Monthly Archives: April 2005

Lassi

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A non-desi former pastry chef has opened a restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves traditional dhaba food, lassi and paranthas (thanks, BridalBeer). The new place is called Lassi:

From delicate plate-dwarfing dosas at Hampton Chutney Co. and the N.Y. Dosa cart, to wraplike rolls at Roomali and the Kati Roll Co., to the colorful, crunchy chaat of Sukhadia’s Gokul, we’re undoubtedly having a Southeast Asian street-food moment…

I think they mean South Asian, but carry on:

Catchily named for the frothy yogurt drinks on offer in mango-flavored profusion all over town, Lassi is much more than an ethnic smoothie shop (though its premade featured beverages, in potent, refreshing flavors ranging from spice-flecked cardamom and vanilla to a complex and curdy lemon, can easily become an après-gym addiction).

… Lassi is bright and cheerful–like its owner, Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, the former pastry chef of L’Impero and Veritas. A chance encounter with a Punjabi student in a pastry class she was teaching–and many stereotype-shattering home-cooked Indian meals– inspired Carlucci-Rodriguez to change culinary course. And even though she’s an unlikely Indian-restaurant owner, she’s a passionate one. Her food tastes unlike any other Indian in town–fresher, cleaner, but undiluted in its intricately spiced essence.

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Torrent of Aishwarya Rai on ‘Oprah’

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“The most beautiful woman in the world” takes on the most powerful woman in the world in an apocalyptic duel to the death on the “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Download the entire sari-wrapping face-off:

“The Oprah Winfrey Show”: Aishwarya Rai (Quicktime, 11 MB, 11 mins.)
Requires a BitTorrent downloader — PC, Mac

Previous post: Not just a rumor anymore, Ash on Oprah this Monday

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“like radioactive fallout in an arable field”

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Perhaps to build enthusiasm for its annual book festival that took place this past weekend, The LA Times Op-ed section featured a moving ode to books (free registration required) by one Salman Rushdie (tip from Apul).

Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

That’s some deep stuff. Walking around the festival yesterday I stumbled across a modest line of people waiting for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to sign her book at the Artwallah table. Artwallah incidentally just released their book Shabash! which they refer to as “the hip guide to all things South Asian in North America.” The highlight of my day was when I made it over to listen to Jared Diamond speak about his book Collapse. Fascinating. Book festivals kick ass. Continue reading →

Soldier bites off roommate’s nose

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Indian soldiers are apparently grossly underfed, and angry enough to eat just about anything:

The two soldiers from India’s Eastern Frontier Rifles were alone in their barracks Wednesday night when Lance Corporal Bhupesh Rava lost his cool because his roommate wanted the lights on for a little while longer. An enraged Rava, who had returned from daytime duty, attacked Sepoy Durga Lama, pinned him down and gnawed off his nose, police said. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: When Rava asks you to turn out the light…

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Flimflam man sells Indian PM’s home

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A businessman forks over a small fortune for a house and ends up with nothing. It’s almost like the real estate market in California:

India’s intelligence department is investigating reports that a fraudster sold an American businessman the prime minister’s residence in the heart of New Delhi recently…and arrived in the Indian capital late in March to take possession of the house for an office he planned to set up only to discover he had been cheated. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Reuters/Yahoo!: Fraudster sells Indian PM’s residence on web site

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The thappad heard around the world

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An Indian-American actress without an accent slaps comedian Steve Carrell in an episode of The Office called ‘Diversity Day’ (thanks, Amardeep). Pop Matters explains:

Michael… goads… a bewildered Indian employee with an outrageously offensive imitation of an Indian convenience store manager [and] earns a hard slap for his trouble…

Watch the clip (18 MB; you need a BitTorrent downloader: Windows, Mac). The thappad is at 1:37 in the clip.

Here’s Apul’s post on another funny incident in the same episode.

Arvin Sharma’s body found

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A tragic end to the Arvin Sharma search (thanks, SadNepali):

D.C. police say the body of 22-year-old Arvin Sharma was pulled out of the Anacostia River. A passer-by saw a body near the 11th Street Bridge and called police at around 9:45 a.m. this morning. [WJLA]

60 Minutes covered the Anacostia River just yesterday, calling it a dividing line between the Capitol and one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:

Police say that so far this year, more than half the murders in Washington were committed here… Anacostia is a neighborhood where unemployment is epidemic and 38 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. [60 Minutes]

The search had been quite intense:

Ashish, Arvin’s 27-year-old brother and roommate, is taking time off work, and the university is spreading the word of Arvin’s disappearance. An aunt is making a trip from Thailand to provide support… “[The family] is taking care of the small things for us,” said Ashish Sharma. “Anyone we call is willing to jump on a plane.”

Arvin Sharma’s younger brother and friends have plastered areas with posters where Arvin might have been seen. “Everyone has been flooding the area with new fliers … Metro stops, gas stations, all the D.C. universities — Georgetown, George Washington and even Howard and Morgan State,” Ashish said. [UMD Diamondback]

Brimful of Amrit

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Amrit Singh, the daughter of the Indian prime minister who’s a staff attorney for the ACLU, was interviewed today on a Chicago public radio station about the torture of U.S. detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay (thanks, KXB).

Listen to the program. Here’s the program’s home page.

Update: Singh summarized the status of the ACLU’s torture lawsuits on the first anniversary of the Abu Ghraib photos. She said the ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld as an individual, so the lawsuit continues even after he’s no longer Secretary of Defense. That’s quite an aggressive tactic.

Singh was well-spoken with nary a stumble. Her accent was light, although she stressed the first syllable of ‘rapport.’

Previous posts: 1, 2

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Joe Drug Addict

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Sham marriages with a twist: a London scammer, Jaswinder Gill, was convicted of recruiting female British drug addicts to serve as fake brides (thanks, Sapna):

A woman who is thought to have made up to £1m out of a sham marriage empire has been jailed for 10 years… she told some of the young girls they would work in India as models or in the beauty trade, soliciting for business by handing out cards at London shopping centres… The court was told the women were described as “vulnerable” with at least two of them drug addicts.

One woman was flown to the subcontinent for what she thought was a photo shot. It turned out the “elaborate set” was a proper ceremony which ended with her married to a complete stranger. She was then abandoned to find her own way home. Another who tried to back out at the last minute was threatened with violence and warned she would be raped if she did not go through with it.

… “These marriages were a charade – arranged between perfect strangers who were coached by Gill to convince registrars of their intentions to live as man and wife in the UK.”

Methinks this would make a great Fox show, Who Wants to Marry a Drug Addict? Smile for the camera, honey! You may now kiss your cellmate.

Kama Sutra to prevent STD’s?

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According to a short audio clip on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Indian government has authorized Kama Sutra playing cards to be distributed in order to promote monogamy and prevent sexually transmitted diseases. To understand the logic of this you can listen to NPR’s clip (with “exotic” music in the background). However, I think NPR may have made a reporting error. First of all this idea isn’t new. The BBC reported on the use of Kama Sutra to prevent STDs (although by different reasoning) two years ago, pointing to a program in Calcutta.

The government in India’s West Bengal State is supporting a programme that offers prostitutes an ancient solution to modern concerns about safe sex.

“Kama Sutra has many postures that can give men the highest pleasure without consummation and that is what the prostitutes are being taught.

“They are learning something very useful,” says Rajyashree Choudhuri, chief of the Institute of International Social Development (IISD), who designed the project.

Furthermore a 1993 journal abstract in Global AIDS News mentions the following:

…the Indian Health Organization, a nongovernmental organization founded 11 years ago in Bombay, is promoting the teachings of the Kama Sutra as an alternative to condom use in preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The basic message that sex with one partner in many positions is safer than sex in one position with many partners is proclaimed on T-shirts and in a series of explicit postcards. This approach is promoting openness, communication, and equality between the sexes.

I’d pay BIG money for one of those T-shirts. Getting back to my point however, I think NPR mistakenly believed that the Indian Health Organization, which it mentions in the audio clip, is a branch of the Indian government and that this is a state sponsored national program. I don’t think the Indian government would be passing out Kama Sutra cards nationally. Am I wrong? If so, someone in India please correct me (and send me a deck of those cards…for reporting purposes). Continue reading →