It’s hard to gauge how well (the) Glastonbury (Festival) is known outside the UK, as…well, because I’m in the UK. You should know it, because it is the largest music and performing arts festival in the world [source]. Aside from this one line, it’s pretty hard to describe as it tends to be different for […]
Embarcadero, S.F., Fourth of July, in an ill-fated attempt to see fireworks long since cancelled at that spot:
Bandstand, Bandra, Feb. ‘07, in the general direction of Shah Rukh’s house:
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 […]
Here’s Maya Auralgasm with her visa marriage fiancé, Benjamin Brewer née Bronfman, who snarls like Hendrix for The Exit (ht: khoof).
Brewer comes from one of Canada’s wealthiest families and is the son of Warner Music Group chief executive officer and chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. [Link]
… The Exit[’s] biggest claim to fame might be having […]
Indira Gandhi being escorted around Pokhran, the site of India’s first nuclear test
Throughout its development, the device was formally called the “Peaceful Nuclear Explosive”, but it was usually referred to as the Smiling Buddha… as a signal to China… [It] was scheduled to occur on May 18, 1974 [on] Buddha Jayanti, a festival… marking the […]
A tribute to NY’s Chinatown, land of 80-cent red bean puffs, overpriced bubble tea and Net cafés full of young rowdies playing Counterstrike or powder puff racing for $2 an hour.
Taro root bun:
Anderson Cooper throttles a furry love puppet in front of a backdrop reading Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Hindi version of Sesame Street.
Here’s the title ref. Bollywood rivals American pop for double entendres. (thanks, MV)
Update:
Actress Nitya Vidyasagar, who plays Leela, was at last night’s gala, joined by the Galli Galli character Chamki, […]
‘Luncheon Party’ by Raghu Rai. (via Chasing Iamb)
Mike Myers rides an electric carpet which beeps when backing up, and he stumbles upon another kind of East India company. Ben Kingsley cameos as his cross-eyed godman. Manu Narayan, John Oliver, Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake clock in as well.
The new Love Guru trailer combines little witticisms with midget jokes which weren’t even funny […]
Photographer Nisha Sondhe is putting together an absolutely brilliant collection called Bombay v. New York. She rhymes the dhobi ghat with a laundromat, koli folk with a Chelsea fish market, Juhu Beach with the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, a farmer’s market with a sabzi mandi and so on. Others including Suketu Mehta see these […]
Achinta McDaniel’s LA-based dance company fused Lewis Carroll with Bollywood elements for last fall’s Paheliyan (Riddles): The Story of Alice:
Take one part ballet, toss in bits of tap, jazz and hip-hop, then blanket it all with a variety of Indian movement. You get Bollywood-Tech…
The original story remains intact, but there are changes. For […]
Congrats to Jenna Bush on getting married to the scion of the Haggar wrinkle-free pantaloon dynasty (
(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 […]
Carole Lombard and Sabu in 1938 on Sabu’s first visit to America.
As if heeding the Dalai Lama, the Tibet protesters in Harvard Square tonight took pains to say they were against the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. But after a couple of generations of propaganda, the prevailing opinion on Tibet seem to have converged with that of the Communist Party.
Unlike the Tibet protests in Union […]
Travel writer and veteran Time journalist Pico Iyer stopped by Harvard Book Store tonight to read from his new book The Open Road, a profile of the Dalai Lama. He said that five years ago when he began his book, he planned its release for this spring because he knew Tibetans would be protesting […]
These giant opera puppets are some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen — Westchester billionaires meet Burning Man. They’re from Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an opera at the Met, and they represent Indian collaborators with the British.
The libretto is comprised of Bhagavad Gita chants in Sanskrit, without subtitles. Hindu weddings really are like German […]
The Olympic torch and relay have been extinguished in Paris:
… thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed [in Paris] to protest the passage of the flame, forcing police officers to bring the torch onto a bus to try to protect it and causing the torch to be extinguished at least once. […]
A Tibet protester tried to wrestle the Olympic torch away from Bangla Brit TV presenter Konnie Huq in Notting Hill today. The protester appeared to be white, not ethnic Tibetan. The struggle:
‘… as I was running with the torch a guy broke out from the crowd and… tried to wrestle the torch off me. I […]
Hometown girl Jhumpa Lahiri, Boston University grad, made the cover of this week’s Improper Bostonian (thanks, G). She drew rockstar attendance at her MIT reading. The Boston public library system has over 200 hold requests for her new book. Its 300,000-copy first printing is from four to twelve times the sales of Rushdie’s last book, […]