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Season’s Gazings
Never mind if the finale didn’t see the Indian team uncorking champagne bottles or breaking into a dance under showers of confetti, being shortlisted for the 74th Annual Academy Awards-the gateway to instant fame and fortune in Hollywood-was reason enough to rejoice. By becoming the country’s first major celluloid ambassador this year to the glittering mega show, which is the monarch among global film fetes, it set the mood for more India-watching and raving by western cinephiles. A film on cricket may have been a bit too foreign for the baseball-addicted Americans, but the westerners were more than willing to lap up a slice of India’s Bengali culture showcased through the lavish sets of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas. It was thus that Devdas opened to rave reviews in the out-of-competition category at Cannes, the picturesque town perched on the French Riviera. The summer of content for Bollywood on the global circuit was capped by heart-warming tidings at the onset of winter from the Locarno and Hawaii film fests, where Aparna Sen’s Mr & Mrs Iyer notched up several honours. The dream merchants of Bollywood also cast their spell on the West with Andrew lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams. With the international interest in India touching a new high, many Bollywood stars queued up to enlist the services of western agents who promised them a break in Hollywood. Nandita Das and Ayesha Dharker signed on Shabana Azmi’s agent, Aude Powell, for handling their Hollywood assignments; Aamir Khan hired Endeavour to bag film projects for him in the USA; Lara Dutta engaged Wilhelmina to channel foreign offers to her...and so on. If Bollywood arrived on foreign shores in a big way, Hollywood too came calling to India in a major wooing bid. The latest tidings were of a Hollywood producer buying the rights to remake the Amitabh-Akshay-Sushmita-starrer Aankhen. In a marked change, we’ll now have a Hollywood remake of this Bollywood hit, titled Three Blind Mice-They Rob. Hollywood big-wigs like Roland Joffe of The Mission and City of Joy-fame and Peter Rowley too arrived in India to make a film on the little-known Battle of Wadgaon. Greats from LA also came knocking on the doors of Monsoon Wedding script-writer Sabrina Dhawan in search of magic box-office formulas. A box-office killing of $ 13 million and the Golden Lion Award for Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding catapulted this Delhi-bred girl into the golden goose of film script-writing. Among those queuing at her doorstep are Warner Brothers, who want her to reinvent Mary Poppins in a Latin avataar, and Disney executives. Another coveted project she may land is the adaptation of William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, which may be directed by our very own man in Hollywood, Shekhar Kapur. But Bollywood’s season of celebrations at international fora was dampened by a summer of discontent back home. The hit-starved cine industry ran into a Rs 290 crore loss as major releases of the year collapsed at the box office like a house of cards. Hits like Devdas and Raaz and medium grossers like Humraaz, Awara Pagal Deewana, etc weren’t enough to revive the sagging spirits of the industry. Of splits & new family profiles
The middle class discarded some of its prudishness as live-in partners became a part of the larger household rather than being confined to an isolated existence away from the disapproving eyes of kith and kin. With the Net increasingly playing match-maker to couples, long-distance wooing and marriages got a fresh lease of life. Double income single kid (DISK) thus was the norm for more and more rushed-for-time working couples battling office deadlines and grappling with their child’s demanding school and social life. As the average urban couple worked overtime to balance marriage and a career, many celebrity couples buckled under the emotional strain of their married or love life and called it quits. One-time sex kitten Pooja Bedi parted ways with businessman husband Ebrahim Furniturewallah. Despite climbing the ladder of glory on the professional front with Lagaan, Aamir Khan and Reena fell out in their personal lives. Their recent petition in a divorce court was the beginning of the end of their elopement and marriage that triumphed over initial odds but could not weather later storms. Sanjay Dutt not only became the bad guy of Bollywood this summer following exposure of his alleged links with an underworld don but also stopped being the hero on home turf as he and wife Rhea too headed on separation course. Newcomer Vivek Oberoi had to part Company with fiancee Gurpreet as they took the Road to estrangement. Interestingly, while the
younger celebrities preferred to exit the matrimonial field, older ones
took a second shot. Star Television’s big man Peter Mukerjea went in
for a second innings of domesticity when he tied the knot with Indrani
Baruah.
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Never before have sugarcane fields sizzled thus with oomph. But the thanda (Coke) ad that set the small screen on fire this summer with three skimpily clad damsels blossoming like mornis in a ganne da khet spawned a whole genre of tashan jokes. The sighting of beautiful girls in any improbable locale triggered a host of ganne de khet vich mornian kithon asides and jokes among the guys. Aamir Khan’s Mumbai-ishtyle dialogue entered colloquial folklore much like Pepsi’s Hinglish slogan yeh dil maange more, which scaled heights of popularity when it echoed even on Kargil peaks. If Indian advertising gave enough starry tashan to the bubblegum crowd, filmdom too gave plenty of Hinglish-isms. Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham set the ball rolling by bending the language in its dubbed version, Football-Shutball Hai Rabba. From movie-shoovie hai rabba to chai-shai ho jaye hai rabba, the Hinglish spinoffs became the talk at birthday parties and in cocktail circles. Kiddies at one birthday bash had to punctuate a nursery rhyme with hai rabba as part of a game. Kitchenscapes and meal times were spiced up as the film’s aloo-gobi dialogues did the rounds. The party-ing shot among the chatterati
As farm houses became the
hottest destinations for party-goers, live food was the latest fad at
social dos in and around City Beautiful with make-your-own-pasta
junctions dotting many partyscapes. Fusion food dominated the feasts as
Thai chicken in red curry rubbed shoulders with Mongolian cuisine or the
Italian penne in spinach sauce flirted with Mexican bhelpuri and
kiwi salad. Individual variations of course added to the flavour of the
season. Like the quiche quiche hota hai party, where these baked
tarts with savoury chicken fillings caused quite a flutter. The cocktail
snacks were more conspicuous by their absence or lack of innovation and
saw little variety beyond the cauliflowers dipped in honey or the fish
cutlets with tartar sauce. Desserts too moved away from the
calorie-laden rabris and boring fruit creams to progress to
continental fare like steamed date-and-walnut puddings. For the
spirit-ed crowd, dine with wine was the consumption mantra. Fruit wines
like ambrosia and the Brazilian Caparinha cocktail and Mexican
margaritas edged out the run-of-the-mill Bloody Marys and rum-and-coke
concoctions. Ring out the old was also the guiding philosophy for decor
as the commonplace marigolds and gladiolus withered into disuse.
Instead, orchids and birds of paradise occupied pride of place at the
lavishly bedecked canopies set up under the starry sky. While imported flowers lent colour to the seating areas, psychedelic lights and raunchy numbers completed the disco effect on the dance floors, presided over by DJs. Couples at most parties swayed and gyrated to Nikamma or Sharara that ruled the music charts along with desi remixes or dance masti scores. If the dance floors sizzled with sexy scores, the swinging crowds shimmered in muqaish-embedded short kurtas, animal print apparels and sequinned lehengas. In body art, crystal tattoos were the ultimate rage as mehndi tattoos became passe. Badhaai time for movie memorabilia merchandising
Gourmets flirt with oysters & ducks, foodies go Sachin-gazing
The Peking duck may hitherto have been the ugly duckling of the chicken-obsessed Indian cuisine but it went on to become the reigning queen of celebrity and five-star menus across the metros. If including roast Peking duck with orange sauce or parmesan-encrusted deep-fried oysters in their party menus became a style statement for the upper crust, tucking into guinea fowl roast or emu meat became a healthier option for the cholestrol-conscious and red meat-wary epicures. The formation of the Indian Emu Association a couple of months ago catapulted emu meat into the culinary hall of fame, giving the tandoori chicken and rogan josh-addicted public something new and more tender to chew on. Riding the wave of experimentation and innovation, there were other funky and fun foods that caught the fancy of the ‘with it’ generation. From naughty female-bust chocolates, photo cakes embossed with edible images of celebrities, chilling concoctions of icecream garnished with green chillis to fusion foods like Lebanese bhel, culinary exotica touched new heights of creativity, and weirdness too. And the eating-out public tossed between all this fusion and confusion! If experimenting with exotica was not really the Chandigarhians’ cup of tea, a dalliance with new flavours became their cup of coffee. As a host of cafe parlours mushroomed in the bustling hubs of City Beautiful, the young and old gladly let their taste buds go globe-trotting with Arabian Nights and Iced Eskimo. With cafe parlours becoming the new hot spots for teen parties, the generation Y sure was full of beans throughout the year! To popularise the kebab culture in the city, an eatery specialising in non-vegetarian kebabs like Afghani kebabs and chicken lolypops and the vegetarian bharwan chillum and biryani came to town. A Delhi restaurant too brought a taste of mughlai nawabi khana to the city. If the cosmopolitan foodies were only full of Mischief (Suniel Shetty’s bar in plush Mumbai) so far, they had more to tease their tongues with and feast their eyes on as sporting icon Sachin Tendulkar launched his celebrity eatery in Delhi in partnership with restauranteur Sanjay Narang. What may be manna from culinary heaven for Sachin fans and the excitement-starved public was in fact another in a string of eateries that thrive on a tantalising recipe for success: a blend of celebrity name and speciality cuisine. If Amisha Patel’s kebab-and-curry eatery Fireplace and Ajay Jadeja’s Italian restaurant Senso have been crowd-pullers, Sachin’s new baby Tendulkar’s may cause a gastronomic stampede with its well-researched recipes! Little bleep-bleep that made cell users lose their sleep
For boyfriends wanting to lure their girlfriends to a New Year eve bash with enticing from-the-spot images of the revelry or a wife wanting to get immediate approval for a jazzy pullover that she wants to pick up for hubby dear while on a shopping spree, MMS promises to be the latest messaging messiah and do to SMS what satellite channels did to Doordarshan. It makes it possible for MMS-enabled cell phone users to exchange multi-media messages-text, pictures, animation, speech, audio content, etc-as compared to only text messages allowed by SMS. Though sleek MMS-enabled handsets were flaunted by the chatterati in metros of Delhi and Mumbai, service providers in other cities were going slow on the idea. Thus, for the time being, it was SMS that was the buzzword of professionals, businessmen, friends and couples wanting to stay connected, the perils of the new technology in the form of TMI ( text message injury) notwithstanding. In fact, love, and even lewdity, found a new instant language as SMS took over the lives of the people like never before. In a snooty rebuff, smacking of technological superiority over the ageless charm of whispering sweet nothings, curt one-liners and abbreviated messages beeping over mobile sets became the brisk forms of endearments of an impatient and rushed-for-time generation. Transcending its functional utility, SMS became an eloquent device for tongue-tied lovers and a ‘handy’ version of naughtyjokes.com for uninhibited voyeurs. If SMS was the watchword
of the present, the future was unplugged- in living rooms, boardrooms
and corporate tabletops-as futuristic gadgets like digicams, web cams,
DVDs (digital versatile disc players), palm theatres, personal digital
assistants (PDAs), eco-friendly laptops became the new-age tools or the
electronic colleagues and partners in gadget-propelled work and home
environments. |
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Consumers bargained as brand brats reigned
Consumers not only sat on a pile of dirt-cheap fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and incentive-laden durables, they were in a position to extract the best bargains. The middle class dream of owning a flat or house became easier to realise as housing loan interest rates dropped. Upgrading cars was not only easier in the age of zero-interest instalments but meant riding on a host of unofficial discounts. Dealers tried to outsmart each other by seducing buyers with add-ons like free seat covers or stylish accessories. In the fierce technologically competitive environment, local manufacturers of durables inched up on the sophistication chart, narrowing the gap between branded airconditioners, geysers, blowers, etc, and their less-polished country cousins. Even though prices of leading brands in the computer industry almost halved, assembled PCs were preferred because of the customised facilities that came attached with their lower price tags, like free Net hours or movie discs. On the flip side though, even though credit card companies too wooed consumers with several freebies like free passes for concerts, shopping and air fare discounts, the buyers were not much in the mood to splurge. Hoardings of sales beckoned consumers practically throughout the year. Still shoppers weren’t queueing up to avail of schemes that sometimes even made a mockery of business sense: buy one shirt get two free or buy a soap and get one free! In a market otherwise labouring under a demand slump, the one optimistic note for sellers was struck by none other than the new-age, brand-conscious kids. They emerged as a major segment in the clientele for branded products. Truly conspicuous by their conspicuous consumption, dictated mostly by peer-group fads, kid consumers were a force to reckon with. From girls who insisted on wearing nothing less than Benetton or Versace apparel or designer jeans to boys who treated their hair with top-of-the-line L’Oreal hair gel and Brylcreem to get the spiked Aamir Khan look, kids knew what they wanted and made sure their parents bought it for them! It was to cater to these brand brats that leading showrooms set up exclusive big outlets for the little ones. Thus if the adult consumer was king, the kiddies were the princes and princesses of consumer land. Of herbal shawls and figures like Emme dolls
But all this futuristic
beauty babble could not drown the saner and safer voice of the
naturalists. They held their own by devising new ways to shower people
with the benefits of flower power and to help them soak in the goodness
of herbs. Though there was nothing new about the back-to-nature beauty
cures or the heightened clamour for organic foods and plants, the
naturalists found innovative ways to bring beauty and fashion
aficionados closer to nature. With an increased demand for
environmentally safe products and a growing revulsion for potions
harmful for the skin, there was yet another thing that went the herbal
way-Holi colours.
War erupts in love zone: Lovers game for POLO!
And those in this game of love were not content just angling for a score in the shape of exclusive love zones, they chased a bigger goal of POLO (Protection of lovers Ordinance). Brushing aside scepticism that the lovers’ movement was nothing but a gimmick to promote indecent behaviour in public, the romantics of Kolkata, led by Rupak Manush and fired by the philosophy that "there is little lust in true love but there is no love in lust", pledged to establish ‘love armies’ in other states too. As if to defuse the suspicion of elders, law-makers and other pyaar ke dushman, the group claims to oppose pre-marital sex, and unhealthy sexual practices but favours innocent display of affection among lovers in the form of hugging, holding hands or kissing in public parks and avenues. That lovers are indeed
viewed with unalloyed suspicion was more than evident when the Haryana
cops recently picked up a number of couples found holding hands in the
verdant surroundings of Panchkula’s sprawling public gardens. Mumbai
police simply swooped down upon 43 couples found necking at a seaside
promenade and came out with a list of do’s and don’ts for lovers in
the bustling metro. That some of the couples were married or engaged was
of no concern to the police and even the moderate voices of politicians
like Sunil Dutt that most young couples could not afford to meet in
hotels fell on the deaf ears of the ‘custodians’ of Bharatiya
sanskriti. It seems that lovers romancing in the land that gives
birth to a thousand reel fantasies need some real inspiration and help
from their more organised and focused brethren in the land of Tagore in
this struggle for open space to love and let love. |
It was the season of
splits for celebrities and a year of surrogate families and revised
family trees for the commoners.Nuclear families missing
out on the presence of aged parents or in-laws who doubled up as
caretakers and baby-sitters forged family-like bonds with neighbourhood
widows or lonely senior citizens with wards in foreign lands.
Conversely, young couples became the beta and beti for
aged bachelor living across the flat as proximity rather than blood
bonds defined the new, larger family. Even the community stepped in in a
big way to cater to old people dependent on others for care. Old-age
homes shed some of their ill-kept, stuffy look and got a new facelift
with latest gadgets and facilities, giving the aged a warm family-like
atmosphere and a pleasant home away from home.
Kanika
Gahlaut may have exposed the frivolousness of the party circuit with her
Among the Chatterati and caused an initial flutter. But after the
glam set’s momentary ire against the page three hack, the party, as
they say, goes on. Let the scribe tribe write, the party scene shall
still shine bright, the page three people seemed to say. And not only
did the party circuit shine and sparkle with all the razzle-dazzle, it
came alive with live cooking, whetted the appetite for fusion food,
fuelled a race for flown-from-abroad floral decorations and burst at the
seams with the dress-down and bare-all crowd.
Some innovative
hosts even got baskets full of white chrysanthemums dyed in blue colour
to shower their party venue with a stamp of distinctiveness!
The hype and hoopla
generated by Lagaan’s Oscar nomination gave a major fillip to
what was hitherto a fledgling market in the country-retail of movie
memorabilia. It not only made the world sit up and take note but also
set the marketing guys and media entertainment agencies devise ways to
mint notes out of the publicity blitzkrieg. Movie memorabilia—from
toys, comic books, games, note pads, colouring books to a film-inspired
clothesline—weremarketed through elite showrooms, giving a new lease
of life to the almost dormant film merchandise sector, which was till
now confined only to producing cheap, pavement imitations of the
"friend’ cap from Maine Pyar Kiya or the ‘cool’
pendants from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. In fact, till now Hollywood had
a greater presence in India’s memorabilia market compared to
Bollywood. Whenever a Walt Disney or any other Hollywood children’s
film has been released in India it has spawned a whole lot of imitations
that simply spilled out of the bags of roadside vendors or from the
shelves of nukkad shops. Images of Lion King, 101 Dalmatians,
Spiderman and the latest kid craze Harry Potter have virtually peered at
us from pencil boxes, nursery stools and what have you. The desi mascots
in memorabilia hardly went beyond a Shaktimaan or a Mowgli. All that
changed this year. Movie merchandising became a conscious, organised
ploy for marketing films through posh supermarkets, upmarket shopping
malls and even designer boutiques. It was for the first time that a
formal clothesline based on a Hindi film was launched. The garments worn
by Hrithik Roshan and Esha Deol in Na Tum Jaano Na Hum became
part of a clothesline launched by a Delhi designer. The next to hit the
shelves was Lagaan memorabilia, launched jointly by media
entertainment firm Egmont and Aamir Khan Productions. From a cricket
game to a the Lagaan mask book or comic book, the memorabilia
business touched new heights of creativity and tapped a wider base of
cine fans. Spiderman T-shirts swamped the shelves of upmarket kid
showrooms. The others to give people a slice of favourite film stars or
movie characters to take home were the Anil Kappor-starrer Badhaai Ho
Badhaai (BHB), which came out with a book BHB Fundas,
and 23 March 1931 Shaheed. With such innovative and slickly
produced memorabilia flooding the markets it sure was a memorable year
for the movie mechandising industry and film buffs alike.
BARBECUED
tiger prawns or poached lobsters may till now have been the ultimate in
bud-tickling exotica for Indian foodies. But the latest to leap and hop
on to the desi’s palates and plates were Peking ducks and
guinea fowls. More and more gourmets’ loyalties crawled away from
crabs and lobsters to oysters and emus in a flirtation with new
delicacies.
Being
wired in (or rather being wireless) was the ultimate style statement for
the upwardly mobile as the message rang out loud and clear: messaging in
its myriad stages of sophistication was the new mantra to stay
connected. Barely had the technology-powered generation been smitten by
the bug called SMS (short messaging service) that its more suave cousin
MMS (multi-media messaging service) began seducing the jetset crowd in
the constant scramble for gizmo-oneupmanship.
Buy an audio system get
three CDs free. Buy a trouser length get the stitching done free. These
were not baits to lure consumers in the festival or marriage season
only. Nor were they schemes offered only as part of off-season sales.
This was the year-round trend that governed the market for daily use
products and consumer durables market this year. True, the cuts in rates
of most white goods did not push up the demand graph, but as computers,
television sets, airconditioners and even air travel and hotel tariffs
became more affordable, the consumer was the monarch of all he surveyed
and master of some.
The future promised to
cast its shadow on beauty treatments as well. Beauty products made of
herbs and fruit juices were passe. Futuristic concoctions-face lotions
and potions laced with the human placenta, exfoliating creams made of
seaweed juice, creams powered with hormone estrogen and bionic make-up
using properties of plastic prisms-held out a promise to those peeved by
pimples or those feeling wretched about wrinkles.
There were dry coloured powders made from arrowroot
and perfumed with the oils of jasmine, rose and sandalwood and kesri
(orange) wet colour was derived from tesu flowers. Riding the
bandwagon of innovation were herbal clothes, a viable and better
substitute for vegetable-dyed fabrics. Dyes extracted from a variety of
plants like red sandal, basil, turmeric, cinnamon, pepper leaf, neem
leaf, curry leaf, cutch tree, henna, etc, ensured that herbal clothes
did not fade into insignificance on the colour palette. The
effectiveness of these garments lies in wearing them close to the skin,
especially at night, to let the body heat release their medicinal
properties. This shift towards herbal apparel blended well with the
trend towards natural fabrics-jute, denim, cotton, linen, etc-that ruled
street fashion and the ramp in a year that spelt a return to
nature-inspired styles (peasant blouses) and cuts (asymmetrical sun
dresses to animal print-short kurtas).
For the brand-toting
glitterati, a range of herb-ingrained, aromatic pashmina shawls
were unveiled this winter in an innovative marriage of machines and
nature. Encapsulating micro granules of aromatic herbs like jasmine and
lavender into woollen weaves, these pricey shawls embody the party crowd’s
idea of romancing nature, the luxurious way! If beauty ingredients made
their way into fashion products, the everyday drink that was part of
Cleopatra’s famed beauty bath-milk-was all set to spill into slimming
regimens and fitness fads as the latest calorie-busting drink. Backed by
fresh research into milk’s fat-trimming properties, the daily glass of
milk offered mega-litres of hope to figure-watchers weighed down by the
thin-is-in complex. Even as milk and its less-rated cousins like yoghurt
and cheese became the latest make-slender wonder foods, there was a
growing disenchantment with the reed-thin beauty cult that deified
Barbie-like figures, spawned diet-unto-death avoidance reflexes at the
eating table and left a trail of living skeletons in the form of
anorexic and bulimic multitudes. To fuel and even ride the new
plump-is-not-bad wave, the company that gave the world impossible
statistics to match in the form of the tiny-waisted and long-legged
Barbie came out with a more realistic, broad-shouldered and
generously-endowed version of her in the shape of the Emme dolls. With a
chubbier icon of beauty to measure up to, the plump now have a fat
chance of being counted beautiful or sexy!
Lovers have now decided to
officially claim a place under the sun. They’ve probably realised that
if they do have to have a place to themselves under the open skies, it’s
time for them to be heard more than to be seen. With the aim to claim
privacy, lovers under the aegis of the aptly-named Lovers Organisation
for Voluntary Exhibition (LOVE) decided to remain in the public eye. By
planning kiss-and-hug rallies and smooch protests on the doorstep of
custodians of law and public morality—the mayor of Kolkata and other
policy-makers—-lovers of the ‘City of Joy’ stepped up their demand
for public love zones where they could meet freely, away from the
grabbing arms of the ‘moral police.’