Author Archives: manish

Heavy baby dies

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The abnormally chubby baby about whom Apul posted did not survive his encounter with an Indian hospital:

Eleven-month-old baby Lokman Hakim, who weighed over 20 kgs, choked to death at SSKM Hospital on Sunday…

Lokman’s mother Ganera Bibi was feeding him mashed boiled rice on Sunday afternoon… But he started getting hiccups soon after his meal. Doctors suspect the baby had “overeaten” and food particles had got stuck in his trachea due to the lack of muscular co-ordination.

“I don’t know what happened. My son had never been given rice before. We brought him all the way from Murshidabad for treatment, and now he is no more,” said the shocked mother.

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Pounding leather

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Beer, thongs, bikinis, toilet seats, sandals and now shoes: it seems the entire inventory of your local Wal-Mart ends up stenciled with Hindu art at some point. Emboldened by his success, the activist who got a brewery to drop its Ganesh beer is now opposing women’s shoes in France displaying an image of Rama:
A pair of women’s shoes allegedly showing Lord Rama made by French shoemaker Minelli has angered a pro-Hindu website, which has urged supporters to begin a letter-writing campaign to the shoemaker protesting against the product…

Expatriate attorney Brij Mohan Dhir has supported the bid, and is himself mobilizing opinion to protest production and marketing of the shoe… The San Francisco-based activist has circulated a copy of the letter widely on the Internet. If Minelli doesn’t back down, he is considering filing a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights…

Dhir’s joined forces with Hindu Human Rights, which complains that Meera Syal disses Hindus:

The BBC has made it to the top of the complaints charts with their new entry straight in at number one: Meera Syal’s much vaunted “Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee” once again shows their inability to provide a positive portrayal of Hindus in Britain. Containing a series of cheap and insulting digs at Hindus, this programme continues the tradition of the Western media’s denigration of Hinduism and Hindu culture.

HHR needs to get in line, because Syal is an equal-opportunity humorist. Her Bhaji on the Beach screenplay, oft-maligned for ‘bashing men,’ is a Girls’ Night Out by definition.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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Dhaka rock

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Bangladeshi-American rocker Arafat Kazi says the Dhaka rock scene is incestuous (via Tales from the Subcontinent):

… if you have one death metal band in Dhaka, there will be five death metal bands in Dhaka a year from now simply from osmosis… Elephant Road is a street which has three stores which had all kinds of LPs and later on CDs which they would copy onto cassette for you for a fee. This is how we ALL got our music until like 1999 or 2000. No CDs till then either… you had a band called The Attempted Band (featuring yours truly among others) which had the hottest girl in town and an enormous fat fuck who knows EVERYBODY in Dhaka city. All the bands that we knew clustered around us because we were doing shows, and eventually they started kicking ass as well. This could NOT have happened in India, where if you have a band in say Gujrat, there’s no fucking way it’s going to get to Cochin…

A big part of why you don’t see Paki or Indian bands doing rock music is because they both have HUGE cinema song industries (esp India). Why the fuck would Channel V show a rock band which nobody cares about when they can just as easily show a garam masala lust-laden video?

He also does a hilarious, purposely desi-accented homage to Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Shame on a N*‘ which reminds me of ‘Drop It Like a FOB.’ Listen and weep.

Kazi’s a member of a rock band called the Watson Brothers:

Farhan happens to have that wonderfully rare quality in a Bangladeshi bassist– he’s had sex…

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Ismail Merchant passes away (updated)

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Filmmaker Ismail Merchant, whose films won six Oscars, passed away today at age 68 (thanks, Paranoid Android):

He died in a London hospital this afternoon, his office said. The cause of death was unclear, but a spokesman said the Indian-born producer had suffered from stomach problems over the past year…

Along with his creative partner James Ivory, he made such acclaimed period films such as Howards End, A Room With A View and Remains of the Day…

Merchant was born in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in December 1936 and educated in New York. [BBC]

Merchant… had been unwell for some time and recently underwent surgery for abdominal ulcers, according to Indian television reports.

Merchant and Ivory, an American, made some 40 films together and won six Oscars — four for best picture — since forming their famous partnership in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. [MSNBC]

Merchant left behind his family as well as long-time partner James Ivory. He focused on producing but also directed one of my favorite films, Muhafiz (In Custody). (Has anyone truly lived until they’ve seen Shabana Azmi sing a ghazal Umrao Jaan-style?) His partner and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala helped Merchant churn out a lengthy body of work.

Update: The LAT says Merchant revived his genre:

Merchant not only adapted great books by Henry James, E.M. Forster and V.S. Naipaul, but also helped establish the careers of a new wave of renowned English actors, including Hugh Grant (“Maurice”), Helena Bonham-Carter (“A Room with a View”) and Emma Thompson (“Howards End”)… The Merchant-Ivory model was soon widely imitated, as filmmakers as diverse as Martin Scorsese (“The Age of Innocence”) and Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility”) turned their cameras toward classic books.

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Putting down the megaphone

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Two bloggers psychoanalyze a Sikh religious body which lobbied against Jo Bole So Nihaal. But their analysis also applies to the rise of virtually all lobbying groups. Mass outrage focused through the lens of a group wields power like a typhoon. Eventually the middlemen siphon off funding for themselves, and the groups self-perpetuate with or without legitimate grievances.

Arnab Ray says:

This is not the first time that religious loons have objected to titles and sequences of movies. The song “Mustafa Mustafa” from “Aatish” which had Raveena and Karishma cavorting in revealing attire had to be changed to “Dilruba Dilruba” following protests from Muslims. Mani Ratnam had a bomb thrown at him for having a Bal Thackeray-lookalike in Bombay.

Usually these things are solved by the producer/director going to one of the self-styled defenders of morality and making some discreet payoffs euphemistically called “seeking blessings/clearing misunderstandings”. The morality police get their dues, the producers get the free publicity and everyone is happy…

… money had exchanged hands, sins had been expiated, everything was right with the world. And yet people wind up dead. What the hell happened?

Amardeep says:

… Until yesterday, the invocation of “blasphemy” seemed pretty laughable… The SGPC seems increasingly like an organization desperate for direction, now that their established enemies — the Congress Party, the Nehru family, the Indian Army’s counter-terrorist measures in Punjab — have either dwindled or transformed. In an era when the Prime Minister is himself a practicing, if secular, Sikh, Sikh organizations in India can no longer claim exclusion or discrimination. They have as a result chosen to mimic the world-wide rhetoric of religious outrage, exemplified in India by the RSS and by conservative Muslim groups. The rhetoric of outrage is, it seems, the primary way in which religious leaders — around the world, and in every major religious community — attempt to make themselves relevant to modernity.
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Beautiful clown

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Amazon on both sides of the pond has posted cover concepts for the new novels by Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith (thanks, Sapna). Rushdie fires first on Sep. 5, Smith the following week. As anyone in mass marketing will tell you, new products crowd the first weeks of autumn. Books and babies are best launched after the summer doldrums.

Previous posts: 1, 2

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Crude forgeries

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In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison was caught inserting the face of a black student into a photo of white Badgers fans for the cover of its undergraduate application:

“Robert Seltzer came to me, initially, with the photo – the undoctored one – and said he was going to use it for the cover,” Barrows said. Barrows, who is black, said he objected to the choice, arguing that the all-white crowd did not reflect the image the university was trying to portray…

Seltzer, who is white, agreed that the photo did not reflect UW-Madison, where minorities make up more than 9% of the school’s enrollment… So when Seltzer was provided with a photo in which the head of a black student was electronically clipped from a photo from another campus event in 1994, and then reversed and inserted into the corner of the football photo, he approved it…

… Gould noticed late last week that the face of the black student, Diallo Shabazz, looked different from the others in the picture… “So Anna looked at the picture, noticed the glare and said, ‘Something isn’t right here.’ “

The university has apologized to application recipients and says they’ve learned from their mistake. By which they mean that next time, they’ll match the light source and contrast for a more believable fake.

Earlier this year, Sepia Mutiny itself was caught digitally inserting an underrepresented minority into a photo:

‘Sepiagate’ was a stain on our blogging credibility, and we’ve vowed never to repeat it.

However, we now feel absolved or, at the very least, in good company. Turns out that Hollywood has been caught doing exactly the same thing, albeit with more technical sophistication. They surveyed global film audiences and used a 64,000-processor supercomputer to calculate, with high degree of precision, the whitest man alive. They shot hours and hours of footage of that man. They crudely pasted him into scenes where he was clearly out of place, attempting things beyond his capabilities like ‘dancing’ and ’emoting.’ And the sad thing is, so far there hasn’t even been a whisper of an apology to filmgoers like you and me.

It’s pretty subtle, but see if you can spot the forgery:

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Naming shastra

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Karthik explains that Bollywood villains and temptresses are auspiciously named:

… [Saul] Bellow famously gave his characters physical traits that seemed to describe their characters… Indian movies, on the other hand, turned names into characterological maps. Pauls and Peters always had ill-fitting goatees, and took orders from their boss to do bad things, while Ritas and Sonas wore glittering, pointy boobed costumes that showed off a lot of thigh (and there was a lot of thigh to show off) and danced badly.

The Bollywood conception of the bad girl, the westernized one with a kicky English name, bobbed hair and go-go boots, always tickled me. And villains got the best names.

Sith, they’re no worse than ‘Bail Organa‘ — felonious prick? And ‘General Grievous’ has no pretensions above pulp. You’d expect General-ji in the WWE.

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Lady and the tramp

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The Gray Lady’s reader advocate shows the back of the hand to a NYT reporter who dissed Padma Lakshmi and Indian fashion (thanks, akhan):

“A semicelebrated hustler Ms. Lakshmi may be.” – Fashion writer Guy Trebay on Padma Lakshmi, Feb. 8.

… gratuitously nasty, and inappropriate in a newspaper that many of us look to as a guardian of civil discussion.

If gratuitous snark were banned, blogs would go begging for want of readers.

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Film bombs in Delhi

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After complaints that a film by a Sikh director and a Sikh actor is insulting to Sikhism, some protozoans hid bombs in two Delhi theaters (thanks, Sapna). At least 44 people were wounded when the bombs went off this evening, some critically:

Bombs exploded inside two movie theatres showing a controversial Hindi-language film in the Indian capital on Sunday, injuring at least 20 people, officials said. Both theatres are located in the Karol Bagh neighbourhood of west Delhi and the explosions occurred 15 minutes apart, said Junior Home Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal.

At least 13 people were injured in the first blast at the Liberty Cinema about 20:30 (15:00 GMT), chief fire officer RC Sharma said. The explosive was planted under a seat in the front rows, he said. About 15 minutes later, another explosion rocked the nearby Satyam Cinema, wounding at least seven people, Sharma said. At Satyam, the bomb went off inside the washroom. [News 24]

There’s some discrepancy regarding where the first bomb was placed:

The intensity of the blast was so powerful that the police fear that many of the injured, who are currently undergoing treatment at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, may succumb to their injuries… Explosions, suspected to be caused by bombs, occurred at Liberty cinema hall took place in the rear stall during the screening of the controversial film Jo Bole So Nihaal. The blast at Satyam took place in a toilet. PVR cinema halls in south Delhi has also been evacuated as a precautionary measure. [Times of India]

Members of Sikhism’s highest body, the Akal Takht, said the film, Jo Bole So Nihaal, was ok by them, so I wonder about the rationality of blowing people up in a neighborhood that’s itself full of Sikhs. It’s true that it’s not entirely cool to explicitly play to dismissive stereotypes — the official site begins with ‘He is cute! He is adorable!’ And using a religious phrase as a title was bound to chafe in a religion-obsessed country:

Some Sikh groups had taken offence at the use of the religious phrase in the title and to some scenes in the film which showed characters entering Sikh places of worship without removing their shoes and covering their heads — considered sacrilege by Sikhism. [Reuters]

But dissing a movie is the realm of bloggers and movie reviewers. This violent reaction to a schlocky, anti-terrorist Bollywood film is self-defeating on every level. You think a movie insults religion and shows people in a bad light? Try mass murder. I hope these criminals are hunted down and granted the love of a good Indian jailer.

Like Kal Ho Naa Ho, the movie is set partly in New York and shows off the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s playing at Loews State in Times Square:

… Sikh groups demanded a ban on it. They were angered by its title and scenes depicting a Sikh character being chased by scantily clad women.

I have no doubt that Vikram Chatwal begged to be included.

Here are more news stories about the bombings.

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