Author Archives: manish

Fareed-peat

Posted on by

After the London bombings, Jon Stewart summoned Fareed Zakaria back to The Daily Show to explain ‘his people.’

In this clip, Zakaria edges away from the neocon thesis that democracy alone can end terrorism, since the British bombers were born in a democracy. He claims the fundies have very low support throughout the Muslim world, pointing out the fundamentalist parties got under 5% in Indonesian and Malaysian elections (but he ignores the provincial elections in Pakistan).

Zakaria says the disaffected youth in Europe don’t feel socially integrated and are latching on to the ideology of the moment; today’s Islamic fundies would have been Marxists or Maoists 30 years ago. But he thinks the core of fundie support is gone in the Muslim world, and the virus will take some time to die out in Europe. In contrast, in the U.S. he says Muslims have done well economically and are much better assimilated.

Zakaria is right that the fundies have little public support, but only if you exclude some mighty key regions, such as Pakistan. And lack of support for fundamentalist political parties is not the same as lack of support for bin Laden or terrorist tactics.

Watch the clip.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

Continue reading →

Neil Prakash in ‘Wired’ (updated)

Posted on by

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! …
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war; …
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

— Billy Shakes, Julius Caesar

Wired’s August issue prominently features Lt. Neil Prakash of the U.S. Army in a story about milbloggers called ‘Blogs of War.’ The Silver Star-decorated tank platoon commander has a striking full-page photo in camouflage, glowering as hard as a 28-year-old can glower.

The story says Prakash was born just outside Bangalore, the son of two upstate New York dentists. He’s quite pyro about firing the tank’s main gun and other testosterone sports. Prakash says his favorite sound is an F-16 strafing run: it sounds like a cat in a blender or as if God were ripping up a phone book in the sky (all quotes paraphrased). He also says something like, ‘I’d rather be commanding a tank than sitting in a call center telling someone in Bumfuck, U.S.A. how to reformat their hard drive’ 🙂

His platoon has been rotated out of Iraq and is currently recuperating in Germany. Prakash used the downtime to get married in Denmark.

Check it out on the newsstands. Here’s Prakash’s blog.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Update: The story has been posted.

By the crude light of a small bulb and the backlit screen of his Dell laptop, Neil Prakash, a first lieutenant, posted some of the best descriptions of the fighting in Fallujah and Baquba last fall:

Terrorists in headwraps stood anywhere from 30 to 400 meters in front of my tank. They stopped, squared their shoulders at us just like in an old-fashioned duel, and fired RPGs at our tanks. So far there hadn’t been a single civilian in Task Force 2-2 sector. We had been free to light up the insurgents as we saw them. And because of that freedom, we were able to use the main gun with less restriction.

Prakash was awarded the Silver Star this year for saving his entire tank task force during an assault on insurgents in Iraq’s harrowing Sunni Triangle. He goes by the handle Red 6 and is author of Armor Geddon. For him, the poetry of warfare is in the sounds of exploding weapons and the chaos of battle.

“It’s mind-blowing what this stuff can do,” Prakash tells me by phone from Germany, where his unit moved after rotating out of Iraq earlier this year. One of his favorite sounds is that of an F16 fighter on a strafing run. “It’s like a cat in a blender ripping the sky open – if the sky was made out of a phone book.” He is from India, the land of Gandhi, but he loves to talk about blowing things up. “It’s just sick how badass a tank looks when it’s killing.”

Prakash is the son of two upstate New York dentists and has a degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins. He’s a naturalized American citizen, born near Bangalore, and he describes growing up in the US and his decision to join the military as something like Bend It Like Beckham meets The Terminator. He says he admired the Army’s discipline and loved the idea of driving a tank. He knew that if he didn’t join the Army, he might end up in medical school or some windowless office in a high tech company. With a bit of bluster, Prakash claims that for him, the latter would be more of a nightmare scenario than ending up in the line of fire of insurgents. “It was a choice between commanding the best bunch of guys in the world and being in a cubicle at Dell Computer in Bangalore right now helping people from Bum-fuck USA format their hard drives.”

It’s taken some adjustment, but Prakash says his parents basically support his Army career, although his father can’t conceal his anxiety about having a son in Iraq. Prakash says he blogs to assure the folks back home that he’s safe, to let his friends all over the world know what’s going on, and to juice up the morale in his unit. “The guys get really excited when I mention them.”

By the time Prakash left Iraq early this year, the readers of Armor Geddon extended far beyond family and friends. He still posts from his base in Germany and is slowly trying to complete a blog memoir of his and his fellow soldiers’ experiences in the battle for Fallujah…

Blackfive himself has degrees in archaeology and computer science and avidly follows the postings of fellow bloggers. He describes Neil Prakash as “borderline Einstein…”

Prakash remains in Germany, awaiting orders to jump back into his beloved tank, which he calls Ol’ Blinky. He says he has no plans to resume his study of neuroscience, although it wasn’t completely useless in Iraq. “Neuroscience actually came in handy when I had to explain to my guys exactly why doing ecstasy in a tank when it’s 140 degrees out on a road that’s blowing up every day is a really bad idea.”

Continue reading →

Rashomon on the tube (updated again)

Posted on by

Plainclothes British special forces chased and killed a supposedly South Asian-looking man on the London tube yesterday whom they suspected of being a suicide bomber (thanks, Ravi):

… he saw a man in a black bomber jacket and jeans running towards him being chased by the officers… The suspect, described as being of Asian appearance and wearing a thick, bulky jacket, vaulted over a ticket barrier when challenged by police and ran down the escalator and along the platform of the Northern Line…

As waiting passengers and those already on a train that had pulled into the station dived to the floor, the suspect jumped on the train. Two witnesses said that as he entered the train he tripped, ending up half in and half out of the carriage, on all fours… the officers caught up with the man and pushed him hard to the floor. Witnesses said that they then fired up to five bullets into him at close range, killing him instantly. [Link]

“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified. He sort of tripped but they were hotly pursuing him and couldn’t have been more than two or three feet behind him at this time. They unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He’s dead, five shots, he’s dead…” [Link]

Police are describing him as an “intimate accomplice of the cell”. His name and address were thought to have been found among the possessions left by the would-be bombers on Thursday… [Link]

Now they say it was all a mistake (thanks, Abhi):

It is understood that he was found not to have been carrying a bomb… After the suspect had been shot police sent a robot to examine the man, because of fears that any device could still prove a danger. But it is understood that no device was found… [Link]

The man shot dead by police at Stockwell Underground station yesterday morning had nothing to do with Thursday’s abortive London bomb attacks, Scotland Yard said tonight… The Met said in a statement this afternoon: “We believe we now know the identity of the man shot at Stockwell Underground station by police… We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday…” [Link]

This is a Rashomon-like story. The cops’ version: they followed him from an apartment complex which they’d staked out in connection with the recent London bombings. He was wearing a suspiciously thick jacket on a temperate day and heading for the subway, so they decided to arrest him. He did not comply with their warnings and instead ran into the tube station, vaulted the gates and made it onto a train. Under those circumstances, it was their duty to stop a potential suicide bomber, so they tackled him to the floor of the train and shot him dead.

From the victim’s point of view, he left the apartment to go to work, got on a bus and got off at his tube station when he noticed he was being followed by men in street clothes. They started yelling at him and pulled guns, which British cops normally don’t carry. Believing his life was in danger, he bolted into the nearest escape vehicle, the tube, and he almost survived. The cops are saying he had no link to the bombings.

Continue reading →

Guest blogger: Amardeep Singh

Posted on by

Please welcome guest blogger Amardeep Singh, he of the excellent blog eponymous. On his keyboard of prolificness, Amardeep has fisked exoticism, the Brit Asian music scene, puffy hair and guru shirts, Parineeta and Sarkar, Suketu Mehta and Monica Ali, Vijay Iyer, singer Kiran Ahluwalia, immigrants in London, and Gandhi’s views on the British Raj. In his spare time, he spins records and teaches lit.

I’ve nicked more post ideas from Amardeep’s insightful writing than I care to tally. Finally, I succumbed to the inexorable logic of laziness: why not bring the mountain to the Mutiny?

Continue reading →

Sussing out an honest bureaucrat

Posted on by

Dr. Krishna Ella is an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin and the founder of Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad. MIT’s Technology Review recently covered the unique challenges he faced when doing business in India. His first challenge, before the Indian economic boom: desis skeptical of returnees.

Ella and his wife had to spend the first months convincing banks to loan them money. It didn’t help that Ella was a repatriate. “Nobody could understand why someone would come back to India,” Ella says. “Everyone’s first question was: ‘What went wrong in America? Did you break some sort of law?'” [Link]

That’s actually still a good question, given that the former chairman of U.S. Airways left that collapsing company and is launching an Indian airline. Ella’s second challenge: routing around the famously inflexible Indian labor market.

As Ella’s business blossomed, though, he faced a classic Indian problem: how to avoid becoming dependent on local labor unions. His solution was practical — and radical: “We chose a poor village in three of the poorest states of India and offered training to their best students, with a promise of at least two years’ employment…” Today, much of the company’s skilled labor force is made up of people who sometimes can support an entire village with their salaries… [Link]

Third challenge: preparing dossiers on which bureaucrats were the least corrupt.

“It was my experience that 90% of the bureaucrats were just in it for the bribes and 10% were really interested in using their position to help the people and the country,” Ella says. He did background research on the employees of an agency from which he needed permits or regulatory approvals, then concentrated his paperwork on the most honest clerk in the department. Further, if a bureaucrat was rude or unhelpful, Ella approached them like he would a potential customer, returning several times to explain his situation in polite and persuasive language. [Link]

Continue reading →

The quonset tunneling effect

Posted on by

Russell Peters jokes that the only thing the desi accent is good for is cutting tension, while Vikrum Sequeira has decoded how the desi head wiggle signals affability. Indeed, you can usually count on desis to be friendly and amiable.

So when a certain Francis Devandra Raj dug a tunnel from Canada to the U.S., it was purely to promote cross-border comity. The three-by-five tunnel was fortified with rebar and concrete, lit and ventilated. In fact, this undercover brother’s purposes were so peaceful that he was using the tunnel to send serene B.C. bud into the grateful arms of American stoners everywhere.

I just can’t see why the U.S. government doesn’t agree 😉 They arrested Raj and two buddies from Surrey, B.C. yesterday on charges of drug smuggling. But one thing remains the same, desis’ pioneering nature. The tunnel is the very first cross-border subterranean passage between Canada and the U.S ever known to exist.

Federal agents have shut down an elaborate, 360-foot drug-smuggling tunnel dug underneath the U.S.-Canadian border — the first such passageway discovered along the nation’s northern edge… The tunnel ran from a quonset hut on the Canadian side and ended under the living room of a home on the U.S. side, 300 feet from the border. Built with lumber, concrete and metal reinforcing bars, it was equipped with lights and ventilation, and ran underneath a highway…

Francis Devandra Raj, 30; Timothy Woo, 34; and Jonathan Valenzuela, 27, of Surrey, British Columbia, were arrested Wednesday… Raj owns the property under the quonset hut. [Link]

The smugglers were apparently religious. I’d give anything to know which saints were found inside the tunnel — Bob Marley? Lakshmi, goddess of wealth? Or, more appropriately for a tunnel, Ganeshji, remover of obstacles?

That tunnel was 3 feet wide and 5 feet high with a concrete floor. It had wood-beam supports, fiberglass walls, ventilation, video security and groundwater-removal systems. Several altars with flowers and pictures of saints also were found inside. [Link]

The police used some pretty high-tech methods to find the tunnel. But really, all they had to do was look for a bunch of dudes with red eyes giggling hysterically.

Investigators used a machine that can “see” underground, a video-equipped robot, a drug-sniffing dog and an air horn to find it. [Link]

Continue reading →

Bucky Done Underwhelmed

Posted on by

Ananthan points us to a new music video for M.I.A.’s ‘Bucky Done Gun.’ The mix she uses, the official one from Arular, is so spare that it can hardly sustain a video, leaving me squirming during the long gaps when nothing’s happening musically. The version from Piracy Funds Terrorism is much higher energy.

The video is beautifully filmed, though, black and white recolored in pastels, much higher production values than her early efforts. It’s strange seeing gritty radical chic, itself poseur, turn glossy like a high end photography mag. The video recolors a pair of loudspeakers to match the Palestinian flag, and M.I.A.’s checkered tights evoke the PLO kaffiyeh. Its firebomb-throwing young men are porn for the ultra-left, but the images are carefully sanitized: you see colored Holi smoke streaming from bottles, but you don’t see any actual explosions or maimings. In another bid for hip-hop authenticity, the label surrounds Maya with a swarm of backup dancers who are black.

In M.I.A.’s attitude you can already see the shift from awkward ingénue to sexually confident diva. The video opens with M.I.A. in a boxer’s hood, mike dangling from the ceiling. A clear homage to ‘Mama Said Knock You Out,’ it’s the very definition of aggression. The gaze from beneath the bangs covering half her face is no longer diffident, it’s brassy, painted and unblinkingly heavy-lidded. Her previous videos have been much more playful; this one’s simultaneously more serious and more trashy, with Maya and her main backup dancer pole-writhing against a chain-link fence.

I should cheer for a performer coming into her own, but it feels like a Miltonian loss of innocence. Yeah, I’m already nostalgic for M.I.A. circa 2004 😉

Watch the video.

Update: Here are the lyrics:

They’re comin through the window
They’re comin through the door
They’re bustin down the big wall
And sounding the horn

What you want
The bucky done gun
What you want
The fire done burn
Get crackin, get get crackin

Time to spit new shit
I’m rocking on this new bit
I’m hot now you’ll see
I’ll fight you just to get peace

Heavy weight wrestler
Fight me in your comforter
Let you be superior
I’m filthy with the fury ya

I’ll hard drive your bit
I’m battered by your sumo grip
Lucky I like feeling shit
My stamina can take it

Gymnastics super fit
Muscles on the gun clip
Bite, teeth, nose bleed
Tied up in the scarf piece

Can I get control
Do you like me vulnerable
I’m armed and I’m equal
More fun for the people

Physical, brute force
Steel, iron, you’re the boss
Yeah, you’re so do-able
Grind me down sugar salt

Continue reading →

Guest blogger: Turbanhead

Posted on by

As Sepia Mutiny’s first anniversary nears, we thought we’d mix things up a little by bringing in friends of the Mutiny to guest blog for a month each. We could think of no more appropriate person to take our guest blogging cherry than the O.G. Bollykitsch blogger. He’s inspired many of our posts and video-blogged oodles of cheesy ’70s item numbers for our milk-snorting pleasure.

Introducing the man who needs no introduction: DJ Spin Boldak, the Stetson from Crooklyn, Turbanhead.

Continue reading →

Anchors away

Posted on by

 

MTV Desi chief Nusrat Durrani picked Brit TV personality Tim Kash for male anchor. As a fellow well-known Sri Lankan Brit, Kash is like the male M.I.A. — if she were as lame as Carson Daly. (That’s a slam on Daly, not Kash, whom I’ve never watched.)

Since Kash isn’t an American, I’m guessing Durrani didn’t find a male anchor he liked by launch time and had to go to the UK bench. I’m also guessing that he’s champing at the bit to get an American. But maybe he just wanted one of the anchors to be an old hand at MTV.

On the right is Niharika Desai, their female face. Here are the anchors’ official bios:

Of Sri Lankan heritage but born and raised in the UK, Tim Kash hosts the daily MTV UK News show… Tim began his career at MTV at age 19, becoming the youngest MTV VJ in history. Most recently, Tim co-hosted the MTV US/International coverage of the recent Live 8 concert in London’s Hyde Park that was beamed across the world.

Niharika is a film editor with a background in photography… [from] Poughkeepsie, Mumbai and Brooklyn… Niharika is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in Psychology and South Asia Regional Studies. She is conversant in Marathi, can read and write the Devanagari script.

MTV Desi apparently didn’t get the ‘must refer to self as Indian’ memo. Damn you, South Asian Studies! Anil Dash says Desai may beat Apu as the most famous desi American within the next 12 months. That would be a relief, but Miss MTV Desai only beams for satellite at the moment.

… I can’t wait for the day when there’s enough Indians in the mainstream media that we can complain about the offensive way in which we’re depicted. Somewhere between Temple of Doom and Apu’s appearance on the Simpsons…

Lilia asked me the other day who the most famous U.S.-born Indian American is, and I had to think a bit. It’s not Deepak Chopra, because I don’t think he was born in the U.S., and I was told [Ed.: by the friend who asked the question] Norah Jones doesn’t entirely count, since she’s half Indian. My guess was that maybe it’s Tony Kanal from No Doubt, but apparently he was born in the U.K. Maybe by this time next year it’ll be Niharika Desai.

Continue reading →

The transit of Venus in Mercury

Posted on by

Mathangi Mian made the shortlist for the UK’s most prestigious music award, the Mercury Prize, today (thanks, brimful). The Kaiser Chiefs are favored to win. Coldplay’s also on the list, but rumour is that this year’s da bomb in Englistan: M.I.A. has a shot to balance out last year’s pick, the already established Franz Ferdinand.

Previous winners include Dizzee Rascal, PJ Harvey, Badly Drawn Boy, Portishead and Talvin Singh, for his groundbreaking OK in 1999. Sometimes the Prize gives me the heebie-jeebies. They once nominated the Spice Girls, which is neither desi nor kosher.

Proving yet again just how much cooler the UK is, there have been loads of desi nominees out of the 10-12 bands shortlisted each year. In fact, from 1998-99 there were two Asian bands each year. It’s like NYC where you’ll often have multiple desi parties or arts events on the same day because the market can support them.

  • M.I.A., Arular, 2005
  • Susheela Raman, Salt Rain, 2001
  • Nitin Sawhney, Beyond Skin, 2000
  • Talvin Singh, OK, 1999 (winner)
  • Black Star Liner, Bengali Bantam Youth Experience!, 1999
  • Asian Dub Foundation, Rafi’s Revenge, 1998
  • Cornershop, When I Was Born for the 7th Time, 1998
  • Apache Indian, No Reservations, 1993

Asians in Media complains that Singh’s win didn’t have coattails:

Remember the infamous ‘Asian underground revolution’ that was supposed to happen when Talvin Singh won a Mercury prize in 1999? Vivek Bald’s excellent documentary Mutiny Sounds showed how that fell apart when industry executives could not grasp how to sell it. Raghav seems to be in a similar bind. One the one hand he seems to be marketed only for Asians. At the same time faces resistance from those who don’t know what to do with an Asian artist. [Link]

Continue reading →