Mature Macaca Molested Montessori Minor, Maybe

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It’s only because Abhi doesn’t pay us I don’t have the time that I haven’t taken myself down to Manhattan Supreme Court to check out on your behalf, gentle reader, the ongoing circus that is generating press clips of this nature:

A city cop who testified he was seduced at age 13 by his East Side Montessori school principal suffered a figurative beating by the same headmistress in court yesterday. …

“Did that involve any noise?” Shargel asked. “Noises that are often attendant to the act of making love?” The cop answered, “The TV would be on loud.”

Backstory and Desi Angle (TM): Well, you see, the Montessori school principal in question is desi. Name of Lina Sinha, age 40. The alleged events took place about ten years ago. It seems something went down between the two, but just what, and how illegal, and whether it can be proved, is up in the air. He says she raped him when he was underage. She says they had an affair after he turned 17, which ended badly; that she had accused him of beating her and he, fearing this would lose him his job with the NYPD, turned around and accused her of rape.

Additional elements of note: Steven Soderbergh was almost a juror in the case. Too bad he didn’t make the final cut – there’s sex here for sure, and lies somewhere, and all we need is the videotape. Second element of note: Sinha’s attorney is Gerald Shargel, who is best known for defending mobsters. Damn! Maybe I will make it down to the court after all. The whole scene sounds classic.

Get your fix with these stories from the first day of the trial last week (Daily News flava; New York Post flava with photo of Sinha — go on, you know you want to; New York Times flava), and these updates. Looks like Shargel’s scoring some points, which is why he gets paid the big bucks. We’ll try and keep an eye on this tawdriness for you as the trial continues. Continue reading →

Virginia is for Lovers and Indians

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Guess what? Virginia ain’t just for lovers no more. It is also for Indian Americans. Well, at least on January 26th of every year:

Virginia will celebrate January 26 as Indian-American Day in recognition of the community’s contribution to the State.

A legislation to this effect was recently passed by its legislature.

“Over the past year, I have come to realize how much the Indian-American community contributes to the Commonwealth. In appreciation of their efforts and all they have done for the Commonwealth and its people, it is my pleasure to announce the creation of Indian-American Day in Virginia,” Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling said. [Link]

Let me rephrase that quote by Bolling so that it is slightly more honest. “Over the past year, I have come to realize that you shouldn’t refer to brown people as Macacas but rather, you should make dosas with them.”

Although this is bound to upset some of our more sensitive readers, I do wish they had been more inclusive and called it “Macaca-American Day” instead. The way I see it, we have nearly 10 months to plan. How are we going to celebrate our own day?

“The face of Virginia is changing and the immigrant community is a powerful force in urban and suburban Virginia,” Bolling said, adding that he wanted to do everything he could to reach out to the immigrant community and build a ‘better’ Virginia.

“During my campaign for Lieutenant Governor I made a promise to the Indian-American community. I promised to do my best to develop closer ties with them and involve them more in the leadership of Virginia,” he said. [Link]
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Comparing “Heroes” to “Midnight’s Children”

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While we’re on the subject of television, am I the first person to think of shows like Lost and Heroes as the television equivalent of “magic realism” in the novel? These shows have elements of science fiction and fantasy, but remain grounded in realistic narration, human relationships, and a world that more or less resembles our own (with certain quiet variations). As a result, they can achieve mainstream respectability and broad popularity, while true Sci-Fi remains somewhat of a smaller, niche market — the “outer space” of basic cable, if you will.

This is going to sound blasphemous, but Heroes in particular actually reminds me a little of Midnight’s Children in some ways. Remember this delightful passage from Rushdie’s novel:

From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any surface in the land–through lakes, and (with greater difficulty), the polished bodies of automobiles . . . and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish . . . and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhvas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumors of the return of Giants . . . from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard . . . near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside of Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result from some barb flung casually from her lips, they decided to lock her up in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sunderbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more…

Ah, Rushdie: the old passages don’t disappoint. Of course, the different magical powers don’t map precisely to the characters in Heroes, but there are certain overlaps:

Continue reading →

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Filmiholic Interviews Kal Penn; They Discuss This Here Blog

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Wow, go Filmiholic — this week she has interviews with both Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri coinciding with the imminent release of The Namesake.

She and Kal Pann actually discuss Sepia Mutiny in Part 1 of their interview, with regards to the SM debate over desis playing terrorists in hollywood, and specifically Kal Penn’s role as a terrorist in a recent episode of 24. I gather he’s sympathetic to the fact that people are having a discussion, but not entirely sympathetic to the “blogging = people yakking at each other endlessly” part:

The point that I was trying to make was that I’m glad that people are discussing it, why I’m glad that people are getting pissed off about it is that I think that one of the things that’s happened since September 11 is we feel like we don’t have control over our representatives in government, especially as people of color, and I think it’s important to take that back.

It’s important to write letters to your Senator, your Congressman, to the guys who are actually voting on the issues that come up fictitiously on 24. The things that happen on 24 are so far-fetched, but there’s an under layer of reality to them that applies to things like the Patriot Act and racial profiling.

These are things that I hope people don’t just blog on Sepia Mutiny and whine their asses off, I hope that they take that a step further and take the passions they explain in those blogs and send a letter to Hillary Clinton, send a letter to whoever your usual rep is and it does have a remarkable effect when you do it as voting block and I hope that it motivates people to take that a step further. (link)

(A little ouch there… two quick responses: first, it should be pointed out that in several instances — Power 99 and Hot 97 come to mind — SM has done a bit more than whine. Second, just watch what we do on the 2008 elections, mofo!)

Anyway, the question stands: on the question of whether to do something like “Van Wilder,” I have to admit I have no idea what I would do in his shoes — how can one make the best out of a rather limited array of options for an Indian-American actor? Especially several years ago, before we had Harold and Kumar, Lost, E.R., and Heroes.

Still, as a counterpoint, I would encourage people to read the recent New Yorker profile of Joel Surnow, the guy behind 24. I was especially disturbed about Surnow’s blithe embrace of the use of torture in the show, contrary to American law and all existing human rights conventions. Once one knows that justifying torture is a pattern in the show — or, put more forcefully, a specific ideology it is promoting — it might be easier to see where to draw the line. Continue reading →

Fencing Out The Other

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The ever-interesting Stratpage has a summary of the next generation of Berlin Walls’ being built all over the world.

Good Fences = Good Neighbors

Of course, unlike the last go around, these walls revert to old skool role of keeping undesirables out rather than locking your citizenry in –

March 4, 2007: There a lot of large scale barrier systems going up in the world…

…Israel is building a 700 kilometers barrier between itself and the Palestinian West Bank.

…Pakistan is building a barrier along its 2,400 kilometer border with Afghanistan .

…Kuwait is upgrading its 215 kilometers of barrier along its Iraq border.

…Spain is building barriers around its two enclaves in Morocco

And so on. But the biggest wall of them all is actually being built by India –

India is building a 4,000 kilometer barrier along its border with Bangladesh. Various Indian rebel groups have been using bases in Bangladesh, and the local government has been reluctant to shut them down. That’s partly because of the large number of illegal migrants moving from Bangladesh to India.

For comparison, the oft-talked about, but never really implemented, US-Mexico border fence would be a full 1000km shorter than India’s Great Wall . And appropriately, the debate surrounding India’s wall echoes familiar arguments and issues from south of the US border.

Continue reading →

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Inside Dharavi

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Last year I did a post on a poverty tourism experiment happening in Delhi. In both my own assessment and in the comments, opinion on the program was mixed: one the one hand, some people are offended by this concept, as it smacks of voyeurism. Others (like Bong Breaker) pointed out that the people who run these tours put money back into charities that support the community, and perhaps the people who go on these tours could benefit by added awareness and sensitivity. And John Thompson, who founded Salaam Baalak Trust, actually chimed in with his own defense of the program.

Now the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on another poverty tourism program happening in Dharavi, Mumbai. John Lancaster acknowledges the controvery over Reality Tours and Travel, but also goes beyond it, to tell us what he learned from the tour itself. Some of what he has to say is surprising:

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,” he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.” (link)

And it continues in that vein: Dharavi as a hive of light industrial activity. He acknowledges the smell, the open sewage, and the crampedness, but he doesn’t dwell on those things so much. And he ends with a telling reflection:

No one gave us a second glance, and I had to wonder about the motives of those in the Indian media and elsewhere who claimed on behalf of the Dharavi residents to be offended by the tours. Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation. I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty—an image at odds with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park. In any case, it seemed to me that the purpose of the tour was not to generate pity, but understanding. That’s not to say that it made me an expert—I was only there a few hours, after all. Were the people I saw in Dharavi the victims of globalization, or its beneficiaries? I still don’t know. But at least the question had been raised in my mind.(link)

Does this article change your opinion of “poorism,” as poverty tourism is sometimes called? Or is Lancaster’s account of a few hours spent in Dharavi too “sanitized” to be of value? Continue reading →

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Ponnuru listens to straight talk

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Seems like that one time “Maverick” John McCain is falling like a rock (an old rock) in the way too early to matter polls. I still think that he would have won running away in ’08 if he had run as an Independent instead of sucking up to the Radical Right and the Bush administration. That ship has sailed, however. While hanging out at the National Review’s website (ahem…cough cough), I came across Ramesh Ponnuru’s cover story interview with McCain. Here is an excerpt:

The “maverick” pose

Sen. McCain: I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today.

Ponnuru (reading headline): “McCain firm on Iraq war. . .” (McCain flips the paper over.) “Despite cost to candidacy”: even better. . .

Sen. McCain: (Laughs) Yep. They’ve got a poll that says 33 percent are much less likely, and 11 percent somewhat less likely to [vote for me]


Ponnuru: So do you think that’s already been costing you? That that’s behind some of the slides in the polls?

Sen. McCain: First of all, I don’t know. But second of all, I can’t worry about it. You just can’t, with something like this you just can’t let it concern you. The issue is too important. The sacrifice that so many young Americans have made already pales in significance to any cost that it may mean to me. You’ve seen these wounded kids, you know how much they’ve given.


Ponnuru: But is the country prepared to give more? The Post had a story on the front page that people want a deadline.

Sen. McCain: Well, I think that it’s the job of people like me to explain to them what’s at stake here. It isn’t just Iraq. I really believe that chaos will ensue, genocide will take place, and unlike after we lost the Vietnam War when they didn’t want to follow us home, these people want to follow us home. I think what’s at stake here is this entire struggle we’re in — you know I hate to use the word war, because then you give people legitimacy as soldiers — but the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism.

And so for me to somehow trim my sails on an issue like this would be just a disservice to the nation. [Link]

By the way, as an interesting side note. This post I wrote when SM was first getting started accounts for a large chunk of visits to our site even still.

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Do You Want to Know What’s Under my Blouse, too? ;)

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my desk.jpg In the kitchen one recent morning…

“Anna! How are you?”

“I’m well Asif, thank you for asking. And you?”

“Ah…busy with _____, but you know how that is.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m caffeinating.”

“What you are drinking?”

“Espresso concentrate and milk.”

“Cold?”

“Yeah. It’s good.”

“Don’t you like tea?”

“I do, but I’m more of a coffee drinker. It’s a South Indian thing.”

“Where your parents are from?”

“Kerala.”

“Where that is?”

“Madras.”

“Ah, Madras. But you were born here.” Continue reading →

Controversy over “Nishabd,” RGV’s “Lolita”

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Just when you thought the old geezer couldn’t possibly have any surprises left in the bag, Amitabh Bachchan has walked into a controversy for the part he plays in the new Ram Gopal Varma film Nishabd. nishabd small.jpg

The photo to the right says most of what you need to know. Big B. plays a 60 year old man who falls in love with his daughter’s eighteen-year old friend (played by newcomer Jiah Khan). He’s tortured about it, but it appears that nothing untoward happens between the two of them. Still, his wife finds out, and I gather from reviews that the film after intermission becomes a typical family melodrama — guilt, shame, etc. While the general scenario is roughly similar to Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the story is actually quite different: there’s no abduction, no marriage to and then murder of an inconvenient mother, and no insane cross-country chase involving witty pseudonyms. On the whole, the film seems to be an order of magnitude less twisted than Nabokov. (And that’s probably a relief.)

As for the quality of the film? Not great, by most accounts. (I haven’t seen it.) The best review I’ve seen is Baradwaj Rangan’s (via DesiPundit), and he is far from thrilled. He says Nishabd isn’t as good as Naach, which means it must be truly bad, since Naach was itself pretty crappy.

Congress government party officials in Uttar Pradesh want the film banned, on account of it being “against Indian values.” But does it really make sense to ban a film for flirting with a taboo — and not crossing it? We’re in strange territory here: somewhere between Minority Report and the Immaculate Conception. Anyway, it’s yet another example of a plea for censorship that is incoherent.

There has been a major protest in Allahabad over the film, where protesters have claimed the film is bringing in “Western values.” And here it might be noted that while Nishabd does seem to have a western feel for it, India does have a tradition of mature men and young women (or girls) getting together — it’s called child marriage. (That, incidentally, is a subject that the great V. Shantaram condemned some 70 years ago, in his film Duniya Na Maane. So this is not a new thing). Continue reading →