The last time I asked Ennis how his personal lowe story was going, he just looked at me woefully and shook his head. Thanks to Eastern Eye, I’ve now figured out what happened:

Ravi Arora, 39, from east London, flew 5,000 miles [to Delhi] to meet a potential bride he had met through shaadi.com… only to find out that she was not born a woman… “I was in front of a girl who no longer looked like one and sounded very different from the Manisha I had been spending two to three hours every week speaking to… The photos were of her cousin, the phone calls had been made by her sister and she had been operated on to become a woman.”

Lest we think Arora is prejudiced, he hastens to add:

“She has a right to express her sexuality as she wants, but by lying about herself, a seed of doubt about all the other profiles on shaadi.com have been placed in my mind.”

I don’t know what’s harder to believe: Arora’s incredible story, or that he actually trusted the profiles on dating sites.

Students in Uttar Pradesh found a new hiding place for their crib sheets (via India Uncut, appropriately enough). I wish they wouldn’t air their dirty laundry:

Invigilators at Jai Narain Degree College were baffled to find eight condoms hidden inside the underpants of a boy taking [an] examination…. Inside the condoms, chits with short answers, tips and formulae were neatly packed. When caught, one of the boys quipped, “It is a ‘condomed’ way to cheat”… The invigilators were not prepared to touch the condoms. So the college sweeper was summoned. He put the condoms in a file as proof for further action…. Another student was found hiding chits in a bandage on his leg.

Silly rabbit, prophylactics aren’t for filing. And I find this story hard to digest:

At Eram College, a girl was found hiding her chits in what the invigilators called “an unmentionable place”. When the chits were recovered, she swallowed them.

When the chits were down…

The very awesome Turbanhead sent me the most deliciously evil link earlier today; it had to do with a college co-ed who needed to write a paper on “Hindu”.

This stellar, morally upright young woman required a little…help. And boy, did she get some.

Laura K: hi can i ask u a quick question Nate Kushner: what’s that? Laura K: i see in ur profile it says something about Hindu….i am a college student and i have to write a paper on Hindu is there anyway u can help me with that Nate Kushner: I can try. Laura K: have u ever written a paper on it before Nate Kushner: I am qualified, seeing as how it says Hindu in my profile. Laura K: well i am looking fro soemone to write me a paper i am more than willing to send u a check in the mail…money isn’t really an object to me…

By the by…the profile they both refer to states that Nate is interested in “Eating Hindu Sculpture.”

What follows, boys and girls, is a stern lesson about how you shouldn’t randomly IM comedy writers and ask them to do your all-nighter work.
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Still rather prejudiced against meat-eaters, my father immediately discards responses from those with a “non-veg” diet. There is, however, a special loophole for meat-eaters who earn more than $200,000…

 

Oddly, by the end of the night, he couldn’t remember my name. Nothing fazed Juan Carlos, however. He quickly jotted off a poem explaining his lapse: “I wrote your name in the sand, but a wave came and washed it away. I wrote your name in a tree, but the branch fell. I have written your name in my heart, and time will guard it…”

 

“What are your qualifications?” I said I had a B.A. “B.A. only?” she responded. “What are the boy’s qualifications?” I flung back… She smirked: “He is M.D. in Kentucky only…” I grumbled, “Auntie, I will speak to the boy only.”

 

Afterward, I was planning to meet my best friend, who’s gay, in a store, and I asked the guy to come in and say hello. My date became far more animated than he’d been before and even helped my friend choose a sweater…

 

A few days after my 1st birthday… I fell out the window of a three-story building in Baltimore. My father recalls my mother’s greatest concern… “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” she cried, begging my father to never mention my broken arm…

 

My friend Divya… stays out clubbing on her nights off. Imagine my surprise when I discovered she was on KeralaMatrimony.com, courtesy of her mother, who took the liberty of listing Divya’s hobbies as shopping and movies. (I was under the impression her hobbies were more along the lines of trance music and international politics…)

 

My father saw my mother once before they got married… he lost sight of her at a bazaar the day after their wedding and lamented to himself that he would never find her again, as he’d forgotten what she looked like.

… my father placed matrimonial ads for me every couple of years… They read something like, “Match for Jain girl, Harvard-educated journalist, 25, fair, slim.”

You knew it was coming: Subservient Sanjeev of the fictional Nevashut, a mini-mart at a British petrol pump (thanks, Turbanhead). Sanjeev, who’s a promo for Pringles potato crisps, is a meld of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken promo, Apu from The Simpsons and video cut scenes from those lame choose-your-own-adventure arcade games of the ’80s.

As is usual in this genre, Procter & Gamble UK strives to be inoffensive by being inconsequential. It’s not totally in-your-face, though it lays the mini-mart stereotypes down thick.

Give Sanjeev some love. Try typing: dance, run, play me a song, moustache, money, and stupid, the clips are pretty funny. I wonder whether anyone’s extracted all the possible video clips from the Web site yet.

Kittyminx thinks it’s racist viral marketing, but the humor is so corporate-colorless (try ‘punch’), I have a hard time getting my high dudgeon on:

If they did this with a black person or a Jew, a lot of people would be pissed and rightly so… The only reason why it hasn’t yet is that I’m guessing that Asians and South Asians in particular, are about the only ethnic group left that pop culture thinks its ok to make fun of. And this ad campaign probably comes from the UK… [w]here they are less concerned about “political correctness”… it also seems that the British are a lot more openly and blatantly anti-immigrant, saying things that in America are usually only said by Pat Buchanan and other wingnuts.

Update: Thanks to reader epoch, you can now see every single keyword that triggers a video clip.

Here. 🙂 Enjoy some light wedding fare:

AS the sun started to set over Miami Beach on March 19, Rita Nakouzi, a consultant on fashion and lifestyle trends, and Touré, a writer and pop culture commentator, were married on the sand behind the Raleigh Hotel in the South Beach area.

“O.K., who’s got the bling?” asked the Rev. Joseph Simmons, a Pentecostal minister, who was looking for the couple’s wedding bands. Also called Reverend Run, he is best known as a member of the pioneering rap group Run-DMC. The crowd of 120 included his brother, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons; the CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien; and members of Miss Nakouzi’s family, who had flown in from Beirut, Lebanon, where the bride was born.

…”We fit very well together,” said Touré, a correspondent for CNN and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. “She’s somebody who can go with me from a 50 Cent concert to a Toni Morrison reading and be equally comfortable in both places.”

Wait, wait…don’t tell me. I know what you’re thinking– why should you care? Aside from the fact that Reverend Run is cool, that’s a fair question. Heck, why does the Mutiny care?

The answer lies within the story of how they met, during one magical night at a Lenny Kravitz video shoot at Limelight NYC: Continue reading →