Still rather prejudiced against meat-eaters, my father immediately discards responses from those with a “non-veg” diet. There is, however, a special loophole for meat-eaters who earn more than $200,000…

 

Oddly, by the end of the night, he couldn’t remember my name. Nothing fazed Juan Carlos, however. He quickly jotted off a poem explaining his lapse: “I wrote your name in the sand, but a wave came and washed it away. I wrote your name in a tree, but the branch fell. I have written your name in my heart, and time will guard it…”

 

“What are your qualifications?” I said I had a B.A. “B.A. only?” she responded. “What are the boy’s qualifications?” I flung back… She smirked: “He is M.D. in Kentucky only…” I grumbled, “Auntie, I will speak to the boy only.”

 

Afterward, I was planning to meet my best friend, who’s gay, in a store, and I asked the guy to come in and say hello. My date became far more animated than he’d been before and even helped my friend choose a sweater…

 

A few days after my 1st birthday… I fell out the window of a three-story building in Baltimore. My father recalls my mother’s greatest concern… “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” she cried, begging my father to never mention my broken arm…

 

My friend Divya… stays out clubbing on her nights off. Imagine my surprise when I discovered she was on KeralaMatrimony.com, courtesy of her mother, who took the liberty of listing Divya’s hobbies as shopping and movies. (I was under the impression her hobbies were more along the lines of trance music and international politics…)

 

My father saw my mother once before they got married… he lost sight of her at a bazaar the day after their wedding and lamented to himself that he would never find her again, as he’d forgotten what she looked like.

… my father placed matrimonial ads for me every couple of years… They read something like, “Match for Jain girl, Harvard-educated journalist, 25, fair, slim.”

You knew it was coming: Subservient Sanjeev of the fictional Nevashut, a mini-mart at a British petrol pump (thanks, Turbanhead). Sanjeev, who’s a promo for Pringles potato crisps, is a meld of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken promo, Apu from The Simpsons and video cut scenes from those lame choose-your-own-adventure arcade games of the ’80s.

As is usual in this genre, Procter & Gamble UK strives to be inoffensive by being inconsequential. It’s not totally in-your-face, though it lays the mini-mart stereotypes down thick.

Give Sanjeev some love. Try typing: dance, run, play me a song, moustache, money, and stupid, the clips are pretty funny. I wonder whether anyone’s extracted all the possible video clips from the Web site yet.

Kittyminx thinks it’s racist viral marketing, but the humor is so corporate-colorless (try ‘punch’), I have a hard time getting my high dudgeon on:

If they did this with a black person or a Jew, a lot of people would be pissed and rightly so… The only reason why it hasn’t yet is that I’m guessing that Asians and South Asians in particular, are about the only ethnic group left that pop culture thinks its ok to make fun of. And this ad campaign probably comes from the UK… [w]here they are less concerned about “political correctness”… it also seems that the British are a lot more openly and blatantly anti-immigrant, saying things that in America are usually only said by Pat Buchanan and other wingnuts.

Update: Thanks to reader epoch, you can now see every single keyword that triggers a video clip.

Here. 🙂 Enjoy some light wedding fare:

AS the sun started to set over Miami Beach on March 19, Rita Nakouzi, a consultant on fashion and lifestyle trends, and Touré, a writer and pop culture commentator, were married on the sand behind the Raleigh Hotel in the South Beach area.

“O.K., who’s got the bling?” asked the Rev. Joseph Simmons, a Pentecostal minister, who was looking for the couple’s wedding bands. Also called Reverend Run, he is best known as a member of the pioneering rap group Run-DMC. The crowd of 120 included his brother, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons; the CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien; and members of Miss Nakouzi’s family, who had flown in from Beirut, Lebanon, where the bride was born.

…”We fit very well together,” said Touré, a correspondent for CNN and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. “She’s somebody who can go with me from a 50 Cent concert to a Toni Morrison reading and be equally comfortable in both places.”

Wait, wait…don’t tell me. I know what you’re thinking– why should you care? Aside from the fact that Reverend Run is cool, that’s a fair question. Heck, why does the Mutiny care?

The answer lies within the story of how they met, during one magical night at a Lenny Kravitz video shoot at Limelight NYC: Continue reading →