Why You Should Watch Bollywood

From the New York Times (subscription required)
Anger Burns on the Fringe of Britain’s Muslims
Published: July 16, 2005
LEEDS, England, July 15

At Beeston’s Cross Flats Park, in the center of this now embattled town, Sanjay Dutt and his friends grappled Friday with why their friend Kakey, better known to the world as Shehzad Tanweer, had decided to become a suicide bomber.He was sick of it all, all the injustice and the way the world is going about it,” Mr. Dutt, 22, said. “Why, for example, don’t they ever take a moment of silence for all the Iraqi kids who die?”It’s a double standard, that’s why,” answered a friend, who called himself Shahroukh, also 22, wearing a baseball cap and basketball jersey, sitting nearby. “I don’t approve of what he did, but I understand it. You get driven to something like this, it doesn’t just happen.”

Now what are the odds of an young Muslim having the real name of “Sanjay Dutt”? And the odds of his friend having the name “Shahrukh” ? Not that their real names are dreadfully important, but I could not resist a chuckle as to how they duped the NYT reporter.

Reminds me of a story my dad once told me. In Hindu hostel (Presidency College), the superintendent, who was concerned with guys coming back very late after a wild night, instructed the guard to enforce the rule that students who came in after 11 were to sign their names in the register.

The guard, who could not read all that well, enforced the rule no doubt but the next day the “super” found out that some very interesting people had stayed in the hostel last night—–Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mussolini…………….

7 thoughts on “Why You Should Watch Bollywood

  1. isn’t there some way to contact the morons and let them know how badly they’ve goofed up?

  2. who needs a subscription to NYT when we can have our fun free on times of india


  3. lol, good one… although never had to try that myself 🙂

  4. @Sunil, I wish there was…but just did not get the tempo to shoot off a mail to the editor of NYT…

    @Teleute and Aparna, 🙂

    @Anon, Maybe it’s the word “Times” that is the root of all evil. But honestly, nothing comes close to TOI—-that newspaper is something.

  5. sorry, have to differ with you on one point, Greatbong: that TOI is “nothing”… and not “something”. Wonder how thick a rhino’s skin they have or how shameless they are to keep boldly flashing those ABC survey results that say they are the world’s largest selling English daily or that they are the world’s masthead…God help them!

  6. South Asian Journalist March 25, 2013 — 11:31 am

    Here’s a possibility: the guys who gave these bytes to the NYT reporter did not want to disclose their true names, and the reporter assured them he won’t. Then he goes back to office, hurries to file the report, and (maybe because the guys were south asian) gives them South Asian aliases. It wouldn’t be incredibly impossible for a British journalist to not know the difference between Hindu and Muslim South Asian names

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