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Sandip Roy
Sandip Roy is an editor with New America Media and host of its radio show New America Now on KALW 91.7 FM.
My friend who went to Gay pride in San Francisco said it seemed to be all about marriage. Marriage equality. The exclusive club of legally married same sex couples. Gay couples pushing babies. The maturation of the gay movement has come with a mellowing. This was the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall but the drag queens had given way to lesbian moms. They were the new shock troops of the LGBT movement and instead of stilettos and platform heels they work sensible flats and sneakers. The first time I marched in Gay Pride in San Francisco I remember how thrilling it felt. The first time our local South Asian LGBT group marched in the India Day Parade in Fremont it was asked to please not wear anything too risqué – leather and chains and bared nipples. We dressed decorously in traditional Indian clothes our mothers would have been proud of.These days the India Day parade would probably not worry. The gays are definitely toning down, the movement settling into becoming Family Guy in its middle age. Stonewall was 40 years ago and fabulous now means the kids took their afternoon nap. It’s not a bad thing. Over in India, the government is finally considering doing away with its antiquated sodomy law reports The Hindu and there were Pride Parades all over the country. I am sure a parade that didn’t try to shock and titillate would go a long way to reassure a jittery public that gays weren’t out to corrupt society. But an activist mourned that even in Delhi’s stifling heat, the gay marchers kept their shirts on. So the parade which was once about flaunting a fabulous otherness now is getting assimilationist, trying to reassure the rest of society we are just like you. Even the go-go boys gyrating on one of the music trucks in San Francisco seemed to be wearing longer shorts sighed my friend. I can’t vouch for that. I decided since the gays were all about marriage these days, I’d just skip the Parade and go to a real hetero wedding in the East Bay instead. It was strange – you could hardly tell the difference, the hotel ballroom, the crooning lounge singer singing “I just called to say”, the friends giving toasts, the pasta-salmon-chicken options. Gosh I thought, this is what we have bought into. And then the dancing began. A bit of Abba, Billie Jean in honor of Michael Jackson. And then to my horror, the Village People. A roomful of sari clad Indian women and their husbands in suits and little toddlers broke into Y-M-C-A. I decided it was my cue to leave. How do you spell STEREOTYPE? Two of the three top winners of the Spelling Bee are Indian-American. Again. Kavya Shivashankar took first place. Anamika Viramani came second. Did second place winner Tim Ruiter really crack under pressure or was it the combined yogic energy of a billion-plus Indians at work? What the heck is it with Indian Americans? Here’s the memo to my fellow Indian Americans – All the spelling bees have been won. Let’s try something else now. I guess its not just Indians. When a Korean woman won the LPGA it set off a golfing craze in South Korea. Last year there were so many Korean women (45!) in the LPGA, it came up with an obviously racist rule about how you needed to be fluent in English in order to play golf! That thankfully was rescinded but I am worried now someone will try and come up with something similar for Spelling Bees. If your name has more than 3 syllables you can’t compete in the Bee. You will have an unfair advantage. No, Mr. Shivshankar, I know your daughter has been practicing for years just to win the Spelling Bee but rules are rules. That’s kind of scary. After she spelled Laodicean to become Queen Bee, Kavya Shivashankar said it was her dream and she hopes she could coach her little sister next. Noooo. Stop. Please make this madness stop. But why do Indian-Americans do so well at Spelling Bees? I confess I loved words. I used to get up early in the morning before everyone awoke and sit on the windowsill in the early morning light with a tattered old Oxford English dictionary, just reading it. But I wasn’t doing it to learn spellings. I just liked words. Maybe we have good memories because we come from a culture where we had to learn reams and reams of dates and dynasties just to pass a history exam. The Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Aibaks, the Mughals, the Hoysalas, the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Pallavas, not to mention the three battles of Panipat. Maybe it’s just good old fashioned family values. Kavya’s coach was her father. It’s a cool way to while away long car drives when you are driving across state lines to the tri-state Gujarati association Navaratri potluck dinner. Perhaps just having to spell our names over and over again in America, hearing that slight shocked pause from the telemarketer when your name pops up on the screen (unless they are a call center in Chennai), spelling has become second nature to our community. Why do Indian Americans want their kids to win the spelling bee so badly? I mean there are no spelling bees in India, certainly no national competitions – of course, India has over 20 languages. Maybe that’s the clue. My native Bengali has two n’s, 2 r’s (one r, one rrrr), three s’s. Once you’ve learned the hard way which ‘s’ is used when and the rules governing the n’s, Laodicean seems like child’s play. But it’s not just Spelling Bee. On May 20 two Indian American teens, Arjun Kandaswamy and Shantan Kroviddi took two of the top three positions in the National Geography Bee. Well, I thought, its kinda cutely nerdy to have your ambition be “I wanna be spelling bee champion.” It’s not necessarily the mark of an over-achiever. Then I read more about this year’s winners. Kavya’s hobbies include swimming, cycling and traditional Indian dance. She plans on becoming a neurosurgeon. Anamika’s hobbies include violin, Indian classical music, dance, and golf. She hopes to attend Harvard Medical School, where she hopes to specialize in cardiovascular surgery. Comment [3] A friend’s status message on Facebook sums up the elections in India best. Comment [1] [ filed under: health the-americas ] Just an hour’s layover at Seoul’s Inchon airport was enough to convince me the swine flu is serious. As soon as the plane from San Francisco landed we were surrounded by men and women in turquoise blue masks who instead of handing us our In Transit stickers made us fill out forms. A few weeks ago we were googling for pirates. This week it’s teabagging. But the real word du jour is bottom. Bottoms are in. When the newspapers report about the economy these days it’s starting to feel a little gay said a friend. He’s right. The Men Seeking Men section of Craigslist has snuck into the headlines and we haven’t even realized it. Except on Craigslist tops are seeking bottoms, bottoms are seeking tops, vstl tops seeking both. In this economy everyone is anxiously looking for the bottom. The bottom is top dog, the one everyone is chasing. The bottom is Mr. Right. It’s as if you are the new kid in town and you enter a gay bar . And all eyes are on you. Could this be him? The question of course is when he does walk into the bar, how will we recognize the bottom. The Motley Fool is listing signs of a bottom. Apparently it has nothing to do with strategically placed handkerchiefs anymore. Even the Wall Street Journal is trying out its gaydar to make sure it doesn’t miss the Bottom. They have helpful hints about Signs of a Bottom though they caution “the market remains hard.” Others think they have found the elusive bottom. JP Morgan, Barclays Capital and PNC Financial have his number and have all been calling him. Three Banks Call A Bottom dishes Forbes. Talk about being in demand. Pros are even having a bidding war over a bottom says NBC. Pros bidding over a bottom? Hmmm. But apparently your gaydar can fool you. There are false bottoms out there. Beware, says Francisco Martin in his blog MarketWatch. “Everybody is calling the bottom,” he writes. “I hate to burst anybody’s dreams and hopes but this is nothing else than a ‘Bear Rally.’” Gosh, a bear rally in search of a bottom. It boggles the mind. Could it get any gayer? I think the leaders of The Resistance, the Christian media watchdog group which wants Anderson Cooper fired for using the phrase “teabagging” on the air, had better wake up. It’s much bigger, much more serious than tea bagging. This national search for the perfect bottom is a whole different ballgame. Is this the gay agenda seeking to infiltrate the economy? I don’t know. All I know is that it sucks that this bottom is taking a really long time to come. Comment [1] |
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