On the 75th anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination today, it is only becoming that we liberate him from the shackles of Mahatmahood and view him for what he really was—an astoundingly self-assured man with a strong moral compass as well an astute understanding of the human condition. Couple that with an epic conceit to devote his entire life to causes of enormous consequences and yet not be attached to it all.
Kicking off the proceedings for the 65th annual Grammy Awards, the Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony will return to the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on 5th February 2023. In an exciting development, the ceremony will be marked by a stirring performance by current Grammy nominee Anoushka Shankar, making it her third Grammy performance.
In her comprehensive work, California’s Pioneering Punjabis: An American Story (The History Press), author Lea Terhune presents the heroic odyssey of the pioneer Punjabis who arrived in California during the closing years of the19th century and through the length of the 20th century, lacing the narrative with historic never-before-seen photographs.
Three Kashmiri youths along with one from Uttar Pradesh have been selected to participate in the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Championships scheduled to begin in the USA on January 22.
An Indian American doctoral student of the University of Michigan, Harsh Patel, has been chosen for the fellowship for Membrane Technology to investigate reducing the cost, energy usage, and environmental impacts of water treatment and desalination.
Mayank Chhaya- As the hugely popular poet, writer and sociocultural observer Javed Akhtar turns 78 on January 17, he does so in the midst of the release of a compilation, snapshots, of his life called Jadunama. Written in Hindi by Arvind Mandloi and translated into English by Rakhshanda Jalil, ‘Jadunama’ or the chronicles of Jadu, […]
For tourists headed towards India, there is now an added attraction – the world’s longest river cruise – MV Ganga Vilas which was flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The cruise offers a 51-day trip from Varanasi to Dibrugarh via Bangladesh covering a 3200 km distance.
Love, they say, knows no bounds and, for the steadfast, even death cannot do them part. Kolkata’s Tapas Sandilya epitomizes eternal love. This retired government employee never stopped missing his wife, Indrani, after she passed away in May 2021, during the second wave of Covid. To once again feel the reassuring presence of his loving wife beside him, Sandilya has got a lifelike silicon statue made of her.
The great sarod maestro and musician Ali Akbar Khan told me once this about Rahul Dev Burman, “Pancham (R D Burman) could pretty much do anything with music. He just lived music.” That was sometime in 1999, at Khan’s music academy in San Rafael, California where I had gone to interview him.
Tourism and Hospitality sectors in San Francisco face extreme on-going challenges. For the last decade or so, the steady decline in tourism has had a cascading ripple effect across multiple allied industries resulting in systemic and significant revenue losses and problems that continue to drag down the trends across the board. Political window-dressing and a misplaced sense of romantic nostalgia of “I left my heart in San Francisco (Tony Bennett 1961)”, are proving detrimental to visitor confidence- with both those contemplating a visit to San Francisco as well as those who paid a visit and faced its shocking reality.
