Maulik Pancholy of 30 Rock, one of the cutest actors on TV (or so the ladies tell me), talks about his cultural heritage in this funny video. “When I was an undergrad at Northwestern, there was definitely a part of my cultural identity that I shied away from, that I was very distanced from – and that was the Indian part of me,” he says.
The Return of Manny Malhotra
If you’re not a hockey fan, you may not have heard of Manny Malhotra, the greatest desi ever
to hit the ice (Smirnoff included). After suffering a severe eye injury on March 16, he recovered just in time to give a boost to the Vancouver Canucks in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final (you may have caught parts of it during the Extreme Makeover commercial breaks).
The Canucks led in the circle in the regular season, at 54.9 per cent. They’re at 49.9 in the playoffs and a lot of the drop-off is because Malhotra and his 61.7 per cent win rate were on the sidelines until Game 2.
“Over the last couple of weeks as I’ve started to work toward this goal, being able to take draws against guys like Kes and Hank and Lappy really pushes you to get to that next level,” said Malhotra. “The competitive level we have at centre really gets your timing back.”
Malhotra did remarkably well overall in 7: 26 of ice time. He played 13 shifts, including killing penalties and taking a leftwing shift on the third line in relief of Raffi Torres.
He purposely kept his game simple and saw the 7: 26 as a good transition back into playing. In the regular season, as one of the best third line centres in the league and in the conversation for the Selke Trophy for top defensive forward, Malhotra averaged 16: 09. [Vancouver Province]
The Bruins walloped the Canucks 8-1 in Game 3, but Malhotra’s team still leads the series 2-1 and has home ice advantage.
Stacking up demographically
There’s always a lot of discussion in the national context about statistics such as per capita income, % with bachelor’s degree attainment, etc. On the one hand these sorts of concrete quantities are really essential to move forward any discussion which presumes a possible policy prescription. But on the other hand statistics without the proper frame can be misused. I recall back in college discussions among my friends who were Asian American activists. Their common complaint was that all Asian Americans were bracketed into a “Model Minority,” when in fact there were large communities of Southeast Asian refugees which as a whole totally did not fit mainstream expectations (usually they were really talking about the Hmong). But the reality is that on the balance demographically Asian America is, and was, dominated by a few large prominent groups, such as the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Indians. The Hmong are real, but they’re not representative (a South Asian analog may be the fact that “Pakistani” and “Bangladeshi” in the U.K. really represent the subcultures of the Mirpuri and Sylhetti, with those outside of these communities often being marginalized in the broader discourse because they’re not demographically representative).
This came to mind when discussing Indian American income and education. I decided to look at a few statistics from the Census 2000 and arrange them in scatter plot form so you could compare how two variables manifest in a particular demographic group. I included Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and the general American population. Continue reading
Not all fairy tales end well
An update to the post below, Report: Shirtless Anthony Weiner photo sent. This is “developing….,” but it has “developed” to my satisfaction in terms of not paying attention to this anymore. Tawdry as the details are, they are all too conventional for the personal lives of politicians. Hopefully at some point in the future Human Abedin’s name won’t be associated with a sexual peccadillo, rumored or real. Continue reading
Spell-brown?
Aziz Ansari pointed me to the fact that it’s that time of the year again. The Scripps National Spelling Bee is counting down to the last person standing, and as of now there’s a large contingent of brown kids in the final rounds. Here are the championship finalists.
Where is Huma?
I don’t keep close tabs on goings on in political stories, let alone tabloid-political stories, but it has been hard for me to avoid hearing about “Weinergate”. Here’s Gothamist:
Rep. Anthony Weiner told reporters this morning that he was “desperately” hoping to get back to work as a Congressman today: “This prank has apparently been successful. After almost 11 hours of answering questions, any that anyone wanted to put, today I’m going to have to get back to work doing the job that I’m paid to do.” But just because he isn’t talking about it doesn’t mean that everyone else has stopped talking, gossiping and joking about the strange ongoing saga that is Weinergate.
If you don’t know what the “prank” alludes to, I recommend Google News. But the short of it is that someone with access to congressman Weiner’s twitter account sent a link to a lewd picture to a Washington state journalism student. But it wasn’t a direct tweet. It was available on his public stream! Continue reading
Russell Peters: One freedom Americans don’t have
Comedian Russell Peters was interviewed yesterday on The Current, a news show on 
CBC Radio (the NPR of Canada) hosted by Anna Maria Tremonti. He had some interesting thoughts on freedom of speech in America — or the lack of it.
AMT: “So you’re living in the States now … Can you feel free to speak the same way you speak other places?”
RP: “No, in the States, you’ve really got to watch what you say. In Canada too, but not as much. But in the States, you really do. You’ve got to think about what you say before you say it. I don’t know where they get off saying that America has this freedom of speech thing. That’s the one freedom they don’t have … is freedom of speech. Nobody says what they want to say. And when people do, they get labeled as crazy or out of their mind or whatever or renegades … They don’t respect you if you actually say what’s on your mind.”
South Asian genetic variation in a glance
Since I began blogging here in February we’ve come a long way in getting a better sense of South Asian genetic relationships. By “we,” I’m referring mostly to Zack Ajmal of the Harappa Ancestry Project, and to a lesser extent the Dodecad Ancestry Project and the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project. These explicitly amateur enterprises have taken off the shelf population genetic analytic tools, such as ADMIXTURE, and combined them with a “crowd-sourced” sampling strategy. Zack now as over 100 individuals, the vast majority of them South Asian, some from ethnicities and communities which have never been analyzed in the academic literature.
The Times of India has now taken an interest in the Harrapa Ancestry Project. I’m rather tickled by this. When I first began corresponding with Zack about the technical details of preforming this survey of South Asian genomics neither of us knew where we were going to go. The main issue we both felt needed to be addressed was of scope of sampling. In other words, there were simply too many under-sampled populations in South Asia when it came to academic analyses of the human genetics of the region.
A quick survey of a map of some participants in HAP shows that much of north-central India remains woefully under-sampled even after six months: Continue reading
“First You Must Say Hello”
The film “Zero Bridge” is a film set in Kashmir and, therefore, the word “terrorist” is used in the film. But only once. This happens when a couple of young white men, tourists, lounging on a shikara on the Dal Lake have the following exchange with the film’s central character, Dilawar:
- Western tourist 1: What does “Dilawar” mean? Your name?
- Dilawar (with a smile): It means a terrorist.
- Western tourist 1 (laughing): I knew it!
Western tourist 2 (also laughing): Yeah, you look like a bad guy.
A Rome Memorial Day
Memorial Day #MusicMonday is the album Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi and featuring one of our favorite Desi songstress, Norah Jones. I was going to post up the YouTube video for my favorite song on the album featuring Norah Jones – a song called “Black” – but I decided to post this video which basically allows you to stream the whole album in one straight shot.
Sorry, no free downloads today. Just an awesome album to soundtrack your Memorial Day. Continue reading
