Monthly Archives: February 2006

Warm, wet, and bubbly

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Yesterday my favorite Canadian blogger posted about a pretty hot German-based band with a lead singer who shares a couple similarities with you-know-who but, in my humble opinion, may in fact be better. The band is Jahcoozi:

This hype Berlin-based trio is made up of MC and singer Sasha Perera (London), bassman Oren Gerlitz (Tel Aviv) and Robot Koch (Berlin) on laptop and drums. From their My Space page: “Blip hop, ragga-tech, RnB punk, click pop illectronica? Pop? A Shakespeare’s Sister – Neptunes collabo?!!” Definitely a band of roughians to watch out for. ‘Half [Pure] Breed Mongrel’ comes as a surprise to me because I didn’t know what to expect on first listen, my only previous experience being Sacha Perera’s appearance on the Modeselektor album (on ‘Silikon’). This new platter has some crazy fire on it that can clearly translate into big things on a live stage. While the beats are supremely dancefloor-friendly the ‘tude is not for the pop-hearted. It reeks satire from the first track (‘Black Barbie’) which makes the album a blast to listen to. ‘Asian Bride Magazine’ is deffo a personal fav (how could it not be?) and had me grinning from ear to ear: “Thank you, L’Oréal, now there’s products for us/Daily use gonna help us to pretend that we’re high caste/ Bleach our skin, lighten our moustache.”

Perera is Londoner of Sri Lankan origin and yes she does do the whole raggamuffin bit with her voice but the comparison to M.I.A. ends there. Unlike Mizz Maya (‘Sunshowers’ chorus anyone?), this lady can really sing. Though the Modeselektor track made it hard to avoid drawing similarities, with this album it becomes clear that Perera is in a league of her own when it comes to her wonderfully husky vocal capability. More like the other major ‘M’ in my life, Missy, in sound. Jahcoozi has made a great debut both in the full-length world and in my hungry ears (I know it came out last year, smartass). [Link]

Like Neha, my favorite track on Pure Breed Mongrel was also Asian Bride Magazine. I am sure many of our female readers will dig the lyrics as well. I also liked the song The Bouncer Who Turned Good for its name alone (in my head I just substituted “blogger” for “bouncer”). The best way to describe Sasha’s voice is to imagine if Tricky and M.I.A. had a lovechild. You can listen to most of Jahcoozi’s Pure Breed Mongrel album by clicking on the songs in the left-hand column here.

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The state of union

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In Jharkand, saffronists have hit upon a new way of ‘encouraging’ marriage: shotgun (or, in this case, lathi stick) weddings. But raksha bandhan is months away:

Hindu right-wing activists in Jharkhand claimed to have married off five romancing couples on Valentine’s Day Tuesday, saying they were celebrating the day even though it was against Indian culture… At the rock garden, three couples were spotted. Two of them were made to move around a banyan tree and take an oath of marriage – in a symbolic wedding…

Activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) even forced a couple to tie the symbolic brother-sister thread of rakhi when they refused to get married. [Link]

Some students were flippant about it:

The move is now being welcomed by courting couples, who are thanking the moral police for adding velocity to Cupid’s arrows. “It is indeed good news. We must thank them for being concerned about our marriages,” said Ruchika, a student of a management institute in this Jharkhand capital. “My parents will finally come to know about my love.”

Priya, an engineering student, echoed similar sentiments, saying: “I hope they stick to their word and ensure my marriage with my boyfriend…” [Link]

But the saffronists couldn’t even stay consistent:

… even Saamna, the [Shiv] Sena’s mouthpiece, could not resist cashing in on the spirit of love by publishing an article on possible gifts to buy your beloved today. [Link]

In Delhi and Srinagar, more political theater, yawn. Funny how the saffronists are a mirror image of Muslim fundamentalists:

About 50 Hindu activists wearing holy saffron-coloured scarves held a noisy protest in a popular market near the Delhi University campus… They burnt greeting cards which they were carrying and shouted “Down with Valentine’s Day”. [Link]

About two dozen women separatists, veiled in black from head to toe, rummaged shops and burnt Valentine’s Day cards in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital… “Valentine’s Day spreads immorality among the youth,” Asiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughters of the Muslim Faith), a group of women separatists, said in a statement. [Link]

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Fasting, feasting

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On this unholiest of days, I thought I’d share 2.0 passages about coupling from 1.5-gen books. Lavanya Sankaran takes joy in the idea that dilly-dallying men deserve what they get in The Red Carpet:

And certainly, a convent-educated accent was an asset… This involved, primarily, keeping our knees together… Innocent of the depredations of Man (or Boy), at least until their parental duty was done. Delivered, one girl, unsullied, to the marital bed. Her price far above rubies…

For a decade, it seemed, [the bachelors] had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticate-mes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’t-love-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them…

All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement… these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated. [Link]

In Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s East Village/Karachi romance ends more happily:

I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly)…

The scene is the East Village, a little before midnight, on the steps of a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A. The date is important… Halloween… So there I am, trudging up the steps… when I see this cute desi guy in a white shirt and black trousers, looking ridiculously out of place but very comfortable at the same time… He catches my eye as I pass and says “Hi,” but I ignore him, because the last thing I want to deal with tonight is some conservative boy from the homeland with nothing to say…

But at some point (you saw this coming) I find myself on the fire escape with the brown boy I’d seen before. We’re dancing, just the two of us, and his name is Ozi and he’s wickedly sexy, and what the hell, we spend the night together…

He proposed during a snowstorm in March, looking cold as only a Pakistani man in America can… Before I knew it, I was showing him off at South Asian Student Association parties, enjoying the horrified jealousy on the faces of my prim and proper colleagues. Yes, Mumtaz, that slut, had bagged herself a prince, which meant there was one less out there for them…

The summer after we graduated… we were married in Karachi by the sea. [Link]

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A Rouge Affair

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I know that L.A. area mutineers have been pushing for a SM meet-up. I admit that I am a horrible host and haven’t been able to step up to the plate as of yet. I am in the middle of grad-school hell right now as my research has been getting some attention in the press of late, otherwise I’d be all about the meet-up. In the meantime let me draw your attention to Artwallah’s kick-off/benefit party this Thursday night. I will certainly be there and so should you:

Dance, Drink and Revel with DJs and Visual Artists for our first ArtWallah Event of 2006, this Thursday, February 16th !

Come paint the town red…
Venue: Fais Do Do
Address: 5257 West Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016
Time: Doors open at 9:30 pm
Tickets: $13 in Advance at www.groovetickets.com
$18 at the door, $15 if you wear red

Music by:
Tej Gill – “Regarded as one of the original South Asian DJ’s in L.A., TejGill brings together Electronic Dance Music and Classical Indian Rhythms to create enigmatic DJ sets. You can find out more as well as hear samples from “The Message” – a limited edition E.P., at www.GillometerMusic.com.”

Gabe Abraham – Gabe Abraham founded didJital as a vehicle for sharing the Asian Massive and world electronica movement with Los Angeles, bringing internationally known artists such as Cheb i Sabbah, Karsh Kale, and Banco de Gaia to the nightclub scene. Part Indian himself, it was a natural progression for him to hear traditional South Asian sounds fused with electronic beats.
www.didjital.com/sounds.html (check out the world groove mix)
www.cirqueberzerk.com

RokFresh: Whets the palate and warms the dancefloor with sultry rhythms and soul creating a loungey vibe of electronica and down tempo, mixing multiple genres of music.

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No Ice Please

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One stereotypical but reliable way to distinguish a FOB from an ABCD is their attitude towards ice. Whereas an ABCD will load their drinks cup up with ice before filling it, a FOB will (usually) leave their cup entirely devoid of crushed frozen water.

Mmmmm … bacteria!

To some extent this is about thrift – why pay for ice when you could be getting more coke – but largely this is a vestigial health mechanism, left over from a childhood in a third world country where ice was unsanitary and teeming with dangerous bacteria. In the USA, it’s superstition, plain and simple.

Or is it? A 7th grader in Tampa Florida decided to compare the bacteria in the ice at a fastfood restaurant to the bacteria in its toilets. Her findings:

Roberts set out to test her hypothesis, selecting five fast food restaurants, within a ten-mile radius of the University of South Florida. Roberts says at each restaurant she flushed the toilet once, the[n] used sterile gloves to gather samples. Roberts also collected ice from soda fountains inside the five fast food restaurants. She also asked for cups of ice at the same restaurant’s drive thru windows.

Jasmine Roberts: “I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant’s contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant’s toilet water…” [Link]

Note that the ice is not necessarily more unsanitary than the toilet water because bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, bacteria in yogurt is good for you. Most types of bacteria are benign and the ice in question probably has high levels of harmless bacteria in it. Toilet water may have lower levels of aggregate bacteria (because they are regularly disinfected) but still higher levels of unhealthy bacteria, so you don’t want to start emulating your dog just yet.

In short, her study is far from an argument that fast food ice is unhealthy. Still, I suspect that the ice at a fast food restaurant probably is kinda gross (via Boing Boing).

Related Posts: How to befriend a vegetarian

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Temple Lady says…

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In King Kong, a powerful ape crosses the sea to rescue a beautiful woman held by his enemy on an island. He enters the capital city, leaping to great heights and leaving destruction in his wake. Where have I heard this before?

Could it be… Ravana?

In the 1933 movie, King Kong varied noticeably in height. At different times, he might be as small as twenty feet, or, in the city, as tall as fifty. [Link]

He could grow as big or as small as he wished… Hanuman grew tall and mighty and with one giant leap began to fly through the clouds to the walled city on the island. [Link]


And check out this issue of The Incredible Hulk. A buff, loincloth-clad beast with the initial ‘H’ leaps back to the mainland to return to his leader. Well, isn’t that special?


I’m accepting royalties on behalf of sage Valmiki. You can send checks to my home address.

Related posts: Yeti kitsch, My Thais, ‘Sita Sings the Blues’

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Some Hate, Some Don’t?

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As an update to Manish’s post below, I opened today’s Washington Post, surprised to find this item in the Names and Faces column – – DC’s answer, if there is one, to New York Post’s Page 6.

A Bollywood Love Connection

Two of Bollywood’s brightest stars, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan, are planning to wed, and according to the Times of India, astrologers say they are a perfect match. Rai, 32, is one of Bollywood’s most recognizable ladies, a former Miss India who starred in the movie “Bride & Prejudice.” Bachchan, 30, is the son of legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan. The couple have been in the news with a series of high-profile relationships — Rai dated heartthrob Salman Khan and actor Vivek Oberoi, and Bachchan was previously engaged to actress Karisma Kapoor .

It’s telling that speculation regarding two Bollywood stars is making its way into a mainstream American newspaper. Ten years ago, I would never have dreamed of finding an item on two Indian film stars in any newspaper, let alone one of the preeminent papers in the country. That national American dailies are detailing the sordid love lives of Indian film stars (with photos) is kind of groundbreaking and reflects not just a growing American interest in Bollywood and Indian cinema, but also that Bollywood is not just a fly-by night fad and here to stay. Sure the average American may have heard of, if not seen Aishwarya, but do they care, or even know who Salman Khan, Karisma Kapoor and Vivek Oberoi are? I think the Washington Post is encouraging them to find out.

As an aside, sure Ash is TMBWITW, but the paper gets it wrong. Ash was never Miss India, but instead a Miss India runner-up in 1994, and subsequently went on to win the title of Miss World. The Miss India title that year (1994) went to Sushmita Sen, who subsequently became Miss Universe.

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Father figure

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First they tell us turmeric in food is good for your health. Now they tell us speaking more than one language protects against senility. By the time they tell us oversized, gold-rimmed aviator glasses are better than Viagra, we’ll all have turned into our fathers:

… Researchers are finding that bilingualism — be it in French, Greek, Portuguese or Hindi — has lifelong benefits.

“Does bilingualism protect you from cognitive decline? Every study we’ve done suggests that it does,” Prof. Bialystok said… while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower…

Brain-imaging research released this week shows that the physical inability to silence mental noise is key in making the elderly prone to distraction and poor multitaskers… the elderly lose the ability to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus on a task, and to turn down activity in inner brain regions that are most active when a person is in idle or default mode.

In contrast, the brain images of people between ages 20 and 30 displayed a far more dramatic see-saw effect activating and de-activating regions as they shifted out of idle to task. The study found this pattern begins to dull in middle age and actually results in cognitive deficits beyond age 60. [Link]

Researchers say the only thing better than Dad is Gamer Dad, so fire up a Ramayana game and start swinging that priapic mace:

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable. [Link]

In 2000, a video game based on the Ramayana legend won Thailand’s national game software competition… The prize-winning game portrays several wars between King Rama and Ravana… Rama and Laksman must successfully manoeuvre through four rounds of fight in order to rescue Sita.

The Thai threesome turned to the epic Ramakien, as the Thai version is called, for its unmatched fighting scenes and more than fifty interesting human and semi-human characters… [Link]

Related posts: My Thais, Haldi may help prevent Alzheimer’s

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Don’t drop the soap

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SM readers that have been with us since the beginning know that I am always inspired to blog about some unique topic after I have gone to get a haircut. In fact, one

The Sepia Redemption

of our readers insisted that I write a post after every visit to my barber. First, a bit of backstory for those of you unfamiliar with what I am talking about. I LOVE my local barbershop. I can honestly say that when I leave here in one year, my barbershop is among the top three things I will miss most about L.A. You see, my whole life, hair “specialists” have messed up my hair which is very thick and very straight. Most novices attack it with a blind fury, just wanting to get it over with while copping the occasional feel and commenting on its softness. The barbers at this shop however, take one whole hour cutting my hair. This is impressive when you consider the fact that I usually get a military-short haircut. But as much as the haircut, I really like the barbers at this shop. Quite a few are ex-southside Latino gang members and they often talk to me about gang culture. They have totally welcomed me with open arms, and even tell me all about the “b*tches” they be working, and describe to me the finer aspects of said “b*tches” anatomies. I listen so as not to be rude. Yesterday my barber and I had a riveting discussion about a topic that I had been thinking about just the day before. For the past two weeks there have been race riots in the California prison system. The Latino inmates and the Black inmates are at war, shanking each other left and right.

Jail officials in Los Angeles County separated black and Hispanic inmates, began transferring troublemakers and brought in clergy to try to restore peace after a week of racially charged brawls that they feared would continue to erupt through the weekend.

“It’s got momentum,” sheriff’s Chief Marc Klugman, who oversees the nation’s largest jail system, said yesterday. “They’re battle-hardened. They’re angry.”

Thousands of Hispanics and blacks clashed Feb. 4, and a black inmate was beaten to death, at the biggest jail at the Pitchess Detention Center, a 6,500-inmate complex outside the city limits. Brawls then broke out during the week at the two smaller jails at Pitchess. About 90 inmates have been injured. [Link]

My barber, who has spent time in the joint, broke it down for me: Latinos and Blacks try to kill each other. Whites usually join the Latinos because they don’t fit with the Blacks. Asian brothers get shanked unless they keep their heads down and stay among themselves. If the Koreans ever do business outside of K-town then they are dead on arrival. Even worse, if you are Latino or Black and don’t want to join in the violence, your own people will shank you for not standing up for your brothers. Now, I know what you are all thinking right now. So I asked for you:

“Ummm. What about the Indian brothers? Where do they fit in this system?”

“You guys? Yo, sorry bro but you guys get your ass passed around. You know what I mean”? Continue reading →

Why they hate Bollywood

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I recently debated the future of Bollywood among American desis with a couple of second genners who aren’t fans of the cinema. ‘Asoka’ thinks assimilation will make Bollywood irrelevant in the U.S. desi community, because the movies are poorly-written. I argue improvements in quality, distribution and filtering point to a bright future. The ever-reasoned ‘Birbal’ split the difference. Names have been changed to protect them from the Bollyfans who walk among us.

· · · · ·


‘Asoka’
Bollywood will vanish among desi Americans

“I‘ll bet you $20 it doesn’t change. U.S. desis, especially the new generations, are more assimilated. They (and I’m one of them) will never be into Bollywood. I view Bollywood as an example of the excesses and frivolity of our culture and not something I am interested in preserving for myself or my offspring. I can count the number of friends I have that like Bollywood films on one finger (men and women)… even the girls I know don’t like Bollywood, and I have as many if not more female friends than male friends.

“The U.S. model will never mimic the UK model unless we start forming ethnic ghettos here. If that happens then I think you’ll be right. What it comes down to is that most Bollywood stories suck by western standards. Production value means nothing when the best Bollywood film would be a C-list Western film.

“The reason that smart Bollywood commentary is lacking is because there isn’t much coming out of Bollywood that can be considered smart… The last Hindi film I saw was Mr. and Mrs Iyer, which I thought was decent. The last Bollywood film I saw was in India and Toral from The Apprentice was in it. I’ve seen Devdas and KKKG and thought they were so bad I wanted to rip my eyeballs out. The only Bollywood film I actually liked was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and by American movie standards it was just okay… Yes, if you are [non-desi] it is exotic and quaint…

“I go to [Indian film festivals]… they have some great Hindi language film and Tamil language films. I both enjoy them and would take my kids to see them someday. They are not, however, Bollywood films, which in my view tend to advocate materialism and shallowness, bigotry against other races, and bigotry in their representation of 2nd gen Indians living abroad. For those reasons I would not expose my children to Bollywood films.

“I still think it’s about the ghettos. We will see in 10 years. I think if you [polled] under-26 Sepia Mutiny readers, they [would] overwhelmingly be non-Bollywood watchers.”


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