Enter Jeremy Lin.

Maybe that story doesn’t play out the same way now?

–

Legend: Phillygrrl Nilanjana Sugi Vivek

There are times when Paris is (unwillingly) touched by other cultures. (“Stop touching me!” “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”) (Touché! Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The touch may be temporary — like a spritz of (jasmine? can it be jasmine?) perfume. (There’s always the possibility of sandalwood. Or… even better for the hippie love fest, Patchouli!!!!!) Or it can open up a well-established world hiding in plain sight. (Like a woman in a burka?! Sign me up!)

This, by the way, has nothing to do with how Paris has clobbered other cultures.

Because I just noticed, This is Paris’s India moment.

In December, Karl Lagerfeld took inspiration from India for his Paris-Bombay collection for Chanel, which included Nehru jackets, sweaters that draped like saris and opulent beading and embroidery. (Hermès! Don’t forget the actual saris lovingly targeting the Indian luxury market. I want.) “Paris-Delhi-Bombay,” which examined India through the prism of 50 Indian and French artists, was the Centre Pompidou’s most ambitious exhibition (no, really, taking on India was really going out on a limb) of the past year. And on Jan. 27, the Petit Palais museum will display nearly 100 paintings and designs by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Having begun to paint late in life, he created a large body of works on paper — bold, bright, jungle-like! tropical! visions of fantasy and inscrutable mystery. (As the spawn of Tagore-o-philes, I’ll note that the man had also had a blue period, i.e. not so bright. But Asian people are all om happy and peaceful, so let’s not talk about that.)

In fact, Paris has long contained spicy hot pockets of Indian culture. Soo, how long has Paris’s India moment been going on, exactly? The Musée Guimet, for example, houses a small but serious collection of Indian art, including sculptures of wood, clay, basalt, bronze, sandstone and schist dating from as early as the third millennium B.C.

There’s good shopping, too. (Forget art, I’m all about the shopping.) Mandalas, one of my favorite boutiques in Paris, and where I bring visitors looking for gifts, is not French but Indian-Tibetan. For about 30 euros, you can find the most beautiful drop earrings with semiprecious stones from Jaipur. (Yaks, camels, it’s all the same. Speaking of… I so love momos!!!! Damn. Now I’m hungry.) And at Le Cachemirien, a shop in the heart of Saint Germain, Rosenda Meer sells some of the finest cashmere in Paris. A double-sided shawl — moss green on one side and muted rust on the other — costs 1,500 euros (or 5 if you go to the street corner, but then what would I have to brag about?).

Yet if you know where to look (and of course I do), there is a more complex picture of Indian Paris just beyond the gemstones. The French had a reed-thin colonial connection to the subcontinent, and in 1674, on behalf of Louis XIV, they negotiated the creation of a trading post at Pondicherry on the southeastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. It changed hands over the centuries before rejoining India in 1956, but it has retained a soupçon of Frenchness (as well it should). (Been a while since I followed the adventures of Mireille, so I had to look ‘soupçon’ up. It translates not only into “hint” but also “suspicion,” and the second works better here, imo.)

The region also sent a small number of Indian Tamils to Paris, who were joined by other Tamil refugees after Indian and Sri Lankan independence in the late 1940s (with smaller numbers of Punjabis, Bengalis, Sikhs and Gujaratis to follow). More came to France in the 1980s after Britain made it harder for immigrants from the subcontinent to settle there. It doesn’t really matter WHY any of them came or in what context – from some countries as refugees, from some as economic migrants, and from some as one then the other. The point is: A pocket of the 10th Arrondissement northeast of the Gare du Nord became “Little India.” And that’s GREAT for us shoppers! Um, also, it has loads of non-Indians! The Sri Lankans mostly came way AFTER the 1940s! And not all the Tamils were refugees! But don’t trouble yourself! All Tamil people are the same! Everywhere! They have a hive mind like the Borg! Don’t worry about the silly context! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Tamil_diaspora#France

The neighborhood is rough-edged, working class and very authentic (read: poor). So authentic that I clutched my Chanel bag closely to my side to ward off the peasants. Is that sentence for real? I am actually out of snark, that sentence is so stunning. VERY AUTHENTIC. If you come, check your map and plot a walking route in advance (or you’ll get mugged). When you emerge from the Chapelle Metro, you don’t want to look like you’re lost (or you’ll get mugged). Or like a tourist. (Or even vaguely North African.) The area is more adventurous than dangerous (heh, who am I kidding, I was terrified and made my driver come with me), but still it’s not Saint-Germain-des-Pres. You will, however, always find someone who speaks more English than French.

If a gritty urban settings [sic] leaves you skittish (as it does me), call Poonam Chawla and she, with the help of her son Nikhil Bhowmick, will guide you on a tour of the neighborhood. She also runs a small cooking school specializing in northern Indian cuisine (with simple recipes learned from her mother (or quite possibly, Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi)) from her apartment in the upscale 16th Arrondissement. (Confused about the Punjabi-Bengali action going on here between mother and son, and how it may affect the authenticity of N. Indian cuisine. I mean, there could be some Pakistani and Bengali food thrown in there, and that is so not authentically Indian.)

The first time I visited the neighborhood, I came in search of small colorful metal bangles worn by young girls (or just women of all ages). (They come in cylinders with about 24 bangles each, and about a dozen bangles mixed together make perfect napkin rings (So for a dinner party of 12, purchase six boxes of bangles. Or just skip the bangles altogether and substitute out-of-season diamond tennis bracelets for a whimsical, fun effect.) I passed shops selling Bollywood DVDs at bargain prices and Indian tailors, food shops, restaurants and travel agencies offering cheap flights to India. (Where’s a good halal butcher when you need one? Oh wait. That’s not Indian. That’s Queens.)

I found the bangles in the sari and costume jewelry shops that dot the Faubourg Saint-Denis, the main street of the neighborhood. These are busy shops that cater to brides-to-be, and many are not accustomed to curious Westerners who aren’t necessarily there to buy (just to gawk at the inscrutable mystery! Y’all know Western isn’t code for white, right?). But Chennai Silks is particularly welcoming. Saris there start at 25 euros and go up to the hundreds for a fine one of beaded and embroidered. Indian Designs dazzles with its wall of costume and real necklaces and earrings, and offers more than 150 patterns of bangles, hundreds of saris and fine cotton embroidered pajamas (they’re called salwars, not pajamas) for men and women. When it’s not too busy, Abdul Aziz Ansari, the owner, will show you around. (I heart Aziz Ansari! I’m so there!!!!) I was waiting for someone to be unable to resist that one.

I ventured onward to VS CO Cash & Carry, a large grocery with mysterious (because I can’t be bothered to find out what they are) spiked (With what? Has potential… ) vegetables and half a dozen kinds of eggplant. Anglo-Saxon-style baking powder is hard to find in Paris, but here it is sold in kilo-size tins. I left with cardamom tea and bottles of curry paste and chutney.

It was getting dark, so I dared not continue on. But I came back, again and again, always in daylight (because I didn’t want to be mugged!). After several visits, the neighborhood became mine. The natives started to call me Columbus madam. It just took several visits! Being entitled is AWESOME! After decades in the neighborhood, many of those residents still can’t say the country is theirs.

Want your eyebrows threaded for only 7 euros? Your hand hennaed? Try the Centre de Beauté Indien. Dass Ponnoussamy, who owns the shop with his wife, Stella, is full of wisdom (full of enlightenment passed down to him by the sages of eyebrow threading), about the area. His father, Antoine, opened the first grocery store nearby more than 40 years ago. The florist Hibiscus Fleurs flies in ropes of fresh jasmine packed in ice from the vast Chennai region. You pin it in your hair and suddenly you exude the sweet smell of fresh jasmine, a purer scent than Chanel No. 5 (but far less expensive, so use it sparingly — or the neighbors will talk).

Noon is the time to witness the midday ceremony at Temple Ganesh, the Hindu Temple on a side street a few blocks north of the main commercial area. Non-Hindus are welcome and no one reading this article could possibly BE Hindu, and picture-taking is allowed. Leave your shoes at the door and buy a basket of coconut, banana and betel leaf for about 8 euros to make a traditional offering. The ceremony, led by a priest naked to the waist (you KNOW what I’m SAYIN’!), fills the room with camphor and incense; chants and prayers; offerings of milk, honey, fruits and flowers. On the day of my visit, I was handed a plate of prasad, warm sweet rice, as a token of appreciation (or a desperate attempt to get me to leave).

Then comes lunch, starting with a lassi made with mango or rose. Southern Indian cooking features dosas (savory rice-and-black-lentil pancakes) and idlis (steamed rice cakes) instead of the naan bread (department of redundancy department, as my high school chem teacher used to say!) of the north. (Where’s the Chettinad chicken? Oh, it’s that sort of South Indian. Sigh. So hungry. The Bong in me is also craving a good Keralan fish curry… along with the momos.) Good vegetarian restaurants can be hard to find in Paris, but the neighborhood has two excellent ones (because DUH, everyone knows Indians are vegetarians!). The most recent one is Saravana Bhavan. Part of an international chain, it leaves even (even!) India-savvy diners with the impression of having just been to Madras (until the bill arrives). At nearby Krishna Bhavan, five of us ate well for 46 euros. (No Woodlands?)

Instead of ordering dessert, stop in at Canabady Snacks. The shop offers both savories (like the spicy chickpea-flour snacks that looks like orange worms) OMG, that phrase is part of the article? not part of someone else’s snark? and brightly colored cakelike desserts. (Holding out for monkey brain fritters on this end, ahem.) They are cloyingly sweet, but that’s part of the experience (oh the compromises one makes for exotic cultures, my carb count just went through the roof!). (If you just want jalebis, you can find them in the Arab or Persian stores. No need to venture out here. Ask for “zalabia” or “zoolbia,” and save on the Métro!) Ask enough questions of the charmingly timid men (so much less scary than those Senegalese and Algerians, I can’t even tell you) (you should see their women!) in the shop and they might pull out folding chairs (in defeat), offer you samples and make you boiling black tea with milk and sugar. (If it’s boiling, you can drink it.) For more on tea in Paris, here’s another Orientalist piece I wrote in these pages!

If you’re in the mood for more, head to the Passage Brady several blocks away. A forlorn, dimly lit covered arcade, its floor tiles are broken and many of its shops and restaurants are empty. (I would think this is more authentic. Dim lighting, forlorn air, broken tiles and all. Flâneur heaven. Just sayin’.) But it offers a piece of history: it was here that the first Indian businesses opened decades ago. Still going strong is Velan, an inviting one-stop shop for foodstuffs, decorative objects, incense, candles, costume jewelry and ayurvedic beauty products.

And in the Joan Miró garden near the Porte d’Italie in the 13th Arrondissement in the south of Paris, off a street called Tagore, there is another surprise: lost in a corner is a bronze bust of the poet and painter himself, pensive as he writes in a notebook. Like me, I am so thoughtful. So thoughtful, I “discovered” all of this.

Fanatic Muslims consider Hindu-dominated India “an unfinished chapter of Islamic conquests”. All other countries conquered by Islam 100% converted to Islam within two decades of the Islamic invasion. Undivided India in 1947 was 75% Hindu even after 800 years of brutal Islamic rule. That is jarring for the fanatics…

The first lesson to be learnt from the recent history of Islamic terrorism against India and for tackling terrorism in India is that the Hindu is the target and that Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus…

We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan (DNA India).

So to recap, despite the overwhelming diversity that defines Hinduism, and despite the glaring social inequities that find their roots in the religion, Hindus in India need to privilege their religious identity above everything else because the Muslims around them are being infected by the suicide bomb bug. Did I miss anything?

As nasty as it is, Swamy’s diatribe doesn’t stray very far from the body of work that defines rightwing Hindu nationalism. That last paragraph I quoted pretty much paraphrases M.S. Golwalkar from his 1939 book, We or Our Nationhood Defined:

The foreign races in Hindusthan [India] must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must loose (sic) their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights. There is, at least, should be, no other course for them to adopt.

Swamy is a long-time faculty member of the economics department at Harvard (he got his PhD there in the 60s), and he is teaching there this summer. Two Harvard students have started an online petition demanding that the university cut its ties with Subramanian Swamy. It currently has 223 signatures. An article in the Harvard Crimson published today contains more details about the story.

Pride of Nations is a turn-based historical strategy game set in the colonial era of the 19th century, where the player takes control of a country and guides it through industrialization, military conquest, and colonization. This upcoming release from AGEOD follows such successful historical strategy games as Birth of America, American Civil War, Napoleon’s Campaigns, and Wars in America [linkocricy].

What? What’s that I hear you say, friend? You feel slightly more ill now than you’d otherwise feel on a Monday morning because there’s about a 0.0001% chance that Pride of Nations in any way addresses the awful things these countries did to colonies and their people? Well rest assured!

Fight against a strong AI through a number of new game mechanisms

Yes! Strong AI will represent your ancestors and their struggle for freedom!

They’re down to the top five in tonight’s episode, and one of the remaining contestants is Sudhir Kandula (@sudsnyc), whose brainchild is Spice Coast, featuring – are you ready? – fast casual southern Indian coastal food! Sudhir’s restaurant began the show with the name Tiffin Box (it had me there) but the investors asked him to change it because no one knows what a tiffin box is.

I spoke with Sudhir earlier in the week about the show, the diversity of Indian food, and his idea for a healthy restaurant:

If you’re viewing this from a device that isn’t flash-friendly, here’s the link.

Your tweets will show up here:

PS: Let me know if you want additional hashtags.

There have been 46 matches played so far in this year’s ICC Cricket World Cup, and only four teams remain:

Sri Lanka, who got to the semifinals by chasing England’s respectable total of 221 without losing a wicket;

New Zealand, who did less to the South African bats than the South African bats did to themselves;

Pakistan, who embarrassed the West Indies by first bowling them out for a paltry 112, then chasing the total in less than half the time it took for the West Indies to accumulate it;

India, who avenged their 2003 World Cup Final drubbing by Australia.

Sri Lanka and New Zealand play tomorrow in Colombo. India and Pakistan play on Wednesday in Mohali. The winners play on Saturday in Mumbai. All three matches start at 5 am Eastern, 2 am Pacific.

So the question is, where to watch?

Eventually we made our way to the gate, where we listened to the departure announcements.

Friends, it was hilarious.

First, an automated voice would make an announcement in English butchering the pronunciation of the destination city (presumably for the phoreign ear). A few seconds later, the announcement in Hindi would pronounce the city name perfectly.

Here’s Chennai:

Guwahati via Bagdodra:

Khajuraho via Varanasi:

Srinagar via Jammu:

If that wasn’t enough, my mother was back in the same terminal a week later. To her surprise, this time boarding announcements came in French and German. When she asked the ticket agents why, they told her that there were French and German nationals on those flights.

Of course it would never strike anyone to make announcements for the Chennai flight in Tamil, the Bengaluru flight in Kannada, the Ahmedabad flight in Gujarati, or the Hi-dehr-a-baaaaaad flight in Telugu…

The World Cup final is to be played on April 2 in Mumbai, whose Wankhede Stadium has a capacity of 33,000 seats. Of these, only 4,000 have been allocated for sale to the public. The remaining tickets, a whopping 27,000, are reserved for the ICC and the Mumbai Cricket Club’s associate members (ESPNCricInfo).

Not only that, but when fans tried to buy tickets online, the whole system crashed from the number of people trying to make purchases.

The most prominent errors took place on Monday afternoon when the servers of Kyazoonga.com, the ICC’s official ticketing partners, were overwhelmed with the load as the site went ‘live’ with sales for the final and semi-finals at 1pm India time. The website received close to ten million hits in a matter of minutes – half a million at any given moment – many of those people refreshing the site. It would have needed, a Kyazoonga staffer said, a server farm the “size of a football field” to keep up with that kind of demand. The site crashed by 1.05pm and the few people who had got into the system and begun purchasing their tickets found their plans hanging somewhere in cyberspace.

The website went online again around 9.30pm IST with a statement that no tickets for the finals & semi-finals had been sold on Monday due to the system issues and that updates about the ticket sales would follow. So, all the tickets allocated for online sales will still be available once the Kyazoonga network teams in India, Europe and the United States get their servers up and running again. Kyazoonga were not willing to reveal an approximate time when that was expected to happen.

Epic Fail. Oh well, it’s better on TV anyway, right? Even if you’ve traveled from South Africa to see it live? Um, yeah.

The only remotely exciting match of the tournament so far was the most recent one, between Bangladesh and Ireland. It shouldn’t have been close, but the side that scored 283 against India in Dhaka last week was nowhere to be found. Instead, Bangladesh were bowled out for a paltry 205, and just managed to make sure Ireland didn’t catch them. Scorecard

This weekend should be more promising: On Saturday, Pakistan and Sri Lanka play in Colombo, and England takes on India in Bangalore.

And in case you’re still not sure what this game is all about, have a whack here. Stick out the first half-minute. You’ll be glad you did.

Before we go any further, let’s have a cool video explaining the rules of this exotic and fascinating game:

What? You don’t speak German? Oh. Well unfortunately, I can’t find a nice, concise video presentation in English of how cricket is played. Any suggestions?

If you’re the texty sort, here are the laws of cricket, with a few slightly helpful pictures. If you’d like to translate those to video, I actually suggest watching Lagaan. I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. You can skip all the parts about drought, taxes, Radha, Krishna, betrayal, rhyming “kiss” with “bliss,” and skip straight to the actual match. Why? Because if I’m not mistaken, the match in Lagaan has a demonstration of every single way you can get out or score a run in cricket.

If you’re in the US, your viewing options are fairly limited, not least because the matches start at either 11 pm or 4 am eastern time. If you’re a DirecTV subscriber, you can buy the World Cup bundle for $149. You can also pay for an online streaming subscription through willow.tv for $129. Willow offers replays and highlights of previously played matches. The tournament is also available through Dish network, though I’m not sure for how much. The World Cup final will be played in Mumbai on April 2.

Here are this year’s participants, divided into two groups, with their seeding in parentheses:

In the first round, each team plays every other team in its group, and the top four teams in each group advance to the quarterfinals. For more details, take a look at the cricinfo.com page.

The World Cup was originally scheduled to be played in Pakistan as well, but the International Cricket Council canceled those 14 matches following a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore in March, 2009.

Apart from the opening match of the tournament on Saturday, in which India beat Bangladesh in Dhaka, the three host countries (India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) play all of their group matches at home. Pakistan will play all of its group matches in Sri Lanka.

As I write this, defending champion Australia is trying to close out what looks like an inevitable win against Zimbabwe in the 4th match of the tournament.

In the 2007 World Cup, Bangladesh beat India in the group round, and Sri Lanka finished them off in their match to deny India a spot in the quarterfinals. This year India got the best of Bangladesh, posting a mammoth total of 370 that Bangladesh couldn’t catch, though if they can repeat their response of 283 in their remaining matches, they’re sure to notch a few wins and find themselves in the next round again this year.

The 2003 World Cup in South Africa saw Kenya come out of nowhere and secure a spot in the semi-finals. They played incredibly well, winning group matches against Canada, Bangladesh, and a stunner against Sri Lanka in Nairobi. That match was one of two scheduled in Nairobi. Kenya won the other as well, but through forfeit: the New Zealand side refused to travel to Kenya because of security concerns. It would have been great to see Kenya hand it to New Zealand in their 2011 matchup in Chennai, but alas, it only took them 8 overs to chase Kenya’s sad total of 69.

Check out Preston Merchant’s memorable profile of former Kenyan captain Aasif Karim.

In the 3rd match, Sri Lanka crushed Canada by 210 runs in their attempt to return to the finals, where they lost to Australia in 2007. The match took place at the newly-built Mahinda Rajapakse stadium in Hambantota. More on that later.

I’ll go digging through the archives for more posts about the 2007 Cup. In the mean time, enjoy the cricket!