Author Archives: manish

Anju Bobby George places sixth in long jump

Posted on by

Indian medal hope Anju Bobby George set a personal best and broke the Indian national record with her sixth-place finish in the long jump at the Olympics.

Vinod has rightly complained about the unsupportive Indian press, but the Indian Express had kind words for George:

It may have been a failure for Anju Bobby George. But it was a success story for Indian athletics… In fact her 6.83 was better than her own national mark of 6.74 which she had done twice.

And the Times of India sent this valentine:

It’s alright, Anju, you are our Athena

She aroused great passions among Indian sports fans just as sprint queen P T Usha had two decades ago… To her credit, Anju kept her cool and pushed herself to the limit. In the end, Anju Bobby George achieved what she was meant to: break through a mental threshold for millions of Indians.

Meanwhile, the women’s 4×400 relay team, a.k.a. the Secret Punjabi-Malayalee Sprinters Alliance of Rajwinder Kaur, Manjeet Kaur, K.M. Beenamol and Chitra Soman, qualified for the finals, just as a previous women’s 4×400 team did in Los Angeles in ’84.

Update: Mango Swami observed their shapely modesty:

[T]hey were the only team not wearing those skimpy bikini running shorts. Forget cutting-edge aerodynamics, we kick it old school, Umbro shorts and waist-length plaits.

Update 2: The relay team placed seventh in the finals after their anchor, Manjeet Kaur, fell ill and had to be replaced with an alternate.

Delhi WiFi costs more if you’re white

Posted on by

The Delhi airports just got wireless Internet access today for Rs. 60/hour at the domestic airport. But if you’re (wink, wink) at the international airport, you pay the more princely sum of Rs. 100. It’s a subtle way to soak foreigners, just like the higher tourist fee for foreigners at the Taj Mahal.

What constitutes a foreigner, exactly? What about a Canadian desi who’s an Indian citizen and, just to throw the game off, has an Amrikan accent? Entire genres of literature have been written on these shades of sepia.

And nothing makes consumers see red like discriminatory pricing. It puts off visitors and marks a country as Third World in mentality. In contrast, it’s precisely the U.S.’ tolerant atmosphere that siren-songs the global wunderkind. The number of Americans happily working in India is just starting to increase. For some short-term revenue, you’d mortgage your country’s economic future?

The education of Hanif Kureishi

Posted on by

Literary wrangler Sukhdev Sandhu, he of the wondrous New York magazine piece on the desified Spiderman, interviews Hanif Kureishi about his new memoir about his father. In My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi writes of his father’s assimilationism, marrying an Englishwoman and refusing to teach his kids Urdu:

“My dad was always very Anglicised. He felt himself to be a Chekhovian figure, wandering aimlessly and foolishly around a country where other people were very committed to religion or community. He saw England as a new start. He wanted us to be English; he didn’t want any of that in-between stuff. So I didn’t have access to India or Pakistan. If his brothers came round he’d speak Urdu, but he didn’t want my sister or me to learn it. I spent my childhood sitting around listening to people speaking in a language I didn’t understand.”

Hanif’s ascension as an iconic ‘in-betweener’ is a form of rebellion, a deep irony. It’s like the Bradford Muslims who turn fundamentalist because their parents aren’t, or the Iranians who are stridently pro-USA because their government isn’t. And Kureishi’s inability to understand Urdu left him doubly isolated, both from the outside world as a ‘Paki’ and from the Muslim community.

This piece reminds me of how much richer the diasporic milieu is in the UK than in the U.S., we’re such hicks in comparison. On Kureishi’s mentoring of other British Asians, including the writer of Bombay Dreams: Continue reading →

Bis-mullah!

Posted on by

Pioneering rock queen Freddie Mercury, a.k.a. Farokh Bulsara, has posthumously penetrated the Persian market (via our very own Abhi):

[T]he Ministry [of Islamic Guidance] liked the song Bohemian Rhapsody… about a man who commits murder and sells his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he prays to Allah for redemption… I will forever think of Wayne’s World. I imagined a bunch of Islamic clerics in the back seat of a car, banging their heads to this song.

The UK voted ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ the best song of all time, beating out the Beatles’ ‘Imagine.’ And in the back seat of the Pacer, in the black turban, jamming on air drums, we have ayatollah Ali. Please give him a warm hand on his opening… Continue reading →

Queer eye for the fundamentalist guy

Posted on by

Fashion tips for terrorists in G-al-Q. The good Turbanhead has a great photo spread:

The [al-Qaeda] manuals devote special care to teaching recruits how to pass unnoticed in the West, and include the following advice… Don’t wear short pants that show socks when you’re standing up. The pants should cover the socks, because intelligence authorities know that fundamentalists don’t wear long pants… You should differentiate between men and women’s perfume. If you use women’s perfume, you are in trouble.

Honey, if you’re a gender-confused fundamentalist? Sigh… where to begin.

Indian ads from the ’80s

Posted on by

CadburysGems.jpgBombayite Vishal Patel scanned in ads from the semi-socialist ’80s, before good printing technology hit Indian shores. Nostalgic. He also fillets half-assed Indian comics (via Boing Boing):

This story ends like every other Chacha Chaudhary story, suddenly and abruptly, like the writer/artist suddenly realised that three pages were up. As a result, we’ll never know if Chhajju Chaudhary was ever brought back to Earth, or was kept on Mars for the sodomising pleasure of the Martian nobility.

Continue reading →

No individual medal for Bhardwaj

Posted on by

The gymnastics floor exercise finals just ended in Athens, and Mohini Bhardwaj finished 6th out of 8. The Romanians were dominant as always, winning gold and silver, with Spain taking the bronze. Bhardwaj’s teammates did well in their individual finals, winning gold in the all-around, silver and bronze on the uneven bars and silver on the vault.

The team silver medal is probably the end of Bhardwaj’s Olympics career, a graduation ceremony into the rest of life. The end of an intensely competitive tournament can be a relief, but also a huge letdown. Gymnast Kerry Strug, who several years ago became famous for landing a critical vault on an injured ankle, Karate Kid-style, now works in the Treasury Department’s general counsel office.

Continue reading →

American investing $120M to train Indians for Olympics

Posted on by

Finance millionaire and Indophile Andrew Krieger is investing $120M in a Hyderabad sports training center to boost India’s Olympics results:

As India awaits glory in Athens, its star athlete, markswoman Anjali Bhagwat, is peeved that she had to pay for a coach on her own… Krieger, who studied Hindu philosophy, is pouring $120 million into a planned sports facility in the Indian tech hub of Hyderabad, where international coaches will groom future champions in all sports. It will be a replica of IMG Academies, a coaching center in Bradenton, Fla., that has produced the likes of tennis champ Maria Sharapova.

It’s just shameful that it’s not an Indian investor doing this. Indian marksman Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, a major in the Indian army, won India’s sole medal, and its first ever individual silver medal, in double trap shooting last week. There are many ways to slice India’s medal drought, all of them wince-worthy:

Continue reading →

Infosys CEO is an ex-socialist

Posted on by

N.R. Narayana Murthy, billionaire CEO of Infosys, an Indian outsourcing giant, used to be a socialist until an encounter with a Frenchwoman on a train didn’t turn out quite like Before Sunrise:

Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by police in a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He had been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he believes that her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. “There was no going back to communism after that,” he says.

Ah, nothing like the smell of a burned convert in the morning…

Continue reading →

‘The Kumars’ to debut on BBC America

Posted on by

kumarsat42.jpg

<

p>Wonderful news: The Kumars at No. 42, a successor to the incredible British Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, debuts on BBC America next Sunday. Like The Ali G Show, it’s a celebrity interview format where the interviewers are in character. You’re inviting Patrick Stewart in to meet your embarrassingly ethnic family, wicked old nani included, and filming the results.

“I said, ‘Mum, this is Helena Bonham Carter.’ Mum said, ‘You’re such a pretty girl. It’s a shame they forced you to wear a monkey mask in your last film.’ “

The desi grandma character is particularly pointed, which puts me in mind of Zohra Sehgal’s ninja-dowager roles in Masala and Bhaji on the Beach.

“The expectation and cliche of an old Indian woman is that she’s the most invisible woman in the world, walking 10 paces behind her husband,” Syal says. “The old ones I met, particularly the widows, were raucous and cheeky. Widowhood was the first time no one relied on them — that’s why they turned out to be so naughty.”

Continue reading →