A decade in Toronto - 13

Che - quiet, shy & handsome

I’ll continue with 2011 because when I look back at the year, I realise that a lot of things happened. And while it’s not possible to capture everything into this series, I do want to ensure that I don’t miss some important occurrences.

My involvement in the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts enlarged my circle of acquaintances in the creative world. I realized that the suburbs of Toronto – Mississauga, Brampton, and Oakville had a thriving cultural scene buzzing with events and programs and that South Asians were organizing most of these events.

I was invited to an exhibition of Hindi film posters – Picture House – organized by Ali Adil Khan and Asma Arshad Mahmood at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. It was a painstakingly put together exhibition, where Ali and Asma put a stamp of originality on a subject that could easily have become a sentimental and lachrymose, not to say banal, depiction of a dying art. 

I blogged rather animatedly about it, and my journalism teacher-turned-friend Teenaz Javat read it. She got me invited to the CBC’s Metro Morning show for a brief chat about the exhibition. (Read the blog: Picture House)

At IIFA, photo by Mariellen Ward

In late June, I was invited to participate in the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards at the Rogers Centre with Mahrukh, Che and Durga who was with us. The invitation was from my friend CP Thomas, who was doing the public relations for the event organizer Wizcraft (co-owner Sabbas Joseph used to be a colleague).

Thanks to CP, a serial entrepreneur and the publisher of Indian Voices, we got some of the best seats at the awards venue. The show belonged to Shahrukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra, and a bunch of film stars from the yesteryears. (Read the blog: IIFA in Toronto)

Farzana Doctor, the author friend who organizes the immensely influential Brockton Writers’ Series invited me to read at the September 2011 edition of the series along with Jessica Westhead and Pratap Reddy. She was greatly amused by the emails I exchanged to finalise my reading at the series and quoted from it verbatim while introducing me.

With Pratap and Jessica at Brocton Writers' Series

I have tremendous admiration and respect for Farzana. She gave key inputs to improve my manuscript and make it more “Canadian,” when I was struggling with it. Of course, by the time the manuscript emerged as a novel, a lot had already changed. At different stages of my writing process, she was willing to assist, suggest, promote and otherwise help in whatever way she could. Being a star author that she is, she’d forgotten my name by the time her third novel was launched.

Later that month, at the Word on the Street, I participated in the “Adopt a Writer” program with Jessica Westhead at the Word on the Street festival. Books and books-related events had become a major preoccupation. The Munk Centre in midtown Toronto became a regular venue to participate in such events. (Read the blog: Parallel Histories) It was to continue for a few years until recently when I began to consciously slow down my activities in view of my deteriorating kidneys. 

Marshall McLuhan’s centenary was celebrated globally in 2011, and in Toronto, his hometown, he was remembered at a panel discussion organized by the McLuhan Legacy Network. It was an important discussion.

McLuhan remains prescient about the future of the media. He’d predicted the Age of Internet long before it became a reality. He said, “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function, and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

My blog was being noticed and I began to get offers from publishers for book reviews. I’d prefer to write mostly about authors, book events and about books without doing reviews. Calypso Editions in the USA sent me a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘How much land does a man need’. It’s a simple, straightforward folklore of human greed. I blogged about Tagore and Translation in two parts. (Part 1, Part 2)

Che - getting ready for the
school concert

At work, I was doing all that needed to be done to give back to the ICCC – the organization that had made life possible in Canada for me and my family. I enjoyed the work, and what I loved more was the constant interaction with people who were deeply involved with the organization. 

Under Satish Thakkar's leadership, the organisation took off and successfully scaled peaks of glory never before attempted in the three-and-a-half decades of the organisation's history. 

Harjit Kalsi was another stalwart – an unassuming, soft-spoken, hands-on manager, who made the most menial tasks pleasurable. Together, Harjit and I created a short documentary on Hindi film songs with the railway motif for the ICCC’s year-end gala that had the Indian Railways as its theme.

At home, Che was in his final pre-teen years and was turning into a handsome young man. The next three years would be hard on him; years that’d change him forever.  I’ve often thought about these years and often wondered whether I did the right thing in getting us here.

Moments in Dance

Dance is about a series of movements. Photography is about a moment. And art is born when moment meets movement.  

Avinash Pasricha, the renowned Delhi-based photographer has an oeuvre of over 30,000 photographs – a historic personal archive – of India’s most iconic performing artists.

Ali Adil Khan, art connoisseur nonpareil, and Asma Arshad Mahmood, artist and art promoter par excellence, have curated a small but significant piece of that oeuvre.  Ali Adil’s South Asian Art Gallery and Asma’s Promenade Gallery have come together to host an exhibition of Pasricha’s photographs titled Moments in Dance.

Effortlessly breaking the shackles of form and frame, the photographs on exhibit are alive to the poetry of splendour of motion and resplendence of rhythm. The exhibit is an ensemble of some of the most venerated names of Indian dance – right from Vyjayanthimala to Kelucharan Mohapatra, and Saswati Sen and Birju Maharaj, to name just a few.

Ali Adil and Asma introduced Pasricha’s work and then invited Akhilesh Mishra, India’s Consul General in Toronto to speak, who emphasized the universality of art. Renowned danseuse, choreographer and legendary performing artist Lata Pada then gave intricate insights into Pasricha’s work, revealing that he has an equally large and elaborate oeuvre of photographs of Indian classical singers, and an exquisite collection of photographs of MS Subbulakshmi.

In a short introduction to the exhibition Ali Adil writes, “Twenty-seven matt bromide prints of the legendary Indian dancers, vocalists and musicians are exhibited in various rhythmic forms, postures and moods. These prints have been selected from Pasricha’s large personal collection of rare ad enduring images of India’s greatest performing artists.”

Pasricha was the photo editor of SPAN magazine (published by the USIS) for over three decades, till he retired in 1997.

The exhibition runs from May 27 to June 10. 

The gallery’s Facebook page is:  https://www.facebook.com/PromenadeGallery 

The group page is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/promenadeart/?fref=ts

Picture House: The Art of Bollywood

MF Husain's last Bollywood poster (2010)

Bollywood has moved to Toronto. There’s more Bollywood here than in Bombay (Mumbai). With the IIFA a couple of weeks from now and the VIP tickets for Roger’s Centre being sold – so I’ve heard – for $10,000 (INR 460,000 approximately).

The Greater Toronto Area and all its towns are being overrun by Bollywood themed events that has got the Indo-Canadians all charged up. 

They’re thronging these celebrations in big numbers. As my friend George Abraham recently posted on his Facebook page, “The flavour of Canada’s summer: all things India...Smart!”

I went to the inaugural of Picture House: The Art of Bollywood an exquisite exhibition of Bollywood posters at the Art Gallery of Mississauga curated by Ali Adil Khan and Asma Arshad Mahmood.

The exhibition had some of the most famous Bollywood posters ever painted.

And the richly-produced accompanying brochure had a well-researched and article by Ali Adil Khan.

Khan writes with the authority that comes from a mastery over the subject. He lists the many billboard painters who didn’t achieve the fame that Maqbool Fida Husain was destined to achieve.

Khan concludes his essay with an insightful observation: “The journey of Bollywood billboards and posters from the street of Mumbai to the museums of the world reaffirms their historical and aesthetic importance. 

"It is the relatively unknown artists, such as those profiled in this exhibition who are the unsung heroes of Bollywood, who worked day and night behind the scene, in open air studios and small alleyways, to give a larger than life image to actors and to commence a visual culture that is widely accepted and easily understood within and outside of India.”

The exhibition transported me to the past; to my aunt’s home in Prarthana Samaj where a few dozen cousins would congregate during the summer holidays, and accompanied by my cousin, I’d go from one cinema hall to another along Lamington Road to watch the posters of new movies.

That stretch of road had nearly a dozen cinema houses – Roxy, Opera House, Imperial, Naaz, Swastik, Novelty, Super, Apsara, Minerva, Alfred, Ganga-Jamuna and Maratha Mandir.

And, if I remember right, in the mid-1970s (1976-77-78) most of these cinema halls were showing an Amitabh Bachchan movie. And nearly all of them were silver jubilee hits.

Image: http://www.mid-day.com/news/2011/jun/100611-India-theatre-community-miss-MF-Husain-posters.htm