Always a bridesmaid, never a bride

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When Dias turns into nights… Ratz! Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Mumbai mandarin, is outpolled by the Frankish Pope:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope today, taking the name Benedict XVI, then telling a wildly cheering crowd from a balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica, “I entrust myself to your prayers.”

Rediff isn’t ready to bury the hatchet just yet:

He is known as ‘the Pope’s enforcer’ due to his uncompromising conservatism… Ratzinger was head of… the church’s chief think-tank that has dominated discussions on sexual morality and birth control and prevented liberals from gaining ground.

Got that? An Indian publication’s chiding the Vatican for being too conservative.

On balance, it’s a good thing that Dias didn’t prevail. The cardinals’ traditional cry of ‘habemus papam,’ or ‘we have a Pope,’ might have been changed to ‘habemus papad,’ or ‘we have a crispy pre-meal appetizer.’

Here’s Ennis’ post on the blasphemous betting.

Trees married in Calcutta

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Residents in Calcutta, India have married together a pair of trees in hopes of warding off evil:

The marriage between the sacred trees — whose trunks were decorated with red cloth, streaks of vermilion and marigold garlands — was followed by a banquet attended by nearly 1,000 people. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Proving once and for all that it doesn’t really matter who, or even what, is getting married — an Indian wedding will always be way too big.

Reuters/Yahoo!: Indians ‘marry’ sacred trees to ward off evil eye

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Illinois likes politicians with weird names

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Illinois voters have gone and done something crazy once again. First they elected Ba-rack O-bam-a as a U.S. Senator, and now conservative DuPage County has gone and elected Moin Moon Khan and Esin Busche as township trustees. The Chicago Tribune (free registration required) reports:

No one would mistake a gathering of DuPage County Republicans for the United Nations, but the party took a significant step last week toward shaking its image as a party dominated by “old white-haired men” when Moin Moon Khan and Esin Busche were elected township trustees.

Party officials say as far as they can tell, Khan, an Indian-born longtime Chicago-area activist who works as a computer network administrator, and Busche, a Turkish-born chemist, are the first Muslim Republicans elected to public office anywhere in the state–and a symbol of the party’s new outreach effort in a rapidly diversifying county.

“This is a small office, and for me it may be a very small individual achievement,” said Khan. “However, I think it’s a giant milestone for the minority communities in general and the Muslim American community in particular.”

What’s even more astonishing is that Khan beat out someone named “Bob Wagner.” I found the following quote by Rasheed Ahmed, coordinator of the Illinois Muslim Political Coordinating Council, quite interesting:

Muslims don’t tend to naturally gravitate to either party, Ahmed said, because there are parts of both the Democratic and Republican positions that appeal to them.

There was also this little gem by Paul Hinds, chairman of the York Township Republican Party.

“We get pegged too much as 70-year-old white-haired men. That’s a stereotype we always have to work against,” he said. “That’s not what we are.”

Moon’s personal story is quite inspiring as related at NRI-Worldwide:

Khan, who came to the US in 1986 with, plans to become a journalist, switched to computers after getting a journalism degree from the University of Georgia, because being a scribe “was not financially lucrative”.

But politics was in his veins, he said, and when he moved to Illinois, he founded the Bihar Cultural Association and served on the boards of more than a dozen civic organisations in the past 15 years.

“Being a scribe was not financially lucrative?” Yeah, no sh*t. Continue reading →

White American Christians Emulate Arranged Marriages

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Abhi’s post about the Prom got me thinking about the non-trivial number of Christians I’ve met over the years who follow desi-like restrictive dating rituals. One friend of mine went no further than holding hands with his intended until they got engaged! Two seconds (literally) on Google yielded a (white American) group that proposes something very similar to “modern arranged marriages”

Let’s be honest for a minute, when we were looking for a spouse, we looked at all the wrong things. All the guys look for is how the girl looks. All the girl looks at is whether or not the guy is nice to her. Single people have a very poor track record in looking for the important characteristics of the heart when they are looking for a mate. On the other hand, there is nobody who knows children like their parents do (except God). So, parents will know the character traits of their children; their strong and weak areas, their likes and dislikes, and their personality. As such, the parents are in a position to make a more accurate evaluation of the compatibility of a particular man, or women with their own kids. Please note, I’m not talking about the parents choosing a mate without the child’s participation in the decision. What I’m saying is that the best possible decision will be made when the parents and child work together … If either they, or us as parents see a possibility in someone, we will mention it. Then, we will investigate that person, to find out everything we can about them and their family. If they still look like a possible candidate for marriage after this investigation, we will go together to talk with that possible mate and his or her parents. [cite]

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Staying home from The Prom

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I keep hearing about the growing “dish cities” in Europe and especially in France. “Dish cities” are named as such because they are predominantly Muslim areas where the residents keep to themselves and have television programming from the Arab world beamed into their homes via a satellite dish. The danger here is that this leads to an extreme, often self-imposed isolation, and a local set of laws and norms that often ignores the laws and cultural norms of the adopted country. Is it possible that such “dish cities” might eventually form in the U.S.? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on some young adults whose religious views guide them to skip the prom.

With prom season in full swing, Najeeb and her Muslim peers are learning one of life’s lessons: Principles matter more when something is sacrificed to uphold them.

Each year, many teen Muslims choose not to take part in one of the hallmark social events of high school. For them, staying true to their Muslim identity is staying true to themselves, no matter how hard.

Proms – a ritual of dating and intimate dancing that for some is associated with drinking and sex – conflict with Islamic beliefs. Islam requires Muslims to dress modestly, abstain from alcohol and avoid close contact with members of the opposite sex. Such interactions are considered haram, or forbidden.

Meeting these standards can be an especially tall order for teens driven by raging hormones, intense curiosity and a fear of alienation.

“It’s a challenge,” said Naba Mallick, 17, a senior at Divine Savior Holy Angels High School in Milwaukee, who didn’t attend prom last year. “To be the one who has stayed strong in religious beliefs, it’s a big deal.”

Since I live in Los Angeles, I am always looking at stories in terms of a possible script for a Hollywood movie. I am thinking about updating Footloose, but with Muslim characters.

To be clear, not all young Muslims skip prom. And among those who do, they are not alone; many conservative Christian families also frown upon dancing and dating among teens.

Alas, it just isn’t easy for young studs to deal with this kind of thing:

Living in America and holding true to his Islamic beliefs are a delicate dance for Zeki Arain, a junior at Brookfield Central High School.

Arain, 16, sometimes struggles between being a teenage boy and a practicing Muslim. With thick dark hair, pale skin and a sharp wit, Arain knows girls have been sweet on him. He’s had crushes, too.
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Who writes the history books?

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Whoever holds the pen, that’s who. As we’ve all heard, there have been lots of protests (some turning violent) in China, over the version of history found in some Japanese school textbooks. As anyone who, like me is a fan of Zinn’s “A People’s History” knows, you must always remain vigilant against inaccuracies in history and social studies. Some desis in the D.C. suburbs have been doing just that. As reported in the Washington Post:

Fairfax County businesswoman Sandhya Kumar teaches her three daughters about other countries, cultures and religions. She wants them to take pride in their Indian heritage and Hindu faith — and to respect and understand other views.

But when Kumar of Lorton scanned several world history textbooks recommended for Fairfax County schools, she worried that students would come away with a distorted and negative impression of her homeland’s culture.

“I thought the American children will think India is some Third World country with pagan beliefs and backward thinking, not a forward-thinking country,” Kumar said.

She and dozens of other Indian American parents launched a campaign to change the way their history is taught in Fairfax, the nation’s 12th-largest school system. Their lobbying has prompted school officials to rethink presentations of India and Hinduism in classrooms and has sparked efforts to develop a more sophisticated and thoughtful curriculum.

So what in particular was inaccurate in the textbooks?

Balaji Hebbar, a George Washington University religion professor who was one of three scholars hired by Fairfax County to review the books cited by the group of Indian parents, said he and his colleagues found few factual errors. But he said the lessons boiled down a complex culture to “karma, cows and caste.”

“It’s as if I were making a picture book of the United States, and I took pictures of the bad parts of D.C., the run-down parts of New York City and the smoke stacks of Cleveland and left out the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty,” Hebbar said. “I would be telling the truth, but I would only be telling half the truth.”

The very open and gracious way in which the school district responded to the parent’s concerns is quite encouraging to me, especially in light of all the craziness that usually seems to undo the educational system in this country instead of helping it become better.

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DC Event – The Hindu Equilibrium

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SM Reader Anjali, hailing from the Institute for Humane Studies, writes in to point mutineers towards a Desi-themed libertarian book preso at the Cato Institute in DC. Cato is far and away my favorite thinktank and seeing them directly take on Desi stuff is just too cool for words.

The Hindu Equilibrium: India C. 1500 B.C. – 2000 A.D. (Oxford University Press, 2005) BOOK FORUM Thursday, May 12, 2005 4:00 PM [EST] (Reception to follow) …India is an emerging economic giant. Deepak Lal will explain the role that modernity and tradition have played in that country’s recent moves to the market after decades of stagnation. Why has democracy succeeded and the caste system survived in India? Why did India switch to more liberal economic policies, and why is it likely to overtake China in the race for economic growth? Lal will provide answers to those questions and review India’s development challenges. Anne Krueger will comment on the record and prospects of Indian growth and poverty reduction.

Live audio and video streams from the event will be freely viewable on the web. Continue reading →

Looking out for “A” & “T”

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Saurav, who co-writes on the new blog Detained, updates us on the situation of the 16 year-old Bangladeshi and Guinean girls that the FBI recently detained, ostensibly as potential suicide bombers. My original posting about this mentioned that the family was not economically capable of fighting the government and Detained elaborates.

As you may have read recently in the New York Times and a number of other publications, two Muslim teenage girls have been detained. One is from Guinea, and the other is from Bangladesh. The government is using immigration law to jail these 16 year olds without charging them with a crime, holding secret proceedings against them without giving them access to the evidence that is being used against them, and slandering them in the media as “suicide bombers” without providing proof.

In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, “Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers.” Another official at the Department of Homeland Security commented, “We’re not spun up about this case.” So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane injustice.

Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.

The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety. The remainder of expenses are for food, transportation and any legal expenses (although the lawyer is currently doing the case for free). Visits to the lawyer and to the detention center take 3 hours each way and cost money. It may also be necessary to fundraise for airline tickets for some family members in the future. There’s enough money available right now from various sources to cover them for a few days, but their situation could become dire very soon.

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