The Great Ganesha

  ? 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I heard on NPR yesterday, that an Italian DJ named Gaudi (a namesake of the original, obviously) has remixed some of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s early work to a reggae beat. He got some forty-year-old reel-to-reel of tapes of unreleased sessions from Khan’s record label and spent two years wading through all of it, isolating [...]

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Picture Source 19th century bazaar in Calcutta Today’s WSJ has an article about the Indian retail baron Kishore Biyani who founded Pantaloon Retail (currently the largest retailer in India, in terms of revenues) and owns the supermarket chains Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar. For the supermarkets, he initially tried to emulate the Western model of [...]

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SAJA (the South Asian Journalist’s Association) has an article on their forum today, highlighting an excellent montage of magazine covers featuring anything and everything South Asian leading all the way back to 1921. My favorites are from the real early years, like this New Yorker cover from 1931 (when it cost fifteen cents!). These covers [...]

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Manish points to a CNN panel discussion that turns into a debate. Fast-forward to 3:10 and you’ll see something not unlike this discussion/debate.

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“I am walking in my city. The island sleeps, and I can feel the jostling of its dreams. I know they are out there, Mahalaxmi, Mazagaon, Umerkhadi, Pydhuni and the grand melodrama of Marine Drive. I have music in my head, the jingle of those old names, Wadala, Matunga, Koliwada, Sakinaka, and as I cross [...]

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[Originally on Blogcritics] So Nikhil left a comment on my post about Apu and the 7-Eleven/Kwik-E-Mart promotion. He said: I see your point about the negative stereotypes, but that’s the whole point isn’t it? Aren’t all the characters stereotypes? Yes, the accent is inaccurate, and the character is two-dimensional, but….it’s a cartoon (one of the [...]

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[Originally on Blogcritics] Seems like everywhere I look, people are talking about the 7-Elevens that are turning themselves into Kwik-E-Marts as a promotion for the upcoming Simpsons movie. Manish at Ultrabrown is far and above at the forefront of the opposition movement to this conversion. Kudos to him. I highly recommend you read what he’s [...]

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Nirali Magazine recently published an interview with Chef Manju Malhi who’s planning on bringing British food to India. When I read it I had a vision. It went something like this…

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