Slumdog kids experience Oscar hysteria

Tanvi, the Mumbai girl who played teenager Latika in Slumdog Millionaire was all excited when she saw the sartorial finesse that awaited her in a plush Los Angels hotel.

Tanvi, along with the other Slumdog… kids, landed in Los Angeles for the much-awaited Oscar awards that will be held at the Kodak theatre.

“Tanvi’s measurements for the Oscar dress and the shoe size had been conveyed to the organizers well in advance.

When she tried them on she was much delighted as also the other kids who were treated similarly,” 13-year-old Tanvi’s mother, said Sharmila Lonkar.

“I spoke to her and she told me that the dress trial was given finishing touches and now the ‘Slumdog’ kids were looking forward to the award announcements hoping for the best”, she said.

Sharmila said the arrival of the kids aroused great interest among the American media, who gave them extensive coverage.

“The American media is more crazy about them (kids) than their Indian counterparts and their arrival was flashed all over,” she said.

Tanvi was accompanied by her father Ganesh. Her mother, would be watching the event from her residence in Borivali.

After the awards function, Tanvi and other children artistes would stay in US for two more days more for sight-seeing.

The trip would also include a visit to Disneyland, Sharmila said.

The kids have already paid a visit to the Universal
Studio in Hollywood, she said.

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Oscar would help do bigger things: Rahman

An Oscar award would be a “great honour” and help do “bigger things”, says Indian music maestro A R Rahman, a hot favourite to take home a trophy for his music in Slumdog Millionaire.

“It would be a great honour,” Rahman told the New York Times

in a telephonic interview from Los Angeles, where he was preparing to perform at the ceremony.

“It would help me to do bigger things.”

Asked to elaborate, Rahman named “some Western directors he would like to work with”. “Baz Luhrmann… Ridley Scott. I’m a big fan of Ridley.”

The Times notes Rahman is “one of the most prolific and successful film composers in India”. He has three nominations for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – best original score and best original song, for Jai Ho and O Saya, a collaboration with the Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A.

Rahman, 43, has already won a Golden Globe for best score for Slumdog Millionaire.

“I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind, while doing something unrelated,” the maestro said. “You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.”

Talking about his work on the most-talked about film of the recent times, Rahman said: “I kept three weeks aside. I moved to London and did the whole score there.”

David Novak, an ethnomusicologist at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, said Rahman is “sort of the Peter Gabriel of the Indian film industry”.

“He shifted things from a simple East-West mode to a multicultural, global mode, where India and its regional musics are part of a palette of sound from around the world,” Novak added.

Andrew Lloyd Weber, who worked with the composer for the West End musical Bombay Dreams, said, “I’ve long been impressed by his talent, and I’m so pleased that Hollywood has recognized it.”

But Rahman said he was yet to prepare his Oscar acceptance speech ready as he was busy meeting various directors and record labels in Los Angeles.

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