Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Special Delivery: Come Give it to me (The Remix)

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lunch.jpg A few years ago, erstwhile mutineer Manish posted here about an enterprising Tiffinwalla in New York who would deliver healthy, vegetarian lunches (“2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney”) for all of $5.

I was living in California at the time and lazy ingrate that I am, I was green with longing, even as I was eating fresh Mallu food daily at home.

It just seemed like such a fantastic concept; New Yorkers got EVERYTHING, I wistfully thought. Couldn’t the left coast have had similar, especially during that arid, empty time that my Mother was abroad for two months? 😉 I mean, protein shakes get old, y’all.

Apparently, my whining has been answered, according to a story in the grey lady which many of you were blowing up our tipline/news tab with (Thanks, Derick):

In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same…
Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.

Srivathsan stumbled in to a market which was just waiting for someone like her to hook them up with comfort food:

She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. “That was the only time I ever did any advertising,” she said. “The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire.”

Continue reading →

5 Things Happening in South Asia Unrelated to Cricket

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There’s been quite a raft of South Asia-related coverage in the New York Times this past week or so.

Perhaps most importantly, the Times finally gets to Musharraf’s ugly confrontation with Pakistan’s legal establishment. Perhaps what’s most striking in the current instance is the fact that Pakistan’s rioting lawyers are only now getting the message that Mushie may not be good for business.

In business news, New York’s Citigroup offices are going to see a major round of layoffs soon, while the company’s Indian back office is going to continue to grow. A few thousand formerly well-paid bankers have suddenly grown quite enthusiastic about Lou Dobbs’ brand of anti-outsourcing populism, and are suddenly pining for John Kerry.

Third, unrelated to outsourcing, it seems the Indian publishing industry has been doing quite well in the past couple of years, even as conventional publishing in the U.S. has struggled. There is an editorial in the Hindustan Times by Peter Gordan to that effect, but more importantly, see the article in the Business Standard from a couple of weeks ago on the subject. Apparently blogs have been part of the growth of the industry:

What has given the industry the much-needed charge and brought about these changes? Says Pramod Kapoor, publisher, Roli Books, “The reading habits of people are seeing a lot of change and there is more thirst for gaining knowledge.” Kapoor feels a lot of the credit for this should be given to the media as well as the Internet boom.
“People on blogs talk about books and there is more awareness about the titles released. The media too has played its role by giving more space to the publishing industry.” Literary festivals too have helped interest in books and authors grow. (link)

This is good news. Societies with vibrant book publishing are generally ones with bright futures. (Yes, I am saying something upbeat about India. Someone must have put something in my Kool-Aid.)

As for the positive role played by blogs, I am sure that Manish’s exhaustive coverage of the effect of Shakira’s abdominal muscles on the Mumbai stock exchange must be the culprit. Continue reading →

On Saving Versus Primitivizing, Or Both

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The LA Times ran this story a few weeks ago on a local college professor’s work in Nepal to fight human trafficking. I’ve been mulling over the story for a while, so I didn’t blog about it right away. I wasn’t even sure why I was bothered, but then I read about After the Wedding last week, and I felt as though I had a moment of clarity. It’s funny how a fictitious story can sometimes help you better understand your own reality.

Anyway, back to the article. Six years ago, California State University professor Jeffrey Kottler visited a village in rural Nepal to study maternal mortality. During his visit, he discovered that sex traffickers were taking young girls from the village — sometimes through kidnapping, sometimes with their parents’ consent — and forcing them into prostitution in India. Kottler, who was very disturbed by the scenario, decided to buy a Nepali girl’s freedom. He paid the village school principal fifty dollars to ensure that the girl stayed in school and out of prostitution for at least one year. Within six years, through fundraising and having two Nepalis monitor the uses of the funds, Kottler bought the freedom of 42 girls, preventing them from ever being sold into sexual slavery.

So why exactly would this article bother me, you might ask? Let me be very clear: I applaud Jeffrey Kottler. I fully support what he is doing, and I wish there were more people in this world like him. He’s done more with his life than anyone I know. And believe you me, most of my friends work or have worked tirelessly in the public sector, organizing immigrant workers or opening a health clinic for the homeless or helping abused mothers find employment. Yet despite our collective efforts, I don’t think any of us can honestly say that we’ve been able to prevent anyone from entering a lifetime of servitude and forced prostitution.

So it’s not Kottler who bothers me, or the idea of non-browns helping browns. It’s the undertones of this article and others like it that I do have a problem with. Those of you who follow my posts and my personal blog know that I generally cringe when it comes to stories of westerners “saving” the primitives from themselves. I cringe largely because these stories tend to reek of condescension, and they overlook the work that the “natives” have also done in the same field.

Likewise, the writer of this article uses interesting anecdotes to highlight just how “backward” the Nepalis are. The villagers are so poor that the typical house has “an animal to be tethered to the back wall.” “It’s a place where a father can be killed by a tiger.” There are blatant strokes of sensationalism here, much of which has nothing to do with anything. What exactly is the writer trying to do by evoking so much animal imagery? Then he states that the natives are so devoid of education that they “didn’t know where America was.” Oooh, shocking. Never mind that most Americans I know wouldn’t even be able to point out Nepal, much less India, on a map either. Continue reading →

Cricket: Amar’s Chitra Katha

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amarrrrshah!.jpg

Day 13 of my Cricket tuition: I’m feeling a bit woozy from all the head-spinning developments regarding certain tragic events of this World Cup. Surely there is no better moment to focus on sweeter aspects of the game, specifically how an essay penned by my erstwhile intern Amar Shah showed up on ESPN the other day. I felt nothing but consummate delight when I followed the link which was submitted repeatedly to the bunker’s hotline; there in baby blue, with his gorgeous wife too, the boy whom I had been surprisingly fond of, even before we had ever met.

It was 2002 and Amar Shah was a student from the University of Florida. I was in a windowless office at Preston Gates, near the White House. I began receiving persistent instant messages from someone with a memorable, if young-sounding screen name. Typical questions about what his internship would be like and how he should prepare gave way to actual conversation and fellowship. Who was this kid? That first day of our program, I remember that though I was excited about finally meeting all of my interns, I was extra-curious about the one who would later jump up in a hyperactive and spontaneous moment mid-orientation and show off how he already knew not just our names, but our AIM screen names, as well. And I thought he had just been chatting with me. 😉

That summer, I held his hand as he crushed on the unattainable: a girl so stunning, she looked as if she had stepped out of a Moghul miniature. I fretted over him while he bounced around the Hill; I kept him company when he was the last of my baby birds to fly away, that tear-drenched August day. It was fitting that Amar’s would be the final flight to leave DC; it was a small comfort that I had a few extra hours to spend with someone I had grown so attached to, someone who since then has always made me proud. Continue reading →

Bringing Balance to the Force

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There is much in my life that the Holy Trilogy has taught me. I refer of course to Star Wars (the original, not the unwatchable prequels). As I make my way through this long and often chaotic journey, I know that I can always refer back to it for understanding and comfort in the face of confusion. Of course, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, Star Wars was really just a vehicle for the re-telling of the story of the Hero With a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. [Link]

The original Star Wars Trilogy featured Luke Skywalker as the Hero. The prequels featured Anakin/Darth Vader as an anti-hero. All this introduction brings me to the story of Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old singer on American Idol. He is the one. The chosen one that will bring a balance to the force. The light must be completely extinguished and the darkness he represents must reign over us all, before the world can rise up and purge that which he represents once again.

Now, before I continue with my analysis I must state, again, that I don’t watch American Idol. It comes on at the same time as Pussycat Dolls Presents: The Search for the Next Doll, which I watch instead. I wish American Idol contestants were “hot like” the Dolls, but they just aren’t so it is an easy choice. I’m shallow like that.

Some xenophobic theories on the internet claim that the reason Sanjaya is winning is because all the call center workers from India are calling in and voting for him. As if they have nothing better to do (like ummmm…take incoming customer complaints through the night). Such racist filth masquerading as one man’s “theory” undermines what is really happening here. Likewise, pictures such as the one below, although they do make the proper Star Wars connection, miss the mark by thinking of Sanjaya as merely a Sith and not the Sith Lord:

Sanjaya Maul

Continue reading →

Not Another West Meets East Movie

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Turns out there was not just one, but two desi-related films up for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars this year. I’m talking about Denmark’s After the Wedding, which will be released here in the US next week on March 30 in select cities. Don’t know how I overlooked this one back when the nominees were announced, but the late release date probably explains it.

While many films concerning Westerners in India involve characters going to the motherland to find themselves after going through some sort of a crisis (Shantaram and Darjeeling Limited come to mind), After the Wedding is different. This film deals with the emotional turmoil a Westerner goes through after he leaves India. In After the Wedding, a Danish expat, Jacob, lives in India and runs an orphanage. He also has an adopted son, Pramod, whom he’s raised since infancy. When the orphanage is threatened by closure, Jacob begrudgingly leaves India for Denmark to meet with a businessman, Jørgen, who offers to help keep the orphanage open. Jacob also discovers that a) Jørgen’s wife happens to Jacob’s ex and b) Jørgen’s daughter (gasp!) might actually be his. And so Jacob must now ask himself a difficult question: return to India and his adopted Pramod or stay in Denmark with the biological daughter he’s never known?

You can view the trailer after the jump. Is it just me or does Jacob look like he’s in excellent shape for someone who’s about to face a mid-life crisis? Continue reading →

Cricket: Farewell, My Aloo

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…wherein Whose God is it Anyways? inspires a second cricket post in a row!

The Sound of Cricket.JPG

The education of my cricket-ignorant kundi continues; I shall torment you with my progress, much like a toddler rushes back to a parent to exclaim, “I did it in the potty!” Like aforementioned kid, I, too would like a cookie and a pat on the head. Thanks, you’re the best.

So. WGiiA left a comment on my last World Cup post which piqued my kitten-like curiosity:

ok. just got very emotional seeing inzi get out and leave the field for the last time in an ODI. he deserved better circumstances under which to leave. [link]

I immediately assaulted consulted one of my cricket tutors, the one who kindly told me a bedtime story via speakerphone last night which starred Sachin Tendulkar– look, when one runs out of Ambien, one reaches for desperate alternatives– and expressively typed “?” in his GChat window. I didn’t expect to like or care about what I’d learn, but I wanted to find out more nonetheless, if only because I’m a sentimental wench and anyone’s last ____ always makes me a bit verklempt. Continue reading →

No, Not Like the Thing for When it Rains

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Siddhartha’s post on lovely lime pickle got me thinking about my favorite. Behold: The Amazing Ambarella!

Before

 

After

Other names for this fruit and close relatives are Otaheite apple, Tahitian quince, Jamaica plum, golden apple and wi…The tree grows tall, reaching almost 20 m (60 ft). The fruit, which is popular in Asia, is plum shaped, sweet-sour and eaten at all stages of ripeness. Its distinguishing feature is a spiny seed. The spines toughen as the fruit matures, so that when eating conserve made from the almost-ripe fruit, the sweet flesh should be carefully sucked from the seed to avoid an unsolicited lip-piercing or a tough fibre stuck between the teeth. In the unripe stages the green skin is peeled with a knife and slices of the firm, pale flesh dipped in chilli powder and salt before being relished by street-side snackers or school children. Unripe fruit is also cooked in chutneys. As the fruit ripens it becomes yellow to orange in colour and more fragrant and sweet, though still with a good percentage of acidity. It has been described as having a flavour like pineapple.link

I don’t think it tastes like a pineapple at all, but the rest of it is pretty accurate. I’ve never seen ambarellas for sale anywhere in the U.S. and the web didn’t have much except for these odd little facts:

In Sri Lanka, ambarellas are made into chutneys, curries, and pickles of all kinds. Cut a raw one up, sprinkle a little salt, sugar, vinegar and chili powder…oooh, heaven. My grandmother had a gigantic tree growing right over her house, and we’d visit her carrying buckets during the fruiting season. I’ve got strangely happy memories of eating peeled, uncut ambarella while reading a book, only noticing my bleeding gums (those spines are shaarrp) when my mother grimaced.

So does anyone else have memories of eating an ambarella? Maybe you call it by another name? Or (and this would be fabulous) you know where I could buy some?! Continue reading →

The Great Achar of Wigan

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limepickle.jpgBehold: The lime pickle. Not the chili pickle, the mango pickle, the garlic pickle, the eggplant pickle, or any other kind of pickle. And certainly not that abomination, the “mixed pickle.” This here is lime pickle, the greatest and more exalted of all the pickles.

Man, me and lime pickle go back a long, long way. You see, in all my mixed-up, tri-continental, ruthlessly secular upbringing, desi food always held its rightful place. Now we lived in France, not a major center of desi culture either then or now, and this was before the globalization of so-called ethnic gourmet cuisine made the basic spices and ingredients available in all the world’s major cities. But we made do, and the key to our survival, desi food-wise, was the one line of prepared foods, spice mixes and achars on the market, which was inevitably Patak’s. So there was always a bottle of curry paste around — not to serve as the sole ingredient, of course, but to accelerate the process. And whether the curry was prepared from a paste or from scratch, there was always lime pickle on hand to give it the necessary je ne sais quoi.

To this day lime pickle is one of the essential condiments in my refrigerator — that and Dijon mustard (the proper smooth kind, not the grainy stuff), a combination that I guess pretty much encapsulates the flavors of my childhood. I find uses for lime pickle that other people don’t have — or so I think. Except I know that now, as I confess to you that I add lime pickle to my tuna fish salad, a whole bunch of you are going to reveal that you do the same. Continue reading →

Bring Me the Head of Nina the Infidel!

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So, towards the end of my essay on acceptance, a commenter thoughtfully asked me to clarify what I meant by mentioning the fact that Nina Paley had lived in Kerala more recently than I had even visited it. Here’s what I said, which prompted her inquiry:

Nina has been to Kerala far more recently than I have; my last visit was back in the dark ages of 1989. In fact, she lived there, which is something I’ll probably never be able to claim. Who the hell am I or anyone else for that matter, to pull rank over that?

Did Nina’s stay in my parents’ home state give her carte blanche? No, of course it doesn’t. When I said that I wasn’t going to “pull rank”, I meant that I was going to acknowledge that others, even white others, might be more familiar with what everyone expects me to be an expert on, and because of that, I especially loathe the idea of playing the race card, i.e. I am desi, therefore I know more about (and/or get to restrict the unbrown from) my culture. If you read my post, you’ll know that I have a very intimate and poignant reason for why the part I italicized resonates with me.

I appreciate that Nagasai and Amitabh both opened a respectful dialogue about how they feel about Nina’s art but I also am known to be a fan of keeping threads on-topic, so I thought I’d spin this discussion off in to its own separate post, because the issues at play here are fascinating and significant.

What does Nina’s artwork mean to you?

What role does race play in all of this– how many of us would have the same issues we do if her name were Nina Patel vs. Nina Paley?

And how far do these “rules” go? Do some of you have a problem with the fact that I’m writing this post (i.e. that I’m a Christian, commenting on the appropriateness of Hindu imagery in art)? Inquiring and potentially bored mutineers want to know! Continue reading →