When young Hindu girls go to school in the morning in Sindh, Pakistan, their parents are never sure whether they will ever see them again: a report on the refugees who have escaped to Jodhpur from Sindh and are starting a new life in India.
Browsing: Pakistan
The revocation of Article 370 has brought many changes to Jammu and Kashmir. We spoke to Kashmiri pandits in the US about their reactions.
Sarab Kaur Zavaleta shares memories of her family’s exodus from Lahore during India’s convulsive Partition and subsequently her return visit to document the past and her family’s history in Pakistan in an upcoming film.
The gallery at the Rubin Museum in Manhattan is hushed with silent screams, copious tears, with catastrophic events as they happened, with real life receding into the realm of the past. Witnesses from the present watch as Mahatma Gandhi lies fasting, shrinking into himself with concerned followers all around him; they watch hundreds huddled on the refugee trains from Pakistan to India; they are at Gandhi’s funeral with inconsolable masses flooding the landscape.
New York taxi drivers, including a few desi ones, pose as pinups for a 2017 calendar which will benefit charity.
Our world is full of irrational, brutal acts and unbelievable consequences, and yet sometimes good can come out of evil. A flying bullet can end a life – or start a bloodless revolution that can change the world.
The film “He named me Malala” documents just such a real life story.
What constitutes an Indian? Are you Indian if you are born in India or is it your Indian genes which make you Indian? Are you not Indian if you are of a different religion or pray to a different God? Are you seen just as a vote bank by conniving politicians in the great tumult of the Indian Elections?
Sabina Himani, an Indian artist who is Muslim and lives in New York, reminisces on a comment which has dogged her through the years and now she hears once again, due to the ongoing elections.
“All Muslims should leave India and go live in Pakistan ..”
Here’s her answer to all those who make that statement.
Could there be a filmi success story brewing in here? We saw some young unknown and aspiring filmakers with cinematic dreams – and we saw how far they went! We’re talking M.Night Shyamalan and Nagesh Kukunoor here.
Well, meet Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad, a young filmmaker from Detroit with a passion to stir up a devilish hell with his supernatural thriller ‘Jinn’. The film had a glamorous premiere in the fabulous Detroit Institute of the Arts with a packed hall. Get ready to get goose-bumps and some sleepless nights for ‘Jinn’ releases nationwide tomorrow and in Canada.
Bollywood may be loved by the frontbenchers in Indian cinema halls but it has friends in high places too – the elite world of contemporary art. There is just something about the surreal, over-the-top world of masala films and item dance numbers that strikes a chord in the more rarified world of contemporary Indian art.
A new show ‘Cinephiliac’ at Twelve Gates Art in Philadelphia, PA, checks out this phenomenon with the work of emerging as well as noted artists, a creative dialogue between art and film. This new exhibition reinforces these influences and shows the work of both Indian and Pakistani artists, for the effect of Bollywood cheekily crosses borders and permeates different cultures.
For all those separated by artificial, manmade borders, here is a love story, a story of friendship which can make you cry – in a happy sort of way. And guess who made it happen? Google! Really, I think we are getting over-dependent on Google to help us in our search for knowledge, words, images, addresses, cat videos – and now even in our search for emotional well-being.
Never knew a Google commercial could make us cry, reach deep down to our better selves, to our aspirations for reunion and healing. The Big G seems to have become an indispensable part of our lives.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh…migrants from towns and villages, leaving everything behind to create something new, something of their own in America.
It’s all about journeys, about the lives you leave behind and the new ones you make. We’ve all got into a plane, left a place and arrived somewhere else. The baggage we’ve carried is physical things – loved old photographs and mementos, homemade garam masala – but it’s also about memories, lost homes and loved ones who are no longer with us.
The way artists deal with this excess baggage and physical and mental borders is through paint and canvas, creating a new reality which did not exist before. For the past ten years, IAAC’s ‘Erasing Borders: has been giving this space to artists to share their creations and their innermost thoughts, and this year too artists participated in this long lasting celebration of home and the world, as more and more artists take on the global trek.
“One day you are uprooted and told that this is not your home any more. Not only that – this is a different country altogether!
Then follows an insane bloodshed which scars the lives of friends and neighbors for years to come. I cannot understand this absurdity. I find it very stupid, drawing lines on paper and fighting over land. The worst is we continue to thrive on hatred, the seeds of which were sown in 1947.”
– Nitin Kakkar, director of ‘Filmistan’ which has won the 2013 National Award for best Hindi film.
This year Mira Nair celebrates the 25th anniversary of her first feature film, the Oscar-nominated ‘Salaam Bombay’ and also the birth of her new film, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’.
On the eve of the release of ‘Salaam Bombay!’ in New York back in 1988, I had taken a subway downtown to interview the new, not-so-famous filmmaker in her tiny apartment.
The world had not yet discovered ‘Salaam Bombay’ but she was exuberant, excited, animated.
Twenty-five years later, she seems exactly the same – exuberant, excited, animated. There have been critically acclaimed films from ‘Mississippi Masala’ to ‘Monsoon Wedding’ to ‘The Namesake’. The awards and accolades have been coming thick and fast.’The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ screened at The Venice International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others. Nair calls it her labor of love, five years in the making.
You’re in the comfortable upper middle-class home of Changez Khan’s parents in Lahore where a qawwalli concert is in full swing and the mesmerizing sounds of Sufi devotional music pervade the room.
The camera zones in on the red paan-stained mouths of the performers, then cuts to the kidnapping of an American academic on the dark streets of Lahore, then back to the musical energy, the total civility of Urdu poetry in bloom. Paan stains and blood. Ethereal music, gun shots and screams. The crescendo rises and you are totally hooked.
Fifteen years ago an art exhibition in New York was presented by a nascent organization called South Asian Women’s Collective (SAWCC). The exhibition was appropriately enough called (un)Suitable Girls. Fast forward fifteen years and I’m once again at an art exhibition, this time called ‘Her Stories’ commemorating 15 years of SAWCC. It presents the creative works of more than 100 diasporic South Asian women artists, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, and writers, with an installation of archival photographs, publications, and ephemera.
Who are Shah Rukh Khan fans? No anthropological thesis this, but anecdotal evidence and what my eyes saw at the recent Yale event where the Bollywood Badshah was honored with the Chubb Fellowship, I would have to say SRK fans are an ageless lot, going all the way from babyhood to Golden Oldies.
Actually maybe it starts even earlier with Shah Rukh-mad moms watching his movies during their pregnancies, giving their unborn babies a taste of Chammak Challo while still in the womb!
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.
“Salman was my first boyfriend. I had a huge crush on him as a teenager. The crush led me to leave Florida and move to India and join films just so I could find him and get married to him. You have a license for doing idiotic things when you’re 15. However, I do not have a single regret of pursuing my first love.”
Somy Ali chats about Salman Khan, the Single Life, and her non-profit No More Tears on ‘Sex and the Single Desi’
” Phew – Welcome to India, the land of colors, exaggeration, opportunism and couch patriotism.
I witnessed India’s second World Cup Cricket win last night very differently from the way I had done in 1983. In 1983, I was a kid who had fallen asleep out of exhaustion, in the middle of the night, in the living room of neighbors who were the proud owners of the only coveted Sony color TV in our whole apartment building.
Last night, 3/4ths of a Johnny Walker Black Label could not knock me out as I sat, eagle-eyed in front of my TV set. Biting my nails in anticipation, whistling in glee, trying to add my bit to my nation’s couch potato-ism, I gratefully witnessed that Midas Dhoni was up to his pranks yet again, and was steering his wobbly ship home yet again, as he has been doing for a number of times in the past five years.”
Guest Blogger Ayon Banerjee.
For fans of Indian cooking, what can be better than Madhur Jaffrey? – Madhur Jaffrey simplified! The noted cookbook writer, who has won the James Beard Award six times, has taught countless women – and men – how to cook. Now she’s set off on a very 21st century mission: Saving time in a hectic world. These recipes retain the classic touch without the classic toil of gourmet Indian food.