Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

‘Grimus’ and Klingons

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The one-man sound bite missile named Rushdie aims His cross-Atlantic test firing at Time and the Times (thanks, Sapna and Karthik):

There’s a line about Klingons on the very first page of Shalimar. Aren’t you worried that a pop reference like that will date the book?

… A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it’s the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve. I have a suspicion that Klingons might be more enduring than we suspect.

Speaking of Klingons, wasn’t your wife… on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise?

Yes, she was. She was an alien empress of most of the universe, I think. The episode was all right. Next Generation was the one that I liked best. [Link]

Now that Lakshmi’s been on Star Trek, our nerdy readers have official permission to idolize. I love the uncharacteristically autistic, Trekkie honesty here (whereas in the Times Rushdie gives wuvvy-dovey, team player quotes). His wife was on TV, and it was just ‘eh’? Something tells me he’s going to learn about ‘withholding’ tonight, and I don’t mean taxes

The Times delves into his early career, which is always where the critical lessons of history are found — not how a success expands, but how it struggled from obscurity in the first place:

He was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers… and Ian with his first collections of short stories… and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”

His debut, Grimus, was both a critical and commercial failure and despite the huge and continued success of Midnight’s Children, all the more remarkable for it being only his second novel, Rushdie could not forgive the casual dismissiveness of those first reviews… he admits that if he sees people reading it, his instinct is to hide behind the furniture. “… it embarrasses me.” [Link]

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Our Parents Shrugged

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Between the Ayn Rand discussion Manish’s post kicked off a few days ago and the fisking of Dr. Patnaik cited on IndianEconomy.org, I figured I oughta finally commit to a post that’s been rattling in my head for a few months – the startling parallels between the fictional, dystopian economic world Ayn Rand outlined in Atlas Shrugged and real life Indian history.

Now although I’m one of those Desi dudes who cites Atlas Shrugged as an all-time favorite, I’m far from a Randroid. I readily recognize that getting too literal runs headlong into a more, uh, empirical assessment of the human condition. But, I’m also more than willing to give Rand credit – especially writing in the 1940s and 1950s – for being more right than wrong about some of the biggest issues of the day. Doubly so because, given the intellectual zeitgeist of the time, Rand was decidedly a contrarian. The example of the License Raj – India’s economic regime “progressively” enacted a scant few years after Atlas Shrugged was published (1957), and to some degree of Intellectual fanfare, gives us the latest, almost depressing example of how Indian fact can be more extreme than Western fiction.

In the novel, a key milestone as the world plummets into dysfunction and chaos is the passage of the innocuously titled Directive 10-289 by the government. It opens with a rather lofty goal –

“In the name of the general welfare to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability…

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When Indophiles mate

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The daughter of a big-time Silicon Valley VC wed last weekend. In these troubled times, it warms my heart to see that the ultra-wealthy are still meeting and mating over that shared hobby called Indophilia

… each had traveled to India, Ms. Kramlich to ride horses across the desert in Rajasthan and Dr. Bowie to Dharmsala, “to meet the Dalai Lama…” [Link]

Wealthy Westerners… a dusty desert… heaving bodices… it’s The Far Pavilions! For that level of Indophilia, their kids better be wearing turbans. I’m thinkin’ Poon-jab as the child of Daddy Warbucks.

As Ms. Kramlich’s father doubtless has access to a private jet, it may be the last time she and her husband find themselves on horseback out of necessity  The wedding writeup is a peek into the lifestyle of Sand Hill Brahmins:

In 2001 she had abandoned a career in business and product development with start-up technology companies to study acting… They were married in typical California wine-country style on Aug. 13. Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court, a friend of the bride’s family, led the ceremony under a canopy of oaks and a Wedgwood-blue sky on the grounds of the 21-acre Oakville, Calif., weekend house and vineyard owned by the bride’s father, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and her stepmother, Pamela Kramlich, a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The bride looked serene in a form-fitting creamy-white Vera Wang gown as a string quartet, tucked into the greenery, played sweetly. A reception and sit-down dinner for 234 guests followed on the grassy lawns surrounding the votive-lit family pool.

After the couple’s honeymoon, at an eco-resort in Nicaragua, that is part nature preserve and part reforestation project, the bride and the bridegroom, who has no pets of his own, will return to their new horse farm in the Oakland Hills of California with her animal entourage: three Arabian horses and one very happy and healthy poodle. [Link]

All joking aside, congratulations to the newlyweds.

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Sakharam Shyamalan

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That *$ siren with wavy hair whom you’re ogling is Sarita Choudhury:

British actress Sarita Choudhury has been signed up for a role in M. Night Shyamalan’s next big film Lady in the Water… M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film tells the story of a superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a sea nymph in the building’s pool…

Sarita Choudhury was born in London and spent her early years in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also lived in Mexico for a while…

In a previous interview, she put her variety of roles down to lack of opportunities for Indian actors. “Left to myself I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters,” she said. She is currently working in three other films. [Link]

Wonder if one of those roles is a terrorist.

Over the Mountains is in post-production and will be the first to see a release. It is about a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City who experiences a crisis of conscience. Indocumentados is currently in production, while work on For Real has not yet started. [Link]

Ding ding ding!

When I saw Shyamalan’s Praying With Anger, a student film that was a prototype for the American Desi/American Chai/ABCD wave, I’d never have guessed what would transpire. Over a decade later, Shyamalan tips his lid to one of the original 2nd gen actresses from his throne room in mainstream American film.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

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This Suitablegirl is suitably loyal.

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Over a decade ago, I walked up and down the aisles of the local Barnes and Noble because of an all-consuming curiosity which was ignited by some now-forgotten book review. (I would later work at that very BN during my senior year of college, in case you are unbelievably bored). I had picked up a torch for brown-ish fiction which burns just as brightly today as it did when I was a teenager. I found my quarry, picked it up very carefully and took it to the cash-wrap, where the clerk, on second thought, double-bagged it.

four pounds.jpg

I went home and didn’t emerge from my room for two days; I waved away meals, plugged my ears to my father’s indignant screams about how I was missing class, I think I forgot to bathe, who knows. I couldn’t leave this tome, whose protagonist shared MY nickname. Upon reflection, I think I understand why you Potter-heads do what you do…oh, wait. I don’t. 😉

Vikram Seth’s “Suitable Boy” changed my life. It altered my expectations for literature, my perceptions of my parents’ histories, my conception of myself and what I wanted out of my future. Suddenly, I had a thousand things to ask my delighted father, about newly-free India in the 1950s. I looked at my mother, a freedom baby who was born right after India gained her independence with a new affection and appreciation; if Aparna were alive, she’d be my Mother’s age. I regarded all the other books on my shelves with a supercilious disdain.

I’ve read SB three-and-a-half times. It never left my bedside table; it’s been there for over a decade. My most cherished ritual involved briefly immersing myself in it before falling asleep every night; as soon as I finished the entire tome, I’d gingerly turn the book over and start it again the next night. Suddenly, I’m sad that my treasured font of comfort is dusty and untouched. Continue reading →

Jaisim Fountainhead

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I’m unapologetically modernist. To me, history only runs forward, and yesterday is usually an embarrassing old version 1.0. If you saw my questionable fashion choices from years past, you’d hasten to agree.

Given my technobarbarian predilections, this NYT story extolling the virtues of housing Bangalore tech workers in former tobacco warehouses strikes me as nothing more than the romanticization of poverty:

In contrast to these unabashed clones of buildings in Palo Alto or San Jose is a 37-acre campus in the heart of the city whose granite- and terra cotta-adorned buildings are set among decades-old trees and painted in vibrant Indian shades of brick red and deep green. The buildings have names from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, while the rooms within are named after the ancient books of learning, the Vedas. Every morning the Indian flag is ceremonially hoisted on a central flagpole, an unusual practice for businesses here… most of the streets have been paved with local stone… walls made of hollow terra-cotta blocks, flat stone tables and acoustic-friendly ceilings that are fashioned out of earthen pots. The giant century-old chimney, ancient trees and even an old fire station have been left standing… [Link]

Crappy old clay buildings, unpaved streets, giving buildings names in local languages? In India that’s not called ‘environmentally friendly’ architecture. That’s called all architecture  The NYT’s spin feels to me like the wealthy patting the pre-industrial on the head. It’s a yearning you only get after industrializing:

… Galapagos Bar… reminded me a hell of a lot of a cement factory in India, with a dank pool taking up most of the space, stone walls with hand-lit candles mounted in odd places, not the least behind rows of expensive vodkas. The charms of the torture castle, the provincial, it’s the classic example of art defining itself as other. Even when other means pre-industrial… in developing countries this would not have been recognizable as a chi-chi place in the art sense, handmade is the order of the day and not as admired as standardized and mass-produced… [Link]

The renovating architect drew inspiration from The Fountainhead. Ironically, the illustrations on Ayn Rand’s popular edition covers are not about building for human scale at all. They’re soaring neo-Gothic works which draw inspiration from the spires of Soviet universities, albeit stripped of communist symbols. They’re Rockefeller Center. Skyscrapers move books, even when they contradict the book’s aesthetic Continue reading →

India daze

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On IST as always, NYC’s India Day parade was held on August 21 this year. I couldn’t attend, but I hear one of our readers played the nauch girl on stage. Perhaps you’ll chime in with incriminating photos.

Like the Poe toaster, only sans macabre, some mystery soul always garlands the Gandhi statue in Union Square with fresh flowers:

For over 50 years since 1949, on the night marking the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious man-in-black has entered the cemetery where the master of the macabre lies buried, and, making his way through the dark shadows to Poe’s grave, he places a partial bottle of expensive French cognac and three blood-red roses there, presumably as tokens of admiration and in tribute to the great author. This ritual completed, he then slips away into the night as quietly and as mysteriously as he came…

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Six degrees of Johnny Lever

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Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf are on the cover of the August-September 2005 issue of Audrey, the Asian-American women’s mag. My dream in life is to squeeze into the gap on the cover. Here’s the blurb:

‘Bollywood to Hollywood’: Indians & Indian Americans, like our cover girls Noureen DeWulf (left) and Navi Rawat, are poised to hit mainstream USA.

The story covers Shaista Usta, a Turkish and desi actress who starred in a recent Dev Anand movie, as well as the usual suspects (Gurinder Chadha, Gitesh Pandya). Rawat explains the numb3rs: looking unplaceably ethnic is far more useful in Hollywood than looking desi. On the other hand, Pandya says he’s happy that after 9/11, there are lots of roles for desis playing terrorists.

DeWulf talks about playing a Palestinian in West Bank Story, a film which played Sundance, and being of Indian Muslim origin. She’ll play ‘PooPoo’ with a desi accent in National Lampoon’s Pledge This. She’s also in American Dreamz, an upcoming movie with an intriguing cast: it includes John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog). Guess what she plays? No, really, take a wild guess.

Hollywood producers of the black comedy American Dreamz are reconsidering the script after the London attacks because it involves suicide bombers attempting to assassinate the American president. The film, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, features a group of Pakistani terrorists, who target a mentally frail president played by Quaid… The script has been written by Paul Weitz, who previously worked with Grant on the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. [Link]

Marcia Gay Harden plays the First Lady while the supporting cast finds room for the likes of Chris Klein, Richard Dreyfuss and Willem Dafoe. [Link]

Aghdashloo, the throaty-voiced Iranian-American GMILF who was so good in Sand and Fog, is also playing Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men 3:

… she’s been cast by Ratner and co. as Dr Kavita Rao. This is the woman who, in recent X-Lore, created the Hope serum, which tried to ‘cure’ a mutant of their powers. It obviously set up a huge ethical and moral dilemma among the mutant community, and didn’t go down well with Hank McCoy, or The Beast as he is perhaps better known (this role has been filled by Kelsey Grammer). [Link]

Playing six degrees of Johnny Lever, we find that Rawat and Aghdashloo were both in Sand and Fog, Rawat playing Aghdashloo’s Iranian daughter (and for that matter, Sir Krishna Kingsley playing the father). Now Aghdashloo is repaying the compliment.

And so the circle is complete.

Previous posts on Rawat: 1, 2, 3; and DeWulf.

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Reason #35213 Indian Kids are so Freakishly Smart

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Express India reports –

New Delhi, August 18: A teacher stabbed a pencil into the head of a four-year-old after she caught him sleeping. An incision had to be made to remove a piece of lead from the boy’s head.

…The incident occurred when class teacher Kalpana Kumari found Anas, a student of Prep I, napping in class. She snatched his pencil and hit him on the head.

This passage brings to mind Maoist Chinese justice where the family of the condemned is charged for the bullet used to execute him –

…The family of the boy alleged that Green Field Convent School did not even provide first aid. Anas, the victim, lives with his aunt as his parents are at Moradabad.

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