Ma & Miso

 

Papa & Miso

 

Nani & Miso

 

ABC Carpet and Home- Retail Therapy

ABC Carpet and Home, is having a promotional event, titled Gateway to India.

Amrita critiques it here.
On Saturday, I went to ABC Home on 19th and B'way, to check out their India promotion, and ended up taking a wrong turn into what they are calling their marigold theater for the duration of the promotion(..."our platform for arts, wisdom and healing" according to the brochure). It's a sale room hung with mostly Benarasi saris at one end to form a stage, and partially peopled with random wood or alabaster murtis, mostly of Krishna and Ganesh, and strewn about with flea market chairs and variously sized cushions all upholstered in more Benarasi silks. The cushions were for the audience, who had to take off their shoes at the entrance, as if entering a temple, but actually to keep the cushions clean. One had already been offered Deepak Chopra teas, unsalted cashews and dried fruit near the entrance and told to consume them before entering the marigold theater. Retail personnel wafted about in ghagras and dreamy expressions, acting as bouncers because Patti Smith was there. There was a collection of very large thangka-type paintings of Tara up on the walls too, by Romio Shrestha, who wore full Tibetan ceremonial dress, and, as it turned out, had become friends with Patti Smith at William Burroughs' funeral-- but that revelation came much later. I claimed a flea market chair while ABC's Creative Director made her faltering speech about being overcome by spirituality and the sound system started up with New Age violins mewling away, and wondered how this would play in India if a shop in Gurgaon were hung with ball gowns and scattered with creches and madonnas and pietas, and everybody had to sit in little gold ballroom chairs and cross themselves while a store executive talked about his admiration for the West. Anyway, there might as well have been incense, since Romio asked everyone who felt like it to close their eyes while he talked about how much the female principle was needed in the world today. Quite a few women did close their eyes, clearly confusing spirituality with self-hypnosis, while the violins went on. I realized actual religious teachings of any sort would never do for these people. When Romio had called Patti Smith a goddess the third or fourth time, it was her turn to take the mike and play and talk and sing, so the mewly music was turned off and she did her own wailing-growling thing and played her alternately musical and bizarre chord progressions, explaining that she could perform her most difficult works with ease because of the positive energy in the room. The room was of course full of people acting out their perceptions of spirituality and behaving like they had taken opium, with a few Indian onlookers at the edges wearing vacant expressions. Patti Smith explained that her last song was about William Blake, a 19th (okay) century Londoner who had addressed the inequities of his day by claiming that all people contained the Divine within --whatev, it went to show how gullible/malleable you had to be. After all this was done, and the audience told they could disperse, it turned out that all this was to sell four books, two quite remarkable and under-priced ones of Romio's paintings, so huge that only a strong man could pick up both at once, plus one by Patti Smith about her own life and -- Deepak Chopra's Kama Sutra. I asked a woman how long she though India would be reflexively connected with this sort of spiritualty. Her eyes glossed over while she thought. "M-m-m-m-n, forever!" she said.

Siddhartha extends the debate while discussing the marketing of tourism to India.

I feel ABC carpet and the Tatva Tours promotions are all events that attempt to generate sales during the month of Feburary, when retail sales plummet. I do not think, that ABC carpet is going meditative or is actually helping Indian craftspeople or promoting Indian arts and crafts. They are attempting to bring customers in through these in store talks, the by products of which will generate big ticket sales and a buzz, that is so essential for retail. There creative sales directors are smart and are picking up on the trend of spritual India, by having chanting by Krishna Das, Buddhist talks by Sharon Salzburg and Jivamukhti yoga by Sharon Gannon.

The Day My Skin Came Of

A powerful piece of writting by Sonny Suchdev, he is angered by black kids attacking other kids of color, like himself. I saw this piece in Sepia Mutiny and was written by Amardeep.
Sonny Suchdev, an activist and member of Outernational, a progressive 5-member band, writes about the time he crumpled to pieces in a New York subway after having his turban ripped off his head by a stranger.

When I was in the fifth grade, a classmate yanked off my dastar, my turban, on the playground one day, perhaps because it seemed funny to him. I will never forget how I felt walking around school the rest of the day with the black cloth of my dastar hanging off my joora, a Punjabi word for bun, because I didn’t know how to put it back on. Humiliated. Enraged. So so alone.

Now seventeen years later it’s the same shit.

I’m riding the F train like usual in Brooklyn when dozens of kids – perhaps in junior high – get in my subway car on their way home from school. The train is bustling with adolescent energy.

As the train stops at 4th Avenue, I hear a boy yell “Give me that!” as he and his friends run out the train door. The next thing I realize, my dastar has been yanked completely off my head. My uncovered joora dangles, and I am in complete and utter shock. Everyone on the train is staring at me. Other kids from the school are both laughing and shaking their heads in disbelief. Not knowing how to react, I stand up quickly, look out the doors of the train car and see a group of young boys of color running down the stairs. Startled and confused, I pick it up my dastar from the grimy platform and get back in the train.

One of the boys of color across the car from me asks, “Are you okay?” Two other boys he is with high five each other as they laugh and say things that I can’t understand. An older South Asian man sitting across from me just shakes his head and doesn’t make eye contact with me.

I get off at Smith and 9th Street with my dirty dastar in my hands, not knowing what to do. My eyes fill with tears immediately. I feel naked and exposed, so small, so humiliated, and so so alone. Why did he do that? Why? Was it fun for him? Did he impress his friends? Does it make him feel like he has more power than someone else – someone who looks like an immigrant, a foreigner, Bin Laden? I am so enraged. I want to break something, I want to beat the crap out of him. My arms keep shaking uncontrollably as if they’re ready to explode. I walk towards the back of the raised platform and thrust my elbow into the phone booth. The pain that vibrates into my elbow and throughout my arm somehow makes me feel like I accomplished something.

I get to a corner of the platform and break down in despair, remembering fifth grade vividly, feeling so angry and exhausted from living in this country. The twenty something years of this shit is going through me at once – the slurs, the obnoxious stares, the go back to your countries, the threats, the towel/rag/tomato/condom/tumor heads, all of it. But somehow pulling off my turban hurts more than anything. Maybe it’s the symbolism of my identity wrapped up in this one piece of cloth that, like my brown skin, I wear everyday.

I think about the Sikh gurus who were tortured and killed by emperors in India because of their religious identities, their turbans forcibly removed and their scalps cut off for refusing to cut their hair and give up their identities.

I think about the thousands of Sikhs brutally murdered by state-sponsored programs in northern India in 1984. Balbir Singh Sodhi shot dead in Phoenix on September 15, 2001 by a self-identified “patriot.” And all the young turban-wearing boys in this country being harassed and humiliated at their schools on a daily basis. I didn’t have this sort of analysis in fifth grade, but on an emotional level I’m still that nine-year-old on the playground right now.

I try to put my dastar back on but it’s too windy. Eventually I get it on messily, cross over to the Coney Island-bound platform, and go home, wishing for the comfort of someone who has gone through this, someone who might understand.

I am now remembering the words of one of the young boys of color in the train as I walked off: “Stay up,” he said, wishing me the strength to not let this hurt me. As I step back from the pain, I think the greatest tragedy is why people of color are doing this to each other. 17 years ago on the playground it was a black boy as well. Somehow it’s more hurtful when other people of color target me than when white people do. With white people, I often go straight to anger, but with folks of color, it’s hard not to feel hopeless. The way this white supremacist system pits black people and immigrants against each other is truly tragic.

But, I will do my best to “Stay up” until the next time.

Which Babies Are Real Americans?

Alternet has an interesting article on how to define an American baby. Is a baby born to an illegal immigrant "not" American? Anti-immigration hysteria and anti-choice propaganda come together in a neat and terrifying package.

Yuki Lin , born on the stroke of midnight this New Year’s, became the winner of a random drawing for a national Toys “R” Us sweepstakes. The company had promised a $25,000 U.S. savings bond to the “first American baby born in 2007.” However, Yuki lost her prize after the company learned that her mother was an undocumented U.S. resident. Instead, the bond went to a baby in Gainesville, Georgia, described by her mother as “an American all the way.”

Alaa Al Aswany

The Hindu literary review has an interesting interview with Alaa Al Aswany, an Egyptian novelist. A dentist by profession, he has written, Imarat Ya'qubiyyan (The Yacoubian Building) which has been the highest selling Arabic novel since its publication in 2002. The screen adaptation of The Yacoubian Building became the most expensive Arabic film ever produced and was released in 2006.

In fiction we create characters based on real life people we see; only they become more significant, deeper and more beautiful. From the whole spectrum of the human experience I try to create a work that reflects the many-layered nature of reality. When people read a novel and mirror their lives through the characters they meet in the book, they realise that a certain situation can have many versions of the truth. They become more understanding and less judging, as we are all largely the result of our situations. And that is the beauty of dwelling on the secrets of the heart while writing.