Author Archives: Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Google Gurmukhi!

Posted on by

Google2.JPG

Wow! I feel … represented, and I barely can read or write in Gurmukhi. Still, it tickles me pink to realize that my grandmother could now Google me, if only she could use a computer.

This is incredible [I’m such a gushing fan-boy] ! Here are some of the other South Asian orthographies that one can google in: Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telegu, Urdu, Bengali (Bengla), Bihari, Malayalam, Sindhi. Interestingly, the source for this list also included Uighur as one of the languages associated with India. I thought the Uighur were Turkic peoples living in China, their big muslim minority. Are there any in South Asia?

UPDATE: As Saheli points out in the comments, these are only languages for which Google has an interface, as distinct from languages that Google indexes. Continue reading →

Both clean and dirty at once

Posted on by

It has been 75 years since Lux soap was first manufactured in India. To mark the occasion, Hindustan Lever is making its first ad for Lux staring a male Bollywood actor. In it they present Shah Rukh Khan in a bathtub full of rose petals. Equal opportunity objectification for men is beginning; you’ve come a long way baby!

It seems that the actor had long wanted to star in a Lux ad:

A spokesman for Hindustan Lever, the Indian arm of the multinational Unilever, said the firm had learnt of Shah Rukh Khan’s desire to star in a Lux commercial, following in the footsteps of actresses Hema Malini, Juhi Chawla, Madhuri Dixit, Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai.

“Our advertising agency somehow managed to hear that Shah Rukh had told his co-stars Juhi Chawla and Hema Malini while shooting for a movie that they are the real stars as they get to sit in elaborate bathtubs and advertise for Lux,” the spokesman, Paresh Chowdhury, told the BBC. [BBC]

And of course, a sudsy SRK made perfect sense for the manufacturer as well: Will desi men start threading their chest hair to emulate SRK?

“The target audience, which is basically women between six and 60, love him because he comes across as vulnerable,” he told the BBC. “You could have had some macho actor get in tub but he would seem unreal.

“Shah Rukh Khan is a man with a very strong female side – he is not ashamed of not having any hair on his chest – yet he is a man’s man.” [BBC]

Is Shah Rukh Khan the metrosexual desi man for the next century or just a passing fad? Will desi men start threading their chest hair to emulate SRK? One thing is for certain, Indian TV will never be the same again.

Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Update on Jayant Patel / Dr. Death

Posted on by

In Australia, an inquiry is slowly proceeding into the actions of Dr. Jayant Patel who has been accused of causing some 80 deaths amongst his patients. He arrived in Australia after he had gotten into trouble in both New York and Oregon. There he:

[performed] unnecessary operations, removed healthy organs and “revealed a lack of up-to-date knowledge in many aspects of medical practice.” Eight of his patients died after he performed complex operations that he had been ordered not to perform in Oregon …
An anesthesiologist referred to Dr. Patel as “Dr. Death,” and another doctor told nurses not to allow Dr. Patel to operate on his patients. One surgeon who had examined about 150 of Dr. Patel’s former patients told the commission that all surgeons have problems with patients, but he said of Dr. Patel’s problems: “They’re not 10 times what you might expect. They’re more like 100 times what you might expect,” [NYT]

How did he get hired in the first place? He lied about his history, had good recommendations, and nobody bothered to check his story:

A simple inquiry would have discovered Dr. Patel’s disciplinary problems, the report says. They were found, and made public, by a reporter at The Courier-Mail of Brisbane on the basis of a Google search. [NYT]

[Can you imagine? An organization not checking the credentials of its employees?] Continue reading →

Dress Code (Update 1)

Posted on by

According to Shashwati, three Indian universities are considering imposing a dress code on their students. Of course, this dress code applies only to their female students.  Bombay University says the dress code will protect women from violent crime, according to the age old Indian principle of  “she was asking for it”:

Bombay University plans to ban women from wearing mini skirts, tight tops and shorts, saying this will help prevent rape. Officials at the university say they would prefer to see women students in a traditional salwar-kameez with no deep neckline. [cite]

Officials at Bombay University also claim that this will benefit the men on campus:

“An attire should be such that it should not be offensive or cause distraction to fellow students and lecturers,” Vice Chancellor Vijay Khole told reporters.  [cite]

At Delhi University, the discussion took on an ethnic dimension. Perhaps it is more acceptable to impose a dress code if you can blame it on ‘outsiders’:

A furious debate is going on among the students of Delhi University ever since Kirori Mal College vice principal Virender Kumar’s remarks that “revealing dresses” allegedly worn by girls from India’s northeast triggered angry responses. Although a chastened Kumar has apologised, girl students, particularly those from the northeast, are still furious. [cite]

Continue reading →

Rainy day friends

Posted on by

With all the bad news about the weather, I thought I would try to lighten things up a bit. It turns out that some people really like the rain, and South Asian countries are creating a monsoon tourism industry around them:

The Indian tourist industry has created tours and activities aimed at rain-starved Arab visitors. Open-air discotheques are billed as “rain dance floors.” Tour operators peddle sight-seeing trips, or “rain walks,” as relaxing excursions for “introspection” and “family bonding.”

The Indian state of Goa first started marketing itself as a monsoon destination about five years ago. Resorts in India and northern Pakistan began seeing more Arabs eager to experience the novelty of rain. Posters went up in travel agencies in the Gulf nations of U.A.E., Qatar and Kuwait, beckoning residents to “Come Feel the Rain.” Goa, on India’s west coast, says it attracted 55,000 Arab visitors during last year’s monsoon season, nearly three times as many as two years earlier.

“We’ve seen steady growth in business from them, all of it during the monsoon months,” between June and early September, says Pamela Mascarenhas, deputy director of Goa’s state department of tourism. [cite]

This is very clever counter-cyclical business development. Usually resorts are only bustling during the dry season, and have to make enough money then to cover their expenses during the rainy season. Now they can use their capacity year round, thus increasing their earnings and dramatically cutting their exposure to risk.

As a child, my father would have loved to go on a vacation like the one described. He grew up in a very dry part of Punjab and was fascinated to discover that there were places in the world that got over 10 feet of rain a year. He instantly wanted to move to one of these places and was disappointed when my grandfather wasn’t ready to uproot the family and move to a tropical rainforest!

Continue reading →

Pulling more than your own weight

Posted on by

Calcutta will soon ban hand-pulled rickshaws. Is this a move to liberate the oppressed from their yoke, or just a clumsy attempt by the communists to eliminate an eyesore that is also a highly effective market based response to current transportation inefficiencies?

The Chief Minister claims his motives are humanitarian, and says that he will look after the interests of all those affected:

Mr Bhattacharya said: “We have taken a policy decision to take the hand-drawn rickshaw off the roads of Calcutta on humanitarian grounds.  Nowhere else in the world does this practice exist and we think it should also cease to exist in Calcutta.” 

The chief minister said the authorities were thinking of alternative modes of transport so that the transition did not affect either the pullers or the riders. “This involves money and training. It will be about the end of this year when the rickshaws are finally gone,” he said. [BBC]

This will be no small order. Rickshaws have been around for a while and fill an important role in the city:

The hand-pulled rickshaw came from China in the 19th century. A recent study …  put the number of hand-rickshaw pullers at 18,000 with more than 1,800 joining the pool every year. Many Calcuttans are uncertain whether they will be able to move around the city’s old lanes without the hand-pulled rickshaws – particularly during the monsoon. “When we have to wade in chest-deep water during rains, no other transport works but you can still find the hand-pulled rickshaws taking people from one place to another,” says Dipali Nath, a housewife in north Calcutta. [BBC]

Continue reading →

Who gave the orders?

Posted on by

Kuldip Nayar (long time advocate for the victims of the 1984 pogroms) reviews the Nanavati Commission report and finds that it does not go far enough:

I find that the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission Report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is not a fair document. The judge traces events more or less accurately, yet he does not come to the obvious conclusion.He goes as far as to say: “The systematic manner” in which the Sikhs were killed indicated that “the attacks on them were organised”. But he holds back when, as a judge, he should have gone further to probe who organised these systematic attacks. [cite]

Nayar illustrates how Nanavati illuminates the role of powerful political actors in setting the 1984 Delhi pogroms into motion, but he does not inquire as to who these political actors were.

Nanavati says there is evidence to show that on October 31, 1984, the day Mrs Gandhi was killed, “either meetings were held or the persons who could organise attacks were contacted and were given instructions to kill Sikhs and loot their houses and shops.”  Nanavati also says that attacks were made “without much fear of the police, almost suggesting that they were assured that they would not be harmed while committing those acts and even thereafter.”

On that command, hundreds of people went to the streets of Delhi with weapons and inflammable material like kerosene oil, petrol and white powder. According to the Nanavati report, “the male members of Sikh community were taken out of their houses. They were beaten first and then burnt alive in a systematic manner. In some cases tyres were put around their necks and then they were set on fire by pouring kerosene oil or petrol over them.”

Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Dharam Dutt Shastri, named by Nanavati, could only be operators. At worst, they could have conveyed instructions. But who gave the instructions? Who were the ones who did it? Where did they gather to hatch the plan? Who were these shadowy figures, behind-the-scenes, confident that their instructions would be carried out? [cite]

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Posted on by

Recently, Al-Arabiya television broadcast a segment showing a white Australian who had joined Al-Qaeda. The Australian government followed up by admitting that a “small number” of Australians were members. But the tape showed more than just this one blonde man in a balaclava:

The executive editor of Al Arabiya, Nabil Khatib, … was surprised by the ethnic diversity of the jihadists in the video – from Central Asia, including Uzbekistan, as well as Europeans, Pakistanis and Saudis. [cite]

We’ve always known that A-Q is diverse in its membership, especially if you include allied groups. There are East Asians (mainly South East Asians, like the Bali Bomber), Africans, various Brown people, and yes … light skinned people as well. Still, people kept ignoring the part about white people in the group, even though they were previously documented. Maybe these photos will help change some minds. Then again, it’s not clear that the African London bombers have made Brits any less fixated on South Asians.

Australians will probably respond to this news by trying to profile Muslims more thoroughly, rather than trying to screen for suspicious actions. Remember, there are still plenty of non-Islamist groups that still pose a threat. Consider, for example, the ironically named “Brown Army Faction” who were busted two years ago:

The threat to Germany from neo-Nazis has risen to a new level, Interior Minister Otto Schily has warned. The discovery of a suspected plot to bomb a Munich Jewish centre during a visit by the German president has “dramatically confirmed” the danger to society, he said on Monday. At least 10 suspects were held and up to 14kg (31lb) of explosives seized in police raids last week. The suspected attack would have coincided with the anniversary of the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht attacks, when thousands of Jewish targets were attacked and dozens murdered. A “hit list” detailing other possible targets, including mosques, a Greek school and an Italian target, had been recovered, said Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein. [BBC]

Continue reading →

If he was brown, we woulda heard about it, right?

Posted on by

More news on the double-standard front. In March of last year, the feds arrested somebody who had the components for both hand grenades and ricin in his basement. The perp lived in Hyattsville, Md, just a few miles from the DC border:

The manhunt, according to court documents and investigators, led last year to a suburban home in Hyattsville, Md., its basement stocked with parts for makeshift hand grenades and ingredients for ricin, one of the most potent and lethal biological toxins….. has since pleaded guilty to charges of extortion and possession of toxic materials. [NYT]

How deadly is Ricin?

If injected or swallowed, the toxin penetrates the body’s cells. It then knocks out the cells’ protein production machinery, leading to cell death. If ricin is inhaled, acute respiratory collapse occurs as the fragile lining cells of the air passages and lungs are destroyed. Once a person is exposed to ricin, there is no known antidote. Minute quantities of ricin are lethal, and they vanish from the victim’s body in hours with barely a trace, making it a notorious stealth murder weapon. [cite]

You’d think this would have been front page news instead of the middle of a long article about cyber extortion in the NYT Magazine. A dangerous criminal was arrested a stone’s through away from the nation’s capital with the precursors to a biological weapon! This guy was more of a threat than Jose Padilla: ricin is more dangerous than a dirty bomb, and he was far closer to creating a WMD than Padilla ever got.

However, this guy wasn’t brown. His name was Myron Tereshchuk. He was a 43 year old white guy, a tech entrepreneur. If his name had been Sandeep Patel, with the same profile and biodata, you can bet that his mug shot would have been plastered all over the evening TV news shows. As is, it got buried below the fold.

Continue reading →

Private Health Care Is Higher Quality

Posted on by

Indians love to boast about the quality of Indian doctors. “The best in the world! And now India is becoming a center for world class health care, even Americans are flying to India now!” But just between us brown folks, we also know the other side of the story. Many of the best doctors leave the country, and if they come back, they come back only to some high end establishment. The quality of the average doctor in India is … well … rather hit or miss.

As a matter of public policy, what should be done? A study of doctors in Delhi finds that increased training helps, but even then the quality of health care remains sensitive to the right incentives:

The quality of medical care received by patients varies for two reasons: Differences in doctors’ competence or differences in doctors’ incentives.  We find three patterns in the data.

First, what doctors do is less than what they know they should do-doctors operate well inside their knowledge frontier.

Second, competence and effort are complementary so that doctors who know more also do more.

Third, the gap between what doctors do and what they know responds to incentives: Doctors in the fee-for-service private sector are closer in practice to their knowledge frontier than those in the fixed-salary public sector. Under-qualified private sector doctors, even though they know less, provide better care on average than their better-qualified counterparts in the public sector. These results indicate that to improve medical services, at least for poor people, there should be greater emphasis on changing the incentives of public providers rather than increasing provider competence through training. [cite]

Although doctors love to tell you that they work out of a sense of seva, and that the quality of care has little to do with the fee structure, it simply isn’t true. Surprising as it seems, the researchers find that you’re better off with a less trained private doctor than a better trained public doctor. Why? Because the private doctors try harder. The difference in quality was significant:

Public sector doctors did less than a third of what they knew to be important in terms of diagnosis, taking about fifteen percent of the time required to fully diagnose complaints. Over-prescribing and mis-prescribing were also rampant. [cite]

Continue reading →