At first blush, Anita Jain’s tale of trying to get hitched in Delhi sounds like classic chick lit. But Marrying Anita is stocked under travelogue, not self-help, and Jain is no Sophie Kinsella. The book is a surprisingly good read. It’s less a Hindu Portnoy’s Complaint than a memoir of a desi American in modern […]

Last week, Aasif Mandvi visited the Senator Larry Craig bathroom stall at the Republican National Convention and apparently had a party in his pantaloons.

A fictionalized account of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s death, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is an odd entry for the Booker longlist. It’s a satirical rant by a Zia hater who tries to do through literature what Pakistan could not do in real life. Author and BBC Urdu chief Mohammed Hanif has his Zia anally […]

Here’s the trailer for I Can’t Think Straight, with its fumbly yet potentially iconic scenes of Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth getting it on. But it’s actually director Shamim Sarif’s second cross-cultural lesbian love story starring the same two actresses:

Her first is The World Unseen, a period piece about two women in South Africa during […]

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 […]

Nina’s Heavenly Delights is the latest badly-written desi flick to hit enough recognizable truths about the diaspora that it’s fun in spite of itself. It’s a Glaswegian lesbian romance interpreted chastely, as if for kids. The female leads nuzzle and kiss without tongue, lest director Pratibha Parmar offend the focus group, while the drag queens […]