Author Archives: manish

Uberoi overpowered by Venus Williams

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ShikhaUberoi.jpg Following up on Anna’s post, Shikha Uberoi lost her second-round U.S. Open match to Venus Williams yesterday, 7-5, 6-1, after sprinting to a 4-1 lead in the first set. The match was hard-fought:

Shikha Uberoi of Boca Raton won a lot of new fans with her super-aggressive play against Venus Williams in the second round.. Her coach, Rick Macci, tutored the Williams sisters for four years…

As fellow Palm Beach County players, Uberoi and Williams are acquaintances. On 9/11, their local airport was in lockdown, so Williams gave Uberoi and her sister Neha a limo ride home. A grateful Uberoi invited Williams in for some home-cooked bhindi:

Shikha invited her to dine with the family. ‘‘And guess what: she agreed. She loved Indian food, bhindi masala particularly, so we called Mom and asked her to make that.’’

Despite having shared bhindi, a near-sacred bond in Punjabi culture equalled only by sharing makhi di roti and sarson da saag, Williams had to take down her young rival at tournament time. All’s fair in love and tennis.

Uberoi is a cousin of Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi.

Anita Desai says men tell better tales

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In an interview with the Guardian, novelist Anita Desai says that male characters tell more adventurous stories (via Kitabkhana):

As a young woman, Desai says she felt her own life was not big or broad enough to feed her writing. “My whole life was about family and neighbours: it was very difficult for a woman to experience anything else. I was bored, and I needed to find more range, which is why I started to write about men in books like Baumgartner’s Bombay [in which a German Jew flees the war in India] and In Custody [a college lecturer goes in search of a famous poet]. Men led lives of adventure, chance and risk. It just wasn’t possible to write that from an Indian female perspective.“

InCustody.jpg Desai, who grew up in Delhi, had a German mother and a Bengali father. Her new book, The Zigzag Way, is a tale about the Cornish miners who settled in Mexico before mysteriously fading away. Desai also wrote the novel In Custody, about a slowly degenerating Urdu poet. The book was adapted into a luscious movie, Muhafiz, starring Shabana Azmi (one of the greatest pleasures in film is watching the lovely Ms. Azmi, bedecked and bejeweled, sitar in hand, croon a ghazal full of smoke and longing). Desai’s daughter Kiran recently debuted as a novelist with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Indian state passes business hiring quotas

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The Maharashtra government has extended its caste hiring quotas into the booming private sector. Because if you happen across an avian that lays ovoids of gold, the first thing to do is to throttle her.

“We’ve already been suffering under many constraints, like socialist economic planning and labour restrictions,” says Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto, the world’s largest manufacturer of scooters and motorcycles and one of India’s largest companies. “If we implement reservations, we’ll have no way to become internationally competitive.”

It’s another example of legacy capture, where programs intended to be temporary are never discontinued. The system adjusts to the new baseline, the constituencies sucking on the taxpayer teat spend part of the windfall on lobbying, and the subsidies are only ever expanded (e.g. U.S. timber subsidies, weapons programs that the Pentagon doesn’t want but can’t cancel):

Many say the constitution intended reservations as a temporary measure. But the rising political clout of low-caste Indians (who make up some 50% of the population) prevented the programme from being discontinued. Instead, it was expanded to include Indians from lower-middle positions in the caste hierarchy… Singh’s reforms made a mockery of the affirmative-action policy, entitling over 90% of the population in some states to reserved jobs.

Continue reading →

Kal Penn defends ‘Harold and Kumar’

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Just want to make sure everyone sees Kal Penn’s reply to criticism of his film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. (Or at least a comment by someone posting a long, careful defense under his name.)

A final scene IÂ’d like to clarify is the “Bag of Weed Dream Sequence”, in which Kumar fantasizes about, falls in love with, and marries a giant bag of weed. In a bout of post-marital financial hardship and depression, Kumar slaps the weed, calls her a “bitch”, and then apologizes… everyone should know that the scene is a parody of (and shot almost exactly like) a very famous scene in the Robert DeNiro film, “Raging Bull”.

It’s much like my point of view, though I missed the Raging Bull reference:

[T]he bit about slapping a bag of weed is intended to make fun of Kumar and is anti-domestic violence. Kumar is in an undershirt in a slummy apartment, chest hair showing, drinking crummy coffee. It’s enlightened society saying that Archie Bunker-like abusers are uncool troglodytes.

This all was prompted by Abhi’s post quoting South Asian Sisters’ criticism:

Harold and Kumar disappointed us. They represented Asian American men as being homophobic, spineless, sex-crazed misogynists.

Kal Penn’s site now has a new link to the anti-domestic violence org Narika and a page of links to progressive South Asian orgs.

‘Everybody Says I’m Fine’ playing in NYC

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RahulBose.jpg KoelPurie.jpg Art film stud Rahul Bose’ new wave film Everybody Says I’m Fine returns to Manhattan at the Pioneer Theater from Sep. 1-8. The film, a thriller in English about a mind-reading hairdresser in Bombay, stars Bose (Mr. and Mrs. Iyer) and British desi Koel Purie (American Daylight, Road to Ladakh). Upper Stall pointed out why the film is innovative, part of a flowering of increasingly sophisticated Indian cinema which includes Dil Chahta Hai and Yuva:

ESIF is most unlike any other commercially made English film in India… The film is not intended for an international (read festival) audience. It is for English speaking Indians… Bose is certainly not trying to sell India with a typical portrayal of a kind of Indianess from a Western perspective… There is no deliberate indulgence in trying to woo a “crossover audience” (whatever that is.) It’s a good story to tell. And Bose has just happened to do it in English.

As usual, the New York Times didn’t grok it. Continue reading →

The brown bard: ‘Twelfth Night’ in India

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A London production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night reimagines the play by setting it in modern India. Stephen Beresford’s production opened Aug. 26 in London for a ten-week run, featuring a mostly desi cast for the classic gender-bending, mistaken identity tale.

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The production relies on notable actors including Kulvinder Ghir (Goodness Gracious Me) as Feste, Raza Jaffrey (fresh from London’s Bombay Dreams) as the duke, and Neha Dubey (the cutie in Monsoon Wedding). Shireen Martineau plays the androgynous female lead, Viola. Jatinder Verma from Tara Arts is advising; he previously put together an all-desi version of Moliere’s Tartuffe at the National Theatre in London.

Beresford said India was exactly what he was looking for:

…[M]odern people in a modern setting but living in a culture thatÂ’s rooted in its past, mysterious, religious and magical; a place where attitudes to sex, love and death are frank and realistic, but where women might veil themselves in front of strangers; a world of shrines and marriage settlements, where ancient music and ritual are a part of daily life… Once India had suggested itself, the solutions followed. Feste becomes a Baul singer, a Bengali tradition of nomadic minstrels and soothsayers… [A]n Elizabethan setting carries its own problems. If you want the freshness and sophistication of the play to come across, you set yourself an uphill struggle by kitting out the actors with ruffs…

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Sikhs mark 400th anniversary at Golden Temple

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On Sep. 1, Sikhs will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the day their holy book was first brought to their most sacred site. In 1604, Guru Arjan Dev carried the Guru Granth Sahib into the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab. The book is accorded such respect that a prayer is spoken before the book is closed, and it’s swaddled in fine cloth and carried on the head.

India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, the first Sikh to hold that post, will preside over the 4 million-strong celebration. In a nod to modernity, Amritsar will host a laser show, very apropos since the inventor of fiber optics is a Sikh.

Every celebration has its inevitable drama. Due to tensions dating back to Indira Gandhi’s reign, Gandhi’s daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi was not invited to the celebration. And a family which holds an even older copy of the holy book has yet to agree to put its copy on display:

The precious manuscript is kept in a 900-kg iron vault built by a German engineer. Though the family claims that the National Archives has preserved the pages, scholars are sceptic. Says Dhillon, “The preservation was done sometime in the 1960s by an outdated method. Nowadays the accepted practice to preserve such manuscripts is to get them microfilmed and as far as I know this has not been done.”

Nonetheless, Amritsar is being newly repainted, the temple walkways are getting new carpeting, and pilgrims are arriving by the trainload in anticipation of celebration.

Jains and Hasidim spar over diamond business

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Jains from the small Gujarati town of Palanpur now dominate the worldwide diamond wholesaling business, taking in 65% of the revenues of the diamond capital in Belgium:

In what was once a predominantly Jewish neighborhood near Antwerp’s central station, young Indians in Armani suits haggle with Hasidic diamond buyers in long black coats, side curls and skullcaps. Hoveniersstraat, a street once celebrated for its kosher restaurants, now offers the best curry in town.

Eighty percent of diamonds worldwide now pass through Indian hands:

Indians like Mr. Shah gained a commercial edge over the Jews by sending their rough diamonds for finishing work to family-owned factories in Bombay and the northern Indian state of Gujarat, where labor costs are as much as 80% lower than in Antwerp… The Indians also proved canny at polishing and cutting the lower-quality rough diamonds that Jewish traders typically overlooked… “We turned cotton into silk…”

India now employs nearly a million diamond polishers. Meanwhile, Jewish diamantaires had some culturally-specific business issues:

Indians… aren’t required by their religion to close their businesses from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday… Many [Jews] were Holocaust survivors afraid to part with their assets or send very expensive valuables far away… (WSJ)

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Fraternal competition for the almighty dollar

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Second-gen U.S. desis sometimes compete for business also outsourced to desis in India and Pakistan. And the second gen are not guaranteed to be as professionally hardcore and driven as either their parents or new desi immigrants their age. But we’re not the only community with these tensions: the New York Times reports that that American blacks are also competing with African immigrants:

“These are very aggressive people who are coming here,” said Dr. Austin, who is calling for a frank dialogue between native-born and foreign-born blacks. “I don’t berate immigrants for that; they have given up a lot to get here. But we’re going to be in competition with them. We have to be honest about it. That is one of the dividing lines.”…

By 2000, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston and about a quarter here in Montgomery County, Md… Bobby Austin, an administrator at the University of the District of Columbia who attended the meeting in Washington, said he understood why some blacks were offended when Mr. Kamus claimed an African-American identity. Dr. Austin said some people feared that black immigrants and their children would snatch up the hard-won opportunities made possible by the civil rights movement…

In New York City, for example, and this is strictly in my humble opinion, the 1st-gen desis who’ve made it through the immigration strainer are much more hardcore on average than U.S.-born desis of the same age. That’s due to the requirements of U.S. immigration law as well as the financial, familial and cultural hardships of emigration. Continue reading →

‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ nominated for Booker

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Nadeem Aslam’s tale of honor killings, Maps for Lost Lovers, has been placed on the long list for the Booker Prize this year (via Kitabkhana). Novelist Kamila Shamsie reviewed the book in the Guardian:

[T]he most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas’s wife, Kaukub… she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin… a woman’s gold bracelet is composed of a series of semi-colons; dead tulips lean out of a bin like the necks of drunk swans; a falling icicle is a radiant dagger.