Our roving reporter on the happenings around town Dev Anand’s Fountain of Youth
Hard to believe, Dev Anand, India’s Forever Young Hero is on the cusp of 80! The debonair actor-director was in the United States to promote his new film Love at Times Square and he looked as swashbuckling as ever, a scarf nonchalantly thrown around his neck. Dev’s acting career began way back in 1945 and he created his own film company, Navketan Films in 1949, and has been acting, producing, directing ever since. In his time he’s made scores of films including memorable ones like.
The Guide, Kala Bazaar, Hare
Rama Hare Krishna and Teen Deviyan. Dev is excited about this latest love
story set in Times Square which he hopes will become a genuine crossover
film, enjoyed by both South Asian and mainstream audiences.With an unerring eye, he’s discovered many new faces including Zeenat Aman, Tina Munim, and Tabu. In fact, his latest film spotlights three newcomers too. He says, “You need a lot of courage, a lot of knowledge to get work out of newcomers. You need guts to do something that is not being given on a platter. You’ve got to sell it hard and you take a lot of risks but you get a great feeling of joy when you find that newcomeris acceptable to the world.”
Does he have any tips on discovering the fountain of youth?
Says Dev, “When I get up in the morning, I always think it’s a beautiful day. I have tremendous optimism; my griefs, my sorrows are very short-lived. I get excited easily, like a schoolboy, and I say to myself, ‘My God, I’m going to do this, I haven’t yet achieved it; I’m going to do that, I haven’t achieved that. There are a lot of things I want to do, lots of movies that I want to make — and you can only make one film at a time, especially when it belongs to you in totality right from the birth of the idea to its final execution.”
And that’s the secret of the Anand longevity: “It’s total involvement and that means you’re not thinking of anything else but your work. The reward of the hard work is the anticipation of the audience’s reaction. So looking forward to that is excitement — and excitement is youth!”
A Gathering of Gods
It was a virtual convention of the Gods: Ganesha, Siva, Vishnu, Radha and Krishna were all there along with Buddha, Tara and scores of Apsaras or celestial dancers. These ancient sculptures and paintings were the main attraction along with wonderful antiquities from China and Japan at the opening of the eighth International Asian Art Fair in New York. Hundreds of well-heeled guests, many dressed in Indian or Chinese costumes, sipped champagne and admired the riches spread all around them.
The fair is the creation of
London-based Brian and Anna Haughton and is one of the showpieces of Asia
Week in New York where every spring major museums and auction houses like
Sotheby’s and Christies celebrate Asian art. This year the event brought
together 54 art dealers from 10 countries showing sculpture, paintings,
ceramic and jewellery from all parts of Asia. While China and Japan still
seem to dominate, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu art was also in abundance.
The economy might be lacklustre, but art is still selling. A pair of prancing
Tang dynasty horses had sold for $180,000 and several miniature paintings
from Kishangarh sold for $10,000 to $50,000.Pico Iyer on Islam
Pico Iyer, novelist, writer and essayist for Time magazine is the author of such critically acclaimed books as Video Night in Katmandu, Lady and the Monk, Falling of the Map, Cuba and the Night and Global Soul. He is currently plugging his latest novel, Abandon.
This novel is really a dialogue between Islam and America, and was created long before the current world tensions. In fact, on Sept. 11, 2001 even as the towers fell, Iyer was proofreading the text, which had to be delivered to his editor the next day.
He says, “I’m not clairvoyant but my sense is that if you travel around the world — and I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a bit in recent years — really you would have seen this conflict going on in many fronts for many, many years.
And in some ways I think radical
Islam has very specific political grievances with America but in my travels
I’ve sensed there’s a much larger debate going on between the old cultures
of the world and of the new world, epitomized by America and California
in particular. Each time I cross the ocean I feel as if I’m going from
one side of the debate to the other because I think it’s really a discussion
between those cultures that are rooted in faith and community and tradition,
really of the past, and those that are committed to the new, to the post-modern
swirl, to indefinitely searching and the whole process of self-fashioning.In the last few years when America politically is at some level of war against radical Islam, the most popular poet in America, as you may know, is Rumi, the Islamic mystic. I think in all my writings and in all my travels I’d always had the sense that politically institutions and governments may be opposed to one another but culturally people are often drawn to the other. Individually they are fascinated by the other and as strongly as we are made suspicious by what we can’t understand, we are also pulled toward what we can’t understand.”
Spelling S-U-C-C-E-S-S
No Indian presence at the Oscars this year? Forget Devdas — a handful of bright Indian kids starred in Spellbound, which was nominated for the best documentary at the Academy Awards. This first feature length documentary from young filmmaker Jeff Blitz is a straight from the heart film made without big bucks. Yet the film bagged awards at several festivals, including the Audience Award and the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Los Angeles Film Festival.
Who would have known
that big dreams can be lost and small worlds can crumble, hinged on the
correct spelling of cephalalgia, hypsometer or logorrhea?Spellbound is a fascinating look into the high-pressure world of the National Spelling Bee and the lives of eight young contestants who struggle to make it to the finals. This captivating film takes you across America, from a luxurious San Clemente home to the stark world of the Washington, D.C., projects, giving you an engaging peep into diverse lives as each contestant prepares for battle — some relying on tattered dictionaries and idiosyncratic methods, others on sophisticated software and coaches.
There’s suspense, drama, humor and tragedy too as 249 spellers begin competition at the Grand Hyatt in Washington — and in the end there’s only one left. The big prize is $10,000 and comes with celebrity status and media stardom, where winners can turn up on Oprah! The eight contestants featured in the film are all so engaging that you find yourself rooting for all of them simultaneously. With their acumen for learning, it’s not surprising to see Indian kids and parents featured prominently in this documentary. In fact, the winner of the National Bee turned out to be 14-year-old Nupur Lala from Fayetteville, Ariz..
“There’s a very strong Indian presence at the National Spelling Bee,” observes Nupur. “In fact over the past four years, three of the champions have been Indian. I think it’s because Indian parents encourage reading a lot at home and with our exposure to words you’re bound to become better at spelling. That’s why I think Indian kids dominate.”
One of the hot favorites was 11-year-old George Thampy from Missouri who is home schooled and “seems to study spelling around the clock.”
It was fascinating to see how the family of Neil Kadakia, who came in fifth, rallied for the Spelling Bee, using everything from meditation to professional coaches and computers. His dad explains, “We collected the data from all the previous spelling bees and saw why people were failing on certain words and tried to correct it for our kids. I can tell you in the final days of the competition we were doing between 7,000-8,000 words a day.”
His mother Darshana recalls, “It was definitely a bonding experience. We were close but this was like a crisis and we all had to pitch in.”
Neil’s paternal grandfather paid 1,000 people in India to chant and pray around the clock for his success and had he won, he would have fed 5,000 people in India. Well, the word “Hellebore” did him in, but as his dad says, “At least he’ll have fond memories of what it was to strive for something that is very difficult and to keep your mind focused whether you succeed or not – you still continue to strive in other things.”
Vegetarianism Is For Lovers
Sex or steak — which will it be?
Do meat-eaters have a lousy sex life? A new ad aimed at South Asians living in the United States seems to imply as much.
The ad shows an Indian man
sitting up in bed as he peers down at himself in utter frustration. It
carries the tagline, “Eating meat got you down? Get it up: Go vegetarian!”The ad from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was shot by Playboy magazine photographer Dilip Bhatia.
The group states that a veggie diet helps men to “rise to the occasion,” asserting that artery-clogging cholesterol in meat and other animal products can play a key role in erectile dysfunction.
Meat-based diets have also been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers but a threat of impotency is bound to get every man’s attention!
Taking the moral high ground and sparing the lives of lambs, cows, pigs and chickens has a big, personal payback.
Not only will you have better health but you will also be able to enact the Kama Sutra! “Cholesterol slows the flow of blood to all your organs, not just to your heart,” says Alka Chandna of PETA. “We want people to use ‘veggie Viagra’—vegetarian cooking—in the kitchen for a spicy time in the bedroom.”
Booking Bachchan
What do you give the man who has everything, especially if he happens to be Amitabh Bachchan? When the Big B turned 60 recently, wife Jaya had to come up with something dramatic. She recalls, “He is a sentimentalist, he clings to his memories. His office room is a maze of memorabilia, mottled letters, sepia-tinted photographs, cartons of news cuttings, hundreds of pens, piles of audiotapes, LP and 78 rpm records and what-not. He has longed to put them in a semblance of order, but there has been no time.”
So she decided to create a book in which “his past and present could be collated and given to him — to riffle through, see, read and preserve.” It started out, she says, “as a small idea but by the time we finished it became really heavy and large.”
And that’s an understatement.
The book, titled To Be or Not to Be and written by journalist Khalid Mohamed,
weighs a ton! The oversized 400 page book is a Bachchan banquet for diehard
fans, with just about everything from baby snapshots to early pictures
to images from every movie he ever acted in, along with interviews with
Amitabh, reminisces from Jaya as well as children Abhishek and Shweta
and son-in-law Nikhil Nanda.Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is the wealth of intimate snapshots and family portraits that fans don’t generally get to see. Amitabh says he had to part with some very personal pictures that he didn’t ever expect to see published but “when the wife asks you to open up, you do just that.”
That Amitabh is still the God of Bollywood was evident from the massive crowds that turned up for the book signings. The long lines snaked down the corridor at the Grand Hyatt in New York and included fans that had flown in especially from Chicago. The crowd also included his littlest fan, 3-year-old Siddarth Muchhal, who celebrated his birthday with an Amitabh theme party with all the guests sporting goatee beards a la Amitabh!
In a chat with fans, Amitabh confessed, “I still feel jittery and nervous and very inadequate every time I get in front of the camera. I think what is important is a keen desire to keep experimenting, keep trying to design your life in a manner that fans want to see you in and that endeavor continues day after day.”
He spoke mov-ingly about “the great fortune of being my parents’ child. I had a very wonderful mixture of the east and the west in my parents. My father was very basic, very eastern, very conventional. My mother came from a very affluent Sikh family and I think the mixture of the two really became the guiding line.”
Big B also turned philosophical about the big six-0: “It’s been a wonderful life and if I were to relive this life I wouldn’t want to change anything. The griefs, the sorrows, the disappoint-ments, the struggles, moments of joy and happiness, I wouldn’t regret a single one.”
Her Indian Affair
Tracey Jackson, the scriptwriter of the big rollicking Bollywood style film from Universal, The Guru is mad about India.
“It goes very far back,” she says. “ I remember being very interested in India, even as a child. My mother recently sent me a pile of my childhood books and that included a big book of Indian classic fables. India to me was always very romantic and as I grew up it was somewhere I always wanted to go. Not knowing what it was or where it was, I always remember saying, ‘I would like to go to India someday.’”
Now of course Jackson has traveled to India over half a dozen times and has immersed herself in the culture.
The Guru is based
loosely on Shekhar Kapur’s experiences in the U.K, and she spent four
and a half years writing it The Guru certainly has Bollywood flavorings
with lots of dance and musical numbers, not to mention dream scenes. Says Jackson, “It was just very organic to the story we were telling and it just made it more fun.
“It’s really something that hasn’t been done in the United States — a big studio film, which incorporates Hindi dance sequences, so if you’re going to make a different kind of film, you might as well make it different all the way. That’s the wonderful thing about Hindi movies — they are greatly entertaining — if the story doesn’t appeal to everybody, then the singing and dancing does. There’s something for everybody in Hindi films. So we used it — stole it from you!”
Although Jackson is working on several American projects, she always has her hand in the jalebi jar, and is doing a film with Ashok Amritraj that will be announced at a press conference in March in Bombay.
She has also been talking with Aamir Khan about a possible project and also is looking to make a film from Bollywood Boy by Justine Hardy.
Can Bollywood films make it big in America? Jackson points out that what’s hot in Hollywood keeps changing — one week it’s rapping kangroos and then you have people dusting up their scripts about rapping kangroos.
“Our stories tend to be what’s working that particular week but I think it can be something like what we’ve done with The Guru — a little bit of Bollywood in what is still an American romantic comedy storyline for in the end we are in the business of entertaining, and if people leave the theater smiling, you’ve done your job.”
When she can’t make it to India, Jackson settles for Little India and takes the subway on a Sunday to have lunch at the Jackson Diner (where else?), buy CDs or visit the Ganesh Temple in Flushing.
But she’ll take the real thing anytime: “I just love India — give me a plane ticket and I’ll go!”