Queens is hosting a big cultural festival this evening and all day tomorrow showcasing the desi cultures of Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in New York (thanks, Saurav). Kitchrie 2005 features food, music, dance and theater at the Rajkumari Cultural Center in Richmond Hill.

The festival runs from 6-10pm tonight and noon-10pm tomorrow, followed by a concert and afterparty. (I’m diggin’ the alternate spellings — kitchrie, Ramnarine, Baboolal, Bisham…) Click here for details.

Kitchrie 2005, Rajkumari Cultural Center, 83-84 116th St., Queens, NY (Richmond Hill); map; J, Z to 111th St./Jamaica Ave. or A to Ozone Park/Lefferts Blvd.; admission ranges from $5-15 Continue reading →

Honestly, you just have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky punk? SM tipster Sabeena alerts us to this story at the BBC.

At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.

Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India’s central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.

He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.

There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.

Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.

Rest assured, Saurabh has been known to strike fear into the dark hearts of criminals:

He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.

All joking aside this is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. There are a number of children in predicaments similar to that of Saurabh’s who are covered in the article. The money they bring in is a necessity for their poor families, but it comes at the expense of their childhood. Some human rights groups are raising objections to the system:

Subhash Mahapatra, president of a human rights organisation called Forum for Fact-finding, Documentation and Advocacy, goes further.

According to the Geneva Convention, he says, employing children as police officials and making them work at such a young age is against Indian and international laws.

“It is very similar to the definition of child soldiers as outlined by the United Nations,” he says.

Continue reading →

A massive Methamphetamine bust went down in Georgia recently. Close to 50 people were charged. GG2.net reports:

Around 50 Indian American convenience store owners and employees have been arrested, in Georgia, and charged with selling substances used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine (meth), a highly addictive stimulant.

An indictment unveiled in a US magistrateÂ’s court, on Monday, said the arrests were made in six Georgia counties over the past month under an operation to hunt down peddlers of meth ingredients. Several of those arrested have been released on bonds ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.

Some of the defence attorneys have accused the investigators of targeting immigrant merchants, most of them of Indian origin. Attorney Steven Sadow, who is representing six defendants, said he will investigate if officials singled out Indians in their “Operation Meth Merchant”.

“I want to know why they went after the Indians to begin with,” said Sadow. He proposes to file a motion to “dismiss all charges based on selective prosecution”. One of the defendants also asserted that the charges stemmed from stereotyping and generalisation.

A list of defendants can be read in the DOJ release. There are a lot of Patels up in there. It doesn’t immediately strike me as “selective prosecution.” I mean Indians do own a lot of convenience stores, and convenience stores do sell drugs. Of course a quick news brief doesn’t give the full story, especially the “convenience store demographics” of the area.

Continue reading →

Not customers but rather, business partners –

In 1998 a California porn princess commissioned a 25-year-old Indian computer wiz to write a piece of software…She had sold all her porn interests and it was time to invest the proceeds. Online gambling was the new buzz and she found a friend of a friend, Anurag Dikshit, a computer engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, to create a programme for casino games such as roulette.

The outcome — the newest Sabeer Bhatia –

The extraordinary result of that meeting was seen yesterday when PartyGaming, the company they created, announced plans to float on the London stock market. Its PartyPoker website is the dominant force in the explosive online poker market and the business will be valued at up to $10bn, or a shade over £5bn – only a little less than Marks & Spencer, or the combined value of British Airways and EMI. At the top price, Mr Dikshit, who owns 42%, will be worth £2.1bn at the age of 33. Ms Parasol, in her late 30s, and her husband, Russ DeLeon, each own 20%, worth £1bn apiece. Billionaire status has rarely been achieved so young or so quickly.

Actually, given that he’s a multi-billionaire, Mr Dikshit will actually be worth several Bhatia’s (who’s estimated to have pocketed only ~200M off Hotmail). My big question for those in the know, don’t most folks with his last name transliterate it to Dixit? Continue reading →

New California Media, partnering with The Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund have just released a poll that they claim shows that nearly half the country’s Hispanics, Asian Americans and other minorities prefer ethnic newspapers, television and radio to mainstream media. The poll is titled, The Ethnic Media in America: The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight. Several news organizations including Yahoo report:

Overall, ethnic media reach approximately 80 percent the groups studied — about 51 million people, or a quarter of the U.S. adult population.

“This is something that is growing like a giant hidden in plain sight,” said Sandy Close, executive director for NCM, a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media groups.

Many turn to foreign language newspapers and broadcasts because English isn’t their native language. Additionally, minority media often do a better job covering news from the homeland and other issues the community cares about.

“We have a multicultural society with multimedia choices, so people pay attention to media that pay attention to them. That’s the bottom line,” said Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

I am a little offended that the poll apparently did not consider ethnic blogs. Although I am obviously biased, it would seem to me that once blogs penetrate the consumer’s mind as an alternate source for news, the overall numbers in this poll will trend higher. Some additional highlights:

-The national reach of ethnic media was calculated by including all adults that watch ethnic television, listen to ethnic radio OR read ethnic newspapers on a regular basis.

-This group includes the 29 million “primary consumers of ethnic media” and another 22 million “secondary consumers of ethnic media” that prefer mainstream media but access ethnic media on a regular basis.

-The reach of Asian Indian, Filipino and Japanese newspapers is smaller but still impressive – more than half of the adults in these groups read an ethnic newspaper a few times a month or more.

-Access to the Internet is very high (67 percent) among all Asian Americans and half of them prefer ethnic websites to mainstream websites. Asian Indian adults access the Internet more often than other Asians.

Continue reading →

These gals could kick my scrawny little Mallu butt anyday. The The Times of India reports –

Indian Army’s women mountaineers created history by becoming the first women’s expedition to scale the Mt Everest. Captain Shipra Mazumdar, Captain Ashwini Pawar, Cadet Tshering Ladol and Trainee Dechin Lhamo scaled the 8848-metre high peak between 0615 and 0939 hours.

Alas, upon reaching the summit, the team discovered they’d been beat to the top by Hrithik and Priety Zinta & a movie crew who, inspired by nuptials on the peak, were seeking the biggest, baddest alpine love chase cum Monsoon Wedding in the history of Bollywood. Captain Mazumdar and her team were invited to participate as background dancers but respectfully declined. Continue reading →

A 37-year-old desi woman from Ronkonkoma, Long Island admitted phoning in a fake bomb threat on a PIA flight because her boyfriend’s sister was being deported on that plane:

[Samina] Faisal… was charged… with telephoning in a false report of two bombs on Pakistan International Airline flight 718 bound for Pakistan on Feb. 13. Federal agents said the 911 call was made from a pay phone located on the second level of Terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport. As a result of the call, airline officials had the plane, which was already en route [to Lahore], return to the airport. Officers using K-9 units then conducted a search, but didn’t find any bombs on the craft, the complaint stated…

During her interview, Faisal told investigators that her boyfriend, who understands Urdu, overheard two unidentified men speaking in the language at the airline terminal discussing that there were two bombs on the aircraft, according to the complaint. Faisal said she sought out airline and security personnel to report the information but couldn’t find any, investigators said.

However, the complaint said the airline terminal had nearly 100 uniformed employees of the Transportation Security Administration on duty, as well as nearly 50 Customs and Border Protection inspectors on duty when Faisal claimed to have made the call.

Faisal is a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan. It’s apparently not the first time she’s cried wolf:

State court records show that Faisal, also known by the surnames Lodhi and Rasheed, has two pending cases involving charges of criminal impersonation and filing false incident reports. She also has a pending motor vehicle case involving a charge of unlicensed driving and what was described in court records as “criminal personation.”