A member of the Beltane Fire Society is seen celebrating the coming of summer on April 30, 2006, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The procession is a revival of the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane.

The ancient year marked seasonal changes with special festivals and rituals. Beltane, one of four quarter-day festivals, is recreated today in the modern Scottish capital with festivities to re-establish Edinburgh residents’ links with the natural year. Join in our celebration with a Beltane-themed hour of music.

Asin Thottumkal, a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, learnt the waltz for an advertisement shoot.

A sequence in the advertisement of a soap brand endorsed by Asin required her to perform the ballroom dance style "Viennese waltz" and she picked up the steps in a short while.

Asin, who was shooting in Wai for Bol Bachchan at the same time, had to juggle between the two commitments.

After the film shooting, when everyone would call it a day, Asin would learn the waltz.

Article continues below

The beachfront cafes of a small East Sussex coastal town might not seem an obvious source of inspiration for a major rock act. But for Keane, one of the biggest British bands of the past decade, nothing beats a blast of sea air.

In their formative years, the group used to cycle to the sleepy resort of Bexhill-on-Sea from their homes in nearby Battle, looking for teenage kicks in tea rooms like the Sovereign Light Cafe. Now, as grown men, they have come full circle.

Their superb new album, Strangeland, is a vivid celebration of small-town life. Tapping into the homely, communal spirit that has sustained them since their breakthrough eight years ago, it does for the English seaside what Springsteen once did for the Jersey shore. "We used to ride to Bexhill to sit on the beach or kick a football around," says drummer Richard Hughes. "It was never sunny, so we’d usually end up in a cafe, sheltering from the rain. In later years, we’d spend hours trying, in vain, to attract the attention of any woman vaguely within our age group.

"People can be very condescending about England’s small towns, but we think of them in a magical way."

Article continues below

Shahid Kapoor has been roped in to host the 13th edition of the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards in Singapore, the organisers confirmed on Tuesday.

Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan are also likely to host segments of the ceremony. Interestingly, both actors also compete against each other in the best actor category for Don 2: The King is Back and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara respectively.

Filmmaker Dibaker Banerjee’s Shanghai, featuring Kalki Koechlin, Emraan Hashmi and Abhay Deol will have its world premiere at the glittering ceremony.

Article continues below

There was something for virtually everyone to smile about on Broadway on Tuesday after 30 of 37 shows this season got at least one Tony Award nomination. The folks at Once had the most reason to celebrate at their working bar on stage.

The musical based on the low-budget 2006 film about an unlikely romance between a Czech flower seller and an Irish street musician in Dublin earned a leading 11 nominations, including nods for best musical, for both its lead actors, its book, lighting, sound, choreography and its set, which offers the audience real drinks before the show in a replica pub.

"Once constantly surprises me. I think it’s the power of the music and the storytelling that people connect with," said John Tiffany, who was nominated for best director of a musical.

Two other big winners were Disney and the Gershwin estate: Two musicals using George and Ira Gershwin songs — The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Nice Work If You Can Get It — each got 10 nominations.

Article continues below

She’s already well and truly asserted herself as one of the most successful female music artists around at the moment.

And it seems Adele is continuing her winning streak as she has now topped a brand new poll on the same day as her 24th birthday. The soul superstar has been named Britain’s most popular act in a new survey.

According to figures by ticket marketplace StubHub, an estimated 730,000 fans rated her in the number one position. And the star’s devotees also spent more than £36 million (Dh213,420) buying her merchandise and attending her gigs in 2011.

It marks another highly successful week for the star, who also saw her album 21 scale new heights. The record outsold Michael Jackson’s Thriller album last week to make it the fifth biggest selling album of all time. Sales figures from the Official Charts Company show the Rolling in the Deep singer’s second album has sold 4,274,300 copies — 500 more than the landmark Jackson album.

Article continues below

From Miracle Mum to Octomum and now, perhaps soon, Homeless Mum, the bizarre life of Nadya Sulaiman and her 14 children has been a subject that rarely fails to hit a nerve among those who have followed her personal soap opera.

With Sulaiman on the verge of losing her home and declaring bankruptcy this week with total debts as high as $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to everyone from her parents to her baby sitters to the water company, the Octomum Odyssey seems headed for darker days.

Beyond the fascination with her public foibles, such as posing topless in an obscure British magazine and talk of a solo porn film, is the very real concern about the welfare of her octuplets and six older children — all borne from her zeal for in vitro fertilisation.

Three of her six older children have disabilities for which she receives government financial support, Sulaiman has said. One is autistic, another has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the third a speech impediment. The older children range in age from 5 to 10.

Article continues below

Actress-producer Amita Pathak, who will be seen in Bittoo Boss, says the film’s script demanded new faces.

"We just felt that it was not required and getting some established stars would not justify the film. The film demanded fresh faces," Pathak said.

Pathak produced Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge?, which did well at the box office, but she says her priority has always been acting.

"Atithi Tum Kab Jaooge? was my first production. It was like a learning experience for me. It did really well and everybody appreciated it. It feels really great," she said.

Article continues below

Story By: by Harold Goldberg

You can battle with lightsabers in the new game Kinect Star Wars.

Maybe it’s the wide-eyed child that still exists within me. But I happen to like much of the dialog and some of the narrative in Kinect Star Wars.

I may be the only one. After being delayed for the better part of a year, the Kinect Star Wars game debuted last week to less than stellar reviews. But Microsoft has high hopes for the offering and even has marketed a fancy, beautifully made Xbox 360 to go with it. Based on the astromech droid R2-D2, it’s a nerd’s delight. But the game in which you take on the roller coaster adventures of an apprentice/Padawan during the Clone Wars has been savaged by critics who hoped for much more. Part of the vitriol comes from the fact that there’s a goofy dancing game included in the package. It’s a bit like a George Lucas version of Dancing with the Stars when, say, Darth Vader hits the floor.

If you approach Kinect Star Wars purely from a gameplay standpoint, you’ll find bugs in the programming. Lightsaber dueling can be slow and plodding. Using The Force to move objects like boulders can be terribly imprecise. So can steering a podracer through valleys, canyons and under kinks in the football-field-long tail of a giant beast. That’s because Kinect’s current gesture-based technology isn’t quite refined enough to be as precise as a game that uses a traditional, handheld controller.

Since the release of the Kinect in 2010, Kinect games have generally received middling review scores. If you parse the reviews at the aggregate site GameRankings, the average of most Kinect game reviews is 70 percent out of a possible score of 100. That list of games includes the latest Tiger Woods golf experience, which is expensive to make. But you can’t blame Kinect for some of the Kinect Star Wars animations which end awfully abruptly, like the game director needed a pee break and couldn’t hold it. All told, Terminal Reality, the developers, have only made one outstanding product over the years: Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

And yet.

What if you look at the game as something else? I began to approach Kinect Star Wars with an open mind and treated it as an interactive movie. Interactive movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Double Switch (with Debborah Harry and Corey Haim) were foisted on the public about 20 years ago. Some, like Tender Loving Care, even made it to theaters. But like the slackers of the time, these games rarely lived up to their potential.

Certainly, Kinect Star Wars needs some shiny polish like the sheen on the engines of a Titan 2150 podracer. But I very much enjoyed interacting with Yoda as he gave me his stilted, sage advice on how to battle. And Jedi Master Mavra Zane made me believe I was an essential part of her smart group of Padawan, rookie though I was. The dialog for this Jedi Master was a breath of fresh air when compared, say, to the unappealingly thin, military bromance narratives of the Gears of War games. (Then again, Gears is a much better game.)

I also stomped around in lunking Godzilla fashion in a small game called Rancor Rampage. As the Rancor, a goony reptomammal from the strange planet Darthomir, you leap about in front of your TV. On the screen, you see that you’ve smashed buildings and tossed humans and droids into oblivion. It’s visceral, refreshing and ultimately somehow as tranquilizing as a good, fast run.

As a fan of Star Wars games since 1993′s Rebel Assault, I fully realize that the quality of Kinect Stars Wars isn’t near that of Knights of the Old Republic, the deepest game in the decades-long series. But it’s not the complete shambles it’s been made out to be, either. There was a time when Star Wars was considered to be the height of pop cultural holiness. Without new feature-length movies to support the mythos, the franchise is beginning to become less important to our culture. Maybe that’s why I like this flawed game that should have been fixed before its release. Despite its creaky bones, bones that need more flesh, Kinect Star Wars has the heart of an underdog.

Harold Goldberg is the author of All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How 50 Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture.

Story By: by Patrick Jarenwattananon

The Asian-American singer Jen Shyu speaks several languages, among them English, Spanish, Portuguese and various East Asian tongues from China, Taiwan and East Timor. But then she started performing with saxophonist Steve Coleman. None of her native tongues would serve for his knotty tunes; “doo-bop-a-da” scat singing wasn’t going to cut it, either. So she had to devise her own sound and fury — perhaps signifying nothing formally, but full of intense personal feeling.

Steve Coleman has long been known as an inventor of language — a composer who draws equally from rigorous examination of music theory, esoteric natural science and myth, and Charlie Parker. But you don’t have to speak his language to be entranced by it. There’s flow, and pulse, and delightful chord changes. And, yes, it’s a little disorienting, which seems like part of the point. “What human energy could have inspired this sound?” you wonder. Exactly.

Coleman’s vision was on display when his band Five Elements played the Newport Jazz Festival last year. But we wanted to know more. So we brought him, Shyu and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson into the ruins of Fort Adams for a more intimate, stripped-down look at his music. We also asked him for a translation into the English language: “If anything, that’s what this music is,” he later told us from The Jazz Gallery in New York City. “It’s a lot of different influences, coming from different places — plus, whatever’s coming from inside you, which is the main thing.”

Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Patrick Jarenwattananon; Additional Videography: Erik Jacobs; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Production Assistance: Caleb Curtis; Special thanks to: Newport Jazz Festival, Josh Jackson, Tim Wilkins, Michael Downes, David Tallacksen/WBGO, The Jazz Gallery; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins