Ray and his family toured Alcatraz Island recently and made sure to bring this to my attention. Indians welcome? Right on! You know us Indians – always happy to be invited to any party. To my dismay, this sign was painted for the The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971. Fine.

Sampat Pal Devi with members of her Gulabi Gang

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Slate | Wear a Pink Sari and Carry a Big Stick

The founder of the gulabis is the fearless Sampat Pal Devi, 40, who was married off at the age of 12 to an ice-cream vendor and had the first of her five children at 15. The gulabis, whose members say they are a “gang for justice,” started in 2006 as a sisterhood of sorts that looked out for victims of domestic abuse, a problem the United Nations estimates affects two in three married Indian women. Named after their hot-pink sari uniforms, the gang paid visits to abusive husbands and demanded they stop the beatings. When obstinate men refused to listen, the gulabis would return with large bamboo sticks called laathis and “persuade” them to change their ways. “When I go around with a stick, it’s to make men fear me. I don’t always use it, but it helps change the mind of men who think they are more powerful than me” says Pal. She has assumed the rank of commander in chief and has appointed district commanders across seven districts in Bundelkhand to help coordinate the gang’s efforts.

Pal’s group now has more than 20,000 members, and the number is growing. Making her way from one far-flung village to another on an old rusty bicycle, she holds daily gatherings under shady banyan trees, near makeshift tea-stalls selling the sweet Indian drink chai and other popular village hangouts to discuss local problems and attract new recruits.

Sisters are doing it for themselves. The Indian criminal justice system isn’t going to stand up for its women and, for the hundreds of languages spoken in India, everyone understands Physical Intimidation. Sad, but true.

… The accusation traced back to a five-year-old divorce file, and even then it was all circumstantial – a nest of gibberish, as they say in the trade … and not entirely unlike the gaggle of wild charges laid by Ronald Reagan against Col. Moammar Khadafy of Libya.

The colonel was whooping it up in Tripoli last week with a fast round of bear-baiting, breast-beating and unsettling displays of what is beginning to look like a genuinely perverse sense of humor, although not everybody saw it that way.

There were those in Washington, including some prominent Democrats, who saw the colonel’s behavior as the last stages of some deep and malignant craziness that might soon cause The End Of The World. Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, a traditionally flaky liberal with credentials suggesting some kind of awful mutation with the genes of Hubert Humphrey, Billie Sol Estes and a Stalinist camel driver from South Yemen, went on national TV to say that the time had finally come for Khadafy to be put to sleep. It was a call for a political assassination. “Maybe we’re at that point in the world,” said Metzenbaum, a longtime lobbyist for Israel, “where Mr. Khadafy has to be eliminated.”

Not even Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was willing to go that far – not even after the colonel discussed his plans for destroying the US 6th Fleet and perhaps every oil well east of Gibraltar in a lengthy personal discussion with Ted Koppel on “Nightline.”

In almost the same breath, however, he assured Koppel that he was absolutely sincere about inviting Reagan to come and visit with him in his tent and hash things out like real men. Koppel responded by inviting Khadafy to the White House, for a long lunch without George Shultz, and al Qaid said, “Why not?” He has never been west of England – and only there for six months, long ago, which he spent hunkered down in some vile basement flat in Brixton – but when Koppel asked him to Washington he seemed gratified. It was an “encouraging exchange,” as they say in the diplomatic business, and some even called it a “breakthrough.”

Indeed. And so much for TV diplomacy. Within 24 hours the colonel had shifted back to his Mr. Hyde mode and was calling Reagan a Nazi pig who should be put on trial for international crimes. He reverted to his earlier assessment of the president as a “stinking rotten crusader” and an “aging third-rate actor” who is even worse than his old movies, which are shown constantly on Libyan TV.

Khadafy also called for help in the form of a new International Brigade of volunteers to join terrorist “suicide squads” to wreak havoc all over the world, if the US attacks Libya.

Koppel had no comment and Shultz laughed all night in his office in Foggy Bottom, and Khadafy claimed he got 10,000 applications in less than 48 hours.

Who will our Hunter Thompson of 25 years from now be? Who will we read then to look back on what’s happening now in hindsight, horror interspersed with giggling fits and deja vu?

Update: It should be said that we could read HST 50 years from now and things will be the same with the names slightly changed. The man wasn’t particularly prescient, although he wrote for the ages; the reality is that America hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1950s. As long as there is fear …

Dave Walker of the New Orleans Times Picayune interviewed me for a piece about the response of blog communities to David Simon’s show, Treme. Walker and I had a nice long phone conversation about The Storm, what kind of person it takes to capture it in a semi-fictional tv series and the blog as a mere yet powerful medium. I’ll expand on this over at Back Of Town in a little bit.

Big news on the desi intertubes yesterday was a TIME column by Joel Stein entitled “My Own Private India.” Oh boy, you say. Yeah. It seems Stein suffers from some inner turmoil about the changing ethnic nature of his Jersey hometown which Tums and a glass of Shut The F**k Up juice alone could not settle. He had to share on the pages of a national newsweekly. And they accuse the blogs of killing journalism. The inimitable ANNA wasn’t going to let this slide and wrote an appropriately scathing response over at Sepia Mutiny, in which she quotes from emails that friends and I sent in to her. I encourage you to read both before coming back here.

My entire email response to Anna follows. As you read it, keep in mind that the older I get, it’s not the overt racists and the content of the racism that bother me as much as the “latent” racists among us and the why of what they say and do. (South Carolina Senator Jake Knotts calling gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley a “f**king raghead” is the dual-headed demon of old hick racism and dirty politics as usual at play. Then, there’s the super-educated white guy I know who has referred to a bunch of brown folks, including me, as terrorist one time too many. Is it different? Moreover, what does this level of discourse prove and why is it so easy?). Here goes:

“Even if this were a simple observation on Joel Stein’s part of how his town has changed economically through the decades, he could have done it a bit differently. Case in point: ‘In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if ‘dot heads’ was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.’ Like these attributes of Hindu gods are insult-worthy. With this, Stein gave up the protection of self-deprecation and crossed that line. Why is it still so easy to do so?

“I was recently invited to a costume party which encouraged attendance dressed as your favorite Indian of the western or eastern variety. The photo montage on the front of the invite (because such a thing requires overt, graphic description) consisted of badly cut-and-pasted Pocahontas, Sitting Bull, a South Indian dancer, Hindu goddess Durga and Gandhi positioned over a wild west barrel. For a while, I fumed over it. I didn’t move back to the Yankee Midwest from the South to receive not-malicious-but-tasteless shite like this. Even if they live in a small town outside of Akron, OH, these are adults, ”professionals” even, who have attended college. How could young, ostensibly educated people in 2010 create and enjoy such a thing, especially when this town overflows with Indians of all walks of life, some of whom employ area residents by the hundreds? Who do these f**ks think they are sending out an invite like that? How would they feel if I were to send them ones for a Come Dressed As Your Favorite Undereducated Small-Town White Bitch party?

“Then I realize that no matter the globalized, trendy clothes they wear and ‘ghetto’ music that they listen to [forget that they'd probably pee their Ed Hardys if they accidentally walked into an actual ghetto], they are products of their upbringing and do not have editors, internal or external, who tell them they ought to know better.

“Time Magazine ought to know better.

“Yet, still, hitherto, even at this point, I can dismiss the whole article as noise. What really cooks me here is not Stein’s provincialism or even how easy it still is to use Indians as the butt of jokes. It’s the Indian-Americans, the ones who keep their heads down, ‘adjust’ and don’t make waves, who will tell us not to be so sensitive and to shrug it off. ‘Let them say what they want. We should not internalize these things and let them bother us. Grow a sense of humor.’ Because of their being doormats, it is easy for the Steins of the world to give ink to the Wholly Unnecessary. They make it so easy to do so. No more. I’m an American. The residents of Edison have been Americans for longer than Stein’s had a column. They don’t need this. Fuck you if you can take a ‘joke.’

“And you can tell the [expletive deleted, but it's the favorite of one Mr. Al Swearengen] who will inevitably show up in the SM comments’ section, ever pointing out the thin nature of our confused brown skins, I said so.”

One more thing: Not all of us are doctors or engineers, ok? Some of us reserve the inalienable American right to be straight f**k-ups. Like business owners or musicians or geologists or journalists. My mother is as disappointed about this as I’m sure Stein’s mom is.

I wanted to marry D five minutes after I met him, mind you. Still, I’m glad we waited.

There is another phenomenon at work in my case: I didn’t have to “put a ring on it”.

The two of us are educated, young, urban professionals, committed to our careers, friendships, and, yes, our relationships. But we know that legally tying down those unions won’t make or break them. Women now constitute a majority of the workforce; we’re more educated, less religious, and living longer, with vacuum cleaners and washing machines to make domestic life easier. We’re also the breadwinners (or co-breadwinners) in two thirds of American families. In 2010, we know most spousal rights can be easily established outside of the law, and that Americans are cohabiting, happily, in record numbers. We have our own health care and 401(k)s and no longer need a marriage license to visit our partners in the hospital. For many of us, marriage doesn’t even mean a tax break.

… Turns out that waiting is a good idea: for every year we put off marriage, our chances of divorce go down. Which brings us to this question: if you’re going to wait, why do it at all? Like a fifth of young Americans, we identify as secular. We know that having children out of wedlock lost its stigma a long time ago.

The joke between D and me is I married him simply to shorten my last name down to an easy five letters.

She pointed me to the following articles for further reading:

American Association of University Women | Why So Few (2010)

American Geological Insititute | Participation of Women in Geoscience Occupations (May 14, 2010)

American Geological Insititute | Trends in Geoscience Degrees Conferred to Women (November 23, 2009)

and had this to say:

“Those of us hired in the 70s and 80s don’t seem to have provided a lot of examples of combining a successful academic career with children. And I think that despite spousal hiring policies, halting of the tenure track for childbirth, etc., it remains more difficult for women faculty in the tenure track to sustain or develop relationships, bear and raise children, and generally maintain some sense of balance in their lives.

“… I also think there are still significant “cultural” aspects of physical science and engineering departments that make them feel less comfortable to some women students (competitiveness, “macho” displays, few women faculty, male faculty who consciously or unconsciously put women down). The enrollment numbers from AGI suggest that the geosciences have made some significant improvements in the last decade, but the total numbers of students in geoscience are much lower than in life science, so there may be some significant noise in the observed trends.”

If you know of any other must-read studies and articles on women in science and engineering or the current state of science and technology education in general, please alert me in the comments.

As a female scientist myself, I’m puzzled at society’s state of puzzlement over this “debate.” The following things are so glaringly obvious that I’m surprised no one has acted on them:

1) With only 25% of our high-school graduates fit to enter college, the workforce or the military, America is decelerating its emphasis on educational supremacy, leave alone promoting women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). And, among developed nations, only in America does the separation into gender roles start at such an early, impressionable age. So, not only are American students screwed, female American students are screwed worse. Leveling the playing field of gender at the university level is admirable but not a permanent fix given ingrained biases at that age; start at the community and elementary level, with clear incentives drawn and labeled from the start as well as parental buy-in.

2) The idea of preparing students for standardized tests as educational recovery policy is ludicrous on the parts of both the Bush and Obama administrations. How does a society foster critical thinkers by inflating grades but not necessary skills? Furthermore, women and men do not perform the same on standardized tests (lots of my female friends and relatives and I suck at them, whereas my non-scientist husband can take an MCAT or GRE without studying because he out-psychs the tests), a male or a female can excel at standardized testing but show no STEM aptitude or original research skills and there is a lot more to STEM research than kicking ass at standardized tests. As Dr. Carolyn Porco responds, “I’ve known males whose analytical abilities were off the charts—the ones on the extreme end of the curve that we are now discussing—but who just couldn’t cut it in the world of scientific research, because they lacked some important personality trait.” There isn’t one way to think or to solve real-world problems.

3) As a graduate of a geology department that hires good professors regardless of gender, I’ve noticed that there is no shortage of excellent female candidates in any subdiscipline. So, why are fewer women hired into academia than men? Do men enjoy a larger incentive to go into the STEM disciplines than women (other than a pre-conditioned social approval)? I don’t know, but it’s an anomaly worth investigating.

4) Again with the incentives. I believe that even if we make astrophysics, structural engineering and neurobiology PhDs out of all of our children, there is no readily-apparent career payout. Where are the attractive STEM research jobs?

If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.

… Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA. And many who do earn doctorates in math-based subjects opt to use their skills devising mathematical models on Wall Street, rather than solving scientific puzzles in university labs, hoping a professorship opens up.

I finished graduate school when I was 28 and, since then, have been so focused on the career for which I went through all that schooling that I am still childless. And I’m not even an academic! How many women today want to deal with 60+ hours of post-doctoral research a week at low pay when they can make twice as much in non-science fields and get home to the kids by dinner? Besides, many of us are about maximizing payoff and minimizing uncertainty. Modern STEM graduate school does not deliver.

5) This is not to discourage women from attaining PhDs and working towards achievement and notoriety, but to point out that a balance between academic work and home life has become virtually unachievable for women thanks to social constructs (see Point 1). Dr. Isis has the best overall reaction to Tierney’s article from which this point stands out:

We can spend our time discussing SAT scores, but I worry that we are missing the most important thing that keeps women out of science – the cultural attitudes that teach women that if they choose a demanding career, they aren’t fulfilling their duties as wife and mother.

6) Raise the pay for teachers so that it doesn’t end up being a garbage receptacle of a job, hence devaluing the work of proficient teachers who want to be there. The big joke when I was in university was ‘Those who can’t do, teach.” How sad. As an example, the female students in my undergraduate geology curriculum who couldn’t maintain a C-average ended up switching to Education’s science teaching curriculum. These are the people teaching our kids! And why is teaching as a profession encouraged more in women than in men?

After all these years, the following observations ought to have slapped us repeatedly into the light, into directed action. But we act astounded when these results come out in modern studies. Why?

from The Times Online

Aziz Ansari hosts the MTV Music Awards (with a message for BP)

Manish Vij is shutting down Ultrabrown, a four-year-old Indian-American literature and arts blog, to pursue tech startups (brave) and writing a novel (braver) full-time. You may recognize Manish as co-founder of and former blogger at Sepia Mutiny, which he left to found Ultrabrown with amazing, young writing talent such as Chandrahas Choudhury, Jai Arjun Singh and Anonandon.

Ultrabrown’s farewell post serves as a refreshing antidote to my despondency earlier today. My parents and the parents and grandparents of many over at Ultrabrown and Sepia Mutiny moved away from the Indian subcontinent and sacrificed much so that we, their children, would be judged by our work and the content of our character, not the color of our skin, flavor of our caste, weight of our bank account or the coin toss of gender. Lately, with all of this immigrant bashing, name-calling and othering, I’ve been starting to think their work was in vain. Until I read this:

I always thought our community would eventually be as integrated as desis in Canada and the UK, where you can’t turn a channel without running into a brown anchor. I didn’t foresee it happening this quickly. For all the ways in which America remains deeply tribal, it is also beautifully and pragmatically open to an Aziz Ansari or a Nikki Haley in a way that few other countries seem to be. One grew up [Tamilian] Muslim, the other [Punjabi] Sikh; Aziz strutted around in a white tuxedo last night and never even bothered with a stage name.

My father’s tech generation often Anglicized their goodnames, started their own businesses because they couldn’t get promoted, and were forced to hire white CEOs anyway because nobody would buy from a desi. And now the former PM of Britain is asking Vinod Khosla for a job. Mindblowing.

I hate MTV awards shows, yet read this with sappy tears forming in my sappy eyes and, as sappy as it sounds, it made me feel for one small second that Barack Obama was not wrong. That “in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” The unlikely story that is Barack Obama, president of the United States. The unlikely story that he recently thanked DJ Rekha for performing Bhangra at the White House. The unlikely story that is my brother, partner in his own successful business solely due to his hard work. The unlikely story that is my aunt, dean and former provost of an American university. The unlikely stories that are my cousins, female sommelier, female aviator, female journalist, female physicist. The unlikely stories that are my nieces, carefree young American women. The unlikely story that is me, geologist, technologist and loudmouth, married to a sweet farmboy from northern Wisconsin.

Hope is what made these people. But, keeping American hope alive and giving it to the next generation requires work. Fighting the hatred, bigotry and violence that will erupt further from an increasingly troubled and changing economy and resulting shattered egos needs the resilience of will, pen and vote. And it needs a lot of love and support of one another. Manish has done us a great service in this arena. So, even if Ultrabrown has closed shop, I ask that you support the blogs and books of its talented writers and start your own movement to inspire and support more.

Good luck, Mr. Vij and the gang, grab your lungis and don’t panic!

“Okay, baby, hold tight,” said Zaphod. “We’ll take in a quick bite at the Vadapav Seller’s at the End of the Universe.”

D travels and is stressed out all the time thanks to the crap Ohio economy. We are both extremely depressed and nauseated over the gross mishandling of the oil disaster response. No one seems to care as long as the price of gasoline sits under $3 a gallon and they’re keeping up with the Kardashians. Every single day, though, I remind myself how lucky I am for being employed, healthy, living near my family and able to take care of myself. But, every single day any more, living in America tries my patience and sense of community and security.

Wonkette | Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students’ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

… Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over.

Couple this with influential idiots using Indian-Americans as fetishes and punchbags, referring to us as everything from the Chosen People to F**king Ragheads. On very public forums. And getting away with it.

I don’t have a problem with conservatism, its principles and opposition based on policy, but Republicans and now The Tea Party are a whole different animal. This is the first time since 9/11 that I have been worried for my safety and that of others of my skin color. When I sincerely hope on a daily basis that these dogwhistles during a time of economic uncertainty don’t incite cultural and physical violence against perceived and real “ragheads.” The malcontents have begun projecting their rage onto people of color in Arizona. Where next? It is scary.

Also read: First Draft’s Arizona Displeases Tube Kitten Again