L. Shankar

March: Noted violinist L. Shankar and his teammate Gingger helped composer John Debney to score the music for Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ which grossed $270 million in three weeks in North America.

Umang Gupta

March: Umang and Ruth Gupta gifted $500,000 to the San Mateo County History Museum. The fund went toward renovating the interior and the exterior portions of the historic courthouse building where the museum is located.

Baldev Singh Grewal, editor of Sher-E-Panjab

July 24: A permanent Sikh heritage gallery, featuring Sikh manuscripts, art and history,d at one of the world’s most visited museum complexes — the U.S. Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., on July 24.

The cover of ‘Soulmantra.’

Aug. 28: Panjabi Sahit Sabha, New York, hosted a discussion of ‘Parikarma,’ a novel about an Indian American who revisits his native village after 30 years, written by Baldev Singh Grewal, editor of the Panjabi newsweekly, Sher-E-Panjab. Fiction writer and poet R.D. Sethi presided over the discussion.

The cover of ‘Soulmantra.’

Oct. 1: ‘Soulmantra,’ CD of a musical rendering of the Sanskrit mantra ‘Om Namah Shivaya’ by businesswoman and philanthropist Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon, was launched at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York.

Natvar Bhavsar

Oct. 10: Zarin Mehta, president and executive director of the N.Y. Philharmonic Orchestra, announced the Philharmonic and the musicians union agreed to a three-year labor contract that includes a raise, benefit increases and changes in working and touring conditions.

Anjolie Ela Menon

Nov. 9: A show of 19 of painter Natvar Bhavsar’s recent works, ‘Color – Poetic Reverberations,’d at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York City. Since the 1960’s, when Bhavsar set up his studio in Chelsea, he has been a key participant in New York’s art scene.



Nov. 9: An exhibition of recent works by Anjolie Ela Menond at Gallery ArtsIndia in New York on Nov. 9. Although she has had over 35 solo shows in India, the U.S., Russia, Germany, France and England over the past four decades, the current show is her first solo exhibition outside India in five years.

(Compiled from the pages of

News India-Times by Nishant Arora)