It's the official Year of India in Canada, Vancouver has been designated Canada's cultural capital for 2011 and it's the city's 125th birthday. So organizers decided it was the perfect time to mount the inaugural Indian Summer Festival, July 7 to 17.

"Everybody seems to be in a celebratory spirit and we thought let's start off with a bang," said Sirish Rao, artistic director of the festival.

"What we really want to do is share culture and increase the cultural traffic between India and Canada," he said. "This is the start of the conversation."

Rao, a writer who ran an art and design publishing house, helped organize literary and cultural festivals, and lives between Vancouver and Mysore, India, is particularly excited about the events where great minds from Canada and India meet.

Man Booker Prize winner Yann Martel will join award-winning Indian film star Tabu to discuss literature, film and their respective processes, July 8. Tabu recently finished filming the movie adaptation of Martel's Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

"To have the two of them meet for the first time at Indian Summer is something we're very proud of," Rao said.

A movie Tabu starred in called The Namesake, a critically acclaimed film about a Bengali family's move to New York City, screens after their conversation.

Tabu stars in four of the seven films to be screened at the festival. The selection includes Maqbool, a retelling of Macbeth set in the contemporary underworld of Bombay; Iqbal, which details a son's battles with his father and his own speech and hearing impairments to realize his dream of being a cricketer; and India's highest grossing Bollywood film, Three Idiots, a comic film that follows three university students and critiques a harsh educational system.

"Most people when they talk of Bollywood, the image that comes to mind is a song and dance musical," Rao said. "Of course, a lot of films are, but what we'd really like to show is the Indian cinema industry, the somewhat more serious side of it. Not that the films aren't fun, but it's just that they deal with issues that are far more universal and talk about relationships and show Indian reality, not only the fantastic part."

Dr. L. Subramaniam, the man who brought the violin to the forefront of music in India, is set to perform compositions with complex rhythms and melodies with an ensemble, July 9. He's collaborated with George Harrison, Herbie Hancock and Ravi Shankar, performed with The New York Philharmonic and written pieces for films, the Alvin Ailey dance company and the Kirov Ballet.

Indian Summer has collaborated with an array of Vancouver festival organizers including the Vancouver International Writers Festival for its literature series, which includes Tarun Tejpal, one of India's most respected journalists, in discussion with award-winning Canadian investigative journalist and author Terry Gould, July 14. They'll discuss the challenges writers face and how they've fought to defend their visions.

Along with literature, yoga and Ayurveda, or traditional Hindu medicine, Indian Summer will feature food.

"Cuisine is an Indian art form," Rao said. "Vikram [Vij] very movingly explains how, for him, the ingredients and the smells are as Mozart to a musician, and the way that musicians play with what they've got and create this melody is how he sees a dish coming together."

Vij's cooking performance, July 13, has already sold out, but during the festival's July 7 opening gala he'll host an open kitchen, for which tickets are still available. "What we're saying is if for once you don't want to queue for Vij's..." Rao said.

Indian Summer Arts Society, Teamwork Productions from India and SFU Woodward's have produced the festival in association with the Consul General of India. SFU Woodward's is party central with free Bollywood dance classes animating its courtyard most evenings.

"The festival is very serious, about dialogue and about intellectual exchange," Rao said. "But we also know how to have a good time."

For more information, see indiansummerfestival.ca.

crossi@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi