Betting on Brown for the Booker?

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Literary bettors rejoice for the shortlist for the 2007 (Man) Booker prize is out. Last year, Kiran Desai won for Inheritance of Loss. This year there are two brown authors, both expats like Desai, on the shortlist: Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Indra Sinha for Animal’s People.

My book is not recommended in-flight reading

The authors on the shortlist this year are unusual. The only big-name author on the list is Ian McEwan, who is on the shortlist for the fifth time (he has won once before). His book On Chesil Beach is less than 200 pages, and therefore would usually have been considered a novella, which would not have been eligible. No other big name author even made the longlist:

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. [Link]

The remaining four books have sold an average of less than one thousand copies a piece in the UK, so they are hardly popular favorites. Other than On Chesil Beach, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has sold the most copies, with 1,519 books moved, and Animal’s People has sold the least, with only 231 copies sold in the UK, despite the sales boost from longlisting it. [Link]

I once translated the Kama Sutra

Both of the desi authors wrote books anchored in current / historical events that were major international tragedies:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist … explores the conflict experienced by a young Muslim who has been educated in the US, worked on Wall Street and fallen in love with an American woman, who finds himself treated with suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11. [Link]

Animal’s People … draws on the real-life events surrounding the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, seen through the eyes of Animal, a boy whose spine was twisted and so must walk on all fours. When an American, Ellie Barber, arrives to seek justice for the victims, he investigates her motives. [Link]

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Anjay of the Flies

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Do you know which Indian dude’s debut is the most hotly anticipated one of this Fall’s television line-up? No, it isn’t Sendhil “I can’t figure out how to speak in an Indian accent even though I’m Indian” Ramamurthy of Heroes. Nor is it Naveen “torture solves everything” Andrews of Lost. The dude that South Asian Americans have their collective eyes on is 12-year-old Anjay Ajodha of Texas. The question is, can he succeed in wresting the reigns of power away from the simpletons within a newly created society known simply as Kid Nation?

40 Kids have 40 days to build a brave new world without adults to help or hinder their efforts. Can they do it? These Kids, ages 8-15, will turn a ghost town into their new home. They will cook their own meals, clean their own outhouses, haul their own water and even run their own businesses including the old town saloon (root beer only). Through it all, they’ll cope with regular childhood emotions and situations: homesickness, peer pressure and the urge to break every rule they’ve ever known.

Will they stick it out? In the end, will these Kids prove to everyone, including their parents, they have the vision to build a better world than the pioneers who came before them? And just as importantly, will they come together as a cohesive unit, or will they abandon all responsibility and succumb to the childhood temptations that lead to round-the-clock chaos? Don’t miss this intriguing series. [Link]

SM readers, let me be blunt. Anjay is the best chance we currently have to demonstrate to the American public how utopian our society might become if super smart desi people were in charge of everything. The governor’s mansion in Louisiana just won’t cut it. More people will tune in to Kid Nation than will pay attention to Louisiana. The question on all our minds is, “will a group of young children between ages 8-15 allow a kid (that reminds us a lot of ourselves at 12) lead the way when left on their own?” Just look at Anjay’s answers to some questions CBS posed. I dare anyone to find more concise and honest answers in any recent Presidential debate:

Who have been some of the best U.S. presidents, and why?
George Washington – he managed to lead a young nation, and headed the conventions to develop the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln – he abolished slavery, and led the nation through the Civil War. Franklin D. Roosevelt – he established the New Deal which got the economy working during the Great Depression and instilled confidence in citizens during his fireside chats.

Who have been some of the worst U.S. presidents, and why?
The US president that comes to mind, due to recent events, is George W. Bush, because I don’t agree with the way he is handling the Iraq war. [Link]

Also, is Anjay Libertarian? And does he know more about government than Fred Thompson?

If you had the power to change one or two things about our country right now, what would it be?
I would create a law that eliminates all budget earmarks – useless bits of spending. If earmarks are eliminated, approximately 78% of the US budget will be freed up to be utilized in areas where there is a more urgent need, such as the national deficit. I would also eliminate paid lobbying in an effort to give all parties involved in a dispute an equal voice. [Link]

Holy crap. 78%? Draft Anjay (or the parents that helped him write this stuff).

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A Potpourri of NPR

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moraygan.jpg Not that you care, but I almost named this post A Salmagundi of NPR. However, I’m smitten with the way some Desis say “potpourri”, so I couldn’t resist the allure of that word. Oh, how do they say it? Like so: pottu-puri

None of these stories feels substantial enough to merit their own post; what does feel significant is perking up FOUR times during Morning Edition, because there are four different sepia-colored stories! That’s almost a fifth of the program! Here is what I (and undoubtedly fellow NPR-phile-Abhi, as well) heard:

1) Moray Eels are toothy!

Scientists in California have reported that Moray eels have a set of teeth within a second set of jaws, called the pharyngeal jaws, that help them capture their prey.
Once the Moray eel secures its prey with its first set of jaws, the pharyngeal jaws reach up from its throat, grabbing and pulling the prey down through its esophagus.

One of you already has an itchy-trigger-comment finger, I know it, so stop it– the brown angle is a-comin’…

Rita Mehta is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Davis who studies the evolution of diversity in eel feeding behavior.

Like, whoa. Not only is there a female scientist to celebrate, this has to do with my alma mater as well! w00t Davis! We study Moray Eels!

“What we discovered is that the pharyngeal jaws of Moray’s have the greatest mobility of any pharyngeal jaws ever documented,” Mehta says.

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Sameness? What Sameness?

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Someone posted a link to Mukul Kesavan’s recent column in the Telegraph on our News Tab. It is, I think, the first full-frontal attack on the desi blogosphere that I’ve seen published in an Indian newspaper.

And it’s so, so wrong. Let’s start at the beginning:

Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. A cultural historian from the remote future (investigating, perhaps, the death of English in India) might use up a sub-section of a chapter to explore the sameness of their concerns. Why did a bunch of grown men, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, write about the same movies, novels, journeys and riots? Why Naipaul? Why not nature? Or Napier? Or the nadeswaram? Why Bachchan? And not Burma? Or Bhojpuri? And, most weirdly, why pogroms and chauvinism? Why not programmes on television? link)

First, my biggest complaint with Kesavan’s piece is his refusal to name names. The “Republic of Blog” is for him guilty of a mind-numbing sameness, but if he doesn’t tell us what blogs he’s reading, it’s impossible to verify what he says.

Second, why only men? Aren’t there lots of Indian women bloggers? Indeed, there are too many to list, so let’s just name one good one: Rashmi Bansal’s Youth Curry. (Readers, feel free to name other Indian women bloggers based in India that you would recommend.)

Third, why not acknowledge that people are blogging in various Indian languages? In addition to its English “main page,” Desipundit links to blogs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, and Marathi. (Sadly, no Punjabi…)

Then the substantive question — amongst Indian male bloggers writing in English, is there in fact a deadening sameness? Do people really only talk about, as Kesavan suggests 1) Hindi films, 2) English novels, 3) various and sundry travels, and 4) Communalism? And do the comments on communalism all take a left-center approach (commonly derided as “pseudo-secular”)? Continue reading →

Cuz I never hesitate to put a fool on his back…

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Long have I bemoaned the often-fugly nomenclature of my people…but I was ignorant as to how good we have it, until I received a tip from one of you (thanks, M).

It turns out that Malayalees have nothing on Venezuelans, though if legislators in the land of OOogo Chavez have their way, we thenga-addicts will go back to being the undisputed world champions of weirdness (take that Lovelypreets and Pinkyjeets of the world! You wish you could be part of a set of siblings named Mincy, Quincy and Finsy):

Goodbye, Tutankamen del Sol.
So long, Hengelberth, Maolenin, Kerbert Krishnamerk, Githanjaly, Yornaichel, Nixon and Yurbiladyberth. The prolifically inventive world of Venezuelan baby names may be coming to an end.[NYT]

Inventive? That’s no exaggeration:

A glance through a phone book or the government’s voter registry reveals names like Taj-Mahal Sánchez, Elvis Presley Gomez Morillo, Darwin Lenin Jimenez…Other Venezuelan first names, which roll off the tongue about as easily in Spanish as in English, include Yusmairobis, Nefertitis, Yaxilany, Riubalkis, Debraska, as well as Yesaidú and Juan Jondre — transliterations of “Yes, I do” and “One hundred.” [IHT]
If electoral officials here get their way, a bill introduced last week would prohibit Venezuelan parents from bestowing those names — and many, many others — on their children. [NYT]

Oh, my. I need to pause for a giggle. Thanks. Okay, so what this means is that parents of newborns would have the pleasure of choosing a name for their baby, from a list of a scant 100 or so choices, which are all approved by the government, ostensibly to protect these fragile youngsters from a lifetime of mockery:

The bill’s ambition, according to a draft submitted to municipal offices here for review, is to “preserve the equilibrium and integral development of the child” by preventing parents from giving newborns names that expose them to ridicule or are “extravagant or hard to pronounce in the official language,” Spanish.

Okay. But why is this even an issue?

The debate over names starter last year when opponents of President Hugo Chavez questioned the accuracy of the voter rolls when it was found that a Superman was on the list.

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Joe Hill and the Jihadis

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The beauty of being an “non exempt employee” is that you work as long as it takes to get the job done. So while the rest of the country was celebrating Labor Day, I was in the office, working more than 14 hours to meet a deadline. Tuesday was the same.

I was driving blearily to work this morning, thinking about the union movement and the 8 hour workday when I heard the news about the latest alleged terror plot in Germany. The name of the group they think is responsible? The Islamic Jihad Union.

It should tell you something about my state of mind that my first reaction was “There is a terrorist union? I wonder what benefits they get?”

This segued into a reverie in extremely poor taste about two Jihadi managers, sitting in Pakistan (where those arrested were allegedly trained), complaining about the new German recruits who came in and unionized their operations.

Manager one: Unions are really playing havoc with our operations. Now they’re asking for 3 suicide bombers when one will do. One to carry the bomb, one to set it off, and another to supervise!

Manager two: Yeah, and if they’re asked to attack after 5PM, they want overtime. They’re demanding 50% more virgins! Their slogan is “fewer hours, more houris!”

Maybe this could be the west’s secret weapon in the “GWOT“: Unionization! “I’m very sorry sir, but this is strictly a union shop. We only accept attacks by unionized terrorists here.” That should slow things down considerably.

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Sant or Shaitan? S.S. Chatwal and the Clintons

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The Washington Post has an in-depth exploration of the long-term connections between Bill and Hillary Clinton and Sant Singh Chatwal, a New York based businessman.

Alongside outsourcing, the connection to Chatwal is another of the issues raised by the Obama campaign memo back in June. Funny how that won’t go away.

I suppose there are two questions that come to mind. One is, is Chatwal merely a bad businessman, or an actual “crook”? He’s settled his debts to the IRS ($4 million), forfeited a building he owned that had a lien on it, and the $12 million loan he didn’t pay to the Bank of New York was eventually resolved in court (Chatwal had to pay $125,000). The Indian banks that had accused him of bank fraud eventually dropped the case against him. Chatwal’s lawyer puts it like this:

“The man came to this country, accumulated an empire, lost it during the time of real estate [softness], and has struggled and worked to try to pay off his debts,” said A. Mitchell Greene, Chatwal’s lawyer for 25 years. “It has been a long battle, but he has cleared up all of his obligations, and in the process he is trying to accumulate his wealth again.”

To my mind, he’s somewhere in between “failed investor” and “crook” (where “crook” admittedly isn’t so much meant as a legal term as it is a kind of moral judgment), partly because at the peak of his troubles he and his family continued to live pretty extravagantly — as if nothing were amiss.

The second question is, what is wrong with Hillary Clinton accepting campaign contributions from (and more importantly, through) Chatwal? If we presume that he’s now out of legal and financial trouble, is it unethical for Clinton to be involved with someone who was once in this kind of trouble? Most of the real pull that someone like Chatwal has comes through his connections, not his actual bank account (which may or may not have much dough in it); if Chatwal is accepted by the Indian-American community, how relevant are his personal financial and legal troubles? If you look at the bloggers who are most excited by this story, it’s mostly Republican blogs like “AgainstHillary.com”; clearly the right is going to want to spin this a certain way: Clinton accepts dirty money from crooked “foreign” businessmen (the Norman Hsu situation doesn’t help).

Is it possible to rise above the cloud of partisan spin, and evaluate this openly and honestly? How would we react to this if we were talking about a Republican candidate like Giuliani, rather than Clinton? Incidentally, the WaPo article I linked to above does mention some of the campaign contribution controversies that have come up with both Obama and Edwards, though the emphasis is really on Clinton. Continue reading →

Sam Arora is the anti-Sanjaya…

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…and he shall redeem us, Amreeka.

As many of you may recall from the “Aviyal” post, I am fascinated by Facebook, and once again, I must insist that it’s not for the usual reasons (though I do enjoy throwing sheep at several of you). No, when I’m not discovering groups which specifically support inter-religious, inter-regional desi relationships, I’m reading this about Giuliani or planning to restock my iPod with these choons. I’m also discovering potential reality TV stars, via my News “feed”:

The show that Sam is auditioning for is called Tontine (Achtung! Pseudo-mystical yodeling awaits you, if you click that link…and you wonder why I went with wiki…wiki is silent AND it lets me copy text…take that official site!):

A combination of Survivor and The Amazing Race, Tontine follows 15 contestants as they travel to all seven continents and contend for the $10 million prize. Contestants each begin with a key, the final contestant who posses all 15 keys unlocks the prize. The show is hosted by “Boston Rob” Mariano, who was a contestant on both Survivor and The Amazing Race before signing on for Tontine. [wiki]

Doesn’t that sound like something our Abhi should have done? 😀

Here’s what the show’s casting director wrote in an email to Sam (and perhaps a few others): Continue reading →

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Unleash Your Inner-Joan Rivers

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TMBWITW and some bad hair.jpg

One of you kind souls, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent me this picture of “India’s Brangelina“, because you were hoping we might play The Caption Game with it (ji, thanks!). Absosmurfly! What better way to draw off-topic commentary away from the Maximum Nerdery thread? 😉

Without further ado, let’s get snarky. To the left we see Abhishek Bachan and his bride strutting down the red carpet at Cannes.

Most of you are aware that Aishwarya is sometimes known by the unwieldy acronym TMBWITW. Well, now that she is part of a pair, I propose that her hubby get an acronym, too. It’s only fair, right? Damnit, I don’t want to propagate the hegemony of the pasty. Err, I meant…it’s only dark? Whatever.

How about TMFHITW? I’m sure you can guess what the third and fourth letters stand for, but in case you haven’t had two cups of coffee like I have, I’ll spare you from wondering– FH = fugly hair.

Unless your name is Esthappan and you’re rocking a puff, COMB YOUR HAIR. I’m guessing Abhishek get it from his Mama? Big Daddy Amitabh’s tresses seem a bit more manageable. Anyway, the entire point of this debacle of a post is to offer you tired, grumpy, three-day-weekend-missing mutineers a chance to play the caption game! You know how we do, and if you don’t, check out previous editions: ein, zwei, drei, vier, funf…

So, just what is Aish saying? What is her spouse thinking? Why are there suddenly so many Tamil people on SM? The answers to all this and more, will most probably not be found below, not that you’re disappointed at that. Now get to captioning! Continue reading →

Outsourcing Spin and Counterspin

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We’re heading into an election year in the U.S., which means facts are largely going to be irrelevant to most public discussions of issues for the next fourteen months. Instead, we’ll be treated to spin, counterspin, and more spin. The big Indian software & services companies realize this, and the Times reports that they’ve decided to hire lobbyists to counterspin the inevitable protectionist rhetoric (the original spin, as it were) that “outsourcing is costing America jobs.”

The economic impact of outsourcing is complicated, far too complicated to be given justice in a 30 second ad or crowd-pleasing stump speech. While it’s hard to argue that no jobs have been lost to outsourcing, there’s no reliable number on how many jobs are actually being lost (it’s certainly nowhere near 3.3 million, as was predicted earlier). There’s also some evidence that “insourcing” creates far more jobs than outsourcing takes away (the U.S. remains a net exporter of business services, for instance). And yes, some Indian companies are now opening up decent-sized offices in the U.S., and hiring American workers. (As you’ll recall, this came up back in June, with the infamous Obama campaign memo on Hillary Clinton’s purported connections to India.) See the conservative Heritage Foundation for more; and see this article at IHT for why it may not matter anyway.

The lobbyists quoted in the Times article are even adding some new arguments and approaches to their arsenal:

But the core of the Indian vendors’ new strategy appears to be removing themselves from the limelight. Outsourcing is not about us, goes the new pitch to lawmakers, it benefits Americans, including ones in your district.

The Washington lobbyist who asked not to be identified said that a focus of the campaign was to collect data on Indian companies’ investments in the United States and then to lobby members of Congress from districts where those investments have created jobs.

For example, a lawmaker from Washington State might be told something like this: Indian outsourcing companies may funnel some Seattle-area technology jobs to India, but with the affluence that creates in India, more and more Indians are flying. That has made India a huge buyer of Boeing aircraft and thus a creator of jobs in the Seattle area, where Boeing does much of its manufacturing.(link)

I don’t know — the tradeoff described here seems awfully indirect, and I’m not sure a politican could really sell the rising Indian middle class as a positive to an American middle class that’s currently dealing with economic uncertainty. Readers, do you buy the argument above? Can people think of other instances where the trade-off works this way? What about cases where it doesn’t? Continue reading →