I must admit – I have been sneering at the Winter Olympics a bit , because it seems to be a white-wash – if you get my (snow?) drift. Skiing , curling ,luges etc  do not seem to encourage diversity.
The US Figure skating team of Meryl Davis and Charlie White , defending US champs, placed second at the time of writing with this rollicking Bollywood routine and made me happy .I absolutely loved the costumes.
SeeBollywood routine via NBC.com
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I watched “My name is Khan” last night. Without spoilers, here are my impressions.
This is a Karan Johar movie and yet it seems to be Karan Johar all grown up. No group dances, Manish Malhotra costumes and very little glamor. I’ll say this : though the movie is too long, it still manages to be watchable and interesting through out. The movie’s protagonist is superbly played by Sharukh Khan . He plays a man with an autistic  disorder, on a mission to convince the President of USA that his name …

And are you a celebrity? Or for that matter even an average person somewhat considerate of unwarranted exposure of your body.
Conspiracy theorist – Alex Jones on his website prisonplanet.com has this to say:
Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.
The report is related to a yahoo news article …

I don’t really #follow celeb tweeple, well maybe a few but you get the idea, and this is perhaps out of boredom from being stuck home on a stormy Friday evening. I was reading this particular quote in this story about Shiv Sena v/s Bollywood stars (yaaaaawn) and came across this particular quote. [IBN]
“We will be back to Mumbai. I hope the Bandar Sena won’t stop us. Shiv Sena has become a joke to the nation. They’re instilling hatred. I guess they didn’t learn any lesson from the election debacle. …

Is there such a thing as the “Slumdog Millionaire” effect? [THR]
Hollywood Reporter … ummmm…. reports on the revival of two new Indian-American themed comedies, “Nevermind Nirvana” on Fox and “Outsourced” on NBC.
The two comedies — “Nirvana” at Fox and “Outsourced” at NBC — have something else in common: They both are ensemble shows about Indians and Indian Americans.
A third project, a U.S. version of popular British comedy “The Kumars at No. 42,” about an immigrant Indian family, also is poised for revival. Eight years after NBC took a stab at …

60 years ago, when the constitution of India was adopted, our freedom fighters hardly expected the unity to remain fragile 60 years later. We stand united in our love for ‘miley sur mera tumara’ for it’s star value and…wait! Before I can finish my latest news on our unity, there were a few interruptions, mostly controversies this video generated. But, watch the video first…

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Now back to the latest news, (only 10 or 20 min old) depending on whether you watched the second part of the video or not.
Raj Thackeray condemned …

Savita, every desi guy’s favorite bhabhi, has become a de-facto personification of sorts against the arbitrary censorship standards of the Indian government. [WSJ]
“I’m going to take a shower! You should also change out of those wet clothes,” she greeted a neighbor in a November episode, for example. As expected, the two end up together in the shower. The illustrations are explicit, the dialogue laughably simple: “Oh that feels so…” or “Oh I’m going to…”
Now, some random Mahila mandal in India felt so threatened by this brilliant piece of anti-feminine literary …

Raj Kumar Hirani is the bearer of a lost art, the art of story telling. The problem is sometimes, he overlaps his piece of art with another of his own, that is still fresh in your memory.
And I’ll try to keep the review clean of any spoilers.
3 idiots is a movie ‘loosely’ based on one of India’s ‘best-selling’ novels, “Five point Someone, what not to do at IIT“, by Chetan Bhagat. A book, that critics love to hate and take a jab at it’s ‘popularity’, while a particular section of …

The Star Trek Gandhi post inspired me to look into the other desi on Star Trek – Persis Khambatta.

Persis was a model from Bombay and somehow landed the role of Lt. Ilia in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Here’s the twist, Persis was a model from India with beautiful long locks and the role of Lt. Ilia required her to be completely bald. So did she somehow wear a wig or did she actually have to shave her head for this role?
In this behind the scenes footage for the …

This interesting feature on BBC talks about the recent emergence of actors of South Asian origin in Hollywood and US television shows. For decades, they were relegated to token and stereotypical roles. As recently as a couple of years back, one of the biggest South Asian names, Kal Penn, played the role of a ….. surprise ….. terrorist on the TV show, 24. Besides Penn, the article also talks about other popular TV names like Aasif Mandvi and Pooja Kumar.
However, before any of the current crop had an opportunity to …

Relatively speaking (in Internet years), South Asian actors are no newcomers to 24, the thriller drama on Fox. Not too long ago, current Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, Kalpen Modi, got to fulfill his lifelong passion of holding people hostage and blowing up things, playing the role of a teenage terrorist on 24.
For long it was rumored, that his hirsuteness, Anil Kapoor, the game show host in the multi-Academy award winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire, would be working on the new season of 24. Well turns …

Shashi Tharoor, Twitterer extraordinaire, Indian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Colbert Nation’s Official Person from another country made a surprise appearance on The Colbert Report and defended Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize for “giving hope to people around the world”. (desinole via Uber Desi on Twitter)
Also featured on that episode was fellow swine flu sufferer, Dr. Sanjay Gupta in his maiden appearance on the Colbert reports discusses Cheating Death, Ted Williams, slurpee machines and zombies.

The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

British-Indian pop star Jay Sean a.k.a Kamaljit Singh Jhooti has gone mainstream in the US with a #1 on the Billboard 100, a single titled “Down”. Indian audiences would be more familiar with his single “Stolen” with Bipasha and his cameo in Bollywood crapflick “Kya Kool Hai Hum”.
The “Down” single has a Chris Brown‘esque feel to it (cue the Rihanna Chris Brown-Rihanna jokes), a tribute to bubblegum R&B pop music, featuring Lil Wayne and …… communism? [TOI]

Anand Deva, a Sydney-based doctor, is in the middle of a major racial controversy after performing a blackface spoof of the Jackson Five on an Australian show ‘Hey Hey its Saturday’. [TOI]
This story seems to have garnered worldwide attention as Harry Connick Jr was one of the judges on the show and ended up protesting the performance and rating it a zero. The offender, Dr. Deva expressed surprise over the controversy and made a rather weak argument trying to justify it.
“I am an Indian, and five of the six of …

Psych, a comedy-mystery show on USA channel, paid homage to Bollywood in a recent episode (tip Karthik via Twitter). The episode directed by Jay Chandrashekar featured among others, Indian-American (and Canadian) actors, Jay Chandrashekar himself, his real life cousin Dr. Suresh Mohinder aka Sendhil Ramamurthy and Lisa Ray.

To those unfamiliar with Psych, the story is basically of two friends, Sean and Gus, who con the local police department into employing them as psychics to help with investigating active police cases. This story line, while entertaining, can get repetitive but a …

This tweet reminds me, before Slumdog Millionaire or Darjeeling Limited, there was City of Joy. Here’s a clip from Patrick Swayze’s venture into critically acclaimed cinema territory, where Swayze’s character of American doctor Max who moves to India to India to “find himself” and ultimately ends up discovering joy in the slums of Calcutta. The movie failed. Here’s a 1992 NYT review that describes it as “simple-minded Occidental literature” and “a visit to a severely depressed Disneyland”. Maybe the movie was a couple of decades too early? After all the …

You probably noticed it, I certainly did, so did the Huffington Post – over the past decade there has been a significant rise in the number of foreign artistes in Indian movies – Bollywood or not. [HuffPo]
While most foreign-born artistes, ranging from countries in Latin America to the United States to Russia and even closer to home like Sri Lanka, are largely restricted to bit roles of back-up dancers and extras, breakthrough stories of such foreign born are becoming more common place.
The most popular among them, is half Brit-half desi, …

This is a real spirited performance. What’s especially touching about this piece is that almost all the performers in this group are daily wage brick kiln workers, from Berhampur, Orissa.  Typically Indian daily wage workers live on anywhere between 40 Rupees to 60 Rupees a day, according to the Indian govt. stats in 2003-2004. (Roughly earning somewhere between 82 cents – $1.25 a day), with men earning more than women and children for the same job.
The physically challenged performers put up a great show too, and the choreography and the …

Quick Gun Murugan, a Tamil speaking cowboy dressed in bright clothes and leotard jackets, seems to be attempting a comeback of sorts after capturing the imagination of millions in the 90s. Being in tune with the times, he picked a Bhangra number with popstar Mika and also learned to speak Hindi. While we’re all for QGM appearing in bhangra (and even, rap) videos, his new found knowledge of Hindi is likely to earn him the label of “Sellout” from hardcore fans who drew immense enjoyment from his Tamil-English punchlines. Mind …

Another Bollywood version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, this time courtesy the Ramsay brothers.
This one is so bad, it’s not half as funny as the Chiranjeevi version of Thriller.