http://www.ultrabrown.com Desi ultragoodness Tue, 13 May 2008 21:57:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Earlier this spring, Tony D'Souza released one of the finest novels about the South Asian diaspora, The Konkans, and promptly won a Guggenheim Fellowship. I bought him a beer, and he gave me a copy of his first novel. Whiteman is based on D'Souza's experiences as an aid worker living in ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/flight-of-the-whiteman Congrats to Jenna Bush on getting married to the scion of the Haggar wrinkle-free pantaloon dynasty () and putting her hard-partying days behind her. Boo to her dad, who had a man-sized limestone cross erected with all the subtlety of a khanda on the rear windshield of a tinted, dropped Honda ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/man-sized-cross Chachaji points us to this Time story on Jhumpa Lahiri's new book which states the obvious: Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction are: humor, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/what-you-will-not-find-in-jhumpa Because there aren't enough massa-servant tales on the market, here's Before the Rains at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan: Before the Rains [directed by Santosh Sivan] is adapted from 'Red Roofs'... in the Israeli director Dany Verete's 2002 film, Yellow Asphalt... Moores... is carrying on a passionate affair with his ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/before-the-rains A cute medical tech ad tips its hat to Indian docs serving in villages. What are probably more in demand, sadly, are portable ultrasound machines. http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/e-k-ji On Thursday May 8, after negotiating a few road bumps along the way, the Olympic torch reached China and was planted atop Mount Everest. It was a good idea to plant it there since it was unlikely that Tibetan independence protesters would come together more than 29, 000 feet above ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/light-my-fire One of the covers of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance features a little boy sitting atop a pole. It always reminded me of mallakhamb, the Indian art of pole gymnastics. In this mallakhamb clip, a lean, oiled Circque du Soleil-style acrobat shatters the idea of Indian unathleticism. Hottest pole dance ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/mallakhamb Why NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani can't abide Salman Rushdie: Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize [her own] prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/critiquing-the-critic Last week I treated myself to a couple of mini-film festivals at home, watching (mostly re-watching) a few films of a particular director or actor. The honorees included James Stewart (whose birth centenary is next week) and Akira Kurosawa, and the festival high point, apart from re-experiencing the gorgeousness of ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/a-few-notes-on-the-seven-samurai Burma is disappearing, like Atlantis; sinking under the weight of bloated corpses and greedy governments. We can thank the inimitable junta and Cyclone Nargis (which macabre twit named a cyclone after a flower?) for giving the country the mystique of Greek myths and making sure it doesn’t last into 2009. ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/chaos-theory