Author: Lavina Melwani

This Dusshera the Goddess Durga herself descended to earth in a powerful tableaux at the Children’s Hope India Gala – Viva Calcutta on October 13, 2013. Over 430 guests who came to this fundraiser for children’s health and education at Pier Sixty in Chelsea Piers, New York, saw this breath-taking 200 1b idol seated in a pandal of radiant hues of red, gold and orange.

A day of celebration indeed as it was not only Dusshera and the last day of the Bengali Puja holidays but also an evening to enjoy the seductive charms of the city of Calcutta, now known as Kolkata. The festive evening, which had a keynote address by Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, raised $450,000 for CHI projects.

Good news for masala lovers – Bollywood is coming to the borough of Brooklyn! Queens and Manhattan have long been the strongholds of Indian cinema but the heady cocktail of comedy, melodrama, fights, songs, romance, item numbers and more are now making their way to Park Slope, with a theater showing ‘Boss’, hopefully the first of many Hindi movies.What is coming to Brooklyn is quintessential masala, amplified in true Akshay Kumar ishtyle.

Malala Yousafzai has received lots of honors and awards for her courageous fight for education – but you know the masses have got the message when Amul Butter puts her saga into its popular ads that people in India have been seeing since their childhood. After all, what’s more basic to life than bread – and butter? This is called buttering up – in an utterly, butterly good way!

For someone who’s gone through so much and for a situation which is so serious and unresolved, this is a dizzy moment of pure silliness and fun.

She’s been called One of the most beautiful women in the world by none other than Oprah and Bollywood fans would love to experience a bit of her life. Well, here’s a chance to actually wear one of her sarees, designed by the hottest fashion designer Sabyasachi. She wore this gorgeous black Matka saree at Cannes. It has vintage hand-embroidered details and a tulle skirt, inspired by the Old Muslim Gharanas of Hyderabad
Yes, you can actually take this saree home! It’s one of the many one-of-a-kind luxe items at the Viva Calcutta Gala in New York on October 13, which includes tickets to the NY Jets game, a cricket bat signed by Saurav Ganguly and a wonderful sketch especially done for this Calcutta themed gala by the noted artist Jogen Chowdhury.
Check it out and the videos about this noted artist.

It’s the biggest block party in America with a desi touch. In fact, it’s become an American tradition – the AIA Deepavali Mela at South Street Seaport where thousands of people of Indian origin gather to celebrate their most important festival – Diwali. Having been to many Diwali Melas in India, I can attest this is as big, as grand and as fun as the ones back in India.ndians are also famous for making and breaking records of all kinds and this year you also get to dance with DJ Rekha and set the Guinness World Record for the largest Outdoor Bhangra party!

By winning the Miss America title, Nina Davuluri has scored big for all those little brown girls who were always the outsider and had to answer the taunt “But where are you really from?” Generations of kids were often asked why their mothers had dots on their heads and whether they lived in huts and about their connection to tigers, snakes and elephants.

The title of Miss America makes Nina Davuluri as American as apple pie, as American as American can be. In fact, you can dance the bhangra, eat dosas and sambar, worship any God you choose – and you’re still American. Davuluri’s win shows Indian-American children that their many differences are what make America rich and special, and don’t make them any less American

In New York, you can expect the unexpected – fabulous Indian dance taking place under the trees in the greenery of cascading parks, right in the middle of joggers and strollers, office workers and moms pushing prams. All the doing of the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) which in collaboration with the Downtown Dance Festival presented free lunch-time performances in Battery Park.

Picture this: The world of global fashion designers who dress glamorous celebrities with bold-face names and fashionistas; leggy models wearing fabulous fashions and glittering jewels; high-end stores showcasing the whimsies of fashion.

Then picture this: Struggling South Asian women without marketable skills, little income, closeted lives and low expectations, no language skills, always working, always the care-givers with no prospects of a better life.

Two very different world views – yet in a moment they can come together to the benefit of both. Meet Ranjana Khan, noted jewelry designer, and Naeem Khan, the iconic designer who has dressed everyone from First Lady Michelle Obama to Hollywood Royalty. Come September 26, they are opening up their penthouse studio for a fashion fundraiser to support struggling South Asian women achieve success and confidence through the non-profit organization Wishwas.org.

Scoop! The perfect career training for desis! A super way for New Yorkers to get web development training from the city at no cost – the City’s Web Development Fellowship. Sept 18 deadline
Mayor Bloomberg and New York City Department of Small Business Services Commissioner Robert W. Walsh today announced the launch of the NYC Web Development Fellowship, a result of initiatives Mayor Bloomberg discussed in the 2013 State of the City address recognizing the need for the development of skilled workers to enter the fast growing technology sector in New York City.

The free five-month training program provided by the Flatiron School is normally valued at $12,000 and will be free to more than 50 adults with no previous web development experience and help place them in jobs paying $65,000 or more.

It’s that time of the year again and one’s mind turns to a day twelve years ago, to that clear blue sky and quiet morning which exploded into the horror of 9/11.

On this day, I always have this surreal sense of foreboding, of calm before the storm but life goes on and people are moving on.

Seems strange but yes, it is Fashion Week in New York and the city is full of beautiful people, designers, models and media. Art events are happening and the city is teeming with tourists. Working, dreaming, creating and deal-making, frenetic New Yorkers move on. Yet they do not forget, as the scores of memorial services around the city emphasize.
I myself am headed out to New Jersey for the memorial of a dear family friend, Rajesh Mirpuri who lost his life as the burning towers collapsed around him.
Every year for the past decade, hundreds of friends and family have gathered around his grieving parents at the Sadhu Vaswani Center, finding solace and strength in prayer. Time passes but can one ever forget?

Where would you expect to see the Durga Puja Pandals, beautiful Bengali fashions, eat kati rolls and puchkas, and check out the Victoria Memorial and the Howrah Bridge? Calcutta, you say? You’re right – but this is all happening in Calcutta – in New York!

You’ll be in wonderful company as you’ll get to meet and listen to Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, a superb speaker, who is being honored with the Impact Award at the October 13 gala organized by Children’s Hope India. Other honorees are human rights activist Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, gallerist Sundaram Tagore, Member of the Rajya Sabha Derek O’ Brien and the noted fashion designer Rachel Roy.

It was about the beautiful city of Varanasi, of endangered silks and a way of life that is under threat. Barneys New York with Freida Pinto, David Adjaye and Wendy Schmidt hosted a private dinner to celebrate the the luxuy brand Maiyet Varanasi Silk Capsule Collection and the nonprofit Nest Varanasi Silk Weaving Facility which through an innovative partnership are bringing new hope to weavers, helping them to redefine and rethink their craft production. It’s all about preserving the centuries old tradition of handloom silk by creating high demand products and a whole new market.

We all know that Christopher Columbus was looking for India and its tangy spices when he took a wrong turn and stumbled into America instead. Now some enterprising Indians have brought India and its cache of cardamom, cloves and peppers right into America. These immigrants have brought not only spices but entire kitchens, cooking pots and chefs along, opening hundreds of restaurants, takeaway joints, mithai shops and Indian supermarkets. Americans are now eating spicier food, ‘samosa’ is an English word now and right in the middle of Manhattan there are ‘dosa’ carts!

Yes, the Big Apple is fast becoming the Big Mango! So how has this big change come about in American food habits?

Don’t you just love fashion shows? It’s a whimsical dream world where real problems are forgotten in a whoosh of youth and beauty and style. It’s a world inhabited by beautiful people and perhaps no one does it quite as dramatically as designer Manish Malhotra. It’s a world of rich Chantilly lace and velvet, of yards and yards of antique silk and the moon is made of gold.

Manish showed his fabulous 1930’s inspired collection at Delhi Couture Week, and he had some heavy hitters modeling his couture – SRK himself and Deepika Padukone. The royal canvas was nothing less than the princely states of India, a time of opulence, of unparalleled riches and a wondrous mix of east and west.

She’s sung for President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. She’s also sung for hardened criminals in the maximum security Sing Sing Prison.
She’s performed with noted names like Yo-Yo Ma, A.R. Rahman, Wyclef Jean, Philip Glass, Ricky Martin, and Blues Traveler. Her songs have also been featured in Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut A Place in Time.
Meet Falguni Shah, popularly known as Falu, a singer from Mumbai who has generated a devoted fan following in New York, and who has blurred the line between different genres of music with her signature style.

Looking ahead to the golden days of Summer, Chef Hemant Mathur shares some delightful recipes for the outdoors – with desi spices! Recipes for grilled shrimp, chicken Tikka and tandoori vegetables. Just right for the holiday weekend!

“What I find remarkable is that miniature painting is so intrinsic to Indian art history but it seems as though Indian artists and Indian art schools have decided to be just colonized by the West and Western art traditions instead,” says Olivia Fraser.
” All the most important Western-born twentieth century art movements: cubism, abstractionism, modernism, post-modernism have been successfully encouraged and developed here but miniature painting has been relegated to the dusty shelf of ‘craft’ – something that is stuck in the aspic of tradition and has no developmental, political or aesthetic possibility of change.”

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh…migrants from towns and villages, leaving everything behind to create something new, something of their own in America.

It’s all about journeys, about the lives you leave behind and the new ones you make. We’ve all got into a plane, left a place and arrived somewhere else. The baggage we’ve carried is physical things – loved old photographs and mementos, homemade garam masala – but it’s also about memories, lost homes and loved ones who are no longer with us.

The way artists deal with this excess baggage and physical and mental borders is through paint and canvas, creating a new reality which did not exist before. For the past ten years, IAAC’s ‘Erasing Borders: has been giving this space to artists to share their creations and their innermost thoughts, and this year too artists participated in this long lasting celebration of home and the world, as more and more artists take on the global trek.

It was a power-packed evening with over 580 people from the worlds of business, arts and philanthropy. AIF, whose honorary chair is President Bill Clinton, has impacted the lives of more than 1.7 million of India’s poor. This evening raised big bucks – $ 1. 5 million – for AIF’s Market Aligned Skills Training (MAST) Program which provides underprivileged youths skill training in India.

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