In Russian news of the weird, a man supposedly put his wife up as poker stakes, and lost:
Andrei Karpov from Murmansk had run out of money in a game of poker and offered his opponent his wife instead of cash to stay in the game.
When he lost the game and his opponent Sergey Brodov […]
The first all-female unit of United Nations peacekeepers has arrived in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.
The group of more than 100 police women from India will stay in Liberia for six months, helping to train the local police force.
They will also carry out security duties in forthcoming local elections.
The UN currently has 15,000 peacekeepers deployed in Liberia, […]
The snapshots of India’s Republic Day on Flickr are far more interesting than the photos of marching columns in the papers. It’s much like the vitality of good blogs vs. staid mainstream news.
Related posts: Beating Retreat, Fanaa […]
Delhi’s Khan Market hit CNN recently as one of the world’s most expensive retail zones, though much cheaper than Fifth Avenue:
Delhi’s relatively few legally zoned retail spaces such as Khan Market are becoming ever more valuable… It is precisely the market’s closeness to some of Delhi’s most expensive residential streets that has seen rents swell… […]
The IIT Delhi campus has been on lockdown following the 2005 terrorist attack on IISc Bangalore. The new buildings are quite pretty from the outside. I love how the main sign is done in Futura.
At first blush, there were more women here than at UC Berkeley engineering, as is the pattern in many developing countries.
[…]
Here’s a clip from the Global Indian Film Awards in Malaysia, a show neither global nor pan-Indian. Skip ahead to 6:45. Shah Rukh Khan’s irritating oratory style makes Dubya sound like Demosthenes:
My favorite part is at 8:40 when Shatrughan Sinha tries to pass off the creator of Krrap as the savior of world cinema.
Under threat of violence in Gujarat, movie theaters have refused to show Parzania, an award-winning indie film about… violence in Gujarat:
… Parzania… is based on the attack on the Gulberg Society [in Ahmedabad during 2002] in which 39 persons were burnt alive… [Link]
Not a single cinema hall in Gujarat is showing Parzania. Theatre owners say […]
Yes, I’m sure it was the extra ’s’ that did it.
Related posts: Right Thurr (Bombay Mix), Numerrology sucks
As a special surprise, we present the now legendary comicbook Nagraj vs Shakoora the Magician. Copyright infringements and grammar be dammed!!
Shia and Sunni
Thanks Aizaz
Auto Shop
I went to get my car serviced and I was amazed how skilled these auto mechanics are. These people are highly intelligent individuals but somehow strayed away from achieving their full potential. They could of [sic] easily been engineers or doctors. Then I glanced over at one of their posters and seen [sic]a picture […]
The Beating Retreat parade is as finely managed as a TV set. The buildings are Rome reflected through Britain, the uniforms and pomp Britain, Indianized. Off in the distance the road rises, creating an artificial horizon. First the cavalry, then the bands, then the camels appear, eighteen on each side in silhouette. The bagpipers come […]
Music director O.P. Nayyar, who composed some of Bollywood’s most memorable tunes of the 1950s and 60s, died on Sunday after a heart attack at his home outside Mumbai, a news agency reported.
Nayyar, 81, was famous for the use of Punjabi rhythms in his music and is credited with making stars of several leading singers, […]
NPR talk to Sanjay Patel, an animator for Pixar Studios and creator of Ghee Happy, yesterday. Take a listen to the interview…..also BUY THE BOOK!
One of the more pleasant surprises at the Jaipur festival was discovering the work of Tishani Doshi (previous post on Kitabkhana here). Tishani trained as a dancer with Chandralekha for several years, and perhaps this gives her a more liberating view of the body than most. Anita Roy drew her out on several subjects, and spoke at one point of women’s dilemmas–motherhood, the messiness of the body. Tishani came back with a different viewpoint, borrowed freely from Chandralekha’s philosophy of the human body as the microcosm of the universe, of discovering and unleashing its power.
Here’s a bit from ‘Homecoming’, in her collection of poems, Countries of the Body:
“I forgot how Madras loves noise
Loves neighbours and pregnant women
And Gods and babies….
….How cars in reverse sing Jingle Bells
And scooters have larynxes of lorries.
How even colour can never be quiet.”
Here’s a link to ‘Ode to Drowning’.
And here’s the opening verse from ‘On the Burning of An Unfamiliar Aunt’:
“My family gathers around to mourn,
But mainly to whisper
How killing yourself
Amounts to confessing
Life somehow got too much for you.”
What I liked most about the poetry reading session in tribute to Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar at last week’s Jaipur festival was that the three readers–Keki Daruwalla, Jane Bhandari and Jeet Thayil–had clearly not attended my convent school.
Keki pulled off the difficult feat of reading Nissim’s over-anthologised Night of the Scorpion as though he was listening to the words for the first time. There are poems that are ruined because they’ve become too familiar–Wordsworth’s Daffodils, Auden’s Stop All The Clocks–and for my generation, it’s hard to read ‘Night of the Scorpion’ without hearing a faint echo of the perfect, merciless parody: “I remember the night my mother bit the scorpion.”
The hall was packed, and Antara Dev Sen, moderating the session, allowed the three poets on stage to remember their three absent colleagues in the way they preferred. Space Bar, Middle Stage and me enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and I think poetry made two new converts out of two old sceptics, Jabberwock and India Uncut.
There were moments of sadness: Keki speaking of all the poets we’ve lost in a relatively short period–so very many of them, so many of them his friends as well as his peers–Arun, Dom, Nissim, also Agha Shahid Ali, A K Ramanujan, a handful of others.
There were small moments of revelation: Jane Bhandari talking about meeting Arun Kolatkar at the Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, Jeet Thayil giving us the stories behind Madhu Kapparath’s photographs of the Bombay poets. Kolatkar’s house was so tiny, he said, that guests had to be entertained on the equally tiny balcony or at his “office”, the Wayside Inn, where he was to be found at the same table for years. Dom Moraes caught sitting at his typewriter at the exact moment that the genial, jesting raconteur melts away, revealing the forceful writer underneath.
The session closed with Jeet, Keki and Jane reading from their own poems. I particularly enjoyed Jeet’s playful ghazal on Malayalam (excerpts reproduced here with the author’s kind permission):
Ghazal: Jeet Thayil
Listen! Someone’s saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there’s no word for ‘despair’ in Malayalam.
Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam….
…Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone’s endowed a high chair in Malayalam.
I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.
Jeet, such drama with the scraps that you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.
In a fit of tech lust and sentimentality, I flew into Delhi on a whim to see what I’m tired of seeing on BBC News and never in person. I speak of course of Sikhs in bagpipes and tartan and sleek silver death machines: Delhi’s Republic Day Parade from Rashtrapati Bhavan to the Red Fort […]
My adorable nephew is taking karate:
Obviously a believer in non-violence
What I love about this spelling-challenged bookshelf label at Crossword Juhu is that the correction lies the princely distance of one inch north.
… on my last trip to the Nalanda bookshop at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Mumbai, I found The 9/11 Commission Report under Fiction. Or maybe that was a political gesture. [Link]
Any young, minimally […]
As India modernizes, caring for sick or abandoned cows has become more of an issue.
VARANASI, INDIA
At an open-air barn outside this holy Hindu city, a gaushala, a “cow residence” or asylum, is doing its part to fulfill the ancient tradition of caring for India’s famously sacred cows.
Today, there are more than 4,000 gaushalas – a […]