Browsing: India

It was a day of celebrating women’s inherent potential and success stories. Over 260 women came to Children’s Hope India annual Spring Lunch to support vocational projects for the girl child in the urban slums and rural India. Designer Ranjana Khan spoke eloquently about her journey as model, wife, mother and entrepreneur in the dizzying world of high fashion.

“Let’s be honest – many Indian women want sons, not daughters,” she said. “And yet here we are in this beautiful room filled with beautiful women who are all doing such interesting things with their lives. Today, I have meet salsa dancers, kick boxers and successful businesswomen.”

The verdict is in – Dharun Ravi gets 30 days imprisonment for spying with a webcam on Tyler Clementi, his roommate having a sexual encounter with a male, and then tweeting about it. Clementi later committed suicide. Did the punishment fit the crime or was it too light?

“In a country with the 2nd largest population in the world there have to be preposterous systems of elimination. We must keep in mind that it is this same country that is producing some of the best brains in the world.
In the meantime, all I am seeking is a way to get my daughter to join that stream of screaming thousands for an academic certificate. An extremely ambitious dream to have in a country where expectations go beyond just the crazy procedure of admissions.
These are just the entry tickets to an endless journey of prodding for things that have limited “seats”, like delightful careers or cushy lives.” Guest blog – Chatty Divas

If the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was really a hotel in Rajasthan, I think I’d like to spend a few weeks there for there’s just such a kookie charm about the going-to-seed establishment and the young manager Sonny Kapoor, played by Dev Patel with maniac energy and chutzpah, is such an exuberant, happy host.

Indeed ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ gives outsourcing a whole new dimension. What if old age could be outsourced – to India? The film follows a group of British retirees who decide to move to India to get more bang for their buck – and discover a whole new world at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ‘for the elderly and beautiful’. Recently the stars of the film were in New York and weighed in on their experiences in India.

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 many Indians living in America, India is the talisman, the sacred thread around their wrists, which connects them to the past and their changing tomorrows. Visit any Indian American family and there are bound to be keepsakes which link them to their lost homeland.

For some it may be a frayed album of photographs frozen in time, for others it may be a much loved folk painting or a pair of tablas, percussion drums. For me it is my silver icons of Krishna and Radha, on their own carved throne, which sits is in my home in Long Island, NY.

I look at it and I am transported back to my home in New Delhi in the India of decades ago. My mother would bathe the many Gods in her home shrine and carefully put new clothing on these mini figurines, cutting holes in silken cloth with a small pair of scissors.

The Chatty Diva, having worked in both India and America, shares some insights into desi networking.
Question asked in Delhi before a networking event – “So what do we do when we get there?” or a blatant “How will this help me?”
Question asked in Manhattan before a networking event – “Where did you say it is?”
GUEST BLOG (Photo by Neal Fowler)

Living in New Delhi, India, Sulekha Rawat tries out various roles from housewife to ‘domestic engineer’ to career woman and finally entrepreneur. In the blog ‘Chatty Divas’ she recounts the ups and downs of a woman’s world, and the realization of what’s really important in life.
Photo by Harry Scheihing. GUEST BLOG

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!

“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

Horror stories of the hired help in India abound. Here is a love story about an Indian nanny which brings back memories of days when the ‘Dai Ma’ was a loved and revered figure, a second mother to the newborn. A new post on guest blog ‘Chatty Divas’

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.

It was only 8 pm on Dec 31st in Mumbai but already the drums were beating wildly outside my window in an apartment close to the Gateway of India. People are packing the streets here and I’m struck by the sheer energy of the crowds. The vitality of Mumbaikars is catching, their passion to live, to succeed. I’ve been in the city just three days but already I’ve met so many ordinary people who take each day as it comes and pack a punch into it.

“I get a missed call. I know who it is, it would have been a dream come true in the US but here it has become ritual – that call… I have pondered over it several times. It’s surreal – the annoying convenience that we get used to in India. I remind myself to be grateful and not get irritated by that call. I tell myself it’s the call of duty on a silver platter. I am almost guilty to be receiving it.”

Who has ever seen the face of the Almighty? Does He wear a peacock feather in His hair or perhaps a coiled snake around His neck? Is the Omnipresent a many-armed powerful Goddess with green eyes or a gentle, golden Madonna and Child?

East and west blend in the surreal works of Brazilian artist Roberto Custodio in which blue-eyed Gods and beauty queen goddesses preside, and the flora and fauna of many continents merge. He creates magic worlds from found materials and paper clippings, discarded consumer magazines which he recycles to create his own truths.

This is the story of Priya and Manav, a childless Indian-American couple who came to India in search of a surrogate mother. They got more than they bargained for – and some surprises too which convinced them to make India their permanent home.
Guest Blog – Chatty Divas. Photo by Paras

I missed it. This beautiful festival of Indian dance in the middle of Manhattan’s bustling downtown business district. A pretty surreal event, I’m sure, looking at the pictures of bedecked dancers striking poses, surrounded by skyscrapers rising against the New York skyline. Yes, the temples of Khajuraho are very far away.

Not too many new fashion design graduates get to debut at the prestigious Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York but that’s what happened with Dipti Irla, a young Maharashtrian designer from Mumbai. There she was soaking in the limelight of this fashion circus at Lincoln Center, surrounded by buyers, editors and paparazzi.

It was the night of maharajas and maharanis, of pomp and splendor. The occasion was Children’s Hope India Royal India Gala and Pier Sixty in Chelsea Piers, Manhattan had been transformed into a royal retreat with life-size peacocks, golden sculptures, rich silks and gorgeous live mannequins draped in Mughal couture. Yes, hookahs and turbans too!

Photo: Shaun Mader