Paulson: A Desi Can Save Us (Updated)

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The response to the mortgage security mess is now winding its way through the government sausage factory and the next level of operational leadership is being revealed. This morning, Hank Paulson announced that Neel Kashkari will oversee the $700B program –

The Treasury Department plans to tap Neel Kashkari, an assistant secretary of international affairs and a former Goldman Sachs banker, to oversee the government’s $700 billion financial rescue program, sources familiar with the situation said yesterday.

Kashkari has been a close adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. on the credit crisis and helped draft the legislation for the massive rescue plan. He is expected to run the program on an interim basis until the Treasury finds a permanent head, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. Kashkari’s replacement would stay on after the next administration takes office in January.

At the tender age of 35, Neel is being handed quite a shopping budget. Then again, often the only thing bigger than a government amplified problem is the government created solution.

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Music Fix: Mekaal Hasan Band

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There was a great story about a Pakistani fusion group, the Mekaal Hasan Band, on NPR this morning, the text of which is here. For starters, you might want to check out one of their songs on YouTube, “Huns Dhun”:

On their website, Mekaal Hasan Band says the following about the song and video above:

The video is a real life account of the mass evacuation of the Afghan Refugees who, according to the Afghan Repatriation Deadline, were supposed to leave the border areas of Pakistan for Afghanistan by 2005. Seen through the eyes of three young Afghani friends, the video traces their journey from the area of Bajaur, NWFP, Pakistan to the bordering hills of Afghanistan.

I knew about the Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but I didn’t know about their forced repatriation, and I haven’t heard much about how they’ve been doing in Afghanistan since this happened in 2005. (Does anyone have more information about this?)

In the NPR story, the part that I found most interesting is the story of how Mekaal Hasan first went from Lahore to Boston, to study at the Berklee College of Music, and then returned to Lahore, where he started the long, slow process of finding a way to be a rock musician in a non-rock oriented culture:

There wasn’t much opportunity to advance his craft in Lahore. So Hasan, like many of his peers, decided to leave Pakistan. He applied to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and got in.

“That jump was just insane,” Hasan says. “It’s like going to another planet and watching people play unbelievable stuff. I had never seen anyone play that way before. I would just listen to music all the time. That’s all I did. I never felt more at home than when I was in Boston, ’cause I was surrounded by so much great music and so many great musicians. I think all creative people need an environment to flourish in.”

But Hasan was on a student visa, and his parents bribed him to come home early by offering to build him a studio. In 1995, he returned to Lahore.

“For a while, a good two to three years, I was massively depressed and really angry, as well,” Hasan says. “I was like, ‘Why am I here? What am I doing here?’ Then you had to reconcile yourself to the fact that, ‘Well, hey, man, you’ve always lived here.’ I resolved to make the best of it, and in some ways, this turned out to be a good exercise in just practicing the concepts that I’d learned in music school.” (link)

Ok, so not everyone has parents that can build them their own music studio! But however it happened, what’s important is that he managed to make the transition back — and now Mekaal Hasan and his band are making some really impressive music, using classical and jazz fusion.

Incidentally, another video I liked is Rabba. Mekaal Hasan Band’s album, “Sampooran,” is available on ITunes; they’re about to go on a tour of India (no word on a tour of the U.S. yet…). Continue reading →

Gearing Up For Election

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We are 30 days before Election Day, and with each day, there seems to be one more new piece of propaganda to buy. We had our own set of Sepia Mutiny political t-shirts on the site last month. Now DesiWear is in the desi political t-shirt business. From the DesiWear blog: Desis for Obama Shirt.jpg

In a few weeks, probably one of the most important and historic elections will be held in the United States. …we have two candidates that are worthy of the presidency; John McCain is a living hero, and a very admirable politician. Barrack [sic] Obama, in his own right, is a visionary who understands that the United States needs to step out of the shadow of dark and start rebuilding its rep with positive and logical change…We at Desi Wear don’t usually get involved in politics, however, after living in North America over the past eight years, it’s absolutely clear that in order for the United States to get back on track on the world stage and lead our world with the TRUE American dream we must come together and join Barrack [sic] Obama and his message for change for a more prosperous and progressive United States. Now is the time! Let’s unite together and vote Barrack [sic] Obama for the next President of the United States. Show you care, rock our new “Desis for Obama” original T. [DesiWear]

Cute. you get a t-shirt and motivation all for one low price of $25. So close to Election Day though, I’m a little skeptical that orders made will arrive in the mail before Nov. 4th. These shirts are unaffiliated with the official South Asians for Obama campaign (SAFO does not have shirts but does have SAFO buttons for sale).

What I love about these shirts is that they are created by a desi owned business unaffiliated with the Obama campaign. But this business wanted to do something. So they did what they do best, designed t-shirts. In fact, there are many people in the Asian American community who have designed ethnically targeted logos/t-shirts for Obama, completely unconnected to the official campaign. It’s all rather…grassroots, you know?

Are you a desi not for Obama and looking for a shirt? Well, I couldn’t find a desis for McCain t-shirt. I couldn’t find non-partisan “Desi Vote” gear either, though this desi shirt at BlackLava comes pretty close. Check out the thousands of political designs up at Cafe Press – I’m sure one of them will suit you, and your political leanings too. Or, be grassroots and design and print one of your own! Continue reading →

Minnesota Republicans on Ashwin Madia: “Not one of us”

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Just a quick post, to highlight something that I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about in the weeks to come. We’re starting to see racially-tinged rhetoric against an Indian-American candidate for U.S. Congress:

It seems to me that the officials at this press event know exactly what they’re saying, though they nevertheless deny the racist and xenophobic thrust of their comments: “From a demographic standpoint, Erik Paulson fits the district very well.”

I do not know whether the Republican Party in Minnesota is going to start running ads along these lines or not. If not, perhaps this isn’t really all that important. But the rhetoric here just feels too deliberate to be merely a one-off event or an accident. That said, if they’re sinking to this level, Madia must be doing something right.

Incidentally, here is a debate between Madia and Paulson that took place on Minnesota Public Radio in mid-August. And here are a few recent SM posts related to Madia: here, here, and here. Continue reading →

Nuke Deal Finally Ready

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Well, it took three years and it nearly toppled Manmohan Singh’s UPA government, but the India-U.S. nuclear deal was finally ratified in the U.S. Senate last night (along with some other trivial legislation…). On NPR yesterday, I heard snippets of speeches supporting the deal from Republican Senator Richard Lugar and Democratic Senator Chris Dodd (who is almost as ubiquitous as the top 40 M.I.A. these days). I also heard a Democratic Senator, Byron Dorgan, from North Dakota, who opposed it. India’s fourteen civilian nuclear reactors will be under international inspection, but eight military reactors will operate without inspection.

Interestingly, India has also just signed a nuclear deal with France, after getting a general waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group. So clearly the work that went into the main India-U.S. deal is already paying off for India in some surprising ways. There is further talk of a deal with Russia in weeks to come.

Though I’ve supported the deal from the beginning, one of the arguments against it from the American side seems worth considering: if you grant India an exemption for civilian nuclear energy, even though it didn’t play by the rules and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and even though it engaged in testing ten years ago, you weaken the argument against allowing countries like Iran to develop civilian nuclear energy.

Does that hold water? I tend to think not, since the point is moot if India already has nuclear technology and is committed to not sharing it with nations that want it. But the Times quotes one Michael Krepon who thinks it will be a problem:

Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a research organization in Washington, called the promise of big dollars and American jobs “pure fantasy” and predicted that the United States would regret further opening the nuclear door.

“There will be a reckoning for this agreement,” he said. “You can argue till you’re blue in the face that India is a special case. But what happens in one country affects what happens in others.” (link)

There is a full-length critique of the deal by Michael Krepon here, published in 2006. Continue reading →

The Last Temptation of Zardari

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Remember last week when Anna linked to the video of the new Pakistani President Zardari kind of…sort of…innocently flirting with VP Candidate Sarah Palin? He said (to paraphrase) “he would be tempted to hug” Palin. Well the Christian Science Monitor reports on the fallout back home:

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt…”

Though the fatwa, issued days after the Sept. 24 exchange, carries little weight among most Pakistanis, it’s indicative of the anger felt by Pakistan’s increasingly assertive conservatives who consider physical contact and flattery between a man and woman who aren’t married to each other distasteful. Though fatwas, or religious edicts, can range from advice on daily life to death sentences, this one does not call for any action or violence.

Last year, the mosque that issued the fatwa, Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, condemned the former tourism minister, Nilofar Bahktiar, after she was photographed being hugged by a male parachuting coach in France. [Link]

Just like I’ve been telling my friends: you can’t call this a real Presidential Race unless a fatwa gets issued somewhere along the way. Now I know that if I praise a non-Muslim lady in a short skirt I can do so only once and not “repeatedly.” Its not just the fatwa he has to worry about either. Feminists in Pakistan are upset as well:

For the feminists it’s less about cozying up to a non-Muslim woman and more about the sexist remarks by Zardari.

“As a Pakistani and as a woman, it was shameful and unacceptable. He was looking upon her merely as a woman and not as a politician in her own right,” says Tahira Abdullah, a member of the Women’s Action Forum. [Link]

I consider myself a feminist too, but with all due respect to Ms. Tahira Abudallah, I think she should watch this video before referring to Palin as a “politician in her own right.” Besides, hasn’t Zardari grieved as a widower for long enough?

Also, I was shocked that this is not new behavior for Pakistani leaders. They pride themselves on being lovers (better than being fighters I suppose):

The incident bears some resemblance to yet another charm offensive by a senior Pakistani politician. Marcus Mabry’s biography of Condoleezza Rice includes a passage in which he relates a meeting between former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Ms. Rice, in which Mr. Aziz was said to have stared deeply into the secretary of State’s eyes and to have told her he could “conquer any woman in two minutes…” [Link]

Damn, when I use that same line I just get slapped.

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Poison in the Name of Politics

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Obsession.jpg

For the past 29 days, if I wasn’t working late I would head over to my parents’ local mosque for the nightly taraweeh prayer. Held only during the month of Ramadan and performed after the last of five prescribed prayers, taraweeh takes worshipers through all the suras in the entire Quran from start to finish throughout the holy month. Unfortunately, Muslims in swing states do not have the freedom of praying freely this year.

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by (sic) the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers.[DailyKos]

This is a cause and effect story. The cause is their cause; promote fear and paranoia of Muslims by mass distribuion of this video (which I am intentionally not linking to).

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear…the DVDs were distributed last weekend in national editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal within selected swing states. These included Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia.[HuffingtonPost]

The effect of the fear-mongering — and keep this in mind, as you hear what conservatives are bound to say regarding how this DVD is only meant to call out ‘radical’ Islamists and not ‘moderate’ Muslims — has been tragic for Americans here at home. The following is a quote about a woman who was at the mosque, praying.

“She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the irritating substance there…The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help her breathe.” [DailyKos]

And of course, to add another layer of absurdity to the story, Dayton Ohio Police decided that the event was NOT a hate crime. Continue reading →

Greenspan: Desis Can Save Us

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Abhi asks how “Does the credit crisis affect ‘us’” and what Desi’s could do so I thought I’d chime in. Personally, although I’m a pretty strident free trader, the more I learn, the more I believe some sort of bailout is ultimately necessary (and so I’m probably disappointed by the House’s failure to pass legislation – don’t know enough of the deets to say for sure).

The Solution to the Credit Crunch? More Desis.

How do I resolve the apparent contradiction? Well, the govt was a large part of why we’re in this mess and it must now reap what it sows. Uncle Sam both directly and indirectly helped push mortgages into new hands that couldn’t afford them (and thus piled on to a Wall Street orgy). Had this been an entirely Wall Street phenomena, perhaps the “housing bubble” would have looked like the prior “dotcom bubble” – painful, but not exactly disastrous. It truly takes the government, however, to ratchet things up to the next level.

Of course, it’s awful on almost all counts that taxpayers get stuck holding the bill. But as I often say here, most of life’s choices aren’t between good and bad (and a bailout is clearly bad) but rather, between bad and worse (an economy-wide credit crunch). It’s cheap & easy moral pontificating to iterate the umpteenth reason why the situation is Bad (or why some sort of Wall Street comeuppance is Good). What real adults have to do is accept the bad to avoid the worse.

This interview from Greenspan, circa August 2008 is quite plain & direct about the necessary outcome –

The collapse in home prices, of course, is a major threat to the stability of Fannie and Freddie. At the Fed, Mr. Greenspan warned for years that the two mortgage giants’ business model threatened the nation’s financial stability. He acknowledges that a government backstop for the shareholder-owned, government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, was unavoidable. Not only are they crucial to the ailing mortgage market now, but the Fed-financed takeover of investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. also made government backing of Fannie and Freddie debt “inevitable,” he said. “There’s no credible argument for bailing out Bear Stearns and not the GSEs.”

If there’s a silver lining here, perhaps it’s that taxpayers & voters will have been taught a bitter lesson about what danger lurks the next time a politician tries to promise some new class of positive, economic rights…

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“Sikh Stand-up Comic” in Newsweek

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narinder singh gotham.jpg
After my post last week on Hari Kondabolu’s “Manoj,” it seems fitting to discuss an actual stand-up comic who walks the delicate line between what we might call “self-deprecating good fun” and outright self-hatred, Narinder Singh (thanks, Colleen). Narinder Singh has three YouTube videos up: here, here, and here (as “Sikh Stand-up Comic”). I don’t love the videos — seems like he’s trying too hard — though admittedly the sound quality on them makes it hard to understand what he’s saying at times.

But Narinder’s “My Turn” essay in this week’s Newsweek is much more to my taste. The key section for me was this:

“A lot of people ask me why I wear a turban,” goes one of my jokes. “I tell them it’s because it contracepts my vices. But you know what, turbans are great contraceptives . . . I haven’t had sex in five years!”

I became more ambitious. I now wanted to show the entire audience that Indians, Muslims or brown people in general were affable and moderate. Because I received my first couple of threats from Sikhs, I had to convince myself that my fellow Sikhs were in fact also moderate. But it felt strangely exciting reading the verbal barbs posted on my first YouTube clip: I was having an impact.

I e-mailed some of the overzealous Sikhs and told them that I was making fun of prejudice against those who wear turbans, not the turban itself, which seemed even more sacred now. After 9/11, many Sikhs had cut their hair and stopped wearing turbans. The menacing looks and discrimination were too much. Our visible identity in numbers was dwindling in both America and India. Bollywood films had reduced Sikhs to fools and caricatures. In America we were being taken too seriously; in India, not enough. It sometimes made me feel compelled to conform and fit in, too. (link)

Seeing Narinder Singh say this makes me appreciate his approach to comedy more, in spirit if not in the actual performances I’ve seen. For one thing, though the reasons were different I too received my share of hate mail around the time I was first blogging at SM, (including an outright threat, from a fellow Sikh). I sympathize partly because I think the temptation is strong to “make an impact” and get attention with edgy statements — every writer, blogger, or comedian just starting out knows this — even if it offends some people and loses you some friends.

Still, I’m not sure he’s quite there yet in his actual comedy routine. What do people think?

To end on a positive note, Narinder Singh’s final quip might well be the funniest line he’s written:

Still, I completely understood my fellow Sikhs’ sensitivity and their fear of being marginalized further. I really didn’t mind the death threats and the heckling, as long as I continued not having sex.

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Does the credit crisis affect “us?”

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Late last week we received our usual dose of hate mail. It read as follows:

Question: Why aren’t you guys covering this emerging economic crisis?. Each time I eagerly come on this site to check out the latest blog, I get disappointed to see it’s about fluff…

This is a huge enough story that I know you can find some ways of relating it to the Indian or Indian-American diaspora.

Even hate-mailers need love from time to time so I thought I would oblige with a bit of an omnibus economic meltdown post that was shaded with a tinge of brown. First up, wanna-be gangsta Sudhir Venkatesh wonders, “with Wall Street tanking, who will think of the prostitutes?”

There are some people who might just benefit from the current turmoil in the financial markets. One probably won’t surprise: lawyers. The other might: sex workers…

I came across these women when I began studying New York’s sex industry at the end of the 1990s. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in an effort to clean up Manhattan’s neighborhoods, forced sex off the streets of Times Square and other Midtown neighborhoods. In the process, his administration created a new economic sector. I’ve been following the lives of more than 300 sex workers–in New York and Chicago, in high and low ends of the income spectrum since 1999…

One thing I’ve learned is that economic downturns can be boom times for high-end sex workers. Sex workers of the past waited on street corners, outside bars, and around parks, and their transactions were fleeting and usually for a few dollars. Today’s high-end sex workers see themselves as therapists, part of a vast metropolitan wellness industry that includes private chefs and yoga teachers. Many have regular clients who visit them several times per month, paying them not only for sex but also for comfort and affirmation.

That’s probably not all Jean did for her clients. But, as I reported in Slate a few months ago, about 40 percent of high-end sex transactions do not involve a sexual service. It’s not difficult to imagine that a man’s need for positive reinforcement is amplified when a pink slip lands on his desk.[Link]

And speaking of pink slips landing on desks, along with doctors, lawyers, and engineers, the hottest desi profession in the U.S. right now is what I like to generically term: “finance guy/girl.” Many of these finance guys/girls can’t really describe to you what it is they do without using the words “hedge, asset, or capital,” and by that time you are already half asleep. In truth, they may not even know what they really do (but the little bastards make three times my salary with one third the education ). In all seriousness though, I think a disproportionate number of our community in the “white collar end” of this turmoil is an example of how the current credit crisis will affect South Asian Americans (but please stay away from the prostitutes!). What about the blue collar South Asian American?

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