Category Archives: Issues

This turban’s disturbin’

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On the late-night community access channel, Dr. Khemfoia Padu, who appears to be black, dons a saffron turban and shills pills with whale tails.

Dr. Padu is the Director of The Natural Healing Foundation… He is a licensed Chiropracter, Herbologist, Nutritionist, as well as a Theologian and Martial Artist. [Link]

I’m not sure whether the pagri pitches desi mysticism, evokes black musicians who wore turbans or references turbans in Africa.

Erykah Padu’s turban may be genuine, but I’m thoroughly irritated that desi culture is associated in the U.S. with hippies and New Age. You can’t go to an all-veg pizza place without drowning in ads for crystals and tarot cards. That ain’t right. A subculture has branded a billion and a half people, the tail wags the wog.

In one freakish conflation of the Indian revolutionary movement with American hippies, a town in Massachussetts actually banned a Gandhi statue. It was the absolute height of clusterfuck ignorance:

Gita Mehta details the extent of the hippie infatuation with South Asia in her classic book, Karma Cola. Westerners seek instant salvation; Easterners the quick rupee. Gurus could pack entire astrodomes in the ’60s, levitation was believed to signal salvation, and Western disciples believed above all else in moksha through easy sex and hard drugs. At one point there were over 100,000 hippies trekking all over South Asia searching for enlightenment in woolly-minded religious platitudes and a variety of uppers and downers. Religion and opium for the masses: no wonder Sherborn, Massachusetts, would have none of it.

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An Angle too Conventional

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himanshu bhatia.jpg WeÂ’ve received a few tips (Thanks, Mytri and Brimful!) about an article entitled “A Flair for the Unconventional”, which ran in the New York Times on Sunday. Following your links, I expected to be slightly bored by something dealing with outsourcing or tech or consulting blah blah blah. I was prepared to let one of the staff entrepreneurs/business titans tackle it, so I could get back to writing a more ANNA-esque post. 😉

But when the page loaded, I was slightly startled to see a striking Brown woman whose picture sat atop a sidebar of “important details” about her: her title (Chief Executive of Rose International, an IT services company in the Midwest), her birth date, her nickname (Himanshu became “Sue”), even what she likes to do in her spare time (nature walks). The last bold, highlighted, impossible-to-miss bit of information contained…

her weight-control regimen?

Are you kidding me? Continue reading →

Yay, More Hope for Men!

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I wish I were a man. Really. Their problems seem so much more…significant, no?

At least, that’s how I feel after reading a Washington Post article entitled, New Wives Bring New Hope to Sri Lankan Widowers.

sepiarantfish.jpg Thanggod! Some good news about Sri Lanka, I thought, as I clicked the link and started reading:

Plunged into despair after the tsunami killed his wife and two of his four children, Ruknadhan Nahamani passed the first months after the disaster in an alcoholic fog, drowning his sorrows in the potent local liquor known as arrack . But grief was only part of the problem, he said.

“There was nobody to wash my clothes and take care of my kids when I went out to work,” said the wiry 32-year-old fisherman, whose teeth are stained red from chewing betel nut, a mild stimulant. “It was really difficult.”

But Nahamani is a single parent no more. In June, he exchanged wedding vows and jasmine garlands at a Hindu temple with a woman from a nearby village. “We are very happy,” he said outside his tent at a refugee camp as his new wife, Leelawathi, heated cooking oil for the evening meal.[link]

The man survived a tsunami and lost almost his entire family and lives in a refugee camp. Of course he deserves all the happiness he can find. sepiarantwomen.jpg But the grinchy pebble I call a heart couldn’t muster more joy when I remembered all the war widows in Sri Lanka. Some 40,000 at last count.

And the fact that women drowned in massively disproportionate numbers (three times more) during the tsunami because they’re not taught to swim.

And the fact that widows are still treated like amoral harlots in most of South Asia.

Where’s the bloody community support for them? Continue reading →

Forget Starbucks, Wal-Mart is evil!

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walmart blows.jpg

In a development that will not surprise anyone, mammoth retailer and purveyor o’ crap Wal-Mart is getting sued for ignoring the conditions of the factories from whence their ultra-cheap merch comes (via the BBC):

The class-action suit has been filed in Los Angeles on behalf of 15 workers in Bangladesh, Swaziland, Indonesia, China and Nicaragua.
Each claim they were paid less than the minimum wage and not given overtime payments. Some say they were beaten.

Wal-Mart promised that the beatings were merely for morale and didn’t leave any marks. I keed, I keed. America’s superstore said it would investigate the claims, duh.

The lawsuit mentions the obvious; the evil yellow circle who zigs and zags about Wal-Mart’s commercials wantonly dicing and slicing numbers is to blame. If they’re going to sell merchandise for unbelievably low prices, they’ll make up for those sales somehow, somewhere– Gunga Din is the easy choice, it seems.

The superstore is predictably vague in its response:

“It’s really too early for us to be able to say anything about this particular complaint,” said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Beth Kath.
“It involves a number of companies and manufacturers and we’re just beginning our research to learn more.”

Research away. Continue reading →

One ticket for the clue train, please

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Tacky, tacky, tacky. Last week, sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling got snarky about India’s hurricane relief offer. I’ll be generous and speculate he was criticizing the U.S.’ tardy disaster response. But get this — he did so by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist landmark, ‘Gunga Din’ (via Amardeep):

Thank Goodness, Here Come the Brave and Generous Indians to Rescue Louisiana
Mood: incredulous
Now Playing: take up the white man’s burden, send forth the best ye breed…

Where’s bloomin’ Rudyard Kipling when we need ‘im, eh?

… I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.

… ‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to pore damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din!

Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! [Link]

Incredulous is right. You thought Indra Nooyi was tone deaf? A middle finger reference is nothing compared to ‘Gunga Din.’ This is like praising Savion Glover’s dancing skills by comparing him approvingly to Little Black Sambo.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Sterling is slyly calling hurricane relief the brown man’s burden. But that would be pretty oblique given the plain meaning of the ‘belted an’ flayed’ Indian servant saving a white man’s life. I don’t think this interpretation holds water, pardon the pun.

Some bloggers are also criticizing a sarcastic Boing Boing title (‘Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!’), but Xeni, a huge Bollywood fan, issued a pretty straightforward clarification.

Here’s more reaction by Uma, Shashwati and Club810, and previous posts on India’s aid offer, Gunga Din, the white man’s burden and racist caricatures.

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Isolating a contagion

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Newsweek columnist Christopher Dickey reviews a provocative analysis of suicide bombings that seeks to characterize and combat them as if they were a contagion:

The most useful way to understand how terrorism became so grimly commonplace may be to think of this slaughter as a pathology, like a contagious disease that began with small outbreaks here and there, and has developed into an epidemic. Suicide as such–without the bombing or the terrorism–has been studied as a pathology by social scientists at least since the 19th-century work of Émile Durkheim, which focused on the societal factors likely to increase the risk that people will kill themselves. And while suicidal terrorism may be distinctive, when you demystify it and put aside the Bush administration’s misleading obsession with a “murderous ideology” in the “Global War on Terror,” the similarities with other forms of suicide are instructive.

In the 1980s, for instance, the suicide rates among young people in several European countries rose dramatically. By the early 1990s, studies showed that in several countries more young Europeans were taking their own lives than were dying on the highways. Dutch researcher René Diekstra, then at the University of Leiden, identified the break-up of extended families and the increasing rootlessness of European life as forces behind these trends. Based on a comparative study of suicide in 20 countries over two decades, he determined in the early 1990s that divorce rates, unemployment, the rising number of working mothers, the declining importance of religion, the diminished number of children, all helped to predict the trends in suicide rates.

I am always ready to listen to people who take a shot at demystifying “evil.”  When leaders overuse words like “evil” they sometimes undermine the pursuit of a real solution to the problem.  For example, one of the best articles I have ever read broke down the motivations of the Columbine killers in a way that finally made sense to me.  Returning to the Newsweek article:

No, there’s something more: the contagion. History is full of suicide outbreaks where first a few, then many people kill themselves.

The savagely cynical leaders of Hizbullah, the Tamil Tigers, Hamas, Al Qaeda and other groups have worked to spread the plague of suicidal terror by denying the taboos against self-destruction while romanticizing the young men and women willing to blow themselves away. Hence the video testaments like Khan’s [London Underground bomber].

“Once a specific form of suicide takes place, it becomes part of the thinking and, if you will, the repertoire of people who can identify with that person who killed himself,” says the Dutch researcher René Diekstra, now at Holland’s Roosevelt Academy. “We know that what we call ‘suicide contagion’ is particularly prevalent in the late teens and early adult age. There is a search for identity, and for heroism.”

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Bad memories

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In unfortunate news, particularly since it comes on the four year anniversary of 9/11, a NYC fire-fighter was arrested for a possible hate crime against a Bangladeshi immigrant.  CNN reports:

Hours after many New York firefighters gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a firefighter was arrested for attacking an immigrant worker and telling him he looked “like he’s al-Qaeda,” police said.

Firefighter Edward Dailey was arrested Sunday afternoon on charges of criminal mischief and felony second-degree assault, Police Sgt. Kevin Farrell said. It had not yet been determined whether the charges would be upgraded to a hate crime, he said.

Dailey, 27, is accused of breaking a piece of Plexiglas off a curbside news stand and throwing it at a 51-year-old man who works there, Farrell said. Dailey had said the man, an immigrant from Bangladesh, looked “like he’s al-Qaeda,” Farrell said.

So discouraging to hear this type of thing happen at all, but even worse on the anniversary.  I’m sure they’ll be a case made make a case for PTSD.  Newsday.com has more:

Dailey, who lives on Long Island and works in Jamaica, Queens, was valedictorian of his Fire Academy class last year, according to the Daily News.

The arrest came on a day when many New York firefighters gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. Police said Dailey had been drinking after attending the memorial service for a fallen firefighter he had known from their previous jobs as emergency medical workers.

In  related news, filmmakers  Valarie Kaur, who blogs at DNSI, and Sharat Raju have a trailer of their upcoming film titled “Divided we Fall.”

A turbaned Sikh man was murdered four days after Sept. 11, 2001 by a man bent on eliminating anyone “Arab-looking.” He screamed: “I am a patriot!” Similar stories of hate crimes swept across the nation in the aftermath.

Armed with only a camera and a question, an American college student journeyed into the heart of a suffering nation in search of answers. She met people, some born and raised in America, others who came seeking a better life and adopted a new land as their own home. All believed in the American dream. Captured on film are their stories — hundreds of them. Stories of sadness. Of unimaginable loss & fear. Of hope, resilience & love.

Two filmmakers. One camera. 14 American cities. Four months on the road. 100 hours of footage. And the question: WHY?

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Don’t freak

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Immediately after the London terrorist bombings there were plenty of comments left on numerous SM posts that all seemed to express a particular opinion that was VERY distasteful to me, and to some other readers.  To paraphrase, the opinion went like this: “We need to educate the public better so that when a racist or bigoted backlash occurs following a terrorist attack, they will be wise enough to target Muslims instead of people that only look like Muslims.”  I thought that such an opinion would find no support at all but I learned that I was wrong.  Dave at DNSI points to an article in the Guardian that shows just how wrong I was.  Some Sikhs and Hindus facing the prospect of a backlash are taking unusual approaches:

The explanation as to why Sikhs and Hindus are targeted…is quite simple: “your average hate-crime perpetrator isn’t going to stop and ask what religion you are before attacking you – or even care, for that matter, about such distinctions.”

If you travel on London’s public-transport system you may have spotted them: stickers and T-shirts with “Don’t freak, I’m a Sikh” written across them. On the tube, they tend to be greeted with wry smiles, but they have sparked heated debate on Sikh online message boards. “Don’t wear these T-shirts, they’re anti-Muslim,” writes one contributor. “We should wear the T-shirts,” says another. “We need to think of ourselves first – let the Muslims take care of themselves.”

In the weeks following July 7 it was widely reported that hate crimes against Asians had increased dramatically. They were not just attacks on Muslim Asians, of course: they were attacks on Asians of all faiths. The fact is that your average hate-crime perpetrator isn’t going to stop and ask what religion you are before attacking you – or even care, for that matter, about such distinctions. But this point seems to have been lost on the media. There’s been a huge focus on the impact on Britain’s Muslim community, but the plight of Britain’s 560,000 Hindus and 340,000 Sikhs has been largely ignored.

Sure, it’s easy for me to judge.  I sit here safe and don’t have to endure suspicious eyes checking me out on the Underground every day.  Still, this rubs the very heart of me.  I think these t-shirts should all be burned.  Prior to WWII, Hitler forced the Jews to wear the Star of David on their clothes so as to single them out with ease.  Here it seems some citizens are volunteering for that sort of indignity in order to make their lives a bit easier, at the price of a higher ideal.  We shouldn’t be declaring that we are different from Muslims.  If anything we should be educating people on how similar they are to us.  I fully support declaring that you are Sikh, loud and proud.  To do so in order to differentiate yourself from a Muslim, specifically to avoid a potential hate crime, is just loud without the proud.

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She’s not cowed by anyone

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savita is fierce.jpg Almost a century ago, my great grandmother was married to a boy of her family’s choosing. This would be totally unremarkable (not to mention irrelevant to the post I’m commencing) except she was a seven-year old bride. When she was eighteen and suitably “womanly” (read: able to reproduce), she went to live with her husband of more than a decade; though he is now gone, she still loves him very much. I remember being very disturbed by this story the first few times I heard it. My mother would always soothe me and say that it all occurred during another time, that the practice of marrying off children wasnÂ’t a part of modern India*.

*When I was a bit older, she explained the asterisk which was visible only in the guarded look her face took on whenever she said the phrase, “Modern India”; that fleeting change in her eyes represented the inevitable and unfortunate truth that “bad things” might still occur, but “only in rural, backwards places” which were still living in the shade of ignorance.

I was reading yesterday’s WaPo when I thought of all of this. The article I knew I’d write up for SM was about Savita Chaudhry, a striking 22-year old who at age 3 was arranged to marry a five-year old. Her matchmaking grandfather sealed the deal with a coconut and perplexed toddler-Savita spent the night with her new in-laws, to “consummate” the marriage symbolically before returning home with her parents. Everyone expected that Savita would willingly stand by her man once she was an adult, like my great-grandmother did.

I wonder if there were signs, when she was a wee three, that two decades later she’d grow up to be someone fierce.

Last year, the willowy young woman with the flashing dark eyes refused the entreaties of her “husband” and his family to join them in their village, several hundred miles from this small city in western India where she runs the family grocery shop. She is paying a steep price.

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To thine own self, Be True

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I would’ve swore at the ref, too. (Thanks, Mankanwal):

Parents and coaches of a Calgary junior soccer team are angry after a Sikh player was barred from a game for insisting on wearing his religious head scarf.
Northwest United was competing in a tournament in this Vancouver suburb when a referee told 17-year-old Gurindar Durah he could not wear his patka, which young, religiously observant Sikhs are required to wear.
Mr. Durah swore at the referee and was ejected from the game. Then his team decided to walk out in protest.

Mad props to his team for standing up and walking out for their boy. Durah’s Coach, Mario Moretti supported his players, calling the tournament “done” the moment the ref brought up Gurindar’s patka:

“This is a decision our players made, not me. I supported my players. They all supported Gurindar, which was a no-brainer for us.”

Of course the people behind the tournament, in a dazzling display of deluded, oblivious lameness stated that Durah was barred from the tournament for “swearing”. Way to address the issue, there.

I’m somewhat shocked that it all went down north of us; I always thought of Cah-naw-duh as being literally and figuratively more chill. Beyond that, the Sikh community there is so accomplished and visible when compared to Amreeka. I unlearn something new, every day. Continue reading →