Shammi Kapoor impersonates Cosmo Kramer while his costar Mumtaz does the twitch in this marvelous ’50s-style Bollyclip (via Turbanhead).

You can now keep track of Ultrabrown posts with the new headline tracker. This little critter hangs out on your desktop, telling you whenever a new post is published. It works on Windows and Macs.

Click the headline to read the entire post. Hover to get a summary.

The soap opera continues — Farah Damji, the ex-publisher of the British Asian mag Another Generation, is on the lam:
Damji, 39… has absconded from Downview prison in Surrey where she is serving a 3½-year sentence for dishonesty and perverting the course of justice. The former editor of the Asian lifestyle magazine Another Generation was released […]

My Bombay ISP InCable is so incompetent, they just got around to blocking Blogspot and Typepad yesterday. The Airtel backbone, which is upstream from me, blocked the sites at the behest of the Indian government two weeks ago, so these sites were blocked for me then. That ban was finally lifted last Saturday.
But now the […]

Georgetown law prof Neal Katyal, a Guantánamo Bay critic and winner of the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, goes on the Colbert Report. He pulls out a crude fake of Stephen Colbert sitting cross-legged next to Osama bin Laden (thanks, brimful). Colbert looks nonplussed.

Last weekend I visited the Haji Ali Dargah in Bombay under gray monsoon skies.

The tomb and mosque are built on an island in Worli Bay. A narrow connecting walkway is covered during high tide (thanks, Nishant).

Inner structure

Check out these odd fruits I spied in Chor Bazaar in Bombay.

Singhada (Indian water chestnut): thanks, Nishant

Singhada, which looks like alien spawn and is possibly the ugliest fruit I’ve ever seen, is heart-shaped, crunchy and white on the inside. It tastes a bit like peeled almond. You peel it by snapping off the stem, putting […]

I recently learned that bagels, beer and the silver foil on mithai (hammered flat in goat intestine) aren’t quite vegetarian. Now we can add cheap soy sauce to the list. Like many bagels, one inexpensive soy sauce brand is made with amino acids from human hair (via Boing Boing):

You like-a the sauce, yes?The sauce, […]

Someone’s actually launching Bollywood dolls, and it isn’t even April 1st (thanks, DesiDancer):
… Spin Master Toys UK have joined forces with entrepreneur Shameen Jivraj to launch the first-ever Bollywood dolls… [the dolls] will be sold in the UK from August 1 under the brand name ‘Bollywood Legends’. [Link]

Shah Rukh Khan — head spinsaround and spews […]

A new play about the Indian mathematician Ramanujan begins in Manhattan on Oct. 4. A First Class Man by playwright David Freeman is about the numbers man and his relationship with the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy.
This coming Saturday, the theater company Alter Ego Productions is hosting a mixer in Manhattan to raise funds for the […]

M. Night on The Daily Show:

Staff counselMichelle Persaud

Sen. Clinton press aideSam Arora

The Hill just ran its tongue-in-cheek, annual Capitol Hill beauty contest, which Guyanese-American lawyer Michelle Persaud won handily (thanks, Razib). She’s staff counsel for the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. And no, she doesn’t look Iranian:
Although Persaud looks Iranian, her family comes from the small South American country […]

How did a lanky lovely from a town near Santa Cruz end up with her own clothing line in Manhattan?

Iman, Damon Dash, Rachel Roy, Petra Nemcova carrying a phaser

[Rachel] Roy… is half Indian and half Dutch and grew up in Seaside, California, near Santa Cruz… Roy, 31, helms the juniors division of Rocawear, [Damon] Dash’s […]

A LazyWeb request: Have you heard of anyone in India with reasonable Net access at home? If so, how? And have you ever heard of Net access via satellite here?
My highly unreliable cable provider just told me I’ve blown through my 10 GB download cap in 2 weeks. (Avoid InCable.)
My neighborhood’s phone lines have […]

Artless iPod Nano fakes on sale at the gray market haven of Heera Panna (Diamond Emerald) Shopping Center, Haji Ali, Bombay

‘Givson’ guitar

‘SONY’ stores abound in Bombay, whether they sell electronics, groceries or medicine. Few have anything to do with Sony Corp. of Japan.
Perhaps my favorite fake is a store on Waterfield Road in Bombay’s Bandra […]

What happened to Papa Bear?

(thanks, brown_fob)

A soldier frisks a civilian in Srinagar, Kashmir (via Krish). This is photo composition as subliminal political protest.

In a typically anecdotal, unsourced ToI story, some Indians are taking classes to neutralize their regional accents when speaking English (via India Uncut):
Well, now we’ve several Elizas rushing to their Dr Higgins, to stop them from saying ‘cock’ everytime they wanted to say ‘coke’, owing to an accent attributed to their mother tongues. [Link]
And that […]

‘Dance,’ made with M&M dyes and eggshells

The paintings of convicted murderer Donny Johnson, who just had an exhibition in Mexico while he sits in a high-security prison, gives a new meaning to the prison slang ‘shiv.’
… he made a brush of his own hair, secured with thread to a rolled piece of paper. For color […]

After days of ducking the press, the Indian government finally addressed its blog ban. SAJA just released this email from the Indian deputy consul general in NYC. How silly is it that policy affecting free speech in India has to be routed through New York and bypassed via Pakistan?
… A two-page write up containing […]