Browsing: Features

Few 100-year-olds are this vibrant but Indian Cinema has all the sass and punch in its centenary year and we can expect exciting things from an industry which has embraced so many different genres. The upcoming New York Indian Film Festival, presented by Indo-American Arts Council, promises to serve up a feast of movies which are making waves. So here’s to a taste of cinema, past and present.

“All the film industry is going to Cannes to celebrate the 100th year of Indian cinema. We are the perfect global kick-off because in 1913 on May 4th was the first-ever Indian movie – and that’s the date of our closing night!” said Aroon Shivdasani, the Executive Director of IAAC, who along with Aseem Chhabra, director of the festival, has selected the eclectic mix of films.

Meet Dr. Neha Sangwan, a young physician based in San Francisco, CA. She has been on the precipice and seen just how traumatic burnout can be. In fact, Neha Sangwan was her own first patient!

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is an America-based artist who grew up in Kerala. In the late 1990’s she made a portfolio titled Satirizing Bollywood, about her memories of her life as a woman in India. She calls it her ‘Angry Woman’ years. Misogyny and a patriarchal society existed then, and as the recent gang rape and unending cases of abuse of women prove, nothing much has changed. Now two decades later, Matthew has taken on the subject again.

“It’s very Andy Warhol goes Indie-pop,” says designer Sabah Arenja Vig about her collection – and that got me a-wondering: what would Andy Warhol think about our wild, multi-hued surreal Indian fashions? Probably turn them into equally wild, multi-hued surreal art!

Yes, Indian couture is certainly riding high. With a young ever-burgeoning population in India and the diapora, the demand for bridal wear and fashion with a touch of India is only going to grow. Recently Shireen Vinayak of Shehnaai Couture showcased the latest collection and answered some burning questions about the new fashion trends, especially for New York fashionistas.

Guess who’s in town? Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Kareena Kapoor! They are all in Times Square and why this hasn’t quite caused a stampede yet is because they are not quite the real thing. Not even the reel thing. They are here in the wax! At Madame Tussauds, traveling all the way from London.

For thousands of fans this may be the closest they’ll get to the Bollywood superstars. You can stand inches away from them, breathe the same air and even get your photograph with them! True, Amitabh Bachchan can’t give you his autograph nor will you hear Aishwariya’s voice or Kareena’s laugh. Nor will King Khan rattle off an inimitable dialogue for you. But you can stand real close and maybe even shake their hand or sneak a hug! Won’t your friends weep with envy when they see your photo with Hrithik Roshan? Who’s to know he’s a fake?

In the larger scheme of things, what does one minute signify? Nothing. Yet in the universe created by Radhika Khanna, fashion entrepreneur and yoga expert, these mini one-minute poses can translate into the difference between stress and calm, good energy and bad health. In fact, utilized well, these minutes can make all the difference in the world of busy professionals.

Khanna knows through her own experience, because yoga literally saved her life. While working in the fashion industry in New York, she got Lupus, for which there is no cure. Normal, day-to-day life was a thing of the past and she found after many treatments that yoga was her best ally in fighting this disease.

Desis are a dynamic, evolving breed who are constantly surprising themselves and others with their creativity, success, and growing place in the world. And yet, despite all this, there are some things about desi culture that never seem to change, such as our craving for spicy food, our inherently musical nature, our extremely dry sense of humor…and our work ethic.

No matter how much we evolve, desis just cannot seem to give up the laissez faire style of working that we have long practiced in our motherland and which we import with amazing tenacity to the new world. So mind-boggling is this phenomenon, in fact, that it is difficult to express its essence in plain prose and requires an imaginary conversation between two desis to be communicated effectively. Guest Blog.

Can you appropriate two worlds? Or to put it less elegantly, can you eat your cake and have it too? The Sa Dancers once again prove that you can, shifting effortlessly as they do between the world of business and the world of fabulous dance.
Their latest showcase at the Alvin Ailey Theater showed how effortlessly they mix their roots and faraway homelands with the here and now of frenetic New York.

The SA Dance Company took an audience of over 200 people on a journey into Indian villages, sitting on an imaginary slow-moving boat, then to Mughal India, and yes, out into the pouring Indian monsoon. The music was a wonderful blend of folk and Bollywood, modern and pop and the dance steps spawned from many different choreographies created a pattern all their own.

Imagine circling the world while sitting perfectly still, almost meditatively, in a darkened cinema hall. You witness real lives, real people in places as far apart as Bahia, Brazil, a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, and the isolated Arnhem Land in Australia. You see the differences between varied people but also the commonalities: people face love and loss, and try to make sense of being human, of grief, of injustice.
All these triumphs and tragedies of human existence are captured on camera by diverse filmmakers in films you may never get to see. This was after all at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York – it is the oldest and best known festival for documentaries from around the world.

“These movies are NOT coming to a theater near you; they are limited distribution, truly independent films that come from around the globe,” says Bella Desai, Director of Public Programs and Exhibition Education.

They may not even have a passport or American visa but everyone from a farmer in an Indian village to a street urchin in Mumbai will have visited Times Square, Fifth Avenue and the skyscrapers of New York – thanks to all the Bollywood movies which are being shot in the US!

Indeed, location shooting in America seems to be one of the hottest trends in Indian cinema, and superstars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Rani Mukerjee, Katrina Kaif and Preity zinta have all danced their way through the streets of Manhattan.

‘Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola’ – it’s a real mouthful of a movie title but what a tasty morsel! It is a reminder of why I love going to the movies. At a time when so many Bollywood films are warmed up repeats of what’s gone before, films where you can easily check out the beginning and the ending, fast forward to a few item numbers on Netflix or simply watch a few song scenes on Youtube, Matru ki Bijlee is a film which is quite delicious and warrants watching.

‘India’s Daughter’ – that is hardly an endearment, a belated title of honor for the courageous young woman, a citizen of India Shining, who was left to fend for herself in the crowded, uncaring streets.

Where was India when its daughter waited, waited late in the night for safe public transportation? Where was India as six goons brutally beat and raped her in a moving bus with tinted windows and curtains on public streets? Where was India when she and her male companion were beaten senseless, stripped and thrown from the bus like unwanted commodities?

We did not know her first name nor her last name. We would not have recognized her if we had met her face to face in the marketplace. Yet in her terrible travails, in her slow, excruciating death, she is us. Every Indian woman who exists anywhere in any country is related to her.

Biba Singh combines two worlds – medicine and music. Yes, this Punjabi pop singer is also a doctor! The daughter of a physician, Biba, who lives in New York, has been singing since the age of 7, and first started out singing shabad in the gurudwara. She has two albums of popular music and is hugely popular. Here she talks to Monica Marwah for the Single Desi blog on pop music, careers, and the single life.
Guest Blog

Does your family try to smuggle Tupperware containers filled with daal chaval into Disneyland?

Do your parents have drawers full of ketchup packages from McDonalds?

Do your parents yell into the phone even when they are not calling India?

Does your family own a Toyota or a Honda?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are definitely, really, Indian! These are part of a quick quiz by light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek ‘anthropologist’ Sanjit Singh whose book ‘Are You Indian?’ is a humorous look at growing up Indian in America. Singh checks out the Indian-American phenomenon right from infancy where the little bachas are being already prepped for the spelling bee by their anxious and ambitious parents to SAT and College Admission, right on to the traumas of finding a mate.

‘Talaash’ has spawned a zillion reviews – in fact, reviewing the film seems to have become a mini cottage industry, and reading some of these reviews I feel I must have gone to a different movie than many of the reviewers. “Mesmerizing’ – ‘Amazing’ it was not, nor did I sit on the edge of my seat from start to finish as some have claimed they did. Nor does it deserve some of the negative comments spawned by movie-goers, after reading the reviews.

No, it’s not the greatest thing since ready-made rotis but it is definitely good cinema.

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.

“New York is such a vibrant cultural city,” says Dr. L. Subramaniam, the master violinist. ” What I like most is that it’s receptive to all different kinds of music.” Indeed, that is the wonder of New York – the way it receives music from all over the world with open arms.

In fact, this is L. Subramaniam’s third concert here in a period of six months: the first was a global fusion concert at Lincoln Center, the second a collaboration with Stevie Wonder and now a classical concert at the Skirball Performing Arts Center on December 9. He will be sharing the stage with his wife, the noted playback singer Kavita Krishnamurti who will be presenting a new repertoire with some classics.

Thought you had put the 2012 Elections behind you? Not so fast! You now have to make the big bird decision and we don’t mean that Big Bird! It’s that time of the year when the President pardons one lucky turkey to live out its life in comfort. On Wednesday, November 21, 2011, President Obama will pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a ceremony in the Rose Garden.

The President will pardon Cobbler and his alternate Gobbler, both 19-week old, 40-pound turkeys. This year, for the first time ever, the American public decided which of the two turkeys – Cobbler or Gobbler – would become the 2012 National Thanksgiving Turkey by casting a vote via the White House Facebook page. And now there’s a winner!

Indian-Americans finally have a presence in the US Congress – Ami Bera, MD, is the new Congressman-Elect from California’s 7th Congressional District. I had interviewed him some months back when he was running a hard-fought race against the incumbent Congressman Dan Lungren, who conceded today.
For Ami Bera, serving people has been an important part of who he is, and he is ever conscious of the need to give back to a country which embraced his immigrant family. While he grew up in California, his father crossed the oceans from a farming family in Rajkot near Ahmedabad, Gujarat for a higher education in America. “My father was the first in his family to go to high school,” he says. “He got a master’s in engineering and my mother became a teacher.”

Like many immigrant families, theirs’ was a close-knit family with a lot of emphasis on education, hard work. His father ran a small commercial real estate business, and inculcated the values for a strong work ethic in his children. “There was a strong family support and strong community support,” he recalls. “And also a keen appreciation of the opportunities America offered.”

Today Diwali is being celebrated in the White House. And yes, ‘Happy Diwali’ is trending on Twitter in America. What more could a Hindu ask for? So before you do your puja and enjoy the jalebis and laddoos, listen to the Prez. And we will also share with you in another post the great work Hindus are doing with disaster relief for those affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Here are President Obama’s thoughts on Diwali. “Many who observe this holiday will light the Diya, or lamp, which symbolizes the triumph of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. As that lamp is lit, we should all recommit ourselves to bring light to any place still facing darkness. Earlier this year, we were reminded of the evil that exists in the world when a gunman walked into the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and opened fire.

In the wake of that horrible tragedy, we saw the resilience of a community that drew strength from their faith and a sense of solidarity with their neighbors, Sikh and non-Sikh alike. We also saw compassion and love, in the heroic actions of the first responders and the outpouring of support from people across the country. Out of a day of sadness, we were reminded that the beauty of America remains our diversity, and our right to religious freedom.”
– Barack Obama