When we’re old and withered, will ‘Come to Me’ be to us what ‘Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai’ was to the parental units?

Rafta, Rafta… (Slowly Slowly) is the first (relatively) big-budget desi play I’ve seen in New York, maybe the first ever. And that is notable in its own right. The production has enough funding to splash out on an eye-catching set. It’s a play, not a Bombay Dreams-style musical, though DJ Rekha contributed the bhangra. The [...]

The narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s new novel Something to Tell You is Jamal. He is half Pakistani-half English, slim, sexy and successful. Before becoming an analyst of the Freudian variety, he directed pornos, was beaten up by his sister Miriam, murdered a man and had a nervous breakdown (not in that order so don’t look [...]

Here are some key excerpts from Aravind Adiga’s excellent class revenge opus The White Tiger. On what fuels the Dickensian bitterness of the Indian underclass. How servants are kept in line:
He must have phoned his man in Laxmangarh… ‘He’s got a good family. They’ve never made any trouble… No history of supporting Naxals or other [...]

Bodhi Art Gallery organises talks with reasonable regularity. It is generally sparsely attended. A good show is one where 80% of the chairs are occupied. Yesterday, critic Ranjit Hoskote was in conversation with Atul Dodiya, one of the few artists who can cheerfully call himself a figurative painter without any fear of being outdated, and [...]

Licensing songs for movies is cool, and the Civic is virtually a Sri Lankan car. But Maya shilling for Bud Light is completely selling out. I mean, that swill is so weak it barely qualifies as beer:

(a.k.a. Harold and Kumar Go to Chai Castle)
After gorging on kati rolls this weekend, my cousin the orchestra conductor decided he just had to have some masala chai. I vaguely remembered a Midtown chaat house I’d been to once six years ago which began with the letter ‘A.’ We texted GOOGL and settled on Amma [...]

The swashbuckling hero of the movie which scarred desi kids with monkey brains and Thuggees is actually named after India, via Columbus, Native Americans and the Hoosier state:
The state’s name means “Land of the Indians”, or simply “Indian Land”. The name dates back to at least 1800, when Indiana Territory was created, at which time [...]

In this post about the Nargis biography Darlingji, I mentioned the splenetic Filmindia editor Baburao Patel, one of the most feared columnists of the 1950s. Well, here’s this inimitable gent again, holding forth on Roberto Rossellini’s affair with …

The White Tiger: Jai’s nailed it, Aravind Adiga’s novel is solid. Corrosive first person voice is like Animal’s People. A howl of anger, Richard Wright’s Native Son transported to Delhi. For anyone who’s wondered how what life as Indian underclass, as part of the ‘Darkness,’ the opposite of India Shining, is really like. Tips on [...]

Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:Infancy is her dis…

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay sounds like a plot summary, but the titular escape actually happens at the beginning of the movie. The rest of the flick lurches between random sketches like a Broken Lizard movie, delighting in its transgressions. This movie is off the charts on gross-out and gratuitousness. There’s the epic [...]

‘Mal De Mer’ by Rupa & the April Fishes is a free download for Zune owners this week, whch probably has something to do with it being April.
Zune focuses on indies because iPod has locked up the mainstream MP3 player market. It’s odd positioning for a behemoth like Microsoft. It’s also a funny switcheroo with [...]

The jacket of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger carries a blurb by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, and reading the book it struck me that the narrative framework is similar to that of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. That novella took…