Old folk can still dance

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I was thinking about the fact that, as an over 30, I am now officially old. I mean, James Bond is now a 30-something, which makes this the first time in my life that I have been in the same decade as a Bond actor.

However, between popping arthritis medicine and obsessing about the fact that I have to settle down before it’s too late, I remembered something. Old folk can still dance. I don’t just mean gorgeous professional dancers like DesiDancer, I mean ordinary uncles and aunties. I’m not saying that they can grind, freak or krump (although I’ll bet DD can krump like a clown) I mean that they can dance which is to me a far more beautiful thing.

Herewith, exhibit A [via Vinod], Gurdas Maan’s Babe Bhangra Pounde Ne:

If I can dance like that, when I’m that age, I’ll be a happy man.

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Lo Tek or High Tech?

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Chiraag from Pardon My Hindi recently posted a video onto YouTube of his harrowing experience flying Air Deccan (via BoingBoing). Says Chiraag:

I dug up this video I shot back in December ’04 when I was aboard an Air Deccan flight from Bangalore to Mumbai. Looked out my window and what did I see, A group of guys repairing the wing with some sort of muthafcukin’ duct tape. There’s some more repairs to the left of the one they are working on with what seems to be the same technique. Crossed my fingers, tossed back a shot of Black Label, and stayed on the flight. [Link]

Honestly, I probably would have reacted the same way, sans Black Label. It looks like a typically desi “Kam Challao” scene – equal mixtures of ingenuity and utter disregard for the principles of safety, like a bus patched together with baling wire, careening down a Himalayan road.

However, looks can be deceiving. This isn’t a 19th century desi solution, it’s a thoroughly modern one. As the comments on Turbanhead reveal, that isn’t duct tape it’s “Speed tape” – it’s specially formulated for use on airplanes (and racing cars and possibly even nuclear reactors). Those employees were actually doing what they would have in any first world airport!

“What you see is the perfectly safe and legal application of some heavy-duty aluminum bonding tape, called “speed tape” in the mechanic’s lexicon. Depending on what a plane’s maintenance manual stipulates — according to the dictates of the FAA — certain noncritical components can be temporarily patched with this material, embarrassing as it sometimes looks. It’s extremely strong, durable, and able to expand and contract through an extreme range of temperatures…” [Link]

Here’s a similar story of a passenger freaking out after watching the application of speed tape on a plane in Seattle.

Poor desi aircraft workers – even when they’re using the most expensive, cutting edge products, we still suspect them of cutting corners and endangering our lives.

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Television execs love "real" Asian men

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Check out this picture. It is the cast of Beauty and the Geek 3 which debuts in January (here is a background on the series):

Is that Matisyahu with the white cap?

The CW (which I guess someone must still be watching) has decided to demonstrate that it is a network of diversity by featuring THREE Asian brothers in ONE reality show. This is unprecedented. We’ve now had a number of Asian Americans in reality shows but here three out of the eight men (competing for the mostly white women who are supposedly out-of-their-league) are Asian. What the F*ck? Can I get a “what what?” I mean, cynic that I am I always believed that the proper formula for a sexually charged reality show (The Real World being the paradigm) was to throw sex-crazed alcoholic white people together with angry black people and then add a homosexual in the mix to take the edge off. How do Asians fit in to that choreography? Oh wait…I get it. This is a show about Geeks. The guy in the middle with the glasses and red vest, that’s Sanjay from Westminster, California.

The producing team of Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg (“Punk’d”) recruited an all-new group of eight gorgeous but academically impaired women and eight brilliant but socially challenged men for the third installment to test intellect and social skills. This cycle will remain true to the series’ format — pairing eight gorgeous but academically impaired women with eight brilliant but socially challenged men to test intellect and social skills — for a chance to win a $250,000 grand prize. [Link]

Sanjay, if you are listening then call up Ankur from Season 2 for some advice. And let’s all be grateful for the CW for featuring real Asian men. If I was an executive there I would have picked 8 nerdy women and 8 dumb-as-dirt but socially adept men (and three of them would be Asian). But alas, I’m not the TV exec type. I’ll just continue to pick nerdy South Asian women to blog for SM to compensate.

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The cost of illness

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A friend working in public health once told me that while mortality rates were highest in Africa, morbidity rates (the rate of non-fatal illness) were highest in India. If I remember correctly, she told me that this had to do with relatively high rates of innoculation – which cut all the nasty childhood diseases that lead to low life expectancy at birth – but a poor health system over all.

While I’m not sure if this is still true, what I do know is that getting sick is expensive, anywhere. Consider the impact of illness on financial health in the USA:

50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses… Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. [Link]

And this is even though “68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance” [Link].

If illness wipes out the savings of relatively high (by world standards) earning Americans, you can imagine what it does to the poor in India. While the cost of medical care is cheaper in absolute terms in India, it is still a large share of already meager resources. Couple that with lost earnings, and the impact can be dire.

About one-fourth of hospitalized Indians fall below the poverty line as a direct result of their hospital expenses, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Many people take out steep loans or sell their homes in order to pay. And for the poor, losing even a day’s wages while waiting in the hospital can be devastating.

“A health event is a bigger risk to farmers than an unsuccessful crop. Once they sell their land or livestock, they become indentured laborers. That takes a generation to fix,”… [Link]
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Los Angeles Meetup: Friday, December 15th

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Is this the last ever Los Angeles Meet-up? Hard to say. Why risk it? The date is unfortunately non-negotiable since Sepia Mutiny’s Los Angeles Bureau is closing its doors in December and relocating to our newly purchased state-of-the-art blogging facility in Houston, Texas (no state taxes in TX).

Time: After 7p.m. (and until the cops come knocking).

Place: TBD. Check this post early next week (or check our Events Tab).

Who: Last time we had like 40-50 people show up and it was a damn good time (ended at 2a.m.).

I will post another reminder on the Tuesday before the meet-up. Mark you calendars now. Last time we met at the Golden Gopher. I’m still checking out options for this one.

RSVP to me if you can come abhi [at] sepiamutiny . com Continue reading →

Straight eye for the guerilla guy

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Inspired by Anna and Sin, I thought that I would try my hand at fashion criticism. But where to start? I’m straight, and hardly fashion forward. I needed somebody who was in greater need of assistance than myself somebody like … Prabhakaran. While I may not be able to wage a decades long war against the government in Colombo, and I don’t have a cult of personality of my own, I can certainly dress better than him. [Yeah, I’m brave, blogging behind an anonymous handle and making fun of the head of the Tamil Tigers.]

So, ‘Tamil Eezha Desiya Thalaivar’ (how could I call him Thambi?) Velupillai, if you’re listening, here’s what I learned from reading GQ in the gym:

  1. Stocky guys should not wear horizontal stripes. And what’s with the camo tiger stripes? That was never in.
  2. Avoid mixing different kinds of stripes. For example, don’t have a sunburst coming out of your head while wearing a hat and shirt with the aforementioned camo tiger stripes.
  3. While hipster, ironic, trucker caps were in a few seasons ago, they’re not any more. And a thundercats type logo cap is only appropriate for a press conference if you’re Ashton Kutcher.
  4. If you have to have a big grimacing cat on your flag, don’t stand in such a way as to make it seem like the cat is taking a big bite out of your arm. It’s distracting, although not as distracting as the camo tiger stripes or the sunburst coming out of your head.
  5. Belts belong close to your waist level, not up above your navel. And a wide belt like that, worn so high? It makes you look fat. Also, try to match your belt with your shoes.
  6. Don’t wear a pistol under your armpit. It makes it harder to draw, and leaves the butt smelling … like armpit.
  7. Cyanide necklaces are out this season.
  8. Don’t shoot the messenger. Or blow him to smithereens.

More images of the man on the Tiger webpage.

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Don’t you wanna be a blogger too?

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Friends, mutineers, countrymen, lend me your ears. There is something that has been bothering all of us here at our North Dakota headquarters for quite some time now. We talk about it often in hushed tones. It is the extreme dearth of fresh new desi bloggers out there. We are ever vigilant and constantly searching for freakishly interesting and smart bloggers to be pulled into the Mutiny and to blog tirelessly for you. We can’t keep doing this forever on our own, especially since many of us are going through transitions in our busy lives. To be perfectly honest, I think that when the time comes we will suddenly and viciously pull the plug on SM. It will be just after the moment we feel that we’ve got no blog left to give and nobody else is capable of picking up the keyboard to mutiny forward. If you like spending time on this website then don’t say we didn’t warn you. I sometimes wonder, if we never existed would more of you be blogging now? Must we burn Rome to save Rome?

So what am I asking? Some of you need to start blogging and do so with a purpose. Almost all of the guests we’ve had were bloggers even before SM was created. Where’s the new blood? We aren’t looking for suggestions like, “Hey what about so-and-so? Why don’t you ask them to guest.” Please don’t use the comments following this post for that. We wouldn’t be worth the ink on our blog unless we were also good scouts. We scout bloggers, sometimes for months, before inviting them to guest for you. Most often we find them by the content of their blogs, especially if they consistently leave interesting comments on SM or expounding on something they read here first. We are scouting several of you right now as a matter of fact.

As you may have noticed SM is very secretive (as all good mutinies must be to survive infancy), but for the first time ever I am revealing the basic requirements we look for in new bloggers (besides being desi). No surprise here:

1) Must be North American or have lived in North America for a significant amount of time.

2) Has a fabulous voice (voice = great writing + interesting perspective) and can cover a wide variety of topics (not just a small range of topics that they know really well). With a little research and a little snark they should be at ease writing about the policies of the International Monetary Fund or Diwali Barbie in under 90 minutes.

3) Have experience with blogging or internet publishing. We are too busy to teach people how to publish something on the web and how to use basic html tags. If you’ve run your own blog for a while then all this should be easy. Thus, if you aren’t already a blogger then you probably won’t be a good fit until you become one, even if you just won the Booker (just kidding Kiran…call me).

4) Be a fearless and passionate writer, not someone who worries how they “sound.”

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For Shame.

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May her memory be eternal, may her murderer rot in hell. From the news tab (Thanks, Maurice):

THE plight of India’s untouchables was highlighted again yesterday after a 15-year-old Dalit rape victim was burned alive for refusing to drop charges against her alleged upper-caste attacker.
Asha Katiya reportedly told police before she died of her burns at a hospital in Pipariya, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, that the man had threatened to kill her if she did not change her statement in court.

Raped in July, Asha was a month away from going to court. She was brave enough to seek justice, he was vile enough to react like this:

“I will burn you, set your house afire and cut your father into pieces,” Asha’s mother, Shashibai, quoted the 22-year-old man as warning them when she and her daughter were working in the fields near their home the day before the blaze.

Such determination to punish his accuser:

Newspapers reported that late on the day of the blaze, the man rode past Asha’s home on a horse and that night “doused the victim with kerosene from an opening in the roof of a room where she was sleeping and threw a burning matchstick”.

Asha’s family couldn’t save her; there was no easy way to speed her to a hospital.

“The family members alleged that though there are many vehicles in the upper-caste dominated village, no one came to their rescue and they had to call one from Sandia, 8km away,” one local newspaper reported.

The article used all the right language, i.e. “alleged” or “claimed”, but I can’t help but think that if you do something so evil to silence your victim, there’s no need for doubt.

Police said the man named by Asha as her attacker had been arrested.

I hope he doesn’t get away with this. Continue reading →

Fashion victims, unite!

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Ennis and I swapped a few e-mails the other day, in which, in-between soliciting my opinions on Begum Nawazish Ali and expressing a fear of pigeon-holing me, he offered up some ideas of stuff to talk about—politics, the whole “war on terror”, fashion, South Asian politics, that sort of thing.

Naturally, having all the depth of a particularly shallow puddle, IÂ’ve opted to go with fashion.

Fashion, or what passes for it in Pakistan, really pisses me off. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I don’t somehow find myself at least marginally involved with it, but in the years since I’ve been back, it’s taken on this quasi-mystical status as an “industry”, with a mythical “council” comprising…well, I’m not quite sure who’s on the council at present, but I’m going to go with “senior”, “established”, and/or “reputed” designers, since those are generally the terms that seem to be kosher.

Now, at the risk of back-tracking, let me just mention for the record that I know most of the designer community in Pakistan. It’s all a bit of the little pink mafia, with most designers either being gay men or straight women (I’m sorry, they’re not always gay, some of them are “bisexual”, or “bi-curious” snort; I’ve yet to meet a larger group of individuals who have managed to make what they describe as a “phase” last well over a decade or two). And then the photographers, stylists, event managers and “choreographers” all tend to fall into the same gay man/straight woman alliance, so when you combine the somewhat incestuous socialising with a severely limited pool, and then further refine it into an industry dominated by fags and their hags, it’s not hard to meet them all—and be declared their new best friend—within a matter of hours. And while I’ll admit that there’s a certain amount of glitz to the whole thing, to socialising with the crowd that everyone knows (of) and being dragged from one party to another, the realisation that it’s tinsel and not actual stardust comes rather rapidly.

I know, what a shocker, right? Fashion, shallow and superficial? Never! Continue reading →

Aishah, You’re Fired.

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The debate over multi-culturalism is back in the news ‘cross the pond, in the land of the pickled: Niqab.jpg

An Indian origin Muslim teaching assistant in west Yorkshire, suspended earlier for refusing to remove her veil during school hours, has now been dismissed from the job.[link]
Aishah Azmi, 24, lost a discrimination and harassment case at an employment tribunal last month, and saw support collapse among parents at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, over what was seen as an uncompromising stand.[link]

That “lost the support of parents”-angle is extra interesting, considering

The school where Azmi was teaching had 530 students, aged seven to 11, and 92 percent were Muslim, mainly from India and Pakistan.[link]

A bit of backstory:

Mrs Azmi, who was awarded £1,000 by the tribunal in Leeds because of mishandled disciplinary processes, was dismissed yesterday after a hearing at the school. She started work a year ago but was suspended in the spring when she refused a male teacher’s request that she remove the veil when helping children in her role as a bilingual support assistant.[link]

This latest controversy comes on the heels of a column written by Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, which provoked international debate about veiling and identity:

Straw wrote in a newspaper column last month that he asks women who visit his district office wearing veils that cover almost their entire face to remove the garment when they meet with him…
He said the piece he published in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph newspaper had been thoughtful and respectful, and that he had never challenged women’s right to wear a veil.
He emphasized that he only requested — and never demanded — that women remove the veils in his office and said he did not support banning the coverings.
He said those living in Britain should have a stronger sense of shared identity based on the country’s democratic values.[link]

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