Author Archives: manish

A silver paisa in her shoe

Posted on by
Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a silver sixpence in her shoe.
 
You know how family members at Indian weddings make lists of the gifts being exchanged? BridalBeer says it’s not merely the crass and mercenary:
I used to wonder why the bridegroom’s grandfathers, his uncles, took the gifts while the bride looked to her painted toes… Men who took these gifts made a list, who gave what. And today, after years, I found the answer in legal text…

THE DOWRY PROHIBITION… RULES, 1985

… The list of presents which are given at the time of the marriage to the bride shall be maintained by the bride.

Continue reading →

A.B., baby

Posted on by

Like doctoral dissertations on hip-hop, here’s a highfalutin’ take on the original Bollywood ass-kicker by David Chute of Film Comment. It was written in honor of the Amitabh retrospective at Lincoln Center last month (via Hollywood Masala):

… he is most fervently admired for his verbal gifts: the sonorous baritone that makes all his setpiece speeches sound like Mosaic proclamations, and the flair for mimicry he exploits as one of the first Bollywood actors to adopt authentic Bombay street slang in his gangster roles… In contrast, Bachchan’s typical terpsichorean style is about as basic as it gets, a sort of blue-eyed Punjabi variant on one of Zorba the Greek’s “hoop-hah” strut ‘n’ shrug routines… Decked out in what looks like a gaucho outfit in Don (78), prancing and preening next to the staggering Zeenat Aman (India’s answer to Claudia Cardinale), he looks less like a performer working through a carefully choreographed routine than a man enjoying himself, and enjoying life…

… even when Bachchan was playing proletarian characters he always walked “with the posture of an aristocrat.” … this guy never feels outclassed. “You see a certain grace about that character… So many other actors have tried to ape Amitabh, but they’ve failed. Because they don’t have the sophistication and the tehzeeb [culture] that he grew up with. As an actor, Amitabh’s anger was never ugly. Other actors mix anger with arrogance. Amitabh’s anger was mixed with hurt and tears…”

In an ironic reversal, Bachchan has begun playing establishment roles against Shah Rukh’s angry young man:

… in Mohabbatein, he looks more like something carved from granite… the ne plus ultra of all the stern father figures his Vijay characters rebelled against in the Seventies.

The reviewer too lightly skips over the intense Ajay Devgan, who starred in just this kind of role in Yuva:

… as no one in the current crop of younger actors has anything like Amitabh Bachchan’s moral authority… there was really only one viable choice for the voice-of-reason title role, an honest policeman fending off both Muslim and Hindu demagogues.

Continue reading →

Suphala’s tabla fusion

Posted on by

A well-connected young tabla player named Suphala Patankar plies the waters of New York society:

The setting was the Greenwich Village town house of Diane Von Furstenberg, where, at the behest of the author Salman Rushdie, a fan, Suphala had been invited to play the tabla with her band at a party honoring the writers’ organization PEN. The crowd of around 200 quieted briefly as Padma Lakshmi, Mr. Rushdie’s wife, introduced Suphala as a new talent worthy of their ears…

The writer Suketu Mehta, long a friend of Suphala’s, said that for a young Indian woman with musical aspirations the tabla was an odd choice. “It’s the equivalent of finding a female drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band,” he said. “It’s not unheard of, but it’s unusual…”

She’s got a Forrest Gump-like ability to connect with the famous:

Last year at a party at Bungalow 8, Suphala met Mr. Rushdie, Ms. Lakshmi, Mr. [Sean] Lennon and Harper Simon, the son of Paul Simon. Within days she was jamming in the studio with Mr. Lennon, the younger Mr. Simon and Edie Brickell, the singer, who is married to Paul Simon. Mr. Rushdie offered to help promote her music…

After hearing Norah Jones, the daughter of Ravi Shankar, sing at the Knitting Factory in 2002, Suphala introduced herself and asked the singer if she wouldn’t mind stopping by her apartment to record some vocal tracks. Ms. Jones obliged, not long before her first album orbited her into international stardom…

Continue reading →

Police rapists

Posted on by

A Bombay policeman allegedly raped a girl in broad daylight (via India Uncut):

A quiet evening, sitting by the sea at Marine Drive turned into a nightmare for a 17-year-old girl. Priya Ravi (name changed), a resident of Chembur, was just idling at the promenade along with three male friends last evening, when constable Sunil More… approached them… he demanded that they come to the police chowky… Inside, he bolted the door and allegedly raped her…

More… was completely nonchalant and allegedly said, “Jo ukhad sakte ho, ukhad lo (do whatever you want)…” According to Kayum Shaikh who was present at the spot, “The constable was drunk and came out of the chowky adjusting his belt. He was aggressive and appeared completely unconcerned with what had just happened.” [Mid-Day]

Police sources said More always got away with rude behaviour and drinking on duty because his brother-in-law, a police inspector in the Crime Branch, shielded him. [Express]

The cop’s been fired and charged with a crime, but only because of public outrage. Says Amit Varma:

I’m just surprised that the boys who were with that girl let the policeman take her inside that chowky. Perhaps they were young and naive. In time, they will learn that the typical Indian policeman is like this: undereducated, overworked, underpaid, sexually repressed, resentful of richer people, and drunk on power. It is a potent combination.

An even worse incident happened in Pakistan:

Continue reading →

Indian food at cafeterias

Posted on by

We never got Indian food at Microsoft, I’m a little jealous.

Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems’ [cafeteria.]

The new Whole Foods in NYC’s Union Square serves hot Indian food. And one of the big selling points of London is that you can get mango lassi and 20 kinds of Indian meals at any Sainsbury’s.

Hey, man. You’ve got your reasons, I’ve got mine.

Zakaria shouts out to his homeboys

Posted on by

I haven’t seen Fareed Zakaria do explicit shout-outs that often, unlike Gurinder Chadha:

India is still a poor third-world country, but if you read [Thomas Friedman’s] book you would assume it is on the verge of becoming a global superstar. (Though as an Indian-American, I read Friedman and whisper the old Jewish saying, ”From your lips to God’s ears.”)

Tribal marriage

Posted on by

The tribal model of marriage:
It’s thoroughly depressing that some Indian girls are still being married off by age 12… suspiciously coincidental with the age of menarche. The obsession with female virginity obscenely reduces half the world to a box of disposable tissues with a faulty seal:

[A]s Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin’s hymen ‘like a ray of sunshine through a window–leaving it unbroken.’

… Today the NYT reminds us Neanderthal marriage customs are not a uniquely desi shame, they’re tribal:

More than half of Kyrgyzstan’s married women were snatched from the street by their husbands in a custom known as “ala kachuu,” which translates roughly as “grab and run.” … at least a third of Kyrgyzstan’s brides are now taken against their will. Kyrgyz men say they snatch women because it is easier than courtship and cheaper than paying the standard “bride price,” which can be as much as $800 plus a cow.

This in particular is reminiscent of desi village culture:

Once a girl has been kept in the home overnight, her fate is all but sealed: with her virginity suspect and her name disgraced, she will find it difficult to attract any other husband… “Every good marriage begins in tears,” a Kyrgyz saying goes.

It’s always bothered me the way the doli / vidai in a Hindu wedding ends in tears… At its heart it’s a submission ritual: the baraatis have stormed the gates, the bride has been caught, the doli is her broken surrender, carried off in a palanquin to the conqueror’s harem. ‘Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge’: it’s Alexander entering Babylon, Hulagu entering Baghdad.

M.I.A. now a role model?

Posted on by

The Voice thinks M.I.A. needs to coin a genre:

Fannypack are like M.I.A., who hops her own scotch and shakes her own jumprope, and they’re in a similar predicament, which is that they don’t quite fit pre-existing genres, dance or hip-hop… Fannypack and M.I.A. should hold a joint press conference and simply declare themselves a genre, invent some name, Jumprope or Streetrope or Boohall or Favela Bratty Beats or Bow-Wow Booty Bop or something… M.I.A. and Fannypack are in dance-club bohemia, which means on the one hand that they’ll be surrounded by preciousness, but on the other that, being bohos, they might stick to their vision, keep doing the jumprope not just for fun or for the moolah but for the art of it, persist long enough and obstinately enough to still be jumping when the world is finally ready to jump with them…

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a decorator

Posted on by

Budding interior designers now have a new way to decorate: have your custom furnishings made in an Indian factory:

[Cornelia] The other fusion element–the Swedish-looking candleholder that I found. I wanted to get 40 made for our wedding. I sent out an Internet request to a consortium of Indian manufacturers: “Can anybody make these?” A man with a factory outside Delhi e-mailed: I can do it!

[Mikael] We use candles a lot in northern countries… We’re a pale people.