We Have Come a Long Way

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Today South Asian Americans Leading Together is launching a year long narrative campaign ‘America4All.’ The campaign will be collecting and sharing stories from the South Asian community on reflections of the past ten years since September 11th. Cross posted below is my piece launching the campaign on the SAALT Spot blog. Please follow the blog to get the latest from the ‘America4All’ series.

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I used to tell this story. It was 2001 and I was living in D.C., 22 yrs old and miles away from my family in Los Angeles. It was just months after September 11th and as a Muslim South Asian woman, though I knew there would be repercussion for looking like the enemy, I was most worried about my family.

Sure enough, on a phone call with my mother she shared a story of how Homeland Security came to our house looking for my male cousin. My family had stopped going to the mosque, wore patriotic flag pins and got followed in unmarked vehicles. My mother said “it doesn’t matter that I’ve lived here for 30 years or that I have my citizenship. I will always be a second class citizen.”

Thus marked my oft told founding story of why I became a South Asian American activist.

Ten years since September 11th, 2001, I wonder, how much has really changed?

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This is the story I tell when people ask me about South Asian American Voting Youth, an organization I founded in 2003 to organize young South Asian people around the country. I was young, naïve and invincible. I truly believed in the power of electoral politics and civic engagement and, most importantly, I believed we could swing political power in our favor when we vote. If we did that – the racial profiling, hate crimes and marginalization of our community would all just stop.

The organization has since dissolved and the state of the South Asian American community has evolved. For me, it has now gone beyond simply registering South Asian Americans to vote into a world of identity politics and includes documenting our narratives and building community at both the pop and politics level. Continue reading →

Headless Horseman Races to Top

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For #MusicMonday today I bring to you the Headless Horseman, an “adventure girl pop duo” coming at you from Brooklyn, New York. Though the band has only been around for the past six months, they have already been making quite the splash. Headless Horseman will be part of the Brownout with MTV Desi this Friday, sharing the stage with Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers and a bunch of other bands we’ve covered here on our site. If you are in NYC, I totally suggest you check it out.

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The Headless Horseman duo consists of Conner O’Neill and Fareed Sajan, two guys with the same Halloween birthday who got together to put out some falsetto laced ethereal music. The vocals remind me of Mayer Hawthorne while the sound has a Beach House flavored clanginess. Take a listen:

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Exclusive to Sepia Mutiny readers, you can download for FREE the track SH8KR RIGHT HERE 04 SH8KR.mp3 . I also asked Fareed Sajan a few question about his music, his life, his sound. Here is what he had to say.

Taz: How do you feel about your Brownout show this Friday with MTV Desi and sharing the stage with dynamite Desis like Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, PO PO and Sunny Ali and the Kid?

Fareed: Really glad to have MTV Desi on board, of course like any ‘alternative’ listening teenager I paid attention to MTV in 90’s. Cool to partner up with them to do something different, and something that feels culturally relevant, at least for me. The bands featured are certainly relevant. Growing up going to the mosque, and mosque related social events, I used to fantasize what it would be like to perform at any social function for my fellow brown people. Like instead of Dandiya and a band playing Dandiya music, I’d imagine performing “Untitled 8” by Sigur Ros off the ( ) album, and I would wonder how people would react to something so ethereal and blissful and alien. Maybe this is the closest I will get?

T: What did you do to get Heems of Das Racist to take you under his wings and manage you?

F: Haha, I sent him an email with my music? Maybe I planted the idea a few times in his brain when we were both inebriated… But we went to College together, so it was sort of a no brainer. Continue reading →

A cautionary tail

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Best opening to a New York Times article in recent memory:

HILLSBORO, Ore. — Like many these days, Shiva sits around too much, eating rich, fatty foods and sipping sugary drinks. He has the pot belly to prove it, one that nearly touches the floor — when he’s on all fours, that is. [Link]

They should hold an essay or short story contest for NYTimes readers that continues this story. Or, our readers can in the comments.

Continue reading →

That Shameless Yoni Nonsense

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It’s that time of the year again, and this year the delightful Micropixie has released a charming promo clip. I’ve included the translation below for those that may need a little bit of help.

“Mooni! Hey Mooni! Gadherini! Do you know I’m going to hit you? I’m going to beat you up, dirty girl! Every time I’m calling you and you’re not answering the phone!

And what is this “micro-bicro-bixie-dixie”?! You went San Francisco, you went to cut off my nose in San Francisco?! Don’t you know in San Francisco they have all those gadherini lesbian girls? What is all this lesbian stuff you’re doing, this Yoni Ki Baat “yon-ki-baat”, what is all that? Shameless girl, don’t you have any shame? [ASIDE TO HER HUSBAND: Hey Kaka, you see that girl she’s going to cut off my nose did you hear this girl? She’s opening (her legs)…]. Tell me, you’re not standing on stage with all your clothes taken off are you? Hai, hai! Who on earth will marry you? Who’s going to wed you?! How can you talk this nonsense?! This vageena, vageena-talking about your yoni ki baat gadherini? Hei?! You’re going to stop all this micro-bicro-pixie type stuff! Who will want to marry you? Which boy will marry you? Don’t you have any shame talking about all this dirty, disgusting stuff? As if one could ever talk about these things! Disgusting girl! When we were little we never spoke about this thing. What is this vageena talking-talking all the time? As if a vageena can even say anything, you brainless girl! As if, when you go and piss, you can talk with it! Don’t do all these things! Don’t you cut off my nose! Do you hear me?! Or I’ll give you one big whack. And make sure you phone your aunty soon… shameless girl!” [youtube]

The show was started by the South Asian Sisters here in San Francisco in an effort to bring a South Asian version of the Vagina Monologues to the scene. In it’s seventh season, Yoni Ki Baat has been replicated in cities all across the nation. I had the chance to check out the show in Los Angeles, but am looking forward to the show in San Francisco on March 5th and 6th. If you are in the area, I highly suggest you check out the show – but buy your tickets now, the show sells out every year.

Are any of you planning on being at the show? If so, maybe we can plan a Sepia Mutiny San Francisco meetup before the show…? Do let me know in the comments! Continue reading →

World Cup Cricket: Desh Edition

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Some of you might remember Sepia Mutiny’s coverage of the only Cricket World Cup to occur during this blog’s existence (2007 in the West Indies). Here we are four years later (can you believe it!?) and this time the World Cup is being played in Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka.

Before we go any further, let’s have a cool video explaining the rules of this exotic and fascinating game:

What? You don’t speak German? Oh. Well unfortunately, I can’t find a nice, concise video presentation in English of how cricket is played. Any suggestions?

If you’re the texty sort, here are the laws of cricket, with a few slightly helpful pictures. If you’d like to translate those to video, I actually suggest watching Lagaan. I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. You can skip all the parts about drought, taxes, Radha, Krishna, betrayal, rhyming “kiss” with “bliss,” and skip straight to the actual match. Why? Because if I’m not mistaken, the match in Lagaan has a demonstration of every single way you can get out or score a run in cricket.

If you’re in the US, your viewing options are fairly limited, not least because the matches start at either 11 pm or 4 am eastern time. If you’re a DirecTV subscriber, you can buy the World Cup bundle for $149. You can also pay for an online streaming subscription through willow.tv for $129. Willow offers replays and highlights of previously played matches. The tournament is also available through Dish network, though I’m not sure for how much. The World Cup final will be played in Mumbai on April 2.

Continue reading →

Is Mandvi the new Cosby?

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As a Desi child of the 80s, television in our household growing up included news with Peter Jennings, PBS shows and The Cosby Show. Think about it – as an immigrant Bangladeshi family during the First Wave (post-1965), my parents (and their community) were drawn to shows like NOVA and Jacques Cousteau to teach them about the sciences. They counted on Peter Jennings to get the news. It was their connection to assimilating and learning about their place in the world.

And The Cosby Show, well the Cosby family showed us how to be the proper brown American. It was a halal show with none of that kissing-shmissing thing that you’d see on the other television shows, except of course what happened between Cliff and Claire, and in our house my parents would have the remote in hand to change the channel as soon as kissing came on the screen. Seriously. This was how I learned to be an American – affection-less and model minority-ed (kidding, kind of).

Maybe, as Katie Couric suggested, all the Muslim community needs is a sitcom showing the quintessential model minority Muslim family. Just like The Cosby Show. Maybe the The Qu’osby Show. Aasif Mandvi takes a stab at creating a pilot episode and it’s blowing up the air waves on The Daily Show.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Allah in the Family
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogThe Daily Show on Facebook

Is that all we need, Katie? A television show to make racist people think that Muslims are less scary? There are two ways to look at this. First, despite all the “post racial narrative” that The Cosby Show put out there, at the end of the day we now have Tyler Perry shows on the CW with minstrel level scripts and C-level comedy. And, oh yeah, racism against Black people still exists 30 years after The Cosby Show first started. Continue reading →

The age at when you learn what’s what

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Late last week I received a tip (on our Sepia Mutiny tipline) about an upcoming play in Seattle,Washington. The play, MOTHER IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE, by Taniya Hossain, is being performed by the Repertory Actors Theater and starts this weekend. The tipster Nitya is one of the actors and sent me the full press release with a detailed description: Mother in Another Language – Press Release.pdf (24 KB). Seattle area Mutineers, go check it out, and let us know how it is:

Tickets: Available online at http://www.acttheatre.org/Shows/OnStage/MotherInAnotherLanguage.

Adults: $15 Students: $12 Children 17 & Under: $12 Seniors 65+: $12

Groups (10 or more): $12 per person (available through the Ticket Office only, (206) 292-7676)

But merely informing you about this play is not what this post is actually about at all. Sorry Nitya! You see, on the first pass through her email tip I stopped reading as soon as I saw her name. The name was familiar to me. Nitya and I went to elementary school together in San Jose, CA in the 80s. I didn’t know her too well back then. In fact, I can’t remember a single interaction or conversation I had with her, although surely there were several. But I did remember her name and the fact that she had long braids and an even longer last name. When I mentioned the tip to them, my parents remembered her too! As memory serves, myself, Nitya, and another kid Sanjay (who is now someone I regularly meet up with in Los Angeles) were the only three brown kids in our school year. In the 80s all brown kids knew each other, even when they didn’t know each other. You know? When I replied to her tip and asked her which elementary school she went to, Nitya was as surprised as I was. What a small world! She says she can somewhat remember my 10-year-old face but not well enough to recognize me today. Even though Nitya and I did not really know each other well in elementary school, she indirectly played a part in a defining moment of my life (about which she has no idea…until now). It is a memory so strong I can replay it perfectly in my head 25 years later.

Fifth grade, late one afternoon (I recall that it was late spring and very sunny outside). Our teacher, a grumbly bear of a man, who was a Korean War veteran and had definitely killed enemy, declared that he was pleased with the great progress our class had made that week and decided we could have the 40 minutes until afternoon recess off. This was a surprise because he had a reputation of being the toughest teacher at the school. I once memorized the Gettysburg address in three hours on a Tuesday night because he said it was due Wednesday. He meant the following Wednesday. On this afternoon Mr. P decided we could do whatever we wanted for fun as long as it was inside the class. Some of the girls in the class, the pretty ones who could get away with anything, had an idea. Boys that age are too slow to come up with anything good when put on the spot. The idea these clever girls came up with was to play the Newlywed Game: Elementary School Edition. Amazingly, surprisingly, I was picked to be one of the 3 “husbands.” My wife was a girl named Juliet.

Keep in mind that I was not a popular kid. I was small and nerdy but well liked. You know that sound and feeling you experience when you get a rental car and turn on the radio and it is on full blast on some rap station that the previous renter was listening to and you awkwardly fumble to turn it down before the bass blows out the windows? That’s what my heart sounded like when I was picked to play this game.

Continue reading →

Dash the Curry

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indian-spice.jpgHitting the interwebs and twitterverse today is a story out of Wales that makes you scream, ‘that’s racist!” It’s the story of a teacher who thinks she can aerosol the Brown away.

Elizabeth Davies, 48, was accused of “humiliating” children aged between three and six by using the aerosol spray on them on nursery class. Mrs Davies, a nursery schoolteacher for 20 years, taught at a inner-city school where more than half of her pupils were Bangladeshi.

The hearing was told she accused Bangladeshi children of smelling of onions or curry – and would say “there is a waft coming in from paradise” before blasting the air freshener. [telegraph]

I’m show you wafts of paradise, Mrs. Davies. You should know better than to be OCD about aromas if you are going to be a school teacher of preschoolers!

Mrs Davies is also accused of spraying other children who broke wind, washing their hands with pine disinfectant and making them stand on newspaper for accidentally wetting themselves.

Mother-of-two Mrs Islam said the spray was “usually” for children who had English has an additional language. [telegraph]

This case is just abhorrent. It’s difficult enough going to school as a pre-schooler. Do you remember it? Being four years old, having to say good-bye to your mother at the classroom door, walking into a room full of strange kids, and having to make new friends? Remember navigating which language to use or why your skin was browner than the others? Really though, it was simply about wanting to belong. What Mrs. Davies was simply uncalled for, and what she did could only be called racist.

Thank goodness she was fired after a parent complained. May her next job be a waitress at an Indian restaurant. Continue reading →

Do that Guju you do!

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gujcluster.jpgThe 2009 paper Reconstructing Indian population history was a watershed in understanding the genomics of South Asians. Before this point the studies had been with unrepresentative samples, fewer markers, or, South Asians were only a sidelight. This paper put the focus on South Asians to elucidate the group’s population history (it still undersampled eastern South Asians, though this seems part of the plan because of their focus on two, not three, ancestral Indian components). If you want to know more about the paper, here is the ungated version. But in this post I want focus on an issue which you can find only in the supplements to the paper.

The HapMap project, which surveys genetic variation in world populations, has a set of Gujaratis, from Houston, Texas. This is currently the primary population of Indian origin you have to work with in the public data sets. There are other South Asian populations in the public domain, but their number of markers is far lower. So the Gujarati sample is very useful right now. But one thing that immediately jumps out at you is that there are in fact two Gujarati clusters. In the PCA plot I’ve extracted from the supplements you see the two largest components of genetic variation. PC 1, the x axis, separates whites from South Asians, and PC 2, separates one group of Gujaratis from everyone else. What’s going on here?

Continue reading →