[This is a quick impression of the first 100 pages, not a review.]
Bloodletting & Miracle Cures by Vincent Lam won Canada’s Giller Prize and has a nice blurb by Margaret Atwood. But it’s actually a poor man’s ER, medical drama written in simplistic, down-at-the-heels prose. One interesting bit concerns cadaver dissection, when female med student […]

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 […]

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 […]

NBC recently ran a human interest segment on how Raj Bhavsar dealt with not making the Olympic team in ‘04. Two words: naked yoga.

A cute medical tech ad tips its hat to Indian docs serving in villages. What are probably more in demand, sadly, are portable ultrasound machines.
Update:
The track is “Oceanic, Part 2″ by Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale from the album Breathing Under Water and features Ravi Shankar. [Link]

Here’s an ad for Konami’s Doko Demo Yoga, a 3D yoga trainer for the Nintendo DS. The ad makes me laugh, because the dulcet, artificially perky tones of J-babes on TV are the exact opposite of becoming comfortable in your yogic skin. They remind me of some salseras from Japan whom I’ve danced with, highly […]

(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 […]

A Meerut shyster hawks a street aphrodisiac, and his patter about the social virtuousness of stiffies on demand is hilarious. In Hindi with subtitles (NSFW).

You know what goes well with arugula? Steak.

Strolling through my local megagrocery, I noticed the salad dressing aisle has been taken over by questionable vegetarian. Don’t believe me? Check the labels: a third of the dressings are made by Wishbone, named after a bone you wish upon and break after gnawing on a dead chicken. […]

In fiction at least, if not in Hollywood, desi doctors get to anchor ER teams. Take Bloodletting & Miracle Cures, the Giller Prize-winning story collection by young ER doc Vincent Lam, and his character Sri, M.D.:
Winner of Canada’s Giller Prize, Lam… an emergency room physician, looks beyond blood and guts… Fitz (short for Fitzgerald) has […]

Tavalon is movin’ on. Sonny Caberwal, he of the Kenneth Cole campaign, has closed his Union Square tea bar. Apparently the future of tea is online, which makes this Feb. 22 India Today story a little stale:
He co-owns the… Tavalon tea bar in New York and also runs a consulting business in San Francisco. [Link]

[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…

After posting about My Good Name Is Lenin, I learned filmmaker Kavita Pillay is a friend of a friend and a total sweetheart. Besides film, Kavita also haunts Boston crafts stores. She’s part of the young knitters brigade, who do it not out of gender expectations but purely for the fun of it.
So her other […]

The man who drank enough colloidal silver to turn his skin blue went on CNN last month and said he’s fine, really. His blueberry days are neither ionic nor ironic:

Karason said it had had “profound benefits”: his sinus problems, his arthritis, and his acid reflux went away… [Link]
A survivalist and libertarian with the same condition […]