Author Archives: Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Flying while anybody through Vegas

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As you can tell from the meetups I will be attending, I’ll be doing a fair amount of flying in the next month (not as much as Vinod, but nobody flies as much as 3V). You can see why I read the following news story with some trepidation [via BoingBoing]:

No, that’s not me but we all look alike 🙂

Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it. The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal. [Link]

Luckily, I’m not flying through Vegas, which is where this system is in place. It seems that what happens in Vegas stays … in homeland security databases. And even things that don’t happen at all make it there too.

I have no information about whether or not similar quotas systems have been implemented in other airports. In Vegas at least, top management issued a memo in July 2004 saying:

“Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month”… A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, “There may come an occasion when you just don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I’m sure that if you are looking for it, you’ll see something.” [Link]

An SDR is a “Surveillance Detection Report,” a secret government document with some very serious consequences.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR? “That could have serious impact … They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,” [Link]

Hmmmm … imagine you’re a Marshal, under serious pressure to say you observed something fishy. Who do you think you’d write up? A white grandmother? A congressional staffer? Or a swarthy young male with a beard, even if he’s really handsome ?

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More meetups – meshuge!

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Since all the cool people are doing it, I thought I would announce one meetup, and the promise of more. Vinod and I will be holding a San Fransisco meetup on:

Sunday August 6th, 3 PM at Chaat Cafe in SOMA, SF.

We considered holding it at Greco, but figured it was bad enough to hold a SF meetup without Anna that we didn’t want to add insult to injury. That, and we wanted to make Brimful happy .

I will also try to take my anonymous kundi to the NYC meetup on August 13th, for those of you who miss me on the right coast. This meetup will have both Anna and live music, so there’s no reason for anybody not to be there.

Lastly – I’m thinking about a Chicago meetup in the middle of September or so – are there enough Midwestern Mutineers that we can hold down a table at one of the Devon Ave dives? This would be the first meetup I’d be hosting solo, so be gentle y’all

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Blogs unbanned (updated)

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The Indian Government’s recently imposed ban on all Typepad and Blogspot blogs will soon be over and may already be over in some places. Earlier today, Rediff reported:

The blocking of blogs hosted by sites such as Blogspot, Typepad and Yahoo! Geocities by Internet Service Providers is likely to be lifted within 48 hours. [Link]

In fact, both the government and the ISP umbrella group are claiming that they never planned a blanket ban in the first place, they just wanted to ban 17 blogs:

Amitabh Singhal, a spokesperson of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) … said … some ISPs — he insisted it wasn’t all — mistook the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains, adding that it was technically feasible to block a sub-domain and leave others still accessible. [Link]

According to an email sent to SAJA by the Deputy Counsul General in New York, the ban was imposed because:

A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well-known search engines

However, here’s the actual list of blogs that the government was trying to block. I’ve just skimmed them, but I can’t see the “two page write up” that they’re referring to [a copy of the original order is below the fold]:

  1. www.hinduunity.org
  2. mypetjawa.mu.nu [American right-wing blog]
  3. pajamaeditors.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
  4. exposingtheleft.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
  5. thepiratescove.us [American right-wing blog]
  6. commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com [This is isn’t even in English!]
  7. bamapachyderm.com [American right-wing blog]
  8. princesskimberley.blogspot.com [Long defunct]
  9. merrimusings.typepad.com [Defunct American right-wing blog, but now at http://www.merrimusings.mu.nu ]
  10. mackers-world.com [American right-wing blog]
  11. www.dalistan.org [They actually mean www.dalitstan.org which is currently down]
  12. www.hinduhumanrights.org/hindufocus.html
  13. www.nndh.com [Dead URL]
  14. bloodroyaltriped.com [Dead URL]
  15. imagesearchyahoo.com [Dead URL, but it wouldn’t be a blog!]
  16. www.imamali8.com [They probably mean imamali.com but somebody mistyped]
  17. www.rahulyadav.com [Computer geek at IU Bloomington – not a blog at all – banned merely for his links to the BJP, RSS, etc]

A few of the blogs mentioned do have some very offensive photos of the Koran, but that’s not the offense that the government was using to justify its ban. Seven of the seventeen blogs are right wing blogs that are strongly anti-Islamic in that LGF-clone way, but again, the government didn’t announce that it was trying to ban all blogs that were harshly critical of Islam. Most importantly, none of them are linked to recent terrorist attacks at all !

So even if you think that censorship should sometimes be imposed by the government, and you accept the government’s reasoning that this “two page write up” is one of those things that should be censored, you’d still be hard pressed to justify this ban.

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This is Gunga Din, reporting for NPR

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Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me this morning made reference to a recent foot-in-mouth remark by White House Spokesman Tony Snow (who used to be at NPR):

“One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you’ve got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling , you’ve got a better chance of getting hired. I’m a white guy named Tony Snow for heaven’s sake. That’s as white as it goes.” [Link]

This remark got very little coverage by either mainstream or blog media and took some digging to find. It seems to have slipped by most people’s radar screens.

I’m aghast at the very casualness of the race baiting involved in that sentence. Oh yes, those brown people with the funny names, the ones who are taking over NPR by virtue of their skin color, not their talent (How many desis are at NPR anyway?). At the same time, I recognize that it is clearly less of a deal than Joe Biden’s recent remarks, which to me were just a minor kerfuffle I recognize that this is a minor rather than major political sin.

Still, Snow’s remarks are eminently cringeworthy and the sort of thing that brown people should both remember and remind him about, just so that he learns the utter gaucheness of what he said.

“Mr. Snow, this is Somini Sengupta from the Times … one of those reporters with a “Kipling Name” … I’d like to ask you about the President’s policy on …”

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The tiffinwalla approach to fighting terror

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I’ve been thinking about what sort of systems should be put into place to try to prevent further attacks as in Mumbai. I don’t mean this to be callous. I too have family in Bombay, and while they’re OK, my heart still aches for those whose family is not. But the trains are running once more and need to be protected. [This is also some very abstract thinking, so I might be and Mumbaikar reveals, in the comments, that I am entirely talking out of my kundi.]

One solution, as Manish argues, would be to close the entire system and control access:

What it would take to solve the bombs-on-trains problem: money, lots of money. Indian Railways needs to run more frequent trains so they’re not jammed all the time. The stations need to be fully enclosed so entrance can be precisely controlled. And, like on Eurostar high-speed trains, every passenger needs to be scanned for explosives. [Link]

Something like this is done in the New Delhi Metro system. Although there was no mechanical sniffer, at many stops passengers were patted down or wanded by bored jawans. However, it strikes me that this is the wrong path, similar to trying to create a computerized tiffin system in Bombay. Sure it might work, but you’d need continuous electricity and literate tiffin carriers. Instead, India currently has something better. Using a system of painted symbols on each tiffin carrier:

Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. [Link]

India works best when its ample semi-skilled labor applies simple rules repeatedly and rigidly. I’m trying to think about how to best reduce security risk by applying India’s comparative advantage, rather than imposing an alien solution. Continue reading →

Investment undeterred by fear

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It is comforting to note that in these times of terror, hard-headed businessmen still make their investment decisions undeterred by threat. My newest hero is that Titan of Industry, the Captain of Capitalism, Laxmi Mittal. It seems that the world’s richest Indian is increasing his investment in India-na:

Mittal Steel Co. plans to begin a $10 million expansion of research and development laboratories in East Chicago. The first phase, to start this week, would add 22,000 square feet to a laboratory. It is expected to be completed within a year. The company is based in the Netherlands, but its U.S. operations are run from Chicago. [Link]

This announcement came the day after it was revealed that India-na is the state in the union most densely populated with potential terrorist targets:

Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation. [Link]

That’s 11% of all targets on the National Asset Database. This is a state so hated by terrorists that even a rural popcorn factory with five employees is considered a target! Clearly Mittal is a man of steel, a hombre without fear, somebody who does not blanch even in the face of terrorists as confused as Christopher Columbus. Who needs Hanu-man, Indian Super-man, a brown Justice League, or any other Indian superheroes when we have a Mittal-man of our own ?

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Deafening silence in the blogosphere

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While trying to deal with the tragedy in Mumbai, I have been wondering what the coverage of the story tells us about ourselves.

I was not surprised by MSM coverage in America: poor in local papers, better in papers with a large desi population or those with an international audience. I was pleased to hear that CNN and CNBC had decent cable news coverage, perhaps because they’re well established in India.

What has baffled me, however, is the relative silence from the world of blogs. The blogosphere is supposed to be the cutting edge, far more advanced than the MSM, yet they’re spending less time on the story.

To be more precise, Technorati’s rankings of popular news stories shows us that average bloggers are paying some attention to the bombings; the fourth, sixth and twentieth most reblogged news stories are the BBC, CNN, and Fox News versions of this story. It’s currently less important than the death of Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, or coverage of Zidane’s press coverage, but more important than Bob Novak and the big dig.

Where we see a distressing lack of coverage most clearly is amongst political blogs in the top 100 list [Thanks Manish]:

Amongst other major politics blogs, Atrios did a one line link while travelling and WashingtonMonthly covered black hair but not blacker events.

What gives? I emailed the following question to three significant political bloggers:

No opinion on the Mumbai bombings?

I’m surprised. Many more have died than did in London a year ago, and the death toll is currently just a little under the death toll from Madrid. Yet the blogosphere is largely quiet. Why?

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But where is the virtual spitoon?

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There is no sphere of life that is safe from the internet, not even in India. As proof, I bring you paan.com the website of Bombay’s most famous brick-and-mortar paanvala [via Amitava Kumar].

He’s probably the city’s most famous paanwala. It’s uncertain whether (as rumours suggest) he drives a Merc, but it’s clear for all the world to see that Prem Shankar Tiwari, the owner of Muchhad Paanwala paan shop on Warden Road, has his own website. It was built in 1998 by a devoted customer Vivek Bhargav. At paan.com, not only can you order paan online (a minimum order of 10 is required), you can also play a game that requires the participant to run from one end of the screen to the other to catch blobs of paan spit in a virtual bucket. [Link]

While you can order your paan online, there’s no word about whether you can spit it online once you’re done chawing it. [Whether ironically or not, right under the name of the store, the website exhorts the user to keep Bombay “clean and green”]

The website is quite amusing, and answered my burning question – why name a paan shop after facial hair?

His father Shyam Charan Tiwari established the shop thirty years ago. The shop was named Muchhad because his father Shyam Charan Tiwari had mustache so big and long that it touched his ears. And now it’s become a family tradition, all the four brothers have long mustache. [Link]

Click here to play the aforementioned game. It involves the player, holding a bucket at street level and trying to catch disgusting human head sized blobs of paan spit dropping from Bombay windows. Step aside Dante, I now know what hell looks like.

Related Posts: Tai-pan tries paan, Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

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Superman is not Hanuman

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Red-white-and blue, flying across the sky with his underwear on the outside … it’s hard to think of anything more American than Superman, right? Manish alerts us to an interesting claim made in an article by the “IndiaFM News Bureau” that Superman is nothing more than a Kaavya’ed Hanuman:

Word is that, that the original creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were inspired from none other than the Indian mythological hero Hanuman and that is how Superman got his flying powers. [Link]

Sure there are some similarities between the two fictional characters: neither is human, they’re both super-strong, they can both fly, and both have names than end in -man. But that’s it, really. Much as I would love to claim Superman as desi, this claim makes as much sense as the claims that Vedic civilization had both airplanes and atomic weapons.

People (scholars even) have written a lot on the origins of Superman.You can find entire articles on this topic in the highly obscure internet source Wikipedia:

Because Siegal and Shuster were both Jewish it is thought that their creation was partly influenced by the Jewish legends of the Golem, a mythical being created to protect and serve the persecuted Jews of 16th century Prague and later revived in popular culture in reference to their suffering at the hands of Nazis in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Another influence could be Hugo Danner, the main character of the novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie. Danner has the same powers of the early Superman (as do many other pulp characters of the twenties and thirties)… However, the sources sited by Jerry Siegel himself were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Tarzan, Johnston McCulley’s Zorro and E.C. Seegar’s Popeye. He also appears to have been influenced by Jack Williamson’s “The Girl From Mars.” [Link]

See – no reference to Hanuman made, ever. While it’s impossible to prove a negative (I cannot show definitively that they were not influenced by Hanuman), how would two Jewish kids in the 1930s know about Hanuman anyway? [And why would they need to know about Hanuman to come up with the idea of a flying hero? What, nobody in the west had ever thought of flying people before? This is after Peter Pan, for crying out loud.]

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