San Jose State prof Hasan Elahi was questioned by the FBI after 9/11. Now the Bangla-American hairmonger posts his current location, photos and the minutiæ of his daily schedule online. He told Stephen Colbert he’s bringing the surveillance value of his datastream to zero:
It’s an art project, an econ experiment and a passive-aggressive kiss-off to Homeland Security. But it’s also an online beacon in case he’s ever disappeared to Gitmo. And that bit about posting trivial dreck online? We call that Twitter.
Drunken driving incidents are like Kryptonite for Congressmen. During the Soviet war with Afghanistan, Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-TX) collided with another driver while drunk and was pursued by D.C. police. He locked himself in his apartment and negotiated with the feds for safe passage to the airport, for an overseas trip in support of the war.
Besides making him a mortal danger to other drivers, the incident played into Wilson’s irresponsible playboy image and nearly ended his career. The loss of Wilson would have imperiled CIA funding for the covert war.
At least Wilson had the self-preservatory instincts to barricade himself in his apartment and whisper to his aides not to let anyone in. Now we’re confronted with the sorry spectacle of Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) of Staten Island not only getting nailed for drunk driving, but also being dumb enough to have his mistress bail him out:
… he was arrested last week in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Police said his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit…
When Fossella was pulled over, police said he told officers that he was going to see his daughter in the area… “I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a 3-year-old daughter”… It was Fay who got him out of jail after the arrest. [Link]
[From my Metro Now column – another in a series of trying-hard-to-be-optimistic pieces about the traffic situation in Delhi]
Every dark cloud has a silver lining, we are constantly told, but the adage forgets to add that at times the lining must be surgically attached. This can be accomplished by grabbing the squirming cloud, pinning it to the ground, stitching the silver lining painfully into its side and then adding a few layers of cellotape as extra precaution.
The silver lining for the satirically named “bus rapid transit” corridor – a cloud that has been brooding above Delhi for the last few weeks – is that it will eventually free up a lot of retail space in our city. The reason is that many offices will empty out as people decide to make productive use of traffic jams and convert their vehicles into workstations. This is the most efficient solution to the current problem of south Delhi-based worker ants leaving their homes early in the morning and reaching their central Delhi offices in the late afternoon, just as things are beginning to wind up for the day. (All you can really do in office at that time is to go out for a long coffee-and-gossip break, which – as all conscientious and disdainful freelancers know – is the only thing offices are good for anyway.)
Mildred Loving, the Rosa Parks of interracial marriage, passed away last Friday. She and her husband Richard’s Supreme Court case Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginiastruck down anti-miscegenation laws nationwide on June 12, 1967:
Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed… five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”
Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”
Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here…”
One and a half months ago, 23-year-old math prodigy Sufiah Yusof was exposed by a British tabloid earning a living as a call girl. She entered Oxford as a 13-year-old, dropped out after a year and demanded to be placed with a foster family because of her tyrannical father.
Nikita Lalwani builds her Booker-nominated novel Giftedon the spine of Yusof’s story. Young math prodigy Rumika Vasi is forced to put in Olympian hours by her controlling, academic father, who checks in on her throughout the day to make sure she’s studying instead of reading novels. Mahesh allows her just ten pence at a time to make an emergency call home. Rumi reminds me of the autistic protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Her math intuition is shown with the conceit from A Beautiful Mind: she reflexively calculates hypotenuses and areal densities like a pilgrim worrying her prayer beads.
Like Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi and Ardashir Vakil, Lalwani chronicles an unhappy British Asian family. The first half of the book wallows in Rumi’s monotonous training, and the plot doesn’t move. I felt like poor Rumi locked in a room, stuck with flashbacks of my own multiplication-drill childhood. Rumi acquires the brainiac version of a meth habit, chewing large amounts of jeera to calm her anxiety. Her cumin habit leaves sores on her tongue and exposes her to public ridicule. The first half of this novel feels similarly pointless and painful.
Sir Vidya once slagged off his former friend Paul Theroux, who retaliated by writing a poison pen memoir. After reading Theroux’ latest collection, I’m afraid Naipaul had the right idea. The Elephanta Suite, a three-novella collection linked by an eponymous luxury suite at a Bombay hotel, is full of tell-not-show summary and pages of philosophy which would sound trite on a greeting card. Perhaps his travel writing is better, but the fiction reeks of amateurishness. Elephanta actually makes you appreciate Jhumpa.
Worse, it’s written from the point of view of an Ugly American, rife with monkey-dung-natives clichés and situations like cheating natives available to sexually service (or rape) American tourists. Some is accurate — pompousness and a tendency toward monologue. But much reads like an angry, nativist tourist rant, Lou Dobbs meets Lost in Translation. From this book’s point of view, all white people get fucked in India, in both senses:
… a week of Indian hell — a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air. He had dreaded it, and it had exceeded even his fearful expectations… ‘Hideous’ did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small… it was a horror… the sidewalks like freak shows.
‘Go to India?’ Sheely raged. The very name could set him off. ‘Why should I got o India? Indians don’t even want to go to India! Eveyrone’s leaving India, or else wants to leave… nor do I ever want to go to that shitty place ever again…’
He feared and hated India… He had said, ‘I’ll hold my nose.’ On the first trip, he had not eaten Indian food, not gone out at night… He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle… escaped the savages, the terrorists, a war zone. India represented everything negative — chaos and night… ‘Human life means nothing to those people’ … the heat, the dirt, the rats… the sludgy buttery food that looked inedible…
Second best: Bridges’ first appearance as Obadiah Stane (get it?), his beard gelled and squared off like a Sikh soldier’s.
And: Two cute desi-ish reporters played by Meera Simhan and Irani-American actress Nazanin Boniadi, seen here as a proto-desi.
Best credit: Egyptian-American actor Ahmed Ahmed as a character named Ahmed.
Weakest: Tahir playing a glowering, crypto-desi Afghanistan terrorist. First Hollywood hated Russians and loved Afghans. Now Afghans are the new Russkies.
And: Random bits of Hindi/Urdu all over the script, along with some Arabic. Dari and Pashto ought to be the most common languages in the country.
The Irani-desi crossover is fair. We borrow their beauties for plays and steal their terrorist roles, they play cabbies and desi pervs. It’s an even exchange.
Laura Bush held a press conference yesterday complaining about the Burmese junta’s lackadaisical response to a catastrophic storm:
“The response to this cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failures to meet its people’s basic needs.” [Link]
These people are missing the gene for shame, and for irony. If only Burmese storm relief were as effective as in America, as in U2 and Green Day’s bitter fantasy ‘The Saints Are Coming’:
I rarely read Bill Kristol, a reliable reciter of GOP talking points. He’s what in radio terms one would dismiss as a repeater, someone who retransmits a signal handed down from party mandarins.
But his position as a propaganda tool is precisely what makes his latest trial balloon intriguing:
… if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number. Maybe that’s why… no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.
It might also be a way to confront the issue of McCain’s age… “You want generational change? You can get it with McCain-Jindal — without risking a liberal and inexperienced Obama as commander in chief”… McCain spent considerable time with Jindal in New Orleans recently, and reportedly found him… personally engaging and intellectually impressive… [Link]
So: Dubya’s incompetence with Hurricane Katrina enabled Governor Jindal. Dubya’s disastrous war enabled candidate Obama and maverick McCain. And candidate Obama enables VP candidate Jindal. In one sense, it’s a chain reaction of unusual circumstances, thanks to Dubya.
Adam Sandler as an Israeli commando in a Jewfro is intrinsically funny given his brand of passive-aggressive humor. Appending M.I.A.’s ‘Jimmy Aaja’ to the Zohanfor its cheesy Eastern European sample is near sacrilege:
There’s whole ‘nother layer of cheese on that caquelon, Sandler-san, and it’s called Disco Dancer. There can be only one.
The Arulpragasam / record label sellout index so far:
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (Adam Sandler) — ‘Jimmy Aaja’ Pineapple Express (Judd Apatow) — ‘Paper Planes’ War(Jason Statham, Jet Li) – ‘Ten Dollar,’ for a strip club scene Civic ad (Honda) — ‘Galang’
With minimum comment, here are selected sentences from Khalid Mohammed’s review of the film Anamika, in today’s HT:
Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s Anamika treats Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) as if it were chewing gum. Chomp, chomp, chomp till it’s tasteless and tiresome. Surely Hitch would have gone burp re burp.
[I don’t know whether the italicized Hitch is a copy-desk goof-up or an attempt to somehow link Hitchcock’s nickname with the Will Smith film. Also love the “1940” after “Rebecca” – so particular about details, aren’t we?]
The plot roast thickens. A cop (Gulshan Glower) eats kilos and kilos of goose liver. You get fever. His wife keeps going “Quack, quack” as if she were in a quackie movie.
Dino Morea and Minisha Lamba must be making Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine rock and roll in their graves.
[Interesting that reviewers who use phrases like “rock and roll in their graves”, and pride themselves on writing for the casual moviegoer, think it’s okay to drop Olivier and Fontaine into a piece like this without clarifying who they might be]
What’s this? The Japanese weren’t bombed by the US at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Hitler or rather his son HitlAR did it? What’s the proof you ask?
Watch and learn a history lesson informing the world that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed NOT by the Americans but by Hitlar! Now the world knows the truth courtesy of Lollywood.
Finally finished the book Charlie Wilson’s War, a sprawling, 500-page work about the Soviet war in Afghanistan published in ‘03, and the tale it tells is wild.
The war
The most successful Islamic jihad in modern history, Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, was run by the CIA, which along with the Saudis pumped in up to ~$800M/year over ~8 years, until the end of ‘88. As successful as it was, Soviets still out-killed Afghans 30:1 — 25,000 Soviet deaths vs. the genocide of a million Afghans.
It was a dirty war, neither side admitted the conflict until the very end; the Soviets brought soldiers’ coffins back home on the condition their parents could not inscribe ‘died in Afghanistan’ on their tombstones. Much the same propaganda motive is now behind the Pentagon’s media blackout of soldiers’ coffins and fudging the number of war deaths and injuries.
The mujahedeen were tough, barbaric and prone to tribal infighting. They were given to Hannibal Lecter-like practices such as peeling Soviet soldiers’ skin up from the waist and tying it around their heads, or leaving limbless Soviet soldiers alongside highways as a warning. They favored sodomizing POWs. After winning the war, the commanders immediately turned the CIA-supplied weapons against each other.
Here’s an ad for Konami’s Doko Demo Yoga, a 3D yoga trainer for the Nintendo DS. The ad makes me laugh, because the dulcet, artificially perky tones of J-babes on TV are the exact opposite of becoming comfortable in your yogic skin. They remind me of some salseras from Japan whom I’ve danced with, highly technical and rigid with their turns.
Oh, East Asia. Is there anything desi you can’t improve?
Take this news item from Turkey, about a misplaced character in an SMS sent by a husband to his estranged wife resulting in two gruesome deaths. Of course, a language where the omission of a single dot in a single word can completely change the meaning of a sentence is begging for trouble, but this is a universal problem. Those of us who use the Dictionary facility on our cellphones will know that a particular arrangement of letters can create two or more very different words, e.g. “awake” and “cycle”, or “ocean” and “madam”, and that this can cause confusion. If the sender isn’t careful, a perfectly harmless sentence like “Federer just crushed Djokovic in the semis” can come out reading “Federer just brushed Djokovic in the penis”. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
This puts me in mind of an incident from a few years ago. Some of us had been invited to a colleague’s place for a debauched late-night party – it didn’t have to be debauched (you could choose to be well-behaved, sip a mocktail and check out by 11 PM), but the possibility was always open. It was an all-night affair at a large house, the sort of place where a hormonally charged couple seeking privacy might at any time stumble into an empty room together, accidentally bolt the door from within and then get down to playing “Doctor”.
Rafta, Rafta… (Slowly Slowly) is the first (relatively) big-budget desi play I’ve seen in New York, maybe the first ever. And that is notable in its own right. The production has enough funding to splash out on an eye-catching set. It’s a play, not a Bombay Dreams-style musical, though DJ Rekha contributed the bhangra. The writing of Ayub Khan-Din(East is East) is far better than the neutered American version of Dreams. And unlike some of the Dreams talent, none of the actors are first-timers.
If you grew up in the ’90s, you probably have fond memories of Sarita Choudhury, Sakina Jaffrey and Ranjit Chowdhry as they starred in diaspora flicks. In Rafta, Rafta…, Jaffrey changes her bra on stage, Reshma Shetty shows off her abs, there’s comic sex set to the beat (beat, beat) of a dhol. Yes, yet again we’re importing something interesting from the West End. But for all the production’s faults, I want to acknowledge at the outset how pioneering it is.
The Acorn Theatre is an intimate venue, and Rafta, Rafta…’s striking set dominates the stage. It’s a 2BR, working-class British Asian home in present-day Oldham, rendered in cutaway. At top left, the master bedroom; top right, the married kids’, the scene of much funny pelvic fumbling; bottom left, the kitchen; bottom right, the living room. Every room except the kitchen is swathed in horrible flocked wallpaper. In Oldham, it seems, painted walls show lack of class. The kitchen gets its own orange-and-brown tread and a puzzling khanda flag, while Krishna and other Hindu paraphernalia adorn the sitting area. The newlyweds’ room has a Madhuri poster, one of Deewaar, and a ceiling plastered with a Bollywood collage.
(Thisislondon) British Airways has taken beef off the menu for economy passengers amid concerns about its “religious restrictions”. The airline has instead switched to a fish pie or chicken dish option for the so-called “cattle class” passengers.
(Yahoo) Myanmar’s military junta seized UN aid shipments meant for survivors of Cyclone Nargis, forcing the UN to suspend help. The junta says it wants material but no personnel.
(NYT) Two corroborate: At a party a few years ago, McCain went off on Bridget smear in South Carolina, ridiculous tax cuts and how Dubya can’t concentrate, you talk for 10 minutes and then he wants to talk about baseball. Said he didn’t vote for Dubya.
(Telegraph) W Hotel in Istanbul has Spice Market restaurant by same owner as NYC’s. For dessert, the ovaltine kulfi, also served in NYC, is a delight. Photo: [via]
(SeaTimes) Two brown men from Europe on a business trip to Seattle were suspected by crew and interviewed by the FBI for snapping photos of a giant car ferry below deck. They’d never seen one before. The ferry went to weekend getaway Vashon Island. [via]
(NYT) Frustrated UN officials demanded access to Burma. A political analyst said the aid the junta is resisting ‘would show them up terribly, organizationally and in terms of equipment, and would be quite a loss of face.’
(NYT) Santosh Sivan’s ‘Before the Rains’: A Brit is having a passionate affair with his housekeeper Sajani (Nandita Das). He instructs his loyal manservant T. K. (Rahul Bose) to violate native customs in a desperate cover-up.
(WSJ) IPL is the first city-based cricket league in India and the first to allow foreign players. Dhoni makes $94K a game, $14K more than Red Sox star David Ortiz. A 19-yr-old cricketer is making $950,000/year; his father makes $150/mo.
(NYT) The U.S. canceled the Pakistan assignment of Maj. Gen. Jay Hood, vilified in the Pakistani press for his previous job as Guantanamo commander. Many Pakistanis were at Gitmo. Torture was widely reported, and Hood’s safety could’ve been at stake.
(WaPo) Washington’s nuclear deal with India is in such desperate straits that the State Department imposed strict conditions on answers to deal questions by members of Congress: Keep them secret.
(Photos) Ninjabi seems to be a peculiarly American Muslim term which means a hijabi who looks like a ninja. Here is picture of a Chinese Muslim sister who looks like a ninjabi. [via]
(NPR) Sri Lankan domestic violence burn victims’ healing tends to be more emotional than physical, because victims are often ostracized. (ht: chickpea)
(Yahoo) When Vina gives Atul a Blackberry, his parents reminisce about getting a water buffalo on their wedding day. Sakina Jaffrey gives a subtle performance as Atul’s sensible mother. Through 6/21. (ht: chickpea)
(Sullivan·C) Treaty of Tripoli, 1797: ‘The USA is not founded on Christianity and has no enmity against ‘Mussulmen.’ It’s hard to think of a contemporary leading Republican who’d publicly agree. In the early republic, not a single senator dissented.
(2camels) Japan’s steel phallus festival, Kanamara Matsuri, features sculptures and models of genitalia in a bid for the blessings of fertility. [Like shivalingams. See also Bhutanese phallus paintings, which are more charms to ward off evil.]
(Yahoo) The new site has all the content from the YouTube global site, but videos of relevance to Indian audiences have been given greater prominence, the company said in a blog on the new site, which is here: [via]
(WaPo) Five climbers took a welding torch-like Olympic flame to Everest’s peak amid strong winds and minus-30-degree temperatures. A Tibetan climber working with the Chinese gov’t said, ‘Tashi delek,’ a benediction.
(Yahoo) Burmese junta is blocking aid. Amnesty Int’l: aid might be siphoned off by the army. Activists painting ‘X’ graffiti on overpasses, meaning vote no on constitutional referendum putting fig leaf on military rule.
One twentysomething desi Internet millionaire throws a catered bash for the homeless for his birthday. Meanwhile his brother and cofounder tries to replace Uday Chopra as reigning Bollywood cheeseball. Click here for the wackness.
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Finally finished the book Charlie Wilson’s War, a sprawling, 500-page work about the 
