Category Archives: News

More ABCD Arranged Marriage Melodrama

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I’m sure everyone is sick of reading “my parents want me to have an arranged marriage, and I’m like, totally annoyed and stuff” stories in the American papers. Officially I am annoyed by them too, though I actually find these stories curiously addictive even in their predictability — like bad pop songs on the radio, or celebrity gossip.

Sarita James has one of these pieces in the New York Times “matters of the heart” column from the Sunday Style section. Though she initially resisted her parents’ attempts to have her arranged off, at the merry old age of 19 she decided she liked a boy they had picked out for her (he was 26) and got engaged. Even at the time of the engagement, the boy’s family indicated that he still had to “see” two other girls, in order to avoid “formally offending” their families.

So he goes off to India, and doesn’t call for a week or two. Oh oh. The family soon finds out the boy got engaged to an engineer in Bangalore! And Sarita gets these emails:

Dear Sarita, I am so sorry for what happened. I wish I had gotten married to you. Matters were taken out of my control. I want to apologize profusely both to you and your family. Unfortunately, I can never explain what happened.

A second e-mail message, posted five minutes later, read:

Dear Sarita, I regret my indiscretion in that first e-mail. Could you please delete it? Please trust that my apologies are sincere. (link)

The snake! But the explanation is even worse than the content of those emails:

A few years later, I learned that a large dowry had been exchanged as part of his wedding. Most of it had been passed along to his sister’s bridegroom when she was married the same year. Not only had the suitable boy let me down, he had also perpetuated the injustices of the dowry system. (link)

So not only is the boy a flagrant yellow-bellied wus, he’s a sell-out to the dowry system. At the end of the article, Sarita indicates that she’s still single, and she’s not doing the arranged marriage thing anymore. Good for her; hope she never gets an email like that again.

Anyone out there have comparable war stories they want to share (anonymously, if you prefer)? I’m particularly curious about nutty things that happen to people because of the internet. Continue reading →

Desi Family Terrorized in Wayne, NJ

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The words in the subject line of Sree’s SAJA email blast made me cringe. HATE CRIME: NJ Record on Hindu family targeted

Oy.

I’ll take the tentative exotification over blatant intimidation any day, thanks. What puzzles me most about this crime is the syntax of the spray-painted hate:

We Kill U.
We will Fire your house.
Watch Your Kids.

Feel free to scream at me for this, but I know desis who sound just like that, not that I’m in any way implying that it’s an inside job OR that asshat racists are usually articulate. “We will Fire your house”? To quote OMC, how bizarre.

More from the Bergen record:

Those threats and other profanities — spray-painted on a two-story house in black and orange and neon green — are terrorizing a Wayne family of five who police say have been singled out for their Hindu beliefs and Asian Indian roots.

Continue reading →

Monica B. Playing Sonia G.? A Look At Director Jag Mundhra

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Up from the news tab: Sonia Gandhi is going to be played by Italian actress Monica Belluci in an upcoming (apolitical) biopic called Sonia. In his comment on the article, Bongopondit points out that director Jag Mundhra has made his mark as a filmmaker doing a string of sleazy ‘skinemax’ flicks, with titles like Tales of Kama Sutra, Tropical Heat, and the memorably-titled Wild Cactus. Perhaps not by accident, on a number of these ventures Mundhra has worked with Producer Ashok Amritraj, who became the Harvey Weinstein of the genre before officially graduating to mainstream Hollywood mediocrity. (Though actually, I thought Raising Helen was a pretty decent romantic comedy, and it did have Sakina Jaffrey…)

The story gets more interesting: interspersed with spicier fare, Mundhra has also done a number of serious (but minor) Hindi films along the way, some of them with heavy-hitting actors (Kabir Bedi in Vishkanya! Nandita Das in Bawandar!). Most recently, of course, Mundhra directed TMBWITW Aishwarya Rai and Naveen Andrews in Provoked. The film gains some legitimacy from the cast, from the soundtrack by A.R. Rahman, and from the true story it is based on: a British court case that tested the legal definition of ‘provocation’ (Regina v. Ahluwalia; the Southall Black Sisters played a major role in her defense). There is a serious legal question here: can prolonged experience of severe domestic violence be considered sufficient provocation for a kind of defensive homicide? I would tend to think not, but as I understand it the British court finally decided in Kiranjit Ahluwalia’s favor. (Update: the court reduced her sentence to time served, but they did not reverse the guilty verdict.)

As a final note, there’s an irony in Jag Mundhra’s schizophrenic directing work that I can’t quite understand: many of Mundhra’s serious films protest crimes against women (Bawandar is about a woman who has been raped, and Provoked is about domestic violence), while his erotic thrillers obviously feature the exploitative display of women’s bodies. Interesting… Continue reading →

25

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I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that AIDS “turns” 25 this week. India now has the largest number of infected people and is still trending downhill:

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’ AIDS agency said.

Peter Piot was speaking as UNAIDS released a report which declared that the world’s response to the disease, that has infected about 65 million people and killed 25 million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special U.N. session pledged its commitment to halt the AIDS pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down…

India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5.7 million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5.5 million. But, the epidemic is still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. [Link]

The first reported case in India came nearly 5 years after the first reported case in the U.S.

The first case of HIV infection in India was diagnosed among commercial sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 1986. Soon after, a number of screening centres were established throughout the country. Initially the focus was on screening foreigners, especially foreign students. Gradually, the focus moved on to screening blood banks. By early 1987, efforts were made up to set up a national network of HIV screening centres in major urban areas. [Link]

The statistics are grim:

The UN Population Division projects that India’s adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9% in 2019. The UN estimates there were 2.7 million AIDS deaths in India between 1980 and 2000. During 2000-15, the UN has projected 12.3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50.

A 2002 report by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council predicted 20 million to 25 million AIDS cases in India by 2010, more than any other country in the world. [Link]

So you guys tell me. We know what some of the problems are. What more can be done to stop this boulder from rolling?

Continue reading →

A Rush of Blood to the Head

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As some of you may have seen on our News tab, a Hindu temple in Minnesota was recently vandalized pretty severely:

The severed head of Andal Devi

Two 19-year-olds were arrested May 10 and charged with vandalising a partially completed Hindu temple in Maple Grove, MN, on April 5.

Maple Grove Police arrested local resident Paul Gus Spakousky and Tyler William Tuomie of Andover, MN, and charged them with first-degree criminal damage to property and third-degree burglary, both felonies…

Several of the deities were damaged in the attack, forcing the organisers to postpone the scheduled June 4 inauguration of the 43,000 square feet temple built at a cost of $9 million (about Rs 40 crore). [Link]

Punkistani follows up with more details [via Sanjay]:

That’s the head of Andal Devi, and just one of eight sacred likenesses that were defiled in a Hindu Temple set to open on June 1st. By defiled, I mean the statues were decapitated and dismembered…

It’s pretty damned recent. The scoop is that vandals punctured walls and broke into a Hindu temple, ruined some Hindu Gods and left. Property destruction is never that focussed unless it’s a deliberate attempt to intimidate. Nearby Churches went untouched.

Six hundred people attended the community meeting that followed, where reports of neighborhood Indians having their houses vandalized and egged were exchanged. The attending Police Captain, Tracy Stille, verified these stories. [Link]

The Kominas, a Muslim punk band that we have previously blogged about, have decided to rush to the aid of the temple and their fellow South Asian Americans. They are putting on a concert to raise money for rebuilding the temple and it would be cool if our New York readers could represent. Continue reading →

Love Makes the World (Record) Go Brown

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While you Amreekan desis are out winning your spelling bees and geography bees, we Canucks are out here breaking records. World records, people! club dj 030s.jpg Sri Lankan-Canadian Suresh Joachim is at it again and this time he’s partaking in one of my favourite activities, karaoke. Starting at 11:00 AM on the 31st and continuing on for fifty hours…:

Suresh Joachim will be singing his way into the record book. This electrifying record is organized by M.M. Robinson high school in Burlington. Suresh Joachim and the students are joining to raise fund for the Canadian Red Cross. The current karaoke world record is 25 hours & 45 minutes and was performed by Mark Pearson (U.K) in 2004. [Link]

Joachim currently holds 33 world records and since Cicatrix introduced us, Joachim has run a hundred klicks on a treadmill, crawled one mile in thirty six minutes, worked a pair of turntables for seventy six hours, moonwalked for twenty four hours, and gone on a thirty one hour couple dance marathon. [Link]

Joachim wants to break the record for holding the most current records, he’s doing it for the children:

The most remarkable demonstration of SureshÂ’s commitment to help suffering children will be the World Peace Marathon. This incredible journey will begin at 12:00 a.m. on December 25, 2007 in Jerusalem and end at 5:00 p.m. on June 24, 2008 in Sydney Australia. During his voyage, Suresh will travel through 88 major cities, in 54 countries passing a symbolic peace torch to dignitaries in each place. [Link]

With this marathon Joachim hopes to petition to make June 24 ‘World Ceasefire Day’ and raise $1 billion for the Universal Fund for Suffering Children. Continue reading →

ARTWALLAH is back- Los Angeles, June 24th

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ArtWallah ’06 is now less than a month away in Los Angeles. SM readers have heard me sing the praises of this organization and its annual festival before. I appreciate what they do and what they are about so much that I have been wallahnteering to help run the festival for the past three years. This year I decided to retire and actually cool out to all the artists and just enjoy myself…or so I thought. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I’m the new “CashWallah.” I will leave it to your imaginations what that job entails.

Last year I decided to entice SM readers to come out to the festival with a little multimedia tour which made it pretty obvious why anyone within a hundred miles of L.A. (at least) should show up. I hyperlinked to some new musicians, artists, dancers etc. This year the ArtWallah Press Team has saved me the trouble and made a detailed program FULL of interesting hyperlinks to artists many of you have never heard of. It took me an hour to click through them all and appreciate what I saw. It was an hour well spent.

…this year’s ArtWallah festival [at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center] will present the works of over 40 artists through dance, film, literature, music, spoken word, theater, and visual arts – showcasing the personal, political, and cultural celebrations and struggles of the South Asian diaspora (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).

Click on “Continued” below for a quick lick.

Continue reading →

Affirmative action: Here and over there

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Over the tipline we are often asked by Indians living in India why we (as individuals) don’t blog more about certain Indian issues (especially those dominating the Indian media). The simple answer is that you most likely wouldn’t want to read what we have to say about many Indian issues. We aren’t Indian nationals, we all reside in North America, and we are all U.S citizens (except for our current guest blogger who runs our Canadian operations). This means that our opinions, at best, would provide some with a broader perspective on a given topic, and at worst could come across as ignorant or ill-informed. There are better places to read about Indian issues if that is what you are looking for. And yet, those of us who write for SM have definitely felt some resentment at times from parts of the Indian blogosphere, both when we blog an “Indian issue,” and when we don’t.

I know that the current hot topic in the Indian media is the battle over a quota system in Indian universities. I wasn’t going to write a post about it because the Indian educational system doesn’t affect me in any way. However, my mom mentioned the debate to me over the phone and we got to discussing it. I realized how similar and how different the debate in India is as compared to the affirmative action debate in the U.S. Being a graduate of the University of Michigan, the central battlefield for affirmative action in the U.S., I have some definite opinions on the subject and am generally in favor of affirmative action and the type of educational environment it leads to when implemented and executed properly.

My mom opined that she kind of supported the protestors in India. I pressed my mom on the matter a bit since I am more inclined to support a quota system of some kind. What about 3000 years of class oppression? You can’t just erase that with pithy protest slogans like:

DON’T MIX POLITICS WITH MERIT; QUOTAS: THIS CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE; MERIT IS MY CASTE, WHAT’S YOURS?… [Link]

Time Magazine Asia breaks down the central arguments in the debate:

“Modern India should be built on merit, not caste,” says Dr. Sudip Sen, 34, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry at AIIMS. “What’s next — are we going to let a slow runner represent India in the Olympics? No, we are going to send our best runner out for the 100 meters, no matter his caste. It should be the same for all fields.”

Countless other Indian medical workers who have gone on strike this week feel much the same as Sen, which is why India’s sudden battle over affirmative action makes the ongoing divide in the U.S. over racial preferences seem tame by comparison. Public hospitals across the country have shut their doors to all but emergency services; private hospitals in some Delhi suburbs are following suit; trade unions have called for a morning of civil disobedience; and students at India’s elite business schools are meeting to plan their own protests. In spite of the disruption, the government has sworn that it will not back down, regardless of who resigns or how many protest. Increased quotas, it claims, are the only way to foster social equality at the institutions that are driving the Indian economy forward.

That fast-growing economy often makes it easy to forget India’s rigidly stratified past. But any country hurtling along the path to modernization is at risk of being occasionally slowed down by the weight of its own history, and in this case, India has been yanked to a crawl by 3,000 years of a strictly codified social pecking order. [Link]

Continue reading →

Fussballweltmeisterschaft-Alert: Abdul Ghafoor Reminisces

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abdulghafoor.jpgAs promised, during this World Cup season I’ll be serving up some desified football-related posts for that arse. Today, my bhai Davy hips me to this fascinating AFP story on “Pakistan’s Black Pelé,” Abdul Ghafoor. Apparently, he was the leading light of Pakistani football in the 1960s, a midfielder on what was a reasonably strong national team:

The midfielder was part of Pakistan’s setup when it was a credible footballing nation, grinding its way into Asia’s top 10 with players in demand from league clubs in India.

Ghafoor played in Dhaka in the 1960s and later represented Mohammedan Sporting in the Calcutta league in India.

It was in Dhaka, which became the capital of Bangladesh in 1971, where he met his wife Sabiha, who also has a penchant for football.

“My husband has been a football hero in Pakistan. There was a time when we couldn’t go out because hundreds of people would gather outside and want to see their Pelé,” said Sabiha …

In a strange new-world-order twist, Ghafoor’s son Ghani is in prison in Pakistan on terrorism charges that his father vehemently denies:

Ghani, who played football for domestic teams, was arrested in early 2004 from his home in Karachi in a crackdown against extremists and remains under lock and key.

The employee of a state-owned bank was accused of planning terrorist acts and is awaiting trial at a Karachi prison.

“My son’s only fault was that he grew a beard and he played football,” claimed Ghafoor.

With Pakistani and for that matter all subcontinental football mired in mediocrity, Abdul Ghafoor is left to reminisce about the old days and root for every Third Worlder’s default team, Brazil:

Ghafoor now stays away from football grounds but avidly stays in touch with the English Premiership and Brazilian soccer.

“Now I just watch Brazil and remember our good old days,” he said.

I tried to get some background on Abdul Ghafoor and his glory days, but found next to nothing. So here’s a call to historians, football fans, or any uncles or aunties who might have memories of Abdul Ghafoor, or more generally, sub-continental football in the 1960s. Continue reading →

The True Story of Ramo Samee, the Indian Juggler

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I was browsing William Makepeace Thackeray’s wonderful and strange The Book of Snobs (1848), and I came across the following odd passage in the midst of a rant about a lady-friend’s poor table manners:

I have seen, I say, the Hereditary Princess of Potztausend-Donnerwetter (that serenely-beautiful woman) use her knife in lieu of a fork or spoon; I have seen her almost swallow it, by Jove! like Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler. And did I blench? Did my estimation for the Princess diminish? No, lovely Amalia!

But, my dear fellow, who precisely is “Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler”? It turns out he was a real person, who came to England around 1819, and lived there with his wife (identified only as “Mrs. Samee”) until his death in 1851. The juggling history website I looked at also speculates he may have gone to the U.S. and performed as “Sena Sama,” in 1817, though that’s only speculation. Ramo Samee is considered by some the first modern professional juggler in England, and he was far and away the most famous practitioner of the art in his era. He inspired royalty, journalists, and famous essayists like William Hazlitt. And yet, when Ramo Samee died he was so poor that his wife needed to advertise for financial assistance just to have him buried (cremation, I suspect, was probably not an option). Today he is, aside from the appreciation he gets on a handful of juggling history websites, completely forgotten.

Needless to say, I am pretty ambivalent about Ramo Samee (or “Ramaswamy,” probably the more accurate spelling), just as I am about Sabu, Dean Mahomed, and scores of other Indian artists and hustling “Gurus” who work “exotic” stereotypes for western applause. In the African-American tradition this type of performance is called minstrelsy, and it is seen as a shameful kind of pandering to other people’s stereotypes.

But Ramo Samee might be a slightly different case at least in the sense that the kind of sword-swallowing and juggling he did is in fact a real historical profession in India, which goes back hundreds of years. So while clearly part of Ramo Samee’s appeal was his exotic otherness, he was doing what he did best — what he had been raised to do. And observers like Hazlitt really did find him to be a performer of astonishing skill. So even if I can’t exactly celebrate Ramo Samee’s life as a triumph, he is nevertheless an interesting figure to learn about and consider. Continue reading →