Indian-Polish-Am actor Danny Pudi went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last Thursday night. The Chicagoan talked about Polish moustaches, Polish dance, how his parents met in an English class, and how he had to play three Sanjays in ‘07. His new, generically-named show Community:
From Dan Harmon (”The Sarah Silverman Program”) and Emmy Award-winning directors Joe and Anthony Russo (”Arrested Development”) comes “Community,” a smart comedy series about a band of misfits who attend Greendale Community College… Also among the series stars who comprise the group are comedy legend Chevy Chase (”Chuck”) as Pierce, a man whose life experience has brought him infinite wisdom… Danny Pudi (”Greek”) as Abed, a pop culture junkie… [Link]
I was in my teens. He was in his thirties. I reached his shoulder. We shook hands when we met and, after our last meeting, he kissed my hand. He’s the only man who swung me around a tree, a la Tarzan, and I was more than happy to be his Jane because it’s not every day that a little Indian girl gets to clutch on to Patrick Swayze (may he rest in peace). Yes, ladies and gents, I have danced with the Dirty Dancer himself. When I read about his passing the other day, I realised just how insidious the impact of bad movie-making is. In my head there rolled a soft-focus flashback of me and Patrick Swayze whizzing around a fake tree in the middle of a film set. Add some falsetto singing and it could be a moment from “Pocahontas”. This is particularly ironic because I honestly didn’t find him particularly lustworthy when I met him. I’d been expecting Johnny Castle and instead there stood before me a man who was blonde, strangely square and much shorter than I’d expected. It was entirely disappointing even though Patrick Swayze was very sweet. After all, he did voluntarily take a hefty teenager in his arms and heave her around tree (and only because I’d mentioned how much I envied Tarzan being able to swing from tree to tree). He remains to this day the most buff man I’ve clutched and I do remember being a little unnerved by how bumpy his muscular body felt. It was a bit like being clasped to a road paved by giant cobblestones. That was the moment I decided that never again do I want to meet anyone I have a crush on: I imagine them much better than God or genetics could.
Kunaal Roy Kapur (The President is Coming) and Sophie Chaudhary(Pyaar Ke Side Effects / The Side Effects of Love) perform an airplane scene in 1-888-DIAL-INDIA, my buddy Anuvab Pal’s new play which is playing the NCPA in Bombay. The absurdist rhythm of the conversation is so signature Pal, the same ear for leering, prodding language in all his plays and movies. It’s as if he were hovering over the actors, a tart-mouthed spectral presence, or perhaps a sedated, non-racist Mamet.
Pal’s plays eventually wend their way across the gully to New York at the very least — can’t wait.
Here’s the trailer for Abhay Deol and Dev Benegal’s Road, Movie, which premiered at Toronto (thanks, Joolz).It’s a cloying trailer, a Cinema Paradiso on wheels, plainly aiming for the international Monsoon Weddingaudience.
I’ve seen a wonderful photo series, perhaps by Raghubir Singh, on hand-cranked movies in the Rajasthani desert. The traveling projectionist story is tailor-made for classic movie homage and local color. Throw in a little violence and it’s got Tarantino written all over it: Inglourious Kaminey.
Even when you’re aware of the extent of Christian fundamentalism in America, it’s surprising to read this news item about the British film Creation not finding distributors in the US because Charles Darwin and evolution are still considered loaded subjects. I was talking recently with a friend about religious intolerance/sensitivity in India probably being greater today than it was 50 years ago, when a revered prime minister was known to be agnostic; today, it’s highly doubtful that an Indian PM or a state chief minister (in north or central India at least) would be able to criticize organised religion or the idea of a personal God as sharply as Nehru did in Discovery of India (a book that was recommended reading for the country’s youngsters). Perhaps this is true of the US too.
A few days ago I re-watched a favourite old film, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, about the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The movie is based on the real-life Scopes Trial of 1925 and it stars one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors, the 60-year-old Spencer Tracy, as a rationalist lawyer who defends the schoolteacher, fiercely challenges literalist interpretations of the Bible and refers to the Book in a decidedly offhand manner. In light of recent developments, this film seems more topical and bolder than ever.
I am reading from Arzee the Dwarf this Saturday in Crossword Bookstore, Hyderabad, and will be in conversation with the poet Sridala Swami. Here are the details of the event:
Saturday September 19, 5.30 pm Crossword Bookstore, City Center, 1st Floor, Shop No. 101-108, Junction of Road No. 1 & 10, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad - 500 034.
And one of the pleasures of the last three months has been the opportunity to speak about the book: a chance to answer questions instead of asking them, and to speak not just about my novel but about literature, classics, reading, and reviewing (and about writing this weblog). So I'm taking the opportunity to also put up a list of links to Arzee-related interviews in newspapers and journals, and on some weblogs. Here they are: the Hindu, the Deccan Herald, DNA, Rediff (this one seems to have made me plenty of enemies), Book Nook and Scribbles and Stories.
If don't sound like the same person across these interviews (the only one for which I actually wrote answers is the penultimate one), this only shows, I think, that interviewers are also interpreters, and hear and transmit the rhythms of a person's voice differently from one another.
The British Library revealed it has made its vast archive of world and traditional music available to everyone, free of charge, on the internet including these from India.
The writer Alain de Botton has, by middle age and across a series of books (How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety), more or less perfected a form of freewheeling, though not flabby, rumination upon a chosen subject. His work embraces, without limiting itself to the understood boundaries of, philosophy, autobiographical meditation, literary criticism and travel writing, generating a fluid and fertile compound of all these elements. The criticism that has sometimes been made of his writing is that it has too much synthesis, and can therefore be synthetic; the writer already knows so many impressive things that he sells himself short on original thought and legwork. But that is not an objection that can be made about de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
De Botton has set out to write “a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace”. His book is also an investigative report into our highly industrialized, synchronized and globalized civilization. As de Botton says, we live our days surrounded by machines and processes “of which we have only the loosest grasp”. Is specialization of labour making for a life of dignity, increased prosperity, and independence, or are we being turned invisibly into cogs in the wheel, alienated, as Marx argued, not just from the very goods and services we produce but also from each other? What is the ever-expanding reach of the hyperbolic language of advertising and PR-speak doing to language itself, to our capacity to trust in words? What is globalization doing to our awareness of the local and its specific rhythms? These are some of the questions taken up by de Botton.
Armed with a photographer (the book has about a hundred black-and-white photographs), de Botton sets out to explore activities as diverse as fishing in the Maldives and cargo shipping, career counselling and entrepreneurship. His study of supermarkets suggests to him that, even as our access to goods from around the world has grown enormously, our understanding of their origins and history has shrunk. “We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods," he remarks, "as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.”
A poor laborer in Russia has become a YouTube star for his a cappella skillz with Hindi songs. It’s all the more impressive because of the intense racism in Russia toward migrant workers like Tajik Jimmy:
… Mr. [Baimurat] Allaberiyev, widely known as Tajik Jimmy, [is] a migrant worker in a provincial Russian stockroom who delivers astonishing renditions of Bollywood musical numbers… as a younger man [he] herded sheep in his native Tajikistan for a salary of one lamb per month…
Allaberiyev cannot walk through a crowd in the Russian capital without being stopped by fans… the voice seems to come out of nowhere — a clear, warbling Hindi falsetto, complete with percussion and twanging sitar solos. For an impoverished boy growing up on a Tajik collective farm, there was no greater pleasure than Bollywood films, which were approved by the Communist Party as a politically safe diversion…
He was singing in the storeroom at a hardware store in the mall in May 2008 when the store’s head of security filmed him with his cellphone. The guard sent the clip to his brother in Moscow, who posted it online, and Mr. Allaberiyev’s fame blossomed… During an interview with The New York Times he asked for money to replace three teeth that were knocked out in April, when he was attacked by thugs… [NYT]
Allaberiyev’s fame reminds me of the time when a family I was having dinner with in Moscow pulled out an entire dresser’s worth of Bollywood videotapes from beneath their TV, caressing them lovingly. But he won’t long be singing filmi music:
He hopes to position Mr. Allaberiyev as a “world music” star, leaving behind Bollywood imitations for a repertory of Afghan and Central Asian folk songs. [NYT]
He sings both male and female parts as well as beatbox and strings. Here he sings ‘Goron Ki Na Kalon Ki‘ from Disco Dancer. Voilà, his art:
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never go up against a Pathan when death is on the line.
What political will we had in the months following 9/11 was squandered by Dubya in the pointless war in Iraq. Eight years on we should have located, tried and hung bin Laden and have been well clear of boots on the ground in Afghanistan, the Good War. Instead we’re dithering over sending ever more of our weary troops, knowing full well that a deployment short of hundreds of thousands will not bring security, and a light footprint strategy for counterinsurgency still requires more troops than we’ve got.
Meanwhile the feudal lords of Pakistani Punjab wait patiently across the border, fitfully backing the Taliban one day, offering one up as an example the next, fickle as a weather vane. Like a dental infection, the Taliban will never be defeated while they have sanctuaries to melt back into in Pakistan, and while we back another corrupt, vote-stuffing narco-junta which fails to fulfill the basic functions of government.
Fresh thinking is needed. Eight years later, we shouldn’t still be there.
Indian policeman Daya Shankar Singh fixes his mustache in Allahabad, India, on Wednesday. He is paid $2 as allowance for his mustache from the office of the Allahabad Police Department's Deputy Inspector General, according to Singh. [ via]
This past weekend was definitely full of labor (of love.)
I headed out to Oakland on Friday to work on Sanjay's book. I knew there was a lot to do before Tuesday's deadline, but I didn't realize I would be at his place for 4 days straight! It's been great seeing this book from its early stages in March ‘07 all the way to the final details. It feels special to be part of this project and to have Sanjay in my daily life ever since I got to SF. I've dedicated myself to *PMH and it's inspiring to have someone close in my life working on the same foundation, South Asian pop culture.
I can't wait for this book to drop, it's gonna make a lot of waves.
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Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never go up against a Pathan when death is on the line.
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