Monthly Archives: June 2005

You have to kiss a lot of humans …

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CNN reports that:

Two giant toads were married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in eastern India … Some 400 people cheered and blew conches as women put streaks of vermilion on the female toad’s head while a band played music and priests solemnized the marriage to the chanting of Hindu hymns.

toadshaadi.jpg This was an arranged marriage for the bufonidae, they were “picked up from separate ponds” and had never met each other before being “dressed in bright red clothes and brought to the marriage venue in a decorated palanquin.”

According to our top secret source (call him Deep Croak) the groom spent the whole time surreptitiously checking out the bride’s legs and wondering if she could cook as well as his mom. The bride, on the other hand, complained that she had no interest in brown toads since they were all chauvinists who cared about nothing other than amplexus and food cooked the way their mother used to. The mothers of the bride and groom spent the entire time coming up with names for all their future tadpoles, and planning their weddings out too.

SepiaMutiny sends the newlyweds a copy of the uncut Harold and Kumar DVD and a year’s membership in the South Asian Sisters. We wish them our mutinous best. Continue reading →

Baked Dånish cøøkies

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What do you do if you’re an aspiring European desi pop star with a catchy yet disposable sound derivative of Jay Sean? You find a producer from Cøpenhagen and put out a stoned vision of a video. The Bombay Rockers are neither rockers nor from Bombay. Discuss.

24 year old Indian Navtej Singh Rehal is the central musician behind Bombay Rockers. Navtej is born in Denmark (Copenhagen), but has his roots in India. He grew up at Nørrebro and has gone through the whole public system – from nursery to gymnasium in Denmark, except for two years, where he went to school in India… Together with the two Danish producers, Janus Bosen Barnewitz and Thomas Sardord, Navtej is the core of Bombay Rockers. [Culturebase]

The Hindu shows why you don’t turn to a paper called The Hindu for music reviews:

The twosome have innovatively mixed an evergreen Punjabi folk song called “Ari Ari” in two versions… one only wishes that they had done away with the slang in the lyrics. [The Hindu]

Their first single, ‘Ari Ari,’ was the rage in Danish dance clubs, & their latest single, ‘Rock tha Party,’ was a hit in Europe & the CD has spent 10 weeks at #1 in India. [Beautiful Atrocities]

Except for the bass, their version of the old bhangra song ‘Ari Ari’ hews pretty closely to the original, there’s no Jay-Z breaking in. If unsweetened, traditional bhangra can make in Europe, could it make it in the U.S.?

Punjabi Boy reviews the ‘Rock tha Party’ video for you, though I’m guessing the state in which something’s rotten is actually Denmark:

The Punjabi dude and the Swedish hero pick up a couple of blonde chicks in Stockholm and have a groovy one night stand with them…. But the Swedish chicks are vexed because they got played. So they call this assasination hit squad of giant teddy bears…

Pretty people being chased by ridiculous assassins? Bad guys subtitled with silly monikers? Wonder if Punjabi MC’s ever done something like this.

Watch the supremely silly video. Sajit’s previous post here.

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Quit BJP? Advani did.

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advani.jpg After stating what very well could be a fact while on a trip to Pakistan, BJP leader LK Advani has asked his party to “relieve” him of his duties. Or, to put it bluntly, he’s resigned after much drama.

A chief architect of the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990’s and the current opposition leader in Parliament, L. K. Advani, resigned today as head of his party, amid a storm of criticism from within his own ranks over remarks he made while in Pakistan.
Last weekend, on a visit to Karachi, where he was born, Mr. Advani stood at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and praised him as a “secular” leader.

Now I was raised to hate on Jinnah like most good, slightly perplexed toddlers were; my father vividly remembered an “India” that still contained an unbroken Punjab and like many of his generation, he bitterly resented Jinnah for “what he did to us”.

I never really thought of or questioned this until today, when I started to see these stories on NYT and the Beeb. I went to trusty Wikipedia to see about Jinnah. What if Advani was right, and gasp he WAS secular?

A common view, especially in India, is that it was Jinnah who was responsible for “the division of India”, creating Pakistan. The portrayal is that of a religious leader completely committed to his community having a country of its own. Jinnah himself, however, was a very secular person. Most of his career till about 1930 was spent trying either to bring the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to work together or getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. When the League was founded in 1905, he was probably the only major Muslim personality to refuse to join.

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SM: A Giant hidden in plain sight?

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New California Media, partnering with The Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund have just released a poll that they claim shows that nearly half the country’s Hispanics, Asian Americans and other minorities prefer ethnic newspapers, television and radio to mainstream media. The poll is titled, The Ethnic Media in America: The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight. Several news organizations including Yahoo report:

Overall, ethnic media reach approximately 80 percent the groups studied — about 51 million people, or a quarter of the U.S. adult population.

“This is something that is growing like a giant hidden in plain sight,” said Sandy Close, executive director for NCM, a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media groups.

Many turn to foreign language newspapers and broadcasts because English isn’t their native language. Additionally, minority media often do a better job covering news from the homeland and other issues the community cares about.

“We have a multicultural society with multimedia choices, so people pay attention to media that pay attention to them. That’s the bottom line,” said Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

I am a little offended that the poll apparently did not consider ethnic blogs. Although I am obviously biased, it would seem to me that once blogs penetrate the consumer’s mind as an alternate source for news, the overall numbers in this poll will trend higher. Some additional highlights:

-The national reach of ethnic media was calculated by including all adults that watch ethnic television, listen to ethnic radio OR read ethnic newspapers on a regular basis.

-This group includes the 29 million “primary consumers of ethnic media” and another 22 million “secondary consumers of ethnic media” that prefer mainstream media but access ethnic media on a regular basis.

-The reach of Asian Indian, Filipino and Japanese newspapers is smaller but still impressive – more than half of the adults in these groups read an ethnic newspaper a few times a month or more.

-Access to the Internet is very high (67 percent) among all Asian Americans and half of them prefer ethnic websites to mainstream websites. Asian Indian adults access the Internet more often than other Asians.

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Singing at the gates or Mordor

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Spamalot and The Light in the Piazza were the big winners at Sunday’s 59th annual Tony Awards. Any early favorites for next year? From April’s Detroit Free Press:

ringsmusical.jpg

The next big thing in theater, the musical version of “The Lord of the Rings,” is scheduled for its world premiere in 2006 in Toronto. Previews won’t begin until Feb. 2 and the show has yet to be cast but producer Kevin Wallace offered a preview Thursday night to tour operators and other invited guests at the Renaissance Center.

Emphasizing “LOTR’s” human aspects before he mentioned its special effects, Wallace called the show “as powerful and emotional a story as you’ve ever experienced in the theater.”

Some particulars: The show will run 3 1/2 hours, including two intermissions; the music is by Indian composer A.R. Rahman (“Bombay Dreams”) and Finnish folk group Varttina, and there will be Hobbits mingling with playgoers before the show.

Playbill.com recently noted that advance tickets are already being snatched up:

In the first week of sales toward the February 2006 Toronto world premiere of the musical The Lord of the Rings, theatregoers snapped up $7 million (Canadian) in tickets, a spokesperson for the Toronto producers confirmed.

One might cringe imagining a quirky show tune of sweet admonition from Frodo called “Oh, Sam!,” about hobbit pal Sam’s dogged faithfulness. Don’t expect it: Traditional musical theatre is not what India’s most popular composer, A.R. Rahman, and the Finnish group Värttinä, collaborating with Christopher Nightingale, write.

What would the elves sing? What is the sound a hobbit dances to? Can an orc carry a tune?

Expect varied Asian- and European-influenced sounds to suggest the many tribes of the story.

No word yet as to whether or not the Orcs will dance Bollywood style in the background.

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A house divided?

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The SJ Mercury dissects the conflict between Indian American technocrats and religious/cultural leaders in the Bay Area. This may well be a microcosm of what we’ll soon see in other areas of the country where large Indian American communities exist:

When Dr. Romesh Japra was building his cardiology practice at Washington Hospital 25 years ago, Hindus wanted their own temple. Fremont’s then-mayor, the late Bill Ball, told the doctor the Seventh-day Adventists were moving out of their church. Japra wrote a personal check for $10,000 to cover part of the down payment and the Fremont Hindu temple was born. The first in the Bay Area, it became part of the bedrock for Silicon Valley’s Indo-American community.

Since the late 1970s, when Japra established himself as a leader in the Indo-American community, thousands have arrived from India, many armed with engineering degrees. The 2000 census revealed that 40 percent of all Bay Area high-tech workers were Asian, and many high-profile Silicon Valley companies were founded or co-founded by Indians.

Despite their land of common origin — which they remind outsiders is a complex mix of more than 1 billion people — the high-tech engineers and the Indo-Americans who preceded them are not united. Some old-timers say the technocrats care more about making money than about the grass-roots community. And to some highly skilled high-tech workers, Japra is a maharaja — Hindu prince — who reflects a past they came to America to escape.

The rift has played a part in preventing the community from realizing its shared goal: gaining political power.

“We have to stop backbiting,” said Mahesh Pakala, 40, a Fremont entrepreneur who is friends with both groups. “We’re killing ourselves. We have to think big. We have to get ourselves a politician.”

We’ve all observed this sort of thing before. It’s the classic old world mentality vs. new world mentality that we see in discussions with our parents. The technocrats have an organization that they claim to run like a “start-up” and the old-timers put on their yearly fair for networking and building community ties. In theory the former is run with business-like efficiency and thus can influence big time politics with money and connections. The latter relies on “who you know” and a turning-out-the-vote model.

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Baby saved by a jury of peers

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A peeing baby is costly in Kerala (thanks, Turbanhead):

The parents of a baby who urinated on his mother inside an Indian temple have won an appeal to overturn a stiff fine imposed by temple officials. Anil Kumar was told to pay 1,001 rupees… to fund cleansing ceremonies when his baby son urinated during prayers at the temple at Trichur in Kerala state…

“I respect the views of the temple priests. But this penalty business is very pre-historic,” KC Venugopal, Kerala state minister responsible for temple affairs, told the BBC. “If they want to conduct a cleansing ceremony, let the money be taken from the temple funds. It should not be taken from worshippers…”

“I am always so nervous to carry my two-year-old son to a temple… What if he throws up or urinates?”

… according to tradition, it is considered unclean if babies urinate or vomit inside temple premises. A purification ceremony must be held to restore the sanctity of the temple…

I have two adorable baby nephews. We also ‘consider it unclean’ when they spit up or pee. Our own ‘cleansing ceremony’ involves paper towels and soap and costs Rs. 0. It has more to do with the sanctity of the hardwood floors than the sanctity of the temple though.

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Sachal Vasandani sings jazz tonight (NYC)

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Speaking of desis in jazz, check out jazz vocalist Sachal Vasandani tonight in Manhattan:

“Sachal Vasandani’s singing reveals emotion and intellect,” says Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Versed in the blues, standards, and modern jazz… his sound is consistent and unique…”

After being named Collegiate Jazz Vocalist of the Year by Downbeat Magazine in 1999, Vasandani moved to New York and, after a year of working on Wall Street, quit his job to begin his career as a singer… Vasandani’s debut solo album is due out later this year.

Monday, 6/6/05, Zinc Bar (90 W. Houston / LaGuardia Pl.), 7:15-8:45pm (he’s on ~7:30pm), $5; Sachal Vasandani, vocals; Jeb Patton, piano; David Wong, bass; Quincy Davis, drums Continue reading →

A not-so-novel writing method

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Writer Ranbir Sidhu just finished a novel while locked in an architect-designed habitat for 30 days, 22 Å“ hours each day. The publicity stunt by Queens artist collective Flux Factory resembles another mentally focusing experience known as ‘poverty.’

The novelists lived in the gallery, in individual habitats built for them by architects and designers who, like the writers, entered a competition. Evenings, they ate together, meals served by local chefs. In addition, they could leave their pads for 90 minutes a day to shower, do laundry or walk on the building’s roof… There were nice writerly touches, like the two empty Scotch whiskey bottles perched on a shelf and a stack of books – including Strunk and White as well as Kafka – lined up near Mr. Bailie’s computer… “I liked the boundaries here… I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to stay in my room a month and write a book.” [NYT]

Here’s an excerpt from the rough draft of the novel he wrote while on the hamster wheel:

“Here, check this out.” Cyrus clicked on a couple of pull down menus. “This sorts into gender. It compares violence against male body parts to violence against female body parts and plots them both against hits. Do you see?… It’s the violence against women that’s really getting us our customers…

“One thing we found that’s strange is this. Violence against dicks. Our readers don’t like that. You cut off balls, interest falls through the floor. You cut off the dick, and man, you lose the whole fucking stadium. There is silence out there.

“Our characters get to keep their dicks,” Cyrus said. “Unless they’re black or brown.”

Here’s Anna on National Novel Writing Month. For speed writing, few compare to the prolific Robert Louis Stevenson, who supposedly wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in under a week while binging on cocaine. (I assume he believed in method writing.)

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Turn your head and cough

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The United States and the UK always seem to be trading the hottest new trends. Could the following be one of them? The Telegraph reports:

The traditional image of the British family doctor as a serious, besuited white middle-aged man is out of date. As far as patients are concerned, the ‘perfect’ general practitioner is his polar opposite: young, female and Asian.

A study of hundreds of patients, which asked them to rate doctors on a scale of one to five for perceived expertise, put women doctors – both white and Asian – first in almost all categories, while white, male doctors over the age of 50 languished near the bottom.

Female doctors under the age of 35 were judged to have a preferable personal manner, superior technical skills and superior powers of description.

Patients also stated that they felt more at ease with young, female doctors giving physical examinations, were more likely to have faith in their diagnoses, and were more likely to follow their medical advice and prescribed treatment.

See, I just don’t know about this trend for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about young female Asian doctors in general, I just think I’d be too embarrassed though. Plus I am strange when it comes to finding the right doctor. When I lived in Houston, after weeks of searching for a general practitioner, I ended up selecting a doctor with the same first and last name as me (not an easy task) except his last name ended in a “y” instead of an “i.” Given that fact, I found it strange that the receptionist asked if we were related.

“It could be a ‘halo’ effect: if somebody likes the look of one aspect of you, such as your looks, they will rate you highly across other areas too.”

The study, called “What’s In a Face” and to be published in a scientific journal called Patient Evaluation and Control, gave white male doctors over the age of 50 an average score of 40 out of 60. Young, white female doctors got 44 while young, Asian female doctors received 47.

Dr Rupal Shah, 31, from Pimlico in London, was taken aback to learn that she fitted the ”perfect” GP’s profile.

“How strange! I had always imagined that an older white male had the most authority. It’s very nice to hear, because I have sometimes felt that people look at me and think: ‘Gosh, she’s a bit young. Does she really know what she’s talking about?'”

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