Author Archives: manish

Happy Independence Day

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For the Indians among you, freedom for trysts with midnight’s children and so on, old chap. Happy day. Off to the big NYC parade in the morning.

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

–Jawaharlal Nehru

Dumb and dumberest

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Comment on Political Animal:

I’m not at all surprised by #4 [most popular blog language] being Farsi. Yes, a lot of people have never even heard of the Faroe Islands, but they are VERY net-savvy there.

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p dir=”ltr”>From Dumb and Dumber:

Lloyd Christmas: That’s a lovely accent… New Jersey?
Lady at bus stop: It’s Austrian.
Lloyd Christmas: Austria! Well, then. G’day mate! Let’s put another shrimp on the barbie!

Mohini Bhardwaj’s Olympic TV schedule

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You can catch gymnast Mohini Bhardwaj and the rest of the women’s gymnastics team in the Olympics by following this TV schedule (all on NBC):

  • Sun, Aug. 15, 7pm-midnight ET
  • Tue, Aug. 17, 8pm-midnight ET

In case Raj Bhavsar gets bumped up from his alternate spot, or you otherwise want to partake in some chiseled bicep action, here’s the men’s gymnastics schedule:

  • Sat, Aug. 14, 12-6pm & 8pm-midnight ET
  • Mon, Aug. 16, 8pm-midnight ET

Gujarat massacre still unpunished

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The killers who participated in recent, government-sanctioned anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat will likely get away scot-free, says the Economist. There have been no convictions to date. None.

…not a single murderer has been convicted, although perhaps 2,000 people died. The state government is under pressure from local activists, human-rights groups and India’s staunchly interventionist Supreme Court to see that justice is at last done. But it continues to act less like a scourge of illegal violence than its sponsor.

In retaliation for the deaths of 58 Hindus who burned alive in a train under suspicious circumstances, 2,000 Muslims were massacred in Gujarat:

Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP’s leader and, at the time, prime minister, seen as a moderate, asked “Who lit the fire first?”. That foreigners and the liberal English-language press in Delhi largely ignored the Godhra massacre, concentrating on the killings of Muslims—some 9-10% of Gujarat’s 50m population—heightened the sense of grievance.

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Team Brown works for YOU!

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Hilarious…

teambrown.gifBehind every sucessful and powerful Whitey, there is a team of brown actually getting the shit done. In the 1800s that meant tea for the British Raj, in the 1900s that meant fighting in the Burmese jungles, and in the 21st century, it means we run the Net, the banks, and everything in between… I gotta tell you, I once had a serious conversation about how it was inevitable that Indians would pretty much be running the world by 2025.

‘Fatwa’ in Manhattan

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Anuvab Pal, one of my most favorite playwrights, is unleashing a new play upon the world at the NYC Fringe Festival tomorrow. The Fatwa synopsis:

A comedy about two elderly men who try to take advantage of the current American political climate to fulfill lifelong artistic desires. Both men have famous names, but are not famous themselves. They are failed writers who in attempting to promote a blasphemous novel, attempt to engineer a fatwa…

More here:

Pal compares favorably to Salman Rushdie in verbal pyrotechnics and Tom Stoppard in barbed wit, and he’s starting to get mainstream recognition… like Woody Allen minus the neuroticism… Fatwa is a thinly disguised satire of Rushdie’s horrific hide-and-seek with the mullahs.

Pal’s work is a treat, go see the play!

Fatwa by Anuvab Pal, NYC Fringe Festival, Players Theater, Studio 3C, 115 MacDougal St, New York, NY, Aug. 14-15, 20-22, 25, 26, tickets at TicketWeb

Sobhraj convicted again

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After serving out a 20-year term in India, Indian-Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobhraj has been convicted again in Thailand (via Shashwati Talukdar). Sobhraj is an odd and unusual fellow as far as homicidal sociopaths go, befriending hippies on the ganja-moksha trail:

Charles Sobhraj was born… to an unwed Vietnamese shop girl and an India merchant who denied paternity… “I will make you regret that you have missed your father’s duty,” he confided in his diary.

… years later he made an even more audacious escape: this time by throwing a birthday party in which guards and prisoners alike were invited. Grapes and biscuits handed around the guests were secretly injected with sleeping pills, knocking out everyone except Sobhraj and four other escapees. Indian newspapers reported that they were so haughty about their getaway that they even photographed themselves walking through the prison gates onto the Delhi streets.

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God’s own comedy

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Paul Varghese made it to the semifinals on Last Comic Standing (via MD). Varghese is a Texan Malayalee who started doing stand-up comedy in 2001. More here:

Growing up was a struggle, Varghese had roving gangs of Malayalee doctors and aeronautical engineers brandishing slide rules in da hood. So, to stay off the streets, he kept it real at comedy clubs… My favorite desi stand-up is still the inimitable Russell Peters, a big, chubby Canadian upon whose dewy lashes perches the daemon of unapologetic cruelty.

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Bhardwaj chosen U.S. Olympics team captain

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Mohini reaps the rewards of intensity and seniority:

Mohini Bhardwaj’s already impressive story just got a little better. Bhardwaj, who is one of the oldest female gymnasts in the Athens Games at 25, was selected as captain of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. “From a year ago, if you had taken odds on her making our Olympic team — even the odds of making it to nationals — she just continues to impress,” USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi said Wednesday.

I’ve been following her pint-sized Rocky story for awhile.

It’s a bit of a surprise since she was one of the last chosen for the team, but only ex-Cuban gymnast Annia Hatch outranks her in seniority (Bhardwaj is 25, Hatch is 26). Both are the oldest female U.S. gymnasts in the Olympics in 40 years.