This blog has moved

After discreet and not-so-discreet threats to be put off blogrolls, I thought this might be essential.

I'm now blogging at Live Lounge—the team blog for the weekend journos at Mint-The Wall Street Journal, India.

Maybe I will revive this sometime again. For now, I'm only living at Lounge.

Ayurveda and the Art of Yummy

Food Consultant Nalini Mehta instructing students at one of her Open Center workshops

A couple of days ago, walking into the room at the holistic learning enclave called the Open Center where food consultant Nalini Mehta is supposed to be conducting a session on Ayurvedic cooking, I first think I’m in the wrong class. Dressed in a crisp white kurta, the instructor seems to be conducting a yoga class.

She asks workshop attendees to close their eyes and study their breath. Then she goes around placing a small fruit on our upturned palms and asks us to feel it with our fingers and then our tongues. Eventually, I realise the mysterious fruit is just a grape. But in those five minutes I spent negotiating the unknown, I had my own definition: A cooling fruit with an elastic skin that bursts into a pulpy profusion of sour-sweetness when bitten.

For Mehta, an empirical understanding of what we consume is what Ayurvedic cooking is about. She speaks of understanding and loving the food we eat. And in her workshops and classes, she expounds on the constituent tatvas of different foods and how one should consume certain kinds of foods to complement their physical makeup.

According to Ayurveda, the almost 5000-year-old science of natural health care, the six different tastes (sweet, sour, pungent, salty, bitter, astringent) can supplement or rectify our bodily doshas or natural constitutions (Vata made of space and air; Pitta made of fire and water; Kapha made of water and earth).

In this class today, around 20 students — transcending age and ethnicity — gather around the cooking table to help peel and cut vegetables to prepare a zucchini khichdi and a kadhi. The diverse mix of attendees exchange ideas before finally settling down to eat the delicious end product after three hours of culinary gymnastics at 10:30 pm on a weekday.

No one seems to be tired by the whole exercise, least of all Mehta herself. “It’s the process of making ghee,” she claims, “that purifies the air and energises the room.”

Ever since Mehta began conducting Ayurvedic cooking classes or workshops 10 years ago, she has begun every class by making ghee. Now she extols on its spiritual and dietary virtues, lamenting that people stay away from this food item considered so important for Ayurvedic cooking because they consider it to be fattening.

Read the full post in the last instalment of my NYC Diary on Mumbai Mirror.

Sivamani on Suitcase

I finally heard Sivamani live at an informal, unticketed performance at the Tamarind Art Gallery two days ago. The master percussionist from India plays with an infectious energy and an ingenuous enthusiasm that I was glad to witness at close quarters (later, I also made mildly cheesy fan pictures with him).

He is in the country for a performance in Florida in early July and is city hopping to vacation with this family. Dressed in a shiny black and blue ensemble designed by his wife (who was present and is gorgeous), he created rhythms with various instruments and on varied surfaces: The Octoban, the Darbuka, a ridged metal plate hanging from his chest, and umm... a suitcase.

Novelty and the New Indian Cinema

A scene from Ray's Pather Panchali (1955)

When New York’s Lincoln Center hosted the Satyajit Ray retrospective two months ago (First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy, April 15-30), I got a little anxious about the stagnant image of Indian cinema for art house cinephiles the world over. Ray’s films are undoubtedly brilliant and they deserve an even larger audience than they now enjoy. But I often wonder if Ray’s stature stands like a giant barricade in the way of other Indian cinema. For festival curators, it is so much easier to stick to an oeuvre that has been certified as genius; to screen and analyze films that have scholars and numerous books devoted to them. Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film itself won the Best Human Document award at Cannes in 1956. Today, his neorealistic world is synonymous with Indian art house. For international audiences, when it comes to Indian cinema, there’s Ray and there’s Bollywood kitsch. And then, there’s white noise in between.

MoMA’s recently concluded New India film exhibit (June 5-18) sought to draw attention to the celluloid space in between. The two week film exhibit had sixteen contemporary feature-length and short films on its program. Put together by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator in the Museum’s Film Department and Uma da Cunha, guest curator, the exhibit was conceived on the heels of the success of MoMA’s 2007 India Now exhibition.

The organizers managed to have several film folks introduce their films, including actors Naseeruddin Shah and Abhay Deol as well as filmmaker Nandita Das. Recent commercial Bollwood releases such as Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance and Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! were screened a;png with eloquent social films such as Megan Mylan's Smile Pinkie —a film on cleft lip surgery and the 2008 winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

The selection was studded with several brilliant picks but it lacked a clear mission: Was the fact that the films were new enough to mark them for inclusion? Or was the criteria new themes and new issues? Did the films necessarily have to espouse new styles of filmmaking and crossover genres?

At the opening reception on June 5, both curators seemed wary of narrowing down to one reason. Evidently, each film was meant to stand in for a different sort of new Indian cinema. Some didn’t: Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar, for instance, is an ocerdramatized period film like several other Indian period films.

The selection of the opening film, however, was baffling. The festival opened with first-time feature filmmaker Megan Doneman’s Yes Madam, Sir, a documentary on one of India’s most inspiring public figures, Kiran Bedi. Bedi was present at the premiere and won the audience over with her humour and witticisms. But the documentary itself—trite and underreported—didn’t justify its position as the opening night film. Bedi has been turning down documentary requests for 15 years now, why she would choose someone as inexperienced as Doneman ( who admitted to having read her film camera’s manual on the way to Bedi’s place in the train) to make a documentary on her life is rather inexplicable. And why this documentary, with no fidelity to the theme of the exhibit, would mark its opening is even more inexplicable. Still, the film makes for an interesting watch simply because the events in Bedi’s politically-charged life make for fabulous material.

Negotiating the diverse terrain of new Indian film is a daunting task. The fact that MoMA’s film department attempted to tackle it is impressive in itself. But then, the unfocussed programming also explains why Ray reigns when it comes to India-related festival programming. With Ray, you can’t go wrong.

Cross-posted from my NYC Diary on Mumbai Mirror.

Woody Works

With Whatever Works, Woody Allen is back to the good old quirky New York comedy after an array of Euro-themed fare. Though I enjoyed both Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) despite their faux sophistication, the films gave the impression that Woody was on a vacation. And now, he's back.

In what appears to be a self-portrait of the director himself, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David, star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and the co-creator of "Seinfeld") plays a cantankerous self-proclaimed genius who meets a naive Southern girl, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood). Beyond the several minor plot points, it is a story of how these two unlikely characters manage to love each other.

Yellnikoff is a cynical divorcee who spends his time having metaphysical discussions with his bunch of uninspiring friends. When Melody lands up on his doorstep, hungry and homeless, he is persuaded to let her live with him and eventually ends up marrying her.

What is ironical is that though Yellnikoff starts and ends the narrative with long, to camera monologues on "seizing opportunities" and " going with whatever works," his overtly grumbly persona doesn't really seem to living those ideals.

Though the characters are exagerrated and absurd ( Yellnikof repeatedly claims to have been close to winning a Nobel Prize), the film has an old Woody quality to it. There are the mindless New York cafe scenes, the ménage à trois, the Village art circles and the circumlocutious philosophical ramblings. And then, there is the sudden happy ending.

But it's good to be back in New York.

And I spent the afternoon thinking it was a hoax...

Likely because I didn't want to believe it. Why? Because Dangerous, at the age of eight, was the first audio cassette I ever bought. And because back then, "You remember the time" and "Thriller" were movies in themselves.

A friend at The South Wing puts it succinctly:

“Thriller” is a product inextricably linked to the era it helped define; it is a movie in miniature from when music videos could be interesting in their own right. I remember I found it hair-raising as a five-year-old, and I find it funny now; but I like it no less."