Aasif Is Brown Like Us

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Shruti’s facebook status earlier this week said that she was “certain that Aasif Mandvi is a regular reader of Sepia Mutiny and Ultrabrown.” I asked her what she meant, and she referred me to the following:

I know he never says that he got his references from the Mutiny, but I’m pretty sure we blogged about ‘What Brown Can Do For You’ and we definitely blogged the dancing little man video. And come on, you have to type in ‘brown’ before you can comment on the sites! He MUST have been talking bout us. The Mutiny has ‘brown’ literally trademarked!

I got the privilege of meeting Asif earlier this year (at a brown conference) and I know he’s a visitor to this site, so Shruti may just be right … How bout it, Aasif? Give the Mutiny a shout out on the Daily Show next time! Continue reading →

Energy Ignorance is Bliss

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Eek. Watching this video of South Asian youth getting interviewed on energy issues made me have bad flashbacks to the days when I would try to register South Asian youth to vote in front of desi parties. Tough crowd, those desi youngsters.

Seriously? Let me break it down. Global warming is bad (and not a myth). Thus, hybrid vehicles are good. Clean energy like wind and solar are good. Saving energy is good. Drilling for more oil (especially domestic) is bad. Suing polar bears to drill for oil is bad. Driving a gas guzzling hummer is tacky (and bad.) Paying high prices at the pump is bad. Bhangra as a source of alternative energy is so not good.

Get educated on the energy crisis, kids. Register to vote. Then vote for the candidate, whether Obama or McCain, whose stance on energy is most like your own.

Desi States of America is a weekly Tuesday night show that is screened on Pan Desi available on your cable channel of Colours TV nightly at 9pm. Desi States of America has a stream of shows uploaded on youtube, and to me it seems like the show is a desi version of a college version of a less funny version of the Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. Not bad, just not great. I get that the clip above was trying to be ironic – like when Jay Leno hits the streets to ask every day Americans questions. But there’s something so pathetically gut wrenching when a guy is asked to name alternative energy sources and he responds, RED BULL. Continue reading →

Why I Didn’t Like “The White Tiger”

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After reading Jabberwock’s positive review of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger some time ago, I was all set to pick it up. Jabberwock, after all, is the quintessential cosmopolitan Delhi-ite, so how can you go wrong?

Adiga also beat out both Salman Rushdie and the amazing Michelle de Kretser to make it to the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Again, that should bode well, irrespective of whether Adiga actually wins the prize. (I have heard that he is currently considered one of the favorites.)

But I haven’t been able to shake the sense that The White Tiger, despite its topicality and its readability, is somehow fundamentally fake. I almost hesitate to bother saying it, because it’s quite common for Indian authors to be accused of composing narratives about India’s poor primarily for non-poor, non-Indian readers. It’s a ubiquitous complaint — almost a critical cliché — which doesn’t make it any less true. Let me give you a passage that I think illustrates my problem with Adiga’s novel quite directly. It’s from near the beginning of the novel, as Adiga is introducing his narrator and protagonist to us: Continue reading →

“Indian It Up” With “Manoj”

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Hari Kondabolu’s video Manoj is up in its entirety** on YouTube. It’s about 11 minutes long, and well worth a look:

I mentioned the short film and posted a few lines of the script a few months ago. It’s well done — my favorite bits include the “South Asian Studies” major, and the comedy club owner who wants Manoj to “Indian it up” with the curry and cows.

Having short films like this available might be especially good for young Desi comics starting out, as they try to figure out how to tread the line between intelligent ethnic comedy and self-hatred. That said, I think the film also shows that there really is a gray area there; aren’t many people (including many Indian Americans) still quite prepared to find a comedian like “Manoj” funny? (Paul’s comment in the earlier thread on this also illustrates how the path to the right kind of “Desi material” is not an easy one.) Another issue raised here (and I know everyone is tired of it) is the ABD/DBD divide, specifically the different relationships to Indian accents. I imagine some readers might watch this and think, “well, isn’t Hari himself actually using a fake version of the Indian accent here for comedic effect?”

(For those in the Washington DC area, Manoj will be screened publicly as part of the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival this Friday night at 7pm. Another obviously Desi short is Maya Anand’s Anjali, which screens on Sunday.)

** Hari emails me to say that the YouTube version is itself slightly edited. The real full version of the film (15 minutes) is at Vimeo, here. Continue reading →

Venkat. Akash. Fight!

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Hey Mutineers – Apologies again for the long absence… Biz travel hell has had me on the road pretty much continuously for the past few weeks. However, I did want to post a quick shoutout about an upcoming program you may wanna set your Tivo’s for. This week’s Discovery Channel Fight Quest will be paying a visit to Kerala –

Discovery Channel / Fight Quest

Fri 9/26 10PM / Sat 9/27 2AM San Francisco

“India” Jimmy and Doug travel to Kerala, India to study one of the most ancient and dangerous martial arts in the world, Kalarippayattu.

Fight Quest is a clone of an earlier program on the rival History Channel called Human Weapon and both follow a very similar formula –

You Will Now Face the Wrath of 8000 Years of Mallu-Brand Whoop Ass

A blend of cultural immersion and good old-fashioned smackdown, the series follows seasoned mixed martial arts fighter Jimmy Smith and 25-year-old rookie Doug Anderson as they travel the globe, adding fight styles from Kali to kickboxing to their repertoire.

In each episode, Jimmy and Doug will explore a new location identified with a style of fighting, such as kung fu in Dengfeng, China, and boxing in Mexico City, Mexico. There, after first immersing themselves in the sounds, smells and tastes of the local scene, the two guys will separate to train with local masters of that method — sometimes an ancient art of combat, and other times a modern form of butt-kicking. After several days of intense instruction, Jimmy and Doug will each face off against a local in a no-holds-barred test of skill.

What a great little Tivo present to welcome me back home to SF next week

Continue reading →

Posted in TV

If he is Insisting on Hug, Slap his Leering Mug

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…well, that’s what my Father would have said, had he been around to witness the smarmy perviness (thanks for submitting this to the news tab, KXB!):

For those who (like me) can’t see wideo at work, here’s what went down:

Sarah Palin and the foreign leaders she has met with in New York have said very little to reporters over the last two days, but the press happened to be in the room on Wednesday for one eyebrow-raising exchange, as the new president of Pakistan lavished praise on Palin’s looks. [CNN]

But first, his wing-woman conveniently buttered her up:

On entering a room filled with several Pakistani officials this afternoon, Palin was immediately greeted by Sherry Rehman, the country’s Information Minister.
“And how does one keep looking that good when one is that busy?,” Rehman asked, drawing friendly laughter from the room when she complimented Palin.
“Oh, thank you,” Palin said. [CNN]

Continue reading →

I’ll Show You Islamic Hood (ie)

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Sepia Post2.jpg Our recently retired around the way desi girl made a come back this past week in New York. Not in music, but in fashion. Yes, the queen of sparkly spandex and fake purple flowers on derby hats debuted her new line at same time as New York’s Fashion Week.

As promised, M.I.A. has launched her limited-edition clothing line, and the “Okley Run” store is open for business on her Web site. While the prints are pretty much as outlandish as you expect, the prices for each individual piece are a bit insane—and not in the “clashing colors that actually look better and better the more you focus on their dissonance” way, or even the Crazy Eddie way*. [idolator]

A quick glance of the online store had me come to a screeching halt — directly on the image of a sweatshirt labeled, “Islamic Hoodie.” It could be that the fasting from Ramadan has me extra sensitive, but it seems that everywhere I look I see images of hijabs as the latest fashion icon. I saw it on a shirt at a festival last week, and now this. On the Okley Run site the image of the sweatshirt could not be enlarged but I did see the eyes of a woman in niqab with what seemed like an explosion over her head. Could that really be what she was trying to say? What could M.I.A. have meant by this logo?

This would take some investigative blogging. The image on her site was simply not clear enough to decipher. Luckily, I just happen to live in one of the two cities where Opening Ceremony, the only store carrying her line retail, is – Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Interstate Love Song

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India's GQ.PNG

Last week, SM reader “S” emailed us a tip about the October issue of National Geographic:

Just wanted to send a quick link to a story I worked on for ngm.com (National Geographic magazine). It’s a story about India’s highway project and has some amazing photography. The photo map has photos submitted to our site by readers.

The highway project is called the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ), and it is

…the brand-new, 3,633-mile expressway linking the country’s major population centers of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. [ngm]

Some history behind the project:

Announced in 1998 by then Prime Minister Atal B. Vajpayee, who is credited with giving the project its grandiose name, the Golden Quadrilateral is exceeded in scale only by the national railway system built by the British in the 1850s. For decades after its 1947 independence, India practiced a kind of South Asian socialism in keeping with the idealism of its founders, Gandhi and Nehru, and its economy eventually stalled. In the 1990s the country began opening its markets to foreign investment, led by a pro-growth government and staffed by an army of young go-getters who speak excellent English and work for a fraction of the wages paid in the West. Yet India’s leaders realized their decrepit highways could hobble the country in its race toward modernization. “Our roads don’t have a few potholes,” Prime Minister Vajpayee complained to aides in the mid-1990s. “Our potholes have a few roads.”
Ten years after Vajpayee’s announcement, the GQ is among the most elaborately conceived highway systems in the world, a masterpiece of high-tech ingenuity that is, in many ways, a calling card for India in the 21st century. Seen on a 48-inch flat-screen computer monitor at highway administration headquarters in Delhi, the GQ seems as beautiful as a space capsule. Its designers describe it as an “elegant collection of data points,” or a gleaming, “state-of-the-art machine,” a technologically advanced conveyor belt moving goods and people around India with seamless precision.

Continue reading →

If you’re male, you may not want to read this…

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…lest you wish to spend the rest of the day with your legs tightly crossed, doubled-over with sympathy pain and terror (thanks, JTMoney!). Via our news tab: Kir Royale the betta.jpg

A 2cm long fish apparently found it’s (sic) way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case.
The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.

Uh…I’ve either had or been around home aquariums since I was a toddler. I have never had a fish slip anywhere, while I was cleaning anything. Hell, I haven’t even had one of these bizarre pedicures.

Professor Vezhaventhan and Professor Jeyaraman, who treated the boy and later wrote a paper on the case, explained: “While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra and then he developed all these symptoms.”

Okay, mens. Here’s the part which will have you wincing:

After detecting the fish in the boy’s bladder, Vezhaventhan and Jeyaraman used a technique known as cystourethroscopy to insert a special set of forceps down the patient’s penis. Unfortunately, the fish was just too slippery to grip, so they resorted to using a rigid ureteroscope with a tool attached that is normally used for removing bladder stones.

Yeesh, even I am crossing my legs at this point. One of the most awesome aspects of being female is knowing what a speculum is, whether one is involved with medicine or not, and by awesome, I mean “atrocious”. Owww.

The fish the urologists removed, which Practical Fishkeeping believes to be a small member of the Betta genus, measured 2cm long and 1.5cm wide.

By the way, bettas aren’t just “Siamese Fighting Fish“, even though many people refer to the latter (a.k.a. Betta Splendens) by just its genus name. For those who may be wondering about it, the image enhancing this post is a picture of my dearly departed “Kir Royale“, a betta splendens who traveled to that great pond in the sky, earlier this year.

He was later admitted into counseling to help him overcome any trauma.

Speaking of trauma, aren’t you glad I didn’t play the caption game, with this one? 😉 Continue reading →

Bumblers boldly buying ballots?

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A new study out in India claims that “in the last decade, at least one-fifth of the country’s electorate was paid cash for their votes.” [HT MR] The study also claims that this percentage (unsurprisingly) is far higher amongst those living below the poverty line, with as many as 94% of Andhra voters below the poverty line alleged to have sold their votes. The side of the bribe varies from around $3/voter up to (and this I find hard to believe) $25:

The bribe money varies from state to state. It may be Rs100-150 (a voter) in some states and it can go up to Rs1,000 in some constituencies [link]

[Huge graphic of findings below the fold]

I don’t have a problem believing that there is vote buying in India – there’s huge corruption throughout the electoral system. Furthermore, vote buying is common behavior in many democracies, including when America was younger.

Washington and Jefferson bought elections using alcohol; Washington paid 40 pounds (a huge sum in those days) to win an election against a more popular rival for the VA legislature in 1758. These practices continued after the founding of the Republic:

Some politicians had been known to buy votes and pay repeat voters. In 1823 the price of a vote in New York City was $5 and for repeat voters, went as high as $30. [link]

I’m also not surprised that poor people who are willing to sell their labor and their bodies just to stay alive might be willing to take a payment.

No, what I have trouble with is the fact that the article reports the conclusions of this study while waving their hands concerning how these numbers were estimated:

Explaining the methodology for the study, Rao said CMS used a perception, experience and estimation method to arrive at its conclusions. “Not many will admit they have been bribed to cast their vote,” he said. “But, in confidence, they would let you know if they knew someone who has taken money.” [link]

Continue reading →