Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Gypsy Rajas

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Beginning today, Delhi will play host to its first ever Salsa festival. Hips will be swaying and spins will be attempted. The BBC reports:

Kaytee Namgyal, the president of the Salsa India Dance Company and festival organiser, says he opened his first salsa studio in Delhi four years ago.

With the growing demand for salsa lessons, he now runs nine centres in the city. He is hoping to open a school in Mumbai (Bombay) soon.

Kaytee says he’s taught close to 1,500 students in the past four years and the number of those wanting to join his studios is ever growing.

So what makes salsa so appealing?

“Salsa is funky and fancy,” Kaytee says.

I think this introduction of Salsa into the motherland is just plain wrong. Hear me out. Picture if you will a guy and a girl. They are in love but the girl is being coy and evasive. Suddenly, they start singing, and dance…the Salsa. Now I ask you quite simply, what would their friends in the background do? Hindi-film dancing provides opportunity for these background hang-arounders to just do their thing. It’s very individualistic. I can’t imagine all those extras hip grinding as well. That would be scandalous!

And now for the zinger:

“Indian people are not great at salsa. That’s because they are so attuned to dancing to Bollywood lyrics. They can’t dance to beats. And salsa is totally based on beats.”

And that’s not the only problem Indian dancers have.

“Indian men don’t lead well,” says Jaquelin, who learnt salsa in Geneva.

“And it’s not really the music they listen to all the time. Also, there’s a cultural problem here. In salsa, you have to touch the woman. And it’s not always easy for the men here to do so. They have to learn to do that.”

Ouch. Luckily there are boot camps for this sort of thing. Continue reading →

Out with the old, in with the new for Arun Nayar

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Arun Nayar has former/future wives in more countries than some people visit in a lifetime (thanks, Vinod):

Supermodel Elizabeth Hurley’s flamboyant Indian boyfriend Arun Nayar is seeking a divorce from his Italian wife on the grounds that she treated him cruelly, a lawyer said. Nayar, from Bombay, is claiming that his wife Valentina Pedroni put him through “mental torture” during their marital life…Nayar and Hurley, meanwhile, have been romantically involved for nearly three years and are often seen at parties and fundraisers in Britain and the United States. Hurley, mother of three-year-old Damian by former movie producer Steve Bing, is reported to be learning Hindi to impress Nayar, whose family runs a textile export business. [AFP/Yahoo!]

Hurley also tries to impress Nayar by adhering to a little-known passage in the Bhagavad Gita, which states women who date Indian men must inexplicably wear saris to celebrity fundraisers (see right photo, it’s our weekly gratuitous pic of an attractive broad).

Sepia Mutiny explanation of previous paragraph
We haven’t posted any photos of beautiful women this week, so we were due. This was an opening, albeit a weak one, and I took it. I don’t regret this decision. And don’t judge me, jerk. I can barely read at a third-grade level, so pictures are all I have.

AFP/Yahoo!: Liz Hurley’s Indian beau seeks divorce from “cruel” Italian wife

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‘In the Face of Jinn’ by Cheryl Howard Crew

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Defamer, a Los Angeles gossip blog, publishes a reader’s report about an Indian-themed party at Brian Grazer’s house. The celebration was in honor of a new book by Cheryl Howard Crew, the wife of Ron Howard:

The whole affair was abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous with an Indian theme (seems as if the book, which I didn’t take, is about an American girl who travels in India) and beautiful Indian dancers doing their thang all over the backyard. But I did feel bad for the poor catering staff, who were all white girls subjected to the torture of wearing saris and showing off their not-quite-brown stomachs. Thankfully the Grey Goose on tap allowed me to forget all my sympathy. [Defamer]

Crew’s novel, “In the Face of Jinn,” carries the following description:

Two American sisters, Christine and Elizabeth Shepherd, are on a silk-buying trip in India for their business in California. After Elizabeth mysteriously disappears, Christine is compelled to challenge the ineffectual U.S. and Indian bureaucracies and venture alone, with various strangers as guides, to find her sister. Disguised in the traditional female garb of some Islamic cultures, Christine continues her search in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She navigates the mysterious tribes of the Pashtuns, has a dangerous encounter with the Taliban, and learns to fear the “Jinn,” the devils that dominate the superstitions of the people she must understand in order to survive. Inspired by her own extensive travel throughout the region, Cheryl Howard Crew has written an unforgettable story with a strong determined heroine who rises powerfully from the pages of this novel. [St. Martin’s Press]

Don’t know anything about the book, but do have a sincere plea for Ron Howard: Please, please, please don’t let Fox cancel “Arrested Development.” That is all.

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Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo raised in ashram

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Everyone knows that all real musicians hit the ashram at some point in their existence. They also hit rehab, but that’s totally unrelated to the following passage from Rolling Stone’s cover story about Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo:

Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams — first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.” [Rolling Stone]

Rolling Stone: Weezer’s weird world

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Kal Penn in ‘A Lot Like Love’

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I’m almost embarrassed to admit I saw an advance screening of A Lot Like Love, a new Ashton Kutcher – Amanda Peet romantic comedy opening tomorrow. It was far better than most Kutcher flicks. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I missed a good chunk of the beginning because, ahem, previews don’t start two hours late like red-carpet premieres where the desi lead fails to turn up.)

Presumably I got the pass, which came via a desi arts list, because a desi plays a main character. Kal Penn plays Jeeter, Ashton Kutcher’s dot-com coworker in avant-garde lenses, and does a great job: he’s charismatic and fluent, drives a hot car, picks up cute women and offers Kutcher tips. It’s as if the Van Wilder roles had been reversed, and indeed this would’ve been a much better movie with Penn in the lead.

The story resembles Boys and Girls, a wooden Freddie Prinze Jr. – Claire Forlani collaboration which, like Golden Gate, I liked mainly for its Berkeley backdrop. Kutcher plays Ollie, a dot-com type who’s inarticulate, obsessed with work and toys with his female fling like a yo-yo. You can never truly suspend disbelief with these movies because, hello, Peet and Forlani are gorgeous.

The script was written with diversity in mind: a major deaf character is played unremarkably, there’s a black priest, the movie uses the ‘burbs rather than New York. And it’s even kind to those in persistent vegetative states. Dumping on Ashton Kutcher’s thespian handicaps is all too easy, so I’ll just say this: Kutcher is the true heir to the Terry Schiavo school of acting. Kutcher makes Keanu Reeves look like Ben Kingsley. Kutcher alternates between two expressions, blank and blank. Kutcher speaks in two tones, dumb and stammering. Kutcher is the latest in a long line of brainless, cardboard male leads such as Dermot Mulroney in, oh, just about everything. Kutcher’s acting never rose above That ’70s Show, and that goes for Topher Grace too. Ok, I’ll stop now.

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‘Brothels’ directors to open school in India

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After you win an Oscar, you’re supposed to treat the little people like shit, not open schools for them. The diabolical do-gooders behind the award-winning documentary, “Born Into Brothels,” appear ready to violate that most holy of Hollywood traditions:

The two directors of the Oscar-winning documentary “Born Into Brothels,” which chronicles the lives of a group of children born to prostitutes in Kolkata’s red-light area, plan to set up a school in India, a member of the duo said in Lisbon on Tuesday. Ross Kauffman, who directed the documentary along with fellow New Yorker Zana Briski, told AFP that the two filmmakers hope to have the school up and running by the start of 2007. “The idea is to create a safe place for these kids to go, where a small group of kids can get out of that environment. It’s a way to make a small difference,” the 37-year-old said. The school will focus on leadership and arts, and will have a capacity for between 50 and 100 students, he added. [Sify.com]

Sify.com: Oscar winners to open school in India

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‘Sita Sings the Blues’

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Ever seen Hanuman pluck a double bass? Animator Nina Paley has created a witty, ’20s jazz musical version of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues (via Turbanhead). Her lovely, highly stylized characters evoke Betty Boop, Amul Butter ads and Ghee Happy, and Sita is voiced by ’20s blues singer Annette Hanshaw.

Watch the clips or, if the site is slow, see the end of the post to download.

This animation’s original title seems to have been The Sitayana. Like Anna’s feminist neologism, ‘Herstory,’ Paley had replaced Rama with Sita in the title. And she goes even further: Sita has the only speaking part in the entire animation. Rama is strong but silent, a Ken doll and essentially decorative, the inverse of most action flicks. But Paley stays reasonably faithful to the original text. Her Sita is still a maiden in distress rather than a Shrek-like princess-ninja.

Paley also inverts the Moulin Rouge formula. Instead of desi music in an American tale, she uses ’20s American music (one song even includes the banjo) in a quintessentially desi story. Her soundtrack choice is a classy touch; imagine someone doing a version like hip-hop Shakespeare, using Justin Timberlake as the soundtrack.

Shudder.

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We AREN’T the champions, my friends…

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London’s Restaurant magazine just released their annual list of the 50 best places to get fat– and of course I’d be the Mutineer to post on this. 😉

I am slightly miffed that the list is not down with anything brown, unless New York’s lauded, pan-Asian-street-food mecca Spice Market counts. Since I cannot partake of their “chicken samosas” with cilantro-yogurt, I’m inclined to say…”NO”. 🙂

Now last year, the greatest place in the world for Dal Makhni made both the list AND the award for “Best Asian Restaurant”– I’m talking about New Delhi’s legendary Bukhara, mais oui. What a difference twelve months makes? Oh, well. I’m just amazed that a Brit magazine that listed no less than FOUR English restaurants in their top 10 couldn’t find a decent curry. Whatevs. Continue reading →

Aish ain’t gettin’ Hitched

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Vaporwarya Rai is endlessly rumored to be in talks for this movie or that. Bond girl, anyone?

But one particular missed opportunity is quite funny: the director of the Will Smith romantic comedy Hitch says Rai was to play the college girlfriend. And since Smith produced the film, he probably had a hand in it. Said the director:

I want to see Aishwarya Rai because she was almost in my film… There was a time when she was going to play the college girlfriend, which was originally a much bigger part. I think we were all keen on she doing it. But we had a demanding schedule which she couldn’t work out. That was the hitch on Hitch.

That’s the girlfriend with whom a Steve Urkel-like, ’80s version of Will Smith makes all his early romantic blunders, like being too clingy too early and blurting ‘I love you.’ He later finds her making out with another guy in a parked car. ‘What did I do wrong?’ he repeats pathetically, slumping against the glass. The Other Guy takes pity on him: ‘You’re doin’ it right now!’

Wussy Will would’ve been an improvement over Two-Fisted Khan.

High-funda food

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As if desis could get any more passionate about their comida, food diversity in India is rising with income (thanks, Rohit):

The amount spent nationally on meals outside the home has more than doubled in the past decade, to about $5 billion a year, and is expected to double again in about half that time…

“In the 1970’s and 1980’s our international menu consisted of Russian salad, shrimp cocktail, French fries … oh, and something baked,” Mr. Desai said. “Recently, though, I had a conservative Hindu lady explain to me the specifics of a risotto she wants for her son’s wedding, and a traditional Bohri Muslim family requested Mongolian hot pots…”

“When I first opened Diva people would send back al dente risotto because they were used to very soft cooked basmati rice…”

While I’m complaining about not getting arbi, Bombayites were complaining about not getting Italian:

The legendary Crawford Market in Mumbai… sells broccoli, iceberg lettuce, thyme, basil, rosemary, bell peppers and other non-Indian vegetables. Pasta in bulk is available alongside basmati rice.

It’s all causing drama with the saas:

“Much to my mother’s chagrin I use store-bought yogurt,” said Rujuta Jog, 24, a recently married office worker. “And my mother-in-law was upset when she saw that I use Pillsbury flour to make rotis. She still prefers to buy wheat and grind it fresh…”

“In the old days, since only the men worked outside the home, they were served first,” said Sathya Saran, a senior executive at Worldwide Media, one of India’s largest publishing companies. “Now everyone eats together, and the entire family dynamic has begun to shift.”

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