At least She’s safe

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nun.jpg I’m an insomniac tonight, but you benefit from what my bloodshot eyes see on the local peacock affiliate. Read what happened to an asset to the abbey:

A Catholic nun who works to provide care for pregnant women was found with only minor injuries after a mysterious abduction from her convent in Southeast Washington yesterday, authorities said.
The 38-year-old nun, known as Sister Liann, was hanging laundry about 6:30 a.m. behind Our Lady Queen of Peace Convent when she noticed a man and woman on the grounds, police said.

Poor Sister Liann–a member of the Missionaries of Charity order that Mother Teresa created–approached the suspicious pair, only to have a blanket thrown over her head as she was forced into a waiting van. I shudder just typing that; I’ve read that once a victim is in a vehicle, their chances are slim to done.

Sister Liann’s peers were alarmed when she didn’t return from her chores to attend 7 a.m. Mass. Once the authorities were alerted, no resource was spared– I’m watching footage of recruits, bloodhounds and even a helicopter, all employed in the search for her.

It’s not clear what the criminals who abducted this nun wanted; they drove her around and later dropped her off two miles from her convent, which runs a soup kitchen among other programs for residents of this troubled neighborhood. Slightly injured (though I haven’t read in what way) she walked to a nearby Catholic church where she waited for help.

Detectives had not determined a motive. They were questioning the woman last night to learn more details. She is from India and speaks fractured English, police said.

D.C.’s archbishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick looked perplexed while on NBC 4 news a few minutes ago, as he reminded the public that these nuns “don’t have two nickles to rub together”.

Neighbors and top police officials expressed outrage over the abduction…
Several residents said the neighborhood is violent and a hotbed for drug dealing. The nuns, they said, seemed to take special care with locking their gate at night and keeping a close eye on suspicious people in the area.
“It’s wild,” said James Kelly, 52, who lives across the street from the convent. “The nuns are here helping people out. They would do anything for you. This is just crazy.”

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All look same and sound like Apu

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The prosecution of various Indian store owners swept up by Operation Meth Merchant has run into some problems. For one thing, they’re having a hard time demonstrating intent on the part of the store owners:

… when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to “finish up a cook,” some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious – one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, “Cheek your change before you leave a counter.” Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often – that they were doing “a cook” – is a “common term” meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English.

“This is not even slang language like ‘gonna,’ ‘wanna,’ ” said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. ” ‘Cook’ is very clear; it means food.” And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. “When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil.” [NYT]

Honestly, even having grown up in the US and knowing something about drug culture, I don’t know whether I would have caught the word “Cook” as drug slang in this context. The deeper root of the problem here, however, is that it’s very hard to write an effective law that says that something is legal unless it’s meant to be used to nefarious purposes. Sudafed, matches, camping fuel are either legal or illegal. You shouldn’t foist the burden on a convenience store owner to figure out how such common items will be used.

Another problem was that the prosecutors kept mixing up the different (unrelated) Patels involved:

Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel.  [NYT]
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Politicians are full of …

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It’s a very common observation to remark that politicians are full of fecal matter[NSFW], but usually this is a metaphorical remark about their character and moral worth. Very little attention has been paid by people to literal politician droppings … until now. It turns out there is no topic beneath the attention of the Indian bureaucrat: squat.JPG

Village council candidates in India should be allowed to stand for election only if they have a toilet at home, the rural development minister says. He said too many elected members “do not have toilet facilities in their own houses and defecate in the open”. Mr Singh said this activity was the main cause of the high incidence of diarrhoea in rural areas. [BBC]

Nor (surprisingly) is this a new issue:

Some states have already made amendments in the Panchayati Raj Act, which deals with the election of village councils, to ensure that elected members have toilet facilities in their households. The rural development minister suggested all chief ministers make similar provisions. [BBC]

Actually, concern with morning stool has long been a staple of desi culture. Mahatma Gandhi’s daily greeting to women was:

“Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?” [cite]

Indeed, one critic pointed out that

… Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning [cite]

It seems the minister is merely following a path made by giants … Continue reading →

5th company, 34th Native Infantry Regiment, North Dakota

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Quizman sends us the following message over our tipline:

[Here is an] Article on Aamir Khan and The Rising. How can The Sepoy(ia) mutiny refuse to carry it? 🙂

How indeed?

Circa 1857. A wounded soldier arrives at a doctor’s clinic after a skirmish with his British superior. The sepoy has challenged his senior’s order to shoot opium farmers who were agitating against the English East India Company’s monopoly. As he is being treated, the sepoy meets a courtesan, Heera, played by Rani Mukherjee. While the woman admires this young sepoy for his bravery, he snubs her. Heera shoots back: “Sepoy saheb, we prostitutes sell our bodies, but you sell your souls.”

The courtesan’s words stir the sepoy’s conscience. And Mangal Pandey turns a rebel. It eventually leads to a chain reaction which triggers off the first war of Independence in 1857, described by the British as the Sepoy Mutiny.

Director Ketan Mehta is bringing alive on an epic scale the story of Mangal Pandey, the sepoy of the 5th company, 34th Native Infantry Regiment, Barrackpore. And who better to play the rebel who roused society to challenge imperialism than a rebel himself.

“He is one of the few actors who stand by their convictions,” said Ketan, who hails Aamir Khan’s portrayal of Mangal Pandey as his finest ever. “A revolutionary and a rebel in his own way, Aamir is a contemporary Mangal Pandey in many ways. Only he would have given everything to a venture of this magnitude.”

Mangal P. even has a profile up on MySpace MSN Spaces complete with a blog.  If Kal Penn can do it why not Aamir Khan? Continue reading →

It Would Be Funny If It WasnÂ’t True

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wires_01.jpg

WhatÂ’s funnier that having someone search your bag before getting on a NYC subway? How about being searched because you have wires on your chest than lead to a small black box on your belt while you are trying to get on the subway?

A friend just emailed this picture of himself with a portable Holter EKG that is monitoring his heartbeat. He uses the subway and NJTransit to and from Manhattan.

Brown – check.

5 o’clock shadow – check.

Visible Wires – check

Something box-like on your belt – check.

Dude youÂ’re getting sent to Gitmo! Continue reading →

The profiling myth

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The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):

Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]

… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]

Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:

I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]

· Ă‚· Ă‚· Ă‚· Ă‚·

I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.

The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.

On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.

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F(l)agged on the Ferry

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It was bound to happen sooner or later and this past weekend it happened to me. My black backpack was searched. It wouldnÂ’t have been remarkable if it happened at a mass transit checkpoint. After all, statistically there was a good chance since I take the New York City subway and LIRR trains on a daily basis. But my brush with long arm of the law took place about 50 miles from Manhattan while standing in line to board a ferry to Fire Island.

For those of you not from the New York area, Fire Island is a small island off the coast of the southern fork of Long Island, New York. In the 1930s and 40s it was a haven for artists and writers and slowly turned into a summer retreat for mostly gays and lesbians. Today, Fire Island is synonymous with “gay beach”.

My wife son and I were with in line with our friends (a lesbian couple and their baby) waiting to board the ferry. As they opened the gate, and the line started to move, I shuffled along with the others in line. Right before I got I stepped on board, I was approached by a man in dark glasses. If he had asked me for my number, I would have been flattered.

“Sir, do you mind stepping aside? I just need to check your backpack.”

It sounded like a request. But it wasnÂ’t.

“Sure”, I said, and stood there while he checked my bag which was still strapped to my back.

After a cursory glance, he said “All done. That’s it”

As I began to leave, he said “Hold on, let me zip you up first”

He closed my bag and I stepped on to the ferry to join my family and friends.

After taking a seat on the top deck I looked to see if others were being checked. No one else was under scrutiny. Our friends who were renting a place on the island for the weekend met as us and while we were settling in one of them asked “Did they stop and check you before you boarded the ferry?”

“Yes” I replied, “Did they check you too?”

“Yeah, they checked my bag and after that I stepped out of line to see if they were doing this to others. I stood there counting to see if it was every 5th person or if there was a method. But I was the only one they searched.”

Now I must add that my friend who was searched is gay, Guyanese (Indian descent) and dark-skinned and I of course had a three day growth of beard.

IÂ’d like to think they were screening us to make sure werenÂ’t smuggling in anything that would take away from the “fabulousness” of the island. Continue reading →

Learning Hindi

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hindi.jpg Manorama has a great post about her experience taking Hindi at her university. She is a Bangladeshi-American graduate student, and is studying the language mainly for scholarly/ academic purposes, as I understand it. Her post dovetails nicely with one of the issues raised in my post yesterday — how and whether South Asians in the diaspora end up learning Hindi — and gives me the chance to research and reflect on the status of Hindi and other South Asian languages at American universities in general.

Manorama’s university decided it needed to separate the ‘Heritage’ Hindi students from the ‘non-Heritage’ (i.e., white, in this case) students. Students who grew up in households where Punjabi, Hindi, Gujurati, etc. were spoken generally go in the Heritage section, where less effort is spent on pronunciation and some basic vocabulary, while more effort is spent on grammar and so on. It’s arguably a good idea, though it results in de facto segregation. Continue reading →

Surviving a crash

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The first lesson I learned as a pilot is that airplanes are incredibly forgiving beasts.  Seriously, you almost have to try to crash them on purpose.  This runs counter to conventional beliefs because movies and the media always play up the stewardess being sucked out of the cabin angle, or the gremlin on the wing angle.  Learning how to crash-land a plane is one of the most interesting lessons that a begining pilot is taught.  Flying is not nearly as spontaneous as one thinks.  There is a checklist for everything.  My checklists were always on a clipboard that wrapped around my right leg, secured with a velcro strap.  If you think that’s kind of silly you should see the volumes of checklists that astronauts have to follow to do anything. 

Practicing crash landings is like a dress rehearsal for a performance you never wish to be in.  At the last minute you pull up of course, otherwise you have to explain to farmer John why there is a Cessna burning in his field.  The closest I ever came to an accident was in fact a landing.  I took a friend up for her birthday.  While landing, the plane bounced several times, several meters up off the runway.  She didn’t realize how badly I had botched it.  Never during all my instruction had such a thing happened but having memorized my checklist I was able to recover.  That brings me finally to Flight 358.  Science Daily reports:

All 297 passengers and 12 crew survived a catastrophic airliner fire Tuesday at Toronto’s international airport, a Canadian airport official said.

The official stressed he was quoting “unconfirmed reports.” He said there appeared to be only 14 minor injuries, but could not confirm that one of Air France Flight 358’s pilots had been taken to the hospital

He refused to speculate on the cause of the fire. The airliner after a flight from Paris.

Earlier, flame and smoke were pouring out of the passenger airliner at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport shortly after an accident around 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday.

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Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

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Writer, director, actor, and comedian Albert Brooks is working on a new film set to be released next year (tip from Srinath).  IMDB has only the most basic details about it (including cast), but Ain’t it Cool News has more (with spoiler warnings):

Okay, so I went to a screening in Pasadena of the new Albert Brooks film. I love this guy’s movies, but I wasn’t crazy about The Muse (I’m with Moriarty on that one). However here’s the truly excellent news: The Albert Brooks I know and love is in fact back!

The title is indeed: Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World and the premise is essentially the title. Albert Brooks, playing himself again – brilliant! (For any of you who haven’t seen Real Life, first, you’re lame. Second, run, don’t walk). So he gets called up by the powers that be, i.e. real life ex-Senator, and current day Law & Order cast member, Fred Dalton Thompson – who too is playing himself, to go to India and Pakistan and find out what makes the Muslims laugh. This is a late in the game attempt by the government to try something other than the “usual methods of spying and fighting” to figure out what the hell is going on on that side of the world.

Mr. Brooks appears somewhat incredulous. He even stops the meeting to point out that India is largely Hindu, not Muslim. To which the one of the suits responds that there are 150 million Muslims in India, and Fred Thomson says, “Is that enough for ya?” Hilarious.

DANGER DANGER SPOILER AHEAD!!!

So much happens once he’s in India, but so much doesn’t too, I mean this is really the brilliance of the movie, but let me save that for a minute. Albert spends the whole movie asking people what they think is funny and never gets any real answers. It turns out that Muslims (and Hindus) are pretty much like Americans; their sense of humor is completely idiosyncratic and doesn’t tell you jack shit about what the country as a whole might consider funny.

I can understand this last point.  Only a few people find funny the things I do.  I’d love to hear some stories of jokes that didn’t go over so well due to cultural differences from our readers.  There is more to the review above in case you aren’t too worried about spoilers.  Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is set for wide release in January 2006.  Let’s hope that for Brooks sake it doesn’t inspire any Van Gogh type critical reviews.

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