Year: 2013

“Once you hit your 30’s, you aren’t going back. It is essentially your last time to have children before having children at a later age of 40. If you are in your 20’s, you have a lot of time on your hands; you can mess up and get back in the dating game. You have a lot of energy to introduce yourself and re- introduce yourself to different people…. However 30 something women know that they are running out of time and their biological clock is ticking.

30 something women have to make the choice of whether to be parents without a life partner in which case, their option would either be adoption or in vitro fertilization. Nowadays, there are a lot of women who want children and want to move on with their life without the help of a partner.” Guest Blog

In New York, you can expect the unexpected – fabulous Indian dance taking place under the trees in the greenery of cascading parks, right in the middle of joggers and strollers, office workers and moms pushing prams. All the doing of the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) which in collaboration with the Downtown Dance Festival presented free lunch-time performances in Battery Park.

“To see the dancers performing among trees at Battery Park, the many members of the public stopping to watch and take photographs – some even during their lunch-time jogging – was quite remarkable. Rama Vaidyanathan did her ‘Mayuri Alaripu’ in a Peacock Feather Suite that was designed for the venue and looks wonderful in it. Vijaya Lakshmi, too, did a peacock dance, but we were happy that it did NOT usher in any rain!” Guest Blog

Picture this: The world of global fashion designers who dress glamorous celebrities with bold-face names and fashionistas; leggy models wearing fabulous fashions and glittering jewels; high-end stores showcasing the whimsies of fashion.

Then picture this: Struggling South Asian women without marketable skills, little income, closeted lives and low expectations, no language skills, always working, always the care-givers with no prospects of a better life.

Two very different world views – yet in a moment they can come together to the benefit of both. Meet Ranjana Khan, noted jewelry designer, and Naeem Khan, the iconic designer who has dressed everyone from First Lady Michelle Obama to Hollywood Royalty. Come September 26, they are opening up their penthouse studio for a fashion fundraiser to support struggling South Asian women achieve success and confidence through the non-profit organization Wishwas.org.

Scoop! The perfect career training for desis! A super way for New Yorkers to get web development training from the city at no cost – the City’s Web Development Fellowship. Sept 18 deadline
Mayor Bloomberg and New York City Department of Small Business Services Commissioner Robert W. Walsh today announced the launch of the NYC Web Development Fellowship, a result of initiatives Mayor Bloomberg discussed in the 2013 State of the City address recognizing the need for the development of skilled workers to enter the fast growing technology sector in New York City.

The free five-month training program provided by the Flatiron School is normally valued at $12,000 and will be free to more than 50 adults with no previous web development experience and help place them in jobs paying $65,000 or more.

It’s that time of the year again and one’s mind turns to a day twelve years ago, to that clear blue sky and quiet morning which exploded into the horror of 9/11.

On this day, I always have this surreal sense of foreboding, of calm before the storm but life goes on and people are moving on.

Seems strange but yes, it is Fashion Week in New York and the city is full of beautiful people, designers, models and media. Art events are happening and the city is teeming with tourists. Working, dreaming, creating and deal-making, frenetic New Yorkers move on. Yet they do not forget, as the scores of memorial services around the city emphasize.
I myself am headed out to New Jersey for the memorial of a dear family friend, Rajesh Mirpuri who lost his life as the burning towers collapsed around him.
Every year for the past decade, hundreds of friends and family have gathered around his grieving parents at the Sadhu Vaswani Center, finding solace and strength in prayer. Time passes but can one ever forget?

“Once in the US, much like in most Jhumpa Lahiri stories, my husband plunged into his work leaving me to figure out the foreign land and how much we would like each other.
Well, we had our tussles but America finally gave in and I made a place there. All this took a little more than a year. I finally found a job and discovered a life I could actually fall in love with. However, I remember us being really stubborn about our resolve of returning to our country ‘no matter what.'”
Guest Blog – Chatty Divas

Where would you expect to see the Durga Puja Pandals, beautiful Bengali fashions, eat kati rolls and puchkas, and check out the Victoria Memorial and the Howrah Bridge? Calcutta, you say? You’re right – but this is all happening in Calcutta – in New York!

You’ll be in wonderful company as you’ll get to meet and listen to Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, a superb speaker, who is being honored with the Impact Award at the October 13 gala organized by Children’s Hope India. Other honorees are human rights activist Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, gallerist Sundaram Tagore, Member of the Rajya Sabha Derek O’ Brien and the noted fashion designer Rachel Roy.

Visiting family and old high school friends is a part of life – especially if you are settled in a city away from them.

This blog is for those of you in your 20’s and 30’s that live far from your family and have spontaneously made a trip down and decided to spend some quality time visiting with your parents and high school friends.

“Spending quality time with your family does not necessarily mean you have to compromise the person you are today. Let’s face it, you are all grown up. As soon as you left your parents’ home you changed. Dealing with generation X and Y, working different jobs, making friends, balancing your relationship with your current boyfriend has all led you to a more grown up you. No matter what anyone wants from you, you will never return to your high school identity. It is your life now and you create the rules.”
Guest Blog

It was about the beautiful city of Varanasi, of endangered silks and a way of life that is under threat. Barneys New York with Freida Pinto, David Adjaye and Wendy Schmidt hosted a private dinner to celebrate the the luxuy brand Maiyet Varanasi Silk Capsule Collection and the nonprofit Nest Varanasi Silk Weaving Facility which through an innovative partnership are bringing new hope to weavers, helping them to redefine and rethink their craft production. It’s all about preserving the centuries old tradition of handloom silk by creating high demand products and a whole new market.

We all know that Christopher Columbus was looking for India and its tangy spices when he took a wrong turn and stumbled into America instead. Now some enterprising Indians have brought India and its cache of cardamom, cloves and peppers right into America. These immigrants have brought not only spices but entire kitchens, cooking pots and chefs along, opening hundreds of restaurants, takeaway joints, mithai shops and Indian supermarkets. Americans are now eating spicier food, ‘samosa’ is an English word now and right in the middle of Manhattan there are ‘dosa’ carts!

Yes, the Big Apple is fast becoming the Big Mango! So how has this big change come about in American food habits?

Don’t you just love fashion shows? It’s a whimsical dream world where real problems are forgotten in a whoosh of youth and beauty and style. It’s a world inhabited by beautiful people and perhaps no one does it quite as dramatically as designer Manish Malhotra. It’s a world of rich Chantilly lace and velvet, of yards and yards of antique silk and the moon is made of gold.

Manish showed his fabulous 1930’s inspired collection at Delhi Couture Week, and he had some heavy hitters modeling his couture – SRK himself and Deepika Padukone. The royal canvas was nothing less than the princely states of India, a time of opulence, of unparalleled riches and a wondrous mix of east and west.

She’s sung for President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. She’s also sung for hardened criminals in the maximum security Sing Sing Prison.
She’s performed with noted names like Yo-Yo Ma, A.R. Rahman, Wyclef Jean, Philip Glass, Ricky Martin, and Blues Traveler. Her songs have also been featured in Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut A Place in Time.
Meet Falguni Shah, popularly known as Falu, a singer from Mumbai who has generated a devoted fan following in New York, and who has blurred the line between different genres of music with her signature style.

The Chatty Diva on the special things in life that we take for granted until we almost lose them – such as a devoted pet which asks nothing in return and the empty paper which gives you the power to write anything you want – and yet we go for the easy, safe answers.

“It will be almost 20 years since I left an Indian household and became an individual entity. I have now turned into myself. I run my own household, follow my own rules, pay my own bills and travel to the destinations of my choice.
Whenever I talk to people of my parents’ generation they always point out that they went from their parents’ household to their husband’s household. They didn’t get the freedom that we seem to have in the middle of life.” Single Desi Blog

Looking ahead to the golden days of Summer, Chef Hemant Mathur shares some delightful recipes for the outdoors – with desi spices! Recipes for grilled shrimp, chicken Tikka and tandoori vegetables. Just right for the holiday weekend!

“What I find remarkable is that miniature painting is so intrinsic to Indian art history but it seems as though Indian artists and Indian art schools have decided to be just colonized by the West and Western art traditions instead,” says Olivia Fraser.
” All the most important Western-born twentieth century art movements: cubism, abstractionism, modernism, post-modernism have been successfully encouraged and developed here but miniature painting has been relegated to the dusty shelf of ‘craft’ – something that is stuck in the aspic of tradition and has no developmental, political or aesthetic possibility of change.”

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.

It was a power-packed evening with over 580 people from the worlds of business, arts and philanthropy. AIF, whose honorary chair is President Bill Clinton, has impacted the lives of more than 1.7 million of India’s poor. This evening raised big bucks – $ 1. 5 million – for AIF’s Market Aligned Skills Training (MAST) Program which provides underprivileged youths skill training in India.

“The Indian community in America has certainly ‘arrived’. Indians are everywhere, from finance to politics to media, and they are not just treading water either – they are rising to senior positions and directing the destinies of industries. They are also greatly involved in philanthropic work, not just for the homeland but right here at home as well, and they are truly assimilated into the American culture and values.

And that is what makes Gutpa’s fall even more problematic. He represents everything good about being Indian-American – educated, polished, humble, generous, statesmanlike – and yet his choices later in life throw all that away for the sake of money and in his quest for even higher status.” – Sanjay Sanghoee – Guest Post