Monthly Archives: March 2005

Cribs: Bangalore

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McMansions in Bangalore powered by the Indian tech boom may now be topping the $200K mark. That’s ~$600K, adjusted for buying power. According to a woman from Portland now working in Bangalore:

… we went to visit two of my colleague’s new homes that are being built… I was shocked to see the model of the contemporary home; it looked like it came straight out of San Diego, Rancho Cucamonga area. It resembled a typical Southern California cookie cutter home. I was amazed to see that here. Those homes cost [Rs.] 1 crore… I cannot wait to see this place 10 year from now.

Bangalore is aping SoCal now? I’ve got some new tunes in my woofers. Bangalifornia… knows how to party. Just hit the east side of the IIT, on a mission tryin’ to find Mr. Varun-ji. Regulators! Stand down.

The NYT had more last year:

Snigdha Dhar sat in the echoing emptiness of her new home, her husband off at work, her 7-year-old son prattling on about Pizza Hut. The weather outside was California balmy. Children rode bicycles on wide smooth streets. Construction workers toiled on more villas like hers – white paint, red roofs, green lawns – and the community center’s three pools…

Continue reading →

Shortcut to Nirvana..at a theatre near you

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Ever wonder what it would be like to join 70 million of your closest friends as they find their way to spiritual bliss? The new documentary, opening in limited release on a city-by-city tour, Shortcut to Nirvana tries to clue you in, just in case you couldn’t be there. The documentary chronicles the 2001 Kumbh Mela festival, one of the oldest, largest, and most fascinating festivals on earth. Kumbh Melas are typically held every 12 years, and the mela held in 2001 was an extra special mela as it was technically a Maha Kumbh Mela, which only occurs every 144 years, where the Ganga and Yamuna rivers meet, in Allahabad, India.

The film, by Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day, attempts to offer a snapshot of the festival, and I think to try and do more would be an impossible task for a documentary. To view the trailer, click here and for news and theatre listings, click here.

To find out more about Kumbh Mela’s click here. Continue reading →

The Court has Hindu friends

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Earlier this week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Van Orden v. Rick Perry (Governor of the Red State of Texas). Slate explains in their “oh so irreverent” manner:

Imagine a bunch of elderly, black-robed medieval clerics absorbed in a scholarly dialogue on the number of angels (better make that “secular” angels—candy stripers or maybe Hell’s Angels) able to dance on the head of a pin. You’d have a good idea of how oral argument went this morning in the pair of cases involving displays of the Ten Commandments on state property.

At one level everything appears scholarly and doctrinal. Until you realize that the doctrine is a mess, and the justices are so tangled up in old tests, old glosses on old tests, and new glosses on new tests that they don’t even know how to talk about the Establishment Clause cases, much less how to resolve them. Perhaps the court is waiting to resolve the chaos until there are as many different Establishment Clause tests (legal scholars currently count about seven) as there are commandments.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That ban has been interpreted to sweep in state and local governments as well. The disaster-on-stilts the court has used to determine whether such an establishment has taken place is known as the “Lemon test,” vomited forth upon the land in a 1971 case called Lemon v. Kurtzman. That test asked whether the government’s conduct had: (i) a secular purpose; (ii) a principal or primary effect that neither enhances nor inhibits religion; and (iii) did not foster excessive entanglement with religion.

Among the many groups that had their day in court was the Hindu American Foundation. Continue reading →

Ravi Chand, melon eater

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Following up on Abhi’s post on PETA’s sexiest vegetarian: Ravi Chand, one of the contestants, is exhibit A in why the de facto draft of military reservists is a bad idea. What happens when you take a pacifist from the liberal enclave of UC Santa Cruz and send him to Iraq? Snake eaters turning vegan and naked kissing in the streets, that’s what. Chand makes love and war:

Chand served as a corporal on the crew of an Amtrack amphibious tank. His unit came under direct fire when it was ambushed in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, he said… Chand said six Marines went vegetarian and one went vegan. [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

Chand, a vegan U.S. Marine, claims vegetarians are sexier and slimmer because they don’t clog their arteries by eating saturated fat. “There’s nothing sexy about gnawing on the corpse of a dead animal,” Chand said. [New Haven Advocate]

Before going vegan, Ravi did only nominally on… a grueling test in which only the top 1% of the Marine Corps are physically equipped to score perfect on. However, just weeks after going vegan, he noticed huge endurance and strength gains… he scored perfect on the test. He ran the 3 mile run at an avg of 5 min 40 second miles, did 30 pullups, and aced the situp portion. [Animal Voices]

Chand, now a triathlete, is involved in a typical PETA stunt in which he gets paid to make out with a rotating selection of models (ok, I’m slightly jealous):

A crowd gathered… to watch a partially clothed man and woman on a mattress as part of PETA’s 10-city “Live Make-out Tour.” [Lansing City Pulse]

Continue reading →

The sexiest wegetarian alive

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SM tipster Flogging Mona directs my attention to the website of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Get Your Hot Tamales Here–
A picture is worth a thousand words, but after reviewing the pictures of the hundreds of sultry soy boys and Tofutti cuties who entered our “Sexiest Vegetarian” online photo contest, only one word comes to mind—HOT! The results are in, and our PETA panel has narrowed down the field. It’s time for you to pick the best from this crop of cruelty-free hotties and crown one guy and one gal the “Sexiest Vegetarian Alive.” Let us know which of the hot potatoes below lights your fire by choosing one woman and one man (don’t forget to click “Vote” at the bottom of the page). We’ll tally the votes and publish the winners’ photos in PETA’s Animal Times. Both winners will also receive a terrific cruelty-free prize package!

Thank you to all who entered. For those who missed the deadline, don’t despair—come back soon to GoVeg.com, where we’ll post details about how to strut your stuff in next year’s contest.

I am a little disappointed to see that despite the fact that Indians invented wegetarianism there is only 1 (maybe 2) brown person on the list. Next year we will submit Anna’s profile. Continue reading →

Tribal ‘justice’

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With every prison blown to dust,
My enemies walk free… [Sting]

Mukhtaran Bibi’s rapists, who received approval to gang-rape from a village panchayat, were set free by judges in Multan today. In some ways this outcome is hard to believe, in other ways all too easy:

The victim of Pakistan’s most notorious rape case wept bitterly after a court in the southern city of Multan overturned the verdict against three of the four alleged rapists and two tribal elders, and quashed the death sentence against the sixth… five of the men prepared to walk free…

… she has maintained the 24-hour police guard at the gate of her remote farmhouse after several death threats. She believed the threats stemmed from her refusal to entertain repeated clemency pleas from the Mastoi, who still live just 100 metres away…

… the panchayat system… has no legal standing but is still prevalent in many rural towns. Last week elders in another Punjabi village ordered that a two-year-old girl be married to a man 33 years her senior. The betrothal was in compensation for an adulterous affair committed by her uncle. [Guardian]

The wisdom of the elders indeed. Previous post here.

Update: In the herky-jerky, stop-start fashion of a desi criminal justice system, the rapists have been re-arrested (thanks, SD).

Seven chutney squishies, make it quick

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Desipina is again hosting its low-rent, highwire theater collection Seven.11 in Manhattan, and Anuvab Pal is contributing a new piece called Paris. The schtick is that playwrights of all colors contribute seven tales of 11 minutes each, all set in convenience stores. It sounds much like 11.9.01: September 11, a collection of short films 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame long by filmmakers including Mira Nair, Sean Penn, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros), Samira Makhmalbaf and Youssef Chahine.

As far as creative gimmicks go, this is a good one: even the Manhattan Project found creative benefit in time constraints, although nuclear incineration has been known to be motivating. This is the third year of Seven.11, so it’s clearly a successful franchise. The quick-witted Lethia Nall, who was so good in Alter Ego’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, appears in both Paris and Soonderella.

Anuvab Pal’s PARIS: Paris is a play about an 11 minute conversation without consequence on a lazy Paris afternoon…

Samrat Chakrabarti/Sanjiv Jhaveri’s new musical SOONDERELLA: a fairy tale of a different colour… The only way to follow up with last year’s wildly successful A Very Desi Christmas, a pop musical adaptation of Scrooge, is with another 11-minute musical set in the convenience store…

It’s also a clear demarcation between Right and Left Coast desi stereotypes; the Left Coast analogue would be 80 tales of 86 engineers, but who’d go see it? Bugaboo and nerdcore call my bluff.

Seven.11, 4/1-4/18/05, Thurs-Sat & Mon at 8pm, Sun at 3pm; The Tenement Theatre, 97 Orchard St. (bet. Delancey/Broome), Manhattan; $15 General, $11 Students/Seniors; 800-965-4827 or TicketWeb (keyword:SEVEN.11)

Rough Riders

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This one is dedicated to all you out there right now, slaves to your computers, wishing that instead you had a powerful beast between your legs and the warm desert wind blowing through your hair. Outside Magazine recently awarded its 2005 Best Trips Award (Asia category) to Alexander Souri, the founder-director of Relief Riders International (RRI). As reported by NewKerala.com:

“Alexander Souri, who has worked on “The Matrix” and “X-Men”, is the founder-director of Relief Riders International (RRI) whose members made the trip in October last year to provide medical and relief supplies to people.

When I created Relief Riders International I never dreamed we would receive such international recognition so soon,” said Souri after winning the Outside Magazine’s Best Trips 2005 award.

“I dreamt of a new way to travel, a chance to see new lands and an opportunity to transform both the visitor and the visited. I am so honoured that Outdoor Magazine appreciated our vision.”

With nearly a million subscribers, New York-based Outside magazine is one of the best-known adventure travel magazines in the world. The magazine recognized RRI for its successful aid component, emphasising the high point of the trip was seeing villagers receive knowledge such as AIDS education plus food and supplies that they desperately need.

RRI is now making final preparations for its second Rajasthan Relief Ride, which begins Feb 25.

The inaugural 15-day ride, created by Souri to establish a living memorial to his Indian father, began at the majestic Imperial Hotel with a bus ride to historic Fort Mukandgarh.

Continue reading →

The next time you’re in Mississippi, wear a white hood while you’re at it.

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J Low.jpg So. J.Lo does German TV wearing a very unique outfit; embroidered on the cuff of her white dead-animal-skin with more dead-animal fur-hooded jacket, there is a logo that includes an Iron Cross, a lightning bolt and skulls.

I don’t expect any of you to connect the dots THIS late in the day, so I’ll just TELL you what’s up– the design resembles patches that were once worn by SS troops during WWII. Thanks to Adolf Hitler, the Iron Cross transitioned from a “proud symbol of courage among German soldiers” to something that represented the Third Reich.

Many of you are aware of another symbol that was tragically misappropriated by Hitler– the swastika. Well, the way that Hitler ruined the Iron Cross was by–you guessed it (assuming you intellectuals are still reading about our gen’s liz taylor)–slamming a swastika on it. Heil Assh@le.

J.Lo’s taste in clothing always gets attention, but this time Drudge and the pajamahadeen are on her like a potential husband.

From Drudge’s site:

The designer of the one-of-a-kind, $2,300 jacket, Jeff Sebilia, says his imagery not only doesn’t endorse Nazism, but is meant “to make people aware of just how powerful imagery can be. We all know the swastika was a peaceful Hindu image, and we know what the Nazis did to that. I think we can use imagery that has stark emotion and make it our own.”

Suuuuuure. Hide behind the “Hindu” explanation. I have no doubt that when people see this swastika-less coat of his, they are thinking, “oh, isn’t it sad that something good from Hinduism was so misused?” :p

I’m positive that’s what J.Lo had in mind, too; she was obviously reclaiming symbols– for all of us. Continue reading →

M.I.A. signs with Interscope

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Billboard.com reports that powerhouse music label Interscope Records has signed U.K. rapper M.I.A., and will release the controversial musician’s upcoming album “Arular” in the U.S. by mid-April (via Nirali Magazine). She’s currently touring the country, and will appear at the immensely popular Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in May.

Billboard.com: Sources: Interscope signs M.I.A.
Previous posts: M.I.A.: step up to blow up, Steel balls and pots, M.I.A. looked directly into my eyes!, and Military chic

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