If anyone wants to go to the classical music concert to benefit the victims of the Pakistan quake, I’ve got free tickets for you courtesy of my cousin the conductor. The catch is that it’s today at 7.30pm at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. On the menu: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Email me for the tickets.
Author Archives: manish
Tactics
In the U.S. and Europe, American forces kidnap terrorists so as not to kill bystanders:
Before a CIA paramilitary team was deployed to snatch a radical Islamic cleric off the streets of Milan in February 2003, the CIA station chief in Rome briefed and sought approval from his counterpart in Italy…In Sweden, an inquiry discovered that Swedish ministers had agreed to apprehend and expel two Egyptian terrorism suspects in 2002 but called the CIA for help in flying them out of the country… [Link]
But in less-developed countries, we just blow up houses:
The provincial government said Tuesday that in addition to 18 civilians, four or five foreign militants were killed by the American airstrikes on the village of Damadola on Friday… The deaths of 18 civilians, among them 6 children, have stirred anger among the population in Pakistan and put pressure on the government to explain what happened in Bajaur. [Link]
I don’t particularly care for national sovereignty when a country won’t take out its trash, as in Afghanistan, the NWFP and the Kashmiri militant training camps. We should’ve put troops on the ground in Pakistan long ago, no matter what the political sensitivities, and bin Laden should have been caught within months of 9/11. That he hasn’t been killed yet is an ongoing embarrassment.
But killing innocent bystanders is not only deeply immoral, it unnecessarily creates enemies and a host population which supports terrorists. One month we distribute quake aid and win public sympathy; the next we kill women and children and say, ‘Oops, but we’ll do it again.’ It’s the very definition of ineffectiveness.
Look at the rank hypocrisy of U.S. lawmakers in defending this missile attack:
U.S. politicians have expressed regret over the weekend killings of 18 civilians along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, but said the airstrike was justified by the erroneous belief that a top al Qaeda leader was among the group, which included women and children. “Now, it’s a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do?” Sen. Evan Bayh [D-IN] asked rhetorically… Senator John McCain, also concurred… “We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again…” [Link]
Gee, Sen. Bayh, would we have launched a missile at a house in London? Would we have killed 18 innocent Brits, shrugged and said, ‘What else are we supposed to do?’
Yeti kitsch
The Imagineers at Disney World in Florida have erected a mandir to the abominable snowman next to their new Himalayan-themed roller coaster. Expedition Everest opens in spring (via Boing Boing):
 |
|
Yeti another mandir |
The artificial mountain is not a reproduction of Mount Everest; it is the fictional “forbidden mountain” guarded by the yeti… One of the highlights of the attraction is an encounter with an enormous audio-animatronic yeti… Although moderate by contemporary roller-coaster standards, Expedition Everest is unique for having its trains travel forward and backward as a result of the yeti’s interference…Riders approach the attraction through the remote village of Serka Zong in the fictional kingdom of Anandapur, which is located in the foothills of the Himalayas. Several village buildings that had been used by the Royal Anandapur Tea Company have been repurposed… the legend of the yeti is communicated vividly through a mandir… and a makeshift museum that documents yeti sightings, the yeti’s significance in Himalayan cultures and a so-called “lost” expedition that ran afoul of the yeti many years before… [Link]
Disney is taking over Times Square immediately after Valentine’s Day:
Disney plans to transform the exteriors of the W Hotel and the adjacent Argent building at Broadway and 47th Street into a gigantic backdrop of Mount Everest. An aerial acrobatic troupe will perform there Feb. 15 and 16 on a stage 57 stories high, rappelling down the mountain and coming face to face with a Himalayan yeti — the legendary abominable snowman. [Link]
I’ve never felt entirely at ease in simulacrum cities like Orlando and Vegas, miniature Matrices. There’s something odd about Imagineers daubing tilaks onto idols of yeti which look like ‘roid-crazed Hanumans, leaving offerings of plastic fruit and hanging a poster of Krishna stealing butter. Disney movies like Aladdin and Pocahontas often mince cultures into purposely inaccurate baby pap which plays to stereotype.
(And in the other direction of mashup done badly, I can’t stomach the weak-ass rap in Bollyflicks. French and Spanish rap has coalesced as the language of the barrios, but Little B rapping is as silly as Nic Cage going gangsta.)
But let’s not be yenta about yeti. At first glance, the props around this roller coaster look pretty cute. I love the hand-painted signs.
A knight’s tale
There comes a time in every knighted actor’s career when he descends from Oscar material to B-level creature feature. Ben Kingsley is the vampire king in Bloodrayne, yet another awful flick derived from a video game. After playing Fagin, he’s well into his monster oeuvre:
 |
|
I vant to suck |
German director Uwe Boll (“House of the Dead,” “Alone in the Dark”) is fast becoming known as one of the worst directors on the planet. Indeed, Boll’s films are archetypes of bad filmmaking… Yet he continues to license big-name videogame titles and turn them into movies with ever more impressive casts… Boll somehow lures an Oscar-nominated Knight of the British Order to play a character as ridiculous as the King of the Vampires. [Link]
If I wanted to watch a desi actor draining the life out of his victims, I’d go down to the local Bollyplex.
 |
|
The video game: sex, death and subtlety |
Unhappily ever after
I’m astonished by the depth of the desi book market in the UK. I was at a store of Britbooks last week. It wasn’t even a real bookstore, it was an airport bookstore, and it was still amazingly well-stocked. If you’ve ever wondered why people call Brits polite, it’s all the time they spend buried in books (while their chavs and yobs whoop it up in da pub).
On the popular fiction shelves I saw a Granta book on India, an odd little compilation of highfalutin’ essays like a Bollysampler CD; several Hanif Kureishi titles; Shalimar the Clown; both of Meera Syal’s novels; Hari Kunzru; William Dalrymple’s White Mughals; Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide; and so on. (In Sevilla, I also saw a tiny book of Ghosh’s tsunami essays.) The chick lit section was chockablock with titles like Bindis and Brides by Nisha Minhas, in which an abusive desi guy tries to rape his estranged wife, and a white guy rescues her. Minhas previously wrote Passion and Poppadoms, Saris and Sins and Chapattis or Chips?, so she’s going for some kind of Nancy Drew mystery effect with alliteration in the titles.
I picked up a copy of Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, a 1998 novella about marital egress and male sexual restlessness, and devoured it on the plane. The book supposedly caused an uproar when it was published; it reminds me of Rushdie’s Fury, a thinly-fictionalized account of leaving your wife and kids by a desi author who had just, well, left his wife and kids. But liberated of the need to be a full-blown novel, it’s a startlingly direct confession of a loveless, sexless marriage told like Portnoy’s Complaint, hands a-wringing and in the same plain yellow cover. It begins the day he decides to leave his wife. Kureishi’s stark emotional intensity comes off better than Fury, which IMO was Rushdie’s weakest after Grimus.
(Side note: According to the NYT, Shalimar the Clown had sold only 26,000 copies in the stores BookScan tracks as of December. Edward Champion points an accusing finger at the less-than-sonorous title: ‘If I were Rushdie’s publisher, I would have urged Rushdie to come up with a title that didn’t involve clowns at all… Shalimar the Clown? Not really a lot of enigma there. You may as well call the book Joe the Barber.’)
NSFW quotes from Intimacy after the jump.
Hare Krishnas supporting ‘Intelligent Design’
 |
|
ISKCON devotees in Allahabad |
It is these I.D.-creationists who are leading the current barrage of anti-evolution lawsuits… They have found enthusiastic allies among the Hare Krishnas… who have been actively propagating their theory of “Vedic creationism”, “Krishna creationism”, or “Hindu creationism”, as it is sometimes called…
Earlier this year, the Hare Krishnas filed an amicus curiae brief supporting I.D.-creationists… Hare Krishnas appealed to the court to keep the anti-Darwinian warning stickers. As the stickers only attack Darwin without endorsing a specifically Christian God, Hare Krishnas see them as an opportunity to introduce Vedic creationism into American schools. They know that once one religion gets its foot inside the door, all others will automatically get equal time to bring in their own creation stories and cosmologies into science classrooms in America. [Link]
The ID’ers don’t mind since it gives them multi-culti camouflage:
`I.D.’ is often accused of being a scientific-sounding cover for Christian creationism. The ID-ers conveniently use the support of Hare Krishnas to paint themselves in multicultural colours. Prominent I.D. theorists (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe) and some Catholic creationists have endorsed Vedic creationism. Any enemy of Charles Darwin is their friend… [Link]
ISKCON creationism sounds just as nutty as the ID’ers:
The intellectual force driving Vedic creationism is a pair of American Hindus, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, both resident “scientists” of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, the research wing of ISKCON. Cremo recently published a huge book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory… While Cremo insists he is offering a “scientific” alternative to Darwin, almost all of his evidence comes from paranormal phenomena, including studies of extra-sensory perception, faith-healing, reincarnation and past-birth memories, UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and alien abductions…
‘If I spoke Punjabi’
Almost fifty people are running to become Canada’s latest South Asian MPs:
 |
|
Who wants to be a Canadian millionaire (USD $14.92)? |
For Jaipal Massey-Singh, Bal Gosal and Jagtar Shergil however, Saturdays for the past month and a half means knocking on doors, listening to complaints and plaudits and eating take-away food… All three men are running in the Canada’s 23 January general elections… [Link]
Fluency in Punjabi or Hindi is virtually a prerequisite for the ethnic vote. In the Punjabi area of Vancouver, the streetsigns are in Gurmukhi:
Nearby, a volunteer makes comforting noises into a phone receiver, before hanging up and saying wistfully, “If I spoke Punjabi, I would know whether or not I was promised that vote.” Mr Gosal says he campaigns in three languages, Punjabi for his largely Sikh constituents, Hindi for other South Asians and English for the rest. [Link]
‘If I spoke Punjabi, I would know whether or not I was promised that vote’If s/he spoke Punjabi, s/he’d also endure a cross-examination about his/her marital situation, village ancestry and parents’ health before being force-fed chai and laddoos. Michael Bloomberg also attempted speaking in Urdu in his re-election campaign for NYC mayor:
During his re-election campaign, Mr. Bloomberg soaked up the city’s diverse communities by hopscotching across its ethnic neighborhoods, and he even studied Spanish. He recorded campaign commercials in two Chinese dialects, Russian, Urdu and Korean, among other languages. [Link]
I hope the Uzbeks love their samsas too
Bukhara is a tandoori place in New York popular with many, including Bill Clinton. I’ve had one amazing meal there and one passable.
 |
|
Samsas stuck to the sides of a tandoor |
Reflecting the influence of silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere. Every Bukharian menu offers a garlicky, chili-spiked Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, that is a legacy of Stalin’s mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers. At Tandoori Bukharian Bakery in Rego Park, a samsa – one of Asia’s many cousins of the Indian samosa – is deliciously spiked with cumin and baked against the walls of a clay-lined oven that Bukharians, like Indians, call a tandoor. [Link]
It probably got the samosa directly from Iran when the Persian empire absorbed the city. The restaurants sound a whole lot like hill stations in India:
A traditional Central Asian restaurant is little more than a stop for merchants and shepherds traveling the difficult road over the Pamir peaks; the ancient Persians called the region the roof of the world. These restaurants, called chai khanas, or tea houses, provided travelers in the most remote settlements with a place to warm themselves with pots of green tea… [Link]
There are Chinese influences on Bukharian food as well:
Farther north, bread and flour take over – especially lagman, hand-pulled noodles whose name evolved from the Chinese lo mein. Very popular among the Bukharians, lagman have been mastered by another Central Asian group, the Uighurs, who have a small community in New York… Uighurs are Muslim, and speak a language derived from Turkish… [Link]Continue reading
Portable vampyre
A newly-invented wristwatch draws blood from the wearer four times a day and tests it for malarial parasites. It’s designed for South African miners, but it could also be useful in South Asia, where malaria is rampant.
Gervan Lubbe has developed the watch which obtains blood samples with a microscopic needle that automatically penetrates the skin twice during the day and twice at nightThe watch takes blood samples with a microscopic needle that penetrates the skin four times a day. An alarm sounds if the parasite count is above 50, before the first symptoms appear… at that point an antidote in the form of tablets should be consumed and, within 48 hours, all traces of malaria are eliminated from the body. Malaria is the single biggest killer on the African continent, claiming close to three million lives a year. [Link]“If you wait until you get symptoms and a malaria diagnosis, you can be in bed for six months and have to take huge quantities of quinine, which can be dangerous…”[Link]
It even has a remote data feed:
With the wristwatch, each miner will walk through a scanner, similar to a metal detector, and the watch’s radio frequency will transmit the wearer’s information to a central computer.
And, just like cleaning out the filter on a clothes dryer, you have to do something with all the blood. Anne Rice should be all over this:
… the watch’s alarm rings every 35 days to remove the small metal sieve and wash the old blood away. [Link]
India still suffers ~2 million malarial infections a year:
According to the World Health Organization, every year in India an estimated 2 million cases of malaria occur, with 1,000 deaths; and 95% of the population live in malaria-risk areas. [Link]
Parents can buy cell phone records
Speaking of cell phones and sweet, sweet looowe, it used to be that desi parents could track your nefarious romantic activities via phone bills, but only until you went off to college. Now they can track who you’re dating right now simply by buying your cell phone bill– and it’s all totally legal:
 |
|
You wanna tight thappad, beta? I know who you been callin’ |
The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls… In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers’ phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer. And some online brokers have used deception to get the lists from the phone companies, he said. “Though this problem is all too common, federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime…” [Link]
Ennis says it even happened to former presidential candidate Wes Clark:
… this morning AMERICAblog bought former presidential candidate, and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO… General Wesley Clark’s cell phone records for one hundred calls made over three days in November 2005, no questions asked… All we needed was General Clark’s cell phone number and our credit card… [AMERICABlog, a liberal blog]
As this becomes widely known, it’s not just police informers, cheating spouses and leaking politicians who need to worry. With desi culture’s open-door, no-privacy social contract, it’s also desi teens living out their Heer-Ranjha stories. Maybe keyloggers, spy viruses and purchased cell phone bills will begin showing up as the new villains in the movies.
Related post: Cell Phones of SHAME and LONGING