‘Hiding Divya’ is a provocative Indie film which takes on hard issues – and delivers. Mental illness is a taboo word in the Indian-American community – it’s about loss of face, ‘bad blood’ and failure – and is often kept under wraps. Filmmakers Rehana Mirza & Rohi Mirza Pandya get the dialogue going…
Above: Pooja Kumar and Madhur Jaffrey in ‘Hiding Divya’
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To bite into a mango and get that sweet, sticky juice squirting all over your chin and clothes is to drift back into blissful childhood, into days that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

BREAKING NEWS: SURRENDER FEE HAS BEEN WAIVED BY THE INDIAN GOVT – BUT THE SAGA CONTINUES

Planning to visit India this summer? If you’re not an Indian citizen, be prepared for some mighty long lines at the Indian Consulate. If you gave up your Indian citizenship, the pigeons are coming home to roost – you now have penalties to pay. According to new rules, persons of Indian origin who acquired foreign citizenship, must surrender their Indian passports immediately after the acquisition of foreign citizenship and also obtain a Surrender Certificate – and pay a price.

Else, no visa and no travel to India!

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Goodbye, Wall Street. Hello, Start-Up! The world is a-changing, the economic landscape is re-aligning. No doubt about it. In the days of the economic downturn, Wall Street had been handing out pink slips to workers – now you have three workers who have given Wall Street the pink slip!

Puneet Mehta was a SVP with Citi Capital Markets, Archana Patchirajan was a senior consultant with the same company; and Sonpreet Bhatia was a vice president at Merrill Lynch/Bank of America.

Now why would people throw up hard-to-get, prestigious jobs in the financial sector and go off into the unknown? They’ve heard the siren song of ‘entrepreneurship’ and their grand dream is being funded by venture capital and endorsed by none less than Mayor Bloomberg!

As spring turns into fall, we should be seeing a lot of excitement and action in the fashion arena. Will more and more Americans be seduced by Indian fashion through travel to India, through cinema, and through Indian-American friends in an ever increasing Asian population?
Will American designers continue to find inspiration in India’s myriad delights of color, crafts and couture? Will Indian designers make it big in America? Will new mega-fashion stores dedicated to India ring up the sweet music of cash registers?

Meet Dr. Neha Sangwan, a young physician based in San Francisco, CA. She has been on the precipice and seen just how traumatic burnout can be. In fact, Neha Sangwan was her own first patient!

A gossamer web of stories ensnares the reader in ‘One Amazing Thing,’ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new novel, taking you into distant lands, hidden places in the heart and into the hidden strengths people have.

Nine very different people drawn by chance or luck or destiny into the same spot just as disaster strikes. They are all gathered for obtaining visas to India in the basement of the Indian consulate in an unnamed American city when a powerful earthquake strikes. ALSO LISTEN TO A LIVE INTERVIEW WITH CHITRA DIVAKARUNI

He’s fifty percent Japanese and fifty percent Indian, so does that make him a Lexus-Nano hybrid? Or a Toyota-Ambassador? This might be my own sorry attempt at stand-up, but Dan Nainan’s mixed heritage has certainly had him laughing all the way to the moolah house. Always squeaky clean, his humor has found many takers in the South Asian community across the diaspora. Here the funny man answers some serious questions.

Are Hollywood movies going to be a cash cow for Indian-American producers? Generally you have NRI filmmakers making movies with Indian themes or Indian actors but Naveen Chathapuram of Chicago has just ventured into mainstream territory, by producing ‘CA$H’, a psychological thriller with Hollywood stars Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings), Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Star Trek) and Victoria Profeta (Push, The Drew Carey Show). The film is written and directed by Stephen Milburn Anderson (South Central)

Now we’ve seen it all! Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal – and one of the world’s richest men, will actually have a tower named after him, and it’s no less a structure than the mighty Olympic Tower being readied for the 2012 Games in London. He will be picking up most of the $30 million tab. It’s going to be made of 1400 tonnes of steel, appropriate for the King of Steel, and is being designed by the acclaimed London-based artist Anish Kapoor