Browsing: Features

It’s not every day that New York actor Samrat Chakrabarti, who’s acted in a ton of movies and TV shows, gets to go back to his roots and star in a Bengali film. And a Hitchcockian thriller, no less! Samrat, who grew up in London, is currently in Calcutta – the city where his parents grew up and he’s seeing himself, larger than life, on huge billboards in the city.

Samrat, who’s done two big movies in the North and South of India – ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘Vishwaroopam’ respectively, is doing a movie in Calcutta for the first time and that too in Bengali. The film is ‘Sada Kalo Abcha’, directed by the innovative digital filmmaker Riingo Banerjee, known as the most experimental and technology driven filmmaker in Tollywood. The entire film has been shot with a range of Panasonic cameras.

Oh, the things people do for love! In his latest film, ‘Gori Tere Pyaar Mein’, dashing city slicker Imran Khan abandons urban comforts to pursue his love, Dia, a social activist played by Kareena Kapoor, in the remote wilds of Jhumli, a small village. Recently the star was in New York and chatted with Lassi with Lavina about this romantic comedy which is being released on November 22.
“Punit, the director, is very, very clear in his intentions,” said Imran during a quick interview at his hotel. ” His intent is to make a fun movie that people should laugh, people should enjoy while they are watching it. He wants to have the kind of songs that make people sing along, make people dance, and you should walk out at the end of it feeling that you have not wasted your time and you have not wasted your money. It is that simple!”

Where would you get to rub shoulders with Salman Rushdie, Shabana Azmi, Danny Boyle, Shashi Tharoor, M.F. Husain, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Madhur Jaffrey – and the late, great Ismail Merchant? Well, I met all these topnotch names in New York, all thanks to a small, spunky organization which has survived and thrived by sheer chutzpah. It’s brought a mix of Indian cinema, art, theater and dance to barren city streets, making them all a natural part of American life.

Indeed, if you’re talking about Indian art and culture in the city, you can hardly go a few sentences without mentioning Indo American Arts Council or its creator, Aroon Shivdasani. This year IAAC celebrates its 15th tumble and toss year, and so here’s the story of the little engine that said I think I can, I think I can, against all odds.

New Yorkers are getting thoroughly pampered – if they can’t get to India to catch the latest Indian fashion, topnotch Indian designers with celebrity models are coming to New York! You had the gorgeous Lisa Ray walking the ramp for Satya Paul, and the equally eye-catching Soha Ali Khan for the designer Joy Mitra.

And so it was that some of India’s hottest fashions came to New York in a space which is the only neo-Gothic Reformist Synagogue built back in 1849. The surreal internal architecture of this space, now known as the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Performing Arts, really added to the atmosphere.

Long before Hindi cinema was rechristened Bollywood, there were film posters and showcards under glass in the lobbies of the theaters in India.

As you bought your tickets to enter a magic world, you sauntered by the display cases to check out these show cards, a collage of hand painted photographs which whetted your appetite for the treat to come.

Most of these old markers have disappeared but recently cinema fans got a chance to see a cache of vintage cards, lovingly preserved.

The fireworks still explode in the memory, and the taste of nuts and cream and sugar still linger on the tongue. For immigrants from India, the childhood memories of Diwali are strong, for it is a time when India transforms into one glittering celebration. Public buildings are illuminated with neon lights and every home, no matter how humble, is ablaze with earthen lamps. In fact, entire villages are turned into fairylands, dotted with millions of lamps, glowing in the dark of night.

Good news for masala lovers – Bollywood is coming to the borough of Brooklyn! Queens and Manhattan have long been the strongholds of Indian cinema but the heady cocktail of comedy, melodrama, fights, songs, romance, item numbers and more are now making their way to Park Slope, with a theater showing ‘Boss’, hopefully the first of many Hindi movies.What is coming to Brooklyn is quintessential masala, amplified in true Akshay Kumar ishtyle.

Where does that gorgeous Indian outfit go after you’ve worn it? I think all of us have faced this dilemma – spending a fortune on an Indian ensemble and not wanting to repeat it again. What do you do with such ornate outfits and how do you get new ones without spending more money?

Dina Patel, a very successful investment banker has used her business smarts to come up with the perfect solution for you! Turning entrepreneur, she’s created Didi’s Wardrobe – a reseller of new and gently used Indian clothing and accessories – in America!
This is what we call reincarnation – the American way! (Sponsored Content – Tips You Can Use)

By winning the Miss America title, Nina Davuluri has scored big for all those little brown girls who were always the outsider and had to answer the taunt “But where are you really from?” Generations of kids were often asked why their mothers had dots on their heads and whether they lived in huts and about their connection to tigers, snakes and elephants.

The title of Miss America makes Nina Davuluri as American as apple pie, as American as American can be. In fact, you can dance the bhangra, eat dosas and sambar, worship any God you choose – and you’re still American. Davuluri’s win shows Indian-American children that their many differences are what make America rich and special, and don’t make them any less American

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

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.

“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.

“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.

‘Raanjhanaa’ – we don’t see men like that anymore – men who are willing to annihilate themselves, subsume themselves for the woman they love, bringing almost a noble, heroic luster to unrequited, unconditional love. ‘Ranjhanaa’ is a Grecian tragedy set in Varanasi, on the ghats and alleys of the holy city and you won’t forget it easily.
I have to admit the film became somewhat of an obsession with me when I saw the pre-release Youtube videos of some of AR Rahman’s songs. They totally blew me away, especially the song ‘Tum Tak’ – so rich in its Sufi textures, so overwhelmingly about a higher love that it had me totally obsessed. I found myself watching the videos again and again, trying to piece together the story from dialogues.

When the movie came out, I was there right in the front char anna class, like a genuine filmi fan, drinking it all in.

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.

Phoolan Devi, India’s notorious Bandit Queen, was gunned down at the age of 37 – yet she continues to live on in the popular imagination. Rape victim and avenging angel, oppressor and oppressed, she finally won respectability, embraced Buddhism, and a seat in Parliament before a barrage of bullets ended it all.

Vengeance. Rape. Murder. Bloodshed. Violence. Her short, chaotic life was indeed the stuff of melodrama, and several artistic ventures have tried to capture its turbulence.

There is a continuing fascination with Phoolan Devi’s life, and in her latest avatar she is the central figure in an opera – ‘Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen’