Am I becoming a prude?

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Over the tip line we got word from runyolarun about an organization up in Toronto that is promoting itself with a new set of agency posters:

“The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention is a community-based, non-profit, charitable organization committed to providing health promotion, support, education and advocacy in a non-discriminatory manner for those who identify as South Asian living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.”

ASAAP is a Toronto based AIDS service organization. It was founded in 1989 as a result of the voluntary efforts of members of Khush (a social group for South Asian gays and lesbians that has since closed down), in a community response to a request for support for a South Asian couple infected with HIV/AIDS who died in isolation, unable to access services in their own language. Our catchment area is greater Toronto and all the surrounding suburbs/towns. Our services include preventative education, support to South Asians infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS, outreach, and advocacy. Services are available in Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Bengali. You may need to call ahead to arrange assistance in South Asian languages.

Seems like they do great work. I realize that I am about to possibly get myself labeled as a prude with the following comments (which I assure you is not true), but I’m just not that into their new posters. In my opinion AIDS education has always been difficult because too many people continue to associate AIDS with homosexuality or otherwise “deviant” behavior. In truth, as we all know, AIDS can affect anyone, and an important part in trying to educate people about the disease should be to reach out to populations who think they are above risk. With that in mind I feel like these posters are a bit too racy. I can’t help but feel that many people will think, “Oh, I’m not like the people in those posters (even the one of the straight couple). This doesn’t concern me.” To be specific, the first poster, which seems to be that of an orgy, has several buzz words on it which include “Slip n’ Slide,” and the poster of the Lesbian couple includes the single word, “fist.” Are orgies popular in South Asian communities in Canada (if so I am leaving Jesusland tomorrow)? Also was it necessary to use a clichéd Come/Cum pun on the poster of the straight couple? Am I just getting old? Do most of you like these posters?

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My Thais

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The Thai clothing retailer Jaspal, which the NYT calls ‘Thailand’s Gap,’ is currently running a big ad campaign with OC actress Mischa Barton. It’s one of those cushy, overseas-only gigs so ably flèched by Bill Murray, who shilled Suntory whiskey in Lost in Translation. The company’s name implies its founder is Sikh. It’s probably another incarnation of India and Thailand’s long history of mixing:

The Thai alphabet is based on Mon (Burmese), Khmer (Cambodia) and South Indian scripts, and the language has many Sanskrit words… It is the only Southeast Asian country never to have been taken over by a European power… [Link]

The Thai language is liberally sprinkled with words from Pali and Sanskrit (the classical languages, respectively, of Theravada Buddhism and Indian Hinduism). [Link]

Thailand, which is 95% Buddhist, seems tolerant of minority religions, with Hindu shrines as good luck charms in downtown Bangkok (thanks, Mark IV):

Ramakien statue at Wat Phra Kaew temple

“This temple [in Chiang Mai] is one of the biggest in Thailand. We also have one big Sikh gurudwara here which is 120 years old. The same devotees go to both the gurudwara and the temple. On Tuesday, for our weekly satsang, you will find a large number of Thai devotees here…” I spoke with one Thai devotee here, Anuma, who said she was a “Buddhist Hindu” and a devotee of Mother Durga…

… the Sri Mariamman temple [in Bangkok]… was built by South Indians who migrated from the Thanjavur District in Tamil Nadu to Thailand about 150 years ago. It was the first Hindu temple built by the immigrant Indian community… “The reason why so many Thai people are visiting the Mariamman temple is that She is considered to be the Goddess of Protection. During World War II, when a lot of places here were destroyed in the Japanese occupation, the temple remained absolutely safe.” [Link]

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Recycled fashion (bags, not heads)

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Here’s the latest in socially conscious accessories:

Ragbags are fashionable products made from recycled plastic bags collected by ‘ragpickers’ in the slums of New Delhi. Plastic rags are collected, washed, dried and separated by colour. The plastic bags then go into a machine, which presses them into thicker and more durable sheets. No dyes or inks are required. It takes about 60 plastic bags to make one sheet. The sheets are then cut, lined with cloth and stitched or moulded into the various products. [Link]

The collection includes shoulder bags, backpacks, shopping bags, organizers (large and small) and wallets. The shoulder bags come in a variety of different color schemes including “Pakistan” and “India”, neither of which matches either country’s flag.

Most of the stores carrying these goods are in the Netherlands, but Americans can purchase them in Brooklyn and Mendocino, or they can go online. Check the shop locator for an outlet near you.

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The economics of the Indian Wedding Industry

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Once upon a time, US dollars went a long way in India. Even weddings, long expensive in local terms, could be staged far more cheaply in India than in the US. Not any more. The wedding planners have arrived, and everybody wants a big extravaganza:

India’s burgeoning middle class – now 300 million strong – are turning weddings into showcases of their growing disposable incomes and newfound appetites for the goodies of the global marketplace.

The largesse has spawned an $11 billion wedding industry, growing at 25 percent annually and beginning to rival the US industry valued at $50 billion.

The minimum budget for a wedding ceremony is $34,000, say wedding planners, while the upper-middle and rich classes are known to spend upward of $2 million. (The average American wedding costs $26,327.) This doesn’t include cash and valuables given as part of a dowry. [Link]

The latest fad is to stage the whole shebang on pontoons, putting family and friends on a veritable flotilla of flaunted wealth

If you consider the fact that India’s middle class are those considered to be earning “$4,545 to $23,000 a year”, weddings are priced comparably to an Ivy League education in the US. To “help out” banks are offering specialized wedding loans (at high rates, I’m sure):

GE Money India has introduced an “auspicious” personal loan, a quick and easy loan exclusively for weddings. [Link]
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Pipe dream

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Serendipity is a pretty lame romantic comedy that’s a staple of cable reruns, where I had the misfortune of running into it this morning. Like Bollywood, it peddles soft-headed romantic fatalism in a one-joke script.

It does, however, do a very funny New Age parody. John Corbett (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) hams it up as Lars, a self-absorbed New Age musician. This schmuck in a silk kurta plays an instrument ubiquitous at Indian weddings while his hype men play tabla and sitar.

As Lars watches the cheesy, Yanni-like music video his record label put together, he complains, ‘You can’t fight off an army of bloodthirsty Vikings with a shehnai. It’s illogical.’

This little fudge cake of brilliance is probably the only shehnai joke in Hollywood history, and definitely the only one involving Vikings.

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Why You Think the Net Was Born

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Thanks to Manish and the rest of the Sepia Mutineers for welcoming me to guest-blog here.

There’s a new Bollywood film out carrying the same name as one from the early ’80s. However, while the old movie was directed by Shyam Benegal and is a modern take on the Mahbharata, the new one is a Mahesh Bhatt production, directed by Mohit Suri, about the international pornography trade. The 2005 version of Kalyug follows the idea of an age of decline, but focuses on sexual degeneracy specifically. At least in the (intentionally?) punningly titled article “Kalyug exposes porn trade,” the movie is entirely negative about this industry. Says Bhatt,

I got the idea of making Kalyug after reading the India Today article on a honeymooning couple, whose lovemaking scenes were recorded in a hotel and distributed throughout the world. People all over the world want to see reality sex, not fictional sex. Human trafficking has become big business everywhere; it’s the third largest international crime after drugs and the arms trade. Desi Indian women and porn sites are a huge craze abroad. That’s why victims of natural disasters like famines and earthquakes are sold for these pornographic rackets. They are drugged, brutalised and blackmailed into joining the flesh trade.

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Guest blogger: PG

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Please join me in welcoming our next guest blogger, PG of Half the Sins and the De Novo group blog. The law groupies here at SM have been atwitter over her smart vivisection of political critters and policy wonkery for some time. From time to time, she also applies her prodigious talents to pawning exotica indien:

I don’t think there will be anything for the next generation of Indian kids to unify around, unless we go through a collective midlife crisis and decide to impose the same expectations on our offspring that our parents put on us.

So far today, I’ve been wished a happy Diwali by a white person and my mom, and my white Property professor was wearing a punjabi dress- style top in class. I was intending to celebrate it properly, but then I realized I was having a bit of iron deficiency, so I ate a hamburger. [Link]

Last night as we were waiting to get into the Lido, a Vegas-style club in Paris’s otherwise elegant Champs Elysees district, I kept pretending that we were going to a strip joint and quoting Chris Rock jokes about how no one would want to eat the food. “Titties and tater tots don’t mix!..”

… then come out the girls with the boobie verison of a punjabi dress/ salwar kameez. By boobie version, I mean that it looked about right, the loose pants and all, except the top didn’t cover their tits. Which was what most of the costumes in this show were like, but you don’t expect to see the same outfit that your mama can wear exposing boobs. That just ain’t right.

But that was only a little appetizer… Shiva with tits was a showgirl wearing a big headdress that looked like the traditional representation of many-armed Shiva, except Shiva doesn’t have tits, on account of Shiva is a MAN.

It wasn’t enough to have Shiva with titties. Nope, then we had to have half a dozen Ganeshas in ass-pants and no shirts. These were the showboys wearing elephant masks, complete with trunk. They came out on a stage set done up to look like a temple. A TEMPLE! Complete with gold paint. They also trotted out a big fake plastic elephant for one of the showgirls to ride…

Did I mention the giant fake lotus blossom that came out of the floor?… [Link]

Welcome, PG!

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Brown dollars, flying around the world

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India is the biggest net beneficiary of money sent home by migrants:

Officially recorded remittances worldwide exceeded $232 billion in 2005, with India receiving almost 10% of the amount ($21.7 billion). China came second with $21.3 billion, followed by Mexico ($18.1 billion), France ($12.7 billion), and the Philippines ($11.6 billion). [Link]

To put this into context, remittances worldwide are roughly the same as the GDP of Sweden, and remittances to India are roughly equivalent to the entire national output of countries such as Latvia or North Korea. India makes even more foreign exchange from sending its workers abroad than it does from exporting software.[Thanks Hammer_Sickel!] Remittances to India are roughly equivalent to the entire national economic output of Latvia. India generates more foreign exchange from sending its workers abroad than it does from software exports.

International flows of labor are now becoming economically critically, like flows of capital in the decade before before:

… remittances sent through informal channels could add at least 50 per cent to the official estimate, making remittances the largest source of external capital in many developing countries. [Link]

With the number of migrants worldwide now reaching almost 200 million, their productivity and earnings are a powerful force for poverty reduction. [Link]

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The Wonders of Dinosaur Dung

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For today’s Science Friday I wanted to talk about crap. Dinosaur crap that is. About two years ago I came across the word “coprolite” in a paper I was reading. I have a bookmark set to Dictionary.com so I tend to look up many words throughout the day (mostly because unlike most desis I am a shockingly poor speller). To my surprise “corpolite” was yet another name that humanity has provided for feces:

The Indus Valley Civilization could have used a few of these

cop·ro·lite n.
Fossilized excrement. [Link]

Well okay then. I am quite sure several of you will be sharing this new knowledge with someone tonight. You see, corpolite is a paleontologist’s dream. Not only can you figure out if the animal that “dropped” it was a carnivore/herbivore/omnivore, but you can also tell which plants existed at the time. An article in the Journal Science today is titled, “Dinosaur Coprolites and the Early Evolution of Grasses and Grazers,” and has Dr. Vandana Prasad of Lucknow as the first author (paid subscription required):

Silicified plant tissues (phytoliths) preserved in Late Cretaceous coprolites from India show that at least five taxa from extant grass (Poaceae) subclades were present on the Indian subcontinent during the latest Cretaceous. This taxonomic diversity suggests that crown-group Poaceae had diversified and spread in Gondwana before India became geographically isolated. Other phytoliths extracted from the coprolites (from dicotyledons, conifers, and palms) suggest that the suspected dung producers (titanosaur sauropods) fed indiscriminately on a wide range of plants. These data also make plausible the hypothesis that gondwanatherian mammals with hypsodont cheek teeth were grazers.

Translate to English please: this means that ~70 million years ago a lot of really large dinosaurs were grazing on grass all over the chunk of land that eventually broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana to become the Indian sub-continent (before it once again recombined like the present day). We can always rely on good old National Geographic to break it down for the laymen:

Coprolites are very common in the area and are often found in rocks that have been worn down by weather. Based on their common association with titanosaur bones, many of the dung fossils probably come from the massive plant-eating reptiles.

The finding is the first indication that grasses evolved before the dinosaurs went extinct.

Fossil evidence had suggested that grasses evolved along with early plant-eating mammals. Hoofed animals with high-crowned teeth suitable for chewing grass first began to appear about 25 million years ago.

But the grass minerals in the Indian coprolites were much older than the hoofed mammals and were already diverse. Five different species were evident, which means that grasses likely diversified substantially before the end of the late Cretaceous.

Imagine that. Dinosaurs were doing almost the same job millions of years before the sacred cow began eating grass all over India (and tilling the fields), thus sustaining the Indus Valley Civilization. This immediately caused me to imagine a Flintstones type universe in which the dinosaurs may have gone on to become sacred, if only they had survived extinction and been domesticated.

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The browning of Netflix

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Bollywood films constitute roughly 50% of all new films added by Netflix this week!

This week alone, Netflix announced 79 new Bollywood releases

in their All DVDs Releasing This Week section. That’s more Bollywood films than films of any other sort of individual genre, probably almost as many films as released in all other categories combined. To give you an idea of how significant this is, just imagine if half the new releases at Blockbuster were Bollywood flicks!

The new films are pretty eclectic, with movies from the 1950s to the present, including golden oldie Shree 420 and compilation DVDs like Dance Songs Forever.

This comes in the same week that GV Films announced their intent to create a legal Bollywood (and Tamilwood [is that even a word? – ed]) film downloading system:

Film buffs worldwide will soon be able to download digitised versions of Indian movies from an online channel that will be launched in Mumbai in 2006. Movie lovers can download the movies by paying between $1-5 a movie, depending on how old the film is and whether it was a big hit — apart from its running time. GV Films is known for hit productions in Tamil like Mouna Ragam (1986), Nayakan (1987) and Anjali (1990). It has also bought rights of hundreds of other movies in various other Indian languages. Though the production house has a large library of nearly 6,000 films to pick and choose from, it is in the process of acquiring more movies. [Link]

What’s going on here? While GV films is targetting their offering specifically at NRIs, it’s not entirely clear to me who is renting the Bollywood films from Netflix. Is this clear evidence of the mainstreaming of Bollywood as “serious foreign film” or are these suburban uncles and aunties who don’t want to drive to little India to rent their desi DVDs any more than they want to drive to Blockbuster to rent their American films? One way or another, it’s a fascinating trend. For those of you interested in Bollywood (I’m afraid I rarely watch the movies, so the titles mean little to me) the list of films is below the fold.

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