"When in America do as the Americans do", Lou Dobbs said to me when I asked him for advice on my new myspace profile. " Be confessional and specific". " But what about invasion of privacy? Isn't that a big pain in the collective American ass?" I asked him. " Yes it is but you don't worry about it until you are as famous as I am". You see, Lou mentors me on my speedy assimilation in America. So these are some of the things I either did in the recent past or are ones that I sorely missed out on; Dissipating my penny stash at the first class stamp vending m/c inside the post office by Webster Hall while enduring the sighs of those behind me in line, Watching the freight train coo coo by while tubing down the New River near Blacksburg,VA, Walking down the Bowery from my apartment in East Village, continuing east on Houston and finally south on Elizabeth to the Banh Mi place on Broome, Playing tennis by the East River courts, Dancing in Orchard Bar ( bastards closed it down ) and at Bollywood Disco, Sleeping under the stars in Rajasthan on summer nights, Listening to an Organ concert inside Trinity Church, Staircase Masterpieces at the Cooper Hewitt, Toy Soldiers at Forbes Gallery, Museum exhibits showcasing among other things history ( anything older than five years is historic ), landscapes, still lifes and women's underwear, Visiting the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery, Five centuries of Swedish silver at Scandinavia House, Photography exhibits , Watching ' The Pig Farm ' on Broadway and ' Sides: the fear is real ' off Broadway, Monday Night Movies in Bryant Park in the summer, Heirloom foods, Rowing on the Potomac, Buying discounted subway cards off Craigslist, Tintin.
I'd like to meet:
Girls who work at and model for American Apparel stores. ' Meet ' being the codeword for ...... . I get it, Myspace ( wink wink )!
Music:
is music to my ears.
Movies:
Seen not too long ago: Sideways ( Village Voice had a damning review of this movie and Sally Quinn of Washington Post who is not a movie critic had to write a special column on the ills of this movie. Why would anyone not like this movie? Triggers a degree of incredulity that many of you experience when you ask me " Why would anyone like Bush? " ) The Ipcress File, Monsoon Wedding, My Favorite Year, Top Secret, LA Story, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Casablanca, Camille (Self Sacrificing protagonists in these last two movies remind me of many schmaltzy Hindi films I grew up watching back in India ), Uzpizhin, A Night at Roxbury, Auntie Maime ( two months after seeing this movie in suburban D.C I actually landed in New York to live in Auntie Maime's neighborhood! ), Romeo and Juliet, Annie Hall ( arriving at a theater and then walking away from it because the movie is well into its fifth minute is not peculiar just to me ), Namak Halal ( Hindi ), Qayamat se Qayamat Tak ( Hindi ), Saman Teri Kasam ( Hindi ), Tere Mere Sapne ( Hindi ), Ghulami ( Hindi ), Jane Bhi Do Yaaro ( Hindi ), Chashme Baddoor, Most earlier Amitabh Bachhan, Sanjeev Kumar, Kamal Hassan, Amir Khan, Faroukh Sheikh and yes Govinda movies!, Company ( Hindi ), Head On ( German & Turkish ), Dogville, Up and Down ( Czech ), All those Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic movies I saw at The Scandinavia House and at BAM, That Israeli film about an Indian Jewish immigrant family in a predominately Moroccan Jewish settlement I saw at Sutton Place Synagogue, The Iranian movie I saw at the Freer Gallery in DC, Mrs Miniver at the Mary Pickford Theatre inside the Library of Congress, The documentary on Catherine The Great and her alleged not-so-platonic love for her horse at the National Gallery of Art ( one of the best movie theatres I've been inside ), Trouble with Angels, Thelma & Louise, Holiday Makers ( Czech ), Duck Soup, The Wedding Crashers, Meet The Parents, Something About Mary, The Entertainer, Ninotchka, It's a Gift, Lolita, Oliver, Manhattan, Only Human ( Spanish ), Little Miss Sunshine ( memorably triumphant ending ), Summertime, The Dead, Loves of a Blonde ( Czech ), Wild Strawberries ( Swedish ), Sunset Boulevard, Alexander Nevsky ( Russian ), Izzat ( Norwegian/Urdu ), The Man from The Embassy ( Georgian/German )
Television:
Conan O' Brien, Win Ben Stein's Money, The Simpsons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Blackadder, Seinfeld, The Daily News, The Office ( Ricky Gervais ), Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi ( Hindi ). Mr Show
Books:
Recently read ; Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, The Moon and The Sixpence by Somerset Maugham ( I had predicted Mrs Stroeve will fall for Strickland long before there was even an iota of such an indication, what does that tell me about myself?) Side Effects by Woody Allen, Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, Snobbery by Joseph Epstein, A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene again ( I found his former title to be better, Halliburton conspiracy theorists however will disagree! ), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle ( preemptive strike partisans get your best metaphor here! ), Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ( this debut collection of short stories by a very young Thai-American author is fantastically unclassifiable as it contains one of the funniest stories I have read alongside one of the saddest, I later ran into Rattawut at a book reading at Happy Ending, a very grounded guy ), On Writing by Stephen King ( I'd seriously recommend this book to aspiring writers not averse to a primer on good writing with a holistic twist ) As I lay Dying by William Faulkner, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, One True Thing by Anna Quindlen, Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence,, With Malice Toward None a bio of Abe Lincoln by Stephen Oates, My Experiments with Truth by Gandhi, To Covet Honor a bio of Alexander Hamilton by Holmes Alexander ( another misunderstood foreigner! ), Discovery of India by Nehru, 90 minutes at Entebbe by William Stevenson, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ( these last two books have copious amounts of pathos restricted to a small geography and a short duration. That's incredible!), A Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger ( Contains one of the most poignant moments in my literary memory when Holden's little sister is struggling with her big suitcase while pleading with her brother to allow her to abscond with him, ), Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Dress Your Family in Denim and Courdoroy by David Sedaris, and a book that I could never make even halfway; Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates ( It's not that it's gory it's the kind of gore ), Plays: Biography by SL Behrman, by Ibsen, Short stories: The Dead by Joyce, An Unpleasant Predicament by Dostoevsky.
