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.

I-Phone, I-Pad, I-Meditate?

It was bound to happen! The practice of meditation may be thousands of years old but it is perfectly suited to our very stressful modern times, when in order to go fast, you have to learn to slow down. And the buzz of the moment is that the power of social media is being harnessed by a group of high achieving young professionals to get the word out about the value of meditation, and the upcoming I Meditate NY event, one of the largest meditation gatherings ever to be held in the Big Apple.

Over 2700 New Yorkers, from all walks of life and all religions, will come together to listen to and meditate with the renowned spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who heads the Art of Living Foundation, with music by Grammy nominated Chandrika Tandon and world music band Bhakti. This unique event will be held at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on April 10, and leading up to it are free meditation classes at the Art of Living Center in Manhattan, a chance to get a first-hand taste of meditation.

What can be better than a feast of cinema? A feast of cinema with several glittering parties and celebrities-in-the-flesh! The Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council festival of Indian films had ample doses of both, and drew an enthusiastic crowd.

New York is full of surprises and unexpected treats, of twists and turns. You can take a detour and find yourself face to face with the cinema you loved in your youth, the films which gave you goose bumps and showed you the futility and heartbreak of life, films which took you into a deeper, more complicated world and made you disregard the bag of chips in your hand. Who can forget the aching pain of ‘Pyaasa’, the disillusionment of ‘Kaagaz Ke Phool’ or the churning emotions of a fading way of life in a changing world in ‘Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam’?

Imagine an opera sung entirely in Sanskrit in the heart of New York! ‘Satyagraha’ is composer Philip Glass’s landmark work, set to text from the Bhagavad Gita, and revolves around Mahatma Gandhi’s years in South Africa and his experiments with civil disobedience. This dramatic event at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center uses giant puppets [...]