Don’t judge a book by its cover

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Recently, Al-Arabiya television broadcast a segment showing a white Australian who had joined Al-Qaeda. The Australian government followed up by admitting that a “small number” of Australians were members. But the tape showed more than just this one blonde man in a balaclava:

The executive editor of Al Arabiya, Nabil Khatib, … was surprised by the ethnic diversity of the jihadists in the video – from Central Asia, including Uzbekistan, as well as Europeans, Pakistanis and Saudis. [cite]

We’ve always known that A-Q is diverse in its membership, especially if you include allied groups. There are East Asians (mainly South East Asians, like the Bali Bomber), Africans, various Brown people, and yes … light skinned people as well. Still, people kept ignoring the part about white people in the group, even though they were previously documented. Maybe these photos will help change some minds. Then again, it’s not clear that the African London bombers have made Brits any less fixated on South Asians.

Australians will probably respond to this news by trying to profile Muslims more thoroughly, rather than trying to screen for suspicious actions. Remember, there are still plenty of non-Islamist groups that still pose a threat. Consider, for example, the ironically named “Brown Army Faction” who were busted two years ago:

The threat to Germany from neo-Nazis has risen to a new level, Interior Minister Otto Schily has warned. The discovery of a suspected plot to bomb a Munich Jewish centre during a visit by the German president has “dramatically confirmed” the danger to society, he said on Monday. At least 10 suspects were held and up to 14kg (31lb) of explosives seized in police raids last week. The suspected attack would have coincided with the anniversary of the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht attacks, when thousands of Jewish targets were attacked and dozens murdered. A “hit list” detailing other possible targets, including mosques, a Greek school and an Italian target, had been recovered, said Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein. [BBC]

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If he was brown, we woulda heard about it, right?

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More news on the double-standard front. In March of last year, the feds arrested somebody who had the components for both hand grenades and ricin in his basement. The perp lived in Hyattsville, Md, just a few miles from the DC border:

The manhunt, according to court documents and investigators, led last year to a suburban home in Hyattsville, Md., its basement stocked with parts for makeshift hand grenades and ingredients for ricin, one of the most potent and lethal biological toxins….. has since pleaded guilty to charges of extortion and possession of toxic materials. [NYT]

How deadly is Ricin?

If injected or swallowed, the toxin penetrates the body’s cells. It then knocks out the cells’ protein production machinery, leading to cell death. If ricin is inhaled, acute respiratory collapse occurs as the fragile lining cells of the air passages and lungs are destroyed. Once a person is exposed to ricin, there is no known antidote. Minute quantities of ricin are lethal, and they vanish from the victim’s body in hours with barely a trace, making it a notorious stealth murder weapon. [cite]

You’d think this would have been front page news instead of the middle of a long article about cyber extortion in the NYT Magazine. A dangerous criminal was arrested a stone’s through away from the nation’s capital with the precursors to a biological weapon! This guy was more of a threat than Jose Padilla: ricin is more dangerous than a dirty bomb, and he was far closer to creating a WMD than Padilla ever got.

However, this guy wasn’t brown. His name was Myron Tereshchuk. He was a 43 year old white guy, a tech entrepreneur. If his name had been Sandeep Patel, with the same profile and biodata, you can bet that his mug shot would have been plastered all over the evening TV news shows. As is, it got buried below the fold.

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“I forgot.” Yeah, that’s my fave excuse, too.

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vella.jpg I hate moving. I hate moving so much that when I left Manhattan in 2003, I hastily shoved everything in storage near Chelsea. ItÂ’s still there.

I think my reluctance to pack a suitcase might be related to the sheer panic and anxiety I experience whenever I have to move. Something about carefully folding and arranging items in boxes freaks me out, man.

This is the explanation I gave my long-suffering Mummy last week when I was at home in California. I was scheduled to leave for the airport at 7pm and I hadnÂ’t packed as of 6:15. Of course, I ended up hastily tossing everything in, cringing at how my clothes were getting abused, how my jewelry would be a tangled mess by the time I got back to DC, how I would surely forget something. I threw everything on my bathroom counter in my cosmetics bag, zipped it and hoped for the best.

8pm. Security. IÂ’ve padded through the gate barefoot and I’m trying not to think about what sorts of germs IÂ’m walking on while I wait for my bag to leave the X-rayÂ…

“Ma’am? Would you mind coming with me?”

Nope. I donÂ’t mind at all. IÂ’m brown, but I have nothing to hide. It’s been years. I know to just expect this routine. I grab my prrrecious iBook and follow him to a table. HeÂ’s poking my carry-on gingerly, a worried look distorting his face. Continue reading →

Rize and hustle

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Do I even need to say it? Mangal Pandey / The Rising, the film about our namesake rebellion, comes out in the U.S. today. It stars Aamir Khan, Toby Stephens, Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel. A.R. Rahman did the music, Ketan Mehta (the director of Mirch Masala) directs this story. Watch the trailer and do your mutinous best

In 1857 Mangal Pandey (Khan) is a sepoy, an Indian serving under the command of Britain’s East India Company, which by then had controlled the subcontinent for a century with its own laws, military and government. Mangal’s a close friend of the sensitive British captain William Gordon (Stephens), but the introduction of a new gun cartridge drives a wedge between them. Greased with cow and pig fat, it’s deeply offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. And a small standoff develops into a full-scale indigent rebellion. [Link]

It’s the McDonald’s beefy french fries scandal writ large!

Gordon’s character has been written with great care, so as to present a saner side to the British who would all otherwise fall into the stereotypical category of moustache-twirling villains. [Link]

Check U.S. showtimes here. American prints are usually subtitled.

Here are photos from the premiere in Bombay. Here’s the movie’s official site.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

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The tyranny of a transposition typo

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Nwo thye wnat ot renmae Delhi (via PPP):

The Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India. They have launched a campaign to correct the “mis-spelling”, which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.

K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: “For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn’t manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the city later came to reflect this.”

I presume the city would be called Newer Dehli. It isn’t a new idea:

What the British knew as Cawnpore is now Kanpur, the northern city of Muttra is Mathura, and the Ganges is known once more as Ganga… In 1995, Bombay became Mumbai after pressure from Hindu-nationalists to reinstate the original Marathi name. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a corruption of the British name but almost certainly derives from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, meaning Good Bay.

A year later, the southern city of Madras – possibly a corruption of the Portuguese Madre di Dios – reverted to Chennai, the name that had been used by Tamils throughout the British period. Then, in 2000, the spelling of Calcutta was officially changed to Kolkata after pressure from the Communist state government to revert to a spelling that more closely reflected the Bangla pronunciation.

I’ve got no fondness for badly Anglicized names. Even old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam. But the new name wouldn’t be entirely accurate either:

… even Dehli was a corrupted word. The pre-Mughal name was Dilli, which was derived from Dhillika, a Rajput name for the area which dates back to the 8th century.

I have the rename to trump all renames: let’s call everything Gondwanaland. It’s an Indian name after all. Problem solved.

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A sea of brown closes Heathrow down

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From fliping through the AP pool photographs of the British Airways catering employees strike (which just ended), you’d think that it was the Salt March or something.  What gives?  And talk about girl power.  Yahoo News reports (thanks to several tipsters):

BA baggage handlers and loaders represented by the same union as the catering staff — the Transport and General Workers Union — stopped work in sympathy with their colleagues.

Some Gate Gourmet staff were astounded at the scale of disruption.

“I didn’t expect the BA staff to join us, but we are very happy about it,” said Gary Mullins, 37, a loader for the company.

“We don’t wish to cause them any more (aggravation) than we have to,” he said of the passengers. “But it’s something that has to be done.”

Wait a minute.  From that sea of brown they picked a guy named “Gary Mullins” to get a quote from? CNN International has more:

The Transport and General Workers Union [TGWU] said it went on strike because Gate Gourmet, a firm that caters meals for British Airways, had fired workers.

Tony Woodley, TGWU’s general secretary, issued a statement Thursday saying he had contacted Gate Gourmet in an effort to reinstate workers and “restart talks without prejudice.”

“Unfortunately, the management of Gate Gourmet has responded intransigently. They are preventing employees reporting for work. This is causing chaos at one of the world’s biggest airports at the busiest time of year,” the statement said.

“The company has told us that ‘this is a community we cannot work with.’ The employees concerned are almost all low-paid, Asian workers, and such an approach is utterly unacceptable.”

The union’s national officer, Brendan Gold, told PA he was continuing to seek legal advice over the “sackings,” which he added had left workers feeling “angry, confused and in a state of shock.”

Great.  Now even more people will be pissed off at Britain’s South Asian population. Continue reading →

Sri Lanka’s foreign minister assassinated (updated)

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Perhaps the Tamil Tigers are showing their cuddly face (thanks, Abhi):

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was shot in the head Friday night just outside his private residence in Colombo and died an hour later after emergency surgery… The assassination is bound to further strain the shaky cease-fire agreement between Sri Lanka’s government and the Tamil Tiger rebels. The truce, in place since February 2002, has been threatened by recent violence and the suspension of talks in 2003. [Link]

Earlier this month, two LTTE members were arrested outside Kadirgamar’s official residence — about a kilometer away from where he was shot — after conducting surveillance and videotaping the area. Kadirgamar had just returned to his private residence late Friday for a swim, after attending a function for the release of his new book, police said. As he walked toward the house from the pool, a sniper fired three shots, striking him in the head and chest. [Link]

… Kadirgamar, 73, who is from the ethnic Tamil minority and a close aide of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, was taken to the National Hospital for emergency surgery after being shot in the head… Kadirgamar, a Tamil Christian, led an international campaign to ban the Tigers as a terrorist organization. [Link]

Kadirgamar’s background:

He was educated at Trinity College, Kandy, and obtained a Bachelor of Laws… from the University of Ceylon… He also has a B.Lit. from Oxford University. He practiced law at the Ceylon Bar and in London until 1974, when he became a consultant to the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

Kadirgamar is a long-time supporter of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)… Despite being himself a Tamil, he strongly supported the Bandaranaike government’s policy of not negotiating with the Tamil Tigers insurgents in northern Sri Lanka. [Link]

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Bhutanese Gothic

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Grinchness continues to cut its green swath across the subcontinent. First Pakistan and Afghanistan banned Indian films. Then, just a couple of months ago, the idyllic Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan banned Indian entertainment channels (via Desi Flavor):

Telecast of some Indian news and entertainment channels has been barred by cable operators in Bhutan, after local media labelled them as a threat to their cultural values, the Lok Sabha was informed on Thursday. “… the above decision was taken by the cable operators themselves, following a series of articles, which appeared in the media in Bhutan,” Reddy said. He said it was alleged in most of the articles that some of these channels were “culturally degrading and were undermining Bhutanese cultural values, besides distracting students from their studies…” [Link]

“Bhutanese kids… suddenly saw these big men [pro wrestlers] beating each other up on television,” he added. “They couldn’t understand it. There were several pained letters from kids saying ‘why are they doing this?’… “[Young people] want and need what they see on television – the fashion, the clothes, the whole changing lifestyle, going to bars, drinking,” Kinley Dorji said. “A lot of these ideas have come from television. And they want more now.”

Others, though, see the whole debate as largely irrelevant. They point out that the vast majority of Bhutan’s population – 70% – do not even have electricity, let alone television. [Link]

You’d think if Bhutan really cared about moral degeneracy, they’d ban public drunkenness and penis art. ‘Culturally degrading’ and ‘distracts from studies’ is kind of the whole point of watching TV. I’ll grant the argument if the Powers That Be take crappy reality shows off air. Leave Beauty and the Geek — that isn’t a reality show, it’s fantasy

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The Engrish Raj

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Author Sujata Massey writes hapa mysteries set in Japan (thanks, tilo). Her Bengali father once lived in Cambridge — alert Jhumpa Lahiri!

Her mother is from Bonne, Switzerland. Her father is a Calcutta-born Bengali. They met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she grew up in Philadelphia and Berkeley… she spends each day writing about a half-Japanese, half-American antiques dealer cum detective living in the seedier streets of Tokyo. [Link]

Her books’ titles (‘pearl,’ ‘kimono,’ ‘samurai’) pitch Asian exoticism, which, to be fair, is common in mass-market mysteries. One booster disagrees, but the name of his bookstore undercuts his argument

“Sujata really evokes a modern, quirky Japan that most Americans aren’t familiar with,” said Joe Guglielmelli, co-owner of The Black Orchid mystery bookstore in New York City. “She’s the only mystery writer out there who’s doing modern-day Japan…” [Link]

Massey chose a Japanese father and an American mother for Shimura to go against the grain. So often, Massey explains, it’s the other way around: The wife is Asian and the husband is American. “Asian women are exoticized,” she sighs… [Link]

She writes about the baffling and often funny Engrish popular in Japan (Hinglish ain’t no slouch either):

She prefers collecting the details of Japanese life… a “Milk Pie Club” sweat shirt; a brand of chocolate pretzels called “Pickle”; the “That’s Donald!” slogan on another passenger’s clothes. [Link]

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An update on those Kids

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The New York Times follows up (tip from Angana) on those Kids with their Cameras [see previous posts 1,2,3]:

The children’s story is by now well known, thanks to the sad, beautiful film that Ms. Briski and Ross Kauffman made about the youngsters’ pinched lives in Sonagachi, the largest red-light district in Calcutta. Their world opened up when Ms. Briski, a photojournalist struck by the children’s plight, decided to give them cameras and teach them photography.

Avijit actually makes his observation in “Born Into Brothels: Reconnecting,” a short three-years-after addendum to the original film that shows the ecstatic reunion of Ms. Briski and most of the children. They were between 8 and 12 when “Born Into Brothels” was shot; they are entering adolescence now, taller, more mature and, thanks to her efforts, attending boarding schools. They appear to have been rescued.

Ms. Briski’s life has changed, too. In 2002, she founded Kids With Cameras, an international nonprofit organization that is building a school for the children of Sonagachi, partly with money from the sales of her students’ photographs. (Kids With Cameras has also established programs in Haiti, Jerusalem and Cairo.)

There were several comments following one of our previous entries that didn’t quite like the message this movie sent or the idea that Briski was “rescuing” these kids.  Most comments however were positive.  Anyone who has seen the movie can attest to the fact that their story is powerful.  If you live in New York then you can decide for yourself this weekend at an exhibit of their work.  I’m curious as to what became of the children:

Open to the public, Kids with Cameras: Calcutta will be presented at ICP, 1114 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd St., Aug. 10 through 14 from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm. The CINEMAX Reel Life presentation Born Into Brothels debuts TUESDAY, AUG. 16 (7:00-8:30 pm ET/PT), exclusively on CINEMAX. In tandem with the premiere, Born into Brothels: Reconnecting, a short update on the children featured in the documentary, will be available on CINEMAX On Demand beginning Aug. 11; Born Into Brothels will also be available on CINEMAX On Demand beginning that day, in advance of its CINEMAX debut.
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