Browsing: Features

Some things never change. Lord Krishna played holi with Radha and her sakhis in the lush groves of Brindaban in timeless time – and now we are still playing it in the 21st century, not only in India but across the diaspora – even on board a ship anchored off New York city, no less!
Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, is here heralding spring, joy and togetherness. In India, the streets are turned multicolored with every hue imaginable. At private parties there are pichkari-fights as revelers get splashed with color, dunked in pools full of colored water, and splurge on sweets and gets intoxicated on thandai, often laced with bhang. We share a wonderful video of the late great showman Raj Kapoor whose Holi parties were legendary. Enjoy!

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For people from South Asia, especially Pakistan, it was a big moment when Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy won the Oscar for Best Documentary for ‘Saving Face’.

It was a triumph for the Pakistani filmmaker and her co-director Daniel Junge, a triumph for Pakistan bringing home Oscar gold for the first time – but most of all, it was a triumph for the women who have been victimized with acid attacks – the most incomprehensible mode of revenge by angry men – jilted lovers and disgruntled spouses.

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Art

Modern day iconic artists like the late MF Husain, FN Souza or Tyeb Mehta are the rock stars of the Indian art world and you see their celebrity status reflected at art biennales and gallery openings, and in the high prices their work commands in the auction houses. They are the superstars, the rajas of any social event, the focal point of international culture. Everyone knows their name.

Yet there is another set of artists who never achieved fame in their lifetime, and whose names no one knows. We are talking of the superb master painters who lived and worked from 1100 to 1900, who rarely signed a canvas with their own names, and who lived and died in anonymity.
They created some of the most magnificent works for emperors, maharajas and the nobility, and yet today no one knows their names or faces.

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Art

“We want to give a sense, an understanding that these works produced by anonymous craftsmen in dimly lit backrooms – these were very creative individuals responding to a particular place and time and their response to the subject matter and the demands of their patron – all those things went into the mix.” Curator John Guy, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Love is the four-letter word most used today on Valentine’s Day and who knows how to use it better than A.R. Rahman.? On this day of love and one-ness, listen to the Maestro’s new song. It covers all the shades of joy and sorrow, togetherness and separation, wanting and denial which make up the high drama of love.

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What better insurance for a home’s peace and prosperity than installing an image of Ganesha or Buddha within it? For the spiritually inclined and the stylish, jewelry designer Amrita Singh has introduced a home collection line which includes some beautiful icons for the home. Singh who was recently in Bali, came back inspired by the sheer joy of having a touch of spirituality in one’s home.

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Zenobia Shroff, the talented actress who starred in Sooni Taraporevala’s splendid ‘Little Zizou’ is back on the big screen, this time in a real, dyed in glitz, Bollywood super-starrer ‘Ek Main aur Ekk Tu’ starring Bollywood royalty Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan and produced by none other than Karan Johar. The film has a great ensemble cast and New York based Zenobia gets to play Kareena Kapoor’s mother, a fun, cool mom to be sure!

Here she talks about ‘Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu’ and the hilarious, catchy item number ‘Auntyji’ which seems to be dominating the air waves and Youtube videos.

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In India you can see man and monkeys living together in an uneasy truce. A photograph that got away was of at least 20 monkeys all dangling from a traffic light pole in Agra! Before I got my camera out, the bus had moved on and the clambering monkeys remain a delightful snapshot in my memory. I’m sure the monkeys run rampant in places like Benares, Mathura and Haridwar.

In fact, I distinctly remember having my toast snatched from my hand by a greedy monkey at the Haridwar Railway Station many years ago. Now I caught glimpses of monkeys – and humans, outside a small wayside temple near the Ranthambhore National Park. Seen as a form of Hanuman, the venerated Monkey God, these monkeys are indulged and even fed by passers-by.

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Ever had the experience of dressing up and rushing out – into a downpour? Or freezing in a slinky outfit when the weather suddenly turns abrasive? Looking out of the window to judge the weather is just not good enough – a more practical weather forecaster might be Daily Dress Me!

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“Tis the Season to Be Fabulous fa la la la la…I love the holiday season. The shopping; the sales; the extravagant get-togethers; the holiday parties; the cookies; the gifts; the Secret Santas; the holiday cards; the holiday movies; the New Year’s eve parties and the chocolate. What a great way to say goodbye to a year and ring in the New Year with some great spirit and some awesome love.”

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In fashion-mad New York, it’s not just the people who get decked out in designer fashion – their bicycles do too! The recent Tour de Fashion may not have been exactly the Tour de France, but bikes certainly received a lot of love from some of New York’s top designers including Diane Von Furstenberg, Isaac Mizrahi, Betsey Johnson, Elie Tahari, Yeohlee, Nanette Lepore, Nicole Miller and many more.
Noted jewelry designer Amrita Singh and happening fashion designers Prabal Gurung and Bibhu Mohapatra were the South Asian presence at this buzz-y fest with designers, fashionistas and hordes of fashionholics.

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Art

Who has ever seen the face of the Almighty? Does He wear a peacock feather in His hair or perhaps a coiled snake around His neck? Is the Omnipresent a many-armed powerful Goddess with green eyes or a gentle, golden Madonna and Child?

East and west blend in the surreal works of Brazilian artist Roberto Custodio in which blue-eyed Gods and beauty queen goddesses preside, and the flora and fauna of many continents merge. He creates magic worlds from found materials and paper clippings, discarded consumer magazines which he recycles to create his own truths.

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He’s got to be the world’s greatest multi-tasker. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is living several lives rolled into one. He’s an Emmy-winning television celebrity, a neurosurgeon, a professor, an author. Not to mention, a husband and dad of three girls, and a sportsman.

“When I turned 40 years old, I thought I could start making my biological clock not just run slower, but start to reverse and I think I have done that. I think in many ways biologically I am younger now than I was five years ago. Athletics, sports, and fitness are a very, very big part of my life. I was up at 4:15 and going for a run and a swim, so it is a big part of my life and that is something that I am teaching my girls too.”

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Not too many new fashion design graduates get to debut at the prestigious Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York but that’s what happened with Dipti Irla, a young Maharashtrian designer from Mumbai. There she was soaking in the limelight of this fashion circus at Lincoln Center, surrounded by buyers, editors and paparazzi.

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“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passports, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

– Susan Sontag.

This quotation begins Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of cancer, ‘The Emperor of All Maladies.”

In this series we pay tribute to five physicians who preside over ‘the kingdom of the sick’ with not only their healing hands but their powerful words: Drs. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Sanjay Gupta and Sandeep Jauhar.

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There were no writers or physicians in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s family. He grew up in New Delhi where his father Sibeswar Mukherjee worked for Mitsubishi and his mother Chandana was a school teacher. His parents still live in Delhi.

“We spoke Bengali and English at home, our house was immersed in books,” he recalls. “I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and I would say my interest besides reading at that point of time in my life was music. And so, my memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music.”

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Doctors are considered omniscient Gods but are actually very human, and no one conveys this truth better than Dr. Sandeep Jauhar. He is Director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York, specializing in novel therapies for acutely decompensated heart failure.

It is hard to believe that this accomplished cardiologist once was a conflicted intern and probably no physician has been able to capture that coming of age story more evocatively than Jauhar in his remarkable first book, ‘Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.’

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The case of the invisible patient, the I-patient who exists just on the physician’s computer monitor as so much data, while the real live patient in the bed is ignored, has become an important issue for Verghese, both in work and his writing.

“I think that there’s a very special transaction that takes place between physician and the patient during the course of a careful examination,” he says. “It’s during that exam when the physician touches you and pulls your eyelid down and looks into your eyes and thumps on your chest – that’s when a very ritualistic bond is formed and if you shortchange that by just sitting behind your desk and saying ‘Let’s send you for this test, let’s send you for that test,’ you have essentially shortchanged yourself from an important transaction.”

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It’s that time of the year again when the annual Sikh International Film Festival takes place – and this year one of the guests is film-maker Gurinder Chadha who is a panelist at the inaugural Leadership Summit and is being honored with an Arts award. at the Sikh Heritage Gala on October 15 at Cipriani.

Lassi with Lavina caught up with the hugely popular director in London to get a heads-up on the Sikh International Film Festival which starts tomorrow. Here’s Gurinder Chadha on her award, the Sikh International Film Festival, the changing face of Southall and – ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ – the Musical.

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Is Madhuri Dixit, Bollywood Superstar, really moving back to India?

Economies and nations can fall, but there is frenzied speculation in the Indian media about this earth-shattering move. The reasons for the move are being analyzed with much indepth analysis by media seers and gossip columnists. Chill, folks! This is the new global age when anyone who can buy an air-ticket can fly wherever they like and for whatever reasons they like!

Meanwhile, one lucky fan in Denver managed to come face to face with the Superstar – in the shoe store! And she heard it right from Madhuri’s mouth – yes, she is moving back to India! This story has all the old-fashioned magic of a fan meeting an unreachable star…truly the world is full of random surprises….

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