Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Another freaky Indian kid

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Title says it all. Here is something to think about on the drive home or to discuss with your friends over a beer tonight:

Roller-skating under cars might seem impossible, but it is the latest craze among kids in India and requires the flexibility, strength and balance of a gymnast.

Six-year-old Aniket Chindak holds the unofficial world record for ‘limbo-skating’ and speeds along no more than eight-inches above the ground.

Unfolding his body from his eye-watering position, the wonder-kid explained proudly how he is training to break his own world record of skating under 57 cars in 45 seconds. [Link]

He is like a human transformer. He goes from upright human to some sort of crazy airplane looking thing. Unfortunately, like all other successful child freaks, he will probably go on to face disappointment in a business that exploits youth to provide blog and media fodder.

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Mira Nair’s “The Perez Family” (1995)

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I enjoyed looking at some of the influences behind The Namesake last week, and I’ve started to look at some of Mira Nair’s older films — including one that I hadn’t seen before, The Perez Family.

The Perez Family is a film adaptation of a novel by the same name by Christine Bell. It’s the story of a family separated at the time of the Cuban revolution, which has the potential to be reunited because of the Mariel boatlift of 1980. The boatlift brought more than 100,000 Cuban refugees to the United States, with full approval of both Castro and the U.S. government.

My detailed (possibly too detailed?) take on the film is below the fold, but at this point one obvious issue for discussion does come up, which is whether there are points for comparison between Cuban refugees and Indian immigrants from the 1960s and 70s. Cuban Americans are famous for skewing somewhat to the Right; many of the earlier wave were wealthy landowners in Cuba, who had the most to lose in Castro’s Cuba. But perhaps many earlier Indian immigrants are themselves somewhat more conservative than one might expect, perhaps because of the “artifact” of U.S. immigration law up through 1980 — which made it relatively easy for doctors and engineers to come in. Continue reading →

A mind, a blog, and a vast emptiness

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We often receive emails like the one below at the lonely North Dakota bunker that serves as Sepia Mutiny’s world blogging headquarters:

…I’d like to reach a wider audience and would really appreciate if you could link [to] my blog.

ps – I’m pretty good at keeping my site updated. Please take a look!

Thanks much!

To this, our standard response (if we have time to write one) is a polite “please read our F.A.Q.” But when I read the above email from a blogger, writing from a lonely bunker of his own, with nothing but his science and his blog…well, I’m not made of stone people. I’m quick to recognize a kindred spirit when I see one.

Plus, this guy’s research has direct bearing on my own work and career aspirations (and might save me some day):

I am a resident of Delhi, India, and a psychiatrist by profession (heal the mentally unwell). I’m also fond of the great outdoors, and cultures around the world. I’ll be spending 3.5 months in Antarctica winter of 2008, doing research at the Indian base station. Thru this blog, I hope to keep my friends and family updated on my stay in this incredible land.
–Sudhir Khandelwal [Link]

Of course he is going to be “good about updating his site!” What else does he have to do? 🙂

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A Spot of Teh?

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Nasikandarpelita.jpgPreston says that I carry a teabag everywhere the way a teenage boy carries a condom. I disagree, as (I presume) teenage boys carry condoms with hope, and I don’t actually want to use the emergency teabag stowed in the change pocket of my wallet. Yes, there is such a thing as a tea emergency—the moment when only black Sri Lankan tea (with milk, one sugar) will make me happy. But I have had no such emergencies in Malaysia, as the tea here (teh tarik, as my preferred version of it is called) tastes like tea in a Sri Lankan home. (Teh tarik is “pulled tea,” according to one of our guidebooks. When I read what that meant, I realized that it’s what I know in Tamil as “athefining.” Pardon the poor transliteration.) Made with condensed milk and mixed by being poured from one vessel to another, it’s fantastically refreshing.

But before tea: food. And here Malaysia outdoes almost every other country I’ve visited. At the open-air food court nearest our hotel, Nasi Kandar Pelita, the cash registers feature a line-up of complimentary meal-enders: vitamin drops of various fruited flavors. The emptiest bin, however, is the one farthest to the left—antacids! The food is well worth the gastronomical price, and worth much more than its actual price. Continue reading →

Huckabee is totally Cobra Kai material.

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Via SAJAForum, an…interesting political cartoon by Ted Rall which experiments with a provocative question: what if Republican threat to everything presidential candidate Mike Huckabee were a different sort of fundamentalist?

Ted Rall on Huckabee.jpg

Here are the cartoonist’s own words regarding this work, from his blog:

Today’s cartoon responds to the generally respectful tone accorded Mike Huckabee, who does not believe in evolution and is therefore, by definition, a lunatic. [vague link]

I do appreciate Rall’s overarching point– Huckabee is allowed to be as batshit crazy as he wants to be because he’s on the fundamentalist fringe of my religion instead of any other one– since I’m no fan of the preacher man. It’s a very valid concern. Continue reading →

Subcontinental Scripts: Urdu vs. Hindi

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As part of a scholarly project I’m working on (on Saadat Hasan Manto), I recently taught myself how to read the Urdu script. I had briefly learned it as part of a Hindi class in college many years ago, but then immediately forgot it.

I must admit, I’ve been finding Urdu quite difficult. Reading from right to left isn’t so hard to get used to, but there are some letters that seem to be interchangeable (i.e., two different ways of writing ‘k’/’q’), and other letters that look painfully similar to one another on the page (‘d’, ‘r’, ‘v’, etc). Also, some of the vowel markers one sees in Hindi/Devanagari, though they do exist in Urdu as diacritic marks, are frequently omitted, so you often have to guess which vowel should be used based on context. Oh, and did I mention that there often aren’t clear word breaks (depending on how the typography is done in a given book or newspaper)?

But once I got the script down (roughly), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Manto’s Urdu vocabulary isn’t that far off from standard Hindustani — but then, he’s a prose writer known for his accessible style. By contrast, the vocabulary of much Urdu poetry (i.e., Ghalib) is so full of Persian words as to be unintelligible — at least to a barbarian ABD like myself.

Via the News Tab (thanks, ViParavane), I came across a great post at the Language Log blog with a historical linguistics explanation for how the script (and language) divide came to be. I don’t have much knowledge to offer on top of what Mark Liberman says, so the following are the just the quotes in Liberman’s post I found to be most interesting. Continue reading →

Thinking of Kenya

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no peace.jpg Outside, it is 15 degrees (that is what it feels like, according to Yahoo Weather) and though I thought I had bundled up successfully and strategically, walking towards the metro felt like lurching through a freezer.

I made it three doors down from my building before a cab pulled over; he mistook my violent shivering as a gesture for his attention.

I gratefully dove in to both the back seat and the dulcet, erudite tones of the BBC world service, which was emerging from several speakers at a volume that was on the wrong side of my comfort levels. If it hadn’t been the Beeb, it would’ve been unbearable.

While we waited for the light to change on Connecticut Avenue NW, I noticed how he was peering at me via the rear-view mirror. I was frantically trying to remember if I had my security badge at the bottom of my boat ‘n’ tote.

We sailed forward, in that smooth, sinking-in-to-pudding way which is unique to Town cars and he made mirror-eye-contact with me again. He smiled slightly.

“Are you from Nairobi?”

How odd. I am forever getting confused for the other kind of Sheba. “No, my parents are from India.”

He looked at me like I was daft.

“You’re Indian.”

It was a declaration, and an odd, exasperated one at that, not a question. I didn’t feel like playing this variation of the “Where are you from?” game on an empty and caffeine-free stomach so I tried to deflect.

“Um, are you from…Nairobi?”, I asked. Continue reading →

Singapore Days, Part I

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I wake to the sound of tennis balls, the sound of leisure. For New Year’s, Singapore went shopping, worshiped, and celebrated, making very little mess in the process.

Hindus, mostly from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, went to the temples here, some dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century and earlier. Families arrived in private cars and taxis, the women bedecked in silk and jasmine. Laborers came in the backs of flatbed trucks fitted with benches to seat them. They smashed coconuts and prayed for good fortune.

singdayscover.jpg

Earlier, they had shopped at Mustafa’s—a postcolonial Marks and Spencer, the Walmart of the East—jammed with every conceivable consumer good: electronics, South Asian and western suitings, cosmetics, jewelry, luggage, appliances, fruit, dry goods, DVDs. The store in Little India is itself a little India and larger than the Little Indias in most non-Indian cities.

Tourists enjoyed the spectacle. The Australians wore shorts and sipped Singapore Slings in commemorative glasses at Raffles Hotel, a colonial-era shrine to steamer trunks, Noel Coward, and Dicky Mountbatten. The daughter of a wealthy Chinese businessman married a wealthy Chinese businessman and had her photo taken in the courtyard of the Empire Cafe.

Singapore goes about its business, which is business.

Elsewhere, at the Malaysian High Commission, in a leafy residential neighborhood, Seelan Palay, the 23-year-old grandson of a gravedigger, stages a one-man hunger strike to protest the detention, in Kuala Lumpur, of the five leaders of an Indian minority-rights organization.

Photo above, smashing coconuts at the Ceylon Temple.

More pictures below. Continue reading →