Monthly Archives: August 2005

More than a Brimful

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My favorite quartet (yes, I have such a thing) will be dropping a new CD on August 23rd.  I first fell for the eclectic sounds of Kronos because of the soundtrack to the 1995 movie Heat.  SM tipster Niraj informs us that the group’s new album titled You’ve Stolen My Heart: Song’s from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood will feature Asha Bhosle.  Take a listen.

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From the fantastical land of India’s “Bollywood,” the world’s largest film industry, comes the music of the Kronos Quartet’s latest CD-a vibrant homage to the pre-eminent composer of classic Bollywood, Rahul Dev “R.D.” Burman. In more than 300 film scores, Burman entranced audiences with melodies steeped in intrigue, festooned with jewels, and stained with tears and henna-an eclecticism mirrored in ever-surprising combinations of Indian classical and folk music, swing jazz, psychedelic rock, circus music, can-can, mariachi, and more. You’ve Stolen My Heart finds Kronos in the eminent company of Bollywood playback singer Asha Bhosle, Burman’s wife and the most recorded artist in the world, who contributes new vocal performances to 8 of the CD’s 12 tracks. Inspired by the chameleonic spirits of Burman and Bhosle, Kronos ventures into novel instrumental territory on this disc-the first to be produced by quartet founder David Harrington-augmenting its acoustic sound with keyboards, gongs, cymbals, mouth percussion, and more. Kronos is also joined by longtime collaborators Zakir Hussain (tablas, trap drums) and Wu Man (Chinese pipa), completing this musical masala of eras and cultures.

1. Dum Maro Dum – Take Another Toke
2. Rishte Bante Hain – Relationships Grow Slowly
3. Mehbooba Mehbooba – Beloved, O Beloved
4. Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jwalao – Light a Match
5. Nodir Pare Utthchhe Dhnoa – Smoke Rises Across the River
6. Koi Aaya Aane Bhi De – If People Come
7. Mera Kuchh Saaman – Some of My Things
8. Saajan Kahan Jaoongi Main – Beloved, Where Would I Go?
9. Piya Tu Ab To Aaja – Lover, Come to Me Now
10. Dhanno Ki Aankhon – In Dhanno’s Eyes
11. Chura Liya Hai Tum Ne – You’ve Stolen My Heart
12. Saiyan Re Saiyan – My Lover Came Silently

Kronos will be playing in the UCLA Live concert series on Sat Sept. 24th in case anybody would like to go see them with me. Continue reading →

IIT Virginia

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A Ugandan politician came up with a novel scholarship scheme a couple of weeks ago (via chick pea):

A Ugandan member of parliament has pledged to reward [high school] girls for their chastity by paying their university fees if they are virgins when they leave school… Bbaale County MP Sulaiman Madada said any girl in his district who wanted to take part in the scheme aimed at promoting girls’ education would be given a gynecological examination by health workers to check they were virgins. [Link]

“We want to encourage people to be morally upright and not to go into early marriages,” Madada said, adding, “We also want girls to resist defilement. We do not want these girls to get exposed to AIDS…” [Link]

If ‘free schooling for virgins’ were extended to desis, it would rapidly bankrupt both the IITs and the MITs. But the program would hardly cost a paisa at certain art schools in Bombay, and even in Delhi it would get cheaper over time.

Of course, if you interrogated virginal high school students before handing out the money, you might find out why they want to go away to college in the first place 

Madada has not extended his offer to young men, because there is no medical examination to prove their virginity. [Link]

You don’t need a medical exam for that. Just ask if they blog.

Continue reading →

Pakistani Writers in English: A Question of Identity

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shamsie.jpg Soniah Kamal of Desilit Daily posts an essay by Muneeza Shamsie on Pakistani literature from the May 7 Dawn (no direct link). The article raises some questions for me about the nature of Pakistani literature, including the basic question of how to define it.

Shamsie has edited several anthologies of Pakistani literature, including one that is scheduled to come out this year (And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women; not yet listed). Muneeza Shamsie is also the mother of Kamila Shamsie (pictured right), who seems to be a bit of a prodigy, having published four novels by the age of 32.

I’m grateful to Muneeza Shamsie for offering a long list of Pakistani writers in English; some of them are names I was unfamiliar with. But there are also some things Shamsie does in her essay that I find to be puzzling. Continue reading →

Chai Egg Creams?

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The Grey Lady lets us know that desis have crossed a new frontier, with desi cooks infiltrating older ethnic food establishments in different parts of New York:

Exhibit A: the egg cream. For New Yorkers of a certain age, this was the nectar of a Jewish neighborhood, and Gem Spa was the drink’s sacred temple, certified as such by magazines and travel writers. Gem Spa is still there, still turning out egg creams at its narrow patch of a soda fountain in the East Village. But the person who owns the store and taught the staff to make this curious concoction of seltzer, milk and chocolate syrup is Ray Patel, a 62-year-old immigrant from Gujarat state in India.

He learned the recipe, including the secret stirring motions that create a frothy head resembling beaten egg whites, from the previous owner (Italian), who learned it from the old owner (Jewish).

“People try to learn new things in a land of opportunity,” is Mr. Patel’s elegant explanation for how an Indian came to make a drink that is considered exotic west of the Hudson River, let alone in Gujarat.

I’ll bet they wrote the same article 30 years ago when the guy behind the counter was Italian. Gujarat is now as exotic as Sicily used to be, so the story becomes interesting enough to retell. What they miss is how little has changed. The owner may be a bit darker, but he’s still named Ray.*

However, don’t look to Ray to spice up the old standards. Ray’s probably a purist,  but somewhere there is a young Jewish foodie who’s hybridizing the old Egg Creams with desi flavors. Cultural appropriation goes both ways. Continue reading →

Were the bombers BBCDs?

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Around half the British bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 were of Pakistani origin, the other half of African or Caribbean origin. The NYT now spins the Pakistani group as victims of cultural confusion:

“They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both…” They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward… they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has.

‘Give me mango lassi and aloo gobi in every grocery store, or give me death’ (which they actually have in the UK, bless Sainsbury’s little heart). The sale of desi exotica and Apu on The Simpsons irritate thin, sunlight-deprived snarkidesis into penning high-class rants on blogs, like the class nerd hitting the football star with a rubber band sneak attack and then running like a coward. But did Apu push the 7/7 murderers over the edge?

It’s pretty silly when you put it that way, of course. And the UK has one of the richest desi diasporic subcultures anywhere, so there’s no lack of musicians, movie stars and models for teens to identify with. Naturally, it’s not about cultural chiseling. IMO the Beeston milieu boils down to three factors: the reverse psychology of teen rebellion, the in-your-face racism of working-class Britain and standard-issue criminality. The perversity of rebelling by being more conservative than your parents is by far the strangest one.

The second gen is much more demanding of their rights as Britons than their immigrant parents who just want to keep their heads down and earn a paycheck:

The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain…Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years… Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. “When we came, we were like servants,” Mr. Hussain said…

The children of the immigrants have shed the servility, and passivity, of their parents, Mr. Hussain said. They want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. This inspires both pride and unease in him… Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. “They were very timid,” he said of the first wave.

Continue reading →