Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Life after Stiffness

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Over the past year, whenever the topic of books comes up, I grab whomever I am speaking to by the collar and hiss just one word: “Stiff.”  You have to read this book.  This is quite ironic since the person who finally gave me the book for my birthday tried unsuccessfully for about 6 months to get me to buy it on my own.  Who the hell would want to read a book about dead bodies?  The full title, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadaver,” is an entire book of non-fiction that pays homage (through use of a unique and witty brand of dark humor) to the unlikeliest of heroes:  the human cadaver (see previous SM post).  SM tipster Shailaja informs me that the author, Mary Roach, is following up her brilliant book with the most logical sequel possible.  The New York Times reviews SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife:

Mary Roach’s journey into the occult takes her to as many strange places as she can scare up. Having written a humorous book about corpses (“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”), Ms. Roach has now ventured one step further into the unknown. On this new journey, she is supposedly searching for answers to life’s great questions about the migration of the soul. But readers of “Stiff” know what to expect: the author is looking for quacks.

Those quacks are sitting ducks for Ms. Roach’s fine-tuned sense of the absurd. So Ms. Roach studies ectoplasm, notes that it looks like woven material and learns of a researcher who in 1921 asked of disembodied spirits: “Have you a loom in your world?”

She visits India to look for firsthand evidence that spirits return. (This trip was worth it for the chapter title alone. It is called “You Again: A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation.”) She finds scientists who have identified the weight lost by a dying person and notes that a recent movie title used the metric version of that figure, “21 Grams.” (“Who’s going to go see a movie called ‘Point Seven Five Ounces’?” she asks.) She cites two Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst, and notes that one worked with a Ouija board. She hopes that “the question ‘What is my full name and that of my partner?’ was never posed.” And she digs up the fact that Elizabeth Taylor claimed to have had a near-death experience but was sent back to the land of the living by one of her husbands, Mike Todd, then adds: “Whether this was done for her benefit or his is not clear.”

I can’t wait.  Each chapter in Stiff can be read almost as an independent essay.  I assume she will follow this model for Spook as well.

In “The Ordinances of Manu,” a legal text based on Vedic scripture that dates to A.D. 500, she finds that a rogue Brahman may be forced to reincarnate as “the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit.”

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A Mumbaikar on Delhi

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A Mumbaikar takes a dig at Delhi, where my family’s from, in a long-running intranational rivalry (thanks, Amardeep). It’s more bare-knuckled than Suketu Mehta’s usual measured style, I like.

Most Indians think about Delhi as a place where women are never completely safe, where the pollution is a large mattress over the city in the winter, and where crazed ministers’ sons pull out guns at the slightest provocation… [Link]

Of course, many Dilliwale think of Delhi quite prosaically as home, and of Bombay as debauchery central: gangsters, bar girls and filmi melodrama. For those stereotypes, we can thank Mr. Mehta

Many Indians, especially in the Northeast, consider it the citadel of the new Indian imperialism… Bombay and Delhi, in particular, have never quite adjusted to the fact that they share the same country. They are India’s New York and Washington, tolerating each other…

When people say nice things about Delhi, it is usually about North Delhi–a very Indian city, with Punjabi families living in ramshackle houses with multiple new additions, sitting on cots under tubelights thick with insects and the lizards feasting on them… [Link]

Or those compliments are about Delhi’s new subway.

I’ve spent many pleasant hours in barsaatis drinking cheap rum with expensively educated friends. And I’ve gone to many a cocktail party at Problem Row… the World Bank, the United Nations… Save the Children, where everybody discusses what problem they specialise in. “I’m in malaria, what about you?”…

Delhi, unlike Bombay, is not an island; people can live very far from their inferiors… I came to think of Delhi as an Endless City… When it is very quiet you can hear the screams of the slaughter of Timur the Lame, blending into the screams of the slaughter of the Sikhs just 21 years ago. [Link]

Melodramatic much? And when it’s quiet in Bombay, you can hear the whine of starlets. It’s blood-curdling, I tell you.

Here’s more on Timur Leng / Tamerlane, the sacking of Delhi and Timur’s capital city, Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan).

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“Anna asks. We write. Friday afternoon :)”

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Once upon a time…well, it was actually just a week ago, a beloved Sepia personality asked:

yay! I love Fast Fiction Fridays at the Mutiny. Can we do it again next week?

Of course we can, darling. “55 Fiction Friday” is a meme I’ve been faithful to for a while; I’m happy to infect the Mutiny with it.

For those of you who missed last week’s brilliance and have no idea what I’m going on about, the idea behind “Fast Fiction” is simple:

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length…One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

More than a few bloggers have been writing a piece of nanofiction every Friday, for weeks.

I was elated at the response that my post on this meme inspired– comment after comment containing perfect little gems of story– we’d be crazy NOT to create a tradition out of such goodness.

What goodness it was. By the time I closed comments at the end of the weekend (a practice I think I’ll continue), we were in the triple digits.

Umair made me lightheaded when he channeled the book I love most:

Transported back to 1951, the thought of making money by betting on cricket matches yet to happen was for some strange reason furthest from my mind, which should give you a sense of just how at home I felt with the whole affair. But then: “I wish she’d married either Kabir or Amit. . .”

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Salsa Diplomacy

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Most have heard the old adage that no two countries that have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.

In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman proposed The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, observing that no two countries with a McDonald’s franchise had ever gone to war with one another, a version of the democratic peace theory. Shortly after the book was published, the NATO bombing of Serbia proved an exception to the theory, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system “symbolised by McDonald’s” (Friedman 2000: 252-253). [Link]

A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor asks, “Why not Salsa?”  Once those hip start swinging who would want to fight?

What if it could be proved that no two nations that play salsa music have ever declared war on each other?

Some of the best salsa music in the Middle East comes from Egypt and Israel, for instance. Both nations have been at peace since 1979, the same period when salsa began to take hold.

The first time I heard Arabic salsa music, I was in a taxi in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, racing to catch a connecting flight to Afghanistan. The taxi driver, a Pakistani, was playing an incredible song on his radio. First came the Latin rhythms on bongos, then the rush of flamenco guitars. It sounded like the sort of dance music I grew up listening to in south Texas but with a distinctly Middle Eastern trill of the voice and the guttural lyrics that could only be Arabic.

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I’m not from around here

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This billboard of TMBWITW sits at the corner of Dundas and Yonge St. in downtown Toronto. Ironically, I was in that city attending the wedding of a man who’s infamous because of the same kind of billboard.

My buddy ‘Milind Das’ (not his real name, for reasons which will become clear) is a Canadian-born desi living in London. He used to work in India as a toney management consultant with an expat package. He often flew between Delhi and Bombay for business meetings at dawn. Early one morning, before sunrise, Milind witnessed an ethereal phantom in a white sari emerging from the fog at Indira Gandhi International. She was a young woman with large eyes, pleasant-looking but not overpoweringly so. She’d covered her hair and much of her face with the end of her sari and was accompanied by an elderly, glowering Cerberus.

Milind settled into his first class seat, pulled out his laptop and began working on a spreadsheet. The watchdog positioned herself grimly between him and her ward. Over the next two hours, her expression changed. At first it was, ‘Don’t even think about talking to my daughter.’ As the minutes ticked by and Milind remained oblivious to her beauty, it became, ‘Why the hell aren’t you talking to my daughter?’

Milind noticed the flight attendants were especially attentive that morning. When the flight ended, he shared a ride into town with one of the attendants whom he’d befriended. (Modesty forbids us from asking about that tale.) She asked him excitedly whether he’d seen the actress.

‘What actress?’

At that very instant, the cab was passing below a supersized Bollywood billboard. The aeronymph stared at him incredulously and pointed up in the air. And that’s how our young swain met The (Second) Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

I trust it’s clear why we must mask Milind’s identity. Otherwise, half a billion desi men would hunt him down for his Bolly ignorance. Of course, he found his own TMBWITW and, 96 hours ago, married her. I’m happy to report that ‘Mrs. Das’ lives up to the name.

Related post here.

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Curry Roots

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In 1810, Sake Dean Mahomed opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in central London. This was the UK’s first curry house, and it was an idea ahead of its time.

In 1810 he opened the Hindoostane Coffee House serving Hookha with real Chilm tobacco and Indian-style dishes. The premises is now a building called Carlton House.

Mr Mahomed’s plan had been to serve “Indianised” British food which would appeal to the Indian aristocracy in London as well as British people who had returned from India, he said.

“The Indian aristocracy however would not come out to eat in the restaurant because they had chefs at home cooking more authentic food – it was just not a big enough draw to come out.” [Link]

Unable to draw either brown or white diners, he was forced to declare bankruptcy two years later in 1812.

While his restaurant was a bust, Sake Dean Mohamed recovered and went on to further success. He opened up a “health resort” (or sorts) in Brighton, specializing in “shampooing” — steam room massage.

He received the ultimate accolade by being appointed Shampooing Surgeon to both George IV and William IV. [Link]

Mohamed seems to have been quite a colorful character. He joined the East India Company Army at 11, and rose all the way to the rank of captain. He served as a “trainee surgeon” although other accounts also indicate that he fought in a series of campaigns.

He emigrated to Ireland in 1786, when he was 25. There he wrote his first book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, making him the first Indian to have a book published in English. He also “ran away with” an Irish woman who became his wife, Jane Mahomet.

His second book, published in 1820, was called “Shampooing; or benefits resulting from the use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath” and went into 3 editions. “He even had poems written in his honour.”

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Favorite Curries

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Last week’s first ever British Curry Awards ceremony took place in a typically desi fashion – over dinner, with the food served late. Curry is big business in the UK, with restaurants serving 2.5 million customers a week and grossing £3.2 billion a year. The British invaded India in the 19th century with gunpowder, now we have … transformed whole swathes of British society with curry powder

The event was similarly a big deal, with 1,200 people in attendance in the Ballroom of London’s swanky Grosvenor House Hotel. It was televised to 126 countries around the world and no less a personage than Tony Blair sent a message of support.

The industry refers to itself as “Curry” or “Spice” and not as “Indian food” because 95% of the restaurants are owned by Bangladeshis. In fact, the awards ceremony was organized by the “Guild of Bangladeshi Restaurateurs.”

In a swaggering speech, Sir Gulam Noon (a leader in the ready made meals industry) said:

“The British invaded India in the 19th century with gunpowder, now we have come back and a century later landed in the UK and transformed whole swathes of British society with curry powder. Without the success of the curry restaurant I could not have built my business to what it is today. I have ridden on the back of your achievements.” In a slight exaggeration, Noon urged his audience to celebrate the vibrancy of their business tonight but not to forget to open for business tomorrow evening on time otherwise, as he claimed, half the British population would be starving. [Link]

So, what do you serve over a thousand chefs and food entrepreneurs for dinner? Madhu’s of Southall “brought out a series of dishes many in the room have established as British culinary favourites:”

chicken tikka; masala fried tilapia flown in from Lake Victoria in Kenya, that other bastion of the British Empire; chicken tikka masala; rogan josh; delicious aloo ravia, small aubergines stewed with new potatoes; vegetable biriani and terrific tandoori naan bread. [Link]

The awards for the night went to: Continue reading →

Love and Longing in 1225 Pages

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Vikram Chandra, the acclaimed author of Love and Longing in Bombay, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and co-author with Suketu Mehta of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, has apparently been at the center of a vicious bidding war for publishing rights over his next novel, which according to his website is due to be released in the fall of 2006.

An untitled, 1,225-page epic set in India and billed as a combination of “The Godfather” and a Victorian Gothic novel will be released next year by HarperCollins after a bidding war involving six publishers. “It’s an extraordinarily compelling page turner that also happens to be a major work of literature,” HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham told The Associated Press on Monday. A source close to the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the deal was worth $1 million.

(It could be closer to 1.3 million.)

This novel, according to the AP story has been in the works for the past seven years. The officialy yet-to-be-titled novel centers on organized crime in modern Bombay and takes on “religion, politics, money, corruption, idealism, family, loyalty, and betrayal. All things near and dear to Mumbai.

I know, I know, another book on the Mumbai underworld. But I must admit, I am secretly very excited for this to come out for two reasons: I think there is still a lot to be written about the underworld, and it has been too long since I have read some good South Asian fiction. Continue reading →

War as mental illness

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The War Within turned out every bit as clichéd as the Voice critic had said. It is indeed a high-def film (thanks, Mark) and not as muddy as the typical DV release. (I have two quarrels with the early days of digital filmmaking: one, regular DV doesn’t yet simulate the saturation, crispness and ‘movie look’ of film, though it inevitably will; and two, digital projection really hoses those who sit up close, like me, because of pixelation. We want to be the first to receive the images from the screen, said Bernardo Bertolucci’s pretentious Dreamers, but unlike a French cine buff, for me it’s simply about max res. And always-available seats.)

This plot, penned by lead actor Ayad Akhtar, is as single-threaded and simplistic as anything you’d see on the nature channel. And that’s not just due to budget, it’s due to writing. Compare to the richness of the action in the low-budget Monsoon Wedding.

Whenever you see a character running around with a white SO and a bottle of whiskey, you know s/he’s a Bad Muslim. Hi Pardes, hi Purab Aur Pachhim! Venerable jungle fever hottie Sarita Choudhury, who in Mississippi Masala ignored the no-smoking-in-bed rule, is surprisingly believable as an older auntie. But she struggles with her Urdu accent — are there really no desi accent coaches? Shelley Malil in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin had just as hard a time. I smell opportunity for some underemployed dramati.

Nandana Sen, in all her Porsche-eyed, Nubian-profiled glory, is given little to do. Firdous Bamji, who plays the terrorist’s unsuspecting batchmate, looks like a wounded, Trojan Eric Bana. Ajay Naidu and Aasif Mandvi appear in only a single scene. When you bend Naidu’s reflective cranium over a mirror, you see a tattoo saying U. BIQUITOUS; after this movie, it reads WASTED.

The movie suffers from amateurish acting and slack editing that leaves seconds ticking in between characters’ reactions. In a pivotal scene toward the end, the baby-faced killer’s reaction seem totally implausible. This flick doesn’t just telegraph its intentions, it puts out a press release, posts them to a blog and pings IceRocket.

The movie’s subject matter left me totally conflicted. On one hand, there’s the inevitable exoticizing of Islam, not by Akhtar but by an American audience’s gaze. It reminds me of the idiots who post frothing, right-wing rants in our comments quoting wingnut Web sites. Try taking off the white hood, provocateur pusses. Dammit, we’ve lived among a hundred and fifty million Muslims in India. Unlike you, we know them, we understand them, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends; and except for those whose conservatism is near-Hasidic, most are utterly unremarkable.

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If you dare, write short-shorts

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Today is Friday and that means that at some point in the next 21 hours, I’m going to write 55 words which contain an entire story. I’m not that big on memes but this one (“55 Fiction Fridays”) is precious to me, because it reminds me of writing exercises and workshops and english minor-y goodness. Por ejemplo:

She nervously adjusted her sari, hoping no one noticed. So far, the night had gone flawlessly; she had made a good impression on everyone, she could just tell.

The older woman at the table noted how silk was tugged upwards. Taking a delicate sip of tea, she thought, “She’s not good enough for our family.”

I’ve consistently written one of these uber-short shorts for weeks now, but last week was the first time a fellow mutineer noticed. Abhi’s interest in the concept of nanofiction made me ponder the possibility that some of YOU would find it fascinating as well. If I further needed to justify making a mutiny out of it, know this: the good Professor Guest Blogger himself reads my “55” and I am aware of this because he referenced one at the last NYC meetup. Not that I need to defend it or anything… 😉

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length.[wiki]

That Hemingway example is ridiculously inspiring. One day I want to write a short that short. I don’t even know if there is a name for a short so short. There is, however, a name for the type of writing this meme encourages:

One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

The virus is spreading throughout the brown blogosphere. SM readers Maisnon, Andrea and Chai are the three whom I go out of my way to check on (hee! no pressure, kids!), but if you decide to try it, please leave a link to your work of art in the comments. I’ll be happy if you flash me. 🙂 Continue reading →