The “venerable” Hindustan Times newspaper had a very interesting article posted to its website earlier today titled “Brawn and Bikinis.” It briefly profiled two very unusual Indian Americans who will surely capture the interest and imagination of Sepia Mutiny readers:

In further evidence of their remarkable integration into the US mainstream, Indian Americans made their first mark in two facets of US popular culture: an iconic swimsuit calendar and the American football championship game.

A Harvard University student has become the first Indian-American to be featured in the magazine Sports Illustrated’s celebrated swimsuit issue. Sonia Dara appears in the 2010 issue that went on sale in the US on Tuesday.

Another Indian-American made immigrant history on Sunday by becoming the first from the community to be on a team competing in the Superbowl, the American football championship game and the country’s biggest sporting event. That was John Singh Gill of the losing team, the Indianapolis Colts. [Link]

Hmmmm. Those two items seem awfully familiar! Didn’t I just read about both these topics somewhere else on the internet this past week?? Oh. Right. I read about them in two of the last 5 blog posts right here on SM.

You see, Anirudh Bhattacharyya decided to simply take two of our latest posts and combine them into one of his original stories without mentioning or citing SM as the source for the idea. At SM we get ideas for stories from lots of places, including mainstream newspapers. But at least we always cite them. Let us fisk some more, shall we? Take the next paragraph:

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, first published in 1964, is an iconic American publication. It has served as a launching pad for many future supermodels, including Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum. The issue attracts tens of millions of dollars in advertising.

This paragraph was paraphrased and spliced together straight out of the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for the SI Swimsuit issue. Everything else in the article seems to be lifted without attribution from other sources already published on the web. I hope the Hindustan Times isn’t paying for this mimicry. They should just pay us the money instead since our writers are doing the work. Shame shame. I know your name.

Update: The journalist’s name sounded familiar so I searched my email inbox. I had spoken to Mr. Bhattacharyya back in 2005. He wanted to interview us about Sepia Mutiny.

Hi Abhi,

I got your email from [name deleted]… I’m working on an article on desi blogs and wanted to look at sepiamutiny in that context. Is there a number you can be reached at? And what day and time is usually good for you?

Thanks

Anirudh Bhattacharyya
Editor, mantram
Consulting Editor, South Asia World

So again, we are absolutely thrilled when someone wants to publish a “mainstream” story based on an idea they got from one or more of our posts. Just cite the fact that your idea came from here is all we ask. It’s only fair

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Update: Maintenance is done. If you notice anything out of the ordinary let us know in the comments!

Kunjan and I will be doing some site maintenance tonight after 10 pm EST. During this time you may not be able to post comments.

This is a major technical upgrade for us. As long as things don’t go really bad (fingers crossed), you shouldn’t notice any difference tomorrow morning. As part of this upgrade, we may also be moving our server (again) to an undisclosed location in the United States (as part of our security measures) and so a DNS update can cause some of you to be looking at the site on the old server (depending on your ISP’s service or where you are in the world).

We will update this post once everything is back to normal. I’ll leave the comments open. After maintenance, please let us know here if you notice anything broken (if comments are working) or email me at chaitan [at] sepiamutiny.com.

Thank you for your support and patience while we continue to keep all the pieces working. Continue reading →

This morning I experienced a personal mini-crisis. When I went to apply my eye cream, specially purchased on my last trip to India I realized – I had just run out. It was like one of those scenes in a movie where time stood still and zoomed in close on the empty container.

Desi girls are brown. Which means that our skin has a high level of pigmentation, unlike the pigmentation of the majority of girls in America. This means that there are probably a few common experiences that we share. At some point in our teenage make-up experimentation stage we were told to purchase the generically colored “tan” foundation and/or concealer despite it not matching our skin tone at all. We wore a ghastly bright red lipstick because someone said it looked good with our skin. Finally is the struggle to find the perfect eye cream to battle those undereye bags that a large percentage of South Asian women are genetically predisposed to and that none of the products sold here cater to.

East Asian women have Shiseido. Ambi is a line of product catering to women of color for lotions and creams. But the Desi girl doesn’t have much else, and a walk through CVS or Sephora or Nordstrom’s makeup counters is liable to give me a panic attack.

Never to fear. In my panicked frenzy this morning, I stumbled across two blogs to the rescue: An Indian’s Makeup Blog and The Indian Make-Up Diva.

Here’s what I love about the blogs: 1) These are Desi American women writing the blogs, so all of the products they use can be found here. 2) They try and review the products with a Desi girl slant. 3) They give easy to understand instructions on how to put on make up. 4) They are written with wit and charm. Continue reading →

Update: If you are seeing this, the move is complete.

We interrupt this blog to bring you this notice that Sepia Mutiny site will be down for maintenance between 2am – 4am EST on 8/26/2009. This includes DNS updates of our domain which would mean that for some users, depending on your location across the globe, the site may not work for up to 24-48 hours. 🙁

Please bear with us during this transition. Back to the real bloggers … Continue reading →

Our newest guest blogger comes to us from (yes, you guessed it) Philadephia. She is a journalist and blogger who many of you are probably familiar with by her comments on SM, or by reading her blog:

PhillyGrrl is your (almost) typical phillygrrl. She likes talking about Philadelphia all the time. It got a little annoying. Especially after she sent out 50+ forwards every day, annoying her friends and relatives to no small end. Now she annoys the general public with the random things in her head. She also writes for uwishunu and Phawker. [Link]

Don’t worry. She will not be writing only about desis in Philadelphia. She will probably cover some from Pittsburgh as well. I also expect her to reveal some interesting links between South Asian Americans and the Continental Congress. Please join me in welcoming PhillyGrrl.

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…It is because our admins are trying to repel what appears to be a Denial of Service attack against the website. We must be doing something right . Personally, I suspect the North Korean government which has never liked us. Please be patient while our great back-end team works a soultion.

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Dear readers,

We reached our fundraising goal in about 48 hours and we now have enough in our account to pay our server costs for a little over a year. Chaitan will be removing the Paypal icon later tonight. We would like to extend our deep appreciation to the dozens of you who sent in a contribution whatever the amount! We will strive to live up to the trust you have placed in us.

I would also like to single out the following individuals who sent in especially large sums:

-Our own website admin Chaitan

-Gurminder M.

-Susan F.

-Katherine W.

-Navdeep G.

-Jayanand V.

-AK P.

And for those of you who have sent a check in the mail, I thank you in advance. Any amount we receive over what we need for this next year will simply be applied to the following year (so it will be longer before we ask again).

Thanks again to all the wonderful readers, including those who have given in the past.

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It is time once again for us bloggers at Sepia Mutiny to extend our empty hats and ask for donations to keep this blog running for another year. Remember, every time you visit our site it costs us money (my Amex Blue is bleeding red right now). We don’t bother you guys with any money-making ads on this site, nor do we sell out to the man and write what he asks us to write for cold cash. Do you really want us to plaster marriage ads all over the blog?

Much like NPR and PBS hold an annual pledge drive, we are asking you to donate whatever you can via our Paypal link. Keep in mind that we haven’t asked for any donations in over a year. If you don’t want to use Paypal but would rather mail in a check, then write me at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com for a mailing address. Donations will keep our website ad-free and crap-free for a year provided we can reach our target of $1000. That shouldn’t be difficult if some of the 7-10 thousand readers we get a day send in a pittance.

In the past year we have redesigned our site and have additional tweaks in the works based on your feedback. Within 24 hours you will also see us featuring artwork by South Asian artists. We would like to continue to make improvements but can only do so with your help now.

In addition to your donations now, over the course of year you can also help us out by buying a book, music, or other item you see written about on our site through our Amazon a-Store link (we’ll soon put up a permanent link). It will give us a nominal commission on each item sold that goes toward paying the bills so as to increase the time between pledge drives. SM can also be download for your Kindle.

Thanks in advance from all of us, and let us know if you have any questions by using our “Contact” link.