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A arts Thursday, 7 March, 2013
PAKIStANI PlAyBACK SINGeR MAlA ReMeMBeRed The 23rd death anniversary of Pakistan’s famous playback singer Mala is being observed on Wednesday. Mala was born in Faisalabad on November 9, 1939 as Naseem Nazli. She was interested in singing and music from a very young age. Her elder sister happened to be her first music teacher and Naseem learnt the essentials of music from her. She started her career somewhere in late fifties and sang more than 300 songs in an almost two-decades-long singing career. “Mala sang many super hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s,” said Radio Pakistan. Her first Urdu film was “Suraj Mukhi” in which she changed her name to Mala and sang a simple Urdu composition‚ Aaya re dekho (1962). However, Mala’s greatest accomplishment was Akele na jana. In 1962, she won the Nigar Award for best singer for the film ‘Ishq pe zor nahi’. In 1965, she won the Nigar Award again, this time for the film Naila. The last days of Mala were fraught with loneliness and misery. She found herself in the midst of deep financial crisis. Mala faded out of the popular music scene towards the late seventies and died on March 6‚ 1990. AGENCIES
holly MAdISoN GIveS ‘BIRth’ to BABy GIRl Holly Madison and her boyfriend Pasquale Rotella welcomed a daughter on Tuesday, in Las Vegas, according to reports. In August, the 33-year-old Playboy model had announced that the couple were set to be parents, before Rotella revealed that they were thinking pink, People magazine reported. The mom-to-be had previously been busy perfecting her daughter’s Alice In Wonderland themed nursery. She said in December that she wants six kids as she would like to have a big family. NEwS DESk
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov
Qatar revealed as the world’s biggest contemporary art buyer The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years, The Art Newspaper can reveal. Sheikha Al Mayassa is not the only art collector in the family: her relative Sheikh Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Ali Al-Thani has always been a passionate art buyer, and was recently named as one of the world’s top ten collectors by Artnews.Among the purchases Qatar is believed to have made are: n The “Merkin Rothkos”: A $310m deal saw 11 Rothkos sold by court order to an “unidentified buyer” in 2009. They came from the collection of financier J. Ezra Merkin, who is being sued in New York over his role as provider of funds to convicted Ponzi-scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff; the collection was the largest private holding of Rothkos in the world. They were subsequently exhibited at the Garage Centre in Moscow, leading to rumours that they had been bought by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, which was strenuously denied. Two very well placed sources maintain that they have gone to Qatar. n The Sonnabend estate: $400m worth of art from the
Former President George H. W. Bush offers intimate observations about low points of his son’s presidency in his latest book, set to be released Tuesday. CNN received an advanced copy of All the Best, George Bush; My Life in Letters and Other Writings, and reports that the elder Bush had a pained reaction to the nation’s criticism of his son’s performance as 43rd president. “My heart went out to him” after Hurri-
eyeing ‘hot’ Jennifer Lawrence One Direction star Harry Styles has been flirting with Jennifer Lawrence for the past one year. A source told the Mirror that the 19-year-old actor knows people will tell Lawrence what he has been saying and eventually they will be introduced. In an interview more than 11 months ago, his band was asked for their thoughts on blockbuster movie ‘The Hunger Games’ when Styles said “The girl, the girl in it is hot as well.” The Kidd Kraddick host confirmed with him that it’s Lawrence, the boys replied that “Yeah, she’s hot.” “Just watched Silver Linings Playbook... I really liked it,” he tweeted on Monday. And before the 22-yearold actress embarrassingly tripped up the stage stairs at the Academy Awards, he said that Lawrence needed to win an Oscar. NEwS DESk
estate of the famous art dealer, comprising major works by Lichtenstein and Koons. The deal was negotiated privately in 2007-08, going to GPS; multiple sources identified its client as Qatar. Ségalot told us that “the group was sold to more than one client”.• The Claude Berri dation: A group of nine works by Ryman, Reinhardt, Morandi, Serra and Fontana was promised to the Pompidou Centre in Paris in lieu of tax. But the heirs of the film director finally sold them through Ségalot for about €50m to Qatar; he did not deny this but said “the reality was less exotic than the French press said at the time”. n Andy Warhol’s The Men in Her Life, 1962, which sold for $63.4m at Phillips de Pury in New York in November 2010, in a sale orchestrated by Philippe Ségalot. He insists that the work was acquired by a US buyer. But a source who bought regularly from Ségalot said that sales often went through his US company, so while the buyer was technically American, the end owner could be of any nationality.
Olivia Wilde slammed by Justin Bieber fans Olivia Wilde, who took to Twitter to criticize Justin Bieber for his love of walking around topless, has been slammed by the singer’s devoted fans. The 28-year-old actress wrote: “Bieber, put your f—ing shirt on (sic),” after recent pictures emerged of the teenage heartthrob in London without a shirt, Contactmusic reported. The fans, who call themselves ‘Beliebers’, tweeted back with one of them saying: “justin probably doesn’t even know who [footballer] joey barton or olivia wilde are LOL you guys just hate from the back.”‘ Another wrote: “@oliviawilde I’ll punch you in your face (sic).” Wilde is the latest high profile celebrity to hit out at the 19-yearold singer, after ‘The Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney suggested that his music isn’t good enough to win awards. NEwS DESk
George HW Bush memoir complains about criticism of his son
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cane Katrina, Bush, 88, writes of his son, former President George W. Bush. “Here is a guy who cares deeply. Who wants every possible resource of the federal government brought in to bear to help people, yet he is being roundly accused of not giving a damn ... the critics do not know what is in 43’s heart, how deeply he feels about the hurt, the anguish, the losses affecting so many people, most of them poor.” The younger Bush was stung by considerable backlash for slow execution of recovery efforts in Louisiana after Katrina. The resentment came to a memorable head in September 2005, when entertainer Kanye West publicly blasted Bush during a nationally broadcast relief telethon, claiming he didn’t “care about black people.” Five years later, in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Bush said he regarded West’s criticism as “one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.” The elder Bush comes to his son’s defense in the book, calling the critics “nasty.” The World War II vet and 41st president then goes on to note that his son had come under fire exactly 61 years after his own Navy plane had been shot down by the Japanese. “I was a scared kid back then,” Bush writes. “Now I am just an angry old man hurting for my son.”
shAh rUKh-AAMIr KhAn flee Twitter terror Nurse wounds inflicted by internet trolls while their teams take the virtual blows A star and his followers have always had a storybook affair, until social networking empowered the latter with an open platform and a mask of anonymity. To follow a star does not necessarily translate into exchanging terms of endearment. ‘Followers’ now tweet to berate, bully, abuse or heckle the stars. As Deepa Mehta had said in an interview to this newspaper, it gives the anonymous, armchair critic a sense of empowerment. And no one knows this better than Shah Rukh Khan, who has quit Twitter again, after a fresh surge of attacks brought on by his views on being a Muslim superstar in India. This is SRK’s second boycott of the popular medium after being hounded out by trolls under similar circumstances last year. But the star showed just how vulnerable he still is, when he tweeted: Sad, i read so much
judgements, jingoism, religious intolerance on the net & i use to think, this platform will change narrow mindedness, but no! TOI has learnt that SRK is now putting together a strategy to handle his online presence. He will no longer take the virtual punches on his chin, but his media managers will do the needful. “Shah Rukh is distraught with the negative energy on Twitter. The abuses and the vicious attacks on him after every tweet have made him very cynical about the medium,” explained a friend of the star. “You can see from his last tweet that he is disillusioned with the medium.” But SRK is not alone. Aamir Khan, who is perhaps not subjected to such intense scrutiny, seems to have taken a break from Twitter because of similar reasons. NEwS DESk