Monthly Archives: April 2005

I tried to be as brave as a cricket player

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Last week I blogged about high altitude heroics, and although nobody (except Manish) commented I thought I’d take another stab at it, believing that lack of comments doesn’t equal lack of interest. The Hindustan Times reports that two Indian Airforce pilots are being inducted into the [Smithsonian Institute’s] Aviation Hall of Fame:

Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots Wing Cdr SK Sharma and Flt Lt AB Dhanake will be inducted into the aviation hall of fame at the prestigious Smithsonian institute in the US for a daring high-altitude rescue.

This is the first time such an honour has been conferred on IAF pilots by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Sharma was awarded the peacetime gallantry award Kirti Chakra on Republic Day this year for rescuing three injured mountaineers from a world record height of 23,260 feet. Dhanake was his co-pilot during that mission.

I can’t seem to find any press release about this on the Smithsonian’s website but I’m sure it must be true. The Times of India story from a year ago details the circumstances of the rescue:

Sharma and Dhanake flew the rescue missions on May 11, 12 and 13 [2004] in severe turbulent conditions and in the face of jet speed winds.

“Landing a helicopter, above its service ceiling of 23,000 feet, at an unprepared site on a snow-covered mountain slope, at wind speeds of 35-40 knots, was definitely not a bed of roses,” recalled Sharma.

Sharma, commander of the Bareilly-based 111 Helicopter Unit, who takes his inspiration from cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar, said they managed the remarkable feat with sheer perseverance.

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Steven Tyler wrote a song about this

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The last time I asked Ennis how his personal lowe story was going, he just looked at me woefully and shook his head. Thanks to Eastern Eye, I’ve now figured out what happened:

Ravi Arora, 39, from east London, flew 5,000 miles [to Delhi] to meet a potential bride he had met through shaadi.com… only to find out that she was not born a woman… “I was in front of a girl who no longer looked like one and sounded very different from the Manisha I had been spending two to three hours every week speaking to… The photos were of her cousin, the phone calls had been made by her sister and she had been operated on to become a woman.”

Lest we think Arora is prejudiced, he hastens to add:

“She has a right to express her sexuality as she wants, but by lying about herself, a seed of doubt about all the other profiles on shaadi.com have been placed in my mind.”

I don’t know what’s harder to believe: Arora’s incredible story, or that he actually trusted the profiles on dating sites.

The butterfly effect

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I love book excerpts. Like film trailers, they offer up the juiciest bits from potentially marginal titles. Here’s a good one from NYT columnist Tom Friedman’s latest, The World is Flat. Hedge (fund) hog and sound bite artiste Dinakar Singh compares minds to perishable inventory in dockside godowns:

”India had no resources and no infrastructure… It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don’t have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.”

”… the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,” Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ”it was the foreigners who benefited.” …That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight.

In Friedman’s butterfly formulation, the Global Crossing bankruptcy let IIT kids enjoy both cash and kachoris. It’s the global version of ‘work in your pajamas’: enjoying family, festivals and food at home.

A Mutinous DC Film Fest

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Imagine my surprise upon opening the handy-dandy filmest DC insert in the Washington City Paper, to find a plethora of Indian films being screened. Now, I am used to seeing one or two, but amongst the many other fine films from other countries being screened, 10 Indian films have been selected for screening. A couple highlights of the selections include an opening night screening of Rituparno Ghosh’s Raincoat (starring TMBWITW Aishwarya Rai) sponsored by Air India and Nutella, a screening of Chokher Bali also starring Rai, both with Ghosh in attendance, the stunningly beautiful, musically amazing, yet poorly scripted Dil Se (score by AR Rahman), Dev starring Om Puri and Amitabh Bachchan (with Amitabh in attendance), and Songs of Mahulbani which will be shown with the Oscar nominated Little Terrorist. Continue reading →

Mamet’s stain on Broadway (updated)

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Re: Apul’s post, David Mamet’s racist salesman drama Glengarry Glen Ross is being revived on Broadway next Wednesday. Even though the lines are uttered in character, it’s a deeply offensive play:

MOSS: I’ll tell you what else: don’t ever try to sell an Indian.

AARONOW: I’d never try to sell an Indian.

MOSS: You get those names come up, you ever get ’em, “Patel?”… You had one you’d know it. Patel. They keep coming up. I don’t know. They like to talk to salesmen. They’re lonely, something. They like to feel superior, I don’t know. Never bought a fucking thing… They got a grapevine. Fuckin’ Indians, George. Not my cup of tea. Speaking of which I want to tell you something: I never got a cup of tea with them. You see them in the restaurants. A supercilious race. What is this look on their face all the time? I don’t know. I don’t know. Their broads all look like they just got fucked with a dead cat, I don’t know…

ROMA: Patel? Ravidam Patel? How am I going to make a living on these deadbeat wogs? Where did you get this, from the morgue?… Patel? Fuck you. Fuckin’ Shiva handed him a million dollars, told him “sign the deal,” he wouldn’t sign. And Vishnu, too.

The play, written in 1984, won a Pulitzer and was turned into a major 1992 film with Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey and Ed Harris. Mamet had second thoughts, but only decades later:

He thinks maybe he should take another look at his anti-Indian remarks that still smolder in Glengarry Glen Ross, a play he wrote 20 years ago. “Patel” was a racial epithet uttered by guys in his line of work years ago, when he was selling real estate. Maybe it doesn’t belong in the play anymore, given what the times are now.

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“Mamlet” in The New York Times

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The New York Times runs excerpts of three winning selections from the American Conservatory Theatre’s “Write Like Mamet” contest, including my brother’s “Mamlet.” I have no doubt that if Shakespeare were alive today, he too would pepper his prose with an occasional f-bomb:

“MAMLET”
By Nihar Patel (Los Angeles)

An empty stage. All performers are dressed in modern business suits.

CLAUDIUS (Ricky Jay) You are a gentlemenly fool. And you haven’t closed a castle in months. You’re old hat, and that comes from downtown.

MAMLET (William H. Macy) Old hat? Old hat. Let’s wait Claudius. Claudius, wait, back up here … I can close, all I need are those Elsinore leads. I want them and I want them posthaste.

CLAUDIUS Go to Norway Mamlet. Will you.

MAMLET Give me two good leads. Anon.

CLAUDIUS Just go to Norway.

MAMLET I don’t want to go to Norway.

CLAUDIUS Go to Norway, Mamlet.

MAMLET Where does he get off to talk that way to a Prince? It’s not …

CLAUDIUS Will you get out of here. Will you get out of here. Will you. I’m trying to run a kingdom here. Will you go to Norway? Go to Norway. Will you go to Norway?

MAMLET You stupid [expletive] [expletive].

Mamlet stabs Claudius.

The New York Times: Channeling Mamet (free registration required)
Previous post: Legit brownout

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A brown Pope? The long odds on Bombay’s Cardinal Dias

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01dias.jpg With the passing of the Pontiff, there is an outside possibility that the next Pope will be Bombay’s Cardinal Ivan Dias. As with the Olympics, the Indian is the long shot. According to the Associated Press, bookies have listed the odds as 16:1 against him; the only online betting agency I can find gives the odds at 47:1 right now.

India has 16,694,000 Catholics who make up 1.54% of the country’s population. This makes it 16th in the world in terms of the number of Catholics per country. However, India does not have alot of leverage in the selection process for the new Pope. India has five Cardinals, only three of whom are eligible to vote. Cardinals Duraisamy Simon Lourdusamy and Simon Ignatius Pimenta are over 80, and are excluded from voting by an age limited introduced by Pope John Paul II himself. The remaining three Cardinals are Cardinal Ivan Dias of Mumbai, Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil of the Kerala based Syro Malabar Church, and Cardinal Telesphore Placidus Toppo of Ranchi.

The speculation about an Indian Pope seems to have emerged when that most religious of magazines, Businessweek, stated that Cardinal Ivan Dias (described simply as “a friend of Mother Teresa”) was under consideration for the top job.

According to the Calcutta Telegraph:

Dias, the archbishop of Mumbai, is among 13 cardinals believed to be in the running. Twenty-six years ago, the Vatican created history by anointing John Paul II, a Pole, the first non-Italian to be elected to the top post in over 400 years. There is now speculation if history will be made again by naming the first Indian and, possibly more important, the first non-White. Whether or not Dias is chosen, there is a likelihood that a non-White could actually become the Pope because several of the cardinals being tipped for the post are from Latin America and Africa. Dias’s office had earlier dismissed as “rubbish” the speculation that he was a candidate. The Catholic Bishops Conference of India spokesman, Fr Babu Joseph, said: “The Indian Church will be happy and proud if the next Pope comes from the country. But these (about Dias’s prospects) are speculative reports. The papal election does not happen just like that.” Dias has a few factors going for him. For instance, he has been a Vatican diplomat for 33 years in various parts of the world before coming to Mumbai in 1997 as the archbishop. He knows 17 languages, mostly European, and even speaks Korean. Above all, like Pope John Paul, he is orthodox, and is relatively young at 69 by Vatican standards. [Telegraph]

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More New York Times Weddings and Celebrations

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Even though this is no longer an infrequent occurrence, I love it that Desi weddings are making a regular appearance in the New York Times Vows section, and thus feel the need to blog them from time-to-time. This weeks entry: the wedding of Geeta Chopra, or as many may know her–Citygirl, founder of SALAAM theatre.

GEETA CHOPRA wears a heart drawn with eyeliner on her cheek and answers her cellphone saying, “Citygirl,” a surname she adopted in college. “She is bubbly down to her handwriting,” her sister, Mona, said. Ms. Chopra, 33, is the founder and artistic director of a five-year-old theater company called Salaam, short for South Asian League of Artists in America. Last March she was steeped in her job, and getting married, she said, was low on her list of priorities. That month, during previews of the Broadway musical “Bombay Dreams,” Ms. Chopra orchestrated a splashy pre-opening party in the K Lounge, a night spot in Midtown…

Oh and make sure to check and see if nytimes wedding and celebrations blog has a different take on the Times’ piece. Continue reading →

The Gods of Chocolate

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chocolategod.jpg New California Media reports on a story found in India West Magazine about chocolate Hindu deities. As I will explain in a moment this is met (by me at least) with great relief and gratitude:

Chocolate Deities, a confectioner based in the Catskill Mountains of New York, offers handmade chocolates molded into the shape of Lord Krishna, Ganesha, Buddha, the Tibetan goddess Tara and many other gods and goddesses.

Some customers like to eat them, while others, according to company cofounder Jeanne Fleming, prefer to put the chocolates on their home altars or even melt them down for hot chocolate or sauces.

“In the case of [Krishna and Ganesh], Hindus asked me to make them … and many of the folks who buy them are Hindus,” she wrote in an email to India-West Mar. 25.

Well hell. I will buy them for sure. So far there hasn’t been a good way for chocolate worshippers like myself to properly practice our faith. As you can see by the picture of my makeshift shrine at home, there is much left to be desired. This way at least my mother will believe that I have returned to my roots and am worshipping Hindu Gods again instead of practicing my heretical Swiss beliefs.

tobleroneshrine.jpg

“We are not expecting that all those who buy our chocolates will necessarily eat them,” Fleming told India-West. “If you read our website carefully, we suggest that they can be used in ceremonial ways, as ritual objects, or spiritual objects for the kitchen. They are not like bikinis, or lunch boxes, or beer labels. They are not used ‘for’ something else, or in the service of something else. They are themselves what they are: objects of devotion, offerings, art, or to be eaten.”

Chocolate Deities website is actually very educational. They even explain that Ganesha liked sweets (so he’d probably approve of this venture):

Ganesha was very fond of sweets. There was one that he particularly adored, a dumpling called a modaka, which has steamed wrapping made of rice flour and a filling that absolutely bursts with coconut and dried fruit. Whenever Ganesha saw a dish of modakas, he had to stop and eat one. Of course, once he had eaten one, he had to eat another. Then another, and another until the dish, in no time at all, was empty.

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A Letter To Our Readers

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[Update: April Fool! 🙂
Dear readers, let’s go over the facts one by one.

True or False: Anna and Sajit are fighting over the affections of Manish?
ANS: False. There is NO love triangle whatsoever within Sepia Mutiny. Blogging and relationships do not mix. We are professionals people.

True of False: Abhi and Vinod nearly came to blows?
ANS: False. I have never even met Vinod. However it is entirely possible that such a thing will transpire when I finally do.

True or False: Ennis has scooped Vinod on several blog entries?
ANS: False. Ennis doesn’t post often enough to cause such problems.

True or False: Sajit is moonlighting on another blog with a pseudonym?
ANS: False. It could be true but we’ll never know.

I am dissapointed in a great number of you 🙂 Has our blog taught you nothing? Investigate people! Ask questions. Question the government. Only one clever commenter, instead of simply believing that our declaration was true or proclaiming confidently that it was a prank, was able to bring forth evidence. Digging back into my personal archives you would have (like her) found the smoking gun that exposed me for the fraud that I was. 🙂

Don’t feel bad though. If you think YOU got badly fooled, you should hear how badly this fooled my dad. Just embarrassing.

We’re back!]

Dear valued readers of Sepia Mutiny,

I am not sure how to begin this posting so as to soften the blow for you or for myself. I am just going to announce what needs to be said and then find a way to explain it as best I can. The bloggers of Sepia Mutiny have decided after much (often heated) debate, to call it quits. Unless something drastic changes (and I have no reason left to hope that it will after the angry conference call earlier tonight) this will be the last posting on Sepia Mutiny. This announcement is particularly embarrassing in light of the fact that just last week I announced that we were going strong and had yet to “jump the shark.” Although I am under no obligation to explain our decision, I feel I must, even without the approval or foreknowledge of the other six writers on our site. The explanation for our “break-up” is MY version of events ONLY. I am quite certain it will result in me getting nasty messages from one or more of the other bloggers for revealing too much of their personal lives. I really wrestled with whether or not I should, but I’ve always felt that with great power comes great responsibility. You lend us your time (and tips) every day and it’s up to me to thank you in kind with the TRUTH. There were two MAIN causes for our decision. The first involved a romantic entanglement between three of our writers. Two of them on the East Coast have gotten quite “close.” It’s not very hard to figure out which two. Some of you have seen them together at events that we have blogged about. Similarly to what happens in rock bands, the rivalry between two of our writers, over the affections of the third, turned toxic. I know. It sounds cliched to me as well. Since most of us weren’t friends before starting Sepia Mutiny (in truth I have only met three other SM bloggers) when the cracks formed, they were not so easy to mend. The second conflict that lead to our decision is partially my fault. Last week I was up in the Bay Area for a two-day conference and used the opportunity to finally meet Vinod. Long time readers of SM will note that Vinod and I don’t agree on a gamut of political issues. Both of us had a few too many drinks at the bar while talking politics and things turned ugly (I guess it’s true that Indian men can’t hold their liquor). While trying to drive home a point with regards to the Israeli/Palestinian issue, I accidentally flailed my arms too wide and knocked my beer into Vinod’s lap. Because I was angry at the time, he mistakenly thought I did it on purpose and retaliated by throwing his beer in my face. When it was obvious that a fight was imminent the bouncers pushed us out of the bar. I think it was a silly misunderstanding but again, the fact that we weren’t friends before has made it more difficult to reconcile. Each of us is too stubborn to admit that we were wrong. There were other tiny incidents of course. All petty upon introspection. Ennis scooped several stories after Vinod had informally announced that he was going to post them. Sajit was apparently moonlighting under a pseudonym on a rival blog, posting his best material there. Again, let me stress that this is MY view of the situation. It is possible that the parties involved might retaliate by posting THEIR own versions here as well, although I hope things won’t get that ugly. The only “good” news is that Apul has gotten a lot of good press from SM and has been invited to write for a well known comedy show. I’m not sure why they singled him out (especially since he is just a recent addition to our crew), but I guess saying “good luck” would be appropriate.

At this point I can only ask that SM readers try to accept this decision and continue to visit each of our individual blog sites. We will still be writing with our own voices just not together in this forum.

I know what comes next may be overly dramatic but I am really torn up over this decision. I would like to end my writing with choice words from the poet William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
 Continue reading →