Monthly Archives: May 2011

Dancing in the Streets, Mumbai Eshtyle

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What would happen if a Bollywood Desi boy fell for a Brooklyn Gori girl, all on the streets of Mumbai? (h/t Girish)

Bachna Ae Haseeno (BollyBrook Remix) from Anne Marsen on Vimeo.

Va, va, va….How charming. Reminds me of the story where that white girl in India got married to the rickshaw driver. Remember that story? Not so far from the real life, na?

BollyBrook is short for Bollywood Meets Brooklyn. This unofficial guerrilla music video for Bachna Ae Haseeno (Hindi: बचना ऐ हसीनो) was shot through the streets of Mumbai, India in four days during mid-March 2011. In English, “Bachna Ae Haseeno” means something like “Save yourself, pretty girls.”[bollybrook]

And some words from th actress playing the hipster…

Being white in India, even Mumbai, invites a lot of stares in itself, so for a white person to walk around with an obnoxious attitude and an accessory as impractical as empty frame ray bands was just a hilarious image for me…I also wanted to compare and contrast this with the character of Bollywood Boy. Both characters are obnoxious in their own ways and they find that after they get over themselves that they can develop a genuine connection and friendship with one another. [bollybrook]

Do you like? Is it fun and playful or stereotypes gone wrong? Continue reading →

Not So Special

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HomelandSecurity.jpgI wasn’t always a an activist in the South Asian community. I got my grounding in environmental organizing and it took the events around September 11th, 2001 to really catapult me into trying to figure out how to create that political voice for this community. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since the capture/death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday night.

One of the first, if not the first, forms of advocacy I partook in for the South Asian community was around “Special Registration” otherwise known as National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). I was living Washington D.C. at the time, and we would go around to Pakistani and Indian restaurants and grocery stores and drop off 3-fold flyers at the front counter informing the community of the new and xenophobic law. It wasn’t much, but at the time it was so important that we let the South Asian community know what their changed rights were in light of the then newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Special Registration required boys and men, ages 16 to 45 from a list of 25 countries with large Muslim populations to register at immigration offices or ports of entry. As a result, 84,000 males were fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned in long interviews based on their countries of origin, more than 13,000 were put into deportation proceedings, and 2,800 were detained. [san]

There were so many stories I heard of where South Asian boys and men in the community had to flee and some scary stories where people simply disappeared. Only later were they found to have been detained.

The impact was felt especially by working-class South Asian, Arab, Sikh and Muslim communities in New York City; the economic impact of losing fathers, sons, and husbands meant that many families suddenly faced homelessness. The Muslim community in Coney Island is said to have lost a full third of its population almost overnight. In its later phases, NSEERS focused on U.S. ports of entry, with the same haphazard scrutiny and interrogations. [illume]

On April 28th 2011, after nine years of “Special Registration”, the government has quietly suspended the law. Continue reading →

Micropixie Releases Under the Neath

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MPX.jpgI first heard of Micropixie (MPX) last summer through Daniela Kantorova of Mideast Tunes, who urged me to explore the work of the recording artist. I was immediately intrigued by the groovy, dulcet tones I heard in her short, My Beige Foot. So when I found out through Nila that MPX had released a new single through her brand spankin’ new record label, One Little Alien, I figured it was time to hear from the alien herself.

The story behind your latest release, Under the Neath?

The title of my new single comes from a phrase my Dad always says (instead of “underneath”, it’s “under the neath”. He has a habit of adding a “the” to everything. eg. when he refers to my Mum, he says “the Mummy”). There’s a very sweet passage in the track where he gives me advice on getting music lessons (which I eventually took to heart). Other phrases are things my littlest sister said when she was a kid. The track sounds like it is laden with innuendos (at least to my dirty mind…), but it is quite innocent. The music (co-composed with Audio Pervert, a Delhi-based producer) was inspired by Underworld’s wonderful album Beaucoup Fish.

Last I checked, you were planning to release a second album, The Good, the Beige and the Ugly. Still in the works?

Yes, it’ll be coming out after the third One Little Alien release. I’ve been working on it for over 3 years now so this sonic baby is well overdue. It’s also a concept album, continuing from my terrestrial adventures after Alice in Stevie Wonderland, but less from the perspective of an alien, and more from the view of a non-white human female. It’s an intergalactic feminist spy thriller… (my, how I love the phonetics of that phrase)! The UK-based producer I worked with, Paul Horton, is very gifted, and I am super excited that it will be out soon.

Continue reading →

Osama & me & we

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Osama_bin_Laden_portrait.jpgI began blogging because of Osama Bin Laden. This was not a necessary condition, but it was a sufficient one. I make that qualification because there are various aspects of my personality which indicate to me that I’d have started blogging when blogging became popular, no matter the details of the world around us. And, I suspect that blogging would have taken off, 9/11 or no 9/11. But in our world the path dependency played out so that political blogging and 9/11 have a strong relationship, with the latter leading to an explosion of the former.

And so I began my online adventure in April of 2002 in the wake of the rise of the “warblog.” My main interests were the War on Terror, web application programming (JSP/Servlets especially), and genetic engineering (in favor!). 9/11 had perturbed me from my default milquetoast libertarian isolationism, though I will admit that my initial starting position probably helped me be only mildly pro-war at the peak of the fever in March of 2003 (I recall throwing out 60 out of 100 in terms of how “warm” I was to the idea of invading Iraq, with 50 being neutral). As the years have passed I’ve rapidly retreated from the position of what I like to think of as my “neocon years.” One gauge of this may be that I used to check out Libertarian Samizdata every day in 2003, but drop in once a year to see if it’s still around now. Continue reading →

The Cinematic Soundtrack of Karsh Kale

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cinema.jpgEver feel like you need a cinematic soundtrack to your day to day life? Karsh Kale’s Cinema may be for you.

The album exploded on the scene last week, going straight to number #1 in the charts. No surprise considering Karsh Kale has been a revolutionary voice to the on the scene for quite sometime. Kale got his start in a rock band, is known for his phenomenal tabla skills, worked in collaboration with the talented Anoushka Shankar in 2007 and most recently has been using his skills to soundtrack movies, such as with Ajay Naidu’s Ashes. It’s no surprise then, with his recent film scoring experiences that he chose to name his latest release, Cinema.

As one of the first groundbreaking genre busting artists in what is now an established musical fusion genre, Karsh Kale can only be referred to as legendary. The album Cinema takes listeners on a cinematic journey, each song reflecting a different emotion and journey. But instead of telling you about the music, how about listening to the music and deciding for yourself. And of course, download the song **Mallika Jam* for free below. The entire album is available on iTunes.

What makes Karsh Kale tick? I wanted to know. Check out the interview with Karsh Kale, and just to mix it up, I asked him to answer in triplicates. Read it below!

What are three words you’d use to describe your 4th solo album, Cinema?

Progressive, Nostalgic, Journey

What were your top three favorite moments in creating this album, Cinema?

  • The day the art work by Archan Nair arrived.
  • The day I finished the final mix w Illinton.
  • The day the album was released at reached #1 on Tunes World Chart. Continue reading →

We got him in Pakistan

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It took 10 years but the chief terrorist got his due. Osama Bin Laden confirmed killed. And apparently by a special forces bullet and not a drone.

The President of the United States made the announcement tonight himself. He was found in “a compound” in Abbottabad, Pakistan.


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I am wondering if this article is related:

ABBOTTABAD: Three loud blasts were heard near the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) Kakul Road late Sunday night and a military helicopter also crashed. Sources told Geo News that heavy firing was heard in the area before the chopper crashed.

Windowpanes of the nearby buildings and houses were smashed due to the intensity of the blasts, the sources said. Eyewitnesses said first sound of heavy firing was heard and then there was a huge blast. Fire erupted at the scene of the occurrence and according to latest reports police and fire brigade teams were rushing towards the blast scene. Security forces cordoned off the entire area and military helicopters were also hovering over the area. [Link]

The helicopter cited above is rumored to have been a Pakistani one is now known to have been a Special Forces helicopter that had mechanical problems. I will update this post tonight with the latest.

Update 1: Here is an intriguing article from two weeks ago about a possible Indonesian terrorist found in Abbottabad earlier this year:

Abdul Hameed in Northwest Pakistan’s hill town of Abottabad would have never imagined that his act of kindness, of giving a foreign couple food and shelter for a few days would blow up in his face.

He had come across a foreign couple, cold and shivering in the street, and could he give them food and shelter for a few days?

Hameed had spare rooms on the second-floor that he occasionally let out since his older children had left home…

The run of good luck had ended for Umar Patek, an al-Qaida-linked Indonesian militant who for 10 years had been on the run from a 1 million US dollar bounty on his head, for allegedly helping build the bombs used in the 2002 bombings of nightclubs in Bali that killed 202 people. [Link]

Update 2: Wow! Check out this article I dug up from just a week ago:

Pakistan’s army chief said Saturday his forces had “broken the back” of Islamist militants after the United States criticised the country’s efforts to quell Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked rebels.

“The terrorists’ backbone has been broken and God willing we will soon prevail,” General Ashfaq Kayani said in a speech at a passing-out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy in northwestern garrison town of Abbottabad. The White House this month criticised Pakistan’s efforts to defeat the Taliban in its border regions, in a report immediately rejected by Islamabad. [Link]

If this article is correct then Bin Laden was staying within a couple of miles of Kayani’s speech!

Update 3 (12:31a.m. EST): The Atlantic suspects they know which compound. I’d take it with a grain of salt for now.

Update 4 (1:32a.m. EST): This is likely going to come down to two brothers that were couriers. The CIA were set up on them for a long time.

Continue reading →

This is 2012 in America (almost)

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Ambassador_Jon_Huntsman.jpgI was just poking around for information on the potential Republican field in 2012 this morning, and I stumbled onto an interesting image of one of the candidates, Jon Huntsman, Jr.. In case you don’t know, Huntsman is the scion of a mega-rich Mormon political family, and viewed as a moderate Republican (though this is mostly because these terms are graded on a curve today, and I say this as a registered Republican). He was appointed by Barack H. Obama to be ambassador to China, but he resigned that position. The supposition is that he might be mulling a presidential run. I am of the set who believes that this is some bizarre joke or tactical feint, as a moderate Mormon has pretty much zero chance in the Republican primaries.

But why the post? First, check out this photo of Huntsman (alternate link if pop-up doesn’t work) with two of his daughters and his wife. How does it make you feel? Here’s an article about Huntsman’s religious pluralism: Continue reading →