Word: indianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...increasing variety of Cultural Rhythms has paralleled Harvard’s growing diversity. Yet through the quarter century of the event’s existence, certain groups, such as the Kuumba Singers and the Harvard Intertribal Indian dance troupe, have remained a constant presence...
...getting a little, well, implausible and hackneyed. Sandipan Deb, writing in the daily newspaper the Indian Express on the morning after the Oscars, insisted that despite the awards for composer A.R. Rahman, sound mixer Resul Pookutty and lyricist Gulzar, the film is still a "Western" film, made by a British director and financed by a British producer. "It's a non-Indian film which happened to have an all-Indian cast," he wrote. This is missing the point. Danny Boyle could not have made the film that he did without this cast and crew, and to pretend otherwise...
...Drawing the easy distinction between the Indian and non-Indian cast also ignores the way many artists in India actually work. Their world is the world - not just India - and they proudly learn, borrow and are influenced by everything around them. That was obvious in the Japanese taiko drummers pounding behind Rahman on his Oscar-nominated song "O Saya." And anyone who noticed Irrfan Khan as Jamal's interrogator ought to have a look at his other, much more substantial role in A Mighty Heart, playing a Pakistani police captain opposite an American superstar in a British film...
...influence goes both ways. Slumdog, which is based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, approaches India and Indians with a new sensibility. Slumdog's central trio aren't victims; they're individuals, and they each manage in different ways to rewrite the lives they've been born into. Jamal, in the film, talks a lot about destiny, but his story is really an argument against it. It's a long way from City of Joy, the 1992 film in which Om Puri's noble rickshaw puller shows Patrick Swayze's disillusioned doctor the path to enlightenment. Slumdog recognizes...
...course, Slumdog Millionaire is not the first to discover this other, more complicated India, as the film's critics correctly point out. It's real for the hundreds of millions of Indians who live in it, the thousands of social workers, nonprofit groups and civil servants who are trying to change it, and those who tell its stories. That includes a handful of young Indian filmmakers who are making movies that are as sharp, challenging and entertaining as the best of Hollywood, although few have been distributed outside India. Let's hope the rest of the world will soon have...