What do you call a cricket fan who hurls racial insults at a player? the answer is, a nice middle class uncle-ji who is showing his true colors. This particular incident is from Bombay, and exactly the same thing had happened in Vadodara. At that time the explanation given by the chair of the BCCI was that the crowd was invoking Hanuman! This photograph taken by Getty Images photographer Hamish Blair certainly does not say Hanuman worship to me. Its just good old fashioned hate speech. I agree with Mukul Kesavan:

It’s silly and deluded to look for anthropological explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the mistake of thinking of the “average” Indian fan as non-English speaking and therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for “us” to explain “their” behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair’s photograph is so important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one of the many international codes they’ve learnt in their cosmopolitan lives, the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they’re making aren’t derived from Kathakali : they’re straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

There was a time when Vivian Richards was as well liked as Kapil Dev. What happened? Were we always like this-vis a vis our obsession for fair skin, and caste based discrimination. Or did our minds get re-colonized with the rise of potato chips and computer chips. Or did we forget that we used to have empathy with those who came from previously colonized countries. All of the above, none of the above?

This photo was in the Taipei Times today:

BRAKE DANCING
Volunteer traffic police integrate traffic direction gestures into a dance while performing in the “traffic dance” segment of the first national competition for applied police skills at Taiwan Police College in Taipei yesterday. (Photo by GEORGE TSORNG)

I don’t even know where to begin trying to parse this one.

The Guardian has an article by Priyamvada Gopal on the troubling tendency of Western liberals to see the fight for gender equality as an exclusive quality of Western civilization, with its corollary — its frequent invocation to justify dubious interventions in the name of saving Brown Women from Brown Men.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

Read the rest of this entry »

After thinking about it for 22 years, a declaration on the rights of indigenous people was approved by the United Nations. Global Voices has a round up of all the blogs that have covered it. Sadly, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have voted against it.

The above is from Anu Matthew’s portfolio, “Bollywood Satirized.” Regarding which she says:

Bollywood Satirized, is a critical commentary on the societal expectations that I experienced as a woman growing up in India.

More images by the very versatile Annu Matthew on her website.

This American Life did a show back in June about Deception. The second story (24 minutes into the show) is about an upper middle class African American Lawyer who worked in a country club in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a bus boy. That was the only way they were going to admit him. Its a fascinating story in its horribleness. The funny thing is, its really hard to understand what era these people belong to, they sound so 19th century. Unfortunately, the reality is, its our own. And these people are hardly an exotic sub-species, they probably own everything and we can thank them for our lousy jobs.

I am sure everyone has seen this NYT article on MIA by now.

Theresa Thanjan and I produced the following PSA for the Dream Act. The music, Star Mangled Banner was composed by John Plenge.

Whose Children Are These? provides a gripping view into the lives of three Muslim teenagers impacted by anti-terrorism national security measures. One such program, “Special Registration,” required male non-citizens, as young as 16 from 25 predominately Arab and Muslim nations, to register with the US Government and resulted in the discriminatory deportation of nearly 14,000 men.

The film introduces Navila, an honors student who fought to have her father released from detention; Sarfaraz, a popular basketball player who confronts pending deportation; and Hager, a young woman who faces bias and is spurred into activism as a result.

I edited this award winning doc which has won seven awards and still counting. It got finishing funds from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, and is now being offered to Public broadcasting affiliates at the end of August. It needs letters of support in order to be programmed. So if you are in the US, please write to your local PBS station by clicking on the following link:

http://www.whosechildrenarethese.com/outreach.html

And forward the information to your friends and networks. Hopefully lots of people will get a chance to see this important documentary.

See Dilip D’Souza’s post on the latest attack on Taslima Nasrin. As usual “religious sentiments have been hurt” is being handed out as so much stale mithai, and as Dilip points out, it has an eery resemblance to recent events in Baroda. This shameful episode is rightly being condemned widely, however, with certain qualifiers:

“The government should immediately cancel her visa and make her go out of the country,” he said adding, “she should realise that this is not Bangladesh or Pakistan, but India where the sentiments of all communities are respected”.(Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui)

And further:

No doubt Taslima Nasrin’s penchant to flirt with the religious sentiment of the Islamic community and her outright defense of right to indulge in sex outside marriage is not less outrageous as such ideas in print form only contribute to pollute the purity of the general mind to a larger extent.

Taslima Nasrin makes everybody uncomfortable. There are those who are complaining that “secularists have double standards because they are not doing dharnas.” Which, as Amardeep points out doesn’t seem to be completely true. And others who are annoyed with her because it makes Muslims look bad in the eyes of the West (look what you are making the crazy mullahs do, stop writing this sh!t already) because:

If Taslima is all about this major literary voice being stilled, why is it that very little analysis is being done of her writings? Why is she always in the news for a perspective other than one of literary or ethical significance? Even when she wrote an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures were mentioned, not for their role in damaging society but for sleeping with her, she was harping on freedom of speech.

A former professor, Shohini Ghosh, has an article, Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms (its a pdf download) in the Sarai Reader. The article was written in response to the West Bengal Government’s ban on Nasrin’s autobiography in 2003, and is about the “critical overlap between hate speech and sexual speech.” She points out how Taslima’s writing are neither “traditionally feminine nor desirable by Bengali canonical standards.” And how, “too much sexual agency deserves to be punished.” It points out how sexual stigma is used in hate campaigns. It leaves one with a chilling sense of the implications of these various forms of moral policing that are being advocated.