Talk of the Town

THE THESPIAN, `Sivaji' Ganesan will be holidaying for nearly a month in America, practically kicking off his visit with a party for his 73rd birthday in Pittsburgh on October 1.

`Sivaji' left on the month-long tour of US via Kuala Lumpur by a Malaysia Airlines flight.

Described as a holiday tour, `Sivaji' Ganesan, will be meeting all his kin, and friends in the film fraternity, and is planning a visit to the White House.

EIGHTEEN YEARS after Richard Attenborough's multi-Oscar winning movie, Gandhi, had the world spell-bound, a dubbed Tamil version is slated to hit the theaters.

This, like the earlier one, will also be tax free in Tamil Nadu. In Chennai, the Tamil version will be exhibited in Casino on three days - September 29, 30 and October 1. The distributors have organised a free special screening for an invited audience, comprising city school teachers and special educators, on October 2.

Despite the English version turning out to be a money spinner when it was released nearly two decades ago, the `translated' version of the movie languished without takers for nearly two years. It was then that Real Image Media Technologies, the producers, decided to release the movie themselves, spurred on by the State Government entertainment-tax exemption.

Mr. Arun Veerappan of Real Image who is the ``director'' of the Tamil version had apparently spent six months in identifying each voice and recreating the perfection in terms of nativity, lip sync, garnishing it with the ``real essence of Tamil''.

Real Image and Media Artists have converted the analogue mono print to DTS, an achievement Kollywood can boast about. These are the same people who gave us Walt Disney's Lion King and Aladdin in Tamil. The word going around is that the Tamil speaking Lion King was one among the four best versions out of the 30 different versions released by Disney.

THIS WEEKEND, it's time for the celebs to hit base. The list is a long one. For starters, we have singer Shubha Mudgal dropping in at Landmark on Friday evening along with the music director of her latest album `Mann Ke Manjeere', Shantanu Moitra and lyricist Prasoon Joshi.

After the musical interaction on Friday, it would be time for the Provogue supermodel hunt in town concluding on Saturday. The cats on the walk-Milind Soman, Madhu Sapre, Dino Morea, Bipasha Basu, Rahul Dev, Priyanka Chopra, Anupama Verma, Craig Scott, Jas Arora, Tapur Chatterjee, Zulfi Syyed, Aditi Govatrikar, Diya Mirza, Shyla Lopez, Aryan Vaid, Netra Raghuraman...and John Abraham! says the programme from Provogue.

Now, that's a rampful.

By T. S. Shankar, R. K. Radhakrishnan and Sudhish Kamath.

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