A Purdue University professor is helping the DoD predict what happens in case of tsunami, anarchy or war (via Reddit):
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), […]
The Deccan Chronicle debases itself with this billboard in Chennai, snapped by Sree Srinivasan of SAJA:
Oh Tamil Nadu, will you never cease to remind me of the vapidity of Bombay dailies?
Michael Ondaatje is frustrating to review. He’s a former poet dragged kicking and screaming into long prose, and it shows in the slimness of his novels and the spare inventiveness of his imagery. The man writes grandiosely, but punctures the possibility of pompousness by turning aside cliché.
On rare occasion, he turns a clunky phrase that’s […]
Michael Moore’s Sicko, his plea for universal, government-run health care, comes loaded with a passel of British Asians working in the NHS. He interviews a smooth young general practitioner who pulls in around $200K/year from the government, lives in a million-dollar flat and drives a high-end Audi. An older uncle type reimburses patients for transportation […]
Wendie Malick, Just Shoot Me
I was recently in a Starbucks near Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large Arab-American population. A sizeable group of old men were sitting around loudly shootin’ the shit in what sounded like Arabic. I don’t speak the language, but I made out ‘Discovery channel’ and similarly mundane phrases.
Then the conversation […]
Inmates at an Indian prison are refusing to leave because the food is so good. Filled at more than twice its capacity, the Parappana Agrahara prison in Bangalore is serving food prepared by ISKCON, or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a Hindu evangelist organization.
Small-time crooks are refusing to apply for bail, swelling the ranks […]
Check out M.I.A.’s latest track off Kala, ‘Boyz,’ with a beat much like ‘Bird Flu.’ Filmed in Jamaica, the video reminds me of Keith Haring and ’80s video games (thanks, Turbanhead):
… she manages to stuff every major dance craze in contemporary Jamaica into one hypnotic short video. [Link]
The lyrics:
Hey nowLet me go hey nowCan we […]
Don’t save the shirt
I learned something at a cousin’s engagement this weekend about gender differences and the bond between mothers and daughters. Girls share clothes. And not just new clothes, either — clothes which were 30 years old.
The ceremony was framed by a pair of saris joined in a knot. It signified the merger of […]
Lisa Ling hosts a documentary of slave girls of India. This Sunday, June 24th at 10 p.m. on the Oxygen Network. [ more ]
If the youtube trailer and the official site are any indication, the film smells and looks like shite.
Entertainment Weekly has a sneak peek at Wes Anderson’s new film The Darjeeling Limited.
A Brooklyn mother and father got the shock of their lives when school officials informed them their brilliant 11-year-old girl was denied admission to an elite public school - solely because she’s of Indian descent.
“I feel bad because I would have gotten in if I was white,” Nikita Rau lamented over her failed bid […]
Will Smith sang a few lines of a filmi song on his visit to Indian Idol:
Nelly Furtado reprised her ‘Kabhi Kabhi’ performance from Bombay at the Nottingham Arena in Britain, February ‘07 (thanks, Umar & Mohan):
Related posts: Meiyang Chang, The full Furtado, Whoa, Nelly, The ‘Maneater’ of Malgudi, Força Furtado, The latest Portuguese-Punjabi collaboration, ‘If […]
My nieces and nephews have such ginormous desi eyes, you can see the photographer in them:
Sometimes you can even see the baby’s arm grabbing for the camera:
Gauri Nanda of MIT Media Lab and Clocky run-’n-hide alarm clock fame is on the cover of the current Inc. magazine. Check it out on the newsstands.
Updated: Nanda’s claiming $650K in preorders for Clocky. Here are the photos:
In the middle of Michael Ondaatje’s brisk, 30-minutes-on-the-dot reading last night, a friend turned to me in surprise: ‘He’s very funny!’ Ondaatje’s prose is compact and poetic and devoid of humor, but in person he was no shrinking violet.
For a reclusive literary fiction author who took seven years since Anil’s Ghost to put […]
It all started with the Jenny Thing (listen): a hip Asian dude with flippy hair and a voice like the Cure. Shyam Rao, friend of a friend, torching the dance floor on lead guitar. Warm beer, cute Cal birds and a mosh pit. Happy days. Shyam went on to med school. The band squeezed out […]
Michael Ondaatje will read from his new novel Divisadero at Barnes & Noble tonight, 4th floor, 7pm. It’s the Union Square location in Manhattan.
He is not telling stories; he is using the elements of storytelling to gesture in the direction of a constellation of moods, themes, and images. He is creating the literary equivalent of […]
Fareed Zakaria went on the Daily Show and scoffed mightily at the neocon view of the world, strange given his early support for the Iraq war.
Plan A was you hold elections in Iraq, in Gaza, in Lebanon. And out of this process will emerge the George Washingtons, the Thomas Jeffersons, the James Madisons of the […]
A Mighty Heart is a solid movie about Mariane Pearl’s search for her husband, murdered WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. It’s well worth watching, but it’s too narrow in scope to satisfy. The full story is crying out to be unraveled: Pakistan’s Great Game, Al Qaeda’s backstory, the ISI links; less Oprah, more Syriana.
In real life
Instead […]