Author Archives: manish

Caribbean desis aren’t feelin’ the love

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The NYT says many Caribbean desis, who originally came to Trinidad, Tobago and Guyana to work on sugar plantations, don’t feel accepted by South Asians in the U.S.:

“They believe our grandparents quit India, so we are like strangers to them…” Mr. Pooran knows Indians, he said, who always speak to him with the expression, “You Guyanese people.” “When I speak I say, ‘We Indians,’ ” he said… Marriages with Indian immigrants from India, though not unheard of, are far less common…

Some Guyanese talk with hurt about not quite being accepted as Indian. Mr. Budhai recalled how in 1978, his wife, Serojini, won an Indian beauty pageant but was never awarded the top prize, a trip to India, after the organizers learned she was Guyanese.

They do feel some bonhomie…

When she walks into a classroom, the first people she notices are those of Indian descent, whether from India or Guyana. “We call it the Indian Connection,” she said. “I glance over at them and they glance over at me, and we exchange a smile.”… When a Sikh spiritual leader was pummeled into unconsciousness in July by a group of people who ridiculed his turban, Guyanese joined in the protests.

… despite the cultural differences:

Guyanese music, while Indian influenced, is marked by a faster West Indian style that has come to be known as chutney soca… Guyanese names are distinguishing, with common Indian first names serving as their last names because of how British planters addressed them… their English [has] a singsong lilt and Creole dialect. Guyanese curries are less spicy, and a shop that serves the flat roti bread with various stews is a distinctly Caribbean conception.

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Makin’ coffee

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Lt. Neil Prakash tells us how the military makes coffee:

Mr. Abrams the coffee maker… slip the lid into the back grill of the exhaust. Then set your canteen cup for about 2 minutes. Let the 900 degree exhaust of your jet engine heat that puppy up and BAM – hot water for shaving, Ramen noodles, coffee…

There’s a certain combination of brute force and delicacy here that I find very appealing 🙂

Livin’ la vida Sepia

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I’m off to India and Turkey for a couple of weeks today. I’ll be livin’ la vida Sepia: riding the Delhi subway; hanging out in Barista, Bangalore, and the new Indian malls; watching a Govinda caper with jeering rickshaw-wallas in the upper stall; eating at the original Bukhara Grill and trying Indo-Chinese cuisine; buying clothing which flatters the desi palette; checking out the WiFi at the airports; and generally basking in the economic liberalization everyone’s been banging on about.

I’ll also be doing a literary tour of Bombay. After having read New York novels for fifteen years, it was a relief to anchor the figurative Manhattan in plaster and stone. And after seven Rushdie novels and an entire oeuvre of diasporic literature, I’m tired of names without faces: Colaba, Bandra, Breach Candy, Cuffe Parade. I feel like the clerk in Hyderabad handling parking tickets from the midwest, I’ve got an intimate map of a terribly remote place.

I’m halfway through Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a tome about the seamy side of Bombay, its ganglords and dancing girls in modern-day slavery. It’s quite interesting, though leaden in parts; it’s not always deftly written, but it’s a fascinating read. What’s most useful, though, is local knowledge; the best spots for vada pav, Maharashtrian food, sherwanis and Bom Bahia sunsets.

Know of a quintessentially Bombay experience? Help me pop my Mumbai cherry by leaving it in the comments.

Union Carbide hoaxer fools the BBC

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The BBC just had its own Dan Rather moment: a media hoaxer pretending to be from Union Carbide took full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster (via Sreenath Srinivasan):

The BBC had earlier twice run an interview with a man it identified as Dow Chemical spokesman Jude Finisterra, who said the company accepted full responsibility for the disaster 20 years ago in the central Indian city of Bhopal. This would have represented a major policy reversal for Dow Chemical which has said it has no responsibility for the Bhopal disaster… “We also confirm Jude Finisterra is neither an employee nor a spokesperson for Dow.”

Union Carbide accepting responsibility for Bhopal? The Beeb should’ve known that was completely implausible.

Checkmate cheating

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Filmmaker Vikram Jayanti’s documentary about the royal sport of chaturanga is coming to the U.S. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine covers the famous chess match between Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s famed supercomputer.

The film hints darkly at human-machine collusion in Deep Blue’s win. The filmmaker expands on his conspiracy theory:

IBM hit the jackpot. Their share value went up and up. And it strikes me that someone in the corporation had a brilliant idea that if they could beat Kasparov, people would think that IBM were in the frontline of computing. IBM was seen as a dinosaur before this match. No one saw them as an innovator. They’re still using Deep Blue in their advertising.

He sees Kasparov as a giant betrayed:

I’ve watched him play inferior players. He just wants to get it over with. I mean, when you’re that good at chess you want a good opponent. And I suspect his fantasy was that a computer would give him that… In terms of walking naively into the lions den, I think he thought there was a chance to make some money and to do something of scientific interest.

Jayanti throws in some puffery about the sport of chess, which apparently is as physically bad-ass as badminton claims to be:

I wanted it to be a combat film. One of the first things Garry said to me was, “Chess is a contact sport.” You know he’s very physically fit. And I asked him why he has to work out so much, and he told me that you had to be very fit in order to play.

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Bend it like Bangladesh

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A real-life case of Bend It Like Beckham has erupted in Bangladesh:

Bangladesh’s government has stopped women taking part in a swimming competition after pressure from an Islamic group. In July, a women’s wrestling tournament was cancelled after threats to disrupt it, and a women’s football competition was called off after protests… a radical Islamic group threatened to bring the entire district around Chandpur to a halt with protests… The Committee for Resistance to Un-Islamic Activities said women taking part in the sport would offend Bangladesh’s more than 100 million Muslims.

How could we ally with a country which bans Gabrielle Reece? Such an ally would be positively un-American. Next thing you know, they’ll ban women from driving.

Brimful of Reese’s on the 35

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Mira Nair waxes about Sapphic pleasures while discussing her Vanity Fair lead Reese Witherspoon’s pregnancy:

“[W]hen I first met her husband [actor Ryan Philippe], I said ‘knock her up, won’t you, I need some flesh on the girl’,” she joked. “I’m not a fan of the underfed Los Angeles actor at all… I love the luminosity that pregnancy brings, I love the fleshiness, I love the ample bosom – it gave me much more to play with.”

Sounds like she appreciates someone with a kachori in the oven. Nair managed to work around Reese’s pieces on screen:

Nair explained how camera tricks had been used to disguise Witherspoon’s “bump” in various scenes – including hiring a number of young boys in costumes to stand in front of her. “She runs, she gets off coal carts, she jumps off horses – she does everything,” Nair said. “But there’s also a certain carriage with horses that is going to wipe the screen at a certain moment, because of the bump.”

The artist formerly known as MC Hammer would’ve understood.

The poetry of racists

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A Sikh-owned gas station in Chesterfield, Virginia was burned and defaced with racist graffiti last week (via Prashant Kothari):

[T]he attackers put the gas station on fire on Wednesday and left after smearing the remaining property with graffiti containing ethnic slurs… The words “Go Back to Bin Laden B–” and “Never Again Indian Monkey N–” were sprayed on a dumpster in the rear of the gas station property. In addition, the words, “F– Arab Gas” were spray painted on the gas station’s shed… “Now they call us Osama bin Laden. In 1979, when Iranians held Americans hostage, they used to call us Ayatollahs,’ says Bammi.

I sure do miss the good ol’ days when the racists weren’t utterly ignorant. The thugs in Britain didn’t call you Eye-rainians, Eye-rackies (mortal enemies of the Eye-rainians) and bin Ladens (mortal enemy of the Eye-rackies) all at once. There was an intimacy to their taunting. And ‘Indian Monkey N–‘ is missing a few other ethnically-inaccurate insults. Is it too much to ask for my racism to be specific?

But ‘F– Arab Gas’ fills me with hope. Hope that they’re energy policy-conscious racist arsonists who want a self-reliant, muscular country which can’t be blackmailed over a non-indigenous resource. And curiosity about whether these gentlemen voted for Arab gas’ #1 friend.

Yep, I sure do miss the good ol’ days.

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Cow dung against nukes

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The intrepid and clever RSS glorifies the totemic Hindu animal by claiming cow dung protects against nuclear fallout (via Spontaneous Order):

Bhanwarlal Kothari, a senior member of the RSS, said, “Our tests have shown that distemper made out of cow dung and spread over walls and roofs can block nuclear radiation.”

But wait, cows also cure cancer…

“We believe that cows’ urine can cure cancer, renal failure, arthritis and a lot of other ailments,” Mansinghka said.

… dispose of biohazards…

“Some of my friends have (debated) ways to use cow dung to wrap surgically removed human body parts and bury them in the ground,” he said. “That will save hospitals the expensive process of incinerating such organs.”

… and cause earthquakes via ‘Einsteinian pain waves’:

“The killing of animals causes natural and manmade disasters,” Bajaj said. “But, since the cow is so useful to human beings, its slaughter causes exceptional seismic activity. The cries of the animals go down to the earth through Einsteinian pain waves.”

Clearly, we should be defending our soldiers in Iraq with nothing more than bull shit. All I’m saying is give pees a chance. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m getting some very non-Einsteinian pain waves in my cranium.

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Mr. Birdie Num-Num gets a biopic

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Many people look better in the animal wax of nostalgia: dictators, drugrunners, Starsky & Hutch. But one never does: Peter Sellers, the British comedian who made a habit of playing mentally-challenged desis in brownface.

The original film [The Party] was a more-than-a-little-racist comedy with a white comedian playing ‘Hrundi V. Bakshi’ in brownface, sporting a degenerate imitation of an Indian accent. Sellers wandered around a film set for a sequel to Gunga Din, itself a landmark of racism featuring civilized British soldiers vs. naked Indian savages.

Yes, Mr. Birdie Num-Num just got an HBO biopic, which means that Glitter has lost its lock on the Razzies. Even worse, Dreamworks is remaking The Party:

The Party, a minor success in comparison to Sellers films like Dr Strangelove and The Pink Panther, was banned in India for some years. Some politicians protested the film caricatured Indians and showed them in absurd light. Only after editor Khushwant Singh intervened was the ban lifted.

The only saving grace is that they’re making the protagonist non-desi.