Browsing: Features

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.

“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.

“One day you are uprooted and told that this is not your home any more. Not only that – this is a different country altogether!

Then follows an insane bloodshed which scars the lives of friends and neighbors for years to come. I cannot understand this absurdity. I find it very stupid, drawing lines on paper and fighting over land. The worst is we continue to thrive on hatred, the seeds of which were sown in 1947.”
– Nitin Kakkar, director of ‘Filmistan’ which has won the 2013 National Award for best Hindi film.

‘Raanjhanaa’ – we don’t see men like that anymore – men who are willing to annihilate themselves, subsume themselves for the woman they love, bringing almost a noble, heroic luster to unrequited, unconditional love. ‘Ranjhanaa’ is a Grecian tragedy set in Varanasi, on the ghats and alleys of the holy city and you won’t forget it easily.
I have to admit the film became somewhat of an obsession with me when I saw the pre-release Youtube videos of some of AR Rahman’s songs. They totally blew me away, especially the song ‘Tum Tak’ – so rich in its Sufi textures, so overwhelmingly about a higher love that it had me totally obsessed. I found myself watching the videos again and again, trying to piece together the story from dialogues.

When the movie came out, I was there right in the front char anna class, like a genuine filmi fan, drinking it all in.

This year Mira Nair celebrates the 25th anniversary of her first feature film, the Oscar-nominated ‘Salaam Bombay’ and also the birth of her new film, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’.
On the eve of the release of ‘Salaam Bombay!’ in New York back in 1988, I had taken a subway downtown to interview the new, not-so-famous filmmaker in her tiny apartment.
The world had not yet discovered ‘Salaam Bombay’ but she was exuberant, excited, animated.
Twenty-five years later, she seems exactly the same – exuberant, excited, animated. There have been critically acclaimed films from ‘Mississippi Masala’ to ‘Monsoon Wedding’ to ‘The Namesake’. The awards and accolades have been coming thick and fast.’The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ screened at The Venice International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others. Nair calls it her labor of love, five years in the making.

Phoolan Devi, India’s notorious Bandit Queen, was gunned down at the age of 37 – yet she continues to live on in the popular imagination. Rape victim and avenging angel, oppressor and oppressed, she finally won respectability, embraced Buddhism, and a seat in Parliament before a barrage of bullets ended it all.

Vengeance. Rape. Murder. Bloodshed. Violence. Her short, chaotic life was indeed the stuff of melodrama, and several artistic ventures have tried to capture its turbulence.

There is a continuing fascination with Phoolan Devi’s life, and in her latest avatar she is the central figure in an opera – ‘Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen’

” I still have insecurities and I am nowhere near perfect, but Tarz has taught me that no one else’s opinion of me matters besides of those that truly know who I am, such as my family. Being around Tarz’s “life is short so don’t let anything bring you down” mentality gave me the courage and security to be on this Bravo show, as I’m sure there will be quite a bit of smack talk!
We’ve had a year filled with some really tough and tragic moments, which I’m guessing will translate into tons of drama and insane moments on the show-which means those haters will have plenty to feed off of!” – Tina Sugandh on her new reality show on Bravo.
Single Desi Guest Blog

You’re in the comfortable upper middle-class home of Changez Khan’s parents in Lahore where a qawwalli concert is in full swing and the mesmerizing sounds of Sufi devotional music pervade the room.
The camera zones in on the red paan-stained mouths of the performers, then cuts to the kidnapping of an American academic on the dark streets of Lahore, then back to the musical energy, the total civility of Urdu poetry in bloom. Paan stains and blood. Ethereal music, gun shots and screams. The crescendo rises and you are totally hooked.

There’s no shame in it – so let’s just face the world and say it out loud: we Indians are addicts – filmi addicts! We are incomplete without cinema; we have our withdrawal symptoms if we don’t get our quota of films, be it in a darkened theater, a borrowed video or a sighting on Netflix.
Life without our desi cinema is unimaginable, for who will teach us about love and heartbreak, truth and beauty, family and sacrifice? We need Raj Kapoor’s blue blue eyes to tell us about yearning and lost love; we need Amitabh Bachchan to paint the harsh complexities of life and strife; and we need Shah Rukh Khan to tell us how to battle a million obstacles and win the sweetheart we all dream of.
All this – set to the music which every lover of Indian cinema has coursing in their veins. ( Also check out the wonderful video which says it all! )

Few 100-year-olds are this vibrant but Indian Cinema has all the sass and punch in its centenary year and we can expect exciting things from an industry which has embraced so many different genres. The upcoming New York Indian Film Festival, presented by Indo-American Arts Council, promises to serve up a feast of movies which are making waves. So here’s to a taste of cinema, past and present.

“All the film industry is going to Cannes to celebrate the 100th year of Indian cinema. We are the perfect global kick-off because in 1913 on May 4th was the first-ever Indian movie – and that’s the date of our closing night!” said Aroon Shivdasani, the Executive Director of IAAC, who along with Aseem Chhabra, director of the festival, has selected the eclectic mix of films.

Meet Dr. Neha Sangwan, a young physician based in San Francisco, CA. She has been on the precipice and seen just how traumatic burnout can be. In fact, Neha Sangwan was her own first patient!

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is an America-based artist who grew up in Kerala. In the late 1990’s she made a portfolio titled Satirizing Bollywood, about her memories of her life as a woman in India. She calls it her ‘Angry Woman’ years. Misogyny and a patriarchal society existed then, and as the recent gang rape and unending cases of abuse of women prove, nothing much has changed. Now two decades later, Matthew has taken on the subject again.

“It’s very Andy Warhol goes Indie-pop,” says designer Sabah Arenja Vig about her collection – and that got me a-wondering: what would Andy Warhol think about our wild, multi-hued surreal Indian fashions? Probably turn them into equally wild, multi-hued surreal art!

Yes, Indian couture is certainly riding high. With a young ever-burgeoning population in India and the diapora, the demand for bridal wear and fashion with a touch of India is only going to grow. Recently Shireen Vinayak of Shehnaai Couture showcased the latest collection and answered some burning questions about the new fashion trends, especially for New York fashionistas.

Guess who’s in town? Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Kareena Kapoor! They are all in Times Square and why this hasn’t quite caused a stampede yet is because they are not quite the real thing. Not even the reel thing. They are here in the wax! At Madame Tussauds, traveling all the way from London.

For thousands of fans this may be the closest they’ll get to the Bollywood superstars. You can stand inches away from them, breathe the same air and even get your photograph with them! True, Amitabh Bachchan can’t give you his autograph nor will you hear Aishwariya’s voice or Kareena’s laugh. Nor will King Khan rattle off an inimitable dialogue for you. But you can stand real close and maybe even shake their hand or sneak a hug! Won’t your friends weep with envy when they see your photo with Hrithik Roshan? Who’s to know he’s a fake?

In the larger scheme of things, what does one minute signify? Nothing. Yet in the universe created by Radhika Khanna, fashion entrepreneur and yoga expert, these mini one-minute poses can translate into the difference between stress and calm, good energy and bad health. In fact, utilized well, these minutes can make all the difference in the world of busy professionals.

Khanna knows through her own experience, because yoga literally saved her life. While working in the fashion industry in New York, she got Lupus, for which there is no cure. Normal, day-to-day life was a thing of the past and she found after many treatments that yoga was her best ally in fighting this disease.

Desis are a dynamic, evolving breed who are constantly surprising themselves and others with their creativity, success, and growing place in the world. And yet, despite all this, there are some things about desi culture that never seem to change, such as our craving for spicy food, our inherently musical nature, our extremely dry sense of humor…and our work ethic.

No matter how much we evolve, desis just cannot seem to give up the laissez faire style of working that we have long practiced in our motherland and which we import with amazing tenacity to the new world. So mind-boggling is this phenomenon, in fact, that it is difficult to express its essence in plain prose and requires an imaginary conversation between two desis to be communicated effectively. Guest Blog.

Can you appropriate two worlds? Or to put it less elegantly, can you eat your cake and have it too? The Sa Dancers once again prove that you can, shifting effortlessly as they do between the world of business and the world of fabulous dance.
Their latest showcase at the Alvin Ailey Theater showed how effortlessly they mix their roots and faraway homelands with the here and now of frenetic New York.

The SA Dance Company took an audience of over 200 people on a journey into Indian villages, sitting on an imaginary slow-moving boat, then to Mughal India, and yes, out into the pouring Indian monsoon. The music was a wonderful blend of folk and Bollywood, modern and pop and the dance steps spawned from many different choreographies created a pattern all their own.