Happy Sunday, folks!
If you’re reading this and opened this email without knowing what Lagaan is, 1) bless you and 2) please go watch it first and then come back to me :)
Okay, now that you’re back, this past week I’ve been thinking a lot about the objectively greatest film ever made in light of the GameStop stock story. This isn’t a perfect comparison, and I have comically little understanding of both cricket and how the stock market works, but bear with me.
Lagaan means agricultural tax in Hindi. The film is set in 1893 in the village of Champaner in Central India during the British rule of the subcontinent. The farmers in the village are already behind on the taxes they owe the British because of a drought (an economic frustration exacerbated by something uncontrollable like, perhaps, a pandemic?). Captain Andrew Russell (the villain aka hedge funds) imposes a double tax on them (aka shorting stock) just because he can.
Then, in a move of pure colonizer ego, he triples the tax after he sees Bhuvan (the main character) making fun of the British game of cricket (shorting 140% of float stock).
That is, unless the villagers can defeat Russell’s squad in a match. If the farmers, who have never played cricket before, and don’t know the rules or have the right equipment (sound familiar?), can win, then the entire province won’t have to pay taxes for three years. Bhuvan, in a move of brown man pride, agrees to the bet and Russell is convinced he can’t lose.
The villagers are rightfully frustrated and stressed that they have little chance of winning with the deck stacked against them. Now Bhuvan is carrying the weight of his village on his shoulders and assembles a team (WallStreetBets). Russell’s superiors are furious, and tell him that if he loses to the villagers, he’ll have to pay the entire province’s taxes out of his own pocket. If you’re feeling bad for Russell at any point, I must remind you that he repeatedly calls the brown people “darkie.”
Russell’s younger sister, Elizabeth (we can think of her like Keith Gill for the sake of this analogy lol), feels bad for the villagers and starts meeting with Bhuvan and his team in secret to teach them how to play (Gill sounding the alarm of GameStop stock being shorted by hedge funds to WallStreetBets). Deva Singh Sodhi, an ex-sepoy who learned the game, also vows to help defeat the British because he hates them. Kachra (which literally means trash in Hindi/Urdu 😞), who’s considered an “untouchable” for being from a lower caste, is a fantastic spin bowler and completes the 11-man team after Bhuvan shames the rest of the farmers for their bigotry against Kachra (look at all this grassroots community organizing!).
Bollywood as an industry is hardly a bastion of tolerance and fairness, but this movie is part of my early understanding of injustice and has only become more enlightening as I’ve gotten older. The idea that the British/Wall Street traders got mad at the farmers/Reddit investors for learning the rules to their game and beating them at it is a textbook example of fearing and suppressing challenges to the status quo. Raising the taxes to an impossible rate for fun/shutting down Robinhood because of “market volatility” is just oppression.
What remains to be seen is if, in the end, the Reddit investors end up like the farmers. 😉
Special thanks to my best editor, my sister, for making this make sense, and Rafia Khandaker for the artwork.
Anyway, here’s what you came here for:
What I read this week (in no particular order)
How will the GameStop game stop? by Matt Levine in Bloomberg Opinion
I cannot overstate how good it feels that Matt Levine, one of the best finance writers in journalism, and I, a writer, came to the same conclusion that this is all kind of dumb and amusing. He writes:
“I certainly don’t think short sellers should be banned or shunned or punished for betting against companies, I agree that short selling is socially beneficial, all that boring stuff. But I also think it is funny when some redditors blow up a short hedge fund for fun, and I don’t really think they should be banned or punished either. The redditors are playing an obvious silly game, in public, on Reddit, but the hedge funds are playing a game too, and they are grown-ups and know what they’re getting into.”
When coronavirus invaded their tiny apartment, children desperately tried to protect dad by Brittny Mejia in The Los Angeles Times
The L.A. Times’ Column One has been my reference for what moving storytelling looks like since it relaunched under Steve Padilla, the best writing coach there is, last year. It’s one of the reasons I’m a subscriber, despite the fact that I’ve only been to Los Angeles once.
I was floored by all the fine points that Brittny Mejia included in this story about the five-person Zubia family’s struggle with social distancing while living in a one-bedroom apartment together during the pandemic, a reflection on the overcrowded housing problem that mostly affects Black and Latino families in Los Angeles. From the kids’ childhood memories to the color of the walls to how the patriarch Jose listened to Los Bukis while working, every last detail works to move you to tears by the end.
Neville asked if the family had socially distanced. Joanna started to cry.
“We live in a small house. It’s hard,” Joanna replied. The ICU was the first time in her life she had her own room.
Emotions on strike by Sarah Jaffe in Dissent Magazine
I found this story through Hamna Zubair’s awesome Instagram account where she dissects interesting stories that she’s read. Here, Sarah Jaffe challenges the premise of Anne Helen Petersen’s book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Jaffe argues that Petersen’s book is largely about a white, millennial middle class, rather than the generation as a whole, frustrated by the fact that “they can’t have it all.” Jaffe, a seasoned labor reporter, argues that the issue of burnout isn’t a generational one in the way that Petersen frames it, but more so a result of capitalism, an increasing prevalence of jobs that require emotional labor, a need to impress on social media, and now a pandemic:
Burnout is not a problem we can individually solve. It is a symptom of the world we live in, which is set up to exhaust us to the point where we cannot resist. “There is no alternative” has gone from cry of triumph to grim promise. We are often too busy to fight. But in the streets last summer, when protests once again overflowed the boundaries placed by work and rules and even a pandemic to bring us together in outrage, we found something better and more meaningful than endless “doomscrolling” through Twitter as the bad news built.
“I Don’t See the Last Four Years as This Journalistic Anomaly”: An interview with NYT political reporter Astead Herndon by Aymann Ismail in Slate
I love a good interview with a journalist because it helps me in my own work, which is largely based on interviewing journalists. I especially appreciated Aymann Ismail’s question to Astead Herndon on whether or not he felt a particular pressure as a journalist of color during the Trump presidency:
I think of being a Black journalist as being pro-truth, pro-accountability and succeeding the tradition of Black journalists who have pushed the industry on what that looks like. Also, racism isn’t true. It’s false. And so as a journalist, it’s worth it to me to expose it as false, not as spite toward any one political actor. Trump certainly has changed the landscape, but my commitment to reporting does not change in a Biden era, because it’s not like a more norm-abiding president has any monopoly on facts. It obviously changes how we’re going to work, but my commitment to journalism will ground me much more than any type of resistance.
Why I separated my Indian identity from my Hindu identity by Dr. Mathangi Subramanian in Harper’s Bazaar
I really enjoyed this essay on how Mathangi Subramanian’s religious and ethnic identities were conflated in her early life, and how she separated them and evolved them in her adulthood. I’m always interested in how my generation is raising its children with religion, which is declining with young people in the United States, so the ways that Subramanian is incorporating Hinduism into her daughter’s life is a prime example (to me) of mindful parenting:
I consider myself Indian but not Hindu. My choice was made easier knowing that, after six years in India, Hinduism was no longer necessary for me to connect with the country that I love. I am particularly aware of this as I raise my daughter. In our house, being Indian is about reading picture books about Dalit hero Bhimrao Ambedkar or written by Adivasi author Mamang Dai. It is about rapping in Tamil to The Casteless Collective, a hip-hop group famous for critiquing the inequity of the caste system. It is about comparing the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil to the paintings of Frida Kahlo, my daughter’s current obsession. If my daughter wants to light diyas on Diwali or throw color on Holi, she has that choice. But when she talks about her Indian identity, Hinduism is secondary, not central.
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You’re welcome to write me back and let me know what you think of the stories and the newsletter, or even better: send me a story that you think I’d like.
Happy reading,
Hanaa’