Yesterday I was going to change up my commute to pass by a bookstore, so that I could check out Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. Tweeps and blogs like SNL, Vulture, Splitsider and ShelfLife were agog over the cuteness of her floral, pink-sweatered, wry-mouthed book cover. Given her writing background and popularity as a tweeter, I imagined that physically flipping through a copy would offer some kind of quirky comedy contact high. Continue reading
Author Archives: Pavani
Don’t Be a Hater Says Outsourced Writer
Will Outsourced, the NBC TV comedy set in a Mumbai call center and cast with more desi actors than Hollywood can shake a feather at, come back for another season? That’s the question up in the air for the moment. Geetika Tandon Lizardi makes her case for the show by preaching to the unconverted–people who think Outsourced is offensive, racist or condescending–in her LA Times article.
Lizardi says she’s one of the “five South Asian writers on the show telling stories that often come straight from our personal experiences.” Her credentials include living in Mumbai where she helped her husband run a call center, and she shares a couple of examples of those straight-from-personal-experience story lines. Continue reading
Catch the New Wave of Tamil Film
This weekend marks the beginning of a new film series from 3rd I Films that will tour in certain cities across the U.S. Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Film opens today at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California (1/30-2/19), and will “travel on to the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC and BAMcinematek in Brooklyn, NY among other venues” according to 3rd I. The series provides an introduction to four new wave Tamil films from the latter half of the 2000s.
The program notes (quoted below) by Lalitha Gopalan and Anuj Vaidya definitely piqued my interest, and so did clips from the featured films, sometimes because and sometimes in spite of the cruelty portrayed. If you caught the wave earlier and saw any of these films, what did you think?
‘I, Nikki Randhawa Haley’: An Inaugural Moment
Governor Nikki Haley’s inauguration last Wednesday felt like a glimmer of light in a political landscape darkened by the recent tragic mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Republicans, Tea Party supporters, Mama Grizzlies, crack-the-fiscal-whip types, Haley’s family, friends and community–all these people and others had reasons to feel happy on the occasion of her inauguration. But what made my day was seeing the young girls who braved the freezing weather in Columbia to see the first-ever inauguration of a woman and minority governor in the history of South Carolina, a history that spans at least four centuries.
We Are Those Lions
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| Photo by simonm1965 |
Jayaben Desai passed away recently at age 77, leaving an extraordinary legacy in labor history. With a handbag in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, she led a two-year strike in the mid-1970s protesting the unequal pay and poor treatment of workers at a North London Grunwick film processing factory. The factory’s workforce consisted mostly of desi immigrants from East Africa, and many were women.
Before she walked off the job one day in 1976, the diminutive Gujarat-born Desai who came in at under 5 feet tall and immigrated to England by way of Tanzania, had a few words for her manager Malcolm Alden.
What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your finger-tips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr manager. Continue reading
The Indian Ambassador’s Mississippi Pat-down
Do you know someone who prefers to wear saris everywhere? One of my aunts wore a sari every day to work in downtown Los Angeles and post-retirement, I hear that she’s only been spotted in non-sari clothes while attending a local yoga class. When I heard about the new federal guidelines for screening air travel passengers, I wondered how she might fare and feel if she’s chosen for an enhanced pat-down at an airport the next time she travels to Georgia to visit her daughter and family.
Mississippi is not Georgia, but Indian Ambassador Meera Shankar’s recent pat-down experience at a Mississippi airport which had no body scanners may shed some light on what it’s like across the U.S. under the new federal guidelines for women who wear saris while traveling (WWWSWT). I suppose WWWSWT could include any of us who wear saris if you’re on a really tight schedule and flying to or from a wedding, for example. But I’m guessing they are more likely to be women like my aunt who simply prefer to wear saris all the time.
Air Pollution: Is Not Flying a Solution?
Tech geek Anirvan Chatterjee and landscape architect Barnali Ghosh were surprised to learn that their carbon footprint was bigger than 90 percent of Americans, despite their green efforts which included living without a car. They found that air travel was to blame and challenged themselves to spend a year without flying. In words that might resonate with many desis, Chatterjee wrote about why it would be hard to give up flying, just before embarking upon the Year of No Flying project.
Growing up in a family of post-1965 transnational immigrants, our history is deeply connected with the democratization of air travel — countless flights to and from India, Canada, Nigeria, and the United States. Our stories begin and end in airports. (Last flight) Continue reading
Musings on Mistaken Identity
Actor Adhir Kalyan was on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and shared a story of being mistaken for Kal Penn when he was visiting a beach in California. I don’t feel there’s too much similarity in their looks, and they sound completely different because Kalyan has a British accent. But hey, I know being mistaken for another desi happens from time to time, even to us non-celebrities who aren’t getting screen time during prime time or in theaters across America.
Example #1: At one summer job, I was one of four interns in a small office with less than ten staff members. Occasionally, throughout the summer the Executive Director and one or two other staff members would call me Ritu, the name of another intern. She was desi, had straight hair (of a different length) and wore glasses like me, but that’s where the similarities ended. Continue reading
Small Minds Judge Kiwis by Their Color
Desi roots in New Zealand go back to the late 18th century when some lascars and sepoys on British East India ships stopping in New Zealand jumped ship to settle there and marry MÄori women. In the first part of this century, the community grew to over 100,000 with a 68 percent growth rate. When Kiwis got their first desi Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand in 2006, Sepia Mutiny blogged about it and the presumably inclusive nature of the symbolic appointment.
But recently that gesture has been overshadowed by a TV host who insisted that Satyanand doesn’t look much like a New Zealander. Add to the mix this week’s media focus on the story of a blue-eyed, blonde Miss IndiaNZ pageant entrant being booed for not “looking Indian” enough, and we have a very Kiwi-flavored reminder about the harms of judging people by their color. I know, I know, it’s 2010 and you thought this was covered on a Wednesday in 1963, but all kinds of people around the world seem to forget. Continue reading
Drawing a Line to Your Heart
By now you must have noticed the newest art banners adorning Sepia Mutiny. They are the creations of Nidhi Chanani, an illustrator and designer living in San Francisco. The first time I spotted one of these scenes at the top of the page it captivated me with cuteness, and I kept clicking to reload the page and see all of them.
I continued clicking on over to her website, and with each view the charming characters populating her illustrations–often smiling, sometimes pensive, but always sweet–quickly worked their way into my heart. I checked in with Chanani to find out more about her and her work. Keep reading to learn what inspires her, which illustration is a favorite, and the details of her award-winning recipe for mattar paneer. Continue reading