Category Archives: Community

A Well-Educated Snob Gets on a New York Train…

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Q: When is it all right to ask someone, “Do you know what schools I went to?”

A: Never. You just negated any glory you may have been seeking when you left that preposition chilling at the end of your question.

B: Never. What kind of an insecure kundi does that?

C: If– and only if– you randomly stumble upon a celebratory gathering where such information is relevant…like at Gold Cup, where different tents are hosted by different institutions of higher learning. Trust me, the UC tent was much nicer than the jokes hosted by Bates or Rollins.

D: Okay, one more: when you run into another alum who is temporarily unaware of what you both have in common. For example, if I ever see someone getting in a car festooned with both UC Davis and GW stickers (not bloody likely), I reserve the right to ask “Guess where I went to school?” in an effusive and ebullient manner, because those are the two places I have degrees from, too! WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

And with that admission of my middling alma maters, I have outed myself as someone who has no right to brag about her academic achievements. Good thing I live in swampy, sleepy old D.C. and not New York, where train conductors are sometimes interrogated by outraged ticket-holders who are really, really invested in where they paid for a degree.

I’m referring to the strange case of Hermon K. Raju, erstwhile Metro North straphanger and last week’s favorite viral-panni-on-tape. Raju was riding a Metro North train when other passengers allegedly complained about her loud cell phone conversation, which was purportedly profane. A conductor warned Raju about her disruptive language and the young woman exploded, defending her right to a “private conversation” while asking “Do you know how educated I am?” Raju also dared the rail employee to stop the train and asked for a refund before threatening that she would never ride Metro North again. To her credit, the Metro North employee remained calm despite the torrent of education-fu aimed her way. Raju, on the other hand…well, she was being taped surreptitiously on an iPhone.

Let’s get two things straight, right now.

One. I HATE people who yammer on their phones on public transportation. Here in D.C. no matter which subway car or bus I board, there’s always some idiot yelling, “What? I can’t hear you. Hold on, what?” Newsflash, dick. They can’t hear you because you are on a train. Yet WE can all hear you because we’re trapped on said train along with your entitled, self-centered, oblivious ass. Talking on the train is one of my biggest urban pet peeves. Please baby Jesus and Saint Anthony, prevent cell phone conversations from ever being allowed on airplanes. My cross-country treks home are already too infrequent and barely tolerable as they are; a cabin full of selfish morons discussing nothing important on their iPhones sounds like the third layer of hell. Continue reading →

Going Back to Cali

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On the heel’s of my national Desi post, and Razib’s international Desi post, I got curious. What about California? That is a state where data was released for “Asian Indians only” by the Census data so far. A friend asked me for California numbers over the weekend (he wants to set up a practice in California and wanted to see where Desis were living – I never would have thought to use census data for that). To make it visually easier for him (and me) I dropped the data for California cities with Asian Indian populations on a google map.


View Asian Indian Population in California in a larger map

It’s no fancy GIS map nor does the data really tell you much beyond population and concentration – but it was quick and simple. The purple markers represent the top ten cities with Asian Indian populations and the yellow markers are for everything above a population of 3,000. The blue markers are for cities with high concentrations of Asian Indians but did not have a population of Asian Indians over 3,000 people. Once again, this map is for people that marked “Asian Indian only” – it does not account for mixed race, nor does it account for other South Asians like Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc…

To me what was the most surprising were the really small cities in the central valley that have a relatively large concentrations of Asian Indians. I’d love to do a Cali road trip based on this map, and hit up the Indian restaurants along the way. Because I imagine, where there’s an Indian population, there’s a saag paneer joint not too far away. Is there an app for that? Continue reading →

Where the browns be internationally

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This is an American-focused weblog, but the internet knows no borders, so there are browns from all over who leave comments and post. It’s interesting to get different perspectives (OK, most of the time!). But on the heels of Taz’s post on the 2010 US Census data release I thought it would be interesting to revisit how “South Asians” are distributed outside of South Asia. To do that I had to look around for ethnic data on a selection of nations with large South Asian populations.

There are some qualifiers here. Since the non-Indian South Asian data for the USA isn’t released yet, I just looked at Indian Americans. This is “good enough for government work” in the USA I think because the brown community is overwhelmingly Indian origin. In contrast that would be a really bad approximation in the United Kingdom, where half of the brown community is non-Indian (this includes into the Indian class those who arrived from East Africa I believe). The distinction between Indian and non-Indian also gets into the “not-even-wrong” category if you are looking at the West Indies, where most South Asians arrived before partition, and so were all “East Indian” no matter where they were from (though I know that in places like Mauritius there is sometimes a post facto identification with post-partition nation-states, often based on religious divisions). Finally, for some Gulf Arab nations the demographic data is nebulous and hard to get. Part of this is due to the fact that the South Asian Diaspora in places like Saudi Arabia is quite transient, and the probability of actually becoming a citizen is low. I couldn’t find Saudi data easily, though it seems likely that there are several million South Asian residents of Saudi Arabia at any given moment. But it seems agreed upon that the United Arab Emirates is about half South Asian, and this community is arguably the most rooted, even if they don’t hold citizenship, so I’m including it in the comparisons.

Below are two scatterplots which show the absolute numbers of browns vs. the % of browns in a given nation. The second plot is log-transformed percentage so you can compare the proportions at the low end of the scale. Continue reading →

Where My Desis At…So Far?

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Two million South Asian Americans. At least, those are the figures we’ve been working with since the 2000 Census and many of us have been on the edge of our seats to see how these numbers have changed in the past 10 years. The US Census is slowing releasing their data and this week they released numbers the larger Asian subcategories under Asian. Meaning, we now have access to some “Asian Indian only” data for SOME of the states. This didn’t keep the media from publishing findings, and I spent some time trying to suss out their source.

A little surfing on American FactFinder (actually, a really inordinate amount of time surfing – they’ve updated the site and it’s not very intuitive). It turns out the South Asian American population has grown – of the Asian American categories, Asian Indians are the second largest only after Chinese. The South Asian population is at 2,802,676 and these will most likely change as the 2010 numbers get published on the census site.

So. Where exactly are the Desis at?

Concentration of Asian Indians v.2.JPG

I took the population data available and did a county break down of all the Asian Indians residing and divided that by the total population. Please note, since the data is still being released in waves, we are still missing a few states to this analysis – Arkansas, New Jersey and Texas and likely some more. Clearly the data for New Jersey and Texas will change the findings. Also keep in mind that the sub-categories for Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc… have not been published yet.

At 11.1% concentration, we have Sutter County, CA listed at the top. Home to Yuba City and a long history of Sikh American farmers, this should come as no big surprise, though the percentage point is rather high. Santa Clara County is next on the list and is considered the “Silicon Valley”, including landmarks such as Stanford University and Google. Third on the list is of course, Queens County, which is where the Indian neighborhood Jackson Heights is.

Largest Populations of Asian Indians v.2.JPG

If you look at raw population count alone, Santa Clara County is number one, Queens County is number two and Los Angeles County is number three. Continue reading →

Not So Special

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HomelandSecurity.jpgI wasn’t always a an activist in the South Asian community. I got my grounding in environmental organizing and it took the events around September 11th, 2001 to really catapult me into trying to figure out how to create that political voice for this community. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since the capture/death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday night.

One of the first, if not the first, forms of advocacy I partook in for the South Asian community was around “Special Registration” otherwise known as National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). I was living Washington D.C. at the time, and we would go around to Pakistani and Indian restaurants and grocery stores and drop off 3-fold flyers at the front counter informing the community of the new and xenophobic law. It wasn’t much, but at the time it was so important that we let the South Asian community know what their changed rights were in light of the then newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Special Registration required boys and men, ages 16 to 45 from a list of 25 countries with large Muslim populations to register at immigration offices or ports of entry. As a result, 84,000 males were fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned in long interviews based on their countries of origin, more than 13,000 were put into deportation proceedings, and 2,800 were detained. [san]

There were so many stories I heard of where South Asian boys and men in the community had to flee and some scary stories where people simply disappeared. Only later were they found to have been detained.

The impact was felt especially by working-class South Asian, Arab, Sikh and Muslim communities in New York City; the economic impact of losing fathers, sons, and husbands meant that many families suddenly faced homelessness. The Muslim community in Coney Island is said to have lost a full third of its population almost overnight. In its later phases, NSEERS focused on U.S. ports of entry, with the same haphazard scrutiny and interrogations. [illume]

On April 28th 2011, after nine years of “Special Registration”, the government has quietly suspended the law. Continue reading →

The Cinematic Soundtrack of Karsh Kale

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cinema.jpgEver feel like you need a cinematic soundtrack to your day to day life? Karsh Kale’s Cinema may be for you.

The album exploded on the scene last week, going straight to number #1 in the charts. No surprise considering Karsh Kale has been a revolutionary voice to the on the scene for quite sometime. Kale got his start in a rock band, is known for his phenomenal tabla skills, worked in collaboration with the talented Anoushka Shankar in 2007 and most recently has been using his skills to soundtrack movies, such as with Ajay Naidu’s Ashes. It’s no surprise then, with his recent film scoring experiences that he chose to name his latest release, Cinema.

As one of the first groundbreaking genre busting artists in what is now an established musical fusion genre, Karsh Kale can only be referred to as legendary. The album Cinema takes listeners on a cinematic journey, each song reflecting a different emotion and journey. But instead of telling you about the music, how about listening to the music and deciding for yourself. And of course, download the song **Mallika Jam* for free below. The entire album is available on iTunes.

What makes Karsh Kale tick? I wanted to know. Check out the interview with Karsh Kale, and just to mix it up, I asked him to answer in triplicates. Read it below!

What are three words you’d use to describe your 4th solo album, Cinema?

Progressive, Nostalgic, Journey

What were your top three favorite moments in creating this album, Cinema?

  • The day the art work by Archan Nair arrived.
  • The day I finished the final mix w Illinton.
  • The day the album was released at reached #1 on Tunes World Chart. Continue reading →

Summer of Solidarity

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final1.jpgDClogo.jpgWhen I was a teen, I knew that I wanted to make a difference in the world. I just didn’t know how. I was lucky enough to attend a week long summer campaign training when I was in college which catapulted me into the world of advocacy and organizing in the environmental movement. It wasn’t until years later that similarly themed advocacy camps for the South Asian American youth community started popping up. I was grateful for my journey, but always wish I could have had access to more at a younger age.

This July there are two 4-day camps for Desi teens, both camps taking youth through a curriculum around identity, social advocacy and connecting with local activists. The first one is DC Desi Summer, based in Washington DC. The second is one I’ve been volunteering with, the Bay Area Solidarity Summer (BASS) which is a project of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA).

On July 22nd, South Asian American teenagers from across the San Francisco Bay Area will convene for a life-changing experience. The youth will be attending the first ever Bay Area Solidarity Summer (BASS), a four-day leadership camp for youth of South Asian heritage seeking to learn about progressive issues, gain organizing skills, connect with other South Asian activists, and develop themselves into leaders. The all-inclusive camp will provide space for young people to learn skills on how to be a social activist, as well as learn about issues affecting the South Asian community both locally and globally.

BASS is open to youth of South Asian heritage ranging in age from 14 to 19 years old. The camp costs only $50, which covers all housing and food expenses for four days and three nights. Held in the beautiful Center for Third World Organizing Training and Retreat Center (often described as the “CTWO Mansion”), the intense camp will cover a wide range of issues such as Creative Arts and Action, Racial Profiling, Hip Hop Revolutionaries, and Environmental Justice. An important component of the curriculum will be a look back at the 100 years of history of South Asian Bay Area student activism.[bass] Continue reading →

Sterilizing History [Updated]

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AZ memorial.jpgWhat is up with Arizona? There was SB 1070, and the shooting of Gabby Giffords. And now, there is this. (via SALDEF)

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is signing a bill to remove Balbir Singh Sodhi’s name from the state’s 9/11 memorial and sell his memorial plaque as scrap metal. [saldef]

Balbir Singh Sodhi was the one of the first victim to a post 9/11 hate crime.

[He]was a Mesa, Arizona, gas station owner who was murdered in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He made headlines because he was the first of several cases across the United States that were reported to the police as acts of retaliation for the terrorist attacks

On September 15, 2001, Frank Roque shot him five times, killing him instantly. Roque, who apparently wanted revenge for September 11, confused him for a person of Arab ethnicity because of the clothes he wore, his turban, and his beard. Within 25 minutes of his death, the Phoenix police reported four further attacks on people who either were Middle Easterners or who dressed with clothes thought to be worn by Middle Easterners. [wiki]

How could anyone object that Sodhi’s death was not a directly connected to the events of September 11th?

The bill, which passed both houses on party-line votes, was sponsored by Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who said Monday that he did only a cursory Internet search on Singh Sodhi’s murder. Kavanagh said it was unclear to him that the shooting was directly related to 9/11.

“He was the victim of a madman. He was not a 9/11 victim,” Kavanagh said. “I don’t mean to (dismiss) what happened to this individual. I don’t mean to trivialize it.” Continue reading →

A nuanced brown place in the world

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Recently my friend Michelle re-tweeted this tweet you see to the left from Aziz Ansari. When I was in college some Indian students would play cricket in the public spaces I had to cross to get between classes, and they would consistently stop what they were doing and give me an inviting stare down. Finally I asked them what was up, and one of the players wondered if I played cricket. I explained not only did I not play cricket, but I had no idea what they were doing most of the time. One of my interlocutors quipped that I looked like I should play cricket. I had to laugh at that, and went on my way.

So first, congratulations to India! I recall how excited Americans were when we won the Women’s Soccer World Cup in 1999, when frankly most Americans didn’t even follow the sport. I can only imagine the euphoria in India due to victory in a sporting activity which is near the center of national consciousness.

But this gets me to a broader issue: as an Indian American, Aziz Ansari serves as a representative in the minds of his fellow Americans of India. In several of the comedic references I’ve seen to his ethnicity Aziz seems to express curiosity as to the farcical nature that his representation of a billion people sometimes takes on. For example, when Slumdog Millionaire was in the public eye people would apparently discuss it with him constantly (Aziz naturally expressed wonder at what the world must be for like for white people, who are the subject of so many films!).

Continue reading →

Tiny Mom’s Kidney Donor Fired from Job

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Remember at the beginning of this month when I told you the amazing story of Amy Donohue and how she decided to donate one of her kidneys to the mother of a Twitter acquaintance? As you’ll recall, Kirti Dwivedi put out a desperate call for kidney donors via Twitter and Facebook after her mother’s kidneys started functioning at less 20%. Amy, who Kirti had only met once at a function, stepped up to offer one of her kidneys in February 2011 and Project #TinyFabKidney was born. Since then, the two have met each other’s families and planned various fund-raising activities together as Amy has undergone testing to determine if she’s a match. A few weeks ago, Kirti emailed me with the good news that Amy was indeed a match and that surgery was scheduled for April 19th! This past Tuesday, however, Amy recieved some devastating news. Her company told her they were letting her go because she hadn’t met her sales goals. Today CBS 5 in Phoenix put up this story:

Kirti said she was shocked when she learned Donohue lost her job.

“Amy is donating a kidney to my mom and she lost her job because of spending time testing for it. It’s really hard to understand how that could happen, and it’s hard not to feel guilty or upset,” said Kirti Dwivedi.

Amy estimated she used about seven sick and personal days in the past couple of months to go through testing. She had held her job for approximately seven months.

“I take full responsibility. How can I not say I’ve been distracted? I’ve got a big thing going on in my life,” said Donohue.

She said while she does not want her job back, she wishes her company had handled her situation differently, considering the circumstances.

“Sometimes, accommodations need to be made for people when something huge is going on,” said Donohue

Amy has written up her own version of her firing over on her personal blog. Personally, I would have thought an employer would appreciate the value of a person with Amy’s courage and empathy and try to accommodate such heroics. But for some people, it’s all about the bottom line.

If you’re interested in learning more about Project #TinyFabKidney and sending your support to Amy, Kirti and Tiny Mom, you can find them on Facebook. And you can donate here. Continue reading →