Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

While Rome was Burning…

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Andrew Brietbart has a fascinating OpEd about a film opening the precise moment India’s 9/11 was being unleashed –

On the evening of Nov. 26, the biggest names in Bollywood walked the red carpet at the Bombay premiere of “The President Is Coming,” a comedy about six 20-somethings vying to win the right to shake hands with President Bush.

Among those in attendance at the star-studded premiere Wednesday evening was Bollywood’s “new heartthrob” Imran Khan, who proudly posed for paparazzi donning a T-shirt with Mr. Bush’s face sandwiched between the words “International Terrorist.”

…At the precise moment Mr. Khan and hundreds of others making their fortunes in the multibillion-dollar Indian movie business were watching “The President Is Coming,” only a few blocks away, 10 20-something Muslim extremists began a horrific three-day terror spree.

In the ironic, postmodern world, you earn accolades by tarring a disagreeable politician with the epithet “terrorist.” By contrast, had Mr. Khan worn a t-shirt critical of Bin Laden & his supporters, and stepped out of his comfy limo at the wrong time just a few blocks away, the word “terrorist” would have taken on a considerably more literal meaning.

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Set Your DVR for a Couple of Britz

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The last mini-series T.V. movie that had me this on edge with anticipation was probably back with Stephen King’s ABC movie The Langoliers. Until tonight.

I just finished watching the first part of Britz, a BBC America movie and am in awe. Given the recent terrorist attacks, I thought the movie was oddly yet gratifyingly timed. Both main characters are Pakistani Muslims born and raised as “Britz.” The movie takes them on antithetical journeys through their search for justice.

In “Britz” (BBC America, 8 p.m.), writer and director Peter Kominsky (“The Government Inspector”) reacts more to the July 7, 2005, London Tube bombing that killed 52 — known there as 7/7 — than America’s 9/11.

But instead of re-enacting that tragedy, he concocts a fiction about a pair of second-generation Muslims in Northern England, a brother and sister who go starkly different ways in reacting to the anti-terror precautions of their time.[courant]

My dad and I were both on the edge of our seat watching this – and there are not many movies that both of us can sit through together. The first part of the movie looks at brother Sohail’s life (played by hottie Riz Ahmed). Sohail detours from his law school to join the M15, the domestic spying operations. As the token Muslim Urdu speaking spy, he quickly gets involved with investigating Muslim terrorist cells. The story takes us on the complex journey on how he is fighting for justice for Muslims through being on “the inside”.

The concluding part, which shows tonight (Dec 1st) on BBC America at 8pm follows the story of Sohail’s sister, a medical student and political activist, Nasima (played by Manjinder Virk).

Part two follows the story of Nasima … who spends much of her time campaigning against repressive government policies and witnesses at first-hand the relentless targeting of her Muslim neighbors… Nasima is not only forced to question her liberal views but left feeling so angry at, and estranged from, the country of her birth, that she embarks on an extraordinary journey that eventually takes her to a terrorist training camp in north-west Pakistan.[bbcamerica]

Besides being a thriller around hyphenated Muslim characters around the struggle for identity, I was particularly compelled with how the movie addresses the idea that ‘terrorists don’t simply exist, but are created.’ Continue reading →

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Alicia’s Tacky Tikka

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I was just watching the 2008 American Music Awards noting that asymmetrical and gold bead worked dresses were in (how gorgeous were Leona Lewis’ and Nicole Scherzinger’s dresses?) when Alicia Keys walked out onto the red carpet. Now, we’ve seen plenty of desi cultural appropriation attire on the red carpet over the years, (remember Madge’s desification?) but Alicia’s tikka and earrings just made me tilt my head to the side and go, “Huh…”

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You’d think with five nominations, her stylist could have spent a little more time on the red carpet outfit… I can’t get over how cheap the combination of the ‘plastic’ earrings with the tikka looked. I kinda can see how the one shoulder dress slightly resembled the swoosh of the auchol over the left shoulder, but still. It’s a stretch.

[Full length fashion disaster after the jump.] Continue reading →

Liveblogging Top Chef…

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…for as long as the brown girl is in the ring. 🙂 I’m here in DC, on the Hill, at Chef Spike’s (Season 4 badboy) Good Stuff Eatery, where he hosts a Top Chef viewing party. If you are on my home coast, are DVR-ing it or otherwise don’t want spoilers, do not go past the jump!

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Time for the quick-fire challenge! The contestants have to recreate an iconic NY dish. Before they announce what that dish is, people here are screaming pizza, cheesecake…nope, wrong. They will need to make a HOT DOG, for Chef Donatella Arpaio.

Okay, I’m a life-long vegetarian who finds hot dogs repulsive and even I know that rice paper is probably a bad idea for a casing.

Brown girl’s strategery: Indian-inspired kebab dog w/caramelized onions and other gunk, from RAD-icka.

Poor Padma! There was a bone in her meat! Er…that didn’t come out right, even though it’s practically a quote from the offending chef. Continue reading →

Great Expectations for Slumdog Millionaire

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The Oscar buzz has already started and it’s only been one day since “Slumdog Millionaire” was released. So far, the new offering from British director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) has been referred to by The New York Times as a film that “could be the breakthrough work that leads the world to focus on the genre …of Parallel Cinema, a more personal narrative type of film like Mira Nair’s art house hit “Monsoon Wedding.” slumdog2.jpg

And, Roger Ebert predicts the film will win an Best Picture Oscar nomination, calling it “a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time [whose] universal appeal will present the real India to millions of moviegoers for the first time.”

When you read gushing reviews like Ebert’s, you can’t help but walk into the movie hall with high expectations, wondering whether a film can really live up to all the hype. The answer is: Yes.

“Slumdog Millionaire” is being billed as a film about “first love, determination, and realizing your destiny.” Not quite the pitch that you’d expect from a mainstream film about a kid from an Indian slum. This is a film that will surprise viewers who think they’re going in to watch a movie about India’s tremendous poverty and rich-poor gap. It switches swiftly between scenes that take you into an India that is at once poor and wealthy, moral and crime-ridden, developed and undeveloped, hopeful and disappointing. And, though the story is laced with a trace of Bollywood romance, goondas, and some implausability, it is for the most part, as Roger Ebert says, “real.” Add to that a soundtrack by A.R. Rahman and Danny Boyle’s directorial talent for bringing India’s sensory overload and motion to life without the typical exoticism or “oh those poor things” mentality and you have a winner.

More of my review below the fold. Continue reading →

Top Chef is on in less than four hours…

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…and zomg, there’s a brown girl among this season’s contestants! Squeee!

Yes, you read right, someone Desi is competing on one of the most addictive reality shows out there. Her name is Radhika Desai and I’m twitching with excitement, because as of last season, I love that show–despite the number of faux-hawks its contestants sport. Ms. Desai, thankfully, does not have a faux-hawk. Yet. (Stay strong, gf!)

Radhika, a 28-year old Execuitve Chef (at the Between Boutique Café & Lounge) from Chicago, loves the show as much as I do:

Known to friends as “Rad”, Desai is the first Indian-American chef to compete on the show. She’s a hardcore fan of “TC”: “I’ve seen every episode at least three times, if not more,” Desai told Chicago Magazine in October. [metromix]

Bravo makes it easy to be that dedicated. They seem to have all of four shows on at a time, so each episode of that meager roster of programs gets trotted out repeatedly. Por ejemplo, if you miss tonight’s season premier, don’t fret, because it’s on again at 11:15pm…and 1:30am…2:45am…9pm on Thursday…etc. But back to why you should DVR one of those offerings:

Radhika currently works as the Executive Chef at Between Boutique Café & Lounge in Chicago. A first generation Indian American, Radhika was born in Ohio and raised in an eclectic Indian-tradition home. Trained in classic French and Indian cuisine, she has worked alongside notable chef Vikas Khanna and has staged at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. She has traveled the world over learning new techniques and flavor profiles and brings spice and bold flavors to the table combined with grace and restraint. Her favorite dish to prepare is spicy chicken and potato curry with cumin scented rice with clarified butter and mint. She describes her cooking style as globally eclectic with a huge spoonful of love. [BravoTV]

Born in Ohio? I’d call her second-generation, not first, but potato, urulai kizhangu. I’ve often muttered to myself about how a Desi contestant might respond to certain quick-fire challenges or TC assignments, since other chefs have drawn on their respective ethnic backgrounds to create dishes. I cannot WAIT to see if Radhika might get down with some brown. Judging from the menu at tonight’s viewing party at her restaurant, I think we’re in for an interesting season: Continue reading →

Rushdie on Religion and the Imagination

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Last Wednesday night, I had the chance to sit in on a fascinating conversation on “Religion and the Imagination” with Salman Rushdie. The author of Midnight’s Children [soon to be adapted for film by Deepa Mehta], The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and East, West was, of course, the perfect person to launch Columbia University’s newly founded Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. The Institute’s mission is to “bring together scholars and students in various fields to reflect and respond to the issues brought about by the “resurgence of religion and, with it, religious and cultural intolerance and conflict [that] are emerging as powerful forces in the new century.” Rushdie2.jpg

Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature, introduced Rushdie as someone who has been “fighting religious intolerance with humor, proving that we can fight moral seriousness with humor.”

The stage in Columbia’s always inspiring (and very crowded) Low Library Rotunda was set simply with two arm chairs–one for Rushdie, who was was all suited up, and the other for his “interviewer” Gauri Viswanathan, Professor of Religion and Comparative Literature, dressed as always, in a sari. The conversation was an intellectual one peppered with doses of Rushdie’s subtle (and sometimes pointed) humor and the topics of conversation ranged from everything to his relationship with religion and his hopes for robust religious debate to his thoughts on Obama’s win earlier that week.

“We don’t live in a world of drama, dance, and love… We live in a world of death, destruction, and bombs… I’m hoping something happened on Tuesday that will change that,” Rushdie said, referring to the election of Barack Obama. “I have no utopian tendencies. I’m good at seeing what I don’t like. But this week, I do feel optimistic,” Rushdie laughed. “It’s an odd feeling, one I’m not familiar with. The last time I felt like this was after the election of Tony Blair and look what happened!” Rushdie paused as the audience chuckled at his dark skepticism, then added, “ I hope it’s not that way this time. Actually … I don’t think it is.”

More on the evening’s highlights below the fold. Continue reading →

“The imaginary flight has the children captivated.”

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It’s a ritual in my family: every evening at 7pm, we sit down with milky cups of kappi and we watch NBC’s Nightly News. Now that I live 3,000 miles to the right, I’ll be honest, I’m somewhat lazy and so the Bru/Taster’s Choice usually stays in the kitchen cupboards, but thanks to the magic of DVR, I never miss Brian Williams’ slightly nasal take on the day. For that– and a hundred other things, right now– I am grateful.

I cried while watching that segment, on the news. I cried again when I tracked down the clip and embedded it. I was so overcome with the awareness of how different my life has been, as well as by how excited these children were, to take imaginary flights on an old, grounded plane. Remember that? When our lives were just as shaped by what we imagined as by what is? When there was hardly a difference?

I’ve never had the sort of glamorous (or arduous…take your pick) job which requires any sort of air travel so I still like airports and airplanes. I always have. When I was 3.5, and we first moved to the Bay from Southern California, I used to beg my Father to take me to SFO, so I could watch the planes take off. A year later, when I went to India for the second time, I was elated to be on the plane vs. in the car, watching them, from afar. The simple idea of being in the sky thrilled me; the fact that I was transported to another world, one which reduced my parents to crying children themselves, only reinforced my sense of wonder at what an airplane could do.

We all have our individual reminders of how everything is utterly different, post-9/11. Almost all of us are now kindly “invited” to be actors in security theater– but that’s not when I’m hit with the “it’ll never be the same”-realization. I don’t feel that prickly, undeniable sadness when I’m putting my shoes back on after going through security or when I’m forced to remain in my seat for the final 30 minutes before landing at DCA. I feel it when I see the cockpit doors. Continue reading →

What Obama’s victory means for me (and perhaps you)

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[Apologies this was delayed. It took me a while before I was ready to put pen to metaphorical paper on this subject]

As an American without hyphen I was gratified to see a consensus emerge around Obama as the better candidate, with even one of McCain’s own advisors crossing lines, and for Obama to emerge victorious. Given the state of the economy, I was pleased to see the candidate preferred by 4 out of 5 economists get the most votes.

But as a hyphenated American, after a campaign where I was repeatedly told I wasn’t a real American, I was thrilled to have the candidate more like me win. That’s a poor reason to choose a candidate, I know, but yes, I’m very tickled to think about the fact that the President of the United States will be a son of an immigrant, a man with a funny name.

I don’t vote based on personal appearance, but sure, I noticed that he’s roughly my height, weight and skin color (I’m better looking, but I wont hold that against him) and closer to my generation than that of my parents.

I don’t vote based on biography, but I appreciated that his father came to the USA to study, he grew up in an extended family, he know what it’s like to stay in touch with those you love over a noisy long distance telephone call. I didn’t think it would be possible that the President of the United States might have grown up and been hassled for being an American Born Confused something:

Even those [Illinois state] senators who seemed like natural allies treated Obama with nothing but enmity…dismissed him as cocky, elitist and… “a white man in blackface.” … Most frequently, they ridiculed Obama for his complex ethnicity. You figure out if you’re white or black yet, Barack, or still searching?… [WaPo]

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Grant Park

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[Apologies this was delayed. It took me a while to recover on Wednesday]

I was lucky enough to be at the official victory celebration of the Obama Campaign in Grant Park, Chicago Tuesday night. It was indeed an amazing experience.

The crowd was friendly and mellow. The air was one of expectation rather than suspense, since the outcome was over determined. I was passing through the various checkpoints when the networks called OH for Obama, bringing him to 194 electoral votes. Since the Pacific states would bring the total up to 271 FTW, everybody knew what would happen.

If the Cubs had won the World Series, the celebration would have been far more ecstatic and frenzied, with drunken people venting all the excitement that had been pent up during the games. This was very different, and far calmer than it appeared on TV.

People milled around, chatting, while watching CNN on the jumbotron. A cheer would go up every time a new state was called for Obama, and a few people cried when CNN finally called the election for him, but these were quiet tears of release leaking from the corners of peoples’ eyes, and not the ragged sobbing I had expected. I too was far calmer than I had expected, given all the energy I had put into the campaign in my life off-line.

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