Emailing Blog Posts/ Mira Nair Directing The Namesake

For those of you that don't know, blogger has this nifty feature that allows you to blog directly from email. Since I will be travelling quite a bit for the next month, I thought I would try and test the feature with this post. Well it hasn't worked yet, so I am posting manually. Apologies if it ends up working later and leads to a double post.

Also, I thought I would note more Mira Nair news. Apparently Nair, the director of Vanity Fair, Monsoon Wedding, and Mississippi Masala, among others, has signed on to do a film version of Jhumpa Lahiri's brilliant The Namesake. (See Manish Vij's post from Sepia Mutiny for more details on this). Interestingly enough, Nair, according to Bombay's Mid-day, has selected another Bollywood beauty, Rani Mukerji, to play Ashima, the mother of the story's main protagonist, a Bengali girl who ages from her final teen years to the mid-40s.

The Namesake is about the Bengali-American experience in the US, or for that matter can be applied to many desi families experiences in the U.S.--particularly those who immigrated in the late sixties and early seventies and then stayed and made homes here.

Originally, after Vanity Fair Nair was supposed to go into a different project: a movie adaptation of American playwright Tony Kushner’s long political play Homebody/Kabul. However, the New York based filmmaker changed her mind because she wanted to do something Indian after Vanity Fair.

Nair is apparently coming to India next month to finalise the rest of the cast, though the male protagonist — a Bengali American Born Confused Desi — could be played by an Indian actor in the US.

DESIBLOG wants to "big-up" Nair, as she is definitely doing her part to help Desi artists make it into the mainstream.

posted by sajit @ 3:02 PM