Browsing: Mumbai

“It was not easy being young lovers in Bombay, even in 1974. It involved a fair amount of lurking and sneaking. You could hold hands in wooded areas, or on the parapet facing the sea in Marine Drive, but you always felt furtive, even on Valentines Day. There were always leers and frowns.

Kissing was already an obscene act. Never seen in film. Sure, you could kiss at the back of darkened theaters, but there were likely to be leering men who sat in the second last row and looked back. You might even find an uncle. It was better to leave with downcast eyes.

But still, you could go home and listen to the Moody Blues record your boyfriend gave you – after your father went to sleep. Valentine’s Day was romantic, and intense. And private.” Guest post by novelist Nayana Currimbhoy

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.

Gunmen take over the city of Mumbai…fire engulfs the iconic 100 year old Taj… explosions at the Oberoi…people trapped in hotels forced to jump from the windows… a numbing stand- off with the terrorists… gunmen shoot indiscriminately in the crowded VT train station…dead bodies and grieving relatives.

All these terrible images flash in the mind’s eye because we’ve seen them so often. For Indians across the Diaspora, the chilling images played time and again on their television sets, stories flashed across the Internet and incessant phone calls to loved ones in Mumbai. The news played out frame by frame on Twitter, with videos and images on Youtube and Flicker. Technology has caused distances to melt away and made disaster touchable, personal and vivid.
Four years later, the lone surviving terrorist has been hanged. Is there closure? It is a day of high alert and added security. It is also a day of sadness, memories.

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.

Traditional Brahmin values, sex and rock n roll and drugs, caste and class, British missionaries, forbidden love affairs and murder, Indian schoolgirls playing British – all in the same India of the 70’s. ‘Miss Timmins’ School for Girls’ is a lush coming of age story and a murder-mystery rolled into one, set in an all-girls school in the sleepy hill station of Panchgani in India.

It also happens to be Nayana Currimbhoy’s first novel – and that is surprising for the writing is seasoned, evocative, taking you into a compelling yet insular universe.
Q and A with the author.

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.

In the city of reinvention, what better way to stand out from the crowd than to reinvent yourself?
As the film festivals focusing on South Asian films have multiplied in the Big Apple, the oldest and most noted showcase of them all, the MIACC Film Festival, is now known as New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) and is focusing on independent and regional films, while still being open to Bollywood blockbusters. The opening film ‘Do Dooni Chaar’ is a Disney film with Bollywood stars but imbued with the indie spirit.

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.

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)

Mumbai is about grit, drama, passion – and the luck of the draw. The new movie ‘Noise/Shorr’ follows three very different lives during the frenzy of the Ganesh Chaturti Festival in the city – and finally these disparate stories come together in the gripping climax. ‘Shorr’ embodies the high energy the city is famous for and keeps you thoroughly engaged. And indeed Mumbai is a central character in the film, around which the various tales are interwoven.

It’s not often that you run into Bollywood biggie Karan Johar at a makeshift Chowpatty or chat with Mira Nair while eating kulfis at a fake Pasta Lane – and that too in the heart of New York, inside the Grand Hyatt Hotel!

The event was An Evening in Mumbai, and like the real Mumbai, this imitation Mumbai glittered. Every one of the guests was dressed in Bollywood glam, a mad medley of colors and jewels. For a day, every guest was a star and walked down the red carpet.

GUEST BLOG by Alex White Mazzarella
“It’s occurred to me that the way we measure what people want and need to be happy, healthy and fruitful is relative to the context and messages our world delivers to us. But one thing seems certain to me, and that is that people who live as part of a genuine community larger than themselves can identify their individual humanity.”

For all those who sat horrified and heavy-hearted as the terrorist drama unfolded on television, watching firsthand the destruction of the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, there is good news: you just can’t keep a good hotel down. The Taj is resilient – no doubt about it. This Independence Day, the 100 year old hotel is back in business with a beautifully restored wing.

India is serenity, beauty, calmness. India is noise, pollution, crowds. India is irony, humor, drama. India is sharp contrasts, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

India is a billion people and you get to see many facets of their lives in Clive Limpkin’s book,’India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z’ (Abbeyville Press)

For all those who’ve been following the real life drama of the release of ‘My Name is Khan’ it will be a relief to know that there’s a happy ending to this blockbuster. After more cliffhangers than the Himalayas, the film finally got to open in theaters across Mumbai and was seen by thousands of people. ‘My Name is Khan’ is an intriguing example of how sometimes reel and real life intersect in this major metropolis.

A movie about racial profiling made by a Muslim man, albeit a Bollywood superhero, itself became a vehicle for racial profiling by the Shiv Sena which sent its army of believers out to threaten and ransack. Well, the people of Mumbai came through, overwhelmingly showing that no one group has the monopoly to speak for the millions in this big, cosmopolitan city.

What’s the buzz right now? Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and their much anticipated movie ‘My Name is Khan’ is what everyone’s talking about.

Well, the buzz is about the film – but also about what could almost become a drama in its own right – the Shiv Sena’s clumsy attempt to muzzle free speech. By now everyone knows about the Sena’s threat to sabotage ‘My Name is Khan’ in order to punish Shah Rukh Khan for his comment about wanting to include Pakistani players in the IPL. The Sena has threatened distributors and theater owners in Mumbai for having the temerity to show the movie, and by association, movie-goers who would dare to watch the film.

All you Bollywood fans, do you ever wonder how the Indian film industry got started almost a hundred years ago? Forget superstars, overseas locations, musicals and spicy dance item numbers – there wasn’t even sound! It’s hard to believe women’s roles were played by men since even prostitutes considered acting in the cinema too demeaning a task.
‘Harishchandrachi Factory’ is a wonderful little film – only 95 minutes compared to the 3 hour Bollywood blockbusters – and it is a journey into the making of India’s first film by Dhundiraj Phalke, who is acknowledged as the father of the Indian film industry.

It’s not every morning that you get to chat with a big Bollywood star even before you’ve had your morning cup of tea. So there I was, a bit bleary-eyed with the hot star Riteish Deshmukh on the phone, me in New York and he in Mumbai.

His big movie, the Ram Gopal Varma film ‘Rann’ is being released this month, and so Riteish was chatting up the international media. We talked about Rann, Amitabh Bachchan, and how Riteish developed his passion for cinema

Can Indian men throw off the tyranny of the necktie – and save energy too? A group of corporate workers in Mumbai are trying to pass a ‘No-Tie Day’ on May 3, 2010, their reasoning being that when men dress cooler, they will require less air-conditioning.