Category Archives: News

Merry Christmas to All, and to All, “Show Some Pride!”

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3670482_a31914cae1.jpg One of my dearest friends has an Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post (page A29). Nitya, I’d be proud of you even if “Longing to Join in Christmas” hadn’t been published, but now that it has, Akka loves you even more, because obviously, like all good South Asian elders, my affection for you is directly tied to your achievements. 😉 I can’t think of a more perfect post for today (so let me get out of the way):

Christmas is the season when you are most likely to find yourself on a street of beautiful homes with twinkling lights, warm fireplaces and happy families outfitted in festive holiday sweaters, only to be filled with a yearning to possess not just the house but the lifestyle inside.

For my whole Indian American childhood in the early 1980s, I wanted a Christmas tree that way. And it wasn’t for the presents. It was for the lifestyle.

I wanted the Santa Claus, I wanted the holly wreath and I wanted the jolly elves who toiled in a workshop all year long. I wanted the sleigh bell-wearing reindeer on my roof. I wanted the colorful stockings hung by the chimney. And I wanted the jolly fat man to wiggle down our (nonexistent) chimney before he ho-ho-hoed his way across the night sky in a triumphant journey back to the North Pole.

From the warmth of my Hindu home, I always longed for that good old Christian magic — and not a holiday like Christmas but Christmas itself. I wanted to belong to the classroom party hosted by homeroom mothers in Santa hats, to know the words to the holiday songs that everyone knew, to feel the evergreen anticipation that never faded or fell from branches needle by needle.

My immigrant father, who’d recently come to America as a University of California grad student, was a man of little sympathy and extra principle when it came to the wants and woes of my childhood.

Continue reading →

Ninde Achan Aara, Nel?

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Sreesanth Swinging His Bat…. Dhoom Machale?!

It’s my first time, Mutineers, so be gentle. I’m a total Cricket virgin and if you’re mean to me about what is sure to be an amateurish post, I’ll be scarred forever– whether I end up a frigid fan or not is in your hopefully kind and capable hands. 😉

After hearing about Mallu hotness Sreesanth (thanks, DTK), I had to visit ye olde YouTube to find out about this right-arm fast-medium-pace bowler, who is a right-handed tailender. Apparently, excessively lippy South African Andre Nel questioned Sreesanth’s heart/courage/skillz after Sreesanth evaded something called a bouncer. Sreesanth responded by hitting Nel for a six and then performing a dance I’d normally associate with an end zone. Oh, that was just brutal to write. I can’t imagine how many men I’ve just annoyed. 😉

I may not know a damned thing about what is arguably the most popular sport in all of South Asia, but I know the art of trash talk well and if anything could get me to fall in love with this very Brown game, it’s the video I’ve posted above. Set to some probably-famous song I’ve never heard before (“Dhoom Machale”), it’s way more fun than the other YouTube clips which came up when I searched for the new object of my lecherous (he’s eight years younger) affection. Not since I was kicked off our co-ed IM team in grad school for illegal (and may I add, utterly justified and deliciously violent) tackling during a flag-football game have I been so delighted by the immaturity of declaring “in your face!”. Gopu, I heart you. 🙂

UPDATE: The Google Video seems clearer, so I swapped it. Continue reading →

The Myth of “Martial Races”

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Gurkha.jpg Though I’ve always been proud of the Sikh tradition in military service — particularly in the First and Second World Wars — the fact that the British Raj designated certain ethno-religious groups as martial races makes me uneasy. And recently I’ve been reading a book on the Gurkha regiments, (Byron Farwell’s The Gurkhas), and after reading a number of chapters I’m ready to throw out the designation entirely.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas’ military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles — just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated “martial races”; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).

As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 — and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands’ War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it’s a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!

The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it’s probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of “martial races.” But it’s extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas’ effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated “martial races.” So why the Gurkhas?

It seems hard to escape the conclusion that “martial race” is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism. Continue reading →

A Business-Friendly Plan For Mumbai Slum Resettlement?

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There’s an interesting article in the New York Times by Anand Giridharadas about the way in which the Indian real estate boom has been affecting slums in Mumbai.

As many readers may be aware, Mumbai shantytowns are unusual in that their residents are often effectively permanent, and many people living there actually prefer the chaotic environment to the cramped enclosed spaces that are sometimes made available to them via various housing/resettlement schemes. The old method of clearing slums consisted of mainly bulldozing them and then going away, at which point the former residents would simply come back and rebuild. It was, in effect, both ineffectual and unfair. In recent years, the pace of slum-clearing has quickened, as the government has hopes of “Shanghaization” in support of “Vision Mumbai” (see this Frontline article for more).

But now there is a new method, where private developers are resettling slum dwellers into tower apartments they build and give away for free to residents. In exchange, they get to develop the remainder of the land any way they want: Continue reading →

Thrust into Greatness

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The reason why no ideology has ever created, let alone sustained, the world it envisioned, is that by definition it could not account for unintended consequences. The same is true of more modest ventures. A war meant to be short and sweet turns out anything but. A campaign meant to steamroll the opposition clears the field of all rivals but one, the most dangerous and unexpected. Observing something alters its nature; naming it alters its meaning. If you’ve ever planned anything – a career, a vacation, a party – you know this already.

And so, when things happen – interesting things, significant things, things that surprise us and thus lead us to feel – they result only partly from deliberate action, and as much from the gremlins of serendipity, who can inhabit any of us for any period of time. Thrust into greatness, we signify; the moment passes, the world changes, we fade to obscurity.

salonsidarth.jpgAre you having a macaca moment yet? In 2006, desis were thrust into greatness in the person of S. R. Sidarth. Senator AllenÂ’s view of SidarthÂ’s ethnic happenstance differed so radically from that of a majority of Virginia voters, that the (near-) accident of the brother being there set in motion events leading, it is argued, to the change of power in Congress.

Macaca was about revealed perception. The perception was AllenÂ’s; but the revelation stems from Sidarth. Without Sidarth, the perception would not have been revealed. The tree might have fallen in the forest, but no one would have heard.

This is old news to us; in this community at least, weÂ’ve followed the macaca story from the start and have no disagreement as to its significance. Where we differ is in what we make of it for ourselves, the extent to which we identify with Sidarth or the fate we wish on the word macaca itself.

timecover.jpgOld news, yes. But this weekend Sidarth was made to reappear, once more in his capacity as the embodiment of macaca, as two news outlets produced their round-up of people who mattered in 2006. Salon names Sidarth its Person of the Year. Time’s Person of the Year is You – you, the diffuse and disparate emanators of content, the users who generate that which is user-generated – and Sidarth is one of the Yous the magazine profiles.

ItÂ’s interesting to compare the interpretations that each of these outlets apply to Original Macaca. Salon, the established survivor of first-generation Web journalism, sees in him less the agent of a brave new world of representation than an embodiment of an America undergoing demographic and attitudinal change. Time, a behemoth of a pre-Internet era when The Press told The Public what to know and believe, now celebrates Sidarth as one of a non-organized army of little people upending the plans and certitudes of the great.

Both treatments have in common, however, that ultimately they are not about Sidarth – not the “real” Sidarth, biologically and spiritually unique, but what he seems through various filters. It was the year of You perceived and revealed, by your own doing and by that of others. That trend will continue, as attested by the fact that you read this blog, perhaps comment, perhaps have established an identity here and elsewhere on the Web.

We are learning that representation matters. We manage our identities lest others manage them for us; in a way the two processes are dialectically the same. What remains is spirit: mercurial, contradictory, and if we will it, potentially free. Continue reading →

Rajiv Chandrasekaran Runs the Voodoo Down Too

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Here’s Washington Post assistant managing editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran on the Daily Show last night. He’s talking about his new book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which tells the inside story of the American administration of Iraq from within the infamous Green Zone. He starts off gamely matching Jon Stewart’s banter, almost as if he were one of the show’s fake correspondents, such as Aasif Mandvi. But watch how the audience stops laughing, and Jon becomes speechless, when Rajiv starts breaking down specific stories of the lack of preparation and incompetence of the enterprise. Powerful and shocking. [Part 2 of the segment is here.] Continue reading →

Absolute Borders: Partition, Pluralism, and Nationalism

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Via Desipundit, I caught a link to a post by Qalandar on a recent article in the Calcutta Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan.

For those who don’t know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer — the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.

His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state — it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.

Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it’s in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:

Pakistan claims Kashmir because as a Muslim state carved out of British India it thinks it has a right to Kashmir as a Muslim majority province. Israel, as a Jewish state, wants to annex large settler blocs of Jews on the West Bank to Israel and in return would be happy to give away bits of Israel that have concentrations of Arabs. Other nations dispute or defend territory on the ground of language. Indian nationalism refused the temptation of a single collective identity; as a result, the republic it created had no way of discriminating between borders that were negotiable and those that were written in stone. Not only were its borders were colonial and therefore arbitrary, being an ideologically pluralist state it couldn’t claim or trade away disputed borderlands going by the nature of the populations settled there. So it decided that every inch of its border was sacred and what it had, it held. (link)

It’s an interesting thesis — one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India’s claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces, where secessionism abounds, seem more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn’t saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn’t). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on — and will continue to hold on — so tenaciously.

There’s more to it, but I think I’ll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai. Continue reading →

Sudhir Venkatesh Runs the Voodoo Down

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Venkatesh.jpg“The Wire meets academia” is how Slate describes Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, the fascinating new book by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Here’s Emily Bazelon’s summary:

Venkatesh, who is now a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia, spent 1995 to 2003 following the money in 10 square blocks of the Chicago ghetto. He finds an intricate underground web. In it are dealers and prostitutes—and also pastors who take their money, nannies who don’t report income, unlicensed cab drivers, off-the-books car mechanics, purveyors of home-cooked soul food, and homeless men paid to sleep outside stores. Venkatesh’s insight is that the neighborhood doesn’t divide between “decent” and “street”—almost everyone has a foot in both worlds.

Readers of Freakonomics will remember Venkatesh as the University of Chicago graduate student whose fieldwork in the ghetto led him to realize why, for instance, drug dealers still live with their mothers. But his really important previous credit is his first book, American Project (2000), which intricately described the life within, and the social and physical disintegration of, several large blocks of South Side housing projects. Like Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk (1999), which investigated the social and economic life of the brothers who sell used books and miscellany on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Venkatesh’s projects are urban sociology of the most compelling type, and well written to boot.

Yesterday Sudhir was on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC [disclosure: I work for WNYC] and you can hear the conversation, punctuated by some interesting listener calls, here. But all y’all macacas might also enjoy taking a look at the prologue and first chapter of the book, which Harvard University Press makes available on its website. Here’s a quick excerpt from the prologue that points out, among other things, a desi angle: Continue reading →

Wide Eyed

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In case any of this wonderful siteÂ’s (donÂ’t fire me!) glorious readers (leave me happy comments!) are in Karachi for the next couple of days, I highly recommend that they check out the 6th KaraFilm Festival being held at the Arts Council and/or the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs. According to the website:

There are a grand total of over 170 films being screened this year, including over 40 features, over 30 documentaries and over 95 shorts. They are from 37 countries as diverse as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, USA, Canada, Lithuania, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Portugal, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland, Romania, Sweden, Guatemala, Sudan, Chad, UAE, Sri Lanka, Peru, China, Poland, Estonia, Austria, Australia, Turkey, Greece, Finland and the Czech Republic . They include a number of World Premieres and Asian premieres, while most are at least Pakistan premieres. Many of them have won prizes at other well known festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, London, Sundance and Mumbai as well as international critics’ FIPRESCI jury awards.

The film festival will also be running a retrospective on François Truffaut, and showcasing the works of Irani (not Iranian, thank goodness) director Jafar Panahi and Pakistani director Jamil Dehlavi. What I love about this festival, despite my inability to actually attend it, no matter how many times I swear to myself in the months leading up that I WILL go to at least a handful of screenings, is that it manages to also (albeit somewhat tangentially) hit other visual arts media. To wit:

Accompanying the film screenings will be a unique curated art exhibition of the work of 5 Pakistani artists who draw their inspiration from the hand-painted imagery of popular cinema and billboard advertising.

In a city like Karachi, where the only forms of public entertainment revolve around food (which, hey, no complaints from me or the owners of my gym) and the occasional (overpriced) concert, this is an unsurprisingly popular event. Tickets tend to be relatively cheap, and the organisers of the event tend to try and cater to a variety of income groups, for example showing movies like The Incredibles dubbed in Hindi/Urdu (the voices are by Sharukh Khan, no less! Eeeee! Not really.) for kids, and charging about Rs. 50 (about 90 cents) for a ticket to a showing. ItÂ’s not a bad deal at all, but I think what I find really encouraging about the whole event is that it tends to remind Karachi that it can well function as a city with cultural projects, as a locus not necessarily limited to bombings and huge amounts of criminal and sectarian violence or a massive economic class divide.

On the off-chance that there are any readers in Karachi whoÂ’d like to go and are having trouble finding tickets or getting sorted out, leave a comment and IÂ’ll try to help out. ItÂ’s well-worth the effort. Continue reading →

Muhammad Yunus receives his Nobel Prize

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10cnd-nobel.600.jpg
The award ceremony of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize took place today. Muhammad Yunus was accompanied by nine village women, elected representatives of Grameen Bank’s borrowers. The full text of his speech is an interesting read. He re-tells the story of the founding of the bank and describes the different ways it has branched out, from its program for beggars to its mobile phone, food, and medical care initiatives. He also gives a sense of his personal economic philosophy, which he grounds in an embrace of the free market and globalization. It’s an argument similar to that made for “double bottom line” or “triple bottom line” investment and accounting, which seeks social or environmental value creation along with financial profit. It’s a good read; you can find it here. Continue reading →