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.
Browsing: India
BlackBerries and Apples are much more than fruit nowadays – they are our very lifeline to the larger world outside. So today on Jan 25, it’s hard to believe that on yet another Jan 25 – in 1915 to be precise – Alexander Graham Bell, first inaugurated US transcontinental telephone service. Can you imagine a world devoid of our little buzzing devices, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no text messages on the run?
Fundraising in New York can have a wonderful ripple effect and translate into health camps, scholarships and education for children in the slums in India. That’s been the happy result of Children’s Hope India, a non-profit organization started by a group of five women professionals in New York in 1992 with seed money donated by them and with just one project in hand.
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.
“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.
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)
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”.
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.
It’s not often that you run into Bollywood biggie Karan Johar at a makeshift Chowpatty or chat with Mira Nair while eating kulfis at a fake Pasta Lane – and that too in the heart of New York, inside the Grand Hyatt Hotel!
The event was An Evening in Mumbai, and like the real Mumbai, this imitation Mumbai glittered. Every one of the guests was dressed in Bollywood glam, a mad medley of colors and jewels. For a day, every guest was a star and walked down the red carpet.
“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.
“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
“Outsourced” is a loaded word, particularly in today’s economic climate, so NBC’s new serial is creating quite a buzz. A comedy about a Mid-Western novelty company that outsources its call center to India, it’s a showcase for Indian-American talents.
So is this the big one? “Absolutely,” says Rizwan Manji. “Correct me if I’m wrong but I think it’s the first time that there’s been a television show on a major network that has a primarily Indian cast. So I think it’s a huge deal – it’s scary but it’s a big opportunity!”
More than three million students travel outside their home countries to study—a 57 percent increase in just the past decade. What’s more, those extraordinary numbers are projected to nearly triple, to 8 million by 2025, says Vivek Wadhwa.
Sometimes you buy a piece of contemporary Indian art and get a love story too in the bargain! Cinq Sens (Five Senses) by M. F. Husain is a powerful work originally gifted by the artist many, many years ago to film director Roberto Rossellini and his Bengali wife, Sonali Dasgupta.
It was a love match he helped bring about, for at that time Rossellini was married to the noted actress Ingrid Bergman and Sonali was the wife of a documentary film-maker in Calcutta. The painting is estimated at $500,-700,000 and is being auctioned by Sotheby’s, and here’s the story behind it.UPDATE – IT SOLD FOR $782,500
At I-View Film Festival 2010 , a powerful band of cinema warriors is coming to town – imagine directors like Vishal Bhardwaj, Aparna Sen, Onir, and Rituparno Ghosh in the flesh along with wonderful actors like Rahul Bose, Rituparna Sengupta, Konkona Sen, Raima Sen, and Juhi Chawla.
This year on 10/10/10 everyone is a Mumbaikar at heart and together we celebrate that great city by the sea which has shown a lot of courage and resilience under attack. Children’s Hope India presents An Evening in Mumbai Gala