Author Archives: Abhi

About Abhi

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

Lord I never drew first, but I drew first blood

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As I’ve watched the news over the past week I’ve started to consider if I should purchase a gun.  I hate guns.  I’ve only held one once.  I have had one too many dreams where I was not only shot, but mutilated by gunfire.  I’ve convinced myself that I must have died from a GSW in my past life and so I’ve wanted nothing to do with them.  Indian families don’t really own guns.  Am I wrong?  Maybe I am just sheltered but I just don’t know any Indian families that own guns.  Most of my first generation relatives have never even mentioned gun ownership.  In India my family didn’t own a gun…well except for an air gun which they used to shoot geckos off the wall.  I could imagine that South Asian hoteliers, convenience store owners, and wannabe thugs are probably packing, but outside of that I’d be surprised.  How many South Asians do you know that either hunt or are members of the NRA?  Not many I’ll bet.  Recently I tried to talk my younger brother into buying a weapon.  In the state in which he resides you aren’t a man without a piece.  People wear them in plain sight on their waist he tells me.  Two weeks ago a man in a pick-up truck pulled up beside him as he walked along the road and asked if he was packing.  “No,” my brother replied.  “You should be,” advised the man.  It isn’t only bears and wolves but some crazies (everyone tells him so) where my brother lives that makes a gun a good idea.

So why aren’t brown folk strapped?  Part of it must be that many South Asian immigrants (and even those born here) don’t understand the technical details of the U.S. Constitution and the 2nd Amendment.  They didn’t need a gun in India so why would they here?  Why does it seem like we have a “duty” to carry guns in America?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [Link]

The founding fathers in their infinite wisdom and fresh from the Revolutionary War, wanted to make sure that the populace had armed state militias that could rise up against the federal government if it made a move toward autocracy.  The phrase “well regulated Militia” however, was a loophole as wide as a football field and has led to the largest rate of gun violence in the world (guns do kill people).  The founding fathers also worked in another rule into the Constitution that also has bearing on this past week’s events in New Orleans.  Many people don’t know that the U.S. military is forbidden by the Constitution from acting (using their guns) within the borders of the United States.  A friend of mine who spent 8 years in the U.S. Army (and who was born and lived in India until she was twelve) asked me earlier this week why the military didn’t just take over down there.  I explained to her about habeas corpus (which is incidentally my favorite Latin phrase).

The right of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject.

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It’s time for a pledge drive

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Folks the inevitable has happened.  As more people visit SM (thanks!) our hosting costs are rising.  Every time someone clicks on one of our postings it takes up bandwidth on the servers that host our site.  Last month’s bill spiked to an amount much larger than we can handle.  Some of us are poor students.

We feel a bit guilty for having to ask for donations right now, especially since we’d rather you gave to a charities in support of disasters like Katrina and Niger, but if you can spare a few dollars (whatever you think we are worth) we’d appreciate it. If a bunch of you just donate $1 to $5 that might be enough to do the trick.  That’s less than a beer at the bar tonight.  Just click this button:

Just like NPR and PBS we would like to stay ad-free for as long as possible, and would thus rather rely on donations like many larger blogs do.  In the coming days we will also be linking any books we write a post about to Amazon.com.  If you buy the book by linking through our site, then we would get a small percentage.  Also we are finally getting the ball rolling on Sepia Mutiny t-shirts featuring some of the stuff we’ve blogged about.  If we think of other revenue generating ideas that don’t ruin the Sepia Mutiny experience then we will switch to relying on them instead of asking for reader donations.

We aren’t yet ready to sell out to the man! Thanks in advance!

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The next coalition of the willing

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The term “Coalition of the Willing,” when used to describe the troops in Iraq has been a bit of a joke over the last few years.  Everyone knows it’s 99% U.S. and British soldiers on the ground.  Right in plain sight however, the U.S. government is constructing its next coalition of the willing.  Guess who it probably hopes is willing participant #1?  First a bit of background though.  The CIA has been grumbling of late at the emergence of China as the U.S.’s main strategic threat (although I think it is global warming) in the next twenty years.

Beijing’s military modernization and military buildup is tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. Improved Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region.

In 2004, China increased its ballistic missile forces deployed across from Taiwan and rolled out several new submarines.

China continues to develop more robust, survivable nuclear-armed missiles as well as conventional capabilities for use in a regional conflict.

Taiwan continues to promote constitutional reform and other attempts to strengthen local identity. Beijing judges these moves to be a “timeline for independence”. If Beijing decides that Taiwan is taking steps toward permanent separation that exceed Beijing’s tolerance, we believe China is prepared to respond with various levels of force. [Link]

Also this:

The United States is closely watching China’s military improvements and hoping the country will evolve into “a constructive force” in the Asia-Pacific region, says Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

At a February 17 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld addressed questions about China’s military modernization — most especially of its navy… [Link]

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A trove of illustrated history

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A few times we’ve posted a link (1,2,3,4) to some political cartoon in the newspaper that hasn’t been quite down with the brown (i.e. often times an illustration of someone South Asian is filled with obnoxious stereotyping).  Barficulture.com recently reported that a new website has compiled nearly a hundred years of newspaper articles and cartoons about the Punjabi community in the UK, which includes some amazing illustrations of life in the19th century:

Launched by the UK Punjab Heritage Association (UKPHA), Punjab Archive is an online collection highlighting the extensive body of material relating to the Punjab, as reported in illustrated and non-illustrated Victorian age newspapers.

The material graphically illustrates the shared heritage and contribution of Punjabis in world history, especially in relation to the building of the British Empire in the second half of the 19th century.

Nearly all of the newspapers are illustrated with woodblock engravings and photographs, and cover a range of events and characters, many significant, some curious, but nearly all little known. The archive was put together by an agency of young Asian designers in Birmingham, Macro Juice, who devised the site in a way that takes a high quality scan, breaks it up into sub images and then stitches them back together in a format that loads quickly but makes it difficult to steal the image, thus resolving copyright issues.

It’s really a trip just looking through some of the great illustrations (although the website is a bit slow).  If you can spare the time also read through a few newspaper clippings by zooming in.

“This is a site of historical documents and news stories from over 100 years ago. At a purely recreational level it allows users to quickly and effortlessly delve into their own personal heritage finding new stories that resonate with themselves and their personal history. At a more scholarly or professional level it provides a bank of material that can be used by journalists, writers and historians for writing assignment and projects.”

UKPHA hopes the website will become a regular citation in Indian & colonial history PhDs in the future.

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Jindal and H.R. 387

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As I’m sure many of you  have been following, the situation in NOLA seems to be getting worse and worse.  Maitri is continuing her great coverage by trying to separate facts from media hype and B.S.  Among the many people who have been evacuated is one U.S. Congressman Bobby Jindal.  The Central Chronicle reports:

Indian American Congressman Bobby Jindal was among thousands of residents in New Orleans, Louisiana, who were left without food or electricity after Hurricane Katrina pounded the US Gulf coast.

“The events of the last 48 hours have hit us harshly, and the effects of Hurricane Katrina are still not fully known,” Jindal, a resident of Louisiana’s New Orleans that has been submerged under the flood waters, said on his website.

“I know most of you, like my family and I, have spent a restless night, evacuated from your homes and still without power. We are all worried about what we will find when we are finally given the all clear to return,” he said.

As “luck” would have it though, one of Jindal’s first actions in Congress was to get a bill passed which eases the financial burden on victims of natural disaster:

Jindal’s legislative victories on natural disaster compensation in Congress this year are critical for Louisianans as they fight yet another major calamity.

Soon after he came into Congress this year, he began to lobby and successfully got passed legislation reversing an earlier ruling that would have taxed compensation to his state’s residents for monies they got as a result of natural disasters. That law takes on added meaning for Louisianans now as they battle with massive devastation from Hurricane Katrina.

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New York’s new political landscape

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The Village Voice takes a look at what a white (presumably) candidate has got to do to tread the ethnic waters of the Big Apple:

Money talks, and the Wongs and Muhammads of this world are speaking louder in New York City politics. From 1989 to 2001, the number of contributions to municipal campaigns from those two surnames quadrupled as the population of Asians–a broad category that includes people from the Middle East to the Far East–grew faster than any other group in the city. Yet the ethnic calculus of this year’s mayoral campaign is still limited to blacks, whites, and Hispanics, according to the Marist and Quinnipiac polls, which report results only for those three groups, omitting a tenth of the city’s people.

Yes, merely a tenth. “For us, we’re still not that big,” says John Abi-Habib, a person of Lebanese descent and a vice chairman of the Brooklyn Republican Party, who helped found a Middle Eastern political coalition eight years ago, “but then we have over 50,000 registered voters in this city.” And that number is growing, partly as a reaction to negative fallout from September 11. “The last four years, we must have registered thousands and thousands of people to vote,” Abi-Habib says, “and they see the importance of it because they know their voice has to be heard.”

Despite the obvious cultural differences between the different groups of Asian immigrants in NYC, City Councilman John Liu of Queens says that they do share some basic things in common which might be addressed by a common overall strategy in trying to capture their votes:

Ethnic labels are crude by definition: You’re black whether you just flew in from Senegal or are descended from slaves shipped to U.S. shores centuries ago. Latinos include light-skinned Cubans and Indian-blooded families from Ecuador. But the categories make some sense if common concerns affect the people they cover. And while Asian and Middle Eastern New Yorkers care about failing schools, high rent, rats, and all the usual urban woes, they also worry about things that other groups needn’t fear.

“There are lots of issues that Asian Americans share,” said Liu, “one being the immigrant experience, being relatively recent immigrant arrivals. And Asians also suffer from a perpetual- foreigner syndrome, meaning that you could be a fourth- or fifth-generation Asian American but still somehow it’s difficult to believe that you’re an American. I get that: First they compliment me on my ability to speak English, and often I get asked, ‘Well, where are you from?’ and for some reason people refuse to take Flushing for an answer.”

The whole article has a bit of a slimy feel to it.  I appreciate the fact that Asian Americans are becoming motivated to vote and that politicians are being forced to listen, but here it almost seems like a contest between the candidates to see who is more down with the “brown and yellow.”  The idealist in me wishes they wouldn’t have to try so hard, but maybe we are at least a generation away from that type of city.

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A New Spook at the Agency

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Rediff.com is reporting that Sumit Ganguly will soon take over as head of the South Asia Bureau in the National Intelligence Council:

Sumit Ganguly, who currently holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilisations will soon be appointed the first National Intelligence Officer of the newly-formed South Asia Bureau in the National Intelligence Council, an appendage of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ganguly, also a professor of political science and director of the Indian Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the first Indian-American to serve in the NIC.

The NIC is the intelligence community’s centre for mid-term and long-term strategic thinking.

Its National Intelligence Estimates on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence (the head of the CIA) are the most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues.

Yes, intelligence estimates are quite useful (when the analysis isn’t pre-ordained at least). Well good.  It makes sense to have someone of South Asian heritage actually head this new branch.

His most recent work, published by Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press (New Delhi), is entitled Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947. He also recently published The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999). His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Asia Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. He has also been a guest scholar and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London). Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Survey, Current History and the Journal of Strategic Studies. He is also the editor of a new journal, The India Review, published by Frank Cass and Company. [Link]

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Birth tax

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SM tipster Olinda (followed by several others) sent us this depressing article from the New York Times highlighting corruption at its worst.  Behold:

Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital’s ritual of extortion began.

Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm.

Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration.

“The ayah told my mother-in-law to pay up fast because the night duty doctor was leaving at 8 a.m. and wanted a share,” she recalled.

Cynic that I am, I could actually imagine a man whisking a kid away and demanding a bribe.  When a woman (who may have children of her own) does it, all hope seems lost.  The article goes on to describe the fact that this sort of corruption has infected basic services that stretch from the cradle to the grave.  The following quote also caught my eye because it sounds like a thing you sometimes hear about the U.S. healthcare system:

“The poor not only are paying much more of their incomes to get the same medical services as the middle and richer classes, but they are also discouraged from seeking basic medical care because they can’t afford it,” said Daniel Kaufmann, director of global programs at the institute.

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We have a reporter at the scene

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The reason that blogs are so relevant is that you ALWAYS have a woman (or man) on the scene.  In this instance SM reader and frequent commenter, Maitri is at what is soon to be ground zero for potentially the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. in decades (although hopefully she is fleeing as I write this).  Some believe that the entire city of New Orleans may be destroyed on Monday.  Now personally, I don’t usually believe in weather.  I don’t even check the weather in the morning before I leave my apartment.  I will break-up with a girl if I catch her watching the Weather Channel.  I have long believed that “weather” is a hoax pushed on us by the umbrella and sun-block lobbies.  This one looks like it may be the real deal though.  Maitri breaks it down for us:

Update 3: A gloomy prognosis still. Even Bob Breck isn’t feeling the hurricane mojo, and that bodes badly for staying in a 130-year-old house. New Orleanians, board your homes and leave. August 27 21:02

Update 4: Up surveying all animated predictions of our impending local weather pattern. Landfall anon, i.e. tomorrow PM. Dinner in the Quarter last night (tomato, lettuce and Diet Coke with Shiraz chasers – anything the gastrointestinal tract can keep down) saw veteran residents discuss seriously the act, not just the thought, of getting out of here. Then again, there are the brave ones staying such as Mac and KFrye, who plans to “stand out on my balconey and shake my fists at the storm.” Good plan – is the webcam all set up? Time for push-ups before hauling stuff to car; hey, the CPUs have got to go. August 28 6:57

Because of what seems to have been excellent planning, the state of Louisiana sent out the evacuation notice in plenty of time.  Really, it seems to have been superbly handled and this will hopefully prevent loss of life.  Get ready for shocking oil prices though.  25% of the U.S.’s refinery capacity is in the center of that green and red blob.  Also, I’m sure we will get to see congressman Bobby Jindal in action around his state.  

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The Rock of the Marne

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A moment of silence:

The Department of Defense announced today [Sat] the death of a soldier, who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Spc. Hatim S. Kathiria, 23, of Fort Worth, Texas, died on Aug. 22, 2005, in Baghdad, Iraq, where an enemy rocket impacted near his position. Kathiria was assigned to the 703rd Forward Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. [Link]

MSNBC has more:

A soldier who called Fort Worth home died in Iraq this week. Hatim Kathiria joined the U.S. Army just months after emigrating to the United States from India.

The 23-year-old had studied to be a software engineer, but work in that field was hard to come by. So, he joined the Army to earn citizenship more quickly and to make money to send to his family.

Kathiria was sent to Iraq in January, the same month he got married and received his U.S. citizenship. He was full of promise, and hoped to advance in the military while saving money for graduate school and preparing to help bring his family to the U.S

…Shortly before he died, Kathiria told his wife that he wanted his body sent back to India to be buried in his hometown. That will happen after a military service in Washington, D.C.

Here are this month’s fallen.

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