Author Archives: manish

This turban’s disturbin’

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On the late-night community access channel, Dr. Khemfoia Padu, who appears to be black, dons a saffron turban and shills pills with whale tails.

Dr. Padu is the Director of The Natural Healing Foundation… He is a licensed Chiropracter, Herbologist, Nutritionist, as well as a Theologian and Martial Artist. [Link]

I’m not sure whether the pagri pitches desi mysticism, evokes black musicians who wore turbans or references turbans in Africa.

Erykah Padu’s turban may be genuine, but I’m thoroughly irritated that desi culture is associated in the U.S. with hippies and New Age. You can’t go to an all-veg pizza place without drowning in ads for crystals and tarot cards. That ain’t right. A subculture has branded a billion and a half people, the tail wags the wog.

In one freakish conflation of the Indian revolutionary movement with American hippies, a town in Massachussetts actually banned a Gandhi statue. It was the absolute height of clusterfuck ignorance:

Gita Mehta details the extent of the hippie infatuation with South Asia in her classic book, Karma Cola. Westerners seek instant salvation; Easterners the quick rupee. Gurus could pack entire astrodomes in the ’60s, levitation was believed to signal salvation, and Western disciples believed above all else in moksha through easy sex and hard drugs. At one point there were over 100,000 hippies trekking all over South Asia searching for enlightenment in woolly-minded religious platitudes and a variety of uppers and downers. Religion and opium for the masses: no wonder Sherborn, Massachusetts, would have none of it.

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‘George Ka Pakistan’

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You might think George Ka Pakistan (George’s Pakistan) is a straightforward description of the political relationship between Dubya and Musharraf. Instead, it was recently Pakistan’s #1 reality show (via Uncleji):

The premise was simple: could a Gora (white man) become a Pakistani? Over 13 weeks, Fulton, a 27-year-old former public schoolboy, travelled the country to find out. He sampled Pakistan’s many delights – moseying through the tribal areas, dancing at slick Karachi parties, speaking bad Urdu and arguing with his electricity company… Fulton squeezed into tiny taxis, milked a buffalo and tried on a dhoti… [Link]

George Fulton, a TV and theater producer, ended up becoming a Pakistani citizen. Why? Lowe, twu lowe:

The ministry of the interior was so impressed with Fulton’s efforts that it offered him Pakistani citizenship… The downsides included the potential of being be conscripted into the Pakistani army in the event of war with, for example, India. But now, he says: “I’m going through with it”… he has fallen in love with a Pakistani woman, also a TV producer, and they plan to get married next November. [Link]

To paraphrase the National Front, if he’s a loyal Pakistani, why does he still root for England’s cricket team?  To be a true Pakistani, all he needs to do is obsess over India and talk nostalgically of his years in New York.

Fulton received… six marriage proposals (he politely refused them all). Then, in the final episode, the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, received him in Islamabad and the show’s producers polled viewers about whether “George Sahib” had succeeded in becoming a Pakistani. Sixty-five per cent said yes. [Link]
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One ticket for the clue train, please

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Tacky, tacky, tacky. Last week, sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling got snarky about India’s hurricane relief offer. I’ll be generous and speculate he was criticizing the U.S.’ tardy disaster response. But get this — he did so by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist landmark, ‘Gunga Din’ (via Amardeep):

Thank Goodness, Here Come the Brave and Generous Indians to Rescue Louisiana
Mood: incredulous
Now Playing: take up the white man’s burden, send forth the best ye breed…

Where’s bloomin’ Rudyard Kipling when we need ‘im, eh?

… I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.

… ‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to pore damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din!

Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! [Link]

Incredulous is right. You thought Indra Nooyi was tone deaf? A middle finger reference is nothing compared to ‘Gunga Din.’ This is like praising Savion Glover’s dancing skills by comparing him approvingly to Little Black Sambo.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Sterling is slyly calling hurricane relief the brown man’s burden. But that would be pretty oblique given the plain meaning of the ‘belted an’ flayed’ Indian servant saving a white man’s life. I don’t think this interpretation holds water, pardon the pun.

Some bloggers are also criticizing a sarcastic Boing Boing title (‘Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!’), but Xeni, a huge Bollywood fan, issued a pretty straightforward clarification.

Here’s more reaction by Uma, Shashwati and Club810, and previous posts on India’s aid offer, Gunga Din, the white man’s burden and racist caricatures.

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Be careful what you say in Singapore

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The magic kingdom of Singapore just charged two bloggers with sedition for posting rants against minorities including Indians, Malays and Muslims:

According to court documents, Lim’s forum message began with: “The masses are idiots. ‘Nuff said”. He went on to make disparaging remarks about Muslims. Then, turning his attention to the Chinese and Indians, he wrote that listening to the complaints of “Chinese and Indians … was no less irritating”.

Koh was more pointed. Peppering his blog entry with vulgarities, he directed his tirade at Malays and Muslims. His blog had a picture of a roasted pig’s head with “a Halal look-alike logo”, according to court documents…

Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, and Nicholas Lim Yew, 25, were arrested and charged under the Sedition Act. [Link]

The tiny Southeast Asian city-state is 80 percent ethnic Chinese, while Malays make up around 15 percent of the country’s 4.2 million populace. [Link]

Racist rants which don’t aim to incite violence are best dealt with by civil society, commercial boycotts or a good blog-whuppin’ rather than the legal system. But in the hypersensitive nation-state of Singapore, even jaywalking can get you arrested. It’s a place devoid of both street litter and truly free expression:

Visitors should be aware of Singapore’s strict laws and penalties for a variety of actions that might not be illegal or might be considered minor offenses in the United States. These include jaywalking, littering, and spitting. Singapore has a mandatory caning sentence for vandalism offenses… There are no jury trials in Singapore, judges hear cases and decide sentencing. [Link]
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1-800-INSOMNIA

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Tomorrow night, PBS stations in the U.S. are airing a documentary on the human impact of outsourcing on call center workers (via SAJA):

1-800-INDIA
Tuesday, September 13 at 9 P.M.

… “1-800-INDIA” explores the experience of young Indian men and women who have been recruited into these new jobs requiring long hours, night shifts, and westernized work habits. The film reveals the human and cultural impact of a sweeping global trend, exploring its effect on Indian family life, on the evolving landscape of Indian cities and towns, and on the aspirations and daily lives of young Indians, especially women, entering the workforce.

Blogger Daniel Drezner penned an introduction:

Ironically, India itself now has some other pressing concerns because of the expansion of the global market for outsourcing services. Wage rates in Bangalore are starting to rise dramatically, and India has bottlenecks in its educational infrastructure that will limit the growth of the labor force. So other countries — the Philippines, Indonesia, Ghana — are beginning to compete. Nowadays you can even find Europeans and Americans working — if only temporarily — in India. Backpackers hiking through India stop off in Bangalore and work in call centers for a few weeks to pay their way…

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They come baring gifts

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Check out how this Brit-influenced Bollywood review reads in American English:

[Salaam Namaste] has a frothy first half and an emotion-filled second half with the climax that warms the very cockles of your heart. And, as a bonus, there is a cameo by Abhishek Bachchan at the fag end. [Link]

Someone needs to take a rubber to the end of that review. It’s the kind of movie review-cum-double entendre which I’d never plunge into. At least not without a safe word.

Not that Americans don’t do the same, only it’s intentional. Ang Lee’s new gay cowboy Western is entitled Brokeback Mountain. The subtlety of the encoding is truly humbling. Heath Ledger and Donnie Snarko stare longingly at each other for the entire length of the trailer, but heaven forbid that they act. The love that dare not, is the wet sari that must not.

I say let the rainbow flag fly. Bollywood has long repaid the compliment.

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Do unto others

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Following Sri Lanka’s lead (when was the last time you read those words? ), India has offered sakat / succor in N’awlins, and Uncle Sam has accepted (via Boing Boing):

India, which regularly is hit by flooding from monsoon rains, has said it has a planeload of supplies waiting. The United States said Thursday night that it has accepted $5 million in aid. [Link]

Post-tsunami, India was criticized by some for rejecting assistance, perhaps out of national pride:

It was told by the U.S. Embassy that “at this moment, the U.S. government is not asking for international assistance.” [Link]

Sweden and others are getting stiff-armed by the famous bureaucratic sense of urgency:

For four days, a C-130 transport plane ready to lift supplies to Katrina victims has stood idle at an air base in Sweden. The aid includes a water purification system that may be urgently needed amid signs deadly diseases could be spreading through fetid pools in New Orleans… The one thing that stands in the way of takeoff? Approval by U.S. officials… Poland, Austria and Norway said they had not heard back on their aid offers, and countries outside Europe said they were also waiting for replies. [Link]

And one member of the axis of heck got nothing but pumpkins:

Tehran offered to send 20 million barrels of crude oil if Washington waived trade sanctions, but Thomas said the offer was rejected because it was conditional. [Link]
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Monster’s ball

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A moment of silence, please — I have truly depressing news to report. Long years of eating English food have wreaked havoc upon the visage of an Oscar-winning desi actor:

Ben… Kingsley… plays… FAGIN! Aww yeah! That’s like Samuel L. Jackson as Ravana or Hanuman vs. the Rock. (And I think we know which one wins.)

Kingsley hams his way through an Oliver Twist revival by pedophile filmmaker Roman Polanski due out this month. Charles Dickens meets a suitable boy — the paid-by-the-word weepies collide in copyright-free drama nirvana. But seriously, after the melo-hungama of Dickens, surely Ben-ji could find it in his heart to pay Bollyrespects?

Polanski struggled with the eternal, Shylockian question of ‘who is a Jew’:

Born in 1837, Dickens’s Fagin The paid-by-the-word weepies collidewas larded with ethnic stereotypes from his first appearance as “a very old, shriveled Jew… Alec Guinness, in David Lean’s 1948 version, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose… it also resembled anti-Semitic caricatures in… Nazi Germany. At a theater in Berlin the audience was so offended by Fagin’s characterization that it rioted… in Carol Reed’s 1968 film version… he played with gay stereotypes, mincing his way through “Pick a Pocket or Two” and twirling a frilly pink parasol in “I’d Do Anything.”

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