Author: Lavina Melwani

This has been quite a year for noted actor and activist Shabana Azmi who was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India. She’s just finished Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ based on Salman Rushdie’s novel and is currently making a film with Vishal Bharadwaj. She has been chosen by TIME Magazine as 1 of 25 Asian heroes and is the only woman amongst 4 Indians on the list.

Now comes her New York minute! Shabana Azmi was presented a proclamation by New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development for her commitment to the arts and contributions to New York City’s film industry.

Foodies, there’s yet another new Indian restaurant in Manhattan – Benares, a cool, contemporary space where you can indulge in regional specialties from many parts of India. In a preview peek at the new eatery which seats 89 diners, one is struck by the sleek, haldi-yellow interiors highlighted by multicolored lamps and beautiful old Benarsi saris framed on the walls.

Peter Beck, who’s previously cooked up a storm in the kitchens of New York restaurants Chola and Tamarind, is the chef at Benares. The name Benares gets you slightly off-kilter – isn’t that city supposed to be a vegetarian paradise? This Benares has everything from seafood to Cornish hens to red meat in abundance, besides meatless fare.

Shah Rukh Khan fans – the King of Bollywood is coming to Yale University! This is a brand new real life role for SRK, who is being recognized as a Chubb Fellow at the prestigious university on April 12.

Shah Rukh Khan is in extremely good company: Former fellows include President George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, authors Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Toni Morrison; filmmaker Sofia Coppola; architect Frank Gehry; choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and journalist Walter Cronkite.
And yes, there’s actually a chance to see SRK!

Chef Peter Beck of Benares Restaurant in New York shares his recipe for Sevai Tomato Kurma – mussels scallops, rock shrimp, fish and crab claws tossed in garlic tomato sauce over Iddi Appam, Indian-style rice noodles.

“The Nowruz dinner is especially meaningful to me, as I am a practicing Zoroastrian and grew up relishing this fare. Today, my love for ingredients and spices is largely influenced by this cuisine, and I look forward to sharing these wonderful gastronomic delights,” says Jehangir Mehta, chef at Mehtaphor and Graffiti, who is recreating those tastes for New Yorkers with a celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year tomorrow.

Some days just begin with news that delivers a powerful kick to your gut and the world seems to stop for a minute.
Sonia Rai, the young woman who gave a human face to the South Asian bone marrow drive, lost her fight against Acute Myelogenous Leukemia today.
You feel saddened and quite helpless.
So we pause and think of the beautiful life lost and what she would have liked us to do, what efforts she would like us to make.
The battle may have been lost but the war goes on.

Some things never change. Lord Krishna played holi with Radha and her sakhis in the lush groves of Brindaban in timeless time – and now we are still playing it in the 21st century, not only in India but across the diaspora – even on board a ship anchored off New York city, no less!
Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, is here heralding spring, joy and togetherness. In India, the streets are turned multicolored with every hue imaginable. At private parties there are pichkari-fights as revelers get splashed with color, dunked in pools full of colored water, and splurge on sweets and gets intoxicated on thandai, often laced with bhang. We share a wonderful video of the late great showman Raj Kapoor whose Holi parties were legendary. Enjoy!

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.

If someone had told me that by lunch time I’d be sitting in a houseboat on the backwaters of Kerala, eating from a banana leaf, I’d have been highly skeptical. After all, I was right in the middle of Delhi’s buzzing mall culture. Well, that’s where Zambar is located, landlocked in the middle of retail heaven. It is one of the fun and innovative eating spots in the burgeoning mall culture of Indian cities.

And if you thought that food from the South means just dosa, idli, and sambar, Zambar is a delicious eye-opener. This fine dining spot celebrates the Southern coastal cuisine of four states – Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka.

Zambar, a restaurant in Vasant Kunj in New Delhi, is an exploration into South Indian coastal cuisine, highlighting the catch of the seas – prawns, fish and crab with authentic recipes from the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka. The dishes are a union between fresh seafood and pungent spices and ingredients including lime, tamarind, chilies, peppers and coconut milk. So till you can get to go and try Zambar yourself, here are two recipes for you from the chef to try at home.

This is probably the dream of every emerging entrepreneur – create a start-up and have it acquired by a major company. In 2010, Divya Gugnani, Mariah Chase and ‘Project Runway’ winner Christian Siriano launched Send the Trend, an innovative fashion e-commerce site, raising $ 3 million in venture capital – and then they just worked at nurturing it and creating a unique company.

QVC, the giant home shopping network, obviously liked what it saw because it has acquired Send the Trend for an undisclosed amount.

Modern day iconic artists like the late MF Husain, FN Souza or Tyeb Mehta are the rock stars of the Indian art world and you see their celebrity status reflected at art biennales and gallery openings, and in the high prices their work commands in the auction houses. They are the superstars, the rajas of any social event, the focal point of international culture. Everyone knows their name.

Yet there is another set of artists who never achieved fame in their lifetime, and whose names no one knows. We are talking of the superb master painters who lived and worked from 1100 to 1900, who rarely signed a canvas with their own names, and who lived and died in anonymity.
They created some of the most magnificent works for emperors, maharajas and the nobility, and yet today no one knows their names or faces.

“We want to give a sense, an understanding that these works produced by anonymous craftsmen in dimly lit backrooms – these were very creative individuals responding to a particular place and time and their response to the subject matter and the demands of their patron – all those things went into the mix.” Curator John Guy, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Love is the four-letter word most used today on Valentine’s Day and who knows how to use it better than A.R. Rahman.? On this day of love and one-ness, listen to the Maestro’s new song. It covers all the shades of joy and sorrow, togetherness and separation, wanting and denial which make up the high drama of love.

What better insurance for a home’s peace and prosperity than installing an image of Ganesha or Buddha within it? For the spiritually inclined and the stylish, jewelry designer Amrita Singh has introduced a home collection line which includes some beautiful icons for the home. Singh who was recently in Bali, came back inspired by the sheer joy of having a touch of spirituality in one’s home.

Zenobia Shroff, the talented actress who starred in Sooni Taraporevala’s splendid ‘Little Zizou’ is back on the big screen, this time in a real, dyed in glitz, Bollywood super-starrer ‘Ek Main aur Ekk Tu’ starring Bollywood royalty Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan and produced by none other than Karan Johar. The film has a great ensemble cast and New York based Zenobia gets to play Kareena Kapoor’s mother, a fun, cool mom to be sure!

Here she talks about ‘Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu’ and the hilarious, catchy item number ‘Auntyji’ which seems to be dominating the air waves and Youtube videos.

Inundated with new cuisines, new restaurants and new foods? Then you need an antidote to the craziness of the Delhi food scene where new eateries crop up all the time. You need to take a walk back into time. You need to visit Embassy, around since 1948.

Haven’t heard of it? Well, if you are a Delhite, you surely know it. It’s the ancient gastronomic heaven where you go to binge on food that is delicious, is reasonably priced – and also invokes memories with each spoonful. After all, the restaurant has been around for six decades with its curious blend of dishes. Where else would you get Bomb de Moscova, Amritsari Macchi, Chicken Strognoff and unmatchable chole bhature and chicken chaat – all on the same table?

In India you can see man and monkeys living together in an uneasy truce. A photograph that got away was of at least 20 monkeys all dangling from a traffic light pole in Agra! Before I got my camera out, the bus had moved on and the clambering monkeys remain a delightful snapshot in my memory. I’m sure the monkeys run rampant in places like Benares, Mathura and Haridwar.

In fact, I distinctly remember having my toast snatched from my hand by a greedy monkey at the Haridwar Railway Station many years ago. Now I caught glimpses of monkeys – and humans, outside a small wayside temple near the Ranthambhore National Park. Seen as a form of Hanuman, the venerated Monkey God, these monkeys are indulged and even fed by passers-by.

Recently Meera Gandhi launched her book, Giving Back at the Leela Palace Hotel in New Delhi. As Fareed Zakaria writes, “The act of giving is twice blessed, touching the recipient but also the donor. We are at the beginning of a great revolution of giving. Meera Gandhi describes and celebrates it in this beautiful, heartwarming book.”

Ever had the experience of dressing up and rushing out – into a downpour? Or freezing in a slinky outfit when the weather suddenly turns abrasive? Looking out of the window to judge the weather is just not good enough – a more practical weather forecaster might be Daily Dress Me!