Category Archives: Photos

Come Home

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Singer-songwriter Shaheen Sheik, a friend from college, just signed with Times Music in Bombay and is on a promo tour here this week. (Watch her video.) Last night she sang on a TV show with a name that’s a paragon of ridiculously nontransitive branding, the Tuscan Verve Zoom Glam Awards. Other nights she slums with the plebeians. That’s usually when I get to see her.

A few of us went to see her first performance at a downtown Bombay club called Prive, which is around the corner from the Gateway of India. It’s decorated like a Southern strip club (black lacquer ceilings, gold bead curtains and lap dance seats), albeit one with floating roses. It was an odd venue for folk-pop ballads, but Shaheen sang four gorgeous melodies and encored with a cover of ‘In Your Eyes.’ Like most desis of a certain age, the duet guitarist provided by the label knew Pink Floyd, the Eagles and Led Zep but was baffled by Peter Gabriel.

There’s an interesting tradeoff when Indians in the diaspora come back to promote their wares (Apache Indian, Salman Rushdie…) On one hand, the potential market is huge with a built-in cultural interest. On the other, the middle class is limited in size, and you earn less per unit than in your home market after currency conversion.

Ballads at Prive

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Everything’s More Fun in a Group

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Meetups might just be the most delightfully unexpected dish which is made from all this flavorful brownness (which conveniently is contained in one savory packet). When liveblogging isn’t possible, sometimes the best substitute is looking at all the wacky, joyful pictures which inevitably get captured by the half-dozen or so cameras which tend to be around (80% of which are Canons– you read it here first).

Now that we’ve had several meetups in four Amreekan cities, I just know that there are potentially hundreds of pictures moldering away on your computers, pictures which could find a home in the Flickr group created just for the Mutiny. LA Mutineers, this is a gentle plea to share your pictures with the rest of us via this outlet. If you are already a member of Flickr, you may comment on the 100 photographs which are already up, all from last month’s fantastic DC meetup. If you’re not a member, you can still view all pictures by clicking here.

I PROMISE you’ll want to see what’s hiding after the jump. 😉 Continue reading →

Worth a lick?

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Indian Americans have been trying for a long time to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a Diwali stamp. The Aussies on the other hand have gone the extra kilometer. They have featured Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan on one of their postage stamps. See for yourself:

Saif Ali Khan who has danced his way to Australian history with his performance in Commonwealth Games. He became the first Indian to feature on a postage stamp published in Australia.

50-cent stamp has Saif among those released on March 27. It shows him on stage in a green kurti with other dancers. Rani Mukherjee and Aishwarya Rai had no such luck who were with Saif from Bollywood. [Link]
I can’t help but find this funny. Indians didn’t really represent at the Olympics, but seemed to do okay at the Commonwealth Games. Still, it is a Bollywood star that is on one of the official stamps from the games and not an athlete.

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Rice cooked in Londonstan

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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has met [mostly desi] Muslim leaders in north-west England in a trip during which protesters expressed anger that an architect of the Iraq war was on their home turf… Dr Rice had been due to visit a mosque in Blackburn until its governors withdrew their invitation out of fear the occasion would be hijacked by demonstrators…

Cartoons lampooned the visit with The Independent carrying one showing a sign at a Blackburn Indian restaurant: “We regret we do not serve Rice.” [Link]

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The Legend of the Flying Elephants

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“In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth.When they molted, millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born….”

I went to an amazing exhibit of sepia photographs earlier today at a “nomadic museum,” four stories high and made of cargo containers, on the Santa Monica pier. The exhibit was titled “Ashes and Snow,” and will be in Los Angeles through May:

Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project that weaves together photographic works, three 35mm films, art installations and a novel in letters. With profound patience and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals, he has captured extraordinary, unscripted interactions between humans and animals.

His 21st-century bestiary includes more than 40 totemic species from around the world. Since he began creating his singular work of Ashes and Snow, Colbert had mounted more than 30 expeditions to locations such as India, Egypt, Burma, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, the Azores and Borneo…

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Too young to be so mutinous

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On my Yahoo start page this morning the picture below stared back at me:

An Indian girl holds a placard during a protest against President Bush in the southern Indian city of Bangalore March 1, 2006. REUTERS/Jagadeesh Nv

I had two thoughts. First, isn’t it just precious how an Indian kid would attach the honorific “uncle” to even a protest sign? I had to laugh out loud at that. Second, I felt conflicted. I don’t approve of children at protests. I feel that taking a child to certain types of protests is like giving a child a gun without teaching them proper gun safety. I believe it is more important to properly educate a child in all aspects of an issue and encourage them to investigate it on their own, rather than take them along to mindlessly protest something. I think it is VERY important to teach a child about the realities and injustices in the world and when to stand up for a principle, but I often see images in the media that hint at the fact that the children holding signs are mostly a form of propaganda. Out of curiosity I did a quick search for some other recent protest pictures featuring young children.

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