The LA Weekly journalist who attempted a Rang De Basanti review has apparently never used a film database in his life:
Veteran character actor Atoll Kukri (Chanting Bar) is equally impressive… The students, whose ranks include superstar Aimer Khan (Lagan)… [Link]
As fun as a ‘chanting bar’ sounds, he means Atul Kulkarni (Chandni Bar) and Aamir Khan (Lagaan). But the mistakes aren’t a language thing, they’re a sloppiness thing. He even gets the British lead’s name wrong:
… a group of slackers at Delhi University is hired by a British indie moviemaker (Alice Payton) to portray the heroes of the terrorist phase of the Indian independence movement… [author:] David Chute… [Link]
This quality review was brought to you by the Yeh Le Wickly’s Daoud Choot.
First of all, the key characteristic of terrorism is targeting civilians rather than military or political figures 
— unlike the miscreants in Iraq, Kashmir and Sri Lanka, the events of Indian independence covered in this film hardly qualify. And second, that’s Alice Patten, 25-year-old daughter of Chris Patten, the last British governor-general of Hong Kong:
… her father Chris Patten… had absolutely encouraged her to do the film. He told her it would be a life-affirming [experience]… [Link]Alice first drew world wide attention when she stood sobbing during the ceremonial British handover of Hong Kong… [Link]
… Prince Charles… was “really sweet” when he fixed her a stiff gin as Britannia sailed out of Hong Kong on June 30, 1997… I cannot resist reminding her of the lugubrious final moments of the handover of Hong Kong. The bagpipe droned, the rain poured down, the Patten girls sobbed. “Sssh!” says Alice. While Prince Charles and her father (with the help of a Vick’s inhaler) maintained dignified control and her mother achieved a certain composure, the girls did not. So the cameras focused on them, because their distress seemed best to capture the poignancy of the moment when the Royal yacht – and with it the British Empire – sailed out of Hong Kong harbour and into history. [Link]
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p>You can hear the Patten who’s still blond speak some pretty passable Hindi in this audio clip (skip to 5:30). But then, how hard is Hindi for someone who’s probably picked up Cantonese? We’re all just phreak phonemes, yo.
‘I probably speak Hindi in 75% of the film. I studied modern languages at university so luckily it wasn’t too difficult.’ [Link]
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p>Listen here for indecipherable Canto-pop swooning over the younger Patten.
Alice… was, while still in her teens, such a well-known figure in Hong Kong that a shrine was set up on the internet, in her honour, when she left. [Link]
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p>There’s no way a single Geocities page qualifies as a shrine. Not even if you put ‘shrine’ in the title. Ironically, Patten Sr. has not only run an outpost in an empire, he’s also been caviling about another:
… their father [has] recently, in his role as European External Relations Commissioner, attacked Bush’s “axis of evil” pronouncements. [Link]… he reproached the White House for pursuing narrow self-interest and “imposing her will unilaterally” on everybody else, citing refusal to sign the Kyoto accords on global warming, the landmine treaty and the International Criminal Court. As for President Bush’s axis of evil speech, he dismissed it as “absolutist and simplistic” to speak of Iraq, Iran and North Korea in the same breath…
“He’s always blaming Israel for everything that happens, always demanding that Israel has to make the concessions,” said one, describing him as Israel’s No 1 EU enemy. [Link]
So the daughter of a British imperialist plays a revolutionary. Meanwhile Lord Patten himself is off on his high horse (or what passes for such in Brussels) slamming imperial arrogance.
Here, have a thick slice of irony. And crow.
Love the “Engrish for boys and girls” pic. Good stuff.
Ain’t (Lord) Chris Patten head of Oxford or something? Or is it a different Lord?
OUCH!!
okay…double ouch! That’s just wrong….”terrorist” phase?? Hasn’t LA Weekly heard of fact checking?
i remember ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ over how hot she was back then during the ceremonies. even posted on usenet in soc.culture.china about it.
as for patten, i believe he is part of the ‘wet’ faction of tories, so his imperialism was always a bit mitigated i suspect.
is it a legacy of colonialism that i think she’s really hot, and the thought of her crying makes me go all awwwww?
I dunno, she looks like her dad.
maybe you’re overlooking certain features that make her much cuter
Men of a certain age have those too.
yeah but those kind have no evolutionary advantage so they’re not the kind that impress (ask razib)
She fills out that red number superbly
sorry for the raging sexism
Love the “Engrish for boys and girls” pic. Good stuff.
yeah, i like that too. must be time for more sardar posts. some folks are begining to hallucinate here. thank god getty images posted more monty pansesar pics.
monty delish panesar. he fills out his cricket uniform RATHER nicely. 😉
is it a legacy of colonialism that i think she’s really hot, and the thought of her crying makes me go all awwwww?
hangovers will make one thinking go a tad wonky. bu aamir looks pretty good in a muzzie. then again, so does atul. in other unralted wierd news, just saw will smith will be on indian idol.
i amdit, i like indian idol.
I seriously doubt that the errors in the review were made by David Chute, more likely an LA Weekly editor messed up stuff he had written correctly . He is one of the more prolific non desi writers about bollywood. Hes got links to a number of his bollywood articles here. . A very cool article on the Big B here , An excellent article on Tamils Cinemas big trio Mani Ratnam, AR Rahman , and Kamal Hassan here .
Found his blog, he blames it on the LA Weekly Spell check program
Atoll Kukri and Aimer Khan… Ah the perils of having multiple syllables in one’s name.. (Speaking from experience)
same guy
So much for TOI bashing, with all the ads laweekly looks like TOI too, atleast there are no pop-ups.
Manish,
Psst, like someone said before this is not the sloppiness of the Journo, but his lousy/uninformed editor. If you write – atul kulkarni aamir khan chandni – in MS word and accept the first “suggested” spelling, you get the Engrish words 🙂
But, what the hell, lets make fun of the journalist anyway.
-ParAnd
AD, if the mentioned link is to be taken as a representative example of his work, then i am not too impressed. The article has all the cliched mistakes common to a non-desi viewer of Indian cinema and the research seems to be incomplete. The recent article profiled here on Sepia has the more obvious mistakes, since its the names that have been mangled. But this older article has similar spelling mistakes, but less obvious that they are not really visible unless you are Tamil and familiar with the movies and the personalities mentioned.
For example:
and
My grouse with the first passage is with the literal translations of the names and in case of the second passage, he has used the word “terrorist”. If you are not familiar with the Mani Ratnam’s Mouna Ragam, the character played by the actor Karthik is not a terrorist, but just a leftist activist. To me that’s a huge difference and points more to incomplete research than anything else.
Paranoid Android,
Yes, you’re absolutely right! I just tried reproducing the experiment and “atul kulkarni aamir khan chandni” does indeed get transmogrified via standard MS Word spell-check into “atoll kukri aimer khan chanting”. Brilliant! I’m curious, now, whether journalists for this periodical are supposed to tag non-english words appropriately so they don’t get substituted — the answer would indicate whether the onus was on the journalist to tag these words for omission from editing or whether the onus was on the editor to spend the time to grasp the context.
Also, I wonder if this spelling gaffe is not the start of a torrent of similar goofs to come. This might be a recurring pattern growing in severity amid advancing globalization. I think demand for incorporating alien words — with which the editors and readers are equally unfamiliar — outpaces, even with podcasting and all the other ways to emanate information, the supply of information from those competent to use these words. Moreover, I think the psychological and social repercussions of a misstep in the U.S. involving non-english, non-french, non-italian, and non-german languages is vastly meeker than an equal misstep involving english, french, italian, or german. I do not believe malice or intended apathy is the reason. Instead, I think the same problem preventing Japan from properly employing English are surfacing in the U.S. The problem is a lack of a noticeably large – and integrated – community which has already mastered the language. Japan’s solution is to increase the rigor of their English classes, importing teachers from the U.S. when needed. Since the U.S. has fairly large and diverse immigration, and since our public schools do not offer languages outside latin, spanish, french, italian, and german, our solution is more likely to leverage immigrants and less likely to rely on public schools.
Cheers, thoreaulylazy
Pattie , we get it already…you think sardars are hot. GeezLouise.
thoreauly dude,
That was pretty heavy stuff. If the written matter goes beyond 20 words in a sentence, my ADA kicks in. j/k i dont think this will start a cascade effect, but I hope it does, just for the sake of some comic relief.
-ParAnd
Pattie , we get it already…you think sardars are hot. GeezLouise.
oh, well..some of us are sick of the dumb goris everyone’s wanting to boff off, so fair’s fair and all for the share. equal rights.