Author Archives: manish

A wing and a prayer

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Delhi’s canoodling commandos suffer coitus interruptus: Oddly enough, several religious shrines sit within high-security zones at Indian airports. Claiming they were visiting a Sufi shrine, two security personnel rode a scooter into the path of a flight taking off from Delhi in the early morning (via the Acorn):

Thursday’s security breach at the Delhi airport, involving two security personnel who drove a scooter onto a runway as a Royal Jordanian Airlines aircraft with over 200 passengers on board was preparing to taxi along it, has raised eyebrows in intelligence agencies.

The Times of India has more:

Bhat later told the police that he and Kusumlata were going to the Pir Baba shrine located near the cargo building on the other side of the runway… “This is a clear case of negligence as the two did not even bother to check whether or not any flight was scheduled for departure…”

Since the shrine is only open in the afternoon, and only with a special permit, and the female constable was not assigned to the airport, I’m guessing that security was literally screwing around. As the queen of tawdry double entendres said:

In the midnight hour
I can feel your power
Just like a prayer
I’m going to take you there

Sexual repression, religious oddities, slipshod security and Bajajs: only in India.

Raghubir Singh photo exhibition

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The Sepia International photo gallery in Manhattan (how apropos) is hosting a Raghubir Singh retrospective through Dec. 30. Singh, an Indian photographer who worked in brilliant color, did for the humble Ambassador what Austin Powers did for the Mini.

“Unlike people in the West, Indians have always intuitively seen and controlled colour… My artistic sense was shaped early by the culture of the Rajputs of Rajasthan.”… it was the dazzling colours of his native state, its hawelis… clothes… and sand dunes that impressed and inspired the budding artist.

Singh eventually settled in the U.S. and was awarded one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Shri, for his photography in 1983. He passed away in 1999.

Our own Seshu has more.

The fairest of them all

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Hijra heaven: The title of Miss Gay Universe, a pageant that’s quite a drag, has been won by Miss Gay India Lidia Zaray (thanks, ‘Me’). India’s hijra community always provides stiff competition, and this year it duct-taped the traditional cross-dressing powers into submission.

And so India turns out another beauty, emphasis on the queen. If you overlook the Adam’s apples, these ladies can sashay. But Zaray is brown, not Snow White. If Zaray had assistants, they’d be called Hairy, Lazy, Cheap, Nerdy, Pious, Chubby and Doc. And their parents would want them all to be just like Doc.

For future reference (?), here’s how international queens gussy up:

Shaving is only the beginning of the female process, which also involves applying duct tape to produce cleavage and many layers of pantyhose for leg tone and shape. Pads, made of foam or rubber, are added to instantly create the illusion of hips and buttocks. Other tricks involve using necklaces or feather boas to elongate the neck and hide the Adam’s apple, high heels for longer legs – and then there’s makeup. Foundation, powder and blush are used to contour the masculine shape of the face. “There’s a reason why we call it painting our face,” a drag queen named Jamie says.

Giuliani would’ve been proud.

Terrorist released from Gitmo returns to crime

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Abdullah Mehsud, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner released by the U.S., turned right around and kidnapped two Chinese engineers in Pakistan:

The former prisoners include Abdullah Mehsud, accused by Pakistani authorities of overseeing the recent kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, one of whom was killed. On Friday, Pakistani soldiers began a massive search for Mehsud, 28, who returned to Pakistan in March after about two years’ detention at Guantanamo. Pakistan officials said he has forged ties with al Qaeda since then.

This blunder reminds me of the 1999 incident when India released three Kashmiri militants in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines jet, IC-814. One of the men released, Maulana Masood Azhar, then masterminded the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

Police kill notorious dacoit

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Veerappan, a notorious Tamil bandit with a truly impressive handlebar moustache, has finally been found and shot dead by police (thanks, Ennis). Veerappan was the Indian D.B. Cooper, an elusive fugitive whose freedom haunted law enforcement for years. His fame ranked with that of Indian-Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

Veerappan, a Tamil, was accused of more than 100 murders – as well as kidnapping, smuggling and poaching – and had been on the run for 20 years…

He was involved in the kidnapping two years ago of former state minister of Karnataka, H Nagappa, who was found dead after three months in captivity. He was also involved in the kidnapping for a famous film star, Rajkumar, four years ago. The film star was released after 108 days of captivity, allegedly for a huge ransom.

The Acorn has more:

India’s very own October surprise: Towards the fag end of his career, Veerappan did try to diversify into the new business model — terrorism — but couldn’t quite find the right sponsors in time… it is still good to see him sent off the field by a bullet paid for by the Indian tax-payer. For a time it looked like nature would claim him first.

Hemachandra numbers everywhere

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Supplesomething forwarded me an interesting NPR piece on Manjul Bhargava, 28, a professor of number theory at Princeton who discusses how the Fibonacci series pops up not just in mathematics but also in the arts.

The Fibonacci series is the set of numbers beginning with 1, 1 where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The series begins with 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. They were known in India before Fibonacci as the Hemachandra numbers. And the ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers approximates a ratio, ~1.618, called the golden section or golden mean.

It’s long been known that the Fibonacci series turns up frequently in nature. The numbers of petals on a daisy and the dimensions of a section of a spiral nautilus shell are usually Fibonacci numbers. For plants, this is because the fractional part of the golden mean, a constant called phi (0.618), is the rotation fraction (222.5 degrees) which yields the most efficient and scalable packing of circular objects such as seeds, petals and leaves.

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