Monthly Archives: November 2009

“Children of a Lesser Google”

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Hey, remember when Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil?” Vaht, you thought they still had it? I did too, but this…might not be evil, but it certainly seems a little unfair:

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Google India had launched a ‘Doodle 4 Google – My India’ contest in August. The Doodle is the logo design you see on the Google homepage. The theme of this competition was ‘My India’. On November 12, Google India announced at Taj Ambassador Hotel that tech hub Gurgaon based 4th standard school kid Puru Pratap has won the competition…a laptop computer for himself, a t-shirt with his doodle and Rs. 1 lakh (approx 2100 US dollars) for his school.

But his counterparts in USA and UK won substantially more. According to Google their US winner “will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Google New York Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. We’ll also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.”

So let’s see: Indian winner = laptop + T-shirt + $2100 (for his school) + $0 (for himself)
US winner = laptop + T-shirt + trip to NY + $25,000 (for his school) + $15,000 (for himself)

Let me see…let me do the math…I dunno, maybe you need a special algorithm or something to make these two things equal? Because to my eyes, it looks like the Indian kid is getting royally screwed. It looks like the same contest, run by the same company, is rewarding a far lesser prize to the winner from one country than to the winner from another country.

The writer of the quoted piece goes on to point of various other prizes that are awarded equally to winners from all countries. She concludes:

Are we children of a lesser Google? Or is the Indian market less important? Perhaps Bing has the answer.

Dammit. I like Chrome. Continue reading →

“In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.”

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I love this picture. I have no other reason for sharing it with you, other than that. I wondered if we might be able to use it for a caption contest, but I’m not sure how it would turn out (did I just diss your creative powers? I might have! Prove me wrong! 😉 Your Shot - Top Shots 2009 - National Geographic Magazine.png

Fantastic capture, isn’t it? It was taken by a Debasis Roy, of Asansol, India, and I felt like it deserved to be seen, in case you missed it when it was featured on National Geographic’s “Top Shots“. As for how the fishy fared, don’t fret about the poor pet:

While transferring fish from one bowl to another, science tutor Roy, 27, was inspired. He composed this scene–a baby guppy sustained by a single droplet, cradled on a grass leaf atop a wooden stool–then put the fish back. [link]

Beautiful. I sweat such talent and creative vision. A whale-sized thank you to the Barmaid, for showing me this magical image. Continue reading →

Tunku Varadarajan: Off the Deep End

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By now, many readers may have seen Tunku Varadarajan’s controversial column for Forbes from last week, “Going Muslim.” In it, Varadarajan coins a new term to describe Major Nidal Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood two weeks ago. “Going Muslim” is Varadarajan’s variation of “going postal,” a phrase coined a few years ago, after a string of (non-Muslim) U.S. postal workers went on killing sprees. Here is how Varadarajan defines the term:

This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.

The most irksome part of Varadarajan’s column for me was the following paragraph:

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage–the camouflage of integration–in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away–to a neighbor–a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”

In fact, reports from Hasan’s colleagues strongly suggest a profile of a person who was borderline psychotic for several years, but who finally snapped around 2007. Yes, he gave away his broccoli on the day he went on a shooting spree. But that is in fact entirely in keeping with how psychotics behave.

What Varadarajan doesn’t realize is that the kind of paranoid argument he is making about immigrants in “camouflage” could very easily be used against any other immigrant group, including Hindus, as a pretext for mistrust or active discrimination.

Varadarajan also make a claim about “integration” into American society that is simply not supported by any facts. The diverse groups of immigrants who are Muslim have done just fine in terms of their economic performance, civil participation, etc. By coining this pernicious phrase, and by promoting an argument based self-evidently on bigotry, Varadarajan has shown us why we no longer need to take anything he says seriously.

Continue reading →

New South Asian Fiction Writers in Guernica / Asian-American Literary Festival

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I know the Mutiny community has lots of literature lovers, so I wanted to let you know about some sharp new writers, and where you can find them–Amitava Kumar and I have edited the fiction section of Guernica this month, and it features South Asian writers. Tomorrow, two of them (Tania James and Hasanthika Sirisena) will be joining us for a reading in Brooklyn as part of Page Turner – The Asian American Literary Festival. (There’s a day of great programming–we’re on at 3. Disclosure: Amitava and I are both on the board of AAWW, the sponsoring org.)

I thought it would be interesting to talk to some of the writers a little bit more about the stories they submitted, and writing in general. Sirisena, who won a prestigious Rona Jaffe Award last year, gave us a story called Murder The Queen. You can read it here. She agreed to chat with the Mutiny–Preeta Samarasan will follow next week.

Sirisena’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Witness, Best New American Voices, and other publications.

Continue reading →

Pakistani Rock Queried by the NYT

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Let’s start with this song by the Pakistani rock group co-VEN, “Ready to Die”:

co-VEN was featured in a recent New York Times multimedia video by Adam Ellick (not embeddable) which can be seen here.

Other musicians mentioned in the Times story include Ali Azmat and the band Noori (identified in the video as the Noori Brothers). To me, Ali Azmat comes across as a blithering idiot in the Times video, but I found the comments from co-VEN more compelling — at least coherent. (For the most part, I agreed with the Pakistani journalists in the Times’ video, not the musicians.)

What was interesting to me was the fact that Ellick, in the Times video, seemed to be putting co-VEN forward as an example of a band that criticizes the west but not the Taliban.

I haven’t heard much of co-VEN’s other music (none of the songs on YouTube seem political) or looked closely at their public statements, but the lyrics to the song above are present in the YouTube video, and they seem more ambiguous than Adam Ellick suggests. While “Ready to Die” does put forward the idea that there is a pattern — and a long history of failure — to western policy in the Muslim world, I don’t necessarily think the song reflects Pakistanis in denial. You can be opposed to the “game of chess” co-VEN is talking about while also being opposed to what the extremists have been doing in Pakistan in recent months. I’m not sure co-VEN is actually willing to go there, but it seems like a stretch to put an interesting indie/metal band next to the more banal pop music of Ali Azmat and Noori, as if they’re all the same.

Oh, and one more thing: it’s a shame that this irreverent and upbeat song, Laga Re by Shehzad Roy, was apparently banned on Pakistani TV. (I wonder whether it might have circulated anyway through the internet etc.) Continue reading →

Is Being Brown Enough To Get Your Vote?

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Our friend Bassam Tariq from 30 Mosques in 30 Days just posted a fascinating story over at Times.com about a Bangladeshi candidate that ran for local office in NYC. (hat tip, Sharaf!)

It’s the classic story, with a modern twist. Bangladeshi immigrant Mujib Rahman wants to be elected to New York’s City Council. It’s the story of an immigrant, running for office on the Republican ticket, wanting to make a difference for his community. The clip shows how he tries to campaign in the local Bangladeshi community to gain votes – to get one of their own Bangladeshis in office. But the campaign he’s running on is based on a divisive message – letting voters know his opponent is gay.

I was conflicted as I watched this. On one hand you want this hard working Bangladeshi uncle to achieve the bootstrap American dream. He’s getting himself and his community involved in civic engagement. But on the other hand, his closed minded smear campaign just reflects all the reasons I stopped talking politics with my father’s generation of uncles. Were any of our readers involved in Mujib’s campaign? Did any of you have the chance to vote (or not vote) for Mujib? Continue reading →

Q&A with Aasif Mandvi: “I Just Make Stuff Up”

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aasif_mandvi_sr.correspondent.jpgIf, like me, you’re addicted to “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, then Aasif Mandvi needs no further introduction. If, for some reason, you don’t watch the show (what’s wrong with you? The internets flattened the world, remember? Click here to watch!) then you’ve seen him in everything from “CSI” to Spider Man 2, generally as a fleeting and funny brown presence. And if you happen to be a theater-going sort of person, you’ve seen him in all sorts of things, and may even know that he won two Obie Awards for his one-man play Sakina’s Restaurant. Multi-talented, is our Mr. Mandvi.

Anyway, the play was recently remade into a film (Today’s Special, also starring Aasif Mandvi) that’s been well-received in international film festivals. He was besieged by other press people (damn you, BBC!) at a screening in NY, but he kindly let me email questions which he promptly answered via Blackberry. Get ready for a formal exercise in true journalism (by that I mean ridiculousness):

What was it like to translate your play, Sakina’s Restaurant, into the film Today’s Special? Was anything lost in the process? Yes, we lost all the Monologues, and the fact that it was a one-man show, and we lost most of the characters in the play, and we came up with all-new characters and a new storyline and all-new lines for the characters to say and… come to think of it, I don’t think the two things are related at all.

Hmm… awkward.

[snip]

Your family left India for England when you were one, then moved to the US when you were 16, according to Wikipedia. How much did it suck to move as a teenager? Have you been back to India? It did suck, and yes I have been back to India…But don’t tell Wikipedia cos he doesn’t know yet…Shhh.

What’s the most offensive thing anyone’s ever said to you? I don’t remember the most offensive thing, but the second most offensive thing anyone ever called me was: a motherf@ckingdotheadtalibanterroristeatingpu##yfacedc@$ksuckera$$holesh!tstaincoloreddotragheadsandnegropakiwalacurrybreathingsh!tlicker.

Which I definitely thought was inappropriate.

(More with Aasif on being Muslim, the secret to getting hired at The Daily Show, sleeping with Margaret Cho, and light sabers. After the jump.) Continue reading →

Lanka Solidarity: Washington, DC-Area Fundraiser for IDPs in Sri Lanka

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I suspect I’m about to set a personal record for question marks used in an SM post.

As a South Asian-American and diasporic blog, SM has hosted numerous conversations about Sri Lanka and related communities. I’ve been involved in many of those conversations–first as a lurker, then as a commenter, and finally, as a writer, journalist, and blogger. No matter my role, it seems that the bigger the Internet gets, the scarier it is for people to talk about Sri Lankan/diasporic politics (or any polarized issue). Off- and online, as like finds like and people reinforce their own beliefs, entrenched polarization makes it hard to listen, hard to talk, hard to *stay *for the very real pain on multiple sides. Sometimes it’s easier to check out. And people do. But don’t we deserve better than that? Is it possible that there might be a little… nuance? What’s a person in the middle to do?

Well, here’s my attempt: I’m one of several individuals behind a new multi-ethnic Sri Lankan diaspora group called Lanka Solidarity.

Continue reading →

Nose-Piercing, Utah, and a Big Oops (Not Mine) [Updated]

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On Thursday, several of us Mutineers spoke to an AP reporter about a story in Utah last week — about a girl in middle school in Utah who got suspended from her school for violating dress code, after getting her nose pierced. She and her family said she did it to get in touch with her Indian cultural identity — she had the piercing done on Diwali just a couple of weeks ago. The school, however, had a strict “ear pierces only” policy, and was only willing to allow her to have a “transparent” stud in her nose, not the more obviously Indian nose ring she wore to school initially.

Here is the AP story that resulted. It’s been printed in a fair number of newspapers around the country. The reporter quotes Abhi, Sandhya, and myself. But something goes wrong here:

“I wanted to feel more closer to my family in India because I really love my family,” said Suzannah, who was born in Bountiful. Her father was born in India as a member of the Sikh religion.

“I just thought it would be OK to let her embrace her heritage and her culture,” said Suzannah’s mother, Shirley Pabla, a Mormon born in nearby Salt Lake City. “I didn’t know it would be such a big deal.”

It shouldn’t have been, said Suzannah’s father, Amardeep Singh, a Sikh who was raised in the United States and works as an English professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. “It’s true that the nose ring is mainly a cultural thing for most Indians,” Singh said. “Even if it is just culture, culture matters. And her right to express or explore it seems to me at least as important as her right to express her religious identity.” (link)

Um, wait a minute. Did I read that right? Take a look at it again: “…said Suzannah’s father, Amardeep Singh, a Sikh who was raised in the United States…”

[UPDATE: The online version of the article has been corrected.]

This is a really bizarre and unfortunate error. Just to be clear, I have one kid, and he’s three years old. I am annoyed on my own behalf, but I also feel bad for the Pablas. (Suzannah has a dad, who is a practicing Sikh. It just so happens that most of the coverage of this story in the local Utah newspapers doesn’t mention his name: see the Salt Lake Tribune, for example)

When I spoke to the reporter who authored this story, he was 100% clear that I was in no way related to the Pablas. Somewhere between that conversation and the story that has now run in 200+ newspapers around the country, that important fact fell out. I don’t know who’s responsible for the error — it appears an editor might have come up with this.

In the end, it’s not really that big a deal; the only people who will really think anything is amiss are people who know the Pablas and people who know me. Still, maybe the moral here is to JUST SAY NO when reporters call you for a quote for a story that doesn’t really involve you directly.

Anyway, what do people think about the story itself? Should schools with strict dress code policies make an exception to accommodate nose rings for Indian students on cultural grounds? Continue reading →

55Friday: The Panni Flu-edition

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Every week, for the last eight months, I have received emails, facebook messages, tweets and texts plaintively asking, “What would it take to bring back the Friday 55?” Twitter : @suitablegirl_1257545747064.png Well apparently, it would “take”…H1N1, or as it is often referred to, swine flu.

That’s what I was diagnosed with two weeks ago, and while at this point I’m simply festering with a secondary infection, I’m still at home, sick. This means I actually have a moment to gasp BLOG. So 55Friday it is.

I know we have many newer Mutineers who may be unaware of the history behind this writing game, so a brief introduction seems apposite. On Fridays, I used to choose a theme and write a post which invited you, our readers, to create a piece of flash fiction (a very, very short story). Each submission was to have exactly 55 words: no more, no less (see: wiki). That (and the theme, if one chose to follow it) was all that constrained creativity.

The last time I posted a 55Friday, we received some flashes of greatness. Here’s one from commenter Non-sequitur; it was a bit of a run-on, but who cares, he fit a whole story in a single sentence with exactly 55 words!

Thomachen couldnt buy the Sony TV because his brother Vareechan didnt get paid the last two months because Dubai’s construction boom has evaporated because global investment and demand is down because U.S. banks are going under because the US consumers took home equity loans they couldnt afford because they wanted a Sony Plasma TV.

As another commenter noted afterwards, “wow – Global Economy Meltdown – 101 in 55 words. loved it.” I did, too. See? There’s so much you can do. 🙂 Now whether you want to write about pannis, being ill, Run-D.M.C. (get it? GET IT?), or flu shots going to undeserving evil like Goldman, feel free. In fact, feel so free– because you can ignore the theme completely. We only provide you with them to help. Panni-themed or not, say something via 55 carefully-picked words in the comments below; I can’t wait to read what you’ve written, as I mend. Continue reading →