Courtesy of Michael Rubenstein.

I took over Sanjay’s crib in Oakland while he’s been traveling throughout Asia, the last 2 months. I wish I could’ve joined, but it didn’t work out this time around, I needed to stick around the States. 2010 for sure!
Here are some great shots from the past couple weeks. Chillin’ on the mothaship….

Pimpin’ with Ashim [...]

Like the Beatles before him, Kanye West will chill out in India for a while, presumably to return with a kaleidoscope double album’s worth of classic new material. Following his no-show at Saturday’s BET awards, multiple sources report that he has decamped to an ashram in Pondicherry for a month, where he’ll meditate and, we [...]

Spotted in Rishikesh this weekend, the Dr Burger restaurant:Click to enlarge. In case you still can’t read the text underneath the topmost “Dr Burger”, it says “Be Happy if U Feel Hungry”.Actually, just seeing this banner was enough to make me feel hap…

On my last trip to NYC I hit three out of the five boroughs, which some Manhattanites consider worthy of some kind of medal. (Sorry, Staten Island. Still waiting on better transit.) In Queens I visited Tangra Masala, which supposedly serves the best Indo-Chinese food this side of Calcutta. It’s got such a fearsome rep [...]

One of the most enjoyable sessions during the trip was our visit to the Kinderbuchhaus (Children’s Book House) in the Altona Museum in Hamburg. It’s a charming place that conducts activities geared towards getting children (and their parents) more involved with books. For instance, there are workshops where children are shown how to bind books [...]

Sorry for the late post, I got back home from Houston late Sunday night and got thrown into a pile of work on Monday.
The trip down to Houston with Sanjay was a blast, but I didn’t take too many pictures, oops.
It started with a bang, we thought the Taliban got on board our flight, but [...]

In Madrid, salsa is considered a Latin American thing and rock is king. Though I’m only an intermediate, I swept through salsa clubs there like Rishi Kapoor at a butter chicken feast.
So I wasn’t expecting much from the salsa scene in Bombay. I was wrong. Shockingly wrong. Salsa in Bombay is a cross between the [...]

If you’re running the free Windows 7 beta, check out my Bombay desktop theme. For non-commercial use only.
Download the .themepack file and double-click to activate.
Update: Here they are as desktop wallpapers, works on any computer.

Gerry Bednob (The Forty Year Old Virgin) is currently headlining a show here in Vegas, where I’m at a family reunion. I didn’t know doing bad Indian accents could get you that far without being named Peter Sellers I’ve seen movies about Vegas more times than I’ve visited. There’s a sudden profusion of cheap [...]

The name Charley Boorman looked familiar when I saw it on the book By Any Means (which Outlook Traveler sent across for review) but it took a Google search to figure out why. I didn’t know about Boorman’s work as an adventurer and TV series host, b…

A new ad campaign at UC Berkeley tries to boost the enrollment of an underrepresented minority

In a moving piece titled “Atheist’s prayer” by Jug Suraiya, I was especially struck by this bit:Prayer is often seen as a form of theft, a guilty misappropriation of another’s hope. But far from being an act of stealing, a zero sum game in which …

A large-scale S. Bombay terrorist attack is going on right now using automatic weapons, hand grenades and possibly a taxi bomb. Commandos and military are supposedly being rushed in. Gunfire is still being heard on live TV. ToI:
Three people, employees of Taj Hotel in South Mumbai, were killed after being fired upon by terrorists and [...]