For the past two months, I’ve been checking out what Sheena Matheiken is wearing. She wears the same thing every day, but then, she doesn’t really. (Huh?)
Monthly Archives: July 2009
The new face of Air India (UPDATE)
There’s something awkward about Air India trying to be hip, sort of like the uncle with the hennaed hair who knows all of the hottest club dance moves. The last time I flew Air India, I was on a 30 year old used Korean plane with an Italian flight crew and Indian flight attendants. Homey, yes. Fashionable and cutting-edge? Hardly.
So when I saw the images from Air India’s award-winning new campaign, I was a bit taken aback. I was used to the fusty maharaja, retro in a very unhip way, a character that was probably dated from its very inception. What was I to make of this mixed race family, desi female sitting openly in her white husband’s lap? (There’s another shot with a desi man, a white woman and a hadesi child)
The Maharaja was from an era of arranged marriages, when nobody spoke of dating, let alone across the colour line. I’ll bet he never looked once at a non-desi air hostess, no matter how flirtatious.
The new Air India, on the other hand, simply says “look, we’re just happy that you’re married and that you’ve given us a gorgeous grandkid! Now please visit more often.” (Yes, the campaign was created in India) It’s not really stylish, but it is most definitely contemporary. Maybe AI isn’t so dated after all. Now if only they could do something about their service, I’d really sit up and take notice.
UPDATE A few comments (thanks El Nino and Rishi ) have argued that these ads were designed just to win awards and haven’t (and wont) actually be used. People also pointed out that the idea is a straight lift from an earlier (proposed?) Air France campaign.
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“Victory Becomes the Defeat of the Good”: Ram Narayan Kumar
I recently learned of the death of Ram Narayan Kumar, an Indian human rights activist, in Nepal. Kumar, who died of natural causes, is well known in the Sikh community as the staunchest non-Sikh advocate of human rights in Punjab. What drove Mr. Kumar, as far as I can tell, was a pure, principled belief in human rights and democracy, not self-interest or any sense of loyalty to the Sikh community. After 20 years of investigating primary sources and personally documenting thousands of human rights violations in Punjab, in the past few years Kumar shifted his focus to India’s northeast — places like Nagaland and Assam — where human rights intervention may be most urgently needed now.
I got to see Ram Narayan Kumar speak in New York several years ago, and was impressed by how methodical and dispassionate he was as he spoke about his attempt to document extrajudicial killings and cremations of prisoners during the peak of the Punjab militancy period in the 1980s. Many Sikhs have taken up this cause over the years (indeed, activists still show up at local Gurdwaras every June to lecture about it), but too often emotion takes over from empirical evidence and the need to provide rock-solid documentation. Ram Narayan Kumar focused on the latter, not because he advocated any political cause, but because he had faith in the idea of Indian democracy, and demanded that the system he believed in be truthful, accountable, and transparent.
Though he wrote several books, Mr. Kumar’s greatest legacy may be his rigorous documentation efforts of extrajudicial killings by the Punjab Police, which are partially collected in the massive book, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. For those who are interested, that book has been posted in its entirety here (PDF, 4.9 MB). I would particularly recommend the documentation section, starting around page 205.
The issue that stood out to me in Ram Narayan Kumar’s quest for justice related specifically to the illegal cremation of 2000+ prisoners who were killed in police custody in Punjab in the 1980s. We may never know exactly what happened to these prisoners, or how they died; a Supreme Court ordered CBI investigation has remained sealed, and its contents unknown. But cremation records were at least kept, and provide an unmistakable record. As a result of the efforts of Kumar and others, in 2006, the Indian government’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued monetary awards to the families of 1245 prisoners who were cremated in the mid-1980s. Below is a brief excerpt from one of Kumar’s more recent books outlining what happened over the decade of legal proceedings that led to a final resolution (albeit a somewhat unsatisfying one) in October, 2006. Continue reading
A Blip on No One’s Radar: Tanveer Ahmad
The New York Times has a story on Tanveer Ahmad, a blip on no one’s radar. Nothing terrible or violent happened to him — he died of a heart attack in a prison in New Jersey — but I was moved by the story, and thought it might be worth taking a moment to pay attention to it.
In 2005, a Pakistani man named Tanveer Ahmad died while being held for an immigration offense in Monmouth County Jail in New Jersey. He had been in the U.S. since the early 1990s, when he had come in on a visitor’s visa and stayed. He had married two American women, one in Texas, and another in the Bronx. He had also apparently married a woman back in Pakistan on a visit home in 1999, an event which led to the collapse of the first marriage (he remained legally married to the woman in Pakistan). While working at a frequently-robbed gas station in Texas, he had an incident that came back to haunt him later:
His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery. (link)
I can understand the legality of this — possessing an unlicensed firearm can be big trouble (though it sounds like it wasn’t his firearm, but the one owned by the owner of the business). Still, there is definitely a tragic irony here: Tanveer Ahmad was punished for being robbed. As a result of that misdemeanor involving a handgun, Ahmad was classified a “violent” offender, eligible for immediate detention and deportation irrespective of any mitigating circumstances.
Tanveer Ahmad’s immigration status wasn’t simple. Like thousands of other people, he had tried various options to find a path to a Green Card, but failed. Until he was actually imprisoned in 2005, it didn’t seem like there was any particular pressure on him from the USCIS to return to Pakistan:
Like several million other residents of the United States, Mr. Ahmad occupied the complicated gray zone between illegal and legal immigration. Though he had overstayed his first visa, he had repeatedly been authorized to work while his applications for “adjustment of status†were pending. Twice before 9/11 he had been allowed back into the country after visits to Pakistan.
But the green card application sponsored by his Bronx-born wife, Shanise Farrar, had been officially denied in March 2005, leaving him without a valid visa. Although the couple could have reapplied, by the time he was arrested they had not spoken in more than a year, and Ms. Farrar, who had received a letter threatening a marriage fraud investigation, was unaware of his detention. (link)
So yes, for at least a few months in 2005 he seems to have reached an endpoint in his immigration quest. But Tanveer Ahmad wasn’t a criminal, and he wasn’t taking jobs away from ordinary Americans. He was driving cabs and working the night shift at gas stations in rough neighborhoods. The latter at least is dangerous and undesirable work — work most Americans aren’t willing to do.
It’s also worth mentioning that, once he was detained, Tanveer Ahmad was ready to be deported, and had told his lawyer that he would waive any right to contest his deportation: he had no desire to remain in detention. Continue reading
Caught in Carrie’s Web
If you are in Los Angeles and looking for something to do this weekend, might I suggest getting caught in Carrie’s Web.
Written and performed by Shyamala Moorty [of Post Natyam Collective], directed by D’Lo with video by Sangita Shresthova. Carrie, a body-conscious, high heel-loving spider is spinning out new moves when she inadvertently snares a young human woman who’s dealing with a terrible family secret. A fantastical web of entanglement is woven with classical and contemporary Indian dance and theater.[indiacurrents]
I had the chance to check out the play a few weeks ago and was mesmerized by how a one person play was able to interweave issues of South Asian culture, sexuality, domestic violence and dance expression so eloquently. To develop her script, Shyamala worked closely with the local domestic violence group NISWA. At the show I attended, several young South Asian teen girls from NISWA that Shyamala had worked with on her script were in the audience.
In 1991, NISWA opened a “helpline” to provide counseling support and resource referrals…In addition, NISWA established a shelter for Muslim battered women in 1996. Since then, the shelter has housed many women and their children, providing them with counseling, and job placement.[niswa]
Vinay Lal, “The Other Indians”
A few months ago, in the middle of the Sonal Shah controversy, I wrote a blog post criticizing Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk as a somewhat inadequate historical account of the Indian-American community. The example I focused on was the “Yankee Hindutva” chapter, which I thought was unbalanced and prone to cast aspersions rather than actually illuminate the topic at hand. But other chapters in Prashad’s book have similar problems: Prashad’s book is more a critique of the “desi” community in the U.S. than it is an introduction to it: we are too bourgeois (the “model minority” myth), too racist (i.e., against African-Americans), and too religious.
We now have a more comprehensive introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on Vinay Lal by Abhi here). Lal’s book covers some of the same topics as Prashad’s Karma but is much more heavily factual and closely researched -– it’s a work of history rather than a political polemic –- and it’s rich with useful and well-sourced statistics. If I were to ask students to read something about the history of South Asians in the U.S., say, in conjunction with a segment of a course relating to Indian immigrant fiction, I would probably assign this book.
In lieu of a comprehensive review, below are a few highlights and interesting tidbits from The Other Indians that I picked up on: Elihu Yale, early Immigration/Legal issues, Religion, and the old terminology question. Continue reading
Meetup Manhattan
Guess what? Ennis and I are going to hang out and we want you to come.
When: 5-7 p.m. Sunday, July 5 Where: Leela Lounge
Come one, come all. Lurkers, commenters, friends, associates…
There will be a special surprise attendee. Continue reading
How the Sri Lankan Civil War was Won
I’ll admit to not following the recently concluded Sri Lankan civil war very closely but other SM bloggers have been. Still, I found this interview with noted Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan quite enlightening about many aspects of the conflict. Kaplan is noted for his relatively unorthodox approach to understanding conflict and in discussing Sri Lanka, he comes out swinging –
MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?
Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that’s over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they’re not.
What are the Chinese getting out of this?
Progress!
Finally, the law has changed. Congrats to at the activists in India that made it happen! Our hats off to you.
In a landmark ruling Thursday that could usher in an era of greater freedom for gay men and lesbians in India, New Delhi’s highest court decriminalized homosexuality.
“Discrimination is antithesis of equality,” the judges of the Delhi High Court wrote in a 105-page decision that is the first in India to directly guarantee rights for gay people. “It is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual,” the decision said.
Homosexuality has been illegal in India since 1861, when British rulers codified a law prohibiting “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” [Link]
A Little on Gauhar Jaan; and Remix vs. Original?
I was doing some research this morning on an unrelated topic, when I randomly came across the name Gauhar Jaan, one of the great recording artists in India from the first years of the 20th century. Gauhar Jaan is thought to have sung on the very first recording of a song ever made in India, in 1902. Here is what she sang:
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It’s a kind of Hindustani classical song called a “khayal,” sung, I gather, in Raag Jogiya. At the end of it she says, famously, “My name is Gauhar Jan!”
Who was Gauhar Jaan? Her background, from what I’ve been able to find on the internet, seems remarkable:
Gauhar Jaan was born as Angelina Yeoward in 1873 in Patna, to William Robert Yeoward, an Armenian Jew working as an engineer in dry ice factory at Azamgarh, near Banaras, who married a Jewish Armenian lady, Allen Victoria Hemming around 1870. Victoria was born and brought up in India, and trained in music and dance.
Within a few years in 1879, the marriage ended, causing hardships to both mother and daughter, who later migrated to Banaras in 1881, with a Muslim nobleman, ‘Khursheed’, who appreciated Victoria’s music more than her husband.
Later, Victoria, converted to Islam and changed Angelina’s name to ‘Gauhar Jaan’ and hers to ‘Malka Jaan’. (link)
Through her mother, who depended on the patronage of wealthy Muslim noblemen (I’m presuming she may have been a Tawaif), Gauhar Jaan got training from the best classical music masters in Calcutta at the time. By 1896, she was a star performer in Calcutta, which is how she was able to charge Rs. 3000 in 1902 to have her voice on the first audio recording of an Indian song ever made. Later, Gauhar Jaan became a star all over India. She performed in Madras in 1910, and even performed for King George V when he visited India. She died of natural causes as the palace musician of the Maharajah of Mysore in 1930. (There is a fuller bio of Gauhar Jaan here, at the Tribune. Also, see this profile of Gauhar Jaan.)
Another song Gauhar Jaan was famous for was “Ras ke bhare tore nain,” which I think many readers will find familiar for reasons that will become apparent below. Continue reading