Monthly Archives: August 2004

Bis-mullah!

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Pioneering rock queen Freddie Mercury, a.k.a. Farokh Bulsara, has posthumously penetrated the Persian market (via our very own Abhi):

[T]he Ministry [of Islamic Guidance] liked the song Bohemian Rhapsody… about a man who commits murder and sells his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he prays to Allah for redemption… I will forever think of Wayne’s World. I imagined a bunch of Islamic clerics in the back seat of a car, banging their heads to this song.

The UK voted ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ the best song of all time, beating out the Beatles’ ‘Imagine.’ And in the back seat of the Pacer, in the black turban, jamming on air drums, we have ayatollah Ali. Please give him a warm hand on his opening… Continue reading →

Queer eye for the fundamentalist guy

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Fashion tips for terrorists in G-al-Q. The good Turbanhead has a great photo spread:

The [al-Qaeda] manuals devote special care to teaching recruits how to pass unnoticed in the West, and include the following advice… Don’t wear short pants that show socks when you’re standing up. The pants should cover the socks, because intelligence authorities know that fundamentalists don’t wear long pants… You should differentiate between men and women’s perfume. If you use women’s perfume, you are in trouble.

Honey, if you’re a gender-confused fundamentalist? Sigh… where to begin.

A Brown Apprentice??

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If anyone has the juice on this guy, then hit me up. From Reuters:

Who will be this year’s Omarosa, everyone’s favorite reality TV villain? Who will be the apprentice to rise to the top of the business world? And importantly, who will hear the ominous utterance of real estate mogul Donald Trump, “You’re fired?”

Fans will know soon, as broadcaster NBC on Friday named the 18 candidates who will compete in the second season of “The Apprentice,” premiering on Sept. 9.

The men are: Kevin, 29, a law student from Chicago; Raj, 28, a real estate developer in the tiny ski resort of Vail ; Bradford, 33, a lawyer and real estate investor from Florida; Rob, 32, a corporate products salesman from Texas; Andy, 23, a new Harvard graduate from Florida; Wes, 28, a financial planner for the wealthy from Atlanta; Chris, 30, a stockbroker from Long Island with only a high school degree; and John, 24, a marketer from San Francisco.

From another source:

Raj, 28, a bow-tie wearing real estate developer who doesn’t really watch television

Now we will really see if a brown man can make it through the glass ceiling maintained by “the Man” (a.k.a. Trump).

Update: Take a look. Is this guy South Asian? Maybe a mix, or just an Indian sounding name?

Update #2: Here is the Full Scoop on Raj Bhakta of Vail Colorado. Continue reading →

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Just what exactly was the Sepoy Mutiny?

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Since we started the blog, several folks have asked me about the Sepoy Mutiny – the historical event our blog title derives from. The ever-excellent Wikipedia provides the most concise overview I’ve ever seen – Indian Mutiny – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Indian Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny) as known to the British or The First War Of Indian Independence as known to the Indians was a period of uprising in northern and central India against British rule in 1857-1858. It is also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny, and the Revolt of 1857. It is widely acknowledged to be the first-ever united rebellion against colonial rule in India.

I’m personally not terribly hung up on colonial / post-colonial politics but I do think the name has a cool sound to it & the history is an interesting read…

he’ll always be Gandhi to me

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if scary movies are your bag, baby, be sure to check out the latest film starring Krishna Banji (aka ben kingsley):

Kingsley’s presence in “Suspect Zero” tells us it must be one of those brainy serial-killer movies in which the killer is much smarter than the FBI agent who has been hired to track him…”Who’s the pursuer and who’s the prey?” we ask ourselves, thoughtfully tugging our beards (imaginary or real) as we observe the agent-killer tête-à-tête and ponder the gnarled, twisted roots of humanity.
…”Suspect Zero” was directed by E. Elias Merhige, who previously made the inscrutable “Shadow of the Vampire.”…Kingsley plays Benjamin O’Ryan, a serial killer: That’s not a spoiler, since we know he’s a lunatic in his first scene. (When he makes his entrance, Merhige shoots him upside down, in the rain, so the drops drip upward from a door frame — please don’t bump your head on the symbolism on your way out.) Kingsley does lots of silent-movie eye-flashing in this picture — he’s monstrously good at it, too.

via Salon.

Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” turns fifty.

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i think that “pather panchali” was the greatest film to come out of india, ever. yesterday marked the fiftieth anniversary of its premiere:

KOLKATA: It was May 3, 1955. The debut film of one Satyajit Ray opened a week-long festival at New York’s MOMA. On August 26 the same year, Pather Panchali opened to Indian audiences at Basusree.
And, in a near-repeat of the phenomenon, four months after Cannes conferred an award on it, the film won the President’s Gold. That prompted the 35-year-old Ray to give up a handsome monthly salary of Rs 1,013 and shoot the sequel, Aparajito. And it changed the face of Indian cinema.
As the film steps into its 50th year, it’s time for flashbacks…
…Soumitra Chatterjee saw it the next day, “and was stupefied.” Till then, he’d weigh every Bengali film against How Green Was My Valley, or Bicycle Thieves. So disappointment was inevitable.
Pather Panchali dispelled that, “it spelled hope for Indian cinema. No, we’d not seen anything like it,” the actor repeats. “Aparajito, Jalsaghar, Charulata were better crafted, but the raw emotion of Pather Panchali has no parallel.”

Through the eyes of cricket

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A couple desi coworkers were mentioning some flare up in the cricket world and I decided to check it out… Very interesting stuff. The brouhaha erupted over comments from an Aussie player – Mathew Hayden.

SYDNEY, August 24: Matthew Hayden says Australia are the leading cricketing team in the world because its players play as a team whereas cricketers from the sub-continent, including India, play for personal milestones.

…‘‘In one-day cricket, if you get to 70 or 80, you can obviously get a hundred by just batting carefully but we just donÂ’t do that. It affects a batsmanÂ’s statistics but we just donÂ’t go for those personal marks,Â’Â’ he said.

…‘Counties like India suffer from that. We back ourselves against those countries because theyÂ’ll get two or three players in the 70s and beyond and theyÂ’ll be eyeing off that personal landmark and it will cost their side 40 or 50 runs as a result. Pretty much all the sub-continental sides are like that. They really can waste a lot of time and thereÂ’s no time to waste.

God, if I knew more about cricket, I could fully appreciate the significance here… BUT, there’s some interesting commentary in this column responding to Mr. Hayden –

Why there’s an ‘I’ in Team India
The self comes before the team because thatÂ’s our way of life
HARSHA BHOGLE

It would be tempting, and egotistical, to ignore Mathew HaydenÂ’s remark about players from the sub-continent being selfish. You could call it gamesmanship, and there will be a substantial element of that, but if it hurts there is probably some truth to it.

…It is my hypothesis that in over-populated, and therefore insecure, countries the self will always dominate. Feelings of comradeship, of surrendering the self to the wider cause, can only arise in either a highly spiritual phase or where the performer has ascended to a level of personal calm about his achievements.

Where you are in a mob, and we are in a mob, self-preservation will always prevail; whether it is catching a bus, or getting out of a movie hall or getting admission to a professional college.

There’s some serious wisdom here.

Cry me a river – “Mr. Hotmail”, no more

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It’s tough to pity the guy – CNN.com – ‘Mr Hotmail’ seeks new challenges – Aug 26, 2004.

(CNN) — As the inventor of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia is the pin-up of India’s IT revolution; the boy from Bangalore who went to Silicon Valley and made his fortune. Bhatia was in his mid-20s when he developed the idea of web-based email accounts in 1995, raising $300,000 in investment to launch the revolutionary service the following year. Within 12 months Hotmail had 10 million users and Bhatia had sold his creation to Microsoft for $400 million.
Launching his new company in 1999, a one click e-commerce venture called Arzoo.com, Bhatia claimed it had the potential to be twice as big as Hotmail. By mid-2001 the dotcom bubble had burst and Arzoo had folded.
“The last couple of years I was quite depressed because I didn’t have an idea or a vision or a goal that would be world-beating like Hotmail. I often wondered if that would be the only success that I would have at the end of my life.
“I would rather not be known as Mr Hotmail anymore,” he says. “What is in the past is over. Now I’m looking for the next big thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have respect for Hotmail and Mr. Bhatia BUT, can’t he and his fawning masses attribute just a tad of his fortune to Timing and Luck? Hotmail was one of the keystone companies of the bubble – no revenue but lots of eyeballs. In any other world, it wouldn’t have been a name-making $400M venture….. There’s a helluva lot of Attribution Error goin’ on…

Maybe I’m just jealous. 😉

Funky Math

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The headline screams – India has 93 per cent of Asia’s ‘extremely’ poor.

But then you read the details –

Of the 690 million extremely poor people in developing countries of Asia, 93 per cent are in India, according to a new report of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

93% of 690 = 641. But the actual number –

Of these, 93 percent (357 million) are in India, the People’s Republic of China (203 million), and other South Asian countries (77 million), says the report released Thursday.

357M is more like 50%. Am I missing something obvious? But there is hope –

The ADB foresees the number of people in extreme poverty in developing Asia declining from 690 million in 2002 to 150 million in 2015.