Author: Lavina Melwani

A world-class music concert, a major dance festival, a film festival are the delights of summer, must-see events on our social calendar. In years past each was a much anticipated real life event, with dressed-up crowds meeting their friends and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Here we share the past memories and how each event has been reborn, reinvented this year.

“We were the first Sikh family in Bamberg. It was a small town in South Carolina, a closed community at that time,” recalls Ajit Randhawa of the 70’s. “Our daughters Simmi and Nikki entered the Little Miss Bamberg contest but the school selected only a White Queen and a Black Queen. So Nikki and Simmi were not eligible as contestants. Nikki was five years old at that time and sang, ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York Island’ and received a resounding applause.”

Fast forward to 2010 and Nikki Haley (nee Randhawa) is not only a contestant in the most powerful contest there is – US politics – but has won big time. Forget black and white, she has shown that an Indian-American can be a game changer where race and gender is concerned in the Deep South.

As New York City slowly recovers from the Coronavirus pandemic, you really can’t meet or talk to real people – but there are lots of fake people in the show windows of the elite stores to whom you can connect!

By binding the past and the present, Birendra Pani’s gorgeous art creates a new way of thinking for the visitors to the gallery: He says: “Relooking and revisiting our local culture and re-establishing  a new relationship with the positive aspects of our tradition will sustain us in a situation of loss in a disoriented and homogenizing world.”

Last minute reprieve for international students who may have had to leave the country if they were enrolled only in online classes during the pandemic

The New York Indian Film Festival is coming to you at home and bringing the best of indie films including regional films, women directed films as well as gay perspectives and social themes.

For Joe Biden, it’s very personal – it’s a batte for the soul of the nation

Indian Matchmaking on Netflix turns a magnifying glass on the traditional Indian arranged marriage with modern couples.

Pooja Bavishi is the CEO of   Malai.co  – an ice cream company with flavors inspired by aromatic, South Asian spices and global ingredients.

A chance to see the fabulous Nrityagram Dance Ensemble in collaboration with The Chitrasena Dance Company perform Nrityagram: Samhara Revisted, in the Temple of Dendur at the Met Museum 

At a time when the coronavirus has caused chaos in many parts of the world and decimated businesses in towns and cities, tech entrepreneur Sree Sreenivasan has started a new venture.

New York, which was the center of the Coronavirus pandemic, is slowly re-opening in what Governor Cuomo calls ‘New York smart’ ways. Several Indian-Americans have been enlisted in this re-birth of New York.

Ten days ago nobody had heard of him but now googling Rahul Dubey generates 17,000,000 results. This Indian-American has got inextricably linked to the unfolding events in America in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and shows that actions speak louder than words.

In a reprieve for the Dreamers, as they are known, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision finding that the Trump administration’s termination of DACA was  judicially reviewable and done in an arbitrary and capricious way that violated federal law.

I can’t breathe” were the last words of George Floyd, an unarmed, handcuffed black man in Minneapolis who died in custody, his neck pressed under the knee of a white policeman for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while three other officers stood and watched.

India is like a gigantic Hall of Mirrors – so many reflections, some magnified, some distorted. Which is the true India? And who is the true Indian? In ‘Kai Po Che’, Abhishek Kapoor’s stunning new film, you realize there are no easy answers as you step into the complex, complicated terrain that is India.

‘Kai Po Che’, based on Chetan Bhagat’s best-selling novel ‘The Three Mistakes of My Life’, takes you into the innards of the bustling city of Ahmedabad and introduces you to real people in situations taken right out of real life, such as the 2001 earthquake and the Godhra killings. You are relentlessly drawn into the ugly, unpredictable vortex of current events, of unforgiving real life as it happens.

It’s been called a pandemic within a pandemic. America has been hit by a double whammy – the coronavirus which has claimed over 110,000 lives and  another virus which has infected it for over 400 years – and that is the virus of racism

Kamala Harris, for the People’ is the new mantra of the US Senator from California who has dedicated her life to fighting for ordinary people, and she likes to use three words as an introduction to who she really is: “Tough. Principled. Fearless.” She proved this first when she became the first African-American, the first South Asian, and the very first woman to serve as Attorney General of the State of California.

“You know, growing up as an immigrant is inherently political: there’s a constant struggle to fit in, to overcompensate for ‘how American you are’ to prove that you belong” – Suraj Patel, on running for US Congress

]he days of invasions and colonization may be over but the world is now facing a mass threat from an invisible invader – the infamous coronavirus which has caused so much grief and pain in countries around the globe. Just a few months back,  this insidious virus had been a blip on the horizon, a tragedy that was unfolding in far-off Wuhan in China. Like a thundering army, the Novel coronavirus which causes the deadly COVID-19 disease has spread across the world, leaving no country untouched.