Sunetra Sastry’s husband Rowan Atkinson, posing as Lucifer, gives you a warm welcome to hell. I’ve seen the silent Mr. Bean so often, I’ve forgotten how clean his delivery is.

A short film playing at the upcoming IAAC film fest in Manhattan reimagines Mahatma Gandhi as a pinch hitter for the Yankees:
… [Mohandas Gandhi] once traded his trademark loincloth for Yankee pinstripes (metaphorically) to pinch hit for the Bombers in 1933. He even managed to turn an infield dribbler into an inside-the-park homer.
At least […]

Remember the post about elephants which kill people? Now an elephant has gone self-aware:
… a 34-year-old female Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo showed researchers that pachyderms can recognize themselves in a mirror — complex behavior observed in only a few other species. The test results suggest elephants — or at least Happy — are […]

Well this is odd. Here’s an endorsement of George ‘Macaca’ Allen’s opponent Jim Webb on Fox News, from the standpoint of who’s more bloodthirsty. ‘I want a guy who’s got blood on his hands, not a football player.’ (via Crooks and Liars)

Interviewer: … Jim Webb has a son, the only one of all these nasty […]

Shooting War is an online promo for a graphic novel about the Iraq war which comes out next year. One side plot is about Bangalore being nuked by terrorists, and India weighing nuclear retaliation against Pakistan. There’s something deeply disturbing about the flippancy of the storyline about erasing the subcontinent’s cities.

Shooting War tracks hipster Jimmy […]

The newly-released poster for Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj is similar to the covers of bodice rippers and the poster for Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, which was itself a spoof of the horror genre.

This highbrow exercise is out in the U.S. December 1. The original was actually good fun, mainly because Kal […]

Back in high school policy debate, we frolicked when we were blessed with tabula rasa debate judges. The game was to link the opponents’ plan to setting off as many nuclear wars as possible. The team whose plan caused the fewest nuke wars, won.
The nuke war decision rule did not play with mom ‘n pop […]

I am not Mindy Kaling, I am not Kelly Kapoor.
But I’ve been wondering lately if I am and I just don’t know it yet.
I hear it a lot. To the point that I’ve concluded that the people who tell me must feel so relieved that an Indian-American actress became mainstream enough that they could turn […]

The fort is my regular hangout. I walk down the seashore promenades, threading through familial hordes out for an evening walk, the sidewalk pulsating like a seaside Tel Aviv. I pass crowds of young men, always men, waiting for Salman Khan to make a seigneurial appearance and strip off his shirt.
I walk in sweeping my […]

A desi Virginian pretends to shit on a roof and scampers about on all fours as a leashed, banana-eating macaca. The logo’s cute, but you might want to fast-forward through the clip — this approach to political satire makes me wince.

On Friday, George ‘Macaca’ Allen attempted to pass off a biography of himself as fiction…
Allen was also asked about passages in his sister Jennifer Allen’s book, Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter, in which Allen is described as a violent bully toward his siblings. “It was a fairly rough and rowdy family […]

The third Bombay blog meetup of the year, at the beautiful Juhu house of host Sakshi Juneja, devolved, as so many Bombay parties do, into a discussion of the sex lives of cheating bastard nymphomaniacs Bollywood stars. Amit Varma of India Uncut was so relieved at not having to expound on libertarianism in the WSJ […]

Is Amrita Rao the new Manisha Koirala?

I recently checked out the South Asian fiction titles available for Sony’s new ebook reader. It turns out there’s a competitor with an even nicer screen, the iRex iLiad:

… enough cannot be said about the sheer beauty of the display. We would swear up and down that we were looking at a sheet of laser-printed […]

The guy on the right gave his name as ‘Gogol Ganguly‘

A damning new WaPo profile of George ‘Macaca’ Allen shades in a portrait of a man who seems used to racism and casual violence:
[A former teammate] said he was offended by the Confederate flags he saw in Allen’s van and his campus apartment, especially […]

Bill Gates has just pledged $23M to fight AIDS in India, one of a long string of serious public health initiatives which have made him one of the leading philanthropists in the world:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $23 million to help fight HIV/AIDS in India, which has the world’s highest number of […]

Farokh Bulsara channels desperate housewives in a leather miniskirt, bob and feather duster (via Andrew Sullivan). He presses the Royal Ballet into service in this video for ‘I Want to Break Free,’ which was initially banned on MTV:

The music video was a parody of the British soap opera Coronation Street… the band members dressed in […]