Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Debutante ball at Carnegie Hall

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Imagine, if you will, being a desi kid with a passion for the claviers and chords of Western classical. You’d be sick of hearing, ‘Why can’t you be like Mr. Malhotra’s son, the doctor,’ for the last 20 years. Tired of uncles asking why you shave your head, where you disappear to all summer, why you’re never free on weekends. Isn’t it risky, a pauper’s life? Could you support a dutiful wife? I don’t know, beta, this whole thing is so phoren.

Imagine that in your 15-minute Warhol, you could perform in the most storied hall in America, painting away every doubt-hound dating back to high school. Your hands would throw auditory pottery, now throbbing delicately like gills, now stabbing angrily at imaginary boxers. Fifty pairs of eyes would look to your space needle for reassurance, tempo, tone. Just you, a riser and your musical crew: o captain my captain, carpe musicum, and they’d respond. A forest of swaying toothpicks, egg slicers and split-tongued shoots would churn buttery tones into a towering aural chasm.

On that day, you could be forgiven for feeling like Salieri even if you sounded like Mozart. So you’ll understand why I’m so proud to share with you my cousin Ankush Bahl’s Carnegie Hall debut. On Sunday, he conducted Brahms’ Tragic Overture for the best youth symphony in America. He did it without sheet music, a zipless conduct.

At 28, Ankush resembles bull-shouldered, shaven-headed entertainers from Yul Brynner to Ben Kingsley. The NYT reviews the performance:

… the Youth Symphony also promotes young professional musicians in the early stages of their careers. One example is Ankush Kumar Bahl, the group’s assistant conductor, who made his Carnegie debut leading an energetic reading of the Brahms overture with clear authority and enthusiasm…

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Showbiz round-up: Where to shoot without getting shot

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Have camera, but where to travel?: Each year insurance broker Aon releases a map that highlights the risks of filming in every country on the planet (via Filmmaker Magazine). Filmmakers use it to avoid hotspots that could derail production, while reality television producers no doubt use it to locate trouble-ready destinations. This may explain why such programs are increasing their visits to India, which ranks rather poorly in the survey.

Kleenex shortage on the set: There’s a new desi independent film entitled “Anokha.” Based on the trailer, it appears to be about crying, and nothing but crying.

Letter arranging contest: The 78th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee is June 1-2. Catch all the dorky goodness live when ESPN broadcasts the event on Thursday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. EST. The cable network’s print ad is to the right.

Obligatory M.I.A. update: Here’s a torrent of her passing through the cone zone (Quicktime, 11 MB, 4 mins.). Requires a BitTorrent downloader — PC, Mac.

Revenge of the rack: Shilpa Shetty versus Mallika Sherawat. Discuss.

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Sampling chutney

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Punjabi Boy points us to samples of chutney music from the Caribbean. Listen here.

It’s my first time listening in on this genre, and it’s wild. Sometimes it sets well-known Hindi songs (‘Jai Jai Shiv Shankar’) rendered in English to hyperkinetic calypso beats. Other times it’s creole music with snippets of Hindi lyrics and desi instruments. ‘Rum Shop‘ by Dil-e-Nadan reminds me of Karmacy’s harmonium-infused rap track, ‘Euphoria.’ Other tracks remind me of the Bollywood hits redone as Broadway / West End songs in Bombay Dreams and Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral.

Rajendra Saywack dissertates:

Chutney was the name given to the pop/folk music of the East Indians that lived in the Caribbean region… In the summer of 1996, the dance hit, “Calcutta Woman” [by Sharlene Boodram] made its debut on the North American & European pop charts… its Wine Yuh Waist lyrics were constantly being sampled by American [DJs]…

… Sundar Popo lept to fame with the song “Nana & Nani.” The song, almost comical in nature described the affairs of a grandfather and grandmother, perhaps his own… Sundar’s lyrics of “Nana drinkin white rum and Nani drinkin wine,” were heard just about everywhere…

The traditional West Indian Calypso was being merged into a new form of music called Soca… Chutney music was caught up in this change, which would later evolve it into a new style called Indian Soca… it was almost solidly dominated by Afro West Indians during its early days. Songs such as Baron’s “Raja Rani”, Mighty Trini’s “Curry Tabanca,” Sugar Aloe’s “Roti & Dhalpourie” & Sparrow’s “Marajin” dominated the Indian Soca scene…

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Dhaka rock

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Bangladeshi-American rocker Arafat Kazi says the Dhaka rock scene is incestuous (via Tales from the Subcontinent):

… if you have one death metal band in Dhaka, there will be five death metal bands in Dhaka a year from now simply from osmosis… Elephant Road is a street which has three stores which had all kinds of LPs and later on CDs which they would copy onto cassette for you for a fee. This is how we ALL got our music until like 1999 or 2000. No CDs till then either… you had a band called The Attempted Band (featuring yours truly among others) which had the hottest girl in town and an enormous fat fuck who knows EVERYBODY in Dhaka city. All the bands that we knew clustered around us because we were doing shows, and eventually they started kicking ass as well. This could NOT have happened in India, where if you have a band in say Gujrat, there’s no fucking way it’s going to get to Cochin…

A big part of why you don’t see Paki or Indian bands doing rock music is because they both have HUGE cinema song industries (esp India). Why the fuck would Channel V show a rock band which nobody cares about when they can just as easily show a garam masala lust-laden video?

He also does a hilarious, purposely desi-accented homage to Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Shame on a N*‘ which reminds me of ‘Drop It Like a FOB.’ Listen and weep.

Kazi’s a member of a rock band called the Watson Brothers:

Farhan happens to have that wonderfully rare quality in a Bangladeshi bassist– he’s had sex…

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Ismail Merchant passes away (updated)

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Filmmaker Ismail Merchant, whose films won six Oscars, passed away today at age 68 (thanks, Paranoid Android):

He died in a London hospital this afternoon, his office said. The cause of death was unclear, but a spokesman said the Indian-born producer had suffered from stomach problems over the past year…

Along with his creative partner James Ivory, he made such acclaimed period films such as Howards End, A Room With A View and Remains of the Day…

Merchant was born in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in December 1936 and educated in New York. [BBC]

Merchant… had been unwell for some time and recently underwent surgery for abdominal ulcers, according to Indian television reports.

Merchant and Ivory, an American, made some 40 films together and won six Oscars — four for best picture — since forming their famous partnership in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. [MSNBC]

Merchant left behind his family as well as long-time partner James Ivory. He focused on producing but also directed one of my favorite films, Muhafiz (In Custody). (Has anyone truly lived until they’ve seen Shabana Azmi sing a ghazal Umrao Jaan-style?) His partner and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala helped Merchant churn out a lengthy body of work.

Update: The LAT says Merchant revived his genre:

Merchant not only adapted great books by Henry James, E.M. Forster and V.S. Naipaul, but also helped establish the careers of a new wave of renowned English actors, including Hugh Grant (“Maurice”), Helena Bonham-Carter (“A Room with a View”) and Emma Thompson (“Howards End”)… The Merchant-Ivory model was soon widely imitated, as filmmakers as diverse as Martin Scorsese (“The Age of Innocence”) and Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility”) turned their cameras toward classic books.

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Squeezing “the white guy”

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SM reader Laks Raghupathi sends us a link to an article in the May 30th European edition of Newsweek Magazine, titled The Big Squeeze. In it we see a yellow man, ostensibly representing a Chinaman, and a brown guy with a small red dot on his forehead. The brown guy appears to be squeezing the balls of the poor white guy (a.k.a. white-collared worker), as if all Americans and Europeans losing jobs are white. The white guy also appears to be wearing a bow-tie (what IS it with bow-ties?).

15 years after U.S. and European multinationals started shipping large numbers of manufacturing jobs overseas, experts are saying that the “second wave” of offshoring is at hand—and it promises to be bigger and more disruptive to the U.S. and European job markets than the first. In the years ahead, sizable numbers of skilled, reasonably well-educated middle-income workers in service-sector jobs long considered safe from foreign trade—accounting, law, financial and risk management, health care and information technology, to name a few—could be facing layoffs or serious wage pressure as developing nations perform increasingly sophisticated offshore work. The shift portends a dramatic realignment of wealth over the next couple of generations—valued by the U.S. consultancy McKinsey Co. at “hundreds of billions of dollars.”

I went over to Joel Elrod’s website to see his other work (which is quite good) and couldn’t find anything with this sort of xenophobic tone, which leads me to believe that Newsweek must have specifically commissioned this type of thing from him. Continue reading →

Posted in Art

Sunil Dutt, 1929-2005

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Dutt as Birju Bollywood legend Sunil Dutt died earlier today of a heart attack in Bombay. On June 6, he would have been 76.

A concise bio:

Balraj Dutt was born in Khurd, Jhelum District (now Pakistan) in 1929. He worked as an announcer on Radio Ceylon before launching his film career. Success came quickly with Mother India in which he played the outlaw hero son of Nargis, who later became his wife. He also played a series of clean- cut modern youths in the late 50’s and was a talented comedian. He made his directorial debut in 1964 with Yaadein, an experimental one-man show, and was responsible for launching his son’s career in 1981 when he directed him in Rocky. Like his wife he entered politics, becoming an MP representing Congress (I) in North Bombay in 1979.

My earliest memory of a Bollywood film involved “Dutt Sahib” as Birju in 1957’s seminal Mother India; I will never forget the look on his face or the sound of his voice in the scene involving his long-suffering Mother’s (Nargis) bracelets. I remember my father telling me the following anecdote, much to my delight:

It is a well-known story that while shooting for the film, Nargis was trapped amidst lit haystacks. As the flames got higher and higher, Sunil Dutt playing her rebellious son, Birju, in the film ran through the fire and rescued her. He proposed to her and Nargis married Sunil Dutt and quit films after marriage.

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