Category Archives: News

The Indian equivalent of Madison or Jacob

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Are you expecting a child soon? Since it’s a well known fact that all Indian kids in the U.S. look alike through college, do your kids a favor and heed the following advice so that they have at least a minor shot at individuality. DO NOT name them Arjun or Maya. The Hindustan Times reports:

Arjun, the warrior-prince of the Mahabharata, and Maya were the most popular names given to baby boys and girls respectively by Indians in the United States.

The name Arjun was given to 247 boys last year, ranking it 741 in the list of 1,000 most popular baby names in the US, compiled by the Department of Social Security Administration.

I now await hate mail from Arjuns and Mayas worldwide. Please, don’t hate the messenger. Continue reading →

The ways of the thug

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Months ago I posted a little history lesson about the Cult of Thugee in India, from which the overused term “Thug” originated. Today Slate.com, in its dispatches, features a look at a modern day Indian thug cult of sorts, which is known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army.

One hundred years ago, Dharavi, which is now Asia’s largest slum, was a fishing village at the edge of Mumbai. As the growing city dumped its junk here, the salt plain turned to swampy landfill. Then, from the 1950s, as rural Indians arrived in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then known, looking for work, they came to Dharavi. Now the teeming slum, which used to be the most marginal of all marginal communities, is right smack in the middle of Greater Mumbai.

Babalu is a clean-cut 27-year-old with a freckle embedded in the white of his right eye who works on the street hawking barrettes. He is also the head of the Lord Ram Unit of the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the religious wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS is a Hindu nationalist organization that has supported a host of unsavory bigots from Adolf Hitler to Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Although the RSS claimed Godse was not a member of the organization at the time of the assassination, this was an attempt to distance the RSS from the scandal.

“As a member of BD, I’m a notorious troublemaker,” Babalu said as he sat at a back table in Venus, a vegetarian restaurant in the slum. The Bajrang Dal, otherwise known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army, is extremely violent. They claim to have 1.3 million members throughout India. I’d met Babalu through a lanky community leader who as a teenager had also been a member of the Bajrang Dal. The lanky man had left the organization years earlier because he was disgusted by their violence.

Reading through Slate’s dispatch I couldnÂ’t help but see similarities between this “Army of the Monkey God” and the notorious American prison gang Nuestra Familia.
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This is the way the world ends…

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StrategyPage offers it’s analysis of what the first stages of a war between India and Pakistan might look like –

May 14, 2005: Can India ever fight a war against its nuclear armed neighbor and rival Pakistan without provoking a nuclear holocaust? The Indian Army (IA) thinks it has an answer to this question. Until now the India’s doctrine for war against Pakistan consisted of combat divisions advancing across the Rajasthan desert border into Pakistan, eventually cutting off Pakistan’s population centers in the north from the only port and economic lifeline of Karachi…

(click quickly! Stratpage’s permalinks are notoriously not so permanent)

Interesting reading if you’re of a macabre / war-nerd sort. Personally, I’m an optimist and believe that, short of an improbable Pakistani state implosion, a Hamiltonian peace will be the long term outcome between the 2 nations. Of course, the path from here to there is rarely a straight line. Continue reading →

Sociology + Econ in One Sentance

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Tyler Cowen @ Marginal Revolution, has the following quote about Indonesia which could just as easily apply to India –

Then Suharto looked at [James] Wolfensohn. “You know, what you regard as corruption in your part of the world, we regard as family values.”
That is from Sebastian Mallaby’s The World”s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

How true it is. Continue reading →

Beer Label a Hate Crime

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Overlawyered reports –

The Lost Coast Brewery in Humboldt, Calif. says it will take off the shelves its Indica India Pale Ale, whose label currently depicts the Indian elephant-god Ganesh “holding a beer in one of his four hands, and another in his trunk”. Although brewery co-owner Barbara Groom said her Hindu friends don’t mind the label, a California man named Brij Dhir sued the brewery, along with other defendants such as the Safeway supermarket chain, claiming that it is offensive and intimidates Hindus from practicing their religion. “Dhir seeks at least $25,000 and his lawsuit mentions that $1 billion would be appropriate to compensate Hindus around the world.” “It’s a hate crime”, Dhir told the Contra Costa Times.

Thanks to Ennis for the pict pointer! Continue reading →

Mr. Hughes isn’t taking visitors

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The Air Sahara magnate, Subrata Roy, has apparently fallen ill and disappeared from public view:

One [rumor] says that an entire floor of a super deluxe hotel was recently bought by Sahara in Mumbai (Bombay) and converted into a make shift hospital… the blood pressure of the Sahara boss has fluctuated frequently… He said the Sahara chief was now leading a much more disciplined and orderly life – even doing yoga and regular exercises…

Roy has Mughal tendencies:

He has a fleet of private jets and helicopters and one of his mansions is modelled on the White House. Another residence – located in a private city he has built at the cost of tens of millions of dollars – is a replica of Buckingham Palace.

He commands a swarm of worker bees which is almost as large as the standing army of the United States and almost three times as large as IBM:

… [with] 900,000 employees – Sahara is India’s biggest private sector employer…

The rumor mill has reached Jacksonesque proportions with a petition of habeas corpus filed:

A habeas corpus petition, claiming that Sahara group Chairman Subrata Roy had been kept in ‘illegal detention’ by his wife and some other senior officers of the company, was filed with the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court on Monday.

Other rumors:

According to Sahara group insiders, Roy was resting in the Sahara group’s Amby Valley – a 10,000-acre resort-style getaway – a few hours drive from Mumbai.

Maybe Roy’s chillin’ with Amby Valley fans Michael Douglas and Christina Aguilera. Billionaire disappears into private valley — could it be Galt’s Gulch?

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Blinkey takes friendly fire

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Blinkey the death tank, the preferred steed of Lt. Neil Prakash, took friendly fire outside Fallujah in November:

A round exploded 50 meters in front of our front slope. “HOLY SHIT! BACK UP BACK UP BACK UP!!!!!. JUST GO GO GO!!!!!” The concussion knocked the air out of my lungs. I felt the soft punch of the air on my face. I didn’t know if more rounds were coming in but the effective kill radius of a 155mm artillery round is 50 meters. And if it was a V/T round (variable time), then it would detonate right above our heads and liquefy us…

The whole back left side of the tank exploded. Grey. Black. Smoke. Dust. Sand. It all happened so fast. I see Langford sitting up on the turret with his legs dangling in the hatch like normal. But against a wall of debris at his back. The image is fleeting. He either fell or got blown forward and down into his hole. Langford and I both fell into our hatches at the same time. My seat went into my back as I looked up at the sky through my hatch…

… where we had just been, my left track was laying out in all of its glory. Broken. With only the right side of track on, the tank could only turn left…like being in a rowboat with just your right oar.

Luckily, Prakash survived to deliver a can of whoop-ass to whomever was calling artillery.

Update: It was an anti-tank mine, not artillery.

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Rocky Horror Le Jayenge

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The earworm-inducing classic Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge just completed its 500th week of showings in India (thanks, Ennis):

Bombay audiences are some of the toughest in the world, and a bad movie can be pulled before the end of opening weekend. Most films bloom for a week or two and disappear. But “Dilwale” has become a Bombay institution, a perfect masala of location, entertainment, and low price. Young men and women, but mostly young men in their untucked white shirts, wait every morning outside the cinema. The box office sells balcony tickets – the choicest seats – for 15 rupees… On busy weekends, the 1,000-seat theater sells out with visiting families… The audience snuggles down in the dark, ready to make jokes, applaud the hero’s arrival, and urge the lovers to “Kiss! Kiss!”

I’m surprised they don’t throw rice. Desi film audiences apparently share a geeky obsessiveness with fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Star Wars. It’s not surprising, really. All three genres are high camp.

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Translate a Huffington Post

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The Huffington Post, a recently launched group blog aimed at the B-list starfucker demographic, hosts a bizarre post by U.K. Maxim editor Greg Gutfeld. It appears to be something about a party in Delhi, or perhaps a dream sequence conceived in an opium-induced stupor:

Things are still going nuts at Alaknanda Jayagopal’s house. Aparjita and Agilah broke into the liquor cabinet, and Gaurika, Fulmala, Heenfu and Indrani started a dance party in the garage. Remember Crystal Water’s “Gypsy Woman?” Well, Dishwari, Fazeela (and her sister, Devapriya) do. They are kicking it, live. Dishwari is also playing truth or dare with Anvita, who dared Deepika to actually swallow a live chicken. Deepika isn’t even speaking to Gangika. Totally off the hook. [The Huffington Post]

If anyone can speak Gutfeldese, please decipher this for us. Winner gets the pride of proving they’re at least as smart as an editor of Maxim. Losers must live with the shame of having read the The Huffington Post.

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