Author Archives: A N N A

Note to Self: Adopt

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…because any gloriously chubby baby who wants to crawl in to the kitchen to sneak dairy products is fantastic by me.

adopt.png

Since I had to shrink it a bit, the caption at the bottom of the frame says, “Adopt: You never know who you’ll bring home”. If you click the picture, you can see a slightly larger version of it.

This is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen on my Facebook feed; I’m grateful that one of you took the time to post it, and say:

a surprise punch of cuteness from the BigB’s blog: adorable psa, especially for fans of TheButterThiefInChief. [link]

The Butter Thief in Chief? Loves it. 🙂 I couldn’t keep all that cute to myself, so I decided to inflict it on all of you. Enjoy. Continue reading →

On Being Down With Dating Brown

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Raakhee

This Sunday, I woke up to an email from a girlfriend who is not Desi. She said that there was a really thought-provoking article in the New York Post, which reminded her of some of our conversations. She thought I might enjoy it. Enjoy it? I could have written parts of it. It was about Dating While Brown– and dating other Browns, to be specific.

The piece was called, “MELTING NOT: Why Young People Like me Started Dating Within our Race“. In it, NYP reporter Raakhee Mirchandani wrote a sensitive, honest explanation of her views on love– and I can just imagine the nastiness she might be encountering because of it.

It’s never easy to put yourself out there, so I salute her for doing so. Besides, with this issue, you can’t win. You date outside your community and you’re either a sell-out, desperate or a coconut. Date within it and you’re insular, insecure and biased. Ugh. Can’t we all just get along? I hope we can remember to be kind to one another, as we discuss an issue which affects all of us, albeit in different ways. We’ve got to let love rule, or whatever Lenny screams. On to the story.

::

I know so many friends, whose experience mirrored this:

Growing up, the man in my dreams was a mystery; he was white, he was tall, he was dark, he was slick. He was always handsome. In my fantasy it didn’t matter if he was Catholic or Muslim, European or African, if he ate pigs or worshipped monkeys. It didn’t matter if he understood that I came from a rich tradition of Indian Hindus who were strict vegetarians, quietly conservative, obsessively dedicated to family and maniacal in their love for cheesy song-and-dance movies with mediocre acting and music.
And so when we met, freshman year at Boston University – the street smart Eastern European with a gorgeous smile, big heart and wicked sense of humor and the artsy Indian girl with a penchant for big hair, Bollywood and Biggie -it seemed like the perfect cross-continental match.

Ah, Biggie. I pour some of my Robitussin with Codeine out for you.

But somewhere along our six years together, the Indian girl from Jersey, who had naively promised him Catholic children, steak dinners and consistently defended his refusal to hang with my family as a simple difference in opinion, had a change of heart. And he did, too.
I remember him looking at me on an evening not far from our last and saying, “It’s like all of a sudden you became Indian.” In a way so quiet I didn’t even realize it was happening, the brown from my skin must have seeped in and colored my heart.

That line just slays me. I project emotions and explanations all over it. Is it accusatory? A blurt of hurt? Is becoming “Indian” a negative thing? The defending “his refusal to hang with my family” is also poignant. America may be a country of individuals, but most of us who are of South Asian descent are tightly tied to our families, for better or for worse. No one wants to be caught in that vise between one love and another. Continue reading →

FBI Raids Office of Vivek Kundra, DC CTO [5 Updates]

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Kundra is Obama’s “much-lauded” pick to be the CIO of the federal government. The AP has more on this budding bribery scandal:

FBI agents are conducting a search of the offices of the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer.
The head of that office, Vivek Kundra, recently left to take a job with the Obama administration.
Katherine Schweit, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, said a search is being conducted that is part of an ongoing investigation…
President Barack Obama named Kundra earlier this month to help oversee the ability of government computer systems to speak to each other and security for vast federal information databanks. [AP]

I know of at least one mutineer who is on the scene, right now. I’ll update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE #1 Kundra is not the target of the raid, but at least one other South Asian (an employee in his office) IS:

The FBI raided the former office of Obama administration official Vivek Kundra in a corruption probe on Thursday but Kundra is not a target of the investigation, a spokeswoman for Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty said.
The FBI was searching the offices of the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer, a position formerly held by Kundra, as it investigates employees for corruption there, spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said…
Yusuf Acar, who works in the District’s technology office, and another man, Sushil Bansal, were arrested as part of the investigation, FBI spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin said, adding that the charges remain under seal. [Reuters]

Continue reading →

55Friday: the compendious edition

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Once upon a time on SM,
we had a fun weekly tradition
called “55Friday”.


Everyone wrote flash fiction,
or tiny stories
which contained exactly 55 words
(no more, no less).
That was the beauty–
and the challenge–
of doing it.


I miss reading
that voodoo
you readers do.
So, let’s start again. 🙂

(Even this post is 55 words.) Continue reading →

Introducing DesiFilter: for all your Stalking Needs!

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And some of you wonder why I sweat engineers…look at what amazing things they do! Hot off our tip-line:

A couple of weeks back, Sree asked SAJA Forum readers to help him see if there were any Desis affected by the Madoff swindle: http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/02/crime-any-desis-on-the-madoff-client-list.html
As a techie, needing to have humans manually crowdsource the filtering of Desi names out of a long list seemed inefficient.
That’s why I built DesiFilter, a new web tool to help community journalists and obsessive Desi-angle stalkers:
http://www.desifilter.com (click on “Example 1”, etc. for sample datasets)
It’s pretty simple — just feed it some text, and it’ll go through a list of about 26,000 common South Asian names and highlight possible matches.
South Asian names are super-multicultural. I tried to remove most common Anglo names (otherwise any list of American names would be all false positives), but there’s still substantial overlap with Iranian, Arab, Turkish, and Portuguese names. It may miss Anna John and catch Osama Bin Laden — but it’s still infinitely easier than looking for potentially Desi names by hand.
My goal is for the tool to be part of any obsessive Desi-angle stalker’s toolkit. I’m interested in what you or Sepia readers find with it. I’d love feedback. Thanks.

You want feedback? Boy, you ’bout to get you some feedback, let me tell YOU. 😉 I love how it’s an accepted practice to be an “obsessive, Desi-angle stalker”. It’s just so matter-of-fact. And warm and fuzzy– we at SM are not the only ones! Admit it, you totally do it, too. When movie credits roll, and you see a Best Boy named Neel/Jay/Anil Patel/Sen/Singh, you feel a little twinge of recognition…or indigestion. Who told you to get a Large popcorn AND nachos?

Anyway, is this the first time I’ve reprinted an ENTIRE, somewhat lengthy missive to the tip line, verbatim? Why, I think it is. I just don’t have the heart to remove anything. Especially any sentence which allows me to escape freely (muahahaha) while catching Bin Laden. FINALLY! Someone needed to do it and the U.S. sucks at it. Jai Hind! No, wait…Jai Ho! Actually, more like Jai HIM—-> Anirvan.

Of course, if you’re a bibliophile, you already knew him; he’s behind the very respected BookFinder.com

…the best resource (online or off) for finding used, rare, and out of print books. The Library of Congress recommends it; both Newsweek and Money magazines called it one of the two best book sites online (the other, in both cases, being Amazon.com). [link]

And no, Anirvan didn’t pay me to splort all over your screen with my giddiness over his geekery. I splorted for free! Wait, that sounds awful. My point is, we get dozens, if not hundreds of tips. We rarely have the resources to cover each one. Most of you are aware of this.

I’m sure Anirvan sent in his DesiFilter message, shrugged, and thought “maybe”. He certainly couldn’t have expected that I’d put down my outrageously late dinner of lemon rice and paavaka mezhukkupuratti, pause the DVR and postpone packing for my trip tomorrow, just to publish an effusive endorsement of his efforts. He deserves it, though. It’s not every day that reading a tip makes me go –> :D. Better living through technology, y’all. I’m ’bout it bout ‘it. Let the stalking begin! Wait, that doesn’t sound right, either… Continue reading →

Gassy? Bloated? Fatigued? YOU may be suffering from PSSD!

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Mutineers, have you been the victim…of strange assumptions and blatant stupidity?

Are you confused? Uneasy? Constipated?

You may be suffering from PSSD. Post-Slumdog Stress Disorder is a very real ailment, with devastating consequences for its sufferers. Victims of PSSD often, on a daily, if not hourly basis, endure flashes of rage, manic ranting, rocking back and forth while twitching slightly in the corner, and a smug proclivity to email links to anti-“Slumdog Millionaire” news stories with the subject line: “HA! Look who agrees with me! LOOK!!”.

If you have been accosted by allegedly well-meaning but clearly oblivious, pink cylons who initiate insensitive conversations about this movie with you, DO SOMETHING. Instead of being harmed by that dangerous trauma trigger, show them this educational video, so that they leave you the fuck alone, then you can go back to being bitter about not going to medical or law school, in peace.


Link courtesy of old skool mutineer Sexy_Gulti_Ho. And yes, that’s his screen name. Continue reading →

Rest in Peace, Annabel, There’s a Heaven for Haathi

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Since my name is Anna, I love elephants. So, while meandering about SFGate.com, home of the beleaguered San Francisco Chronicle–the first newspaper I ever read– I saw a thumbnail of one which I couldn’t resist clicking. When I realized what I was looking at, I became sad. Obviously I had to inflict such depressing news on all of you:

shes mourning her friend.jpg

RIP, Annabel: An elephant at Holland’s Emmen Zoo mourns at the edge of a ditch where 45-year-old Annabel, the zoo’s oldest elephant, fell in and died. The zoo said its elephants regularly stumble into the ditch that surrounds their compound and are able to climb out, but that Annabel was unable to. [SFGate]

At 45, Annabel was the zoo’s matriarch. When she fell on Sunday, she landed on her side, that’s why she was “unable” to get up or climb out.

A breakdown truck was called to lift her out of the ditch, but her rescuers couldn’t get her to stand up again. A vet said she had gone into a state of shock and decided to put her to sleep. [RadioNL]

Part of me is wondering why there is this potentially dangerous ditch in the first place? Asian elephants (like those at Emmen Zoo) are endangered enough without unnecessarily risking their lives in poorly-designed spaces. Poor Annabel.

I know elephants are amazing, sensitive creatures but this caption just emphasized that in such a way that I was jolted right out of my passive, blithely-surfing-the-net state. The other elephants are in mourning. After my father passed away, our two German Shepherds began howling at night, much to the discomfiture of my mother. One waited outside the patio door, where he had seen my father collapse while the other remained near the front, from where the ambulance had left.

So animals grieve, like we do. Maybe more than we do. I started eating before our dogs did. It may seem tie-dyed or crunchy, but I wonder what the zoo is doing for the surviving elephants, and their human caretakers. I’m not even going to get in to the politics of zoos or the ethical implications of containing such magnificent creatures in less than natural spaces for the entertainment and possible edification of humans. I just felt sad for this fallen matriarch, and wanted in some small way to remember an elephant who wasn’t just Asian, but probably South Asian. Be at peace, Annabel. May you romp and play at the Rainbow Bridge— and if you see my three late German Shepherds, tell them I miss them. Continue reading →

25 Random Things…About Sepia Mutiny

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Earlier this month, the “25 Random Things About Me”-meme was so omnipresent on Facebook, even major papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune discussed it. What, you haven’t heard of it? Wow. No wonder newspapers are going out of business! Well, here’s some background info from the grey lady, then:

…the latest digital fad — a chain-letter-cum-literary exercise called “25 Random Things About Me” — is threatening to consume what little remaining free time and privacy we have.
Here’s how it works: friends send you an e-mail message (or, on Facebook, “tag” you in a note posted to their profile) with 25 heartfelt observations about themselves — like “I named my son after a man I’ve never met” or “I once paid good money to see Whitesnake in concert” — along with instructions for you to follow suit. You are then expected to gin up your own clever list and foist it upon 25 people, including the friend who asked for it in the first place. [NYT]

The 25 things can be habits, goals, quirky facts– whatever. Everyone on Facebook seemed to be doing it, so much so that a backlash started. People used their status messages to denounce the meme and warn others from including them. Groups like “Stop Tagging Me in 25 Random Things Posts You Tards” were formed. But the lists weren’t really THAT bad. No one was forcing anyone to read them. Often, if you did, you’d end up learning fascinating things about the people whom you allegedly “know”.

That’s the thing about “25 Random Things About Me”: Once you stop being annoyed you realize that, at its best, it’s one of the more compelling — and, yes, even oddly inspiring — wastes of time to hit the Web in years. And let’s cut to the chase. Should we really be complaining about the inanity of this new trend? We’re a nation entertained by lolcats. [salon]

Word. Besides, it’s not like this is anything new:

“It’s a brainstorming exercise,” said Anne Trubek, an associate professor at Oberlin College who said she used to give nearly identical assignments 15 years ago to beginning writing students. “It’s used to get people to think about ideas without the pressure of developing a thesis or an argument.” [NYT]

Continue reading →

SM Live-blogs the *other* SM, at The Oscars

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Tonight, I’ll be trying something a little different in the bunker.

Instead of live-blogging the Academy Awards the way I might have in the past, via a disjointed, half-kundi’d sort of list, I’m going to use the nifty program you see below. If it’s good enough for Sports blog Ball Don’t Lie, it’s good enough for this fellow fan o‘ Sheed:

What’s great about this is…well…everything. I can put up instant polls, pick out comments from you to publish in the stream of live blogging, and then tie it up at the end in to a lovely little package with a “replay” ribbon on top, so all may enjoy it at their leisure. I played with it on my own blog, here, so that’s what the finished product will look like. I’m excited, about this and whatever else may come. Are you? 🙂

::

I will also be one of many, many people participating in SAJA’s post-Oscars Call-in Web Radio Show Thing tonight. Continue reading →

Sensual Seduction by Noop, not Snoop

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Move over, Papaya…now there’s someone talented. AND cute. Introducing the latest (and easily greatest) brown singing hopeful– UNC’s adorable Anoop Desai, a.k.a. Noop Dawg (I heard Randy loved that). I may actually have to start watching American Idol again. What am I saying, you will watch American Idol and feverishly send in tips or post stories about it to the news tab. I will watch YouTube, where there is aural gorgeousness like this:

I first saw that vid on VH1 blog, which goes on to say:

Simon Cowell may have been turned off by Anoop Desai’s nerdy appearance at his American Idol audition (”you look like you came from a meeting with Bill Gates“), but we have a feeling this guy’s going to be a contender for the top spot after checking out some of his work with the UNC Clef Hangers, an a capella group at the University of North Carolina, where Desai studies Southern Folklore. Watching this guy croon everything from Brian McKnight’s “The Only One For Me” (above) to T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank,” it’s clear that this nerd is a heartthrob. They’re already shrieking for him at school, so just wait until he gets to Hollywood. Anoop Dogg is hot! Fire! [VH1]

Dear Simon, kindly STFU. A college kid shows up to audition in shorts and you automatically think, “Microsoft”? That doesn’t even make sense. You’re about as worthless as the dozens of “all-look-same”-fools who type, “omg he luks like kal pen!” under his pictures and video clips. Sure he does.

I love that Anoop was the soloist for this song, mostly because I have always loved “The Only One For Me” but hated Brian McKnight; now I can enjoy this joint without hating myself! McKnight made quite the impression on me in 1998, when he played pool with my friend at a DC club, lost, and then sportingly threw the cue stick at the man who pwned his kundi so publicly (incidentally, the friend who humiliated him was also desi).

So, yeah…Sanjaya who? Anoop’s a cutie who sounds like he could make Stupid Simon eat his words. You know, that might actually be worth watching shit-tay American Idol for… Continue reading →