Indian censors to suppress ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’

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Anjali from over at to the teeth has utilized the Sepia Mutiny Tip Line and alerted the Mutineers to some interesting information out of India (you can read her take on the site). As reported at CommonDreams.org:

Film activists in the Indian capital have strongly protested the country’s censors holding up release of the award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

“Fahrenheit 9/11”, vehemently anti-US President George W. Bush, won the Palme Ór best film award at Cannes this year. It can be downloaded off the Net and its pirated copies are available across the country.

“The censor board takes these senseless decisions because as a body it is irrelevant and completely behind times,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta at Sarai, the media and research foundation.

“The censor board itself should be done away with,” Sengupta, a researcher on issues of censorship, told IANS.

The Michael Moore film, which has become a pillar of the Democratic presidential campaign, was supposed to be released in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Pune on Oct 15.

But what in the movie could possibly offend Indian censors? India isn’t part of the coalition of the bribed an coerced that Moore makes fun of in the movie. Then what?

Several reasons are being offered on why the censors are worried about the film. One of them is to avoid offending the American authorities.

We wouldn’t want that. I for one think that the censors are simply trying to suppress the film because they found out from the Detroit Free Press that Moore is a criminal.

Tiffinwalla in New York

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The mountain comes to Muhammad: You’ve probably heard of the FedEx-like reliability of tiffinwallas of Bombay. Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. This six-sigma error rate puts Indian bureaucracy to shame. And, as Forbes reported, all for just 150 rupees/month:

Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.

Well, one tiffinwalla who cooks his own food is expanding into New York, via a friend:

My cousin just recommended this guy (Krishna) in NYC who delivers packed Indian vegetarian lunch or dinner boxes for $5 a meal. He only works Mon-Fri, so it’s $25 a week (this includes deliver). Apparently, each meal includes 2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney. My cousin is very health conscious and swears that Krishna’s meal is cooked with very little oil. Though I would share the number with you – 212 945 ####.

And let’s not forget the dosa guy at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park (weekdays at lunch):

[Designer Alpana] Bawa does admit a lunchtime weakness for dosas found at a cart in Washington Square Park (New York Dosa, 917-710-2092), made by Sri Lankan Dhiru Kumar. “I’m on my way,” she tells Kumar on her cell phone, not even identifying herself. “Can you have a Pondicherri dosa ready for me in a few minutes?” Bawa asks… When we arrive, Kumar hands Bawa a Styrofoam container with her dosa — spicy potatoes, carrots and peppers in a thin crepe made from rice and lentil flours.

Ah, the benefits of living in a maximum city. Continue reading →

How will U.S. election outcome affect India?

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The Asia Times recently weighed in on how the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election might affect the politics in India. Who should India desire as the U.S. President?:

Indians in India generally see Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry as a thorn in India’s side. Many more in India’s money-spinning outsourcing industry see him as a business process outsourcing (BPO) party pooper. Even New Delhi – seat of the Indian government – sees greater advantage in a second term for George W Bush in terms of strategic partnership. But a huge number of Indians based in the US believe that Kerry may bode well for India. And remarkably, though Kerry’s strong anti-outsourcing stand has emerged as one of the biggest sources of discomfort for India, many Indian Americans support Kerry for that very reason.

This issue may get into the whole question of where loyalties lie. Many first generation Indian-Americans perceive outsourcing as an unequivocally good thing. Any money that goes back to help the economic situation of a society or even family members that they have recently left behind is a good thing. Second and third generations Indian-Americans however may perceive outsourcing as a bad thing. Many of them after all are the very tech workers whose jobs are being sent abroad. Now whether outsourcing is good or bad is not as relevant as the perception of whether it is good or bad.

“Outsourcing is a major issue that has to be dealt with,” says Selma D’Souza, president of the Indo-American Democratic Organization, a lobby for the Indian American community on social issues and hate crimes. “Most Americans, including Indians, don’t like outsourcing because many of them are concerned their children’s jobs are being outsourced, especially in the IT field. I don’t think this is an India-US issue, it’s an issue about employment in the US.”

There should be other issues to consider beyond just outsourcing argue some:

Some also hold that India’s concerns are narrow and partisan. “It seems to be foreign policy-focused and not people-focused,” says Tanzila Taz Ahmed, director of the South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), another US-based lobby that’s trying to push South Asian American issues to the forefront of US politics. “Sure, Indians in India may want Bush because of his more liberal stand on outsourcing, but that view doesn’t take into consideration the persecution their fellow Indians have to suffer living with him.”

Continue reading →

Military chic

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Guerrillas in her midst: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., is a 26-year-old British Asian DJ who raps in the garage/grime genre (via Tablatronic and our own Sajit). For song material, she mines her family’s flight from the Sri Lankan civil war.

The new arrivals were not exactly welcomed with open arms by London’s Sri Lankan community… “They are really obsessed with impressing the British. They want to be doctors and engineers and go to Cambridge, buy leather couches to match their encyclopedias, have a sitar in the corner and whip their saris out once a year for a wedding. They’d look at us and go, ‘We don’t want them hanging round with our kids, they’re into rap, they think they’re black.’… I’ll go to LA and be black: it’s better than being in Britain and being brown.’

Check out the video for ‘Sunshowers,’ a bouncy track which makes frequent and incongruous reference to guns, bombs and the guerrillas of Colombo.

Update: Nirali magazine has a great profile of Arulpragasam:

She never knew her father, one of the founding members of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militant guerrilla group formed in 1976 with the goal of gaining political independence for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil population. “We saw him once a year, for 10 minutes at a time. My mum said, ‘That’s your uncle–your dad is dead.’ It was to protect us,” she explains… “We lived in hiding for so long. We were just moving from village to village and from house to house. Nobody wanted to put us up; we were untouchable. Everybody knew about us in Sri Lanka, and nobody wanted to deal with us because we brought so much heat. The army would follow [us wherever we’d go]. We were living in big-time poverty, stealing mangoes off someone else’s tree,” she remembers.

Update: M.I.A. just spun in New York (photos) and landed on the cover of Fader magazine. Here’s the layout.

Yoga for Kerry

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The Troy Michigan Democratic Club sponsored a forum last night called, “At Peace with Politics: Yoga for Kerry.” According to the Detroit Free Press:

“People who practice yoga are almost always Democrats,” said Priyanka Shanbag, a yoga teacher from Bloomfield Hills who will instruct at the event, which will be at Troy’s community center.

“There’s a lot of compassion there. It’s about doing the right thing.”

Ouch. The head of Troy’s Republican club is NOT going to like that at all. What’s Goray Mookerjee got to say?

“We need a real truthful commander in chief who has the guts and determination to do the job,” Mookerjee said.

“He doesn’t need any yoga training.”

And his party argues that yoga will persuade its practitioners to vote for George W. Bush.

I think we need to find a master Yogi to weigh in on this debate or things could get messy in Troy.

Chino Hills, CA: A haven for terrorists?

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Well not yet. But it could become one if a proposed Hindu temple is erected there. That was at least one of the reasons residents tossed around before San Bernardino County protested vehemently against construction. From KTLA.com:

It was proposed as the largest Hindu temple and cultural center in Southern California, an ornate structure with the kind of religious status held by the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

But when a nonprofit Hindu organization selected Chino Hills farmland for the project, residents in this wealthy bedroom community of San Bernardino County protested vehemently, saying it would generate too much traffic, ruin the city’s rural atmosphere and become an unwanted regional attraction.

Objections also surfaced from opponents who said the project would turn Chino Hills into a “Third World city” and a haven for terrorists. One petition to stop the project said the temple would play a role in “changing the city’s demographics forever.”

Gee, I wonder if the proposed building of a large church would have caused such a reaction as well. That, I bet would have been touted as being good for the local economy. The chairman of the city’s Planning Commission, supported the Hindu project, calling it an asset to the city. “It’s a beautiful building with wonderful landscaping and water features,” he said. Still, many folks don’t like the idea.

Some of the opponents also seemed worried that the temple would draw Hindus to live in the city. “Unless you want the current demographics to look a bit like New Delhi, don’t do this,” said an e-mail dated Aug. 9, 2003. Another letter suggested Muslim extremists might blend in among Hindu worshipers, making the temple a “hiding place for terror.”

Continue reading →

Celebrating an early Diwali

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An early Diwali in New York yesterday at the South Street Seaport:

It’s one of the most upscale Diwali settings I’ve ever seen, tall ships and a fireworks barge bobbing beneath skyscrapers of robin’s-egg blue… Ashen wrappers smelling of gunpowder drifted onto the heads of desi elders who had splayed themselves across the wooden pier steps… A dance troupe on the pier practiced ballroom with shells whistling overhead, a scratchy violin track playing in the background.

Continue reading…

Multiculturalism in Skokie

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The Chicago tribune reports on the addition of a Gandhi statue to the Chicago suburb of Skokie (where this blogger was born). In addition to simply discussing the statue they also discuss the demographics of the suburb:

Once an icon of the Jewish community, Skokie since the 1980s has become something of a north-suburban United Nations, where 80 languages are spoken in the homes of its public school students. In May, the annual Festival of Cultures drew an estimated 25,000 visitors.

And three years after Kamaria and a citizens group proposed the idea, Skokie again celebrated its rich cultural diversity by dedicating an 8-foot-tall statue of Gandhi on Saturday, the 135th anniversary of his birth.

Of course the other ethnic communities there want statues of their heroes as well:

So far, at least three groups–representing Skokie’s Korean, Filipino and Swedish ethnic communities–are toying with the idea.

“Who knows? Maybe we could find a great figure of sports,” said Jin Lee, director of the Keumsil Cultural Society, which promotes Korean-American culture. “Or [it might be] best to have a scholarly figure who did great deeds for the country.”

Might this great gesture honoring Gandhi eventually stir up a controversy in the community? At least some local politicians think so:

Michael Gelder warned fellow members on the Skokie board of trustees to consider “the quagmire we might be creating for ourselves.”

Although it might be easy for Skokie residents to agree on the worthiness of someone like Gandhi, Gelder said recently, “it strikes me that there’s very little consensus among the various ethnic groups or nationalities about [what constitutes] a great leader.”

“… One person’s liberator is another’s terrorist,” Gelder said.

I really loathe how people now so casually throw the “T-word” into every situation.