The more things change…

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Consider if you will some of the following quotes:

“There are Koreans, Chinese, and Hindoos numbering over one billion. Allow them to secure a foothold in the United States, and they will, within a few generations, sweep like an avalanche of death from the Himalayas around the globe”

or

“It is essential that the blood of the American-Europeans of this country, who together with their ancestors developed civilization to its present state, should be kept pure and free from the taint of the decadent Orientalism of China, Japan and India. We have no quarrel with those people. We wish them well in their own countries, but we do not want them in ours.”

or

“[Indian religions are] debauched with deeds of lust and blood…Many of the Indian deities, given to lustful amours, are especially worshipped by the people….It is not surprising that religion in India is not only divorced from morality but married to vice…much indecency exists in India under the guise of religion, many of the temple dancing girls are merely consecrated prostitutes, and in many cases respectable women are led to lives of shame.”

Do you get angry when you read this? Or perhaps it sounds vaguely familiar to you? When compared to the transcript of the Jersey Guys radio show that I posted a few days ago the above quotes aren’t that radically different. Well what if I told you the quotes above are all about a century old? Indolink.com has a very educational article titled, Fear and Loathing: Hinduphobia in America .

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Blogs as Freudian Telephone

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When you were a kid, did you ever play telephone? That game where a whole bunch of people would sit in a circle, the first would pass a message to the second, and so on until it came back, having changed in some bizarre and unpredictable way? Well, blogging on news stories can be like that, as bloggers pass along a story it becomes simply an inkblot, showing us more about the bloggers involved than about the original item. Here, I offer a minor example of such an indianinkblot from two of my favorite economics bloggers:

Recently Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution wrote another in his series of wonderful Outsourcing for Everything posts:

Why not grade exam papers in India?  Brad DeLong offers the link.  The obvious question is what we really need professors for anyway  — are we simply magnets of personality to keep students interested?

Working backwards, we find Brad’s story etitled  Offshoring Creeps Closer to the Professoriate! which contains the following blurb:

BBC News: British exam papers India bound: “Thousands of exam papers from England will be sent to India later this year as part of the marking process. Critics in England say the move is the latest example of cost-cutting by outsourcing, and will result in errors in exam marking and delays in results. The exam board behind the initiative, AQA, told the BBC that no marking would take place in India and that the move would make marking more efficient.

What’s the original story really about? It’s about how the brits are scanning in handwritten one word answers on exam sheets, and sending them to India to be transcribed. There is no actually exam marking in India at all! None! To their credit, neither blogger says that there was any grading going on in India, but I’ll bet many sloppy readers might have come away with that impression.

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Just deserts

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Imagine being a poor Indian villager. You’re recruited for an honorable blue-collar job in the Middle East. Your dad borrows money to buy you the ticket. Your travel agent takes pity on you and buys you decent clothes for your first day on the job.

When you arrive, customs searches your belongings. You’re shocked when they tell you they found a small amount of heroin in your shoes and throw you in jail. You quickly realize the travel agent was not as generous as he seemed. You spend the next five years in lockup. The Indian embassy doesn’t help.

One fine day, the police take you out back and cut off your head. Then, while closing out your case, they realize they made a mistake and send a message to the Indian embassy: you were innocent after all. Shrug. Body’s been disposed of. Shit happens. Whaddya gonna do.

Unfortunately, it’s not a macabre short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Naickam Shahjahan, a poor Muslim from Kerala, was beheaded two months ago in Saudi Arabia for a crime he didn’t commit (via Prashant Kothari). 1.3 million Indians work in Saudi Arabia, and 18 were beheaded in 2003. But when innocent Brits are caught in the Saudi sharia system, their government usually manages to get them out.

… an undetermined number of foreigners, among them Indians, have been sentenced to death in the kingdom and await execution. Details of their trials and the evidence presented to convict them are treated as a State secret. “The tragedy is that in many cases, the condemned men did not know they had been sentenced to death, and their embassies were only informed after the fact,” says Menon.

Last year, an Indian diplomat in the Gulf said no advance information is given to the embassy before Indians are beheaded. “We get the information after the execution from local newspapers,” he said. After the execution, the body is not returned to the family. Relatives receive no official information about the location of the mortal remains in Saudi Arabia…

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Do you feel safer?

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Yesterday, Vinod reported on the convinction of Hemant Lakhani, would be merchant of death. Lakhani is clearly scum:

Lakhani was filmed clapping his hands in glee as he admired the missile he thought he had single-handedly smuggled into the US and was clearly delighted with his achievement. [cite]

However, I don’t feel any safer today. Consider the following:

1.  Lakhani was a nobody who got set up in a sting.  He wasn’t a big time arms dealer before the FBI came to him, he was a two-time loser in textiles who “had declared bankruptcy, owed taxes on his house, was evicted from the office where he ran his clothing business and owed money on bounced cheques.” From what I can tell, he had no prior involvement with arms dealing, nor any prior association with “terrorists” (it’s in quotes since the FBI guy was a ringer) before the sting.

2.  He was completely incompetent as an arms dealer. Lakhani spent 2 years trying to find missiles to sell to the FBI’s fake terrorist buyer but he still couldn’t get his hands on any weapons. He was so clueless that, according to the fake buyer,  Lakhani was unfamiliar with terms such as ‘ammo’.” His lawyer characterized him as: 

a failed businessman, motivated solely by money who “couldn’t finish a deal if his life depended on it” and would not have done so without a hefty government operation behind him.  [cite]

3.  To make the arrest, the FBI had to supply the arms for Lakhani to sell to them. The FBI supplied both “the arms buyer, and Russian agents who posed as sellers” They even smuggled the “missile” to New Jersey. Before that point, for almost 2 years, the buyer never received any military hardware from Lakhani.

I am not trying to defend Lakhani’s actions. He did something criminal and has been sent to jail. I am simply not convinced that there are any fewer arms or (real) arms dealers in the world today as a result. Continue reading →

How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and…

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By the title alone I think I’m going to like this book. Little Brown & Company has offered Kaavya Viswanathan a $500,000, two book deal. The Financial Express provides the details:

YouÂ’re 17 and want to get into USÂ’ Harvard University, but first what do you do about those infernal jumping hormones that every gal goes through post-teens. Being an Indian, you donÂ’t indulge your sex-oriented daydreams (study first, pleasure later). So the next best option is to pen them to paper and get rid of the hots.

In a huge first, US born Kaavya Viswanathan did exactly that and more. Little Brown & Company, a respected 109-year-old publishing house offered Kaavya a $500,000 two-book deal with the first one to be out next spring titled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In. Considering that first-time writers get $10,000, Kaavya sure made a killing.

Writing is also the way I get rid of my “hots.”

The New York Sun (registration required) goes into more detail:

Ms. Viswanathan began writing the novel while still at the Bergen County Academy at Hackensack. She’s the only child of her Indian-born parents, Viswanathan Rajaraman, a neurosurgeon, and Mary Sundaram, a gynecologist.

“Everybody in my family, including my parents, won science prizes,” Ms. Viswanathan said. “I was the one with the writing gene – and I’ve no idea where that came from. My parents are still in a state of shock. When I’ve gone home on some weekends, they look at me working at my computer and surely wonder, ‘Who is that strange person?'”

What I can’t help noticing is that a 17-year-old writer, seems to like writing about day-dreams and possibilities, and getting wild, whereas older writers like to focus on why Indian men (or women) suck.

“The main character is a girl of Indian descent who’s totally academically driven, and when she senses from a Harvard admissions officer that her personal life wasn’t perhaps well-rounded, Ms. Mehta goes out and does what she thinks ‘regular’ American kids do – get drunk, kiss boys, dance on the table,” Ms. Viswanathan said.

Can I get a “hell yeah?” Please, anyone? 🙂

Desilit Daily comments: I can’t tell if this is more likely to sell to desi high school students applying to colleges, or to the parents desperate to get them in to Harvard…

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Desi uncle in the import / export bidness

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Oh simple trader, I hope thee rots in hell –

NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) – A British man was found guilty of trying to provide material support to terrorists on Wednesday for selling a shoulder-launched missile to an undercover FBI informant posing as an Islamic militant seeking to attack the United States. Hemant Lakhani, 69, a British citizen born in India, was found guilty of five criminal charges by a U.S. District Court jury in Newark, New Jersey, that began deliberating on Tuesday.

His defense – racial profiling –

But while the prosecution depicted Lakhani as an enthusiastic broker eager to supply a terrorist group, the defense said he was a victim of overzealous law enforcement in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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Here we go again

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Jerseyguys.jpg

Honestly I’m soooo tired of the following topic. I know that I should be completely jaded by such things already, but I like to think that they can still bring out the fight in me. The same mob mentality over the radiowaves that we have seen in the past has happened once again. SM tipster “Ayyner” alerts us to yet another racist outburst by some East Coast on-air personalities. The following is a partial transcript (a longer transcript here) of the Jersey Guys Radio Show on NJ 105.1 FM. The Jersey Guys are Craig Carton and Ray Rossi.

[Caller]: You just said it all, the last couple of Â… callers, I guess they donÂ’t know that they live in America and weÂ’re being overrun. I had just moved out of Edison because of what has happened in the past 10 yearsÂ… Orientals are all along, the whole complete route 27. And Indians have taken over Edison in north and all over.

[Carton]: Damn Orientals and Indians.

[Caller]: I..i moved out..36 years IÂ’ve lived in Edison

[Carton]: And what was the biggest problem you had with the Orientals and the Indians ?

[Caller]: I canÂ’t handle them! ThereÂ’s no American people anymore.

[Carton]: Eh..

[Caller]: There shoving us the hell out!

[Carton]: ItÂ’s like youÂ’re a foreigner in your own country isnÂ’t it?

In my opinion the above excerpt is rather tame compared to the rest. Their ignorant invective seems to be particularly focused on East Asians. Unlike previous on-air incidents, this seems to have occurred in the middle of a “political discussion” instead of one meant to be funny. Specifically, the conversation centered around the upcoming race for mayor of Edison, NJ. The discussion basically degenerated into Carton bashing liberals who he thinks care too much about getting minority votes. You should be concerned with the majority (“me”) to paraphrase Carton. According to an article from a few weeks ago this duo has a large audience.

Touted as the most listened to FM talk show, the afternoon program commands nearly 1 million listeners a week, said Ray Handel, director of marketing and promotions for the station.

Of course this is really nothing new. Limbaugh gets away with this kind of crap all the time but is clever enough to not be so blatant. If you can’t even be clever enough to veil your racism [sarcasm] you deserve to be smacked off the airways. In any case, we’ve been informed that “South Asian legal organizations are coming together again to craft a concerted response.”

Update (4/27/05): The reaction. Continue reading →

‘Four Weeks in Bombay’ on $20

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Hollywood Masala’s Santhosh Daniel directs our attention to “Four Weeks in Bombay,” an exciting experiment in reality filmmaking/human torture:

Set in Mumbai (Bombay), the film follows four continuous weeks in the life of twenty-year-old San Diego-native, Phil Mikal, as he steps off the plane and into one of the most compelling cities in the world. Given just twenty American dollars, a few necessities and no translator, Mikal a.k.a. Jonny Quest can end his involvement in the project only if serious illness or injury occurs and, voyeurs can watch his adventure via broadband-access from May 6th-June 3rd for just $2. [Hollywood Masala]

Here are the rules for Mikal, who must have agreed to them while under some form of intoxication or duress:

1. The game starts as soon as he lands at the Airport in Bombay and ends at his scheduled flight back to the U.S.
2. He will only have $20 American dollars to get him started.
3. He will only be allowed to bring daily necessities like clothes, toothbrush, shaving cream, deodorant and so forth.
4. He’s not allowed to advertise that he’s only there for 4 weeks to anyone!
5. He’s allowed to get a job or do anything he has to do to survive as long as he complies with the rules.
6. Since he is aware of the project ahead of time, he’s allowed to do whatever research he may feel is necessary.
7. He is only allowed to forfeit the project if he catches a serious illness or gets a serious physical injury. Common cold, flu, stuff of that nature doesn’t count.
8. He will be allowed to take any required/suggested medical shots preparing him for the trip.
9. We’re not allowed to help him at all…not even translate. We’ll be operating the camera and only act as observers and leave the viewer to draw their own conclusions. [Four Weeks in Bombay]

Still, $20 is a shockingly low amount of money for four weeks in India. How will Mikal earn more cash?

Since your visa is for traveling purposes only, legally you can’t get a job in Bombay. Have you thought about how you’re going to overcome that challenge?
Either by not getting a job and trying to make money in alternate ways… [Four Weeks in Bombay]

Ah, indeed, there are many “alternate ways” for a pretty white boy to make money in Bombay. Hopefully, this will also be taped, making the $2 access fee a downright bargain. The adventure starts on May 6, and the price of admission unlocks full access to the entire show.

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Resort opens world’s first all-glass underwater eatery

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This has to be what fish and lobsters in tanks at seafood restaurants dream of — a glass case in the ocean filled with juicy humans, fattening themselves up with rich resort food:

The world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant has opened at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa on the Island of Rangali. The restaurant, called Ithaa – meaning ‘pearl’ in the Maldives’ language of Dhivehi – is situated on the seabed, six metres beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. All the walls of the restaurant are transparent, offering 180 degree views of the surrounding marine life and coral reef. [World Leisure News & Jobs]

World Leisure News & Jobs: Underwater restaurant for Hilton

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Forbes’ breakdown of Lakshmi Mittal’s crib

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Lakshmi Mittal’s fortress isn’t made of steel, which calls into question his affinity for the source of his eye-popping wealth:

The steel magnate set real estate records last year when he paid $128 million for a townhouse in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens…Mittal’s mansion, tucked between Kensington Palace and the Sultan of Brunei’s spread, has garage space for 20 cars, and is embellished with marble taken from the same quarry as that for the Taj Mahal. [Forbes]

Forbes: Homes of the billionaires 2005 — Lakshmi Mittal

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