Since we are just days away from the anniversary of history’s worst industrial disaster, I thought it was important to highlight a couple of relevant articles on the subject starting with this excellent piece in The Tribune of India.

For many who survived the dark night of December 2-3, 1984, in Bhopal, dawn is yet to break. The leak of 40 tonnes of lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas from the Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide factory — the worst industrial disaster in history — killed or disabled several lakhs. By the third day of the disaster, around 8,000 had died. Today the number of those who died stands at 20,000. Lakhs who survived were debilitated for life. Of the 5,20,000 who were exposed to the poisonous gases, 1,20,000 remain chronically ill. Nor is that all; till today children in the city are born infirm and deformed.

Successive governments, Union Carbide Corporation and its new owner Dow Chemical shrugged off responsibility for the compensation and rehabilitation of victims. After years of legal wrangling for compensation, more than five-and-a-half lakh survivors of the tragedy are facing another threat. The hazardous waste, still lying abandoned at the site, is continuously seeping into the ground water.

With the scientific evidence of contamination in ground water increasing and spreading with every passing day, the wait for a sequel to the 1984 disaster has started.

20,000 dead and still no justice. It reveals a lot about the way the World works when you see what kind of justice is provided after a terrorist attack by comparison. Is there any new momentum gaining in an effort to bring help and closure for the continuing victims?

It seems the government [Indian], which has been criticised for its lax regulation of the UCC and reluctance to pursue legal claims, is finally ready to hold Dow Chemical, the multibillion chemical company which took over the UCC, liable for the ground contamination.

Vinuta Gopalan, a Greenpeace India campaigner associated with the Bhopal campaign, terms this a good sign, even though it has come quite late in the day. “But that is how governments work. There is a lack of political will to enforce corporate responsibility and Dow Chemical refuses to fulfil its medical and social responsibility. It is not a question of 1000 houses but of 25,000 persons who still do not have access to piped water. These days tankers supply water to some areas, but during summers and monsoons matters become worse.”

New Zealand censors have gone so far as to ban an American video game from being sold in that country. The offending game is called Postal 2: Share the Pain. “Postal,” of course is short for “going postal” which is a slang term refering to the murder sprees some U.S. Postal Service employees have gone on mostly in the 80s and 90s in the U.S. The Malaysia Star reports on the reasons behind the ban:

Chief censor Bill Hastings said the American game Postal 2: Share the Pain asked players to control a character who exposed his penis, urinated on, attacked and killed opposing groups including “angry parents protesting violent games, Arab terrorists, Catholics, Indian shop owners, gay men and other stereotyped minority and protest groups.”

But is the game any fun, and what’s this about an Indian shop owner? A review of the game found on PCGameworld sheds light on each question.

Ah, the Postal 2 demo has been released, all is well. I’ve been playing this demo a hell of a lot since its release and the one word review, is fun. The game seems to be designed to offend, which is actually a low point. Instead of satirizing life as it should be, it’s just some guys thinking: “If we let the player light women and cats on fire, someone will get pissed at us.”

… Racially, the game likes to make fun of the darker persuasion. Just take one step into Happy Ganesh, the convenience store and Postal dude asks if a Cow died in there. When you try to buy that milk you were pining for, the clerk tells you to go to the back of the line, you infidel.

You can uncover a more sinister plot involving a bunch of female characters that look suspiciously like the Taliban. A friend of mine who is Indian was brutally offended. He thought, we can make fun of Nazis because that happened so long ago, but an attack that happened a few years ago gets made fun of already since the people who attacked were already one of the most ridiculed groups of people in the country. I don’t share these views, but he has a point.

Whatever happened to the good old days when it was just about fending off space invaders?

The Times of India reports that U.S. pop singer Christina Aguilera will make her first-ever visit to India during the early weeks of December.

According to the story, Aguilera said, “India has always captured my imagination with its myriad cultures and spiritualism. I am looking forward to my visit with great enthusiasm to feel the color and vibrancy of this great country.”

Where does she plan to find such “color and vibrancy?” In Sahara Corporation’s planned tourist city of Amby Valley. The 234-acre destination outside of Lonavala includes golf courses, lakes, spas and dance clubs.

Sahara has hosted other celebrities in Amby Valley, such as actress Goldie Hawn and tennis pro Anna Kournikova. Aguilera and her family will be the company’s sponsored guest for three days, but the 23-year-old singer is not slated to perform during her stay.

In a reversal of travel protocol, the trip marks the first time that Indian residents are expected to receive vaccinations for a visit by an American traveler.

The Times of India: Christina to visit India

Relax. President of his incoming freshman class of Republican congressman only. Still, a very substantial honor. From NCMonline.com:

The new Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 109th Congress have elected Bobby Jindal, R-La., president of the freshman class by a unanimous vote.

According to the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, the 33-year-old “eager-beaver A student,” with “no significant opponents” to worry about, “spent much of the election season quietly getting a jump on everyone who actually did have to worry about getting elected.”

Jindal used allocated chunks of his $2-million war chest to help GOP candidates facing tougher races. In his most recent financial disclosure report, the Times-Picayune said, the Indian American donated $46,000 to other Republican candidates for House seats, $25,000 in “excess funds” to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and $750 to the National Rifle Association’s political action committee. Jindal estimates he donated or helped raise at least $150,000 for other GOP candidates, the newspaper said.

Very smart. He was thinking ahead by greasing the skids like a political pro. The Indian American Republican Council immediately issued a statement of congratulations:

The Indian American community is very proud of Bobby’s election to Congress and his election as President of the Freshman class. We know he will be a strong voice on fiscal matters and the moral issues facing our society today as he serves in Congress.

Looks like everyone is hopping on the “moral issues” bandwagon.

Can’t wait for Gotham Studios’ western-styled renditions of Indian epics? The classic graphic novels of comic book company Amar Chitra Katha are available for online purchase and reading, as reported earlier on BoingBoing.

Started in 1967 by editor Anant Pai and publisher G.L. Mirchandani, Amar Chitra Katha created 436 titles on Indian history, folklore, mythology and culture. At its peak, the company sold as many as 500,000 copies a week, and had their work translated into 18 languages, ranging from Hindi to Serbo-Croat.

Pai started the company after watching a children’s game show, where contestants “were well-versed with the lore of Tarzan and the exploits of Greek gods, but could not answer simple questions about the Ramayana.” Asia Society’s web site hosts a scanned version of that tale, which was one of Amar Chitra Katha’s first creations.

BoingBoing: Indian epic Ramayana as comic

Shailaja Neelakantan writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that student elections in India are a farm league for national campaign thuggery:

[S]tudent elections are seen as steppingstones to national politics, and therefore a route to wealth and power. Scores of important political figures, including Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former prime minister, got their start in university campaigns…

Mr. Rai’s death marked the climax of three and a half months of fear unleashed on Lucknow by members of various student groups, who defaced public property, extorted money from businessmen and doctors at gunpoint, and forced the university to shut down classes with threats of violence…

Many of these thugs become perennial students on the 10+ year plan:

Some Lucknow candidates have been at the university for as long as 13 years, earning not only bachelor’s but also numerous master’s degrees in order to continue their involvement in university politics while they wait to advance to the national level of their parties.

They’re generously funded by the national parties:

During the September elections, Mr. Khanna says, he saw student groups giving away mobile-phone cards, chocolates, and coupons for liquor, among other freebies. At Lucknow University, student leaders spent an estimated $444,000 on the elections this year. [Ed.: Yes, that’s in dollars.] “We don’t get money. We get support and nonmonetary resources to mobilize students…” He was evasive as to what he meant by nonmonetary resources.

In contrast, filmmaker Mani Ratnam lauded student activism in Yuva; his students were reformists leveraging a student campaign into a Lok Sabha seat.

Waris Singh Ahluwalia plays a henchman in oddball auteur Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Life Aquatic, with Bill Murray and Owen Wilson. Anderson also directed The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and Bottle Rocket.

Ahluwalia was last spotted in a recent Time Out fashion spread pimped out urbanwear and turban. He doffs the pug in one scene, but manages to preserve his manly modesty under a neoprene scuba suit (clip 1, clip 2).

It’s not clear whether this is the same Waris Singh Ahluwalia who reported a hate crime in NYC a few months after 9/11:

Four friends and myself walked into Joe’s Pizza on Carmine + Bleeker. About a minute after we arrived, a man standing a few feet away from me looked at me and said “You’re the perfect target.” He smiled as he said this… He walked by close, smiled and repeated the same thing- “You’re the perfect target.” Before he got to finish saying it he punched me in the face.

Ouch…

Also check out the Sikh couple in the ‘Welcome to Atlanta’ booty video by Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris:

 

Are these Sikh actors being used as silent, exotic henchmen? Probably. But any exposure in a non-bad guy role is a good thing.

Last week the NYTimes Business section went into details about self help guru Deepak Chopra’s effort to bring western style comic books to India.

The newly formed Gotham Studios Asia is a joint venture between the media company Intent, run by Mr. Chopra with Shekhar Kapur, the director of movies like “Bandit Queen” and “Elizabeth,” and Gotham Entertainment Group, South Asia’s biggest licensee for international comic magazines such as Marvel Enterprises, the publisher of “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” as well as DC Comics and Warner Brothers Worldwide Publishing.

Gotham Studios will offer an adaptation of “Spider-Man” [see previous SM post here] in which the hero is a young Indian named Pavitr Prabhakar, who is shown bouncing off rickshaws in a dhoti, a loose Indian garment. There will also be a comic-book version of “Ramayana,” an Indian tale about faith, loyalty and war, to be retold in a sweeping style reminiscent of the “Lord of the Rings.” The titles are to be released in the middle of next year.

Gotham Studios is one of many companies trying to take advantage of an expected boom in the sale of books and music in India, fueled by rising literacy rates and buying power and changing spending habits. India’s population of more than one billion is the youngest in the world. Projections are that, by 2015, India will have 550 million people under the age of 20.

Imagine edgy western style comic book art used to re-tell the Indian classics. Comic books don’t just have to be marketed to kids and teens either, but can be used as a way to reach a larger Indian population with social messages (such as the way Art Spiegalmen did with Maus). Whatever you think of Chopra’s self-help philosophies, this seems like a very profitable venture. I hope there is not to much cross-over with his other books and he can keep his characters from being too preachy.

Mr. Chopra will infuse spirituality and mysticism into the characters. For instance, in the Indian version, Spider-Man gains his powers from a mysterious yogi, not from a radioactive spider. Spider-Man’s enemy, the Green Goblin, is the reincarnation of an ancient Indian demon called a rakshasa. “The superheroes of tomorrow will be cross-cultural and will transcend nationalistic boundaries,” said Mr. Chopra, the chairman of the new company. His son, Gotham Chopra, who is the story editor of the comic book “Bulletproof Monk” and was executive producer of the movie version, will write many of the comics for Gotham Studios.

Who’s got the world’s longest constitution? Suketu Mehta claims in Maximum City that India’s #1. At approximately 500K words via a sophisticated algorithm known as Back-of-a-Napkin, that sounds about right: Indians took British bureaucracy, mixed in their dilatory sense of time, quasi-socialist ethos and love of jawboning, and inflated government like a puffed puri.

But Alabama is contesting the claim, with more than 740 amendments and 310K words. India’s constitution has fewer than 100 amendments. Anyone know for sure?

By the way, Alabamans may be the most amendment-happy people in the world, but they couldn’t find it in their strict constructionist souls to strike school segregation and poll taxes from their constitution earlier this month. For shame.

A transportation expert penned an op-ed in the NY Post yesterday bemoaning that New Delhi is more efficient at building subways than New York:

New York is talking - again - about starting work on the 8-mile Second Ave. line. It’s budgeted at $17 billion and scheduled to take up to 16 years to complete…

New Delhi started from scratch in 1998 and now has 13 miles of rail line up and running. The system is due to grow to 40 miles by next June, as workers complete their jobs three years ahead of schedule. The cost of all this: $2.3 billion…

In contrast to Delhi’s count-every-minute attitude, New York officials have talked about a Second Ave. subway since the 1920s… If New Delhi can do it, why can’t New York?

Why not, indeed. Cast off the bureaucratic habits of our former overlords, oh Yankees! Delhi’s subway was built five times faster at one-third the cost (buying power-adjusted), for a 15x improvement in bang for the rupee. Who’s the Mr. Laajawab behind this feat?

In glossy, hi-tech Bangalore, India's virtual bridge to the west, decidedly parochial sentiments are aflame. Kannada groups, concerned about the influx of Tamilians, are taking a hard line stand against films made in outsider languages. This includes movies in English or Hindi, India's two official languages. As a result, Veer-Zara, Bollywood's current megahit, cannot be shown.

Policemen are frisking ticket holders at the gates as a security measure in the wake of threats to disrupt the first screenings of the film in the city. The film has been screened in defiance of an unofficial moratorium ... on new films not made in Kannada, the language of Karnataka state. Police are taking no chances as the threat is real. [BBC]

Why don’t you EVER hear that? British accents are sexy but Indian ones for some reason aren’t. Humorist Melvin Durai writes a coulmn over at Indolink.com lamenting this unfairness:

The other day, my wife, a research scientist, returned home with a major finding, one that may soon be published in a scientific journal. “The Irish accent,” she announced, “has to be the sexiest in the world!” She had been listening to National Public Radio in her car and some Irishman had gotten her a little, shall we say, revved up. SheŽd been totally charmed, even without seeing his face, smelling his cologne, or exploring his views on politics, literature and the theory of evolution.

Needless to say, I was envious. IŽve always wanted to have that kind of effect on women. Just open my mouth and have them falling at my feet, begging me to say more. But as luck would have it, only one woman has ever fallen at my feet after I opened my mouth — and she was begging me to try a breath mint.

IŽve tried enchanting women with an accent, but the only accents that come naturally to me, the only accents I can pull off, havenŽt endeared me to a single woman, even when IŽve gone so far as to say, “Vat a lowely voman you are!”

If I were Irish, IŽd be sweeping women off their feet every chance I got: “Whart a lurvely worman ya arre!” Of course, IŽd save my best line for my wife: “Whart a sirksee marn ya mahreed!”

Melvin has an idea though of how to get mainstream America to grow to love the Indian accent.

… the Indian accent may not seem particularly sexy, but wait until NBC produces a reality show called “The Programmer.” Ten Indian computer experts compete for the chance to get a job at Microsoft, joining ten zillion others. Soon every woman would find her heart palpitating whenever she hears the words “softvare enjunyer.”

Ummm. I don’t really know how to explain this one so I am not going to even try. You gotta believe that there is a market for this. Right?

DESIGNERS of an Indian high tech crematorium have decided to screen funerals online so that people who can’t make the ceremony can watch it from the comfort of their own home.

The website will be called www.mokshadham.org [note: website is probably .com and not .org, and it isn’t up yet] which in Sanskrit means “abode of liberation”. Most Hindus believe that cremation brings liberation, mukti or moksha. Hence, the site where relatives are burnt is called a samadhi. Holy men, sadhus, may become liberated while they are still alive and so are buried, not burnt. Because of these considerations, Hindus rejoice at death and only the faithless mourn.

The site is expected to be live by June.

The NYT reviews Magic Seeds, V.S. Naipaul’s sequel to Half a Life. Naipaul’s protagonist Willie Chandran join a pointless communist group in India, a metaphor for the reign of Marxists in the author’s native Caribbean:

Willie is the latest exemplar of a type familiar to Naipaul’s readers: the fanatical idealist drawn to… “socialist mimicry.” Cheddi B. Jagan, the orthodox Marxist who rose to become prime minister of Guyana; Michael X, the black power leader who ends up a murderer in Trinidad… Naipaul is infuriated by their charade, the fraudulent progressive ideology that masks their will to power.

Chandran is eventually disabused of his fuzzy-minded notions. Naipaul also mocks hopes for a postracial society, and not gently:

Willie attends the wedding of the half-English son of Marcus, a West African diplomat “who lived for interracial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild.” The groom, Lyndhurst (“very English,” Roger comments dryly), is marrying a white woman, a union that will result in the culmination of Marcus’s dream. The wedding takes place at a grand house fallen into dereliction in the English countryside. A passage from Othello is read, an “Aruba-Curacao” band plays…. just as the mixed-race couple is about to exchange vows, one of the children they’ve had out of wedlock audibly passes gas, no one is certain which: “But the guests lined up [with political correctness] on this matter: the dark people thought the dark child” had done it; “the fair people thought it was the fair child.”

I'm guessing their subsequent flicks will be doomed to a mediocrity vs. their first movie - Reiter's Camera Phone Report: Indian student porn MMS video results in expulsions, cellular phone ban -

Two Indian students used a camera phone to film a short porn video, resulting in their expulsion and the banning of cellular phones, according to several media reports, including one in Sify News.

Two students in New Delhi -- a girl honor student and a boy from a wealthy family -- were expelled after they circulated their 2.37-minute film to other students.

This post is in honor of the busiest shopping day of the year. A fashion entrepreneur might do very well with a more desi-friendly Zara:

Zara is paradise for sexy men’s clothing. It’s my all-time favorite store…

• It’s one of the vanishingly scarce stores in America which do fall colors and deep jewel tones, like Indian formalwear, instead of those sickly pastels which look terrible on desis
• Its fabrics are beautifully textured, like sherwanis, so subtle details appear upon closer inspection
• It does dramatic tapered cuts rather than the shapeless American box cut; it’s the only non-designer store where I can get any semblance of a V-shape and waist…

The Economist compliments its speed:

Zara is the world’s fastest-growing retailer… Zara can make a new line from start to finish in three weeks, against an industry average of nine months. It produces 10,000 new designs each year; none stays in the stores for over a month…

Someone please clone this store, quick. The number of dark-haired people in the U.S. (black, Latino, Asian, desi) is enormous and growing. Zara with a more desi-friendly line and deeper supply chain could be an absolute gold mine…

Also focusing on the underserved dark-haired, olive-skinned market is fellow Berkeley grad Lubna Khalid’s startup, Real Cosmetics.

Continue reading…

The family of a late Himachal Pradeshi princess is not happy with her beneficence to her domestic help:

Raj Rajeshwari, 66, princess of Bilaspur in India’s Himachal Pradesh state, reportedly changed her will shortly before she died. She left about 25m rupees ($556,000) to a peanut-selling father and son who also worked as her domestic helpers.

“…cash, gems and jewellery, a car, Persian carpets and rare artefacts have been left to Babloo Gupta and Ram Bilas. The remaining half of the property has been handed over to a trust of the Himachal Pradesh government to open an old people’s home.”… The princess’ brother is furious, accusing the beneficiaries of drugging her to change the will…

The reclusive, unmarried princess changed her will the day before she died. Is there substance to her family’s claim? Her sister-in-law says:

“They attempted to kill her by an overdose of alprex (sleeping pills) three years ago and have indulged in foul play again.”

CSI:HP is on the case. Results are due back Wednesday at 8/7 Central.

I thought since its Thanksgiving why not do a small survey of what is being eaten in Desi kitchens. Growing up in my house we usually ate traditional Lasangna or some equally rebellious dish. I have always been a bit of a Grinch when it comes to the holidays so I don’t care about corporate America’s traditions. From the Portsmouth Herald:

Turkey Tandoori, anyone? Well, not exactly, but Gill Varinder, manager of Shalimar Restaurant, said that some of his native India makes it to his Thanksgiving meal.

“We do celebrate Thanksgiving. All the Indians here have for a long time. Mostly they will cook the turkey like everyone else does, but the stuffing is different. Ninety percent of the time, the stuffing is made with spinach and green peas.”

Varinder said that, while a turkey can be cooked in a traditional Tandoori oven, it would take a very long time, and on the Indian table garlic is a big ingredient for the turkey.

“We slice the skin and put garlic under it. Our gravy is a bit different, too. We take about 5 pounds of fresh lamb and cook it with onions, ginger, garlic, cumin and tumeric, and cook it down for three or four hours until it’s very thick and dark brown.”

What else is different and what’s the same on the Indian table?

“We don’t have much pie, but the side dishes are usually the same as the regular dinner. We have mashed potatoes but also some rice and chapatti (whole-wheat flat bread). And we drink scotch.”

Mashed potatoes and scotch. Some things on the Thanksgiving table transcend cultures.

I just finished watching tonight's episode of the West Wing on NBC. Maybe it is John Wells (the producer of ER and The West Wing), or maybe NBC has simply discovered the Desi market in the U.S., b/c this episode of The West Wing featured who I thought was Pragna Desai (she starred in ER's episodes based in the Congo and The Ben Affleck flop The Sum of All Fears) as Leo McGarry's nurse.

In the episode, Leo has lost his appetite, and Desai, as his nurse--ok, so we still only play health care professionals (but it is a start!)--uses Indian food and her good looks to charm McGarry into eating.

Is a South Asian woman, dressed in her wedding best and bearing Indian food better than certain illicit substances at giving people the munchies?

Also interesting was some of the dialogue between Desai and McGarry. In the episode, McGarry was considering joining the board of some sort of corporate chemical company. The company seemed quite similar to Union Carbide, because at one point McGarry asked Desai if she was from Haryana, and that that the company was trying to make up for all of the damage it had done there in 1986. Perhaps this was a reference to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal in 1984, and the upcoming 20th anniversary of this tragedy on December 3. The issue of a name-change was also discussed, a la Union Carbide to Dow Chemicals.

What is up with alluring South Asian men lately? Apparently, famous women can’t resist them! ;) First Liz Hurley and Arun Nayyar, now this?

From “stuff”?

We could spend the whole column this week trying to untangle the web of intrigue surrounding Imran Khan, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Jemima Khan, her children and Hugh Grant.

…The story so far has the sprightly sexagenarian Goldie doing a runner from California to be at Imran’s side at a get-together in India, where “friends” say they were very pleased to see each other. New Idea tells us Goldie has become obsessed with Imran since meeting him two months ago. One witness was “amazed” at the display of affection.

Back in California Kurt is telling friends he thinks Imran is a bit of a dog and that Goldie is “kidding herself” if she thinks Imran is serious.

Since we were just discussing the merits (or absurdity) of Brad Pitt in a movie about the life of the Buddha, I thought it would be appropriate to point out Halle Berry’s upcoming role as “Vanita Gupta.” From Apunkachoice.com:

Academy Award winner Halle Berry is likely to play the role of an India-born law graduate in America, Vanita Gupta, whose campaign helped overturning the judicial ruling in one of the biggest drug bust cases in the US.

Vanita Gupta is like the Erin Brockovich for the colored people in the Texas town of Tulia where 10 percent of its African-American population was arrested in a drug bust case in 1999, based on the sole testimony of under-cover narcotics agent Thomas Coleman, who was also a Ku Klux Klan member.

Halle Berry portraying an Indian woman, though? Well a short haired Halle does look a little like Arundhati Roy doesn’t she? Well…the face at least. I am quite sure their bodies aren’t as similar.

American reality shows involve marrying off little people and eating offal.

Indian reality shows focus on finding “India’s smartest kid”.

No, no stereotypes anywhere… ;)

A 12-year-old boy from India’s poorest and most lawless state, Bihar, is celebrating being named India smartest kid after winning a nationally televised quiz.

Subham Prakhar won the title of “India’s Child Genius” after several rounds of stiff competition between some 16,000 schoolchildren.

Both of his parents are currently unemployed and Subham had to depend on generous relatives and the internet to gain access to the books he needed to prepare for the competition.

Finding India’s child genius required quite a process: 16,000 students, aged 10-13 (who had done well in the past two academic years), telephone interviews, tests, ten months, 27 episodes, countless smacks upside a sleepy child’s head if they weren’t studying hard enough… ;)

All in the pursuit of a glass trophy, an Encyclopedia Brittanica CD, some pens and a cash prize of one meeel-ion rupees. bragging rights for the parents of the winner: priceless.

As a follow up to this post I wrote a while back, I point SM readers to an article in The Christian Science Monitor that looks into the emerging use of a mixture of English and Hindi (Hinglish) in India:

Turn on any Indian television station these days and you're likely to hear things like "Hungry kya?" and "What your bahana is?"

Or one of your friends might ask you to "pre-pone" your dinner plans or accuse you of "Eve-teasing."

No, you didn't mishear them. These and countless other new words and phrases are part of the fastest-growing language in the country: Hinglish.

The mix of Hindi and English is the language of the street and the college campus, and its sound sets many parents' teeth on edge. It's a bridge between two cultures that has become an island of its own, a distinct hybrid culture for people who aspire to make it rich abroad without sacrificing the sassiness of the mother tongue. And it may soon claim more native speakers worldwide than English.

Once, Indians would ridicule the jumbled language of their expatriate cousins, the so-called ABCDs - or the American-Born Confused Desi. (Desi means countryman.) Now that jumble is hip, and turning up in the oddest places, from television ads to taxicabs, and even hit movies, such as "Bend it Like Beckham" or "Monsoon Wedding."

But Hinglish isn't just a language spoken between the younger generation or amongst the rich elite who want to come across as more "western." It is now being used extensively in marketing campaigns by large corporations.

Aishwarya Rai may play Buddha’s wife in a biopic coinciding with the 2,550th birthday of the Gautama. The film’s backers have signed up Shekhar Kapoor and should find it easy to recruit Hollywood stars who dabble in Buddhism.

The chance to play opposite Aish would turn me into a monk any day, but there’s a catch:

Buddha’s wife Yashodhara became a Buddhist monk soon after Buddha’s enlightenment… Gautam Buddha… was married to Yashodhara at the age of 16 and he left the palace soon after the birth of his son Rahul… Yashodhara became a nun when Buddha turned 36.

Buddha turning Aishwarya celibate? Methinks I’ve figured out who’s really holding the cards.

Sepia Mutiny's favorite Desi Playboy never ceases to amaze. His movie "One Dollar Curry" opened up this week in Paris to pretty flattering coverage - Sify reports & graciously links back to Sepia Mutiny

"One Dollar Curry" by France-based Indian filmmaker, journalist and writer Vijay Singh takes a comic look at tolerance while lifting the curtain on an exotic side of the French capital unknown to many visitors.

... "One Dollar Curry" is set in the French capital's well-established home of immigrants from the subcontinent, the 10th district on the northern side, packed with grocery stores, restaurants, clothing stores and video rentals with cheap "phone home" facilities, bringing colour and exotic spicy smells to the grey streets.

Its star however is Vikram Chatwal, a New Yorker whose family runs a chain of hotels and restaurants in the United States.

He plays Nishan, a young Sikh political refugee who hawks curry from a cart in the streets but claims to be related to a line of chefs who cooked for the great names of the world from the Moghul emperors to Winston Churchill and Michael Jackson.

Word on the street is that Chatwal extensively researched the role by dismissing the maid for an evening and doing his own dishes before going to bed.

The Times of India has more.

Previous SM coverage on Chatwal - One More Dream for Chatwal and ON the Trail of Vikram Chatwal

(via Madhoo) Arundhati Roy, faithfully carried by Al Jazeera -

Award-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who will be presented this week with an Australian peace prize, has defended her views that people should join what she calls the Iraqi resistance.

...In a television programme screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) last month, she called on people to "become the Iraqi resistance".

...She said activists and resistance movements "need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance".

Of course, Roy's support is merely emotional, she certainly didn't mean to incite violence -

[I]wasn't urging them to join the army, but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation," she said, adding that the term resistance needed to be redefined.

"We can't assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation," she said.

Sigh.

Lately, lighthearted stories about single urban chicks looking for love in a world of noncommittal guys flood our newsstands, televisions, and Cineplex screens. EASY confidently rises above the ranks of these romantic comedies, offering a less glossy, more penetrating vision of lovelorn life. Jamie Harris, portrayed with sparkling intelligence by actress Marguerite Moreau, is a neurotic, bright 25-year-old with a career naming peculiar consumer products. Though she gives them their identities, she’s rather confused about her own. After dating a string of jerks, she’s bewildered about whom to trust or how to find true intimacy. When two seemingly honorable men orbit around her, Jamie must confront what she is most afraid of. As in Shakespearean comedies, writer/director Jane Weinstock’s playful, nuanced script adroitly tosses competing desires up in the air, offering audiences the delicious pleasure of watching characters squirm and wriggle before everything falls into place.

…Marguerite Moreau (“Runaway Jury”) portrays the irresistible Jamie Harris. Naveen Andrews (“The English Patient”) is John, a sexy, sensitive and brilliant Anglo-Indian poet.

…The Production Designer was Aradhana Seth (“The Guru”)

After viewing the clips it looks like the movie has some potential. But then again I am a sucker for movies about angst ridden urban chicks.

The full trailer can be seen here.

The NYT on desis in Trinidad:

When slavery was abolished on the island in the 1830’s, the planters looked to India for workers, and the first ship, bearing more than 200 Indian indentured servants, arrived in May 1845. Over the next 75 years, some 143,000 Indians came to Trinidad, mostly from Calcutta, and mostly Hindu.

On one man’s struggles in the name of religion:

The Waterloo Temple was first built near the coast in 1947 by a devout laborer named Seedas Sadhu. Problem was, he didn’t own the land, so the bulldozers rolled in to level his creation. Undaunted, he commenced a 25-year project of hauling rocks and concrete several dozen yards offshore at low tide; there he single-mindedly set about constructing his own island where a new temple could stand unmolested… the Trinidad government commissioned a more permanent artificial island, connecting it to the mainland by a pedestrian causeway.

Seeda-sadhu is an ideal name for a priest. But since his artificial island was constantly eroding, maybe it should’ve been Sisyphus. Another devotee built a supersized statue of the monkey-king to rival the Bamiyan Buddhas:

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Indus Valley Civilization, came across this passage, and couldn't help but think about how much we've regressed -

A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture is evident in the Indus Valley civilization. The quality of municipal town planning suggests knowledge of urban planning and efficient municipal governments which placed a high priority on hygiene. The streets of major cities such as Mohenjo-daro or Harappa were laid out in a perfect grid pattern, comparable to that of present day New York. The houses were protected from noise, odors, and thieves.

(reading the encyclopedia? I think we've firmly established that I'm a dork)

Whatever. All of us guys are thinking it. Beyonce is pretty fly. You always wonder if its a combination of proper eating and working out or what. Well here is some insight for you.

Beyonce and other celebs tucked in at a party in the US - to a curry flown 3,000 miles from a village takeaway in Surrey.

The Sun says it cost £4,000 to treat her and other guests to the spicy British Indian takeaway.

The tab was picked up by Virgin Records boss Tony Matthews.

He had got his people to track down the tasty kormas he had enjoyed eight years before.

Tony, 40, tells the paper: “Takeaways in New York are not so great so I flew a proper British curry over.

I still think the best place to eat in NYC is at Kati Roll at 3a.m.

Star NFL running back Ricky Williams shocked his Miami Dolphins teammates and sent several fantasy football owners into convulsions when he abruptly announced his retirement before the NFL season this summer, at the tender age of 27. Ricky is known to suffer from a sort of anxiety disorder and describes himself as very shy. He used to do interviews with his helmet on sometimes. He is also known for his love of marijuana which is what first got him in trouble with the NFL and was going to get him suspended. He has hinted in recent months that he regrets his decision and would like to return to the NFL. He thinks he might like to play in the Bay Area (Oakland specifically), because to paraphrase, weirdness is accepted out there. But what has Ricky been up to lately? From SFGate.com:

He’s no longer Ricky Williams the football player. He plans to become Ricky Williams the holistic healer.

It’s been more than 10 months since Williams, one of the premier running backs in the National Football League, last ran off tackle for the Miami Dolphins and four months since he suddenly announced his retirement at age 27.

Then he dropped from sight. But now Williams has turned up about as far away from professional football as you can get, as a student of the ancient Indian medical system known as Ayurveda. In the Sierra foothills, no less.

“I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate,” he said, “and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.”

Sweet. He’s traded in one set of herbs for another. Or more likely he now uses both kinds. I am actually afraid that Ricky will fall into the hands of one of my fantasy football opponents now should he make his way back to football. A spiritually centered Ricky could be devastating on the gridiron.

“Ayurveda deals with using your environment to put yourself in balance,” he said. “I’ve realized, both on a psychological and physical level, that the things we do in football don’t bring more harmony to your life. They just bring more disharmony.”

Update: Here is where Ricky is studying- The California College of Ayurveda in Grass Valley

Back from a blogging break and I see that Anna, Sajit, newcomer Apul & the other mutineers have been doing a fabulous job keeping SM interesting & sparkling with life.

It almost hurts to post about a subject as dry as the Indian tax code but hopefully there are other econo-geeks out there who might find this succinct article pretty interesting - Project Syndicate

India illustrates the importance of a well-designed tax system. In Bangalore, high-tech companies have built world-class campuses replete with manicured lawns and high-speed data communication networks. Outside these campuses, however, lie open sewers, uncollected garbage, and roads in acute disrepair. Whereas technology companies instantaneously transmit terabytes of data to remote continents, local transport proceeds at an almost medieval pace.

...India's financial difficulties stem from a badly designed and administered tax system. Rates and rules for personal and corporate income taxes appear reasonable by international standards. Nonetheless, India's government collects income taxes amounting to only about 3.7% of GDP, about half that in South Korea and the other Asian tigers.

Why? Insane levels of corruption... read on for the details.

Microsoft’s newest certified professional is an 8 year old Indian kid. From Channel News Asia:

An 8-year-old boy in India has established himself as the youngest ever certified computer professional. This, despite being born with a severe physical deformity.

Channel NewsAsia’s Atul Jolly caught up with the amazing whiz kid. Mridul Seth is the youngest ever Microsoft-certified computer professional in the world. It’s equivalent to a degree obtained after sitting for an Engineering exam.

All this, at the age of 8.

This news actually comes to Sepia Mutiny at the most opportune of times. We were looking to add another writer to our blog. But, does Mridul have what it takes?

He cannot speak properly, but that has never stopped him from mastering computers.

He became an expert in HTML, Photoshop and Windows before he was 6.

Yeah. I think he’ll fit right in here.

Let the wifeswapping and casual encounters begin!

The New York Times is running an interesting series entitled "the Next Wave on what they call, "the transplanted New Yorker." Profiling the stories of 10 different transplants, obviously one had to be brown.

The brown portrait was written by photographer Sanjna Singh, who writes about the voyage she made one summer from her home on the Upper East Side to the man-made India in the Jackson Heights section of Queens. Sanjna's portrait is interesting as it contrasts the modernity, if you can call it that, of Indians living in India to the self-made constraints of tradition that many immigrants from South Asia bring with them into the diaspora. Sanjna, who immigrated to New York from New Delhi about eight years ago, labels her reaction to this phenomenon aptly, as "being in the grip of a bizarre reverse culture-shock."

She notes later,

"here in New York, I didn't think of myself as an immigrant, because for me, the door leading back to Delhi seemed wide open, and I could return anytime I chose. Yet as I entered my eighth year in America, I was forced to recognize that this open door grew more illusory with each passing year. As I drifted further from my own country, I started to feel the need to grant space to my Indian self, right here, in New York."

It’s our favorite scheme by a racist diamond magnate to civilize the natives by re-educating them in jolly old England! Three desis are Rhodes Scholars this year:

Mylavarapu is an ex-debater. Word.

Although technology drives history (fire, metal, stirrups, guns, electricity, airplanes, computers…), technologists are usually excluded. I’m not bitter, really.

Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids, a documentary about children of prostitutes in Kolkata who try to start a new life, has been shortlisted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the contenders for the best documentary feature Oscar, according to rediff.com

A portrait of several children who live in the red light district of Kolkata where their mothers are prostitutes, Born Into Brothels, celebrates New York-based photojournalist Briski's efforts to change the lives of the youngsters. She gave them cameras and taught them how to take pictures, leading them to look at their world with new and hopeful eyes.

Water is becoming increasingly scarce, all over the world. In India, perhaps fewer than a third of all Indians have access to "decent sanitation and high quality drinking water." (See V's earlier post on the subject) Nor is this just an Indian problem. Some of Australia's biggest cities, for example, may run dry in just a few years, perhaps as early as 2006.

What is to be done? Well, there is the ancient vedic practice of Shivambu or Amaroli, but despite Morarji Desai's best efforts, drinking one's own urine has not(ahem) gone down well amongst the general population.

But don't despair. In Singapore, they have harnessed the braininess of Brown scientists in the US to produce NEWater!

NEWater is the product of Singapore's new water-treatment system, and it is wastewater that has been purified through advanced synthetic membranes called ZeeWeed. That's right: The crystal-clear NEWater that gushes through the country's faucets isn't gurgling from a mountain spring. Most recently, it was flushed from a toilet. [Salon.com]

This process is the brainchild of Ashok Gadgil:

In December 1992, an outbreak of a new and dangerous strain of cholera began in southeastern India. Within months it had spread into neighboring countries, killing up to 10,000 people. The tragedy inspired Ashok Gadgil, an Indian-born scientist working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, to look for a new way to purify drinking water. Using science no more complex than the ultraviolet light emitted by an unshielded fluorescent lamp, he built a simple, effective, and inexpensive water disinfection system. Dozens of these systems are now installed around the world.

"At the bare bones, using the simplest engineering, we could disinfect water for half a cent per ton. That's shockingly cheap. You could disinfect water for one person, a full year's drinking supply, for a couple of cents."

Goddess bless Nirali Magazine, for being so gosh-darned entertainin’. You MUST peep this excerpt from the excellent website’s interview with our favourite female reality show reject— it seems that Julie Ann Titus of America’s Next Top Model fame has some memorable opinions on certain fashion designers:

You said you specifically want to do men’s apparel. Why?

Everybody goes so crazy with women’s clothes—it’s not even fashion anymore, it’s costume. I just think guys look better in their clothes. My dad always dressed up in really nice suits for work. I thought, guys should wear suits all the time. And I want to incorporate Indian style, too. I was so excited when I met designer Anand Jon on the show.

What was that experience like?

I saw him walk into the room, and I went crazy. I mean, I’ve studied his work. But he was an interesting character. I wouldn’t want to hang out with him, that’s for sure.

Why not?

I respect him as a fashion designer. But he was very, very rude to some of the girls. He seemed so boring to me. I asked him what part of India he was from, and he asked me, what part of India are you from? So I said I’m from Kerala, and he looked at me kind of crazy. He’s Malayalee, too. He asked me if I knew any Malayalam, and I said I only knew the bad words. Then he says, “Shouldn’t you be serving us or something?” [Titus and the other cast members had to serve four of the girls who won that week’s model challenge.] So I walked away, cursing at him in Malayalam. He said, “Oh, so now you know it?” And he smelled bad. The girls looked at me and were like, are all Indian guys like this? And I was like, nope, just this fool right here. Later, my parents told me that they know him through family friends.

Among Bollythemed entertainment, Bombay Dreams on Broadway and Bride and Prejudice in the UK have both trended sharply downward after strong openings. Two other desi (but not Bollywood) projects, Vanity Fair and Harold and Kumar, also did weak box office.

It’s tempting to conclude from the business torpor that America is not yet ready for desi culture, that the existing revenues reflect mainly interest from niche, culture-sampling subcultures. But take a look at it from the perspective of the ‘big bang’ launch: the $1B marketing campaign for the presidency, the $250M spent on the Windows 95 launch and so on. Creating a market via customer education is far more expensive and time-consuming than just selling into existing positioning slots (Spiderman 2). The former is a long-term campaign, while the latter is straightforward, tactical awareness-raising: hit the magic 7+ impressions per customer, and you’ll get higher sales.

I’m pretty sure fusion desi culture in the U.S. is not a fad. It’s a strong subculture with intense palettes, a supporting South Asian American population and rising awareness. So each desi cultural product, no matter how it performs, is also an in-kind contribution to the ‘big bang’ launch for Desis in America. This launch is being done in pieces, as befits a small, innovative product growing organically. The endgame is probably similar to the awareness and saturation of desi subcultures of the UK or Canada, albeit more dilute.

So while Meera or Mira or Gurinder or Kal may be nibbling discontentedly on their numbers, they can take some consolation in their contributions to a larger campaign, no matter how unintentional.

I didn’t realize this but apparently even the U.N. has a union. Specifically the U.N. Staff Union. Yahoo News is reporting that the UN staff are preparing to cast a historic no-confidence vote against Nobel Prize winner and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

UN staff are expected to make an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Secretary-General Kofi Annan, union sources say, after a series of scandals tainted his term in charge of the world body. The UN staff union, in what officials said was the first vote of its kind in the almost 60-year history of the United Nations, was set to approve a resolution withdrawing support for Annan and senior UN management. Annan has been in the line of fire over a series of scandals including controversy about a UN aid program that investigators say allowed deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to embezzle billions of dollars.

Okay, but this kind of news will eventually be found all over the mainstream press. Why are we reporting it? Well apparently the oil for food scandal wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Staffers said the trigger for the no-confidence measure was an announcement this week that Annan had pardoned the UN’s top oversight official, who was facing allegations of favouritism and sexual harassment.

The union had requested a formal probe into the official, Dileep Nair, after employees accused him of harassing staff and violating UN rules on the hiring and promotion of workers.

Dileep Nair is an official from Singapore who denies any wrongdoing of course. The U.N. workers aren’t buying it though, and haven’t forgotten previous things they were upset about.

On June 29, 1792, Neelkanth begins his journey of awakening. Having resolved to embrace the challenges of nature, he leaves his home in the city of Ayodhya. Neelkanth walks alone into the cold stormy night, wearing nothing over his shoulders or under his feet, carrying nothing - no maps, no money, no food - except inner courage, confidence and a silent spiritual strength. At the Saryu River, he enters the cold, raging current. Neelkanth is swept away, leaving behind all that was familiar.

Neelkanth’s footprints begin to map the length and breadth of India - its dense jungles, fertile plains, majestic mountains, mighty rivers, and peaceful coastlines. Flourishing for more than 8,000 years, this land has been home to an ancient and highly advanced civilization. Neelkanth’s walk would last for 7 years, 12,000 kilometers, covering every corner of India.

I note with interest that the filmmakers have decided upon Ayodhya, which is at the center of all kinds of contemporary bloodshed, as the town where this young yogi comes from. Will the film try to be objective and promote unity, or will it stress the “Hinduness” of India instead of it’s diversity? The film is being produced by BAPS:

BAPS [Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha], an international NGO, has a rich experience of presenting Indian culture to over 55 million people worldwide through its 9 cultural festivals and 3 permanent exhibitions at Akshardham –Gandhinagar and Shri Swaminarayan Temple - London and Nairobi. As part of its continuing activities, In early 2001, BAPS decided to make a film that would show the true wealth of India – its culture, its heritage and its wisdom. To make the film more interesting and take the audience into it with a story, it was decided to present India through a unique inspiring person – Neelkanth. This would give the opportunity to present a docu-drama rather than a documentary.

As all IMAX movies, this one promises to be visually stunning. A preview of the film can be viewed here (although the link seems to be temporarily down).

CNN is running a new series of humorous ads, one of which features medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta unintentionally distracting a female viewer.

In light of the recent brouhaha surrounding Terrell Owens' skit on ABC's "Monday Night Football," this inter-racial coupling is sure to ruffle some feathers. The sexually-charged tone of the ad alone should raise the ire of FCC dick-tator Michael Powell. Fallout will soon commence.

Is this my lame attempt at creating controversy where none exists? Is the title of this post outrageously misleading? The answer to both questions: yes (head pointed downward in dirty, dirty shame).

One thing's for sure — the pro-Sanjays lobby over at Mahoot will be quite pleased.

The page that hosts the ad uses one of those unfriendly Flash interfaces, so there isn't a direct link to the video. You'll have to skip past the intro, and then possibly click around a bit. Also, Anderson Cooper's ad includes a brief mention of India.

CNN: Lou Dobbs and Dr. Sanjay Gupta TV Ad

Just in time for the PM’s visit, it’s “No globes for you”!

From Yahoo! India News :

New Delhi, Nov. 10 (ANI): The Delhi High Court today put an interim ban on the import and marketing of Chinese-made toy globes in India, saying that they incorrectly represented the country’s map by not showing Jammu and Kashmir as part of its territory.

A Bench comprising Chief Justice B.C. Patel and Justice B.D. Ahmed directed the government not to permit the circulation of Chinese-made globes in the market.

Yes, but can I buy one on EBay now? Should I? or does it not work like that? ;)

Rediff.com is reporting today that film distributor Miramax has postponed the U.S. release of Gurinder Chadha's "Bride and Prejudice."

The film is now scheduled to open during the second week of February, moving from its original release date on Christmas. The change is bad news for the film, because it essentially pulls it out of contention for most major awards.

On the bright side of things, the postponement offers potential viewers an extra couple of months to read the film's source material, Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." For some of us, it provides an extra two months to think about maybe buying the Cliff Notes, but eventually relenting to a similarly-priced bottle of Thunderbird.

Rediff.com: Bride and Prejudice's U.S. Release Postponed
Sepia Mutiny: The New York Times on Bride and Prejudice

That is thankfully not the name of a new Hollywood movie. Prince Charles it seems has taken exception to the Blair government’s praise of the Indian and Chinese education systems. Specifically, Gordon Brown who is Blair’s Finance Minister, said last week:

“Within a decade, five million US and European jobs could be outsourced. And all the time China and India are upgrading their [IT] and science skills. They are producing 125,000 computer science graduates a year, and the UK [is producing] only 5,000,” Brown said.

Just last week the government agency e-Skills UK criticised the IT training industry for being unequal to the task of filling the UK technology skills gap.

Brown added that to “fail to confront or complacently side-step” global competition would cause the UK to be left behind.

In response,

Britain’s philosopher-Prince Charles has hit out at the Blair government’s envious warning refrain on the sheer volume and calibre of India’s academic successes, by accusing educationists of seeking to turn students into “better robots”.

All we are sayyyyying…is give peas a chance:

A thousand Indian troops withdrew from the disputed territory of Kashmir yesterday in a goodwill gesture aimed at fostering a new peace in the province.

The move was timed to coincide with a visit to Kashmir by Dr Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, and is the latest in a series of confidence-building initiatives between India and Pakistan.

Through a bullet-proof screen in Srinagar, India’s PM stated that he “extended the hand of friendship” to Pakistan.

…Last month Pakistan’s president Gen Pervaiz Musharraf seized the initiative on Kashmir by floating a plan to divide and demilitarise the region, calling on both sides to take radical steps towards a settlement.

Initially India responded coolly, but has reciprocated in kind with a symbolic reduction in troop numbers.

via the telegraph

Psychiatrist and actor Reef Karim, who stars in CourtTV’s “House of Clues,” has landed on People Magazine’s annual list of “Sexiest Men Alive.”

Karim recently co-starred in the desi film, “Flavors,” and is an addiction specialist at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He also makes expert appearances on VH1’s “The Love Lounge,” MTV’s “Loveline,” and NBC’s “The Today Show.”

Unfortunately, my favorite for the list, gangsta’-bandit Veerappan, failed again to make the cut. He is unlikely to do so in the future, given his newfound disqualification from the “alive” portion of the title.

The magazine, which awarded its cover to actor Jude Law, hits newsstands this Friday.

PR Newswire: Dr. Reef Karim Named One of Sexiest Men Alive by People Magazine
People: Sexiest Man Alive (Subscription Required)
Sepia Mutiny: Police Kill Notorious Dacoit

American actors in Bollywood find it famously disorganized and star-centric (the Brit actors in Lagaan complained bitterly):

[T]he industry is chaotic, in part due to film-makers being secretive about films and where they are shooting, in order to avoid others stealing their ideas. There are no call sheets, no shooting schedules and no shooting scripts. Crew are rung up the night before. In India labour is cheap, but there is a lack of organization; it is the biggest organized chaos in the world.

American actors in Japan think it’s spookily efficient and down-to-earth:

Shimizu looked at us, smiled and said, ‘Okay.’… Then I turn around and notice that the camera tracker’s already moved, the camera has shifted and everyone was already in place. It was the most efficient crew I have ever worked with.”… “For actors, the American film system is medieval. You’re either working and coddled or unemployed and ignored. But in Japan actors are just another member of the crew…”

But there are a couple of things both cultures agree on, the muharrat…

“In Japan, there is always a purification ceremony to ensure safety of the filming and the crew,” says Ichise. “We also pray for the success of the film…”

… and the shoes:

“There’s something wonderful about everyone paying their respects on the set by taking their shoes off when they enter,” observes [Sarah Michelle] Gellar.

‘Mera joota hai Japani, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.’

This lovely colonial coinage from the British Raj comes to us via Prashant Mullick. On top, King George the Fifth; on bottom, ‘India.’ Sacre bleu! How apropos.

By the way, one Anna is all anyone can really handle ;)

U.S. digital TV service DirecTV announced today that it will begin offering four Indian channels from News Corp.'s Star Group to its 13.5 million customers.

The new channels include:

• Star Plus – Hindi entertainment and dramas. India’s leading cable channel, with 50 million viewers a week.
• Star One – Hindi action/thrillers, comedies and dramas. Recently launched.
• Star News – 24-hour Hindi news channel. Reaches 20 million homes in Asia.
• Star Vijay – Tamil entertainment. Reaches 8 million homes in Asia.

The HindiDirect package includes Star Plus, Star One and Star News, and is available for $29.99 per month. Star Vijay is offered in the TamilDirect package, which will cost $14.99 per month. A cricket sports package is also on the plate for $199.

Despite numerous requests, Star After Dark and Star Spice will not be offered (or even conceived). One day, my friends, one day…

Variety/Yahoo!: DirecTV Beams Up 4 Indian Channels
Business Wire/Yahoo!: DirecTV Expands International Programming Platform to Include Star Indian Channels and International Cricket
StarTV: Official Site
DirecTV: Official Site

I’m consumed with history and cars, so I was gleefully surprised when AnkG pointed me towards this pop-up-laden Sify article; it’s a fascinating look at the exalted place that Rolls Royces had in Royal old India.

The article discusses a title from appropriately-named Roli Books, Rolls-Royce and the Indian Princes. Written by Murad Ali Baig, the work details the myriad ways that India’s princely class pimped their rides—and let me tell you, no hip-hop star has anything on the ruler of Travancore (my hood!);

A 1933 Rolls-Royce that belonged to Maharani Sethu Parvati Bai of Travancore had a small stool on the floor. “On it sat a dwarf who massaged the queen’s legs while he remained invisible to onlookers,” said Baig.

Show-off. Other automobiles catered to any and every other whim, from special “Purdah” models that had drapes to hide modest Maharanis, to the Phantom II that was created in the exact shade of pink (as defined by his wife’s slipper!) that the Maharaja of Jamnagar wanted, to the 24-carat gold-plated appointments and solid silver door handles of the Maharaja of Baroda’s 1927 Phantom I.

SM’s favorite Page Sixer, hotelier and actor Vikram Chatwal, is celebrating the opening of his newest destination with a “star-studded” bash tomorrow night.

Despite Chatwal’s busy social life, and a tussle with celebrity photographer Dave LaChappelle, “Dream NY” will open its doors as scheduled. No word yet on the status of invitations to the opening party for east coast Mutineers.

The hotel boasts “a hip, futuristic fantasy of mirrored vaulted ceilings, columns crowned by blown glass, a glass elevator and a whimsically striped lounge.” The rooms are equipped with iPods and plasma TV’s, which should make watching hotel porn a truly memorable experience. If you’re interested, rates for this weekend range from $309 to $789 a night.

For those of us on the other side of the country, we may soon have our own Dream to reckon with. Chatwal’s Hollywood flack, Eileen Koch, released a press release yesterday announcing her client’s interest in opening up “Dream LA” on the city’s Sunset Strip.

* * * A Special Message for Vikram Chatwal * * *

Mr. Chatwal, when such a hotel opens, I (and possibly fellow Angelino, Abhi) would love to join the west coast division of your party-hoppin’ crew. I haven’t hooked up with a supermodel since…well, since forever, so this could be just the opportunity I’ve needed. I eagerly await your response.

* * * End Special Message for Vikram Chatwal * * *

Included in the press release was news that Chatwal has landed a role in the independent film, “Hope and a Little Sugar,” which is scheduled to commence shooting in a couple of weeks. He was last seen in the short film, “One Dollar Curry.”

Business Wire: Hotelier Vikram Chatwal Scouts Location for New Hotel on the West Coast
Sepia Mutiny: On the Trail of Vikram Chatwal…

Badmash is hosting a new short film on its site entitled “Aunty Gs.” Created by Geeta Malik's Shetani Films, the six-minute piece asks you to “meet the ladies from the original Bay Area…the Bombay area.”

Badmash:
Aunty Gs - High Bandwidth
Aunty Gs - Low Bandwidth

Shetani Films: Official Site

The British Asian Pop sensation Jay Sean has been making waves in the UK in recent months, beginning a few months back with his hit collaboration Dance with You, and now with the release of his top 40 full length album, Me Against Myself, which debuted at 29 this week on the British Charts. Featuring the top ten charting hit singles, "Stolen" and "Eyes on You," Sean is tipped to be the British Asian to actually be the one that finally makes the crossover into the mainstream. Lets hope so.

The Telegraph (UK) too has praise for Sean, whose real name is Kamaljit,

[for many] the best tracks will be two hidden ones, from his earlier incarnation, including You Don't Know Me, about the difficulties of trying to make it as an Asian in the hip-hop arena. The title track sees Sean dissing himself for making music ? presumably the poppy stuff ? that "you pretend you are into". The intro skit has his producer-mentor Rishi Rich telling him, in a posh English accent, to cut out the conscious stuff, that UK hip-hop doesn't sell and he should write songs about girls. Clearly highly talented, and currently attracting the attention of demi-god producer Timbaland, it will be fascinating to see how Sean resolves his musical schizophrenia.

No, I don’t think Disney would take it quite that far, but the company does want to start making some Indian animated films. Its about damn time. I think there should be more animated characters who look even remotely like Princess Jasmine. Wow…that sounded awfully desperate of me. From The Financial Express:

The Walt Disney Company wants to make original desi animation films and TV shows in India for the world market, as against the outsourcing model prevalent in the industry, it is learnt. In effect, everything will be Indian, from start to finish, in these films.

The possibilities are endless with stories from India’s rich mythology to draw from. And while we are on the subject of India and animation it is worth pointing out that Disney’s Pixar studio will be releasing a dubbed version of the current box-office hit The Incredibles, retitled Hum Hain Lajawaab (somebody please translate for me). Guess whose voice will be cast in the lead role? No really, just guess.

Anyone who has seen the fine American television show Law & Order, or any of it’s many spin-offs, knows that the show is loved for its gritty reality from the streets to the jury box. The show even starts by claiming that it’s stories are ripped from the headlines. Well apparently one story hit too close to home for attorney Ravi Batra. From IrelandOnline:

Producers of TV series Law & Order were sued for $15m (€11.5m) on Friday, by an angry attorney who accuses them of portraying him as a villainous lawyer.

Ravi Batra complains an episode titled ‘Floater’ deliberately inflicted emotional, monetary and professional injury on him by featuring an Indian-American, Brooklyn-based lawyer named Ravi Patel who has similarities to Batra - including a bald head and a beard.

And the character Batra claims is based on himself is found guilty of fixing matrimonial cases, corruptly selling consultancies and appointments to judgeships.

The lawsuit says people who know Batra “were disturbed and distressed by the story line of criminal conduct attributed to plaintiff (Batra) by the defendants”.

I think Ravi is more disturbed by the fact that people notice that he has a bald head.

Voice of America features a news story about the community of Artesia, California known for its very visible Indian population, and their bid to post a highway sign designating Artesia with the nickname “Little India.” The full story can be viewed here and a transcript can be read here.

Artesia, California - population 16,000, was settled as a farming community by Portuguese immigrants in the 19th century. Today Artesia’s rural past is a faint memory, its main street paved, the shops along it owned for the most part by merchants from the Indian subcontinent. But plans to officially recognize the city’s altered social landscape have received unexpected resistance from many in the community.

What’s the resistance about? Well despite the Indian community’s overwhelming visibility, they only make up 5% of the actual population. That rubs some the wrong way. Says the leader of the local Portuguese Cultural Center:

“Artesia is composed of Hispanic, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, all sorts of diversity as you can see, including Indian. Now the Indian community does have quite a few shopping centers in Artesia, but it’s only a small percentage in the whole big picture of all the shopping centers.”

Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez is more reasonable:

“This sign is not about celebrating just one culture, one community. It’s about celebrating the vast diversity of this city. And it just happens to be that one of the richest destinations in California, Southern California, is here on Pioneer Boulevard - and it’s “Little India.”

The remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has decided to ban all tobacco products from Wednesday, a government notification says.

Shops, hotels, restaurants and bars selling tobacco products have been ordered to dispose of existing stocks before 17 December.

Those who violate the ban will be fined $210 and owners of shops and hotels will lose their business licenses.

Are you a tourist who desperately wants to go to Bhutan, but who can't go a few days without a smoke? Don't worry, you're OK as long as you don't sell your stash to the locals:

The tobacco ban will not apply to foreign tourists, diplomats or those working for NGOs.

[However] Foreigners selling tobacco to locals will be severely punished.

"If any foreigner is caught selling tobacco products to Bhutanese nationals, he will be charged with smuggling. Tobacco will be treated as contraband," Karma Tshering of Bhutanese Customs told the BBC.

Now what puzzles me is why people at high altitudes are smoking at all? I mean, isn't the air thin enough? Apparently, Sherpas in Nepal do so all the time, as they lead expedititions up the mountain. And I remember reading about cases where mountaineers would suck in oxygen from a tank, then inhale their cigarette (dangerous!), and then get more oxygen, etc. (like this: "Meanwhile, Finch had been staving off the effects of altitude with regular gasps of oxygen — between puffs on a cigarette!"). However, the best quote I found on the subject was:

"This is the fucking life, no ?" — Jean Afanassieff, first frenchman on Everest (on the summit of which he smoked a cigarette waiting for the others).

“Veer-Zaara” made a strong debut last weekend, opening on more North American screens than any previous Bollywood release and finishing 15th among all films at the domestic box office.

Starring the ever-popular Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta, “Veer-Zaara” took in an estimated $903,010 during the four-day period beginning on Nov. 11. Its per-screen average of $10,261 was among the highest of the weekend, bested by only two other films in the top 25.

Shiraz Jivani of Naz8 Cinemas told the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News that he expects the three-hour film to break box office records for Bollywood releases in the U.S.

“We have it, and we’re going to be playing it around the clock, 24 hours a day,” Jivani told the newspaper. His chain of Calif.-based theaters expects to collect $1.2 million over the film’s six-week run. The final tally will receive a bump from ticket prices that were increased just for the film.

No word yet on how pirated copies of “Veer-Zaara” fared at unscrupulous video rental shops, as such businesses are only required to report their earnings to hell’s despotic overlords.

Box Office Mojo: Gross Tracking for “Veer-Zaara”
San Jose Mercury News: High Hopes for Bollywood Musical (Registration Required)
The Chief Report: Review of “Veer-Zaara”
Naz8 Cinemas: Official Site
“Veer-Zaara”: Official Site

Pia Awal's search for a bone marrow transplant donor produced a match last week, and she will undergo the procedure later this month at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Awal, who has leukemia, inspired family and friends to launch a nationwide search for a match, which ultimately led to the addition of 12,442 profiles to the country's bone marrow registry.

The online portion of their campaign was truly impressive. I recall receiving numerous e-mails about Awal's plight from South Asians and non-South Asians alike. The grueling ordeal was also documented on the web by Awal and her fiance, Tim Dutta.

USA Today/AP: Bone Marrow Found for Woman Seeking South Asian Donors
Official Site: MatchPia.org
Nirali Magazine: Hoping for a Match

Damn. Unable to find love here because women simply don’t understand me, I had planned on making my next trip to India count. I had intended to find myself a bride while over there. Now it seems there will be people running a background check on me first. I got to say this is long overdue, even though a background check is sure to eliminate me. From the Times of India:

The Union ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs will appoint volunteers abroad to carry out a background check on ‘eligible’ bachelors settled in foreign countries.

At the forthcoming Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), the ministry is planning to appoint non-resident Indian (NRI) volunteers who will represent it in foreign countries, to make discreet inquiries about bachelors who have set their sights on the Indian marriage mart. The PBD is to be held at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Nariman Point, Mumbai, from January 7 to 9.

The idea is the brainchild of Jagdish Tytler, minister of state for Overseas Indian Affairs. Speaking to TOI en route to Kenya and South Africa to promote the PBD, he said, “This is being done to prevent the exploitation of gullible girls and their families by so-called bachelors.” There are 10,000 cases in Punjab alone of NRI husbands abandoning their wives. In Gujarat about 12,000 cases have been reported, Tytler said. Figures for other states were not available with him.

Part-desi songstress Norah Jones and Dolly Parton teamed up for 'Creepin' In' on Jones' album Feels Like Home. Ennis notes that the lyrics can be read as coarse double entendres:

There's a big old hole
Goes right through my soul
Oh that ain't nothin' new

So as long as you're around
I got no place else you've found
There's only one thing left for you to do

Just creep on in
Creep on in
Creep on in

There's a silver moon 
Came a little too soon 
Oh for me to bear 
It shines brightly on my bed and the shadow's over head 
Won't let me sleep as long as it's there

And once you have begun don't stop until you're done 
Sneakin' in...

But then, Ennis is a long-time Norah perv, seeking filth in that innocent hit 'Don't Know Why':

I feel as empty as a drum
I don't know why I didn't come

For shame, dude. Jazz, that last bastion of civility, has always been wholesome and clean.

The ImaginAsian, a new Asian-American cinema in midtown Manhattan (59th St. between 2nd & 3rd Ave.), has begun showing Bollyflicks. It's the second Manhattan theater to show Bollywood movies after the Loews State in Times Square.

The theater is currently showing Veer-Zaara, which I found butt-bustingly boring.

Suketu Mehta scribes in the magazine of another maximum city about the film industry of the Mumbai (via Amardeep). He describes it as a love affair with an international beauty:

The Soviets gave us arms; we gave them our kitsch movies in return. Israelis watch them. Palestinians watch them... Dominicans and Haitians watch them. Iraqis watch them. Iranians watch them. In a building full of immigrants in Queens, an Uzbek man once cornered me in a dark stairwell... As he towered over me, he started singing, "Ichak dana, bichak dana..."

The initial flush of romance, often consummated in what used to be a porn theater, the Eagle in Jackson Heights:

Why do I love Bollywood movies? To an Indian, that's like asking why we love our mothers; we don't have a choice. We were born of them.

The unreality of the affair:

My aunt's family emigrated to Uganda from India a century ago; she now lives in England and has never been to India... none of the children under 5 in her extended family spoke English... The children, two or three generations removed from India, were living in this simulated Indiaworld.

Falling out of love:

It was not until graduate school that I became cynical about Bollywood movies. I too began to think that the plots were weak, melodramatic. At the University of Iowa's student-run movie theater, the Bijou, I could see two movies for five dollars, most of them European. I was introduced to Renoir, Fellini, Fassbinder, De Sica... the Indian movies seemed pointless and absurd to me...

Mira Nair writes in the New York Times Magazine about the chaat-fueled filming of Hysterical Blindness. We apparently share a favorite snack, kachoris from Jersey City’s Little India:

As others tucked into Krispy Kremes, I’d pop the just-made almond kachori in my mouth, no cutlery needed, licking the sour-sweet taste of tamarind chutney off my fingers… Uma [Thurman] would sidle over to me in her ripped Joan Jett T-shirt and blue eye shadow to ask, “Is it samosa time yet?”… I would pop kachoris directly into Juliette Lewis’s rosebud mouth so not to disturb her lipstick. The gaffers and grips would holler across to me, “Did my Indian balls come in?” Soon the little box of snacks from Rajbhog grew into a stack, and kachoris conquered Krispy Kremes.

When I first heard about this story several months ago it just really got under my skin. Apparently these Macedonian police decided that they would prove that Macedonia was fully committed to the U.S. led global war against terror. They did so by luring innocent Indian and Pakistani illegal immigrants into Macedonia and then presenting them to the world as captured terrorists shortly before executing them. Their trial has now commenced. From Aljazeera:

The four defendants include police general Goran Stojkov, intelligence officer Aleksandar Cvetkov, the former commander of a now disbanded special police unit, Boban Utkovski, and businessman Mitko Kikerkov

Former Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski was initially also charged as the main organiser of the slaying but fled to Croatia. He is in detention in the coastal Croatian town of Pula and the case against him will be handled by authorities there.

Ahead of the trial, the defence lawyers claimed their clients were innocent and victims of “politically motivated” proceedings that are part of “political revenge” by the new Macedonian government.

Sources at the court, who asked not to be named, said that at least 30 witnesses will testify during the trial.

The defendants face sentences of up to 20 years in prison.

The ever-illuminating Shashwati has a precious find: the Hot Spot reviews International Gorillay, a paranoid Lollywood fantasy about assassinating Salman Rushdie (circa 1990). With disco. And batsuits. Aw, yeah! Praise the Lord and pass the cheese.

Rushdie plans to drive the final nails into the coffin of Islam by opening a new chain of Casino's and Disco's spreading contemptable vice and debauchery. Mustafa Qureshi... decides to call it a day with his day job at the Police station and induct his unemployed brothers to create a Mujahid (God's soldiers) trio whose sole aim is to seek out and destroy the despised Salman Rushdie before he manages to destory all virtue and decency on the planet. The trio have a personal axe to grind as their beloved family cherub was recently slaughtered by Rushdie's men while protesting Satanic Verses... The direction is sledgehammer subtle as is the norm for Punjabi cinema and the one-liners have to be delivered slowly and deliberately and sometimes even three times in a row so as to not miss their point!

Rushdie is eventually offed by a laser beam to the head from four flying Korans (watch the cheesy special effects). The Koran as a directed-energy weapon: Isn't that, um, a bit sacrilegious? But wait, there's a subtext -- the film functions as sly literary criticism:

... Rushdie... is of course a man of unsurpassed evil and tortures his hapless victims by forcing them to listen to chapters from his fatwa-inducing book...

I can think of several desi authors, the reading of whose works would qualify as torture. Rushdie ain't one of them. Ironically, this film was banned in the UK, a country which defended Rushdie against censorship for years. The ban was eventually lifted at the behest of the author himself. Apparently, Rushdie wasn't too worried about death by killer lasers from levitating religious screeds.

Don't miss Bubonic Films' archive of cheesy Bollywood clips and Lollywood horror films. The scariest things about these movies are the hairstyles.

An argument is raging in Pakistan about the reform of religious education in madrassas. Lord Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education, a treatise on imposing English-language education on India, anticipated many of the same arguments.

Macaulay's text was openly racist...

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia... the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England... We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language... The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

... shrewdly imperialist...

What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth... If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be.

Robert Kaplan draws a comparison in the NYT between this blog's namesake revolt and the war in Iraq. He argues that rather than evangelizing instant democracy, the U.S. should temper its ambitions:

... Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India - to make it more like England - were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule... The bloody debacle... did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

Kaplan's description of the British Empire pre-Sepoy Rebellion is oddly enervated. Modernize India? Methinks the evangelicals were mainly interested in conversion. To them, heathen Hindus were the sub-Saharan Africans of the 19th century, a teeming continent of raw material for Christianity. Alexander Pope chastised Hindu beliefs in his 'Essay on Man':

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul proud Science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk or milky way;

Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,

Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler Heav'n,

Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,

Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,

Where slaves once more their native land behold,

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.

To be, contents his natural desire;

He asks no Angel's wing, no Seraph's fire;

But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Given the desi focus of this blog, it's a surprise we haven't pointed readers @ the Blog Mela's on the net.
Well, here it is
-

Call me paranoid but I sense a conspiracy. In the U.S., little league baseball is always importaning ringers from Latin America who are really too old to be eligible to play baseball, but are able to lie about their age due to the region's poor birth records. Is the greybearded Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh likewise too old to be eligible for office, or maybe too young? From TeamIndia.net:

Asked by accompanying journalists aboard [a] flight that took him from London to New York Monday evening about [a] planned birthday celebration on air, Singh was quietly dismissive.

"I have never celebrated birthdays. I don't even know the exact date I was born."

He explained that a few weeks after he was born in 1932 in Gah, a village in Punjab province of what is now Pakistan, he lost his mother. And he, therefore, never got to know his birthday till the time he was enrolled in primary school when an approximate date was given as his date of birth for the school records.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…everywhere (read: Indian factories) you go…

This year at the swank stores of New York and London, Christmas and New Year shoppers will pick up scores of gifts made in India.

Now I almost didn’t blog about this, but the next line made me fall out of my recliner:

Almost all top-end stores like Macy’s, Wal-Mart, Selfridges and Bloomingdale are buying hundreds of gifts from the country in a new genre of outsourcing.

WAL-MART? Are you bleedin’ kidding me? Top-end, my kundi. I wonder if that’s the first time the evil discounter has been mentioned in the same breath as Bloomie’s…

…”We’ve got orders for seven to eight items - mostly cushions, pillows, Christmas tree hangings and stockings,” Nebu Jacob, a gift manufacturer, told IANS.

Jacob’s Lakshmi Caminse, whose factory is in Gurgaon, produces popular gifts like beaded mats and silk napkins and supplies names like Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale and Selfridges.

What, no sales to Wal-mart? (like you could’ve resisted…)

Slow news day at Slate? An Arab-American finds that a new puppy makes him more palatable to neighbors:

Muslims are prohibited from touching the saliva of dogs. If you do come in contact with a dog, you're supposed to wash your hands seven times before you pray. Most Muslims will avoid dogs at all cost to stay clean for their daily prayers...

People on the street, in their cars, in the parking lot, and at the supermarket were giving me a new look--a friendly one. Strangers who used to skillfully avoid eye contact now wanted to engage me in warm conversation. Patriotic national hotline tippers, who are usually more concerned about Muslim sleeper cells, now stopped me and cordially inquired about my puppy's sleeping habits, breed, and big black eyes.

The puppy effect is old news, the author must've missed Eddie Murphy's dog gimmick (and dawg role) in Boomerang. Maybe he should try strolling babies or handing out lollipops and unicorn stickers. It's a cute story, but the point of civil rights is the freedom to be as punk as you wanna be without being hosed by bureaucrats -- the triumph of clean, fair play over arbitrary prejudices.

The White House hosted its second Diwali celebration Wednesday, which is very cool. It'll be interesting to see how that plays with the evangelicals who equate Hinduism with devil worship. Former ambassador to India Robert Blackwill hosted the party; it was his last day in government, he just resigned as head of Iraq policy due to a staffer abuse mini-scandal.

Dubya and Laura, Karl Rove (who attended last year), and Representative-elect Bobby Jindal were no-shows. One fundraiser said that for Indian-Americans, 'pay to play' is all pay, no play; he threw a hissy-fit when Bush attended a Ramadan dinner a few hours later:

Community activists were told that if the President and the First Lady attended the event of one community or nationals, there would be pressure from others. But a few hours after the Diwali event, Bush attended an Iftar dinner hosted by the White House to mark the end of Ramzaan... "We raised millions for the President and the GOP... and this is what we got in return," the activist, also a physician, fumed.

Many Republican desis attended, and the mithai and samosas were ordered from the same New York midtown restaurant, Bukhara Grill, which catered Salman Rushdie's wedding and is a favorite of Bill Clinton's. Great food is nonpartisan, time for a pilgrimage:

Dhandu Ram is the man behind the tandoor at Bukhara Grill in New York. He is a master tandoor who hails from Rajasthan, but got his training on the job at the famed Bukhara at the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi... As a tandoor chef, Ram is the star attraction at Bukhara Grill and agrees that more respect is given to chefs here... He points out that a tandoor chef generally gets a green card because this is a task that no one else can really do.

Update: Someone who once worked for the host of the party chimes in on Daniel Drezner's blog:

Blackwill is an incredibly brilliant thinker with absolutely no interpersonal skills... I never saw Blackwill touch an employee other than to shake hands. His manner is such that embassy staff wondered that he could have fathered three children... He sleeps four hours a night... By the time I'd arrive in my office at 0730... I would find between 20 and 30 e-mails from Blackwill, time-stamped from 0330 onward... he was always a decent human being. I think his major fault was that he simply lacked empathy toward other human beings...

The Independent (UK) is running an interesting story on the embedding of microchips inside of trees in the Indian state of Kerala, in order to curb illegal logging of the precious and aromatic sandalwood tree.

Forestry officials will then be able to use a satellite to monitor the trees. Not only will any attempt to cut them down be detected - the Forest Department will be able to trace the movements of any smugglers who try to take timber out of the area. The trade in contraband sandalwood is one of the most lucrative in India. The "bandit king" Veerappan, wanted for more than 120 murders before he was gunned down by Indian police last month, may have started out poaching elephants for their ivory, but soon moved on to the much more profitable business of sandalwood.

I'm a news junkie and was reading this report from Fallujah when I came across a tres Desi surname - Lt. Neil Prakash.

Did some googling and it turns out that Lt. Prakash is a recent neuroscience major from Johns Hopkins whose hope as he joined ROTC was to be in the tank corp and see some action. Like many Desi's, he was on a path to med school -

1st Lt. Neil Prakash is the platoon commander, in the lead tank. Prakash was born in Bangalore, India, and came to the U.S. as a baby. His parents are both dentists and he was planning a career in medicine like his siblings when he enlisted in ROTC and discovered his true passion. Prakash doesn’t smoke, but he’s having a cigarette now. While waiting for the order to go in, he’s just gotten word of video images from an overhead drone. They indicate that squads of insurgents are on many rooftops armed with machine guns and RPGs...

While I'm working on my facial tan from the glow of the CRT on my desk, Lt Prakash is perhaps 25 yrs old and is the platoon commander leading 4 70-ton tanks crewed by 16 soldiers through the streets of Fallujah. Sure makes me feel like a slacker...

Suffice to say, Prakash survived the RPG fire and had a prominent role in yesterday's Telegraph report on the fighting in Fallujah-

"Guys with short brown hair, dark pants and carrying AK-47s were moving in groups of between two and five across the road to a yellow building," said Lt Neil Prakash, the tank commander. "Then some started throwing Molotov cocktails and pouring gasoline on the road to create a smokescreen."

...Lt Prakash was asked to provide a grid co-ordinate.

Indian beauty queen Sayali Bhagat is a hot favourite to be crowned Miss World at its 54th edition slated later this year in the tropical island of Sanya in China, according to Internet bookmakers, Interpops.com.

“The world needs some spice! It will certainly have it if Sayali Bhagat becomes the jewel in India’s crown when she wins the 54th Miss World contest,” the betting site said on Thursday.

“The world needs some spice?” Geez, please come up with something better than that.

The bookmakers said there were also some unfortunate “flavourless offerings” that may not make it past the first course. At the bottom of their betting menu are Miss Turks and Caicos at 100/1 and Miss Kenya at 150/1.

Ouch. I’m glad nobody will ever place odds on my beauty.

The Atlantic Monthly has a small piece this month about wagering on the January outing of a character on the Simpsons (subscription required). An Ireland-based betting site offered odds on the identity of the closet-dweller, but halted plays when large amounts of money started floating toward Marge Simpson's sister, Patty.

Resident Indian-American Apu Nahasapeemapetilon was among the possibilities, because the "Kwik-E-Mart owner spends long hours away from his wife and children." Still, he's considered a long-shot, with 14 other characters deemed better choices.

On a related note, White House officials recently confirmed that any amendment banning gay marriage will extend to cartoon characters and muppet-lookin' muthaf----s.

Though Anish Shroff was recently eliminated from ESPN’s competition to become the next sportscaster there, I give him props. I only saw parts of one episode but it looks like a tough job. A lot of sports stories are coming in while these guys are already in the middle of the show and they have to improvise and think on their feet to describe whats going on. I don’t care how many years of experience you have, nothing can prepare you for this scenario though. From The Times online of UK:

FOR a commentator, it would have been a nightmare. “Patel passes to Patel, it bounces off Patel’s boot, but Patel comes in from the wing and shoots and oh, a brilliant save by Patel. Every Patel on the terraces is on his feet.”

The reason was simple: all 124 players in a weekend five-a-side charity football tournament in Leeds, and 300 of their fans, were called Patel.

For the participants, it was an extended family occasion. The Patels may not all know each other intimately, but they are all in some way related.

This is scary. It reminds me of a nightmare I had once. Pretty soon there will be Patels within the ranks of the Mutiny as well. Oh. Too late.

Patel is merely the 24th most common surname in Britain. Nonetheless, two years ago an eleven from Mr Patel’s society played cricket against another Bradford-based Indian side. All 22 players turned out to be Patels

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I must have given up my email address or dropped a biz card at some lame Desi 'circuit party'. So, I now get spammed a couple times a week with ads for the latest "meet my mate" function and loathe to do anything to give these guys any more publicity than they already obnoxiously secure.

But this one - New Site Launch!: an exciting way to meet south asian professionals - has a twist that may be of interest to SM readers - it features a celebrity date auction with Vikram Chatwal up for grabs.

If you're so inclined the party's this Sunday @ 5pm in 6 cities across N. America. Other celebrity dates include Serena Varghese of Where's the Party, Yaar fame as well as 2 of the cast members of Bombay Dreams.

Hollywood Masala has a pair of photo journals documenting the recently completed Fourth Annual IAAC Film Festival in New York. The photos were taken by writer-director-actor Nikhil Kamkolkar, whose feature film Indian Cowboy screened during the four-day festival. His shots include the opening night gala, which honored Shabana Azmi, Mira Nair, Salman Rushdie and Ismail Merchant for their support of South Asian artists.

Photo Journals:
Opening Night Gala - 9 photos
Various Festival - 13 photos

This fall’s once-promising crop of South Asian reality show contestants has lost another prominent member. SportsCenter-hopeful Anish Shroff failed to advance to ESPN Dream Job’s final round after losing a deciding vote among the viewing public.

Check out his concession speech (Video - Windows Media), where a disappointed Shroff employs some of the very same cliches favored by most athletes. According to the episode recap, Shroff will return “to basic training at Syracuse,” and probably develop a newfound allegiance to Fox Sports.

Update: Badmash offers the networks an incentive to put more South Asians on the air.

Since this is Veteran’s day in the United States I felt it was most appropriate to have a post about military matters. Embassy Magazine is a publication targeting the diplomat community in the Ottawa, Canada area and recently ran a piece about the often overlooked Brown soldiers of the two World Wars.

Over 1,300,000 soldiers of Indian ancestry fought in the First World War. It remains the largest volunteer army ever assembled in the history of the world. It was the largest number of soldiers fighting from the British Empire after those from the British Isles. Not Canada, not Australia, no other part of the Empire contributed as many troops.

Two and half million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. You might want to read those sentences again.

If this group of soldiers came from anywhere in the Western world and if they were white, there’d be monuments to them in every major Western capital in the world.

I guess thats the way of history though isn’t it? Whoever ends up in charge writes history by highlighting certain things and not emphasizing others.

The latest TCS article on India v. China comes out pretty optimistic about India's prognosis - TCS: Tech Central Station - The India-China Gap -

Despite the record of the recent past, there is reason for hope that the economic gap between these rivals will soon diminish. On the one hand, India may advance in relative terms through no fault of its own. This is because China's storied economic growth is likely to falter under the weight of a massive default of the banking system or from political pressures arising from restructuring of state enterprises.

On the other hand, India's leaders are becoming aware that their own economy can move forward more rapidly by undertaking meaningful and aggressive reform. For example, India scores well in the area of macroeconomic conditions where restrained monetary expansion has brought inflation to a record low 2.5 percent. China's battle with price instability has seen swings from high inflation in the mid-1990s to its current troubling bout of deflation.

Call me a skeptic but I'm personally not that hopeful about the nearterm. The previous article on the sad plight of Varanasi silk weavers is another little datapoint that adds to my fear that -

I promise this will be my last knee-jerk crosspost of material from Marginal Revolution. There's so much of it and it's such great quality. But today, Tyler gives us the economists-eye view of a question that has plagued Desi's for generations - Marginal Revolution: Should you give money to beggars? -

In Calcutta I confront this question every time my cab stops. Put aside the usual debate about selfishness and altruism, assume you will give something away. To whom should it go? Why not give it to the gentleman sleeping under a piece of cardboard who is poor but not begging?

Tyler's answer elegantly waltzes between Game Theory, Public Choice, and classical economics all in the space of less than 200 words. Fantastic.

As someone who collects and wears saris eagerly, I was surprised and interested to learn that international trade with China has severely affected the artisans who create the iconic Benares/Varanasi sari;

“With our business coming to an end my six children have turned into beggars,” says Razia Biwi, wife of a silk weaver in the northern city of Varanasi. “They move from door to door with a bowl each and eat whatever the kind neighbours give them.”

The Varanasi silk industry is in turmoil.

For centuries it has produced exquisite handloom silk. Of India’s 10m weavers, this city - also known as Benaras - in Uttar Pradesh boasts nearly 13%.

…The problems started in 1995, when demand for Varanasi silk suddenly dwindled.

There was a sudden influx of Chinese silk traders, who imported cheap yarn to the local market.

They even competed against Varanasi traders by hiring local weavers from the city.

The extreme poverty has caused some to resort to drastic, disturbing measures; Ghulam Rasool of Kotwan sold his two-month old child to a wealthy family “where he would get his daily meals”. Rasool’s choice got some attention;

Their story touched the village and with its help, along with police intervention, they got back their son along with a sum of 10,000 rupees ($220) compensation from the government.

Rajan Bhal, general secretary of the Varanasi Cloth Industry, says: “This was one isolated case in the entire town where the government came to the family’s rescue.

“The government otherwise seems uninterested in reviving this traditional art in the city.”

I’ll never look at my saris in quite the same way again.

via the beeb.

In a horrifying court case being tried across the pond, three men, Kenneth Regan, William Horncy and Peter Rees are accused of murdering an entire family because they wanted to steal their Southall-based freight business, to use for smuggling narcotics.

Describing the deaths of Amarjit Chohan, 45, Nancy Chohan, 24, Devinder, 18 months, Ravinder, eight weeks old and Charanjit Kaur, 51, Richard Horwell, prosecuting, said: “Some crimes are beyond belief and on any view these horrific murders fall into that category.”

He said: “Three generations of a family were executed, deliberately killed, because of the greed of these three defendants.” He told the court that Regan lured Chohan to a meeting in Stonehenge on February 13, 2003, ostensibly to meet a potential buyer for his fruit freight business, CIBA Freight.

“Mr Chohan walked into a trap. Thereafter he was used and controlled by the defendants and held against his will for several days before being murdered. To make his disappearance appear genuine it was, or became, necessary for his family also to be murdered.

…The bodies were initially buried on farmland near Tiverton, Devon…When (Regan) realised police were closing in to exhume them he and Horncy bought a boat which was used to dump the family in the sea on Easter Sunday last year.

Two days later, Chohan’s body was found near Bournemouth pier. In July, Mrs Chohan was found in a fisherman’s net between Dorset and the Isle of Wight. In November, Mrs Kaur’s remains were washed up on the Isle of Wight. The boys have never been found.

Businessman Chohan had previously served time in prison for tax evasion, and this allowed his alleged murderer to craft a suitable lie in an attempt to cover his tracks; he tried to make it seem as if Chohan wanted to avoid his business partners and the government by taking his family to hide abroad. If it weren’t for Nancy Chohan’s skeptical brother, Regan and his accomplices might have gotten away with murder.

Reuters has put together a nice little slide show of some great images showing preparations for Diwali in India. One of them includes two women wrestlers. I had no idea women’s wrestling was a Diwali tradition. I vow that my children shall know more about our culture than I.

According to Sky ShowBiz, Liz Hurley it seems is planning an elaborate Indian wedding to marry long-time boyfriend Arun Nayar. But who is giving her away?

…a close pal of the posh beauty told the paper: “Liz wants Hugh [Way too attractive ex-boyfriend Hugh Grant] to give her away because they remain really close friends.”

Oh, hellls no. Ain’t no ex-boyfriend gonna give away my future wife to me. What is Arun thinking? Grow a set dude. This reminds me of Kill Bill vol. II.

Half-Brown apprentice Raj earns a spot next to Vikram Chatwal with this NYPost Page Six blurb - New York Post Online Edition: gossip

November 10, 2004 -- RECENTLY fired "Apprentice" Raj Bhakta might be better suited for a role on "The Player."

The would-be lothario distinguished himself last week by hitting on Donald Trump's assistant, Robin Himmel, while he was waiting for the elevator to take him from the building after his dismissal.

However, Himmel may be the only one Bhakta struck out with, as three of his fellow castmates have fallen prey to his charms, a source shared — including Stacy Rotner and Jennifer Crisafulli, who have "at least made out" with Bhakta.

SuperJagjit provides his own tribute to Raj here.

Madhoo posts w/ images of the long rumored, ancient, Indo-Sri Lanka land bridge (mentioned in the Ramayana) - Dancing with Dogs: NASA images of the bridge between India and Sri Lanka -

NASA images of the bridge between India and Sri Lanka

We blogged about this a long time ago, but couldn't find the images - these are the actual images here -

Tyler Cowen, still in India, reports on an, uh, exceptional property of the Ganges - Marginal Revolution: The River Ganga

All along the Ganga [Ganges], the major problem of waste disposal has defied the best efforts of the Ganga Action Plan set up in 1986 to solve it. The diversion and treatment of raw sewage in the seven main cities was planned. In Varanasi however, the 17th century sewers, the inadequate capacity of the sewage works, the increased waterflow during the monsoons and the erratic electricity supply (essential for pumping) have all remained problems. In addition, although most Hindus are cremated, an estimated 45,000 uncremated or partially [sic] cremated bodies are put in the Ganga each year. A breed of scavenger turtles which dispose of rotting flesh was introduced down river but the turtles disappeared.

Surprisingly, although the Ganga may be one of the world's most polluted rivers...scientists had discovered the river's exceptional property in the last century. The cholera microbe did not survive 3 hrs in Ganga water whereas in distilled water it survived 24 hrs!

The transport minister of India's northern state of Bihar has been fined for travelling on an express train without a ticket.

Awadh Bihari Choudhry and his security guard were both fined 250 rupees ($5.50) after being caught on Monday.

Mr Choudhry is a member of the political party led by the federal railways minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav.

Director of public relations for the federal railways, MY Siddiqui, told the BBC: "Ticketless travelling and paying less are two areas our minister is very keen to focus on. And the results are already showing."

"The increase in fines from 50 rupees to 250 rupees this July is proving to be a deterrent," he said.

India's railway network is among the world's largest, carrying more than 13m passengers a day. [source: BBC]

For some reason, I found this hillarious. Hoist on his own master's petard, eh? If I was drinking lassi, it would have come out of my nose! [Insert gratuitous train pun here]

Vikram Chatwal may be the closest thing us ABCD's have to a certified Desi Rock Star (right down to the de rigeuer photo op w/ a Hilton sister). Gawker's got a tracker link on him just to keep up with his gossip (thanks Super Jagjit!) and the NY Observer recently saw fit to run a feature length article on his exploits -

Vikram Chatwal is not your usual rich Manhattan playboy. For starters, he has never cut his hair and he wears a turban, in keeping with his Sikh heritage. And while he does all that other playboy stuff?dating fashion models, tooling around town in an Aston Martin, running up an $11,500 bar tab in a nightclub, hanging out with Bill Clinton?he strikes many Manhattan night-crawlers as having something extra, something "spiritual", if you will.

Mr. Chatwal will tell you he plans to be the first Sikh billionaire. His father says: "Why not? This is New York City; he?s just 31 years old; he?s got a base to start with. The problem right now is, he?s only spending 30 percent of his time towards business. The day he starts spending 70 percent of his time, within two or three years he?ll make it."

...Mr. Chatwal gets some good-natured ribbing from his family about his penchant for nightlife. Earlier this month, he attended Puff Daddy?s birthday party in Morocco, flying with the birthday boy on a 767 lent by the King of Morocco.

I knew he?d dated lots of women; I asked what his favorite nationality was.

"none of that would matter without Aishwarya Rai. As Lalita Bakshi, the latest and by far the most glamorous incarnation of Jane Austen's tartly independent Elizabeth Bennet, Ms. Rai doesn't just carry the picture. She also saves it from its occasional leaps into the taste void, as when she tosses off the lyric, "I just wanna man who'll give me some back/ Who'll talk to me and not to my rack!" with such deadpan aplomb that you almost don't wince. But she's more than just a knock-down, drop-dead gorgeous face. She's even more than a talented singer, graceful dancer and vibrantly confident actress in at least two languages.

Also in the the Sunday Times is a review-ish type piece by Polly Shulman entitled "Dear Reader, Elizabeth Has Returned. And She's Wearing a Sari." Shulman does an actual comparison of Bride with the original Pride, including a comparison of dialogues. Shulman writes,

The provincial Indian setting offers a dowry of matchmaking mothers, colorful scenery and extravagant song-and-dance numbers that can seem captivating or vulgar, depending on your level of pride and prejudice. Perhaps because in an interracial, cross-cultural romance those traits can come uncomfortably close to racism, the "Bride and Prejudice" script plays down its title attitude. Here, Darcy is less snobby than misunderstood. For example, he refuses to dance with Lalita (Aishwarya Rai), the Elizabeth character, not because "she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me," as Darcy tells Bingley in the novel, but because he hasn't mastered the drawstring on his Indian kurta-pajama suit, and his pants are falling down.

Not really into Bombay Dreams? Well if you live in New York you may be in luck. Sakharam Binder is being staged by The Play Company. From Villagevoice.com:

How often do New York theatergoers get a chance to see a premier work from a major Indian dramatist, staged with the collaboration of the writer himself? Almost never. Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder was written and first performed in 1974 and hardly qualifies as a new play. Thirty years after setting Indian censors aflame, it makes its New York debut in a spare, lucid, and altogether thrilling production from the Play Company. At a time when the airheaded confection Bombay Dreams passes for subcontinental theater, Sakharam Binder not only feels vital, but painfully necessary.

Sounds interesting, but I don’t know the story really. What’s it about?

Sakharam is a fortyish bookbinder who offers lodging to cast-off women in exchange for housekeeping favors and the occasional fuck. The drama focuses on two of his concubines—the introverted and ultra-religious Laxmi (Anna George) and the arrogant and slutty Champa (Sarita Choudhury). Their sequential stories are told in highly diagrammatic fashion—Laxmi brings out the Fagin-ish slave master in Sakharam while the insatiable Champa reduces him to a lovelorn puppy.

Oohhh. Saucy.

Update: I had missed the fact that Sepia Mutiny has already covered this story in more detail here.

Aljazeerah has an article on Jindal being elected to Congress, that is just like every other article written about him in the past week except for two things that caught my eye:

Born, raised and schooled in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a young Piyush adopted the name “Bobby” at the age of four, after a likeable character from the TV serial “The Brady Brunch.”

Is this true? I find that very amusing. The other assertion Aljazeerah makes is the following:

Political supporters say he is the Republican Party’s equal to Barack Obama, the newly elected Democratic African-American senator (of Kenyan origin) from Illinois who is the toast of the America’s center-left political junkies.

If that were true I would be hearing calls for Jindal to run for President. Never going to happen since he is so right wing. Oh wait…nevermind.

The eagerly anticipated show “Nevermind Nirvana” from NBC has gone through some shakeups. Not only has Kal Penn been replaced as the lead, but the show has been re-named “Nearly Nirvana,” and is still hoping to be a midseason replacement on some network. From Zap2it.com:

As any good Hindu knows, Nirvana (or moksha) is something worth fighting for. After all, it’s not everyday that you get to reunite with Brahman and free your soul from the continuous cycle of rebirths. Of course, the possible NBC comedy “Nearly Nirvana” appears to have several more rebirths still to come. After NBC didn’t pick up “Nevermind Nirvana” for the fall season, the show underwent a name change and dropped lead actor Kal Penn (“Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle”). Now, with its fresh title and a new star in place, “Nirvana” is ready to move forward with a second pilot, even if NBC may not be interested anymore.

According to the industry trades, “Nearly Nirvana” writer and producer Ajay Sahgal has stepped in as star, just before the second pilot was ready to shoot with Arj Barker in the lead.

David Schwimmer from Friends is one of the producers of this show about a young Indian American man, his white girlfriend and his traditional parents. I think he is a doctor too, if I remember right. Its too bad it is this difficult to find a market for a show about Indians on television here. I bet its easier in Canada, which is looking more attractive every day.

Pakistan's high court has banned feasts at weddings as being un-Islamic:

The court bench then went a step further to criticise some of the most popular customs linked to South Asian weddings, including the colourful rituals of mayun and mehndi... and baraat... Describing them as social evils, the court said the state should take steps to eradicate them.

I found truth to be stranger than fiction:

The excision of all Hindu-inspired culture from a nation cleaved Siamese-style from its dominant twin leaves it with nothing more than echoes of Arabic, a thin rind of astringent Wahabbism and insufficiently comprehended talibs, freshly imported. This fingernail clipping, this ecliptic corona, this Venn diagram of loss leaves the nation with a desert of prohibited activities enumerated with the heavy delicacy of a tax code.

Amardeep jests that it's a good remedy for boring weddings:

... it's a little ridic. to dance for six hours on the street celebrating the marriage of a distant cousin one (sometimes) barely knows, who is sitting uncomfortably on a horse, while a band of profoundly underpaid horn-players tries to do a very un-funky version of "Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe."

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new book, Queen of Dreams is featured in Newsweek magazine:

Newsweek: What else influenced you [to write Queen of Dreams]?

CBD: The shock of 9/11 and its aftermath. If my novel is about how dreams affect our waking life, this was the other end. What happens in reality is sometimes unbelievable, like a nightmare. Many people felt, “Is this real? This can’t be happening.” When reality takes on that nightmare quality, that shade of the surreal, some people respond with fear and prejudice; they need to blame somebody, to lash out at someone who looks different, who is the “other.” Nationwide, Middle Eastern and South Asian communities became hate-crime victims. Businesses were vandalized, people beaten up—even murdered. Many were afraid to leave their homes. We were advised by mass e-mail, “Don’t wear Indian clothes,” “Don’t go out by yourself,” “Pretend you’re Hispanic,” “Put up an American flag, a GOD BLESS AMERICA sign.”

Of course this will probably be another depressing book by a South Asian author but at least it tackles some new themes.

CBD: …That [9/11] was a tragedy for [Americans of South Asian descent] also—we’d lost people. Then this additional burden—of proving ourselves patriotic—was placed on us because we were “suspicious looking.” It was an injustice to our community at a time when we all needed to come together as Americans. So, the second theme in “Queen of Dreams” is, what does it mean to be American? Does it mean one thing in good times, another in bad? When everything’s going well, Indians are a model minority—we’re exotic, you take our bindi, our henna, things you like. When things go bad, suddenly, we’re “terrorists”?

Ramachandran Guha, a historian from Bangalore, was denied entry into the U.S. on a lecture trip to Oberlin and UC Berkeley. He says he had a valid visa and supporting letters. The reason? Immigration officials disbelieved his sizeable speaking fee (via Amardeep Singh):

Why was I stopped? One reason might have been my jhola, a patch of mirrorwork on red... Another, certainly, was the letter of invitation from Oberlin, which specified a fee for my lectures which greatly angered [immigration officer] McCullough. "How can they pay you so much," he said more than once, adding, "And for teaching history."...

Berkeley and Oberlin are now planning a joint letter of protest. Meanwhile, they've written me handsome letters of apology, expressing shock at "such discriminatory and unjustified exclusion", and anger at the "terrible injustice you had to endure... [from] these cretins".

The Washington Post features the plight of a Pakistani American family today. The tale is a real downer so for all of you who like depressing books by South Asian authors (oh wait, thats all of them) read on:

On Wednesday morning, as most of the country was either reeling from the election or celebrating it, a slim, long-faced youth named Syed Shah sat in his family’s darkened living room in front of a blue hard-shell American Tourister suitcase and contemplated what it means to be a man.

The suitcase was brimming with papers. “Work Permit,” said one manila folder, in handwritten English and Urdu script. Beside it, photocopies of expired diplomatic visas were strewn across the pistachio-green carpet. He must figure out what to do with these documents so his family can keep working legally in the United States.

Why the great burden on this teenager? His father, according to the article, was shot in a robbery while delivering Pizzas. That was one of three jobs his father held. This is sad of course but you have probably heard stories like this before. Here is what is different though about his father’s story though:

He spoke four languages and had been a diplomat with the Pakistani government, living with his family in Iran and Syria before coming here to take a post with the Pakistan Embassy. When the posting ended unexpectedly and the government wanted to move him to another country, he said no.

“He said, ‘My kids are now in school here, and we don’t need to disturb their education,’ ” said Jafar Hussein, a longtime family friend who has been helping sort their affairs. Instead, Musharaf left his job at the embassy and found other work — delivering The Washington Post and the Washington Times in the early morning, working at 7-Eleven, Kmart and later Pizza Hut in the daytime and evenings. He was always scanning the classifieds for better jobs, and he joked about attending college with his kids.

"From India . . . " screams the announcer, as Dutt bursts out of the tunnel, struts down the ramp, then leaps onto the ropes, whipping the crowd into fierce applause. Dutt, now 22, was still pretty young when he got hooked. On Saturdays, he and his father would watch wrestling on television all afternoon. Ric Flair. Hulk Hogan. Dusty Rhodes. He taped the shows, bought the magazines, begged for the action figures. Then decided he wanted to grow up to be a wrestler, just like other little boys grew up wanting to be John Elway or Michael Jordan. At first, his parents thought it was amusing. Saw it as a phase. Assumed he'd grow out of it. Certainly didn't take it seriously. "My parents?" says Dutt, as he prefers to be known. "They laughed in my face, of course. They had the same idea that every Indian parent has for their child. Being a doctor or lawyer or something to that effect. I chose totally the opposite."

Remember this post on Sepia Mutiny about a letter from the South Asian Sisters regarding the film Harold and Kumar? It has been SM’s most controversial posting thus far. Well here is some more news regarding our sisters from The Stanford Daily:

The South Asian Sister, a Bay Area cultural group, will perform tomorrow night [Friday Nov. 5th] a South Asian version of the Vagina Monologues in Cubberley Auditorium. “Yoni Ki Baat: Talks of the Vagina,” is hosted by Saheli, Stanford’s South Asian Women’s Alliance, and Sanskiti, the Stanford’s South Asian cultural group.

“The Vagina Monologues has received such positive feedback on this campus, and we hope to create the same sense of empowerment and pride in the women who see this South Asian version, particularly those who can relate specifically to cultural and gender issues that the play addresses,” said senior Shilpi Agarwal, a member of Saheli.

Sounds like it will be an interesting and provocative show. Too bad I live at the wrong end of California.

“It’s often hard for young South Asian women here in America to reconcile the ideas of modesty and relative conservatism that pervade the Indian culture with the fact that empowerment extends beyond just educational achievement, but also to one’s body,” Agarwal said. “Because sex is a relatively taboo topic in many South Asian households, it’s important to remind South Asian women that they have the right to express themselves sexually and should not be ashamed of being strong women with needs and desires.”

Nepalese authorities have thwarted serial killer Charles Sobhraj's plan to escape from jail. Sobhraj, who had already spent two decades in Indian prisons, was sentenced to life after being convicted of the murder of a female tourist from the US.

Officials say they seized several phones and other electronic devices from his cell ...details of the plan are yet to emerge because experts are examining the electronic devices and phone sets that Sobhraj was found to be using.

Sobhraj escaped from a maximum-security prison in the Indian capital Delhi in 1986 but was recaptured soon after.

I love how he's in jail with a bunch of phones and helpful equipment.

Sobhraj, a.k.a "The Serpent" (because he's great at disguises...wait, wouldn't "The Chameleon" be more appropriate then?...Ah, forget it.) or "The Bikini Killer" (because he killed "western" women at a Thai beach resort) was never convicted of any of the 20 murders that he was linked to in the 1970s. "The Serpent" is half-Indian and half-Vietnamese, for those of you who are keen to know such things.

via the beeb

From his list of 18 things he loves about India:

I love the way it is so easy to make friends. I love seeing people everywhere who I think are exotic, and who at the same time think that I am exotic. I also love what Joseph Campbell simplistically called “India’s homosexual atmosphere.” I say “simplistic,” because it seems that few people in India think or act in terms of homosexual vs. heterosexual, or even think about homosexuality at all. See previous post on this subject. When I was a gay teenager, I tried to wriggle away in horror when even a beautiful beloved put his arm around me in public. In India, guys are arm-in-arm even when both are riding bicycles on a busy street. At my house, I have seen local “straight” guys sit in each other’s lap, and not only hold but caress each other’s hand. I love the fact that it is relatively easy to have affairs with handsome Indian guys. The rare, more media-conscious ones call it “the homosex.” The less aware simply call it “maasti,” which means mischief or play. I wonder how much more decent America would be if males were allowed to show affection for each other. I wonder how much more decent India would be if the sexes were not so segregated. I wonder if I am a fool for wondering these things.

Last night I was on my balcony reading the stars. I am a man of many talents. All of the stars pointed to the fact that Indian Astrologers are full of sh_t. From Newinidapress:

New Delhi-based astrologers S R Krishnamurti and Lachhman Das Madan, who had forecast a win for Kerry, were hard put to explain what went wrong.

“The sub-period of Mercury in the main period of Mercury, which was in operation for Senator Kerry for the last five-sixth months, appears to have been not strong enough to take him to victory,” said Krishnamurti, who not only predicted a Kerry win, but had also said he would usher in an era of world peace.

“Two other planets, the Sun and the Moon, that were earlier on Kerry’s side, also appear to be not favouring him,” added Krishnamurti, a mystic, seeking cosmic reasons for the turnaround.

Lachhman Das Madan, known as Jyotish Samrat (king of astrologers) and a favourite of the Indian political class, was unwilling to throw in the towel. “I will wait till the final results are out,” he said, shortly before Kerry conceded defeat.

The best part about this is that now I can marry anyone I want without our star charts having to match.

The people over at South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR) are pretty upset by the election results to say the least. Here is an article by Vijay Prashad who is the Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

Four years ago, Bush’s Brain Karl Rove swore that he would not rest until the four million Evangelicals who did not vote then would turn out yesterday. And they did. They came in droves. They told those who did the exit polls that the issue that brought them to the franchise was not their own unemployment or under employment, or even the loss of their family members in a war of choice. They came to vote for “moral values.”

After Rove told participants at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in 2001 that the goal of the Bush re-election campaign would be to make sure that all 19 million Evangelical Christians voted, his team hired Ralph Reed to take charge of the effort. Reed, the veteran of the Christian Coalition, mobilized his contacts and his good looks and went after the withheld votes.

I think this is going to be the chief finding when the post-mortem of this election is completed. All the issues we so vehemently debated all these months were rather irrelevant when it came down to what ended up swaying this election. Mr. Prashad makes his feelings on the subject quite clear as he ends,

Progressives are loath to offer a frontal criticism of the theocracy that has overtaken the South and the Midwest — where under the command of tolerance we have to endure the intolerance toward women and their bodies, toward gays and lesbians, towards anyone who does not fit the compass of the “moral values” mass-produced by the established churches. It is time to throw off our forbearance and open a direct debate on the suppression of rational argument in favor of theocratic bigotry.

Homophobia elected Bush. Misogyny elected Bush. Unreason elected Bush.

A Brooklyn theater company is presenting a minimalist staging of E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India:

... the company uses a single, brushed-metal set, simple white costumes, a few chairs and props, and a small cast of actors to present Forster's multilayered story of cultural conflict in colonial India... there are some clever bits of invention in Ms. Meckler's staging - for example, a lumbering elephant represented by a pyramid of softly swaying actors... no more illuminating is the decision to recast the tale as a flashback, and employ the novel's most prominent Hindu character, Godbole, as narrator...

[Forster] clearly meant Dr. Aziz to embody the unfettered emotionalism that he observed in Indian Muslims. As played by Mr. Caan, he is temperate and considered, a perfectly turned-out, machine-tooled product of British colonialism. Dr. Aziz concludes the play with a passionate speech denouncing the British occupying forces, but you wouldn't be surprised to see him turn around and invite his enemy to join him in a game of cricket.

At Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene through Saturday.

A few days ago I blogged about the Indian government possibly having spotted Bin Laden. Soon after, some FBI agents were dispactched to India but nobody was sure why. Now several newsites, such as the dailytimes.com, are reporting the following:

A senior FBI official visited India last week to alert intelligence agencies of the possibility of Osama Bin Laden sneaking into India, official sources said on Monday.

The Pakistan-based official sought Indian assistance for joint operations by Indian and US forces to nab Bin Laden if he crossed over to India from northeastern Pakistan.

The official’s visit followed India’s reports’ of spotting Bin Laden in northeastern Pakistan, close to the Pakistan-China-India border, sources added.

They said the FBI official met senior officials of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Intelligence Bureau (IB), Border Security Force (BSF) and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP).

If this is true it lends more credence to my previous entry. Hey, sneaking over to India worked for the Dalai Lama.

Our man in Delhi - interviewed by the Hindu Times - Marginal Revolution: My talk as reported by The Hindu Times

"His ideas might give most art lovers, especially the die-hard supporters of the culture cause in Bengal, more than a sleepless night. But Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University in the United States, firmly believes that Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Leonardo da Vinci and even Shakespeare were businessmen and is willing to prove it.

..."I don't think that India has anything to worry about on the count of culture. It has a vibrant culture; it has a great food culture too. India is growing and the purchasing power of people is also increasing. There is more foreign culture that is coming into India, but India has always had the ability to integrate different influences from the Mughals to the British and make it distinctly Indian. The earlier styles were a fusion of culture from Persia, China, but always with an Indian touch," he says.

...A "hero" that most commercial Hindi movie directors would love, his theory resemble the ideas they have been have been selling for years. "I know people criticise Hindi movies saying that it is not like Satyajit Ray. But I think that they require as much talent as a Ray film. They have a dreamlike quality, similar to Shakespeare. It appeals to universal human emotions and everyone wants to fall in love," he adds."

Sarita Choudhury is starring in acclaimed playwright Vijay Tendulkar's work 'Sakharam Binder' in Manhattan. This play, Tendulkar's most famous work, was once banned in India:

"Sakharam Binder''... tells the story of Sakharam's seventh and eighth "birds" (as his envious friend Dawood calls Sakharam's women). Laxmi (Anna George) is shy, submissive and pious, whereas Champa (Sarita Choudhury), her successor, is brash, voluptuous and spoiled... Ms. Choudhury radiates a proud, willful acuity that reads as desperate indignation as Champa shirks, malingers and turns to alcohol to blunt her disgust at Sakharam's sexual demands...

Mr. White vividly captures the strange and complex pathology of Sakharam, who seems to want to please his "birds" even as he bullies them and who speaks like a freethinking crusader for women's rights one minute and like an philistine scornful of their devotion to him the next... Like Brecht's Mother Courage, he exploits a corrupt system for personal advantage, then discovers that the price of playing the game is everything he hoped to protect.

The last play I heard of starring Choudhury was the off-Broadway 'Roar' by Palestinian-American playwright Betty Shamieh. I ran into Shamieh at a BBQ; despite her heavy subject matter, she's very funny in person.

Part of the IAAC's Tendulkar Festival, through Nov. 14 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th St., Manhattan.

Jindal elected to Congress: 33-year-old Bobby Jindal was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana in yesterday's national election. As expected, Jindal won decisively with 78% of the vote. Several challengers split the remaining vote, with no one else getting more than 7%. Jindal follows Dalip Singh Saund, a California Congressman in the '50s, as only the second South Asian American ever elected to Congress.

Aside from being of Punjabi origin, Jindal and Saund's stories differ markedly. Saund was a progressive lettuce farmer who attended UC Berkeley, while Jindal is a conservative Rhodes Scholar who attended Brown and Oxford. But they both persevered in the face of electoral disappointment: Jindal recently lost a close race for Louisiana governor, while Saund won a race for a judgeship but later had to re-fight the campaign:

Saund ran for his friend's office and won. But because he had only been a citizen less than a year, he was barred from taking office. A petition signed by twice the number of people who had elected him did nothing to help his cause... Two years later, he again ran for the judgeship and won despite anti-immigrant bashings made by his opponent who had tried to incite the public with sayings like "Hindu for Judge."

Other elected desi politicians at the state legislature level include Nikki Randhawa-Haley and long-serving doyen Kumar Barve.

Previous posts on Jindal: 1, 2, 3, 4

Done voting in the U.S. election? Vote again in a different one. As you may recall, 22-year-old Anish Shroff is competing for a job as ESPN sports anchor on the show 'Dream Job.' Well, he's now made it into the final four (via SAJA).

The show airs 9 pm ET / 6 pm PT, and you may vote for Shroff online after midnight ET / 9 pm PT. Here's the voting page.

From Yahoo Asia:

“They hide in trees and swoop on unsuspecting children loitering about in the temple premises or walking by, clawing them and even sucking a bit of blood,” Bani Kumar Sharma, a priest at the Kamakhya temple in Assam state, told The Associated Press. The temple, one of the most famous in India, is located in Gauhati, Assam’s capital.

“I was returning home from school when a monkey suddenly pounced on me, scratched my head and hand and pushed me to the ground,” said Jolly Sharma, a 6-year-old girl.

Hmmm. These sound awfully similar to the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

My mom was lazy and didn’t register in time (plus she was afraid she would be called to jury duty). My brother was lazy and didn’t secure an absentee ballot in time. Is the brown turning out? From Rediff.com:

South Asians, including Indian Americans, turned up in unusually large numbers to vote in New York City, reflecting what observers say is a nationwide trend in the 2004 presidential election.

“I have not only taken part in election, but have been an observer for many years. I have never seen such huge number of people from the South Asian community standing in queue to cast votes,” said Morshed Alam, former NYC School Board member and commissioner for the city’s voter assistance commissioner. “This is just unbelievable.”

That’s what I like to hear.

Editors note: The image that was originally here has been taken down for copyright reasons. It was a picture of an elderly Indian woman holding up a sign that said “The Time is Now.”

South Asians for Kerry just sent me an email with this picture. The sign looks doctored to me. The election fraud has begun. I wonder what the sign originally said. Apparently this woman tends to “get around.”

Ally McBeal ain't got nuttin on Bombay - Getting sexy at work? No crime - The Economic Times

"Flirting can be fun if confined within limits. My marital status has never stopped my colleagues from flirting with me. And frankly, I quite enjoy the attention and the harmless stuff. I know where to draw the line," Samant, says.

Using sexuality to further career is not entirely an alien concept in the Indian corporate milieu. As conventional behaviour takes a backseat, it is time to do away with inhibitions. Professionals are no longer scared to admit ambitions.

This is fascinating: Indian outsourcing companies, caught short-staffed by surging sales, are subcontracting some of the work to China.

"We need a deep reservoir of talent as well as an alternative low-cost center like India as we continue to grow," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, who has talked of his company's scaling up to become the Wal-Mart of outsourcing. "And only China can match up."... China has some 200,000 information technology workers--compared with India's 850,000--in 6,000 local companies... More than 50,000 Chinese software programmers are being added to this pool annually.

... even with wages rising in India, China's information technology workers are more expensive "because a combination of English-language and technical skills is at a premium," Nilekani of Infosys said.

So a country which couldn't defeat its neighbor on the battlefield is employing it instead. And it's all thanks to unwanted colonization by an empire which left behind its language. It's not only the law of unintended consequences, it's also slick jujitsu.

Dr. Mohammed Ali Chaudry was elected mayor of Basking Ridge / Bernards Township, New Jersey last year. He may be the first Pakistani-American mayor in the U.S., an achievement we should be proud of.

Sahiwal born Dr. Chaudhry left Pakistan in 1963 to study at London School of Economics, and…  came to United States in 1967 and earned a Ph. D. in Economics from Tufts University…

However, Chaudry also voted to ban Midnight’s Children in local schools while on the local board of education, possibly driven by antipathy dating back to The Satanic Verses. One desi voter who couldn’t read the book in his high school English class was so incensed that he cast a write-in vote (via liberal blog DailyKos) this morning for Salman Rushdie, who, to the best of my knowledge, is not running for Township Commissioner in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

As soon as I saw his name on the ballot last week, I flipped out… My 11th grade English teacher wanted to teach the book Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie in the year’s curriculum. However, this Chaudry guy tried to ban it! He was relentless!… my whole family went with my teacher to contest the banning of Midnight’s Children… that was 10 years ago… My sister and I (as well as my mom and dad…) agreed to write in “Salman Rushdie” as Township Commissioner… I’d pay generously to see the steam rising from Mr. Chaudry’s head.

Chaudry is probably also the first mayor to use an instant messaging video feed to attend a city council meeting from Pakistan:

“I had a friend who had a cable modem in Lahore and a camera set up so the Council could see my picture on the screen and I could see the Council. A landmark, I was very pleased with that. The beauty of this was it did not cost the Council a single penny.”

Do you miss your brother or sister so much that you are not willing to put up with the 13 year waiting period to sponsor them over to the U.S.? Then marry them. From OnlyPunjab.com:

In a ludicrous move to outwit US immigration laws, an Indian American from Punjab ‘married’ his own sister while his wife ‘married’ his brother so that they could circumvent the 13-year waiting period necessary for siblings.

Paramjit Singh Taggar, 44, and his wife Harbans Kaur Hothi, 51, were found guilty of conspiracy, fraud and misuse of visas by a US district court in San Francisco, California.

I wouldn’t want to be there when they have to explain it all to the kids.

The latest market to fall prey to the vicious outsourcing demon - Desi pornstars get on top : HTTabloid.com

'Be Indian, Buy Indian' when it comes to porn. A newfound lust for the dark-skinned woman is fuelling a demand for desi pornstars not only within the country, but also abroad.

...popular titles include Mr and Mrs Bollywood, Private Fantasies, Delhi Babes, Saree Strippers, Agni Pushpam, Yamni and Ratree Milan. Even films made years ago are staging a comeback. Looking Eyes, originally shot in Malyalam some ten years back, has now been dubbed in Hindi due to incessant demand.

...Interestingly, desi porn seems to have found a dedicated following in the West as well. "To be honest, European girls look more like fresh ham, while the women from India are far sexier," insists an NRI who watches porn regularly.

Debkafile, which according to the Times of India is “a website believed to be run by people close to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad,” claims that the Indian Airforce spotted Bin Laden by airplane or satellite between October 17th and 19th in the North-Eastern corner of Pakistan bordering India and China.

Bin Laden was actually spotted in the flesh just a few days ago - according to DEBKAfile’s counter terror sources. Between October 17 and October 19, an Indian air force reconnaissance plane picked him up in the Tibet-Laddakh region close to the North-Eastern corner of Pakistan bordering India and China. Additional surveillance aircraft were called in and identified the al Qaeda leader on the move with a 10-vehicle convoy of black Japanese minivans. Four of the vehicles turned up again on October 22 heading east towards the Chinese border. Our sources maintain that the rumored sightings of bin Laden on the Lingzi Thang Plain on the Tibetan border in June may have been true then but are now outdated. In any case, he was not at the time in Pakistani Waziristan or the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The agents hunting the al Qaeda leader are working on the premise that he has decided to wait out the winter months in one of two regions: Hunza province in the Northern Frontier tip of Indian Kashmir or Little Pamir, where fanatical Tajik tribes have never allowed any Kabul government - whether Taliban or led by Karzai - to secure a foothold. Little Pamir is wedged between Tajikistan

I don’t think anyone knows for sure if this is true or not but Foxnews ran the story as well (at least according to the Times of India, although I am unable to locate the story on Fox):

The Fox Channel too made similar claims late Sunday night.

However, sources in the Indian military have dismissed the news saying they had “no such” high-level exchanges with US agencies and there was no such evidence on bin Laden.

It is well known that Indian intelligence agencies are extremely upset with US agencies that sourced all possible information from them after 9/11 while denying them any access to American information including those regarding terrorism against India.

Most voters are wary of campaign promises. Perhaps the most famous broken campaign pledge in recent history was the senior Bush’s “Read my lips. No new taxes.” It might be a good idea to make note of the campaign promises being made right now as well, to see if any of them come to pass. From IACFPA:

“John Kerry and John Edwards will not tolerate threats, violence or discrimination against the Muslim-American community,” he said in a press statement, adding that top Democratic Party leaders “recognize the many contributions that Muslim Americans have made to our nation,” assuring them that Kerry would favor immigration laws.

“They will offer a reform bill in the first 100 days of a Kerry-Edwards administration that allows immigrants to earn legalization, encourages family reunification, and strengthens our border protections,” Khan maintained in what is sure to become a “Kerry-watch” in a post-election scenario.

What else do they pledge to do?

Currently, most Muslim Americans and civil rights advocates have opposed the Patriot Act. “Both the leaders support efforts, such as the bipartisan-sponsored Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act, to amend the Patriot Act to set reasonable limits on access to library, medical, and other records containing the sensitive, personal details of the lives of law-abiding Americans and on the conduct of so-called “sneak and peek” searches, Khan insisted, pointing to Kerry’s former job as a prosecutor. Kerry, he said, knows that “racial profiling is nothing more than ineffective law enforcement and must be prohibited.” He and John Edwards, Khan said, “support End Racial Profiling Act, which would ban racial profiling and require federal, state, and local law enforcement to take steps to end and prevent racial profiling,” and that both are working to strengthen hate crime laws. Both, he noted, “have led the fight for the Workplace Religious Freedom Act which will ensure that no American is forced to choose between the job they need and the faith that sustains them.”

London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and his son Aditya are planning a $17.8B acquisition of an Ohio company which will make Mittal Steel the world’s biggest:

Last week, in a complicated $17.8 billion deal, Indian entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal said he would merge his existing steel assets — the privately-held LNM Holdings and the publicly-traded Ispat International — with the U.S.-based International Steel Group (ISG). The deal, which must still gain regulatory approval, would create the world’s biggest steel company, Mittal Steel, to be based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and help Mittal pursue his modest goal of making Mittal as synonymous with steel as Ford is with the motor car. The new company could produce up to 10% of the world’s steel…

Mittal made his $6.8B fortune in steel mills all over the world, including Calcutta, Romania, Mexico and Kazakhstan. Ironically, Mittal no longer owns any steel mills in India itself.

He has been able to generate profits by using his scale to buy lower-cost raw materials and by importing modern management techniques into previously inefficient state-run mills.