Author Archives: Abhi

About Abhi

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

The Bilderberg Group is even more secretive than our blog

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The secret organization of illuminati known as the Priory of Sion (that you read about in The Da Vinci Code) is a hoax, of course. What isn’t a hoax however, is the shadowy and ultra-powerful Bilderberg Group who are meeting in Ottawa, Canada this weekend:

It’s like Woodstock for conspiracy theorists.

A serene suburban setting has been transformed into a four-day festival of black suits, black limousines, burly security guards — and suspicions of world domination…

It’s not the Freemasons.

Forget those fabled U.S. military men who tucked away UFOs in the Arizona desert.

These guys, you’ve probably never even heard of, and if you believe the camera-toting followers who attend all their meetings, they control the world.

They’re called the Bilderberg group.

They include European royalty, national leaders, political power-brokers, and heads of the world’s biggest companies. [Link]

If you happened to be at the airport in Ottawa yesterday you may have noticed a bunch of limo drivers holding up a single letter. That would have been a sign that a Bilderberg attendee was near at hand:

Greeted at the airport by limousine drivers holding single-letter “B” signs, global luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands began arriving in Ottawa Thursday for the annual gathering of the ultra-secretive Bilderberg Group. [Link]

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Zakaria: "First, be scared, be very scared"

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In the latest issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria examines what many Americans have recently been wondering: “How Long Will America Lead the World?”

…Americans have replaced Britons atop the world, and we are now worried that history is happening to us. History has arrived in the form of “Three Billion New Capitalists,” as Clyde Prestowitz’s recent book puts it, people from countries like China, India and the former Soviet Union, which all once scorned the global market economy but are now enthusiastic and increasingly sophisticated participants in it. They are poorer, hungrier and in some cases well trained, and will inevitably compete with Americans and America for a slice of the pie. A Goldman Sachs study concludes that by 2045, China will be the largest economy in the world, replacing the United States.

It is not just writers like Prestowitz who are sounding alarms. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, reflects on the growing competence and cost advantage of countries like China and even Mexico and says, “It’s unclear how many manufacturers will choose to keep their businesses in the United States.” Intel’s Andy Grove is more blunt. “America … [is going] down the tubes,” he says, “and the worst part is nobody knows it. They’re all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead…” [Link]

I find many parallels between this and the long denied facts surrounding global warming. I saw Gore’s fantastic powerpoint presentation/movie two weekends ago and it struck me how slow to react people can be even when they know they are on the losing side of time. Zakaria goes on to point out the same thing that I mentioned in an earlier post and that Vinod tried to push back on a bit:

The national academies’ report points out that China and India combined graduate 950,000 engineers every year, compared with 70,000 in America; that for the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S. a company could hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India; that of the 120 $1 billion-plus chemical plants being built around the world one is in the United States and 50 are in China.

There are some who see the decline of science and technology as part of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We’re losing interest in the basics–math, manufacturing, hard work, savings–and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure. “More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees,” says Immelt. “So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way…” [Link]

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The Desi Dad Project

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The past month or so has taught me that there are a lot of people out there that want to see this blog, and what it is all about, succeed. The emails we recently received offering technical support, as well as the offers of financial support we have gotten, have led me to conclude something similar to what one forward looking American politician once said. To paraphrase:

“We’ve earned capital in this blogosphere, blog capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.”

So with that I am announcing the creation of The Desi Dad Project.

For the past six months I have been mulling this idea over in my head. Photographs, even without any words or explanations, can convey a tremendous amount of information and history. Just look through these pictures of some of the first Indian Americans that came to the U.S in the early 20th century, most of them Sikh Punjabis. Recently, with the immigration debate in this country raging on, we have discussed the signifigance of the 1965 Immigration Act and how many of our fathers immigrated to the U.S. as a result of this act. Eventually this led to many of our births. 🙂

So this is what I am proposing, particularly in light of Father’s Day which is just two weeks away. I want you guys to upload a single picture of your dad. I want a photographic archive that captures the spirit of what it meant to be an immigrant in this country as part of the second wave. I want to capture that part of our collective history before it rots away in old albums in our basements, attics, and closets. This project won’t end with Father’s Day though but will keep accepting phtographs.

Here are the criteria you must meet before uploading a picture of your father into this new archive I am proposing:

  • Your father immigrated to the United States between 1965 and 1985. If he arrived a couple of years before 1965 it is okay, but please do not upload pictures taken after 1985. I am looking for pictures that capture the experience of a SPECIFIC generation for the purposes of this project.
  • Your father came from a country in South Asia (e.g. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.) or from ANY other country so long as his ethnicity can be traced back to a South Asian country.
  • The picture you upload has to have been snapped in America.
  • I strongly prefer that your father should be the only person visible in the photograph (feel free to crop the original picture). Pictures of individuals tell a different story than pictures of families. If you don’t have ANY pictures of you father alone then maybe you have one with the two of you together.

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A bunch of lawyers in ATL-NASABA 2006

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It is time once again for the annual North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA) conference. This year it is being held in Atlanta on the June 16th weekend. I have attended this worthwhile conference the past two years, 2004 in Los Angeles and 2005 in Washington D.C. No, I am not a lawyer just a lawyer groupie (although I pass myself off as a tort lawyer when mingling amongst their kind). In addition to getting to attend fantastic seminars, NASABA is also a great place to flirt with federal clerks as well as meet desi attorneys who will one day run for office. Just read my recap from last year. Unfortunately, despite their gracious invitation, I won’t be able to make it down to Atlanta this year, but all you lawyers (and lawyer groupies) should:

More than 400 South Asian judges, attorneys and law students will gather in Atlanta for the third annual national convention of the North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA), June 16-18, marking a year of progress for the South Asian legal community.

Achievements in the U.S. and Canada to be acknowledged at the conference include high-profile South Asian legal appointments, diversity strides and greater representation of South Asian concerns in business, entertainment and education. Expert speakers will cover more than a dozen topics at this year’s conference, “Networking to Influence, Influencing the Network: South Asian Lawyers Changing the Flow of the Mainstream.”

Seminars, workshops and networking events will provide thought-provoking and productive sessions for attendees to review the year’s significant strides and establish new objectives. Representing more than 5,000 South Asian American attorneys, this year’s NASABA convention is expected to be larger than previous gatherings. The Convention, for one memorable weekend, will bring together attorneys from firms, large and small, from small private companies to large public companies, like CompuCredit Corporation, a convention-level sponsor, from the public and private interest sectors, from all branches of government, and from the world of academia.

The keynote this year will be given by Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal (see previous SM posts 1,2,3,4). Here is a schedule which includes a list of all the great seminar panelists they have coming out. Continue reading →

Introducing Kunjan Shah and Paul Singh

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Batman has Alfred Pennyworth. James Bond has Q. Jack Bauer has Chloe O’Brian. Sidney Bristow has Marshall Flinkman.

…and now Sepia Mutiny has Kunjan Shah and Paul Singh.

We put out a call for help recently so that SM could continue to grow and improve. Many of you answered our call and we thank you ALL sincerely. We have decided to add two people to help with site administration and also to help improve this blog with lots of new features over time. Like Lexus, we here at SM are in the relentless pursuit of perfection. So far we have been handing out the equivalent of blog cocaine. Soon we will flood the blogosphere with blog crack.

Kunjan is only 22 and lives in Kansas City. We needed some young blood in our North Dakota bunker. Everyone around here has been going around using the phrase “when I was young,” way too often. We knew things had to change. Around the bunker we refer to Kunjan by his codename: The Keymaster.

Paul is a bit of a mystery. He is currently in New York although seems to be a Californian originally. We picked Paul for his years of experience and also his great aesthetic sense. We want to give SM a bit of a makeover and he seems to be the right person for the job. Around the bunker we refer to Paul by his codename: The Gatekeeper.

Please join me in welcoming Kunjan and Paul.

We are also in the process of moving our site to a new dedicated server. SM reader Krishnan has been instrumental in helping us secure the new server and we would really like to convey our thanks to him for all the time that he has put into it so far.

Because so many readers have offered to help and seem so capable, we are going to try and create a space in the near future whereby readers can offer technical suggestions to help improve the site. Think of it as open-sourcing. Right now we use Moveable Type but we may eventually switch to WordPress. For those of you who have offered your help, look for a post about this within the next month or two and we may contact some of you by email.

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The dark side of gym rats

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I self-identify as a gym rat. My body begins to feel ill and lethargic if I go even a week without working out. I have been working out at a gym regularly for the last eleven years. I consider going to the gym an almost spiritual duty. I believe in a personal philosophy that you must keep your body in the best shape you possibly can at all times so that it will be clean and ready if called into service for a greater cause (whatever that might be). I know that might seem silly to a lot of people but I really mean it. It isn’t about vanity. I actually eat four servings of fruits a day also, because being in shape isn’t just about going to the gym but about taking care of your health in general.

When I am at the gym I do not socialize. I only know the first names of one or two people at my gym. I always workout alone, I wear headphones, and 80% of the time I am there I don’t even make eye-contact with anyone. The gym is my “me” time. It is where I meditate on the things bothering me as well as on the things I am happy about. I toss around ideas for blog posts and also consider whether I should ban that one commenter who has been bugging me for months. It is my hour and a half of refuge from the storm outside.

An article published this week at Slate.com has got me reconsidering everything. Far from living a good example, maybe I, and those of you like me, are just a bunch of freaks in the making:

There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years–9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohamed Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though–their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others–whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course. [Link]

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Live-blogging the 2006 Bee (updated)

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Tonight a Spelling Bee champion will be crowned in America. Unlike the Kentucky Derby there is no chance that one of the competitors here will be shot if they come up lame. Most likely. This competition marks the annual pinnacle of Indian American intellectual flexing, and we can almost guarantee a Thomas Friedman op-ed tomorrow.

Tonight we (Indian Americans) make up for all of the incidents where we got picked last in gym class or that one time we didn’t make the high school badminton team because we cut our head open and had to get like a whole bunch of stiches the night before tryouts and were in the emergency room until very late at night and the doctor said that we should stay away from all strenuous physical activity for at least a week but we tried out anyways…and got cut, from the badminton team, which even our other more nerdy friends made it onto.

Throughout the rest of the day please check this post for updates. I might be a little behind some of you during parts of the day but I will hopefully be online for the championship round this evening which will be televised on ABC.

Here are the desi horses in the race starting from Round 4 onwards. This is how it works. If you see a word appear under their picture it means they have been eliminated and should be banished forever from our thoughts. There is an ages old Scottish saying that is quite appropriate here: “There can be only one.”

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25

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I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that AIDS “turns” 25 this week. India now has the largest number of infected people and is still trending downhill:

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’ AIDS agency said.

Peter Piot was speaking as UNAIDS released a report which declared that the world’s response to the disease, that has infected about 65 million people and killed 25 million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special U.N. session pledged its commitment to halt the AIDS pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down…

India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5.7 million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5.5 million. But, the epidemic is still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. [Link]

The first reported case in India came nearly 5 years after the first reported case in the U.S.

The first case of HIV infection in India was diagnosed among commercial sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 1986. Soon after, a number of screening centres were established throughout the country. Initially the focus was on screening foreigners, especially foreign students. Gradually, the focus moved on to screening blood banks. By early 1987, efforts were made up to set up a national network of HIV screening centres in major urban areas. [Link]

The statistics are grim:

The UN Population Division projects that India’s adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9% in 2019. The UN estimates there were 2.7 million AIDS deaths in India between 1980 and 2000. During 2000-15, the UN has projected 12.3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50.

A 2002 report by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council predicted 20 million to 25 million AIDS cases in India by 2010, more than any other country in the world. [Link]

So you guys tell me. We know what some of the problems are. What more can be done to stop this boulder from rolling?

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A Rush of Blood to the Head

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As some of you may have seen on our News tab, a Hindu temple in Minnesota was recently vandalized pretty severely:

The severed head of Andal Devi

Two 19-year-olds were arrested May 10 and charged with vandalising a partially completed Hindu temple in Maple Grove, MN, on April 5.

Maple Grove Police arrested local resident Paul Gus Spakousky and Tyler William Tuomie of Andover, MN, and charged them with first-degree criminal damage to property and third-degree burglary, both felonies…

Several of the deities were damaged in the attack, forcing the organisers to postpone the scheduled June 4 inauguration of the 43,000 square feet temple built at a cost of $9 million (about Rs 40 crore). [Link]

Punkistani follows up with more details [via Sanjay]:

That’s the head of Andal Devi, and just one of eight sacred likenesses that were defiled in a Hindu Temple set to open on June 1st. By defiled, I mean the statues were decapitated and dismembered…

It’s pretty damned recent. The scoop is that vandals punctured walls and broke into a Hindu temple, ruined some Hindu Gods and left. Property destruction is never that focussed unless it’s a deliberate attempt to intimidate. Nearby Churches went untouched.

Six hundred people attended the community meeting that followed, where reports of neighborhood Indians having their houses vandalized and egged were exchanged. The attending Police Captain, Tracy Stille, verified these stories. [Link]

The Kominas, a Muslim punk band that we have previously blogged about, have decided to rush to the aid of the temple and their fellow South Asian Americans. They are putting on a concert to raise money for rebuilding the temple and it would be cool if our New York readers could represent. Continue reading →