Tiffin Wallah in Curry Hill, with walls made for blind giants, serves a Pondi masala dosa to die for. It’s full of thin-sliced red onions along with the usual masala filling, cut into rectangular ribbons angled carefully on a long sushi plate. A Malayali friend thought his dosa was on tbe bland side, but […]
Our best-known Toastmasters Club refugee has sold out Symphony Space in Manhattan. Actress Rita Wolf will interp a story from Unaccustomed Earth, which will save committed fans the heartburn of shelling out $26 for 40 minutes of head down, straight through.
Or you could see her at Barnes & Noble Union Square tomorrow (Tue April 1) […]
Of all things, I found myself thinking about V S Naipaul while watching the Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan on DVD the other day. It’s been instructive to see the gleeful reactions from media and public after the pu…
Apologies in advance - this is a VERY long post. But trust me, it will probably feel shorter than some of the performances described below felt.
Day 5 at Live ‘08
Alliance Francaise (stupid PC keyboard is crap at reproducing the cedilla) is a lovely building in Lodhi Estate. The Indian International Centre - pretty rose garden […]
If you tell anyone Live ‘08 that the performances at the galleries feel a bit like their hired spectacles, like jesters at medieval European courts or Shah Rukh Khan at the Mittal wedding, it’s most likely that you’ll get a spontaneous lecture on the politics of being a performer and how interesting it is to […]
The last time I saw Rehaan Engineer, I glimpsed his red underwear. Last night when I saw him in the distance, he was wearing a Superman t-shirt. Hmmm….
I’m not stalking Mr. Engineer, as much as I’m tempted to. In fact, I could have been in a room with a bed in close proximity to Mr. […]
Meghan Asha Parikh: 27-year-old Kristin Davis lookalike with wealthy Silicon Valley dad shocks America by showing up on Fox Business without big hair.
Shy, retiring PR hound comes with TV show, blog, Tumblr, videos and Valleywag tag.
And questionable taste in exes.
Carrying on from the short post about Arthur C Clarke…some of us were watching Superman II on TV a few weeks ago, and during the scene where General Zod and his villainous associates make their way towards Earth (a glowing blue-green orb suspended in…
[More than a year and a half after I went to Rishikesh and Ananda Spa to do stories for Outlook’s Wellness guide (posts from that time here and here), the book is finally out. Very readable too: many informative and nicely written pieces on Ayurveda, Y…
Kaliman
Working my way backward through Junot Díaz, I found his first book Drown more memorable than his second, Oscar Wao. Because Drown is a collection of short stories, the language is sharper, tighter and more poetic. As a new author, the writer was on a budget; whereas Wao spreads into footnotes like a fat man […]
I heard from friends close to Sameer Bhatia that he passed away early this morning. The Help Sameer blog shows a spiral of medical complications from leukemia, ending in a stroke.
Last year’s bone marrow drives were hugely successful in getting 24,000 people signed up for the donor registry and finding donors for Sameer and for […]
When I came to Mumbai for the first time, years ago, I was certain that the city had a strong Japanese community. What else explained neighbourhoods being called things like “Saki Naka” and “Oshiwara”? A couple of months in the city and I realised my chances of getting miso soup were about as high […]
If you read the reviews of British director Bharat Nalluri’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, you might think it a mannered, stilted WWII-era comedy. But it’s actually a light, modern comedy which pays stylistic homage to old-school Hollywood. And it’s quite good, a rom-com written with adults in mind. Frances McDormand (married in real […]
Happy Bangladesh Independence Day:
‘Amar Shonar Bangla (My Golden Bengal)’ is a 1906 song written and composed by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the first ten lines of which were adopted in 1972 as the Bangladesh national anthem. The word shonar literally means ‘made of gold’, but in the song shonar Bangla may be interpreted to either […]
Notorious song thief Pritam Chakraborty, the Carlos Mencia of Bombay, lifted a K-pop song for ‘Pehli Nazar (First Glance),’ used in Race (thanks, brown_dbd). He ‘worked’ on Gangster, which was set in South Korea, so you just knew a K-lift was inevitable.
What I like about the video above is that someone’s gone to the effort […]
Barely had Pakistanis broken out the mithai and bhangra at the swearing in of a new Prime Minister and the release of judges including boss judge Iftikhar Chaudhry, when the heavies winged in to watch over their investment:
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Richard Boucher, […]
To enjoy Abbas-Mastan’s Race, you have to quickly make peace with the rules of the film’s very particular universe. Among the most important of these is that no time need be wasted on subtle characterisations. Everyone comes with convenient identif…
The Tata Sky programme schedule has a new spin on the Oedipal undercurrents in many Hindi films. The synopsis for the cult Mithun musical Disco Dancer reads thus:After his mother’s death Jimmy finds himself unable to perform. Will he be able to recover…
The indie comedy Bheja Fry came out the week I left Bombay, and I just got around to seeing it this weekend. It’s a decent if lightweight timepass. The poster of Rajat Kapoor throttling Vinay Pathak (Manorama Six Feet Under) struck me as a village comedy, but it’s anything but — it’s an urban […]
Here’s what Google Suggest thinks people are searching on when you type the phrase ‘Indians are’:
Naturally, it’s been Googlebombed