For most air passengers a nine hour flight involves the prospect of cramped leg room, a troubled sleep and meals delivered with plastic cutlery.
For first class customers of Jet Airways, however, the experience is a little more civilised.

Passengers prepared to pay out just over £4,000 for a trip to Delhi will get to relax in […]

Reena Patel, Kink’s vice president for marketing, who has an M.B.A. and previously worked at Merrill Lynch, told me, “I actually apply my education to this job.”
Everyone at the company works 10 to 6. Matt Williams, who directs both Hogtied and the hard-hitting girl-on-girl wrestling site Ultimate Surrender, told me: “I like this because when […]

Richard Gere explains on The Daily Show why there’s an arrest warrant for both him and Shilpa Shetty in India. Gere and Gerbil start with the same letters — coincidence?
Stewart: Today it was announced there’s an arrest warrant out for you in India.
Gere: Thank you for reminding me of this. That is really sweet of […]

A few months ago, a semi-independent movie called Gafla (Scam) came out in Bombay. It seemed conceived along the lines of Madhur Bhandarkar, the director of sledgehammer subtlety whose one-note movies garnish dry typing scenes with cheesy subplots of prostitution. The topic, stock scams in Bombay, was timely but the reviews were mixed, and we […]

Aasif Mandvi finally hits his marks in this piece about the political theater over Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty:

Mandvi: By morning the police had managed to disperse the crowd, not with tear gas but by showing the rioters Autumn in New York on a continuous loop. People’s eyes are still burning today…
Stewart: How do you […]

The Indian food at Google’s main cafeteria was odd today: dal, rice, curried squash and some concoction with a French name involving eggplant. Mango lassi flowed from a juice dispenser. It was pleasingly thick but not very sweet — these guys need input from Sainsburys or Whole Foods. From the drink cabinet I snagged a […]

Newsreader Brie-Ann Villyums made an ass of himself on Letterman on Monday night:
‘Sanjaya…’

I remember a day when you couldn’t say that on the air… You’d just say ‘private parts…’

Balle balle, Bombay to L.A.:
It took me three days of work just to exit India (foreigner registration, converting rupees to dollars 10K at a time, filling out two pages of forms and having my passport photocopied). In contrast, in London they converted the remainder in seven minutes flat without even asking for ID. The immigration […]

“Why would she change into pajamas?” asked Mr. Richards. “Why didn’t she leave when she sees there’s no bed for her? Why didn’t she punch him in the face?” He noted that there were no signs of physical trauma. “My client is 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds. He’s a thin Gandhi-type guy. He can’t overpower anybody. […]

Krishnatube

Available for purchase.

Helen performing Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu from the 1958 Indian film Howrah Bridge.

Here’s the performance that finally got Sanjaya Malakar kicked off American Idol. On the radio in LA today, some guy said he hoped Malakar would endorse feather dusters shaped like ponyhawks.

Will be hopscotching continents. Here’s a fabulous time waster for those of geekier persuasion: The Order of the Stick web comic. It’s South Park meets World of Warcraft.

Why was 24-year-old Indian sales rep Devang Rawal, engaged to be married next month, dragged off his motorcycle in Kampala and stoned to death last Thursday? One op/ed blames envy of a prosperous minority:

The anti-Asian sentiment and most other anti-immigrant sentiments around the world is a thinly-veiled envy of their industrious nature. Their entrepreneurial discipline […]

This looks like the Indian version of a Lifetime network movie of the Week starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. Oh, and it also has an appearance by International Star , Kabir Bedi!

Maulik Pancholy, who play’s Alec Baldwin’s secretary on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock was featured as an oncologist tending to Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni, the NY mob boss on the Sopranos. Johnny Sack gets the news that his cancer had advanced and he has about three months left to live. While he ponders his […]

Check out this great invite for a Sikh gala in Toronto last night, with a uniformed Sikh Mountie, a four-way English-Punjabi pun on ‘ho!’ (go; be; a yell of joy), and a visual pun on the khanda and maple leaf. Honorees include Waris Singh Ahluwalia, Valarie Kaur, Fauja Singh and the head of the Spinning […]

Azaadville is a township in South Africa, and this cutie is apparently Johannesburg blogger Saaleha Bamjee, whose review of David Hasselhoff’s autobiography is presented here in its entirety:

Before the simians bang out Beowulf, they decided to try a practice run. [Link]
Here she is on the pleasures of watching movies solo:

I’ve never been much of a […]

Aasif Mandvi, Rita Wolf and Rajesh Bose star in a staged reading of one of my favorite not-love stories, my friend Anuvab’s wordplay romance Chaos Theory. Wolf and Bose have done a reading of this play before:
Chaos Theory begins at Delhi University in 1965 and traces the lives of Sunita Sen and Mukesh Singh as […]