Browsing: Features

Want to make some spiritual gains and rub shoulders with Gods and Goddesses? The place to go for darshan is the Brooklyn Museum because here you get to meet not one, not two but all ten avatars of Vishnu, Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior.

“Vishnu – one of Hinduism’s most important and powerful deities – is the Great Preserver, vanquishing those who seek to destroy the balance of the universe,” writes Joan Cummins in ‘Vishnu – Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior.’ Indeed, the time looks ripe for Vishnu’s avatar to come to earth…

A chat with Joan Cummins, who is the Curator of South Asian art at Brooklyn Museum.

“Right from my childhood, when I would be getting ready for school, my mom would be getting her makeup done for her shoot,” recalls Esha Deol, star daughter of super stars Dharmendra and Hema Malini. “So instead of being in uniform, I would try on her wig, put on her lipstick.
I used to love watching ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’ which I saw every day. I loved dancing on all Hindi songs of the 80’s, so I knew that this is what I have always wanted to do.”

What can be better than seeing the wonderful Hema Malini performing Indian classical dance live on stage?
Watching Hema performing Indian classical dance live on stage with her two daughters Esha and Ahana Deol!
Three for the price of one you could say!
For New Yorkers this will be a unique experience as the famous mother and daughters have never performed together in the US before. Read an exclusive interview with Ahana Deol on life in a star-spangled world.

“I was looking through the list of runway shows at Lincoln Center and saw that there was not one South Asian woman designer presenting,” says Reema Rasool, the founder of SayWe. “It actually made me mad, with all of the amazingly talented South Asian women designers we have worldwide! I wanted to do something to correct the situation.”

The result is the upcoming Fashion for Compassion event which honors noted designer Ranjana Khan and showcases the collections of South Asian designers.

‘The ‘Emperor of All Maladies’, subtitled A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. This week it won the 2011 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. An interview with this award-winning author about the writing of the book.

The challenge of ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ was that in taking on such a formidable foe, Mukherjee had to create a complex tapestry which was by no means linear. It went all over the map, backwards, forwards, even sideways, zig-zagging between the impersonal and the very personal, between a clinical trial with 10,000 patients to the emotional tale of one particular patient. “The challenge was to take all that and make narrative out of it – it really is the most invisible thing in the book, it is the bones of the book,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Are you a lover of contemporary Indian art who always thought collecting art was beyond your means?
Did you think you’d have to mortgage your house – and sell your soul – to obtain an MF Husain?
Were you always intimidated by the art auctions which seemed so elitist and such a closed club?
Well here’s Anu Nanavati Chaddha, Director of Saffronart in New York, to show the path to newbie collectors and to answer all the questions you had about contemporary Indian art – but were afraid to ask.

Long Island was once an Indian stronghold (native Indian, to be precise) – well now the Indians from India are making their mark there, what with the burgeoning Indian population, academics at various area universities, not to mention an overload of Indian grocery stores, sari boutiques, and the occasional Bollywood extravaganzas at Nassau Coliseum.

So now it’s pretty sweet that the mainstream is also recognizing this newest population – and its cinematic contributions. The recent Gold Coast International Film Festival organized by the Great Neck Arts Center on the North Shore of Long Island, gave a nod to the Indian film industry with several screenings of India-related films.

Project Chirag began as a student-run organization in Free Enterprise at H.R. College of Commerce & Economics in Mumbai. Since its inception, the Project has purchased solar equipment, trained and hired paraplegic Indians to assemble the parts, and then installed the panels and lanterns in thousands of households across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka.

M.F. Husain – Goodbye to an Icon. (September 17, 1915 – June 9, 2011)

The great artist died of a heart-attack in London, far from his homeland of India. He was a giant of the contemporary Indian art world and there are as many colorful stories about him, about the controversies swirling about him, as there are unmatchable pieces of art which encapsulate the complexities of India. New York gallerist and collector Kent Charugundla shares some untold stories about the flamboyant artist. Join in sharing your comments and memories of M F Husain.

“So I am relatively new to this 140 characters world. Been there for a bit but just can’t figure out what to tweet about.

When I do find something fun to tweet about, I spend 5 minutes trying to get rid of the negative character count .. aaah … how frustrating!! Do you know how hard it is get interesting thoughts across in less than 140 characters?

Imagine if Twitter existed in the Elizabethan era! I think I need to enroll in a ‘Twitter Short Form Writing’ class right after I get done with ‘What Do I Tweet About?’ ” – Ruchi Kalra

As we, the New Americans, mature and root ourselves further in the sacred and secular landscape of America, we see a need to build national and local organizations focusing on serving — with Seva Bhava — contemporary needs of our growing community and the community at large.
Seva or service is an integral part of our culture and traditions, an inside-out approach to life. Many individuals and organizations volunteer and serve in soup kitchens, shelters, health camps, and disaster relief. But few Dharmic – Hindu, Jain,Sikh, Buddhist – institutions have the capacity to provide sustained social services and do seva as is prevalent in other faith based institutions in America. GUEST BLOG

In our virtual worlds, there is a small, vibrant nation of 7 million people called Foursquare – it’s actually an app that can be uploaded on your mobile or your computer but is a buzzing hive of human activity. Everybody seems to live on Foursquare nowadays.

It is a location based social networking website created in 2009 by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley to help people to check in through their mobile devices with their friends in different locations where the action is.

This innovative app which brings people and businesses together in a win-win situation was recognized as a Technology Pioneer for 2011 by the World Economic Forum.

Imagine a room full of women, prostitutes, lowest of the low. They are faceless – without an identity, without a future. They are created out of found objects, the flotsam and jetsam of society.
Their heads are fashioned out of jars, their breasts are jars shaped like voluptuous melons– after all, aren’t women objects? They lack hands, and some even their lower limbs, they have no standing in society. Clad in flashy underwear and gold heels, they are what they wear, sexual objects in an uncaring society.
And yet to stand in that small room with these life-sized, lifeless women was to feel their presence and their pain. It seemed almost a community. Iranian artist Shirin Fakim’s women were just one vignette of the recent Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW)

“Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Friendster have definitely made the world a smaller place but they’ve also made it more open for everyone to peek into our lives. Today we are defined by the number of friends we have on FB, by how many people follow us on Twitter, and how many people subscribe to our blog, rather than by the number of true friends that we can sit with and have a cup of chai.” GUEST BLOG

The only job he ever applied for was at McDonalds – and he was turned down! He is a high school dropout who at the age of 16 went on to create ClickAgent, an Internet business which sold for $ 40 million.

He sold his next start-up, BlueLithium, to Yahoo for a whopping $ 300 million. Now he’s on to his third start-up, RadiumOne, and is having the time of his life.

Meet Gurbaksh Chahal, the kid from Tarn Taran, near Amritsar, who has gone on to become a major serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He has been on Oprah before millions of viewers and has written a best selling book. Worth over $100 million, he’s got the fabulous penthouse and the Lamborghini and all the perks. He was proclaimed as the most Eligible Bachelor in America in 2009. Now, at 28, he’s still single!

Last year Vikas Reddy and co-founder Jeff Powers of Occipital, a start-up in Boulder, Co, were listed in the 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Entrepreneurs by Inc. Magazine.

Vikas and Jeff came up with an innovative price checker called RedLaser, a free scanning application for iPhone and Android that has been downloaded over 8 million times. They sold RedLaser to eBay for an undisclosed amount, and now are creating and fine-tuning 360 Panorama, an exciting new product which enables computers to see like the human eye.

At 21, Rahim Fazal was the youngest CEO ever to head a publicly traded company. He was the celebrity entrepreneur whose face was splashed in newspapers and who at 16 had already sold another company for $1.5 million. But within a year his new company was in trouble, and he had to walk away from it – to study in a community college since he had hardly finished high school. Talk about ups and downs!

Rahim, who was named amongst America’s top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 by Inc. magazine and amongst the top 25 digital thought leaders by iMedia, has had enough twists and turns in his life to be worthy of a Hollywood – or Bollywood – movie!

In the city of reinvention, what better way to stand out from the crowd than to reinvent yourself?
As the film festivals focusing on South Asian films have multiplied in the Big Apple, the oldest and most noted showcase of them all, the MIACC Film Festival, is now known as New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) and is focusing on independent and regional films, while still being open to Bollywood blockbusters. The opening film ‘Do Dooni Chaar’ is a Disney film with Bollywood stars but imbued with the indie spirit.

In our virtual world anyone can become an instant expert on any city – thanks to MyCityWay, an innovative mobile app designed by the team of Archana Patchirajan, Puneet Mehta and Sonpreet Bhatia, three immigrants from India who’ve made New York home and achieved the American Dream.

MyCityWay just raised $ 5 million in financing from BMW i Ventures, FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures and you may see this app in BMW cars in the future. This little app, which can be downloaded free on your mobile and offers you a comprehensive grid of the city, is currently available in 40 cities and the plan is to bring it to 40 more.

Do you think it’s still possible to dream big and actually see that dream become a reality? Ask first-time filmmaker Nayan Padrai. His project ‘When Harry Tries to Marry’ – made on hope, persistence and a limited budget has gone on to bag several top awards at the recent London Asian Film Festival: Best Crossover Film and the Audience Award for Best Film. Rahul Rai, the young actor who’s never acted before, was named Best New Talent.
The film has already shown at the Austin and Mumbai Film Festivals, and its script was a featured project at the Sundance Institute Independent Producers’ Conference. It’s now showing in New York.