Browsing: Features

I interviewed Chandrika Tandon for The Wall Street Journal just before the Grammy Awards and asked her for her thoughts on the Prize.
“That’s not the way I think of my life; I don’t think of winning or losing. I think of the Grammys as a happening at a point in time. I’m not trying to use this as a stepping stone to something else. I live by the words of the mystic Kabir:

‘When ‘I’ was there, the Divine was missing.

When ‘I’ left, the Divine took over. ‘

So the quest is to lose myself and go with the flow.”

She spoke about her childhood, her passion for music and how the worlds of business and art intersect. You can read the full interview at The Wall Street Journal

Have you met Radical – I mean – Radhika Vaz? Known as Rad for short, this stand up comic and sketch artist is the mouthpiece for all that women have been dying to say – but were too afraid to, or perhaps too ladylike. Vaz’s new one woman show ‘Unladylike’ takes on everything one would hesitate to discuss in polite company. It’s all about letting your hair down and speaking your mind.

Mount Kailash, Tibet’s holiest summit, gives lessons in life – and death. It can even inspire people who have never seen it. Mexican artist Ricardo Mazal was mesmerized by the images and took a trip, one of the most difficult he’s ever attempted, to do the ‘Kora’ or pilgrimage which is a 33 mile trek around the peak, and is undertaken by Buddhists, Hindus, Jains and Bonpos alike.

It is believed that 108 rounds of Mount Kailash can lead to nirvana. The Kora became a pilgrimage for Ricardo Mazal to unearth larger truths about life and death.

Life can change in the blink of an eye. It happened to Sonia Rai, 24, a risk analyst in Boston, when a routine visit to a dentist turned into a nightmare scenario. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and is desperately seeking a match.
Did you know that if you are a South Asian and get Leukemia, your chances of survival can depend on a bone marrow match from another South Asian? While 30 % of patients will find a matching donor within their family, the remaining 70 % have to search for a match from unrelated donors.The hard fact is that only 1% of South Asians are registered with the National Marrow donor program.

The men all wear dhotis (and look darn good in them), the women are covered from head to toe and there’s not a swinging item number in sight. In an age of mindless Bollywood entertainment, Ashutosh Gowariker’s ‘Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey’ (KHJJS) is a film you can sink your teeth into. It’s the real stuff.

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)

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.

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).

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.

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!

“My father was a CEO, so I grew up in a family that gave me a very real sense of the positive impact that business can have upon society – from providing goods and services to creating jobs to building entire communities,” says Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School.

“Women in South Asia are some of the most policed in the world. Their sexuality, their bodies, their desires are constantly monitored and judged through the morality of societies in South Asia,” says Myna Mukherjee, director of Engendered. “Fashion has an incredibly popular appeal yet is considered frivolous or superfluous – both its creative roots as well as its worth are constantly questioned.”

“You know what it is with me – I’m all heart. I can’t do anything else. Everything I do, for every decision I make – of course I use my brain – but my heart kind of takes over, and I can’t fight it. So music was just something I couldn’t give up.” – Jay Sean