If the State of the Union made one concrete promise it was to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And the president obviously means business. The powers that be are lining up behind it.

Robert Gates said the Pentagon is preparing to repeal the law.

Adm. Mike Mullen got a lot of press for his comments that it is his “personal belief” that lifting the ban is the “right thing to do.”

Now Colin Powell has added his voice to the chorus. “Attitudes and circumstances have changed,” Powell said. They certainly have in the 17 years that have passed since he had opposed it.

The energy of the gay movement has shifted away from military to marriage. Most developed countries don’t discriminate on basis of sexual orientation when it comes to gays and lesbians in the military and none of them seem to have imploded. They serve quite well as America’s NATO allies in the “War on Terror” while the U.S. proceeds to discharge its gay Arabic speaking officers.

Now the United States is finally catching up. Powell said, “We’ve have a lot of experience watching what other nations have done.” Really? On this issue and this issue only America needs to follow while others lead? I thought President Obama in his State of the Union said “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”

But what is aggravating is that Colin Powell who had helped scuttle Bill Clinton’s promise to end the gay ban in the military said in his eminently reassuring way that it’s OK now because there is increased “acceptance of gays and lesbians in society.”

Did it make it all right then to drum gays and lesbians out of the military or force them to lie about their orientation just because society was not as “accepting” then?

I am glad that Powell now thinks its OK. Better late than never. But I am wondering what he really thought then. Has he changed his attitude towards homosexuality which he once called “a behavioral characteristic”? Has Powell had a change of heart or is he merely glad the great unwashed masses have had a change of attitude? Did he always believe this way but was waiting (quietly) for society to catch up? Would he ever admit he was plain wrong like the mayor of San Diego Jerry Sanders did when he reversed his stance on same sex marriage?

Colin Powell is a respected figure in politics because he has so often stayed above the fray. His endorsement of Obama, when it came, carried weight. On this issue a mea culpa would have been appreciated. It’s not that much to expect for 17 years of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the hundreds of lives that were upended in a morass of lies and accusations.

Dear Colin Powell, those discharged soldiers do ask, please do tell.

I think President Obama just killed comprehensive immigration reform.

If he did, he killed it gently, with a pat on the head. Actually to be fair, he did not kill it. He sent it to the back of the bus. Behind the gays and lesbians.

The gays got the promise of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And a reminder that he’s already given them Employee Non-Discrimination.

Immigration reform got a casual platitude.

And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system – to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.

12 million undocumented immigrants deserved more than those 38 words.

“Continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system.”

Does that imply that Congress or the White House have been already busy fixing our broken immigration system? Were they doing it during the rest breaks in the middle of health care reform gridlock? If so, I missed the memo.

Yes, Department of Homeland Security has been tweaking the system, re-examining Bush-era diktats, looking at the conditions of detention centers. But that’s not fixing a broken system, it’s not even duct taping it. That is just sweeping at the edges with a fly whisk.

But it says something for our nation’s mood that President Obama felt more confident promising repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell than taking on the immigration hot potato. Perhaps the defenders of Prop 8 in the courts in San Francisco had a point when they said that gays don’t need the protection of the court. It’s a community with a lot of political clout already.

The tragedy is, that when the cultural tides are sweeping towards gay marriage, the president offered gays the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – a promise that seemed fresh and exciting in the first days of the Clinton presidency. Now it seems like yesterday’s leftover promise.

But at least gays got the leftovers. The immigrants who had demanded comprehensive immigration reform were gently told “Not right now. With 10 percent unemployment, it’s too risky. We must wait for the right time.”

I remember when they would tell that to the gays.

When the US Immigration and Naturalization services asks the pro forma question – Have you ever been or are you a member of the Communist Party – I always gulp.

I have not.

But I wonder, does it count that for almost all my growing up years the party in power in West Bengal was the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Surely some red must have seeped in growing up with symbols of sickles and stars graffitied on the neighborhood walls. The men who drank tea and smoked Wills Filter cigarettes on the tea shop across the street stood every morning reading Ganashakti – the Communist party mouthpiece – pasted on a billboard on the street.

Communists were not the red menace they were in the US. They were just another political party for us. Middle class Bengalis, in clean white dhotis, they looked like they could be your uncle. Except they talked about “the party” all the time. We didn’t say someone was a Communist. We would say “Oh he does the Party.”

The Communists also did things like name streets after Ho Chi Minh. Not just any street. Ho Chin Minh street in Calcutta houses the US Consulate.

And now the last Communist is dead.

Well not really, but Jyoti Basu was for over twenty years the Chief Minister of West Bengal, the longest serving Chief Minister in India. He was a dimunitive colossus who presided over a patchwork of Communist parties of various shades of red that had a stranglehold on West Bengal politics for most of the eighties and nineties. He was our version of the “great Leader.” But it was a particular kind of Bengali babu that gave Communism a sort of dal-fish-rice kind of everyday feel.

I remember as a kid we were plagued with power cuts all day. We would joke that Jyoti-babu (and his name ironically meant light) helped solve that problem by driving all industry out of West Bengal. No industry. No demand. No power cuts.

Jyoti-babu in his heyday was the one who became the face of labor strikes and industrial deadlocks. People said if there was a brain drain in West Bengal it was because of people like Jyoti babu. Bengal once used to boast that what Calcutta thinks today, Delhi thinks tomorrow. Under two decades of Communist rule, West Bengal fell behind the rest of India, Calcutta became a sleepy backwaters city compared to Mumbai and Delhi.

In a way that’s also allowed Calcutta to retain a certain nostalgic charm, while the rest of the metropolises turn into cookie cutter malls. There is a slowness of pace which has its own charm, at least for the visitor.

That was not Jyoti Basu’s intention. But in an era when Communism is disappearing all over the world, the red flag still flies over Calcutta. The party’s strength was in the countryside, in its policies of land reform. Of course today’s Communists are busy kowtowing to the industrialists, desperate to entice them to the state. Now the Communists in power in Calcutta can be found unleashing police on the peasantry, taking the side of industrialists. The Communists out of power in Delhi still happily oppose the very same industrialists that their comrades in Calcutta might be courting.

An editorial in the local newspaper The Telegraph sardonically commented that he gave the state a great gift by dying on a Sunday. Monday was declared a holiday. “What better gift could a chief minister whose politics destroyed the work culture of the state give to its people?” asked the writer.

Well, in death though it seems he spurred people into hyperactivity.

My friends in Calcutta had a party to organize the next day. They said they were desperately trying to stock up on alcohol in all the liquor shops were shut down for state mourning.

The party went off well, I hear. The fate of the Party is unclear.

To YouTube or Not-to-YouTube – that seems to be the question when it comes to Prop 8 same sex marriage court case in San Francisco.

Meanwhile over in Uganda they are debating whether to pass death sentences on homosexuals. Or merely 7 years in prison.The bill might be softened. The death penalty, we are told, might not be “necessary.”

In San Francisco, the anti-same-sex marriage side is falling over themselves to prove that they are not anti-gay, that this is not personal. Nothing against gays, some of them are my best friends, look we’ve given you domestic partners, sure, go visit your sick lover in hospital – but hey, we aren’t going to give you access to our strategy emails. But trust us, this is not about bias.

Over in Kampala, there is no need for such niceties. As Edwin Okong’o writes in his piece on NAM, “American religious right-wingers are flocking to Africa and are having more success in passing new legislation criminalizing homosexuality there than they are having in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.”

I guess it is a sign of progress that even homophobia has to put on a kinder, gentler face these days in America. Homophobia is going into the closet.

At a seminar I went to last year, the speaker, an expert on immigration said the anti-gay issue was losing steam as a way of attracting the rightwing. Ellen, Rosie and Glee are mainstreaming gayness in a way laws like ENDA (important as it is) cannot. Some of us remember what a big deal it was when the Ellen character on her sit-com was teetering on the edge of coming out. That could no longer be the climax of a show.

The gay was no longer quite the “other” he had always been in American popular culture.

In dark economic times the undocumented immigrant was instead becoming the “new gay”, the “other” on which one could blame the economic decline of America. When factories close and jobs disappear, the hapless Mixtecan-speaking poultry farm worker is a much more obvious target.

He becomes the guest who’s not coming to dinner, or the Tea Party!

Same sex marriage on the other hand gets defended in court by lawyers who were on opposite sides of Bush v Gore. The Republican governor of California and the Democratic Attorney General decline to defend Prop 8 in court.

In a way it seems despite Prop 8’s victory in the polls, the culture war against homosexuals that the likes of Pat Buchanan had once trumpeted, has been shipped overseas to places like Uganda.

(Of course the question is why in Uganda and other former colonies which are quick to dub gay rights as “foreign imports” and examples of Western decadence, are only too happy to accept the help of the same foreigners when it comes to gay-bashing?)

But in the U.S., despite polling setbacks, same-sex marriage is becoming ho-hum, a little bit “yesterday’s news.” Listening to a talk-show on the Prop 8 trial’s first day, I heard the host ask the reporter “But what was new?”

Men marrying men is neither new, nor news anymore.

And when the anti-same-sex marriage side objected to the trials being telecast on Youtube they were in essence indicating they didn’t want more heart-string-tugging me-and-my-lesbian partner testimony flooding the Internet. They don’t want to fight that battle.

They cannot say that. So instead they said they were afraid their backers would face harassment if their faces appeared on YouTube. That they could stand there and complain about harassment and bullying to a group of homosexuals took some balls.

I wonder if any of them ever tried to be a femme boy in a high school locker room?

That the great moral majority is now worried about straight-bashing and eager to present themselves as pro-marriage but not anti-gay is a sign that the times, they are a-changing.

If you need more proof just read this story about first same-sex marriage in San Francisco’s jail. Dawn Davis II married her girlfriend while still in jail because she was afraid it wouldn’t be legal by the time she got out.

But what really amazed me was after the wedding both guards and inmates congratulated her. They even threw her a party – a cake made out of honey buns and melted Snickers and chicken pieces that everyone had saved from their dinner trays the night before. From their dinner trays!

“Then they made me a card that everybody in the whole D-pod signed,” writes Davis.

This is the county jail, not San Francisco city hall.

No matter what the courts decide on Prop 8, its death warrant has already been signed.

It was signed by the inmates of D-pod in San Francisco County Jail.

Christmas feels smaller and bigger in Calcutta.

When we were kids we used to go to see the Christmas lights on Park Street, the main restaurant drag in Calcutta. Restaurants with names like Sky Room and Moulin Rouge twinkled with lights. Flury’s fine confectioners would stay open late for Darjeeling tea and plum cakes. Calcutta, the most British of India’s big cities, celebrated Christmas as if the 1950s had not gone out of style.
This year as I walked down Park Street and saw the trees and restaurants strung with twinkling strings of lights, it felt a little shabby. Nothing it seemed had been updated in the last twenty years unless you consider the new McDonalds an upgrade. Sky Room was gone. The fancy restaurants of our childhood looked a little time worn, the uniforms of the doorman seemed a little shop soiled.

The fake Christmas trees were still there – spindly and green, surrounded by mounds of cotton wool snow. The toy Santa Clauses were on sale. A big one for Rs60 ($1.50), a small one for Rs 25. They looked tacky now. The rest of the year they were cheap plastic dolls. During Christmas they got red suits and crookedly pasted white beards.

But Christmas was also much bigger now than it had ever been in my childhood. Even my bank officer has a tiny Christmas tree in a thimble sized pot on her desk next to twin flags of India. India of the malls and shopping complexes had seized on Christmas and made it just another giant Indian festival after Diwali and Durga Puja. Every mall had Christmas trees and Xmas sales. Restaurants were serving tandoori turkey specials. Confectioners were advertising Yule logs and Christmas cakes (some of which tasted like a run of the mill fruit cake with a new wrapper). Even my cell phone keeps spamming me with exhortations to send Santa text messages – Rs 3 per message.

We tried to escape the carol frenzy and go to a traditional Bengali restaurant for lunch. Though there was no turkey on the menu there was a Christmas tree in the lobby. The doorman, a rather thin, undernourished looking man was standing miserably in the sun in his red Santa Claus costume. My sister says he’s probably going to be stuck in that costume till New Year’s day.

It’s still warm in Calcutta – the winter sunshine buttery gold. The temperature is in the seventies. But outside the huge new mall in our neighborhood, the piles of cotton wool snow gleam pristine unmelting white.

I remember we used to always get a box of brightly colored crackers for Christmas from New Market. You pulled one end, your friend pulled another. It was supposed to pop and out would fall a little gift. The crackers were badly made. The string would tear before the crackers popped. The toys were usually the same – a little plastic whistle.

I don’t know if you can get the crackers any more. Christmas was a private festival then. Now it’s another mall special. But in the old convent college where my sister went the nuns still gather for midnight mass. Those cheap little plastic Santa Clauses in their red suits now seem almost retro in their tackiness. That that even survives is one of the small miracles of Christmas.