Category — Media & Entertainment

I was surprised the First Lady Michelle Obama did not try a sari in India. After all her husband used to hang with the Indian crowd when he was known as Barry and cooked Dal with his roommate Vinai Thummalapally (now the Ambassador to Belize). But so many other Western women try on this versatile garment when they visit India. Here are some celebrity photos

Actress and Indian-Englishman's wife Elizabeth Hurley in sari

Pamela Anderson was wildly popular for the TV Show "BayWatch"

Russian born tennis player Anna Kournikova in Sari

Tennis players visiting India seem to prefer saris, perhaps because no one will ask them to play, once they don this garment. Here are sisters Venus and Serena in a sari

Tennis stars Venus and Serena williams in Saris

Super Model Naomi Campbell in Black Sari

Oprah Winfrey is in India to film a segment of her new show, “The Next Chapter,” staying at The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in south Mumbai.  She is virtually unkown in India since  her erstwhile show did not air in India.

Oprah Winfrey dressed in Sari

Wearing an orange sari, Winfrey, visited the home of the Bachchan family, to meet aging megastar Amitabh and his daughter-in-law, former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her husband Abhishek. The senior actor drove the group himself in his Rolls Royce to a party hosted by Ms. Paramsewhar Godrej and featuring the Bollywood gliterrati. Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Anil Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Imran Khan, Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi and Farhan Akhtar were there mostly to meet one another since they have little to do with Oprah.

Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan in the front seat of the Rolls

Winfrey was seen later, shopping in Mumbai on Martin LutherKing Day.

What this means

Precious little to India or to business with India.  In the USA, I guess  it means that everyone is making a beeline for India, whether relevant or not.

Simi Garewal, (known in the West as the courtesan Kamala in Conrad Rooks’ Siddhartha, 1972) currently hosts India’s Most Desirable on News Corp.’s Star network channel Star One. Lady Gaga was a guest, in her first appearance on an Indian talk show, “I have seen a few Bollywood films and I love how theatrical they are, and that’s my favorite part – that they are so surreal and full of fantasy.”

Recorded in Singapore,  Gaga dressed in black with a neon green hair-do, fashion icon Lady Gaga complimented Garewal – the veteran Bollywood actress turned TV presenter who usually dresses in white — for her fashion sense, “You are so stunningly gorgeous. We all gasped when you walked in.” Gaga may visit India as early as October for her first concert.  She has previously admitted to loving Indian food and culture.

In the meantime, Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan has approached her to sing a song for his next home production Ra One. This would not be unprecendented:  Snoop Dogg, recorded Indian’s #1 Hit, as recently as 2008, Singh is Kingg.

What this means:

India’s movie and entertainment culture is sampling the west in a bigger way, driven now by the appetites of its audiences to experience the West beyond simply an exotic venues in its movies.  After the 1960′s and the Beatles’ fascination with yoga, sitars and marijuana, India had been absent on the global pop music until just five years ago. The trend is now irreversible.

According to SoCal Tech, Los Angeles- and Austin-based GameSalad, the iOS game creation software firm founded by Michael Agustin, Dan Treiman, Tan Tran, and Joshua Seaver, has an unlikely hand in the anti-corruption issues facing  India, and Indian activist Anna Hazare: a video game called “Angry Anna”.

The game–a takeoff the popular Angry Birds smartphone games–was developed with GameSalad’s software, and runs on HTML5 browsers and smartphones. GameSalad said the game has become a “viral hit” and has been played over 225,000 times since launching a week ago. The game was developed by Delhi area game development firm Geek Mentors Studio. Instead of birds, the game includes Indian anti-corruption figures Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and Kiran Bedi.

What this means:

The Jon Stewart/Daily Show form of news/entertainment is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Young people in India don’t see the boundaries that newspaper-reading pre-GenXers grew up with.

Long before the success of  Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. Rahman became a legend in India for his spellbinding musical scores. Today he is recognized worldwide for his prowess and his work appears in Western movies; Rahman also wrote the music for the Commonwealth Games song in 2010.

AR Rahman (right) at the Hollywood Bowl

He was in my town on Sunday. Here is the local paper said of his performance.

Winner of two 2009 Academy Awards (best score and song) for “Slumdog Millionaire,” Rahman is a master of epic themes embellished with artful textures and details. The Bowl selections ranged from Rahman’s first film score, “Roja” (The Rose),  in 1992 to the sci-fi fantasy “Endhiran” in 2010.  Music for  “The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey” (2005) demonstrated one Rahman extreme — maximum power and sweep –but  the soulful delicacy of “Chan Chan” (from “Water,” also 2005) sounded no less impressive.