George Dubya Bush may already have enabled the next 9/11, says a heavily researched NYT story printed this morning:
Leading terrorism experts have warned that it is only a matter of time before a major terrorist attack planned in the mountains of Pakistan is carried out on American soil… “The base of operations has moved only […]
The Institute for Contemporary Art is currently floating a large ‘Kapoor’ banner into the Boston skyline. It advertises their Anish Kapoor retrospective, for which they had to slice a hole in the side of their brand-new architectural showcase.
But all I can think of as I’m being driven past on the Silver Line is that levitating […]
Delhi and Bangalore saw their first gay pride marches over the weekend, along with Calcutta. But at least one masked lucha libre bhenji didn’t want to risk it:
Yesterday was the biggest day in the life of one 26-year-old insurance agent in Delhi, yet he came to the city’s long-awaited first gay parade hiding behind a […]
[From a column I did for Business Standard]I recently realised that this month marks 10 years since I first got an Internet connection at home. (I was a Net user for a year or so before that, but only sporadically, at a tech-savvy friend’s house – …
John W Hood’s Beyond the World of Apu: The Films of Satyajit Ray, published by Orient Longman, is a very low-profile book – I can find hardly anything on it online – but a very rewarding one. The essays here are elegantly and carefully written, a…
After the sad passing of Sameer and Vinay, I wanted to share a story with a happier ending. Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s and the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., wrote about our mutual friend Shalini Malhotra’s accident in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Shalini used to edit the first desi zine I ever […]
Two headlines yesterday, side-by-side:
Robert Mugabe’s Militia Burn Opponent’s Wife Alive
Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe Stripped of Knighthood
Even Ceausescu was knighted. But enjoy the title, Sir Salman, Sir Ben.
Vidiadhar had the right idea the first time around.
Related posts: Plus ça change, Brown sahib
The very funny Iraq war satire War, Inc. plays like Idiocracy meets Halliburton. Ben Kingsley plays an evil mastermind in a fitted suit painting something like Guernica by numbers. (Subtle this movie isn’t.) As a CIA muckamuck, he mimics Dubya’s overly aggressive hand gestures, stiff, arm-swinging walk and acquired Southern accent. With a gun he […]
SAJA is reporting that bone marrow drive inspiration Vinay Chakravarthy passed away today at 29. I didn’t know him well but went to college with his brother Bharath, who’s a sweetheart. Here’s a three-minute interview with Vinay on how he found out he had leukemia.
Both Vinay and Sameer Bhatia found bone marrow donors through unprecedented […]
The movie version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is playing in a couple of theatres in the city, including the PVR in Saket’s Select Mall and the pointlessly named PVR-Europa in Gurgaon. (I think Europa was originally meant to screen…
Last night’s Daily Show poked fun at this over-the-top campaign ad for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), co-chair of the Senate India Caucus and a man famous for being cussed out by John McCain:
Aside from the hilarity of the ad itself, the soundtrack sounds very A.R. Rahman — small bell, tabla-like drum, violin track which leans […]
The self-effacing Junot Díaz gives some love to Suzanna Arundhati Roy in an interview on the cover of this week’s Improper Bostonian:
Three books you’d take to a deserted island.
Beloved, because it’s the one book about the American experience that gets it right. Akira, because it’s the greatest science fiction story ever told and because […]
Greetings from Bury Park is journie Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir about growing up working class in Luton. Manzoor’s Pakistani father worked at the Vauxhall auto factory, his mother sewed piecework out of her living room, and Manzoor fled to college to avoid being stifled by his conservative father, ’six-foot-five and built like a brick house.’ Along […]
After seeing The Happening, I’m convinced that Manoj Shyamalan is the George Lucas of horror.
Hear me out on this.
There are some things Shyamalan/Lucas do quite well: Concept. Carefully-framed visuals. Shyamalan builds his filmi lasagnas with layers upon layers of symbolism: the compressed start and end times of 9/11, references to ’50s English poetry. The old […]