Category Archives: Humor

She’s Better Off Without Him

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Kenyandesi posted this story on the News tab yesterday and then Ruchira kindly reminded me of it via email today, (Thanks, ladies!) so I thought I should probably blog about the latest bit of stupidity regarding arranged marriages:

Citing the potential bride’s protruding teeth, bad complexion and poor English, a family in Massachusetts called off an arranged marriage and filed a lawsuit for damages.
The Hindu family, residing in Belchertown, Mass., had agreed to an arrangement proposed by Hindu friends in Maryland to marry their niece, who lives in India, the Springfield Republican newspaper reported.
But the father of the groom-to-be, Vijai B. Pandey, 60, filed suit after family members saw the selected bride in New Delhi last August. The Pandeys, according to the lawsuit, were “extremely shocked to find … she was ugly … with protruded bad teeth, and couldn’t speak English to hold a conversation.” The woman’s complexion also was cited. [linkage]

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But where is the virtual spitoon?

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There is no sphere of life that is safe from the internet, not even in India. As proof, I bring you paan.com the website of Bombay’s most famous brick-and-mortar paanvala [via Amitava Kumar].

He’s probably the city’s most famous paanwala. It’s uncertain whether (as rumours suggest) he drives a Merc, but it’s clear for all the world to see that Prem Shankar Tiwari, the owner of Muchhad Paanwala paan shop on Warden Road, has his own website. It was built in 1998 by a devoted customer Vivek Bhargav. At paan.com, not only can you order paan online (a minimum order of 10 is required), you can also play a game that requires the participant to run from one end of the screen to the other to catch blobs of paan spit in a virtual bucket. [Link]

While you can order your paan online, there’s no word about whether you can spit it online once you’re done chawing it. [Whether ironically or not, right under the name of the store, the website exhorts the user to keep Bombay “clean and green”]

The website is quite amusing, and answered my burning question – why name a paan shop after facial hair?

His father Shyam Charan Tiwari established the shop thirty years ago. The shop was named Muchhad because his father Shyam Charan Tiwari had mustache so big and long that it touched his ears. And now it’s become a family tradition, all the four brothers have long mustache. [Link]

Click here to play the aforementioned game. It involves the player, holding a bucket at street level and trying to catch disgusting human head sized blobs of paan spit dropping from Bombay windows. Step aside Dante, I now know what hell looks like.

Related Posts: Tai-pan tries paan, Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

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This is how we ride

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I’ve been thinking for a while of starting a side blog where I put up an entry every day featuring another sign of the end times. This picture below isn’t quite Cats and Dogs mating but it is kind of cool (via Ashwin our News Tab). My sources in Lucknow tell me that the Rickshaw-wallahs are striking again and so the mouse had no other choice except to hitch a ride on slower moving transportation. Last we heard he was on his way to stay with his cousin in the countryside for a few days.

It could be the most spirited interspecies escape since The Rescuers. But unlike the 1977 Disney movie, this situation is anything but fun.

Photographed Friday in the northern Indian city of Lucknow…, a mouse perches on a frog in waist-deep (for a frog, anyway) floodwaters–a small sign of the early arrival of annual summer monsoon rains.

So far, more than 30 people have died in India as a result of this year’s monsoon-driven landslides and floods. Last year’s deluge killed some 1,000 people in the financial center of Mumbai (Bombay) alone. Today polluted, knee-deep waters are raising fears of a repeat disaster among the city’s roughly 17 million inhabitants.

In drought-stricken areas, too, frogs were playing the role of rescuer. [Link]

Giddy-up!

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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 →

Colonized clothing

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When I was in India last, I acquired a new pet peeve, one that irritates me far more than it should:

Why is desi clothing called “ethnic” in India itself?

In the USA, sure, we’re different, we’re quaint, we’re ethnic. Salwar Kameez/Kurtas/Saris/Lehngas/Sherwanis are our traditional ethnic (read funny-looking)dress. We’ve all had this conversation with a non-desi at a desi wedding:

“Why is the bride wearing red?”
“Well, some brides wear white, but for others, wearing red or pink is our ethnic tradition.”
“Oooooh, that’s so exotic”

Ethnic means we’re different from them.

But in India, why are Indian clothes called ethnic? Ethnic connotes the other, the habits of the minority, things that are unfamiliar to mainstream society. None of this applies in India for Indian clothing. There is no them to be different from.

Why not call it “Western” vs. “Indian” clothing? Or (although this is not accurate) “Western” vs. “Traditional Clothing”? Or, if you think the term ethnic refers to the fact that various types of clothing have regional roots, why not say “Gujarati Lehngas” and “Punjabi Salwar Kameez” etc? Better yet, why not just say Sherwanis rather than “ethnic Sherwanis”? I just don’t get it.

Then again, if you consider the breadth of my ignorance about fashion, the fact that I don’t understand this one little thing is really the least of my troubles

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SuperModi

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Since Abhi my colleagues at Sepia Mutiny have apparently stopped doing their earlier hourly updates on what Kal Penn is up to, I feel it is incumbent upon me to remind readers that second-gen actor Kal Penn plays one of Lex Luthor’s henchmen in the new film Superman Returns (aka, the “American version of Krrish“). Reviews have been pretty positive, though there are still some signs that the film may be a load of “Kraptonite” (or, in a nod to Manish, Krraptonite!), but how can that stop me from loyally supporting the ABCDeNiro?

And no, he doesn’t play a vaguely middle-eastern terrorist type. Nor does he speak in a bad Indian accent. In fact, in the final cut of the film, I gather, Kal Penn doesn’t have any speaking lines at all. Also, his character is named “Stanford.” Ah well: if they don’t have you playing the demonic terrorist, they’ll have you whipped as the “model minority.” Sigh.

At least he’s on the right side. From the trailers, this version of Superman seems like one of those movies with a hero so annoyingly earnest you end up rooting for the bad guys to win. Of course, with bad guys as charismatic as Kevin Spacey (or indeed, Kal Penn), that comes pretty easily. Can you think of other examples in this genre? Bad guys so diabolical and cool that you’re practically depressed when they’re finally vanquished at the end? Continue reading →

Paanchdrunk

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Yet another in the everything comes from India (etymology) series. Have you ever noticed how desi college students all congregate around the punch bowl in the corner? It’s not because they’re alcoholics too cheap to buy their own brew and too goody-goody to get a fake ID (well, maybe it is), it’s really because punch comes from India. In fact, it’s not really punch, it’s paanch [Thanks Sameer]:

Originally, the word punch was a loanword from Hindi. The original drink was made from five different ingredients, namely arrack, sugar, lemon, water, and tea. Because of this it was named panch which is the Hindi for five. This name was adopted by the sailors of the British East India Company and brought back to England, from where it was introduced into other European countries. [Link]

In Germany, they call it ‘Punsch‘ and it (of course) includes wine or liquor. And in Scandanavia the meaning has morphed yet further, losing the other ingredients to the point where it is just an arrack based booze. Surprisingly enough, the custom used to be to drink it with (what else?) daal:

The first ready-made punsch was sold in 1845 and initially the custom was to serve it warm, often together with yellow pea soup. [Link]

If the drink “punch” is an Indic loanword, then what about the action “punch”? Shouldn’t that be desi too? After all, it takes five fingers to make a fist in order to punch, and desis tend to throw punches after drinking too much of the same. And of course a “paunch” is what you get from drinking punch. Step aside, Noah Webster! We’re Indian givers and we want our loanwords back!

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Art Imitates Kaavya’s Life

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Since Miss Maya hasn’t done anything blog-worthy lately, I thought I’d torment you with the other Southern belle who gets assloads of Sepia space: Kaavya Viswanathan. Oh, admit it. You totally missed her. I know I did, especially since my plea for temperance in judging her brought me a few love letters with choice sweet nothings like the following:

Your defense of that plaigarist (sic) Kaavya destroys all your credibility with me. I will never take what you say seriously. You think lying and cheating is okay and you call yourself Christian? Maybe you are a plaigarist, too!

For the record, I am neither a plaigarist nor a plagiarist and I usually call myself, “you IDIOT!”. But I digress. Apparently, someone might have been inspired by the would-be author who…was…”inspired” by so many other writers. Could the saga of the other Miss Viswanathan be coming to a YA shelf near you? Via Gawker:

CHILDRENÂ’S: YOUNG ADULT Jamie MichaelsÂ’s KISS MY BOOK, story of a teen writing sensation who gets caught plagiarizing her debut novel, but finds redemption and romance when she escapes to a small town, to Krista Marino at Delacorte, by Michael Bourret at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (World). [link]

Gawker didn’t explicitly state where that blurb was from, but I’m guessing that we’d find it on Publishers Marketplace if we could get in there. Nick Denton’s flagship blog snarks on:

Surely DreamWorks is considering optioning this, if only to get back at Viswanathan for screwing them over the first time. No studio exec is above exacting revenge on a teenager. Now, does anyone know who reps that Bend It Like Beckham girl? [link]

I know, there’s only one desi actress in Hollywood (and we had to go across the pond to find her), but maybe, just maybe, she doesn’t have to play EVERY brown female role? Surely it might be possible to import another hottie from the land of Pickled Politics and give pretty Parminder a break? Casting directors might have to– the current E.R. star isn’t known for her sneer. Continue reading →

It Sounds Like Bologna To Me, But…

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pudgesicle10mos.jpgUsually, an article related to the process of sex selection would sadden me because I think the brown preference for boys blows, but this one which was submitted to our news tab (Thanks, Premii!) had me laughing, because I immediately thought of celebrity evidence to back it up. Apparently, it is possible to choose whether you are going to have a male or female…calf:

Want to have a baby boy? Tuck into the burgers, fries and ice cream. Want a girl? Then go on a diet and lose some weight.
It works for cows, according to John Roche, a scientist at New Zealand’s dairy research organisation Dexcel. “And we would expect what holds true for one mammal will hold true across the board,” he said.

Also, if it can be applied to celebrities, it must be true. Angelina stayed rather sleek while incubating the most attractive celebrity baby possible, to the point where useless weeklies which cost $1.99 and all run the same story (though with slightly different covers) speculated that based on the lack of fat around her elbows, the lippy star was way too skinny. (I kid you not. I read this while waiting for my train.) Angelina, the magazines screeched, was “dangerously thin”. She had a girl, in case you haven’t had access to television, radio, newspapers, the internet, carrier pigeons, flaming arrows etc.

Meanwhile, Kate Hudson put on an amount which was almost equivalent to my mother’s entire body weight pre-pregnancy-with me; Hudson gave birth to a boy, Ryder. Britney…well, we all know about Britney. Do not read anything in to the fact that the quote I’m about to use contains the word “heifers”. I am establishing no connection between Britney and one of those. If you are currently thinking that thought, it’s your bad, not mine. 😉

They found that cows that gained weight before conceiving were more likely to give birth to bull calves. Those shedding kilos before conception had a better chance of producing heifers (females).
Roche told the Waikato Times , published in Hamilton at the heart of New Zealand dairying country, the research underlined the theory that humans had some control over the sex of their children…Roche said it was not clear exactly why weight affected the sex of a cow’s offspring.

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