Category Archives: Politics

Indian Woman Marries Snake

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Look, I love animals. I mean, I really love animals. I grew up with a dog, I have cats, and I walk some of the dogs in my neighborhood to break up my writing day. But I draw a line at this: Indian woman marries cobra.

Now, all phallic jokes aside, let’s take a look at this. This woman was sick. She started feeding the snake and got cured. Perhaps this was psychological, or coincidental, or perhaps it was indeed a religious sign. But basic questions are being ignored here.

For one, how did the snake propose? I’m assuming this Bimbala Das is a nice Indian girl who didn’t spring the question on it/him? Also:

Priests chanted mantras to seal the union, but the snake failed to come out of a nearby ant hill where it lives,

Then how do you know it said yes? What if it has a little cobra wife and babies already? You mean the incredible racket of an Indian wedding isn’t conducive to luring snakes into matrimony?

Second, what are the snake’s rights? Does he know own her property? Did he provide some kind of dowry? And, perhaps most important from the cobra’s point of view–does the snake have any conjugal rights? I mean, I’m just asking here, it’s a logical question.

“I am happy,” said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.

Eeeeeeeenteresting. Perhaps a trip to the zoo is in order? I’ve heard penguins mate for life….

a traditional Hindu wedding celebrated by 2,000 guests in India’s Orissa state

This is the most shocking of all. A cobra can get 2000 guests to come to its wedding in the heat of India in June and I can’t get half my guests to come up past 14th street on a weekday. Continue reading →

Silencing the “Code”

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Oh dear. Andhra Pradesh is the seventh Indian state to ban The Da Vinci Code. Why?

“We have taken the decision because the release of the movie could have led to demonstrations and trouble,” Paul Bhuyan, the special chief secretary of Andhra Pradesh, told The Associated Press. More here. Apparently, the chief secretary took Tommy Lee Jones seriously in Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, stupid animals and you know it.”

Now, I have not seen the movie, nor have I read the book. I tried, but I didn’t like the writing. Thanks to the combination of hype and Wikipedia, I know the whole damn story, right down to the mad albino monk’s favorite method of self-flagellation. Everyone I know who has seen the movie has thought it stuffy and boring, but I will quote only my mother “That Indiana Jones was much funnier.”

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The dark side of gym rats

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I self-identify as a gym rat. My body begins to feel ill and lethargic if I go even a week without working out. I have been working out at a gym regularly for the last eleven years. I consider going to the gym an almost spiritual duty. I believe in a personal philosophy that you must keep your body in the best shape you possibly can at all times so that it will be clean and ready if called into service for a greater cause (whatever that might be). I know that might seem silly to a lot of people but I really mean it. It isn’t about vanity. I actually eat four servings of fruits a day also, because being in shape isn’t just about going to the gym but about taking care of your health in general.

When I am at the gym I do not socialize. I only know the first names of one or two people at my gym. I always workout alone, I wear headphones, and 80% of the time I am there I don’t even make eye-contact with anyone. The gym is my “me” time. It is where I meditate on the things bothering me as well as on the things I am happy about. I toss around ideas for blog posts and also consider whether I should ban that one commenter who has been bugging me for months. It is my hour and a half of refuge from the storm outside.

An article published this week at Slate.com has got me reconsidering everything. Far from living a good example, maybe I, and those of you like me, are just a bunch of freaks in the making:

There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years–9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohamed Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though–their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others–whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course. [Link]

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Desi Family Terrorized in Wayne, NJ

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The words in the subject line of Sree’s SAJA email blast made me cringe. HATE CRIME: NJ Record on Hindu family targeted

Oy.

I’ll take the tentative exotification over blatant intimidation any day, thanks. What puzzles me most about this crime is the syntax of the spray-painted hate:

We Kill U.
We will Fire your house.
Watch Your Kids.

Feel free to scream at me for this, but I know desis who sound just like that, not that I’m in any way implying that it’s an inside job OR that asshat racists are usually articulate. “We will Fire your house”? To quote OMC, how bizarre.

More from the Bergen record:

Those threats and other profanities — spray-painted on a two-story house in black and orange and neon green — are terrorizing a Wayne family of five who police say have been singled out for their Hindu beliefs and Asian Indian roots.

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A Rush of Blood to the Head

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As some of you may have seen on our News tab, a Hindu temple in Minnesota was recently vandalized pretty severely:

The severed head of Andal Devi

Two 19-year-olds were arrested May 10 and charged with vandalising a partially completed Hindu temple in Maple Grove, MN, on April 5.

Maple Grove Police arrested local resident Paul Gus Spakousky and Tyler William Tuomie of Andover, MN, and charged them with first-degree criminal damage to property and third-degree burglary, both felonies…

Several of the deities were damaged in the attack, forcing the organisers to postpone the scheduled June 4 inauguration of the 43,000 square feet temple built at a cost of $9 million (about Rs 40 crore). [Link]

Punkistani follows up with more details [via Sanjay]:

That’s the head of Andal Devi, and just one of eight sacred likenesses that were defiled in a Hindu Temple set to open on June 1st. By defiled, I mean the statues were decapitated and dismembered…

It’s pretty damned recent. The scoop is that vandals punctured walls and broke into a Hindu temple, ruined some Hindu Gods and left. Property destruction is never that focussed unless it’s a deliberate attempt to intimidate. Nearby Churches went untouched.

Six hundred people attended the community meeting that followed, where reports of neighborhood Indians having their houses vandalized and egged were exchanged. The attending Police Captain, Tracy Stille, verified these stories. [Link]

The Kominas, a Muslim punk band that we have previously blogged about, have decided to rush to the aid of the temple and their fellow South Asian Americans. They are putting on a concert to raise money for rebuilding the temple and it would be cool if our New York readers could represent. Continue reading →

Arundhati Roy’s Suicidalism

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As the eminent Arnold Toynbee pointed out, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”. Here, Arundhati Roy carries her Far-Left Post-Modernism to its logical suicidal ends –

…the longer you stay [in places like Iraq], the more you’re enforcing these tribal differences and creating a resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep saying, you know, I’m doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.

So, it seems she’d rather cast her lot with the barbarians who’d “string her up” than implicitly support the Western hegemony responsible for her material well being, freedom of speech and physical security. So be it.

(hat tip – DesiDudeInGotham whose submission to the News page roused me from my blog slumber)

[previous SM coverage on Roy – “Back the Resistance” and “Tunku vs. Arundhati“] Continue reading →

Arnold: "Must be a cultural thing"

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Recently Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California spoke at the 2006 TiEcon conference in front of a large group representing the Indian American business and entrepreneurial community. The conference was held in Silicon Valley and dealt mostly with the intersection of California, business, and Indian Americans. A mash-up clip featuring the highlights of his talk are available on the internet. It is worth seeing (scroll down just a bit on the linked page) especially for the zinger that Schwarzenegger unleashes about a quarter way through the clip when he notices that all of his co-panelists are men. What’s up with that?

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Affirmative action: Here and over there

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Over the tipline we are often asked by Indians living in India why we (as individuals) don’t blog more about certain Indian issues (especially those dominating the Indian media). The simple answer is that you most likely wouldn’t want to read what we have to say about many Indian issues. We aren’t Indian nationals, we all reside in North America, and we are all U.S citizens (except for our current guest blogger who runs our Canadian operations). This means that our opinions, at best, would provide some with a broader perspective on a given topic, and at worst could come across as ignorant or ill-informed. There are better places to read about Indian issues if that is what you are looking for. And yet, those of us who write for SM have definitely felt some resentment at times from parts of the Indian blogosphere, both when we blog an “Indian issue,” and when we don’t.

I know that the current hot topic in the Indian media is the battle over a quota system in Indian universities. I wasn’t going to write a post about it because the Indian educational system doesn’t affect me in any way. However, my mom mentioned the debate to me over the phone and we got to discussing it. I realized how similar and how different the debate in India is as compared to the affirmative action debate in the U.S. Being a graduate of the University of Michigan, the central battlefield for affirmative action in the U.S., I have some definite opinions on the subject and am generally in favor of affirmative action and the type of educational environment it leads to when implemented and executed properly.

My mom opined that she kind of supported the protestors in India. I pressed my mom on the matter a bit since I am more inclined to support a quota system of some kind. What about 3000 years of class oppression? You can’t just erase that with pithy protest slogans like:

DON’T MIX POLITICS WITH MERIT; QUOTAS: THIS CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE; MERIT IS MY CASTE, WHAT’S YOURS?… [Link]

Time Magazine Asia breaks down the central arguments in the debate:

“Modern India should be built on merit, not caste,” says Dr. Sudip Sen, 34, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry at AIIMS. “What’s next — are we going to let a slow runner represent India in the Olympics? No, we are going to send our best runner out for the 100 meters, no matter his caste. It should be the same for all fields.”

Countless other Indian medical workers who have gone on strike this week feel much the same as Sen, which is why India’s sudden battle over affirmative action makes the ongoing divide in the U.S. over racial preferences seem tame by comparison. Public hospitals across the country have shut their doors to all but emergency services; private hospitals in some Delhi suburbs are following suit; trade unions have called for a morning of civil disobedience; and students at India’s elite business schools are meeting to plan their own protests. In spite of the disruption, the government has sworn that it will not back down, regardless of who resigns or how many protest. Increased quotas, it claims, are the only way to foster social equality at the institutions that are driving the Indian economy forward.

That fast-growing economy often makes it easy to forget India’s rigidly stratified past. But any country hurtling along the path to modernization is at risk of being occasionally slowed down by the weight of its own history, and in this case, India has been yanked to a crawl by 3,000 years of a strictly codified social pecking order. [Link]

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Fear of a Brown Magnate

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Mittal-steel.jpgA big current international business story is the attempted takeover of Arcelor, a Luxembourg-based steel manufacturer, by London-based, desi-owned Mittal Steel, the voraciously successful family business of Lakshmi Mittal. Arcelor is itself the result of a merger of European steel firms, a logical consolidation in its day since steel is a sunset industry in Western Europe and many firms enjoyed protections of state ownership or subsidies that EU rules no longer permit. However, European politicians have retained a bit of a proprietary cultural interest, as it were, in firms like Arcelor, since even without state ownership they possess a sort of vestigial patriotic value as “national champions,” and they still employ a fair number of people, if far fewer than before, in depressed industrial areas.

Well, ever since Mittal made his first overtures to Arcelor shareholders (which Manish blogged here in January), followed by a formal takeover bid once he got permission from competitive authorities, Arcelor has done everything possible to wriggle away from its suitor. Fair enough – that’s what companies threatened by hostile takeovers do, especially when it becomes clear that their management don’t enter into the buyer’s plans for the future. But with investment analysts lining up in favor of the Mittal bid, there’s also been, of course, speculation that even though Mittal is a London-based, London-quoted firm, it may just be a little too brown for the comfort of the European industrial bourgeoisie.

All this could be dismissed as reading-ethnicity-into-everything, and to some extent probably is. (Though…) Still, itÂ’s remarkable to see that this week the board of Arcelor found themselves rushing into the arms of what is known in business lingo as an, ahem, white knight, in the form of a Russian firm of the new-oligarch variety. The merger deal with Severstal is framed as a purchase by ArcelorÂ… except that it is funded by an increase in ArcelorÂ’s capital via investment by Alexei Mordachov, SeverstalÂ’s 38-year-old chairman. By funding ArcelorÂ’s purchase of his firm, Mordachov takes a 32 percent interest in the merged firm, which would become the worldÂ’s largest steel producer, ahead of Mittal.

The London business writers are having a field day with this one. “The putrid stink of hypocrisy hangs in the air,” says The Observer‘s Richard Wachman, noting that Arcelor, having criticized Mittal for non-transparency in past business dealings, has found its savior in the land where opaqueness and favoritism are essential components of business success. And The IndependentÂ’s business columnist Jeremy Warner cold lays down the card:

Is it cos I’s brown? The Arcelor board appears so appaled at the prospect of takeover by the Indian-born steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal, that it will do almost anything to avoid his clutches – right down to surrendering control to the Kremlin. Okay, so I’m exaggerating to make the point, but only a little.

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