Monthly Archives: August 2005

“Amma is unharmed.”

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mata.jpg

Mata Amritanandamayi, the world-famous “hugging saint” whose charitable trust runs schools and hospitals all over the world, is safe after being attacked yesterday by an unidentified assailant. The attempted stabbing occurred in the Kollam district of Kerala, where the spiritual leader is based.

Reports say her followers wrestled the attacker on to the ground before he could reach the stage where she was leading prayers for 18,000 people.[BBC]

Two of the disciples who rushed to protect their leader experienced minor injuries.

Mata Amritanandamayi, (“Mother of Absolute Bliss”) or “Amma” as she is sometimes called cautioned against revenge:

Ms Amritanandamayi said on Monday she wanted her followers to forgive the attacker.
“All those who are born will die one day. I am going ahead keeping this reality in mind,” she said.
“I will carry on. I will continue to give darshan to the devotees coming here to meet me. I don’t want my [followers] to create any problem for what had happened yesterday.”[BBC]

Hail Lucifer?

The Indian Express newspaper said the attacker may have been a follower who was expelled recently.[BBC]

The spiritual leader’s website had this statement:

August 21, 2005 – Latest News from Amritapuri
Amma is unharmed. She is giving Devi Bhava darshan now. Stranger with a hidden knife rushes to the stage during Amma’s bhajans. Devotees overpowered him and have handed him over to the police. None of today’s Devi Bhava programs were interrupted by this incident.

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India daze

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On IST as always, NYC’s India Day parade was held on August 21 this year. I couldn’t attend, but I hear one of our readers played the nauch girl on stage. Perhaps you’ll chime in with incriminating photos.

Like the Poe toaster, only sans macabre, some mystery soul always garlands the Gandhi statue in Union Square with fresh flowers:

For over 50 years since 1949, on the night marking the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious man-in-black has entered the cemetery where the master of the macabre lies buried, and, making his way through the dark shadows to Poe’s grave, he places a partial bottle of expensive French cognac and three blood-red roses there, presumably as tokens of admiration and in tribute to the great author. This ritual completed, he then slips away into the night as quietly and as mysteriously as he came…

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Spy vs. spy

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The de Menezes case has turned murkier: the stakeout guys now blame the shooters for the mistake. The surveillance team noted that de Menezes did not look Ethiopian like their suspect. And the police say the undercover cops who trailed de Menezes onto the train would not have been there if they thought he was packing heat. So it’s still baffling why the shooters pulled the trigger.

… members of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into Stockwell underground station in London felt that he was not about to detonate a bomb, was not armed and was not acting suspiciously… The two teams have fallen out over the circumstances surrounding the incident, raising fresh questions about how the operation was handled. A police source said: ‘There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device…’

For the firearms officers involved in the death to avoid any legal action, they will have to state that they believed their lives and those of the passengers were in immediate danger. Such a view is unlikely to be supported by members of the surveillance unit. [Link]

When filling out your biodata, remember to replace ‘wheatish’ with ‘IC3’:

The first man who was supposed to identify the suspect admits that he was relieving himself behind a tree but saw enough of Mr de Menezes to tell commanders that he was an “IC1” — the description used for a white North European and nothing like Hussain Osman, the suspected Ethiopian-born bomb suspect awaiting extradition from Rome. [Link]

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Six degrees of Johnny Lever

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Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf are on the cover of the August-September 2005 issue of Audrey, the Asian-American women’s mag. My dream in life is to squeeze into the gap on the cover. Here’s the blurb:

‘Bollywood to Hollywood’: Indians & Indian Americans, like our cover girls Noureen DeWulf (left) and Navi Rawat, are poised to hit mainstream USA.

The story covers Shaista Usta, a Turkish and desi actress who starred in a recent Dev Anand movie, as well as the usual suspects (Gurinder Chadha, Gitesh Pandya). Rawat explains the numb3rs: looking unplaceably ethnic is far more useful in Hollywood than looking desi. On the other hand, Pandya says he’s happy that after 9/11, there are lots of roles for desis playing terrorists.

DeWulf talks about playing a Palestinian in West Bank Story, a film which played Sundance, and being of Indian Muslim origin. She’ll play ‘PooPoo’ with a desi accent in National Lampoon’s Pledge This. She’s also in American Dreamz, an upcoming movie with an intriguing cast: it includes John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog). Guess what she plays? No, really, take a wild guess.

Hollywood producers of the black comedy American Dreamz are reconsidering the script after the London attacks because it involves suicide bombers attempting to assassinate the American president. The film, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, features a group of Pakistani terrorists, who target a mentally frail president played by Quaid… The script has been written by Paul Weitz, who previously worked with Grant on the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. [Link]

Marcia Gay Harden plays the First Lady while the supporting cast finds room for the likes of Chris Klein, Richard Dreyfuss and Willem Dafoe. [Link]

Aghdashloo, the throaty-voiced Iranian-American GMILF who was so good in Sand and Fog, is also playing Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men 3:

… she’s been cast by Ratner and co. as Dr Kavita Rao. This is the woman who, in recent X-Lore, created the Hope serum, which tried to ‘cure’ a mutant of their powers. It obviously set up a huge ethical and moral dilemma among the mutant community, and didn’t go down well with Hank McCoy, or The Beast as he is perhaps better known (this role has been filled by Kelsey Grammer). [Link]

Playing six degrees of Johnny Lever, we find that Rawat and Aghdashloo were both in Sand and Fog, Rawat playing Aghdashloo’s Iranian daughter (and for that matter, Sir Krishna Kingsley playing the father). Now Aghdashloo is repaying the compliment.

And so the circle is complete.

Previous posts on Rawat: 1, 2, 3; and DeWulf.

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Reason #35213 Indian Kids are so Freakishly Smart

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Express India reports –

New Delhi, August 18: A teacher stabbed a pencil into the head of a four-year-old after she caught him sleeping. An incision had to be made to remove a piece of lead from the boy’s head.

…The incident occurred when class teacher Kalpana Kumari found Anas, a student of Prep I, napping in class. She snatched his pencil and hit him on the head.

This passage brings to mind Maoist Chinese justice where the family of the condemned is charged for the bullet used to execute him –

…The family of the boy alleged that Green Field Convent School did not even provide first aid. Anas, the victim, lives with his aunt as his parents are at Moradabad.

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‘Oops!… I Did It Again’

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I hate to be the Celebrity Nazi, but this must not pass unremarked. We’ve noted the hackish tendencies of the Times of India web site before. Check out yesterday’s doozy (via Kush): the ToI’s photo implied that Britney Spears’ first husband was Jason Alexander, the rotund comedian who played George Costanza on Seinfeld.

Of course, the young rake they’re really after is Jason Allen Alexander of ‘I was Britney Spears’ love slave for 55 hours’ infamy.

“I never thought the wedding was a joke. I was serious about everything I said. But being married to Britney Spears was shit…” [Link]

Maybe the ToI should hire some of those call center people who watch American sitcoms all day. No fact-checking for you!

In other news, I was married to Carmen Electra for 55 hours. Uh, that’s Carmen Electra of Oskaloosa, Kansas

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‘The Aristocrats’

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The Aristocrats is a new documentary about a hoary inside joke in the informal guild of American stand-up comics. The joke, a fraternity-like test of wit and manhood, involves improvising as many deeply sick events you can imagine within the framework of a simple story. Most comics tell the joke only to other comedians. They often begin with incest and pedophilia, delve into scatology and bestiality and finish with a chaser of sadism and necrophilia. This joke doesn’t play in Peoria. The most fun thing about the movie is seeing George Carlin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey and Jason Alexander together on the same reel.

The documentary shows a female comedian doing a throwaway joke about desis. It goes something like this: ‘Maybe we could bring in an Indian guy. The slurpee kind, not the casino kind. He could sprinkle curry all over everyone, make them stink.’ The joke, which takes much more racist digs at blacks and Latinos, is purposely illustrating offensive comedy. The comedian is pointing out that for shock value, race is the new sex.

You’d think the racism joke would be the least memorable thing about a movie which catalogues all the variants of a deeply repellent story. But it was actually the only one in the entire movie that stood out to me as mean-spirited. It proved its point exactly: sex and cartoon violence don’t hold a candle to what happens in real life.

Update: Watch the trailer. Here’s a very filthy, NSFW South Park version of the joke (thanks, Project37). Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach.

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Really Stuck on Shiva

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Over in the tech world, a debate rages over the naming of Really Simple Syndication, a format which lets you subscribe to multiple blogs and receive regular updates. Some say its orange button is ugly, its acronym too geeky for your grandma to grok. They suggest the simpler word ‘subscribe’ or, perchance, ‘feed.’ Others say that people learn acronyms all the time: XP, BMW, CYA. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a blog editor and prefer non-technical terms.)

What few are saying is that the little saffron RSS button really freaks out millions of desis all over the Net. It’s the flip side of the cultural hijacking of the swastika, and the acronym makes it looks like a donation button for right-wing Hindus. Godse would be proud.

The Internet standards groups are getting ready to roll out their next proposal, Very High Performance. In retaliation, India has released its version, Konsistently Krunk Kaching 

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Boot camp for bad Indian boys

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In America, parents threaten truant kids with military school. Or so I learned from an excellent documentary called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But in desi America, the Hindustan Times informs me, they threaten them with banishment to dude ranches in the motherland:

The fees are exorbitant compared to regular schools, ranging from… $700 to $6,000 a year for Indian kids. NRIs pay almost double the amount. Some schools demand hefty down payments for admission in addition to the tuition charges… JIRS, constructed over 125 acres at a cost of Rs 72 crore, offers virtually every sports and games facility including cricket, astro-turf hockey fields, football fields, mini golf course, six tennis courts, a roller-skating rink, horse riding and compulsory micro-flight flying lessons…

Indian professionals abroad want their children to benefit from the same educational system that enabled them to compete with the best in world… “I don’t want snooty kids who think they are above the rest. I want them to learn about humanity, Gandhi and non-violence, about learning to create peace and harmony in the world…”

And horse riding, calculus by first grade, and getting beaten with a heavy ruler

Keval, Ankur and Raj are enrolled into the athletic, academic program at JIRS. Their day begins at five thirty in the morning with meditation and yoga and ends at ten in the night with prayers. One of them even told his mother, “We pray so many times through the day, there is hardly time to talk…”

It’s a Hindu madrassa!

Both his children, Sumit Munjal, 15 and Ronika Nirankari, 16 are in residential schools in Deheradoon and Missouri. Pal is very happy with the way his kids are turning out, “away from the bad influence of American classrooms, drugs, obscene clothes and unmanageable independence…” A beaming Pal declares that his daughter plays the harmonium, sings beautiful bhajans and learns Indian classical dance.

I know a few drill sergeant aunties who turn out kids exactly the same way. You can tell because their kids’ twitchy eyes are tapping out an S.O.S. They have a haunted look as if their souls are silently mouthing the words, ‘Get me out of here!’

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