Thursday, January 27, 2011

I wish India was a person so I could high-five them with both hands

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us


Well I haven't written on the blog in a long long bit, but only because I haven't been truly inspired until this very moment.

I'm a fan of all things Indian. It's a known fact that I'm 110% gay for Chicken Tikka Masala. Not to mention Garlic Naan, the crack cocaine of the carbohydrate universe. I love reading books by Yoga dudes with long, awesome sounding names..the ones that hipsters name-drop during late night post-dinner convos in order to look both deep and cerebral. I do enjoy soaking in the wisdom of smiley eyed, peaceful wizards who rock mind-powers and Snuggies at the same time, all the while sporting proper Jim Henson beards to keep the Hippie cred strong and keep it green. Don't even get me started on Ghandi (the movie), which won like 67 Oscar Meyer statues back in the day, and is such a fantastic movie that I happily sit through all 14 hours of it whenever it comes on TV. Which is something I only do for the likes of "Bloodsport", "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", and post-beard Riker episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". (A feat indeed for a man who already forgot how this sentence is supposed to end, because of a condition that sometimes makes me jumpy like a squirrel, and occasionally causes my elocution to take on a pace and consistency akin to the movements of a severely retarded goldfish.

Where was I? Yeah. Ghandi. God dammit that is a good movie. That movie literally made me begin to hate white people. I'm white, which is cool I guess, but I can't really grow a mustache, and I'm terrible at accents. Also I'm not an Imperialist British land baron who shoots Indians and relishes in the act of being a total dick for no reason. I'd even go as far to say that the movie "Ghandi" illuminated a defining moment in history; it illustrated the moment when passive-aggressive mustachioed British men of wealth and influence officially became the biggest assholes in the entire world.

Even though I'm excitable, I'm surprisingly not prone to being starstruck. That is with the exception of this one time I met Ben Kingsley at my old job. First of all, he's a fucking Knight, which could only be more badass if they gave him a real sword and a suit of armor and sent him off to burn villages and drink mead out of bejeweled goblets. Secondly, he's Ben fucking Kinsley. Who, some have dubbed, "The Ben Kingsley of actors". I'd even go out on a limb and say that Ben Kingsley's Ghandi, while obviously not as world-changing and influential as the real Ghandi, was more, how do I say,"convincing" as Ghandi than the actual Ghandi was. Which is totally crazy, because non-Kingsley Ghandi was Ghandi all the time, plus, he was the original.

Anyway when I met him he was so cool that it kind of took me off guard. I figured someone who got Knighted would have at least a few diva tendencies, so when he had none at all, I got nervous. And, for whatever reason, I got all nervous and I started to feel like one of those sweaty European girls about to faint at a Thriller-era Michael Jackson concert, somewhere in the grayish part of the map between Eastern Siberistan and the western half of the Balkan Powder Keg. (Shout outs to the Ottoman Empire. Play on, players!)

You know the type of place I'm talking about...that little "whatever"
country shaped like an Amoeba,
the one conveniently wedged between former Cold War adversaries that only Wikipedia webmasters can properly pronounce or even care to know the name of. A country so insignificant and small that their two Olympic athletes flip coins to see who gets to carry the flag at the opening ceremony and who gets the top bunk back at Olympic Village. A land where kindergartners smoke unfiltered cigarettes and men's names sound like a brand of assault rifle, and women's names either sound like poison flowers or a chemical ingredient of Industrial Solvent. A place where smiling is restricted to supervised children under the age of 5 and allowed only during daylight hours, and only on their birthdays. Adults caught smiling without just cause face a mandatory sentence of 20 years hard labor in the notorious ice mine of the northern lands, a place rumored to be haunted by Communist ghosts.

The clip below reminds me why I love the Indian movie industry. It literally has all my favorite things in it: robots, nonsense, noises, unnecessary assortment of guns, leather jackets, mustaches, fun, Mom jeans, fast movements, inexplicable kung-fu zooms, the list goes on.

Just watch this video. I promise you it's so good you'll want to snort it, then spend next month in the woods drinking coffee in hooded sweatshirts with tired looking men and frowny women with clipboards, detoxing from the effects of it's awesome motherfucking awesomeness.