Author Archives: manish

Checking in with my favorite authors

Posted on by

Zadie Smith, she of the Bangla-Jamaica mashup White Teeth, got married last September; they met at Cambridge. I ran into her at a small London birthday party at an age when she was considered precocious, well before I’d read her. She was all biting wit, creeper hair and privacy. Authors never look like their jacket photos, nor friendsters like theirs.

She’s due out with a third novel, On Beauty, in September. Autograph Man was studiedly trivial, seemingly an entire chapter devoted to Alex-Li’s body fluids. You’ve gagged on the wealth and hype jalebi, now toss me some more of that fine, fine namkeen.

Rushdie dogged my steps all through this India trip via the gossip columns. He returned to his eternal muse, Bombay; worked the press in that quintessential writer’s city, Calcutta; and held court at a fashion designer’s nightclub in that most elegant of settings… a Noida mall. Avoid-a the New Okhla Industrial, y’all.

Kitabkhana drolled on about Rushdie’s Delhi reading:

“That story, man, that story, it has the touch of genius, pure, jaano, calibre aachey. Each line has the stamp of a Master.” (Displaced Bong intellectual wannabe who spent most of the reading with eyes closed in ecstacy that would have been more convincing if he hadn’t snored once or twice in between.) … Sleepy photographer… wanted to go home but had been told by his editor to stay till the bitter end. “In case,” the editor apparently said, “Rushdie gets shot or something.”

… my last glimpse of the Rushdies was of them using upturned plastic chairs to hold at bay hordes of… squeaky-voiced journalists asking original questions (“Mr Rushdie! Are you writing a new novel?” “Padma, what’s your favourite food?”)

Continue reading →

Power99 teaches Weaseling 101

Posted on by

Power99’s response to their racist broadcast controversy is a textbook example of corporate weaseling. First, they told the press that the real problem was that they got caught — that they posted the audio clip to their Web site. Then they ducked responsibility by saying the complaints are coming from non-African Americans (duh) and non-Philadelphians.

As pressure mounted, they buried a Web apology on the bottom of the second screen, well below the fold, and refused to apologize on air. And they simply changed the date of an already-planned radiothon and tried to pass it off as a DJ ‘suspension’:

On Wednesday morning, the station broadcast a radiothon for tsunami victims in place of Star and Bucwild. The radiothon was previously scheduled and was only advanced to the show’s slot, Morill said.

Here’s the text of the apology:

The Star & Buc Wild Show prides itself on walking on the edge. On December 15th, we crossed it. We know the pain racial slurs cause and apologize that this comedy segment went too far.

At the same time, it’s also become clear that the abuse of call center workers is more widespread. Check out the Is Your Job Going Offshore? forums (via Times of India):

“… we’re up and running with our call campaign against the BP Motor Club. There are three of us calling on a daily basis to express our displeasure with oursourcing [sic] to the Indian phone center workers. There’s room for you!… Usually, I limit the calls to 60 seconds anyway, so I can call back and really hammer them. I’ve been doing this about 20 minutes a day. It’s great fun!”

Because that’s the rational thing to do when you’re jobless: spend your unemployment benefits on phone calls to India.

Continue reading →

‘Bhowani Junction’

Posted on by

Aishwarya’s crossover plan is running on IST: old-time starlet Ava Gardner, who’s currently being impersonated in The Aviator, crossed over way back in the ’50s. Gardner starred in Bhowani Junction, a 1956 film about an Anglo-Indian struggling with identity in post-Partition India.

I haven’t seen it, so I’ve got no idea whether it was more respectful than Gunga Din and its ilk. The character does try ‘going native,’ and she does wear brownface, though it seems subtle. Money quote: ‘I thought I could overcome my guilt by becoming a Sikh!’ Reel Movie Critic has the plot summary:

Ava Gardner delivers a stellar performance of a ravishing nurse in the English army in India in 1947… She initially is romantically involved with another “chi-chi” (half-breed)… She is the victim of an attempted rape by her brutal co-worker, Lt. McDaniel (Lionel Jeffries), which sends her into the safe and strict arms of a traditional Indian, Ranjit [Singh] Kasel (Francis Mathews).  Draped in a sari, she makes bold political/racial statements by showing up at various military events dressed in traditional Indian attire. But she seems to appear to her British colleagues to be trying too hard to claim her new ethnic identity… Ultimately she has a romance with a stoic, brave Anglo-Saxon British Officer… she realistically declines to return with him as his wife to live in England, certain she will be treated like a half-breed outsider in that society.

Chowk fills in the backstory:

… it is quite similar in theme to Deepa Mehta’s ‘Earth 1947’ which also deals with Partition through the eyes of a Parsi girl, another outsider to Indian society… Fifty years on, people still talk about when Ava Gardner came to Lahore to film this movie. I think every man of the previous generation fell in love with her then… it says a lot about an actor or actress who is willing to take on a complex role in a different culture – like Christopher Lee who took on Jinnah back in 1997.

Continue reading →

The tufani entrepreneur

Posted on by

The PR machine formerly known as Mira Nair says fast and cheap is where it’s at (via India Uncut):

When you have a big budget, like a Harry Potter, you have that many more people to answer to. You are simply one part of the machine that takes it over. It’s actually the freedom, the creative freedom, that is imperative for me. It comes only when the stakes are really low financially. That’s why I had total freedom to make a Salaam Bombay, or to make a Monsoon Wedding or to make a Namesake… If you have a big budget, you have that many more men in suits to deal with…

I like to do things unobtrusively and quietly, without much fanfare. People often don’t know what we are up to until it’s over. And that’s the secret.

She whips out her population and lays it on the table:

Let’s just face facts: our Indian cinema audience is now bigger than the Hollywood audience. So it’s not about wanting to be what they are, it’s about them opening their eyes to us…

On desi provincialism:

The extraordinary irony in making Mississippi Masala was that the African-American community and the Indian community were remarkably similar — in their love for family, in their communal sort of way for operating, in religion even, in that sort of emphasis on family bond and God for instance. But would an Indian ever cross the track into an African-American family? No way.

Going to plan B

Posted on by

Indians are routing around their ineffectual local governments:

Fareed Zakaria agrees in Newsweek that India really feels like a boomtown right now… Tired of waiting for the government, some desis are running parallel local services…

There’s little regulation by private tort… because the courts take 30 years to resolve cases. So you see exposed wires hanging from strip mall ceilings, parking lots using barbed wire at toddler level and outdoor barbers using straight razors. You still risk stomach upset or worse by eating food from unlicensed street vendors, which makes you want to just shake the local babus and say, ‘Come on, guys, this is just so basic. Nothing should come between me and my kachoris…’

I have new respect for government regulation of food, transportation safety and public health. If ‘there are no atheists in foxholes,’ I’d add that there are no pure libertarians in developing nations. If ‘no revolution on empty bellies,’ I’d say that libertarianism is uniquely a rich person’s vice 🙂

Because the legal system doesn’t work, it forces people to turn to the parallel legal system, gangsters. Any time you see a country with a parallel legal system, a parallel black economy, parallel power generation and parallel street sweeping, you know its government is dysfunctional.

Read the full piece.

Kumar’s ‘Salon’

Posted on by

Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek loves how Harold and Kumar shows unremarkable, assimilated hyphen-Americans instead of relegating minorities to ethnic curio shops (thanks, Razib):

“Harold & Kumar”… may have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year. .. [W]hat’s most impressive about “Harold & Kumar”… is that it didn’t dawn on me until the movie was nearly over that its two protagonists weren’t your usual average white kids… There’s something freeing in the way “Harold & Kumar” treats its characters’ ethnic backgrounds not as a novelty, as a stumbling block or even as an advantage, but as a simple fact… Race is an issue in “Harold & Kumar,” but it’s not the issue…

Of course, Zacharek is using Spanglish as her benchmark, so make of that what you will. I think we know her inspiration for the story:

“Harold & Kumar” is a reminder that our great land is made up of people from many nations, and a few of them are quite stoned. Let he who is without sin light the first joint.

Here’s more on how Harold and Kumar deals with race.

Requesting Eartha Kitt

Posted on by

I thought the desi accent was good for cutting tension?

More customers now ask to speak to an American after they hear an operator with an Indian accent… “In India, the operators are doing a lot of the courtesies they are trained to do,” … but they often miss the nuance of conversations.

I didn’t know you had a choice in voice. I’ll take an Eartha Kitt with a side of Scarlett Johansson, please. Silly Americans! You can request a native, but all your call are belong to us:

[M]onitoring is also moving offshore. HyperQuality, which is based in Seattle, has 100 call monitors in New Delhi who eavesdrop on call center workers around the United States.

Eavesdropping on American call center workers probably leads to some interesting conversations in Delhi. ‘Eh, Seema, vat does it mean, “I am all crunked up”?’

‘Chaos Theory’… it’s like buttah

Posted on by

Here’s a chance to catch one of my favorite plays by one of my favorite playwrights while scratching your desi sense of economy at the same time. A free staged reading of Chaos Theory by Anuvab Pal is taking place Mon 1/17 and Tue 1/18 in Manhattan.

Chaos Theory is an intensely romantic, delayed-gratification talkie for people who dig wordplay — you Before Sunset, Raincoat, Tumhari Amrita, Woody Allen fans. Y’all know who you are, you silver-tongued scoundrels.

The reading is being put on by Pulse Ensemble Theatre; Rajesh Bose, Sanjiv Jhaveri and Rita Wolf (My Beautiful Laundrette, Homebody / Kabul) star, Alexa Kelly directs.

Chaos Theory, 1/17-1/18, 7 PM, at the American Place Theatre, 520 8th Ave. (36th/37th), 22nd floor, 212.695.1596; free admission

A flurry of wavelets

Posted on by

Although it appears a Kerala baby girl was not named Tsunami after all, a newborn boy from the Andamans has swiped the sobriquet (via Boing Boing). Meet Tsunami Roy:

“It was early morning Sunday, when I made my pregnant wife a cup of tea and woke her up. She was just about to take a sip when we felt the first jolt of the quake…” After hoisting his injured wife and [older] son on to the rickshaw, Roy pedaled and pushed the rickshaw as fast as he could up and away from the shore toward a nearby rocky slope…

The nurse… rigged up a makeshift curtain, laid the 26-year-old Namita down on a bed of dried leaves and grass and ordered the men to get some clean cloth, thread and a bowl of hot water. “A few hours later the child was born…

“It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember.”

It’s a little bit morbid and a little bit poetic. It’s not quite like naming him Bubonic, but much more eyebrow-raising than just plain Venkat. Ah well, people will never forget his birthday.

Of course, they’ll also be in mourning. No matter the name, there’s nothing he can do about the date per se. He joins all those poor saps born around Christmas, New Year’s, final exams and 9/11 as people cheated out of their own remembrances.

Fisking the ‘Bride and Prejudice’ campaign

Posted on by

The U.S. version of the Bride and Prejudice trailer was recently released (thanks, Abhi). It’s getting heavy promotion, it runs before The Aviator in New York City.

What happened in the marketing speaks volumes about how the world perceives Americans. The trailer has been recut not as a musical but as a romantic comedy. The U.S. version cuts down the bhangra centerpiece and the pajama song from the international trailer. The plot has been simplified, like the U.S. version of Bombay Dreams; the subplot with the second male lead has been removed.

In a nod to the U.S., Martin Henderson gets a lot more lines, the R&B artist Ashanti is featured prominently in the voiceover, Indira Verma makes a crack about American Idol, and there are a couple of Baywatch, L.A. and surfer shots that weren’t in the international trailer. India’s Third World-ness is played up for comic effect, there’s no mention of Amritsar in the subtitle and there are precious few turbaned guys for a film set in Punjab (the ones who do exist hurry by, out of focus).

I watched the trailer live last night and heard very little audience reaction. Either it fell flat, or the audience didn’t know what to think. The serpent dance sequence at the very end drew a few titters. It wasn’t what I expected from a New York crowd, which is generally pretty down with desi culture.

Continue reading →