So is anyone coming down to Texas for SXSW? An anonymous tipster with good taste in music points out that The Big Sleep (see also here), The Cassettes, Voxtrot, Swati Sharma, and Aziz Ansari will all be representing the brown.
Speaking of Aziz, as I am sure many of you heard, MTV (not MTV Desi) just gave him his own show titled:
Here is a little taste. You can check out more on their website.
Seems like that one time “Maverick” John McCain is falling like a rock (an old rock) in the way too early to matter polls. I still think that he would have won running away in ’08 if he had run as an Independent instead of sucking up to the Radical Right and the Bush administration. That ship has sailed, however. While hanging out at the National Review’s website (ahem…cough cough), I came across Ramesh Ponnuru’s cover story interview with McCain. Here is an excerpt:
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The “maverick” pose |
Sen. McCain: I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today.
Ponnuru (reading headline): “McCain firm on Iraq war. . .” (McCain flips the paper over.) “Despite cost to candidacy”: even better. . .
Sen. McCain: (Laughs) Yep. They’ve got a poll that says 33 percent are much less likely, and 11 percent somewhat less likely to [vote for me]
Ponnuru: So do you think that’s already been costing you? That that’s behind some of the slides in the polls?
Sen. McCain: First of all, I don’t know. But second of all, I can’t worry about it. You just can’t, with something like this you just can’t let it concern you. The issue is too important. The sacrifice that so many young Americans have made already pales in significance to any cost that it may mean to me. You’ve seen these wounded kids, you know how much they’ve given.
Ponnuru: But is the country prepared to give more? The Post had a story on the front page that people want a deadline.
Sen. McCain: Well, I think that it’s the job of people like me to explain to them what’s at stake here. It isn’t just Iraq. I really believe that chaos will ensue, genocide will take place, and unlike after we lost the Vietnam War when they didn’t want to follow us home, these people want to follow us home. I think what’s at stake here is this entire struggle we’re in — you know I hate to use the word war, because then you give people legitimacy as soldiers — but the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism.
And so for me to somehow trim my sails on an issue like this would be just a disservice to the nation. [Link]
By the way, as an interesting side note. This post I wrote when SM was first getting started accounts for a large chunk of visits to our site even still.
In the kitchen one recent morning…
“Anna! How are you?â€
“I’m well Asif, thank you for asking. And you?â€
“Ah…busy with _____, but you know how that is.â€
“Yes. That’s why I’m caffeinating.â€
“What you are drinking?â€
“Espresso concentrate and milk.â€
“Cold?â€
“Yeah. It’s good.â€
“Don’t you like tea?â€
“I do, but I’m more of a coffee drinker. It’s a South Indian thing.â€
“Where your parents are from?â€
“Kerala.â€
“Where that is?”
“Madras.”
“Ah, Madras. But you were born here.†Continue reading
Just when you thought the old geezer couldn’t possibly have any surprises left in the bag, Amitabh Bachchan has walked into a controversy for the part he plays in the new Ram Gopal Varma film Nishabd. 
The photo to the right says most of what you need to know. Big B. plays a 60 year old man who falls in love with his daughter’s eighteen-year old friend (played by newcomer Jiah Khan). He’s tortured about it, but it appears that nothing untoward happens between the two of them. Still, his wife finds out, and I gather from reviews that the film after intermission becomes a typical family melodrama — guilt, shame, etc. While the general scenario is roughly similar to Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the story is actually quite different: there’s no abduction, no marriage to and then murder of an inconvenient mother, and no insane cross-country chase involving witty pseudonyms. On the whole, the film seems to be an order of magnitude less twisted than Nabokov. (And that’s probably a relief.)
As for the quality of the film? Not great, by most accounts. (I haven’t seen it.) The best review I’ve seen is Baradwaj Rangan’s (via DesiPundit), and he is far from thrilled. He says Nishabd isn’t as good as Naach, which means it must be truly bad, since Naach was itself pretty crappy.
Congress government party officials in Uttar Pradesh want the film banned, on account of it being “against Indian values.” But does it really make sense to ban a film for flirting with a taboo — and not crossing it? We’re in strange territory here: somewhere between Minority Report and the Immaculate Conception. Anyway, it’s yet another example of a plea for censorship that is incoherent.
There has been a major protest in Allahabad over the film, where protesters have claimed the film is bringing in “Western values.” And here it might be noted that while Nishabd does seem to have a western feel for it, India does have a tradition of mature men and young women (or girls) getting together — it’s called child marriage. (That, incidentally, is a subject that the great V. Shantaram condemned some 70 years ago, in his film Duniya Na Maane. So this is not a new thing). Continue reading
Two years ago when Aishwarya was promoting Bride and Prejudice in the US, we were subjected to this idiocy on Oprah. (My favorite part of the interview: Do Indian women practice the Kama Sutra?)
Now Fox Searchlight provides us with a tongue-in-cheek promotional interview with Kal Penn on The Namesake. Although this clip is staged, something tells me that Kal will be fielding similar questions from media personalities in the coming weeks. According to IMDB, the film opens this Friday, March 9. Brace yourselves, I’m sure we’ll have fodder to blog about. Continue reading
Speaking of unhinged people in media, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention the train wreck that recently went down at San Francisco’s AsianWeek newspaper, where a complete idiot by the name of Kenneth Eng, 22 years of age, wet behind the ears, hot under the collar, too big for his britches and bats in his belfry, has been allowed to write a column called, interestingly, “God of the Universe,” in which he spewed moronic racist rants against white people, fellow Asian people, and Black and Latino people, apparently unchecked until his most recent gem blew the lid off the whole damn pot. Entitled, “Why I Hate Black People,” it explained, well, why Kenneth Eng hates black people. Though he also likes to call them Negroes. The column has been pulled and AsianWeek, which ran this guy’s infantile bloviations for a number of months, has now issued a pathetic, simpering apology, but the text has been preserved for posterity in various places on the interwebs. Here is a wee sample:
Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It is unbelievable that it took them that long to fight back. On the other hand, we slaughtered the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War.
You’ll find a link to a PDF of the whole thing here. Anyway, at the risk of over-extending this fool’s fifteen seconds of fame, I also wanted to draw your attention to his soapbox at Amazon, where he’s also peddling some really atrocious fantasy writing (there’s a link to excerpts on this page). He writes on his Amazon blog:
Let’s look at the muslim religion. They believe that music, dance, naked women and other such things are “indecent”. They think that some creature called “allah” will bring them peace, yadda, yadda, yadda. They think that if they bow every day, they will somehow be transported to a place called “heaven”, where everyone looks conspicuously human. I don’t know about you, but I masturbate all the time. It’s not going to affect me in any way, aside from making me need to take baths more often. And listening to O Fortuna will not make my head explode. Nor will spitting at every church I see make my intestines burst out of my abdomen.
Furthermore, most religious people I’ve met tend to be incredibly stupid/poor. They are usually black/hispanic immigrants who do not have the brains or the balls to understand science and thus resort to reading retarded stories about saviors and saints. (Oh, by the way, for those of you who want to scream at how “racist” I am for mentioning negroes and hispanics in such a way, go to someone who gives a sh*t).
OK, that’s enough of that. So what’s this AsianWeek anyway? Here’s a take from Neelanjana Banerjee, who was once a reporter and editor there. AsianWeek’s pitch to advertisers says the paper is aimed at “1.5, 2nd and 3rd generation Asian Americans” — basically the East Asian equivalent of a lot of y’all macacas reading this site. You’d think someone there would have had the sense to sever young Mr. Eng’s ties to the paper a long time ago. I’m all for free speech, but I’ve rarely seen a more compelling case for blacklisting (pun intended! ha ha Kenneth, I said blacklisting!) — or maybe just an good ol’ fashioned beatdown. Happy Friday everybody! Continue reading
Props to tipster Rajath, who overnight sent in a link to this extraordinary item (via Wonkette) on the blog of George Archibald, a journalist who worked for two decades at the Washington Times and clearly maintains close connections there, since he has the verbatim backstory on the paper’s recent series on female abortion in India. Now I know that gender selection in India (and in other countries, yes, yes) is a serious and real issue. And also, far be it from me to impugn the journalistic standards of the Washington Times, which as I’m sure you heroes know is the brave and patriotic alternative to that noted leftist, freedom-hating rag the Washington Post, but still, it seems that managing editor Fran Coombs has taken it to that other level:
The day before, there was a brief discussion on the foreign desk about a pending series by religion writer Julia Duin on the abortion of girls in India. The Times had expended a lot of money for Julia Duin and photographer Mary Calvert to travel to India to produce this series.
In the discussion with colleagues on The Washington Times foreign desk, editor Jones said: “The reason we are running this story is that Coombs thinks all the aborted girls means that Indian men will be immigrating to the United States to marry our girls.” That is an exact quote, what Jones told his colleagues on the foreign desk.
Coombs has told me and others repeatedly that he favors abortion because he sees it as a way to eliminate black and other minority babies.
Read Archibald’s post for more newsroom shenanigans involving this character. Meanwhile, if there are any red-blooded Caucasians reading this site, here’s another reason for you to hide your daughters from the impending hordes of brown. Continue reading
I know that many SM readers like to partake in one particular cross-border skirmish we seem to have a lot here. You know the one of which I speak, right? It’s the herbivores vs. the carnivores (although technically we are all omnivores). Well, to throw a little fuel on to that fire I submit to you this book review over at Slate.com.. The book is titled “Bloodless Revolution” and is meant to be a sort of “history of European vegetarianism.” I haven’t read the book but the review was quite insightful
. First the background on the book:
Here’s the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And with that, the battle was over–not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into “a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored.” But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, “negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary…” [Link]
The critic contends, however, that vegetarianism from a European perspective isn’t so much something they accept as a way of life but is rather a philosophy to be practiced off an on:
If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it’s because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn’t on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn’t beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not–or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it’s Thanksgiving, ham because it’s Easter, pepperoni because it’s pizza–what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat. [Link]Continue reading