By Mona Tailor, on Fri Nov 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET  It’s amazing to see how far women have come in the last century: voting rights, moving into the world of work, while balancing motherhood, and even running for the highest office in the land, President. We have such amazing figures to inspire us: Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Indira Gandhi, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice, just to name a few politically inspiring ones.
In Indian culture, similar to many Asian cultures, parents, especially fathers always want a son. A daughter also causes excitement, but there is always the underlying thought that the girl will eventually get married, and will have to leave her parents’ household and take her husband’s name.
 In Gujarat [the Indian state where my family originates] the woman takes her husband’s first name as her middle name and takes his last name. Any children born to them also share their father’s first name as their middle name. In essence, as a daughter the girl must listen to her father, and when she becomes a wife she must listen to her husband. In this culture and this setup, I come from a very remarkable group of women, who set their own rules.
My grandmother on my father’s side was a remarkable and strong woman. In 1933 when Mohandas Gandhi inspired Indians around the country to walk with him in the Salt March, my grandmother wanted to join their cause. Her mother-in-law was not happy with her decision, gravely concerned that she would ruin the family status and appearance in society by doing such a thing, threatening her to never return to the household. My grandmother stood her ground, she was part of the Salt March, and returned home to her family, regardless of what anyone thought. This was just one of her many strengths. After my grandfather died, she raised 5 children in rural India on her own, a remarkable feat on its own..
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Mona Tailor: Women’s Empowerment in the Hindu Culture
By Lisa Miller, on Wed Nov 9, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET “I am what they call me, a pirate, she mused. And several other things too, for have I not lived many lives in one? And known more than one man… her lips curled into a smile, remembering. I’ve taken what I wanted, but I’ve also done the best I could for those who depended on me. Some call me an ally and some think me a traitor because they do not understand that.”
(Grania: She King of the Irish Seas, Morgan Llywelyn)
 I devoured all of those 792 pages about the legendary Grace O’Malley this summer, because I needed to find my inner lady pirate.
Did it help?
Yup.
Dr. Deepak, founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, says that the need for archetypal role models are key in uncovering one’s hidden potential. Because archetypes offer profound wisdom across the ages, they typically represent strength and endurance in the face of struggle; define character traits in which we long to aspire; and they demonstrate the potential to live with a little more oomph.
A lot more oomph.
While I’m very happy in my marriage and don’t need more than one man (one is great, thanks), I was (am) exploring what it means to be, what my beloved female mentor, Rosalyn Bruyere, calls a “Goddess”, and what my young adult girlfriends call, “kick-ass.”
 Grace O'Malley And Grace O’Malley (Grania, in Ireland) delivers. She was a big specimen of female apparently–tall and strong with big thick hair, trousers, a hearty laugh and an appetite to match.
She learned to swim in order to avoid drowning at the hands of obnoxious village boys, and she learned to sail the world at the knee of her sea faring father. With work to be done on every expedition, she pulled her weight, literally, with hands raw and bloody along side every single sailor on every single voyage.
And years later, on her own ship when fire broke out on deck and relentless flames threatened to take her ship along with the lives of her crew, she beat back the firey rage over and over again with the only thing available in close proximity, her jerkin.
That’s old timey talk for “shirt off her backside.” Errr, frontside. So basically waist-up naked, she saved 40 men serving under her. That doesn’t sound right.
OR maybe it does.
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Lisa Miller — Sisters: Empower Your Inner Pirate
By Mona Tailor, on Thu Nov 3, 2011 at 9:30 AM ET For the 27 years of my life, I have been proud to call myself a Kentuckian and a Hindu.
My parents immigrated in 1980, and in a state that had never seen Indians before, it was not the easiest at times. I remember as a first grader in the early 1990s, when other kids foundout I was Indian, they would ask me what tribe, and start dancing around me in a tribal dance, placing their hands over their mouth and chanting the stereotypical Native American songs we had only seen in cartoons. However, if they did assume the right country, the next followup question would be “Do you eat monkey brains like they did in Indiana Jones [And the Temple of Doom]?”
As I became older and India and the Indians in the community became more recognized, I could see the difference. I did not get asked these silly questions anymore. They knew where India was and what I meant when I said I was Indian. These questions lead more into religion by this point when I got older. Thankfully my parents had shared a lot of Hinduism with me as I grew up, so I was no stranger to the topic. As a child we watched the Indian epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, which taught principles of Hinduism but also the right moral values we should have. I learned more about Hinduism from the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, a revered book of the Mahabharata where Lord Krishna speaks to Arjuna to encourage him to fight on the battlefield, which is just a larger metaphor for fighting in the battlefield of life.
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Mona Tailor: A Hindu Kentuckian’s Perspective on Senator Williams’ Comments
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Oct 31, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET
Louisville’s reputation outside Kentucky rests, in part, on baseball bats, fried chicken, Muhammad Ali, and a horse race, but now one must add the Festival of Faiths to that list.
There’s never been more of a cynical curmedgon than David Hawpe, the former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. So his glowing endorsement of this week’s upcoming 16th annual celebration of the Festival of Faiths is something for all to take notice.
Read Hawpe’s entire piece here.
This year’s event — entitled Sacred Air: Breath of Life — takes place from November 2nd – 7th, and it reaffirms our commitment to come together as many faiths, united in our mutual respect for each other, so that we can engage in common action on behalf of our community.
 The chair of the festivities, Christy Brown, is one of Kentucky’s greatest treasures. Recently widowed from her extraordinary husband Owsley Brown II (whom I briefly eulogized here), Christy has shared her heart, soul, and considerable talents transforming the Festival of Faiths into an internationally-celebrated event.
Both the Mrs. RP and I are proud to take part in the festivities.
 Lisa has helped organize a full day of Yoga, Tai Chi and Meditation exercise. A wide range of movement and breathing exercises will be available, suitable to every level from beginner to proficient, and appropriate for families as well as individuals. Classes will be offered continually throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday. For details, click here.
I will be joining a panel on Friday afternoon, from 3:00-4:30 PM in the Tavern Room at the Henry Clay at 604 South Third Street in Louisville. At this session, participants will be developing a Statement of Belief for the festival, in order to leave the week with a powerful call to action. The goal of the session is to come up with evidence of actions and steps to present to churches, synagogues, mosques, religious organizations, and other leadership bodies.
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The RP: Join Me at The Festival of Faiths
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Fri Oct 21, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET  The Arab Spring has led many commentators to ruminate upon the mixed blessings of democracy. As they asked when Hamas won the first free elections in Gaza, or when Hezbollah found itself in government in Lebanon, people today are asking, “Is democracy a good thing if people end up voting for extremists, or if they vote to crush the rights of minorities?” Ross Douthat, reflecting on the increasingly dire situation of Coptic Christians in Egypt, recently posed the question slightly differently, wondering whether the development of modern polities actually requires a kind of forced homogenization that comes at the expense of minorities.
Many if not all readers of this post likely agree that they prefer to live under a system of representative government based on democratic elections. Nevertheless, I wonder how many have taken seriously the structural problem of how democracy encouraging homogenization and its implications for the future. I have to admit it worries me more each day. My inspiration for such worry is not the impending presidential election (which gets more impending all the time as states fall over themselves to push their primaries back into 2011) but rather the approaching Election Day in my own back yard, Philadelphia. This year, as in 2007, the November Mayoral election is a complete afterthought, since it is obvious that Democratic incumbent Michael Nutter will sail to victory over the underfunded and barely noticed Republican challenger (and former Democrat) Karen Brown. The lack of excitement is even greater this time, since in 2007 at least the Democratic primary in May was a close-fought race among several viable candidates, whereas this year Nutter won the Democratic primary handily over token resistance. Then as now, however, commentators have to keep reminding themselves and their readers/listeners that Nutter has not officially been (re-) elected yet, even though there is no doubt.
 Mayor Michael Nutter My point here is not to attack Philadelphia (which I have come to like very much, as only the son of a different but eerily similar gritty post-industrial city) or Michael Nutter, who strikes me as an earnest and honest man. Nor is this a purely partisan complaint—I happen to agree with those Philadelphia Republicans who argue that their leadership is complicit in this situation. The problem is not that the Democrats will win in November. The problem is that, no one even pretends that the election will be competitive. I have seen this same development from the other side, when I lived in the lovely town of Greenville South Carolina, where all the action was in the Republican primary, while the general elections were a foregone conclusion. (That the one-party system was especially entrenched in Chicago, where I lived for the second through seventh years of the Reign of Richard II, goes without saying…)
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Ron Granieri: Democracy is for Losers…and That is a Good Thing
By Steven Schulman, on Tue Oct 18, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET  My team, beset by an epic collapse and management dysfunction, has me angry, depressed and sleepless. The seeds of this disappointment were sown when I lived in Boston, a recent college grad who stayed in the cradle of idle young men (a tradition that started with the Sons of Liberty, the first Bostonians with way too much time on their hands).
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had the good fortune to live in easy proximity of the leadership of the franchise that has so disappointed me this year. I watched faithfully as ownership built some great teams, and even though we both spent plenty of time at Fenway, I could not truly call those my own. It was only this year that I allowed myself to buy in fully, but given past performance, I should have known that heartbreak was more likely than a shower of Champagne.
 Our Entourage. From Top left, clockwise: The author's much better looking brother, the RP, the author, and Turtle I am, of course, talking about the recent disastrous performance of OVFTY Charts and my co-owner, The RP. Fantasy football is killing me. (Yes, I am also a Red Sox fan, but two World Series wins in the recent past has assuaged the pain of this year’s flop.)
While Jonathan and I have enjoyed Rotisserie league baseball as rivals over the course of 22 seasons, it was only his year that we decided to co-own a team. Because The RP has matched me with 6 titles in our Rotisserie league over its long history, I had high expectations. OK, so neither of us know anything about football, but how hard could it be for two men with absurdly expensive educations and penchants for obsession over the most trivial matters? (For Jonathan, politics; for me, Slovakian mud wrestling.)
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Steven Schulman: The Collapse of The RP
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Wed Sep 28, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET Last month I offered a meditation on sports in general and my devotion to the Buffalo Bills in particular under the motto, “Root for the Laundry.” In it, I emphasized that it is devotion to the team as symbol rather than any particular player that gives sports meaning, at least to me.
Well, the last month has been interesting. The Bills did not win that first preseason game against Chicago, which had inspired my post, and looked so awful in the second preseason game the following week in Denver that many professional observers (not to mention the self-flagellants within Bills Nation who populate most Internet discussion boards devoted to the team) concluded that this team was likely to be the worst in the NFL this year, if not in history. One columnist, seconded by a chorus of disappointed Buffalonians, called the Buffalo roster “a crumbling monument to neglect and bad personnel moves,” and predicted nothing good for the immediate future. Words such as “disaster” were thrown around, and cynics even claimed to espy a dark conspiracy of conscious destruction a la Major League, preparing the way for the team to move to Los Angeles or, worse, Toronto.
 Then, something happened. The last two preseason games turned out to be encouraging, which was nice, though skepticism reigned as the Bills approached their regular season opener in Kansas City. To the delighted shock of Bills fans, and the plain old shock of most other observers, however, the Bills crushed the defending AFC Western Division champions, 41-7, one of the most dominant opening day performances in the history of the Bills.
But wait, there is more. In the following week’s home opener at Ralph Wilson Stadium, the Bills fell behind 21-3 at halftime to the Oakland Raiders. The skeptics and naysayers claimed to have been right all along, and began listing the team’s many weaknesses. Then the second half began, and the Bills scored a touchdown, followed by another… then another. Indeed, in five-second half possessions, the Bills scored touchdowns on every one, playing enough defense to walk away with a stunning 38-35 victory, and the team’s first 2-0 start since 2008. Sprits were very high indeed on web sites such as twobillsdrive.com (the very best place to go for Bills news and conversation, period).
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Ron Granieri: Here’s to the Laundry… and the Guys in It
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET The media are full these days of stories discussing the relative value of education. Some detail the political fights in various states, such as Texas and California, over funding and control of state universities, while others discuss the failure of universities in general to educate “academically adrift” students, or the pernicious effects of the tenure system on higher education. Central to many of these discussions are attempts to evaluate education, or individual educators, on the basis of measurable quantities—student scores on standardized tests or average salaries upon graduation on the one hand, number of refereed publications or hours taught on the other.
Frankly, I find these discussions both depressing and unenlightening. Attempts to quantify the value of an education strike me as irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst.
 Part of my objection is practical. Any quantitative measure of education is susceptible to interpretation and manipulation (literally, if one follows the growing scandal in the Atlanta public schools over cheating on standardized tests). Even if honestly gathered, such data may still not tell us what we think we want to know. Do the GPAs or the starting salaries of graduates really tell us whether those graduates received good educations, or do they just tell us about the relative success of those graduates to manage the practical aspects of life? Should we be surprised that Engineering majors make more on average than English majors? Do the number of refereed publications or the numbers of credit hours taught tell us whether a professor is an effective educator?
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Ron Granieri: On the Tyranny of the Measurable
By Will Allison, on Thu Aug 18, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET I haven’t watched network TV in many years. I can’t stand pretty much any contemporary music act. I enjoy professional sports, but do not follow them, and always embarrass myself when I pretend that I do. However, I do faithfully watch a handful of cable television programs. Here they are, with some thoughts on each:
5. True Blood
As President Obama would say, let me be clear. This show is as dumb as a bag of hammers. I am dumber after I watch it. All of us are. The pilot episode offered the worst dialogue I had ever heard on a television show. The performances as a rule are unbelievably repetitive. A handful of the characters—including THE LEAD—are unusually annoying. When did Anna Paquin decide that every line should be served with three extra helpings of sass? And Tara, thanks, but if I wanted to be yelled at for an hour, I’d time travel back to Mrs. Phillips’ seventh grade math class.
This scene alone invoked three separate articles of the Geneva Conventions.
And yet…
OK, I confess. The damn show is entertaining. As dumb as it is, dumb also means I get to turn my brain off for an hour and watch vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, witches, whoknowswhathehellelse go at it. In bad Cajun accents. Usually, sans clothing. There are worse ways to spend an evening.
 4. Game Of Thrones
This series appeared at first to be a conventional medieval fantasy epic, told in the style of The Lord Of The Rings, pitting good against evil. It slowly revealed itself to be a far more complex piece of storytelling. The “good” guys in this tale often behave stupidly and are far too trusting of their enemies, not to mention the “neutral” parties of whom they assume good faith. The “bad” guys are regularly more successful because they do not slow themselves down with quaint notions of “honor”. They also may have more legitimate grievances than we are initially led to believe. The history of the world in which these people reside is slowly revealed to the audience. It is a world nowhere as simple as that depicted in The Lord Of The Rings, a world much more like our own, where nothing good is accomplished easily–if at all–and what “good” actually is becomes harder to define at each turn.
Exemplifying this outlook is the performance of Peter Dinklage, who has created the most fascinating supporting character on television since…Omar. He is The Imp, a little person living in a chaotic world ruled by “might is right”, and yet The Imp manages to slip through incredible dangers using his mental ingenuity alone. He is neither good nor bad, possessing no innate hostility towards perceived enemies, nor any frivolous notions of “honor” that would too firmly entrench him. The Imp has no problem helping strangers, and bets they’ll never realize how much more he needs them. He has only his wits, and his mouth. In a land where most have lost sight of what matters save some ancient moral code, the man with none may be the most moral of them all.
 3. Teen Mom
I generally detest reality television. I believe 99.9% of it is useless, vapid exhibitionism of the lowest order. I think anyone who would put themselves on a reality television program is very likely to have either some kind of severe personality disorder, or simply be un-hirable in any other occupation.
However…
Teen Mom is one of the most gripping and educational shows ever put on the screen. The show is pretty straightforward: let’s film the repercussions of some teenagers who got themselves pregnant. Let’s show what it’s like to be an 18 year-old girl with a 2 year-old boy. What happens when that girl wants to go out with her friends, but doesn’t have any time, because she has a 2 year-old boy, and doesn’t have any money, because she doesn’t have a job, because she can’t get a job, because she has to stay home to take care of the 2 year-old boy. And if she gets a job, it won’t be a good job, because she didn’t finish high school, and even if she did, she didn’t go to college, because she has a 2 year-old boy. And if she tries to go to college, then she’s being a bad mom, because she’s not devoting herself entirely to the 2 year-old boy, and eventually one of her parents will step in and fight for ownership of the 2 year-old boy. And God forbid she go and try to do what got her into this mess in the first place: fall in love. On Teen Mom, nothing is more dangerous than trying to have a life of your own. And that is what makes it truly compelling television, as well as essential life education. I wish it was shown in every middle and high school in America.
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Will Allison: Top Five TV Shows
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Wed Aug 17, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET After a four-month labor standoff, the NFL owners and players managed to agree to a new ten-year agreement that will guarantee the season will start on time. For me, that means the Buffalo Bills will open their 52nd season on September 11. In fact, as I finish this piece, the Bills are in Chicago getting ready for their first preseason game tonight. I can hardly wait.
Yes, I am excited to see the latest season of a team that finished 4-12 last year, and that has had one winning season (and two 8-8 records) since 2000.
The team that last went to the playoffs during the Clinton administration—only to be robbed of victory by a heartbreaking piece of semi-legal deception known to people outside of Western New York as “Home Run Throwback.”
[People in Western New York know it by a variety of other names, none of them suitable for this family website…]
 Scott Norwood, wide right Yes, the same team that went to four consecutive Super Bowls in the early 90s—losing the first one on an achingly close field goal attempt (videos of which I admit to watching many times, hoping for a different result), then the next three in different but equally painful manners.
But also the team that mounted the single greatest comeback in the history of the NFL, overcoming a thirty-two-point deficit in the second half of a 1993 playoff game.
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Ron Granieri: Root, Root for the Laundry — Confessions of an Ex-pat Bills Fan
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It’s amazing to see how far women have come in the last century: voting rights, moving into the world of work, while balancing motherhood, and even running for the highest office in the land, President. We have such amazing figures to inspire us: Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Indira Gandhi, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice, just to name a few politically inspiring ones. 
In Gujarat [the Indian state where my family originates] the woman takes her husband’s first name as her middle name and takes his last name. Any children born to them also share their father’s first name as their middle name. In essence, as a daughter the girl must listen to her father, and when she becomes a wife she must listen to her husband. In this culture and this setup, I come from a very remarkable group of women, who set their own rules.
