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KAMAL HO GAYA |
The very special and prestigious “Lifetime Achievement” award for distinguished contribution to the Bollywood movie/music industry in the Caribbean will be given to the legendary Kamaluddin Mohammed, at the Bollywood Music Awards night, to be held on Saturday, December 3 rd at the Hasely Crawford Stadium in Trinidad. The Bollywood Music Awards will be an electrifying event, and will be viewed by over 270 million viewers on television in over 90 countries. One night on one stage, a night to remember as history is created in Trinidad.
One hundred and sixty years ago the Fatel Razack and other ships sailed from India and arrived on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago bringing hundreds of Indian immigrants from many provinces of the Indian continent. Out of determination to survive and dedication to their families they sacrificed, holding tightly to the only link they had with the motherland, their culture, with music, song and dance being the key component. They struggled and toiled in the canefields to ensure that their children would have a better life in this new land, known as Trinidad. These struggles produced great men and women who have changed the face of this nation for the better and who made their parents and grandparents proud as they rose to the highest positions in the land culturally, professionally and politically. Among these great men and women stands
Kamaluddin.
In September 1947, Trinidad’s 1st station, Radio Trinidad, was launched. In the Trinidad of the 1940’s there were not so many radios and so large crowds would gather at the few homes with radios to listen to this programme. Kamal’s ability to speak oriental languages (Hindi and Urdu) with such ease and fluency was a definite asset. This was interspersed with English, which made for a really interesting and enervating broadcast in which the announcer would wend his way through a linguistic mosaic that conveyed an atmosphere of East meeting West.
For a young man of only 20, this was a major achievement. When one considers that opportunities for such prestigious positions in the media even today are limited, one can fully appreciate the impact that a young 24-year-old East Indian male would have had to make in 1947 to get the nod of radio producers to host such a programme. But then again that was Kamal.
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STEEL FORTUNE |
| Chairman and CEO of Mittal Steel Company has found his name on the Forbes Billionaire List. As Forbes sums up, “Mittal has been the biggest dollar gainer on this year’s listing of the world’s billionaires, adding $18.8 billion to his net worth.” With a whopping $25 billion, Mittal has been named the third richest man on the planet, behind Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet. |
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A SLEW OF AWARDS |
| Shiladitya Sengupta has joined the Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital as an assistant professor of medicine and the Harvard-MIT division of health sciences and technology. An AIIMS alumni, Sengupta was born in West Bengal and grew up in Delhi. He then went to Trinity College as a Nehru Cambridge and British Chevening Scholar to pursue a PhD in pharmacology.
Not new to awards, Shiladitya has won the Shakuntala Amir Chand Prize
for excellence in Medical Research from the Indian Council of Medical
Research (ICMR) and the Geeta Mital Gold Medal from AIIMS. He has also received the Amanda Stavely Prize in the Cambridge University 50K entrepreneurship competition. |
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TUBE QUEEN |
Non-resident Indian TV presenter Anita Anand has won the Nazia Hassan Award for 2005 in the category of upcoming television broadcasters. At a function held in the Attlee suite of the House of Commons, awards in the form of individually engraved silver plaques, were also given to 16 others, including Hardeep Singh Kohli (writer/director), Nitin Ganatra (performing Arts), both NRIs.
The awards were instituted in memory of Nazia Hassan, best known for her music. Her song ‘Baat ban jaiay’ for the Hindi film Qurbani revolutionized south-Asian music and introduced Asian pop music to the subcontinent. With her brother Zoheb, Nazia sold 60 million records and became an international name at the age of 13. |
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