Chinese Idol

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Earlier we posted about how prayers have been outsourced to India. Now Indian priests have even found subcontractors (via India Uncut):

After toys and dolls, communist China — where there are strict curbs on religious practice — has flooded Indian markets with images of Hindu gods and goddesses. And the religious-minded are bowing before their superior quality.

“Containers are landing in Mumbai by the dozens every month. Not a single idol goes unsold; there’s a mad scramble for them. I’m struggling to cope with the demand,” said Balwant Singh, who runs a gift shop in Mohali. “The buyers come and ask for images of different gods and goddesses, but will accept only those made in China. Not many buy Indian-made idols now.”

What makes the Chinese idols so attractive? “Their finish is excellent. They are made of synthetic material and are very colourful,” said another gift shop owner in Chandigarh, Inder Kumar Sethi. “The customer would take one look at a Chinese idol and immediately settle for it… There is also more variety in these idols… They are unbreakable and can be washed. The Indian ones are heavier and not as well polished. Their shelf-life is very short but the price is cheap.” [Link]

As Clayton Krishnasen might say, only the high end is safe from this market disruption:

For the moment, though, Kumartuli with its heavy, custom-made idols seems safe enough. [Link]

You know which god the communists churn out? Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. Amit Varma wisecracks:

And you know what they’re made of? Irony. [Link]

I leave you with the hilarious lyrics to ‘Plastic Vishnu,’ a banjo song:

Plastic Vishnu, plastic Vishnu
Riding on the dashboard of my car:
Ride with me and you’ll be safer,
You needn’t bother with any wafer
Bow to Plastic Vishnu, in my car…

If I run over little old ladies
And the police think I might have rabies
They’ll never find my hashish, though they ask;
plastic Vishnu shelters me,
For His head comes off, you see —
He’s hollow, and I use Him for my stash…

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Satellite Radio Super-Globality

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A few months ago, my wife started a job that entails a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.

A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said ‘hey, what’s the big deal? We already have one of those at home.’ Oops. In some spaces, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one such space (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).

asiastar.jpgWorldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it’s only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they’ve now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.

Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)

The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn’t that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can’t be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities… Continue reading →

Major Butani

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Yahoo India has the story of returning Army doctor Major Raj Butani:

They could see the buses rolling out across the airbase tarmac but were not sure their soldier son, Iraq returnee Major Raj Butani of the US 2nd Brigade, was in one of them.

But Chandru Butani’s account of his son’s experiences is immediate, raw, throbbing and is perhaps the first authentic, first-hand account by an Indian American of life with the US army in Iraq.

Sleeping on top of an ambulance… gazing at the night sky in a steamy, dark desert… seeing friends blown to pieces…

Butani and his wife had heard from their son sparingly, once in a while when he could send an email or talk over the phone, but army regulations did not allow him to give much detail.

Butani explained why they had been ‘on the racks’ all the while. Raj had been posted in Ramadi, which forms part of the Sunni Triangle, an area with the highest resistance to US presence.

The “first authentic, first hand account” part is wrong of course, but a doctor does provide a different perspective than a tank commander.  My own cousin was a Devil Doc in the group of Marines that sped toward Baghdad during the opening week of the war.  Having to care for friend and foe with equal vigor is a difficult situation from what he told me.

Said father Butani, ‘One of the worst incidents happened when his Physician Assistant and closest friend, who shared room with him at the Ramadi Base, was slain when an IED blew his vehicle to smithereens. I remember Raj being devastated for several weeks. Being his closest friend, he read out the eulogy, and he completely broke down.

You can read more about this Lehigh University Alum here.

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“An independent tribute”

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This morning, the Los Angeles Times gave the most behind the scenes story to date (that I’ve see at least), about the second bomber cell in London, the one that failed to carry out it’s mission:

The suspects had sharpened their radicalism in the streets, mosques and housing projects of rough ethnic neighborhoods, investigators, witnesses and friends say. They were brazen voices in an unsuspecting city, marginalized East Africans who lived by their wits, dabbling in street crime and reportedly manipulating the immigration and welfare systems. During workouts at a West London gym, they channeled their private rage into public diatribes.

Brothers Ramzi and Wharbi Mohammed sold Islamic literature and recited religious verses on a gritty North Kensington street of antiques stores and cafes, skirmishing with a shop owner who chased them away. Hamdi Issac, now jailed in Rome, belonged to a gang of extremists who waged a belligerent campaign to take over a mosque in South London. Roommates Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar were loud militants, praising Osama bin Laden to neighbors at the rundown building where Ibrahim is accused of preparing five backpack bombs.

Their agitation allegedly gave way to action after July 7, when four young British Muslims, three from the northern city of Leeds, ignited bombs on three subway cars and a bus, killing themselves and 52 others. Issac claims that his group struck two weeks later in an improvised, independent tribute to the dead bombers. Despite similar methods and targets, British authorities say they have found no link between the two plots.

That last sentence is the most chilling.  This wasn’t a second Al Qaeda cell activated and timed to strike a couple weeks after the first.  The second group was simply “inspired” by the first to act on their own.  In case there is any doubt as to what they claimed their motivation was, Italian investigators provide the answer:

“He’s calm — he seems scared,” said the Italian official, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “He’s open, gentle, polite; he doesn’t get mad even when you provoke him. But when you ask him why he did it, he starts with the speech about Iraq: They are killing women and children, no one’s doing anything about it, on and on. That’s when you can see there has been a brainwashing.”

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Pulling more than your own weight

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Calcutta will soon ban hand-pulled rickshaws. Is this a move to liberate the oppressed from their yoke, or just a clumsy attempt by the communists to eliminate an eyesore that is also a highly effective market based response to current transportation inefficiencies?

The Chief Minister claims his motives are humanitarian, and says that he will look after the interests of all those affected:

Mr Bhattacharya said: “We have taken a policy decision to take the hand-drawn rickshaw off the roads of Calcutta on humanitarian grounds.  Nowhere else in the world does this practice exist and we think it should also cease to exist in Calcutta.” 

The chief minister said the authorities were thinking of alternative modes of transport so that the transition did not affect either the pullers or the riders. “This involves money and training. It will be about the end of this year when the rickshaws are finally gone,” he said. [BBC]

This will be no small order. Rickshaws have been around for a while and fill an important role in the city:

The hand-pulled rickshaw came from China in the 19th century. A recent study …  put the number of hand-rickshaw pullers at 18,000 with more than 1,800 joining the pool every year. Many Calcuttans are uncertain whether they will be able to move around the city’s old lanes without the hand-pulled rickshaws – particularly during the monsoon. “When we have to wade in chest-deep water during rains, no other transport works but you can still find the hand-pulled rickshaws taking people from one place to another,” says Dipali Nath, a housewife in north Calcutta. [BBC]

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Mangal Pandey: Language Issue

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Happy Independence Day, y’all.

(Manish says he planning to do a full review of Mangal Pandey: The Rising soon, so this is a post on just one aspect of the film, not a general review.)

The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I’ve seen in any other Hindi film. There’s more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors’ roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: “darvaaza khul!”.)

The issue of Toby Stephens’ use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He’s on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual “Baar aa jao!” type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions — tenderness, ambivalence, regret — a tall order even in one’s first language. I personally thought Stephens’ Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he’s not emotionally convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I’m possibly being overly gentle on this score.)

So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I’m not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.

(The film might fail for other reasons too, but we’ll save that for another discussion…) Continue reading →

Fifty-eight years

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‘… the highest ideals of the human race: satyam shivam sundaram.’

— Subhash Chandra Bose

‘A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East… May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed…

‘The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye.  … so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over…

‘… no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action… All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India.’

— Jawaharlal Nehru

‘… even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vaishnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis, and so on… Indeed, if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long, long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this.

‘Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any region or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.’

— Mohammed Ali Jinnah

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Better Living through (Massachusetts Institute of) Technology

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anmols creation.jpg

Boys, the era of “uh-huh” is over and you have one of your own to thank for it {Thanks, Srinath + Anon}.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people — on a scale of 0 to 100 percent — on how engaged they are in a conversation.
Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master’s degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts.

HA. You’re all busted. No more mindlessly muttering, “uh-huh…yup…wow.. .huh” while your significant other chatters on– the Jerk-O-Meter is listening! Thanks to the magic of mathematical algorithms, the program can measure stress levels, how often one speaks and how empathetic a person’s voice sounds…if it doesn’t hear dulcet tones, the Jerk-O-Meter admonishes users to be nicer via pop-up messages on their phones. This isn’t all bad news, though. The Jerk-O-Meter could be a boon to the back, since its use could prevent a night spent on the couch.

“Think of a situation where you could actually prevent an argument,” he said. “Just having this device can make people more attentive because they know they’re being monitored.”

A penguin was involved:

The prototype version of the program runs in Linux on a phone plugged into Voice over Internet service. Once the Jerk-O-Meter is completed, in six months or so, Madan envisions selling it as software that could be downloaded off the Internet — a potentially useful tool for focus groups, telemarketers and salesmen.

Pish posh. It’s such a useful tool, it’s going to become a best-seller with pissed off girlfriends, trust me. 😉 Continue reading →

The Prophecy

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William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:

It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…

As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…

In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”

It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience – they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…

… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…

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