Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

‘The Aristocrats’

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The Aristocrats is a new documentary about a hoary inside joke in the informal guild of American stand-up comics. The joke, a fraternity-like test of wit and manhood, involves improvising as many deeply sick events you can imagine within the framework of a simple story. Most comics tell the joke only to other comedians. They often begin with incest and pedophilia, delve into scatology and bestiality and finish with a chaser of sadism and necrophilia. This joke doesn’t play in Peoria. The most fun thing about the movie is seeing George Carlin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey and Jason Alexander together on the same reel.

The documentary shows a female comedian doing a throwaway joke about desis. It goes something like this: ‘Maybe we could bring in an Indian guy. The slurpee kind, not the casino kind. He could sprinkle curry all over everyone, make them stink.’ The joke, which takes much more racist digs at blacks and Latinos, is purposely illustrating offensive comedy. The comedian is pointing out that for shock value, race is the new sex.

You’d think the racism joke would be the least memorable thing about a movie which catalogues all the variants of a deeply repellent story. But it was actually the only one in the entire movie that stood out to me as mean-spirited. It proved its point exactly: sex and cartoon violence don’t hold a candle to what happens in real life.

Update: Watch the trailer. Here’s a very filthy, NSFW South Park version of the joke (thanks, Project37). Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach.

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Public service announcement

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Kingfisher Beer has put its ‘swimsuit’ calendar online. It’s just like the CNN site which annoys me daily (‘we interrupt you with breaking news: Model of the Day!’), but with lotus pads: zen cheesecake, if you will. There are so many floating flowers in the frame, you’d think it was pitching feminine products instead of beer.

The launch party attained this pinnacle of cheese: Salman Khan (1) in a muscle shirt (2) ripping cheetah print (3) off a bikini calendar (4). Behind him are a large contingent of underfed (5), blue-eyed Anglo-Indians, those ubiquitous khakhi-suited, pot-bellied sipahis (6), and Vijay Mallya (7), who’s way too old to be playing Richard Branson.

Beat that, Hasselhoff.

From the same photographer, here’s Aamir Khan whoring out timepieces in Mangal Pandey attire and cornrows, and a very funny wireless campaign with Javed Jaffrey.

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I have my eyes on the Queen

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The Queen of fruits?The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food.  Well so do I.  The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried.  It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:

Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.“

Good God.  What hole have I been living in?  I must have this fruit, I simply must.

durian

Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen–widely considered the “queen of all fruit”–carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head–plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.

Durian looks totally freakish to me.  It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:

We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”

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Versions of The Ramayana

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[For people who don’t know The Ramayana at all, here is a short version of the story you can look at to gain some familiarity.]

ramayana agni pariksha.jpg I’ve been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.

But in the Malayalam version Anand’s father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand’s father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn’t enough to clear Sita’s honor, and persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:

“What the society thinks is important. The Gods too look down upon ill fame, and fame brings respect everywhere. Does not every noble man yearn for it? I fear dishonour, oh, learned men, I’ll even renounce your company and my own life, if needed, for the sake of honour. Sita has to be deserted. Understand my state of mind, I wasn’t sadder on anyday before. Lakshmana, tomorrow you take Sita in Sumantra’s chariot and leave her at our border. Abandon her near the holy Ashram of Sage Valmiki on the banks of the Tamasa river, and get back here soon.”

This episode is known as Sita Parityaga. I’ll be referring to it in this post simply as the abandonment of Sita. Continue reading →

Mangal Pandey: Language Issue

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Happy Independence Day, y’all.

(Manish says he planning to do a full review of Mangal Pandey: The Rising soon, so this is a post on just one aspect of the film, not a general review.)

The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I’ve seen in any other Hindi film. There’s more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors’ roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: “darvaaza khul!”.)

The issue of Toby Stephens’ use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He’s on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual “Baar aa jao!” type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions — tenderness, ambivalence, regret — a tall order even in one’s first language. I personally thought Stephens’ Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he’s not emotionally convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I’m possibly being overly gentle on this score.)

So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I’m not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.

(The film might fail for other reasons too, but we’ll save that for another discussion…) Continue reading →

Fifty-eight years

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‘… the highest ideals of the human race: satyam shivam sundaram.’

— Subhash Chandra Bose

‘A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East… May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed…

‘The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye.  … so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over…

‘… no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action… All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India.’

— Jawaharlal Nehru

‘… even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vaishnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis, and so on… Indeed, if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long, long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this.

‘Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any region or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.’

— Mohammed Ali Jinnah

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The Prophecy

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William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:

It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…

As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…

In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”

It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience – they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…

… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…

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Meat without murder?

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May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere.  The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by  Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:

Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques. 

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

Wicked!  It’s like Franken-food.  Oh come on.  You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too.  The Guardian has more:

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

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Blessed review: mangal ho

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The NYT smiles upon Mangal Pandey: The Rising:

“Mangal Pandey: The Rising” … [has] important messages about global trade, corruption and martyrdom… the film takes you somewhere, teaches you something and inspires smiles in a way that few retellings of the anti-imperialist revolts of 19th-century India ever have before…

The crux of the epic is Mangal’s on-again, off-again alliance with a Glaswegian military officer who is in the employ of the East India Company… They both comprehend the fraud that the mercantile class perpetrates, and they both abhor the bigoted ugliness embodied in one British soldier who indulges in prostitutes and lies about it in polite company, who uses the power he has over servants to unleash some deep-seated cruelty…

At times, the racial hatred seems rabid and cartoonish, the political discussions of the opium trade become preachy, and the romance feels more like a cause for dance-offs… But the movie meets its grand incongruous aims with the exaggerated smiles and scowls of two gifted principal actors.

The camera drinks in gorgeous landscapes and trawls through high-end bordellos… [Pandey’s] biography is the basis for this spectacle of splash and meaning… “Mangal Pandey” proves that warfare mixed with winking sexpots can be a bloody good show. [Link]

I enjoyed the movie, will post a review later. The Friday late show in Times Square was completely sold out. Lines of dejected buskers tried to buy spare tickets off showgoers. The last time I saw that was with Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, and never before in Manhattan.

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Grind me down sugar salt

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Standup comic Aziz Ansari recently did a sketch about how the ‘gasam blew him off at her Knitting Factory show. He re-enacts several far-fetched scenarios about what he wishes had happened instead:

M.I.A.: ‘Actually, I have a lot of experience with hard disk recoveries on Macs…’ (Lowers eyes seductively) ‘Maybe tomorrow I could come by your place…’

It’s a cute schtick, but overly long as a video. On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard Tamil spoken in a comedy sketch and the first time I’ve seen a tall, pasty white guy stand in for Aziz’ ‘Sri Lankan princess’

Does Ansari merely want to jump M.I.A.’s bones, or is it also a great publicity gimmick? I surrender. Watch the low-budget video. Here’s the site.

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