Philosophical question for the day: if you’re a poet who has spent a lot of time and energy persuading an elephant-headed God to transcribe your opus, is it wise to include a scene where the hero of the epic (whom you repeatedly extol in the verse) p…
I have a feeling that Ekta’s Mahabharata will soon cease to be funny and settle down into the solemn blah-ness of all her daytime soaps. Episode 2 contained lots of the familiar camera whooshes and swishes, sudden zooms, intensely irritating combinat…
Once again, real life makes satire seem feeble. When I wrote this post about Ekta Kapoor’s Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharata Ki, I had no idea how summarily the actual show would outstrip my expectations. The first episode was telecast last night and thou…
Immigrants in superhero movies tend to be cast as either criminals or local color, to give their metropoli grittiness and veracity. Aasif Mandvi’s pizzeria owner in Spiderman 2 existed for little reason but to reassure audiences that yes, this is New York.
The drunk superhero movie Hancock is no exception. Pritam Singh Biring plays the token […]
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 […]
June sixth:
South Carolina drivers will be the first in the nation to be offered license plates that carry the phrase “I Believe” and a Christian cross over a stained-glass window… A proposal for an “I believe” plate in Florida failed in April. [Link]
Juneteenth:
A group that advocates separation of church and state filed a federal […]
We are talking about God and so we can’t be anything but authentic- Ekkta Kkapoor, announcing that the role of Baby Kkrishna in her Kahani Hamaaray Mahabharata Ki must be played by an infant who was born on last Janamashtmi.And here I was thinking th…
Hindu Temple Society president Uma Mysorekar bravely went on the Colbert Report last night to defend Hinduism. The shtick was that since Barack Obama left Jeremiah Wright’s church, Colbert will help him shop for another.
Mysorekar claimed that neither is Diwali over-commercialized, not does being Hindu involve guilt or sin. Methinks auntieji is fudging a bit […]
Now at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Love Guru is devoted to juvenile poo, pee and wee-wee jokes. Mike Myers seems locked into his Fat Bastard phase, and the movie is late-night cable fare with barely anything worth critiquing. Balls are kicked, midgets are clowned. This is Bad News Bears territory, insipid and inoffensive. […]
Ekta Kapoor’s soon-to-be-telecast production of the Mahabharata (retitled Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki, kyunki “K” ka hona zaroori hai) promises to change the landscape of mythological serials in much the same way that her daily dramas transfor…
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:
A man carrying a Nepali flag stands atop a statue of king Mahindra, an image destined to be as iconic as the Chinese protester in Tiananmen Square. In formally voting to become a republic yesterday, Nepal became the first country to drive its monarch from office since Iran.
It was also the last Hindu monarchy, an […]
Indiana Jones and the X-Files Rehash quotes a line from the Gita. You know which line. It’s the line every exoticist quotes. The one repeated by Oppenheimer and Michael Clayton. ‘He took it from the Hindu Bible,’ says Indy, which I suppose is one way of looking at it, though the Gita well predates the […]
West Virginia voters say why they voted in overwhelming numbers for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama (at 1:45):
I guess because he is another race. I’m sort of scared of the other race ’cause we have so much conflict with ‘em…
He’s Muslim, and that has a lot to do with it…
I don’t like the […]
Earlier this spring, Tony D’Souza released one of the finest novels about the South Asian diaspora, The Konkans, and promptly won a Guggenheim Fellowship. I bought him a beer, and he gave me a copy of his first novel.
Whiteman is based on D’Souza’s experiences as an aid worker living in a village in West Africa. […]
Congrats to Jenna Bush on getting married to the scion of the Haggar wrinkle-free pantaloon dynasty (
An early version of the Monkey King makeup; the final is much more subtle
On one hand, current box office champ The Forbidden Kingdom has Jet Li in blond capuchin hair playing Sun Wukong, the mischievous, powerful Monkey King. He flies around mountaintops, battling baddies with his magical bowstaff. All that’s missing is Hanuman’s inflated cheeks.
On […]
Pope Ratzinger, the most powerfully regressive voice on contraception and religions other than Catholicism, got front-page treatment today:
Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton attended an event called the Faith Forum, fumbling around in public about their love for an incarnation. Get a pew, you two.
And India is worse. This is a country where gurus […]
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 […]
I was a bit harsh with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions when I mentioned it in an earlier post. Having sped-read it at the time (out of idle curiosity, not for a review), my rough impression was that the narrative lacked intensity…