Samrat Upadhyay and the Nepali Present Tense

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upadyay the royal ghosts.gif Readers interested in what has been happening in Nepal recently might find Samrat Upadhyay’s The Royal Ghosts a worthwhile read.

Upadhyay is a Nepali who teaches at a university in the U.S. He is, I think, the only Nepali publishing his fiction in the U.S. at present. Though his stories as a rule tend to focus more on personal issues and relationships than on poitics, in this latest book of stories he has for the first time tackled the effect the “Maobadis” (Maoists) have had on Nepali life. Even here the treatment of the ongoing civil war is a little bit oblique: these are middle-class, urban, Kathmandu stories, and the violence that ravages countryside is as far away from the metropolitan consciousnes as Delhi is from the tribal regions of Bihar (see English, August, which Siddhartha blogged about recently). Continue reading →

Indentured Brownitude in Iraq – Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Recently, I read a story about South Asian workers mistreated by military contractors in Iraq. They were lied to about where they were going, the terms of their contracts were violated, they weren’t paid, they had lousy working conditions, and their passports were withheld so they couldn’t leave. As a result, the US military has had to spend its time cracking down on conditions in its kitchens when it has larger fish to fry:The man told them they would not get any more food. “We bought you,”

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had issued new orders to private contractors in Iraq to crack down on violations of human trafficking laws involving laborers … at American bases and other sites. An inspection completed in late March uncovered evidence that it was widespread practice among firms providing services to the military to take away their workers’ passports to keep them in place… Hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers, many from South Asia, are employed by contractors at U.S. bases and elsewhere in Iraq as cooks, food servers, janitors, construction workers and in other menial jobs.

Human rights groups have reported complaints by some workers that they were tricked into coming into Iraq. After they paid fees to recruiters in their home countries for jobs said to be in the Gulf, their passports were taken and they were forced to go to Iraq, the workers said. The groups have also reported complaints of withheld pay and overtime and unsuitable working and housing conditions. [Link]

This is deja vu all over again. Almost exactly the same stories first came to light 2 years ago this month when four men from Kerala came back from Iraq after working for a subcontractor for Kellogg, Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton):

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English, August

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First published in 1988, at the dawn of the desi-lit craze, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, has been a secret touchstone for later desi authors and for readers fortunate enough to get their hands on a copy. This April, it was finally released in the U.S., by New York Review Books, in a handsome paperback edition with an introduction by Akhil Sharma. Not only has it not aged a bit, but it far outshines many recent works in its wry, thoughtful, and dare I say authentic portrayal of major aspects of Indian life.

The book is the story of Agastya Sen, a newly minted member of the Indian Administrative Service who receives his first posting, per IAS practice, in the deep boonies — in a fictional town called Madna, which is vaguely set in central India and is known for record temperatures and nothing else. Agastya, who was at loose ends to begin with, is now at even looser ends; he improvises his way through the torpor, and by the end we too have been to Madna, eaten the cook’s disgusting preparations, amused ourselves spinning outrageous tall tales to local dignitaries, shirked on all of our work obligations, and spent endless hours lying on the bed staring at the ceiling fan, watching for lizards.

Chatterjee went on to write several other books, none of them quite at this level; English, August is one of those perfect pieces that result from some fortunate blend of authorial talent, mood, and just plain serendipity. Chatterjee is an IAS officer himself, and stayed in the service rather than become a Famous Writer. Now he’s been in the odd position of coming to the U.S. for a book tour to promote a work he penned two decades back.

Last Friday Chatterjee was on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC public radio; you can listen and download here. Asked to respond to Suketu Mehta’s comment that English, August is “the ‘Indianest’ novel in English that I know of,” Chatterjee replies: “It speaks of a world that we — we Indians — are all familiar with, but at the same time it’s a world that hasn’t been reflected in fiction. India tends to be romanticized, and English, August is anything but romantic.” Continue reading →

Pramod Mahajan RIP (and India’s Cell-phone Boom)

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pramod mahajan bbc.jpgMany people have probably heard that BJP leader Pramod Mahajan passed away yesterday after being shot by his brother in a family dispute. From the obituaries I’ve been reading and from the Wikipedia page, an image of Mahajan as a very complex and interesting figure emerges — an icon both for some positive shifts in the Indian political system as well as of some of the problems that have come with it. Rather than dwell on the negative, in this post I’m going to talk a little about Mahajan’s role as the architect in the deregulation of India’s mobile phone industry in the early 2000s. I view this as something positive Mahajan did that may actually have been against the law at the time he did it.

Mahajan’s political record is somewhat mixed. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant campaign organizer, Mahajan was credited with helping the BJP rise to power in 1998, and with the consolidation of its power in state elections in 2003. But Mahajan is also blamed for the BJP’s shocking electoral loss in 2004, and indeed, he publicly accepted the blame for making strategic mistakes in that campaign.

In December, the BBC suggested that he was one of a handful of people being considered to take over the reigns of the BJP party. But the same article describes him as part of a new breed of “technocrat leaders who lack a grassroots base,” suggesting that Mahajan perhaps wasn’t quite of the stature of people like Vajpayee or Advani. Continue reading →

The structure of a classical tragedy

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I. Introduction

‘I’ve never read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist.’

— Kaavya Viswanathan, April 26, 2006 [Link]

II. Conflict

Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier, a teen novel with an Indian-American protagonist

[via Harvard Independent; thanks, Rekha]

 Opal Mehta

All day the house had smelled of spices, and now before our eyes lay the resulting combustion of all that kitchen chemistry. The feast my mother had conjured up was extravagant, and I realized how hungry I was; I wasn’t a big fan of Indian food, at least not on a daily basis, but today the sight of it was pure poetry.

Brown sugar roti and cloud-puff puris just itching to be popped. Coconut rice fluffed up over the silver pot like a sweet-smelling pillow. Samosas transparent, peas bundling just below the surface. Spinach with nymph-finger cloves of garlic that sank like butter on the tongue. A vat of cucumber raita, the two-percent yogurt thickened with sour cream (which my mom added when we had guests, though she denied it when asked; I’d seen the empty carton, not a kitten lick left). And the centerpiece: a deep serving dish of lamb curry, the pieces melting tenderly off the bone.

 … the house had smelled of spices all day, and when we sat down at the dining room table, I nearly combusted at the sight of the extravagant feast my mom had conjured up. Usually I wasn’t a big fan of Indian food, but today I was suddenly starving.

The table creaked with the weight of crisp, brown rotis and feather-light, puffy puris. A basket of my favorite kheema naan sat beside the clouds of cashew and sultana-studded coconut rice in an enormous pot. There was plump okra fried in oil and garlic till it melted like butter on the tongue, aloo curry studded with peppercorns and glistening chopped chilis, and a crock of raita, a cool, delicious mixture of yogurt and sour cream, bursting with finely chopped onions and cucumbers. The centerpiece was a deep dish of mutton curry, the meat (my mom only used halal bought from an Arab butcher in Edison) already falling off the bone.


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Losing sucks when you are the more qualified candidate

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In Ohio’s statewide primaries yesterday, Democratic attorney general candidate Subodh Chandra of Cleveland, lost to Ohio state Sen. Marc Dann. He didn’t just lose by a little, but by a lot (3-1 margin). It is enough to make me wonder why it ended up being such a lopsided contest. First, let’s go to a pre-election article to explain my surprise at the ultimate results:

Dann has been endorsed by the Ohio Democratic Party and labor unions, while Chandra has received the majority of major Ohio newspaper endorsements and is supported by a long list of elected Democrats and former officeholders.

Their match-up has not been exactly friendly. Chandra has attacked Dann’s legal skills, pointing out a reprimand Dann received from the Ohio Supreme Court for mishandling a divorce case, plus a criminal case in Warren in which one of Dann’s clients pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor no longer on the books, spent four months in jail and later sued Dann. [Link]

On election day the Cleveland Enquirer told its readers:

Subodh Chandra, a former Cleveland law director, is our recommendation for the Democratic nomination for attorney general. Chandra ran Cleveland’s legal office efficiently and aggressively, going after fraud and waste, using a management style that fostered communication and motivation. Also on his resume are stints as a federal prosecutor and as a legal ethics professor at Case Western Reserve University. [Link]

At a debate two weeks ago Chandra scored some points with the following:

The debate turned contentious after Chandra claimed that Dann would have failed the FBI background check that Chandra passed.

“I say this with regret because as a Democrat, I don’t like to say anything ill of a fellow Democrat, but we’d better have an honest conversation right now,” Chandra said. “My primary opponent could not become an entry federal-level attorney with a Supreme Court reprimand [and] with a case in which somebody went to jail for four months for a nonexistent crime…” [Link]

Here is one take on why Chandra got thumped so badly:

A political newcomer, Chandra, 38, impressed audiences with his legal acumen, rhetorical skills and the humorous and disarming manner with which he addressed questions about his Indian-American heritage.

He repeatedly criticized Dann’s legal work but ultimately suffered from a lack of name recognition outside of Cuyahoga County, where he spent most of his time campaigning. [Link]

So was it due to a lack of name recognition or due to a hard to pronounce name? I guess only Ohio voters know for sure.

See previous post: Ohio’s newest puppetmaster

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The Right Stuff

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As seen on our News Tab, NASA officially announced the crew of Expedition 14 on Tuesday. The crew, which will be the next one rotated in to live aboard the International Space Station, will consist of mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin serving as flight engineer, and Sunita “Sunny” Williams (formerly Pandya) who will also serve as a flight engineer.

Williams will join Expedition 14 in progress and serve as a flight engineer, after traveling to the station on space shuttle mission STS-116. This will be Williams’s first space flight.

Selected as an astronaut in 1992, Lopez-Alegria flew his first shuttle mission, STS-73, in 1995 and later visited the station on shuttle missions STS-92 in 2000 and STS-113 in 2002, conducting five spacewalks during the station assembly complex. He has logged more than 42 days in space, including 34 hours spacewalking. Lopez-Alegria is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and received a Master of Science degree from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Williams was selected as an astronaut in 1998. She also is a graduate of the Naval Academy and received a Master of Science degree from the Florida Institute of Technology. Williams was designated a Naval aviator in 1989 and graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School in 1993. She has logged more than 2,770 flight hours in 30 different types of aircraft. At NASA, Williams has served as a liaison in Moscow supporting Expedition 1 and has supported station robotics work.

Tyurin was selected as a cosmonaut in 1993 and was a flight engineer aboard the station for Expedition 3 in 2001. He has spent 125 days in space. Tyurin is a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute. [Link]

Attentive SM readers will remember that I have covered Williams in a prior post. She is a Navy test pilot who specialized in rotary-winged vehicles (helicopters). Additionally, she is only the second rookie (Edward “Mike” Fincke of Expedition 9 having been the first) to be assigned as an ISS crew member. This is a big deal since in the shuttle era you’d never have more than one or two rookies on a given flight. Astronauts aboard the ISS have almost every minute of every day tasked out. Experience is key to making sure that everything keeps running smoothly up there. Williams has been serving as the astronaut liaison to Moscow so she is used to working with the Russians and is probably fluent in Russian. You will also note that with the current backlog of flightless astronauts, Williams has had to wait eight years for her first shot. Lesson: Get picked up by the Corp when you are still pretty young.

Every mission patch (like the one on the right) tells a story. I haven’t completely translated this one yet (I’m working on it) but the red dot may represent Mars, probably as a reminder that they are keeping an eye on the ultimate prize.

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GWOT Update… Got Another One… In Pakistan

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Good News: Got Another One In Pakistan

Bad News: Why are so many of them in Pakistan?

A top al-Qaida leader whose links stretch from Osama bin Laden’s training camps to extremist networks in Europe has been captured in Pakistan, a U.S. law enforcement official confirms for the first time.

Pakistani officials also told The Associated Press that Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a dual Syrian-Spanish national with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, had been flown out of the country to an unspecified location.

Nasar was captured in a November sting in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta that left one person dead,

…It would not be the first time Pakistan _ a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism _ has detained al-Qaida terrorists and turned them over to the Americans.

Pakistan says it has captured more than 750 al-Qaida suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks and has handed most of them to the United States.

Now adjusting for reportage (e.g. folks captured elsewhere are less likely to get the press conference treatment than Pakistani’s seems to give), it says a lot about the state of governance in Pakistan that the Northwest Frontier is somehow a more hospitable place for these folks than… say… Afghanistan.

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Meet the asio

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A ToI editorial today bemoans the instability of the U.S. dollar and suggests creating a unified Asian currency as an alternative to the euro. Several years ago, Asiaweek suggested the same:

… it took Europe 10 years to produce the euro, building on three decades of efforts at economic integration. An Asian currency would probably have to be grounded in the yen, while China, because of the socialist foundations of its economy, might need to stay on the sidelines for some time. And the political, economic and cultural differences among Asian nations are greater than those within Western Europe. [Link]

I think the asio is a wonderful idea. Here’s how we’ll get there:

  • India and Pakistan agree to merge economies
  • Japan decides it’s willing to merge the yen with the rupee
  • China and India drop all vestiges of socialist economic intervention
  • Japan, China, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and so on get their economies into the same narrow band of inflation, debt and other key economic indicators
  • China, Korea and Japan allow an Asian Economic Zone common passport and migration without work permits
  • The asio countries choose a bland, centrally-located capital and characterless symbols for the currency which evoke no sense of history or nationalism
  • A new pan-Asian parliament and central bank are created
  • The parliament is held hostage to petty provincial issues by a nation deeply convinced of its innate cultural superiority
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Femme Fatale

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A few weeks ago, I made my merry way to The Gladstone Hotel for the launch of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s new book, Consensual Genocide (also available at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore) . I arrived early and thirsty after doing a bit of cybernet sleuthing…having only read a couple of her poems previously, the research was very necessary:leah.jpg

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was raised in Worcester , Massachusetts , the daughter of a Sri Lankan father and an Irish/ Ukrainian mother. After moving to New York for four whirlwind years of coming of age in the middle of riot grrl, queer, anarchist and student of color organizing, she moved to Toronto in 1997 in the hopes of no longer being the only Sri Lankan in the room. Her work has been published in the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous Families , With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn , the Lambda Award-nominated Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World . A frequent contributor to Colorline s and Bitch magazines, she has performed her work throughout North America, from gigs at Yale University and Oberlin College to benefits for queer youth resource centers and at antiwar protests. She teaches writing to LGBT youth at Supporting Our Youth Toronto, for which she won the City of Toronto Community Service to Youth Award in 2004, and is one of the organizers of the Asian Arts Freedom School. [Link]

Respect!

My experience within the Toronto literary scene is a sad state of affairs so I was feeling a little unsure of my footing in the creative landscape that is West Queen West (TO’s Soho, why do we have to have these NY rip off names, WHY? Another time, another post 🙂 As my frothy malt bevvie began to settle I caught Leah standing nearby, talking with friends. Her remarkable bio had me a little star struck so the best I could muster was an awkward smile/nod combo in her direction. She promptly walked over and gave me a hug as if we had been friends forever. Let us pretend, for the sake of my silly pride, that it was not simply a case of mistaken identity…hugs rule! You could say that the hug or even the sheer amount of M.I.A. playing at the launch informed my resulting opinion of it. You would not be entirely wrong. Continue reading →