Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Monday Movie

Posted on by

sepiafilm.jpg.jpg

Tired of Harold and Kumar? Want a desi film that asks more than “Where’s the Party, Yaar?” You’re in luck if you live in NY, because ImaginAsian Theater is screening Kaya Taran tonight at 7pm, followed by a discussion with the Director, Shashi Kumar. From the website (thanks Saurav!):

<

blockquote> The film straddles two traumatic events in recent Indian history: the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the anti Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002…The film essentially deals with the dilemma of identity in a multicultural society that, every so often, turns volatile. Many aspects of the highly charged contemporary discourse find resonances in the film: the religious divide, the tyranny of the majority, the issue of religious conversions, the alienation of tribals from their hereditary land.[link]

Kaya Taran won the Aravindan Puraskaram award in 2004. If the description above sounds a bit heavy, check out the cast! The 100% fresh Bandit Queen stars: sepiakaya.jpg.jpg

The 107-minute-long film…is based on the Malayalam writer N. S. Madhavan’s short story titled “When Big Trees Fall”, set in the background of the anti-Sikh riots in 1984. The cast includes Seema Biswas, Angad Bedi, Neelambari Bhattacharya and Neetha Mohindra.[link]

TODAY, 7pm, @ImaginAsian Theatre, 239 59th Street NY, NY 10022. Continue reading →

Musharraf on ‘60 Minutes’ (updated)

Posted on by

A 60 Minutes segment tonight on the search for Osama bin Laden needled Musharraf and the head of Pakistan’s ISI on their strategy to play the U.S. for arms and aid.

The reporter asked if they would hold bin Laden’s capture back for maximum publicity or move him to Afghanistan so Dubya could take credit. Musharraf laughed uncomfortably and stuttered a reply. He then wisecracked, ‘But we would like to take the money part.’

The interviewer asked, ‘The $25 million [reward]?’

Musharraf: ‘Not bad. Good money.’

Check out the subtitle during the bin Laden discussion. Is that a show promo, or political commentary?

Watch the clip (19 MB DivX; you need a BitTorrent downloader: Windows, Mac). Here’s the press release.

Update: Here’s who CBS misidentifies as Musharraf on their Web site. Apparently they’ve been taking lessons from both the Times of India and George W.:

Interviewer: “Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?” …

Bush: “General. I can’t name the general. General.”

Interviewer: “And the prime minister of India?”

Bush: “The new prime minister of India is – (pause) No… Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico?”

Interviewer: “No sir, but I would say to that, I’m not running for President…” [Link]

Continue reading →

A chilly Diwali

Posted on by

Manhattan celebrates Diwali next Sunday, October 2nd at the South Street Seaport. Come enjoy bhangra, chaat, Air-India fireworks (not the Flight 182 kind) and life insurance booths next to the Brooklyn Bridge.

The chilly Seaport is a moorage for tall ships in the shadow of azure skyscrapers by Wall Street. It’s both an anachronism (a mall these days) and an odd spot for the celebration, evoking the Americans dressed as Indians who dumped tea in Boston Harbor.

Real Indians would never waste perfectly good tea. And it would probably be Lipton.

Previous post here. Related posts: one, two, three.

Continue reading →

Roll bounce

Posted on by

Forbes magazine says audiophiles are apeshit over a cheap, $30 amp which sound as clear as high-end competitors. It’s the audiophile version of Two-Buck Chuck:

… the T-Amp was nothing to brag about, just a… battery-powered amplifier that hooks up to chintzy cardboard speakers. A firm called Sonic Impact Technologies introduced it to no acclaim in 2003. Then orders suddenly took off last fall, surging from a hundred to a thousand units a week…

… audiophiles were raving about the T-Amp on the Internet, claiming this tiny plastic wedge produced music as sweet-sounding as amplifiers costing thousands of dollars. The customer had “hooked it up to an $18,000 pair of speakers and a $6,000 CD player,” Bracke says. A reviewer on a Web site in Italy called the T-Amp the most amazing product in 25 years. And an online cottage industry had sprung up around the T-Amp, with companies such as Red Wine Audio, in Auburn, Massachusetts, stuffing the electronic guts of the plastic amps into sleek metal cases and selling them for up to $1,200… [Link]

The secret to this amp is an innovative audio chipset designed by an entrepreneur named Adya Tripathi. Is he the new Amar Bose?

Tripath’s founder, Adya Tripathi, figured out a way to make a digital amplifier that produces very little distortion. Tripathi, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a veteran of National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, found that part of the trick involves pulsing on and off at far higher rates–millions of times per second… Tripath’s higher pulse rate creates more chances to offset signal distortion by applying feedback… The T-Amp uses Tripath’s lowest-end chip… which puts out 15 watts of power and costs $3… [Link]

Tripathi is from Benares:

The advance comes from a little chip produced by Tripath Technology Inc., a 150-employee company in Santa Clara, Calif. It was founded in 1995 by Adya S. Tripathi, a 48-year-old engineer from the holy city of Varanasi… Before taking the company public… Tripathi secured $50 million in funding from such high-tech heavyweights as Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. [Link]

This is when I expect a certain mutineer to roll into Adya uncle’s office as a long-lost relative and then bounce, saying goodbye to the sucka mutineers who fly economy

Continue reading →

Goyal’s toils

Posted on by

Raghubir Goyal the Foil, the One-Track Uncle called on by White House press secretaries to evade tough questioning, shows up in a Daily Show segment. ‘Go ahead, Goyal,’ says the spokesman.

‘My question is in connection with the Prime Minister of India’s visit on Monday…’ he begins, sidetracking the preceding questions about domestic politics. Old faithful.

Watch the clip, he’s at 4:29.

Keep watching to see the other reliable escape hatch. Lester Kinsolving is the resident crank from WCBM Radio. A female reporter sits behind him, smirking and exchanging looks with other reporters while he asks a long, bizarre question about whether Dubya agrees with emperor Constantine’s fourth-century Christian theology.

Dude, have a little respect. I think we can safely assume POTUS knows about Constantine.

It had Rachel Weisz and Keanu Reeves and, like, totally rawked.

Previous post here.

Continue reading →

Bombay, the Mehta Way

Posted on by

In case you missed it in hardcover, Maximum City will be out in paperback next Tuesday. sepiabook2.jpg

I will spare you my opinion of the book since Suketu Mehta appears to be Sepia regular, but just for those who can’t get enough, the Columbia Journalism Review runs a highly entertaining interview with Mehta in next month’s issue.

His interviewing technique:

I was writing as I was speaking to these people. IÂ’d bring out my laptop.. one of their hit men might say, ‘You know, we had a job to kill somebody for their laptop last week.Â’ And IÂ’d say, ‘Yes, IÂ’m aware of that” …. I noticed this subliminal thing started happening where as they spoke, I was literally typing. My fingers were dancing, and they would look at me and pick up these cues from when IÂ’m typing or not. Now, in India the problem isnÂ’t getting people to talk, itÂ’s getting them to shut up or to stick to the topic. And I didnÂ’t have to tell them to stick to the topic, but..when they wandered off into a tangent IÂ’d still be nodding, but my fingers werenÂ’t dancing. And so they would, without my ever having to say anything to them, come back to the topic that I was interested in…

Writing as self-actualization:

Each chapter was a journey into myself, into my weaknesses and my strengths. And I asked myself, Why was I attracted to these tough boys? And itÂ’s because in school I was a weedy kid, and I always looked up to the tough boys. The short and the smart sat at the front of the class….in the back were the people who had failed the grade and were taking it again or the really tall kids and we called them the LLBs — the Lords of the Last Bench. And I always looked up to these guys. These were the ones who were good at cricket, could get the girls. And here they were — they were grown up, and they were my protectors.

Even a hitman’s got a conscience:

I remember one of the hit men saying, ‘It used to happen that after I killed, the soul of the man I kill will come and sit on my chest. But then a Muslim gangster taught me to sleep in a fetal position with my back to the door, so the soul doesn’t have access to my chest so I can sleep peacefully.’ Each one of them had different rationalizations, including the police.

Continue reading →

Big Desi TV Week

Posted on by

This American television season-premiere week for some reason has been filled with an unprecedented number of desis. Not including the various desis already appearing as regulars on television series, the week began with Indira Varma on Rome, Toral on the apprentice, and relative newcomer Maulik Pancholy on the new Showtime series Weeds, which airs Monday’s at 10 pm.   Pancholy, who was previously seen in Hitch, and appeared as various generic brown characters in a handful of sitcoms (including Jack and Jill and the hilarious Tracey Takes On), scored a recurring guest role on Weeds, which stars Mary-Louise Parker and Kevin Nealon. A bit early to say, but could Pancholy be the next Kal Penn?


Incidentally, Pancholy is starring in the off-Broadway play, India-Awaiting, which opens for previews on October 15, 2005 at the Samuel Beckett Theater.

See Manish’s previous post on Pancholy here.

Continue reading →

Congressman Bhakta??

Posted on by

Don’t forget to set those TiVos because tonight marks the debut of Season IV of The Apprentice.  As previously reported, Toral Mehta will make her debut.  Guess who just decided to steal the spotlight?  That’s right. The Raj is back (thanks for the tip “Bella”):

Raj Bhakta, former contestant on Donald Trump’s reality show, said he is contemplating challenging Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz in next year’s election for the 13th District.

“I think Allyson Schwartz is a formidable opponent, clearly. At the same time, I think she’s beatable,” Bhakta said, adding that he wants to run “because I think it’s very important to have a fresh, progressive, conservative voice representing the parts of the country that are not necessarily blue and not necessarily red.”

Bhakta, a 29-year-old businessman from the Fort Washington area, is a Republican. He said he has talked to Montgomery County GOP chairman Ken Davis and Philadelphia GOP leader Vito Canuso and plans to go to Washington, D.C., next week to talk to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Davis – who said he never watched “The Apprentice” – said he had no trouble taking Bhakta seriously.

“Any candidate who decides to do this and is as organized and as thoughtful as I think he is, you have to take them seriously,” Davis said Tuesday. “He has a lot of ideas, and he’s a very bright young man. I think he is a serious candidate.”

What would Raj stand for?  If you remember I previously blogged about his political venture the Coalition for the Advancement of the Republic.  Doesn’t seem like he has added much to the website though.

Before he can hammer his opinions into a campaign platform, however, Bhakta said he knows he has a monumental task: figuring out where the cash will come from.

“Everywhere I’ve gone, even before they ask me what I believe, they ask how much money I can raise,” Bhakta said. “For one district in Congress, to know that $10 million could be spent on the election, aggregately. Well, something’s wrong there.”

Yes, Raj now knows that in the world of politics the only thing that matters is how much cash you can raise.  He should also know to stay on Karl Rove’s good side if he wants Roves operatives to help him out.  Recently Raj, and other semi-celebrities, were asked to suggest a reading list for President Bush while he vacationed at Crawford.  Here was Raj’s advice:

” ‘Empire,’ by Neil Ferguson. He should read it with an eye towards realizing that as we stumble further into ’empire,’ we should avoid the inevitable fate of them all.” – Raj Bhakta, former contestant, “The Apprentice”; chairman, Coalition for the Advancement of the Republic

Rove has an all seeing eye.  That kind of teasing could get you in the GOP’s dog house.

See previous Raj posts.

Continue reading →

I am Fangirl. Hear me purr.

Posted on by

collage.jpg

SM reader Kiran wrote:

I went to the show last night. Amazing!
But our camera crapped out. Did anyone get any good shots? I would love to see them..

Kiran, my dear…the Mutiny is ALWAYS in the front row, dead center baby, especially at the 9:30 club. Last night, I took 333 pictures of Miss Arulpragasam– that’s M.I.A. if you’re nasty– they are unedited and up on flickr, right this second. Check the slideshow of her show here.

If I weren’t so busy working for the (wo)Man, I’d cull the current set of 283 further, caption some of them and then write a post which told you an enchanting story called, “The Concert that was Worth Respraining my Ankle for”. What a show. Continue reading →