Word: istanbul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Here's the basic story... Born in Gujurat, the son of a school teacher, Desai goes abroad as a teenager (heading for Istanbul, not Aden, where Dhirubhai landed) to learn business. He returns a decade later to start a textile company, in partnership with a more cautious cousin who later leaves in a dispute over our hero's risky ways. He switches from cotton to polyester and makes his fortune, creating India's biggest company, in part by encouraging the rising middle class to invest in it (tens of thousands flock to his shareholder meetings). He suffers a stroke that...
...number is a compendium of Bollywood visual tropes (no, let's be honest and say cliches): she dances in the rain, through a temple, by a waterfall, moving with more energy than rhythm and getting whiplashed by her pigtail. Much more satisfying is an early turn in an Istanbul night club by Bollywood bombshell Mallika Sherawat. For her writhing, shimmying moment in the spotlight (she's out of the picture before the opening credits), Sherawat brings a visceral enlightenment to Guru in a dance number where she really gets to shake her bodhi...
...hearing he was moving "to a Third World country. But there's been a huge surge forward in terms of modernization. People who never had a landline telephone have gone straight to cell phones; their first TVs are plasma screens. Things here are changing very fast and Istanbul is the locomotive pulling the rest of Turkey forward." (Turkey is also in long-term negotiations to join the European Union...
There's energy in the arts too. The elegant Oya Eczacibasi (a member of one of the premier industrial families, equivalent to New York's Rockefellers in the 19th century) is the chairwoman of Istanbul Modern, which opened in 2004. Eczacibasi, who campaigned tirelessly for a museum of modern art, says it's important to emphasize that culture here did not stop at manuscripts and carpets. "We were very proud of our Ottoman past. Now we can be proud of our present and our future," she says...
Erdem Moralioglu, a Canadian of Turkish descent whose Erdem label is sold at Harrods in London and Barneys New York, says the thing one always has to keep in mind about Istanbul is that for everything you think you've learned, you'll find the opposite to be true. "It's about the dichotomy of contrast, old and new, cosmopolitan and yet so ancient. I remember as a boy getting lost in the bazaar and then stumbling into a McDonald...