Monthly Archives: March 2005

Casting couch caught on tape

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Like a pair of star-crossed lovers, the words “Bollywood” and “sex scandal” just can’t keep their hands from going down each other’s pants (or something like that). The latest hullabaloo erupted after the broadcast of famous villain actor Shakti Kapoor purportedly soliciting sex from a reporter posing as an aspiring actress:

A video clip, which the station said was taken earlier this year, purportedly shows Kapoor in a Bombay hotel room telling the undercover reporter, “I want to make love to you … and if you want to come in this line (of business), you have to do what I am telling (you) to do.” Kapoor is heard on the 40-minute recording telling the woman that he will put her through acting and dance classes before introducing her to top directors. He also names three Indian actresses who allegedly had sex with top producers and directors in exchange for roles. [AP/Yahoo!]

Kapoor denies any wrongdoing, claims it’s a frame-up, and accuses the broadcaster of altering the clip. See, when he said “I want to make love to you,” the unedited version actually had him saying, “I want to make love to you, mom.” So really, there’s nothing tawdry about what he said. Oh, wait…

AP/Yahoo!: Sex scandal embroils Bollywood

Update: Saurav points us to a download site that has a copy of the video (5.1 MB).

Update 2: DesiDancer directs us to a pair of Sify articles (1, 2) that name names. Kapoor’s spin is almost as hackneyed as his pick-up lines:

Kapoor found himself deeper in trouble because he named leading film personalities to have used the casting couch to enter the film industry. “With folded hands I have apologised to the entire film industry, including Subhash Ghai, Preity Zinta, Aishwarya Rai and Rani Mukerji, who are close to me,” he said. “I had no intention to hurt them. The whole thing was doctored and tampered and, in case they still feel hurt, I am ready to apologise again.”…“I have been framed so badly that I could suffer a heart attack,” he said. “They could have pushed me to the brink of committing suicide.”…“I suspect I have been framed by a political party. I had supported the Congress and my opposing rivals would have found this the right opportunity to settle scores for having backed the party. The said channel (India TV) which has pulled through this ’expose’ is known to have the backing of the rival party. Hence, I strongly suspect that the whole thing had been framed,” he said. [Sify]

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G.I. Josna

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gijosna.jpg
Last week the Sacramento Bee had a fairly lengthy article about women going to war. It featured one Ranbir Kaur, a 19-year-old from California.

Two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and for the first time in its 229-year existence as an independent nation, America is fighting a war with a military machine that is dependent on women.

The women span a universe of backgrounds. There are women like Ranbir Kaur, a 19-year-old part-time college student from the obscure San Joaquin Valley town of Earlimart. By summer’s end, Kaur expects to trade her textbooks for an M-16 rifle and head for Iraq.

What were Kaur’s motivations for joining the Army? No surprise here. She joins for the same reason that many Americans (men or women) join up. A possible ticket out of a small town and to a better life:

It was the limits of life in a comatose San Joaquin Valley farm town that spurred Ranbir Kaur to join the California National Guard in late 2002, two days after her 17th birthday and more than a year before she graduated from Delano High. That, and the $3,000 bonus for enlisting.

The daughter of Sikh grape farmers, Kaur emigrated at age 7 from India to the Bay Area, then moved to Earlimart, a dusty burg of 6,600, about 40 miles from Bakersfield, 70 miles from Fresno and light-years from the kind of things that would interest most teenagers.

The only restaurants in town are a mom-and-pop burger joint and a Mexican bakery that sells tortas and burritos. The high school is in Delano, eight miles away. There is no movie theater, no bowling alley, no nightspot.

The article profiles several other women as well. Still no women NAVY SEALS though. 🙂

To view more pictures of Kaur you can click on the slide show. Continue reading →

Million Maid March

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The Washington Post carries an uplifting story about the counter-counter demonstration in Lebanon on the one month anniversary of Hariri’s assasination. Not to be one-upped by the Hezbollah’s counter protest last week, the Lebanese people showed up in enormous numbers (by some estimates a quarter of the population of the country).

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri on Monday to mark the one-month anniversary of his assassination and to intensify pressure on Syria to immediately withdraw its troops from a country that appears split into two rival political camps.

The demonstration covered wind-swept Martyrs’ Square and stretched for blocks into side streets, likely surpassing the size of the rally organized last week in Beirut by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim movement at the forefront of support for Syria’s three-decade presence here.

In a crowd that Lebanese police officials estimated at close to 1 million people, some demonstrators waved placards that read “100 percent Lebanese,” a direct challenge to Syria’s supporters here and the delicate balance among Lebanon’s sectarian parties that has prevailed since the country’s civil war ended more than 15 years ago.

Slate’s daily news round-up however, points out an interesting sentence buried deep within the story:

Many opposition members contended Monday that Hezbollah’s Beirut rally was populated mostly by Syrian intelligence agents and poor Shiites from the south. “They didn’t come by their free will,” said Charles Kanaan, 23, a systems engineer and Maronite Christian from Beirut. “And they weren’t 100 percent Lebanese. This is free will. This is the real Lebanon.”

In an apparent response, Hezbollah’s satellite channel, al-Manar, focused its coverage of Monday’s rally on the maids from South Asian countries who attended with their employers.

I get it. It isn’t patriotic Lebanese that want the Syrians out of their country. It is those dirty South Asian immigrant maids who make up the majority of the crowd. This is just another example that as bad as FOXNEWS is with their propaganda, it’s still nothing compared to the propaganda machines in the Arab world.

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Police kill wife beater

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A high-speed chase down Highway 101 in South San Francisco ended with police killing a man believed to have beaten his spouse. It all took place last week when Kamal Lal punched his wife Shelly in the face following a dispute over a pile of trash. Shelly called 911, and Kamal fled from the scene in his truck. When authorities tracked him down, Kamal led them on a chase at speeds as high as 100 mph. His car eventually ran off the road and into a ditch. Kamal emerged from it and began throwing rocks at CHP officers. When he threatened them with a concrete slab, they pumped him full of bullets. Court records show that Kamal had a history of domestic abuse, and had plead guilty to misdemeanor battery against his wife in 1996. Like many battered spouses, Shelly defended her husband of 16 years:

“Everyone has their problems, but where this went, it totally doesn’t make sense,” said Lal, 37, of her husband. “I’m just mad that he was killed in such a barbaric way”…Lal described her husband as a warm, generous man who loved playing with his son and often bought homeless people meals. She said their relationship was strong enough, she thought, to withstand Sunday’s domestic violence. “It just seemed like a little dispute between husband and wife,” Lal said. [San Francisco Chronicle]

San Francisco Chronicle: ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says wife of man shot by CHP, Man killed by CHP had battery record

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Let sleeping Moghuls lie…PLEASE.

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Taj

My initial reaction was, “you have GOT to be kidding me.”

An Indian Muslim charity has laid claim to the ownership of the world’s most famous monument to love, the Taj Mahal.
The Sunni Waqf Board controls all Muslim graveyards in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the spectacular marble monument is located.

Since Muslims who AREN’T royals are buried at the Taj AND it contains a Mosque, the Sunni Waqf Board has a reason to pursue this obviously innocent and well-intentioned claim.

Whom can we blame for this latest bit of eye-roll-inspiring controversy? Wait for it…

The Sunni Waqf Board (SWB), a Muslim trust, was given ownership of Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim graveyards by the Indian government itself.

Right.

There wouldn’t be some financial motivation for this surprising development, would there? Noooo. Couldn’t be.

Mr Usman said once the ownership issue had been decided, the board would demand that 7% of the total earnings from tickets should be transferred to its coffers.

Here’s my favorite part:

He said the board did not stake a claim to the monument earlier as it had not wanted to enter into any controversy.

They were correct! There is no controversy at all. My ocular muscles (and my potential for disbelief) are taxed. Oh, Shah Jahan…what has your legendary love wrought? Continue reading →

And you can’t beat that with a bat

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Babu, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves food from Calcutta, apparently made up its menu according to Black Sheep’s hip-hop classic, ‘The Choice Is Yours.’ The formerly price-list-free restaurant sits below Kati Roll Co. and is by the same owner (thanks, Turbanhead):

… the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience…

Payments range from generous (foodies) to parsimonious (Midwesterners):

 “We had one couple who paid two hundred bucks for an eighty-dollar meal,” Saha said… “We talked to some people before sending them their check, asking if they would pay fifty dollars for this meal,” Jung said. “The people mostly said yes, except for one couple from Minneapolis. They were shocked at that price.”

In classic desi fashion, our fine young cannibals took advantage of the price-free policy:

A rowdy group of ten young Indians walked in one Friday evening and occupied the restaurant’s large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; they didn’t even tip the wait staff.

But all good things must come to an end on the credit card slip, top copy:

A few weeks ago, prices were finally written into the menu: a three-course meal with wine comes to about fifty dollars a head.

The New Yorker also covered M.I.A. recently — is Eustace Tilly crushing on cumin?

What do the World and Blogosphere have in common?

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Answer: They are both dominated at the top by white men. That fact, which seems obvious when one thinks about it, is one of the reasons that this blog got started. Just think back to the bloggers who were (or weren’t) invited to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Newsweek expounds:

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the “comments” space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, “we will throw out some of the best … journalism of the 21st century.” The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. “It has taken ‘mainstream media’ a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion,” Jenkins wrote. “My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere … will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.”

But WHY? The Blogosphere at face would seem to be the ideal example of a meritocracy. If your writing sucks you’ll get no readers. If you don’t like what someone writes then either move on or start your own blog. THIS blog exploited the fact that there weren’t many South Asian American blogs providing YOU with what YOU wanted to read.

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The Karachi Kid

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For those of you who have never had the privilege of listening to the radio program This American Life, you are missing out on quite simply the best radio program on U.S. airways. If you have listened to the program, in your car perhaps, you are sitting in front of your computer nodding your head in agreement right now. This past weekend one of the three acts in a program titled “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” featured a young man from Pakistan making his first trip home after traveling to the United States for an education. He reflects on the freedoms and opportunity he has been given in the U.S. versus the desire to return home and to be with his family. He has changed a great deal, as has the society he had left behind. He attends a party with vodka flowing and 50 cent’s music playing, and yet is shunned when he goes to speak to a girl at the party (you can’t go up to a girl in an Islamic culture he explains). At the heart of this story is a choice. Does he return to his native Pakistan and “serve his country,” or does he explore his full potential in the U.S? Should he stay or should he go? By the end of the story he decides and gives the rationale for his decision. Put your headphones on right now. Tune out work, and tune in to his story.

Note: the story is in the first act of the radio program and starts at 4 min and 45 sec and ends at 25 min and 15 seconds. Continue reading →

Eyes wide shut

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Satisfy the voyeur in you by peeping the literary orgy in Manhattan:

 Pankaj Mishra, in puffy shirt and boho beard, was the absolute star with a hilariously barbed passage from Butter Chicken in Ludhiana.
Only two of the authors reading were second-gen: Jhumpa Lahiri and Vijay Seshadri, the O.G. ABCD in his 50s who teaches at Sarah Lawrence. ‘Thelma,’ a love poem from The Long Meadow: baritone wit, a thatch of gray hair and vulnerability.
Read his iconic passage on the Bombay monsoon from Maximum City.
Spying a courgette in his ex-lover’s hand, Shamsie’s protagonist asked, ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?’
Flip-haired, moddish diplomat with the rich tones of a British lord read aloud about book markets in Baghdad.

Anna, Turbanhead, Prashant Kothari and Deepa represented. We left the authors and their groupies at a dimly-lit bar and gorged on tricorner dosas shaped like pirate hats. Over dinner, one moblogger and one guy checking email. Gay racehorses and fowl necrophilia were on the table, and a tipsy mutineer kept yelling, ‘This is so gonna be blogged!’ The wine was free, oh yes, the wine was free.

Update: DesiLit has more.