PEOPLE
Lady Gaga
GAGA over India Salim, left and Sulaiman Merchant
After Enrique Iglesias collaborated with Sunidhi Chauhan on his music video, it is now Lady Gaga’s
turn to sample the Indian flavor. The
pop sensation is collaborating with
Bollywood composer duo Salim and
Sulaiman Merchant for an Indian version of her latest hit Born This Way.
‘When Gaga wanted to present it to the
Indian and Asian music fans, she
thought of giving it a Bollywood twist to
increase the appeal. Gaga is a huge fan
of Indian music and Bollywood songs.’
Salim has also lent his voice to the new
version, which uses Indian instruments
like the sitar, dholak and dhol. Rumor
has it that if the response is positive,
Gaga might churn out an entire album
of her songs, remixed Bollywood style.
LUCY NICHOLSON/REU TERS
DOMINIC XAVIER
People’s Most Beautiful 2011 list is out, and among the usual suspects — the JLos, Zac Effrons and Reese Witherspoons — are two women who
made us do a double take. Sharing the 11th spot are
the smart and gorgeous Mindy Kaling and her The
Office co-star and fellow Ivy Leaguer Ellie Kemper.
While Kemper went to Princeton, Kaling chose
Dartmouth. And in her trademark style, Kaling
embraced the compliment, saying, ‘I identify as a comedy writer, so to get compliments on appearance,
that’s the nicest compliment — to be shallow!’ Now
that’s what we call beautiful.
The beautiful Mindy
A taste of
No Dev for
Freida
Gingger
Mindy Kaling
Gingerr Shankar, probably the only woman in the world to have mas- tered the 10-string double violin, is a proud global desi. In fact, she thinks of herself as ‘a hybrid,’ she tells The Crest. The daughter of violinist L Subramanium and late classical singer Viji, Gingerr was raised in
India and the United States. She grew up on a mixture of Indian classical
music and rock; and along with the violin, she learnt the piano, dance and
opera. ‘I think my music reflects me — modern, traditional, Indian,
Western, electronic,’ she says. ‘I love crossing boundaries of both and creating new soundscapes. Especially in the land of film scoring, taking a
Western traditional score and putting an Indian twist to it is so much fun.’
And Gingerr, who has just finished scoring for the films Circumstance (a hit
at the Sundance Film Festival) and Homecoming, would love to bring her
music to Bollywood, if only someone approached her to do it!
They met and fell in love on the sets of their debut film Slumdog Millionaire, but
Freida Pinto says that she and
Dev Patel will never share the
screen again. ‘I wouldn’t want to
work with him, but I don’t mean
that in a bad way,’ she told the
Daily Mail. ‘He said something
similar in an interview that was
misinterpreted. What he was
trying to say is that so much
happened on Slumdog
Millionaire, in terms of it
becoming so big, that if the two
of us were paired in a film as a
couple again it wouldn’t live up
to that. Nothing ever could. It’s
too much magic to live up to on
screen.’ Hmm...
MAX MORSE/REU TERS Ellie Kemper
Like their country men back home, Indians abroad have captured the world’s mindscape. And on top of the mind, according to India Today’s list of the Top 10 Overseas Indians, is steel baron Lakshmi Niwas Mittal. He is followed by influential business executive Ajit Jain (2) and Nobel aureate and economist Amartya Sen (3). Sharing space with this exalted trio, in order of rank, are PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi, jour- nalist Fareed Zakaria, banker Anshuman Jain, Hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta and economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Raghuram Rajan. Look who’s on top Ajit Jain CHAI WAT SUBPRASOM/REU TERS
L N Mittal
Amartya Sen JAY MANDAL/ON ASSIGNMENT CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
MARIO ANZUONI/REU TERS
