Author Archives: Abhi

About Abhi

Abhi lives in Los Angeles and works to put things into space.

DNC Day 2: My Mom’s a PUMA. Will she come around?

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Tuesday night at at the convention was all about Hillary Clinton. Would she come around and give the speech she needed to in order to unify the base, or would she subliminally lay the groundwork for 2012? Well honestly, I didn’t catch most of her speech. I had a floor pass but the fire marshall shut the floor down and blocked off every exit. The Democrats seem to have given everyone floor passes. There are guests, special guests, celebrities, and a large contingent of foreign nationals (including Indians and Pakistanis) who I guess are here to “observe democracy” (cough cough…hanging chads). All of this is just going to reinforce the image of the Democrats and Obama as the party of vanity. But I wasn’t too bummed about missing parts of her speech because there was lots of interesting stuff happening in the halls of the Pepsi Center. People were clustered around television sets waiting to see if she would stick a knife in him or lift him up. I’m astounded by how politically intelligent EVERY delegate here seems to be.

So did Hillary succeed in getting her devotees to vote for Obama? The best poll out there this morning will be my mom. She is one of the PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass) . She was a Hillary supporter who refused to vote for Obama. Ravi and I have been stalking the forrests of Denver looking for desi PUMAs but with to avail. I explained to my mom that abstaining would be the same as a vote for McCain but she just said “*grumble grumble* Hillary was very qualified *grumble grumble.*” I think she will come around and stick to voting as a Democrat, but I will call her this morning to ask her (She’s currently at Bally’s so I am unable to reach her). In the meantime I am a little worried. All she asked me for was to get Bill or Hillary’s autograph while I was here. Only two days left!

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DNC Day 2: Subodh Chandra, Captain of Team Ohio

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I was just on the floor of the Pepsi Center here in Denver. I passed by Senators Claire McCaskill and Dick Durbin very very slowly since traffic on the floor is completely choked. So choked in fact that I ended up standing next to the CNN folks long enough to see the make-up on Blitzer and Cooper’s faces. I got to say, thus far I have been EXTREMELY disappointed in the organization of this convention. Calling it chaotic would be too kind. They didn’t even have lanyards left for me to put my credentials in so I had to rig something together (which included the use of scotch tape). I feel like that kid in school who tapes his glasses when they break. Also, myself and a handful of other press had to walk a half hour in the blazing sun because the buses dropped us off at the wrong gate. Ok, I will quit my complaining now and talk about something positive. The positive is that this is still a great event and we have a lot we will be blogging about through the night.

While on the floor I had a chance to speak with former Ohio Attorney General candidate Subodh Chandra. I didn’t get to speak to him for very long however, because as you can see in the clip below, he was busy passing out signs and rallying the Ohio delegation. Chandra’s energy is unreal. The days here are really long and hectic given all the security checks, walking, and schmoozing. I’m yawning twice a minute but Subodh was still energized.

When speaking with him I wanted to know, “What comes next?” After the convention is over and everyone goes home, what is he going to be doing? Turns out that early voting in Ohio starts in just 5 weeks. He plans to use that time raising money for Obama (a meme I will revisit later tonight), getting out the vote (especially the South Asian vote), and educating the naturalized citizens of Ohio about their voting rights. This last issue is something I hadn’t heard about.

Today, we won.

Secretary of State Blackwell’s counsel agreed to a permanent injunction against enforcement of most of Ohio Revised Code Section 3505.20(A), the section that would permit a poll worker to demand of voters whether they are naturalized citizens and their certificate of naturalization before permitting them to vote by a regular ballot.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Boyko then issued the permanent injunction and agreed to publish his decision, because it is an important issue and no other state has tried to do this before. Blackwell’s counsel agreed to draft a directive to county Boards of Elections informing them about the court’s decision, so we assisted them in preparing some draft language. The directive, which we anticipate will be issued soon, will inform Boards of Elections and poll workers that they are not to enforce the offensive provisions of Section 3505.20(A). It will also require them to post at polling places notices that proof of citizenship is not required. [Link]

Time permitting I will tag up with Subodh again later this week to get his impressions of each night. Meanwhile, Ravi has scammed his way into the Alaska delegation. Do South Asians even live in Alaska? 🙂

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Twas the night before…

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I never went to journalism school and I haven’t taken a writing class since my freshman year of college (as I am sure is more than apparent to long time readers). Thus, I’ve been kind of flustered all day today (on the eve of one of SM’s biggest moments) as to how to prepare for THIS. If you know me then you know I am an obsessive, to the point of ridiculousness, preparer (which has actually served me well for my chosen profession). However, I don’t really know how to prepare for the responsibility we now have and neither does our young new blogger Ravi , who has already started blogging from Denver. He hasn’t even been to college yet! What the hell were they thinking letting us crash these gates?

I sat down tonight and started preparing dossiers (well…ummm…index cards) on some of the people we want to interview. We want SM readers to get some firsthand insight into who the South Asian Americans are that are going to this Convention, some serving as delegates. I’m also reading the book all those political types are reading so I can sound somewhat smart when I get there.

The logistics of the convention alone are a total nightmare. Venues are spread all over Denver. Luckily I lived in Colorado for two years so I remember some of the streets and have a place to crash with a friend. My flight gets in too late and I am going to miss the IALI Cocktail hour where all the South Asian Democrat big-wigs are going to be schmoozing, but Ravi will be there. Last Tuesday I put in a request to interview Joe Biden about his views on Pakistan. After Saturday morning’s big news I’m sure that’s not going to happen.

We just want you all to know that we are excited and we hope that you are excited too. We want to make this as participatory as possible so if you have story ideas or things you want to learn then hit us up and we will do our best to chase them down.

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Sepia Mutiny’s Tumblr and Twitter go Live

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We here at Sepia Mutiny are always working (especially our sleep deprived admin Chaitan) behind the scenes to improve the site’s features, interactivity, and addictiveness. Thus, just in time for the Democratic National Convention, we are introducing two new SM features. The first is the new SM “shorts” site on our Tumblr page. This is the place where you can go to find small tidbits like quotes, pictures and videos that we are interested enough to want to blog, but might now have the time to write a full post about. It is in beta testing right now which means we are aware of a few issues (e.g. font colors, permalinks, etc.) that need to be worked out but we are on it. Both Ravi and I will be using this site A LOT while reporting from the convention so please visit it often this week. If I get to meet Fergie in Denver, for example, there will be a picture of us (but not of me touching any bumps) on our Tumblr site accompanied by a brief quote about how the meeting was a step forward for South Asian Americans in politics. Check us out:

The next feature we have added is an SM Twitter page. What’s Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. [Link]

Whenever there is an event of interest to the South Asian American community (and we have a blogger there) we will microblog the event with “tweets.” Anna has been doing this already for a while now. More importantly, if a group of you are headed to an event (independent of each other) SM can “follow” your Twitter pages. Thus, we hope to be able to capture and post a diversity of reactions to the same event via our new Twitter feed. If you are going to be at the DNC or RNC in the next two weeks and want to participate then please create your own Twitter page and then email us (abhi at sepiamutiny dot com). We will “follow” you through SM so other readers can virtually attend through your microblogging.

Lastly, we are finally, seriously, working on a major site re-design. We hope to seamlessly incorporate all these new features and a re-vamped News Tab into a new accessible (yet still mutinous) format.

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Denver or Minneapolis bound? Contact SM

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If you are a South Asian American delegate, volunteer, politician, blogger, protester, anarchist, whatever and will be at the Democratic National Convention this week or the Republican National Convention the week after, please get in touch with us as soon as possible. Our blogging team is looking to talk to everyone we can find there in order to bring the full experience of these events to the online community. Please email me at abhi [at] sepia mutiny dot com ASAP.

If you know a friend going to either event and they don’t read/know about SM then please forward this to them. This is our chance to maximize the participation of the South Asian American community and every person that attends these events will have a unique experience that we’d like to share.

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Why Joe Biden? Answer: Pakistan

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As everybody and their mother now knows, Obama’s Vice Presidential running mate will be Senator Joesph Biden of Delaware. Very clever of Obama to wait the whole week, gathering the cell phone numbers of thousands of potential supporters wanting to be the “first to know” via text message (well eat it guys because this post is up even before you got your lousy text message…at ~3:30 a.m. EST). His campaign now has the ability to send get-out-the-vote texts to thousands of young and new voters, many of them who don’t even keep land lines and are traditionally hard to reach on election day. Anyways, we here at Sepia Mutiny have of course written about Joe Biden’s predilection for verbal gaffes before (see Donutgate here and here), which is probably his greatest weakness. However, it is no doubt his considerable strengths that led Obama to choose him as the running mate. Here Obama, in his own words, describes what he was looking for:

“Obviously, the most important question is, is this person prepared to be president? Second-most-important question, from my perspective, is: Can this person help me govern? Are they going to be an effective partner in creating the kind of economic opportunity here at home and guiding us through some dangerous waters internationally? And the third criteria for me, I think, was independence. I want somebody who is going to be able to challenge my thinking and not simply be a yes-person when it comes to policymaking…” [Link]

Biden walking with Kerry and Nawaz Sharif near Lahore earlier this year

Arguably, the most dangerous waters to be waded through internationally in the next few years will be the tribal areas of Pakistan and it’s border with Afghanistan. There is probably no one in the Senate who knows more about these issue than Biden. In fact, remember this article I blogged about last November:

President Pervez Musharraf and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto each placed telephone calls from Pakistan to Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to discuss the country’s crisis before either talked to President George W. Bush.

On Saturday, Bhutto stressed to Biden the need for parliamentary elections in January with Gen. Musharraf remaining as president but leaving the army. Musharraf called Biden Tuesday and asked that their conversation be kept confidential. Biden got the impression Musharraf could accept January elections although he had triggered the crisis by suspending the constitution. [Link]
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Mutinous Fashion: T-shirts for the political season

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A few weeks back I offered a challenge to SM readers: Design t-shirts for me to wear at the Democratic National Convention next week and I’d buy them from you and publicize them:

design a t-shirt that features a political or social (but non-partisan) message and I can order it using Café Press, Threadless, or one of many other internet t-shirt companies. Send me the design at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com. I will narrow it down to the best entries and have SM readers vote on the finalists. I will be at the convention for three full days so I will purchase up to three winning t-shirts to wear on the floor. The more clever/funny/relevant/socially conscious your t-shirt, the more likely it is to grab attention and communicate your message to all the varied citizens expected to be in Denver

Well, a handful of you did take up the challenge (and I thank you)…but none to my satisfaction. What can I say, I am very hard to please and my standards are quite high (as the interns at our North Dakota headquarters know all too well). The response was also much less enthusiastic than I had hoped for. Thus, the always creative Manish and I joined forces once again (he did co-found SM in case you forget) to come up with our own original designs to sell to you all. Below are two that I will be sporting at the convention next week. These two are ready for sale now, but a few others will go on sale as early as next Monday, exclusively through SM and Ultrabrown.

Hopefully everyone understands the references but if not remind yourself here and here. Tell your friends.

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Seeing things that just aren’t there

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Look, I’m just about as big a Michael Phelps fan as there is out there. No disrespect here. My boy is even a fellow Wolverine. However, when I saw the new cover of Sports Illustrated I thought it was a woman until I panned up to the face. I swear, with all those medals (8) it looks like he is wearing a top similar to something you’d see at an Indian wedding (picture on left). Am I going totally crazy? Am I the only one that now has this unusual image of Phelps etched into my psyche?

Truly sorry if this traumatizes anyone.

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Barack Obama: “I’m a desi”

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Recently Jeff Yang of the San Francisco Chronicle sent me an article he had just published in that newspaper. He wrote:

I wanted to share with you guys the most recent installment of “Asian Pop”–which some of you may be aware now appears in both the online and the reconstituted wood pulp edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The response to it has been quite interesting and, er, high-volume, from black, white and Asian American readers alike. Anyway, if you’re getting this then you’re someone whose opinion I value and whom I think might be interested in the issues involved here, and I’m curious about your thoughts.

Here are some excerpts from Jeff’s article:

“White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, he displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas…”

With these words in the New Yorker in 1998, Toni Morrison granted our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, a kind of cadet membership in the grand cultural narrative of black America…

…reading Obama’s absorbing 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” it strikes me that the tropes that surround and define Obama can just as easily be read as those of another community entirely. Which raises the question: Could it be that our true first black president might also be our first Asian American president? [Link]

I will reserve my opinion of what I think of Jeff’s partially rhetorical question. Instead, I’d like to take you now to a fundraiser that happened Sunday in San Francisco (also reported in the SFChronicle):

The Illinois senator said it is “a testament to the American spirit that I’m even standing here before you” as the Democratic Party’s presumed nominee, because some Americans are “still getting past the name,” which he said some consider “funny.”

“Change is always tough, and electing me is change … and it means that people are going to hesitate a little bit,” Obama told a crowd of about 200 deep-pocketed supporters at a VIP reception for South Asian and Pacific Islander supporters at the Fairmont Hotel.

“Barack Obama – they’re still getting past that name,” he said. “…

Obama told the group – many of them Indian and Pakistani immigrants – that he is not only familiar with their cultures – but also proud of his lifelong associations with them. [Link]

And now for the money shot:

“Not only do I think I’m a desi, but I’m a desi,” he said, using a colloquial term that describes South Asian immigrants. The remark was greeted with laughs. “I’m a homeboy…” [Link]

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