Author Archives: vinod

War Nerd on the Kargil Incident

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kargil.jpgReader & frequently thoughtful commentor KXB wrote into the Tip Line with a link to War Nerd’s column on the Kargil incident. The writing is entertaining and provocative to say the least –

Some guy in India asked me to write about the 1999 Indo-Pakistani fighting in Kargil, a patch of high-altitude ice in Kashmir at the northern tip of the Subcontinent. This is some of the most worthless and fought-over ground in the world, up where the borders between Pakistan, India and China smear together like the middle of a pie sliced by a spastic. … hand-to-hand fighting 18,000 feet up in the Himalayas makes me tired just thinking about it. It must’ve been some pretty slow-motion combat, like Tom and Jerry on valium. Lunge, take a five-minute breathing break, lunge again. …Kargil was the only time two modern armies fought at such an insane altitude. …And that’s where losing 400 men in a high-profile, harmless little war like Kargil comes in handy. Those websites I mentioned list the names of every single Indian soldier killed up there. When you consider how many Indians die every day, with nobody giving a damn at all, it’s pretty amazing that these 400 dead guys get so much adoring press. When you look at the list of names, you see why. Some of the names are obviously Sikhs (Sikhs love armies), but there are plenty of Hindu names, Muslim names — for all I know there are Zoroastrian names in there too. It’s a chance to sob together over those dead integrated units — like those good old corny WW II movies where every platoon has this melting-pot roll call: “OK, lissen up, Bernstein, deNapoli, O’Brien, Kowalski, and Running Bear!”

Heh. For a more balanced discussion, there’s always Wikipedia’s entry on the Kargil War.

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India ranks 118 of 155

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In economic freedom…. I’m personally a little skeptical of this result – surely India’s in better shape than 118? The Financial Express reports – Mostly unfree –

That India still ranks in the last quarter of a world ranking on economic freedom with an index score of 3.5 illustrates the extent to which we are inured to clamps on our rights to trade and invest. One needn’t agree with all the details of this ranking of 155 countries by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal to go along with its basic thrust. The notion of economic freedom is only a theoretical ideal — like perfect competition — and its finest expressions are found in small trading bastions like Hong Kong (which topped the 2005 index for the 11th year running)followed by Singapore. …This global ranking should set aside a lingering delusion among IndiaÂ’s officialdom that one major advantage we have vis-a-vis our emerging economy rivals like China is our wider range of economic freedoms — rule of law and all that! Far from it. China occupies the 112th place when compared to IndiaÂ’s 118th and the report notes that the dragon has reduced tariff barriers since joining the WTO, cut government expenditure and privatised some companies. India, by contrast, has wound up the disinvestment ministry altogether under the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government.

The Indian Express also covers the story…

How do you bury a news story?

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bg-map.gifAn OpEd in the Boston Globe tackles an issue which is part of the reason we put so much energy into Sepia Mutiny – Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Living / Arts / Deliver us from faraway evil

Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor. The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers’ attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ”In India.”

Sad but True.

Back in the early 90s, a round of cyclones / floods in Bangladesh killed almost 140k folks — a comparable number to the Tsunami’s toll (for now). This situation was possibly more acute because all the carnage was concentrated in a single, dirt-poor nation with 140M people and few resort beaches. Needless to say, that story appeared & disappeared from our headlines pretty darn quickly.

Still, I don’t fault the newspaper editors of the world too much – it’s human nature for Americans to care more about Americans & Swedes about Swedes (be they on Phuket resorts or down a well in Midland, Texas). My takeaway is that it’s an important reaffirmation of the importance of micro-media outfits like Sepia Mutiny, desi blogs, and vast collaboration media like the Internet.

Bombay Dreams Epilogue

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04dream4.jpgAs Sepia Mutiny mentioned, the NYC run of the London hit musical Bombay Dreams closed this past weekend. Rediff reports, however, on an interesting, far more long-term development within the cast –

As Manu Narayan, Tamyra Gray, Sriram Ganesan and Anjali Bhimani joined 34 of their peers in Bombay Dreams to take the final Broadway bow on New Year’s Day, at least one actor was taking home more than memories and an impressive resume. Aalok Mehta, part of the ensemble cast, is now engaged to Anisha Nagarajan who played Priya, the idealistic movie director, in the musical for about six months.

Some interesting financial info & hope for a Bombay Dreams road tour –

Most among the cast of Bombay Dreams are hoping to join the road tour that could start this summer, provided the producers, who have lost about half of their $14 million investment in the Broadway production, are able to raise fresh investment and get good backing from regional promoters.

Happy New Year from Sepia Mutiny

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On behalf of the mutineers, we wish all of our readers – and especially our commentors – a happy and safe New Years. If you’re ever curious what drives a labor of love like Sepia Mutiny, it’s cuz most of us obsessively hit the reload button to see the feedback and commentary generated from y’all (including and sometimes especially GC ;-). We built this house but you guys make it a lively home.

Roughly half of the Mutineers will be welcoming the New Year in NYC while others will be in DC (and possibly LA?). If you run into any of us at a party and mention the blog, we’ll be honored. BUT, distract us too much from the revelry with a discussion of blogging, the Left/Right divide or what GC just said… well, it’ll still be interesting but… other folks at the party might catch on to what dorks we actually are. And we can’t have that.

The past 6 months have been swell — here’s to the next 12. Have fun and stay safe.

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Not really a desi post… The Left/Right Divide

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Several posts (for ex., here and here) have ignited quite a firestorm of comments and degenerated into Left vs. Right name calling. This being a blog and we being Desi, I suppose it’s understandable that eventually, things have gotta get political.

I found this post from Eric Raymond an interesting read for many of our “lefty” commentors (Sluggo/Liberalpundit, Anjali, Desinar, etc.) trying to understand why the “righty” folks (myself, GC, Razib, etc.) react the way we do to so much of the rhetoric –

IÂ’ve been reading a new blog called Left2Right, founded in mid-November 2004 as an attempt by a group of left-wing intellectuals to reach out to intelligent people on the right of the American political spectrum. It is indeed a thought-provoking read, but the thoughts they are provoking are not necessarily of the sort they intend. …One advantage my libertarianism gives me is that while I disagree violently with a lot of right-wing thinking, I understand it much better than most leftists do. The reverse is not quite as true; while I do believe I understand left-wing thinking pretty well, most right-wing intellectuals are not so ignorant of leftism that I have an unusual advantage there. They canÂ’t be, not after having passed through the PC indoctrination camps that most American universities have become.

What proceeds is a GREAT “Lefties are from Mars, Righties are from Venus” sort of discussion. In this particular case, how the Left often talks past the Right even when they’re trying to meaningfully engage them. (the fact that Raymond is writing from a Libertarian perspective is, as usual, major bonus points 😉

For example, this quoted passage and its response could practically have been lifted verbatim from some of the stuff in our comments – Continue reading →

1LT Prakash & the Scourge of Hollywood Typecasting

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Lt Prakash’s blog has developed QUITE a following in few short weeks it’s been published. His writing is fantastic, incisive, and dripping with first person perspective. I & many others are incredibly proud of the caliber of men in our armed forces.

In this recent entry, Prakash learns of a newly planned Hollywood movie chronicling the adventures of the Fallujah takedown in which he participated-

hunglikeastudbull : Fallujah the Movie prakred6: i hope your kidding hunglikeastudbull : oh no hunglikeastudbull : i hear they are going to have Val Kilmer play the part of me hunglikeastudbull : and the indian guy from Van Wilder play the part of “Red 6” prakred6: i heard Apu from the Simpsons was playing me
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The Quaker Who Would Be King

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For all the post-colonial angst Brown folks have about the period of English Occupation, you do have to admit that the times created some fascinating history. Between the Thugees, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Gurkhas, and the Battle of Sargarhi, Victorian India created tales that rivalled practically any classical saga in adventure & intrigue.

Via the blogosphere, I came across the absolutely riveting story of the American who may have been the real life inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King — the History News Network reports on the saga of Josiah Harlan–

Josiah Harlan served as the basis of Rudyard KiplingÂ’s short story, “The Man Who Would Be King,” written in 1888 while Kipling was a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer newspaper. The real-life Josiah Harlan was born in 1799 into a Quaker family from Pennsylvania. As an adolescent, Harland read works in botany and medicine, but above all Greek and Roman history, having taught himself Latin and Greek. He became inordinately interested in the life and adventures of Alexander the Great, after whom he would no doubt later fashion his own adventures. …In 1822 Harlan sailed for Calcutta on a merchant ship. …[In 1826] Josiah succeeded in gaining a meeting with al-Moolk [the deposed king of Afghanistan residing in Punjab], during which he offered to travel to Kabul and link up with Shah ShujahÂ’s allies in an effort to organize a rebellion against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had stolen his crown. …Harlan left Ludhiana with a rag-tag army comprised of mercenaries and headed for Kabul. Along the way, he passed himself off as a religious mystic, a wealthy adventurer, and as a doctor, even treating the locals he encountered with a variety of ills. In 1828 Harlan reached Kabul and sent a message to Dost Mohammed Khan requesting a meeting, as news of a “feringhee” or foreigner having entered Kabul circulated throughout the city. Harlan wrote in his memoir that he found Dost Mohammed to be as intelligent and sophisticated as any Western ruler.

But how did he ascend the NW Indian political ladder? A drunk Punjabi raj & an interim step as the Governor of Gujrat had something to do with it. The IHT continues the story – Continue reading →

Desi Libertarian Activist – Govindini Murty

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(Thanks to Deepa for alerting us via the Tip Line!)

Back in college, a single guy friend had a taxonomy of the type of women attracted by the different bands of the political spectrum.

He argued that the average attractive & approachable gal on campus was a soft lefty. She’d advocate things like national healthcare out of a semi-fashionable, prima facie concern for her fellow human beings. Of course, she felt this concern naturally extended into politics & was blind to the economic logic.

Angry, granola gals oppressed by the patriarchy often filled out the far left, weren’t exactly the most dateable & he avoided them like the plague. Being famously politically incorrect, he’d remark that these gals were “either angry cuz men always treated them like sexual objects or angry cuz men never treated them like sexual objects.” I’ll reserve my comments.

By contrast, the few & far between campus Right Wing gals tended to be a tad too country club / prep school for our tastes.

But Libertarian activists? Well unfortunately, a libertarian rally is possibly the only gathering that scares gals off faster than a Star Trek convention. As a self-described libertarian, ’twas a pity.

BUT, enter the first, and possibly the most attractive Desi libertarian female activist I’ve seen in a long time. Govindini Murty was recently profiled in the Washington Post for hosting a Conservative / Libertarian film festival in the People’s Republic of Hollywood –

The festival was organized by a husband-wife duo of young filmmakers, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, and underwritten by the Foundation for Free Markets, which likes privatizing Social Security, cutting taxes and issuing school vouchers. …Murty, an aspiring actress, says the impetus was, in part, the cool reception she and her husband have received in Hollywood for their own screenplays and their film “Terminal Island,” which premiered at the festival.

Continue reading →

Tunku vs. Arundhati

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(from the tipline – thanks JT!) This sort of stuff is usually a tad too political for SM BUT, since it’s a desi-writer taking on another desi-writer, I figured it was well within Sepia Mutiny’s posting guidelines 😉

The fact that it’s by a WSJ staff writer I follow from time to time – Tunku Varadarajan – & that he provides a BEAUTIFUL skewering of Arundhati Roy was merely the icing on the cake –

When a friend learned that I was pondering a piece critical of Ms. Roy … he e-mailed me reprovingly to ask whether that would not be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But second thoughts can strike at the speed of light. No sooner had he hit the “send” button than he hit it again: “There are certain fish, however, in certain barrels, that cannot be ignored.” …A certain segment of the American intelligentsia connects gleefully with exotic leftists like Ms. Roy. In fact, the Ms. Roys of our age, and their fans and subsidy-givers in the West, enjoy a touching symbiosis. Arundhati Roy, I’d venture to say, is George Soros’s political poster girl. Ms. Roy and her type pay the ultimate compliment to America by holding that all world events occur at America’s behest and that the six billion non-Americans on the planet are but helpless pawns, incapable of doing anything–especially anything bad–without Uncle Sam’s imprimatur.

Those are just a few of the plentiful nuggets in a very well written & succinct piece.