BROWN WHITE AND BLUE

Vivek Nemana is PhD student in sociology at Princeton University. He's writing a book about young people from tribal communities in India that are newly exposed to global markets. He also writes elsewhere. Locations: Hyderabad, India Princeton, NJ vnemana [at] gmail.com "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." - George Orwell Home About Portfolio Twitter Instagram CV Archive

[brownwhiteandblue]

I just wanna go where love is alive #strangerthings (at Bushwick)

[brownwhiteandblue]

Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low. . . . You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) . . . it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, he does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.

“Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird, Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957. The quote is also the epithet for The White Negro by Norman Mailer, Dissent, Fall 1957.

[julydogs]

As Tears Go By (1988) Wong Kar Wei. Cinematography: Andrew Lau

[brownwhiteandblue]

That florescent light.

[brownwhiteandblue]

Nehru and Indira Gandhi visit Albert Einstein and his wife in Princeton, NJ

[brownwhiteandblue]

Me as a cartoon #untilnow

[brownwhiteandblue]

"Look at my hands. See how hard they've become." Gundu Borjabariki, 46, bemoans how farming has become the sole burden of aging men and women. These days, vast tracts of once-lush land across the Agency are left fallow, and you can only ever see the elderly at work on the fields. In fact it hardly makes sense to be a farmer in India anymore, since you are as likely to lose money as you are to earn any, which is why millions of rural youth have refused to join the sector. So Gundu and his wife till the soil and sow their fields and raise their cattle, solitary work that is excoriating on their broken bodies. He has children but they are too busy in search of permanent jobs to help. "The kids don't know how to farm. And in any case, they don't really care." #fieldnotes #rural #reportage #farming #india #countryside

[brownwhiteandblue]

The milk and seeds of the yellow oleander, above, are as toxic as a rattlesnake's venom, enough to disrupt a grown man's heartbeat. Venkat nearly died once when someone crushed the seeds into his whiskey. His nephew wasn't as lucky.

[brownwhiteandblue]

always workin OT

[brownwhiteandblue]

Check out pratyushahome to learn more about these girls: 

Rains have made the Valley lush, and now that the sun is back out the weather is perfect for gardening. So the other day Mrs. Kambadi and the girls revived their organic vegetable garden, which provides the family with fresh tomatoes, greens and lots of other healthy local fruits veggies. And besides, as Divya -- the one on top with the gorgeous smile -- will tell you, gardening is just a lot of fun. 

When the new Pratyusha Children’s Home is complete, the girls want to plant an even larger garden with pumpkins and papaya trees, maybe with some animals too. It’s sure to bring even more smiles. Thanks again for your love!

Help us build them a home via our Generosity campaign.

[brownwhiteandblue]

Tribal folks in and around the village of Panasapottu say nobody ever carved this sculpture of Nandi, or Shiva's sacred bull. It just appeared in the stone one day, and they have worshipped it ever since by singing, drinking and dancing all night on the festival of Shivraatri. The festival gets rowdy but it's fun. #village #folktales #India #countryscapes #fieldwork

[brownwhiteandblue]

There’s a power in forward motion, even if, as Johnson sang, it’s taking your soul to hell. Greyhound was important in de-segregation movements much in the same way it has been important in so many moments of national change: by being the only available ride.

Vagabond Express by Haley Cullingham 

[brownwhiteandblue]

narcopolis

[W]hen everything had at last been arranged, I was leaving the neighborhood, the apartment, the habit, I was leaving and I wouldn’t return -- on that last day, in parting, the city was revealed as the true image of my cancelled self: an object of dereliction, deserving only of pity, closed, in all ways, to the world. 

After I read this I stared awhile at the dim frames of my borrowed room, at the cobwebbed walls and sooty black stain where the ceiling fan used to be, and wondered, “How often do you really tell the truth?” 

(via)

[brownwhiteandblue]

Our ghosts come to us misunderstood, unwelcomed, willfully unrecognized. Ourselves made strange. They come to us as promises betrayed. As people unaccounted for in any census. People who live down dirt roads and in backwoods so distant that if you drove there, you'd need to honk your horn as you approach so as not to arouse panic with your presence.

Scott Blackwood on Pembroke, the poorest place in America, for Chicago Magazine. But it could just as well be about the ghosts of any country. 

[brownwhiteandblue]

When did Indians stop intermarrying?

Over 1,500 years ago, the Gupta emperors ruled large parts of India. They helped consolidate the nation, but they also popularized India's caste system, making it socially unacceptable for people to marry outside their castes. Now, a new analysis of genetic variation among contemporary Indians has revealed that this social shift left a distinctive genetic signature behind.

...

Especially among the upper castes, endogamy was the only legal option. People had to marry within their castes. And suddenly, we no longer see signs of intermixing between different groups. The researchers were able to measure exactly when endogamy became the rule of the land by looking at subtle shifts in haplotype sequences. With each generation, these sequences are cut into smaller pieces via recombination between chromosomes.

The researchers report there is a startlingly sudden shift where genetic mixing seems to stop. If a person has genetic material from two haplotypes—let's call them Hap1 and Hap2—a shift to endogamy causes far more recombination events in Hap1 than in Hap2. That's because future generations stop intermarrying with people from the Hap1 haplotype, yet they keep getting new copies of the Hap2 haplotype. This keeps Hap2 intact while recombination constantly breaks up the Hap1s.

...

By identifying five ancestral populations among contemporary Indians, the researchers have revealed that Indians today are more genetically diverse than we've realized. But they have also shown that social shifts can dramatically affect a nation's genomes. The caste system has consequences that affect people all the way down to their DNA.

So interesting to note how endogamy -- which Ambedkar identified as one of the most critical institutions of caste discrimination -- came into existence with what is almost a policy decision, and never went away after that, no matter how many empires rose and fell in the subcontinent.  

[brownwhiteandblue]

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

Bolano. Never forget. 

[brownwhiteandblue]

I stood between two rails, one in the shadows and one in the light, but both of them paused, indefinitely, their destinations no more than the faint glimmer of faraway stars. (at Eastern Ghats)

[brownwhiteandblue]

The other night I took my book and rode down to Hyderabad's central lake, where, at an open air restaurant beneath a sign that shouts "WOMEN'S EMPLOYMENT SCHEME CANTEEN," an all-male staff sells ice cream and barbecued meat. They built the space into a spacious dugout, breezy but well shielded from the din of the street and the stench of the lake. No one was in a hurry that cool fragrant evening. And the pathar-ka-gosht, man. The lamb sizzled like heaven on the grill and when it finally arrived the meat was, as I'd hoped, tender enough to melt. What a simple joy to be outside, eat well, and read without worry. #latergram #foodheaven #hyderabad (at Bade Miyan Kabab's)