(From top): Suniel Shetty, Bela Raja and Hafeez Contrator at Crossword; models show off the latest styles at the new Hugo Boss store; Suchitra Krishnamoorthi with some of her paintings; Sanjay Suri and Edna Fernandes at the launch of their books Brideless in Wembley and Holy Warriors respectively

How many people can boast of juggling three careers ? all at the same time? But actress and singer Suchitra Krishnamoorthi is doing just that and holding the second exhibition of her paintings. The exhibition called Rebirth was on at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre recently.

Krishnamoorthi, who is the wife of filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, insists that her artistic career just happened at a time when she was feeling particularly low and depressed. The special moment of inspiration came to her during Ganesh Chaturthi in 2004 when she experienced a strange numbness and sitting alone in her home cried for hours. After this she picked up the brush and started painting and thus began her journey as an artist. “Art seems to be pouring out of me. When I first started painting, I didn’t plan it.” She later trained under American artist and art academician Betsy Dillary Stroud in New York. Her first solo show was held in Mumbai last year.

She says her paintings present figurative and abstract works done in bright colours which “reflect my personality”. With titles like One +One, Words, and Are You Ready To Be Free, some of her paintings also include poems written by her.

Explaining why most of her figurative paintings depict women and not men Krishnamoorthi said, “I am scared of men and feared that they might jump out of my paintings and try to dominate me.” The show was inaugurated by Minister of State for External Affairs, Anand Sharma. Commenting on the paintings artist Anjolie Ela Menon said, “She is self-taught. Her abstract works are better than the figurative.” Also present on the occasion were artists like Sanjay Bhattacharya and Subrata Kundu.

Twin treat

It was an unusual double-bill. First came a book on religious extremism in India by a British journalist of Indian origin who spent several years in India. It was followed by a book written by an Indian journalist who has been living and reporting from Britain for the last 15 years for the Indian media.

But apart from that tenuous link, the two books couldn’t have have been more different. Journalist Edna Fernandes spent three years in India working for The Financial Times and researching her book Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism which looks at extremists in all India’s leading religions. She travelled from Kashmir to Gujarat, Punjab to Goa in order to meet the “generals and foot soldiers of the communal wars”. In conversation with media person Siddharth Varadarajan she said, “The factor common to this issue is economic marginalisation.”

Sanjay Suri’s Brideless in Wembley is an entirely different offering that’s more like a reporter’s blog. The title story, Brideless in Wembley is an account of a bridal bazaar in London that turned out to be only for the Gujarati Lohana community. Another story read out by Suri was about a trip with film czar Yash Chopra to the Midlands. “It just grew out of reporting and I just happened to be there. There was no conscious effort to make the book humorous, that’s the way I think,” he said.

Playing Boss

After making shoppers in Delhi and Mumbai swoon at their chic designs (and price tags), German fashion label Hugo Boss opened shop in Bangalore at the Leela Palace hotel this week with a high-profile fashion show. Located at the Leela Galleria, a floor-space dedicated to brands that spell LUXURY, the Hugo Boss outlet promises to give shopping-crazy Bangalore, with its well-heeled geek class and expat crowd, one more reason to reach for their credit cards.

Breaking away from the usual practice of glitzy fashion shows in stuffy hotel ballrooms, Hugo Boss decided to hold its fashion show in an open pavilion at the Leela, with lush greenery and gothic columns as a backdrop. Admittedly, the late afternoon sun did its best to dampen things a bit, but models Acquin Pais, Vijay Balhara, Adam Bedi, Bhanujeet Sudan and Anshai Lal refused to be daunted as they strutted their stuff in front of an appreciative (mostly) female audience.

The clothes ranged from street funk to classy evening wear-with-a-twist. Under its Boss Orange label, the brand has gone sporty with a vengeance, with violently distressed jeans, shirts, tees, bags and sneakers. The crushed, much-worn look is the USP of this line, with printed shirts teamed with lightweight suede and corduroy jackets and scruffy low-waist jeans with retro-styled shirts in muted colours and pleats and ruffles down the front. The washed-out look was consistent with the colour scheme as well, which was marked by an absence of colours.

The eveningwear line, Boss Black, features stylish jackets. Shiny, apparently, is in, as is a casual twist to take away from the severity of eveningwear for men. So even while ties showed up, the designs played around with collars. Chinese collars showed up, as did the tiny collars that are all the rage in men’s shirts these days.

After the show, the models, instead of discreetly retiring behind the screens, lounged around and nibbled on delectable smoked salmon wraps and mushroom pat?s. The already gratified ladies were even more pleased at the praise they heaped on Bangalore ? the heat, it seems, was nothing compared to Mumbai’s, while Vijay Balhara certainly made history by claiming Bangalore’s traffic looked ‘quite manageable’. As for the clothes, “I wouldn’t mind spending a lot of money on these kind of clothes,” the curly-haired, boyishly good-looking Acquin Pais was heard saying while T N Pratap, group CEO of Bin Hendi Enterprise that brings the Hugo Boss label to India nodded encouragement.

A worthy cause

What do you do when your pupil refuses to pay attention in class? How do you get your bored young learner to memorise his multiplication tables? The answers to all these queries are put down in a simple way by author Bela Raja in her book titled Children with learning difficulties ? A guide to parents and teachers published by Vakil Publications. The launch of this book at the Crossword bookstore in Mumbai attracted much media attention especially since it was none other than actor Suniel Shetty who did the honours.

A counsellor by profession, Bela has organised workshops in the past explaining the ways in which you can improve the teaching of children with learning difficulties. The book, which is born out of her past experiences, explains in a lucid style the ways in which such problems can be handled by teachers.

And while reading out excerpts from her book, Raja even mentioned that if the problem is not handled with care, it may lead to psychological trauma, which could further lead to behavioral disorders in children.

Besides Suniel Shetty adding some star attraction, architect Hafeez Contractor also showed up to support the cause. Contractor even admitted that when he was a child, he faced difficulties in learning and memorising.

Photographs of Delhi events by Jagan Negi and Ramakant Kushwaha