Author Archives: manish

Mira Nair at work on ‘The Namesake’

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Time Asia runs an interesting profile on Mira Nair (also see Sajit’s post):

Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child—or, as she puts it, a “contraceptual blunder.” In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent his wife Praveen to a clinic for an abortion, but she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it…

…Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love was universally skewered, and even Nair disowned it as an “aberration.” (Time)

As Amardeep Singh has fisked in far greater detail, some reviewers have complained about the desi influences in Vanity Fair:

The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray’s Indian influences—he was born in Calcutta—including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the “outlandish” sight of Witherspoon doing a “grinding Indian-flavored hoochy-cooch, worthy of Britney Spears,” saying it seemed “shoehorned in from another movie.” (Time)

Nair defended her colonialism-centric angle as a legitimate, innovative interpretation:

The basis of what I loved and which I thought Thackeray plumed so acutely and beautifully was the relationship between the colony and the empire. Thackeray himself was born in Calcutta and came to England, and I always saw him and his writing as a sort of satiric look at his own society; that he was the ultimate insider/outsider and I think it was in that realm and that vein that he created his great heroine, Becky Sharp… (Metro)

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Victorinox takes a stab at the Sikh market

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Swiss Army knife maker Victorinox is creating a line of high-end kirpans for Sikhs, saying premium knives should be treated with the same reverence as samurai swords (via Ennis):

“The first kirpan — with a handle made of solid gold and studded with diamonds and precious stones — will be presented to the Darbar Sahib at the Golden Temple in Amritsar before being rolled out in India, UK, US and Canada.”

Next up: a Victorinox kukri knife for Gurkhas.

Personally, I’d be happier with a desi Swiss Army knife with red chili and pickle dispensers. I’ve got no beef with ethnic cuisines and would never pull my knife on them. But I’d whip it out against continental, nouveau, and that anemic simulacrum, American vegetarian.

New Indian government frees universities

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The new Indian government is unleashing universities from some of the pro-bribery, anti-intellectual freedom regulations the previous government imposed:

[Education minister Arjun Singh] has… scrapped a controversial order, also issued by the BJP government, that required private donations to public universities to be routed through a special government agency; and allowed India’s universities to seek collaborations with their foreign counterparts without obtaining the government’s permission. In addition, Mr. Singh has ordered the replacement of high-school history textbooks that the previous government had changed to reflect a Hindu-supremacist viewpoint.

Centralizing financial control over donor money? No prizes for guessing what the purpose of that was. Striking down the new regulations allows more intellectual freedom:

The academics were up in arms because they thought it was an effort to blatantly promote ministerial intervention and curb the autonomy of the universities.

And the education minister calls the reversion of textbooks ‘de-saffronisation.’ So far, the new Manmohan Singh government is doing good things.

Sick of spices

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Blogger Priya Lal wrote that the Oscars found many desi films ‘not Indian enough’ for the foreign language category. But what’s Indian enough?

Second-gen writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali have largely been re-telling their parentsÂ’ tales. ItÂ’s interesting as a topic but repetitive as an entire oeuvre, made even worse by book covers which all feature nubile brown women with mehndi hands and first-gen authors who willingly swan with incense and sarod music at book readings… Peacocks and payals are gorgeous when judiciously applied, and any desi could be forgiven for admiring a royal, nose-ringed nariz evocative of Mughal miniature. It gets annoying mainly when lit and film treats culture as a tourist backdrop, a Potemkin village with the thinnest faciæ of stereotype… when directors ask for the Peter Sellers / Gunga Din caricature of a desi accent rather than the real one, like Apu on The Simpsons and the dadÂ’s accent in Harold and Kumar. ThatÂ’s just insulting… CanÂ’t we all just agree to consign mehndi to weddings, mangos to dinner plates and the words exotic and spicy to the seventh circle of hell?

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Terraforming religious rights

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A Sikh truck driver from Yuba City was cited for carrying a concealed weapon while on a produce delivery haul in Oregon. His kirpan is a ceremonial dagger common to Sikhism (via Ennis).

The officer allegedly dragged Gill to the ground, shoved a knee into his back and shoved his head into the ground as he handcuffed him, he said. The officer then told him that the police look to pull over people who look as though they are from India, Pakistan and or of the Sikh faith, which Gill and Sraon said is racial profiling and illegal… Gill was cited for carrying a concealed weapon and told to appear in Douglas County Court… Sraon said the kirpan is not a weapon but a religious symbol and therefore protected by law under the first amendment of the Constitution.

Kirpan case law is an example of a very interesting body of law dealing with the conflict of religious beliefs and the public interest (e.g. peyote in Native American rituals, sharia vs. common law, religions which ban modern medical treatment). Since Sikhs are in the minority in most places, they’re often afterthoughts when laws affecting them are enacted. For example, the new hijab ban in France, ostensibly aimed at undermining militant Islam, also inadvertently bans turbans. Nobody thought to ask the small French Sikh community for input, it was a boundary case. And in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, wearing a kirpan provided an easy pretext for cops to detain Sikhs without suspicion of wrongdoing. Continue reading →

Anupam Kher on ‘ER’

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Veteran Bollywood actors Anupam and Kirron Kher will play the parents of Parminder Nagra’s med student character in an upcoming episode of ER (via Ennis). Anupam Kher already played Nagra’s dad in Bend It Like Beckham and will also play Aishwarya Rai’s dad in Bride and Prejudice.

That’s the trouble with desis: you let one in, and they’ll bring in all their relatives 😉 I once hired a great desi dude for my group and later left that job. When I came back to visit some friends, I found out he’d taken over my office and even my phone number. Apparently we’d turned that position permanently brown. Colonize, y’all!

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Dude, where’s my ransom?

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As Vinod has posted, the Iraqi insurgents who took Indian truck drivers hostage were tokin’ the desert weed with their nonsensical Dr. Evil demands. And here I was thinking the coalition of the willing could fit on a 3x5 index card:

This shadowy group of kidnappers demanded that Indian troops immediately leave Iraq and stop assisting US forces… it was pointed out to the kidnappers that India had no troops in Iraq and was indeed vehemently opposed to the US invasion… The group maintained that the war had killed 250 women and children in Falluja and demanded the Indian [not U.S.] government pay compensation to the bereaved families.

Given their familiarity with underworld financing and general lack of recent employment, aging Bollywood stars jumped into the fray:

[The mediator] Sheikh Hisham al-Dulaimi has a passion for Bollywood… He has three wives and 12 children. He smokes cigars… if big Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Asha Parekh and Dharmendra made a personal call to him pleading for the release of the three hostages, the three, in his words, “would be released today itself”.

The imprisoned drivers were more than willing to do their own stunts:

[T]he [Iraqi] guards are hopelessly trained. At the first sound of gunfire they usually run away… “My Iraqi security was pathetic. I shouted at him that if you cannot fire your gun yourself, teach me how to do it.”

More by Vinod here and here.

Sepia Mutiny, the film

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MangalPandey.gifA new Bollywood film about the Sepoy Mutiny is nearing completion. The Rising, a patriotic screed that’s the love child of Lagaan and 1942: A Love Story, stars Aamir Khan, the ubiquitous Aishwarya Rai, Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel. It focuses on Mangal Pandey, the original militant vegetarian who sparked the rebellion. And nothing says ‘freedom fighter’ like a big, honkin’ moustache (vegetable wax only, please). Director Ketan Mehta hopes the film is subversive, not preachy:

“We have seen our history from the British perspective. Now let us see it from the Indian perspective…”

TheRising.jpgI have to admit the Brits are good sports about it, shelling out shillings for Lagaan and those adorable cricket-playing natives. But what about the odd appearance of Prince Ears at the film’s ceremonial kickoff? Chuck, just a hint: you were on the other side. Khan wiggled uncomfortably:

“This film is not against the Queen’s rule, but the East India Company, which ruled India then.”

A nuanced, sensitive position on war. Well, ok then. Mehta also did the art film Mirch Masala with Shabana Azmi and the film Sardar on the iron-willed annexer of Indian kingdoms, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A.R. Rehman, who did the music for Lagaan, is scoring the film, to be titled Mangal Pandey for the Indian market.

Numerous villagers who all claim to be Pandey’s descendants are up in arms over a smooching scene in the film, the irony of which is left as an exercise for the reader. We at Sepia Mutiny are just chapped over being kissed off by their casting department for said scene, despite our obvious lip-locking skills.

Life after the Olympics

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How does a new Olympic silver medal winner celebrate? Mohini Bhardwaj is tattooing the five rings to her wrists and exchanging rings of a different color by getting engaged. It’s a far cry from surviving on PowerBars:

“… [A]fter practice, I’ll grab all the pennies and go to the Coinstar and get like $12 off the Coinstar and be so excited that I could buy some soy milk and cereal…” [The coach] became aware of Bhardwaj’s fun-loving side in 1997, she said, when Bhardwaj stayed out late with the members of the Russian team at the world championships in Switzerland. She partied too much and studied too little, once coming to the coach in tears, proud that she had finally earned a B in a class. “Her peak of being a rebel was probably in the late 90’s, so it really wasn’t her time,” Kondos Field said. “This time, she did it for herself…”

By the way, that multi-culti paragon The New York Times thinks a desi with a nose ring is ‘walking on the wild side’:

She has walked on the balance beam and walked on the wild side; she still has a subtle piece of jewelry pierced into the left side of her nose.

Austen gunfight

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BrideAndPrejudice1.jpgKeira Knightley, whose breakout role came in Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham, is going head-to-head with her former mentor as they both film Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It’s a Brit vs. British Asian showdown separated only by angle and time.

As Sajit has posted, Chadha’s version, Bride and Prejudice, is an unapologetically Bollywood interpretation starring Aishwarya Rai that debuts this year. Knightley’s version comes out in ’05, a traditional version with mostly British actors set in yesteryear London.

BrideAndPrejudice2.jpg Chadha recently released the full trailer for her version, a light-hearted romantic comedy co-starring Martin Henderson, Namrata Shirodkar, Anupam Kher, Naveen Andrews, Indira Varma and Ashanti. Check out the bit where Henderson describes bhangra (‘screw in a lightbulb with one hand and pet the dog with the other.’)

Throw in the Mr. D’Arcy character from Bridget Jones’ Diary, he of the ugly jumper, and never-married miss Jane is gettin’ some lowe. And she’s not the only one. Considering all the desi shout-outs scampering through Vanity Fair, and the desi re-imaginings of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the English are in for some hot, back-door reverse colonialism action.