Author Archives: manish

Jaisim Fountainhead

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I’m unapologetically modernist. To me, history only runs forward, and yesterday is usually an embarrassing old version 1.0. If you saw my questionable fashion choices from years past, you’d hasten to agree.

Given my technobarbarian predilections, this NYT story extolling the virtues of housing Bangalore tech workers in former tobacco warehouses strikes me as nothing more than the romanticization of poverty:

In contrast to these unabashed clones of buildings in Palo Alto or San Jose is a 37-acre campus in the heart of the city whose granite- and terra cotta-adorned buildings are set among decades-old trees and painted in vibrant Indian shades of brick red and deep green. The buildings have names from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, while the rooms within are named after the ancient books of learning, the Vedas. Every morning the Indian flag is ceremonially hoisted on a central flagpole, an unusual practice for businesses here… most of the streets have been paved with local stone… walls made of hollow terra-cotta blocks, flat stone tables and acoustic-friendly ceilings that are fashioned out of earthen pots. The giant century-old chimney, ancient trees and even an old fire station have been left standing… [Link]

Crappy old clay buildings, unpaved streets, giving buildings names in local languages? In India that’s not called ‘environmentally friendly’ architecture. That’s called all architecture  The NYT’s spin feels to me like the wealthy patting the pre-industrial on the head. It’s a yearning you only get after industrializing:

… Galapagos Bar… reminded me a hell of a lot of a cement factory in India, with a dank pool taking up most of the space, stone walls with hand-lit candles mounted in odd places, not the least behind rows of expensive vodkas. The charms of the torture castle, the provincial, it’s the classic example of art defining itself as other. Even when other means pre-industrial… in developing countries this would not have been recognizable as a chi-chi place in the art sense, handmade is the order of the day and not as admired as standardized and mass-produced… [Link]

The renovating architect drew inspiration from The Fountainhead. Ironically, the illustrations on Ayn Rand’s popular edition covers are not about building for human scale at all. They’re soaring neo-Gothic works which draw inspiration from the spires of Soviet universities, albeit stripped of communist symbols. They’re Rockefeller Center. Skyscrapers move books, even when they contradict the book’s aesthetic Continue reading →

India daze

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On IST as always, NYC’s India Day parade was held on August 21 this year. I couldn’t attend, but I hear one of our readers played the nauch girl on stage. Perhaps you’ll chime in with incriminating photos.

Like the Poe toaster, only sans macabre, some mystery soul always garlands the Gandhi statue in Union Square with fresh flowers:

For over 50 years since 1949, on the night marking the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious man-in-black has entered the cemetery where the master of the macabre lies buried, and, making his way through the dark shadows to Poe’s grave, he places a partial bottle of expensive French cognac and three blood-red roses there, presumably as tokens of admiration and in tribute to the great author. This ritual completed, he then slips away into the night as quietly and as mysteriously as he came…

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Spy vs. spy

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The de Menezes case has turned murkier: the stakeout guys now blame the shooters for the mistake. The surveillance team noted that de Menezes did not look Ethiopian like their suspect. And the police say the undercover cops who trailed de Menezes onto the train would not have been there if they thought he was packing heat. So it’s still baffling why the shooters pulled the trigger.

… members of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into Stockwell underground station in London felt that he was not about to detonate a bomb, was not armed and was not acting suspiciously… The two teams have fallen out over the circumstances surrounding the incident, raising fresh questions about how the operation was handled. A police source said: ‘There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device…’

For the firearms officers involved in the death to avoid any legal action, they will have to state that they believed their lives and those of the passengers were in immediate danger. Such a view is unlikely to be supported by members of the surveillance unit. [Link]

When filling out your biodata, remember to replace ‘wheatish’ with ‘IC3’:

The first man who was supposed to identify the suspect admits that he was relieving himself behind a tree but saw enough of Mr de Menezes to tell commanders that he was an “IC1” — the description used for a white North European and nothing like Hussain Osman, the suspected Ethiopian-born bomb suspect awaiting extradition from Rome. [Link]

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Six degrees of Johnny Lever

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Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf are on the cover of the August-September 2005 issue of Audrey, the Asian-American women’s mag. My dream in life is to squeeze into the gap on the cover. Here’s the blurb:

‘Bollywood to Hollywood’: Indians & Indian Americans, like our cover girls Noureen DeWulf (left) and Navi Rawat, are poised to hit mainstream USA.

The story covers Shaista Usta, a Turkish and desi actress who starred in a recent Dev Anand movie, as well as the usual suspects (Gurinder Chadha, Gitesh Pandya). Rawat explains the numb3rs: looking unplaceably ethnic is far more useful in Hollywood than looking desi. On the other hand, Pandya says he’s happy that after 9/11, there are lots of roles for desis playing terrorists.

DeWulf talks about playing a Palestinian in West Bank Story, a film which played Sundance, and being of Indian Muslim origin. She’ll play ‘PooPoo’ with a desi accent in National Lampoon’s Pledge This. She’s also in American Dreamz, an upcoming movie with an intriguing cast: it includes John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog). Guess what she plays? No, really, take a wild guess.

Hollywood producers of the black comedy American Dreamz are reconsidering the script after the London attacks because it involves suicide bombers attempting to assassinate the American president. The film, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, features a group of Pakistani terrorists, who target a mentally frail president played by Quaid… The script has been written by Paul Weitz, who previously worked with Grant on the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. [Link]

Marcia Gay Harden plays the First Lady while the supporting cast finds room for the likes of Chris Klein, Richard Dreyfuss and Willem Dafoe. [Link]

Aghdashloo, the throaty-voiced Iranian-American GMILF who was so good in Sand and Fog, is also playing Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men 3:

… she’s been cast by Ratner and co. as Dr Kavita Rao. This is the woman who, in recent X-Lore, created the Hope serum, which tried to ‘cure’ a mutant of their powers. It obviously set up a huge ethical and moral dilemma among the mutant community, and didn’t go down well with Hank McCoy, or The Beast as he is perhaps better known (this role has been filled by Kelsey Grammer). [Link]

Playing six degrees of Johnny Lever, we find that Rawat and Aghdashloo were both in Sand and Fog, Rawat playing Aghdashloo’s Iranian daughter (and for that matter, Sir Krishna Kingsley playing the father). Now Aghdashloo is repaying the compliment.

And so the circle is complete.

Previous posts on Rawat: 1, 2, 3; and DeWulf.

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‘Oops!… I Did It Again’

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I hate to be the Celebrity Nazi, but this must not pass unremarked. We’ve noted the hackish tendencies of the Times of India web site before. Check out yesterday’s doozy (via Kush): the ToI’s photo implied that Britney Spears’ first husband was Jason Alexander, the rotund comedian who played George Costanza on Seinfeld.

Of course, the young rake they’re really after is Jason Allen Alexander of ‘I was Britney Spears’ love slave for 55 hours’ infamy.

“I never thought the wedding was a joke. I was serious about everything I said. But being married to Britney Spears was shit…” [Link]

Maybe the ToI should hire some of those call center people who watch American sitcoms all day. No fact-checking for you!

In other news, I was married to Carmen Electra for 55 hours. Uh, that’s Carmen Electra of Oskaloosa, Kansas

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‘The Aristocrats’

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The Aristocrats is a new documentary about a hoary inside joke in the informal guild of American stand-up comics. The joke, a fraternity-like test of wit and manhood, involves improvising as many deeply sick events you can imagine within the framework of a simple story. Most comics tell the joke only to other comedians. They often begin with incest and pedophilia, delve into scatology and bestiality and finish with a chaser of sadism and necrophilia. This joke doesn’t play in Peoria. The most fun thing about the movie is seeing George Carlin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey and Jason Alexander together on the same reel.

The documentary shows a female comedian doing a throwaway joke about desis. It goes something like this: ‘Maybe we could bring in an Indian guy. The slurpee kind, not the casino kind. He could sprinkle curry all over everyone, make them stink.’ The joke, which takes much more racist digs at blacks and Latinos, is purposely illustrating offensive comedy. The comedian is pointing out that for shock value, race is the new sex.

You’d think the racism joke would be the least memorable thing about a movie which catalogues all the variants of a deeply repellent story. But it was actually the only one in the entire movie that stood out to me as mean-spirited. It proved its point exactly: sex and cartoon violence don’t hold a candle to what happens in real life.

Update: Watch the trailer. Here’s a very filthy, NSFW South Park version of the joke (thanks, Project37). Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach.

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Really Stuck on Shiva

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Over in the tech world, a debate rages over the naming of Really Simple Syndication, a format which lets you subscribe to multiple blogs and receive regular updates. Some say its orange button is ugly, its acronym too geeky for your grandma to grok. They suggest the simpler word ‘subscribe’ or, perchance, ‘feed.’ Others say that people learn acronyms all the time: XP, BMW, CYA. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a blog editor and prefer non-technical terms.)

What few are saying is that the little saffron RSS button really freaks out millions of desis all over the Net. It’s the flip side of the cultural hijacking of the swastika, and the acronym makes it looks like a donation button for right-wing Hindus. Godse would be proud.

The Internet standards groups are getting ready to roll out their next proposal, Very High Performance. In retaliation, India has released its version, Konsistently Krunk Kaching 

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Boot camp for bad Indian boys

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In America, parents threaten truant kids with military school. Or so I learned from an excellent documentary called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But in desi America, the Hindustan Times informs me, they threaten them with banishment to dude ranches in the motherland:

The fees are exorbitant compared to regular schools, ranging from… $700 to $6,000 a year for Indian kids. NRIs pay almost double the amount. Some schools demand hefty down payments for admission in addition to the tuition charges… JIRS, constructed over 125 acres at a cost of Rs 72 crore, offers virtually every sports and games facility including cricket, astro-turf hockey fields, football fields, mini golf course, six tennis courts, a roller-skating rink, horse riding and compulsory micro-flight flying lessons…

Indian professionals abroad want their children to benefit from the same educational system that enabled them to compete with the best in world… “I don’t want snooty kids who think they are above the rest. I want them to learn about humanity, Gandhi and non-violence, about learning to create peace and harmony in the world…”

And horse riding, calculus by first grade, and getting beaten with a heavy ruler

Keval, Ankur and Raj are enrolled into the athletic, academic program at JIRS. Their day begins at five thirty in the morning with meditation and yoga and ends at ten in the night with prayers. One of them even told his mother, “We pray so many times through the day, there is hardly time to talk…”

It’s a Hindu madrassa!

Both his children, Sumit Munjal, 15 and Ronika Nirankari, 16 are in residential schools in Deheradoon and Missouri. Pal is very happy with the way his kids are turning out, “away from the bad influence of American classrooms, drugs, obscene clothes and unmanageable independence…” A beaming Pal declares that his daughter plays the harmonium, sings beautiful bhajans and learns Indian classical dance.

I know a few drill sergeant aunties who turn out kids exactly the same way. You can tell because their kids’ twitchy eyes are tapping out an S.O.S. They have a haunted look as if their souls are silently mouthing the words, ‘Get me out of here!’

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Public service announcement

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Kingfisher Beer has put its ‘swimsuit’ calendar online. It’s just like the CNN site which annoys me daily (‘we interrupt you with breaking news: Model of the Day!’), but with lotus pads: zen cheesecake, if you will. There are so many floating flowers in the frame, you’d think it was pitching feminine products instead of beer.

The launch party attained this pinnacle of cheese: Salman Khan (1) in a muscle shirt (2) ripping cheetah print (3) off a bikini calendar (4). Behind him are a large contingent of underfed (5), blue-eyed Anglo-Indians, those ubiquitous khakhi-suited, pot-bellied sipahis (6), and Vijay Mallya (7), who’s way too old to be playing Richard Branson.

Beat that, Hasselhoff.

From the same photographer, here’s Aamir Khan whoring out timepieces in Mangal Pandey attire and cornrows, and a very funny wireless campaign with Javed Jaffrey.

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BusinessHype

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BusinessWeek just published a massive issue dedicated exclusively to India and China (via SAJA). I’m talkin’ huge.

… most economists figure China and India possess the fundamentals to keep growing in the 7%-to-8% range for decades. Barring cataclysm, within three decades India should have vaulted over Germany as the world’s third-biggest economy. By mid-century, China should have overtaken the U.S. as No. 1. By then, China and India could account for half of global output. Indeed, the troika of China, India, and the U.S. — the only industrialized nation with significant population growth — by most projections will dwarf every other economy…

The closest parallel to their emergence is the saga of 19th-century America, a huge continental economy with a young, driven workforce that grabbed the lead in agriculture, apparel, and the high technologies of the era, such as steam engines, the telegraph, and electric lights. But in a way, even America’s rise falls short in comparison to what’s happening now. Never has the world seen the simultaneous, sustained takeoffs of two nations that together account for one-third of the planet’s population. [Link]

India and China accounted for more than 50% of world gross domestic product in the 18th century and to my mind, there is no doubt this will be repeated. [Link]

Their sudsing machine is on hype cycle high:

Google… principal scientist Krishna Bharat is setting up a Bangalore lab complete with colorful furniture, exercise balls, and a Yamaha organ — like Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters — to work on core search-engine technology… “I find Bangalore to be one of the most exciting places in the world,” says Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems Inc.’s senior vice-president for corporate development. “It is Silicon Valley in 1999.” [Link]

Today’s reality is more sobering:

Today, China and India account for a mere 6% of global gross domestic product — half that of Japan. [Link]
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