A tipster notifies us that Miss Indiana, who appears at the Miss USA pageant that is on NBC tonight, is an Indian American woman by the name of Courtni Shabana Hall (more pictures here):
Courtni Hall, a 5’5″ brown eyed brunette, is the 22-year-old daughter of Barbara Hall of Crawfordsville. A senior at Indiana State University, Courtni’s career ambition is to obtain her Masters degree in Communications and to work in the entertainment industry as a television personality. Courtni is a spokesperson for Children’s Hope International and serves as an advocate for adoption, as she was adopted from India at just five months old. Her hobbies include singing, traveling, acting and volunteering as a Spanish tutor. [Link]
Her profile at NBC’s website has a bit more concerning her adoption and a few of her interests:
* Born in Calcutta, India weighing only 2 lbs., 2 oz., she was abandoned at birth, and adopted by U.S. parents and brought to Indiana.
* Working towards getting her pilot’s license.
* Has a beaver, 56 tigers and a pet alligator. [Link]
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p>Mad respect to anyone working toward their pilot’s licence because I appreciate the commitment that takes. However, I am a bit concerned about the 56 tigers and the pet alligator (owning a beaver is probably not as dangerous and I think is fairly common in some parts).
In case you want to “friend” Courtni or become a fan, her FB page is here.
I for one will be tuning in and keeping my fingers crossed for the gorgeous Courtni (who speaks so well), and perhaps I shall follow along in the Twittervesre.
More than caste, I think the fact that she has no traceable “family line” would be more of a concern. I think more than anything that the desi auntie and uncle types would view her as “rootless”.
Conrad,
I beg to differ. Political scientists also use rational choice a fair bit, particularly when using game theory and statistical analyses. This is particularly true amongst quants.
Very uneducated speculation, no surprise there.
So you are saying that some desi auntie would not care at all about her background, if they had a male in there family who was in relationship with a desi girl who was raised by an American family after being adopted from place like Calcutta. Yes or No?
Has a beaver
I wonder if she keeps this beaver properly groomed, and protected… you know.. from anything that might try and attack it.
“More than caste, I think the fact that she has no traceable “family line” would be more of a concern. I think more than anything that the desi auntie and uncle types would view her as “rootless”.”
As far as I was aware, a traceable family line only comes to play when it is about royalty (other than concerns about marrying too close within one’s own family.) But what the heck, it’s always open season on caste so why miss an opportunity to make people from the desh sound stupid.
Nope. In Desh coming from a “good family” is very important. Still don’t know what “good family” exactly means though.
Fair point, I think though this is something limited to US Poli-Sci depts. and even there it has caused rifts -one of my best friends who is an Assistan prof in the US refuses to even say he teaches Political Science but that he teaches Politics since there is no such thing as the former.
Rational Choice is usefu for constructing models and developing some basic hypotheses which can be tested but apart from economists, few social scientists would use it as a way of iunderstanding how the real world works. IMO of course, since I am no more an authority on social scientists than I am on American beuaty queens. Mores the pity.
“In Desh coming from a “good family” is very important. Still don’t know what “good family” exactly means though.”
Good family means things like there are no drunks in the family, the family has money and prestige, etc. It’s pretty much the same here in the US as far as these things are concerned, so I still find your comments unfair and unwarranted. Notice how you went from “traceable family line” to “good family” when traceable family line suddenly didn’t sound as idiotic as we’d expect Indians to be. Also family (in the current situation) would be the adoptive family for purposes of marriage and there’s no mystery about that.
Divya, I don’t know what you mean by “traceable family line” but what I mean by it is, aunties and uncles wanna know who my blood relatives are and what they do, what they are into and etcetera. Because a marriage is not just between two individuals but between two families. If I have no connection to my blood relatives, that would be deemed strange and rootless.
The Prince and The Little Prince are two of my favorites 🙂
Dr. Abhi and Mr. Snide . . .
God, can’t anyone appreciate a beauty pageant without turning this into the most boring comment thread ever? Thanks for ruining it you three.
I prefer Abhi and Evil Abhi 🙂
Well, now that we can’t comment on the girl’s looks…
Its called retribution for milleniums of objectification.
If this thread had a wang it would be about
1 and a half inches long.
Why? Because retribution is a turn off?
“God, can’t anyone appreciate a beauty pageant without turning this into the most boring comment thread ever? Thanks for ruining it you three.”
Perhaps you can take your own advice and go read something else?
If you decide to take your own advice, Abhi, as advocated by Divya so helpfully I think you should check out ‘The Music Man’. It has a song this thread reminded me of. Only vaguely of course….
I concur that the ‘traceable family’ thing is still important in India. Even in my family, which is very liberal by desi standards, adoption was seen as something controversial because ‘you don’t know who the [biological] parents are’. My great-grandmother was very displeased at first when one of my mother’s cousins decided to adopt children, but she came around.
Actually I’m a bigger fan of “rational public” theory. Essentially individual people can behave “irrationally,” but the combination of reading the statements of respected intellectuals, cultural norms, and legal restrictions push society so that the average for society ends up moving in a rational direction. Ideally, the cultural norms are supposed to be set up to help people make decisions more easily that maximize their own well-being and the “social good” and economic constraints are going to have an effect on that. For example, high infant mortality means you place a lower value on the lives of infants and, consequentially, don’t even bother doing a naming ceremony until at least a few months in. Lower value of life combined with other social and economic costs and it is not hard to see why kids get abandoned. Fixing it isn’t a matter of a marketing blitz or willful attempts to change the “culture.” Better access to healthcare, better law enforcement and education, and improved incomes for women would all reduce the problem to the level of tragedy rather than statistic. Culture will organically change from there on its own.
Even those areas undergoing rapid economic growth are also undergoing rapid inflation and not seeing much of a concurrent improvement in provision of public services. So while the poverty headcount might be lower, it’s still shitty to be poor. And I say again, a state or city level analysis to control for income and education just isn’t going to work. Those sorts of decisions are made at the household level and unless you can come up with a household level survey that can get you a reliable count on foeticide or female infanticide you are not going to accurately capture the effect of any of your control variables. Just because an area has more money and more educated people doesn’t mean every individual in the area does and it doesn’t mean that people who are nominally rich relative to the countryside are going to be rich relative to their neighbors or richer in terms of real income. Middle class Indians don’t typically get pensions and girls do represent a significant cost that doesn’t get recouped relative to boys. If you want to change that you need to change incentives.
Female literacy and length of education, are the decisive variables – imo. these of course will inevtiably change “the culture” as such. States can’t directly assault cultural norms without changing the legal system, provision of public services and distribution of assets – all of which will have a large impact. For the regions of India affected with a marked adverse ratio; changing the legal inheritance systems and enforcing land ownership for women will have a role but in areas where agricultural operations can’t all be done by women (usually where it is undertaken by OBCs and ‘upper caste Hindus’) this may be difficult.
And I say again, a state or city level analysis to control for income and education just isn’t going to work. Those sorts of decisions are made at the household level and unless you can come up with a household level survey that can get you a reliable count on foeticide or female infanticide you are not going to accurately capture the effect of any of your control variables. Just because an area has more money and more educated people doesn’t mean every individual in the area does and it doesn’t mean that people who are nominally rich relative to the countryside are going to be rich relative to their neighbors or richer in terms
The disagregated data that we do have at the household level is by religion and social caste. Hence one can observe that Hindus and Sikhs have a much worse and declining ratio than Muslims and other minorities like Christians and that upper caste and OBCs have a worse and declining ratio vis-a-vis Dalits/adivasis. Why this is the case is debatable; certainly it seems counter-intuitive since those groups with the worst educational attainment and lowest income levels have the most balanced JSRs – adivasis. IMO and that of some demographers like Monica Das Gupta who had an excellent article on this in the JDS a couple of years back; kinship systems that were not virilocal and inheritance systems that were more equitable towards women; as well as factors like womens’ ability to undertake agricultural operations usually reserved for men such as ploughing; in these communities played an important role. But of course a lot more work needs to be done on this and these are tentative conclusions. The problem is that there is a lot of regional and social variation; so in-depth studies like those on Bijnor etc. will be of limited use to generalise any conclusions from.
I don’t accept that ‘rational public’ is a valid way to analyse societies at a macro-level. These kinds of assumptions always assume that the interests of the ‘public’ are essentially singular when in reality such categories are made up of different groups that have conflicitng aims and desires. As a proscriptive framework for public policy though, it seems reasonable.
At the risk of starting an even bigger derail . . . what exactly is the joke here? Yeah, yeah, beaver = vag, I get it. But the double entendre talk of “attacking” a woman’s “beaver”? That sounds more like a reference to sexual assault than anything else to me. Is there some other way I was supposed to read this?
“Pageant contestants compete to be judged by pageant judges, not you.”
I’m sorry, this is plain idiotic. If a person runs around having pictures of themselves taken while wearing next to nothing, they deserve whatever comments the blogosphere makes about them. I’m not a supermodel, but I’m putting myself out there like her.