(Alternate link to the video) Aasif Mandvi is an Indian-American actor and one-time playwright who has had small parts in many movies and larger parts on a number of major TV shows (like CSI). His Daily Show appearance — as a “Middle Eastern Affairs Correspondent” — is pretty clever; he riffs on Condoleezza Rice’s claim that the current wars in the Middle East are merely the “birth pangs” of emergent democracy in a “new Middle East”. Mandvi gets a couple of big laughs, but also possibly loses the audience at the end with an ironic line about 9/11. Continue reading
Author Archives: amardeep
Happy Raksha Bandhan!
Today is Raksha Bandhan (or Rakhi), the Indian holiday where sisters are supposed to tie a bracelet around their brothers 
as a symbol of sisterly devotion. The basics of the holiday are at Wikipedia:
The festival is marked by the tying of a rakhi, or holy thread by the sister on the wrist of her brother. The brother in return offers a gift to his sister and vows to look after her. The brother and sister traditionally feed each other sweets.
It is not necessary that the rakhi can be given only to a brother by birth; any male can be “adopted” as a brother by tying a rakhi on the person, whether they are cousins or a good friend. Indian history is replete with women asking for protection, through rakhi, from men who were neither their brothers, nor Hindus themselves. Rani Karnavati of Chittor sent a rakhi to the Mughal Emperor Humayun when she was threatened by Bahadur Shah of Mewar. Humayun abandoned an ongoing military campaign to ride to her rescue. (link)
Though the holiday is strongly associated with Hinduism, in my experience it is somewhat of a secularized, “cultural” holiday both in India and the diaspora, where other religious groups participate. (I’m not sure if it’s absolutely universal — do Indian Christians and Muslims celebrate Rakhi? Is there Rakhi in Bangladesh or Pakistan? Based on this article, the answer to the second question is maybe.) Indeed, these days, it isn’t surprising to see Rakhi designs that contain references to Indian and western superheroes (check out this cool Spiderman Rakhi), alongside the more traditional designs.
In Haryana, a group of women tied Rakhis around trees, as an environmental gesture. (“Her other brother is a tree,” one bystander quipped.) Apparently the best-selling brand of Rakhis (“Laloos”) in the state of Bihar are named after the current Railway Minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav. (“But these Rakhis are only available on the black market!” the same bystander wryly noted.) And Indian PM Manmohan Singh recognized the holiday in a typical fashion. Continue reading
Kumars at No. 42 Back on BBC America
The Kumars at No. 42 will be back on BBC America starting this Friday at 9pm ET for its sixth season. Personally, I am looking forward to it because it’s the first time since the show started being broadcast in the U.S. that I actually get the BBC America channel in my cable lineup.
North London’s most famous and eccentric Indian family is back and would like to welcome its U.S. viewers into their home for an all-new season of celebrity chat. Think sitcom meets talk show with a little improv thrown in for good measure!
On the guest list this season are David Hasselhoff, George Hamilton, Elvis Costello, Alice Cooper, Joanna Lumley, Jane Seymour and Zoë Wanamaker. The Kumars have indulged their spoiled son, Sanjeev by installing a state-of-the-art TV studio in their backyard where he attempts to host a talk show. (link)
I’m not sure who some of those people are (brit-celebrities, I presume), but certainly it should be interesting to see what they do with/to David Hasselhoff and Alice Cooper in particular.
Sepia Mutiny (mostly via Manish) has posted on the doings of Sanjeev Bhaskar (OBE), Meera Syal, and company many times, so this is more of a heads-up post than anything new for long-time readers. There are of course innumerable Goodness Gracious Me clips of varying hilarity (GGM was Bhaskar’s earlier gig) available on Youtube. However, despite the ready availability of GGM on the internet, it’s odd that the only sketches from the more recent Kumars at No. 42 one finds online are on the BBC website. (Perhaps the BBC is more vigilant in patrolling its current content than Comedy Central?)
Incidentally, Meera Syal, at age 45, is a new mum, an experience which, she says, leaves her feeling “really knackered.” (She has a 13 year old child from a previous marriage.) Continue reading
Xeni Goes Trekking
No, not Star Trek — across the Himalayas. Xeni Jardin, a freelance journalist who is on the Boing Boing blogroll, recently went to India, China, and Tibet for NPR, as part of a four-part series called “Hacking the Himalayas”. The Boing Boing post introducing the series is here; the main focus is on how technology is transforming the lives of Tibetans, both in Tibet and in exile in India.
The first two parts in the series have links up at NPR, though as of now only part 1 has audio (part 2 is expected to go up later today). The first story is actually not on the Tibetans themselves, but on a partially-nomadic local tribe called the Gaddi, who are based around Dharamsala and various villages in Himachal Pradesh. Most of the story is about their local folk traditions, which are apparently somewhat in decline. I’m not quite sure what technology (or Tibet, for that matter) has to do with it, but at least the story is something other than the usual, “look, they have Cyber Cafes!” type of thing.
Xeni has started a blog dedicated to providing auxiliary material to the stories that air on NPR. Among other things, she has a short post there on the popularity of hip hop amongst Tibetan-in-exile teens in Dharmsala.
(Link via Desipundit) Continue reading
The Indian Dentist and the Holocaust Survivor: Vikram Seth’s “Two Lives”
A biography creates a record of a life, but it must also attempt to assemble many divergent strands and seemingly 
incoherent fragments of that life into a semblance of a story for a reader. It’s hard to do even half-comprehensively with any one life — it requires, for one thing, intimate access to the person him or herself, as well as a pretty good paper trail. Vikram Seth, in Two Lives, had such access to not one but two people, who were extraordinary individually but even more so as a couple. It’s the story of Shanti Behari Seth, the author’s great uncle, and Hennerle Caro (Henny), a German Jewish refugee from the Nazis. The two of them met during the early 1930s, when Shanti was in Germany to do a doctorate in dentistry, and he rented a room in the Caros’ house. In 1937 and 1939, respectively, they left Germany and settled in London.
When the war broke out, Shanti enlisted (on the British side, of course), and served as a dentist for the troops in the African campaign, and later in Italy (where he lost an arm at Monte Cassino). Henny, for her part, lost her nuclear family at Auschwitz: unlike them, she was able to get out in time. Henny and Shanti became a couple, and eventually married. When Vikram Seth went to England initially in 1969, he didn’t know much about his uncle or his foreign wife. But as he stayed with them and then continued to visit over the course of more than twenty years, he became quite close to them. They even helped him learn German, a skill which turned out to be indispensible for this project. Continue reading
Khushwant Singh’s Journalism: The Illustrated Weekly of India
Khushwant Singh was someone I naturally gravitated towards as a young literature scholar, as he was one of the very few modern, secular Sikh writers with an international profile. (Now we have Brit-Asians like Nirpal Dhaliwal — though judging from this, I’m not really sure that represents progress.) 
But while I did read everything I could find by Khushwant Singh early in graduate school, I ended up not writing about him, barring one seminar paper that my professor at the time didn’t particularly like.
The truth is, from a literary perspective Khushwant Singh’s novels really aren’t that great. They aren’t as adventurous as G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr, and not quite as carefully controlled as the novels written by his contemporaries in the 1950s — i.e., R.K. Narayan. Train to Pakistan (1956) sold very well in the west, and was in print for years and years. It isn’t bad — it’s actually a well-plotted, suspenseful partition novel — but it’s just somewhat unremarkable. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi, by contrast, aren’t very readable at all.
After the 1950s, Khushwant Singh focused less on creative writing and more on journalism, which is where, I think, he’s made his greatest contribution. Between 1969 and 1978 he was the head editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, an ancient institution that lasted for more than 100 years, and was, until the 1980s, the biggest English-language news-magazine in India (perhaps in all of Asia). Under the British, it was effectively a colonial society magazine, and it didn’t change much under its first two Indian editors. Khushwant Singh was the third Indian editor, and he turned the ethos of the magazine on its head. Continue reading
Designer Desi Baby Food
It’s hot outside. So hot, these days, you want to curl up next to a fan with a cup full of ice water and allow your brain to regress to an almost womb-like state of slushee-induced, heat-transcending peace. The local papers here in Philly have had nothing very exciting to say about the curent heat wave, but the BBC has an amusing article on the rest of the British media’s penchant for “climate porn” (the BBC, of course, only participates in the phenomenon by discussing how everyone else participates in it). Still, “climate porn”: you might want to rethink how much time you spend at work checking the weather. 
Speaking of returning to the womb, or something close to it, did you hear about the new, designer desi-themed baby food?
HappyBaby, which sells colorful cubes of frozen vegetable and fruit purées through FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage, flavors puréed peas with fresh mint, and potatoes and red lentils with coriander and cinnamon in their savory dahl, an Indian staple.
“This is how my parents fed me,” said Shazi Visram, co-founder of HappyBaby, which began on Mother’s Day and is expanding its line this month. “Why shouldn’t babies, of all people, get to eat delicious things?”(link)
No more vanilla, canned Gerber for today’s stylish babies. At HappyBabyFood, you get organic Baby Dhal. It comes in frozen, baby-sized cubes, and is sold at health food places in the New York City area. (Because it’s frozen, they can avoid having to put in preservatives.)
Not everyone is thrilled with the masalafication trend:
But some parents remain skeptical. “Moms ask me, ‘Can babies really have that?’ ” said Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby, which delivers meals like Vegetable Korma, made with coconut milk, for 12-month-olds, and purées of fruits like pomegranates and figs for infants. “And I say, of course! What do you think they feed babies in India?” (link)
Wait, you mean they feed babies in India something other than American baby food?
For more frozen organic baby food porn, click on this image, from New York Magazine. And a bit more on HappyBaby Food co-founder Shazi Visram, who has an MBA from Columbia and has worked in real estate in Brooklyn, can be found here. Continue reading
Indian Soft Drinks Not So Soft
There’s quite a controversy brewing (thanks, Scott Carney) over the pesticide content in Indian soft drinks. The vast majority of these are owned by the multinational Coke and Pepsi companies, and are of course manufactured and bottled locally in India using all local ingredients. 
The controversy actually began three years ago, with a report from the Centre for Science and the Environment that alleged high concentrations of pesticides in soda samples. The government at the time attacked the findings aggressively, and questioned the credibility of the scientists who conducted it. But as a result of the study, strict standards for pesticide content were put in place for the water that is used in soft drinks, though standards for the sugar and other ingredients that go into the soda still haven’t been finalized.
Now the CSE has done another study, and published the findings in its magazine, Down to Earth. The actual numbers, and notes on methodology, are available on this PDF. (I haven’t found a more formal, “science journal” style article indicating the methodology of the study in detail anywhere.) The CSE says it is testing the soft drinks using methodology developed by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
There are stories floating around of farmers using Coke and Pepsi drinks as low-budget pesticides, which would be a rather grim confirmation of this finding if substantiated. Of course, it’s unlikely that the amount of pesticide in these drinks is actually killing any bugs (the study finds pesticides in the drinks in the range of 11 parts per billion); it might well be the citric acid or the phosphoric acid (on the other hand, wouldn’t bugs be attracted to the sugar?). As a commentor on Scott Carney’s blog points out, it’s not clear whether this is a widespread practice, or a bit of an ‘urban legend’. Continue reading
Pranay Gupte, No Longer Offering “Lunch” For Free
Pranay Gupte is a New York-based journalist. For nearly two years, he wrote a column at the New York Sun called ‘Lunch at the Four Seasons with…,’ where he interviewed politicians, educators, prominent businessmen — basically, anyone who is vaguely famous (or wants to be) in New York. There’s a comprehensive list of these articles at Gupte’s website.
Officially, he’s quitting the column and the Sun because the newspaper “can’t afford to pay him.” Unofficially, however, it appears he’d gotten a series of nasty letters from colleagues at the paper, and resigned when nothing was done to discipline the senders. Did the letters he received contain racial slurs? [Update: The answer is no.] Gawker has a copy of the letter he wrote to the Sun where he stated his dissatisfaction with how he’d been treated:
For a guy who works 24/7 for The New York Sun without pay — out of friendship toward you and a commitment to the Sun’s success — I think I deserve better than these disgusting notes that your general manager and other wet-behind-the-ears toddlers in the business staff have been sending to me.
Not only am I dismayed, I am also perplexed that you would allow these idiots to continue their attacks on me. What seems to be their problem? Are they resentful of the efforts I make on behalf of the Sun? Do they have a color issue? Do these white boys and girls believe that a person of Indian origin — however accomplished in journalism, and however well known — doesn’t really belong at a newspaper such as the Sun? (link)
“Omkara,” “Othello,” and the Dirty Business of Politics (a film review)
We went over to the multiplex in Doylestown, PA yesterday to watch Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara on the big screen. It was nicely done — relatively crisp at two and a half hours (not bad for a faithful rendition of a Shakespeare tragedy), and unpretentiously shot in rural Uttar Pradesh. It was also well-acted by a group of talented actors — Ajay Devgan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kareena Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Viveik Oberoi (formerly known as “Vivek”), Saif Ali Khan, and Naseeruddin Shah. The standout performance is probably Saif Ali Khan’s Langda Tyagi (Iago), though I also thought Konkona Sen Sharma was quite good as Indu (Emilia). 
Omkara bears some similarities to R.G. Varma’s Sarkar in that it takes the gruff realism of modern Indian gangster pictures and applies it to politics rather than the criminal world — the point being, of course, that there isn’t that much difference between the two. While Varma’s Sarkar was an allegory for the Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray, the “Bhaisahib” in Omkara is a rural political chief, perhaps a Chief Minister like Bihar’s Lalu Prasad Yadav (formerly known as “Laloo”). In his home environment, he commands near absolute authority and devotion from his followers, though the legal system at the Center (commanded by “Auntyji,” possibly a figure for Sonia Gandhi) is constantly nibbling away at his fiefdom. In Omkara, Bhaisahib is in and out of court, and he relies on his faithful “General,” Omkara, to handle his equally corrupt political rivals — sometimes by exposing them (via MMS video sex scandals, no less), and sometimes by simply shooting them down. Continue reading