Zeb & Haniya and qawwal Javed Bashir collaborate on ‘Chal Diye’: outstanding. This song sounds vaguely like Pink Floyd plus qawwali, and the whole studio series is ear candy.

Related post: Archive dive 1

Boston.com's The Big Picture has a feature on recent Hindu festivals. The comments are almost as good as the photos.

For those of you more into books than any other strand of this site, I’ve just started blogging literature at vij.com …

… and microblogging books at twitter.com/manish_vij. Will not be restricting myself to South Asian lit. Do follow me there for book-specific and longer-form writing posted ~weekly.

The desi bits will be crossposted here, and Ultrabrown will remain ~daily. I’ll be bringing on some additional bloggers here while on sabbatical to finish the novel. Still posting, just less.

After an eight-year legal fight, Malaysian Knockoff Uncle finally wins one against a multinational, against McDonald’s:

… the Federal Court in Kuala Lumpur ruled that there was no evidence to show McCurry was trying to pass itself off as part of the McDonald’s empire. [BBC]

And the legal win is all because of the little-known Scottish-Punjabi community of Malaysia whose traditional food is the two-minute chicken curry.

No? That wasn’t the alibi provided by Kanageswary and P. Suppiah (video)? Ah well, the one they used is about as plausible:

The owner of McCurry insists its “Mc” prefix is an abbreviation for Malaysian Chicken Curry. [BBC]

Now trademark infringement is not exactly, how should we put this, unknown to desis. I’ve lost track of all the Sony Markets I’ve seen in Bombay. But trademark law in America, at least, evaluates whether there is customer confusion and whether the accused infringer would harm the infringee’s market. By those standards, McCurry is clearly inspired but not infringing. McD’s would have a case should McCurry ever start flipping hamburgers.

If you haven't noticed thus far (or simply don't read the paper), Mint Lounge now has a space for poetry on the books page every Saturday.

Although it is, for now, only a small space – down in the bottom-right corner, enough for about a sonnet or a bit longer – the idea is to provide a room for the best Indian poets of today to declaim from. Today's poem, "War Poetry", is by Aseem Kaul, and here is last week's poem by Anjum Hasan, "Distant Gods":

Distant Gods
by Anjum Hasan

When the bombs go off and there is blood all over the TV,
he'll be sitting in some human corner of the world,
drinking his tea, stunned by the impersonal reach
of his act, just as you are by how far this screaming thing
has travelled - translated by distance into helplessness
at being dumb witness again to the guts-spilled-open
suffering of random strangers.

And this is how we realise the world's grown-up -
by knowing that the act of twisting a knife
inside the warm heart of your enemy on a summer night
is far too local a measure of your loathing, while to kill people
you do not know and will never see is to speak a language
of the universe that can be relayed on the TV.


And an old post: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare".

A friend argues that Jay Sean’s ‘Ride It’ lifts its background melody…

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A businessman whose father was killed by an infection acquired at the hospital, argues that Obama is going about health care reform all wrong, and he cites Atul Gawande’s push for medical checklists:

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande [advocating] a simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization… deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people. [Atlantic]

It’s a fascinating read. The nut of the article is that we think insurance is free only because it’s pre-deducted from our paychecks and depresses our wages. We’re actually paying for a massive insurance bureaucracy, and removing our names from the checks hospitals see distorts the price and quality signals in a free market. Variable pricing is rampant; bills are inflated up to ten times what insurance companies actually pay. Many hospitals will refuse to even quote a price for a procedure because they want to avoid price comparisons and their real customers are insurers rathe than individuals.

Goldhill argues that insurance ought to handle catastrophic events only, the same way we buy auto or house insurance. Ongoing medical costs should be paid out-of-pocket in a transparent fashion. Laser eye surgery, an elective procedure usually paid out-of-pocket, has fallen in price by 80% over the last few years; the same would happen if you were paying directly rather than through a middleman and could transparently compare cost and quality.

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First there was the Indian writer in English, and it was good. Then came the Pakistani writer in English, and some say it was better. Now it is Bangladesh’s turn. Of course, if Shazia Omar's depiction of Bangladeshi youth is anywhere near authentic then it's going to be tough for them to string a sentence together through that haze of smack, yabba and other vein-snapping drugs. Her novel "Like a Diamond in the Sky" is a little gem that blindingly sparkly in parts and cloudy in others. When she hurtles through the electric rush of a high and the painful crackle of withdrawal, the novel is intense enough to make you hold your breath as you race through the words that make up her sentences. It isn't an easy read because of what she's describing and also because she smoothly inserts Bangla slang into her storytelling like an expert dealer who slips that little packet into his client's palm with sure-fingered subtlety. There's no glossary to decode meanings,  not that you really need it. The meaning of turquing or khor or dosto isn't too hard to figure out but you piece the meanings together as you read and they linger in your memory. Turquing, for example, is one word that has been haunting me. I'm left remembering all the friends whom I've witnessed trying to survive those moments when their bodies bite into themselves because they need another hit so damn badly.

It's when Omar gives in to the temptation to become the bard of Bangladesh that her novel becomes slack. There are sections of "Like a Diamond in the Sky" when the omniscient narrator decides to pontificate upon the state of the nation and Omar tries to weave this into the storytelling but it's an awkward fit. This need to insert a social commentary so that a novel isn't only the story of a set of characters but also the nation in a nutshell is a cross that South Asian authors eagerly take upon their shoulders only to crumple under its weight. Almost every postcolonial South Asian author wants to write something that is relevant, insightful and somehow holds up a mirror to the society they see around them. For some reason, it isn't enough to tell a story and build characters. Jhumpa Lahiri's works have to be a chorus for the middle class non-resident Indian in America. Amitav Ghosh's novel has to be steeped in accurate history that shows India in detail-heavy authenticity. Not that any of this is a bad thing but I really wish sometimes that our writers would just have fun with their writing and tell us a story. And not in the silly way that pulp authors like Chetan Bhagat do. The problem is we don't value fun enough to realise that quality entertainment is as hard to craft as philosophical truths.

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Jay Sean’s ‘Down’ is #2 on the current Billboard U.S. Top 100 after the Black Eyed Peas, above tracks by Jay-Z, Rihanna and Kanye; Mariah Carey; Shakira; Flo Rida and Ne-Yo; Lady Gaga; and Beyoncé. Wow.

The last time a desi artist rose this high on the Billboard 100 was M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes,’ which hit #4 (thanks, Joolz). Excluding M.I.A., when was the last time a desi artist rose this high on U.S. charts? Soundgarden, Tony Kanal, Queen? I fear this because it means my brother will put it on repeat x 10.

This reminds me of the summer when the #1 U.S. movie and book were both done by desis. Was it M. Night and Jhumpa, with Sanjaya on the telly?

Our boy Soy Panday is staying busy these days, and not only by hittin the pavement with his board. His artwork is part of a group show down in L.A. at the end of September. I'm gonna try to head down there to finally meet up with him. The show is at the
Ghetto Gloss Gallery — 6109 Melrose Ave.
Definitely check it out if you're in town.

Here's the flyer with all the information about the show.

Another project he was recently involved with was this music video for a song called Chicken Masala by the french group Le Drum Beat. Holy shit, this video is way too funny. Go SOY!

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I’ve read several brilliant books in which I couldn’t point to a single memorable passage. Their excellence lies in the gentle accretion of detail, like overnight snowfall; they say things sideways rather than in a blaze of textual craftsmanship.

The funny, beautifully-written Atlas of Unknowns (plot summary) is the inverse of this. Debut novelist Tania James, 28, fills the book with beautiful, memorable passages and piquant wit. But the book suffers from a poverty of ambition. Unwilling to actually become a pirate or a commando or commit murder or go to war, I read to stretch my mind and profit by the experiences of others. This novel doesn’t offer that. Mired in a very middle-class sensibility, Atlas is gorgeous but trivial and bounded, content in a sandbox of its own making.

The central conflict, two separated sisters reuniting, is done with less pathos than any middling Bollyflick. The plot thrives in Kerala, where characters face actual privation and penury, and droops in NYC. The sister who walks out faces nothing more dangerous than a subway ride in mundane areas of Manhattan and Queens. A lesbian subplot meant to drive much of the drama is hinted at in the softest of terms before the author turns away. The character remains a bit of a cipher, and it comes across as unwillingness to go there rather than elegant restraint. The book is terminally G-rated, well-crafted auntie lit which never lets its freak flag fly. The author either hasn’t truly lived or is unwilling to share it.

It’s one thing for a novel like No Onions Nor Garlic to stick to light comedy. But James has greater ambitions. She writes in a literary style, and in the U.S. at least, Atlas isn’t saddled with the dreaded sari cover. It feels like the author is content to bite off something rather less than she’s capable of. Tony D’Souza’s Whiteman, in contrast, is written in fairly spare language. But he joined the Peace Corps, traveled through West Africa and wrote an Ivory Coast novel of considerable emotional heft.

This has less to do with the subject matter, the emotions of intimates, and more with the author’s predilections. Mavis Gallant’s stories also focus on relationships between mothers and sisters. But, like The Remains of the Day, they pack a hidden punch, focusing on trivialities on the surface, plumbing deep drama beneath.

Though fundamentally unambitious, Atlas is great fun to read. James skewers American foreign policy, capricious visa denials, Orientalism, Malayali hypocrisy, the upper class in Kerala, and especially documentary filmmakers. Boy, does she have it in for NYC documentary-wale (her undergrad degree was in film). She shouts out to the locals: an auntie with a Namaste America-style talk show writes large checks to the IAAC, and much of the action is set in Jackson Heights.

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Seen on a DVD shelf in Planet M this morning, a box-set titled “Black and White gems from Hindi cinema”. Three films - Ardhangini, Kath Putli, Ram aur Shyam.

And on the cover of the DVD, a large, urgent sticker that reads: “The film Ram aur Shyam in this package is in full colour.”

At the Jaipur literature festival earlier this year, a group of authors were asked about the role their home countries played in their work, and whether they felt the need to be spokespersons for their cultures. The standard reply (and the one you’ll hear from most cosmopolitan writers) was, “No, I don’t carry that baggage.” But the Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam admitted that she felt a strong responsibility towards her country, “perhaps because there are so few writers who are presenting the realities of Bangladesh. I’m not saying that I want to write a history textbook disguised as a novel, but I do have political stakes”.

I was thinking about this while reading Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky, a fine new addition to Bangladeshi fiction in English. This is a fast-paced story set in Dhaka, about young heroin addicts whose “fixes” help them temporarily cocoon themselves from life’s rough realities (and from well-meaning family members). It’s driven by characters and vignettes, centering mainly on an alienated young junkie named Deen and his friend AJ (“Khor2core”, they call themselves, Khor being Bangla for “addict”), but it’s also a book that has political stakes. There are little asides about the social and economic issues facing modern Bangladesh: the disaffection of youngsters who regard themselves as both God-forsaken and GOB-forsaken (GOB = Govt of Bangladesh), the widening of the rich-poor divide, the conflicts between conservative and liberal attitudes, the frequent hollowness of the country’s democracy.

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In last night’s America’s Best Dance Crew, the teams fumbled through mudras, Rye Rye and M.I.A. After years of watching Bollywood massacre adapt moves from hip-hop and salsa, it’s fun to see the sharing flow the b-boy way. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing Madhuri try a standing backflip someday.

Update: Watch the video here.