 Home |
|
|
|
India - News
|
News Updates - 10
April 2001 The next wave: Yoga - TIME magazine Lets spray ourselves red! - San Francisco Chronicle Bollywood by the bay - San Francisco Chronicle A breeze from India blows away the cliches - New York Times Teaching for a lifetime - San Francisco Chronicle THE
NEXT WAVE - YOGA: Balancing
Body, Mind and Spirit WASHINGTON: Patricia Walden took her first yoga class 30 years ago for reasons that were less physical than metaphysical. "My interest was enlightenment," she recalls. "I was reading Aldous Huxley at the time." But she was well grounded in psychology and physiology and devoted herself to the most anatomically precise style of yoga: Iyengar. After 26 years of teaching, Walden has become one of the leading proponents of the Indian science of yoga, as a form of holistic therapy. At the Somerville, Mass., B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Center she co-founded in 1985, she teaches a class for students with "specific needs." She has developed customized posture sequences for conditions ranging from arthritis to cancer to Parkinson's disease. Her students report experiencing both relief from pain and greater calm. "Some say it's the only thing that gets them through the week," says Dr. Timothy McCall, who works with Walden in her specific-needs class."Yoga is the single best system of preventive medicine there is," says McCall, echoing a belief subscribed to by more and more doctors. "It increases strength, flexibility, balance, and brings psychological calm. It can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol, tap into spiritual leanings and be a heck of a good aerobic workout." When Walden conducts seminars--whether in Italy or India--they sell out months in advance. "She's one of the crown jewels," says India Supera, executive director of the Feathered Pipe yoga retreat in Helena, Mont. Yoga is more popular than ever, and Supera credits Walden's early teaching videos with helping move it into the mainstream. 15 million Americans now participate in this "ancient mystical Tradition" of India - twice as many as five years ago, because they believe it has real medical benefits. Former supermodel and yoga practitioner Christy Turlington and others who practise yoga are interviewed to determine "How much of that can be proved scientifically" and "How much must be taken on faith."
WE ARRIVED IN Bombay on Holi, the "festival of colors" that celebrates the end of winter and the beginning of summer. It's a national holiday. Many of the public buildings and businesses were closed; the usually jumbled and chaotic streets were almost serene. There is a custom at Holi, mostly indulged in by young people but universally recognized and tolerated. People spray each other with color, usually food coloring and water in some sort of squirt-gun-like delivery system. As we walked around the city, we saw red people and green people, often in groups, often laughing. We also saw young men with their faces painted dead white, like mimes. That too was part of the deal. I expect that there are other rules and rituals; we got a tiny representative sample. We went up to the park at the top of Malabar hill. It was jammed with families. Large groups of people, multi-generational, were playing a taglike game that involved people squatting in long rows while one or two ran up and down the rows. There was much giggling and more than a little rolling on the grass. There were paper packets wrapped in string filled with sweets or savories. I sat on a bench and watched it all, and was happy. FOR ME, INDIA is the most emotionally complicated of countries. I spent my honeymoon there. I became intoxicated by the rich symphony of odors, which range from offal to incense. I loved the conversation, the passion, the mixture of rigid propriety and some of the weirdest stuff on earth. I sat on a bench and watched children laughing. I mean: You tell me. India will soon be the most populous nation on earth. Its best and its brightest are now, some of them, living within a 25-mile radius of San Jose. It was a beautiful spring day, 80 degrees, wind off the ocean. You tell me. I was happy to bask, if only for a moment. TO THE VISITOR, the American holiday that Holi most resembles is Halloween. I have become convinced that Halloween has outlived its usefulness, and would humbly propose that we abandon it and adopt Holi instead. Instead of standing in your door handing out sugar treats to strange children, wouldn't you much rather have a water pistol filled with red water and a license to drench anyone you see? Even more: Wouldn't the children rather have that? If you don't like guns, how about buckets? Yes, whole buckets of dyed water being hurled across public parks, scattering giggling children. Adults carefully wearing old clothes, miming outrage. Green children asleep on the grass, tired from running around. When I go to India, I feel abashed, like the child of a callow nation.
The Bay Area's newest movie complex features concessionaires dressed in saris, films from Bombay and special tea and snacks that let patrons imagine they're in the middle of India. The India Movie Center, a six-screen theater in Sunnyvale that opened March 9, is the latest sign that Bollywood - the Bombay-based studio system - is big business here. Need more proof? Drive to Fremont Boulevard in Fremont, where the Naz 8 cineplex regularly sells out showings of its most popular Indian films. More proof? Go online to www.planetbollywood.com, a San Ramon-based Web site that is polling hundreds of thousands of Bollywood fans around the world - a six-week exercise that will culminate in an Oscar-like ceremony in Bombay. Indian movies have never been more popular. Because the audience for Indian films has expanded so much in the United States and other countries, studios now make films like "American Desi," a comedy about Indo American college students who study hard and stumble their way through romantic pursuits. For the past three weeks, "Desi" has played simultaneously at the Naz 8 and the India Movie Center, drawing packed houses every day. "There really is a lot of demand," says Lu Muvva, who runs the India Movie Center. Muvva, 36, may be typical of the estimated 100,000 Indo Americans who live in the Bay Area. A lifelong movie fan, Muvva left southern India for the United States to work as an engineer. After saving money, he opened an Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale, then acted on the impulse to start his own theater when the AMC multiplex at a Sunnyvale mall went out of business. Muvva shows movies in English and Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and other Indian languages. Shiraz Jivani, who opened the Naz 8 in November 1999, shows films in 27 languages - including Tagalog, Cantonese and Urdu - though Indian movies are his staple. Campy, sexy and fun to watch, Bollywood films are seen by about 1 billion people every year, with growing numbers of fans in the Middle East, Russia, Central Asia and North America. Bollywood makes more than 800 movies annually, dwarfing Hollywood's output. It's no wonder, then, that fan magazines, Web sites and TV shows are devoted to chronicling the gossip and goings-on of everyone in Bollywood. More than 300,000 people are expected to vote in the Planetbollywood.com poll, which is dubbed the People's Choice Awards and ends in three weeks. Among the categories: best villain, best comic performance, best male singer. Of course, Indian films are more than just Bollywood. Satyajit Ray, whose humanist movies are among the finest in cinematic history, won an honorary Academy Award in 1992, shortly before his death. And Mira Nair became a name in film circles 13 years ago when "Salaam Bombay," her touching film about street children in India, won the Camera d'Or for best first film at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. Tamarind: A Breeze From India Blows Away the Clichés INDIAN cuisine sometimes feels like a perennial lost cause, perhaps because it's too much of a good thing. There are too many regional styles, too many spices, too many heady aromas for most diners to make sense of. Because the United States lacks the close ties to India of a country like Britain, Indian food has not been translated well here. The favored setting, heavy on beads and brass, with an endless sitar loop playing in the background, only reinforces the dreary impression that one Indian restaurant is all Indian restaurants. But, Tamarind, is a clear-cut victory for the cause of Indian food.Tamarind, named for the sweet-and-sour fruit, may not be the answer to the vexed Indian question, but it makes some headway. It looks and feels fresh. The menu, though multiregional, identifies the origin of some dishes. It also plows new ground. Raji Jallepalli-Reiss, known for her fusion cooking at Raji's in Memphis, helped develop a menu that treats Indian cuisine as a genuine culinary language, like French, able to assimilate nontraditional ingredients and techniques. Implicit in Tamarind's menu is a desire to educate the American palate. But why stop halfway? Why not encourage eager but confused patrons to organize a meal that, conceivably, actual Indians might eat? To the extent that there's a logic to an Indian meal, it would be nice to share it. After all, this is one cuisine that can use all the help it can get. Tamarind’s ATMOSPHERE: A cool, stylishly decorated space for modern Indian cuisine. RECOMMENDED DISHES: Raj kachori (spiced chickpea croquette), shrimp balchau (shrimp in chili-masala sauce), she- crab soup, noorani kebab (spiced chicken with saffron), shrimp moiley (shrimp in coconut sauce), nargisi kofta (lotus-root dumplings), bhindi do piaza (okra with onions and dried mango), pistachio ice cream, rasmalai (cottage cheese dumplings in rose water). Teaching for a Lifetime - Indian musician performs songs from
homeland Laxmi G. Tewari arrived in Middletown, Conn., on Sept. 3, 1968. It was his 30th birthday, and the musician from Kanpur, India, had no idea what life in the United States had in store for him. A dedicated teacher back home - Lalmani Misra -- had taken Tewari into his home like a son, and taught him to sing classical Indian music and play the tabla drum and the tambura, a bass instrument formed from a hollow gourd. Tewari's talent was spotted by an American music professor who invited him to study at Wesleyan University. More than three decades later, Tewari is still singing in the classical khyal style. Now it is he who is the master teacher -- driven to preserve and perpetuate India's "bhajans" (devotional songs) and "ragas" (pentatonic scales that characterize specific moods). "When somebody wants me to teach them, I say, 'Do you have four or five years to spare?' " Tewari says, in all seriousness. In India, young musicians are sometimes told to train for 20 years before worrying about their profession, he says, a far cry from some young Americans he meets whose first worry about a career is how much money they can make. A professor of ethnomusicology at Sonoma State University, Tewari also performs and teaches Indian classical music to a select few students in the North Bay as well as San Jose. He is performing at Sonoma State tomorrow night with Ravi Gutala on tabla and Vivek Datar on harmonium. A few of Tewari's senior students will also perform. "For a musician, there's no bigger fame than his own disciple performing," Tewari says. "I will be glowing then, and no money can buy that." Tewari is the grandson of an ayurveda - or religious-healer and the son of a medical doctor. He is the only one of his seven siblings to move to the United States. When performing, Tewari's voice resonates with soul and emotion, and reflects the subtle complexities of ragas that can take a lifetime to explore. "Our Indian music is closely related to how you feel as a human being," said the Hindu who likens music to prayer. "In the ragas, each note seems like it goes right inside you as you sing it. It's not a one-day relationship. It's like a friendship," he said. And Tewari's kinship with classical Indian music is one he intends to pursue for years to come. "In India, they say you become a musician after seven lives," he said. "I'm sure there's six more left for me to come back." |
News Updates
|
|
Questions
(FAQ's) or Comments (feedback) about this
site? Email to
damanig@diehardindian.com |
|
