IBLOG SPACE

Lisa Ray speaks to Subhash K Jha on her impending wedding… How much of your Indian background would be visible in your wedding on Oct 20? Would you be wearing Indian clothes? Wendell Rodricks is designing my wedding gown and he's a very dear friend who has known me since I first landed in Mumbai in 1991. There will be a strong Indian influence in our Wedding starting with the sangeet on Friday night. My friend Suphala who is an extremely accomplished tabla player based in New York will be performing that evening. I will be wearing a Tarun Tahiliani anarkali outfit, and on the Wedding day, I will change into a Satya Paul sari. I also have a lovely Laila Motwani ensemble. Jason will be rocking in a custom-designed Raghu Rathore bandgala. Raghu is also an old friend. We've been joking that since both my father and Jason are wearing exactly the same Rathore band-galas, I have to get a string of pearls for Jason to wear in order to stand out! Would there be any invitees from

Barfi!  is a success. Wait, a huge success actually. The film is continuing to find good footfalls in theatres and is turning out to be one of those rare offbeat affairs that has actually caught fancy of its target audience. Anurag Basu has presented the story in exactly the way he wanted and the wounds of Kites seem to have healed. He is not alone though. Sujoy Ghosh ( Aladin ) and Shoojit Sircar ( Johnny Mastana ), his fellow Bengalis, too were nursing their wounds when they made Kahaani  and  Vicky Donor  respectively. Today, these Bengal Tigers could well be dancing to their own music in a closed door party. Kahaani - Director Sujoy Ghosh Aladin  was one of the biggest commercial disasters in the year of its release. Even when  Home Delivery  flopped, Sujoy Ghosh, director of  Jhankaar Beats , dreamt big and spent years in conceptualising  Aladin . The film did go through a change of hands from the production perspective and even though many around him suggested that he could

Somewhere deep within the corroding flamboyance of filmdom, there is a tale of heartbreaking compromises and immorality tucked away from the naked tearless eye. Madhur Bhandarkar nearly gets to the nerve centre of that world, and then pulls back just before he's really gotten to the centre. Heroine is an intriguingly unfinished film. It's partly done in the rapid-fire mood of a gameshow and partly like an elegiac melody played gently on an antique piano with immaculate fingers. It lacks a centre, sometimes even a focus as it tries to cram in too many incidents, episodes, scandals, controversies and plain absurdities that are an integral part of Bollywood, so much so that the first hour or so gets suffocatingly airtight. And then you realize towards the end, that the world of the superstar Mahi Arora traps the star, makes her a puppet of success, traps her in a web of deceit and finally throws her into a whirlwind of vaporous deceptions. The closing moments have that gut-

You could call her the youngest veteran. Not just because dozens of singers have come in after her, but also due to the fact that though this voice of Madhur Bhandarkar's  Heroine (' Halkat Jawani ') began singing for big-name heroines only in 1999 with ' Ruki Ruki Thi Zindagi ' ( Mast ), Sunidhi Chauhan has actually been around since the early '90s, she was the star attraction of Kalyanji-Anandji's globally-successful  Little Wonders  show. Unfortunately, Sunidhi never got to record a song with the legendary maestros as they had quit the film industry scene by then, but she started out in playback by recording (at the age of 11!) her first song for Aadesh Shrivastava - ' Ladki Deewani ' in Shastra , the Suniel Shetty actioner. The year was 1995, so she insists that she has been around for 17 years!  By concentrating more on shows, playback singers today spend more time performing live than in the recording studios, unlike in the eras of Lata Mange