I hate moving. I hate moving so much that when I left Manhattan in 2003, I hastily shoved everything in storage near Chelsea. ItÂ’s still there.

I think my reluctance to pack a suitcase might be related to the sheer panic and anxiety I experience whenever I have to move. Something about carefully folding and arranging items in boxes freaks me out, man.

This is the explanation I gave my long-suffering Mummy last week when I was at home in California. I was scheduled to leave for the airport at 7pm and I hadnÂ’t packed as of 6:15. Of course, I ended up hastily tossing everything in, cringing at how my clothes were getting abused, how my jewelry would be a tangled mess by the time I got back to DC, how I would surely forget something. I threw everything on my bathroom counter in my cosmetics bag, zipped it and hoped for the best.

8pm. Security. IÂ’ve padded through the gate barefoot and I’m trying not to think about what sorts of germs IÂ’m walking on while I wait for my bag to leave the X-rayÂ…

“Ma’am? Would you mind coming with me?”

Nope. I donÂ’t mind at all. IÂ’m brown, but I have nothing to hide. It’s been years. I know to just expect this routine. I grab my prrrecious iBook and follow him to a table. HeÂ’s poking my carry-on gingerly, a worried look distorting his face. Continue reading →

Nwo thye wnat ot renmae Delhi (via PPP):

The Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India. They have launched a campaign to correct the “mis-spelling”, which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.

K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: “For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn’t manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the city later came to reflect this.”

I presume the city would be called Newer Dehli. It isn’t a new idea:

What the British knew as Cawnpore is now Kanpur, the northern city of Muttra is Mathura, and the Ganges is known once more as Ganga… In 1995, Bombay became Mumbai after pressure from Hindu-nationalists to reinstate the original Marathi name. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a corruption of the British name but almost certainly derives from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, meaning Good Bay.

A year later, the southern city of Madras – possibly a corruption of the Portuguese Madre di Dios – reverted to Chennai, the name that had been used by Tamils throughout the British period. Then, in 2000, the spelling of Calcutta was officially changed to Kolkata after pressure from the Communist state government to revert to a spelling that more closely reflected the Bangla pronunciation.

I’ve got no fondness for badly Anglicized names. Even old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam. But the new name wouldn’t be entirely accurate either:

… even Dehli was a corrupted word. The pre-Mughal name was Dilli, which was derived from Dhillika, a Rajput name for the area which dates back to the 8th century.

I have the rename to trump all renames: let’s call everything Gondwanaland. It’s an Indian name after all. Problem solved.

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From fliping through the AP pool photographs of the British Airways catering employees strike (which just ended), you’d think that it was the Salt March or something.  What gives?  And talk about girl power.  Yahoo News reports (thanks to several tipsters):

BA baggage handlers and loaders represented by the same union as the catering staff — the Transport and General Workers Union — stopped work in sympathy with their colleagues.

Some Gate Gourmet staff were astounded at the scale of disruption.

“I didn’t expect the BA staff to join us, but we are very happy about it,” said Gary Mullins, 37, a loader for the company.

“We don’t wish to cause them any more (aggravation) than we have to,” he said of the passengers. “But it’s something that has to be done.”

Wait a minute.  From that sea of brown they picked a guy named “Gary Mullins” to get a quote from? CNN International has more:

The Transport and General Workers Union [TGWU] said it went on strike because Gate Gourmet, a firm that caters meals for British Airways, had fired workers.

Tony Woodley, TGWU’s general secretary, issued a statement Thursday saying he had contacted Gate Gourmet in an effort to reinstate workers and “restart talks without prejudice.”

“Unfortunately, the management of Gate Gourmet has responded intransigently. They are preventing employees reporting for work. This is causing chaos at one of the world’s biggest airports at the busiest time of year,” the statement said.

“The company has told us that ‘this is a community we cannot work with.’ The employees concerned are almost all low-paid, Asian workers, and such an approach is utterly unacceptable.”

The union’s national officer, Brendan Gold, told PA he was continuing to seek legal advice over the “sackings,” which he added had left workers feeling “angry, confused and in a state of shock.”

Great.  Now even more people will be pissed off at Britain’s South Asian population. Continue reading →

Perhaps the Tamil Tigers are showing their cuddly face (thanks, Abhi):

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was shot in the head Friday night just outside his private residence in Colombo and died an hour later after emergency surgery… The assassination is bound to further strain the shaky cease-fire agreement between Sri Lanka’s government and the Tamil Tiger rebels. The truce, in place since February 2002, has been threatened by recent violence and the suspension of talks in 2003. [Link]

Earlier this month, two LTTE members were arrested outside Kadirgamar’s official residence — about a kilometer away from where he was shot — after conducting surveillance and videotaping the area. Kadirgamar had just returned to his private residence late Friday for a swim, after attending a function for the release of his new book, police said. As he walked toward the house from the pool, a sniper fired three shots, striking him in the head and chest. [Link]

… Kadirgamar, 73, who is from the ethnic Tamil minority and a close aide of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, was taken to the National Hospital for emergency surgery after being shot in the head… Kadirgamar, a Tamil Christian, led an international campaign to ban the Tigers as a terrorist organization. [Link]

Kadirgamar’s background:

He was educated at Trinity College, Kandy, and obtained a Bachelor of Laws… from the University of Ceylon… He also has a B.Lit. from Oxford University. He practiced law at the Ceylon Bar and in London until 1974, when he became a consultant to the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

Kadirgamar is a long-time supporter of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)… Despite being himself a Tamil, he strongly supported the Bandaranaike government’s policy of not negotiating with the Tamil Tigers insurgents in northern Sri Lanka. [Link]

Every day I am reminded of how we still live in a Demon Haunted World.  Vikram tips us off to a very Arthur Miller-esque story in the Washington Post.

At sundown, Pusanidevi Manjhi recalled, nine village men stormed into her house shouting, “Witch, witch!” and dragged her out by her hair as her six small children watched helplessly.

“This woman is a witch!” the men announced to the villagers, said Manjhi, 36. She said they tied her ankles together and locked her in a dark room.

“They beat me with bamboo sticks and metal rods and tried to pull my nails out. ‘You are a witch, admit it,’ they screamed at me again and again,” Manjhi said, tearfully recalling her four days of captivity in June.

“They accused me of casting an evil spell on their paddy crop that was destroyed in a fire. I begged them and told them I was not a witch,” she said, showing wounds on her legs, thighs, hips and shoulders one recent morning in this village in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand.

So of course I wonder, why her?  What was the real reason the village men decided to put on such an obscene farce?  After reading just the above portion I skimmed over most of the article to land on the following:

“Gahan Lal was a powerful landlord. There were fights all the time in the village over land and wages,” said Jayant Tirkey, the police officer investigating the case. “When his paddy caught fire, he blamed [Manjhi] for casting an evil spell. But that is merely an excuse. His real motive is to instill fear among the poor.“

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The best coverage I have seen on this topic comes from the Human Rights in India Blog, run by the Human Rights organization Ensaaf. Ensaaf has done some truly excellent work on the Delhi 1984 Pogroms. Here they compare the Nanavati Commission report to their own investigation of the subject:

The report fails in similar ways as the Misra Commission report. In its report, Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, ENSAAF analyzes thousands of pages of previously unavailable affidavits, government records and arguments submitted to the 1985 Misra Commission, established to examine the Sikh Massacres in Delhi, Kanpur, and Bokaro. The report reveals the systematic and organized manner in which state institutions, such as the Delhi Police, and Congress (I) officials perpetrated mass murder in November 1984 and later justified the violence in inquiry proceedings.

… police officers not only passively observed the violence, but also actively participated in the attacks and made promises of impunity to assailants. Senior officers: ordered their subordinates to ignore attacks against Sikhs; ordered policemen to disarm Sikhs to increase their vulnerability to attack; systematically disabled and neutralized any officers who attempted to deviate from the norm of police inaction and instigation; released culprits; and manipulated police records in order to destroy the paper trail of the violence and protect criminals from the possibility of effective future prosecutions. At all times, the police and their superiors had sufficient force and knowledge to effectively counter the violence.

ENSAAF’s report further demonstrates the involvement of the Congress Party in organizing the massacres. Senior political leaders provided for details such as deployment of mobs, weapons and kerosene, as well as for the larger support and participation of the police. They conducted meetings the night before the onslaught of the massacres where they distributed weapons, money, voter and ration lists identifying Sikhs and their properties, and in inflammatory speeches, instructed attendees to kill Sikhs.

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We are pretty used to it here in the States.  Whatever the reason, we accept labeling people as German-American, Japanese-American, Indian-American, etc.  We are at once comfortable with the identity inherited from our ancestors as well as that acquired from our new home (even if it’s been are only home).  Or perhaps, a hyphenated-identity is how it has always been and it’s too late to fight such convention.  Not so in the UK where folks are raising a storm.  MSNBC reports:

Inayat Bunglawala was born in northwest England, speaks English as his native language and only once visited his ancestral homeland, India.

That makes him bridle at a proposal being floated in the government to give members of minorities hyphenated identities — he would be Indian-British — to strengthen their bond to Britain.

The idea “simply makes no sense,” the 36-year-old said. “I am 100 percent British.”

The British government is discussing a variety of ways to improve community cohesion after last month’s bombing attacks, and it was not clear in what ways such a label might be used. But minority groups were angry at the very idea that they need a new identity label to tie them closer to a country that has been the only home many of them know.

Who the hell suggested such a thing in the first place? Continue reading →