Author Archives: vinod

The Strange, Twisted Tale of Priya Venkatesan, PhD

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The blogosphere is alight with the story of a (former) professor at Dartmouth named Priya Venkatesan. Teaching is a tough job and I have the highest regard for some of the amazing teachers I’ve had the privilege of learning from over the years. Priya, however, is apparently not quite in that class (pun intended).

The WSJ provides one summary of the case –

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

What praytell were these unruly students doing to our poor teacher? And, aside from her personal ethnicity, is there a desi angle to the story? Continue reading →

Conquest, Culture, and India

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I’m in the midst of biz trip hell and one book I’m plowing through is Thomas Sowell‘s Conquests & Cultures. The book is part of a trilogy where Sowell brings his considerable scholarship to the relationship between culture and socio-economic outcomes across a wide span of history & the globe. This is a mighty controversial topic, to say the least, and one which Sowell engages with aplomb.

Clearly, one factor which has shaped the fate of groups over time is, of course, Conquest. And Sowell isn’t afraid to discuss how this dynamic played out for both Worse *and* for Better.

Now, we need to be very clear that by pointing out the Better, Sowell is emphatically NOT making a case for future Conquests of Cultures. Nor is he delving into whether Conquests are / were Morally Good. And, for that matter neither am I (just to forestall some of the comments a post like this generates – let’s try to keep the discussion Type C rather than descend into Type M. One can credit how the K-T extinction helped give rise to Humanity, for example, without calling it Good or “wishing” for another one; same with the British Empire).

What he is noting, however, is that just as many of the leaps and bounds of progress in tech can be traced to conflict & competition (WWII and the Space Race, to pick a few quickie examples), cultures are similarly fluid and subject to evolution. Proof of this & a tremendous source of historical experiments to this effect is Conquest [pg ix]-

The underlying theme of all these books is that racial, ethnic, and national groups have their own respective cultures without which their economic and social histories cannot be understood. Modest as this claim may seem, it collides head-on with the more widely accepted visions in which the fates of minority groups are determined by “society” around them, which society is therefore both causally and morally responsible for the misfortunes peculiar to the less fortunate of these groups — though apparently not responsible for the good fortune of more successful minority groups. This trilogy also collides head-on with prevailing doctrines about “celebrating” and preserving cultral differences. Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.

In other words –> Culture is a moving target & is responsible for much of our socio-economic fate(s). One source of Punctuated Equilibrium in Culture’s evolution is/was Conquest. Let’s learn how it got us to where we are today & use those lessons + our volition to further evolve moving forward…

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Pose Your Questions to Amit Singh…

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A few weeks ago, I got a chance to interview Amit Singh who is a currently a GOP primary candidate for Virginia’s 8th District congressional seat. The interview covered a variety of topics and generated some interesting comments & discussion amongst the Mutiny. One specific request was an opportunity for other folks to hit him with questions of their own.

I pinged Amit and not only did he enjoy reading the discussion spawned by the interview but he was pretty interested in doing more Q&A with us. So, we’re going to use this post for other readers to send their questions to Amit.

I do wanna set a few groundrules –

  • STRUCTURE: We’ve all got day jobs (this is a jetlagged-in-a-foreign-hotel blogpost, for ex.) so rather than a Live Q&A (which requires realtime moderation), I’m going to use this blogpost to compile questions from folks and present them to Amit who’ll hit ’em in a subsequent post. Schedules permitting, we may try to do some Live Q&A afterwards.
  • TIMING: Between Amit’s campaign schedule and my work/travel schedule we’ll give commentor’s here ~1 week to post questions and about a week or so later, I’ll get the responses up and posted.
  • MODERATION: Because politics can bring out the nasty side of a very small number folks, it’s worth being pretty direct here – If your question / comment is a personal attack, rude or insulting, SM Intern will delete it (yep, our busy intern was forced to pounce on a few in the last interview with Amit; others were borderline). If it’s *really* rude or insulting, you get banned. One can disagree without being disagreeable. And, we’ll try our best but, in all likelihood, not all questions will get addressed.

Fire away….

Continue reading →

Too Many Desi Docs

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Regular SM Commentor Razib has a great post on one of his blogs about the racial mix of doctors in the USofA. What instigated a fresh take on the classic question was an article in SFGate decrying the lack of “minorities” in the medical profession –

A new study on physicians in California shows a glaring gap between the number of doctors of color compared with the state’s ethnically diverse population, especially among African Americans and Latinos.

At the same time, the state has a disproportionate number of Asian and white doctors, according to the UCSF study, which focuses on doctor ethnicity and language fluency.

The linear implication, of course is that if one group is under-represented, it must mean that other groups are over-represented and therefore must get penalized to address the imbalance. Advocates of measures to address this directly assert that minority under-representation is the product of historical transgressions by the over-represented majority. So, the penalty is a form of inter-generational justice. Continue reading →

The Truth about Cancer

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Hey Mutineers – 1H’08 biz travel has me on the road so I missed the first airing of a documentary that many of you will be interested in.

The Truth About Cancer is a PBS documentary highlighting the current status of the War on Cancer and conveys the personal stories of several cancer patients including our own Vinay. Some of Vinay’s program segments are viewable on the web here, here and here.

VINAY CHAKRAVARTHY: This is to donor ID 068842004. Don’t know who you are, but you’ve just done something great for myself and for humanity by giving a life back, and I really, really, really am grateful to you and indebted to you forever.

Thankfully, my trusty Tivo has found at least one more airing of the entire program in the Bay Area and the program’s website lists repeat showings in other markets. Set your DVR’s.

The Truth About Cancer

Filmmaker Linda Garmon documents stories from patients, doctors, researchers and patient advocates at the same hospitals where her husband was treated for cancer.

Sat 4/19 3:00 AM

9 KQED

It’s a tiny bit of a non-sequiter but not quite worth it’s own post; as long as your setting your Tivo’s etc., Kal Penn is on Leno tonight! Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Amit Singh Sits Down With the Mutiny

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p>Election 08: The Mutiny Inquires and the Candidates Respond. Well, one of them anyway .

Last month, we profiled Amit Singh who’s running for a congressional seat representing Virginia’s 8th district. To get there, he’s first fighting for the GOP nomination against Mark Ellmore on June 10th. The winner of that race will in turn do battle against long serving Democratic incumbent, Jim Moran in November.

Amit recently (and quite graciously) took some time out of his busy campaign and day job to answer some questions via email. The Q&A is below the fold and spans the gamut from his positions, to why he’s a Republican, to his observations on Desi-American politics, down to some of his thoughts on controversial national issues like illegal aliens and Iraq.

In addition to answering our questions, Amit also pointed me at a few of his other, recent interviews including this video and some updates on his website including a WaPo profile. For example, he recently took a position similar to McCain in pledging to avoid the widespread practice of earmarks – a cornerstone of pork barrel politics, and particularly so at the local congressional district level.

His video interview on Darshan reveals him to be a well spoken, thoughtful individual in RealTime and he gives us some tantalizing clues about his “intelligence community” job –

“the rest of the world is adopting free market principles… including India and China and the United States seems to be going in the opposite direction.”

“we have a very young district, I myself am 33 and our average voter is 32”

“my niche is building prototypes for the intelligence community… we do a lot of work for soldiers that are deploying out to Iraq and Afghanistan that have an evolving threat. IEDs, for example, are consistently changing and maturing so we have to stay ahead of the game…”

– Amit Singh on DarhsanTV.com

Continue reading →

What Microloans Miss… and then some

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James Suroweiki of “Wisdom of the Crowds” fame has a piece that tries to reality check the current enthusiasm for micro-loans.

Mohammed Yunus. Good vibes.

Suroweiki clearly agrees that loans are a Good Thing by nearly any measure, BUT their ability to solve problems of the scale required in India is doubtful –

There’s no doubt that microfinance does a tremendous amount of good, yet there are also real limits to what it can accomplish. Microloans make poor borrowers better off. But, on their own, they often don’t do much to make poor countries richer.

This isn’t because microloans don’t work; it’s because of how they work. The idealized view of microfinance is that budding entrepreneurs use the loans to start and grow businesses–expanding operations, boosting inventory, and so on. The reality is more complicated.

The core issues are 2 fold. First, Microloans generally don’t go into job-creating ventures. Second, the ventures that really do create jobs are often far outside of micro-loan territory and subject to many other local constraints (for ex., corruption, infra, etc.)….

Suroweiki touches only a bit on a more subtle issue, however — the “meta-narrative” and lessons learned from microfinance on capitalism and charity. This last issue has sorta been nagging at me since I saw Muhammed Yunus speak in San Francisco back in January (its worth ipod-ing the MP3) and I’ve been reading up on microloans quite a bit since Yunus won his Nobel Prize. Continue reading →

In your yard I am the Ferengi man…

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You haven’t been a web-lifestyle desi unless you’ve at least once come across the hundreds of Tunak Tunak video parodies out there. Wikipedia very aptly describes the smackdown to his haters that Tunak Tunak represented for Daler –

The “strange” dancing and presence of only the singer in this video was a response to criticism from the world of Bhangra pop. Many critics at the time complained that his music was popular due to his videos which featured beautiful women dancing; his response was to create a video that featured only himself. As he predicted, the song was still a huge success, but the phenomenon of foreign language and unusual dancing made the video a cult hit in other countries as well.

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p>There are as many parody videos as there are pet theories for why Daler inspires such devotation and imitation (and in my case, admiration) but I think I’ve found my new favorite

This one’s made by some dude named Buffalax trying to figure out how to sing along to Daler and providing his own transcription along the way. As a non-Punjabi, I find his work incredibly helpful –

Continue reading →

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Post Vegas Wrapup

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Hey folks – A quick note to say thanks to the mutineers who came out last week for the first ever Las Vegas SM Meetup.

Our first target, V-Bar, turned out to be a bit too loud and over the top for my / our convention weary self. So, we grabbed a drink across the way at David Burke and hung out for a couple of hours….

In attendance –

  • Chi_Diva – representing Chicago and new to the depravity that was Vegas.
  • Arun – like a total Roca, he’d just flown in a few hours before but couldn’t let a meetup go by.
  • Amit – An Old Skool friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few years and managed to get married and have a baby girl in the interim.
  • Sandhya – who joined us at the beginning but was swiftly whisked away by coworkers who feared our swarthiness.
  • Dale – Amit’s friend / co-worker there to keep the peace

It was good seeing you all and particularly impressive that you guys came out on such short notice. Chi_diva in particular gets props for suggesting the meetup in the first place…

Continue reading →

Vegas ; V-Bar ; 1030pm ; TONIGHT

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Hey CTIA-ing mutineers – Just a quick note that it looks like our impromptu Las Vegas Meetup will be 1030pm – midnight, Wednesday night @ the V-Bar in the Venetian hotel.

No cover, no line, no list. And may I add, no pretension, snobbery or attitude. V Bar recently went where precious few clubs have gone before by celebrating its five-year anniversary. Many a Vegas nightspot’s lifespan can be clocked from grand opening to grand closing in mere months or in the time it takes to enjoy just one cocktail. But as with a fine wine, cheese or an unpaid parking ticket, this small bar has gained complexity over time.

Sounds perfect for a bunch of convention-weary mutineers

Continue reading →