Category Archives: Politics

Desis Can Save Us… Part II

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A few months ago, I mentioned a unique proposal from Alan Greenspan for addressing our housing-led recession – basically, import desis to shore up the buyer side of the market –

Here We Come to Save the Day… Again.

“The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants,” he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

He estimates the number of new households in the U.S. currently is increasing at an annual rate of about 800,000, of whom about one third are immigrants. “Perhaps 150,000 of those are loosely classified as skilled,” he said. “A double or tripling of this number would markedly accelerate the absorption of unsold housing inventory for sale — and hence help stabilize prices.”

In the meantime, several other pundits have come forth with similar proposals including Thomas Friedman –

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Shashi Tharoor Enters the Political Fray in Kerala

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Earlier today in my Google News feed, I was surprised to note a story in the Indian news about Shashi Tharoor’s campaign for a Lok Sabha seat in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Tharoor, whom we’ve written about relatively often at Sepia Mutiny, was until 2007 the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations. He is currently 53, which makes him practically a baby in Indian Political Years; he could certainly have a significant political career ahead of him in India if things work out. The nation-wide Parliamentary elections start in India next month.

Tharoor is running as a Congress Party/UPA member. He has started a bilingual website to articulate his campaign platform. Here is his recent announcement at the Huffington Post, explaining roughly what he’s trying to do:

On Thursday night, 19 March 2009, the Indian National Congress party announced my nomination as its candidate for the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of Parliament) at the forthcoming General Elections. I will contest from the capital of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram (known more familiarly as Trivandrum).

It’s a huge turn in my life and involves a further “reboot” two years after leaving the UN. The seat is currently held by the Communist Party of India, which has nominated its general secretary. There are also candidates from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a former Congress Member of Parliament, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well an independent candidate who has already outspent the rest of us and whose posters have been plastered across the city. Rumours are circulating of a sixth possible entrant into the fray. Psephologists would have about as much accuracy as astrologers in predicting the outcome of such a complex contest.

Thiruvananthapuram is only about 40% urban Рthe rest of the constituency, stretching to the southernmost tip of the country, is rural, and includes a large coastal community dependent largely upon fishing. As I embark on this voyage, every clich̩ about sailing into uncharted waters and choppy seas applies to me. (link)

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Aristotle as Kerala’s Suicide Cure?

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p>I came across a brief blogpost about the correlation between literacy, GNP and suicide rates in Europe and it spawned some rambling thoughts Perhaps this is exactly what blogging’s meant for –

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Does He Have An Answer?

Dr Andrej Maruai, a Slovene psychiatrist involved in organizing the conference, presented a paper called “Suicide in Europe: Genetics, Literacy and Poverty” which convincingly shows the links between the social factors of literacy and poverty, and suicidal behavior. . . .

According to Maruai’s theory, the higher any given country’s literacy rate and the lower that country’s GNP, the more likely the country is to have a high suicide rate. The theory can be convincingly applied to the countries with the highest suicide rates in Europe, namely the three Baltic states, Hungary and Slovenia, where literacy is at almost 100 percent and where the GNP and standard of living have been adversely affected by the transition process.

Maruai’s hypothesis certainly fits one of the oft-cited downsides of “the Kerala model”

…among other states of India Kerala has highest suicidal rate. This is in spite of the fact that Kerala is having the highest rate of literacy and Kerala is having an accepted model for Health Care Delivery System. In this context it is also important to note that Kerala is the largest market of psychiatric drugs in South India and our state is having the highest rate of unemployment and the highest per capita alcoholic consumption.

Why is this so?

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Happy Nuclear Bomb Diwali!

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There’s a fascinating set of Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards from the 1990s over at Tasveer Ghar, with an accompanying essay. All of the cards were made for New Years, and intended to be used used on Diwali and Vikram Samvath. My favorite two are below.

The card on the left is a Diwali card celebrating the first Indian nuclear bomb explosion, and yes, that is a lingam in the center of the explosion.

The poem at the back of the card tells the reader that “Today, the nation’s sleeping pride has woken up …. Shiva’s third eye has opened, and the World-destroyer has woken. … The nation’s sleeping pride has woken up.” [link]

The card on the right depicts “Mother India calling her sons to fight against capitalism, Islam and Christian missionary activities” [link]:

The primary dangers represented in this New Year card are cultural domination (Westernisation); the alleged threat to Indianness from ‘alien’ religious practices of Christianity and Islam (conversion and separatism), and the politics of economic globalisation (capitalism as colonising practice) [link]

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p>You can imagine what they must think of Bobby Jindal.

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On Being Down With Dating Brown

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Raakhee

This Sunday, I woke up to an email from a girlfriend who is not Desi. She said that there was a really thought-provoking article in the New York Post, which reminded her of some of our conversations. She thought I might enjoy it. Enjoy it? I could have written parts of it. It was about Dating While Brown– and dating other Browns, to be specific.

The piece was called, “MELTING NOT: Why Young People Like me Started Dating Within our Race“. In it, NYP reporter Raakhee Mirchandani wrote a sensitive, honest explanation of her views on love– and I can just imagine the nastiness she might be encountering because of it.

It’s never easy to put yourself out there, so I salute her for doing so. Besides, with this issue, you can’t win. You date outside your community and you’re either a sell-out, desperate or a coconut. Date within it and you’re insular, insecure and biased. Ugh. Can’t we all just get along? I hope we can remember to be kind to one another, as we discuss an issue which affects all of us, albeit in different ways. We’ve got to let love rule, or whatever Lenny screams. On to the story.

::

I know so many friends, whose experience mirrored this:

Growing up, the man in my dreams was a mystery; he was white, he was tall, he was dark, he was slick. He was always handsome. In my fantasy it didn’t matter if he was Catholic or Muslim, European or African, if he ate pigs or worshipped monkeys. It didn’t matter if he understood that I came from a rich tradition of Indian Hindus who were strict vegetarians, quietly conservative, obsessively dedicated to family and maniacal in their love for cheesy song-and-dance movies with mediocre acting and music.
And so when we met, freshman year at Boston University – the street smart Eastern European with a gorgeous smile, big heart and wicked sense of humor and the artsy Indian girl with a penchant for big hair, Bollywood and Biggie -it seemed like the perfect cross-continental match.

Ah, Biggie. I pour some of my Robitussin with Codeine out for you.

But somewhere along our six years together, the Indian girl from Jersey, who had naively promised him Catholic children, steak dinners and consistently defended his refusal to hang with my family as a simple difference in opinion, had a change of heart. And he did, too.
I remember him looking at me on an evening not far from our last and saying, “It’s like all of a sudden you became Indian.” In a way so quiet I didn’t even realize it was happening, the brown from my skin must have seeped in and colored my heart.

That line just slays me. I project emotions and explanations all over it. Is it accusatory? A blurt of hurt? Is becoming “Indian” a negative thing? The defending “his refusal to hang with my family” is also poignant. America may be a country of individuals, but most of us who are of South Asian descent are tightly tied to our families, for better or for worse. No one wants to be caught in that vise between one love and another. Continue reading →

Oklahoma, this is not OK

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Last week, the Oklahoma House passed H.B. 1645 which states that you can’t cover your head in your driver’s license photo for any reason:

Hats, head scarves, head garments, bandanas, prescription … glasses … are strictly prohibited and shall not be worn by the licensee or cardholder when being photographed for a license or identification card.

It means that religious Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and others who wear religious head covering will have to choose between their faith and their ability to travel.

The legislation was proposed in a fit of pique, after the Oklahoma Department of Transportation reversed itself and allowed a young hijabi woman to have her license photo taken with her head scarf on and her face clearly visible, but without her hair showing.

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p>Represenative Rex Duncan was so incensed by this that he took over a different bill, with a different purpose, and “hijacked it” to create requirements that the bureaucracy says it doesn’t need, that it will have to defend in court, and that don’t really make a lot of practical sense.

Why don’t I think the bill makes sense? Imagine that I actually did what the law wanted (which I wouldn’t, I would leave the state) and got my photo taken with a naked head. Do you think that a cop would find it easier to recognize me with my glasses and turban from a photograph of me with my hair down and my beard unfurled, man on the cross ishtyle? How about the TSA person at the gate at Tulsa airport?

The bill is also inconsistent. If the legislature seriously believes that hair is a critical part of identification, this is what they would have to do:

  • Mandate no toupees or hairplugs or extensions — sorry, Represenative, but you have to go baldy now
  • Mandate no changes to facial hair
  • Mandate no changes in hair color or style — sorry Represenative, but your wife can’t color that grey out, and your daughter who had long brown hair can’t drive now that she has short pink hair unless she had the photo taken with the short pink hair, in which case you have to live with it from now on
  • Mandate that any time somebody does change hair color or style they have to have their photo retaken
  • Apply the bill retroactively, so that everybody whose appearance has changed at all since their photo was taken has to get a new ID

Can you imagine? The hairdresser’s lobby would kill that bill deader than a combover on a red carpet!

Here’s a petition in opposition to the bill. Right now, the bill is in limbo, since the Senate sponsor has backed down after talking to the transportation bureaucracy and finding out that they don’t actually want these changes. I’m hoping the pressure keeps it that way, and that they recognize that they will face opposition if they proceed with their hair-brained (sic) scheme.

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Inheriting…a bunch of dating problems

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The Washington Post featured an article this morning about ethnic dating patterns, primarily those in the Asian and South Asian American communities. At first I assumed, “here we go again, another hackneyed piece about arranged marriages or something.” While there were a few clichés in the article, it did feature an intriguing revelation (to me at least). 2nd generation South Asian Americans (like some other ethnic groups), are increasingly marrying within their race. The magnitude of the trend was somewhat shocking to me since South Asian Americans are better assimilated than our European counterparts, and truly homogeneous ethnic enclaves which would foster such trends are very rare in the U.S. I thought for sure there would be a minor slope in the opposite direction:

The number of native- and foreign-born people marrying outside their race fell from 27 to 20 percent for Hispanics and 42 to 33 percent for Asians from 1990 to 2000, according to Ohio State University sociologist Zhenchao Qian, who co-authored a study on the subject. The downward trend continued through last year, Qian said.

“The immigrant population fundamentally changes the pool of potential partners for Asians and Hispanics. It expands the number and reinforces the culture, which means the second generation . . . is more likely to marry people of their own ethnicity,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University.
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Increasingly, singles are turning to a growing number of niche dating sites on the Internet, such as http://Shaadi.com and http://Persiansingles.com. [Link]

A recent book titled Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age also tracks the dating and marriage patterns of 1.5 and 2nd generation South Asian Americans and finds similar results:

Researchers spent a decade following 3,300 children of immigrants in the New York region as they navigated adulthood, which led to a study published last year called “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age.” They followed both the “second generation” children born in the United States and the “1.5 generation” — children of immigrants who came as youngsters — who were Dominican, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans and West Indians.

Researchers found that their subjects were constantly struggling with the desire to be open to people of all backgrounds vs. family expectations, and their own desires to sustain their culture. Most paired with others who shared similar racial or language backgrounds. [Link]

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Love don’t come easy

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When our parents ask “Beta/i, why aren’t you settled yet?” We like to respond that it’s just much harder to find somebody in American than it was back in the desh. Well, it seems that men and women in India don’t have it so easy either.

Consider the eligible bachelors of Barwaan Kala who remain unmarried because the ladeez (and their parents) consider the village a tad too rustic:

Some 121 villagers aged between 16 and 80 remain bachelors, they say, because of the remoteness of the village. The last wedding in the village was reportedly 50 years ago… the reason for the high number of bachelors is not because they lack eligibility but because there is no approach road to the village. [link]

After 100 50 years of solitude, they were given hope that the government would listen to their pleas when a politician asked for their votes and promised that he wouldn’t get married either unless he could get them a road. Unfortunately, that hope was cruelly dashed the next year:

But, after winning, the new Member of the Legislative Assembly not only got married the next year but, in the villagers’ eyes, added insult to injury by making the event a gala affair. He is now the proud father of a two-year-old daughter. When the villagers approached him to remind him of his promise to them, they say he asked them if they really believed that he too should remain a bachelor forever. [link]

So now the villagers have decided to take the grasp the problem firmly with their own two hands, and are laboring furiously to produce a solution. In the past six weeks half the road has gotten laid, with an equivalent amount of laying still to be done.

“Who among you,” she asked “will donate to me your sperm?”The story is pure Bolly. You have desperate villagers, a perfidious politician, and an epic effort by the men to build a bridge to romance, much like Rama building a bridge to Lanka to rescue Sita.

There’s even a Jindalesque moment in the plot where the villagers are told that they cannot build the road themselves, because they are in a protected wildlife area and they have to satisfy the red tape! (We’re currently at the cliffhanger moment right now … )

There’s one problem – I don’t believe it. If nobody has gotten married in 50 years, then how are there 16 year old boys in the village?

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Amartya Sen, on the Recession, Adam Smith, Keynes, and Kerala

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I was recently talking to a financial consultant visiting from India about the state of the Indian economy (she recently married my cousin; congrats. P & S!). She seemed to think that, despite how gloomy the Indian television news analysts tend to be, the Indian economy is actually continuing to grow somewhat even as western economies are sliding into a deepening recession. A quick look at the Economist’s latest country data for India seem to confirm that outlook: India’s economy is still forecast to grow at a 5% rate this year. That’s down from 9-10% in the past few years, but growth is growth. (She suggested that Indian business news analysts might be channeling the gloom of their western counterparts, rather than using actual data particular to the Indian economy.) Have readers seen other data about the state of the Indian economy as a whole?

That might lead us to Amartya Sen. Sen has an essay re-appraising of the works of Adam Smith in light of the current global economic recession in a recent New York Review of Books. His basic point seems to be that Adam Smith was right, though perhaps hardcore free market types today tend to misread Smith as advocating unregulated free markets. Sen also notes that Keynes is currently more popular than ever, though he argues that Keynes’ contemporary at Cambridge, Arthur Cecil Pigou, might be more helpful to us today because of the latter’s work on the role of behavior in shaping markets (behavioral economics), as well as welfare economics.

In a discussion of the possible role that reforming health care might play in government-supported economic recovery programs, Sen makes an interesting side-note about health care in Kerala as compared to China:

A crisis not only presents an immediate challenge that has to be faced. It also provides an opportunity to address long-term problems when people are willing to reconsider established conventions. This is why the present crisis also makes it important to face the neglected long-term issues like conservation of the environment and national health care, as well as the need for public transport, which has been very badly neglected in the last few decades and is also so far sidelined—as I write this article—even in the initial policies announced by the Obama administration. Economic affordability is, of course, an issue, but as the example of the Indian state of Kerala shows, it is possible to have state-guaranteed health care for all at relatively little cost. Since the Chinese dropped universal health insurance in 1979, Kerala—which continues to have it—has very substantially overtaken China in average life expectancy and in indicators such as infant mortality, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. So there are opportunities for poor countries as well. (link)

Interesting that Sen singles out Kerala; I wonder where he got that information from. Also, I wonder what the differences are between Kerala’s current health care policy and that of other Indian states. (Or, is this just yet another case of “everything is better in Kerala”?)

Also see: Wikipedia on Health Care in India, Palliative Care in Kerala Continue reading →

The Great “Beige” Hope of the Republican Party

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I was hesitant when I heard 60 Minutes was doing an interview with Governor Bobby Jindal because frankly, I didn’t think I could take sixty minutes of the sing-songy voice we heard on Tuesday night. But Jindal’s segment is only 12 minutes long. So I watched. And was a little bit impressed. Don’t believe me? Here, watch for yourself.


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I’m not sure if it’s because I’m juxtaposing this clip with his speech earlier this week, but I actually kind of liked watching it. The segment shows him as an ethical, straight-edge, god-fearing, son-of-immigrants, birthed-his-third-child-himself family man. I think it was smart of him to do this interview so soon after the disastrous performance earlier this week, but I’m just not sure enough people watched it to nullify the effect.

It was interesting how Jindal and his wife tried to downplay the Indian factor when approached with questions of race. When asked if he felt any racial tension while being raised in Baton Rouge, he said he didn’t feel any and “they accept you based on who you are.” When asked about if his family maintained any Indian traditions, the couple responded, “Not too many. We’ve been here for so many years. We were raised as Americans.”

Personally, I think that maintaining Indian traditions is completely American and you should not have to marginalize one for the other. We are all Americans with a hyphenated back story. But I also think the question was poorly asked and I wonder if the couple would have responded differently if it was a Desi reporter asking the question with more nuance. I also wonder how much of what they say to media is political posturing verses what they feel about identity behind closed doors.

Overall, I think it was a decent bio-fluff interview with no real hard hitting questions from 60 Minutes. We didn’t learn too many new Jindal facts, though Manish listed some here. But I think what this interview did for me was remind me that there’s a brown* guy in politics gunning for Obama’s seat in seven years. But from the other side. And my kind of brown*. And that is kind of… remarkable.

*I say brown. Republicans say beige. Can someone explain to me why he’s the “beige hope”, not “brown hope”? Continue reading →