SUVs -- An Inevitable Must in Suburban North America

By Raj S. Rangarajan

As the ad says, if you have a load of people and/or cargo to transport, it’s more economical and fun to invest in a sport utility vehicle (SUV).

North America’s obsession with SUVs has been ceaseless over the decades and is unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future. With more and more SUVs and crossover trucks becoming vehicles of choice in several households, and with newer, upgraded, cost-efficient, upscale models being offered by car manufacturers, the consumer has a wide choice, at varied purchase-levels that suits individual families. 

New York’s 116-year-old International Automobile Show at Jacob Javits Center, few months ago, featured more than 1,000 automobiles, trucks, motorcycles and concept cars with 60 world and North American vehicle debuts with more than a million visitors attending the ten-day event.

Among the inaugurals were awesome SUV’s, sedans and trucks from well-known brands. Not to be outdone was a cute i-Road Toyota 2-seater 3-wheeler that is ideal for a romantic neighborhood romp or for a pleasant downtown dinner or even for the mundane, but necessary trip to the grocery.

After attending twenty New York auto shows, this writer realized, its almost the same drill every year: the hype and hoopla in varied degrees, with colorful balloons and festive confetti, charming shiny models of woman and machine, ghost-written speeches, and a lot of fun for the uninitiated and the veteran. 

We are all familiar with Lexus SUV or the BMW SUV or, for that matter the Lincoln or the Honda sport utility vehicle. With the American Independence Day weekend in the U.S. you should be seeing the 8-speed Levante SUV from the prestigious and distinctive Maserati stable. Aggressive looking, the front introduces tapered headlights with upper headlight unit connected to the radiator grille. 

Also seen in your neighborhood will be the first SUV from Jaguar, the F-Pace – a British import that offers a choice of 340- or 380-hp supercharged 3-liter V6 mated to an 8-speed transmission. Another England-crafted Bentley, imminently available is the Bentayga, powered with a twin-turbocharged W12 engine with a top speed of 187 mpg.

Among the models that wowed the car connoisseur were the all-new Audi’s R8 Spyder with V10 engine, found in the R8 LMS racecar, a Quattro all-wheel drive; the 740i and 750i xDrive from BMW’s 7 Series that shows up new technologies such as “Gesture Control” and “Wireless Charging”; Alfa Romeo’s Giulia Quadrifoglio that is powered by a Ferrari-derived 505-horsepower V-6 bi-turbo with a starting price of about USD 70K; and Infiniti’s QX30 line powered by turbo-charged 4-cylinder mated 7-speed dual clutch automatic transmission. 

In the luxury – and obviously pricier category – were Lexus LC 500 luxury coupe powered by a 5-liter V8 engine that carries 10-speed automatic transmission in the rear wheels, a first in luxury autos; the Mercedes’s E-Class nine-speed auto transmission; the Volvo S90 with Sensus Connect touch-screen, clutter-free interior with a T8 Twin-Engine plug-in hybrid option and the new 4th generation Prius’s 1.8-liter VVT-i gas engine with an anticipated fuel economy rating of 58 MPG, made possible with lighter aerodynamics. 

It is fair to say that in spite of a sputtering economy, the car lover’s intoxication with speed, luxury, hi-tech gadgetry it seems a cinch almost always to equip oneself with new wheels. Add to that the average North American’s zest for attending a car show such as the New York International Auto Show, and one could be certain that it would be yet another fun-filled, exciting day with one chasing one’s dream of getting a swanky set of “souped-up” wheels one day, or upgrading one’s model and status incidentally. Or, perhaps just another day for indulging in nostalgia, and reflections on what could be or could have been!

With new models slated for a 2016 or 2017 Fall debut into the competitive auto market – the real challenge – to borrow a cliché – is when rubber literally meets the road.

Volvo’s Future of Driving survey spoke with 10,000 respondents on autonomous (or driverless) drivers:

• 92% believe that people should be able to take control of driverless cars at any moment
• 81% agree that car manufacturers, not car owners, must take responsibility if an accident occurs when a car is driven autonomously

Grand Performances at Eclectic Indian New York Film Festival

Grand Performances at Eclectic Indian New York Film Festival

Raj S. Rangarajan *

There was rhythm and resonance, music and melody, and it was pure joy for 156 minutes. And the audience loved it.

I am talking of Nachom-ia-Kumpasar, the award-winning 20-song Konkani (film) musical, set in the 60sand 70s in India. The pulsating voice of Palomi Ghosh (Bengali actor, Awakenings) and reverberating trumpet strains from Vijay Maurya (Black Friday, actor, director) carried the evening.

The occasion was the 16th anniversary of the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) in May, and the fare included independent, art-house and alternate films as also a couple of thrillers. The forty screenings and shorts included regional films drawn from eleven languages with English subtitles. Every year NYIFF showcases, promotes and encourages filmmakers to tell their stories of and about the Indian continent, viewed by highflyers, celebrities, regular film buffs and students.

Older Hindi films such as Anubhav (Basu Bhattacharya’s feature, with Sanjeev Kumar and Tanuja); Sujata (Bimal Roy’s feature with Nutan and Sanjay Dutt) stirred one’s love for nostalgia, and director Aparna Sen’s film Arshinagar, adapted from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, about rivalry between two prominent families in Kolkata that spills into religious confrontations, had some seniors registering shock and dismay. The festival also hosted film industry panels and post-screening discussions on humor, love, lust and LGBT.


Nachom-ia kumpasar (translated as Let’s Dance to The Rhythm) is a tale set in the 60s and 70s – times when these rollicking musicians lived and died – unrecognized, unappreciated and unsung. The film is a fitting tribute to Goan music and two of the genre’s jazz musicians, – Chris Perry and Lorna. Directed by former ad guy from Mumbai, Bardroy Barretto, the film chronicles a bitter-sweet relationship between a young singer and her mentor set against the backdrop of the jazz clubs of Bombay and Calcutta of the 1960s.

Lawry, a young Goan musician playing in the nightclubs of Bombay, returns to Goa to find a singer for his band, and meets Dona. While Lawry moulds the impressionable young Dona into a talented singer, they fall deeply in love, and what happens later is a monument to their bond and music. Fun-loving Goans are known for their football teams and their well-known drink – feni – which is appropriately celebrated in many a scene in this film.

A week later, we were treated to a touching true story of an academician in Aligarh, a film with LGBT overtones and accompanying innuendo, instigated by close-minded voices. Manoj Bajpayee (Gangs of Wasseypur) as the professor and Rajkumar Rao (Love, Sex aur Dhokha) as a sensitive journalist (Deepu Sebastian), have done ample justice to their roles.

Set in a city in Uttar Pradesh, Bajpayee plays Dr. Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, a professor of Marathi at the Aligarh Muslim University. He is fired from his position of Reader and Chair of Modern Indian Languages on charges of homosexuality. A sting operation conducted by a television channel shows the male professor in an embrace with a male rickshaw puller in the privacy of his house in campus.

Between the two main characters, the film plods along at gingerly pace, with mediocre legal arguments back and forth on the merits of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that deals with “unnatural offences”. The scene of the hearings is largely cluttered and haphazard, and professional cinematic touches would have helped.

Earlier, the NYIFF festival had launched the screening of the film The Man Who Knew Infinity (which was reviewed in these columns in May).

* Raj S. Rangarajan is a New York based independent writer. He covers trend stories on art, reviews films and books for media based in New York; Toronto, Canada; and India. He can be reached at raj.rangarajan@gmail.com

The Mystique That Was Srinivasa Ramanujan

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By Raj S. Rangarajan *

Film Review

Most of our readers would have heard of or read about Srinivasa Ramanujan, the math genius who lived in early 20th century. Some of you would have also read Robert Kanigel’s 1991 book – The Man Who Knew Infinity – that was followed in the making of the film with the same name. 

As the story goes, in 1913, a young Indian clerk wrote a letter to well-known British mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy if the latter would be interested in reviewing former’s original mathematical works. Ramanujan had documented his work with formulas, and realizing that the young man’s work was perhaps significant, Hardy, then a professor at Trinity College in Cambridge arranged for Ramanujan to come to England. 

Kanigel, describes lucidly, “the temples and slums of Madras as also the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, ‘the Prince of Intuition’ tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, ‘the Apostle of Proof’." 

Directed by Matthew Brown and shot in South India, where Ramanujan grew up and in Cambridge, U.K. where the twenty-plus clerk from the Madras Port Trust, propounded his theses, the bio-pic is a feel-good film. More so, if you are of South Asian (read Indian) origin.

Commendable performances from Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) who plays Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons (Prof. G.H. Hardy), who trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England highlight the 114-minute film. Ramanujan worked as a clerk under Sir Francis Spring, played by Stephen Fry (who played Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels).

Brown says, for the first time, the celebrated Trinity College allowed them to shoot on their campus, and among the scenes was Hardy with his ubiquitous umbrella open, and Ramanujan arguing as to why proofs were really needed. Hardy was superstitious in that if he had the umbrella open, it would not rain. 

In an odd way, the story is an accident of history in that while the Indian and the Brit had an obsessive, insatiable love for numbers, they were not alike. Ramanujan was a god-fearing Hindu Iyengar Brahmin who believed that all that he knew was thanks to his goddess, “Namagiri Thayar” in the town of Namakkal in South India. He had boldly declared, “an equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God”. This belief was at variance from pipe-sporting Englishman Hardy’s who was proud of being an atheist.

The family setting in Kumbakonam was fairly authentic with Janaki (Devika Bhise – Queensbee) playing a subdued role, overseen by a domineering mother-in-law (Arundhati Nag, actor, director), clad in a nine-yard sari – normally draped by traditional Iyengar women. As a doting mother to Ramanujan, Komalatammal felt, her son needed all the concentration and meaningful time at Trinity College to complete his work. She hid Janaki’s letters to her husband: letters that had to be mailed to Cambridge. With no communications from Ramanujan ever, young Janaki decides to go back to her parents. There is no empathy from the mother-in-law.

According to M.N. Krish’s novel, The Steradian Trail: Book #0 of The Infinity Cycle – cited in Scroll.in, Ramanujan’s wife Janaki-ammal, has said: “After he came back with the disease, he would say that if I had been able to go and take care of him he would not have fallen sick. He used to regret not taking me with him to England.”

In the film that emphasizes intellect, cinematographer Larry Smith has captured its essence admirably while accentuating that period’s sartorial costumes in England and in South India. Luciana Arrighi, who won an Oscar for Best Art Director in film Howards End) and costume designer Ann Maskrey (Dangerous Liaisons) have done ample justice to their craft. 

John E. Littlewood (played by Toby Jones), contemporary of Hardy’s and famed philosopher Bertrand Russell (played by Jeremy Northam), says, with light-hearted humor that every positive integer was a personal friend of Ramanujan’s.

The film covers a period around World War I when the clerk and the professor became friends in a common pursuit: feverishly cracking numbers at a time when bigotry and racism was benignly normal.

Hardy, has said in “A Mathematician’s Apology,” published in 1940, “I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729”. But the film version shows Hardy bidding goodbye to Ramanujan at the pier as the newly-minted F.R.S. leaves for India. Looking at the cab, Hardy says: “The number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen.” Responded Ramanujan, "Actually, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Their relationship is touching and caring. When the frail protégé is seen ailing in a hospital bed, Hardy counsels him poignantly like an affectionate father would. Ever the hard-nosed realist Hardy asserted: “we all need proofs, not merely final answers.”

Director Brown says, “it took more than six hours to travel to Kumbakonam (from Chennai) to shoot the rural scenes, and more than 12 years to make the film. Even the research for making the film was daunting”. Through Facebook, he could locate “a grand-nephew of Ramanujan’s for fact-checking”.

* Raj S. Rangarajan is a New York based independent writer. He covers trend stories on art, reviews films and books for media based in New York; Toronto, Canada; and India. He can be reached at raj.rangarajan@gmail.com

Salubrious Spring Opening at New Jersey Art Show

APRIL 1, 2016

Salubrious Spring Opening at New Jersey Art Show

By Raj S. Rangarajan *   

If it’s March, it’s Spring and start of the art season. For the basketball fan, it is March Madness. Among the annual art events are shows from IAAC – the New York-based premier South Asian institution for art, films, theater, dance, et al. – Indo American Arts Council.

For the first time, IAAC decided to cross the Lincoln Tunnel and move west to Bedminster, New Jersey – a shot in the arm for Garden State’s collectors and art aficionados. 

Titled Erasing Borders 2016 Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora, 24 artists of South Asian origin from North America have displayed their artworks and the inaugural on March 17 comprised established artists and wannabes from far-flung states such as California and Maryland.

South Asian Outlook caught up with two of the artists who have their works on display – Norbert Gonsalves and Rochana Dubey. An art director from New York city, Norbert calls his piece Despite and Hope 1, an encaustic on wood panel with feminine symbols such as charred sari fabric and broken glass bangles. The artist terms them “Dowry Deaths which are well-documented in India, when a young bride is doused with kerosene and her saree set aflame, and occasionally killed in a futile attempt to extract additional dowry money from the bride’s family.” 

Norbert adds, “I literally scorch and burn traditional sarees, bangles and chains to fashion misshapen forms that allude to the legacy of these victims of male patriarchal violence.”

A Graphic Design student at the J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai, India, Norbert has been making art since a very young age under the influence of his late artist father, J.W. Gonsalves. Having moved to North America at age 29, with stints in Toronto, Canada, Norbert now operates out of this studio near New York city. His vivid, large-scale, mixed media works on canvas are still very much anchored to his Indian homeland as evidenced in the piece on display. He is also into sculpting, and his work offers a conflation of painting and drawing, realism and abstraction, with found objects such as fabric incorporated for texture and density.

For Calcutta-born artist Rochana Dubey introspection and looking inward seem to work. She expands, “If I was good with words, I’d write a book. So I paint to tell my story. Conveying thousands of ideas, theories or simply a moment of intense feeling is what I do with my art. Love, passion, fear, insecurity – and now with age – spirituality, have all found expressions in my work.”

In her four-feet square acrylic on canvas – Is it really You or is it Me? – seen here, she has used multiple abstract layers to weave this thought together. “I have used symbolism of the lotus bud and its reflection, the silhouette in the background and the extended seeking hand, around the central face.” Vision, the recurring motif in her paintings, depicts self-realization and the knowledge of its power.

“With my new series, Discoveries, the attention turns inwards to reflect on one’s state of mind in different life-scenarios. Humanity at large needs to rethink and recalibrate. Instead of pointing fingers at each other and our religion, faiths and practices, we need to reconsider what it means to simply be alive. Live and let live. Isn’t the next person as human as oneself? Isn’t the color of his blood the same as mine? Isn’t his heart bleeding for the loss of a loved one – the same way mine is? Isn’t our God the same – the ONE in whose image we have been created? So we believe…and so we must act.”

Adds Rochana, “My experiments have been explorations of my abilities and attempts at understanding nuances of the rapidly changing social landscape around me. My training allows me the flexibility of expressing myself in various media.”

In philosophical strain, the artist extrapolates: There is so much violence all over the world today. To seek solace or direction, we pray to our respective gods or higher power or guide – that constant presence that seems to calm our minds and make sense of it all. 

* Raj S. Rangarajan is a New York based freelance writer. He covers trend stories on art, reviews books and films for media based in New York; Toronto, Canada; and India. He can be reached at raj.rangarajan@gmail.com