If you are in town over the weekend, be sure to head down for an early evening treat at LPR and the CD release party for Arooj Aftab, a New-York based Pakistani female vocalist, composer and music producer.  Based in Brooklyn,  Arooj worked on creating “a sound that culminates the energy and sensibilities of jazz upright bass tones, inverted chords and modal scales, americana acoustic folk guitar, south asian ancestral vocal melodies

Kudos to our good friend D’Lo and his recent article in the Guardian! You probably caught D’Lo in the first season of Amazon’s “Transparent”,  HBO’s “Looking” and he just completed a successful tour of “D’FunQT“, where he “considers queer love and the artist’s personal and complicated relationship with Sri Lanka as a trans masculine person”.  And, he’ll be in the upcoming Netflix series, “Sense8″ directed by the “The Matrix Trilogy” creators,

“Seeking 25-40, well-placed, animal-loving, vegetarian GROOM for my SON (36, 5’11”), who works with an NGO, Caste No Bar (though IYER preferred)” Harish Iyer’s mom, Padma, felt her son needed a little push in the romance department and like many meddling Indian parents, she decided to take the matter into her own hands by placing a personal ad in a local Mumbai newspaper. The fact that her son—an activist and

We were shocked and saddened early Saturday morning to hear that Prashant Bhargava suddenly passed away the previous evening .  Prashant, born and raised in Chicago and based in Brooklyn, was a vital part of our South Asian creative community in New York.  He made international headlines with his debut feature film “Patang“, which was based in Ahmedabad during India’s largest kite festival.   His most recent venture was “Radhe Radhe”, a collaboration

If you woke up early this morning with your alarm clock set to NPR and heard Desilicious and ‘gay desi“, you weren’t dreaming. NPR reporter Alexandra Starr, who wrote a piece on Desilicious for the “New York Times” in 2007, attended our Sholay Birthday Bash last month.  You can listen to the audio version of Alexandra’s  “Weekend Report” here and read the text version.  A big thanks to Sazzad Reza,

Guests at our Sholay Birthday Bash this past April may have caught a flash of orange sequins and smiles as Junoon Performing Arts took over the dance floor for a dazzling Bollywood fusion performance. The dance troupe will be taking their talents to Manhattan Movement Center with “Dil Se–a Journey of Emotions.” Coming up on Sunday, May 10th. We had a chance to sit down with them between rehearsals to

“I wondered if I could create a minuscule postmodern hippie outpost, a safe haven for artists, musicians, writers, poets, activists, and thinkers — essentially anyone who wanted to escape the relentless tyranny of the city for a little while,” Sabeen Mahmud described her inspiration behind founding The Second Floor—a coffeehouse and haven for progressive expression—in a recent interview with MIT’s Innovations Magazine. On April 24th, the Karachi-based human rights and counterculture