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Sangath, www.sangath.com, is looking to build a centre for services, training and research and seeks to buy approx 1500 to 2000 sq mtrs land betweeen Mapusa and Bambolim and surrounding rural areas. Please contact: contac...@sangath.com or yvo...@sangath.com or ph+91-9881499458 http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2009-July/180028.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Leela Naidu personified grace and beauty Bharati Dubey, TNN 29 July 2009, 02:24am IST MUMBAI: Leela Naidu, once listed by Vogue as one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world, passed away at her Colaba residence on Tuesday night. She was 69. A close family friend of the actress told TOI that Naidu was down with fever for some days. "Last night, one of her domestic staff gave her porridge,'' he said. "She had a few spoons, after which she went to sleep. A little later, one of her paying guests who came to check on her found her dead.'' The funeral at Chandanwadi was attended by her daughter, grandson and friends. Film publicist Piroj Wadia, who knew Naidu for nearly nine years, said the actress had descended into loneliness after her second husband, the late litterateur Dom Moraes, left her. "People too abandoned her after that,'' she said. "But although she was almost a recluse, she was completely clued in to events around her. After the 26/11 attack, she didn't celebrate any festival or event for the rest of the year. She said she didn't feel like doing anything.'' Naidu's entry into films was serendipitous. Director Hrishikesh Mukherji chanced upon her pictures taken by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and declared that he had found his Anuradha, the protagonist of his eponymous 1960 film. Naidu played a woman who has to sacrifice her musical talent when life with her doctor husband (Balraj Sahni) takes her to a village. The film came a cropper at the box-office but went on win the national award for the best film and a nomination for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961. Naidu did not have a huge body of work as an actress but she did some momentous films__the 1963 Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke, for instance, was based on the celebrated Nanavati court case involving Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati, who was tried for shooting dead Prem Ahuja, his wife Sylvia's paramour. The incident shocked the nation, got unprecedented media coverage and inspired several books and movies. The case was not only the last jury trial held in India but also a direct cause of the abolition of jury trials. Naidu's extraordinary half-French half-Indian looks, which had won her the Miss India title in 1954, got her a role in Merchant Ivory's The Householder opposite Shashi Kapoor. After just a few films, however, she opted for matrimony over a movie career and settled down with Tiki Oberoi of the Oberoi hotel group. Naidu returned to films with Shyam Benegal's Trikaal in the late 1980s. "I had directed her before that for a Finlays fabric commercial,'' said Benegal. "She was most incredibly gorgeous woman and an absolutely wonderful human being.'' Writer John Mathew, who knew Leela for over two decades, recalls her as a `conversationalist'. "We could discuss anything under the sun with her,'' he said. "She was a fantastic host__I remember she learnt how to cook pork from her Catholic neighbours and made it for us.'' Journalist Jerry Pinto, who has written a book on Naidu, described her as a lady with grace and impeccable manners despite stories to the contrary about her. "She was a tough lady,'' he recalled. "I remember when her house was being was repaired, she kept calling the BMC and even spoke to the workers with equal politeness.'' Jerry completely denied that Naidu was lonely. "Just because she was confined to a room does not mean that she was cut off,'' he said. "The world came to her. She did not throw her life away. She did a lot of work, which not many people know. She produced a documentary film by Kumar Shahani. When she was in Hong Kong, she produced radio programmes, which were even banned after she spoke against the government. She even dubbed for Hong Kong films. She was like a butterfly at a buffet and wanted to try everything.'' In Dom Moraes's memoirs Never At Home, there are several passages devoted to Leela Naidu whom he described as "ineffably beautiful''. Theirs was not an easy relationship. "My temper was short. My drinking deep. I knew Leela was miserable,'' he wrote of their time in London. She often accompanied him on his travels including those in Naxalite Bengal and when he went to interview Jiddu Krishnamurti. According to Leela, the philosopher laid a hand on Francis's (Dom's son) head and his nosebleed stopped. Dom and Leela had known each other as children and they reconnected at cartoonist Mario Miranda's house when Dom came back to India to shoot a documentary One Pair Of Eyes, about India viewed through the eyes of migrants who had returned. Dom and Leela went out together on to the balcony overlooking the harbour to catch up on their lives. After a while Mario came out to the balcony and joked, "Are you two conspiring to kill Mrs Gandhi? Come inside and meet people.'' Ironically, a few years later, Leela happened to be in Delhi on the day Mrs Gandhi was assassinated. Wrote Dom, "She had seen a Sikh rickshaw-driver beaten to death by a Hindu mob, and part of the city on fire. ..I felt my own mortality, and, more sharply, that of Leela's.'' http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/City/Mumbai/Leela-Naidu-personified-grace-and-beauty/articleshow/4831749.cms