Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Beebful of Russell

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Here’s yet another Russell Peters comedy clip. A thinner Peters makes an appearance on the Beeb and does a shout-out to Meera Syal, who’s sitting in the front row.

Madhuri Dixit and Vinod Khanna in Dayavaan

You’ve probably heard most of the material before, but there’s a cute joke about what porn would be like if it conformed to the standards of Bollywood censors. Contrary to popular belief, there have been oodles of smooches in Bollywood films, including by the faux-virginal Rai, and even some toplessness.

Way back in 1933, Devika Rani shocked people with her lingering kiss with Himanshu Rai in Karma. [Link]

… [Dimple Kapadia] created as big a splash with her comeback in Saagar when she flashed her exposed breasts to the camera for a few quick frames… a shocking first for a mainstream actress in a Bollywood film. [Link]

Mrs. Kapadia presents! This gallery of kisses through Bollywood history is way too rrro-man-tik to be saved for V Day.

For readers of different suasion, try Dosti: Friends Forever (trailer). Bobby Deol and Akshay Kumar gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, vowing eternal love and loyalty… on motorcycles. They were trying for ‘Yeh Dosti’ from Sholay, with Deol as the younger Dharmendra. What they got instead was Brokeback Hillstation. A film culture which only mentions gays when ridiculing them, affords lots of room for hot hetero phrendship.

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We are the World, We are South Asian

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Dear () :

First, allow me to congratulate you on your excessively clever handle. Normally, I’d be jumping out of my chair like the little cartoon man who signifies “stellar!” for the San Francisco Chronicle’s arts reviews, out of appreciation of your FANTASTIC taste in music, but I am almost 99.9% certain that you weren’t paying tribute to a three-year old release from Sigur Ros with the whole empty parentheses schtick.

Second, allow me to even more sarcastically congratulate you on your attempt at incisive commentary, issued in support of the link you wanted to tip us to…ouch, I think it gave me an owie:

Islamic terrorists attack IISc in Bangalore and shoot a professor dead. Such beautiful gift from our loving South Asian brothers deserve a mention on this blog….or perhaps you’d choose to bury your head in the sand and pretend that this doesn’t/didn’t/won’t happen.

Not.

This trifling game is getting so old, I can pay a premium for it (still in the original box! mint!) on eBay. This Mutiny is brown. We like the term “South Asian“. We write about stuff that happens in the countries that surround India. We care. If you don’t, then that’s unfortunate. Getting snide in an ANONYMOUS tip isn’t going to change our minds, surely you had to be aware of that. If not, let this “musing” of mine clue you in: inclusiveness is how we roll, even though every one of our parents once had an Indian passport and exactly eight dollars in their pocket, upon landing at JFK. Continue reading →

DhamaalSF touring…. India

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Any self-respecting, well-connected desi in SF has found himself at a DhamaalSF party or 2 over the years. Dhamaal’s recent Halloween party, for example, was a world-beater – at least when it came to mutinous content. Alas, the denizens of the city by the bay will have to go a while longer before the next one. Our boyz are back in da homeland –

Dhamaal Soundsystem, one of America’s most vibrant South Asian club performers and music bands, is currently touring India, and plans to set dance floors on fire in Mumbai, Goa and New Delhi.

San Francisco’s native sons are taking on the world with their unique twist on South Asian soundz –

The San Francisco-based group, which is a rage among alternative and South Asian music lovers in the US, consists of 20-odd members, including technicians, who trace their roots to different parts of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.

“Our goal is to showcase South Asian or sub-continental music, including sufi, Hindustani and Carnatic classical with a Western perspective,” Maneesh Kenia, who set up Dhamaal in 1999 with DJ and producer Janaka Selekta, told IANS.

…”Please do not perceive us as another group which just hitchhikes on Bollywood remixes and Bhangra-hip hop,” said Maneesh, an Indian American who quit his career in music software to follow his passion.

DNA India gives us a few blurbs about the origins of this veritable SF institution –

Dhamaal was born when a few friends got together and hosted a house party seven years ago. “We’re a 20 strong group and we do the whole live experience with the DJs, video, artistry, etc,” says Dhruv.

Their parties are renowned for the eclectic mix of desi’s, non-desi’s, artistes, techies (we’re in SF, afterall), and alterna-culture fans across the Bay Area. Dhamaal’s website, gallery, and, most importantly, music clips can be found on their website – http://www.dhamaalsf.com/.

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Long overdue

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A great many tipsters are informing us that People Magazine has included an Indian American as one of its Sexiest Men Alive. Yeah, he’s half Indian and he is “sexy.” So what, I say? That doesn’t really seem that blog-worthy to me. However, what eventually convinced me as to the importance of getting this story out to the people isn’t the fact that he is representing Indian Americans, but rather that he is a proxy for the previously unacknowledged sexiness of all geologists in the Earth and Space Sciences Departments of schools in the University of California system. Meet Michael Manga:

People magazine has featured a geophysicist of Indian origin alongside the likes of U2 frontman Bono in the ‘Smart Guys’ section of its ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ issue.

Michael Manga, a 37-year-old geology professor of UC Berkeley, who won the $500,000 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant earlier in 2005, shares pages with stars like Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Orlando Bloom among others.

“My first inclination, of course, was to say no, because that’s not how I perceive myself,” Manga, father of two boys, said. “But it is a way to let people know about science and that it is OK to be a scientist.” [link]

I think it is a particularly sad commentary on the decadence of our culture that it has taken THIS long to point out that there are in fact “sexy” Indian geologists that deserve to share the same page as Bono.

Manga was one of only two men in academia admitted to the ranks of America’s dreamiest dudes. “That’s why I agreed to do this,” he explains.

“I wanted to get information out to people who wouldn’t normally hear or see anything about science.”

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WaPo’s Front Page: “Redskins Heat Up in December”

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My roommate just brought in the paper and exclaimed, “LOOK!”. I thought I was going to see a picture of an adorable little angel in some DC-area Christmas pageant, a put-upon dog wearing antlers or Santa water-skiing on the Potomac…what landed in my lap was a lot cooler (and way unexpected). I knew Redskins mania had been taking over my city, and NFL fans are a devoted lot, but I think it’s extra cute to sport Redskins Red this way. 🙂

After posting this a few minutes ago, I thought, “I’ll bet someone sent this in as a tip”. Ah, but you readers never disappoint. A full hour ago, AM wrote:

The print edition of the post features a big photo from the redskins game yesterday showing Santana Moss after leaping into the stands – nearly in the center of the picture is a man in a sporty burgundy dastar. I was at the game as well and was impressed by the variety of fans – no longer the homogeneous crowd of the early years of the NFL.

I’m impressed, too. But I’m still a Niners girl, now and always. 😉 Continue reading →

The story of a fisherman

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This morning, NPR’s weekly segment on the StoryCorps Project, featured a Sri Lankan couple speaking about the tsunami. I woke up to it and got a little misty eyed by the chemistry between the two (and the fact that their names rhyme).

As we approach the tsunami’s one-year anniversary, we bring you an interview between husband and wife Prianga and Eranga Pieris.

The couple, who currently live in New York, are originally from Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people died in the disaster.

They sing a song that Prianga wrote in honor of the sea and their beloved homeland. It tells the story of a fisherman — and the woman who loves him.

I don’t have much to say about it. I just thought some of you may appreciate it as much as I did. Listen. Continue reading →

About last night

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A Sikh, a Sri Lankan and a regular Joginder walk into a Whole Foods café. Cicatrix has her hair blown straight and at this very moment can pass for brown Japanese. I’m sometimes confused with Latino. But Ennis the turbaned Sikh? People recognize. There’s no mistaking where he’s from.

Ennis makes a food run downstairs. Here’s what he hears in the sushi line: ‘Sat sri akal, sardarji!’ It’s coming from the chefs rolling seaweed serpents behind a chic bar. They’re actually Tibetan, not Japanese. They say they get hired to work the sushi counter because ‘assi chinki lagde ne’ (we look East Asian).

So Punjabi-speaking Tibetans pass for Japanese by resembling the Chinese because it fools Americans. It’s like Sepia-ites inventing black ancestry to win street cred in North Dakota

The conversation turns to accused shooter Biswanath Halder, a longtime ranter on Usenet (one prescient 1993 reply was titled ‘Mr. Biswanath Halder, please calm down‘). There’s disbelief over the mechanics of the rampage. I explain that a thousand rounds don’t take much space at all. Ten small boxes, neatly packed as chocolates. The turbaned man looks worried and says, ‘Keep your voice down.’ It’s just a Sri Lankan, a turbaned guy and a pajamahedeen shootin’ the shit, saying things now off-limits to brown people in public.

Related posts: Indian enough, The talented Mr. Rupinder, Shazia Deen / Dancing Queen

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An American cannibal amongst the Aghori

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Last week Bong Breaker contended that if there is a post on Sepia Mutiny about “Raw meat” then chances are that it may be one written by me. I hate to be predictable but I hate to disappoint even more. An SM tipster sends us the following article about cannibalism in India from Student Newspaper.org:

As we shared a bumpy auto-rickshaw journey between two North Indian villages, I began to realise that the frail old man I was rubbing thighs with was in fact a cannibal who claimed that babies taste “fresh” whereas the corpses of older people have a “stringy texture like wood”. Gary Stevenson (the name he used to introduce himself) then proceeded to illustrate and justify his preference for younger human flesh through the comparison of superior-tasting lamb over mutton…

Once we were sitting comfortably, Stevenson eagerly whipped out the skull of a young girl that he “dragged out of the Ganges” and carries with him at all times, proudly stroking the smooth bone and proclaiming the cranium to be the finest from his expansive collection. Licking his lips, my congenial cannibal enthusiastically described the sensation of eating his own species: “Human flesh smells like rawhide and tastes like pork. The fingers are the most succulent part,” declaring the practice of devouring corpse meat to be a sacred primordial ritual which still occurs amongst radical Hindu Aghoris in certain parts of India.

Houston-born Stevenson [a.k.a. Kapal Nath], who has come to be known as the “American Aghori”, told me of how he has roamed India for years in search of enlightenment, feasting on the remains of the Hindu dead “as often as possible…” [Link]

I didn’t know that there were any Hindu cannibals. It seems like such a contradiction in terms at its face. At first the only thing I could find was that National Geographic once featured a segment about them and that Wikipedia has a short entry about their ways:

A sect who them selves relates to the order of lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Aghori means non-terrifying in Sanskrit. The sect is peculiar with its rituals and way of life. This extremely shy and secretive community is known to live in the graveyards, wearing the ash from the pyre, use human bone from the graveyards for the rituals.

The sect dates back to around 1000 A.D., and practices cannibalism in the belief that eating human flesh confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging.

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Beauty and the Geek Redux

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A while ago we blogged about this picture of Vishwanath Anand and model Carmen Kass playing chess.

While calling for caption nominations for this photo, Ennis suggested “Beauty and the Geek.” That desi men are portrayed as geeks/dorks/nerds isn’t a surprise. Afterall, there are many of us that possess a high degree of intellect, but lack an equal level of social grace. This often makes mingling with members of the opposite sex, or anyone for that matter, quite difficult and awkward. It seems that Ashton Kutcher and his Punk’d buddy and co-creator Adam Goldberg are playing on this stereotype in the second season of their apparently successful, and aptly titled reality show, “Beauty and the Geek,” which airs on the WB. The new season, which will begin airing at 9 pm, on Thursday January 12, apparently features a sepia geek, Ankur, an MIT graduate and his sex-kitten-partner Jennipher, who while learning the various ways one can spell Jennifer, spends her time as a camp counselor.

To shave or not to shave, that is the question.

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Posted in TV

NSFW, But for Temple

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While writing my last post, I ran across an article about trying to reduce the number of families who had their daughters become devadasis. I was fairly sure that I knew what that meant, but Googled for confirmation and thus saw this NOT SAFE FOR WORK site, which was the third hit. Abhi blogged about it previously here.

I don’t want to be putting down someone whose circumstances and mindset I’m only gleaning from a website, but for a devadasi to operate for personal profit seems rather irregular. I suppose this independence removes it from the most objectionable aspects of the “traditional” devadasi system as still practiced today. Yet to be doing it so differently while working under the same name worries me, because that kind of definitional blurring often works to bury the problematic actions under the newly legitimized ones. Kama dismisses the question of why she isn’t working in a temple with “For many years it has been illegal to leave girls in the temple because of the many problems that have become associated with the poverty and exploitation of many Devadasi.” This answer seems to minimize the inherent problems of temple prostitution. Continue reading →