Hindustantimes Brunch 26 June 2011

SUNDAY MAGAZINE, NEW DELHI, JUNE 26, 2011 Free with your copy of Hindustan Times

Author Amitav Ghosh says he is a slow writer. He counts VS Naipaul as one of his major inspirations. He was deeply influenced by Aradhana. And he’s just written a masterful new book – the second in an ambitious trilogy

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We’re Logged On facebook.com/hindustantimesbrunch

THE GHOSH WHO WALKS 12

Pankaj Jha Your wellness special a very good heath capsule. I am also health conscious but used to eat heavy dinner now i will take it lightly.

Thnx for ur cover diet rule no.1

Kushal Dahiya Fantastic article by seema goswami...i agree wid her...thr r defintly many other and btr ways f stndin up fr our freedm than d slut walks. Adored it compltely n da way she explns her point.

twitter.com/HTBrunch @roshni_donny Awesome article about Dhiraj Arora, given me motivation and inspiration. Thanks for ths sunday gift. @serendipitypist A fine balance of food alongside Mother Dairy Icecream ad and perfect french fries... you got it all.. @RashuTai Today's @HTBrunch is confusing. The cover story is on fitness and then Vir Sanghvi talks about perfect French Fries. My tummy be flummoxed.

Ghosh’s River of Smoke (Penguin Viking) is being launched in Delhi on July 1

TECH TALK

Super Power 6

Think your smartphone couldn’t get any smarter? Think again!

INDULGE LIVE

Taking A Break?

VARIETY

Travel the world if you want to; but don’t knock the humble ‘family holiday’

Once Upon a Time 24

DRINK

Relive the forgotten art of Dastangoi

Wine Secrets Uncorked

PERSONAL AGENDA 30

@DILIPtheCHERIAN @RajivMakhni Great piece that cleared some clouds for me..for a nervous neophyte you were very reassuring..Catch up soon !!

PHOTO: RAJ K RAJ

Aditi Ray Absolutely wonderful..! i've always wondered as to even after takin so much of care n effort y dont our home-made fries turn out to b perfect! thnxx a ton to vir sanghhvi for encoding the secret for perfect fries...

Calling All Tweeple

Yes, we can

With a boyish sense of adventure and influences as varied as Hindi cinema, art, gardening and author VS Naipaul, it’s no wonder that Amitav Ghosh is such a profoundly exciting writer

Shahzan Padamsee

The actress tells us what makes her feels sexy, what makes her day and why her first kiss was awkward as hell

BRUNCH ON THE WEB

Be it the right taste or right year, all your wine FAQs answered PLAY

Being A Twit: A Socially Irritable Tale

Dear dorks on Twitter: here is an open letter just for you. #havefun LISTEN

Two For Joy

Two favourite musicians release two new albums. Can you ask for more?

hindustantimes.com/brunch BRAND NEW VIDEO: BAGGED IT!

IT’S STORYTIME!

BEING IN BALANCE We hear the word ‘moderation’ so often that it no longer holds meaning. What a pity. Because it really is the key to a healthy and centred life. An exclusive story from the Brunch Quarterly only on our website!

Write to brunchletters@hindustantimes.com or to 18-20 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi - 110001

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Relive Dastangoi, the forgotten art of Urdu storytelling with professional storytellers Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain in this video at hindustantimes.com/dastangoi

Accessory designer Shahrukh Zaidi shows what you should be carrying around this season

And don’t forget to catch up with Maria Goretti in her happy kitchen along with the funniest voices from the tweet-o-sphere! Log on for weekly blogs from Gursimran Khamba, Rajneesh Kapoor, The Fake Jhunjhunwala, Rahul Roushan, Rohan Joshi and Tanmay Bhat.

Plus, an all-access pass to older Brunch issues – all in one place!

EDITORIAL: Poonam Saxena (Editor), Kushalrani Gulab (Deputy Editor); Tavishi Paitandy Rastogi, Mignonne Dsouza, Veenu Singh, Parul Khanna Tewari, Pranav Dixit, Yashica Dutt

DESIGN: Ashutosh Sapru (National Editor Design), Swati Chakrabarti, Rakesh Kumar, Ashish Singh, Saket Misra

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

I HAVEN’T even reached the other articles in today’s edition (I’m stuck at How Dhiraj Arora got thin, got wise and got a life, 19 June) and I’m already writing this letter to you. I need to thank Dhiraj Arora in Pranav Dixit’s rejuvenating article. He has done to me exactly what Brian Tracy has done to Dhiraj. His mantras like “Try being a better person every single day”, ”Live life on your own terms, and not for others” and “Self help is just self realisation. Get your priorities right” are truly magical! Dhiraj's inspirational narrative of how he got his life back on track, be it his shape, losses or family, was highly motivational. Thank you Brunch!

— NANDITA CHETTRI , Delhi DHIRAJ ARORA’S story is an excellent account of how to change your life with determination by following a healthy daily routine. But this cannot be followed blindly. Points like consuming parathas and beer but completely abstaining from tea, coffee and cold drinks, need be pondered upon.

However, all in all, an inspiring tale!

— DR NARENDRA KUMAR, Delhi

Why be slutty?

I WAS mesmerised by the way Seema Goswami expressed herself sensibly in her article.(Slut Walk? No Thanks! 19 June). I have always maintained that “right to dress” should not be stretched to have a “right to undress” and “freedom of expression” should never be misused as “freedom to hurt.”

Just as the slut walkers want others to behave responsibly (when they are badlly dressed) they too have the same obligation. I often wonder why females (unlike males) measure their liberty with their freedom to show skin.

When males show their sexuality they never complain if they get a response (if at all they get one!). Women should attempt to shake the conscience of males by exposing their usual tendencies of showing their sexuality, verbally or otherwise.

-DR RAKESH KUMAR PANDEY, New Delhi YOUR LAST issue had to be one of the best, with articles on all kinds of issues. Really enjoyed reading it on a rainy Sunday morning, after having waited for it all night.

— SWATI KAUL, via email

Cover design: ASHUTOSH SAPRU COVER PHOTO: RAJ K RAJ

Tech Talk

Super

Power Think your smartphone couldn’t get any smarter?

Brace yourself: you’re in for the ride of your life

by Pranav Dixit

ANALYSTS PREDICT

THAT 2011 WILL BE THE YEAR OF THE DUAL-CORE SMARTPHONE 6

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HIS TIME last month, my house was sunk in gloom. In the living room, my brand new Samsung Nexus S smartphone – bless its little soul!

– lay face down in its sleek leather casket, ready to be consigned to the Cemetery of Technological Obsolescence. To be fair, the death didn’t come as a shock. Even as I bought my Nexus sometime around the end of last year, there had already been whispers of newer, faster, more powerful phones, phones with dual-core CPUs, dedicated graphics processing units and gobs of RAM, that were ready to hit the market at any moment. And even though my Nexus wasn’t exactly a weakling, its days were numbered the moment Samsung released that sleek behemoth, the Galaxy S II. This one boasts of such impressive specs as a 1 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM and a quad-core GPU. It is, by some measures, the most powerful smartphone in the market right now.

If you use a smartphone, hold on tight: this year, your phone is about to get a lot smarter. Many of last year’s top-end smartphones packed in at least a 1 GHz processor but 2011 promises to be the year of the dual-core smartphone. In fact, analysts predict that every high-end phone released this year will sport a dualcore processor. Christmas may even usher in the age of the quad-core mobile!

What dual-core chips basically do is

EVERYTHING PLUS THE KITCHEN SINK Vivid graphics, a rich Internet experience, 3D gaming, high-definition movies, zippy multitasking... and it’s only going to get better!

IMAGING: PRASHANT CHOUDHARY PHOTOS: THINKSTOCK

this: they enable more power to be squeezed out of the processor because they contain two ‘cores’. For instance, a 1 GHz dual-core chip will have two 1 GHz processors that can be used in parallel to speed up the performance of your mobile.

What this means for you is simple: highdefinition video playback and recording, console-quality 3D gaming, on-the-fly multitasking and basically carrying around the equivalent of a small netbook in your pocket.

Is it time to throw away your clunky laptop yet? And what – just what – is your smartphone morphing into?

EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION

“Smartphones will be the computers for what technologists call the ‘massive middle of the market’, that is, a majority of people,” says Internet entrepreneur and gadgets editor for MW magazine, Madhulika Mathur. Two things are happening in the world today. “One, smartphones are evolving at such a rapid pace that they will soon rival the speed and capability of netbooks, if not laptops. Two, our lifestyles are becoming increasingly mobile. With high-speed wireless networks available,

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

we are no longer tied to our laptops and desktops.”

Smartphones have been around for a couple of years but experts believe that we are now entering an era of the super smartphone. “What’s inside a mobile device now is as powerful as a device you would use for computing,” says resident Brunch columnist and Gadget Guru Rajiv Makhni. “Naturally, there are differences in the way these processors are built for mobile phones and your regular laptops, but from a sheer horsepower standpoint, they are equal.”

So what do you do on your phone? My Nexus S stores my entire music collection.

The sharp, high-resolution screen is great to watch movies and TV shows during a boring flight (I’ve been catching up on Dexter), play games (Angry Birds has been beat so now it’s Fruit Ninja), browse the web (read Facebook), listen to music (paws up, Lady Gaga fans!) and read ebooks (Pride and Prejudice. About damn time).

The camera takes fairly good pictures and the built-in GPS makes sure I never lose my way on Delhi’s roads.

All these things, believes Mathur, put pressure on the smartphone to be more powerful because then, it “no longer competes with other smartphones. It’s competing with your PCs,

POWER PORTAL Future-proof yourself: here are the most powerful smartphones you can buy today!

SAMSUNG GALAXY S II

TECH SPECS: Dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, Mali400MP GPU, Orion chipset, 1 GB RAM, up to 32 GB of internal storage CHINK IN THE ARMOUR: A flimsy plastic body that doesn’t really suit such a premium phone. Yes, we’re nitpicking.

PRICE: R31,000

HTC SENSATION

TECH SPECS: 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm MSM 8260 Snapdragon, 768 MB RAM CHINK IN THE ARMOUR: A ‘death grip’ issue with the WiFi. Grip it too hard and watch your WiFi die. Also, the Super Clear LCD screen doesn’t exactly make for pleasant viewing in bright sunlight.

PRICE: R30,500

Tablets, netbooks, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS units and e-readers,” she says. “So doesn’t it stand to reason that the hardware inside the phone needs to evolve as well? If you put more power in these phones, it could convince buyers to chuck the iPod or drop plans to buy that compact digital camera they’ve been eyeing.”

The name of the game is convergence. It’s about stuffing everything possible into that 5-inch slab of metal and plastic in your hand. Powerful, multi-core hardware has been gracing the insides of your laptops for years now, so the current trend suggests that at some point in the future, your phone and your laptop are headed for a resounding collision.

“I think that even smaller, 7-inch Tablets like the BlackBerry PlayBook will eventually converge into your smartphone,” says Nishant Padhiar, editor, Stuff (India), a gadget magazine. “The Tablet, however, will become a standalone category. So we will all have a Tablet and this allin-one pocket device for everything else.”

YES, YOU CAN!

So what will your future phone be capable of (let’s keep the sci-fi stuff – expandable displays, flexible screens, phones that are embedded in your brains – out of the picture for now)? “In the near future, smartphones will be able to offer a PC-like Internet experience, rich and vivid graphics, fast downloads, 3D gaming, multitasking, amazing high-definition video playback, uninterrupted battery life and multipoint video conferencing. Among other things,” smiles Mathur. That’s the vision that chipsters like Intel and ARM, the leading processor makers have. “They’re targeting mid-2012, so it’s not far off,” says Mathur.

The right innovation, however, needs to happen on the software side.

Right now, we are using powerful hardware to run mobile operating systems that were meant for older generation hardware. “Once software catches up with current generation hardware, you could do things like stream a movie from your phone to your living room HDTV, play a game and have someone else use your phone as a WiFi hotspot – all at the same time with zero stuttering or glitches,” says Makhni.

Also possible, is glassless 3D: yes, actual three-dimensional images popping out of your phone screen without those clunky glasses! Currently, this technology is possible only on screens that are five inches or smaller, making it perfect for your mobile screen. Plus, it requires vast amounts of processing power, which mobile phones didn’t have before. “The possibilities are endless. It’s exciting,” says Padhiar.

TOO FAST TOO SOON?

Early this year, Motorola took convergence to the next level by releasing the Atrix, a high-end smartphone that has horsepower enough to run your laptop and your desktop computer. All you need to do is slide it into a dock that you connect to a plastic laptop body with just a screen, keyboard and battery and voila! Suddenly, you have a full-fledged computer system!

But that doesn’t mean that people will suddenly abandon PCs. Our primary computing experience still comes largely from sturdy, workhorse laptops and desktops.

That is not going to change any time soon.

“All of us have at least one ‘mothership’ machine which is home to all our critical data – movie and music collections, important documents, pictures, financial data and more. We would still like to rely on such a system,” says Padhiar. Unless something like Apple’s recently announced iCloud service, which provides a backup of all your important data on the Internet, gains serious traction (difficult in a country like India that continues to be alarmingly bandwidth deficient). Then, it will be a different story.

There are also different use cases for different devices. I cannot – cannot – imagine typing this story on my Nexus S (though I know people who are capable of typing entire Hindustan Times columns on their BlackBerrys). For that, I need my good old Dell. Also, processor-intensive apps like video-editing and graphic designing require you to use a powerful laptop or desktop computer. So clearly, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

But does blitzing ahead at such a breathless pace have a flipside? Is there such a thing as innovating too fast, too soon?

Yes, says Ajith Pillai, a tech enthusiast and blogger who runs the gadget blog onlygizmos.com. “We saw mobiles with dualcore processors hitting the market at the beginning of this year and by the end, we’ll see the launch of quad-core devices. For consumers, it is difficult to buy the ‘best’ device as they change every other week.”

Early adopters, especially, get a raw deal.

“Frankly, to most consumers, terms like dual and quad-core processors, GPU and RAM are jargon. All they want to know is whether they are going to be able to run the latest game with all its bells and whistles or if their smartphone is smooth and snappy,” says Padhiar.

You know what else I care about? How much these damn things are going to cost!

YOUR PHONE AND

MOTOROLA ATRIX

TECH SPECS: Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 chipset, 1 GB RAM CHINK IN THE ARMOUR: A lacklustre 5 megapixel camera? A TFT screen? What is this, the 21st century?

PRICE: Yet to be released in India.

LG OPTIMUS 2X

TECH SPECS: Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 chipset, 512 MB RAM CHINK IN THE ARMOUR: The IPS capacitive touchscreen isn’t as awesome as some of the displays that the competition sports.

PRICE: R27,000. *ALL PRICES ARE ROUNDED OFF

8

YOUR LAPTOP ARE HEADED FOR A RESOUNDING COLLISION

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

pranav.dixit@hindustantimes.com

Nine To Five

Holiday brood

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

If the thought of returning to the office after a glorious vacation makes you the world’s No. 1 grouch, cheer up.

Here’s how to ease back into work

by Aruna Rathod

I

F YOU were in the Alps and didn’t care where your next meal came from (because it was all included in the itinerary) and got up in a leisurely manner every single day of your holiday, then getting back to the daily grind is definitely the last thing you want to do.

And yet, holidays don’t last forever, so back you must go. That’s the trouble with vacations. They lead to a disconnect with your regular life. But (sigh), this is life and work is life (for most of us) and we all have to deal with it at least once a year. So we’re resigned to it, but… for the first day, colleagues had better keep out of our way.

Because we snap a lot.

“When we go on a vacation there is no routine or structure,” says clinical psychologist Saloni Sawnani. “So it’s fun and exciting. But it means that getting back to routine is boring. This creates a feeling of dread.”

Getting back to work involves two things. It means your long-dreamed-of holiday is over. And it means catching up with everything you’ve missed at work as well as getting back to your regular responsibilities. That’s a double whammy.

This is what’s responsible for our sense of depression at the thought of resuming work. We know we’ll settle down in a few days, but the first day feels like hell. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We’ve got some advice from people who’ve learned how to trash the postvacation blues.

time with. So it actually feels quite good chatting with them. And when you’ve just returned from a holiday, you have so much to talk about and so many pictures to share.

And you could also return to the age-old practice of bringing back goodies for your colleagues. “When I visit my hometown, I always bring back specialties like sandesh and rossogollas for everyone at work,” says Ruchira Ganguly, a programmer who visits Kolkata every year. “This means my first day back at work is fun.”

IF WHAT’S MAKING YOU LOW IS THE thought of the double whammy of catching up with what you’ve missed, plus plunging back into your daily job, try this. “I always get back to work on a Friday, not a Monday,” says Pradeep Goswami, a marketing executive. “It helps me get back into the routine knowing that the weekend starts the next day. So I spend Friday catching up, then I have two days off, and by Monday, I’m fully settled in.”

‘THERE’S NO

THE PROBLEM WITH most of us is that we eke our holidays out. So we screech back into the city after a glorious vacation at 11 on Sunday night and expect to be fully adjusted to the dayto-day routine by 7 on Monday morning. No wonder we’re grumpy!

“I make it a point to return from my holiday at least three days before I resume work,” says Smita Khedekar, a hospitality executive and mother of two school-going children. “This way I am mentally and physically prepared to get back to the office as the backlog at home has been cleared.”

ROUTINE IN A HOLIDAY. SO GETTING BACK TO WORK SEEMS BORING’

AY WORK FOR YOU D LI O H R U YO E K A M An ‘I’m comThe best Get to the office back’ way to get ing early on the day to your ail em to is back r beyou resume ge na ma ease into ing urn work. This way ret e your tasks for od way you can get into go a is y. all gradu the routine easily to get back Don’t try and fill up on into the mendo d an what’s been tal space of ng everythi happening while work. at once. you were away.

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ke creative Plan your hol- Ma lisation ua iday well so it vis for you. rk wo g hin is refres of the ink Th and without ls and hil u yo If s. es str aches you have truly en- be uld go to co joyed yourxt time, ne siea it’s self, en you feel wh ck er to get ba es str sed. to work.

“THE MOMENT I GET BACK TO work after a vacation, I plan a weekend break,” says Mithu Basu, founder of Dolna – The Movement, an art movement.

“Whether it happens or not, looking forward to it keeps me pepped. This is the best way to beat the back-to-work blues.”

KEEPING THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT alive may be just as effective.

Remember, your colleagues are the people you spend most of your

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

RETURNING TO THE CITY ONE DAY before you have to go back to work is good enough to prepare yourself, says Pallavi Krishnan, a cost accountant.

“Though I find a break refreshing, I also feel a sense of anxiety about what has happened at work when I was away – were there any changes that would affect me and how to deal with the piled up work. I believe one must fight back and get back into the routine instead of getting derailed,” she says.

And though it doesn’t seem like a good thing (your companions will complain), technology is a good way to keep in touch with what’s going on at work while you are away. Jayesh Shinde, an executive, says, “I keep in touch with my colleagues through emails or phone calls and messages.

This way I am not totally disconnected and look forward to getting back.” brunchletters@hindustantimes.com

COVER STORY

With a boyish sense of adventure and influences as varied as Hindi cinema (think Aradhana), art, gardening and author VS Naipaul, it’s no wonder that Amitav Ghosh is such a profoundly exciting writer

The Ghosh Who Walks

by Indrajit Hazra

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HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

t’s a blistering hot Sunday morning in Delhi and the last thing you expect to hear from Amitav Ghosh is how cold the water in his hotel room is. “They have a pool in my room. Can you imagine? A pool in the room! But I can’t get into it because the water’s too cold.”

I get a chance to check the temperature of the sunken pool the next evening and find the water to be invitingly cool. “Hmm, yes, it is better now,” he had said before returning to his glass of after-dinner (neat) whisky. I suddenly had this absurd image of Ghosh, arguably India’s finest writer and a contemporary literary master, stretching out in the pool with a gold chain glinting from his neck and helping himself to a line of powder that matched the colour of his snow white hair.

But Ghosh is not a drug lord from Scarface.

Or, for that matter, one of those celebrity writers whirling about the world doing the lit fest circuit, providing wise and witty observations about everything under the sun, and appearing on the covers of every second issue of glossy magazines. This Sahitya Akademi-winning author even has problems talking about the thing he does and loves best: writing.

“It’s very hard [to talk about the act of writing]. It’s impossible to say. It’s impossible to know,” he says in between sips of Darjeeling tea in the shade of the hotel lobby. He looks remarkably fresh for someone who flew in the night before from London where the book tour of the second volume of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy, River of Smoke kicked off. (“I’m not feeling terribly fresh though,” he says with his schoolboy smile.) Once you realise that a few days before he had flown into London from New York – where he lives (dividing time between homes in Goa and Kolkata) with his wife Deborah Baker, an author whose biography of an American woman who moved to Pakistan in the ’60s, The Convert, has also just been published – you are ready to feel bad about having asked him that silly ‘So, how do you write?’ question.

“The main thing about writing novels is concentration and focus and persistence. These are all things which are increasingly difficult in the world we live in,” he says in his calming, singsong voice. “Everything in the world is geared towards distraction, attention deficits. It’s not just that writers have to do tours when the book comes out, or attend all these festivals. As a writer, you could continuously live in a state of distraction.”

The piped muzak in the otherwise empty

lobby doesn’t distract him.

“I’m a very slow writer. It really takes a lot of work to write one page, you know.” At 553-odd pages, River of Smoke, took only three years to come out since he finished the first ‘volume’, Sea of Poppies. The trilogy is Ghosh’s most ambitious work, an epic vision of masterful story-telling where history and individuals slosh about in one coherent, remarkable tale of a time set in the early 19th century just before the Opium Wars between the British Empire and China. In River of Smoke, the story starts where Sea of Poppies had ended: a storm in September 1838 on the Indian Ocean catching three ships – the Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth with their cargoes of indentured labourers from Calcutta to Mauritius, of opium from Bombay to Canton, and of botanical specimens from Mauritius to London – and bringing them and the destinies of their inhabitants closer together.

While the first book chronicled the journey of Deeti and Kalua and other labourers and convicts across the seas, in River of Smoke, Ghosh draws us into a gathering storm whose ingredient is opium. In 2008, at the Mumbai launch of Sea of Poppies, Ghosh had spoken about how the cities of Calcutta and Bombay were built on the riches made by Indians from opium and how we, unlike the Chinese, have forgotten that noxious chapter in history. In the new book, Ghosh reminds us with all the vividness and dexterity of a grand novelist how China played such an important, yet forgotten role, in Indian history.

“The strange thing is that I’ve travelled a great deal in my life, but I’d never before even thought of going to China. But it was Sea of Poppies that took me in the direction of China.

Then in 2007-08, I spent a lot of time in Guangzhou – modern Canton – and I became very fascinated with China,” says Ghosh with sudden animation. “I think one of the things that hit me in the face in relation to China is our utter and profound ignorance of it and I feel a deep shame for myself and for my country and my culture.”

In a way, the story of the first two books of the ‘Ibis’ trilogy tell us about the machinations, the politics, the economics and the psychology behind the selling of huge amounts of opium from the poppy cultivating areas of eastern India to a market in China. In the second chapter, the scene of the precious cargo of the Anahita washing all over the ship’s innards that includes its owner, the rich Parsi Bombay opium merchant Bahram Modi, is overpowering and provides a prelude to the greater inundation to come.

There is another scene, a flashback, where Bahram is trying to convince his father-in-law to diversify his ship-building business and get into the lucrative opium trade.

“Listen sassraji, he had said. I know you and your family are committed to manufacturing and engineering. But look at the world around us; look at how it is changing. Today the biggest

profits don’t come from selling useful things: quite the opposite. The profits come from selling things that are not of any real use... Opium is just like that. It is completely useless unless you’re sick, but still people want it. And it is such a thing that once people start using it they can’t stop; the market just gets larger and larger.

That is why the British are trying to take over the trade and keep it to themselves.

Fortunately in the Bombay Presidency they have not succeeded in turning it into a monopoly, so what is the harm in making some money from it?” eavy shades of Sonny Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather trying to convince his father Vito to take up the offer of a rival mafia family to go into the drug business.

(Don Corelone said no; Seth Rustamjee finally relents.) Even as I ask Ghosh whether he wants the reader to find the echoes in opium being ‘force-sold’ in the early 1800s to China with today’s hard-ball globalisation where big economic powers pry open resisting markets, he widens his eyes, nods and smiles, the combination of gestures adding up to an unsaid, “Yes, of course!”

And yet for all the fumes of opium and the geo-economics of the British and the East India Company, with Indian opium merchants playing

their large role in this Other Great Game, Ghosh didn’t have the drug and its history or even China and the Opium Wars in mind when he set out to write his epic three-part story.

“I actually didn’t have China or opium at all in my mind when I started this project. While writing The Glass Palace [his 2000 novel on the changing society in early 20th century BurmaIndia-Malay], the central character Rajkumar got me more and more interested in the story of migrants and migration. So The Sea of Poppies started out as my exploration into the world of indentured workers in the early 19th century, their stories of these epic journeys,” says Ghosh, himself having been a migrant who has moved from Calcutta to Dehradun to Delhi to Alexandria to Oxford to New York and Goa and Kolkata. “One can understand the migration of people from coastal parts of India crossing the seas to go to places as far off as Mauritius. But people from Bihar and Jharkhand, Bhojpuris who don’t have any water body for miles making such a journey was as intriguing as it was incredible. Then it made sense. These were opium-growing regions. Which is where the migrants and the opium story clicked into place.”

As an anthropologist as well as a novelist, Ghosh has always been interested in identities and how people ‘self-fashion’ themselves and the ‘admixtures’ created in the process. In his 1986 debut novel The Circle of Reason, the course of a Bengali weaver is charted as he travels westwards, ultimately landing up in Alegria. Shadow Lines, published two years later, charts the trajectory of a young boy moving from Calcutta to Delhi to London. In the 2005 novel The Hungry Tide, Ghosh moves with his characters not only in space but also in time.

And then there’s the sea. While water bodies have played an important role in his earlier stories – in The Hungry Tide, the coastal region of the Bay of Bengal in the

I’M A SLOW WRITER. IT TAKES A LOT OF WORK TO WRITE ONE PAGE, YOU KNOW

PHOTO: SATISH BATE

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

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COVER STORY Sunderbans is the palpable protagonist – it is in the ‘Ibis’ project that the sea comes into its own. The sea also explains his desire to have a home in Goa. “Just organising everyday life in a city, any city, adds so much to one’s disruptiveness. So I just wanted to be not in a city. Many people love the mountains. I love the sea. I wanted to be near the sea.”

Along with the sea, he also loves his gardens – both in Brooklyn and in Goa. “Did you know that much of what we find in gardens comes from China?” He insists that he’s not much of a green thumb but he simply likes being in his gardens. But loving the sea and pottering about in gardens aren’t the same as making a novel teem with details about ships and plants and other minutae that form this novel set in history. His wrapping a story with facts has been a hallmark as a writer and creator of a world that greatly resembles ours but doesn’t exist or never existed.

Ghosh sounds a bit irritated when I ask him how he balances all those facts in his books with the fiction and whether he ever worried – “now that it’s a daan haath ka khel for you” I added for protection – that with too much research, the ‘Ibis’ novels could become a history book in disguise. He gives out an exasperated sigh and replies, “I could never write a history book in disguise really because... because I am a novelist. I am a writer of fiction.

That’s what I do. To write history is a very particular thing. It calls for specific talents, which are not my talents, you know. It’s not something that can happen. First and foremost I think of myself as a storyteller.” He pauses. A sigh later he continues, “But historical research is interesting because of the background. This particular world [of River of Smoke] is so little known.” arlier in the interview, Ghosh had talked about Orhan Pamuk’s description of the novel being a kind of encyclopaedia. “I was very struck by that. That’s certainly the way I work. All the things that interest me go into my books.” I figure he had answered my silly question of how he ‘balanced’ research with storytelling already.

I ask Ghosh at this point whether he has any writer’s kinks. Goethe kept a rotten apple in his desk when he wrote; Philip Roth writes standing up. He laughs and says that he needs to be at his desk while writing. At his three desks at his three homes, he clarifies. He also uses pen and paper. “I’m very obsessive about paper and ink and pens,” Ghosh says, leading me to suspect that he’s a fetishist, after which he adds perhaps a little too quickly, “I’m not a fetishist.

But good writing paper is surprisingly difficult to find in America or, for that matter, in India.

Good writing paper is now only produced in Japan and in Europe.”

Which author would he consider as an influence? “I would say Naipaul.” He lets out a laugh and continues, “I feel embarrassed to say this now because if you say that Naipaul was an inspiration to you it’s like saying that you subscribe to his idea that women are not novelists and all these crazy things he says from time to time. But in my formative years as a reader,

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Naipaul was incredibly important to me.

Especially his travel books, I loved them. I read them and told myself that I want to do this, I want to go to these places.”

So can a writer be disassociated from the person and the views he holds? I ask Ghosh about the old ‘good writer-bad human’ dichotomy that plagues many readers. “I think you really have to separate the books from the person. I mean, I would hate it if someone would sit here talking to me and then think that what I’m saying is the equivalent of my books. Because it’s not. In your books, you work at it, put your most considered thoughts into it and it’s not like sitting across a table at all. But I must say, in the case of Naipaul’s latest statements, you can’t help feeling a sense of derangement.

And that’s why I think it’s so important to separate the books from the man.”

Ghosh’s novels, especially the latest one, is incredibly visual. His words and passages form pictures in the head in the form of the reader’s private cinema.

Are there ‘cinematic’ influences?

“Oh absolutely. Satyajit Ray was a major influence for me. I was deeply immersed in his films. In a way, Indian cinema of the ’60s and ’70s was very important to me. I remember the early Mrinal Sen, his Bhuban Shom. I’m still haunted by that film, its images. But also Hindi cinema of that time. Aradhana.”

Aradhana? Shakti Samanta’s 1969 Sharmila Tagore-Rajesh Khanna-starring remake of the ’40s Hollywood film To Each His Own? Er, why, I ask Ghosh.

“I loved that movie,” he laughs. “I also loved the old Kishore Kumar movies. The ways in which the stories were constructed in Hindi

THE WAY STORIES WERE CONSTRUCTED IN HINDI CINEMA HAD AN IMPORTANT EFFECT ON ME cinema, in Aradhana, had an important influence on me and many other writers.”

I still don’t get it. He may have loved these movies, but them being an influence for him as a novelist? I egg him on. “See, I basically lost interest in Hindi cinema during the Amitabh Bachchan period. All that star appeal sucked out everything else. The story-telling power of Hindi cinema just disappeared. It just became a spectacle. But before that, what I would have

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

compared Hindi cinema to would be opera, you know, structured like opera, in the sense that like opera always builds towards drama, in the same way, Hindi cinema was very focused on building towards climaxes, towards creating situations of drama.” hosh also loves art. His way of seeing, he tells me, is very much influenced by what he has seen of art. “It was such a pleasure to have a painter in this book. Suddenly all the art I’ve seen, it just came pouring out of me,” he says gushingly, adding that 17th century Spanish painter Velasquez and 16th century Italian master Caravaggio are among his favourite artists. “In both Velasquez and Caravaggio, there is so much drama.”

Which is what River of Smoke, teeming with characters (including a delightful cameo from Napoleon Bonaparte), places, objects is about: drama. Literary fiction was arguably never such a page-turner, all 553-plus pages of it. But like the reader, the writer of River of Smoke confesses to having tremendous fun writing such a book, piecing the puzzle, fitting one shape to another.

I sensed it even when Ghosh excitedly elucidated about the volcanic island of Krakatoa between Java and Sumatra and when the island exploded in 1883, killing around 40,000 people and then disappeared from the face of the earth. “Oddities about the natural world fascinate me. Did you know that when Krakatoa exploded, in the resulting tsunami the sea receded more than a mile in Bombay?”

It’s that boyish sense of adventure and wonderment coupled with his mastery over the allencompassing craft of the novel which makes

PHOTO: RAJ K RAJ

the 54-year-old Ghosh such a profoundly exciting writer. In a sense, the ‘Ibis’ trilogy, with its ships, its sense of changing space, new lands and people from various places of the world mimic the world of a science fiction space opera. “That’s an interesting comparison actually,” says the winner of the 1997 Arthur C Clarke Award for his novel The Calcutta Chromosome, the next evening as he pours a second glass of whisky. His hotel suite, with the sunken pool in the next room, I note, vaguely resembles the set from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in a way fits perfectly with his continuing saga of a space and time journey into the 19th century. The thought of the white-haired, never-ageing novelist as a time-travelling, shape-shifting alien crosses my mind briefly. ihazra@hindustantimes.com

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Taking A Break?

Travel the world if you want to; but don’t knock the humble ‘family holiday’

DO WHATEVER Gorge – or gag, it depends entirely on you – on authentic Chinese fare in Shanghai or Beijing

C

NATURE’S COMPANY HANCES ARE that you are The summers were invariably spent at my reading this either while aunt’s tea garden in Assam planning a holiday, enjoying a break, or recovering from the rigours of a family vacation. Yes, summers were invariably spent at this is the holiday season, when everymy aunt’s tea garden in Assam. And one who can afford it gets away from the holiday started from the time we the heat as fast as they possibly can. boarded the train from Sealdah staAnd these days we are all spoilt for tion, me armed with a stack of Amar choice, aren’t we? We can hit the beachChitra Kathas and my mother with es of Goa or Koh Samui, depending on a lot of patience. Snack-time came our budget. We can enjoy the mounwith every station we stopped at, PUSHING THE LIMITS tain air in Manali, Shimla or even with deep-fried samosas and pakoAs far as holidays are concerned, the sky is the limit. Walking up the Switzerland, if our money stretches ras being scoffed down with hot, slopes of active volcanoes in New Zealand? Count us in that far. We can trek in Nepal; go shopmilky tea drunk from terracotta ping in Dubai; watch plays in London; bhands (yes, I know, it sounds a bit golf in Scotland; sample the best of vulgar, but it just means a tea-cup).

Renaissance art in Italy; indulge in a The high point of the journey was bit of wine-tasting in France or the the ferry transfer across the Napa Valley; gorge – or gag, it depends Brahmaputra, which put all those entirely on you – on authentic Chinese geography lessons in perspective. And fare in Shanghai or Beijing. then, there was the rickety jeep-ride As far as holidays are concerned, the to the tea garden itself, with us indesky (and of course, our bank balance) fatigable kids singing loudly and I fear is the limit. And even then, there’s nothquite tunelessly in the back while the ing we enjoy more than pushing the limadults struggled to stay upright on its. A week spent river-rafting in the those long and winding roads. wilds of a South American jungle? Bring And then followed a few weeks of it on. A fortnight in the icy wilderness absolute bliss, when you never needof Greenland getting in touch with our ed to do anything you didn’t want to. inner Inuit? Why ever not? Walking up There were no mandatory early the slopes of active volcanoes in New mornings to catch the sunrise on the Zealand? Count us in. beach; no traipsing around museums These days, everyone wants to push feigning interest in the Dutch masthe envelope when it comes to holidays. ters and dinosaur models; no endless It’s no longer enough to go tiger-watching in Ranthambore, Pench or shopping trips for our moms to drag us on. Instead, my assorted Bandhavgarh. You have to go on a safari in Africa or better still, watch cousins and I ran quite wild: going on long exploratory walks on the from the sidelines when the annual migration of wildebeest takes place tea slopes; examining the wildlife in the area (mostly frogs and leechin Kenya. Chilling out on the beaches of Kovalam is now passé. These es, if you must know); starting our own Enid Blyton-style Five Finddays you must head out to Croatia, the new jewel of the Mediterranean. Outers gang; making friends with the kids in the local village; and genAnd Nainital and Darjeeling are now spoilt beyond belief; if you want erally, having a blast. to enjoy the mountains then Ladakh is where it’s at.

In the winters, we headed north to visit more uncles and aunts. It It sounds great doesn’t it? After all, who would pass up the oppor- helped, of course, that my uncles were in the army and hence could tunity to see the world in all its glory, sample the delights – both culi- host us in a different city every three years or so. Thus it was that we nary and cultural – it has to offer, and explore every nook and cran- sampled the delights of Southern temples, splashed around on the ny of our beautiful planet. If we live in a global village, then I guess rocky beaches of Visakhapatnam, explored a yet-unspoilt Bhutan, visit behooves us to get acquainted with all its secret gardens. And ited endless forts and palaces in Rajasthan and made ourselves at great fun it is too. home in army messes all around the country. All of this, leavened with And yet, even as I scour the Internet looking for the best deals lots of inter-generation bonding, and much re-telling of old family lore. on hotels and airline fares, there is a tiny little part of me Even today, when I have traversed every continent in my travels, it that misses the good old days when holidays were more is those family holidays that evoke the most heart-felt memories. And about family time and less about seeing the world. When it is the family bonds forged on those vacations that provide me with we spent our vacations bonding with assorted uncles, aunts, the most emotional sustenance. nieces, nephews and a veritable army of cousins rather than So, in case you haven’t booked that mini-break in Bangkok just yet, discovering the delights of gelato or the finer points of bull-fighting. you might want to examine the possibility of a family vacation. Your When taking a break didn’t necessarily involve breaking the bank. kids may baulk at it now; but they may well thank you for it in the Growing up, I spent all my school vacations visiting various mem- years to come. bers of our extended – and, to be honest, fairly extensive – family. The seema_ht@rediffmail.com. Follow Seema on Twitter at twitter.com/seemagoswami PHOTOS: THINKSTOCK

spectator

Seema Goswami

IT’S NO LONGER ENOUGH

TO GO TIGER-WATCHING IN RANTHAMBORE, BANDHAVGARH OR PENCH. YOU HAVE TO GO ON A SAFARI IN AFRICA

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HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

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Wine Secrets

UNDRINKABLE Spoilage occurs frequently because of poor storage and other factors

From the right taste to the right price, here are answers to the most frequently asked questions about wine

I

WROTE SOME weeks ago about the practice of up-selling wines – that is, of restaurants pressuring you to buy more expensive wines than you had originally intended to drink – and cheating guests on wine pricing.

So great has the flood of responses to that piece been that I decided not to answer all the questions I was asked individually but to combine them into a single piece. Here are answers to the mostfrequently asked questions.

When ordering a wine should I care about the grape?

Well, yes and no. The grape is one of the most important constituents of a wine and each grape has distinguishing characteristics: the inkiness of Cabernet Sauvignon; the fleshiness of Merlot; the silkiness of Pinot Noir; etc.

But the emphasis on grapes is a relatively recent phenomenon encouraged by wine-makers from the New World. In France, they don’t like naming the grape variety on the bottle. They take the line that wine is an expression of terroir. In Burgundy, for instance, they say that Pinot Noir was first selected thousands of years ago by the Romans because it best absorbed the influences of the soil, the weather and the barrel. In that sense, the grape is no more than a translation of the soil.

This sounds like bunk but you have to only travel from village to village in Burgundy to discover how the same grape (Chardonnay or Pinot Noir) yields completely different wines in vineyards that are only a few miles away.

My own view is that grapes matter in the case of New World wines but can be an irrelevance in France or Italy.

How important is the vintage?

It can be very important. The same vineyard can yield great wines and mediocre wines, depending on the year. On the other hand, vintage matters less and less in warm weather countries and in places where wine is an industrial product (some American, Australian and South American wines fall in this category). The general rule is that cold weather countries (France, for instance) produce wines that vary more from year to year than warm weather areas (California).

Where vintage does make a difference, however, is price. If you are ordering a 1995 Bordeaux and they give you a 2009, then you have a right to complain. Some vintages are more expensive than

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PHOTOS: REUTERS

rude drink

Vir Sanghvi

Uncorked

NOT WORTH IT Hotel wine lists contain many expensive wines from Bordeaux that nobody orders (Petrus, Lafite, etc.) but rarely feature good, drinkable wines

others and frequently restaurants will charge you for an expensive vintage and then substitute a cheaper one.

Also remember that some wines, red Bordeaux for instance, take at least five years to show their hand and should not be ordered when they are young.

Should I return a bottle of wine?

Not if you just don’t like it. If you ordered it, you are obliged to pay for it unless the wine is spoilt.

But spoilage occurs frequently because of poor storage and other factors. There was a time when it was impossible to order white Burgundy in India because the spoilage factor was 50 per cent. In those cases, always send the wine back. It may take you a while to be able to detect a wine that is corked or spoilt but once you have some experience, it is easy enough. Your nose will tell you when a wine smells like moist cardboard and is corked.

Do waiters take bottles back? It varies. Last month I had a bottle of an obviously corked, very expensive wine at Beaumaniere, the most famous restaurant in Provence. Though my host was from the wine trade and knew what he was talking about, the sommeli-

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

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PHOTOS: THINKSTOCK

PHOTOS: REUTERS

NO THANKS The so-called house wine – the one they offer to sell you by the glass – can be dire at many restaurants

DIFFERENT TASTES Cold weather countries, France, for instance produce wines that vary more from year to year

er said the wine was fine and charged us for it anyway. If it can happen at Beaumaniere, it can happen anywhere.

Do restaurants charge too much for wine?

In a word; yes. Any hotel or restaurant with foreign exchange earnings can order wine free of customs duty. But state taxes can be ridiculously high. Even so, hotels levy absurd mark-ups. One way of checking is to compare the price of a wine at a five-star hotel which has imported it duty-free with the price of the same wine at a stand-alone that does not get duty exemption. In almost every case, the wine will be cheaper at the stand-alone even though the restaurant has paid more to buy it.

Years ago, when I was editor of the HT, we ran a campaign in HT City (then edited by Sourish Bhattacharya) examining how much difference there was in the price of the same wine depending on where you drank it. I am pretty sure that were we to conduct the same exercise again, the results would be the same.

How do I know that I am getting good value for my wine at a restaurant?

Well, frankly, unless you are part of the wine trade, you don’t. But some general rules may help. The mark-ups on expensive wines are lower than the mark-ups on cheap wines. So, in the case of wine at least, more is less.

The so-called house wine – the one they offer to sell you by the glass – can be dire at many restaurants. They choose wines that they can buy cheap and often they open the bottle many days in advance, store it badly and serve you the wine when it is spoilt. So be careful about ordering wine by the glass.

Remember that in the Indian market at least, California is overpriced and Bordeaux prices can be a joke. Hotel wine lists contain many expensive wines from Bordeaux that nobody orders (Petrus, Lafite, etc.) but rarely feature good, drinkable wines. Instead, they rely on meaningless brand names (the Rothschild brand means nothing unless you are drinking a first growth).

The best value in cheap wines is Chile. For middle range wines, it is Australia or New Zealand. And for expensive wines, it is Italy or Burgundy.

Should I order Indian wine?

Oh dear, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that. I was an early champion of Indian wines and now that there is a wine boom in the country, I should be more encouraging.

But here’s my problem. I find a complete lack of consistency in most Indian wines. The great brands tend to bottle rubbish. The ‘champagne’ tastes like cat’s piss. And there is more hype than quality.

That said, I’ve drunk some very good Indian wines and I am told that things are getting better. As of now, however, I am still not confident enough to make blanket recommendations. Besides, Indian wine is not particularly cheap, at least on restaurant menus. Either the quality improves or the price comes down before I start recommending it.

I love wine. But can I get it at home?

Only with some difficulty. In theory, you can buy wine at shops in our big cities. But the range is not great and in my limited experience, I have found that the wine is not always stored properly and can be spoilt as a consequence.

And yet, if wine drinking is to take off in India then we should be able to drink good wine at home. My friend, Dharti Desai of Fine Wines and More, is that rare phenomenon: a wine merchant who pays as much attention to the retail market as she does to the restaurant sector. Fine Wines and More has some innovative wineselling ideas (including a hugely successful service for American Express card-holders).

But despite the excellence of many of the wines on offer, the sector is young, the laws are complicated, excise officials are corrupt, retail spaces are limited and it will be a while before you and I can wander into a shop and buy the sorts of wines we can order at restaurants.

IN THEORY YOU CAN BUY WINE AT SHOPS IN OUR BIG CITIES. BUT THE RANGE IS NOT GREAT AND THE WINE IS NOT ALWAYS STORED PROPERLY HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

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IT’S DIFFERENT Each grape has distinguishing characteristics: for example, the fleshiness of Merlot (above)

HIGH MAINTENANCE There was a time when it was impossible to order white Burgundy in India because the spoilage factor was 50 per cent

VINTAGE VALUE If you are ordering a 1995 Bordeaux (above) and they give you a 2009, then you have a right to complain

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Being A Twit: A Socially Irritable Tale Dear dorks on Twitter: here is an open letter just for you. #havefun

techilicious

Rajiv Makhni

I

T HAS changed the world; it has creatively challenged every form of media; it dispenses news and information faster than any other media; it has been the backbone of revolutions and social change across the world; it has spawned a new culture; it is a great leveller; it has bridged the gap between celebrities and fans; it’s... well, it’s a long list of greats. Yet, with all this jaw dropping stuff that the 140 character revolution has archived, Twitter does have some truly gut-wrenching irritants.

Let’s start from the basics. The abuse of Twitter by people who use it in ways no other human can endure.

To the Forever Status Updater: Do we really need to know when you got up, what you’re feeling every 10 minutes, your goal for the day, your to-do list, what you ate, a photo of everything you ate, how you’re driving and tweeting (!!), what song you’re listening to, a shortened url of that song on YouTube (!!), where you are now, where you were before, where you’re going to be in the next 10 minutes? Stop! We get that you’re with it and cool and also great at fiction-writing and have invented a life that doesn’t exist.

To the New Crap Language Inventor: Yes, Twitter restricts you to 140 characters and yes, it is sometimes tough to express yourself in that many words. But do you have to pulverise the language to little bits and pieces, use slang and abbreviations to the point of insanity and add acronyms and phonetics that make no sense to anybody but to yourself? No wonder you have just five followers – nobody understands what you’ve been tweeting for the last one year!

Uhvgt2stprgnw.

To the #Hashtag Army: Agreed, hashtags are a powerful way of making something trend, to get people unified on a single topic, to make a point that the world is with you, to bring people together, to start a movement and a revolution. But could you desist from putting hashtags to complete nonsense, using a hashtag on four words in a single sentence, using it with words like #justsaying and #meloves and #itsraining? It will never trend, the world isn’t with you on that, it doesn’t make your tweet look cooler and yes, you do look and read like a fool. #youhavebeenwarned.

To the Blow Your own Trumpeteer: Come on, it’s Twitter, not a job application or a CV depository. Could you tone down your digital profile to earth-terms and not fly in the stratosphere? Get off the poetic route, erase those lofty claims and stop making yourself sound like the second coming of Christ. No, you don’t have so many interests and you most certainly haven’t achieved so much.

Also, those moody little philosophies of life and the little pieces of dark brooding advice you’re giving everyone in your profile – nope,

not the right platform. An introduction, where you are from and a factual sentence or two about yourself is good enough. Let your tweets do the rest of the magic.

To the One-Way Celebrity:We know it feels good, we know it’s a ratification of your power and your fan base and we know that having ‘followers’ in millions is just such a warm and fuzzy feeling.

But can you treat them with some respect? Don’t start tweeting only when you have a new movie or a book or a TV show (guilty). Don’t treat it as a one-way broadcast street. Engage, interact and reply to some of the people going gaga over your spelling mistake-ridden, terribly formatted, grammatically incorrect tweet. And don’t disappear forever off Twitter and still give press interviews about how much you love the fact that you’ve got the sweetest followers who’ve helped you cross the 10 million mark.

To the Social Media Guru: Look, you may be a consultant to the top companies, you may be God in front of your little band of four people at home and you may well be the greatest thing since sliced silicon in your own eyes.

Could you not dispense wisdom, advice and instructions in that rude and very stand- offish manner? Don’t tell people how to tweet, don’t correct them, don’t be the spelling police, don’t be the Twitter-usage mafia, don’t guide anyone and send out howto lists, don’t be Big Brother and don’t sermonise and criticise one and all. You may know your stuff (I doubt that) but when you do what you do, you sound like a jackass on Twitter.

There are lots of other characters and characteristics on Twitter that universally cheese everybody off. RTing somebody’s tweet and cutting the original person out, IMAGING: ASHISH SINGH using Capital Letters and shouting everybody out, abusing the Direct Message privilege and using it for marketing or selfpromotion, keeping a running score of who you unfollowed and broadcasting it, using seriously abusive words in order to sound cooler than the rest, begging and imploring to be followed, ditto for asking for your tweet to be retweeted, name dropping, continuously reposting your tweets in the hope that more people respond and react and spending every waking hour on Twitter... it’s as silly and as embarrassing as it is in real life. You’ve got to have a real life to sound like you have an amazing life, even on Twitter. #justsaying :)

HASHTAGS ARE GREAT, BUT THEY DON’T MAKE YOUR TWEET LOOK COOL

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Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology, NDTV and the anchor of Gadget Guru, Cell Guru and Newsnet 3. Follow Rajiv on Twitter at twitter.com/RajivMakhni

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26 2011

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Two For Joy Two favourite musicians release two new albums. Could you ask for more?

download central

Sanjoy Narayan

Y

OU ARE unlikely to find a rock musician who works harder than Warren Haynes. The 51-year-old lead guitarist and singer works in three bands – Gov’t Mule, which he fronts, The Allman Brothers Band where he plays the lead guitar along with Derek Trucks, his own solo projects, as well as occasional stints with Phil Lesh & Friends. How the man manages to do all of that for outfits that tour like maniacs – most of these bands mainly play live gigs (sometimes more than a 100 shows a year) and record very few studio albums – is a mystery. Yet Haynes, who was featured at No. 23 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, powers on, shuffling his dates between bands and, as he did recently, makes time to record studio albums as well.

If you’ve seen Haynes perform or heard recordings, you will know how intense and solid he makes his guitar sound and how blessedly soul-filled his voice sounds. Inspired equally by the raw, unpolished blues of legends like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, as also by heavy 1970s rock bands, Haynes is a contemporary purveyor of blues-rock. To add to all of this, there is a southern jam-band twist to his playing.

So when Haynes released his much-awaited latest solo studio effort, his first since 1993, Man In Motion (aptly named, I thought, for a guitarist who is constantly touring), I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I had just heard last November’s Another One For Woody (an annual gig by Gov’t Mule in New York, which is staged in memory of the late Allen Woody, former bassist for the Mule) and the nearly two-hour concert had some Mule staples, such as Soulshine and Banks of The Deep End, but also a fabulous cover version of The Beatles’ Dear Prudence (a 10-minute plus version, actually!). My apologies for this digression, but at that same gig there were sets by The Allman Brothers Band and a really good one by the North Mississippi Allstars (fronted by the talented duo of Luther and Cody Dickinson) but perhaps I should gush about them on another Sunday.

When I finally got listening to Man In Motion, I found it to be a mellow, soulful album in which Haynes returns to the roots of old-fashioned blues and R&B. Haynes had a couple of well-known New Orleans musicians working with him – Meters’ bassist, George Porter Jr, keyboardist Ivan Neville and drummer Raymond Webber – and that makes a huge difference. Man In Motion is an example of how versatile the itinerant guitarist is.

His gigs with the Mule or the IN THOSE DAYS Allman Brothers can be rock Jim James’s soulful howls and blues-infused extravain Circuital, My Morning ganzas but he evidently has Jacket’s latest, took me back a subdued side as this album to the time I first heard him shows.

LIKE IT IS Guitarist Warren Haynes (above) makes his guitar sound intense and solid. Man In Motion (right) is his first studio album since 1993

James’s wails and howls and a sound that can be best described as soul flecked with psychedelia, were unique. The problem started when I began looking for more MMJ records – studio efforts such as At Dawn (2001), It Still Moves (2003), Z (2005) and Evil Urges (2008). Z was an instant hit with me, the sound synthladen and spacey and while all the others were nice, I kept going back to Okonokos, the live album that had made me a fan of the band.

Like many bands, they were best heard at gigs, I said to myself.

Till I got this year’s Circuital; actually, I heard the title track off a podcast and it transported me back to the first time I heard Jim James off Okonokos. Just as Haynes is what Gov’t Mule is all about, James is MMJ. His dramatic vocal style is what makes the band what it is. Pretty much like Haynes’ guitar makes Gov’t Mule what it is.

Circuital has got rave reviews from many critics, who’ve mostly said it’s a return to their roots by MMJ. I don’t agree. Circuital is an evolution by the band. It’s a step forward, highly listenable, very MMJ-like and closest to any of the band’s live recordings. Circuital has a strong whiff of the live energy that the band is gifted with.

And it may also be a step towards more studio albums that will sound as good as the live ones. On their 2008 studio album (Evil Urges), I’d not really liked James’s new-found falsetto on a few tracks but this time round, he’s used it very sparingly. It works. On Holdin’ Onto Black Metal – a spirited song that I’m still trying to interpret (is it a parody or a mock caution against continuing as a black metal addict?) – his falsetto fits in perfectly. As perfectly as the two new albums fitted into last week for me.

To give feedback, stream or download the music mentioned in this column, go to http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/download-central, follow argus48 on Twitter or visit our website: www.hindustantimes.com/brunch

I

FIRST HEARD My Morning Jacket when someone pointed me to 2006’s Okonokos. It was a two-disc live stunner that made me an instant fan of the Kentucky-based band.

They were nothing like any other southern rock band that I’d heard. The reverbladen guitar, frontman Jim

PHOTO: REUTERS

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

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Wellness

Eat well, heal

faster

When recuperating from an illness, remember that food helps in healing as much as medicines do

by Dr Shikha Sharma

Fractures and post surgical healing Recovery from upper respiratory tract infections (throat, cold, cough, lungs) Recovery from liver and digestive problems Recovery from fevers and post fever weakness

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RECOVERY FROM UPPER RESPIRATORY TRACT INFECTIONS (THROAT, COLD, COUGH, LUNGS) The lung is the site for consumed regularly kapha, and most of the throughout the day upper respiratory infecBlack pepper - It tions are due to too reduces phlegm, much of kapha. For healand dries infections ing from such infections the Turmeric - It reduces food should be pitta in taasir PHOTO: THINKSTOCK infection and helps and have drying properties. in healing One must keep the following Ginger - It dries the points in mind: secretions and is a Avoid kapha foods like rice, natural antibiotic banana, cold drinks, maida, One should inhale fried foods, butter, lassi and pasteam which contains neer neem and tulsi Soups which contain the folNutrition - High prolowing ingredients should be tein foods with low fat

like pulses (mung, lobhia, channa), black channa soup, soya, corn in boiled form should be eaten as they effectively dry lungs after pneumonia. Fruits like pomegranate, apple, sweet lime (mosambi) also help as they provide adequate protein for tissue repair. Zinc and vitamin C are required for regeneration as well.

PHOTO: MCT

DRY DOSE Turmeric and pepper help in drying out infections

RECOVERY FROM FEVERS While recovering from fevers, the most important aspects are fluid replenishment and liver strengthening. So, it’s essential to have foods rich in vitamin C and electrolytes.

Coconut water - It provides electrolytes and natural sugar Nimbu paani PHOTO: MCT

M

OST PEOPLE understand that nutrition is important for growth during childhood and for providing strength.

At the other end of the spectrum lies dieting for weight loss. In between these two zones lies an area of great importance which is frequently forgotten. And that is nutrition for healing. In other words – correct nutrition to recover from illnesses. Once, nutrition was a part and parcel of the science of healing and doctors would explain in detail about the correct diet to be consumed during the process of healing in order to ensure complete recovery.

Food and nutrition form the basis of the development and regeneration of the body and if the nutrition is adequate, the body has the capacity and ability to heal itself faster and regain its lost strength.

Conversely, if the nutrition is deficient or inadequate, the body takes a lot of time to heal and at times even falls prey to other illnesses.

Today medicine and nutrition have separated to quite an extent and while medicine has progressed very fast, the science of nutrition for healing has failed to progress to that level.

As a result, in most cases the patient is left to his own devices to find the correct nutrition for healing, post illness. There are different nutritional requirements in different kinds of illnesses for optimum recovery. And they fall in these broad categories:

COOL DRUG Medicines play their part but right nutrition helps a lot in recovering faster

- One must have it with brown sugar and rock salt Sweet lime - Fresh juice Barley water - Have barley broth khichri made with rice and mung dal Avoid dairy products - Nonvegetarian foods, processed foods and dry foods like corn, besan, phool-makhana (lotus seeds) should not be had.

FEVER BEATER Sweet lime and coconut water replenish and build strength post a fever

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

PHOTO: AJAY AGGARWAL

BONE BUILDING Foods like almonds and flaxseed aid in tissue repair by providing vitamin E

RECOVERY FROM LIVER AND DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS, INFECTIONS ETC

SOAKING THE SUN Exercises like Suryanamaskar are very helpful in recovering from a fracture especially when performed in the light of the sun

of the most important minerals and is useful in skin healing and regeneration. Many popular and successful brands of medicinal ointments contain zinc for faster recovery. It is also essential for maintaining fertility.

Vitamin E - Vitamin E is important for tissue repair and healing, Its main sources are almonds and flaxseed.

Vitamin D - It is activated by sunlight (a good reason to do suryanamaskar in the morning) Vitamin C - It’s important for skin healing and also essential as it helps the immune cells which are the soldiers who fight and eat up the deadly viruses and bacteria in the body. It is also required for tissue healing and collagen rebuilding.

Chromium - Another mineral which is important for faster healing in diabetics. It has been seen that diabetics who have poor insulin function are also deficient in chromium.

Vitamin B12 - This is a very interesting and important vitamin, as it helps the nervous system. In several cases of chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic listlessness and depressive feeling, it has been PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

seen that supplementation with Vitamin B 12 helps in a major way to give relief from the symptoms and provide relief.

Vitamin A- This vitamin being the precursor to important vitamins is very essential for skin healing and regeneration. Several medicated skin ointments contain vitamin A. Protein - Protein supplementation is needed for post surgical healing in cases of bone injuries, muscle injuries and post partum nutrition.

The quality and quantity of protein needs to be balanced in order to provide optimal nutrition whilst avoiding protein overload on the liver. Post surgical nutrition is a science which has not been explored enough. Its benefits are immense and it needs to be explored more so that the recovery of patients is faster.

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

The liver is the seat of metabolism and also detoxification of PHOTO: MCT the body. It is not only responsible for transforming the ingested food into energy but for providing components for tissue repair and generation as well. If the liver falls ill it needs certain components for healing. Especially in the critical stage, there are certain foods and herbs which are important: Electrolytes - To replenish electrolytes, the best combination to try is brown sugar and rock salt, with a decoction of saunf Healing fluids - Turmeric decoction for infections, ginger decoction for improving liver function and digestion and peppermint for gas are useful Alkaline foods - The liver, due to its functions, HERBAL DETOX ends up collecting a lot of Juices of aloe vera and toxins. To cleanse it, one amla assist in cooling of needs to have counterballiver post inflammation ancing foods, which by nature are alkaline and cool the liver down. And they are: Aloe vera juice - It provides cooling and detoxification Amla - A rich source of vitamin C, it helps in tissue repair B complex - It’s very important for replenishing the metabolic raw material. In the deficiency of B complex, liver metabolism also suffers. Sources of B complex include fruits and whole grains.

SHIKHA SHARMA Dr Shikha Sharma is a regular Brunch columnist and a well-known wellness consultant. You can contact her at ask@drshikha.com

PHOTO: MCT

Let’s take a typical case of the fracture. While in hospital the bones are aligned so that they touch each other. This alignment is held together by a cast or by steel rods. However, the actual healing is a chain of processes which begins the moment the injury takes place. First the body creates clots to prevent too much blood loss, then the body brings all the healing components or “stuff” at the point of injury to aid the tissues to heal. And finally the bones themselves begin to generate cells which multiply and join or reconstruct the bone.

This absolutely amazing power of the body is assisted in part by nutrition. The body requires the basic nutritive components to aid in the repair and healing process.

Typically the body may use the following components (besides several other things): Calcium - It is very essential in bone healing and repair as it maintains the blood acid base balance. It is equally important for diabetics for glucose transport. It also provides a basic structure to the bone.

TO MAKE UP FOR COMMON DEFICIENCIES Potassium - It’s required to maintain the acid - base balance and also to ensure effective and timely clotting of the blood. It also helps in forming the bone Zinc - It is one

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

FRACTURES AND POST-SURGICAL HEALING

Variety

... tales were told by professionals trained in the art. Lend your ears to storytellers Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain who take you back to that era

by Parul Khanna Tewari PHOTO: RANGA SHANKARA, BANGALORE

R

EMEMBER YOUR grandmother narrating stories from the Arabian Nights?

Her raised eyebrows when the evil khalifa, yet again, kills his young wife, her victorious smile when the earnest king wins over his cousin and her eyes widening in shock when she told of the giant roc made those tales a pleasure to listen to. Her theatrics were what made them memorable.

Storytelling is a performance art, just like dance, opera and music. It thrives on an audience that needs to be entertained. And according to historian, theatre actor and author Mahmood Farooqui (who also co-directed and did the casting for the movie Peepli Live with his wife Anusha Rizvi), “It is the most expressive and challenging of all performance arts. Text is illustrated through gestures, facial expressions and voice modulation. It is an expansive medium. You are playing to lots of people as a storyteller.”

And it is this passion for performance that led Farooqui, along with fellow dastango (storyteller) and actor Danish Husain, to revive the lost tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, a few years ago.

there are many dastans, this was the most popular. Based on the legends of the valour of the prophet Muhammad’s uncle, Amir Hamza, the text tells the tale of the fictional Hamza and his exploits.”

Dastangoi remained popular till the early 20th century. Dastangos would recite stories in public squares and on the steps of Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. But then, in the 1920s, the art just vanished. And Farooqui only came across it in 2002.

“That’s when I had my first encounter with the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza,” he says. “Although I had been an avid reader of Urdu fiction and had even formally studied it for my M Phil dissertation, I had never actually read a dastan. That year, SR Faruqi, the leading scholar of the form, asked me to help somebody who was interested in making a film on dastangoi. Though the film was never made, I read the first volume of his marvellous study of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza.”

Farooqui became a Sarai fellow that year, intending to collect material for a documentary on the tradition. Today, the dastangos are toying with the idea of incorporating newer languages into the form, so that it reaches a wider audience. And also tell stories from the Urdu Mahabharata and Ramayan.

AKBAR WAS KNOWN TO PATRONISE DASTANGOS IN HIS COURT

THE LOST ART

Dastan means story and dastangoi means to tell a story. It is a unique form of Urdu storytelling that uses no musical instruments, no props or other visual stimuli. Only the story is told. The tradition was very popular during the Mughal era and Akbar was known to patron dastangos in his court. The stories were about magic and sorcerers. While the traditional storytellers of the Mughal era innovated and improvised stories depending on their audience, Farooqui and Husain, the dastangos of today, mainly re-tell those tales. “We usually perform chapters from Dastan-e-Amir Hamza,” says Farooqui. “Though

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CHARMING NOTES

In 2005, Farooqui did his first show at the India International Centre in Delhi. He was apprehensive about the reception, considering not many people understand Urdu. “We first performed the story Tilism-e-Hoshruba (Hamza pursues Laqa who takes refuge in the enchanted kingdom of Hoshruba. The story talks about how Hamza’s grandson fights sorcery and magical snares to conquer Hoshruba), the best known chapter of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. The crowd mostly consisted of Urdu scholars and journalists. They understood the language and the performance

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

TELLING TALES Professional storytellers Mahmood Farooqui (right) and Danish Husain (left) at a performance, in costume

The Adventures Of AMIR HAMZA

The Adventures of Amir Hamza or the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza narrates the legendary exploits of Amir Hamza, the uncle of the prophet of Islam. The stories are supposed to be told through performances. The book was compiled more than 1,000 years ago, probably in Persia, and its stories spread through the Islamic world. In 1562, Akbar commissioned a manuscript of Amir Hamza which became a favourite text for dastangos. The stories create a world of seduction, imagery, secrets and fantasy.

They’re quite similar to Bollywood potboilers: formulaic, with heroes vanquishing villains and demons. They’re also very funny, shift from one location to another, and have sorcery, magic and battles.

was applauded. But the real test was when I performed solo to a non-Urdu and even non-Hindi speaking audience. People loved it and responded to the twists, the turns and the way the stories are narrated, the expressions, the drama,” says Farooqui.

Since then, the group has done over 130 shows and has performed at college festivals in Delhi, the Jaipur Literary Festival, Karachi, New York, Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai and smaller towns like

PHOTOS: JASJEET PLAHA

Curtain Raiser Dastangos Danish (left) and Mahmood (right) illustrate the nuances of the art

Text is illustrated through gestures, facial expressions and voice modulation

Binayak Sen. Now they’re working on a story based on the works of Rabindranath Tagore for Rabindrotsav, a Tagore festival in Kolkata.

“We have also been approached to do a story on Gandhi and another one on our nuclear plants,” says Husain. Even as new stories are being added to their repertoire, the dastangos have changed the form somewhat. Traditionally, only one dastango would perform at a time. To break the monotony and to add drama, Farooqui decided to use two people.

But not anyone can be a dastango, even though Farooqui feels that, to truly revive the form, it is essential to have more dastangos. “Like all performance arts, you need to learn storytelling,” he says. “But unless many more people take up the art, the form itself will not be revived. It will just remain a successful show. The first step in extending its reach is to create new storytellers.”

Currently, there are 17 dastangos in India, including actor Naseeruddin Shah, all trained by Farooqui and Husain.

Since so little has been documented about the actual performance – how the storytellers sat, how much they moved around, their individual stylistic quirks, whether they took breaks, how the audience was arranged, whether they sang the poetry – Farooqui and Husain devised their own performance methods to suit the 21st century.

“Traditionally, dastangos

Aligarh, Patna. Even on the banks of the Ganga in Allahabad, with doped sadhus as an audience.

In spite of possible language problems, people return again and again to see the shows, claim the duo. “Even foreigners enjoy the dastans,” says Farooqui. “It is the pleasure of listening and the anticipation of what will happen that captivates the audience.”

It’s likely too, that storytelling in this manner is a big change from all the visual stimuli people are used to now. “It’s a rarity for people to listen, form a picture and use their imagination. And that is what stories get them to do,” says Farooqui.

Also, listening to old texts is a delight because of the sheer richness of the language and content, says Danish Husain. “Once you hear the stories, you will be taken with the language. Good language attracts people.”

CONTEMPORARY TALES

The moment they found an audience for dastangoi, the art was contemporised, says Farooqui. The dastangois did not have to fiddle with the basic stories. But what they did was take up new issues and write stories around them. At a recent performance, the group told a story on partition and another on

Naseeruddin Shah is also a dastango Naseer read an interview with Mahmood Farooqui about dastangoi. When Farooqui and wife Anusha went to Mumbai for Peepli Live, they met Naseer and Farooqui gave him lessons in the art. Naseer finally debuted as a dastango at the Asia Society Muslim Voices Festival in New York in 2009.

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PHOTO: LA FRANCES HUI

Dastangoi is a form of Urdu storytelling that uses no musical instruments, no props or visual stimuli

The stories have heroes, villains, pretty princesses, demons, magic, sorcery and battles

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

would perform through the night but we put up 90minute shows,” says Danish. “There is a threeminute audio clip of the last dastango who performed in 1920. We’ve referred to that. We focus on our linguistics. We wear white achkans and topis and sit on a white mattress. But we have no evidence that this was the proper dress. We suppose this is what they would have worn as achkans were common then.”

New dastangos will be taught all this and will also have to learn the art of improvisation to appeal to newer audiences. So what is the duo looking for in a dastango? “Passion for languages, especially Urdu, and a passion for performance,” says Farooqui. “Diction, expressions, voice modulation, all can be taught. And, yes women are welcome,” he adds. “We have a 33 per cent reservation!”

To create more dastangos, Farooqui and Husain need to conduct a series of workshops with aspiring performers, give them basic training, hand them some of the texts in a Hindi transliteration and see what they can make of it.

“With the emergence of new dastangos, we might have newer styles, variations in performances and eventually, even newer texts,” says Farooqui. The essence of the art of dastangos of old lay in improvised storytelling. They started with bare essentials and wove in the colour depending on the audience, added humour and poetry in other areas. New dastangos will have to learn this art too. Apart from giving performances, Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain also conduct workshops to train people in the nuances of the art of Urdu storytelling. If you’re interested, go to their blog, dastangoi.blogspot.com. parul.khanna@hindustantimes.com

MORE ON WEB ■

To see a performance of dastangoi, log on to

hindustantimes.com/dastangoi

Travel

RACING Time Every June, Chantilly in France takes itself back to the graciousness of its past, via the sport of kings

by Veenu Singh

WINNER ALL THE WAY French jockey Martin Guyon, riding Golden Lilac, celebrates after winning the 162nd Prix de Diane Longines in Chantilly

A PRIX DE DIANE WITHOUT THE LADIES’ HATS IS LIKE A JOCKEY WITHOUT HIS CAP

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A

PHOTOS: AFP

T A time of year when Delhi resembles nothing so much as a blazing tandoor, an invitation to visit France seemed nothing less than a miracle. Paris, I thought dreamily. The Eiffel Tower. The museums. The streetside cafés. Ah, Paris.

And then I took a closer look at the invitation. Not Paris (except to pass through). My invitation was to Chantilly.

But where, I wondered, was Chantilly.

And what’s so interesting about it?

Since few people appeared to know, I turned to fail-safe Google. Chantilly, I learned from several websites, is the horse racing capital of France. Horse racing was first introduced from England in 1830 and today Chantilly still trains about 3,000 thoroughbreds in the surrounding forests and countryside. June marks the beginning of the flat racing season, and it attracts the biggies of European society for two historic trophies - the Prix du Jockey-Club and Prix de Diane.

My invitation was from the watch brand Longines, the sponsors of the Prix de Diane. So, I was going to watch one of the most prestigious races in the world – and would also get to meet Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Longines’s brand ambassador.

Not a bad reason to get out of Delhi.

This was going to be no ordinary trip, I realised, when I received my itinerary.

There, among the details of hotels, flight timings and so on, were dress codes. One for every event I’d be attending. So not only did I require an evening gown for the

gala dinner, I also needed a hat for the Prix de Diane!

Naturally this called for hectic shopping for everything from matching shoes to accessories, but I finally landed up at the airport to take the Turkish Airlines flight to Paris via Istanbul.

Grey skies and a chilly breeze welcomed us at the Charles De Gaulle airport in France, setting the mood for the next few days. A taxi was waiting to take us to the hotel Tiara Château Hotel Mont Royal in Chantilly. The hotel has a lovely location, almost in the middle of a forest.

The rooms, done up Victorian style, were comfortable and offered an excellent view of the lush green trees all around.

And though Chantilly is known for racing, it also seems to be popular for weddings. Or at least, that’s what I gathered, watching the hectic preparations at the hotel for a wedding over the weekend.

Makes sense, I thought sleepily, as I headed for my room and bed. With the parks and forests we saw on our way in, this is a very romantic place.

My first full day in Chantilly was scheduled to be a long one. A tour of Château de Chantilly during the day, then the gala dinner at night.

The way to the Château was beautiful – we drove past open fields, lovely houses and quaint cafés offering a variety of delicacies. Nestled in the heart of the town, the Chantilly Domain (home of princes) offers visitors a trip back in time, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

guided tour begins with the history of France seen through the lives of the princely families who occupied Chantilly.

It also offers a great insight into the history of French art and architecture as seen in the unique collections of paintings and books preserved in this Château.

Because the area is famous for its lace – Chantilly lace is renowned all over the world – there are samples preserved in the Château. Out in the estate, the tour takes you through the history of landscape gardening via design traditions of the 17th to 19th centuries.

The Château also boasts of a restau-

A DAY AT THE RACES Aishwarya Rai Bachchan at the Prix de Diane Longines with her mother, Vrinda Rai. Ash, who had done a photo shoot at the same racecourse many years ago, chose to wear a peach Elie Saab dress with a matching hat. The satin flowers in the hat were apparently her idea

WHAT A FEAST Racegoers enjoy the customary picnic at the Chantilly racecourse

THE HOME OF PRINCES The Château de Chantilly offers visitors a trip back in time, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century

rant called La Capitainerie, which occupies the very kitchen run by the renowned Francois Vatel, master steward for Louis II de Bourbon-Conde, Prince of Conde, who died in 1686. In addition to the sumptuous meals that Vatel made during his time at Chantilly and his contributions to the era of the Grand Conde, he is also credited with creating the famous Chantilly cream that is still a favourite all over the world.

Cultural appreciation over, it was time to get ready for the gala dinner – which meant we’d be going back to the Château.

That the evening was going to be exciting

was clearly visible from the way everybody was dressed up. The Château looked beautiful in the evening, bathed in a blue light with a blue carpet welcome (the colour for the Longines brand) for everyone. It reminded me of star-studded awards nights where all eyes are on the people walking the red carpet.

After cocktails in the courtyard, we went in for a four-course sit-down dinner in the banquet hall where magnificent dinners must have been held in the past.

The evening ended on a high note with a spectacular display of fireworks that left us spellbound.

Although the next day was a Sunday, there was no question of lazing around.

This was the day of the much-awaited Prix de Diane Longines.

More than anything else, I was keen to check out the wide variety of hats that apparently are an integral part of the event. Since the Prix de Diane was created, a hat has been an essential accessory.

And just as at Ascot, eccentricity and extravagance have become the norm amongst female race goers. In fact, as Chantilly residents say, a Prix de Diane without the ladies’ hats is like a jockey without his cap!

The Prix de Diane, sometimes referred to as the French Oaks, is a Group 1 flat horse race in France, open to three-yearold thoroughbred fillies only. First run on 18 May 1843, it has become a June tradition, covering a distance of 2,100 metres.

Since tradition seems to be in charge for this race, we went to the Hippodrome De Chantilly, the racecourse next to the Château de Chantilly in beautiful carriages. Nearly 40,000 people from all over Europe were gathering to watch the event: the place looked like one big party.

Which, actually, it is.

Traditionally (there’s that word again!) a giant picnic is organised in the centre of the Jardins de Diane, surrounded by the racetrack. And a concert is also organised on the central lawn. This year, Coeur de Pirate from Quebec gave an unforgettable performance.

Meanwhile Longines’ brand ambassador Aishwarya Rai Bachchan arrived in a carriage, wearing an Elie Saab dress and matching hat and acknowledging the cheers of the crowd.

After the picnic lunch, the races began and there was another kind of excitement altogether, with people betting on and cheering for their favourite jockeys.

As the day drew to an end, I sat back, thought of what a great time I had had… and remembered my time in Chantilly was now over. Well, at least I had a hat for remembrance.

OH MY HAT! Eccentricity and extravagance are the norm at the Prix de Diane Longines

veenus@hindustantimes.com The writer’s trip to Chantilly was sponsored by the watch brand Longines

JUNE 26, 2011

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PERSONAL AGENDA ACTRESS

SHAZAHN PADAMSEE Her career started with theatre, just like her parents, Alyque Padamsee and Sharon Prabhakar. But Shazahn also took up modelling and at the same time, started auditioning for films. Her debut movie Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year failed to make an impact, but her next release Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji worked. And now, Shazahn is gearing up for Houseful 2. A self proclaimed fitness freak, Shazahn endorses Reebok’s Easy Tone range One word that describes you best?

Fun.

Love is...

Very rare.

What did you do with your first pay cheque?

I bought a flat screen TV and a stateof-the art surround sound music system.

If a traffic constable hauls you up, what will you do?

I would bat my eyelashes and hope that my charm works on him.

What makes you feel sexy?

Victoria’s Secret.

Earth’s crowded and chock full of trash. Choose another planet.

I adore them. I go for the mushiest of the mushiest.

You get high on?

I’m a fitness freak and just love my Easy Tone shoes that help tone my legs the whole day.

Which superhero would you like to be and why?

I would love to be this invisible woman who could spy on what people do behind closed doors.

The last time you rode on bus...

It was for my Telegu film Orange. For

If you could have a star perform at your wedding, who would it be and why?

Choose: Air India or Indian Railways?

Shah Rukh Khan. The best performer in the world.

Indian Railways because even if anything happens, at least I would not be caught mid-air.

A tune you can’t get out your head?

The song Jaadugiri from my last film Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji. I even have

What is the weirdest thing that ever went into your mouth?

The new drinking age. I’m 23 years old right now and I would like to go for an occasional drink or two.

Share a secret with us…you can trust us, we’ll only print it!

I dated a guy who looked like Frankenstein and I loved him.

A PLACE WHERE YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE LOST FOR A MONTH.

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Do you love ‘luv storys’?

that we shot on top of an open bus all over Mumbai.

The one law you would break if you could get away with it?

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

Awkward as hell. Both of us were in college and had no idea how to do it.

Venus.

that as my ringtone.

THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS. THEY ARE SO BEAUTIFUL. I CAN EASILY BE LOST THERE FOREVER

Your first kiss was...

LIFE IN THE FAST FOOD LANE: CHOOSE YOUR MENU

CC/LIKE_THE_GRAND_CANYON

SUBWAY SANDWICHES. I DO MY OWN VARIATIONS AND TAKE AGES OVER THAT

HINDUSTAN TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE JUNE 26, 2011

Frogs legs.

What makes your day?

Laughter.

What screws it up?

Over-judgemental people.

If you were the last person left on Earth, what would you ?

I would try to find a friend as I hate being alone

— Interviewed by Veenu Singh

THE LAST MOVIE THAT MADE YOU CRY?

THE NOTEBOOK. THE STORY OF THE TWO LOVERS REALLY TOUCHED MY HEART