Caption: Love is blind, and plain dumb
Source: sify.com

Charles currently cooling his heels in a jail in Nepal, where he was arrested in Sept. of 2003 on prior charges of murdering two women from North America in 1975 (link). His name is linked to around 20 murders and he has spent a considerable time in jails around India, before escaping at least once after drugging the prison guards on the pretext of his birthday (link). One of the shrewdest and most violent criminals ever - his capture in India was because of his ‘miscalculation’ (link).

Charles Sobhraj is seen more as a ‘celebrity’ criminal (courtesy-our media) than the man who killed nearly 20 known victims, often burning them alive or poisoning them after befriending them. Personally, I think Sobhraj has got this far, despite being a murderer, because of his victims’ kith and kin. Till date, I’ve never seen any of the victim’s family members in the news (Indian/international) hound the ’serpent’ for justice.

Agreed most of the murders were in 1970’s, that doesn’t mean we forget his crimes, for which he has not gotten the punishment he deserved. Someone must be there seeking justice against an innocent traveler being brutally murdered, and let the common people know the pain they feel.

And now the bride, Nihita Biswas, a 20-year old Nepali girl, who started as an interpreter for the alleged killer while he was imprisoned, states that it was ‘love at first sight’. (link). Her mother Shakuntala Thapa was the lawyer in Nepal for Charles Sobhraj (link).

Whatever this girl is looking for - love, infamy, maybe money, or a misplaced sense of adventure - is her personal choice, but still outrageously ridiculous. And her mother did show her ’support’ by attending the wedding in the jail, and that is the most painful thing to read.

Bikini killer weds… - Über Desi

Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up.

Pollack went on to smack down everybody. (Even our very own Arundhati Roy gets an honorable mention when he roundly criticizes a truly horrendous poem dedicated to her by Daniella Gioseffi!)

He ended his diatribe against assorted lefties, fulminating righties and the rest with :

So to all of us who deem ourselves writers in this time of war, I can only say, in the immortal words of the great folk singer Kelly Osbourne:

Shut up!

A few months later, Slate.com did an equally marvelous deconstruction of the Bill O ‘Reilly “Shut Up”. For those of you with strong stomachs who watch Bill “Falafel” O’Reilly, you know that he has elevated “shut up ” to an art form:

he uses it as a place-holder for an idea still formulating in his brain. As a way to begin a sentence, end it, or punctuate it.(link)

For the first time in my life, I am going to take a life-lesson from Bill O and just: Shut Up!

Not on everything - no fears there - but I think this whole Presidential Election has made me realize that I am DONE with the political process. You have seen my earlier reactions here and here. What began as simmering discontent at sexism and misgyny has morphed into a full-blown rage. And as a result I find myself in a bizarro world where I am defending those whose positions I abhor. I catch myself watching FOX news so that I do not have to see the clowns on MSNBC and CNN. I have lost all perspective and emotion is definitely clouding my judgment.

As there is no chance that Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow,Campbell Brown, Alex Castellanos, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper etc are going just shut up and let the people decide for themselves who they want as President - I will have to do the next best thing.

I am going to Shut up. No more posts or comments from me on the American Presidential Election until it is over and someone wins.

PS: I will keep writing on other stuff - can’t shut me up that much!

The Epiphany - Über Desi

toning down of the act to legalize private consensual sex between consenting adults.(Ed emphasis added)

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is legislation introduced during British Rule in India which reads in part:

Unnatural offences 377. Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

( Image from npr.org)

This was a legacy of Lord Macaulay- who , ironically, in one of his better moments also said:

We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation

I wonder what he would have thought of the Government of India’s position, as was declared by the additional Solicitor general PP Malhotra in open court:

“Homosexuality is a social vice and the state has the power to contain it,” he contended. “It (decriminalizing homosexuality) may create breach of peace. If it is allowed then evils of AIDS and HIV would further spread and harm the people. It would lead to big health hazard. It would degrade moral values of the society,” the ASG maintained………Countering the contentions of activists, the government said such behaviour is not a natural trait but a reflection of a perverse mind.

Malhotra was evidently trying to cram as many errors as he could in a couple of sentences.Homosexuality -as the rest of the civilized world ought to know by now is not a social vice of any kind. The Government of India has no business in spreading lies and misinformation about AIDS and HIV- especially not when considering the fact that over 2.4 million people in India suffer from AIDS and

Infection rates soared throughout the 1990s, and today the epidemic affects all sectors of Indian society, not just the groups – such as sex workers and truck drivers – with which it was originally associated.(link)

The British left India over 60 years ago - the law remains. It has been used repeatedly to persecute homosexuals - particularly gay men. The Indian police has been notorious for cracking down on events such as private parties held for and by gays or social clubs (link). Meanwhile the rest of the country goes to hell - education, shelter, drinking water and primary healthcare is still a distant dream for most. The Government is too busy monitoring what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms!

Its not just in faraway, third-world India that such discrimination backed by Government support exists. Last I checked, the Constitution of the USA too begins “We the people..” . Yet out here in California , ballots will soon be cast for and against Proposition 8, which eliminates the rights of same sex couples to marry. This is in response to the May 15,2008 ruling of the California Supreme Court that ruled unconstitutional previous attempts to legislate against gay marriage. The state has been processing same sex marriage licenses since then. Proposition 8, if it passes, will once again make gay marriages impossible and leave those same-sex marriages already formalized in a legal limbo.

Several organizations and individuals support the “No on Prop 8″ campaign which has begun an advertising campaign featuring families of gays and lesbians, urging the people of California to let their sons and daughters have the same rights as everyone else. (Further irony: State Senator William “Pete” Knight, was the author of the original Proposition 22 that banned same-sex marriage and was invalidated by the May 15 ruling. Senator Knight’s son, Dave Knight, wed his partner of 10 years in a same sex union in March (link) )

Trikone is a non-profit organization that works with gay, lesbian and transgendered persons of South Asian descent. Trikone has joined the fight against Prop 8 and plans to run an ad featuring a desi parent who has a gay son in the next issue of “India Currents”.(link)

In the ad, Mrs.Gurkripal Singh Dhillon - looking like every desi auntie I ever knew says

” …Our desi traditions have flourished with my son, Inder and his partner, Ken”

Take a look at her two cute grandkids - how can the government deny them the right to have married parents?

And in case you are still against gay marriage - here is a thought :

No one is forcing you to have one.

Why are you denying a section of society which is voluntarily accepting the rights and obligations of marriage the same opportunities as the rest of us to either make a grand success or a miserable failure of it?

We , the people - with some notable exceptions - Über Desi

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

If only I could vote and if only my vote could make a difference.

4 more years of the same. Sarah Palin agrees. - Über Desi

Anyone who has been reading this blog for sometime knows how I felt about the virulent hatred that was spewed at Hilary Clinton. I spoke about it here. And the idiotic outpourings of the talking heads brought back all those bad memories.

Let me state clearly that I have no horse left in this race. I am still watching it but I do not care for any of the candidates left in the fray. With Sarah Palin, the fact that she is not pro-choice and her opposition to stem -cell research is kind of a deal-breaker for me. However, I cannot and will not be silent over the crappy treatment that she is getting from the media and left-leaning blogs.

Friday afternoon it began with John Roberts of CNN :

“Now, she is a manager. She is the governor of a state. She does have limited experience, though. She’s also been the mayor for a city in Alaska. And for a time she was the ethics chairman of the Alaska oil and gas conservation commission. But that does not add up to broad experience, particularly the type of broad experience you think should launch you to the national level.” (link)

And the Democratic nominee has more experience how? Or is his qualification of an extra appendage compensation?

CNN is rapidly becoming the Faux news of the left.

Sarah Palin has had her readiness questioned because she is a mother of 5. She has had her judgment questioned because she chose to bear a child at the age of 44. This by a media that has dumbed down to satisfy the demands of 24 hour headlines. In the age of Powerpoint when everything must be boiled down to 6 bullet points the logic is laughably simple. Sarah Palin is a woman and as she is ambitious ergo she MUST be a bad mother and so a bad vice president. (link)

Sally Quinn of the Washington post tried the old “I don’t mean to criticize working women but…” ploy with these golden words of wisdom:

“This is about this particular woman with her particular family situation putting herself in a position to be the commander in chief of the most powerful country in the world.” ( link)

Earlier, the wondrous Ms.Quinn wondered what would happen if the phone rang at 3 am and Sarah Palin’s baby is ill.

Ms. Quinn: The twenty-first century called. They were wondering if you could finally join them.

As for the nutcases on the far left : The Blogosphere hummed with slander of the vilest type. Palin was accused of trying to pass off her teenage daughter’s baby as her own. That was quashed when Palin revealed that her teenage daughter was five months pregnant and intended to marry the teenage father. That set off a fresh firestorm. Abstinence does not work, the left screams. Her daughter would never have got pregnant if she had had more liberal parents. (Echoes of the time HRC ( Hillary Rodham Clinton)was criticized by none other than Michelle Obama over “not being able to manage her own household but wanting to manage the White House” (link )) Palin was raked over the coals for what is ultimately a personal, family matter. In fact her family’s predicament actually underscores the fact that she at least walks the talk.

There is legitimate stuff to criticize Palin and other Republicans with. Its called “issues”. I do not see any meaningful discussion on her views on the economy or the war or even a debate on pro -life vs pro -choice. Instead its so much easier to take potshots at her past as a “pageant winner”.

The unintended consequence of this slanted media coverage is that women will come out in droves to support Palin.

Her excellent performance at the Republican Convention Wednesday night will not hurt either. (In case you missed it, Obama got served not once - but several times!)

Disaffected Hilary supporters, reeling from the raw deal that their candidate got from the media and the Dems may vote for Palin. Of course the blogosphere and the talking heads cannot let that be. Women are being told that they should be insulted - “McCain chose her only because of her internal plumbing” ( see for example link)

First off: Sensible women were insulted long, long ago when the media and the DNC (including the current nominee and his campaign) dropped all pretense of decency and allowed the rampant sexism against HRC.

Don’t tell me when I need to feel insulted.

Secondly: What is with this morbid fascination with the womanly parts?

The Democrats are trying to scare women into voting for their candidate by pulling out the Roe V Wade at every opportunity. I said it before and I will say it again - we are not walking wombs.

When you refer to women’s internal plumbing you are no different from the blogger boyz who called HRC supporters “the dry p**sy brigade”. I am not making this stuff up!

McCain has only played smart and tapped into the vein of anger and frustration that exists over the unbridled misogyny that the primary uncovered.

What is not arguable then is the arrival of identity politics on the American national stage.

The Dems did not bargain for this but here is a freebie:

Be very careful what you wish for.

This genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

Sexism and the City - Über Desi

She saw a Gandhi in Edwards
img: via Hollywood Gossip

Newsweek’s Johnathan Darman, who covered the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, recounts his encounters with John Edwards’ other woman Reille Hunter. [NewsWeek]

When Edwards finally confessed to the affair, he gave the timeline as 2006. [Wiki article]

Recounts Darman: [Newsweek]

It was July 7, 2006. I’d been sent to Iowa to write a piece on John Edwards. We were on our way to Des Moines, where I would be the only national reporter following him around the state for two days. From a few rows back, I tried to observe Edwards before the plane took off. Most of the other passengers seemed to have no idea who Edwards was. But this blond woman, putting away her bags, was visibly captivated by him. She tried repeatedly to engage him in conversation, but he seemed uninterested in talking.

Uninterested in talking, or trying to avoid public attention? Because as we’ll see later in this story, he probably already knew her at this point.

Darman also reminisces when Reilly Hunter actually turned some heads and got tongues wagging when she tagged along with Edwards’ team as a movie maker.

She showed up at his first event that day in Des Moines with a video camera. She was trying to get as close to the candidate as she could. “Does she work for the campaign?” I asked Edwards’s press secretary, Kim Rubey. “Oh, she’s working on a documentary project,” said Rubey. “We’re not sure if it’s going to work out.” But it was soon clear that she was on Team Edwards. When it came time to drive to the next event, she rode in the car with the candidate. I drove behind in a rental car.

Darman then decided to chat up with this woman, to find more about her. He discovered that she was a bored New-York socialite ………..

She’d been a New York party girl, she’d been married and divorced, she’d been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth.

how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she’d previously had “many lives.”

…. who was starting to dabble in new-age spiritualism and the fancy jargon that goes with it.

She’d worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality.

At this point, you can already see the path this is going down on.

Remember when we talked earlier in this post about how Edwards and Hunter were not two strangers meeting on a plane?

She told me that she had met Edwards at a bar, at the Regency Hotel in New York.

And why did she continue pursuing him?

She thought he was giving off a special “energy.”

Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this (new-age spiritualism), to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
Her latest project was John Edwards.

So she was an enabler, nothing wrong with that.

Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world.

And all this to what purpose? Ready, or not, here it comes.

If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a “transformational leader” on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. “He has the power to change the world,” she said.

The reason this story resonated with me was because Gandhi, as remarkable of a political leader he was, was notorious for unusual sexual shenanigans in his personal life - from his vow of celibacy as a married man, to his (non-)tryst with a prostitute, to his experimentations on sexual self-control with younger women. (reliable online links to these incidents needed)

Whether Rielle Hunter was able to transform John Edwards into a political leader of the stature of Gandhi, only history will tell, and right now I’m betting against it.

But she did achieve something. Remember her goal?
“If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less”
Edwards did use his head less and tapped something.

The Gandhi-fication of John Edwards? - Über Desi

India’s Sushil Kumar won the bronze medal in the men’s 66-kg freestyle category on Wednesday at the Beijing Olympics ending a 56 year drought. The last bronze medal won in wrestling was by KD Jadhav who won a bronze in the 1952 Helsinki Games (link)

( Sushil Kumar’s moment of glory :Image via TOI )

Sushil Kumar is an employee of the Indian Railways which also had another employee, Yogeshwar Datta competing at the Beijing games.

Meanwhile part-time model Vijender Kumar, whom we talked about earlier on here as one of India’s brightest hopes for a medal lived up to expectations beating Ecuadoran boxer Carlos Gongora in the men’s bantamweight event 9-4 to give India a guaranteed first ever medal in boxing.(link)

What is specially heartwarming about these victories (beside the fact that this is the first time ever an Indian Olympic contingent will return with a haul of 3 medals in individual events) is that both the Kumars ( no relation to each other) come from small town backgrounds.

Two of these boys—one from an unknown village, Baprola, situated on the outskirts of Delhi and the other from nearby Bhiwani, one a wrestler, the other a boxer— did the impossible on Wednesday and wrapped the tricolour on their broad chests with pride as the world looked on.

Vijender Kumar gets his groove on
Image via TOI and BBC

To climb to Olympian heights from decidedly humble roots is a testament to sheer tenacity and hardwork. Not for them the glory and glamor that usually belong to India’s indulged cricketers. Instead it meant a lot of sheer hard work- grit,grind and finally glory. Sushil Kumar in an interview to an Indian news channel thanked his father who unfailingly woke him up at dawn and made sure that he got his daily quota of milk before sunrise! Vijender’s father was also interviewed and said that the whole village was celebrating and that forty people went to see off their hero proudly when he left for Beijing. There is something so quintessentially Indian about these statements that it just adds to the sweetness of an Olympic win.

Congratulations to the Kumars and heres hoping that this means generations of Indian kids will dream to aspire swifter, higher, stronger!

Update : Our intrepid blogger Santosh tips us to the fact that Bipasha Basu has promised to go out on a date with Vijendra if he brings home the gold medal.

The actress told a television channel, Aaj Tak that she is ready to go on a date with the boxer after a reporter informed her that Vijender is a great fan of hers.(link)

(Reports that Abhinav Bindra finds this offer to date a hunky boxer highly discriminatory against bespectacled,gold medalist shooters are highly exaggerated.)

Whether he heard this or not, Vijender firmly has his sights set on the gold.

“I’ve achieved what I came here for and none can take it away. That surely takes the pressure off my shoulders and I’ll be in a free state of mind tomorrow,” said Vijender, ahead of his 75kg semi-final bout against formidable Cuban Emilio Correa Bayeaux at the Worker’s Stadium.

“But that does not mean I’ll just go through the motions. It will be the same vigour and the intensity too would remain same. I’m going for the gold,” Vijender said.(link)

Victory - it only took 56 years !(Updated) - Über Desi

Isn’t this is a classic glass half full or half empty case? The writers of such articles should be looking at the amount of economic freedom everyone has, instead of griping about how everyone else is spending their money. Freedom has been turned into an overused cliché by political readers and so-called “intellectuals”, into something that involves token acts like puffing your chests in pride and waving a flag.

Being in a society and market that affords you more freedom than most countries in the part of the world that surround you, what is more patriotic than celebrating it by giving back to the economy that brought about a lot of these changes in the first place?

Marketing Freedom - Über Desi

For long, anti H1B propagandists like Lou Dobbs and Ron Hira (no link love for either) have complained about highly qualified tech workers from India accepting positions in the U.S., for perhaps, a marginally lower pay than their American counterparts.

WSJ talks about a new trend in corporate America where businesses and employees (not necessarily in technology) are having to adapt to a slower economy. Faced with cost cutting, companies are hiring employees who are either over-qualified for the post or those who will take responsibilities for more than one positions or both, all for a lower pay.

Perhaps the Indians were simply ahead of the pack on this trend?

American jobs being taken by lower paid workers …. - Über Desi

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices

The article goes on to discuss the various ethical and moral issues surrounding surrogacy including the very real possibility that third-world women may potentially be exploited and get into surrogacy without being fully informed of the medical and other issues. Yet, one may counter- argue that such surrogacy allows the surrogates to earn money for the betterment of their own and their families’ lives while at the same time allowing childless folks to have children whom they will presumably cherish.

I try not to be judgmental about the whole issue of assisted reproduction. As a parent myself, I cannot imagine life without my son and can empathize with those who cannot have children but want to. Yet, I am disturbed that current regulation and legislation - especially in India- are not enough to cover the myriad ethical and legal issues that some forms of assisted reproduction present. I said so here

Here comes a case in India that kind of underscores my unease. An 11-day old baby is at the center of a huge issue . (link)

She’s only 11 days old, and already her fate is tied in legal knots and international complications. Her biological parents are Japanese. When her mother, Yuki Yamada, could not conceive, she chose a surrogate mother in Ahmedabad to carry her child.

The child was born on July 25 in Anand, Gujarat. But a month before that, Yuki divorced her husband, Dr Ikufumi Yamada, and disowned the child. And that, it seems, is the root of all trouble for the infant who still does not have a name.

The surrogate mother gave up the baby after birth exactly per the terms of the surrogacy agreement.The biological father of the infant and his mother want to take the little girl back to Japan. But the article states that Indian adoption laws, some of which were written 120 years ago, do not allow a single man to adopt a child.(While the article is not clear on this, I suspect his single status is an issue because the child is being adopted to be taken out of India. From what I know, single parents have successfully adopted children in India). Whatever the reason the little girl is in danger of becoming India’s first surrogate orphan. Her to be - adoptive mother( who is also the biological mother as egg donor) evidently changed her mind after divorcing her husband. She is unwilling to travel to India to complete the adoption procedures.

While its great that Science and Technology pushes the frontiers of reproductive limitation allowing older and infertile couples to become parents, I do feel that it needs to be tempered with some regulation and legislation. Else the price will be paid by innocents like this little 11 day old girl.

In all the debates over the rights of surrogates vs rights of the adoptive /biological parents - who is fighting for the rights of the child?

UPDATE: CNN has picked up the story TODAY much after we did. The article can be seen here .The baby is called Manjhi and looks like the immediate obstacle for the father is that the Indian government will not allow grant an Indian passport to the child unless both Mother and father are present.Add to that the fact adoption by a single father is not possible ( see above) and the baby is stuck in legal limbo.

The 70-year-old grandmother, Emiko Yamada, (ed: mother of the child’s biological father) has stayed put[in India]

Uneasy about how the baby was created, she comes to the hospital to cradle her granddaughter day and night, and has become so attached, she says, she cannot imagine going home without Manjhi.

“I am very worried and stressed. Why can’t they let her father take his child?” the grandmother says

UPDATE 2: Baby Manjhi (sp?) may finally be allowed out of India. One major hurdle towards getting travel documents was cleared when a birth certificate was issues with the father’s name

Anand municipality has issued a birth certificate in her name late on Friday[Augut 10]. The baby will now have to either get an Indian passport or Japanese visa issued in her name before she heads to Japan. (link)

Meanwhile, true to the adage of personal business being everyone’s business in India, an NGO SATYA for no discernable logical reason, filed a petition stating that alleging that in the absence of any surrogacy law in the country, the surrogate child could not be kept in the custody of her Japanese grandmother Emiko.(link)

Luckily , justice of some sort is alive in India and the Supreme Court of Rajasthan made a ruling:

The Supreme Court on Thursday [August 14]granted the custody of surrogate baby Manji to her Japanese grandmother Emiko

All is not decided,however.The Court has issued a directive to the  Union and the State Home Departments asking them to produce the Japanese surrogate baby Manjhi in court within four weeks and explain why the baby was being allowed to be taken to Japan

Suffer the little children(UPDATE 2) - Über Desi