With President Obama going to Mumbai — where he will be protected from coconuts — I've started reading the Mumbai Mirror.

Here's "Coconuts removed from trees in preparation for Barack Obama's India trip." But searching for the story — I'd heard Rush Limbaugh exclaim about it — I ended up at a Mumbai Mirror article about the special dishes the local chefs were cooking up in honor of the visit.

O’Barry Pie

This recipe is as rich as Obama’s biography. It uses 44 ingredients in honour of the 44th American president’s life.

There’s nothing quite as American as an American pie.

Maybe people who hear the song or see the movie titled "American Pie" think there's a dessert we call "American pie." Americans say: as American as apple pie.

But this pie combines elements from the various places he’s lived in.

Cocoa and coffee from Kenya, of which Obama’s father was a native, Polynesian fruits like banana and pineapple because he spent his childhood in Hawaii, and a coconut-and-rice pudding from Indonesia, where he lived with his stepfather for a few years.... 

The result is new and unusual. A single bite brings on a rush of many separate elements and, at the same time, has its own overall personality, just like the person it’s named after. The attractive pie is garnished with hazelnuts and rice crispies.

Rice Krispies for the time he spent in Kansas?

So now, I'm really getting into the Mumbai Mirror. What's its explanation of why Obama is coming to town:

Unlike his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, who came to India and charmed Indians, President Obama will be here physically, but his mind is likely to be on what he can carry back home from this country.

Most notably, his eyes will be set on creating jobs, which he can accomplish to some extent if he can wangle some of the multi-billion-dollar contracts, especially in the defence sector, that US firms are keen to sign. But this would not be easy as India is not yet ready to sign the agreements for ensuring sale of defence ware to New Delhi.

He's not coming here to slather us with love like Bill did. He just wants our money, they're thinking?

Look how the Mumbai Mirror covers our elections:

Americans awoke on Wednesday to a vastly different political landscape, with Republicans retaking the House of Representatives as US voters punished Democrats over high unemployment and a sluggish economic recovery, delivering a divided Congress in Tuesday’s midterm poll.

Resurgent Republicans, led by the ultra-conservative Tea Party insurgency, steamrolled Democrats, taking at least 60 seats and a commanding majority in the House. It was one of the chamber’s largest political swings of the past century.

Ultra-conservative? I've never thought of the Tea Party as ultra-conservative.

Then there's "Indian-American Nikki Haley scripts history in US politics":

Daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from Amritsar, Namrata Nikki Randhawa Haley who has become the first Indian origin woman to become the governor of a US state has been propelled to centre stage of American politics after her baptisation into politics in 2004.

She is the second Indian-American leader after Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana to have caught the attention of the Americans.

I'd never put that together. Two Indian-American governors now. Interesting. Both Republicans, for what it's worth.

It has not all been smooth sailing for the tall Haley, 38, mother of son Nalin, 9, and daughter Rena, 12 as she had to overcome allegations of extra-marital affairs and racial digs  to become the first Asian woman to don a US governorship.

What were the "racial digs"? I don't know, and I don't like Indians thinking we were awful to Haley.

Force Althouse to go to the movies.

You know I said the other day that "I don't enjoy going to the movies these days -- for about 6 reasons." Pushed about the reasons, I enumerated not just 6, but 8.

But I'm going to give you a chance to force me to go to the movies. Apply whatever standard you want -- what you think I'd like, what would lead to the best blog post, what would teach me a lesson I need to learn, what would punish me for my sins.... The choices on the poll are just the movies that are currently playing at Sundance, the Madison theater with the best aesthetic appeal -- notably: rectangular screens.

I'm assigning Althouse to see:
	"Slumdog Millionaire"
	"Milk"
	"Let the Right One In"
	"Australia"
	"Synecdoche, New York"
	"Rachel Getting Married"
pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: "Slumdog Millionaire" won the poll, and accordingly, I saw "Slumdog Millionaire." I didn't know what this movie was about -- not the slightest thing -- so I was a little worried when it opened with a torture scene. I certainly didn't want to watch a man being tortured -- or even an actor pretending to be tortured. But the torture did not last long, and it set up a delightfully plotted story about 2 very different brothers, a beautiful girl, and a sprightly tale framed by a set of questions on the Indian version of the TV show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." We got heights and depths of ecstasy and despair and the best and worst of human nature -- not to mention the slums of Bombay and the Taj Mahal. Children suffer, but never too much (or at least not too long), and they never cry or lose their fundamental feistiness. Our hero Jamal is up for everything, because he trusts destiny, and he is ready to put up with whatever it takes, from his first -- intentional -- plunge into a pool of shit.

The director is Danny Boyle, who directed "Trainspotting" -- and I seem to remember someone falling into a toilet in that movie too. Ah, yes. Here it is (NSFW):



Well, "Slumdog Millionaire" is much more uplifting. And the excrement is a much cheerier color for whatever reason... artistic license? ... turmeric? ....

UPDATE 2: I let you force me again, see "Australia" and detect 7 points of comparison to "Slumdog."

"Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay."

Wrote Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh, Christopher Hitchens tells us:

[H]e was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it—after a Hindu goddess—Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

Andrew Sullivan resolves to write "Bombay" from now on.

I'll change my "Mumbai" tag to "Bombay." (My "Burma" tag was always "Burma.")

ADDED: From Hitchens's book "God Is Not Great":

Bombay... used to be considered a pearl of the Orient, with its necklace of lights along the corniche and its magnificent British Raj architecture. It was one of India's most diverse and plural cities, and its many layers of texture have been cleverly explored by Salman Rushdie... and in the films of Mira Nair. It is true that there had been intercommunal fighting there, during the time in 1947-1948 when the grand historic movement for an Indian self-government was being ruined by Muslim demands for a separate state and by the fact that the Congress Party was led by a pious Hindu. But probably as many people took refuge in Bombay during that moment of religious bloodlust as were driven or fled from it. A form of cultural coexistence resumed, as often happens when cities are exposed to the sea and to influences from outside. Parsis -- former Zoroastrians who had been persecuted in Persia -- were a prominent minority, and the city was also host to a historically significant community of Jews. But that was not enough to content Mr. Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena Hindu nationalist movement, who in the 1990s decided that Bombay should be run by and for his coreligionists, and who loosed a tide of goons and thugs onto the streets. Just to show he could do it, he ordered the city renamed as "Mumbai"....

The Mumbai terrorists, pumped up on steroids and cocaine.

"This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep."

They also, apparently, took LSD, and it's hard to see how that could have helped.

"The terrorists were watching CNN and they came down from where they were in a lift after hearing about us on television."

Idiocy crosses the line into evil.

UPDATE: CNN says:

"CNN has received no complaint from any individual regarding our coverage and their safety. We take such matters very seriously. We are not aware of the allegedly compromising broadcast, but even in the absence of key details such as when and where, we will continue to check."

"We thought, 'Let’s get the barricades done, let’s do the practical things rather than sit there like sheep and wait to meet our fate.'"

Nick Hayward, a 37-year-old Brit, describes the "can-do attitude" of the "extremely lucky," "very good bunch of people" who holed up in a restaurant inside the Taj:

"Three or four of us were Brits. There were some Irish as well. Most were Indian.

"We’d never met each other but I have to say, it was a true British stiff upper-lip situation. Together, the Brits helped to keep up morale. ...

"We all decided that even though we had alcohol within reach we wouldn’t touch it because it seemed like a bad idea to get drunk.

"But come 5am, we were fairly confident the police were going to get us out, so I marched over to the bar and found a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne and opened it and began pouring it into glasses.

"Then the head waiter came rushing across to me and said, 'No, no, you can’t do that!' and I said, 'Well we’re going to' and he said, 'No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes.'

"And he did. The service was immaculate."

Like a scene in an old-fashioned movie.

Via Blackberry, Hayward got news and encouragement, including, from his boss, some lines from the poem "The Private Of The Buffs," which is about a young British soldier dying rather than kowtowing to the Chinese. What lines? Perhaps:

Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel
He put the vision by.
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel;
An English lad must die.
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink,
To his red grave he went.

"The vision" is the vision of home.

"His last words before being cut off were 'Lo tov'... which means 'not good' in Hebrew."

Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg -- along with his wife Rivka -- died in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

AND: "The miracle of this life continues to unfold for me on a daily basis," wrote Alan Scherr, who "devoted his life to meditation and the search for peaceful balance." He took his 13-year-old daughter Naomi with him to India, on a spiritual quest. The 2 of them died in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

"We have water and we're hunkered down and patient and ready to wait it out. We're OK. Last night was a different story, but today we're OK."

An American woman, still trapped in the Taj Mahal hotel.

UPDATE: Who is doing this?

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.” By contrast, [Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London] said “the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."