Author Archives: manish

Desi MovieLink

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A former coworker of mine from Microsoft just launched Masala Downloads, which lets you legally download and watch Bollywood films and cricket matches. The price is $2.99 for a 3-day rental, and the downloaded files come DRM’d (locked) in Windows Media format with a 3-day expiration.

The idea is convenient for people with fast Net connections who don’t live near an Indian movie rental store. And since those stores often rent out pirated copies, this concept is potentially as legit a rental as you can get. It’s similar to MovieLink and CinemaNow, which offer downloadable Hollywood flicks, and CrimsonBay, which serves up desi music downloads.

The films are high-quality rips of DVDs they’ve purchased. The site says it enforces DVD licenses; I imagine they have a ripped version on a server, buy several DVDs and block over-limit downloads until at least one outstanding rental expires. I can’t imagine they’ve negotiated with film companies for authorization directly, but maybe they’ve spoken with distributors.

The site is pretty young — it’s got limited selection and only takes credit cards via PayPal — but the concept seems sound, and the trial movie, a 15 MB snippet of Veer-Zaara, downloaded quickly. Check it out.

Meet Dell-jit

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Michael Dell personally opened a campus for his eponymous computer company in Mohali, a suburb of Chandigarh, today. The campus will house both sales and support:

The company employs more than 7,000 people in India, its largest work force outside the United States…. “Certainly the scale of India is pretty awe-inspiring,” [said Michael Dell]. Dell has one call center in the southern city of Hyderabad and another in India’s technology capital, Bangalore… [News.com]

Dell Inc., which had revenues of over $45 billion last year, would be the first major company to set up its centre in the Quark City complex being built here… by [a] software giant – Quark. Many other leading IT and software companies from India and abroad are expected to locate at the Quark City complex that is being planned with office spaces, residential areas, complete underground parking, 100 percent power backup and a lively entertainment area with shopping malls and multiplexes. [ToI]

We welcome Dell to the land of sardars in shades on scooters with sidesaddle Sikhnis, wax-tipped moustaches and mooli parantha. And we offer this unsolicited advice: the 12-step program for keeping your Punjabi workers happy is, the dhaba should be no more than 12 steps away.

Kolli wins a memento

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24-year-old Ram Kolli just won the U.S. Memory Championship, quickly memorizing decks of cards, names and faces, poems, and long numbers.

… when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor… To keep all this information in order, memorizers have to link their images together in a chain. Some… use what’s called the “journey method.” They place their images at predetermined points along a route that they know well… When it comes time to recall, he simply takes a mental stroll through his old college town and is able see each of the images in the place where he put it.

Evolutionary selection has favored sharp navigational memory, ranging from ‘dude, where’s my food?’ to ‘dude, where’s my wife?’:

… this method of using visual imagery as a mnemonic device was first employed by a Greek poet named Simonides in 477 BC. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the guests at a large banquet he was attending. He was able to reconstruct the guest list by visualizing who was sitting at each seat around the table. What Simonides had discovered was that people have an astoundingly good recollection of location… this same technique was later used by Roman generals to learn the names of thousands of soldiers in their command and by medieval scholastics to memorize long religious tomes.

Slate has a fascinating followup on memory formation as portrayed in one of my favorite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

… some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they’re activated, thanks to a process called reconsolidation… instead of simply recalling a memory that had been forged days or months ago, the brain is forging it all over again, in a new associative context. In a sense, when we remember something, we create a new memory, one that is shaped by the changes that have happened to our brain since the memory last occurred to us. Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure.

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Hoteliers sweep out Modi, AIANA persists

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The Asian American Hotel Owners Association is canceling its invitation to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi:

[AAHOA chairman Mike Patel] said Gujaratis settled in USA have decided to stand by the decision of the US administration on the visa issue. He said, “We support the decision of the American government on this issue.” Patel pleaded with Modi to expedite the process of justice for the riot victims in the state…

Modi’s search for the real killers will proceed about as quickly as Robert Blake’s and O.J. Simpson’s. But the Association of Indians of North America wouldn’t know a losing cause if it bit them in the ass. It’s hosting Modi via satellite feed at Madison Square Garden on Sunday:

[The Association of Indian-Americans of North America (AIANA)], the organiser of the public meeting in the Madison Square Garden in New York, said they plan to put up a huge screen in the hall to telecast Modi’s speech live from Gandhinagar… An [AIANA] spokesperson claimed that the organisation represented the point of view of the majority of Indian-Americans in the United States.

AIANA is feting the man behind the abbatoir of Ahmedabad. They sure as hell don’t speak for me. ‘Aina’ means mirror in Hindi — they need to take a good, hard look at what they really stand for.

In related news, desi Christians have set a new record for longest acronym: the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations of North America applauded the visa denial.

John Prabhudoss, the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee of FIACONA, said, “I applaud the decision of the State Department and I thank the US Congress for standing with us in the effort. Those who invited Modi to honour him in the US have done so in total neglect for the pain and suffering he has caused to hundreds of thousands of people in Gujarat and elsewhere…”

Update: Here’s a good way to show someone you disagree: torch an unrelated party’s godown.

Nearly 150 activists barged into the warehouse of U.S.-based PepsiCo in the western city of Surat, smashed bottles and set fire to the place…

Update 2: AAHOA is sending mixed signals about whether it still wants Modi to speak.

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Q is for quotas

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A desi girl from South Africa was rejected by a med school, but her desi friend with lower grades was accepted. Keeping up with the Junejas, the family filed a lawsuit. In court, the med school admitted it had mistaken the friend to be black:

A doctor of Indian origin in South Africa has filed an appeal in Cape Town High Court after his daughter was refused admission to a medical school… He pointed out that [the University of Cape Town med school] had accepted Sunira’s friend, also of Indian origin, although her result was not as good. The friend was accepted because the university believed she was African… [Telegraph]

Due to South Africa’s discriminatory history, the UCT med school has explicit racial quotas for admissions. It even mandates that 2/3rds of its students be female, which must be a major bonus for male applicants:

… UCT’s “target equity mixes” for first-time-entering medicine undergraduates were set at 42 percent black, 28 percent white, 16 percent coloured and 14 percent Indian. Gender targets required 65 percent of these students to be female and 35 percent male. [Pretoria News]

The parents objected to assuming a disadvantaged background even of wealthy blacks:

They pointed to documents that showed that all African and coloured students who applied to study medicine at UCT were considered to be “educationally disadvantaged” even if they attended private schools. [Cape Argus]

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Times of India threatens blogger

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The Times of India, whose Web edition is rife with inaccuracies, cut ‘n paste stories and jingoism, has pressured a media critic into shutting down his blog by threatening to sue for libel (thanks, H.):

… when one of the few noted [Indian] media critics, Pradyuman Maheshwari, criticized the Times of India on his Mediaah Weblog recently, the Times looked to squash him with a seven-page legal threat for libel. The threat worked, and Maheshwari decided to close his site, as he has a day job running the daily Maharashtra Herald in Pune…

“… if this goes where I think it’s going, it should go down in history as ‘The Great Indian Blog Mutiny,'” Gupta told me via e-mail. “The Times of India has simply shown how far they’ve come from being a respectable newspaper to being a common school bully…”

One of the ToI’s most criticized practices is selling front page space to PR firms for their clients’ publicity shots. The newspaper allegedly auctions off this space without disclosing that it’s pay-for-placement:

Maheshwari says much of what upset the Times was his criticism of its MediaNet initiative where businesses can actually buy photos and profile stories in the Times’ editorial section — what it calls “edvertorials.”

Here’s an example in the Bombay Times, a tabloidish paper owned by the ToI:

A McDonald’s spokesperson on the front page picture of Malaika Arora posing to announce McDonald’s home delivery service in Bombay Times dated April 12, 2004: “Yes, the photograph was paid for.”

Here’s a mirror of the offending posts and the ToI’s legal threat.

Do you want McAloo Tikkis with that?

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McDonald’s is routing drive-through orders to a remote call center in the U.S. Can Gurgaon be far behind?

Company officials said the idea, being tested at a small number of restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, is aimed at reducing the number of mistakes at the drive-thru window… “You have a professional order taker with strong communications skills whose job is to do nothing but take down orders,” said Matthew Paull, the chief financial officer. Paull said a “heavy percentage” of complaints the company receives are from drive-thru customers who got the wrong order.

The commando elves who man our secret North Dakota headquarters have been spotted wearing phone headsets and glazed expressions.

This reminds me of the Pakistani company in D.C. which outsourced its receptionist to Lahore (thanks, Parag). You walk in and interact with a webcam and a floating head, very Oz.

And you can’t beat that with a bat

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Babu, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves food from Calcutta, apparently made up its menu according to Black Sheep’s hip-hop classic, ‘The Choice Is Yours.’ The formerly price-list-free restaurant sits below Kati Roll Co. and is by the same owner (thanks, Turbanhead):

… the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience…

Payments range from generous (foodies) to parsimonious (Midwesterners):

 “We had one couple who paid two hundred bucks for an eighty-dollar meal,” Saha said… “We talked to some people before sending them their check, asking if they would pay fifty dollars for this meal,” Jung said. “The people mostly said yes, except for one couple from Minneapolis. They were shocked at that price.”

In classic desi fashion, our fine young cannibals took advantage of the price-free policy:

A rowdy group of ten young Indians walked in one Friday evening and occupied the restaurant’s large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; they didn’t even tip the wait staff.

But all good things must come to an end on the credit card slip, top copy:

A few weeks ago, prices were finally written into the menu: a three-course meal with wine comes to about fifty dollars a head.

The New Yorker also covered M.I.A. recently — is Eustace Tilly crushing on cumin?