Author Archives: manish

Who gets the microphone?

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The NYT reviews the latest book by Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago professor who studies Hinduism:

Though sexual imagery is found throughout Hinduism’s baroque mythology, many groups would like to minimize its importance. They have different concerns: some with purity, some with Hindu power, some with minimizing the influence of “Eurocentric” commentators…

… threatening e-mail messages were sent to Ms. Doniger and her colleagues. And in November 2003, an egg was lobbed at her at the University of London… Scholarship about Hinduism has also come under scrutiny. Books that explore lurid or embarrassing details about deities or saints have been banned. One Western scholar’s Indian researcher was smeared with tar, and the institute in Pune where the scholar had done his research was destroyed. Ms. Doniger said one of her American pupils who was studying Christianity in India had her work disrupted and was being relentlessly followed. [NYT]

What struck me about this story is the degree to which the reviewer absolutely, unquestioningly takes Doniger’s side without acknowledging there might be another point of view. She’s pushed the envelope, to say the least, on sexual, Freudian interpretations of Hindu mythology and reportedly called the Gita ‘a dishonest book’:

Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th century Hindu saint, has been declared by these scholars as being a sexually-abused homosexual, and it has become “academically established” by Wendy Doniger‘s students that Ramakrishna was a child molester, and had also forced homosexual activities upon Vivekananda… Other conclusions by these well-placed scholars include: Ganesha’s trunk symbolizes a “limp phallus”; his broken tusk is a symbol for the castration-complex of the Hindu male; his large belly is a proof of the Hindu male’s enormous appetite for oral sex. Shiva, is interpreted as a womanizer, who encourages ritual rape, prostitution and murder, and his worship is linked to violence and destruction. [Sulekha]

This is a hairy issue, so let me tease out various threads here. I’m not in favor of right-wing Hinduism; I’m certainly against any form of academic intimidation. And there are, in fact, rich veins of sexuality in Hindu mythology. It’s one of the ways Hinduism feels more organic, less Puritan to me than the fire-and-brimstone self-abnegation of the Bible.

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Use the shakti, Luke

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This post is from the files of Mr. ‘Everything Comes From India’ and the chest-thumpingly nationalist father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

An author who’s a Hare Krishna is penning a tome on how Star Wars was inspired by Hindu myths. In his formulation, The Jedi and the Lotus, the Force comes from Brahma, Yoda and Luke are guru and disciple, Jedi training is yoga and the Jedi rules are the warrior code of the kshatriya.

[J]ust as Star Wars takes place in deep space, most of the battles in the Ramayana take place in sophisticated aircrafts, and Arjuna, too, in the Mahabharata, is said to engage in many battles while in outer space… Ancient Indian myths are perhaps the earliest examples of these world myths, while Star Wars is merely among the most contemporary… I look at George Lucas’ major influences, from Flash Gordon to Joseph Campbell, and how Indian tales form the central core around which his series is modelled.

So much sci-fi rips from warrior mythology (samurai, cowboys), I find it hard to believe a claim of exclusive inspiration, although there’s an interesting argument for the ferengi and Klingons in Star Trek being desi in origin.

A stamp of approval

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In a quest for validation-by-sticker dating back to those gold stars from third grade, desis are yet again pitching a Diwali stamp to the US Postal Service. The online petition comes with a ‘No fair! Rashid got a bigger piece’ twist, because an Eid stamp came out years ago. Since both the Diwali and Dalip Singh Saund stamps have been rejected before, the latest try shows we can take a lickin’ and keep on stickin’.

Some experts told that the stamp being issued was not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’, said Kumar. “Diwali‘s recognition by the US Postal Department… will also honour a civilisation that has the merit of being a continuous propagation for 6,000 years, and Diwali is celebrated not just by Hindus but also Sikhs and even Christians. It’s like Christmas,” he contended.

My assessment is a bit too flip. It’s true that in the email age, procuring a Diwali stamp is like flyering the Titanic. But it’s actually free marketing for the South Asian brand. You might not have to explain your damn holiday to your elderly neighbors any more. You might get a sponsorship from Illuminations.

You might even pull a Hannukah (eight days of presents? It’s a shanda) and leave work early every day in November. ‘Ours is a very respectful religion,’ you might say. ‘We respect the ancient tradition of shubh ghanta. Also called happy hour. We take converts.’

Sign the petition here.

Desh-hop

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While we’re freeing Jins from diyas, definitely check out the desh-hop artists who own3d the mike in the hip-hop documentary Brown Like Dat.

First, MC Kabir. The son of Nobel winner Amartya Sen, Kabir is half Italian and lives in Boston. He’s got good flow, an apropos namesake and a solid track in ‘Recognize.’ Kabir tells a great story on screen about freestyling in a dark club and pushing off an overzealous fan who was trying to grab the mike. ‘When I looked closer, I realized it was Wyclef.’ And they jammed. It’s hard to tell the story while looking humble; his lips twitched, but he had it sorted. Listen here.

Also give a listen to the Himalayan Project. Chee Malabar, who showed up to the screening, sported a gaunt frenchie and a serious ‘fro, looking for all the world like a brown Dogg.

The group’s name pays homage to their ancestral roots in India and China — the Himalayan mountain range straddles the borders of both countries. [Official site]

Listen here.

Jin and juice

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Sajit did a very thorough post about the offensive Hot 97 tsunami song. I wanted to call out the lyrics of Jin tha MC’s reply track. It’s in the finest tradition of angry, political rap, and it’s actually a good track on its own merits. Listen to the track.

You got it all twisted if you think I’m here to cockblock
on a bunch of no-talent, wanna-be shock jocks (nah)
And you say it’s all freedom of speech
Well, you just lost yours, read ’em and weep
Won’t be happy ’til you’re fired…

Fuck the tsunami song and whoever thought of it
Matta fact, fuck the engineer that recorded it…
Anything for ratings, huh? That shit is corporate

That little bullshit statement has gotta be
The world’s most half-assed apology
Thousands are still gettin’ discovered each day
How dare you compare a life to a week’s pay?

HipHopMusic says the station issued a weird, passive-aggressive apology, and Sprint and McDonald’s have pulled their advertising for now:

At 6 AM this morning, Hot 97 announced the Miss Jones morning show is “suspended indefinitely”… Most of the calls they took were in favor of bringing Miss Jones back. Many people have reported to me that when they called to speak against bringing the show back they were screened out…. They’re not saying whether the suspension is permanent or temporary, or whether it is a paid suspension….

They also played Jin’s dis track repeatedly.

Riding the Delhi metro

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I rode the Delhi metro the week it opened its first underground route:

Extra-wide cars, fully automated driverless trains, all-electronic fare gates with magnetic farecards and cool magnetic tokens, overhead electric wires that are safer than a third rail, floor-through layout so you can walk from one end to the other without opening doors… this subway system has the finest in Indian, err, South Korean tech. The subway feels and sounds like the D.C. metro. It’s faster and wider than Boston’s, newer and more luxurious than New York’s.

Check out the photos.

Saru Jayaraman

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The NYT profiled Saru Jayaraman, a 29-year-old activist for Manhattan restaurant workers, last week (thanks, Ms. World):

She is the executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a little nonprofit that just pulled off a David-versus-Goliath feat. The center extracted $164,000 from two fashionable Manhattan restaurants – Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe – to settle lawsuits that involved charges of discrimination and failure to pay overtime to 23 restaurant employees, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico and Bangladesh.

The ‘pretty people in sales, pimply workhorses in the back office’ model is used by many, many industries (software, consulting, finance). But you can’t put it in employment ads. There’s a euphemistic hypocrisy here, but like blind auditions at symphony orchestras, it at least gives interviewees an honest shot.

“… you wouldn’t believe the ads put out by restaurant employers – ‘good-looking required, send photos’ – to be a waiter. Employers have told us that means they want good-looking white people in the front and hard workers in the back. Hard workers mean immigrants…”

Jayaraman has an interesting background:

A daughter of immigrants from southern India, a graduate of Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she was singled out and honored as one of America’s finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton… Ms. Jayaraman, whose father is an unemployed software developer and whose mother is a school aide, grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles… She teaches… immigrant rights at New York University… She is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard.

Jayaraman’s organization is opening its own coop-style restaurant on a fashionable street in Manhattan. It’ll be an interesting experiment in a tough biz.

This fall, it plans to open a restaurant, Colors, on Lafayette Street near Astor Place, to be owned and governed by workers.

Pushing back on premarital injustice

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Women with supportive, well-off fathers often are often at the forefront of women’s rights in conservative nations, because they have the means. One such woman has shocked Egypt by filing a paternity suit against a well-known actor. Because it involves a woman fighting injustice before marriage, losing her privacy and being publicly vilified, it reminds me of the dowry extortion case in Delhi:

The standard three-step program for any unmarried upper-class Egyptian girl who becomes pregnant is an abortion, an operation to refurbish her virginity with a new hymen and then marriage to the first unwitting suitor the family can snare… Instead [Hind el-Hinnawy] did the unthinkable here: she had the child and then filed a public paternity suit… Ms. Hinnawy contends that the two had what is known as an urfi [unregistered] marriage… She may well set an Egyptian legal precedent by requesting that the court order Mr. Fishawy to submit to a DNA test…

Corporate tycoons and politicians who are married have found urfi marriages a convenient means to carry on affairs with everyone from secretaries to belly dancers with an Islamic seal of approval… “People prefer that a woman live a psychologically troubled life; that doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t become a scandal…”

… the case would help defeat the conservative Saudi values that she said had changed Egyptian society for the worse… “These values from Wahhabi Islam are completely different from our Islamic values,” Mrs. Bakr said. “This is petrodollar Islam…” [NYT]

The 2003 Nisha Sharma case in Noida:

Just a couple of hours before her wedding ceremony, Ms Nisha Sharma used her mobile phone to report her in-laws-to-be to the police. They had allegedly demanded Rs 12 lakh from Ms Sharma’s father, and had even assaulted him when he had hesitated to comply with the demand…

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