Deepa Mehta, LLD (Hindi: दीपा मेहता) (born 1 January 1950 in Amritsar, Punjab, India)^[2] is a Genie Award-winning Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, most known for her Elements Trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005); among which Earth was submitted by the Indian government for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and "Water" was submitted by Canada for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it Canada's first non-French Canadian film to receive a nomination in that category. She also co-founded Hamilton-Mehta Productions, with her husband, producer David Hamilton in 1996.

Early life and education[link]

Mehta was born in Amritsar in Punjab, India, though her family moved to New Delhi while she was still a child, and her father worked as a film distributor.^[1] Subsequently, Mehta attended Welham Girls High School, a boarding school for girls in Dehradun ^[3] and graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in philosophy.^[4]

Career[link]

After completing her graduation, Mehta started making short documentaries in India, and in time she met Canadian documentarian Paul Saltzman, who was in India making a film and whom she was to later marry and migrate with to Canada in 1973. Once in Canada, she embarked on her film career as a screenwriter for children's films, she also made a few documentaries including,At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch (1975).^[1] In 1991 she made her feature-film directorial debut with Sam & Me (starring Om Puri), a story of the relationship between a young Indian boy and an elderly Jewish gentleman in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale. It won Honorable Mention in the Camera d'Or category of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Mehta followed up with Camilla starring Bridget Fonda and Jessica Tandy in 1994. In 2002, she directed Bollywood/Hollywood, for which she won the Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Mehta directed two episodes of George Lucas' television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The first episode, "Benares, January 1910", aired in 1993. The second episode was aired in 1996 as part of a TV movie titled Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father.

Mehta also directed several English-language films set in Canada, including The Republic of Love (2003) and Heaven on Earth (2008) which deals with domestic violence and has Preity Zinta playing the female lead. The film premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.^[5]

Elements trilogy[link]

Mehta is best known for her Elements Trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998) (released in India as 1947: Earth), and Water (2005), which won her much critical acclaim.^[6] Some notable actors that have worked in this trilogy are Aamir Khan, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, John Abraham, Rahul Khanna, Lisa Ray, and Nandita Das. These films are also notable for Mehta's collaborative work with author Bapsi Sidhwa. Sidhwa's novel Cracking India, (1991, U.S.; 1992, India; originally published as Ice Candy Man, 1988, England), is the basis for Mehta's 1998 film, Earth. Mehta's film, Water, was later published by Sidhwa as the 2006 novel, Water: A Novel. All three films have soundtracks composed by A. R. Rahman.

[edit] Midnight's Children

Mehta is currently collaborating on the screenplay for Midnight's Children with the novel's author, Salman Rushdie.^[7][8] British-Indian actor Satya Bhabha will play the role of Saleem Sinai^[9] while other roles will be played by Shriya Saran, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Siddharth Narayan, Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan,^[10] Shahana Goswami^[11] and Darsheel Safary.^[12] The film is scheduled to be released in 2012.^[13]

Personal life[link]

In Canada she met and married filmmaker Paul Saltzman whom she divorced in 1993. The couple have a daughter, author Devyani Saltzman. Her daughter is an acclaimed author, curator and cultural critic.

Mehta is currently married to producer David Hamilton.^[14] Her brother, Dilip Mehta is a photojournalist and film director, who directed, Cooking with Stella, which he co-wrote with Deepa.^[4]

Filmography[link]

• Sam and Me (1991)
• Camilla (1994)
• Fire (1996)
• Earth (1998)
• Bollywood/Hollywood (2002)
• The Republic of Love (2003)
• Water (2005)
• Heaven on Earth (2008)
• Cooking with Stella (2008) (co-director)
• Midnight's Children (2012)^[7] - based on the novel by Salman Rushdie
• Komagata Maru (TBA) based on Komagata Maru incident

Awards[link]

• Doctor of Laws, University of Victoria, 2009 ^[15]

See also[link]

• Women's Cinema

References[link]

• Beard, William; Jerry White (2002). "Deepa Mehta as Transnational Fimmaker". North of everything: English-Canadian cinema since 1980. University of Alberta. ISBN 0-88864-390-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=iLNhHWfarosC&pg=PA270&dq=%22Deepa+Mehta%22+-inpublisher:icon&cd=3#v=onepage&q=%22Deepa%20Mehta%22%20-inpublisher%3Aicon&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=iLNhHWfarosC&pg=PA270&dq=%22Deepa+Mehta%22+-inpublisher:icon&cd=3#v=onepage&q=%22Deepa%20Mehta%22%20-inpublisher%3Aicon&f=false. 
• Levitin, Jacqueline; Judith Plessis, Valerie Raoul (2003). "25 An Introduction to Deepa Mehta: Making Films in Canada and India". Women Filmmakers: Refocusing. UBC Press. ISBN 0-7748-0903-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=bxO38D-I1UoC&pg=PA273&dq=%22Deepa+Mehta%22+-inpublisher:icon&cd=4#v=onepage&q=%22Deepa%20Mehta%22%20-inpublisher%3Aicon&f=false. 

External links[link]

• Deepa Mehta at the Internet Movie Database
• Hamilton Mehta Productions

Salman Rushdie
Rushdie at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Vanity Fair party
Born	Ahmed Salman Rushdie (1947-06-19) 19 June 1947 (age 65) Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India (now Mumbai, Maharashtra, India)
Occupation	writer
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	Indian[1]
Alma mater	King's College, Cambridge
Genres	Magic realism Satire Postcolonialism
Subjects	Historical criticism Travel writing
Spouse(s)	Clarissa Luard (1976–1987) Marianne Wiggins (1988–1993) Elizabeth West (1997–2004) Padma Lakshmi (2004–2007)
Influences This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) Günter Grass Gabriel García Márquez Italo Calvino Vladimir Nabokov James Joyce Jorge Luis Borges Thomas Pynchon Mikhail Bulgakov Franz Kafka Saul Bellow Christopher Hitchens
Influenced This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) Zadie Smith Homi K. Bhabha Taslima Nasrin Christopher Hitchens

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq);  /sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/;^[2] born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.

Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999.^[3] In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature.^[4] In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.^[5]

Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City.^[6] In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives.^[7] In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[8]

His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. Earlier the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs.^[9]

Early life and family background[link]

The only son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University of Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent.^[10][11][12] He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School, and King's College, University of Cambridge, where he studied history.

Career[link]

Copywriter[link]

Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.^[13][14][15] John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads ... admittedly."^[16]

Major literary work[link]

His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. It significantly shaped the course that Indian writing in English followed over the next decade, and is regarded by many as one of the great books of the last 100 years.^{[citation needed]} This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years.^[17] Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie.^[18]

After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame (1983), in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.

Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in the 1980s, The Jaguar Smile (1987). The book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.

His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see section below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" in 1990.

Salman Rushdie presenting his book Shalimar the Clown

Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.^[19]

In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.

In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack--a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks to create an immersive reading experience—when he published his short story In the South on the platform.^[20]

Other activities[link]

Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general.^[21] He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours.^[22] Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006.

He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.

Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students

In 2006, Rushdie joined the Emory University faculty as Distinguished Writer in Residence for a five-year term.^[23] Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).

Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On 12 May 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program "Real Time With Bill Maher".

Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be called Midnight's Children.^[24][25] While casting is still in progress, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das,^[26] and Irrfan Khan are confirmed as participating in the film.^[27] Mehta has stated that production will begin in September, 2010.^[28]

Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the U.S. cable network Showtime, a project on which he will also serve as an executive producer. The new series, to be called The Next People, will be, according to Rushie, "a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people." The idea of a television series was suggested by his U.S. agents, said Rushdie, who felt that television would allow him more creative control than feature film. The Next People is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind such projects as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.^[29]

Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund,^[30] a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America,^[31] an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[32]