Reading this article all I could think of was the Eddie Murphy classic Coming to America where he works at fast food restaurant named McDowell’s that was a total rip-off of McDonalds.

While the Hyderabad-born owner, Mr Anil Jintoorkar, feels that red (kumkum) and yellow (haldi) are the traditional, auspicious Indian colours and also proven marketing colours, the multinational fast foodchain McDonalds thinks red and yellow are their colours.

Yet another egregious example of a multinational corporation pushing around the little guy.

and he’s not “aboot” to take it! from the TOI:

MUMBAI: Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt says he would sue for defamation a Canadian paper that has labelled him a terrorist.

Calgary Herald , a leading daily in Canada, has allegedly branded Sanjay Dutt a terrorist from India and wondered about the wisdom of allowing such elements into the country.

“It was a long half-page article ripping my reputation into bits. I’ve never been more hurt in my life,” Sanjay Dutt said from Los Angeles sounding acutely upset. He left Calgary where he was shooting for Anubhav Sinha’s Dus.

i have no idea what he may or may not be guilty of with regards to terrorism, but i DO know he is, without a shadow of a doubt, guilty of terrible highlights and horrible facial hair. click the TOI link for his pic, you’ll see.

New York, New York in all its Technicolor finery. The Empire State inverted the tricolor, but the tower on 23rd St. got it right.

my happiness over india-pendence day diminished after reading salon:

Aug. 15, 2004 | NEW DELHI (AP) — A bomb exploded during an Independence Day parade in India’s remote northeast on Sunday, killing at least 15 people, officials said, just an hour after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged to fight terrorism. The outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom was suspected of being behind the attack in Assam state and a second one later in the area, said Assam Inspector General of Police Khagen Sharma.

Dilip Saikia, a local lawmaker, said 15 people were killed in the powerful blast in the grounds of a local college in Dhemaji, where the parade was being held. Most of the dead were school children, who had come to see the parade, Saikia told The Associated Press over telephone from Dhemaji. The remote town is 1,015 miles northeast of New Delhi.

57 years later…we may be free of the brits, but we are still enslaved by hate, terror and violence. sigh.

For the Indians among you, freedom for trysts with midnight’s children and so on, old chap. Happy day. Off to the big NYC parade in the morning.

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

–Jawaharlal Nehru

After serving out a 20-year term in India, Indian-Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobhraj has been convicted again in Thailand (via Shashwati Talukdar). Sobhraj is an odd and unusual fellow as far as homicidal sociopaths go, befriending hippies on the ganja-moksha trail:

Charles Sobhraj was born… to an unwed Vietnamese shop girl and an India merchant who denied paternity… “I will make you regret that you have missed your father’s duty,” he confided in his diary.

… years later he made an even more audacious escape: this time by throwing a birthday party in which guards and prisoners alike were invited. Grapes and biscuits handed around the guests were secretly injected with sleeping pills, knocking out everyone except Sobhraj and four other escapees. Indian newspapers reported that they were so haughty about their getaway that they even photographed themselves walking through the prison gates onto the Delhi streets.

Continue reading →

If Vijay Singh was from Madras rather than Fiji, do you think that sportswriters would call him the “Tamil Tiger Woods?”