It was the Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week and Sabah Mansoor-Husain was one of six student designers from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco who showed their debut collections at the tented extravaganza. For Sabah, the destination was particularly thrilling for the journey to Bryant Park had started all the way in Bangalore, her hometown.
Browsing: The Buzz
The buzz around us about trends and events
There it stood in all its bright yellow glory, an icon of style, right in the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design on Fifth Avenue! Yes, the Tata Nano is causing a buzz in Manhattan as museum goers circle it and peer at its many features, its cute shape and its various assets. There was a rope around it and no one was allowed to touch it, giving it even more of a celebrity status.
All you fans of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, looking for a job that satisfies your passion for social networking? Well your country needs you, President Obama needs you! Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is looking for a Tweeter-in-chief.
Life seems to be turning into a Bollywood movie and you won’t even need to lip-sync as you sing and dance your way through life with your romantic hero – just wear a musical sari! Yes, you’ve seen those Made in China Christmas cards which sing, autos from everywhere which talk and clocks which nag you to wake up. Now you have a Made in India intricately embroidered sari which comes embedded with a digital player in the ‘pallu’, 8 micro-speakers on the border and can play over 200 songs for four hours.
As if there aren’t enough big breaking news stories or international crises to report – Elizabeth Hurley wears a sari and discards the blouse – and Huffington Post reveals all! Great investigative reporting!
India and Indians seem to have a finger in every pie, and recently New Yorkers got to see the full gamut of India’s 7 billion dollar leather industry, from bags to stylish leather jackets in every possible hue.
Saks Fifth Avenue, Cole Haan, Jones New York, Levi’s, Guess, and Norma Kamali were just some of the style leaders who came in to check out Indian leather at Know Leather, Now India, a sourcing show at the Westin Hotel. Models displayed a rich array of fashion garments which underlined the fact that Indian leather has moved from just basics to high fashion too.
Want to know where you can get WiFi connection in Manhattan? Confused by the labyrinth of subway connections? Or just hungry for a great meal? Now, thanks to a team of Indian IT professionals, you can have all that information at your finger tips on your iPhone – and it’s free.
NYC Way is the name of this neat application and it’s got Mayor Bloomberg’s seal of approval. It got an honorable mention for the App of the Year but also won the Public Choice Grand Prize and the Investors’ Choice Award in the NYC Big Apps competition
McMansions, hefty bank balances, unfettered success, Ivy League schools, a world embroidered with dollar signs.
For many Indian immigrants, that was the fabric of the American Dream. Add to that a Lexus and maybe a BMW in the double car garage, lots of travel, lots of dining out, and the ability to live a rich lifestyle.
For other Indian immigrants, the American Dream was much more modest—just the ability to survive, to consolidate some savings and send funds back home to family members still in the village.
Yet all these dreams, big and small, modest and immodest, have been gathered, whipped up and churned in the ruthless and noisy cement mixer of the economy—pummeled, pushed and battered by the worst crisis in memory as the global economy has taken a severe beating.
The bride in her glittering red sari was carried into the ballroom in a palanquin held aloft by four burly Westerners dressed in turbans. As the gathered guests watched, the bridegroom came forward to claim his bride and the couple walked to the stage. Standard wedding fare you’d say – except both the bride and bridegroom were children!
“This is the pleasure of making films as a woman – I get to break the rules!” says the thoroughly feisty, unconventional Gurinder Chadha.
Fans who have been waiting for their Bend-It fix will be happy to know her new comedy ‘It’s a Wonderful Afterlife’ has been selected for a world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival which runs January 21-31.
Gurinder Chadha did a quick Q and A with Lassi with Lavina about the making of the movie. (Take a FIRST PEEK at the video!)
In the 1990’s, tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalis living in Bhutan were stripped of their Bhutanese citizenship. Born and brought up in Bhutan, they were ruthlessly expelled by the government, compelled to live in a wasted no-man’s land, in seven crowded refugee camps on the outskirts of Nepal.Difficult as their situation has been, the one silver lining has been the offer of the United States to resettle up to 60,000 of the 106,000 refugees. About 8,000 of them have arrived in the US and will be given government assistance to settle down. I checked out a Little Bhutan which is beginning to bloom in the Bronx.
I have a new respect for Twitter since I started following Bollywood celebs – it’s the democracy of interaction and the immediacy of hearing the news from the horse’s mouth without the intervention of gossip magazines. The complete lack of punctuation and slaphappy grammar makes it even more laid back and buddy-like.
As a writer, I often wonder what happens to the people one reports on. How do their stories pan out? Do they find happiness and their way in the world? Recently I had written about the influx of Bhutanese refugees into the US, spotlighting their lives in New York. I’m happy to provide a follow up and a happily ever after – several non-profit organizations have got involved in helping the newcomers get a foothold in America.
I’m always amazed by the passion India evokes in those who visit her. I’ve met people in New York elevators and on the streets whose eyes light up when they hear you are from India. All of them have love stories to relate, wonderful anecdotes about what the country means to them. In the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, people everywhere have expressed their solidarity with the city and the country, showing their caring in many different ways.
It’s not every morning that you get to chat with a big Bollywood star even before you’ve had your morning cup of tea. So there I was, a bit bleary-eyed with the hot star Riteish Deshmukh on the phone, me in New York and he in Mumbai.
His big movie, the Ram Gopal Varma film ‘Rann’ is being released this month, and so Riteish was chatting up the international media. We talked about Rann, Amitabh Bachchan, and how Riteish developed his passion for cinema
Haiti lies in ruins after the catastrophic earthquake, the streets of Port-au-Prince awash with dead bodies. It seems surreal that we are all going about our daily lives while a nightmare unfolds in our backyard. How can one help in such a mammoth tragedy?
Snow, blizzards, ice, the grim topography of winter. Caught in the clutch of cold, hazy mornings and dark evenings in New York, I suddenly got a gift from the artist Birendra Pani. An image of Spring, sent via email. It certainly lifts up the spirits, making one’s heart soar like a kite. So if you’re feeling the winter blues, take a whiff of Spring. It’s not too far away!
Can Indian men throw off the tyranny of the necktie – and save energy too? A group of corporate workers in Mumbai are trying to pass a ‘No-Tie Day’ on May 3, 2010, their reasoning being that when men dress cooler, they will require less air-conditioning.
Does IIT Madras have answers to New York City’s energy dilemma?
Three students Aashish Dattani, Sriram Kalyanaraman and Vinayshankar Kulkarni were the big winners in Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Next Idea Global Business Plan Competition, winning over teams from ten leading business and engineering schools in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The criteria were for the business concepts to have a connection to NYC and be commercially viable.
The next time you shop at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, you’ll be able to pick up a Bollywood DVD with your milk, potato chips or your electronics. And for those of us having to wait to get to an Indian store to pick up our DVD masala, it will be fun to just order it from Amazon.
Although Disney already has a presence in India, this is the first time the company is distributing a Hindi film on DVD in the US. The movie is ‘Like Stars on Earth’ – better known to Bollywood fans as ‘Taare Zameen Par’ – Aamir Khan’s award winning film which has moved audiences everywhere and was India’s official selection for the Academy Awards 2008 in The Best Foreign Language Film category.