The Great Ganesha

idol ramblings, holy irreverent.

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Entries from January 2008

Jaan Pehechaan Ho

August 31st, 2007 · No Comments

Uber geeky blog BoingBoing links up to a video mashup of Rafi’s ‘Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ (from Gumnaam) with a Primus number on the WFMU blog. I can’t say that I’m a Primus fan, but I’ll tell you - it appealed to some primal part of me, because I couldn’t stop watching it.
Meantime, also on [...]

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Tags: india · music

The City So Nice They Named It Twice

August 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

I’m off to New York, New York for a week for some work, a wedding and some partying. The blog may see intermittent postings if I get time. But don’t worry, I’ll make it up when I get back. That’s a promise.
Meanwhile, here’s an excellent Goodness Gracious Me sketch (one of my favorites, [...]

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Tags: blog

Mera Joota Hai Japani

August 21st, 2007 · 2 Comments

In today’s New York Times:
As Beijing?s influence in Asia and around the world has grown, their common interests have forced Tokyo and New Delhi to begin warming their historically chilly relationship and to start forging closer economic ties. ?The key issue facing the whole region is how to accommodate the rise of China,? said Suman [...]

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Tags: current · diaspora · economics · india · news

Ramayanimation

August 19th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Was browsing around YouTube this morning and I came across a bunch of animated Ramayana clips. Here’s one on Hanuman (in Hindi), since I’ve blogged about him before, though in another context.

They’re made to be in the style of Japanese Anime and I was intrigued, so I did a little bit of research (well [...]

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Tags: diaspora · india · offbeat · spirituality

Goya’s Ghosts (2006)

August 15th, 2007 · No Comments

[Originally on Blogcritics]

Milos Forman’s (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) latest movie can be divided into two halves: The first half being intellectual masturbation for the anti-war groups; and the second half, a historical melodrama. Putting the two together results in a political soap opera which is as intellectually compelling (and just as easy [...]

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Tags: film · review

The Calculus of Eurocentrism

August 15th, 2007 · No Comments

 
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So it looks like the theory that calculus in India predated Newton’s and Liebnitz’s calculus is back in the news again. I blogged about it in a series of three posts some time back, and it’s good to see that it’s getting some traction. I seriously doubt it will enter the mainstream any time soon, [...]

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Tags: diaspora · india · mathematics · offbeat

Mishra on Partition

August 15th, 2007 · No Comments

Picture Source

On the 60th anniversary of India’s and Pakistan’s independence (and partition), here’s a quote? from Pankaj Mishra’s recent article in the New Yorker.
Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, was flown to Delhi and given forty days to define precisely the strange political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called [...]

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Tags: diaspora · india

In Your Face, Tony Blair

August 14th, 2007 · 1 Comment

A ‘Dear Economist’ column of the Financial Times had an interesting letter a couple of weeks ago from a “T.B.,” who asked:
…somebody has just shown me a thing called ?Facebook?, which they say is being used by lots of new graduates. I have been told that the economic value of my ?network? is not what [...]

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Tags: economics · humor · rant

Married To Your Blog

August 14th, 2007 · No Comments

An article from two weekends ago in the WSJ talks about what happens to a marriage as technology gets more and more programmed for individual use. If you’re married, you know where this is going. He likes techno, she likes rock. He likes sci fi, she likes romantic comedies. And that leads us to some [...]

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Tags: blog · humor · news · offbeat · technology

Hoo-ah! How Pacino Got Bigger Than Himself

August 9th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Slate.com’s Jessica Winter dissects how Pacino, unlike his peers (Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson), became better at playing the role of the “Famous Person” than what he did to become famous.
Pacino increasingly sought out big, shouty parts and then inflated them past their already outsized proportions: He out-Sataned Satan in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), [...]

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Tags: film · rant