U.S. immigration allegedly advised a Mississippi shipyard on how to conduct surprise illegal deportations of their skilled Indian metalworkers:

As it rushed to repair offshore oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, [a Missouri shipyard] hired about 500 skilled metalworkers from India… Once the workers realized they would not receive green cards, many complained of fraud…
… the “direction” [...]

Ghee Happy’s deeply satisfying big brother, Ramayana: Divine Loophole, just went live on the Chronicle Books site. Or, if you can wait a couple of weeks, you can pre-order for $10 less on Amazon.
From what limited previews I’ve seen, the book’s art style is somewhat reminiscent of Sita Sings the Blues in that it’s bright, [...]

We’ve added free classifieds at: ultrabrown.com/classifieds
You can buy and sell stuff, post or find housing, jobs, gigs, volunteering and so on.
Ever since the halcyon days of desi blogging, we’ve joked about putting together a personals site called Sepia Destiny. Yes we can. We decided against a casual encounters section for now — surely that’s what [...]

Screw you, matrimonial site, for creating the most deceptive, ad network-mandated close button possible. It’s catty-corner to the standard location, the opposite of the standard color and as small as possible. For following me all over the Net if I’ve ever so much as breathed on the Times of India online. And for covering my [...]

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 [...]

In a fated pairing of retro cool, Nike and Cornershop teamed up for an ad called ‘Chalk’ starring terror of the court LeBron James:

It’s a cavalcade of mashups. Cornershop is redoing black music from the ’70s, and its album covers are a nod to blaxploitation flicks. Setting LeBron to their music is just repayment in [...]

You can now get Ultrabrown on the ebook reader whose name evokes Fahrenheit 451. Click to subscribe.
The Kindle biz model is odd: Amazon’s charging Kindle customers $2 a month per blog, the sort of nickel-and-diming that wireless companies are infamous for. And they’re cutting blogs in for 30%, when the usual margins are the reverse [...]

The continuing adventures of taro root man: taro almond tea at Fantasia, a high-end Asian tea café at Santana Row, San Jose.
Update: The next evening I’m sitting yet again at a sleek little East Asian café, having another taro root milk tea, hold the pearls. Bless their flavas.
We can’t desis have nice fast food cafes? [...]

American Idol is the canonical maudlin, mainstream music show, but Anoop Desai’s remarkable run matters. He matters because he’s a test case challenging the music industry’s ‘rule’ that those who can’t be shoehorned into the U.S.’s dominant racial categories are unmarketable. The show’s producers went out of their way to fuck with Desai, and it [...]

Salman Rushdie wrote (weakly) about sexual fetishists in Fury:

His secret sexual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra… meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him…
Here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything sexual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most sexually uninhibited, her masochistic excesses — now [...]

The wonderful comedic actor Debargo Sanyal’s contribution to the national dialogue is a New York state lottery ad.
Related posts: El Debargo, ‘The President’ in New York, Reclaiming Apu

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit sounds like he hired an accent removal coach. The result is this synthetic American accent where the hard, Germanic sounds are aspirated, sometimes exaggeratedly, and a softer Indian English accent still peeks through like a mujra behind a marble screen.
Bully for self-reinvention, I say, and adapting to your audience. But did [...]

I had an errand to run at the Chennai West Toyota dealership this afternoon. Five bored salesdudes clustered like vultures around the door. I was dressed casually, and all of them developed a sudden fascination with their shoelaces while the manager pointed me to the desi guy. He seemed disappointed as he showed me to [...]

Manu Narayan (Bollywood Dreams, The Love Guru) stars in a new campaign during The Daily Show which features the gayest, most mustachioed alcohol mascot on TV. These too speak to a male fantasy, but the Rangpur ones were funnier.
My all-time favorite Narayan clip is him crooning ‘More than Verds’ with Mike Myers: