Reminder: Kal Penn, DJ Rekha and the muy caliente cast of Bombay Dreams are hosting a New York party tonight, with proceeds going to the John Kerry campaign. See Abhi’s post for details.
Author Archives: manish
Meet the grandparents
Tiffinwalla in New York
The mountain comes to Muhammad: You’ve probably heard of the FedEx-like reliability of tiffinwallas of Bombay. Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. This six-sigma error rate puts Indian bureaucracy to shame. And, as Forbes reported, all for just 150 rupees/month:
Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.
Well, one tiffinwalla who cooks his own food is expanding into New York, via a friend:
My cousin just recommended this guy (Krishna) in NYC who delivers packed Indian vegetarian lunch or dinner boxes for $5 a meal. He only works Mon-Fri, so it’s $25 a week (this includes deliver). Apparently, each meal includes 2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney. My cousin is very health conscious and swears that Krishna’s meal is cooked with very little oil. Though I would share the number with you – 212 945 ####.
And let’s not forget the dosa guy at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park (weekdays at lunch):
[Designer Alpana] Bawa does admit a lunchtime weakness for dosas found at a cart in Washington Square Park (New York Dosa, 917-710-2092), made by Sri Lankan Dhiru Kumar. “I’m on my way,” she tells Kumar on her cell phone, not even identifying herself. “Can you have a Pondicherri dosa ready for me in a few minutes?” Bawa asks… When we arrive, Kumar hands Bawa a Styrofoam container with her dosa — spicy potatoes, carrots and peppers in a thin crepe made from rice and lentil flours.
Ah, the benefits of living in a maximum city. Continue reading
Military chic
Guerrillas in her midst: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., is a 26-year-old British Asian DJ who raps in the garage/grime genre (via Tablatronic and our own Sajit). For song material, she mines her family’s flight from the Sri Lankan civil war.
The new arrivals were not exactly welcomed with open arms by London’s Sri Lankan community… “They are really obsessed with impressing the British. They want to be doctors and engineers and go to Cambridge, buy leather couches to match their encyclopedias, have a sitar in the corner and whip their saris out once a year for a wedding. They’d look at us and go, ‘We don’t want them hanging round with our kids, they’re into rap, they think they’re black.’… I’ll go to LA and be black: it’s better than being in Britain and being brown.’
Check out the video for ‘Sunshowers,’ a bouncy track which makes frequent and incongruous reference to guns, bombs and the guerrillas of Colombo.
Update: Nirali magazine has a great profile of Arulpragasam:
She never knew her father, one of the founding members of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militant guerrilla group formed in 1976 with the goal of gaining political independence for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil population. “We saw him once a year, for 10 minutes at a time. My mum said, ‘That’s your uncle–your dad is dead.’ It was to protect us,” she explains… “We lived in hiding for so long. We were just moving from village to village and from house to house. Nobody wanted to put us up; we were untouchable. Everybody knew about us in Sri Lanka, and nobody wanted to deal with us because we brought so much heat. The army would follow [us wherever we’d go]. We were living in big-time poverty, stealing mangoes off someone else’s tree,” she remembers.
Update: M.I.A. just spun in New York (photos) and landed on the cover of Fader magazine. Here’s the layout.
Celebrating an early Diwali
An early Diwali in New York yesterday at the South Street Seaport:
It’s one of the most upscale Diwali settings I’ve ever seen, tall ships and a fireworks barge bobbing beneath skyscrapers of robin’s-egg blue… Ashen wrappers smelling of gunpowder drifted onto the heads of desi elders who had splayed themselves across the wooden pier steps… A dance troupe on the pier practiced ballroom with shells whistling overhead, a scratchy violin track playing in the background.
Russell Peters show online
Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters, an unfairly funny man, has taped a hilarious 45-minute Canadian TV special (via Half the Sins). Watch the video: torrent (57 MB RealVideo file).
First get an easy BitTorrent downloader:
- For Windows: ABC
- For Mac: Tomato Torrent
Then click here. The download will start automatically.
‘Bombay Dreams’ premiere photos
Here’s a great photo gallery from the April premiere of Bombay Dreams in New York. Celebs in the photos include A.R. Rahman, Padma Lakshmi, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Meera Syal, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Claire Danes, Edie Falco (The Sopranos), Kenneth Cole, Donald Trump and hydraulically-assisted girlfriend Melania Knauss, Ivana Trump with boy-toy, and former Miss USA Shandi Finnessey. And it’s interesting to see, out of costume, the guy who plays Sweetie the hijra. Salman Rushdie and Bill and Hillary Clinton have also seen the show.
Last call at the Lone Star Bar
The U.S. presidential election is just a month away on Tuesday, Nov. 2. If you’re an American citizen, you can register to vote or update your address.
This is the most important election in over a decade. Registration deadlines have almost passed (15-30 days before the election), so register now if you haven’t done so already.
The effect of androgens on man-in-the-moon marigolds
Wrestler Dalip ‘Giant’ Singh: a living testament to the effect of androgens on fetal development. 7’3″, 408 lbs, claims to eat five chickens and 24 eggs a day.
Wrestler Tiger Jeet Singh. Not so large, but like Hasselhoff, he’s big in Japan.
…running amok in a Japanese arena, bedecked in a turban and brandishing a menacing sword. Bellowing like a bull elephant in heat, he attacks members of the ticket-paying audience, scattering them hither and yon… He once mauled the editor of Tokyo’s largest sports daily newspaper. Another time, the Tiger demolished a Mercedes with a baseball bat in downtown Tokyo during rush hour… He claims that Japanese wrestling fans will not wash those parts of their body he has struck, so honored are they to be pummelled by Tiger Jeet Singh.
The jawans on the India-Pakistan border, from the always-funny Sin.
… the border guards are all MASSIVE. The midget amongst them was 6’8″ tall… the guards (quite literally) utter these primal screams at the other side of the border, in some sort of bizarre alpha-male routine. The whole macho element of guns, sabres, and massively magnificent moustaches is, however, completely ruined by the modern dance routine that ensues once the “parade” begins; although it defies description, lets just say that it involves high-kicks, stomping, twirling, a hip-shimmy, and much prancing.
Bio researcher wins genius grant
Bio researcher Vamsi Mootha, 33, just won a $500K MacArthur fellowship (via Political Animal). Mootha is an assistant professor at Harvard who researches mitochondrial gene expression to combat disease.
By comparing the protein fingerprints with gene expression databases, more than 100 previously unknown mitochondrial proteins were identified. He used a similar, coordinated approach to identify the gene that causes Leigh Syndrome French Canadian variant, a fatal metabolic disease. In diseases resulting not from a single gene but the interaction of sets of genes, he introduced a computational method for identifying patterns of gene activity in specific diseases… As importantly, Mootha has pioneered powerful, adaptable computational strategies for mining data collected in laboratories throughout the world, providing an efficient means to hunt down gene interactions that lead to a wide variety of diseases.
The James Logan debate coach won one as well. The Fremont-Newark-Union City area across from San Francisco has desi and Afghan gang problems, so this guy’s in the thick of it.
For 15 years, against long odds, Tommie Lindsey has held together an award-winning speech and debate team at James Logan High School in the blue- collar suburb of Union City. His students frequently defeat well-heeled competitors from elite high schools.
His teams have won four state championships; three James Logan students have been top winners at the national level and 25 at the state level. This year the team has more than 200 students. Ninety percent of Lindsey’s students go on to four-year colleges. Overall at Logan, just one-third of students qualify for the state university systems… In recent years, the team has been featured in a documentary and won a $100,000 award from Oprah Winfrey.
A 200-person debate team is enormous.