Monthly Archives: November 2004

“Veer-Zaara” Storms U.S. With Impressive Opening Weekend

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veerzaara300x250.jpg“Veer-Zaara” made a strong debut last weekend, opening on more North American screens than any previous Bollywood release and finishing 15th among all films at the domestic box office.

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

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

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

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

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

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Campaign Yields South Asian Bone Marrow Transplant Donor

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piaAwal270x130.jpgPia Awal’s search for a bone marrow transplant donor produced a match last week, and she will undergo the procedure later this month at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

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

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

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

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Marriage plans foiled again

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

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

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

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

Norah and Dolly’s double-E’s

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

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

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

Just creep on in
Creep on in
Creep on in

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

And once you have begun don’t stop until you’re done 
Sneakin’ in…

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

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

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

Suketu Mehta on Bollywood

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

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

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

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

The unreality of the affair:

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

Falling out of love:

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

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‘Did my Indian balls come in?’

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

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

Wanting to be part of “The War on Terror”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Batman and Rushdie

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

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

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

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

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

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

Macaulay’s Minute

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

Macaulay’s text was openly racist…

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

… shrewdly imperialist…

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