These past few weeks I’ve been grappling with exactly what Sepia Mutiny has meant to me in the past six years I’ve written for the site and have been playing musical montages in my head of my favorite moments. Six years – longer than any job or relationship I’ve ever had. This site provided a much needed space to dialogue and develop the South Asian American identity and, in many ways, set the benchmark with how the community voiced ourselves. I always approached blogging on this site with three things in mind – 1) write about the Desi-American experience, the narrative I was yearning for, 2) a 1:1 ratio of pop to politics posts, and 3) find the marginalized Desis and give them space. And of course – the self pep talk before every remotely Muslim post - “Fuck all the trolling Islamophobic haters – as long as they’re commenting, there’s an important reason to keep blogging.” There was always that.

To commemorate – let’s list, shall we? So here we go. My top ten most influential moments here in the Sepia Mutiny bunkers…

1. Sepia Destiny: Oh, the trials and tribulations of being a single Desi girl with dating woes and having it all laid out in blogs. Remember the Dating While Desi rules? And wondering if Dating While Desi Bradley Effect of if Obama would increase the dating pool? These posts were our most commented on the site and clearly a very important issue to many of us. Though we always had high hopes of setting up a Sepia Destiny dating tab, it never came to fruition. Luckily, many of you didn’t wait for the tab to find SM love, myself included. Thank you, Sepia Mutiny for making dating life all that much more thrilling.

2. Gaza: Is Palestine a Desi issue? To me, the connection was immediate – but how to write about it? I hit the streets for the protests, interviewing every Desi person I saw and did it again at the rally in front of the Israel Embassy after the flotilla’s were attacked. In an American world where USINPAC and AIPAC are working in coordination to promote an Indian-Israeli alliance at the Capitol – I found it even more important to push this counter-narrative out there on SM’s pages. Especially after this Bollywood dancing missile promo video. Vijay Prashad’s Uncle Swami book coming out in June has a detailed analysis, but sadly my book review won’t be on these pages.

3. Ami Bera: He folded in to returning $250 of donations from CAIR-Sacramento Executive Director, thanks to pressure from his opponent Dan Lungren during the 2010 elections. My blog post sparked an interesting dialogue between readers, donors and the candidate himself - and even led to his having to return donations from people wanting their money back. Ami Bera is at it again, running in this fall’s election. But this time his race is highly supported by the Democratic Party big shots. Let’s just hope he doesn’t fold to Lungren again.

4. Edison, NJ: Joel Stein’s article caused a ruckus in our bunker – was it racist or was calling it racist too much? I tied it to The Last Airbender and called it racist – but others disagreed.

5. Bridget McCain: During the 2008 election John McCain’s Bangladeshi adoptee daughter hit the campaign trail, and I wrote a letter to her. The comments were fierce to say the least and generated a dialogue that I will never forget.

6. IndiCorps: This had to be one of the larger recent issues that totally split the Desi progressive community in two. You either sided w/ Vijay Prashad who “called out” Sonal Shah on aligning herself with the VHP or you sided with Indicorps family. I didn’t write about this, but Amardeep’s post, Ennis’ post, and Amardeep’s second post did cause a lot of ruckus both within the bunker and within the community. With ten year anniversary of the Gujarat riots around the corner, I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ve heard of it.

7. Queerness: One of the things I’ve completely enjoyed about writing on Sepia Mutiny the amount of coverage that was given to the queer community. There were the marches on Pioneer Blvd., Gay Pride in NYC, coming out stories, interviews with Prerna Lal and Sikh Knowledge, and the Nani supporting Proposition 8.

8. Bone Marrow Donation: The Mutiny has been featuring stories of bone marrow donors needed for the past few years – and has contributed to the significant increase to the South Asian donor pool. Most recently, Amit Gupta’s story and his viral social media campaign generated a 10/10 donor bone marrow donor match.

9: Hate-crimes: There have been so many hate crimes in the community over the years at Sepia Mutiny. Some were in post 9/11 hate and others were driven by islamophobic fear. There was the monument in Arizona that wanted to remove Balbir Singh Sodi off of the 9/11 monument, Kamal Uddin, Satender Singh, the Elk Grove murders, and the controversial fake hate-crime of Aisha Khan.

10: Voting: Of course, voting. What drew me to these pages of Sepia Mutiny was what drew me to start South Asian American Voting Youth – to empower the community to have a political voice. After ALL of my posts on voting, posts on Obama, and posts on south asian candidates – I hope that you all walk away a bit more empowered.

Thank you. Thank you to Abhi for inviting me to be a guest blogger way back in 2006 and for not kicking me out of the bunker. Thank you to all the dear bloggers who gchatted with me through ideas, who edited my posts at all hours of the night and who inspired me to keep writing. Thank you to the fabulous readers and commenters and lurkers who made this experience a constant learning and growing experience. Thank you to all of you who took the time to email me personally, talk to me at a meetup or voiced encouragement in person – each of you helped me onto this journey that I’m on today, and I’m a much better person for it.

As for where you can find me now… you’ll always be able to find me tweeting away @TazzyStar or on my personal blog at Say What?. You can find my tumblr site where I curate images of the South Asian American diaspora Mutinous MindState, and more infrequently at the Taqwacore Webzine. Finally, you can read one of my stories in Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. As for the future, time will always tell. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and one more song. For old times sake.

Ami Acshi.

Thanks, y’all, for having me over one last time. I’ve already said my goodbyes. This curious form of public performance brought me some of the people I cherish most. It’s been a second education in the erudition of the comments. The Mutiny was alt.culture.us.asian-indian before and @allyousmartf-ers now, and this delicious salon will continue in another face.

I want to toss in one last thought. Early desi American artists began with the idea of marginalization. Their references were specific and elaborate in-jokes. But look at who’s blown up: those who gave no ground in their conception of themselves. They dabbled in the desi palette because it’s rich, not because it’s definitive. Those who started with I am a Queens rapper, or I am an art director, or I am an animator, experienced brownness not as conscription, but freedom.

And in fact it is. It is a thin layer atop a deep commonality. As a species we are, when you zoom out, genetically almost clones. The differences we draw among us are like the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee squabbling with the fictional town of Eagleton: from the outside, all look same.

A couple of years ago I was watching Aziz Ansari make silly jokes at a small NYC club about hitting on MIA in bad Tamil. Today he’s touring in a 007 tux. Still bemoaning his sex life, but on a much bigger stage. Sepia is one of our colors, one near and dear. But it is only one. Let’s launch our flicks, ebooks, startups, campaigns. Let’s let our freak flags fly.

Can’t wait to see it all, and unlike Bill, I will inhale.

—Manish

Fast forward to March 2012.

Despite admitting to have shot and killed a 17 year-old armed with Skittles and a hoodie, George Zimmerman remains a free man today. The story struck a chord and has become a worldwide sensation. Just as thousands of ordinary folks of all stripes have taken to the streets to peacefully protest the outrageous impunity, a similar scene is happening right now in Punjab; the difference is that the “criminal” is slated to die for attempting to stop the targeting of his community for extrajudicial torture and killings. Here is the breakdown on Balwant Rajaona and why he was to be hanged from The Langar Hall.

On March 31st, Bhai Balwant Singh Rajoana [was] set to be executed in Punjab for his involvement in the assassination of former chief minister of Punjab, Beant Singh. Chief minister Beant Singh was involved with carrying out brutal and mass killings of Sikhs in Punjab.  He is widely held responsible by many Sikhs for ordering the kidnap, torture and death of many young Sikh men.  A report by Amnesty International can be found here.

Whereas outrage around the cold-blooded murder of a kid/boy/person/however you’d like to term Trayvon armed with only Skittles and a hoodie has galvanized action worldwide, the imposed media blackout and military presences have in Punjab made sure that most people outside do not learn the facts of the case, and those who do organize are slammed as “terrorist sympathizers.” Just as black boys, girls, men, and women in this country learned that the combination of darker skin and an otherwise innocuous piece of clothing can make them targets for harassment, Sikhs have had to essentially face a death sentence for the same, also in the country they call home. Over the years, we’ve have had many discussions over the realities and pitfalls of being minorities, from having to choose Starbucks names to sharing our stories of insults, harassment, and even violence. From these conversations, I’ve learn that our shared experiences and status as the perpetual other makes the need for solidarity with other minorities groups all that much more necessary: I do not have to be an African-American to be moved by tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death, nor do I have to be Sikh (I’m not) to be see the incredible injustice meted out to this minority. Though a stay has been put on Rajaona’s hanging, those who were responsible for the murder of as many as a quarter million missing and murdered Sikhs remain free and continue to live and operate with complete impunity. As this Mutiny signs off today, no justice has been served in either cases, but the Mutiny against this impunity grows stronger by the minute.

I’d like to thank Abhi for first inviting me into the bunker to blog about my obscure desi vinyl collection, among other things. The original gangstas, Manish, ANNA, Cicatrix, Neha, The Barmaid, Siddhartha, and Preston have had had more of an impact on how I viewed myself and the world I inhabit than I probably would feel comfortable admitting and I am forever in their debt. This site and the community it subsequently created has given me more than I could have ever hoped for and introduced me to bloggers and commenters who ended up becoming close friends in real life (like Harbeer and Cheap Ass Desi) and those who become something more (like I’m going to tell you). (Check out my tongue-in-cheek tribute to EVERYONE who helped make SM what it is!) But just as Abhi can say with confidence that the Mutiny has completed its mission, I can say that mine has just begun. This Mutiny is standing down, but for me, what began as stimulating, often contentious and always illuminating but ultimately idle conversation slowly grew into a reconnection with a lost heritage, a fledgling awareness of a need for further engagement, and finally a clarion call for action. For this reason, #Iamtrayvonmartin, and #Ipledgeorange, and I hope we can all continue together in our Mutinous ways.

I thought I’d saunter away to the musical stylings of a well-known white man with connections to the mafia. ’Cause that makes sense for this desi blog.

Just kidding. I thought I’d go out myyyyyyyy way. With a point, or attempting to make one. I aim for rallying cry rather than dirge, in keeping with my bullheaded desire to cultivate optimism and seek action.

So here are some things that are related to each other (and the optimism is coming just a ways down the pike, I swear, because most of this list of connected things is comprised of news that devastates):

• George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin recently, in Florida. I hope you already know this by now, that Martin’s name is etched in your memory, but if you don’t, here. Go you and read it. And then please sign it, and come back.

Trayvon Martin was a child, a black teenager, and he carried Skittles and iced tea and no weapon. He could have been my classmate, my relative, my friend, my colleague, my teacher, my student. He wore a hoodie. I think of my beard-sporting, turban-wearing friends. I think of the black men and black communities who have supported ­me.

Watch this brilliant and moving response from a set of Howard University guys:

I think of laws that need changing.

• Shaima Alawadi was killed recently too, found with a note that said Go back to your country, you terrorist. She was 32. She was the mother of five and wore a hijab and had immigrated from Iraq.

I think of Muslim friends, profiled. I think of Tamil friends, profiled. I think of minorities… profiled.

• An American soldier killed 17 civilians in Afghanistan. Much of the Western media failed to adequately acknowledge the dead. 

O, failures to acknowledge and mourn the dead, how you haunt me. 

• The long-awaited film of The Hunger Games prompted a slew of racist reactions from fans who couldn’t believe that black actors had been cast in roles they’d imagined white.

And good God, I think of my own job: I am a fiction writer.

And the last item on this list (which clearly could have included a great deal more)—

• Taiwanese-American Harvard alum and Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin became an international phenomenon.

Yes, I’m the Sri Lankan chick who went to Harvard, but I’m glad to say I know lots of people who cheered for him with no “connection,” with no self-interest. Because he impressed, and they admired. Without reservation.

Not all of these things are explicitly connected to anything desi. But they are related. We are related. As the collective work of Sepia Mutiny has asked others to not only know but also imagine South Asian(-Americans), the incredible variety our lives contain, I want to exit the bunker and imagine how we might be in solidarity with other people. Other Others, if you will. How can I know their lives? What do we have in common? How can I throw my lot in with those who think imagination, emotion, compassion, and respect don’t default to white, to straight, to male, to able-bodied? How can I do this rigorously, thoughtfully, with humor and humility?

I think that now, to change things, we have to go outside ourselves. Maybe Twitter killed SM; maybe Facebook slayed us. Still, I just wanted to say, I hope this isn’t just an end. I want it to be a turn, a growing. I think it will be. And of course much of this work has already begun.

Poittu Varan / I go only to return / catch you later

And so you may have noticed that I didn’t say goodbye. BECAUSE THERE ARE THINGS TO DO!

I’ve had good times here. I learned an enormous amount. I was a lurker, then a commenter, then a guest, then a regular. I felt a certain solidarity with my bunkermates, even when I disagreed with them. This feeling of being backed-up and valued counted for a lot; it made it possible for me to say things that felt difficult to say. Thanks, bunkermates. I e-mailed you, called you, chatted you and relied on you even when we hadn’t met… and you always treated me as though we had.

SM readers, in their turn, offered thought-provoking, funny, nasty, reasonable, and deeply kind responses to what I wrote. Thanks to them too. Some became real-life friends. We met in New York, Ann Arbor, other cities, other countries. They kept me honest and tested my patience. I cut my argumentative teeth on SM’s threads, made mistakes, corrected, learned, revised, edited, and hopefully improved. Those threads taught me that I didn’t need to have the last word to win an argument, and that sometimes the best response was no response. (Don’t feed the trolls!) I learned to bide my time and hold my temper. Funny thing to learn from the Internet. And hella useful.

And the Interwebs taught me about generosity, too. I particularly remember one insightful, positive, compassionate comment made about two years ago. I wasn’t familiar with the handle; I have no idea who it was. But I have returned to that comment multiple times, to remind myself that people actually did sometimes get what I was saying, that I was allowed to be human, and sometimes even to do it in public. To the readers who took the time to comment when they liked something… that mattered, and thanks so much.

So I will see you again out there again, you know, and I won’t say goodbye. I’ll say—until next time, see you soon, somewhere else, somewhere new.

Hi, everyone. For the last few years I’ve been pretty much fulltime over at our twitter franchise, one of a few people trying to make sure you get all your savory brownness in an 140 character packet. As a result, I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty at this longer-form blogging.

But the truth is, as my exes can attest, I’ve never been any good at final goodbyes. I even skipped the funeral of a close friend because I couldn’t stand the finality involved in watching him get cremated, even though I knew he was already gone. But I’m afraid there’s no way to skip your own wake, and once you’re there, you might as well try to deliver a eulogy, awkward as it is.

Part of the problem is that Sepia was never just one thing, it was many. There were the blog posts, but that was just the tip of the iceberg, the part you could see. There was also everything that happened out of view, so many stories that I don’t think any one of us knows them all.

Fun fact: VH-1 once considered a “Behind the Blogging” special on Sepia Mutiny, but decided the truth (replete with biting off the heads of live bats) was too bizarre to be believed. That, and MTV-Iggy said “I’ll cut you, VH-1, Sepia is my bitch! Don’t you go near it!”

The other part of the invisible sepia, the spirit rather than the body, of course, was you all. This is what we never could have forseen when we started the blog, just four guys and one girl, all plugged into a group chat session on (gasp) AOL chat, that such a giant community would spring up around the blog, that people would continue the connections they formed in the comments and continue them, both online and offline, elsewhere. This was both our greatest triumph and our undoing.

Like any club, once we became popular, we lost some of the attributes that made us a hip watering hole in the first place. The comment section changed. We spent too much time and energy policing comments, and even so, it was impossible to maintain the vibe that first brought people here. Plus, as Facebook grew stronger, people simply took their conversations elsewhere, into private spaces.

That’s fine though. Eight years is a good run, longer than most sitcoms, the entire possible lifetime of a Presidential administration, and far longer than I thought we had any possibility of surviving.

We certainly had no idea what we were creating at the time, how many people we would touch, how it would affect each of us, and how, in the end, it would gently unravel. It’s hard to believe all the things that we achieved, as well as all the things that happened that I still cannot tell you about.

I could show you a slow montage of our greatest moments, all slung together in the standard narrative of the rise and fall of a rock-and-roll band, but that would be bullshit. Sepia was never about the commercial, the slick, the neatly manufactured. At our best we were messy, fractious, incoherent, and full of life.

My most famous post, Straight eye for the guerilla guy, could have used a good deal more polishing and refinement. Yet that didn’t stop it from being widely pirated and going viral, in the sincerest form of flattery.

So this, post #539, is my messy, poorly written, farewell and love letter to Sepia, both official and invisible, singular and plural, inside and out.

(Most likely, we’ll keep tweeting from @sepiamutiny for a little while longer, sort of the way the body of a chicken keeps running around, long after the head has been cut off. After that, you can catch me at my new twitter handle @ennismutinywale, and the rest of the crew at their twitter handles and personal blogs in turn.)

When did you know that you wanted to sing? After I finished school at Lahore, I started college, but it just didn’t feel right. I had a strange feeling that there had to be something more exciting to do in life. I had always loved music, because of my parents’ love for music and because of the music culture in Lahore. But there were no musical schools in Pakistan, which was kind of annoying.

Now your parents must be pretty cool, to let you come to America and pursue your music. Was there ever a “No beta, don’t do this” moment? It’s such a stereotypically unstable profession. So they always have a “Oh god, why did we let you do this” attitude. But I think secretly they’re excited because they both have great voices themselves and a love for music. In 2003, I made my dad sit down and listen to a cover I did of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and he became really quiet. That was when he started to take  my music seriously.

How much of a music foundation did you have in Pakistan and how was that supplemented in Berklee? I didn’t really have much of a chance to study music in Pakistan. I would love to set aside three or four years to go back home to Pakistan and get some classical training, but I haven’t been able to do that. I have gone back and apprenticed with local Lahori singers. It’s quite hard, they’re very traditional. It all depends on who exactly is teaching you music. Styles vary from teacher to teacher. Whereas over here, it’s very straightforward and standard. You learn European music theory. You learn jazz arrangements. You learn orchestral arrangements. They give you all the information and tell you, “Do what you want to do with it.” Over there it’s much more fluid.

Were you a musical child? My father would have a musical teacher and instrumentalists come by on the weekends for fun and I would be glued to him. Then they would host these musharas for their friends and I loved them. Musharas go on until four or five in the morning. I would be fully focused and I would listen very carefully. All the other kids would be running around and crying.

They tell me I was also fascinated by the tabla, but my parents discouraged me, saying, “If women play the tabla, then their wrists break.” I had a similar moment in college where I wanted to switch from vocals to a drumset and my parents said,  “Beta, why can’t you play something graceful like the piano!”

Which musicians influence the music you compose and sing you? People like Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. Mehdi Hussin. Beghum Akhtar. Super classical people. And of course Ella Fitzgerald, Erykah Badu, Billie Holiday. Also an amazing composer is Meshell Ndegeocello, who has just funky, deep grooves. Her voice is so rich and moving. Her compositions are really dark, melancholic and slow. She’s amazing.

Tell us about your band and how you chose the instruments? I put out an album in 2006 featuring six songs that I had recorded while I was at Berklee. I put them out on the Internet with the world being the test audience. It was just intelligent pop, featuring an acoustic guitar player, an upright bass player and a percussionist. It  also had a little bit of jazz, rock and some flamenco.

Recently, I’ve been switching instruments around, for instance, we have a Turkish percussion player.  We also utilize an Arab instrument called the kanoon, kind of a sit-down harp thing. Also horn. I hope to arrive at a sound that is world music, but not Starbucks café world music. I’m tired of this exoticized South Asian music. There’s so much music like that. It’s so annoying. It has this exoticized vibe in the way that they treat female vocals. It features the same few chords over and over again. It makes me crazy. Over here, just walking around being a South Asian musician, they will just immediately slap that on you. Before they hear you sing or hear your music, they will assume you’re that same exoticized music. That you’re that sound.

What’s it like playing with an all-male band? There have been some really difficult moments. When the leader of the band is female, it’s really important that she be a very strong instrumentalist. Otherwise, people just think, “The diva has arrived.” It’s surprising to me that even being around really well-informed musicians, vocalists – especially females –  are still belittled. There’s always that initial struggle. “I’m not going to write it for you, I’m not going to play for you.” As musicians, we should all be able to communicate with each other with respect and grace.

I have learned that you can’t just hand out charts and say “Play these notes.” That produces a forced, synthetic sound. You have to invite people that you love and respect to come with you to a space and create sound that is super organic and alive. The people I work with now, I really respect.

Tell me about Rebuild Pakistan? My band and I did a three week live installation with Sonny Singh and many other amazing artists. We holed up in a house in Brooklyn and came together in solidarity for Pakistan to record. The result was magical.

Check out his video for “Guttersnipe,” his sultry voice set along a snapshot of “life along the Indian railways,” after the jump.

When reporter and novelist Sonia Faleiro (The Girl) meets a lively, fast-talking 19-year old dancer named Leela in Mumbai, she finds herself intrigued by the characters of the dance bar world and decides to learn more. Over the course of five years, Faleiro painstakingly interviews Leela and her friends and family, as well as other key characters in the Mumbai dance bar scene and captures their stories. The result? Beautiful Thing, a captivating nonfiction narrative full of rich prose and powerful Hinglish dialogues that exposes readers to an underground world where people are mere commodities. A world where relatives sell young girls to the highest bidder and dancers lose their value well before their mid-20s.

At its center, Leela, a proud, beautiful bar dancer full of infectious joie de vivre whose philosophies and observations belie her horrific upbringing. Faleiro tell us haunting tales of Leela and her compatriots in their own voice — sharp, vivid writing that deftly avoids any preachiness, piety or poverty porn. Faleiro documents Leela and her friends as they navigate the world of exotic dancing, brush up against violent gangsters and educate themselves about the ever-present dangers of HIV/AIDS. But when Leela and the other dancers face a politician determined to rid the city of dance bars, their lives are changed dramatically.

In between her travels in India, a jet-lagged Faleiro kindly agreed to tell SM readers more about Beautiful Thing.

In writing this book, you spent roughly nine months with Leela, two years interviewing scenesters in the Mumbai bar dancing scene and two more years continuing to write and research the book – a total of five years. Were you ever tempted to cease work on Beautiful Thing? If so, what led you to persist? I remember coming home at dawn after the birthday party in the hijra brothel, which you read about early in the book, and thinking I couldn’t do this for five years. It was just too hard. But the fact is that however hard it was for me to observe, those times, that life, was a hundred times worse for the hijras or Leela to experience. I reminded myself of that every time I wanted to quit. Researching Beautiful Thing changed me. Now I’m suspicious of easy stories. I know the untold, the hidden, the stories we need to report on take time to reveal themselves. They demand as much as they promise to give.

What are some of the perils and perks of writing nonfiction narrative? Well I’m in Bihar right now. So you tell me, peril or perk? I write non-fiction because I want to understand India. The people who interest me live on the margins or in sub cultures, and they experience India in a way that’s impossible to imagine—It must be observed. And I like to observe people and things. I like to take my time finding my way around what intrigues me. Non-fiction is an excuse to do that.

What did you learn from writing Beautiful Thing that you will incorporate in your next project, also a nonfiction piece (the topic of which you have not yet disclosed)? I’m not sure I should have stopped at five years. I’d like to spend more time on my next book.

Who are the writers (if any) that inspired you while you wrote Beautiful Thing, both contemporary and classic? When I first started writing about the margins I had no template to refer to.  No one in India did that sort of thing. One of the editors at the publication I worked at told me I was being obsessive and suggested I get down to interviewing Aamir Khan instead. Then I discovered Dayanita Singh’s Myself Mona Ahmed, a memoir/biography in which Dayanita’s photos of Mona, a hijra trying to find her place in the world, are accompanied by text supplied by Mona. That was the first book I ever read that made my ‘obsession’ okay. And every couple of years I return to Adrian Nicole Le Blanc’s Random Family. It’s a book about poverty in America. And it’s reportage at peak form.

Beautiful Thing offers a colorful rendering of the Mumbai bar world. In many scenes, you, the narrator, find yourself chatting with gangsters over chai, hanging with hijras in the redlight district, etc. What was the most threatening situation you found yourself in? There were a few. But it’s never going to be easy doing this job, and dwelling on such matters isn’t helpful. I carry my cell phone and pepper spray.

Since writing the book, I know you have been unable, despite efforts on your part, to keep in contact with Leela herself. What do you think her response would be to the finished product? She won’t be thrilled at the amount of space expended on her mother, Apsara. Or on Shetty, her former boss. On people she didn’t care for, either at the time or in retrospect. But that apart, I think—I hope—she’ll really like it.

What surprised you most about the reactions to Beautiful Thing? That Leela’s experiences came as a surprise to many. You cannot live in India and fail to see how difficult women have it. And I’m not just talking about women who are poor or low caste. But of course a woman like Leela who is, in fact, poor and of low caste is born into a life of difficulties that are to us unimaginable. And these difficulties are inevitably compounded by all manner of abuse. This is life for a majority of women in India and we need to realize that. Leela is not the ‘Other India.’ She, and women like her are representative of India.

Here we are in the last week of Sepia Mutiny. On these pages as a reader, I’ve discovered some of my favorite songs and as a writer, I’ve gotten to interview some of the most amazing people. I’ve loved discovering new Desi music and examining musicians exploration of hyphenated identities through lyric, music and movement.

Since I love lists – what better way to remember this then… a Top Ten Favorite Mutinous Music Moments.

1. M.I.A.- Maya has graced the pages of our site an innumerable amount of times – 100 posts to be exact. From her first “galang”, to her so-called retirement, to a pregger M.I.A. singing at the Grammy Awards with A.R. Rahman. She was the first things that drew me as a reader to the pages of the Mutiny. In the past 8 years peoples opinions of her may have waned, but she definitely has made her mark
2. Das Racist – Despite Abhi’s first post where he made his firesauce prediction that Pizza Hut, Taco Bell was going to be a Desi fave, could we have suspected these guys would have exploded the way they did? They’ve gone from a YouTube sensation to dropping Shut Up, Dude & Sit Down, Man & Relax to selling out shows as an international music sensation. But by far, PhillyGrrl’s interviews Part 1 & Part 2 were my most favorite interviews to grace these pages.
3. Vijay Iyer – He’s gone from Still Life with Commentator in 2006 to the #1 Jazz Album of the year IN 2010 for Historicity. Sugi’s interview with Vijay is one of the sweetest interviews Part 1 & Part 2.
4. The Kominas – Who would have known when I first blogged about these guys in 2006, that my life as a blogger would get so intimately intertwined w/ this band and the taqwacore scene? My first interview with Basim Usmani goes down as one of my favorites. Following the growth if this band personally has been epic to say the least, whether following them on cross country TaqwaTour or as my “camera crew” at Sundance for my Aamir Khan interview. Epic, indeed.
5. DJ Rekha – the infamous and legendary, we’ve talked about Rekha since she smacked Daler Mehndi down. Whether Basement Bhangra (dance party AND CD) or DJing at the White House Easter Egg Hunt. There’s a reason why she’s one of my Desi Women of the Decade.
6. Mandeep Sethi – He came aisee taisee out of nowhere and is a hip hop artist, filmmaker, producer, South Asian musical networker collaborating w/ everyone and is now in India establishing the first Indian B-Boy crew, SlumGods. All before hitting the age of 24, of course.
7. Sikh Knowledge – A queer Canadian Sikh dancehall beat-making MC and producer, my interview with him is one of my proudest SM moments. Baas.
8. Goldspot – These alterna pop boys have been on our pages and a Phillygrrl and Abhi favorite, from 2006 to the 2011 KCRW live performance. A golden find.
9. Red Baraat – A baraat brass band? When I first met Brooklynwallah and heard about his band, I never suspected I’d become as big of a fan of it as I did. The interview w/ Sonny and Sunny made me want to Chaal, Baby.
10. Penn Masala – The longest running Desi A Capella group from UPenn, they have been training generations of swooners and it even landed then in the White House. 

So there you have it – my top favorite musical moments of Sepia Mutiny, though there are many more interviews I conducted that I wish I could have included in this list. But these are just my personal faves – I’m sure you all must have your favorites too! Drop them in the comments. It has been an absolute pleasure finding music for the mutiny.

The New York Times noted its “limber, detailed prose.” The Guardian stated: “Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect, whether describing a Bangladeshi woman’s relationship with her landlady or the political manoeuvring within a jury.” In The Washington Post, Chris Cleave wrote that Waldman “excels at involving the reader in vibrant dialogues. Additionally, The Submission was named Esquire’s Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Novel for the Year, NPR’s Top Ten Novels for 2011 and the list goes on. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “gorgeously written novel” and went so far as to call it the 9/11 novel. High praise, indeed.

In an interview with The Browser, Waldman was asked to define a 9/11 novel.  She responded:

“I guess a 9/11 novel is one that grows out of the attacks in one way or another and uses literature to try to shed some new light. It seems to cover such a wide range of books – from ones that are trying to completely reinvent that day to ones where it’s only a plot device to reroute characters lives. And it includes one where 9/11 isn’t even mentioned – my novel, The Submission.”

According to that same interview 150 works of fiction and nearly 1,000 works of non-fiction have in some way, shape or form been inspired by the events of 9/11. Salon columnist Laura Miller writes that the absence of any great 9/11 literature suggests the banality of death itself. She states: “Life, not death, is the novelist’s subject.” Well, that doesn’t seem to have stopped hundreds of writers, including Waldman. However, The Submission may be a 9/11 novel, but it isn’t the 9/11 novel. It remains simply one of forgettable hundreds trying and failing to meet the strange, insatiable thirst for 9/11 literature.

The Submission tells the tale of half a dozen characters whose lives change after an American-born architect of Indian descent named Mohammed Khan wins a contest to design the  9/11 memorial, provoking widespread outrage and controversy.  (Think the Maya Lin controversy magnified a gazillionfold.) While Claire, a 9/11 widow and wealthy Manhattanite struggles to fight for Khan’s right to remain in the competition, others, like the ambitious New York governor, use the occasion as a vehicle to make political gains. The novel introduces us to a smarmy Muslim American politician, a hapless community of Bangladeshi illegals, a family of angry blue-collar workers who lost a firefighter son in the attack, a radical Islamaphobe and others whose lives have been drastically affected by 9/11.

Waldman, who was assigned to the New York metro desk as a reporter at the Times when the towers fell, likely found herself exposed to many of the factions that arose when the disaster occurred and undoubtedly possess an enormous amount of familiarity with the topic.  As one of the writers who contributed to the Portraits of Grief project, which attempted to chronicle each life lost in the September 11^th attacks, she has seen her share of 9/11 firsthand. One wishes she had been able to take that experience to humanize her characters. In an interview shortly after the book was released, she said:

 “As a novelist, I didn’t want to raid details of people’s lives for material. But also, as a reporter, I felt ambivalent about the “Portraits of Grief”. The wordcount left no room for complexity. The project made me ask, how do you avoid reducing the dead to thumbnail profiles? People are much more complicated than can be represented through daily journalism. They deserve to be portrayed and remembered in all their fullness.”    

Clicking through the Portraits of Grief project, which average 200 words apiece, one can see how tempting it would be to delve into the subject in depth and allow an individual narrative to flow on to the 300+ pages Waldman employs. Unfortunately, allowing a novelist to roam untethered poses its own risks. Waldman makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much where much less would have sufficed.

The novel first appeared as short-story excerpts in The Atlantic, a form much better suited to Waldman’s futile endeavor to encapsulate the entire post-9/11 debacle in a single book. The Submission nobly attempts to stuff the narratives of half a dozen characters into an entire book, but weaves them in a confusing, unsatisfying manner. The biggest failing, by far, are Waldman’s loosely sketched characters, who spew forth earnest, stiff dialogue that serves to stereotype, not humanize. And sadly, Waldman attempts to accomplish a neat, cyclical narrative through the use of convenient plot twists and various ironies. (Along with a heap of wishful thinking and clunky prose.)

Take for example, a passage about the architect Mohammed “Mo” Khan, as seen through the eyes of a skeptical, tabloid reporter. “He had a beard, but it was tastefully trimmed. His suit looked expensive, and his bearing, unlike the grasping, too-eager-to-please Indians in her neighborhood, was haughty. Next to him sat a dark-haired, foreign-looking woman in a cardinal red suit that suggested she was not only comfortable with attention but craved it. Men, some of them in Islamic costumes, and a few women in headscarves, stood stiffly against the wall behind them, looking like a police lineup of terrorism suspects.”

For a book that drives along on the suspense of a single question (Will Khan be allowed to design the 9/11 memorial?), any interest in an outcome dies of boredom 20 pages in.  For example, Waldman’s depiction of Asma Haque, the illegal Bangladeshi immigrant whose husband, a domestic worker, perished in the attacks, represents potential for a powerful narrative about the problems families of undocumented workers faced after 9-11. However, in Waldman’s prose, any elegance a character like Asma may have had falls flat. Seen through a narrower scope, the characters could be compelling. But as a whole, the characters are tiring.

Somewhere out there, people have come up with some fanciful checklist of the quintessential elements a 9/11 novel contains and have decided that The Submission meets this standard (however vague that may be). But the fact remains, a true 9/11 novel would delve deeper into the human complexities that drive the issues surrounding the attack. Ten years after September 11, the nation still reels with the aftereffects of the catastrophe’s reduction of humans into mere keywords. Brown? Terrorist. Muslim? Terrorist. Turban? Terrorist. Sadly, Waldman’s The Submission does much the same thing. It takes the same tired tropes and trots them out for the reader to rally over. Maybe The Great 9/11 Novel exists. Maybe it doesn’t. But either way, the list will not include The Submission.