It’s On !!!

Posted on by

bagan-1911.jpg On July 29, 1911, the gentlemen to the right lifted their first IFA Shield as Mohun Bagan defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment by two goals to one. Founded in 1889, Calcutta’s Mohun Bagan are Asia’s oldest football team, and to this day a major force in Indian soccer, along with perennial in-town rivals East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting. Calcutta remains a hotbed of Indian football, with the most famous clubs and the most ardent and knowledgeable international football fans.

A memory: Midway through the US-hosted 1994 World Cup, I learned that my grandmother was ill and unlikely to survive. I flew to Calcutta from Boston, where I had attended two 1st-round matches and one 2nd-round (the Nigeria-Italy of tragic memory). For two weeks, my father and I held death watch in the family house. Our sole distraction was the World Cup matches that beamed in to the ill-tempered black-and-white television at ungodly hours of the night. In this nether state we saw the heroics of Romania’s Georghe Hagi, Sweden’s unlikely run, and Branco’s 30-meter free-kick that broke the Brazil-Netherlands tie. At 8 a.m. the armada of doctors would appear. They too had risen at 3 to watch the games. We’d analyze Colombia’s strange collapse or Brazil’s atypically dull style as they hovered over my grandmother, our own drama sadly easier to predict than, say, the fact that Brazil would beat Italy in the final on, of all things, a missed Roberto Baggio penalty.

Costaricafan.jpgMinutes away as I write this, Germany and Costa Rica will kick off this year’s tournament. In Calcutta, LCD and plasma television sales have doubled, says the Telegraph. The paper provides its readers with an invaluable feature on World Cup viewing tips which will be useful to sepia aficionados worldwide.

It covers dress:

The price may be a little steep at Rs 2,700, but Adidas is seeing team jerseys of Argentina, Germany, Spain and France fly off the shelves in city stores. Ditto for Nike jerseys of Brazil, Portugal and Holland, priced at Rs 2,495.

Posture:

The TV set should be at eye level, at a distance of at least five to six feet. Sit upright in straight-backed cushioned chair with head and lumbar support….

That Calcutta is becoming more conscious of the cramp and the cringe is clear from the queries reaching gyms about what to do during World Cup viewing.

“An erect posture should be maintained while sitting for such long hours because if the posture is faulty back trouble is inevitable. Reclining chairs are not advised,” says Divya Himatsingka of Gold’s Gym.

Exercise: Continue reading →

Where Is The Love? Ziauddin Sardar v. Rushdie

Posted on by

Ziauddin Sardar, a prolific left-leaning political writer based in London, has been going after Salman Rushdie lately, calling him a “brown sahib” — the postcolonial equivalent of an Uncle Tom. I find Sardar’s attacks upsetting (I side with Rushdie here, as I’ll explain below), but more generally I am so over this habit of brown intellectuals tearing each other to shreds on the question of their loyalty to the “cause.” Just because someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean they are a traitor or a coconut, needing to be “flushed,” as a certain desi blogger is fond of saying. There’s something pathological and deeply self-destructive about the way minority writers do this to each other, and I wish it would stop.

The current feud is a bit of a convoluted story, starting most recently with Sardar’s review of a book on Islam/terrorism by Anthony McRoy called From Rushdie to 7/7: The Radicalisation of Islam in Britain. It looks like your basic, “Watch out, Muslims in Britain have become very radicalized!” type book.

In the review, Sardar says some harsh things about McRoy’s book that might or might not be accurate, as he tends to argue more from insinuation than evidence. I don’t know, as I haven’t read McRoy’s book. But he says this about Rushdie:

For example, he suggests I labelled Rushdie as a “brown sahib” because I feared that the new generation of Muslims would become “contaminated” with “infidel ideas”. This is laughably absurd. The “brown sahib” is a recognisable sociological type on the Subcontinent: an uncritical Anglophile. My point was that Muslims should not be surprised by what Rushdie had done. A brown sahib, somewhere, sometime, was bound to do just that. (link)

Now when this story broke last week, I searched the papers looking for what Sardar had originally said about Rushdie, and why. I couldn’t find it — it could either have been Rushdie’s approving noises on the War in Iraq, or the act of writing The Satanic Verses itself. (But do you ever need substantial justification to call someone a race traitor? No — you just do it, and you expect it will stick.) Continue reading →

African-Indians

Posted on by

We are all at least somewhat familiar with the phenomenon of Indian migration to Africa, mostly in the form of persons of Gujarati origin working their way to East Africa, but little has been publicized about the opposite, about Africans migrating to India. I wasn’t even sure something like this existed until I read an advertisement for a lecture, “African Elites in India,” which is being given this Saturday, June 10 at 2 PM at the Smithsonian’s Meyer Auditorium by Kenneth Robbins and John McLeod, editors of the book African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat. The book focuses on the story of sub-Saharan Africans who migrated, beginning around the 15th century, to India and subsequently gained positions of power and status on the sub-Continent. Who knew hyphenated identities went so far back?

“Known as Habshis, the Arabic word for Abyssinian or Ethiopian,” the duo’s book tells the story of a “little-known group of elite sub-Saharan African-Indian merchants, soldiers, nobles, statesmen, and rulers who attained prominence in India in the fifteenth to twentieth centuries but also on the Africans who served at the courts of Indian monarchs as servants, slaves, eunuchs, or concubines.”

It turns out the Africa-to-India phenomenon is not all that limited. In 1996, the Anthropological Survey of India reported sizeable communities of African ancestry in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Gujarat, and the metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai (link). For those of you who count yourself among the South Asian history geek-squad like I do, this lecture sounds fascinating. If you need more information, or to RSVP, you can call 202 633 0444. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Perhaps this answers why Anna, and so many other desis are often mistaken for Ethiopian. Incidentally, the Freer Gallery is also screening a few Sri Lankan films this month. The remaining two are Flying with One Wing (2002), which is showing tomorrow, and Guerilla Marketing (2005) which is screening on Sunday.

Continue reading →

The Dirt on Brother Paul

Posted on by

paulplane.jpegOur invaluable H-town correspondent technophobicgeek alerts us on the News tab to a Houston Press exposé on K. A. Paul, my favorite Indian religious huckster of the moment. Brother Paul, né Anand Kilari or by some accounts Kilari Anand, was blogged here not too long ago, and I see a lot of you have checked out the article, so I’ll limit the priceless quotes to this one, on how Paul’s church conned a pro-Israel group (“Friends of the Israel Defense Forces,” yikes) out of $850,000 which it used to repair the leader’s decrepit 747, Global Peace One:

In the e-mail to FIDF Chairman Larry Hochberg, Dodson [Paul’s factotum] writes: “Israel’s arrogance toward us stands in stark contrast to the 51 presidents who have attended our rallies or have come to meet Dr. Paul in other venues. A perfect example is Israel’s neighbor Ethiopia, whose 80 year old president, His Excellency President Girma, broke all rules of protocol to come to personally meet us at the airport with a red carpet welcome.” (According to one passenger on that voyage, it was Kilari who brought his own red carpet.)

Without the multi-entry visa, Dodson wrote, the Jewish group had three options: Get off in Poland and find its own way to Israel, fly with Kilari to Syria before going to Israel, or cancel outright. The group called the bluff and chose Door No. 3. Because the $850,000 was a “donation,” Global Peace Initiative refused to refund the money, which was sunk into the plane. Less than a month after Kilari stood up the Jewish group, the plane took a last-minute jaunt to Canada, where it confused officials at the tiny Thunder Bay, Ontario, airport, which hadn’t serviced a 747 in years. It sat there for about a week, at which point the Federal Aviation Administration deemed it unairworthy. Yet for some reason, the administration permitted Kilari to fly the plane to Tijuana, where it is now collecting dust in a vacant lot.

Classic stuff. OK, one more, from the Press‘s attempt to interview the holy man:

This is why he shouts, “You’re asking stupid questions!” and adds, “You write that story, boy, you write that story and you wait for the response…Benny Hinns and TD Jakes are becoming millionaires and billionaires, and you’re now talking to a village preacher, broke completely, can’t even pay his own salaries anymore, and doesn’t own a $100 property anywhere in the world–“

At which point we had to ask Kilari, “You don’t own a $100 property anywhere in the world, but you own a freaking 747?”

“No, I don’t own freaking 747, you idiot. I don’t own!”

“Who owns it?”

“It is the organization owns it, you chicken!”

Continue reading →

Another Hijra-Visit Candidate

Posted on by

temple-nytarticle.jpg Ah, mysterious India, ever in flux yet steadfastly the same! While greenbacks, terabytes and bushy-tailed MBAs woosh back and forth between Bangalore and Wall Street, the eructations of Tom Friedman speeding them across the Flat World like some kind of ill pneumatics, the doings of the superstitious masses still supply orientalists correspondents with fare for cutesiness and condescension. As Henry Chu sat barricaded at the crib contemplating his balls, Jonathan Allen of the New York Times was bravely setting off into Delhi’s diesel dawn to document the queer customs of the Hindoo:

the creators of the new Swaminarayan Akshardham temple complex that towers over east Delhi thought to include several features not commonly found in Hindu architecture, including an indoor boat ride, a large-format movie screen, a musical fountain and a hall of animatronic characters that may well remind us that, really, it’s a small world after all. There are even pink (sandstone) elephants on parade.

After noting that the temple is inspired by Disneyland (“We visited five or six times. As tourists, I mean,” the temple’s PR officer clarifies), Allen goes on to, let’s see, analogize Indian temple-goers to people waiting for the toilet, and Indians in general to dogs, amongst whom he is like an unflappable elephant…

Wait, you think I’m making this up?

Here are the toilets:

The appeal of this might at first be lost on visitors to India, who are usually coming to see the country’s abundance of genuinely ancient buildings [say wha…? – ed.]; Indians, who are surrounded by them, will generally grab any opportunity to escape from all that decrepitude for the afternoon, ideally to a place with musical fountains. The crowds here aren’t pilgrims; they’re day trippers. (…)

And so, although Western tourists are welcome, they can expect to receive the occasional look of benign giggly bemusement, the same kind a gentleman receives upon joining the line for the ladies’ toilets. (…)

The dogs:

Sometimes the allegorical power of elephants is overestimated, as in the tableau which, according to the caption, claims that: “One problem elephants never face is the generation gap.”

The one that most strikes me is the creature shown “equipoised and nonchalant amidst barking dogs”; for the tourist sometimes overwhelmed by the colorful chaos of India, this could well be the most relevant elephant.(…)

Portrait of the author as a patient pachyderm:

People cut in line and tread on my toes, which strike me as things Bhagwan Swaminarayan would not do. It seems the combined efforts of the Akshardham’s robots, elephants and talking boats in relaying BAPS’s essential message of humble compassion may still not have been enough.

As I leave the temple, a horde of rickshaw drivers surrounds me, loudly and physically hustling for my business. I again try to adopt the posture of the unflappable elephant.

But unlike Henry and the hijras, this elephant has balls. Jonathan gets all New York on motherfuckers:

Then it occurs to me that that elephant must get ripped off all the time, and I argue furiously with the drivers until one of them relents and agrees to take me back to central Delhi on the meter.

Balls and all! Continue reading →

Computers Without Words

Posted on by

I have numerous jobs in addition to my writing, one of which involves working with new technology. I know it’s a stereotype to say that Indians are good with computers, but I welcome it in my case, mostly because it’s hilariously untrue. I’ve avoided technology as much as possible–I didn’t have an email address until 1996, and it’s still a crapshoot if my cell phone is working–despite coming from a family of technophiles. What they actually do to these computers, I have no idea, but despite being voted Most Likely to Spill Coke On the Keyboard Again, I find myself reasonably skilled at this new IT-oriented gig. Nature or nurture? Or dumb luck? Discuss.

But what about those who are not just computer illiterate, but actually unable to read or write? Microsoft has a plan: make computers that don’t depend on words. This March 2006 USA Today article talks about how a new breed of computers can help often-illiterate domestic servants:

Working with a local advocacy group, Microsoft has developed a prototype of a system that would connect illiterate domestic workers in India with families seeking their services. The system uses pictures, video and voice commands to tell women what jobs are available, how much the jobs pay and where they are.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? For one thing:

they [the domestic workers] had trouble seeing why a computerized system for finding work was better than traditional word-of-mouth

Additionally, the computer’s images and pictures had to bridge language and cultural gaps, such as this one:

the women associated neighborhoods with landmarks rather than addresses, so an interactive map and verbal directions had to be tweaked to represent that.

Finally–the big hurdle: implementation. This CNET article discusses the difficulties poorer areas of India have getting computer literate. Apart from the most obvious issue of languages, there is problem of power:

To save power, the PCs run on car and truck batteries. Unfortunately, the batteries regularly need recharging and the public electrical power system can’t always handle the demand.

and crime:

Three weeks ago, the village transformer blew because too many people tapped into it illegally, a chronic problem here. The government refused to rebuild the transformer until the villagers promised to punish anyone who stole power.

and bad freakin’ luck:

The day after it was rebuilt, the transformer blew again.

Continue reading →

India Fact of the Day

Posted on by

From the always interesting Marginal Revolution –

One third of the value of Indian fruits and vegetables ends up destroyed or spoiled on the way to market, mostly because of bad infrastructure, most of all bad roads.

When we think about / talk about economic growth, it’s easy to get preoccupied with high geek glamor fields like software and biotech. When push comes to shove however, trucking, Wal-Mart, and logistics have a far greater bearing on quality of life for the masses.

A commentor @ Marginal Revolution notes that the “spoilage” rate in the US is 1/10 of this – or nearly 30% more food available en toto for a given amount of production. As Amartya Sen famously pointed out, modern hunger ain’t about growing more food, it’s about getting it to the market. Continue reading →

Do Hijras Dream of Saffron Balls…?

Posted on by

…or just of wads of rupees?

This one is so easy I’m (almost) embarrassed to blog it, but our duty of chronicling the ongoing encounter of Western and South Asian cultures requires that we note this first-person piece by the Los Angeles Times‘ new India correspondent, Henry Chu:

On a recent afternoon, as I stood surrounded by a dozen workers hammering, sawing and drilling in my new apartment, they materialized out of nowhere, two sari-clad women with suspiciously mannish features.

The taller one had a broad face, a big nose and a purple sari — a color I like, but not on her. The other was thin, almost bird like, in every way: face, body, voice. Something about their manner, or their rather harsh, heavily made-up look, put me on guard.

I’ll let you read the piece, noting only that although it certainly possesses a sensationalist edge, the author does note the historical background of hijras and recent status victories, such as the third-sex option on government forms. (How many other countries offer that, I wonder?)

In any case, Henry was shaken up by the shake-down:

The short one continued to appeal to me directly, gazing at me meaningfully and sprinkling her Hindi with unmistakable English phrases like “a thousand rupees” (about $22). At one point she knelt down and touched my feet in a sign of obeisance or importunity. Then, growing frustrated by my stinginess, she drew up the hem of her sari, perhaps to warn me that she was ready to flash her mutilated parts, a common tactic among eunuchs to hurry horrified partygoers into forking over cash to get their uninvited guests to leave.

I won’t spoil the ending. But I will issue a politically-correct tsk, tsk, at Chu’s sign-off line:

When I see them through the peephole, I don’t answer the door.

Instead, I tiptoe back and huddle quiet as a mouse, praying that they’ll go away, while an annoying voice in my head snickers, “Who’s the eunuch now?” I don’t answer that either.

Stay long enough in India, brother Henry, and you’ll surely grow a saffron set of your own!

Flame away, people. It’s a rainy day where I am right now, and we could use the heat. Continue reading →

Zakaria: "First, be scared, be very scared"

Posted on by

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria examines what many Americans have recently been wondering: “How Long Will America Lead the World?”

…Americans have replaced Britons atop the world, and we are now worried that history is happening to us. History has arrived in the form of “Three Billion New Capitalists,” as Clyde Prestowitz’s recent book puts it, people from countries like China, India and the former Soviet Union, which all once scorned the global market economy but are now enthusiastic and increasingly sophisticated participants in it. They are poorer, hungrier and in some cases well trained, and will inevitably compete with Americans and America for a slice of the pie. A Goldman Sachs study concludes that by 2045, China will be the largest economy in the world, replacing the United States.

It is not just writers like Prestowitz who are sounding alarms. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, reflects on the growing competence and cost advantage of countries like China and even Mexico and says, “It’s unclear how many manufacturers will choose to keep their businesses in the United States.” Intel’s Andy Grove is more blunt. “America … [is going] down the tubes,” he says, “and the worst part is nobody knows it. They’re all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead…” [Link]

I find many parallels between this and the long denied facts surrounding global warming. I saw Gore’s fantastic powerpoint presentation/movie two weekends ago and it struck me how slow to react people can be even when they know they are on the losing side of time. Zakaria goes on to point out the same thing that I mentioned in an earlier post and that Vinod tried to push back on a bit:

The national academies’ report points out that China and India combined graduate 950,000 engineers every year, compared with 70,000 in America; that for the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S. a company could hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India; that of the 120 $1 billion-plus chemical plants being built around the world one is in the United States and 50 are in China.

There are some who see the decline of science and technology as part of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We’re losing interest in the basics–math, manufacturing, hard work, savings–and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure. “More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees,” says Immelt. “So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way…” [Link]

Continue reading →