Going to plan B

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Indians are routing around their ineffectual local governments:

Fareed Zakaria agrees in Newsweek that India really feels like a boomtown right now… Tired of waiting for the government, some desis are running parallel local services…

There’s little regulation by private tort… because the courts take 30 years to resolve cases. So you see exposed wires hanging from strip mall ceilings, parking lots using barbed wire at toddler level and outdoor barbers using straight razors. You still risk stomach upset or worse by eating food from unlicensed street vendors, which makes you want to just shake the local babus and say, ‘Come on, guys, this is just so basic. Nothing should come between me and my kachoris…’

I have new respect for government regulation of food, transportation safety and public health. If ‘there are no atheists in foxholes,’ I’d add that there are no pure libertarians in developing nations. If ‘no revolution on empty bellies,’ I’d say that libertarianism is uniquely a rich person’s vice 🙂

Because the legal system doesn’t work, it forces people to turn to the parallel legal system, gangsters. Any time you see a country with a parallel legal system, a parallel black economy, parallel power generation and parallel street sweeping, you know its government is dysfunctional.

Read the full piece.

War Nerd on the Kargil Incident

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kargil.jpgReader & frequently thoughtful commentor KXB wrote into the Tip Line with a link to War Nerd’s column on the Kargil incident. The writing is entertaining and provocative to say the least –

Some guy in India asked me to write about the 1999 Indo-Pakistani fighting in Kargil, a patch of high-altitude ice in Kashmir at the northern tip of the Subcontinent. This is some of the most worthless and fought-over ground in the world, up where the borders between Pakistan, India and China smear together like the middle of a pie sliced by a spastic. … hand-to-hand fighting 18,000 feet up in the Himalayas makes me tired just thinking about it. It must’ve been some pretty slow-motion combat, like Tom and Jerry on valium. Lunge, take a five-minute breathing break, lunge again. …Kargil was the only time two modern armies fought at such an insane altitude. …And that’s where losing 400 men in a high-profile, harmless little war like Kargil comes in handy. Those websites I mentioned list the names of every single Indian soldier killed up there. When you consider how many Indians die every day, with nobody giving a damn at all, it’s pretty amazing that these 400 dead guys get so much adoring press. When you look at the list of names, you see why. Some of the names are obviously Sikhs (Sikhs love armies), but there are plenty of Hindu names, Muslim names — for all I know there are Zoroastrian names in there too. It’s a chance to sob together over those dead integrated units — like those good old corny WW II movies where every platoon has this melting-pot roll call: “OK, lissen up, Bernstein, deNapoli, O’Brien, Kowalski, and Running Bear!”

Heh. For a more balanced discussion, there’s always Wikipedia’s entry on the Kargil War.

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Kumar’s ‘Salon’

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Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek loves how Harold and Kumar shows unremarkable, assimilated hyphen-Americans instead of relegating minorities to ethnic curio shops (thanks, Razib):

“Harold & Kumar”… may have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year. .. [W]hat’s most impressive about “Harold & Kumar”… is that it didn’t dawn on me until the movie was nearly over that its two protagonists weren’t your usual average white kids… There’s something freeing in the way “Harold & Kumar” treats its characters’ ethnic backgrounds not as a novelty, as a stumbling block or even as an advantage, but as a simple fact… Race is an issue in “Harold & Kumar,” but it’s not the issue…

Of course, Zacharek is using Spanglish as her benchmark, so make of that what you will. I think we know her inspiration for the story:

“Harold & Kumar” is a reminder that our great land is made up of people from many nations, and a few of them are quite stoned. Let he who is without sin light the first joint.

Here’s more on how Harold and Kumar deals with race.

Requesting Eartha Kitt

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I thought the desi accent was good for cutting tension?

More customers now ask to speak to an American after they hear an operator with an Indian accent… “In India, the operators are doing a lot of the courtesies they are trained to do,” … but they often miss the nuance of conversations.

I didn’t know you had a choice in voice. I’ll take an Eartha Kitt with a side of Scarlett Johansson, please. Silly Americans! You can request a native, but all your call are belong to us:

[M]onitoring is also moving offshore. HyperQuality, which is based in Seattle, has 100 call monitors in New Delhi who eavesdrop on call center workers around the United States.

Eavesdropping on American call center workers probably leads to some interesting conversations in Delhi. ‘Eh, Seema, vat does it mean, “I am all crunked up”?’

Quick, call the desi cultural conspiracy! Stat!

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Tyler Cowen reports that, in a step backwards, “Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons.” [The step backwards is Tyler’s interpretation, not mine. I’ve always been fond of Lasagna, and indifferent towards CTM]

Although Tyler is quoting the Beeb, he fails to quote the whole three sentences of the passage, which would explain their methodology for arriving at such a conclusion:

Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons. Sainsbury’s sold 13.9 million lasagne ready meals and just 7.4 million chicken tikka massalas last year. Tesco sold 9.8 million lasagnes and 6.3 million chicken tikka massalas.

If the best way to find a country’s national dish is to look at their choice of frozen food entr&eacutees, then clearly we are losing ground to the Italians. Still, I doubt that curry will be easily dislodged from that special place in a Briton’s heart: even racist yobs eat curry before going out to work it off with a spot of PakiBashing. I suspect that curry has simply become so British to most Brits, that to them Lasagne is a far more exotic food item, one with a bit more pizzazz. They’ll be back. If not, we’ll deploy our secret weapon: Gobi Aloo.

Speaking of frozen CTK, when I spent a few weeks living in London I conducted a taste test by trying different frozen versions from different supermarkets. What I found was that the higher end supermarkets (like Sainsbury’s) had used superior ingredients (thus accounting for the higher cost of their entr&eacutee) but fewer spices, and that the best frozen CTK came from the lowest rent supermarket, a rather shady Safeway in a place I didn’t want to be caught after dark.

p.s. anybody know how to get accents above my “e”s, I’m embarassed to say “entree” Thanks Andrea. And merci for letting my spelling error pass unremarked! p.p.s. I have no idea what stat means, I’ve just always wanted to say it

‘Chaos Theory’… it’s like buttah

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Here’s a chance to catch one of my favorite plays by one of my favorite playwrights while scratching your desi sense of economy at the same time. A free staged reading of Chaos Theory by Anuvab Pal is taking place Mon 1/17 and Tue 1/18 in Manhattan.

Chaos Theory is an intensely romantic, delayed-gratification talkie for people who dig wordplay — you Before Sunset, Raincoat, Tumhari Amrita, Woody Allen fans. Y’all know who you are, you silver-tongued scoundrels.

The reading is being put on by Pulse Ensemble Theatre; Rajesh Bose, Sanjiv Jhaveri and Rita Wolf (My Beautiful Laundrette, Homebody / Kabul) star, Alexa Kelly directs.

Chaos Theory, 1/17-1/18, 7 PM, at the American Place Theatre, 520 8th Ave. (36th/37th), 22nd floor, 212.695.1596; free admission

Excuse me. I think somethings hanging from your turban.

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turbanmta.jpg

Last October I reported here on how the Justice Department laid the smack down on the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority for attempting to require Sikhs and other religious minorities to discard any head coverings while on the job. Well it seems as though the MTA is trying to be “cute” in how it complies with the Justice Department’s wrath. From Reuters:

A Sikh subway driver is being forced to wear a badge on his turban or face being demoted and sent to the stock yards, his lawyer said on Thursday.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (news – web sites), which operates the subways, told motorman Kevin Harrington to wear the MTA badge or he cannot not work with customers.

“If he wears it, he can operate in customer service areas, if not then he’s relegated to yard duty,” said Charles Seaton, spokesman for the MTA’s Transit Authority.

“I feel wearing the patch violates my religious freedom,” Harrington, 53, told The New York Daily News. “The turban is a sacred space, so it’s like asking a priest to wear a logo on his vestments.”

Harrington’s lawyer, Amardeep Singh, said his client had always worn the turban in his 25 years on the job, but it was only after “9/11 that the agency tried to get its Sikh and Muslim employees to stop wearing their turbans and hijabs.”

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The life [(or lives) saved by] aquatic [vegetation]

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There’s the high tech approach to minimizing tsunami deaths — a global alert system that tries to predict tsunamis — and then there’s the low tech approach — mangrove swamps. This should not be a surprise – wetlands are very effective at combatting flooding, for example, far more so than levees and dams. And while it is anthropomorphic to say that “the wetlands are nature’s method of protecting people,” it is useful to observe that wetlands have preserved many lands and try to cultivate them for that purpose. The Christian Science Monitor reports [snippets only]:

Mr. Selvum says that 172 families were saved from the tsunami in the fishing village of Thirunal Thoppu in India’s Tamil Nadu state only because the mangroves are thriving and dense there. He also mentions three other Tamil Nadu villages where damage had been minimized by the aquatic trees. “Every village has more than 100 families, so just think of the number of lives saved,” he says. “Even though the mechanical impact of a tsunami is enormous, and is bound to destroy the first line of mangroves, the water suddenly slows down as it moves farther in,” Selvum says.

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The Crossover

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Sepia Mutiny has just received its first mention in the REAL news. Journalist Francis Assisi (whose stories we have referenced here before) writes an article regarding the Power99 Fiasco (see here and here) for IndoLink.com:

Spewing hate and vitriol at Indians and at outsourcing may make good comedy shows for Americans. But not for Indian Americans. Not anymore.

Thanks to alert American bloggers (notably Turbanhead, Sepiamutiny, Herstory and Moorishgirl) Indian Americans are raging mad at the racism and sexism displayed by a Philadelphia radio station last week when its African-American DJ, phoned an India-based call center worker, showering her with obscenities on-air, and then offering her humiliation to his listeners as entertainment.

Some Sepia Mutiny readers will note their comments in the story. Does this mean that the Mutiny is now legit? Never!