Entries by Sandip Roy

Sandip Roy

Colin Powell, We Ask But You Still Don't Tell

By Sandip Roy, Feb 4, 2010 2:36 PM

 If the State of the Union made one concrete promise it was to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And the president obviously means business. The powers that be are lining up behind it.

Robert Gates said the Pentagon is preparing to repeal the law.
Adm. Mike Mullen got a lot of press for his comments that it is his “personal belief” that lifting the ban is the “right thing to do.”

Now Colin Powell has added his voice to the chorus. “Attitudes and circumstances have changed,” Powell said. They certainly have in the 17 years that have passed since he had opposed it.

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Sandip Roy

Immigration Reform - Killing it Softly With a SOTU

By Sandip Roy, Jan 28, 2010 12:49 AM

 I think President Obama just killed comprehensive immigration reform.

If he did, he killed it gently, with a pat on the head. Actually to be fair, he did not kill it. He sent it to the back of the bus. Behind the gays and lesbians.

The gays got the promise of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And a reminder that he’s already given them Employee Non-Discrimination.

Immigration reform got a casual platitude.

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Sandip Roy

Goodbye to The Last Communist

By Sandip Roy, Jan 19, 2010 8:13 AM

 When the US Immigration and Naturalization services asks the pro forma question – Have you ever been or are you a member of the Communist Party – I always gulp.

I have not.

But I wonder, does it count that for almost all my growing up years the party in power in West Bengal was the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Surely some red must have seeped in growing up with symbols of sickles and stars graffitied on the neighborhood walls. The men who drank tea and smoked Wills Filter cigarettes on the tea shop across the street stood every morning reading Ganashakti – the Communist party mouthpiece – pasted on a billboard on the street.

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Sandip Roy

Homophobia Goes into Closet in Post-Prop 8 World

By Sandip Roy, Jan 12, 2010 4:44 PM

 To YouTube or Not-to-YouTube – that seems to be the question when it comes to Prop 8 same sex marriage court case in San Francisco.

Meanwhile over in Uganda they are debating whether to pass death sentences on homosexuals. Or merely 7 years in prison. The bill might be softened. The death penalty, we are told, might not be "necessary."

In San Francisco, the anti-same-sex marriage side is falling over themselves to prove that they are not anti-gay, that this is not personal. Nothing against gays, some of them are my best friends, look we’ve given you domestic partners, sure, go visit your sick lover in hospital – but hey, we aren’t going to give you access to our strategy emails. But trust us, this is not about bias.

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Sandip Roy

Christmas Miracles in India

By Sandip Roy, Dec 25, 2009 1:50 AM

Christmas feels smaller and bigger in Calcutta.

When we were kids we used to go to see the Christmas lights on Park Street, the main restaurant drag in Calcutta. Restaurants with names like Sky Room and Moulin Rouge twinkled with lights. Flury’s fine confectioners would stay open late for Darjeeling tea and plum cakes. Calcutta, the most British of India’s big cities, celebrated Christmas as if the 1950s had not gone out of style.

This year as I walked down Park Street and saw the trees and restaurants strung with twinkling strings of lights, it felt a little shabby. Nothing, it seemed, had been updated in the last twenty years, unless you consider the new McDonalds an upgrade. Sky Room was gone. The fancy restaurants of our childhood looked a little timeworn, the uniforms of the doorman seemed a little shop soiled.

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Sandip Roy

Tareq Salahi and the New Age of Party Crashing

By Sandip Roy, Nov 30, 2009 5:45 PM

Tareq Salahi might not be South Asian. But he was following in the footsteps of a fine desi tradition – crashing big parties, especially ones involving food.

In a gray recession, with one out of eight Americans on food stamps, their crash landing into the first official state banquet for a visiting leader, is strangely in keeping with an almost forgotten slogan of “yes we can.”

The economy might be down, but yes we can still crash the party for the Indian prime minister.

 

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Sandip Roy

Mr. Singh Goes to Washington (And Gets Prawn Curry)

By Sandip Roy, Nov 25, 2009 2:16 PM

The front page of the New York Times is telling. The photograph shows President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh toasting each other in Washington DC. The story is on page A22.
Singh’s visit to Washington DC, the first state dinner of the Obama presidency was large on symbols, short on anything truly substantive. As one commentator put it in Rediff.com – “where’s the beef?”

It was missing, as might be expected in a state dinner for a Prime Minister from a Hindu majority country. The actual menu avoided meat altogether, opting for a prawn curry.

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Sandip Roy

Illegal in Italy

By Sandip Roy, Nov 18, 2009 3:34 PM

FLORENCE. It sounds fairly benign in English but clandestino has Italian media roiled up. It’s the word of choice for some for those in the country illegally – the “illegals” of Italy’s immigration debate. But the word is so loaded with negative connotations that many in Italy’s media and civil society wonder if it’s not fanning the flames of xenophobia.

Not that there is any lack of that in Italy. A British media observer sent me a list of headlines that had appeared recently in Italian media. Headline writers have no problem putting the race and ethnicity of alleged perpetrators of crimes in their headlines, no matter whether the crime had anything to do with their race.

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Sandip Roy

Labor Pains: How Our Broken Immigration System Hurts All Workers

By Sandip Roy, Nov 4, 2009 11:14 AM

Editor's note: This blog by Tyler Moran, Policy Director at the National Immigration Law Center, originally appeared here, on Immigration Impact, the blog of the Immigration Policy Center.

While most employers are law-abiding, some unscrupulous employers have a secret weapon for keeping down wages and working conditions—our broken immigration system. Bad apple employers hire undocumented immigrants, subject them to unsafe working conditions, pay them less than the market wage, or don’t pay them at all. If undocumented workers file a labor complaint or try to form a union, the employer will threaten them with deportation or even call DHS to have the workers deported. Then the workers are whisked into detention or out of the country before they can seek remedies for the labor violations. Most employers don’t get punished for their misconduct, which puts unscrupulous employers at a competitive advantage over law-abiding employers.

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Sandip Roy

The Homeless Ghosts of Calcutta

By Sandip Roy, Oct 31, 2009 1:10 PM

 Listen to this commentary on NPR.org

Every day at dusk, I go around the house turning on the lights.

My grandmother did it. My mother still does it. It’s well-known that twilight is the perfect time for wandering ghosts to sneak into the house.

Haunted houses in India don’t have just one ghost. It could be a whole family. There are shankchunnis and petnis, ghosts of women unlucky in love who wear saris and pounce on eligible young men. Brahmodoityas are the ghosts of Brahmans, and might bless you or curse you. The skondhokatas are the headless ghosts of people who died in train accidents. They sound terrifying, but because they don’t have heads, you can trick them easily. But you have to watch out for the very dangerous nishi, who call people by name in the dead of night and lead them away, never to be seen again.

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Sandip Roy

Power Sharing - the Fix-it-All from Honduras to Zimbabwe

By Sandip Roy, Oct 30, 2009 3:40 PM

 It’s good to know they have brokered a power-sharing deal in Honduras.

Manuel Zelaya is happy. Roberto Micheletti said he had made a “significant concession.”

Most importantly Hillary Clinton gave it her blessing calling it “an historic agreement.”

This is becoming increasingly the West’s policy for dealing with pesky squabbling countries of the Third World. Once the world’s policeman, insistent on reshaping the map of the Middle East, now America wants to settle geopolitical disputes like schoolyard brawls.

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Sandip Roy

Facebook Sees Dead People

By Sandip Roy, Oct 27, 2009 10:05 PM

When William showed up as a suggested friend on Facebook I almost clicked on the link. He was an acquaintance. We had friends in common. Then I remembered I had gotten a mail about his memorial service months ago. In the eternal sunshine of Facebook’s mind we could still become friends. There was something simultaneously soothing and creepy about it all.


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Sandip Roy

The Great Diwali Fight and President Obama

By Sandip Roy, Oct 16, 2009 2:03 PM

OK, you have to give it to President Obama. He knows how to work the symbol.

President Obama became the first US President to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, in the White House.  That’s been a longstanding fight of Hindu Americans.

Actually, Diwali has always been the big multicultural fight for many Indian Americans.

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Sandip Roy

The Fear Factor of Paranormal Activity

By Sandip Roy, Oct 12, 2009 10:24 AM

Here is why the movie Paranormal Activity scared me as much as it did. It had nothing to do with demons or ghosts.

It tapped into the most primal of fears. You wake up with a start in the middle of the night convinced that someone is in your house.

It used to happen to me as a kid. I’d wake up convince there was someone in the bedroom. I could almost make out their shadow in the room. I could imagine them crouching in the dark. I would lie frozen in bed, convinced that any sign I gave of life would be the end of me. Sometimes if I was lucky I’d drift back to sleep. Sometimes I would have to wait until the first gray light of dawn seeped through the curtains and make me realize there was no one in there, just my clutter. I could have called out to my parents. Or my sister. I could have turned on the flashlight. But instead all I knew to do was lie still and hope whoever it was didn’t realize I was awake.

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Sandip Roy

To do or to be - The Lessons of Obama's Nobel

By Sandip Roy, Oct 9, 2009 3:23 PM

 Obama???!!!

That was my friend in India’s Facebook status about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Seven hours later he was obviously rethinking the whole thing.

His status changed.

Obama’s prize gives me hope, in a sense. It means you can be awarded for BEING someone, rather that DOING something. And that’s good news for non-doer individuals like me.

That is hopeful, indeed.

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Sandip Roy

California Could be a Golden Failed State

By Sandip Roy, Oct 6, 2009 10:20 PM

 I first craved California when I read Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. Written entirely in sonnets, it was about iguanas, a band called The Liquid Sheep, Silicon Valley, fine wine and love gone awry. “The Great California Novel” Gore Vidal called it. And it was written by an outsider.

Perhaps it needed an outsider to write the great California novel, to really recognize California for the marvel it was – beyond being the 8th largest GDP in the world.

Now another outsider, The Guardian, a British newspaper, has recognized California for what it has become. A failed state.

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Sandip Roy

Guess Who's Not Coming to the Olympics?

By Sandip Roy, Oct 2, 2009 4:16 PM

 It’s probably just as well that Barack Obama’s magic touch didn’t work on the International Olympic Committee. The election of Obama has certainly reduced the number of globetrotting Americans who try to pass for Canadian. But he can’t just touch down for five hours and seal the deal.

But the most interesting quote I read about Chicago’s drubbing in the Olympic hosting race was a question from an I.O.C. member from Pakistan.

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Sandip Roy

Holy Cow! It's Twittergate in India

By Sandip Roy, Sep 28, 2009 3:36 PM

India is in the middle of Twittergate.

Shashi Tharoor, the high-flying minster of state for external affairs in India, was almost felled by Twitter.

A Twitter fan asked Tharoor if, in light of the government’s austerity drive, he was now going to fly “cattle class” instead of business

“Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows,” Tharoor tweeted back.

It was funny.  But not in a country of holy cows.  

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Sandip Roy

My Name is Khan (and Other Things You Can't Say at the Airport)

By Sandip Roy, Aug 17, 2009 2:33 PM

Editor's note: While traveling in India, NAM editor Sandip Roy examines America's problematic treatment of South Asians and Middle Easterners, particularly Muslims, at our airports.  Shah Rukh Khan gets an international megaphone to voice his discontent.  But what happens to those who don't?

Bollywood’s biggest star was detained for over an hour, maybe two, over the weekend at Newark International Airport. He says it’s because his name is Khan. The officials say its because his baggage hadn’t arrived. They say there were following protocol. He says the protocol needs to a little more “warm and speedy.”

Shah Rukh Khan, welcome to America.

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Sandip Roy

Julie and Julia, Madhur and Me

By Sandip Roy, Aug 7, 2009 11:58 AM

 As I watched Julie and Julia I thought this is my story. Except my Julia Child was Madhur Jaffrey, doyenne of Indian cooking in the West.

The other difference – instead of a rather self-absorbed, somewhat petulant blogger, I was a clueless sheltered momma’s boy immigrant loose in middle America, barely knowing how to boil an egg.

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