Category Archives: Issues

Did he or didn’t he?

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An anonymous tipster alerted us via the News tab to a possible racist/scandalous/nebulous slip of Michael Moore’s tongue. I sat through the entire, excruciating 10+ minute video at Breitbart.tv, only to discover that the controversial part is at the end; the video I posted below features the last eleven seconds of the entire segment and contains the relevant moment.


Link: sevenload.com

Well? What do you think? Racist or immature? Mispronounced or intentionally mangled? Or is this much ado about nothing? Comments on Breitbart were hot, heated and divided about whether or not Michael Moore started to channel Apu. What say you?

Continue reading →

The FBI offers employers advice

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The FBI is apparently being proactive in doing its job by laying out specific scenarios on its website that employers can learn from in order to prevent spying and generally help keep our nation safe (via Wired). Here is one fearful scenario:

You hire a foreign-born engineer who has been educated in this country. Over a 10-15 year period, she rises to mid-level management. Then, she returns to her home country—where she gets paid by that government to set up a business that competes with yours.

The key there is “foreign-born.” It doesn’t matter if you have been educated in this country from an early age or even if you are a Greencard holder. If you are foreign-born then employers should watch out for you because you may sell good Americans out to your Motherland. That’s scary. If I was an employer I might instead hire someone that looks American…just to be safe. Here is another one:

A series of university students and professors from overseas take jobs in research labs on campus and get involved in related military projects. Individually, they learn only bits and pieces. But collectively, when they pass that information back to their home country, it paints a telling picture of our country’s defense initiatives.

Good advice. The next time I see a group of “FOBs” eating lunch together I am going to consider them a “collective.” But wait, what if someone thinks that I’m foreign born when they see me sitting with a group of other desis at school! Qué Malo!

The FBI is willing to help by offering a training program (or something) to spot these collectives, or sleeper cells, or whatever…

Specifically: Join our Counterintelligence Domain Program or our Research and Technology Protection program.

Amazing what helpful advice you find on websites paid for by your tax dollars. I hope no foreign born readers visit Sepia Mutiny. Individually they can’t do us any harm but collectively they could use the knowledge they gain here to paint a telling picture of how we operate and then make the blogs of their own countries better. Continue reading →

…TiE Seattle Does Not, Unfortunately.

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I was getting ready to post a friendly, pushy reminder about a fantastic event which is taking place tomorrow, in DC at Tony and Joe’s (read: Sequoia ;)– but when I went to Vinay’s excellent website, something else caught my attention.

Something wrong.

All of us have at some point or another, met self righteous folk, very often rich entrepreneurs, who act like they’re God’s gift to the rest of us. Here’s where they become even more obnoxious if you can imagine what that might look like. TiE Seattle approached me last year to do a story on them for a prominent CA Indian paper which I promptly did. I didn’t play any games with them, didn’t dangle them for weeks. They asked, said their story had not been told before, I promptly, gladly did a story on them. Period.

Why not.JPG

Afterward, at every single TiE event I went to, their president (who shares his name with a Bollywood superstar) would drop as I’d be right in the middle of dinner, and demand right away, “So when are you doing another story on us?” At first I thought he was making small talk, then I thought he was just some overeager zealot but then I heard from many people that his malaise was something else. He just suffered from a bad case of pushy Swagger, EGO and a of lack of good manners. So I did what every journalist does. Ignored his prattle and stopped going to TiE Seattle…
I approached TiE asking them if they’d be kind enough to circulate an email to their member base telling them about Vinay and the bone marrow drive for him in Seattle. Just an email. I didn’t ask them for money or anything else. Just an email. 15 days out and what do I get? Zilch. Not even the courtesy of a, “Right now we’re too busy counting our dollars and won’t be able to email our members. Thank you for asking.”
Is it too much to ask to help a dying man? [SeattlePI]

Can I buy a round of WTFs, straight up? I’ve been called some…interesting things on SM these past few days, but maybe one of the trolls should have hurled “naive” my way. How could anyone say no to this cause? I can understand why the blogger, Priyanka Joshi, whom I quoted above, said this:

Corp-Social Responsibility? Hahaha![SeattlePI]

Would it have been THAT difficult to forward Priyanka’s email to their members? Maybe there are good souls in the Seattle chapter who would’ve wanted to help Vinay. It’s a shame that certain people are too…I don’t know what to put here…to help another human being.

Disclaimer for those who need it:

I am not denigrating TiE, its chapters or even its Seattle members. I’m just echoing another bloggers shock and disappointment in whomever decided that a wee email wasn’t important enough to pass on…okay?

I mean, it’s not like I sent the following words heavenwards…

So, in spirit of human dignity, as I pray for Vinay tonight, I’m also saying a prayer for TiE Seattle. “May TiE’s swagger and a lack of concern for other people be replaced by genuine compassion for the rich and the middle class alike.” Amen. [SeattlePI]

…but that’s only because I didn’t think of them, first. Amen. Continue reading →

This is what a Feminist looks like.

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Daddy's Girl.jpg

Exactly 32.5 years ago, a short man with a fearsome moustache stood at a nursery window, tears in his eyes, pride bordering on arrogance spilling forth via his words.

“See her? The one with the huge eyes? That’s my daughter.”

The strangers standing near him congratulated him and politely made remarks about his newborn’s full head of hair and yes, her eyes, which were peering around suspiciously as if she were casing her bassinet, planning a possible escape.

“She was alert, when she was born. She didn’t cry. She…uh…she takes after me. Strong.”

He cleared his throat and complained about the dust, using his ever-present handkerchief to wipe his eyes swiftly.

“Look at the other babies…they are oblivious. They’re nothing compared to her.” He had never been so smug.

My “Grandma”, who is a Russian Orthodox woman who married an Italian, who still sends me a check every January, who told me this story, stood by him, smiling.

“Oh, cut the bullshit George! Every parent thinks their kid is a damned miracle.”

She was teasing him, she didn’t mean it. She always admitted as much when telling this tale, because the next part of it involves her elbowing the woman next to her, and asking, “Have you ever seen a baby with so much hair and such big eyes? Most kids are bald. And squinty.”

My Mom was down the hall, passed out. There was still a tiny smudge of flour on her arm; she had been making chapati when I made my abrupt entrance on a Saturday night, after less than two hours of labor.

::

Much like the adorable protagonist of “Knocked Up”, my father had purchased baby books to study.

Ever the engineer, he charted out milestones and other information. He laid awake at night, unable to sleep; his brain, which already over thought everything, was now whirring even faster. He was the precursor to today’s “helicopter” parent, though he’d scoff at such dilettantes for being OCD-freaks-come-lately.

“That’s what happens when you wait until you are 38 to have a child. You really parent”, he’d explain to me and anyone else who would listen, later.

::

“You will be a book baby,” he allegedly announced to me, the day he strapped me in to the back of one massive Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, on the way home from the hospital. “You will do everything exactly when the books say…”

…or else. Or else, what? Who knows, I’m just lucky I did it. All that amazing early achievement would buy me some leeway when I turned out to be spectacularly mediocre, later on in life. Continue reading →

“Come back here, man. Gimme my daughter.”

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Safe.jpg

I’m swamped at work, but I’m also outraged, because of Fuerza Dulce’s latest submission to our news tab– I can’t let this go. CNN may be a bunch of assholes with sensationalism on their minds, but their story and this one are essentially about the same thing; we do not value the lives of women. Via the BBC:

A two-day-old baby girl in India has survived after being buried alive in a field by her maternal grandfather in the south of the country. The baby, who had apparently never been fed, was discovered by a farmer near a village some 150km south of Hyderabad.
He said he only spotted her because her tiny hand was sticking out of the soil.
Police say they have arrested the baby’s grandfather, 52-year-old Abdul Rahman, after he confessed to trying to kill the newborn by burying her alive.
“I am yet to marry off four daughters and cannot take responsibility for a fifth one, even when she is only a granddaughter,” Mr Rahman was quoted as telling police.

The article went on to state that he may have taken his grandchild without his dauther’s consent. His unnamed grandchild. Whom he buried. Alive.

I am so livid, I can barely type. Because of this immutable fact, I will warn you that I will shut this thread down if:

  • If “Maximum City” gets mentioned. I beg you, this is not the place.
  • I get asked, “why didn’t you post about immigration/terrorism/the story I sent in four times, instead of this predictable infanticide story?”
  • If one of you says this makes us look bad.

I really don’t care if all of the above makes me a pain in your ass or if it proves that the trolls are right and I am a bitch, after all. This doesn’t make us look bad, this IS bad.

A baby. Buried alive. Yes, it’s happened for centuries, but that doesn’t mean that reading such a story five minutes ago didn’t send a searing dagger in to my heart. We each blog about whatever moves us; there are no assignments in the bunker, no requirements or expectations. This moved me to despair. There will never be a point when we bless someone by saying, “May you be the mother of a hundred daughters“, and we are lesser for it. Continue reading →

Kumar Wants You to REGISTER

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Meanwhile, that Sunkrish Bala is a slice of adorable, isn’t he? I wouldn’t kick him…off the couch…where we would be demurely seated on opposite sides. And not touching. With vada on the coffee table as our witness. And our parents there, too. Ah, I digress.

But while I’m digressing, you should know that “Notes from the Underbelly“, which SB starred on, was one of my favorite shows of the past season. 🙂 Go on with your bad self, Sunkrish, whose name leaves me puzzled. And let me just say that I heart you more, for trying to help Vinay and others like him. “I’m registered…are you?” should become our new pickup line at the clubs, because I would’ve hurled my digits at THAT, for sure.

I was proud to see several of you get swabbed at the last Subcontinental Drift event. Drives are still happening all over the country.

There is still time– one of you could be the one. Continue reading →

May You Finally be at Peace [UPDATED, Sadly]

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A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about a Muslim youth who had cut the hair of a Sikh peer, during a fight in their high school bathroom. You may recall it– I asked you if this was a hate crime and many of you responded, some by saying “yes”, others “no”. The utility of hate crimes legislation was also debated; weren’t all violations worthy of condemnation? What if penalizing hate crimes really meant prosecuting thought crimes?

I thought of all of this, today. I was moderating a link on our news tab by clicking it, to make sure it worked. This takes less than a second, but sometimes, I linger for an extra moment on whatever news site you’ve submitted, especially if there’s another story which captures my attention (I’m powerless against the “most emailed” list).

“Survivor of Hate Crime Takes Own Life“, it said. Or something similar. I realized that David Ritcheson, 18, was dead, a year after he probably should have been. A comment from the post I referenced above came back to me:

I wouldn’t classify this as a crime… a little hair cut doesn’t hurt. He wasn’t sodomized for crying out loud. Plus, these were kids. Kids can be more sadistic than adults at times. Its actually somewhat normal for a pre-teen to be sadistic… part of the maturation process. This was peer pressure, not a hate crime. Whoever cut the Sikh fellow’s hair did to retain his status among the peer group. [Link]

Well, David was sodomized, for crying out loud. He wasn’t just sexually assaulted, he was brutalized. Stomped. Burned. Kicked. And as he lay on the ground, naked and dying, his attackers poured bleach on him. Why? He tried to kiss a 12-year old white girl, who was not related to either of his murderers. David.JPG

Who was David?

David Ritcheson had been a running back on the Klein Collins High School football team. He was homecoming prince as a freshman and had a girlfriend. He “hung out with the good crowd,” he says, and had every reason to look forward to returning last fall.
But once classes resumed, Ritcheson was overwhelmed by the looks he got everywhere he went — in the halls, in the cafeteria, in classrooms.
The looks all said the same thing: You’re a victim, how do you deal with it? Everybody knew what had happened to him, and the attack, he says, “was just so degrading.”
In a case that drew national attention, Ritcheson, a Mexican-American, was severely assaulted last April 23 by two youths while partying in Spring. One of the attackers, a skinhead named David Tuck, yelled ethnic slurs and kicked a pipe up his rectum, severely damaging his internal organs and leaving Ritcheson in the hospital for three months and eight days — almost all of it in critical care. [Houston Chronicle]

Here are his own words, which were uttered at a hearing on H.R. 1592, The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007; he testified, in an effort to wrest some good from his pain.

I appear before you as a survivor of one of the most despicable, shocking, and heinous acts of hate violence this country has seen in decades. Nearly one year ago on April 22, 2006, I was viciously attacked by two individuals because of my heritage as a Mexican-American…a minor disagreement between me and the attackers turned into the pretext for what I believe was a premeditated hate crime. This was a moment that would change my life forever. After I was surprisingly sucker punched and knocked out, I was dragged into the back yard for an attack that would last for over an hour. Two individuals, one an admitted racist skinhead, attempted to carve a swastika on my chest. Today I still bear that scar on my chest like a scarlet letter. After they stripped me naked, I was burned with cigarettes and savagely kicked by this skinhead’s steel toed army boots. After burning me in the center of the forehead, the skinhead attacker was heard saying that now I looked like an Indian with the red dot on my forehead.

Continue reading →

Sometimes, There’s a Match.

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Meenu Bedi is saving a life she’s never met…

The posts about Vinay and Sameer make it worthwhile to highlight and remind people that there *are* success stories out there. As many nonprofit volunteers can tell you, the single best cure for donor fatigue is a tangible example. For Vinay & Sameer, our local SF press highlighted this very recent one –

Bedi said she was “honored and ecstatic” when she found out her stem cells were a match.

“It was a privilege to do it for someone,” she said. “I would hope that they would do the same for me, if I was in their shoes.”

…”I know she’s 54 years old and that she has leukemia,” Bedi said. “They won’t release her ethnicity, but, yeah, she’s East Indian.”

Meenu was registered via a Team-in-Training program sponsored by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

As rare as matches are, what’s even more sad is the occasional response to a match (a problem which, sadly, Vinay appears to have run into) –

“We often get a lot of people to sign up,” [Program Director] Vlume said, “but the unique problem is getting people to say ‘yes’ after we’ve made a match.”

She said that sometimes, as many as 70 percent of people deemed matches decline to go through with the process.

“They want to look like they’re doing a good thing, they want to show they support the community, but in the end they never really wanted to do it in the first place,” Vlume said.

Sometimes, attitudes are a far worse problem than numbers. Good luck Vinay & Sameer.

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Help Vinay & Sameer – SF

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Unfortunately, Vinay isn’t alone in needing your / our help. Sameer Bhatia has also recently been diagnosed with AML, needs a bone marrow transplant, and is joining forces with Vinay to get South Asians registered. Mutineer Anna’s been fantastic about getting the word out for NYC and DC marrow registration drives, but West Coasters should know about an upcoming drive & fundraiser in SF — TONIGHT.

When: Thursday, June 28, 7pm to 10pm

Where: Dolce in San Francisco

www.dolcesf.com

Contact: Deepa Prasad and Harini Madhavan; deepaprasad@hotmail.com or hvmadhavan@hotmail.com

At the second event, we will be holding a donor drive as well as raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. We would love to see you there as well. Please spread the word and bring as many people as you can to both events. It should be a great time as well as an important and meaningful cause.

If you can’t make it up to SF, there are other drives tonight in Sacramento, Seattle, Sunnyvale and NYC and a LARGE LIST of future drives all across the country. With 1 in 20,000 odds of finding a suitable match, every little cheek swab helps. Continue reading →

How to Save A Life in DC + NYC — UPDATED

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Remember Vinay? I blogged about him because he direly needs a bone marrow transplant and his best chance at finding a match lies with us. Unsurprisingly, several of you said you would step up and get swabbed, if only you had the opportunity to do so. Well, after throwing more meetups than any other mutineer, I know for a fact that DC has a TON of SM readers– now make good on your word to help.

You can even do so TODAY— look:

* * *
THURSDAY, JUNE 14 – DOWNTOWN D.C.
4:30p to 7:30p
Asian American Justice Center
1140 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC
Contact: DCdonorDrive@aol.com or Rachna at (202) 256-4326

Can’t make it? Live in the burbs? Try these:

* * *
SATURDAY, JUNE 16 – LANHAM, MD
10:30a to 3:30p
Sri Shiva Vishnu Temple
6905 Cipriano Rd.
Lanham, MD
Contact: Aditya at aditya.raghavendra@gmail.com or (617) 872-0081
* * *
SUNDAY, JUNE 17 – BALTIMORE, MD
9:30a to 5:00p
Greater Baltimore Temple
2909 Bloom Rd.
Finksburg, MD
Contact: Seema at indiaseema@hotmail.com or (949) 291-2545

5:45 PM UPDATE–

* * *

Jane says (she’s done with Sergio) that a NEW YORK Drive commences in 15 minutes;

Hey in NYC tonite as well….
Public House
141 East 41st St (between Lexington and Third Avenues), New York, NY
Thursday, June 14, 6:00pm to 10:00pm

One of our longtime readers lost a parent to this tragic disease last week. Some of you know whom I’m referring to and if you haven’t already given a little bit of yourself, maybe this message from their family will move you:

In lieu of flowers, please help save a life and register with the national bone marrow registry or get someone else to register (www.marrow.org).

How many people whom we know and love must we lose before you register? Continue reading →