Lounge, saturday magazine by Hindustan Times

www.livemint.com

New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Pune

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Vol. 9 No. 7

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

HOW TO SEE RED >Page 8

ALCHEMICAL SOLUTIONS

How long and sustained friendships can help articulate our individuality, and foster every kind of alternative family >Pages 1011

Homosociality, ‘bhakti’ poetry, sibling bonds. This Valentine’s Day, we celebrate love that goes beyond yin and yang >Pages 916

love

CURIOUS COUPLES

stories

Some of the most lyrical writers of love had odd partners and unconventional love lives >Page 13

GEOGRAPHY OF LOVE

Forget Valentine’s Day, in love unfriendly Delhi, Lodi Gardens is an everyday oasis. Mumbai’s lovers aren’t bereft of similar spots either >Page 14

REPLY TO ALL

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

AAKAR PATEL

NATASHA BADHWAR

LESSONS FROM A FATHER

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

CLASS DIVIDE, ARMS AND BOLLYWOOD

HOW TO GET THE PIZZA RIGHT

nd so off to Karachi for their literature festival, Pakistan’s biggest, organized by the Oxford University Press. The Bengaluru posse was represented by your columnist and Arshia Sattar, translator of Valmiki’s Ramayan and the Kathasaritsagara. There we were, two fine specimens from the martial race of Gujaratis, a Memon translator of Sanskrit and a Patel translator of Urdu, looking like an ad for national integration. The 75-minute Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight from Mumbai... >Page 4

well-known and well-respected British food writer once told my youngest son (then aged about 10) that he had a very fine palate. She said that children who are extremely fussy (and my son was so fussy at the time that he only ate things that were white or beige—rice, pasta, eggs, occasionally toast) sometimes have very delicate taste buds. He’s less picky now but he has remained very proud of his palate, although I do sometimes... >Page 4

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

PHOTO ESSAY

GOOD OLD DAYS

Experience the “CITY LIFE” like never before… MID WEST

Cars and Motown stars in Michigan’s city of contrasts • With an inspiring and sizeable art community, Detroit is home to the Hart Plaza. It is a must visit for experiencing popular city events (e.g. Motor City Pride and the Detroit Jazz Festival), public art and great views of the Detroit skyline. • The Heidelberg Project - a world-renowned neighbourhood filled with colourful polka dot houses, retro painted cars and buildings covered with creative outdoor installations is worth a visit. • Visitors who want to discover the true meaning of the Motor City should attend some of Detroit’s major auto events organised throughout the year. Double the fun in Minnesota’s friendly ‘Twin Cities’ • The Twin Cities are famous for their great nightlife. First Avenue and 7th Street Entry - a club made famous by Prince in the film Purple Rain, continues to attract music lovers to downtown. Minneapolis, whilst The Cabooze also hosts regular live music. • Every shopper’s paradise, the Mall of America, is Minnesota’s shopping mecca. Visitors can enjoy tax-free shopping on clothing and shoes in over 500 stores. It is also home to hundreds of events, family-friendly attractions, over 50 restaurants and hotel accommodation. • Minneapolis has a fantastic arts scene. The Walker Art Museum is a modern art icon. Its neighbour, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, is a large urban sculpture park home to the famed Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. Living the high life in the Midwest’s urban giant – Chicago! • Known for its passion for sports, visitors can see the popular Chicago Bulls (basketball) at the United Centre, also home to one of USA’s original National Hockey League teams, the Chicago Blackhawks. Catch a baseball game with the Cubs at historic Wrigley Field or the White Sox at U.S. Cellular Field, or for classic American. Football, the Chicago Bears await at Soldier Field. • The Magnificent Mile in Chicago is one of the top 10 avenues in the world for shopping, dining and entertainment. Along this strip of Michigan Avenue, visitors can also access luxury hotels, art galleries, museums, spas and sightseeing tours. • Home to exciting festivals and events, including the Grant Park Music Festival in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago’s Millennium Park buzzes with life year-round.

NORTH EAST New York! Much more than just Times Square • The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are two major must see destinations. It is now a national park and museum; visitors can take a cruise or ferry to Ellis Island and the Circle Line boat tours offer great views of these icons. • Begin a culinary and cultural journey through Manhattan’s Chinatown, where seven busy streets meet (including the Bowery and Mott Street). Travellers can also experience classic American bars and restaurants amidst the hub of New York’s Broadway scene. • Similar to the views seen from atop the famed Empire State Building, the Top of the Rock Observation Deck at Rockefeller Plaza offers spectacular city vistas over 260 metres. Both buildings are open late (Top of the Rock until 12 a.m. and the Empire State Building until 2 a.m.) and visitors can watch the city’s lights sparkle at night. Freedom rings in Pennsylvania’s grand metropolis • Philadelphia is home to some of USA’s most notable historical events. The first American Flag was designed here and travellers can visit the historic attractions including the house of the seamstress, Betsy

Ross, the Liberty Bell Pavilion, Independence Hall and the modern National Constitution Centre. • Philadelphia is also the birthplace of the famous Philly Cheesesteak sandwich. Visitors can find the original Pat’s King of Steaks on Passyunk Avenue, but there are countless vendors each claiming their Philly Cheesesteak is the best! • Philadelphia’s art scene is booming. Home to the nation’s oldest art museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, travellers can also pay a visit to The Barnes Foundation for world-class collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, early modern paintings and more. Fine food and nightlife in Rhode Island’s big city • Providence, the creative hub of Rhode Island is home to the RISD Museum of Art, which features over 80,000 artefacts from around the globe. To experience Providence’s thriving art scene, visitors can explore more than 20 artistic venues that offer free entry during Gallery Night from March to November. • Visitors can explore the city on the Providence River by ambling along the cobblestone riverside walkways or floating downstream on a gondola. The rivers’ centrepiece is WaterPlace Park, home to an amphitheatre showcasing summer concerts and the multi-sensory art installation, WaterFire. • Just 12 miles south of Providence sits the coastal city of Warwick, the old summer playground of Rhode Island’s wealthy. Offering 39 miles of beautiful coastline with wonderful ocean vistas, it provides fine dining experiences, miles of shopping and premiere golf courses.

SOUTH EAST French flourishes in Louisiana’s eternal party city • The French Quarter in the oldest neighbourhood

in New Orleans houses many buildings from the period before the city became a part of the United States. Here visitors can find great places to eat, shop and dance the night away. • Mardi Gras is an annual Carnival in New Orleans. The celebrations last about two weeks during the end of February/ beginning of March and usually there is one parade every day. Visitors during this period will be able to experience the real spirit of New Orleans. Atlanta - A peach of an Olympic city at the heart of Georgia • Grant Park is the oldest park in Atlanta and offers stunning views as well as the opportunity for visitors to enjoy an afternoon among lush lawns. The park borders three of Atlanta major attractions – Zoo Atlanta, Oakland Cemetery and Atlanta Cyclorama. • The Fox Theatre in Atlanta gives visitors an opportunity to see a show or enjoy Atlanta Ballet performance. The theatre building, once a Mosque, is now a historic landmark and one of the iconic buildings in Atlanta. • At Atlanta Cyclorama visitors will find the world’s largest oil painting, the “Battle of Atlanta’’. They can also experience a show which brings the Atlanta Battle to life. Florida’s flourishing coastal hotspot does a little of everything • Those in search of nightlife will find no shortage of it here in Miami. South Beach is home to worldclass DJs, electronic music and cool cocktail bars. • The Miami neighbourhood of South Beach is not only the home of the popular Art Deco architecture, but it is also a great place to relax on the white sand beaches or explore world-class boutiques, galleries, stores and restaurants. • For nature lovers, a visit to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens in Florida is a must. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is a National Historic Landmark, which features a Main House, 10 acres of gardens and a rockland hammock (native forest).

SOUTH WEST Texas’s big-hitter is a rival to USA’s greatest cities • At the Space Centre Houston, the official visitor centre for NASA’s Johnson Space Centre, visitors can explore and get up close to spacecraft including Mercury 9, the Apollo 17 Command Module and a replica of the 122.7 ft space shuttle. • A fantastic sporting city in Houston, visitors can embrace the passionate American sporting culture by catching a baseball game at Minute Maid Park or a basketball match at the Toyota Centre or experience American football at the Reliant Stadium. • Visitors seeking some retail therapy should head to The Galleria. This upscale shopping complex located in the Uptown District of the city offers a great choice of brands with more than 375 stores. It is also the largest shopping centre in Texas. Texas’s TV-legend metropolis is far more than a soap star • Naturally, Dallas is a place for visitors to indulge in, a truly Texan experience. Holidaymakers can kit themselves out at Wild Bill’s Western Store before sampling some of the state’s best Tex-Mex at restaurants around the city. For a unique historic Dallas experience, tourists can hop on the McKinney Avenue Trolley line for a free ride from Uptown to the Dallas Arts District. • Dallas is filled with exciting attractions. Visitors can

The United States being the most ‘aspirational’ destination on every globetrotter’s bucket list houses some of the world’s greatest cities. Right from history, arts, science, culture, nightlife, shopping, food, beaches and sports, come experience a myraid of activities in the magnificent cities of USA. explore the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which features a poignant 9/11 exhibit, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science as well as the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens and families can enjoy Dallas Zoo. • Dallas is a shopper’s paradise. The North Park Centre is a world-class retail space with more than 230 unique, famous and luxury stores, fine restaurants and department stores, including Macy’s and Nordstrom. Phoenix, a rising presence in the Valley of the Sun • There are many more cultural attractions to explore in Phoenix such as the Desert Botanical Garden, the Phoenix Zoo, the Children’s Museum of Phoenix and the Arizona Science Centre, which are home to many hands-on interactive exhibits. • Phoenix is famed for its golf and luxury spa resorts. The surrounding mountains and desert landscape offer a beautiful setting. • Shoppers should head to Scottsdale Fashion Square, the largest shopping mall in Arizona, for favourite brands and luxury shopping, plus the nearby Scottsdale Waterfront for more shops and popular restaurants.

WEST California’s Golden Gateway truly shines • No visit to San Francisco is complete without spending time at bustling Pier 39. With views of the bay, Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, travellers can enjoy two floors of restaurants, shops and attractions. • San Francisco offers fantastic city shopping. Union Square is one of the largest shopping areas in USA, home to artsy craft shops, high-end brands and luxury department stores. Just a short walk away is the oldest and largest Chinatown district outside of Asia. Food-lovers should also visit Ferry Building Marketplace for fresh local fare. • Visitors can also travel in one of the city’s most loved icons – the cable car. One of the few national historic landmarks, the cable car has been carrying tourists and locals up and down the city’s steep streets since the nineteenth century – pick it up at Powell or Market Street. Glitter and good times for all in the perfect party town • Las Vegas brands itself as ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World’ and catching a show is a must-do for any traveller. Las Vegas offers comedy, dance, top international musicians in concert, magic shows, musicals and tribute acts along The Strip. • Las Vegas is the ideal place to pick up a tour to the magnificent Hoover Dam, Colorado River and the Grand Canyon (Arizona). Travellers can also choose to see them with a luxurious helicopter ride or take an off-road tour in an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV). • Las Vegas also offers an escape from the big city buzz with its wealth of spas and golf courses. There are over 55 golf courses for visitors to choose from. Many destination spas along The Strip offer unique, indulgent and bizarre treatments perfect for relaxing after a hectic day out.

HOME PAGE L3

LOUNGE First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

LOUNGE EDITOR

SANJUKTA SHARMA DEPUTY EDITOR

RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA

(EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT SUNDEEP KHANNA ANIL PENNA IRA DUGAL LESLIE D’MONTE DHANYA SKARIACHAN SEEMA CHOWDHRY ©2015 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

THE FATHER WHO TAUGHT ME HOW TO BE A MOTHER

inner of the Pulitzer Prize. Over 15,000,000 copies sold,” it says on the cover of my copy of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This dates my copy of the book. By now it has sold 30,000,000 copies. Last week Harper Lee’s publishers announced that they would be publishing a recently discovered second novel, a sequel to her iconic first and only book. Memories of Atticus Finch came back to me. My first reaction was a greedy desire to know more about Atticus, a lawyer and a single father, who is the main adult protagonist in the book. To Kill A Mockingbird had been my constant companion through many of my growing-up years. I have bought it repeatedly as a present for many friends over the years, but my first copy still sits on my bookshelf. I went and picked it up, this time after a gap of years. My book opened on page 118. These lines were underlined with a pencil. “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” As a teenager, I had adopted Atticus Finch as a foster parent. I wanted to grow up and become him. It is an intrinsic human need to have role models. When children can’t find real people to admire, they choose imaginary ones. Atticus doesn’t judge anyone. He is wise and heroic. He reads to his children, Scout and Jem, at

night. Atticus is a single parent. He never loses his cool. Atticus has terrible relatives. Some of his neighbours are crazy. Atticus has insomnia. He seems to know what is going on in everyone else’s mind. Atticus walks away from insults. Atticus Finch is a lawyer in the fictional small town of Maycomb, Alabama. At the centre of the book is a criminal case in which he has been appointed by Judge Taylor to defend the accused. Tom, a young black man, has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman. In spite of the backlash from most people in town, Atticus decides to take his role seriously. He protects Tom from a lynch mob of white men and defends him to the best of his ability. It becomes clear in court that the accusers, Mayella and her father Bob Ewell, are lying. Mayella was attracted to Tom and her father had discovered her attempting to get physically close to him. Tom had been framed. “As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.” Despite the evidence presented by Atticus to prove that Tom is innocent, the all-white jury convicts Tom of rape. Despite winning the case, Bob Ewell, the accuser, feels exposed as a liar. Chastened, he vows revenge. He spits on Atticus’

NATASHA BADHWAR

face in public but Atticus refuses to rise to the bait. Scout and Jem are scared for Atticus. He explains his decision to not retaliate to Bob Ewell’s threats and insults. “…see if you can stand in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I’d rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You understand?” To Kill A Mockingbird is narrated by six-year-old Scout, who declares in chapter 10 that her father is feeble and no good at anything. While other children’s fathers are playing football matches and hunting, Atticus sits and reads in his free time. As the town gets divided along racial lines, Scout, her elder brother Jem and their friend Dill discover what courage, honour and justice really mean. They learn tough lessons about race, class and gender politics. They learn empathy. They experience true love from the father they had found boring, their coloured maid, Calpurnia and their mysterious, reclusive neighbour, Boo Radley. As I reread Harper Lee’s book as a parent, I found new lessons. Real parenting requires us to take risks. We need to engage with and challenge the world around us. Sometimes we may find ourselves in danger. We all go through phases when we feel like shutting ourselves away from the world like Boo Radley. We recover our strength. “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide my majority rule is a person’s conscience.” As they grow older, we will not be able to protect our children’s innocence. Will it be replaced by their own inner moral compass, or the fears that we have planted inadvertently?

LOUNGE REVIEW | ASADO, MUMBAI

inding an exceptional steak in Mumbai can be described as searching for that elusive diamond in the rough. Besides the unadventurous 24x7 cafés at five-star hotels, there are a handful of delis and restaurants that serve meat that isn’t rubbery or drowning in brown sauce. But at Asado, Bandra’s newest barbecue and grill outlet, we found the most fantastic “rough”. With a Latin American multi-cuisine theme, the restaurant is well equipped to feed vegetarians too.

The good stuff

Asado is a “Latin Grill” that replaces Bembos, the South American Burger Grill on Swami Vivekanand Road. It is designed to resemble La Rambla, Barcelona’s famous pedestrian street. It won’t be easy to get past kitschy murals and the clear blue skies painted on the ceiling, or the fake birds perched on fake lamp posts. It will be a challenge to get past the obscene pricing of food and drinks, but if you manage to stay put, rewards come in the form of genuinely lip-smacking, melt-inyour-mouth meats. From the appetizers, we tried the Katafi Prawns (`485), crisp and plump, served on a bed of spicy jalapeño-flavoured corn purée and tangy mango salsa, and the Chocolate Mole Chicken Flautas (`425), mini tortilla rolls stuffed with shredded chicken cooked in slightly sweet chocolate and nutmeg gravy. There are other TexMex staples, but you might want to skip them in order to splurge on the mains. The Live Lava Stone Grill section allows you to choose from Jumbo Prawns (`1,100), Scallops (`1,850), Lobster (`1,850), Lamb Chops (`850), Pork Ribs (`900) and a Brazilian Beef Steak (`2,400) and pair them with sauces like an Argentine Chimichurri, a Miso Glaze or a Lemon Tarragon Beurre Blanc. We got the Brazilian Beef Steak with the rec-

Mouthful: (above) The interiors of Asado; and pork ribs.

The notsogood

ommended Pink Peppercorn Apple Jus and the Pork Ribs in a Homemade Smokey BBQ sauce. The tenderloin was grilled to a sweet spot between medium and well-done and the sauce was an admirable update on the brown gravy. The pork ribs were just the right combination of fatty, salty, sticky, sweet and smoky. The drinks menu consists of plenty of top-shelf spirits, imported beers and expensive European, local and new-world wine and sparkling wine (starting from `650 for a glass of Sula), as well as an extensive list of rumbased Tiki cocktails (`550-750). Our Tiki mug of Gooney Goo (`600), made with dark rum, brandy, port wine and mixed fruit juice, was so smooth that we couldn’t resist a repeat order. The Sula Brut in the Passion Fruit and Peach Bellini (`750) may have tasted a lot better had the bartender used fresh fruit rather than Monin syrups.

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION: JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Asado is bizarrely positioned as a fine-dining restaurant. It comes from the team behind Loco Chino, the city’s newest quick-service chain specializing in Asian and Mexican fusion dishes. Besides the meat, there’s not much to love about the food, drink and service. The servers, dressed like a mariachi band, were pretty clueless about the menu. Our too-small dinner table was covered with a dozen wine glasses and heavy slabs of slate in place of plates, and the armless chairs were too uncomfortable for a slow, leisurely meal.

Talk plastic

Eating at Asado is a pricey affair— soups, salads, starters and flatbreads are priced from `325-500; mains from `575-2,450; and grilled meals start at `650 for a Haloumi “Cottage Cheese” Veg Skewer and go up to `1,850 for scallops and `2,400 for a Brazilian Beef Steak. A meal for two without drinks will easily set you back by about `5,500. Asado, Manorama Chambers, SV Road, Bandra (West). For reservations, call 65686666. Prerna Makhija

Real courage: Head up, fists down. In chapter 14, Scout is sitting in the living room with her father and aunt after supper. “What’s rape?” she asks him. Atticus looks around from behind his newspaper and sighs. Rape is carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent, he says to his daughter. “When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em.” Many years after I had first read the book, I met a teacher and a therapist who became the Atticus Finch of my life. When faced with a dilemma, I just hand over my conflict to Father Os in my mind. What would he do? What would he suggest I do? Like Atticus, Father Os always had creative solutions to issues. His perspective was unique and often startling. A friend of mine had signed up for Life Skill sessions with Father Os for a few weeks. He wanted to learn how to be assertive and strategic as an entrepreneur. He wanted to unlearn conditioned responses. Someone he had partnered with had swindled him of his share of their project’s profits. “How should I deal with this dishonest man?” my friend asked. “How can I make him give me my share of the money we earned together?”

“How old is he?” Father Os asked. “He has grown-up children in college,” my friend answered. “Maybe he needs the money more than you,” Father Os said. This didn’t sound like the life skill my friend was looking for. He was feeling frustrated and vulnerable. He wanted to learn to be clever, to be able to intimidate someone who was bullying him. Father Os seemed to be telling him to let go. Maybe he was asking him to cut his losses. He would earn again. Perhaps the lesson was to not repeat the mistakes he had made. To not make the conflict about money. To not take this monetary loss personally and have a strong ego. “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.” It is possible that Harper Lee may not be involved in the decision to publish the sequel, Go Set A Watchman. News reports suggest that she is too old and ill to be able to take decisions. As I revisited her first and only book, I got over my desire to know any more about the lives of Atticus, Scout and Jem. Everything I need to know about the conflict between family and society, one’s own conscience and popular opinion, is already there in To Kill A Mockingbird. I browsed through it and realized that I have learnt a lot about how to be a good mother from a very good father. Natasha Badhwar is a media trainer, entrepreneur and mother of three. She writes a fortnightly column on family and relationships. Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Natasha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/natashabadhwar

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Class divide, arms and Bollywood in Karachi

ASIM HAFEEZ/BLOOMBERG

nd so off to Karachi for their literature

festival, Pakistan’s biggest, organized by the

Oxford University Press. The Bengaluru

posse was represented by your columnist

and Arshia Sattar, translator of Valmiki’s

Ramayan and the Kathasaritsagara. There we were, two fine specimens from the martial race of Gujaratis, a Memon translator of Sanskrit and a Patel translator of Urdu, looking like an ad for national integration. The 75-minute Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight from Mumbai was on a leased plane and crew with pretty but grumpy East European airhostesses. PIA was down to 19 aircraft last year, according to its chairman, and that is a shame because I personally have found its crew to be warm and friendly. The flight begins, as I remembered, with a prayer in Arabic, something that began in the Zia-ul-Haq years. But since the plane was leased, the recording was not available and a man on board actually delivered it live. The passengers were mainly Gujaratis, as may be expected—Memons, Khojas and Bohras, who dominate the economy of Karachi and so of Pakistan. From the air, Karachi looks more orderly than our cities, particularly Mumbai, and is laid out in straight lines. It is also much cleaner than Mumbai, but more about the comparison later. Karachi airport was empty and almost deserted when we landed in the evening. I had written about Pakistan’s airports when I first visited a decade ago, that they were nicer and more modern than those in India. Now they appear small and outdated, not because they have changed of course, but because India’s airports have. Taxpayers are so rare and prized in Pakistan that they get a separate immigration queue. Indians are sent off to their own line for ritual harassment (from which we were excluded because of our VIP status), and this is something that is inflicted on Pakistanis visiting India as well, of course. Our stay is at the Beach Luxury Hotel, owned by the famous hoteliers, the Parsi Avari family, a beautiful property by the mangroves at the edge of the sea. In my room, the man fixing the telephone,

James, speaks to the operator in Gujarati. I ask him how and he grins and says all the old staffers speak it. Karachi produces 70% of the state’s revenue, and my guess is that 70% of that comes from the tiny community of Gujaratis. I asked those I met what the numbers were, and a Memon told me his community was 100,000 strong and a Bohra told me they were 10,000. I do not know if the actual numbers are wildly off from these, but I would be surprised if my guess on the economy is off. Anyway, my panels for the lit-fest were the usual stuff and I don’t want to go on about that. Let me instead record some things about Pakistan in general, and Karachi. Pakistanis are better-looking than Indians on average, as visitors there will notice immediately, at least about the women—but I think that may also come from our perspective that conflates fairness with beauty. That brings me to the other thing, which is that caste is as visible as in India. The wealthy are fair, the middle-class is wheatish and the poor are the darkest. On our first night, I teamed up with the Malayali writer Benyamin, famous for his novel Goat Days. We were hosted by Omar Quraishi, opinion editor at the Gujarati-owned Express Tribune, for whom I have long written a column. Quraishi took us out for some excellent street food and then drove us around after dinner. At a signal, a battered white Maruti 800 (called Mehran in Pakistan) on the other side was stopped by two policemen. We heard a man shrieking something obscene as a challenge (“go ahead, cut my penis off”). Then he rushed out of the passenger door, in shalwar kurta, carrying a pistol in his right hand. This he pointed, elbow held high, at the forehead of the now cowering policeman whom the man was holding with his left hand, by the scruff of the neck. The other policeman stood aside, stupefied in fear. At this point

Karachi Karachi blues blues:: Residents Residents blame blame gangs gangs with with political political support support for for high high crime crime rates. rates. Quraishi sped off through the red light. Karachi’s citizens say the high rates of crime are from gangs that have political support, whether it is the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (the party of refugees from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) or Asif Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party. I wonder if the easy availability of modern weapons is the real reason. Many people say they have been mugged at gunpoint and one man said he had been mugged twice. What is taken is usually cellphones, and for this reason many people don’t carry smartphones. I haven’t written about the sectarian violence and the terrorist attacks, and there are more of the latter in Karachi alone than in all of India. Given this reality, it isn’t surprising that the speeches at the lit-fest from the organizers were grim stuff about Karachi and its intellectual depletion and its future. My friend Ayaz Amir wrote this in his column: “Pakistan’s problem is not so much the power of the religious right as the fecklessness and lack of spirit of the liberal left, what may be loosely called

the liberati…the liberal, Englisheducated classes. “Take in the evidence. Whereas the half-tutored and half-lettered battalions of the religious right are ready to take to the streets at a moment’s notice, and at the slightest provocation, in defence of obscure and often hard-to-understand causes, the liberati for the most part are armchair samurai, waging their battles— in a language and an idiom which most Pakistanis find hard to comprehend— from the deep comfort of their sofas.” The cliché about Pakistan is that it doesn’t have a middle class, as India has. In my observation, the proportion of middle-class (meaning “not poor” in our parts) Pakistanis is probably larger. One doesn’t see as much wealth as one does in India, nor does one see as much poverty. The sea of blue tarpaulin that hits the eye when landing in Mumbai is not to be seen in Karachi, where the katchi abadis or hutments are not as ramshackle, nor the poverty as desperate. It is true that the Anglicized middle class, those who own cars and go on foreign holidays but are not truly

wealthy, is disproportionately bigger in India and growing. It is this group that Pakistan should target. Currently it is impossible for Indians to get a visa unless one is invited from Pakistan for a conference, or one has relatives (and even then it is difficult). The refusal to let the other side’s tourists in is reciprocal and so is the process. If we make Pakistani tourists register themselves (twice!) at a police station on landing, they also do that to us. If Pakistan forces Indians to enter and exit only from specific cities, we also do that to them. India may or may not have gained from keeping Pakistanis out, and certainly the events of the last few years, particularly the attack in Mumbai, mean that no government, much less this one, will let Pakistanis come over easily. However, in following blind reciprocity, Pakistan has lost by denying itself Indian visitors. Nobody else is coming to Karachi or elsewhere in Pakistan in the near future, whether tourists or businessmen. Indians went to Kashmir even when it was violent. They would flock by the thousands to Pakistan if given visas-onarrival. Think of direct flights to Mohenjo Daro and Indus river cruises (I can even see my misguided Hindutvawadi friends lining up). Indians will not need special food, will be happy with the accommodation and dress modestly. Sindh has easy access to alcohol (Karachi itself has over 60 official outlets, one of which friend and Mint Lounge reader Imran Yusuf took me to). It is legal to have a drink in Karachi, but not in Gujarat—think about that. In one area, Pakistan has already acted more maturely and let India in unilaterally, and that is entertainment. Pakistan’s multiplexes all show Bollywood, while it is difficult for Pakistani films to get a screening in our halls. The same is the case with television. Pakistan needs to think selfishly about tourists as well, and not just about how it can pay India back for some silliness in a process that is ultimately damaging to itself. Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakarpatel

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

HOW TO GET THE PIZZA RIGHT

well-known and wellrespected British food writer once told my youngest son (then aged about 10) that he had a very fine palate. She said that children who are extremely fussy (and my son was so fussy at the time that he only ate things that were white or beige—rice, pasta, eggs, occasionally toast) sometimes have very delicate taste buds. He’s less picky now but he has remained very proud of his palate, although I do sometimes wonder if he invokes it merely as a way of avoiding foods that he just doesn’t fancy eating—like vegetables. For instance, his “refined palate” is often brought into play when he doesn’t like the look of what I’ve made for dinner and would prefer to order in pizza. Personally I would rather eat the cardboard box they come in—it probably has more nutritional content, and certainly more flavour—but I do sometimes give in. From time to time I’ve made pizzas to try and wean him off the delivery pizza habit but

they’ve never quite hit the mark for him. And it’s true, homemade pizza crust is usually too heavy or bready. Then I came across a recipe recently that suggested putting semolina in the dough to make the crust a bit more crisp, and we had something of a breakthrough. I’m pleased to report that The Palate is finally happy—although while I’ve been testing the recipe, he has offered endless minute alterations: “not quite so much tomato”, “a little bit of Cheddar with the mozzarella”, “grated, not sliced”, and “in separate mounds so the cheese doesn’t all join up and come off with the first bite” (I know!). But still, we haven’t ordered pizza for about two weeks, which is a record. Making the initial batch does involve waiting for the dough to proof (double in size) but once it’s made, you can put it in the fridge. For a few days, you’ll have pizza on hand whenever you want it. Simply take it out of the fridge, roll out, add toppings and bake—in the time it takes to

place an order for a pizza.

Margherita pizza for fusspots Makes 4

Ingredients 400g ‘00’ flour (available in gourmet stores, it does make a better pizza crust but if you can’t find it, use refined flour) 100g semolina (suji) 1 tsp salt 1 tsp fast-action dried yeast 325ml warm water For the topping 500g tomatoes (as ripe as possible) 2 tbsp olive oil 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 100ml tomato purée (Indian, not the European concentrated type) 1 tsp salt 1 tsp sugar 200g mozzarella, grated 80g Cheddar, grated Method Put the flour, semolina, salt and yeast into a large bowl. Add the water and mix everything together. Turn the dough out on

Ready to be sliced: Fresh from the oven, with rocket leaves. to a floured surface and knead it for about 5 minutes until it is smooth and very elastic when stretched. Put the dough back into the bowl, cover and leave for about 1 hour or until the dough has proved. If you don’t want to bake the pizza straight away, you could put the kneaded dough in the fridge, where it will proof much more slowly. So if you made the dough in the morning, it would be ready to bake in the evening. If you make the topping in advance too, then you have an almost instant supper. To make the topping, skin the tomatoes by first covering them in boiling water. Leave them for 1 minute, then peel off the skin.

Chop them. Put the olive oil in a pan and heat gently, then add the chopped garlic. Let the garlic turn light brown, then add the chopped tomatoes. Stir in the tomato purée, salt and sugar (the tomatoes used for pizza in Italy would be a lot sweeter than the ones we get in India, so I always add a bit of sugar to tomato sauces for pizza or pasta). Let the sauce simmer gently for about 20 minutes, by which time the tomatoes should be fairly mushy—if not, mash them down with a fork. Let the sauce cool a little before using. When you’re ready to bake the pizza, turn the oven to 240 degrees Celsius and put a baking sheet (or pizza stone if you have

one) into the oven to heat up (this will help the base of the pizza to become crisp). Divide the proved pizza dough into four pieces. Knead each one into a neat ball and leave to rest for the time it takes for the oven to heat up. Roll out one of the balls on a large sheet of floured baking paper into an oval or circle approximately 20cm wide. Spread two tablespoons of tomato sauce on to the dough (leaving a 2cm border at the edge). Sprinkle the mozzarella and Cheddar over the sauce. Lift the baking paper and pizza on to the hot baking sheet and bake for about 10 minutes, until the edge of the pizza is nicely browned and the cheese and tomato are bubbling invitingly. I like to sprinkle rocket leaves as soon as the pizza comes out of the oven—obviously, my youngest son does not approve. Pamela Timms is a New Delhibased journalist, food writer and author of Korma, Kheer And Kismet. She blogs at Eatanddust.com. Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Are you a spouse whisperer?

hat you need this Valentine’s Day is not flowers or candles, but a spouse whisperer. What, you ask, is a spouse whisperer? Remember The Horse Whisperer, the movie in which

Robert Redford made a horse do things it didn’t want to do? Spouse whisperers do the same thing to spouses. There comes a time in every relationship when you realize a simple truth: Your spouse doesn’t listen to you. The harsher truth will follow: Your spouse listens to someone else who says the exact same thing that you’ve been repeating for days, months, sometimes years. You could have been telling him to buy mutual funds for years. Suddenly, one day, he will return from his haircut and announce: “You know, Billu barber is buying mutual funds. I think we should too.” Before you froth at the mouth, take stock. If you are as smart as I think you are, you will immediately see the need to cultivate the barber, tailor, hairdresser, golf and drinking buddies, who shall henceforth be referred to as spouse whisperers. Take a simple example that is the source of much discussion in many households these days: the amount of time that your spouse spends on social media. As her well-meaning husband, you believe she is spending far too much

time on Twitter and Facebook. It is not a belief; it is a fact. Being the software engineer that you are, you have ingeniously set timers to detect when she logs in and out of Facebook and Twitter on all her devices. You have wads of proof that you have collected on your daughter’s graph paper—pencil marks that go up and down like an ECG, plotting the amount of time she is on social media on a minute-by-minute basis. One evening, you begin a discussion about this, little realizing that it is a path to self-obliteration. Let’s figure this out rationally, you say. As you speak, there is a series of reactions in rapid succession. First, she doesn’t listen. Then she pretends she doesn’t understand what you are saying. Third, she says that you are wrong! Flat out. Without discussion. It is all in your head, she says. That’s when you bring out your ammunition: those green graph papers that you clutch in your hands. Proof. Going back weeks. That’s when her eyes go cold. “Have you been spying on me?” she says in that deceptively quiet voice you have come to fear. That is when you

realize that all your meticulous tracking of her time on social media, and rigorous collection of proof, was not just suboptimal; not just a waste of time. It was worse. It was like digging your grave, jumping inside it, and smearing yourself with dirt just to save your face. The tone of the discussion changes entirely after that. Your spouse spiritedly argues with you about how you are wrong in your perception of her. She has the gall to call it “perception” when you were waving around scientific proof. Then she turns the tables on you. She isn’t the one spending too much time on Facebook, she says. You are the one who is constantly on the phone—checking messages, texting colleagues, giving the thumbs-up to lame jokes on all the superfluous alumni groups that you are part of on WhatsApp. You are the one with the addiction, not her, she says. At the end of 4 hours, she is packing her bags to go to her mother’s house. The present scenario is so far removed from the image you had in your head that it makes you doubt how somebody in your office called you empathetic and insightful. In your imagination, she sees the validity and truth of your statements. Her eyes fill with tears of gratitude. “Thank you for showing me the way,” she says. What follows is a night of merriment. What has ensued is the exact opposite. The worst part isn’t the fight or its aftermath. It occurs during a casual dinner a couple of weeks later. As she sips soup, she says casually, “You know, there was an article posted on Surekha’s

THINKSTOCK

The key: Spouse whisperers come in many guises, your job is to figure out who they are. Facebook update about how women are addicted to social media. It causes our hormones to go entirely out of whack; and turns us into raging psychotic beasts. Do you know that the most aroused emotion when you are on social media is envy?” “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?” you feel like shouting. But you hear the word “aroused” and stay silent. Your lovely wife proceeds to blithely tell you that Surekha and she have made a pact to stay off social media for a week; to “detox”, as she calls it. You may wish to dump all those graph papers on Surekha’s head; you may wish to avoid her at all parties. But that would be a wrong approach. You need to cultivate Surekha so that she can deliver your messages to your wife. Silly Surekha, as you call her, is your spouse whisperer. Spouse whisperers come in many guises. As a sneaky spouse, your job is to figure out who they are; and how you can get them to pass along your messages. It could be the office peon; an astrologer; or a gym trainer.

If your husband is tight with his golf buddies, befriend them. Get them over for lunch or dinner. Then, have a quiet chat with the man your husband respects: “I think it is so great that you are strict with your children. You should mention that to (insert your spouse name). He spoils our kids and leaves me to be the bad guy.” The last bit of advice I have for you is to cultivate a tag-team of spouse whisperers, because you never know when your spouse will wisen up to the fact that the driver is giving him suggestions for vacation destinations— particularly if those vacation destinations happen to be the ones you are pushing. Shoba Narayan has ruined all the whispering by revealing the concept to her spouse through this column. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

STREET FOOD

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Cheap and chic

Truckin’ around: (clockwise from left) Siddhanth Sawkar of The Spitfire BBQ Truck; the Square Ruth truck; and food trucks are becoming a familiar sight in the city.

PRIYADARSHINI NANDY

The laws may still be fuzzy, but food trucks are ready for a fight on the streets of Bengaluru

B Y P RIYADARSHINI N ANDY ···························· he food battle is about to spill over on to Bengaluru’s streets. Even as trucks with bright signage and tempting food photos become familiar around the city, industry insiders say around 25 more food trucks are set to hit the streets this year. It indicates that enthusiasm for the newformat food business is at a high, despite the grey areas of licensing and permissions. As with all me-too plans, the trigger for the impending influx is the success of the six food trucks currently doing the rounds of the city—The Spitfire BBQ Truck (the first to hit the streets in May), The SWAT Truck, GypsyKitchen, De3, Square Ruth and Fuel Up. These pull up at various spots around the city, with Kammanahalli, Sahakara Nagar, Indiranagar, Koramangala, HSR Layout, BEL Road and Whitefield being the most popular destinations. The location is usually relayed via social media. The primary attraction at most of the trucks, not surprisingly, is fast food. Spitfire focuses particularly on barbecues and grills, while SWAT dishes out popular American grab-and-go snacks such as sloppy joes, corn dogs and deepfried Oreos. De3 sells fries in various avatars, as well as chicken wings, hot dogs, rolls, sandwiches, pastas, steaks, and even some Indian-inspired rice dishes. Fuel Up’s menu comprises a bit of everything popular—from panini, pasta, spare ribs and burrito bowls to appams, waffles and desserts. Square Ruth is mostly about sand-

wiches, burgers, wings in different sauces, steaks, and nachos. All the trucks price their products from `60-150, making them far more affordable than a restaurant or even a regular fast food outlet. So what sets them apart from, say, the old-school cart vendors, who sell everything from dosa to “Chinese” on basically the same principles? “People want good quality street food, and they want something different,” says Siddhanth Sawkar, the 24-year-old owner of The Spitfire BBQ Truck. “And food trucks definitely add to the novelty factor. Most of them are brightly painted and attract a lot of attention; they feed the curiosity of the people who are constantly looking for a new food experience.” Though most food trucks have a central kitchen for prep work, or for cooking certain ingredients such as bacon, all truck owners believe the mobile food business offers an escape from Bengaluru’s prohibitive real estate rates. “I had an outlet at Phoenix Mall, Whitefield, but the rentals became impossible,” says Umesh Chandran, the 25-year-old owner of Square Ruth. “Since I did not want to quit the food business, I began to research food trucks. If everything had gone as planned, I would’ve had the first food truck in the city. But by the time I got my concept and finances together, there were already a few on the streets.” Square Ruth is a refurbished Tempo Traveller, about 11x5.5ft, and fitted out with a basic kitchen. “My truck is not as elaborate as some of the others—in fact, it’s probably the cheapest in the city. I

don’t think I spent more than `2.5 lakh on it,” says Chandran. “I work alone with two assistants, and all I needed was a simple truck.” For Sawkar, the food truck was a stopgap option to begin with. “I finished my master’s in hotel management, specializing in Italian cuisine, from the Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria and came back to India to open my own restaurant. But it was taking a while to realize, and so I decided to launch a food truck in the meantime. Now I think it just may become my primary business,” Sawkar laughs. “I picked up the truck from a second-hand com-

The playful purist S

B Y P OOJA C HATURVEDI

pooja.c@livemint.com

Australian chef Adam D’Sylva on why a snapshot can sum up his food

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Authentic: Chef D’Sylva believes that fusion is not the way to go.

···························· easoning and serving are the two important things in a chef’s life, according to Australiabased chef Adam D’Sylva. “You might have made the most wonderful food, but if these two are not up to the mark, your food will fail,” says D’Sylva, the man behind two of Melbourne’s hottest restaurant/bars, Coda and Tonka. The Australian chef, who was in India recently, talks about his love for food and why he thinks fusion is not the way to go. Edited excerpts:

You grew up in an Indian/Italian family, travelled extensively around Europe and Asia, working under chefs in Hong Kong and Italy...yet you have always refused to identify your cooking style geographically. Growing up, I always had a bowl of pasta and a bowl of Indian curry on my table. And living in Australia meant I never had to eat the same meal two days in a row. That inspired me to try out different

mercial vehicles market. It was in a deplorable condition. But since I understand the structure and mechanics of a truck, I did a lot of the refurbishment myself. A truck might not give you much space, but what you can do in that space is unlimited.” Keen to ride the trend, Sagar Govindappa, 27, a former merchant navy officer, launched Fuel Up in November. At 24Kx7Kft, his truck is arguably the biggest in the city and also one of the most expensive. “Most of the other food truck owners have old trucks that they’ve refurbished. I bought a new one and worked on it from

bottom up, investing about `25 lakh in all, to set up a station kitchen, a sandwich grill, a dosa tawa, a 400-litre fridge and freezer, a 180-litre water tank with a basic sink, a 3 KVA generator and two deep-fryers,” he says. Govindappa is depending on a contract that allows him to station his truck at Manyata Tech Park, an IT park in Hebbal on Outer Ring Road, to make good his investment. “I did a few runs there in December and I should be set up at Manyata in the next few weeks,” he says. Housing leading IT firms such as Cognizant and IBM, the park can potentially get him

foods. My mother, aunt and grandmother always encouraged me as a kid to observe and cook for the family. For someone who enjoys food or likes to cook, Australia serves as a melting pot of international authentic cuisines, including Chinese, Italian and Vietnamese. I have people from diverse nationalities working in my restaurants, simply because I love the contrast and variety in food—and that is what my food is all about. Take a snapshot of any group of people in Australia—in culinary terms, that would translate into my food, modern Australian. Australian cuisine has become a force to reckon with, after pretty undistinguished beginnings. How did it manage to merge the very diverse immigrant influences to evolve its own personality? Nobody and nothing has united Australian cuisine as such—it has come together organically. It has always been normal for us

Australians to have access to many cultures and cuisines. As a young country, we may not have the expertise of the French or Italians, but our trump card is our produce: It’s excellent and abundant. For instance, we have strawberries round the year. Our meat is halal. Seasonal produce gives us variety and is also economically viable. The trend today is towards experimental food. What do you think about it? I am not very much for fusion food. I’d call my food India-inspired if and when I am cooking Asian cuisine, but it is really about cooking a meal using fresh, good quality produce and Indian flavours. For instance, my modern Indian food isn’t like Manish Mehrotra’s, where I am fusing foods and producing a sort of mixedgel. I don’t like to eat that way; I don’t cook that way. My food uses very authentic spices and flavours and this is because I believe all these traditional cuisines are a great source of culture and history, and not to be

`22,000 a day, says the entrepreneur, admitting that the contract certainly helped his budget. Location, location, location. The mantra of conventional restaurateurs, then, is as applicable to food trucks. As pivotal is the day of the week. Weekends, say the food truck owners, are when they earn the most. “I earned up to `15,000 per day on weekends when I was parked in Indiranagar, operating only between 5.30pm and 8.30pm,” says Chandran. Sawkar, on the other hand, says he averages 35-40 customers a day, which climbs up to 70 on weekends. “On a good day, we’ve earned up to `10,000 a day from about 2 hours of sales. Our average revenue on other days would be `6,000-7,000 per day,” he says. Despite the profitability and the prospects, owning a food truck comes with quite a few challenges. For instance, one business runs as a mobile canteen; another has permissions under the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act. “If the licensing process could be made more transparent, food trucks have the potential to become a sustainable business in the city,” says Chandran. “For a while in December 2014, I parked my truck in upmarket Indiranagar and did extremely well. But then we began to have trouble with the local cops, so we moved back to HSR Layout.” Apart from the fuzzy licensing issues, there are road taxes and health certifications to be considered, plus an annual road tax of `40,000-50,000, insurance and fitness certificates issued by the regional transport office that need to be renewed every six months. In a sector forever in search of the next big thing, however, entrepreneurs are holding on to the moment and established restaurateurs are taking note. “Food trucks in the West are proof that this business can become popular. If the players are organized, it can definitely become an important part of the food industry,” says Vijay Abhimanyu, managing director for Billionsmiles Pvt. Ltd, which owns the restaurants South Indies and the quick service restaurant Upsouth. For the next date then, let’s go truckin’.

played with. Instead of fusing things up, I would much rather play with technique or the spices. You could change the produce, and try experimenting with the flavours. So If I use a French cooking technique for an Asian dish, it is because that is how I interpret the dish. You serve a lot of Indian dishes at Coda and Tonka. How would you define modern Indian food? People all over the world are becoming increasingly conscious of what they are eating, and whether the food is nourishing them, besides tasting good. So modern food—and that applies to Indian cuisines as well—is how you retain the authentic taste of any dish and yet make it nourishing and healthy for the customer to be satisfied and feel good about spending money. www.livemint.com For a recipe of young coconut panna cotta with tapioca and fresh fruits, visit www.livemint.com/pannacottarecipe

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015

Play

LOUNGE GADGET INSPECTOR | VISHAL MATHUR

Small pickings

Product evolution comes full circle: small, affordable laptops are back in vogue

ust four years ago, netbooks were considered the next big computing revolution. They were affordable (at `14,000-24,000), had a small footprint (11.6-inch screens were common), and enough power for Web browsing, emails and media playback. Suddenly, however, they disappeared as laptop makers shifted focus to the 13-inch and 15.6-inch laptops, in the `20,000-30,000 range. But things are changing again.

HP Stream 11d023TU

Travel light: Lightweight laptops are back. HP (top) adds a SIM card slot to the Stream; and Asus’ price tag is attractive.

`19,990 What makes the Stream a real cool laptop for professionals and travellers is the 3G SIM card slot. Most Indian cities don’t have Wi-Fi connectivity outdoors. Relying on the phone to create a hot spot means you end up discharging the phone’s battery rapidly. The Stream’s striking design and vibrant blue colour draw attention. It doesn’t have the cheap-looking shiny plastics common to low-priced laptops. Instead, the shell is made of highquality plastic. The lid is fingerprint-resistant, there is a nice imprint on the keyboard deck, and the chassis is stiff enough not to flex. It weighs 1.3kg, and

can be carried easily in a handbag. The keyboard layout is similar to HP’s pricier laptops. For the price segment the Stream is positioned in, the excellent typing experience, given the adequate spacing and key size, is a real bonus. The 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. Not ideal for movies and videos, but it gets most Web browsing and productivity tasks done. The fact that the screen isn’t as reflective as some of HP’s other laptops is good—it makes the Stream a lot more usable outdoors, and in brightly lit offices. It packs in a dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 (2.16 GHz) processor, paired with 2 GB of RAM, and comes pre-loaded with the Windows 8.1 (64-bit). This processor is part of the Bay Trail series of chips, designed for low power use. The Stream is meant for basic use—Web browsing, document creation, music and movie playback. Full HD movie files play back smoothly, without stuttering. Open seven tabs in Chrome and have iTunes playing music in the background, and the next software will take some time to load. Internal storage is a quick 32 GB flash drive, but that may not be enough space. We would recommend that you slot in an SD card for all data and files. In our video playback battery test, the Stream’s battery lasted nearly 8 hours on a single charge. While browsing the Web or working on a spreadsheet, you will be using minimal resources and could easily touch the 10hour mark. Lightweight laptops are ideal for travellers and people who are always rushing from one meeting to the other. And for its price, the HP Stream 11 is a steal.

Asus EeeBook X205TA

`14,999 Asus makes some beautiful laptops, and the X205TA is no different. The 11.6-inch screen X205TA

tips the scales at 980g, making it the lightest laptop we’ve tested. Keeping the weight down hasn’t compromised construction—the plastic chassis is well put together, and doesn’t creak or flex. The rounded edges around the lid and keyboard deck add a touch of sophistication, as do the colour options—blue, champagne, white and red. This laptop has a fan-less design—no cooling fan is needed, so there are no vents spoiling the look. Limited space has ensured that historically, keyboards on the smaller-sized laptops have not been very good. The X205TA’s island-style keys, however, are spaced out adequately and are consistent in their response. Individual key size is slightly smaller though—it takes a while to get used to them. Unfortunately, the glass above the screen reflects your environment— though it makes up for that with crisp text and good colours. The X205TA packs in an Intel Bay Trail-T Z3735F quad-core processor (1.33 GHz) with 2 GB of RAM. It’s enough for basic tasks—Web browsing, YouTube videos and media. Despite lower clock speeds than the Stream 11, this laptop can handle six Chrome tabs and iTunes easily, and opening a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation at this point was in fact marginally quicker. It comes pre-loaded with Windows 8.1 (32-bit). This particular processor is designed for tablets, which is why the fan-less deployment is possible. The X205TA doesn’t heat up even when it has been in use for more than an hour. Internal storage is a fast 32 GB flash drive. Asus is also bundling 500 GB cloud storage. Considering our poor broadband speeds, however, a simple microSD card will be a better bet The X205TA’s battery lasted more than 8 hours on a single charge (8 hours and 21 minutes, to be precise), in our tests. It should last close to 10 hours in most usage cases, so it would be capable of lasting an entire day at work. The X205TA doesn’t have a single USB 3.0 port (the Stream 11 has one) or a SIM card slot. It is ideal for someone who wants a lightweight laptop for basic use at home or for document and spreadsheet work in office. And at this price, we cannot really fault it for minor shortcomings. vishal.m@livemint.com

Cool factor: Nike has created a fabric that uses recycled plastic bottles.

Wearing it all Team India will take the field in Australia in a smartapparel kit B Y V ISHAL M ATHUR vishal.m@livemint.com

··························· t is 6 March, and India are playing the West Indies at the Waca ground in Perth, Australia. The sunny city sees the mercury soar to 42 degrees Celsius at that time of the year. Chris Gayle is in one of those moods, and the ball is disappearing to all parts of the ground. Captain Dhoni chucks the ball in the direction of fast bowler Umesh Yadav, hoping for a breakthrough. Several unquantifiable factors can contribute to Yadav finding that extra yard of pace to flummox the batsman. Smartwear attempts to tap some of these— for instance, lightweight material that sits easily and regulates body temperature, preventing tiredness from creeping in, can provide that extra 1% to improve onfield performance. At the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 starting Saturday, the Indian cricket team will wear a kit developed by Nike. Every kit (jersey and pants) is made from 33 plastic bottles. Rachel Goldner, senior product line manager at Nike, says their aim is to minimize the impact on the environment while providing “superior innovations” for athletes. “The kit,” she says, “is made out of 100% recycled polyester. An average of 15 recycled plastic bottles are used to create the jersey and an average of 18 recycled plastic bottles to create the pants.” Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET or rPET) can be “recycled” to reduce the amount of slow-degrading waste going into landfills—Nike refused to comment on where the bottles are sourced from, but these are the bottles generally used for colas, mineral water, energy drinks and juices. Team India’s uniform was designed after listening to feedback from athletes across various sports, and by collecting on-field movement (running, diving, stretching) data. Designers then

developed the Dri-Fit Prime Lite fabric that stretches four ways, to improve comfort levels as well as movement speed. The material is much lighter than previous kits. The micro-fibre, polyester fabric picks sweat from the body and directs it to the fabric surface, from where it evaporates. Ventilation zones (each hole is laserdesigned to ensure uniform airflow) specifically cool parts of the body that sweat more. Incidentally, this isn’t the first use of smart apparel in sports. The England cricket team’s Twenty20 jersey (by Adidas) is made of a fabric woven with titanium and aluminium dots to pull heat away from the body. The dots are concentrated around the back and forearms, areas that Adidas’ research shows sweat more. The mesh-like micro-fibre design absorbs the sweat on the skin. Heike Leibl, senior vicepresident, training, Adidas, says, “Cooling spheres provide an instant chill sensation to keep the athlete at their peak optimum temperature.” Ice hockey in the US could soon have jerseys with sensors to monitor player performance in the ring. The National Hockey League (NHL) is considering integrating one in the puck too to map numbers, like the number of shots taken at goal, total distance covered, who hit the most powerful shot, passing accuracy, etc. The idea is to not just use this for training, but also provide the statistics in real time to the fans. The New Zealand national rugby union team, nicknamed All Blacks, wears perhaps the smartest kit. Adidas uses a body-mapping process called Dynamic Stretch Analysis, a method used in the aerospace industry, to ensure best possible fit and flexibility. Numbers were analysed to understand players’ bodies as they move; how much strain is applied, and in which direction. Based on the findings, Adidas designed two separate sets of jerseys, one for the forwards and one for the backline.

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015

Style

LOUNGE

TREND TRACKER

How to see red If you’re serious about fashion you can’t forgo red. Here’s how to wear every hue of it—from vermilion to wine red marsala, Pantone’s colour of the year

B Y S UPRIYA D RAVID ···························· t the 2015 Golden Globes last month, nearly 13 top actors donned various shades of scarlet. Lena Dunham wore a Zac Posen rosy-red satin gown with a high-low hemline, her Girls co-star Allison Williams was in a blood-red sequined Armani Privé dress, Viola Davis was in a beaded red Donna Karan dress, and Kate Mara sported a cherry-red Miu Miu gown belted at the waist. At home, red was actor Tabu’s choice for the crêpe sari she wore at the Life OK Screen Awards; US first lady Michelle Obama paired her black slim pants and black jacket with a sleek red top at the Republic Day parade last month. The colour has been a constant star in Indian fashion. “Red is the Indian neutral. We are naturally inclined to veer towards this family of colours,” says Aditi Prakash of Pure Ghee Designs, who makes fabric bags. No wonder, Indian Spring/Summer 2015 collections saw designers conjuring up all kinds of crimson. Rohit Bal’s line Gulbagh, which paid homage to Kashmir with impeccably crafted lehngas and sherwanis, most of them in ivory, was sprinkled subtly with red. Models wore roses and red carnations as maang tikaas, even as red flowers became the motif for many of his ivory and gold ensembles. An amaranth coloured anarkali jumpsuit with a deep-red border, worn with a floor-length black and gold jacket, was a regal play on the same colour scheme. “Red is energy,” says couturier Anju Modi, who uses the colour liberally in her collections—prêt or couture. “Red is an organic, powerful colour that evolves as we do, to our moods, and to our needs at that time,” says designer Anupamaa Dayal. Red requires balance to look stylish instead of garish. “The gradation of how we use red determines its vibrancy,” says Modi. In winter, Modi says she veers towards a slightly “English-y mix of combining accents of indigo and navy with a deep red. But a summer red is paler and goes beautifully with a sea blue”. “One must balance the colour cleverly—that’s the key to make red work,” advises Modi. “If it is a strong shade of red, sometimes a scarf will be enough,” says designer Poonam Bhagat of the label Taika, adding that the kind of red one must use depends on the skin tone. “Burgundy, vermilion or Bengal red look best on brown skin tones,” says Bhagat. Taika’s summer silhouettes were inspired by the tapestries of Central Asia, where red plays a prominent role. Her interpretation had appliquè and prints where she played red against ecru, white, blue and gold. There has to be some amount of visual relief when using red.

“You don’t want to look like a Kingfisher air hostess,” laughs David Abraham of Abraham & Thakore (A&T). He cites the example of Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango, who pairs his saris with imaginatively off-kilter coloured blouses to fabulous effect. “For instance, the parrotgreen blouse Sanjay pairs with his red Chanderi sari is a great combination,” says Abraham. For A&T’s collaboration with Ekaya, the Banarasi sari boutique in New Delhi and Ahmedabad, the duo created weaves in rich oranges and purples that were emphasized with sumptuous red borders with sprinkles of gold. For their Spring/ Summer 2015 collection, they worked with dyed dhotis, adding vermilion borders to tunics, separates and skirts—elevating the pieces to modern classics. There are some who prefer a conventional rendition. For Oscar-nominated singer Bombay Jayashri Ramnath, red is a beautiful reminder of her mother’s kumkum (vermilion). “The colour is an abiding memory of my childhood. It immediately rings in a sense of celebration, auspiciousness and positivity,” says Jayashri. “I have never not worn red. Even if I am wearing an indigo or a peacock-blue sari, there will definitely be generous touches of red in it—either on the border or on the blouse,” she adds. It is not a coincidence that Pantone, the global colour authority, announced marsala, an earthy wine red, as the colour of 2015. Pantone experts believe that with the growing popularity of floral prints and stripes, variations of the earthy red hue will carry over into men’s and women’s clothing throughout this year. The Pantone colour forecast also suggests marsala as a popular choice for jewellery and fashion accessories, including handbags, hats, footwear and wearable technology.

Red is an organic, powerful colour that evolves as we do, to our moods and to our needs

Crimson tide: (clockwise from above) Nida Mahmood’s fuchsia coiled headband; Louis Vuitton’s Dora PM bag; Bobbi Brown’s Valentine’s Day line; Rohan Arora’s shoes; Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2015 collection; A&T for Ekaya; and Anju Modi’s Spring/Summer 2015 collection.

The pairing of fiery red with earthy wine itself is a potent mix in fashion. Just the stance designer Nida Mahmood took for her Spring/Summer 2015 line. She highlighted her earthy tunics with headbands in red and fuchsia coiled into dramatic knots and roses. Spring/Summer collections on global runways were awash with shades of red. Roksanda Ilincic’s neon red was teamed with a Pepto-Bismol pink to delightful effect. At Louis Vuitton, there was a 1970s vibe with A-line silhouettes in diagonal stripes of red eel skin. Dolce&Gabbana continued with their red lace dresses while Comme des Garçons drenched the entire collection in various shades of crimson. Céline showcased a minimalist version of red and black florals while Carolina Her-

rera played with beige accented by brighter pinks and her signature red. When it came to bags, the options were dizzying. Louis Vuitton had a whole range of sling bags (including a red and black monogrammed version) and totes, while Valentino and Mulberry showcased sumptuous red evening clutches. Closer home, Kolkata-based shoe designer Rohan Arora is the new go-to guy for most haute steppers. Last year, he created a series of shoes inspired by 26 shades of red. “Only film actor Govinda can carry off that all-red ensemble,” he laughs. “But to really carry off a pair of red shoes, you need to tone down the rest of your outfit,” he advises. Red’s sensual maximalism seeped into make-up trends as well. At Tarun Tahiliani’s Spring/Summer 2015 show inspired by The Singh Twins, the London-based artists, Mickey Contractor, director of make-up artistry at M.A.C cosmetics, conjured up the designer’s vision of the red smoky eye. “Red is an excellent colour for Indian skin tones,” says Contractor. M.A.C has just unveiled its “Red Red Red” collection, while Bobbi Brown’s special Valentine Day edition has 32 shades of lipsticks in reds and rusts. All these artists agree red is about confidence—lipstick, bag, shoe or dress, loud or subtle, it has to be worn with verve. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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e will leave the essentializing to poets; they will distil emotions to their purest forms and scatter them like gems with lines like, “Don’t worry, I shall arrange it/So that roses or jasmines can be exchanged at the State Bank/For at least four hundred thousand taka/And one marigold will mean four cardigans” (‘A Salute To You, My Love’, Shahid Qadri, translated by Arunava Sinha). In the following pages, we’ve steered clear of essentialisms and presented instead the multiple manifestations of that thing we call love, only to say this: There is more to love than the straight, heterosexual manwoman relationship. And there’s more to even that relationship than we’re brought up to believe conventionally. In this Love Issue, the definition of family is questioned and expanded upon; friendships tinged with romance are acknowledged; the implications of the various kinds of unions in cultural texts are examined; and ecstatic devotion is recontextualized. We recognize the reality of our lives, where the city plays a role in our love stories, where different kinds of lifesustaining coupledoms coexist and nostalgic longing isn’t reserved only for a human partner. Happy reading. Dhamini Ratnam

mythological

bromance OUR ANCIENT TEXTS ARE ABOUT ALL KINDS OF UNIONS—LOVE IS A SPLENDID THING, AND HOMOSOCIALITY,

A DEEP MALE FRIENDSHIP.

MODERN INDIA COULD DO WITH SOME CATCHINGUP BY DEVDUTT PATTANAIK

romance in India means yaarana, dostana. We saw it on full display when Jai and Veeru rode on bikes in the 1975 film Sholay. In 1990, journalist Ashok Row Kavi started the publication Bombay Dost. In 1999, Hoshang Merchant published an anthology of gay writing called Yaarana: Gay Writing From India. Karan Johar made Dostana in 2008. With that, the words yaarana and dostana became synonyms for gay. Many were upset that the purity of bromance was now contaminated by lust. In Sarira Traya, the doctrine from the the Vedanta school of Hinduism, we occupy three bodies: the physical, the mental and the social. The social body is constituted by our title and estate that give us status, and is the outcome of our past deeds. When the physical body is attracted to another physical body, we call it lust. When the mental body is drawn to another mental body, we call it love. When the social body is attracted to another social body, we call it networking. In lust, we want to exchange bodily fluids. In love, we rejoice and bloom in each other’s company. In networking, through a social contract, we benefit from other people’s property, or lack of it. The rules of society determine which of these three exchanges is allowed. Lust is permitted between a man and a woman, but much of it is shaped by the social body: age, caste, class, religion, education. Love between a man and a woman is allowed, but only if it culminates in lust. Love without lust between a man and woman is seen as ludicrous. Love between two men or two women is acceptable as long as lust does not tinge it. Two men who love each other intensely as friends are called sakhas, two women who love each other are called sakhis. Sakha-bhaav (or bro-

mance) is about homosociality—even homoeroticism—but not homosexuality. It is viewed as a pure relationship; lust is not allowed to creep in. Yet, life is never so simple. It gets even more complicated when the physical body changes gender or is of indeterminate gender, or if there is dissonance between the mental body and the social body (I feel like a man but I have to dress as a woman). We love organizing life, but life refuses to stay organized. Our problem with sex began when Buddhist monks started describing desire as Mara, the demon of desire whose defeat enabled Buddha to attain enlightenment. Until then he was Kama, god of love and lust, whose arrows aroused passion and creativity, who was celebrated in spring festivals by all. Kama, or Madan, had to be set aflame by Shiva’s third eye and reduced to ashes in rival Hindu story cycles. Beautiful Kama became the invisible Ananga after resurrection. With that, sex became a bad word unless it occurred in a particular socially defined framework. So Ram could only be with Sita, and Shiva could only be with Parvati. But Krishna? He refused to stick to these conventions. He loved Radha and Rukmini and Satyabhama. He loved Radha, but never married her. He married Rukmini and Satyabhama, but did he really love them? He loved Draupadi, the common wife of his cousins, the Pandavas, but not quite in the same way as he loved Radha. And then, of course, there was his love for Arjuna, the two inseparable like the sages of yore Nara and Narayana, whom no nymph could separate. And in folk retellings of the Mahabharat, Krishna and Arjuna, both of whom have many wives, go on cross-dressing adventures, sometimes to trick villains and sometimes to seduce damsels. This love of

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Krishna for Arjuna, and Arjuna for Krishna, was sakha-bhaav—a deep friendship, as intense as any love, full of promises and expectations and obligations. Arjuna even travels back in time, turning into a woman so that he can participate in Krishna’s raas-leela, according to the Padma Purana. But suggest sex and the saffron brigade—who see sex as dirty— will get upset. Saffron, the colour of monasticism in both Buddhism and Hinduism, is associated with celibacy. Sex is forbidden to monks, as it draws them away from the hermit’s path. It supposedly even gives them magical powers. As their influence grew, sex became a source of contamination unless performed in socially and ritually prescribed ways. Sex stopped being just indulgence (bhog), as sex manuals such as the Kamasutra presented it, and became a bad habit (vasana) in monastic traditions. Rules were created to distinguish between good sex and bad sex, appropriate sex and inappropriate sex, dharma sex and adharma sex. The early patrons of Buddhism were courtesans, but eventually they were all encouraged to change their ways: not to simply be monogamously married, but to

give up sex altogether and become nuns (as in the Tamil epic Manimekhalai). This rejection of sex is very different, in principle, from the rejection of sex by the Roman Catholic church on the grounds of original sin, a Biblical idea that came to India much later through Jewish, Christian and Islamic traders and sea-faring merchants, and, eventually, warriors and colonizers. The Vinaya Pitaka tells us how rules were created in a Buddhist monastery to stop sex between male monks. A young man had chosen to become a monk. But he could not control his libido and encouraged fellow monks to have sex with him. When they refused and admonished him, he approached novices, but even they refused and admonished him. Finally he went to the stables and approached men who tend to elephants and horses. They indulged him and then proceeded to make fun of him and gossiped about the pandaka (Pali for passive and probably effeminate homosexual) in the sangha. In response, it was decided not to ordain pandakas and disrobe those who had already been ordained. Thus all

homosexuals were punished for the act of one individual (in the case of heterosexuals, more rules were created to restrain oversexed women, not men, the Vinaya Pitaka shows). With that, sex between men went underground. Friendship, however, was tolerated. The Jataka tales tell the story of how the Buddha and his chief disciple, Ananda, were inseparable even in their former births. In one former life they were Chandala men who oversaw the burning of bodies. In another life, they were two deer, always together. The Jataka tells a similar story of the old monk Kesava and his love for his young pupil, Kappa. When the king sends for the old monk and refuses to let him go, the old man falls ill. His health improves only when he returns to the Himalayas and is able to see Kappa. In both stories, because they are monks, there is no talk of sex, not even in the previous lives. But there is always love. How does one classify this love? Love mercifully has not been classified as good or bad, right or wrong. All kinds of love is socially sanctioned, but within limits. Folk tales based on the

Ramayan speak of how Sita is upset with the excessive devotion of Hanuman to Ram. He never leaves his side. When he learns that Sita puts a red vermilion mark on her forehead as a sign of her love, he daubs his whole body with vermilion. This is love of a smart and mighty, but very celibate, monkey for his god-king master who resides in his heart along with his queen, Sita. Across the world, there is always debate on whether an intense friendship between two men should be seen as love or as lust, homoerotic or homosexual. In Greek mythology, we hear the story of Achilles and Patroclus, who fought beside each other in the Trojan War. In the 2004 Hollywood film Troy, starring Brad Pitt, it was shown as a pure relationship devoid of sex. The film was a flop. But in her 2011 best-selling novel Song Of Achilles, Madeline Miller makes their relationship a homosexual one, appealing to the younger generation of readers who had no problems with homosexuality. In the story, the obstacle to their love comes from Thetis, the seanymph, mother of Achilles. In the Bible, we hear the story of the love between Jonathan and David. King Saul, Jonathan’s father, hates David, the killer of Goliath, because God has chosen David to be his heir. But Jonathan is in love with him and shares his armour with him, even though David marries his sister. Much later, Jonathan is killed in battle and David sings his lament: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; you have been very pleasant to me. Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.” Jonathan is at once brother and dearer than a woman. Biblical scholars, who value abstinence, reject such sexual interpretations, but not modern LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activists, who have even traced formal same-sex unions in Church liturgy called adelphopoiesis or “brother-making”. We see what we want to see. We allow what we are comfortable with, and what we are mature about. Love is indeed a splendid thing. But sex remains a bad habit. Devdutt Pattanaik is the author of 30 books and 400 articles on the relevance of mythology in modern times. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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alchemical

solutions BY PAROMITA VOHRA

‘TO RECOGNIZE FRIENDSHIP IS TO HEAR THE UNSPOKEN’

his year, my friend Anusha Yadav, a curator and photographer, created a unique birthday present for me. She put up a map of Bombay on my wall and ordered every friend who entered the party: “Mark the location where you first fell in love with Paromita.” People took to the task with enthusiasm, searching for the landmarks of our relationship. A former student, now a colleague and friend, marked the college where I had taught her, another looked betrayed because someone had already marked my favourite (once perennial) haunt, the now-shut Sea View Café, in Juhu. People also marked hospitals, offices, the Goregaon grounds where we volunteered for the humongous World Social Forum, and the houses of mutual friends who had since drifted out of our lives. Some had been my friends for over half my life, some I had met in the last few years, and one I had met only two weeks ago. They were married, single, gay, straight, bisexual, and ranged in age from 25-67. One thread joined them all. No one questioned Anusha’s phrase, “in love”, which we otherwise usually associate with an amorous relationship, to describe their friendship with me. Is friendship a romantic relationship? I certainly think so. I’m a fool for love, and an even bigger fool for love at first sight, I admit. My friendships, like my other romances, have also been sort of love at first sight, followed by what the Japanese graphic artist Yumi Sakugawa describes in her comic I Think I Am In Friend Love With You: an intense desire to spend time with the friend, to discover things together, to talk and laugh and share secrets, being dazzled by them and wanting to dazzle them, to bring them delight with a poem or song they don’t yet know. I remember, some 20 years ago, going to my neighbour and friend Meena Menon’s house after work, as I often did. Meena, a former trade unionist and 17 years older than me, was making gulab jamuns. “Who’s coming?” I asked. “You,” she said. “I just felt like making something nice for you.” My heart flooded with an indescribable feeling of being special. This being the silver jubilee year of our friendship, it seemed fitting to discuss the romance of friendship. So I

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called Meena, who now lives in another city. “Hey,” I asked, “do you think friendship is a romantic relationship?” “Yes of course,” she answered, not pausing to think. “It’s a lot like falling in love at first, the same emotional and intellectual headiness. It doesn’t have that constant sheen of physical awareness, of sexual romance. But there is a great emotional sensuality in friendship, that feeling of deep, intimate connection.” I asked if she remembered when she fell in friend-love with me. “The first time I met you. In that peace march from Dadar to Thane—you were wearing a denim skirt and a striped T-shirt saying, ‘À nous la liberté’!” I laughed at this recollection of my earnest, youthful self, and replied, “I remember you put your hand on my shoulder and I had a feeling of warmth. Then you asked, ‘Are you the crazy kid who works for Anand?’ (he was my boss at the time) and I was indignant!” Our reminiscences lasted an hour. My college friend, Swati Bhattacharya, now a mother of two and an advertising big shot, says: “My ECG while waiting for a friend will show the same reading as waiting for a lover. Only I’m not caught up in figuring if his degree of excitement matches mine, and consequently behaving like a fool. There’s a relaxed quality to friendship, because there’s a relaxed quality about the future.” One could argue that though intense like romantic love, friendship eliminates the anxiety that clogs the beginning of many an affair, since it is not based on being exclusive. We don’t enter into a friendship with caveats. It is assumed it will be forever, unless something really isn’t right; that we will keep reshaping it to fit into our lives as long as possible. Friendship is no utopia. Betrayal, anger, pettiness, coldness, competitiveness, have all featured in my friendships. Some trials expose fundamental differences in values and the friendships don’t survive. Chance meetings with these former friends can be as strangled as those with ex-lovers. But most friendships keep reconsolidating themselves. My friend Anjali Panjabi, a film-maker, and I have often disagreed emotionally and drifted apart for substantial periods. But we always felt love in the hurt or anger, and that kept making us search for the

right rhythm and fit. As she said to me once when we thrashed out our issues (never arriving at an agreement!), “Bottom line— we’ve been through so much together and I can’t imagine you not being in my life, yaar!” It’s not that these friendships are replacements for sexual romances. If you asked me the difference, I would say that the romance of friendship is like sunshine on a winter’s day— lambent, enveloping, making you happy in your skin. Sexual romance, on the other hand, is the languor of an afternoon turned intimately dark by monsoon rain. One makes you shine in the world, the other makes you glow in the dark. They fulfil different parts of ourselves— friendship helps us articulate our individuality, amorous love allows us to surrender ourselves to an extent. As a woman in my 40s, I may belong to the second generation of women for whom friendships are also a comradeship of feminist discovery and possibility, but I have seen these relationships in people of every generation I’ve known. My parents, aunts and uncles have friends they visit annually and write to regularly. I’ve heard stories of friends living as neighbours after Partition, one dying soon after the other, of sadness. One of my aunts often says about my late father: “I miss Ravi. He was not my brother-in-law, but my friend. He understood my heart. I feel alone in the world without him.” Despite its rich social existence, friendship is rarely accorded recognition as an important relationship, or to use the right Hindustani word, darja, that family or amorous relationships receive. One of my closest friends, Samina Mishra, a film-maker from New Delhi, told me, “I remember when we drew up the list of invitees for some function at our wedding, our families were bewildered that both of us wanted some of our friends at some family-only functions. But for both of us, our friends are as important as family. I can’t do without mine.” As with much else, the dominant culture pretends that coupledom, the “hum do hamare do” plus grandparents, are our only major personal relationships. Relationships that don’t fit into this grid are depicted as superfluous or temporary—giggling gal pals passing time till married. Emotional truths are more complex. And they have always been. To paraphrase what the scholar Ruth Vanita said to me about her new book, Gender, Sex, And The City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry In India, 1780-1870, on Lucknow’s culture, seen through its popular poetry: Everyone was married off as a norm. That was not the sum total of their personal life, which was made up of a rich web of relationships—gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual and non-sexual friendships, which, while not exactly respectable, were not considered immoral or an aberration. These are not elements only of an urban culture. Across more rural Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, there are wide-

spread traditions of ritual friendship. For instance, women who develop close relationships working in the fields, have a ritual of exchanging wheat seedlings (called bhojali) that have been sprouted for nine days and offered to the goddess to solemnize a friendship—after which they call each other Bhojali. A number of such friendships across community and caste, within and across genders, are named after the offerings involved in their solemnizing rituals—phul-phulwari, mahaprasadi, gangajali, and so on. In Varanasi, some women seal their bond by giving each other ornaments, a practice called “tying sakhi”. And of course, in Bollywood, there’s Sholay. For our own solace, we need to reinstate these social histories. They give a name and place to how our society feels about relational love—the intimacy we easily call prem, whether for friends, families or lovers. Perhaps one of the reasons we have ceased to privilege friendships is because we’ve internalized Victorian definitions of hetero-normativeness, monogamy and familial relationships. Contemporary culture idealizes the couple who need only each other—my wife/husband is my best friend. The popular media stories around LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights and recognition too stick very closely to this paradigm of coupledom and love as an indication of “normalcy”. This understanding only impoverishes our emotional lives, leaving us far more lonely than we are able to admit. Two of my heterosexual male friends both hesitated to call friendship “romantic”. RS, a teacher, said: “In friendships with the opposite sex there is always some hum of awareness. It’s pleasant, you like to see yourself through their eyes because they are women, but it’s also a source of tension. It’s more relaxed with men.” Women agreed there was a different feeling with men friends. Irrespective of their sexual orientation, they too spoke of being very attuned to female friends’ attractiveness from time to time. But they saw it as simply another interesting layer of the deep appreciations of friendship, not as a doubleedged one. Yet both the men—one married, another single—counted their friendships among their most important and sustaining intimate relationships, much as heterosexual women and gay and lesbian friends had done. Those who value friendship in this way also share a more expansive idea of personal life, feeling it can’t be restricted to conservative definitions of family, any more than personal selves can be restricted by traditional expectations of gender, career, or sexual choices. Perhaps friendships make possible

HOW LONG AND SUSTAINED FRIENDSHIPS CAN HELP ARTICULATE OUR INDIVIDUALITY, AND FOSTER EVERY KIND OF ALTERNATIVE FAMILY BY LESLEY ESTEVES

ALL AROUND US EXIST QUEER FAMILIES THAT AREN’T THOSE WE’RE BORN WITH

this host of less clearly mapped journeys which families often restrict. They offer understanding, conversation and love, which is not conditional on fulfilling traditional obligations. Vanita puts it elegantly in her book when she talks of the ghazal: “(Friendship is) a more hidden, (relatively) less stylized love.” In being neither gay, nor straight, neither sexual nor asexual, friendship exists in that space we might call queer—which defies definition, but is yet vibrant and alive, and palpable and in fact, allows for the redefinition of social life. It has no reason to be, except that it springs from being human, and privileges and celebrates our humanity. To recognize friendship is to hear the unspoken, pay allegiance to human desire, to have the confidence that we may love and be loved for no reason, except for being us. Paromita Vohra is a film-maker and writer whose work focuses on desire, feminism and popular culture. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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he word family is deeply invested with the promise of love and unquestioned support. That’s why we sometimes tell our most loved friends, “You are like family.” We do so because the only family model we are taught tells us that those with whom we have no blood ties are not our family, even if we get life-sustaining love and support from them. We are also told that family is all-important; in our actions lies its good name. For the state it is our primary identity, through which it channels recognition and privileges to us from birth to death. But for many who can’t live by its unreasonable, unending maze of rules, family is not such a safe space. Familial love and support is often not unconditional for the rule-breakers—like queer people, single people, or heterosexual people in mixed-faith, cross-caste or same-gotra (family lineage) relationships, to name some. In many instances, the support is cut off altogether. Some of us rule-breakers, who find ourselves excluded from traditional families, find acceptance, support and love in the alternative families that we seek out. But survival is not the only mother of invention. Alternative, or queer, families are also created by people not in conflict with their biological or assigned families. One of the most famous queer families, familiar to most English-speaking Indians in metros, are the six characters in the US sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S, tied together by that simple commitment, “I’ll be there for you.” All around us exist many queer families—same-sex families, the hijra gharanas, the single person, platonic or poly-amorous communes, to name a few. This rainbow of structures is deliberately excluded from the attendant privileges of the legal recognition of family. So much of the queer movement’s struggle is to expand contested terms to reduce their exclusivity, to push for equality despite difference. That’s why I use the term queer families to describe every kind of alternative family. Like heterosexuality, the norm of a nuclear family with a married couple at its core, and surrounded by blood relatives, is not a natural family system,

but simply one singled out for privilege, empowerment and protection by law. Queer families threaten that system as they smash traditional gender roles of breadwinners and housekeepers, and undercut the hegemony of biological family over resources by sharing property and income with non-blood relatives. MD, a 33-year-old academic in Mumbai who didn’t want to be identified, says he gets emotional sustenance, love and understanding, but also financial backing, from his queer family. “These can take various forms, and differ according to needs. Those who earn more are able to contribute more. Some monetary contributions are sustained over time, whereas some are provided when required. Contributions may also be in the form of providing food and shelter, which have an economic element to them.” Artist Sunil Gupta, 61, whose queer family comprises his husband, former partners, and close friends “scattered across the world”, including lesbian couples and straight single women, says the anxiety of his biological family hasn’t diminished. “My queer family accepts me without question. I feel protected financially by them. And by and large it has been quite accepting of alternative lifestyles which the bio family cannot fathom. They live in constant anxiety that I will ‘die alone, and who will get the property’. But of course I won’t, I’ll have the queer family around me.” The lack of legal recognition in India, however, prompted Gupta to leave New Delhi for England in 2013, where samesex marriage has been recognized by law since 2014, and civil partnerships, since 2005. “My husband and I decided that we would have to leave India, at least till some of the complications resolve themselves. It was unbearable to not have a joint lease for a flat, and to have no recognition by the bank and hospital. Completely unacceptable.” Queer families also question an underlying concept of family. Theirs isn’t centred around a romantic-sexual relationship. Many of us have come to accept that that fairy-tale idea of “happily ever after”—a single love relationship lasting a lifetime— actually occurs more in fairy tales than in life. But there are many others—whether they are

romantic partners or not, blood relations or otherwise—who we do imagine will be with us till the end of our days. These are the relationships that form the basis of queer families. Interestingly, queer families also challenge the notion that a family remains static and constant. Queer families are elastic; they can grow to include new sustaining relationships that form even as some older ones wane, unbound by duty and obligation that create artificial, forced relationships, for instance with cousins and uncles we can’t stand. This is echoed by 46-year-old Pawan Dhall, a queer rights activist based in Kolkata. “I would say my queer family, as of now, would include about half a dozen individuals—very dear friends, colleagues, a couple of people I have been involved with emotionally. At this point in time, all these people are not in the same city, but our common past, common struggles in working and building queer support forums, tie us together quite deeply. I think what we have now is likely to last much longer, perhaps a lifetime. In my mind it is clear that we are something like a family unit. We keep in touch, helping out with information and advice, financial support. When we get together, it is invariably fun time and non-stop gossip, but we also tackle issues like taking care of old parents, financial planning and illnesses.” If this is the first time you are reading about queer families, one way to understand the social and economic discrimination they face is if you are having a hard time renting a house in our big cities. Real estate brokers and building societies currently occupy the frontlines of championing traditional family life. If they refuse to rent to you, you are perhaps single, sharing with friends or a live-in partner. My queer family, comprising my same-sex partner, a former girlfriend, and friends of several non-conforming genders, is not the kind that qualifies as fit tenants. So extreme are some of these housing societies that a friend and her daughter are currently being refused flats because society rules exclude single women tenants. In most societies, transpersons in any kind of family need not even apply. My queer family is completely separate from my assigned family, and despite wills, anything I choose to pass on to the former is vulnerable to legal challenge by some of my less supportive next of kin. For some others, their queer family includes both assigned and chosen family. A guru from the Bhendi Bazaar hijra gharana counts her mother, sibling and chelas in her family, her one safe zone of acceptance. This is true for MD too, who wonders how he will accommodate his dreams given current family laws. “My queer family consists of my biological brother and his same-sex partner, in addition to several friends. So the line between assigned and chosen families, queer or otherwise, is not stark. “I’ve often wondered how the

laws on adoption would work in my case, given that I am a single male Christian in India, and family law allows me wardship, but not adoption rights. I have never been in a position to be married to a significant other, but if I do in the future, I would like to decide what proportion of my property goes to my children, my partner, my biological family, and my queer family.” These are concerns Dhall shares. “As a queer activist, I have discussed and advised people on matters of inheritance. Within the queer family, I am hell-bent on ensuring that people undertake financial planning for their advanced years. Not that everyone listens to me, but then such is family life!” It is obvious that we should all have the right to determine how we prefer to live and share love. It’s then equally obvious that the law needs to empower all kinds of families, not just one sort. But given that there are potentially as many kinds of family systems as there are people, it makes sense to legally empower that big threat to traditional families—the single person. Legislate for the rights of the single person to nominate anyone or no one as their family member. If law can provide for freely registering wills multiple times, each version replacing the last, it can enable the nomination of family members too. There are so many ways that Indians live, love, survive and thrive in queer families of many kinds; and so much that Indian law needs to catch up on. But of course, only for those who wish to opt for a legally protected family. Deepti, 40, a queer feminist activist in New Delhi who uses only one name, has been part of queer families for a while, but has this to say: “I may be part of other people’s queer family but I never use the word ‘family’ to describe my jigris and community of friends, because I think the notion of family itself is patriarchal and problematic. It is an exclusionary space. I have a strong critique of family. Members of a family must think alike, vote for the same candidate, practise the same religion, inhabit the same space together or not.” She says it does not allow for any difference to emerge, such as inter-caste relationships, young girls asserting their sexuality, and it remains a huge risk to transgress family norms. “I understand it is tempting for queer people to reclaim some institutions, but I see family as an institution we should reject. And queer people who are already on the margins are in the best position to do so. I know that my jigris will be there. But there does not need to be this mutuality that family demands. I don’t want to be in a closed circle in which everyone fits, all neat and tidy. But in groups that overlap with others, like an endless galaxy of circles that are somehow connected to each other, and never closed.” Lesley Esteves is a queer rights activist and freelance editor. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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lyrical

devotion BHAKTI POETRY THAT CRASHED

CASTE AND CLASS BARRIERS

AROUND THE EIGHTH CENTURY WAS ALL ABOUT PERSONAL EQUATIONS WITH GOD BY ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

hakti. For a long time, I thought the word was synonymous with religious sycophancy and spiritual feudalism. It conjured up images of jangling temple bells and glazedeyed adoration, of mindless, weak-kneed devotion, calendar-art love, the path of the servile, the unthinking, the bovine. It took me time to see it for the subversive animal that it is. Not weekend spirituality, not armchair spirituality, not institutional spirituality. Instead, a journey in which the seeker stakes her very life, demanding some intensely personal answers to ultimate questions. It took me a long time to see bhakti for the radical, scorching, self-implicating existential quest that it really is. Love? Certainly. That’s at the heart of it. But not docile, measured, tepid love. This is high-voltage stuff, an urgent, unguarded longing, a passionate human cry for authenticity and belonging: dangerous, ecstatic, self-annihilating. A longing so encompassing that it blurs the divide between the sacred and the profane, union and oblivion, lust and liberation, ecstasy and extinction, more and no more. “A bhakta”, poet-scholartranslator A.K. Ramanujan, says, “is not content to worship a god in word and ritual, nor is he content to grasp him in a theology; he needs to possess him and be possessed by him. He needs also to…embody him in every possible way.” Like every seeker, the bhakta or devotee wants to return to a place of wholeness, of non-fragmentation. But she is not content to be a plodding law-abiding pedestrian. The bhakta doesn’t follow traffic rules; she makes them. She doesn’t accept inherited wisdom; she demands a first-hand one. She doesn’t bow to hierarchy; she stakes her claim to the highest place she knows—the limitless heart of the divine. And if she isn’t always terribly genteel or servile about it, it’s because she knows that getting where she wants is only a matter of time. God isn’t her boss; he’s her birthright. Experientially, the condition is as old as time. Historically, it had its identifiable moment of emergence—an exuberant tidal wave of longing that crashed across the great barrier reefs of region, language, caste and class—around the eighth cen-

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

tury. Beginning in the south, its inclusive, egalitarian spirit spread rapidly over the subcontinent. And it proclaimed, quite simply, that devotion was the supreme road to the divine. It was not a unitary movement. The many popular devotional cults were staggeringly varied in belief and practice. The objects of devotion could be embodied or non-figurative, saguna or nirguna. God could have a name, family, pin code and vehicle; s/he could also be transcendent, formless and unnameable. But what underlay all this plurality (which, admittedly, was not without its contradictions) was the assertion of a direct, fiercely intimate relationship with the divine. To read bhakti poetry—the lyrical outpourings of medieval mystics—is to enter the province of a slippery, feral longing, a non-domesticable love, a roller-coaster ride. What made bhakti such a vertiginous, topsy-turvy affair? For one, the bhakta. A changing zeitgeist, converging with the need of lower castes to give voice to their aspirations, gave birth to a new spiritual aspirant. These were men and women of startlingly diverse social contexts—potters, peasants, weavers, cobblers, basket-makers, palanquin-bearers, musicians, milkmen, scholars, tax-collectors, boatmen, blacksmiths, pundits, hangmen, pariahs, plebeians, princesses. What did they have in common? Not much. Other than a collective feverish thirst. They

were anarchic improvisers, not mere inheritors; less God-fearing than God-possessed; less content to receive wisdom than impatient to express their own tempestuous interiority. And since their relationship with God was so ferociously personal, it could brook no intercessor or intermediary. Which explains the bhakta’s habitual scorn for punditry, tradition, ritual and orthodoxy. Since it was a relationship conducted in the innermost chamber of the heart, the refined, formal cadences of Sanskrit were often abandoned for regional language and dialect. The idiom was vigorous, colloquial, slangy, inventive; the timbre fiercely individual. Take Kabir’s fiery iconoclasm, for instance: O pundit, your hair-splitting’s/So much bullshit. I’m surprised/You still get away with it. And if the devotee was liberated by this lawless longing, so was the divine. Temple doors swung open. No longer imprisoned in stone or in scripture, gods and goddesses tumbled out in a festive cascade. Free to saunter in and out of hearts at

will, they could sulk when neglected, be wooed when peeved, be reprimanded when capricious. They wept with the dispossessed and celebrated with the joyous. They understood lapses in attention, errors in grammar, enjoyed trivia, relished detail and local gossip, revelled in the particular, had no ideological issues with the concrete. You didn’t have to know their language; they already knew yours. You didn’t have to propitiate them with a cargo of coconuts and terror; they were simply waiting for an invitation into your heart. They weren’t snobs. Above all, the place where one encounters the upside downness of bhakti is in the poetry itself. First, there is the delicious shock of discovering just how erotic, even carnal, sacred verse can be. There’s nothing tame or lily-livered about this longing. In the work of Telugu poet Annamacharya, for instance, the

male seeker’s voice is tormented and imploring; in contrast, the woman seeker (a goddess in her own right) speaks in a voice that is bold, playful, fearlessly sensual. She reminds us that there is nothing anaemic or asexual about spiritual hunger; that the erotic and the existential, the physical and the metaphysical, are, in fact, deeply linked. In the finest verse, there are in fact no easy hierarchies between flesh and spirit either. The body is often a shrine, a sanctum worthy of worship, the locus of wisdom, an instrument of knowing. Basavanna reminds us that the body is “the moving temple”; Chandidas proclaims that “man is the greatest Truth of all”, confident that this in no way contradicts his love for Krishna. And courageous woman mystic Soyarabai affirms that bhakti is not bloodless: If menstrual blood makes me impure/tell me who was not born of that blood? Then, if you thought bhakti was about God as zamindar (landowner) and devotee as bonded labour, think again. Each time you think you’ve figured out the hierarchy here, you’re ambushed by the unex-

pected. Devotee and God shared a bond of such intimacy that it made every tone permissible—rebuke, banter, humour, lust, entreaty, indignation, rage. God could be addressed the way one might speak to a beloved, if habitually disobedient, member of one’s household. You could reproach him, hurl the choicest cuss words at him, personalize him, infantilize him, cannibalize him, knowing all along that he was the sustainer of life and the world. Interestingly, although the devotee is often presented as female, you won’t find pat gender equations either. So, if you’re looking for tropes of passive female bhaktas and dynamic male gods, it’s best to look elsewhere. As you approach the rising temperature of the bedchamber, power equations are in hectic flux. The female devotee is no demure bride: She’s capable of tying her lover’s arms to the bedpost (Narsinh Mehta), kicking him out of bed (Salabega), imperiously designating him her slave (Annamacharya). And God, as we see in Jayadeva, pines for his beloved in a way that can be poignant and heart-rending. He is creditor and debtor, conqueror and conquered, boss and serf (in Mehta’s verse, he even shows an occasional propensity for crossdressing, adding an exciting twist to the recipe). Any notions about sacred verse being peaceful and serene are also recurrently challenged. The bhaktas’ imagery can be violent, at times brutal. In their poems, they show a readiness to wreck homes and marriages, commit adultery and suicide, turn homicidal and cannibalistic with impunity, as long as it brings them closer to the objects of their desire. Take these husbands who die,/decay, and feed them/to your kitchen fires! cries Kannada woman mystic Akka Mahadevi. Tamil bhakta Nammalvar warns God of his intention even more plainly: If I see you anywhere/I’ll gather you/ and eat you up. Finally, for those who believe that bhakti is dumb love, there are huge surprises in store. Reading these mystic poets is a reminder that bhakti is not (as many suppose) a state of imbecilic joy or emotional jingoism. There’s psychological complexity in abundance— nuances, subtexts, humour, startling undercurrents. The bhakta was not a plaster saint; she was a rebel, fully aware of the perils of the border game she was playing. Her devotion had its own deep intelligence. It was often a conscious strategy, a tool. For it is in the experience of devotion that the alchemy of self-transformation lies, not in the content—and bhaktas intuitively know this. Bhakti isn’t neurotic love. It isn’t the desperate resort of the overwrought and the highstrung. Nor are these poems starry-eyed song and comfort food. The finest poets remind us, instead, that it is a technology of unmaking, an ecstatic device of self-dismantling. They remind us that bhakti is the deepest science of the heart. Arundhathi Subramaniam is the editor of Eating God: A Book Of Bhakti Poetry, and recently released her own book of poems, When God Is A Traveller. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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curious

couples

SOME OF THE MOST LYRICAL WRITERS OF LOVE HAD

ODD PARTNERS

AND UNCONVENTIONAL LOVE LIVES

BY SOMAK GHOSHAL

s it possible to be happily married, or in love, and also be a writer of some worth? Or is happiness inimical to the making of literature that endures? Must writers be brooding, melancholic individuals, forever stewing in the fever and fret of life, or can ordinary, uneventful characters also wager a tryst with greatness? A cursory glance at the history of art and literature does not present a very inspiring answer. The overwhelming majority of creative souls, through the centuries, did not seem to enjoy the comfort of cheerful conjugality. However, the best among them turned their miseries to their advantage, into fodder for their work. Socrates did not have the most heartening things to say about his wife, while Shakespeare liked to live far away from his (in fact, both men preferred the company of handsome young men). Jane Austen may not have written at all if she had been ensconced in domesticity, minding a husband and children, whereas Sylvia Plath became the poet she did precisely because of her profound unhappiness with having to do that, among other things. F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated his books to his wife Zelda, who suffered most of her life from a mental disorder, and Vladimir Nabokov remained devoted to, but also exasperated by, his spouse Vera, his editor, translator and muse. T.S. Eliot had to work at Lloyds Bank for years and nurse his ailing wife Vivienne, who apparently sought pleasure in the arms of Bertrand Russell because of her husband’s indifference to sex. One would be spoilt for choice were one to pick such pairings, but the following five, not exclusively defined by romantic or erotic feelings, deserve a special mention in the pantheon of curious coupledom.

Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf

They met in 1900 at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, where Virginia had gone to see her brother Thoby, and married 12 years later, almost on a whim. In the interim, painter Lytton Strachey proposed to Virginia, changing his mind the following day and sending along a glowing recommendation about Virginia to Leonard, then posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a civil servant. “She is young, wild, inquisitive… and longing to be in love,” he wrote, forgetting to add, “with women”. For most of their married life, Virginia felt no physical attraction to her husband (“there are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock”) and carried on with her girlfriends, most famously with Vita SackvilleWest, the model for the gender-bending protagonist of her fictitious biography, Orlando. All along, she also wanted children, which her doctors forbade her on account of her health problems. In 1941, when she killed herself, Virginia left a suicide note for her husband, telling him, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Months after her death, Leonard fell in love with artist Trekkie Parsons even though she chose to stay married to her husband.

TERRY SMITH/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

JOHN BAYLEY AND IRIS MURDOCH

MONDADORI PORTFOLIO/GETTY IMAGES

FRANZ KAFKA AND FELICE BAUER

JeanPaul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

he urged her. “I belong to you … But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?” Needless to say, things did not end too well (Kafka later described her as “plain and unimpressive”). With Milena Jesenská, the tables were turned somewhat. An independent-minded editor, translator and columnist, she was deeply troubled in her marriage with a philandering husband when she met Kafka at a café. She was attractive, damaged, into drugs, and had a string of male admirers. They started a tumultuous affair which, once again, did not end happily, though this time due to Jesenská’s refusal to end her marriage to be with Kafka. Perhaps wisely. She, too, picked up on his fabled self-absorption and pathological inability to commit himself in a relationship. “He was a world within himself,” she wrote in his obituary after his untimely death of tuberculosis.

John Bayley and Iris Murdoch

The charming, witty, brilliant and flirtatious Iris Murdoch was the exact opposite of her husband, the balding, unmindful, shy and retiring John Bayley. Their courtship involved rubbing noses, swimming in the Thames, and very little sex. Although they married in spite of their mismatched temperaments, Murdoch continued to have lovers, of both genders, until age and ill health began to catch up with her. After she was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease in the 1990s, Bayley decided to take care of her full-time, an experience he chronicled in three volumes of his memoirs. From having to keep track of Murdoch’s whereabouts to her dwindling memory to cleaning up after her (she had severe incontinence) to running an exponentially messy household (there is a story about a pork pie left somewhere in the kitchen, never to surface again), the professor of English did his duty, and more. He managed to write articles, books, and later went on to marry a second time. Their relationship may have been based on half-truths, but there was a core of comfort, trust and love in it.

The term Nightmare Couple was coined for people like them. Two of the 20th century’s most important philosophers, Sartre and de Beauvoir were a match made in the inner circles of Dante’s hell. Behind the façade of their “essential love” and pact of “morganatic marriage” were episodes of murderous jealousy, inflamed by their incurably promiscuous natures. Sartre, with his squat frame and squint, was not the dandiest man about town, though he seldom found himself without female attention and flattery, especially from young students of philosophy. De Beauvoir, regal and ravishing in contrast, had an obvious, magnetic appeal. Afraid of losing her “little husband”, she seduced her young female protégés, before passing them on to the “Kobra”. In their several memoirs—de Beauvoir wrote many more than Sartre—they did not spare each other any indignity. Every bit of dirty linen was exposed in public, washed, hung, and dried, only to be trampled all over again. The Sartre-de Beauvoir clique reminded writer Jean Cocteau of “dogs who gnaw at bones, who Evelyn Waugh and take turns to piss on the same lamp post, who bite and sniff one Nancy Mitford There was not a trace of romance another’s bottoms.” between them, but two people could not have been more suited Franz Kafka and Felice to each other. Their friendship, of Bauer/Milena Jesenská which there is delightful epistoFor a writer whose best-known lary evidence, played out on a story involves the fantasy of note of high camp: Mitford being turned into giant vermin, shrieking with laughter on readFranz Kafka had quite a merry run with women, especially with ing Waugh’s letters, and Waugh mesmerized by Mitford’s gift for those who traded in giving turning gossip into great literapleasure (there are rumours of ture. Mitford, happy as a lark, an illegitimate son born of one refused to take herself seriously of these liaisons). Kafka was at as a femme de lettres, chattering his most romantic, however, away with him in their own priwhen he wrote to his girlvate language. Depressive and friends—and he did churn out dyspeptic, he found her joie de reams of letters to them. vivre highly infectious, if “entirely To Felice Bauer—whom he indecent”, and dedicated his was engaged to twice, only to novel, The Loved One, to her. break up both times—he wrote some 500 epistles, their tone Somak Ghoshal is a New Delhiranging from worshipful adoration to passive aggression. “Write based editor and writer. to me only once a week … for I cannot endure your daily letters,” Write to lounge@livemint.com

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geography of

love

FORGET VALENTINE’S DAY, IN LOVEUNFRIENDLY DELHI, LODI GARDENS IS AN EVERYDAY OASIS. MUMBAI’S LOVERS AREN’T BEREFT OF SIMILAR SPOTS EITHER THINKSTOCK

BY MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

ome say that love’s a little boy. Some say it’s a bird. Some say it makes the world go round—so mused a long dead poet. In Delhi, he would have without doubt heard some say that love is Lodi Gardens. On a weekday afternoon, the park’s long, circular jogging track is empty. So are the green benches. The expansive lawn seems abandoned. But love is everywhere—in mausoleums, under a bridge, on a rock. On the rampart of Sikander Lodi’s tomb too. The wall spans out in a series of recessed arches; each has a Juliet and her Romeo. There flashes a wooing arm, a soft kiss. Every move of these lovers is public; it’s on the Internet too. A short documentary on YouTube, titled Sexuality in India: Why People Hide In Lodi Garden, shows a pair kissing near a tea vendor. Early this month, a Hindu nationalist outfit in Uttar Pradesh threatened to forcibly marry couples caught celebrating the “foreign festival” of Valentine’s Day. The organization is reported to have said: “India is a country where all 365 days are days for love, why then must couples observe only 14 February as Valentine’s Day? We are not against love. But if a couple is in love, then they must get married...” They may not have intended it, but the first half of the utterance does hold true for Lodi Gardens and, as a recent Love Maps project on Google Maps started by Mumbai-based photographer and curator Anusha Yadav reveals, other Indian cities, too. Yadav, inspired by a friend’s birthday gift, created a map for New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and asked people to pin down the place in their city where they fell in love. Since midJanuary, when the maps went live, several people across the country have entered their names, often more than once. The project, says Yadav, is an “attempt to strip away different narratives about the city, leaving only love, the most primal emotion”. In Mumbai, Marine Drive, the rocks that line the Arabian Sea, and Bandstand and Carter Road in Bandra are a few of the spots where lovers seek privacy and, more significantly, space, a rare commodity in this city of 20 million people. They pick their way gingerly over the rocks, returning only when the evening tide threatens their haven. “Bombay is a city of migrants—there is a sense of freedom here which translates to freer forms of expression. That probably also explains why no one bats an eyelid when couples here display affection,” says Yadav. In Lodi Gardens, it’s romance in all seasons, though summer is friendlier. In her essay Lodi Garden, published in the anthology City Improbable: Writings On Delhi, novelist Bulbul Sharma writes, “Winter afternoons which bring great crowds of people to Lodi Gardens cause great grief to the courting couples who long

for the quiet, sultry days of summer when they can sit safely under the shade of the neem tree and whisper sweet nothings to each other, watched only by a sympathetic pair of cooing doves.” Sharma forgot about peeping Toms like me. Over the years, I have off and on interacted with the lovers in this central Delhi park. Most said they had chosen this place, far from their homes, in the hope that no acquaintance would see them together. At stake is their reputation, and that of their families. Many of these couples are the children of first-generation migrants to the Capital. Their Delhi is the city that author Ranjana Sengupta sketched out in her 2008 book Delhi Metropolitan: The Making Of An Unlikely City. “Lodi Gardens are a rare bastion of liberality and tolerance, an oasis marked in the maps of Delhi’s lost lovers,” Sengupta says. “It is a thin fig leaf perhaps but most of the VIPs who walk in the Gardens would not approve of the persecution, public shaming and exposure of the couples who congregate there. The police know this and hence they leave the lovers alone. The power walkers have power and influence and would stop any police brutality in its tracks, though the same individuals might be reactionary and intolerant otherwise in their lives. At least that is the perception.” Of course, lovers pervade every public park in the Capital that is not nestled within a residential locality. A stroll in the Buddha Jayanti Park near Dhaula Kuan revealed bolder expressions of intimacy than in Lodi Gardens. In Lodi Gardens, you don’t have to be an anthropologist to spot the social disparity between the lovers and the regulars. The latter include ministers, industrialists, bureaucrats, diplomats and columnists. They tread firmly on the soft earth; their outdoor gear would be eyed with admiration in the tony Khan Market nearby. The lovers walk hesitantly. Their eyes dart around anxiously, like those of an unlicensed street-food vendor scanning for policemen. The girls are almost always in salwar-kameez suits. “Delhi’s young lovers who seek refuge in parks don’t have anywhere else to go, so they’re not young professionals with their own places,” says Sengupta. “They’re on the margins of the middle classes or from towns in the suburbs, living with relatives or in crowded PGs, and can’t afford hotels or weekends away. They will not be clothed in frayed denim or GAP/Next/Zara/Benetton (original or knock-off). They lack the self-confident ethnicity of south Delhi/Noida/Gurgaon progeny. They’re neatly dressed—dressed for the office or the call centre or college, which is where their parents expect them to be. The parks are the only places they can go to be together and Lodi Gardens is the safest of all of

Treading softly: A couple in Lodi Gardens.

THE ‘LOVE MAPS’ PROJECT FINDINGS THANE

ANDHERI

MUMBAI Bandstand

BANDRA

King's Circle MATUNGA

Navi Mumbai

Marine Drive

COLABA

INDIA

ARABIAN S EA GRAPHIC

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

them. If they are caught, they are not likely to say, “My father knows the police commissioner...’,” she adds. A teenaged couple sitting on the steps of Muhammad Shah Sayyid’s mausoleum in Lodi Gardens is overheard talking in Hindi. Boy: You picked up a call from an unsaved number? Girl: You are pagal (mad). Boy: Tell me who it was. Girl: You are making dahi out of my dimaag (you’re irritating me). Close by, a woman in a black burqa and black leather overcoat is snapping at her boyfriend. He holds his ears, as if seeking pardon. She is not mollified. The slope beside the Mughal-era Athpula stone bridge has as many couples as there are ducks in the pond below. “Delhi doesn’t enable lovers,” says Sengupta. “I can’t think of a city lower in the romance stakes, unless we’re looking at Jeddah or Tehran. The only space that remotely qualifies is Lodi Gardens, and that is more because of the oddities of the city’s various

contradictory universes than any true sympathies for the needs of desperate lovers. “It’s Lodi Gardens’ location at the very heart of Lutyens’ Delhi (and you could argue that it is the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi) that allows couples in search of privacy to conceal themselves undisturbed in bushes, undergrowth, and in the various passages and alcoves of the Lodi tombs. What the kings think about such acts taking place near the resting places of their nowpowdery bones, I don’t know. But then what they think of the area surrounding their mausoleum becoming the favoured recreational space for the Capital’s elite is also unknown,” says Sengupta. Evening is setting in. The tombs and lawns in Delhi are gradually emptying of lovers. Lodi Gardens will soon be left alone in the dim glow of its lamp posts. The lovers in Mumbai, meanwhile, will wait for the moon to rise slightly higher. Dhamini Ratnam contributed to this story. mayank.s@livemint.com

LOUNGE

THE LOVE

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ISSUE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

home

the ride back

SHAKIR VIRPURWALA GAVE UP A CAREER TO TAKE CARE OF HIS

DISABLED SISTER RUKAIYA

AND FIGHT FOR HER RIGHT TO BE ACCEPTED IN MUMBAI’S PUBLIC SPACES PHOTOGRAPHS

BY SANJUKTA SHARMA

ukaiya Virpurwala, 63, has spasticity with mental retardation, a relatively rare condition that requires support for basic body movements, and the most mundane of daily activities like eating, bathing or walking. The Spastics Society of India, now called ADAPT (Able Disabled All People Together), does provide special caretakers for a fee, but her sole support and caretaker now is her 52year-old brother Shakir. A former professor and copywriter, Shakir gave up his career three years ago when their mother died, to take care of his sister. “She has me, and I have her,” says Shakir, a bachelor, as he helps his sister adjust rubber slippers over her socks-covered feet. She sits on a wheelchair restlessly, anticipating an outing. This is the best part of their day— getting ready, locking up the house and venturing out. We met recently, after a city tabloid published reports of the Virpurwala siblings being denied entry at a restaurant called Stadium in south Mumbai. The restaurateur denied Shakir’s claim that on seeing Rukaiya, the waiters on duty said there were no tables available and almost “shooed” them away. “There is a way you tell a customer if there are no tables. Their attitude towards us was more like, ‘You can’t go in here, and we don’t have to explain why.’ She is not disturbing anyone or causing any alarm with odd behaviour. Why were we asked to leave?” argues Shakir. Most restaurants declare “rights of admission reserved”. Shakir approached a lawyer

friend, who is helping them with information on how the law can protect Rukaiya’s free movement in the public space. The story spread on social media. Shakir and Rukaiya became the city’s ambassadors for a cause that rarely gets much attention, except, perhaps, in the weepy TV show Satyamev Jayate. The siblings are like outsiders in the housing society they live in; most neighbours are indifferent towards them, only noticing when Rukaiya tries to speak—her speech is unclear, but voice loud. Their siblings live as nuclear families in other parts of the city. Some of Shakir’s friends have accepted Rukaiya into their gatherings; Shakir and Rukaiya go occasionally. Their socializing is limited to strangers on the streets—some kind, some wary of them. “In our neighbourhood, people recognize us. A supermarket near our house has accepted Rukaiya’s visits. They are used to her,” Shakir says. Rukaiya looks at the city’s bustle and its fretting humans with childlike wonder. I discover this while accompanying her and Shakir for a walk on the Mahalaxmi Race Course. She sits behind Shakir on their blue scooter. The two-wheeler keeps pace with my walk; she is impatient for a serious ride around town. “Go, go,” she would say to her brother, infuriated. Shakir and Rukaiya, who live in the house their father bought in 1978 near Haji Ali, have three other siblings. Their father was an assistant collector with the Brihanmumbai municipal corporation. By the time the family moved from Abdul

Rehman Street to the leafy housing society right in the heart of south Mumbai, Shakir had completed his bachelor’s in English from St Xavier’s College. He started working at an exports company before moving to Khalsa College as a copywriting lecturer. All this while, Rukaiya attended the Society for the Vocational Rehabilitation of the Retarded, while her parents tended to her smallest needs. Shakir, whose family traces its roots to Godhra in Gujarat, says Rukaiya developed spasticity and mental retardation as a baby, and has become weaker with the years. She started developing the condition when she was about eighteen months old, he says. In 1997, their father died, and in 2012, they lost their mother to a prolonged illness. Since 2011, Shakir has been taking care of his sister. Since he doesn’t have a full-time job, the siblings make do with Shakir’s freelance copywriting work and meagre financial help from their family. “It has been quite an exhausting three years for me;

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

but I never regretted my decision to give up so much to take care of her. I knew nobody else would. And I know she will be worse off at state rehabilitation homes or institutions,” says Shakir. “I am sure a specialized caretaker will be better at caring for her. Besides the money that it would cost us, I am concerned about her acceptance of one. She likes to go out, eat out, and we have found a way to do all that and be happy,” says Shakir. They often travel to Lamington Road for seekh kababs. . “The incident at Stadium was a culmination of many such incidents. Indirect belittling of her, strange looks, excuses to keep us away from patrons—we have faced this everywhere we go. Taxis refuse us all the time. There are occasions when I take her to places many kilometres away on my feet and she on her wheelchair,” he adds. When denied entry at the juice centre on Lamington Road, Shakir approached the police, but they weren’t sure which section of the law would apply and what case to register.

Legal experts say The Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995, has largely failed to empower India’s disabled population of around 100 million. And a Bill to repeal it, The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2013, is yet to become law. The draft attempts to assimilate the provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which was ratified by India. The Bill has received mixed responses. Pankaj Sinha, a New Delhi-based advocate who takes up cases related to the rights of the disabled in the high court and Supreme Court, says, “The law can’t provide absolute protection and dignity to the disabled population until there is social security available for them, in the form of a minimum wage.” The private and the government sectors have devised their own procedures. “Airports will have a set of rules, for example,” says Sinha, “but there is no centralized mechanism to help.” The Virpurwalas can claim some form of compensation if they use the UNCRPD provisions, he says. Shakir was initially hesitant to be interviewed because Rukaiya does not like questions. “She is smart enough to recognize who a journalist is,” Shakir says, jokingly. “If our story is just a great one-time read, it is a pity.” He is active on WhatsApp and Twitter, sharing news, photos and information. Photos of the Virpurwala siblings continue to circulate on social media. They want to be seen. They want to be embraced. sanjukta.s@livemint.com

Two’s Two’s company company:: Shakir Shakir and and Rukaiya Rukaiya Virpurwala; Virpurwala; and and (top) (top) at at the the entrance entrance to to their their home, home, getting getting ready ready to to go go out. out.

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THE LOVE

LOUNGE

ISSUE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

life without

Krishnankutty

INDIA PICTURES

FOR THIS MAHOUT, LOSING HIS ELEPHANT WAS LIKE LOSING A SON

Trunk call: A mahout guiding an elephant; and (below) Nair with a picture of Krishnankutty.

BY SHAMIK BAG

hen 9ft-tall Krishnankutty was struck by lightning, all a helpless Sashidharan Nair could do was watch the elephant die. Sixty-year-old Nair sat near the elephant he had looked after for close to four decades. The April rain hid his tears. Krishnankutty’s toenails gleamed; the mahout would chip and polish them to perfection ahead of the temple festival in Kerala’s Kottayam district, where the tusker was among the richly caparisoned ceremonial elephants. Nair’s mind wandered back to the day when his father, who was also a mahout (pappan in Malayalam), had taken the 18year-old to see Krishnankutty— a six-year-old rescued from an elephant trap and bought by a wealthy Kottayam family from the state’s Kodanad Elephant Training Centre. Even then, it was clear that Krishnankutty had a mild disposition. On his part, Nair had inherited the virtues of patience and understanding from his father. Krishnankutty and Nair took to each other and two years later, he officially took charge as the sole pappan for Krishnankutty. It was the beginning of a mananimal relationship that lasted a few months short of 40 years. A relationship that ended in a flash on 8 April at the Kadappatoor Sree Mahadeva Temple. For an outsider it is hard to fathom the bond between a mahout and his elephant. Even more so if one is also a newcomer to Kerala’s deeprooted cultural ties with elephants, especially tuskers. In this state where religion and ritualistic practice are well entrenched, elephants act as emissaries to God—in many districts, almost no temple festival is considered complete without the presence of caparisoned elephants. Some temples have their own elephants; Guruvayur Temple in Thrissur district has around 57. The busy roster of Hindu religious festivals sees elephants moving around from temple to temple; at some festivals, like Thrissur Pooram and Arattupuzha Pooram, the number of elephants in attendance sometimes crosses the 100 mark. The high demand for ceremonial elephants means the owners of celebrity elephants can ask for—and get—`2-3 lakh for an appearance. At the festivals, two of which I witnessed last year, ornately decorated elephants stand in a semi-circle as a frenzied crowd of thousands dances before them to the boisterous sounds of hundreds of chenda (drums), kombu (horn), kuzhal (pipe) and ilathalam (cymbals), which are part of what is known as the symphonic melam. The mini-industry that

Kerala’s temple elephants have spawned has bred its own star system. The famous elephants—a class apart because they meet criteria ranging from height, forehead bump, eye and tusk colour and trunk and tail size, to behaviour, even the quality of toenails—have their own fan clubs, statues, feature films, television series and Facebook pages. Animal rights activists have complained about the torture that these elephants suffer in life-long captivity, in chains. P. Balan’s unremittingly alarming documentary film, The 18th Elephant, has shocking footage and narratives of torture, and festivals where the firecrackers are so loud that the ground vibrates. Some of the elephants bear injury marks from the spears that the mahouts use to discipline them, while the chains on ankles have cut through the skin of some others. At his home in Chirakkadavu village in a remote corner of Kottayam district, Nair says he had little use for the spear. Krishnankutty never misbehaved, and even during the couple of months of musth—an annual cycle of heightened sexual tension and aggression in male elephants— Krishnankutty rarely needed strict disciplining. For Nair, a typical day at work would begin at 8am. It would involve feeding the elephant, cleaning his nails and feet, giving a bath and a scrub with copra—Krishnankutty would squeak gently in delight, sometimes weaving his trunk languorously around Nair. “Krishnankutty was used to seeing me from when he was a child and I was a youngster. We grew up together and he knew my every mood like I knew his. Even during musth, he would invariably calm down somewhat on seeing me. He would know that this is a person who cared for him dearly,” says Nair. On hearing the news of Krishnankutty’s death, I rushed from Idukki district to the village, wanting to witness the burial. I was a few hours late— the burial had taken place at dawn on the same patch of land where Krishnankutty had stayed. A large circular area had been dug up and trees felled to allow the crane carrying the elephant to enter, and floodlights installed. From there, the story of the 40-year relationship led me to the home of the mahout. But not before I visited the house of Krishnankutty’s businessmenowners, the Thiruvappallils. They are among the diminishing community of private owners in Kerala who use the animals in factories, for logging, or hire them out for temple festivals. The Hindu god-inspired names of captive elephants, once considered a symbol of social status, are

SHAMIK BAG

often prefixed by the family name of the owners. Indeed, Krishnankutty had multiple first names, indicative of his various owners— maintaining an elephant is an expensive proposition. Though he garnered fame as Chaappamattom Krishnankutty, from the wellknown family that owned him, at the time of his death he was known as Thiruvappallil Krishnankutty— famous still as the elephant with “clear, honey-coloured eyes”, “butter or sandalwood” coloured tusk, “long trunk that trails into the ground even if its head is held high” and “clear nails without cracks”, as the Kerala elephants compendium website, Starelephants.com, notes. When we meet a day after Krishnankutty’s death, Nair is distraught. He quickly arranges his hair, there’s a whiff of alcohol on his breath. He says he never missed a day in tending to Krishnankutty. The youngest daughter of the Thiruvappallil family confirms

that he was always there, a point reinforced by the mahout’s wife. “My father would usually walk to his workplace, but once when he was feeling really sick he hailed an autorickshaw to be with Krishnankutty. The elephant would only be fed by him,” says Amruta, Nair’s daughter, who was in class X at the time. Nair himself had yet to come to terms with the loss. “I don’t want to be pappan to any other elephant. It won’t be the same,” said the man who won the award for best pappan in the state in 2010; Krishnankutty had won the coveted Gajarajapattom in 2008. Before the burial, Nair draped the elephant in a red silk cloth and scattered flowers at the grave while prayers were chanted. “Krishnankutty was my only son and now I’ve lost him.” The sound of thunder that accompanied our conversation had made way for rain, again. shamik.b@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015

L17

Books

LOUNGE AND HOME WAS KARIAKOO | MG VASSANJI

A returnee’s memoir

HAECKEL COLLECTION/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

The pioneers: An Indian textile dealer in East Africa in the early 1900s.

The Canadian author’s moving account of his return to East Africa, the land of his youth, is preoccupied with the idea of belonging B Y V IVEK M ENEZES ···························· n 1895, the British foreign office took over the administration of the Imperial British East African Company’s territories in what are now Kenya and Uganda, and persuaded the colonial government of India to sanction large-scale emigration of indentured labour to construct the Uganda Railway (aka “the Lunatic Express”) from the port city of Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Some 30,000 Indians, shipped in on contract, were joined by thousands of others—Gujarati shopkeepers, Goan tailors and civil servants, Punjabi policemen—pursuing the East African

And Home Was Kariakoo—Memoir Of An Indian African: Hamish Hamilton, 384 pages, `599.

opportunity described by Sir Harry Johnston, special commissioner of Uganda from 18991901, as a possible “America of the Hindu”. “It seems incredible today to imagine Africa as the land of milk and honey that it was for Indians,” writes M.G. Vassanji in his latest book, And Home Was Kariakoo—Memoir Of An Indian African. “By the early twentieth century, Indians could be seen everywhere in East Africa, in every town, large and small…But these ‘Jews’ of Africa, as they were sometimes called, were rarely appreciated. To the poor Africans they were the ones raking in the cash. To the white colonials they were often an irksome, alien presence, the bone in the kabab—to use an Indian metaphor—spoiling their pure black-and-white picture of Africa—the whites the superior race out to convert and civilize the blacks, and later the

benefactors bringing aid, the blacks the beneficiaries. In their writings and nostalgic musings about East Africa, the white settlers seem to have simply wished the brown man away.” Moyez Vassanji is one of Canada’s acclaimed writers, the first double winner of the country’s prestigious Giller Prize (Alice Munro has since also won it twice), and author of six novels and two short-story collections. Born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, he left Africa to study physics in the US and Canada, and eventually settled in Toronto. His fiction returns again and again to migrant preoccupations: shifting identities, the idea of belonging, topographies of loss. And Home Was Kariakoo is best understood as companion to Vassanji’s previous book and his only other volume of non-fiction. A Place Within: Rediscovering India is a telescoped account of GRAHAM DENHOLM/GETTY IMAGES

CRIMINAL MIND

ZAC O’YEAH

WHAT US PRESIDENTS READ

hat do the most powerful men in the world have in common? Most American presidents, it turns out, were seriously into books. Thomas Jefferson, for example, could read in several languages and was such a big collector that the Library of Congress is based on his personal collection. President Barack Obama is also known to be bookish and was even a sporadic reviewer in his pre-president days. He’s into middlebrow literary fiction, especially best-sellers, and is now and then spotted in Washington, DC bookshops. One interesting pick from his reading list is Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest, The Lowland. In the old days, however, presidents generally favoured works on politics or economics, history and biographies of important people (such as themselves), though some, like James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, did prefer poetry, and Abraham Lincoln is said to have taken the collected works of Shakespeare with him wherever he went. Franklin D.

Roosevelt, who had a personal library of 22,000 books, put the Mumbai-born writer Rudyard Kipling above all the rest. But popular fiction has had a place on many a president’s bedside table. Ulysses Grant was into heroic adventure stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott, while James Garfield had a borrowed copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to thank for his initiation into literature. Getting closer to genuine pulp, John F. Kennedy (JFK) was a fan of the spy thrillers by Ian Fleming, starting from the very first book Casino Royale, while the last film he watched before being assassinated was the adaptation of From Russia With Love (speaking of Russia, both Richard Nixon and George Bush Sr had a soft corner for Leo Tolstoy). The Wild West actor turned president, Ronald Reagan, grew up on a diet of Edgar Rice Burroughs and later, while in office, is known to have enjoyed The Hunt For Red October, a Cold War thriller by Tom Clancy. But the president best known to have a developed taste for

the author’s travels around his explorers of East Africa, John Hanancestral homeland—first visited ning Speke and Richard Burton when he was already 43: photos, and David Livingstone and Henry personal anecdotes and family Morton Stanley, was, “Where was stories set off by broader-frame I in all this history?” Thus his book historical sketches of the places returns again and again to “that visited. He wrote that India “spoke irresistible and obsessive subject”, to me; I found myself responding the Khoja community in which he to it, it mattered to me. It was as if grew up, and its own strand in the a part of me which had lain dor- East African narrative. But there is also a strong measmant all the while had awakened ure of what was quite unique in and reclaimed me”. Similar sentiments gird And the Indian African experience: a Home Was Kariakoo, another sense of wholehearted belonging extended travelogue that tracks to the modern, post-colonial the author’s exhaustive (and nationalistic project. Thus, Vasexhausting) recent journeys— sanji deplores Tanzania’s descent into donor dependmostly by public bus— ence, “for those of through Tanzania, my generation who with a brief stop in have not forgotten Nairobi, in neighbourFOR AN the calls for self-reliing Kenya. It is also a EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK, VISIT ance and dignity, valuable, often insightWWW. who volunteered to ful, book on the theme LIVEMINT.COM/ build houses during of “the returnee”, BOOKEXCERPTS our vacations, and about which Vassanji recall the pride we writes, “Circumfelt at (Julius) stances took me away, Nyerere’s rebuff of a and for a long time it pushy foreign power, seemed to me that I would never visit those lost this is humiliating.” The front cover of the book’s dimensions, experience the land in its variety, appreciate the diver- Indian edition is adorned with a sity of its people. I was wrong, all it pabulum blurb comparing Vasrequired was a will to go and do sanji to V.S. Naipaul and Graham just that.” Vassanji’s slow, diffi- Greene (it is taken from a longcult, almost compulsive perambu- ago review of his first novel, The lations through Tanzania—to the Gunny Sack). But this book is Malawi and Burundi borders, up much better understood as a necand down the coastline from essary corrective to what has been Tanga to Kilwa and across to Zan- written about Tanzania—and zibar—make for rather moving other African countries—by jaded, opportunistic journeymen reading. Despite all the years away— like Paul Theroux. About Therand the celebrated literary life in oux’s “dark continent” drivel on Toronto—his desire to write “not Tanzania, Vassanji writes, “How as an outsider reporting to out- do you explain to a fleet-footed siders but as someone from traveler, who speeds through a there, who understood”, is palpa- place like the Road Runner, ignoble. You recognize the truth rant of the language and knowing when he writes, finally: “I wished nobody locally, and with naïve I could go on and on, from place arrogance reports to his brighter to place, and never stop. But I world about it, that there is life was not young anymore, and one here, and all that living entails. lives with constraints; twice I had That the people who live here are to be told Enough, and reluc- not shadows or mere creatures tantly, facing an inviting, unvis- but humans; all you need to do is ited landscape, I turned back. I touch them.” had to stop.” One main compulsion driving Vivek Menezes is a writer, phothe book is familiar to Indians and tographer, and founder and coother former colonials. It is the curator of the Goa Arts and Literreclamation of place. The precise ary Festival. question that struck Vassanji after learning all about the pioneering Write to lounge@livemint.com

crime fiction is Bill Clinton. Every year, the White House would release his holiday reading list, which apparently often featured thrillers. And just as JFK’s “endorsement” helped the British writer Ian Fleming become big in the US, the fact that Clinton in the early 1990s declared himself a Walter Mosley fan, kickstarted one of the finest crime writing careers in history. Clinton once even invited Mosley to dinner. Shortly afterwards, Mosley hit big-time with his pioneering series of novels about the Los Angeles slum detective “Easy” Rawlins, soon translated into over 20 languages. And in 1995, one of the books was made into a Hollywood movie starring Denzel Washington. For some reason I had missed the series, so recently, on the former president’s recommendation, I went to my local book store in Bengaluru and returned home with a couple of slim second-hand volumes, all

Mosley fan: Bill Clinton. with colour-coded titles like Devil In A Blue Dress (Mosley’s 1990 debut novel), White Butterfly and Black Betty. On the face of it, these are typical hard-boiled private-eye stories with a hero who survives many hangovers and beatings, while he beds gorgeous ladies, rescues people in distress, solves multiple homicides, and spouts a lot of cool dialogue. So far so good, but what makes the books special is the setting in a segment of American society that has rarely been explored in mainstream fiction. We get to know areas like Watts in Los Angeles, where the mean streets, at least according to Mosley’s novels, are really mean—where right is not always right and

wrong may not necessarily be wrong, and there are a few constants that you can bank upon: violence, Bourbon, sex, dollars and racism. It is a world where nobody can be trusted, especially not white people. “Half the black people I knew would walk an extra mile to avoid straightforward contact with white people,” we read in White Butterfly, a novel about college girls working night-shifts in Watts’ striptease cabarets. Mosley doesn’t mince words as he investigates social problems through his protagonist. Rawlins isn’t a licensed detective; he has moved from the American south in pursuit of a better life in Los Angeles. When we first meet him (in Devil In A Blue Dress), he’s a freshly laid-off aeroplane mechanic. Unable to pay the mortgage on his house, he becomes, under duress, the local trouble-shooter to whom, a few books down the line, even the police turn with tricky cases— after all, white policemen aren’t very welcome in these parts. The series becomes an exploration of African-American history in the 20th century, especially those turbulent midcentury decades which saw protests, ethnic riots, segregation, human rights campaigning and the development of various subcultures. In an interview I came across,

Mosley says: “Racial issues in America intersect with class issues. There is still racism in America, and in the rest of the world in general. There is still the possibility of any black male being rousted because of profiling, or whatever. But it is most common among poor black people. If you are a poor black person, and you look like a poor black person, and the policemen believe you’re a poor black person, they will abuse your rights a little bit more than if you have the telephone number of a good lawyer in your pocket.” It sounds bleak, but on the other hand, his fictional detective, Easy, is a good-hearted fellow. And although his own marriage collapses and his love life is chaotic, he builds up a small family of adopted children that he rescues from the streets. Mosley’s is a disturbing world, but also somehow full of hope for a better future. And one thing’s for sure—Clinton has good taste in literature. Zac O’Yeah is the writer of Once Upon A Time In Scandinavistan and Mr Majestic: The Tout Of Bengaluru. Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Zac’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/criminalmind

L18 FLAVOURS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

VIVEK MUTHURAMALINGAM

LOCAL GEOGRAPHY | RAJAJINAGAR 2ND STAGE, BENGALURU

Neon signs and a ‘kabadiwala’

Retracing parts of a childhood walk in a neighbourhood that was once home to a lake and the 80 Feet Road

INDIA

Benson Town

RAJAJINAGAR 2ND STAGE B ENGA LURU

Intimate takes on city neighbourhoods

B Y V IVEK M UTHURAMALINGAM ···························· efore my family made its way to the boondocks of Yelahanka in 2002, we lived in Bengaluru’s Rajajinagar 2nd Stage residential extension for 18 long years. Among the many memories that I have of growing up in the Rajajinagar neighbourhood, the long walks with a school friend remain vivid. We would take breaks in between our halfhearted attempts at homework and walk to the Iskcon temple on West of Chord Road, a good kilometre or two. We felt very adult about it, walking to clear our mind and all. Rajajinagar sat on hilly terrain and no two streets looked similar. We would often change routes to beat the monotony and sometimes discover the homes of classmates by accident. Cycling, too, was always exciting, and near the Kamalammana Gundi (KG) Grounds, a particularly challenging street with a really deep trough would leave us gasping for breath. Local cricket teams used the playground on weekends, and it was believed that a dilapidated bungalow overlooking the grounds was haunted. We would sometimes stand outside the compound wall and imagine we were seeing things. In the post-Orion Mall era of today (and with it, the Brigade Gateway, the World Trade Centre, Sheraton hotel and, more recently, One Bangalore

Ganganagar

West—an uber posh apartment complex that is coming up in the vicinity), I decided to retrace parts of that walk. I was apprehensive, and had very little hope of finding the relics of my childhood. The first thing I observe are the chequered lights of the World Trade Centre dominating the skyline, accompanied by the red safety lights of a gigantic crane hovering over a concrete edifice nearby. The Ganesh Juice Centre near our school is still there—a mango milkshake used to cost `5 then. The menu has now expanded to include butter-fruit shake for `40 and an Arabian pulpy grape juice. On the opposite side of the road, a flight of steps leads to the Punyadhama Temple, which is still a fine place to sit and watch the passing traffic. A little further on, the many decades old Prabhu Sweets appears on the right. A frail-looking chap, whom we assumed was Mister Prabhu himself, used to serve us samosas during the tiffin break on Saturdays when we wouldn’t carry anything from home. His samosas had potatoes with peels intact, but they were tasty enough to be devoured hot. I see the signboard missing and ask the man at the Pavan Book

and Stationers shop nearby if Prabhu is still around. He says: “The shop shut down just a month ago. But don’t worry, his kitchen is still running. Go up this road and take the second left. It’s the second or third building.” I heave a sigh of relief. Continuing further down the road, the Bhaktha & Sons photo studio appears on the left. Right behind it was our favourite pastry shop; it’s no longer there. The shopkeeper there used to speak good English and seemed to be this well-mannered and perfumed specimen from another world, and we assumed

it must be the Cantonment area in his case. His chilled Black Forest cake was an indulgence when we had the money. Udupa’s, at the end of Chord Road, which once served the best idlis and sambhar, has met a similar fate. The idlis have now moved close to Navrang Theatre, I am told, and have made space for Malabar Gold and Diamonds. From the Vidya Vardhaka Sangha Saptharishidhama, a Kannada-medium school, we would take a right and the street would begin its ascent. The houses ended abruptly and,

with them, the street lights too. Back then, a rough and uneven path, interspersed with shrubs and a water tank, used to lead up to the Iskcon temple. We would linger, chatting in the dark, away from the city lights and thoughts of homework. The Iskcon temple stood on a hillock then; rough steps led to the structure that looked like a makeshift warehouse with a roof made of asbestos sheets. Every year, during the painting contest that was organized there, my brother and I would happily settle down on the rock surfaces surrounding it and draw our masterpieces. Today, the temple is huge— multistoreyed, with the air of a luxury hotel—and opinions are divided on whether it’s a brilliant piece of architecture or an eyesore. The 80 Feet Road, renamed Dr Rajkumar Road, now has offices of global banks. I assumed there would not have been any space for the humble Amba Bhavani Medical Stores and Santhosh Café of yesteryear. Miraculously, the former survives in its corner. There weren’t many pharmacists in the neighbourhood back then, and this store would remain open till 11pm. I was eager to talk to its owner, Amarnath Singh; initially, I couldn’t recognize him. He filled me in on everything from the time of his birth at the KC General Hospital to the current family dispute between his brothers over a house in the same neighbourhood. The Milk Colony Ground, which used to be a lake, is a builder-sponsored, manicured recreational facility with an athletic track

Time travel: (from above) The Milk Colony Ground, with the Brigade Gateway towers in the background; the Milk Colony in 2009; and Amarnath Singh at the Amba Bhavani Medical Stores. and basketball courts. The White Horse bar nearby has thankfully survived the ravages of time. It is safe to assume that it is because of its timely reincarnation— fancy décor, neon signage, waiters dressed as sales executives and a brand new name, 1522 The Pub. The Vinayaka Paper Mart, our friendly kabadiwala, has made it to 2015. My brother would spend time after school helping arrange stacks of newspapers to earn himself a book or two. It helped him build a library of Tinkle magazines, and Amar Chitra Katha and Tintin comics. Balaji Stores—where my father’s friend, Ramaswamy uncle, would get his brand of cigarettes—is still run by Srinivas, who tells me that the rent for a single-bedroom house in the area is now as high as `6,000 a month. Sri Keshava Stores and Sri Venkateshwara Provision Stores, both grocery shops, survive too, with very little cosmetic change. It is the skill and resilience of the Setty clan, I assume. They still have clients who buy on credit. And you can buy “loose” oil there. Taking a turn into one of the by-lanes, I am delighted to see that very little has changed. Many of the houses still have little garden fronts, terraces with “rooms” for the adolescent son or daughter seeking privacy, the strong aroma of a hing (asafoetida) overdose from Brahmin kitchens, and coconut palms swaying gently where the architecture acknowledges their presence. The streets have retained the unmistakable signature of this neighbourhood—little children out on the streets prancing about from one compound to another at 8 in the evening, away from the watchful eyes of parents. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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