ZVM’s Indian Undercurrent

The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.

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The Huffington Post

• By Arianna Huffington. Last updated 3 hours ago.
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com
• 13,572 blogs link here

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Techcrunch

• By Michael Arrington. Last updated 2 hours ago.
• http://www.techcrunch.com
• 12,083 blogs link here

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PostSecret

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

• By frank warren. Last updated 5 hours ago.
• http://postsecret.blogspot.com
• 11,734 blogs link here

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From CNET

“Terrafugia prefers to call it a roadable aircraft because the Transition will spend most of the time in the air. Owners will, ideally, drive the two-passenger vehicle from their garage to an airport. At that point, the retractable wings will be unfolded and it will turn into a plane.”

“Potential buyers can also now plunk down $7,400, or 5 percent of the anticipated $148,000 purchase price”

Taz here notes that these are the top cities with the top South Asian population, defined as all Asian Indians + Bangladeshis+ Pakistanis + Sri Lankans.

Top Cities of South Asian Americans

1. NYC (251,121)
2. Chicago (132,811)
3. Washington DC tri-state area (90,705)
4. Los Angeles/Long Beach (73,489)
5. Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, NJ (71,116)
6. San Jose (70,581)
7. Houston (63,657)
8. Oakland (59,103)
9. Philadelphia (48,240)
10. Dallas (46,182)
11. Detroit (45,459)
12. Nassau-Suffolk, NY (40,670)
13. Boston (33,336)
14. Orange County (31,914)
15. Newark, NJ (30,614)
16. Bergen-Passaic NJ (29,429)
17. Jersey City, NJ (23,675)
18. Seattle (20,475)
19. San Fransisco (19,170)
20. Baltimore, MD (18,738)

What?! No Fremont? Or Milpitas?

If you’re still wearing your Britney Spears T-shirts, blasting bubble gum pop in your shiny Honda Civic, cruising down the freeway thinking you’re the epitome of coolness, I have a newsflash for ya. ‘Cool’ changed its definition and sadly didn’t inform you.  So here I am, enlightening you about the latest musical trends of the Bay Area, because gone are the days of the Backstreet Boys, and lip-syncing blondes. Heck, even 50 Cent got shuffled out the door. We have something far worse now, something that’ll give you another reason to frown upon my generation – The Hyphy movement. The original, made-in-the-Bay, hip-hop culture that takes Rap and hip-hop to a whole new level of obscenity. So of course, as teenagers, we just had to have the Hyphy, be the new ‘cool’ thing.

Now some of you might be familiar with the Hyphy movement. “ Ho-hum, Janu, that’s so yesterday.”  You’ll tell me. But this is for the others, the tie-wearing, office-going, morally upstanding people amongst us,  who are entirely clueless that the Bay Area has now been officially renamed  the Yay Area.

 

So what’s the Hyphy?

Its nothing new. It’s a longstanding, evolving culture of the Bay Area that wasn’t much in the limelight until early 2000. It began as a response from Bay Area rappers against commercial hip hop for not acknowledging the Bay for establishing trends in the hip hop industry. Much of the Hyphy slang was invented by MacDre, but the movement gained popularity because of  E-40 from our very own Danville.

So what getting Hyphy basically is, is dancing in a ridiculous and overstated manner, often after a lot of substance abuse, to put it mildly. The term was coined by the Bay Area Rapper ‘Keak da Sneak’ (yes, its an actual name). Other synonyms for Hyphy: acting “Retarded”, “Riding The Yellow Bus”, “Going Stupid” or “Going Dumb”.

This music endorses heavy usage of possibly every drug available on streets, alcohol, marijuana, dancing and wild partying, more so than Rap culture. And we all know how vile Rap culture is. Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does.

 

Here’s the general slang. The words you’re most likely to hear.

 

“18 Dummy” – popular song. It means getting dumb by drinking Jose Cuervo tequila. Its also known as Dummy Juice.

 

“Ghostride the whip” -  Ever heard of ghostridin’ the whip? So what it is, is that the driver walks along slow-rolling car with the door open, so it looks as though the car is driving itself. Sometimes just for the hell of it, the passengers leap out of the moving cars, and sit on the car hood.

 

“Going or getting dumb/stupid/ignorant/retarded/brain-dead/hyphy/yellow bus” – This is the meat. You must VOLUNTARILY degrade your mental capabilities to that of a hamster. THAT is cool. To be truly ‘cool’, you must have a good time ‘while ignoring society’s negative opinion of “uncivilized” behavior’

 

“Hyphy train” - A wild, mobile party with a long line of cars, everyone ghostridin’, dancing on the hood and roof, and otherwise getting hyphy.

“Crunk” – Crazy + Drunk = Crunk.

 

“Stunna shades” – My favorite. So what these are, are oversized dark glasses that are the ultimate bling. They aren’t just ANY shades, they are the ‘stunna’s. Its part of the get up: you wear humongous white T-shirts, jeans baggy enough to house a nuclear family, and then the Stunna shades.

 

Yadadameen/Yadadamsayin?” – You know what I’m saying?

 

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s more. Its shocking. Even I’m shocked.

 

 So now you’re wondering, why on earth would any self-respecting person ever even consider getting Hyphy, to becoming the intellectual equivalent of a doorknob.

I wish I could answer that. Even as an official badge-holding member of the Teenage Cult, I am as baffled as you are. I’d agree with you if you said that my generation is morally depraved. You’d be very well justified to frown reproachfully at the next suspicious looking teenager who passed you. We redefined coolness in the most hideous way. We’ve lowered the bar even more. We’re listening to music that most sane people would consider utter nonsense. And sadly, we are proud of this.

 

But now you know what to do, if your son or daughter suddenly turns up in gigantic glasses and tent-sized clothes, and  says, “ Hey Parental Units, I am notifying you thus that I will ghostridin’ the whip outside with my delightful companions.”

 

You ground them, till they reach a mature age of, say, 40.

Yadadameen?

Prayer does not heal the sick, study finds - Britain - Times Online

How depressing, and idiotic at the same time. Was it Swami Vivekananda who spoke about God being on a different spiritual plane and the impossiblity to “derive” God via physical experiments?

Newton’s laws were good until Einsteinian laws were discovered.

The article ends with

As for the new study, he said, “I don’t think… it’s going to stop people praying for the sick.”

What a maroon!

When we are kids, things are much simpler - every story has a happy ending, a moral at the end of it. As we become adults, complexity increases, only slightly. (For some it remains at the same level as kids resulting in overly simplistic assumptions and judgements.)

Recently a couple of Hindi movies have forced me to rethink and marvel at the extent Bollywood has evolved - the two movies are “Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara” (I did not kill Gandhi) and “Rang De Basanti” (dunno the transalation). I’ll talk about the former in this post, and leave the latter for later.

“Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara” deals with a story that by the title apparently feigns to be historical, but is surprisingly contemporary - dealing with mental illness, degenration of mental faculty due to age, pseudo-alzheimers etc - a senior citizen who is convinced that he mistakenly assasinated the Mahatma. The role has been played to perfection by Anupam Kher, and superbly directed by Jhanu Barua.

While growing up in India, my personal experience witnessing as a kid was mental illness patients being treated with a casual “lets put him/her in the asylum” attitude - something that this move talks against in the protagonist Urmila Matondkar.

Anupam talks about his guilt at killing the father of the nation and acts it out till the very end (no spoilers here, sorry!). The peeling of the onion is interesting to watch.

The director chooses to leave out the moral till the very end and cannot resist from inserting it in the movie… a little unfortunate since the storyline itself carries well, and seems a little disconnected from the rest of the movie. Or maybe, this was the right ending for the ones who are looking for closure.

Maine picture ko nahin mara.

Links:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110008126

Ever lived in a city that offers efficient public transportation? It is a breeze to go from point A to Point B - all major cities are connected, and the transportation system (whether its the metro or subway system) offers a great alternative to stuck up traffic snarls that we are feel victim to in the Bay area.

Cities where I’ve seen this work - London , Paris, New York, Boston. Areas that are in bad need of this - SF Bay area. But hold on, you say - what about our famous BART? To this, I have a simple question - ever tried to travel from San Jose/Palo Alto to the east bay areas? You cannot use the BART for lack of connectivity, or at least continous connectivity. Even areas inside of San Francisco are covered sketchily. Add to the union woes, and fare increases, with long due expansion plans (to Livermore and beyond) - BART is a long way from truly being effective.

Let’s examine this historically. Ford invents the Model-T in the early 1900s. 15 million cars are produced by 1930. The US is on its way to becoming the largest automotive country in the world. The biggest threat to the automobile companies: public transporation, especially anything that runs on rails.

And then started the lobbying, the increases in fares, the labor unrests and the methodical but delibrate dismantling of a superior and efficient network of trains and replacement with roads. Which is where we are today - you can drive or fly anywhere but you cannot take a train or a bus.

It is indeed unfortunate that citizens of the bay area have chosen to buy automobiles, agree to sit in the killer traffic (See Mayoral candidates say traffic, housing top campaign issues) and debate endlessly on how to solve traffic problems with bandaids, and not even consider public transportation!

“We need to provide better safety for our children,” Kralik said. “We ought to start a pilot program for busing our kids. At the same time, businesses could help by staggering their starting times for employees.”

Buses! Now that’s a thought…

What’s clear here is not even cities in India are spared from this problem, and seem to be doomed in repeating this back at home.

The company in a recent statement said it saw significant potential in the Indian automobile market in the long term and that it would be well positioned to fully tap it. The number of luxury brands on Indian roads is set to expand with market watchers pointing out that several luxury carmakers such as Aston Martin and Ferrari are in the process of charting out their foray into the domestic market.

The problem is not that there are sellers of cars. The problem is that there are no sellers of public transport. Worse, even its “owners” have become its enemy. In most cities, bus fleets run not as transportation companies but as employment services.

And that, sadly is one of things that we talked about earlier in this channel. Having cars is cool, only if you can drive them at speeds higher than 10 Mph!

We just finished reading The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown’s un-put-down-able thriller. If you haven’t read this yet, please add this to your list of must reads.

I guess the most interesting part here is the extensive discussion of “paganism” and how it contrasts with christianity. I couldn’t help thinking - so is Hinduism pagan by this definition in this book - we seem to have the following criteria:
Worship of Devis (Godesses)
Nature worship
Idol worship

among others… Mr. Brown talks about how Christianity was carefully marketed with specific objectives to build its brand - making the initial devotees larger-than-life, competitively depositioning other religions (striking down anything that went against the original charter as heresy) ensuring that this religion continues, particularly due to a political connection.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses” - if there is a way to sway large masses of people in one direction, what better way than to climd the high horse of religion. It certainly lets avoid the more difficult process to build a position, convince, attract and recruit that independent candidates use.

Incidentally, there is a Hollywood movie in the making by the same name due in 2006.

Stay tuned!