Author: Lavina Melwani

Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon, the dynamic chairman of Tandon Capital Associates, who has done major restructuring surgeries in the global financial world, is executive-in-residence at New York University Stern, a member of the board of overseers of New York’s Stern School of Business, a member of the President’s Council of International Activities at Yale University, and an arts patron.
There’s more: she has the voice of an angel. ‘Om Namo Narayanaya’ is the chant that will calm and strengthen you. Newsbreak: Soul Call has just been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary World Music Album category

She’s made Madhur Jaffrey, Preity Zinta, Yoko Ono and even Cherie Blair, the former First Lady of Britain, taste her cakes. She says with a smile, “Preity Zinta called them ‘yummy’; Yoko Ono said ‘Nice cupcakes’ and Cherie Blair said, ‘These are great!’”
Indeed, if Parul Patel has a mission in life, it’s to get a cupcake inside you!
(Parul offers a tasting to Britain’s former First Lady, Cherie Blair, at a fundraiser)

“I think acting, especially in something as delicate as this, is like when you’re switching a radio knob to look for a correct frequency and you know the program you want to listen to is at 99.5 and you don’t get it. You try 4 and you try 6 and you still don’t get it and you feel that you’ve lost it forever, it doesn’t exist.
And then suddenly at 99.48 something happens and you suddenly can hear very clearly the song you were looking for, the radio station you were looking for. It’s really a chance – you have to try hard but ultimately it’s a lot to do with chance and I think I got lucky. At least I hope so!”
(Rahul Bose seen here with Minu Tharoor)

Last call – the Thanksgiving countdown has begun! But what if you’re a klutz in the kitchen and would rather not be performing stomach surgery on a turkey? What if you’re tired of the traditional turkey taste and are yearning for some spice and fire in your bland holiday meal? The Indian culinary elves are at your service with Thanksgiving dining and takeout options.

What happens when you manage to gather critical thinkers like Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s Chairman and CEO, the many faceted Fareed Zakaria, Kapil Sibal, India’s Union Minister for Human Resource Development and Richard C. Levin, President of Yale University all in the same room?

You get some thought-provoking conversation about where India is going, and the challenges along the way.

What is India doing right – and what is it doing wrong? Can it beat China? And what about privatizing public works to fix the infrastructure? Will India have enough teachers? What about the health challenge?

So come be a fly on the wall and listen to where India is headed.

Bollywood, Hollywood, art cinema, documentaries and shorts all came together in that swirling melange of new and exciting films at the Mahindra 2010 Indo American Art Council Film Festival known as MIAAC.

Ekta Kapoor is a self-made millionaire and, as the head of Balaji Telefilms, she’s produced over 74 hugely popular television serials which are said to make up about 80 percent of television programming in India. Recently the Queen of TV Soaps was in town for the premiere of the gritty, fast moving ‘Shorr’ which is as real and as different as you can get from the sugar coated melodrama of the television serials steeped in tradition and changing social mores.
(Ekta seen here with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy)

Mumbai is about grit, drama, passion – and the luck of the draw. The new movie ‘Noise/Shorr’ follows three very different lives during the frenzy of the Ganesh Chaturti Festival in the city – and finally these disparate stories come together in the gripping climax. ‘Shorr’ embodies the high energy the city is famous for and keeps you thoroughly engaged. And indeed Mumbai is a central character in the film, around which the various tales are interwoven.

Aasif Mandvi’s ‘Today’s Special’, which premiered at MIACC Film Festival last year, is now showing at the Tribeca Film Festival and getting a theatrical release on November 19. It is a fun and funny movie which gets you involved in the travails of Samir, a sous cook in New York, who has to find himself and his culinary soul. He is helped in the journey of self discovery by a mystical taxi driver who treats cooking like a beautiful, complex raga. (Naseeruddin Shah digs into this meaty role with relish – he’s utterly believable as the charismatic cabbie, a part of the magic of New York).

Well, the big Obama trip is over but it’s something Indians will talk about for a long, long time. He seems to have won Indian hearts by correctly enunciating ‘Namaste’, ‘Sal Mubarak’ and ‘Jai Hind’.
It’s almost as if Obama has been adopted into the family, and is part of the Indian tribe.
Take a look at how anonymous Indians are paying him the supreme compliment of being one of their own!

“So often when we talk about trade and commercial relationships, the question is who’s winning and who’s losing. This is a classic situation in which we can all win. And I’m going to make it one of my primary tasks during the next three days to highlight all the various ways in which we’ve got an opportunity I think to put Americans back to work, see India grow its infrastructure, its networks, its capacity to continue to grow at a rapid pace. And we can do that together, but only if both sides recognize these opportunities.” – President Obama

Bollywood fans will be intrigued to know that their favorite hunk John Abraham is part of ‘Damaru’, Isheeta Ganguly’s new album – in a very different way than they usually envisage him. Rather than a Bollywood hero, his is the thoughtful, strong voice behind the words of “Bande Mataram” and the Tagore poem, “Where the Mind is Without Fear”.

This festival brings an eclectic, surprising mix of South Asian based cinema from different parts of the world – and you never know which film will turn out to be the next big hit or major award-winner. After all, ‘Namesake’, ‘Water’ and even ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ first opened here, almost six months before their general release.

For fans of Indian cooking, what can be better than Madhur Jaffrey? – Madhur Jaffrey simplified! The noted cookbook writer, who has won the James Beard Award six times, has taught countless women – and men – how to cook. Now she’s set off on a very 21st century mission: Saving time in a hectic world. These recipes retain the classic touch without the classic toil of gourmet Indian food.

It’s taken a century of lobbying – both formal and informal, organizational and personal – to arrive in the America of 2010 where Bobby Jindal sits in the Governor’s Mansion in Louisiana, Nikki Haley is poised to become the next governor of South Carolina, and where scores of Indian-Americans are serving in the Obama White House and many more are standing for political office.

Diwali tradition mandates you indulge in the richest of mithais and halwas during the festivities – laddoos, chumchums and burfi – amongst a myriad of classic sweets. To that list you can now add Diwali truffles – with a traditional Indian twist!

A decade ago it would have been unimaginable that the beat of bhangra drums would be heard reverberating from the hundred-year-old New York Public Library, the city’s Beaux Arts landmark building, until the late hours of the night.
Well, this too came to pass with the grand gala concluding the two-day International Sikh Film Festival where power people, artists and film-makers gathered to celebrate not only the cinema arts but the role of Sikhs in every sphere of life…

Imagine this: just one actor on stage. No set transformations, no costume changes, little or no action. Yet you sit for a full hour, totally engrossed, and are almost surprised to find that, though you’ve sat immobile in your seat, you’ve traveled into complex worlds, into the innermost reaches of mind and heart.

Few people could pull this off but the combination of actor Shabana Azmi, director Alyque Padamsee and playwright Girish Karnad makes ‘Broken Images’ a play to watch and relish.

In the world of cinema, there is usually a clear demarcation between the silver screen and the audience. If you are a fan you might count yourself lucky if you got a fleeting glimpse of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan on the red carpet or if he waved out to you as part of a crowd.

Yet for one Indian-American fan, real life blended into reel life, resulting in ‘Walkaway’, a movie which is being released on 26 screens across 18 cities in the US and echoes the life of young South Asians in New York City. First time filmmaker Shailja Gupta, very much a New York based South Asian herself, managed to pull this film off with help from none other than – Shah Rukh Khan!

October was a good month to be Sikh in the Big Apple – there were enough films, seminars and socializing events to make you think you were back in Amritsar or Delhi! The 8th Annual Sikh International Film Festival took place at the Asia Society in Manhattan with a powerful array of films organized by the Film Chair Dr. Paul Johar.