Author Archives: manish

Giants, dwarves and lemurs

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Like that VW ad, NYC sometimes has moments of spooky synchronicity. Like the time two weeks ago when I hailed a cab to SoHo. The fellow who picked me up was an uncle crooning along to Hindi ghazals in the direction of his steering wheel. After crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, we passed a Sikh guy with a black pug and a cute Punjaban walking toward chic bar Mecca. A block later, a group of desi high school kids sounded their barbaric yawps over the sidewalks of the world. The louche lounge turned out all Arabic and Hindi tunes, Turkish lanterns and Bombay tones; ’twas hookahs and wine, you know the kind.

 

Similarly, both major movies released last weekend, Madagascar and The Longest Yard, had desi influences. In the animated film Madagascar, a major character speaks in a comical desi accent mouthed by Ali G. His Julian the lemur king is pompous and faintly ridiculous, though aside from the accent he’s funny in his own right. The sound isn’t exactly Sellers, but this movie confirms the cycle of immigrant visibility: first ignored, then laughed at, then accepted. (And finally The Man? Only in spelling bees.)

 

The hilarious thing is, American movie reviewers couldn’t place the accent. It was clearly a desi parody, though rounded off via the West Indies or just the fertile mind of Sacha Baron Cohen. Reviewers guessed all over the map: Eurotrash, Middle Eastern, Caribbean. Here’s what the director said:

We had this two-line character, Julian, and we got a tape of the show “Ali G” with Sacha Baron Cohen. He came in and he invented this Indian accent. We gave him a couple of lines and he turned them into eight minutes of dialogue. We were just in tears on the floor and thought, “This guy has to be the king.” So that was just a two-line part that he invented and it turned into that role.

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Raja Wilco

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Check out the lyrical stylings of desi rap group Raja Wilco, about whom I can find damn near nothing on the Net except that they’re from Jersey. Fobio Patel says:

These tracks were ripped from Raja Wilco’s CD “Raja That!”, the 10-4 Sampler… May I draw attention to the fact that tracks 9 and 10 are missing. All of them, especially Raj Makhija and Raja Wilco should feel shame for even including those tracks on their CD. They had such a good thing going, and then tracks 9 and 10 totally fucked them up. It made my ears bleed. I’m bewildered by their extreme lapse in good judgement.

Notable tracks:

  • ‘Chalo Chalo’ and ‘That’s Life’: great filmi and bhangra samples (can anyone name them?)
  • ‘Peter Pank’: interesting syncopation and a reference to a Spanish punk comic:
… the anarchic 80s trash culture comedy PETER PANK, mixing JM Barrie with Johnny Rotten… The best Peter Pan adaptation ever created wasn’t Spielberg’s, or Hogan’s, or even Disney’s. It was made in the 80s, in Spain. In comic form. And it featured sex, drugs and enough rock and roll to get Elvis out of his secret retirement and send him on tour with zombie Sid Vicious and the ghost of Eddie Cochran.
  • ‘Maharaja’:
Yo, I enter the picture like Shah Rukh Khan
Puffing a sto’ like Salman Khan…

From Oldbridge, Edison…
home of the desis…
Brunswick… Cherry Hill…
Freestylin’ under the Brooklyn Bridge
with Crooklyn kids…

You can listen to all the tracks, except the ones Fobio despises, at his site.

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Movies and sausages

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Otto von Bismarck apocryphally joked, ‘Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made,’ and we all know what happened to him. So here are snapshots of two yet-to-be-completed movies as they’re fed through the meat grinder.

The Namesake: Kal Penn photoblogs a day of shooting The Namesake at Calcutta’s Howrah Station:

The press had somehow found out that May 29th had been secured as the day we were shooting at the station, and they saw fit to publish that as news. So in addition to hordes of reporters, photographers, and camera crews, we also had a lot of people standing around watching. I don’t mean “a lot of people” as in 80 people on some street corner in midtown. I mean thousands…

See the photos, watch the video.

Life of Pi: M. Night Shyamalan has dropped out of the Life of Pi film project to focus on his mermaid tale. Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the excellent, dark, third installment of Harry Potter as well as Y Tu Mamá También, may now fill the director’s chair (via Anangbhai):

Fox appears to be breaking with Shyamalan over his decision to make his next picture Warner’s Lady in the Water instead of Pi, an adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning bestseller by Yann Martel. Unwilling to wait a year and a half for Shyamalan to finish Water, Fox was happy to take a call from Cuaron’s reps at William Morris offering his services.

I finally got around to reading the religiously syncretic yarn which starts in Pondichéri and stars a piscine Patel. The Booker book is solid, quality writing, though old-fashioned in style. I do like writers who break the rules of language when required, but that’s not the complaint here. The book’s psychotropic island scenes and its entire narrative arc remind me of Jules Verne and other 19th century adventure authors. There’s also a genteelness and reserve which belongs to an era when women wore corsets and men wore fedoras. It’s an oxymoron, a survival tale that’s not in-your-face in any way. Like Shyamalan, it’s Hitchcock in a De Palma age.

Previous posts: 1, 2

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Film bomb plot uncovered

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Two militants from Babbar Khalsa have been arrested and charged with the Jo Bole So Nihaal film bombings. Two others are still being sought:

… the Delhi Police today arrested two activists of the Babbar Khalsa militant outfit allegedly responsible for the crime and claimed to have recovered one kg RDX, Rs 2.94 lakh cash and two kgs of gold… [Outlook India]

The extremist group, previously thought to be nearly defunct, was accused of planning the Air India bombing in 1985 and assassinating Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh with a suicide bomber in 1995. The U.S. added Babbar Khalsa to its list of terrorist groups only last year:

Many leaders of the Babbar Khalsa, who are on India’s most-wanted list, are now based in Pakistan… [NDTV]

The militants had been in constant touch with Wadhwa Singh, the Pakistan-based chief of Babbar Khalsa International… [Outlook India]

The suspects seem to have learned from Al Qaeda tactics. They allegedly used plastic explosives to evade metal detectors and cavities in running shoes to smuggle the easily-molded explosives. Like the 9/11 hijackers, they allegedly plotted in a country away from the target, one perceived to have lax security. And there’s the ubiquitous Pakistan connection:

Balvinder and Jaspal had travelled to Bangkok on April 22 and met one Shahid to discuss about terrorist activities to be carried out. Though it was not yet clear which group Shahid was affiliated with, several militant groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir had been using Bangkok as a base lately. [Outlook India]

Police Commissioner K K Paul said they smuggled in the two detonators, two timers and wires in their underwear while the plastic explosives were carried in sports shoes. The explosives, possibly RDX, was in the form of four sheets wrapped in polythene which were kept in sports shoes which they had bought specifically for the operation…

On the day of the attack… the foursome came to the Liberty cinema hall in two cars, a Tata Sierra and a Hyundai Santro… The Sierra had special cavities to hide the explosives… Jaspal, Balvinder and Vikas entered Liberty while Jagannath waited outside. Jaspal prepared the bomb inside the toilet and gave it to Balvinder and Vikas who placed it under a seat in the front stall. Jaspal left the hall before the interval and the other two just afterwards. All four then went to Satyam where Jaspal and Jagannath went inside and placed the bomb in the toilet before exiting, Paul said. [Outlook India]

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Debutante ball at Carnegie Hall

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Imagine, if you will, being a desi kid with a passion for the claviers and chords of Western classical. You’d be sick of hearing, ‘Why can’t you be like Mr. Malhotra’s son, the doctor,’ for the last 20 years. Tired of uncles asking why you shave your head, where you disappear to all summer, why you’re never free on weekends. Isn’t it risky, a pauper’s life? Could you support a dutiful wife? I don’t know, beta, this whole thing is so phoren.

Imagine that in your 15-minute Warhol, you could perform in the most storied hall in America, painting away every doubt-hound dating back to high school. Your hands would throw auditory pottery, now throbbing delicately like gills, now stabbing angrily at imaginary boxers. Fifty pairs of eyes would look to your space needle for reassurance, tempo, tone. Just you, a riser and your musical crew: o captain my captain, carpe musicum, and they’d respond. A forest of swaying toothpicks, egg slicers and split-tongued shoots would churn buttery tones into a towering aural chasm.

On that day, you could be forgiven for feeling like Salieri even if you sounded like Mozart. So you’ll understand why I’m so proud to share with you my cousin Ankush Bahl’s Carnegie Hall debut. On Sunday, he conducted Brahms’ Tragic Overture for the best youth symphony in America. He did it without sheet music, a zipless conduct.

At 28, Ankush resembles bull-shouldered, shaven-headed entertainers from Yul Brynner to Ben Kingsley. The NYT reviews the performance:

… the Youth Symphony also promotes young professional musicians in the early stages of their careers. One example is Ankush Kumar Bahl, the group’s assistant conductor, who made his Carnegie debut leading an energetic reading of the Brahms overture with clear authority and enthusiasm…

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Movin’ on up

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Promotions in the news (biz): The new editor of the Wall Street Journal’s European edition is desi (via SAJA). Raju Narisetti, who’s sporting an official Editor Goatee, has been with the WSJ for 11 years:

Raju Narisetti has been named editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, moving up to the top job from managing editor – making him the first South Asian to run an edition of the Journal…

BBC reader-stud Riz Khan joins the control room for the Fox of the Middle East:

Riz Khan, former CNN and BBC anchor, joins Al-Jazeera as an anchor…

Tech geeks have long drooled over Berkeley grad Sumi Das’ gadget reviews. She’s now at CNN in DC:

Sumi Das has joined CNN Newsource’s Washington, D.C. bureau as a national correspondent. Previously, Das was a correspondent for MSNBC, where she covered the Scott Peterson trial in Modesto; and before that, she was host of “Fresh Gear” on TechTV.

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Sampling chutney

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Punjabi Boy points us to samples of chutney music from the Caribbean. Listen here.

It’s my first time listening in on this genre, and it’s wild. Sometimes it sets well-known Hindi songs (‘Jai Jai Shiv Shankar’) rendered in English to hyperkinetic calypso beats. Other times it’s creole music with snippets of Hindi lyrics and desi instruments. ‘Rum Shop‘ by Dil-e-Nadan reminds me of Karmacy’s harmonium-infused rap track, ‘Euphoria.’ Other tracks remind me of the Bollywood hits redone as Broadway / West End songs in Bombay Dreams and Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral.

Rajendra Saywack dissertates:

Chutney was the name given to the pop/folk music of the East Indians that lived in the Caribbean region… In the summer of 1996, the dance hit, “Calcutta Woman” [by Sharlene Boodram] made its debut on the North American & European pop charts… its Wine Yuh Waist lyrics were constantly being sampled by American [DJs]…

… Sundar Popo lept to fame with the song “Nana & Nani.” The song, almost comical in nature described the affairs of a grandfather and grandmother, perhaps his own… Sundar’s lyrics of “Nana drinkin white rum and Nani drinkin wine,” were heard just about everywhere…

The traditional West Indian Calypso was being merged into a new form of music called Soca… Chutney music was caught up in this change, which would later evolve it into a new style called Indian Soca… it was almost solidly dominated by Afro West Indians during its early days. Songs such as Baron’s “Raja Rani”, Mighty Trini’s “Curry Tabanca,” Sugar Aloe’s “Roti & Dhalpourie” & Sparrow’s “Marajin” dominated the Indian Soca scene…

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Jersey Guys apologize (updated)

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Lester Gesteland quotes an Asian Media Watchdog email saying the Jersey Guys will apologize on air:

… 101.5FM agreed in writing to the following.
  • Issue an on air, formal & blanket apology by the “Jersey Guys,”
  • Invite Jun Choi (the KoreanAm candidate who was attacked) to be a guest by “Jersey Guys…”

… Comcast and Verizon agreed to suspend their radio ads…. “Kick The Jersey Guys Off The Air!” collected the largest amount of signatures in the shortest amount of time, even more so than our last major campaign, Hot 97…

Gesteland, who’s got three hapa kids, says:

This evening my wife was listening to the infamous Carton & Rossi show when she heard Jun Choi being interviewed…

Choi is running for mayor of the desi haven of Edison, NJ. Now that’s consumer power. Well done.

Update: Carton apologized, and Choi raked him on air, telling him why his comments were offensive. Listen here: part 1, part 2

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The Taliban of Manipur

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Separatists in Manipur shot a man in the knees because he violated their ban on chewing zarda:

Arun Thakur is battling amputation at an Imphal hospital after he was shot at close range on his legs by suspected separatists on Wednesday. One of the assailants reportedly shouted at the barber from Bihar, who has made Imphal his home: “You are punished for chewing paan.” The attack comes a day after the outlawed separatist Revolutionary People’s Front (RPF) imposed a ban on the sale and consumption of chewing tobacco products in Manipur…

Tobacco products locally known as khaini and zarda are a common form of addiction among many Indians, including a vast majority in Manipur… “The ban is meant to counter India’s evil designs of getting the younger generation hooked to such dangerous substances,” an RPF statement said.

Encouraged by the rebels, frustrated desi readers worldwide have threatened to ‘bust a cap in Random House’s ass’ if they publish one more book with mehndi on the cover.

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