On the 10th Day of Krishmas

On the 11th day of Krishmas

12 Days of Krishmas

On the First Day of Krishmas my Sadhu gave to me …

Grumpy Old Indian Men for an Error Free Internet

Grumpy Old BBC Listeners everywhere love Sandi Toksvig … and hate spelling and biography errors.  Keep the internet accurate.  Keep the BBC admirable. Write a Grumpy Old Letter today!    

 
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One Flew Over the Coup Coup Nest

The Alpha and Omega of Bollywood

It’s the new speed reading alphabet of social and semiotic significance.

From A to B …

From ASH to BHACHAN

Sitting on Top of the world … or dancing

… and in a flat world (Thanks to Tommy Friedman) that’s the whole bloody alphabet. Its, in fact, seventeen plus alphabets, devanagri, dravidian and roman … you take your choice.

Yes Aishwariya Rai and Abhishek Bhachan are the ultimate Globalized and Bollywood Royalty combination.

She made it on beauty, charm and timing.

He made it on nepotism, nasal deja vu … and Daddy Love

The world is their oyster.

They run the gamut of emotions from A to B … and they can dance if they want to …

and that is very likely, and most hopefully, the first and last time Dorothy Parker and Men Without Hats have been quoted in such close proximity.

Another Alpha and Omega.

Ashwariya and Ben Kingsley Save Britain

SPOILER ALERT

Rotten Tomatoes synopsizes The Last Legion like this:

“The Last Legion” is a fantasy action-adventure in the vein of “The Sword and the Stone” set against the fall of Rome and its last emperor, 12 year-old Romulus Augustus … He discovers instead “excaliburnus,” the legendary sword of Julius Caesar… (a)ided by the clever strategies of his teacher, Ambrosinus, and the heroic skills of his loyal legionnaire, Aurelius, Romulus escapes the island. Accompanied by his friends and a mysterious envoy from Constantinople [ed. ASH is in the house], Romulus travels to Britannia … and take his first steps to becoming a man and the king who would father a legend.

But Grumpy Old Uncles know the real deal … Yes, finally the mythic truth can be told. The Last Legion reveals the truth we’ve all long suspected …

INDIANS actually founded Britain with a combination of mad Kallaripayat skillz and ancient Vedic wizardry. NRI that you German ruled fellows.

Booyakkkasha padme hum diddly hum.

Ash plays lady warrior Mira — straight outta old skool Kerala — Matriarchy in the house.

In a reasonably charming children’s film fashion (which this movie clearly is — without anyone involved ever having acknowledged it) Mira whirls about with a band of rogueish characters … including uber-Romcom Brit, Mr Darcy, Colin Firth.

While Darcy seems to have misplaced his famous Christmas Jumper at the Turkey curry buffet, its homely knitted spirit hovers over this project.

Dyslexic name swapper Krishna Banji — is back again in druidic kahdhi — kicking it as Sir Ben Kingsley — aka Merlin.

What role can’t that talented proboscis sandwhiched between those ever growing
ears make his own. Here he whirls about as Merlin - in some scraps of Ian McClellan’s left-over beard floss.

There must have been a remnant sale at the THEATRICAL SIRs & Sons STORE.

Well long story short

… and direct video story short
… and all stars refused to do publicity story short
… and has been sitting on the shelf for two years story short

The Mallu Matador and the Krishna Magician …
… end Roman rule
… and bury the famous sword in the well-known stone

… just waiting for Arthur to come along shortly … or should I say Arshya. King Arthur to some, perhaps, Raja Arshya to those in the know.

The word Arshya means that which is from the Rishis - the great sages of ancient

India. They are the original of being in the know. There is no more know than what they are in.

Check out the movies right here:

There’s just so much Shilpa Shetty

There’s just so much Shilpa Shetty to go around these days.

If that Orwell fellow had only known how lucrative this Big Brother gig was … think how he could have cashed in early and retired.

Reasonably fresh from being first reservedly hand-shook by Elizabeth Regina II and then vigorously deep-dipped by one Mr. Richard Gere - Shilpa’s having quite the year. A right old Annus Shilpabilis … that’s something like Fergalicious but more Englishy.

Everyone’s favorite mangalorean mami, now Dr. Shetty, has taken residence in balmy groves of Honorary Doctorship. Dr. Shilpa Shetty, I presume.

Beyond the Beyond at Blogwired reports:

‘ News around Shilpa Shetty just doesn’t stop flowing. (((Boy, that’s for sure. The woman’s a global publicity machine.))) And this time the buzz is about a doctor’s degree that has been conferred upon Shilpa Shetty by the Leeds University for her outstanding contribution to cultural diversity. ‘

Ohhh the luck of the Mangaloreans … all the phii, haitches and dees … the very best bits of the angrezi alphabet with none of the tiresome study or student loans, deadlines, dissertation writing, tutorials, teaching … just beaming Mango-flavored Maa-Baap in the Leeds Metropolitan audience.

Plus some funny hats and robes. Very Harry Potter … vhii haitch phii … Every new Volume of Shilpa Shetty meets an eager readership and a profitable filmic adaptation.

Still Dr. Shetty ain’t content with the sweet smell of simply one success.

You can smell her, you can see her and once she’s been seen, she’s a …

Shilpa Seen Sans Frontières … No Border can Hold this Doctor Back!

The Times of India reports:

Shetty’s fragrance, S2, has risen to the number 3 spot in the UK fragrance charts within a fortnight after it was launched in London.

Shilpa has beaten off stiff competition from the likes of other international stars such as Kylie Minogue, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Lopez and Paris Hilton. Her inimitable S2 perfume has proved itself to be a cut above the rest amid the sea of other celebrity fragrances launched in the lucrative perfume market, sources said on Sunday.

Describing the popular fragrance that has been created by the oldest French perfumer, Robertet, Shilpa said: “The perfume is truly unique because of the whole edge we have with the ethnic aroma.

Sadly for the rest of us … ethnic aroma is not usually such a smashing success. The neighbors complain and the landlords worry about never getting it out of the upholstery.

That Shilps she could sell ice to eskimos, aroma to ethnics … good gods … I bet she could sell racism to the Brits.

A veritable Marvel of Mangalorean marketing modernity.

Props to La Shetée … she’s getting all Twelve Monkeys out for her Sterling British future.

AIM reports:

Ethnic agency Sterling Media has taken over from publicist Max Clifford in representing actress Shilpa Shetty in Britain.
Managing director Natasha Mudhar said: “We are delighted to have won the account, and look forward to propelling Shilpa across an international and mainstream platform. Shilpa has some very interesting projects lined up which we are sure will generate extensive talkability.”

… I think that was a Homi Bhabha paper I once heard …

Ethnic Agency: Generating Extensive Talkability from the Upanishads to the Booker Man Prize.

Well Ethnic Agency … Shilpa’s Soaking in IT … take a dip … I hear the water’s fine.

Being Shashi Means Never Having to Say Its Your Sari

More proof that the S-G letdown is Sending Shahsi Tharoor down the long stony path to crankdom and grumpy Uncle-ness. He’ll be swilling Johnny Walker Black and talking out his neck with Christopher Hitchens any minute now … although as Hitches still has his turn of phrase and the relevance that comes with a current best-seller … Shashi will once again be an also-ran.

The latest proof of Shashi’s descent into Grumpy Old Indian-ness is that after a bloviating, pompous-ji article on the disappearance of the sari from the modern Day India as it is raked by his Shashi-esque gaze. He did not receive the approbation to which he is accustomed

He has responded to criticism with all the aplomb of an uncle chortling through his moustache …

Have a gander at the musings.

Remember if you don’t read the Tharoor-ists have already won!

The Sari Saga (via The Khaleej Times)
By Shashi Tharoor

13 July 2007
EARLY IN 2007 I found myself unwittingly caught up in a row over sexism (mine) and feminism (others’). It all began with a casual observation in one of my columns, prompted by my last few visits to my homeland: whatever became of the sari?

For centuries, if not millennia, the alluring garment, all five or six or nine yards of it, has been the defining drape of Indian womanhood. Cotton or silk, Banarasi or Pochampalli, shimmering Kanjeevaram or multi-coloured bandhani, with the pallav draped front-to-back over the left shoulder or in the Gujarati style back-to-front over the right, the sari has stood the test of time, climate and body shape.

Of all the garments yet invented by man (or, not to be too sexist about it, mankind) the sari did most to flatter the wearer. Unlike every other female dress on the planet, the sari could be worn with elegance by women of any age, size or shape: you could never be too fat, too short or too ungainly to look good in a sari. Indeed, if you were stout, or bowlegged, or thick-waisted, nothing concealed those handicaps of nature better than the sari. Women looked good in a sari who could never have got away with appearing in public in a skirt.

So why has this masterpiece of feminine attire begun fading from our streets? On recent visits home to India I have begun to notice fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser and even the Western dress-suit have begun to supplant it everywhere. And this is not just a northern phenomenon, the result of the increasing dominance of our culture by Punjabi-ised folk who think nothing of giving masculine names to their daughters.

At a recent Press conference I addressed in Trivandrum, there were perhaps a dozen women journalists present. Only one was wearing a sari: the rest, all Keralites without exception, were in salwar-kameezes. And when I was crass enough to ask why none of the “young ladies” present wore saris, the one who did modestly suggested that she was no longer very young.

Youth clearly has something to do with it; very few of today’s under-30 women seem to have the patience for draping a sari, and few of them seem to think it suitable for the speed with which they scurry through their lives. (“Try rushing to catch a bus in a sari,” one young lady pointedly remarked, “and you’ll switch to jeans the next day.”)

But there’s also something less utilitarian about their rejection of the sari for daily wear. Today’s younger generation of Indian women seem to associate the garment with an earlier era, a more traditional time when women did not compete on equal terms in a man’s world. Putting on pants, or a Western woman’s suit, or even desi leggings in the former of a salwar, strikes them as more modern.

Freeing their legs to move more briskly than the sari permits is, it seems, a form of liberation; it removes a self-imposed handicap, releasing the wearer from all the cultural assumptions associated with the traditional attire.

I think this is actually a great pity. One of the remarkable aspects of Indian modernity has always been its unwillingness to disown the past; from our nationalists and reformers onwards, we have always asserted that Indians can be modern in ancient garb. Political ideas derived from nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers have been articulated by men in mundus and dhotis that have not essentially changed since they were first worn two or three thousand years ago. (Statuary from the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation more than four thousand years ago show men draped in waistcloths that Mr Karunanidhi would still be happy to don.)

Gandhiji demonstrated that one did not have to put on a Western suit to challenge the British empire; when criticised by the British Press for calling upon the King in his simple loincloth, the Mahatma mildly observed, “His Majesty was wearing enough clothes for the two of us”. Where a Kemal Ataturk in Turkey banned his menfolk’s traditional fez as a symbol of backwardness and insisted that his compatriots don Western hats, India’s nationalist leaders not only retained their customary headgear, they added the defiantly desi “Gandhi cap” (oddly named, since Gandhiji himself never wore one). Our clothing has always been part of our sense of authenticity.

I REMEMBER being struck, on my first visit to Japan some fifteen years ago, by the ubiquitousness of Western clothing in that Asian country. Every Japanese man and woman in the street, on the subway or in the offices I visited wore suits and skirts and dresses; the kimono and its male equivalent were preserved at home, and brought out only for ceremonial occasions.

An Asian Ambassador told me that envoys were expected to present their credentials to the Emperor in a top hat and tails. This thoroughgoing Westernisation was the result of a conscious choice by the modernising Meiji Emperor in 1868. One sees something similar in China today: though the transformation is not nearly as complete as in Japan, the streets of Beijing and Shanghai are more and more thronged with Chinese people in Western clothes. In both Japan and China, I allowed myself to feel a perverse pride that we in India were different: we had entered the twenty-first century in clothes that our ancestors had sported for much of the preceding twenty.

Today, I wonder if I’ve been too complacent. What will happen once the generation of women who grew up routinely wearing a sari every day dies out? The warning signs are all around us now. It would be sad indeed if, like the Japanese kimono, the sari becomes a rare and exotic garment in its own land, worn only to temples and weddings.

Saying which, I went on to appeal to the women of India to save the sari from a sorry fate.

Feedback is, of course, the life-blood of the columnist, but sometimes you get so much feedback it amounts to a transfusion. Practically every woman in India with access to a keyboard rose up to deliver the equivalent of a smack across the face with the wet end of a pallu. Emails flooded in to all my known addresses, including to my publishers and agents; the blogosphere erupted with catcalls, many of which were duly forwarded to me by well-meaning friends. Having digested as many of them as I can take, the only fashion statement I was left in a condition to make would be to don sackcloth and ashes.

So where did I go wrong? It seems my innocent expression of concern at the dwindling appearance of the sari on Indian streets and offices was offensively patriarchal. It reflected the male gaze, demanding of the female half of the population that they dress in order to be alluring to the masculine eye.

Worse, by speaking of the declining preference for the sari amongst today’s young women in terms of a loss for the nation, it placed upon women alone the burden of transmitting our society’s culture to the next generation. And this was unacceptably sexist: after all, my column only called for the sari’s survival, never demanding that Indian men preserve the dhoti or mundu. These arguments were made, with varying degrees of emphasis, by a variety of critics, most notably in a lengthy email from Vinutha Mallya and in an “Open Letter” addressed to me by a blogger who signed herself Emma.

I admitted right away that all these points were valid ones, as far as they go. Yes, I wrote as a man, because that is what I happen to be. If columnists were all obliged to be Ardhanarishwaras, we might be more even-handed in our judgements, but I doubt very much that all our columns would be worth reading.

The purpose of a column is to offer an individual perspective — with which the reader is, of course, not only free to disagree, but encouraged, even invited, to disagree. I apologise if my point of view offended any of my female readers, but I do not apologise for having expressed my point of view on this subject, as on any other. If a female columnist were to expatiate on the merits of tight jeans on male hips, I may not agree with her, but I would not excoriate her for taking a female view of male attire. What other view could she take but her own?

What about my unreasonably demanding of women that they preserve and transmit Indian culture? I have to concede that Indian men have abandoned traditional clothing in even larger numbers than women have put aside the sari. At the Press conference I described, there were a few men in mundus, but the vast majority was in the Western shirt-and-pant combination that dominates working attire in our country today. For every Karunanidhi or Chidambaram who adorn our public life in spotless white mundus, there are ten others in trousers. And, as several of my critics pointed out, my argument was a bit rich coming from someone who spends his working days in a Western suit and tie.

POINT conceded, but I should hasten to add that this is not a result of my own preference, but of the norms of international officialdom. Early in my UN career I turned up at work in an elegant cream kurta, only to have my Danish boss ask disparagingly, “who do you think you are — a surgeon?”

I still wear kurtas all the time after hours, at least when the climate permits it, and mundus in Kerala; but it was clear to me that if I was to represent the United Nations to the world, I was expected to do it in a suit and tie. Indian women in India, on the other hand, would face no disdain for sporting the sari: if they choose not to, it is because they choose not to, not because their employment obliges them not to.

And let’s face it — whatever the aesthetic merits of the dhoti or mundu, they pale in comparison with those of the sari. It’s fatuous to suggest, as several of my critics did, that the two are equivalent. Ask a fair-minded jury of women and they’ll agree that the beauty of a well-crafted sari is a source of non-sexist pleasure — to them, not just to men — in a way that no dhoti can possibly match.

Saris may well be a hassle to wear, and less convenient to get around in, but those are points I had already conceded. What they are, though, is special - and to my relief a handful of Indian women wrote to say they agreed with me.

Shreyasi Deb sent me a blog post in which she declared that “I know that the ultimate weapon in my kitty is the saree … This Sunday I have taken down my Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri, Laheriya, Bandhej, Bomkai, Gadwal, Narayanpet, Maheshwari, Kantha and Kanjeevaram sarees and stroked them in the reflecting sunlight.” (I guarantee no man would ever think of doing anything similar with his dhoti collection.)

And Sindhu Sheth wrote that she would heed my appeal: “I have decided to wear a sari (instead of my regular churidar-kurta) — once a week, to begin with.” In that “to begin with” lies the hope that my original appeal will not have been entirely in vain….

Shashi Tharoor, the former UN diplomat, will write a fortnightly column for the magazine.

 

 

Ohhh Shashi … do shut up .. I mean, you’re a pretty consummate old ass, aren’t you? Not that I want to hurt your feelings, of course. What with being in the guild myself and all. Still a purist might well consider you more or less off your onion.

Back and Grumpier than ever

After a hefty Sabbatical from blogging , I, the most esteemed, Grumpyji, am back. INSERT HERE: (smattering of sincere applause)
In my time away I was heavily involved with a sub-division of UNDP (United Nations Desi.door.darshan Programme) helping Ban-ki-ji Moon Moon deal with the general regional diasppointment at his Usurpation of Shashi Taroors bid for Secretary General (EssJi).

A spokesperson (yours truly, but I can’t confirm) for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the world to remember the pain and loss of the disaster, but at the same time expressed hope about the prospects for a return to normalcy in the affected regions. These being both follicular, concentrated on the Upper East Side, all future Sonny/Gita Mehta parties and also at Shashi’s mother’s house.

“Science (Vedic science of Vaastu Shastra) has shown that, after two decades, a return to normal life will be a realistic prospect for people living in the Tharoor-affected regions,” the spokesperson (hello again) said on behalf of the Secretary-General.

My work done at Banki-ji’s house of cards, I felt I coud return my attention to a Grumpy assessment of the press. What should greet my horrified eyes upon first perusing this weeks back log of NY times but to see that once again some young pup, who had his heart broken because the nice Indian girl down the hallway at Swarthmore or Columbia, is again wreaking journalistic vengeance upon the community.

They cant even let us have Spelling Bees. I kid you not : The actual headline is

Torn From Parents, a Top Speller Vents His Anger, Letter by Letter

Akeelah get a Bee and a teaful victory

Kunal gets caterpillar on his lip and a lot of typical time backchat about the ‘lush’ smells of indian cooking round his parents motel, how they don’t sit at the front desk so their dark faces don’t scare off the tourists and how generally disliked they are by their Utah neighbors. Kirk Johnson somehow manages to make it seem like it might just be the uppity Sahs fault … Im almost sympathetic as the Dad is some sort of VHP thug, but fearless boy reporter KJ manages to wander off that angle and into a general portrait of surly, dark faced bastards spelling for Anger while stinking up the joint with their cooking.

Oddly they have now excised the adjective ‘lush’ from their description of the cooking … I suspect Kirk got an in-office bitch slap from a desi colleague. Hope it stung.