Category Archives: Politics

All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word…

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…Maria.

As soon as word of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s adulterous affair with an Argentinian mystery woman hit the streets, Indian American gubernatorial candidate Nikki Randhawa-Haley pulled any association with him off of her website. Sanford who? Never heard of him. Did you check under the bus?

Hmmm, just a week ago some were intimating how close a professional relationship the two had:

Since there’s no question who S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford is backing for governor 2010, the only real suspense left is this: at what point does First Lady Jenny Sanford start getting jealous?

Seriously, Sanford’s abiding affection for third-term Lexington Representative Nikki Haley continues to manifest itself, as the governor blasted out an e-mail to several thousand of his closest friends this morning telling them Haley was “worth getting to know.” [Link]

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“Talk Hindi To Me”

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Doubtless many readers saw the recent article in the New York Times, profiling Katherine Russell Rich, author most recently of a book called Dreaming in Hindi — a memoir of a year spent in Rajasthan, learning Hindi.

Something about the article in the Times bugged me, starting with the following passage:

One store owner insists in English that she is not actually speaking Hindi; when Ms. Rich explains, in Hindi, that she studied the language for some time in Rajasthan, he retorts, in English, “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan.” (This happens not to be true.)

When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.” (link)

Wait, couldn’t it also be that the people Rich has been accosting, taxi drivers and convenience store clerks, might simply find this persistent American annoying, and have refused to speak Hindi with her mainly to make her go away? Lady, I’m sorry if your being in New York means your newly-acquired Hindi is going to start getting rusty. But I got a job to do, and that involves speaking English to patrons as I sell them stuff, not teaching you how to pronounce “lajawab” correctly. Next in line, please?

The question has to be asked: why does Katherine Russell Rich want to learn to speak Hindi? Is it to communicate with Hindi speakers while living in India? That would be a perfectly fine reason, indeed, an admirable one. But I suspect that sadly her real desire was to a) get paid for writing a book where she can talk all about her Hindi lessons and her impressions of Rajasthan, only to b) promptly move back to Manhattan, where she’ll irk Hindi speaking New Yorkers with her persistent demands that they speak Hindi with her?

Another annoyance in the article is the presumption that people refuse to acknowledge a white woman who speaks Hindi because we desis like to gossip about Americans in our secret language:

To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim. (link)

I really don’t know where the author of the article got this idea. (Why not ask an actual Indian, Hindi-speaker before making the speculative statement that “domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim”?)

Finally, there is the obligatory dis on second-generation, “heritage” students who take Hindi classes at their universities:

“A lot of Indians who were born here or moved here when they were very small want to rediscover the language,” he said. (Ms. Rich said that she had overlapped with such students at New York University, and that many were already proficient in the language, less interested in their heritage and more interested in an easy A.) (link)

I’ll have you know, Ms. Rich, that most second gen, Indian-American college students do not take Hindi for this reason. I myself took Hindi at Cornell, and my professor gave me a “B” in intermediate Hindi (I deserved it, but it still smarts: certainly not an “easy A”).

In fact, most Indian-American college students actually take Hindi to meet, and flirt with, other Indian-American college students. So there. Continue reading →

WWAID?

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Would you take financial advice from a 26-year-old whose book is called “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”? For the readers who helped blogger Ramit Sethi’s book climb onto The New York Times best-seller list and those who regularly visit his web site or pay to subscribe to his Scrooge Strategy newsletter, the answer is yes. You may have seen Sethi on TV news shows commenting on personal finance matters or read his answers at The Times “Your Money” column. Last week on ABC he elaborated on the differences between frugal and cheap. Continue reading →

Swami Sotomayor

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Our party is in free fall. How do we attract more minorities to the conservative movement? I have a brilliant idea!

Ramesh Ponnuru, I pray you did not have a hand in this. I ask you to meditate upon this to ask yourself if this is truly the path to Nirvana and out of the ocean of suffering. The slanted eyes were a nice touch.

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How he became a Patel

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The June issue of Khabar magazine has a touching first-person piece called “How I Became a Patel,” in which Rick Beltz, a onetime alcoholic, describes how he transformed his life. The turning point, he writes, came a decade ago, when Vipul and Bharti Patel bought the motel in rural North Georgia where he worked as a handyman.

As a Native American who had lived all his life in Toccoa, Georgia, before meeting the Patels, I had very little experience with other cultures. Indeed, my only exposure to other cultures came from my interactions with Hispanics. Other than that, what I knew about worlds outside my North Georgia cocoon came from movies, where foreigners are often portrayed as evil, scheming, greedy characters. To me, people from India were turban-wearing dolts working at the local 7-Eleven. [Link]

That’s the impression he had back then, as a non-turban-wearing dolt working at the local motel. The Patels, including Vipul’s mother, Gulaben, helped bring him around, saving him from alcoholism, as well as ignorance.

The Patels … would completely demolish my preconceived notions about Indians and foreigners; but that is the least they would do. Over the years, I would come clean with myself, quit alcohol, start believing in myself, in people, and in life—all because this one family gave me unconditional acceptance and love almost from the time I first met them. [Link]

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Muslim World is Here, Not There

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There was a lot of hype this week about President Obama’s address to the “Muslim world” that he delivered some time Thursday early morning in Cairo. I looked upon this delivery with skepticism – as a Muslim in America, to me the Muslim world is here, not there. Being Muslim is a faith, not a region. As if reading my mind, The White House released the following video.

One of the questions that I did have about President Obama in regards to the Muslim community was how there was a lack of representation in his administration. We all know Israeli army serving Rahm Emanuel is his Chief of Staff, and with that appointment, it was pretty clear that the Palestine-Israeli conflict was not going to be resolved for the next four years. What we see in the video is three prominent Muslims (two of them Desi) serving in the White House administration, yet, it still seems to me that their positions are not high profile enough to influence international and domestic policy.

I’m not totally bashing on the President for his Muslim politics. In fact, Obama’s speech today does take a surprising amount of ownership over the power the United States has inflicted on the “Muslim world.”

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam. [newyorktimes]

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Good on you, mate

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Australia is a country with strong cultural pressures to conform; Aussies are rewarded for fitting in rather than standing out in all areas except for athletics. It’s known as the tall poppy syndrome, as in the tall poppy gets mowed down. In the USA, there’s a different saying, one about squeaky wheels, and I’m glad to say that desis in Australia seem to be following the American model.

This weekend, at least 2,000 Indians protested in Melbourne, blocking traffic on a busy street for almost 20 hours to protest the large number of crimes and assaults against Indians in the last year and the lack of police interest or response. The demonstrations started at Royal Melbourne Hospital where Sravan Kumar Theerthala was lying comotose after having been stabbed with a screwdriver at a party.

Latest available police figures say 1,447 people of Indian origin were robbed or assaulted in Victoria state in 2007-2008, although students from the country say they have risen since then. Many of the most serious cases occurred in the western suburbs of the state capital Melbourne, where police estimate Indians account for about 30 percent of all robbery and assault victims. [link]

Police have denied any racial motivation, saying the students were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have said the crimes were “opportunistic”, with Indian students seen as “soft targets”. [link]

In addition to the protests in Melbourne, there was a strong diplomatic response. Manmohan Singh has called the Australian PM, and the Indian and Australian Foreign Ministers are holding talks on the matter. The diplomatic engagement was accompanied by a vigorous thapad by BigB who turned down a honorary doctorate offered by the Queensland University of Technology, saying “Under the prevailing circumstances I find it inappropriate at this juncture, to accept this decoration.” Continue reading →

Life on $2 a Day

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Slate’s Explainer series had an article last week that attempted to get to the bottom of the following question (a version of which some of you may have also wondered about in the past):

Recent news reports about the Congress Party’s election victory note that two-thirds of Indians live on less than $2 per day. How far does two bucks take you in India? [Link]

The answer cites the “basket of goods” concept::

Not far in Mumbai, but it’s a living in the villages. The people who get by on less than $2 don’t even qualify as being in poverty, according to the Indian government’s own definition…

India, like the United States, uses a “basket of goods” approach to define its poverty threshold. The cost of a minimally adequate diet is multiplied by a set amount to account for the cost of food and other essentials. (The United States multiplies by three, because the average American family spends one-third of its post-tax income on food.) The European Union uses a different method, based on relative income: The poverty line is set at a certain percentage of median income.

Neither of these methods works on a global scale, though, which explains why the World Bank has its own system. The “basket of goods” approach can be confusing, since every country uses different goods in their equations, based on local dietary habits. [Link]

In a new book titled Portfolios of The Poor – How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, authors Daryl Collins et al. explored the daily economics of the poorest of the poor with some insightful results. EconLog reviewed the book:

I really liked Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 A Day. Westerners tend to think of the world’s bottom billion as charity cases. The harsh and amazing reality, though, is that they largely stand on their own two feet. The ultra-poor not only feed, house, and clothe themselves; they raise children and work hard to give them a better life. Portfolios shows us how they do it, relying heavily on financial diaries kept by villagers and slum dwellers in South Africa, India, and Bangladesh. [Link]

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Are doctors the problem and can they be the solution?

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This week’s New Yorker has another article by doctor and health care policy expert Atul Gawande. In the article he attempts to probe why medical costs in this country are spiraling out of control, singling-out one particular outlier in Texas:

It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here.

McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami–which has much higher labor and living costs–spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns. [Link]

By systematically eliminating all the likely suspects (e.g., it’s the lawyers and their malpractice suits that cause health care costs to soar), Gawande comes to a conclusion that many doctors probably already grudgingly realize through experience. It is doctors (not all, just the ones who increasingly advocate for tests that the patient probably does not need) who are driving up health care costs for everyone:

“McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere.

That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down?

“Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted.

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures. [Link]
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An update on Sri Lanka

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I woke up this morning stunned at the following news:

Sri Lanka last night scored a major propaganda coup when the UN human rights council praised its victory over the Tamil Tigers and refused calls to investigate allegations of war crimes by both sides in the final chapter of a bloody 25-year conflict. In a shock move, which dismayed western nations critical of Sri Lanka’s approach, the island’s diplomats succeeded in lobbying enough of its south Asian allies to pass a resolution describing the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”.


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