Shaheb Cafe – Page 26

The Concert for Bangladesh Turns 40

Go, iTunes for showing the The Concert for Bangladesh free this past weekend to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the concert held on August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York. I’ve had the triple album on vinyl for years but had never seen the movie.

Highlights include George Harrison having to explain up front what a sitar is, and for the audience to sit quietly and behave during the Indian music part led by Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha. Just shows how culturally far the US has come musically since 1971. Today instruments like the sitar and the sarod are commonplace in American rock and folk music.

Then there are the ubiquitous Coke cans (I’m guessing Coke donated refreshments backstage or footed part of the bill for the MSG rental). It’s hard to believe the product placement is accidental. Billy Preston’s seen with one just before hopping up from his keyboard to go into a dance frenzy (must have been the caffeine), then Leon Russell’s seen with one at his keyboard just before belting Jumpin’ Jack Flash. There are just these Coke cans sitting around on the stage everywhere that get nicely framed by the cameras when they go in for closeups of the artists.

Also amazing is how many of them are smoking (tobacco) cigarettes. Today they’d probably have to hide that from the cameras to keep the film from getting an NC-17.

Eric Clapton is humble as usual.

For the most part the musical performances aren’t stellar (the simplest and most polished-sounding was George and Eric’s duet on Here Comes the Sun) but that wasn’t the point. The concert was quickly thrown together and they all did it for free to raise money to aid the grim humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh brought about by their war to break away from Pakistan (who can blame them?) and by the world’s largest tropical cyclone hitting them at the worst possible time. Even without the cyclone, the Pakistani army killed an estimated 3 million, systematically raped thousands of women, and 10 million refugees fled into neighboring India. The concert was intended to call attention to their plight and offer some relief for their horrific suffering.

If you download the concert (the album, not the movie) from iTunes they’ll make a donation to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF. Or just go to concertforbangladesh.com and donate any amount there. For the month of August all funds raised will go toward famine relief in the Horn of Africa. That’s the famine in Somalia you’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for days. Why not chip in a little and help them out? It’s what George and Ravi and Eric and Billy and Leon and Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan and Badfinger would want you to do.

I resemble that.

Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged. They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press? Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT https://www.mtvdesi.com/2010/12/07/new-york-press-delves-into-the-paan-game

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance. CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor. I’m truly honored and humbled.

I HEART PAAN

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

The cover story on this week’s New York Press, “New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

Jeffrey Stanley is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora. By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker. I’m happy to…CONT’D>>

News Flash: Theatre Really Can Change Lives

Despite my deep passion for theatre I’ve often quoted the cynical aphorism, Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that, and I have believed it to be true.

I stand corrected thanks to the new book, Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre by Jonathan Shailor (Kingsley Press, 2010) about 14 prison theater programs. The chapter “Drama in

Despite my deep passion for theatre I’ve often quoted the cynical aphorism, Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that, and I have believed it to be true.

I stand corrected thanks to the new book, Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre by Jonathan Shailor (Kingsley Press, 2010) about 14 prison theater programs. The chapter “Drama the Big House” was penned by my good friend Brent Buell, a director, actor and writer who has volunteered for more than a decade for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a division of Prison Communities International, directing plays and teaching acting classes to inmates. Brent’s locus in the New York State prison system is the original Big House, Sing Sing state penitentiary in Ossining, NY.

I first met Brent in 2004 through our mutual friend David Gaynes and took my first trip via Metro-North train from Manhattan, zooming along the Hudson to the Big House to see the inmates’ production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a farce written and directed by Brent (a photo from that production adorns the book’s cover). I returned the next year to see the bold satire The N Trial, a meditation on the uses of the dreaded “N-word” in our society, including within prison walls, written by inmate Philip Hall, who was wrapping up a 20 year sentence.

Such productions of a full-length play performed for the general public have become an annual event at Sing Sing. The cast and crew are primarily inmates, co-mingled with professional actors and crew who volunteer their time

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Happy 150th, Tagore

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="266" caption="Tagore Celebration in Kolkata, 5/8/10"]

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Rabindranath Tagore (May 8, 1861 – August 8, 1941) the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born 150 years ago this weekend. Celebrations are underway in India, especially in his hometown of Kolkata, West Bengal, and across the globe. Would that I were there

A few of my pix from the historic Tagore family home Jorasanko, winter 2010, Kolkata.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Tagore family home, Jorasanko, earlier this year, which continued to turn me on to this Bengali Renaissance Man’s works in poetry, theatre, fiction and music. Today Jorasanko is a museum operated by nearby Rabindra Bharati University named in Rabindranath’s honor and focusing on performing arts and the humanities. My fellow travelers and I were fortunate to have a personal tour guide at Jorasanko, music faculty Prof. Ghosh. He also took me to visit the campus and meet with the Performing Arts chair and some of the faculty, and I wound up giving an impromptu lecture and Q&A about contemporary US theatre to the bright, informed and eager undergrads in an Ancient Greek Theatre class.

The visit to Jorasanko and the university campus wound up indirectly turning me on to the works of Tagore’s precursors such as Ishwar Chandra Gupta (1812-1859), largely forgotten today in Tagore’s long shadow.

I leave you with one of Tagore’s poems:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.

The above poem is very Walt Whitman, eh? It’s from Tagore’s Nobel-winning collection Gitanjali.

Rabindranath Tagore statue at the entrance to Rabindra Bharati University, winter 2010, Kolkata.

Einstein and Tagore in Berlin, July 14, 1930

[pix taken from indiablooms.com and schoolofwisdom.com; the rest are mine]