Almost underneath their robes

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Part of Sepia Mutiny’s hidden agenda (we have never published our actual mission or spoken of the Machiavellian designs that drive us) has been to develop an influential and well placed system of CIs that will help our collective Mutiny to spread in both numbers and power (but especially in power). I have taken the liberty of modifying former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s formal definition of a “CI” for those of you unfamiliar with this term:

“Confidential Informant” or “CI” — any individual who provides useful and credible information to a JLEA Sepia Mutiny regarding felonious criminal interesting desi-related activities, and from whom the JLEA Sepia Mutiny expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future. [Link]

Basically this means that we want to encourage SM readers to send us the “goods” or the “dirt” on happenings that we don’t yet know about. Want me to give you an example of what kind of CIs that we are seeking out? SM reader Venkat of BTD gives us a heads up about some interesting developments at the Supreme Court. Three of the incoming Supreme Court Clerks are desi:

Scalia: Hashim Mooppan (Harvard ’05/Luttigator ’05-’06)… [Link]

Ginsburg: Arun Subramanian (Columbia ’04/Jacobs ’04-’05/G. Lynch ’05-’06) [Link]

Breyer: Thiru Vignarajah (Harvard ’05/Calabresi) [Link]

These three make ideal CIs. I am reaching out to them. If you know them then forward this on. We can be very discreet. Dead drops could be arranged in random parks by a variety of means. I have had pleasant dealings with clerks from lower federal courts before. Just ask around. We know that in the coming term the Supreme Court will be dealing with many cases involving desis, or with definite importance to the desi community. These three could maybe keep us up to speed on things.

The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal before major media outlets did. We want SM to break more news also. That is where we need YOU dedicated reader. Are you in a position of power or influence and are just dying to share something you know, or stick it to the man? Do you work for some government agency or powerful corporation that doesn’t appreciate you enough? We appreciate you. Think of me as your very friendly case officer. The agent Vaughn to your agent Bristow. Will some real CIs please stand up?

[Disclaimer: For the record, I am not advocating that you break any laws, at least if they get me in trouble also…or if they get me subpoenaed, because I don’t think I could last in jail very long to protect you as my source. I would really try to though…unless they put me in a cell with some guy named “Tiny” who really isn’t.]

See related posts: The “Devils” Advocates, The Court has Hindu friends, …then you can’t have our money, Orwellian logic

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The end of an era

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R.I.P. Loews State

The Loews State cinema, the last cinema on Broadway and the biggest Bollywood theater in Manhattan, closed last Friday, a victim of the AMC-Loews merger. This Times Square theater was so central that it showed up in movies ranging from Kal Ho Naa Ho to Phone Booth. As far as I know, the much smaller ImaginAsian is now the only theater on the island regularly playing Bollywood flicks. Where will I go to get my regular phixx?

I loved and hated you, my State. From playing telephone with the non-Hindi-speaking ticket window to watching tripe masquerading as film, you brought me the best and the worst on giant screens. You brought me up with Parineeta and down with Deewane Huye Paagal, up with Mangal Pandey / The Rising and down with Bluff Master; you brought me sold-out crowds (for Pandey) and a hall to myself (for everything else). Not three weeks ago, I ran backward down your escalator to retrieve a scarf and met two cuties doing the same. In recent years you were a second-run theater, but watching desi flicks at the center of the world was its own distinct thrill. And your location in the Virgin Megastore was so Bolly-apropos

When I lived in S.F., a friend of mine hosted stylish, witty desi parties for the mid-20s to mid-30s set. She had a baby, the parties stopped, and everyone felt the loss. Some things are as much community services as profit-making ventures. The Bollyrun at the Loews State was such a creature.

Fifty years ago, the neighborhood was the world’s largest showcase for cinema — the area housed over a dozen grand movie palaces, including the Paramount, Roxy, Capitol, Strand, Warner, Rivoli and the National. In late 2004, the Loews Astor Place closed on 44th Street (it is now a concert venue, the Nokia Theatre), and a few years before, the area lost the Embassy two-plex and the Criterion Center. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of increased rents for commercial space, the recent AMC-Loews merger, and the flourishing new multiplexes on 42nd Street near Port Authority, the AMC Empire 25 and the Loews E-Walk. [Link – NSFW]

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Oh no! It’s another M.I.A. post!

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The Village Voice’s “Pazz & Jop” supplement is out this week. It’s the only annual music survey that counts; tallying votes from 795 critics, it’s a clear statement of the prevailing wisdom in US pop criticism. Online you can check out each critic’s list, and search to see how your favorite grime, electroclash, nerd-hop or screamo fared. So, how about the desis?

Albums
2 – M.I.A., Arular
149 – Kronos Quartet f/ Asha Bhosle [thanks Sajit]
231 – Anoushka Shankar, Rise
Songs
29 – M.I.A, “Galang”
30 (tie) – M.I.A., “Bucky Done Gun”
61 (tie) – M.I.A., “Sunshowers”
313 (tie) – M.I.A., “Bingo”

And, unless you count Devendra Banhart (album: 90; song: 313) as an honorary desi (ahem), thatÂ’s it.

ItÂ’s also interesting to search for desis among the critics. Gauging by name, I found only two: Nikhil Swaminathan of Creative Loafing, the Atlanta weekly, and Joseph Patel of MTV. I donÂ’t know either cat; for all I know Joseph may be Trini or Guyanese. He placed M.I.A. on his list of mainly Black music; Nikhil is an indie-rock cat who didn’t find room for a sista. [UPDATE: Also Geeta Dayal! My bad. Thanks, Neha.] Continue reading →

The profiling myth, part 2

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NYC police chief Ray Kelly agrees that racial profiling is trivially defeated by terrorists and too dangerous to rely on:‘I think profiling is just nuts’

— NYC police chief
Ray Kelly

“If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty percent of New Yorkers are born outside the country… Who am I supposed to profile?… Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.” [Link]

The author of this New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell, explains that a racial profile fails against an adaptive foe:

… what the jihadis seemed to have done in London [was that] they switched to East Africans because the scrutiny of young Arab and Pakistani men grew too intense. It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable–or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization. [Link]

Kelly had previously eliminated ineffective profiling in the U.S. Customs Service:

… he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?

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Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen

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Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there, hair!
Shoulder length, longer (hair!)
Here baby, there mama, Everywhere daddy daddy

Abhi at age 3: Nice hair runs in our Indian family.

-Lyrics from the musical Hair

You know what I love me most about South Asian women? Long, beautiful, black hair. Yep, I’m a hair man. Last Friday Brian (followed by a few others) tipped us off that NPR’s Day to Day ran a story about the hottest beauty trend to hit Los Angeles. “Indian Temple Hair.” As everyone knows, L.A. sets the trends for the rest of the nation to follow. Look out middle-America:

In most big American cities, almost any luxury item can be had for a price — real champagne from France, truffles from Italy, and in Los Angeles, human hair from India. Whether it’s individual clumps or full wefts, true human hair is available in beauty salons across the city, and selling very well.

Take, for example, Vared Valensi. The walls of her salon on a busy corner of Melrose Avenue are plastered with pictures of Valensi with some of her celebrity clients, including Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Tara Reid and a nest of Playboy bunnies. Each one is cute, skinny and has someone else’s hair attached to her head. Valensi put it there.

This story is absolutely ridic. The interview they do with the woman from the temple in India (where they import this hair from) had me speechless.

…so-called “temple hair” comes from India. It is a byproduct of a religious practice many faithful Hindu women have observed for generations. Pilgrims cut off their hair as an offering to the gods. The hair is then cleaned, processed and exported.

Tiripati temple is where most of the Hindu offerings take place. The hair trade is a boon for the temple, now commonly known as the richest temple in India. Much of that money is coming from places like Los Angeles, where advertisements for Indian hair dot utility poles and storefront windows across the city. With demand for Indian hair growing, more and more Indian companies are advertising to Americans directly, hoping to cash in on the trend.

Ummm. I’m not sure…but isn’t it kind of blasphemous to take hair offered to the Gods…and then turn around and sell it to Tara Reid?

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TODAY: Kiran Desai reading

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SAJA and the Rubin Museum of Art present
Kiran Desai reading from The Inheritance of Loss
Today, Wednesday, February 1 at 7pm
(how’s that for notice?)

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. between 6th/7th Aves., Manhattan [map]
$11 / $5 SAJA members
(includes admission to the museum of Himalayan art)

The novel wears the tricolor on its sleeve and savages wealthy immigrant privilege:

The Indian student bringing back a bright blonde, pretending it was nothing, trying to be easy, but every molecule tense and self-conscious: “Come on, yaar, love has no color…” He had just happened to stumble into the stereotype; he was the genuine thing that just happened to be the cliché…

Behind him a pair of Indian girls made vomity faces.

And yet she lives in…

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her MFA from Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.

Related posts: The tree groom, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’

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I’ll try the canned fish curry, please

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The word curry is a topic sure to rankle desis; the debunking of this colonial category is the rare cause that can unite desis of all origins and persuasions in a chorus of righteous indignation. And rightly so: The reduction of the subcontinentÂ’s rich foodways to this one invented label has caused any number of ills, not least the viscous glop known as tikka masala, and more than a few upset stomachs.

But just because curry isnÂ’t authentically Indian doesnÂ’t mean it isnÂ’t authentically… something. TodayÂ’s New York Times has a review of a new book called “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,” by Lizzie Collingham — a book I’m excited to read, despite the kind of horrible cover art that has Manish breaking out in hives. It invites us to follow as curry spread around the world, picking up bits and pieces from each culture like some syncretistic religion. Curry may or may not be Indian, but it sure is global:

Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. … Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Ms. Collingham. … One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision.

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Guest Blogger: Siddhartha Mitter

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I found our newest guest blogger sitting under a Bodhi Tree in a snow covered park near our world blogging headquarters in North Dakota. For one who had made such a long journey, an invitation to guest blog seemed very appropriate. As I approached him he simply said, “I had been expecting your arrival.” Please welcome one ill Hindu: Siddhartha Mitter.

I am an independent writer on topics including politics, music, food, race, globalization, and cultural change. After academic training in the politics and economics of developing countries, I worked on electric utilities in West Africa, and then spent six years in research and consulting work in the global energy industry. In 2002 I shed these layers to regain my creative freedom. [Link]

Yes, we have found that people who end up in our bunker have shed themselves of material things and chosen to take the blogastic vows that we too hold dear.

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The tortoise and the hare

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A business professor at MIT Sloan argues in the Financial Times that India is economically underrated. Yasheng Huang sounds a clarion call for China to relax its financial controls:

Rama vs. dragon? Cake.
But Rama vs. Chuck Norris…

From April to June 2005, India’s GDP grew at 8.1 per cent, compared with 7.6 per cent in the same period the year before. More impressively, India is achieving this result with just half of China’s level of domestic investment in new factories and equipment, and only 10 per cent of China’s foreign direct investment…

… in 2003 and 2004, [China] was investing close to 50 per cent of its GDP in domestic plant and equipment – roughly equivalent to India’s entire GDP. That is higher than any other country… China’s growth stems from massive accumulation of resources, while India’s growth comes from increasing efficiency…

While India’s stock market has soared in recent years, the opposite has happened in China. In 2001, the Shanghai Stock Market index reached 2,200 points; by 2005, half the wealth wiped out. In April 2005, the Shanghai index stood at 1,135 points… [Link]

Huang argues against using foreign direct investment as a key measure of economic growth:

Brazil was a darling of foreign investors in the 1960s but ultimately let them down. Japan, Korea and Taiwan received little FDI in the 1960s and 1970s but became among the world’s most successful economies…

With few exceptions, the world-class manufacturing facilities for which China is famous are products of FDI, not of indigenous Chinese companies… [Link]

· · · · ·

His analysis is that India has a more laissez-faire attitude in both politics and entrepreneurship:

[Infosys] was founded by seven entrepreneurs with few political connections who nevertheless managed, without significant hard assets, to obtain capital from Indian banks and the stock ­market in the early 1990s. It is unimaginable that a Chinese bank would lend to a Chinese equivalent of an Infosys…

China was light years ahead of India in economic liberalisation in the 1980s. Today it lags behind in critical aspects, such as reform that would permit more foreign investment and domestic private entry in the financial sector. [Link]

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Air Strikes from the Left

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It has been said and said again several times over, but here is something that bears repeating: India has the worst airports in the world. Our escalators open up unexpectedly and swallow kids; our toilets are horribly bad; our conveyor belts are too small to hold all the bags from a single plane (leave alone the 3 that arrive at one time); sleeping is impossible and even if you escape the airport in one piece, you still haven’t escaped the airport mafia.

And it is only going to get worse – the rapid growth in the Indian economy and the mushrooming of budget carriers in the country means that in a couple of decades from now, Delhi and Mumbai will be as busy as Chicago or Atlanta are today. Imagine. The solution to the problem is quite simple of course: A lot more money, which the Government does not have. As early as 1997, the Government of India released an “airport modernization policy” that said among other things that:

Looking at the quantum of investment required the answer to all the problems lies in the infusion of private — including foreign — investment in this sector. [Link]

Meaning, we don’t have the money. And we think the way to fix these airports is by handing them off to someone else. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the policy finally looked set to take off this year with the Government inviting competitive bids to privatize the management of the two biggest airports in the country: Delhi and Mumbai.

Then the bidding process ran into trouble, and so they appointed a technical committee (but of course) that evaluated the bidding process and okayed it, and then another committee was appointed to make sure the technical committee knew what it was doing. And finally, a decision was made: The bidding process produced a couple of winners. Nice.

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