india currents - march 2016

by Kamala Thiagarajan

The theory behind lucky charms and evil omens

march 2016 • vol. 29 , no .11 • www. indiacurrents.com

Ich Bin ein Berlinerby Riz Mithani

Delhi Coolieby Kalpana Mohan

In Defense of a Nine Lettered Nameby Sandhya Acharya

INDIA CURRENTSCelebrating 29 Years of Excellence

INDIA CURRENTS

March 2016 | West Coast Edition | www.indiacurrents.com | 1

2 | INDIA CURRENTS | West Coast Edition | March 2016


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It’s the Race Card, People!

When Meryl Streep announced that after all, we’re all from Africa, in response to the lack

of color in the Oscar nominating panel, she was being completely accurate, but not entirely truthful.

When it comes to questions of race, the best strategy often is to quibble, split hairs or dissemble. Streep was pushed to a corner to justify an all-white cast that picked an all-white cast for the Oscars. There can be no comfortable truth in that.

Meanwhile, #OscarsSoWhite 2016 goes down in history as another racist experiment.

Therefore, I tell Meryl Streep that we might still be Africans if a group of intrepid people hadn’t decided to go ex-ploring to far away lands for better game. We might still be Africans if the gentler sun hadn’t blanched our ancestors’ skins. We might still be Africans if our ancestors hadn’t created boundaries and walls and religions to keep neighbors away from their resources.

In a perfectly homogenous world of us people from Africa, we would be mi-grating in and out of countries, utterly confident in our ability to blend into one people, choosing the shine of the sun and its golden rays of opportunity as the rea-sons for our homesteading.

But that’s not how it is. We are now a people of divisions and classes.

And so it reminded me of the 2001 voter registration card on which South Carolina governor Nikki Haley checked “white” for her race classification. She’s been in the news lately, endorsing Marco Rubio, and giving the Republican re-sponse to the State of the Union. True, it’s a sleeping ghost and it’s about fifteen years since the incident, yet it still brings up im-portant questions of how we see ourselves.

As much as Meryl Streep was right about us being black, so was Nikki Haley of being white.

It’s an if-then-else tautology. First, let’s understand the voter registration catego-ries. There’s white, there’s black, there’s Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Na-tive American and there’s the catchall “other.” The first two are color groupings and the next three are immigrant divisions. So does “other” fall under color or immi-grant or both? Since it is unclear, let’s allot

it to the immigrant bucket. If Nikki Haley is not an immediate

immigrant, in the way her parents were, she couldn’t check any of the categories of immigrant heritage specified. And so she was left with color groupings. She could well have chosen black and this editorial would have been very different. Instead, she chose the color of privilege. Was she wrong? No, not really.

Sir William Flower, a 19th century anatomist and surgeon, once explained that “physical characters are the best, if not the only, true tests of race,” and Haley’s Indo-Aryan characters, on the spectrum, have more in common with Caucasoidal traits than with Mongoloid or Negroid.

Hence, Nikki Haley is white, by de-fault, just as we are all Africans by default.

Confused? I am too, and that’s the point. Race, as we know it, is socially con-structed and works for and against us in different ways.

While Streep and Haley would prob-ably like to believe that they are beyond the categorizations of race, it determines much of our behavior and how we relate

to each other. It certainly did in their cases. Streep became the face and voice of Oscar's all white panel. Nikki Haley, aka Namrata Randhawa, carefully crafted a white description just so she would have a seat at the chosen table at a crucial time in her life.

Race assigns possibilities to our future.The possibility of being noticed by the police, of finding a job, of getting a pro-motion, and of being “on the finish line,” to quote actress Charlotte Rampling, who suggested that non-white movie profes-sionals perhaps didn’t deserve the Oscar nod this year.

There’s just no indisputably correct answer to who we are, and how we see ourselves, racially. It’s a dilemma that often surfaces at key moments in our lives. I be-lieve that it’s a question of being comfort-able in the colors of our past and having the patience to wait it out. For sooner or later, things will change. It did for our African ancestors.

Jaya Padmanabhan, Editor

4 | INDIA CURRENTS | West Coast Edition | March 2016

INDIA CURRENTSPERSPECTIVES West Coast Edition

www.indiacurrents.com

Find us on

March 2016 • vol 29 • no 11

3 | EDITORIALIt’s the Race Card, People!By Jaya Padmanabhan

8 | WORDS AND THINGSTo My Uncle Shashi Tharoor on his 60th BirthdayBy Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

14 | VIEWPOINTIn Defense of a Nine Lettered NameBy Sandhya Acharya

22 | EDUCATIONDegrees Without JobsBy Shail Kumar

24 | COMMENTARYLooking for Phoenicia Street, 1969By R. Benedito Ferrao

27 | BOOKSA Review of Goddess of Fire, Ticket to IndiaBy Hemlata Vasavada, Tara Menon

62 | MUSICNo Ryan in Bollywood ArabiaBy Priya Das

94 | ON INGLISHDelhi CoolieBy Kalpana Mohan

102 | THE LAST WORDMy Hillary DilemmaBy Sarita Sarvate

LIFESTYLE

Southern California:70 | Cultural Calendar91 | Spiritual Calendar

Northern California:74 | Cultural Calendar82 | Spiritual Calendar

26 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA How to Break the Ice on a First DateBy Jasbina Ahluwalia

36 | TAX TALKTax Implications of the Health Care LawBy Rita Bhayani

43 | RECIPESGluten Free Green ChapatiesBy Shanta Sacharoff

88 | HEALTHY LIFETrimming the FatBy Nina Radcliff

90 | DEAR DOCTOR Multiple Personas, One PersonBy Alzak Amlani

DEPARTMENTS6 | Letters to the Editor29 | Popular Articles

WHAT’S CURRENT

30 | Ask a Lawyer31 | Visa Dates

Do superstitions work as guiding tools for negotiating our complex world?

By Kamala Thiagarajan

16 | Of Taboos and Talismans

Reviews of Airlift and Neerja

By Aniruddh Chawda

39 | Lives

Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi

By Aarti Johri

64 | Films

47 | TravelIch Bin ein Berliner

By Riz Mithani


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