We get "news clips" on the elevator ride up to work... today the news clip was that India had landed a "TV-size probe" on the moon.

Didn't specify which kind of TV. For the sake of the moon, I'm hoping they meant a flatscreen.

Sigh.

Here I was thinking maybe I'd left enough non-robo answering messages for Obama.

Back to the phones.

Wait... why are they wearing sweaters instead of cholis?

Someone page Ugly Ugly Bollywood Fugly! This deserves a honorable mention.

India tries to be cool by copying American movies.

Now America is trying to be cool by copying Indian movies.

We'll say this one is the artistic equivalent of Heyy Baby. *__^

... close parentheses.)

I have to smile at the thought that you're just now discovering Lakme. ^__^

That Flower Duet is probably one of the most frequently-performed choral/orchestral/piano pieces ever. Can't count how many times I had to perform it in band/choir.

(It's also really easy to teach because it's, like, one phrase repeated over and over and over...

And self-proclaimed "boring white girl" Ashley Holmes aptly notes that they're doing it to show the world that the name Hussein has "little meaning."

From integration to assimilation to boutique multiculturalism in one swift step!

I could have sworn it was Carell in a fake beard and brown makeup during the Gitmo scene (the one who gave the anti-America speech which prompted Kumar's "F-- you, donuts are delicious!").

Internet does not help me out, and I can't find the clip on YouTube.

I'm probably wrong.

Mercifully buried? Didn't Steve Carell just do brownface in HK2?

So did Obama do the commercial or didn't he?

Did a YouTube search for "Obama Jindal" and came up with nothing.

And since the names are almost all Christian, they could be set virtually anywhere.

Forget nature-nurture; it's all about nomenclature. *__^

More examples of "not a big deal" desiness are in the original script (which you can see clips of in the special features section of the DVD).

In the "honest to blog?" scene, Juno talks about losing her virginity to Habib, a dude she banged for six months. Leah says that she always thought Habib was weird because he liked "that Japanese porn," and Juno retorts that hentai is mainstream and an art form.

In the "your baby wants to be born" scene, the character was originally supposed to be named Prashanti Patel.

Rock.

So you're saying that Gifted and Golden Age, two books by women about women's lives, have girly covers, while four books written by men about men's lives do not?

^__^

Put an example of a SA "girly" book written by a man (and about men -- leave Suitable Boy out of this!) up and then maybe I'll believe your theory.

I'm trying to figure out how you learn yoga from a handheld gaming device.

Do you have to hang on to it the entire time?

Redheaded white girls FTW!

From the NYT:

The tenor Richard Croft, who shaved his head and lost 10 pounds for the role, plays Gandhi.

10 lbs makes all the difference. ^__^

(Also: I need to look a bit more closely at the production photos, but -- despite the fact that the opera tells the story of Gandhi's trip to South Africa -- I'm not seeing any desi or Black actors. No, wait... there's one, eight pictures down.)

The NYT book review of Unaccustomed Earth is #4 on the "most-emailed" list.

How often are book reviews on the "most-emailed" list?

It's a fantastic article -- and I agree with everyone who has said we need a President w/international understanding and sensitivity, etc.

I also have a new life goal: to someday be as cool as Obama's Mom. ^__^

Wait -- Manish, did I just catch that you are pro ebook? ^__^

Stuff White People Like: Reading books like Sacred Games w/o the glossary, determining the intended meaning of any "foreign" words using context clues (chutiya, for example, was pretty obvious -- and actually, I don't think Chandra wrote anything that I couldn't understand, at least at the general level), and then bragging about how smart they are.

^__^

Cloth pads! Down with paper!

Long I or short I?

Or do we know?

The clip doesn't seem to say...

And no turban on the cover, though we do get a glittery bindi.

No wonder you're an Obama fan. ^__^

Thank you, Jon Stewart. ^__^

This is truly awesome. No one ever went around singing "Viva John Kerry."

Obama is like... the next Harry Potter. He is hearted within every possible demographic.

Why is "change you can Xerox" a bad thing? I mean, it's a way to distribute the change to more people without a large overhead. What is it, ten cents a copy?

A bouquet of nipples????

How many know a damn thing about what everyday life is like in Bangalore versus a town in Illinois?

Check (it was a homestay, so a little different than being a hotel tourist) and check.

Maybe The Simpsons should hire me.

^__^

Story time.

I was in Hyderabad during Gandhi's birthday, and one of the other visiting fac (from Germany) heard that it was a "dry day."

In order to show his respect for Gandhi, the poor soul abstained from drinking water for the entire day. He found out about his mistake at dinner, when he saw the rest of us and our water glasses.

So they played "Bole Chudiyan" but recreated the video from "Suraj Hua Maddam?"

Were there no rec rooms available for their re-enactment?

Oh, heavens. The acting is atrocious. Nearly as bad as B&P. How'd she manage to pull off Beckham? On the sheer strength of Parminder and Keira?

Do vegetarian women practice fellatio?

Practice makes perfect.

Remember, vegetarians can eat milk, cheese, and swallow anything they want as long as there's no killing involved. It's those vegans you've got to watch out for. *__^

Wow. "Wallows in menstrual blood." That's a rather accurate description of my current physical state. If it expresses the true nature of being a woman that cogently, perhaps I need to see this film after all. *__^

Read it and reviewed it.

I guess I'm contractually obligated to read all books about white female Indophiles. *__^

If you're curious, here are the original illustrations compared to the revised ones, and...

Here are copies of the letters exchanged between Dahl and his editors in which they ordered the revision.

Someday I'm going to get a full-time job as a fact checker. *__^ (Or... um... a supermarket checker. Probably more likely.)

Actually, he kind of did. The original Oompa-Loompas were African, until an editor convinced Dahl that his depiction was horribly racist and so he changed them to the wacky "out-of-this-world" creatures we know today.

You can still find editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the original illustrations, which depict the Oompa-Loompas as "pickaninny" types.

Duran Duran songs don't mean anything? Well, that means my understanding of "Hungry Like The Wolf" was pervier than it ought to have been.

Ouch.

They’re a succession of flat cutouts.

They're a list of boyfriends summarized into types, which is, unfortunately, how us ladies tell the stories of our previous relationships. ^__^

(I'd daresay men do the same. *__^)

The net effect is something pen-and-ink and arty, like a certain genre of Japanese anime, but you get very little Iranian flavor.

I agree about the pen/ink/arty business, but if the film (and its literary predecessor) was written/drawn by an Irani about her life in Iran, is it not by definition Iranian? Or, at least, her interpretation of Iran?

The artistic style seems to say more about the author and her method of remembering than about an attempt to recreate a location photorealistically.

Blue: Maybe not, but the first black president will be quite a milestone for America.

I know. That's why it's great that he's the current front-runner. People aren't voting Obama just to "get the milestone" (that is, they're not voting Obama on the grounds that "we should have a Black president someday, and this guy will do as well as any," which I got the feeling was the sentiment around Hillary and "first female president"), but that doesn't make the possibility of the milestone any less cool.

An Obama presidency might let average people absolve residual guilt for America’s history of slavery.

I don't think average white folk are supporting/voting for Obama out of guilt. Nor do I seriously think that we're all subconsciously thinking "if I vote Obama, it'll prove that I like Black people and am sorry for what happened in America."

He's a qualified, charismatic, passionate candidate. Those seem to be the primary motivators.

Obama also won the caucus in Iowa because of the giant youth vote; young people turned up in droves. The younger generation has a different exposure to (and relationship with) race and diversity than the Boomer generation (and, to an extent, Gen-X). Do they consider this "absolving the past?" Is there guilt involved? Check Facebook. The sentiment is simply "Obama is SO AWESOME!"

LOL

I wondered why all my site traffic today came from you!

Thx!

I'll join in the boycott of cheap perfume.

(My perfume of choice has always been cooking vanilla, rubbed against the wrist.)

How so awesome. Congrats!

I didn't know about half of the books on the list (or the authors) --- thanks so much for posting it. Now I have more stuff to read.

(what was the rest of the post about? something about a kindle?)

Perhaps Blogspot should pay you for keeping it in your URL, since you could have easily switched to just "jaiarjun.com"...

After all, you're giving them publicity, not the other way around. *__^

What's worse is there's absolutely no indication on the screen that they're using an image editor, or anything that would make it actual "work," though I'm assuming that's what it's supposed to represent.

It looks like they pulled up a picture of a guy from the internet and are giggling over him.

:P

Is Lions for Lambs really a "small" movie?

It's playing at my local movie theater (located in a midwestern town with population 14,000).

OSO and Saawariya aren't playing there, of course.

So Lions gets that chunk of revenue, however small. Multiply that by all the midwestern towns in Flyover Country, and...

So why didn't Carell go all the way and list Indian celebrities? Something along the lines of "That guy on Lost you thought was an Iraqi/On Diwali he shoots off the firecrackies," etc.

(Yes, that would presume that "all Indians" celebrate Diwali. But the song is missing something without it's list of celebs.)

It sucks because the writing is bad. All of the dialogue is ham-handed, not just the "culture" bits. It's like all the sentences are made out of sandbags and exclamation points. ^__^

Seven pounds? Poor baby.

Wait a minute. I just arrived in India, and my luggage got lost and my toilet, while not a hole, doesn't have a flush handle (I have to reach into the water tank to pull on the little plastic thing).

So... does that mean I could be a Bollywood film star and dance with Salman too???

So wait... if this was the book launch, why was I able to read a copy in B&N last week???

I suppose I'm obligated now to comment on all the Apu posts... the strangeness of this to me is the fact that the Simpsons isn't really a show for children, and I would think that it would be more appropriate to fill the children's hospital with giant cutouts of Dora the Explorer or whatnot.

When's the last time you saw a kid wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt, after all? They've all grown up now, and become jaded Gen-Xers. ^__^

Am no oracle. It's just that I have no life.

Dare I mention that it's not a lunchbox, and not even Homer?

It's a box of Mr. Sparkles dishwashing detergent.

^__^

And you're right. The Apu toy is the only one saying anything that makes the character look bad.

I just thought it was cute that they so prominently featured your age. ^__^ Did they ask for your astrological sign as well?

Otherwise, pretty much the same article that we've been seeing everywhere else.

Wow. And the worst thing is that it's designed for a young audience who, if they live in, say, a "non-diverse" or "not-very-diverse" area of our country, won't have any experiences to challenge this one and will be more likely to believe/accept its crap.

Although the scene did appear in The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular, apparently. That's a bit of trivia I didn't know. ^__^

You do know that the particular "Apu shows Bollywood" clip was actually CUT from its relevant episode (ep. 94, "Homer and Apu"), yes?

We only learned about it when they released the Season 5 DVD and it showed up as a deleted scene.

Very interesting, eh? The creative team says it was cut for "time reasons," but... you can conspiracy theory why that scene was pulled instead of two minutes of different Homer/Apu fun. ^__^

(yes, am complete Simpsons triviadork)

My piece was entitled ‘Much Apu About Nothing’ on PP and ‘The World of Apu’ on DR…cheeky!

Oh dear, that’s like wearing the same dress to a party. I’ll have to revise. Did I mention your great taste in headline humor? ;)

To quote South Park, "Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!" Episode 151, in 1995. ^__^

Just had to note that the kid in the clip standing next to the Ralph statue looks creepily like a live Ralph. ^__^

I think people in real life know that Indians — South Asians, in general, are extraordinarily accomplished.

There’s actually an episode that I saw Apu, 15 years ago I think, with him, Paul McCartney, teaching one of the main character on “The Simpson’s” about vegetarianism and what a lovely way to save animals.

Oh, please.

And they weren't actually addressing the question all -- they had clearly made up their mind and wanted to prove why everyone else was wrong.

I've deconstructed the Quik-E-Mart thing here, after I noticed that half the zany sayings in the store weren't even Apu quotes (they were said by other characters on The Simpsons). "Just slap anything stupid up on the walls, it'll sound like Apu!"

It made me realize that they weren't trying to do a "tribute to" a favorite character; they were just trying to make the desi guy look funny. Grrr.