Quote of the Day – Sallie Bingham

You can’t sing to the flower without including the bud and stem and the root, even the mud around it, too. – The mad woman Clare in The Wedding by Sallie Bingham, p.172, Source: Mending – New and Selected Stories (Sarabande Books, 2011)

Indian Food Has Been Bastardized – Rahul Akerkar

There is no such thing as “Indian food.” It’s a fabrication of the West. Each state has its own regional cuisines: Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bengal. And then even the states have subcategories — there’s coastal Maharashtrian, inland Maharashtrian, Muslim-influenced. Sadly, what most of the world knows today as Indian food is bastardized, trivialized — tandoori chicken, […]

Apple iPhone Still King of Smartphones

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times. When it comes to smartphones, Apple’s iPhone is King of the Heap. All the other vendors (HTC, Samsung, Blackberry/RIM etc) are merely playing catch up. Market researcher Nielsen put out a report today and the numbers show Apple iOS ahead of its nearest platform […]

Dumb Folks at Encyclopaedia Britannica List Akshay Kumar but not Shahrukh Khan or Lata Mangeshkar

We just subscribed to the iPad version of Encyclopaedia Britannica for a princely sum of $1.99 a month. Well, what do we think we did first. Yes, schmucks, yes. We searched for our Bollywood stars on the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Guess what? There are some surprises here. Real big surprises! We found separate profiles for trash […]

An Encyclopaedia in Your Pocket for $2 a Month

In the free Wikipedia age, are there people who’d care to pay for the Encyclopedia Britannica? Although the jury is still out on that question, we’re inclined to believe that the answer is No given the masses’ disinclination to pay for online content. But that doesn’t mean the folks at Encyclopaedia Britannica are easily conceding […]

Going by the Book – Offbeat Korean Crime Film

(For SI blog reader Guruji) In a long life, we’ve watched many kinds of rape scenes in movies. In Hindi films from the 1970s, we watched Prem Chopra and Ranjeet smacking their lips as they fall upon the helpless girls, and then in the 80s we witnessed the suave cold-blooded Raj Babbar rape the two […]