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.)

NEW TIME: 2:30pm – 6:30pm

NEW LOCATION: The Liberties Bar, 998 Guerrero Street  San Francisco, CA 94110

++++

What’s that you say? It’s the end of a mutinous era and you never even made it to a Sepia Mutiny Meetup? Rajni the Monkey went wild in the bunker once he heard this news and is now throwing poop at your computer screen. But ask and The Mutiny delivers – at least for the next 15 days till the April 1st door slam. ANNA revived the 55 Friday because of this tweet and hell, thanks to this forlorn tweet from @YungCoconut and @AmericanTurban, I will do the same.

Join Manish, Vinod, Pavani and myself for the Cali swagest meetup of your mutinous lifetime in San Francisco on Saturday March 31st. We know that you Alterna-Desi types have already bought your tickets to the 8th annual Yoni Ki Baat performance. “Yoni Ki heh…?” you ask? Desi, please.

South Asian Sisters are back again to present another brand new script with funny, touching, sensational, and thought-provoking raw performances submitted by South Asian women across the country! [southasiansisters]

For more info and to purchase tickets to the March 31st & April 1st San Francisco Yoni Ki Baat shows, please check out their site here.

As for the LAST CHANCE AT GOING TO A SEPIA MUTINY MEETUP…

• New Time: 2:30pm – 6:30pm
• Date: Saturday, March 31st, 2012
• New Location: The Liberties Bar, 998 Guerrero Street  San Francisco, CA 94110
• Facebook Event Page Right Here

Please comment below if you will be able to make it! Since this is the last meetup – EVER – I highly suggest out-of-towners fly into SF for a Cesar Chavez long weekend of Mutinous fun. If you have a bar/lounge suggestion (that is open at 4:30pm) do let me know and we can change the local, as long as we keep it in The Mission. And if you can’t come to the meetup but want to keep in touch - you can always find us on twitter, too.

It’s not goodbye – it’s just a farewell, for now. I’ll see y’all on the internet flip side and by that I mean IRL.

Now, I don’t begrudge my parents their position toward turkey. It’s a confounding bird for most immigrants, who are generally more comfortable with the bleats of a goat or a lamb, the squawks of the simple-minded chicken. The turkey was an enigma: a heavy, feathered bird with its “gobbledygook” mutterings, freakish red wattle and vast supply of dry, juiceless meat.     “Do the Amreekans realize it is dry?” ask my still perplexed relatives living in Pakistan. “Where is the masala? The taste? The juices? Why do they eat this bird?”  

What did you serve this Thanksgiving? Did you desi-fy your turkey? (Aarti Sequeira has a recipe for tandoori turkey here.) I grew up in a vegetarian household, so no turkey for me, but we did have pumpkin raita and cranberry chutney on the table as a nod to the holiday.

To me, the sound is classically Southern Californian ska punk, with a little bit of tequila thrown in. I’m a sucker for punk covers (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes anyone?) and am really digging this Boys Don’t Cry cover. According to their facebook, they are working on their latest demo and have an international tour planned for early 2012. Follow Los Kung Fu Monkeys here on Facebook and on Twitter.

Also, I do realize there are South Asian diaspora migration stories of every kind, and I’m really curious as to how the Pakistani brothers ended up in Tijuana, Mexico. Is there a big South Asian population in Mexico? Anyone know?

I no longer live in New York, and I was following the Occupy Wall Street movement only vaguely when last week, something on FB caught my attention… and kept it. It was a lengthy note by Hena Ashraf, chronicling how she and a few other desis had gone down to Liberty Square on Thursday night and argued to change some of the language in Occupy Wall Street’s primary declaration.

I recognized some of the names in her story from my own time in New York: Sonny Singh (of, among other things, Red Baraat) and Thanu Yakupitiyage, an immigrant rights activist who is also a Lanka Solidarity member. And another, whom I didn’t know: Manissa McCleave Maharawal. These four, it seemed, had formed the posse primarily responsible for the intervention that had me riveted.

Here’s how it looks in the Occupy Wall Street notes:

Block 4—Grievance in supporting a document that claims that my oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religion, and things not mentioned on this document are something that happened formerly and not in the present day.

Response: This can be addressed.  The document says that these divisions have formerly happened.  We know they happen now, that’s why we’re writing it this way.  This document is saying “we want to leave this shit in the past where it belongs to create a new America, world, new society, where everyone is equal.”  We do not mean to ignore present-day issues.  It was drafted so we can leave that behind.

Block 5—That phrase erases so much history of oppression, it is idealistic, not realistic.  We still think it should be changed, and we think it’s an ethical issue.

Response: Rephrase, “formerly divided” so we can have what you would like to see written.  Then the working group can decide whether we want to move to consensus without it.

Let’s all relax!

We appreciate the process, we appreciate everything you’ve done, we want a small verb change, we feel it is an ethical matter.

“As one people, despite divisions of color of our skin…”

Response: We’re fine with that.  Let’s meet after and decide which phrasing to use.

Block withdrawn.

And here’s a snippet of what it felt like, from Manissa’s point of view:

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to. 

And from Hena’s:

Long story short, we got the paragraph changed to adequately address our concerns that it reflect issues around dynamics of power and privilege that marginalized people feel every single day. This was a very hard discussion to have, and it felt so real, it hurt. It hurt that it had to happen, it hurt that we had to explain what is really behind racism to this man, and the people around him, it hurt that so many tried to disrupt us. But at the same time, we were meant to be there, meant to be heard, to make this happen, to make these changes occur. And there were a lot of people sitting there and listening in and contributing constructively. We walked away realizing what we had just done – spontaneously come together, demand change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with, but also feel a need for constructive criticism.

How many activities and movements or even conversations have I forgone, thinking that they had no space for me? How many times have I thought that some purportedly progressive activity wasn’t even considering anyone like me? How many times have I walked away, rather than saying anything, because I was bone-tired?

Thanu-Sonny-Manissa-Hena-anyone else who was there: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU—

I can’t embed this one, but if you go to about the 53:30 mark, you can actually see the post-General Assembly discussion (thanks, Manissa, for pointing this out).

All four of them chatted with me, so stay tuned for an update, or Part II!

The video was created as a DVD insert to the Asian American Literature Review Tenth Anniversary of September 11th issue.

So many of our communities have borne witness to so much over the past 10 years; it behooves us to critically consider the moment and its aftermath—the various political, legal, and civil rights repercussions, particularly for the communities most directly affected, South Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim American. But how can we do so, when so many of the voices of affected communities remain unheard? [AALR]

You can order your copy of the AALR special issue online here now.