A friend turned me on to an article in the NY Times detailing the post-Iraq life of Shaheen Khan, a Pakistani woman who is now paralyzed after a few months as a laundry worker in the Green Zone in Baghdad. KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and recently delinked from Halliburton’s family, is supplying non-Iraqi contract labor to create another kind of army, one that is without the privilege of combat training, ultra protective gear, tanks, and guns. Perhaps the only shield besides the vest and other government issue nominal gear that Shaheen has is the color of her skin, easily blending in with Iraqis. But in the Green Zone, I’m not sure it makes a difference.

Shaheen is living in a nursing home, and her insurance provider, AIG, is not willing to provide her enough to cover moving out of the nursing home and being cared for at home. This has strained her marriage. This has made life in Houston so different than anything she could have ever imagined. She was asked, “What are you looking forward to?” and she responds with a blankness with the words “nothing” flitting off her lips. When reading, I stopped for a moment to think about those being contracted out to Iraq, and realized its as if the American dream can be found in the Green Zone, that everything that is used to lure immigrants to the United States – the clean homes, suburbs, grocery stores with aisles of fresh food, the calm parks and sunny shores – are maintained by war and oppression abroad. Working for KBR is a chance to see first hand what it takes to maintain the America everyone knows and loves.

And I looked it up – how many jobs does it take to show people what America is all about? As of this post, there are exactly 1019 jobs available in Iraq through KBR. Electricians, IT folks, laundry workers, truck drivers. Salaries are not listed. But everyone knows that you can get a pretty penny. I know because someone close to me works for KBR.

This got me thinking about the level of influence that we have, and what we are influenced by.

I’ve realized that one’s life is filled to the brim with influence, and if one isn’t careful, it can be swayed by corporations like KBR, AIG, Halliburton, and any others. By Starbucks. By Microsoft. By any product we buy that holds a brand. Of course, many of us don’t have much choice; Shaheen was in loads of debt when she signed up to clean the underpants of the US Army. And it wasn’t her fault that both KBR and AIG screwed her over, and vicariously the US Government for generating and stoking the fire that is Iraq. But the corporations that saturate the landscape of the American and Global economy have sway over our daily lives to an extent that we likely won’t be able to realize until years from now. Unfortunately for Shaheen the influence the corporations had on her lives were horribly negative and violent, emptying her of the hope that led her to cross an ocean once again in pursuit of an economic dream.

For me, I have always had a distrust of corporations, beginning from the first time my father was laid off by a company, forcing our family to uproot to a different state, a different set of strangers to try and befriend. The distrust multiplied each time the pink slip would arrive. It got to the point where I would remain distant from those around me so I could easily pack my bags and jet off when the lay off would come.

Although not as violent, but perhaps as disturbing is the recent iPhone phenomenon, when I saw the man who slept and shat outside the Manhattan Apple Store for a week, and whose exuberance at shelling out obscene amounts of money was matched by another kind of obscenity, with him yelling “This is amazing! I can’t believe it!” when interviewed by the media mob. People were dressing their kids up as iPhones. The media fed at the trough provided by Apple, forgetting that bombs are dropping in Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. That HIV is eating South African families alive. That the courts are chiseling away desegregated schools.

I am trying hard not to forget that which is important.

Oh, this is a half distraction because I haven’t read the whole story yet. I’m a slow reader and I have to study for final exams.

I promise, though, that when someone does comment, I’ll promptly read the story in full. Click here for story please.

Israel continues its grossly disproportionate blood bath by an equally machismo war machine.

There is certainly no justification for this incursion. I’ve been wondering what has made Israel come to this, to nearly destroy Lebanon. They’ve done a decent job of destroying Palestine, and I think their military is loving this raucous display of their brute force. And the question remains, are these actions actually helping secure the Israeli soldiers? Or the Israeli people?

Its quite clear that these actions are not. Israel has taken this as an opportunity to clean out Hezbollah. But haven’t they learned that taking out a guerrilla force cannot be done with ultra modern tanks and other brute elements of statecraft?

200 Lebanese dead. 24 Israeli dead. Everytime another Israeli citizen dies, it makes its way into the news. 200 Lebanese have died, and I only hear that solitary statistic, occasionally updated, but nonetheless, the lives of the Lebanese are not worthy enough to be individualized, personalized.

Don’t forget, though, if you get really mad about it and want to curse about it, you may be caught on tape and broadcast to the rest of the world. Especially if you’re, well, at some important meeting and talking to some equally important person. But then again, if you’re someone who is a habitual expletive producer, then no camera will likely stop you.

In other news, there has not been a single documented case of a Hindu attacking a Muslim in Bombay after the bomb blasts last week. Everyone was thinking about it, about where it would start, where shops would first close down and curfews first enforced. Tensions exist, no doubt, and the police is taking up anyone with a beard and a cap. But the worst hasn’t happened, and I hope it stays this way.

A single blast on any of these rail lines would lead to massive injury and death. At least 137 people are dead and the count is growing.

Here’s a link to Sepia Mutiny’s discussion of the incident. NDTV’s report is here. The Hindu’s report is here.

But I have relatives in Bombay; my brother-in-law’s family is there. I know people who are struggling to fight the wholesale eradication of the slums there. I know people fighting for the Global South there.

It doesn’t matter to me what they do anymore, just that they and their families are ok.

I brace myself for the inevitable ‘terrorist’ link and the sweeping generalizations that will be made about Muslims that will be the first, and only, culprit named by most media in India and most definitely abroad. I brace myself for the potential storm of fundamentalisms that will reveal themselves again in Bombay and the rest of India. I take a breath and brace myself for further bloodshed.

I wait for the Hindu Indian community here in Houston to begin their finger-pointing and further bashing of Muslims via head nodding, editorial writing, and sycophantic alignment with the right wing people, the anti-terrorist people that want to stalk our minds, monitor our every move.

No evidence and no discussion. I wait for all that.

My stance is that the d-word indicates a shared experience, and is particular to the diaspora. It doesn’t indicate a homogeneity of people coming out of the subcontinent, nor some essential trait, but of something that binds the people together. Whether it be racism, classism, or more (seemingly) positive things like cultural similarities, food, or the commonalities that emerge out of hours of desi satellite TV watching, there are things that bind us, whether we want to smash other so-called desis to bits and pieces or not.

There are a ton of organizations that rely on this term, or rather what this term is rooted in, to do their work. Immediately, DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) in NYC, ASATA (Alliance of South Asians Taking Action) and FOSA (Forum of South Asians) in the Bay Area, and SAN (South Asian Network) in LA come to mind. They work in different segments – with young people, with working class folks, with yuppies, with immigrants, etc. etc. But there is something shared, that desis have to deal with issues such as immigration, racism, classism and more importantly, have enough commonalities which can serve as the grounding point for organizing to change the norms that structure peoples’ experiences.

So I want to know – what do you all think? What does ‘desi’ mean to you?

Whats the name of the movie?

1. A main refrain in a song involves a play on the name of a certain disease that many of diasporic desis need to take pills for before and during our visits to our respective homeland(s).

2. The song was started off by a bearded guy who made a drum appear magically in his hand. He’s the same acclaimed actor that has played, more recently, in a role as a working-class taxi-driver opposite Crorepati John Abraham’s character and in another film as a Bombay police officer whose job it is to kill as many gangsters as possible – both of these films have numbers in their titles.

3. Shortly after that song, there’s a scene involving a car salesman whose name is LOVEchand Kukreja, and at the end of the scene, the male protagonist proclaims his love for the female protagonist by promising her, the salesman, and everyone watching at home that he will buy a car for her when he has the money.

There it is. I’ll try to post hints if nobody seems to be getting it. And you may use whatever is at your disposal to figure it out (may I suggest tonight’s movie lineup on the desi satellite network, i.e. Zee TV, Sony TV, etc.?).

Good luck!

Ever since I saw Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, I’ve become a big fan of both Rahul Bose and Konkona Sen Sharma, only the latter of which was in Page 3. As I recently discovered when I was in India earlier this year, page 3 is the actual page on which newspapers dish out the latest gossip on Bollywood and soap opera stars, the parties they’ve been to, the latest fashions and bindis and logos they wear, the people they are with. As you could probably imagine, the page is not filled with much criticism and boasting with high-photos. There were times when I flipped to page 3 automatically after picking up the newspaper, taking a cursory-I do social justice work so I should be in the know about politics in India, my homeland over which I have some authenticity so there is perhaps even a moral obligation I have to have this working knowledge!-look at first couple of pages before setting my eyes on the gloriousness of page 3. While my friend Amal spent more than the 15 seconds I took poring over the latest in the activities of Parliament, I went straight to the eye candy.

Amal has intimate knowledge of various crushes I had on certain Bollywood stars, most notably Sushmita Sen and Bipasha Basu, and used that to his advantage. One time, I was rudely awakened by the crispy scent of newspaper in the morning, when he threw page 3 on my face when there was a cover story about Bipasha.

I was even thinking about auditioning as a Bollywood back-up dancer, but alas, my time in Bombay was too short. But I digress.

I saw a review that does a decent plot outline of Page 3. In the film, Sharma’s character, Madhavi Sharma, is a journalist for page 3, and goes through a realization that the world of actors and stars is flighty and catty, ridiculous and unconcerned about “real” issues such as rape, dowry, gangs, etc. When she starts working with Vinayak Mane, played by the excellent actor Atul Kulkarni, who covers criminal cases, she gets a dose of the same stuff – that the world is similarly disgusting, that her newspaper is run by corporations that are sycophants to the companies that pay its bills.

I like how there are more folks in Indian cinema doing interesting things. I remember on my visits to India when I was much younger – maybe in high school – and I used to ask about these so-called “art films” (we know them as independent films) and none of my cousins would watch them. Perhaps there were a ton of art films back then and my family simply didn’t watch them, but it seems there are a lot more of them now. And these art films are connected to Bollywood – actors, directors, perhaps now even funding sources, are shared.

Bollywood has been a global phenomenon for some time now, mostly due to the scattered nature of the desi community and their demand for desi things such as basmati rice and Hindu priests. But I think because of the mechanisms of corporate-led globalization, Bollywood has been able to reach a ton more people and, consequently, has reached more non-desi audiences. Nowadays, once every 2 or 3 months, I meet a non-desi who loves Bollywood movies. Its becoming less surprising each time, but its still surprising and a tiny bit unsettling (as in, is that what they think about desi folks? That we only believe in love at first glance and spend our youth loving and then getting into an arranged marriage which nobody is happy about?). So maybe the demand for art films is also increasing because of a growing Bollywood fan base; a side-effect of globalization is the increased promotion and funding of independent art films that discuss the “real” issues.

Who knows? Someone should look into it. For now, I’ll settle with using globalization (via the internet) to get the latest goop on my favorite Bollywood stars.