Chetan Bhagat’s debut novel Five Point Someone is a much better read than One Night @ the Call Center, the sophomoric book with which I had the misfortune to begin. It’s still the kind of book with only a solitary spark of literary wit, and the author was so taken by this meager glimmer of [...]
It took quite a lot of searching to find online movie listings in Bombay. Please share if you have better.
Booking movies in Bombay is an adventure. I try and see Hollywood weekends and Bollywood weekdays. The big Hindi flicks always sell out, even when you try and book on your mobile phone These were [...]
Das Indische Grabmal, or ‘The Indian Grab-Ass,’ features a German Sita, priests in brownface, an idol with a boob enlargement and and the fakest-looking cobra ever (via the dedicated ripping efforts of Turbanhead). It all goes down on the set of Street Fighter. Pure gold:
Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride was once criticized for dredging up and exoticizing an obscure old custom, that of marrying off women to symbolic mates. (Women tend to choose hardwood, natch.) But the criticism may have been premature. There’s speculation that TMBWITW may succumb to the same superstition:
… the buzz is that [Aishwarya Rai] just [...]
A Padma Lakshmi retrospective:
Club Ganesha in Nagoya, Japan, pushes tusk-in-cheek elephantine exotica. The statue is up by the DJ booth, which is more in-your-face than a decorative Nataraja off in a corner.
A Japanese school even seems to have named its soccer team after the deity (via Vikram):
Related posts: The Battle of Kurukshetra (updated), Dunking Ganesh (updated), [...]
Bitter:Sweet’s track ‘The Mating Game’ is preloaded on the Zune. The LA neo-nova band is made up of Kiran Shahani and Shana Halligan. They met when Shahani placed a Craigslist ad for a lead singer for trip-hoppers Supreme Beings of Leisure (member Ramin Sakurai is Iranian-Japanese).
Halligan is the lead singer and the face in this [...]
I haven’t yet seen the famous Seinfeld episode called ‘The Implant,’ but it’s apparently got two of my favorite things, Rushdie jokes and Teri Hatcher.
KRAMER: You know who I saw at the health club? Salman Rushdie.
ELAINE (laughing): Yeah right, Salman Rushdie. Yeah well, I can see that - you got five millions Moslems after you, [...]
Sanjeev Bhaskar had a blink-and-you-missed-it cameo as a poker player in Woody Allen’s Scoop (Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johanssen):
Right this minute I’m sitting at a rooftop bar watching the blood sun set over the Arabian Sea. The bar is all Mediterranean whites and candles and I’m sipping a caipiroshka with freshmint and lime. The Air India centaur whirls silently behind flickering flame and Malabar Hill, where my mother snapped my baby photo in [...]
In the style section this week, Mallika Sherawat remembers the decade we tried so hard to forget:
Related post: Creature from the Cheese Lagoon
Just how much does Bombay love its soap operas? Enough to live them again and again as a comic strip in the Mumbai Mirror.
This is like straight man shark repellent. Carry it at night. Bust it at the first sign of trouble.
In case blogging doesn’t keep me rolling in saffron and bling, I’m keeping my day job: