A DREAM IN DOUBT, OR, CAN BIGOTRY DRIVE YOU CRAZY?
PBS Independent Lens
"Mental Illness" vs" Prejudice

"He's called [Black people] 'niggers' before"...
--Frank Roque's daughter


"Patriot" "American" bigot kills Sikh on Septmber 15, 2001. His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi, the US's first casualty of 9/11 anti-Arab, anti-turban, anti-brown-person hysteria.

These "Patriot" "American" people make the American Dream -- whatever that's supposed to be -- into a nightmare. I remember hearing that Sikh men were being begged to take off their turbans in the wake of the murder.

Not surprisingly, they are the same old Save Our State, VDARE, American Patrol, American Renaissance, Peter Brimelow worshipping H1B.Info anti-India crowd, still blubbering that "Indians" are stealing "their" jobs. Frank Roque still blames the tee vee for showing 9/11 footage and making him go out and kill, 4 days later.

7 years later, there's a documentary on the family and the incident.

Prejudice IS mental illness.


A Dream In Doubt PBS.

More:

Frank Roque

Historical - 1984 Golden Temple from a Sikh point of view

Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund (SALDEF)

Self-referrential humor post

MADRASSA CURRY

Was in Williams-Sonoma the other day, looking at high-end cookware. The chatty young lady behind the counter was cooking up some Maiya Kamal curry, which comes prepackaged at W-S. (In my city, Kamal also offers fresh versions in the refrigerator sections of foodie stores.)

She asked me if I wanted to try some, and I did. It was really good. She told me, we have it on the shelf around the corner. It's the madrassa curry.

"Madrassa curry?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Madrassa curry. It's one of my favorite sauces we sell here."

"Madrassa curry," I repeated again. "Uh-huh," was the reply.

So, I bought some,. It really is quite good.

OH MY
Oh Dear.
This is just...

Via The Mutiny



Ohh, uh-uh.

SPOTLIGHT INDIA
Variety Special Section on How Indian Technology is Revolutionizing Broadcasting and Film in India

Sorry the link is subscription only, but fair use should allow a few notable quotes from last month's "India Challenges Digital Standard: Low-res Approach to Distribution Finds Success" by Patrick Frater.

The country's tech suppliers and exhibitors are putting rival business models into operation, and distributors are increasingly making use of the expanded options.

"India may have 13,000 screens, but a wide release is 500 prints. Digital is great, it changes that," says Jyoti Deshpande, chief operating officer of Eros Entertainment. "If we try and go above that number, the cost of prints starts to take us to the Hollywood model where P&A costs equal a film's production budget."

Last month UTV gave big-budget "Jodhaa Akbar" an ultra-wide 900-print release, of which only 500 were physical prints and 400 were digital copies.

With a business model incredibly simple for theater owners, UFO Moviez now has an installed base of more than 1,000 cinemas. For each cinema it equips, the company spends some $35,000 installing projectors, servers and satellite receivers. To exhibitors it provides free maintenance and upgrades, and on behalf of the distributors it encrypts movies directly from digital intermediates and distributes MPEG4 compressed files by satellite.

. . .


Digital distribution has the potential for far greater change still -- it could eventually create a nationwide market.

The distribution sector is traditionally fragmented regionally, by language and between big cities and small towns. India doesn't naturally have a day-and-date releasing structure, but digital is changing that and may allow distributors to monetize product before pirates do.

So an emerging film distribution model is sattellite/server-based, directly to the exhibitor. Something interesting to keep an eye out for.

OH SNAP! Rev. 5
Brevities From Around the Web

Hey all you out there in BIW-land, it's been a long time since we rock and roll. So what better way to crank up the old bloggie again than with a new edition of OH SNAP! Brevities From Around the Web.

New additions to the BIW Blogroll:

Middle Class Death Trips by Chris Newfield. See especially the March 29 entry on lawyers in Pakistan.

Panopticon Review by Kofi Natambu.

Veen We used to have a band, man.

Other items of interest:

Food Poisoning Lawyer - a depressing reminder of all the tiny beasties in our food.

Torture and the Future - a conference at UC Santa Barbara this past summer. A humanities perspective on the US's stance on torture.

Turban Tide - old school anti-India sentiment.

Crazy Preacher Lady - a now-ancient meme that ran its course some time last year, but it's still utterly irresistible.

Broadcast Engineering - perhaps a fresh career outlook.


--Edited at 2:27 to add link.

I LOVE THIS MAGAZINE!

Everybody should take a look at this month's Global Services, which has a fairly realistic take on temp visas.

The site seems to work better in IE.

From the cover article:

H-1B visas are issued to companies to hire and bring foreign skilled workers (engineers, doctors, nurses, architects, mathematicians) to the U.S. at salaries comparable to their U.S. counterparts. Companies can hire such staff only if the skills that they bring aren’t available locally. There is also a cap on the H-1Bs — 65,000 as of now, though in 2000 it went up to as much as 195,000. L-1s, on the other hand, are allocated to companies with offices both in the U.S. and abroad for bringing their foreign workers to work in the U.S. for a short while.


IT outsourcing firms — not just Indian firms, but equally American ones — have been charged of misusing these two types of visas allocated to them. Protectionist forces have alleged that foreign outsourcing companies bring their employees into the U.S. on the H-1B and L-1 visas to get them trained on the work done by Americans, and then offshore that piece of work abroad. Moreover, since these guest workers purportedly come in “cheaper,” they work as inexpensive onsite resources to coordinate the offshore functions.


Following this, corporate America, and indeed even the Indian outsourcing firms, riding their fortunes on the back of a global economy, feared a backlash reminiscent of the 2004 Presidential elections when John Kerry and his democrats raised job losses as a result of outsourcing as one of their campaigning placards. Some of these fears proved founded — Patni, one of the Indian companies charged of visa misuse, will be paying $2.4 million in back wages to 607 of its H-1B employees, whom it purportedly brought to the U.S. under salaries lower to what U.S. workers would get paid for similar work.


In Defense of the Indians


Meanwhile, the accused Indian companies responded to the Senators toward the end of June through the country’s high-profile association of software and services companies, Nasscom. When contacted by Global Services, Nasscom declined to comment, though in its statement issued to the press it held the Indian companies in question as abiding by the law, while shifting the blame to smaller, “fly-by-night” operators.

Serendipitously (or not), the article begins with a reference to a Sanjay Dutt movie.

But back to our soapbox: quit blaming Indians for the problems your complicity and apathy during the boom years has caused you. Stop passing the buck.

And reread our tagline.

DESI? RED?



No, just an extended ad campaign by Sting or one of 'em.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!



Happy Eid from Blame India Watch