Category Archives: Humor

IndianDonating.com

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This NYT story about single women attempting artificial insemination explains what happens when a 38-year-old, blond, female advertising exec starts browsing sperm donor profiles. Yup, one of them turns out to be desi:

She loves dandy lions

As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors’ descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: “He’s got black straight hair,” she told me, “brown eyes, he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect. You don’t have to get in fights about food.” The Indian donor’s complexion was described as “medium/dark,” and he had proven fertility. He had a master’s degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. [Link]

I can see their first meeting now. He comes out of the kitchen in a salwar kameez with a dupatta over his head, tea tray in hand, eyes downcast and shy. She ticks ‘wheatish complexion’ on her clipboard and says, ‘Beta, please walk around the room’ to make sure he’s not lame. She opens his mouth and checks his molars, hocks and withers.

Sure, everything looks good on paper now, but what happens 18 years down the road? They need to put out a public health warning:

YOUR TALL, STUDLY HADESI CHILD
MAY GROW UP ADDICTED TO
BADMINTON, PAAN AND TEEN PATTI

This story shouldn’t surprise anyone though. With the conservative public morés of traditional desi culture, hundreds of millions of desi men happily spill surplus gametes outside the regular channels. But this chap was the only one enterprising enough to get paid for it.

Is he desi? Oh, indubitably.

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Desi athletes take the gold

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Desi athletes have picked up a series of gold medals in the 2006 Commonwealth games in Melbourne. I know it’s not the Olympics, but the sight of a gold medal hanging around any brown neck is rare enough that it is worth remarking on. India is ranked third of all countries (after Australia and the UK England), with 12 gold medals, while Pakistan and Sri Lanka each have one. [By comparison, Australia, the host, has 42 gold medals and the UK England has 18]

Invoking every Goddess before serving sure slowed things down

These recent victories wont give brown people a reputation for being jocks though. At least five of India’s gold medals are from air rifle events. While I’m sure this requires skill, I can’t imagine that it takes either stamina or strength. The Indian women’s table tennis team also won a gold, but only with divine intervention:

In table-tennis, India’s women’s team won a closely fought match against Canada, winning 3-2. “I prayed to the Goddesses to please give me strength to perform well for myself and India,” India’s Mouma Das is quoted as saying by AFP news agency. “I felt in my heart they heard” [Link]

This isn’t even badminton fer cryin’ out loud, let alone “real” tennis. How much pride am I supposed to take in the fact that it took all the Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon to win a table tennis competition without any Chinese athletes! And air rifle and table tennis account for at least half of the Indian gold medals.

The most macho gold medal was won by the Pakistanis who set a new Commonwealth record in weightlifting:

Pakistan picked up its first gold medal of the Games with a win for Shuja-ud-din Malik in the men’s 85kg weightlifting event. Malik’s combined 343kg in the clean-and-jerk, including a new Commonwealth record of 193kg, placed him ahead of Cameroon’s Brice Batchaya. [Link]

I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping that desi athletes can redeem themselves by doing well in some more strenuous sport, like Netball or Lawn Bowling. During the last Commonwealth Games, the Indians won 30 gold medals. Would it be too much to ask if half of India’s gold medals this time were in sports that desi mothers would disapprove of?

UPDATE: Wgiia, ms and Soooraj remind me that India’s first gold medal was earned by female weight lifter Kunjarani Devi and that two of India’s 12 medals are in women’s weightlifting.

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55Friday: The “Pop Song 89/Stand/Orange Crush” Edition

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This morning, I stumbled in to a rather important meeting nearly twitching from twin deficits in sleep and kcals. I furrowed my brow, willed myself to focus…and found myself talking about nanofiction, of all things. The man I was meeting with had googled me and he wanted to know what the deal was with “that 55 thing” he had seen on my blog. As I hastily prepared an answer, I mentally swore at myself that if I used the word “meme” more than once, I’d deny myself food for such lame blogginess. I am pleased to report [burp] that I did not suffer from starvation today.

Buzzwords aside, I was struck by the look on the man’s face when I told him about Hemingway’s famous piece of flash fiction, all six words of it. He was concomitantly fascinated and appreciative, as all good readers are. It was at that very moment that I thought of Jai and nearly drowned in 55-related guilt. 😉

Since we’ve done this and this, I figured that today would be an apposite day for quelque-chose similar. Oui? Oui. We will make others green with envy at all of our brilliant fun. As always, you are welcome to comPLETEly ignore my thematic suggestions and doowutchyalike. Just do it in the comments below, mmmkay? And remember, you might be hungover from too much guiness, but you can still string together 55 words, my out-of-practice leprechauns. 😉 Seek sympathy for headaches, nausea, dehydration and lost pots of gold elsewhere– we’ve got fiction to write! Continue reading →

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

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Mr. Everything Comes from India breaks down the origins of the Irish flag:

Dressing up in color and molesting people while tipsy:

This Holi week
She must be Asian Irish

The official plant is a widely-available magical weed:

Bhang
Shamrock

More specifically, the Irish are like the Punjabis. One is a farming culture where people are warm, like to drink and like to fight. Its men are famed both for toughness and for being mama’s boys. The other sits around singing farmer songs in an unintelligible accent. It used to host a religion-based separatist movement and is now a magnet for outsourcing. I even know of several Irish-Punjabi marriages. No, nothing like each other at all

Éireann go Brách, chak de phatte and belated happy Holi!

Update: Check out these Irish-Indian fusion tracks: ‘Punjab Paddy‘ by Gaelicstorm and Butterflies by conFusion (thanks, Saheli and niki).

Update 2: Post was accidentally deleted, taking the comments down with it. Mea culpa, sorry!

Related post: Holi Day munchies

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Get Your “Kundis” to the D.C. Meetup, 3/25

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“Anyway monay, can I call you right back? I was in the middle of reports…”

“Ma? Please, really quick, ’cause I’m writing something?”

“Vat?”

“Does kundi mean “ass” or “anus“?

Sigh. A deep breath is inhaled.

“This is for your website? Kundi is chunthi. Koothi means anus.”

“Let me be painfully careful– kundi and chunthi are like…the butt cheeks?”

“Yes, they are what I would like to kick right now, absolutely.”

“So, like, you could use kundi in the following context: “get your kundi on the dancefloor?'”

Another sigh is sighed.

“YES.”

“I knew it!” Continue reading →

‘Playboy’ Nehru

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The latest New Yorker reports that Jawaharlal Nehru did an interview for Playboy’s October 1963 issue. Oh yes, we read it only for the articles. Will anyone cop to having a copy, or you gonna make me drag my culo down to the N.Y. Public Library? ‘Cause you know I will.

… Playboy’s fiction was far less important than its interviews, inaugurated in 1962. Among the subjects were Miles Davis, Peter Sellers, Bertrand Russell, Malcolm X, Billy Wilder, Richard Burton, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jimmy Hoffa, Albert Schweitzer, Nabokov, Jean Genet, Ingmar Bergman, Dick Gregory, Henry Miller, Cassius Clay, and George Wallace, and that’s just for the first three years. The questioning was long (seven to ten hours) and confrontational. Presumably for that reason–and maybe, too, because this was a skin magazine and what the hell–the subjects often said what they did not say elsewhere. [Link]

The cover model uses Nehru as a fig leaf of civility (NSFW):

Shortly after this interview ran, the Nehru ‘jacket’ became popular in America. I think you see where I’m going with this. Embarrassed, the Indian government quickly backpedaled:

… after the rest of the magazine had gone to press, we received word from the Indian Embassy in Washington that our interview with PM Nehru was not, in fact, the result of an exclusive, personal conversation with the head of the Indian state, but simply a gathering together of public pronouncements made by the Prime Minister in various speeches, statements, etc., over the past several years. The Nehru material was submitted to us by a well-regarded journalist-publisher who has previously conducted numerous similar interviews with famous personages all over the world: it was sold as an actual interview, recorded on tape, and the covering letters that so described the material also included photographs of the Prime Minister and journalist together… [Link]

Rajiv Gandhi also did an interview for Penthouse’s Jan. 9, 1987 issue (thanks, Karthik). And Kal Penn did a famously raunchy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek Playboy interview (NSFW):

What’s the most number of women you’ve slept with in a day?

Two, when I had the threesomes. But, ask me again three months after Harold & Kumar comes out. [Link – NSFW]

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Malaysia: Fobs too sexy for jobs

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It’s pretty common for bigots to complain that outsiders are intent upon luring, seducing and despoiling their women. The defense of the motherland is intimately linked to the defense of mothers, and women in general, who have to be protected from the depredations of the evil other. It’s also common for nativists to complain that there are too many immigrants, and that those who arrive under legal cover often stay to do something else. However, it’s rare to complain that illegal immigrants pose a national danger because they’re just too good looking.

Warning: Bangladeshis will not be allowed into Malaysia if they look too much like this man!

Until now.

Malaysia is being swamped by thousands of illegal Bangladeshi workers who are gaining entrance on the pretext of being students, according to reports… Home affairs minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said the men end up doing menial jobs in response to a labour shortage. [Link]

Malaysia has a manpower shortage, and Bangladeshi men are arriving in Malaysia to fill the gap, to give Malaysia what it needs. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in this – it’s completely natural. Why should the minister object, then?

Home Affairs Minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said Bangladesh workers were still spotted on construction sites and in restaurants despite a ban on their employment two years ago over concerns they were causing “social problems”. “They have blue eyes and look like Hindi film actors and they create social problems here,” Radzi was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times of the reason for the ban…. Hindi films are popular amongst Malaysian women, as are handsome male Bollywood film stars. [Link]

Ahhh … that explains it. Bangladeshis are too sexy for their jobs (too sexy for their jobs, so sexy, they’re fobs). Can you just imagine the Malaysian ambassador asking the Bangladeshi PM to make sure that only ugly “students” go to Malaysia? [Give us your tired your poor, your ugly masses yearning to be free, the unattractive refuse of your too too sexy shore … ] And what does it mean that no such restriction is imposed upon Indians?

I’m sure that today, all over Dhaka, Bangladeshi college students are walking around, catching reflections of their butts in shop windows, and comparing each other to movie stars. “Dude! You so look like SRK! I’m not kidding man, you really do! You’ve got the same blue eyes as he has!”

[Thanks also to technophobicgeek who blogged this story on the News tab]

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They love themselves some Kali

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Here are excerpts from The Daily Show on Dubya’s South Asia trip:

Sub-Continental Divide: The deal: our scientists will help India build nuclear reactors if their children stop crushing us in spelling bees. We’re trying so hard. I mean, for god’s sake, your names already have, like, 20 letters in them. That’s a huge advantage…

Holy shit, what is that? That’s a potato? India is so kicking our ass!

Obligatory geography lesson for American viewers

Insight on India and Pakistan: Resident Expert John Hodgman takes a look at India and Pakistan… which are two different countries.

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Nessie? Desi

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My fofatminions, I’ve been hearing back-chatter about the mystery of me. Rrrreeeally? I’m so flattered, though gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, they kiss and post.

But as I am a gentle and one-track uncle, let’s talk about how Everything Comes From Desiland. A study just published in a British science journal pushes the idea that the “Loch Ness monster” was actually an Indian elephant on its way to performing in a circus:

Neil Clark, curator of paleontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, sees striking similarities between descriptions of Nessie and what an Indian elephant looks like while swimming. And perhaps not coincidentally, a traveling circus featuring elephants passed by the misty lake in the 1930s at the height of the monster sightings.

“It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant — the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,” thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday…

But he said the vast majority of sightings occurred not long after 1933, the first year of the A82, a road that runs alongside the lake. Around that time, Mills’s traveling circus was visiting nearby Inverness and “would have stopped on the banks of Loch Ness to allow their animals to rest.”

You can judge for yourself whether Nessie is desi. Take a long, sensitive look…

Convincing, na? One shadowy mystery solved, one to go.

Only fools in pools see lumps and trunks as things that go plunk in the night. That dark summer night, in your jacuzzi, that was me. My humps, your aquifer, please excuse. I was on my way to performing in a circus.

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A dog’s life

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The good ol’ U.S. of A.: alleviating poverty, one five-star doggie hotel room at a time…

An argument broke out between US security personnel and the management of the [five-star] Le Meridien Hotel in New Delhi on Wednesday over the accommodation of 60 sniffer dogs that are part of President George W Bush’s security entourage. The US Embassy booked 70 rooms in the hotel in the Indian capital, where Bush will travel on Thursday. However, the hotel management was surprised to find that the rooms had been reserved for dogs.

These weren’t just any old pooches, they were decorated officers of the U.S. Secret Service:The hotel management was surprised to find that the rooms had been reserved for dogs

US security personnel accompanying the sniffer dogs were offended when the management told them that dogs were not allowed on the hotel premises, saying that they were “security officers”. The External Affairs Ministry had to intervene and arrange for the rooms to be allotted to the American “officer” dogs. Each “security officer” dog has been provided an air-conditioned room with an American attendant. [Link]

… the newly revamped Le Meridien in New Delhi has some “special guests”… The hotel is playing host to an “important delegation” from the United States — the K9 dog squad. But the word “dog” is never mentioned in front of these elite canines: they are referred to as “officers”… Kennels have been flown in specially for them… The “officers”, who have been decorated for their service, have their own private area in Le Meridien. [Link]

Upon hearing of the K9 unit’s digs, half the population of Bihar attempted to enlist Continue reading →