You guys probably know or can guess that I travel quite a bit for work. When you're the lonely business traveller, you end up spending a fair number of your jetlagged hours channel surfing the local TV. In between dubbed reruns of TJ Hooker in various languages, one ofthe things that's surprising me more and more is how much Desi culture I'm running into in random countries.
I was impressed, for ex., with the Desi quarter of Singapore (one of the cleanest cities in the world, and yet, Desi's have managed to make an entire street smell like Garam Masala ;-). But I think most folks generally expect to see (and smell?) the Desi presence there.
The spate of more surprising examples began about a year ago when I was in Stockholm and flipped out when I saw the video for Mundian To Bach Ke on Swede MTV.
A little over a month ago, I was in Amsterdam and Russell Peters was on TV (with Dutch subtitles). He appeared to be delivering his usual desi-themed material to a UK audience and the show was rebroadcast on a local TV station.
And now, I'm in Sao Paolo, Brazil and just a few minutes ago, a total 3rd tier ABCD movie - Bollywood/Hollywood was on the boob-tube complete with Portugese subtitles. The movie still sucked but it was sorta interesting to see a Brazilian announcer say something about the flick afterwards with a headshot of Lisa Ray in the corner of the screen.
