Vikram’s Talking Points

While elite east coast universities still strive for a student body somewhat representative of the American population, the highly-regarded University of California system does no such thing, and, thanks to state proposition 209, must admit students based on quantifiable achievements.

Whites, who were expected to be the beneficiaries of the proposition, don’t seem to have benefitted at all. Instead, the California system has witnessed an Asian influx.

The axing of affirmative action | Unintended consequences | Economist.com

Today, World AIDS Day, always brings back memories of Larry Kramer and the era of heroic AIDS activism. It was 1981; gay men were dying of a mysterious disorder that compromised the immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to a host of baffling diseases.

Larry Kramer - playwright, activist, provocateur - wrote a famous article in the gay press entitled "1,112 and counting," urging the community to act. While the government took some early initiatives, partly at the behest of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization Kramer helped to found, the response was predictably inert and bureaucratic.

As friend upon friend passed into Hades, Kramer believed that a more combative activism was the only solution, so he founded the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP). This was a full frontal, fuck all movement; and it had to be. I still recall the time ACT UP activists busted onto the set of CBS Evening News while it was on air; and can still hear the chant - "Act up, act now, fight AIDS!" - they declaimed with desperate commitment at the Halloween parades in Greenwich Village. Their resolve came amid a time of manifest despair, when a whole community lay exhausted from the relentless round of funerals; it galvanized them to fight against extinction.

Kramer contracted HIV himself, though he lived on as his friends continued to die. Recently, there was a rumor that he had died after a liver transplant (necessitated by chronic Hepatitis B infection), but he emerged from that as well, and continues, at 72, to taunt the government and the gay community for its indifference to the suffering and the dying.

While his play, The Normal Heart, may be his most famous work, I would recommend Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, which is a compilation of his writings in various newspapers, including the New York Times. In Reports, we have a vituperative voice battling a host of public figures -Senators, Mayor Ed Koch, prominent scientists and fellow gays - for indifference to a horror he likened to the Holocaust. In some ways his rage reminds one of King Lear, but, unlike Lear, Kramer is sane, too sane for most.

His heroism is not easily emulated, and because of that, frequently condemned, but history, I am persuaded, will see him as a pivotal figure in America’s continual struggle against the many varieties of human injustice.

The Man Booker Prize is open only to British and Commonwealth citizens and Indian-born Desai has yet to apply for a US passport, although she has lived in New York for 20 years.

"George Bush won once and he won the second time and I couldn’t bring myself to (apply)," Desai said late last month in an interview in Toronto as she voiced her disapproval of the president’s foreign policy.

"So I really owe George Bush my Booker, in an odd way. It’s really very funny." [Link]

A few thoughts on her book, The Inheritance of Loss:

I didn’t like it. In fact, I forced myself to finish the last 50 pages about a week after reading the first 300. (I was not expecting an exciting denouement.) The story revolves around a community of anglicized misfits and their interlocutors on the India-Nepal border, and wends its way occasionally to the subterranean New York of illegal immigrants. The anglicized folks live a content life, reading Trollope and simulating colonial Britain in the Himalayas, until their world is turned Upside Down by a Gorkha separatist movement roiling through the region.

Desai’s book is populated with characters thin with meaning. There is Sai - a young girl forced to decamp to her to her grandfather’s home when her parents are killed in a freak accident in Moscow; her grandfather - a bitter misanthrope who can find no love for anyone in his life save his dog; the son of the family cook - a failed New Yorker whose return to India reminds us that immigration basically sucks; the family cook - a feckless man whose life is forever bound to his son’s immigration to America; Sai’s Gorkha boyfriend, who scorns her for the separatist movement…and so many stereotypes skipping about in puddles of inconsequence.

They did not move me, and neither did the subtext. The hopelessness of -

the anglicized class,

separatist politics,

immigration to America,

globalization,

secularism,

the Indian state 

- is limned with such predictability as to render even a lugubrious reader completely unsympathetic. This is the Left frowning at the abyss; there is no redemption to be found here.

Desai delivers a clever phrase now and then, but with her disjointed style - where long sentences are killed off with one-liners, where descriptive prose is fractured by running social commentary - one is never quite on terra firma. After a while, it simply does not please. 

But what do I know? The Booker committee loved it. Perhaps it was time for another India novel to take the honor.

Bleh.

Senator George Allen is defeated  in Virginia. Allen called, S.R. Sidharth, an Indian-American campaign volunteer for his opponent, a "macaca," after sardonically "welcoming" him to America in a small Virginia town. The slur loosed a torrent of protest in the second-generation community; it seemed to rankle little among the India-born.

Why so? Because we can lay claim to no other country. India will always be theirs, no matter what their passport says. For many of us, the only time we are actually identified as American is in India. When Allen welcomed us, he tapped into a deeply-felt anxiety.

Some have linked macaca to North Africa and Portugal. It apparently refers to a species of monkey, and is wielded in derision at black Africans.

For us, the slur wasn’t specific enough. When we heard it we knew it was bad, but couldn’t offer much more than that. It suggested generic marginalization, that we were one of any number of brown communities loitering on the periphery of white and black America, easily dismissed. Our indignation was ultimately a cry for the recognition of our singularity.

I doubt we achieved that, but I’m still glad he lost.

Thanks SAJA, and happy Diwali to all.

Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That’s approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

Violence Against Women in the United States 

1) The density of the Spanish-speaking population in Southern California allows Mexican immigrants …to continue speaking their mother tongue very well until the third generation… — longer than any other group… — but Spanish still goes extinct thereafter.

"Like taxes and biological death …linguistic death is a sure thing in the U.S., even for Mexicans living in Los Angeles, a city with one of the largest Spanish-speaking urban populations in the world."

2) Immigration raids have practically wiped out one Georgia town, "underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy," writes Russ Bynum of the Associated Press. Since Sept. 1, federal officials have rounded up more than 120 illegal immigrants in Stillmore, Ga., a town of about 1,000. Hundreds more fled to avoid deportation. Now the town’s poultry plant is struggling to find workers, the story says, and business has dried up at the few local stores.

3) At the University of Michigan, the Democrats brought in a long-serving liberal, Rep. John Dingell, to address students. And Michigan’s branch of the College Republicans? They planned to stage "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day" on campus. …

WSJ.com - Border Lines