Lebanese LGBT Org Gets Support at Out Games

Helem, the Lebanese LGBT organization, was unable to send its member to the OutGames plenary session in Montreal this week due to the continuing destruction of Lebanon by Isreal. Instead, the member sent a video statement, which was apparently received with a lot of support from the audience, some of whom gave a standing ovation. You can see the full story and look at the video statement here.

Mullahs on Earthquake Relief: Women Need Not Apply

Just when one thinks that the mullahs can't possibly get any worse, they manage to scale new heights in idiocy. This is the latest bit of lunacy (via The Daily Times):

Clerics want no women aid workers in quake areas

MANSEHRA: Clerics in the NWFP want authorities to expel all women working for international relief agencies in earthquake-affected areas by the end of this month.

The clerics accuse the women, including Pakistanis employed by foreign non-government organisations (NGOs), of dressing improperly, mixing with men and drinking alcohol.

“We are not against the NGOs, but we are against them spreading obscenity in society and trying to weaken our faith by corrupting our women,” Moazzam Ali Shah, head of Tehreek-e-Islaha Muashra, or Movement to Cleanse Society, said.

The clerics have not said what action they might take if the women aid workers are not asked to leave. More than 50 international NGOs are based in Mansehra carrying out relief and rehabilitation projects for the victims of a massive earthquake that killed over 73,000 people and rendered millions homeless in Kashmir and NWFP last October.

“We know an ultimatum has been given and we are waiting to see what happens,” said Frank Lehmann, a senior official with World Vision, an NGO involved in providing schooling for children still living in tent encampments. “We respect the local culture and try to behave accordingly,” Lehmann said, adding that the relief agencies had raised their concerns with the local authorities. Police have given assurances that aid workers will be protected, while talks are held with clerics to settle the issue. “No one would be allowed to disrupt relief work and we are absolutely serious about security issues,” Waqas Aziz, a district police officer, said.

“We see this as a local issue, which is being defused. But we have told the NGOs to take care about local sensitivities while working in this area,” he said.

Jamaatud Dawa, a charity with links to banned militant organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, is active in the area, and its officials in Balakot said they supported the allegations against the foreign aid workers.

I know of several women who are working in these areas, and they are generally not the sort of women who will be scared away by some half-sentient mullah. However, it is interesting that the main target might be foreign female aid workers; the main group quoted above is World Vision, a US-based Christian aid group (yes, one of those really awful "let's save the dark-skinned victims and while we're at it let's try and convert them too" type of groups - they are pretty active in Darfur, for example). That does thicken the plot a bit, but of course does not justify this absurd behavior on the part of the mullahs. But let me also make a request to World Vision: please stop trying to convert Pakistanis to Christianity. They already have many mind-numbing extremist versions of religion to choose from, and they don't need your version to confuse them even more.

Female Councillors Held Hostage in NWFP

This really pisses me off (although it shouldn't surprise me). Courtesy The Daily Times:

PESHAWAR: Having succeeded in overturning a jirga-decision last year that sought to prevent them from filing their nomination papers for the local bodies polls, Upper Dir’s elected female councillors now face a new political battle: the right to attend their respective council meetings.

As the situation currently stands, female councillors are barred from council meetings, with male relatives attending the sessions on their behalf.

“This practice, which deliberately deprives women of their political rights, is encouraged and supported by the leaders of the District, Tehsil and Union Councils,” a spokesperson of Individualland, a group of political analysts, told Daily Times on Wednesday.

Requesting not to be named, the spokesperson said that, according to Individualland researchers, the majority of elected female councillors were being represented at meetings by male family members.

“The male members regularly attend the district assembly sessions on their behalf, sign in for them, speak for them, vote for them and of course, needless to say, also collect their honorariums,” she said.

In Upper Dir, she said, sons, brothers, husbands and fathers were representing female councillors on reserved seats. So, for all practical purposes, the men in Upper Dir were occupying seats reserved for women while the elected women were forced to sit at home, she added... [More here]

And what is the federal government doing about this? Let me guess - nothing. So much for enlightened moderation. By the way, who/what is "Individualland"??

Closer to Repealing Section 377 in India?

The BBC reports today that NACO (National AIDS Control Organization) has decided to support the petitioners who want Section 377 repealed. From BBC News:

The Indian government's HIV/Aids control body has backed calls for homosexuality to be legalised.

The National Aids Control Organisation (Naco) said that infected people were being driven underground and efforts to curb the virus were being hampered.

Naco supported a court motion filed by an Aids charity on Wednesday seeking to end a law criminalising homosexuality. [More on the story here]

The development is related to the legal case that has been making its way through the Indian court system. The last word on the case was the Indian Supreme Court's ruling that Indian society was, basically, not "ready" for the legalization of homosexuality, and sent the case back to the Delhi court for reconsideration. It is in this court that NACO has now agreed to join the petitioners wanting to eliminate Section 377. HomoFOBia is cautiously optimistic...

Karachi Burns

With all of the attention on the violence in Lebanon and on the Bombay blasts, it's easy to forget that people all over the world are dealing with violence. Turabi, a Shia leader, was killed in Karachi on Friday. Subsequently the city has flared in violence again; the KFC in Gulshan was set on fire, buses have been burned, and fighting and gunshots have been reported. So far, there are no confirmed casualties, which is something to be grateful for, I suppose. But with all the violence right now, plus the derailing of the Pakistan-India peace process, and now the burning of Karachi - it's put me in a very bad mood.

Apologizing for the Blasts in Bombay

Everyone on the planet now knows about the blasts in Bombay that have killed almost 200 people. In addition to the usual rhetoric that accompanies such violence, there has been considerable condemnation and sympathy from two specific quarters: Indian Muslims, and the Pakistani government. These statements were issued almost immediately after the fact, suggesting that they were meant to preempt accusatory fingers that were inevitably going to be aimed their way. But, given that we don't know who it was, or why they did it, why is it that these two groups feel compelled to respond immediately? Yes, of course, one realizes the politics of the situation. Pakistan and India have their long-standing tensions, and there is sometimes good reason for each to point fingers at each other when things go horribly wrong domestically. And of course, for many in India, including increasingly the mainstream, Indian Muslims are practically Pakistanis anyway - at the very least they are seen as suspect citizens, with questionable loyalties. (Frankly, I shudder to think what lies ahead for Indian Muslims in the immediate future, especially those in Bombay.) But even if these knee-jerk condemnations makes sense to me, they still feel kind of sick - because they reinforce the suspicion and mistrust, not dispel it.

The Bookseller of Kabul

Okay, so I read this book by Asne Seierstad. The way the press had raved about it, it was supposed to be something like Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda. Sadly, it isn't. There were two chapters that were good but they were not even half as good as the weakest chapters of Gourevitch's "We wish to inform...". But that is all. Rest of the book was not bad but there was nothing in it that we didn't know already. It is really the type of book that Europeans love to read on their summer vacations - the kind of book that makes you feel so thankful that you are European before you go for your vacation to Africa, or Asia and feel thankful that you are European, and then return home to feel thankful that you are European. Some of it was pretty repetative especially about the veiling of women in the Ninja Burka - the Shuttlecock Burka. I will write more about it later.

French Fries and Curry

I was doing my regular Jackson Heights browse, taste, walk around, have-a-drink-with-Ali, check out brothers, weekly tour. The movie store Aunti-ji who believes that I have an "off-beat taste" (her exact words) in desi movies called me over and said that she had a new film for me: "French Fries and Curry". She believed it was a local desi film, dealing with women's issues. She had not seen it herself.

As you all know, since American Desi, American Chai, ABCD, and other such brilliant endeavors I have been begging for redemption. So French arrives as a welcome change from the ragged story line: ABCD guy is running away from his roots, goes to college, falls in love with another ABCD girl who is connected to her roots, and hey presto! he accepts his ethnic origins rooted in temples, dung, and mosquito bites and marries her to consummate natural hetero marital impulses. French has a different story. It is not about ABCD guys waiting to be saved by their ethnic-chic girlfriends. It is about three women, two desi FOB girls, and one "American" (white) girl finding love and friendship and happiness. The film was shot on a budget lower than the Blair Witch Project's. As such it dispenses with the notion that bad cinema needs Hollywood props.

The dialogue is peppered with heart wrenching lines about arranged marriages and position of women in desi families. Teesta – knows as a trendy “T” - walks out on her suitor telling him that she can never make him happy in his house since she is a woman with dreams of owning her own publishing company. Sounds radical na? Wait till you see the incredible acting that goes with it. She is also horrified when her white friend Mark asks her to go for dinner with him. She shouts in, what is supposed to be, amazement: "Are you okay? Are you asking me out on a date?". At the same time Sheri's relationship with her live in boyfriend-husband (we really don't know cause we are told both - he is referred to as her husband in one scene and then boyfriend in another) is falling apart. Sheri seems to be falling for Abhi who is a hard working dim-wit owner of a coffee shop. He spends a total of one minute and nineteen seconds with her (and another 5 on the phone) and in a typical Indian way of love at first sight, he proposes marriage. Sheri's white American sensibilities are shattered since Brian, her white American boyfriend-husband neither wants marriage, nor children. In fact Brian doesn't like children. In the first scene we meet Brian, he is appalled by the Indian guy - Abhi, who is to steal Sheri's heart later - with kid in the supermarket. He says something about "these Indians" who have children by the age of twenty, and by their fourtieth birthday have a "brood". Sheri is horrified and asks him whether he hates children. The more appropriate question would have been: "Do you hate Indians?". Followed by: You Raicst Asshole!.

Deep psychological issues haunt our protagonist whose parents divorced when she was young. She is, in a typical model minority myth manner, a very successful software engineer now. She is wooed by Pankaj Malhotra who lives in her apartment building. Malhotra, if we need any reminder, is also a techie. In his circular love letter, she finally finds the father she lost to Malyalam literature. Pankaj, like all the other characters in the movie - if it can be called that - is uni-dimensional. He wants to get married, and marry he will. There are lots of scenes with ducks, doves and lakes with enchanting music in the background, I was constantly reminded of Beliefnet's biblical phrases appearing against different natural wonders.

If movies were to be rated according to literary icons then "French" would be the unknown step brother of the unknown person who penned "some love one, some love two, I love one, that is you". "French" makes American Desi seem like the Tolstoy of modern cinema. Please watch it when you have progressive desi friends over. Huddle together, drink some beer, and laugh away.

My Haircut

Last week I had the worst haircut ever. Or rather the second worst haircut. The first one was by my friend Daks who had smoked so much pot that he forgot whether he was shearing a sheep or cutting his dear friend's locks. I wanted to wear a t-shirt that said, "I HATE MY HAIR DRESSER". And my friend was (and still is) Gay. How could he have given me a haircut like that? I have asked myself numerous times. The cut was so bad that I would have been thrown pennies at had one more strand of hair been removed. Patches of short hair liberally covered under uneven curls. Right side wiped clean and left part trimmed. I looked like this goth girl who resembled a cat and sat in Comparative Literature classes.

So Hair Cuttery in Dupont Circle in Washington DC is the culprit's den. I should have known better than to walk into a highly unimaginatively named place: Hair Cuttery. It's second only to walking into a place with a french name in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Imagine a place called "Le Heir Clippery" or whatever it is called in French, located on State St in Chatts.

A $20 steep shampoo and cut. I was transported back to Lahore where I once had my "tind" done when I was a boy of merely 10. Nayi's ustraa went all over town on my little head. And the way water slipped on my pretty tind. And the mandatory knocks on the skull. And the shouts: Oye Tind. Oye Tarkone. Oye Ganje!

Yes, it all returned as the cut progressed. At the total mercy of electric-ustra-wielding elderly woman named Mercedes, I sat like Abraham's son waiting to be slaughtered. She was not as slick as her name suggested but she did destroy the environment that she came into contact with. Oye, I am not THAT stupid that I would give her real name away and then have you all deny business to some poor immigrant woman who just happens to be in the wrong profession. In fact, I suggest real full bloodied Americans should go and have a haircut by her, and then experience being at the recieving end of tyranny. But Lord O Lord, why me? What have Punjabis done to Nicaragua that I had to suffer the revenge? I mean, if she was Bengladeshi I would understand.

I texted all over the globe with my Cingular phone, announcing from Cape to Cairo, from London to Luanda, from New York to bloody Nagasaki, that my hair were never gonna be the same again. Some of you told me that I should sit tight as it all grows back pretty quickly. You were right. But the humiliation of walking around Dupont Circle like that..........