SOMAN'S SHORTS

I don't quite understand how publicists can think we're all mentally impaired. First, David Letterman's publicist randomly announces that Dave's heading into the hospital for a "check-up" and professes shock when the talk show host has to undergo 'emergency" bypass surgery. Lightning strikes twice when Steven Spielberg also heads in for a routine check-up and emerges with only one kidney. And the example that hits closest to home, Elisabeth Shue's spokesperson claimed that Shue wouldn't return until the fall--and yet, she's been spotted at various campus hotspots (with a very strange haircut). Why bother telling us anything at all?... Everyone's dying their hair again. Maybe an attempt to escape the monochrome colors of barren Cambridge?... Our designer suggested that the public embraces American Beauty because it makes them think they're thinking when they're really not thinking at all. (I would compare it to Salman Rushdie or The English Patient. The latter is a terrible, thuddingly boring movie. And no, it wasn't intelligent. Just because people speak with a British accent doesn't mean they're intelligent.)... Speaking of which, why are pseudo-accents popping up all over Harvard? If I hear one more fake British accent that falls away when the person gets plastered...Rumor has it that the trendiest classes this semester are: Soc 150, German Bab, Foreign Cultures 76 ("Nazis for ROTCs"), Womens Studies 156 ("Hardcore Sex")--and Rome of Augustus before everyone found out that it also counted for a History B... Is it too late for me to try a special concentration in Contemporary Mass Communication (a.k.a. Trashy Pop Culture)? For my thesis, I want to fashion a cutting-edge visual landscape that reflects current sociological tastes (a.k.a. a music video). I'll let you know if the English Department approves.

PUTTING THE "SUB" IN SUBCONTINENT

I'm certainly no Indian nationalist, but I do find it odd that Indian actors or actresses just can't find their way onto the big screen (or the small screen. for that matter). In David Lean's A Passage to India, the only Hindu was played by a white man in brown face. In Short Circuit, Fisher Stevens added the needed laughs by yukking it up as an Indian with an accent so heavy that even the Indians in the audience couldn't understand him. Over time, it only got worse. Imagine if Malcolm X in Spike Lee's epic was played by a white man--that's how I felt when Ben Kingsley was given the highly coveted role of Gandhi (even though I was four years old). Even more egregious was the dreadful manipulation of races in 1997's A Perfect Murder. The movie is set in New York--Indian heaven--so when Sarita Choudry, one of India's great actresses, shows up on screen as Gwyneth Paltrow's best friend, I almost stand up and cheer. But then her mouth opens and a Hispanic accent dribbles out. Oh yes, Sarita Choudry--one of India's most famous faces--had been magically transformed into a Mexican. (But then again, what Indian would want to be friends with Gwyneth Paltrow? As if.) What's the deal? I'm saying it loud and clear --put an Indian in a movie and I guarantee it will be a blockbuster! M. Night Shyamalan did it with The Sixth Sense--in one totally irrelevant scene, two attractive Indians engage in a random argument over an engagement ring. But I assure you, those 30 seconds explain the movie's $250 million dollar gross. After all, every Indian in America went to see for themselves whether we had actually made it up on to the big screen. But truth be told, Indians will probably never stop being the lame-o sidekick or the inane comic relief (Apu, anyone?). Oh, but not to confuse those casting agents out there, I still want to be Anakin's Indian friend in Episode II. Help me out, Natalie.

U+ME=US (CALCULUS)