The ZamZam Cooler

Last year, I was walking through the student centre with a close friend of mine when he asked me, "Why do religious Sikhs dress like gangsters?"

I found that pretty funny and added the qualifier that because they wore the turban didn't preclude the fact that they might not be fully observant of their faith. Some that as Muslims, is very familiar to us.

Every time after that whenever I would see a group of Sikhs dressed like an entourage for a rap star, I'd smirk to myself. But the reality is that this is a wide spread common feature of almost all immigrant children, going well beyond just the Sikh community. There is a general attraction to black or Afro-American urban culture across the board. But from my general survey of schools and campuses, shopping centres, the many Popeye's food chains I've visited and the population of Mississauga, South Asians are the most gangsta of the bunch.

The more and more I walked around campus, the more I noticed it. At first, I found it pretty funny but then I began to really think about it. What's the source of this attraction to a culture that is ultra urban, completely commericalized and whose projected values are in complete conflict with all the values of almost all thought, religious or otherwise, that comes from the East. What is that makes our kids go and listen to 50 cent and not heavy metal or to become a crazed Maple Leaf fans? Can he or she not make inroads with those crowds if its all about social acceptance? You'll notice on campus, amongst the clusters of students, groups of friends sitting and enjoying one anothers company whose dress would suggest that they would probably look more at home on a street corner than in a lecture hall. But when you really look closely, none of those kids have any affinity to the Afro-American culture or any talents that might make them able to contribute to the culture in any way and the fun part--all of them might be Muslims or Hindus, or a mix of Muslims and Hindus. They all could even be from the city sharing the same native language and customs. Social acceptance doesn't explain that sustained preference, there must be more to it that makes young people find it agreeable. I can remember in highschool, most of the FOB kids always like Tupac Shukur. They wore shirts with his portrait on the front and their ears were swallowed in massive head phones blaring his songs. These guys could barely speak english and they were memorizing his lyrics that were replete with expletives which they couldn't even pronounce properly and carried out discussions promoting gang violence and promiscuity.

Maybe its that Afro-American popular culture is more accepting to immigrants than anything else. Or that we both share a sense of victimization from a very white Western authority that has historically treated our cultures and civilizations as collateral damage. That would be kind of paradoxical were it be true. When we come to these countries, we always buy into the stereotypes labelled onto other people. I'm sure some brown people believe in those same stereotypes about black people that frightened white people do, so the likelihood of collaboration to unite and fight the power(!) would obscured by shared sense of suspicion against one another.

The one thing I've noticed however, there hasn't been a general transfer or change of values (thanks to traditional parenting). Urban, gangster-wannabism has just therefore become the means through which our young people interact with other young people or use as front when they have to. That takes the pizazz out of the story if its true and doubly so if its just that other trendy groupings are less accepting. But I don't care it was fun to think about and all in all, I think its still a really interesting social question that would make a neat topic for a paper or a case-study.

Nice piece by the master.

Lebanon is a good place to find out what tosh the 'terror' merchants talk

So it was back to terror, terror, terror this week. The "terrorist" Hizbollah was trying to destroy the "democratically elected government" of Fouad Siniora in Lebanon. The "terrorist" Hamas government cannot rule Palestine. Iranian "terrorists" in Iraq are going to be gunned down by US troops.

My favourite line of the week came from the "security source" - just how one becomes a "security source" remains a mystery to me -- who announced: "Terrorists are always looking for new ways to strike terror... There is no end of the possibilities where terrorists can try to cause terror to the public." Well, you could have fooled me . . .