Posts for 'Shows' Category

This past weekend I saw Atif Aslam and Shreya Ghoshal impact DAR Constitution Hall in Impact 2010. The event was put on with aplomb by Sachin Rajgire and Lavika Bhagat Singh.

The event started right on Indian Standard Time (which is to say, one hour late). Our Emcee for the evening was a poetically minded woman - whose name I didn't catch.

Dressed in a bright red top and skirt, she provided a nice touch of earnestness to an evening that was already headed way into deep camp territory with the first act/.

The strutting of the Miss India DCs across the stage and back. The crowd was really buzzing with excitement as the dancers, dressed.

In gloriously tacky ensembles of gold lame tops/trousers for the men and gold lame tops/booty shorts for the women, came out for their medley of recent Bollywood hits.

As I wrote in my notes - and will transcribe for you here - "This is the way to warm up a crowd!!" After the dancers was a wonderful jazz fusion performance from a violinist who was also the musical director of the tour.

If I heard correctly. While the crowd wasn't really feeling it and, to be fair, the pianist did go very heavy on the scales, I thought he was fantastic and wish I knew his name.

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Times of India and the Jang Group of Pakistan). The brightly lit up Chowmallah Palace seemed the perfect venue for a soiree to celebrate the spirit of fraternity and aman between India and Pakistan.

Much before the event actually began the open-air auditiorium was packed. Parvathy, in a flaming orange saree and long curly locks swaying along with her whirling moves instantly struck a connect with the audience.

Arif in his shimmery black sherwani, was a showstealer too. A misty-eyed Arif told the crowd later: “Aap ki taaliyon se apnepan ki khusboo aa rahi hain.”

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Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a soul-touching singer and there is no exaggeration if Japanese could not stop calling him a singing Buddha and Americans found a voice of paradise in him. Nusrat, whose fans elevated him to the status of Shahenshah-e-Qawali, left the mortal world at the age of 48.

Fateh was born with God-gifted qualities as an artist who inspired fans from every class and age group. Humaira Channa, famous for her film and television songs, got the opportunity to work with Fateh.

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He said this at a function on Monday at the Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture held in connection with two awards given to him — Hilal-e-Imtiaz by the Pakistan government and Sharomani Award on Literature by the Indian government.

‘In Oct, the academy will hold an international writers’ conference on ‘Sufism and peace’ in which 80 countries will participate,’ he added. He urged cordial relations between India and Pakistan so that the people on either side could lead a prosperous life.

He said the academy has translated books on mystic poets of Pakistan into eight languages. These books were available in various libraries of the world. He said the academy was reprinting the literature on resistance.

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At a recent battle of the bands, heavy metal guitarist Navid Chohan started shaking his head so violently onstage it looked like he was going to hurt himself. Soon his entire face was lost in waves of his shoulder-length hair.

Chohan's head-banging spread like a virus. First his bandmates got into it, then a group of teenage boys in front of the stage and, all of a sudden, scores of people violently whipped their heads to the ear-splitting sounds of heavy metal. It might have seemed like any other night of music one could see anywhere, but this heavy metal head-banging was happening in Pakistan.

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It's a music jam more than 6,000 years in the making. Hundreds of fans - many of them natives of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh - will converge on a small Catholic college in Weston this weekend to indulge in a banquet of classical Indian music.

The three-day festival, opening tomorrow night at Regis College, features a broader range of music than is likely to be heard at one time in one place anywhere else in the world, India included, its organizers say.

"We have the North Indian-South Indian connection," said Jawed Wahid, the festival committee's chairman. "We have the East-West connection. We have the India-Pakistan connection.

"This is our i"While Hindustani music is more improvisational in style, Carnatic music is very structured and disciplined," said Durga Krishnan, director of Carnatic music at LearnQuest, which is based at 108 Elm St. in Waltham and also holds classes in Acton and Andover.

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Iran's "Mainline" by Rakhshan Bani Etemad won Kara Film Festival's special jury award. The best actress prize also went to Bita Farahi for playing the supporting role in "Mainline". Also "The Music Man" by Iran's Dariush Mehrjui received the prize for best music in the festival.

"Mainline" narrates the story of an Iranian girl Sarah addicted to drugs and her betrothed Arash is studying in Toronto, Canada and has no knowledge of her addiction. Sarah decides to fight her addiction a month a head of Arash's trip to Iran for marriage ceremony, but she moves back and forth while trying to fight her addiction.

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