The 74-year-old celebrated Kathak dancer created her own parameters for her art in Canada. Rina Singha started the Canadian Multicultural Dance Theatre as well as a dance program at schools to help children understand what multiculturalism is all about. Singha also used Kathak, a dance form traditionally associated with the courts of the nawabs and Lucknow’s aristocracy, to tell Bible...

As a new immigrant, I had been in survival mode,” says Vasdev Chanchalani. “When the home front was secure, I ventured into business.” Today, he heads an organization with over 1000 employees and a turnover of $100 million. Wanting to give back to Canada, the country where he found phenomenal success, and to India, his country of birth, he created the Chanchalani Global Indian Award with...

Chandra Siddan examined her life with an unflinching honesty in her documentary, Remembrance of Things Present. Siddan made the documentary to discover for herself whether her life was a function of a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional culture, but Remembrance...is more than just Siddan’s personal story. She made certain points in it that connect to the stories of women...

She was told by many people that it is very hard to break into the media scene here in Canada. “But I believe if you really want to do something, you can,” says award-winning documentary film-maker Lalita Krishna. “Just don’t let anyone dissuade you! I understood the class and caste privileges I’d enjoyed in India and it made me question, who was I to point a finger? The emphasis...

“Dance is my life, my being, my consciousness. I approach dance with spirituality and scholarship. I see the world through my dance,” he says. “Dance helps educate, challenge and provoke my awareness and my thinking of the world around me. Through dance, I see life in a more varied, wider way. Not compartmentalized.” When he moved to Canada in 1991, Krishnan revelled in the feeling...