Via Pickled Politics, here is an upbeat track from a British singer named Bishi:
She’s rocking the sitar, and the music has kind of a new wave synth feel, with a driving bass. (Or whatever — we could also just call it London pop music.)
There’s also this slower song (with a pretty silly video). Continue reading
First off, a belated thanks to the Mutiny for letting me stay a month longer. I’m excited to be here, and even more excited that my topics now know no bounds. Brace yourselves. Huddle in the bunker.
You all know I love to write about food. And I love Sri Lanka. So what would make me sadder than anything? (Subtract conflict in Sri Lanka from consideration.) This piece about a Sri Lankan restaurant, from the Village Voice.
My friend K sent me this. (Thanks, K!) There’s so much wrong with it that I hardly know where to begin. But what struck me most was something I’ve been seeing more and more in coverage of Sri Lanka: gratuitous inclusion or overemphasis on religion. There’s enough carnage in Sri Lanka that I suppose people feel compelled to cover or mention the country. At the same time, they feel that they ought to smush news or writing about it into the Religion v. Religion WWE format currently favored by those discussing 9/11 and its aftermath. Continue reading
We’ve sometimes blogged about the Pakistani TV host, Begum Nawazish Ali, a drag queen who hosts a variety show on Pakistani TV. 
Now Tamil TV (thanks, Shalini and Literary Safari) will have something similar, in Rose Venkatesan, who is not merely in drag for the TV show, but actually transgendered (meaning, she identifies as a woman socially):
“The sari is the most flattering garment,†he added, as he touched up her makeup minutes before the cameras started rolling. “It disguises manly shoulders, takes attention away from a masculine neck.â€
A complex procedure even for experienced hands, the process of tying a sari is particularly hard for Rose, who was raised as a boy, and used to be known as Ramesh Venkatesan. Her mother never taught her the skill and refuses to see her wear one. Even so, the outcome was flawless.
When it is broadcast on Vijay television to an audience of up to 64 million people in the southern state of Tamil Nadu later this month, “Ippadikku Rose†(“Yours, Roseâ€) is expected to cause a sensation, introducing India’s first transgender celebrity to television. (link)
I like the bit about the sari as a flattering garment for transgendered women (will have to keep that in mind…).
Rose has, I gather from the rest of the article, always been effeminate (and I mean that non-pejoratively), though she’s only ‘become’ a woman in the past four years. She has a degree in biomedical engineering (!) from Louisiana Tech:
Rose said attitudes were no less hostile in parts of the United States, where she had spent three years studying at Louisiana Tech University. “There, people were aggressively homophobic,†she said. “America is very hypocritical when it comes to its stand on sexual minorities. Historically, India was very progressive about this until the British came and imposed a Victorian sense of morality, which still remains.†(link)
Interesting — a slightly different twist on the narrative we might have expected (i.e., where someone who doesn’t fit in in India finds a measure of liberation and acceptance abroad). In Louisiana, Rose encountered homophobia; in Chennai, she will be a star.
(See Ennis’ post below for video clips of both the Begum and Rose.) Continue reading
To supplement Amardeep’s post, I thought I would share a video clip of Rose:
I don’t think she’s as funny as Begum Nawazish Ali, although she is just starting out:
And while the USA has plenty of homophobia, don’t forget that RuPaul had a talk show on American TV in 1996, a decade before either of the desi shows. You can see a clip here.
A couple of quick music notes for SM readers. Up first, Chee Malabar has released a few songs he has been working on as an internet mix tape titled “Unearthed Hurt and Other Disappointments.” From my past reviews you guys know that I dig his stuff. You can download the songs for free here (.zip file).
A friend of mine also tipped me off to a new Hindi-ish song by Timbaland (he who just remixes other peoples stuff) with “Amar & Jim Beanz.” The song is titled “Bombay” and although there is no video for it yet, you can at least listen to it in the Youtube clip below:
Last week Anna posted about some “controversial” statements made by a British politician with regards to inbreeding within the British Asian (i.e. Muslim) community. Specifically cited was the practice of marrying one’s first cousin. Coincidentally, a friend of mine from L.A. (Amyn Kaderali) has just finished a movie (awaiting distribution) titled “Kissing Cousins.” It is not a documentary but rather a “Relatively Romantic” comedy that tries to make the audience feel just a bit uncomfortable. Here is the trailer:
Amir is the last bachelor in his group of coupled-up friends. When they accuse him of being incapable of having a relationship and replace him as the best man at an upcoming wedding, Amir and his visiting long-lost cousin hatch a plan to prove them wrong. [Link]
Among the cast of actors is the gorgeous Rebecca Hazelwood as the hot cousin, Gerry Bednob, David Alan Grier, and…Urkel (sorry, Jaleel White…respect). Amyn also previously released the short film Call Center. Keep an eye out for Kissing Cousins at upcoming film festivals and let SM readers know how it is.
As desis we feel that the burden of meddlesome parents is uniquely ours. Exhibit A, an email from Yo Dad to Abhi:
Also please try and select life partner before next January !! Good luck !! Love…. Dad… [Link]
How typical, right? How very … African. The text that follows is from a BBC forum on the proper role of parents in childrens’ love lives in Africa:
Should African parents stay out of their children’s love lives? Or should a happy medium be reached between traditional match making and modern dating? … Is a marriage between two people or between two families?… [Link]
That’s right, it’s not just brown parents that like to … help their children and who view marriage as being a partnership between two families, it’s African families as well. There’s a reason why Bollywood fillums are so popular across Africa.
Similarly, we feel that pressures to be pragmatic about relationships are uniquely desi. Well, what about these quotes from a first world writer:
What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5’4″ and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:
I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway). [Link]
Marriage isn’t a passion-fest …It’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. [Link]Continue reading
Remember this cringe-worthy Superbowl ad about the stereotypical desi salesman who is about to be fired by his cranky white boss? [Update – changed from the Panda ad to the Ramesh ad, thanks VV]
It was written by the CEO of InfoUSA himself, Vin Gupta. The ad was not just offensive, it was a total waste of money:
The panda ad ranked 45th out of 55 ads shown during the Super Bowl. The other Salesgenie ad, with a salesman who thinks he is going to get fired, ranked 50th. [Link]
Gupta doesn’t seem to mind spending money though, as long as it gets him visibility. Gupta is an FOB, a Friend of Bill that is (although he is also a DBD). Gupta is generous to Bill not just with his own personal money, but also with the company’s resources as well:
Gupta’s Clinton connection came into the spotlight last year, when angry shareholders of InfoUSA filed a lawsuit in a Delaware court; claiming that the CEO had wasted millions of dollars of the publicly-traded company to get into Clinton’s good books.
They seem to have good cause. The plaintiffs have alleged that Gupta misused the company jet to fly the Clintons to vacations. Gupta is believed to have paid Bill Clinton $2 million for vaguely-defined ‘consulting services’. In addition, he is alleged to have spent close to a million dollars to fly Bill Clinton around the world for his Presidential Foundation work; and to fly Hillary to campaign events. [Link]After the Clintons left the White House, Gupta hired Bill Clinton as a consultant. It’s one of two continuing business relationships he has had since leaving office, and it has been worth $3.3 million, in addition to the options on 100,000 shares of stock. [Link]
But here the story shifts, and becomes stranger.
There have been quite a few stories in the past couple of weeks about the issue of translation in Indian literature, most of them stemming, I think, from the annual Jaipur Literary Festival which took place last month. (Incidentally, I’ve been keeping up with these stories through The Literary Saloon, by far the best blog for world literature out there right now. All the links below come from that blog.)
Some of the stories read kind of like pep talks for translators — come on guys, get translating! This story, in The Hindu, might be one such example. Mini Krishnan focuses on the idea of a translator as a creative figure in his or her own right — a “conjurer.” One of the translated passages she quotes, from a Tamil writer, seemed particularly evocative to me:
The translator throws her voice so skilfully that the truth of a text originally written in an Indian language is “heard†in English. Here is Vasantha Surya translating the Tamil writer Ki Rajanarayanan: “Taking out the betel leaves one by one as if he were taking things out of a pooja box, he would lay them out with the devotion due to objects of worship. . . Next he would sniff the broken areca nut. Then he would blow on it. This sniffing and blowing procedure was repeated several times, his hand transporting the areca nut from nose to mouth, nose to mouth, more and more rapidly until ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, dabak! Into his mouth the areca nut would go, having been noisily purified.†Which Indian — educated in English, unable to read his mother tongue or born of a mother other than Tamil — will not thrill to such a retelling? (link)
What I liked about this is the fact that the translator doesn’t feel the need to translate every word. Even though I don’t know Tamil, I have a pretty good idea of what a word like “dabak” must mean, just from context. I think even writing originally written in English can often get away with the inclusion of many more words from Indian languages than people might think. (I’ve seen my students pick up words on their own as they read books by Indian authors. They often have no idea how to pronounce them, but the foreignness of the words usually doesn’t stop a dedicated reader; if anything, it presents them with an interesting puzzle to solve while reading.)
The folks over at Cinematical.com have been taking an early peak at some of the films that will be playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin. This one immediately caught my eye as a film that more people need to know about:
FLYING ON ONE ENGINE captures the story of the severely disabled Dr. Dicksheet, a man who has donated his surgical skills to the cause of alleviating suffering among India’s poor. The film both highlights the problems of cleft lip and other congenital deformities, and also tells the dramatic story of a person risking his life to help those in need. Emphasizing Dr. Dicksheet’s frailty, his surgical brilliance, and the spectacular effects of his actions, this film juxtaposes the Nobel Prize nominated surgeon’s godlike status alongside the incredible desperation of the Indian community in which he serves.
The website of The India Project which Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet (from Brooklyn) runs is filled with inspirational pictures and stories, so I am glad someone has made a documentary about his work to spread the word. He is an eight-time Nobel Prize nominee and although he is himself hobbled by sickness, his patients think of him as a “God” for the help he brings to their lives.