Speaking of desis at Occupy Wall Street, last week I chatted with Arun Gupta, one of the founders of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Gupta, who talked with me on the phone from a road trip to visit different sites of protest, has been working with newspapers off and on for the past two decades, and writes for publications like AlterNet and Al Jazeera. He’s also been with the Indypendent for the past 11 years. He told me about making the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal happen in under 24 hours.

(Time-sensitive note for New Yorkers: If you want to hear more from Gupta, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, is moderating a discussion about OWS tonight at Florence Gould Hall in NYC. 7 p.m. In addition to Gupta, the event features NYer staff writers John Cassidy and Jill Lepore, as well as former NY governor Eliot Spitzer. Online tickets are gone, but a limited number of free tickets will be available at the door.) And a BONUS read via Sonny Singh: Manissa McCleave Maharawal in conversation with Eliot Spitzer about OWS in NYMag, here. I blogged about Manissa earlier in this series.)

Gupta is no longer involved with the publication—he said he needs to refocus on the Indypendent, as well as his road trip to see all the different Occupy protests. But he told me a little bit about the founding of the newspaper, which he called the only polished media outlet in terms of getting out the perspectives of the people in Zuccotti Park.

At first, OWSJ’s founders wanted to pursue publishing the newspaper via the processes afforded by the protest’s General Assembly, or its media working group. However, he said, they quickly realized this wouldn’t work: agreeing on messaging would be too difficult and slow for a publication to react to events quickly. “There’s a value to having this media where you can react in real time,” he said. So instead, they set it up as an affinity group that operated autonomously and by consensus; technically, the OWSJ is not an official publication of OWS.

The first issue, Gupta said, wasn’t too hard to do, because it was put together with the aid of preexisting content and some strong photographers. It was funded via a Kickstarter campaign that aimed for $12,000 in 10 days and instead raked in $75,000. “It was just a wild success,” he said. (Each issue costs $4,000 to $5,000.) An artist contacted them to work on a spread of people holding signs. The resulting publication was a four-page tabloid. (See links to the past three issues of the Occupied Wall Street Journal here.)

At that size, Gupta would prefer to see it come out more frequently, perhaps with two issues a week, but publication has slowed. (Issues came out Oct. 1, Oct. 8, and Oct. 22. I spoke to Gupta after the second issue had come out, but before the third.) “Things can change dramatically within a couple of days down there,” he said. “I think you have to engage with the public in a regular fashion.”

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience. “As print disappears the more important individual publications become, especially if you’re doing real journalism…. The public is hungry for real journalism,” he said. Subscriber-based publications and the Web are both self-selecting, he added, but of course, a free publication reaches a wider audience. The first issue’s first printing was 50,000 copies; a second printing added another 20,000. The second issue was another 50,000; they also printed 20,000 copies of a Spanish-language translation of the first issue.

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience.

Now that he has stepped back from helping with the OWSJ, he is traveling around with the aim of interviewing Occupy protestors. I asked him what he was hearing and seeing in different spots. He noted the wide range of opinions. People he has interviewed at various sites agreement that something wasn’t working, he said, but opinions on solutions varied wildly. “I think this movement has a lot of potential to affect social, cultural, and ideological change, but it’s going to take a logn time for it to do that,” he said. He added that in recent years, some leftists movements have appeared and disappeared quickly; he posited that the left often struggles to get the resources that would sustain such change. Leftist groups “certainly punch above their weight, but still the resources are just so small and everyone is scraping for every penny they can get,” he added. For OWS to be different will take time.

*

When—in light of my previous posts about the people of color working group and some of its members—I asked him about race and the protests, he referenced his recent appearance on Democracy Now, where he faced off against Kai Wright. (As Unions, Students Join Occupy Wall Street, Are We Witnessing Growth of a New Movement? (Democracy Now video, featuring Arun Gupta and Kai Wright, plus transcript).) An excerpt from a piece Wright penned for Colorlines prior to the Democracy Now appearance (and which he annotated later):

There are literally millions of people who have been kicked out of their homes, laid off or forced to work multiple part-time jobs, caught in predatory debt traps and, yes, so harassed by cops that they have petty criminal records that make them unemployable. These millions are neither lobbying Congress nor marching across the Brooklyn Bridge; they’re trying to make it through the week without another crisis. They are also overwhelmingly and not in the least bit coincidentally black people. And I suspect that until we build our politics around their participation, we will continue to miss the point. Everyone will continue to suffer as a result. Well, everyone except the Wall Street fat cats who have gone right on with their theft throughout their occupation. [full piece, Here's to Occupying Wall Street! (If Only That Were Actually Happening)]

Gupta argued that Wright’s take missed the point of the protests, which have no leadership to do the sort of outreach Wright suggests; instead, Gupta said, OWS has created a space. Early on, the protestors counted few New Yorkers and few people of color among their number; now, he said, New Yorkers and people of color are organizing and using the huge platform that OWS affords. “Yes, if you go down there you are going to be dealing with people’s white-skin privilege, but so what?” he asked. “We have to struggle with this and deal with it”—engage in a principled fashion, he added, not sit on the sidelines or dismiss it. When he went to the protests in its earliest days, he said, it did not include many members of the New York left. “The movement was a rejoinder to everyone’s failed politics,” he said. “I include the left in this.”

Related links:

Occupying, and Now Publishing, Too (NYT.com)

India Abroad cover, featuring desis at Occupy Wall Street (including Sonny Singh!) and more Arun Gupta in the associated story

Personal sidenote: I recently signed on to OccupyWriters. Check out the full list of signatories and original works by Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell, Duncan Murrell, Anne Waldman, Danica Novgorodoff and Michael Voll, Maureen Miller, Daphne Carr, Alice Walker, Paula Z. Segal, John McManus, David Hollander, Blair Braverman, Scott Sparling, and Joshua Cohen at Occupy Writers.

When I first talked to Sonny Singh, Thanu Yakupitage, Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Hena Ashraf about two weeks ago, Occupy Wall Street was just gaining steam, and I was newly intrigued by what I’d heard of the quartet’s intervention to eliminate post-racial language from the OWS declaration.

Talking about one of her earliest visits to the protests, Manissa McCleave Maharawal told me, “It felt like a space where people were talking about things.”  But, she added, “it needs to be thinking about the role of people of color.” When the post-racial language came up, she said, “I think there was an urgency to it.

“I didn’t want that line to be published because I knew that it would prevent me from being as fully on board with this movement as I had been, and it would prevent other people like me from getting fully on board,” she said. “I want to be able to bring my people down here.”

And eventually, they did. A recent POC working group meeting saw more than 100 attendees. Maharawal, a longtime activist who is also a CUNY anthropology graduate student, says part of the protest’s appeal for her has been the pull of the space. “It feels like it’s changing all the time,” she added. “It feels organized and disorganized at once.”

And, she added, it also felt open to growth. While the change didn’t go through without debate, by fighting for it, they were able to get it done. For Maharawal, who had never spoken in front of such a large group before, it was intense—especially because these were people she wanted on her side. “I don’t think any one of us would have been able to do that if there hadn’t been five or us there, four of us there—it was so important that we were all together,” she said.

Thanu Yakupitiyage had gone to the General Assembly the evening before the intervention and heard one person talk about the need to be in solidarity with people of color, with queer people. “But I didn’t see that reflected in who was speaking,” she said. The post-racial language caught the attention of the four of them, as well as a few others.

“It was trying to talk about unity but it was completely negating and neglecting the experiences of oppressed people,” she said. “Why in order to be completely united do we need to erase difference? …What bothered me about that paragraph was that I didn’t think that this was a movement that could grow if it was starting from such a naïve place…. If you want to use the slogan ‘another world is possible’ you have to acknowledge the realities of today.”

To get their change passed, the four of them had to declare it as an “ethical objection.” Hundreds of people turned to look at them. “We were so visible,” Yakupitiyage recalled.

UPDATE, FRIDAY MORNING: Brookfield, the private owner of the park, has postponed the cleaning. See a story on The New York Times website. However, my own Facebook feed still has information about confrontations between police and protestors… Waiting for more. Reuters has a blog of Occupy events in different locations: see this. 

Are you at Occupy Wall Street or another protest? Send us your images and tell us what’s in them: v_v@sepiamutiny.com

Story to be continued…

a video about people at the protests one week ago, courtesy of Thanu Yakupitiyage

“We must not miss the chance to put the needs of people of color—upon whose backs this country was built—at the forefront of this struggle.”

—from CALL OUT TO PEOPLE OF COLOR from the #OWS POC Working Group

How Hena Got There

Two Thursdays ago, after Troy Davis had been executed, Hena Ashraf protested his killing at a rally in New York City. The group that she was with didn’t have a particular plan, she says, but “we ended up on Wall Street.”

It was her first time at Occupy Wall Street, a movement that’s rapidly gaining steam and numbers. And a week ago, by her fourth time there, Ashraf had become a game-changer: one of a group of desis who stood up and insisted that the movement’s primary declaration edit language that referred to racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination as though they were things of the past.

“We definitely stood out,” Ashraf told me. At that point, she explained, the protests were still overwhelmingly white. (We spoke on the phone Sunday night; she was two blocks from Wall Street, heading back to the protests.) But, she added, over the course of her visits to the site, she’s seen them become more diverse.

Ashraf, an independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, has been involved in activism before, but says Occupy Wall Street is “not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“The atmosphere is very electric. Anything can happen. There’s so much potential for it,” she says. One of its key strengths, she adds, is that there’s no central leadership, no one trying to dictate what should be said. That meant that when Ashraf, Sonny Singh, Thanu Yakupitiyage and Manissa McCleave Maharawal met up at the protests a week ago, they could jump right in and make a change.

“What happened on Thursday was crazy and intense and amazing,” Ashraf says. “I’m going to keep coming back. We have to keep coming back now, after what happened on Thursday, because what we did had such a huge effect.”

Solidarity and critique aren’t opposites, she notes. “I think solidarity and critique can go together,” she says. “Constructive criticism can also be a good thing.”

Part 1 here: Desis Take Action At Occupy Wall Street

Related links:

• Reflections on Occupy Wall Street from Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, a hip-hop community center in the South Bronx (h/t Thanu)
• Wall Street Protests Spread, Channeling Anger at Corporate, Political Forces | PBS NewsHour (Arun Venugopal on Occupy Wall Street)
• We Are All Human Microphones Now, from The Nation, h/t Naeem Mohaiemen
• Occupy Wall Street POC affinity group, h/t Naeem Mohaiemen
• De-Colonize Wall Street, by Vijay Prashad, in Counterpunch
• Here’s to Occupying Wall Street! (If Only That Were Actually Happening) from Colorlines

Twitter

• Thanu Yakupitiyage on Twitter
• Anjali Mullany, social media editor of the New York Daily News, on Twitter
• Arun Venugopal of WNYC on Twitter

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!

Census 2010 data shows that the Asian Indian population ballooned 69 percent from 2000, to 2,843,391. Thus far, the Census Bureau has released Asian Indian data only for those who reported a single race. When multiracial Indians (those who reported multiple racial identities) are factored in the Asian Indian population will top 3.2 million, according to Little India analysis.

Nearly 12 percent of the Asian Indian population in the 2000 Census was multiracial. Little India projects that the final count for the Asian Indian population, including multiracial Indians, will fall between 3.2 million to 3.3 million. The Indian population may well have touched 3.5 million, but an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Indians returned to India in recent years after the U.S. economy was jolted by the global financial meltdown.

The multiracial issue touches upon a debate that I had with two of this weblog’s co-founders ~2003: the demographic assimilation or involution of the Indian American “community.” I use quotation marks because I think that though there are commonalities and similarities it’s clearly a rather heterogeneous collection of communities, in the plural.Some of this population growth is clearly due to illegal immigration, driven in part by the fact that the Indian American community is large enough that it is viable to just “disappear” once you make it to American soil. Here’s a story about Indians from south of the border, though not Mixtec or Maya people as you might expect: More Illegal Immigrants From India Crossing Border:

Police wearing berets and bulletproof vests broke down the door of a Guatemala City apartment in February hunting for illegal drugs. Instead, they found a different kind of illicit shipment: 27 immigrants from India packed into two locked rooms.

…

Indians have arrived in droves even as the overall number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. has dropped dramatically, in large part because of the sluggish American economy. And with fewer Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, smugglers are eager for more “high-value cargo” like Indians, some of whom are willing to pay more than $20,000 for the journey.

Indians have flooded into Texas in part because U.S. authorities have cracked down on the traditional ways they used to come here, such as entering through airports with student or work visas. The tougher enforcement has made it harder for immigrants to use visas listing non-existent universities or phantom companies.

…

Many of the Indians apprehended are Sikhs, followers of India’s fourth-largest religion, who tell authorities they face persecution back home and want asylum. Applicants need to convince officials that they have a credible fear of persecution in India. If so, the case is referred to an immigration judge.

Such persecution was common in the mid-1980s, when the state battled a Sikh secessionist movement, Kumar said. But today the ruling party in Punjab is Akali Dal, a Sikh party, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also Sikh. “It’s all nonsense,” Kumar said of asylum claims.

These are not the poorest of the poor if some of them are managing to scrounge up $20,000, or were using visa overstays.

I particularly find the subtext irritating because of the writer’s own background:

“You’ve completed a four-year university?” the recruiter asked, pen poised above my résumé.

“Yes,” I said.

“And your stream?”

“Pardon?”

She sighed. “What did you study?”

“Religion,” I said. “Well–liberal arts.”

She made a face, scribbling something.

“What does your father do?” she asked.

“He’s a doctor.”

“And your mother is a housewife?”

“No, a doctor also.”

“A doctor also! Why didn’t you go in for that line?”

“I…I didn’t want to,” I said.

“You didn’t want to?” She could no longer hide her exasperation.

“These things are different in America,” I said feebly.

A little poking around online indicates that he went to NYU and Brown. One might speculate that because his parents were both medical doctors this was relatively feasible for someone of his background. Andrew Marantz is a child of assumed affluence. Would he wish to trade his parents’ professional success and no doubt hectic schedules for a life of idyllic rural genteel poverty, albeit one graced with more leisure?

There are finite choices in this world of ours. India is slouching in a particular inevitable direction. The past will be what it was, for good or ill. So the past has been in the West, for good or ill. We don’t live in the 1950s, nor do we live in a pastoral idyll before the railroads. Family life continues, and we find a way to flourish. Andrew Marantz and his family have, despite being part of the American system of capital, production, and consumption. His Indian friends also will find a way to flourish in a more protean and dynamic economy.

In Mother Jones Marantz comes awful close to implying that authentic Indian culture is some somnolent gentle Gandhian stasis. On the contrary, being Indian, or American, or Chinese, has evolved and transmuted over the ages, and so it will in the future. Affluence does not mean one can not be authentic. Authenticity is not a fixed object, but a way of being and adapting to the circumstances, come what may.

Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley pushes some peoples’ buttons on this weblog. In this way she’s similar to Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. But it seems that the shine has worn off a little on the man with the golden oeuvre. It began with an optically disastrous and widely mocked Republican response to Barack Hussein Obama’s State of the Union speech a few years back. But over the years his wunderkid reputation has moved to the background inevitably as he’s gotten caught up in the same muck which afflicts most politicians who’ve been in the public eye for long enough.

Of course one can’t say that Nikki Haley has avoided muck in her short time in the national spotlight. But she’s new yet, and the media needs a human interest political story, and she certainly presents well.

In the wake of the announcement of her memoir The New York Times gives her the full treatment, South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile and Higher Hopes:

Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.

When she signed a long-fought bill to bring more transparency to legislative voting, the Black Eyed Peas blasted through the Capitol rotunda here.

Joan Jett, a personal hero because of her fight to prove that women can rock, provided inspiration when it seemed impossible that a relatively inexperienced, deeply conservative woman with Indian immigrant roots could win a bid to govern the state where the Civil War began.

But Ms. Haley’s most enduring theme song, as it was when she campaigned on Tea Party politics and a nod from Sarah Palin, might be Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

It hasn’t been a year since she’s been in the governor’s mansion, so it isn’t as if they had that much to work with. Aside from the specific reference to her parents’ immigrant background and her difference from the run of the mill South Carolina Republican as an Indian American woman there isn’t much to the profile which is brown-tinged. One aspect of this is which is rather noticeable is that Haley is very light-skinned, and could probably “pass” (This is not an opening to assert how awesome you’re “brown-dar” is and how clearly brown she is to anyone with eyes. I have read enough instances where some South Carolinians were surprised about her Indian background, assuming she just liked a good tan. This could not have been the case with Jindal). Additionally, with her name change and conversion to Protestant Christianity she has assimilated to her cultural background a great deal. Contrast her with another brown American raised in South Carolina, Aziz Ansari. More saliently brown in appearance and name, instead of assimilating to the Christian majority Ansari is an admitted atheist. These are obviously different paths!

Granted, I don’t want to overemphasize the depth of Haley’s conversion. There is a fair amount of evidence in the public domain which suggests that her shift to an identity as a Methodist was more of a transition than a rupture. The exigencies of politics in the “Bible Belt” are such that it would be professional malpractice to deemphasize Christian bona fides. That she emphasizes her positive beliefs in the Christian religion, as opposed to a strong negative contrast with the “darkness” before she accepted Jesus Christ as her savior, suggests to me that Haley’s personal orientation is more toward that of moderate mainline Protestants than that of evangelicals, let alone fundamentalism. That seems obvious in that she’s a member of the United Methodist Church in Lexington, which is comfortably mainline. I also infer the nature of her beliefs in part from the What We Believe section of her church’s website. Contrast their sparse set of principles with the belief statement with that of the First Baptist Church in Lexington. Those congregations with a fundamentalist or evangelical orientation are more prone to having a precise “laundry list” enumerated in exactly such a fashion. Haley’s church does not.

But if Haley is going to be remembered in the future her religion is going to be a marginal issue. Who today recalls the curiosity that the first Italian and Jewish mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, was an Episcopalian? During his lifetime this was a major topic of discussion, but a mayor of New York with an “ethnic” background no longer merits raised eyebrows. The salient human interest points at any given period of time differ. But policy is what is the measure of a politician. In that domain it is safe to bet that Haley will follow Jindal’s path toward being entrapped by the reality that remaining popular is difficult when you have to enact changes which might anger some. It is simply a statistical fact that most politicians are like shooting stars. Only a rare few last in our imaginations. Already Haley’s approval rating is at parity with her disapproval This is probably in part due to the generally difficult economic times across the nation. And yet like many states in the South the governorship of South Carolina is a weak position. The most tangible benefit is the access to the bully-pulpit, but without cooperation from the legislative branch the executive is not going to be very effective in influencing policy in a positive sense. Haley’s predecessor, and original political patron, Mark Sanford, may have gotten a lot of national press for his conflicts with other politicians in the state over fiscal issues (not to mention his personal life!), but from what I gather he was viewed in the end as an ineffective governor.

Nikki Haley may want to be a fiscal conservative who vetoes spending, but the Republican legislature has been overriding them! This is great as far as national optics go, she can take credit for trying to cut spending, all the while the state will continue to operate as planned. Right now this detail is not relevant for national press profiles, but if Haley is elevated to a higher level this pattern will come under scrutiny. Instead of glowing puff profiles she might be faced with articles which imply that there isn’t any substance to the style.

This is a fine direction by me. A focus on a politician’s biography, their race, religion, and class origins, are natural human reactions. Personal history matters to us. Period. But it is the substantive political planks and policies enacted which will echo down through the generations.

Personal note: My own normative preference is toward a lean and humble government with minimal ambitions. But from what I can gather those politicians who believe they can push through changes through force of personality fail. Mark Sanford and Jesse Ventura are case studies in this. The institutions of America’s government are such that yelling louder or making a firmer stand does nothing over the long run. So my expectation for Haley having a lasting effect on South Carolina politics are dim. I hope to be wrong.

Addendum: I’m prone to deleting long accusatory rants about Nikki Haley in the comments. Just so you know. Diminishing marginal returns on that sort of thing.

Image credit: Dave Shankbone

This came to mind when discussing Indian American income and education. I decided to look at a few statistics from the Census 2000 and arrange them in scatter plot form so you could compare how two variables manifest in a particular demographic group. I included Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and the general American population.

Faheem Zaman has shot the moon on nearly every SAT test he’s ever taken: 5580 points across 5 tests. He wants to decentralize banking in the developing world with a mobile payment system. Because savings are difficult in poor countries–including in some regions of South Asia where many have to hoard and protect cash–Faheem believes mobile financial services will help bring prosperity to these areas. Before he introduces his technology to the developing world, Faheem’s initial plan is to gain a foothold in the U.S. market for mobile financial services.

Sujay Tyle is one of the youngest students at Harvard and is passionate about hacking cellulose to create cheap biofuels. He first worked in a lab when he was 11, interned at Dupont as a teenager, and won the grand prize at the 2009 International Sustainable World Energy Olympiad in Houston. With his older brother, Sheel, he also runs ReSight, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to helping the vision-impaired around the world.

I’ve defended Thiel’s idea elsewhere, but the short of it is that the intent is prod some bright young things to take some time off from school and engage in some entrepreneurialism. The fellows are given $100,000 to drop out of higher education (or not pursue higher education) for two years. I think that our society’s focus on higher education as if it must be the ends for all individuals, instead of a means, is problematic. This is an issue which brushes up against the broader themes which Abhi addressed when it comes to Asian American focus on achievement by orthodox metrics only.

Here’s a post on DealBook, Finding the Next Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel is all over the media, so I’m sure you’ll hear the pros and cons.

Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty on Wednesday of fraud and conspiracy by a federal jury in Manhattan. He is the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street.

A brown man persecuted?I highlighted what I perceive to be the relevant part. Billionaire. If Raj Rajaratnam were being convicted of child abuse for having a son wear a dhoti or lungi I could see a “brown angle” on this. But Raj Rajaratnam is a billionaire who made his money playing the game of global capital. His brief was to create “efficiencies” by “allocating capital” more “rationally.” I won’t elaborate anymore because of my profound skepticism of the aggregate value of this sort of activity on the margin.

Rajaratnam played a high stakes game. He played it as a financial professional, not a brown man. The ‘brown mafia’ angle may have some legs in a narrow sense, but there’s a Harvard mafia too. But at the end of the day iBankers who can keep the H-bomb in their back pocket are a world away from Harvard grads working at non-profits. Similarly, management consultants, bankers, and hedge fund managers who find commonality or comfort in being South Asian are a world away from the Indian Culture Association. Let’s not confuse apples with diamonds.

As I have noted before the media representative who wanted me to address this from a South Asian perspective admitted he was having a hard time getting a brown on the show who wanted to talk about the impact of the case on ‘the community,’ as opposed to those who wanted to get the word out on the finance or management consulting perspective. Apparently financial folk and management consultants were worried about their reputation being further sullied. They need to consult the most recent social science. In the general social survey in 2008 20% of the sample had “hardly any” trust in banks and financial institutions. In 2010 that figure was 41%.The public long ago soured on the “masters of the universe.” We’re at a new equilibrium. They can have their dollars, or they can have their respect. But there’s no way they’re going to have both (want to take bets on what they’ll pick?).

If there is a South Asian angle on this, I would have to say that I did begin to wonder if my family had left one sort of corruption in Bangladesh for another sort in the United States in 2008 and 2009. Corruption destroyed the career advancement of many of my relatives in Bangladesh, and was one of the primary reasons that my father gave for wanting to start anew in the United States. The presumption in Bangladesh, and in much of the world, is that the high attain their positions through low means. The behavior of “the Street”" simply seems to have been a grander instantiation of that phenomenon.

As for Raj Rajaratnam I assume he’ll be taken care of. I don’t get the impression that his actions were qualitatively different from what is common in the construction of a “constellation” of information for the purposes of investment in high finance. So even if I shed tears for him as a brown man I would rest easy. Capital and politics may pretend to throw one to the peasants, but at the end of the day they take care of their own for committing crimes which they all partake in.