“Stolen,” British Asian Pop-Star Jay Sean’s next single drops on October 18th. This will be followed by Jay Sean’s full length album entitled “Me Against Myself.” The video for stolen made some headlines in India, as it features Bollywood Hottie/Provacateur Bipasha Basu.
Click here to see the video Continue reading
Now, Britain’s youngest Olympic boxer since Colin Jones in 1976 is firmly in the spotlight. That Khan is his country’s only fighter makes the glare even brighter. But if he is feeling the strain, the graduate of Bury Amateur Boxing Club is keeping it well hidden. “I don’t feel any added pressure. I’m just going to box like I normally do,” he said. “All the media attention I’m getting is brilliant, it’s everyone’s dream at my age. All my mates are buzzing about it and everyone from school and college is proud of me. “I’m only 17 and it’s an experience for me. At the next Olympics I’ll be a lot more mature, a lot stronger and I’ll also have a lot more pressure on me because I’ll be tipped for gold.” Refreshingly self-aware, Khan also realises the significance of his Pakistani background and what his appearance in a British vest could do for race relations. “Asians are thin on the ground in British teams and it’s a big thing for me to get a medal,” he said. “I hope it could push a lot of Asians into sport and show that, with the support of your family, as an Asian you can get anything you want.”
And in other Amir Khan news, the BBC has announcedthat the 17 year old silver medalist will be the youngest contestant ever to feature in the BBC sports show Superstars, which is being filmed in Spain this month. Continue reading
Mandvi’s first lesson on the racism that can come with living in a community where you are different should have prepared him for his second. As a small Indian-born schoolboy in the working-class town of Bradford, England, he was often taunted and chased home from school by “the white boys.” The experience, fading over time, rushed back to him after the attacks of 9/11, which produced a backlash that made him, as a Muslim, again feel the sting of being “an outsider.” But Mr. Mandvi, an actor, has reacted to what he sees as the current assault on Islam – born of indiscriminate fear and suspicion – by identifying with those who are attacked rather than those who are doing the attacking. “I never heard the word ‘jihad’ until it came out of the mouth of an American television reporter,” he said, “and I was raised Muslim. I was never interested in being a political artist, but all this has forced me to become a more political artist. And it has made me a better artist. I want to do work that is honest, work that allows people to see another dimension of life.” To that end, Mr. Mandvi, who says he is in his 30’s, is turning his one-man show, “Sakina’s Restaurant,” for which he won an Obie Award, into a film. “Sakina’s Restaurant” is a comedy that chronicles life in a family-owned Indian restaurant, which in the movie will be set in Jackson Heights, Queens. “I think it is possible to portray Muslims without having to set them against the backdrop of a post-9/11 world,” he said. “This is the story of an American family that happens to be Muslim.”
Wouldn’t it be great if we could return to this frame-of-mind?
Click here to read the full story.
I don’t necessarily think the appropriation by popular culture of Hindu icons is always offensive. Any deity on a toilet seat, sure that is offensive, a deity on a t-shirt…I don’t think so.
Anyway, Time Magazine (Asia) recently published an interesting story on Pop culture’s appropriation of Hindu icons and how “the faithful” is up in arms about it. The article is essentially a listing of some of the more recent examples of this, including Roberto Cavalli’s ingenious Holy Bikini and undergarments which made a stir earler this summer, and were subsequently removed from the famed British department store, Harrods.
It’s been five years since the spirituality-seeking Madonna, dressed in a sari and adorned with a tilaka marking on her forehead, sang a self-composed Sanskrit song at the MTV awards before a backdrop of Hindu god images—simultaneously raising the West’s awareness of Hinduism and incurring the ire of the religion’s faith police. Things Indian have only gotten trendier since. But as Madonna discovered, cashing in on Hinduism can be a mixed blessing.
To read the full article, click here.
Your new film, ”Vanity Fair,” is based not on the magazine but on the great English novel. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, one of the most conniving heroines in literature. As someone once said of Becky, she is not just a social climber; she’s a mountaineer. Becky Sharp was a girl who bucked the system. She didn’t like the cards that society gave her. So she created her own deck, and created it at a time when a woman was supposed to sit still in a drawing room and hope a guy was going to come and propose. You grew up in India and set films like ”Salaam Bombay!” and ”Monsoon Wedding” there. Were you drawn to Thackeray because he was also born in India? When I was young, I spent summers in Calcutta and worked in political protest theater. And every morning, walking to my theater company, I would pass Thackeray’s bungalow. There is still a crooked board there saying, ”William Makepeace Thackeray was born here.” As an Indian citizen living in New York, do you see the U.S. as a force for good? No. Islamophobia has completely raged in the Western world since 9/11. Americans are only given one very biased point of view about the Islamic faith. You seem to be suggesting that Americans view all Muslims as terrorists. Living in New York, we never felt foreign. After 9/11, we felt foreign.
Click here to read the full NYT interview.
A review of the film from the San Francisco Chronicle can be found here, and here is a larger profile of Nair from MSNBC.
Incidentally, rumor has it that Mira Nair has been offerred to direct the next in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Znet has an interesting interview, dated August 31, 2004, with Booker prize winning author turned-global activist, Arundhati Roy here. And then here is a link-filled article about her recent talks on the Left coast.
In person, Roy is soft-spoken and nothing like a rabble-rouser. She seems to save her sharpest words for the printed page. For her public speeches in the United States, Roy usually reads essays she has written. In fact, Roy says, her onstage comments are really written for herself. That many people (especially liberal thinkers) agree with her statements is but a kind of bonus. “I think what probably drives me as a writer is a curiosity to understand and to keep understanding,” Roy says. “When I write, I write for myself, not just in order to let people know, because the writing clarifies things to me.”
Both make for interesting reads.
Gurinder Chadha, director as everyone should now know of Bend it Like Beckham and the forthcoming Bride and Prejudice spoke to recently spoke to rediff.com about her recently completed film.
How would you define Bride And Prejudice? It is a British film made by British finance, obviously because I am British. But it is a homage to Hindi cinema and to Hollywood musicals. My friends in the West, who have seen it, have compared it to Grease. They don’t know the musical references from Hindi films. There are very deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar. Do you think post-Bend It, Bride And Prejudice might be over-sold to the public? I don’t think so. I know audiences will go to the theatres with a lot of expectations. But they will enjoy it. I don’t think it will be a huge 100-week ‘House Full’ film in India because it’s in English…What I hope to do with Bride And Prejudice is make the Hindi language familiar to the world. After all, Bollywood is much bigger than Hollywood. Hopefully, it will work both ways. It will spur Westerners to watch more Hindi movies and also inspire Bollywood filmmakers towards better narratives.
Click here to read the full interview.
The film opens in India and the UK on October 8th, and during the very busy Christmas movie season in the states.
Incidentally, it is quite amazing to flip on my cable, and in one channel sweep find Monsoon Wedding on IFC, Bend it Like Beckham on HBO, and commercials for Mira Nair’s forthcoming Vanity Fair throughout. From eating chilled monkey brains and snake surprise to this. How far Desis have come! Continue reading
More from the Penguin website:
In the summer of 1999, while the Kargil War was being fought, author Amitava Kumar married a Pakistani Muslim. That event led to a process of discovery that made Kumar examine the relationship not only between India and Pakistan but also between Hindus and Muslims inside India. Written with complete honesty and with no claims to journalistic detachment, this book chronicles the complicity that binds the writer to the rioter. Unlike both the fundamentalists and the secularists, Kumar finds—or makes—utterly human those whom he opposes. More than a travelogue which takes the reader to Wagah, Patna, Bhagalpur, Karachi, Kashmir, and even Johannesburg, this book, then, becomes a portrait of the people the author meets in these places, people dealing with the consequences of the politics of faith.
The book, which was released by Penguin India will be published in the States by the New Press in January 2005. Click here to go to the authors homepage.
Luckily, I am headed to South Asia for work in a couple weeks and can pick it up early.
“I don’t have the luxury to fail, because I must deliver perfect results 100 percent of the time.”
In case you haven’t had a chance to catch Dr. 90210 yet, a marathon will air this sunday August 29–check your local listings.
Immigrant patterns are such that newly arriving immigrants often flock to locals in which many of their former country-men have settled. As a result, various ethnic ghettoes are created–Chinatowns, Little Italies, and of course Little Indias. One of the more well known Little Indias is in Edison, NJ, the home of Oak Tree Road, Sukhadia Sweets, and the Subzi Mandi grocery store that my mother drives three hours to frequent. Anyway, somewhat along these lines, The New Jersery Star Ledger has run an interesting peice on the desi community in Edison.
The Asian population in Edison climbed 1,175 percent over two decades: from 2,245 residents in 1980 to 28,634 in 2000. In Woodbridge, the number of Asian residents increased by 1,025 percent over the same time frame, from 1,251 to 14,078 residents, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Magan Patel, a 64-year-old Edison resident who immigrated to New York 33 years ago, trekked home after the parade yesterday with an Indian flag swinging beside an American flag. Patel said he carried both flags to signify the synthesis of his Indian values with the job and educational opportunities he has discovered in America. “I am a U.S. citizen since 1978,” Patel said. “My family’s here. We live good here. I consider (myself) American.”