My Latest Himal Southasian Web exclusive

Ridiculous/Sublime

Himal Southasian 29/04/2011

Amidst the British royal wedding frenzy, Sophia Furber looks into the rising trend in Western celebrity nuptials in India.

India has emerged as one of the most desirable locations for opulent ‘destination weddings’ among celebrities from Hollywood and elsewhere, a trend arising from a heady cocktail of their ideas about the country. The West, while regarding India as the cradle of Eastern spirituality and a place of escape from materialism through yoga and meditation, also gawks at lavish Indian wedding parties. The result is a strange mishmash of spirituality and spectacle.

In recent years, the glamour and conspicuous consumption of Indian marriages has captured the Western imagination and generated countless columns of coverage. Expensive weddings are hardly a new phenomenon in Southasia, but with economic liberalisation, multi-million-dollar Indian weddings are on the rise. ‘The socialist inhibitions of old have gone,’ comments sociologist Patricia Oberoi. ‘And there is encouragement from private interests, and by default from the government, to spend more.’

A case in point is the recent March wedding, dubbed India’s most expensive wedding ever, of Congress politician Kanwar Singh Tanwar’s son Lalit. The bash was the apogee of modern-day Indian consumerism; unofficial estimates put the cost at USD 22-50 million. The bride’s family reportedly gifted a helicopter to the groom, who wore a garland of banknotes during the wedding ceremony.

The media in the West is enamoured by India’s growing economic clout, especially since the country survived the recent global financial crisis in a shape better than most economies in Europe and North America. Even at times of the deepest financial gloom, India consistently provided the international media with colourful stories of consumption and runaway growth. Tales of outlandish weddings sit nicely against this backdrop.

Everything for sale
The honour of being the trendsetters for outlandish Western celebrity weddings in India can be bestowed upon Arun Nayar and Liz Hurley, the textiles heir and model, respectively. In 2007, they decided to follow their English-castle wedding with a Hindu one in the groom’s homeland. The ceremony took place at a maharajah’s palace outside Jodhpur. Hurley’s fabled cleavage was tastefully covered with a pink sari for the ceremony, and guests were required to pick an ‘ethnic’ outfit from a boutique set up especially for the purpose in a swanky Mumbai hotel. British tabloids and celebrity magazines had a field day covering the celebrations, reportedly one of the most expensive celebrity weddings of all time. The marriage itself, however, was short-lived. The couple recently separated amidst rumours that Hurley was having an affair with cricketer Shane Warne.

In December last year, American pop star Katy Perry married British comedian Russell Brand in a seven-day North Indian extravaganza. The festivities featured a procession of 21 horses, camels and elephants, and an after-party at which P Diddy, the American rap star, performed alongside Indian classical dancers. The couple later remarked – apparently, without a hint of irony – that it had been a ‘very private and spiritual ceremony’.

Now, the biggest Hollywood celeb couple of them all, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (aka Brangelina) are rumoured to be talking of a traditional shaadi in India. The couple are said to have turned to 83-year-old Hindu mystic Gurudev Ramlaji Siyag to teach them yoga and meditation, in order to get through a rough patch in their relationship. Rumour has it that it is at this guru’s ashram in Rajasthan that the pair now plans to tie the knot, sometime in 2011. Few stories would be capable of uniting both financial journalists and celebrity hacks in a feeding frenzy, but this one has.

read the rest of the article on the Himal website

The Ajnabee’s Latest Discovery: Kutla Khan

I went to see British-Tamil singer Sushila Ramam at Southbank last night. The gig was part of Alchemy, a festival of Southasian music, dance and literature. Raman’s style is a blend of carnatic music, folk and jazz, what I guess would be called fusion music.  Raman shared some *reinterpretations* of ancient Tamil hymns that she had been working on during a recent trip to India, which she delivered with much swaying, growling and some surprisingly sexual grinding. I can’t say I remember South Indian temple singing to be like that when I spent 4 months living in Tamil Nadu some 10 years ago, but it wasn’t the raunchiness I objected to but the fact that it just wasn’t very good. I’m all for experimentation, but this just felt more like confusion than fusion.

But enough of Sushila, the real star of the evening was Rajasthani percussionist/singer Kutla Khan, one of her support acts. He’s not only an incredible morchang (mouth harp) and khartal (southasian castanet) player, but also has a stunning voice, raw and soulful. Mesmerising to watch and listen to.

See youtube link here for Kutla Khan in action.

I think this song is something about delivering a message by pigeon (kabootar) to the beloved (sajana).  I’ll be looking out for this guy in future.

For my Friends in Nepal

Loving the rituals that keep men close,
Nature created means for friends apart:

Pen, paper, ink, the alphabet,
signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

(Paladas, translated by Tony Harrison)

I saw this poem on the London Underground the other day and it made me think of my friends back in Nepal. We have these extracts from poems on the walls of underground trains to keep us entertained when we are crammed like sardines during morning and evening commutes (you can see more here, on the Poems on the Underground website). The reason that this one made me think of Nepal is that I’ve been a bit crap at keeping in touch over the past month or two. So this post is my way of saying sorry (to two girlfriends in particular… you know who you are!) To Palladas’ list of  pen, paper, ink and the alphabet I would add blogs, skype and email…. so really I have no excuse.

I just wish that South London was a bit nearer to Nepal so that we could all meet up for some beers and sekuwa!

Open up the Wagah Border for a Different Type of Boom-boom: India-Pakistan Cricket

The world will be holding its breath this afternoon as a major geopolitical stand-off takes place. That’s right, India and Pakistan are playing each other in the World Cup.

Here is an ‘unofficial’ song from the Pakistani side, ‘Haara Peela’ (Green and Yellow), which contains gems of lyrics like ‘open up the Wagah Border ‘cos we’re about to blow up with a different kind of boom-boom.. his name is Afridi’ and ‘blowing wickets into pieces/can’t believe they gave us visas’.

This clip comes via my friend Urooj from Karachi and has been causing a few laughs over here this evening.

As The Ajnabee is not taking sides here, this is the Indian ‘comeback’ to the Pakistan song:

I’m in meetings all afternoon and will miss all the drama, which is a shame because I think this is going to be quite a tamasha.

Lessons from the intersection of Odissi and… life

I’ve been persevering with Odissi dance lessons at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. It’s definitely the toughest dance form that I’ve attempted yet, but also the most interesting in many ways. In the last class, I learnt how to stand in tribhangi position. This rather cute pose is what distinguishes Odissi from all other forms of Indian classical dance, and is based on three bends. Check out this youtube clip for a demo.

Try standing in this position for a while – looks very graceful but gets uncomfortable quite quickly if you’re not used to it.

One thing that is fascinating about Indian classical dance lessons is that the student-teacher relationship is very different to that in ‘western’ dance lessons. Students treat their teacher with an enormous amount of deference, and never, ever answer back. If you want to learn Odissi you have to be prepared to deal with a lot of poking, prodding and telling-off if your tribhangi is wonky or you are not stamping vigourously enough, and you have to just suck it up. Which brings me to the title of the post. There are a number of lessons from learning Odissi dance that are applicable to life generally (or at least my life, as it is at the moment). The most important one is that learning Odissi teaches you take criticism well. If it’s done in the right spirit, criticism can only be a good thing. When someone is teaching you something and they really, really care about it – and want you to get it right – it can be a very good thing.  If it doesn’t sound too pretentious, my Odissi lessons so far have been the cause of a bit of a paradigm shift for me in terms of how I take criticism, not just in terms of dance but in other areas of life too. There will always be moments when one needs to need to submit to a lot of prodding, coaxing and refining to get something just right. And that’s ok.

 

Those Awkward Bollywood Moments

What on earth is Akshaya Khanna doing?

There are some more political posts in the pipeline, but on a lighter note I just wanted to share this rather amazing tumblr with you, Awkward Bollywood. As the name suggests, it is collection of awkard moments from Bollywood films. Shahrukh Khan, undisputed king of ridiculous, figures very prominently.

 

That awkward moment when you have no idea that the houseguest your sister-in-law brought home is ACTUALLY your long lost brother… but you both start crying anyway

Stuff Dictators Like #2: Living in London

Dictators and their families love London. This city has a long history as a refuge for the rich and politically suspect, including scions of the Gaddafi family and Teodorin Obiang, son of the Equitorial Guinea’s dictator of 30 years, whose spending on yachts and luxury mansions dwarfed his country’s combined health and education budget. Gamal and Alaa Mubarak reportedly arrived in London in February after the Egyptian revolution put an end to their father’s regime.

Knightsbridge is the address of choice for toppled despots, but most neighbourhoods on the Picadilly Line between Green Park and South Kensington are highly desirable (not that former dictators and their families travel by tube, that is).

Deposed despots’ wives also love London; Sarah Kyolaba Amin (Idi Amin’s former wife) allegedly works as an events organiser in Tottenham these days, while Sebha Begum Musharraf can be found pottering around Knightsbridge.

At Home with the Musharrafs

And London loves dictators too, as highlighted rather embarrassingly by events of recent weeks. The LSE and SOAS (The Ajnabee‘s alma mater) have both been tarred by associations with the Gaddafi family. Prince Andrew has been at the heart of a media frenzy in recent weeks thanks to his friendships with Saif Gaddafi and Kazakh oil tycoon and society beauty  Goga Ashkenazi.

Disturbingly, a whole industry seems to have grown up in London around meeting the needs of the global super-rich and super-dodgy. This article from the FT over the weekend, ‘The London Laundry’ by Matthew Engel explains how London has become a one-stop shop for services including ‘reputational management’, advice on tax avoidance, expensive schools and luxury retail:

“The country that famously lost an empire but had yet to find a role had finally found one: a full-service bolt-hole and pit stop for the mega-rich, however their gains were gotten.

Only within the past week, when the extent of Prince Andrew’s links to assorted oligarchs, despots and dubious tycoons became general knowledge, have the British started to realise just what a haven they are offering.

“Good schools, Harrods, and a co-operative attitude to the reputationally challenged: for the recently retired Mr and Mrs Dictator in a hurry, there’s still nowhere like London,” says one private banker with a mildly subversive view of his own high-net-worth clients. (He spoke on the condition of anonymity.)”

Harrods Deparment Store: The Cornershop of the Damned?

How the hell did we allow this to happen? I’m a Londoner myself and I am appalled that we’ve allowed ourselves to become the global destination of choice for ‘Mr and Mrs retired Dictator’. As Engel points out in the FT, the dictum ‘as long as they pay their taxes’ doesn’t even seem to apply any more, since many of these people clearly don’t contribute a penny of their ill-gotten wealth to the public coffers. It’s one thing to be ok with people being ‘filthy rich’, but Britain’s level of relaxation about people ‘getting rich filthily’ (Engel’s phrase) has now gone beyond a joke. Is this really what we want our capital city to be known for?

Golden Kela Awards: Get Your Vote In!

There is still time to vote for the Golden Kelas, an alternative award ceremony celebrating the best-of-the-worst of Bollywood, taking place on March 12th.

Last year was not exactly a vintage year for Bollywood, and like 2009, bought us a mixture of bland big-budget movies, obnoxious holiday crowd-pleasers  and uninspiring debuts. However, thanks to the Golden Kelas, you now get the chance to vote for the worst offenders of the year. As well as awards for worst movie, worst actor/actress and most irritating song, there are ‘special awards’ such as The Dara Singh Award for Worst Accent and The Laijja Award for Worst Treatment of a Serious Issue.

For me, the absolute cinematic low of the year was Action replayy. This really was one of the worst films I have ever seen, and I don’t say that lightly. My girl Surabhi and I lost three hours of our lives watching that movie. We will never get those hours back. However, you can help by voting for Action replayy, which I believe is up for Worst Movie, Worst Actress and Worst Debut among others.

Last year, Kambakht Ishq won worst film, which I feel was very well-deserved. Any film in which the hero’s first line to the heroine is ‘shut up, you uptight bitch’, and in which aforesaid trainee-surgeon-heroine accidentally loses a heart-shaped charm from her bracelet inside the abdominal cavity of a patient she is operating on (whom she later marries) has got to merit this kind of honour. Oh, and did I mention that the heart-shaped charm plays wedding bhajans, which can be heard from time to time emanating from deep inside the patient’s thorax at inopportune moments?

In amongst all of those bad movies from 2010, I bet there were some that you Bollywood watchers secretly loved. For me, my guilty pleasure was Anjaana Anjaani, which I watched in a cinema in Biratnagar on a muggy afternoon. Contrived and ridiculous but strangely moving, and Priyanka Chopra and ranbir Kapoor were rather adorable together. Own up, what were yours?

If we’re going to talk about ridiculous, nothing can compete with rajnikanth-starrer robot. This song is up for Most ridiculous Lyrics. I can’t claim to understand all of them but from what I can catch it’s pretty absurd.

Let’s hope that 2011 is going to be an improvement, and that if it’s not, at least we can continue to enjoy some laughs at what the Golden Kela people call ‘the cream of the crap’ of Bollywood.

Thoughts on Totalitarian Kitsch

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements…

Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life… Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

There was a bit of a vogue a couple of years ago among some of my acquaintances for bagging artefacts of ‘totalitarain kitsch’ as souvenirs of travels and business trips in Africa and Asia. Gaddafi watches and rugs, Pakistan army mugs and stickers and scary gilt-framed photos of (now deposed) Tunisian dictator Ben Ali were just a few of the items that were brought back home, to be met with a delicious mixture of horror and hilarity by friends and colleagues.

This all suddenly seems in somewhat poor taste given recent events in North Africa. Ben Ali and Mubarak have gone, and Gaddafi is still clinging on to power as Libya burns. Perhaps it will only be after the dust settles on the crisis that the outside world will be able to get anything like real insight on what life has been like for Libyans under the repressive and secretive Gaddafi regime.

Sam Leith did a great piece in The Evening Standard earlier in the week analysing the way in which the Western media has turned the undeniably bonkers Libyan despot Gaddafi into a figure of fun (for an example of this tendency, see this slide show in Vanity Fair on Gaddafi’s fashion sense). By having a good old laugh at Gaddafi’s hilarious outfits and hot female bodyguards, Leith argues, we have turned him into a bogeyman – and this has rather masked extent of his brutality.

Tony Blair‘s government started flogging him arms and buying oil from him; and the general conversation rehabilitated Gaddafi as a comic character. He wasn’t the first it has happened to. Think of Turkmenbashi, with his rotating golden statues and his bonkers poetry; or of stack-heeled, bouffy-haired Kim Jong-Il, singing “I’m so rone-ery!” in Team America: World Police.

Peter York did a book called Dictator’s Homes a couple of years ago: a Hello!-style album of funny photographs of the kitsch ways in which despots did up their front rooms. My dear, the vulgarity! It seemed to epitomise the way sophisticates end up occluding what they know about very bad men by making a joke out of them.

Of course, to make bogeymen look absurd is the proper task of ridicule. But by making them cartoony, we also risk making cartoons of the people who suffer under them. We risk forgetting why they are bogeymen. From the student with his bust of Lenin and his Che Guevara T-shirt to the hipster wearing the Chairman Mao wristwatch, the ironic appreciation of foreign mass-murderers is a sort of connoisseurship.

It makes trinkets of monsters – bringing a version of them into our self-enclosed world as an accessory, and driving out the need to imagine what it is to live in theirs. It’s strange how shallow and silly we can be, in other words, when we’re being sophisticated. Remember those 200 dead Libyans, not getting the joke. Might be possible to be too sophisticated, hey? (see here for full story)

Does collecting bits of ‘totalitarian kitsch’ from travels also have the same effect? I think very possibly it does. I’m not going to be a hypocrite here because I think that this is a form of humour I wholeheartedly participated in at one point in my life. It’s just that it doesn’t seem quite so funny now.

There is a really amusing (and often painfully true-to-life) website called ‘Stuff Expat Aidworkers Like’. It includes such gems as #15 dressing like a local and #9 war junk (expat aidworkers just love to pose next to burned-out tanks!). I think I would also include ‘collecting Totalitarian Kitsch’ as something that expat aid workers like; also journalists, political analysts, business execs and students.

Pakistan army window stickers: whose poor taste?

Mundane artifacts (for want of a better word) do often reveal a fascinating subtext about political and economic processes. If you want to check out two very different and rather eccentric ‘collections’ of objects from overseas travels compare/contrast these two examples: War rug and this ‘Informal Museum of Foreign Grocery Products’. In my book there is nothing that wrong with collecting bits and pieces  when you are abroad that intrigue/amuse you or that tell a story , but when we go into the realm of pieces of ‘totalitarian kitsch’ you have to wonder whom the joke is really on…

 

It’s the stories that we tell about ourselves..

I’ve updated the About and Published Work section.