The Empire State Building is lit green and white this weekend in honor of Pakistan’s independence. Manhattan’s parade starts at 12:30 pm today and goes down Madison Ave. from 41st to 26th Sts.
The 23rd St. tower’s lighting is still on IST. Maybe it’s reactionary political commentary; maybe it’s a statement of solidarity; maybe, like vegetables and viceroys, it only morphs at the stroke of midnight.
Seen atop a NYC cab: ‘Hum vahan vyavsaya ke liye jaathe hain,’ ‘we go there for business’ (thanks, skk).
I love the non-translation. It’s like the out-joke in Lost in Translation when the enfant terrible director rants at length in Japanese:
Ms. Kawasaki: He want you to turn and look in camera. Okay?
Bob (Bill Murray): Is that all he said? [Link]
On the other hand, they skipped the obvious alliteration: ‘Don’t dilly-dally, Delhi daily.’
Check out D’Arcy, a Brit indie pop group with an ’80s fashion fixation (obligatory M.I.A. reference via AiM):
[The band was] founded three years ago by Ashish Dharsi, the band’s vocalist and rhythm guitarist, and Tristan Evans, who plays lead guitar… “When I started as a solo singer songwriter a friend was designing a flyer and wrote my name on it as D’Arcy instead of Dharsi thinking that’s how it was spelt. I liked it and we have stuck with it and it’s attracting a lot of support, particularly from our Irish fans.” [Link]
Well, of course that’s what you get when you pronounce your pukka desi name in that posh Brit accent 
Ashish makes a much more interesting Dharsi than Martin Henderson.
Listen here (MP3).
A pariah agiary is rushing new pledges in Bombay (via Arzan):
On Khordad Sal, Prophet Zarathustra’s birthday, a group of Parsis quietly inaugurated a new ”universal agiary” or Fire Temple in a Colaba apartment. It was for the first time in the community’s history a temple was thrown open to non-Parsis. Almost a hundred people, both Parsis and non-Parsis, turned up for the agiary’s jashan and the humbandagi–traditional prayers recited strictly for and by Parsis. And supporting the move were script writer Sooni Taraporevala and Smita Godrej Crishna, sister of industrialist Jamshyd Godrej…The prophet encouraged conversion, but Parsi women who marry outside the fold are pariahs, debarred from fire temples, from converting their families. But dwindling numbers–the census recorded 69,601 at last count–have prompted progressive Parsis to adopt a more practical approach…
Already, half a dozen Parsi priests have started offering clandestine ritual services at Navjots, marriages and funerals for a sizeable number of ostracised clients. Now the Wadias hope the new agiary will voice the unspoken aspirations of 40 per cent of Parsis who married outside the clan. [Link]
The Parsi religion seems to be missing the key meme of those which spread widely, a liberal conversion process. The elders are displeased:
He explains that an agiary can only be consecrated by the highest echelons of the clergy, after three weeks of rituals. ”Needless to say, a group of renegade priests officiating in a cult movement certainly don’t qualify.” [Link]
Former McKinsey chief Rajat Gupta interviews the man in the perenially blue turban in the McKinsey Quarterly (registration required). 
I bet he pronounces the name right. It’s two free-marketers talking to each other, the benefit of having an economist occupying 7 Race Course Road.
Singh says his top priority isn’t high tech or special export zones, it’s electrifying villages. He’s talking about the basic heavy lifting of a long-delayed national bootstrap:
We have, for the next four to five years, a very ambitious plan to expand… the availability of electricity to all of our villages…When I look at countries like South Korea, all children who are of secondary-school-going age are in school; our children drop out even before they complete primary school… we are making, for the first time, the most determined effort to ensure that all our children… in the next four or five years have the benefit of minimum primary schooling.
Beyond upgrading airports, his administration is also spending on ports and railroads:
We are working with the Japanese government to draw up a program in which the freight corridors between Mumbai-Delhi, Mumbai-Chennai, and Delhi-Kolkata can be modernized. Our estimate is that that will cost about 25 thousand crore of rupees [$5.7 billion], and that’s our high priority as far as the railway system is concerned… We also are now in the process of modernizing our seaports.
The Indian government’s policy naming schemes are an odd hangover cocktail of faceless socialist, stymied bureaucrat and shudh Hindi or Sanskrit:
The Common Minimum Program, which is the benchmark for us to assess where we want to go, talks about the navratnas. These navratnas are companies essentially in the oil sectors, the power sectors, which are doing really well…
The one-man sound bite missile named Rushdie aims His cross-Atlantic test firing at 
Time and the Times (thanks, Sapna and Karthik):
There’s a line about Klingons on the very first page of Shalimar. Aren’t you worried that a pop reference like that will date the book?
… A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.Speaking of Klingons, wasn’t your wife… on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise?
Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best. [Link]
Now that Lakshmi’s been on Star Trek, our nerdy readers have official permission to idolize. I love the uncharacteristically autistic, Trekkie honesty here (whereas in the Times Rushdie gives wuvvy-dovey, team player quotes). His wife was on TV, and it was just ‘eh’? Something tells me he’s going to learn about ‘withholding’ tonight, and I don’t mean taxes
The Times delves into his early career, which is always where the critical lessons of history are found — not how a success expands, but how it struggled from obscurity in the first place:
Continue readingHe was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers… and Ian with his first collections of short stories… and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”
His debut, Grimus, was both a critical and commercial failure and despite the huge and continued success of Midnight’s Children, all the more remarkable for it being only his second novel, Rushdie could not forgive the casual dismissiveness of those first reviews… he admits that if he sees people reading it, his instinct is to hide behind the furniture. “… it embarrasses me.” [Link]
Ananthan recently penned this fascinating post 
on the Tamil Tigers’ cemeteries (see photos):
The LTTE is a secular organization but up until the early 90s it seems that dead cadres… were all cremated according to Hindu practice. In the early 90s this was changed to burial…… the use of these graveyards, similar in style to those used by militaries in the west, helps to confer legitimacy to the LTTE. The Tigers are often dismissed or denounced as unthinking, purposeless terrorists; established memorials help to combat that view… Cremation doesn’t leave any tangible, visible evidence of those who have passed, burial does…
The Maaveerar are celebrated on November 27th, officially remembered as the day in which the first Tiger died… in Sri Lanka the ceremonies take place in the Tuillum Illam. [LTTE Leader] Prabhakaran’s yearly speech is delivered and broadcast through loudspeakers in all Tuillum Illam.
… the practice of burial is rationalized with the opposing beliefs of Hinduism…
The daughter of a big-time Silicon Valley VC wed last weekend. 
In these troubled times, it warms my heart to see that the ultra-wealthy are still meeting and mating over that shared hobby called Indophilia
… each had traveled to India, Ms. Kramlich to ride horses across the desert in Rajasthan and Dr. Bowie to Dharmsala, “to meet the Dalai Lama…” [Link]
Wealthy Westerners… a dusty desert… heaving bodices… it’s The Far Pavilions! For that level of Indophilia, their kids better be wearing turbans. I’m thinkin’ Poon-jab as the child of Daddy Warbucks.
As Ms. Kramlich’s father doubtless has access to a private jet, it may be the last time she and her husband find themselves on horseback out of necessity The wedding writeup is a peek into the lifestyle of Sand Hill Brahmins:
In 2001 she had abandoned a career in business and product development with start-up technology companies to study acting… They were married in typical California wine-country style on Aug. 13. Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court, a friend of the bride’s family, led the ceremony under a canopy of oaks and a Wedgwood-blue sky on the grounds of the 21-acre Oakville, Calif., weekend house and vineyard owned by the bride’s father, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and her stepmother, Pamela Kramlich, a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The bride looked serene in a form-fitting creamy-white Vera Wang gown as a string quartet, tucked into the greenery, played sweetly. A reception and sit-down dinner for 234 guests followed on the grassy lawns surrounding the votive-lit family pool.
After the couple’s honeymoon, at an eco-resort in Nicaragua, that is part nature preserve and part reforestation project, the bride and the bridegroom, who has no pets of his own, will return to their new horse farm in the Oakland Hills of California with her animal entourage: three Arabian horses and one very happy and healthy poodle. [Link]
All joking aside, congratulations to the newlyweds.
That *$ siren with wavy hair whom you’re ogling is Sarita Choudhury:
British actress Sarita Choudhury has been signed up for a role in M. Night Shyamalan’s next big film Lady in the Water… M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film tells the story of a superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a sea nymph in the building’s pool…Sarita Choudhury was born in London and spent her early years in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also lived in Mexico for a while…
In a previous interview, she put her variety of roles down to lack of opportunities for Indian actors. “Left to myself I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters,” she said. She is currently working in three other films. [Link]
Wonder if one of those roles is a terrorist.
Over the Mountains is in post-production and will be the first to see a release. It is about a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City who experiences a crisis of conscience. Indocumentados is currently in production, while work on For Real has not yet started. [Link]
Ding ding ding!
When I saw Shyamalan’s Praying With Anger, a student film that was a prototype for the American Desi/American Chai/ABCD wave, I’d never have guessed what would transpire. Over a decade later, Shyamalan tips his lid to one of the original 2nd gen actresses from his throne room in mainstream American film.
A de Menezes update: police and military radios both were on different frequencies and apparently didn’t work underground. It’s shades of 9/11.
Police marksmen and army surveillance teams following Jean Charles de Menezes onto a Tube train could not receive orders in the vital moments before he was shot dead because their radios did not work underground… The undercover officers sitting alongside Mr de Menezes are understood to have decided he was not a threat, but they could not get this message back to Gold Command at the Yard nor relay it to the marksmen.
As the firearms officers ran into the station they are believed to have been out of touch with everyone else involved in the operation. It has been disclosed that the two groups involved — one from Scotland Yard and the other from the Army — were using different radio networks as they trailed the innocent electrician from his home on July 22. Officers on the train are understood to have decided that from the way Mr de Menezes was dressed, and that he was not carrying a bag, he was not about to blow himself up. [Link]
Active suspects should never have been let onto the tube in the first place:
One of the troops who accompanied the Yard marksmen on to the tube also reportedly told military chiefs that the armed police arrived far too late and should have intercepted their target outside Stockwell Underground station, in South London. [Link]