Foul Behavior Rings In the New Year

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[Note: I was trying to use the “embed video” feature now offered by IBN-CNN in India, but it was taking way too long to load. So here’s a link.]

“This is making the South Asian women’s circles headlines,” advises an anonymous tipster. Thanks for alerting us to the extremely ugly incident that took place during New Year’s Eve at the Gateway of India in Mumbai, where the crowd gathered in the same way it does in Times Square in New York City or similar plazas worldwide. Only here, there was an attack on a young couple in the middle of the crowd in which a mob of about 60 men molested the young woman for ten minutes with no one coming to her and her friend’s aid. A photographer for Mid-Day, Shadab Khan, witnessed it all:

On New YearÂ’s Eve, I was supposed to click pictures of revellers at the Gateway of India, but what I witnessed instead has left me shaken.

A young woman was groped by some 60 perverts in plain public view, while her male friend, who tried to protect her, was pushed aside violently.

The 10 harrowing minutes the helpless woman cried for help as the perverts abused her, shook my faith in the city I have lived in all my life. I thought such things happened only in Delhi. I was clearly wrong.

I was at the place at 11.35 pm with my camera, taking pictures that captured the mood of the New Year celebrations. I was atop the temporary watchtowers erected by the cops.

After a few minutes, as the crowd grew larger, I could vaguely make out a youth aged around 25, surrounded by a mob of around 60 to 70 people.

The perverts tore off her dress in the middle of the teeming crowd When I zoomed in, I saw the girl of about the same age being groped by the crowd.

The girl was screaming for help but her voice was drowned in the commotion. Her companion tried to shield her but found himself helpless.

The presence of 50-odd policemen at the site did not deter them. Even as she cried pitifully, I saw them pull at her dress, leaving it torn from below the waist.

In the middle of this pushing and shoving, the girl fell down. The wild men, taking advantage of her, pounced on her with even more venom. After an agonising 10 minutes, the two managed to extricate themselves from the crowd and leave the venue.

Numerous Indian outlets have now picked up the story. I’m waiting for Mumbai’s strong female bloggers like Uma and Sonia to contribute their thoughts; it seems they are still on vacation. Amit Varma has an item on the incident, and picks up on some idiotic interpretations being distilled by so-called experts:

The Times of India brings us some bizarre reactions on the incident. First, Dr Mahinder Watsa, “an expert in sexual medicine,” says:
This is a rage attitude of devil-may-care.
And then, Dr Harish Shetty brings capitalism into it:
[T]here is this global selling of ecstasy pushed forward by a market-driven economy, and so, the line of demarcation between fun and ecstasy is getting blurred. Hence, we find some youngsters indulging in such behaviour.

As disgusting as incidents like this one are, it’s just as repulsive when the (men in the) so-called “responsible media” deploy horseshit such as this from (male) so-called experts to explain away actions that are just plain violent, ignorant, criminal and wrong. How is there ever going to be any progress? Continue reading →

Secularism and Reverse-Engineering (and, an announcement)

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The debates about secularism we’ve had over the months I’ve been on Sepia Mutiny have sometimes gotten stuck due to differences in terminology. People have different ideas of what “secularism” means, and not simply because one party is “right” and the others are “wrong.”

In fact, there is some slipperiness in the way many people use the term on a day-to-day basis. Some people think of secularism as a cultural attribute, indicating the opposite of religiosity. A society where people are not very religious might be termed secular, and under this terminology, Europe would be very “secular,” while the U.S. would be less so, even if (and Razib has often pointed this out) there is actually more religion taught in public schools in most northern European countries than is allowed in the U.S. system. India is a society that is also very non-secular by this definition, partly because the overwhelming majority of its citizens would identify themselves as belonging to one or another religious community. Moroever, one of the unique features of life in the Indian subcontinent is the fact that a person’s religious identity is often publicly visible to others –- it’s built into one’s name, as well as various kinds of bodily markings and religiously-coded attire. A Bindi might mark a woman as a Hindu; a turban and beard might mark a man as a Sikh; and any number of identifying marks are possible for Muslims. (Christians and Buddhists, interestingly, are less visibly marked.)

The problem with the cultural definition of secularism is that it seems very difficult to think of changing anything. If the people in a given society are seen as religious, one could claim that thereÂ’s no need for a legal or political system that requires separation of church and state. Nor need there be any particular incentive to reform aspects of a traditional culture that are incompatible with the idea of civil rights. Also out the window are specific protections for religious minorities, as well as vigilance about protecting individuals (as in, women) from religious coercion. If a woman (or even, as is often the case, a girl) is being pressured by her family to accept a marriage she doesnÂ’t want, under the culturalist definition of secularism there isnÂ’t really justification to help her: thatÂ’s simply the culture, one could say. Continue reading →

Are we monkeys riding tigers?

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Dance monkey. Dance.

About this time of year we all go about making our resolutions for the coming year. I, for example, have resolved to be in the best physical shape of my life and also to have the best year of my life (God willing). The latter includes using my free will to make proper decisions based on the experience gained from bad past ones. Resolutions seem to be an acknowledgement of the hope that we do indeed possess the free will to determine our fate, regardless of what has happened to us in the past or what some “magical power” wishes upon us (but just to be safe some throw in a “God willing” whether or not they are believers). To quote Swami Vivekananda on the subject:

Each one of us is the maker of our own fate. We, and none else are responsible for what we enjoy or suffer. We are the effects, and we are the causes. We are free therefore. If I an unhappy, it is of my own making, and that shows that I can be happy if I will. The human will stands beyond all circumstance. Before it — the strong, gigantic, infinite will and freedom in man — all the powers, even of nature, must bow down, succumb and become its servants. This is the result of the law of Karma. [Link]

An article in the New York Times, however, throws us a curve ball. Perhaps we have as much free will as a monkey standing backward while riding a tiger with a mind of its own. Perhaps free will is an illusion also:

A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. [Link]
Continue reading →

The Year (2006) in Books

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Red Snapper wrote me and suggested a post reviewing the books of 2006. This is of course somewhat difficult to do, because unlike some readers I tend to spend most of my time reading books written years and years and years ago — and I often let new works of fiction simmer into paperback before venturing to sit down with them. In this case, I haven’t actually read several of the books on the list below, and the list is as much a “to read” as it is a “best of.”

Secondly, the ordering isn’t especially significant. The list is more about the group as a whole than it is about putting X above Y or Y above Z. As I mentioned, I haven’t read some of the titles, and anyway ranking books isn’t usually a very intelligent exercise, especially when you’re talking about different genres of writing.

Third, I’m curious to know what was on your list in 2006. What am I leaving out? Continue reading →

Off we go then

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GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY.

phew There we go, I just had to get that out of my system.

Oh hang on. Gay Pakistani male! Gay Pakistani male!

Right, I think weÂ’re done on that front.

And on this particular front as well. My time at Sepia Mutiny has—at long last—come to an end, and I can say without a single doubt that I’m glad I got to close out 2006 on such a bright note. It has been an experience, tumultuous and otherwise, and at the risk of loading up on the frommage, I think I’d be the poorer without it.

It gives me hope, sometimes. This community—because that’s what it is, a community, not just a place to write about brown-people-stuff—isn’t just dynamic and interesting and occasionally thought-provoking; it’s all of those things AND the whole damn’ bag of chips. It thrives on everything (clusterfucks be damned!—and secretly enjoyed!), and it makes me glad that I was incredibly, incredibly wrong when I thought to myself at its inception, wow, I wonder how long it’ll take for that site to tank, it’s a good idea, but I just don’t think enough people will be interested.

In case you were wondering, itÂ’s taking me a while to write this post because IÂ’m single-finger-typing while trying to get my ankle out past my molars with the other hand.

It was one of the things I felt most keenly while at university in the US. A lot of us homeland desis tend to automatically assume that just because we were born in South Asia, weÂ’re somehow better-informed and more capable of analysing/providing information about the region than people of desi origin who werenÂ’t necessarily raised there. And I canÂ’t speak for everyone, but some of us also felt very marginalised in the sense that we didnÂ’t think or feel that we had enough of a presence to be a viable social group beyond the simple stereotypes (OK well, I like men and make no bones about that so I definitely stood out, but you see where IÂ’m going with this) that everyoneÂ’s so well-aware of.

And once again, I was wonderfully, gloriously, terrifically wrong. The mould has been broken, the restrictions shattered and a bhangra danced all over them while Amitabh comes out of retirement once more to chew the scenery and Nusrat’s voice soars.

ItÂ’s utterly delightful, it really is. Continue reading →

“They don’t hire their own people. They hire Kenyans.”

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Greetings from Nairobi. Many thanks to Abhi and the gang for letting me guest-blog, so here begins a short series (illustrated!) about Indo-Africa.

Amardeep’s recent post about Indo-African writers brought up the big question about Indians (East Asians, as they are called here) and the other communities:

And indeed, anecdotally, one hears that the Asians in Africa tended to hold themselves aloof from “native” Africans, at least before Idi Amin.

That question is a good place for me to start since, quite coincidentally, it’s where I started.

Visiting a place for the first time, especially one defined by a confluence of cultures, requires peeling back the layers of the onion, at least rhetorically. What is said or not said, and how it’s said, can reveal a great deal about a place, and it’s important for a journalist to get a handle on the terms of the discussion if he wants to engage it in any meaningful way.

Best way to orient yourself to the local situation? Ask a cab driver.

Daniel, a black cabbie in his forties attached to my hotel, took me to Diamond Plaza, a shopping center in Parklands, the Indian section of Nairobi. He said he had grown up nearby. I told him why I wanted to go there.

“”Indians are rich,”” he said. “”They don’t come from farms. They are in business.”” It’s always a little dicey when a person of one race makes comments about another to someone who belongs to neither. But I thought he sounded admiring. “”They are good employers,” he said. “”They hire cooks, housekeepers, drivers, guards, lots of staff.””

And then we reached something close to the center of the onion: ““They don’t hire their own people. They hire Kenyans.”” Continue reading →

Guest Flogger: Preston Merchant

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Every good mutiny needs a photographer or two associated with it. Someone needs to document the “grand struggle,” just as Henri Cartier-Bresson documented some of Gandhi’s. To start off 2007 we have a little treat for you. Preston Merchant, the photographer shooting away at many of our NYC meet-ups, is traveling in Kenya right now and will be training his eye and camera on the Indian diaspora there. Before he proceeds we should clear up a few questions you might have:

Statement: Oh, Merchant! Way to represent the Parsees. Finally, some more diversity on SM.

Response: Nope. Preston is white. He is not Parsi (not that you can’t have a white Parsi).

Statement: Whoa. What’s up with letting a colonialist in the house?

Response: Remember the movie Lagaan? How all the villagers banded together to play cricket and won over the hearts of their colonialist oppressors, and how Amir Khan even won the eye of that one white British lady? It is the same thing. SM is like that cricket team but Preston thankfully doesn’t sing.

Preston isn’t just over there taking pictures for no reason. He is working on a book titled IndiaWorld about the Indian diaspora and has already visited South Africa, Dubai, Trinidad, and Guyana, in addition to his work here in the States. In Kenya he will be focusing especially on the Ismaili Muslim community. I’ll let him explain to us about that though. Get ready for a good flogging.

Continue reading →

Indo-African Writers (report from a conference)

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My after-Christmas is usually spent in a suit and tie, at the big, 3-day MLA conference — where all the literature professors in North America get together and try to impress one another with advanced theoretical jargon and turtle-neck sweaters in the darkest possible shades of black. For the past six years, the South Asian Literary Association has also had a conference that piggybacks on the main MLA. Everyone calls it the SALA conference (I know, unfortunate acronym; trust me, it’s been noticed before!), and it’s an academic space where no one looks at you funny if you are in a sari or a “FabIndia” khadi kurta.

This year the focus at SALA was on literature of the South Asian diaspora, and the keynote speaker was Gaurav Desai, who gave a talk was closely focused on the literary history of South Asians in East Africa. I won’t say much here about Gaurav’s actual thesis (look for his upcoming book, which is entirely dedicated to the Indo-Africans); instead, I’ll stick to simply mentioning some of the names he mentioned. While Gaurav did make brief reference to some famous Indian Ugandan exiles, like M.G. Vassanji, most of his talk was focused on lesser-known figures, such as Peter Nazareth and Yusuf Dawood. He also gave some helpful leads for others interested in the topic. He mentioned, for instance, Robert Gregory’s 1972 history of “India and East Africa,” as well as Cynthia Salvadori’s We Came in Dhows, which is actually quoted on some Sikh websites for the background on East African Sikhs.

Commentators like Shiva Naipaul (Sir Vidia’s deceased brother) focused earlier on the distance of the Asian community from black Africans before the traumatic exodus of the early 1970s. And indeed, anecdotally, one hears that the Asians in Africa tended to hold themselves aloof from “native” Africans, at least before Idi Amin. Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community — especially artists, playwrights, and poets — who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with their black African neighbors.

One name that came up a lot in this regard in Desai’s talk was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Indian descent who started a famous African magazine called Transition. Neogy’s magazine was a freethinking forum for many of the major postcolonial intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s (some of them are named at Wikipedia, while others are named at the Transition website). The magazine went defunct in 1976, when Neogy was arrested by Idi Amin’s henchmen, but it was revived in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates (among the early contributors to the magazine). Transition is now based in the U.S. — as are most of the writers who wrote for the original magazine, not surprisingly.

Another name mentioned by Desai was Peter Nazareth, a writer of Goan and Malaysian ancestry, who actually worked briefly in the Idi Amin regime before getting out in 1973. He wrote a novel about Amin, called The General is Up, that sounds pretty interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, Nazareth now teaches at the University of Iowa.

Finally, Desai mentioned a writer named Yusuf Dawood, who has also written about the mass exodus of Indians from Uganda in a novel called Return to Paradise.

Has anyone read any of these writers’ works?

While on the subject of east Africa, a quick side-note: at the main MLA, I was thrilled to see Ngugi w’a Thiong’o read from his new novel, The Wizard of the Crow on Friday evening. Parody is one of the best weapons with which to battle the sickening corruption of postcolonial dictatorships, and Ngugi wields it with ferocity and charm. I’m looking forward to getting the book. Continue reading →

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Danse Macabre

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I shed no tears for the passing of Saddam Hussein, although I oppose the death penalty. Of course, just as disturbing has been the danse macabre in the past few days around his impending execution — what to show? how to cover? — so perhaps it’s just as well they got it over with rather than drag it out. In order to retain my sanity I won’t be checking out Fox News to see what gloating may be going on. However, the eagle eyes at SAJA note some of the first coverage in the more responsible press has been by desis. Aneesh Raman of CNN broke the news of the execution minutes ahead of MSNBC and Fox. (Trivial as it might seem to the outside world, that’s an important metric in newsland.) The coincidence that lead coverage at the Washington Post, Time.com, and CNN, has all been by desis is noteworthy in the context of our discussion, following Abhi’s post yesterday, of what professions are “traditional” or “non-traditional” for desis in America.

A list of desis working the Iraq beat (and its various spinoffs) for US media is at the SAJA website. Continue reading →