![Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt and Geeta Dutt celebrating the silver jubilee run of Chaudvin Ka Chand. [x]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m48p6vP9AP1rtsvqoo1_500.jpg)
Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt and Geeta Dutt celebrating the silver jubilee run of Chaudvin Ka Chand. [x]
Last night, I had the chance to see Tania James read from her new collection Aerogrammes and Other Stories. Ranging in genre from diasporic fiction to historical fiction and fantasy, the collection demonstrates what a talented and versatile storyteller James is. James discussed her ambivalence towards being compared to other “female Indian lady writers” (as she put it), and her fiction itself resists the pigeonholing experienced by so many “ethnic” writers. Though I’m not quite finished with the collection, I strongly recommend it so far!
“Andha Arabi Kadaloram” from Bombay, performed by A.R. Rahman, Suresh Peters, and Swarnalatha.
This soundtrack is one of my favorite collection of songs by A.R. Rahman. I’ve gotten into far too many debates about whether the Tamil version or Hindi version is better, and I’m ultimately going to leave that to personal preference. However, I will say that I strongly believe a lot of the narrative intricacy of this film was lost in its translation from Tamil to Hindi. If you haven’t seen both versions, please watch and compare. Several incredibly important plot points about differences in regional identity and linguistic background are completely abandoned in the Hindi version, which ultimately simplified the narrative far too much. Both versions of the film have their problems, but there are specific commentaries that emerge from its original Tamil context that need to be examined and discussed, and I hope that viewers don’t assume that the Hindi and Tamil versions are equatable versions of the same film.
I went on Anderson Cooper’s show Anderson to plug my new special Dangerously Delicious, but decided to send my Aziz Look a Like aka Sumit out instead.
This is my new favorite video. My new life goal is to have a look-alike that I can send in my place. My second, significantly less achievable goal is to be Aziz Ansari’s look-alike. Aziz, if you’re ever super confident that the people around you can’t tell the difference between distinct brown people, hit me up.
“Madurai Ponnu” from Billa 2, sung by Andrea Jeremiah
This is my current Indian jam.
Are Yaar. What a Superb song. English trans.
“Paayaliya” from Dev.D, performed Shruti Pathak.
I know I’ve already expressed this recently, but this is one of my favorite film soundtracks to come out of India in recent memory. Parallel (or maybe this qualifies more as middlestream?) cinema rarely receives that much attention for its music, but damn, this soundtrack is amazing.
Since I’m on a streak of posting favorite Bollywood songs from my childhood…
“Aati Kya Khandala” from Ghulam, performed Aamir Khan and Alka Yagnik.
“Aye, kya bolti tu” is one of the most memorable phrases from the period when I first began to take an interest in Bollywood.
“Dholna” from Dil To Pagal Hai, performed by Lata Mangeshkar and Udit Narayan.
This is yet another childhood favorite of mine that I’ve only recently rediscovered how much I love.
Thought Catalog recently featured an article entitled “NBC’s Smash Takes on the Misappropriation of Indian Culture” that truly bothered me in its simplistic engagement with notions of Orientalism and postcolonial theory.
For many people who have casually read the introduction of Said’s Orientalism, there’s a way that that any type of cultural production having to do with the “East” produced within “West” can be critiqued as Orientalist, neocolonial, racist, and as a form of cultural appropriation. It’s an easy argument to make that requires relatively little critical engagement, and one that can appear legitimate by using Said’s vocabulary without actually confronting the complexity of his theory. However, reading Thought Catalog’s response to this incredibly minor moment in American popular culture somehow upset me more than the scene itself, which I honestly found fairly insignificant. There’s something strikingly condescending about the way that postcolonial theory is misappropriated to defend “Eastern” cultures without fully engaging with the complex processes of self-fashioning, local modernity, and transnationalism within these cultural forms. Again, it’s pretty easy to point out that the scene conflates Arab culture and Indian culture. It’s a lot more difficult when you have to grapple with the fact that Hindi cinema has a deeply cosmopolitan aesthetic that defies any claims of authenticity. Islamic courtly aesthetics like those found in the Smash scene are an established feature of contemporary Bollywood cinema, and often, Hindi films borrow other cultural aesthetics in a way that can easily fall into the language of “appropriation.” But having to contend with the appropriation of appropriation might complicate easy claims of Orientalism, so obviously that has no place in the critique. Calling something Orientalist has huge stakes. The article features this particularly damning conclusion:
In the scope of three minutes and eleven seconds, Smash’s “One Thousand And One Nights” lambasts the legitimacy of the non-Western world, summons the centuries-old tenets of the colonial mindset, and “allows” the (mis)appropriation of culture.
Such a sentence is much more disempowering than anything contained in the scene itself. It comes from a mindset so firmly entrenched in the notion that “Eastern” culture is in need of protection from Orientalism that it fails to see the way that Bollywood aesthetics regularly ironically engage with what many can only identify as Orientalist discourses. Ultimately, if you’re going to critique the exoticization of a culture, you better know a lot about the culture that you claim is being exoticized. This article’s failure to see the complexly modern and positively cosmopolitan nature of Bollywood musical scenes ends up reading as incredibly patronizing for those who know these texts, and isn’t that exactly what this article is trying to critique?
I am, however, totally open to any criticisms of the dance itself. As any Desi can tell you, we’ve seen better dancing at most weddings.
A selection of photographs from the final roll of kodachrome taken by Steve McCurry and published in Vanity Fair. Partially taken in India, these photographs range in subject from Bollywood actors and writers to members of the Rabari community.
“OH I KNOW, IT MUST BE TILDA BASMATI”
This is still my favorite commercial of all time.
Also, considering that the dog knows how to put on sunglasses by itself, that mom should probably treat it better.
“Dil Se Re” from Dil Se, performed by A.R. Rahman, Anuradha Sriram, and Anupama.
As I imagine most of my fellow millennial Desis would agree, this is THE defining soundtrack of our youth, yes? There are very few songs I can turn to from my childhood and still fully appreciate in new ways, but every single piece on this soundtrack still continues to impress.
