Author Archives: manish

Spinning heads spit sambar

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Exorcism: it’s not just for Bobby Jindal (see liberal blog DailyKos) any more. Faith healers in the UK are fleecing depressed Muslim women by vending talismans and djinn exorcisms:

A victim of exorcism, eighteen-year-old Sureha Begum, from Manchester, attended the conference. She suffered from chronic depression and was self-harming after an arranged marriage in Bangladesh. When she became ill her parents were told that she was possessed by jinns. They spent over £3,000 on faith healers and exorcisms…

Said Sureha: “Faith healers told my parents that I was possessed and the more my mental health deteriorated the more these faith healers convinced them it was the work of the jinn… These faith healers know your weaknesses as soon as you open your mouth and they use it to con people out of hundreds of pounds.”

If I were to be the property of a djinn, let that djinn be Barbara Eden.

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Revenge of the nerds

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NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says Americans need to emulate Asian and desi nerds:

The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they’ll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid’s idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

Patenting the chapati

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Last week, the European Patent Office revoked agricultural conglomerate Monsanto’s patent on a variety of Indian Nap Hal wheat, widely used in chapatis because it doesn’t rise when baked (via Boing Boing). Indians had cried biopiracy, reacting the way we would if France had patented apple pie (Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri).

The wheat’s low gluten content gives it low water absorption and elasticity. One scientist elaborated on how the patent’s central claim was not novel:

The Indian wheat patent by Monsanto has lower gluten, which is responsible for its lower elasticity… This is the trait that is the core of Monsanto’s patent and it is a trait evolved by farmers breeding in India. Introducing the trait into a cross… is an obvious step any breeder familiar with the art of breeding can undertake. Monsanto’s claim is clearly not novel. This is a clear case of piracy of India’s indigenous knowledge of breeding and cooking.

Yes, breeding and cooking: the desi core competencies. The patent opposition was filed in conjunction with Greenpeace.

Monsanto denied the patents would be used to block Indian farmers from using their Nap Hal seed. “Indian users can use Nap Hal for chapatis or whatever else, now and just as they’ve always been used to,” McDermott told The Scientist. “The idea that Indian farmers would have to pay royalties to use Nap Hal, that’s just inflammatory and ridiculous.”

The controversy echoes the neem patent case in 2000. Neem leaves are widely used in ayurvedic remedies. The EPO revoked this patent, held by the U.S. government and W.R. Grace on a neem-based fungicide.

Here is the patent text.

Desi woman teaches at West Point

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Dr. Meena Bose, 34, is an assistant poli sci prof at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a frequent pundit on American politics (thanks, Ennis). I’ve seen her on TV discussing the presidential election. She comes across as earnest, fair, wonkish yet accessible. She’s clearly intelligent, clearly high-bandwidth. But she lacks some of the swagger you need to hold your own on a panel of pundits or with decorated military men. It’ll probably come with age.

She is a petite woman in a pageboy haircut who looks barely out of her teens… Her expertise and evenhandedness have made her an increasingly sought-after television pundit, most recently for “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” Ms. Bose is one of the few female scholars… asked to provide historical context for American politics.

But Ms. Bose, whose heritage is Bengali Indian, touts neither a feminist nor immigrant American viewpoint… Her father, Nirmal, is an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, where Ms. Bose was an undergraduate, and her mother, Chandra, formerly history instructor in New Delhi.

Bose earned her doctorate from Princeton and wrote Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy.

The UK crowns a new Queen

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Aishwarya Rai’s star rose over Britannia last weekend as Bride and Prejudice premiered at #1 in the UK (thanks, Ennis). The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, sold £1.67M ($3M) in tickets and topped Saw, Wimbledon and Resident Evil 2.

Adjusted for population, that’s the equivalent of a $15M U.S. opening, pretty decent since the UK film industry doesn’t produce many blockbusters. The UK’s most successful opening of all time, Bridget Jones’ Diary, did £5.7M ($10.2M) its first weekend, or the equivalent of $51M in population-adjusted dollars.

Rai follows in the illustrious desi footsteps of Queen and curry as the UK’s most popular. The film opens in the U.S. in limited release on Christmas Eve.

Bride and Prejudice

is the first English-language Bollywood musical to succeed in a mainstream market, Lagaan (Rs. 375M in India) and Monsoon Wedding ($30M worldwide) notwithstanding. The UK audience was probably drawn by its affection for Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. It’s been a year of crossover firsts: the first desi Broadway musical, the first Indian-American Olympic medalist, and now the film.

Previous posts on Bride and Prejudice: 1, 2. Also see newly-released film clips, the reviews, and the trailer.

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‘Mira and the Mahatma’

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A new novel by Goan psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar re-imagines the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Miraben, one of his most committed disciples, a British admiral’s daughter who ‘went native’:

[N]one stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade… She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial… He gave Slade the name of Mira, after a mythical Hindu princess, and elevated her to the status of his foremost disciple, sitting with her every evening for an hour of quiet conversation while Slade massaged his feet with oil. Over the next two decades, he would write her nearly 500 letters…

[H]e does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy… [Gandhi wrote,] “May God remove what I consider is your moha,” a Hindi word for infatuation.

The book’s approach echoes the Freudian analyses of Indian mythology, such as that of Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna, by non-South Asians. These analyses’ obsession with sexuality almost always provokes controversy. In this case, Kakar is adopting a classically Western approach to explore the obvious implications of a retroactively sainted man’s personal relationships. Of course, Gandhi admirers are up in arms:

Kakar’s implication that the deep emotional connection between Gandhi and Slade had something other than a purely spiritual basis has raised eyebrows in a country accustomed to hagiographic portrayals in school textbooks and movies such as “Gandhi”…

Here’s Ennis’ previous post on canonizing Gandhi.

Chadha dreams of ‘Jeannie’ prequel

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Gurinder Chadha is directing a $90M prequel to the TV series I Dream of Jeannie:

This is, after all, the series that made the line ‘Yes, master?’ famous and kept the busty, blond Stepford djinn in a bottle at home. I suppose her omnipotence makes up for it, but Jeannie’s long since been overtaken by the winky, S&M version of magical subservience at costume shops. Can you still parody a parody?

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Biggest Navratri celebration canceled

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The U.S.’ biggest Navratri celebration, a 15-year-old, 20,000-person raas-garba under a large tent in Edison, New Jersey, has been canceled (via SAJA). The event’s tent supplier shipped all its stock to Florida in the aftermath of the hurricanes, and the new vendors wanted more money than the organizers had on hand:

“We are the richest per-capita community, and they are calling it off because of money?” said Sylvester Fernandez, an Indian-American engineer from Edison and Republican candidate for Congress. “That’s just wrong, that’s just pathetic.”

Yes, Gujarati teens will be deprived of their most efficient flirting grounds this year, forced to gather in small high school gyms. Dandia’s counter-rotating circles are like a socialist dance club, everyone has to dance with everyone else, and (bonus!) they’re parentally-approved. So if you’re a respectable New Jersey parent and your child runs off with a circus freak, you know who to blame. I’m just sayin’.

In the past, the celebration has faced tensions over noise levels with uncalled-for religious overtones:

[T]he Edison Township Council… are paying them to break the law so they could bang their heathen drums in obeisance to their heathen gods until 4 a.m. on the Sabbath… –The Rev. Kenneth Matto, Edison

 The preeminence of the Gujarati community in New Jersey did not come without a fight:

[I]n September 1987, a group calling itself the ‘dotbusters’ wrote a letter to a Jersey City newspaper. The letter read: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.” A couple of weeks after that, an Indian doctor, Kaushal Sharan, was beaten up by three white men. And three days later, in the neighbouring town of Hoboken, an Asian Indian, Navroze Mody, was beaten to death by a gang of 11 men.

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Half of all films ever are Indian?

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Salon is blogging a conference called Web 2.0, about the future of the Web. Entrepreneur Brewster Kahle (Alexa, Internet Archive, WAIS) just said something interesting. Kahle wants to offer all books and films ever created, online:

Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable.

Take that, Hong Kong and China! You may have some stylish martial arts and crime films, but we’ve got scads of third-rate melodrama under our collective belts, and we ‘make it up in volume.’

The rise of subtle markets

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Wired has a piece on how online businesses roll up niche markets into a larger, virtual whole. Here’s my take:

Netflix claims that, unlike Blockbuster, 99% of its extensive catalog is rented out every single year… people are wired differently from birth and then actively fragment their interests. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s skimmed the morass of offbeat personal Web sites… [or] readers of Sepia Mutiny or one of its spiritual ancestors, the Usenet group alt.culture.us.asian-indian in its heyday.

But what does surprise new Netflix members is the service’s extensive selection of Bollywood films, which it apparently rents out profitably… Outside Netflix… the situation is grim:

An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India’s film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon’s Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

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