In NYC today:
When traffic gets tough, the tough take a rickshaw. Some things never change.
The Kali Cow and the Trinidadian ‘Saint dance their dance of destruction. Meanwhile, the walk to the gym turned out to be an hour (the NYC weight loss special!), and cab fare home is up 70%. A Bangladeshi brutha told me traffic turned 10-minute rides into 40, so the city jacked up rates to ensure cabbies turn up for work.
He seemed plenty cheerful to me as he palmed my Andrew Jackson.
We are sad to report (thanks for the tip Yasmine) that Dr. Zehra Attari’s body has been found. It doesn’t appear to have been foul play, just foul weather that is to blame. America’s Most Wanted reports:
After a six-week search, Dr. Zehra Attari’s body was found in her car at the bottom of the Oakland Estuary in Almeda, Calif.Divers at the Grand Street pier on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005 located a car matching the description of Attari’s 2001 gray Honda Accord. After lifting the car from the murky water, police discovered the doctor’s body…
According to police and residents, the road on which Attari was traveling is deadly — no barrier between the street and the water exists. They say it is likely that someone who didn’t know the area could drive off the pier and into the water unknowingly. [Link]
This is kind of scary because I think it may remind many of us about our own mothers. Her family describes her as being an under-confident driver and easily disoriented when traveling new routes. I know this description fits my own mother when she is faced with highway driving.
Attari was not far from her destination that evening on Nov. 7. A right turn onto Otis Drive would have set her back on track. Instead, Attari made a left. When she finally made a right a few blocks down, it was onto Grand Street.
While Grand Street is not exactly a road to nowhere, it is a road that leads directly into the cold black waters of the Oakland estuary. That is where Attari’s journey ended. [Link]
Updated: A reader sends us the video. It’s just like Jerry Springer!
Normally I don’t like featuring “odd-ball” stories from the subcontinent, but this one was really unusual in my opinion. We all know that in certain parts of the world, including India, public displays of affection are frowned upon. In many cases the authorities decide to arrest, punish, or otherwise chastise amorous couples who are getting their groove on in public. This however, is the first time that I have read about women in authority doing the heavy handed punishing. The BBC reports:
Two policewomen have been suspended in the northern Indian city of Meerut for slapping and punching couples who were dating in a public park.Police were carrying out “Operation Romeo,” which they said was to target the sexual harassment of women.
Anti-police protests erupted after TV pictures showed officers punching and pulling the hair of young women.
Police chief Rajiv Ranjan said the drive was to tackle obscenity but the officers had “clearly gone overboard.”
I don’t get it. You would think that as women they would be more sympathetic to women, especially if their intent was to prevent sexual harassment as they claim. Yet apparently the girl always gets the blame no matter the gender of the authority figure. I’m wondering if perhaps these policewomen were a bit bitter about their own romantic fortunes and simply releasing their frustration.
[The chief] said the police action was part of a drive undertaken at periodic intervals – often at the behest of the parents of young women – to “cleanse” parks and other public places of people indulging in acts of public obscenity.But he made it clear that there was no law which banned men and women walking together in public places or sitting in a park.
He said police personnel had no business bothering, let alone beating up, couples sitting together in public.
My posts today have featured two particularly gruesome subjects. Since I am on a roll, I thought why not try for a hat trick? Bill O’Reilly, the resident jingo at that “Fair and Balanced” news organization is at it again. A few weeks back he encouraged Al Qaeda to lay waste to San Francisco. Recently he has created his own media blacklist, sort of like Oprah’s book club, except what NOT to read. SM reader “Mephistopheles1981” informs us that Bill has most recently decided to take Circuit City and its “Indian owners” to task for not sharing in the Christmas spirit. He is sick and tired of all these secular stores that take advantage of Christmas giving, without acknowledging it. Only one problem. Circuit City isn’t owned by Indians. Media Matters for America reports:
O’REILLY: Yeah, Target’s changed its policy. And we appreciate that.
CALLER: That’s fantastic. So, I hope now you can do something about Circuit City. I was in there last week —
O’REILLY: [Laughing] Circuit City —
CALLER: — and —
O’REILLY: I think people from India own Circuit City. I think that’s the problem there.O’REILLY: I can’t — I can’t do — I can’t do everybody. I’m trying to do the big ones that are all over the place. Yeah, look, you know — but again if you go into any retail store and you’re buying a Christmas present and they refuse to acknowledge Christmas, you know what I’m going to do. You know what E.D.’s going to do —
…Contrary to O’Reilly’s ownership theory, none of the major, direct, institutional, or mutual fund holders of the publicly traded company is Indian. The same appears to be true of the company’s senior management and its board of directors. In addition, the retailer limits its business to the United States and Canada.
It’s not just what he says. Click on the audio file to listen to how he says it. Tell me his voice isn’t lined with a tinge of bigotry. Oh please, oh please can we end up on his blacklist? We are Indian owned. I’d rather be on Oprah’s list but we got no shot at that.
I really wanted to write a post about the U.S. Federal Court slapping down “Intelligent Design” in Dover, Pennsylvania today:
A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled today that it is unconstitutional to compel teachers there to present “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation to evolution because it amounts to establishing religion in public schools.
I couldn’t find a strong Desi-angle beyond what we’ve already blogged about though. So instead, I’ve decided to write a post about “Un-intelligent Design.” Most people know that Hitler’s Third Reich was fascinated by the occult and was always looking for mystical weapons and methods in order to defeat the Allies. Essentially, that is what the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark is about. He is also thought to have been fascinated by Eastern religions. After reading the following article out today in the Scotsman, I wondered if the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin might have been reading up on his Hindu mythology when he came up with this VERY unintelligent design idea:
The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior…According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat…”
Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail. [Link]
Sick, sick, sick. Nothing is going to convince me that they were really “volunteers.” I wondered if Stalin may have been inspired by Hanuman’s story. He is after all the mightiest of warriors and proved himself during the Ramayana War. He was conceived more naturally…well sort of.
NYC subway workers have just gone on strike for the first time in 25 years and only the third time ever. Many, many desis were on both sides of these negotiations. 
Everyone has been glued to the TV sets at the gym for the last few days. Asking random strangers about strike status is as commonplace as asking for The Score when the Yankees are in the World Series.
Coming home from the city tonight, fellow passengers were sharing gossip about whether trains turned into pumpkins after the strike deadline at midnight. We buttonholed the conductors of passing trains. None of them knew any more than we did. Boarding the train, we knew that we could be kicked off at any stop and be forced to walk the rest of the way home. The atmosphere was a little bit like the East Coast blackout, but with less promise of impromptu rooftop parties followed by a baby boom.
Along with thousands of others, I’ll be walking across the Williamsburg Bridge today to get to my beloved gym and bookstore, suffering little inconvenience other than a warmly bundled, 40-minute walk in 23 degree weather.
Meanwhile, millions of workers will be showing up at friends’ houses at 6 am to share rides to work. Large swaths of the island are now off-limits to cars with less than four riders or an equivalent number of convincing mannequins. Those who toil at large companies will expense cab rides and hotel rooms; those who don’t will take over the couches of friends in the city. There will be a run on bicycles.
The greatest ill effects, of course, will be suffered by two very different groups: emergency victims stuck in life-threatening traffic jams, and transit workers themselves, who will be docked both pay and penalties for every day of the strike. It seems almost ungracious to mention that a subway strike the week before Christmas will slam retailers in what’s normally the most profitable week of the year.
Sepia Mutiny has been covering the case of Biswanath Halder – a man with an interesting on-line trail – for a few months. In the latest development, while he may 
be an attempted mass murderer, he’s not quite a terrorist –
A US court has tossed out terrorism charge against an Indian accused of a seven-hour university shooting rampage in 2003, but retained 201 other charges against him, including aggravated murder.Biswanath Halder’s attack against a “small, random” group of people in Case Western Reserve University’s business school building did not constitute a terrorist attack on the civil population as defined by Ohio law, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peggy Foley ruled on Wednesday.
If convicted of the aggravated murder charge, 65-year-old Halder, who hails from Kolkata, could get death penalty.
Prosecuting him as a terrorist is a bit extreme although I can see both sides of the case – there’s probably a DA in this mix who’s been instructed to go “Timothy McVeigh” on his ass and throw the book at him – including marginal claims. On the flip side, the defense just gave a basic “c’mon, the dude was acting alone for dubious motives – he’s certainly not Al Qaeda linked.” At the limit, it does raise important questions about when an act is a loony acting on his own and when it’s part of a larger terrorist agenda (I suppose, given the tone of SM of late, that many folks here would argue that “terrorist = brown dude that a white cop / DA doesn’t like.”).
Whatever the case, it’s not like Halder’s getting off scot free although perhaps if he writes a few children’s books he might be more successful at travelling down the Tookie Williams path. And just what set off our 65 yr old defendant?
Halder went to the University’s Business School with more than 1000 rounds of ammunition because he thought that a computer lab employee had hacked into his website which was set up to help people from India form businesses.
1000 rounds – this guy ain’t f*ckin’ around. An hour of solid shooting at the range is probably no more than 200 rounds. Homey was loading up for a 5 hr shootathon. Moral of the story – be careful when you step between a desi dude, his computer, and his business.
Unlike much of the public I really do listen to what critics say before I go to see a movie. I especially like Kenneth Turan and Joe Morgenstern who lend their critiques to NPR every week. Some of their best reviewed films happen to be ones you’ve never heard of, but will be sorry if you miss. It comes as no surprise that many of these movies don’t make a lot at the box office. As the number of crappy films that do make it to the screen increase every year, resulting in fewer people going out to see movies, studio executives need some sort of crystal ball or…formula to know which films they should greenlight for maximum profitability. Enter Professor Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University. MSNBC reports:
A scientist in the United States says he has come up with a computer program that helps predict whether a film will be a hit or a miss at the box office long before it is even made.“Our goal is to try to find oil, in a way,” Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University said Wednesday.
“We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on things that are decided before a movie has been made,” he told Reuters by telephone.
Yes. That’s exactly what Hollywood needs. More formulaic movies. It’s even more discouraging when you see the variables that Sharda finds will maximize studio profits. Some of them are things that cause me to shy away from a movie:
Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from “flop,” meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to “blockbuster,” meaning more than $200 million.
I wonder what would happen if you started entering Bollywood films into the system. I predict the system would crash. 
The system cannot take into account the intricacies of the plot, but Sharda says it can nonetheless get the revenue category spot-on 37 per cent of the time, and correct to within one category either side 75 per cent of the time. This is enough to make the system a “powerful decision aid”, Sharda says. [Link]Continue reading
Dave Sharma is the flame-haired percussionist who gave his dhol a good thrashing nightly by the Bollywood Dreams stage.
I later ran into him at the State of Bengal show. He’s got a rep as a bad-ass dholi and also seems like an all-round good guy. (Disclaimer: he’s dating a friend o’ mine.)
Sharma, who’s part Himachal Pradeshi and part white, is a member of Dhol Collective. He sometimes plays with DJ Rekha and Tanuja Desai Hidier’s band. He’s also played at the Brooklyn Museum’s Fourth of July fest and on Sarina Jain’s bhangra aerobics videos.
His college band, The Scholars, toured the country and even did a video for MTV. [Link]
This year, Santa Dave brings New Yorkers a dhol ‘n bass Christmas:
… I’m beyond excited to be part of an extra-special session of DirectDrive, NYC’s longest-running weekly drum n’ bass party… I pack up my records and tablas to throw down the freshest in subcontinental grooves, dubby jungle, fresh dubplates, funky DnB and just generally really hot records alongside DD residents Jaggi and Shichman…So jump out of midnight mass early and swing down to Rothko; I’m on @ 12:30 for the DJ set, and will be playing tablas alongside Jaggi’s set afterwards.
DIRECT DRIVE PRESENTS: XMAS EVE WITH BOLLYDUB D&B
Schichman spinning liquid beats early
Sharma in the center slot
Jaggi cleaning up, w/ Sharma on tablas
How far would you go to avoid something unpleasant? Would you lie? Cheat? Publicly HUMILIATE yourself? Via the BBC:
Bollywood star Salman Khan has given an unusual excuse for not attending court this week in India – he was recovering from hair implants, his lawyers say.
Oh, it hurts to chortle THIS much. The Khan I like least had to stay home to recover from all the plugging he took. An advocate for the wispy one had more to add:
Khan’s lawyer, Dipesh Mehta, said this was the first time the actor had had hair implants.
“Salman Khan had just returned from Dubai and undergone hair-weaving treatment,” he told the BBC. “He was also suffering from flu and not feeling well.”
Feeling plugged or not, Salman is in trouble. Not showing up for his trial resulted in cancelled bail (and the Beeb article…and this post…and the evil gleam in my eye…)
Salman Khan is accused of killing two blackbucks, a small, protected species of Indian antelope, in the city of Jodhpur during a film shoot in 1998.
Mais oui, Vain-y McPlugster denies all charges. Most of you are aware– this isn’t the first time he’s behaved badly and claimed innocence. In 2002, Khan decided that homeless people looked like road and drove over them, killing one and injuring three. Besides this poaching case which he’s attempting to unplug from, he also faces a trial in Mumbai for that stunning example of deadly recklessness. Continue reading