Indo indie

Posted on by

The NYT takes a look at new wave Indian cinema:

Being Cyrus

Lately, a third type of Hindi cinema has emerged. It’s composed of smaller, offbeat films that are more realistic than Bollywood tales and edgier than art-house ones. The films have an urbane, uniquely Indian sensibility. Many, though not all, are in Hinglish, the hybrid of Hindi and English that is spoken in metropolitan India.

These films have none of the overt glamour or sunny disposition of mainstream movies. Emotions are messy, characters have pasts and endings aren’t always happy. But neither are the movies treatises on social issues far removed from the filmmakers’ own experience, like so much art-house cinema was… Grimness is no longer box office poison, however. The first hit of 2005 was “Page 3,” the director Madhur Bhandarkar’s scathing look at high society in Mumbai. It featured pedophilia, drug-fueled rave parties and unabashed nastiness… [Link]

Distribution is key:

But the current crop of Indian independents can count on far wider release, thanks in large part to the arrival of more multiplexes. The first Indian multiplex, the PVR Anupam, opened in New Delhi in June 1997. Until then most filmgoers patronized cavernous theaters with 1,000 to 1,500 seats…

After the PVR Anupam opened, some state governments announced entertainment tax exemptions and prompted a multiplex boom. There are 73 multiplexes in India, with 276 screens and about 89,470 seats. The numbers are expected to increase to 135 multiplexes with more than 160,000 seats by the end of 2006…

The more affluent multiplex viewers have given filmmakers new fiscal and artistic freedom. “A film is a conversation,” said the director-producer Ram Gopal Varma… “The multiplex gives me flexibility and enables me to have a conversation with my intended target audience without worrying about small towns and villages…” [Link]

Related comments: Third I film fest

Related post: ‘Everybody Says I’m Fine’ playing in NYC

Continue reading →

N.Y. Giants games are no fun

Posted on by

Some of you may have heard that last week five Muslim fans alleged racial bias while attending a New York Giants game. The Boston Globe reported:

Five Muslim football fans were detained and questioned during a game [Sep. 19th] at Giants Stadium because they were congregating near an air duct on a night former President George H.W. Bush was in the stadium, the FBI said yesterday.

Some of the Muslims said they did not know they were in a sensitive area, and said they were subjected to racial profiling while they were praying, as their faith requires five times a day.

”I’m as American as apple pie and I’m sitting there and now I’m made to feel like I’m an outsider, for no reason other than I have a long beard or that I prayed,” said Sami Shaban, a 27-year-old Seton Hall Law School student who lives in Piscataway.

Come on, they are probably just being oversensitive, right? I was willing to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt:

FBI agent Steven Siegel, a spokesman for the bureau’s FBI office, said the men had aroused suspicion because they were congregating near the main air intake duct. Bush was in the stadium that night as part of a fund-raising campaign he and former President Bill Clinton were leading for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The site is now fenced off and is no longer accessible to fans.

Ok, no harm no foul. Then I read this article yesterday. Seems like this might be a pattern at Giants games, at least when there is a Bush in the house:

Two more men stepped forward Friday accusing authorities at Giants Stadium of racial profiling.

Mathew Varughese, 26, of Port Chester, and Pierre Mainville, 28, of Stamford, Conn., said they and four other men were unfairly questioned and detained by stadium police and the FBI during a Sept. 19 Giants-Saints game.

The incident happened the same day that five Muslim men were detained and questioned by authorities. Those men, who accused authorities of violating their religious rights, are considering whether to file a lawsuit. [Link]

Continue reading →

Mortified

Posted on by

‘The Boondocks,’ a leftist, angry-black-man comic drawn like anime, reeeeeeaches for a punchline. This is more puerile than its usual fare and conflates Hinduism with Islam, though it’s more a comment on the grandfather character’s bumbling.

Mohandas Gandhi’s hunger strikes have long been the object of derision in cultures without ascetic tradition. Churchill dismissing Gandhi as ‘nauseating’ and a ‘half-naked fakir’ wasn’t just the poisoned fruit of an embittered colonialist, it was also gut-level cultural revulsion which transcends political orientation. When Jon Stewart makes fun of ululating Arabs on the Daily Show, or show alumnus Stephen Colbert cracks a Gandhi starvation joke, they’re expressing culture clash. Personally, I draw the line at the Shi’as’ bloody self-flagellation during the Ashura festival and the self-mortifying skin hooks for the Thaipusam festival shown in the ‘Mundeyan To Bach Ke’ video (thanks, jeet).

But dissidents like Mandela have long gone on hunger strike, and many African countries are much poorer than India. The American shorthand for starvation used to be Ethiopian famine — why now Gandhi?

I blame Richard Attenborough. There’s nothing you can teach an American about what’s outside our borders that we can’t make fun of

In 2003, Maxim beat up an icon.

Related posts: Fatty fatwa, New evidence uncovered about Gandhi’s assassination, Promo’s pizza leaves bad taste in actor’s mouth, Gandhi didn’t wear Armani

Update: Ennis points out that pork chops are Southern food, like yams and greens. But pork is still laden with cultural connotations with which I’m sure Aaron McGruder is familiar, and he uses it for comic effect.

Continue reading →

Armistice day

Posted on by

Veterans day has its roots in Armistice day, the holiday that once marked the end of the “Great War” (WWI) on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 [Link].

Over 138,000 Indian troops fought in Belgium and France during World War I, many of them Sikhs. More than one quarter of these soldiers would became casualties.

In the first battle of Ypres at Flanders in 1914 a platoon of Dogra Sikhs died fighting to the last man, who shot himself with his last cartridge rather than surrender.

After the bloody battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915 the Sikh regiments had lost 80% of their men, 3 regiments stood at only 16% of their original compliment. [Link]

Encarta: Indian Soldiers in France

Continue reading →

A double whammy

Posted on by

Another VERY patriotic South Asian American

Last week when I was live-blogging the incoming polling data from around the country, I didn’t list every South Asian candidate. Manish posted a link to some additional results in the comment section of my post. A race to be on the Fairfield City Council in Solano County, CA turned out to be one of the most dramatic races of the night. The Indian American candidate, Democrat Iqbal “Paul” Randhawa, lost with a meager 5% of the vote. There was drama nonetheless:

As voters cast ballots Tuesday afternoon, Fairfield City Council candidate Paul Randhawa, his wife and son were in court.

After confirming the charges against each of the owners of Fairfield-based M&K Travel Services, Solano County Superior Court Commissioner Barbara James told the trio they could post a collective $2 million bail once they appear in court in San Francisco.

They were then returned to Solano County Jail.

“Is my lawyer here?” a confused Iqbal “Paul” Randhawa asked before he was led from the courtroom. He told The Reporter during a Monday jailhouse interview that he hoped to post bail following Tuesday’s hearing.

Randhawa, his wife, Gurdev “Debbie” Randhawa, and son, Manjinder “Manny” Randhawa, were arrested Monday at their Dynasty Drive home on San Francisco-issued warrants alleging fraudulent business practices.

Paul Randhawa, 52, faces 15 counts of grand theft, 15 counts of failing to refund money and one count of conspiracy. His bail is $1 million. [Link]

Damn. Way to kick a man when he is down. Not only does he get creamed in the election, but he has to spend election day in jail with his family. What kind of game was Paul running?

According to the authorities the Randhawa family which operates M&K Travels with offices in Fairfield, San Francisco and San Jose allegedly failed to deliver more than $50,000 worth of discounted air tickets to India; and in two instances clients received refund cheques that bounced.

Randhawa, his wife and son face 31 counts of conspiracy and grand theft, they said.

According to the District Attorney’s Office, Paul Randhawa, if convicted, could face 13 years and four months in a state prison along with a fine of $375,000. [Link]

Continue reading →

A Bellygraph Test to Ascertain the Gut Truth of the Matter

Posted on by

Desis know that the seat of all emotions isn’t the heart but the belly – why else would we spend so much time catering to its needs? Based on that principle some clever desi-americans have come up with a better truth test, one almost as effective as having your mother look you in the eye and tell you that she knows what you did, so you better be honest about it. Instead of a polygraph, they used an electrogastrogram to measure changes in the digestive tract associated with stress.

Manish reluctantly posed for this photo …

… when 16 volunteers were hooked up to heart and digestive tract monitors, the researchers were surprised to find that lying had a closer correlation with stomach changes than with heart changes.

When the subjects lied, their heart rates increased, but it also did so at other times. On the other hand, lying was consistently associated with a decrease in the slow waves of the digestive tract. [Link]

Why is a stomach test more accurate? Because, as any auntie will tell you, the heart is a fickle creature, led around by hormones:

“The heart is unreliable because it’s affected by not only by your brain, but by many other factors, such as hormones,” says Pankaj Pasricha, who is leading the team. “The gut has a mind of its own – literally. It has its own well-developed nervous system that acts independently of almost everything except your unconscious brain.” [Link]

The Pasricha Family: Where nobody dares tell a lie!
This discovery had classically desi roots, it started with a father helping his daughter with a science project (the final version was called “Liar, Liar, Your Stomach’s on Fire”):
The study began as a high school project for Dr. Pasricha’s daughter, Trisha, who is listed as an author. (Dr. Pasricha’s wife is a former F.B.I. agent.) [Link]

Her mom’s a former F.B.I. agent and she just helped her dad come up with a better lie detector test? Boy, she’s really not planning on dating in high school, is she?

Continue reading →

M-m-me so hungry

Posted on by

Legions of gastrophilic blurb writers drown South Asian lit in a very nice béarnaise sauce with a hint of tarragon:

Choli ke peechhe kya hai?

(What’s behind the choli?)

ALSO BY ROHINTON MISTRY: … Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new. Swimming Lessons is an intoxicating literary experience, as elegantly composed as a classic raga and as intensely flavored as a lamb korma.

Yes, and it’s as exciting as baseball and as delicious as a BLT. Pardon me while I light a few sticks of air freshener, put on some Christian rock and bask in exawtique, mystical Occidentalism.

Guess what borders the Vintage Books softcover edition of Mistry’s Family Matters:

Photograph… from Traditional Indian Textiles…

A Rajasthani choli. Sit down, the shock could kill you.

Related post: Buzzword bingo

Continue reading →

Evolution and Religion: A Science Friday smackdown

Posted on by

For today’s Science Friday, I want to jump right into the center of the culture wars. From Tuesday’s elections, two results in particular will affect the way that science is taught in parts of our country. First, the Kansas Board of education voted 6-4 to weaken evolution teaching in its classrooms. Second, voters in Dover, PA swept eight pro-Creationist school board members out of office and replaced them with eight anti-creationists.

The Kansas Board of Education has approved science standards that support the theory of intelligent design and cast doubt on Darwin’s theory of evolution. The final vote was 6-4 in favor of intelligent design. [Link]

Voters in rural Dover, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday ousted eight school board members who favor mentioning the concept as an alternative to evolution. The newly elected board members are opponents of the concept, which critics say promotes the Bible’s view of creation and violates the constitutional separation of church and state. [Link]

The latter action prompted this from good ‘ole Pat Robertson:

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck…

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city,” Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, “The 700 Club” [Link]

This week’s Time magazine features a very clear and concise appeal from commentator Eric Cornell, calling all scientists to action:

…as exciting as intelligent design is in theology, it is a boring idea in science. Science isn’t about knowing the mind of God; it’s about understanding nature and the reasons for things. The thrill is that our ignorance exceeds our knowledge; the exciting part is what we don’t understand yet. If you want to recruit the future generation of scientists, you don’t draw a box around all our scientific understanding to date and say, “Everything outside this box we can explain only by invoking God’s will.” Back in 1855, no one told the future Lord Rayleigh that the scientific reason for the sky’s blueness is that God wants it that way. Or if someone did tell him that, we can all be happy that the youth was plucky enough to ignore them. For science, intelligent design is a dead-end idea.

My call to action for scientists is, Work to ensure that the intelligent-design hypothesis is taught where it can contribute to the vitality of a field (as it could perhaps in theology class) and not taught in science class, where it would suck the excitement out of one of humankind’s great ongoing adventures.

Continue reading →

Fire Fire, Pa?

Posted on by

The New York Daily News reports today of one Karnail Singh, a Queens, NY resident who is currently recovering in Weill Cornell Medical Center’s burn unit since being seriously burned on October 28. How was he burned, you ask? Well, he hasn’t been convicted or anything, but it turns out Singh, 48 apparently set himself on fire while trying to set a deathtrap for his daughter-in-law by torching her basement apartment. The cause of his anger (according to fire officials): Singh claimed his daughter-in-law wasn’t sending money to his son in India. Oh, and he also also accused her of seeing other men. Thankfully Singh’s daughter-in-law Gurpreet Kaur, was rescued unharmed by firefighters who had to cut through metal bars on a basement window to get her out. In a weird twist of fate, as Singh was fleeing, he mistakenly set himself on fire. What goes around, perhaps really does come around.

Continue reading →

55Friday: The “War” edition

Posted on by

We all know what today is and rather than prattle on about how I’m flummoxed that yet another week has raced past me and here we are, ready to write nanofiction, I’d rather focus on the significance of this day. In addition to 55Friday, today is Veterans day.

I learn something new every day. Here’s my chewable vitamin for today:

Q. What is the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day?
A. Many people confuse Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring military personnel who died in the service of their country, particularly those who died in battle or as a result of wounds sustained in battle. While those who died are also remembered on Veterans Day, Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor ALL those who served honorably in the military – in wartime or peacetime. In fact, Veterans Day is largely intended to thank LIVING veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served – not only those who died – have sacrificed and done their duty. A complete history of Veterans Day, and why it is observed on November 11, can be found on our Veterans Day History Web page.

Though I tend to cringe whenever I’m exposed to the oeuvre of this holiday’s pneumatic spokesperson (who decides such things?) I am loyal to our military for a million reasons, most of which are inspired by my sole sibling who has spent almost a decade in active duty in the Air Force. Thank you, Veena, for all of your leadership and sacrifice. Thank you for giving yourself to a country that has given us so much. Most of all, thank you for putting a face on an organization which our family never really understood, appreciated or paid attention to until your courageous decision to serve. P.S. Please tell all of your friends, especially those who have been or are in Iraq and Afghanistan that I sweat them, too. Continue reading →