Spam on my phone

In addition to frequent inducements to view pictures of "EXOTIC & SEXY BABES!!!," I've now started to receive very strange SMSes from people purportedly on Yahoo! Messenger.

From hard_ik2002: "hi there honi any plans to rock sat nite?"
From masti_masti2000: "how are you doing? the indian sardarni?"

Is this really a new service Yahoo! India is offering? Or is this a virulent (and obnoxious) new form of spam? I don't recall ever putting my mobile number anywhere on the Internet, much less on any Y! site ...

Booze basics

Aspiring Indian oenophiles, take heed: Tulleehoo wants to "enhance your alcohol experience."

It sounds vaguely menacing to me -- so formal! -- but apparently this company offers training in the fine art of tasting, appraising, and appreciating foreign and domestic wine, beer, and whiskey. In addition to product info, there are also cocktail recipes, including India-specific delights such as "tar-booze" (a play on tarbooz, or watermelon).

They also seem to be trying to build a booze-centric online community, which (in my humble opinion) is far superior to the scrapping about who made out with whom and why on Orkut. But sometimes, they miss the mark.

The pub rating system for users to vote on local bars is entirely incongruous. People can typify the experience at the city's most glamorous hubs, from Tuskers to Tabula Rasa, as: 1) Five orgasms in a row; 2) One orgasm; 3) Hand jive; 4) Coitus interruptus; or 5) Like getting sodomised by all the Harlem Globetrotters.

Umm ... is that really necessary? I don't really think the categories are cute or hip, which is what the site seems to be aiming at, and I somehow think that their clientele -- the city's elite -- might be somehow beyond sophomoric college humor. Then again, what do I know? Maybe sodomy is the new black!

Monday meanderings

So tonight I decided to try and imbibe a full-length movie in Hindi (even if it is a children's animated film). This, of course, led me to some pretty aimless Internet surfing, because if that damn ... being or whatever ... says "Narayan, narayan" again, I might throw my newly purchased set-top box out the window. This might also be rage that I've been desperately trying to learn Hindi and am still at a pretty elementary level (exhibit A being trying to explain to the guard/receptionist at work today that I needed to get a new key, which resulted in much parroting of "Naya chhabi? Chhabi?" and a very nice guard man turning bright red and suppressing what must have been one hell of a laugh).

AAAAANYhow, so I was on Metafilter and someone linked to The Beast, which attracted me because it basically said that "you" (you know, the "you" that Time loved so much?) are the cause of all the world's problems -- or, rather, "you" is No. 16 on a list of the year's 50 most loathsome people.

Not so interesting -- I have a healthy degree of self-hatred without my Internets turning on me -- but then I got to No. 25 on the list, Deepak Chopra.

And I quote, "Charges: Widely regarded by new age simpletons to be a font of wisdom, Chopra peddles a chutney-flavored weak anthropic principle based on the usual dippy claptrap about "universal energy" and a profoundly erroneous extrapolation of quantum physics. An accused plagiarist and sexual harasser, Chopra entreats his readers to abandon their silly religious traditions—and adopt his. Pitching a watered-down Hinduism as some perfect union of science and spirituality while supporting Intelligent Design and purporting to "prove" the existence of an afterlife, Chopra’s work proves only one thing: he’s just another mystical moron providing a psychic security blanket to soft-skulled suckers.

Exhibit A: Suggested a Middle East Disney World and Iraqi Nickelodeon to mollify their rage.

Sentence: Five years shoveling actual bullshit."

Dog? Word. Word. Also, I'm fairly sure he was testing the waters to proposition me a few years ago; it was my first assignment in Delhi and I accompanied a fellow journalist who, of all things, had forgotten a pen and pad of paper and needed me to transcribe his interview. At some point, Chopra stopped addressing said journalist and instead started asking me about myself, before finally asking us up to his room for ... mystical voodoo? A copy of his latest book? Something kinky and Kama Sutra-esque?

I rest my case. I also return to my movie.

Seeing America from the East

Was browsing some Press Trust of India photos, and found these two images particularly interesting.

The first is from Kolkata, where a political party (Samajwadi) was protesting Saddam's hanging by carrying an effigy of Bush (or is that Mel Gibson?) at the American Center. The second, in case you're not keen on Bollywood, features Salman Khan saluting Old Glory alongside a few cricketers.

It's difficult to describe the American expatriate existence, but this duo sums up, at least for me, the sort of double life one must play (regardless of one's one opinion of her country and its politics). Americans are at the same time lauded for being the land of the free and lambasted for supporting a leader who is mediocre at best, a monster at worst, and in reality, probably somewhere smack in the middle.

I suppose it's much like America's current view of India; there was a brilliant little post a few weeks ago (though I can't remember it's link or author -- it was on both DesiPundit and BlogBharti) offering a (tongue-in-cheek) guide for how people in the U.S. can report on India. Salute the burgeoning middle class, but don't forget to mention the grinding poverty. Juxtapose the jolly, well-fed, polished young technocrats in an office with lots of gadgets with the group of children who wait panstless at the stoplight, playing drums and doing backflips.

Sometimes I wonder if there's any hope for people to have accurate perceptions of place without actually going somewhere. I suppose that's what literature and art and hell, even the Internet, aspire to achieve -- freedom from the bounds of geography -- but is it possible for humans to conceive of locales without trying to fit them into categorical archetypes?

A new fave

Word people, pay attention! Great little Web site I just discovered (umm, and I'm probably way behind the curve, so don't skewer me if everyone already understands this site's awesomeness) -- Verbotomy.

Each day the site owner posts a definition and a cartoon illustrating the definition, and people write in suggesting words that could be defined in such a way. That's not a real coherent explanation, I know, but trust me. Give it a click, check out the FAQs and submit you own! There's some sort of strange scoring component, but it's just as well to ignore the social-networking aspects and merely delight in the wonderful, inventive, luscious creative solutions people come up with. Tonight I'll curl up with my latest apparamour, a beautiful embroidered shawl that was a wedding gift, and enjoy the show.