quit gossiping and let him drive

Andrew and I made a weekend outing to see Dostana, the newest Karan Johar-produced Bollywood film that I’ve been excited about seeing for weeks. As it wasn’t playing at our neighborhood theater we headed out to the Inox Cinema at the Forum Mall, where our tickets cost about 3 times what I usually pay for a movie here and where I was forced to temporarily turn in to security the battery from my camera, my bottle of water, and a pack of gum.

The basic plot of Dostana is basically the same as I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (at least from what I gathered from the previews) except everyone’s hot. Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham pretend to be a gay couple in order to room with Priyanka Chopra and get expedited residency permits (because everyone knows that it’s worlds easier to maneuver the bureaucracy of U.S. Immigration if you’re a gay couple) in Miami, America’s Party Capital. The movie is mostly about John Abraham’s ass, but manages to fluctuate between insanely awesome and totally fucked up, which is really to be expected in any big-budget Hindi film that “deals” with “homosexuality.”

Karan Johar, who directed many hugely popular Bollywood movies in the last five to ten years, is a bit of an oddity in that he’s an openly gay man who has been extremely successful in the industry. He was educated in California, and all his movies, whether they deal with it as a theme or not, are about the Indian Diaspora community. In the last couple of years, coinciding with a perceived progressiveness in the general urban Indian social milieu, he has also begun inserting homosexuality into his films in very superficial and minor ways, like in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna where random men on the street announce their sexuality out of nowhere to the stars of the film, who reply “Good for you!” I suppose just talking about it is a step forward, but the ways mainstream media is talking about homosexuality (and it is of course always male homosexuality) is still pretty shitty. When Abhishek asks Priyanka if she’s “cool with the whole gay thing” her response, which is not meant to be funny, is almost stammering “oh yeah of course, I mean it’s your choice, I mean, gay rights.” Choice is a big theme whenever Bollywood speaks out about the illegality of homosex in India, such as “people shouldn’t be penalized for their choices,” which, in addition to being totally regressive, actually makes no sense. All this being said, I bought the Dostana soundtrack immediately after leaving the theater and have listened to it an unhealthy number of times since.

There was an article in Outlook this week about how all urban girls simply have to have gay male friends. Most of the people interviewed about this were chick-lit authors. There was a short section near the end when a couple of gay men were all, “actually, not all gay men love gossiping and women and shopping and most of them aren’t available at the drop of a hat to be your bestie because of course they have no sex lives of their own, and actually, y’all are stupid,” which was certainly refreshing, but the writer had the gall to end the article directly following this quote with, “Perhaps. But ask any urban Indian girl and she’ll tell you that boyfriends and girlfriends come and go, but her gay friend is forever.” Bah. I’m going to write a children’s book called “My Gay Friend.”

It’s looking like the first thing I’ll ever publish will be a short paper I’m working on with my boss in Baltimore on dog bites. In my literature searches for the background section I have learned all sorts of new things, including that human rabies is still much more of a problem than I always assumed it was. Also, in perhaps the first study of its kind, I found something pretty great going on in our very own West Bengal called “puppy pregnancy.” Excerpt from the abstract:

Delusion of pregnancy in males, though uncommon, has been reported in the literature. Delusion of animal pregnancy in humans is unreported until now, and we are reporting here cases of puppy pregnancy in human beings from a part of rural West Bengal, India. Studies of six male cases and one female case of delusion of puppy pregnancy after an alleged touch or bite of a dog are presented. (…) One case (11-year-old child) exemplified how the social imposition of this cultural belief made him a case that allegedly vomited out an embryo of a dog foetus.

I love that puppy pregnancy is the scientific term they’ve chosen. Sometimes my job is kind of awesome.

I watched a guy get hit by a car the other day a block from my house (just his leg) and to keep with the subsequent preoccupation in my mind with physical hazards, I bring you a couple of highlights from Safety In India Watch 2008: WTF. A couple of weeks ago there was an accident involving two city buses that resulted from the two drivers racing each other. An article in the paper quoted a bunch of passengers as having pleaded with the drivers to slow down but to no avail. I was reminded of this last night when a bus drove by with “born to kill” hand-painted on its rear over a picture of a phoenix.

Back in October at the beginning of the Puja there was a stampede in Jodhpur outside a temple where over 200 people were killed. Stampedes seem to be alarmingly common in most parts of the world, but read this excerpt from October 1st’s Telegraph:

Around 5.15am, more than an hour after the temple gates opened at 4am, a 14-year-old slipped in the men’s queue. As he fell, a part of the bamboo barricade put up to control the crowd — 50 devotees were being allowed in at a time — gave way. This caused a surge as people behind the boy tried to rush into the temple. Many more slipped and fell in the melee, sliding backwards down the slope in the narrow 2km path. The stampede continued for around an hour.

Does anything stand out to you? AROUND AN HOUR. How does that even happen? Even thousands of people at a time have to get the hint at some point that running up a slippery incline over other people’s bodies can only end in tragedy. If only we lived in a world where the only thing to fear is the possibility of puppy pregnancy.