Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas, India's official entry for the Oscars, has been nominated in the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) this year while NRI director Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham' has got nomination in the 'Outstanding British Film of the Year' category.

The Hours, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Pianist are the other smovies in the frame for best film, while The Hours, Bend it Like Beckham, Dirty Pretty Things, The Magdalena Sisters and The Warrior, another film produced by an NRI fight it out for best British film.

The BAFTA awards will be held on February 23, a month before their more famous US equivalent, the Academy Awards.

Courtesy: PTI, January 27, 2003

MUMBAI: Rahul Bose's Everybody Says I'm Fine has won the first runner-up award for the best debut feature film at the Palm Springs Festival in the US.

Incidentally, Aparna Sen's Mr & Mrs Iyer, in which Bose stars, has been chosen as the sixth most popular film in the viewers' choice category at the Palm Springs festival, which is often regarded as the precursor to the Oscars.

Said Bose: "The Bollywood song-and-dance formula is absolutely done with in the West. It's the so-called crossover films which are in demand over here".

Courtesy: IANS, January 20, 2000

The film had broken the box-office record for the first weekend of releases of most Hollywoood films here. The critics were quite surprised that over 50 per cent of audience was white. But this is why it ran simultaneously in many halls for weeks.

The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London has been for decades spreading and popularizing the culture and arts of India and attracting students of music and dance from Europe. But last year proved to be a very momentous year in the Bhavan's history.

It was approached by the prestigious Trinity College of Music for help in starting a course in Indian music. The Bhavan sources said that plans were being discussed to start the course next year in 2004. This will be a historic development for the Indian music. What can be a better institution than the Trinity College for attracting more western disciples to learn the classical ragas and lead not only their introduction in the west but a renaissance through over 20 million Indian diaspora the world over.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, January 13, 2003

MUMBAI: Deepa Mehta's comedy Bollywood Hollywood, starring Rahul Khanna and Lisa Ray, has received five Genie nominations, Canada's equivalent to the Academy Award.

The nominations include Best Motion Picture, Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Ranjit Chowdhury); Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (the late Dina Pathak); Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Moushumi Chatterjee); and Original Screenplay (Deepa Mehta).

The Genie Awards, inaugurated in 1980, honor outstanding achievement in the Canadian film industry. The 23rd annual Genie Awards will be telecast in Canada February 13.

Courtesy: Indiawest, January 03, 2003

LONDON, JANUARY 9, 2003: Children in primary schools in Britain could soon be studying Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi rather than French and Spanish if the Government accepts the proposed radical shake-up of language teaching.

Ministers are planning to give all primary school pupils the chance to learn a foreign language from the age of seven. But there will be no insistence that the pupils should be offered only a European language.

A teacher in a Gujarati dominated area in Leicester told HT that the move to introduce non-European languages in schools was very welcome because it would help the future generations of Asians to know their culture and help in enriching the life in this country. "It would make for better integration."

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com

CHENNAI, INDIA, January 5, 2003: A British marine archaeologist Graham Hancock has been examining a submerged city on the East Coast of Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Hancock says a civilization thriving there may predate the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq and definitely existed before the Harappan civilization in India and Pakistan. He has been excavating the site off the coast of Poompuhar, near Nagapattinam, 400 km south of Chennai.

At a meeting of the Mythic Society in Bangalore in early December, Mr. Hancock said underwater explorations in 2001 provided evidence that corroborated Tamil mythological stories of ancient floods. He said tidal waves of 400 feet or more could have swallowed this flourishing port city any time between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, the date of the last Ice Age.

The Gulf of Cambay was also submerged, taking with it evidence of early mans migration. The populations Mr. Wells and Mr. Pitchappan (see previous article) mapped settled on Indias East Coast 50,000 to 35,000 years ago and developed into modern man. According to Hancock, "the Poompuhar underwater site could well provide evidence that it was the cradle of modern civilization." Hancocks theory is strengthened by findings of Indias National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), which has explored the site since the 1980s.

Man-made structures like well rims, horseshoe-shaped building sites are some of the lost citys secrets. At low tide, some brick structures from the Sangam era are still visible in places like Vanagiri. The region, archaeologists say, has been built over and over again through the ages and some of its past is now being revealed. Mr. Glenn Milne, a British geologist from Durham University, has confirmed Hancocks theory.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com

CHENNAI, INDIA, January 5, 2003: Indias East Coast, especially along Tamil Nadu, is increasingly drawing the attention of archaeologists and anthropologists from across the world for its evolutionary and historical secrets. The focus has sharpened after genetic scientist Spencer Wells found strains of genes in some communities of Tamil Nadu that were present in the early man of Africa.

In the "Journey of Man" aired by the National Geographic channel, Wells says the first wave of migration of early man from Africa took place 60,000 years ago along the continents east coast to India. Genetic mapping of local populations provided the evidence. R.M. Pitchappan, a professor of Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, helped Wells collect the gene evidence from Tamil Nadus Piramalai Kallar people, inhabiting the Madurai and Usilampatti areas 500 km south of Chennai. The community was once quite strong and independent. Their genes have the amino acid bands found in the gene map of the original man from Africa, and similar to bands in the Australian aborigines. Says Pitchappan, "The ancestors of the Kallar community may have come into India from the Middle East."

Wells believes there were three waves of migration that early man undertook. According to Mr. Wells and his Indian collaborator, early man went from Africa to the Middle East, on to Kutch on Indias west coast, all the around to the peninsulas east coast and then on to Australia. "These gene pools are unique and very accurately map the path a population has taken, leaving behind original communities to grow into independent groups but with a common ancestor," explains Pitchappan.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com