South Asian Festival, July 2005 - TheStar.com

TheStar.com - A bridge built with music
With a little moxie and lots of masti, M! M! M! blends the traditional arts with the contemporary Two Down Easters perform at Harbourfront fest with their eyes on Delhi, writes Prithi Yelaja

The organizers:
Abhishek Mathur, left, and Jyoti Rana are co-founders of the annual Masala! Mehndi! Masti! festival, a Harbourfront feast of South Asian culture with a youthful bent. It starts Wednesday.

PRITHI YELAJA
STAFF REPORTER
Pursuing their musical dreams may have taken these two kids from Truro and St. John's a long way from home. But not to New York, New York.
In the highly competitive world of Indian classical music, New Delhi is where it's at.
'If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,' says Vineet Vyas, 30.
And Toronto's Masala! Mehndi! Masti! festival, where he and his dancer wife, Bageshree Vaze, will perform next week, is one of the stepping stones to India's capital.
As Vaze's feet tap in perfect rhythm to the beat of Vyas' tabla, it's clear this is a couple in perfect sync.
'There's an unspoken understanding between a tabla player and a dancer,' says Vaze, whose ankles are adorned with ghungroos --100 brass bells that jingle melodically with every movement.
But the symbiotic performance is completely 'upaj,' or improvised.
In Kathak, a north Indian style of classical dance, the dancer recites what she's going to perform for the benefit of both the tabla player and the audience, just at the start of each number.
'Rehearsal is not a feature of this tradition,' says Vaze, 26.
Vyas and Vaze, who both grew up on the East Coast -- she in Newfoundland, he in Nova Scotia
-- have steady gigs, together and separately, across Canada, the U.S. and Europe, and now live half the year in India, where they are quickly making a name for themselves."

TheStar.com - Designer adjusts to Toronto style
Teams Indian fabric and embroidery with Western styles
Each hand-made outfit takes about 30 hours to complete
July 28, 2005

PRITHI YELAJA
STAFF REPORTER
She used to live in a Maharajah's palace in Mumbai, but fashion designer Sushma Kilachand now calls a modest house off the Danforth — which doubles as her studio — home.
What compelled her to give up her pampered existence and move half way around the world to start a new life?
Love.
But first, the clothes.
Walking in from the steamy haze of Toronto's heat wave, her home, decorated with family heirlooms shipped from India, is an oasis of cool elegance.
"I love this weather. It reminds me of India," says Kilachand.

Upstairs in her small studio, Kilachand designs her collection, called Sushk, by teaming Indian embroidery and fabrics — silk, chiffon, linen and georgette in bright shades of pink, orange, purple and turquoise — with Western styling to produce a versatile line of tunics, ponchos and Indian suits that she describes as Indo-Western.
"Colour symbolizes what India is all about. You can wear these tops with jeans to a brunch or to afternoon tea or with pearls and heels for an evening out. They look so hot!" says Kilachand, 29, whose designs are featured in next month's Flare.
"Most of my ideas come from watching what women are wearing in the clubs and bars and on streets of Mumbai. These are middle-class women who can't drop thousands of rupees on clothes, but they want to be trendy on a budget."

Mumbai —with its hip club scene, restaurants, shops and fashion houses including Versace and Armani — is the Paris of the East, says Kilachand, who is dressed casually in capris and a white T-shirt.
Since leaving Mumbai two years ago, she's kept in touch with what's happening on the fashion scene through her production team.
Kilachand sketches her designs, scans them into the computer and emails them to the 12-member team, who stitch and embroider each piece by hand. Each outfit is unique.
Because of the superior fabric and painstaking handwork involved — each outfit takes approximately 30 hours to complete — the price and quality is higher than similar mass-produced garments sold at chain stores. Tunics range from $100 to $130; ponchos from $130 to $160 and churidars, salwar kameez and kurtas with trousers from $150 to $220.
The Shopping Channel approached Kilachand to sell her line on-air, but she declined because the quantities they required would have forced her to switch to mass production. For now, she is content selling to customers through word-of-mouth referrals out of her home showroom, which helps her keep overhead costs down.
She counts some high-powered women among her regular customers, including Dr. Tanya Chawla, a radiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, who likes the simple, elegant lines of Kilachand's designs.
They are a refreshing take on traditional South Asian styling, which Chawla finds "too garish, too gaudy and makes you look like a Christmas tree."
"Sushma's designs cross over well. You can wear them pretty well for any occasion, from formal to casual," says Chawla, 35.
Kilachand's outfits are one of a kind yet reasonably priced, and that appeals to Carole Adriaans, an events producer.
"I go to a lot of functions. I know if I buy something from her, I won't see it on anyone else. I've spent big money at Holt's only to see someone else wearing the same thing," says Adriaans, 53.
Kilachand's other specialty is giving a new, modern feel to vintage silk saris, which she does by removing the border and pallu embroidered in real gold thread, (the pallu is the piece that hangs over the shoulder) and fashioning these onto lighter, airy materials such as chiffon and georgette.
"By switching it to a more wearable, softer fabric, it breathes new life into saris that are family heirlooms, but are too heavy to wear."
She charges $250 to $300 for restyling, including the price of the new fabric.

For her wedding two years ago, Kilachand designed all 10 of her outfits — she wore a different one for each event in the week-long round of parties leading up to the wedding ceremony — as well as the outfits of all 20 people in her wedding party.
The wedding and reception, with 800 guests, took place in her childhood home — a sprawling 55-room, 100-year-old palace that once belonged to Bhupinder Singh — Maharajah of Patiala. As the ruler of the largest Sikh state during the British colonial era, he was famous for having a gargantuan appetite for women, food, jewellery and sport. In fact, he is considered the father of cricket in India.
The palace has been designated a heritage property by the Indian government.
As the only daughter of a wealthy business family that owned sugar cane factories and alcohol distilleries, Kilachand had a fairy-tale upbringing.
"I was surrounded by beauty , so it was hard not to be inspired," says Kilachand, who began designing her own clothes at 14. After high school in 1998, she studied at the Institute of Fashion Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.

She landed a dream job as an assistant buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston after graduation, but gave it up six months later because she was homesick. She returned to India and worked with designer Krishna Mehta for two years before launching her own line in 2001.
When Ashish Rajendra, a 29-year-old project manager from Toronto, came to visit India in 2003, Kilachand was already engaged to marry a wealthy industrialist — a love match, but also an alliance that furthered the interests of two business families.
Kilachand met Rajendra through her cousin. After three meetings, including a marathon six-hour dinner, they were smitten with each other. "We just clicked. We knew we were destined to be together," says Kilachand.
She broke off her engagement.
Her mom initially "freaked out" at the news, but in the end was completely supportive. Kilachand married Rajendra three weeks later.
Life in Toronto has been a bit of an adjustment, to say the least, for someone who was used to living like a princess with 20 live-in servants.
When she first arrived in Toronto in 2003, Kilachand asked her new husband who would be doing the cooking for them.
"He said, `You.' I was shocked because I hadn't entered the kitchen back home in 16 years. I had never even made a cup of chai."
Though the couple eats out frequently, Kilachand has now mastered cooking. And surrounded by Mughal miniatures and Burmese teak furniture, antiques from her childhood, she feels thoroughly at home.
"It's stuff that's priceless. Bringing a piece of my life in Mumbai here has made the transition a lot easier."