Category Archives: Holidays

The Buddha is my Om boy

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As some of you may know, today is the day that many across the world celebrate the birthday of Lord Buddha:

Buddha Poornima, which falls on the full moon night in the month of Vaisakha (either in April or May), commemorates the birth anniversary of Lord Buddha, founder of Buddhism, one of the oldest religions in the world. Notwithstanding the summer heat (the temperature routinely touches 45 degrees C), pilgrims come from all over the world to Bodh Gaya to attend the Buddha Poornima celebrations. [Link]

Sarnath seems to have been rocking on Saturday:

Click for a larger (more enlightening) picture

Sarnath — the site where Buddha ignited the light of knowledge among five disciples centuries ago was this evening bedecked with 20,000 diyas (earthen lamps).

Marking the 2550th Great Parinirvan of Buddha, this festival of lights started off at 1840 hrs today evening in the lines of Dev Deepawali — the evening when all 84 Ganga ghats of Varanasi are decorated with diyas.

While Dev Deepawali is held every year to mark the Hindu festival of Kartik Purnima, this evening’s twinkling delight coincided with Buddha Purnima at the world famous Buddhist pilgrimage of Sarnath. [Link]

Over 2500 years after the Buddha walked the Earth there is still proof all around us of his tremendous influence and teachings. As a matter of fact I am here to tell you that those Ipods which many of you cling to so dearly (I have never owned one) are like so passé. The hottest trend to hit the streets is the divinely inspired (and powered??) Buddha Machine:

The controls are simple: There’s a volume dial on top that doubles as an on and off switch, which is next to a headphone jack and a power adaptor input (the Buddha Machine also runs on two AA batteries). A red LED on the side indicates whether the box is on, and an adjacent two-way switch allows users to flip between recorded loops. It’s available in six different colors, but you don’t get to choose – they ship randomly to mail orders from online sites such as forcedexposure.com.

So what the hell do you use this thing for?… [Link]

Good question young one, but the answers that you seek in life don’t always come simply because you demand to know them.

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Our Blue Turbaned Mayor (Updated)

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I was mindlessly watching the mind-numbing local news of Los Angeles (it’s usually either a shooting or a car chase), and I did a double take. On my TV, there was a group of Sikhs parading on the streets in front of the Staple Center and a shot of Mayor Villaraigosa in a blue turban.[Google image has not been able to help me on this one, but trust.]

“What makes L.A. so special is that we come here from every corner of the Earth to participate in the American dream,” [Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa] said during a prayer service at the Los Angeles Convention Center, part of a celebration for Baisakhi Day, the India-based religion’s annual holiday of renewal and rebirth…Organizers said that as many as 15,000 Sikhs from throughout Southern California attended the daylong event, which included music, free food and a colorful parade through downtown.[link]

Busy weekend. Not only was it Sri Lankan New Year, Bangladeshi Bengali New Year, Thai New Year (with water fights), Easter, the Los Angeles SM Meetup, but it was Baisakhi Day as well.

L.A.’s Blue Turbaned Mayor

Baisakhi Day, which historically marks the year’s first harvest, commemorates a principal guru’s directive in 1699 that Sikhs “become protectors of the human spirit.” [link]

The Sadh Sangat of Sikh Dharma held its first celebration of Baisakhi in Los Angeles in April, 1970…Since the late 1980s, the Sikh Dharma Baisakhi Celebration has been held at the vast Los Angeles Convention Center, in collaboration with a network of Southern California Gurdwaras…This year’s Baisakhi theme is “We are the Khalsa – A Legacy of Service.”… To highlight that standard, this year Golden Temple Cereals, a socially and environmentally responsible company founded by Yogi Bhajan, will be making a presentation to the Los Angeles Mayor’s office on behalf of the entire Sikh Community of Southern California, and donating a truckload of Peace Cereals to the Los Angeles Food Bank. [link]

Yum, Peace Cereal. And a peaceful post 9/11 message at the parade to go with it…

“In the post-9/11 environment, the turban has gotten a lot of negative associations because of the images we’ve seen,” said Ek Ong Kaar Kaur Khalsa, a spokeswoman for Sikh Dharma International, one of the event’s sponsors… “The Sikh turban, from a values perspective, is synonymous with the core Bill of Rights.” [link]

Whatever your holiday of choice was this weekend, I hope it went well-!

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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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For the Love of Language

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I meant to post about this in a more timely manner, but a brown holiday I find somewhat romantic is commemorated every February 21st in Bangladesh; yesterday was Language Movement Day. Also known as Language Martyr’s Day, its point is to remember the protest made on behalf of the right to use Bengali as a national language:

Around 1950-52, the emerging middle classes of East Bengal underwent an uprising known later as the Language Movement. Bangladeshis (then East Pakistanis) were initially agitated by a decision by Central Pakistan Government to establish Urdu, a minority language…as the sole national language for all of Pakistan. The situation was worsened by an open declaration that “Urdu and only Urdu will be the national language of Pakistan” by the governor, Khawaja Nazimuddin. [wiki]

300px-Shaheed_minar_Roehl.jpg Now you’ll know why Bangladesh’s Shaheed Minar monument exists where it does:

On February 21, 1952, dozens of students and political activists were killed when the Pakistani police force opened fire on Bengali protesters who were demanding equal status to their native tongue, Bangla. The massacre occurred near Dhaka Medical College and Ramna Park in Dhaka. A makeshift monument was erected the same night by students of University of Dhaka and other educational institutions, but soon demolished by the Pakistani police force. [wiki]
The movement spread to the whole of East Pakistan and the whole province came to a standstill. Afterwards, the Government of Pakistan relented and gave Bengali equal status as a national language.[wiki]

First they won respect for their language, then in 1971, they won their freedom. Continue reading →

Tonsil Hockey

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About a half-dozen tipsters, starting with Seema, wanted us to point out this little tidbit in a New York Times Op-Ed published this morning:

Give me some tongue baby

SINCE it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire?…

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn’t know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale…

If kissing is not universal, then someone must have invented it. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M, has traced the first recorded kiss back to India, somewhere around 1500 B.C., when early Vedic scriptures start to mention people “sniffing” with their mouths, and later texts describe lovers “setting mouth to mouth.” From there, he hypothesizes, the kiss spread westward when Alexander the Great conquered the Punjab in 326 B.C. [Link]

Well who would have thought? In addition to writing the Kama Sutra we can now take partial credit for kissing! The Hindu right-wing activists are going to go into shock when they see this (or at least they will try and keep it out of California textbooks). For the rest of this week I plan to honor my forefathers by exchanging as much saliva as possible. Who is with me?

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The state of union

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In Jharkand, saffronists have hit upon a new way of ‘encouraging’ marriage: shotgun (or, in this case, lathi stick) weddings. But raksha bandhan is months away:

Hindu right-wing activists in Jharkhand claimed to have married off five romancing couples on Valentine’s Day Tuesday, saying they were celebrating the day even though it was against Indian culture… At the rock garden, three couples were spotted. Two of them were made to move around a banyan tree and take an oath of marriage – in a symbolic wedding…

Activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) even forced a couple to tie the symbolic brother-sister thread of rakhi when they refused to get married. [Link]

Some students were flippant about it:

The move is now being welcomed by courting couples, who are thanking the moral police for adding velocity to Cupid’s arrows. “It is indeed good news. We must thank them for being concerned about our marriages,” said Ruchika, a student of a management institute in this Jharkhand capital. “My parents will finally come to know about my love.”

Priya, an engineering student, echoed similar sentiments, saying: “I hope they stick to their word and ensure my marriage with my boyfriend…” [Link]

But the saffronists couldn’t even stay consistent:

… even Saamna, the [Shiv] Sena’s mouthpiece, could not resist cashing in on the spirit of love by publishing an article on possible gifts to buy your beloved today. [Link]

In Delhi and Srinagar, more political theater, yawn. Funny how the saffronists are a mirror image of Muslim fundamentalists:

About 50 Hindu activists wearing holy saffron-coloured scarves held a noisy protest in a popular market near the Delhi University campus… They burnt greeting cards which they were carrying and shouted “Down with Valentine’s Day”. [Link]

About two dozen women separatists, veiled in black from head to toe, rummaged shops and burnt Valentine’s Day cards in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital… “Valentine’s Day spreads immorality among the youth,” Asiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughters of the Muslim Faith), a group of women separatists, said in a statement. [Link]

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Fasting, feasting

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On this unholiest of days, I thought I’d share 2.0 passages about coupling from 1.5-gen books. Lavanya Sankaran takes joy in the idea that dilly-dallying men deserve what they get in The Red Carpet:

And certainly, a convent-educated accent was an asset… This involved, primarily, keeping our knees together… Innocent of the depredations of Man (or Boy), at least until their parental duty was done. Delivered, one girl, unsullied, to the marital bed. Her price far above rubies…

For a decade, it seemed, [the bachelors] had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticate-mes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’t-love-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them…

All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement… these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated. [Link]

In Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s East Village/Karachi romance ends more happily:

I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly)…

The scene is the East Village, a little before midnight, on the steps of a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A. The date is important… Halloween… So there I am, trudging up the steps… when I see this cute desi guy in a white shirt and black trousers, looking ridiculously out of place but very comfortable at the same time… He catches my eye as I pass and says “Hi,” but I ignore him, because the last thing I want to deal with tonight is some conservative boy from the homeland with nothing to say…

But at some point (you saw this coming) I find myself on the fire escape with the brown boy I’d seen before. We’re dancing, just the two of us, and his name is Ozi and he’s wickedly sexy, and what the hell, we spend the night together…

He proposed during a snowstorm in March, looking cold as only a Pakistani man in America can… Before I knew it, I was showing him off at South Asian Student Association parties, enjoying the horrified jealousy on the faces of my prim and proper colleagues. Yes, Mumtaz, that slut, had bagged herself a prince, which meant there was one less out there for them…

The summer after we graduated… we were married in Karachi by the sea. [Link]

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Brown V-day Haikus

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I wanted to tell you about an cool V-day haiku contest that my friends over at Breakupgirl.net have put together (yes, there are prizes). Being me, I’m naturally informing you about it on IST, right up against the deadline. Submit your best valentines day efforts here, according to these rules:

The 411 on 5-7-5

With this contest, we honor the noble Japanese poetic form — the demure yet powerful haiku — as the only literary vehicle with the suppleness to master the depths and breadths of woo and rue that blossom at this black/magic time of year. Turn your insights and/or outrage into subtle poly-syllabic philosophies that follow this timeless equation: 5 + 7 + 5 = 17. To demonstrate:

First, five syllables.
Then, seven in the middle.
See? That’s seventeen!

Entries will be accepted until Saturday, February 11 at 12 midnight, and the winning haikus will be unfurled on February 14 for all to see. [Link]

Submit your entries to the contest and leave your submissions in the comments as well. I’m playing around with a few desi-themed ideas:

Her dal was tasty
Hungrily, I married her
It was all takeout

Spicy! Exotic!
Was this a personals ad,
or a Times story?

Not great, but I just came up with them now. You might find greater inspiration by looking at some of the past winners:

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Happy New Year

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Happy new year or, as we say here in North Dakota, (smack) ‘More rum, in-tern!’ Inspired by a Rushdie fable, I’m spending a couple of days traipsing around Moorish country without a Moorish girl.

I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengali; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. [Link]

True melodrama. Take that, writing workshop.

Orangedrinks. Lemondrinks. CocaColaFantaicecreamrosemilk… In pointy shoes and a puff… With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo… [Link]

May all your Orangedrinks Lemondrinks dreams come true.

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