Author Archives: manish

Yurt lit

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That’s just great. After years of bitching about the colonialism of language and reverting city names to their pre-British originals, South Asian countries are about to lose their economic advantage. Yes, Outer Mongolia is learning English:

Within a decade, Mongolia is expected to convert its written language to the Roman alphabet from Cyrillic characters… “If there is a shortcut to development, it is English; parents understand that, kids understand that…” In Chile, the government has embarked on a national program to teach English in all elementary and high schools. The goal is to make the nation of 15 million people bilingual within a generation. The models are the Netherlands and the Nordic nations, which have achieved proficiency in English since World War II…

Mongolia, which, suspiciously, rhymes with Elbonia, has big plans for the tech industry:

“If we combine our academic knowledge with the English language, we can do outsourcing here, just like Bangalore…”

As you may recall, Kemal Ataturk forcibly converted the Turkish language from Arabic to Roman script decades ago. Turkey has done relatively well and is hoping to join the European Union. So Mongolians are welcoming their new Hinglish overlords only:

Mr. Tsagaan… explained in English that Mongolia hoped to attract English teachers… from India, Singapore and Malaysia.

You know what this means: bookshelves packed with weepy Mongolian memoirs written from the barren hinterlands of SoHo. The book covers will be edged with sensuous yak skins, yurts and thick-lipped models. That hot new novelist from Ulan Bator will be munching canapes, showing up in Granta and getting shortlisted for the Booker.

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Swab-in-cheek wisdom

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When I was a kid, I used to devour comic books about Indian mythology. One of the best set of stories was about Birbal, the wise chief minister in emperor Akbar’s court. The Birbal-of-the-comic-books used to take the piss out of the wealthy, pompous and illogical with cleverness and humor.

One of the tales I remember was a story, pretty much identical to the one from King Solomon, where two different women claimed to be the mother of a single baby. Birbal ordered that the baby be cut in half and shared between the women. One of the supplicants begged him to stop and gave up her struggle, and her love for the child revealed her as the true mother.

These days, gene sequencers dispense justice like modern-day Birbals:

Sri Lankan authorities say DNA results have confirmed the identity of a baby who was found alive in the rubble of the tsunami disaster. Nicknamed “Baby 81,” the toddler was the subject of a desperate eight-week custody battle involving as many as nine couples… Nine couples claimed the child was theirs, but only Murugupillai Jeyarajah and his wife Jenita followed through, providing DNA samples.

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Shaitan’s Billis

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Fresh from evangelist Benny Hinn’s miracle healings, the Jakkur airfield outside Bangalore hosted India’s version of the Blue Angels for an aviation expo where India’s surging airlines placed orders for new planes.

The Surya Kiran (Sunrays) precision flying team looks fantastic, but even to these non-military eyes they don’t cluster as tightly as the Blue Angels. They fly Kiran Mark II trainers instead of the more capable F/A-18 Hornets; these stubby trainers handle forgivingly but are slower than front-line fighters. So they use the patented Indian solution of throwing manpower at the problem by using 50% more pilots on the team 🙂

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‘I was a Bollywood stuntwoman’

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Salon writer Cara Anna became a Bollywood extra through casting agents who stalk backpacker hostels in Bombay. She played many a blank, blond backup dancer, getting a taste of reverse exoticization (via Attempt to Be Hip):

[Casting agents] wait patiently… skimming over the dirty and the clearly stoned, looking for the freshest faces… Lonely Planet guidebooks in hand… Want to be in a film? Just get in this car…Westerners resemble certain Mexican laborers — picked up from street corners, without the proper work papers, by shady middlemen who keep a generous dose of a long day’s pay for themselves…

I could… eavesdrop on actors complaining about Bollywood’s gay casting couch. Being foreign and assumed ignorant, I was harmless…  I not only met stars but became a casting agent, a dancer, a pitch-making screenwriter, a documentary assistant and an aspiring film journalist, all in less than four months…

I met a man from New York who, knowing nothing about Bollywood, became a bodyguard for one of India’s biggest actors. He worked his new connections, appearing in runway shows, and made the Mumbai tabloids as the rumored new lover of a dimpled starlet.

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Creative courtesy

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In the last few months of the Mutiny, we’ve been thrilled that we don’t have to pay y’all to read our stuff 🙂 But, we’d very much appreciate if those who quote us would extend the same courtesies that we do:

  • Please excerpt posts, don’t snarf the whole thing
  • Please credit us or the individual author and link directly to the post, not just the home page

Details are here:  

Thanks, and happy blogging!

(Also for your consideration, the strange case of the cut ‘n paste artist who hit some sister blogs.)

Indian food hacks

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You know how your desi mom totes around lal mirch in her purse because everything’s just too damn bland? And how embarrassing it is when she whips it out at restaurants, hunched over like it was a bottle of Night Train? This is just like that, but classier because, um, you’re epicurious: here’s my favorite Indian food hack from my bachelor kitchen.

At most grocery stores, you can buy tortelloni or ravioli stuffed with fillings such as sun-dried tomatoes and cheese. Try boiling the tortelloni for five minutes, ladling on spaghetti sauce and adding the secret topping: generous scoops of chutney powder, a.k.a. idli masala. It’s a yellow-orange spice mix that morphs the flavor of ravioli into something as delicious as dum aloo. It’s easier than fixing a sandwich, and it is absolutely sabroso. I’ve eaten it for six months and I’m still not sick of it.

And I’m not the only Marco Pulao running around. The desi pizza joints of Jersey City and Jackson Heights, and my own family, are famous for their Indian reimagining of hot pie. Dumpling Man, who makes fresh, thin-skinned Chinese dumplings, offers a spaghetti sauce option. I pitched him a chutney powder topping in a note scribbled on the back of a business card; when I left, I think he was laughing.

Here’s an older, non-Italian favorite which I eventually wore out: toasted onion rolls with spicy hummus, pepperjack cheese and the secret ingredient: mango achar. Please, for the love of Bacchus, share your own favorite food hack here in the comments.

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First desi CEO in the Dow Jones?

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As y’all know, the CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina, was fired yesterday for architecting a failed merger with Compaq. If the head of HP’s flagship division were elevated in her place, Vyomesh Joshi would become the first desi CEO of a company listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (as far as I know).

The Dow Jones includes just 30 blue-chip stocks such as Procter & Gamble, Boeing and Microsoft. The mustachioed, light-eyed Joshi has long been a tireless advocate for HP printers.

[The board] did not rule out promoting someone from within the company… the most likely candidate would be Vyomesh (“VJ”) Joshi. He had been the widely respected head of HP’s printing and imaging division and was recently put in charge of a new unit that combines the printing and PC businesses… one analyst asked Wayman whether the company was concerned about Joshi leaving if he were not named the new CEO… Milunovich added though that it would be important for HP to hold on to Joshi. [CNN]

In three years in charge of the printer unit, which delivers 73 per cent of the company’s operating profits, he boosted profit margins from about 10 per cent to almost 17 per cent at the end of last year. HP could ill afford to lose Mr Joshi, but he may be deemed unsuitable for the top job because he has no experience in corporate computing. [Financial Times]

HP, with $80B in revenues, would actually be the perfect company for this to happen to first because it’s not the hippest company in the world. It’s slightly dowdy, carrying around a pocket protector, an RPN calculator and a combover, but its products tend to be intelligent and dependable. Just like a desi uncle.

Aishwarya in high res

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Here’s a higher-resolution version of Aishwarya’s appearance on Letterman last night. It’s available via BitTorrent, here’s the torrent (73 MB MPEG, 7:52).

First get an easy BitTorrent downloader:

Then click here. The download will start automatically.

Here’s Aishwarya on 60 Minutes: torrent (15 MB AVI, first 2:43).

Update: The shallowness of these questions surprises me. Letterman asks if she lives with her parents, 60 Minutes asks if she’ll kiss on screen. I half expect someone to ask if she ‘wears a dot on her forehead.’ She’s being treated gingerly, like a Martian, like Gandhi — talk about tension! Yeah, she’s not from Britain or Australia, get over it. On Aish’s part, she’s a lot more skittish, nervous and diva-ish in her American interviews than her Indian ones. And she was strangely combative: I dug her cultural smack-back on the living-at-home question, but it needed to be softened by a big smile.

The rant on American imperialism which Letterman showed was the strangest thing to pick out of a musical; it won’t do Bride and Prejudice any favors at the box office. And Aish dressed quite modestly, even more so than at Cannes or, for that matter, in most of her films. I get the feeling that she sees herself, and maybe the interviewers see her, as the Great Brown Hope.

Which is silly, really. I thought that was Kal Penn 😉

Update 2: Check out the video of Aishwarya on Nightline, and the rest of the 60 Minutes segment, here.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

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Posted in TV

M.I.A.: step up to blow up

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Abhi blogged M.I.A.’s LA concert in inimitable style, so let me fill you in on the NYC gig last Saturday as best as I can: consider me the B side. And Anna couldn’t make the sold-out concert, but she graciously gave me her unused tickets. Caring, sharing and turning green with envy: it’s the mutineer way.

The concert utterly rocked with audience energy, and Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam felt like a star in the making. There was heavy promo in NYC: a staid New Yorker story (talk about hipster buzz kill), the cover of the Village Voice entertainment section, Gawker. And her DJ backup, Diplo of Hollertronix, is popular out here. Her first full album, Arular, is out Feb. 22.

The crowd was a weird mix of spiky-haired Asians, Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side liberals with the odd square-jawed, Shannyn Sossamon-like Tamil beauty thrown in. There were very few desis in all, but the show was jam-packed. Most of the crowd already knew and sang along to her songs. I can’t tell you how much Lower East Side angst it inspired in me to find out she’s no longer a ‘discovery’ 🙂

Arulpragasam had great flow, and every single song was good. The tracks she chose were much fresher, catchier and more layered than the mixes I’ve heard online. They call it electro-dancehall and electrogroove, but the moves were deliciously familiar: she and her backup dancers reminded me of early Salt ‘n Pepa. I did find the soldier step a bit precious.

I’ve never rocked out to a desi woman before, that was quite novel. The Village Voice called her a ‘Sri Lankan Tamil hottie,’ a phrase you rarely read in America. But her aesthetic was also intimately familiar: her small-faced, tousle-haired cutenesss resembles my female Berkeley classmates; the South Indian hip-hop fans at Berkeley are legion.

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Porno for Goopers

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‘GOP Babe of the Week‘ Govindini Murty also starred in a student film called San Pedro in 2001. Murty may otherwise be quite intelligent, but this potboiler is howlingly bad. Slamming a student film? Fish in a barrel; but the director, Murty’s husband Jason Apuzzo, graduated from USC film school, Stanford and Yale, so the movie shouldn’t be as awful as it so eminently is.
 
Murty, playing a hotel maid, flashes a lingering cleavage closeup at 24:31, a truly atrocious Latina-meets-Borat accent soon after. Then the script hurls this gem, a bumbling, literal translation of an English idiom that no Spanish speaker would ever utter:
‘He might want his statue back so he doesn’t get into agua caliente!’
… followed by:
‘It is a real statue. It has the ancient Chinese key inside.’
Ah, so: ancient Chinese secrets, that deus-ex-I-Ching. Yes, it really is that bad. The plot is pure Republican porn, putting forth a Vince Foster-esque conspiracy theory involving Men’s Wearhouse pitchman Al Gore:
On the final night of the 2000 Democratic Convention, a hard boiled bounty hunter must recover an ancient Chinese statue, and clean up a trail of big money that threatens ‘bad buzz’ for Al Gore. But when a sexy immigrant maid stumbles onto that trail first…

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