Author Archives: Abhi

About Abhi

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

NASA and the missing Indian children

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When I saw this headline on Monday I couldn’t help but laugh a little: Four [Indian] Kids on NASA Trip Go Missing. I mean, I know NASA is occasionally accused by some crackpot (even well-respected crackpots) of covering up info about aliens, but the idea of foreign kids going missing on a NASA field trip is a whole new kind of conspiracy (wrong kind of aliens). Here is how things unfolded:

The authorities of a private school here have lodged a police complaint that two of its students, who went on an educational trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at its US headquarters, have gone “missing.”

The two students, Paramjit Singh and Kunal Bhandari, went as part of a 13-member delegation of the Dayanand Model School on July 22. While the other members returned, these two students did not come back. [Link]

Then there was this:

Four students from a school in Parowal village who went on a trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have gone missing in the US. One of the teachers accompanying them has also not returned as she reportedly got married.

Eighteen students of the CBSE-affiliated Doaba Public Senior Secondary School went to NASA for a project. While 14 returned, Arshdeep, Sumit Sahni, Dalbir Singh and Baljinder Singh have not come back. The four are aged between 14 and 15 years.

“Teacher Meenu Sharma sent an e-mail to the school authorities, requesting them to extend her leave by a month as she got married,” a source said. [Link]

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SAFM-It’s been brung

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A confrontation I imagine in my head set to the tune of Beat It by MJ (its funnier in my head though):

South Asians for Obama: You better bring it you desi Republicans

South Asians for McCain: Oh. It’s been brung.

Remember when I wrote the following in my post about South Asians for Obama back in February of 2007 (yes, a year and a half ago)?:

In order to be fair and balanced I thought I’d link to South Asians for Rudy, or McCain, or Mitt but I wasn’t able to find such fundraising sites. I would be forever grateful to anyone that could alert me to such a development though. [Link]

Well, this week (less than 100 days before the election) desi supporters of John McCain have answered the challenge! IndiaWest reports:

Indian supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain are trickling out of the woodwork to battle the groundswell of support created by the South Asians for Obama campaign.

Last month, Suresh Kumar, CEO of NexAge Technologies USA in Iselin, New Jersey, launched South Asians for McCain. The nascent organization has picked up 85 members in the three weeks since its inception.

On the West Coast, Atul Saini, co-chairman of the Santa Clara County Business Leaders for John McCain, is attempting to mobilize the large contingent of South Asian business people in the Silicon Valley to vote for his candidate. [Link]

It is interesting to hear which issues motivate these two founders:

McCain is open to free trade, said Kumar, adding that his candidate was not opposed to work going overseas as long as it benefited U.S. interests. The veteran senator also supports lower taxes, which is especially important to small entrepreneurs, said Kumar, adding that “Lower taxes allow free enterprise to flourish.”

Most important to Kumar was the issue of terrorism. “Terrorism is the over-arching threat to civilized society and there is no focus on this issue as far as the Obama campaign is concerned,” he said, adding that McCain recognizes the need for a coordinated global effort to combat terrorism…

Saini said Indians are natural McCain supporters. “We come from India and we are very conservative, business-minded people,” he said, adding that the enterprise-friendly initiatives of McCain’s platform supported South Asian entrepreneurs. [Link] Continue reading →

Guest Blogger: Mallika

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As long time readers of Sepia Mutiny know, we are nothing if not Fair and Balanced in our blogging here. Myself and Ravi are headed to the Democratic National Convention in just two weeks! It is only fair that SM also have a fearless blogger in Minneapolis rubbing shoulders with the elephants at the Republican National Convention. We know you are all equally excited about the happenings there. Thus I would like to introduce everyone to Ms. Mallika Rao.

Mallika is a Master’s Degree student in journalism at Northwestern University and has a temporary gig working for Reuters as well. That’s just the type of hungry young blogger we need to get the juice on why Jindal decided not to accept the VP position (should it have been offered) from McCain.

Please join me in welcoming Mallika to SM.

P.S. If you are a reader of this site and plan to be at the RNC then please contact us.

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Highs and lows at the Olympics (updated)

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Watching the Olympics this past weekend has been equal parts exhilarating and depressing. Seeing the American men win the 4 x 100 m swimming relay last night was un-freaking-real! But it also sent me in to full, early mid-life crisis mode. Am I the only one? I kept thinking how I’m now too old and beat-up to be an Olympian and I was feeling kind of jealous of fellow Wolverine Michael Phelps (would my upper body look like that if I growled in victory poolside?). And then this morning my depression lifted some. Even though I woke to the upsetting news that American Badminton stud Raju Rai had lost to a Finn (read here to understand how hard the environment is), I was quickly informed that Abhinav Bindra of India won the Gold in the 10m Air Rifle! It was Bindra that turned out to be the great brown hope.

So how did Abhinav help me to avert my midlife crisis until another day? Just look at our boy. He looks like and ordinary IT guy or an engineer or friendly grad student. He is now a national hero. A Peter Parker of sorts. He is the great common brown guy hope! Not all of us can have Phelps upper body, but some of us can imagine looking like this (I like paintballing for instance ).

From a virtual non-entity to the country’s hottest property overnight, Abhinav Bindra has struck gold. Not just in Olympics. The Chandigarh shooter who picked up India’s first ever individual gold in Olympics is expected to see his brand value shooting up to a couple of crores, riding not only on his historic feat but also his youthful personality. [Link]

Oh, lighten-up you nationalists! I’m just joking around. A hearty congrats to Abhinav! The dude even has over a 1000 comments on his latest blog entry. A feat unmatched by even…me. Well at least I can go after that record.

And for every hero of the day there is the sad story of the day. Poor Sania. Pulled out because her wrist was hurting. That’s what cortisone injections are for woman!

Raj Bhavsar lives on!!!

Update: Raj sports the bronze. Awesome.

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Cocks of Fury

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Early in high school I weighed about 105 lbs soaking wet. I know, laugh if you want to. I am descended from two bean poles so I was at a genetic disadvantage. This was, after all, long before my collegiate boxing, my climbing adventures, and before I started appearing shirtless in “Boys of Blogging” calenders (ahem…cough cough). So just how does a 105 lb boy make his way in the brutal world that is high school? By laying low, very low. Most people don’t notice a scrawny little kid in high school (as many of our readers might sympathize with). I was also very very very shy.

I hung out with the nerd/geek crowd at the first of the two high schools I attended. It wasn’t much fun as nothing exciting ever happens in the nerd/geek crowd. One day however, my friends and I hatched a plan. The only way that we could raise our station in life was to be on a high school sports team. Even JV would do. This would be our ticket out. But what could I play? Basketball was definitely out. I was a fierce defender but way too short. Baseball? I could play infield but could barely hit the ball out of the infield. Football? Ha Ha Ha. I was pretty good at indoor hockey on the gym floor and rough enough that one kid even tried to fight me for high-sticking his friend until the PE teacher broke it up. However, there is no gym floor hockey team in high school. And then, like a ray of light the answer was revealed. My high school would be holding try-outs for the…Badminton Team.

I was pretty good at badminton and my odds were good because none of the cool kids (who were also the more athletic kids) would EVER be seen anywhere near a shuttlecock. My svelte body would dart back and forth pounding that birdie mercilessly. The fact that it looked like a tiny upside down Apollo capsule re-entering through Earth’s atmosphere was just a bonus (although I could’t say that out loud or even the geeks would make fun of me). The problem was that the competition was cut-throat. All the other geeks were gunning for the same few spots. Many of them were also Asian or South Asian since, for some strange reason, Asians have a fascination with racket sports. Every day I practiced and practiced, honing my skills while huffing like a young Boris Becker of Badminton. Then, the day before the try-outs I came down with a cold and was battling flu like symptoms all day. After watching television while slumped in a couch I got up too quickly, got a massive head rush, passed out, cut my head open on my metal bed frame as I fell, bled all over the place, and had to get stitches in the ER. The doctor ordered me to miss tryouts the next day. I didn’t make the team. This was the single most scarring failure of my life. And that brings me to the point of this thus far depressing post: American Olympian Raju Rai. Geek has been replaced with chic.

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The Birth of the Indian-American “Celebrity?”

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My friend Reshma recently emailed me to ask if I could highlight a fundraising event in NYC she was holding for Obama. Reshma, formerly of South Asians for Hillary and South Asians for Kerry, is one of the members of Barack Obama’s new Asian American Finance Committee (other members mentioned here). Normally I would have just placed the event info on our “Events Tab,” where you can highlight just about any desi-related event. There was something about this event that was different though and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I re-read her email again. Then it struck me that the event itself represents a political first…as far as I know. This is the first time that such a large group of Indian American “celebrities” is being deployed in favor of a Presidential candidate. I am putting quotes around the word celebrities not to minimize the successes of some of these individuals but rather to contrast their pull to what we traditionally think of as Hollywood political celebrities (e.g., George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie, Jane Fonda, etc.). In the past, both parties have relied on wealthy DBDs such as Sant Chatwal or various tech entrepreneurs or medical doctors for their campaign donations (from mostly first generation Indian Americans). Obama and his committee are taking a different approach, perhaps because he doesn’t want McCain to call him D-Punjab.

In all the loud talk of unity amongst the campaigns there is at least one tear jerker, or sort of – a controversial Indian American supporter of Hillary Clinton, appears to have not found favour with the Illinois Senator Barack Obama in the post-union phase of the Democratic party for 2008 presidential elections.

Sant Chatwal, known as one of the most effective fund raiser among the Indian American money bags, is not in the list of Asian Americans Finance Committee officials announced by the Obama campaign. [Link]

Instead of enlisting only rich “uncles” to help bring in the cash from our community, Obama picked a much younger group and that younger group in turn thinks young desi celebs may be the way to bring in the cash for their candidate (although this is probably just one of many ways they are considering). Their target demographic appears to be very similar to the type that reads SM:

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The “Lingo Kid”

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Everyone knows by now that I love bringing news of “freakish” (in a good way) little Indian kids to SM (see here and here as examples). SM reader Taara tipped us off to this little linguist via our tip line:

It looks like the Videographer returned a few years later to find a “grown-up” Ravi who has added even more languages into his arsenal:

Seriously, this little kid should be doing something other than selling Peacock feathers near the Hanging Gardens!

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The power of email squatters

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The recent issue of The New Yorker had a cute story, that I can totally relate to, about one particular G-Mail address account created four years ago:

On July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail–available by invitation only–was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.

At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj @ gmail.com and rajguru @ gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell…”

Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.[Link]

I found this anecdote rather funny because on my (now-defunct) personal blog I wrote of encountering the same problem. Back when G-Mail first came out I snapped up three addresses. Two of them were quite obscure but the third one was the equivalent of “smith @ gmail.com.” Needless to say, over the years I have received all kinds of random emails from people who intended their message for someone(s) else. For example, I get at least two marriage-related biodata emails (complete with pictures) each week. I also get lots of people following up on a job interviews or medical results. A lot of these emails come from India. I am always faced with a choice: do I help destiny along by informing the sender of the error or by remaining silent? I randomly go either way (I know, this is probably evil and megalomaniacal).

Raj, who now works for a software consulting company in Washington, D.C., never replied to these, or to any other e-mails meant for Obama, not even to tell an excited would-be pen pal that he is not, in fact, the Democrats’ presumptive Presidential nominee. “It just became an interesting portal into Americana,” he said. “From the beginning, I had no intention of manipulating anyone.” .[Link]

Yes! See, Raj gets it. Its just like being the postal worker whose job it is to open all the mail addressed to Santa Claus. Nobody expects him to fulfill the expectations of every letter (or even a few letters), but at least someone can bear witness (even if they are biodata packages).

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You call THAT an Indian accent?

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Mindy Kaling, who writes for and acts on the NBC show The Office, recently revealed to David Letterman a secret that many Indian Americans guard very closely. Not all of us are good at imitating an Indian accent just because our parents are Indian [via Defamer]:

That’s right, we may not do Indian accents well…but no other ethnic group should be able to point that out without an indignant tongue-lashing back

If you want to skip the rest of the interview then start at 1:30 min mark. I can really sympathize with Mindy. When I try to do an Indian accent I sound slightly Scottish. Its just sad.

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Guest Blogger: Ravi

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As of this weekend we have invited yet another guest blogger into the fold of our secret world blogging headquarters in North Dakota. The twist this time is that our new blogger is only 18 years old, making him even younger than our over-worked intern (the intern was not happy about this). Here is the email we received from Ravi. It had a rather interesting proposition in it:

My name is Ravi M and I’m a graduating high school student from Lake Forest High School and I’ll be attending Harvard this fall. I’m an avid reader of your blog, and will be attending the DNC in a few weeks as a member of the Junior State of America’s 2008 Election Symposia, a non-profit, non-partisan civic education program. I’m writing because I’d like to offer my services/be considered to be a guest student correspondent for your blog during the DNC…This could give your blog an opportunity to showcase the viewpoints of a younger generation, and the trend in increasing political activism and awareness amongst my generation of Indian-Americans during this election year. I have experience as Editor-in-Chief of my school newspaper, and have won Scholastic Regional and National Awards for my journalism. In addition, I have served as the governor of the Junior State of America, a student-run debating organization, for the past two years, as well as Debate Team Captain the previous year, giving me a deep understanding of politics and the perspectives of our younger generation….

So now we will have two SM bloggers reporting from the convention n Denver in just a few weeks. Hmmm, maybe I can be the voice of the grizzled old cynic and Ravi can report with wide-eyed optimism. In any case, please join me in welcoming Ravi to SM.

Note: If any of our South Asian American readers has access to the Republican National Convention and would like to blog for SM from there then please email me: abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com.

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