Browsing: India

” Phew – Welcome to India, the land of colors, exaggeration, opportunism and couch patriotism.

I witnessed India’s second World Cup Cricket win last night very differently from the way I had done in 1983. In 1983, I was a kid who had fallen asleep out of exhaustion, in the middle of the night, in the living room of neighbors who were the proud owners of the only coveted Sony color TV in our whole apartment building.

Last night, 3/4ths of a Johnny Walker Black Label could not knock me out as I sat, eagle-eyed in front of my TV set. Biting my nails in anticipation, whistling in glee, trying to add my bit to my nation’s couch potato-ism, I gratefully witnessed that Midas Dhoni was up to his pranks yet again, and was steering his wobbly ship home yet again, as he has been doing for a number of times in the past five years.”
Guest Blogger Ayon Banerjee.

Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, or M G Vassanji – who would be the one you’d vote for in the world of journalism and literature? Bobby Jindal, Swati Dandekar, Dr. Ruby Dhalla or Ameya Pawar – who would be your choice for political leadership? Would you be torn if you had to choose among Mira Nair, Russell Peters, Meera Syal, Sunil Nayar and Sanjeev Bhaskar in the field of entertainment?

Well, now you have a chance to vote for the most notable NRIS – and perhaps win free tickets to India in the bargain, with the upcoming Light of India Awards.

If you want to see Padma Lakshmi break into a smile, all you have to do is ask her about her little girl, Krishna. “She’s wonderful, she’s healthy!” she beams. “We went to the zoo today – it was such a beautiful day! She’s the light of my life and I am very thankful to have her!”

She adds, “And I might not have had her if it wasn’t for the fact that I was diagnosed by Dr. Tamer Seckin and I got the help I needed. I can’t stress that enough – I was told that I wouldn’t be able to have a baby and the fact that I have her is a gift of God and this is just my way of saying thank you.”

‘This’ was the Blossom Ball at the New York Public Library to raise awareness and funds for the Endometriosis Foundation of America, and Padma Lakshmi, who is the co-founder with Dr. Seckin, was on the red carpet at the gala, looking stunning in a Sabyasachi saree.

“Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon. Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.

At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political leaders are working to keep the world’s best and brightest out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs.” – Vivek Wadhwa

A precursor to Asian Contemporary Art Week in NY, a recent group show: India and Pakistan may have been geographically birthed on the same subcontinent but they are relentlessly apart as nations. It is a question of so near – and yet so far. Once one people, they are now so far apart that can one understand the mindset of The Other?

Yet, art by Indian and Pakistani artists hung side by side in the Aicon Gallery in Manhattan – perhaps there were not even six degrees of separation between these canvases.

Looking at these powerful works of art one would be hard-pressed to say which artist was from India, and which from Pakistan. This only goes to prove that at heart, the dreams, the hopes and the fears are the same…

“As a single desi, one really great way to establish your independence and live vicariously is to pick some hot destinations and explore. Check out the bars and clubs, talk to locals, sight-see and get a sense of how everyone else lives in different parts of the world. As a school psychologist, I am lucky to have spring break, Christmas break and summer vacation. I use that time to travel and see the world. Here are tips on traveling on your own and making the best of your given circumstances.” GUEST BLOG

This is the tale of The Three Chocolatiers. Once upon a time there was a hotshot financial wiz, a smart biochemist who loved to bake, and a savvy chef who had sailed the high seas on the Q E 2, each going their own way.

A steamy passion for chocolate brought the three together to create Co Co Sala, a foodie kingdom dripping in high-end chocolate, coffee and cocktails. This attracted legions of chocoholics, made the fortunes of the Three Chocolatiers, and they all lived happily ever after.

Now isn’t that a sweet ending?

The story, however, is fact and not fiction. Co Co Sala is a hot and happening chocolate lounge, bar, restaurant, pastry shop and boutique on F Street in Washington DC, and three young Indian-American entrepreneurs are behind its big success – Bharet Malhotra, Nisha Sidhu and Santosh Tiptur.

If you’ve been enjoying Lassi with Lavina, now it’s time to make some of your own too!

If you have insights, ideas, thoughts – provocative, funny or plain offbeat – you are welcome to be a guest blogger at the ol’ Lassi Guesthouse. We’d love to hear your perspectives on India and all things Indian or South Asian. Take an Indian thread and spin a silken tapestry!

When you are in your adolescence and twenties, you want to do what the norm is. If everyone around you wants to be more Indian, then so do you. If everyone wants to be more American, then so do you. It depends on where you are living, your social experiences and how much impact your family has in shaping your cultural life.

Life can change in the blink of an eye. It happened to Sonia Rai, 24, a risk analyst in Boston, when a routine visit to a dentist turned into a nightmare scenario. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and is desperately seeking a match.
Did you know that if you are a South Asian and get Leukemia, your chances of survival can depend on a bone marrow match from another South Asian? While 30 % of patients will find a matching donor within their family, the remaining 70 % have to search for a match from unrelated donors.The hard fact is that only 1% of South Asians are registered with the National Marrow donor program.

BlackBerries and Apples are much more than fruit nowadays – they are our very lifeline to the larger world outside. So today on Jan 25, it’s hard to believe that on yet another Jan 25 – in 1915 to be precise – Alexander Graham Bell, first inaugurated US transcontinental telephone service. Can you imagine a world devoid of our little buzzing devices, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no text messages on the run?

Fundraising in New York can have a wonderful ripple effect and translate into health camps, scholarships and education for children in the slums in India. That’s been the happy result of Children’s Hope India, a non-profit organization started by a group of five women professionals in New York in 1992 with seed money donated by them and with just one project in hand.

The men all wear dhotis (and look darn good in them), the women are covered from head to toe and there’s not a swinging item number in sight. In an age of mindless Bollywood entertainment, Ashutosh Gowariker’s ‘Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey’ (KHJJS) is a film you can sink your teeth into. It’s the real stuff.

“I think acting, especially in something as delicate as this, is like when you’re switching a radio knob to look for a correct frequency and you know the program you want to listen to is at 99.5 and you don’t get it. You try 4 and you try 6 and you still don’t get it and you feel that you’ve lost it forever, it doesn’t exist.
And then suddenly at 99.48 something happens and you suddenly can hear very clearly the song you were looking for, the radio station you were looking for. It’s really a chance – you have to try hard but ultimately it’s a lot to do with chance and I think I got lucky. At least I hope so!”
(Rahul Bose seen here with Minu Tharoor)

What happens when you manage to gather critical thinkers like Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s Chairman and CEO, the many faceted Fareed Zakaria, Kapil Sibal, India’s Union Minister for Human Resource Development and Richard C. Levin, President of Yale University all in the same room?

You get some thought-provoking conversation about where India is going, and the challenges along the way.

What is India doing right – and what is it doing wrong? Can it beat China? And what about privatizing public works to fix the infrastructure? Will India have enough teachers? What about the health challenge?

So come be a fly on the wall and listen to where India is headed.

Bollywood, Hollywood, art cinema, documentaries and shorts all came together in that swirling melange of new and exciting films at the Mahindra 2010 Indo American Art Council Film Festival known as MIAAC.

Ekta Kapoor is a self-made millionaire and, as the head of Balaji Telefilms, she’s produced over 74 hugely popular television serials which are said to make up about 80 percent of television programming in India. Recently the Queen of TV Soaps was in town for the premiere of the gritty, fast moving ‘Shorr’ which is as real and as different as you can get from the sugar coated melodrama of the television serials steeped in tradition and changing social mores.
(Ekta seen here with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy)

Well, the big Obama trip is over but it’s something Indians will talk about for a long, long time. He seems to have won Indian hearts by correctly enunciating ‘Namaste’, ‘Sal Mubarak’ and ‘Jai Hind’.
It’s almost as if Obama has been adopted into the family, and is part of the Indian tribe.
Take a look at how anonymous Indians are paying him the supreme compliment of being one of their own!

“So often when we talk about trade and commercial relationships, the question is who’s winning and who’s losing. This is a classic situation in which we can all win. And I’m going to make it one of my primary tasks during the next three days to highlight all the various ways in which we’ve got an opportunity I think to put Americans back to work, see India grow its infrastructure, its networks, its capacity to continue to grow at a rapid pace. And we can do that together, but only if both sides recognize these opportunities.” – President Obama

Bollywood fans will be intrigued to know that their favorite hunk John Abraham is part of ‘Damaru’, Isheeta Ganguly’s new album – in a very different way than they usually envisage him. Rather than a Bollywood hero, his is the thoughtful, strong voice behind the words of “Bande Mataram” and the Tagore poem, “Where the Mind is Without Fear”.