My absolute favorite, gimmick-constrained desi experimental theater series is moving up in the world with $18 tickets and what may be a larger location than the railroad apartment-sized microtheater in ‘05.
Eleven-minute plays set in a convenience store… [include] superheroes on a quick snack stop, a Bollywood superstar promoting the latest Slurpee flavor, a historical tour [...]

Cora the exotica-smoking pop tart

Music and Lyrics is the first movie I’ve seen (second if you count the vaguely Eastern flautist in Serendipity) where the plot pivots on a putdown of bad Indian exotica. Cora is a Christina Aguilera-Shakira-Madonna pop tart who mixes a pop ballad with ‘this heavy Indian thing,’ drugstore spirituality and rock [...]

At the Kitab literary festival in Bombay last weekend, author Amit Chaudhuri (Real Time) injected classical ragas into the jazz standard ‘Summertime.’
The tabla player wiped his palm across the doogi, approximating the shimmery, slidey sound of a wire brush across a cymbal:

The band is called This Is Not Fusion. Naturally.

Related posts: One-liners from the Kitab [...]

I’d like the blandest thing on the menu

The Oscars were a joke this year. The Queen for best actress and The Departed for best picture? One light and bloodless, the other an emotionally flat remake of the intense, atmospheric and markedly superior Hong Kong original. Who in their right minds wants an Oscar when these [...]

Hillbilly armor in Baghdad:
Hillbilly armor, also known as “farmer armor”, is a slang term used by American troops to describe improvised vehicle armor, most notably during the occupation of Iraq… In World War II, U.S. tank crews welded spare strips of tank track to the hulls of their Sherman, Grant, and Stuart tanks. In the [...]

From blog stats at Quantcast, I’m confident (within ± a kajillion percent) that Sepia Mutiny readers are SepiaCrack-addicted single male grad students refreshing hundreds of times a day:

Kite flying during Basant is one of the prettiest Punjabi traditions and one I look back on with fondness. This season, a journie from Lahore wants to ban kites because fighting string injures bystanders (via Andrew Sullivan). But that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

A beautiful cultural tradition has degenerated into a [...]

onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you’ll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are.
View all the [...]

Hannah Mitchell’s real name is Anne Nicodemus (born August 24, 1962, in Maryland, USA). Her family moved to London, England, in 1969. In 1980, her family moved to Bangalore, India, where they lived for several years and where she joined them in 1981. Through her mother’s art groups, Anne got involved with [...]

Now you’re shooting women, you coward?

An Islamist ‘fanatic’ on Tuesday shot dead a Pakistani female provincial minister and supporter of President Pervez Musharraf because she was not wearing Muslim clothing… Zilla Huma Usman, 35, the Punjab province minister for social welfare and a renowned women’s rights activist, was killed as she was about to address… [...]

Chandni Chowk’s claustrophobic souk includes a famous paranthe wale gali, but the paranthas were crisp-fried and not very tasty:

Delhi’s Rapid Action Force, staging here in front of Lal Qila, is probably made up of some badass commandos. But they need to stop using K.Jo as their designer. Purple fatigues are only acceptable in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory

Snaps from the brilliant Delhi metro: