Some kind Brit Asian soul has posted a cornucopia of record covers from Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi film soundtracks of the ’60s-’80s (via Boing Boing). Groovy, baby!
Click Continue to see my favorites.
Author Archives: manish
Yoda syndrome
Let’s face it, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi suffers from a severe case of Yoda syndrome. On one hand, he was the moral leader of a subcontinent and delivered a large can of whoop-ass to an evil empire. On the other, he was short, wizened and, in the eyes of many Westerners, just plain funny-lookin’.
Which image will win out in the end? One Aussie fast food chain has cast its vote (via Saheli and Age of Gold). Its logo references Gandhi, the Taj Mahal, ‘curry,’ and a name which is both misspelled and rhymes only when pronounced badly:
On learning that Mahatma Gandhi’s image was being used to sell Indian takeaway food by a franchisee in Australia, his great grandson, Tushar Gandhi, urged the Central Government to take action against the “exploitation” of Gandhi’s image, which “is protected under the Indian Constitution and the National Emblems Act… “I am against such irreverent use of the Mahatma’s image…” [The Hindu]
The chain’s radio ad starts with a Middle Eastern tune. It has some guy doing a supposedly desi accent which lands somewhere between strangled Vietnamese dowager and fuckup. Listen to the ad.
After Tushar Gandhi’s statement, the chain said it now sees the light, doesn’t want to be offensive and has completely revamped its branding. So here’s their new, corrected, stereotype-free logo. Take a look:
High aspirations
Sajit posted earlier about a remarkable Spanish-Hindi fusion track called ‘MÃrame’ (Look at Me). It’s by Daddy Yankee, who sings reggaeton, a popular genre of Latino hip-hop:
Daddy Yankee is reggaeton’s biggest crossover contender: He has already rhymed alongside Nas, Lil Jon and Terror Squad, and his brassy, slogan-strewn flow suggests both a quick-tongued thug and a Latin crunkster.
This pounding reggaeton song leads off with ‘Eli Re Eli’ from Yaadein, covered by Hindi singer Deevani. But not only is this a rare Hindi-Spanish mix, Deevani also sings in Spanish. Well.
The song innovates on several levels by merging similar sounds rather than contrasting ones. A lot of desi fusion has a low hip-hop beat, bass-heavy and distinct from a high-pitched tumbi or bhangra track which soars above. But in this song, the male reggaetonero is almost higher-pitched than the female Hindi singer. Which, to state the obvious, is insane. It’s playing chicken by shriekiness.
Desi remixes often use a smooth-voiced rapper or reggae artist; the rough edges are provided by the Hindi/Punjabi singer. In this song, the roles are flipped. Daddy Yankee’s style is aggressive and cants forward against the honey-voiced Hindi singer.
Remixes usually highlight the differences in pronunciation between the German-influenced English, with its hard, aspirated consonants, and the much softer Hindi/Punjabi. But in this track, Spanish and Hindi flow seamlessly into one another. It’s the same reason why Spanish teachers would always go nuts over desi kids’ Spanish accents. Years of trying to teach a soft language to American kids left them putty in my Hindi-speaking hands.
Remixes often mock the foreignness of the tweeter track. ‘Indian Flute’ by Timbaland & Magoo with Raje Shwari says, ‘Sing it to me, but I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’.’ ‘Rock The Party’ by Bombay Rockers says, ‘I don’t know what you’re sayin’, all I know’s that I came to party.’ But this song doesn’t take the easy out. Deevani sings in Spanish and pulls it off respectably.
Air bubble (updated)
A startup Indian airline backed by the former CEO of U.S. Airways startled the industry with a mammoth, $6B order for 100 planes at the Paris Air Show last week:
The order for 100 Airbus aircraft… is the biggest single order from India and the biggest, as well, for a single Airbus model (A320)… [Rahul] Bhatia may have been emboldened to take the plunge, backed by former US Airways head Rakesh Gangwal, who he has known for 20 years…… the biggest advantage his IndiGo, designed to be a budget carrier, has, is size. With 100 aircraft, it will be able to touch all airports in the country with multiple connections… IndiGo will be able to connect the lucrative metro routes with flights every half-an-hour… “We will connect every possible destination in India.” [Business Standard]
Gangwal apparently took the phrase ‘aviator frames’ literally 🙂 I love the airline name but am skeptical of the cash-rich naïf story. A high-profile team, unproven in a new market, drums up massive startup funding and makes confident proclamations about dominating the sector. Webvan, anyone?
Even before IndiGo’s buy, India had ordered almost half the world’s output of airliners in the last few months:
In the last nine months, India alone has booked 250 aircraft, nearly half of the orders for the entire industry worldwide. [Deccan Herald]
Besides the budget carriers, a new category of premium airlines is arising. In typical desi style, they don’t want an efficient shortcut, they want the whole experience: a high cost structure, bankruptcy and then a belated turn to the budget carrier model 😉
Paramount, from the Coimbatore-based textile company of the same name, will be a different kind of airline. While all the new airlines starting in the country are no-frills, low cost carriers… Its 70-seater aircraft from Brazil’s [Embraer], will be a business class airline — contrary to the all-economy class budget carriers. Paramount, which plans to take to the skies in August next, believes that there is enough premium traffic to be targeted in the country. [Deccan Herald]
I still question the wisdom of painting on airplanes a name which evokes ‘mountain.’ Those are two things which never should meet.
Tips for turbans
This one’s for all my keshdhari friends:
[Iranian President Mohammad] Khatami’s friends say he wraps his natty turban by himself, tying one end of a 12-foot-long cloth to a door knob… “It is important in Islam to be elegant,” he said. “In fact, being chic is a religious duty and there are many sayings from Prophet Muhammad, who encouraged his followers to look good and smell fresh.” [NYT]
Are y’all following the edict of the prophet, PBUH, in the interests of ecumenical harmony? Be chic, look good and smell fresh — it’s Muslim Eye for the Sikh Guy. I wonder whether there’s anything in the Sikh canon about waxing the muchha and sharply creasing the pug 😉
Sun, sand and surf
Wiki WiFi: The desi-heavy island of Mauritius is turning into even more of a hot spot. It plans to be the first island with blanket wireless Internet (via Slashdot):
From his office window in Mauritius’ new Cybertower–a sleek blue glass and gray stone tower that is the heart of the country’s first high-tech park–Rahim can point out one of five new radio transmission antennas his company has installed in the last month perched beside a Hindu temple on a nearby green mountainside… The antennas now beam his wireless Internet service over about 60 percent of the island and within range of 70 percent of its population… Getting to every last corner, he said, might take a little longer. “We have so many sugar cane fields,” he lamented, tracing the island’s outline on a map.An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links… Many of the country’s 1.2 million people–a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants–are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable…
But the government’s telecom monopoly made it reluctant to issue the permits:
Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom’s profits, even though the country’s National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for “positive discrimination” by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.
Mauritius really does sound like India 😉
Related post here.
Nusrat picks a face (Kinna Sona remix) – updated
Three months ago, I met some friends of friends for drinks in a dimly-lit Times Square hotel lounge. The group included Nusrat Durrani, who runs MTV World and is now launching MTV Desi. Like the Bombay Dreams team, Durrani bemoaned his casting issues. Everyone and her mom had auditioned for VJ, but nobody looked ‘authentically’ desi American, whatever that is.
Until I met Durrani, my only image of a rocker past his 30s was of the dyed-haired, aging rockers showing off studded belts and butt-cracks at the gym or in the West Village. You want to throw an arm around their shoulders and say, ‘The ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s are over, man. Let it go.’
Durrani is nothing like that. He’s the most punk fortysomething I’ve ever met. He’s got a wife and kid(s) and a spacious Brooklyn loft, but he still dresses like a rock star. In person he’s a shorter, desi version of Mick Jagger: the lips, the shaggy hair, the dog collar around his wrist.
But I still feel bad for the guy. Charismatic though he may be, we all know MTV has a terribly difficult time creating buzz 😉 So I was greatly relieved to hear that the NYT covered Durrani’s VJ auditions (thanks, Arun and Sachin).
Mr. Durrani said that he worried that Ms. Taufiq was too much of an Indian-American stereotype (beautiful overachiever) and that Mr. Usman would be straitjacketed in a V.J. role. Ms. Desai had no experience in front of a camera but she was cute, hip and sassy, and this captivated, as she put it, the Man… [NYT]
No shit — look at how these three are dressed. R&B singer Reshma is vamped to the max, MTV India-style. Comedian Azhar Usman is kitted out for the burbs. But video editor Niharika Desai’s look has Brooklyn artist all over it. Her site’s called Post-Punk Kitchen (hot PoPu, come ‘n get it!), for chrissake:
Niharika graduated from the University of Pennsylania… Some of her editing credits include… Alanis Morrissette Live! and SHARKS! (a series pilot on female Poker champs). [Post-Punk Kitchen]
Her female rival, Reshma, has a day job y’all might be familiar with. Ah yes, HP, the paragon of parking cushily. A college friend chose HP as his day job because they don’t make you work more than 8 hour days. He built and sold night job, a tech startup, for gobs of money, so who looks silly now?
Ms. Taufiq summed herself up: R&B artist who is bilingual in English and Hindi… and, well, chemical engineer now working in software development at Hewlett-Packard. [NYT]
Kitsch Idol
Sometimes we run across artistic works so breathtaking that we wonder whether in all the preceding years we have actually lived. Sometimes we find übermenschen who leap cultural chasms in a single bound. These artists have an intrinsic Goodness which translates in all cultures: Márquez. Rushdie. And… Mehndi?
For your amusement, I offer Daler Mehndi’s ‘Tunak Tunak Tun’ in Flash (via Freedom Shock). There’s some charm in this badly-drawn boy (doesn’t Daler deserve a full beard?), but the original was even more craptastic. ‘East Indian,’ flying carpets and comments about bin Laden, check. Hello my crazy-eyed future girlfriend!
Here’s the white boy version, bhangra moves and all, by SUNY Buffalo. I think my family owned a buffalo by that name once. It sounds Punjabi.
Here’s a disturbing industrial version, proving that there’s nothing so saccharine that a German can’t make it depressing.
Set a thief
The FBI has revealed one facet of its antiterrorism strategy by its handling of the high school girl deported (‘voluntarily returned’ under duress) to Bangladesh. They’re finding neoreligious Muslim kids, those who turn to religion as a way of rebelling against their more liberal parents. They’re zeroing in on those who listen to radicals like Omar Bakri Mohammed, an infamous North London imam.
Up to this point, I agree with their strategy. Here’s where I think they go wrong: they’re deporting them under any pretext without distinguishing between actual extremists and those who are just rebellious teens.
From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day – and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil… Her parents… rejected… an arranged marriage to an American Muslim man… When Latif suggested an elopement to Michigan, Tashnuba impulsively agreed…… she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed… What mainly drew the agent’s eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word “suicide” – her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said…
Tashnuba said she believed she was singled out precisely because she is a noncitizen – allowing investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing the familiar limits of criminal and juvenile proceedings. [NYT]
The most interesting part about this story is that the FBI agent who gets credit for the takedown of a confused 16-year-old is herself familiar with the North London fundies. Thirty-seven-year-old Foria Younis was raised a British Muslim:
Armed with her knowledge of three continents, and fluent in Punjabi and Urdu, she flies the globe with FBI teams… Younis won’t go into specific details of her work, which is often undercover, but admits to travelling to “South Asia” on missions, and to co-operating with officers from Scotland Yard. Flanked by an FBI press officer, she is allowed to confirm she has been involved in the arrests of several Islamic extremists…Continue readingShe knows that when she enters a Muslim household, even on a raid, the sight of her has an electrifying effect, especially on the women and girls of the home. In many households, women are “held hostage” by their men’s radicalism, she says… Britain has changed in 20 years, she says, especially the corner of the East End in which she grew up. “I grew up in a very South Asian community, so I didn’t get full exposure to all of what England had to offer…”
Reparations
The Shinnecock Indian tribe said on Wednesday it was seeking billions of dollars for 150 years of back rent on land it inhabited for 12,000 years in New York state… The Shinnecock tribe… said they have inhabited the shores of Long Island for 500 generations and were swindled in an 1859 deal they say was forged with a group of unnamed private investors, wherein members of the tribe signed over their claim to the disputed land. [CNN]
[Scene: Big desi guy with a Brooklyn accent walks in. He approaches a flat and starts pounding on the door.] ‘Queenie! Hey, Queenie! You owe me back rent! Yeah, for India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. You’re 58 years overdue. What, eviction didn’t teach you anything? Fuggedaboutit. I know you’re in there. I’m slidin’ a bill under the door. It’s for damage to the place. You gotta pay me back for the gems you stole from the Taj Mahal. That’s right, tack that onto the back rent. Yeah, I know you added permanent fixtures. But that was with my money, labor and materials. So don’t go gettin’ all holy on me. I’m taking my chicken tikka masala back. And my Farokh Bulsara records. What? You actin’ like you nevah heard of an Indian giver before. My lawyah will be comin’ by in the morning.
‘Lemme let you in on a little secret. Yeah, you stole a lot of stuff from the place before leavin’. It’s a pretty long list. Truth is, I only want one thing, and it ain’t even on the list. So listen up before the lawyahs get involved. It’ll save you a lotta grief. Here it is:
‘All I really want is… an apology.’
Sadly for the Shinnecock, the account books of history are kept in a palimpsest, not a journaling file system.