Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

SM Live-blogs the *other* SM, at The Oscars

Posted on by

Tonight, I’ll be trying something a little different in the bunker.

Instead of live-blogging the Academy Awards the way I might have in the past, via a disjointed, half-kundi’d sort of list, I’m going to use the nifty program you see below. If it’s good enough for Sports blog Ball Don’t Lie, it’s good enough for this fellow fan o‘ Sheed:

What’s great about this is…well…everything. I can put up instant polls, pick out comments from you to publish in the stream of live blogging, and then tie it up at the end in to a lovely little package with a “replay” ribbon on top, so all may enjoy it at their leisure. I played with it on my own blog, here, so that’s what the finished product will look like. I’m excited, about this and whatever else may come. Are you? 🙂

::

I will also be one of many, many people participating in SAJA’s post-Oscars Call-in Web Radio Show Thing tonight. Continue reading →

Is Dev a homewrecker?

Posted on by

Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

Earlier this week I read a salacious article claiming that innocent little Latika Frieda Pinto is really a shady McShadester:

The star of Slumdog Millionaire has been hiding a secret husband whom she ditched after the film became a hit, it was claimed today.

Freida Pinto, 24, is said to have married Rohan Antao at a ceremony in Goa in December 2007 but last month ended their relationship. The couple were previously thought only to have been engaged… Their relationship appears to have foundered in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire’s success. Pinto, who plays the main love interest, was nominated for a Bafta and the film won a Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast.

It is claimed that Mr Antao, a Mumbai-based executive, supported Pinto during filming but ‘she just stopped calling him’ at the time of the Golden Globes this year, according to reports today. [Link]

If you check out the picture of Mr. Antao you can’t help but come to the conclusion that the poor chap never had a chance. In reality you can only date so far outside of your attractiveness league and the fact that guys like Salman Rushdie have a lock on the statistical outlier category means that the Rohan Antaos of the world are headed for disaster. Then I read another article yesterday that got me to re-think this all a bit. Perhaps Frieda is innocent and Antao is possessive and delusional. Continue reading →

Slumdog is no underdog

Posted on by

Oscar season is upon us once again, and with it the opportunity to make some money by betting on the home team. Gambling on the Oscars is as venerable tradition as gambling on Diwali, making this the third biggest betting day of the year.

The sole uncontroversial topic about Slumdog is that it’s the odds on favorite tonight for both best picture and best director. The only surer bet out there is Heath Ledger for best supporting actor (you have to put down $25 to see even $1 of return) and he’s dead!

Furthermore, as we get close and closer to Oscar time, the odds keep improving in these two categories. Right now, Paddypower is giving 1-14 odds for best picture (bet $14, make $1 profit if Slumdog wins) and Danny Boyle 1-10 odds for best director (bet $10, make $1 profit if Boyle wins).

Boylesports is offering better odds for bestpicture and worse odds for best director, but in both cases, the certainty of a Slumdog win is higher today than it was just a few days ago.

Even at these odds, Slumdog is still a good investment. King of Elections Quantgeekery Nate Silver says that Slumdog has a 99% chance of getting best picture and a 99.7% chance of getting best director, estimates based on how well previous awards (which Slumdog has swept) predict the Oscars.

The chance to win big might also stem the anti-Slumdog tide of public opinion in India. Right now there is already over Rs. 2 billion ($41 million) staked on the film, so a lot of Indians will be rooting for the same film that they objected to.

Continue reading →

Slumdog hungama

Posted on by

Honestly, I’m perplexed by the range of reactions that Slumdog has elicited. I liked the movie, had a great time while I was watching it, adored the sound track and cinematography and thought the plot and acting were clichéd. But a week later, I would have forgotten the film if not for all the other hoopla surrounding it.

The core of the controversy seems to be whether the film is exploitative. Who gets exploited (slumdwellers, old India, new India) changes depending on who is levelling the accusation, but each time the claim is that the movie is somehow poverty pr0n.

The main broadside against the film was lobbed by Amitabh who said:

“if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” [link]

He later backpedaled, saying that the words were not his own, and that he had put them up merely to start a debate.

Similar criticism came from former ambassador (and Sree‘s dad) T P Sreenivasan, who saw the movie as undermining new India:

Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet… the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success.

Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture….The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do… As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. [link]

And an anonymous friend of mine summed up his discomfort with the film by saying:

Anything having to do with the third world that masses of white people go into paroxysms over is guilty until proven innocent…

Continue reading →

Sunday feel good: Bob Marley around the world

Posted on by

Here’s some Sunday afternoon feel good for you – two Bob Marley songs performed by musicians from around the world, including several from South Asia. I liked the first, One Love, better than the second, Don’t Worry, but thought both were worth sharing. (Actually, the best video in this sequence is the first, Stand By Me, but unfortunately it has no desi musicians in it)

The organization that produced these videos (and others) is called Playing for Change. It’s worth clicking through to read their (short) manifesto. They’ve used portable digital recording technology to do a series of such recordings around the world, and are releasing them sequentially. There is a documentary about the project, and a CD/DVD that will be released at the end of April. There is an associated foundation that seems to be doing good works – there is a video of a music school they built in South Africa.

Continue reading →

It wasn’t just Lupercalia yesterday

Posted on by

I know most of you were too busy yesterday celebrating the orthodox feastday of Saint Brigid of Kildare to think of anything else, but it was also the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Back then Rushdie was already a literary hotshot, having won the Booker in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children. This was long before Padma, when Rushdie was newly married to Marianne Wiggins and could walk down the street without being recognized.

However, it was the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses that really put him on the map, making him both notorious and a cause celebre all over the world, granting him immortality while putting his own body and that of others into mortal peril.

Although Rushdie had always courted controversy, having mocked Indira Gandhi, the Bhutto family, and American foreign policy in previous books, he claims that he had no idea what a hornet’s nest The Satanic Verses would stir up:

Rushdie … said “I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public… I honestly never expected anything like this.” [link]

Instead the book was banned within a month in India, followed by Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and lastly Venezuela in June 1989. A large number of threats were made to bookstores in the US and UK. Daniel Pipes claims that “[t]he bombings meant that hardly a single bookstore sold Rushdie’s novel openly in the UK” [link]

Continue reading →

Contest: Write a Six-Word Memoir of Love or Heartbreak for V-Day (and win a free book)

Posted on by

It’s almost that time of the year when big pink hearts take over storefronts, over 190 million cards are exchanged, and the average U.S. consumer will spend $103 on gifts, meals, and entertainment,. Yup, St. Valentine’s Day. The day of L-O-V-E.

I’m not one to make a big hoopla about this holiday – I’m one of those people who prefers to receive flowers or a gift on random days rather than on a day when there are such high expectations. But, a handwritten card or a poem, ah, that I will never turn away. swm_love.jpg

This year, my Valentine’s Day gift to my husband is a copy of SMITH magazine/Harper Perennial’s Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak: By Writers Famous and Obscure. It’s a pocket-sized paperback (4X6, a little smaller in size than your average Valentine’s Day Card, but chock full of so many more wishes and reflections on matters of the heart).

This book is the second offering from SMITH Magazine whose initial invite to writers two years ago was a simple one (inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn): Everyone has a story. Can you tell yours in six words? The submissions poured in like crazy and soon enough they had published the NYT bestselling Not Quite What I Was Planning. (

The book features my very own six word memoir on page 13:

Sleeping, our foreheads touch. Fates mingle.

As I was flipping through the book, I came across another one-liner by our very own mutineer V.V. on page 70:

My book title makes dating awkward.

There were several more six-word desi memoirs that made it into the book:

Girl beautiful. No Mercedes. No love. – Sujoy Kumar Chowdhury
I fixed him but broke myself. – Amal Khairul
Proposal. Dowry. Bethrothal. Marriage. Children. Love. – Mitali Perkins
Arranged marriage now sounding pretty good. – Saleem Reshamwala

Add your own six word memoir (consider it your Valentine’s day greeting to the world) in the comments section before midnight on Sunday, February 15th. V.V. (author of the Washington Post choice for one of the best books of 2008, Love Marriage will pick two winners who will each receive a free copy of Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak. And, that’s our V-Day gift to you.

Below the fold, check out a book trailer for inspiration. Continue reading →

Don’t be Loose

Posted on by

India’s religious right has been taking a public relations beating this past week. The newly formed Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women (which, by the way, is the greatest name for a group since the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) has organized the Pink Chaddis Campaign to oppose the Sri Ram Sena’s despicable actions last month and their impending Valentine’s Day protests:

The group says it will give the pink underwear to Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) on Valentine’s Day on Saturday.

[SRS] was blamed for the bar attack in the southern city of Mangalore last month.

Pramod Mutalik, who heads the little known Ram Sena and is now on bail after he was held following the attack, has said it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.

He has also said his men will protest against Valentine’s Day on Saturday. [Link]

Let’s just hope that the SRS leaders don’t have a fetish for women’s underwear or this campaign will not have its intended effect.

In other news (perhaps not entirely unrelated) the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s Hindu nationalist group, has decided to start marketing a soft drink that contains cow urine. They see it as a refreshing alternative to Coke or Pepsi. I am sure they would rather young women kick back with a six pack of these instead of be loose at a bar with a beer:

Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink – called “gau jal”, or “cow water” – in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched “very soon, maybe by the end of this year”.

“Don’t worry, it won’t smell like urine and will be tasty too,” he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. “Its USP will be that it’s going to be very healthy. It won’t be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins.”

The drink is the latest attempt by the RSS – which was founded in 1925 and now claims eight million members – to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness. [Link]

I am curious, does anyone know how the cow urine aftershave splash has been doing in sales?

Continue reading →

Beating a Brazilian Path to India

Posted on by

Last summer, I posted about my experiences Desi Spotting in Brazil and observed that “despite my lack of desi human spottings, there was no dearth of Indian influence—mostly of the exotic India variety—to be found in Brazil.”

I’m revisiting this topic today, thanks to Sepia reader Vijay, who shot me an email from Rio a couple of weeks ago. “Omg–have you heard of this Brazilian soap opera about an indian family?” he wrote. “A sepia investigation is in order.”

It certainly was! And, here’s what I dug up, with a little help from Vijay.indias.jpg

Since January 19th, Brazilian TVs (approximately 60,000 households just in Sao Paulo) evenings have been tuned to a new telenovela six nights a week. Camhino das Indias (Path of India) “examines beliefs and values that differentiate the Eastern and Western world” and follows the story of a forbidden love between a Brazilan man (whom I understand to be a yoga instructor) and an Indian woman from a conservative family. The drama was filmed with a budget with a mostly Brazilian cast on a budget of $80 million in Jaipur, Agra, Dubai, and Rio (where two Indian towns were constructed for production purposes!).

Backpacking Ninja, a desi blogger traveling through India describes it thus:

With Portuguese actors all dressed in extremely jatak (gaudy) Indian clothes (looking thoroughly North Indian), speaking Portuguese, it’s a total riot. I laughed so much watching one episode. The episode was a wedding….. the background music that was playing in the wedding as they did the saath phere (sacred walk around the fire symbolizing marriage) was Kajra re (one of the most popular songs to play in dance bars in India). It’s almost like playing Shakiras ‘Hips dont lie’ when someone is walking down the aisle in a church. In another scene, the heroine Maya (Juliana Paes) walked over to the buffet table and made eye contact with the hero Bahuan (Marcio Garcia, and trying to be Indian in all ways possible, they showed a dream sequence of them holding hands… not in person.

The opener features Sukhwinder Singh’s “Beedi” and is intended to show off the “cultural diversity that exists in the country,” according to creative director Roberto Stein. I’ll let you be the judge of that. Whatever your opinion (“this exoticizes India yet again” or “this is great for Indian tourism” or “wtf?”), I think that you’ll agree that your eyes will stay glued to it.

For those who want more (I certainly did!), beneath the fold, I’ve added clips from episode one. Continue reading →

Please don’t Swagger like them

Posted on by

I know I am going to get in trouble for this post. I mean, what kind of a**hole makes fun of a pregnant woman? This is why our headquarters is in a secret North Dakota bunker where I can be safe from shoes hurled at me:

MIA cross-bred a lady bug and a zebra and then skinned the resulting spawn alive to create her outfit. PETA is going to lose its sh*t over this. For real.

I was at a loss for words while watching this last night so I consulted a dictionary in order to find the right words:

Hot Mess: (NOUN) term used to describe somebody that has NO REASON to look the way that they are lookin at the time. [Link]

Also, I can understand why TI, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z were up there (I guess some consider them better than Lupe Fiasco who was in the audience), but why was Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rapping on stage with them also? What am I missing? The whole thing was just a dissonant mess.

For those of you that didn’t realize it, MIA was a real soldier last night. Her baby was actually due yesterday! Got that? The baby decided to stay inside the womb longer than it was supposed to so that it would not be around the bear witness to that performance. I mean, you got to give MIA props for her dedication but you also got to give that baby boy props for barricading the door.

Continue reading →