Is there anything schlockier than this fiber optic, snow-flocked Om tree? For just 50 quid, you get the same emotional, uh, ‘appeal’ of an interreligious wedding where not only are both religious ceremonies conducted simultaneously, they’re physically merged. I’m thinking a pandit with a yarmulke. Syncretic-alicious!
(via the Calcutta Telegraph)
16-year-old Kiran Matharu, a third-gen Brit Asian, is a budding golf star from Leeds whom some call the best female amateur golfer in the UK (thanks, midnight toker):
[Amarjit Matharu’s] daughter, Kiran, is the best female amateur golfer in the country. She plays off plus 3.4 – compared to Michelle Wie’s plus 4.2 – and she is only 16. Kiran is off to Texas this week, having been invited to a training camp by Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods’ former swing guru. Nike, Ping and Red Bull are all keeping a close watch. Serious money is just around the corner…Continue reading[Her father] was a keen sportsman, playing golf off four before switching his attention to cricket, but he never quite made the big time. He runs a bar in central Leeds and follows sport as a fan. He feels hard done by that Kiran is not given more attention. ‘Everyone raves about Michelle Wie,’ he says. ‘I know that if Kiran was American, she’d be red-hot news…’
Her practice swing is a thing of artistic beauty. So smooth, so relaxed, so natural. She bangs the ball 260 yards down the middle of the fairway without appearing to make any effort…
Kiran Matharu could be the most exciting female golfer to emerge in this country since Laura Davies started scorching the hide off the ball. Let’s hope she makes it, not just to repay the £50,000 her family has already invested in her career, but for her sake. [Link]
She will play in the Curtis Cup next year — the youngest member of the squad — and then turn pro. [Link]
Waris Singh Ahluwalia is the young actor and Urban Turban designer last seen in, and airbrushed out of the ads for, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.
He’s currently shooting Spike Lee’s The Inside Man, which also stars Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Plummer (thanks, zimblymallu):
The Inside Man tells the story of a cop (Washington) who must outsmart a professional bank robber (Owen) during a bank robbery turned hostage situation. [Link]
As negotiations grow more strained, a powerful lawyer with mysterious ties (Foster) becomes involved in the crisis… Dafoe will be playing the role of a police captain while Ejiofor plays a detective… [Link]
Waris plays a bank clerk… there you have Spike Lee wearing House of Waris. In the end he bought the horn ring and the enameled skull. On his right hand he is wearing the white gold and diamond skull ring. He’s totally decked out in House of Waris. [Link]
The movie, parts of which were shot at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, is due out March 24 next year. What fresh hell is this, to be green-eyed man-meat like Clive Owen and yet be cast opposite Waris ‘the S. is for sexayyy’ Ahluwalia 
A British ad agency’s animated demo reel uses ‘Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ as its cinematic score (via monika). Thanks, Ghost World!
[C]heck out the showreel of studio aka – an animation studio based in london.. http://www.studioaka.co.uk (follow the ‘overview’ link and then click on ‘showreel montage’).. enjoy!
The December issue of Harper’s contains a short story called ‘Lost in Uttar Pradesh,’ more exoticized claptrap about oddness in India. One could pick a much less prosaic state than U.P. for the title; this is sort of like Louis Leakey traipsing around the mystical badlands of Cleveland.
This week’s New Yorker includes a cover story on the Pakistan quake aftermath:
Musharraf seized power in a coup, six years ago, and at the time he described the Army as… the only body disciplined enough to fix the country’s ills… yet, when the earthquake hit, the Army appeared neither efficient nor consumed by any sense of urgency… ten days after the earthquake struck, Musharraf’s government signed a billion-dollar contract for Swedish military surveillance aircraft, a bewildering priority… “If you were a Westerner asked to provide humanitarian financial assistance to a country led by a military government obsessed with the regional ‘military balance,’ what would you think?”…“The villagers, when tensions run high, can’t even do free farming out on their terraces, because the Indians fire at them,” he said. “They and their animals are often wounded.” Half a mile up, a section of the gorge wall had collapsed. Small tombstones protruded at odd angles from a mound of dirt. A bloated corpse wrapped in a black shroud lay on top of the mound. Apparently, the person had been killed by a falling graveyard…
As we approached the Line of Control, Abbas lost his way. He made a U-turn in the gorge, swung right into another canyon, and then hurriedly made a second U-turn. A soldier assigned to spotter duty pointed down at a tricolor Indian flag flapping directly underneath the helicopter… It’s hard to imagine how the two militaries keep track of the line in any event. The border twists from side to side and up and down, as if tracing the fingers of a very thick hand. [Link]
If you thought Russell Peters’ material was too stereotypical in New York, 
watch what happens when a desi comedian plays Cincinnati. Rajiv Satyal, a moonlighting P&G’er, plays to stereotype up the yin-yang with threadbare jokes about camels, Kwik-e-Marts, Slurpees, terrorists and ‘thank you, come again.’ Wince.
He even calls himself Razheev. It’s my pet peeve, the weird American idea that Indian languages pronounce ‘j’ like in French. If you’re foreign in the movies, you’re given a British accent; if you’re foreign in real life, you’re assumed to be French. Sometimes it seems the only countries we know are the ones which fought here 250 years ago. Over New Jersey.
So take back your ‘Veezh,’ please. It’s Vij, just like it’s spelled, thankyaverramuch. Like Spanish, we’re into phonetic spelling down on the subcontinent. For your confusion, thank the French:
Send these, the confused, pronunciation-challenged to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Set aside an hour for this one. 
Funnyman Russell Peters strikes again in this stand-up clip, and once he lets rip, you’re not gonna want to stop (thanks, Aizaz). Politically incorrect, but he’s just sayin’ in public what y’all say in private.
Update: At 21 minutes, he goes self-referential with his old punchline, ‘Somebuddy gonna get hurt real bad.’ Half the audience gets it and laughs. ‘Downloading m*f*s… that’s 45 minutes of material you won’t be hearing today.’
Update 2: Dwarf and deaf person jokes? The old show was better.
A new study shows that meditation lets you close popup ads faster (via Boing Boing):
The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond… meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.
“Every single subject showed improvement… Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice. [Link]
Not to mention bigger head muscle:
They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.
“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”. [Link]
A ToI reporter showed up to a small Delhi blogger meetup several days ago under an assumed name and did a Page Six/Page 3-style takedown of our very own TTG:
Most mainstream Indian papers are glorified scandal rags.. the active blogging community in India is a shockingly tiny group… Their preoccupation nevertheless continues to be slamming and analysing a very wide variety of things in an attempt to display their intellectual might… Their favourite pastime remains MSM (blog speak for mainstream media) bashing, often without caring to provide substantiations and taking cover behind free speech platitude…… the 3rd annual Delhi bloggers meet just proved how big (or small) is the Indian blogosphere. Just four bloggers attended it, counting the host… ”I have booked the entire section of the restaurant,” he added, pointing at the empty sofas reserved for an army of bloggers that he had expected…
The Indian blogosphere has a long way to go before it even comes near to achieving the influence of the American bloggers… We are yet to see the Instapundit of India or an Andrew Sullivan. And this is not lost on them. ”We are the elite bloggers of India,” announced Tarun… [Link]
There’s no law against snark, but the aggrieved organizer says the story is full of inaccuracies:
Barista is not a restaurant. I hadn’t booked the “entire section” of it. And there was ONE sofa, which could hold 2 people, and ONE chair that was empty…Continue readingI SAID I WASN’T one of the ELITE bloggers of India, and went on to roll off a list of all the A-list dudes…
Now I know how celebrities must feel when they see their quotes in print. Is anything in the paper the truth? [Link]
Amitav Ghosh penned a harrowing essay on the organized anti-Sikh riots of ’84 (via DesiLit Daily):
The first reliable report of Mrs. Gandhi’s death was broadcast from Karachi, by Pakistan, at around 1:30 PM. On All India Radio regular broadcast had been replaced by music… The motorcade of Giani Zail Singh, the President of the Republic, a Sikh, had already been attacked by a mob…A stout woman in sari sitting across aisle from me was the first to understand what was going on. Rising to her feet, she gestured urgently at the Sikh, who was sitting hunched in his seat. She hissed at him in Hindi, telling him to get down and keep out of sight. The man started in surprise and squeezed himself into the narrow footspace between the seats.
Minutes later, our bus was intercepted by a group of young men dressed in bright, sharp synthetics. Several had bicycle chains wrapped around their wrists. They ran along beside the bus as it slowed to a halt. We heard them call out to the driver through the open door, asking if there were any Sikhs in the bus. The driver shook his head. No, he said, there were no Sikhs in the bus. A few rows ahead of me, the crouching turbaned figure had gone completely still…