Browsing: Features

People
0 Shabana Azmi in Broken Images

Imagine this: just one actor on stage. No set transformations, no costume changes, little or no action. Yet you sit for a full hour, totally engrossed, and are almost surprised to find that, though you’ve sat immobile in your seat, you’ve traveled into complex worlds, into the innermost reaches of mind and heart.

Few people could pull this off but the combination of actor Shabana Azmi, director Alyque Padamsee and playwright Girish Karnad makes ‘Broken Images’ a play to watch and relish.

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Cinema
0 'Walkaway': Real Life Becomes Reel Life

In the world of cinema, there is usually a clear demarcation between the silver screen and the audience. If you are a fan you might count yourself lucky if you got a fleeting glimpse of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan on the red carpet or if he waved out to you as part of a crowd.

Yet for one Indian-American fan, real life blended into reel life, resulting in ‘Walkaway’, a movie which is being released on 26 screens across 18 cities in the US and echoes the life of young South Asians in New York City. First time filmmaker Shailja Gupta, very much a New York based South Asian herself, managed to pull this film off with help from none other than – Shah Rukh Khan!

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People
0 Harvard's Nitin Nohria – The Arc of leadership

“My father was a CEO, so I grew up in a family that gave me a very real sense of the positive impact that business can have upon society – from providing goods and services to creating jobs to building entire communities,” says Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School.

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Art
1 Asian Art Week Love Fest

Sometimes you buy a piece of contemporary Indian art and get a love story too in the bargain! Cinq Sens (Five Senses) by M. F. Husain is a powerful work originally gifted by the artist many, many years ago to film director Roberto Rossellini and his Bengali wife, Sonali Dasgupta.
It was a love match he helped bring about, for at that time Rossellini was married to the noted actress Ingrid Bergman and Sonali was the wife of a documentary film-maker in Calcutta. The painting is estimated at $500,-700,000 and is being auctioned by Sotheby’s, and here’s the story behind it.UPDATE – IT SOLD FOR $782,500

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Cinema
1 ‘Hiding Divya’ Stirs Up a Taboo Topic

‘Hiding Divya’ is a provocative Indie film which takes on hard issues – and delivers. Mental illness is a taboo word in the Indian-American community – it’s about loss of face, ‘bad blood’ and failure – and is often kept under wraps. Filmmakers Rehana Mirza & Rohi Mirza Pandya get the dialogue going…
Above: Pooja Kumar and Madhur Jaffrey in ‘Hiding Divya’
WATCH THE VIDEO

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Cinema
0 King Khan Meets Bollywood fans at Madame Tussauds

For once, the gregarious Shah Rukh Khan didn’t have a word to say. He stood as still as a statue – oh, what am I saying – this Shah Rukh Khan was a statue – a wax one at that! The famous tourist attraction Madame Tussauds in Times Square has now immortalized superstar King Khan in wax, and throngs of fans came to see him holding court in the Bollywood Zone.

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Travel
10 India on My Mind

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)

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Cinema
0 Tere Bin Laden – Osama Tales

Who would have thought Osama Bin Ladin could make you smile? The face that gives one nightmares becomes central to ‘Tere Bin Laden’, a good-natured, cheeky comedy which is almost a fable about America’s war on terror.

What would the real Osama say if he saw ‘Tere Bin Laden’? Says director Abhishek Sharma, “I think even he would be amused to see the way we have used Bin Laden tapes to show the madness in the post 9/11 world.”

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Art
0 Malleable Memory: How True is Truth?

We are a simmering bundle of the past, the present and our hopes and anxieties about the future – what we remember and what we choose to forget becomes the world around us. Memories often trespass from locked rooms and forbidden places in the mind into the present. Some of them become the scaffolding for art, for the truths artists want to share through their work. Yet seen through the distancing telescope of memory, how true is truth?

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Faith
4 Heaven on Earth, Guruvayur Temple

“It is the devotees who humanize Guruvayurappan, investing Him with characteristics and traits that bring Him into their lives at a level where He ceases to be a distantly enshrined divinity. They display an intimacy with Him that in no way diminishes their reverence, expressing emotions that speak volumes about their sense of His accessibility and understanding.” – Pepita Seth

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