The Flying Sikh: Direct Flights from Amritsar to Birmingham

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I used to go from Birmingham to Amritsar by foot, but it was a very slow walk!

Birmingham International Airport (BIA) has celebrated the launch of a new non-stop long haul charter service with specialist tour operator, Midland Airways. Travellers are now able to fly direct to Amritsar, the City of the Golden Temple, from Birmingham each Friday. This service will increase to two flights per week before the end of the month and will see a third weekly departure in early December.

The flights are operated by a new airline to Birmingham, Slovak Airlines, using a 215 seater 767-200 aircraft. Although the service is operated as a charter flight, passengers have a choice of two classes – economy (203 seats) and first class (12 seats). Prices start from GBP299 return.

Currently, the weekly service departs from Birmingham each Friday at 21:00, arriving the next morning into Amritsar Airport at 09:30. The return flight leaves Amritsar on Sunday at 13:30 and arrives into Birmingham at 20:00 the same evening. These flight times will change as new frequencies are added.

[FYI: The original Flying Sikh was Milkha Singh, “the only Indian to have broken an Olympic record” (unfortunately, he broke the record in the 400m preliminaries, and then came in 4th in a photo finish in the 1960 Rome Olympics.)]

Patenting the chapati

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Last week, the European Patent Office revoked agricultural conglomerate Monsanto’s patent on a variety of Indian Nap Hal wheat, widely used in chapatis because it doesn’t rise when baked (via Boing Boing). Indians had cried biopiracy, reacting the way we would if France had patented apple pie (Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri).

The wheat’s low gluten content gives it low water absorption and elasticity. One scientist elaborated on how the patent’s central claim was not novel:

The Indian wheat patent by Monsanto has lower gluten, which is responsible for its lower elasticity… This is the trait that is the core of Monsanto’s patent and it is a trait evolved by farmers breeding in India. Introducing the trait into a cross… is an obvious step any breeder familiar with the art of breeding can undertake. Monsanto’s claim is clearly not novel. This is a clear case of piracy of India’s indigenous knowledge of breeding and cooking.

Yes, breeding and cooking: the desi core competencies. The patent opposition was filed in conjunction with Greenpeace.

Monsanto denied the patents would be used to block Indian farmers from using their Nap Hal seed. “Indian users can use Nap Hal for chapatis or whatever else, now and just as they’ve always been used to,” McDermott told The Scientist. “The idea that Indian farmers would have to pay royalties to use Nap Hal, that’s just inflammatory and ridiculous.”

The controversy echoes the neem patent case in 2000. Neem leaves are widely used in ayurvedic remedies. The EPO revoked this patent, held by the U.S. government and W.R. Grace on a neem-based fungicide.

Here is the patent text.

Desi woman teaches at West Point

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Dr. Meena Bose, 34, is an assistant poli sci prof at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a frequent pundit on American politics (thanks, Ennis). I’ve seen her on TV discussing the presidential election. She comes across as earnest, fair, wonkish yet accessible. She’s clearly intelligent, clearly high-bandwidth. But she lacks some of the swagger you need to hold your own on a panel of pundits or with decorated military men. It’ll probably come with age.

She is a petite woman in a pageboy haircut who looks barely out of her teens… Her expertise and evenhandedness have made her an increasingly sought-after television pundit, most recently for “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” Ms. Bose is one of the few female scholars… asked to provide historical context for American politics.

But Ms. Bose, whose heritage is Bengali Indian, touts neither a feminist nor immigrant American viewpoint… Her father, Nirmal, is an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, where Ms. Bose was an undergraduate, and her mother, Chandra, formerly history instructor in New Delhi.

Bose earned her doctorate from Princeton and wrote Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy.

Sorry Mr. Aheebeshek Trybathy. We have no openings.

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All those years, that all those teachers mispronounced my exotic name by accident has irrevocably scarred my delicate psyche. However, apparently that isn’t as important as what employers think of my name. Before working for Sepia Mutiny I applied to several other blog jobs and they all rejected me. I always thought it was due to my inferior blogging skills, never suspecting something more sinister was afoot. Finally, upon joining Sepia Mutiny I was among my own kind. Names like Vallloooopillliillli and Peedidiliakalli and…Vij, are common around this outfit. Now, at last, the plot that held back one with my talents has been revealed. As exposed in the San Jose Mercury News today:

Asian women are near the bottom of the heap when it comes to responses to résumés sent to California temporary agencies, according to a new study.

One Cal student was so disturbed by the data, “I called my father and asked if I should change my name?”

“It really bummed me out,” the unidentified Chinese-American student wrote in e-mail feedback to her professor. She would be graduating in a few months and heading into the job market.

The study, released last week by the Berkeley-based Discrimination Research Center, found that having an Arab or South Asian name — like “Mohammed Ahmed” — in California meant having fewer responses than whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians when it came to seeking a job at temporary employment agencies.

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The UK crowns a new Queen

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Aishwarya Rai’s star rose over Britannia last weekend as Bride and Prejudice premiered at #1 in the UK (thanks, Ennis). The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, sold £1.67M ($3M) in tickets and topped Saw, Wimbledon and Resident Evil 2.

Adjusted for population, that’s the equivalent of a $15M U.S. opening, pretty decent since the UK film industry doesn’t produce many blockbusters. The UK’s most successful opening of all time, Bridget Jones’ Diary, did £5.7M ($10.2M) its first weekend, or the equivalent of $51M in population-adjusted dollars.

Rai follows in the illustrious desi footsteps of Queen and curry as the UK’s most popular. The film opens in the U.S. in limited release on Christmas Eve.

Bride and Prejudice

is the first English-language Bollywood musical to succeed in a mainstream market, Lagaan (Rs. 375M in India) and Monsoon Wedding ($30M worldwide) notwithstanding. The UK audience was probably drawn by its affection for Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. It’s been a year of crossover firsts: the first desi Broadway musical, the first Indian-American Olympic medalist, and now the film.

Previous posts on Bride and Prejudice: 1, 2. Also see newly-released film clips, the reviews, and the trailer.

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‘Mira and the Mahatma’

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A new novel by Goan psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar re-imagines the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Miraben, one of his most committed disciples, a British admiral’s daughter who ‘went native’:

[N]one stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade… She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial… He gave Slade the name of Mira, after a mythical Hindu princess, and elevated her to the status of his foremost disciple, sitting with her every evening for an hour of quiet conversation while Slade massaged his feet with oil. Over the next two decades, he would write her nearly 500 letters…

[H]e does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy… [Gandhi wrote,] “May God remove what I consider is your moha,” a Hindi word for infatuation.

The book’s approach echoes the Freudian analyses of Indian mythology, such as that of Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna, by non-South Asians. These analyses’ obsession with sexuality almost always provokes controversy. In this case, Kakar is adopting a classically Western approach to explore the obvious implications of a retroactively sainted man’s personal relationships. Of course, Gandhi admirers are up in arms:

Kakar’s implication that the deep emotional connection between Gandhi and Slade had something other than a purely spiritual basis has raised eyebrows in a country accustomed to hagiographic portrayals in school textbooks and movies such as “Gandhi”…

Here’s Ennis’ previous post on canonizing Gandhi.

Yo Gramps. You on the wrong floor.

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Are Chicago nursing homes actually grouping residents by ethnicity? I shudder to think of what could happen if segregation in nursing homes mimics segregation in prisons. We might have different ethnicities forming gangs on the “inside.” From the AP wire at ABCnews:

Mid America Convalescent Center is one of a growing number of Chicago-area nursing homes that assemble residents by ethnicity. Asians live on one floor, Hispanics are on another.

Each group has its own traditional food, activities and a staff that speaks its language. Within a few miles are other facilities doing the same for Poles, Russians, Indians and Koreans.

There have long been nursing homes that cater to certain nationalities and religions, or become popular with different ethnic groups. But in Chicago, with the third largest number of foreign-born residents in the United States, that sort of specialization is becoming increasingly common and formalized, said Kevin Kavanaugh, spokesman for the Illinois Council on Long Term Care.

At first this sounds kind of bad. Segregation is something you must always remain vigilant against. But…when you are that old you may want to revert to what you are most familiar with. I can’t fault that logic. All the different groups have their own customs and quirks.

Specialized ethnic care can be helpful, advocates argue. Nursing homes must be aware, for example, of elderly Jewish residents for whom a trip to the shower may trigger memories of the Holocaust.

They also must be aware of customs and rituals, said Rosemary Gemperle, executive director of the Coalition of Limited English Speaking Elderly, an organization of community-based ethnic agencies in Chicago.

“Indian people, Hindus, won’t eat before they are bathed,” Gemperle said, offering an example. “They will starve first.”

Some Koreans won’t drink cold water, believing it can cause disease. A nursing home that doesn’t understand that can create a life-threatening situation if residents refuse to take medications because they are given only cold water, said Susan Duda Gardiner, director of clinical services with the Illinois Council on Long Term Care.

H1-B Visa- It takes you everywhere you want to be

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Want an H1-B visa? If you applied by Friday, October 1 of this year, you might have a shot. If you didn’t, well, best of luck next year.

Congress set a cap of 65,000 such visas per fiscal year. By the end the work day Friday, Citizenship and Immigration Services already had received enough applications to meet the limit.
Agency spokesman William Strassberger said applications filed by Friday will be considered. For any after that, “It’s too late,” he said.

In this age of Outsourcing, Congress is predictably wary about raising that figure even though “those that use the program say they can’t find enough Americans with the necessary math, science and engineering skills.”

The “65,000” figure is a bit misleading, since 6,800 visas are already reserved for workers from Chile and Singapore, thanks to free trade agreements the U.S. has with those nations.

A few Republicans in Congress are trying to introduce legislation that could be construed as favourable to South Asians:

Employers hope to get relief from a proposal being pushed by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. They are proposing that foreign students graduating from master’s or doctoral programs at U.S. universities not be counted against the H1-B limit. Such students often are recruited by U.S. businesses and could end up working for global competitors when H1-B visas are unavailable.
It is unclear whether Congress will consider the proposal before adjourning.