The bride in her glittering red sari was carried into the ballroom in a palanquin held aloft by four burly Westerners dressed in turbans. As the gathered guests watched, the bridegroom came forward to claim his bride and the couple walked to the stage. Standard wedding fare you’d say – except both the bride and bridegroom were children!
“This is the pleasure of making films as a woman – I get to break the rules!” says the thoroughly feisty, unconventional Gurinder Chadha.
Fans who have been waiting for their Bend-It fix will be happy to know her new comedy ‘It’s a Wonderful Afterlife’ has been selected for a world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival which runs January 21-31.
Gurinder Chadha did a quick Q and A with Lassi with Lavina about the making of the movie. (Take a FIRST PEEK at the video!)
I have a new respect for Twitter since I started following Bollywood celebs – it’s the democracy of interaction and the immediacy of hearing the news from the horse’s mouth without the intervention of gossip magazines. The complete lack of punctuation and slaphappy grammar makes it even more laid back and buddy-like.
I’m always amazed by the passion India evokes in those who visit her. I’ve met people in New York elevators and on the streets whose eyes light up when they hear you are from India. All of them have love stories to relate, wonderful anecdotes about what the country means to them. In the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, people everywhere have expressed their solidarity with the city and the country, showing their caring in many different ways.
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
Snow, blizzards, ice, the grim topography of winter. Caught in the clutch of cold, hazy mornings and dark evenings in New York, I suddenly got a gift from the artist Birendra Pani. An image of Spring, sent via email. It certainly lifts up the spirits, making one’s heart soar like a kite. So if you’re feeling the winter blues, take a whiff of Spring. It’s not too far away!
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.
When you need to find a wonderful restaurant where do you turn? Forget reviews and restaurant guides, just hop into a cab and consult your taxiwalla!
Layne Mosler is a New Yorker who has found that the cabbie who knows his way on the streets of Manhattan can also guide you to the right restaurant. Constantly navigating the city, cabbies are a great resource for off-the-beaten-track inexpensive places with authentic food.
Does IIT Madras have answers to New York City’s energy dilemma?
Three students Aashish Dattani, Sriram Kalyanaraman and Vinayshankar Kulkarni were the big winners in Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Next Idea Global Business Plan Competition, winning over teams from ten leading business and engineering schools in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The criteria were for the business concepts to have a connection to NYC and be commercially viable.
The next time you shop at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, you’ll be able to pick up a Bollywood DVD with your milk, potato chips or your electronics. And for those of us having to wait to get to an Indian store to pick up our DVD masala, it will be fun to just order it from Amazon.
Although Disney already has a presence in India, this is the first time the company is distributing a Hindi film on DVD in the US. The movie is ‘Like Stars on Earth’ – better known to Bollywood fans as ‘Taare Zameen Par’ – Aamir Khan’s award winning film which has moved audiences everywhere and was India’s official selection for the Academy Awards 2008 in The Best Foreign Language Film category.