watch out, here comes MTV Desi!

So the giant luddoo of hype...

...is gathering momentum and flying towards us the masses with increasing speed and size. It's growing ever-bigger and menacing in its huge orange carbohydrated sugary overwhelming hypedness, gripped by the invisible fingers of some auntie-cum-cultural-enforcer in the sky, heading right towards the unwilling open mouths of freaked-out north american desis whose mothers are pinching their nostrils shut....

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OR the luddoo is rolling Bang SMACK right into the ecstatic open arms of second generationers who have been craving, needing, hurtin' for exactly that, a glutinous dimpled orange ball of chickpea-flour, sugar and love wrapped in the gorgeous silver tinsel of partying and celebration, hungering for it right in their guts.

What on earth am I talking about? Why, MTV Desi, of course!

Holy shit, YES, it's exactly what it sounds like: a new MTV channel that will showcase desi music videos from bollywood as well as diaspora artists like M.I.A (whose album is described on her site as politicised party music, "an unparalleled mongrel mix of hip-hop, ragga, dancehall, electro and, dare we say, punk"), as well as artists like Karmacy...

...who just did the musically kick-ass gujarati hip hop video Blood Brothers (so good...so hot...hitting the exactly right sepia-toned note of seventies-era migration...I love the brothers arguing with each other in gujarati rap...can I say how much I love broody men of color with nose rings?...but CLEARLY in their universe traditional family values are way superior, meaning no one should ever leave India, because that's what India has to offer, and North America ONLY offers alcohol, SUVs, nice suits, extreme loneliness and westernized lookin' ethnic girls! (?) Um, for starters, are there no avaaragard-party-animals in India? Hell, yes. And, like, people do form meaningful relationships in North America, even if they're not the kind recognized by those who happen to be 'family-values' types in India).

The laddoo was rapidly inflated to even more global proportions this weekend when Deborah Sontag covered this weekend's MTV auditions for the new desi DJ in I Want My Hyphenated-Identity MTV,exploding bits of orange all over the blogosphere and it's olderfashioned cousin the listserv-o-sphere. (technorati search for 'mtv desi')

So who won out?? Well, not the guy with the beard, knitted cap and fake accent who called himself 'Vijay the V.J'. Neither did the hot chemical engineer with the breasts in the vampy green top, because Nusrat Durrani, the man making it happen, rejected the 'beautiful overachiever' desi stereotype. (man, wouldn't that suck, to be rejected on those grounds?). So who did he and his gang pick? The Brooklyn artist behind The Post Punk Kitchen, Niharika Desai, first on the right.

Nusrat Durrani (as described in Sepia Toned Mutiny) sounds like this intriguing guy in his 40s who still successfully pulls off punk, riding the giant wave of converging historical conditions making MTV Desi (and eventually MTV-chi and MTV-k, for Chinese and Korean Americans) possible...

...(aka according to the Times):

The three target audiences for the new MTV channels, especially Indian-Americans, are better educated and more affluent than average Americans, according to the census. The median family income of an Asian Indian in the United States was $70,708 in 1999, compared with $50,046 for all Americans; 64 percent held at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 24 percent for all American families.

Ah, right, that's why they didn't do this in the seventies when paki-bashing was at its height and you had to slink around the concrete walls of your school to avoid getting noticed and beaten up.

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Someone on the South Asian Women's Creative Collective list pointed out today that India-phile timing is really creepy given 'the war on terror'; it fits into a liberal agenda of multi-culti guilt and appropriation without challenging the racism and violence murdering and destroying the people whose 'lovely culture' is painted onto sandals and embroidered onto slinky tops.

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Sarah Hussein wrote:

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Alot of us have carved multiple spaces/places in this culture,
in our cities across the US in many different ways and MTV has surely not been the goal nor should it be seen as a symbol of achievement; nor the end. It's just now we're marketable."

...

If Desi culture was being recognized and respected then perhaps "desi" women, particularly older and recent immigrants with all their accents and broken English would be allowed to wear their saris and shalwar kameezes or their hijabs to their work places without being looked down upon.

...

what is it about these times, this time of war, that Desi culture is appearing and appealing to pop culture...like Monsoon Wedding, Bend it Like Beckhem, Vanity Fair, etc. etc...? And how is this kind of visibility still not changing the overall condition of the communities being represented and racist attitudes still rampant?

...

How does liberal america apologize and feel good about its actions and inactions through these multi-culti shows? (and i'm certainly not saying that it is white america alone responsible for this change, I mean"white
america" as a social construction an attitude, an ideology, perhaps as
well, so non-white are included in this generalization).

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I say yes, that's true...why is it that desi culture is so popular now in times of war, how is this figuring into the ongoing economy of justification, guilt, and meaning that makes war possible? Now let's remember that and push whatever small advantages this opens up, while also maintaining focus on other terrains of struggle--but let's use whatever we can here to keep relentlessly pushing, politicizing, resisting, even through music that's going to be commodified, even through videos that are fucked up. Change ain't linear--every crack in consciousness has potential to rupture someone's perceptions of the world and its relations, inspire them to step back and choose not to perpetuate violence as much as that is possible, choose to reinterpret. And damn, I'm excited about access to music and videos and language and images of young desis producing our culture and not just according to that damn passive imported-straight-from-India-you-ain't-authentic-enough model of consumption. And I know that the very existence of this opportunity is going to drive a lot of people to produce more shit. It's not going to change the world, but it's a new lever for us to exploit. Now I happen to freakin' hate luddoo, but that's something I can nibble on.