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.
Abandoned at birth in India, and now Miss Indiana!
Life sure has taken her a long way. That’s the sorta story movies are made of!
Good luck to Courtni for the Miss USA pageant.
Now this could help people who had hardtime believing Slumdog millionaire story line.
In the photo posted here she has a good figure, but one that would be considered a tad chubby for American standards. But maybe the photo added the illusion of extra bulk. They say the camera adds 10 pounds. Of course nowadays curves are making a comeback, so maybe I’m wrong.
Any trollish comments that are deemed by me to be either sexist, misogynistic, or in bad taste (see comment 3) will be deleted. Thanks.
I think she looks like Priyanka Chopra, who was crowned Miss World…, so you never know. She might go all the way. I wish her the best.
She’s gorgeous! Wishing her all the best. Wondering if she can speak any desi language or connected to some desi culture. These days, a lot of adopting parents try to keep the adopted kid in touch with their native culture ? I won’t care at all if they haven’t: it’s their personal discretion about their family and she seems to be doing very well regardless. But just curious.
Zee, please see this old post about two adopted girls trying to re-discover their roots.
56 tigers? Is that a misprint?
Dude, please do not underestimate. Only a cynic would think this was a misprint. 😉
Has a beever?
For the news junkies – state of Indiana seems to be making a lot of “Indian” waves – Courtini Hall, Tim Roemer, Sumit Ganguly
Odd that SMIntern would think comment 3 was sexist or misogynist when the commenter was merely stating a fact of life about American preferences…note any number of TV actresses, super models, comments about McCain’s daughter, etc.
On the other hand, I think the whole concept of a beauty pageant in 2009 is basically objectification of women, so should the SM post itself be deleted?
This part really saddened me; I don’t know why exactly she was abandoned but I just wish and dream of a day when we don’t systematically devalue our girl-children so much.
She looks attractive (obviously given the nature of the post) but 56 tigers?!?! That is a lot, wouldn’t wanna have to feed those cats everyday!
LOL, does she really need anymore paunchy male admirers to gush over her?!
And it’s also the home of the reigning national spelling champ.
Evidently Indiana isn’t one of the states that have banned private ownership.
No offense, but a commenter on here cant say she is a little chubby(I think she is fine as can be), even though the person the post is about makes a living by being judged?
Like someone above said, if that is the case then Sepia should just delete this whole post.
Just doesnt make any sense.
If any of you thinks she’s “chubby” or overweight, your comment should be deleted. Chandru et al, you’re not clever with the whole “then this post should be deleted”-refrain . If you can’t understand why this was story was posted on this blog or why they have reasons for discouraging certain sorts of comments yes, EVEN FOR BEAUTY QUEENS, you are beyond help. Pageant contestants compete to be judged by pageant judges, not you.
O come on. It makes perfect sense to anyone who’s read the great romance novel entitled “The Prince.”
I don’t see any reason to delete comment 3, its not sexist or particularly offensive. It is, however, pretty stupid. She’s chubby? Come on now. Maybe the commenter has a distorted computer screen. And chubby for American standards? The US is one of the most obese nations in the world, so Courtni Hall would probably fall into the skinniest 10%.
Can quite fathom how she can have 56 tigers though. How the hell does someone do that, logistically?
“Owning a beaver”. Hehe.
What makes you, CR, the judge of my comments (unless you’re the “Intern”)? I assumed that on a blog that solicits comments, one is free to post one’s opinion and stimulate discussion. Nothing I said was antagonistic or troll-y.
If someone enters a beauty contest, she has let herself to be judged. If I think she’s chubby (which I don’t), I have the perfect right to do so; it’s no longer offensive. And while you may not think the whole concept of beauty contests is not sexist and tawdry, I do, and I have the right to hold that opinion.
In fact, I think it’s sad that this orphan girl was raised to think that her main option to fame and fortune was to win a beauty contest; note further that her goal is to be a “tv personality” via a “communications degree”, which is pretty much the type of thing that all beauty contestants aspire to.
As the author of this post I am the judge of your comments. Your one comment has already derailed this thread and taken it into the ditch. SM is not a democracy. On my posts I have the right to create a safe space for people to leave comments without having to deal with some anonymous commenter’s opinion that she is chubby or that Americans would consider her chubby. I think I am as off-put by your comment about Americans as anything else.
I am not asking for any of your advice on which comments I delete and why. Please limit your comments to the post and not my comment policy which has been consistent for the past 5 years. If you have an issue with the comment policy then you can email me to complain or refuse to ever read me again. Thanks.
Interestingly The Prince and The Little Prince are two of my favorites 🙂
hey… she has been an adoptions advocate and that’s a good thing. a little less narcissism in our offspring expectations wouldnt hurt.
and dont be so dismissive just yet. other beauty contest winners [ms north dakota actually] have gone on to noble things, and actually need our prayers right now.
Far from “taking it to the ditch”, I was bringing up a perfectly valid issue on the meta-aspect of your post, abhi, that is, whether beauty contests are sexist or not. Why that is not valid is not clear; how it could have created an “unsafe” space to comment is beyond me, but if that’s your policy you certainly have a right to hold it. 10-4.
Indiana has the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, http://www.exoticfelinerescuecenter.org/home.html
From their website,
“With 195 exotic felines calling the EFRC home, we are one of the largest rescue centers in the United States for abused, unwanted and neglected exotic felines. Our mission is simple: We provide permanent homes for exotic felines that have been abused, abandoned or for some reason have nowhere to live out their lives, while educating the public about these beautiful cats”.
We do not buy, sell or breed cats;
We give big cats a home for life;
Maybe she has “adopted” some of the tigers there.
More than likely the tigers are stuffed animals. I would bet though that she has both a beaver and an alligator since that seems reasonable.
manju, is it too easy? i’m dying here.
bump, set, spike
more power to her, and bless her parents. a few years ago there was a book out by a spanish adoptee. she was an attractive young woman (sells books, no?). in any case, she went back to rural maharashtra and tracked down her biological sister. the woman was about 10 years older than her (i think mid-30s vs. her mid-20s), but looked about 30-40 years older. it really brought home to me how hard life is these third world countries, and how it wears down your body.
And who said brown don’t frown (like black don’t crack)? And that desis “age better”?
Totally depends on one’s lifestyle. Even black will crack if it spends an excessive amount of time outdoors exposed to the elements.
well, khoofi…sometimes that which is easy demands something hard. And while a beaver in the hand is worth two in the bush, an alligator is always more desirable than a doggie.
Well, someone add her quick to the Wikipedia list of Indian Americans 🙂
The Other Face of the Moon: Finding My Indian Family by Asha Miro is the book razib is referring to.
Also check out Love our way: A Mothers’s Story from an adoption mother’s perspective.
There was the Mother Jones article on Indian adoption linked here sometime back, as well as Pushpa’s Blog among others. It is very interesting to read their stories on identity and cross-cultural upbringing, that bumps up such issues a notch above ABDs issues.
Reminds me of National Geographic’s Afghan girl.
The book Razib is talking about is called DAUGHTER OF THE GANGES by Asha Miró. A moving and engrossing memoir.
Let’s not go too gaga here. But an interesting story nevertheless. And of course, she has a beaver. If she puts it to the right use, it might even help her win!
Are you sure it was because she was a girl or was it because she was born weighing just over 2lb and no poor family could ever afford to keep her alive? Or maybe she was just left unattended for a while and then kidnapped and sold-off to an adoption agency.
It’s hard to say for sure and casting aspersions on her likely desperately poor and uneducated biological family for having to make what was probably one of the most difficult decisions of their lives is in bad taste.
Hmmm, I addressed the fact that the motivation behind why she was abandoned was unknown but this is hardly uncommon for girl-children in India. There is no evidence that she was kidnapped so I don’t suppose where you got that information from and it seems to cast ‘aspersions’ as you put it on her adopted parents that they would not have bothered to go through the right channels and made sure the baby they were adopting wasn’t stolen.
I am not casting any aspersions directly on her parents or family; what their feelings were and decision-amking processes is unclear. I don’t have a romanticised image that you seem to that it ‘probably’ was one of the most difficult one etc. the ugly truth is that there is an extreme range of attitude of parents towards this practise and not all of them fall into the category that you so complacently describe.
Well done on your manufactured outrage though.
There rarely is. If evidence was obvious the industry wouldn’t exist.
9 months of pregnancy is totally easy to just write off.
There is an extreme range of attitudes regarding the holocaust too. The range doesn’t tell you anything about the median. But once again, being able to extrapolate from “The child was found abandoned” to “God why do they hate women!?” is just an absurd oversimplification of a complicated issue. There are a variety of reasons as to why children are abandoned and not one of them is 100% due to people who just hate on the second X chromosome. It’s not faux outrage, it’s a critique on sloppy generalizations.
Well, in my experience, which is actually based on working in two orphanages; I don’t share your complacency or your attitudes.
Where did I say it was easy, oh wait I didn’t.
Where did I say that “God why do they hate women” – who is the “they” here? Discrimination against girl-children is an empirical fact, not a fiction across the board whether one talks about medical care, nutrition or education. But yay, lets concentrate on non-issues instead.
Only thing faux here is your so-called “critique”.
There’s a difference between sloppy generalizations and observable patterns. Obviously Conrad, having worked in 2 Indian orphanages, has observed certain patterns.
Actually, right here: “I don’t have a romanticised image that you seem to that it ‘probably’ was one of the most difficult one etc.”
And like I pointed out, calling it only a hatred of females is a gross oversimplification of the numerous and systemic issues that prompt behaviors ranging from financial security (boys make more money) to concerns with caretaking (girls are more at risk where law enforcement is non-existent) to medical issues (girls are more likely to have health problems in their teens and in young adulthood) to lack of informal institutional support from families that all actually make raising a girl harder and consequentially more likely to be abandoned.
Trying to cast it as just an issue of not liking girls misses the point entirely. It is a shallow and rather snobby generalization where we pat ourselves on the back for being so very enlightened rather than actually focus on why these are problems and how to solve them. So what ends up happening is ineffective ad campaigns for “saving the girl child” and wholly inadequate financial incentives designed to make people feel better from the warm glow of their charitable donations rather than actually solving problems.
A.) Patterns don’t just magically appear. There are forces nudging people in the directions that they choose to go. B.) This is the internet. Credentials are impossible to verify.
“It wasn’t ‘airplanes’, it was the beast of society that killed beauty!”
Yoga Fire is right. The concerns about security of girls is exactly why helpless girl infants are abandoned, and often forced into a life of sex workers.
Clearly, Conrad is wrong when he makes statements about the systemic discrimination against girl children. He only has the weight of empirical evidence behind him whereas Yoga Fire has THE TRUTH!
For more Courtni pics: http://www.missuniverse.com/missusa/members/profile/226
I’m with you on the finanical part Yoga Fire, but when it comes to medical, girl babies are stronger than male babies and it’s baby boys who need more medical attention, so if these parents are really as analytical as you are assuming they are, they would take that into consideration as well.
They don’t need to be analytical. They just need to look around them and see how things are going with other people’s kids. Culture doesn’t just drop down from the sky. Norms form as people make exactly those sorts of observations and decide what kinds of decisions seem to work out best in general. If you have a decent education system in place then you can expand that decision making process to account for society at large and the long-run effects. But looking at interviews with people who have either had sex-selective abortions, given up girls for adoption, or just complained about having yet another girl the big concern that sticks out is not being able to adequately protect them, so I think the security concern is more likely than one would assume at first glance. If you think about it the risk of rape, abduction, being pressured into prostitution, unplanned and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, etc. are all big risks being thrown in without the balancing effect of any additional income.
As for girl babies being stronger than boys I would be honestly interested in seeing research on that. All I know is that insurance companies project girls to cost more but the health disparity doesn’t start coming about until the early teens. A study would be hard though since I can’t think of any way to collect an unbiased sample. I can think of a way to test the case where the girls who are raised are healthier than the boys if sick girls are more likely to be aborted or otherwise given up but I am unsure about health in general would be tough. It is worth looking into though.
“if you thinking about it, abandoning is probably the most responsible thing these parents ever did. not to mention the best thing they could have done for these girl kids”
if the premature/underweight baby had been a boy, do you think he would have been abandoned? of course no one can say for certain, but given the well-documented preference for boys in this society, it is safe to assume that more of an effort would have been made by the family to save/keep it.
of course, one can AND MUST! conveniently ignore the huge imbalance in sex ratios even among educated communities and the prevalence of sex selective abortions and an outsize amount of abandoned babies. just take the example of studies of middle class and wealthier families in punjab, or the number of abandoned girls in tamilnadu, one of the wealthier/educated states in india.
As for girl babies being stronger than boys I would be honestly interested in seeing research on that.
this is true, generally the ‘heterogametic’ sex has more genetic problems because of the expression of sex-linked diseases (in mammals those are males). also testosterone seems to weaken the immune system somewhat. i’m not going to cite anything because i assume there are enough SM readers who have taken college human biology who can corroborate these facts. i assume then that extra insurance costs incurred by being female has more to do with the costs of specialized gynecological care than anything else (and perhaps the risk premium on the fact that there is always a chance that a female will get pregnant, while no change that a male would), but i don’t really know. but the point about males being at least genetically/biologically more vulnerable is just true.
More effort no doubt, but there are all those other factors included in the cost/benefit calculation behind that decision.
Hey guys. Did you know that if a community is rich and educated, EVERY INDIVIDUAL IN THAT COMMUNITY must also be rich and educated as well?
In the absence of proper medical care and resources do those kids survive infancy?