role models

i've had the flu for the last two weeks which means i've been watching tv. a lot of tv. that got me thinking about role models. like it or not, we live in a culture that prizes celebrity. if you're brown and born (or transplanted) to the wild west, who's your celebrity? who can you look at on tv, in movies, or magazines and say, s/he looks like me?
for the longest time, brown characters were the bad guys (many still are, since mysterious europeans are no longer scary) or the exotic, curvy girl, with almond-shaped eyes. [right?!]
not too long ago, brown men broke into mainstream comedy. say what you will, but i believe apu paved the way. sure he's a cartoon. and a stereotype. but he's a featured character on a primetime series that's been running for more than 25 years. not too shabby. except, i doubt anyone looks at him and says, 'hey, he looks like me!'
building on the stereotype, seinfeld brought us babu. he of the wagging finger and the phrase, 'very bad man.' his short arc included a struggling business and deportation. because, what else would a brown character live through?
next came the timid, comic relief types. like raj, whose wardrobe is straight out of the 80s and can't speak to women. he deals with the demands of his overbearing parents, his friends lusting after his exotic sister, and he too faced deportation...all while whispering in howard's ear. good, but not great.
then, somebody, somewhere, figured out that brown people are sometimes born in america. and along came tom haverford. brown, funny, able to speak to women, and all without the exaggerated, generic brown accent. [news flash: we come from different countries, speak different languages, and have different accents.]
while brown men were blazing their trail there wasn't a woman to be found. then, in the annex of the office, inexplicably lusting after ryan, appeared kelly kapoor. [full disclosure: i may be in love with mindy kaling even though i was crushed to learn that her real name is vera chokalingam...i know that doesn't exactly roll of the tongue but why not hang on to some of it?] totally weird, funny, very american...and has a family who throws a serious diwali bash. then a book, and now the mindy project. queue the rain clouds ending the drought. i would look up to her except i'm pretty sure she's shorter than i am. and younger. wow, that's a bit depressing. fortunately, the mindy project is on now which means i have to go.

it ain't easy

kermit had it wrong - being green is a piece of cake. it's being brown that's tough.
it’s far from easy being brown these days. though i’m not sure it ever really was. not on this side of the world anyway. don’t worry, this isn’t one of those blogs. i’m not one of those crazy radicals. (just plain crazy, maybe.) i'm writing about what it's really like to be brown.
for the record, i’m not speaking for ‘my people.’ quite frankly, i’m so confused, i’m not even sure who my people are!
let’s start there, why don’t we? everyone else gets to be a colour, so why don’t we? there’s black, there’s white and then the rest of us...all conveniently lumped together under the heading of asian. anyone been to asia lately? it’s a pretty big continent. in fact, it’s huge. how fair is it that all of us people from different countries, of different cultures are crammed together under one label? why not call us miscellaneous and be done with it? or better yet, other.
it’s probably best to tell a story in chronological order. but let’s start with a committee meeting i attended in what was a quite white environment. i thought this was a meeting of like-minded anti-discrimination activists, but turned out to be a gathering of politically correct, um, people, who were just trying to make sure everyone had the right labels. this is where i learned i am, and should refer to myself as, asian. imagine my surprise. and unlike most surprises, this one wasn’t pleasant.