Monthly Archives: January 2005

A Baby with any other name would smell as sweet.

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One of my most popular blog posts ever dealt with the…um…”unique” names that Malayalee parents bestow on their helpless offspring. Most bloggers get a large number of hits via Google searches for all sorts of random things; HERstory is visited daily by people who wish to marvel at the ad hoc list of contrived and tortured nomenclature I compiled during one ennui-laced jaunt through Friendster.

I think I might have to amend the list:

Tsunamis are associated with death and destruction. But that has not stopped a couple in Kerala’s Alappuzha district from naming their new-born baby girl after the killer waves.
Kutten and Priyanka of Valiyazheekal in the district, where several people have been killed by the disaster, named their child Tsunami following her miraculous escape from the killer waves.
Priyanka and her daughter were rescued by a relative.

I have no words.

Okay, that’s a lie. I have a few. I guess they can call her…”Tsu”? As a nickname?

Oh, it’s all so wrong…

Via Rediff.

:+:

Update!

Sepia Mutiny reader “JK” points us to an article where “Kutten”, Baby Tsunami’s father, states that he did nothing as foolish as naming his kid after the worst natural disaster in years. Apparently the kid is named “Nakshatra”. So Baby Nakshatra’s Daddy didn’t do it, got that? Yeah, me neither. 😉

Sepoy Rebellion?

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Rediff.com is reporting that Ella Gabriella, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, plans to marry her Indian boyfriend Aatish Taseer. Ella, 23, the 30th in line to the throne, was studying Spanish and English literature at Brown University, when she met 24-year-old Aatish, a Mumbai-born Sikh, who occasionally dresses up as Captain Condom to promote the importance of safe sex. Taseer’s marriage to Lady Gabriella, both of whom are aspiring journalists, will certainly help to put to rest accusations of racism that have dogged her mother since she allegedly told a table of black diners in a Manhattan restaurant to “go back to the colonies” after they ignored her request to quiet down.

Maybe Taseer can do something to get all those items taken by the Brits from India returned. (The Padshahnama, The Kohinoor Diamond etc.))

Jetting to Bangalore

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Jet Airways, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice of North or South Indian meals (ever had hot idli sambar and utappam on an airplane?), and a never-ending stream of tea and coffee. And all this on short-haul domestic routes rather the overseas ones served by Singapore and Virgin.

The Indian government will now allow Jet and Air Sahara to fly international routes, although it continues to shelter the lucrative Middle Eastern routes from competition. The airlines are presumably on their own for buying landing slots.

Indian airports are also in dire need of investment. On a recent trip, I could get wireless Internet access at the Delhi and Bangalore airports. However, they otherwise still resemble small regional airports in the U.S.: open-air gates, buses instead of jetways and a vanishingly small distance from gate to parking lot. They’re like the old terminal at San Jose before the tech bubble.

But with an astonishing 20% annual growth in air traffic, India just signed off on a plan to upgrade 80 airports throughout the country, including brand-new airports for Bangalore and Hyderabad. They’re partying like it’s 1999.

And in the tech-heavy cities, it pretty much is. Driving through Bangalore, I saw buildings that looked exactly like U.S. tech campuses, though smaller. Intel, Dell, Oracle, Accenture and Macromedia buildings abound; on one corner, with a shock of recognition, I came face-to-face with a company started by a friend. I couldn’t help but feel late to the party. With the number of South Indian programmers already working at Oracle, why not hire ’em straight from the motherland 🙂

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The boob tube

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Just a reminder: A 12-minute segment on Aishwarya Rai, entitled ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Woman?,’ airs tonight at 7pm on 60 Minutes (CBS). Here’s Apul’s post on the interview.

The press release is incredibly disingenuous, asking the questions usually done by trashy film mags:

Rai’s first movie kiss, should she do it, will be a minor scandal among her fans, especially in India… The country that gave the world the Kama Sutra, one of the oldest known sex manuals, isn’t prudish, just not into public displays of intimacy… Rai… dances delicately around the subject of screen sex. “We’ll cross the bridge when we reach it,” says Rai of the inevitable love scene in her American film future.

Kama Sutra reference, check. Desperate bid to boost viewership, check. Aishwarya’s ever-so-precious virginal mugging for Stardust, Filmfare and Cineblitz, check.

A 31-year-old actress/model will have done a hell of a lot more than a public kiss, and more power to her. No matter how much fans may confuse reel life with real life, the Britney Spears impression isn’t necessary, discretion works fine. But the fault probably lies more with the interviewers than the actress. It’s the kind of tissue-thin softball usually tossed underhand by Baba Wawa.

Update: Watch the first 2:45 of the video: mirror 1, 2; torrent. Aishwarya seemed extremely nervous, her humor strained, this is her big U.S. launch. Her answers seemed unrehearsed and forced, her giggling a touch shrill; she was like a liquored-up Cameron Diaz on Craig Kilborn, truly cringeworthy. The interviewer spent a third of the segment on ‘you’re so hot,’a third on explaining Bollywood (pretty decent — they clipped her best films) and a third on ‘why won’t you kiss on screen?’ Ahh, hard news — I thought I’d escaped the Hindustan Times, but 60 Minutes dragged me back in.

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‘Bombay Dreams’ closes today

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As I type these very words, Bombay Dreams on Broadway is finishing up the final performance of its eight-month run. Its closing unleashes a horde of desi actors with Broadway experience. May they find their way to productions far beyond these comfortable shores.

Richard Corliss of Time analyzes Bombay Dreams’ short run:

[Meera] Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they’d be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora…

Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal’s best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version… The Indo-American audience wasn’t large enough to keep it afloat, and it didn’t attract the idle non-Desi curious.

The outreach to critics was a disaster for this straightforward, unironic ’50s-style show. The London show had a better book and more physically striking actors, though the New York version had stronger singers and a slicker production.

And what is the sound of one critic’s heart breaking? Corliss has found his guru, and it’s the show’s composer A.R. Rahman:

Rahman is not just India’s most prominent movie songwriter… but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more.

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Haldi may help prevent Alzheimer’s

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There’s finally some good news about the desi diet to balance out all the heart disease. A compound in the haldi (turmeric) used in desi cooking may help prevent Alzheimer’s (via Boing Boing):

The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and also breaks up existing plaques. The research team also determined curcumin is more effective in inhibiting formation of the protein fragments than many other drugs being tested as Alzheimer’s treatments.

The rate of Alzheimer’s in India is 4x lower than in the U.S.

Here’s a copy of the full research paper.

Do you know what you are funding?

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In reviewing the myriad of organizations that are now collecting for the Tsunami relief, I wondered (a bit cynically) how many stories we will come to hear about scam organizations that will use this tragedy just to fleece generous donors. Another concern I had (which may be shared by other readers) is the “baggage” that is sometimes included with your donation, when giving to certain groups. A friend pointed me to www.stopfundinghate.org which points out that donations to some religious organizations in India may be funding communal violence and Hindu Nationalism in addition to providing the help promised.

Are the charity dollars generously provided by American companies, including some of our leading corporate citizens of the high technology world, being used to fund violent, sectarian groups in India? The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (SFH) launched Project Saffron Dollar in November 2002, to bring an end to the electronic collection and transfer of funds from the US to organizations that spread sectarian hatred in India.

The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (SFH) is a coalition of people-professionals, students, workers, artists and intellectuals-who share a common concern that sectarian hatreds in India are being fueled by money flowing from the United States. SFH is committed to an India that is open, tolerant and democratic. As the first step, SFH is determined to turn off the money flow from the United States to Hindutva hate groups responsible for recurring anti-minority violence in India.

This is not something that only affects individuals but large and small companies as well.

Many large US corporations such as CISCO, Sun, Oracle, HP and AOL Time Warner match employee contributions to US based non profits. “Annual Giving” programs normally happen once a year in late Fall-timed to occur between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Unsuspecting corporations end up giving large amounts of money as matching funds to IDRF [India Development and Relief Fund] as employees of these firms direct funds to IDRF. For instance, in fiscal 1999, Cisco Foundation gave almost $70,000 to IDRF – placing IDRF among the top 5 of Cisco grantees. In comparison, a well-regarded mainstream institution like the Nobel Peace Prize winning Doctors Without Borders received only $2,560. Also, other Indian-American development organizations such as Asha ($1,417), CRY-Child Relief and You ($4,427) or the Maharashtra Foundation ($2,000) all fared much worse than IDRF. Clearly, at least among Cisco employees, the IDRF has come to occupy much of the giving space. When you add Cisco’s matching grants to the original amounts given by its employees, a total of at least $133,000 went through Cisco to IDRF in 1999-2000-this is more than 5% of IDRF’s total cash collections for the same time period.

Just to clarify, this website and campaign existed long before the Tsunami, and nothing on it pertains directly to the current crisis, but I thought it would serve to remind readers that even though they should definitely GIVE, they should be thoughtful about it. Continue reading →