CEREBYTES

Wtah teh fcuk?

2006-09-10T15:14:00.000+01:00

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I wasrdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, itdseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrodare, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit apboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raedervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

What's new in The World?

2006-08-31T13:35:00.000+01:00

It seems like such a long time since I last blogged. Sure I take a look around the blogosphere every once in a while to see what fellow bloggers have been up to but just haven't felt the urge to purge. If you know what I mean.

There are some really great blogs out there and some really crap ones too and all the rest in the middle. But is anyone listening? Does it matter? If I blog for Me then my blog is no more than a personal diary of my thoughts. But then if it's purely for me why launch it into cyberspace for others to see. I mean, you wouldn't publish copies of your most innermost thoughts and reflections from your personal diary and hand them out to friends and foe alike, would you?

So I think maybe it's more than just for Me. I blog for Me and for others and that's fine, so long as I'm not in denial.

Is this attitude progressive?

2006-07-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

Carl Von Clausewitz

2006-07-21T11:48:00.000+01:00

War is the contiunation of politics, by other means.

Word War III

2006-07-11T02:26:00.000+01:00

So M*!!!***^%&*i called Zidane the son of a terrorist whore, allegedly! That's what triggered the "Magician" to use his head in the war of words. Perhaps, he showed the world a different side to football, fame and glory: there are more important things to life than winning a trophy, even if it is the World Cup. Things like self-respect and integrity.

Momentary Madness?

2006-07-10T02:22:00.000+01:00

What a tragic way for Zidane to end his legendary career. I really wanted to see him score the winning goal and raise the World Cup once more, for the Grande Finale of his illustrious career as one of the greatest midfielders of my generation. But fate had another score for him to settle. It was very upsetting to see him using his head instead of his magical feet. What I can't figure out is what was said to bring out the demon in him? Perhaps the spirit of Hitler spoke from the infamous Olympic Stadium once more - bringing out the worst from the best of people. Spooky.

Zero

2006-07-07T23:21:00.000+01:00

Answers

2006-07-01T02:12:00.000+01:00

The desperate search for answers and solutions in the gutter and in the stars but the gutter's foul-mouthed and the stars remain silent.

Question

2006-06-27T12:26:00.000+01:00

Are we human beings the only Life that is conscious? Are the birds and the trees, the oceans and the skies, the stars and the planets all dead? Are we really the living foetus within the womb of a dead universe? If the mother is dead how can the foetus be alive?

Pearls

2006-06-06T23:08:00.000+01:00

Great pearls of wisdom are often mistaken for common grains of sand.

Home Loan

2006-05-22T20:15:00.000+01:00

If you are a homeowner in need of a home equity loan but you have not yet built up any equity in your home, don't despair. A 125 percent equity home loan may be the answer.A 125 percent equity home loan is a second mortgage loan that allows you to borrow up to 25% more than the value of your home. For example, if your home is worth $100,000 and you owe $100,000 on the mortgage, this loan program would allow you to still borrow up to $25,000.The 125 percent equity home loan is offered by various online lenders. Each lender has their own qualification and loan term guidelines but generally this is a credit score driven loan program. Credit score driven means that you have to have a certain credit score to qualify for the loan.In addition, your credit score usually determines the maximum loan amount you may qualify for and the maximum cash in hand you may receive. Also, some 125 percent equity home loan lenders may require seasoning on the length of time you have lived in your home. Three months is normally the minimum.When it comes to a property appraisal, most 125 percent home equity loan lenders do not require you to obtain one. They generally will use the purchase price of your home as the value if you have lived in your residence for 12 months or less. If you have lived in your home over 12 months, a recent tax assessment, simple drive-by appraisal, or automated value model (avm) can be used. An avm is a computer generated assessment of your home's value which is based on recent home sales of comparable houses in your neighborhood.For more information on 125% home equity loans, or to compare rates and programs of 125% home equity loan lenders visit www.equityloansource.com

House Market Data

2006-05-19T15:05:00.000+01:00

The outlook for the housing market has brightened and steady house price inflation should support spending as consumers borrow against the value of their homes, according to a Reuters poll of 21 housing experts.
Median forecasts in this week's survey showed house prices -- based on the main house price indices -- would be six percent higher in the fourth quarter this year from the same period a year ago, up from 3.5 percent forecast in February's poll.

Housing market activity has picked up since the start of the year as confidence has grown that last year's downturn, when house price inflation fall to low single digits from a peak of more than 25 percent growth in 2003, is over.
The Halifax, Britain's largest mortgage lender, said its 3-month annual rate of house price inflation picked up to 8.0 percent in April, its highest in 13 months, while Bank of England data showed mortgage approvals jumped by the biggest amount since November 2003 in March.

"There is plenty more upside given the latest mortgage approvals figures but it may not necessarily get to 20 percent year-on-year," said Alan Clarke at BNP Paribas in London. The rebound in house prices also bodes well for consumer spending in Britain where two thirds of households own their homes. Retail sales, hit by a decline in consumers' appetite for debt in the last year as house price inflation eased, rose by more than expected in April.

Mortgage equity withdrawal -- where homeowners refinance home loans to extract cash -- also rose to the highest level in more than a year in the last three months of 2005 and many economists -- 10 of 18 -- expect to see further rises."It will help consumer spending as people have this resource they can tap into to augment their take-home pay," said Clarke, adding that this was one factor which may prompt the Bank of England to eventually raise interest rates from 4.5 percent.

House prices are set to rise by 3% during the year, barely enough to keep pace with inflation, the Halifax said.
A crash would be avoided due to high levels of employment, wages rises and interest rate cuts, the group added.
But at the same time,- well known market sceptics - Capital Economics warned that house prices could fall 5% in 2006. House prices rose by 2.0% in April and by 4.4% in the first four months of 2006, the bank has said. April's price rise was considerably up on March's figure of 0.9%. Halifax expects prices to rise further over the summer but then level off later in the year due to a "softening" of the labour market.

The Bank of England revealed that mortgage lending jumped by the biggest amount in two and a half years during March. Mortgage lending rose by £9.3bn compared with a forecast of £8.6bn. Loans agreed for house purchase rose to 116,000 in March from 114,000 in February. The strong showing by the UK housing market took many economists by surprise, particularly as the most recent data from the Nationwide had indicated that house price inflation was slowing.

Congratulations Tricia!

2006-05-13T15:24:00.000+01:00

Congrats to my very old friend Tricia for graduating! All the best success and fulfillment! And to all those who will be celebrating with her-- have a night that puts bacchanal to shame!!!!!

Bob Marley

2006-05-11T16:02:00.000+01:00

Until the philosophy
Which holds one race superior
And another

Inferior

Is finally

And permanently

Discredited

And abandoned -

Everywhere is war -

Me say war.

That until there no longer

First class and second class citizens of any nation

Until the colour of a man’s skin

Is of no more significance

than the colour of his eyes-

Me say war.

That until the basic human rights

Are equally guaranteed to all,

Without regard to race-

Dis a war.

That until that day

The dream of lasting peace,

World citizenship

Rule of international morality

Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,

But never attained-

Now everywhere is war -

war.

Today marks the 25th anniversay of the death of the greatest black musician since Orpheus- Robert Nesta Marley. The man, the myth, the legend and his music transcended all boundaries, making him an Icon and giving reggae universal and long-lasting appeal.

Bob Marley was a hero figure, in the classic mythological sense. His departure from this planet came at a point when his vision of One World, One Love - inspired by his belief in Rastafari - was beginning to be heard and felt. The last Bob Marley and the Wailers tour in 1980 attracted the largest audiences at that time for any musical act in Europe.

Bob's story is that of an archetype, which is why it continues to have such a powerful and ever-growing resonance: it embodies political repression, metaphysical and artistic insights, gangland warfare and various periods of mystical wilderness. And his audience continues to widen: to westerners Bob's apocalyptic truths prove inspirational and life-changing; in the developing world his impact goes much further. Not just among Jamaicans, but also the Hopi Indians of New Mexico and the Maoris of New Zealand, in Indonesia and India, and especially in those parts of West Africa from wihch slaves were plucked and taken to the New World, Bob is seen as a redeemer figure returning to lead this planet out of confusion.

In the clear Jamaican sunlight you can pick out the component parts of which the myth of Bob Marley is comprised: the sadness, the love, the understanding, the Godgiven talent. Those are facts. And although it is sometimes said that there are no facts in Jamaica, there is one more thing of which we can be certain: Bob Marley never wrote a bad song. He left behind the most remarkable body of recorded work. "The reservoir of music he has left behind is like an encyclopedia," says Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes. "When you need to refer to a certain situation or crisis, there will always be a Bob Marley song that will relate to it. Bob was a musical prophet."

The country of Jamaica has produced an artist who has transcended all categories, classes, and creeds through a combination of innate modesty and profound wisdom. Bob Marley, the Natural Mystic, may yet prove to be the most significant musical artist of the twentieth century.

Today I dusted off my CD's and chilled to the mellifluous sounds of my hero; HERE'S TO YOU BOB!

We’re jammin’:

I wanna jam it wid you.

We’re jammin’, jammin’,

And I hope you like jammin’, too.

Ain’t no rules, ain’t no vow,

we can do it anyhow:

I’n’i will see you through,

’cos everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice,

Jammin’ till the jam is through.

We’re jammin’ -

To think that jammin’ was a thing of the past;

We’re jammin’,

And I hope this jam is gonna last.

No bullet can stop us now, we neither beg nor we won’t bow;

Neither can be bought nor sold.

We all defend the right;

jah - jah children must unite:

Your life is worth much more than gold.

We’re jammin’ (jammin’, jammin’, jammin’)

Stop Making Sense

2006-05-08T15:19:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I feel like a Nomad. There is no place I can truly call home. I did have a home once, in Leeds where I was born and grew up with my mother and father. Those were happy times. I was an only child but I played with neighbourhood friends and i-friends, just like mathematicians play with imaginary numbers. I felt secure, my house belonged to me, there was a balance between the authoritarianism of my father and the severity of my mother. I remember one Sunday morning playing with a ball-point pen while lying in bed just curiously trying to figure out how it worked. I was about 5 years old at the time. Suddenly, something went radically wrong and I accidently made a long mark in ink along my mother's prized faux-sheepskin sheets. So, never one to panic, I calmly licked my fingers and tried to rub the mark out. Ha! That's when I discovered the Eighth-Wonder of the world: the permanence of ink! This ink mark just wouldn't budge, infact it smudged until it turned into a blue-hazy smear. The more I rubbed it with wet finger tips, the more it spread out with different densities of blue creating an atmospheric "sky" effect. I didnt know it then but ten years later I would find out that what I was doing at 5 was known as the sfumato technique, the one Leonardo Da Vinci perfected on the Mona Lisa. lol. That's not what my irascible mother thought. Never mind sfumato, she went fuming mad! I had been playing with an INK PEN in bed on HER SHEEPSKIN SHEETS????!!!! She beat me with a slipper, a shoe and worst of all- a hard rock-like mineral that felt like murder (It's made of calcium and comes covered in a thin layer of elastic so it hurts and stings at the same time) - yes, a HAND. At the time I was so sorry I had ever been born with the curse of curiosity. If only I had never woke up that morning I thought, I wouldn't have had to be murdered with a star-fish shaped rock. But then my father came running up the stairs to see why his son was screaming like he was being stoned to death and why my mother was shouting like she'd just found out her son had died in a car accident: NOOOOOOOOOO! When he found out that it was over a little bit of ink on a meaningless bedsheet, he just calmly said: "It's alright, we'll buy another one." And that was the end of it, my life was spared. Not that we ever did buy another one, there was no need, afterall the ink mark came out with a few washes and my previously unknown talent at sfumato was never used again. For fear of my own safety. lol.

A Life of Crime

2006-05-03T15:06:00.000+01:00

Two police officers were attempting to apprehend a suspect wanted for questioning in connection to a burglary when one of them stopped, out of breath. After a few more minutes of chasing the burglar, the other officer too ran out of gas and stopped running. The burglar, relieved to see them gasping and panting in the distance now, kept running knowing he was practically home and dry. Hoping no more cops would pick up where the others left off, the career criminal swore to himself that, if he made it this time he would leave burglary for good and get an easier "job". As the second officer staggered back to where his partner was, both of them still huffing and puffing, he said between gulping lung-fulls of air: "Aw man......that creepy crawly......was fast......! What happened to you?...You gave up running...before you've even chased the guy! You ill or something?" To which the first officer, having just come off the radio to report the suspect's failure to be apprehended, said: "I caan't do this anymore Joe, I mean, what's the point huh? We chase 'em, they escape, we chase 'em another day, they go down and before you know it, they're back out here again and we gotta chase 'em all over again! Nah man, I had it up to here! I want out Joe, I wanna do something better than this!" Joe had caught his breath back now and was shaking his head and said: " Al, make your mind up for Christ's sake! 5 years ago when WE were being chased by the cops YOU were the one who said you wanted to get outta crime! Well hey: WE HAVE...sorta. So stop busting my balls will ya!

What's in a Word?

2006-05-02T14:36:00.000+01:00

The latest proclamation to come out Iran is that it will target Israel first if the United States does anything "evil", a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said on today.

"We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel," Revolutionary Guards Rear Admiral Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani was quoted as saying by Iran's student news agency ISNA.

Experts said recent wargames, in which Iran said it had tested new missiles and torpedoes, were a thinly veiled threat that it could disrupt vital Gulf oil shipping lanes if it was attacked.

This word "evil" seems to be causing a lot of problems in the world, so much so, that perhaps we should blast the word itself from all languages. The first time I came across this evil word was at church as a child. Everything that was not of God was evil I quickly realised. Then, for the first time I heard a teacher call a mischievous individual the "E-word." The whole class was shocked. This was unprecedented. Now this boy would forever bear the mark of E. We even wondered amongst ourselves if his being the "E-word" meant he was a child of the devil. Afterall, people could be "naughty", "bad", a "nuisance", "insolent", "terrible" but never would they be called e-v-i-l unless they really deserved the scar of the most awful of words. Fastforward twenty years to the present and it seems every nation calls a friend it just fell-out with - evil. Up to twenty-seven years ago, Iran and the US were best friends; Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi being returned to power in Iran with US help after he had fled the country in 1953.This was achieved by overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, done through the aid of a joint CIA and MI6 covert operation, Operation Ajax.

Now Iran calls the US the E-word, the US calls any of its friends who've developed a mind of their own - the E-word or worse: being on the axis of the E-word! How do you get to be on the "axis" of a word? It's not geometry! Funnily enough, not too long ago the E-word was known by another word, the C-word. No, not that one, the other one. But I feel sympathy for this poor little word that has been used and abused so unceremoniously to mean v-i-l-e. Evil is so much more than that, on a good day when you see him from behind he can mean l-i-v-e! At night sometimes he can be enignmatic wearing a v-e-i-l of mysteriousness. But most of all, just like Communism which in its heyday was equally infamous causing much anxiety and fear, evil will always be just a word; words don't destroy - people do.

Law Lords

2006-04-28T14:26:00.000+01:00

Three Law Lords were heard having an interlocution in Chambers. The first, Lord Swift, remarked to his two noble and learned friends: "Change is good", his eyebrows raised. Lord Stay, however, with a look of consternation retorted: "No-change is better!" The third, Lord Sharp, sighed deeply and after carefully and deliberately adjusting his impossibly thin spectacles on the tip of his nose, turned to Lord Swift and responded: "I take it then you will not be too displeased to hear me confess that I have slept with your most fragrant wife on many an occasion and most enjoyable she has proved to be too." Lord Sharp then turned to Lord Stay and with grave face intimated: "In light of what you have just said I shall be forced to refuse your request hitherto for the blue torpedo as I think it best that I did not deal to you a cut from my supply of Viagra afterall; for I fear that you will pose an even greater threat to soceity than you evidently already do, as a bombastic prig and a pompous prick. To provide you with the means to pain us further as a perambulating priapism would indeed be a great miscarriage of justice! If you are in such comfort with the order of things, you should accept your dysfunction satisfactorily, not attempt to remedy it. " The Court Usher, who unintentionally overheard the Lordships' conversation added, with a knowing smile on her face, that: "When you've seen your Lordship crawling on all fours, wearing nappies with a dummy in his mouth moaning to be spanked for being a naughty baby - you come to realise that anybody who chooses to work at a bar which makes you dress in fancy costume - wearing curly, horsehair wigs, skirts and ribbons and flowing, red and black dresses....has to be secretly o-u-t-r-a-g-e-o-u-s! But for the record, let's just say they have to be a little peculiar, to say the least." Oh well, at least it's reassuring to know they're human after all, or is it...?

Gautam Malkani

2006-04-23T06:02:00.000+01:00

I read an interesting article in the Financial Times entitled: What’s right with Asian boys. Gautam Malkani is an FT journalist and by the sounds of it is content to let Malibu the sweet, coconut flavored caribbean white rum, with a taste reminiscent of coconut, almonds and mocha - take its natural course on those seriously easy going desi Bombay Bronx nights and why not? A blend of cultural influences is just like Malibu: distilled in Barbados, bottled in Scotland, exported throughout the world and appreciated by many, not for its origins but purely for its taste.

He writes:

"Not too long ago, British Asians used to joke that any graduates among us who weren’t working in law, finance or medicine must have bad parents. These days - every third Tuesday of the month to be precise - members of a more creative Asian scene descend on a basement bar in London called the Notting Hill Arts Club. In among the throng of stylish, spiky-haired students you can find bhangra and hip-hop artists, disc jockeys, MCs and even a former Tory parliamentary candidate. I have bumped into brown-skinned broadcasters, publishers, playwrights, actors, stand-up comics, photographers, fellow journalists, PR people, internet entrepreneurs and, of course, people who “work in fashion”.

But the monthly club night, called Bombay Bronx, is not a networking event for arty Asians in Britain’s creative industries. The music is too loud, you see. And it is the music that everyone has come for. The records are spun by BBC Radio One disc jockey Nihal Arthanyake and the fusion of bhangra, RnB, Bollywood, UK garage and US hip-hop is a genre of its own, widely known as “desi beats”.

As well as Bombay Bronx, there are dozens of regular desi events held at nightclubs across the country. The desi beats scene has all the characteristics of other youth subcultures, but one feature is particularly important: for many young British Asians, it offers us something to wear on top of our ethnicity - giving us an alternative collective identity.

The word “desi” literally means countrymen and refers specifically to the diaspora. It is broader than terms such as Indian, Pakistani, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, and yet narrower than the term Asian or even South Asian. It acts as a self-determined alternative to the word “paki” and the enthusiasm with which it has been embraced suggests a conscious decision against appropriating the offensive word paki and trying to turn it into a positive the way black kids have done with the word “nigger”.

Last year, “desi” appeared as a noun in the Oxford Dictionary of English, having been first introduced as an adjective in 2003. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have employed it for programming - such as the BBC’s Desi DNA show - and even an entire channel in the case of MTV Desi.
All this semantics is important because, as a result of the word’s development, desi is now closer to the term “latino” than “Hispanic”. And because it has come to refer to a loose subculture rather than a rigid ethnicity, desi beats is not exclusively Asian. Tune in to any of the above broadcasts or walk into Bombay Bronx and you will not be greeted by a sea of brown faces. When people talk about the failure of the cultural melting pot, it might be because they cannot appreciate the popular culture melting pot.

Traditional cultural forms usually associated with multiculturalism (such as folk dancing or religious headgear, for example) are by nature not particularly pliable. If you focus on them as characteristics of a multicultural society then, yes, Britain all too often seems segregated according to whether people are wearing turbans, headscarves, skullcaps, dreadlocks or adopting the shaven-headed look of a Millwall football fan. But unlike these more rigid cultural forms, the more demotic desi subculture gives kids a more porous identity. It is derivative in a positive sense that fosters social cohesion and inclusiveness - everything and everyone seems to blend together like the records being mixed up at Bombay Bronx.

This view of Britain might require some oversimplification, but it is surely a view worth entertaining given that it is conducive to both multiculturalism and social cohesion - instead of setting up a trade-off between the two. And while popular culture may not seem particularly politically empowering, it gives me and other British Asians a sense of real, constructive participation in whatever it is that constitutes Britishness.
It all looked so different nearly a decade ago, when I undertook a study of Asian youth as part of my university degree. Back then, my research had a much more pessimistic premise and conclusion. What I did not appreciate at the time, however, was that the seemingly bleak state of affairs was arguably a necessary stage in the evolution of the subculture I am championing today.

At university, I had wanted to know why brown-skinned kids back home in the west London borough of Hounslow were suddenly choosing not to integrate with white-skinned kids. Why they were discarding the British Asian youth stereotype of disciplined, academically and grammatically conscientious citizens and instead asserting their ethnicity with an aggression usually associated with black-skinned kids. This was ironic given the prejudices Asian families have typically had against black communities and so, finally, I wanted to know why Asian kids were becoming alien to their own parents and adopting cultural identities that had as much to do with US hip-hop as they
did with Bollywood.

When I asked Cambridge University’s social and political sciences faculty if they’d let me hang out with my mates back in Hounslow and then submit the results as my undergraduate dissertation, I didn’t think they’d say yes. After all, I was clearly more at ease in Hounslow than I was at Cambridge and so my proposed dissertation may merely have looked like an academic solution to homesickness. Fortunately Dr Susan Benson, an anthropologist and social scientist who sadly passed away last summer, agreed to supervise my research.
Not only that, but she did so with a suggestion that developed into a core theme of the study and its evolution into my novel, Londonstani: that I submit the dissertation under the faculty’s gender relations paper rather than the race relations paper. And, as a result, my work became an exploration of how the assertion of ethnic identities is sometimes better viewed as a proxy for the reassertion of masculinity.
Of course, this standpoint was not about downplaying the relevance of what many of my friends saw as a perennial fight against racism and discrimination - it was simply about deciding that those things should not be the focus of my work.

When I approached Dr Benson, I told her I wanted to study the beef between this relatively new breed of hardcore Asian “rudeboys” and “coconuts” - a term of abuse for Asians who, despite their brown skin, are deemed to be “white” on the inside because of their assimilation into mainstream British society.
Dr Benson refined my proposal to make it more academically acceptable, replacing “my mates” with “ethnographic informants” and the word “beef” with “boundary” - in the vein of those sociologists who argued that ethnicity is best understood as the boundaries between people rather than the “cultural stuff” within them. She also saved me from myself by adding the subtitle “Assertive ethnicity, masculinity and identity” to the title I had given the dissertation (which was “Chocolate flavoured coconut milk”).
At first I was apprehensive about Dr Benson’s emphasis on gender identities, but the wisdom behind it became gradually clear when I was back in Hounslow over Christmas for the first stage of fieldwork - a combination of loosely structured, taped interviews and participant observation. For example, it was uncanny how for many Asian kids, the term “coconut” was synonymous with a stockpile of slang for effeminate or homosexual - such as sap, ponce or batty.

Nevertheless, it seemed premature to conclude that “whiteness” was being simply dismissed as effeminate because, at that time, mainstream British youth culture centred on Britpop, personified by the likes of Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Suede’s Brett Anderson. Surely the androgynous look of these skinny swaggerers was just a passing phase, convenient at the time for some Asian kids to mock but not fundamental to what was going on in the playgrounds and on the high streets?

I remember starting to be swayed one Friday night when, after spending the evening with a group of kids in a local snooker club, we all drove down to a plane-spotting site near Terminal 4 so that some of the boys could sober up before going home. No sooner had they started up with their routine homophobic and misogynist banter than one of the boys pulled me aside and became watery-eyed as he talked about the way a girl he claimed not to fancy probably didn’t think he was manly enough because he wasn’t Indian enough. The boy in question was drunk, but what he was saying was pretty sobering.

Dr Benson had told me people might confide in me this way precisely because I was a stranger - that was why it was better to cultivate “ethnographic informants” instead of hanging around with my mates. Sure, it might make me feel like an idiot when I approached potential informants, but in the long term it would be a more efficient way of gathering insights into a community I’d presumed I already knew so well. Dr Benson was vindicated again.
The conflation of questions of masculinity and race had been well documented in studies of Afro-Caribbean communities, and each time I went back to Hounslow to conduct another stage of fieldwork yet more anecdotal evidence would convince me how useful it could be to look at ethnic identities as tools or props for the bolstering of boys’ gender identities. Sometimes those were religious, such as Sikh boys’ tendency to display holy symbols on their BMW windscreens. Sometimes, the props had racial undertones, such as the loud bhangra music being blasted from those cars. And then, of course, there were those props that illustrated how ethnicity can often refer to national identities as well as religious or racial ones - such as wearing Indian cricket shirts.

All this cultural stuff was being used by brown-skinned boys as a way of helping them stand taller, speak up louder and strut their stuff with greater gusto. Add a bit of the hip-hop paraphernalia that had for long fulfilled similar functions for black kids, and you had a new model of British Asianness that was much less vulnerable to emasculation by any racism in the dominant culture.

Back then, there was only a handful of texts about the crisis of masculinity, compared with the bookcases-worth we have today. But one theory that repeatedly jumped off the pages to become central to my thinking was the idea that if a boy’s maternal role model is stronger than his paternal one, he is likely to overshoot with his own definition of what it is to be a man and develop a form of “hypermasculinity”. It sounds complicated, but basically it means that if boys don’t have adequate emotional ties with their fathers, then they will have to develop their definitions of masculinity in opposition to their mothers rather than in relation to their dads. Thus they strive to be more manly than their mothers rather than simply being as manly as their fathers. If their mothers also happen to be domineering, more demanding of respect and generally more macho, then the resulting machismo of their sons might be all the more so.

The model could easily apply to people of all races and ethnicities - from tough guys in London’s East End to disaffected youth in New York’s Bronx. But clearly I could not ignore how neatly this theory fitted the lives of the people I was studying in Hounslow. Of course, applying it involved a degree of generalisation, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason. Indian boys are renowned for being mummy’s boys; Indian dads are renowned for being emotionally detached patriarchal figures; while Indian mums are renowned for being domineering, emotionally involved patriarchal figures. Although prescriptive hypotheses like this have a tendency to prove self-fulfilling, the usefulness of this theory seemed to be confirmed during interview after interview.
If Asian “rudeboys” were thereby overshooting their masculinity and looking for cultural props with which to do so, no wonder they’d also reached out to gangsta rap music, successfully blending the elements of machismo, misogyny and homophobia in their parent’s culture with that inherent in hip-hop.
This was also apparent in their language. As well as absorbing the steady supply of new hip-hop slang for effeminacy and creating a sorry situation where you simply couldn’t swear enough, our mother tongues became a source of strength. Not only could rude boys utter abuse at other kids, they could do so in a way that only they understood. This was particularly the case with Panjabi - spelt the local way rather than the British “Punjabi”. Indeed, while they were busy pulping the English language, their Panjabi generally adhered to strict grammatical rules and respect for the nuances created by silent letters.

Of course, language is also important in its own right, with rhythmic verbal abuse often acting as surrogate fists. Indeed, it is often as if boys’ tongues take on some kind of phallic symbolism - except of course there is no magic Viagra for those who cannot cuss properly.
Another such symbol is the mobile phone. Asians have typically been early adopters of new technology but even 10 years ago top-of-the-range Nokia handsets were being brandished by schoolboys in ways that they couldn’t always do with the latest sports car, widescreen television or video game console. But the study highlighted how mobile phones represent more than just fashion accessories doubling up as high-tech penis extensions. They are also weapons that enable a new kind of technological truce between domineering Indian mothers and sons, one that somehow gives both parties more potency. Boys are able to conduct their affairs in greater privacy while mothers can exert their overbearing presence even when their sons aren’t at home.

If another expression of virility is the ability to dictate a female’s sexual relations (as illustrated by hip-hop’s abhorrent glamorisation of the professional pimp), then it was little surprise to see aggressive ethnic identities employed by both Sikh and Muslim boys in order to punish those who had relations with girls across that traditional ethnic divide. Indeed, after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, when my reporting on the recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists took me back to Hounslow, a colleague seemed bemused when some informants divulged information not about potential terrorists, but how local Muslim boys were converting or “sisterising” Sikh girls through the age-old technique of pretending to be in love with them.

However, if my dissertation offered any additional insight for that reporting assignment, viewing ethnicity as a proxy for masculinity made for gloomy conclusions - especially in the context of today’s political debates about how best to engineer a deeper allegiance to Britishness without threatening our country’s rich multiculturalism. After all, while you might be able to devise citizenship tests and oaths to create more cohesive national identities, how on earth can anyone engineer against something as innate as a boy’s desire to be manly and virile? By promoting the androgyny of Jarvis Cocker? I don’t think so.

My dissertation did, however, highlight one optimistic interpretation of what might be going on among Asian kids. Sociologist Tariq Modood had written about how voluntary segregation along ethnic lines might give minority communities the strength and self-esteem to assimilate with mainstream society later on, but on their own terms.
The actions of some Asian kids might have looked unnecessarily aggressive and sometimes even ugly, but racism and discrimination were once very real threats.

Indeed, some of the infamous west London Asian gangs that predated my dissertation and filled the local press with stories of rampages on the local high street may have originally been responses to racist attacks on Asians. But by the time I started my fieldwork those gangs were more legends than reality and the threat of racism appeared more imaginary than real. Similarly, the tendency of kids to ghettoise Hounslow to make it sound like a Bronx-style hood implied another kind of imagined threat in a local economy that remains relatively healthy thanks to having Heathrow Airport on its doorstep.

As the threat of racism receded, surely these kids’ aggressive, anti-assimilation ethic would follow? Perhaps that dynamic that Modood called “assertive ethnicity” and the evolution of Asian boys from victims to predators was a necessary step in the creation of a truly British Asian subculture - allowing kids to integrate on their own terms, bringing their own brand of Britishness to the table.
And so the Asian boy as victim (represented by the word “paki”) may have given way to the aggressor (represented by the names of some gangs such as Shere Panjab, where the word “Sher” translates as lions or tigers). And, in turn, that may have led to a social equilibrium between victim and aggressor implied by “desi”.
However, at that time I saw no evidence of British Asian kids using their newly-asserted ethnicity to assimilate on their own terms. They wanted to live in a separate society and, accordingly, there was little by way of a sustainable cultural scene that was as British as it was Asian. Some form of this holy grail may have enjoyed a heyday in the late 1990s thanks to the musical genius of artists such as Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, but the reality is they were embraced more by mainstream society than British Asian kids on the streets.

By contrast, today’s desi beats artists such as Jay Sean may sound more like black US urban acts than anything remotely Indian. But Hounslow-born Jay Sean is British, not American. And if his success here and in India means kids look up to him as a British Asian role model, then so what? The fact that today’s desi scene borrows so much from popular black culture hardly makes it less worthy or authentic. After all, Elvis did the same thing - that’s what popular culture is about.

The success of contemporary desi artists and events such as Notting Hill’s Bombay Bronx - which celebrates its second birthday next month - suggests my earlier pessimism was misplaced. Indeed, at a time when many observers have grown gloomy about the state of Britain’s multicultural project and when posses of Asian youth are often viewed as potential fanatics ripe for new race riots, I have revisited my dissertation with more optimism than when I did it in the 1990s.

If it is arguable that what is being asserted today is no longer simply an ethnic identity but a new, sustainable subculture, it is important to stress its Britishness. Not only was it born in the UK, it has been exported around the world - including back to India. Just as hip-hop culture is neither West Indian nor African, but American, so too desi beats is as quintessentially British as punk rock was in the 1970s, acid house was in the 1980s and Britpop was in the 1990s.

This view was for me crystalised not during the course of a university social sciences dissertation or my reporting on Islamic fundamentalism for the FT, but the slightly more frivolous setting of the Po Na Na nightclub in Hammersmith. It was a Thursday night in October 2003 and the club had been hosting the British Asian Music Awards ceremony, a celebration of all aspects of the then-fledgling desi subculture. I remember it well because I was late and just caught the presentation of the final award and was amazed to see it go to someone with white skin - the opposite of a coconut, if you like. Hounslow-born Markie Mark, a DJ with the Panjabi Hit Squad who earlier this year was named head of music at the BBC’s Asian Network digital radio station, had been voted for his “Commitment to the Brit-Asian scene”.

By allowing our ethnicity to give birth to a British subculture, the Asian scene that a few years earlier had seemed so insular was much less so. There are sweet ironies in the way nightclubs all over London and the Midlands regularly hold what have been described as “brown pound nights”. This is because the collectives of Asian DJs that first emerged in places such as Hounslow during the 1980s and sowed the seeds of what became the desi beats music genre, did so largely to provide local venues for Asian boys who back then simply couldn’t get past the bouncers of central London’s nightclubs.

It is worth highlighting here the unique role of the BBC as a kind of cultural glue - helping to take the subculture from the underground and making space for it within the British mainstream (but without infecting it with naffness). Nihal Arthanyake, for example, presents a Radio One show with Hounslow-born Bobby Friction. He is also a presenter on BBC2’s Desi DNA programme. BBC 1xtra, meanwhile, broadcasts a weekly Desi Beats show hosted by the Panjabi Hit Squad. And where the BBC went, so commercial radio groups such as Emap have followed with their own desi beats show on Kiss FM fronted by the Rishi Rich Project.

So while the bhangra and Bollywood remixes that Asian kids blasted out of their Beemers in the 1990s may have been intentionally inaccessible to others, Asian kids now cannot take exclusive ownership of the desi beats genre even if they want to. But the optimistic thing here is that they don’t want to.
The compatibility of the desi identity with Britishness is also evident in the realm of sports - perhaps best symbolised by the sight of Pakistani kids from the Midlands dancing around in the Union Jack to cheer on British boxing hero Amir Khan. The contrast with the infamous Tebbit cricket test (where the former government minister questioned the allegiance of British Asians who failed to support the English cricket team) could not be starker. Even when England’s cricketers have had brown skin - such as former team captain Nasser Hussain or Mark Ramprakash - British Asians have still tended to cheer for the opposing side (be it India or Pakistan).
I would argue this contrast would still exist if Khan were to take on a boxing champ developed in the Indian subcontinent. And the reason he makes for a more effective British Asian role model than the likes of Hussain or Talvin Singh lies in the fact that Khan simply oozes desi subculture. He has the right hair, the right swagger, the right speech patterns, the right clothes - and, being characteristics of “desiness” rather than “Pakistaniness”, all of these things are no less British than Hussain’s cucumber sandwiches. It will be interesting to see whether Monty Panesar, the Sikh spin bowler who recently buoyed England’s performance, can bridge the gap. In the meantime, Khan’s street credentials have been cemented by his appearance in the latest Reebok “I am what I am” advertising campaign, following in the footsteps of other urban youth culture icons such as rappers 50 Cent and Jay-Z.
But this rosy new perspective is not without qualification. The Amir Khan billboards underline the extent to which the desi beats subculture is part of the broader urban youth scene, which encompasses other music styles such as hip-hop, garage and RnB. Borrowing from these other subcultures may not matter per se, but there are real problems insofar as the urban scene does not just bolster masculinity, it frequently does so through misogyny and homophobia. Also, it is the first subculture to celebrate rather than counter conspicuous consumerism. Its golden dictum is neatly summed up by 50 Cent’s album and film title Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

While there is a genuine debate to be had about the social and economic implications of this attitude crowding out the traditional material restraint of British mainstream society, there are also repercussions for the debate about multiculturalism. Just as British Asian boys have fused the misogyny of their parents’ culture with that of hip-hop culture and thereby reinforced both, so too there is a fusion of the materialism inherent in Indian culture and urban youth culture. At best, this just accentuates the worship of flash mobile phones, bling bling jewellery and luxury cars. But at worst, it means any social cohesion achieved by the desi subculture might be undermined by the individualism unleashed by this materialism - illustrated, for example, by the rampant tax avoidance in the Indian subcontinent and the dog-eat-dog principles of hip-hop culture. Tax evasion and grey economies could evolve into symbols for another kind of anti-assimilation ethic.

However, the crowd that gathers for Notting Hill’s Bombay Bronx might argue this pessimism is misplaced too. After all, those in the creative professions generally earn a lot less money than those working in law, finance and medicine."

Potential

2006-03-27T22:34:00.000+01:00

When I was seven years old my mother told me that humans only used 2% of their brains. I found it hard to grasp that we barely used our brains at all yet managed to do so much like split the atom and put astronauts on the moon and.....think. 2%! Is that all? I pondered. Well, now I question whether that percentage is accurate but it is widely accepted that we don't utilise all or even half of our cerebral powers and I can't help but wonder what could we achieve if we did. Arguably, the greatest minds have had what we have - a brain, the difference being, theirs were "wired" a little differently or they used theirs to a greater degree than we do. Either way, the potential is there. If one brain can envisage helicopters 500 years before their "invention" then somewhere out there is another mind being used to envisage say, faster-than-light-travel. The point is even if every person is not a polymath genius, every person has the potential to use their mind to accomplish something extraordinary. The question is how do you tap that potential? Historically, bright sparks have been spotted, nurtured and challenged to push beyond the boundaries of what was considered achievable in order to accomplish great things; sometimes it just "happened", but what if we as a soceity specifically held every person to be a genius of sorts? What if we taught in schools that all children are gifted, just in different areas and that identifying, refining and polishing that gift is the goal to strive for, instead of passing a spectrum of brain-dulling exams? If we only use say 50% of our brains and we've come this far, then using the other 50% would literally mean we would be "Gods" - we would have invented the technology to re-create our physiological selves, jeez, we're already half way there with genetic manipulation! We would have eridacted death as it is merely a cellular error not a necessity. We'd be travelling intergalactically, hell, between universes - as we would have thought beyond the speed of light being the universal speed limit. In fact, with enough mental effort we could create reality, any reality with just a thought. If that sounds preposterous, consider that every invention from the wheel to the space shuttle, from the printing press to the internet and from herbal cures to gene therapy - all began as a concatenation of thoughts - it became thought-materialised. If you think you can fly, you're already airbourne.

TGV

2006-03-23T03:01:00.000+00:00

How fast are you travelling when you're standing at the bus stop? It's a no-brainer, right? Think again if you thought "how can I be travelling when I'm standing still?". Even when you're asleep you're still travelling without moving and at high velocity too. We're all aboard this vast lump of rock which is hurtling around the Sun at phenomenal speed: roughly 67,000 miles per hour; yet we don't perceive a thing. Instead it appears the Sun is moving throught the sky around us. Add that to the fact that we're also rotating at about 1000 miles per hour and moving with the sun around the centre of our galaxy, which itself is moving with about another 20 galaxies called the Local Group, which themselves are moving in an even bigger cluster known as the Local Supercluster - means at no point whatsoever are we stationary, static, still. Metrically speaking we're talking about 30 km/s +0.5 km/s +230 km/s + 40 km/s which = 900 km/s! Doesn't feel like it does it? Just reflect on that the next time you wake up after a peaceful night's rest, that in effect - you've been zooming about at almost 1000 km per second all night. It adds new meaning to the word sleepwalking. It does of course also raise the question yet again: how much can we really rely on our senses when trying to determine reality?

Alchemy?

2006-03-19T14:40:00.000+00:00

A puzzle book containing clues leading to jewels worth £1m is set to spark a treasure-hunt craze unseen since the publication of Masquerade in 1979 caused a frenzy of nationwide digging in search of a golden hare.

Secrets of the Alchemist Dar, by millionaire author Michael Stadther, will incorporate riddles leading to 100 gems hidden around the world. A single jewel described as 'one of the most precious stones on earth' is worth £530,000.

Claiming that someone in this country has the same chance of finding them as someone in Afghanistan, Stadther is secretive about what form the hunt will take. 'It might be physical; it might not. People might have to get in cars or on planes; they might not,' he said. But he did give one hint: 'I have found the power of the internet - it's vast.'

In 2004, Stadther published A Treasure's Trove in America, sending thousands of 'trovers' looking for 18-carat gold coins that he and his wife had scattered around state parks across the country. The coins, hidden in the bark of trees or under debris, were redeemable for jewellery encrusted with diamonds, rubies and emeralds, all based on the story's animal characters.

Jason Davis, a student in cognitive neuroscience, borrowed money for a two-day bus journey from California to Foss State Park in Oklahoma to retrieve a coin that he later redeemed for jewels worth £150,000.
Inspiration for the book came from the artist Kit Williams's Masquerade, which sold more than a million copies. The jewel-laden hare was uncovered beneath a stone cross in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, after two years of people arbitrarily digging up the countryside - something Stadther is keen to discourage: his coins were stowed without disturbing nature.

Secrets of the Alchemist Dar is due for international release in September but of course there'll be much more hype about the book before then to get everyone clammering up the preverbial beanstalk.

Call me cynical but I smell the blood of a publicity stunt-man. Why not just cut to the chase and pay people out right to buy your book?!

FourFishFingers

2006-03-13T23:57:00.000+00:00

Idiocy and lunacy are not to be confused. Idiots may be charming and erudite but lunatics are always clever.

The contours of a persons character are better shaped by a long shore drift of knowledge and refined by the coarse hand of experience than by the contorted machinery of convention.

Divorce: is it a human invention? Can an electron divorce itself from its atom? Can an atom of hydrogen divorce itself from a molecule of water? Can a molecule of water divorce itself from the cytoplasm of a living cell?

Sometimes all you have to do is close your eyes to see the same situation from a new perspective.

One

2006-03-07T21:30:00.000+00:00

When I walk along the sandy shore on a beautifully miserable day and beneath my feet I sense the coarse, crunch of an infinite number of dense, soaked fragments of silica and I gaze toward the horizon where Sky and Earth are integrated, continuous, as one - I am transfixed by the unique freedom of nature, the earth, the universe and as the moment becomes the moment that was, my divided self enters a phase of undulated eloquence. It is between these moments that I belong.

As the continuum of that of the above and that below glides toward my beckoning pupils there is no glamour simply composure. The unforgiving urge to roll with the tide to see as the sky to disintegrate as the rain and to pervade as the wind, at this moment is stunning in its authenticity, only a matter of contaminated thoughts separate the willing unconscious from the discontinuation of the conscious. A glimpse now, will be a panorama soon.

When I walk along the sandy shore on a miserably beautiful day and my presence is approached by the torrent of the air, the rain, the tide - I am stirred by the sudden realisation of how fragile this precious moment will be after the passing of the storm. Though the event will unfold before my eyes for a lifetime its completion occurs in the moment gyrus and sulcus become the horizon. In this instant, the moment and my thought are one.

Which do you like?

2006-02-21T19:54:00.000+00:00

As everyone knows I write aphorisms. That's probably because I'm a conversationalist and as such I try to say as much I can in the least amount of words, so that I can say even more.This is your opportunity to drop me a little hint of the aphorisms you like the most, the ones you don't "get" and the ones you dislike.

The most popular aphorism will be submitted to the THE PENGUIN BOOK OF QUOTATIONS and auctioned on ebay; the proceeds of which will go to Save The Children charity, if there are any!

"An aphorism can be to an essay what a short-story is to the novel: a seedling to be nurtured in the mind and fleshed out by the imagination."

"To be or not to be? That is the question. To be AND not to be. That is Life's answer."

"The more you know, the more you know you know no more."

"Yesterday is tomorrow's today, but tomorrow is yesterday's today and yet today is yesterday's tomorrow. Time appears to be illusive, as real as you want it to be."

"Working in a job you loathe but which remunerates well is as irksome as buttering fresh, soft bread with cold, hard butter."

"Madness is a stranger with whom we are all acquainted."

"Sometimes you find that it is not until you tear up the past that you can begin to piece together the future."

"Those who spend their lives fighting every battle realise eventually that there never was a war. Life isn't about winning or losing; it's about living."

"If Gain and Risk were so harmoniously inseparable, then how come Loss is the latter's bastard child?"

"Behind all clear blue skies lie black windows."

"The only thing that's worse than not being talked about is being talked about in your presence in the third person."

"Jealousy is hungry and voracious. Feed her trust and she dies quickly of starvation!"

"Man is perfect for 40 weeks in his whole life. Then he is born."

"I have little doubt that woman is smarter than man. She has to be; the fate of the species lies in the palm of her womb."

"In keeping with Newton's third law of motion, a force of marriage and its accompanying ceremony will elicit one which is by nature, equal and opposite, that is: divorce and its associated acrimony.Vast amounts of energy are therefore required if a body of marriage is to succeed in circumventing the natural laws of physics."

"If you want to teach a child the beauty of arithmetic, take her to the art gallery for a day; for it is here that she will discern the inner nature and significance of numerical operations by gazing upon canvasses displaying in glorious colour and rich texture the precise antithesis of such operations."

A penis gains much publicity, yet is merely a genetic periscope. Breasts gain even more publicity and are ultimately...biological vending machines. The Brain is a universe between the ears and yet it is hardly noticed at all.

"To live, die and be remembered is as good as not dying at all."

"Coincidence is a whisper by Circumstance to pay close attention."