Doctors marry each other; world eagerly awaits their super-perfect offspring:
The couple, both 31, are fellows at the Boston University School of Medicine, the bride in gastroenterology, the bridegroom in cardiology. They met at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where they completed their residencies in internal medicine. [The New York Times]
Today, NPR’s Morning Edition surprised me with a lovely present, though it wasn’t my birthday they were celebrating. Ravi Shankar is 85 today, and the story I blasted on my way to work was produced in honour of that.
In the latest report for the NPR/National Geographic co-production Radio Expeditions, NPR’s Susan Stamberg travels to New Delhi, the capital of India, to meet with the artist…
…Shankar is totally in his element when he performs — sitting on his oriental rug, sitar nestled in his lap, the air scented with incense, he appears lost in a trance.
“Ravi Shankar’s music is like a fine Indian sari — silken, swirling, exotic,” Stamberg says. “It can break your heart with its beauty.”
Oy, Ms. Stamberg…we could’ve done without the dreaded “E”-bomb, but we forgive you.
SM readers (and Mutineer Manish) might enjoy the legend’s take on why he is known as “Pandit”; personally, I was more amused by the piece’s description of Shankar’s wife as one “…in a crowd of Ravi’s lovers”. Ahem. No sex please, we’re Indian. Wait, too late for that–listeners are treated to Sukanya Shankar (“Ravi’s merry, dimpled wife”) trilling, “what you do to me!” in answer to a befuddled/barely-risque question that her husband poses.
Oh and yes, there is the obligatory Norah Jones ref; they played a snippet of “Don’t know why”, since THAT wouldn’t be predictable, at ALL. 😀
Enjoy the interview (and some “pillow talk”) here. Continue reading
Even though this is no longer an infrequent occurrence, I love it that Desi weddings are making a regular appearance in the New York Times Vows section, and thus feel the need to blog them from time-to-time. This weeks entry: the wedding of Geeta Chopra, or as many may know her–Citygirl, founder of SALAAM theatre.
GEETA CHOPRA wears a heart drawn with eyeliner on her cheek and answers her cellphone saying, “Citygirl,” a surname she adopted in college. “She is bubbly down to her handwriting,” her sister, Mona, said. Ms. Chopra, 33, is the founder and artistic director of a five-year-old theater company called Salaam, short for South Asian League of Artists in America. Last March she was steeped in her job, and getting married, she said, was low on her list of priorities. That month, during previews of the Broadway musical “Bombay Dreams,” Ms. Chopra orchestrated a splashy pre-opening party in the K Lounge, a night spot in Midtown…
Oh and make sure to check and see if nytimes wedding and celebrations blog has a different take on the Times’ piece. Continue reading
Chila from Wolverhampton and Mr. Kiss My Chuddies got hitched in a small, private ceremony on Jan. 21 (thanks, Punjabi Boy). Coverage here, here and here.
[Goodness Gracious Me] started as a one-off stage show called Peter Sellers Is Dead… designed to indicate that the days of white actors blacking up to play Asians were over. [BBC]The newlyweds are currently working on the movie version of another of Miss Syal’s novels, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha, Hee Hee. [ThisIsLondon]
Narain Karthikeyan is on the verge of becoming the first Indian on the Formula One circuit. The agreement with the Jordan Formula One team is expected to be signed over the next two days (thanks, Sapna):
Karthikeyan, 28, was the first Indian to drive a Formula One car and last year raced for Red Bull in the World Series by Nissan. He was offered an F1 drive by Minardi in 2003 but was unable to raise the funds required to secure the offer.
His new employer is looking to Karthikeyan to rescue its burned buns from the oven:
The struggling Jordan Formula One team announced yesterday it would be taken over by Midland Group, owned by Russian-born businessman Alex Shnaider… Jordan finished ninth out of the 10 Formula One teams in 2004 and hit serious problems after Ford, who supplied the team’s Cosworth engines, announced in September they were withdrawing from the sport.
Karthikeyan was the first Indian to win the Formula Asia championship and won two races in last year’s Nissan World Series. He’s sponsored by Tata and Bharat Petroleum. Homeboy needs some sharper paint, this is the country that invented day-glo salwars. I’m diggin’ the helmet, bro — a spinning wheel, how apropos.
‘Fastest Indian in the world,’ I think not. Ever seen Abhi in a room full of females? It’s like feeding time at the dolphin tank 🙂 But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Karthikeyan is played by Tom Cruise and marries Ashley Judd.
The NYT profiled Saru Jayaraman, a 29-year-old activist for Manhattan restaurant workers, last week (thanks, Ms. World):
She is the executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a little nonprofit that just pulled off a David-versus-Goliath feat. The center extracted $164,000 from two fashionable Manhattan restaurants – Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe – to settle lawsuits that involved charges of discrimination and failure to pay overtime to 23 restaurant employees, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico and Bangladesh.
The ‘pretty people in sales, pimply workhorses in the back office’ model is used by many, many industries (software, consulting, finance). But you can’t put it in employment ads. There’s a euphemistic hypocrisy here, but like blind auditions at symphony orchestras, it at least gives interviewees an honest shot.
“… you wouldn’t believe the ads put out by restaurant employers – ‘good-looking required, send photos’ – to be a waiter. Employers have told us that means they want good-looking white people in the front and hard workers in the back. Hard workers mean immigrants…”
Jayaraman has an interesting background:
A daughter of immigrants from southern India, a graduate of Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she was singled out and honored as one of America’s finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton… Ms. Jayaraman, whose father is an unemployed software developer and whose mother is a school aide, grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles… She teaches… immigrant rights at New York University… She is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard.
Jayaraman’s organization is opening its own coop-style restaurant on a fashionable street in Manhattan. It’ll be an interesting experiment in a tough biz.
This fall, it plans to open a restaurant, Colors, on Lafayette Street near Astor Place, to be owned and governed by workers.
Lt. Neil Prakash was just awarded a Silver Star for leading his platoon through a horrific explosive gauntlet to victory against 60 Iraqi rebels.
Well done, soldier.
It took the crew about one hour to fight their way through the next one kilometer stretch of road. Official battle reports count 23 IEDs and 20-25 RPG teams in that short distance, as well as multiple machine-gun nests, and enemy dismounts armed with small arms and hand grenades. … enemy dismounts were attempting to throw hand grenades into the tank’s open hatches… Prakash’s tank took the brunt of the attack, sustaining blasts from multiple IEDs and at least seven standard and armor piercing RPGs… One round blew the navigation system completely off of the vehicle, while another well-aimed blast disabled his turret…By battle’s end, the platoon was responsible for 25 confirmed destroyed enemy and an estimated 50 to 60 additional destroyed enemy personnel. Prakash was personally credited with the destruction of eight enemy strong-points, one enemy re-supply vehicle, and multiple enemy dismounts…
“He’s a pleasure to command because he doesn’t require very much direction. He uses his own judgment and he’s simply an outstanding young lieutenant…” Although born in India and maintaining strong ties to the Indian community, Prakash was raised in Syracuse, New York, in what he called a very patriotic American household.
Lt. Neil Prakash tells us how the military makes coffee:
Mr. Abrams the coffee maker… slip the lid into the back grill of the exhaust. Then set your canteen cup for about 2 minutes. Let the 900 degree exhaust of your jet engine heat that puppy up and BAM – hot water for shaving, Ramen noodles, coffee…
There’s a certain combination of brute force and delicacy here that I find very appealing 🙂
A transportation expert penned an op-ed in the NY Post yesterday bemoaning that New Delhi is more efficient at building subways than New York:
New York is talking – again – about starting work on the 8-mile Second Ave. line. It’s budgeted at $17 billion and scheduled to take up to 16 years to complete…New Delhi started from scratch in 1998 and now has 13 miles of rail line up and running. The system is due to grow to 40 miles by next June, as workers complete their jobs three years ahead of schedule. The cost of all this: $2.3 billion…
In contrast to Delhi’s count-every-minute attitude, New York officials have talked about a Second Ave. subway since the 1920s… If New Delhi can do it, why can’t New York?
Why not, indeed. Cast off the bureaucratic habits of our former overlords, oh Yankees! Delhi’s subway was built five times faster at one-third the cost (buying power-adjusted), for a 15x improvement in bang for the rupee. Who’s the Mr. Laajawab behind this feat?
Dr. Meena Bose, 34, is an assistant poli sci prof at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a frequent pundit on American politics (thanks, Ennis). I’ve seen her on TV discussing the presidential election. She comes across as earnest, fair, wonkish yet accessible. She’s clearly intelligent, clearly high-bandwidth. But she lacks some of the swagger you need to hold your own on a panel of pundits or with decorated military men. It’ll probably come with age.
She is a petite woman in a pageboy haircut who looks barely out of her teens… Her expertise and evenhandedness have made her an increasingly sought-after television pundit, most recently for “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” Ms. Bose is one of the few female scholars… asked to provide historical context for American politics.But Ms. Bose, whose heritage is Bengali Indian, touts neither a feminist nor immigrant American viewpoint… Her father, Nirmal, is an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, where Ms. Bose was an undergraduate, and her mother, Chandra, formerly history instructor in New Delhi.
Bose earned her doctorate from Princeton and wrote Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy.