How very karmic. Our chikna brother Turbanhead is relaunching his highly graphic, Bollykitschy blog today. The new version has all the greatest hits, but redesigned and with comments finally turned on again. Mosey on over and update your feeds (RSS).
Don’t miss his cheeky felicitations on our one-year anniversary.
 ‘… the highest ideals of the human race: satyam shivam sundaram.’ ‘A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East… May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed… ‘The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. ‘… no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action… All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India.’ |
 ‘… even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vaishnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis, and so on… Indeed, if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long, long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this. ‘Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any region or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.’ |
Boys, the era of “uh-huh” is over and you have one of your own to thank for it {Thanks, Srinath + Anon}.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people — on a scale of 0 to 100 percent — on how engaged they are in a conversation.
Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master’s degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts.
HA. You’re all busted. No more mindlessly muttering, “uh-huh…yup…wow.. .huh” while your significant other chatters on– the Jerk-O-Meter is listening! Thanks to the magic of mathematical algorithms, the program can measure stress levels, how often one speaks and how empathetic a person’s voice sounds…if it doesn’t hear dulcet tones, the Jerk-O-Meter admonishes users to be nicer via pop-up messages on their phones. This isn’t all bad news, though. The Jerk-O-Meter could be a boon to the back, since its use could prevent a night spent on the couch.
“Think of a situation where you could actually prevent an argument,” he said. “Just having this device can make people more attentive because they know they’re being monitored.”
A penguin was involved:
The prototype version of the program runs in Linux on a phone plugged into Voice over Internet service. Once the Jerk-O-Meter is completed, in six months or so, Madan envisions selling it as software that could be downloaded off the Internet — a potentially useful tool for focus groups, telemarketers and salesmen.
Pish posh. It’s such a useful tool, it’s going to become a best-seller with pissed off girlfriends, trust me. 😉 Continue reading
William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:
It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…
As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…
In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…
When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”
It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:
Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience – they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…
… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…
May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere. The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:
Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques.
In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.
A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.
Wicked! It’s like Franken-food. Oh come on. You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too. The Guardian has more:
According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.
Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.
Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.
Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.
Kuldip Nayar (long time advocate for the victims of the 1984 pogroms) reviews the Nanavati Commission report and finds that it does not go far enough:
I find that the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission Report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is not a fair document. The judge traces events more or less accurately, yet he does not come to the obvious conclusion.He goes as far as to say: “The systematic manner” in which the Sikhs were killed indicated that “the attacks on them were organised”. But he holds back when, as a judge, he should have gone further to probe who organised these systematic attacks. [cite]
Nayar illustrates how Nanavati illuminates the role of powerful political actors in setting the 1984 Delhi pogroms into motion, but he does not inquire as to who these political actors were.
Nanavati says there is evidence to show that on October 31, 1984, the day Mrs Gandhi was killed, “either meetings were held or the persons who could organise attacks were contacted and were given instructions to kill Sikhs and loot their houses and shops.” Nanavati also says that attacks were made “without much fear of the police, almost suggesting that they were assured that they would not be harmed while committing those acts and even thereafter.”
On that command, hundreds of people went to the streets of Delhi with weapons and inflammable material like kerosene oil, petrol and white powder. According to the Nanavati report, “the male members of Sikh community were taken out of their houses. They were beaten first and then burnt alive in a systematic manner. In some cases tyres were put around their necks and then they were set on fire by pouring kerosene oil or petrol over them.”
Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Dharam Dutt Shastri, named by Nanavati, could only be operators. At worst, they could have conveyed instructions. But who gave the instructions? Who were the ones who did it? Where did they gather to hatch the plan? Who were these shadowy figures, behind-the-scenes, confident that their instructions would be carried out? [cite]
The NYT smiles upon Mangal Pandey: The Rising:
“Mangal Pandey: The Rising” … [has] important messages about global trade, corruption and martyrdom… the film takes you somewhere, teaches you something and inspires smiles in a way that few retellings of the anti-imperialist revolts of 19th-century India ever have before…
The crux of the epic is Mangal’s on-again, off-again alliance with a Glaswegian military officer who is in the employ of the East India Company… They both comprehend the fraud that the mercantile class perpetrates, and they both abhor the bigoted ugliness embodied in one British soldier who indulges in prostitutes and lies about it in polite company, who uses the power he has over servants to unleash some deep-seated cruelty…
At times, the racial hatred seems rabid and cartoonish, the political discussions of the opium trade become preachy, and the romance feels more like a cause for dance-offs… But the movie meets its grand incongruous aims with the exaggerated smiles and scowls of two gifted principal actors.
The camera drinks in gorgeous landscapes and trawls through high-end bordellos… [Pandey’s] biography is the basis for this spectacle of splash and meaning… “Mangal Pandey” proves that warfare mixed with winking sexpots can be a bloody good show. [Link]
I enjoyed the movie, will post a review later. The Friday late show in Times Square was completely sold out. Lines of dejected buskers tried to buy spare tickets off showgoers. The last time I saw that was with Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, and never before in Manhattan.
Some time ago we posted about a young woman, Pia Awal, who needed a bone marrow donor to fight her leukemia. A 20-year-old Pakistani woman from London matched and saved her life.
Awal and her fiancé, Apratim Dutta, just had their long-delayed wedding. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through in the meantime. The NYT reports:
On June 30, 2002, Mr. Dutta’s 31st birthday, Ms. Awal was feeling feverish and bone tired. They went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, expecting that she would be given some antibiotics for the flu… she was found to have acute myelogenous leukemia…
… weeks before their July engagement party, Ms. Awal’s doctor said the leukemia had returned… Mr. Dutta began searching for a South Asian donor whose white blood cells were a genetic match for Ms. Awal. He started a Web site, matchpia.org, to find donors. He made a DVD about Ms. Awal’s situation and tried to get television stations to broadcast it. Finally, through an international donor registry, they found a match in a 20-year-old Pakistani woman living in London.
Mr. Dutta, who loves steaks and red wine, began to eat vegetarian meals with Ms. Awal… As part of her recovery this time, she started eating meat, which gave her the sense of being fully fused with Mr. Dutta…
They were finally married on July 30 in Manhattan at the Tribeca Rooftop… Ms. Awal, who cannot have children because she has had so much chemotherapy, is working on a children’s book about cancer.
Congrats to the newlywed couple.
Click here to add yourself to the South Asian bone marrow registry. There are several booths at India Day parades in the next ten days. In NYC, go to 27th & Madison on Sunday, Aug. 21, from 12-6pm for a simple, painless blood test.
Some desi guy posted a hilarious rant to Craigslist on dealing with suspicious looks from fellow passengers while riding the DC metro (thanks, midnight toker):
… after the London subway bombings, i have been getting “the look” on public transportation and at airports. To put it mildly, my days of picking up girls on a plane are over…
I don’t have an accent, a dot or a large cobra wrapped around my head (except on Tuesdays). I’m your typical poser hipster Indian living in DC, trying to get my hands on as much smoke, beer and ass as i can. But step on the metro… and suddenly i transform into Allah-kazam bin Laden…
… open your book bag at least 3 times. As soon as you reach for the bag, look at their reactions. Kodak moments all over the place.
My dream is to go on a plane, act crazy suspicious… basically inviting some white folk to beat the shit out of me. Then when they open my bags, it will be full of Bibles and medicine for sick children. Then i’ll sue all the muthafuckers and go live on some island with all my money and broken bones. Now that’s the American dream.
… i gotta deal with this bullshit everyday on the metro… It’s not even a cool subway like NYC or in Paris. The lame ass DC metro.
The DC metro reminds me of BART. The New York subway is to DC’s what a fastback is to a station wagon: it isn’t wide and cushy, but it’s a hell of a lot faster.
Read the whole thing. See Anna’s related post here.
Standup comic Aziz Ansari recently did a sketch about how the ‘gasam blew him off at her Knitting Factory show. He re-enacts several far-fetched scenarios about what he wishes had happened instead:
M.I.A.: ‘Actually, I have a lot of experience with hard disk recoveries on Macs…’ (Lowers eyes seductively) ‘Maybe tomorrow I could come by your place…’
It’s a cute schtick, but overly long as a video. On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard Tamil spoken in a comedy sketch and the first time I’ve seen a tall, pasty white guy stand in for Aziz’ ‘Sri Lankan princess’ 
Does Ansari merely want to jump M.I.A.’s bones, or is it also a great publicity gimmick? I surrender. Watch the low-budget video. Here’s the site.
