Gypsy Rajas

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Beginning today, Delhi will play host to its first ever Salsa festival. Hips will be swaying and spins will be attempted. The BBC reports:

Kaytee Namgyal, the president of the Salsa India Dance Company and festival organiser, says he opened his first salsa studio in Delhi four years ago.

With the growing demand for salsa lessons, he now runs nine centres in the city. He is hoping to open a school in Mumbai (Bombay) soon.

Kaytee says he’s taught close to 1,500 students in the past four years and the number of those wanting to join his studios is ever growing.

So what makes salsa so appealing?

“Salsa is funky and fancy,” Kaytee says.

I think this introduction of Salsa into the motherland is just plain wrong. Hear me out. Picture if you will a guy and a girl. They are in love but the girl is being coy and evasive. Suddenly, they start singing, and dance…the Salsa. Now I ask you quite simply, what would their friends in the background do? Hindi-film dancing provides opportunity for these background hang-arounders to just do their thing. It’s very individualistic. I can’t imagine all those extras hip grinding as well. That would be scandalous!

And now for the zinger:

“Indian people are not great at salsa. That’s because they are so attuned to dancing to Bollywood lyrics. They can’t dance to beats. And salsa is totally based on beats.”

And that’s not the only problem Indian dancers have.

“Indian men don’t lead well,” says Jaquelin, who learnt salsa in Geneva.

“And it’s not really the music they listen to all the time. Also, there’s a cultural problem here. In salsa, you have to touch the woman. And it’s not always easy for the men here to do so. They have to learn to do that.”

Ouch. Luckily there are boot camps for this sort of thing. Continue reading →

Out with the old, in with the new for Arun Nayar

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Arun Nayar has former/future wives in more countries than some people visit in a lifetime (thanks, Vinod):

Supermodel Elizabeth Hurley’s flamboyant Indian boyfriend Arun Nayar is seeking a divorce from his Italian wife on the grounds that she treated him cruelly, a lawyer said. Nayar, from Bombay, is claiming that his wife Valentina Pedroni put him through “mental torture” during their marital life…Nayar and Hurley, meanwhile, have been romantically involved for nearly three years and are often seen at parties and fundraisers in Britain and the United States. Hurley, mother of three-year-old Damian by former movie producer Steve Bing, is reported to be learning Hindi to impress Nayar, whose family runs a textile export business. [AFP/Yahoo!]

Hurley also tries to impress Nayar by adhering to a little-known passage in the Bhagavad Gita, which states women who date Indian men must inexplicably wear saris to celebrity fundraisers (see right photo, it’s our weekly gratuitous pic of an attractive broad).

Sepia Mutiny explanation of previous paragraph
We haven’t posted any photos of beautiful women this week, so we were due. This was an opening, albeit a weak one, and I took it. I don’t regret this decision. And don’t judge me, jerk. I can barely read at a third-grade level, so pictures are all I have.

AFP/Yahoo!: Liz Hurley’s Indian beau seeks divorce from “cruel” Italian wife

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Non-Christians harassed at Air Force Academy

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Since the military successfully rid itself of open homosexuals, where do the righteous direct their indignant bigotry? Thankfully, the Air Force Academy has a small number of non-Christians just asking for it:

The Air Force Academy, still recovering from rape and sexual harassment scandals, is facing charges that some Christian cadets have bullied and berated Jews and students of other religious backgrounds. School officials said Tuesday they had received 55 complaints over the last few months and were requiring students — and eventually all employees — to attend a course on religious tolerance…The academy is about 60% Protestant and 30% Catholic. Included in the number of Christian cadets are 120 Mormons. There are 44 Jews and a handful of Hindus and Buddhists at the academy, officials said. [Los Angeles Times]

As soon as they rid themselves of the pagans and other undesirables, we can finally have ourselves a good-old-fashioned crusade. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, says Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family. He says the bullies are the true victims:

“If 90% of cadets identify themselves as Christian, it is common sense that Christianity will be in evidence on the campus,” he said. “Christianity is deeply felt and very important to people … and to suggest that it should be bottled up is nonsense. I think a witch hunt is underway to root out Christian beliefs. To root out what is pervasive in 90% of the group is ridiculous.” [Los Angeles Times]

Los Angeles Times: Non-Christian Air Force cadets cite harassment (free registration required)

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‘In the Face of Jinn’ by Cheryl Howard Crew

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Defamer, a Los Angeles gossip blog, publishes a reader’s report about an Indian-themed party at Brian Grazer’s house. The celebration was in honor of a new book by Cheryl Howard Crew, the wife of Ron Howard:

The whole affair was abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous with an Indian theme (seems as if the book, which I didn’t take, is about an American girl who travels in India) and beautiful Indian dancers doing their thang all over the backyard. But I did feel bad for the poor catering staff, who were all white girls subjected to the torture of wearing saris and showing off their not-quite-brown stomachs. Thankfully the Grey Goose on tap allowed me to forget all my sympathy. [Defamer]

Crew’s novel, “In the Face of Jinn,” carries the following description:

Two American sisters, Christine and Elizabeth Shepherd, are on a silk-buying trip in India for their business in California. After Elizabeth mysteriously disappears, Christine is compelled to challenge the ineffectual U.S. and Indian bureaucracies and venture alone, with various strangers as guides, to find her sister. Disguised in the traditional female garb of some Islamic cultures, Christine continues her search in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She navigates the mysterious tribes of the Pashtuns, has a dangerous encounter with the Taliban, and learns to fear the “Jinn,” the devils that dominate the superstitions of the people she must understand in order to survive. Inspired by her own extensive travel throughout the region, Cheryl Howard Crew has written an unforgettable story with a strong determined heroine who rises powerfully from the pages of this novel. [St. Martin’s Press]

Don’t know anything about the book, but do have a sincere plea for Ron Howard: Please, please, please don’t let Fox cancel “Arrested Development.” That is all.

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Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo raised in ashram

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Everyone knows that all real musicians hit the ashram at some point in their existence. They also hit rehab, but that’s totally unrelated to the following passage from Rolling Stone’s cover story about Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo:

Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams — first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.” [Rolling Stone]

Rolling Stone: Weezer’s weird world

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Going Nuclear

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Okay everyone. Get ready. With all this Pope business firmly behind us, the press will be looking for the next big story to dissect to death from every angle. The pundits will be out in full force (including me). The next big story (which will begin Sunday) will be that of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, invoking the Nuclear Option. From Wikipedia:

The “nuclear option,” as used in American politics circa 2005, is a catchprase referring to a political manuever that would allow the Senate majority (currently Republicans) to prevent the minority party (currently Democrats) from filibustering judicial nominees. By U.S. Law, certain judicial appointees, particularly Supreme or other federal court Justices, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before taking the bench. Under current Senate rules, a minority of senators are able to prevent the confirmation of judges via filibuster unless a supermajority can be reached to ‘break’ the filibuster. The ‘nuclear option’ refers to the technicality that only a simple majority is necessary to change this rule. That is, although a supermajority is currently necessary to break the filibuster, a simple majority could alter the Senate rules so that only a simple majority would be required to break the filibuster. The term is often used derogatorily by Democrats because of the term’s bad connection with nuclear war.

The primary argument forwarded by Republicans in defense of invoking the nuclear option and ending filibusters was a legal argument written by Martin B. Gold and a moonlighting 26 year old Justice Department attorney, Dimple Gupta.

To make it as succinct as possible (and there really is no fair way to do so), Gold and Gupta point out that according to the law the majority HAS THE CONSTITUTIONAL OPTION to change the rules.

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Moms know best

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arvindsharma.jpg

Despite the fact that I get paid the big bucks (I wish) to be a blogging maven and learn desi related stuff first, so that I may humbly bring it to the attention of SM readers, there are some stories that an Indian mom will ALWAYS know about before us savvy internet users. This one comes from first time SM tipster, my Mom. Diamondbackonline.com, a University of Maryland school paper, reports on missing person Arvin Sharma:

A 22-year-old university student was reported missing following an evening of clubbing with friends in Southwest Washington Saturday, officials said.

District Police are looking for Arvin Sharma, a recent transfer from Temple University who lives in Greenbelt. He was last seen near the 1800 block of Half Street near the Lime Night Club, police said. Officials had few details yesterday regarding what may have happened to Sharma or what he was doing when last seen.

Sharma’s family searched his condominium Saturday morning and found his car parked outside, said his brother, Ashish Sharma. He left his car at home Friday evening and rode to the club with friends.

The family has sent e-mails and photos to media throughout the Washington and Baltimore areas, family members said.

“He’s not answering his cell phone; he hasn’t made any withdrawals from his bank account,” Ashish Sharma said.

So why is it that an Indian mom would know about this news first? It’s just the kind of example my mom uses every time I go home to the D.C. Metro area and decide to meet up with some friends in the city. “Be careful, its dangerous.”

My mom also pointed out the fact that the police will attempt to use their brand new anti-terrorism surveillance system, which consists of cameras on practically every D.C. street (more on that here), to figure out what became of Sharma.

Sharma’s family described him as a light-complexioned Indian male with brown eyes and black hair.

He is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs about 190 pounds, they said.

District police are asking anyone with information to contact them at (202) 727-9099.

NBC4 has a video report of the story with full details. Continue reading →

Kal Penn in ‘A Lot Like Love’

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I’m almost embarrassed to admit I saw an advance screening of A Lot Like Love, a new Ashton Kutcher – Amanda Peet romantic comedy opening tomorrow. It was far better than most Kutcher flicks. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I missed a good chunk of the beginning because, ahem, previews don’t start two hours late like red-carpet premieres where the desi lead fails to turn up.)

Presumably I got the pass, which came via a desi arts list, because a desi plays a main character. Kal Penn plays Jeeter, Ashton Kutcher’s dot-com coworker in avant-garde lenses, and does a great job: he’s charismatic and fluent, drives a hot car, picks up cute women and offers Kutcher tips. It’s as if the Van Wilder roles had been reversed, and indeed this would’ve been a much better movie with Penn in the lead.

The story resembles Boys and Girls, a wooden Freddie Prinze Jr. – Claire Forlani collaboration which, like Golden Gate, I liked mainly for its Berkeley backdrop. Kutcher plays Ollie, a dot-com type who’s inarticulate, obsessed with work and toys with his female fling like a yo-yo. You can never truly suspend disbelief with these movies because, hello, Peet and Forlani are gorgeous.

The script was written with diversity in mind: a major deaf character is played unremarkably, there’s a black priest, the movie uses the ‘burbs rather than New York. And it’s even kind to those in persistent vegetative states. Dumping on Ashton Kutcher’s thespian handicaps is all too easy, so I’ll just say this: Kutcher is the true heir to the Terry Schiavo school of acting. Kutcher makes Keanu Reeves look like Ben Kingsley. Kutcher alternates between two expressions, blank and blank. Kutcher speaks in two tones, dumb and stammering. Kutcher is the latest in a long line of brainless, cardboard male leads such as Dermot Mulroney in, oh, just about everything. Kutcher’s acting never rose above That ’70s Show, and that goes for Topher Grace too. Ok, I’ll stop now.

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They couldn’t keep it up forever

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So an Airborne Express Supe in Philly gets suspicious and…busted.

An Internet pharmacy based in India that sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drugs without prescriptions has been indicted by U.S. authorities, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Brij Bhushan Bansal of Agra (say THAT teen times fast) was “charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, money laundering and misbranding drugs”.

Though Bansal is the alleged mastermind behind a business that provided the pills to practically 200 websites which promoted them, his son, daughter and son-in-law are also defendants, since they helped him purvey Codeine and Viagra.

The market rate for 100 tablets of Codeine is $64; Dr. BBB added a tidy $200 premium to that. Valium was even more expensive– a hefty $198 vs. the $27 your local scam-artist charges. 😉 Authorities were able to seize $7.1 million of the group’s proceeds. Pity. That’s a paltry portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars they probably made.

Prepare for more “P”s:

“There was no physician, no pharmacist and no quality control of these drugs that were sold at above-market rates,” Patrick Meehan, U.S. attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, told a news conference.

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