Chaal with Baraat

red baraat.jpgGet up. Get up out of your office chair. Ready? Now get ready to move your butt and shock your cubicle mate. Today’s #MusicMonday comes from Red Baraat and I double dare you to listen to this song without dancing. it’s impossible. And it’s free to download!

This song is just one of many live tracks on an EP the band is dropping very very soon. I’m a big fan of Red Baraat and interviewed Sonny and Sunny after the release of their first album. I’ve never seen them perform before and am itching for them to come tour out to the West Coast. After watching this clip, it’s hard not to want to see them.

Folks in Louisiana,Texas and Canada though are in luck – the band starts their summer tours next month, traversing the dirty South and Canada, aye. Check out their site for the latest tour dates and be sure to visit their bandcamp for the release of their latest live EP.

Baile, baile! Continue reading

A call to all brown gene nerds!

Update II: Several people have emailed me and confirmed that they finally purchased a kit. A little over $100 seems to be a good price point for what is mostly recreational genetics. Tomorrow I will post on what you’ll see in your 23andMe account, and how you have to interpret it if you are brown.

Update: Sale is operative. Limit 5 per person!

Just thought I’d pass on word, tomorrow the 23andMe genotyping service is going to have a sale. The details:

When: April 11th, 12 AM PDT to 12 PM PDT (so 3 AM EDT to 3 PM EDT)

How much: $9/month for 12 months = $108 per year for their analytic service. The kit cost, $199, is waived for the sale.

What you get: Ancestry analysis, trait assessment, and disease risk estimates. I wouldn’t put too much stock in the last in terms of bang-for-buck if you are not adopted…though the last person I explained that to ended up finding over 50% probability of macular degeneration (not a 50% increased risk, a 50% probability of developing the disease!).

For nerds the big deal is that you can get your raw genotype for 1 million markers. There are several personal genetics projects which have been started by people pooling their data. I put up a simple tutorial for those curious, and have started my own African ancestry project. But for readers of this weblog, Harappa is the way to go. Zack has over 80 participants now. Below the fold I’ve placed a tree which shows the genetic relationships in terms of ancestral quanta. I’ve underlined myself (I’m right next to my parents, as you’d expect). Continue reading

New Study Says “Desi Men Are Hot” (Or Something Like That)

Desi.jpgAs a young child, I thought the standard for beauty was contained within the perfume-scented pages of Vogue. When I turned its glossy pages and saw impossibly thin (mostly-white) women with flawless skin carrying $10,000 handbags and hairless men with heroin chic eyes, I thought, “Here is beauty.” Well, I was all wrong. Beauty is actually a South Asian man. And a Latina woman, but let’s focus on the man for the sake of this blog. Allure magazine released the findings of a 2,000 person survey last month and found some interesting results. According to Racialicious blog: Continue reading

Top Chef Masters: Coming Back to Earth

top.chef.masters.chefs.jpg The third season of Top Chef Masters is different and not just because it includes for the first time ever, one–wait, make that two–desi chefs: Floyd Cardoz and Suvir Saran. Instead of having about 20 contestants as in previous years, this season has 12, and pits them against each other in elimination challenges like Restaurant Wars that come straight from the original Top Chef series format. But as usual they are all chefs already at the top in terms of professional success, competing to win money for charities and the title of Top Chef Master.

Cardoz and Saran definitely have what it takes to make it to the finals, and they made a good showing in the first episode. It’s too early to tell which of the remaining 11 chefs will make it to the end, but after the first episode last night it is NOT too early to know that Saran and his quips make for good TV. What did you think? Have you tried their food?

You can watch both chefs introduce themselves below.

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A Meandering Welcome to Lawrence Singh, Teen Boxer Extraordinaire

On Sunday night, my right knee gave out. Twice. This was only mildly surprising, since I was born with a bad right knee and I spent a year of college with it in a full leg immobilizer. The problem is, the Sunday before that, my left kneecap moved in a way that it shouldn’t, as I was ascending the stairs to my beloved cathedral while wearing the most glorious suede four-inch platforms.

That might be the single worst circumstance during which to injure your knee. Stairs? Heels? Hell. The pain was excruciating. I never made it past the narthex, which is where I collapsed on the first bench I could find. When the liturgy was over, I limped out of the handicapped exit and proceeded to drive a stick shift to the nearest CVS in Georgetown, where I procured a knee brace to hold my kneecap together.

Oh, the looks I got in that store, people scornfully glaring at me as if I were an idiot, stumbling around in heels when injured. Silly make-an-ass-out-of-you-and-me strangers. I am stubborn and unwise, but not THAT stubborn and unwise. Sheesh. So let’s recap: two Sundays ago, I hurt my left knee, and by the time I made it to urgent care, favoring my feeble right, it was too late– both were busted. And when they gave out this weekend, I knew that my Orthopedist might have underestimated how serious my injuries were. I swear, I have a point, and that point is, I am not very mobile right now.

Forget driving, I can’t walk without a cane. And that means that I am at home. All the time. Often with a boxing writer. And so I marinate in the sweet science, because, well, I have no choice. http://www.flickr.com/photos/chamberoffear/4439398769/ I guess there are worse sports to be subjected to, visually. Golf. Bowling. Drawn out games which involve bats and balls– of course, I am talking about vampires and testicles there, I promise. But I’m not that into boxing, despite said boxing writer’s endearing attempts to draw me in. He started (somewhat logically, given my mutinous proclivities) with Amir Khan.

Amir Khan is a British pugilist of Pakistani descent who is referred to as “King Khan”, or the “Pride of Bolton”. Khan is an Olympic medalist, and he’s a big enough deal that he trains with Freddy Roach; in other words, when he runs around, toning that lovely body of his, he might be trotting next to Manny Pacquiao. Perhaps you have heard of him? Anyway, I’ve seen King Khan throw stiff jabs and it barely inspired me to look up from the interwebz. Yay team brown and all, but it’s hard to cheer for someone who is prettier than and weighs less than me. I keed, I keed. It’s hard to cheer because I don’t give a tatti. Continue reading

2011 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. Who’s in?

I can’t tell you just how excited I am. After being away from LA for the past three Aprils I am now back to enjoy this year’s film festival which, as always, will be at the Arclight. In the past I would have done a detailed breakdown of the films and then maybe recommended some to you based on my LA street sources. Nah. Times have changed and I have been out of that kind of hard slog blogging for much too long. I am going to crowdsource this. Here is the program complete with trailers to most of the films. Tell me what you think I should go see either because the trailer “speaks” to you or because you know that one of these films has serious buzz or you’ve seen it. Better yet, if you made one of these films then leave a comment. The artist is the best advocate. Filmmaker Geeta Malik sent me the trailer to her film which will be playing at the festival so I will feature it:

Also, do any of you plan to go to some of these films? Please let other like-minded readers know in the comments below and maybe we will see each other there.

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A nuanced brown place in the world

Recently my friend Michelle re-tweeted this tweet you see to the left from Aziz Ansari. When I was in college some Indian students would play cricket in the public spaces I had to cross to get between classes, and they would consistently stop what they were doing and give me an inviting stare down. Finally I asked them what was up, and one of the players wondered if I played cricket. I explained not only did I not play cricket, but I had no idea what they were doing most of the time. One of my interlocutors quipped that I looked like I should play cricket. I had to laugh at that, and went on my way.

So first, congratulations to India! I recall how excited Americans were when we won the Women’s Soccer World Cup in 1999, when frankly most Americans didn’t even follow the sport. I can only imagine the euphoria in India due to victory in a sporting activity which is near the center of national consciousness.

But this gets me to a broader issue: as an Indian American, Aziz Ansari serves as a representative in the minds of his fellow Americans of India. In several of the comedic references I’ve seen to his ethnicity Aziz seems to express curiosity as to the farcical nature that his representation of a billion people sometimes takes on. For example, when Slumdog Millionaire was in the public eye people would apparently discuss it with him constantly (Aziz naturally expressed wonder at what the world must be for like for white people, who are the subject of so many films!).

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Tagore makes a (uncredited) Congressional cameo

Actor Martin Sheen (The West Wing, Apocalypse Now) spoke before a Congressional briefing last week in favor of funding for drug courts.

The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column singled out this section of Sheen’s “heartfelt, yet grandiose oratory”:

“A dream that helps lift up this nation and all its people to a place where the heart is without fear and the head is held high and knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls where words come out from the depths of truth and tireless driving stretches its arms towards perfection where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way to dreary desert sands of dead habit.”

Sound familiar? As the Reliable Source pointed out in a follow-up column, Sheen forgot to note that he was quoting from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali.

It looks like the mistake was inadvertent. Sheen quoted the same Tagore excerpt during a 2008 speech at Notre Dame and promptly devoted the next paragraph to explaining who Tagore was.

Sheen first became familiar with the poem while filming the movie Gandhi in 1981.

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Brimful of Music from Cornershop

Guess who is back? Cornershop. And this time they are back with a brimful of music for today’s #MusicMonday.

The song above is United Provinces of India (hmm, India’s anthem in light of the cricket win?) and is my favorite out of their latest. A couple of weeks ago, Cornershop released their 8th album Cornershop and the Double “O” Groove Of. Six years in the making, the album came together when the band met unrecorded Punjabi singer Bubbly Kaur. They were inspired. Her voice lilts through the entire album, acting as a consistent thread in an eclectic mix of music. This album maintains the unique Cornershop Brit-pop flavor and has pushed the envelope on redefining the ‘fusion’ genre while keeping it fresh and new. You can get the album now directly from the band’s online store right here.

Interested in a free download off of their latest album? Check out the link below!

It’s a comeback for Cornershop – for people that have heard their recent songs, what do you think? Continue reading