IAAC Film Festival Line-up

  Here are the titles being screened at  the Indo-American Arts Council Sixth Film Festival.   The opening night film is Mira Nair’s The Namesake on Wednesday night, the 1st of November, and the closing night film (on Sunday, 5th of November) is Backwaters, set in Kerala.   At the press conference hosted at the […]

Art Malik in NYC

Well, on screen at least.   He was  Hari Kumar in the Beeb’s Jewel in the Crown.    Later he went on to do the best book-on-tape I’ll ever own (The Moor’s Last Sigh), and  since then is almost never seen in anything in the U.S. (let’s not mention that terrorist turn in a certain […]

Don – the Chase Begins Again

Well, who knew? My only motivation for going to  theater tonight were (1) the excitement of  seeing a Diwali hit on Thursday night at 8pm (EST) while India is  still  waking up and the cinemas there have yet to open, and (2) the  picturization of the Ganapati Morya Re  song.   I mean, come on, […]

Interview: Tejaswini Ganti, Pt 1

Tejaswini Ganti, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University and author of Bollywood, A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, was one of the academics presenting a paper at the  conference hosted by NYU earlier this year.   The  subject of the conference was  The Social  and Material Life of Indian Cinema, and it  was […]