Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Your Indi-Pop Fix: Raghu Dixit

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Every so often I link to musicians I learn about via MTV India, a desi TV channel I subscribe to at home. Sometimes readers groan in horror at my taste (“God this is a horrible song”), but for some reason I persist…

Today, meet Raghu Dixit, whose song “Hey Bhagwan” is starting to show up in the rotation on MTV India:

The sound quality in the YouTube upload is poor, but at least you get a sense of what the music is like (you can hear a higher quality preview of the song here; also, another video sharing site, Vimeo, is carrying the video). I also like the lyrics (My rough translation of the chorus: “Hey Bhagwan, give me life all over again”).

Raghu Dixit also has a blog, with a detailed account of the shooting of this video at Mehboob Studios in Bombay.

In the U.S. Raghu Dixit’s CD is on sale at CD Baby, where you can also preview the other songs on the album (check out “Mysore Se Ayi”). Continue reading →

Suriname’s Linguistic Khichri

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The New York Times has an article on Sranan Tongo, the creole language that is spoken by a majority of people in Suriname, in South America.

Suriname, like Guyana and Trinidad, has a large Indian diaspora population from the 19th century, people who came across originally as indentured laborers. For a country of just 470,000 people, the linguistic and cultural diversity is truly astonishing:

To get a sense of the Babel of languages here, just stroll through this capital, which resembles a small New England town except the stately white clapboard houses are interspersed with palm trees, colorful Chinese casinos and minaret-topped mosques.

Slip into one of the Indonesian eateries known as warungs to hear Javanese, spoken by about 15 percent of the population. Choose a roti shop, with its traditional Indian bread, to listen to Surinamese Hindi, spoken by the descendants of 19th-century Indian immigrants, who make up more than a third of the population. And merchants throughout Paramaribo speak Chinese, even though the numbers of Chinese immigrants are small. (link)

Is it just me, or is Suriname exactly like Queens? (The food options sound enticing.)

For the curious, there is a Sranan Tongo-to-English dictionary here (not many words derived from Indian languages, as far as I can tell), and a “Sarnami Hindustani”-to-Dutch dictionary here. (Of course, for the latter, you need to know Dutch!)

I would also recommend a reader comment on an earlier post by Vinod (where he mentioned the Surinamese Indians in Amsterdam).
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From George to Jyoti: The Famous Five Get a Disneyfied Makeover

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OK, Enid Blyton fans, get your hankies out. The Famous Five are getting a 21st century makeover, courtesy of Disney. Think multicultural meets technology in the new animated series “Famous Five: On the Case” which premieres in the UK next month. The crime busting gang of George, Dick, Julian, Anne, and Timmy the dog that Enid Blyton created in 1942 with the bestselling book Five on a Treasure Island is going to be replaced with characters who are the children of the original Famous Five, including a lead Anglo-Indian character.famousfive.jpg

That’s right, the team leader is the daughter of George (the tomboy and the original gang’s leader), Jo, short for Jyoti. According to Jeff Norton at Chorion, which owns the rights to Blyton’s books,

“We tried to imagine where the original Famous Five would go in their lives …Because George was such an intrepid explorer in the original novels we thought it would be only natural that she travelled to India, to the Himalayas, where she fell in love with Ravvi. That’s the back story (to Jo). We spoke to Enid Blyton’s daughter and she thought her mother would love what we have done …” [source: BBC News]

Don’t anyone try to tell me that the Disney executives don’t know how wildly popular Enid Blyton’s books are in India. I’m sure that the decision to have the lead protagonist be connected to the subcontinent somehow had a little something to do with this fact.

Other characters in the revamped series are Allie, a Californian shopaholic (and the daughter of Anne) who is sent to the British countryside to live with her cousins; Julian’s son Max, an “adventure junkie”: and Dylan, the 11-year old son of Dick. Only Timmy the dog gets to keep his original name. Continue reading →

There goes the neighborhood

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The big news on this Sunday is that an Indian character (human not puppet) is finally (after 39 years) moving on to the storied Sesame Street!

Doesn’t Snuffleupagus look like he is eyeing “Leela” as food?

The newest neighbor on Sesame Street just happens to be Indian American, because the role was originally dreamed up with no particular ethnicity in mind.

“It was incidental,” actress Nitya Vidyasagar told India-West by phone last week from New York City, where she is currently taping the 39th season of the award-winning PBS children’s show. “The casting notices said nothing of ethnicity.”

But the New York-based stage actress made such a strong impression on the show’s producers that they found themselves willing to create her role from scratch.

Vidyasagar plays Leela, a young Indian American woman who runs the local laundromat. Unlike many of the other actors on the show, who use their own first names as their character’s names, she felt more comfortable with the name Leela. “My name is hard for some people to say,” she explained. [Link]

Sepia Mutiny went down to Sesame Street and conducted interviews to see what some residents thought of their newest neighbor. Would there be increased tension because a South Asian was moving in to the neighborhood?

First off, we found that the some Koreans were pissed that a desi is running the laundromat instead of one of their own. When pressed further they said, “why not the 7-11 one street over?” The cookie monster was also in a foul mood explaining, “great, one more mouth to feed.” Count von Count was excited that he may soon learn how to count in Hindi. Oscar threw a garbage lid at one of our bloggers and just didn’t want to be bothered. Elmo just kept laughing because he was so happy at the news but then Bert came by and slapped him upside the head for no (good) reason.

The only one that would speak to us in earnest was Grover. He turned out to be far more lucid than he comes across on television (and he wasn’t wearing a cape). He struck me as an old soul actually. He was glad to see “Leela” move into the neighborhood but expressed some remorse when learning that Nitya had chosen to go by “Leela” because she thought “Nitya” might be too hard to pronounce. “We have a mammoth-like dude named Aloysius Snuffleupagus that lives on this street. Would Nitya really have been that hard to pronounce? Even Barack gave up Barry,” said Grover.

The new Leela is quite an international woman, and speaks Hindi and Telugu. Born in Muscat, Oman, she moved to India with her family when she was a year old. She and her family lived in Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore before moving to the United States when she was 12, and she speaks English with a delicate, yet hard-to-place, Indian accent. “They said I could speak with my accent, too,” she laughed. [Link]

Look for the new season to start in August. This post was brought to you by the number 8 and the letter W.

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Poetry Friday: Corona, Queens

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Friday means a poetry party at sepia this month. To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets all month long [catch up on past week’s poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Shailja Patel]. Today’s featured work is “Corona, Queens,” by Bushra Rehman, a bi-coastal, Pakistani-American poet whose words sing of place, family, religion, and identity with an honest, insightful, and poignant sensibility. Bushra.jpg

A few years ago, the Bowery Poetry Club and City Lore asked a bunch of NYC poets to write an epic poem about New York. Bushra was one of them, and of course, she wrote about Corona, Queens, the neighborhood where she lived as a child.

Corona, Queens

Fitzgerald called Corona the valley of ashes
when the Great Gatsby drove past it, but
we didn’t know about any valley of ashes
because by then it had been topped off by our houses,
the kind made from brick this tan color,
no self-respecting brick would be at all.

We knew Corona,
home of World’s Fair relics
where it felt as if some ancient tribe
of white people had lived there long ago.
It was our own Stonehenge,
our own Easter Island sculptures
made from a time when New York City
and all the country
was imagining the world’s future.
Continue reading →

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP (with excerpts from a novel)

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Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 — in large part for the year-around access to diving — and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke’s novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a “Prince Kalidasa,” who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named “Taprobane” — Tap-ROB-a-nee — by Clarke). Continue reading →

The Aunt Also Rises

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I take my duties as an aunt very seriously. Ever since I became a massi a year ago, I’ve started reflecting more and more on the important role that my aunts and aunties (the female family friends and mothers of friends) played in my life, both when I was a kid and in many cases, now. aunts.jpg

So, I’m not exaggerating when I say that one of my life goals is to be the best massi ever. I can’t help it that I want to be adored and worshiped by my nephew in the same way that I adored and worshiped my aunts (the sisters of my mom and dad who I called tata-French for aunt–or simply by their first names, as in Dipika or Poupee) and aunties (I can never forget the glamorous Auntie Veena in Ghana who baked cheese sticks for our picnic at the Tesano Sports Club in Accra when I was 10) throughout my childhood.

Which is why when I first heard about the UK bestselling tribute to the institution of aunty-dom, The Complete Book of Aunts, by Rupert Christiansen with Beth Brophy, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. It even includes “ten golden rules for aunts”! From the book jacket:

Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. THE COMPLETE BOOK OF AUNTS is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources.

The book was inspired by a kid’s question to the author: “Why are there aunts?” In response, Christiansen takes a thorough look at the etymology of the word aunt, the many words for it that exist in world languages, and great aunts in (mostly Victorian) literature. He also highlights various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, X-Rated Aunts, and Honorary Aunties (think of all the older desi ladies you call ‘auntie’). Continue reading →

This Too Is India

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Long-time reader Kush Tandon was in India a couple of months ago, and since then he’s been slowly putting up the photos he took on his blog and on his Flickr account. As I was perusing them the other day, one photo stood out to me:

kush tandon iit roorkee.jpg

(click on the image to see it larger; click here to see Kush’s IIT-Roorkee photo set)

Kush also gives a caption to the photo to explain a little about the history of IIT Roorkee:

IIT Roorkee, once University of Roorkee, and before that Thomason College is perhaps the prettiest campus in India, something like Cornell University campus in Ithaca for North America. It is a quiet, green oasis that is about 150 years old. Its history spans training engineers for canal building in India, sappers for Indian military for many wars (British India and later independent India), for huge dam making projects immediately after the independence, and now with India’s economy opening up. (link)

I personally like the photo because it defies the clichés regarding what India looks like — which probably tend to dictate what we ourselves photograph when we go there. That is not to say that there isn’t another side to life, even in Roorkee (and Kush himself has a number of photos showing poverty as well as open trash). But both kinds of images are part of the story.

Do readers have photographs in their public collections that show images of the Indian subcontinent that also defy expectations in some way? If so, we would love to see them… Continue reading →

Posts that fall into the cracks

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As has been said (by some of the individual bloggers that write here) many times in the past, we don’t always have the time to blog all the wonderful news tips, events, causes, new blogs, etc. that are sent to us via the tip line, email, or the top secret phone line. It isn’t that your tip/cause/event isn’t worthy, it’s just that there aren’t enough hours in the day to blog everything and still pursue a normal, blog-free life. In order to be worth crafting into a post in the first place, some items take a lot more research and individual interest than others. We all attempt to add some value to any item we post. We encourage you to use the News Tab and Events Tab as much as possible.

That being said, I did want to draw your attention to three recent “tips” that I didn’t want falling through the cracks:

1) The fellowship application deadline for Indicorps is fast approaching and I know there are many SM readers who would make perfect candidates:

Who: You! Indicorps seeks to engage the most talented young Indians from around the world on the frontlines of India’s most pressing challenges; in the process, we aim to nurture a new brand of socially conscious leaders with the character, knowledge, commitment, and vision to transform India and the world.

Why Now: We are currently recruiting soon-to-be college graduates and professionals of Indian origin for our August 2008-2009 Fellowship. There are over 50 exciting community-based projects ranging from educating tribal youth in Maharashtra to increasing production of natural dye based products in Karnataka.

2) There is a new blog worth checking out called Out Against Abuse. It is a forum dedicated to issues surrounding domestic abuse in the South Asian community:

Out against abuse is an online blog based forum created to bring together activists, volunteers, survivors, and members of the community to encourage the discussion of gender related abuse and how it affects the South Asian community. We hope through constant dialogue and collaboration we can all learn from each other and work to educate our community on how to end gender related violence in our homes and lives. [Link]

3) Finally, The Kominas have a new album out titled, “Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay.” Taz featured them in a post back in 2006. I hope they get on to the new Harold and Kumar movie soundtrack with that title:

This is the highly anticipated debut release of quite possibly the most popular Taqwacore band in existence. The CD was recorded with the band fresh off the first US Taqwacore tour. The CD includes old crowd favorites like “Suicide Bomb the Gap” and “Sharia Law in the USA,” but also includes newer songs with a more punk edge, like “Blow Shit Up.” [Link]

Keep sending in the tips. We won’t be able to blog each one but we do read them all.

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Hussein Ibish Embarrasses Himself on The Colbert Report

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Alert Mutineer Giri hit up my wall on Facebook*, and wrote a scorching screed about something he witnessed while watching last night’s Colbert Report.

Apparently, Hussein Ibish, the Executive Director of The Hala Foundation For Arab-American Leadership was a guest on the show; he was invited on to address the whole “Is Obama actually a Muslim?”-question, or, as Colbear facetiously put it, whether Obama is “a secret Muslim”. Ibish was ostensibly offended enough by Colbear’s jocular query to utter the following stupidity to his host, as if this would clear everything up:

“If someone says…that you…are a secret Hindu or perhaps a child molestor…are we to take that as…”

I beg your pardon? Sorry, Mr. Ibish, perhaps you should beg ours?

To his credit, Colbert forcefully replied, “I’ll take care of this one” to his loudly booing audience. He went on to proclaim:

“I find it offensive, that you are implying that all Hindus are child molestors. Your words, Sir. Your words.”

I find it offensive, too. What kind of “spokesperson” is so utterly reckless, or barring that, terrible at hiding their biases? Ibish went on what is arguably an influential television program and offered a dysphemistic metaphor, when he should have– for his sake, his cause’s sake, hell, everyone’s sake– been far more diplomatic. Continue reading →