Proposed agreement between Aishwarya and Freida

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Melvin Durai

WHEREAS, Aishwarya Bachchan (nÃ©e Rai) won the Miss World contest in 1994, bringing glory to India and paving the way for three lesser beauties to win the same title.

WHEREAS, Freida Pinto was a model who appeared in ads for Hutch, Airtel and Wrigleyâ€™s Chewing Gum, but was not selected by L’OrÃ©al, the world’s largest cosmetics and beauty company, to grace billboards in New York, Toronto and other major cities around the world, causing innumerable men to drive their cars into telephone poles.

WHEREAS, Aishwarya Bachchan has long been known as â€œThe Most Beautiful Woman in the World,â€ a title bestowed on her by none other than Julia Roberts, which, along with the acronym TMBWIIW, is widely recognized as her trademark, in much the same way as Angelina Jolie is widely considered to possess the trademark of TMBWITWOTA, or â€œThe Most Beautiful Woman in the World Other Than Aishwarya.â€

WHEREAS, Aishwarya Bachchan has appeared in 40 movies, has been crowned the â€œQueen of Bollywood,â€ and is a favorite of Mani Ratnam, Ashutosh Gowariker and other top directors who have created blockbusters featuring such acclaimed stars as Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Bachchan.

WHEREAS, Freida Pinto has appeared in just one English movie, a role that required her mainly to smile and look pretty, while Aishwarya Bachchan has starred in several English movies such as Bride and Prejudice, Mistress of Spices and The Pink Panther 2, roles that required her to not just smile and look pretty, but also flutter her eyelashes. Continue reading →

SM Live-blogs the other SM, at The Oscars

Posted on February 22, 2009 by A N N A

Tonight, I’ll be trying something a little different in the bunker.

Instead of live-blogging the Academy Awards the way I might have in the past, via a disjointed, half-kundi’d sort of list, I’m going to use the nifty program you see below. If it’s good enough for Sports blog Ball Don’t Lie, it’s good enough for this fellow fan o‘ Sheed:

What’s great about this is…well…everything. I can put up instant polls, pick out comments from you to publish in the stream of live blogging, and then tie it up at the end in to a lovely little package with a “replay” ribbon on top, so all may enjoy it at their leisure. I played with it on my own blog, here, so that’s what the finished product will look like. I’m excited, about this and whatever else may come. Are you? 🙂

I will also be one of many, many people participating in SAJA’s post-Oscars Call-in Web Radio Show Thing tonight. Continue reading →

Is Dev a homewrecker?

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Abhi

Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

Earlier this week I read a salacious article claiming that innocent little ~~Latika~~ Frieda Pinto is really a shady McShadester:

The star of Slumdog Millionaire has been hiding a secret husband whom she ditched after the film became a hit, it was claimed today.

Freida Pinto, 24, is said to have married Rohan Antao at a ceremony in Goa in December 2007 but last month ended their relationship. The couple were previously thought only to have been engaged… Their relationship appears to have foundered in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire’s success. Pinto, who plays the main love interest, was nominated for a Bafta and the film won a Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast.

It is claimed that Mr Antao, a Mumbai-based executive, supported Pinto during filming but ‘she just stopped calling him’ at the time of the Golden Globes this year, according to reports today. [Link]

If you check out the picture of Mr. Antao you can’t help but come to the conclusion that the poor chap never had a chance. In reality you can only date so far outside of your attractiveness league and the fact that guys like Salman Rushdie have a lock on the statistical outlier category means that the Rohan Antaos of the world are headed for disaster. Then I read another article yesterday that got me to re-think this all a bit. Perhaps Frieda is innocent and Antao is possessive and delusional. Continue reading →

Slumdog is no underdog

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Oscar season is upon us once again, and with it the opportunity to make some money by betting on the home team. Gambling on the Oscars is as venerable tradition as gambling on Diwali, making this the third biggest betting day of the year.

The sole uncontroversial topic about Slumdog is that it’s the odds on favorite tonight for both best picture and best director. The only surer bet out there is Heath Ledger for best supporting actor (you have to put down $25 to see even $1 of return) and he’s dead!

Furthermore, as we get close and closer to Oscar time, the odds keep improving in these two categories. Right now, Paddypower is giving 1-14 odds for best picture (bet $14, make $1 profit if Slumdog wins) and Danny Boyle 1-10 odds for best director (bet $10, make $1 profit if Boyle wins).

Boylesports is offering better odds for bestpicture and worse odds for best director, but in both cases, the certainty of a Slumdog win is higher today than it was just a few days ago.

Even at these odds, Slumdog is still a good investment. King of Elections Quantgeekery Nate Silver says that Slumdog has a 99% chance of getting best picture and a 99.7% chance of getting best director, estimates based on how well previous awards (which Slumdog has swept) predict the Oscars.

The chance to win big might also stem the anti-Slumdog tide of public opinion in India. Right now there is already over Rs. 2 billion ($41 million) staked on the film, so a lot of Indians will be rooting for the same film that they objected to.

Continue reading →

Slumdog hungama

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Honestly, I’m perplexed by the range of reactions that Slumdog has elicited. I liked the movie, had a great time while I was watching it, adored the sound track and cinematography and thought the plot and acting were clichÃ©d. But a week later, I would have forgotten the film if not for all the other hoopla surrounding it.

The core of the controversy seems to be whether the film is exploitative. Who gets exploited (slumdwellers, old India, new India) changes depending on who is levelling the accusation, but each time the claim is that the movie is somehow poverty pr0n.

The main broadside against the film was lobbed by Amitabh who said:

“if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” [link]

He later backpedaled, saying that the words were not his own, and that he had put them up merely to start a debate.

Similar criticism came from former ambassador (and Sree‘s dad) T P Sreenivasan, who saw the movie as undermining new India:

Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet… the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success.

Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture….The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do… As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. [link]

And an anonymous friend of mine summed up his discomfort with the film by saying:

Anything having to do with the third world that masses of white people go into paroxysms over is guilty until proven innocent…

Continue reading →

Sunday feel good: Bob Marley around the world

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Here’s some Sunday afternoon feel good for you – two Bob Marley songs performed by musicians from around the world, including several from South Asia. I liked the first, One Love, better than the second, Don’t Worry, but thought both were worth sharing. (Actually, the best video in this sequence is the first, Stand By Me, but unfortunately it has no desi musicians in it)

The organization that produced these videos (and others) is called Playing for Change. It’s worth clicking through to read their (short) manifesto. They’ve used portable digital recording technology to do a series of such recordings around the world, and are releasing them sequentially. There is a documentary about the project, and a CD/DVD that will be released at the end of April. There is an associated foundation that seems to be doing good works – there is a video of a music school they built in South Africa.

Continue reading →

Thomas Friedman on Desi Muslims

Posted on February 20, 2009 by vinod

I‘m pretty lukewarm on Thomas Friedman overall but he’s built quite a franchise on turning a good phrase or 2 and he does occasionally deliver some solid bits. Lately, in a media environment where every other article about Islam involves beheading, suicide bombs or sharia, he’s been doing a great job of recognizing the important & emerging pockets of liberalism in Muslim society writ large. In Iraq, for example, he recently noted an important reversal of the usual storyline for what happens to an intellectual who violates Arab society’s norms –

Combatting Islamophobia His Own Way…
Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

More stories like this & I believe Islamophobia worldwide would be taken down a notch or two. Towards the same end, Friedman has a great column this week about the Indian Muslim community’s response to the Mumbai attackers & how it contrasts with too many Arab Muslims –

Continue reading →

Everyone Loves A Winner: V-Day Contest Results

Posted on February 19, 2009 by V.V.

Hey yâ€™all,

I appreciate your indulging my travel and jetlag. Here, without further ado, are the results of our V-Day contest. I was excited to see so many entries. Seems like you guys really got into it. This was hard to judge. Thanks so much for participating!

Some thoughts on my judging process. I read what Sandhya had written, and realized I was looking for verbal inventiveness and something that touched multiple emotionsâ€”not just funny, but funny and sad; not just angry, but angry and funny; etc. etc. How much did the entry achieve in six words?

This decided, I waded in. Now, before I announce the winners, a few comments on the other entries. Continue reading →

All of this has happened before …

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

This month, IBM announced Project Match, a program to help laid off workers move overseas with their outsourced jobs … provided of course, that that they’re willing to accept local wages:

“IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand. Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move.” [link]

I can see it now, America’s best and brightest leave their homes and everything familiar to them to move overseas and start a new life, one fraught with cultural confusion. A new generation is born in India, one plagued by confusion and self-doubt.

Novelist Juniper L. Harry depicts the lives of these American Indians with a series of stories about Boston Brahmins in Bengal. In her most famous book, the protagonist Tolstoy Thudpucker struggles to figure out where he truly belongs, whether in India or America. His classmates cruelly mock him for his name and for not having an unfamiliar cultural background. Everybody in India is different, they say. But not poor Tolstoy, he’s got no culture of his own:

“What’s your language? American English? That’s like what we speak, but with an accent, right? What do they eat in America? Pepperoni Pizza? What’s that – like Chicken Tikka Pizza but with dried out slices of dead pig on top? Sounds bland and gross! How come we can breakdance better than you? Don’t you even have a dance of your own to teach us?”

Tolstoy suffers through a series of happy marriages and confusing name changes until he attains enlightenment by transcending worldly duality and learning to dance. The Bollywood version of his tale wins plaudits from reviewers across India, none more so than the bloggers over at the IBCA blog Boston Chai Party.

With apologies to Nabokov Ninnington.

Continue reading →

Where’s Osama?

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Academics love nothing more than a bit of intellectual arbitrage. Take a theory developed for one purpose, apply it to a different subject, and voila – twice the intellectual bang for your buck! And since in this case the topic is that of Osama bin Laden’s location, and bin Laden is still at liberty 7.5 years after 9/11, why not take a stab at the problem?

In this case, Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, two professors of Geography at UCLA used techniques developed to track endangered species, and information on “bin Laden’s last known location, cultural background, security needs, declining health, limited mobility and height” to predict that there is a “90 percent chance that bin Laden is in Kurram province in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, most likely in the town of Parachinar which gave shelter to a larger number of Mujahedin during the 1980s.” [link]