#196: Dropping Babies

Michael Jackson dangled a baby from a balcony, and maybe its that cavalier spirit toward raising strapping children that Indians can identify with in the King of Pop.

Indians at the shrine of Solapur in the state of Maharastra have been dropping babies from the holy site's 50 foot ledge for 500 years with the intent of blessing their free-falling newborns with luck and strength.

Both Hindus and Muslims have indulged their superstitions with this practice, proving the Indian obsession with pushing their children through the most stressful and traumatic childhoods is a trait that transcends creed.

#29: Michael Jackson

Like Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson is a perennial favorite among Indians in America. Eddie Murphy wrote the handbook for immigrant acculturation in Coming to America; the Huxtables became the model family for raising dark-skinned children while working as doctors and lawyers; Michael Jackson showed recent emigres that in America it's still okay to dance. MJ's reach has even extended beyond the pond, inspiring Indians in England to put their arms up and get down, as shown by Suleman Mirza and Madhu Singh on a recent episode of Britain's Got Talent

Perhaps nowhere else in the world does Michael Jackson continue to enjoy cultural relevance other than the place where 1980s American music stars go to die and enjoy karmic rebirth on the Channel V pop charts - India. Just ask Bryan Adams.

Jackson moved to Bahrain, seemingly aware that the white people he loved enough to physically emulate have rejected him as a psychopathic baby-dangler. You married Lisa-Marie Priestley, but she didn't like you. You were best friends with Paul McCartney, but now he hates your guts. No worries, Michael, you never had Paris, but at least you'll have Dhaka, where the less informed still believe "Heal the World" is a motivating message and not just a pretty badass Super Bowl halftime show.



In the 1970s and 1980s every Indian-American family had a copy of the Bad album on vinyl, had committed to memory the words of Weird Al Yankovic's parody "Eat It," and had a third cousin named Raj who at every annual Telugu convention in Houston would unbutton his white shirt, tip his black fedora, hike up his white socks and pop-lock it out to a Michael Jackson - Bally Sagoo medley mix.

You're right, Michael, it doesn't matter if you're black or white. Sometimes you can be brown or whatever race you are now. In the end what brings us together is the popular culture that unites us and the songs to which we can dance from LA to Lahore, ideally with members of the same sex.

#190: Phonetic Misspellings

Subway Sammiches. 50th and Broadway. New York, NY.

#189: Homeopathic Care

It goes without saying that Indians like the practice of Medicine. What is alarming, though, is that for a community with such confidence in the institutions of science and maths, Indians still manage to believe, in a back corner of their minds normally reserved for heretical thoughts such as "M. Night Shyamalan sucks" and "Isn't Sanjay Gupta gay," that homeopathic care might work.

One would think that 4 years of private, parochial high school, 3 years of undergraduate study in an accelerated medical program, 4 years of medical school, 2 years of interning, and 3 years of residency would banish any and all thoughts among Indians that remotely consider holistic care a legitimate alternative to Western medicine. Gas X is for indigestion; Zithromax is for boils; hydrocortisone cream is for eczema; and Prilosec is for acid reflux. Ginger root, chamomile, red bark and vinegar have no place in the pantheon of prescribed panaceas.

Not so, according to Indians, superstitious and scientific alike. To Indians there is no hypocrisy between taking Crestor for high blood pressure and tiger toe nails for a migraine. Even pharmacies in India, which boast their accredited professionalism with a dingy red-cross insignia outside a ramshackle stand crammed between a cobbler and a paan shop, offer both acetaminophen and hibiscus leaves to cure that crick in your neck.

Do you suffer from Asthma? Try some Pranayama.

What about Diarrhea? Here are some boiled banyan buds.

Do you have Depression? Too bad, it doesn't exist.

To Indians there's no sickness beyond the reach of antibiotics, analgesics and good ol' fashioned ayurveda. Except leprosy. That shit is still a bitch to cure.

#188: Dancing With Members of the Same Sex

It's no surprise that Indians enjoy dancing. On wedding occasions, birthday occasions, pooja occasions, after party occasions, bhangra occasions, and garba occasions, Indians love to crank dat curry sauce and cut a Persian rug.

What is somewhat eye-opening, however, is the Indian penchant for dancing with members of the same sex. In metropoles around the world Indian men and Indian women congregate in groups of their own gender and make their shoulders lean. Maybe it's a sociological result of a conservative culture inhibiting casual and free interaction between the sexes beginning at a very young age. Or maybe it's more simple than that; maybe Indians just like getting down with people that share their genitalia.

You've seen this phenomenon manifest itself at every SASA show, Diwali Function, Holi Fest, India Night, Fusion Concert, and Diversity in Dance Celebration you've ever been to. In nearly each Hindi Flim Remix Dance there is an even number of boys and girls. One would assume this ratio would facilitate quick and easy partner pairing.

Wrong. Instead, Indians prefer to break fusion dances into gender specific portions during which all the girls dance together and subsequently all the boys dance together. Girls will usually do something vaguely inspired by Indian classical forms while the boys will break out their classic Blackstreet-meets-112-meets-'Nysnc-meets-DDLJ hip-hop bhangra routine to the ritual cheers of "Oh my Gawwwwwwds, so sexy Pratul!" from the crowd.

One also sees the Indian proclivity for same sex brown downs in numerous national dance competitions that encourage dude-on-dude dancing and girl-on-girl garbas. Bhangra Blowouts, Dandia Dhamakas, and Raas Riots from Berkeley to GW feature large groups of Indians breaking it down on stage with finger flags and wooden dowels while the opposite sex watches from the seats of the amphitheater, left only to "ooh" and "aah" at hammer downs, poorly executed worms and gratuitous shoulder mounting. Clearly, as evinced by by these demonstrations of dancing in practice, in India girls garba with girls, boys bhangra with boys and only girls named Lakshmi do Kathak.



Perhaps nowhere else is the practice of same sex dancing between Indians more prevalent in the community than at the club or after party. Normally, social interaction tends to escalate during the course of the night from immature tom-foolery to more intimate exchanges on the dance-floor. One need not look further than their high school Homecoming dance to see this. At the end of Homecoming, who were you slow dancing with to Sarah McLachlans "Angel"? Pathik? Ajay? Sanjeev? No, most likely you were dancing with Kate, Katherine, Kimberly, Jenna or whichever other white girl you decided to ask as your date.

At the Indian after party, though, 9 times out of 10 by the end of the night you're huddled tight into an Urkel Circle with 5 other Indian guys throwing your arms up in unison to whatever Mariah Carey remix is most culturally salient at the moment. And where are Preity, Payal, Puja and Priyanka? Dancing with each other on the opposite side of the dance floor, of course, mentally plotting the steps for their all-female Kuchipudi dance to be performed at next year's cultural show.

#186: Pretending Their Favorite Book is Midnight's Children

The world of South Asian diasporic literature is as populated as India itself. There's Masti Chick Lit, Alternative Identity Lit, Plagiarized Lit, Overwrought Lit, Wait is Zadie Smith Black or Pakistani Lit, Who's Monica Ali Lit, and Sweet Lakshmi Please Have My Baby Jhumpa Lahiri Lit. Above and beyond all these words, pages, paperbacks and epigrams, though, there is only one forefather of South Asian diasporic literature. Sorry, Naipal, but his name is Salman, and Indians like lying to people that they love his books.

Depending on your degree of precociousness and the extremes of your post-adolescent identity crisis during which you threatened to change your name to Steve and convert to Christianity, you probably picked up your first Rushdie book around middle to late high school. Most likely this was Satanic Verses since you vaguely remembered something from when you were 8 about a revolution in Iran and a fatwa on a fat man. Or maybe it was Midnight's Children, which you stumbled across on the Barnes and Noble Summer Reading table while looking for Confederacy of Dunces. Either way, whatever you read you didn't understand and it took you seven years to finish.

It doesn't matter that you turned the last page of Midnight's Children by the time you finished college. It doesn't matter that you bought The Ground Beneath Her Feet, or that you thought the plot sounded a lot like the movie Taal. It doesn't matter if you watched Rushdie speak, or that he signed your copy of Shalimar the Clown. You didn't read it, but you tell people you did.

On Friendster, Facebook, Orkut and Linked In pages all around, Indians claim their favorite books are some sort of combination between The Interpreter of Maladies, The Kite Runner, Digital Fortress, On Beauty, The God of Small Things and Midnight's Children. Most likely that last one is an equivocation. You may have read Midnight's Children but can you remember it? Can you describe Salim? Can you tell me why he ended up in some spitoon on the Kashmiri border? Can you explain why his left nostril always ran? Neither can I. But, damn, I love that book.

#185: Jumping the Shark

Five weeks in, more than a 180 posts deep and it seems we done run out of ideas. That's where you come in, though. We're going to harness what those cats who work in "media" in "New York City" call User Generated Content and ask you all to help us write a post that's way better than some of these more recent ones we've been flatulating out.

There are a ton more things macacas like that we're going to get to - wassup, parties in remodelled basements - but first we want to know what Indians like about:

The University of Texas Austin


Most of us barely went to college - well, 2 of us went to private schools so we kinda did - and the UT experience is not something you can find anywhere else. We've never been there, though, and only know of 6th street through stories Indian kids from Houston, Dallas, Sugarland and Plano tell us about....well, I've never heard stories other than, "Yo, there are mad Indians at UT." Kind of the same thing about Indians that studied abroad at the London School of Economics. "How was it," you'd ask. "Mad Indians," they'd respond, "Mad Indians."

So yo, mad Indians at UT, e-rogramme us some hot spots, clubs (wow, I meant student clubs but then forgot and thought I meant dance clubs because I'm that desi champ), late-night snack shacks, library study carols, computer labs, bars and Econ study sections Indians tend to favor.

For example: if you went to, say, randomly, hypothetically speaking, I don't know, some college in Chicago, like, how about Northwestern University and we asked for the same type of information as we are for UT, you'd email us and be like, "Hey, all the Indians live in the Foster Walker Complex in single units and only see day light during Organic Chem midterms, but a lot of them are really jacked because they break dance in the basement with the hmongs." Then we could take that information, hopefully add it to other tidbits, and come up with a pretty Masti'd up description of why Indians seem to love schools in Chicago.

Simple as that. So, Longhorns, take a second out of your ritual of lamenting the slow rise of Vince Young and atone for losing to Memphis in the NCAA tournament and subsequently seriously compromising my bracket. Email us peccadillos of your school. We never went there, but deep down inside in places we don't talk about at Desi parties, you know we wish we did.