Stuff Gets Stupid(er)

See a larger image here.

Stuff magazine, not exactly known for its highbrow content, may have crossed a line in its continual quest to whet the prurient appetites of its readership. Alongside a June 2007 quiz entitled “Yoga Pose, Drink or Sex Position?” wherein readers have to decide in which category names like “downward facing dog” and “reverse cowgirl” belong, an illustration labeled “Vice” depicts Hindu deities overindulging in alcohol and having sex.

For me the cartoon is troubling on a number of different levels. Although I support the magazine’s freedom of expression, as a practicing Hindu, I find those images deeply offensive. Also profoundly irritating to me is the obvious ignorance at issue here. While Indian culture today is rather prudish, ancient Hinduism acknowledged and even celebrated sexuality—witness the worship of the obviously phallic Shiva lingam, or the erotic carvings at Khajuraho. But instead of playing on those readily available themes, the artist chose instead to draw Hanuman, noted for his celibacy, having sex.
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Extreme Entrances

Prayes peers out the window of a helicopter. (Photo: Humza Yasin Photography)

When I was little, my mother told me about a groom who arrived at her friend’s daughter’s wedding in a golden chariot pulled by a white horse. To a 5-year-old fully versed in the World of Disney, that just sounded absolutely magical. Over the years we’ve all heard about our auntie’s brother’s son who arrived on an elephant. Or in a stretch Range Rover.

While talking to brides for this issue, we met Sonali, whose now-husband Prayes arrived on the day of their wedding in a helicopter and then boarded (boarded?) an elephant to the ceremony. Yes, a helicopter and an elephant.

So my question for you, dear readers: What is the most creative or extreme way you’ve seen a groom arrive at a desi wedding?

Watch Prayes’ arrival on YouTube after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Here Comes the (Nirali) Bride

Last December, I traveled to Lahore, Pakistan, to attend my cousin’s wedding. December is the peak of wedding season in Pakistan, and I’m always amazed by the endless, colorful celebrations held each night during the winter. Of course, in North America, most people—including South Asians—hold their weddings in spring or summer, when the weather is more cooperative.

But that’s not the only difference between weddings on the Subcontinent and weddings over here. There, most couples have much more help during the planning process, and parents are usually the ones who handle everything. Right up until her wedding, my cousin was pampered and primped with uptan massages and told not to lift a finger. Not so for modern South Asian American and Canadian brides. They’re often busy juggling jobs with planning every wedding detail themselves. Add to that the stress of meeting family expectations, blending desi customs with Western ones and managing a multitude of vendors, and you’ve got the recipe for nothing short of a nervous breakdown.

That’s why when readers asked us for a Nirali weddings issue, we were excited to oblige. After all, there are few good, easily accessible resources for South Asians planning weddings in North America. We hope our first attempt at offering this service makes life somewhat easier for future desi brides. In this half of the issue, we’ll show you how four couples planned beautiful, unique South Asian weddings. We’ll offer you advice on everything from designing invitations to choosing wedding photographers. We’ve even rounded up the best tips from recent South Asian brides. On June 18, when the second half debuts, look for even more tips and useful stories, like a guide to shopping in India and Pakistan and a piece on how to invest in wedding jewelry.

After talking to dozens of brides, we learned one thing for certain: Try not to get caught up in the planning, and focus on making the marriage—not the wedding—your top priority. After all, it’s the little things that will make your day special. Aneesa Shoaib, a bride featured in our Real Tips piece, said it was a simple gesture by her mother that made her day perfect: “The only desire I had for my wedding day attire was to wear a garland of jasmine flowers in my hair. I was willing to wear anything, serve anything, decorate with anything, but I really wanted the jasmine flowers that every Indian bride wears.” Because her wedding was in Morocco, the flowers were impossible to find. “But on the day of the mehndi, my mother came to my room with a garland of jasmine. I am not sure how she pulled it off, but it was the most beautiful and touching moment of the entire wedding.”

So remember your jasmine flowers—whatever they may be—and don’t forget to bask in your day.

The Bard Gets Down With Brown in Love’s Labor’s Lost

Nitya Vidyasagar as Jaquenetta, ensemble member James Rana and sitar player Brian Q (Stan Barouh).

The universality of Shakespeare’s themes allow his plays to take place in settings as varied as Nazi Germany and gang-ridden Los Angeles. And for two weeks in Washington, D.C., The Shakespeare Theatre Company Free For All has taken the Bard and his audience to a tripped-out version of India with a delightful and exuberant staging of the comedy Love’s Labor’s Lost. The production is the company’s contribution to the 6-month long Shakespeare in Washington Festival; you have until Sunday to see the play at D.C.’s Carter Barron Amphitheater. The outdoor setting is perfect for this show, as a more stodgy environment would have taken away from this irreverent spin on Shakespeare’s work.
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DC-ists: Check Out Duology Tonight

Attention Nirali readers in DC: Are you experiencing a long-weekend hangover? Is it hard to slog through the work week after three glorious days off? Break up the monotony by checking out Duology tonight, performing live at 8 p.m. at DC’s The Red and the Black.

You’ll groove to Duology’s self-described improvisational music that will “stimulate the mind and body” and “take you on a musical journey that reflects the ethnic roots of its members, the spice of Latin America, their extensive studies of straight-ahead jazz, and the funky sounds of their hometown, Washington, D.C.”

Duology is the collaboration between buddies Sriram Gopal (drumset and percussion) and Geoff Rohrbach (keyboards and flute). Nirali talked to Duology’s Gopal to find out how the band came to be.

How did you guys get started? What’s your sound like?
Geoff and I played in a Latin fusion quintet from 2002-2004. That band dissolved but the two of us enjoyed playing together, so we formed The Duology Band in 2004. Geoff writes most of the material and I book all the gigs. It’s a good division of labor.

We play instrumental jazz fusion. Until this year, our gigs were mainly in jazz clubs around DC/Baltimore, but our sound has become more “rocked” out recently and so we’ve started trying to get gigs in rock clubs. We put out a CD, One and One Makes One, in September 2005.
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Shalini is On The Lot

(egothemag.com)

I’ve kinda gotten sucked into FOX’s new reality show On The Lot where a group of talented aspiring movie directors are given weekly challenges to make short films and are voted off by viewers American Idol-style.

Last night’s episode featured the filmmakers 1-minute comedy shorts… there were definite standouts (Adam Stein’s Dance Man) and films that left me scratching my head (Kenny Luby’s Wack Alley Cab).

Of the eighteen contestants is documentary filmmaker Shalini Kantayya of Brooklyn, NY. While her comedy short wasn’t conceptually one of the best last night, it was still beautifully shot and sent me off to Google to search for her work.

I found her film A Drop of Life, starring Nandita Das and liked what I saw in the trailer.
From the movie’s web site:

This woman has definitely got a voice. Tune in tonight to the results show to see if she stays in the competition. (And read more about her from Ego Magazine‘s interview with her last year.)

On The Lot airs on Monday and Tuesday nights at 8/7 c on FOX.

Let’s Put It On

Thukral & Tagra

The Daily Desi suggests that we run out to see Thukral & Tagra’s exhibit “Put It On” at Bose Pascia in Chelsea, Manhattan, while it’s still hot. Hosting the show until June 9, and established in 1994, the gallery was the first in the West to specialize in and promote contemporary and avant-garde art from South Asia.

New Delhi-based Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, graphic and product design, websites, music and fashion.

In their latest exhibition, “Put It On,” they channel their collaborative artistry into “arriving at a range of probable solutions for HIV awareness and vigilance through the visual arts.” The resulting works include stylistic and creative placement of pictures of proper condom usage throughout large-scale canvas paintings and mixed-media installations with custom-designed underwear and flip-flops.

More:
Photos of Thukral & Tagra’s Everyday BoseDK exhibit in New Delhi last month; BoseDK Designs, T&T’s consortium of graphic designers, illustrators, film-makers and design-inclined writers. With e-zines.

Born In The U.S.A.A.

Anthony, De La Cruz, D’Lo (APICC)

Running through May and June in San Francisco, the 10th Annual United States of Asian America Festival showcases over 75 Asian Pacific Islander artists in the the fields of dance, music, visual art, theater and multidisciplinary performance. The festival’s diverse program includes a May 26 show by the Spotlight Stealerz, an LA-based performing troupe comprised of writers Adelina Anthony (“Mastering Sex and Tortillas”), D’Lo (“Ballin’ With My Bois”) and Alison De La Cruz (“Sungka”). The Stealerz use comedy to “weave individual stories and group sketches together to explore a range of issues within their multiple experiences, identities and communities (Xicana, Tamil Sri-Lankan, Filipino, lesbian, queer, stud, immigrant, mixed-race).”

You can see more of Spotlight Stealer D’Lo, a Tamil Sri Lankan-American performer, writer and music producer with a background in piano, ethnomusicology, hip-hop, dance and more, at upcoming shows across the country, including “Ramble-ations: A One D’Lo Show”—an attempt at fusing together elements of her being on stage: “Gay Hindu Hip Hop—These three things make me but don’t allow for one another.”

More:
Watch “D’Lo Speaks the Good Word” on MTV Desi and Alison De La Cruz perform at Serafemme 2006.

Joya Speaks To The World

Joya at UCLA (Photo: Lluvia Gamez)

I wish I could say that I first heard about Malalai Joya, the bravest, youngest and first female member of Afghanistan’s parliament in the course of keeping up with international news or listening to current events on the radio, but the truth is she was the footnote in a coffee klatch-style video book club interview with Khaled Hosseini that I clicked through to from a Borders bookstore mass email. Over bundt cake in the kitchen with adoring fans of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini gave props to Joya for speaking out about crimes against girls and women in Afghanistan.

Her colleagues in the Afghan parliament do not share his admiration for her outspokenness. Earlier this week, they voted to suspend her for criticizing them in violation of article 70, a procedural rule that has not been enforced against other members despite their regular criticism of each other. What did she say? BBC reports: “A stable is better, for there you have a donkey that carries a load and a cow that provides milk.” “The parliament is worse than a stable.” Human Rights Watch is calling for her reinstatement.

Joya, 28, famously spoke out in 2003, when as an elected delegate to Afghanistan’s constitutional convention, she objected to the domination of the proceedings by mujahideen. “Why have you again selected as committee chairmen those criminals who have brought these disasters for Afghan people?” Read the rest of this entry »

Arson, Murder, and Beating in California

The Dhanaks’ home. Mark Boster for the LA Times

Yesterday morning, two severely burned bodies were found on a California bike trail near Concordia University.

One was identified as being Karishma Dhanak, a 20-year-old college student from Anaheim Hills. The other body, which investigators have described as being burned beyond recognition, might belong to Dhanak’s father Jayprakash (“Jay”), a 56-year-old engineer and manager for a direct-mail company.

“We don’t know a motive, we don’t know if it relates to their personal or professional life, and we don’t know if it was random or if the suspects knew them,” Anaheim police Sgt. Rick Martinez told reporters this afternoon.

What officials do know is that Mr. Dhanak was convicted of mail fraud in 2002–a federal crime for which he served two years in prison. “But it was not a crime of violence. Jay was a quiet guy, not a gangster type or a rough guy,” his attorney, Rafael Bernardino, has said.

Jay Dhanak was ordered to pay the government $2.5 million. According to the Orange County Register, the family also had a half-a-million dollar mortgage on their house and had paid high sums to send Karishma and her sister (Shayona, now a freshman at UC Irvine) to Fairmont Private School in Anaheim: Read the rest of this entry »