Remember Kenneth Eng? He’s the young gentleman whose column in a San Francisco Asian-American paper headlined “Why I Hate Black People” caused a certain amount of agitation back in late February and early March. Though it was that article that led to his column being pulled, it turned out that in previous writings he had also lobbed large quantities of idiotic, racist invective at any number of other ethnic and cultural groups — whites, Latinos, Muslims, working-class people, fellow Asians accused of self-hatred — on grounds, apparently, of some combination of inherent inferiority and complicity with some kind of conspiracy to devalue and degrade Asian people in America.

So then the Virginia Tech massacre happens and, returning to the Eng thread here, commenter “A Black Muse” asks the following question:

Ok, now, I’m just waiting for the Cho/Eng connection. Did you read about the disturbing behavior Cho exhibited prior to his rampage? Did it remind you of anyone? About two weeks ago, Eng posted reply to the FoxNews video to drone on about a concept he has no understanding, and in the middle of it states that the killing of cashiers, teachers and lawyers would make little difference to the world as they are people of limited awareness and impact on the world. (wtf?) […] The day after the shooting, Eng posted another video LAUGHING about it and congratulating Cho!

Well, now the connection is complete, per this article in the Village Voice today that contains comments in which Eng gives props to Cho for his actions and suggests that Cho may have read Eng’s “works” for inspiration. Behold: Continue reading →

It’s Monday morning, tax day, crummy weather, and lots of work to do, so I’m not going to make things worse by posting here the photo that the New York Times splayed across the front of its Sunday Styles section yesterday, and that made me (and probably many of you) go ICK! EWWWW! EWWWW EWWWW EWWWW! At the very least, the photo, which depicts disgraced “fashion designer” Anand Jon in the company of two very, very young-looking models somewhere out on the party circuit, is the kind of woozy tableau that reminds you that the lower rungs of the fashion and celebrity world are saturated in vulgarity and creepiness whether or not actual crimes are committed. Of course, given the multiplying legal charges of rape and molestation that Jon now faces, the photo’s prominent placement, beneath the headline “The Designer Who Liked Models” and accompanying a spare-no-tawdry-detail article by Hollywood correspondent Sharon Waxman, makes for quite the indictment in the court of public opinion. It does so, in fact, to an extent that made me uncomfortable, though I’ll go out on a limb and say that this brother is clearly a grade-A, bona fide creep and I’d be highly surprised, given what’s coming out, if he was cleared of all charges.

Meanwhile the article has raised hackles in other quarters, as I discovered while checking our news page to see if anyone had posted it. Indeed: an anonymous tipster linked the story as “NY times ignorant report,” quoting this line from the piece: “Mr. Jon is well known in his native India, and national newspapers like The Hindustan Times and Calcutta Times follow every development with interest,” and commenting in response:

Actually he is unknown in India.The is no newspaper called Calcutta Times. And this Jon story has never appeared in The Telegraph. Indian media has not any given attention to Anand Jon.

Now the “Calcutta Times” thing tripped me up too; I chalked it up to shoddy Googling by Waxman to make a point that, while tangential to the story, might give it some extra oomph. I maintain that view, especially upon finding that “Calcutta Times” is the name of the Times of India’s Calcutta supplement (similar to those it runs in other cities); Waxman must have just grabbed something that ran there to support her claim.

But of course, the tipster had to go and assert that the Jon story has not even despoiled the virginal eyes of the Indian newspaper reading public, and that, of course, is a load of bollocks. In fact, the very Telegraph, which the tipster claims has never run a story on Jon, did exactly that on March 14, with a piece by K. P. Nayar that begins as follows:

Washington, March 14: Anand Jon, whose Indian-American success story is the stuff of dreams, is in a Los Angeles jail, arrested on rape charges.

So even if Waxman’s technique was shoddy, you can hardly fault her for claiming that Indians are paying attention to the case given this kind of treatment.

Anyway, this is inside baseball, and I would like to explain for the benefit of any mainstream media or bloggers coming here to find the “official” desi reaction to the latest developments in the Jon case, that the point I’ve just raised is totally tangential to the case itself, and that as far as I know, reaction among American desis remains the same combination of “innocent until proven guilty… I guess” and “EEEEWWWW ICK ICK ICK” that it’s been from the beginning. Continue reading →

I don’t need to tell y’all that brown people are taking over the world. Hell, desis been taking over for a minute now. One place where you would have thought this would be apparent is here in New York City, where our people are running things across the board, from academia to media to cinema to art to finance to medicine to law to activism to philanthropy to — oh, yeah, fruit vendors and taxi cab drivers (but we do not speak of these). And yet, there remains a class of benighted New Yorkers who have yet to recognize the ever-browning brownitude in which they bathe.

Who are these poor souls? Why, they’re the readers of the New York Observer: the pink-papered weekly with the highbrow preoccupations and the arch headlines and the Upper West Side noblesse oblige; the original fount of the Candace Bushnell column that begat Sex and the City; the paper that crows to advertisers that it “delivers the top of the market: a well-educated, affluent audience of highly influential consumers.” Indeed, according to the sales kit, median household income among Observer subscribers is $162,500; median net worth is $1,546,200; the average numbers are much higher.

Well, in what must be confirmation that we have finally arrived, this lofty set has been officially advised of our existence as of the current issue of the Observer, which features a series of short profiles penned by Nicholas Boston, under the (highly original!) title “India, Inc.” The reduction to India of a group that actually mixes FOBs (or whatever we’re calling them now), ABDs, 1.5s, and people of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani and even half-Dutch origin is but one of the various conflations that y’all sensitive types might bridle at but that, let’s face it, shouldn’t really matter all that much given that we all look the same.

Anyway, now that we exist, at least as some kind of highly literate brown blob, we also need a name. What would it be? Desicrats? Macacarati? No! We are… the Bollypolitans! “A Bollypolitan elite is the newest creative class to kick into New York with art, fashion, literature,” the subtitle announces. And in the first sentence we meet our leader:

In 2000, the Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with The Interpreter of Maladies, making her the first South Asian—and, at 33, among the youngest of any ethnicity—to be named in that category. She appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, wearing crimson, her hair gelled back into a chignon.

Charlie Rose! Crimson! Chignons! Shit, this desi thing must be for real. Indeed:

Ever since then, twenty- and thirtysomethings of South Asian descent—that would be Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan—have emerged in a very public way on New York’s cultural stage, and we’re not talkin’ Kaavya Viswanathan. Art centers have been chartered, dance ensembles formed, fashion companies founded—and many more books, both fiction and nonfiction, written and published. Herewith, some names to learn.

So, quick: If you had to pick 12 desis-you-need-to-know in the New York “creative class” (and don’t pick Cicatrix or myself, that would be too easy :P), who would you choose? You can compare your results with Mr. Boston’s incredible advanced sociological sampling analysis here. Discuss! Continue reading →