Author Archives: manish

Expiration date

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Congrats to reader chick pea on her tongue-in-cheek ‘wedding’

Huevos don’t last forever

TN boy and I made a pact 10 years ago, that we’d get married if we hadn’t or had anything cooking by the age of 30. Well, a few weeks ago, he turned 30, I left him a voicemail to wish him a Happy Birthday along with a message of how he wanted the invitations to look :).

… I just got an email from him (he’s now also a doctor, and a busy resident in NYC) that he’d have to brush up on his Gujarati skills, and to have the wedding planned, as we must now get married….and to hurry it along since the deal breaks by age 31… too funny, too funny, too funny.

So people, help me plan a quick wedding, simple, short, and sweet. [Link]

To everyone else, who was your marriage pact with, and how did it turn out?

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Wikiveda

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Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit

Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…

Mogambo is displeased

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages – English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish – in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…

… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]

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Interpreter of blandness

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The New York Press, an alternative weekly, printed two stories last week which provide interesting bookends to our debate on Orientalism. In the first, a columnist uses Calcutta in the City of Joy sense, as synonym for grinding poverty:

The mayoral election was still fresh in everyone’s mind… “The billionaires have won,” Ken said. “They’ve been given a billionaire’s mandate…”

It’s time to start making New York City more homeless-friendly again… Before the rest of us are completely shoved out of Manhattan, we do our part to repopulate the streets with smelly, drunken and drug-addled bums. We turn street-level New York into Calcutta. Doing that will destroy the property values these people have worked so hard to build up. Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets. [Link]

That will come as a surprise to homeowners in posh South Calcutta, I’m sure. In the second, Sam Sacks begins an essay on modern American short stories with a 40-year-old tale by R.K. Narayan, a self-referential parable about writing which foreshadowed works like Adaptation:‘Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets’

In R.K. Narayan’s novel The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short-story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear, and the hapless man squanders the family savings.

Still, if Narayan floated the idea ironically 40 years ago, today a short-story machine is probably within technology’s grasp. Given a set of common parameters… a literate engineer could surely create a serviceable program. [Link]

It’s already been done. This post was generated by our AutoBlogger™: works day and night, doesn’t demand the abuse meted out to interns, and is just as repetitive as our own writing. I’m actually kicking back in Ooty right now. If you get too many M.I.A. posts, tweak a checkbox or two.

Sacks criticizes the bland homogeneity of stories from writers’ workshops:

… I was reminded of Narayan’s machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006… Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible…

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Kosher yoga

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As I posted earlier, some fitness instructors have been Christianizing yoga out of fear that its Hindu origins open you up to demonic possession. It’s the same kind of assimilation which annoys theologians about Hinduism:

When Cathy Chadwick instructed her three yoga students to move into warrior position… she read aloud the prayer of St. Theresa of Avila. “Good Christian warriors,” Chadwick softly said as the women lunged into the position…

Chadwick is one of a growing number of people who practice Christian yoga, incorporating Biblical passages, prayers and Christian reflections. Occasionally, teachers rename yoga postures to reflect Christian teachings or, as Chadwick did with warrior position, include religious metaphors… [Link]

Good Christian warriors, assume the position! Apparently Catholics in yoga haven’t gotten the memo:

In a 1989 letter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, said practices like yoga and meditation could “degenerate into a cult of the body…” [Link]

Never mind that meditation is designed to do the exact opposite. Trying to keep up with the times, the Vatican issued the memo over IM. Here’s an actual, unedited transcript:

c^th0l1k: omg y0gA rOxX0Rz LOL
V^tic^n_1: newayz h0 dAt sHiZz b3 d3m0nIc ROTFL

The NYT reported recently that HinJews are now jumping in. Well, technically, they’re shuffling in while complaining about the weather

A similar movement is taking place in Judaism, with teachers merging teachings or texts into yoga classes… Stephen A. Rapp, a Boston yoga teacher, developed Aleph-Bet yoga, a series of postures meant to represent Hebrew letters… Rapp expresses the Hebrew letter ‘bet’ in the posture Dandasana, where one sits on the ground with legs and arms straight out in front. [Link]

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Muriel’s shredding

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The Drew Carey Show begins with a song and dance called ‘Cleveland Rocks!’, the joke being, of course, that Cleveland is pretty far down on the list of best cities in which to party. It sounds like a slogan concocted by the Cleveland department of tourism on the theory that if you repeat it enough, someone’s going to fall for it.

Last week, a judge upheld the NYC subway’s questionably random bag searches, deferring in part to the judgment of former U.S. antiterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. It may be the first time that anyone in the government has taken Cassandra Clarke’s warnings seriously (if you ignore ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,’ you’ll pretty much ignore anything).

It may also be the least effective. Look who’s one of the latest suicide bombers in Iraq:

Muriel Degauque,
suicide bomber

Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium… Ms. Degauque, 38, detonated her explosive vest amid an American military patrol in the town of Baquba on Nov. 9, wounding one American soldier…

… European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe… European terrorist networks were trying to recruit Caucasian women to handle terrorist logistics because they would be less likely to raise suspicion. [Link]
Add to that the list of American, European and Australian white men caught fighting for the Taliban. So let’s keep racking up police overtime searching those with brown skin instead of installing explosives scanners at subway entrances.
On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans… A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it. [Link]

Related posts: Banerjee wants bag search ban, A profile of cognitive dissonance, The profiling myth

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Hate crime acquittals in Sikh beating

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Five of Rajinder Singh Khalsa’s attackers were just acquitted on hate crime charges (thanks, Dave). Two were convicted of assault, but the hate crime acquittals sure look like a miscarriage of justice:

A Queens judge rendered mostly not guilty verdicts Monday in the trial of five men accused of attacking a Sikh man in Richmond Hill. All were acquitted of the hate crime charge. Two defendants were found guilty of second degree assault while three others were found guilty only of aggravated harassment…

Queens Supreme Court Justice Seymour Rotker, who conducted the non-jury trial, suggested he didn’t believe at least one of the witnesses and appeared skeptical at the evidence as he rendered the verdict… Rotker said there was “conflicting testimony as to who did what and how” during the July 11, 2004 beating… Police said Khalsa was attacked by the men who were at a christening at a catering hall next to an Indian restaurant. [Link]

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Boulevard of broken dreams

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CityWalk, an outdoor mall in Hollywood, figures prominently in two terrible date flicks I saw this weekend, Shopgirl and Deewane Huye Paagal. Perhaps I can spare you the pain.

· · · · ·

In the Anand Tucker-directed Shopgirl, the extremely funny Jason Schwartzman takes Claire Danes out on a date to CityWalk just to sit and watch its theater marquee from the outside because he doesn’t have the cheddar to take them both. ‘Well, we could split it,’ she says cautiously. To repeat an old joke, she offers her honor, he honors her offer, and all night long it’s ‘honor’ and ‘offer.’ Tucker, whose father is desi, serves up this mini-haha:

‘Lisa?’
‘Ray.’
‘Lisa Ray, it’s nice to meet you.’

I’m not sure whether Tucker’s Bolly-aware enough to sneak in a desi shout-out, but producer Ashok Amritraj certainly is. Sadly, the rest of this bildungsroman about a lonely salesgirl is so slow-moving and trite that the little double entendre was my highlight. Steve Martin sleepwalks through the movie. The Martin I loved from Roxanne in junior high still makes movies for 12-year-olds — saccharine, kiddie and devoid of edge. His novella-based voiceovers are from the Bulwer-Lytton school of writing. Danes’ character spends much of the movie next to glove mannequins, disembodied hands pointing at the sky. Hands beseeching heaven are exactly what came to mind when I realized how long this movie ran.

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How to write an India story

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Pop quiz: what is this NYT story about?

Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction, thinks otherwise. She is angry, say the colorfully garbed women massing in the holy tree’s dappled shade…

… idol-makers… came from their villages to work their craft for Calcutta’s festival for the 10-armed goddess, Durga, the invincible killer of demons. Statues of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, lay cast off under the highway overpass, waiting to be resurrected. [Link]

If you said ‘a mundane highway appropriations bill,’ you’re psychic. New India hands, dust off that pith helmet and shake off those jodhpurs. Here’s the official NYT checklist on what must go into an India story (and what did, in fact, go into this one):

Taj Mahal
Sacred cows
Camels
Holy trees
Benares
Ganga
Hindu theology
Bullock carts
Rickshaw-wallas
Awkward polytheism metaphor
Religious nuts from small towns
British colonialism
Kali (bonus points!)

Mmm, I love the smell of incense in the morning. This story has that touch of Orientalism which wins Pulitzers. What, no bride-burning, snake charmers or Thuggees? If Amy Waldman keeps it up, she could pen something for the South Asian fiction shelves. Maybe it’ll even have mehndi hands and a sari border. Calling Lady Mountbatten — she’s truly gone native.

Here in NYC, we just passed a referendum to build a new Second Avenue subway. The Calcutta Telegraph’s coverage would be terribly incomplete unless it included the following:

The Mall of the Americas
Dogs which are (gasp!) allowed into houses
Buffaloes
Pat Robertson
The Virgin Mary toast
Christian theology
Farm tractors
Windshield men
Awkward Crusades metaphor
Religious nuts from small towns
British colonialism
Waco (bonus points!)

Otherwise, your readers might not grasp the story. And we can’t have any cultural misunderstanding here. It might make Jesus angry.

Related posts: M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

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