Author Archives: manish

A chilly Diwali

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Manhattan celebrates Diwali next Sunday, October 2nd at the South Street Seaport. Come enjoy bhangra, chaat, Air-India fireworks (not the Flight 182 kind) and life insurance booths next to the Brooklyn Bridge.

The chilly Seaport is a moorage for tall ships in the shadow of azure skyscrapers by Wall Street. It’s both an anachronism (a mall these days) and an odd spot for the celebration, evoking the Americans dressed as Indians who dumped tea in Boston Harbor.

Real Indians would never waste perfectly good tea. And it would probably be Lipton.

Previous post here. Related posts: one, two, three.

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Roll bounce

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Forbes magazine says audiophiles are apeshit over a cheap, $30 amp which sound as clear as high-end competitors. It’s the audiophile version of Two-Buck Chuck:

… the T-Amp was nothing to brag about, just a… battery-powered amplifier that hooks up to chintzy cardboard speakers. A firm called Sonic Impact Technologies introduced it to no acclaim in 2003. Then orders suddenly took off last fall, surging from a hundred to a thousand units a week…

… audiophiles were raving about the T-Amp on the Internet, claiming this tiny plastic wedge produced music as sweet-sounding as amplifiers costing thousands of dollars. The customer had “hooked it up to an $18,000 pair of speakers and a $6,000 CD player,” Bracke says. A reviewer on a Web site in Italy called the T-Amp the most amazing product in 25 years. And an online cottage industry had sprung up around the T-Amp, with companies such as Red Wine Audio, in Auburn, Massachusetts, stuffing the electronic guts of the plastic amps into sleek metal cases and selling them for up to $1,200… [Link]

The secret to this amp is an innovative audio chipset designed by an entrepreneur named Adya Tripathi. Is he the new Amar Bose?

Tripath’s founder, Adya Tripathi, figured out a way to make a digital amplifier that produces very little distortion. Tripathi, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a veteran of National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, found that part of the trick involves pulsing on and off at far higher rates–millions of times per second… Tripath’s higher pulse rate creates more chances to offset signal distortion by applying feedback… The T-Amp uses Tripath’s lowest-end chip… which puts out 15 watts of power and costs $3… [Link]

Tripathi is from Benares:

The advance comes from a little chip produced by Tripath Technology Inc., a 150-employee company in Santa Clara, Calif. It was founded in 1995 by Adya S. Tripathi, a 48-year-old engineer from the holy city of Varanasi… Before taking the company public… Tripathi secured $50 million in funding from such high-tech heavyweights as Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. [Link]

This is when I expect a certain mutineer to roll into Adya uncle’s office as a long-lost relative and then bounce, saying goodbye to the sucka mutineers who fly economy

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Goyal’s toils

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Raghubir Goyal the Foil, the One-Track Uncle called on by White House press secretaries to evade tough questioning, shows up in a Daily Show segment. ‘Go ahead, Goyal,’ says the spokesman.

‘My question is in connection with the Prime Minister of India’s visit on Monday…’ he begins, sidetracking the preceding questions about domestic politics. Old faithful.

Watch the clip, he’s at 4:29.

Keep watching to see the other reliable escape hatch. Lester Kinsolving is the resident crank from WCBM Radio. A female reporter sits behind him, smirking and exchanging looks with other reporters while he asks a long, bizarre question about whether Dubya agrees with emperor Constantine’s fourth-century Christian theology.

Dude, have a little respect. I think we can safely assume POTUS knows about Constantine.

It had Rachel Weisz and Keanu Reeves and, like, totally rawked.

Previous post here.

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Peace, love and breakfast cereal

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The 3HO group of Sikh converts in the U.S. has made a small fortune on health food (thanks, commenters). Now, with real corn!

So the ginger asked the almond, “Could you make me a snack?” and the almond said, “Kazam! You’re a snack.”

What did the peanut say to the cashew? Gesundheit! [Link]

Waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ki granola bar? I gotta say, their sense of humor is authentically desi. Let’s not forget Yogi Tea, which tells us you don’t have to work your way into exotique, you can just drink it (via Tilo). On camelback in front of the Taj, apparently.

Exotic Teas: Savor the enchanting flavor and sweet aroma of spices from around the world… [Link]

Peace Cereal, a million dollar biz, pitches nirvana via breakfast cereal. It’s a Ben & Jerinder’s business model:

Peace Cereal has promoted the transformative power of peace by donating 10% of our profits to peace building organizations, resulting in more than $1 million in donations. [Link]

They even have a warm and fuzzy founder story like the one on every package of Mrs. Fields. When Yogi Bhajan baked his first batch of authentic guru cookies…

In 1969 Yogi Bhajan began teaching Kundalini Yoga in America, sharing the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda and healthy living that he had mastered in India. After each class he would serve his students a special spice tea based upon this healing science, which they affectionately named Yogi Tea… Golden Temple (bulk granolas), Peace Cereal (packaged cereals), Wha Guru Chew (candy bars), Herbal Gems (capsulated herb formulas), Sunshine (body care products) and Soothing Touch (professional massage products), were some of the companies… [Link]

Other parts of their empire: Ancient Healing Ways, Yogi Botanicals.

The whole thing strikes me as a cross between the friars who support themselves with wine, fruitcake and Web design and the same consumer couture which gags my bullshit sensor on Solano Ave. I’m more impressed with their business savvy. At least they have a sense of humor about it.

Related posts: one, two, three

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Washington monument

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My favorite festival with a faux-Muslim name starts in just a week. SALTAF, the South Asian Literary and Theatre Arts Festival, will indulge your culture-vulture proclivities in D.C. this October 1st weekend (thanks, Pooja). It sounds remarkably highbrow for a NetSAP/NetIP event.

The list of numinaries includes poet filmmaker Deepa Mehta, Vijay Seshadri, Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers), Anita Desai, M.G. Vassanji (Toronto South Asian Review and my fave title ever, Amriika) and Shyam Selvadurai. With that literati-centric lineup, maybe they should just name it SAJA Delhi and call it a day

This documentary on the parallels between kathak and flamenco looks interesting:

Firedance by Vishnu Mathur

Two renowned Toronto performers… each [tell how]… Kathak and flamenco shared an ancient history. Soon they started working together… Joanna and Esmeralda demonstrate in the documentary how similar the foot and hand movements of these two dance forms are – and they trace the evolution of the differences that came about in the course of time; Flamenco using shoes for sound and subtle nuance, Kathak bells and bare feet for its rhythmic expressions.

Here’s the festival schedule.

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The Cara Sutra

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Commenter Angie went beyond the call of duty and scanned in this bit of whimsical pop surrealism from Cadbury:

… you’ll notice some very odd accessories in the drawing: a bbq, a duck flotation device, barnyard, and of all things a PLOW in the background. Maybe this appropriately 5 o’clock shadowed brown fellow plans on hooking up his lady to the plow later on… I don’t think he’d want to ruin his sheer silk chiffon shirt and capris with any dirty field work.

I love the musical anachronism, not that it’s a boombox but that it’s not an MP3 player. The two feet pressed together are a randy reference to a sexual position used to much effect by Indira Varma in Mira Nair’s soft-core raspberry, Kama Sutra.

Exploitative? Surely there’s a straight line from chocolate to eroticism. It’s much more tasteful than Raymond’s raunchy KamaSutra condom ads. Oh, yes: the conservative, Indian men’s suiting company covers everything that might pop up.

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Highway to heaven

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Highway signs from Ladakh:

        

Himank is responsible for construction of GS roads and other related infrastructure for Army, Air Force and government organisations located within the Ladakh region consisting of Leh and Kargil districts. Project Himank looks after the famous areas of Drass, Kargil, Batalik, Siachen Glacier and Chushul. The project sector encompasses world’s second coldest region of Drass, world’s highest motorable road astride Khardung La, world’s highest battle-ground of Siachen Glacier and Pangong Tso Lake at 14500 ft located across India-China border. [Link]

(thanks, Ankush)

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Yaaran, start your engines

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British bhangra label Nachural has announced that five of its tracks will appear on a Microsoft racing game for the Xbox 360:

… Nachural has taken bhangra onto another level in announcing the placement of tracks from its catalogue onto [Project Gotham Racing 3], the game to be launched by Xbox [360]… in the winter of 2005…

Two tracks by Achanak (‘Teri Muhabbatan‘ and the ‘Lak Noo’ remix) and three tracks by Tigerstyle (‘Boliyaan,’ ‘Akh Mastani’ and ‘Maan Doeba Da’)… This is the first time that bhangra tracks… have been placed [in] any interactive game… [Link]

Art finally imitates life: First bhangra tracks in a console game?Vinod and I used to car-dance to Achanak while jamming from sterile Seattle up to rockin’ Vancouver on the weekends. Personally, I can’t wait to play berserker bhangra while fragging demons asuras in the next version of Doom. Bhangra’s raw energy is like Nine Inch Nails’ Doom soundtrack, only less sadist. Bow to the power of the turbanator!

In other news, Microsoft plans to release an even deadlier version of Halo (screenshot). It will also one-up Super Mario with Super Patel Brothers, where players must collect cheap vittles from an Indian food superstore in Jackson Heights.

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Bibliophilia

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Sikhs from New Orleans used equipment popular with Navy SEALs to rescue their copy of the Guru Granth Sahib from a gurdwara under nine feet of water (via Amardeep):

… the United Sikhs sought the help of one of its volunteer Ranbir Kaur, a US Army National Guard [soldier], to hire the rescue services of SRT, a private helicopter special response… firm… [The] operation… lasted over a period of 22 hours…

Zodiac boats equipped with underwater cameras and rescue equipment were used to reach the flooded gurdwara, which was completely damaged inside, but [the] Guru Granth Sahib was on the ‘palki’ (palanquin) and floating on water. “I was amazed, looking at the Guru Sahib’s ‘sukhasan’ on the palki, floating on 5 feet of water and untouched by the flood waters,” Hardayal Singh was quoted as saying. [Link]

The immense value the Sikhs place on this religious artifact reminds me of synagogues’ ingenious solution to the theft of Torah scrolls. To protect priceless ancient work, they’re using digital watermarking:

Like many Torah scrolls in active service, the one stolen from Temple Sholom last month is an antique, and is believed to have been crafted in the Middle East several hundred years ago… With a fair market value of around $50,000 for a new scroll, $9,000 for a used one, Judaism’s sacred text is in some ways a perfect underground commodity… Torah scrolls are inherently anonymous. Jewish law dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah’s text. That means no “property of” stamps, no serial numbers, no visible identifying marks of any kind…

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