Brunch 09 11 2014 by Hindustan Times

WEEKLY WEEKLY MAGAZINE, MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER JUNE 22, 9, 2014 Free with your copy of Hindustan Times

: IDE S IN cial Spe re on tu fea betes dia

Quite a lot, actually. Vegetarian dining is now cool, high-end, and might even cost more than meat. But as restaurants put more green on the menu, are Indians getting a better meal or just a raw deal?

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

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Brunch Opinion

by Rachel Lopez

What I Learned From Working On This Week’s Cover Story

The Book Club

Conversations With A Vegetarian

I’ve been a vegetarian all my life. And every meal is a struggle – in mixed company. I’ve been laughed at and laughed about. So has my paneer. And I don’t even like paneer! On behalf of all of us animal-loving, green-grazing, gentle folk, here’s a list of things we don’t want to hear you say. Ever. ‘Don’t sit here! The vegetarians are sitting on that side of the table’

‘Have you never even tasted? Not once? Not even by mistake?’

‘Sorry, I don’t take food recommendations from vegetarians’

‘Are you vegetarian for religious reasons or for animal rights?’ ‘But I only eat homecooked mutton,’ says Veenu Singh, the colleague who’s a mutton-eating vegetarian

‘Would you kill animals if marooned on a deserted island?’

‘But you must eat meat when travelling. It’s disrespectful to local cuisine and so inconvenient!’

‘There is no such thing as a vegetarian hot dog.’ Or ‘What’s inside your burger? It doesn’t matter. It’s not a real burger’

by Aastha Atray Banan

Cover design: SWATI CHAKRABARTI Cover image: SHUTTERSTOCK

Tricking vegetarians into eating meat

‘But don’t you feel bad about killing plants?’

EDITORIAL: Poonam Saxena (Editor), Aasheesh Sharma, Rachel Lopez, Aastha Atray Banan, Veenu Singh, Satarupa Paul, Saudamini Jain, Asad Ali, Atisha Jain

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

Superb travelogue on Germany! The parking lot surprise blew my mind. - Vaibhav Batra

trip to Goa, On a recent to visit a le I was unab d felt my trip casino – an complete. in n ee had b ver story co ur But yo like I had el made me fe ere! been th anjeev sir Thanks to S cellent ex e th r too fo photos. in - Tanmay Ja The great gramblers and the bright bahus made this issue impossibly intrestin g!! - Riya Gautam

Drop us a line at: brunchletters@hindustantimes.com or to 18-20 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001

‘Oh? You don’t look vegetarian.’ (Apparently, bacon gives you personality.)

by Saudamini Jain

Find Hindustan Times Brunch on Facebook or tweet to @HTBrunch or DESIGN: Ashutosh Sapru (National Editor, Design), Monica Gupta, Swati Chakrabarti, Payal Dighe Karkhanis, Ajay Aggarwal

‘I can’t trust people who don’t eat butter chicken’

On The Brunch Radar

In this expensive wo rld, thank God we get Sunday Brunch free! Love ‘love/shove’ column a lotttt. & ur book challenge is kee ping me my toes -@kritish200 on 7

n They lose all perspective and filter when they fall in love. Sigh! n If they’re your besties, they may compete with you, but also flaunt your achievements (except when you lose weight). n They may want a gentleman who asks their advice about everything, but sometimes, they love a man who takes charge. n The coy ones also love sex. Yes, yes, yes!

‘Real men eat meat’

The caveman argument (Is it such a bad thing to follow a concept introduced by civilised man?)

Stuff You Said Last Sunday

How To Decode The Games Girls Play

So, I have written a book called Games Girls Play and it’s on the shelves now! It’s all about two girls, complete opposites of each other, finding love in Mumbai. My working title was actually, “The Prude and the Promiscuous”! While they find love with men who they never thought they could fall for, they also become besties, despite their differences. But what are the games girls play with each other, or with the men in their lives? Here’s what my book says: n They hate each other’s choice in men, but are there when that bad boy in your life dumps you.

When other vegetarians ask you, “But would you be okay with marrying/ dating/making out with someone who eats meat?”

‘So you still buy into Brahmin supremacy?’

LOVE IT n Slam poetry (special mention

to Mildly Offensive Content, Delhi’s super slam poetry group) n Amruta Fadnavis – we haven’t seen a political wife in forever! n This story: Guy orders a phone online. Gets soap instead. Complaint goes viral. A soap company sends the dude a phone and soap n Kiss Of Love n Ishant Sharma n If SRK stars in the next Dhoom n The “seen” on Facebook chat. Grr, stalkers n Spending 600 bucks on a jar of feta cubes because YOU CAN’T FIND IT CHEAPER ANYWHERE n Forwards on Whatsapp n People who assume being single means being alone

SHOVE IT

FOR ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT National – Sanchita Tyagi: sanchita.tyagi@hindustantimes.com North – Siddarth Chopra: siddarth.chopra@hindustantimes.com North – Shaila Thakur: shaila.thakur@hindustantimes.com West – Karishma Makhija: karishma.makhija@hindustantimes.com South – Sharbani Ghosh: sharbani.ghosh@hindustantimes.com

Photos: SHUTTERSTOCK, THINKSTOCK, GETTY IMAGES

n Kashmiri morels taste better than chicken. I will happily give up chicken for the rest of my life for them. n Hipster types who brag about tasting deer, octopus, grasshoppers and snails on trips abroad probably haven’t tried drumstick leaves, banana flowers, millet rotis and stinging nettle in India. n I hate aubergine. But I like baingan. And I love vaangi. n Amdavadis have the biggest appetites in India, and judging from Kunal Kavi, my informal guide to the city, they also have the biggest hearts. My sincerest thanks, good sir! n There is such a thing as Jain Chicken. It contains no onion and no garlic, but it does contain chicken – great for errant Jains who don’t want tell-tale breath when they return home from dinner. n When chefs say “every cuisine in the world tastes as good as vegetarian” they mean Mediterranean, Mexican and some Asian. Not South America, East Europe, Central Asia and North Africa. Or Bohri, Goan Christian or Naga cuisine. n Pasta with paneer tastes like death. n You can do vegetarian food well and non-vegetarian food badly. A good meal is a good meal, regardless of its contents. n But at least six dishes I sampled could have done with a bit of pork. Ah, well…

by Saudamini Jain

Apples and Oranges

COVER STORY

Royal food on silver thalis, veggies flown in from Peru, 21-course dinners, tea-leaf salads, deconstructed vada paos, seasonal menus and five-star ghar ka khaana... Vegetarian dining is posher than ever

Mille foglie at Le Cirque

by Rachel Lopez Mandalay meeshay at Burma Burma HAAS-PHOOS. Surely you’re familiar with the term. It’s what India’s carnivores call that side of the menu that’s priced at a lower rate, and often treated as second-rate. Think ghastly gravies called pasanda or lajawaab; hara bhara kebabs, pasta minus the meat, and paneer. Always paneer. No one looking at it would believe India has a vast and wonderful repertoire of vegetarian food. Meat eaters will probably choke on their disdain at India’s new green revolution. The country’s 20 to 30 per cent vegetarians are finally breaking the taboo of eating out. Of the rest, an increasing number is cutting back on meat for health reasons. And with allergies on the rise, many are switching to safer foods when eating out with

the kids – they’re going veg. “Menus are getting greener,” says Varun Mohan, the chef at the vegetarian Royal Vega restaurant at the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai. “But the big change is that veg customers are demanding better food.” Art teacher and vegetarian caterer Urvi Sanghvi says she grew up watching people admitting to being vegetarian almost as an apology at restaurants. “Now we think it’s the restaurants who should be sorry about missing our business,” she says. You’ll see it clearly at top-end restaurants, where patrons are likely to be not just vegetarian but stricter (often richer) Jains. While chefs the world over balk at modifying their masterpieces, any foreign brand with eyes on India knows its Japanese or European menu must be 50 per cent NOVEMBER 9, 2014

veggie if they want to succeed. No ghaas-phoos here. Cooks are developing menus sourced from the farm, not the freezer (sometimes a farm halfway across the world to justify a finedine price). Tony restaurants are ensuring that vessels, crockery, even entire kitchens are vegetarian-approved. And local-born foreign-trained vegetarian chefs are localising global gastronomic trends – minus the meat. But beetroots don’t swim in the Atlantic like salmon. You can’t dry-cure cauliflower into Parma ham. Restaurants have a unique conundrum: How to make food luxurious, sophisticated and memorable when all your diner sees is subzi? Here’s how they try...

Make subzi the star

Vegetables were always part of the plan when New York restaurant Le Cirque set up at The Leela in Delhi in 2009. Their sandwich stuffed with cow stomach was a roaring success in America, but “we knew we needed vegetarian options here or there would be a problem,” says Le Cirque’s chef Matteo Boglione. So they got to work, sourcing vegetables locally, partnering with Indian suppliers for creamy burrata cheese, and importing exotic greens such as white and green asparagus from Peru at `2,000 a kilo. Dishes were developed especially for India – a cauliflower flan among several meatless mains. Boglione prices his five-course vegetarian set meal at `4,500 (nonvegetarians pay `6,500, but for six courses) and here’s why. “Our lemons are flown in from America,

Oh no khowsuey at Burma Burma

Pani puri at SpiceKlub

Shahi karela at Royal Vega

Work harder

Tinda chanaka at Royal Vega

we have yellow, green and black tomatoes, the Kashmiri morels at `3,000 a kilo cost almost as much as Italian porcini at `3,900, plus portions are larger,” says the chef. Diners seem happy to pay. Le Cirque opened in Mumbai last year (with 16 vegetarian picks in a 35-item menu) and opens one in Bangalore this month. Wasabi, the Taj’s Japanese restaurant in Delhi and Mumbai has similar solutions so vegetarian patrons are neither hungry nor disappointed. The set menus cost roughly the same: non-vegetarian, `6,750; vegetarian `6,500. You can eat yellowtail, cod and sea bass, or fresh rhubarb, soramame and edamame beans, which cost roughly as much to import.

Mimic the Maharaj

If a big-spending community considers non-vegetarian food con-

A salad and (below) an Oriental entrée at The Cooking Culture Classe

taminating, offering purity is only good business sense. In Mumbai, the Oberoi hotels have separate vegetarian menus (patrons need never see the items they’d never eat). Sofitel’s Tuskers, Mumbai’s only five-star vegetarian restaurant, has its own kitchen, staff, utensils, even supply sources.

Some regulars eat out nowhere else in the city. “People only return if they trust you as much as their cook back home,” says Tuskers’ chef Jankidas Vaishnav. In India’s vegetarian capital, Ahmedabad, Mrudang Jambusaria knows a thing or two about trust. Jain families arrive in groups of 20 at his The Cooking Culture restaurants, and none eat meat, fish, eggs, seaweed, onion, garlic, potato, beetroot, cauliflower, mushrooms, roots, eggplant or yam. Some months, they’ll even abstain from leafy greens. How then to secure their patronage? “We have a fully open kitchen where every member of the staff is visible, even the dishwashers,” he says. “Guests can tour the cooking area with the chef himself. It shows we have nothing to hide.”

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

At Royal Vega, at Chennai’s ITC Grand Chola, the food is inspired by kings but is neither meaty nor rich. A good part of the menu is seasonal (they’ll only serve cauliflower in winter), changes every two months and respects ayurvedic principles (it’s all pH-balanced). Chef Varun Mohan says this makes his staff work harder than Peshawri, the ITC’s iconic restaurant serving fleshy North-West Frontier food. Royal Vega’s Roti Angaar Kadi, for instance, is made by pinching each roti 101 times before cooking to create the chain link pattern that gives it its name. Staff takes turns to make it every day, and each vegetable has its own recipe. It might explain why dinner here can cost `3,000 per person. Or why at `725, Tuskers’ Sankre Ke Kofte is their costliest and also bestselling dish. Vaishnav’s recipe for the Rajasthani wild beans comes from his mother and takes two days – three hours to clean, six to soak, then a few more to boil, strain and decant before cooking starts. “You can’t make this on a whim,” he says.

Play with your food

“When so much food is off limits to a vegetarian, chefs can’t help but get creative,” says Sujit Mehta who runs Ahmedabad’s swanky 650 -The Global Kitchen. This means dressing up the few ingredi-

COVER STORY ents they can use. Croquettes come in shot glasses and a single wonton is served opened up like a flower as an individual portion. Taking dressing up to haute levels is Mumbai’s six-month-old SpiceKlub. It serves molecularinspired Indian cuisine without the meat – deconstructed vada pao (buns, liquefied vada, boondi, edible packets of masala on a platter), coriander foams, and kulfi chips frozen with liquid nitrogen. This is where the waiters bridge the gap between familiar and unfamiliar. They’re as unpretentious as the cuisine is avant-garde. They’ll guide you through the ordering, tell you how to eat it and check back after the first few morsels with, “Mazaa aa raha hai na?” Low prices (dishes are between `200 and `400) encourage diners to try everything they fancy. No wonder it’s been packed since it opened, with a waiting time of as much as an hour even on weekdays.

Papad methi nu shaak at Tuskers

Cauliflower flan at Le Cirque

Thali at Royal Vega

Bubbling kulfi at SpiceKlub

Focus on flavour

Getting a table at Burma Burma in the weeks leading up to Diwali was just as hard. It’s probably because the tiny Mumbai restaurant serving a tinier menu of Burmese vegetarian dishes is the only one of its kind in India. Owner Ankit Gupta, whose Indian mother spent 25 years in the eastern nation, grew up eating Burmese food and felt Indians were ready for its familiaryet-exotic taste. “But Indians won’t like the non-vegetarian food, there’s too much fish sauce and shrimp powder,” Gupta explains. Instead there are flavourful soups with tiny samosas dunked in, a tart tea-leaf salad with imported leaves, stuffed steam buns and, of course, khowsuey. “A few dishes contain mushroom and browned onion, ingredients that coat your mouth and mimic the lingering taste of chicken. So even non-vegetarians don’t miss meat.” By his own admission, Mru-

dang Jambusaria’s new venture is “ahead of its time for Ahmedabad” and possibly India. The Cooking Culture Classe offers 15- and 21-course dinners. In a country of big sharing portions, this calls for prior warning. “Your stomach can hold only 350 to 400 grams at a time, so we inform people the meal will take long – even three-anda-half hours for 21 courses.” All vegetarian, of course, from South Indian Gazpacho (a cold rasam) to gnocchi. People love the idea. “Last month we sold 75 of the 21-course meals,” Jambusaria says proudly.

Let them choose

Variety is the name of the game

Vancouver

HOW THE WEST WAS WON Vegetarian restaurants in America, Canada and the UK are, let’s say, a different Glasgow kettle of ﬁsh. Mono City Bar Take a quick serves everything tour from bean burritos and burgers made with seitan (a wheat gluten) to nasi goreng and falafel. PETA named the city the best in the UK for vegans in 2013.

banana flowers. They source from far and wide too: potatoes from Talegaon, black pepper from Kerala, hing from Afghanistan, yellow turmeric from Guntur.

Heirloom’s seasonal menu has crispy avocado slices with spiced cornmeal rub; artichoke hearts in cider batter with curry aioli; crispy tofu; black Portland rice; beet bacon Natural Selecand vegan tion has a weekly mayo. menu. Diners can order chard and mushroom gnocchi and caramelised cauliﬂower with polenta, using local vegetables and fruits in season.

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

for Narendra Somani, who owns The Grand Bhagwati, India’s largest chain of vegetarian luxury hotels in Gujarat. His restaurants offer vegetarian versions of several cuisines so travellers feel at home: Parsi-style paneer patra, Persian cheese kebabs, Lebanese paneer shawarmas, Israeli mezze and Mandarin singadas. “For a lot of people, luxury is the ability to choose,” Somani explains. “We give them more to choose from, without the worry that it may be something they cannot eat.” You don’t have to cross national borders for choice. India has enough vegetarian dishes that remain unknown outside their community. Drumstick leaves, purple yam, and stinging nettle are as exotic to most Indian diners as New Zealand lamb or Chilean sea bass and can be as hard to procure. The menu at Masala Art at Delhi’s Taj finds a way to turn the unusual into the extravagant: kebabs made from lotus stem, water chestnut and whole milk fudge. Royal Vega works with millet and

New York Pure Food & Wine serves organic vegetarian. This means date bread with trufﬂe cream and fava beans; orange blossom sponge cake with strawberryLondon elderﬂower; quiFood for noa poppadum; Thought’s daily and cashew menu features tamales everything from cheese and dill scones and quiches to stroganoff and sweet potato and coconut soup.

Give it time

“Things are changing,” observes Ankit Gupta of Burma Burma. “If you saw someone with six-pack abs one generation ago you’d wonder ‘What are those things coming out of his stomach?’ Today everyone’s more health conscious.” Jambusaria believes that vegetarian food should be made more expensive today, securing its status in a country where meat consumption is rising. “A veg restaurant is not cheap,” he says. “Chicken costs `130 a kilo but good paneer is `240 here. People are realising that.”

Know when to stop

Even five-star hotels sometimes need to curb their enthusiasm. Tuskers has to stop making an aloe vera subzi as people weren’t ready for it yet. Burma Burma’s menu is also predominantly vegan but Gupta keeps mum about it: “India is still where indulgent food sells but healthy fare doesn’t”. Sujit Mehta knows that his molecular experiments with sodium alginate to create savoury yolks will work, but no hearty Gujarati will want an insubstantial flavoured foam. “They’ll ask ‘Ama su karvanu?’” he says, his tone indicating diners actually mean, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” rachel.lopez@hindustantimes.com Follow @GreaterBombay on Twitter

MORE ON THE WEB To see how Amdavadis eat out, visit hindustantimes. com/brunch

San Francisco

The iconic Greens opened in 1976. Diners are served Provençal gratin with fromage blanc custard and pupusas (thick tortillas) with summer squash, Manchester serrano chilies Manchester and pumpkin House has the seeds. world’s most expensive vegetarian menu. At £95 for 12 courses, it costs the same as the meat, as the staff says they work just as hard.

PEOPLE

Dancing Back To Bollywood

He shimmied in shiny shirts in the ’80s and ’90s, quit film for politics and now returns, crazy as ever. Can Govinda do it?

by Udita Jhunjhunwala

Photo: VIDYA SUBRAMANIAN

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

OVINDA SITS in a large, sparsely furnished room, facing two standees with images from his upcoming home production and solo starrer, Abhinay Chakra. A dripping airconditioner has been switched off and a noisy fan cannot be switched on. “I have heard a noisy fan is inauspicious,” says Govinda, twirling his blue bracelet and beaming that famous grin as he awaits his first question. In his heyday of superstardom, Govinda was infamous for his tardiness. So imagine my surprise when our interview began five minutes after the scheduled time. The five minutes I had to wait were simply because Govinda was just finishing his prayers and bidding farewell to his priest. “You have done more than 150 films,” I say, and he interrupts. “164,” he says gently. Govinda began acting in the second half of the ’80s, peaking in the ’90s with films like Shola Aur Shabnam (1992), Aankhen (1993), Raja Babu (1994), Coolie No. 1 (1995) and Hero No. 1 (1997). “I have had to work hard,” he says, “but it was interesting.” His popularity was as much for his outlandish costumes as his comic roles and energetic dance moves. He was a star despite being portly and over the top. He was loved because he made us laugh. You may not know this, but Govinda – or Govind Arun Ahuja – is in fact a child of the Hindi film fraternity. His father, Arun Kumar Ahuja, had been an actor. According to a newspaper report,

the veteran film producer-director Mehboob Khan had brought him from pre-Partition Punjab to Mumbai in 1937 and cast him as a lead in one of his films. Other films followed. He met Nirmala Devi, a classical singer, at a film set, and the two married. After the only film Ahuja ever produced flopped, the family had to move from posh Carter Road to suburban Virar. Of their six children, Govinda is the youngest. “After I became a hero, I had to look after my home and extended family,” he says. And although he saw incredible success, the actor’s career has taken hard knocks. By the mid 2000s, he seemed to have faded away. In 2007, we saw him in Salaam-e-Ishq and he was hilarious in Partner. But “You could say that after 2009, my career faltered,” he says. “And even when I did films, they did not release. Or if they did release, they were not very successful.”

THIS TIME AROUND

Today, the 50-year-old has reinvented himself. He is slimmer, fitter and calmer. And he is excited about the unexpected response to the trailer of Kill Dil, slated to release on November 14. “People are praising it as if it is already a hit,” he says. “They have not seen me in such a role. I myself am shocked that I could do it.” When director Shaad Ali offered him the role of Bhaiyaji, a character with negative shades, Govinda was taken aback. “I was not sure I could pull it off, so I said I’d try it for a few days, see if I can

PEOPLE

THE NEW GOVINDA

The original funny man will be doing his thing in Kill Dil (above) and Happy Ending (right)

manage, or make some nice excuse and exit. I was not very confident about myself. But I found I enjoyed playing the villain.” Meanwhile in 2004, Govinda, who had joined the Congress party, won a Lok Sabha seat, defeating the BJP’s Ram Naik. After a failed attempt at politics, he quit and returned to films. Govinda has now been on the comeback trail for the last few years, but has had limited success in supporting roles in films such as Raavan (2010) and Holiday earlier this year. But 2014 could just be the turning point. “More than films, I am selecting work,” says Govinda. “I take the kind of projects where I like the feel and am working with good filmmakers, like Shaad [Ali] and Anurag [Basu, who is directing Jagga Jasoos, which also stars Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif and is slated for release next year]. There are two ways to think about it: are you getting the kind of roles you want, or can you mould the roles that you are getting into what you want?”

drive films on his own, he needs to rebuild his brand. Also releasing later this month, is Happy Ending (where he is a shining part of the star-studded cast including Saif Ali Khan and Kalki Koechlin). “I am not competing with [them], but complementing youngsters like Saif Ali Khan,” he says. Actually Khan is not much younger than Govinda, but it’s the sentiment that matters. “I hope my next few films are so successful that I can launch Narmadaa [his daughter]. I was telling my wife Sunita the other day that if these films are hits, spectacular days lie ahead,” he says. There have been rumours about Narmadaa’s launch all over the media previously, which have angered him. It’s a subject that comes up in every interview. To Govinda’s great credit, while the first phase of his career was driven by his dancing and David Dhawan films, he has always managed to hold his own. Whether it was opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Hum (1991) or Salman Khan in Partner (2007), you couldn’t ignore him. Even as Kill Dil spotlights a more saleable star like Ranveer Singh, Govinda grabs your attention in under a minute, with a small dance step or a joyously wicked laugh.

“I was telling my wife Sunita the other day that if these films are hits, spectacular days lie ahead”

CHANGE OF PLOT

The actor’s return, whether based on financial need, or a need to survive in the industry, comes with the realisation that in order to

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

“Whatever God has written for you can be good only,” the actor says. “My desire now is to work and work hard – like I did in the early days. Of course, it’s not the same as the old days. You cannot make people wait now. Every hour costs lakhs. Instead of wasting that money, you could give it to the poor. I have become very particular. As a producer too, only if I come on time can I expect others to do the same. Now shoots are much better planned.” He is irked, perhaps in jest, when asked about his issues with punctuality. “When I used to reach Mani Ratnam’s set at 4am, even though my shot was not till 11am, no one wrote about that! I think maybe it didn’t suit my enemies to talk about that.”

GROUNDED REALITY

Another reason he may have been able to make the switch to a more disciplined lifestyle, is because of the influence of his now-deceased mother. “While mummy was alive, I didn’t do anything without her permission. I was 34 when I first told her I wanted to drink beer. When she heard that, she gave me a long sermon,” he says, flashing a disarming smile. Govinda has two releases this year, and two more next year, a far cry from the many he used to have at his peak. But the actor has a simple explanation for where he stands in his career now: “Dil laga ke kaam karta hoon, lekin kaam se kabhi dil nahin lagata.” Maybe it’s not a coincidence that his next film is called Kill Dil. brunchletters@hindustantimes.com

GOVINDA’S GREATEST HITS n Star No. 1: The only actor with six “No. 1” movies: Beti No. 1, Aunty No. 1, Hero No. 1, Coolie No. 1, Jodi No.1 and Anari No.1 n Street Dancer: Govinda did steps anyone could follow, including the pelvic thrusts. We’ve all copied his walk-backand-forth-standing-in-one-placemove at parties. Your playlist this Sunday must include: Sarkai Lo Khatiya, Main Toh Raste Se Jaa Raha Tha, Main Laila Laila Chilaunga Kurta Phad Ke and Akhiyon Se Goli Maare n Fashion bomb: Garish became Govinda’s signature style in the 1990s. Velvet tux, gold zippers on shoes, orange pants and yellow overalls. He’s been there, worn that n Everyman’s hero: Easy roles, slapstick humour and that endearing grin. What’s not to love?

PEOPLE

Bugs Bunny Meets Julia Roberts I T MIGHT be fair to say that the general interest in Victoria Ocampo was never as high as in early October. As people queued up outside Stein auditorium in India Habitat Centre, Delhi, snippets of conversation could be heard about the life and times of Ms Ocampo. So who is Victoria Ocampo? A certain Argentine writer/intellectual with whom the poet Rabindranath Tagore shared a brief, and much publicised relationship. Why the sudden surge of interest in her? Because Kalki Koechlin was playing her in the Manav Kaul production, Colour Blind. We meet Koechlin off stage for the interview and she gives a full, radiant smile as she sinks into a lounge chair and crosses her feet. As we start talking I’m reminded of what Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the Koechlinstarrer That Girl in Yellow Boots: She is a figure of instant enigma. A young white woman in Mumbai, speaking Hindi, living alone... consumed by an obsession... we learn she is half-Indian. Ebert was describing Ruth, the character Koechlin portrayed in the Anurag Kashyap-directed 2010 film. But it may well be one of the more accurate descriptions of Koechlin herself and the journey she embarked on after coming to Mumbai to try her luck at acting.

She’s a white woman in Mumbai, speaking Hindi, consumed by an obsession for cinema. Get to know the real Kalki Koechlin by Asad Ali

WOMEN WHO CAUSE

COLOUR ME DESI

Koechlin was born in a small village outside Puducherry to parents of French descent, Joel and Françoise, devotees of Sri Aurobindo. Growing up, she dealt with her share of confusion, primarily related to her own identity as a white-skinned woman growing up in Tamil Nadu. “It was bizarre because in every photograph you could see this one white kid amidst a group of dark south Indian kids!” laughs Koechlin. Koechlin’s love for acting took shape at the residential Hebron School in Ooty. As a child, there were times when she had to defend her Indian-ness. At social gatherings it was assumed she was a firang and was asked, “How do

Kashyap was. It was only after the auditions that she got a call from him and she researched about his work: “I saw Black Friday and thought that this is work of substance. To be honest I had dismissed Bollywood because of the jhatkas and matkas. So it was nice to see his work.” Given that Dev.D dramatically remodelled the role of Chandramukhi to suit modern-day sensibilities, how did she go about preparing for it? “Anurag told me to not watch the Sanjay Bhansali version, or read about it. Instead he gave me a bunch of DVDs to watch, mostly about prostitutes who negotiate different life situations.” Next up was the Bejoy Nambiar-directed Shaitan where Koechlin played Amy, yet another edgy role for which she received acclaim. However, as is the norm in Bollywood, Koechlin started to get similary ‘dark’ roles from directors: “I only started getting roles of prostitutes or those I-am-a-disturbed-teenager kind of roles! It takes time for people to warm up to the idea that actors can cover a wide gamut of emotions.” So, when Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara came her way, she was keen on doing it, despite the role being very short, because it was quite different.

you like it here? Do you like spicy food?” Next came Goldsmith’s College, London, (“a left wing, arty college known for wackos like Damien Hirst”) where Koechlin studied drama and theatre. “I was quite intimidated when I first got there. Everyone had some defined identity. Some had purple hair, some had ‘I am a lesbian’ written on their T-shirt. On the other hand, I was too normal and that scared me initially,” says Koechlin. During her stay in London, Koechlin became part of a troupe

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

called Theatre of Relativity. After finishing her studies, when she moved back to Bengaluru, there was hardly any stimulating work to be found. Koechlin soon realised that Mumbai was her best bet if a career in acting was what she wanted. She was moving in the right circles and also earning some money on the side – “I did some terrible teleshopping ads for those useless machines supposed to make you lose weight!” she recalls. It wasn’t long before Koechlin auditioned for Dev.D. She says she had “no idea” who Anurag

In recent times Koechlin has emerged as the fresh new face of Bollywood who is vocal about women’s equality and gender issues. Earlier this year, she spoke at a conference on child sexual abuse (CSA) organised by actor Rahul Bose’s NGO H.E.A.L. “I remember mentioning in passing that I too had faced such trauma as a child. I really didn’t know that it would be such a huge deal afterwards.” One of Koechlin’s films which dealt with the issue of CSA was That Girl in Yellow Boots – directed by Kashyap – that she co-wrote. Kashyap, says Koechlin, wanted a woman’s perspective and hence asked her to write the script. But Koechlin voices her suspicion rather bluntly: “I think Anurag

Photos: GETTY IMAGES

ONCE A POWER COUPLE

In retrospect, being transparent about her relationship with Anurag Kashyap wasn’t such a great idea, says Kalki was just feeling sorry for me because I was unemployed at the time and he gave me this job!” But what exactly was wrong with the movie? “It was Anurag’s idea and tough for me to tackle because it wasn’t my story at all – also, my dad is not the person who abused me sexually, just to let you know because that’s what Ruth’s story is about in the film!”

OF STAGE & LOVE

“As soon as Anurag and I started dating, we spoke about it. We didn’t want to use the ‘we’re only friends’ line,” laughs Koechlin, but says that she now regrets being so transparent about her personal life. “It just takes centre stage instead of your work, which is what you should be in the limelight for,” she says. Speaking of stage, how does she manage to maintain balance between theatre and cinema? “I don’t! I’m either doing films or theatre and it’s taking a toll on my body,” she says. Admitting she can be a bit of a workaholic, Koechlin says, “I love theatre a lot. It just keeps me sharp. But I love the film work I’m doing too,” and winks before adding, “it gets me the money which theatre doesn’t!” Koechlin though, doesn’t need to worry about lack of work, for now. Her film Margarita, with a Straw is slated for an early 2015 release. Directed by Shonali Bose, the film is about the life of a young woman with cerebral palsy – the film takes a lot of cues from Bose’s own cousin Malini, who was born with the condition. It’s gained much attention at film festivals abroad and looks set to be one of Koechlin’s most powerful performances yet. To play the role

of someone differently-abled is a challenge Koechlin was prepared for. She spent a lot of time with Malini: “I lived with her, went drinking, dancing, did everything to understand what I needed to do in the film.” Koechlin took to using the wheelchair as well, right from when she woke up in the morning. Explaining the minute physicalities that the role demanded, Koechlin says, “Even breathing in such a condition is different. Your lungs take in less air and by the time you can finish a sentence, you’re out of breath. The body muscles collapse in a lot of ways.” Koechlin says that in order to perfect the manner of speaking with a certain lisp, she tried everything – from putting marbles in her mouth to asking her dentist to give her a ‘dead tongue’ so she could get the enunciation just right. Next, Koechlin is set to star in a Raj-DK film called Happy Ending, releasing this month. It is a comedy, a genre that Koechlin loves. Another film in the pipeline is Jiah aur Jiah, directed by Howard Rosemeyer. She is also going to share screen space with Naseeruddin Shah in an upcoming Anu Menon film titled Waiting. Ask her about directors she would love to work with and Koechlin’s eyes light up: “I feel so greedy! But I guess Lars von Trier and Michel Gondry would make it to my ideal directors list!” With her films making their presence felt on the global stage, one wonders if the list will remain ‘ideal’ for long. As I wish her goodnight, she smiles her dazzling smile once more and I remember a character in That Girl in Yellow Boots describing Ruth as “sort of like Bugs Bunny meets Julia Roberts.” Koechlin could fit that description nicely.

“I feel so greedy [for roles]! But I guess Lars von Trier and Michel Gondry would make it to my ideal directors list”

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

asad.ali@hindustantimes.com Follow @AsadAli1989 on Twitter

HEALTH FOR DIABETICS

SUG N O I T AR U RUS CA H N A O I H T E U AD A C Photos: SHUTTERSTOCK , THINKSTOCK

Patients of diabetes know sugar is bad and avoid it. But sugar is a carbohydrate – essential for the body. Here’s how to tell the good carbs from the bad by Atisha Jain

OU HAVE been diagnosed with diabetes. “Par main to mitha khaata hi nahi hoon,” you argue. Your family and friends instantaneously declare a sugar divorce. Your morning cuppa is no longer sweet. Your spouse has found new, innovative places to hide the mithai boxes. Dessert has deserted you. And your kitchen now holds packets of ingredients labelled ‘healthy’ and ‘nutritious’. It’s enough to make you sick. You may think you’ve eliminated all the sugar. But you haven’t. Not by a long shot. “Sugar in any simple form is forbidden to diabetic patients,” says Dr Saptarshi Bhattacharya, endocrinologist, Max Super Specialty Hospital. “Whether it’s in juices, sweets or chocolates, any form of sugar which is easily digestible should be avoided.”

BODY BASICS

We tend to forget that sugar is a carbohydrate and most carbohydrates ultimately break down into sugar. That is why it is important to keep tabs on your carbohydrate count to manage your blood glucose levels. How do you tell the good carbs om the evil? Simple and refined from

sugar and starches (bread and pasta made with white flour, white sugar, sodas, cakes and candies) get absorbed by the body rapidly and have a high glycemic index, meaning they cause blood sugar levels to rise rapidly after eating. So, look out for words like glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, maltose, and galactose in the ingredients list of the processed foods you buy. They are all simple sugars. Other carbohydrates, such as the fibre found in whole grains, fruits and vegetables (spinach, cabbage, brown rice, cauliflower, broccoli) move slowly through the digestive system, and much of it isn’t digested at all because it’s insoluble fibre. That’s simple so far, but now it gets a little complicated.We just told you to avoid food products that list fructose or lactose on their ingredients list. But fructose is found in fruits, and lactose in dairy products. Does that mean you should avoid fruit and dairy? The answer is a firm NO. Because the source of the carbohydrates matters just as much as its type and quantity. A fruit is healthier than a food product with fructose simply because fructose is just one ele-

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

ment of the fruit. It also has fibre, vitamins and antioxidants that keep you satisfied longer after a meal. The same goes for vegetables and grains which contain simple carbs mostly in the form of sucrose. On the other hand, processed foods such as cookies, candies, and cakes are high on added sugars but devoid of nutrients, leading to cravings and wide fluctuations in blood-sugar levels.

SLOW IS BEAUTIFUL

Don’t let all that information you’ve just read convince you to go on a carb-free diet. That’s not the point at all. “Carbohydrates are an important constituent of any diet and the source of energy for our body,” says Dr Bhattacharya. However, you do have to look at carbs in a somewhat different way than you may at present be used to. Think of them as slow burning wood in a bonfire rather than dry hay, writes fitness expert Deanne Panday, in her book Shut Up And Train! And this applies especially to diabetics whose bodies cannot cope with blood sugar spikes. That is why it is better to have a whole fruit than a glass of tetrapacked fruit juice, or anything with added sugar. The fibre in the fruit allows the body to break down the sugar (a carbohydrate) in a slow and steady manner, which means the glucose will take a longer time to be released

SOMEBODY STOP ME Invited to a party and looking at the food longingly? Who said you can’t enjoy a buffet because you are diabetic?

INDIAN

Half the plate should contain tandoori veggies or salad and the other half a combination of paneer subzi with one chapati or one cup each of dal and rice.

CONTINENTAL

Greek salad or fattoush salad and two slices of thin crust pizza, wholewheat pasta with twice the amount of veggies in red sauce.

CHINESE

Avoid the gravies as there’s a good chance of hidden sugar in the sauces. Enjoy tofu and veggies or un-breaded chicken preparations sautéed with garlic and ginger, with one cup steamed rice.

Courtesy: Lovneet Batra, Clinical Nutritionist, Fortis La Femme

into the blood stream, and your blood sugar levels will rise much more slowly.

THE EVIL WITHIN

You may be tracking your carb intake. But you still have to watch out for simple sugars hiding in the most complicated places. Sugar lurks in the shadows under many aliases, sabotaging

arte h d abelles sugar” l s t c produ ith exces t a h t andal e loaded w c s e t bsolu -free can b a n a “It’s thy or fat heal

HEALTH ALTH FOR DIABETICS NO, YOU DON’T HAVE TO DESERT THE DESSERT Being diabetic doesn’t mean you have to bid adieu to sweets altogether. You can try these once a week: Dry rasgulla (1 piece) Calories – 100, Carbs – 15 Makhana kheer (1 katori) Calories – 72, Carbs – 9 Baked apple with cinnamon (1 small apple) Calories – 78, Carbs – 21 Srikhand (1 katori) Calories – 78, Carbs – 15 Almond ﬁlled baked peaches (1 peach) Calories – 85, Carbs – 13 However, the timing of indulging is very important. “Don’t have it right after the meal as it further increases the blood glucose levels. Rather have it as an in-between meal snack,” says Lovneet Batra. Besides, it’s imperative that you never replace a main meal with a dessert. Make treats, treats, not a routine. Courtesy: LOVNEET BATRA

your intentions of healthy eating without your even knowing it. “It hides under several names, including high fructose corn syrup, dried cane syrup, invert sugar, brown rice syrup, dextrose anhydrous, dextrose monohydrate, dried glucose syrup, demerara sugar, treacle, high fructose insulin syrup, corn sugar, xylose and caramel syrup,” says Lovneet Batra, clinical nutritionist, Fortis La Femme. Besides, a product heavy with sugar needn’t be sweet. “Some not-so-sweet sugarladen foods are ketchup, salad dressing (even the low-fat variety) and cereal (including ‘natural varieties’),” she adds. So what do you do? You turn to the ‘healthy’ and ‘nutritious’ products. But guess what! Just because a product claims to be healthy (read, zero transfat, fat-free, high-fibre, or made with whole grains) it need not necessarily be low on sugar, and thus advisable for a diabetic patient. A packet of oats ‘high in fibre’ and ‘made with whole grain’ has 14 gms of sugar per 100 gms. Pre-mixed soups like Chinese Manchow

As failing ugar divor c marri age the is long ov e at’s c soup have around 13 ausin rdue. This gms of added sugar per 100 g a lo t of m is a gms. “Even ‘organic food’ means isery! SLASH that the food is grown without THAT SUGAR using pesticides. It doesn’t imply it

is without sugars,” clarifies Batra. In fact, if you’re serious about your health, says Dr Aseem Malhotra, cardiologist and science director, Action on Sugar (a group of specialists working to bring about a reduction in the amount of sugar in processed foods), you must avoid all food packages marked with a ‘healthy’ label. “Labelling itself is synonymous with ‘processed’ and it is processed food that’s driving the epidemics of obesity and type-2 diabetes.” Besides, labels are not exactly user-friendly. “In many cases, you need to be a math whiz to figure out how many grams of sugar or calories a product contains,” says research neuroscientist, Dr Nicole Avena, author of Why Diets Fail: Because You’re Addicted to Sugar. So how should a diabetic decipher nutritional labels? A good way to do it is to look at the ‘total carbohydrates’ content of the product, not just the ‘added sugars’ content, recommends Dr Anoop Mishra, chairman, Fortis C-DOC Centre of Excellence for Diabetes, Metabolic Diseases and Endocrinology.

Although Dr Mishra says you don’t need to ban sugar altogether even if you’re diabetic, Dr Avena recommends a sugar separation even for non-diabetics. “Try to go two weeks without added sugar,” she says. “This way, you can see how it affects you, how much you were really eating, and if you were dependent on it. After that, you can decide if you need a divorce.” But that is not as easy as it sounds. Our daily consumption of sugar is seriously high, even when we avoid sweets. Even as I write this piece, I realise I am already over the WHO recommendation of 20 gms of sugar per day, for women. By 12 noon, I had had a bowl of cereal with milk (10 gms) and later, a banana (12 gms). Sugar is only an indulgence, and can be done away with, says Dr Malhotra. “It’s important for people to understand that there is no biological requirement for added sugar for our bodies,” he says. “A sugar divorce is long overdue. This is a failing marriage that’s causing a lot of misery!”

atisha.jain@hindustantimes.com Follow on Twitter @JainAtisha

WELLNESS

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

It’s Time To Talk

There was a time when, if you went to a therapist for help, people assumed you were ‘mad.’ But for many young people today, therapy is the only way to stay sane by Parul Khanna

HAT DO you do when you feel lost? Confused? Incapable of dealing with relationships? Chances are you keep these feelings to yourself. Or, at best, talk about them with close friends or family members without much hope of having them resolved. It wouldn’t occur to you to go seek professional help – that is, talk these problems through with a trained psychotherapist or counsellor. Why should you? These are small emotions, nothing major. You’re not mad or anything. Just a bit confused. And you’re not American or something to go running to a therapist for every little problem. No way. If this is how you think, you may want to reconsider. Because, over the last few years, more and more twenty-and-thirtysomethings in India have begun to see therapy as a positive step towards a happier, better fulfilled life. That’s what Madhvi Bhalla, counselling psychologist at The British Psychological Society, UK, discovered when she moved back to India from London. Bhalla

meets 20 patients every week, all of whom need help with the challenges of everyday living. They’re not ‘mad.’ They just believe that even ‘minor emotional crises’ can affect the way they live, and that professional help can change these for the better.

THE COUCH IS COMFORTABLE

There are many reasons for why we seem to have changed our minds about therapy as a possible solution for everyday problems. First, of course, is the fact that as society changes, people become unsure of their roles in life and look for some sort of guidance. They also lack the support of family systems that the older generations had, and often can’t bring themselves to be completely open with their friends either. “Friends come from their own spaces, experiences and thought processes, whereas a therapist is a master of human

behaviour,” says Nandita Diwan, a 30-year-old journalist who goes to a therapist to learn how her childhood shaped her into the adult she is. Diwan finds it difficult to navigate the challenges of life, and though she had talked about her problems with her parents, family members and friends (she also tried astrology), she was unable to resolve her issues and finally, as a last resort, began therapy. Job stress, job uncertainty, the pressures of everyday life, the tension of relationships… these are also pushing many young people to seek professional help. “There’s no obvious way to live. There are just so many subjective ways, and that’s confusing people,” says Bhalla. As we begin to see ourselves as individuals rather than merely members of a family, the ‘Who am I?’ question looms large. “Society is moving towards

The tension of relationships is among the factors pushing young people to seek professional help

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

an interest in the self,” says Sujata Chatterjee, a consultant clinical psychologist. “‘How do I function in the larger collective?’ is the question people want answers to.”

TIME FOR A COUNSELLOR?

People also want answers to these questions: Why and when should they try therapy? How will they know when they really need help? The answer is quite simple, say experts in mental health. If whatever’s bothering you begins to affect your day-to-day functioning, call a counsellor. “That’s the warning sign,” says Bhalla. Ask yourself these questions, suggests Chatterjee. “If you are going through anything in the list below, you may want to explore therapy,” she says. n Do I want to know myself ? n Am I struggling with the people around me, or with situations? n Do I need support, and am I struggling to find that support in the people around me? n Do I know what my strengths are? n Am I finding myself stuck somewhere – at the office, in a relationship, with people? n Is my life story playing on repeat mode? Do I keep making the same mistakes all the time? n Am I trapped in a story I believe about myself ? Psychotherapy, says Bhalla,

can help with a range of problems: anxiety, trauma, depression, sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, issues with self-esteem, trouble with relationships or just an inability to normalise part of your life. The last problem is why 35-year-old lawyer Aditya Panicker is seeing a therapist. He finds it difficult to handle working life after the fun of college. And he’s also unable to accept that his seven-year relationship with his girlfriend has completely broken down.

HOW THERAPY WORKS

One of the biggest benefits of therapy is that it lets you know that you have options. That you are not simply stuck in a situation beyond your control. It also helps identify negative behavioural patterns. Usually, when faced with challenges, people react or think in similar patterns, which keeps them stuck in a rut all their lives and harms them. Therapy helps people recognise why they do what they do, even if it is negative, selfharming behaviour. For example, says Chatterjee, one of the most common negative patterns that emerges when a relationship has broken down is the inability to manage hurt and anger. “Once you identify that inability, you process it and react to it differently to arrive at a different conclusion,” explains Chatterjee. She adds: “The ultimate aim is to know yourself better. When you know more about yourself, you are not a slave to your in-built emotional reactions or your default settings. Understanding this can help you make positive changes in your life by thinking and acting differently.” A good friend could help you sort out your emotions, but a good therapist judges nobody and has no vested interests, so talking to her or him means that you could go on a journey of self-discovery in a contained, safe space.

HOW TO GET HELP n Word-of-mouth is the best way to ﬁnd a good therapist. Talk to friends who go for therapy about what their therapist is like. n Your doctor or a psychiatrist could recommend a good therapist. Or ask at a couple of the bigger hospitals. n Be clear about what you want from therapy. What are the results you are looking for? Read up on the Internet and self-analyse. n After two or three sessions, ask yourself if you feel comfortable opening up to your therapist. If not, try someone else. n You should be able to talk to the therapist about anything. If you feel judged, overpowered or disrespected by your therapist, try someone else. The therapist should not talk down to you. You should feel heard, empathised with and safe. Courtesy: Madhvi Bhalla, counsellor psychologist

resources (financial and family). But it isn’t an easy process. Therapy can force you to face emotions you may not want to even acknowledge, so while it can be cathartic, it can also be painful. So therapy works only if you let it. For Nandita Diwan, therapy has almost been like a magic cure. Within 15 sessions, she travelled from helplessness to empowerment. She feels ready to face life on her own. “I realised my past was shaping the opinion I had of myself,” she says. “Therapy helped me create a space that other people couldn’t trample on.” There’s still something of a stigma about it though. Most people in therapy don’t like to mention it to other people. “My close friends know about my sessions, but I keep it a secret from others because their reaction would most probably be ‘He must be really f**ked up’,” says 35-year old advertising professional Rajesh Airy, who’s in therapy to learn why he can’t seem to sustain a relationship. That said, therapy is no magic bullet, but it can help, says Aditya Panicker. “It isn’t foolproof,” he says. “But in the eight months I’ve been in therapy, I’ve come a long way. I am more independent emotionally.”

The ultimate aim is to know yourself better. This can help you make positive changes in your life

ALL BETTER NOW?

Most people need 15 to 25 sessions with a therapist before their problems are resolved. Sometimes, however, more sessions are required. How well therapy works depends on how hard the client and therapist work together, the client’s inherent strength, and the client’s

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

brunchletters@hindustantimes.com

TRAVEL

Gawk Like An Egyptian

Walk among pyramids, take a cruise on the Nile, or haggle at the Khan el-Khalili market - Cairo has something for everyone text and photos by Amisha Chowbey

EFORE YOU step into the land of the powerful pharaohs, you need to bust a few myths about Egypt. For starters, you won’t spot Lucky Ali crooning O Sanam on the steps of the Great Pyramid! But for the determined traveller, an action packed two-day itinerary can include all the “must-see” historical sights. Pack bottles of water, munchies, hand-fans and hats to cool off, and you’re good to go.

DAY

THE PYRAMIDS

What better way to kickstart the “touristy” experience than to witness the grandeur of the Pyramids? Located in the Giza Necropolis over an hour’s drive from Cairo, the Pyramids and the stately Sphinx have survived centuries of vandalism and still stand tall as the only remaining wonder out of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

It might appear dry and brown at first, but there’s grace in the triangular tombs and an addictive mystery about their history. Even though you may have seen the Pyramids countless times in reproductions, seeing them in real life will leave you reeling. The largest of the more than hundred Pyramids scattered throughout Egypt, is the Pyramid of Khufu (or the Great Pyramid) that stands at over 138 metres. It comprises approximately 2.3 million blocks of limestone and weighs about 6.5 million tonnes. Strolling along the Giza Pyramid complex, you will be awestruck by the massive structures, even as hawkers try to grab your attention with souvenirs. Then go gaze at the majestic Sphinx, the shrines of officials from the reign of the pharaohs and smaller satellite pyramids of the queens, besides the three large pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. Another great site for Pyramid

BLASTS FROM THE PAST

sighting is Saqqara, half an hour’s drive from Giza. Use the drive to cool off, drink some water or stop for mangoes on the way. Saqqara houses the step Pyramid of Djoser, which is also the first Pyramid to be built in Egypt. With fewer tourists, the thrill of visiting this site is different from the experience in Giza. The tour guide points to what seems like a mound of dust, but when you go inside, you see clear hieroglyphs on the walls and ceilings of the Pyramid of Teti. If Teti is the icing on the cake, the mastaba of Kagemni is the cherry on top. The relief drawings and intact colours make for a jawdropping end to the Pyramid overdose. In case you haven’t had your fill of Pyramids, finish off with a sound and light show at Giza.

The Pyramid of Khafre (left); the mosque of Muhammed Ali

A DATE WITH HISTORY

The city of a thousand minarets, a breathtaking panoramic view of Cairo unfurls itself from atop the citadel DAY

CITY LIFE

Bustling with people, Cairo’s vibe is not unlike an Indian city’s. When you drive through this City of the Dead to see the brilliance of the mosque of Muhammed Ali, there’s a sense of familiarity, a contrast to the alien nature of the Pyramids. Popularly called the city of a thousand minarets, the breathtaking panoramic view of Cairo unfurls itself from atop its famous citadel. Descending from the citadel, the Egyptian Museum is a mustsee, even if you expect a mummy to walk past you in the hallways! Then there’s the glittering collection of King Tutankhamun. On display are his belongings – ranging from his pure-gold mummy case, the iconic mask and even the carefully preserved underwear! You probably need half a day to do full justice, but for more restless souls, an hour-long trip will suffice. Another interesting part to visit is the Coptic area in the city, with its churches and quaint streets. Here stands the oldest church in Egypt, where Joseph and Mary are said to have fled to with baby Jesus and where they spent almost threeand-a-half years, waiting for the next cue from the Guardian Angel. Spend a couple of peaceful moments here before you plunge into the chaos of the Khan el-Khalili market. This is where you quit the game of dodge-the-hawkers and go straight at them, haggling over prices, getting bargains. The best picks are the natural perfumes, scrolls of paintings done on papyrus and beautiful reproductions of the Pyramids. The perfect end to an exciting day? A quiet evening cruise on the Nile. You can choose the dinner cruise with the sassy belly-dancers or hire a felucca small boat. It’s exciting in every way. Cairo makes for a completely delightful trip, with hospitality fit for pharaohs and exciting possibilities for exploration. It’s like stepping back into time, into the secrets of the past.

The relief drawings make for a jaw-dropping end to the Pyramid overdose

brunchletters@hindustantimes.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

indulge

Photo: SHUTTERSTOCK

For The Love oF ScoTch In Scotland, as in India, Scotch is more than just a drink. It’s a religion. And like all religions, it requires a ceremony like none other Vir Sanghvi

rude drink

T IS A strange thing to say but there are only two countries in the world where Scotch whisky is more than just an alcoholic drink. The first is, of course, Scotland. Scotch is that nation’s greatest product, its finest export and the one drink that places a relatively small country in the top league of the world’s nations. The other, oddly enough, is India. We like to think that the Raj bequeathed us the legacy of Scotch-drinking, but I’m not so sure. The British drank a lot of gin when they were in India (tonic water was invented here and so was that great mixed drink gin and tonic) and yet there’s not much gin consumed in India these days. We prefer vodka which has no British connection. Prohibition in the post-independence era made Scotch seem like the forbidden fruit. Despite police raids and anti-smuggling drives, the Indian thirst for Scotch was so insatiable that the smugglers found it worth their while to persist. And often they mixed Indian whisky with Scotch and passed it off as the real thing. In the process, Scotch became much more than a mere drink. It became a measure of several other things. The most obvious of these was class. If you thought of yourself as upper middle class, then you served Scotch to your guests, no matter how much it stretched your budget

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

because Indian whisky was socially unacceptable. If you wanted to indicate wealth in Hindi cinema, then you made sure your character had a bottle of Scotch (Vat 69, usually!) on view somewhere in his house. If you gave a valued friend a present, then nothing worked better than a bottle of Scotch. In the process, a whole Scotch sub-culture developed. One of my parents’ close friends was the editor and bon vivant RK Karanjia (the founder-editor of Blitz) who only served and drank Scotch. If he went to a party where they were serving Indian whisky, he asked for rum instead. If the Scotch was dodgy, as it so often was in these days, he wasted it after a single sip. As the great and classy Tiger Pataudi used to joke, many Indians were uncomfortable drinking Scotch outside of India because “it tastes very different from what we are used to here.” Though my father was a dedicated Scotch drinker – Chivas Regal mainly – it took me a while to get into the whisky culture because it seemed so grown-up and sophisticated. But fortunately for my generation, liberalisation removed many of the old barriers to the import of Scotch. Not only did we have access to the finest whiskies from Scotland, we could discover the single malts that were never available in India in the old days. And with liberalisation came choice. My father bought his Chivas abroad, at duty-free shops and I hardly saw it served at most Indian homes, even those of the very rich. Later I discovered one possible explanation. In the old days, Chivas was owned by Seagrams which was owned by the Jewish Bronfman family. So no smuggler in Dubai was even willing to touch it, let alone pass it on to his associates in India. (Seagrams has since been taken over by the entirely gentile French company Pernod-Ricard but nobody needs smugglers any longer in the era of liberalised imports.) When you talk to the pioneers of the legitimate Scotch whisky business in India, they have fascinating stories to tell about how difficult it was to broaden people’s tastes and to get them to try new whiskies (including single malts) in the years after liberalisation. Torquhil Campbell (well, his full title is The Thirteenth Duke of Argyll) came here in the Nineties from London to sell Chivas only to find that Indians had not been allowed to develop a taste for it because the smugglers steered clear of Bronfman-related products. Peter Prentice started out selling J&B Scotch, which nobody in India had heard of, but by the time he switched to marketing Chivas, he found that Indians were more receptive to quality. And a new generation which had no memory of the dodgy so-called Scotch sold by ‘smugglers’ showed a genuine interest in learning more about blended Scotch and rare single malts. It was Peter who put me up for membership of The Keepers of the Quaich. This is a body in the heart of the Scotch whisky establishment with about 3,000 (at best) members from around the world who are chosen for their appreciation of “the great cause of Scotch whisky.”

Liberalisation removed many of the old barriers to the import of Scotch. Not only did we have access to the finest whiskies, we also discovered the single malts

Photo: SHANNON TOFTS PHOTOGRAPHY

2 SNIPPETS FROM SCOTLAND

1. Atholl Highlanders form guard of honour outside Blair Castle 2. Torquhil Campbell, the Thirteenth Duke of Argyll, came to India in the 1990s to sell Chivas while 3. Peter Prentice started out by selling J&B Scotch 4. The investiture ceremony for The Keepers of the Quaich is followed by a banquet and entertainment 5. We put our hand on the Quaich to take a solemn vow to uphold the traditions of the Keepers

5 Something like 95 per cent of the Keepers are whisky professionals and after 10 years of membership the most distinguished Keepers are chosen as Masters of the Quaich. The society is taken very seriously by the whisky world, membership is subject to rigorous screening by the management committee and every big name in the whisky world is a member. For instance, this year, they made Diageo boss, Ivan Menezes a Master and the Keepers included people like Andrew Lindsay who supplied the finest quality grain to Chivas Brothers for their whisky. So I was somewhat sceptical when Peter made me fill in a nomination form. But obviously their selection process is not infallible and so I found myself at Blair Castle, near Edinburgh for the investiture ceremony. This turned out to be more elaborate than I had imagined. The guests were in evening dress, which in the case of the Scots meant kilts and in the case of Torquhil, meant full Ducal regalia including the silver salmon symbol that has been the mark of his people for over a thousand years. Foreigners wore black tie (except for Ivan Menezes who carried off his kilt with style – clearly he’s been doing this for a long time!) and the women were expected to wear long gowns with the sash of the Quaich. We were led to a large room in the castle where we lined up till each of us was called to put his hand on the Quaich (a large silver bowl, basically) and to take a solemn vow to uphold the traditions of the Keepers. Then, they pinned a medal on each of us, we shook hands with Lord Dalhousie, the Grandmaster of the Quaich (it all sounds vaguely Masonic in the retelling, I admit) and then we wandered off for a full-on banquet in the Scottish style with marching soldiers, military bands (bagpipers etc) an ode to the haggis (a Scottish delicacy that, regret-

4 tably, has limited appeal to non-Scots), formal toasts and finally entertainment which ended with Lord Bruce keeping up his family’s tradition of leading the Keepers in a performance of ‘Scotland Yet’. This is a patriotic song but I’m not sure how seriously we were meant to take it as the instructions were: “To stand during the first verse, stand on the chair during the second verse and for the third, to have one foot on the chair and one foot on the table.” The high spot of the banquet was – as you might imagine – the whiskies. We drank Naked Grouse (auld blend) Haig Club (single grain), Benriach Authenticus (25 years old), The Glenrothes (1995) and my personal favourite Aberlour (16 years). There were other parties too – including one hosted by the Duke of Argyll – and I was grateful for the opportunity to taste more rare whiskies throughout my stay in Edinburgh. Did I deserve to be a Keeper in this august company? Probably not, though of course I’m grateful that they inducted me and invited me to Scotland. But I guess that there was a message behind my induction. It was Scotland’s way of telling India that it recognised the very special role Scotch whisky has played in Indian drinking habits. Our two countries are not yet united by independence from the English (Scotland voted ‘no’ around a fortnight before I got there). But we are united by our love of whisky.

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

MORE ON THE WEB For more columns by Vir Sanghvi, log on to hindustantimes. com/brunch The views expressed by the columnist are personal

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Not Ready to Shut dowN yet

The year 2014 may be drawing to a close, but there’s still a lot happening in the world of technology

T’S ALMOST the end of the year. For most companies the big launches and big ticket releases are over. We’ve had some huge events in the last few days with the Apple iPhone twins and the new iPads; the Samsung Note 4, the Alpha, the new Tab S slates, plus their new Gear Smartwatch; HTC One M8; Motorola’s second generation of G and X phones and the Moto 360 Smartwatch; Lenovo’s big bomb Yoga 2 Tablets, Sony’s Z3 and Z3 Compact and about a dozen more headline-making products. That makes it some of the most productive 60 days on the tech calendar. Thus, most companies will wait it out and make the next market-shaking announcements in the new year. This is offseason for new stuff, the ho-hum gap in which you pause for breath. At least that’s how November and December usu-

from one side that makes this a standout device. In a world where companies now play safe and don’t do anything radical, the Edge is just, well – really edgy. The second screen on the side has a life of its own, has actual utility built in, can be a life-saver in a pinch and is a truly radical way to rethink smartphone use and efficiency. Expect the Edge in India in December for about `65K.

TRULY EDGY

Samsung’s Note Edge is a radical way to rethink smartphone use and efficiency

NEXUS 6

Rajiv Makhni

techilicious ally pan out. But this year, even the last few days have mega-awaited devices all set to be unleashed.

IMAC 5K

NEXT TECH GOD DEVICE

Apple offers the first 5k on a computing device with the iMac

THE FLAGSHIP KILLER

OnePlus One delivers almost everything at 1/4th the price of any top-level phone

Once again, Apple hits a home run with a product that may not be radically out-of-thebox, but makes it seem like the ‘Coming Of The Next Tech God’ device. This is the iMac getting retina resolution on a seriously big display. And, as Apple has determined that there must be a certain number of pixels per inch for something to be called a retina display, they had to go for a 5K instead of a 4K for this iMac to qualify. May I suggest a totally different reason? Other 4K display desktops and even laptops are now available and this is Apple’s way of ensuring headlines with the first 5K on a computing machine. The good thing is, the product has super high specs and the screen looks gorgeous. It’s going to be gorgeously expensive too.

ONEPLUS ONE

Talk about disastrous launches! We’ve been hearing about this phone and this brand coming into India since July. Finally, the company seems to have got their act together and the One should be here in another three weeks. The OnePlus One is called the smartphone-flagship killer as it delivers almost everything you need in a top-level phone at about 1/4th the price. Pretty much another Xiaomi. And, this phone looks good with a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 3100 mAh battery, magnesium chassis, full-HD screen and a price point under `15K.

SAMSUNG NOTE EDGE

Many call this the most anticipated phone of 2014, and yet most people didn’t even know it existed till it was announced with the Note 4 recently. The Note 4 has started off selling very well in India, but the Edge is what a lot of people are now waiting for. While the specs are amazing and the ergonomics really good – it’s the curve off the screen

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

The rumour was that the Nexus line may get killed off and only Android One will take things forward. The Nexus 6 is big and solid proof of things being just the exact opposite. This time, Google got Motorola to make it for them and they’ve gone for the absolute top-of-the-line with no compromises at all. A 5.96-inch, 2560x1440 quad-HD display, a 13MP rear camera, 3GB of RAM, a 3220 mAh battery and most critically, stock Android 5.0 Lollipop. The HI-END DEVICE only difference this time is that The Nexus 6 is absolutely there may not be Nexus-level agtop-of-the-line without gressive pricing and this compromises phone may well be priced upwards of `35K.

GIONEE S5.1

Gionee set the market on fire with WINNING COMBO the S5.5 which also took on the Gionee’s new S5.1 takes coveted title of the world’s slim- form, factor and design to a mest phone. While that title may new level be at stake with Oppo’s new super slim phone (there is controversy there too, as the camera protrudes a fair bit out of the body on the Oppo), Gionee’s brand new S5.1 is eagerly awaited for far more than just its extreme thinness. This is a phone that is now going to be trying to claim the title of the world’s most good-looking phone. And, in a world where there are some seriously awesome looking phones, the S5.1 actually takes form, factor and design to a whole new level. Great specs, excellent optics and a price point that may well be less than `20k could make this one more huge winner for Gionee. Hope you’ve saved up some cash to get your hands on all this great stuff that the last 60 days of the year seem all poised to bring out. All of this ensures that the curtain on 2014 draws close with a big bang. Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology, NDTV, and the anchor of Gadget Guru, Cell Guru and Newsnet 3

MORE ON THE WEB For more Techilicious columns, log on to hindustantimes.com/brunch. Follow Rajiv on Twitter at twitter.com/RajivMakhni The views expressed by the columnist are personal

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Aki Kumar went to the US to become a software engineer. But the boy from Mumbai ended up making waves as a bluesman in California

Y NEWEST discovery of a bluesman is a 34-year-old harmonica player and singer who has been creating ripples – some of it still subterranean – in California’s Bay Area but whose story began in Mumbai. Aki (full name: Akarsha) Kumar was born in Mumbai and moved to the US only in 1998 when he was 18, ostensibly to study like thousands of Indian students do. He became a software engineer in the US, again like many young Indians who go to the US become. Those Indians quickly fall in step with the pursuit of ‘the Great American Dream’ and live the life of what we here call NRIs, some of whom many of us saw waving at the cameras at a particular event at the Madison Square Garden stadium not long ago. Only, in Aki Kumar’s case, things took a deliciously interesting twist. He began playing the blues. First parttime and then, when his blues career began flourishing – he started getting regular gigs – he turned full-time. I discovered Kumar on a recent episode of the Bandana

Sanjoy Narayan

download central MORE ON THE WEB To give feedback, stream or download the music mentioned in this column, go to blogs. hindustantimes.com/ download-central. Write to Sanjoy at sanjoy.narayan@ hindustantimes. com. Follow @ SanjoyNarayan on Twitter

Blues podcast, which I think is the best weekly blues podcast I have heard but more on that later. The song I heard on the podcast was Mumbai Express, an original composition by Kumar and an instrumental that seemed to be influenced by Junior Parker’s famous blues standard from the 1950s, Mystery Train. On Mumbai Express, a lively track, Kumar shows how versatile he’s on the harmonica and has, as part of his band, an accomplished guitarist, Kid Anderson. Interestingly, like Kumar, Anderson, a Norwegian, moved to the US only in his early 20s. On Mumbai Express, the duo’s licks complement each other perfectly. After listening to a bluesman who’s named Aki Kumar (the podcast didn’t spell out any details; for those, I had to scour the Net, including Kumar’s Web page where you can get a free track if you sign up, by the way), I had to explore the bluesman’s oeuvre. The only full-length I found (besides several videos on the Web) was Don’t Hold Back, an album released earlier this year. On most of the 13 tracks, besides

Photo: RACHELKUMAR

Aki SingS The BlueS

AMERICAN DREAM, DESI TWIST

Aki Kumar’s sound is easy-on-the-ear tenor; his lyrics, clear and well pronounced. His album Don’t Hold Back, released earlier this year, deserves a place in any blues fan’s collection playing his harmonica, Kumar also sings (he has an easy-onthe-ear tenor and, what’s more, his lyrics are clear and well pronounced). Kumar’s sound is closest to the Chicago style of urban blues and on the album, besides Kid Anderson, there are other excellent musicians – including guitarists Jon Lawton, Johnny Cat Soubrand and Rusty Zinn; bassist Vance Ehlers; and drummer June Core. On the album, besides his three original compositions, Kumar has covered other bluesmen’s songs, not all of them very common – Hank Ballard’s Hoochie Coochie Coo and Memphis Slim’s Wish Me Well are two of them. There’s a Bollywood surprise too in the end when he sings (along with Lisa Leuchner Anderson) Ajeeb Daastaan Hai Yeh, a Hindi film song of the 1960s originally sung by Lata Mangeshkar. Kumar, my research on the Web revealed, grew up in Mumbai listening to a mix of western and Indian music. I’m guessing Bollywood music made up a lot of his listening fare. For a musician whose entry into the acutely competitive blues scene in the US has been fairly late, the fact that Kumar has already made a splash in the West Coast area is commendable. The videos on YouTube and elsewhere (and there are plenty) of gigs in various clubs are great to watch and the album deserves a place in any blues fan’s collection. Here’s hoping he plays a gig in India sometime soon. Tailpiece: I mentioned the Bandana Blues podcast where I heard Aki Kumar first. It’s a weekly podcast done by two blues aficionados – Beardo (based in the US) and Spinner (based in The Hague) – and each of its episodes is nearly two hours long. It’s the most passionately put together podcast I’ve come across and every installment has a selection of musicians from the US and Europe that anybody who loves the blues cannot afford to miss. Recently, on Show #564, the range was stunning: from British 1960s’ band Cream (bassist Jack Bruce had just died so it was appropriate) to Paul Rodgers to Frank Zappa to Larry Coryell, it was a delightful panoply of blues and blues rock. A bonus: it also had a track from composer Carla Bley’s jazz opera, Escalator Over the Hill, on which, incidentally, Jack Bruce also plays. Download Central appears every fortnight

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

indulge

spectator

MORE ON THE WEB For more SPECTATOR columns by Seema Goswami, log on to hindustantimes.com/ brunch. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/ seemagoswami. Write to her at seema_ht@ rediffmail.com The views expressed by the columnist are personal

The sad truth is that most people have to pass on before we are willing to grant them their histories and their stories

know existed). I see the defiant woman who eloped with the man of her choice in the face of parental opposition. I see the radiant bride in Paris, in her Patola sari and her bouquet of flowers, basking in the glow of her happy-ever-after love story. I see the working mother, juggling office and a baby. I see the dreamer who gave it all up to become India’s leading pottery artist. I see the untimely widow, left to rebuild her life, coping with adversity as best she could. I see the doting mother, the loving mother-in-law and the indulgent grandmother. I see a person. A person with a history, a person who led a fun, full and fulfilling life, who loved, lost and then found peace and contentment in whatever circumstances life thrust upon her. I see stories in her wrinkles, laughter in her eyes, joy in her smiles. What do you see when you look at the aged people all around you? Do you regard them as objects of pity? Do O, YOU are very into pottery,” she said, as I walked you see them as a waste of time? Do you find them to be her to the front door, pointing to the many terraa drain on your resources? Do you resent them for growcotta pots and figurines that lined the hallway. “Not ing old and infirm when you weren’t looking? Do you feel really,” I demurred. “These were all made by my anger because they are casting a depressing shadow on the mother-in-law.” best years of your adult life? Do you feel ineffably sad to see I could see her do a double take as I said this, though what they have turned into? Do you feel guilty because you she was polite enough to disguise it. And sadly, I could unfeel you don’t do enough? Does that, in turn, make you feel derstand why. These days, my mother-in-law is confined to angry at them for making you feel this way? Or do you just her bed – bar the occasional whirl on the wheelchair – with feel toe-curling fear at the thought that one day you could be round-the-clock nursing care. So, all that who visit her now, just like them? see an old, frail woman who needs to be cared for as you I guess at some point or another in our lives, we have would a small child. felt all or most of these emotions. And given how universal And that is true, as far as bare facts go. But what is also they are, we should not feel ashamed for feeling this way. And yet, more often than not, shame is exactly what we feel. And it is that shame that makes us back bac away from the elderly just when we Seema Goswami should be hugging them even closer. hug Maybe one way of coping with this is to Ma look beyond the wrinkles, the sagging flesh, the clouded eyes, and the sparse hair. Instead we should look for the rich histories that live behind them, the complicated tapestries of a life well lived, which would keep us entertained for days if we only knew even the half of it. e true is that there is so much more But the sad truth is that most people to the woman lying in bed than have ha to pass on before we are willing to her fragility and helplessness. grant them their histories, not to mention gr But most people can’t really look their stories. That’s when we sit down and beyond appearances to see this esgig giggle about the time grandmom nearly sential truth. They find it easier bu burnt the house down or how grandpa A GI AL NOST HIGH NOTES OF antito deal with her reality by infantitur turned into such a rogue when he drank see the radiant I , ide ds be r he When I sit by d her an ri sa lising her. And in seeing her as an a little. We giggle about that family trip la to Pa r he bride in Paris, in , basking in the glow of ildhood, infant (“it’s like a second childhood, wh where mom lost all her clothes at the rs we flo of t bouque ently) isn’t it?” they smile indulgently) ri riverside when she went for a holy dip. fter love story her happy-ever-a they wipe out her entire history, reWe tell each other funny stories about ducing her to a cipher instead of the famil family weddings and annual picnics, starthree-dimensional woman she is. ring the recently departed. We pull out old picture albums, But even though her visitors can’t seem to look beyond which make us both laugh and cry. the obvious – an aged, helpless woman lying in bed, with That’s when we remember the old as the people they nurses hovering solicitously around her – what I see is were. Ironic, isn’t it? We are only willing and able to give something very different indeed. When I sit by her bedside, them their lives back once they depart them. What a pity I see a whole lot more. it is that we can’t seem to accord them that dignity and I see the bright young student, the first woman of her respect, not to mention affection and remembrance, when family to go to university in America to study industrial they are still around to appreciate it. psychology (a subject that most people in India didn’t even I know it’s hard, but surely, it can’t hurt to try?

Age CAnnot Wither… What do you see when you look at all the old people around you?

Photos: SHUTTERSTOCK

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

WELLNESS

MIND BODY SOUL SHIKHA SHARMA

KEEP ASTHMA OUT OF YOUR HOME PART- II These simple precautions will help you manage this respiratory condition

and herbal alternatives. n Ask your physician for a list of medicines that are unsuitable for asthmatics. Refer to that list whenever you’re buying over the counter medications. n Go to an immunologist for a food allergy test and patch test to identify the allergens that trigger your asthma. n Sometimes, strong emotions like fear and rage can trigger an asthma attack too. n Inhalers and critical medications should GENERAL DOs AND always be close at DON’TS FOR ASTHMA hand. Family members n Use a wet duster to and your child’s school clean your home. Dry teachers must be taught dusting causes small what to do in case of dust particles to fly and an asthma attack. remain suspended in n Asthma-prone the air for a long time. children must avoid n Ideally, use a soft toys and all dustvacuum cleaner for collecting toys. your floors. Like the n Do not keep pets at dry duster, the broom home. BYE-BYE TEDDY lets dust particles fly. Avoid keeping soft n Do not let the If you don’t have a toys if you have an asthma-prone be sudvacuum cleaner, use a asthma-prone child denly exposed to hot or wet mop. cold air. n Wash your curtains n Get checked by a doctor if frequently, as they tend to you have a cough that leaves gather dust and pollen. you breathless. n Avoid carpets altogether. n Have regular oil massages They collect dust, pollen and with a non-fragrant oil. house mites. n Do home-based exercises like n Minimise the use of houseyoga and Pilates. hold cleaners. The chemicals in n Avoid junk food, cold drinks, them could trigger coughing, pickles, fried food, and curd at sneezing and an asthma attack. night. n If you’re painting your home n Stay away from smokers and or varnishing the furniture, polluted areas. keep asthma-prone family n List foods that trigger members away. allergies and avoid them. n Avoid using strong chemicals in the rooms of asthma-prone ask@drshikha.com family members. Try natural (This series is concluded)

Photos: SHUTTERSTOCK, THINKSTOCK

UST, SMOKE and cold air are the biggest triggers of asthma, a respiratory condition in which the airways suddenly contract and become inﬂamed. Given our highly polluted environment, many people, especially children, are prone to asthma. The condition must be carefully managed, especially in winter, when cold air adds to the dust and smoke we breathe already.

MORE ON THE WEB For more columns by Dr Shikha Sharma and other wellness stories, log on to hindustantimes.com/brunch NOVEMBER 9, 2014

FINE PRINT

“Love Is A Limiting Word” Ananth’s recently published erotic novel pushes the envelope on ideas of love and sex

Photo: GURINDER OSAN. Location courtesy: The Wine Company, Cyber Hub, Gurgaon

by Poonam Saxena

NANTH WROTE his first erotic short story sometime in 2011 in the unlikeliest of places – Saravana Bhavan, over a south Indian coffee. It was about two men who walk into a New York strip club where the narrator recognises one of the dancers as the daughter of his father’s best friend. Subsequently, Ananth went on to write ten more short stories. But even so, he would’ve never imagined that he’d write a full-fledged erotic novel one day – the recently published Play With Me. How the novel happened is also a story Ananth can dine out on for years. At a routine meeting at Penguin, where he works as a senior vice-president, he was suddenly asked by publisher Chiki Sarkar if he would like to write an erotic novel. Ananth was taken aback, but immediately seized on the idea. It’s an open secret that most voracious readers and people who love books are potential writers. Ananth was no different. He’s been reading books since he was a child. “My parents always shoved a book into my hands,” he recalls. “And since my dad’s younger brother had a lending library in Chennai when I was growing up, I was constantly reading.” So when Chiki asked him if he’d like to write this particular book, he had no reservations about taking on the challenge. There is an element of self-consciousness with most first-time writers, and this is probably compounded if you’re attempting to write an erotic novel. How do you draw the line between erotica and soft porn? How nervous are you that your family and friends may be a trifle embarrassed by your book? How do you write the sex scenes – the toughest part, even for experienced authors? (There’s a reason why there is Bad Sex Award given to authors every year and it’s been ‘won’ by some of the best-known

names in the business, including Tom Wolfe and Manil Suri.)

JUST LET GO

We are sitting in one of Delhi’s charming French cafés on a twilit evening, as Ananth attempts to answer these questions. “I think you have to just let go,” he says. “That’s what I did. I am also a photographer, so I could see a lot of things in my head, as visuals. I wrote with my own sensibility. But I knew that if readers – particularly women – felt disgusted after a sex scene, I’d be screwed.” As for the embarrassment factor, Ananth says some readers did tell him they’d kept the book away from their children. And a few friends said they had some queries for him, but when he asked them to mail the questions, they went quiet. Play With Me is about a cool, young ad photographer, Sid, and his relationships with two women in his life – the staggeringly gorgeous Cara (as many reviewers remarked – “a male fantasy” if there ever was one) and the warm, sensible Natasha. There is plenty of uninhibited sex – on the office

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

couch, a rain-drenched terrace, a sandy beach in Goa. There’s also a threesome at some point. “I meant to push the bar on titillation,” admits Ananth. “But it’s not soft porn.” He emphasises that it was “very important” for him to get the women characters right. As he says, “My women are strong, independent. Sid likes women, he treats them well. He’s not an alpha guy.” But interestingly, Ananth stays away from the stereotype of women wanting love and men wanting sex. “Love is a limiting word,” he says. “In my book, the characters barely say ‘love’ to each other. It’s a world where you can have pleasure without sex. Cara has sex with Sid, but she’s not possessive. In fact, Sid is the one who is tormented – when they meet after a long time, she has no qualms about having sex with him. That bothers him.”

In my book, the characters barely say ‘love’ to each other. It’s a world where you can have pleasure without sex

THE EROTIC RIPPLE

Play With Me is selling well. A few other Indian erotic novels have also come out recently. Ananth believes it was the success of

MAN OF LETTERS

Ananth is already planning a sequel to his first novel, Play With Me EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, published in 2011-12, that proved the tipping point for erotica to go mainstream internationally (“what JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series did for fantasy”). And naturally the ripples have been felt here as well, though they have yet to create a full-fledged wave. “I think Indian writing in English has got caught in this ‘look, we can write’ thing,” says Ananth. “We want to intellectualise everything and scoff at anything else. Play With Me is a simple story of four or five people. It does say a few things though. We’re all capable of loving more than one person. Sex can be for pleasure. It doesn’t have to be unusual [read deviant] to be extraordinary.” It’s clear that Ananth enjoyed writing this book. So much so that, despite his busy, full-time job, he’s all set to do a sequel. He’s storyboarding it right now, but he’s already decided on the name: Think of Me. In conservative India, it’s always a good idea to push the envelope. But when someone decides to tear it up, it’s even better. poonamsaxena@hindustantimes.com Follow @poonamsaxena_ on Twitter

Don’t know much about Japan? Radhika Jha’s new novel will take you there by Saudamini Jain

ADHIKA JHA’S new book, My Beautiful Shadow, did not get favourable reviews. It was trashed for being too dark, dramatic, depressing. And it is all these things. But how can it not be? It is so very Japanese. Kayo is an ordinary housewife, who sinks into depressions, becomes addicted to shopping, gets heavily in debt, and then her life spins out of control. Along the way, you stop over at Dogenzaka, Tokyo’s love hotel district. You visit a pachinko, the Japanese video game parlour. You wander through zen rock gardens. You realise kimonos are more expensive than you could have imagined. Radhika Jha is a dancerturned-journalist-turned writer. When her debut novel, Smell, was released in 2001, she was hailed as a promising new voice. With My Beautiful Shadow she lives up to it. We met at Mamagoto in Khan Market over crisp vegetable tempura. Excerpts from the interview.

When did the novel begin?

It started with a dream. I saw a woman’s family go away in a car while she was sitting alone in the house. I knew the family didn’t realise she had not gotten into the car. And I thought, “How can someone so essential, the mother of the family, become so invisible?” I wanted to find out how. And, in my dream this was a Japanese family.

It’s in Japan because of a ‘dream’?

Well, it’s one thing to say, “dream”. At a deeper level, what fascinates me about Japan is how it’s held on to its culture despite being so modern. As I lived there, I saw this has come at an enormous price.

How so?

It’s practically a stereotype. Children grow up hardly seeing their fathers. Divorces happen when men retire at 55 and women are faced with husbands who are strangers. The nuclear family has created these individuals in the most brutal kind of way.

Photo: RAJ K RAJ; Location courtesy: Mamagoto, Khan Market

Out Of The Shadows “It is a woman’s lot to have to deal with that invisibility when she decides to be a mother and wife”

People in Japan have a pragmatic attitude towards sex. I liked that.

The sex parts were disconcerting.

that the stress gets too much. That shopping is your moment of existing for yourself.

Is your protagonist, Kayo, like you?

Do you speak Japanese?

I could completely identify with her feeling of invisibility. For me also, Japan was kind of a brutal change. I wasn’t working when I was there, so the only role I had was being mum and wife.

Was shopping your drug?

After my daughter was born, I was obsessed with buying. It was the only way to feel that I was doing something for myself. I talked to a lot of women, and we all felt

I did learn it for about five years. I was in a hospital for a few weeks, there my Japanese became natural. I can read at the level of a fourth grader. But Doraemon I can read! I was tempted to use a Japanese pseudonym. But if I did that, I would be giving in to the idea in the West that ‘If you’re Indian, you should write about India.’ saudamini.jain@hindustantimes.com Follow @SaudaminiJain on Twitter

PERSONAL AGENDA

twitter.com/HTBrunch Photo: MANOJ VERMA

Actor

Huma Qureshi BIRTHDAY SUN SIGN HOMETOWN PLACE OF SCHOOL/COLLEGE BIRTH Gargi College, Delhi Leo Delhi

July 28

FIRST BREAK

Gangs Of Wasseypur (2012)

Delhi

University

HIGH POINT OF LOW POINT OF CURRENTLY I AM... YOUR LIFE YOUR LIFE Endorsing Oriflame’s colour

Moving to Mumbai. The independence, new life, new goals were liberating

Moving to a new city. I missed home, family and the Delhi winter

Which classic would you have chosen as your debut movie? Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). If you weren’t an actress, you would have been... A chef or a restaurant owner. Sexiest actors in Bollywood. Ranbir Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. One director you want to work with. Martin Scorsese. And, back home, Raju (Rajkumar) Hirani. What excites you about gangster films? The edginess of the world shocks you. Do you enjoy doing romantic films? I’m a complete rom-com girl who grew up on films like When Harry Met Sally (1989), Titanic (1997) and SRK-Kajol films. What kind of a foodie are you? The big munching type! Bollywood’s most romantic pair. Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. What is your style like? Casual, comfortable and quirky. Your take on size zero. It’s for mannequins. #Facepalm A dessert that describes you. A yummy red velvet cupcake. A dance number you would love to do. Dhak dhak karne laga from Beta (1992). Your idea of a perfect weekend. Swimming, seafood and the sun.

cosmetics. I am also working on two upcoming movies, Badlapur and Mumbai Saga

my movies THE FILM YOU HAVE SEEN MORE THAN 5 TIMES

Blue V Valentine (2010)

THE MOS MOST OV OVERRATED FILM

Th There are sev several

THE MOST PAISAVASOOL FILM

Om Shanti Om (2007) A MOVIE THAT REMINDS YOU OF YOUR CHILDHOOD

Tomboy (2011)

What do you love about Delhi? The weather and the food. What makes your day? A hug, a good coffee, a smile, white lillies and a good film. What spoils it? Rash, uncouth behaviour, road rage, a broken toenail. Your favourite junk food. Chilli cheese toast and chips. You de-stress with... Massages. The last line of your autobiography would read… Turn the page. — Interviewed by Veenu Singh