Ultraliberal ‘toonista Ted Rall asks what a Parsi America would look like. Actually, that’s not really what he’s saying at all, but it’s fun to imagine a President Politicswalla.
Click here to read the whole thing.
Author Archives: manish
Catching bin Laden? Not so much
The NY Sun blames the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan for hindering Osama bin Laden’s capture (thanks, Prashant):
[Former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan] Nancy Powell refused to allow the distribution in Pakistan of wanted posters, matchbooks, and other items advertising America’s $25 million reward for information leading to the capture of Mr. bin Laden… thousands of matchbooks, posters, and other material… translated into Urdu, Pashto, and other local languages – remained “impounded” on American Embassy grounds from 2002 to 2004…A single matchbook helped lead to the capture of Mir Amal Kansi, who gunned down several CIA employees at the front gates of the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters in 1993. Kansi was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 when a local fingered him for the $5 million reward…
Mr. Kirk [R-Illinois] said that he raised the issue directly with the ambassador. According to the congressman, she replied that she had “six top priorities” and finding Mr. bin Laden was only one of them. She listed other priorities: securing supply lines for American and allied forces in Afghanistan, shutting down the network of nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan, preventing a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, and forestalling a radical Islamic takeover of the government of Pakistan, a key American ally.
The conservative rag may have an ulterior motive in blaming the State Department instead of the president for making bin Laden a low priority. Either way, nailing that bastard is still my #1 voting issue — 3.5 years and counting.
In other news, Pakistani businessman Humayun Khan makes a convincing case for why he’s not buying parts for nukes:
Humayun Khan… denied any involvement with the recent shipments, saying that “someone else” ordered the oscilloscopes and the switches, had them shipped to his office, then snatched them somewhere along the way. “It’s very tragic,” Humayun Khan said. “You don’t know where these things are landing. They come through and they vanish.”
Yes, boss, ‘someone else’ charged the strippers to the company AmEx, had them sent to our office and then snatched them somewhere along the way. It’s tragic, I say, tragic.
Missing in Acton
The Washington City Paper covers the M.I.A. buzz with some true musicology:
… M.I.A. [is] a battlefield acronym that’s also a play on her real name and the London neighborhood of Acton… despite being an exotic and a refugee, M.I.A. is no primitive. She found a well-worn DIY-aesthete’s path out of London’s housing estates, leading to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. As much a pop-music finishing school as anything else, Saint Martins offered an art career, but also introductions to Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Pulp’s Steve Mackey, and electroclash diva Peaches… In her glammier shots, she looks a bit like multi-ethnic actress Rosario Dawson…The title [‘Galang’] sounds Malay or Indonesian, not Tamil, although some experts insist that it’s actually a dancehall contraction of “go along…” “Pull Up the People” is a potential Peace Corps anthem with Baader-Meinhof attitude. “Fire Fire” name-checks the Pixies, the Beasties, and Lou Reed, but also invokes “Growin’ up brewin’ up/Guerrilla getting trained now…”
She’s been officially classified as a rapper, and though she’s no Celine Dion, that’s not quite right. M.I.A. is more of a chanter, and such vocal hooks as “Hello this is M.I.A./Can you please come get me” come as close to singing as the vocals of any monotone rocker… Arular recalls minimalist proto- and postpunk–maybe not Wire or the Stranglers, but definitely Suicide, T. Rex, and Bow Wow Wow…
There are but a handful of conspicuous samples on Arular, including the sitar bit that opens “Hombre”–ironically, given that the tune is a lustful plea to a Spanish-speaking hunk. (Sitars, by the way, aren’t prevalent in Sri Lanka, which feels almost as Indonesian as Indian, and where the dominant music is baile, derived from the Iberian dance music of the island’s former Portuguese rulers.)
Billboard reveals M.I.A.’s given name is Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam (subscription required). The magazine says she’s viewed by some as not a mere Asian, but rather the potential savior of UK rap (Dizzee Rascal has plateaued). She swaggers, saying she signed with XL Recordings because it was closest to her house, and so they’re lucky to have her. There’s this delicious little bit of braggadocio: she says she told the label, ‘Trust me, you’ve been looking for me,’ dropped off the ‘Galang’ tape, and they called her back 20 minutes later. She says her dad asked her not to use his name as the album title (maybe it increased his risk in the field?), but she refused. She’s sad he chose his cause over his family.
‘Out of Fashion’ at the QMA
Playwright Anuvab Pal has a new play in staged reading this Saturday, March 26th, 7pm at the Queens Museum of Art. The play is ‘a historical comedy set in a Savile Row suit shop.’ He writes:
It’s called Out of Fashion and it’s an hour long comedy about British tailors, Indian fashion designers, Irish patent clerks and Indian freedom fighters. It attempts to be funny. Would be great to see you there.
The QMA is currently hosting art exhibits from both American desis and the subcontinent. Here’s the rest of their theater schedule:
-
Saturday, 6:30-7pm, preview of Seven.11
-
Sunday, 4:15-5pm, staged reading of Deepa Purohit’s Exile: ‘a story of a South Asian woman’s journey through memory which spans two continents in search of lost loves’
The museum is also hosting dance performances throughout this weekend. Full details here.
Update: Vernacular Body reviews Out of Fashion:
The play was good fun, despite the absence of props and an abundance of wild accent shifts: neither the upper-crustish (fathers) nor the Dublinish was particularly convincing, and the cockney (sons) was a complete cock-up. Had a good mind to send them tapes of David Beckham talking, innit? But there was much wild punnery to be had, Alfred J. Prufrock played a major role, andapt indeed was the nudge-nudge wink-wink cleverness of the Monty-Python-meets-Falstaff variety (which I happen to like) as the play was set in a Saville Row tailor shop. I confirmed with the playwright afterwards that Wilde and Stoppard were major influences on his sensibility.
Holi Day munchies
Straight from your druggie aunties and uncles, here are some traditional recipes for Holi bhang. The Hindustan Times even tells you how to make pot laddoos and green halva!
Bhang, or cannabis, is freely associated with the splash of assorted Holi colours. During this season, bhang is prepared and served according to age-old traditions throughout the Himalayan foothills.With a simple mortar and pestle, the buds and leaves of cannabis are squashed and ground into a green paste, to which milk, ghee and spices are added. This base can be mixed with the nutritious, refreshing drink, thandai… This can also be mixed with ghee and sugar to make a tasty green halvah, and into peppery, chewy little balls called [golis].
I’m cracking up just thinking of aunties hanging out around shady parks after midnight trying to score Shiva’s herb for their Holi parties. Mistress of Spices indeed. Like Bhang for Chocolate. Maybe desis’ popularity in stoner flicks is justified — I’ll never look at pista barfi the same way again.
The adult Holi is the desi Halloween, a day for masks, flirting and outrageous fun. Meanwhile, bhangra aficionados are busy denying that its name derives from bhang:
Cecil Beaton described the ‘concoction of milk of almonds, rosewater, carminum nuts and eight ingredients of which hashish, or Bhang, was the principal’. (‘One of the effects of Bhang,’ he further reported, ‘is that it makes everything appear humorous. Another is that strange things happen to one’s sense of time.’)
Brimful’s amphora runneth over as she tells a hilarious tale about an auntie, an airport and a dime bag:
… her brother-in-law, V mama, puts in his request, asks her to get him some of that stuff that goes into bhang. She puts it on the list, describes it exactly that way when she seeks it out in India.
So there she is, waiting in the customs line at Logan, carting along two rather young kids, bags filled to the point of bursting, and the customs inspector decides that her bags should be inspected…. The inspector does his thing, until he comes to a bag of dried leaves. “What’s this?” he asks.
Parting the Luna Sea
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Jesus, a sex guru, a ballet dancer and Superman’s girlfriend walk into a casting call…
Indian-Canadian director Vic Sarin is putting together an indie film called Partition (thanks, sd). The Sepia Films (wha?) script seems more than ‘inspired’ by the Bollywood megahit Gadar. Both films show a Sikh villager rescuing a Muslim girl during Partition and guiding her safely into Pakistan:
Partition is a sweeping, historical drama set against the partition of India and based on the real life experiences of director Vic Sarin’s family. Partition tells the story of a former British army Sikh officer, Gian Singh, who rescues a young Muslim girl, falls in love with her and must travel to Pakistan to save her… Production on the film will begin next April in South Africa, India and United Kingdom…
The film features Jimi Mistry (East Is East, The Guru), Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ), Neve Campbell (The Company) and Kristin Kreuk (Smallville). Mistry will take the lead, and Campbell will play his British friend, fitting neatly into the Candice Bergen role in Gandhi. She even has a similar jawline.
Kreuk will play the 17-year-old Muslim love interest, Naseem. Her parents are Chinese and Dutch, but I suppose it’s walking distance from Smallville to the Punjabi pind.
“I’m so excited about Partition,” KK told TV Guide…
That’s right, she told TV Guide… that she’s excited… about… Partition. Isn’t that kind of like telling Soap Opera Digest that you’re excited about the Holocaust? I doubt those in my family who survived it were in their happy-happy-fun-fun place at the time. Here’s an idea: how about Kal Penn the henchman shooting death rays from his eyes at Superman’s girlfriend. Now that’s exciting.
A beautiful brown mind
Eccentric mathematics rock star Srinivasa Ramanujan, who died at age 33, postulated a combinatorics problem almost 100 years ago that’s just been solved (via Slashdot). The breakthrough may yield better cryptography, meaning more secure documents and transactions.
Any integer can be broken down into sums of smaller numbers (‘partitions’). A University of Wisconsin researcher has extended Ramanujan’s theorem and shown that the number of partitions in any large integer are divisible by all prime numbers.
The truly interesting bit is Ramanujan’s Indian Idol story. He was recruited to Cambridge from an underdeveloped farm system like a pitching prodigy from Puerto Rico:
… in 1913, the English mathematician G. H. Hardy received a strange letter from an unknown clerk in Madras, India. The ten-page letter contained about 120 statements of theorems on infinite series, improper integrals, continued fractions, and number theory… Every prominent mathematician gets letters from cranks… But something about the formulas made him take a second look… After a few hours, they concluded that the results “must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them…” [Hoffman]
The next Einstein working alone in a room, surfacing out of nowhere to overturn the accepted paradigm: it’s every institution’s nightmare. The self-taught Ramanujan had flunked out of school in Tamil Nadu and run away from home because he obsessed over math and only math. Over time, he was granted an honorary doctorate by Cambridge and elected to the Royal Society of London, Valhalla for mathematicians.
Ramanujan was an intuitive thinker who disdained formalism:
Hardy was a great exponent of rigor in analysis, while Ramanujan’s results were (as Hardy put it) “arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account…” He was amazed by Ramanujan’s uncanny formal intuition in manipulating infinite series, continued fractions, and the like: “I have never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi.” [Hoffman]
Monsters of rock
India Abroad magazine just ran an excellent cover feature (zipped PDFs) on desi rockers and rappers in America, covering Stubhy of Lucky Boys Confusion, M.I.A., Karmacy, Chee Malabar of the Himalayan Project, Shaheen Sheik, Jungli and Funkadesi. They also shout out to ancestral rockers dating back to Freddie Mercury: Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Ashwin Sood (Sarah MacLachlan’s drummer-husband) and Tony Kanal of No Doubt. There are others, of course, such as Dave Baksh of Sum 41.
Stubhy, lead singer of 100K-selling ska-punk band Lucky Boys Confusion, vents his parental issues in his music:
… the artist formerly known as Kaustubh Pandav was something of a vagabond, sleeping on roofs and behind couches in Chicago… he had to decide exactly what he would have to sacrifice to pursue a music career. At the time, he figured it would be his college education. The parents weren’t happy. “They said, ‘Get the hell out of the house,’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ ” What followed was a long string of “odd, crappy jobs,” like doing the midnight shift in a parking lot, or whatever else inspired him. “I threw parties,” said Stubhy. “Bought a keg. It was one grand scheme to the next. ‘Let’s go steal comic books from that kid and sell it.’ That would make about $15. Stupid stuff.”… the song ‘Fred Astaire’ [is] a terse dialogue between a demanding parent and a son who can’t live up to expectations. The title, he said, could have just as well been “Amitabh Bachchan”… he still gets e-mails from Indian kids who thank him for writing the song.
Scene in New York
Just north of Manhattan’s Union Square (17th St. between Broadway and 5th Ave.), a small shop called Beads of Paradise has a big India display in the window. It’s the same old exotic schtick: saris, elephant statuettes, beads, you know the shpiel.
But the centerpiece of the display caught my eye: they’re selling some random desi family’s photos for half a G apiece so they can grace a Union Square trust-funder’s mantelpiece. Just imagine that poor family, the Griswolds of Rajasthan, cleaning out their attic and realizing some hippie’s snuck off with their family memories.
And what if we’d done it in reverse? Tourist in Delhi: ‘Thelma, come quick! I think I found cousin Edna’s bat mitzvah photos!’
Seen in San Francisco: here.
Indian film festival in LA
Pencil or Outlook in the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles from April 20-24, 2005. The organizers haven’t released the schedule yet, but they’re showing the newly colorized Mughal-e-Azam as well as Morning Raga (Shabana Azmi, Lilette Dubey; playing in New York at the Imaginasian).
Here’s the photo gallery from 2003 with indiephreaks Rahul Bose and Koel Purie, and the festival home page.