The power of a brand..

Jhumpa Lahiri is no doubt a fantastic writer. What is even more
powerful than her writing today is the "brand" that has encompassed
her work. Lahiri is now one of the most powerful brands in the
literary world. Her book is now on the New York Times bestseller list.

"Lahiri, an author in the literary genre, has become so popular that
Knopf has reportedly printed 300,000 copies of her latest book,
similar to the amount of copies printed for books by popular fiction
authors like John Grisham," this is from a piece that I wrote for Idol
Chatter.

All the reviews of her latest book Unaccustomed Earth have been
fantastic, taking a powerful writer to even more heights, than she
could have ever imagined. Perhaps the only review that is critical of
her work with surprising logic is the one at www.Desicritics.org says
"Reading the collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri in
Unaccustomed Earth is like unwrapping layer upon layer of a much
anticipated gift only to find a mundane trinket in the end. Lahiri
seems to take perverse pleasure in playing bad Santa who stuffs the
stockings of her readers with coal, when in fact she could have easily
gratified us with eight beautiful presents. I am not entirely sure why
she would want to do what she does with unerring success story after
story. Is this by design or an unintended consequence?"

Read the full review at --
http://desicritics.org/2008/04/20/114322.php

Read the Idol Chatter piece about Lahiri becoming a pop-culture icon at--
http://blog.beliefnet.com/idolchatter/2008/04/jhumpa-lahiri-a-new-pop-cultur.html

Some glowing reviews and interviews with Lahiri can be read at the links below--
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200802u/jhumpa-lahiri
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/books/04Book.html?ref=review
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=b458594b-ac96-4572-8b8b-bedcd27bbf5e
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89236881

Mira Nair's Kosher Vegetarian

Mira Nair's has cast Irfan Khan and Natalie Portman in lead roles in
her new venture, a romantic comedy titled "Kosher Vegetarian" India
eNews reports. "Irrfan is ready to morph into a 'Gujarati' Romeo. 'But
no accent this time. I'm very clear about that,' laughed the actor,
who has just returned from Santa Monica in California after attending
the Spirit Awards," says India eNews. They also claim that this is
Irfan Khan's second movie with Mira, but according to the IMDB
database, this is her third with Khan, after Namesake and Migration.

According to IMDB Mira Nair has the follwoign movies in the works
1. Amelia (2009) (pre-production)
2. Shantaram (2009) (pre-production) -- with Amitabh Bachan
3. New York, I Love You (2008) (filming)
4. Migration (2007) -- also with Irfan Khan

Read the India eNews story at --
http://www.indiaenews.com/bollywood/20080227/100423.htm

See Mira Nair's IMDB page at --
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0619762/

Outsourced Wombs

An article by Judith Warner in the New York Times opinion section is highly thought provoking --

Outsourced Wombs
Tags: India, surrogate motherhood
The voice was commanding, slightly disdainful and officious.

“The legal issues in the United States are complicated, having to do with that the surrogate mother still has legal rights to that child until they sign over their parental rights at the time of the delivery. Of course, and there’s the factor of costs. For some couples in the United States surrogacy can reach up to $80,000.”

This was “Julie,” an American thirtysomething who’d come to India to pay a poor village woman to bear her baby. She went on:

“You have no idea if your surrogate mother is smoking, drinking alcohol, doing drugs. You don’t know what she’s doing. You have a third-party agency as a mediator between the two of you, but there’s no one policing her in the sense that you don’t know what’s going on.”

Would you want this woman owning your womb?

The Indian surrogate mothers quoted along with Julie in a report on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on NPR last week didn’t much appear troubled by that kind of thought. After all, the money they were earning for their services — $6,000 to $10,000 – might have been a pittance compared to what surrogates in the United States might earn, but it was still, for their families, the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of normal income.

They couldn’t hear Julie speaking in her awful, entitled tone. And if they had, would they have cared? “From the money I earn as a surrogate mother, I can buy a house,” said Nandani Patel, via a translator. “It’s not possible for my husband to earn more as he’s not educated and only earns $50 a month.”

We, however, can hear the imperious tone, so much more audible in radio than in the troubling print reports that have surfaced lately on Indian surrogate mothers’ “wombs for rent.” And we should care about how things sound.

Because what’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” (One “medical tourism” website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere “host.”) Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

Surrogate mothers are seen at Kaival Hospital in Anand, India, in 2006. Photo: AP Photo/Ajit Solanki
I say “feels like” and “look like” because I can’t quite bring myself to the point of saying “is.” And in this, I think, I am right in the mainstream of American thought on the topic of surrogate motherhood.

Read the full essay at --
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/?em&ex=1199682000&en=8bf9729c4f2c5a0c&ei=5070