Category Archives: Photos

Bush’s 60th birthday celebration gets "Foiled"

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President Bush today held one of his extremely rare press conferences. Hey, lay off. If you were going to get asked a bunch of depressing questions about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea you wouldn’t want to be up in front of the press either. Later on in the evening he even went a step further and gave an interview to someone named Larry King. What is the occasion? It’s his 60th birthday of course! Birthday or not, if you were a hard-nosed reporter and had a deadline on your story, you’d go for the jugular…wouldn’t you? To avoid any uncomfortable questions Bush decided to have a photo-op with any of the White House correspondants who “happend” to share his July 6th birthday. Anyone? Yes good readers. You know where this is going already don’t you? Even the President knows that when you want to dodge tough questions it is time to go to Raghubir “The Foil” Goyal. “Coincidentally” July 6th is his birthday as well. Yeah right (tip via my Mom).

Bush celebrated his birthday with friends on Tuesday at a White House party on Independence Day and there weren’t supposed to be any festivities on Thursday. Still, the occasion was noted in a long day of meetings and public appearances, including a press conference with Harper.

The president received birthday greetings from Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin who talked with Bush on the phone Thursday morning about North Korea’s missile tests.

As Bush closed his news conference, a reporter in the audience, Raghubir Goyal, called out that it was his birthday, too. Bush invited him to the podium for a picture. The president asked if anyone else had a birthday and invited them to come up. Two others, reporter Richard Benedetto and State Department employee Todd Mizis joined the birthday celebration. [Link]

I think this is like when you pretend that it is your birthday so that you can get free cake at the restaurant.

See related posts: A wtf? moment at the Whitehouse press briefing, Goyal’s toils, One-Track Uncle, Scott McClellan feels the heat, Who let brown folks aboard Air Force One?

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Is this Indian man Skeletor in disguise?

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Filed under “signs of the Kali Yuga,” this next story comes to us from India where crowds are gathering to see a man who is sporting a skull for a hairstyle (via the News Tab):

I say we expose this villain for who he really is.

Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off.

Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull came away Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood.

“When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burned and within months it came off exposing the skull,” Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy told Reuters Wednesday.

“Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases.”

The piece came off Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone. [Link]

Poor guy. It is bad enough that he got burned but to have people staring and pointing at your skull?? You can’t even put a cast on that thing. At least then you could hope to make friends when people asked to sign it.

Bandyopadhyay said the skull’s inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow…

“Doctors say a new skull covering has replaced the old one, but I am not letting go of this one,” he told Reuters.

He intends to keep his prized possession for life and not hand it over to the hospital when he leaves: “My skull has made me famous,” he says. [Link]

You may have fooled the others Roy, but I know who you are. That brown skin and somber expression is just a facade for the evil that lurks beneath. When I find my Battlecat I shall come for you. Continue reading →

Postcards from the 2006 Artwallah Festival

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I spent the entire day yesterday at the Artwallah Festival in Los Angeles. Since many of you couldn’t be out here for the festival I thought I would do my part to relate the experience through some pictures that I took. I bought a new camera recently so forgive me for going overboard with the colors. 🙂

Micro Pixie soothes the crowd with her ambient sound.

Adnan does his thing while Micro Pixie does hers.

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Everything Brown Is Better ;)

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even our crustaceans are prettier.JPG
This is going to seem highly random, but I was meandering about Wikipedia thanks to this thread, because I thought I’d read more about Bigelow teas after this comment. Whenever I wiki, I always peep the main page to see if there is something interesting and or brown (since I’m the one who named this category).

Today’s featured picture of mictyris longicarpus captured my attention for two reasons:

1) I am absolutely terrified of crustaceans and think eating them is just gross. They remind me of insects and one of you more useful (read: non-poli-sci major) types told me that the two groups of ickiness are actually related.

2) LOOK at those COLORS. Have you ever seen a prettier icky creature?

Here, learn something:

The light blue soldier crab (Mictyris longicarpus), inhabits beaches in the Indo-Pacific region. Soldier crabs filter sand or mud for microorganisms. They congregate during the low tide, and bury themselves in a corkscrew pattern during high tide, or whenever they are threatened.

I googled a bit more and found out that this thing (more formally known as the “soldier crab”) scurries about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This proves my E.C.F.I.-Uncle-esque theory that everything South Asian is prettier. 😉 Continue reading →

First we play…then we’ll meditate

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Via our News tab (thanks WGiiA) we get a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been if only India had fielded a World Cup Team…of Hindu ascetics. From the Associated Press:

Peep the footwork on the right. Put this guy in for Ronaldo.

If I worked for Addidas I would have my new ad campaign right here. Those feet just need some free shoes.

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The Desi Dad Project will continue on…

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Despite the fact that it is now Father’s Day, only EIGHT of you have thus far contributed a picture to The Desi Dad Project. To those eight, I appreciate your contributions. Now, I understand that many of you don’t live anywhere near your parents’ basement and that it may be difficult to scan a picture of your father right away. I know that you will when you finally can. The rest of you though are just lazy wankers. Even those annoying Canadians who begged and pleaded to be allowed to upload their fathers were just talk. Perhaps just like George W. Bush’s struggle to promote his social security plan, I am now engaged in a struggle to promote a plan for which I have not yet created enough blog capital. If this is my third rail then so be it. It is a shame though. The eight pictures we have gotten so far are fantastic and the descriptions are even funny to read through (note: you need to open a Flickr account to see all eight).

After today The Desi Dad Project logo will come off of our sidebar but the project will remain open indefinitely. Maybe some of you will finally upload your dads. Lazy wankers.

Happy Father’s Day!

Here are a couple of desi-related Father’s Day links (1, 2).

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The Desi Dad Project

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The past month or so has taught me that there are a lot of people out there that want to see this blog, and what it is all about, succeed. The emails we recently received offering technical support, as well as the offers of financial support we have gotten, have led me to conclude something similar to what one forward looking American politician once said. To paraphrase:

“We’ve earned capital in this blogosphere, blog capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.”

So with that I am announcing the creation of The Desi Dad Project.

For the past six months I have been mulling this idea over in my head. Photographs, even without any words or explanations, can convey a tremendous amount of information and history. Just look through these pictures of some of the first Indian Americans that came to the U.S in the early 20th century, most of them Sikh Punjabis. Recently, with the immigration debate in this country raging on, we have discussed the signifigance of the 1965 Immigration Act and how many of our fathers immigrated to the U.S. as a result of this act. Eventually this led to many of our births. 🙂

So this is what I am proposing, particularly in light of Father’s Day which is just two weeks away. I want you guys to upload a single picture of your dad. I want a photographic archive that captures the spirit of what it meant to be an immigrant in this country as part of the second wave. I want to capture that part of our collective history before it rots away in old albums in our basements, attics, and closets. This project won’t end with Father’s Day though but will keep accepting phtographs.

Here are the criteria you must meet before uploading a picture of your father into this new archive I am proposing:

  • Your father immigrated to the United States between 1965 and 1985. If he arrived a couple of years before 1965 it is okay, but please do not upload pictures taken after 1985. I am looking for pictures that capture the experience of a SPECIFIC generation for the purposes of this project.
  • Your father came from a country in South Asia (e.g. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.) or from ANY other country so long as his ethnicity can be traced back to a South Asian country.
  • The picture you upload has to have been snapped in America.
  • I strongly prefer that your father should be the only person visible in the photograph (feel free to crop the original picture). Pictures of individuals tell a different story than pictures of families. If you don’t have ANY pictures of you father alone then maybe you have one with the two of you together.

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Like No Business I Know

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projectorroom3.jpg Technics aside, a perfect photograph usually involves both, an absorbing subject matter and an image that leaves an imprint as if it were a memory of one’s own. Take these qualities and wrap them around India’s filmi phenomena, turn the roll into a series and what you have is the stuff that dreams are made of. Bollywood dreams, to be (slightly inaccurately) exact.

Jonathan Torgovnik‘s extensive travels throughout India in the early 90s led him to rural India’s nomadic cinema halls and the masala movie sets of Chennai and Mumbai. On the way he managed to create a completely riveting contribution to the study of Indian cinema in the form of Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003). This (unbelievably perfect coffee table) book feels like a deeply personal photo essay as well as a tribute to Indian cinema’s grass roots. All seen through the eyes of a former combat-photographer for the Israeli army.

Online exhibitions of Torgovnik’s work with the Indian film industry can be found at Digital Journalist and foto8. A short (5min.) self-narrated clip of his photographs can be found at Google viddy. His website too is chock full of goodies, like the Mumbai laughing clubs series, which is reducing me to fits of giggles just thinking about it. Or the Satosh series, which is pure breaking my heart. Either way, I can’t stop looking. Continue reading →