Author Archives: manish

Hari Puttar: Attack of the Clones

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Young’uns Shefali Chowdhury and Afshan Azad play Parvati and Padma Patil in the latest Harry Potter movie, the one with a goblet of masala pani. They’re Harry and Ron Weasley’s backup dates for Hogwarts’ Yule Ball:

Born in London in 1989 and brought up in a conservative Muslim family, Shefali is of Bangladeshi origin. Her parents had migrated to England from Sylhet, Bangladesh… She plays the role of Parvati Patil in the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire film. Prior to that her only recorded film appearance was an uncredited role in Kannathil Muthamittal in 2002.

She plays Harry Potter’s Yule Ball date in Goblet of Fire. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the film… told This Is London: “I had a dance scene with Shefali. She was completely gorgeous.” [Link]

I counted ~8 British Asian kids in the movie, one with a long closeup. Somewhere between installments two and three, casting got the diversity clue.

This movie was lovely and lots of fun, it held my attention. Numbers three and four have both been much better than the slow, dumbed-down numbers one and two. Favorite scene: underwater with the merpeople. What is it about smart girls named Emma? The movie obliquely referred to 9/11, King Kong and being misquoted by the press. The over-the-top reporter reminded me of the purring, Eartha Kitt-like gossip maven, Kitty DaSouza, from Bombay Dreams.

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Come on, Naureen

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In Wedding Crashers, actress Naureen Zaim plays the credulous babe on the other end of this exchange:

Hindu woman: French Foreign Legion?
John Beckwith: Yeah, we lost a lot of good men out there. [Link]

She soon falls into bed, bouncy and topless, with Owen Wilson. Like Yasmeen Ghauri and Rhona Mitra, she’s part desi, part white:

I am originally from Chicago. I am half Pakistani, and 1/4 Irish, and 1/4 German. [Link]

She has an advanced degree in glass blowing, like mine in home ec and underwater basket weaving:

I blew glass at University of Illinois, and actually received a degree in it. [Link]

After teaching the The Republic by Plato at an Ivy League university, she shoots a TV show: model boxing.

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Also from Wedding Crashers, actor Neil Patil’s resume shows Hollywood offers desis lots of ground-breaking, non-stereotypical roles without accents:

  • Terrorist
  • Cabbie
  • Limo driver
  • Valet
  • Indian wedding groom
  • Exchange student
  • Waiter

So here we’ve got Hollywood’s gender-specific treatment of desis neatly encapsulated in a single movie. Desi women are cast as random babes, men as servants and terrorists. It’s tribal: kill the men, fuck the women. About the only role I remember where the desi guy was neither mocked nor feared was Kal Penn’s in the little-seen A Lot Like Love.

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My Thais

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The Thai clothing retailer Jaspal, which the NYT calls ‘Thailand’s Gap,’ is currently running a big ad campaign with OC actress Mischa Barton. It’s one of those cushy, overseas-only gigs so ably flèched by Bill Murray, who shilled Suntory whiskey in Lost in Translation. The company’s name implies its founder is Sikh. It’s probably another incarnation of India and Thailand’s long history of mixing:

The Thai alphabet is based on Mon (Burmese), Khmer (Cambodia) and South Indian scripts, and the language has many Sanskrit words… It is the only Southeast Asian country never to have been taken over by a European power… [Link]

The Thai language is liberally sprinkled with words from Pali and Sanskrit (the classical languages, respectively, of Theravada Buddhism and Indian Hinduism). [Link]

Thailand, which is 95% Buddhist, seems tolerant of minority religions, with Hindu shrines as good luck charms in downtown Bangkok (thanks, Mark IV):

Ramakien statue at Wat Phra Kaew temple

“This temple [in Chiang Mai] is one of the biggest in Thailand. We also have one big Sikh gurudwara here which is 120 years old. The same devotees go to both the gurudwara and the temple. On Tuesday, for our weekly satsang, you will find a large number of Thai devotees here…” I spoke with one Thai devotee here, Anuma, who said she was a “Buddhist Hindu” and a devotee of Mother Durga…

… the Sri Mariamman temple [in Bangkok]… was built by South Indians who migrated from the Thanjavur District in Tamil Nadu to Thailand about 150 years ago. It was the first Hindu temple built by the immigrant Indian community… “The reason why so many Thai people are visiting the Mariamman temple is that She is considered to be the Goddess of Protection. During World War II, when a lot of places here were destroyed in the Japanese occupation, the temple remained absolutely safe.” [Link]

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Pipe dream

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Serendipity is a pretty lame romantic comedy that’s a staple of cable reruns, where I had the misfortune of running into it this morning. Like Bollywood, it peddles soft-headed romantic fatalism in a one-joke script.

It does, however, do a very funny New Age parody. John Corbett (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) hams it up as Lars, a self-absorbed New Age musician. This schmuck in a silk kurta plays an instrument ubiquitous at Indian weddings while his hype men play tabla and sitar.

As Lars watches the cheesy, Yanni-like music video his record label put together, he complains, ‘You can’t fight off an army of bloodthirsty Vikings with a shehnai. It’s illogical.’

This little fudge cake of brilliance is probably the only shehnai joke in Hollywood history, and definitely the only one involving Vikings.

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Guest blogger: PG

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Please join me in welcoming our next guest blogger, PG of Half the Sins and the De Novo group blog. The law groupies here at SM have been atwitter over her smart vivisection of political critters and policy wonkery for some time. From time to time, she also applies her prodigious talents to pawning exotica indien:

I don’t think there will be anything for the next generation of Indian kids to unify around, unless we go through a collective midlife crisis and decide to impose the same expectations on our offspring that our parents put on us.

So far today, I’ve been wished a happy Diwali by a white person and my mom, and my white Property professor was wearing a punjabi dress- style top in class. I was intending to celebrate it properly, but then I realized I was having a bit of iron deficiency, so I ate a hamburger. [Link]

Last night as we were waiting to get into the Lido, a Vegas-style club in Paris’s otherwise elegant Champs Elysees district, I kept pretending that we were going to a strip joint and quoting Chris Rock jokes about how no one would want to eat the food. “Titties and tater tots don’t mix!..”

… then come out the girls with the boobie verison of a punjabi dress/ salwar kameez. By boobie version, I mean that it looked about right, the loose pants and all, except the top didn’t cover their tits. Which was what most of the costumes in this show were like, but you don’t expect to see the same outfit that your mama can wear exposing boobs. That just ain’t right.

But that was only a little appetizer… Shiva with tits was a showgirl wearing a big headdress that looked like the traditional representation of many-armed Shiva, except Shiva doesn’t have tits, on account of Shiva is a MAN.

It wasn’t enough to have Shiva with titties. Nope, then we had to have half a dozen Ganeshas in ass-pants and no shirts. These were the showboys wearing elephant masks, complete with trunk. They came out on a stage set done up to look like a temple. A TEMPLE! Complete with gold paint. They also trotted out a big fake plastic elephant for one of the showgirls to ride…

Did I mention the giant fake lotus blossom that came out of the floor?… [Link]

Welcome, PG!

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Magic Inc.

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Bubble boy Ram Sabnis helped an inventor complete his decade-long quest to create a new kids’ toy: the first bubbles with disappearing color, so they won’t stain your kids or your floor (see photos). Like sticky notes, their impermanence is their selling point (via Boing Boing). I knew that textile industry would come in handy someday!

Ram Sabnis is a leader among a very small group of people who can point to a dye-chemistry Ph.D. on their wall. Only a handful of universities in the world offer one, and none are in the U.S. (Sabnis got his in Bombay). He holds dozens of patents from his work in semiconductors (dying silicon) and biotechnology (dying nucleic acids)…

Sabnis told them he’d have it ready to market in a year… “This is the most difficult project I have ever worked on,” Sabnis says now… For months, he ran 60 to 100 experiments a week, filling notebooks with sketches of molecules, spending weekends in the library studying surfactant chemistry, trying one class of dyes after another…

He synthesized a dye that would bond to the surfactants in a bubble to give it bright, vivid color but would also lose its color with friction, water or exposure to air… go away completely, as though it had never been there. When one of these bubbles breaks on your hand, rub your hands together a few times and look: Poof. Magic. No more color… [Link]

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Omi do play that

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Watch Omi Vaidya rockin’ the pug in the American version of The Office airing Nov. 22 (thanks, Kiran):

He plays a Sikh IT Tech that helps Steve Carell’s character with some computer issues. [Link]

A bunch of us auditioned for this role. It started out as a “Pakistani IT Tech” wearing a turban. They seemed to get some of the culture right, but the joke centers around Steve Carell’s character wearing a giant “Karnak” type turban. [via email]

Vaidya previously created the reality dating show ‘Prem or Not to Prem.’

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Posted in TV

A chicken in every pot

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The Daily Show’s resident ranter Lewis Black riffed on today’s Sri Lankan election. Watch the clip, it’s at 2:20.

In Sri Lanka, presidential candidate Victor Hettigoda has promised to give a free dairy cow to every family in the country if he wins. Finally, a candidate who’s ready to say no to government pork and yes to beef! [Link]

They’re not just any old cows, they’re Malayalee:

A wealthy Sri Lankan presidential candidate said he will use his personal fortune to buy a cow for every home if he is elected.

“Every Sri Lankan home will be gifted with a high milk-yielding cow from (the Indian state of) Kerala which could be expected to yield 10 liters (2.5 gallons) to 16 liters (four gallons) of milk every day,” Victor Hettigoda was quoted as saying by The Island newspaper on Friday. “Even families who live in flats, who could make suitable arrangements to look after a cow, will receive a gift of cow,” he was quoted as saying. [Link]

A Sri Lankan presidential candidate promised a free cow to every family in the country‘A chicken in every pot and a cow in every garage.’ More to the point, the independent candidate, a successful entrepreneur, is Tamil Tiger-friendly:

He also said the LTTE are “a prudent lot” who have not resorted to corrupt practices, and he pledged to offer the LTTE a number of key ministerial portfolios in his government if his talks with them are successful. [Link]

“It was our own narrow minded party politicians who went around the world and said that they were terrorists. If they said they (LTTE) are our own sons and daughters, then the world would have not cornered them as terrorists. So who created this situation? We ourselves…

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Kundalini Shock Attack

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If you’re a desi in your thirties, you’ve probably got fond memories of Depeche Mode, New Order and the Cure. You might also be nostalgic for the desi songs your parents used to play at home.

Realizing this, an indie band in Dallas got peanut butter in their chocolate and chocolate in their peanut butter (thanks, midwestern eastender). The members first met at UC Berkeley:

… I’ve also recently gotten a CD from the Amrikan Kundalini Shock Attack (I actually found them just by typing in “indotrash” after a conversation with Shiva Soundsystem one night), which has been amusing me all week. Imagine Depeche Mode singing in Hindi and you’d be in the ballpark of their old-school techno-disco style. [Link]

Listen to Kundalini Shock Attack. I still haven’t decided whether this self-proclaimed ‘desi post-dancefloor deconstructionalism… techneurotic… neoretro post-structuralist desiwave’ duo is Spinal Thappad or just sincerely trashy:

The songs evoke an energy that is lysergic, kaleidoscopic and Rangolian. It will blow the saris off all mofos! [Link – PDF]

That pseudo-PoMo humor, however, is pure Berkeley.

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Panjabi having a very ‘Good Year’

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Actress Archie Panjabi has a small role in a new film with Russell Crowe:

Panjabi in another film, Yasmin

Archie Panjabi, to my mind the best Indian actress in Britain, is currently filming in A Good Year, which is an appropriate title because she has had a pretty good year. The film, directed by Ridley Scott and based on a book by Peter Mayle, is about an investment banker (played by Russell Crowe) who swaps London life for a vineyard in France. [Link]

An Englishman (Crowe) inherits a vineyard in Provence. Upon arriving at his new property, he meets an American woman who claims that the land is hers. [Link]

The film co-stars French actress Marion Cotillard. Here’s the book upon which the movie is based:

The caper in A Good Year revolves around a mysterious small-batch cult wine that never makes it to the wine store and trades as an investment. [Link]

Panjabi’s last project was a tawdry teledrama about former British Home Secretary David Blunkett:

… Archie was in A Very Social Secretary, a television dramatisation of the events surrounding David Blunkett’s affair with Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher of The Spectator magazine… An outraged Blunkett tried unsuccessfully to stop the broadcast on Channel 4 on the grounds that his privacy was being invaded. [Link]

Related post: The spy who loved me

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