Pride (In the Name of Love)

The excitement of yesterday's pride parade (which, thanks to Emily, I had a spectacular front row view of!) got me thinking about the tenuous position of the LGBT community in India today.  This weekend saw Bangalore and New Delhi's first-ever gay pride marches -- monumental events in a country that has legislated its LGBT community into the closet for many years. From the AP:

While small groups have marched in the eastern city of Calcutta in recent years, Sunday's events were the first gay pride parades in Bangalore and New Delhi. Several hundred people turned out at each of the three events.

The marches came days before the Delhi High Court is expected to hear arguments on overturning a law against homosexual sex that dates to the British colonial era. The law, which forbids sexual acts "against the order of nature," carries punishment of up to 10 years in prison.

The law is rarely enforced, but activists say it sanctions discrimination.

And as the Deccan Herald's terse coverage of yesterday's march in Bangalore suggests, this is just a very small first step.  But an important one!

(Self-)Reliance is a Blockbuster

So one thing that struck me this past trip to India was the explosion of Reliance Industries -- in 2005, when I was last in the country, the company didn't particularly cross my radar, but three years later, it was impossible to miss. Mobile phones, gas stations, grocery stores -- even Mumbai's IPL cricket team is under the Reliance brand (a fact Royal Challenger fans in the Bangalore stadium pointed out in their signs as Sachin Tendulkar and his buddies womped their team). What, I wondered, was left for Reliance -- or, more specifically, its head tycoon, Mukesh Ambani* -- to take over? The answer, friends: Hollywood. And by Hollywood, I mean Steven Spielberg. From Defamer:

Reliance is apparently taking over Hollywood one A-list player at a time. Its film funding arm, Reliance Big Entertainment, made headlines at Cannes last month when it announced development deals with the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and others, splitting with studios the costs of new productions costing up to $1 billion. Reliance's latest venture is decidedly more ambitious, expanding its vast media footprint to claim what will be roughly half of the new DreamWorks: Six or so films a year through a studio to be determined (probably Spielberg's old stomping grounds at Universal, where he still keeps an office).

Under this new venture, the The Wall Street Journal reports, Reliance would provide Spielberg and DreamWorks with $500-$600 million in equity to finance their departure from Viacom's Paramount Pictures. Is your head spinning yet?

*Correction: Hollywood dominance is the plan of Anil Ambani, not Mukesh. From the New York Times:

The parent company, with assets of $29 billion, is controlled by Anil Ambani, the younger brother of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. The elder Ambani runs a conglomerate involved in old-line businesses like oil refining and agriculture. As Mukesh’s company, called Reliance Industries, expands in India, his younger brother Anil has increasingly eyed foreign growth.

Bangalore Train Junction

Did I mention that I was recently in India? When people ask about my trip, I'm never sure what level of detail they're interested in -- or how to quickly convey a real sense of the experience without being a bore. Lo and behold, this week BoingBoing comes to my (partial) rescue with this excellent video of a Bangalore train junction. Click to spend 3 minutes and 58 seconds on an intersection in the capital of Karnataka. 

Zoom Zoom

Landed! A little jet-lagged but thrilled to be here. 

Imports vs. Exports: Bring it On!

The "Indian Premier League," a brand new 44-day 59-match cricket extravaganza (and "one of the largest and most- promising new business opportunities in India in recent years," according to Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee) is quickly gaining on "Barack Obama" in Google Trends rankings! This surely in part due to the controversy erupting around the IPL's decision to import cheerleaders -- like those of the Washington Redskins (who apparently, may not even have Indian work permits) -- to spice up the sidelines. "What the cheerleaders are doing during cricket matches is ten times more vulgar than what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai," Nitin Gadkari, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra told Reuters. (As for "what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai," well, the BJP worked to ban it.) The counterpoint of course: "Our stars wear skimpy dresses in movies but nobody seems to protest. Why this double standards?" Why indeed? As the spectator interviewed in this Washington Post video puts it, "Sexuality and cricket is the way forward!"

Unaccustomed Earth

She's got a new book out! This from Slate (via my brother):

In her fiction, learning "to not build walls around ourselves" doesn't begin to cover the challenges that await her characters. They are wanderers navigating elusive borders, bumping up against barriers and testing ties, uneasily wondering if they will hold or not. That doesn't prevent Lahiri—or Hema and Kaushik, or plenty of others in these impressive stories—from finding "kinship and beauty in unexpected places." But it inspires a perpetual vigilance and an awareness that, even as the globe shrinks, vast distances will never disappear.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ... Hanuman?

Two related stories about mythology-inspired comic books and cartoons in India come from my Mom; as a kid who grew up devouring classic Amar Chitra Katha titles, I have mixed feelings on some of these new trends (though I get that "It's absurd to be purist about one of pop culture's most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms," as my former professor Sukhdev Sandhu puts it). This story from NPR features Indian animators at Virgin Comics who are riffing on Hindu mythological tales in their work. Though I don't think Virulents (in which a regenerating rakshasa is discovered by American troops in modern-day Afghanistan) is to my taste, I think it's good news that a country that has long prized (and profited from) rote memorization is seeing the growth of companies that encourage such imaginative originality. I have similar feelings about feature-films like "The Return of Hanuman," in which the title deity "is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most important, smashes the bad guys to pulp." Again, yay for creative hybridity (as in this fantastic Indianized Spider-Man comic -- reviewed by Sandhu -- starring one Pavitr Prabhakar in a spider-suit with a dhoti)! And yay for elements of an ancient culture being perpetuated in novel ways (that aren't grossly offensive). But there's also a lot to be said for simply passing on the timeless tales of Hindu lore -- in all their unrevised rich intricacy -- without necessarily trying to "update" them. (Call me old-fashioned? ... ) One way or another, with the Indian animation industry (now said to be worth $285 million) projected to boom to a worth of $1 billion by 2010 (according to the Washington Post), this story may have just started.