Author Archives: manish

Gadget blog speaks Hinglish

Posted on by

A popular gadget blog starts a post with ‘Jaan pehchaan ho!’ That’s Hindi for ‘recognize!’ If I were drinking a pint of old-skool chocolate milk, it would be spraying out my nose right now. Thank you, Engadget blogger Phillip Torrone.

Jaan Pehechaan Ho! This week’s show is chock full of goodness.

Previous posts on Hinglish: 1, 2

Update: As Chaitanya points out in the comments, it may be a reference to a bouncy Mohammed Rafi tune from Gumnaam (Anonymous) which was featured in Ghost World:

Jaan pehchaan ho,
jeena aasaan ho.
Dil ko churane walon,
aankh na churao–
naam to batao.

       

If I knew you,
living would be easy.
All you heart-stealers,
don’t hide your eyes too–
at least tell me your name.

Jetting to Bangalore

Posted on by

Jet Airways, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice of North or South Indian meals (ever had hot idli sambar and utappam on an airplane?), and a never-ending stream of tea and coffee. And all this on short-haul domestic routes rather the overseas ones served by Singapore and Virgin.

The Indian government will now allow Jet and Air Sahara to fly international routes, although it continues to shelter the lucrative Middle Eastern routes from competition. The airlines are presumably on their own for buying landing slots.

Indian airports are also in dire need of investment. On a recent trip, I could get wireless Internet access at the Delhi and Bangalore airports. However, they otherwise still resemble small regional airports in the U.S.: open-air gates, buses instead of jetways and a vanishingly small distance from gate to parking lot. They’re like the old terminal at San Jose before the tech bubble.

But with an astonishing 20% annual growth in air traffic, India just signed off on a plan to upgrade 80 airports throughout the country, including brand-new airports for Bangalore and Hyderabad. They’re partying like it’s 1999.

And in the tech-heavy cities, it pretty much is. Driving through Bangalore, I saw buildings that looked exactly like U.S. tech campuses, though smaller. Intel, Dell, Oracle, Accenture and Macromedia buildings abound; on one corner, with a shock of recognition, I came face-to-face with a company started by a friend. I couldn’t help but feel late to the party. With the number of South Indian programmers already working at Oracle, why not hire ’em straight from the motherland 🙂

Continue reading →

The boob tube

Posted on by

Just a reminder: A 12-minute segment on Aishwarya Rai, entitled ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Woman?,’ airs tonight at 7pm on 60 Minutes (CBS). Here’s Apul’s post on the interview.

The press release is incredibly disingenuous, asking the questions usually done by trashy film mags:

Rai’s first movie kiss, should she do it, will be a minor scandal among her fans, especially in India… The country that gave the world the Kama Sutra, one of the oldest known sex manuals, isn’t prudish, just not into public displays of intimacy… Rai… dances delicately around the subject of screen sex. “We’ll cross the bridge when we reach it,” says Rai of the inevitable love scene in her American film future.

Kama Sutra reference, check. Desperate bid to boost viewership, check. Aishwarya’s ever-so-precious virginal mugging for Stardust, Filmfare and Cineblitz, check.

A 31-year-old actress/model will have done a hell of a lot more than a public kiss, and more power to her. No matter how much fans may confuse reel life with real life, the Britney Spears impression isn’t necessary, discretion works fine. But the fault probably lies more with the interviewers than the actress. It’s the kind of tissue-thin softball usually tossed underhand by Baba Wawa.

Update: Watch the first 2:45 of the video: mirror 1, 2; torrent. Aishwarya seemed extremely nervous, her humor strained, this is her big U.S. launch. Her answers seemed unrehearsed and forced, her giggling a touch shrill; she was like a liquored-up Cameron Diaz on Craig Kilborn, truly cringeworthy. The interviewer spent a third of the segment on ‘you’re so hot,’a third on explaining Bollywood (pretty decent — they clipped her best films) and a third on ‘why won’t you kiss on screen?’ Ahh, hard news — I thought I’d escaped the Hindustan Times, but 60 Minutes dragged me back in.

Continue reading →

‘Bombay Dreams’ closes today

Posted on by

As I type these very words, Bombay Dreams on Broadway is finishing up the final performance of its eight-month run. Its closing unleashes a horde of desi actors with Broadway experience. May they find their way to productions far beyond these comfortable shores.

Richard Corliss of Time analyzes Bombay Dreams’ short run:

[Meera] Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they’d be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora…

Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal’s best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version… The Indo-American audience wasn’t large enough to keep it afloat, and it didn’t attract the idle non-Desi curious.

The outreach to critics was a disaster for this straightforward, unironic ’50s-style show. The London show had a better book and more physically striking actors, though the New York version had stronger singers and a slicker production.

And what is the sound of one critic’s heart breaking? Corliss has found his guru, and it’s the show’s composer A.R. Rahman:

Rahman is not just India’s most prominent movie songwriter… but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more.

Continue reading →

Haldi may help prevent Alzheimer’s

Posted on by

There’s finally some good news about the desi diet to balance out all the heart disease. A compound in the haldi (turmeric) used in desi cooking may help prevent Alzheimer’s (via Boing Boing):

The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and also breaks up existing plaques. The research team also determined curcumin is more effective in inhibiting formation of the protein fragments than many other drugs being tested as Alzheimer’s treatments.

The rate of Alzheimer’s in India is 4x lower than in the U.S.

Here’s a copy of the full research paper.

Indian bureaucracy fumbled tsunami warning

Posted on by

One of the things that the 9/11 report brought home is that in major disasters, there are always early warnings from experts in the field.

The vaunted British-style bureaucracy in India responded with its usual alacrity to the incoming tsunami warnings:

[T]he top brass of the Indian Air Force knew their Nicobar Air base had been submerged a full hour before the waves struck the mainland coast…

The Indian Meteorological Department knew of the earthquake within minutes. Its first fax went out two and half hours later, and was sent to the home of the previous government’s science and technology minister, rather than his successor… “[I]t was a Sunday. Time was taken by the officer to get ready and get into the car…”

“There have been four tsunamis in India in the last 100 years, and it is well-known that an earthquake of such a large magnitude generates a tsunami. There was no system in place.”… “A country that hopes to run the call centers of the world could not call its own people.”

It took time to get into the car? IIT kids broadcast large porn videos in under 30 minutes, and they couldn’t pick up the phone?

Welcome to the old new century.

Coke pays homage to Mulit

Posted on by

Coca-Cola recently released a great Bollywood-inspired ad in Spain, Portugal and Italy (thanks, GG). The ‘Del Pita’ ad retraces The Party, The Guru and Russell Peters’ wisecrack that the only thing a desi accent is good for is cutting tension.

In the ad, a desi waiter livens up a dreary party by bursting into a Bollywood song. Here’s the really cool part: it pays homage to Absolut Vodka’s unforgettable Mulit parody — pink shirt, shiny belt buckle and all. Watch the clip.

Update: Boing Boing reader JJ Merelo says,

… it was released last summer and become an instant sensation: the theme has been even featured in the new year’s eve TV shows, replayed over and over as a ringtone, and so forth. The party does not really look like a Spanish party, it rather looks like a british party. Believe me, I’ve been in Spanish parties. And a bit of trivia: it’s actually a girl who sings it, it’s a kind of ‘bollywood asereje’, since it’s not really in hindi (or telugu, for that matter), but in mock-indian language, and it was originally done in Argentina. There’s also a pointer to the spanish Coca Cola site: Link, and a story by a popular hispano-argentinian blogger: Link.

Asereje is that catchy track by Las Ketchup written in nonsensical language. Here’s a machine translation of the Argentinian blogger’s post.

Spaniards are somewhat familiar with Bollywood, as the films are widely available at mainstream DVD stores in Madrid.

Giant tidal waves kill thousands in India, Sri Lanka

Posted on by

Double-check any plans to visit coastal cities on the eastern shores of South Asia:

The world’s most powerful earthquake in 40 years rocked northern Indonesia on Sunday and launched tidal waves that swamped villages and seaside resorts across Asia, killing more than 700 people in five countries….

Waves crashed into coastal villages over a wide area of Sri Lanka — some 1,000 miles west of the quake’s epicenter — killing some 300 people and displacing thousands of others, said military spokesman Brig. Daya Ratnayake. Parts of the northeastern districts of Muttur and Trincomalee were inundated by waves as high as 20 feet, said D. Rodrigo, a Muttur district official.

In India, beaches were turned into virtual open mortuaries with bodies of people caught in the tidal wave being washed ashore. At least 150 were recovered around the coastal town of Cuddalore, said deputy Superintendent of police K. Panniselvan. Some 100 others were found around Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu… Thirty-six were killed in neighboring Andhra Pradesh…

Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture

Posted on by

As we’ve blogged before, the Indian prime minister’s daughter, Amrit Singh, works for the ACLU in New York and is currently tracking down abuse at Abu Ghraib. Yesterday, her team released an FBI email from May 2004 that says President Bush personally authorized torture at Abu Ghraib:

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.”… The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from “On Scene Commander–Baghdad” to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized…

India just loves to jawbone the U.S. out of a sense of false moral superiority, and it’s completely counterproductive to her own interests. But the Abu Ghraib case is an exception: the disregard for our city on a hill ideal went much higher than the few soldiers scapegoated. I applaud Ms. Singh and, although she’s not an official spokesperson for the Indian government, caution her dad to prepare for the inevitable reprisals.

The Times of India recently profiled Ms. Singh:

Singh, who is the Prime Minister’s third daughter, studied law at Yale and has kept a relatively low profile in the US, seemingly unaffected by her father’s dramatic political ascendancy… His economist friend Jagdish Bhagwati, who teaches at Columbia University, thinks Amrit is as brilliant as her father during his youth.

Continue reading →

Baazee.com CEO arrested over sex clip

Posted on by

The Baazee.com CEO, Avnish Bajaj, was arrested yesterday by the Delhi police due to the sale of the infamous mobile phone sex clip via his auction site. Baazee.com was recently acquired by eBay. Bajaj, a U.S. citizen and Harvard MBA in his early 30s, languished in a Delhi jail last night because of a tortured Indian theory of vicarious liability. It’s as if eBay CEO Meg Whitman were thrown in jail due to the sale of off-color items on eBay. The legal analogies in this case are phone companies and ISPs, where the high volume of traffic precludes censorship, rather than a common criminal case. The guy who should actually be in jail is the student who filmed and distributed the clip without his girlfriend’s consent. The Delhi court’s actions reek of opportunism to me– to take a stand on a high-profile case in a sexually repressed society. It’s all high-volume throat clearing.

Disclaimer: Bajaj is a friend of a friend.

Update: Bajaj was denied bail and remains in jail. Condoleezza Rice has asked the Indian government to guarantee him a fair trial:

The arrest of the Baazee CEO, who has been based in Mumbai for the past four-and-a-half years, has perplexed many in the Indian establishment as Bajaj has responded to summons to help the investigators probing the case. “He, as well as Baazee.com, had been cooperating in the investigations. The arrest has come totally out of the blue…”

Yesterday, Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay… called up from the US to reassure Baazee staff… Bajaj’s counsel Dinesh Mathur pleaded that his client had at no point attempted to evade the police. Moreover, with the site having more than 75 lakh listings, it was impossible to scan each and every item being traded.

Archaic Indian law apparently does not recognize electronic signatures:

Mathur said the video clip… was taken off the site after it was brought to the notice of Baazee officials that it was violating a user agreement… The magistrate, however, said the user agreement did not stand as it was not “signed” and was just a photocopy of a document.

The bullshit continues to fly.

Update 2: The Gray Lady finally cobbles together wire reports four days later.

Continue reading →