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Monthly Archives: January 2005
Philly Racist Radio Station
Was just browsing rediff and came across an article. It is about an RJ @ a Philedelphia based radio station, who threatened to choke an Indian Call Center employee.
He uses words/phrases like bitch, eff, filthy rat eater during his call. The call was aired on the radio and put on their website.
Turbanhead has the audio file . Ed has transcribed the conversation:
NARRATOR INTRO: Wakeup with Star and Buc Wild in the mornings of Power 99 FM.
STAR: I’m going to play this call from earlier before we get out of here. This is the, uh, call that I made to — I thought it was a company here locally. Not that I was surprised.
(laughter)
STAR: I saw this infomercial about, uh, what are these things called again? Oh, the, uh…
FEMALE VOICE: Bead? Oh shoot.
STAR: Anyway, let — let’s just play the call. I was surprised when I got somebody on the line in East India. These little beads that I saw. Little white kids, uh, a little machine that puts them in their hair.
FEMALE VOICE: Mm’hm.
STAR: Play it.
(tape begins)
STEENA: This is Steena. How may I help you?
STAR: Hi, Stain-a, you say?
STEENA: Yes.
STAR: (in fake Indian accent) Yeah, I called and I just got hung up on. I’m calling from America about the quick beads for my daughter’s, uh, hair. Quick beads.
STEEA: Okay. May I have your ZIP code please?
STAR: 10274.
STEENA: 10274?
STAR: Yes. Get it right. Now are you in India? Because I just spoke to someone in India who hung up on me.
STEENA: Thank you. I am from India, ma’am.
STAR: Okay. So my call is being outsourced to India.
STEENA: That’s right.
STAR: In… in regards to my six year old, white American daughter who wants to get the quick beads like Serena and Venus Williams.
STEENA: Now. I’ll definitely place an order for that. See…
STAR: What’s that?
STEENA: …in the ad, she called to place a quick bead of counier. To ensure proper handling…
STAR: Ma’am, I don’t know what the hell you’re saying. Hang on a second. Let me try and get something straight here. The quick beads, like Venus and Serena Williams, that to advertise to — to the white kids on television. This call has been outsourced to India?
STEENA: That’s right.
STAR: Well, ma’am, what the eff would you know about an American white girl’s — uh, uh — hair? And quick beads.
STEENA: Just to inform you, ma’am, we’re a national chain services company. And we’re just taking calls on the opposite…
STAR: Listen, bitch! Don’t get slick with the mouth! Don’t you get slick with me, bitch!
STEENA: Now if you continue to speak this language, I will disconnect the call.
STAR: Listen to me, you dirty rat eater. I’ll come out there and choke the eff out of you.
(laughter)
STAR: You’re a filthy rat eater. I’m calling about my American six year old white girl. How dare you outsource my call? Get off the line, bitch!
(laughter; end of tape)
STAR: Pull it up.
(laughter)
STAR: Heard they listen well out there.
This is not the first case of racism against Indians. I had a friend working for a call center for few days. He told me that a lot of people calling from US abuse them. They would say that you f****** Indian, you took our jobs…
This incident has disturbed me a lot. RJ “STAR” is a black guy. On one hand he wants them to be respected and called “African Americans” and on the other hand he derogates Indians and curses them. Bloody Hypocrite.
I think its high time that Asians or any other minority living in US should fight for their rights. The American society which is believed to be “fair and just” is fair and just in the books and papers only.
If you are Indian living in US, or living in India or an Asian or anybody else and think that whatever happened was wrong and the RJ should be fired, then write a letter/email or call the Radio Station and tell them how you feel about the issue, and what action you expect from the radio station.
So far I just tried to call the Radio Station, but they were closed. I am gonna write an email to Michael Saunders of Clear Channel (Radio Station’s parent company) and would tell him how I feel about the issue.
I don’t believe in illegal or wrong activities such as spamming them or abusing them on fone or writing. I also don’t believe in Gandhian theory acc. to which, you should put your left cheek forward, if someone slapped your right. I can only think of calling and writing to them. Right now am unable to think of any other way of protest. Someone suggested that we should list the names of their advertisers and call them and tell them that we will boycot their products if they don’t pull out their ads from the radio station (kind of Gandhian), but I can’t do this as the radio is aired just in Philly. If someone got any ideas of protest then do let me know.
The contact details are here:
Philadelphia, WUSL
Business line: 215.483.8900
Studio hotline (toll-free): 800.669.99FM
Studio hotline (local): 215.263.6699
Attention: Richard Lewis & Thea Mitchem
Power99 WUSL-FM
440 Domino Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19128
Director of Urban Programming/Program Director: Thea Mitchem
Music Director: Coka Lani
News & Public Affairs Director: Loraine Ballard Morrill
New York, WWPR
Program director: Michael Saunders, msaunders@clearchannel.com
Request line: 800-585-1051
Business line: 212-704-1051
Here is a forward (2 years old) related to the issue.
Continue reading
Accident
Am I prone to accidents? In my last post, I wrote about that spam accident and today I met with a real life accident. It happened in the morning at 9:55. I was driving on campus and then suddenly a green car (Saturn I believe) came right infront of me. I applied brakes. Although I was driving at 25 mph but the car was so close that by the time my car could stop, it dashed into the green car. I could see the dent on that car’s right rear door. The girl drove the car to the parking and I as well.
She was nervous and asked me in a shivering voice, “are you ok?” “Yeah, I am fine.” I was nervous too as something like this never happened to me before, but I was smiling. I don’t know but I think I have same issues like Boman Irani in Munna Bhai MBBS. I don’t laugh like him but start smiling. My face doesn’t show tension unless its a real big thing. Anyways we exchanged the reqd. info. She asked me to talk to her bf who was on cellphone. He asked me if I was ok n if she was ok. I told him that shes ok, but nervous.
I didn’t have too much dmages as I was driving at a nominal speed. My car’s front number plate broke and was lying on the road. Some guy picked it and handed it to me. He also told me that he was sorry that I had to start my day like that. My car also got a few scratches and a smaal dent on the bumper. The girl’s insurance company called me about the incident, but I never got a chance to return the call and now they would be closed, so I’ll call tomorrow.
After that I parked my car at another parking and left for the class. When I returned from the class, (had another one after 10 minz.) I noticed that my parking permit for the univ was missing. It used to hang by the rear view mirror. I found it lying on the ground and put it back up. Thank god no one came for checking the cars and parking permits or I would have had got a parking ticket too :p.
Here are the pics of the car and a special paper on which I drew what exactly happened.
Please note that am not gonna put any forward with this post, but the next one(coming soon).
Spamish Accident?
When I checked my email today, I found 8 emails from one email address. I do get spam, but its not that much generally.
All the headers are different. I logged onto the domain from where the emails were coming from: gold-solutions[dot]co[dot]uk (I don’t want to give them any link or publicity.)
And they had this message posted:
Gold Solutions : Important Information
Upgrade is complete – Ready to put new website up in less than 14 days.
Thank You.For any information please contact us at: info@gold-solutions.co.uk
Message Updated: 29 Dec 2004 – 16:59pm
NEWSLETTER PROBLEM – PLEASE READ IF YOU WERE AFFECTED
Dear those of yous who were effected,
One email was suppose to be sent for the Tsunami fund. The system was corrupted and kept sending the email another time. When sending the newsletter a function was enabled that allows users to reply to the newsletters. Someone had sent an email with the BT email a number of times, and as of those who were effected were part of the Tsunami fund newsletter they also recieved the reply.
The problem has now been fixed and the last email should have been some BT message sent at: 9th January 2005 :: 20:05pm
Again all apologies to all of yous. The email was suppose to only try to attract people to help punjabicity.com as they are going to india to help.
contact: gaurav_at_gold-solutions.co.uk if you want any information.
Kind Regards
Gaurav Malhotra
Managing Director
WTF?????????????? I am not even on any of their lists n stuff!!!! Does anybody know of a site where I can lodge a complaint for spamming. Their domain is UK based, so any UK or US site apart from any intl. would do.
To read all the mails with header from just first, click the page number 2, right above the comments link.
Tsunami Relief Fund Raising Match
Weekend is here…..so am I.
I was at work today and it was pouring badly at times, so nothing interesting happened. Southern California’s freeways are not in a good shape due to snow.
Whatever I wrote above was just random stuff. More randomness: The Bay Area’s traffic is a pain. A lot of people who live here would defy. agree with me. Most of the time I use I-80 freeway and its too bad, esp. around Berkley. Here are some pix clicked about 20 days ago. You can certainly appreciate my picture-taking-while-driving skills (the car was crawling at the speed of 0 – 10 mph)
In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to blog about keywords – Indonesia, Tsunami aid, politics. Here is the detail
Continue reading
Applied for the graduation
Lately I only get time @ weekends when I write 2-3 posts at one time. I think I might start writing advanced posts, i.e. i’ll write the articles on weekends but they’ll publish after 2-3 days. But on the other hand, blogging is about the feelis of Da Moment, so I might not do so.
Life has been going chaotic since 3rd Jan. Not necessarily in a bad way, but had been busy. Winter qtr. started on Monday, there were some issues with the course reg. site, so I had to goto their office n do blah blah. I am taking 28 units this qtr. (dat is 7 classes), for those who have exp. qtr sys. would know how much work load is that 
. But I just wanna get rid of studies. In order to get rid of studies, I filed for my graduation in Spring 2k5 today. There are too many code req. 
( Some of the courses am taking this qtr. r Anthropolgy , Philosophy (Critical Thinking) , Art (as in drawing), Women Studies (no, they don’t teach how to study women), International Studies – it kinda seems like interesting, it is about Globalization – we have to study both, for and against opinions. (did u notice “kinda seems like”?) We will also discuss about WTO n etc also we have 2 write a paper on a subtopic @ Globalization – I can choose the globalization n its cultural effects (a.k.a MMS kand) As far as I remmember, I last studied drawing in 8th class? Hopefully I’ll graduate by spring (jaan chutegi).
Some random stuff:
Watched Aish on 60 Minutes and here r my views –
{Anti Aish Mode}
….& she was faking that accent, didn’t even answer any question properly & yeah, “I’m real” was…..errrrrr…simply dumb
{/Anti Aish Mode}
{Fragment of Imagination}
How someone told her one fine sunny day – Ohhhhhhhhh Aishwarya, you are so real, aaaawwww.
{/Fragment of Imagination}
Was it sallu, when she was yelling at him?
{To be Noted}
But she is the one who got featured along with the Google Billionare and also got searched so many times @ Yahoo and had her pic @ Yahoo’s homepage.
Updated: Aish is also @ Zeitgeist.
{/To be Noted}
One thing good she said was that a person’s independence is independent of the fact that he lives with his/her parents or not – ofcourse she didn’t use these cool words, they r my creation, but she said something on these lines.
There are a lot of random stuff, which I can’t squeeze in this post, so I’ll just put them up here so that I can write a post on each whenever I get time
- Tsunami Aid {Indonesia} politix
- California Garib.
- Indian police wale and technology (article was /.ed)
For now….here is a fwd. sent by Param, one of my friends. Its not funny but interesting and some inspiration to Aaina
Veer-Zaara and Swades DVD Piracy
A lot of Bollywood fans are eagerly waiting for the release of Shahrukh Khan’s Veer-Zaara and Swades on DVD, so that they can get their favorite stars’ movies close to them and can watch them anytime they want. The DVDs are also expected to have an additional DVD containing the making of the movie and some other exclusive material. But a little known fact is that the movies are already in the market and are sold openly on the internet. So here is an exclusive report on the DVD Piracy. Continue reading
Tsunami Videos
Just watched the face of the destruction. As I had expected, there are a lot of Tsunami videos online and I am expecting a lot more to be online soon.
The videos are available here. By the time I checked it out their main mirror has served 764 terabytes of data. Amazing!!!
Wiki also got tons of info.
There is no way for me to serve as one of their mirrors (i dunn have that much of bandwidth) , I want to be 1 though. So I chose one of the smallest files and put it here.
This video shows what I was really talking about in the previous post. The people never thought it was so serious. In most of the vids u see people just watching as the waves approach them.
A general thought about the waves are that they come and go…..sometimes they travel farther than most of the times and it is normal. Mostly the waves touches your feet and then go away. All these thoughts can be seen/heard in the above posted video.
First, the people experiencing the waves get surprised over the height of waves……this surprise doesn’t have fear at all. As the wave approaches them, they don’t even move as they firmly believed that the wave would go back before reaching them. But when the wave doesn’t go back and drench them, you can hear their laughter. They laugh at the innocent waves as the waves make them wet and are playing with all the people on the beach. Soon the laughter transforms into the screams….suddenly the fear, which was missing before, appears and people panic.
That site also had a link to an image. The image is dreadful and has extreme loss of life shown in it. The image can be seen here.
Acc. to Wiki the death toll may rise to 425,488+
Update: Continue reading
May god bless their souls
Finally, I am back. Haven’t updated my blog since a week now. I was busy with problems on my websites. Some problems were accidents, some were foolish mistakes and some others which I couldn’t have avoided.
Anyways, Happy New year to everybody, hope this year brings joy and happiness to all. The last year was ok. Atleast it didn’t have any war (I mean a war started), but dubyaa got re-elected
The last few days were very tragic and destructive. I truly can’t feel how the people feel in those areas, but I can understand their feelings and grief. I knew what Tsunamis were, as I had read about them in my Geology class but wasn’t sure of the details of the whole process, untill I read it on Suneel‘s blog. I think a lot of people didn’t even have a clue that a wave can be that big or can cause so much damage. Probably this was the reason that people kept speculating the huge waves, instead of running for their lives.
A lot of questions have been risen about the warning system in the Indian Ocean. I feel that Indian ocean should definetly have a warning system. Suneel wrote about how Pacific lab knew about the danger, but couldn’t contact the authorities as they didn’t have their contact numbers. How lame can that be….He also wrote that Doordarshan couldn’t give updates on Tsunami coz Ind Vs. Ban match was on
I heard that it took 1.5 – 2 hrs for the waves to travel from Indonesia to Sri Lanka (not sure though.) I think it was plenty of time to warn the whole coastline of Sri Lanka as well as India. The U.S., which has its satellites roaming around the whole world, taking pictures of Pokhran, Saddam’s bathroom, Korea’s nuclear program, would have had spotted the waves too. I am not saying that all the destruction has occured because of US, but just wondering why nobody alerted the coastline? Perhaps due to the rairty/ignorance of the Tsunamis, no one thought that it could kill 150k+ people.
The United States and the nations of the West are “stingy.”
This statement comes from a UN official amidst this chaos and adds to it. Mr. Bush, who is enjoying his winters in his ranch, is perhaps preparing for the Iraqi election while so many American as well as Iraqi lives are being lost, replies in a firm tone that we are not stingy and increases the relief fund to $350 million. Well, increasing the amount from $35 m to $350 m won’t even matter that much as the dollar touches record lows as compared to other currencies almost everyday.
Is US really stingy? googled and found two interesting articles. One was for while other was against.
Look who’s talking about ‘stingy’ is published @ Washington Times and is written by its Editor in Chief – Wesley Pruden. I pity this guy.
America the stingy fits with The Post’s view of a world where all news is bad, the sun shines only on the rich, the rain falls only on the frail, and everyone is a victim — of homophobia in Peoria, AIDS in Afghanistan, an outbreak of teenage pimples in San Diego, a tsunami in Sri Lanka, the scarcity of vegetarian restaurants in Topeka, a woman who got winked at in Cleveland, a shortage of condoms in St. Paul. Some days there are so many victims there’s hardly any room for the news on Page One.
He compares the AIDS in Afghanistan, Tsunamis in SL with an outbreak of teenage pimples in San Diego, the scarcity of vegetarian restaurants in Topeka, a woman who got winked at in Cleveland, a shortage of condoms in St. Paul. As if lives lost in Afghanistan or SL have no meaning at all.
On the other hand…
Two-bit Bush makes his costliest blunder
…states another story.
the most powerful man on the planet remained apparently oblivious to the suffering. Holed up for Christmas on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, a president who famously refuses to take work home with him was reluctant to let international affairs impinge on the most important holiday of the year.
Bush, who warned Asian leaders almost immediately after 9/11 that they would be judged by their contribution to the war on terror, waited 72 hours before he called to offer his condolences in the wake of this shocking tragedy. From a trailer outside his ranch, he called the leaders of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India to pledge his support. That support amounted to $35m, barely £18m, a figure dwarfed by the sums pledged by nations including Spain and Japan.
With due respect to the victims of 9/11 – I still remmember at the the time of 9/11 attacks, Bush-Powel-Rumsfeld at some point of the time or other, made it look like as if it was the first attempt of a terrorist attack and felt strongly about the “World” terrorism. Didn’t they know about Punjab, Kashmir, Nagaland, Assam, LTTE, Israel, Palestine, Russia and almost whole of Africa?
Someone fwded me Tsunami images, they seem to be original, but one of my cousins wrote that they are not. I think they are original as the camera was a most expected object to be carried by tourists on beaches and resorts. Here are the images. I also found sattelite images.
For those who care to help the victims can donate to Aid India, an American based NGO, or can buy stuff from here. 50% of the profits are donated to Aid India.
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Today we saw Sarvar and Aditi win the India’s Best. More details can be read here.
I think both the guys were equally good in acting, but I think Mohit was more good looking. I didn’t watch all the episodes, but today watched that Sarwar did a topless dance (Raat Ka Nasha…) perhaps that helped him :p
Both girls were good acting wise, but Aditi had an upper edge as she was cute on screen as well as off screen. Yuvika, look alike of Diya Mirza, indeed had the best face!
I have been adding forwards to my blog, but I think a blog should be more creative and ones own feelings, so I’ll write more than adding forwards….but for those who had been waiting for a forward….here is one Continue reading