Dotbusters, Dothead, ...

As a fresh off the boat newbie graduate student, I had a great time spending hours in the libraries at the university.  I couldn't believe there were multiple libraries on campus.  Of course, this was also before the dawn of the internet age and, therefore, it was in the libraries that I could read the newspapers from around the country and the world.

One of the news stories from those newbie days was about the "Dotbusters" in New Jersey.  I tracked down a New York Times report on that, from October 12, 1987:

For years, Indians living in blue-collar enclaves here have been taunted with ethnic epithets by white, black and Hispanic youths, according to the city's Indian leadership and many other people here.
But in recent weeks, Indians here say, the violence has taken on a new and uglier cast. One Jersey City Indian was beaten to death in Hoboken. Another remains in a coma after being discovered beaten unconscious on a busy street corner here earlier this month. And in a crudely handwritten letter, partially printed in The Jersey Journal, someone wrote, ''We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City.'' The note was signed ''The Dotbusters.''         

I remember many of us Indian students talking about the "Dotbusters" and how the Los Angeles area, where I was, seemed more welcoming.  But, it shocked us that the violence was not in some remote part of the US, or in the Deep South, but in New Jersey!

  A 40-year-old Indian shop owner looked out on to Central Avenue and wondered aloud.
''Why do they want to hurt the Indian?'' she said, apologizing for her broken English. ''We want to make America beautiful. We don't want to spoil it.
''America is a land of chances,'' she said, too fearful to have her name published. ''That's why everybody is here.''

Yes, that's why everybody is here and would love to come here.  Like why I am here and not back in India, nor was I interested to go anywhere else.

An Indian-American was on NPR yesterday, and stirred the stories lodged in my memories from nearly three decades ago.  Amit Majmudar is yet another Indian-American who makes me feel like I am nothing but a blabbering idiot who does nothing.  Majmudar is a radiologist, novelist, poet, and writes commentaries.  And, yes, he is a family man.  Seriously, isn't that supposed to be four different people?  And, oh, he is yet to turn forty! I hate such people who make a good-for-nothing out of me!!! ;)

Majmudar was featured in the NPR segment because he has been appointed "Ohio's first ever poet laureate."  How about that!  Does Ohio's governor, John Kasich, know about this? ;)

Majmudar's "new collection of poems, has as its title an ethnic slur, "Dothead.""  Why?

Well, if you look at racial slurs like this, there is a way to retake it, the N-word, for example. Rappers have taken that word back. And it's still off-limits to those outside of the sort of circle. But internally, it's something that they call each other. And in this way, you kind of take it back from the people who use it against you. And "Dothead" actually relates to something very beautiful and eloquent related to Hindu symbolism. And for me, the dot on the head is something that I associate with my mom. My wife wears one every once in a while when we go to, you know, an Indian wedding or something like that. And above all, it has this religious meaning for me. And so I wanted to take it back, and I wanted to make a poem out of it.

April being poetry month, here's Majmudar's poem:

"Dothead"

by Amit Majmudar
Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.
I know they said "third eye" in class, but it's not
an eye eye, not like that. It's not some freak
third eye that opens on your forehead like
on some Chernobyl baby. What it means
is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen
eye, on the inside. And she's marking it.
It's how the X that says where treasure's at
is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.—
All right. What I said wasn't half so measured.
In fact, I didn't say a thing. Their laughter
had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after
World History; that week was India—myths,
caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits.
The white kids I was sitting with were friends,
at least as I defined a friend back then.
So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot?
I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd—
She wear it to the shower? And to bed?—
while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad
was getting ready for another stab.
I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there.
And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear,
and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked
circles till the red planet entered the house of war
and on my forehead for the world to see
my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats,
their flesh in little puddles underneath,
pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.

From Dothead by Amit Majmudar. Copyright 2016 by Amit Majmudar. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf.

Nataraja (ca 11th century) at the Met

If only we had bold, responsible, and no-nonsense leaders like Gov. Christie

What an awesome statement from Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. (ht)  And in time for Ramadan ...
Makes me damn proud to be an American :)



What a crazy anti-Muslim hysteria we have in this country. 

I wonder how this anti-Muslim mania compares with the anti-Catholic and anti-Semite viruses of the past. It is awful that we haven't learnt from those and many other ugly aspects of our history.

Even more pathetic: there are very few politicians like Governor Christie who bluntly dismiss such hysteria with the kind of an attitude and words he uses.  Yes, "crazies" and "crap" are the best way to deal with them.

And, by the way, what ever happened to the Islamic Center project across from NJ, in the Empire State?  Remember that one?

Joel Stein's Indianized New Jersey

I have read Joel Stein's columns when he wrote for the LA Times--some were really good, and many fell flat.  Now, Stein has become the news himself not because of a brilliant column, but otherwise.
At Time, where Stein has a regular gig , he has written a piece that is neither funny nor critical nor even informative.  In fact, it sounds very high-schoolish.  He does a very poor job of joking about things that, say, Russell Peters has already joked about and joked really, really, well.

The WSJ has a round up of some of the reactions to this column.  The title of that piece says it all: Indians Unamused by Time’s ‘Edison’
Back in India, Pranay Gupte has authored an opinion piece with a title that is meant to be more catchy than anything else: Will Indians face a backlash in the U.S.? 

It is not merely Massachusetts. Remember Virginia and New Jersey?

Losing the seat held by a Kennedy since 1953 in a very blue state is, of course, a huge loss to the Democratic Party.  But, this is being seen as some kind of a one crazy shot out of nowhere.  Well, how quickly we forget other results that were not too long ago:
This is how the NY Times reported the results of the elections in Virginia--elections held just over two months ago, on November 3, 2009:

Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican and a former state attorney general, won a decisive victory in Virginia’s governor’s race Tuesday, a stark reversal of fortune for Democrats who have held control in Richmond for the past eight years.
Mr. McDonnell defeated the Democratic candidate, R. Creigh Deeds, an 18-year state senator from rural Bath County in western Virginia. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. McDonnell had 59 percent of the vote, and Mr. Deeds 41 percent.
Republicans cited the victory as a repudiation of the Obama administration and the national Democratic Party’s agenda, especially that of departing Gov. Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

And, there was one other election that same day, in New Jersey.  And what happened there?  Over to the NY Times again--after all, this was in their backyard:

In New Jersey, a former federal prosecutor, Christopher J. Christie, became the first Republican to win statewide in 12 years by vowing to attack the state’s fiscal problems with the same aggressiveness he used to lock up corrupt politicians.
He overcame a huge Democratic voter advantage and a relentless barrage of negative commercials to defeat Jon S. Corzine, an unpopular incumbent who outspent him by more than two to one and drew heavily on political help from the White House, including three visits to the state from President Obama.

The way I read the results is this: none of the election results was about Obama per se.  We Americans are less comfortable with one-party rule, and we way prefer divided governance.  Bush would have experienced similar situations, if not for the events of 9/11 and then the wars that got him and the Republicans the extra vote needed to win seats.

I am used to people expressing their preference for a divided government.  It used to happen all too often in the state, Tamil Nadu, where I lived until I came here to the US.  Electors routinely would send one party's candidates to the parilament but elect the other party's candidates for the state government.

So, as far as I am concerned, both the Republicans and Democrats are making a mistake when they interpret the election of Brown as some kind of a statement on healthcare, Obama, ..... whatever.
BTW, it also seems like voters are making a clear distinction between Obama's popularity and the issues on which they have to vote.  So, whether it is the Olympics, or NJ governor race, or the MA senate race, well, Obama might attract crowds, but if the proof is in eating the pudding, well, ....

From Calcutta to New Jersey .... the mosquito diaries :-)

If people can move, so can other animals.  And, thus, even can mosquitoes!

A couple of years ago, I ran into trouble (ed: when have you not run into trouble?!) for writing an opinion column that as long as humans move around the world, there will always be invasive species.  And, because there is no way we would ever force people to stay put, well, we can only expect more and more of species appearing in habitats far, far away from their original homes.

The latest in the example here is mosquitoes. (HT)

The modern city of Kolkata sits toward the western end of what could, until recently, have been called the natural range of the Asian tiger mosquito: a swath of land stretching from Pakistan to North Korea. Its ancestral habitat is in the forests of Southeast Asia, where it laid eggs in water-filled tree holes or the hollow insides of bamboo stalks, rarely travelling more than a few hundred metres from the cavity where it was born.

Over the course of the past two or three decades, however, the Asian tiger mosquito has become considerably, prodigiously more mobile. It has circled the planet, emerging in Trinidad in 1983; Mexico in 1988; France in 1999; Cameroon in 2000; Nicaragua, Greece, Israel and Switzerland in 2003. It has colonised North and South America, Africa, and Europe, until it has become a great nuisance in Brazil, Albania, Nigeria, Mexico and Italy – “the most invasive mosquito in the world”, a team of researchers wrote in 2007, in the journal Vector-Borne Zoonotic Disease. The mosquito from the Southeast Asian jungle is also now a great nuisance in Trenton, New Jersey – the greatest present-day mosquito nuisance in a wetland state whose history is written in waves of mosquito infestation.

What is the problem, you ask?

The Asian tiger mosquito is capable, in laboratory testing, of carrying and transmitting a variety of viruses, but so far, in the wild, it has been a less effective vector of disease than the yellow fever mosquito, with one notable and alarming exception. An outbreak of chikungunya – a virus that causes high fever and lingering joint pain – on the island of La Reunion in 2005, which infected 266,000 people and killed 248, was traced to a mutation in the virus that enabled it to be transmitted by the Asian tiger mosquitoes. Two years later, a tourist who had been in the Indian Ocean region passed through Ravenna, Italy. There, he encountered a local population of Asian tiger mosquitoes, which had arrived from the United States in a shipment of tyres. The convergence led to Europe’s first outbreak of the disease – and raised the possibility not only of chikungunya continuing to follow the mosquitoes around the world, but of diseases such as dengue or yellow fever making the same mutational leap. 

Of course, we then launch a war on mosquitoes:

New Jersey is merely the northern fringe of the Asian tiger mosquito’s US territory, which now includes the entire southeast, from the Gulf of Mexico across the south and more than halfway up the Atlantic coast. Mercer County and neighbouring Monmouth County, which together form a belt across the middle of the state, are in the second year of a five-year, $3.8 million project, backed by the United States Department of Agriculture, to try to bring the invading swarms under control.

Maybe yet another war we are going to lose!