Reading this news item about the possibilities of “laboratory-grown meat” got me thinking about the two or three times in my life I’ve flirted with vegetarianism. As a child, after seeing a struggling chicken being carried to its doom through a l…
I was talking with someone recently about various aspects of movie-reviewing and book-reviewing, and one of the things that came up was the idea of unevenness: how it’s possible for a film to be transcendentally beautiful in some ways while at the sa…
(Quick impression of the first few pages, not a review.)
Here’s an excerpt from Marsha Mehran’s Rosewater and Soda Bread, an Iranian-Irish novel not nearly as interesting as it could have been. It begins with yet another exotic-female-meets-white-guy-at-her-ethnic-restaurant cliché like The Mistress of Spices, Chocolat, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and so on. An Irish character [...]
I once had a college roommate who grew up in South Lake Tahoe but had never been skiing. ‘That’s for tourists,’ he sniffed. And the same was in my years in New York. I was proud of living in a place where you could ignore three great desi arts events every Saturday. While if you [...]
The Indian love of peace didn’t leave South Africa with Gandhi, as hundreds of convicted murderers, rapists and smugglers embrace yoga.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest prison populations, despite only having about 48 million inhabitants. Groenpunt Prison is home to the most violent and fights were common. An offshoot of the Art [...]
So Dr. Sanjay Gupta, 39, will get to wear the three shoulder stars of surgeon general in the Obama administration (thanks, Sunil). At first blush this seems like the freebie appointment after the gravitas ones are done: people are playing paper football, everyone’s a little punchy, and someone pipes up, ‘Hey, what about that Goopta [...]
Here’s a roundup of election results for candidates and propositions further down the ticket:
Ashwin Madia (would-be D-MN): Fell a few points short in a race to replace a retiring Republican Congressman. When it became apparent the ex-Marine was competitive, Nancy Pelosi and other senior Dems pulled out all the stops in campaigning for him.
Rep. Bill [...]
[This is a quick impression of the first 100 pages, not a review.]
Bloodletting & Miracle Cures by Vincent Lam won Canada’s Giller Prize and has a nice blurb by Margaret Atwood. But it’s actually a poor man’s ER, medical drama written in simplistic, down-at-the-heels prose. One interesting bit concerns cadaver dissection, when female med student [...]
After the sad passing of Sameer and Vinay, I wanted to share a story with a happier ending. Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s and the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., wrote about our mutual friend Shalini Malhotra’s accident in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Shalini used to edit the first desi zine I ever [...]
SAJA is reporting that bone marrow drive inspiration Vinay Chakravarthy passed away today at 29. I didn’t know him well but went to college with his brother Bharath, who’s a sweetheart. Here’s a three-minute interview with Vinay on how he found out he had leukemia.
Both Vinay and Sameer Bhatia found bone marrow donors through unprecedented [...]
NBC recently ran a human interest segment on how Raj Bhavsar dealt with not making the Olympic team in ‘04. Two words: naked yoga.
A cute medical tech ad tips its hat to Indian docs serving in villages. What are probably more in demand, sadly, are portable ultrasound machines.
Update:
The track is “Oceanic, Part 2″ by Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale from the album Breathing Under Water and features Ravi Shankar. [Link]
Here’s an ad for Konami’s Doko Demo Yoga, a 3D yoga trainer for the Nintendo DS. The ad makes me laugh, because the dulcet, artificially perky tones of J-babes on TV are the exact opposite of becoming comfortable in your yogic skin. They remind me of some salseras from Japan whom I’ve danced with, highly [...]
(a.k.a. Harold and Kumar Go to Chai Castle)
After gorging on kati rolls this weekend, my cousin the orchestra conductor decided he just had to have some masala chai. I vaguely remembered a Midtown chaat house I’d been to once six years ago which began with the letter ‘A.’ We texted GOOGL and settled on Amma [...]