Ticket 2 Bollywood

When I first heard about Ticket 2 Bollywood: Beyond the Song and Dance, a weekend conference taking place in NYC next month (at $300 per person), and which is advertised as including the participation of Zoya Akhtar, Imtiaz Ali and Madhur Bhandarkar in a series of panels and classes about the “new” Hindi film biz […]

Opening tonight: Hard Times

Am very excited and curious to see (and hear) the musical drama Hard Times, which opens tonight at The Cell theater on West 23rd Street in New York. It’s set in the Five Points area of Manhattan in July 1863.  The location will ring a bell if you’ve seen Gangs of New York  or are […]

Trishna

Trishna opens with a quartet of well-to-do British Asian guys, all in their 20s and currently stoned to varying degrees, rating the places they’ve just visited on their India trip.  As their holidays end, they twice cross paths with the 19-year-old Trishna (Freida Pinto) and one of them, Jay (British-Pakistani-Indian actor and rapper Riz Ahmed) […]

Le Tamoul – for a change!

When recently directing a friend who was in Paris to the website for L’Harmattan bookstore there, and their amazing selection of Francophone African literature, and all variety of “international books,” I couldn’t help but notice a brief paragraph on the page promoting an upcoming salon about Indian writing (in November) this year. Wonderful, of course, […]