Something a little lighter, hopefully to make you smile (h/t Arvind):
I love it. It’s a mashup of a T-Mobile ad and a B21 jam, “Darshan“. I think bhangra is a huge improvement compared to the original East 17 track the commercial used. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go give my shoulders a much-needed work out.
It’s time for wedding of the year! No, not that other wedding across the ocean. I’m talking about the wedding where moustachioed Rajiv finally gets wedded to Vimi on the show Outsourced! It’s been a tumultuous first season run for Outsourced, and this Thursday night on NBC the season finale comes to a glorious Bollywood climactic finish. Will the finish be final or will Outsourced be picked up for another season? The cast and crew has been advocating in the community to make sure the show comes back for another season.
I sat down virtually with the bride-to-be, the gorgeous shaadi-rific Noureen DeWulf about her time on set, a real life shaadi, and her perspective on facial hair. Here’s what she had to say.
Shaadi Mubarak, Noureen! This Thursday night you get married, in an all out big Indian wedding on the set of Outsourced for their season finale. Oh so very Bollywood. You came on later as a guest star later in the season, as Rajiv’s fiancée Vimi. What has it been like to be on the set of Outsourced for past few episodes?
Working on the show was a truly great experience. The actors for the most part are a humble and talented group and it is really fun to work with other Indian actors. The producers are pretty incredible people also, having come from and worked on other great shows, so it is a very fun and talented set to be on. I came on in their last few episodes of the season so you could really feel how tight knit they all were and how much they enjoyed their jobs, which is really nice to be a part of.
Outsourced is probably one of the first television series with a largely South Asian cast. I have to admit, I wasn’t a fan of the concept of the show after watching the pilot episode. But the shows that I’ve seen recently are really funny, having moved away from the Tyler-Perry-desified-type jokes, and the characters have far more depth and complexity to them. Do you feel the show has matured? Why do you think it’s important to have a show with a South Asian ensemble cast on American television? Continue reading
Galleon’s Rajaratnam Found Guilty:
Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty on Wednesday of fraud and conspiracy by a federal jury in Manhattan. He is the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street.
A brown man persecuted? Continue reading
Evil needs a face. In the 1980s that face was Ruhollah Khomeini. In the 1990s it was Sadam Hussein. In the 2000s it was Osama bin Laden. Setting aside whether these individuals were in fact evil, the reality is that for the American people they were the face of evil. They were personifications of a complex bundle of geopolitical concerns which came to the fore for a given span of time. Like it or not this was relevant to American brown folk. Apparently Sanjay Kumar, a Sri Lankan American who was later became the C.E.O. of Computer Associates, had to wear an “I am not Iranian” t-shirt in high school around 1980 during the hostage crisis. During the first Gulf War I encountered a weird comment that I looked like Saddam Hussein from an idiot in one of my classes (my own reaction was “what kind of crack are you smoking?!?!”, and my friends pretty quickly started mocking the kid who had thought to get one in at my expense). More recently in the 2000s the issue of “false positives” has been widely covered on this weblog, not without controversy. Continue reading
Yesterday, at 5:12PM, while I was sitting in the law library, panicking over the last sentences of my final exam for this semester, only a few blocks away a 23-year old boy, Mohan Varughese, a student from Penn State, was sitting with his girlfriend on the front steps of her off-campus apartment near Temple University, no doubt luxuriating in the perfect spring sun.
The semester was almost at an end, final examinations ended in two days and already the campus had a deserted look about it. The few people left to tend the campus were mainly university employees. The security guards. The maintenance crews, finally able to swab the floors without interruption. Outside, you could hear the cries of children, playing hopscotch and jumping rope double-dutch style in the streets, pausing every now and then to let cars go by. Continue reading
This is going to be the most talked about article since Amy Chua’s. Every South Asian American man visiting this site should read the whole thing. Here are just some of the attention grabbing sections from Wesley Yang’s piece in New York Magazine, broken out for our readers (and these excerpts are from just the first half of the 11 page article). First, what a school with admissions based purely on test scores looks like:
Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.
This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don’t believe in. They believe–and have proved–that the constant practice of test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools,” or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times as saying. “It’s about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”
But it won’t last into college:
Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. Upper-middle-class white kids, after all, have their own elite private schools, and their own private tutors, far more expensive than the cram schools, to help them game the education system…
And it isn’t like the movies anymore:
“The general gist of most high-school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,” he says, “the nerd is going to rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a carwash.
“At Stuy, it’s completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to student government. It all converges at the top. It’s like training for high society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had to study hard, but it wasn’t enough.”
I don’t know if you realize this, but there’s a lot of bad music out there, particularly bad music by Desi artists. I’ve been pretty consistent with these Music Monday posts at Sepia Mutiny for the past six months, and the only requirement I have is that the musician or song that I profile has the be something that I myself would download on to my iTunes and embarrassingly blast loudly in my car. That being said, I have to dig through a lot of ear bleeding songs to get to one that really moves me. But I get so excited when I find something that I want to share.
Today’s #MusicMonday comes through an interview I found at Brown Girl Magazine of the doctor-hyphen-rapper out of Detroit, Lazarus. A Pakistani-American artist, his lyrics are conscious and gritty, and his beats are Detroit ferocious.
With over a million views on the above video, I clearly have learned about Lazarus after all the other kids have. I kind of love how he is unapologetic about pursuing his medical degree and a rap career at the same time, as can be heard in his song “Living the Dream.” Ain’t no shame in improving yourself. Lazarus dropped a mixtape called Lazarus Story this past September, which can be downloaded for FREE online through this link right here. Continue reading
It has been nearly two years since we have held a pledge drive to keep Sepia Mutiny rolling along. Our server costs come to about $65 a month (yes, we have thoroughly researched cheaper options). For the last six months I have been paying out-of-pocket to keep things going. We have been ad-free for seven years strong now, and unlike the NY Times, aren’t considering putting up a paywall. Every one to two years we ask our readers to pitch in whatever they can if they appreciate the service our bloggers provide.
If you don’t want to use the Paypal link above but would rather mail in a check, then please write me at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com for a mailing address. In case you are curious, 100% of the money goes to paying the server costs and blog related upgrades. We don’t pocket any of the money. We will keep the Paypal link live until we have collected enough to keep the blog going through 2012.
Thanks in advance to anyone who appreciates this site or the conversations that occur here or are started here.
I have an idea. Let’s have national birth certificate coming out parties. Groups of people can get together with each other in homes or bars and reveal their certificates together and then ponder them while occasionally challenging their authenticity. Don’t like my idea? Why? You have something to hide?
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge to immigrant parents from India, has released his birth certificate.
Jindal is being considered by some observers as a potential candidate in the 2012 presidential race.
His office says they released the document to quell any speculation that his eligibility to run for office would be affected by a “birthright citizenship” bill introduced by fellow Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. It would limit automatic U.S. citizenship to children whose parents were legal residents. [link]
Correction, Jindal is no longer even an afterthought in the 2012 race. Thus, this publicity stunt. Here is the backstory on Jindal’s birth:
As he wrote last year in his book, “Leadership and Crisis,” his mother had been offered a scholarship in 1970 to complete a graduate degree in nuclear physics at LSU.
When she informed the university that she couldn’t accept the scholarship because she was pregnant, “LSU wrote back and promised her a month off for childbirth if she changed her mind. LSU was so accommodating, and the opportunity to come to America so thrilling, that my parents accepted. [link]
Now, if I was a certain type of conservative I could argue that Jindal is kind of an “Anchor Baby.” He best not step in to Arizona:
Continue readingBuoyed by recent public opinion polls suggesting they’re on the right track with illegal immigration, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona — and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution — to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens. The law largely is the brainchild of state senator Russell Pearce, a Republican whose suburban district, Mesa, is considered the conservative bastion of the Phoenix political scene. [link]
If you’re a Mindy Kaling fan, you’ll enjoy the new music video produced by her character from The Office, Kelly Kapoor. Fans of the show will recall that Kelly and her coworker teamed up to form girl group, Subtle Sexuality, about two years ago and released their catchy “hit” single, “Male Prima Donna.” Well, the dynamic duo is back. I don’t find this particular song, “The Girl Next Door” as singable as the last one. It’s a bit slower and ballad-y. (Perhaps Kelly has a particular fixation on Taylor Swift this season, who knows. Certainly elements of “You Belong With Me” in the piece.) You can catch the “story” behind the song, here. Enjoy!