A man of many talents

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Director Wes Anderson, in addition to “hearting Walis,” also has a soft spot for Kumar Pallana.  Why?

Wes Anderson has given Kumar Pallana (Pagoda [in The Royal Tenenbaums] ) a part in each of his movies (with the exception of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)). Pallana used to work at his favorite Coffee shop in Dallas.

Pallana is actually quite a character:

Born in India in 1918, Pallana began as a juggler and singer, performing for small Indian communities throughout Africa. In 1946 he took his act to America, eventually appearing on several television shows, including The Mickey Mouse Show and Captain Kangaroo. Pallana also toured nightclubs in Las Vegas, Paris and Beirut, combining magic, rope tricks, comedy and plate-spinning under the name “Kumar of India.”

Apul informs me that the new video for the song “Clock In Now” by the group The Deathray Davies also features Pallana and some of his tricks.  When I am that old I hope to be nearly that cool.

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How it begins

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Editorial cartoonist Sandy Huffaker published this toon today:

Sure, maybe it’s a stereotype, but 9/11 changed everything. We really need to sock it to the bastards.

Well, we’ll do it sensitively. We’ve learned from our excesses.

“If I see someone (who) comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over,” [Louisiana Congressman] Cooksey said. [Link]

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The flooding continues…

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Just a quick note about the Monsoon induced floods in India in case you missed the note at the end of Amardeep’s updated post.  Two new blogs have recently emerged to collect stories and the latest news from the affected area.  They are in the same tradition (and run by some of the same dedicated people) as the SEA-EAT blog which was a great resource for many during the Tsunami.  The blogs are as follows:

http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/
http://cloudburstmumbai.blogspot.com/

Also, on Thursday morning many of us NPR addicts woke up to a poignant essay by commentator Sandip Roy who relates his memories of the rains from his youth.  He describes them in a mixture of both wonder and destruction.

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Another late/lonely night

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I am so ashamed of myself today.  I was up late last night watching TV.  As usual I was all alone.  After a long days worth of hard blogging I look forward to consuming several drinks and plopping down in front of the TV to consider my numb state.  As I was flipping channels a commercial caught my eye.  Admit it.  You guys watch these commercials too.  Usually I just change the channel after about 10 seconds, but last night I was just mesmerized.  I actually picked up the phone to order the product.  Someone named Jenny answered.  I realized that it was all a ruse.  I felt so ashamed.  So dirty…

Image from Badmash.org
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Hanif Kureishi and British Multiculturalism

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In the August 4 Guardian, the writer Hanif Kureishi weighs in on what British multiculturalism might mean in light of the atmosphere of extreme intolerance that prevails at some of the London Mosques. (Via Locana)

Kureishi’s name has been in the air a bit since it was revealed that the men behind the 7/7 bombings in London were second-generation Brit-Asians. The spread of an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims was something Kureishi explored in his screenplay to My Son the Fanatic (which began as a short story in The New Yorker) as well as in The Black Album, a novel responding to the turmoil in the British Muslim community following the Rushdie affair.

But the interesting part of this essay isn’t really its central point about the poison of religious extremism –- which I think any moderate or progressive person would probably agree with. What is more intriguing is actually Kureishi’s unusual use of the word ‘multiculturalism’ in the context of British ‘faith schools’. There’s a lot of confusion about what these schools are and how they work (especially for us non-Brits), and in this post I’ll explore them a little. Continue reading →

Aalok all Coked

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The hirsute Aalok Mehta from American Chai and Bombay Dreams is in a new Coke ad. Gently tossing his windblown musician locks, he makes the ad look authentic. It says, ‘Yo dawg, I see brown people. This colored sugar water’s down.’

The ad has alt rocker G. Love and a group of demographically correct city people jamming with a guitar on a Philly rooftop (thanks, brimful). They’re singing a mutant version of the ’70s song, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’ Actually, that’s backward. The song by the New Seekers started as a ’70s Coke pusher jingle (‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’), and the clean version later became a bona fide hit.

Watch the ad, which runs before a Daily Show clip. Previous post here.

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Separation of Burger and State

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Dave Sidhu at the great blog DNSI has a very illustrative example of what stinks in the ethnic ghettos of Europe in my opinion.  It turns out that Muslims that have the munchies can now satiate their cravings at their own Beurger King Muslim (BKM).  The BBC reports:

Parisian Muslims can now enjoy halal meals in an atmosphere that mimics US fast-food joints after BKM, or Beurger King Muslim, opened its doors.

BKM has set up in the northern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where many locals are first or second generation Muslims from former French colonies.

And half of the suburb’s population of 28,000 are aged under 25, the Agence France Presse news agency reported.

Beur is slang for a second generation North African living in France.

So let me understand this.  It mimics the atmosphere of the U.S. by essentially being a segregated establishment?  I’m torn.  I HATE this idea because all it does is serve to further segregate a community whose children sometimes seem to turn fanatical because they feel segregated against.  At the same time however it helps fight the poverty that leads to and maintains the segregation:

For most of BKM’s employees, the restaurant had “ended a long period of unemployment”, Mr Benhamid said.

One BKM worker called Hakim explained that “young people in these suburbs have trouble finding work and this restaurant will allow the hiring of young people who have no diplomas or are looking for apartments”. 

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A profile of cognitive dissonance

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How people think subway bombers look:

How some of them actually look:

Here’s a Reaganesque guy in a suit:

That’s the Boston Strangler.

You can’t catch the black guy above by profiling those who ‘look Muslim.’ You couldn’t even get accurate racial ID before the bombings. To the confused masses, those who ‘look Muslim’ means those who ‘look Arab,’ which means Sikhs and other South Asians.

It works in reverse too: last month, a light-skinned man with brown hair was gunned down after being misidentified as South Asian.

At the subway station, you need to scan for the bombs, not the people.

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Torture on Diego Garcia? (updated)

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This tidbit about an Amnesty International report yesterday on extraordinary rendition caught my eye:

Others have suggested “high-value” detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base. [Link]

Torture is hardly a newcomer to the Indian Ocean. You only have to go a bit north of the atoll to see it in practice by both intelligence and garden-variety cops on the subcontinent. But has the CIA joined the party? The Toronto Star reported last month:

… intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia’s geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes… These prisoners are known as “ghost detainees” or the “new disappeared,” and they’re being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts…

Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world… one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out… the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean. “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility,” says American defence analyst John Pike. “They want somewhere that’s difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”

The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn’t deny it outright, saying only, “I don’t know. I simply don’t know.” [Link]

Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin), the leader of the Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, is currently being held on the island. [Link]

Diego Garcia is a 6Å“-by-13-mile coral atoll in the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka. It’s as long as Manhattan and three times as wide, but with much less usable land. With a huge central lagoon protected on three sides by land, it’s an equatorial paradise. The lagoon reaches depths of 60-100 feet with coral underneath.

· Â· Â· Â· Â·

In the early ’70s, the British government forcibly deported the 2,000 Iloi residents, mostly coconut farmers, to Mauritius to make way for a military base which it leased to the U.S.:

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