Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Bush’s 60th birthday celebration gets "Foiled"

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President Bush today held one of his extremely rare press conferences. Hey, lay off. If you were going to get asked a bunch of depressing questions about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea you wouldn’t want to be up in front of the press either. Later on in the evening he even went a step further and gave an interview to someone named Larry King. What is the occasion? It’s his 60th birthday of course! Birthday or not, if you were a hard-nosed reporter and had a deadline on your story, you’d go for the jugular…wouldn’t you? To avoid any uncomfortable questions Bush decided to have a photo-op with any of the White House correspondants who “happend” to share his July 6th birthday. Anyone? Yes good readers. You know where this is going already don’t you? Even the President knows that when you want to dodge tough questions it is time to go to Raghubir “The Foil” Goyal. “Coincidentally” July 6th is his birthday as well. Yeah right (tip via my Mom).

Bush celebrated his birthday with friends on Tuesday at a White House party on Independence Day and there weren’t supposed to be any festivities on Thursday. Still, the occasion was noted in a long day of meetings and public appearances, including a press conference with Harper.

The president received birthday greetings from Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin who talked with Bush on the phone Thursday morning about North Korea’s missile tests.

As Bush closed his news conference, a reporter in the audience, Raghubir Goyal, called out that it was his birthday, too. Bush invited him to the podium for a picture. The president asked if anyone else had a birthday and invited them to come up. Two others, reporter Richard Benedetto and State Department employee Todd Mizis joined the birthday celebration. [Link]

I think this is like when you pretend that it is your birthday so that you can get free cake at the restaurant.

See related posts: A wtf? moment at the Whitehouse press briefing, Goyal’s toils, One-Track Uncle, Scott McClellan feels the heat, Who let brown folks aboard Air Force One?

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Oblique Brown

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For the past two weeks, since I picked it up at Artwallah, I have been listening to Chee Malabar’s new solo effort on my .mp3 player. It went on sale on-line today. Malabar is one half of the duo known as the Himalayan Project. He actually debuted the title track “Oblique Brown” at the SAAN conference to an audience that was floored by the raw (and ultimately sad) story. Here is a snippet from the title track about an incident that happened to Malabar in New York City:

It was the, moment I feared, the corner was clear,
or so I thought then a fucking cop appeared,
in my rearview, red-blue berries was flashing,
flagged me to the side of the road, started askin’
for “License, Registration”, stayed silent and patient,
waitin…as the cop ran my plates,
he came back moments later, scanning my face,
disappointed, “Ain’t no warrants in my name,
and this ride’s clean man, I got it in my mama’s name,
“What I do?”, “You ran a red, illegal U, that’s two tickets!”
“Cool, pass em over, i’d love to stay and kick it,
but I’ll catch you in court, you know I’ma fight it!”
“What! Hold up Osama, don’t be so near-sighted!”
Before I snatched the ticket, the cop got excited,
clutched his glock and screamed, “Don’t even budge bitch!”
Thought he’d call Tom Ridge to tell him “flip the color switch”
A white boy rocks a beard, he’s consided rugged,
and If I sport one, I’m a threat to the public!…

[Listen to Oblique Brown on Myspace]

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Is this Indian man Skeletor in disguise?

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Filed under “signs of the Kali Yuga,” this next story comes to us from India where crowds are gathering to see a man who is sporting a skull for a hairstyle (via the News Tab):

I say we expose this villain for who he really is.

Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off.

Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull came away Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood.

“When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burned and within months it came off exposing the skull,” Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy told Reuters Wednesday.

“Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases.”

The piece came off Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone. [Link]

Poor guy. It is bad enough that he got burned but to have people staring and pointing at your skull?? You can’t even put a cast on that thing. At least then you could hope to make friends when people asked to sign it.

Bandyopadhyay said the skull’s inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow…

“Doctors say a new skull covering has replaced the old one, but I am not letting go of this one,” he told Reuters.

He intends to keep his prized possession for life and not hand it over to the hospital when he leaves: “My skull has made me famous,” he says. [Link]

You may have fooled the others Roy, but I know who you are. That brown skin and somber expression is just a facade for the evil that lurks beneath. When I find my Battlecat I shall come for you. Continue reading →

Indian Science Fiction and Fantasy, According to Samit Basu

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180px-Black_Box_(Bashur).jpg

Since Ennis mentioned superheroes, I wanted to point out that Samit Basu has put together a wonderful series of essays and interviews on the subject of contemporary Indian speculative fiction (“speculative fiction” is an umbrella term, which includes sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and alternative history).

It’s really a small encyclopedia rather than a blog post, so here are a couple of pointers to start you off. First and foremost, Samit deals with the question of Indian speculative fiction in the context of the recent flourishing of “literary” Indian Writing in English here. He deals with the question of “authentic” Indian superheroes (as opposed to the bad, but familiar, ripoffs of western superheroes) here. Both are highly recommended links. Basu also gets into some questions about the publishing industry and the current dominance of diasporic writers here, though that may be of interest more to people interested in publishing questions. Continue reading →

Superman is not Hanuman

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Red-white-and blue, flying across the sky with his underwear on the outside … it’s hard to think of anything more American than Superman, right? Manish alerts us to an interesting claim made in an article by the “IndiaFM News Bureau” that Superman is nothing more than a Kaavya’ed Hanuman:

Word is that, that the original creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were inspired from none other than the Indian mythological hero Hanuman and that is how Superman got his flying powers. [Link]

Sure there are some similarities between the two fictional characters: neither is human, they’re both super-strong, they can both fly, and both have names than end in -man. But that’s it, really. Much as I would love to claim Superman as desi, this claim makes as much sense as the claims that Vedic civilization had both airplanes and atomic weapons.

People (scholars even) have written a lot on the origins of Superman.You can find entire articles on this topic in the highly obscure internet source Wikipedia:

Because Siegal and Shuster were both Jewish it is thought that their creation was partly influenced by the Jewish legends of the Golem, a mythical being created to protect and serve the persecuted Jews of 16th century Prague and later revived in popular culture in reference to their suffering at the hands of Nazis in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Another influence could be Hugo Danner, the main character of the novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie. Danner has the same powers of the early Superman (as do many other pulp characters of the twenties and thirties)… However, the sources sited by Jerry Siegel himself were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Tarzan, Johnston McCulley’s Zorro and E.C. Seegar’s Popeye. He also appears to have been influenced by Jack Williamson’s “The Girl From Mars.” [Link]

See – no reference to Hanuman made, ever. While it’s impossible to prove a negative (I cannot show definitively that they were not influenced by Hanuman), how would two Jewish kids in the 1930s know about Hanuman anyway? [And why would they need to know about Hanuman to come up with the idea of a flying hero? What, nobody in the west had ever thought of flying people before? This is after Peter Pan, for crying out loud.]

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As British as Chaz Singh

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Come the Fourth of July, I often wonder what my life would be like if I was British. My father worked in the UK before he came to the US for graduate school, his only brother still lives in Zone 2, London. As a result, I have both literal and metaphorical cousins across the pond.

“Chaz Singh” as St. George

To their credit, Brits are the only westerners who assume that I must be one of them rather than a foreigner. When I’m travelling abroad (outside of India or the UK), British travellers will go out of their way to say hi, while Americans look right through me. In the London, I’ve had people make eye contact with me when they rolled their eyes in disapproval at the noisy tourists who just entered the tube. “Boy, aren’t those foreigners noisy” they telegraph silently to me, while I try to keep a straight face and signal back proper stiff-upper-lip sympathy.

In that vein, I bring you “Chaz Singh” [I suppose that is his real name] who I discovered via DNSI.

Chaz Singh is one of the recipients of the BBC Breeze bursaries that has enabled him to … a collection of images that portray his identity as both Sikh and British. The verses also reflect the image as a verbal translation.[Link]

The St. George photo is my favorite of the lot. The verse … well, it’s in rhyme, and I don’t find it quite as interesting as the photos. More examples of his words and pictures below the fold, including his paired compositions concerning being both “Chav and Goth”.

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Anar (is the) Key

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Perhaps Uncle “all things desi are good for your health” was right. Turmeric may prevent Alzheimer’s. Mangosteens may combat bird flu. Ice in your soda may be bad for you. And now it turns out that pomegranate juice may reduce the risk of heart disease and even fight off prostate cancer.

Seeds of life?

Although Persephone’s consumption of pomegranate may have consigned her to the land of the dead, it looks like the fruit may have the opposite effect on us:

Scientists in Israel have shown that drinking a daily glass of the fruit’s juice can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Pomegranate juice contains the highest antioxidant capacity compared to other juices, red wine and green tea,” said Professor Michael Aviram, who led the team. [Link]

Drinking a daily eight ounce glass of pomegranate juice can significantly slow the progress of prostate cancer, a study suggests. Researchers say the effect may be so large that it may help older men outlive the disease. Pomegranates contain a cocktail of chemicals which minimise cell damage, and potentially kill off cancer cells. [Link]

No word on whether cooking with anardana has a similar effect. Of course, you know where the best anardana in the world comes from, don’t you?

Pomegranate seeds are sometimes used as a spice, known as anardana … The seeds of the wild pomegranate daru from the Himalayas is considered the highest quality source for this spice. [Link]

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Colonized clothing

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When I was in India last, I acquired a new pet peeve, one that irritates me far more than it should:

Why is desi clothing called “ethnic” in India itself?

In the USA, sure, we’re different, we’re quaint, we’re ethnic. Salwar Kameez/Kurtas/Saris/Lehngas/Sherwanis are our traditional ethnic (read funny-looking)dress. We’ve all had this conversation with a non-desi at a desi wedding:

“Why is the bride wearing red?”
“Well, some brides wear white, but for others, wearing red or pink is our ethnic tradition.”
“Oooooh, that’s so exotic”

Ethnic means we’re different from them.

But in India, why are Indian clothes called ethnic? Ethnic connotes the other, the habits of the minority, things that are unfamiliar to mainstream society. None of this applies in India for Indian clothing. There is no them to be different from.

Why not call it “Western” vs. “Indian” clothing? Or (although this is not accurate) “Western” vs. “Traditional Clothing”? Or, if you think the term ethnic refers to the fact that various types of clothing have regional roots, why not say “Gujarati Lehngas” and “Punjabi Salwar Kameez” etc? Better yet, why not just say Sherwanis rather than “ethnic Sherwanis”? I just don’t get it.

Then again, if you consider the breadth of my ignorance about fashion, the fact that I don’t understand this one little thing is really the least of my troubles

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An Ode to My [Least] Favorite Auntie

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I always ran into you on the days I least wanted to. You knew how to cut to the core of me, of everyone, of the weak- and strong-willed alike. Your bullshit detector was unsurpassed.

Foolishly, for a time, I thought I could anticipate your moves and quickly learned I would never be fast enough: you were always one step ahead. I tried valiantly to dodge your never-ending stream of inquisitions over standardized test scores, cumulative grade point averages, class rank, college major, graduate school, first job, starting salary, rent payment, home purchase, and potential spouse — I always failed miserably, stuttering, shot down and wounded on topics I would have never even thought to imagine. Like how much my student loan payments were. It always seemed easier to surrender immediately to your poison bite than to fight it and prolong my own demise, snared and tangled in a weak web woven of my own lies.

I always suspected you knew the color of my underwear, how much I’d paid for it and strongly disapproved.

I avoided Indian functions my entire senior year of high school because of you… Continue reading →

Fox News apologizes for Toronto terror error

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[Don’t you expect this post to start: “Man hit by flying pig” ? ]

Earlier this month, Fox News reported on the Toronto terrorism arrests with a story shot in front of the Ontario Khalsa Darbar, “the largest and busiest Sikh gurdwara in Canada“.

The broadcast story showed the front of the Ontario Khalsa Darbar – a Sikh Gurdwara … as the house of worship the terrorists frequented and also showed members of the local Sikh congregation. [Link]

That’s right – a story about suspects from “Somali, Pakistani, Indian, Egyptian, and West Indian backgrounds” and what do they do? They choose to shoot using a Gurdwara and Sikhs as a backdrop, misidentifying them in the process. They all look same, massah, here, use the generic other!

To be absolutely clear, I am not saying “beat them up, not us!” I find that kind of talk completely abhorrent. If I was producing the segment, I would have used one of the targets as a backdrop rather than a mosque, precisely because of the fear of hate crimes and vandalism.

To their credit, Fox News responded and apologized when contacted by SALDEF:

In an email to SALDEF, the Fox News Correspondent noted, “I did pull our entire crew into the satellite truck and explained to them the difference between a Gurdwara and a mosque. I can assure you they realized the gravity of this situation. I’m very, very sorry. “

Additionally… John Stack, a FOX NEWS Vice President, … expressed similar regret in the mistake and vowed to make a personal inquiry into the matter to assure that it would not happen again. [Link]

By the way, if you need further evidence as to why “beat them up, not us” is not just morally bankrupt but also tactically ineffective as a response to hate crimes, it turns out that even in multicultural Canada, bigots are ignorant:

Hindu temples, including those where Guyanese worship, were attacked in Toronto last week. The temples were apparently mistaken for mosques and the Hindu worshippers as Muslims. [Link]

All hate crimes are bad, people, all of them (And that includes terrorism). Don’t make Pastor Niemöller return from the dead to kick your kundi.

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