Tablas against teabags

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A brand-new tea bar called Tavalon just opened by Union Square in Manhattan. It sells high-end loose leaf teas in a microscopic but slick storefront decked out like a lounge. The founders are young corporate law dropouts, a turbaned Sikh dude named Sonny Caberwal and his biz partner John-Paul Lee. Sonny is also a tabla-ista who rocked out on a Thievery Corporation album a couple of years ago. It’s the second gen version of the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream:

There’s a new wave of Indian restaurants as lifestyle businesses being started by young, desi Manhattan professionals. Indian Bread Company, Chinese Mirch, and their granddaddy, Kati Roll Co., remind me of the second wave of upscale restaurants in London’s Brick Lane; they’re slicker than the usual desi joint… As young restaurants, owners, friends and relatives still work behind the counter… educated urbanites… A lot of the initial marketing of these places goes through word of mouth, friends of friends in the high-speed desi network; it’s the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream made real. [Link]

The place is decorated with white tile in a fabric texture like Tamarind, white orchids, uplit shelves like a cosmetics counter and menus on 32″ LCDs. It sells teas in tins and test tubes. My buddies DD Pesh spun in the DJ perch yesterday, and Sonny played stand-up tabla by the door.

The teas themselves mimic vitamin water with frou-frou, we’re-not-Lipton themes like anti-aging, energizing and balancing. The bar also carries some wicked-looking paraphernalia including a tea stick, a perforated, stainless steel cylinder which you fill with loose leaf tea; stainless steel honey spoons shaped like honeycombs; and sinuous, double-sided sugar spoons. It’s all very SoHo-boho chic (tongue-in-cheek).

They’ve got a blend called Ceylon King for the days you’re feeling Ravanous. Thankfully, they don’t carry any redundant-dundant ‘chai tea,’ but do stop by and give Sonny shit for his ‘secret Indian spices’

Kama Chai Sutra: … teas just don’t get any more flavorful than this organic chai, made with a secret blend of Indian spices.

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The Cash Money Crew

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Three million people marched in France today against a labor flexibility bill, possibly the largest protests in the history of modern France. It’s the kind of reaction you’d expect in Bengal:

The marches were part of a nationwide day of action against the Villepin legislation, which was intended to encourage hiring by making it easy for companies to fire workers under age 26 during their first two years on the job. [Link]

“It is a collective failure of the French system,” said Louis Chauvel, a sociologist who studies generational change. “You earn more doing nothing in retirement at the age of 60 to 65 than working full-time at the age of 35…”

… A sweeping survey of people in 22 countries released in January found that France was alone in disagreeing with the premise that that the best economic model is “the free enterprise system and free market economy.” [Link]

According to the poll cited above, more Indians believe in a free market economy than even the Brits, Germans or French. China tops the poll, and France sits at the bottom.

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “In one sense we are indeed facing what has been called ‘the end of history,’ in that there is now an extraordinary level of consensus about the best economic system.” [Link]

My theory is that rapid development gives people faith in the redemptive power of the invisible hand. The poll was conducted in India’s major cities, so urbanites support liberalization. But the poll says nothing about the voter-heavy heartland.

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Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

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As I write this post, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, an important case involving the president’s constitutional and statutory authority in times of war, and the legality of military commissions set up to try detainees captured in the war on terror. The facts of the case:

Petitioner Salid Ahmed Hamdan is a detainee being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and admits to being a personal bodyguard and driver to Osama bin Laden. He was charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism, and was to be tried before a military commission, which is a special adjudicatory body created by Presidential order to try individuals accused of war crimes. [Link]

The procedural history, or how the present case made its way to the Supreme Court:

Before trial, Hamdan challenged the lawfulness of the military commission that was to try him, and in November 2004, the D.C. District Court enjoined the military commission proceedings as illegal under the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that military commissions had been duly authorized by Congress; that relief was unavailable under the Geneva Convention because it did not create privately enforceable rights and because it did not apply to Al Qaeda; and that the UCMJ did not preclude HamdanÂ’s trial before military commissions. [Link]

Hamdan appealed to the Supreme Court and in November 2005, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Chief Justice John Roberts recused himself, as he served on the D.C. Circuit Court panel that upheld the war crimes tribunals. (Some are calling for Justice Antonin Scalia to step aside as well because of comments he recently made in Switzerland, see here.)

Respected desi law professor Neal Katyal is arguing the case on behalf of Hamdan. There are two questions (.pdf) before the Supreme Court. The first is a threshold inquiry regarding the Court’s jurisdiction to hear the case. The government contends that the Court should dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds:

[The government] argue[s] that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA), enacted by Congress after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in this case, preclude pre-trial review by establishing an exclusive post-trial review process for all Guantanamo detainees. In addition, the Government has argued, even absent the DTA, the Court should withhold ruling on the merits until a final decision has been reached in accordance with traditional abstention doctrine. Petitioner, on the other hand, argues that Congress specifically modified the effective date provisions of the DTA to ensure that the Supreme Court could decide this case.[Link]

Second, as to the merits:

petitioner argues [in part] that the military commission that seeks to try him is not authorized to do so under U.S. law. [H]e argues that such authorization must be explicitly provided by Congress. Respondents dispute whether such explicit authorization is required, pointing to the historical practice of the President convening military commissions as evidence of his inherent “Commander-in-Chief” power to do so. [Link]

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The Britannia Cartel (updated)

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Dave’s post about the British Raj reminded me about the seamy underside of the British East India Company, namely its business in drugs. Imperial trade in opium was central to the success of the British empire:

Indian opium helped the British rule the world

By the early part of the nineteenth century, British Indian opium had stanched the flow of New World silver into China, replacing silver as the commodity that could be exchanged for Chinese tea and other goods…Opium revenues in India not only kept the colonial administration afloat, but sent vast quantities of silver bullion back to Britain. The upshot was the global dominance of the British pound sterling until World War I… [the] data supports, without opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable. [Link]

The British energetically encouraged poppy growing, on occasion coercing Indian peasant farmers into going over the crop. By the end of the 1830s the opium trade was already, and was to remain, “the world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.”(4)… [Link]

The definition of a drug cartel is a group with a monopoly on the distribution of an illegal narcotic. The empire, in the form of the East India Company, fits the bill quite neatlyWithout opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable:

In 1773, the Governor-General of Bengal was granted a monopoly on the sale of opium, and abolished the old opium syndicate at Patna. For the next 50 years, opium would be key to the British East India Company’s hold on India. Since importation of opium into China was illegal … the British East India Company would … sell opium at auction in Calcutta on the condition it was smuggled to China. In 1797, the company ended the role of local Bengal purchasing agents and instituted the direct sale of opium to the company by farmers.

In 1799, the Chinese Empire reaffirmed its ban on opium imports, and in 1810 the following decree was issued:
“Opium has a very violent effect… Opium is a poison… Its use is prohibited by law.” [Link]

Certainly, the British ended up doing many good things in India. Still, we should acknowledge that the roots of the British Raj lie in something as dirty and illicit as the Medellin cartel. That a bunch of dirty narcoterrorists could give birth to the world’s largest, and (relatively speaking) one of its more humane empires, is perplexing indeed.

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The Guardians of the British Raj

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Stalin found it “ridiculous” that “a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India.” [Link]

A new book by historian David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006), “helps explain how [the British civil servants in India] pulled it off.”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, noted author and UN official Shashi Tharoor gave a generally favorable review of The Ruling Caste. In Tharoor’s view,

The Ruling Caste paints an arresting and richly detailed portrait of how the British ruled 19th-century India — with unshakeable self-confidence buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall…. [For example,] one 24-year-old district officer found himself in charge of 4,000 square miles and a million people [Link]

The arrogance of the British administrators and the paternalistic means by which they viewed their Indian subjects is upsetting, though not unsurprising. One viceroy is quoted by Gilmour as saying:

“We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.”

According to Gilmour:

Few shared Queen Victoria’s “romantic feelings for ‘brown skins….'” Well into the 20th century, they spoke and wrote of the need to treat Indians as “children” incapable of ruling themselves.

Despite Gilmour’s insights into the personal lives and thoughts of these administrators, Tharoor is critical of the book’s failure to examine the Indian response to the British public officials, who were “members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS)”:

What is missing, though, is any sense of an Indian perspective on these men and their work. What did the subjects of their administration think of them? Gilmour does not tell us. He glosses over the prejudice and casual racism of many ICS men.

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Marital Advice from the Homeland

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Aside from Religion, few things have spilt more blood and ink than the battle of the sexes. Even those beholden to the most strict and twisted notions of piety recognize the one domain where the rules sometimes just don’t apply –

Mr. Moussaoui said there were times when a Muslim can lie without being immoral: to reconcile Muslims, to answer “yes” when a wife asks, “Am I beautiful?” and to carry out jihad.

Because any man knows that answering that question honestly is tantamount to jihad unto itself. Best to save that energy for a battle you might actually win.

Now while mere questions of spousal beauty allow for wiggle room, in a different corner of the world, we learn that divorce is rather literal –

A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders to separate after the husband “divorced” his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.

Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband, Aftab, had uttered the word “talaq,” or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers on Monday.

When local Islamic leaders heard of the sleep talking, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.” The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.

Husbands and wives are known to lash out at small annoyances as a way of signalling something deeper; in this case, maybe it really was just the small annoyances –

A jobless man burned himself to death after his wife refused to serve him meat for dinner, Indian police said Sunday.

The wife, who works as a domestic, refused to cook meat, saying they could not afford it.

Irritated by this, Sanjivan locked her in the house before setting himself on fire outside.

Poor Sanjivan, if he only knew about the Triple Talaq.

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Templezilla vs. Megachurch

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Earlier Abhi posted about the booming hair trade at the main Venkateshwara temple in Tirupati. It turns out that the sale of devotees’ hair is only one of this massive temple’s revenue streams, which dwarf those of American megachurches. Other revenue streams include cash, gold and diamond donations, laddoo sales and e-hundi.

Tirupati

E-hundi? Yes, electronic donations. You can donate to the temple right from ATMs owned by Andhra Bank and State Bank of India. The lords work in mysterious ways, but especially at withdrawal time:

“Andhra Bank ATM cardholders can make payments into the `hundi’ of Lord Venkateswara of Tirumala, from any of the bank’s ATMs. All they have to do is insert their card, enter the amount to be credited to the hundi account and it would be done instantly. In future, the facility would be extended to make payments for railway reservations and other services…” [Link]

Tirupati is also the most visited temple in the world. It is estimated that more that 50,000 people visit the temple everyday; this makes it almost 19 million people in a year, almost double the estimated number of people visiting Vatican City… Tirupati is the second richest religious institution after the Vatican City… it usually takes anywhere from 2 to 40 hours, depending on the season, to get to the Sanctom sanctorum from the time one registers into the queue system. [Link – thanks, tef]

The temple staff alone amounts to a number of 18,000. [Link]

Hundi collections (cash donation by devotees) account for roughly one-third of the Tirupati trust’s income. It also earns substantial money from the sale of human hair (offered by devotees) and laddoos, apart from interest on bank deposits. [Link]

For added convenience, you can book religious pilgrimages at State Bank branches worldwide. Separation of temple and state, what?

The bank is in tie-up with the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams management on a package to get the various `sevas’ in Tirumala temple and cottages booked at any of the bank’s branches in the world. ‘ `e-hundi’ is also part of the software, wherein a devotee can drop his offerings either in an ATM in the country or at the 52 overseas offices in 33 countries. [Link]

The bank was nationalised in 1955 with the Reserve Bank of India having a 60% stake. [Link]

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The tao of Steve

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Last weekend I saw Inside Man, currently the top movie in America. In Spike Lee’s excellent caper mystery, actor Waris Singh Ahluwalia explains the significance of the Sikh turban, covering your head in the presence of god, to the largest American audience to date. It’s very cool of Lee to carve out screen time for this exposition, and more such movies might reduce Sikh harassment in America.

The hollow men

On the other hand, Denzel Washington’s rejoinder (‘Bet you can catch a cab…’) feels like shuffling, not dancing. I didn’t catch Ahluwalia’s smack-back because the audience was laughing too hard at the turban-cabbie joke. Ick. Ahluwalia gets the lion’s share of the desi actors’ screen time. Reena Shah has a couple of seconds as a hostage, and Jay Charan is barely seen as a bank teller.

The movie opens with ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya‘ from Dil Se, and Punjabi MC raps over an orchestra-enhanced mix during the closing credits. The inclusion of ‘Chaiyya’ has nothing to do with Hindi samples in hip-hop or Bombay Dreams — Lee draws directly from the source (thanks, mallika). At some point desi influence in American pop culture will melt in so thoroughly, it won’t even be worthy of remark. Then the Uighur-Americans will start blogging about how poorly they’re represented in popular American culture. Viva la Uighur Mutiny.

Viva la
Uighur MutinyThe flick reminds me of Gurinder Chadha’s newer movies: it’s a thoroughly commercial film, a bid for mainstream relevance which still shouts out to the brotherhood (minorities, blue-collar workers, Brooklyn and polyglot NYC). It finesses the task of melding social commentary, such as a violent Grand Theft Auto parody, with product placements galore. As unfocused as it is, just one of Lee’s movies gives you more to chew on than three normal Hollywood flicks. Unlike Chadha’s work, Inside Man objectifies women as much as She Hate Me reportedly did, with an extended joke about big tits.

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VoA will no longer speak Hindi…but learns more Bangla

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From the newswire (thanks “Blue Mountain”) we see that the Broadcasting Board of Governors has decided to scale back some of its global Voice of America programming, seemingly to re-direct dollars to countries most in need of America’s voice.

This may come as a shock to millions of Hindi radio fans worldwide, Even as the Indo-US relationship scales a new peak, the popular Hindi service of the Voice of America seems all set to be closed down in six months, after being on air for more than four decades. In its annual budget, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has said it will close down VoA’s Hindi radio broadcasts along with four others–Turkish, Thai, Greek and Croatian. Although it is still under Congressional review, it is unlikely that the lawmakers would go against the board’s decision.

At the same time, VoA’s Urdu service is being increased to 18 hours a day, including a special six-hour broadcast for the tribal areas of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The duration of the Hindi service is one hour and 30 minutes. [Link]

This strikes me as short-sighted. What’s happening here is that the powers that be are shifting their dollars away from many of the countries in which VoA is popular and arguably effective, and is instead going to try and focus on immediate hotspots using more exciting forms of media (as exemplified by Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra TV). The Baltimore Sun has a nice op-ed outlining possible motivations behind these directed cuts and why they may be a bad idea:

The enemy media fire hard and fast, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a recent speech, and we must return the fire just as fast. As an example, he cites the extensive coverage of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Why not respond, he asks, by reporting on the mass graves of Saddam Hussein’s victims – torture answering torture, as it were. And non-journalists may have to paid to do the job. It is a kind of shock and awe of the media, a crucial part of the war on terror…

The Voice of America, to be sure, does not do this, and therein lies the problem. Dismissed as old-fashioned, stodgy and slow-moving, it is slated for drastic cuts by the supervising Broadcast Board of Governors…

Since, comparatively speaking, it costs so little, what’s the problem? Many say it is political. Every administration in Washington tries to nudge VOA this way or that way politically, but the pressure exerted by the current administration is said to be unprecedented…

This interference is not unique to VOA. It reflects what has happened at the Pentagon and the CIA, where dissenters have been demoted, reassigned, fired or otherwise silenced. [Link]

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!ncredibly repressed

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The ToI claims two tourists from Morocco and the UAE were deported for making out in Mumbai. What say we pass the hat so the thin khaki line gets laid once in awhile?

Slapping hussies in Meerut

Ibtisay Lamyani, 27, and Alfasar Nasir Abdul Hussain Ali, 37, were visiting India separately and had met at the Gateway of India. They were necking near the Metro cinema junction on Tuesday afternoon when a woman constable from Azad Maidan police station decided to intervene. She warned them against indecent behaviour in a public place. [Link]

The ToI’s smug commentary mirrors the sourpuss constable:

When they argued back, she demanded they show their passports. As luck would have it Lamyani’s visa had expired… Not chastened in the least, they promptly got into a clinch again. [Link]

The female tourist saw the director’s cut of Bombay (now with behind-the-bars footage), and both tourists were deported:

The police then submitted a chargesheet to the court which convicted Lamyani to a day’s imprisonment… Ali was also fined. They were both deported to their respective countries on the same night. [Link]

India Welcomes You.

Related posts: Bitter much?, Do Not Touch!, No sex please, we’re Indian, There is no place to hide it in India, Sex (gasp) in India: juxtaposition, Those legs are weapons of mass distraction, apparently, Indian Maxim is out to save lives, Dress Code

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