NYC cabs bore psychedelic flower stickers all summer. Check out the detail on this Voice toon about the NYC Halloween parade:
Yet again, I’m deciding whether to cheap out, strap a plastic sword to a sherwani and march in the parade. Makes the viewing so much easier
I watched Anurag Kashyap ’s No Smoking late on Friday, just before going out of town for the weekend, and was very impressed by it. Though I had to review it for Tehelka, it wasn’t on a very pressing deadline and this meant I had time to think abou…
The Sundance Channel series Iconoclasts claims it chooses two wildly unrelated celebrities for a televised conversation. Unrelated? Judging from the Deepak Chopra - Mike Myers exoti-fest, I call shenanigans. One sells the Kama Sutra watered down for suburbans, the other walks in blueface for the bonfire of the Vanity. It’s a meeting of love gurus.
Related […]
Former U.S. ambassador to India Robert Blackwill visited a Delhi gurdwara in ‘01. He’s now flipped out the whirligig door to a cushy lobbying position in D.C.:
India, which has paid Barbour Griffith & Rogers $1.24 million since Mr. Blackwill began lobbying for it in late 2005, has hired him… to push for a nuclear deal […]
Several new site features were posted last night:
Click the Releases tab to track upcoming movies, albums, books and plays. The column updates in place without having to refresh the page.
Click to add the release to your calendar. Works with Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar and so on.
News stories automatically prefix the source, such as (NYT) […]
Here are some of the more unusual photos from a Diwali celebration in London’s Trafalgar Square (thanks, chachaji).
Severus Snape gazes gloomily at his gopis:
Among the joys of a hill-station visit are the signboards one gets to see. Just back from Mussoorie and Landour and had to share these pictures, most of them from the long and winding Mussoorie mall:How to lure the sophisticated dinerI like the way the…
My friends and I went to a South African place for lunch yesterday, Madiba in Fort Greene. The ubiquitous samosa had crossed over — samoosa in South Africa, sambusa in Malaysia, Ethiopia and Somalia. I ordered a bunny chow, a bowl scooped out of half a loaf of bread and filled with stew.
There was no […]
Witty band names which could double as blogs:
Brown blaxpoitation and Krishnery.
Danish singer Anita Lerche makes a village boy very happy in the straight-outta-the-pind track ‘Passport’ (thanks, SP):
“I freaked on the Punjabi dhol beat and fell in love, the moment I heard it,” says Anita who first came to India in 2005 on a trekking trip to the Himalayas… Anita now plans to travel the world […]
Oh, behave.
(thanks, Lucky)
Related posts: Hack Hindu, Guru Pitka
This was last week’s Newsweek cover story on Pakistan:
This scare story was loaded with terrorism hype. By the time I finished the story, it seemed like jihadis were on the verge of overrunning not only Islamabad but India too. And yet with all the advantages of Musharraf’s rigging, Islamist parties crested at a tiny minority […]
A sensational Tehelka sting published this week surreptitiously filmed Indian politicians boasting about killing Muslims in the Gujarat pogrom. One of the conspirators, a Bajrang Dal leader, hoists himself on his own petard:
His confession is horrific (NSFW):
The cylinders were [the Muslims’]… Whichever house we entered, we just grabbed the cylinder and fired at it, and, […]
El Próximo Oriente: Una Historia de Amor al Curry (The Near East: A Story From Love to Curry) is a Spanish rom-com about a guy who gets his Muslim girlfriend pregnant and grapples with the consequences. Have I mentioned that Spaniards love Bollywood?
Brick Lane premiered yesterday at the London Film Festival, with Tannishtha Chatterjee resembling an older Jiah Khan. The buzz is that the movie is (thankfully) better than the book. I don’t know the Sylheti accent, but they’ve nailed the generic desi lilt, because Chatterjee and the actor playing her husband are both Indian. Here’s […]
African-American jholiwali at a Times Square movie theater:
Avaaz last night in Williamsburg was the first zombie hipster bhangra party I’ve been to. It’s like Sank liveblogging desi bands, and it’s never less than interesting. At one point a Kurt Russell impersonator rapped over AC/DC with ‘Addicted to Love‘ backup dancers in ashes and latex.
Here’s Manish Tandon of the Krishna-referencing Butterthief. They sounded […]
Tamil film star Madhavan and Marathi director Nishikant Kamat swung by NYC yesterday to screen their Tamil remake of Dombivli Fast. As a tale of a white-collar everyman who slowly escalates his rebellion against the corruptness of society, Evano Oruvan (Someone) plays much like Rang De Basanti, Falling Down and John Q. The protagonist […]
Yes, Dear Leader: Amit pulls a Mao
At first I thought the Bastiat Prize meal was to be dinner with rich bastards. Sitting among i-bankers and VCs, I prepped a day-job story to suit the audience — ‘I make petroleum from the bones of the poor.’
I’ve been reading Irawati Karve’s Yuganta, a collection of essays on the Mahabharata and its characters. Had read a couple of these essays as an adolescent when I was heavily into Mahabharata-related literature (straightforward translations as well as …