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.

For example,

Argues with girlfriend – Sets fire to divan – Handcuffs for an Egyptian
Albanians ‘Lords’ of the drugs
Or

Nine immigrants in abandoned farmhouses – only one was illegal
Some Italian journalists are so worried they have come up with a Charter of Rome – a code of conduct on how to talk about refugees, asylum seekers and victims of trafficking. But it doesn’t go far enough said Lorenzo Guadagnucci, a journalist fighting against racism and promoting multicultural media. He said that not enough journalists subscribe to it yet and the Charter of Rome really focuses on asylum seekers rather than migrants in general.

And there is plenty of negative stereotyping of migrants around even when they are not seeking asylum. One example is that word clandestino. Italians wonder if it would not be better to use the word “without papers” instead. Do words like “clandestino” allow politicians seeking to whip up anti-immigrant frenzy to trade xenophobia for votes?

But in some ways it’s really anxiety about a changing society. In Florence, home of Italy’s high renaissance, of all that’s quintessential Italian, migrants are everywhere. Bangladeshis sell chestnuts in the piazza. African immigrants tout guidebooks to gaggles of Japanese tourists. Romanian immigrants take care of Italy’s elderly. Italians know this but are not always ready to admit that their country is changing. Instead some cities pass regulations about Doner Kebab shops in the hopes of hiding the face of migration. Lurid stories of Roma gypsies kidnapping babies turn from urban legends into accepted knowledge.

The story goes that when Pope Boniface VIII received the ambassadors of foreign states, they all turned out to be Florentine in origin. “You Florentines are the quintessence,” pronounced the Pope famously, a fact immortalized in a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vechhio.

Now centuries after Boniface VIII, Italians wonder what is quintessentially Italian after all as migrants from Romania and Morocco and Bangladesh land on the streets of Italy. After all many of these immigrants don’t even eat Italy’s famous cured hams and prosciutto. An Arab journalist told me that after years in Italy the question he gets asked the most is still “But why don’t you eat pork?”

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.

In one of my favorite movies when I was a kid, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, the king of ghosts doled out wondrous gifts — food and music and shoes that could transport you anywhere. And, of course, he sang.

Once upon a time, ghosts used to hang out in old abandoned mansions and village ponds choked with moss. As India changed, ghosts moved to middle class Calcutta neighborhoods like ours, to the trees in our backyards and driveways. Fig trees. Banyan trees. The bel tree, with its glossy green leaves and round golden fruits. Don’t break its branches, my great-grandmother would say. You don’t want to wake up the brahmodoitya.

On nights when the electricity went out and the oil lamps cast flickering shadows on the wall, we’d huddle together, swatting mosquitoes and listening to stories about graveyards and women in white saris. The hallways of the house, so nondescript by day, were suddenly eerie in the dark.

I never saw the ghosts. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I would lie in bed and watch the neem tree through the window. During the day, we plucked its tender, bitter leaves and stir-fried them. But at night, the tree was a perch for ghosts. I’d start awake, convinced there was someone in the room. Paralyzed with fear, I’d wait for the first gray light of dawn to seep through the window.

Now the ghosts are being stirred up again, all over my old neighborhood. As families break up and children move away, the old houses are being torn down, replaced by boxy apartment buildings and glitzy malls.

Ours was torn down, as well. I remember asking my mother if we could at least save the neem tree. We couldn’t. Apartments only have room for potted marigolds and money plants.

But petnis and mamdobhoots can’t haunt marigolds. In signing the death warrant of our house, we rendered the ghosts homeless.

As I vigorously turn on the lights in the San Francisco dusk, I wonder what they are doing — the homeless ghosts of Calcutta.

And, I wonder, what happens if a nishi calls out a name and there’s no one there to answer?

Commentator Sandip Roy is an editor with New America Media and host of New America Now on KALW in San Francisco.

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.

“You have to play nicely, together, and share the sandbox.”

(And don’t bother mummy because mummy is very busy being the last superpower standing.)

What the West does not acknowledge is that there are fundamental differences between rival leaders which cannot necessarily be papered over in a government of national unity. The power-sharing deal, the government of national unity is a way to take the drama off the headlines and stash it away in the back drawer of international politics. The alternatives, truly free and fair elections, putting real pressure on leaders who rig the polls, are costly, both politically and economically. The West has no stomach for it especially in a recession.

One of the first ideas floated immediately after Afghanistan’s electoral debacle was a “power sharing agreement” between Hamid Karzai and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Eventually when Hamid Karzai agreed to a run-off, Obama gave him a pat on the back. As Jamal Dajani of Mosaic News points out in the Huffington Post, “If someone is caught cheating in the Olympics or another sporting event, the athlete is immediately disqualified, and it is seen as a disgrace. In the case of the recent election in Afghanistan however, cheating has been rewarded and even praised by no less than the President of the United States himself.”

Where does that leave the warring parties from disputed elections? They are trapped in an arranged marriage of someone else’s convenience.

Take Kenya. After the violent protests following the 2007 elections, the warring sides were brought together in a coalition government. But a report in the Christian Science Monitor quotes Jakoyo Midiwo, chief parliamentary whip for the Orange Democratic Movement as saying “We may have achieved a certain level of peace in the country, but underneath that, there is nothing.” Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga’s government have become better known for scandals, rather than the new constitution they were supposed to write. According to the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Monitoring Report, only 40 percent of those displaced in the post-election ethnic violence have returned home. Kofi Annan is now warning Kenya’s leaders that that time is running out.

In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe was forced to enter a power sharing agreement with his bitter rival Morgan Tsvangirai. That fell apart a few weeks ago when Tsvangirai accused Mugabe’s Zanu-PR party of failing to live up to its power sharing commitments (and after it arrested one of its MPs). Now that’s reached a head with the UN torture investigator Manfred Nowak stopped at the Harare airport and not allowed to enter Zimbabwe. Tsvangirai had authorized the visit. But his foreign minister apparently follows orders from a higher master. “The invitation by the prime minister was a nullity,” he told AP.

Internationally imposed power sharing agreements might stop civil war. But do they actually bring reconciliation in the long-term? Or do they in effect just divide the pie among the elites, elections be damned? No wonder its becoming more and more de rigueur for parties to refuse to accept the results of elections, almost before the last polling stations have closed.

Which leads me to wonder why it’s always the Zimbabwes and Kenyas and the Afghanistans of the world who are told they need to just get along and share power.

Why not the US itself? Can it take the medicine it prescribes so freely for the rest of the world? There was a disputed election here in 2000 that hung on a chad. Imagine if Honduras had told us then that what the US needed was a Bush-Gore government of national unity.

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.

Others have complained about how a new feature on Facebook tells them to reconnect with friends they haven’t talked to for awhile. Except some of those friends are actually dead.

Now Facebook says dead people won’t show up as suggested friends anymore. But if their friends and family request it, their pages can be preserved for eternity – a sort of virtual memorial.

I wonder who qualifies as friends and family here, who gets the power to preserve someone’s page. Do already-approved friends get precedence here? My mother and my sister are not on Facebook. If something happens to me, do they have the right to demand my page be taken down? Or do one of my Facebook friends (many of whom are really Facebook acquaintances) get precedence?

And how do you prove someone has died? Facebook requires an obituary or a news article. But what if there is neither?

Ashley Gilbertson, who wrote an amazing book about being a war photographer in Iraq once talked about his new project. It was photographing the bedrooms of young soldiers who had died in Iraq. The rooms were frozen in time, preserved by grieving mothers – a jumble of photographs of high school sweethearts, posters of rock stars, college jerseys, sports trophies.

Facebook is creating its own versions of those bedrooms, preserved in Internet ether – messages on the wall, links they had shared, quizzes they had taken (what kind of superhero are you). They are there forever (as long as the storage lasts.)

And their approved friends, a sort of exclusive club, are the only ones allowed to post on their wall. It sounds a little spooky, a sort of online planchette, leaving messages for the beyond on the dead person’s wall. This is not like leaving teddy bears and candles at a memorial shrine. That shrine eventually disappears. The teddy bear gets grubby. The candles melt. But the Facebook shrine never ages, never fades. Can the friends unfriend themselves if it gets too much, trapped in the mausoleum?

It makes me curious what else can happen with the pages of people who died. Facebook says they won’t be searchable anymore. But a report on NPR just talked about how those endless quizzes we take on Facebook actually can allow an application to mine our profiles for all kinds of information – religion, sexual preference, school, groups we belong to etc. All that information can then be sold to marketers. These people won’t know that William has died. He will live forever in their database, memorialized whether he wanted to be or not.

Facebook has really altered our notion of privacy. Work colleagues, lovers, cousins, parents, casual acquaintances you met at a party, members of your book club are suddenly all swimming in the same pool. Some of them might even know each other.

There have already been stories of people posting about playing hooky from work without realizing work colleagues were on it. I went to an event the other day that was rather ridiculous but I stopped myself from posting about it because I knew the organizer was a Facebook friend. I have realized that when I enter the social networking world I am visible in ways I didn’t count on. I am searchable. I have no real privacy even though it gives me the illusion of intimacy. That’s the price I pay for connection.

Now even in death we are not private. Facebook sees dead people.

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 long standing fight of Hindu Americans.

Actually all of Diwali has been the touchstone of multicultural tussles in America.

The first big Diwali fight was about street parking. New York Mayor Bloomberg didn’t want to add Diwali to its list of major holidays when street cleaning would be suspended. The City Council passed the bill in 2005 and the Mayor vetoed it. In 2007 it was finally approved. Phew.

Then there was the petition for the Diwali stamp. If Muslims could get the Eid stamp, why not a Diwali stamp? Diwali is our Christmas said the Hindus. There was an online petition for signatures. According to SAJA the petition was started by an Atlanta businessman Bob Ghosh and it even got dead signatories like former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The US Postal Service told them respectfully that the signatures didn’t count. But like the NPR funding being cut right now hoax email, the Diwali signature email would pop up in Indian-American mailboxes every year.

That fight started a long time ago. You can tell. The stamp was worth 37 cents. In 2009 the Hindu American Foundation formally asked the US Postal Service’s Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee for a Diwali stamp. Earliest that can happen – 2012. No one claimed this was express mail.

But the big fight was always about the Presidency.

Next year, Diwali in the White House.

They got close with George W. Bush. But it was always Diwali in the annex to the White House. And it was always with a “senior administration official”, never the Big Boss himself.

One can’t blame Bush. In 2007 When Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest was invited to offer the morning prayer in the Senate protesters shouted “this is an abomination” from the gallery.

The American Family Association urged its members to protest because Zed would be “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.” (Note the small g). Former Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt said Zed “committed the sin of idolatry” with the “permission” of the government.

Now that abomination has moved from the outhouse to the inner sanctum itself. The historic East Room of the White House was the site of the DIwali celebration. Hindu Americans are tickled pink. The Hindu American Foundation has issued a press release saying “”Never before had a sitting US President personally celebrated the Diwali holiday, and with that one gesture, two million Hindu-Americans felt a bit more like they belonged—one more reason to feel at home.”

Of course for those who think Obama is the anti-christ this is one more proof that godless heathens have taken over the White House. But the president was careful to make sure he didn’t make it seem like the ten armed goddesses were taking over the administration. (But I think a ten-armed kick ass Goddess with a lot of Second-Amendment protected weapons would not be a bad ally to have in pushing through health care reform).

Obama invited people of different faiths to the ceremony. And he talked abot the larger significance of a festival of lights – a time for celebration and contemplation.

He explained what Diwali meant for Hindus, and what it meant for Jains and what it meant for Sikhs. I was startled because having grown up in India I didn’t know all that myself.

I just knew Diwali as fireworks, oil lamps and platters of sweets. It needed President Obama to explain my culture back to me with professorial authority.

It was a little embarrassing.

But anyway what are the brave Diwali fighters going to do now?

I guess they could always go back to the great battle for the Diwali stamp.