http://www.ultrabrown.com Arts and politics of the South Asian diaspora Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:29:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I would like to invite all the readers of The Middle Stage in Delhi to the launch of Arzee the Dwarf this Friday, the 10th of July, at 7pm at the India International Center, Lodhi Road, New Delhi - 110003.Although Arzee the Dwarf is set entirely in Bombay and was ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/reading-from-arzee-the-dwarf-in-delhi-and-in-love-with-delhi iTunes isn't so great at matching Bollywood tracks with their album covers. Corporate Whore is an aptly-named American b-school band, not a bad Bipasha Basu movie, a redundancy if ever there was one. I wonder what it might come up with for songs from Don -- Don Henley, 'Dirty Laundry'? http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/jo-pehchaana-woh-sikandar Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, Tyeb Mehta all died this week. A couple of weeks ago Ali Akbar Khan passed away in his Los Angeles home. A little more than a month ago, Kamala Das died alone in a hospital at Pune. Barring Bausch, the others were well past their glory ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/death-row If the real thing don't do the trickYou better make up something quickYou gonna burn it out to the wickAren't you, Barracuda? -- Heart, 'Barracuda' So Sarah Palin dumped her resignation announcement on Friday night before Fourth of July weekend. Palin can see Indictment from her house: ... all of this precedes what ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sarah-barracuda The UK documentary Dispatches: Terror in Mumbai got some horrific leaked audio intercepts of the gunmen. At 4:00, the 11/26 attackers calmly murder a Chabad House hostage in front of a phone so their Pakistani handlers can listen. The whole operation is conducted in relaxed Urdu and Punjabi. Here's part 1. Related ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/1126-audio-intercepts In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/on-mridula-koshys-if-it-is-sweet It's not every day that I have the time to take a walk along the sea in the mornings. Today was one of those rare days when the weather was perfect and I had the time so I thought, "Carpe diem et coffee. Let's go for a walk." As I ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/rain-mix My Sita Sings the Blues tee just arrived, and it's gorgeous. The gold is a bit blingy. No doubt some desi auntie swapped out the original color at the factory. Subtlety is like kryptonite for that old biddie. There's a light sprinkle of tiny gold rub-off, which is common with ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sita-tees-are-out Ever since shiny little Apple products started including voice commands, I've wondered how they'd handle song names in unsupported languages. Would it be as bad as Moviefone's text to speech bot? Yes it is. Here's how the current iPhone reads out the title track to 'Kaho Na Pyaar Hai (Please Say ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/voice-control A set of curly-toed juttis signify a couple's overweening liberalism in Away We Go, a film by writer couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and director Sam Mendes. Eggers and Mendes are doyens of dysfunction, but Away is more comic than dark. It's less a movie than a series of ... http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/stuff-white-people-like