Rushdie regaled with stories like the one about Zeenat Aman’s Hollywood boyfriend not knowing she was a Bollywood star.
NEW YORK: The five-day Indian film festival in New York opened on Wednesday with a constellation of Hollywood, Bollywood stars attending the premiere of Mira Nair’s film The Namesake which seesaws between Kolkata and New York.
Celebrated author Salman Rushdie, model-actress Padma Lakshmi, Indian-American movie stars Kal Penn and Pooja Kumar, producer Jagmohan Mundhra, acclaimed British gay film-maker Pratibha Parmar and veterans Deepti Naval and Shabana Azmi walked up the red carpet of the event aimed at bridging the East-West divide.
The buzz was so strong that $350 tickets to the screening of The Namesake followed by a dinner at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park were sold months before the curtain went up. The 800-seat theatre filled up so quickly that it was left to Rushdie and UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor to scramble like Sir Galahads to find freshly-minted literary star Kiran Desai a seat as she was temporarily blinded by the pop of camera flashbulbs.
Even the organisers were overwhelmed. “We are still in our puberty but seem to be growing up quickly,” remarked Aroon Shivdasani who is the creator of the Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival. The festival is on its sixth run but drew over 300 entries.
Rushdie said the popularity of the festival reflected the maturing of the thriving Indian community in the US. “It is wonderful to see the festival grow as the community itself grows more confident, more diverse and more original,” said Rushdie, adding that he was going to watch Kabaddi Cops, Gandhi at the Bat, My Bollywood Bride and sizzling lesbian comedy Nina’s Heavenly Delights where Scottish humour meets Bollywood spectacle.
“I was looking down at the list of programming and there are films that have me intrigued. I really want to see Kabaddi Cops — the idea of a bunch of Canadian policemen learning kabaddi in order to integrate with the Asian community is something I wish to see. I shouldn’t tell but the theme in My Bollywood Bride where this young American man discovers that his girlfriend is a Bollywood movie star is a true story,” said Rushdie cheerfully going on to spill the beans.
“A major Hollywood movie star had an affair with a pretty Indian girl. When she told him her name was Zeenat Aman he didn’t know who that was. He was clueless about his girlfriend being India’s most famous movie star at that time.” Rushdie who is the patron saint of the IAAC which was started in 1998 added; “I also want to see Mahatma Gandhi appearing for the New York Yankees in Gandhi at the Bat. It is worth the price of admission.”
Gandhi at the Bat is a newsreel-style account of the little known (and totally fictional) incident when Gandhi pinch-hit for the New York Yankees in 1933. It is based on a story by Chet Wiliamson that appeared in the New Yorker in 1983. The directors Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm transformed a minor league ballpark in California into a recreation of Yankee Stadium as it was over 70 years ago to film this movie.
Making it as a serious actor in Hollywood has always been the longest of career long shots. And if you are of Indian origin, chances are you may never even have glimpsed the target. But Kal Penn said that this festival showed that it was “possible to break free of stereotyped immigrant casting — the cab driver, the convenience store clerk.”
“I grew up seeing a white guy doing a really bad Indian accent in Simpsons. There were no role models for aspiring Indian actors. It was only when I saw Mississippi Masala in a New Jersey mall with my parents that I realised there could be actors that looked like me. Today, look at this festival,” exclaimed Penn who tried to buy the film rights to Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake but was beaten to it by Mira Nair. He still got what he wanted. Nair said; “Kal blew my socks off when he came to my office and auditioned. I also had my 14-year-old son rooting that Kal play Gogol as he is this big Hollywood star.”
The Indian community in the US is over two million strong and New York and Los Angeles are the launch-pad for Indian films, television, music and fashion around the rest of the diaspora.
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