Hello! My name is Joel Swine and I write for Schtime magazine in Switzerland. Recently I traveled back home and I experienced some reverse culture shock. [NYT]

p.s. Much thanks to my evil American alter-ego for providing the inspiration for this post. [Time]

I am in favor of tourism everywhere except in Engelberg, Switzerland. It appears a small church in my town was featured in a Bollywood movie called “The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride”. The mostly white rural town I left is now teeming with lovestruck Indian couples reenacting scenes from their favorite movie.

Vishal and Jagruti Purohit had traveled here from Mumbai, India, on their honeymoon, but they had a greater mission: to find the small village church that provided the backdrop for a scene in their favorite movie, a 1995 Bollywood blockbuster called “The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride.”

Heck, even though they are mostly Hindus, these Indians, who besides showing us how to reboot our computers, show up in our churches where some scenes of this DDLJ (Braveheart bride blah blah) movie were filmed. Why can’t they pray to their gods with multiple arms and an elephant nose and a dozen vowels at the end of their names?

In the scene, two young Indians, played by Mr. Purohit’s favorite actor and actress, see their love seeming to come to an end. She kneels and prays, while he cavorts in the dark, neo-Gothic church. In the end, she breaks off an engagement and he wins her hand.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The alpine slopes where I used to ski have been replaced by teems of Bollywood wannabes striking poses for their Patel snaps (why not Singh or Reddy or Iyer snaps, IDK).The Indian tourists, who come mostly in summer, has doubled in the last decade. I suspect they come in summer because Indian people can’t ski.

“In June, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker, noting that in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians. The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that blacken tubs; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with the entire family.”

I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in Switzerland to visit. Must be the lure of their crappy Bollywood movies

“shot on location in this country’s high Alpine meadows, around its serene lakes, and in its charming towns and cities to convey an ideal of sunshine, happiness and tranquillity”.

First came one of their most overrated and successful directors, Raj Kapoor, to film his movie called Sangam. He was followed by an equally overrated and successful director, Yash Chopra, who apparently while losing his virginity on his honeymoon promised his wife

“that every movie he made would have to have one romantic song or scene in Switzerland”.

Ever since, every time he makes a movie, he gets a do-over on losing his virginity by interjecting

“dream scenes in which lovers dance or romp on Alpine meadows strewn with flowers or roll in the snow in unlikely flimsy Indian garb on wintry slopes”.

in his movies.

Then came their not-so-bright Bollywood cousins and the Indian tourists and we started to understand why India is full of slumdogs.

That’s it for this article. The “Braveheart will take the Bride” movie reminds me that the local cable channel is running a Mel Gibson marathon and I’ve to brush up on my bigotry.

Über Desi responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by this humor column of Joel Swine’s. It was intended to cause offense and since it worked we suggest you Indian people resort to Gandhigiri and send us flowers.

Joel Swine responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I’m a no-talent assclown and even the presence of “clown” in my title in not indicative of the lack of humor in my writing works. I have a penchant for penning rambling articles that are likely to offend many, regardless of comedic effort, so I would like to offer my lame apologies.

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 here in which SRK appearing on a popular British television show, narrated how he signed his autograph on what apparently was pictures of his body scan at the airport. Commendable/Condemnable as his response may have been – this is bound to blow up into a controversy in India and elsewhere, and possibly brickbats for SRK from the random Indians, among 1.2 billion of us (hey – so many people, so many opinions, don’t blame us). And then, step into his shoes – what would you prefer to give up for a safe ride on the plane? Something you perceive as self-dignity  and privacy of yourself and your fellow travelers including your family – spouse, children, parents. In spite of objections due to privacy violation – the scanners as you can see are already in operational mode. And without a practical alternative solution in sight, controversies such as these might just make things more complicated for everyone – the travelers and the governments.

Tip: Before TOI or other papers pick this story up ‘Drudge Report’ was kind enough to highlight these articles with ‘bollywood in the buff’ headlines blaring in red. Let’s see the media game unfold in the next few days.

Want to appeal to Indian people? Make it exotic and make it HD.

Q. How does one get around Mumbai? A. In a “Turist Vehical“

Fairness cream model? Tanning in the sun, bad idea.

God and country, desi ishtyle

Why is local (Mumbai) tabloid Mid Day interested in John McCain’s ex-girlfriend?

*022 = Mumbai area code

View these images and others on the Über Desi Flickr photostream

My recent ongoing visit to Über Desi’s top secret India H.Q. in Mumbai involved a non-stop flight from New York JFK to Mumbai CSIA (Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, not to be confused with Mumbai CST Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminal).

Since I make this trip pretty much on an annual basis, I decided to switch things around and booked a direct US-India flight instead of one involving an obligatory halt in Europe. For starters, I hate Paris De Gaulle airport. Not only is the layover long and extremely confusing, but the airline staff and airport officials in Paris are rude, if not borderline racist towards Indians. Frankfurt, the other major Europe hub is no different, if not worse.

So I decided to skip Europe and fly non-stop from New York to Mumbai. As I’ve mentioned before, no crummy desi travel agents for me. I book my flight or Orbitz or the airlines website directly, in this case Delta. While doing so, I made sure I got an aisle seat but that was hardly necessary given the time of the year I was traveling in, my adjacent seats and half the seats in the plane were empty.

Anyone who lives in Florida, Texas, California or other states in the Southern half of the US, will often witness the phenomenon of snowbirds, people from Northern and Midwestern states migrating south to escape the winters and going back home for the summers. The September-October months also presents us with desi snowbirds, parents visiting their children settled in the US for the summer, returning to India to escape the cold winters. The desi snowbirds comprised 75% of the passengers on this particular flight. Regular readers of this blog are familiar with my obsession for desis in cowboy attire. On this flight, I also ran into a Maharashtrian cowboy – a desi dude sporting a “10 gallon hat” greeting people with a “kasa kay” instead of “howdy”. Ok, I made that greeting part up but the cowboy was still speaking in Marathi. Yee haw!

Flight DL16 departed JFK at 9pm EDT Wednesday. Given that the flight was running half empty (or half full, perspective and all that), seating and sleeping were quite convenient. Food was okish, at best. I don’t blame people for packing their own food but perhaps some people should be educated of the olfactory effects of a lethal combination of stale thaiyar sadam and extra-oily chivda in an airtight flying tube at 35,000 feet.

The best part of the flight? Entertainment. 5″ x 7″ screens on every seat with a touch screen menu and wide selection of Bollywood and Hollywood movies and a variety of TV and news shows. That combined with airport novels numbed my mind to the vagrancies of this 14-hour epic journey.

Over the last 3-4 years of travel, through experience and research, I’ve come to the conclusion that most things available in the US can be bought in India and vice versa and so I travel light, one suitcase and change of clothing in carry-on. Toting around a light carry-on makes a journey more tolerable. The flight landed in Mumbai close to 8:15pm IST Thursday, almost 14 hours after takeoff, if you adjust for time zones. Luggage in hand and nothing to declare in customs, I was out of the airport by 9:00pm and home by 10:00pm. A nice night’s sleep and I’m feeling fresh as a papaya, almost zero jetlag.

To those living on the East Coast of the US, traveling to India, I’d highly recommend the non-stop flights between India and the US. Preferably sit in aisle seats, pack a couple of books, sleep well, stay hydrated and travel light. Hopefully I’ll have a similar experience on my flight back to the US.

Traveling between US and Canada with your personal or office notebook computer? Think again. Homeland Security has issued broad and sweeping powers to border security agents empowering them to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices without suspicion of any wrongdoing for an unspecified period of time. It is unclear at this stage if this also extends to immigration checkpoints within the country at airports (JFK, Atlanta, for instance) but certainly seems like a possibility. [Reuters]