Author Archives: cicatrix

Vinod “Friend of Bill” Gupta’s InfoUSA Receives 2nd NASDAQ Warning

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InfoUSA, the Omaha, Nebraska, based data-processing and marketing monolith owned by Vinod Gupta faces the prospect of being delisted from the NASDAQ because the company has not filed its annual reports for the 2007 fiscal year, and again for the period ending March 31.

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The company’s failure to file is due to ongoing litigation involving its shareholders, which has been stayed until June 30. In 2005, shareholder hedge funds Dolphin Limited Partnership and Dolphin Financial Partners filed suit in a Delaware court alleging that InfoUSA founder and CEO Vinod Gupta had spent corporate funds on personal expenses. link

That discreetly worded phrase, “personal expenses,” refers to the extreeeemly questionable corporate-funded generosity dear Vinod showered on his pals, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Among the allegations:

  • Mr. Gupta’s spending on the Clintons is part of a pattern of improper company expenditures for things like luxury cars, jets and houses, as well as a yacht that is notable for being one of the few to have an all-female crew. link
  • InfoUSA made $2.1 million in quarterly payments to Mr. Clinton from July 2003 to April 2005, and in October 2005 entered into a new three-year agreement to pay him $1.2 million. It also gave him an option to buy 100,000 shares of infoUSA stock, with no expiration date. link
  • InfoUSA paid $18,480 in January 2004 to fly Mrs. Clinton “and her four-person entourage” to New York from New Mexico, where she had made a campaign appearance and attended a book signing. Campaign finance records show that her committee, Friends of Hillary, made a reimbursement of $2,127 for that flight. link
  • InfoUSA has spent nearly $900,000 since 2001 flying the Clintons to domestic and international locations and political events…InfoUSA paid for use of a jet plane, the 80-foot yacht American Princess, condos in Hawaii and California and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln stadium box. link

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Dancing in the Family

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He is tall, slim, and strikingly long limbed. Dressed in jewel-colored silk tunics and antique ornaments that are family heirlooms, he looks more like a handsome young maharaja than a traditional South Indian dancer. Newsweek

Yes, I know, vomit, it sounds like more exoticizing pablum from a mainstream media source. But getting past the opening drivel, this article (posted in the news tab, thanks Brij01!) turned out to be about a rather fascinating family:

Aniruddha Knight is the ninth generation heir of a 200-year-old family of professional dancers and musicians from Chennai, India. He is also half American. His father, Douglas Knight, married into this artistically rich family when he studied classical drumming on a South Indian mridangam at Wesleyan University, where Aniruddha’s late grandmother–T. Balasaraswati, India’s prima danseuse–and her two musician brothers had taught since 1962.

Aniruddha followed his mother and grandmother, continuing the family’s bharatanatyam tradition:

Knight is fluent in Tamil, his mother’s language, and spends half a year in India, performing and learning from aunts and cousins who had worked with his mother. He has established a school and an archive of family history in Chennai. (The Smithsonian boasts an archive of Bala’s performances, too.) It houses all the records of his grandmother’s performances.

About his mixed parentage:

“It’s isolating to identify with two cultures, it creates a split personality. I can never be just one or the other, it’s a heartwrenching lonely process. But then, what I have, many don’t have.”

Those against mixed marriages often cite fear of waning traditions, culture, language, etc., as a reason to date within one’s own ethnic community. So it’s heartwarming to see this family’s artistic legacy continuing on, and even thriving, under the stewardship of its youngest, half-desi member. But do other half-desis feel the same sense of loneliness and isolation? Continue reading →

Thrown Your Baby off a Building Lately?

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Yet another “bizarre ritual” from the desh…but to be honest, I’ve never heard of this at all before. Have you? Anyone know anything about this?

Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual – they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health. The faithful have been observing the ritual at a shrine in Solapur, in western India’s Maharastra, for more than five hundred years. They believe it will make their children strong and say no accidents have ever happened. link

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When Every Happy Plot Doesn’t End with a Marriage Knot: Love Marriage

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Hello dear SepiaReaders, it’s that girl with half a face again. I’ve been absent from the bunker for a while but fresh air is vastly overrated so I wormed my way back in. I hope to hunker down in the bowels of our concrete barracks and start posting furiously. Whether this is promise or a threat greatly depends on how drunk you are while reading this. Cheers!

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To kick things off, I’m delighted to discuss the debut novel by non other the mutiny’s own V.V. “Sugi” Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage. Published recently by Random House U.S., the book will also be available in Canada, the U.K. Italy, France, Romania, and Germany. So GO BUY IT, wherever you are. Sugi’s posts on Sepia introduced us to a eloquent writer unafraid to tackle to thorny issues surrounding the Sri Lankan conflict with even-handedness and humor. In Love Marriage she pulls off the astonishing feat of writing about Sri Lanka with an honesty that doesn’t simplify, tackling issues without a trace of polemics, and a love that still remains clear-eyed.

Super full disclaimer: it’s proved incredibly difficult for me to distance myself enough to write a fair review. I know and adore the author as a person, she’s a fellow Sri Lankan, instead of some Kaavya Viswanathan-style American Desi fluff, she wrote about Sri Lanka. And instead of a pretty “beaches and jungles” treatment, she delves into a sticky thicket of diasporas, internecine warfare, generational drift, ‘ethnic’ identity creation, politics, love, nostalgia, loyalty…

(Uh, wait. The book is a fun read, I swear!)

To continue disclaiming: I wrote a review a while ago and kept revising it. Then Sandhya’s awesome Q&A was in the works so I sat on the review so we’d get both pieces up simultaneously. Then I found out that the dastardly speedy Ultrabrown posted a review today (with mistakes!!) so to juice things up a bit, this review was rewritten to go head-to-head with the fearsomely logorrheic (or, to use my favorite made-up word for him, verbacious) Manish.

Prepare to duck as the verbal darts (or in my case, coconuts) fly! Continue reading →

Who Ya Gonna call?

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Oh my god. I’m speechless, have no words, and my brain just froze. So pardon my terrible blogger protocol in just copying over from Wonkette.com:

The CIA has inexplicably come up with a logo for the “Terrorist Buster,” some sort of imaginary Christian cheerleader representing the DCI Counterterrorist Center. Take a better look at the logo, realize that this is actually happening, and then continue reading. We’ll wait for you. [Pause]. Ready?

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT LOGO?!

This is not a joke. I can’t believe this is not a joke. The CIA really did create a logo for a “Terrorist Buster” (who the hell would that be anyway? Is this related to those “If you see something, say something” campaigns? Does a counterterrorist center really need a logo? If yes, then THAT?!) and unveiled the logo on the official CIA website. Go see for yourself at www.cia.gov

As Wonkette goes on to point out, the logo looks like some mad, racist twisted version of the logo (after the jump) from the Ghostbusters movie. Goddamn. What would Peter Venkman say??

Continue reading →

Coming Back with Power Power: MIA @ CMJ

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Our favorite Sri Lankan world runner played at Terminal 5 in NYC last night, as part of the CMJ showcase. Terminal 5 is cavernous space with two tiers of balconies, a giant bar island, and draconian crowd-control policies. They made you get into lines to go outside for a smoke.

Doors opened at 7pm. So with nothing but a faintly entertaining opening act (“we’re the new Black Beastie Boys!” was probably their best line) that didn’t do much to help kill the time until M.I.A. came on, people got drunk. Finally around 10pm her presence was felt rather than seen – a roaring, sucking noise as people stampeded toward the stage.

I think she opened with “Bamboo Banga,” but I don’t really remember too well. The next 80 minutes flew by in a blur of jaw-dropping energy, radiating charisma, mind-blowing mashups and the surreal spectacle of pretty white girls moaning “ajaa!!” Continue reading →

On a Train to Nowhere

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Once upon a time, in a land called “college”, I dated a wealthy white boy from Arizona. He was a nice boy, with nice parents who rushed to embrace and accept me. I was young and eager to be embraced. Trouble was, his mom had an odd way of tacking on an explanation (sometimes sotto voce, sometimes not) to anything “cultural” whenever she addressed me. Implicit in every conversation was the assumption that they would refine me, expose me to the better things in life, elevate me somehow. I shrugged it off time and again until the weight of all that well-intentioned condescension finally felt too crushing: for god’s sake, high art to this family meant Monet’s fucking Water Lillies!! They spent gobs of money on interior designer who made them buy a pool table swathed in beige felt!

I would stand there in my thrift or Army-Navy surplus wear and thrill at the fact that I was secretly turning up my unrefined nose at them, a giant thought-balloon screaming “TACKY!!” rising above my head. I didn’t say anything because it was all so deliciously meta. Also? I was a chicken-shit people-pleaser.

So, anyway, it’s been a great many years since I dumped the guy, but seeing Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited brought on some strange flashbacks.

I’m a sucker for cinematography. Great art direction and visual flair can supplant character development, direction, or even plot, as far as I’m concerned. So naturally, I’ve been a rather ardent Wes Anderson fan. His stilted little diorama-like movies were fine by me. I accepted his narcissistic, self-involved characters because I was watching Anderson’s carefully constructed little world, and if the darker/foreign people were always a little goofy, and not really treated all that well by the main characters, well, that’s alright, right? His world, his prerogative, and all that. Besides, the soundtracks were so great! Continue reading →

Wheatish and Balanced?

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foxanchors_lgl.jpg Fox News Channel launched a new Business Network today, creatively named Fox Business Network (FBN), and available in almost 30 million homes. In the ever-competitive cable news market, Fox is trying to fish for viewers in a most unusual way:

Fox News Executive Vice President Kevin Magee, who’s in charge of FBN’s day-to-day operations, says it doesn’t want to trade blows with CNBC, (GE) or even Bloomberg TV, the current channels of choice for financial market watchers…Instead, his new business channel aims to draw viewers “from soap operas, game shows — any place we can.”
FBN executives hope to do that with personality-driven programs heavy on personal finance and with stories offering business insights into general interest news. There is some traditional market news, along with an on-screen crawl showing the latest stock prices.link

But you know what they really have? What they’re using to chum the waters?

Hot chicks, duh.

Almost all of the on-air talent that’s plugged on the site are skinny, youthful beauties like Shibani Joshi (a former model in India), Cheryl Casone (a former flight attendant), Jenna Lee (she played Division One softball in college), and Nicole Petillades (she loves slalom waterskiing!). link

Of course, the foxy ladies are also quite talented. Take Ms. Joshi, for example: shibani_joshi_ourteam.jpg

Shibani Joshi, based in New York, joins from her role as a reporter covering breaking news for News 12 Westchester. Before this, Joshi was a producer for Reuters Television and TIMES NOW, the joint venture news channel with The Times of India, where she was responsible for producing news packages and interviews broadcast all over India. Joshi has also served as a contributing writer for ABCNews.com and ABC News Now covering business and technology stories. She began her journalism career as a news production assistant at CNNfn where she contributed to Lou Dobbs Moneyline and CNN Money Morning. link

I think I read about an MBA from Harvard to cap that sweet resume, so, you know, I’m not hating the beautiful. Much. And networks are notorious for playing up the youth and sex appeal of female anchors. But this crew is exceptionally young, and Fox is blatantly plastering their glamor shots everywhere. Is this sort of business plan a harbringer for Naked News (NSFW!!) on network TV? Doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it?

More on the the FBN at Adweek, USAToday, Forbes, DealBreaker, etc. Continue reading →

Basement Bhangra Comes to Your House!

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BasementCD.jpg If you’re South Asian and live in New York, you’ve probably heard about Basement Bhangra, maybe stopped by a few (every month) times, and possibly brought all your friends to boot. It’s ridiculous to think that the monthly bhangra party at S.O.B’s has been going on for over ten years. Clubland years are like dog years – this thing should be arthritic and/or dead by now. But instead, DJ Rekha (disclaimer: I’m a friend) still brings live-wire energy and mad-scientist enthusiasm to the party as she continues to expand her empire (Basement, Bollywood Disco Mutiny, NYU Artist-in-Residency), relentless in her determination to bring joyous bhangra to the masses.

To that end, Rekha’s releasing a Basement Bhangra CD. According to the press release:

This 17 track album is a mix CD – with four exclusive tracks including two original productions… DJ Rekha has collaborated with an array of incredible artists including Wyclef Jean, Panjabi MC, and Bikram Singh – to name a few. The album skillfully weaves together Punjabi folk traditions and dancehall rhythms from Jamaica and DJ techniques that are 100% New York.

The album comes out on October 23rd. More info, track listing and ordering here. Continue reading →

A Conspiracy of Nooses

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As many of you might have already heard, the Jena Six incident found an odd resonance at Columbia University in NY. A noose was hung outside an African-American professor’s office door on Tuesday morning. The past two days have seen student protests, press conferences, and emotional meetings with university officials. The NYPD hate crimes unit is testing the rope for DNA.

The professor, Madonna G. Constantine, whose specialty is race, racial identity and multiculturalism, stood before protesters at midday and thanked her supporters… “I think we are all pretty much mystified as to why it happened,” said George A. Bonanno, a professor of psychology. “This is an institution that prides itself on having open dialogue about race and fairly progressive ideas.”

At an afternoon news conference, Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood, commander of the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, said, “Right now we have no suspects, but we will go down all investigative pathways.” He ruled out any possibility that Professor Constantine had hung the rope herself. link

So amidst the uproar, why has Columbia University refused to turn over security video tape to the police?

Police and students remain baffled as this move only ignites conspiracy theories. Not to further fan the flames here, but the Associated Press, New York Magazine, and that bastion of rational thought, The New York Post, have already named another professor at Columbia involved in a legal tussle with Constantine:

Court records show Constantine filed a defamation lawsuit in May against another professor of psychology and education, Suniya S. Luthar. The one-page filing in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court also accuses Luthar of libel and slander and asks for $100,000 in damages. The single page was signed only by Constantine and does not indicate if she had a lawyer. Luthar declined to discuss the lawsuit. She wouldn’t say if she had spoken with police about the noose. “I think it is an unspeakably ghastly, horrible incident,” she said Thursday.link

Any current of former students at Columbia care to comment on this? Ever had Constantine or Luthar as teachers? This case grows murkier by the day, but no matter the outcome, it’s dismaying to realize we’re so far from ever becoming a race-blind society. Continue reading →