Monthly Archives: April 2005

Moms know best

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arvindsharma.jpg

Despite the fact that I get paid the big bucks (I wish) to be a blogging maven and learn desi related stuff first, so that I may humbly bring it to the attention of SM readers, there are some stories that an Indian mom will ALWAYS know about before us savvy internet users. This one comes from first time SM tipster, my Mom. Diamondbackonline.com, a University of Maryland school paper, reports on missing person Arvin Sharma:

A 22-year-old university student was reported missing following an evening of clubbing with friends in Southwest Washington Saturday, officials said.

District Police are looking for Arvin Sharma, a recent transfer from Temple University who lives in Greenbelt. He was last seen near the 1800 block of Half Street near the Lime Night Club, police said. Officials had few details yesterday regarding what may have happened to Sharma or what he was doing when last seen.

Sharma’s family searched his condominium Saturday morning and found his car parked outside, said his brother, Ashish Sharma. He left his car at home Friday evening and rode to the club with friends.

The family has sent e-mails and photos to media throughout the Washington and Baltimore areas, family members said.

“He’s not answering his cell phone; he hasn’t made any withdrawals from his bank account,” Ashish Sharma said.

So why is it that an Indian mom would know about this news first? It’s just the kind of example my mom uses every time I go home to the D.C. Metro area and decide to meet up with some friends in the city. “Be careful, its dangerous.”

My mom also pointed out the fact that the police will attempt to use their brand new anti-terrorism surveillance system, which consists of cameras on practically every D.C. street (more on that here), to figure out what became of Sharma.

Sharma’s family described him as a light-complexioned Indian male with brown eyes and black hair.

He is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs about 190 pounds, they said.

District police are asking anyone with information to contact them at (202) 727-9099.

NBC4 has a video report of the story with full details. Continue reading →

Kal Penn in ‘A Lot Like Love’

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I’m almost embarrassed to admit I saw an advance screening of A Lot Like Love, a new Ashton Kutcher – Amanda Peet romantic comedy opening tomorrow. It was far better than most Kutcher flicks. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I missed a good chunk of the beginning because, ahem, previews don’t start two hours late like red-carpet premieres where the desi lead fails to turn up.)

Presumably I got the pass, which came via a desi arts list, because a desi plays a main character. Kal Penn plays Jeeter, Ashton Kutcher’s dot-com coworker in avant-garde lenses, and does a great job: he’s charismatic and fluent, drives a hot car, picks up cute women and offers Kutcher tips. It’s as if the Van Wilder roles had been reversed, and indeed this would’ve been a much better movie with Penn in the lead.

The story resembles Boys and Girls, a wooden Freddie Prinze Jr. – Claire Forlani collaboration which, like Golden Gate, I liked mainly for its Berkeley backdrop. Kutcher plays Ollie, a dot-com type who’s inarticulate, obsessed with work and toys with his female fling like a yo-yo. You can never truly suspend disbelief with these movies because, hello, Peet and Forlani are gorgeous.

The script was written with diversity in mind: a major deaf character is played unremarkably, there’s a black priest, the movie uses the ‘burbs rather than New York. And it’s even kind to those in persistent vegetative states. Dumping on Ashton Kutcher’s thespian handicaps is all too easy, so I’ll just say this: Kutcher is the true heir to the Terry Schiavo school of acting. Kutcher makes Keanu Reeves look like Ben Kingsley. Kutcher alternates between two expressions, blank and blank. Kutcher speaks in two tones, dumb and stammering. Kutcher is the latest in a long line of brainless, cardboard male leads such as Dermot Mulroney in, oh, just about everything. Kutcher’s acting never rose above That ’70s Show, and that goes for Topher Grace too. Ok, I’ll stop now.

Continue reading →

They couldn’t keep it up forever

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So an Airborne Express Supe in Philly gets suspicious and…busted.

An Internet pharmacy based in India that sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drugs without prescriptions has been indicted by U.S. authorities, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Brij Bhushan Bansal of Agra (say THAT teen times fast) was “charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, money laundering and misbranding drugs”.

Though Bansal is the alleged mastermind behind a business that provided the pills to practically 200 websites which promoted them, his son, daughter and son-in-law are also defendants, since they helped him purvey Codeine and Viagra.

The market rate for 100 tablets of Codeine is $64; Dr. BBB added a tidy $200 premium to that. Valium was even more expensive– a hefty $198 vs. the $27 your local scam-artist charges. 😉 Authorities were able to seize $7.1 million of the group’s proceeds. Pity. That’s a paltry portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars they probably made.

Prepare for more “P”s:

“There was no physician, no pharmacist and no quality control of these drugs that were sold at above-market rates,” Patrick Meehan, U.S. attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, told a news conference.

Continue reading →

‘Brothels’ directors to open school in India

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After you win an Oscar, you’re supposed to treat the little people like shit, not open schools for them. The diabolical do-gooders behind the award-winning documentary, “Born Into Brothels,” appear ready to violate that most holy of Hollywood traditions:

The two directors of the Oscar-winning documentary “Born Into Brothels,” which chronicles the lives of a group of children born to prostitutes in Kolkata’s red-light area, plan to set up a school in India, a member of the duo said in Lisbon on Tuesday. Ross Kauffman, who directed the documentary along with fellow New Yorker Zana Briski, told AFP that the two filmmakers hope to have the school up and running by the start of 2007. “The idea is to create a safe place for these kids to go, where a small group of kids can get out of that environment. It’s a way to make a small difference,” the 37-year-old said. The school will focus on leadership and arts, and will have a capacity for between 50 and 100 students, he added. [Sify.com]

Sify.com: Oscar winners to open school in India

Continue reading →

‘Sita Sings the Blues’

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Ever seen Hanuman pluck a double bass? Animator Nina Paley has created a witty, ’20s jazz musical version of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues (via Turbanhead). Her lovely, highly stylized characters evoke Betty Boop, Amul Butter ads and Ghee Happy, and Sita is voiced by ’20s blues singer Annette Hanshaw.

Watch the clips or, if the site is slow, see the end of the post to download.

This animation’s original title seems to have been The Sitayana. Like Anna’s feminist neologism, ‘Herstory,’ Paley had replaced Rama with Sita in the title. And she goes even further: Sita has the only speaking part in the entire animation. Rama is strong but silent, a Ken doll and essentially decorative, the inverse of most action flicks. But Paley stays reasonably faithful to the original text. Her Sita is still a maiden in distress rather than a Shrek-like princess-ninja.

Paley also inverts the Moulin Rouge formula. Instead of desi music in an American tale, she uses ’20s American music (one song even includes the banjo) in a quintessentially desi story. Her soundtrack choice is a classy touch; imagine someone doing a version like hip-hop Shakespeare, using Justin Timberlake as the soundtrack.

Shudder.

Continue reading →

We AREN’T the champions, my friends…

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London’s Restaurant magazine just released their annual list of the 50 best places to get fat– and of course I’d be the Mutineer to post on this. 😉

I am slightly miffed that the list is not down with anything brown, unless New York’s lauded, pan-Asian-street-food mecca Spice Market counts. Since I cannot partake of their “chicken samosas” with cilantro-yogurt, I’m inclined to say…”NO”. 🙂

Now last year, the greatest place in the world for Dal Makhni made both the list AND the award for “Best Asian Restaurant”– I’m talking about New Delhi’s legendary Bukhara, mais oui. What a difference twelve months makes? Oh, well. I’m just amazed that a Brit magazine that listed no less than FOUR English restaurants in their top 10 couldn’t find a decent curry. Whatevs. Continue reading →

Almost funny if it weren’t true

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This almost feels like it should be a scene from Kung Fu Hustle except for

1) the unhappy ending and 2) it’s sadly all too true –

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd. Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam’s holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said. …Witnesses said the man was chased through fields and climbed a tree to get away from an angry crowd of up to 500 men. When he refused to come down, someone shot him dead, they said.

Although the article doesn’t really tell us how he desecrated the Koran, one of the mob’s motives here was apparently a type of vigilante justice. It appears that relative at least to this little slice of society, Pakistani courts almost come across as bastions of liberal due process. –

Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.

I guess in conjunction with the tragic death in India tab, we’ll start a count of the ones in Pakistan too. Continue reading →

K-street Kid

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Think Pennsylvania Avenue is the seat of power in D.C.? Wrong. It’s K-street. Desi-Talk introduces us to Raj Mukherjee, a twenty year old lobbyist from Jersey who may end up there soon:

Most people would think for a 20-year-old being a lobbyist is an unusual career choice. Traditional choices for Indians have been engineering or medicine. But Raj Mukherjee doesn’t think it is so atypical. It is understandable considering since the age of 10 Mukherjee claims he has been making web sites to attract politicians. Today, he is a partner in the New Jersey-based lobby firm, Impact NJ, which is a full-service government affairs firm with an emphasis on lobbying in the Garden State.

Mukherjee told News India-Times that politics is a disease, “when it bites you can’t shake it away.” Initially his parents didn’t want him to do business or enter politics. “They wanted me to do school work. They believed in the power of academia,” he said.

Mukherjee is currently working with U.S. Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) on his campaign for governor. “I feel he can restore public trust. He is a good friend of India on the India caucus. In the Senate, he will work with Frank Pallone and Congressman Bob Menendez to represent the interests of Indian Americans in New Jersey, which has the largest Indian population in the U.S.” said Mukherjee.

Pretty impressive, right? Not everyone is going to be “elect-able,” especially at such a young age, but there are other ways to influence policy while he bides his time. Mukherjee already has an impressive resume.

He gained critical acclaim in N.J. political circles when at the age of 16, he became the vice chairman of the Publius Group (where he was previously director of technology & security), which owns and operates the state’s heavily trafficked political news source (PoliticsNJ.com), receiving approximately 4 million gross hits per month.

Mukherjee, who speaks four languages, joined the Marines at 17 two weeks after September 11. It is difficult to establish how long he spent time in the Marines considering he is an undergraduate student at Rutgers, majoring in counterintelligence. It is an inter-disciplinary major that combines political science, Middle Eastern studies and military studies.

Damn. Now I feel like I haven’t done enough today. Continue reading →

Aish ain’t gettin’ Hitched

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Vaporwarya Rai is endlessly rumored to be in talks for this movie or that. Bond girl, anyone?

But one particular missed opportunity is quite funny: the director of the Will Smith romantic comedy Hitch says Rai was to play the college girlfriend. And since Smith produced the film, he probably had a hand in it. Said the director:

I want to see Aishwarya Rai because she was almost in my film… There was a time when she was going to play the college girlfriend, which was originally a much bigger part. I think we were all keen on she doing it. But we had a demanding schedule which she couldn’t work out. That was the hitch on Hitch.

That’s the girlfriend with whom a Steve Urkel-like, ’80s version of Will Smith makes all his early romantic blunders, like being too clingy too early and blurting ‘I love you.’ He later finds her making out with another guy in a parked car. ‘What did I do wrong?’ he repeats pathetically, slumping against the glass. The Other Guy takes pity on him: ‘You’re doin’ it right now!’

Wussy Will would’ve been an improvement over Two-Fisted Khan.