Pinto

Actor Freida Pinto, who rose to fame with her role in Danny Boyle`s `Slumdog Millionaire` talked about her future projects and said that she doesn`t want to confine herself to Hollywood, reported Variety. "I`ve always looked at cinema globally," she told Variety. "After `Slumdog,` I could have easily played all the Indian roles, the girlfriends and sidekicks, or just gone and done something only in India." Talking about playing challenging roles like playing a Palestinian girl in `Miral`, which is a biographical…

Few know that Christmas has been celebrated in the subcontinent for almost two millennia. According to writer Manimugdha S Sharma, there are two different apocryphal traditions about the coming of Christianity to India. The first says that Thomas the Apostle arrived at the court of Indo-Parthian king Gondophernes and introduced the new faith in north-western and northern India. The other tradition says that Thomas came to Kerala in 52 AD and built the first church there and introduced the faith. Novelist Madhulika Liddle…

At a time when museums thought that the works of Progressive Artists should be hung in toilets, mercurial entrepreneur Kekoo Gandhy believed in modern Indian art. He and his wife Khorshed went on to set up Gallery Chemould. Jerry Pinto’s Citizen Gallery is a biography of the Gandhys and of Chemould, now a byword in the art world. Before the first galleries came along, the Bombay Art Society and the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art were the two most important art institutions in Bombay. In the 1940s, three Jewish…

Yuri Fonseca of Mahim, raised without family but for his uncle, has grown up lonely. Now, he struggles with making friends when the story begins with his joining senior college; his sense of embarrassment, awkwardness and insecurity sting him. Called padri ka bachcha at school and very culturally different from his peers, he has grown up hurt. In college, he gives in to the enthusiasms and causes of others, which he abandons when following through is needed. When included in a group, he finds himself drifting away. He…

In your latest film, Mr Malcolm’s List, you are cast with no regard to skin colour or race, as was your Slumdog ex, Dev Patel, in The Personal History of David Copperfield. Colour-blind casting is great, obviously, but why does it seem to have only affected period dramas, or do we not notice it elsewhere? TopTrampPeriod dramas are the one area it was completely unheard of. If you look at, say, Star Wars , Riz Ahmed’s character did not have to be painted as south Asian or Muslim. He just existed in that world. I’ve been in…

Mumbai-born actor Freida Pinto found fame after being cast in 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire: she had been working as a model for Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Škoda and Vodafone, and was picked by Danny Boyle to star as the love interest to British-born star Dev Patel. (Boyle, meanwhile, cast Patel on the recommendation of his daughter who had seen him in Skins.)After Slumdog cleaned up at the award dos, Pinto went on to become a household name, with the unusual career trajectory for an Indian actor of having not featured in any…