Author Archives: Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Miracle of science or antiseptic travesty?

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Growing up, I never understood why some people found it necessary to use a bagel guillotine. It’s easy enough to cut a bagel with a sharp knife, and it avoids squishing the bagel the way a slicer does. Part of my rejection of the tool is probably New York Jewish snobbishness (coupled with fear that if I ever embraced such a shanda, I’d be required to return my virtual circumcision and fountain pen). But it also comes from a sense that using such tools makes the whole process of bagel eating less sensual and more antiseptic.

As such, I’m agnostic about the Oxo mango slicer until I actually get a chance to try one out for myself. On the one hand, if you watch the video below, you’ll see that it makes very quick work of a mango, turning it into two halves and the seed in no time flat. And honestly, I’m better at and more interested in mango eating than mango cutting.

On the other, I wonder if the tool exists because of the big deal that non-desis make about how messy mango eating is. I remember once somebody on the radio solemnly intoned “mangos should only be eaten naked and in the ocean.” My mother scoffed and replied “White people don’t know how to eat mangos, otherwise they wouldn’t make such a mess.” Sometimes I lose the fruit under all of the “exotic” subtext going on and I don’t know how much of this machine’s appeal lies in this myth of the messy, untamable mango.

Will any of you admit to having used a tool to (ahem) split the mango? If so, did it increase or decrease your pleasure?

Related Posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Flesh for Fantasy

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What’s the opposite of coconut?

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As an ABCD, I want things both ways. In the USA I want to be recognized as fully American; hyphenated American to be sure, but still just as American as any pink-skinned Mayflower descendent. This is especially true when I need consular support or when I am re-entering the country.

I once had an INS agent look at my face and tell me that the line for foreign nationals was elsewhere. When I showed her my passport, she proceeded to treat it as fraudulent and grilled me (improperly) until she was satisfied. Ironically, she was a Filipina with a thick accent herself.

But in India, I usually want to pass. I was really proud when a Delhite came up to me on the street and asked me for directions in Hindi. The only time I’ve been amused to hear “You speak English really well” was when it came from an Eastern European tourist at Fatehpur Sikri. [I ruined the illusion by responding “Thanks. I watch a lot of American television” whereupon he recognized the American sense of humor.]

Heck, last time I was in India, I passed too well. I was wearing a khaddar kurta and had my beard open and some guard at the Delhi domestic airport decided I was too pendu to belong and demanded that I produce my ticket. I responded in very American English that my ticket was with my “Daaaaad” (it was) and walked off, having asserted myself as an NRI.

Is Jamie a modak? A manju?

Straddling these two worlds is fairly easy and has gotten easier over time as urban India has come to resemble the urban west more and more. I can’t imagine doing the opposite journey however, being a white person who was born and raised in India, carries an Indian passport, and intends to spend the rest of their lives in India.

I mean, we don’t even have a word for the opposite of coconut. What would we call somebody who is white on the outside, but brown (and hairy) on the inside? A pickled egg? A rotten egg? What’s the correct term for somebody like Jamie Alter?

A day in the life of Jamie Alter is not easy. He takes the bus to office … and is stared at all the way. Teenagers snigger and point… But Jamie, son of actor Tom Alter, isn’t a tourist or long-term expat. He’s Indian and it says as much on his passport. Having grown up in Mumbai and Mussoorie, Jamie understands references to Chitrahaar, not American sitcoms. When he went to the US for his undergraduate degree, he thought he’d blend in. And he did — as far as appearances go. Until he realised his heart was in India. “I missed the chaos of Mumbai. I love cricket, not American culture. I came back because I’m happier here,” says the 25-year-old. [Link]

To me, the correct term for Jamie Alter is Indian. Continue reading →

Salt on wounds

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I know I know that right now is the worst possible time for this story. I know we’re supposed to be all “ABCD-FOB Bhai Bhai!” but this is just too funny to pass up.

He said it, I just blogged it.

A mobile phone game … will be used to help international students cope with ‘culture shock’ and university life in Britain … The game – called C-Shock – is the brainchild of University of Portsmouth academic and games technology expert Nipan Maniar who, himself, arrived in the UK from India five years ago as an international student…
Nipan said the game would act as an ‘e-mother’ or ‘mobile mummy’ for new students. [Link]

When you hear e-mother you imagine a sort of Tamagotchi in reverse right? Something that nags you to eat enough, sleep enough, and call home? [Actually, you don’t need a mobile game for that, just a mobile]

“E-mother” could be expanded with modules to help explain how you do your own laundry, something my white American roommate could have used freshman year. (When asked how he had survived in summer camp he said he just looked clueless until a girl took pity on him and did his laundry, so he had never done a single load on his own. We mocked him mercilessly).

But no, Maniar means something else. He means the culture shock that comes from seeing people kiss in public and from seeing students (especially girls) drink:

The game’s opening scenario is a student’s first day at university in the UK. The student is shown a map of the campus and is given tasks to find specific locations. Clicking on images along the way warns the student about what to expect in terms of culture shock – for example, it is acceptable for students to drink alcohol and it is okay for people to display affection in public. [Link]

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Skin deep

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Last week I was standing in a bookstore, looking for something trashy and utterly mindless to buy. I picked up Deborah Rodriguez’s “Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil.” and read the first chapter, which was around all I could handle.

I realize that I was far from the target audience for such a book. I’ve never had a haircut in my life, and I’ve never been to a spa. I’m not a very sympathetic audience for stories about how the women of Kabul felt better inside because they felt more glamorous outside (well, inside their burkas). Furthermore, I am a guy, and this was a tremendously girly book:

When Deborah Rodriguez arrived in Kabul in 2002 as part of a charitable aid mission, what she saw appalled her… It was a land of bad haircuts, poorly applied makeup and no styling gel. To Rodriguez, a Michigan hairdresser with a can-do attitude, task No. 1 was obvious: get these poor people some beauty salons. [Link]

Despite my lack of personal experience with the topic, I was willing to suspend disbelief and work with the book’s basic premise, namely:

…hairdressing … is one of the few truly viable options for would-be female Afghan entrepreneurs. There’s a huge demand for such services, as many Afghan women sport elaborate hair and makeup styles under their burqas. At the same time, it’s work that can be done entirely in female company – a necessity in a segregated society. [Link]

My problem was not the subject but the condescending tone of the book. It was “City of Joy” meets “Steel Magnolias,” the usual story of somebody in the first world who finds their calling “helping” people in the third world, where the only purpose of the poor and unfortunate is to serve as a backdrop to the protagonist’s journey.

For example, the opening chapter tells of “Roshanna,” a friend who had been raped and thus was no longer a virgin. Roshanna was terrified of her wedding night, when eager crowds await a bloody rag — the telltale sign of virginity.

Ms. Rodriguez sprung into action, whipping out nail clippers, cutting her finger, dripping blood on a handkerchief and instructing Roshanna to place it under a cushion. When the time came, she could swap it with another one. The next morning, she writes: “When I rush into the hallway, I see that Roshanna’s mother is wailing for joy. ‘Virgin!’ she shouts at me triumphantly, waving the handkerchief stained with my blood. ‘Virgin!’ “… [Link]

C’mon now. Afghan women have never figured out how to fool their husbands with chicken blood after thousands of years? It took a spunky hairdresser from Michigan with a can do attitude to come up with this? Roshanna’s mother didn’t help her, and was even fooled by the simple deception? As if!

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Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb

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It’s almost the weekend, so indulge me a bit of crankiness leftover from the work week. I had been avoiding mentioning the arrest warrant against Richard Gere until I realized it rankled. For those of you who have managed to avoid it:

A court issued arrest warrants for Hollywood actor Richard Gere and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty on Thursday, saying their kiss at a public function “transgressed all limits of vulgarity”. [Link]

So what, right? So some busybody in Jaipur gets his or her nose bent out of shape and files a complaint “charging that the public display of affection offended local sensibilities” [Link] and finds some judge who agrees, saying that the incident was “highly sexually erotic” and violated India’s public obscenity laws. We blogged earlier about how Ajmer had prepared a booklet instructing tourists of the opposite sex not to hold hands or touch. It’s just more of the same.

Part of my annoyance stems from the fact that this frivolous suit will further clog a court system that can’t handle urgent matters in a timely fashion.

But mainly I’m annoyed at Shetty’s lame ass response to the incident. Instead of telling people that it was just a peck on the cheek, she replied:

I understand this is his culture, not ours. But this was not such a big thing or so obscene for people to overreact in such manner… [Link]

Was I the only one who expected her to follow that sentence with a list of activities on stage that would have been far more obscene?

Honey, just a little bit obscene is like being a little bit pregnant. Show some backbone! An embrace and a smooch on the cheek is tame compared to stuff in Bollywood lately. Why pander by arguing that it was kind of obscene but not … you know … not such a big deal.

Shetty compounded the lameness of that response by also saying:

I understand people’s sentiments, but I don’t want a foreigner to take bad memories from here. [Link]

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No Balle Balle for Bally

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HL Menken famously said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” That’s true not just of customers, but of corporate employees as well.

If I managed a gym and I was hiring somebody to do sales, I would care about how much experience they had, maybe how fit they looked, but I can’t imagine caring about the nationality or religion of the applicant. And this would especially true in a place like Fresno which is one of the most diverse counties in the state of California. Still, that’s just what one Bally’s in Fresno did – out and out discriminated against a Sikh man:

Sukdev “Devin” Singh Dhaliwal applied for a sales job with one of Bally’s five Fresno fitness centers in 2004. An interviewer quizzed Dhaliwal, who was born and raised in California, about his religious and ethnic background, and then denied him a job and hired non-Sikh, non-Indian applicants with less experience, according to the commission.

“He was basically asked where he was born, where his parents were born, what religion he subscribed to and whether he was a Muslim,” said EEOC program analyst Linda Li. “He’s very American.” [Link]

Why bring up news from almost 3 years ago today? Because it took that long for Bally’s to face justice and … lose:

Under the consent decree approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White, Bally must pay Dhaliwal $24,000 in damages and provide training in equal opportunity hiring practices to managers at its Fresno locations. Dhaliwal said he plans to donate some of the money to his alma mater, California State University, Fresno, where a business law professor steered him to the EEOC after hearing about the interview. [Link]

It’s not a lot of money, but it should send a message. Sadly, it’s a message that still needs sending.

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Can’t buy me love?

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All over the greater diaspora, Aunties bemoan that desi children are picky. How will they ever be satisfied? How will they ever settle down and start popping out the requisite grandkids?

Aunties can sleep better at night now that SCIENCE is on the job. Examining peoples’ behavior in online dating settings (which is equivalent to looking at biodata), they’ve noticed a few clear patterns:

Men are easy – they are generally interested in hotness above all.

Women are choosier, but it turns out their preferences are fungible. This is good news for aunties because it gives them a metric with which to translate different suitor’s attributes to a common scale, allowing them to rank apples and oranges. They can tell, for example, whether an average woman (in this study) is likely to prefer the not quite as handsome, shorter i-banker or the more gorgeous, slightly taller, high school English teacher.

What is this common scale? Money. According to these researchers, women will forgive men’s flaws if (gasp) they earn more.

Consider looks. A guy can compensate for ordinary looks with more moola, which tells us what he has to reveal in his biodata if he wants to be a playa:

Suppose you’re an ordinary-looking guy whose online picture is ranked around the median in attractiveness… And suppose you’d like to be as successful with women as a guy whose picture is ranked in the top tenth. Then you’d need to make $143,000 more than him. If your picture is ranked in the bottom tenth, you’d need to make $186,000 more than him. [Link]

Cash also acts like elevator shoes for our shorter brothers:

… a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. [Link]

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Radically private water

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When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was hot in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning.

Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the 2 million children who die each year for want of proper water and sanitation.

The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm.

Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.

For example, the Lifestraw is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:

… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [Link]

The original Lifestraw was field tested amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir.

Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product – that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [Link].

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Easy Devanagari

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If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.

The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:

The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]

They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.

If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.

The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:

The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.

Related Posts: Mass literacy can be fun

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My yoga is unstoppable

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When I was younger, I was always jealous of the other Asian kids. Why? Because they had kick-ass unarmed martial arts. A Chinese kid could say “Hey, don’t mess with me – I know Kung Fu like Bruce Lee!” What was I going to say in response – “Well, I know Ahimsa like Gandhi?”

And it wasn’t just the Chinese kids. If you were Korean, you could say you knew TaeKwanDo. If you were Japanese, obviously you could claim to know Karate. Sure, India does have martial arts like gatka, wrestling, and Kalaripayattu but nobody had heard of those and I couldn’t even pronounce “Kalaripayattu.”

In fact, the physical activity that India is most known for is Yoga. I like Yoga but it’s not very macho, and how on earth are you going to use it to defend yourself?

In fact, this amazingly paneer filled clip from Yoga vs. Kung Fu is the only time I’ve seen Yoga used in a movie to beat somebody up:

[Yes, it’s dubbed into French. IMHO, that just makes it all better.]

Of course, you could always try to sell Yoga as the perfect adjunct to a more bloodthirsty activity, like shooting guns:

You shoot better when you realize that your soul is a leaf falling through time, and that work shouldn’t equal struggle. And yoga never aligns you with the universe better than when your forearm is still tingling from the buck and recoil of a .357 bullpup.
Someone needs to open a combination shooting range and yoga studio. I’m serious. Maybe I should do it. Hose off a few clips of Glaser safety slugs, then see how deep you can go into Warrior II. The murder rate would go down. No, wait — it would stay the same, but people would realize it’s all part of a bigger plan. [Link]

Maybe that’s the best way to make Yoga more effective as a tool for avenging the wrong done to your master – do Yoga softly, but carry a big Dandasana.

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