Category Archives: Humor

Two thumbs WAY down

Posted on by

J, Rohit, and I went to the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles last night. This is my fourth year in a row attending. The film directors usually show up after the movie for a little Q&A as an extra bonus. The first movie I ever saw at the festival was Everybody Says I’m Fine. The main character in that film (a mind-reading hair dresser) really “spoke to me.” I have returned every year to sample some desi cinema that, thankfully, isn’t Bollywood. I had purchased us some tickets to the movie Parzania starring Naseeruddin Shah and…Corin Nemec. Let me tell you folks that Parker Lewis CAN lose, but we will get to that later.

J was having a good time before the movie because she swears she saw either Tia or Tamara. She wasn’t sure which one but does it honestly matter? The word on the street is that the night before at the premiere, the likes of Reggie Miller, Chad Lowe (looking sad sans Hilary Swank), and Sheetal Sheth had all been spotted. I was in the mood for a good film because I have had a very unlucky month. First I had a bad cold for two weeks, then last Sunday I got a painful root canal infection that is requiring me to take antibiotics (which sucks because I’m running a relay marathon on Sunday). I’ve just been feeling very unsexy of late. On top of that I spilled my Thai-takeout all over my kitchen floor while rushing to make it to the festival to meet J. Would some cinema magic be able to numb all of my pain and put an uplifting bounce back into my step?

So here is the synopsis of the film Parzania:

Parzania is the breathtaking untold story of an event that changed the country and the world forever.

Cynical. Intelligent. Hilarious. Drunk. An American man by the name of Allan Webbings arrives in Ahmedabad city. For the longest time, Allan has been searching for answers, praying to find both internal peace and understanding of the horrors that religious differences can create. Allan has chosen India as his playground, and Gandhi as his subject. It’s here that he meets Cyrus, the local projectionist who brings the young and troubled intellectual into his beautiful family. Cyrus is a Parsi, a follower of a rarely practiced religion that is both small in numbers and neutral to religious politics. He has a beautiful wife named Shernaz, a practical woman who after eleven years still can’t resist his charisma and charm; two children- Parzan an imaginative ten year old that has developed his own world, the world of Parzania, where the buildings are made of chocolate and the mountains of ice cream. Parzan, in his mind, has created the perfect world, a world that only his eight year old little sister Dilshad truly understands.

Through Cyrus’s family, Allan finds his peace, right before the rest of the country loses its sanity. One morning, the beauty and peace that India is so famous for, is rocked beyond measure, as a bomb explodes in a train killing Hindus.

Within 24 hours, thousands of Muslims are slaughtered, making that day one of the largest acts of communal violence the country has ever seen. And in the midst of the terror and violence, Parzan comes up missing.

While Cyrus fights for his own sanity and searches for his child, Alan battles to uncover the truth behind the riots.
Parzania is inspired by a true story. [Link]

Continue reading →

The Barmaid’s Tale

Posted on by

Every once in awhile, introducing a writer demands that you not pen something funny, embarrassing or insightful, that you get out of the way and simply quote the fabulosity. This is one of those times: rollin’ down D.C., sippin’ on Love and Haterade.

On the relationship between eyefucking and classical dance:

… fifteen years of Indian dance classes have made me ridiculously good at eyefuckingFifteen years of Indian dance classes have made me ridiculously good at eyefucking. Like, I think I’m better at eyefucking than some people are in bed. [Link]

On Indian parents and parallel parking:

Lester and Sally [parents] never taught either of us how to parallel park with actual cars… We often wonder what that might have looked like to unsuspecting suburban passerby… Two orange cones in an empty parking lot, a middle-aged balding Indian man explaining the art of parallel parking with charts and math and interpretive dance, and a disgruntled hyphenated-American teenager standing by the sidelines watching the scene unfold with amusement and shame, longing for the day she would have a license to drive away from it all. [Link]

On the masonry cock-block:

The building had unbelievable restrictions about overnight guests… they were truly outrageous: forms needed to be filled out at least 24 hours in advanced, signed by all your suite-mates, then approved by the building… I almost felt bad for the kids because it made an outside random hookup absolutely impossible… the building itself was perhaps the greatest cock block of all time…

Katrina (whose hair, if I haven’t mentioned it, was totally JBF): Well, it’s just that…

[The author]: Katrina? Unless he’s dying and sleeping with you was the antidote to that death, I assure you — he’s ok… I promise you, Katrina, in my 26 years on this earth, I’ve never seen anyone die as a result of unfulfilled desire.

And with that, Katrina fled the building and followed her Michael Fink into the dark night. [Link]

Continue reading →

Get you love drunk off my hump

Posted on by

In the basement of our North Dakota headquarters we employ a small but elite team or researchers designated the “SMU.” Their sole job is to predict “the next big thing,” and they are rarely wrong. You see, our marketing department has indicated that based on focus group feedback, readers that visit our site will flock to other blogs the minute we fall behind on what’s happening in the world around us. They will leave us the minute we aren’t ahead of the curve on “what’s cool.” Therefore, whenever the SMU staff starts “rattling their cages,” they know they will have my full attention. I predict that the next big thing (and you are hearing it on our blog first) is…Camel Milk:

While slightly saltier than cow’s milk, camel milk is highly nutritious. Designed after all for animals that live in some of the roughest environments, it is three times as rich in Vitamin C as cow’s milk.

In Russia, Kazakhstan and India doctors often prescribe it to convalescing patients. Aside from Vitamin C, it is known to be rich in iron, unsaturated fatty acids and B vitamins.

Tapping the market for camel milk, however, involves resolving a series of humps in production, manufacturing and marketing. One problem lies in the milk itself, which has so far not proved to be compatible with the UHT (Ultra High Temperature) treatment needed to make it long lasting.

But the main challenge stems from the fact that the producers involved are, overwhelmingly, nomads.

Another problem, according to the FAO, is the nature of the animal itself. Camels can reputedly be pretty stubborn. And unlike cows, which store all their milk in their udders, camels keep theirs further up their bodies. [Link]

Now I know that some of you might not like milk of any kind. Some people just don’t. My mom for example never drinks milk. But what about chocolate? Everybody likes chocolate…

An easier sell would appear to be the low-fat, camel milk chocolate, which A Vienna-based chocolatier, Johann Georg Hochleitner intends to launch a low-fat, camel milk chocolate this autumn. With funding from the Abu Dhabi royal family, his company plans to make the chocolate in Austria from powdered camel milk produced at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, then ship 50 tons back to the Gulf each month. [Link]

Continue reading →

In a puff of smoke

Posted on by

A Kashmiri man was recently injured by an explosive cigarette either distributed by militants or airdropped by Acme Corporation. While I feel terrible for the guy who was hurt, the moral here is, don’t pick up stuff by the side of the road and, like, smoke it.

Thakkar landed in hospital after he lit one of the two cigarettes he found lying in a field in Mislai village of Doda district…

… terrorists are probably experimenting with the low-cost idea of filling cigarettes with explosives, leaving them in public places to tempt smokers to pick these and light up. [Link]

“Militants are now using explosive-filled cigarettes to carry out blasts in Jammu and Kashmir. One such cigarette has been recovered last night,” Col Badola said. [Link]

If the FDA randomly hid a few of these in every thousand packs of cigarettes, just imagine where the smoking rate would be now.

That’s right, exactly the same. Only some smokers would need to switch hands while taking a hit off the cancer stick.

Continue reading →

55Saturday: The Poetry of Math Edition

Posted on by

Our resident bean left us a comment which reminded me that we wrote haikus to celebrate a rather obvious holiday two months ago. This, of course, made me feel guilty for being tardy with the 55Friday flash fiction free-for-all, so to distract myself from the shame, thoughts of a third writing exercise which employs “resource constraints” came to mind. Behold, a “Fib”:

Blogs spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry? [linky-poo]

What is a “Fib”? It’s a six-line poem inpired by the Fibonacci (Cough! Hemachandra Cough!) sequence, which controls how many syllables can be in each line.

The allure of the form is that it is simple, yet restricted. The number of syllables in each line must equal the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. So, start with 0 and 1, add them together to get your next number, which is also 1, 2 comes next, then add 2 and 1 to get 3, and so on…Fibs…top out at line six, with eight syllables.[linky-poo]

According to the afore-linked NYT article, April just happens to be National Poetry Month AND Mathematics Awareness Month, so the sudden craze for “fibs” seems especially appropriate. Know what else is apposite?

The earliest known reference to Fibonacci numbers is contained in a book on meters called Chhandah-shāstra (500 BC) by an Indian mathematician named Pingala. As documented by Donald Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, this sequence was described by the Indian mathematicians Gopala and Hemachandra in 1150, who were investigating the possible ways of exactly bin packing items of length 1 and 2. [wiki]

Paging “Everything-is-Yindian”-Uncle!

I know I usually name our nanofiction-orgies after some much-adored song in my catalog of tunes which I cried to in high school and or watched on “120 Minutes”, but I’m so fascinated by this “new haiku” that I’ll refrain from capping this post with an angst-ridden hat. Everything else is the same as it ever was, so leave your bit o’ brilliance (or a link to where we can find it) in the comments below. 55-word gems which tell a story, haikus which reference mezze and poetry which reminds me of that mindless Da Vinci code…come fifty-five, come all. Continue reading →

It’s Not Just a Better Seat

Posted on by

The Onion does it again…

Air India Now Offers Business Caste Seating

April 12, 2006 | Issue 42•15

MUMBAI–Air India, the subcontinent’s largest airline, announced it will offer upgraded Business Caste seating on all flights starting in July. “More legroom, wider seats–and no need to associate with the manual laborers,” a spokesman for the airline said Tuesday. “Our business travelers must have lived good past lives to deserve this. (link)

Something makes me believe that the fine folks over at The Onion may have actually flown an Air India flight while researching this story.

Continue reading →

The spices speak to me

Posted on by

Director Paul Mayeda Berges was quoted in DNA today about his new movie The Mistress of Spices:

The other key element was to… give each spice its own Indian instrument so you could know when they were calling out to Tilo. The chillies warn her with a tabla. Chandan, kala jeera, tulsi, hing and cinnamon each have their own sounds.

I’ll bet that what the spices are telling Tilo is, ‘Stop exoticizing us, wench!’ Spice-tabla-Chocolat-sex: Tilo Does Oakland

Related posts: Juicier matters, Coffee cant, We’ve got a live one!, Sakina’s Restaurant, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

Continue reading →

Nabokov Ninnington

Posted on by

With apologies to The Namesake

2006

On a wet August monsoon evening two weeks before her due date, Jennifer Ninnington stands in the kitchen of a Pali Hill apartment, combining Bournvita and Horlicks and crumbled chocolate in a bowl. She adds sugar, flour, egg whites, wishing there were yeast to pour into the mix. Jennifer has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the brownies sold for two bucks in New York cafés and at large train stations throughout America, spilling from saran wrap. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her denim shirt. Her swollen feet ache against speckled white marble. She reaches for another chocolate bar, frowning again as she pulls at its crisp gold wrapper. A curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the chocolate bar with a thud on the floor.

She calls out to her husband, Andy, an MBA candidate at IIM-Bombay, who is studying in the bedroom. He leans over a card table; the edge of their bed, a queen mattress under a pastel blue pinstriped twill spread, serves as his chair. Continue reading →

Menerith Has Never Been Hotter

Posted on by

“Hell-o!” she trills, happily.

“Ma! What! IÂ’m busy watching ‘Moses‘!”

(laughter)

“Sure you are. Listen, I need to ask you something.”

“You’re stopping me from being more Christian! Bad mummy!”

“Oh, please kochu. The church will collapse when you next walk in. Anyway, are you still in touch with your cousin Susan I…….?”

“Yeah, mos def. Why?”

“Her father is trying to reach me at home…”

“We’ve had the same phone number for 22 years–“

“Edi blonde, would you be quiet if you’re not going to think before talking?”

“Moses! I’m missing Moses! It’s a miniseries and you’re interrupting part one, yo.“

4-800.jpg
Continue reading →

Defending your gimmick

Posted on by

The NYT is reporting that Jewish synagogues are enticing new members with yoga. They’re mimicking the recruiting techniques of evangelical megachurches, even though some evangelicals have later disavowed yoga as heathen and tried to Christianize it.

A group of New York-area congregations… refashion their synagogues into religious multiplexes on the Sabbath, featuring programs like “Shabbat yoga” and comedy alongside traditional worship… a… synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan… has organized Sabbath programs around tai chi and nature walks. Others have tried yoga classes and stand-up comedy as a means of Sabbath observance. [Link]

Comedy in a synagogue? What, they’re showing Seinfeld? I say, get your own damn gimmick. You don’t see Hindus serving matzoh ball soup (mmm, matzoh ball soup). You don’t see Muslims serving wine with a wink-wink, ‘It’s sangre, not sangría.’ Red dearth and pour in vain.

And what’s this about Shabbat yoga? Aren’t you supposed to avoid work on Shabbat? I guess that rules out Bikram yoga. Besides, you’re nicking the wrong gimmick. Want to rip a desi religion? A friendly suggestion: serve Sikh-style langar (mmm, langar). Treble attendance, guaranteed 😉

Although Abhi apparently needs a hug, my favorite recruiting technique is the one practiced by a very, very dangerous cult I walk past every morning on the Bandra promenade by the Arabian Sea. It’s called the Laughter Club of Joggers’ Park, and it’s 50 uncles and aunties laughing in unison, ‘Ho-ho, ha-ha-ha,’ like deranged, elderly cheerleaders. Every morning I watch apple-cheeked grannies and patka-clad uncles bending side to side expelling belly laughs. One morning a beggar missing a couple of his toes sat on the ground chortling along with them. Continue reading →