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:
When I first saw Delhi’s heartbreakingly romantic Lodhi Gardens, my reptilian sub-brain said, ‘Badmashi bingo!’ Sure enough, it was full of couples coupling in the sun. Kids played hide-and-seek on a narrow ledge surrounding the Bada Gambad dome. A JNU type lay spreadeagled, photocopied reader at his side.
With a lotus pond, spring flowers, fortress walls […]
No disrespect intended, but these are some funny billboards:
I really think this Army ad outside the Delhi Cantonment would work better if it didn’t look quite so much like a homicide waiting to happen
Just like I’ve never gotten Kingfisher Airlines — two things which shouldn’t go together are pilots and alcohol — I’ve never gotten devil masks (thanks, Sharanya) on truck axles:
Late-night trucks on National Highway 24 are far too close to being real-life harbingers of doom
Tata Indicom, an Indian broadband ISP, is so unprofessional that it lost its Web address to a domain registrar (thanks, Amit) and didn’t even bother to update its links.
The old address, www.tataindicombroadband.in, now goes to a placeholder site by Net4India. Links on the new site are thoroughly broken because they point to the old address. […]
Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi is often parodied for being a hothouse for students in severe specs, scarves, kurtas or salwars, jholis in ethnic prints, and long hair (for men) or short hair (for women), preaching socialism long after its expire-by date.
I’m not sure how broadly the stereotype applies, but a quick visit makes it […]
Women who look better bald than Britney Spears. And check out who number 1 is!
Persis Khambatta
Why she shaved her head: Persis adopted the Kojak look to play Lieutenant Ilia, the Enterprise’s Deltan navigator, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Why she looks better bald than Britney: According to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the bald […]