Author Archives: manish

State of the union

Posted on by

You’re probably familiar with State of Bengal’s iconic drum ‘n bass fusion track, ‘Flight IC408,’ on Talvin Singh’s Anokha. The airport sample below was good for one correct answer on Amardeep’s quiz. Listen here.

[In thickly accented English] Your attention please… Your attention please… Indian Airlines announces the departure of their flight IC408 to Calcutta.

This kickass DJ is spinning at a live show tomorrow in Manhattan. It’s in honor of the third anniversary of Third I New York, the screening group for desi indie films.

Sam, aka State of Bengal… [was] a cutting edge producer/DJ at the infamous ‘Anokha’ club nights… His eruptive tracks ‘Flight IC408’ and ‘Chittagong Chill’, featured on Talvin Singh’s Anokha compilation… remain anthems. State Of Bengal is finalizing his new… album, Skip-IJ… His [set will include] his new tracks.

Also playing: videos for M.I.A., Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation, Karmacy, Lal, Geto Boys, Gurpreet & Jugular.

State of Bengal at the Sullivan Room, 218 Sullivan btwn Bleecker and W. 3rd, Manhattan; Thursday, Nov. 10, 10pm, videos at 11; $10
Continue reading →

Pakistan quake vigil

Posted on by



Candlelight vigils for the Pakistan earthquake were held in 25 cities worldwide tonight. In NYC’s Union Square, chic midtown suits sold fundraising bracelets, listening somberly and flirting subtly. One white paramedic who volunteered in the relief effort spoke of doing amputations in the open air without anesthesia, of villagers hoisting near-dead relatives upon their backs and hauling them seven hours down the mountains to the paramedic camp. After the speeches, Nusrat sang quietly in the background.

A buddy of mine, Monis Rahman, penned this first-person account of volunteering in the mountains:

Two weeks earlier, a Sungi volunteer named Tariq took a helicopter filled with relief supplies to one of the mountain villages. The villagers rushed the helicopter, which was hovering slightly above the ground… Amidst the chaos, one fell to the ground. As Tariq reached to help him up, the rear rotor blade of the helicopter struck his head. He died instantly…

… we saw smoke coming out from a distant peak. Yasir casually asked Farooq if it was a volcano erupting. Our village guides immediately stopped, clearly terrified by the possibility of another catastrophe. There had been rumors in these areas that a volcano would erupt to further punish the villagers for their sins. Most of them believed that something they did as a community was responsible for the devastation they faced… I quickly pointed out that it was just a man-made fire… [Link]

Continue reading →

Vikram Seth live interview

Posted on by

Author Vikram Seth just did a live audio interview with SAJA. The audio will be archived here.

A suitable interview

A Conversation with Vikram Seth, bestselling author of “A Suitable Boy” and “The Golden Gate” – about his brand-new book, “Two Lives,” and his career.

Interviewing Seth will be Sreenath Sreenivasan, SAJA co-founder and Aseem Chhabra, SAJA board member. They are in NYC, Vikram’s in Seattle. All three will be on a conference call, and that call is webcast live + they will be taking the questions you send in via e-mail. [Link]

Liveblogging, quotes are inexact:

A Suitable Boy: … the publisher asked, can we have a few more foreign characters to appeal to the foreign market… that’s why I was rather surprised that the… interminable book about a rather obscure period of Indian history in the ’50s… without war, without the assassination of prime ministers, without… much in the way of sex… without even a glossary… was successful outside India…

Whether to include a glossary: You can describe what a duck is, but if somebody hasn’t even seen a duck… If someone’s read Dickens… they have certain references to the geography of London… that we don’t get. But as long as the writer’s not trying to be particularly obscure… we give them latitude…

Continue reading →

Foreign minister, meet petard

Posted on by

The Indian PM stripped foreign minister Natwar Singh of rank today after Singh was fingered by a report on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.

Why you gotta be all up in my grill?

It’s not clear yet whether the move will be merely cosmetic or permanent:

India’s foreign minister was stripped of his post Monday over allegations that he benefited illegally from the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, becoming the first political casualty of an independent report that revealed massive corruption in the effort to help Iraqis suffering under sanctions. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh… demoted him to minister without portfolio…

The independent inquiry, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, has accused more than 2,200 companies and prominent politicians worldwide of colluding with Saddam Hussein’s regime to bilk the oil-for-food program of $1.8 billion in kickbacks and illicit surcharges. It named Singh and the ruling Congress party as a ”non-contractual beneficiary…”

NDTV, a local television news channel, reported that Singh will get his portfolio back if Pathak’s investigation clears him. [Link]

Continue reading →

Boys and their toys

Posted on by

The Indian Air Force reveals its hand by agreeing to fly its new, $45M Sukhoi 30 MKI fighters in mock air combat against the U.S. Air Force tomorrow:

Actual fighter manoeuvres during the war game beginning Monday will commence on Tuesday and last till November 17…

The IAF has normally been wary of fielding the Sukhoi 30 Mki for drills with foreign air forces… The decision to field the Sukhoi 30 Mki was taken because Cope India 2005 is the largest and most sophisticated of air exercises that the IAF will be participating in with the Americans.

The deployment by the USAF of an E-3 Sentry AWACS (airborne early-warning aircraft) and the possibility that the IAF will participate in the Red Flag exercises — the largest multinational fighter aircraft exercises — in the US next year were motivating factors that have led to the decision to use the Sukhoi 30 Mki. [Link]

These are late-generation fighters with thrust vectoring pitted against aging F-16s. During the last such air exercises, the American F-15Cs lost (thanks, GujuDude); there was speculation that the U.S. military was deliberately punching above its weight class to plump for a raise.

You can always count on Bengal to protest

The exercise, to be based out of Kalaikunda in Bengal, which the Left is protesting against, takes off tomorrow. [Link]

Here’s a photo of the fighter at the Bombay airport. Related posts: one, two, three, four.

Continue reading →

Krishna for Christmas

Posted on by



ABC Home is a Jagannath of a furnishings store which fills an entire New York City block. Here’s their sidewalk display for the holidays. They hawk Lakshmi with leather gloves, Buddha with bath beads. Reindeers game at Krishna’s feet, Ganesh sits blue by Christmas trees. Three white women, expensively dressed with close-cropped hair, chatted by the display: ‘And then the Buddhists get annoyed…’

30% Off — She Love You Long Time — Take Lakshmi Home Today

It’s syncretic, it’s pretty, it’s callow. I don’t see Jesus and Mary lounging among the loofahs, I don’t see Moses parting the Listerine. But you can buy ‘spicebodhi,’ capsaicin enlightenment in a bar. Symbols my parents revere become interior design props. Mild, tolerant, ‘cardamom-scented‘ Hinduism and Buddhism are gussied up and vended. We gave you Manhattan, you give us beads.

Continue reading →

‘I was a Gujarati bride for Halloween’

Posted on by

The NYT weddings section tells us of a Manhattan bride whose wedding two days before Halloween had a costume ball theme. The bride’s costume: an American wedding dress and the forehead decorations you see on Gujarati brides. And sometimes elephants. How cool is that — Halloween with a twist of commitment, a.k.a. singleton Kryptonite

The couple were married on Oct. 29 before 126 friends and family in what they called an “antiwedding”- a costume gala. Guests arrived at Studio 450, a loft in New York, wearing top hats, Egyptian headdresses and masks glittering with feathers and rhinestones. The bride’s father dressed as Zorro. The bride and bridegroom came as – surprise! – a bride and bridegroom. Candles and rose petals were scattered throughout the space… [Link]

The groom is apparently an honorary desi:

… [The groom works at] a computer software firm in New York… A few months into their relationship Mr. O’Donnell got Ms. Schaffer a PlayStation and they spent entire days playing “Final Fantasy X” and “The Sims…” [Link]

Umm, yeah, sounds familiar. Wallace and Gromit also made their presence felt:

… the wedding “cake” was served: a five-tiered wonder made up of five different types of cheese. [Link]

Cheese, Gromit!

Continue reading →

Fatty fatwa

Posted on by

From the showing-up-on-the-radar dep’t: The Colbert Report, a Daily Show spinoff, satirizes religious outrage:

My fatwa was issued by certain religious leaders because… I happened to say that Halloween was a better holiday than Romadon…

After I slammed Gandhi for his eating disorder, the Hindus came after me with an eight-armed Sheeva squeeze…

I got the Dolly Lama to take a punch at me just because I said Boodism is a religion for chubby chasers…

Nazi pope Benedict the 16th wanted to excommunicate me just because I called him a Nazi pope.

(The names are spelled the way he pronounced ’em .)

That’s not a Shiva image I recognize, though maybe it’s a style I’m unfamiliar with. The reference strikes me as a bit Temple of Doom-ish — Americans make a beeline for death cults. But hey, a funny mention is better than no mention. Watch the video.

Continue reading →

Ivy jive

Posted on by

Good taste becomes him

Yale has an entire course this semester dedicated to South Asian lit. And we didn’t even have to donate a million bucks for a South Asia chair destined for a non-South Asian Not even As-Am torchbearer Berkeley had one of these back in the day:

FALL 2005: ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
William Deresiewicz…

Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent… Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Average reading load: 250 pages/week. [Link]

Sure, it’s 250 pages/week — if you leave out A Suitable Boy Why is the prof fascinated with these themes?

William Deresiewicz is the author of Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets… [Link]

The redcoats are coming

Ah yes, soap operas with Victorian morés, a perfect match. It’s that blasted Pride and Prejudice again. After jonesing for Bridget (twice) and Bride of Gurinderstein, the new Keira Knightley version seems superfluous. The horse has not only been beaten, it’s died and been reincarnated as a hack. Ennis has been pitching me the book, but I’m in sucrose overdose.

· · · · ·

Deresiewicz talks smack about Jhumpa Lahiri’s work:

Interpreter of Maladies… exhibit[s] a high degree of competence, but it’s the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programsIt’s the kind of competence that makes you want to abolish writing programs… The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted–no, machine-tooled–to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices–the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany–arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class. [Link]

Continue reading →

The blacker the berry

Posted on by

Turnabout’s fair play: Now the Indian cosmetics industry is targeting mattar-sexuals with a skin lightener for men.

The advert for the male cream shows a dark-skinned college boy relegated to the back seat and ignored by the girls until he uses the product. Soon enough, his complexion lightens and girls flock to him like moths to a flame…

Until now, skin-lightening creams have been aimed almost exclusively at women. This is the first launched nationally for men… Called Fair and Handsome, the advertisement for the product gives the message: be fair or remain in dark oblivion…

“A look at the matrimonial section… there’s not one guy who admits to being dark and attractive, they just say we are wheatish and fair. So there is just not one dark-skinned person in this country, they are all rolling wheat fields of masculinity.” [Link]

Naomi Wolf penned an interesting polemic on this subject in The Beauty Myth. She says many cosmetics companies fund women’s mags which are largely designed to make girls feel insecure about their looks. The industry appropriates the sheen of science (white lab coats in department stores, medicalized vocabulary like ‘invisible damage to your skin’) when many of them are really peddling snake oil. The more successful they are at creating a culture of hypochondria and medicalized insecurity, the more product they move.

Many industries besides cosmetics use fear in advertising. However, it’s far more damaging when it hits women’s self-confidence instead of something more neutral like their feelings about, say, consumer appliances.

Continue reading →