Immigrants in superhero movies tend to be cast as either criminals or local color, to give their metropoli grittiness and veracity. Aasif Mandvi’s pizzeria owner in Spiderman 2 existed for little reason but to reassure audiences that yes, this is New York.
The drunk superhero movie Hancock is no exception. Pritam Singh Biring plays the token […]

Greetings from Bury Park is journie Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir about growing up working class in Luton. Manzoor’s Pakistani father worked at the Vauxhall auto factory, his mother sewed piecework out of her living room, and Manzoor fled to college to avoid being stifled by his conservative father, ’six-foot-five and built like a brick house.’ Along […]

Congrats to Jenna Bush on getting married to the scion of the Haggar wrinkle-free pantaloon dynasty (

Sikh construction workers are actually a common sight in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn:

Pictured during one of my regular jaunts through Williamsburg… The boys with the black hats were on their way to temple which was just down the street, the boys working with the shovels were mixing concrete by hand, and laying bricks outside […]

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is apparently circulating photos of Barack Obama in Somali nomadic dress while visiting a Somali-inhabited part of Kenya. It’s the turban which they’re calling attention to, of course — because we all know turban means Muslim means terrorist. Hillary herself wore a hijab on a trip to Saudi Arabia, and Dubya and […]

I’m feelin’ Mandeep Sethi’s conscious, jazz-inspired hip-hop beats. Listen here: every track kills, but especially the gorgeous, downtempo ‘Blissful State of Anarchy’; ‘Jazzy Fresh’; and ‘Maybe Then.’ As a turbaned man, he’s got serious beef after 9/11. From ‘Place Where I Live’:
Yo, I feel the flava, I don’t think it feels me backIt’s kind of […]

The elegant San Jose gurdwara sits in the eastern hills overlooking Silicon Valley. The inside of its dome has only the ‘ik onkar’ symbol. It’s far less ornate than Italian churches:

I was served langar by an Ultrabrown reader

Waris Singh Ahluwalia is always searched, but it’s truly random

Rootsgear… which designs T-shirts with political and social messages and a hip-hop sensibility aimed at Punjabi Sikh youth, says its Facebook group helps the company stay connected to regulars in its ethnic community and the socially conscious rap scene… the page drives more traffic to Rootsgear… […]

Baroness Thatcher attended a wreath-laying ceremony today to honour Commonwealth soldiers killed fighting for Britain.
Lady Thatcher was a guest alongside the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres and foreign dignitaries at the event held ahead of Remembrance Sunday at the Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill, London.
The Gates were completed five years ago, in […]

Former U.S. ambassador to India Robert Blackwill visited a Delhi gurdwara in ‘01. He’s now flipped out the whirligig door to a cushy lobbying position in D.C.:

India, which has paid Barbour Griffith & Rogers $1.24 million since Mr. Blackwill began lobbying for it in late 2005, has hired him… to push for a nuclear deal […]

Evan Almighty sees a turbaned tech support guy and panics on an episode of The Office called ‘Email Surveillance’ (skip to 0:18):

The Canadian government backed down yesterday from banning immigrants named Singh or Kaur. The immigration service says providing an additional name is optional and blamed the lafda on a poorly-worded letter:

Asking applicants to provide a surname in addition to Singh or Kaur has… [reduced] incidents of mistaken identity. This was not a mandatory requirement.There is […]

A Canadian babu has just started unilaterally enforcing an obscure policy banning immigrants with the surnames Kaur or Singh. The bureaucrat wants Sikhs to pick more unique names. The government’s apparently never heard of assigning identification numbers:

Incognito

… a long-standing [Canadian] immigration policy… forces people with the surname Singh or Kaur to change their last […]