The Great Ganesha

[Originally on Desicritics] 
When I was in Seattle last week, the conference organizers were offering a cruise around the Seattle lakes and locks. I decided to check it out – take a breather from the conference chaos, and heave a sigh of relief after my talk.
At first, I thought “locks” was a mis-spelling of “lochs,” but [...]

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If you’re Indian and were at a reasonable age in the ’80s (4 years and up) then it’s most likely that you remember the 1982 Asian Games that were held in Delhi. You probably even remember the mascot – an elephant named Appu.
Well, the other day, I was having a coffee at Ritual Coffee Roasters [...]

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Durga Puja in Calcutta is like Ganesh Chaturthi in Bombay. A several-days-long religious festival, filled with increasingly complex and creative idols of Durga (a.k.a. Temple of Doom’s Kali) for the former and, as I had posted earlier, Ganesha for the latter. It’s a huge event for Bengalis, whom urban slang refers to (affectionately, of course) [...]

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Just came across this tidbit yesterday, from the SAJA blog forum:
Two young brothers, one of them still in college, have put Kolkata on the world?s Internet map by building the hottest online game on social networking phenomenon Facebook.
Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla have built a free online scrabble game that has 800,000 registered users on [...]

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Picture by Flickr user racoles

Protesting monks gathering at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon
Okay, this may be a tad too cynical, but take a little Buddhism, add a military regime, throw in a Nobel Peace Prize laureate (imprisoned) and you get something which is just begging for a Hollywood celebrity to make it their cause du [...]

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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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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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[Originally on Desicritics]
One section of the capital of Puerto Rico – San Juan – has cobbled streets, brightly colored buildings and beautiful sculptures. This part, called Old San Juan, shows the strong influence the Spanish had on Puerto Rico, and also has several historical monuments and forts. The old city is very small and very [...]

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I have to say – Indian advertisements rock. Now this may be because of a cultural bias, or because they really do kick ass. Nonetheless though, some of the adverts that I saw in India decades ago still strike a chord in a way that no ad commercial in the US has done.
And from the [...]

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Reading the BBC this morning, I came across a story entitled Polygamous Lesbians Flee Sharia. Now, just think: How many controversial items are in the title itself? Firstly, we have “polygamous” which is certain to raise some eyebrows. Then we have “lesbians” – enough said about that. And finally, we have “Sharia” or Islamic law [...]

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