Author Archives: amardeep

There’s No Business Like Masala Business

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From the News Tab (thanks, Aliya), a link to an article in the New York Daily News: “Bhangra dance workout is a sweaty fitness celebration.” It’s a profile of Sarina Jain, whose “Masala Bhangra” aerobics classes have been mentioned at Sepia Mutiny before. The highlight has to be this passage:

Jain infuses her classes with elements of both Indian and American cultures, alternating shouts of “Balle Balle!” – a Punjabi expression of joy – with very American exclamations of “Sexy arms! Sexy arms!”

The steady beats of Bhangra and shouts of encouragement from Jain keep the energy level up, even as students’ faces get pink.

Jain’s students – women and one man at a recent session at a Manhattan gym — pulse their arms and follow her footwork as she instructs the class using a headset microphone.

“Her enthusiasm is quite infectious,” said Pradyot Dhulipala, a 26-year-old programmer and the only man in the class. Dhulipala said he mentioned Jain’s workout in his blog and got 30 to 40 additional hits that day. (link)

30 to 40 additional hits on his blog, huh? I wonder if we can do a little better: here. Pradyot’s comments on his experience at Masala Bhangra are pretty entertaining, and might bear comparing to Abhi’s own gym obsession: Continue reading →

Ajeet Cour: A Punjabi Writer

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ajeet cour.jpg

Since I’ve written a lot on Indian writers from Bengal (and lately, the South), I often get emails from people saying, “when are you going to write about Punjabi literature? And what about Sikh writers?” My response is pretty simple: a person needs to be inspired. Ethnic and religious loyalty ought to take a back seat to the quality of the writing, and the effect it has on you as an individual reader. If that means Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, or Zadie Smith get more of one’s critical attention than Amrita Pritam, so be it.

But I was recently invited to give a talk on Sikh writers at a small Sikh Studies conference at Hofstra University, so I started reading authors that I didnÂ’t know very well — and I was, in fact, quite impressed. So over the course of this summer I hope to profile some Punjabi writers, including some that are Sikh, starting with Ajeet Cour, Kartar Singh Duggal, and Khushwant Singh (who writes in English). Incidentally, many of these writers’ works are accessible in North America and the UK, through sites like Indiaclub.com or Amazon Marketplace sellers.

Continue reading →

More ABCD Arranged Marriage Melodrama

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I’m sure everyone is sick of reading “my parents want me to have an arranged marriage, and I’m like, totally annoyed and stuff” stories in the American papers. Officially I am annoyed by them too, though I actually find these stories curiously addictive even in their predictability — like bad pop songs on the radio, or celebrity gossip.

Sarita James has one of these pieces in the New York Times “matters of the heart” column from the Sunday Style section. Though she initially resisted her parents’ attempts to have her arranged off, at the merry old age of 19 she decided she liked a boy they had picked out for her (he was 26) and got engaged. Even at the time of the engagement, the boy’s family indicated that he still had to “see” two other girls, in order to avoid “formally offending” their families.

So he goes off to India, and doesn’t call for a week or two. Oh oh. The family soon finds out the boy got engaged to an engineer in Bangalore! And Sarita gets these emails:

Dear Sarita, I am so sorry for what happened. I wish I had gotten married to you. Matters were taken out of my control. I want to apologize profusely both to you and your family. Unfortunately, I can never explain what happened.

A second e-mail message, posted five minutes later, read:

Dear Sarita, I regret my indiscretion in that first e-mail. Could you please delete it? Please trust that my apologies are sincere. (link)

The snake! But the explanation is even worse than the content of those emails:

A few years later, I learned that a large dowry had been exchanged as part of his wedding. Most of it had been passed along to his sister’s bridegroom when she was married the same year. Not only had the suitable boy let me down, he had also perpetuated the injustices of the dowry system. (link)

So not only is the boy a flagrant yellow-bellied wus, he’s a sell-out to the dowry system. At the end of the article, Sarita indicates that she’s still single, and she’s not doing the arranged marriage thing anymore. Good for her; hope she never gets an email like that again.

Anyone out there have comparable war stories they want to share (anonymously, if you prefer)? I’m particularly curious about nutty things that happen to people because of the internet. Continue reading →

Monica B. Playing Sonia G.? A Look At Director Jag Mundhra

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Up from the news tab: Sonia Gandhi is going to be played by Italian actress Monica Belluci in an upcoming (apolitical) biopic called Sonia. In his comment on the article, Bongopondit points out that director Jag Mundhra has made his mark as a filmmaker doing a string of sleazy ‘skinemax’ flicks, with titles like Tales of Kama Sutra, Tropical Heat, and the memorably-titled Wild Cactus. Perhaps not by accident, on a number of these ventures Mundhra has worked with Producer Ashok Amritraj, who became the Harvey Weinstein of the genre before officially graduating to mainstream Hollywood mediocrity. (Though actually, I thought Raising Helen was a pretty decent romantic comedy, and it did have Sakina Jaffrey…)

The story gets more interesting: interspersed with spicier fare, Mundhra has also done a number of serious (but minor) Hindi films along the way, some of them with heavy-hitting actors (Kabir Bedi in Vishkanya! Nandita Das in Bawandar!). Most recently, of course, Mundhra directed TMBWITW Aishwarya Rai and Naveen Andrews in Provoked. The film gains some legitimacy from the cast, from the soundtrack by A.R. Rahman, and from the true story it is based on: a British court case that tested the legal definition of ‘provocation’ (Regina v. Ahluwalia; the Southall Black Sisters played a major role in her defense). There is a serious legal question here: can prolonged experience of severe domestic violence be considered sufficient provocation for a kind of defensive homicide? I would tend to think not, but as I understand it the British court finally decided in Kiranjit Ahluwalia’s favor. (Update: the court reduced her sentence to time served, but they did not reverse the guilty verdict.)

As a final note, there’s an irony in Jag Mundhra’s schizophrenic directing work that I can’t quite understand: many of Mundhra’s serious films protest crimes against women (Bawandar is about a woman who has been raped, and Provoked is about domestic violence), while his erotic thrillers obviously feature the exploitative display of women’s bodies. Interesting… Continue reading →

Going Multitone: Desi Ska Music

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Laila k sonic boom six.jpg I was saddened hear about the death of Desmond Dekker, one of the pioneers of the original Jamaican ska music scene (hear some of his music at Myspace). Ska, which Dekker and a handful of others invented in the early 1960s, is a kind of double-speed form of calypso that is generally upbeat and celebratory. It was a pop fad in Jamaica in the early 1960s that was reborn as a kind of multicultural pastiche in England with bands like Madness and The Specials in the late 1970s. Those bands were self-consciously racially integrated — often with black lead singers and white bandmates — and they were hugely commercially successful. The lead record label in this second wave of ska bands was 2 Tone Records, which got its name from its distinctive checkered logo, though “two tone” also clearly referred to the label’s multicultural, racially inclusive vibe.

I was a big fan of this type of music in high school and college, though I grew up during the ‘third wave’ of ska — after it had been reborn yet again as a kind of offshoot of American punk rock. As I bounced along to Operation Ivy in high school, I wondered: what about desi ska? The upbeat rhythm you find in The Specials (or earlier, in Desmond Dekker himself) is also key in Bhangra, and the two genres seem almost made for each other.

In fact, there was some ska-bhangra fusion back in the day, and there still is some today. If the mainstream record label was called 2 Tone Records, the desi version was Multitone Records, and it was founded in the early 1980s, just around when Brit-Asian Bhangra bands like Achanak and Premi were first starting to make records. (This was also, coincidentally, just after the peak of the 2-Tone Records era on the British music charts.) Continue reading →

The True Story of Ramo Samee, the Indian Juggler

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I was browsing William Makepeace Thackeray’s wonderful and strange The Book of Snobs (1848), and I came across the following odd passage in the midst of a rant about a lady-friend’s poor table manners:

I have seen, I say, the Hereditary Princess of Potztausend-Donnerwetter (that serenely-beautiful woman) use her knife in lieu of a fork or spoon; I have seen her almost swallow it, by Jove! like Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler. And did I blench? Did my estimation for the Princess diminish? No, lovely Amalia!

But, my dear fellow, who precisely is “Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler”? It turns out he was a real person, who came to England around 1819, and lived there with his wife (identified only as “Mrs. Samee”) until his death in 1851. The juggling history website I looked at also speculates he may have gone to the U.S. and performed as “Sena Sama,” in 1817, though that’s only speculation. Ramo Samee is considered by some the first modern professional juggler in England, and he was far and away the most famous practitioner of the art in his era. He inspired royalty, journalists, and famous essayists like William Hazlitt. And yet, when Ramo Samee died he was so poor that his wife needed to advertise for financial assistance just to have him buried (cremation, I suspect, was probably not an option). Today he is, aside from the appreciation he gets on a handful of juggling history websites, completely forgotten.

Needless to say, I am pretty ambivalent about Ramo Samee (or “Ramaswamy,” probably the more accurate spelling), just as I am about Sabu, Dean Mahomed, and scores of other Indian artists and hustling “Gurus” who work “exotic” stereotypes for western applause. In the African-American tradition this type of performance is called minstrelsy, and it is seen as a shameful kind of pandering to other people’s stereotypes.

But Ramo Samee might be a slightly different case at least in the sense that the kind of sword-swallowing and juggling he did is in fact a real historical profession in India, which goes back hundreds of years. So while clearly part of Ramo Samee’s appeal was his exotic otherness, he was doing what he did best — what he had been raised to do. And observers like Hazlitt really did find him to be a performer of astonishing skill. So even if I can’t exactly celebrate Ramo Samee’s life as a triumph, he is nevertheless an interesting figure to learn about and consider. Continue reading →

The Coming Care Drain: Nurses in the Immigration Bill

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Everyone knows the ‘brain drain,’ I presume — the flight of educated professionals from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to the west. A number of the immigrants were doctors, who were in desperately short supply at a time when the U.S. population was spiking. My own family was part of that event, which admittedly must have hurt the progress of health care in India itself (though I don’t know if this has ever been formally studied).

And while there now are, perhaps, too many doctors in the U.S., there aren’t enough nurses. According to one statistic in today’s New York Times, there were 118,000 nursing vacancies in U.S. hospitals last month, and the deficit could reach as high as 800,000 in the next decade. Now the U.S. Senate’s immigration bill contains a clause that will remove the immigration cap entirely for qualified nurses from India, the Philippines, and China.

The lack of qualified U.S. nurses is due mainly to the lack of places to train them; nursing schools turn away scores of applicants since there simply aren’t enough Professors of Nursing around. But despite the severe shortage, the American Nurses Association is opposed to the current measure, which it calls “outsourcing.”

The repercussions on the health care systems of the affected countries could be severe, even if there is some overall benefit to the local economy:

The flight of nurses from the Philippines, a former American colony, has provided a huge boost to a weak economy, through remittances. Some government agencies there have encouraged the export of nurses, who send home billions of dollars each year to their families.

A nurse in the Philippines would earn a starting salary of less than $2,000 a year compared with at least $36,000 a year in the United States, said Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a medical professor at the University of the Philippines who led the country’s National Institutes of Health.

He said the flight of nurses had had a corrosive effect on health care. Most Filipinos died without medical attention in 2003, just as they had three decades earlier. (link)

For the Philippines, there’s already a care drain. The same may be in store for India if this bill passes and goes through the House, as seems likely.

Incidentally, there is already a recruiting company, called RNIndia, that specializes in bringing Indian nurses to U.S. hospitals. And Abhi talked about another side of this issue here. Continue reading →

Desi Kids Also Rule Geography Bee (Quiz Included)

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bonny jain.jpg Bonny Jain, of Moline Illinois, won the 2006 National Geographic Spelling Bee. He’s twelve years old, and he’s also a spelling champ and a violin player when he’s not naming mountain ranges in Wales.

He beat — no surprise — two other Indian American kids to take home the prize:

Neera Sirdeshmukh, 14, of Nashua, New Hampshire, came in second place, while 13-year-old Yeshwanth Kandimalla from Georgia came third.

For the winning question, his 26th out of 27, Jain correctly answered ‘Cambrian Mountains’ to the question ‘Name the mountains that extend across much of Wales, from the Irish Sea to the Bristol Channel.’

Jain, who is still in eighth grade, won $25,000 and a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society for his efforts. (link)

That’s right, the three top contestants in the top U.S. Geography Bee are all Indian Americans. (Incidentally, Jain came in in the top 10 last year, and was mentioned by Sepia Mutiny here)

Think you can run with the geography whizzes? Try this quiz — written by Jain himself — at the Chicago Tribune. (Remember, no cheating! I got 7/10) Continue reading →

Angrezi, Solamente (English, Only)

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The Senate recently passed a series of bills regarding the status of the English language that no one quite understands. Senate Republican James Inhofe of Nebraska Oklahoma proposed a bill defining English as the “official language” of the United States, and gave a fiery speech about it on the Senate floor, where he claimed that elminating all traces of bilingualism from government services would save taxpayers $1 to $2 billion a year.

But that’s not the end of the story. First, Inhofe himself softened the bill, changing “official language” to “national language,” which means something quite different. The measure passed. Then, senate Democrats countered and proposed an amendment which defined English as the “common and unifying” language, and that also passed. So which is it to be? Well, it’s not a law until it also goes through the House, so the whole thing could get changed again in Committee.

In the meanwhile, people are trying to figure out what the heck it means. Continue reading →

Indian Painting in San Francisco: Anjolie Ela Menon

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anjolie ela menon.jpg A solo exhibit by Indian Painter Anjolie Ela Menon is up at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Artdaily reports. Menon is a Delhi-based painter of mixed American and Indian heritage. She was born in 1940 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris as well as at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay (which she did not like!). Menon has had an active and successful career, winning many awards, including India’s prestigious Padma Shri.

In the exhibit are ten major paintings as well as a large a triptych called “Yatra,” which you can see in small form here. See if you can rectify the painting itself with the explanation offered in Artdaily:

This triptych depicts various figures that can be identified as participants in a particularly well-known north Indian Hindu pilgrimage, or yatra. MenonÂ’s interest in these pilgrims stems from both a sense of admiration and from her view of their devotional act as an unbroken bridge linking IndiaÂ’s ancient past with its rapidly modernizing present. (link)

(Incidentally, the image on the right is a portrait of Menon I found on the Flickr site of a brilliant photographer calling herself “50mm.” Check out the rest of 50mm’s amazing photos here.) Continue reading →

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