Look who has weaseled his way onto the New York's Post's famous gossip column Page 6 today (hmm...gossip-time... he and RM dont get along, huh!) .... - via

Unbelievable... A Belgian embassy official in Delhi allegedly got involved in an affair with her driver - who later killed her!! Even a Bollywood movie director couldn’t have thought of this... Life is stranger than art!

A Belgian embassy official was brutally murdered on Saturday night at Vasant Vihar, part of Delhi's posh diplomatic enclave. The police have now arrested the suspect, the murdered woman's driver – and are hinting that it was a crime of passion. The Belgian embassy already seems to be distancing itself from the incident. Belgian Embassy Spokesperson Jean Lee Villet says, “She had nothing to do with the embassy. She came here on an official passport and not on a diplomatic one."


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And an old fashioned sex scandal from the UK :)

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Today, I heard a song called Amy (hear a 1 minute excerpt here from a previous release) by Kante Manfila, a Guinean born guitarist from Mali, on Andy Kershaw's program on BBC Radio (song was on the Sep 10th playlist.. the link is updated every week and so after next week, you will not see the list I heard today.)

The reason to highlight the song is not because I love music from Africa (read my post about Farka Toure's guitar playing) but because the song is part of a new release, 'Various: West Africa Unwired', which is part of the Think Global label from the World Music Network ..

..that combines the ideals of reducing poverty, defending human rights and protecting the environment with superb collections of cutting edge music from around the world. In partnership with Amnesty International and Oxfam, all Think Global releases will use a novel type of packaging – using only 100% recycled card with no plastic tray or plastic jewel case.

For information on music from West Africa, see the following wikipedia links for music from Benin - Burkina Faso - Chad - Côte d'Ivoire - Gambia - Ghana - Guinea - Guinea-BissauLiberia - Mali - Mauritania - Niger - Nigeria - Senegal - Sierra Leone - Togo and Western Sahara.

You can also read, "West Africa's Musical Powerhouse" by Lucy Duran, in Rough Guide to World Music Volume One (Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, James McConnachie, James and Orla Duane (Ed.), pp 539-562, 2000.)

Also see this great video - Gobissa and Child, See the Rider by Markus James.

Enlisting the brilliant support of Hassi Sare (njarka violin, vocals), Solo Sidibe (kamele n'goni, vocals), and Hamma Sankare (calabash, vocals), James creates a beautiful music video about the contrast of life in the dessert and life speeding up in the modern world and how life could be over at anytime. The music video was filmed in the sand dunes and villages in and around Timbuktu, Mali.

Celebrating R. K. Narayan, on the occasion of his 100th anniversary is Jhumpa Lahiri* through this article, Narayan Days.


* Read this Jhumpa Lahiri short story in New Yorker magazine from May 2006. An overview of her literature is here. I have enjoyed Lahiri's short stories far more than anything I have read from other Indian-origin authors who reside in the US...only because she did not make a big deal of mixed culturual identities (she writes equally well about both Indian and American personas and a good short story is exactly that - a good story about people!)...or so I thought until I just researched (or to use the right verb, googled) and found articles in the WSJ and Newsweek where Lahiri talks about her hyphenated existence and about the "intense pressure to be at once 'loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.'" Blaah...wonder if the media makes a big deal out of the author's mixed identities across two nations, two cultures, and worst still...the immigrant experience, every time they encounter an author of Indian origin or whether they do so only because Indian authors (Many thanks, Bharati Mukherjee & Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni!!) have made multi-culturism and the immigrant experience their only selling point over the years. Its probably a little of both - a chicken and egg problem of sorts ...


Anyways, back to RK or Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami... who was essentially the first Indian writer in English to become famous outside of India* too. Tagore precedes him but I consider him more a poet than a writer and more of his work was in Bengali than in English. Appropriately, RK Narayan is one of the early chapters in a recent book I read (read only about 60% of it) - Modern South Asian Literature in English by Paul Brians, part of the Series Literature as Windows to World Cultures. (Brians is a Professor of English at Washington State University, Pullman. He also maintains a webpage on Common English errors, has a page on Resources for study of World Civilizations, and The Chernobyl Poems of Lyubov Sirota)

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* For example, see:
- Tribute from VS Naipual in Time magazine. (wow..he has a good word to say about someone!!)
- Pankaj Mishra discusses his work in the New York Review of Books.
- The life of RK Narayan in California Literary Review
- Obituary in New York Times
- Paul Brian's World Literature in English list has a study guide to RK's The Guide

but here is someone (Shashi Tharoor) who is not a fan!

Other Links:
- Vendor of treats - a tribute to RK Narayan
- A friend remembers RK.
- Another friend reminisces

My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes by Lila Azam Zanganeh

http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/lila_azam_zanganeh

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/iran/zanganla.htm

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200604/20060414.html

Lila Azam Zanganeh discusses Giorgio Fabre's new book about the relations between Hitler and Mussolini

Lila Azam Zanganeh, in the NYT (Nov. 7, 2004)

- 7 / 22 / 06

10 years ago, I would be listening to classical music all the time. These days it is jazz (and occasionally blues) .. listening to it incessantly on the internet for the most part - my favorite shows being Jazz with Mell Hill on BBC Radio and WWOZ.org straight from New Orleans.

But driving back from running some errands today, I was taken back to those times remembering a past joy.. (for listening to classical music has now become a past fad, the possesion of 100+ CDs from those days notwithstanding!) ... when I heard two great performances today on WGBH.org public radio

1) Ravel: Tzigane played by Dmitri Torchinsky on violin and Daniel del Pino on piano.

2) Paganini's 'Introduction, theme & variations on Paisiello's "Nel cor più"' played by Romanian violinist Eugen at the Newport Music Festival, which took place this year from July 7–23.

Pakistani cricketer, Wasim Raja dies from a heart attack while playing cricket
Obituary - The good die young Dileep Premachandran - Cross-border hero Gideon Haigh - A breathtaking strokeplayer

Veteran filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee, feted with the Dadasaheb Phalke award and Padma Vibhushan, and director of several Hindi movies that continue to be enjoyed by me time and again, including Anand, Golmaal, Chupke Chupke, and other classics like Abhimaan and Khubsoorat, died at age 84 at the Leelavati hospital in Mumbai after a fight with a series of illnesses recently. His last work was Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate starring Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla, released in 1998....which I have not seen. Other fans pay tribute here..

Apparently, Geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the "air" have been discovered on Mars. Images from a camera orbiting Mars on the Mars Odyssey probe have shown the 100mph jets of carbon dioxide erupt through ice at the planet's south pole.The geyser debris leaves dark spots, fan-like markings and spider-shaped features on the ice cap. The scientists said geysers erupted when sunlight warming the ice turned frozen carbon dioxide underground into high-pressure gas.

(In a bizzare coincidence, I saw a documentary on Science Channel yesterday on the 'killer lakes' of Africa - where a huge cloud of CO2 emanated from the bottom of the lake and killed 1800+ people around Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986. Had never heard of this huge tragedy before and moreso also that such a thing was possible on earth! Interesting how scientists went about deciphering what happened and also how to degass the lakes to prevent future disasters - although per this 2005 article, efforts to prevent the release of deadly clouds of toxic gas from two African lakes appear to be failing.)

Perusing through a list of people who died in 2006 on wikipedia (no..no morbid fascination about death - just happened to reach that page after reading the wiki entry on Bismillah Khan)..and read about 3 deaths in the last 4 days of July ...

1. Akbar Mohammadi - 34, Iranian student dissident, heart attack following a hunger strike and torture.
2. Sunil Kumar, 34, Bhopal disaster campaigner against Union Carbide and founder of Children Against Carbide, found hanged.
3. Jessie Gilbert, 19, British chess player, youngest Women's World Amateur Championship winner, fall.

I had not read about their deaths nor even ever heard of these 3 people ever until today and still rue their loss today - perhaps more than I mourn the loss of a maestro like Bismillah Khan.

Update: Confused writes about how life can be a bitch!

David Grossman is one of Israel’s foremost novelists and peace activists.He is perhaps best known for his 1987 novel Yellow Wind. Though, he was initially supportive of the Israel-Lebanon war, recently he came out strongly against the 11th minute expansion of the ground war. Israel has pushed thousands of troops in the last days of war to score some brownie points against the Hezbollah before the ceasefire set in. One of them was Grossman’s 20 year old son Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman. Grossman’s opposition to expansion of the war was prescient. Today, on the last day of war, his son was killed in Lebanon.

Note: "Death be not proud" is a reference to the famous poet, John Donne's poem by the same name.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

More quotes from his work here.

Adventure racing on auto-rickshaw ...


Teams from around the world have begun racing across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in three-wheeled auto-rickshaws.

The 1,000km (590-mile) race, which kicked off in Madras (Chennai), will end in Kanyakumari, the southern-most tip of India, on 27 August. Participants come from as far as the UK, US, Hungary, Armenia and Russia. The Indian Auto-rickshaw Challenge is strictly fun, without any prize at the end of the race, the organisers say.

Colourfully named teams like Tamil Devils and Curry in a Hurry will get a first-hand experience of Indian roads. The Indian Auto-rickshaw Challenge is strictly fun, without any prize at the end of the race, the organisers say.

... Whitney (and her hubby) might need a bodyguard afterall!

Read more here.
Al-Qaeda chief and the world’s most dreaded terrorist, Osama bin Laden had a crush on singer-cum-actress Whitney Houston and wanted to make her his wife after killing her husband Bobby Brown.

Sudanese poet and novelist Kola Boof (37), who claims to have once been Osama's sex slave, writes this in her autobiography - Diary of a Lost Girl.

“He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown,” Page Six quoted her as saying.

Maybe he mis-interpreted her crooning of I'm every woman by taking them literally ;)

Whatever you want
Whatever you need
Anything you want done baby
I´ll do it naturally
Cause I´m every woman
It´s all in me
It´s all in me

I´m every woman
It´s all in me
Anything you want done baby
I do it naturally

American Masters is a great show, playing various episodes on WGBH & other PBS stations recently. I had seen a little bit of the show on James Dean last weekend...but today saw the entire hour of Albert Einstein: How I See the World .

More about the show at the link above, but here is a preview: Expelled from high school, unable to find a teaching job, and stuck working at a government patent office, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) went on to become one of the greatest scientific thinkers of all time. He used his free time at the Swiss Patent Office to develop his groundbreaking theories on the nature of time and space. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for his theory that light is made of waves as well as particles. Although his early theories paved the way for the atomic bomb, Einstein later became a peace activist, saying, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." By the time he died, Einstein was considered not only the most important scientist but the smartest man of his time.

Exhausting & Awesome - Two contrasting Bollywood movies

Rediff review - KANK is an exhausting watch:
I feel older. A showing of Karan Johar's mammoth 22-reel Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna has left me unbelievably exhausted. I walk out of the hall feeling my cheeks for stubble, wondering if my clothes are suddenly dated and my hair's grey. For this is no ordinary 3.5-hour film. It is a saga that stretches on and on -- imagine, if you will, a Balaji Telefilms soap running for several seasons, time leaps and all. Yes, I've lost a sizeable chunk of my life, and you will too.

and ends...

"Damn, it still hurts. Think it'll take a couple more viewings of another film with a limping leading man to soothe the pain."

The film that blew (the reviewer's) mind being Omkara (official site), based on Othello, a great movie directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, director of Maqbool (which I have not seen but was based on Macbeth, it seems)...

Amit Varma blogs about the movie and refers us to a good review of Omkara by Baradwaj Rangan and also Jai Arjun Singh's raving blog post praising the movie, although apparently Falstaff is most unimpressed with Omkara.

Also, read an interview with the director, Vishal Bharadwaj, who started in Hindi movies as a music composer but after seeing the great acclaimed Polish director & Master of Cinema, Krysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog was inspired into making films.

Poet's New Work Chronicles a Couple's Love
On PBS's Newshour poetry series, Arizon'a poet lauerate, Alberto Rios reads from his latest book of poetry "The Theater of Night" which follows a couple in a U.S.-Mexico border town through their youth, marriage and thoughtful old age. Rios was recently a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award for his last book of poems.

“Let us create a future we would want to speak in any language.”—Alberto Rios interviewed on NewsHour.

PBS's Profile: Alberto Rios
Rios' Web site at Arizona State University

Some other books by Rios include:
Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses: Poems
Five Indiscretions
Petalos; Poemas, Biligual Edition with Richard D. Mahoney
Lime Orchard Woman
The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body
The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart
Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir
Whispering to Fool the Wind
The Curtain of Trees: Stories