Author Archives: amardeep

Samrat Upadhyay and the Nepali Present Tense

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upadyay the royal ghosts.gif Readers interested in what has been happening in Nepal recently might find Samrat Upadhyay’s The Royal Ghosts a worthwhile read.

Upadhyay is a Nepali who teaches at a university in the U.S. He is, I think, the only Nepali publishing his fiction in the U.S. at present. Though his stories as a rule tend to focus more on personal issues and relationships than on poitics, in this latest book of stories he has for the first time tackled the effect the “Maobadis” (Maoists) have had on Nepali life. Even here the treatment of the ongoing civil war is a little bit oblique: these are middle-class, urban, Kathmandu stories, and the violence that ravages countryside is as far away from the metropolitan consciousnes as Delhi is from the tribal regions of Bihar (see English, August, which Siddhartha blogged about recently). Continue reading →

Pramod Mahajan RIP (and India’s Cell-phone Boom)

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pramod mahajan bbc.jpgMany people have probably heard that BJP leader Pramod Mahajan passed away yesterday after being shot by his brother in a family dispute. From the obituaries I’ve been reading and from the Wikipedia page, an image of Mahajan as a very complex and interesting figure emerges — an icon both for some positive shifts in the Indian political system as well as of some of the problems that have come with it. Rather than dwell on the negative, in this post I’m going to talk a little about Mahajan’s role as the architect in the deregulation of India’s mobile phone industry in the early 2000s. I view this as something positive Mahajan did that may actually have been against the law at the time he did it.

Mahajan’s political record is somewhat mixed. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant campaign organizer, Mahajan was credited with helping the BJP rise to power in 1998, and with the consolidation of its power in state elections in 2003. But Mahajan is also blamed for the BJP’s shocking electoral loss in 2004, and indeed, he publicly accepted the blame for making strategic mistakes in that campaign.

In December, the BBC suggested that he was one of a handful of people being considered to take over the reigns of the BJP party. But the same article describes him as part of a new breed of “technocrat leaders who lack a grassroots base,” suggesting that Mahajan perhaps wasn’t quite of the stature of people like Vajpayee or Advani. Continue reading →

The Sadhu and the Shor Birds

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Hello again, Mutiny peeps! For this first post I’m going to get a little experimental, and hit you with an original short story (all borrowings are unconscious and unintentional, etc.). If it’s not to your taste, no problem; I will be regularly posting on more traditional bloggy topics. Incidentally, the following is part of a little series I’m doing — postmodern Sadhu stories; see another effort here.

Sadhu liked to sit on the porch of his son’s new house and write poetry, but lately he was finding it difficult. The problem was a group of noisy birds that lived in the trees behind their house. They gathered in the trees and bushes and seemed to do nothing but chatter, not in quiet, birdly chirps, but angry squawks. Most of the time Sadhu couldn’t even see the birds, as they seemed never to move from their respective perches in the trees, so merely sitting on the porch was a little like diving into a pit of greasy wrestlers. Sometimes this pleased the Sadhu, as it reminded him vaguely of India — the loud voices of the street hawkers arguing with customers over a few paise in his home town of Maramari. But he had heard that type of argument rarely since leaving India fifteen years ago, and now it had begun to seem abrasive and somewhat troubling. And anyway, that type of marketplace arguing usually ended in a sale, and the restoration of good will. But these birds squawked and squawked with an endless amount of stamina, which was almost mechanical in its regularity. Continue reading →

Stem-cell Research vs. The Mahabharata (and fare thee well)

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[Hi folks, this is my last Sepia Mutiny post. It’s been fun, but it was a one-month guestblogger gig all along (same deal with Turbanhead). I’ve really enjoyed playing in this sandbox, and doing comments gupshup w/people like Bong Breaker, Punjabi Boy, DesiDancer, Razib the Atheist, Al-Mujahid for Debauchery, etc. etc. Feel free to come play in my smaller, geekier box over here. Ciao, and I leave you with a short post on bioethics, just in case “Versions of the Ramayana” wasn’t punk enough for you]

Pankaj Mishra has an intriguing piece in the Times, about India’s budding biotech industry. It receieved a major injection of momentum after George W. Bush severely limited embryonic stem-cell research in the U.S. a few years ago.

Surprisingly, though India is in some ways an even more religiously polarized place than the U.S., the question of the ethics of this kind of biotech (as well as the ethics of genetic cloning) has not become a bone of political contention. This is despite the fact that passages in Hindu scriptures like The Mahabharata clearly suggest that life begins at conception:

Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul — the true Self (or atman) — as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception. The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in The Mahabharata, the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father’s cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother’s womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed. (link)

Continue reading →

Fareed Zakaria Is Not Sexy (a syllogism)

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The Village Voice tries to make everything it likes into something sexy, cool, and happening.

They’re aiming to do the same with Fareed Zakaria in their profile of him in this week’s issue. Joy Press piles on the adjectives, starting with the subtitle to the article: “Muslim, Heartthrob, Super-Pundit.” A rather unlikely string of words, isn’t it? (Especially jarring is “Muslim” and “Pundit.” But we’ll let it go.)

Press pushes the sexy button a bit more before Zakaria’s anti-sexy, policy wonk energies start to dominate the interview:

Sitting in his airy corner office at Newsweek, Zakaria is the definition of dapper, clad in a pale yellow checked shirt and crisp khakis. He ignores the constant ambient ping of incoming e-mails and phone calls as he talks about his PBS show. Zakaria may be the pundit world’s answer to the Backstreet Boys, but there’s nothing sexy about Foreign Exchange. It has the standard muted tones of a serious news program, complete with generic set and antiquated electronic theme music. “People ask how we’ll distinguish ourselves from the competition,” Zakaria says animatedly. “What competition? There’s literally not another show on American television that deals only with foreign affairs–you know, the other 95 percent of humanity.” (link)

She starts off this paragraph with a kind of journalistic optimism that her subject is in fact hot and happening. Looking dapper! Ignores email pings! (Translation: he’s a busy man, but cool about it.) Argably, the reference to the Backstreet Boys doesn’t help her cause (though maybe the Backstreet Boys are cool again and I am just out of the loop). However, this earnest effort at Cutening Fareed is betrayed by Zakaria’s use of the word “foreign affairs,” which is about as appealing to the fashion-obsessed Voice as a Slurpee in January. From here on out, the interview is all rigor, internationalism, policy, and PBS.

The other 95 percent of humanity is not sexy. Fareed Zakaria is interested in them. Therefore, Fareed Zakaria is not sexy. QED.

For the record, that’s just fine with me: the U.S. media needs more unsexy Muslim heartthrob superpundits. And less Botox News, please.

See more Zakaria SM posts here, here, here, here, and here. Continue reading →

Versions of The Ramayana

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[For people who don’t know The Ramayana at all, here is a short version of the story you can look at to gain some familiarity.]

ramayana agni pariksha.jpg I’ve been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.

But in the Malayalam version Anand’s father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand’s father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn’t enough to clear Sita’s honor, and persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:

“What the society thinks is important. The Gods too look down upon ill fame, and fame brings respect everywhere. Does not every noble man yearn for it? I fear dishonour, oh, learned men, I’ll even renounce your company and my own life, if needed, for the sake of honour. Sita has to be deserted. Understand my state of mind, I wasn’t sadder on anyday before. Lakshmana, tomorrow you take Sita in Sumantra’s chariot and leave her at our border. Abandon her near the holy Ashram of Sage Valmiki on the banks of the Tamasa river, and get back here soon.”

This episode is known as Sita Parityaga. I’ll be referring to it in this post simply as the abandonment of Sita. Continue reading →

Satellite Radio Super-Globality

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A few months ago, my wife started a job that entails a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.

A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said ‘hey, what’s the big deal? We already have one of those at home.’ Oops. In some spaces, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one such space (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).

asiastar.jpgWorldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it’s only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they’ve now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.

Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)

The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn’t that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can’t be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities… Continue reading →

Mangal Pandey: Language Issue

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Happy Independence Day, y’all.

(Manish says he planning to do a full review of Mangal Pandey: The Rising soon, so this is a post on just one aspect of the film, not a general review.)

The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I’ve seen in any other Hindi film. There’s more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors’ roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: “darvaaza khul!”.)

The issue of Toby Stephens’ use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He’s on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual “Baar aa jao!” type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions — tenderness, ambivalence, regret — a tall order even in one’s first language. I personally thought Stephens’ Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he’s not emotionally convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I’m possibly being overly gentle on this score.)

So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I’m not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.

(The film might fail for other reasons too, but we’ll save that for another discussion…) Continue reading →

Women in Sikhism: A Promising Reform

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bibi jagir kaur.jpgSikhs like to talk a big game about gender equality, but most of the time it’s just talk. Patriarchal institutions like dowry are still quite widespread amongst the Sikh community in India, for one thing. And worse: Punjab, as many people will know, has the highest male/female birth ratio in all of India, due to rampant female foeticide. It’s hard to talk about gender equality when that is going on.

Well, this week there is one small but promising reform out of Amritsar, the granting of full inclusion of women in Sikh religious services, according to the IANS:

Sixty-five years after making a demand that they be allowed to take part in two rituals at the holiest of Sikh shrines – the Golden Temple at Amritsar – women will finally be able to enter an arena so far dominated by males. The religious promotion and affairs committee of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) – the governing body for Sikh shrines – decided Monday that Sikh women would be allowed to perform ‘kirtan’ (singing hymns) and ‘palki sewa’ (carrying the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib in a palanquin) on religious occasions. The decision came when the SGPC has a woman president – Jagir Kaur [pictured right] – at the helm of affairs. The first demand to allow women to do religious service at the Golden Temple was made in 1940 but the male-dominated SGPC never allowed it to happen. Jagir Kaur became SGPC president in 1999 but was unable to get the resolution allowing women to join rituals to be passed. The controversy over women performing voluntary religious service at the Golden Temple erupted in February 2003 when two Sikh women from Britain were prevented from doing religious service there. Till now, women were allowed to participate only in certain activities at the temple, like preparing food at the langar or community kitchen. (link)

Continue reading →

The Kite Runner

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kite runner.jpgSome might question whether Afghanistan counts as South Asia. Geopolitically, it makes sense to see the country more as a hinge between western Asia (i.e., Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), and South Asia, than as decisively belonging to either region. There are certainly strong cultural ties between especially the northwestern (Pashtun-dominated) part of Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. And they listen to Hindi film songs and ghazals, and through Persian, use words like Zindagi, naan, pakora, mard, etc. On the other hand, while there are some good historical connections to the Indian subcontinent (i.e., through the the British Raj), geographically Afghanistan is cut off from it by mountains so… take your pick. There is a discussion of the question here.

Whether or not it’s certifiably ‘Sepia’, The Kite Runner does feel desi — or Watani — and it’s likely to be a book many of the readers of this blog will enjoy. Besides the (primary) story about a pair of friends growing up in idyllic, pre-1973 Afghanistan, there is an interesting consideration of life in the Afghan neighborhood in the Bay Area, “Little Kabul” in Fremont (a town which also has a large Indian population, incidentally).

Fremont is where author Khaled Hosseini grew up after his folks left Afghanistan in 1980. It’s interesting to me that in real life Hosseini is a practicing physician (age 38), while he makes the protagonist in his somewhat autobiographical book a professional writer. That Amir’s father in the novel accepts his son’s unconventional choice of profession without a fight — which no South Asian parent would ever do! — might be the only thing that really doesn’t ring true for me in terms of the immigrant experience reflected in The Kite Runner. Continue reading →