Category Archives: News

Welcome Grandmaster P!

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We at Sepia Mutiny would like to extend a very snarky hearty welcome to the newest Sepia Macaca: Puran Singh. That’s right – Deep is a daddy! [Mothers everywhere want to know what the rest of us are waiting for]

Puran Singh (“Master P,” as my brother is already calling him) was born yesterday at 8pm. He’s 8 pounds, 2 ounces (3.7 Kg), and both he and his mother are doing well. We have lots of family around helping us out and giving support (thanks, everyone), and the hospital experience has been pretty good, though the final stage of labor was difficult (I guess it always is).

The name means “fulfillment,” “completion,” or “perfection.” No one in our family has been named “Puran,” but there are a couple of famous people who have had this name: including Bhagat Puran Singh and also a famous Punjabi poet. In the Sikh tradition, the first letter of a baby’s name is usually chosen by opening the Guru Granth Sahib at random, and taking a “Vakh.” The first letter of the page opened is supposed to be the first letter of the baby’s name. In our case, we got “P,” and I immediately thought of “Puran…” [Link]

P is for Perfection

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Truth by Injection

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An Associated Press wire report getting widespread publication today says that the Mumbai police have determined that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, planned the July train bombings and had them executed by members of Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The police were forthright about their methods:

Mumbai police Commissioner A.N. Roy said an intensive investigation that included using truth serum on suspects revealed that Pakistan’s top spy agency had “masterminded” the bombings.

Roy said Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, began planning the attacks in March and later provided training to those who carried out the bombings in Bahawalpur, Pakistan.

“The terror plot was ISI sponsored and executed by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba operatives with help from the Students Islamic Movement of India,” Roy said at a news conference to announce the completion of the investigation. (…)

Police cracked the case after tracking down a suspicious call from Mumbai to the Nepal border region, Roy said. There they picked up one of the suspects, who led them to others.

However, Roy said that many of the suspects had been trained to resist interrogation and only the use of truth serum helped tie loose ends together.

I sure hope that none of the suspects were picked up by mistake, because it must have gotten very ugly indeed in that interrogation room. As for this “truth serum,” it may ring a bell — it was one of the “methods” discussed in the first wave of pro-torture proposals immediately after September 11. Here’s what Slate’s “Explainer” feature clarified at the time: Continue reading →

Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Paani?

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Articles like this are always saddening to read. Delhi is facing an extreme water crisis. Even middle class people are foraging from tankers, and the millions of gallons of untreated sewage emptied into the River Yamuna every year are killing it.

One of the main figures cited in the article is Sunita Narain, of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), the same people who brought us the summer pesticide/soda controversy. I know some readers will find her a controversial figure, but I don’t think the scale of Delhi’s water problem is really in dispute. Here are some of the stats Somini Sengupta brings to our attention:

  • 25 to 40 percent of the water sent into Delhi’s water pipes leaks out before it reaches its destination.
  • 45 percent of Delhi’s population isn’t connected to the public sewage system, and all of their waste runs back into the Yamuna untreated.
  • 2.1 million (Indian?) children die every year because of inadequate sanitation. [The article is unclear as to which children exactly are dying from sanitation related problems]
  • The river water is so polluted with fecal coliform that it’s not even remotely safe for bathing, which is required for devout Hindus.
  • Sewage plants have been constructed to treat waste, but have thus far have “produced little value.”

Better management might well make a difference:

Yet the most telling paradox of the cityÂ’s water crisis is that New Delhi is not entirely lacking in water. The problem is distribution, hampered by a feeble infrastructure and a lack of resources, concedes Arun Mathur, chief executive of the Jal Board.

The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40 percent of the actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr. Mathur well knows. “It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we can make water abundantly available,” he said. A proposal to privatize water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and was dropped. (link)

Privatization is, I think most people would agree, the wrong direction to go in for an essential resource like water. But the government seems to have been so thoroughly incompetent, it’s hard to see how simply pumping more money into the system will make a big difference. Government money is, like water, prone to “leak.” Continue reading →

A suitable boy or girl

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Although Vikram Seth has been out of the closet as bisexual for some time now, I had not been aware of his sexual orientation until he gave a lengthy interview to Outlook India on the subject. His more visible profile on the topic of his sexuality is related to his public support for the anti-Section 377 movement, the movement for the decriminalization of homosexuality in India.

The interview is fascinating, both in terms of what it reveals about Vikram Seth and in terms of what it reveals about India. My favorite part involves the interviewer grappling with the very idea of bisexuality.

I’m not sure I quite understand what bisexual means?

What do you mean you don’t understand? Supposing I have a physical attraction at some time or in a certain place to a particular woman, and another time to a particular man …I suppose if you don’t like the word, you could say I am gay and straight.

But if you can be straight, and life is so difficult as a gay, isn’t it simpler to just be straight?

Of course not. You have your feelings. You can’t just suppress or contort your feelings, either your emotional or sexual feelings. And why on earth should you, just to appease someone else’s unthought-through prejudices. [Link]

Ah yes, such a desi question. But beta, if you are attracted to vomen, then vhy do you need to be the gay? She follows that little gem up by asking “This is something that people often snigger about: has boarding school anything to do with you being gay?” which was the icing on the cliche cake.

While I cringed to read her asking these questions, I was still glad she did. Even if she knows better, I imagine these are questions that your average person on the street is thinking of, so it’s far better to give Seth a chance to respond than to leave them unsaid. Continue reading →

Wrong Swastika

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The New York Times recently ran a story about a mysterious gigantic swastika in Kyrgyzstan. The swastika in question is 600 feet across, at least 60 years old, and made out of fir trees:

Legend has it that German prisoners of war, pressed into forestry duty after World War II, duped their Soviet guards and planted rows of seedlings in the shape of the emblem Hitler had chosen as his own.

More than 20 years later, the trees rose tall enough to be visible from the village beneath. Only then did the swastika appear, a time-delayed act of defiance by vanquished soldiers marooned in a corner of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

For all the tidiness of legend, however, the tale is not quite true. [Link]

The article then goes on to present various explanations for the swastika, none of which quite click. A major reason why they don’t click is that the swastika in question obviously not a Nazi swastika (based on its orientation) but a Hindu/Parsi/Buddhist/Jain one:

The mystery’s persistence is in its way surprising, given that as a Nazi swastika the symbol is imperfect, whether by design or because of uneven terrain. Hitler’s swastika was tilted 45 degrees; the formation here is almost level. Moreover, the arms do not mimic the Third Reich’s symbol, but its mirror image — a swastika in reverse. [Link]

Left facing swastikas long predate the Nazis and are common in Asia. One explanation for the swastika is that it is in some way connected to Hinduism. The swastika is known as the “Eki Naryn swastika” and is located in a town of the same name. The phrase “Ek Narayan” means “One God.”

However, we don’t know it was Hindus for sure. It could be the Chinese:

[The left facing] swastika is often found on Chinese food packaging to signify that the product is vegetarian and can be consumed by strict Buddhists. It is often sewn into the collars of Chinese children’s clothing to protect them from evil spirits. [Link] [It is a well known fact that Chinese spirits are afraid of children of dyslexic Nazis – ed]

In Taiwan, the swastika is a generic symbol for temple:

On maps in the Taipei subway system a swastika symbol is employed to indicate a temple, parallel to a cross indicating a Christian church. [Link]

Synbols on a Taipei subway map

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

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So, where the hell is Osama bin Laden, anyway? Depends who you ask:

In a memoir that was released yesterday, “In the Line of Fire,” President Musharraf of Pakistan suggests that the leader of Al Qaeda is still in Afghanistan. “The fact that so many Saudis are in the Kunar area perhaps suggests that this is where Osama bin Laden has his hideout, but we cannot be sure,” he writes in the new book, published by Free Press.

But over the weekend, President Karzai of Afghanistan said Mr. bin Laden could be in the border region of Pakistan, but that he is definitely not in Afghanistan. “He is not in Afghanistan. I can tell you that for sure,” Mr. Karzai said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

And, where the hell is Mullah Omar, anyway? Depends who you ask:

The Afghan leader then suggested that Mr. bin Laden is in Quetta, Pakistan. The Taliban warlord, Mullah Omar, is believed to be living there.

In his memoir, General Musharraf said the idea that Mr. Omar is running an insurgency from Quetta is “ridiculous.”

With these diametrically opposed views, no surprise that it’s gotten personal:

“As soon as president Karzai understands his own country, the easier it’ll be for him,” General Musharraf said in an address to the Council for Foreign Relations think tank in New York.

Meanwhile:

Karzai has been no less testy this past week in his public comments, saying what Pakistan is doing in Afghanistan is akin to training snakes and the snakes would one day come back to bite Pakistan.

Well, tomorrow night Messrs. Karzai and Musharraf will enjoy dinner together, hosted by their great mutual friend and ally George Bush, who had this to say earlier today:

BUSH: Tomorrow, President Karzai and President Musharraf and I will have dinner. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be an interesting discussion amongst three allies, three people who are concerned about the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Should be interesting, indeed! No word from the White House yet on the menu, but we’re thinking there’ll be more red zinger than humble pie. Musharraf has an unfair advantage: he gets to practice his best lines tonight on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The world is truly strange. Continue reading →

Burnt Cork and Grease Paint

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bamboozled.jpegThere’s a powerful scene in “Bamboozled,” Spike Lee’s most difficult and underappreciated movie, in which the street-actor characters played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, having been recruited into a scheme that involves staging a deliberately outrageous, racist pilot for a TV show, find themselves in the dressing room applying blackface. The camera lingers as the cork burns and the grease paint is prepared, and pulls back to show us the characters as they see themselves in the mirror, watching their natural brown hues turn to a shiny, oily black.

Blackface was both insult and injury. Used by white actors, it offered literal cover for the most offensive caricature; used by black actors, it represented a negation of oneself that was demanded to earn a living as a performer, and worse, the prerequisite of dehumanization in order to represent those portrayed as one’s own community, one’s own self. More than any law or repressive policy, it sent the message that black people were simply not human.

kate_1.jpgOver the weekend, I was shown a tube of grease paint of a make used back in the blackface heyday. A small, banal object, yet one invested with so much and so troubling a meaning. Well it turns out that just a couple of days earlier, the British daily The Independent ran this front-page image in honor of its “Africa issue” with half of the day’s revenues to help fight AIDS on the continent. The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside.

Here’s a British term: BOLLOCKS! That’s also the view of Sunny from Asians in Media and Pickled Politics, our sister-from-another-mother site from across the pond, who puts it succinctly:

Could they not find a black model to represent Africa?

A particularly typical example of liberal guilt “we-feel-sorry-for-you” racism. You see they would have liked to to put a black model on the front but she just would not have sold as many copies. So they used a druggie.

It would have been better for the Indy to not even bother.

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Pandita Ramabai’s Book on America (1889)

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ramabaibw.jpg In a class I’m teaching this fall, we’re looking at Pandita Ramabai’s book on America, which has been recently translated by Meera Kosambi as Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter (2003). The original book was written in Marathi in 1889, and published as United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasavritta, which translates to The Peoples of the United States. It’s an intriguing book — part of the small group of “Easterner goes West” books published in the 19th century, coexisting uneasily alongside dozens of conventional, Orientalist travel narratives that describe the mystic, masalafied “East.” What Ramabai has to say about America is interesting partly for the oblique criticisms of colonialism and racism one finds at various points, and partly because of her staunch, unapologetic feminism.

Meera Kosambi has a thorough introduction to the book and to Pandita Ramabai, which is the source of most of the information in the post below. First off, the basic biography: Pandita Ramabai was born to a Brahmin family in Maharashtra in 1859. In a personal memoir she writes that her father (known as Dongre) went out on a limb and taught her Sanskrit, and also taught her to read and recite from the Puranas — considered completely off-limits to women at the time. But both of her parents died in in 1874 [approximately] because of famine, and Ramabai and her brother wandered around India until they ended up in Calcutta in 1878. They impressed the local Sanskrit experts (Calcutta, being more progressive, didn’t shun a female Sanskrit scholar), who granted Ramabai the name “Pandita,” in honor of her learning. Unfortunately, her brother died soon afterwards, and Ramabai married one of his friends, a lawyer from the Shudra caste named Bipin Behari (also known as Das Medhavi). The couple was ostracized for the cross-caste marriage, and tragically, Medhavi died just a couple of years later (in 1880), leaving Ramabai to raise their daughter Manorama, completely on her own. Continue reading →

Allen’s Cavalier remarks surface

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On Sunday Salon.com published a very provocative article about Sen. George Allen of “Macaca” fame (thanks for the tip Subodh and “Sparky“). To those people who have been defending him, including members of the Indian American Republican Council (IARC) and some Indian American business men in Virginia, I am sure this story will be of interest:

Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.

“Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where ‘blacks knew their place,'” said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. “He used the N-word on a regular basis back then.”

A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word “nigger” to describe blacks. “It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used,” the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word “nigger,” though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. “My impression of him was that he was a racist,” the third teammate said. [Link]

Here is one more tidbit:

Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. “He proceeded to take the doe’s head and stuff it into a mailbox,” Shelton said. [Link]

I am interested of course in what these former teammates have to say about Allen as it has bearing on the whole “macaca” incident. However, I am equally blown away by how similar this is to when former Presidential candidate John Kerry got “swift-boated” during the 2004 campaign. At that time it was some of Kerry’s former Vietnam war comrades that cast aspersions on his character from their interaction with him decades before. Here it is Allen’s former teammates on the UVA Cavaliers. Are we about to see political karma played out before our eyes? Another Presidential hopeful’s ambitions thwarted? I am going to predict so. Many macacas are known for their belief in karma after all. 🙂

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The original Indian American lobby

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We’ve had a few posts in the past on the growing influence of the Indian American Lobby (see 1,2,3), particularly with regards to the U.S./India nuclear deal. However, a new book set for release stateside next month takes us old school. Long before Indian Americans were lobbying for a nuclear deal with India they were lobbying for the basics, such as civil rights here and freedom for India. Indolink.com has a very informative review:

“Sikhs, Swamis, Students, and Spies: the India lobby in the United States, 1900-1946” is the title of a new book, authored by veteran South Asian scholar Dr Harold Gould, of the University of Virginia, and scheduled for release later this month by Sage Publications.

The subtitle suggests that it deals with the pioneers who confronted racism and opened America to South Asians, reflecting, as Joan Jensen informs us in her earlier classic study ‘Passage from India,’ “The story of how Indian immigrant pioneers settled in a hostile land and struggled to enjoy rights equal to those of Euro-Americans.”

That’s certainly a part of the historical confrontation between desis and non-desis in North America. It should be remembered that this was a time when the process of becoming an American citizen was one from which Indians were excluded through an increasingly complex maze of laws and regulations. Indeed, Indians were the only class of people whose citizenship was revoked because they did not neatly fit into the then commonly accepted racial categories of Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro.

This was also a time when the chief of the bureau of naturalization notified all United States attorneys to oppose actively the granting of naturalization to “Hindoos or East Indians” and to instruct clerks of courts in their districts to refuse to accept declarations of intention or to file petitions for naturalization. Attorneys were also asked to file motions for orders to cancel declarations of intention already filed by Indians.

That’s why, in 1907, when Bengali student Taraknath Das was refused an application for citizenship in San Francisco, he wrote to the attorney general: “May I ask you if the Hindus who belong to the Caucasian stock of the Human race have no legal right to become citizens of the United States, under what special law the Japanese who belong to a different stock are allowed to declare their intention to become citizens of the United States.” [Link]

By that last paragraph I can see that solidarity with other Asian Americans definitely wasn’t in vogue at the time. According to review, the book takes a very close look at the efforts made throughout North America to drum up support against the British occupation in India:

Most of the India associations had high aims and objectives. For instance, the Hindustanee association of United States, founded in Chicago in 1913, stated its aims as follows: “To further the educational interests of the Indian students, to gather or disseminate all kinds of educational information, to seek help and cooperation from people at home and in the country.” As I.M.Muthanna observes in his book ‘People of India in North America,’ “Though outwardly it posed as a cultural organization, the real aim of this association was to preach sedition against the British.”

The ‘Hindu’ Associations organized in the U.S. had the following objectives: ‘Receipt of vernacular papers from India in order to keep Hindus fully informed of the events in their country, importation of youths from India to America for their education and for preparing them for developing their nationalist outlook, and to hold weekly meetings and discus politics.’

Apart from the Ghadar weekly, some of the pamphlets that were widely circulated include New Echo, Gadar di Goonj, Gadar di Karak, Gadhar Sandesh etc. The editor Ram Chandra wrote: “The ghadar conveys the message of rebellion to the nation once a week. It is brave, outspoken, unbridled, soft-footed, and given to the use of strong language. It is a lightning, a storm and a flame of fire ..we are the harbinger of freedom…” [Link]

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