This is a followup to Ennis’ post, in pictures (thanks, Sajit). Memos released in ’02 show that Richard Nixon continued supporting the Pakistani military throughout the genocide in Bangladesh, even sending them fighter jets. During the massacre, the U.S. ambassador in Delhi cabled Nixon:
The U.S. consul in Dhaka also wrote:
And:
The Mistress of Spices and Deepa Mehta’s trilogy finale will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September (thanks, DesiDancer). Mehta’s filming was blocked by protests, but that’s just Water under the bridge:
Filming on Water in India had to be abandoned five years ago after protests over the pic’s subject. It concerns an 8-year-old child bride, sent to an ashram after her husband’s death, who forces the other widows to question their culture and faith. Pic stars Lisa Ray and John Abraham. The Hindi- and English-language film eventually was shot in Sri Lanka under the name River Moon, a moniker selected for its cheesiness, producer David Hamilton said. An “anti-publicist” was hired to keep word of it out of the media…
Now they say desi artists are picking cheesy titles? Here’s one: Mistress of Spices is exoticism buzzword bingo. And Padma Lakshmi’s cookbook title, Easy Exotic, is exactly the two things which desi women don’t want to be known for.
Also making its world premiere will be Mistress of Spices about an Indian woman (Aishwarya Rai) running a spice shop in San Francisco whose magic fails her when she falls in love. Pic is from Paul Mayeda Berges and Gurinder Chadha, the team behind Bend It Like Beckham…
How’s the art film actor with washboard abs doing? Everybody says he’s fine:
Indian filmmaker Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Kaalpurush will world premiere. [The] pic, starring Rahul Bose, follows a man struggling to come to terms with the memory of his powerful father…Continue reading
In a grand jury filing two weeks ago, D.C. prosecutors revealed that Jayant Kadian confessed to killing his mother:
The 20-year-old Great Falls resident told a Fairfax County detective that the tension between them escalated after he was arrested in connection with marijuana possession a third time… his mother, Kiran V. Kadian, told him she wanted him to see a psychiatrist, he told police… “He said at that point, he picked up a butcher knife out of the butcher block, and he said, ‘I . . . axed her. It was weird.’ ”… Kadian stabbed or slashed his mother 23 times in the neck and seven times elsewhere… he said… he stabbed her once from behind and she dropped to the floor, Allen said. “I wanted to kill my mother real quick,” Allen quoted Kadian as saying. “I did my best to make it quick.” [Washington Post]
There’s a special pit in hell reserved for this guy, who allegedly did the deed while she was making him food:
KADIAN’S MOTHER, 52, was preparing food for her son when she was murdered, according to testimony from Allen, a homicide detective. When Allen arrived at the Kadian’s house, an untouched plate of food remained on the kitchen counter above her body which was surrounded by a pool of dried blood…Kadian thought the purpose of meeting with a psychiatrist was to place him in a 28-day inpatient treatment center, according to Allen, who said Kadian didn’t want to go… after the murder, Kadian washed the knife, placed it on the dining room table and went upstairs to get $4, shoes and socks and to put a Band-Aid on two cuts he suffered during the stabbing. He set the alarm to the house and drove to the Great Falls Shopping Center, where he parked behind the CVS Pharmacy, according to Allen. Later he drove back by the house and saw the police cars and “decided he wasn’t ready to be caught and drove to James Madison,” Allen said… [The Connection]
News.com just posted photos of the Infosys campus in Bangalore. Wow, Karnataka really can be sterilized so it’s just as boring as Santa Clara. But it’s nice to see homo technorati in their natural habitat.
Their signature building looks like the retro-Jetson TWA terminal at JFK. The landscaping makes it look like those SoCal Spanish-style haciendas rented out discreetly for porn shoots.
Don’t you think you’ll be telling your nieces and nephews to work here someday?
Here’s a surfeit of campus snapshots. Related post here.
Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):
An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”
PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.
Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:
Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries – with SingTel acting as its operating agents.The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.
In North Carolina, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is requesting that Muslim court witnesses be allowed swear their veracity with a Koran instead of a Bible:
Ellis said there is concern allowing the Koran could create new challenges. He questioned what would happen if a person claimed to worship brick walls and wanted to swear the oath on a brick. [WebIndia123]
They’re right. What if some lone wacko claimed to worship a stone, such as the Qa’aba, a shivalinga, a laughing Buddha or an engraved copy of the Ten Commandments? Blasphemy! I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Of course, since the scripture use is fairly ceremonial, you can already swear without your personal flavor of holy book, and people lie in court all the time, this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering issue. But it’s important to religious literalists who believe morality requires a warden-deity with night vision goggles.
So, taking the question at face value, it does in fact point to a larger issue of ownership. On one hand, it’s courteous to allow the majority religion its ceremonial religious invocations, which are woven throughout the Declaration of Independence, the currency, national holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance and the invocations of Congress and the Supreme Court. This religion and the work ethic it spawned built a great country over the years, and the American separation of church and state is reasonably good relative to most other nations. Those institutions are far more entangled on the subcontinent. Continue reading
Thievery Corporation and Gunjan from Bally Sagoo’s label roll into a radio studio for a hypnotic, downtempo version of ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram‘ (thanks, Arun and Turbanhead). A later song in this video reminds me of the velvety Bebel Gilberto. Watch the video.
Whoah, these serious-faced sitarists and tabla players look way less edgy than their music. Especially when it’s the soundtrack at a chill lounge with a good rioja at hand. Then again, have you seen Bollywood playback singers? I guess I virtually expect rental silicone in the age of the Black Eyed Peas.
These next two rockin’ videos came out last year (inspired by Amardeep’s quiz). First up is Dum Dum Project with the punny-named ‘Punjabi 5-0.’ There are shades of ‘Mundian To Bach Ke‘ in the image mix, it’s much grittier overall than a Bally Sagoo video. The faux lesbian, Asian-exotic groping is very Robert Palmer. An infamous fashion-mashin’ lookalike makes an appearance. Watch the video.
In ‘Supafly Bindi,’ DDP samples ‘OPP,’ which is so acro-apropos. The video rips Soul Train, but the hook is catchy as hell. Watch the video.
DDP started in my bedroom studio, Lower East Side, NY and now it’s got “branches” in London, Bangkok, and Bombay…
… I love the name of the group. How did you all come up with it?… Took it right off the back of a bunch of old Hindi film records: Dum Dum-India.
… How did… The1Shanti… come to be a part of the troupe?… I discovered him rhyming for loose change at the Atlantic Ave. subway station in Brooklyn.
Update: Here’s the kicker: the group’s founder, Sean Dinsmore a.k.a. DJ Cavo, isn’t desi. And his India story reads like a breathless backpacker’s. Just how badass is this guy that he can just walk into a musical subculture and start innovating? Continue reading
This tech support parody (warning: sound) has a wild-eyed Sikh wearing an Afghan-style turban surrounded by Hindu icons in southern India (thanks, Avi). The usual bad Indian accent and cow jokes ensue. I supposed we should thank the animator for drawing him in an office instead of squatting on the ground with an abacus. Its dissection of brainless tech support is pretty cute, though.
Screwy Flash animations shouldn’t be politically correct, but they shouldn’t be ignorant either. Team America knowingly poked fun at American stereotyping even while engaging in it, by putting together a Middle Eastern disguise for the protagonist. The ‘disguise’ consisted of stray bits of toilet paper stuck to his jawline and brownface splashed on as if by a 2-year-old. That’s about how well Americans understand the Middle East, the movie was saying.
This animation doesn’t do that — it cheaps out with crude, wildly inaccurate ethnic stereotypes. I’m not saying don’t poke fun at desis. Hell, we do it all the time. I’m saying: Ill Will Press, this creative work is trite and lame. Get it right next time. There are a quarter million of us right in your backyard, the second-largest Asian-American group in NYC, so just ask somebody.
Granted, it might be a strained conversation (‘Say, dude, fact-check this animation and do a bad accent so I can make fun of your country of origin’)… 🙂
M.I.A. and DJ Rekha spin, grind and wobble at a free concert in Central Park, August 7 at 3pm (thanks, Anna). The suspiciously absent-as-of-late Diplo is still on the bill.
It’s an odd combination, electrogrime and Rekha, and a long way from Simon and Garfunkel and Strawberry Fields. But if the show draws hipsters shedding layers of snitty reserve to blog archly about it later, it’ll rock as hard as the Knitting Factory. And once my fellow bhangraleros arrive, it’ll be ebony ‘n ivory all over again — carefully mussed shabby chic versus the authentically disheveled 😉
I can get squeaky so she can come and oil me at:
Central Park SummerStage is… at Rumsey Playfield… on East 72nd Street off Fifth Avenue… enter the park on 69th Street and 5th Avenue.Entrance to the SummerStage area begins 90 minutes before the shows start on weekends, and 60 minutes before for weeknight performances… If you’re not into battling crowds and are content to just hear the music, there is plenty of space on the grass outside of the SummerStage area. From there, you can easily hear the concert while lounging on the grass. [About.com]
Also, Missy Elliott gets ‘hur’ freak on with everyone’s favorite Salt ‘n Pepa fan on her new album (via Brooklyn Vegan):
M.I.A.’s… rumored to be on Kanye’s upcoming Late Registration… [and] has a guest spot on the last track of the new Missy Elliott joint, The Cookbook. The cut, “Bad Man”, also features Vybz Cartel and was produced by Missy herself. [Pitchfork]
Y’all may be familiar with geeksta rap:
Geeksta rappers… bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code… Nerdcore now refers to artists waxing lyrical about topics as disparate as engineering and Lord of the Rings…“50 Cent has dance clubs and oral sex, we have awesome video cards…”
“If the genre is to succeed, you’re going to need some females…” [Wired News]
You may have heard of the Northbridge-Southbridge rap feud:
“Feuds between Nas and Jay-Z, Biggie and Tupac and 50 Cent and Ja Rule have… [resulted] in more exposure for both artists, so I decided to bring this to the world of CS gangsta rap by starting a feud with MC Plus+,” Monzy explained. [Wired News]
Well, all the trash IMs and dis MP3s have finally claimed their first real-life victim. A desi script kiddie from an Edison high school commanded a botnet to attack a rival online vintage jersey shop. The attack took down an entire desi-owned ISP in upstate New York as well as an Internet backbone in Pennsylvania:
… on one day over the summer it knocked out a “backbone provider” of Internet service in eastern Pennsylvania for 12 hours… [Detroit Free Press]
Jasmine (Jasminder?) Singh infected thousands of PCs with a Trojan horse by spreading a file called ‘Jennifer Lopez’ over file sharing networks. Victims expecting to see J.Lo in BootyVision actually ended up letting Singh control their computers.
Early last July, with control over ~2,000 PCs, he commanded them to take down his victim’s Web site:
Soumen Das, owner of a small Internet provider in Pittsford, N.Y. … realized he was on the receiving end of… a flood of traffic so immense that a site has no option but to shut down. What Das didn’t know at the time, and wouldn’t know until months later, was that the attacker was a 17-year-old high school student from Edison…Singh’s target? A handful of merchants that sell “retro” or “throwback” sports apparel – replicas of shirts and caps worn by teams of yesteryear… His motivation? A few sneakers and a watch. That was the payment offered by Jason Arabo, an 18-year-old community college student in a Detroit suburb. Arabo had his own retro sports apparel business and was hoping to steal customers from his competitors… [Bergen Record]
