Author Archives: manish

T-Bills & Louise

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My ridiculously talented corporate whore / playwright friend Anuvab Pal has managed to get a reading of Life, Love and EBITDA into the Public Theater’s festival of emerging artists. God knows what this’ll do to the size of his head. We can only hope the play lands with a thud so Anuvab continues to fit through Manhattan’s notoriously narrow doorways. But judging from past audience reaction, he’s taking the double-wide lift from now on.

Ruled from London by millionaire twins with workers toiling in India, the sun never sets on Gofuz Inc.-the world’s largest manhole-cover maker. But two women bankers have devious plans to reshape Gofuz and the future of global waste. [Link]

… investment bankers… I found fascinating because they were supposedly the cleverest people in the world, working harder than anybody else but producing absolutely nothing… I step on a manhole cover every day here in New York and it says Made in India… Every “corporate play” is always about men in suits… So why not a Wall Street play about women?… “A man’s his job,” I think Mamet told us in Glengarry Glen Ross. [Link]

Yeah, along with some other choice words now recanted

… it is easier to write a play about architects or poets because… everyone knows exactly what the end product is, a house or a poem for example… I have spoken to many senior bankers, been in the industry for many years, and they have no idea either, except it is something that pays for their kids’ colleges. [Link]

I’ve seen a reading of this play. It’s a very funny, wordplay-packed satire about the i-banking grind, the buying and selling of companies and, of course, sweet sweet lowe. Go see LL&E if you find wicked-smart women slinging finance and deconstructing romance hot.

Did I mention it’s free?

Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven

Life, Love and EBITDA reading, the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., Manhattan, Sunday, Sep. 11, 2 pm; 6 train to Bleecker St. or B, D, F, V to Broadway/Lafayette; call 212-260-2400 for free tickets
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Mirza Ghalib

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Watch Sania Mirza play with her hair and handle her bidness in front of the press at the U.S. Open (thanks, Nilesh). Doña Quixote turns inane lobs into backhanded sports clichés, just like American jocks but with considerably more fluency. What is it with desis and references to the middle finger?

The press is turning Mirza into a latter-day Cool Runnings, but Indians already know all about vicious serves and over-the-line returns. Just eavesdrop at a party on Malabar Hill.

Speaking of nose rings, the press has a new obsession:

The diamond-studded nose ring protruding from her left nostril is the first giveaway that Sania Mirza is not your typical teenage prodigy shooting up the rankings. [Link]

Sania Mirza has punishing groundstrokes, a pierced nose and burgeoning celebrity in her native India. [Link]

Mirza and her doubles partner Bryanne Stewart dropped their match on Thursday, but both Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi advanced in mixed doubles. Mirza’s third-round match starts at 11 am ET today.

Previous posts: one, two, three, four

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The spy who loved me

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My first memory of Brit Asian actress Archie Panjabi is of her in East in East and pigtails, kicking a soccer ball around the back yard. I next saw her burnishing her Asian cred as the bride in Bend It Like Beckham. So it was a pleasant surprise when she popped up in The Constant Gardener, a John Le Carré thriller adapted for screen by the director of the wonderfully fluid City of God.

Like Sarita Choudhury in A Perfect Murder, Panjabi plays yet another desi Tonto. Her character Gita, a member of the British High Commission in Kenya, is sidekick and confidante to Tessa Quayle, played by lovely, googly-eyed Rachel Weisz in a mummy suit. Ralph Fiennes’s self-effacing diplomat spends the movie decoding his wife Tessa’s secret life and eventual assassination. His British accent turns ‘Gita’ into the German ‘Gitte’; in the screen credits it’s massacred again as ‘Ghita,’ acolyte of ghee. Aside from the appellation snafu, Panjabi gets to turn up in a sari and plays the vulnerable diplomat quite serviceably.

The movie itself suffers in comparison with City of God. It’s just as long (around 2:10) but not nearly as light on its feet: blame the patient English for that. It’s a Big Pharma conspiracy theory intercut with an ad for Africa aid. Several passages are filmed in grainy Primer green with buzzing fluorescent lights and very un-starlike blood and grime. Other passages are stylistically familiar, filmed in extreme close-up with a shaky, handheld camera, the colors supersaturated and grainy. Fernando Meirelles turns a lake bed into red and blue abstract art. The couple-play is as natural as can be expected when the stiff English mate in a Calvin Klein linen closet; unlike Meirelles’ earlier film, by the end the protagonists have been thoroughly sainted.

Also unlike the kinetic CoG, this one takes the notion that movies should start with a bang and turns it on its head. The rest of the film keeps up that languid pace, so all the ad blurbs claiming it to be a thriller are overblown, to put it kindly. On one level, the über-boring title is truth in advertising; slack pacing is the enemy at these gates. On another, this is a visually inventive and deeply serious movie about the cat’s cradle between Western governments, African corruption and MNCs, with ordinary Africans caught in the middle — not to mention a posthumous, detective-story romance.

· Â· Â· Â· Â·

Ithought of the movie when I heard how a femme fatale penetrated the British High Commission in Islamabad:

Britain has removed its defence attaché in Pakistan… Red-faced and tight-lipped British officials said they were not ready to provide any details… Durcan had been recalled because he had been “tricked into a close friendship by the attractive woman”… But it described the woman as a “defence academic” who was “also believed to be an undercover agent for rogue elements within Pakistan’s intelligence services”. [Link]

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Sania Mirza in U.S. Open third round (updated)

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18-year-old tennis terror Sania Mirza just beat her second-round U.S. Open opponent, Italian Maria Elena Camerin, 6-4, 1-6, 6-4 (thanks, Sania Fan). Her next draw is 21-year-old Marion Bartoli of France (via desiFans). Mirza won her first round against Mashona Washington of Houston.

The 18-year-old from Hyderabad defeated Italy’s Elena Camerin 6-4, 1-6, 6-4 in a roller-coaster of a match and with France’s Marion Bartoli to follow, she will harbour genuine hopes of reaching the last 16 and a likely encounter with top seed Maria Sharapova.

But she will need to fully recover physically from what was a punishing second round tie if is she is to better her breakthrough third round performance at this year’s Australian Open where she eventually lost to Serena Williams. [Link]

Now ranked 42nd in the world, Mirza is the first Indian woman to win a match at the U.S. Open. She’s got lots of power, but in her last two matches committed plenty of worrisome unforced errors.

The doubles events have produced some interesting desi pairings:

Injuries notwithstanding, Sania Mirza has opted to play in the women’s doubles, partnering Australia’s Bryanne Stewart, at the US Open… Sania has a strained abdominal muscle and is also troubled by bleeding toes…

In the mixed doubles, Leander Paes joins hands with Martina Navratilova, in what could be the 48-year-old legend’s last US Open. Paes and Martina [are] seeded seventh… Mahesh Bhupathi will pair up with Slovakian Daniela Hantuchova…

Paes and Bhupathi are playing with their regular partners Nenad Zemonjic of Serbia and Montenegro and Martin Damm of the Czech Republic respectively in the men’s doubles. [Link]

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Babu hell

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Sooner or later, just like the world’s first day
Sooner or later, we learn to throw the past away
History will teach us nothing…

— Sting, ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing‘

India’s coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance, has pushed a quasi-socialist employment guarantee through Parliament:

Parliament on Wednesday night approved the historic Bill for providing employment guarantee to all rural households in the country with Rajya Sabha passing the legislation by a voice vote. [Link]

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2004 promises wage employment to every rural household, in which adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Through this Bill the government, aims at removing poverty by assuring at least 100 days’ employment. [Link]

Like most government handouts, the entitlement was expanded from its original means-tested form to include all rural households, even the relatively prosperous. India needs to build plenty of infrastructure, her villages are very poor, and so I’m all for the UPA’s WPA for a limited period of time. But you do that by first fixing which roads, flyovers and airports you want to build and then figuring out manpower requirements. What you don’t do is guarantee a paycheck regardless of the availability of work, able-bodied individuals in a household or the individual worker’s performance.

The Congress returned to power in last year’s general election largely on its promises of giving the country’s economic reforms a human face and making the process more inclusive so that it benefited the poor in rural areas…

“This bill has been tabled in Parliament without proper preparation. The government does not know the exact number of unemployed people. There were six such schemes earlier, but they all failed due to the same reason,” said Singh, who is chairman of the Parliament’s standing committee on rural development. The bill, when enacted, will cover all rural households, not just those below poverty line, as had been provided earlier. [Link]

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Disastrous celebrity

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Remember when much of the coverage of last year’s tsunami focused on the Victoria Secret’s model caught up in the waves rather than the 200,000 dead? And the ToI story which said the real tragedy of the Bombay cloudburst was that customers couldn’t get their ToI?

The Indo-Asian News Service throws its hat into the ring of vacuousness. Remember that in inverted pyramid style, the most salient fact comes first in the headline and lede. So here’s the most important fact about the destruction of New Orleans and the Louisiana, Missouri and Alabama coasts as reported by IANS and quoted in Abhi’s post:

Hurricane Katrina leaves US Congressman man Jindal homeless [Link]

You can contribute to the Red Cross relief effort here. Previous posts: one, two

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The New Yorker Festival

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This year’s Wells Fargo New Yorker Festival draws a grab bag of celebs-e-tweed you can pay to rub shoulders with: Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Richard Dawkins, Behnaz Sarafpour and Sasha Frere-Jones. And they’re not alone: Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Roots, yadda yadda. It’s like they swiped the Sex and the City item numbers and invited with abandon.

In a highbrow bow, a gesture of noblesse oblige, the magazine not only ran a feature on the Three Stooges this week, they invited the South Park brats to the fest. But of course the Jhumpa-Zadie axis is sold out. How now, brown cow?

The Aug. 29th issue also ran an excellent Vijay Seshadri poem, ‘Family Happiness.’ Seshadri is an English professor who may have been one of the original 2nd genners, with both a pukka American accent and an incongruous shock of gray hair. He read another poem I dig at the SAJA fest; he’s got a radio voice and a knack for lines of astringent tenderness within the clutches of marriage.

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio… and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing and logging industries, and New York’s Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature… He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. [Link]

New Yorker Festival, Sep. 23-25, 2005, Manhattan, various locations

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Uptight Updike

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John Updike reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest in the New Yorker. He moans about Rushdie’s precocious, hyperactive style but has the grace to quote extensively. He slowly dribbles out the master’s words to be set upon by the ravenous she-wolf bitches known as rabid Rushdie fans. Such as, uh, my ‘friend.’

My ‘friend’ here appreciates Updike cribbing from Shalimar. It sounds raw. It sounds risky. It sounds fabulous. Oh, and there’s some famous-author-whining in there too.

In a neat trick both topical and intimate, Rushdie is symbolically returning to Kashmir with this novel. Recall the rapturous prose about Dal Lake, red hair, blue eyes and a distinctive proboscis where Midnight’s Children began. It’s a journey desi authors selling into the West often make in reverse: their first few books aren’t ‘write what you know,’ but rather ‘write what sells.’ Only when they’re comfortable in their bestselling skins, and the wolves of missed rent bay at the doors of younger writers, do they return to exorcise their deeper pains: for Rushdie, the rape of Kashmir; for Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan civil war.

[Dedication:] … in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents…

In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell… Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete… The world was no longer calm…

… he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood…

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‘Aishwarya Jones’ Diary’

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What happens when Prides collide? Aishwarya Rai and Colin Firth are filming a $70M sword-and-chappals epic with Sir Ben (via DesiFans). Harvey Weinstein is backing Rai again despite the disappointing U.S. box office of Bride and Prejudice. It’s called The Last Legion:

The Last Legion is an epic adventure based on acclaimed author Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s international best-selling 2003 novel of the same name. The film is set against the fall of the Roman Empire in 470AD and its last emperor, 12-year-old Romulus Augustus…

Over-run with rebellion, Rome is a city on the brink of chaos and destruction. Imprisoned by rebels on the island-fortress of Capri, Romulus, aided by the clever strategies of his teacher Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley) and the heroic skills of his legionnaire Aurelius (Colin Firth), escape the island. Despite the turbulent events around them, this small band of Roman soldiers, accompanied by Byzantine warrior Mira (Aishwarya Rai), are determined to continue their mission to restore the Empire. This resolute group sets out on an arduous and dangerous trek for Britannia in search of the Last Legion, in their bid to make one final stand for Rome. [Link]

Colin Firth …. Aurelius
Ben Kingsley …. Ambrosinus
Aishwarya Rai …. Livia  [Link]

Finally, we’ve got a suitable hero for the queen of mock chastity: not Colin Farrell, but Colin Firth, the serious Darcy in a ridiculous jumper. Though now that I mention it, the other pairing would have been interesting, the louche Lothario meeting chastity princess:

Farrell: ‘You know, I’ve dated a desi woman before.’
Aishwarya: ‘Strippers don’t count.’

Instead we get Aishwarya Jones’ Diary. ‘Aurelius, do these knickers make me look fat?’

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Burqa provocateur (updated)

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Pakistani-Norwegian stand-up comic Shabana Rehman is a burqa provocateur (thanks, Srinath):

Rehman… was born in Karachi but raised in Norway… [Link]

She typically begins her act wearing a burqa, which she then strips away to reveal a tight, red cocktail dress… She notably made headlines in the popular press last week by dropping her pants and baring her buttocks at a film festival in Haugesund, in southwest Norway. “I want to show that in Norway, you can do such things without being lynched or arrested… You can’t do a stunt like this in Karachi or Kabul.” [Link]

She’s pulled both a Madonna and a Demi Moore:

Rehman then went on to kiss vigorously Norway’s female Culture Minister… seeking to make a point about a debate raging in the country’s Pakistani community over a film scene showing a young Pakistani girl kissing a Norwegian boy… [Link]

‘In Norway there are approximately 70,000 Muslims out of a total population of 4 million [1.75% of the population]… My answer to their reactions was to paint my body with the Norwegian flag and pose in the nude.’ [Link]

The 5’4″ woman pulled an old Jewish and Punjabi wedding trick upon a fundie with suspected Al Qaeda links who took asylum in Norway. If only he were Jewish, he’d have known what was coming

Rehman came on stage and said she wanted to carry out a “satiric test” to find out if Mullah Krekar was as strongly fundamentalist as some of his critics believe. When he approached her, she grabbed him and lifted him up in the air.

Krekar… became furious, grabbed the microphone and began speaking in Norwegian for the first time that evening. “… she has no right to carry or touch me… ” Krekar said, and promised to lodge a complaint via his lawyer. Rehman… told newspaper VG she also wanted to show that if she could lift him, he could hardly be a danger to national security. [Link]
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