Author Archives: Ennis Singh Mutinywale

All of this has happened before …

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This month, IBM announced Project Match, a program to help laid off workers move overseas with their outsourced jobs … provided of course, that that they’re willing to accept local wages:

“IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand. Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move.” [link]

I can see it now, America’s best and brightest leave their homes and everything familiar to them to move overseas and start a new life, one fraught with cultural confusion. A new generation is born in India, one plagued by confusion and self-doubt.

Novelist Juniper L. Harry depicts the lives of these American Indians with a series of stories about Boston Brahmins in Bengal. In her most famous book, the protagonist Tolstoy Thudpucker struggles to figure out where he truly belongs, whether in India or America. His classmates cruelly mock him for his name and for not having an unfamiliar cultural background. Everybody in India is different, they say. But not poor Tolstoy, he’s got no culture of his own:

“What’s your language? American English? That’s like what we speak, but with an accent, right? What do they eat in America? Pepperoni Pizza? What’s that – like Chicken Tikka Pizza but with dried out slices of dead pig on top? Sounds bland and gross! How come we can breakdance better than you? Don’t you even have a dance of your own to teach us?”

Tolstoy suffers through a series of happy marriages and confusing name changes until he attains enlightenment by transcending worldly duality and learning to dance. The Bollywood version of his tale wins plaudits from reviewers across India, none more so than the bloggers over at the IBCA blog Boston Chai Party.

With apologies to Nabokov Ninnington.

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Where’s Osama?

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Academics love nothing more than a bit of intellectual arbitrage. Take a theory developed for one purpose, apply it to a different subject, and voila – twice the intellectual bang for your buck! And since in this case the topic is that of Osama bin Laden’s location, and bin Laden is still at liberty 7.5 years after 9/11, why not take a stab at the problem?

In this case, Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, two professors of Geography at UCLA used techniques developed to track endangered species, and information on “bin Laden’s last known location, cultural background, security needs, declining health, limited mobility and height” to predict that there is a “90 percent chance that bin Laden is in Kurram province in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, most likely in the town of Parachinar which gave shelter to a larger number of Mujahedin during the 1980s.” [link]

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p>The paper comes with some pretty pictures (like those above) and even goes so far as to identify three buildings where Osama might be located.

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Speak Hindi? Join the army and become a citizen in 6 months

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It’s not easy to get a green card in America, and harder still to become a citizen. However, under a new recruitment program for the armed forces, if you’ve been in the US for 2 years and have the skills the military needs, you can get your citizenship in as little as six months from the day you begin service. While in the past recruitment was open to green card holders (with 8,000 a year signing up for the military) this is the first time recruitment has been opened to temporary immigrants.

The program targets two groups: medical professionals and those with language expertise including speakers of “Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Igbo (a tongue spoken in Nigeria), Kurdish, Nepalese, Pashto, Russian and Tamil. [link]” In other words, this is a program tailor made for desis (although not exclusively so)

The only catch is that you have to serve out your time in the military honorably, or you might lose your citizenship (!) even if you received it in the first six months of service:

Language experts will have to serve four years of active duty, and health care professionals will serve three years of active duty or six years in the Reserves. If the immigrants do not complete their service honorably, they could lose their citizenship. [link]

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It wasn’t just Lupercalia yesterday

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I know most of you were too busy yesterday celebrating the orthodox feastday of Saint Brigid of Kildare to think of anything else, but it was also the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Back then Rushdie was already a literary hotshot, having won the Booker in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children. This was long before Padma, when Rushdie was newly married to Marianne Wiggins and could walk down the street without being recognized.

However, it was the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses that really put him on the map, making him both notorious and a cause celebre all over the world, granting him immortality while putting his own body and that of others into mortal peril.

Although Rushdie had always courted controversy, having mocked Indira Gandhi, the Bhutto family, and American foreign policy in previous books, he claims that he had no idea what a hornet’s nest The Satanic Verses would stir up:

Rushdie … said “I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public… I honestly never expected anything like this.” [link]

Instead the book was banned within a month in India, followed by Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and lastly Venezuela in June 1989. A large number of threats were made to bookstores in the US and UK. Daniel Pipes claims that “[t]he bombings meant that hardly a single bookstore sold Rushdie’s novel openly in the UK” [link]

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The GOP to Piyush back against Obama

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This ain’t yo daddy’s GOP no more. Not only is the Chair of the RNC a black man (Michael Steele, who owes his victory to the majority-minority terroritories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa) but Jindal is the new televised face of the party, set to issue its rebuttal to Obama:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, widely seen as a potential 2012 GOP presidential contender, will deliver the Republican response following President Obama’s nationally televised Address to the Nation on Feb. 24, Republican congressional leaders announced in a joint statement today. [Link]

Has the GOP decided to embrace multiculturalism as a demographic necessity? Was 2008 the last year that contenders for the top RNC spot will send out CDs of such chart topping hits as “Barack the Magic Negro,” and “The Star Spanglish Banner“?

Not exactly. Nativists remain both a significant constituency within the party and a significant source of amusement for those of us outside of it, offering insights like:

“Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.” [Link]

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Job security for Aasif Mandvi?

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I figure if Gupta takes the Surgeon General post, that has to add at least a year to Mandvi’s contract with the Daily Show …

And yes, I agree entirely with the sentiment expressed by brother Aasif at the end of the segment … Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Too sexy for this job?

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News that Sanjay Gupta has been offered the position of Surgeon General has produced the classic trifecta of Golidlocks responses: Is he too sexy for the job, not sexy enough, or does he have the right amount of smouldering sex appeal to keep pace with Obama, Biden, Daschle and Hillary Clinton?

Too sexy for this job:

My friend Dr. B objects to the idea that SG could be the SG, saying that he lacks the gravitas for the job, and that she would have preferred a more established, less erotically charged nominee in the C. Everett Koop mold.

For those of you too young to remember, despite Koop’s mad pediatric surgical skillz, he was as attractive as Bill Gates on a bad hair day. Nobody, no matter how intense their uniform fetish, ever had an erotic dream about Dr. Koop or Joycelen Elders, and Dr. B thinks that precedent should be maintained.

Similarly, when Dr. Amonymous asks for SG’s policy qualifications, pointing out that “The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the USPHS, a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency.” [wiki], it’s clear that what he’s really saying is … “how can I take him seriously when he’s so pretty?”

(Manish has a variant of this argument, claiming not that Gupta is too sexy for the job, but that the job isn’t sexy enough for him, calling it a step down from his current position to one that pays less and has less influence.)

They do have a point since “Gupta was named one of the Sexiest Men of 2003 by People magazine.” [wiki] It’s hard to see what more objective measure of sexiness there might be.

Not sexy enough for this job:

There are those, however, who reject People Magazine’s imprimature as if it were some illegible doctor’s scrawl on a prescription pad, arguing brazenly that Dr. Gupta doesn’t have the intellectual honesty sex appeal necessary for the position.

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Bedi, Bhatt and Nayak

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Sounds like the name of a law practice right? Instead it’s the surnames of the three (brown) stooges in low places who figure at the heart of the Blagojevich pay-for-play scandal, key actors in the attempt to auction off the IL senate seat vacated by Obama to the highest bidder as if it were nothing more than a suitable boy from a “respectable” but dowry mad family.

This is how it allegedly went down, at a lunch meeting at India House, of course:

Businessmen with ties to both Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson discussed raising $1 million for Blagojevich as a way of persuading him to appoint Jackson to President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat. [Link]

Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak… Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson’s bid for the Senate. Among the attendees was a Blagojevich fundraiser already under scrutiny by federal investigators, Joliet pharmacist Harish Bhatt.

“Raghu said he needed to raise a million for Rod to make sure Jesse got the seat,” the second businessman said. “He said, ‘I can raise half of it, $500,000.’ The idea was that the other two would help raise the rest.” [Link]

I know that our generation often tries to persuade the older generation to get involved in American politics, but this is not what we have in mind! Legal campaign contributions can be good, but getting busted trying to buy a senate seat is bad.

(For the record, “Jackson’s attorney said while Jackson discussed the Senate seat with Nayak, he never asked him to do anything.” [Link] It really isn’t clear at this point whether Nayak was acting for Jackson or just freelancing, but Jackson’s seems unlikely to gain the senate seat now. )

So who are these jokers? (profiles and pics after the fold) Continue reading →

Fear of a blue turban?

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Recently, I saw the image above, taken from a screenshot of the webpage of a Los Angeles talk radio station [via sullivan]. The show it mentions is the “top rated morning program in the Los Angeles market, with over 1 million listeners.”[wiki] I was struck by the blue turban which, it turns out, the wingnuts think is part of Nostradamus’ prediction about Antichrist III:

Out of the country of Greater Arabia Shall be born a strong master of Mohammed, He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban. He will be the terror of mankind. Never more horror. [freep!]

Now if they think that Hawaii is part of Greater Arabia, I’m worried what they’ll think when they see a photo of the Indian Prime Minister! Or worse, one of Sikh peacekeepers, since we know how they feel about the UN … (images below the fold)

I’m tempted to gather together a whole bunch of friends to stand outside a wingnut gathering, all of us wearing blue turbans, staring at people as they enter and exit. It would be worth it for a laugh, that is, if they didn’t call the FBI and accuse us of suspicious behavior. One step at a time, I guess. Maybe I should start with that cool forehead tattoo instead …

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Sonal Shah under pressure

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At the same time that one report mentions Sonal as a possible cabinet choice, Sonal seems to be under pressure as a member of the transition team as a couple of mainstream media outlets started to write about her.

I last posted about Sonal when she issued her statement, almost a month ago. In case, you’ve forgotten, here are the key things she said:

  1. “my personal politics have nothing in common with the views espoused by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or any such organization”
  2. “I’ve always condemned any politics of division, of ethnic or religious hatred, of violence and intimidation as a political tool”
  3. “factually inaccurate internet rumors have attempted to link me to Hindu Nationalist groups through a variety of tenuous connections: Relief work I’m proud to have helped coordinate following the Gujarati earthquake of 2001 … “
  4. “I do not subscribe to the views of such Hindu nationalist groups, and never have”

Since then, however, there have been four new developments (listed chronologically) in the continuing saga of Sonal Shah:

1 The general secretary of VHP-America said Sonal was a member of the governing council of the VHPA for three years. Her critics followed up with a link to the “VHP Governing Council & Chapter Presidents/Coordinators List” in 1998, hosted on Hindunet.org, which showed Sonal as a member of that group, and listed her US Treasury department email as a contact.

Sonal’s earlier statement stated that she was not a member of any Sangh organization in India and had implied that she had never been a member of the VHP-A, but had simply coordinated relief efforts after the earthquake. There was no response by her supporters, some of whom had argued outright that she was not a member of the VHPA, to this news.

2 The transition team announced that Sonal’s work is on the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform panel.

When I found out that Sonal would be working on tech issues, not foreign policy or personnel issues, I thought this would quiet criticism since it made her past affiliations less relevant. However, as with point #1, there was little acknowledgement of this from the other side.

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