Shaheen Sheik is dropping her album Rock Candy on Sunday, May 1st. Now if I was a proper music reviewer I’d paint a picture for you about what her music sounds like. I’d say something clever like “Norah Jones meets so and so” and I’d use music industry words like “mellifluous.” I am not a Rolling Stones writer though. I’m just a humble blogger. I can only tell you that when she sings my feet tap and my head bobs and I think pleasant thoughts while oblivious to distractions. Besides, I’ve always thought of music the way I think of paintings. I don’t like people putting thoughts in my head of what I should expect to hear when I can simply listen for myself. Go listen to some songs off of her new CD here and decide for yourself.

Her record release party will be on Sunday night at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood for those who might be interested in seeing her perform. I’ll be there of course :)

Also see previous post here.

[disclosure: Shaheen is a friend]

L.A. Mayorial Candidate Antonio Villaraigosa has pandered to pretty much every ethnic minority in L.A. in his bid to unseat incumbent Jim Hahn. Why not South Asians? Indiawest reports:

If elected mayor of Los Angeles in the May 17 election, city councilman Antonio Villaraigosa pledged that, in making Los Angeles more “open” to South Asians…His administration would also seriously consider making appointments from within those communities

In fairness though, you have to excessively pander in L.A. to win.

Reza Aslan has been making rounds on the talk show circuit recently to hype his book “No God, but God.”

In No god but God, Aslan challenges the “clash of civilizations” mentality that has distorted our view of Islam and explains this critical faith in all its complexity, beauty, and compassion.

Irshad Manji (born to Indian and Egyptian parents) on the other hand takes a different approach. USA Today reports:

Irshad Manji has plenty of enemies among her fellow Muslims. Her critique of Islam is frank and fierce. She defends the invasion of Iraq. She sympathizes with Israel. She’s a lesbian and doesn’t try to hide it.

“Then there is the hair,” she adds, referring to the spiky highlights that sharpen her live-wire manner.

What has brought this Uganda-born Asian-Canadian to prominence is her book, “The Trouble With Islam Today,” just out in paperback in the United States where she has been touring and talking.

As you can imagine, a practicing Muslim with such unique views might be a product of an unusual background.

It’s thoroughly depressing that some Indian girls are still being married off by age 12… suspiciously coincidental with the age of menarche. The obsession with female virginity obscenely reduces half the world to a box of disposable tissues with a faulty seal:

[A]s Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin’s hymen ‘like a ray of sunshine through a window—leaving it unbroken.’

… Today the NYT reminds us Neanderthal marriage customs are not a uniquely desi shame, they’re tribal:

More than half of Kyrgyzstan’s married women were snatched from the street by their husbands in a custom known as “ala kachuu,” which translates roughly as “grab and run.” … at least a third of Kyrgyzstan’s brides are now taken against their will. Kyrgyz men say they snatch women because it is easier than courtship and cheaper than paying the standard “bride price,” which can be as much as $800 plus a cow.

This in particular is reminiscent of desi village culture:

Once a girl has been kept in the home overnight, her fate is all but sealed: with her virginity suspect and her name disgraced, she will find it difficult to attract any other husband… “Every good marriage begins in tears,” a Kyrgyz saying goes.

It’s always bothered me the way the doli / vidai in a Hindu wedding ends in tears… At its heart it’s a submission ritual: the baraatis have stormed the gates, the bride has been caught, the doli is her broken surrender, carried off in a palanquin to the conqueror’s harem. ‘Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge’: it’s Alexander entering Babylon, Hulagu entering Baghdad.

The Voice thinks M.I.A. needs to coin a genre:

Fannypack are like M.I.A., who hops her own scotch and shakes her own jumprope, and they’re in a similar predicament, which is that they don’t quite fit pre-existing genres, dance or hip-hop… Fannypack and M.I.A. should hold a joint press conference and simply declare themselves a genre, invent some name, Jumprope or Streetrope or Boohall or Favela Bratty Beats or Bow-Wow Booty Bop or something… M.I.A. and Fannypack are in dance-club bohemia, which means on the one hand that they’ll be surrounded by preciousness, but on the other that, being bohos, they might stick to their vision, keep doing the jumprope not just for fun or for the moolah but for the art of it, persist long enough and obstinately enough to still be jumping when the world is finally ready to jump with them…

Budding interior designers now have a new way to decorate: have your custom furnishings made in an Indian factory:

[Cornelia] The other fusion element—the Swedish-looking candleholder that I found. I wanted to get 40 made for our wedding. I sent out an Internet request to a consortium of Indian manufacturers: “Can anybody make these?” A man with a factory outside Delhi e-mailed: I can do it!

[Mikael] We use candles a lot in northern countries… We’re a pale people.

With Edison, NJ in the news, this article from the the good folks over at GNXP is rather timely - a mathematical model for the formation of ethnic enclaves -

...Natural Intelligence has developed an application called the "Ethnic Simulator" that models the residential behavior of people in the hypothetical ethnically diverse city of Metropolis.

...The premise of the Ethnic Simulator is that ethnically distinct groups have a modest preference to live among their own kind. In Metropolis there are five ethnic groups –- Blues (the majority), Greens, Reds, Grays, and Yellows. The application allows the user to set the percentage of preference of each group for its own kind.

Outcome? Regardless of how "racist" the majority Blues are, the minority Yellows end up in "ghettos" if they express even the most minor preference for being near each other.... Intuitively obvious perhaps, but interesting to see mathematically modelled.

Turbanhead brings our attention to an album of Hindi ABBA covers from the 1970s with puzzling translations of song names:
Ho Jayegi Badnami (Money, Money, Money), Mitha Maze Dar (Dancing Queen), Pehil Pehli Preet (Super Trooper), Toba Toba (Mama Mia), etc

Karthik tells a droll story about borrowing a library book in India:

“Do you have The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?”
“Who is the author?”
“John Le Carre.”

… she scribbled something in the note, and left it on her desk… Stuck to the notice with cellophane tape was the make shift post-it note. It said, in Tamil:

Karthik
John
Book with a long name

Shashwati explains murderer Charles Sobhraj’s escape from a Greek prison:

One day he managed to purloin a syringe. He drew some of his own blood, and spat it out during an inspection, and collapsed feigning illness… While in hospital, he lay his hands on a bottle of perfume… Charles and some other inmates were put in a van to be taken back to the prison… Charles threw the perfume on a bunch of oily rags and lit it, starting a fire in the van… Sobhraj escaped in the confusion.

Suketu Mehta wrote this sensuous take on the Great Northeast Power Outage (via Green Channel):

As it got dark, the texture of the city changed. The street lights were out, and people strolled about with flashlights, lanterns. Street vendors were selling glow-sticks and phosphorescent necklaces which would save you from being run over at intersections… It was a steamy night; men walked around without their shirts; women came out in their shortest skirts. People trying to catch the trains to the suburbs realised they couldn’t make it, met other commuters, and made impromptu dinner plans with them; ate pizza by candlelight and slept together in the parks… For one night, the city shed its load.

Eyebrow-raising patents are also granted outside of the U.S.:

...a food plaza in Hyderabad has recently introduced 104 different varieties of Dosa. They have already patented 27 of them. The food plaza introduced this new concept in Hyderabad after a successful trial in Mumbai...“Focal point of the Dosa Plaza is we have created more than 104 varieties of Dosas out of which 27 are patented, nobody can copy it. The difference between other Dosas and these Dosas are the fillings. We have the international flavour like Mexican dishes are filled in the Dosas or there are American fillings,” said Jagdish Khorwal, Project Head, Dosa Plaza. [ANI/Yahoo!]

This far-out concept of wrapping a round piece of flattened bread around Mexican ingredients is going to be big. Picture, if you will, a whole chain of hacienda-like eateries with...bells...selling this truly groundbreaking product to all of India’s mostly non-obese citizens. So big, that it should spark unbridled franchising around the world, catering to those starved for affordable Mexican food prepared quickly. Billions upon billions of dollars will be generated. Luckily, Khorwal has patented this ingenious design, so he won’t have worry about unscrupulous businessmen stealing his idea. He will also finally collect the years of royalties owed to him by the citizens of entire continents, who have been enjoying for eons just such a delicacy without paying him his proper dues.

ANI/Yahoo!: 104 varieties of dosa to stir Hyderabadis’ taste buds!

So does this mean that Microsoft is hiring?

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates slammed the federal government’s strict limits on temporary visas for technology workers, saying that if he had his way, the system would be scrapped entirely. “The theory behind the H-1B (visa)--that too many smart people are coming--that’s what’s questionable,” Gates said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the Library of Congress. “It’s very dangerous. You can get this idea that the world is very scary; let’s cut back on travel...let’s cut back on visas.” Federal quotas on H-1B visas, capped at 65,000 last year, have long been a sore spot for Microsoft and other technology companies. But, Gates said, the increased caliber of research institutions in China and India means that curbs on immigration and guest-workers will pose a greater threat to America’s competitiveness than ever before. [News.com]

Of course, the rudimentary pro- and con- noise from elected officials:

“I think there was a post-9/11 effort to cut down on visas,” added Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. “I think this was a mistake.” Rep. David Dreier, a California Republican, was left defending stricter immigration rules. “We can’t be so naive as to think there is not a very serious problem” with terrorists entering the country, he said. [News.com]

News.com: Gates wants to scrap H-1B visa restrictions

I sense a conspiracy. My senses are often way off though so I will let you guys be the judge. First, Renu Kansal sends us the following tip from Variety.com (subscription required):

Outgoing Walt Disney chief exec Michael Eisner and his successor, Bob Iger, were stalking the Indian subcontinent this week in search of new business opportunities. The pair met both President APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday and Tuesday and held talks with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, Information and Broadcasting Minister Jaipal Reddy and senior bureaucrats before traveling to Mumbai today.

Leaders of the world’s top media and entertainment groups are increasingly beating a path to the subcontinent as they recognize its huge potential as an emerging market with a population of 1.3 billion. Rupert Murdoch, in particular, is a frequent visitor.

Did you get that so far? Michael Eisner of DISNEY was spotted in India on business. TODAY the BBC has this story (thanks to my brother for the tip), announcing the world’s FIRST Hindu theme-park (that we’d heard rumblings of before). Coincidence I ask you??

Its backers describe it as the “world’s biggest ever mythological theme park”. Hindu gods such as Ram, Hanuman and Krishna will be the central attractions for a ‘Disneyland on the Ganges’ in India.

The aim of the 25 acre park, called Gangadham, is to recreate great moments in Hindu mythology through hi-tech rides, an animated mythological museum, a “temple city”, food courts and a sound and light show.

The park is to be on the banks of the Ganges, in the north Indian pilgrimage town of Haridwar.

I bet you they will just take apart and old Dumbo ride from Disneyland, modify it to make it look like Ganesh, and then charge a fortune. Also I remember the California case not so long ago where Tigger was charged with, but acquitted of fondling a young girl. Can you IMAGINE if such scandal were to hit a Hindu theme park? Perish the thought. Of course Disney in reality has nothing to do with this but it’s fun to imagine what would happen if they did.

Consider if you will some of the following quotes:

“There are Koreans, Chinese, and Hindoos numbering over one billion. Allow them to secure a foothold in the United States, and they will, within a few generations, sweep like an avalanche of death from the Himalayas around the globe”

or

“It is essential that the blood of the American-Europeans of this country, who together with their ancestors developed civilization to its present state, should be kept pure and free from the taint of the decadent Orientalism of China, Japan and India. We have no quarrel with those people. We wish them well in their own countries, but we do not want them in ours.”

or

“[Indian religions are] debauched with deeds of lust and blood…Many of the Indian deities, given to lustful amours, are especially worshipped by the people….It is not surprising that religion in India is not only divorced from morality but married to vice…much indecency exists in India under the guise of religion, many of the temple dancing girls are merely consecrated prostitutes, and in many cases respectable women are led to lives of shame.”

Do you get angry when you read this? Or perhaps it sounds vaguely familiar to you? When compared to the transcript of the Jersey Guys radio show that I posted a few days ago the above quotes aren’t that radically different. Well what if I told you the quotes above are all about a century old? Indolink.com has a very educational article titled, Fear and Loathing: Hinduphobia in America .

When you were a kid, did you ever play telephone? That game where a whole bunch of people would sit in a circle, the first would pass a message to the second, and so on until it came back, having changed in some bizarre and unpredictable way? Well, blogging on news stories can be like that, as bloggers pass along a story it becomes simply an inkblot, showing us more about the bloggers involved than about the original item. Here, I offer a minor example of such an indianinkblot from two of my favorite economics bloggers:

Recently Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution wrote another in his series of wonderful Outsourcing for Everything posts:

Why not grade exam papers in India?  Brad DeLong offers the link.  The obvious question is what we really need professors for anyway  — are we simply magnets of personality to keep students interested?

Working backwards, we find Brad’s story etitled  Offshoring Creeps Closer to the Professoriate! which contains the following blurb:

BBC News: British exam papers India bound: “Thousands of exam papers from England will be sent to India later this year as part of the marking process. Critics in England say the move is the latest example of cost-cutting by outsourcing, and will result in errors in exam marking and delays in results. The exam board behind the initiative, AQA, told the BBC that no marking would take place in India and that the move would make marking more efficient.

What’s the original story really about? It’s about how the brits are scanning in handwritten one word answers on exam sheets, and sending them to India to be transcribed. There is no actually exam marking in India at all! None! To their credit, neither blogger says that there was any grading going on in India, but I’ll bet many sloppy readers might have come away with that impression.

Imagine being a poor Indian villager. You’re recruited for an honorable blue-collar job in the Middle East. Your dad borrows money to buy you the ticket. Your travel agent takes pity on you and buys you decent clothes for your first day on the job.

When you arrive, customs searches your belongings. You’re shocked when they tell you they found a small amount of heroin in your shoes and throw you in jail. You quickly realize the travel agent was not as generous as he seemed. You spend the next five years in lockup. The Indian embassy doesn’t help.

One fine day, the police take you out back and cut off your head. Then, while closing out your case, they realize they made a mistake and send a message to the Indian embassy: you were innocent after all. Shrug. Body’s been disposed of. Shit happens. Whaddya gonna do.

Unfortunately, it’s not a macabre short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Naickam Shahjahan, a poor Muslim from Kerala, was beheaded two months ago in Saudi Arabia for a crime he didn’t commit (via Prashant Kothari). 1.3 million Indians work in Saudi Arabia, and 18 were beheaded in 2003. But when innocent Brits are caught in the Saudi sharia system, their government usually manages to get them out.

… an undetermined number of foreigners, among them Indians, have been sentenced to death in the kingdom and await execution. Details of their trials and the evidence presented to convict them are treated as a State secret. “The tragedy is that in many cases, the condemned men did not know they had been sentenced to death, and their embassies were only informed after the fact,” says Menon.

Last year, an Indian diplomat in the Gulf said no advance information is given to the embassy before Indians are beheaded. “We get the information after the execution from local newspapers,” he said. After the execution, the body is not returned to the family. Relatives receive no official information about the location of the mortal remains in Saudi Arabia…

Yesterday, Vinod reported on the convinction of Hemant Lakhani, would be merchant of death. Lakhani is clearly scum:

Lakhani was filmed clapping his hands in glee as he admired the missile he thought he had single-handedly smuggled into the US and was clearly delighted with his achievement. [cite]

However, I don’t feel any safer today. Consider the following:

1.  Lakhani was a nobody who got set up in a sting.  He wasn’t a big time arms dealer before the FBI came to him, he was a two-time loser in textiles who “had declared bankruptcy, owed taxes on his house, was evicted from the office where he ran his clothing business and owed money on bounced cheques.” From what I can tell, he had no prior involvement with arms dealing, nor any prior association with “terrorists” (it’s in quotes since the FBI guy was a ringer) before the sting.

2.  He was completely incompetent as an arms dealer. Lakhani spent 2 years trying to find missiles to sell to the FBI’s fake terrorist buyer but he still couldn’t get his hands on any weapons. He was so clueless that, according to the fake buyer,  Lakhani was unfamiliar with terms such as ‘ammo’.” His lawyer characterized him as: 

a failed businessman, motivated solely by money who “couldn’t finish a deal if his life depended on it” and would not have done so without a hefty government operation behind him.  [cite]

3.  To make the arrest, the FBI had to supply the arms for Lakhani to sell to them. The FBI supplied both “the arms buyer, and Russian agents who posed as sellers” They even smuggled the “missile” to New Jersey. Before that point, for almost 2 years, the buyer never received any military hardware from Lakhani.

I am not trying to defend Lakhani’s actions. He did something criminal and has been sent to jail. I am simply not convinced that there are any fewer arms or (real) arms dealers in the world today as a result.

By the title alone I think I’m going to like this book. Little Brown & Company has offered Kaavya Viswanathan a $500,000, two book deal. The Financial Express provides the details:

You’re 17 and want to get into US’ Harvard University, but first what do you do about those infernal jumping hormones that every gal goes through post-teens. Being an Indian, you don’t indulge your sex-oriented daydreams (study first, pleasure later). So the next best option is to pen them to paper and get rid of the hots.

In a huge first, US born Kaavya Viswanathan did exactly that and more. Little Brown & Company, a respected 109-year-old publishing house offered Kaavya a $500,000 two-book deal with the first one to be out next spring titled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In. Considering that first-time writers get $10,000, Kaavya sure made a killing.

Writing is also the way I get rid of my “hots.”

The New York Sun (registration required) goes into more detail:

Ms. Viswanathan began writing the novel while still at the Bergen County Academy at Hackensack. She’s the only child of her Indian-born parents, Viswanathan Rajaraman, a neurosurgeon, and Mary Sundaram, a gynecologist.

“Everybody in my family, including my parents, won science prizes,” Ms. Viswanathan said. “I was the one with the writing gene - and I’ve no idea where that came from. My parents are still in a state of shock. When I’ve gone home on some weekends, they look at me working at my computer and surely wonder, ‘Who is that strange person?’”

What I can’t help noticing is that a 17-year-old writer, seems to like writing about day-dreams and possibilities, and getting wild, whereas older writers like to focus on why Indian men (or women) suck.

“The main character is a girl of Indian descent who’s totally academically driven, and when she senses from a Harvard admissions officer that her personal life wasn’t perhaps well-rounded, Ms. Mehta goes out and does what she thinks ‘regular’ American kids do - get drunk, kiss boys, dance on the table,” Ms. Viswanathan said.

Can I get a “hell yeah?” Please, anyone? :)

Desilit Daily comments: I can’t tell if this is more likely to sell to desi high school students applying to colleges, or to the parents desperate to get them in to Harvard…

Oh simple trader, I hope thee rots in hell -

NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) - A British man was found guilty of trying to provide material support to terrorists on Wednesday for selling a shoulder-launched missile to an undercover FBI informant posing as an Islamic militant seeking to attack the United States.

Hemant Lakhani, 69, a British citizen born in India, was found guilty of five criminal charges by a U.S. District Court jury in Newark, New Jersey, that began deliberating on Tuesday.

His defense - racial profiling -

But while the prosecution depicted Lakhani as an enthusiastic broker eager to supply a terrorist group, the defense said he was a victim of overzealous law enforcement in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Honestly I’m soooo tired of the following topic. I know that I should be completely jaded by such things already, but I like to think that they can still bring out the fight in me. The same mob mentality over the radiowaves that we have seen in the past has happened once again. SM tipster “Ayyner” alerts us to yet another racist outburst by some East Coast on-air personalities. The following is a partial transcript (a longer transcript here) of the Jersey Guys Radio Show on NJ 105.1 FM. The Jersey Guys are Craig Carton and Ray Rossi.

[Caller]: You just said it all, the last couple of … callers, I guess they don’t know that they live in America and we’re being overrun. I had just moved out of Edison because of what has happened in the past 10 years… Orientals are all along, the whole complete route 27. And Indians have taken over Edison in north and all over.

[Carton]: Damn Orientals and Indians.

[Caller]: I..i moved out..36 years I’ve lived in Edison

[Carton]: And what was the biggest problem you had with the Orientals and the Indians ?

[Caller]: I can’t handle them! There’s no American people anymore.

[Carton]: Eh..

[Caller]: There shoving us the hell out!

[Carton]: It’s like you’re a foreigner in your own country isn’t it?

In my opinion the above excerpt is rather tame compared to the rest. Their ignorant invective seems to be particularly focused on East Asians. Unlike previous on-air incidents, this seems to have occurred in the middle of a “political discussion” instead of one meant to be funny. Specifically, the conversation centered around the upcoming race for mayor of Edison, NJ. The discussion basically degenerated into Carton bashing liberals who he thinks care too much about getting minority votes. You should be concerned with the majority (“me”) to paraphrase Carton. According to an article from a few weeks ago this duo has a large audience.

Touted as the most listened to FM talk show, the afternoon program commands nearly 1 million listeners a week, said Ray Handel, director of marketing and promotions for the station.

Of course this is really nothing new. Limbaugh gets away with this kind of crap all the time but is clever enough to not be so blatant. If you can’t even be clever enough to veil your racism [sarcasm] you deserve to be smacked off the airways. In any case, we’ve been informed that “South Asian legal organizations are coming together again to craft a concerted response.”

Update (4/27/05): The reaction.

Hollywood Masala’s Santhosh Daniel directs our attention to “Four Weeks in Bombay,” an exciting experiment in reality filmmaking/human torture:

Set in Mumbai (Bombay), the film follows four continuous weeks in the life of twenty-year-old San Diego-native, Phil Mikal, as he steps off the plane and into one of the most compelling cities in the world. Given just twenty American dollars, a few necessities and no translator, Mikal a.k.a. Jonny Quest can end his involvement in the project only if serious illness or injury occurs and, voyeurs can watch his adventure via broadband-access from May 6th-June 3rd for just $2. [Hollywood Masala]

Here are the rules for Mikal, who must have agreed to them while under some form of intoxication or duress:

1. The game starts as soon as he lands at the Airport in Bombay and ends at his scheduled flight back to the U.S.
2. He will only have $20 American dollars to get him started.
3. He will only be allowed to bring daily necessities like clothes, toothbrush, shaving cream, deodorant and so forth.
4. He’s not allowed to advertise that he’s only there for 4 weeks to anyone!
5. He’s allowed to get a job or do anything he has to do to survive as long as he complies with the rules.
6. Since he is aware of the project ahead of time, he’s allowed to do whatever research he may feel is necessary.
7. He is only allowed to forfeit the project if he catches a serious illness or gets a serious physical injury. Common cold, flu, stuff of that nature doesn’t count.
8. He will be allowed to take any required/suggested medical shots preparing him for the trip.
9. We’re not allowed to help him at all…not even translate. We’ll be operating the camera and only act as observers and leave the viewer to draw their own conclusions. [Four Weeks in Bombay]

Still, $20 is a shockingly low amount of money for four weeks in India. How will Mikal earn more cash?

Since your visa is for traveling purposes only, legally you can’t get a job in Bombay. Have you thought about how you’re going to overcome that challenge?
Either by not getting a job and trying to make money in alternate ways... [Four Weeks in Bombay]

Ah, indeed, there are many “alternate ways” for a pretty white boy to make money in Bombay. Hopefully, this will also be taped, making the $2 access fee a downright bargain. The adventure starts on May 6, and the price of admission unlocks full access to the entire show.

This has to be what fish and lobsters in tanks at seafood restaurants dream of — a glass case in the ocean filled with juicy humans, fattening themselves up with rich resort food:

The world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant has opened at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa on the Island of Rangali. The restaurant, called Ithaa – meaning ‘pearl’ in the Maldives’ language of Dhivehi – is situated on the seabed, six metres beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. All the walls of the restaurant are transparent, offering 180 degree views of the surrounding marine life and coral reef. [World Leisure News & Jobs]

World Leisure News & Jobs: Underwater restaurant for Hilton

Lakshmi Mittal’s fortress isn’t made of steel, which calls into question his affinity for the source of his eye-popping wealth:

The steel magnate set real estate records last year when he paid $128 million for a townhouse in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens...Mittal’s mansion, tucked between Kensington Palace and the Sultan of Brunei’s spread, has garage space for 20 cars, and is embellished with marble taken from the same quarry as that for the Taj Mahal. [Forbes]

Forbes: Homes of the billionaires 2005 — Lakshmi Mittal

From the Los Angeles Times (free registration required):

Tehmina Mehta, the matriarch described as the quiet strength of a classical music family that encompassed her late husband, Mehli, and sons Zubin and Zarin Mehta, has died. She was 96. Mehta died Friday in Los Angeles of natural causes...Her late husband perhaps offered the greatest assessment of Tehmina Mehta when he told The Times in 1984: “Though her body is frail, her mind is stronger than all of us put together. She’s the center of our family and the one person who holds it all together.” [Los Angeles Times]

This one has it all: Hermaphroditism, incest, sex change surgery, betrayal, and the inevitable lawsuit. Cable executives score their next movie-of-the-week:

Twenty-nine-year-old rubber tapper Kuttiyamma, born with both male and female genitals, had been in love with the relative, Laura, 25, for 15 years before having surgery to become a man and change her name to Binu, the Hindustan Times reported. But Laura became engaged to another man and Binu is suing her for breach of trust after spending 50,000 rupees ($1,150) on the sex change in southern Kerala state. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: He sues lover after sex change hitch

Bangladeshi customs officials have yet to discover the concept of a seizure auction:

Hundreds of people watched as officials from the National Board of Revenue (NBR) used bulldozers to crush a Mercedes Benz and a Toyota car and other luxury goods at a railway container terminal in Dhaka. NBR chairman Khairuzzaman Chowdhury said a trading firm had sought to evade customs duties by falsely declaring that the container carried iron scrap. "They wanted to befool us by saying they brought in scrapped metals...so we are giving them the same. They, or anyone like them, will not forget this," he told reporters at the site. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: Declaring cars as scrap? Dhaka customs makes it true

Update: BBC News has a small photo of the glorious event.

Accents matter:

In a rambunctious Meatpacking District bar, I met a woman whose parents were German. She was tall, brown-haired and fair and had grown up in India. She had a Delhi accent.

At a self-storage business, I met a manager who looked black. He had a courtly manner and a delightful accent, and his nametag said Seetram (Sitaram). He was surprised and pleased when I guessed Guyanese.

In college, the hardest partier in the entire coed dorm was a girl from a wealthy Bombay family… She once told me, ‘English is my native language, yaar. I can hardly speak Hindi.’ She had that aggressive Bombay accent, the hard one used by young men on the make, not the singsong one nor the Marathi tapori…

In Barcelona, a middle-aged cab driver with a rich baritone guessed I was Latin American, narrowing it down to either México or Costa Rica. He was very good, because I had picked up my Spanish from a costarricense teacher in a California high school. In his mind, the Hindú bit was of least importance.

In 1993 I rode my motorcycle from San Francisco to Seattle and back, pausing overnight at a remote motel in Crescent City near the California-Oregon border. The motel owner was happy to hear Hindi. It’s a pity I didn’t have Gujarati in my repertoire for that extra discount.

Congratulations, [the talented] Mr. Rupinder. You’ve successfully passed just this once. But you’re only as good as your last con.

Continue reading…

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Upgrading my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it…

— apologies to R.E.M., ‘Losing My Religion’

Are you highly religious and anxious about the fast pace of technological change? Simply text your guru for personalized blessings (via Boing Boing):

… they were dubbed “bhajan-kirtan” channels, watched by the very old or the very bored… [Sadhana] has started an SMS service by which viewers can contact their favourite guru for blessings/advice. So, if you want to know from Sudhanshuji Maharaj if it’s the right day to go looking for a job, all you have to do is type “7333” and “S SUD”.

… the channel has empanelled 40 spiritual leaders. “We get 20,000 SMS every day from all kinds of viewers,” says Gupta, who has tied-up with 85 cellular operators…

Or launch a satellite so you know when to pray:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim body, said Sunday it plans to launch an $8 million satellite within two years to take pictures of the moon to find lunar calendar dates… “The satellite will have a fixed camera on board that will take highly detailed pictures of the moon and beam them back to earth…” A moon sighting committee in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, frustrated millions of worshippers when it said it got the date wrong by a day for the peak of this year’s haj pilgrimage in January.

There is already some criticism from religious officials in Saudi Arabia, which uses the lunar calendar. “The shape of the moon has to be seen from the ground,” said Osama al-Bar, dean of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute for Haj Research in Saudi Arabia.

Osama the Hajj researcher has decreed it, so thus it will be.

SM tipster Chai Shenoy, brings it to our attention that there has been a settlement in the discrimination lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch. From the New York Sun:

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge yesterday approved a $40 million settlement of employment discrimination lawsuits charging that a popular clothing chain, Abercrombie & Fitch, avoided hiring minorities and women nationwide in order to preserve the “all-American look” cultivated by the company in its catalogs and advertisements.

After a brief hearing, Judge Susan Illston gave a strong endorsement to the settlement. In addition to offering cash compensation, the deal requires the company to set up a diversity office and to cease the practice of limiting recruiting to certain fraternities and sororities.

“I think this is excellent work,” Judge Illston said. She heaped praise on attorneys for both the company and the class. The judge also paid tribute to the “courage” of Abercrombie employees who were named plaintiffs in the case. “I do think you’ve done a public service,” she said.

The lawsuits alleged that Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos who were hired by the company were often relegated to stockrooms where those staffers could not be seen by customers. An attorney for Abercrombie referred questions to the officials at the company’s headquarters, who offered no comment. In court filings, the company has denied any systemic discrimination.

Incidentally, A & F is also known for its T-shirt “humor”, which pokes fun at minority stereotypes.

A non-desi former pastry chef has opened a restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves traditional dhaba food, lassi and paranthas (thanks, BridalBeer). The new place is called Lassi:

From delicate plate-dwarfing dosas at Hampton Chutney Co. and the N.Y. Dosa cart, to wraplike rolls at Roomali and the Kati Roll Co., to the colorful, crunchy chaat of Sukhadia’s Gokul, we’re undoubtedly having a Southeast Asian street-food moment…

I think they mean South Asian, but carry on:

Catchily named for the frothy yogurt drinks on offer in mango-flavored profusion all over town, Lassi is much more than an ethnic smoothie shop (though its premade featured beverages, in potent, refreshing flavors ranging from spice-flecked cardamom and vanilla to a complex and curdy lemon, can easily become an après-gym addiction).

… Lassi is bright and cheerful—like its owner, Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, the former pastry chef of L’Impero and Veritas. A chance encounter with a Punjabi student in a pastry class she was teaching—and many stereotype-shattering home-cooked Indian meals— inspired Carlucci-Rodriguez to change culinary course. And even though she’s an unlikely Indian-restaurant owner, she’s a passionate one. Her food tastes unlike any other Indian in town—fresher, cleaner, but undiluted in its intricately spiced essence.

“The most beautiful woman in the world” takes on the most powerful woman in the world in an apocalyptic duel to the death on the “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Download the entire sari-wrapping face-off:

“The Oprah Winfrey Show”: Aishwarya Rai (Quicktime, 11 MB, 11 mins.)
Requires a BitTorrent downloader — PC, Mac

Previous post: Not just a rumor anymore, Ash on Oprah this Monday

Perhaps to build enthusiasm for its annual book festival that took place this past weekend, The LA Times Op-ed section featured a moving ode to books (free registration required) by one Salman Rushdie (tip from Apul).

Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

That’s some deep stuff. Walking around the festival yesterday I stumbled across a modest line of people waiting for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to sign her book at the Artwallah table. Artwallah incidentally just released their book Shabash! which they refer to as “the hip guide to all things South Asian in North America.” The highlight of my day was when I made it over to listen to Jared Diamond speak about his book Collapse. Fascinating. Book festivals kick ass.

Indian soldiers are apparently grossly underfed, and angry enough to eat just about anything:

The two soldiers from India’s Eastern Frontier Rifles were alone in their barracks Wednesday night when Lance Corporal Bhupesh Rava lost his cool because his roommate wanted the lights on for a little while longer. An enraged Rava, who had returned from daytime duty, attacked Sepoy Durga Lama, pinned him down and gnawed off his nose, police said. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: When Rava asks you to turn out the light...

A businessman forks over a small fortune for a house and ends up with nothing. It’s almost like the real estate market in California:

India’s intelligence department is investigating reports that a fraudster sold an American businessman the prime minister’s residence in the heart of New Delhi recently...and arrived in the Indian capital late in March to take possession of the house for an office he planned to set up only to discover he had been cheated. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: Fraudster sells Indian PM’s residence on web site

An Indian-American actress without an accent slaps comedian Steve Carrell in an episode of The Office called ‘Diversity Day’ (thanks, Amardeep). Pop Matters explains:

Michael… goads… a bewildered Indian employee with an outrageously offensive imitation of an Indian convenience store manager [and] earns a hard slap for his trouble…

Watch the clip (18 MB; you need a BitTorrent downloader: Windows, Mac). The thappad is at 1:37 in the clip.

Here’s Apul’s post on another funny incident in the same episode.

A tragic end to the Arvin Sharma search (thanks, SadNepali):

D.C. police say the body of 22-year-old Arvin Sharma was pulled out of the Anacostia River. A passer-by saw a body near the 11th Street Bridge and called police at around 9:45 a.m. this morning. [WJLA]

60 Minutes covered the Anacostia River just yesterday, calling it a dividing line between the Capitol and one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:

Police say that so far this year, more than half the murders in Washington were committed here… Anacostia is a neighborhood where unemployment is epidemic and 38 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. [60 Minutes]

The search had been quite intense:

Ashish, Arvin’s 27-year-old brother and roommate, is taking time off work, and the university is spreading the word of Arvin’s disappearance. An aunt is making a trip from Thailand to provide support… “[The family] is taking care of the small things for us,” said Ashish Sharma. “Anyone we call is willing to jump on a plane.”

Arvin Sharma’s younger brother and friends have plastered areas with posters where Arvin might have been seen. “Everyone has been flooding the area with new fliers … Metro stops, gas stations, all the D.C. universities — Georgetown, George Washington and even Howard and Morgan State,” Ashish said. [UMD Diamondback]

Amrit Singh, the daughter of the Indian prime minister who’s a staff attorney for the ACLU, was interviewed today on a Chicago public radio station about the torture of U.S. detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay (thanks, KXB).

Listen to the program. Here’s the program’s home page.

Update: Singh summarized the status of the ACLU’s torture lawsuits on the first anniversary of the Abu Ghraib photos. She said the ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld as an individual, so the lawsuit continues even after he’s no longer Secretary of Defense. That’s quite an aggressive tactic.

Singh was well-spoken with nary a stumble. Her accent was light, although she stressed the first syllable of ‘rapport.’

Previous posts: 1, 2

Sham marriages with a twist: a London scammer, Jaswinder Gill, was convicted of recruiting female British drug addicts to serve as fake brides (thanks, Sapna):

A woman who is thought to have made up to £1m out of a sham marriage empire has been jailed for 10 years… she told some of the young girls they would work in India as models or in the beauty trade, soliciting for business by handing out cards at London shopping centres… The court was told the women were described as “vulnerable” with at least two of them drug addicts.

One woman was flown to the subcontinent for what she thought was a photo shot. It turned out the “elaborate set” was a proper ceremony which ended with her married to a complete stranger. She was then abandoned to find her own way home. Another who tried to back out at the last minute was threatened with violence and warned she would be raped if she did not go through with it.

… “These marriages were a charade - arranged between perfect strangers who were coached by Gill to convince registrars of their intentions to live as man and wife in the UK.”

Methinks this would make a great Fox show, Who Wants to Marry a Drug Addict? Smile for the camera, honey! You may now kiss your cellmate.

According to a short audio clip on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Indian government has authorized Kama Sutra playing cards to be distributed in order to promote monogamy and prevent sexually transmitted diseases. To understand the logic of this you can listen to NPR’s clip (with “exotic” music in the background). However, I think NPR may have made a reporting error. First of all this idea isn’t new. The BBC reported on the use of Kama Sutra to prevent STDs (although by different reasoning) two years ago, pointing to a program in Calcutta.

The government in India’s West Bengal State is supporting a programme that offers prostitutes an ancient solution to modern concerns about safe sex.

“Kama Sutra has many postures that can give men the highest pleasure without consummation and that is what the prostitutes are being taught.

“They are learning something very useful,” says Rajyashree Choudhuri, chief of the Institute of International Social Development (IISD), who designed the project.

Furthermore a 1993 journal abstract in Global AIDS News mentions the following:

…the Indian Health Organization, a nongovernmental organization founded 11 years ago in Bombay, is promoting the teachings of the Kama Sutra as an alternative to condom use in preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The basic message that sex with one partner in many positions is safer than sex in one position with many partners is proclaimed on T-shirts and in a series of explicit postcards. This approach is promoting openness, communication, and equality between the sexes.

I’d pay BIG money for one of those T-shirts. Getting back to my point however, I think NPR mistakenly believed that the Indian Health Organization, which it mentions in the audio clip, is a branch of the Indian government and that this is a state sponsored national program. I don’t think the Indian government would be passing out Kama Sutra cards nationally. Am I wrong? If so, someone in India please correct me (and send me a deck of those cards…for reporting purposes).

Director Sydney Pollack’s new film The Interpreter, which opened this weekend, is the first film ever to be allowed access to the halls of the United Nations in New York. The film stars Nicole Kidman’s character who, while performing her job as an interpreter for a fictional African nation, overhears a murder plot. The current United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, like his predecessors, was very sensitive about the image of the U.N. and wanted to make sure it was portrayed in a positive light and not maligned. He therefore appointed his trusted deputy, and author, Shashi Tharoor to interpret the script (and modify it if necessary). Rediff.com reports:

…Pollack could not take a no: the script demanded that much of film had to be shot inside the UN. He must have been aware that recreating the interiors of UN on a soundstage would cost nothing less than $5 million. And for a film budgeted at about $50 million, it would have been a burden.

‘I started calling anybody and everybody that I knew who had any connections and eventually, I was able to arrange a meeting with (UN Secretary General) Kofi Annan,’ he recalls in the production notes of the movie that opens on April 22.

The film has already opened in a handful of countries including Britain, Spain and Australia where it is shaping into a sizeable hit.

Pollack says he had no idea that the key to arranging the make-or-break meeting would be the novelist and movie buff Shashi Tharoor, who is also the under secretary-general for communications and public information at the UN. Tharoor was at once sympathetic to Pollack.

Tharoor says he felt the ban was ‘not terribly wise.’ The UN ‘is an institution we need to demystify a little bit,’ he says in the production notes. ‘We are an organisation of governments but we work for the peoples of the world, and I think it is important to make the UN more accessible to those people.’

Before Annan gave his approval, he asked Tharoor to consult the heads of the General Assembly and Security Council. Once they gave their assent, Pollack received the first-ever access to shoot at the General Assembly and other UN interiors. The Interpreter then became the first film to be shot inside the UN buildings, which are over five decades old.

An NPR interview with Pollack where he discusses the approval process and Tharoor’s involvement can be found here.

Tonight, 60 Minutes showed medical tourists getting treatment at sleek new hospitals in Thailand and India. By showcasing ordinary Americans, the segment amounted to a giant infomercial for this practice. It’s especially salient given 60 Minutes’ demographic, older folks who are significant consumers of health care.

Download the video (49 MB; you need a BitTorrent downloader: Windows, Mac).

The Thai hospital they showed is designed like a hotel, with restaurants and boutique shops in the lobby. They also showed better treatment in India than in the U.S.: an advanced procedure, hip resurfacing, which is not yet available in the U.S.; a high ratio of nurses to patients; personal service; post-op recuperation at nearby resorts; and all for a tenth of the cost. A British medical tourist said that in the UK’s national health system, some women are pressured to leave the hospital just five hours after delivering a baby. In India there was no such pressure. On the flip side, the show noted that suing for malpractice in Indian courts is quite difficult.

The segment also interviewed Indian doctors returned from practicing in the U.S. who say they make only a tenth the money they used to make. One was quite earnest in wanting to help people: he said in the U.S., there are 1,500-2,000 pediatric cardiologists, but in India there were only four. I’ve also heard similar reasoning from eye surgeons.

The more video clips of modern India’s islands of quality are shown, the more respect desis in America will receive. Conversely, desi American doctors will face the same cost competition from India on high-end procedures that desi American programmers do now.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

We have been reporting this for over a month now here on Sepia Mutiny, and it seems to be official, Aishwarya Rai (TMBWITW), who was featured prominently in DC's most recent international filmfest, will appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show this Monday (4/25), check your local listings to find out when it airs, and Aishwarya's official site for more updates.

Amardeep directs our attention to the  Indian Superheroes page at the  International Catalogue of Superheroes. While it's no Museum of Black Superheroes, it goes alot further than just Indian Superman and the new Spiderman.   Among my favorites were Koushik, a cyborg spy working for "Research & Analytic Wing, the super-secret intelligence service of Indian Government." What boy wouldn't like a superhero like this:

During one mission, his right arm got severely injured and had to be amputated at the wrist. One genius scientist from the espionage service replaced it with a very special robotic arm. This robotic arm has many secret powers including being able to fire bullets (used as a gun in emergencies) and spraying paralyzing gas which can paralyze even an elephant for a few hours. It also has nails which he can extended out from the hand and use like claws. Those nails can also be shot at any object, like a double-edged knife. The arm can be used as a laser gun; has a hidden transmitter/receiver near the wrist; and is so flexible that when he wears a glove, nobody can make out that it is a robotic arm.

There is also Jumbu, about whom virtually nothing is known (Real Name: Unknown, Identity/Class: Unknown, Occupation: Unknown, Affiliations: Unknown, Enemies: Unknown, Known Relatives: None, Aliases: None, Base of Operations: Unknown, First Appearance: Unknown, Powers/Abilities: Unknown, History: Unknown) except that he is "One of the earliest Indian costumed superheroes." What his constume is, exactly, is very hard to tell. I also don't understand why he's wearing his chuddies on the outside of his tin cans, except that this is what happens when you take fashion advice jointly from Superman and the Hulk.

UPDATE: Check out the other 21 superheroes listed at the Indian Superheroes page including Chacha Chaudhary, Chacha-Bhatija, and Supremo. [I should have mentioned Chacha Chaudhary, but had no interest in any of the live action superheroes being discussed.] You can also go straight to the Raj Comics and Diamond Comics websites. There you can indulge in your Chacha Chaudhary nostalgia for RS 15 per comic.

Beginning today, Delhi will play host to its first ever Salsa festival. Hips will be swaying and spins will be attempted. The BBC reports:

Kaytee Namgyal, the president of the Salsa India Dance Company and festival organiser, says he opened his first salsa studio in Delhi four years ago.

With the growing demand for salsa lessons, he now runs nine centres in the city. He is hoping to open a school in Mumbai (Bombay) soon.

Kaytee says he’s taught close to 1,500 students in the past four years and the number of those wanting to join his studios is ever growing.

So what makes salsa so appealing?

“Salsa is funky and fancy,” Kaytee says.

I think this introduction of Salsa into the motherland is just plain wrong. Hear me out. Picture if you will a guy and a girl. They are in love but the girl is being coy and evasive. Suddenly, they start singing, and dance…the Salsa. Now I ask you quite simply, what would their friends in the background do? Hindi-film dancing provides opportunity for these background hang-arounders to just do their thing. It’s very individualistic. I can’t imagine all those extras hip grinding as well. That would be scandalous!

And now for the zinger:

“Indian people are not great at salsa. That’s because they are so attuned to dancing to Bollywood lyrics. They can’t dance to beats. And salsa is totally based on beats.”

And that’s not the only problem Indian dancers have.

“Indian men don’t lead well,” says Jaquelin, who learnt salsa in Geneva.

“And it’s not really the music they listen to all the time. Also, there’s a cultural problem here. In salsa, you have to touch the woman. And it’s not always easy for the men here to do so. They have to learn to do that.”

Ouch. Luckily there are boot camps for this sort of thing.

Arun Nayar has former/future wives in more countries than some people visit in a lifetime (thanks, Vinod):

Supermodel Elizabeth Hurley’s flamboyant Indian boyfriend Arun Nayar is seeking a divorce from his Italian wife on the grounds that she treated him cruelly, a lawyer said. Nayar, from Bombay, is claiming that his wife Valentina Pedroni put him through “mental torture” during their marital life...Nayar and Hurley, meanwhile, have been romantically involved for nearly three years and are often seen at parties and fundraisers in Britain and the United States. Hurley, mother of three-year-old Damian by former movie producer Steve Bing, is reported to be learning Hindi to impress Nayar, whose family runs a textile export business. [AFP/Yahoo!]

Hurley also tries to impress Nayar by adhering to a little-known passage in the Bhagavad Gita, which states women who date Indian men must inexplicably wear saris to celebrity fundraisers (see right photo, it’s our weekly gratuitous pic of an attractive broad).

Sepia Mutiny explanation of previous paragraph
We haven’t posted any photos of beautiful women this week, so we were due. This was an opening, albeit a weak one, and I took it. I don’t regret this decision. And don’t judge me, jerk. I can barely read at a third-grade level, so pictures are all I have.

AFP/Yahoo!: Liz Hurley’s Indian beau seeks divorce from “cruel” Italian wife

Since the military successfully rid itself of open homosexuals, where do the righteous direct their indignant bigotry? Thankfully, the Air Force Academy has a small number of non-Christians just asking for it:

The Air Force Academy, still recovering from rape and sexual harassment scandals, is facing charges that some Christian cadets have bullied and berated Jews and students of other religious backgrounds. School officials said Tuesday they had received 55 complaints over the last few months and were requiring students — and eventually all employees — to attend a course on religious tolerance...The academy is about 60% Protestant and 30% Catholic. Included in the number of Christian cadets are 120 Mormons. There are 44 Jews and a handful of Hindus and Buddhists at the academy, officials said. [Los Angeles Times]

As soon as they rid themselves of the pagans and other undesirables, we can finally have ourselves a good-old-fashioned crusade. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, says Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family. He says the bullies are the true victims:

“If 90% of cadets identify themselves as Christian, it is common sense that Christianity will be in evidence on the campus,” he said. “Christianity is deeply felt and very important to people … and to suggest that it should be bottled up is nonsense. I think a witch hunt is underway to root out Christian beliefs. To root out what is pervasive in 90% of the group is ridiculous.” [Los Angeles Times]

Los Angeles Times: Non-Christian Air Force cadets cite harassment (free registration required)

Defamer, a Los Angeles gossip blog, publishes a reader’s report about an Indian-themed party at Brian Grazer’s house. The celebration was in honor of a new book by Cheryl Howard Crew, the wife of Ron Howard:

The whole affair was abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous with an Indian theme (seems as if the book, which I didn’t take, is about an American girl who travels in India) and beautiful Indian dancers doing their thang all over the backyard. But I did feel bad for the poor catering staff, who were all white girls subjected to the torture of wearing saris and showing off their not-quite-brown stomachs. Thankfully the Grey Goose on tap allowed me to forget all my sympathy. [Defamer]

Crew’s novel, “In the Face of Jinn,” carries the following description:

Two American sisters, Christine and Elizabeth Shepherd, are on a silk-buying trip in India for their business in California. After Elizabeth mysteriously disappears, Christine is compelled to challenge the ineffectual U.S. and Indian bureaucracies and venture alone, with various strangers as guides, to find her sister. Disguised in the traditional female garb of some Islamic cultures, Christine continues her search in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She navigates the mysterious tribes of the Pashtuns, has a dangerous encounter with the Taliban, and learns to fear the “Jinn,” the devils that dominate the superstitions of the people she must understand in order to survive. Inspired by her own extensive travel throughout the region, Cheryl Howard Crew has written an unforgettable story with a strong determined heroine who rises powerfully from the pages of this novel. [St. Martin’s Press]

Don’t know anything about the book, but do have a sincere plea for Ron Howard: Please, please, please don’t let Fox cancel “Arrested Development.” That is all.

Everyone knows that all real musicians hit the ashram at some point in their existence. They also hit rehab, but that’s totally unrelated to the following passage from Rolling Stone’s cover story about Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo:

Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams -- first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.” [Rolling Stone]

Rolling Stone: Weezer’s weird world

Okay everyone. Get ready. With all this Pope business firmly behind us, the press will be looking for the next big story to dissect to death from every angle. The pundits will be out in full force (including me). The next big story (which will begin Sunday) will be that of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, invoking the Nuclear Option. From Wikipedia:

The “nuclear option,” as used in American politics circa 2005, is a catchprase referring to a political manuever that would allow the Senate majority (currently Republicans) to prevent the minority party (currently Democrats) from filibustering judicial nominees. By U.S. Law, certain judicial appointees, particularly Supreme or other federal court Justices, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before taking the bench. Under current Senate rules, a minority of senators are able to prevent the confirmation of judges via filibuster unless a supermajority can be reached to ‘break’ the filibuster. The ‘nuclear option’ refers to the technicality that only a simple majority is necessary to change this rule. That is, although a supermajority is currently necessary to break the filibuster, a simple majority could alter the Senate rules so that only a simple majority would be required to break the filibuster. The term is often used derogatorily by Democrats because of the term’s bad connection with nuclear war.

The primary argument forwarded by Republicans in defense of invoking the nuclear option and ending filibusters was a legal argument written by Martin B. Gold and a moonlighting 26 year old Justice Department attorney, Dimple Gupta.

To make it as succinct as possible (and there really is no fair way to do so), Gold and Gupta point out that according to the law the majority HAS THE CONSTITUTIONAL OPTION to change the rules.

Despite the fact that I get paid the big bucks (I wish) to be a blogging maven and learn desi related stuff first, so that I may humbly bring it to the attention of SM readers, there are some stories that an Indian mom will ALWAYS know about before us savvy internet users. This one comes from first time SM tipster, my Mom. Diamondbackonline.com, a University of Maryland school paper, reports on missing person Arvin Sharma:

A 22-year-old university student was reported missing following an evening of clubbing with friends in Southwest Washington Saturday, officials said.

District Police are looking for Arvin Sharma, a recent transfer from Temple University who lives in Greenbelt. He was last seen near the 1800 block of Half Street near the Lime Night Club, police said. Officials had few details yesterday regarding what may have happened to Sharma or what he was doing when last seen.

Sharma’s family searched his condominium Saturday morning and found his car parked outside, said his brother, Ashish Sharma. He left his car at home Friday evening and rode to the club with friends.

The family has sent e-mails and photos to media throughout the Washington and Baltimore areas, family members said.

“He’s not answering his cell phone; he hasn’t made any withdrawals from his bank account,” Ashish Sharma said.

So why is it that an Indian mom would know about this news first? It’s just the kind of example my mom uses every time I go home to the D.C. Metro area and decide to meet up with some friends in the city. “Be careful, its dangerous.”

My mom also pointed out the fact that the police will attempt to use their brand new anti-terrorism surveillance system, which consists of cameras on practically every D.C. street (more on that here), to figure out what became of Sharma.

Sharma’s family described him as a light-complexioned Indian male with brown eyes and black hair.

He is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs about 190 pounds, they said.

District police are asking anyone with information to contact them at (202) 727-9099.

NBC4 has a video report of the story with full details.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit I saw an advance screening of A Lot Like Love, a new Ashton Kutcher - Amanda Peet romantic comedy opening tomorrow. It was far better than most Kutcher flicks. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I missed a good chunk of the beginning because, ahem, previews don’t start two hours late like red-carpet premieres where the desi lead fails to turn up.)

Presumably I got the pass, which came via a desi arts list, because a desi plays a main character. Kal Penn plays Jeeter, Ashton Kutcher’s dot-com coworker in avant-garde lenses, and does a great job: he’s charismatic and fluent, drives a hot car, picks up cute women and offers Kutcher tips. It’s as if the Van Wilder roles had been reversed, and indeed this would’ve been a much better movie with Penn in the lead.

The story resembles Boys and Girls, a wooden Freddie Prinze Jr. - Claire Forlani collaboration which, like Golden Gate, I liked mainly for its Berkeley backdrop. Kutcher plays Ollie, a dot-com type who’s inarticulate, obsessed with work and toys with his female fling like a yo-yo. You can never truly suspend disbelief with these movies because, hello, Peet and Forlani are gorgeous.

The script was written with diversity in mind: a major deaf character is played unremarkably, there’s a black priest, the movie uses the ‘burbs rather than New York. And it’s even kind to those in persistent vegetative states. Dumping on Ashton Kutcher’s thespian handicaps is all too easy, so I’ll just say this: Kutcher is the true heir to the Terry Schiavo school of acting. Kutcher makes Keanu Reeves look like Ben Kingsley. Kutcher alternates between two expressions, blank and blank. Kutcher speaks in two tones, dumb and stammering. Kutcher is the latest in a long line of brainless, cardboard male leads such as Dermot Mulroney in, oh, just about everything. Kutcher’s acting never rose above That ’70s Show, and that goes for Topher Grace too. Ok, I’ll stop now.

So an Airborne Express Supe in Philly gets suspicious and...busted.

An Internet pharmacy based in India that sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drugs without prescriptions has been indicted by U.S. authorities, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Brij Bhushan Bansal of Agra (say THAT teen times fast) was "charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, money laundering and misbranding drugs".

Though Bansal is the alleged mastermind behind a business that provided the pills to practically 200 websites which promoted them, his son, daughter and son-in-law are also defendants, since they helped him purvey Codeine and Viagra.

The market rate for 100 tablets of Codeine is $64; Dr. BBB added a tidy $200 premium to that. Valium was even more expensive-- a hefty $198 vs. the $27 your local scam-artist charges. ;) Authorities were able to seize $7.1 million of the group's proceeds. Pity. That's a paltry portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars they probably made.

Prepare for more "P"s:

"There was no physician, no pharmacist and no quality control of these drugs that were sold at above-market rates," Patrick Meehan, U.S. attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, told a news conference.

The Onion discovers India’s new tech-support caste:

“While we rank below members of the reigning order, those of us responsible for helping Americans track their online purchases and change their account PINs share many privileges not enjoyed by the merchant class below us.” (said technical-support agent Ranji Prasat). [The Onion]

The Onion: New tech-support caste arises in India

After you win an Oscar, you’re supposed to treat the little people like shit, not open schools for them. The diabolical do-gooders behind the award-winning documentary, “Born Into Brothels,” appear ready to violate that most holy of Hollywood traditions:

The two directors of the Oscar-winning documentary “Born Into Brothels,” which chronicles the lives of a group of children born to prostitutes in Kolkata’s red-light area, plan to set up a school in India, a member of the duo said in Lisbon on Tuesday. Ross Kauffman, who directed the documentary along with fellow New Yorker Zana Briski, told AFP that the two filmmakers hope to have the school up and running by the start of 2007. “The idea is to create a safe place for these kids to go, where a small group of kids can get out of that environment. It’s a way to make a small difference,” the 37-year-old said. The school will focus on leadership and arts, and will have a capacity for between 50 and 100 students, he added. [Sify.com]

Sify.com: Oscar winners to open school in India

Ever seen Hanuman pluck a double bass? Animator Nina Paley has created a witty, ’20s jazz musical version of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues (via Turbanhead). Her lovely, highly stylized characters evoke Betty Boop, Amul Butter ads and Ghee Happy, and Sita is voiced by ’20s blues singer Annette Hanshaw.

Watch the clips or, if the site is slow, see the end of the post to download.

This animation’s original title seems to have been The Sitayana. Like Anna’s feminist neologism, ‘Herstory,’ Paley had replaced Rama with Sita in the title. And she goes even further: Sita has the only speaking part in the entire animation. Rama is strong but silent, a Ken doll and essentially decorative, the inverse of most action flicks. But Paley stays reasonably faithful to the original text. Her Sita is still a maiden in distress rather than a Shrek-like princess-ninja.

Paley also inverts the Moulin Rouge formula. Instead of desi music in an American tale, she uses ’20s American music (one song even includes the banjo) in a quintessentially desi story. Her soundtrack choice is a classy touch; imagine someone doing a version like hip-hop Shakespeare, using Justin Timberlake as the soundtrack.

Shudder.

London's Restaurant magazine just released their annual list of the 50 best places to get fat-- and of course *I'd* be the Mutineer to post on this. ;)

I am slightly miffed that the list is not down with anything brown, unless New York's lauded, pan-Asian-street-food mecca Spice Market counts. Since I cannot partake of their "chicken samosas" with cilantro-yogurt, I'm inclined to say..."NO". :)

Now last year, the greatest place in the world for Dal Makhni made both the list AND the award for "Best Asian Restaurant"-- I'm talking about New Delhi's legendary Bukhara, mais oui. What a difference twelve months makes? Oh, well. I'm just amazed that a Brit magazine that listed no less than FOUR English restaurants in their top 10 couldn't find a decent curry. Whatevs.

This almost feels like it should be a scene from Kung Fu Hustle except for

1) the unhappy ending and
2) it's sadly all too true -

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd.

Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam's holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said.

...Witnesses said the man was chased through fields and climbed a tree to get away from an angry crowd of up to 500 men. When he refused to come down, someone shot him dead, they said.

Although the article doesn't really tell us how he desecrated the Koran, one of the mob's motives here was apparently a type of vigilante justice. It appears that relative at least to this little slice of society, Pakistani courts almost come across as bastions of liberal due process. -

Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.

I guess in conjunction with the tragic death in India tab, we'll start a count of the ones in Pakistan too.

Think Pennsylvania Avenue is the seat of power in D.C.? Wrong. It’s K-street. Desi-Talk introduces us to Raj Mukherjee, a twenty year old lobbyist from Jersey who may end up there soon:

Most people would think for a 20-year-old being a lobbyist is an unusual career choice. Traditional choices for Indians have been engineering or medicine. But Raj Mukherjee doesn’t think it is so atypical. It is understandable considering since the age of 10 Mukherjee claims he has been making web sites to attract politicians. Today, he is a partner in the New Jersey-based lobby firm, Impact NJ, which is a full-service government affairs firm with an emphasis on lobbying in the Garden State.

Mukherjee told News India-Times that politics is a disease, “when it bites you can’t shake it away.” Initially his parents didn’t want him to do business or enter politics. “They wanted me to do school work. They believed in the power of academia,” he said.

Mukherjee is currently working with U.S. Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) on his campaign for governor. “I feel he can restore public trust. He is a good friend of India on the India caucus. In the Senate, he will work with Frank Pallone and Congressman Bob Menendez to represent the interests of Indian Americans in New Jersey, which has the largest Indian population in the U.S.” said Mukherjee.

Pretty impressive, right? Not everyone is going to be “elect-able,” especially at such a young age, but there are other ways to influence policy while he bides his time. Mukherjee already has an impressive resume.

He gained critical acclaim in N.J. political circles when at the age of 16, he became the vice chairman of the Publius Group (where he was previously director of technology & security), which owns and operates the state’s heavily trafficked political news source (PoliticsNJ.com), receiving approximately 4 million gross hits per month.

Mukherjee, who speaks four languages, joined the Marines at 17 two weeks after September 11. It is difficult to establish how long he spent time in the Marines considering he is an undergraduate student at Rutgers, majoring in counterintelligence. It is an inter-disciplinary major that combines political science, Middle Eastern studies and military studies.

Damn. Now I feel like I haven’t done enough today.

Vaporwarya Rai is endlessly rumored to be in talks for this movie or that. Bond girl, anyone?

But one particular missed opportunity is quite funny: the director of the Will Smith romantic comedy Hitch says Rai was to play the college girlfriend. And since Smith produced the film, he probably had a hand in it. Said the director:

I want to see Aishwarya Rai because she was almost in my film… There was a time when she was going to play the college girlfriend, which was originally a much bigger part. I think we were all keen on she doing it. But we had a demanding schedule which she couldn’t work out. That was the hitch on Hitch.

That’s the girlfriend with whom a Steve Urkel-like, ’80s version of Will Smith makes all his early romantic blunders, like being too clingy too early and blurting ‘I love you.’ He later finds her making out with another guy in a parked car. ‘What did I do wrong?’ he repeats pathetically, slumping against the glass. The Other Guy takes pity on him: ‘You’re doin’ it right now!’

Wussy Will would’ve been an improvement over Two-Fisted Khan.

Punjabi Boy has quite a find about the new Pope’s views on Hindus and Buddhists:

Hinduism, he said, offers ‘false hope’; it guarantees ‘purification’ based on a ‘morally cruel’ concept of reincarnation resembling ‘a continuous circle of hell’…

In 1997 Ratzinger annoyed Buddhists by calling their religion an ‘autoerotic spirituality’ that offers ‘transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations’… The Cardinal predicted Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church’s main enemy this century.

Ratzinger had even more choice words for those who are not Catholic:

… Dominus Jesus, the major Vatican document released… by Cardinal Ratzinger… called other world religions “gravely deficient,” denied that other religions can offer salvation independent of Christianity, and said non-Catholic Christian churches have “defects” and are not “churches” at all in the proper sense.

‘Enforcer,’ in the hockey sense, sounds about right.

Update: Ratzinger was apparently more sparing with Judaism (thanks, MD):

… Ratzinger played an instrumental role in the Vatican’s revolutionary reconciliation with the Jews under John Paul II. He personally prepared… [the] document outlining the church’s historical “errors” in its treatment of Jews…

Previous posts: 1, 2

As if desis could get any more passionate about their comida, food diversity in India is rising with income (thanks, Rohit):

The amount spent nationally on meals outside the home has more than doubled in the past decade, to about $5 billion a year, and is expected to double again in about half that time…

“In the 1970’s and 1980’s our international menu consisted of Russian salad, shrimp cocktail, French fries … oh, and something baked,” Mr. Desai said. “Recently, though, I had a conservative Hindu lady explain to me the specifics of a risotto she wants for her son’s wedding, and a traditional Bohri Muslim family requested Mongolian hot pots…”

“When I first opened Diva people would send back al dente risotto because they were used to very soft cooked basmati rice…”

While I’m complaining about not getting arbi, Bombayites were complaining about not getting Italian:

The legendary Crawford Market in Mumbai… sells broccoli, iceberg lettuce, thyme, basil, rosemary, bell peppers and other non-Indian vegetables. Pasta in bulk is available alongside basmati rice.

It’s all causing drama with the saas:

“Much to my mother’s chagrin I use store-bought yogurt,” said Rujuta Jog, 24, a recently married office worker. “And my mother-in-law was upset when she saw that I use Pillsbury flour to make rotis. She still prefers to buy wheat and grind it fresh…”

“In the old days, since only the men worked outside the home, they were served first,” said Sathya Saran, a senior executive at Worldwide Media, one of India’s largest publishing companies. “Now everyone eats together, and the entire family dynamic has begun to shift.”

Tonight’s episode of reality television show “The Amazing Race” takes its contestants to the streets of Lucknow, India:

Battle lines were drawn as Teams made their way to Lucknow, India. Boyfriends Lynn & Alex led a group against their rivals, engaged couple Rob & Amber, who paired up with former POW and beauty queen Ron & Kelly, in an uneasy alliance. Catching an earlier flight to India, Rob & Amber never relinquished their lead as they battled for first place. Winning the hard-fought match, Rob & Amber stepped on the mat and received a shock when Phil told them that he had their next clue. The leg was not over. [CBS]

The web preview hosts video vignettes, a location briefing, and a call for your own Lucknow stories. “The Amazing Race” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBS.

A Manhattan gallery honors artist Rajkamal Kahlon this Friday with a reception opening her latest exhibit, ‘Unbound.’ Kahlon’s work, which I first saw at ‘Fatal Love,’ reminds me of the tortured visions of Frida Kahlo and Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell. (I said Kahlo, not J.Lo.)

Kahlon literally paints over history:

Kahlon’s new series of paintings respond to a nineteenth century tome entitled Cassell’s Illustrated History of India. After finding this book in 2003 on auction at Sotheby’s, Kahlon borrowed $400… with the intention of unbinding [it]… painting over texts and manipulating the illustrations set in front of her… she creates a charged, fragmented narrative about her relationship to India’s history and its colonial past.

You can see more of her work here and here.

When Dias turns into nights… Ratz! Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Mumbai mandarin, is outpolled by the Frankish Pope:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope today, taking the name Benedict XVI, then telling a wildly cheering crowd from a balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica, “I entrust myself to your prayers.”

Rediff isn’t ready to bury the hatchet just yet:

He is known as ‘the Pope’s enforcer’ due to his uncompromising conservatism… Ratzinger was head of… the church’s chief think-tank that has dominated discussions on sexual morality and birth control and prevented liberals from gaining ground.

Got that? An Indian publication’s chiding the Vatican for being too conservative.

On balance, it’s a good thing that Dias didn’t prevail. The cardinals’ traditional cry of ‘habemus papam,’ or ‘we have a Pope,’ might have been changed to ‘habemus papad,’ or ‘we have a crispy pre-meal appetizer.’

Here’s Ennis’ post on the blasphemous betting.

It’s desh-hop most spectacular: Karmacy’s performing their latest stuff at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan this Saturday. Chee Malabar takes the stage, and Rekha DJs the afterparty. Karmacy is also giving out free CDs of their latest album, The Movement.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Residents in Calcutta, India have married together a pair of trees in hopes of warding off evil:

The marriage between the sacred trees -- whose trunks were decorated with red cloth, streaks of vermilion and marigold garlands -- was followed by a banquet attended by nearly 1,000 people. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Proving once and for all that it doesn’t really matter who, or even what, is getting married — an Indian wedding will always be way too big.

Reuters/Yahoo!: Indians ‘marry’ sacred trees to ward off evil eye

Wonkette’s annual list of the world’s 25 least influential people recognizes a striking resemblance between musician Moby and Mohandas Gandhi.

Illinois voters have gone and done something crazy once again. First they elected Ba-rack O-bam-a as a U.S. Senator, and now conservative DuPage County has gone and elected Moin Moon Khan and Esin Busche as township trustees. The Chicago Tribune (free registration required) reports:

No one would mistake a gathering of DuPage County Republicans for the United Nations, but the party took a significant step last week toward shaking its image as a party dominated by “old white-haired men” when Moin Moon Khan and Esin Busche were elected township trustees.

Party officials say as far as they can tell, Khan, an Indian-born longtime Chicago-area activist who works as a computer network administrator, and Busche, a Turkish-born chemist, are the first Muslim Republicans elected to public office anywhere in the state—and a symbol of the party’s new outreach effort in a rapidly diversifying county.

“This is a small office, and for me it may be a very small individual achievement,” said Khan. “However, I think it’s a giant milestone for the minority communities in general and the Muslim American community in particular.”

What’s even more astonishing is that Khan beat out someone named “Bob Wagner.” I found the following quote by Rasheed Ahmed, coordinator of the Illinois Muslim Political Coordinating Council, quite interesting:

Muslims don’t tend to naturally gravitate to either party, Ahmed said, because there are parts of both the Democratic and Republican positions that appeal to them.

There was also this little gem by Paul Hinds, chairman of the York Township Republican Party.

“We get pegged too much as 70-year-old white-haired men. That’s a stereotype we always have to work against,” he said. “That’s not what we are.”

Moon’s personal story is quite inspiring as related at NRI-Worldwide:

Khan, who came to the US in 1986 with, plans to become a journalist, switched to computers after getting a journalism degree from the University of Georgia, because being a scribe “was not financially lucrative”.

But politics was in his veins, he said, and when he moved to Illinois, he founded the Bihar Cultural Association and served on the boards of more than a dozen civic organisations in the past 15 years.

“Being a scribe was not financially lucrative?” Yeah, no sh*t.

Abhi's post about the Prom got me thinking about the non-trivial number of Christians I've met over the years who follow desi-like restrictive dating rituals. One friend of mine went no further than holding hands with his intended until they got engaged! Two seconds (literally) on Google yielded a (white American) group that proposes something very similar to "modern arranged marriages"

Let's be honest for a minute, when we were looking for a spouse, we looked at all the wrong things. All the guys look for is how the girl looks. All the girl looks at is whether or not the guy is nice to her. Single people have a very poor track record in looking for the important characteristics of the heart when they are looking for a mate.

On the other hand, there is nobody who knows children like their parents do (except God). So, parents will know the character traits of their children; their strong and weak areas, their likes and dislikes, and their personality. As such, the parents are in a position to make a more accurate evaluation of the compatibility of a particular man, or women with their own kids.

Please note, I'm not talking about the parents choosing a mate without the child's participation in the decision. What I'm saying is that the best possible decision will be made when the parents and child work together ... If either they, or us as parents see a possibility in someone, we will mention it. Then, we will investigate that person, to find out everything we can about them and their family. If they still look like a possible candidate for marriage after this investigation, we will go together to talk with that possible mate and his or her parents. [cite]

I keep hearing about the growing “dish cities” in Europe and especially in France. “Dish cities” are named as such because they are predominantly Muslim areas where the residents keep to themselves and have television programming from the Arab world beamed into their homes via a satellite dish. The danger here is that this leads to an extreme, often self-imposed isolation, and a local set of laws and norms that often ignores the laws and cultural norms of the adopted country. Is it possible that such “dish cities” might eventually form in the U.S.? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on some young adults whose religious views guide them to skip the prom.

With prom season in full swing, Najeeb and her Muslim peers are learning one of life’s lessons: Principles matter more when something is sacrificed to uphold them.

Each year, many teen Muslims choose not to take part in one of the hallmark social events of high school. For them, staying true to their Muslim identity is staying true to themselves, no matter how hard.

Proms - a ritual of dating and intimate dancing that for some is associated with drinking and sex - conflict with Islamic beliefs. Islam requires Muslims to dress modestly, abstain from alcohol and avoid close contact with members of the opposite sex. Such interactions are considered haram, or forbidden.

Meeting these standards can be an especially tall order for teens driven by raging hormones, intense curiosity and a fear of alienation.

“It’s a challenge,” said Naba Mallick, 17, a senior at Divine Savior Holy Angels High School in Milwaukee, who didn’t attend prom last year. “To be the one who has stayed strong in religious beliefs, it’s a big deal.”

Since I live in Los Angeles, I am always looking at stories in terms of a possible script for a Hollywood movie. I am thinking about updating Footloose, but with Muslim characters.

To be clear, not all young Muslims skip prom. And among those who do, they are not alone; many conservative Christian families also frown upon dancing and dating among teens.

Alas, it just isn’t easy for young studs to deal with this kind of thing:

Living in America and holding true to his Islamic beliefs are a delicate dance for Zeki Arain, a junior at Brookfield Central High School.

Arain, 16, sometimes struggles between being a teenage boy and a practicing Muslim. With thick dark hair, pale skin and a sharp wit, Arain knows girls have been sweet on him. He’s had crushes, too.

Whoever holds the pen, that’s who. As we’ve all heard, there have been lots of protests (some turning violent) in China, over the version of history found in some Japanese school textbooks. As anyone who, like me is a fan of Zinn’s “A People’s History” knows, you must always remain vigilant against inaccuracies in history and social studies. Some desis in the D.C. suburbs have been doing just that. As reported in the Washington Post:

Fairfax County businesswoman Sandhya Kumar teaches her three daughters about other countries, cultures and religions. She wants them to take pride in their Indian heritage and Hindu faith — and to respect and understand other views.

But when Kumar of Lorton scanned several world history textbooks recommended for Fairfax County schools, she worried that students would come away with a distorted and negative impression of her homeland’s culture.

“I thought the American children will think India is some Third World country with pagan beliefs and backward thinking, not a forward-thinking country,” Kumar said.

She and dozens of other Indian American parents launched a campaign to change the way their history is taught in Fairfax, the nation’s 12th-largest school system. Their lobbying has prompted school officials to rethink presentations of India and Hinduism in classrooms and has sparked efforts to develop a more sophisticated and thoughtful curriculum.

So what in particular was inaccurate in the textbooks?

Balaji Hebbar, a George Washington University religion professor who was one of three scholars hired by Fairfax County to review the books cited by the group of Indian parents, said he and his colleagues found few factual errors. But he said the lessons boiled down a complex culture to “karma, cows and caste.”

“It’s as if I were making a picture book of the United States, and I took pictures of the bad parts of D.C., the run-down parts of New York City and the smoke stacks of Cleveland and left out the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty,” Hebbar said. “I would be telling the truth, but I would only be telling half the truth.”

The very open and gracious way in which the school district responded to the parent’s concerns is quite encouraging to me, especially in light of all the craziness that usually seems to undo the educational system in this country instead of helping it become better.

SM Reader Anjali, hailing from the Institute for Humane Studies, writes in to point mutineers towards a Desi-themed libertarian book preso at the Cato Institute in DC. Cato is far and away my favorite thinktank and seeing them directly take on Desi stuff is just too cool for words.

The Hindu Equilibrium: India C. 1500 B.C. – 2000 A.D. (Oxford University Press, 2005)

BOOK FORUM
Thursday, May 12, 2005
4:00 PM [EST] (Reception to follow)

...India is an emerging economic giant. Deepak Lal will explain the role that modernity and tradition have played in that country’s recent moves to the market after decades of stagnation. Why has democracy succeeded and the caste system survived in India? Why did India switch to more liberal economic policies, and why is it likely to overtake China in the race for economic growth? Lal will provide answers to those questions and review India's development challenges. Anne Krueger will comment on the record and prospects of Indian growth and poverty reduction.

Live audio and video streams from the event will be freely viewable on the web.

Saurav, who co-writes on the new blog Detained, updates us on the situation of the 16 year-old Bangladeshi and Guinean girls that the FBI recently detained, ostensibly as potential suicide bombers. My original posting about this mentioned that the family was not economically capable of fighting the government and Detained elaborates.

As you may have read recently in the New York Times and a number of other publications, two Muslim teenage girls have been detained. One is from Guinea, and the other is from Bangladesh. The government is using immigration law to jail these 16 year olds without charging them with a crime, holding secret proceedings against them without giving them access to the evidence that is being used against them, and slandering them in the media as “suicide bombers” without providing proof.

In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, “Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers.” Another official at the Department of Homeland Security commented, “We’re not spun up about this case.” So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane injustice.

Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.

The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety. The remainder of expenses are for food, transportation and any legal expenses (although the lawyer is currently doing the case for free). Visits to the lawyer and to the detention center take 3 hours each way and cost money. It may also be necessary to fundraise for airline tickets for some family members in the future. There’s enough money available right now from various sources to cover them for a few days, but their situation could become dire very soon.

Sepia-friendly record label, Six Degrees Records, based out of San Francisco, releases on Tuesday April 19th a couple of albums that many of you will be interested in. The first, and one of my favorites of the year is MIDIval Times, the second full length release by the New Delhi based duo of Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj, collectively known as the MIDIval PunditZ. The follow-up to their very successful 2002 debut is a bit more melodic, a bit more classically Indian, and a little less beat heavy, but nevertheless has changed my perception of what Asian Massive, or Indian influenced electronica can sound like.

The 11 track album opens with the song, "Morning," a teaser of sorts that sets you up for an outrageous and mind-opening roller coaster ride of music. The album is not cookie-cutter by any means and does not fall into any one genre of music, at times it is Indian Classical and traditional, and at others it is Drum and Bass and filmi.

Last week, the media flip-flopped yet again on the issue of terrorism. When reporting on the three darker skinned guys recently arrested in the UK and accused of plotting a series of horrific bombings, the NYT, AP and other news outlets called the accused "terrorists." However, when reporting on the recent plea bargain by Eric Rudolph, the T-word was absent from their coverage. The NYT only called Rudolph an "anti-abortion crusader and former soldier." Reuters called him a "survivalist" and a "fugitive" but not a terrorist.

What gives? Might melanin and foreigness have anything to do with it?

Rudolph's actions clearly met the US State Department definition of terrorism. His bombs "killed two people, wounded 120 others, and "terrorized" people in three states." When he was caught, he had 250 lbs of dynamite stashed away, and a 25 lb bomb "filled with 20 pounds of screws as shrapnel" across the street from his next target.

His goal was political and intended to influence an audience ... and the attacks were most definitely perpetrated against noncombatants by a non-state entity. The situation seems at least as clear-cut as many acts regularly labeled terrorism in the media.[cite]

Not only was Rudolph a terrorist, but he was a terrorist who justified his actions based on his religious beliefs. He was a member of an extremist religious group and cited a religion as the central reason for his attacks when he made his statement to the feds. After most of the bombings, letters came from the "Army of God" saying things like:

We declare and will wage total war on the ungodly communist regime in New York and your legaslative bureaucratic lackey's in Washington. It is you who are responsible and preside over the murder of children and issue the policy of ungodly preversion thats destroying our people. [cite]

While the US government (to its credit) clearly calls Rudolph a terrorist, it may not be prosecuting him as vigorously as it does other terrorism suspects:

Curiously, the Justice Department allowed Mr. Rudolph to plead guilty and avoid the death sentence that in other circumstances the feds have been quite energetic in pursuing. The official explanation was that a trial and a death sentence would have made a "martyr" of this man, who as a high-profile fugitive for five years eluded a giant manhunt and became something of a folk hero in rural Appalachia....

Maybe the prosecutors thought they couldn't get him and so opted for an easy plea. But there are powerful people for whom the spectacle of an unrepentant murderer for the unborn, a clean-cut movie star handsome Christian terrorist, posed political problems. Better to defend life in the abstract, keep the focus on the enemy at the gates and keep skeletons like Eric Rudolph locked up in the closet.[cite]

There's a new list of the best airports to sleep in, for those who are too busy or too thrifty to check into a hotel room. The best of the best? Singapore's Changi airport. The worst? Anywhere in India, which is as bad as PNG's Port Moresby airport where there was a gang shoot-out in the terminal.

Worst Airport(s) - This was toughy. I certainly could not narrow it down to just one in this case. First up, everybody please put their hands together for Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), an airport in which one of our contributors witnessed 7 seven being killed in a gang shoot-out. When in Port Moresby, be sure you're wearing your bullet-proof vest and run.
And then there are the airports in the Mid-East and India section where we have received MANY Hellish reviews. As there are so many to choose from, I am also giving the Worst Airport(s) award to the entire country of India who only has one airport rated "good", but only because it was a better alternative to actually sleeping in one of their hotels. Unacceptable seating, foul odours, filth, fleas, safety, and general hassles have resulted in India's 8 year reign of the Worst Airport(s) Title. Travellers beware: when sleeping in one of India's "fine" airports be sure you have your own bug spray, air freshener and disinfectant or just go to the nearest bar and drink the pain away.[cite]

The list is an equal opportunity critic, American airports are not spared from its scrutiny either. The first runner up for worst is Boston's Logan airport, and the fourth runner up was Chicago's Om Hari airport. [via bookofjoe]

The fundamentalists claiming to preserve their cultures are often the ones responsible for torching them:

Protesters demanding the introduction of Manipur’s ancient Mayek script set fire to the Central Library in Manipur’s capital Imphal on Wednesday. Officials say many of Manipur’s most ancient texts were among the books destroyed by the fire… Analysts say… the library was burnt because almost all Manipuri books preserved in it were written in Bengali script.

The Cauvery riots, the Karnataka cinema shakedowns — language stirs intense passions in India. But wishing that history were different doesn’t make it so. I could close my eyes and wish away the British Raj. Open them, and there lies Victoria Terminus still.

Previous post here.

Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf is finally getting his birth certificate — from a New Delhi hospital:

Officials are set to present Pervez Musharraf with a certificate showing that he was born on 11 August 1942 at a maternity hospital in the city… “Begum Zarin became very emotional during her visit to the hospital and she could even recall the name of the medical superintendent of the hospital in those days and some of the staff members,” said hospital medical superintendent Indira Yadav. Delhi’s city council confirmed that an entry for the Pakistani leader’s birth had been found in the hospital’s records and a certificate was being drawn up.

August 11, eh? It’s a pity he was born four days early, or no one would’ve ever forgotten his birthday. Besides, his punctuality virtually disqualifies him from being desi :)

Like Rushdie’s protagonists, Musharraf also has superpowers. Only his came from sacking the judiciary and rewriting the constitution.

The Neo-Taliban running Pakistan’s fundamentalist parties aren’t content with banning food at weddings. Now they’ve figured out how to recruit more sexually-repressed young men. They want to ban all ads featuring women:

Last week the six-party religious alliance that constitutes one-fifth of the country’s parliament, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) introduced a bill in parliament seeking a complete ban on women in advertising… It proposes one-year imprisonment for any ad agency that uses women models…

The neobans (for banning is what they do) want to turn the clock back to when only men could perform in public, teaching an entire generation of boys to dress in drag. They yearn for when NAMBLA-like encounters were the norm as long as female chastity was protected. Of course, women were treated as mere property and were at much higher risk of rape and murder, but it was all in the name of purity, right? It was all for the noble goal of keeping people’s minds off sex… by depriving them of it.

Yeah, that worked out well. About as well as another movement which went against fundamental human nature.

Of course, the neobans won’t be content with banning female images. They’ll go after the right of women to drive, then to vote. All Pakistan would be left with is rifle-toting bullies in pickup trucks beating up men without beards and women without burqas. Been there, done that, seen it on F*dCountry.com.

The more that a religious strain teaches personal spirituality, the less that political middlemen can manipulate the faithful.

Previous posts: 1, 2

Sanjay Kumar of UP is feeling very cool and refreshed these days. Grocer by day, this real life Apu has just won a unique prize. Tipster Deepa Menon forwards us this Times of India article:

When Kumar bought a bottle of Coke to quench his thirst he ended up becoming the regional winner for Coca-Cola’s under-the-crown promotion, Thanda Aish-Cash.

As the winner, Kumar takes the prize - a dream date with the beauty queen.

Wait, if Kumar is a grocer, why would he have to “buy” a bottle?

So what might Sanjay expect to do on his date? Well if this dream sequence (.zip file of commercial) is any indication, he is going to be having a memorable time.

The date will be in Mumbai, where he will spend an entire evening with Ash at the premiere of her upcoming movie.

For Kumar, who has idolised Ash for years, reacted in disbelief. “I just could not believe my luck,” he says.

And what’s more, Kumar could well end up travelling with Ash to a foreign location for the international premiere of the movie.

Who knows? This whole affair may end in an altogether unexpected way. The possibility reminds me of this General Electric commercial. If only…

The F-16 debate to date has focused on the military balance between India and Pakistan. Many SM commenters have noted that even though India will be allowed to buy U.S. arms, it's unlikely to do so because the U.S. has been an unreliable supplier.

Today a NYT story took the opposite tack: F-16 sales to India are good because they'll keep the production line open in case the U.S. military ever places another order.

"The reopening of sales to Pakistan and the opening of sales to India extends the life of the production line, the Fort Worth operation and the entire F-16 supply chain throughout the country. It also provides the Air Force with a warm production line should it want extra F-16's."

Lockheed is talking like a business, not saber-rattling like the U.S. government:

"If India's requirements are beyond any existing fighters, we are prepared to make upgraded F-16's to India's specifications with complete transfer of technology," Mike Kelly, a Lockheed senior executive said in an interview last month with the Press Trust of India, a New Delhi news agency. "We have, in the past, taken up building of such exclusive fighters for the U.A.E. and we are prepared to manufacture F-16's to India's special requirements."

India already writes software for Boeing and Lockheed :

Boeing... is already relying on Indian companies to provide software for its new commercial jet, the 787 Dreamliner...

The U.S. as hopeful suitor: it's a newly respectful tone in the media's handling of this story.

NPR’s “Day to Day” interviews actor Amitabh Bachchan about his career and the Bollywood film industry:

In a tribute later this month, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will bill Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan as “the Biggest Film Star in the World.” Madeleine Brand speaks with the performer, a major star in Indian cinema, about earning the superlative celebrity moniker.

NPR: Amitabh Bachchan, ‘the biggest film star in the word’ (Real Audio and Windows Media)
Previous post: Brief film updates

Although some of you may not realize it, one of the most popular brown “Mom & Pop” websites out there is alt.muslim.com, which was founded by a married Indian-American business student who grew up in California. From the Information Warfare Site:

“My name is Shahed Amanullah, and I created the Website altmuslim.com. I started the site because I wanted to see some more open dialogue and discussion and debate about things that are happening in the Muslim world.

“Before the Internet came around, Muslims lived in relative isolation and obscurity from each other. They never had to deal with Muslims of different colors, of different schools of thought, of different political persuasions. And when the Internet came about and these people had to find each other and see each other for the first time, it was really jarring. I mean, Muslim discourse on the Internet for the first several years was nothing but fiery debates and insults and things like that. Muslims need to learn together in cyberspace in a way that’s civil and respectful.

“Only now are people starting to get together as Sunni, Sufi, Shia, without it automatically meaning, ‘let’s have a theological argument.’ And that change has been happening slowly over time. Friendships have been happening between these different people, between Muslims in the West and in the Muslim world, between Shia, Sunni, Sufi, even between Salafis and progressives.

“I think one person put it that the Muslim community has an ‘irony deficiency.’ Because of that, we wanted to interject humor and wit into all the work we did, because we felt that it was a really good way to defuse tension and make the pill easier to swallow, so to speak. So one of the things we do, at the top of our Website, is we have little taglines that describe who we are, ‘cleared by Homeland Security,’ ‘no assets to freeze,’ ‘all the news that’s not fit to print.’

Ahhh. That’s just the type of humor that hopefully turns SM readers on (well most of them).

Going over to alt.mulsim.com we see that in addition to running the site, Amanullah and his wife are bloggers. His wife Hina, blogs about her recent experience with motherhood.

Go check out the main news site. There are lots of good and often controversial articles posted. Great brain food.

I know, I know. I too hate it when lame journalists decide to add a “Gate” at the end of a story just to capture attention and show that the story is about scandal. I would not have succumbed to this type of journalistic laziness were it not for the wire tapping. The BBC reports:

A police officer in India’s Gujarat state says the government there authorised the killing of Muslims three years ago. RB Sreekumar made the allegation in notes he kept at the time while serving as Gujarat’s intelligence chief.

The Gujarat government says the charges are baseless and untrue, instigated because Mr Sreekumar was not promoted.

Personally I think it would have been more efficient if Sreekumar had stayed anonymous and led SM bloggers to the truth by arranging a series of meetings in dimly lit parking garages, but I suppose my life was not meant for such excitement.

Mr Sreekumar has submitted his notes to India Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) which investigates complaints by civil servants.

He brought a case against the Gujarat government, saying he was denied a promotion for refusing to act upon the “illegal and unconstitutional directives” of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as well as the state government and senior state police officers.

In the notes, Mr Sreekumar alleges that the chief minister asked him to tap the telephones of Shankersinh Vaghela, who was then president of the Congress party.

He said that he was also asked to tap the telephone of cabinet minister Haren Pandya.

In the notes, Mr Sreekumar also says that senior government officials sent messages asking him to kill Muslim extremists who were involved in rioting.

In other news it is obvious that Mr. Modi is still bitter about last months events. Rediff.com reports:

Law and order situation in Gujarat is far more satisfactory than other states and even some other countries, Chief Minister Narendra Modi said in New Delhi.

He was speaking at the Chief Ministers Conference on Internal Security and Law and Order on Friday.

“The number of murders in Gujarat is 30 per cent lower than the national average and rapes 70 per cent lower. Compared to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the crime rate in the state is negligible,” the CM said.

As summer fast approaches we are all eyeing those concert schedules to see which one’s we’d like to attend. Here is one for the mix that I ask you to consider: Sanskrit Rock [thanks for the tip Dinesh Rao]:

Shanti Shanti is a performing group consisting of two young sisters, Andrea & Sara Forman. They are gaining worldwide recognition for their Sanskrit chanting as well as for their unique approach to New Age music. Sanskrit is the ancient language of India and is known for it’s tranquil and harmonious effects.

Andrea & Sara Forman have been chanting Sanskrit since they were nine and seven years of age, respectively, and are now considered among the top scholars in the U.S. in their field. The girls have performed Sanskrit nationwide, including appearances on PBS television programs, and on various radio broadcast shows.

Andrea & Sara have just released their fourth album, which steps into a whole new level of enchantment as they chant, in Sanskrit, the traditional Vedas from India, as well as perform ancient Bhajans. You will also enjoy the magic of their new, original songs, which are causing such a stir in the World Music community.

You’ve got to see the clip for yourselves. If they ever decide to add a band mate, I have a great suggestion for them. If any of you live in Colorado Springs go check them out next Friday and report back to us your impressions if you can. MP3’s of more of their music can be found here. They aren’t the Corrs sisters but I’d watch them. Incidentally, I also highly recommend Sheila Chandra for those that enjoy “Indian Gospel” music.

The other shoe has dropped — authorities will close approximately 600 dancing-girl bars in Bombay:

The crackdown was launched last month with the closure of bars in the rest of the state, but a decision has now been taken to include the state capital. The girls dance Bollywood numbers and clients often thrown them money. The government says the bars are a breeding ground for crime and prostitution. [BBC News]

First the casting couch, and now this. How the hell is Shakti Kapoor supposed to get laid in this town?

BBC News: Axe falls on Mumbai dancing bars
Previous posts: Maharashtra shutters dance bars, Casting couch caught on tape, and Updates on the Shakti Kapoor Scandal

You’re in a restaurant or airplane, and someone’s rat-bastard tot will not stop crying at the top of their lungs. There’s something you can do about it, as long as you’re willing to risk arrest:

Indian police have charged 80 people for burying children alive in an ancient Hindu ceremony known as “the festival of pits.” The ceremony, in which children -- some less than a year old -- are buried alive briefly and then dug up, happened on Monday in southern Tamil Nadu state, The Asian Age reported on Thursday. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: Indians charged for burying children alive

The Los Angeles Times discovers the three-year-old Artesia branch of Naz Cinemas during a recent cricket match between India and Pakistan. What took them so long to notice? Hey, you try driving from L.A. to Artesia in under three years. It might be worth the trip:

The cinema draws expatriates from San Diego to Santa Monica, eager to see the colorful costumes and hear the lively songs that make Bollywood films famous. In addition to Indian movies, Jivani shows films from Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Korea and the Philippines. But to South Asian immigrants, Naz cinemas is more than a movie theater. It also serves as a sort of community center and social club. Here they can comfortably gather and gossip, reminisce and reconnect. “It’s like a home away from home,” said (owner Shiraz) Jivani, 49. “By serving them Indian tea, Indian samosas, Indian snacks, they feel like they are back home.” Jivani, a Pakistani native with a degree from Stanford University, opened his first theater in the Bay Area city of Fremont in 1992, followed by another in nearby Sunnyvale in 1999 and the Lakewood theater in 2002. [Los Angeles Times]

Los Angeles Times: Indians and Pakistanis get together for cricket (free registration required)

India’s offshore dominance on the wane because of rising salaries? Hell no, says/hopes/prays Marc Hebert, the VP of a Silicon Valley company that has a branch in India:

Some even speculate that rising salaries in India will erode the cost advantage over U.S. IT workers, ultimately returning offshore jobs to American soil. But that’s only one side of the story. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reported death of Indian outsourcing is greatly exaggerated. The counterargument rests on two pillars: productivity and scale. Salaries may increase, but there are offsetting factors such as experience, infrastructure, high productivity levels and economies of scale to consider. Let me put it another way: The cost of doing information technology in India is falling, as the range and complexity of projects that can be offshored to India is increasing. [News.com]

News.com: The end of India’s offshore dominance?

For your kitschy pleasure:

‘Indian God.’ A music vid of Ganesh as petulant recording artist.

I’m a fuckin’ Indian god, baby that’s a fact
I’m a fuckin’ Indian god, girl I want you baaack
How can you leave an Indian god, baby that’s fucked up…

Fuckin’ Indian god, man, you can’t leave that.
It’s too good, mmm!

He said he’s an Indian god, baby, not a fuckin’ songwriter. Watch the video.

‘Handy Hindus’ finger puppets. They’re Hindu gods done up Elmo / Sesame Street style in cheap plastic.

‘Hindi Bendy’ toy. Here’s a quick way to make money: take a boring old toy, slap on a bindi and add some extra arms.

Here’s their entire section of Hindu products; Archie McPhee sells novelty products by mail-order:

“I study customer’s actual orders. I see 100 voodoo dolls going to a software firm in Palo Alto. What does this mean? A Manhattan buyer wants every nun and Catholic religious item we carry and wants them by air. What’s the rush? And here’s yet another order to Japan. What are they doing over there with all this glow-in-the-dark string they order?”

Lest you think they specifically tweak Hindus, you should see the rabbi punching puppet and the bobble-headed Jesus. They don’t sell Islamic novelties, can’t imagine why.

Bombay street merchants sell just about everything — clothes; food; human kidneys. Seven Mid Day reporters tried their hand at hawking a variety of wares, in order to see if they could earn a day’s wage (thanks, Avi Solomon). Who made the biggest profit? Vinod may have been on to something about Indians and superstition:

Item Sold: Net Profit (Rs.)
Fortunes: 110
Head Massages: 109
Water: 107
Flowers: 40
Hairbands: 38
Newspapers: 22
Popcorn: 15

Mid Day: Mid Day reporters turn hawkers

Tragedy struck earlier this week at a sweatshop in Bangladesh:

Rescuers pulled two more bodies out of the rubble of a nine-story garment factory that collapsed four days ago, taking the toll to 32 on Thursday with more than 100 workers still feared trapped...The factory at Palashbari, 30 km (18 miles) from the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, was built without planning permission, officials and engineers said. Its owners have not been found since the worst tragedy in the country’s accident-prone garment industry struck in the wee hours of Monday. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

The factory produced clothes for export to the U.S, Belgium and Germany. The companies haven’t been named, or stepped forward. Seeing as how their oversight of the factory was lacking, they probably don’t even know yet. Once they do, surely their hell-bound executives will mourn the loss (of revenue, not life).

Reuters/Yahoo!: Hopes for Bangladesh factory survivors fade as death toll hits 32

In what seems (to me at least) as counter intuitive, the U.S. South has recently been fertile ground for ambitious young Indian-American politicians, many of whom end up winning. The next one to keep an eye on may be Shyam Reddy of Georgia. Late last month he announced his candidacy to run for Secretary of State of Georgia. The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Reddy dubs himself as a “fiscally conservative, socially responsible candidate” whose platform includes fostering a business-friendly environment for the state, preventing investment fraud and promoting public health and safety by overseeing licensed professionals more effectively.

A native of Dublin, Ga., Reddy serves on the board of The Indus Entrepreneurs, which mentors local entrepreneurs, and the board of the Red Clay Democrats. Reddy is also an active member of The Technology Association of Georgia and The Georgia Bar and is part of the 2005 L.E.A.D. Atlanta Class of Leadership Atlanta.

I love the term “socially responsible candidate.” It’s purposefully vague enough to avoid taking a stand and using the dreaded “liberal” tag. This is a required trait in any good politician, especially a Dem running in the South. The Hindustan Times reveals more about Reddy:

His parents, he says, emigrated to the US in pursuit of a better life and raised him in Georgia, reminding him to be ever cognizant of the fact that he and others like them were fortunate to live in a country that allowed, fostered even, equality and opportunity for all.

As is the case with most Indian families that affirm ties to their roots, he says that he was ‘raised in a strict environment deeply grounded in strong principles and moral values.

Again, as is the case with most urban and economically mobile Indian families, he was encouraged to pursue and complete his education.

Becoming a public servant and serving fellow Georgians, however is something that he has wanted to do from the very outset.

With his expertise in business and legal arenas, he is expected to be fully aware of the Secretary of State’s office and the significant role it plays.

Reddy is a diehard Southern Democrat, fostering a business-friendly environment that will make Georgia the preferred destination for business.

If you live in that dirrtiest of the dirrty south states, and you have an interest in politics I suggest you get involved. Even if he loses, great strides will be made and grass roots connections will be formed.

The ever excellent Wikipedia has a fascinating, quite detailed entry about the structure of Indian English -

Indian English is a catch-all phrase for the dialects or varieties of English spoken widely in India (by about 11% of the population, according to the 1991 census) and the Indian subcontinent in general. The dialect is also known as South Asian English. Due to British colonialism that saw an English-speaking presence in India for over two hundred years, a distinctly South Asian brand of English was born.

...Spoken Indian English is often the butt of jokes by "educated" British, American and Indian English-speakers alike as is evidenced by such characters as Peter Sellers' Indian party-goer in the movie The Party and the Simpsons' convenience-store owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilon; there is also no dearth of jokes among Indians 'riffing' the pronunciation and idiomatic inconsistencies of Indian English.

Despite the almost de rigeuer and somewhat derogatory Apu reference, the article is a pretty serious language analysis and covers a lot of ground including regional differences within Indian English. Bihari's for ex. apparently substitute "j" and "z" while we all know that "subcontinentals" just can't wait to swap a few "v's" and "w's".

In the end, however, here's the real test of authenticity -- just try to not to shake your head as you read a few entries aloud from their list of common Hinglish quirks -

...anomalies in the grammar of Indian English:

• The progressive tense in stative verbs: I am understanding it. She is knowing the answer.

Many of us have been waiting a long time for some new Panjabi MC material, and while he has released a new album, entitled Steel Bangle--in reference to the Kada or bracelet that many Sikh men wear, the material used for the album is apparently music that did not make the final cut for the last album PMC recorded for nachural records.

Word around the block is that PMC, aka Rajinder Rai, had signed on to release a certain amount of records for nachural, and to fulfill his commitment he decided to release old material, again. Even though the material is leftover, it is still PMC, and so some of it is quite hot. You can hear samples of the album's 10 tracks here so go and give it a listen. My favorite track is Nachdi Tu Gidhe Vich featuring his longtime collaborator Labh Janjua, the singer from Mundian to Bach Ke.

That being said, this is definitely not an album to write to MTV about.

Night of Henna claims to be the first-ever Pakistani-American film, which if true would be remarkably overdue (thanks, Turbanhead). It looks to be more arranged marriage with bad accents yadda yadda. Will she marry a desi, or will she stay with her white beau? It’s what we all struggled with — back in the days of Motley Crue.

Pooja Kumar, the print ad model for Bombay Dreams, stars. Craig Marker, from the most excellent Neil LaBute play The Shape of Things, co-stars, as does male model Suhail Tayeb. DJ Cheb-i-Sabbah did the soundtrack, which is promising; he does a soulful take on ‘Kaise Kaise.’

Watch the trailer. Here are showtimes. The film plays NYC’s Imaginasian starting Apr. 22.

Seven.11 turned out to be insanely good, and if you’re in NYC you have only five days left to see it. This series of seven short plays, each 11 minutes long is absolutely hilarious, and the performers were obviously having a blast.

Amardeep has a rundown of this harvest festival and Sikh New Year. Lohri is another favorite festival of mine: baking like the planet Mercury, searing bonfire on one side, frigid night on the other and bhangra all around the fire.

Here’s a snapshot I took at the 2003 Sikh Day parade in NYC. It’s the Madison Square Park tower in a playground mirror. This year’s parade will be held on Sat., Apr. 30.

Yoko Ono, the almighty creator of cacophony and destroyer of institutions, allows a Broadway-bound musical to perform a pair of unpublished songs written by her late husband, Beatle John Lennon. One of those songs, “India, India,” received yesterday its first-ever public performance:

Lennon wrote ‘India, India’ in the late 1970s for a musical of his own writing named after his song The Ballad of John and Yoko. However, the show was never performed and the track remained unheard. It seems likely that in ‘India, India’ Lennon was writing about his 1968 visit to India, when the Beatles indulged their spiritual side at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh. [Apun Ka Choice]

Apun Ka Choice: Lennon’s ‘India, India’ on Broadway
Times of India: India, India lyrics

Sounds like a cocktail, no? Pixar artist Sanjay Patel illustrates Hindu mythology in a style reminiscent of Suck, Demian 5, Virgin and Bewitched (thanks, Turbanhead). It’s gorgeous work, although his Rama does look a bit much like Hrithik Roshan, and any kid-safe interpretation of Kali is bound to cross the line into kitsch.

Patel’s site says he came up with its name, Ghee Happy, via obscure analogy: reducing the rich strokes of Hindu iconography to their essence is like clarifying butter into ghee. He self-published a children’s book of Hindu gods and also sells 11”x17” prints on his site. Check it out if you have any little ones in need of full-color indoctrination or just dig the visual style.

Update: Drawn has more (thanks, Harry). A commenter there says:

We were actually joking with Sanjay that he SHOULD do this with every religion, but I guess the problem with the monotheistic religions is that there would only be ONE page in the book…

Actress Noureen Dewulf plays an Indian sorority pledge named Sanagarvarapoopoo “Poo Poo” Gandosimi in this summer’s “National Lampoon’s Pledge This!” The film reads like a female rehash of “Van Wilder,” and stars wealthy porn star Paris Hilton as the sorority president. Peta Cooper (PC) interviews Dewulf (ND) for DesiClub.com:

PC: Does your character have a lot of “fobby” qualities?
ND: Fobby? Not really, I mean she speaks with an accent, wears Indian clothes and is really innocent until she gets corrupted.
PC: Does she wear deodorant?
ND: Peta - Shut up! (laughs) I kind of like FOBs anyway. They are cute and funny plus ignorance is bliss right?
PC: So you’re in this movie with Paris Hilton, how do both of your characters interact?
ND: Well, Paris’ character, Victoria, is the president of a sorority (Gamma Gamma) that my character Sanagarvarapoopoo Gandosimi aka “Poo Poo” is trying to pledge. So basically, she tortures me and the other pledges throughout the film, which is really funny. [DesiClub.com]

Even if it is funny, it’s going to be pretty damn hard to top the hilarity of Hilton picking up a cell phone during the sex scene in her previous masterpiece, “One Night in Paris.” (NSFW)

DesiClub.com: Noureen DeWulf — in hot company with Paris Hilton

Twenty years ago when everyone was sporting Hard Rock Café t-shirts, this would have allowed us to be culturally-appropriate posers:

...global cafecum-entertainment giant - the USD 426-million Hard Rock International - has made the move to enter India. Industry sources said Hard Rock International has signed an exclusive arrangement up with two Indian franchisee partners - Jai Singh and Sanjay Mehtani. The first Hard Rock Cafe is expected to come up in Mumbai, in September. [Times of India]

Times of India: Hard Rock to enter India

From the perspective of religious extremists, at least this is somewhat logical — if you’re trying to enslave women, you definitely don’t want them training to outrun you:

A week ago baton-wielding men threw petrol bombs and torched vehicles at a mini-marathon in Gujranwala, 135 miles south of Islamabad. The race - one of the first to allow female participation - ended with police firing tear gas and making more than 50 arrests. The threat of further violence forced the cancellation of other mini-marathons at the weekend in a direct challenge to President Pervez Musharraf’s policy of “enlightened moderation”. [The Guardian]

The Guardian: Mullahs target women runners

I am at a conference in Boulder, CO this week and unfortunately don’t have time for any relevant desi postings. I used to live in Boulder and so I originally recommended to the other Mutineers that we check out nearby South Park, CO as a potential site for our blogging world headquarters. South Park was going to provide us with a lot of perks and tax breaks. Eventually we established the home office in North Dakota for increased privacy and security. I was feeling nostalgic though so I thought I’d share this picture we took on a snowy field during our scouting trip out here.

Unicef says that of the 2.2 million HIV+ children in the world, an underwhelming 20,000 receive some form of treatment. The last Democrat to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW wants to change that.

(IANS News) New York: Former US President Bill Clinton's foundation has tied up with Indian pharmaceutical firm Cipla to provide medicines for 10,000 AIDS-affected children in 10 developing countries, Xinhua reports.

There is a huge need for such initiatives. Last year, half-a-million children died of AIDS.

The agreement with Cipla would enable supply of the AIDS drugs at less than half current market rates, Clinton told reporters Monday. His foundation will give $10 million for treatment of the children.

HIV/AIDS-stricken youngsters could be treated as early as next month; medicine has "already been ordered for children in China, the Dominican Republic, Lesotho, Rwanda, Mozambique and Tanzania". The former President's foundation has set a goal of treating 60,000 children by 2006.

For some reason, I end up covering the macabre "random death in India" beat for Sepia Mutiny. Here's the latest one -

Up to 150 pilgrims drown in India

Hundreds of wailing pilgrims have lined the banks of a holy river in central India and prayed for loved ones after more than 150 [previous pilgrims] either drowned or were missing when the gates of a nearby dam were opened.

...The [first group of] pilgrims had gathered on the banks of Narmada a day ahead of the new moon, a period which is considered auspicious by Hindus as they feel bathing in the holy river at this time would wash away their sins.

...officials at the Narmada Hydroelectric Development Corporation (NHDC), which operates the dam, said they were not aware of the Hindu fair downstream.

And wash away their sins it did.

For Ambaram Kakaria, it was too late. She sobbed as she performed the last rites over her 19-year-old nephew Babulal, who was due to be married soon.

"I would have never allowed my nephew to come to this place had I known that I would be losing him forever," she said. "I was planning to get him married in a couple of weeks."

..."We found the body of a woman with a one-year-old dead child in her arms," police constable Ram Singh told Reuters.

Actually, I'm nowhere near as callous as this post makes me sound. It's just a weird frustration where everytime I come across a headline like this, a little voice inside my head says "oh please, don't say 'in India' " and sure enough, it ends up being 'in India.'

I suppose when you've got a billion people, an underdeveloped economy, a myth / superstition-fueled culture, and a (relatively) well-developed media, this sort of stuff percolates up moreso than, for ex., in China. But man, talk about wanting to bang your head into a wall.

2 TV events that might be of interest to Mutineers -

• Kiran Rao on 24 -- Sepia Mutiny's favorite ABCD actor (Kal Penn, alas, is but a close #2) has a recurring role on the Fox hit 24. He writes -

  I will be on two episodes of “24” in the next couple of weeks.

  It looks like I will be on the 4/18 and 4/25 episodes, but there is a small chance you may see me in tonight’s as well.

  While I don’t have an accent, I do get to carry a gun!

  9pm on Fox if you want to catch it.

  The curse of the brown actor in Hollywood - you unload several AK magazines without hitting a thing and get popped on the first shot by Jennifer Garner / Arnold Schwarzenegger / Kiefer Sutherland. He had a great writeup of his experience on Alias awhile back.

  In between terrorizing the good guys, he occasionally saves their lives as well - but in the hospital rather than during a covert op.

  Kiran took a little heat on this earlier and had this to say (read the comments here)-

  WHY WHY WHY do brown folks take parts like this!? congratulations to your friend, big time boo hoo for the rest of us.

  ...Kali: would you mind explaining "why why why" this part offended you so much? Was it because there was a brown person playing a plastic surgeon (stereotype #1) or helping terrorists (stereotype #2) or dying quickly (stereotype #3)?...

  Read the rest. Whatever the case, I still think it's cool.

  (previous SM coverage of Kiran - here; some of his previous roles were covered on my blog here; Kiran also runs a website focused on desi's in Hollywood called Hollywood Masala)



• Raj Bhakta judges Miss USA -- You know, there's just something really special about seeing someone reach for and achieve their dreams.

  Competing with Kiran's (potential) time slot on 24 tonight will be the Miss USA pageant judged by Mr. Raj Bhakta.

  Pageant rules strictly prohibit fraternizing with the contestants before the contest. Consoling the runner's up afterwards, however, is another story I'm sure.

  (previous SM coverage of Bhakta - too numerous; Hat tip to SM reader Pooja who alerted us via the tipline!)
  

Time Magazine released today its list of the world’s 100 most influential people, which includes Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in its assortment of “Leaders & Revolutionaries.” Bollywood, despite its growing popularity around the world, doesn’t show up anywhere on the list’s crew of “Artists & Entertainers.” Ann Coulter made it there though, which leads one to suspect that the selections are a tad American-centric. After all, the Third Reich hasn’t reemerged yet, so how much influence can Coulter possibly have outside of hard-up American reactionaries? Wipro’s Azim Premji and steel kingpin Lakshmi Mittal are also notably absent from the list’s club of “Builders & Titans,” which includes domestic diva Martha Stewart and rapper Jay-Z.

We at Sepia Mutiny are in favor of equal opportunity boobage. A couple of years ago, this oddity went out over the wire (via BridalBeer and Gene Expression):

Mr B Wijeratne, from Walapanee, near Colombo, took to breastfeeding her soon after his wife died three months ago while giving birth to their second child.

His elder daughter, 18-month-old Nisansala Madhushani, was so used to her mother’s milk that she would not take formula milk. Mr Wijeratne told Sinhalese language newspaper Lankadeepa: “My child would reject the powdered milk I tried feeding through a bottle. “Unable to see her cry I offered my breast. That’s when I discovered that I could breastfeed her…”

Dr Kamal Jayasinghe, a spokesman for the hospital, said: “Men with a hyperactive prolactine hormone can produce breast milk.”

Wikipedia explains:

It is not so often understood that [human males] also have mammary glands… Under the appropriate hormonal stimulus… the mammary glands of human males can also produce milk… The volume… will be small relative to the amount that a female can produce.

The most common circumstance under which lactation is induced is when hormonal treatments are given to men suffering from prostate cancer… Male-to-female transsexuals may also produce milk due to the hormones they take to reshape their bodies. Extreme stress has also been known to be a cause of male lactation, as evidenced upon the return of American POWs from the Korean and Vietnam Wars… It is also possible for males (and females) to induce lactation through constant massage and simulated ‘sucking’ of the nipple over a long period of time (months).

From an engineering standpoint, this is actually fairly cool. Just think of all the unused capabilities your body’s hiding away for when hormonal switches are flipped. It’s a pity none of them are superpowers. Beyond suckling, that is.

There’s a more disturbing story in this vein from India here (not for the squeamish). Now can we get back to posting Aishwarya photos?

"Did you read the Post yesterday?", SM-loyalist Deepa asked me over AIM. I replied negatively and she sent me the link to a love story...

The two were as opposite as could be. Saqib is tall, olive-skinned and athletic. Susan is tiny, fair-skinned and delicate. Saqib is Muslim, the son of immigrants born in India. Susan was raised in a conservative Christian family from a small town in Pennsylvania. He's a door-knocking community activist who hopes to run for public office someday; she's soft-spoken and cherishes her privacy. He's a perpetual pessimist, always managing expectations and planning for the worst; she's an eternal optimist who's always smiling.

Though both of their families initially balked at a desire to be with someone so "opposite", eventually, all the in-laws came around.

After a few years together, Saqib and Susan wanted to become parents. Surely they might have thought that after the considerable struggle they survived just to get married, this next phase of their lives would be less fraught with turmoil. One would have hoped.

"It's a girl!" the technician announced, to a round of cheers. Susan squeezed Saqib's hand. The couple had already settled on a girl's name: Leila. Her middle name would be Daine, a tribute to Susan's mother, Diane, who had died suddenly a year earlier, two weeks after learning she had a brain tumor.

Leila Daine Ali. It was a name that Saqib knew he'd never tire of saying -- introducing her to the world, chastising her for trying to poke her pudgy toddler fingers into wall sockets, exclaiming over her good grades in school. It was a name he knew he would scrawl countless times on the "memo" line of his checkbook. "For clown at Leila's party." "For Leila's tuition." "For Leila's wedding dress."

Reading this story at thestar.com, I was reminded of two things. First, that old Bollywood song (to which I confess I don’t understand the lyrics) Mera naam chin-chin-chu that my parents must have played on long car rides. Secondly, I was reminded of the movie, Elf.

KUALA LUMPUR: He can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakka fluently, but Lim Meng Sain was born an Indian.

And this anomaly has sometimes put him in a tight spot.

The contractor was raised as a Chinese after his biological parents gave him up for adoption when he was an infant.

Now 25 years old, Meng Sain is a true product of the community he grew up in.

Oh, I’m sure this isn’t nearly as unique as it would seem, but I still thought it was a cute story, especially when compared to this earlier post about preconceived notions based upon skin color.

Once, while parking a truck behind his house recently, he was stopped by a police officer.

“The officer asked for my identity card and when I gave it to him, he took a good look and asked me if it was a fake,” he said.

“I’ve gotten used to all the puzzled stares. Maybe it’s just God’s way of testing me,” said Meng Sain, who was baptised a Catholic when he was 12.

After decades of advocating Tibetan independence, India now accepts Chinese control of Tibet, much to the chagrin of thousands of Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala. [CSM]

I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised to hear this news. Like any newly popular teenager, India is kicking its penniless lover out of bed for a wealther swain. India has ended its support for a free Tibet, and is seriously cozying up to China. It's getting increased commerce, a new border agreement, China's acceptance of India's invasion and annexation of Sikkim, and China's tacit consent of how India treats its own domestic independence movements.

The kissy-face between India and China today is a substantial change from the four decades of frosty relations between the two countries. Why? It's all about the benjamins, 'natch:

India's bilateral trade with China touched $13.6bn last year with the balance of trade reportedly favouring Delhi. The two sides were surprised with the growth in bilateral trade as it was a mere $1bn a decade ago. Experts say with this rate of growth, China may soon overtake the US as India's largest trading partner. Indo-US trade stood at about $20bn in 2004. [BBC]

Bilateral investment is going up as well, and mainly in one direction:

Indian investments in China crossed $100m last year. On the other hand, China feels the Indian economy is not opening up to Chinese investments, which remain at a mere $20m. With the Indian side now favouring 100% foreign investment in the construction sector, Beijing hopes to increase its presence in India. [BBC]

With increased commerce comes ... cheesy lines from politicians:

On a visit yesterday to India's technology capital of Bangalore, Premier Wen urged Indian software companies to come to China and take advantage of his nation's manufacturing capabilities. "Cooperation is just like two pagodas, one hardware and one software," Wen said. "Combined, we [India and China] can take the leadership position in the world." [CSM]

Is this a good idea for India? Should it trust China even as it plans to build a jet fighter with Pakistan? How much does India in fact trust China? Well ...

Remember how everybody in 7th grade would snicker in SexEd when the teacher would put a condom on a banana? Well, Indians are far thriftier than that. Instead of wasting a perfectly good condom on a banana, they use the condoms to weave a sari, and use just the banana as birth control. Well, kinda:

India's western state of Maharashtra has told banana and sugar cane farmers they will not get water for irrigation if they have more than two children. The state's water minister says the move will help curb the rising population and solve water shortages.

The bill also requires all banana and sugar cane farmers, regardless of child numbers, to use drip or sprinkling systems of irrigation within five year or lose their supply. The bill is targeting the crops because of the large amount of water they require.

The upper house of the state's parliament has backed the bill and it will go to the lower house on Monday. If the bill is approved into law it will not apply to farmers who already have more than two children.

Maharashtra is agriculturally one of India's most advanced states but has suffered bad droughts ... that have led to hundreds of farmers committing suicide. [Note: Quotes out of order from the original BBC article]

Would this have been half as funny if I had posted about sugar cane?

The NYT reports that some Chinese intellectuals and officials have kind words for India:

“India is a far more diverse country… a place with the second largest Muslim population in the world, and lots of ethnic minorities, and yet it organizes regular elections without conflict. China is 90 percent Han, so if India can conduct elections, so can China.” [Pang Yongzhing, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in Tianjin]

India, a paragon of manufacturing efficiency?

“To produce goods worth $10,000, for example, we need seven times more resources than Japan, nearly six times more than the United States and, perhaps most embarrassing, nearly three times more than India.” [Pan Yue, China’s environment minister]

Respect for intellectual property? He’s probably never visited a pirate desi Blockbuster store.

“In India there is a lot more room to move around… their capital markets are good, their banking sector is better than in China, and there is entrepreneurialism everywhere in India, along with well-protected intellectual property rights. All of these are things that China lacks.” [Zhang Jun, director of the China Center for Economic Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai]

Some desis have a disturbing attachment to authoritarian government, or perhaps (not so disturbing at all) just plain effectiveness:

There is constant talk these days of turning Mumbai, the southern commercial metropolis formerly known as Bombay, into a new Shanghai, China’s most glitteringly modern city… Such contrasts have left some Indians to remark, sometimes despairingly, about a “democracy price” that slows development… “I’m often approached by friends returning impressed from China, saying how our airports in Bombay and Delhi can’t compare,” said G. P. Deshpande, a longtime China scholar at Jawaharal Nehru University in Delhi. “When I tell them that these things come in a package, that you don’t just get the new airports, and I describe the package, though, they say no thank you.”

Finally, perhaps India too will get its Mideast invasions:

“As far as exporting democracy, it is only a matter of time before India gets the self-confidence to begin doing this.” [Subramanian Swamy, president of India’s Janata Party and former minister of law, commerce and justice]

A whole bunch of stuff going on in the world of movies. Some we’ve missed; some yet to come:

• Amitabh Bachchan — Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the actor by screening 12 of his films (estimated total running time: 3683 hours). The undisputed king of Bollywood also appears in person on April 15 to talk about his long and storied career (estimated total running time: 3683 hours). (via BBC News)
• “Mughal-E-Azam” — Bollywood’s biggest film of all time is restored, colorized, re-recorded, and possibly molested (I mean, c’mon, they’ve done just about everything else to it). Film purists aren’t crying foul though. The production company behind the colorization says it was merely completing the unfulfilled dream of its creator. Playing in theaters now.
• “Continuous Journey” — Ali Kazimi’s film won the Best Documentary Feature Audience Award at the 23rd San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. It documents a period when Canadians weren’t as nice as they are today:

  Continuous Journey is an inquiry into the largely ignored history of Canada’s exclusion of the South Asians by a little known immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people from British India were excluded by a regulation that appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948. As a direct result, only a half-mile from Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration boats and the passengers were held in communicado ­ virtual prisoners on the ship. Thus began a dramatic stand-off which would escalate over the course of two months, becoming one of the most infamous incidents in Canadian history. [Continuous Journey]

• “Morning Raga” — In their own words:

  Morning Raga is about the meeting of worlds. It is a story that brings the modern and traditional together, unites the past with present, Carnatic music with Western music, the comic with the tragic, fate and coincidence with individual choices. It is a story of our times where our worlds are interacting with each other. [Morning Raga]

  Even tougher to figure out is where it’s playing. As far as we can tell, it’s slowly popping up in theaters around the country.
• “Bomb the System” — The title screams, “movie about the digestive consequences of a bad batch of pani puri.” The official web site says, “first feature in over 20 years to delve into the world of graffiti art.” Let’s hope they read this, and find some way to combine the two. The film (Exec: Kanwal Rekhi, Prods: Ben Rekhi, Smriti Mundhra) opens in L.A. and N.Y. on April 22. (thanks, Abhijay Prakash)
• Kal Penn — Yahoo! Movies hosts production stills from the actor’s new flick, “A Lot Like Love.” Gawker, a Manhattan gossip blog, published this Penn-sighting from one of their readers:

  on the afternoon of sunday the 3rd, i saw kal penn (from the new superman sequel, the lead role in the movie adaptation of jhumpa lahiri’s bestselling book “the namesake” and the role of kumar in “harold and kumar go to white castle”) at whole foods in Columbus circle. he was wearing a knit wool cap, a black fleece patagonia jacket and a vest over the fleece. was it really that cold? he noticed me squinting at him, so i asked him, “what’s your name?” he replied, “kal.” i then asked him, “were you in a movie?” he said, “yes.” then, i asked him if the movie had been “harold and kumar go to white castle.” he replied in the affirmative and asked me if i had seen it. i replied honestly that i had not. He seemed to be annoyed and bewildered at the same time by my answer. i guess his annoyance was compunded by the fact that i am asian and the movie i asked about was supposed to be the movie that proved asians could produce a mainstream hit. well, it bombed at the box office. at least he has now gotten those two nice roles that i just mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. [Gawker]

While there’s considerable debate as to whether residents of Los Angeles read books, at the very least, we hold big festivals celebrating them. The tenth incarnation of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books lands later this month on the UCLA campus, and offers tons of signings, readings and discussion panels. Chitra Divakaruni, Pico Iyer and Ved Mehta are among the authors expected to hold court on the following topics:

Saturday, April 23

10:30 AM - The Challenges Facing Latin America: Politics & Art
Moderator: Marjorie Miller. Panelists: Ann Louise Bardach, Pico Iyer, Alvaro Vargas Llosa and Tom Miller.

11:00 AM - Writers in Exile
Moderator: Karen Stabiner. Panelists: Chris Abani, Ved Mehta and Loung Ung.

Sunday, April 24

11:30 AM - Fiction: Searching for Our Ideal Reader
Moderator Paula Woods. Panelists: Elizabeth Berg, Chitra Divakaruni, Janet Fitch and Lisa See.

I’m a hustler, baby
I just want you to know
It ain’t where I been
But where I’m ‘bout to go

—Jay-Z, ‘I Just Wanna Love U’

British author Preethi Nair self-published after her first novel was rejected everywhere (thanks, Punjabi Boy). She invented a PR persona out of whole cloth so publications wouldn’t catch on she was a one-woman band. She landed a three-book publishing deal, and the Beeb is filming one of her novels. Here’s the kicker: her fake PR persona was shortlisted for Publicist of the Year. Not content, Nair then turned her fictional life yet another novel. Meta, shameless, impressive!

Preethi Nair was born in Kerala, South India in 1971 and came to England as a child… she worked as a management consultant but gave it up to… become a writer… Jobless and having been rejected by most publishers, Preethi took the deposit out of the flat she was about to buy and set up her own publishing company… Not having enough money for a PR agency, she… appointed… Pru Menon (her alter ego) to shamelessly hype the book… she signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins. Preethi won the Asian Woman of Achievement award for her endeavours and Pru was shortlisted as Publicist of the Year for the PPC awards.

“100 Shades of White”, her first novel with HarperCollins has been bought by the BBC for a television adaptation and her third novel “Beyond Indigo” will be published in August, along with the reissue of “Gypsy Masala”. [Her own bio, natch]

A Citibank call center worker in Pune allegedly stole $350K from NYC customers’ accounts via electronic transfer (via Slashdot). It sounds like he and 11 of his closest friends may have done the nasty via online banking:

Thomas, who worked in the callcentre for six months… had the secret pincodes of the customers’ e-mail IDs… In January, he roped in his friends and transferred money from four accounts of the bank’s New York-based customers into their own accounts, opened under fictitious names… The customers, from whose accounts the money had been withdrawn, alerted the bank officials in the US, after which the crime was traced to Pune…

… police sources said some of those arrested were employees of Msource [a subsidiary of Mphasis], Kalyaninagar. Police sources said the alleged mastermind [was] Ivan Samuel Thomas (30) of Sangamnagar…

Mphasis, which owns the call center, is a multinational with an office on Park Ave. It’s not known whether Thomas actually uttered the line, ‘Thank you, come again.’ Indian cops are gently questioning the suspects with their special brand of TLC.

Continental Airlines will add the first nonstop flight from the U.S. to India beginning Nov. 1, contingent on approval from the Indian government (via SAJA). The Newark (NYC)-New Delhi route will cosset passengers in the belly of a 777.

The only other nonstop from this continent is Air Canada’s Toronto-Delhi route. Also, Air India just added an LA-Frankfurt-Delhi flight. Thanks, open skies agreement!

See flight nerds’ discussion here. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

An Indian dance troupe incorporates Kobe Bryant’s moves into their latest creation:

The dribbling is quicksilver, strong and startlingly percussive. The jumps look effortless — and lofty. But this isn’t Staples Center, and instead of purple-and-yellow Laker jerseys, the garb consists of sherbet-colored silk kurtis, or tunics, cotton drawstring pants and hundreds of ankle bells. In fact, this isn’t a game of basketball but a rehearsal by Anjani’s Kathak Dance of India, a Diamond Bar-based company that Sunday at La Mirada Theatre will premiere a work inspired by hoops. “Kobe Bryant is my favorite,” gushes Anjani Ambegaokar, the 60-year-old dancer, teacher and choreographer who founded the company in 1985 but only began watching the Lakers on television a few years ago. “The kid is so graceful that the dancer in me started thinking, ‘How does he do that? He’s like an artist.’ I became interested in the rhythms of how they play the game and thought, ‘We can incorporate their moves and even sounds of bouncing balls into a Kathak-style piece.’” [Los Angeles Times]

Their new Kathak moves include a continuous shooting pattern dubbed “The Ball Hog,” a back-stabbing motion called “The Shaq,” and a simulated chokehold with crotch-thrusting labeled “The Eagle, Colo.”

Los Angeles Times: A jump shot, from Kobe to Kathak (free registration required)

Everyone holding their breath over a hip-hop version of yoga can finally exhale:

(Russell) Simmons, the founder of Def Jam Records, released a video series on Wednesday titled, “Yoga Live”, with instructions set to 72 tracks of original hip-hop music -- sounds that might have jarred the yogis of bygone days. Simmons said he tried to distil the spiritual from the physical in his tapes. “We packaged it intentionally in a way for people to digest the physical practice,” he told Reuters. “It’s not meant to get them worried about religion or spirituality.” [Reuters/Yahoo!]

It’s important to eliminate such worrisome items from yoga, as potential customers are already expected to have 99 problems (the bitch not being one, of course).

Reuters/Yahoo!: Yoga goes hip-hop as marketing takes hold

A while back Manish had a post featuring a multimedia exhibit titled “DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA.”

Since 9/11, thousands of American Muslims were detained in a security dragnet. To date, none have been prosecuted on terrorism charges. The majority of those detained were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. They are the recent immigrants who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we see their faces are when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor.

SM Tipster “Joykee” sends us this article hot off the NYTimes press:

For years, the father said, he watched as his daughter, now 16, became more and more drawn to the family’s Muslim religion. At 14, she began wearing a full-length veil and teaching religion classes at mosques around the city.

A year ago, she withdrew from her Manhattan high school because, a school official said, she felt uncomfortable with typical teenage banter. She told her family she wanted to go to an Islamic all-girls school, and when they could not afford to send her, she chose to study at home.

The father, a Bangladeshi watch salesman who describes himself as far more devoted to American education than to prayer after 13 years as an immigrant illegally in the United States, said he pushed for his daughter to return to public school.

Then last fall, the daughter he also describes as loving Bollywood soap operas and shopping with girlfriends startled him and her mother by seeking their approval to marry a young American Mu