Gray corn
Those who fancy themselves literary sophisticates consistently squeeze out cliché-ridden corn with a swirl of non sequitur exoticism when it comes to South Asian fiction. Take this NYT review, please:
[Sacred Games] was the subject of an intense bidding war among New York publishers, one apparently presided over by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, who bestowed upon this 45-year-old cherubic-faced author a seven-figure advance…
Like spices in an Indian auntie’s grinder, the book mixes English with Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and mobster vernacular. [Link]
Gag me with a bagel and lox. Why is the readership so undemanding?
If you can set aside the style, there are some interesting nuggets in this piece, like the title being reference to Krishna Leela:
“Murder [for gangsters] is part of the divine play of the Lord.” Thus Sacred Games… [Link]
The feedback Chandra refers to tends to come nonverbally 
Though Sacred Games was released in India last summer, Mr. Chandra has yet to receive feedback from mobsters… He met the Razor in his gangland den in south Mumbai. Though lacking formal education, the gangster spoke sophisticated Urdu and, Mr. Chandra observed at the time, wore very expensive European cologne… Shortly thereafter, the mobster was gunned down after rendezvousing with his lover alone, a foolhardy undertaking that the police, with whom the Razor was cozy, had discouraged…
In Mumbai, where Mr. Chandra’s family still lives, he communed with “a yoga-practicing vegetarian hit man…”
… [William Dalrymple:] the perception persists of “a bunch of middle-class guys who got out of India at the first possible opportunity living it up in Manhattan while passing themselves off as third world real McCoys…” [Link]
This is an adorable syncretic mashup:
Their home in Berkeley is an intriguing blend, with the requisite hot tub in the backyard and, in the front hall, a lotus-leaf menorah… [Link]
Has anyone seen this? It stars Anupam Kher, Mahima Chaudhry, Vikram Chatwal, Ranjit Chowdhry (the drag queen from Bollywood/Hollywood), and Amit Sial. Check out the trailer. Director Tanuja Chandra also did the Bollywood cheesefest Zindaggi Rocks:
His sister Tanuja Chandra’s first English-language film, Hope and a Little Sugar, a Muslim-Sikh love story set in New York right before Sept. 11, recently won best feature film at the South Asian International Film Festival in Manhattan… [Link]
[Amit Sial] starred in a lead role of Tim Suppel’s adapted version of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories… [Link]
Pankaj Mishra’s review in the New Yorker was predictably less clichéd.
Related posts: The book review as self-parody
on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007, 5:02 pm in Literature, Media › 
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My gosh, I just saw the clips for that film ‘Hope and a Little Sugar’ and it looks risible. A tediously worthy Sunday afternoon TV feature film, arrrrgggggghhh — and what’s with making the cliched angry sardarji the centre piece and instigator of post 9/11 prejudice when they were the first to be victimised, shot dead, beaten up? Way to go, fools! This crap won an award at some ‘South Asian’ film festival? Give me strength….
I just watched it again to make sure I was not hallucinating, but it is that bad, and Mahima Choudhry’s acting is spectacular in that aspect. Nice cleavage though.
Koo-koo-koo!
Anupam Kher is popping up in every NRI comedy, but his accent is atrocious. Aside from his performance in that Beckham film, he sounds like he just got finished smoking some you know what in his trailer before the take.
I’m sure you’ve read this before, but it pretty much describes most of the “non sequitur exotic” lit out there:
“Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class.” Bill Deresiewicz
Intergalactic civil war?
GENTRIFICATION!
How is this comment
less shallow/more glib than
??
That said, I certainly look forward to the book.
Though 900 pages is a trifle too much.
we don’t knock the book - it’s a rip-roaring hash of all bollywood cliches, but i cannot see how they are going to film a book that makes a masala of all the masalas. cringeworthy, eh?