Emily has topped the list since 1996. Jacob has done so since 1999. Elizabeth returns to the top ten after a two year absence.

I was curious how many (if any) desi names made the list for 2007. So, I took a look and here's what I found on the boys' side:

510. Rohan
729. Arjun
749. Aditya
821. Nikhil
829. Samir
881. Pranav
958. Rishi
959. Arnav

Quite frankly, I was surprised to see so many. But perhaps if you think about proportions, 8 out of 1000 is 0.8%, roughly 1%, which is in line with the size of the desi diaspora in the USA. I'll have to look at the lists from previous years to see if there's been an uptick. One notable omission, as noted by the SSA themselves:

Although “American Idol’s” Sanjaya did not influence this year’s list, other young celebrities influenced the naming of American children.

Heh, heh. As for the girls, another surprise - I only found Maya at position 62. The other name that came close was Saniyah at 565. There were two others, "India" at 690 and "Karma" at 859 but those aren't names desi parents assign to their daughters, not that I've heard of anyway.

You can find the lists here.

If you haven't checked the state's unclaimed property registry lately, you could be costing yourself some bucks. That utility deposit you didn't bother to get back when you moved, the safety deposit box you forgot to clean out, a gift certificate you didn't get around to using - they all could be listed at www.ClaimIt.ca.gov.

The database includes millions of names, and billions of unclaimed dollars. Even if yours isn't there, it's great fun to search. Clint Eastwood has $300 in salary coming from MGM Studios - probably a rounding error. Lindsay Lohan has an outstanding legal award of $1,559.80. Steve Jobs can claim a $120 from an insurance company and Larry Ellison has $59.30 coming from Hertz. My neighbors Judy and Richard are due more than $200 from various insurance claims and deposits.

Call me voyeuristic, call me a good samaritan, whatever, I couldn't resist the urge to see whether any California company owed any money to the desi diaspora's finest. Of course, first I had to try my own name. Nothing. No overlooked rent deposit or gift certificate. After that initial search, I tried putting in some of the brighter names in the desi firmament. And was surprised to see some actually come up. Here's what I found:

Deepak Chopra
The web site came up with a couple of hits. I ignored the fellow living in the Bay Area and picked the entries with the Palos Verdes address. Here's what I found:

That's right. Allstate owes $48 to Dr. Chopra. Somehow, I doubt he'll be rushing to collect it anytime soon, flush as he is.

Another entry was this:

What kind of court settlement? The good doctor has been in the courts a fair amount but this amount of money is piffle, barely enough to buy one or two of his hardbacks. What could it be? Neighbors playing Van Halen too loud perhaps? The mind boggles.

Vinod Khosla

These were all for prescription overpayments, the well known (and exceedingly well off) venture capitalist presumably not needing to bother with insurance co-payments like the rest of us mere mortals.

Kal Penn

Paydirt! Kal Penn is owed a cool $5K for his acting services. I know brother is living large what with Harold and Kumar doing boffo box office but I am sure this is still not chump change territory. Hey Kal, throw me a 10% finders fee when you claim the money, will ya? :-)

We were told we were winning the Vietnam war until the last Americans were helicoptered off the roof of the embassy.

There are sections on Life, Wealth, Religion, Politics and more. All in all, a lovely collection of quick verbal pick-me-ups, particularly when you're feeling a little jaded with the world.

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Sam’s Club, the membership warehouse division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what it calls “recent supply and demand trends,” the company said Wednesday

The broader chain of Wal-Mart stores has no plans to limit food purchases, however.

Sam’s Club said it will limit customers to four bags at a time of Jasmine, Basmati and long grain white rice. Rice prices have been hitting record highs recently on worries about tight supplies as part of broader global inflation in food costs.

Howls of outrage from the local "Passage To India" and "Lucky Pot Chinese" establishments were not included in this article. Probably because:

The warehouse chain caters heavily to small businesses, including restaurants. Spokeswoman Kristy Reed said she could not comment on whether the problem was caused by short supplies or by customers stocking up in anticipation of higher prices.

So gentle readers, the next time your Indian curry night cookout is ruined by lack of basmati, you know who's hoarding the grain.

The whole affair is sadly reminiscent of the Great Dal Shortage of 2006 when:

The Indian government's decision to ban the export of dal (lentils) has hit Indian Americans hard.

The ban, imposed in June, has resulted in the commodity getting scarce in Indian grocery stores in the US, with prices almost doubling at some places.

"The minute (the ban) was announced, wholesalers put up the price," Jalil Hay, owner of an Indian grocery store in Stockton, California, told India New England , an ethnic newspaper. "(Prices) have almost doubled and tripled."

Ouch! Forget the recession, the lack of dal-bhaat (rice/lentils) is the one-two punch that's likely to hurt us Indian Americans the most.

a Hindu rite-of-passage ritual that marks an infant's first intake of food other than milk. The term annaprashan literally means "food feeding" or "eating of food".

and

Commonly referred to in English as First Rice, the ceremony is usually carried out when the child is about 6 months of age. (some Hindu communities do it later). It is an occasion for celebration, and extended family, friends and neighbours will be invited to attend. The mother or grandmother will prepare a small bowl of payesh (boiled rice, milk & sugar) which is blessed in a brief puja. The child will generally be held in the mother's lap, and a senior male family member (grandfather or uncle) will feed it a small spoonful of the payesh, to general celebration. Other members of the family then take turns to give the child a taste.

We actually held the ceremony a little early (just prior to Virj's fifth month). However, as you can see, he seemed pretty ready for solids. I would imagine a steady liquid diet of the breast milk variety for five months straight would have that effect.

The feeding ceremony is often followed with a game, in which the child is presented with a tray containing a number of objects. These will include a bangle or jewel (symbolising wealth), a book (symbolising learning), a pen (symbolising career) and a clay pot or container of earth/soil (symbolising property). The child's future direction and prospects in life are indicated by the object which it prefers to hold and play with.

Yep, he's all about the money. Or perhaps the dollar bill was the most succulent option on the tray.

I didn't do any work on it for nearly a year until it came time to trot out some stuff for the annual Holi function at my grad school. With my partner in crime, Subra, we fashioned an entire narrative with verbal nods to A Tribe Called Quest, GangStarr and Das EFX. Yes, they were very big then. Given I was already mucking about with a high end Mac Quadra for my thesis work, it was a no brainer to actually record and create a track. I wish I had it lying around now to share but the files ended up in digital nirvana, sadly.

I remember being worried on the eve of the performance that the audience wouldn't be able to hear the words, so we passed out lyric sheets in advance. To no avail as it turned out. The whole thing fell a bit flat, at least by my standards. I consoled myself with thoughts of being too ahead of our time etc etc and went on to other things.

It wasn't until I began occasionally e-mailing out the lyrics that things started to happen. Somehow, one such missive triggered a chain e-mail reaction amongst desis in the Northeast - from what I understand, the usual comment was "check out this cool rap. Grad students in Ithaca seem to have entirely too much time on their hands!"

Then, in '99, I received the following e-mail from noted Asian American scholar Vijay Prashad:

You will no doubt be rather surprised to hear from me after all these years (admittedly only three years). My reason for writing is rather urgent, so forgive me for getting right to the point. I have a book that is in production (Karma of Brown Folk) with the University of Minnesota Press. In it, I use several lines from "Desi Like That" by your fine group, Desi Jersey Mafia. Of course, I give full credit to you and the group.

Indeed, Karma of Brown Folk came out later that year and we were in it. I have my own complimentary copy of the book to prove it too. Courtesy Google, here's the actual place in the book where the excerpt appeared, ahead of a chapter, "On Authentic Cultural Lives", dealing with Asian migration to the United States.

Enough of the preamble. Here's the whole thing. Enjoy:

Yo my name is Soam , that's foam with an S
them dudes like my duds, see I'm dressed for success
I higgedy diggedy my Mama, I'm as built as Bhima
taller than a tree and I sting with my degree
I drive a Honda Civic, but to me it's a Ferrari
Hemanta on the speaker - 'cause I'm a Bengali
but hey, 'nuff of me, I got work to do,
so let's go and chill with the rest of my crew

'Cause we're cool like dat, we're cool like that, we're cool like that
we're cool like that, we're desi like dat, we're desi like that, we're
desi like that, yeah we're desi(echo)

Yeah, some of the references are really dated. Who remembers Digable Planets' "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" anyway? Or Dimple Kapadia? And yes, there are some real cringe worthy moments in there. But it still brings a smile to my face. Surely, that's worth something after all those years.

Now, if everyone would only pronounce it properly :-)

I thought I was being facetious. Hard to go wrong with something so succinct, right? It's been four months now, so what's been our experience?

Amongst folks originating from the subcontinent there wasn't a problem. More or less perfect enunciation every time. However, for everyone else, particularly if they happened to have been born and brought up in the USA and had little or no exposure to Indian culture, it was more hit and miss. Correct pronunciation is "veerj" with stress on the "e" sound. But we were equally likely to get "verge" as in parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I exaggerate but imagine our plight. The early months of parenthood are particularly brutal - add to that regrets about picking a name that I thought was bulletproof, but one that turned out to have loopholes regardless - it certainly doesn't help.

At this juncture, we found the following skit from the hit BBC show Goodness Gracious Me particularly calming. The sketch, which came out around 1998 or so, is eerily prescient. We have Jonathan moving from the UK to join a firm in India where they have trouble with his name:

In today's mobile, intertwined, economically shifting world, there's really no guarantee our son will choose or even necessarily be able to live in the USA. Consequently, we tried to pick a name for all seasons and continents. On the whole, we're pleased.

Devi Brown grew out of a simple observation: '70s blaxploitation and Bollywood masala movies are long lost twins separated at birth. Perhaps not identical twins, but certainly fraternal. Consider the similarities: over the top costumes. Sticking it to The Man from an Angry Young Man. Melodrama by the pound. Vavavoom heroines. Nutty sidekicks. And last but not least, the audio. Whatever the surface trimmings, the pulsating greasy funk at the core of soundtracks on both sides of the world knew no boundaries. Small wonder then beat producers, tired of digging in their crates of blaxploitation LPs, have now increasingly started to mine Bollywood soundtracks of the same period.

Speaking of music creation, Devi Brown is our attempt to apply some of the hip hop production aesthetics to filmmaking. The time honored approach to producing a hip hop track is to start with a collection of samples from various sources, process/chop them, overlay drums and other instruments as necessary, and weld into a cohesive whole via a rapped narrative. Similarly, source material for Devi Brown was assembled from a number of Bollywood films of the 70s and early 80s. These clips or rather "samples" were then trimmed, sequenced, processed, overlaid with additional soundtrack elements from blaxploitation classics, and topped with an appropriate voiceover serving as narrative. The final product is best described as a masala mashup.

Our approach allows us to deconstruct the original source material and have a little fun with some Bollywood conventions of the time. The heroine, often relegated to a side role, now becomes the centerpiece. The hero becomes the villain. Slow expositions are dramatically accelerated; many hours worth of movies are now packed into five minutes consisting only of the action stuff, the "good parts" version, as it were. Whether our effort is successful, whether something coherent has emerged from all this mashery, is ultimately up to the viewer to discern. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did putting it together. If not, at least it will be over quickly!

• The obvious: it cheats the original creators and content producers.
• It deprives desi writers out of a living. Why would anyone want to pay a writer when source material is only a DVD away?
• It deprives the audience. Imagine this: you've forked over your hard earned money to watch latest desi blockbuster X only to find you've seen it all before in Hollywood indie sleeper hit Y. To make matters worse, Y's themes and plots have been "Indianised" to the point where the femme fatale actually gets caught as opposed to ending up in a retired private island somewhere. After all, in Filmisthan, the baddies must always pay.

Small wonder, interest is growing in the lack of copyright enforcement in India as this recent report from National Public Radio, Bollywood's copycat film industry, illustrates:

Rajiv Masand: I also think that in the West, I don't think they realize to what extent the borrowing is happening. Increasingly you see entire screenplays literally unfolding exactly like the original film, and every now and then you'll see films that are just dialogues translated down to the last word.

Sometimes it's more than dialogue. Anjum Rajabali is a successful Mumbai screenwriter. He says he's been on sets where everything was copied directly from a video of a foreign film.

Anjum Rajabali: There was a video monitor, and the VHS was actually playing. The angles of the camera would be taken directly from that. The actors would actually watch, and say, "OK, this is how you want me to do it? Fine." Camera angles, lighting, properties...

...All copied. And film songs, of which there are several per Bollywood film, might not always be 100 percent original, either.

[MUSIC: "THOIA THOING"]

That's R. Kelly's tune "Thoia Thoing." I think that's how it's pronounced.

[MUSIC: "GELA GELA"]

...And that's a song called "Gela Gela," from the Bollywood film "Aitraaz."

Take a bow Adnan Sami/Himesh Reshammiya ("Aitraaz" music director/singer). Your music was piped into a whole lotta speakers in the USA just now. But not in the way you imagined it. So, what can be done about this?

Gagliano: Does anybody point this out in media or fans, anybody?

Karthik: They do, but nobody cares.

Except, well, you'd think the original artists would care. And according to Indian intellectual property lawyer Praveen Anand, intellectual property laws are very strong -- yet no Indian filmmakers have been taken to court.

Praveen Anand: There are lots of them which have copied concepts and a lot of detail -- clear infringements of Hollywood films. But somehow, Hollywood producers have not come forward to file cases and test the proposition.

Small wonder then desi bloggers are reduced to fantasizing about how best to punish perpetrators. In particular, consider this genius piece from greatbong where a particularly noxious fate awaits Sanjay Gupta, director of Zinda, a pretty gratuitous Oldboy ripoff:

But where is he now? A small room with one television set, a rack full of DVDs—it is obvious to him he has been kidnapped.

But by whom? He had given the overseas rights to Bhai, sought the “blessings” of the Balasaheb–in all discharged all the duties of a Mumbai director/producer. And yet why is he in this solitary room with just a TV set , DVDs and a plate of pao bhaji inserted through a hole in the door?

He breaks down. Pleading with his unknown captor to let him go. But noone replies to his anguished cries. He only gets regular meals of the same pau bhaji and nothing else. The TV tells him about the outside world—-and then there are the DVDs. Realizing he can do nothing else and besides he always made films based on DVDs, Sanjay Gupta starts watching these movies one by one. Putting the time to good use—he thinks.

Aaah what a treasure trove. He starts making copious mental notes of which movies to copy once he gets out, how to “Indianize” it and how to pass off each of them as his creations. But he knows not when he shall get out—if at all.

From time to time, a strange tune plays (he notes in his mind to copy that tune once he gets out), his room fills with noxious gas—the kind one smells after one too many bean burritos and he collapses. When he comes to, he finds he has been shaved, bathed and his DVDs replenished with new ones.

A year passes. And another. On the TV he sees all the movies he had plans of Indianizing being remade one by one by his one-time friends—Manjrekar, Ramgopal Verma and suchlike. All his babies being taken away from him in front of his own eyes and Sanjay Gupta powerless—confined in this hellhole. He breaks down, tries slashing his wrists with a extras DVD (the 2nd disc noone watches) but his evil captor wont even let him die.

In greatbong's fervid imagination, Gupta's tormentor ultimately turns to be Chan Wook Park, the director of OIdboy, taking revenge on the wholesale pilfering of his work. The whole thing is great. Check it out. As for real life, there is hope yet. From the NPR segment again:

Anjum Rajabali: There is no doubt it'll change. I mean, economics will ensure that it'll change. Hollywood studios have begun investing in Indian productions as of the last six to eight months, in a very big way. There's a big market -- we're talking about one billion captive eyeballs in India. Hollywood studios would like to cash in on that. Now, they might also want their own earlier successful films adapted. But if somebody else has already done it without paying them anything, they will stop that.

Bread Line During the Louisville Flood, Kentucky, 1937

My intention is not to be apocalyptic. But it's good to remind ourselves.

"Shot in Bombay"

This fast-paced, immersive documentary from London-based American Liz Mermin (whose last film was the peculiar and compelling "Beauty Academy of Kabul") plunges you into the off-kilter chaos of Bollywood filmmaking, behind the scenes at an atrocious-looking action-adventure based on an infamous 1991 Mumbai shootout between cops and gangsters. The film's star, Sanjay Dutt -- a beloved Indian cinema icon run slightly to seed -- is himself under indictment on a weapons charge that's dragged through the courts for 13 years, and the crew spends more time with Dutt's double than with him in person. Mermin navigates between the film and the real-life crime story behind it, between Dutt's legal problems and his lengthy troubled-heartthrob career, with remarkable flexibility and sharp, dry humor. (Here's director Apoorva Lakhia, after every take, no matter how bad it is: "Cut! Mind-blowing! Let's move on!")

Mind blowing! I love it! Reminds me of John Cleese's clueless Scottish director from Monty Python's "Scott of the Antarctic" sketch:

It's quite simple:

• soak bread in milk to soften
• fry in vegetable oil for crispness
• dip in sugar syrup - but not too much, just enough for the sugar to seep in
• set aside to cool

Apparently, a variant of this recipe is also known as Bombay Toast.

This can make pleasing everyone a bit tricky: his films tend to meet with a better reception in Turkey itself than among the emigres, perhaps because any uprooted traditionalists are more liable to be rubbed up by Akın's unvarnished, street-level portraits. He sees it as purely a matter of numbers, the same problem faced by any director working outside the mainstream: "It's just the avant-garde who like my films. In Turkey, you have 60 million people and an avant-garde of a couple of hundred thousand. But in Germany, you have just 2.5 million. Most came here for economic reasons and work, and they're not from well-educated circumstances - so the audience for my films is probably only 2,000 to 3,000."

This is a challenge faced by any diaspora filmmaker. Take South Asia - are desi diaspora films likely to do better amongst NRIs in the USA or in India directly? NRIs tend to be better educated, yet their tastes tend to stick to whatever fare they were seeing back in India. However, those in India are likely to be more adventurous. Akin's argument about the sheer numbers making an avant garde audience possible even more the case here. Lack of box office numbers and the weak rupee prevent my listing any diaspora films that did better in India than abroad though. Perhaps Hyderabad Blues?

Now, here's the part about the two way street: after it gained in popularity, YouTube users began taking the video and adding their own twist. Like farts. Or splicing in the original Thriller video such that you can now see the desi version with Jackson warbling on the soundtrack juxtaposed against Michael dancing with the audio from the Tamil soundtrack. The latter actually works better, IMHO:

The best remix, however, was done by popular YouTube prankster, buffalax. He added subtitles, not intentionally bad translations a la Wayne's World, but vaguely phonetically accurate transliterations with hilarious results:

This was a big hit by itself, garnering over 2 million views. Interested, I dug into buffalax's back catalog. He's done Punjabi bhangra as well (Daler Mehndi's video for Tunak Tunak but his greatest hit was for a dance sequence from South Indian star Prabhu Deva. It's a scene from the movie Pennin Manathai Thottu. Entitled Crazy Indian Video .. Buffalaxed, this clip was a monster YouTube hit, garnering around 3.7 million impressions:

As you see in the opening credits, Buffalaxed has no idea about the context of the original video, nor does he care. His is a strictly phonetic deconstruction of the Tamil lyrics and it's brilliant. Blogger Pramodh writes:

Mike Sutton is a 24 year old dude from Ohio. His hobby is to find some foreign videos in YouTube and make up the lyrics just the way they might sound in English. The twist is that he makes the lyrics hilarious. And he calls himself Buffalax in YouTube. On August 18 2007 he relased a video and called it a "Crazy Indian Video Buffalaxed!" And in a few months its popularity in the internet went up so much that Urban Dictionary decided to add the term Benny Lava in their Lingo. So far it had 2+ Million views and still going strong.

Searching for views on Benny Lava, I found an interesting trend: bloggers (by and large non South Asian) and YouTube commentators found it to be hilarious. But some also noted their enjoyment of the actual dancing in the video itself. An interesting way of crossing over: come for the humor, stay for the moves. Pramodh adds:

Prabhu Deva the actor in the video is now known as Benny Lava all over the internet. Yesterday I was having a conversation with a friend who studies in Ohio. She said that some of the students performed the Benny Lava dance in her school.

This subtitling approach by buffalax has inspired others but by and large, it seems to be a one trick pony. Buffalax's recent efforts in other languages haven't really garnered anywhere near as many hits. Still, it's another example of the ebb and flow across cultural divides that a megabazaar like YouTube can produce.