Category Archives: Blog

Ike comes knocking (updates: 2)

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12:46p.m. CST

There is really no explicit South Asian American angle to this post other than the fact the Sepia Mutiny’s U.S. Southern Region Bureau is located in Houston. Houston also has the largest desi population in the U.S. outside of NY/NJ, California, and Chicago. I have evacuated all of our staff but, as the bureau chief, have decided to stay behind and blog updates on this thread for as long as I have electrical power. Right now the eye of Ike is on a path to travel almost directly over our bureau.

I was looking for a bucket of food yesterday but the lines at the stores were too long. I was also looking for a shotgun in case I had to protect myself but I don’t know how to use one anyways so that was probably pointless (I’m not as cool as Omar unfortunately). Other than that I am just going to hunker down (Texans like this phrase) with my camera and video camera and document as much as I can (safely of course). When the storm passes I will try and see if there are any volunteer opportunities for people in more need. Luckily SM’s bureau is located on the second floor of a complex and is relatively well protected and just beyond the surge zone, so my mom is way more worried than I am. Here is the view of downtown from the parking garage:

View of Houston skyline: 12:30 p.m. CST, 9/12/08

I’ve been checking out StormPulse.com and the SciGuy at the Houston Chronicle for the best technical information on Ike. Stay tuned for more updates on this thread.

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DNC Day 4: Strangers in a Strange Land

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Our whole time here, while we’ve been blogging, nobody has really asked Ravi or I what we do. I know what I am suggesting is silly. Why should they? We are Sepia Mutiny. We blog. A lot of them read the blog. What else is there other than that we are bloggers here to report? But that is not what we are and there is an important point here so bear with me. Blogging is just a hobby. It was created out of nothing four years ago and my personal objective was to gain access to this convention. Access to “power,” so that we could tell the story from the inside. We are still outsiders here though, both at the fundraising luncheons and in the press room where people keep bitching about how the celebrity press (Couric and Cooper) gets treated better. We are here because we claimed this spot. We wanted it bad enough because we see the potential our community has if they get more involved…and not by simply raising money. A life in politics where money is important isn’t the only way in.

Ravi is about to enter college at Harvard next week and major in applied math. I have degrees in aerospace engineering and geology. We are not bundlers, politicians, or journalists. We aren’t getting paid a dime for any of this and we aren’t asking for a dime for our posts. We are doing what we do because we have something to say and something we believe in. For those of you sitting at home watching the coverage and thinking you have to be rich or an important politician to participate in this process I’d like to point you to an article about the headline speaker tonight. Sometimes you just show up and think on your feet because you believe in yourself and what you want to do:

The Democratic National Convention is akin to a longstanding family reunion. And eight years ago, Barack Obama was not on the guest list… He was drained of money and confidence, fresh from a punishing defeat in a Congressional primary race here. Even the Illinois delegation did not have room at the party’s gathering in Los Angeles for Mr. Obama, then a 39-year-old lawyer, who had annoyed some state Democrats for not waiting his turn to seek a higher office.

Never mind all that. Mr. Obama bought a plane ticket and headed west anyway.

He persuaded a clerk at the car rental agency to overlook the unpaid balance on his credit card, and he made his way to the festivities. He was not a delegate — not even close to being a superdelegate — and without a floor credential he had all the sway of the junior state senator that he was.

“I have no memory of him there,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, recalled in an interview the other day. “It was a disastrous trip for him…”

When party activists gathered in Chicago to nominate Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996, Mr. Obama was making his first run for political office, but he did not have enough clout to get full access to the convention. Instead, he concluded that high-dollar breakfasts and dinners seemed to lock voters out of the system, grousing to a reporter, “The convention’s for sale, right?”… [Link]

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Twas the night before…

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I never went to journalism school and I haven’t taken a writing class since my freshman year of college (as I am sure is more than apparent to long time readers). Thus, I’ve been kind of flustered all day today (on the eve of one of SM’s biggest moments) as to how to prepare for THIS. If you know me then you know I am an obsessive, to the point of ridiculousness, preparer (which has actually served me well for my chosen profession). However, I don’t really know how to prepare for the responsibility we now have and neither does our young new blogger Ravi , who has already started blogging from Denver. He hasn’t even been to college yet! What the hell were they thinking letting us crash these gates?

I sat down tonight and started preparing dossiers (well…ummm…index cards) on some of the people we want to interview. We want SM readers to get some firsthand insight into who the South Asian Americans are that are going to this Convention, some serving as delegates. I’m also reading the book all those political types are reading so I can sound somewhat smart when I get there.

The logistics of the convention alone are a total nightmare. Venues are spread all over Denver. Luckily I lived in Colorado for two years so I remember some of the streets and have a place to crash with a friend. My flight gets in too late and I am going to miss the IALI Cocktail hour where all the South Asian Democrat big-wigs are going to be schmoozing, but Ravi will be there. Last Tuesday I put in a request to interview Joe Biden about his views on Pakistan. After Saturday morning’s big news I’m sure that’s not going to happen.

We just want you all to know that we are excited and we hope that you are excited too. We want to make this as participatory as possible so if you have story ideas or things you want to learn then hit us up and we will do our best to chase them down.

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Sepia Mutiny’s Tumblr and Twitter go Live

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We here at Sepia Mutiny are always working (especially our sleep deprived admin Chaitan) behind the scenes to improve the site’s features, interactivity, and addictiveness. Thus, just in time for the Democratic National Convention, we are introducing two new SM features. The first is the new SM “shorts” site on our Tumblr page. This is the place where you can go to find small tidbits like quotes, pictures and videos that we are interested enough to want to blog, but might now have the time to write a full post about. It is in beta testing right now which means we are aware of a few issues (e.g. font colors, permalinks, etc.) that need to be worked out but we are on it. Both Ravi and I will be using this site A LOT while reporting from the convention so please visit it often this week. If I get to meet Fergie in Denver, for example, there will be a picture of us (but not of me touching any bumps) on our Tumblr site accompanied by a brief quote about how the meeting was a step forward for South Asian Americans in politics. Check us out:

The next feature we have added is an SM Twitter page. What’s Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. [Link]

Whenever there is an event of interest to the South Asian American community (and we have a blogger there) we will microblog the event with “tweets.” Anna has been doing this already for a while now. More importantly, if a group of you are headed to an event (independent of each other) SM can “follow” your Twitter pages. Thus, we hope to be able to capture and post a diversity of reactions to the same event via our new Twitter feed. If you are going to be at the DNC or RNC in the next two weeks and want to participate then please create your own Twitter page and then email us (abhi at sepiamutiny dot com). We will “follow” you through SM so other readers can virtually attend through your microblogging.

Lastly, we are finally, seriously, working on a major site re-design. We hope to seamlessly incorporate all these new features and a re-vamped News Tab into a new accessible (yet still mutinous) format.

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Denver or Minneapolis bound? Contact SM

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If you are a South Asian American delegate, volunteer, politician, blogger, protester, anarchist, whatever and will be at the Democratic National Convention this week or the Republican National Convention the week after, please get in touch with us as soon as possible. Our blogging team is looking to talk to everyone we can find there in order to bring the full experience of these events to the online community. Please email me at abhi [at] sepia mutiny dot com ASAP.

If you know a friend going to either event and they don’t read/know about SM then please forward this to them. This is our chance to maximize the participation of the South Asian American community and every person that attends these events will have a unique experience that we’d like to share.

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Mutinous Fashion: T-shirts for the political season

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A few weeks back I offered a challenge to SM readers: Design t-shirts for me to wear at the Democratic National Convention next week and I’d buy them from you and publicize them:

design a t-shirt that features a political or social (but non-partisan) message and I can order it using Café Press, Threadless, or one of many other internet t-shirt companies. Send me the design at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com. I will narrow it down to the best entries and have SM readers vote on the finalists. I will be at the convention for three full days so I will purchase up to three winning t-shirts to wear on the floor. The more clever/funny/relevant/socially conscious your t-shirt, the more likely it is to grab attention and communicate your message to all the varied citizens expected to be in Denver

Well, a handful of you did take up the challenge (and I thank you)…but none to my satisfaction. What can I say, I am very hard to please and my standards are quite high (as the interns at our North Dakota headquarters know all too well). The response was also much less enthusiastic than I had hoped for. Thus, the always creative Manish and I joined forces once again (he did co-found SM in case you forget) to come up with our own original designs to sell to you all. Below are two that I will be sporting at the convention next week. These two are ready for sale now, but a few others will go on sale as early as next Monday, exclusively through SM and Ultrabrown.

Hopefully everyone understands the references but if not remind yourself here and here. Tell your friends.

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Guest Blogger: Mallika

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As long time readers of Sepia Mutiny know, we are nothing if not Fair and Balanced in our blogging here. Myself and Ravi are headed to the Democratic National Convention in just two weeks! It is only fair that SM also have a fearless blogger in Minneapolis rubbing shoulders with the elephants at the Republican National Convention. We know you are all equally excited about the happenings there. Thus I would like to introduce everyone to Ms. Mallika Rao.

Mallika is a Master’s Degree student in journalism at Northwestern University and has a temporary gig working for Reuters as well. That’s just the type of hungry young blogger we need to get the juice on why Jindal decided not to accept the VP position (should it have been offered) from McCain.

Please join me in welcoming Mallika to SM.

P.S. If you are a reader of this site and plan to be at the RNC then please contact us.

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Guest Blogger: Ravi

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As of this weekend we have invited yet another guest blogger into the fold of our secret world blogging headquarters in North Dakota. The twist this time is that our new blogger is only 18 years old, making him even younger than our over-worked intern (the intern was not happy about this). Here is the email we received from Ravi. It had a rather interesting proposition in it:

My name is Ravi M and I’m a graduating high school student from Lake Forest High School and I’ll be attending Harvard this fall. I’m an avid reader of your blog, and will be attending the DNC in a few weeks as a member of the Junior State of America’s 2008 Election Symposia, a non-profit, non-partisan civic education program. I’m writing because I’d like to offer my services/be considered to be a guest student correspondent for your blog during the DNC…This could give your blog an opportunity to showcase the viewpoints of a younger generation, and the trend in increasing political activism and awareness amongst my generation of Indian-Americans during this election year. I have experience as Editor-in-Chief of my school newspaper, and have won Scholastic Regional and National Awards for my journalism. In addition, I have served as the governor of the Junior State of America, a student-run debating organization, for the past two years, as well as Debate Team Captain the previous year, giving me a deep understanding of politics and the perspectives of our younger generation….

So now we will have two SM bloggers reporting from the convention n Denver in just a few weeks. Hmmm, maybe I can be the voice of the grizzled old cynic and Ravi can report with wide-eyed optimism. In any case, please join me in welcoming Ravi to SM.

Note: If any of our South Asian American readers has access to the Republican National Convention and would like to blog for SM from there then please email me: abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com.

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SM T-shirt contest: Making a Fashion Statement at the DNC

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Folks, it is time to get excited about the fact that we will have greater South Asian participation than ever in this year’s Presidential election. Through this blog we also hope to provide a perspective from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver next month that has been missing in previous years. This has been one of the long term goals of this blog after all. I will sniff out every conceivable brown angle I can find once I get there (especially if Huma is there). However, I would like to make this event as bi-directional as possible. I don’t want to show up there and simply write about what I want to write about. I want you all to send me ideas for what you’d like to learn. I’d like you guys to get me in touch with other South Asians you know will be there. I also want to know what you’d like me to communicate to the other bloggers and citizens I meet while I’m there.

In the spirit of that last point, and so we can have some fun with this, I am asking you guys to dress me. That’s right. You, the SM readers get to decide what I will wear on the convention floor next month. It is simple really: design a t-shirt that features a political or social (but non-partisan) message and I can order it using Café Press, Threadless, or one of many other internet t-shirt companies. Send me the design at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com. I will narrow it down to the best entries and have SM readers vote on the finalists. I will be at the convention for three full days so I will purchase up to three winning t-shirts to wear on the floor. The more clever/funny/relevant/socially conscious your t-shirt, the more likely it is to grab attention and communicate your message to all the varied citizens expected to be in Denver (the picture below is a perfect example of what I’m looking for). Let’s have some fun with this. My mom (retired from a major department store) has been dressing me all these years. It’s time for you guys to have a turn.

Just a clarification: I am looking for full t-shirt Designs, not merely slogans or catchphrases.

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