A tragic, disgraceful witch hunt is playing out in India right now, as three politicians from a morally conservative party were forced to resign yesterday after they were caught watching pornography on a cell phone during a state assembly session. As a professional blogger, it makes me sick to my stomach to learn that even in this day and age, some men aren’t allowed to watch porn at work. STOP THE PINK SCARE!

News channels broadcast footage showing Karnataka state Minister for Cooperation Laxman Savadi sharing a porn clip with his colleague C.C. Patil, the minister for women and child development, while sitting in the state assembly.

Cooperation, women, and child development! Porn requires all of those things! This is important research! They don’t even say what kind of porn it was, maybe it was really tasteful, like a duke and a duchess doing anal.

The owner of the phone, state Minister for Ports, Science and Technology Krishna Palemar, also quit.
“We are requesting the honorable Speaker of the House to conduct an inquiry and we’ll come out with a clean chit,” Patil said, denying that they were deliberately looking at porn.
The three men said they did not want to cause any embarrassment for their party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state and is in opposition at a national level. [Reuters]

Ah, the old “whoops, I didn’t mean to look at porn” defense. Yeah, I don’t know what happened, it’s probably a problem with the phone, you should call tech support. You don’t even need a phone for that in India, just shout. (Haha, good one, Jay!)

Read the rest of this entry »

Japan enjoys a well-deserved reputation for all things batpoop loco, but India is headed to the top of the crazy chart with a bullet. Between bulldozing the Slumdog kid’s shanty like the villain in a Brendan Fraser movie, making a movie that makes Michael Bay’s movies look like cinema verité, and my personal favorite, hiring larger, more violent monkeys to control the population of smaller monkeys, India is easily my favorite story setting of the year. More to the point, today in wacky news stories, the popularity of Harry Potter (note: NOT Hari Puttar) has spawned an owl-trapping trend.

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans of Harry Potter for the demise of wild owls in the country as children seek to emulate the boy wizard by taking the birds as pets.
The hit books and films, which are popular in India, feature a snowy owl called Hedwig who is a feathered sidekick for the Potter character and used to deliver mail.
“Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls,” Ramesh said Wednesday, according to comments reported by the BBC.
Researchers found that a growing number of owls were being trapped, traded or killed in black magic rituals. [AFP via AV Club]

My favorite part of the story is the way the modern effortlessly co-exists with the ancient, almost as an afterthought.  “A western book about a boy magician has spawned a trend of pet owls among the urban middle class.  Oh, and some actual sorcerers have also joined in, hoping to use the owl parts for black magic.”

Sidenote: This Indian guy would make Harry Potter his bitch. God knows what he had to do to make that sloth bear so happy.

India’s most expensive movie ever, Endhiran, aka The Robot, aka A Giant Cobra Made of Robot Men Slithers Around Eating Cars, opened in India in three languages last Friday, and surprise surprise, the $35 million-budgeted romp is breaking box-office records.  And if the crew didn’t celebrate by dancing, everything I know about India is wrong.

“In the opening weekend, all the three versions of Robot have together collected 950 million rupees (21 million dollars), the highest-ever in India,” said Komal Nahta, a Bollywood trade analyst.  …with sales twice that of the previous record opener — Bollywood star Salman Khan’s recent hit “Dabaang”.
Accurate box office figures are hard to come by in India. An independent industry website, boxofficeindia.com, said “Endhiran” had taken in 12.4 million dollars over the weekend — a far lower estimate, but still a record.

Theatres are running shows of Endhiran as early as 4:00am in star Rajinikanth’s stronghold southern city of Chennai, where fans have been seen queuing up for tickets.
In Chennai, a 61-foot-poster was created close to a theatre where the movie was released. Some fans washed the poster with milk — as offered to Hindu Gods — a sign of purity. Some celebrated the release by bursting crackers, beating drums and showering the movie screen with flowers.
In Mumbai, Bollywood’s hometown, fans offered prayers at a local theatre and the reel of the movie was offered in worship at a nearby temple, after which it was made available for public viewing.

In related news, M. Night Shyamalan recently cut short a jog after he was hit by a bag of dog poop from a passing car.

Man, between making hit movies and hiring big, angry monkeys to scare away the smaller monkeys, it seems like India’s got it all figured out.

Well this was sort of inevitable.  It seems there’s a real-life tribe of Na’avi in the form of the Dongria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills on the northeast coast of India, who live peacefully, worshipping the mountains and raping pterodactyls. The Dongria are in the midst of a fight for their homeland against some real-life, golf-playing Giovanni Ribisis at a company called Vedanta, who want to cut the top off the Dongria’s sacred mountain so they can mine for bauxite (the most important aluminum ore), and no doubt make fur coats out of their children’s skin to wear while they dance on the ashes of the Dongria rec center.

U.K.-based charity Survival International has appealed to James Cameron on behalf of the Dongria. Survival said, “The Dongria Kondh are struggling to defend their land against a mining company hell-bent on destroying their sacred mountain.”  The ad also provides a link to a 10-minute film [attached after the jump] narrated by India-born British actress Joanna Lumley (“Absolutely Fabulous”). Survival explained how the Dongria are battling against U.K.-based Vedanta Resources, majority-owned by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal.

“Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything,’ for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected. The fundamental story of ‘Avatar’ – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids — is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri,” Survival’s director Stephen Corry said. “The mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. I do hope that James Cameron will join the Dongria’s struggle to save their sacred mountain and secure their future.”

Survival International recently persuaded the Church of England to sell its investment in Vedanta Resources “for ethical reasons.”  In 2007, a pension fund backed by the Norwegian government also sold its $13 million investment based on recommendations from the funds’ ethics council, which stated that “allegations leveled at (Vedanta) regarding environmental damage and complicity in human rights violations, including abuse and forced eviction of tribal people, are well founded.”  Similarly, another Vedanta investor, Scotland-based Martin Currie Investments sold its £2.3 million stake last year, as did British Petroleum’s pension fund, which reduced its holdings in Vedanta due to “concerns about the way the company operates.” [THR]

It seems now that the tide is already turning, and all that’s left is for James Cameron’s remotely-controlled avatar to parachute into the jungle, rape the biggest animal in the forest, and teach these noble, ignorant savages how to kick ass, white-man style.  ”Here, Tuk Tuk, learn how to fire this sidearm.  Go ahead, it’s not heavy.  See, it’s light because it’s made of aluminum.”

Read the rest of this entry »

(I just thought Professor Fuzzkins and the duckling duo were less depressing than the original picture)

The father of Slumdog Millionaire star Azharrudin Mohammed (who played Salim), the same one who slapped his son around for being impolite to photographers, has died in Mumbai.  He got the finest care possible, but succumbed to a rare, incurable diseas– wait, hold on, I’m getting some new info… Sorry, check that, he died of tuberculosis.  Which is still India’s number three killer, behind the bubonic plague and Ox palsy.

Mohammed Ismail’s premature death will inevitably fuel the controversy surrounding the fate of the slum children who appeared in the movie. He died today in the new flat bought for the family by the trust set up by director Danny Boyle.
Ismail had been ill for some time and had twice been admitted to a tuberculosis hospital in Mumbai after being turned away by another hospital in the city, which refused to admit him in case he infected other patients.

Well sure.  I asked my friend who’s a doctor what the best way to cure someone with tuberculosis is, and he said, first you cover them with a plastic tarp, then you kick them into a vat of acid, and then you throw away anything they might have touched.  Then you rub two sticks together and make a fire, because witches hate fire.

Read the rest of this entry »