The perfunctory celebrity sighting happened (as did the first of two Love Guru related conversations of the weekend) when just before the show began, Manu Narayan (yes THAT Manu Narayan) politely asked this blogger if the seat down the row was taken. Oh yes, that was a Love Guru related conversation. Oh, enough already. Let’s not argue semantics now.

After a dreary Friday, Saturday found me up and about early, just like a normal workday. With NYC’s famed transport system seemingly in chaos, with subway closings and at least one tunnel closure all happening on the same day, it was a tense bus ride into the city that set the ball rolling on what proved to be a fulfilling day. But thanks to my decision to take a cab (and a misjudgment about the day’s schedule) I was one of the earliest to collect UD’s press pass. Yup, like last year, I was imitating a press pass carrying citizen journalist. But unlike last year, when I sleepwalked wide-eyed through most parts of the convention, this year was that I actually was expecting to hobnob with the best of them.

The first session of the day was a panel discussion about the historic Presidential campaign this year. Leslie Wayne (NY Times), Aswini Anburajan (NBC), Nick Timiraos (WSJ); Rebecca Kutler (CNN) and Andrea Bernstein (WNYC) shared their experiences while on the road with the candidates. One of the interesting points to come out of the session was the universal agreement among the panelists that campaign meetings akin to tourist attractions with entire families using their vacations to drive long distances to listen to stump speeches.

Then sports won over politics. The unique opportunity to interact with a sportscaster with a unique perspective drove me toward the East Lounge where Kevin Negandhi, ESPN’s first desi anchor was waiting for us. Kevin, a graduate from Philadelphia’s Temple University has been anchoring on the ESPN Networks for more than a year now. An entertaining hour and a half with him followed - filled with the couple of the common (and a few uncommon) desi backstories. Yours truly managed to shoot a few questions at him, more as a sports fan (and perpetual ESPN viewer) than a desi, though I did manage to slip in a cricket question.

Another panel, this time geared more toward true blooded journalists than hacks like me, titled Blogging To Augment Your Reporting, followed. Sewell Chan and Jennifer Lee (of the NY Times’s City Room blog) and Mark Seibel, (of McClatchy’s Washington Bureau) discussed their experiences while blogging to supplement their reportage and presented a tidy how-to on efficient usage of blogs for journalists. As for me, certainly not part of the target audience, this panel introduced me to City Room, which in the two weeks since has become a must read on my feed reader.

And then came the session that I was mostly looking forward to - a salon with Fox News’s Jerusalem based Middle East correspondent, Reena Ninan. However having been sidetracked into an interesting discussion with someone, I walked in late to the session only to find it metamorphing into a lecture on India (not really because of Reena, who was mostly a silent spectator).

Coming to the fag end of the day, I wanted out earlier than last year to go and meet up with my boss and some clients for dinner. Waiting around to thank Sree and take my leave for the day, I found myself standing next to a gentleman who was in a conversation with someone else. And then a glance at his id tag made me do a double take. I had found myself standing right next to Vineet Chander, the Communications Director for ISKCON (America).

Once I got past my excited surprise, I waited around and once he got done with his conversation, I pounced on him and told him about UD being Love Guru Central. He said he knew about UD and appreciated our finding our niche among all the desi blogs. He graciously agreed to talk to me about The Love Guru and the various related issues that plague Hindu American society in general.

That last conversation with Vineet brought the curtain down personally on an interesting SAJA weekend. Sunday being match day (I play in a local tennis ball cricket league), I had to give the traditional Sunday brunch a miss. Next year though, we will be there for sure through the whole convention.

Thanks Sree. Our calendars are already marked!

It appears from the comments section, his blog has turned into the Indian railways complaint desk.

While we whole heartedly support this “black out” protest by the bloggers, we’re unable to “black out” our blog for a myriad of technical and logistical reasons. May the force simbly be with you.

When blogger Inji Pennu catches Kerals.com red-handed plagiarizing some of her blog content, she gets a nasty reply from the portal’s support staff and further responses that are blatantly criminal acts of cyberbullying and cryberstalking. I’m just shocked at the kind of nastiness that the Kerals.com staff and their affiliates sink to.

The entire sequence of emails are listed here.

Update: This incident is also being reported on DesiPundit.

Q: When I was in Delhi, I felt weirdly safer in an auto-rickshaw weaving past cars, motorcycles, and the occasional cow. Is there some logic to that or am I just insane?

A: Statistically, you’re much better off in an auto-rickshaw than on a motorbike or on foot in Delhi, though this is a complex question with many variables.
Also, in any city you’re safer in a car than you are in rural areas, where the bulk of fatalities happen. On cows in the street — Delhi’s former top traffic cop told me he was of two minds; yes, they obstruct traffic flow, but they also act as a calming influence on Delhi’s “rash” drivers. A cow is only a hazard if you drive in a way that doesn’t take into account the cow.

I rest my case.

On a tangential note, Tom Vanderbilt’s theory on road rage ….

What happens to most of us, in most driving conditions, is that we’re losing some of the key attributes that facilitate human cooperation and, in a larger sense, society.
Eye contact, for example, has been shown in any number of experiments to increase the chance of gaining cooperation — that’s why when drivers give you what was called on Seinfeld the “stare-ahead,” your chances that they’ll let you merge in ahead of them are greatly reduced.
Then there’s the anonymity in traffic — there’s no one to spread rumors or gossip about you about how bad your behavior was — not to mention the lack of consequences for acting like an idiot. It’s all strikingly similar to the way we act on the internet, in what’s called the “online disinhibition effect.”
We can lurk behind screen names (our car and license plate), say nasty things about people (honk, give the finger), and then sign off and never be heard from again (drive away).

…… can easily translate to behavior of humans online, e.g. trolls.

The article written by Toni Bowers, Head Blogs Editor of TechRepublic Blogs had a technicality out of place, unnoticeable to most but significant enough to affect the opinion of laymen. The post read

This latest rule is trying to circumvent the 65,000 annual cap of people allowed to get the H-1B

As Sidhu points out, this is technically incorrect because the 17 months extension applies to the quota of 20,000 American educated international students only. A brief email to Toni from Über Desi explaining this caveat fixed this technical detail. Turns out it was unintentional. All thanks to an alert reader, Sidhu.

Email communication after the jump.

Email from UD:

From: Santosh
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 7:21 AM
To: Toni Bowers
Subject: Suit filed against Department of Homeland Security over changes to H-1B visa

Toni,
I read your post and its obvious we’re on opposite sides of the fence on the H1B issue. However, I’m not here to argue or vent, just to point out a technical detail on this statement.

“This latest rule is trying to circumvent the 65,000 annual cap of people allowed to get the H-1B”

Since you’re talking about OPT extensions, it actually deals with American educated foreign students. They have a separate quota of 20000. This extension deals exclusively with those 20000 students, not the majority 65000 professionals.

Thanks,
Santosh
Blogger
UberDesi.com

Reply from Toni Bowers:

From: Toni Bowers
To: Santosh
Subject: RE: Suit filed against Department of Homeland Security over changes to H-1B visa

Thanks for the correction. I got the information form the Wall Street Journal. However, you are correct in that my sentence should have read “Critics claim that this latest rule is trying to circumvent…” I have changed that and added an addendum to the piece that includes your clarification about the numbers.

Toni Bowers
Head Blogs Editor
TechRepublic

Turns out WSJ (or someone from WSJ) provided inaccurate information on the above topic.
Lesson learned
#1 Assume the best in people
#2 Simple polite communication can fix most issues
#3 Nothing stops the flow of incorrect information like alert readers (Kudos Sidhu)

On a peripherally related note, Toni Bowers has some interesting career advice, which our readers might be interested in. [Toni Bowers' blog posts]

If you come across similar incidences on the Internet, point it out to us and we will work on resolving them.

It all started with “Stuff White People Like“, a blog centered on humorous social commentary on white people. Some of my favorites from this blog: Being Offended, Bumper Stickers, Scarves (will someone please point out to Michelle Malkin white people wear scarves also?), Poorly Read Partners, SFO, Threatening to move to Canada, Apple Products, Ganja, Being an expert on YOUR culture and Awareness. My favorite ones were White Suburbs (a.k.a Gentrification) and Co-ed Sports.

This promoted a whole new genre of blogs inspired by this concept featuring people ragging on other of their own ethnicities:
-Stuff Asian People Like
-Stuff Educated Black People Like
-Stuff Black People Hate
-Stuff Educated Latinos Like

Not to be left behind even gay people started one - Stuff Queer People Like.

With all these “Stuff People Like” blogs how could desis be far behind?
Enter Stuff Desis/Brown People Like and Stuff Desis Love, Hate and Love to Hate, with the former being the more active blog.

For desi bloggers intending to cash in on this trend. I’d like to see more blogs featuring social commentary on narrower community bases. For instance:
Stuff Palakkad Iyers Hate
Stuff Goan/Bandra Christians Like
Stuff Patels from Anand Like
Stuff Wealthy Punjabis Hate
Stuff Wannabe-Gangsta Desis Like
You get the idea.

Here’s a sampling of quotes that raised some red flags for me.

I was working as an IT consultant in corporate America for nearly five years. By most definitions I had ‘made it’ — good education, good job, nice car, pretty girlfriend, ‘success.’ Yet, I voluntarily chose to walk away from it all and search for a totally different way of life. Why? Let me share two reasons, one external and one internal, although both are deeply connected.

I had long since questioned the role of the US government and multinational corporations in dominating the world and recreating it in its own image.

But the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq — though hardly new or different than what the US had long been doing — brought me to a point where I had to make a decision: was this a system I could support? For supporting it I was, through my tax dollars, job, and my way of life — despite going to protests to the contrary.

The post goes on to say he quit his job, sold his belongings and moved back to India. I sincerely hope he paid off his credit card debt because, if he did not, in some way I’m paying for his dues today with my tax dollars. I also hope, for the sake of his “pretty girlfriend”(who, I assume, was none too happy with this surprising turn of events) that he broke up with her in a proper manner and was able to explain his reasons. Of course, I suspect we’ll never know the nitty-gritty of what really went down.

“Getting away from it all” seems to have a romantic tune to it for all of us, because most people would rather not deal with the “kelas” life hands us at one stage or another. But, what does walking away from it all really accomplish? Lets say you see something happening that you feel is inherently wrong. Would you be contributing by walking away from it or staying and attempting to right it? The old cliche of “if you can’t stand the heat leave the kitchen” holds true here. Roy did. And I highly question his motivations for doing so. Remember the underlying causes for NFL star Ricky Williams’ abrupt retirement from football along with the stories he fed the media?

As for Roy’s reasons - he felt he attained success with education, job, car, and a “pretty girlfriend”. Not only are his criteria for success pretty generic, but they are also outright filmi (car, building, bank balance, anyone?). Roy set the bar to something commonplace and attainable and when he was done and bored with it, he walked away. Understandable, perhaps to some. Consider me unconvinced. I would’ve had more faith in his words, if he gave a real world reason - I hated my job, my life sucked, I could not find the right woman or even a simple: this is not what I wanted to do. But then he goes on a political agenda with this remarks on the US government and multinationals.

From the second quote it is obvious, Roy has a problem with the role of the US government. Nothing new there. But multinational corporations? He escaped US and went to, of all places in the world, India, to get away from multinationals? Somehow, that line of reasoning doesn’t add up at all.

As for bringing up the wars, I hate it when people equate the two wars. The Iraq invasion has been controversial to say the least and less than favorable opinions have been expressed on it, even on this blog. But I almost choked on my coffee when Roy lumped the Afghanistan war with the Iraq invasion. Would it be too obvious to say that he is doing a disservice to the obvious causes that preceded the Afghanistan war? Somehow, I’m not too comfortable with this line of reasoning.

Roy’s reasons seem to perfect, in fact, they seem right out of a textbook, a Marxist textbook. Not a big deal except that Marxism assumes that humans will behave in the best possible manner, which flies in the face of reality. I would’ve had more respect for him if he gave us the actual reasons for his choice to “leave everything”, which by the way has another term - escapism. Eco-friendly or not, Roy is living in his own little Marxist Disneyland.

Having said that, I have immense admiration for people who are above the rat race (notice I said “above the rat race” and not “running away from it”) and even more, for people who work towards nature conservancy and other eco-friendly causes. If an IT consultant like Roy were to stay among us and show us how to balance eco-friendly causes with our high-tech lifestyle, I would be all for it. Note, there has been zero mention of the other people in the commune and, since they have not fed us a cock-n-bull story replete with political agenda, we will assume their intentions are noble and unselfish.

Other resources:
How you can help [BBC]
Other international websites/blogs:
American University Student Campaign for Burma [AUBurma]
Cyclone Nargis [nargis-myanmar.org]