Over at the Travel+Leisure blog, I profile Vikas Khanna, a rising star on the food circuit who’s destined to become the world’s first famous Indian chef.
Over at the Travel+Leisure blog, I report on a study that says bland airline food is unavoidable. And I wonder if India could ever host the Olympics.
Dabangg is a feature film starring Bollywood A-lister Salman Khan. Released on September 10, it’s already smashed box office records in India. Though it’s received solid reviews from critics and audiences alike, not everyone’s happy about the film’s huge success. One man, in fact, is roaring mad.
The Times of India’s lifestyle sections can be downright weird. At their best, the articles are quaintly queer. They reflect a culture struggling to reconcile modern lasciviousness with the country’s overall prudishness. But sometimes the editors go off the rails. This morning, for example, they asked: “Should a Woman Marry Her Rapist?”
Remember the martian asteroid that was said to contain evidence of life, way back in 1995? This isn’t about that. Not exactly, anyway. Instead, in 2001, there were widespread reports of a “scarlet” or “red” rain in the Kerala region of India. Now, some scientists claim to have found evidence of extraterrestrial life in the fallout from those rains.
The Kashmir Conflict is already murky. India controls one large chunk, Pakistan another. Both have standing armies in the area, ever wary of even the slightest encroachment by the other. It’s the perfect symbol for the tensions between those two countries. It’s also cited as the situation most likely to cause nuclear war between the neighbors. And now, China is getting involved.
As far as rivalries go, India vs. Pakistan is pretty heated. Perhaps in a few generations, these neighbors will be able to channel more of their anger into cricket. You know, like the English and Germans with football. For now, it’s bombings, border disputes and bad feelings on both sides. Such as, this Indian writer’s skepticism about the flood damage in Pakistan.
It won’t prevent the upcoming 2012 Race Riots, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce nonetheless reports that skilled foreign workers are not snatching jobs away from Americans. It’s bad news for those in the anti-immigration crowd who insist that all immigrants — skilled, unskilled, Mexican, Indian, smart, stupid — are making it impossible for us real Americans to find work.
The rise of medical tourism had its day in the media spotlight about two years ago. Since then, the practice has only grown; several countries have even cemented their reputations for specific procedures and specialties. There’s been relatively little downside to this new global industry. Until now.
When it comes to body hair, all the good genes went to East Asia. Thanks to some ancestral path that seems to point back to the Middle East, South Asians inherited hirsuteness. Traditionally, women have managed their body hair with waxing while — as in most cultures — their men were allowed to nurture jungle patches on their chests, balls and ass cracks. That may be changing.
Yelling, booing and heckling may be common during UK Parliament meetings, but you don’t often witness all-out attacks during hot-tempered meetings. Sambhajirao Kunjira, a former congressman of the western state of Maharashtra, found out the hard way that things work differently in India.
Katrina Kaif is a big deal. The 26-year-old Hong Kong-born Bollywood actress has seen her star rise steadily over the last few years thanks to screen time alongside megastars Abhishek Bachchan and Salman Khan. With such celebrity, of course, comes scandal. But celebrity and scandal are peculiar things in India, where until recently it was [...]
Though the Indian rupee is a major player in world markets, it doesn’t have a recognizable symbol in the manner of the dollar, euro, pound and yen. So, in May 2009, the Indian government announced a contest. All were welcome to submit their designs for the rupee’s new global symbol. Five have now advanced to [...]
A few days ago, the online payment service Paypal — which is owned by eBay and, by one report, was the driving force behind the auction giant’s Q4 2009 growth — suspended its service in India. It wasn’t a complete freeze. Deposits to Indian banks were still accepted, but no personal activity is currently allowed [...]
At the tail end of our recent trip to India, we made the wise choice of choosing The Imperial for our last night in Delhi. Though I’m little more than three years removed from my dirtbag days of $3-a-night rooms while backpacking around the world, thanks to my time at Forbes Traveler I’m now sort [...]
Air India is an awful airline. Just awful. The planes are dirty, the staff incompetent and let’s not waste time bitching about the food. I wasn’t very surprised, then, by today’s tale of an in-flight fistfight between Air India pilots. From the BBC:
India’s media went wild over the weekend after a report that one of their biggest movie stars had been detained by security while exiting the U.S. via Newark airport. Shah Rukh Khan, affectionately and universally known simply as SRK, was taken for secondary screening. The actor blames his surname. Though the king of Bollywood managed [...]
As closeted Christians freak out over legalized gay marriage in the U.S., homosexual Indians have been fighting a fundamental battle over the legality of gayness itself. Pink desis got good news last week, as the Delhi High Court decriminalized so-called “unnatural sex acts.” No longer is private homosex punishable by life in prison. Have it, [...]
Laugh if you want, but at least I’m prepared for the roboglobopocalypse. As regular readers recall, two weeks ago I reported that the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Industrial Research had developed “artificial intelligence” for airplanes. At the same time, AP was reporting that our air traffic systems were being hacked by persons unknown. And [...]
From the Hindustan Times, proof positive that we’re getting dumber with every generation: Adolf Hitler is seen as a management guru by business students who are lapping up the Nazi dictator’s autobiography Mein Kampf for inspiration, a news report has said. The Nazi leader’s autobiography is flying off the shelves at Indian book stores as [...]
