Monthly Archives: April 2005

Caught…handed.

Posted on by

I’ll never be able to sleep on a plane again (which is great since whenever I fly, it’s cross-country).

Sick, sick, SICK:

BOSTON — An Arizona executive was convicted on Tuesday of sexually assaulting a sleeping woman seated next to him on a flight from Dallas to Boston.
Deepak Jahagirdar, 55, of Scottsdale, Ariz., was convicted by a federal jury after a six-day trial and five hours of deliberations of sexually abusing and having abusive sexual contact with the 22-year-old woman.

Of course, he tried to claim it was consensual. Sleep always means, YES, doesn’t it???

The woman, traveling alone and returning home from a vacation in Texas in March 2002, told authorities that she fell asleep early on the Delta Air Lines flight and awoke to find that Jahagirdar had covered her with a blanket, unbuttoned her pants and had his hand inside her.
The woman left her seat and alerted the flight crew. Jahagirdar, a marketing manager for a health care company, was arrested by Massachusetts State Police when the flight landed at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Jahagirdar’s sentencing is set for June 24. He faces up to 20 years (for sexual abuse), three years (for abusive sexual contact) and a half-million dollar fine. He also faces the prospect of me cursing him violently whenever I have to stay awake during the long flight home to California. Continue reading →

“I care about my brother Nikhil. Do you?”

Posted on by

Several tipsters sent us this NYTimes article about a new Indian film that surprisingly has not stirred up much controversy as of yet:

Late last month, a low-budget drama called “My Brother Nikhil” opened in movie theaters across India, telling the story of a gay man’s struggle with his family and his country after contracting the virus that causes AIDS.

Quietly, gently, “My Brother Nikhil” has tested the limits of the Indian cinemagoer’s sensibility.

Commercially, it is no runaway Bollywood blockbuster; nor is it meant to be. Rather, its impact lies in having served up a story about love and loss – sentimental staples of contemporary Indian cinema – with a gay man at its center, and having done so without kicking up the slightest fuss from India’s cultural conservatives. As one review published in the latest issue of Outlook, a mainstream newsweekly, put it, “The two lovers seem just like any other couple.”

Playing here in Mumbai, formerly called Bombay, and in about a dozen other major cities in India, “My Brother Nikhil” is part of a new breed of Bollywood pictures known here as the “multiplex movie” – appealing to an urban middle-class audience, peppered with English phrases, and easy on the song-and-dance numbers and potboiler story lines usually associated with Indian commercial cinema.

The Indian Supreme Court is currently reviewing the ban on homosexuality in India.

“My Brother Nikhil” has faced none of the protests that six years ago greeted “Fire,” Deepa Mehta’s film about two women in love. Actors and athletes have been plugging “My Brother Nikhil” in television spots, an extraordinary marketing ploy in an industry where few people plug movies that are not their own. “I care about my brother Nikhil. Do you?” is the punch line. “This film has shown it’s possible to show a committed gay couple,” said Vikram Doctor, a journalist here who is active with a support group called the Gay Bombay Group. “It’s passed the Censor Board without any comment. Theaters have not been attacked. There’s no catcalling. It’s treated respectfully by the audience and the filmmaker. I’m happily surprised.”

View movie trailers and listen to the soundtrack here. Continue reading →

A whole boardroom full of brown contestants

Posted on by

What comes next was ENTIRELY expected if you think about it. From Rediff.com:

After the huge success of the reality show Indian Idol on Sony Entertainment Television, Freemantle Media, which conceived the programme, is set to tap the huge potential of the Indian market for reality shows.

Freemantle Media will host The Apprentice, one of its most popular shows in India. “We are planning to introduce The Apprentice later this year. The show will be telecast on the Star network,” says Gavin Wood, director of production, India Freemantle Media.

One of the most popular television reality series in the world today, The Apprentice will be conceived on the lines it is aired in different parts of the Asia, Europe and the United States.

Yes, yes. We will export cut-throat corporate world behavior to the third world now. I wonder if Laxmi Mittal will be the tycoon.

“India is a land of great creativity, talent and passion. The spark among the people is truly amazing,” says Wood.

“Although the television Industry in India is young, it is very professional and has high quality standards which is lacking in many other countries where the industry is much older than in India. The television sector with its wide reach will be a major driver of growth in the entertainment sector,” Wood explains.

What they don’t seem to understand is the potential trauma that rejected contestants could suffer in Indian society. Just imagine being fired, coming home and having to listen to your Indian mother point out the fact that the other people’s children haven’t been fired yet. Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Dabbas for dummies

Posted on by

If you, like I, have never actually lived in Bombay, here’s a great primer on why office workers use the O.G. FedEx (via Kunjan):

A restaurant meal costs five to fifteen times more than home-food. To them, the dabbawalla brings the security of a cheap, clean, tasty and often still-warm, home-cooked meal… Bombay alone can sustain a dabbawalla network of this size and complexity because it alone, among Indian cities, has a quick, efficient and far-flung suburban railway service.

Not to mention that many have religion-based dietary restrictions. Density and train availability is also why some businesses only work in Manhattan and like cities; Bombay’s north-south orientation is strikingly familiar. Here’s how the routing system works — each packet is marked with hops, destination and recipient name, and handoffs are made at railway stations:

The outer case of Mohile’s dabba is marked with a black swastika, a red dot, a yellow stroke… Different marks on other dabbas tell the career at which stations en route he must pass them on to other waiting links in the crosscross network. At Victoria Terminus, the hub of commercial Bombay, Mohile’s dabba enters the last phase of its journey. Dabbawalla No. 4 waiting on the platform, picks it out together with other boxes marked with his symbol, the white cross. The black circle on Mohile’s case indicates its exact destination: the BMC Building. By 12.30 he has carried his crate up four flights of stairs and left Mohile’s lunch-box along with some 20 others in a corner of the canteen. Mohile, coming in at 1 p.m. will recognise his dabba from his name on an attached tag.

The dabbawallas’ perseverence puts the U.S. Postal Service to shame, and they charge only 35 rupees a month:

Some months ago, a dabbawalla waiting on his bicycle at a traffic light was hurled off the road by a lorry gone berserk and was smashed to death… The mukadam [dabba boss] got to hear of the accident within minutes and contracted the secretary of the Association… asked him to look after the police formalities, collected the dead man’s dabbas, and being familiar with the symbols, got them to their destination — just 30 minutes late…

Continue reading →

Faded Genes

Posted on by

We are going to have to ask for the experts to comment on this one. The BBC reports (thanks for the tip Mytri):

Indians infected with the AIDS virus are more likely to contract the disease than people in the west, a new study has found.

Scientists say that Indians have lower immunity to the virus because they have genes that hasten the disease.

India says more than five million of its citizens are infected with the HIV virus, second only to South Africa.

Activists say the number of Indians affected by HIV/Aids is much higher than the government says.

Scientists at India’s premier medical school, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), studied 200 people with HIV infection and 2000 healthy people over two years for the study.

I always try to look at genetic anomalies in terms of evolutionary pressures. In cases where none are obvious I just shrug my shoulders and wait for an explanation.

“Protective genes are low among Indians while the harmful genes are more common,” Dr NK Mehra, head of the study told the BBC.

Ummmm. That explanation doesn’t quite make it clear (to me at least). In a somewhat related story the Hindustan Times reported last week that Indians and Pakistanis in England have the lowest number of sexual partners (ouch).

Continue reading →

Desis on U.K. ‘Apprentice’

Posted on by

England’s magnificent Punjabi Boy alerts us to their home-brewed edition of “The Apprentice,” which features a pair of desi contestants. If you’re among the ladies who was turned off by our American Raj, check out the U.K. alternative:

Name: Raj
Age: 30
Qualifications: LLB Law (Hons).
Career: Internet entrepreneur, founder and managing director of an estate agency.
Hobbies: “I have no hobbies or interests – my total focus in on business.”
He says: “I’m an entrepreneur, not an angel.”

To quote Punjabi Boy, he’s a “complete dork.” Since American Raj is totally awesome, we win that round. But then our Raj’s awesomeness is easily trumped by the “feisty and sexy” Saira Khan:

Name: Saira
Age: 34
Qualifications: BA in Humanities, MA in Environmental Planning.
Career: Sales manager for an online recruitment company.
Facts: She runs marathons, loves diving, and speaks four Asian languages.
She says: “I hope that as an Asian woman I will give other Asian women the inspiration to go out there and do well in business.”

Indeed, it never fails: the British version of any television show is always better.

Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Gotham Chopra explores spirituality on TV

Posted on by

Former Vice President Al Gore on Monday unveiled his long-awaited television venture, “Current,” which is described as “the first national network created by, for and with an 18-34 year-old audience.” Deepak Chopra’s son is prominently featured:

Among Current’s young on-air talent is Gotham Chopra (host of “Current Soul,” an exploration of spirituality from a young perspective), a former Channel One News anchor who has reported from around the world and interviewed leaders including Bill Clinton and the Dalai Lama, wrote three published works including the comic book Bulletproof Monk (serving as executive producer of the film adaptation), and was called one of the “most powerful and influential” South Asians worth watching by Newsweek. [PRNewswire/Yahoo!]

Twenty-somethings discussing and exploring spirituality? What, did a high-pitched screeching sound already have a prior commitment?

PRNewswire/Yahoo!: Al Gore and Joel Hyatt unveil Current…

Continue reading →

Posted in TV

Indian music in ‘The Far Pavilions’

Posted on by

There’s some buzz surrounding plans to bring together western and Indian music for the U.K.-theatre production of MM Kaye’s classic romantic novel “The Far Pavilions”:

The original book, published in 1978, told the story of forbidden love between an Indian princess and a British army officer during the time of the Raj. To replicate the contrast between the two cultures that forms the essence of the book, the new musical, directed by Gale Edwards, has two composers – Philip Henderson, who is British, and Kuljit Bhamra, who is Indian. [BBC News]

Gurinder Chadha has got to be pissed. Her monopoly on brown-woman-white-man productions appears to have crumbled. Every KFC in her immediate vicinity is advised to prepare for an onslaught of takeout orders.

BBC News: Indian music tradition revived in musical

Continue reading →