Author Archives: manish

Take cover! It’s furrin’!

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What pops into your mind when you see Arabic script? BBC World News? Urdu shayari? Old-school Punjabi poetry?

Midwest Airlines grounded a flight from Milwaukee to San Francisco after a passenger grew alarmed at seeing Arabic script handwritten inside a magazine (via Half the Sins). The plane returned to the gate, a thorough search turned up nothing, and passengers had to spend the night. The script turned out to be a meditative passage in Farsi written by a Persian Jack Handy.

Reminds me of a trusty Shazia Mirza joke which went something like this: ‘I told my audience I had a surprise for them. And everybody ducked.’

Naveen Andrews stars in ‘Lost’ on ABC

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Shaggy-haired actor Naveen Andrews (Bride and Prejudice, The English Patient, The Buddha of Suburbia, Wild West, Kama Sutra) is starring in a new ABC series, Lost, satirically described by the New York Post as a show about an airplane crash on an island where only models survive. Andrews plays an Iraqi dealing with racial prejudice from his fellow survivors. Can’t say they’re not trying to be topical.

I wouldn’t have expected this of the U.S. film market vs. that of the UK:

The actor told [Asians in Media] recently that he has moved to the USA because opportunities for non-white actors were greater out there.
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Amber Alert tied to desi family

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AmberAlert.jpg Over the weekend, I went to a desi wedding in Long Island and drove past a slew of Amber Alert child kidnapping signs asking people to watch for a white van. The kids turned up safe, and the father/abductor committed suicide after killing his wife and shooting her sister. Turns out Clifford Bonner’s wife Michelle and her sister, Candice Rampersad, are both desi. The police bulletin on Bonner described him as black, but he’s actually Hispanic and Cherokee. Another case of conforming race to black / white/ Hispanic / other? Continue reading →

DJ Rekha smacks Daler Mehndi

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DJ Rekha calls Daler Mehndi the Punjabi Bobby McFerrin (via Tablatronic):

Mehndi was bhangra lite and a diversion, says DJ Rekha of New York’s hip Bhangra Basement club: “Even back when he was big, he was kind of like the Will Smith of bhangra. Not so respected. Now, after the scandal, his position in the scene is that he doesn’t really have one.”…

There’s a new breed of younger, tougher British bhangra kings in Rishi Rich and Panjabi MC. Rich, in particular, has taken the music to heights Mehndi never dreamed of, fusing it with hip-hop to create a more aggressive sound that has Britney Spears and Ricky Martin queuing up to ask the 26-year-old to add a global street edge to their singles… Rich’s hardening of bhangra takes it back to its roots. As the music of the dry farms of the Punjab, bhangra lyrics were often gritty, and even today Punjabi artists are the most outspoken in India, singing about sex, drugs and crime just as their hip-hop peers do in the West…

In 1999 an American critic, stunned by the ecstatic crowd at one of his New Jersey concerts, declared Mehndi “bigger than the Beatles.”… “You know, I was a very bad taxi driver,” he says. “Always looking in the mirror at myself and imagining I would be a big star in music…”

Continue reading →

Indian PM’s daughter works for the ACLU

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Amardeep Singh reports that Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh is visiting the UN in New York this weekend, followed by meetings with Bush and Musharraf and some quality time with his youngest daughter, Amrit.

Now here’s what’s really interesting: Amrit Singh works for the ACLU in NYC fighting both the Pentagon on Abu Ghraib and airlines on anti-brown discrimination while flying.

Many years ago, my now-retired uncle was an Indian diplomat. Whenever my cousin and I stepped out of the family apartment, we were trailed by Indian men in dark suits, packin’ heat. So here’s what I want to know:

  1. When Manmohan Singh meets Bush, are their daughters verboten? Is talking about Amrit frowned upon, like ‘Hey Dubya, is Jenna out of rehab?’ and ‘Hey Dick, what’s Mary been up to lately?’
  2. Could Amitabh Bachchan beat up eight Indian bodyguards, like in the movies? Or do they have some gatka moves up their sleeves?

Maybe they need to hire this woman.

Comparing fatwas

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The former Kuwaiti information minister said on the 9/11 anniversary that Muslims should condemn terrorist Osama bin Laden with the same energy they expended on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

Tefla said much damage has been caused to Muslims because the world is contrasting Muslims’ tepid approach to bin Laden to their overwhelming response in the 1980s to British author Salman Rushdie and his controversial book “The Satanic Verses.”

Against Rushdie, Tefla wrote, “We rattled and sharpened all of our rhetorical sabers, our religious legal rulings [fatwa], [alerted] our guards, our ports, our airports and our border crossings in order to prevent his entering [our countries] and the distribution of his book, since it does damage to Islam.”…

“Have we earmarked a reward for anyone who kills bin Laden as we did for anyone who kills Rushdie on account of his book?

How Rushdie got his groove back, an aria

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Salman Rushdie has adapted Haroun and the Sea of Stories into an opera playing at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from Oct. 31 to Nov. 11. Haroun is a fabulist children’s tale, more accessible than his usual work, but still layered with allegory:

Haroun narrates the fate of the story-teller, who loses his ability to tell tales. His son then sets out on a journey to save his father’s skills. Rushdie had intended the book as a gift to his son Zafar… to make the son understand his father’s plight… [T]he book reached out to audiences uncomfortable with the complexities of Rushdie’s other novels…

Rushdie found the process of adaptation taxing:

S.R. ItÂ’s a strange book, Haroun. This was the one that came with the greatest fluency—it took me less than a year, and itÂ’s now taken ten times that long to adapt, so you know this is a much larger achievement… C.W. ThereÂ’s a practical reason for that. Its brevity makes it a little bit more manageable. I mean, I have my eye on The MoorÂ’s Last Sigh… S.R. Yes, that would be a very long opera.

Rushdie’s last stage adaptation was the excellent, albeit rushed, Midnight’s Children in London and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He’s also working on a film version of his short story The Firebird’s Nest, in which he’s cast his inamorata Padma Lakshmi.

Update: Amardeep Singh has more.

BBC profile of Anju Bobby George

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AnjuBobbyGeorge.jpg The BBC ran a great profile of long jump queen Anju Bobby George:

She’s the only Indian ever with a world championship bronze… On the runway she’s imposing, attractive, five feet 10 inches, her legs long, her elegant face carrying a hint of cosmetics… Ask her about the make-up and her giggle skitters down the phone line from Paris. She sees herself as an ambassador, and that means presentation is important… She stands there, visualises her jump, and in and out of her mind flow technique and prayer, asking perfection from herself and from Mother Mary…

When Anju competed in Madrid two weeks ago there wasn’t a single brown face in the audience. They know, they’ve looked… despite every achievement she has only one sponsor, Sobha Developers (though the government helps considerably). It is an absurd universe… “Imagine,” says Bobby, “Indian cricketers playing abroad without supporters, not even one.”

More here, here and here.

Welcome to reality

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AnishShroff.jpg Desis have begun competing in reality shows with a vengeance: Raj Bhakta on The Apprentice, Julie Ann Titus on America’s Next Top Model, and now Anish Shroff on Dream Job, a competition to be the next ESPN SportsCenter anchor (thanks, Jagjit). Shroff is a 22-year-old Yankees fan and radio sports announcer, a Syracuse University graduate from Bloomfield, NJ.

I’m looking forward to seeing Thuggee leader Amrish Puri on Fear Factor and backstabbing Bollyistas on Real World, though young Neil Kadakia of Spellbound qualifies under fear and loathing on film.

Maybe this will be the next topic of competition conversation between desi moms: ‘My Twinkle was just on American Idol last week.’ ‘That’s nothing, my Sweetie was on Survivor.‘

Ah, who am I kidding. With all due respect to Hari Sreenivasan and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the most common desis on American TV will probably be on Beat the Geeks and Jeopardy. You’ll have to watch CNN International to catch Monita Rajpal, Daljit Dhaliwal and Zain Verjee. BBC World has at least six more, and the UK’s Channel 4 is rife.

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