Author Archives: amardeep

The Biggest Malpractice Suit Ever?

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This story broke last week, but I’m just starting to catch up on it now: in Las Vegas, more than 100 people have tested positive for Hepatitis C and HIV after being treated at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada. Apparently, investigators have found that anesthesia needles were re-used on different patients without adequate cleaning, and in some cases, portions of the same dose of anesthesia was injected into multiple patients.

The person who founded the Center, who has also been its majority owner, is a doctor named Dipak Desai. Three class action lawsuits have been filed against the center, with more than 100 plaintiffs total. Doctor friends tell me it might be the biggest medical malpractice case in recent history (I have not been able to directly confirm this… any docs in the house?).

I haven’t come across anyone saying that Desai himself gave the order to use the syringes this way, though I gather that the anesthetists employed at the Endoscopy center were nurses rather than doctors (might be a little corner cutting there). Since the investigations started, the nurses employed at Desai’s clinics have given up their nursing licenses. As of now Desai has not given up his own medical license, though he has voluntarily agreed to not practice medicine until the investigations are complete. My own inclination is to “wait and see” before piling on against Desai: he ran several clinics, and employed many other doctors, nurses, and technicians. This particular policy, which has caused so much harm to so many people, may not have come from him.

Before this mess started, Desai was a very well-respected doctor in the state of Nevada; he had a $1 million contract with the University Medical Center, where he directed the gastroenterology department; and the governor had appointed him to the State Board of Medical Examiners. All of that is not to excuse him; rather, it helps give us some sense of the scope of this case. Incidentally, when two doctors working at his clinics had earlier complained about unsafe hygiene with syringes, the claims weren’t investigated.

I’m curious to know what people think about this case. Obviously, it doesn’t reflect the practices of Indian doctors more broadly (and I come from a medical family, so I’m quite proud of the contributions Indian-Americans have made in medicine in the U.S.). But it does seem like a terrible tragedy, and for the employees of this particular Endoscopy Center, a huge mess. Continue reading →

Interviewing Partition Survivors

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Via 3QD, I came across an article in the Washington Post about a 10 year research project, based in Delhi but funded by the Ford Foundation, to interview thousands of survivors of the 1947 Partition.

The story begins with a powerful anecdote:

Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.

At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.

“None of the women protested, nobody wept,” Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. “All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book.” (link)

These ‘honor killings’, where women were killed by male members of their families to prevent their being raped by communal mobs, were not at all unusual. I do not know if they happened in other communities, but in the Sikh community in particular it is thought that thousands of women died this way. (I do not think anybody knows exactly how many it was.)

Thus far, the project has interviewed about 1300 people, including Bir Bahadur Singh. The project (“Reconstructing Lives: Memories of Partition”) does not appear to have a web presence, and I’m not sure whether there are any plans to digitize the tapes from the interviews, or publish raw transcripts. Hopefully, that will be in the cards at some point.

Readers, if you have grandparents (or great-grandparents?) who went through this, and who have stories they want to tell, I would urge you to interview and record what they went through while they’re still around. (Projects like the one I’m describing are only interviewing people still in India — I’m sure there are more than a few who have ended up settled abroad.)

If you’ve actually done such an interview, have you published the text of it anywhere? (If you’re interested in doing this, drop me a line.)

Why all this is important: Continue reading →

Subverting Stereotypes: Hari Kondabolu’s “Manoj”

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A short film written by comic Hari Kondabolu will be playing with a group of other shorts at the SFIAAFF film festival this weekend (Friday night and Sunday night), and readers in the Bay area might want to check it out. As you may remember, Sepia Mutiny posted on Hari’s aggressive brand of comedy earlier, in this post (also see Smithsonian Diamonds Exhibit — with a rather shocking epithet for the Queen of England).

Here is the short blurb on Manoj: hari-manoj.jpg

MANOJ is a short documentary about the life and remarkable success of Indian-born standup comedian, Manoj Krishnamurthy. Manoj’s use of South Asian stereotypes has led to a growing fan base across the United States and has placed him on the edge of greater stardom. However, this begs the following questions: What happens in America when you’ll do whatever it takes for a laugh? What if you don’t care?

The idea of the film is interesting — what if a performer actively and intentionally set out to exploit comic Indian stereotypes for all they’re worth? It reminds me, a bit, of Dave Chappelle’s own dilemma about whether his brand of comedy was subverting old racial humor, or in some sense perpetuating it. It’s also an issue that is in the air when discussing Kal Penn or Russell Peters.

No clips from the film are available online yet, but Hari was nice enough to email me a couple of snips of dialogue to give us a sense of what he’s after in Manoj:

Continue reading →

Review: Tahmima Anam’s “A Golden Age”

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A friend gave me a copy of A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, as a present a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week. A Golden Age, it turns out, is a very strong first novel, written in a direct, natural style, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. tahmima-anam.jpg

Anam’s is the first novel put out by a western publisher that I know of to have Bangladesh’s war for independence as its main theme, and for that reason alone, I suspect A Golden Age will become the kind of book that is often taught in college classes on “South Asian Literature” (like the courses I myself get to teach every couple of years). The War is important in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, but only at a great distance (Mistry’s novel is set in Bombay). And a section of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children deals with this event, but it comes near the end, and Rushdie addresses it in rather lyrical terms — you don’t really get a solid explanation of how the war started or what it was about.

Here, you do. The center of the novel is, of course, the family drama — involving a widow named Rehana and her two grown children, Sohail and Maya. Both of the children are politically oriented, and take a strongly pro-Bangla, pro-Sheikh Mujib position on the events that transpired in 1971. By contrast, their mother Rehana is at first reluctant to make a commitment — though the needs of her children soon force her to inject herself into the conflict. She also begins to come out of her shell emotionally, which is of course what most readers want to see.

Continue reading →

Kal Penn @ UPenn

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This past Sunday I went down to the University of Pennsylvania for a rare, open Q&A session with Kal Penn. As readers may remember from Anna’s earlier post on the subject, Penn is at Penn this spring, teaching a class on representations of Asian Americans in the Media. He’s also shooting episodes of “House” (go, House), and stumping for Obama in his free time, though with that schedule I’m not sure how he has any.

As I understand it, there was initially some controversy about the class — is this going to be a stunt, or a real asset to a the Asian American Studies curriculum?

If it were just about bringing a little glamor to campus, I would be skeptical too. But I think it’s fair to say Penn is both an actor and a careful observer of the representation of Desis in both Hollywood and the Indie film world. If you listen to him talk, it’s clear that he’s thought carefully and self-critically about his experiences and choices (he’s very aware that his role as a home-grown, Muslim-American terrorist on 24 might be seen as “problematic,” for instance — though he still defends the choice to take the role). He’s self-conscious enough to know what a racist representation of a South Asian character is, and call it by that name. But at the same time, he’s open about the fact that minority actors sometimes need to play ball to get an entree in Hollywood.

In response to one of the questions posed by a student at the Q&A Kal Penn effectively acknowledged that this was the dilemma he faced when he auditioned for his first Hollywood movie, “Van Wilder.” Unfortunately, Penn also suggested, in response to another question, that things aren’t all that much better even now, for actors who are just starting out:

“I think things for me personally as an artist have changed dramatically, but I know that overall, that change has been slow and incremental. There is no shortage of truly talented actors of South Asian descent in places like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London. There are folks who majored in theater, studied film, and are experiencing the same struggles I went through when I was starting out. I think that was my main point: things for me have begun to change, but things for others are perhaps remaining the same.” (Kal Penn, from an email)

Continue reading →

Sister Alphonsa’s Story

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A nun known as Sister Alphonsa will be canonized by the Catholic Church later this year, becoming the first Indian female saint, according to the BBC. sister-alphonsa.jpg Sister Alphonsa has a somewhat dark life story:

Sister Alphonsa (1910-1946) of Kerala was beatified in 1986 by the late Pope John Paul II on a visit to India. She will be formally canonised in October.

She had burnt and disfigured herself to avoid a marriage, having chosen to dedicate her life to Christ.

She will become a saint ahead of the Albanian nun Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa was beatified in 2003.

The decision to accord sainthood to Sister Alphonsa was made over the weekend at a meeting between the Pope and other cardinals at the Vatican.

Sister Alphonsa, whose real name was Anna Muttathupadathu, was described by those who knew her as generous and loving. (link)

I should note that the story about it being an intentional self-injury is not repeated on Sister Alphonsa’s Wikipedia page, nor did the Catholic Church refer to it that way in its statement on Sister Alphonsa’s Beatification in 1986. (Also, see how her story is described by Catholicism.org) So perhaps the story isn’t true, or if it is true, it may not be important to those who revere Sister Alphonsa. (If readers have experience with Sister Alphonsa, do people tend to believe this story? Is it important to the popular understanding of why she is revered?)

Of course, Sister Alphonsa is not becoming a Saint for that back-story, but rather because she lived a pious life, overcame her disability (and the lifetime of pain that followed her injury), and helped people. Two miracles are also attributed to her (that is also a requirement for canonization, as I understand it).

That said, I have to say I find the back-story powerful. Is it really true that at age 13 she burned herself in this way to escape a marriage she didn’t want, in order to dedicate her life to the Church? If so, that is at once an amazing and horrible act of self-assertion — and renunciation. Continue reading →

Another film trailer

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There is going to be a new Tarsem Singh movie, The Fall and here the trailer is funny, albeit for somewhat different reasons than The Love Guru:

There is sort of a S&M look here, which might be appealing if one is into that sort of thing… On the other hand, all the leather and stylized violence might also just come across as kind of kitschy and pompous — this is the kind of imagery that’s very, very easy to mock. Continue reading →

‘Every Unsavoury Separatist is Gloating’: Questions about Kosovo

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Via Crooked Timber (and also 3QD), there is a learned critique by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express, of the recent “engineering” of independence for Kosovo by western European powers and the U.S.

The key paragraph in the argument for our purposes (i.e., with South Asia in mind) might be the following:

In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill had argued, in a text that was to become the bible for separatists all over, including Jinnah and Savarkar, that democracy functions best in a mono-ethnic societies. Lord Acton had replied that a consequence of this belief would be bloodletting and migration on an unprecedented scale; it was more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy. It was this link that Woodrow Wilson elevated to a simple-minded defence of self-determination. The result, as Mann demonstrated with great empirical rigour, was that European nation states, 150 years later, were far more ethnically homogenous than they were in the 19th century; most EU countries were more than 85 per cent mono-ethnic. (link)

In his Column in Indian Express, Mehta keeps his focus sharply on Kosovo’s status within Europe, and also considers the seeming double standard as the Western powers disregard Russian objections to Kosovo’s independence, on the one hand, while they go out of their way to accommodate China’s (unconscionable) policy on Taiwan, on the other.

But there is obviously a question for South Asia here as well, and India in particular. Mehta briefly alludes to the history of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent when he invokes Jinnah and Savarkar, but his column raises questions for us as we think about the present too — specifically the questions over the status of Kashmir and Assam (maybe also Manipur and Nagaland, not to mention Punjab in the 1980s).

The debate between Acton and Mill Mehta invokes isn’t so much a “conservative” versus “liberal” debate — John Stuart Mill is considered one of the architects of the philosophy of liberalism, but in this case his views come out as less “liberal” than Acton’s. Mill supports thinking of nations as defined by race/ethnicity, but that approach can reinforce ethno-religious differences, rather than leading to an environment where different communities have equal status in a diverse nation. I tend to favor Acton’s approach, except perhaps in cases where minority communities face imminent violence, or genocidal suppression.

(Incidentally, Mehta builds his arguments on an essay called “The Dark Side of Democracy” in New Left Review, by Michael Mann; for those who have subscriptions, you can find the article here.) Continue reading →

Follow-up: Hillary Clinton’s Op-Ed in India Abroad

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It turns out Barack Obama is not the first presidential candidate to publish an Op-Ed in India Abroad, after all (see earlier post). In fact, Hillary Clinton had her own Op-Ed appear there three weeks ago. An anonymous source close to the paper sent me a link to the article.

It’s very different from Obama’s, and looking at the two side by side one gets a clear sense of the different approaches taken by the two campaigns. Hillary stresses the India-U.S. relationship much more than Obama does; Barack, for his part, seems to be more attentive to the Indian-American community in its specificity. Hillary has a number of specific events she can cite — experience! — whereas Barack is all about ideas (admittedly, most, though certainly not all, of the events Hillary cites are from her husband’s administration). And Barack goes on a bit longer (too long?), while Hillary goes for the crisp, content-stuffed bullet-points. Here, then, is Hillary Clinton:

As First Lady, I traveled to India twice to represent the United States. I’ll never forget my visit in 1995. In Ahmedabad, I met women taking advantage of microcredit to start their own tiny businesses and achieve economic self-sufficiency for their families. I was inspired by these hardworking women and moved by their hope for the future of their families and of India.

In New Delhi, I was warmly welcomed by Sonia Gandhi, and at a speech at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, I spoke about the importance of opening up educational opportunities to girls, as well as boys. And I was so gratified to see the progress India had made when I returned a few years later.

On my second visit, I went to Kolkata where I met with President Narayanan. We discussed the great strides being made to send more girls to school and to bring girls and women into the circle of economic and social opportunity. That circle is growing by leaps and bounds in India, encompassing more and more people, lifting millions out of poverty.

I am proud that the Clinton administration helped build a strong partnership between India and the United States and I was proud that president Clinton made that historic visit to India in 2000.

As co-chair of the Senate India Caucus in the Senate, I’ve been working hard these past four years to build on those efforts. And as a Senator from New York, I have been honored to represent a thriving Indian-American community, among the most successful immigrants in our nation’s history.

I visited India in 2005 and have met with India’s leaders both in the United States and in India. I also voted to support the US-India Civilian Nuclear Agreement to pave the way toward peaceful nuclear cooperation — and to move toward greater cooperation to prevent nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation. (link)

Which Op-Ed speaks to you more? Continue reading →

Obama Says “Ji, Haa” To Indian Americans

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Via SAJAForum, Senator Barack Obama has written a substantial Op-Ed (PDF) in India Abroad, outlining his appeal to Indian Americans. India Abroad doesn’t publish online, so we’re grateful to the SAFO people for posting the full text of it.

There are several paragraphs relating to Obama’s opposition to racial profiling and support for hate crimes legislation — that much we certainly knew. Also references to Mahatma Gandhi, his admiration for Indian success in technology fields, as well as points where he draws a comparison between his father (who came to the U.S. “without money, but with a student visa and a determination to succeed”) and the experiences of Indian immigrants. The Op-Ed is well thought-out and polished on the whole.

(Incidentally, is this the first time a Presidential Candidate has published such an Op-Ed type piece in an Indian American community paper? It’s certainly the first time I can remember seeing something like this.)

Something struck me on reading the paragraphs on Obama’s Pakistan policy:

The United States and India must work together to combat the common threats of the 21st century. We have both been victims of catastrophic terrorist attacks, and we have a shared interest in succeeding in the fight against al Qaeda and its operational and ideological affiliates. That fight must not be undercut by a misguided war in Iraq.

I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, arguing that we needed to “finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda” in Afghanistan. I have argued that we need to do more to roll back the al Qaeda sanctuary along the Afghan-Pakistan border, and that we cannot put all of our eggs in the Musharraf basket in Pakistan. That is why I proposed, long before the declaration of martial law in Pakistan, that we need to condition our assistance to the Pakistani government so that we encourage stronger action against al Qaeda and a restoration of democracy. Our goal remains not simply an ally in Pakistan – our goal is a democratic ally, with a vibrant civil society and strong institutions. (link)

The policy laid out here isn’t new — Obama was talking about this approach to Pakistan back in August (notably, before the State of Emergency, and before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). But what is new might be the use the position is being put to: it may be that Obama’s hawkishness on Pakistan might eventually be an asset for him in appealing to Indian American voters (and perhaps more importantly, Indian American campaign money).

I wonder if Obama will be posting something similar in an English language Pakistani-American paper. If so, will he tweak the language at all, or keep it as is? Continue reading →