Just to get high

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hotair.jpg The BBC and several other news orgs report that Indian textile magnate Vijaypat Singhania (who seems to be a contemporary of Howard Hughes) will attempt in November to set a new hot air balloon altitude record:

The record breaking attempt will take place in November in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay).

Mr Singhania, 66, will have to fly in a pressurised capsule in sub-zero temperatures to achieve a feat that he describes as MI 70K (Mission Impossible 70,000).

The 1.6 million cubic feet capacity balloon, which is being built in UK, is as tall as a 30-storey-building, according to the organisers.

The flight could take up to five hours – three hours to go up, and two hours to come down.

Officials from Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which ratifies aviation records, will be present.

“Vijay is going for the biggest feat – this is the heavy weight championship of hot air ballooning,” UK-based adventurer, Brian Milton, who is coordinating the flight told the BBC news site.

Now for my fellow aviation geeks out there, I have a bit more. As impressive an attempt as this will be, it pales by comparison to other high altitude feats. Singhania will be in a pressurized capsule (he’d die within seconds otherwise) but a century ago, similar feats were attempted sans pressurized cabin:

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Penis protects Bhutan

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BBC News describes a stimulated aspect of Bhutan’s scenic landscape:

Driving from the country’s only airport in Paro to the capital city of Thimphu, graphic and colourful paintings of penises adorn the white-washed walls of homes, shops and eateries. In many places, pictures of dragons and soft drink advertisements showing a Bollywood actress jostle for space on the walls with phallic drawings. [BBC News]

An actress jostling with a penis could just be a still frame from any Bollywood flick, instead of evidence of a phenomenon. It’s not until you go down further on the article, that you realize the almighty deeock is found in even the most remote of Bhutan’s crevices:

Next to the traditionally painted wooden windows of the 80-year-old farmer, Dema’s, house is a bright red painting of a penis. Dema tells me she hired a professional artist to do it. “It’s to protect those who live inside the house,” she says…A few houses away lives 42-year-old Kinley. A simple drawing of a phallus adorns his wall. He tells me he painted it last year when he renovated his house. “It’s to ward off the evil eye. When people envy me or say bad things about me or my family, it takes away the sting,” Kinley says. [BBC News]

Kinley is doing something horribly wrong if a penis is taking away, rather than delivering, a sting. So why is everyone in Bhutan nuts about penis? The admiration is borne of religious lore:

Legend has it that Drupka Kinley would hit errant demons over the head with his penis to subdue them and turn them into protective deities. Today, several wooden penises are kept in the monastery. The longest, a brown wooden one with a silver handle, is the most important – it is considered a religious relic and is used for blessing the devout…The monk hits three young women devotees who come to pray at the monastery on the head with it. [BBC News]

Homesick Bhutanese monks (or just about anybody else) in Los Angeles can get that service for $30-40 (per head) on Hollywood Blvd.

BBC News: Bhutan’s phalluses warn off evil

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Zakaria, Fareed Zakaria

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Foreign policy mandarin Fareed Zakaria has launched a new weekly show called Foreign Exchange on PBS stations nationwide (via SAJA). It’s odd to see the omnipresent guest turn host, even stranger to hear someone with a prep school, Anglicized Bombay accent hosting an American TV show. But, as always, neocons and Zakaria fans (I count myself among the latter) will wet themselves.

Watch the trailer. Here’s the show’s official site and bios of the Zakaria brothers.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria: in Chicago on WTTW; in San Francisco on KQED; in Washington, DC on WHUT; in Seattle on KCTS; in Tampa on WUSF; in Denver on KRMA; in Oregon on OPB; in Kansas City on KCPT; in Salt Lake City on KUED; and others; check TV listings.

The Modi protest

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Shashwati reports backs from the protest against Modi at Madison Square Garden (photos here):

Among the anti-Modi and anti-Hindutva signs were some anti-Indian Army in Kashmir signs… the Kashmir folks had been piggybacking on the anti-Modi protest. They were politely banished to the other side of Seventh Avenue…

The passersby hurried by in a typical New York rush, some holding up their fingers in a peace sign, without slowing down… Stan asked him if it was true that two thousand people had been killed, the man very matter of factly answered, “sometimes people needed to be disciplined and taught a lesson…” They looked like they had been herded by the more affluent Indians, who were the organizers of the show. Unlike the folks who had been bussed in, most of these people weren’t wearing a tilak, and were barking orders in their walkie-talkies, and generally looking self satisfied. I spoke to a woman in a leather jacket, I asked her what she thought of the proceedings, which she had been watching with an eagle eye, she answered with great unsmiling certainty, “Modi will be the next great leader.”

While she was chatting up the better heeled delegates, a man draped in a saffron shawl stood on top of the steps, not speaking to anyone and standing very still. He seemed to be committing every protestor’s face to memory… At that point a very large man in a trench coat and hat told me to clear the sidewalk. he was the detective in charge. He was the spitting image of Orson Welles in “A Touch of Evil.”

On my way home, I shared a bus ride with some middle aged Gujarati people who had gone to the event, they seemed like nice people. It was chilling to think that they were unmoved by the brutal killing of so many people…

‘Modi will be the next great leader’? Where do they find these people, under the same rock as David Duke groupies?

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

I blame the “Vestern” influence…

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A sizzling performance by dance group during the Pond’s Femina Miss India 2005 in Mumbai on Sunday ( TOI Photo/ Uma Kadam. )

I’m so confused. And yes, I’m American-born. I’ve gone to several brown cultural shows at major Amreekan universities, and the filmi/”fusion” dancers don’t look like this. Metallic hot pants and Come-prance-with-me-in-Switzerland-in-the-rain boots? What the-? Continue reading →

Suga’ Mommas

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Several news orgs chime in on the latest press release from the Census Bureau. As reported on CNN:

Black and Asian women with bachelor’s degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.

A white woman with a bachelor’s degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to data being released Monday by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less at $37,600 a year.

The bureau did not say why the differences exist. Economists and sociologists suggest possible factors: the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others.

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Air India launches daily direct flights to Los Angeles

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Pay up if you bet the long lines at LAX couldn’t get any worse:

Air India will now fly daily to Los Angeles, three times from Delhi and four times from Mumbai. “These flights provide the easiest connection for passengers. Incidently, the flights to LA are AI’s longest flights with 20 hours of flying time and do not involve change of aircraft,” said Air India’s Director for Public Relations, Jitender Bhargava…An estimated two million passengers travel between India and the United States annually. No US airline currently operates a non-stop service to India. [WebIndia123.com]

WebIndia123.com: Air India commences direct flights from New Delhi to Los Angeles

Previous post: Open skies and Air India

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I love a woman in uniform

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tamilnadupolice.jpg Ms. Magazine spotlights the world’s first all woman police battalion: the Tamil Nadu Special Forces Fifth Battalion.

They were first inducted into the Indian police force in 1973, but today women are mostly confined to desk jobs. In 1992, they were allowed in the defense forces but, again, in service and support jobs. This, despite India’s history of such warrior women as Rani Lakshmibai, who fought the British army in the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, India’s first freedom struggle.

Still, Indian women are making a comeback, starting in the southern-most state, Tamil Nadu, where Avadi (a suburb of the state’s capital city, Chennai) houses the Tamil Nadu Special Forces Fifth Battalion: the world’s first all-female battalion.

Tamil Nadu has always been progressive regarding women, electing the first female chief minister (a state chief minister holds the power of a U.S. state governor). It boasts the first women’s university, first women’s engineering college, first female-staffed police station, first all-female police commando company, and now the first women’s special-forces police battalion.

According to the article, a women’s battalion is particularly useful when dealing with crimes against women that many insensitive a*hole male cops don’t handle properly. If only certain fundamentalist states in the Arab world would adopt such practice.

According to Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha, since women constitute half the population, their problems could better be understood by policewomen. Each AWPS staffs 15 policewomen, and is focused on crimes against women.

Today, there are 188 AWPS, one in each Tamil Nadu district, along with two toll-free help lines — Woman in Distress and Child in Distress — through which anonymous complaints are pursued at the same priority level as regular complaints. The result: a 23 percent increase in reporting of crimes against women and children — and a higher conviction rate. Several other states have started pilot AWPS.

I have a great idea for a television pilot about a modern day Cagney & Lacey set in Tamil Nadu that I want to sell to American Desi TV. Continue reading →

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Yet another arranged marriage story only

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Yet another arranged marriage story in New York magazine with oodles of exposition for those not in-the-know (thanks, Sital and Prashant). I’m guilty in this genre too, but my excuse: it was years ago for a desi mag. Some amusing bits:
Still rather prejudiced against meat-eaters, my father immediately discards responses from those with a “non-veg” diet. There is, however, a special loophole for meat-eaters who earn more than $200,000…
 
Oddly, by the end of the night, he couldn’t remember my name. Nothing fazed Juan Carlos, however. He quickly jotted off a poem explaining his lapse: “I wrote your name in the sand, but a wave came and washed it away. I wrote your name in a tree, but the branch fell. I have written your name in my heart, and time will guard it…”
 
“What are your qualifications?” I said I had a B.A. “B.A. only?” she responded. “What are the boy’s qualifications?” I flung back… She smirked: “He is M.D. in Kentucky only…” I grumbled, “Auntie, I will speak to the boy only.”
 
Afterward, I was planning to meet my best friend, who’s gay, in a store, and I asked the guy to come in and say hello. My date became far more animated than he’d been before and even helped my friend choose a sweater…
 
A few days after my 1st birthday… I fell out the window of a three-story building in Baltimore. My father recalls my mother’s greatest concern… “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” she cried, begging my father to never mention my broken arm…
 
My friend Divya… stays out clubbing on her nights off. Imagine my surprise when I discovered she was on KeralaMatrimony.com, courtesy of her mother, who took the liberty of listing Divya’s hobbies as shopping and movies. (I was under the impression her hobbies were more along the lines of trance music and international politics…)
 
My father saw my mother once before they got married… he lost sight of her at a bazaar the day after their wedding and lamented to himself that he would never find her again, as he’d forgotten what she looked like.
I love how she includes a photo and slyly drops in the H-bomb, because even though it’s just a feature piece, ‘ya never know.’ These stories are a kind of implicit personals for journies:
… my father placed matrimonial ads for me every couple of years… They read something like, “Match for Jain girl, Harvard-educated journalist, 25, fair, slim.”
That we all include our photos on this blog is, umm, sheer coincidence.

Religious hard-liners united by lunacy

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Hindu and Muslim extremists share at least one thing in common: A knack for creating controversy where none should exist. The latter is up in arms over an on-screen kiss between Pakistani actress Meera and Bollywood actor Ashmit Patel in the yet-to-be-released “Nazar”:

Conservative Islamists are incensed at the thought of a Muslim woman kissing a Hindu. Some have called for an apology; others have filed a lawsuit, demanding that she be censured for an “immoral scene” — it is unclear what the court could do if it agreed – and still others have issued death threats. [The New York Times]

Not to be outdone, former BJP MP Vinay Katiyar is trying to pull an Ayodhya on the venerable Taj Mahal:

“The Taj Mahal was, in fact, a Shiva temple and was built by Raja Jai Singh. Its name was Tejo Mai Mahal (shining palace),” Katiyar said in Lucknow…“It (the Taj) actually belongs to us (Hindus) and we will do everything possible to reclaim it,” Katiyar said adding a ’Shankar Sena’ (Shiva army) would soon be formed and ‘Damrus’ (Shiva’s drum) distributed among the people to create awareness on this issue. [Hindustan Times]

Imagine the uproar from the zealots if a Hindu man and Muslim woman shared a kiss (with tongue, of course) on the steps of the Taj Mahal. Would the mere thought of it just cause their heads to explode? I hope so. Because that would mean that they’d be dead from a massive head explosion. And then we wouldn’t have to hear from them anymore. We can only fervently pray for such a peaceful fate.

The New York Times: Kiss a Hindu? Just imagine. Islamists did, with outrage (free registration required)
Hindustan Times: Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple: Vinay Katiyar

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