Aishwarya Rai Filming The Pink Panther 2 In Paris

Aishwarya Rai Biography

Aishwarya Rai (born November 1, 1973), is an award-winning South Indian actress. Rai, who won the Miss World title in 1994, made her film debut in Mani Ratnam's Iruvar (1997) and had her first critical and commercial success with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), with whom she repeated this success with Devdas (2002). Since then, she has acted in nearly forty Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English films. Today, she is considered to be one of the most popular actresses in India and the best-known Indian actress in the world. Rai is married to Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan and is daughter-in-law to Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan.

Rai was born in Mangalore, in the South Indian state of Karnataka, to Krishnaraj Rai, a marine engineer, and Vrinda Rai, a writer. Her ancestors are from the Bunt community of Mangalore. Her family relocated to Mumbai (Bombay) after her birth. Rai has one elder brother, Aditya Rai who is a film producer. Rai attended the Arya Vidya Mandir at Santacruz, Mumbai, then entered Jai Hind College, Churchgate, Mumbai for one year and then moved to Ruparel College, Matunga, Mumbai to finish her HSC. She was an A student and was on track to become an architect. Her mother tongue is Tulu. She also speaks Hindi, English, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil.

Rai began modeling on the side while pursuing for studies in Architecture, which did not materialise. In the 1994 Miss India contest, she was controversially placed second behind Sushmita Sen, and went on to win the Miss World title that same year and the Miss Photogenic award. After the one year reign as Miss World in London, she then worked as a professional model, in advertising and Indian fashion magazines and later got into the Indian film industry.

Live Arts and Fresh Cut Chips

Live Arts and Fresh Cut Chips
by Mark Anthony Neal

I’ve been in the UK the past few days, specifically Birmingham, where I’ve been attending the opening days of the 3rd Decibel Performing Arts Showcase and Symposium. Sponsored by The Arts Council of England, the event brings together Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and African artists and programmers from across England. I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote address—yet another incarnation of my ongoing meditation on Jay Z as cosmopolitan—which was quite an honor considering the fact that folk like Carl Hancock Rux, Hip-Hop Theater pioneer Benji Reid and longtime Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall Inc. Executive Director Patricia Cruz were all in the audience and could have provided a brilliant keynote address in their own right. The same goes for my brilliant interlocutor Robert Beckford.

The real beauty of the event though, is that it afforded me a wonderful opportunity to break bread with a range of artists and thinkers from across the diaspora such as Sydney Bartley (Director for Jamaica's Ministry of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture), Dr. Vena Ramphal (who specializes in South Asian Dance), Myung-Joo Chung (who consults Korean Theater companies) and David Tse, who directs the Yellow Earth Theater in London. Like progressive artists in the US, they are all struggling to convince State institutions and various other potential benefactors that their art is worthy of support, while also struggling to provide progressive art that doesn’t cater to lowered expectations.

Read More at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

The Katrina-Politans

The Katrina-Politians:
A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and the Katrina Generation
by Mark Anthony Neal

Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, two years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests an access to economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world?

What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed two years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.

When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he recently did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State, are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects.


Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Nerd Sexy: The Return of Junot Diaz

from the New York Times

Travails of an Outcast
by Michiko Kakutani

Oscar, Mr. Díaz’s homely homeboy hero, is “not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about — he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy” with a million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat, self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction writer, who dreams of becoming “the Dominican Tolkien.” He’s one of those kids who tremble with fear during gym class and use “a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous” when talking to kids who could barely finish high school. He moons after girls who won’t give him the time of day and enters and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears “his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber”; he “couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”

Read the Full Review

Tara Reid

Tara Reid Biography

Tara Reid (born November 8, 1975) is an American actress. She is known for her roles in the films American Pie (1999), American Pie 2 (2001), National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002), The Big Lebowski (1998), and My Boss's Daughter (2003).

Reid was born in Wyckoff, New Jersey to Donna and Tom Reid, both of whom are teachers and day care center owners. She attended Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School then went to Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. She has a younger sister, Colleen, and two brothers, Tom and Patrick (who is a twin of Colleen). Reid grew up in New Jersey.

Jessica Alba Outdoor Photoshoot HQ

Jessica Alba's Biography

Jessica Marie Alba (born April 28, 1981) is an American actress. She is known for her roles in Dark Angel, Sin City, Fantastic Four, Into the Blue and Idle Hands.

Alba was born in Pomona, California, to Mark Alba, who is Mexican American (though both of Jessica Alba's paternal grandparents were born in California), and Catherine Jensen, who has French and Danish ancestry; the two married while in their teenage years. Her maternal grandfather was a Marine NCO for 30 years, serving in the Pacific during WWII, and later as Asst. Drum Major for the United States Marine Band. Alba was raised in an Air Force family, along with her brother, Joshua, an actor who appeared with her in the season one finale of Dark Angel, and her grandparents until she was 17 years old. Her father's Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi and Del Rio, Texas, before they settled back in California.

Alba's early life was marked by a multitude of physical maladies; she suffered collapsed lungs twice, had pneumonia 4-5 times a year, a burst appendix, and a cyst on her tonsils. This served to isolate her from other children at school because, as she claims, she was in the hospital so often that no one knew her well enough to befriend her.

She has also acknowledged suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder during childhood. Her health improved, however, when her family moved to California.

Alba had expressed interest in acting since the age of five. She took her first acting class at age twelve, and an acting agent signed her nine months later.

Christina Aguilera Seducing On The Sofa In Hot Silky Dress

Christina Aguilera's Profile

Birth name ------- Christina Maria Aguilera

Also known as ---- X-tina, Baby Jane

Born ------------- December 18, 1980 (age 26) , Staten Island, New York, United States

Origin ------------ Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Genre(s) --------- R&B, Latin pop, jazz, dance-pop, pop, rock

Occupation(s) ---- Singer, songwriter, producer

Years active ------ 1998 – present

Website ---------- www.christinaaguilera.com