Monthly Archives: July 2013

‘Transnational Gender Vertigo’ By Kimberly Kay Hoang

Posted on by
Reply

“I first met Tram in 2006 in a tiny bar on Pham Ngu Lao Street in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), in a neighborhood frequented by backpackers from abroad.

Tram and other sex workers in the bar, disguised as bartenders, catered to Western budget travelers seeking brief encounters or longer relationships-for-hire. They were the bar’s key attraction, but the women received no wages from the owner; they were independent entrepreneurs in a niche of the sex trade.

Tram, 27 years old and adorned with bracelet, rings, and a diamond necklace, was a model of success and economic mobility. She lived in a brand-new luxury condo with two servants, a full-time house cleaner and a cook who prepared Western foods for her new American husband. Tram had come from a poor village, she told me, where the only jobs were in the rice fields. In Ho Chi Minh City, she worked first as a maid and then in a clothing factory. But after two years of earning no more than the equivalent of US$70 a month, Tram had saved no money, could barely cover food and rent, and saw no hope for improvement. “Life in the city is so expensive,’’ she said. She saw sex work as her best route out of poverty.

Tram met William, 70, as a client, and quickly began to develop a more intimate relationship with him, hoping that her emotional labor might lead to ongoing economic support—in a remittance relationship, or marriage. Many Western men come to Vietnam seeking wives, or they become attached to women they hired once there, sympathizing with their plight, and wanting to take them out of the sex trade and care for them. Six months after they met, William asked Tram to marry him and move to North America. They were married in 2007.

In 2009, I reconnected with Tram, along with William and their three children at an airport outside of Montreal, Canada. As we drove the three hours to their home, passing lumber farms, acres of undeveloped land, and pastures sprinkled with sheep, I commented on its beauty and tranquility. But Tram expressed no such sentiments. She had never intended to escape small town Vietnam, she said, only to end up in another small town in rural Canada. She had hoped to move to the United States, and had dreamed of living in Los Angeles or New York, “a big city, like the movies.”

Instead, she found herself isolated, in a cold climate and working long hours. Williams’ savings had dwindled, thanks to the expense of immigration, and they had arrived in North America smack in the middle of a global recession. For a year and a half, she worked nights and weekends for her brother in-law’s lumber company. She did see progress: By June of the year I came to visit, she had saved over US$20,000 and, with her sister in-law, opened a small shop selling local produce. But she was now the primary breadwinner, while William, retired but without much of his savings, stayed home with the children. “This is not what I thought my life would be like,” she lamented.”

“In my study, most of the women had expected to end their working days once they reached their destination. Instead, most of them quickly ended up finding jobs, looking for income to supplement their husbands’ and hoping to send some home to family in Vietnam, and 8 of the 12 women quickly became the main breadwinner, often working double shifts, with husbands working less lucrative jobs or at home doing childcare.”

“But it didn’t help many of the couples to seek out other Vietnamese immigrants abroad. Some of the women found jobs in the Vietnamese ethnic enclaves, in nail salons, restaurants, or coffee shops. But when the details of their marriages were revealed, they suffered new isolation. The stigma associated with being a young Vietnamese woman married to a Western man made it difficult to establish trust or social bonds with them.

Hoai told me, “When the [Vietnamese] owners [of a nail salon] found out that I was married to an older white man, they started to trust me less with the money. They look at me like I might steal something from them because I was a bar girl in Vietnam. The female boss always watches me around her husband.” Read full article by clicking link;

http://contexts.org/articles/spring-2013/transnational-gender-vertigo/

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Eye to Eye: Taher Shah, Unlikely Overnight Pop Sensation’ By James Hamblin In The Atlantic

Posted on by
Reply

“If I had to disable you with just one part of my body,” Taher Shah announces apropos of nothing, lowering his shades as ice cubes crackle in his lemonade, “I would use my eyes.”

I look away, dipping my hand into the pool at Shah’s Sindh estate. Rich, fatty sauces drift lazily off of my fingertips, layering in rows across the surface of the artificially cooled water.

He’s not really going to disable me, I think.

Still, I’ve been here too long. I should get out … of this dream world wherein I traveled to Pakistan to profile Taher Shah.

I have actually not yet met this summer’s international pop sensation-in-the-making. I requested an interview but am still waiting. Maybe it’s all part of the mystique.

Taher Shah’s digital tail is short, almost eating itself. The most credible Twitter account in his name (Or is it this one? There are impostors) was just opened at the end of April, and it is little more than an exaltation of the human eye.

The one thing we know for sure about the self-describedsinger/lyricist/writer/model/actor/producer/director/businessman is that he has a super-hot single. Despite YouTube being banned in his home country, his recently released debut “classic epic song and video” has already been viewed half a million times around the world.

If you haven’t seen it, here it is. I don’t think there’s really anything I can say to prepare you.The single is entitled “Eye to Eye” (“Ankhon he Ankhon Mei” in Urdu). Yes, a good amount of it is him looking pretty longingly at another incarnation of himself. He also lays claim to your heart without regard for your perspective on the matter. (“Your heart is mine because I love you.”) But let’s not get on him about syntax; any effort at working multilingually is a noble one.

Link to video; http://vimeo.com/64215903

Link to full article;

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/eye-to-eye-taher-shah-unlikely-overnight-pop-sensation/277471/

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Definining Science-Where To Draw The Line Between Science and Non-Science?’ By Sean Carroll

Posted on by
1

“Defining the concept of “science” is a notoriously tricky business. In particular, there is long-running debate over the demarcation problem, which asks where we should draw the line between science and non-science. I won’t be providing final any final answers to this question here. But I do believe that we can parcel out the difficulties into certain distinct classes, based on a simple scheme for describing how science works. Essentially, science consists of the following three-part process:

  1. Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an “hypothesis.”
  2. Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see “data” (or “evidence”).
  3. Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.

The steps are not necessarily in chronological order; sometimes the data come first, sometimes it’s the hypotheses. This is basically what’s known as the hypothetico-deductive method, although I’m intentionally being more vague because I certainly don’t think this provides a final-answer definition of “science.”

The reason why it’s hard to provide a cut-and-dried definition of “science” is that every one of these three steps is highly problematic in its own way. Number 3 is probably the trickiest; any finite amount of data will generally underdetermine a choice of hypothesis, and we need to rely on imprecise criteria for deciding between theories. (Thomas Kuhnsuggested five values that are invoked in making such choices: accuracy, simplicity, consistency, scope, and fruitfulness. A good list, but far short of an objective algorithm.) But even numbers 1 and 2 would require a great deal more thought before they rose to the level of perfect clarity. It’s not easy to describe how we actually formulate hypotheses, nor how we decide which data to collect. (Problems that are vividly narrated in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, among other places.)

But I think it’s a good basic outline. What you very often find, however, are folks who try to be a bit more specific and programmatic in their definition of science, and end up falling into the trap of our poor lexicographic enthusiasts: they mistake the definition for the thing being defined.

Along these lines, you will sometimes hear claims such as these:

  • “Science assumes naturalism, and therefore cannot speak about the supernatural.”
  • “Scientific theories must make realistically falsifiable predictions.”
  • “Science must be based on experiments that are reproducible.”

In each case, you can kind of see why one might like such a claim to be true — they would make our lives simpler in various ways. But each one of these is straightforwardly false.” Click link to read full article;

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/07/03/what-is-science/

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘The Rise Of Narendra Modi’ By Zahir Janmohammad in Boston Review

Posted on by
Reply

Bharatiya Janata Party has chosen Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujrat as their official candidate for Prime Minister in the upcoming elections. It is interesting book review to read about Narendra Modi, a controversial figure in Indian politics.( F. Sheikh)

Some excerpts;

The physician sat in the corner of his office in Ahmedabad, a map of India’s western state of Gujarat on one side, a map of the human nervous system on the other, his hip leaning against the drawer that I spent weeks trying to convince him to open.

After agreeing to a list of conditions—I could not take any photographs, I could not remove anything from his office—he agreed to show me the drawer’s contents. It was a six-inch stack of letters between two longtime pen pals, the physician and a young man named Narendra Modi, the current chief minister of Gujarat and the official candidate from the Bharatiya Janata Party to contest next year’s elections for India’s prime minister. I took out my digital recorder and began reading each letter aloud. A few days before I boarded my return flight to California, the physician called me to his office.

“Zahir bhai,” he said. It was unusual for him to address me this way—he is in his 60s, twice my age, and “bhai” means brother in Hindi and is used most often with someone older.

“Zahir bhai,” he repeated. “I am very sorry. You cannot use my name in your piece.”

I was not surprised; very few in Gujarat are willing to use their real name when asked about Modi. I told him I would be happy to change his name.

“No, you cannot use my name or my letters or my story. I have three children. Modi will ruin their lives if people know my views on him.”

I pleaded with him to reconsider but he would not budge.

“You do not have children. You do not know what it is like to live in Gujarat. You will return to America eventually. Please, you must understand.”

Unfortunately, I do understand.”

“Narendra Damodardas Modi was born on September 17, 1950 in Vadnagar, then a part of the Bombay state that later split into two, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Modi’s father was a tea vendor, his mother a homemaker, and Modi spent much of his childhood working alongside his father. But it was not a happy childhood, he tells Mukhopadhyay: “I had a lot of pain because I grew up in a village where there was no electricity and in my childhood we used to face a lot of hardships because of this.”

Modi showed a fondness for the Hindu right wing group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a child. The RSS was started in 1925 as a Hindu nationalist movement and reached infamy in 1948 when one of its members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi. It was declared a terrorist group immediately after by the Indian government and banned for two years. But today it remains as strong—and hardline—as ever.

There are an estimated 40,000 RSS camps, or shakhas, across the country where Hindu men and young boys gather each morning to chant slogans and perform a series of exercises, often using a long stick. In the landmark report on the 2002 Gujarat riots, “We Have No Orders to Save You,” Human Rights Watch said it was the RSS that was responsible for passing out lists of Muslim-owned business and homes to mobs at the start of the violence.” Click Link to Read Full article;

http://www.bostonreview.net/world/zahir-janmohamed-narendra-modi-india-gujarat-man-who-refuses-wear-green?utm_source=Newsletter+July+2%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Newsletter+July+2&utm_medium=email