Monthly Archives: December 2004

When you care enough to send the very _____

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Per my Friday night custom, I visit a nearby drug store on Wilshire Blvd. to pick up a bottle of soda pop and some correspondence stationary. I hop over to the greeting card aisle whenever I need to restock my arsenal of overpriced pieces of color-printed cardstock. On one such occassion, I ran into the following birthday card from Ohio-based American Greetings:

 

I felt compelled to purchase and share the card with the Mutiny because it sprung forth many conflicting questions that I could not answer: Is this good-natured, equal-opportunity ribbing? Does such mainstream inclusion signify true acceptance and integration? Is the joke really just derived from a sinister dig at turbaned Sikhs? Did I really just shell out $2.30 for a card that I’ll probably never address? Why do my Friday nights resemble that of a kind, old granny?

Any answers are greatly appreciated.

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Livin’ la vida Sepia

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I’m off to India and Turkey for a couple of weeks today. I’ll be livin’ la vida Sepia: riding the Delhi subway; hanging out in Barista, Bangalore, and the new Indian malls; watching a Govinda caper with jeering rickshaw-wallas in the upper stall; eating at the original Bukhara Grill and trying Indo-Chinese cuisine; buying clothing which flatters the desi palette; checking out the WiFi at the airports; and generally basking in the economic liberalization everyone’s been banging on about.

I’ll also be doing a literary tour of Bombay. After having read New York novels for fifteen years, it was a relief to anchor the figurative Manhattan in plaster and stone. And after seven Rushdie novels and an entire oeuvre of diasporic literature, I’m tired of names without faces: Colaba, Bandra, Breach Candy, Cuffe Parade. I feel like the clerk in Hyderabad handling parking tickets from the midwest, I’ve got an intimate map of a terribly remote place.

I’m halfway through Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a tome about the seamy side of Bombay, its ganglords and dancing girls in modern-day slavery. It’s quite interesting, though leaden in parts; it’s not always deftly written, but it’s a fascinating read. What’s most useful, though, is local knowledge; the best spots for vada pav, Maharashtrian food, sherwanis and Bom Bahia sunsets.

Know of a quintessentially Bombay experience? Help me pop my Mumbai cherry by leaving it in the comments.

Amitabh is huge now…imagine him on IMAX!

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What on earth would inspire you to see DDLJ, KKHH or KKKG again?

Perhaps if Shah Rukh Khan was magnified to half the size of a football field?

I know what you’re thinking…and no, though it’s Friday night, I’m not drunk. 😉 I’m just surprised that IMAX is interested in Bollywood. That’s right, the next time you visit your cousins in Mumbai, you could while your day away watching Aftab on a screen “large enough to show a whale life-size”. (ahem. i’m in no way commenting on the girth of certain bollywood stars, but if your mind goes there, don’t blame me just because I said the screen could show a life-size whale.) 😀

Before you forget the original point of this post because of my bloggy meanderings, I was trying to tell you faithful SM-readers that IMAX might be coming to INDIA. Read on:

“Eventually, Bollywood films will be converted into IMAX format. It can happen in three to four years,”said Richard L. Gelfond, co-CEO and co-chairman of IMAX Corporation.
“But India needs at least 20 IMAX theatres to justify converting films to IMAX format,” he said.
Gelfond said the company had already started talks on the subject with some film producers. India, which presently has only three IMAX theatres, will add seven more by 2008, he announced Friday.

India is a natural choice for this experiment; it has a robust film industry and the cost of converting a regular 35mm film into an IMAX movie is more competitive. Normal cost? $4 million. Indian Price? $2.5-3 million. Continue reading →

Law & Order: Ganesh conceals heroin

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Last Wednesday’s episode of NBC’s “Law & Order” featured Indians using religious objects to smuggle heroin into the U.S.

Here’s a quick recap of the episode: A group of prep school students and gang-members are shot to death in a drughouse. The investigation leads to “Rahim of Bombay,” a Pakistani importer of religious objects. Rahim smuggles Afghani heroin inside his imports, because customs inspections are less stringent on religious devices. Rahim sells out his boss, a U.S.-sponsored warlord named Khaleel. At the end of the show, Khaleel is convicted for the murders.

An estimated 15 million viewers tuned in to the program, according to Nielsen Media Research.

“Law & Order” often reminds us that their stories are “ripped from the headlines.” Does anyone know if there’s a real-life event that inspired this episode? My curiosity is peaked because I’m anticipating another defamation suit filed by a desi who believes that a “Law & Order” villain is based on him.

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Posted in TV

The Windfall that Bhopal never got

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Aishwarya Rai announced yesterday that she will be the executive producer and star of a film dealing with the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal. As reported by emediawire.com:

The fiction feature film [titled “Windfall“], a murder mystery inspired by true events, is set mostly in present day America, with flashbacks to Bhopal. Movie is the story of a young womanÂ’s search for her father, a plant manager on duty the night of the disaster. Ms. Rai plays the lead role, Jasmine Singh, an Indian-American debutante born in Bhopal but raised in Beverly Hills.

“The story of the disaster in Bhopal is all too tragic,” said Ms. Rai. “But this film will be inspiring. The story of a young woman’s search for her father, the love story with her American fiancé and the issues she goes through as a survivor of the disaster – I simply had to be involved. And I hope the films’ success will draw attention to the need of victims in Bhopal, and to those everywhere who’ve suffered from injustice.”

“This is a heroic role, like Erin Brockovich, but on an epic scale – THE INSIDER meets TITANIC,” said producer Zachary Coffin. “Aishwarya was our first, last and only choice to play the lead, and I truly believe this will be the most inspiring performance of her career yet.”

The INSIDER meets TITANIC? Surely we can minimize the latter? The film will borrow facts from a non-fiction book, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk, by Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam. The film is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2005.

Spitzer in a twist

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New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has been a one man wrecking ball against the corrupt practices of big business the last couple years, will be featured tonight, on NOW with Bill Moyers in an episode titled Eliot Spitzer: “The Sheriff of Wall Street”.

As New York’s chief law enforcement officer, Elliot Spitzer has taken on the titans of Wall Street to get a fair deal for Main Street. His far-reaching investigations have uncovered fraudulent practices in some of the nation’s biggest companies and helped restore transparency and honesty to industries that provide important products and services to regular Americans-mutual funds, prescription drugs, insurance. On Friday December 3, 2004 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), NOW’s David Brancaccio goes inside the mind, motivations and investigations of one for the nation’s most feared and respected attorneys general, the man they call “the sheriff of Wall Street.”

In addition to taking on the Mutual Fund industry and other titans, Spitzer is also helping the little guys. In this case, Bagladeshi pretzel vendors in Central Park.

M&T Pretzel Inc., which owns more than half the pushcarts in Central Park, has agreed to pay $450,000 to settle labor law violations because it stiffed its workers on overtime or minimum wage.

Between 50 and 100 vendors who worked from 1999 to 2002 are expected to share in the settlement, said state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who announced the deal yesterday.

Most of the workers are Bangladeshi immigrants who have gone on to other jobs.

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Union Carbide hoaxer fools the BBC

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The BBC just had its own Dan Rather moment: a media hoaxer pretending to be from Union Carbide took full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster (via Sreenath Srinivasan):

The BBC had earlier twice run an interview with a man it identified as Dow Chemical spokesman Jude Finisterra, who said the company accepted full responsibility for the disaster 20 years ago in the central Indian city of Bhopal. This would have represented a major policy reversal for Dow Chemical which has said it has no responsibility for the Bhopal disaster… “We also confirm Jude Finisterra is neither an employee nor a spokesperson for Dow.”

Union Carbide accepting responsibility for Bhopal? The Beeb should’ve known that was completely implausible.

Checkmate cheating

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Filmmaker Vikram Jayanti’s documentary about the royal sport of chaturanga is coming to the U.S. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine covers the famous chess match between Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s famed supercomputer.

The film hints darkly at human-machine collusion in Deep Blue’s win. The filmmaker expands on his conspiracy theory:

IBM hit the jackpot. Their share value went up and up. And it strikes me that someone in the corporation had a brilliant idea that if they could beat Kasparov, people would think that IBM were in the frontline of computing. IBM was seen as a dinosaur before this match. No one saw them as an innovator. They’re still using Deep Blue in their advertising.

He sees Kasparov as a giant betrayed:

I’ve watched him play inferior players. He just wants to get it over with. I mean, when you’re that good at chess you want a good opponent. And I suspect his fantasy was that a computer would give him that… In terms of walking naively into the lions den, I think he thought there was a chance to make some money and to do something of scientific interest.

Jayanti throws in some puffery about the sport of chess, which apparently is as physically bad-ass as badminton claims to be:

I wanted it to be a combat film. One of the first things Garry said to me was, “Chess is a contact sport.” You know he’s very physically fit. And I asked him why he has to work out so much, and he told me that you had to be very fit in order to play.

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