Karthik tells a droll story about borrowing a library book in India:
“Do you have The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?”
“Who is the author?”
“John Le Carre.”… she scribbled something in the note, and left it on her desk… Stuck to the notice with cellophane tape was the make shift post-it note. It said, in Tamil:
Karthik
John
Book with a long name
Shashwati explains murderer Charles Sobhraj’s escape from a Greek prison:
One day he managed to purloin a syringe. He drew some of his own blood, and spat it out during an inspection, and collapsed feigning illness… While in hospital, he lay his hands on a bottle of perfume… Charles and some other inmates were put in a van to be taken back to the prison… Charles threw the perfume on a bunch of oily rags and lit it, starting a fire in the van… Sobhraj escaped in the confusion.
Suketu Mehta wrote this sensuous take on the Great Northeast Power Outage (via Green Channel):
As it got dark, the texture of the city changed. The street lights were out, and people strolled about with flashlights, lanterns. Street vendors were selling glow-sticks and phosphorescent necklaces which would save you from being run over at intersections… It was a steamy night; men walked around without their shirts; women came out in their shortest skirts. People trying to catch the trains to the suburbs realised they couldn’t make it, met other commuters, and made impromptu dinner plans with them; ate pizza by candlelight and slept together in the parks… For one night, the city shed its load.
Imagine being a poor Indian villager. You’re recruited for an honorable blue-collar job in the Middle East. Your dad borrows money to buy you the ticket. Your travel agent takes pity on you and buys you decent clothes for your first day on the job.
When you arrive, customs searches your belongings. You’re shocked when they tell you they found a small amount of heroin in your shoes and throw you in jail. You quickly realize the travel agent was not as generous as he seemed. You spend the next five years in lockup. The Indian embassy doesn’t help.
One fine day, the police take you out back and cut off your head. Then, while closing out your case, they realize they made a mistake and send a message to the Indian embassy: you were innocent after all. Shrug. Body’s been disposed of. Shit happens. Whaddya gonna do.
Unfortunately, it’s not a macabre short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Naickam Shahjahan, a poor Muslim from Kerala, was beheaded two months ago in Saudi Arabia for a crime he didn’t commit (via Prashant Kothari). 1.3 million Indians work in Saudi Arabia, and 18 were beheaded in 2003. But when innocent Brits are caught in the Saudi sharia system, their government usually manages to get them out.
… an undetermined number of foreigners, among them Indians, have been sentenced to death in the kingdom and await execution. Details of their trials and the evidence presented to convict them are treated as a State secret. “The tragedy is that in many cases, the condemned men did not know they had been sentenced to death, and their embassies were only informed after the fact,” says Menon.Last year, an Indian diplomat in the Gulf said no advance information is given to the embassy before Indians are beheaded. “We get the information after the execution from local newspapers,” he said. After the execution, the body is not returned to the family. Relatives receive no official information about the location of the mortal remains in Saudi Arabia…
In a rambunctious Meatpacking District bar, I met a woman whose parents were German. She was tall, brown-haired and fair and had grown up in India. She had a Delhi accent.At a self-storage business, I met a manager who looked black. He had a courtly manner and a delightful accent, and his nametag said Seetram (Sitaram). He was surprised and pleased when I guessed Guyanese.
In college, the hardest partier in the entire coed dorm was a girl from a wealthy Bombay family… She once told me, ‘English is my native language, yaar. I can hardly speak Hindi.’ She had that aggressive Bombay accent, the hard one used by young men on the make, not the singsong one nor the Marathi tapori…
In Barcelona, a middle-aged cab driver with a rich baritone guessed I was Latin American, narrowing it down to either México or Costa Rica. He was very good, because I had picked up my Spanish from a costarricense teacher in a California high school. In his mind, the Hindú bit was of least importance.
In 1993 I rode my motorcycle from San Francisco to Seattle and back, pausing overnight at a remote motel in Crescent City near the California-Oregon border. The motel owner was happy to hear Hindi. It’s a pity I didn’t have Gujarati in my repertoire for that extra discount.
Congratulations, [the talented] Mr. Rupinder. You’ve successfully passed just this once. But you’re only as good as your last con.
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Upgrading my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it…
— apologies to R.E.M., ‘Losing My Religion’
Are you highly religious and anxious about the fast pace of technological change? Simply text your guru for personalized blessings (via Boing Boing):
… they were dubbed “bhajan-kirtan” channels, watched by the very old or the very bored… [Sadhana] has started an SMS service by which viewers can contact their favourite guru for blessings/advice. So, if you want to know from Sudhanshuji Maharaj if it’s the right day to go looking for a job, all you have to do is type “7333” and “S SUD”.… the channel has empanelled 40 spiritual leaders. “We get 20,000 SMS every day from all kinds of viewers,” says Gupta, who has tied-up with 85 cellular operators…
Or launch a satellite so you know when to pray:
The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim body, said Sunday it plans to launch an $8 million satellite within two years to take pictures of the moon to find lunar calendar dates… “The satellite will have a fixed camera on board that will take highly detailed pictures of the moon and beam them back to earth…” A moon sighting committee in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, frustrated millions of worshippers when it said it got the date wrong by a day for the peak of this year’s haj pilgrimage in January.There is already some criticism from religious officials in Saudi Arabia, which uses the lunar calendar. “The shape of the moon has to be seen from the ground,” said Osama al-Bar, dean of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute for Haj Research in Saudi Arabia.
Osama the Hajj researcher has decreed it, so thus it will be.
A non-desi former pastry chef has opened a restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves traditional dhaba food, lassi and paranthas (thanks, BridalBeer). The new place is called Lassi:
From delicate plate-dwarfing dosas at Hampton Chutney Co. and the N.Y. Dosa cart, to wraplike rolls at Roomali and the Kati Roll Co., to the colorful, crunchy chaat of Sukhadia’s Gokul, we’re undoubtedly having a Southeast Asian street-food moment…
I think they mean South Asian, but carry on:
Catchily named for the frothy yogurt drinks on offer in mango-flavored profusion all over town, Lassi is much more than an ethnic smoothie shop (though its premade featured beverages, in potent, refreshing flavors ranging from spice-flecked cardamom and vanilla to a complex and curdy lemon, can easily become an après-gym addiction).
… Lassi is bright and cheerful–like its owner, Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, the former pastry chef of L’Impero and Veritas. A chance encounter with a Punjabi student in a pastry class she was teaching–and many stereotype-shattering home-cooked Indian meals– inspired Carlucci-Rodriguez to change culinary course. And even though she’s an unlikely Indian-restaurant owner, she’s a passionate one. Her food tastes unlike any other Indian in town–fresher, cleaner, but undiluted in its intricately spiced essence.
An Indian-American actress without an accent slaps comedian Steve Carrell in an episode of The Office called ‘Diversity Day’ (thanks, Amardeep). Pop Matters explains:
Michael… goads… a bewildered Indian employee with an outrageously offensive imitation of an Indian convenience store manager [and] earns a hard slap for his trouble…
Watch the clip (18 MB; you need a BitTorrent downloader: Windows, Mac). The thappad is at 1:37 in the clip.
Here’s Apul’s post on another funny incident in the same episode.
A tragic end to the Arvin Sharma search (thanks, SadNepali):
D.C. police say the body of 22-year-old Arvin Sharma was pulled out of the Anacostia River. A passer-by saw a body near the 11th Street Bridge and called police at around 9:45 a.m. this morning. [WJLA]
60 Minutes covered the Anacostia River just yesterday, calling it a dividing line between the Capitol and one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:
Police say that so far this year, more than half the murders in Washington were committed here… Anacostia is a neighborhood where unemployment is epidemic and 38 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. [60 Minutes]
The search had been quite intense:
Ashish, Arvin’s 27-year-old brother and roommate, is taking time off work, and the university is spreading the word of Arvin’s disappearance. An aunt is making a trip from Thailand to provide support… “[The family] is taking care of the small things for us,” said Ashish Sharma. “Anyone we call is willing to jump on a plane.”Arvin Sharma’s younger brother and friends have plastered areas with posters where Arvin might have been seen. “Everyone has been flooding the area with new fliers … Metro stops, gas stations, all the D.C. universities — Georgetown, George Washington and even Howard and Morgan State,” Ashish said. [UMD Diamondback]
Amrit Singh, the daughter of the Indian prime minister who’s a staff attorney for the ACLU, was interviewed today on a Chicago public radio station about the torture of U.S. detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay (thanks, KXB).
Listen to the program. Here’s the program’s home page.
Update: Singh summarized the status of the ACLU’s torture lawsuits on the first anniversary of the Abu Ghraib photos. She said the ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld as an individual, so the lawsuit continues even after he’s no longer Secretary of Defense. That’s quite an aggressive tactic.
Singh was well-spoken with nary a stumble. Her accent was light, although she stressed the first syllable of ‘rapport.’