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INDIA

NOVEMBER 2017 `150

FITNESS GOALS

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RANVEER SINGH PHOTOGRAPHED BY R BURMAN

RANVEER

REVEALED

CONTENTS 130

RANVEER SINGH IS NO JOKE This is his darkest shade yet. By Megha Shah

ON THE COVER

COVER STAR

RANVEER SINGH

INDIA

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(the Right way) RANVEER SINGH PHOTOGRAPHED BY R BURMAN

RANVEER

REVEALED

PHOTO: R BURMAN

SUIT BY PAUL SMITH. T-SHIRT BY MCQ BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN AT THE COLLECTIVE. SNEAKERS BY ADIDAS. WATCH BY VICTORINOX

JUMPER BY PAUL & JOE. JACKET BY STELLA MCCARTNEY NOVEMBER 2017

— 13

CONTENTS

178

FEMME FATALE Don’t mess with Esha Gupta.

Photographed

by Signe Vilstrup ON THE COVER

BIKINI BY MELISSA ODABASH. NECKLACE

BY CORNELIA WEBB

16 —

NOVEMBER 2017

Some watches tell time.

Some tell a story

ÂŤ

ÂŤ

For nearly three centuries, Jaquet Droz has placed time under the banner of astonishment, excellence and constantly renewed creativity.

Model SW Steel

BOUTIQUES Chennai - The Helvetica, Tel (044) 2846 4095/96 New Delhi - Johnson Watch Co. Connaught Place, Tel (011) 4151 3110 - Johnson Watch Co. South Extension, Tel (011) 4164 6788 www.jaquet-droz.com - Contact : (91) 11 4609 29

CONTENTS

34 38 42 46 237 240 246

Editor’s Letter Contributors GQ Access GQ Digital Where To Buy GQ Central Open Letter

FEATURES ON THE 186 GQ’s Guide To Cryptocurrency COVER Everything you need to know about new-age money. By Arshie Chevalwala

192 Master Class Aziz Ansari unabashed – and unplugged.

By Mark Anthony Green 200 That’s All Folks!

Why Hollywood is under threat.

By Nick Bilton 208 Kick Start The coolest high-tops to covet this season.

Photographed by Lee Shin Goo 20 —

NOVEMBER 2017

222 A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof And the horror he unleashed. By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

THE GOOD LIFE

53

The honeymoon destination guide for every kind of couple; Amaro should be your new nightcap, and here’s how; All the food, drink and luxury that matters this month

VIBE

75

Ed Sheeran concert etiquette; BritishIndian Ahir Shah’s turned his rants into stand-up; What to watch this month; It’s festival season – these are the ones to hit up; Your favourite classic videogames are back; Music albums for every mood; Web series you need to stream now; Smartphones that’ll leave you mesmerised; Sarod virtuoso Soumik Datta is keeping classical music relevant

STYLE

95

The only guide you’ll need to be the suavest guy at any wedding (including yours): Slick accessories, ways ON THE COVER

to rock everything from the classic tux to the bandhgala to asymmetrical jackets, and grooming essentials; Meet Gucci’s new king Alessandro Michele; Five ways to shape up for party season

WATCH

139

Design aces; Fossil’s nailed the smartwatch hybrid with the Q Commuter; Big dial watches; Black is the new black

TALK

153

153 Sexualities: Being single in India is hard. By Sandip Roy 156 Sex: Meet the new-age single Indian woman. By Chastity Fernandes 158 Experience: Becoming single needn’t always be bad. By Uday Benegal 162 Family: When they try to find a suitable match. By Maroosha Muzaffar 166 Culture: Unmarried and successful.

By Annie Zaidi

DRIVE

171

The new Mercedes-Benz S-Class is upping the stakes; What to expect from Ducati’s newest superbike

eDitor

Publishing Director Arjun

che Kurrien

MANAGING EDIToR Maniza

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DIGITAL wRITERS

DIGITAL MoNETIzATIoN DIREcToR Rohit Gandhi SENIoR MANAGER – DIGITAL BRAND SoLUTIoNS (BENGALURU) Anitha Ramabhadran SENIoR ADVERTISING MANAGER Niti Solanki SENIoR MANAGER – DIGITAL SALES James Harris williams MANAGER – DIGITAL SALES (NEw DELHI) Siddarth Paruthi ASSISTANT MANAGER – DIGITAL SALES (BENGALURU) Disha Shetty PRoGRAMMATIc SALES MANAGER Riddhi Pimputkar AD oPERATIoNS MANAGER Sujit Jha AD oPERATIoNS ExEcUTIVE Vartika Sohal

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24 —

November 2017

Jonathan newhouse

TO BREAK THE RULES, YOU MUST FIRST MASTER THEM. THE VALLÉE DE JOUX. FOR MILLENNIA A HARSH, UNYIELDING ENVIRONMENT; AND SINCE 1875 THE HOME OF AUDEMARS PIGUET, IN THE VILLAGE OF LE BRASSUS. THE EARLY WATCHMAKERS WERE SHAPED HERE, IN AWE OF THE FORCE OF NATURE YET DRIVEN TO MASTER ITS MYSTERIES THROUGH THE COMPLEX MECHANICS OF THEIR CRAFT. STILL TODAY THIS PIONEERING SPIRIT INSPIRES US TO CONSTANTLY CHALLENGE THE CONVENTIONS OF

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Condé Nast International CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Jonathan Newhouse PRESIDENT: Wolfgang Blau EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT: James Woolhouse

The Condé Nast International Group of Brands includes: UK: Vogue, House & Garden, Brides, Tatler, The World of Interiors, GQ, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour, Condé Nast Johansens, GQ Style, Love, Wired, Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design, Ars Technica France: Vogue, Vogue Hommes, AD, Glamour, Vogue Collections, GQ, AD Collector, Vanity Fair, GQ Le Manuel du Style, Glamour Style Italy: Vogue, Glamour, AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, La Cucina Italiana Germany: Vogue, GQ, AD, Glamour, GQ Style, Wired

INDIA

Spain: Vogue, GQ, Vogue Novias, Vogue Niños, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue Colecciones, Vogue Belleza, Glamour, AD, Vanity Fair

NOVEMBER 2017 `150

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Mexico and Latin America: Vogue Mexico and Latin America, Glamour Mexico, AD Mexico, GQ Mexico and Latin America, Vanity Fair Mexico India: Vogue, GQ, Condé Nast Traveller, AD

Published under Joint Venture

RANVEER SINGH PHOTOGRAPHED BY R BURMAN

RANVEER

REVEALED

Brazil: Vogue, Casa Vogue, GQ, Glamour Russia: Vogue, GQ, AD, Glamour, GQ Style, Tatler, Glamour Style Book

Published under License or Copyright Cooperation Australia: Vogue, Vogue Living, GQ Bulgaria: Glamour China: Vogue, AD, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, GQ Style, Brides, Condé Nast Center of Fashion & Design, Vogue Me Czech Republic and Slovakia: La Cucina Italiana Hungary: Glamour Iceland: Glamour Korea: Vogue, GQ, Allure, W Middle East: Vogue, Condé Nast Traveller, AD, Vogue Café at The Dubai Mall Poland: Glamour Portugal: Vogue, GQ Romania: Glamour Russia: Vogue Café Moscow, Tatler Club Moscow South Africa: House & Garden, GQ, Glamour, House & Garden Gourmet, GQ Style, Glamour Hair The Netherlands: Vogue, Glamour, Vogue The Book, Vogue Man, Vogue Living Thailand: Vogue, GQ, Vogue Lounge Bangkok Turkey: Vogue, GQ Ukraine: Vogue, Vogue Café Kiev

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Letter from the Editor

MACHINE HEAD THE

GUIDE

S NGLES’ S P E C I A L

INDIA

NOVEMBER 2017 `150

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@chekurriengq

34 —

NOVEMBER 2017

Everything you need to know about

Crypto Currency

RANVEER

REVEALED

PHOTO: MA X HERMANS/THOMPSON PHOTO IMAGERY (CHE)

I

t’s been a terrible year for Bollywood. Movie after movie has bombed, with literally a handful of releases breaking into the black. In an industry where everyone is a pundit, myriad reasons for the failure have been proffered, though no one seems to have an idea of how to break out of the gloom. Except, perhaps Aamir Khan – who is a savant.

For years Bollywood had a monopoly on the distribution of entertainment in this country, forcing us to consume their products as we didn’t have many choices. For Indians of a certain vintage, boredom and heat inevitably led to air-conditioned theatres. But as the world has grown flat, culturally and technologically, we now have a wide array of dynamic media pipelines to lose ourselves within, whether it’s Netflix, Instagram or PlayStation. Further, we are increasingly refusing to battle traffic and crowds for the shared cinema experience; entertainment now plays on our personal screens in the privacy and comfort of our homes. This trend has decimated Bollywood, whose bloated, defunct business model is predicated on audiences buying pricey tickets. Most of the producer’s money was spent on paying stars and marketing. Great writing, or investing in it, was never a priority.

Of course, the big American film studios are suffering in equal measure, with movie theatre attendance in the United States down to a 19-year low, as writer Nick Bilton shows in his feature (page 206) that describes Silicon Valley’s evisceration of Hollywood. Even the creative class – whether actors, writers or technicians, who consider themselves specialists and therefore irreplaceable – better beware he says, as the bots are coming. And the bots are really good. They’re not great, but good enough to replace all but the truly exceptional.

The one person who shouldn’t fear the future is our cover star, Ranveer Singh, whose public persona offers an interesting model for celebrities of the future. He does a movie a year for the cred, makes every public appearance and social media post count, and works with relentless energy for the brands that pay him the big bucks. His unique, clairvoyant instinct trumps Artificial Intelligence any day.

CONTRIBUTORS

MEHAK OBEROI WHO: Freelance hair and make-up artist. Instagram @mehakoberoi WHAT: Makes Esha Gupta glow, page 178 QUALIFICATIONS: “She’s this dynamite package of confidence, ambition and enthusiasm, but with a really cool vibe. And, of course, she’s an absolute stunner. It’s a perfect description of the GQ woman.”

R BURMAN WHO: Photographer. Instagram @ridburman WHAT: Goes old-school by shooting our cover star Ranveer Singh on film, page 130 BACK TO THE BASICS: “Shooting on film is about the subject placing his complete trust in the photographer and the shoot’s vision – which Ranveer did.”

MAROOSHA MUZAFFAR WHO: Freelance journalist. Twitter @maroosha_m WHAT: A perspective on being single, page 153 THE REAL TRUTH: “When I started reporting my book (on loneliness and online dating in India), I was sceptical about people talking about loneliness.

It’s not something we mention publicly or even acknowledge. A taboo topic.

And we do everything to try and escape it. Dating was my escape at one point.

When I met fellow loners on the internet who spoke to me poignantly about their lives, I was humbled. I met people on dating apps that I’m still friends with.

The antidote to loneliness is connection.

Not marriage, not necessarily.”

SAJID WAJID SHAIKH ARNAUD PYVKA WHO: Photographer. Instagram @arnaudpyvka WHAT: Catches Aziz Ansari in “Master Class”, page 192 IN SPADES: “He’s everything you could ask for in a GQ man: gentlemanly, funny, kind.”

38 —

NOVEMBER 2017

WHO: Multidisciplinary visual artist, owner of Fortysix & Two Designs.

Instagram @sajidwajidshaikh WHAT: Illustrates this month’s Talk Singles’ Special, page 153 #FEELS: “It was easy to find inspiration when creating the artwork for these stories, especially in their ambiguity and relatability.”

AB de Villiers and the new TimeWalker Chronograph Inspired by performance and the spirit of competition. The TimeWalker Chronograph. montblanc.com/timewalker Crafted for New Heights.

Phoenix Market City Mall · Upper ground level, 64A · Bangalore · Phone +91 80 67 26 61 30 The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel · Colaba · Mumbai · Phone + 91 22 6464 4499 Palladium Mall · Lower Parel · Mumbai · Phone + 91 90 041 06 341 | Grand Hyatt Hotel · Mumbai · Phone +91 22 306 890 01 The Taj Mahal Hotel · New Delhi · Phone + 91 95 99 511 448 | Dhole Patil Road · Pune · Phone +91 841 20 12 299 Taj Krishna Hotel · Hyderabad · Phone +91 40 66 77 77 92

TUNE INTO LUXURY

BEYOND THE ORDINARY The luxury that Lexus offers is already known to be invincible.

Especially when it’s the LX 450d. This time, it takes you beyond the drive, enamors you with the sound of perfection within its luxe embrace—leaving you to discover a whole new world of luxury. All this courtesy the SUV’s exclusive Mark Levinson audio system—the pinnacle of acoustic technology on the road There are different levels of luxury in the music system industry— mass, premium and the one that Mark Levinson falls in, which is hi-fi luxury

THE LEXUS STATE OF MIND The idea behind any Lexus masterpiece is simple: create an experience that will transport you to another world. A world where luxury isn’t just a whim, but a necessity. Where everything feels extraordinary. Every drive. Every comfort. Every sound. At Lexus, nothing is predictable. They treat perfection like it’s the air they breathe. But even then, they’re always in pursuit of greater excellence, striving to create experiences beyond pure function. They take you over, not only with their cars, and the LX 450d in particular, but with every detail they spend hours obsessing over.

The one we fell in love with most recently was their superior audio technology—in collaboration with the legendary Mark Levinson brand—which quite simply, will

blow your mind. It did ours. After all, Lexus never compromises, on anything, at any level. It does quite the opposite. It focusses on the aspects that may not even occur to you—like their zealous hospitality. It leaves you awe-struck. Or in this case, in a state of audio-nirvana.

WHEN AUDIO LUXURY WAS BORN For those of you who yet haven’t had the chance to be entranced by the name Mark Levinson, allow us to transform you into a pure breed audiophile. To begin with, the man himself was a music and electronics prodigy before the age of 20. He merged his musical prowess and technical talents to create the sound mixer used onstage during the legendary Woodstock Festival.

He went on to found Mark Levinson Audio Systems in 1972, where he hand-

built stereo components. Over the years, the Mark Levinson brand became synonymous with high-performance audio. They have won 40 awards in the last 36 months, from HI-FI NEWS UK to STEREO SOUND JAPAN winning 11 awards for three years consecutively, it was the 2016 Grand Prix winner, and it was awarded 6 of 6 stars at the LDY & BILDE NORWAY, including the prestigious CES INNOVATIONS USA for the last three years. It even bagged the STEREOPHILE USA May 2017 cover story.

Their ultimate goal is the recreation of live sound, not simply the acoustics, but the emotional response that comes from listening to music. In other words, handcrafted precision. Just like Lexus endeavors towards, and achieves, with every vehicle.

A SHARED PASSION FOR THE FINEST The Mark Levinson philosophy resonates deeply with the Lexus luxury mindset. Just like the Lexus engineers pour hours of hard work into each vehicle, fixated over detail and demanding the highest results, Mark Levinson engineers spare no expense sourcing the best materials from around the world. It is indeed the audio equivalent of feeling like a million bucks—the same overwhelming feeling you get inside the LX 450d, or any Lexus vehicle for that matter. Just to give you perspective, Mark Levinson home entertainment speakers go for nothing less than $100000—that’s the worth of quality going into your car. At the final frontier of luxury is exclusivity, and this is what compelled both brands to create this unique collaboration. Not taking away from the fact that no automaker could, until now, provide the superior acoustic environment necessary for premium Mark Levinson audio systems.

Lexus, scientifically engineered for a quiet and refined ride—was the first that Mark Levinson wanted to create the emotional experience that music and movie aficionados could only attain with the finest home-audio equipment

could. And so for the last two decades, Mark Levinson has been redefining the Lexus luxury drive by bringing mindnumbingly sophisticated, passionately created sound to Lexus vehicles, tailortuned for every Lexus model. You literally cannot unhear the precision in every note, changing your Lexus experience, and life, forever.

CLARI-FI TECHNOLOGY THAT INSPIRES The Mark Levinson audio system in the Lexus has its very own proprietary music restoration technology—called Clari-Fi. The technology rebuilds audio signals lost in the digital compression process—whether it’s your MP3 files, streamed music or satellite radio.

Optimised for today’s mobile lifestyle, it is designed to restore a hi-fidelity listening experience to music stored on or streamed from your cellphone.

We told you, mind blown right! This is the Lexus promise, to keep pushing the boundaries across every detail, and provide the most exceptional, satiating every desire, before you can even anticipate it.

The Mark Levinson home entertainment speakers go for nothing less than $100000 CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT CAPTIVATES To produce such magnificence is no easy feat. But with the Lexus and Mark Levinson commitment, magnificence is the starting point. Designed and made in the USA, they begin to collaborate early in the development cycle, and continue to work closely throughout the vehicle’s progression. There are several challenges—from the speaker placement with the vehicle’s packaging constraints to dealing with the variable ambient noise levels. But who better than a collaborative duo like this to make the magic of process, patience and precision a reality. Working alongside the Lexus experts, the Mark Levinson acoustic engineers first determine the optimal system architecture, specifying the design of each custom-engineered component. They together spend hundreds of man-hours voicing the system with the final goal of achieving the Mark Levinson Sonic Signature. Both brands have a legacy of excellence, that continues to live on with each crafted work of art.

The 19-speaker Mark Levinson reference surround system delivers home-theater quality in-car entertainment

Mark Levinson products are a true example of “Science meets Art,” delivering the best possible measured & subjective performance

Clari-Fi technology intelligently and seamlessly reconstructs the compressed music for an enhanced listening experience LISTENING EXPERIENCE THAT LEAVES YOU SPEECHLESS As soon as you enter the LX 450d, you won’t be able to stop marveling over the 19-speaker Mark Levinson Reference Surround Sound System, which promises to belt out home-theatre quality in-car entertainment. The speakers are arranged so ergonomically, that everyone from the lucky person driving the car to the one who’s sitting way in the back, all get to hear audio brilliance at the same relentless magnitude. In fact, your LX 450d could very well become your very own driving, moving, party machine. Because superiority like this is rare. But then, when did Lexus ever do anything that’s not.

For more information, visit lexusindia.co.in

ACCESS

Y O U R E XC LU S I V E PA S S T O T HE M O S T H A P P E NIN G PA R T IE S A ND E V E N T S

Manoviraj Khosla Erwan Dantan & Afshaad Kelawaala

Sanjiv Shanmugam, Thejaswi Udupa, Nikhil Barua, Arjun R Narayan & Siddharth Poojari with the Audi TT

WHAT: GQ GENTLEMEN’S CLUB WHERE: THE RITZ-CARLTON, BANGALORE The Garden City played host to GQ’s Gentlemen’s Club – a swanky gathering of some of the city’s most accomplished, stylish individuals. The room was filled with IT moguls, finance chiefs, angel investors, start-up gurus and bon vivants, reflecting the dynamism, economy and warmth of this progressive, modern city.

Ila Naidu

Caught in conversation: Rishad Premji, Che Kurrien & Aditi Premji The Vacheron Constantin display

Dana Kursh & Meera Pai

Antony Page

Sneha Mahant, Kaustav Dey, Almona Bhatia & Kshitij Saxena

Guneet Kochar & Rikin Kotecha Sunder Belani, Keerthana Sundaramurthy, Ravina Belani & Ranjit Sundaramurthy Manish Saxena The Chivas bar

Delicious fare at The Ritz-Carlton, Bangalore

Vinod Naidu 42 —

NOVEMBER 2017

Paresh & Anjana Lamba with the Audi A5 Sportback

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WEAR THIS TO YOUR BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING

46 —

NOVEMBER 2017

WHAT WENT DOWN AT THE 2017 VAN HEUSEN + GQ FASHION NIGHTS

PHOTO: TARUN KHIWAL (SRK), MANISH MANSINH (FASHION NIGHTS)

THE BEST BIG DIAL WATCHES THIS SEASON

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THE

• FOOD • DRINK • TRAVEL • NIGHTLIFE

EDITED BY M E G H A SHAH

Honeymoon HOW AND WHERE TO

WORDS: MEGHA SHAH. IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

SUCCESSFULLY

Planning an Indian wedding is one of the most stressful activities that two individuals can wilfully undertake. Which is why the good folks in Great Britain’s tourism industry came up with the honeymoon.

You plan some more, spend some more – but finally get to have fun and begin to like the person you married again. Yet, while you’re sure your love is true, you still have to face the prospect of there being just the two of you, on and on, for days. So it’s important to recognise what sort of couple you are, how much time you really want to spend, and ensure that you’ve got a great hotel room – because it might just be where she discovers you snore

THE

IF YOU’RE NOT THAT FLUSH

Oman

We get it, you’re not swimming in cash (yet), but you still want firstclass luxury. In that case, a shorter trip with concentrated opulence is the way to go. Unlike many of its Emirati cousins, Oman hasn’t fallen into the trap of brash over beauty. Endowed with stunning topography, and maintaining its traditional side while offering some of the world’s most glitzy hotels, Oman will satisfy the pickiest of brides. Stay at the Anantara Al Jabar Al Akhdar, set 6,500 feet above sea level on the Saiq Plateau of Jabal Ahkdar, an area famous for its damask roses. Or choose The Shangri-La Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa for a more adult-oriented experience (no children are allowed in the pool). Watch a fire-orange sunset against rust-red dunes that seem like you’re picnicking on Mars, and end the day with a spiritual sojourn to the colossal Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, with a prayer under a 14m-tall chandelier.

IF YOU WANT A PRIVATE ISLAND FOR LESS

Fiji

DOLPHIN ISLAND

Seclusion is something most honeymooners seek. What you’re also seeking is a sigh, of total bliss.

That, and hours of sexy time that don’t need to be restricted to the indoors. A five-hectare property that can be rented out only by one

party at a time – in your case, just you two – ticks all the boxes. That’s right, it’s a private island. An entire mass of land, dotted with thatched villas with flowing cream curtains and elaborate outdoor showers amid curling hibiscus, in the middle of the vast blue ocean, by god, for you. That sigh will give way to incredulity pretty quickly. How does this place even exist? It doesn’t seem like it should, considering the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Nadi airport, and 20-minute boat/ helicopter/seaplane ride just to reach here. But it does, and it won’t break the bank – much.

From NZ$2,349 (approx `1,30,000) per night; dolphinislandfiji.com

GQ TIP: Research the best restaurants and bars before the trip.

Trying to binge-read TripAdvisor reviews and find the best mode of transportation when you’re hungry will undoubtedly bring out the ugly in both of you.

WORDS: MEGHA SHAH. IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK (FLAGS)

From IDR 50,00,000 (approx `24,000) per night; jabal-akhdar.anantara.com.

From `18,000/night; shangri-la.com/ muscat/barraljissahresort

60 YEARS OF ADVENTURE AND DISCOVERY

FOR A LEADING BREITLING RETAILER CLOSE TO YOU CALL BREITLING INDIA 022 – 66155000

THE

GQ TIP: You will eventually get bored of the bubble baths with rose petals and room service. Plan your days out well.

IF YOU WANT IT ALL

For a transatlantic destination, soul-stirring views, great food and the experience of a desert, a beach, a city and a glacier, all in one go, Chile’s a great pick. It’s as long as the US is wide, and also gives you boasting rights about having visited a place most people haven’t. You can find a hotel to fit pretty much any budget, but if you’ve got the cash, check in to the Awasi. Take a day trip to La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaíso, or picnic on a plateau in the Atacama desert. Extend your trip by combining it with Argentina, the Napa Valley of South America, or sexy Brazil, for its wild nightclubs and cachaça. The land of the tango knows a thing or two about romance.

From USD $3,993 (approx `2,60,000) per person for 3 nights; awasipatagonia.com 56 —

NOVEMBER 2017

IF IT’S LAST MINUTE

Thailand

SIX SENSES HIDEAWAY, YAO NOI

Just because you haven’t had time to plan doesn’t mean she needs to know it. Thailand is the honeymoon of choice for many Indians, and a bit of a cliché for a discerning gent like you. But it’s also pretty simple to execute. So, it’s essential to steer

clear of the usual Phuket and Koh Samui resorts, and find a castaway gem where she won’t run into Akshay from marketing. Perched atop the island of Ko Yao Noi in the Phang Nga Bay, this resort’s villas and suites are laid-back, relaxed affairs, with private pools and views of the ridiculously beautiful Sugar Loaf Islands.

Drop in to the spa for a sensuous couples’ massage, then watch the sun go down with cocktails at the bar. It’s the perfect place to disappear together.

From 18,000 Thai baht (approx `35,000) per night; sixsenses.com/resorts/yao-noi/destination

WORDS: MEGHA SHAH. IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK (FLAGS)

C hile

THE

Italy THE AMALFI COAST

It may not be one of the trendy destinations for 2018, but this mélange of towns dotted along Italy’s glamorous coast – which might as well be sponsored by Instagram – provide the sort of backdrop that makes you feel glad you’re in love. Make Positano your base (stay at Le Sirenuse, the chicest hotel in the city centre), described

by Paul Klee as “the only place in the world conceived on a vertical rather

GQ TIP: Don’t plan your honeymoon for literally the day after you get hitched. It’s highly likely one or both of you will need at least a week’s sleep before you can find your enthusiasm again.

than a horizontal axis.” From there, visit Sorrento, Amalfi, Naples and, if you’re in the off-season, Capri. The cafés are posh, with fresh seafood (best enjoyed al fresco) being picked at by men in cream linens and women with tanned legs and flashy jewels. A short drive away are rural pockets with red-cheeked farmers and their wives who make cheese. Alternatively, stay at the beige-toned Monastero Santa Rosa, a monastery suspended between sea and sky. There are hikes and bikes and private yachts to hire. Take one to Li Galli, an archipelago of three tiny, jagged islands just off the coast where, according to Greek mythology, the Sirens attempted to lure Odysseus to his death on the rocks. How he managed to resist the temptation is baffling.

From €400 (approx `30,000) per night; sirenuse.it

IF YOU WANT THE ANTI-HONEYMOON

Vietnam Forget those pictures of toned, amorous couples on sunny beaches – they’re compensated models.

You’re actual people in an actual relationship. So if the idea of spending day after day getting sunburned on a little stretch of sand held hostage by the ocean is anything but romantic, that’s okay. The bustling cities of Vietnam can be just the antidote you need.

In Ho Chi Minh City, you’re met with staggering French architecture dating back to the 18th century, endless stalls selling the famed Banh Mi sandwich and elegant cafés you’ll be surprised to stumble across. In Hanoi are treelined boulevards and a lively tangle of streets known as the Old Quarter.

Go kayaking in Ha Long Bay, cruise down the Mekong River or take a speedboat to L’Alyana Villas Ninh Van Bay – 35 reed-thatched villas you get to by climbing up a tree, only to find your private butler waiting to serve you Pho. From $360 (approx `23,500) per night; anlamnvb.com

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WORDS: MEGHA SHAH. IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES (VIETNAM), SHUTTERSTOCK (FLAGS)

IF YOU LIKE IT CLASSIC

THE

CHUG IT

ROCK(S) IT

DRINK BITTER THAN YOU’RE USED TO

Now widely available after 25 years of scarcity, the piney and intense Braulio is best over ice with an orange wedge.

(OK, maybe don’t chug it) Meletti is said to be made with the kola nut, the same stuff that gives cola its flavor. Lots of spice and vanilla. Drink it as Teague suggests: 50-50 with seltzer to create the best “Coke” you’ve ever had. “A frosty glass of that and a couple ice cubes? You could crush it all day.”

Three ways to enjoy amaro, the Italian national spirit that’s becoming our favourite post-dinner drink… And pre-dinner drink…

And whenever-you-want drink

SIP IT Nonino is as sweet and drinkable as amaro gets – very light on bitter herbs. (Though at 70-proof, it’s heavy on alcohol for an amaro.) Drink it neat after a few too many agnolotti.

62 —

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WORDS: ROSS MCCAMMON. PHOTO: GRANT CORNETT. FOOD STYLIST: MAGGIE RUGGIERO. PROP STYLIST: AMY HENRY

T

hose bottles of amaro you’re seeing behind the bar on your trips abroad more and more with their beautiful Italian labels featuring beautiful Italian scenes representing the beautiful Italian liqueur inside – aren’t just for sipping. They’re for drinking. Amari – Italian for “bitters” – are indeed bitter. But also sweet, smoky and citrusy, too.

They are as versatile as whiskey and maybe even more complex.

“There’s nothing missing,” says bartender Sother Teague, who opened his bitters bar Amor y Amargo in Manhattan’s East Village in 2011.

“There are oldfashioneds in a bottle.”

Here are three ways to drink three amari that you can now find in any good liquor store on your next trip to the US, where amaro is replacing port as the go-to digestivo.

M-66 Greater Kailash-1 Market New Delhi 110048 T: 41634788 29231155 JMD The Empire Square MG Road Gurgaon Next to Bristol Hotel T: 0124-2889101/02 For Appointment Call: 9873173456 W: www.sunilmehra.co.in E: contact@sunilmehra.co.in

THE

TASTE ALL THAT MATTERS THIS MONTH

THE FURNITURE LINE

ASHIESH SHAH X URBAN LADDER

Designer of celebrity homes and glamorous restaurants, Ashiesh Shah is now making his aesthetic more accessible by collaborating with Urban Ladder on four different collections. Made out of local materials like teak wood and cane, they explore local fabric-dyeing techniques while maintaining a contemporary aesthetic. The first collection, called Wabi Sabi launched last month, and features minimalist chairs, pouffes, sofas and coffee tables with secret nooks for your coasters. `13,000-`1,30,000; www.urbanladder.com

THE CAFÉ

With over 300 tea blends created by owner and tea blender Jiten Sheth, this new café in Fort serves up hot brewed, iced and milk teas in a charming vintage space with high ceilings and Victorian furniture. On the food menu are trendy options like Jerusalem artichoke soup and blue pea quinoa salad, along with tea-infused foods for the complete tea aficionado: misal pav flavoured with Assam tea, Thai curry with oolong tea and a mixed-tea-infused Buddha bowl. `250-`5,000 a pot; www.tdtworld.com 68 —

NOVEMBER 2017

WORDS: MEGHA SHAH

TASSE DE THÉ CAFÉ | Mumbai

THE

BOM

THE GIFT

ROYAL SALUTE LIMITED-EDITION GIFT PACK

Created in partnership with British-based wallpaper designer Angela Groundwater, this gift pack pays homage to the Regent’s Banquet of 1817, one of the earliest recorded feasts held in the formal royal residence, the Brighton Pavilion. The legendary party featured 121 dishes, which were recreated – yes, all 121 of them – at a recent soirée fit for kings at Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad. It’s also where the limited-edition pack was launched – including the luxurious Royal Salute 21 Year Old, with a handsome crystal glass that any of your buddies would be pretty kicked to receive. `15,300 (Delhi); www.royalsalute.com

THE HOTEL

WELIGAMA BAY MARRIOTT RESORT & SPA | Sri Lanka

The best thing about this property is its excellent location: the sleepy fishing village of Weligama Bay, where the sea is perfect for surfing, swimming and blue whale watching. You can visit the Galle Fort, 45 minutes away, and spend your evenings sampling tapas at the pool bar and nights at Big Fish, the hotel’s fine-dine, for seafood that’s as fresh as it gets. www.marriott.com

TASTE

BKK

ALL THAT MATTERS THIS MONTH

MUMBAI TO BANGKOK ON THAI LION AIR

If you needed another reason to take a trip to Thailand, we’ve got one: Thai Lion Air, an associate company of the Indonesian low-cost airline Lion Air, has begun Mumbai operations. Flights run thrice a week starting October 29, and while year-end prices are getting steeper by the minute, fares are available for just `13,000 for early next year. There are also budget-friendly connections to destinations like Phuket, Singapore, Guangzhou, Krabi, Ko Samui, Chengdu, Ho Chi Minh City, Chiang Mai and Jakarta. www.lionairthai.com

70 —

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WORDS: MEGHA SHAH. IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK (LION AIR, MAP)

THE ROUTE

THE ULTIMATE FAMILY CARNIVAL From traditional Rajasthani entertainment options to Tingar – the thrilling kids club, Fairmont Jaipur sure knows how to play the host. The deeper you dive into these luxury experiences, the closer you get to your loved ones

E

very time you plan a family vacation, two questions ring loud and clear in your head. One: will it be kidfriendly? Two: will you get the chance to do what you want to with the kids around? More often than not, you end up compromising and just focus on the former. But we’ve got some good news for you. The next time you plan a family vacation, do it right at Fairmont Jaipur.

And you’ll find – it’s a home-run.

From elephant rides to BMW bike trails, customised Jaipur trails to hot air ballooning, local shopping markets to authentic village visits, the hotel ensures that you have much to do and more to see. You also get a taste of the Jaipuri culture as you sit in the ornate halls listening to the storytellers and their tales of long gone kings and queens who reigned once upon a time. And while you’re busy falling in love with the magnificent architecture surrounding

you, the hotel ensures that your children have a whale of a time at Tingar – the kids club.

Bright, colourful and engaging, this arena of gaming gadgets and board games can keep the kids busy while you indulge in a therapeutic massage or laze in the outdoor pool. Equipped with the PS 3, kids movies, table tennis, foosball and more, kids can have a fun-filled time under the constant supervision of trained professionals.

Besides this, the hotel also organises fun activities like temple run, traditional puppet shows, bangle making, folk dances, clay pot making and more.

All in all, a trip to Fairmont Jaipur is a celebration of elegance, culture and family time.

Only to create memories that you’ll always cherish and look back upon with a smile.

∙ MUSIC ∙ FILMS ∙ TECH ∙ TV ∙ COMEDY ∙ GAMES EDITED BY NIDHI GUPTA

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO GET IN ON THIS MONTH

WORDS: NIDHI GUPTA. IMAGE:GETTY IMAGES

T LIVEWIRE

here are three reasons you’re going to find yourself at the Jio Gardens in BKC one Sunday this month: You’re either in a committed relationship, which means tagging along to watch one of the world’s biggest superstars live. You’re suffering from a severe bout of FOMO and belong to that category of people who want to be part of the conversation even if they know only one line from “That One Song”. Or you’re an actual blue-blooded fan of the sentimental goop Sheeran croons with such swashbuckling swagger. Regardless, here’s what you need to do to belong to this moment: Don’t raise your fist, do argue about how “Happier” is actually the best song on ÷ and get ready to drop the line: “That’s a loop station. He’s not Bieber!”

What will Ed Sheeran’s gig look like? You do the math

Ed Sheeran is in Mumbai on November 19 as part of the ÷ album tour

DIVIDE AND RULE

NOVEMBER 2017

— 75

COMEDY

SCREAM TEAM

Catch British-Indian comedian Ahir Shah ranting about the world on a stage near you

A

hir Shah spends a lot of time being “absolutely fucking terrified about the state of the world” these days. “Sometimes I take time out from thinking about how climate change poses an existential threat to our species, and how Donald Trump might just nuke us all to death, and instead spend time reflecting on the fact that we’re just as likely to be destroyed by antibiotic-resistant microbes.

“Yeah, I’m a lot of fun at parties.”

Shah is a political humorist who “grew up in Wembley along with basically every other British-Indian person in the UK.” His father, most unlike the stereotype about Indian fathers, would push him to “try out different artsy things”. This included a brief, unsuccessful stint with dance, before he quickly moved on to stand-

up at age 15 – even though “realistically, who has anything worthwhile to say to an audience when they’re a teenager?”

But then Shah went off to Cambridge to study politics and realised that he “could get more people to listen to his ranting if [he] threw in a few jokes.” Today he’s widely acknowledged to be one of Britain’s most promising comedians, after he blew everyone away with “Control” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival earlier this summer.

“Control”, in a sense a sequel to his 2016 show “Machines”, happened because “the past appears to be winning worldwide. Part of my frustrations with the world at the moment,” he explains, “is the complacency with which we’re treating genuinely dangerous shifts in our politics.”

Obviously, this includes Brexit – “usefully, everyone around the world knows how it’s ruining my country and everyone is having a jolly old time laughing about it.” But there are also wry jokes about vegans who like Nando’s; sour milk; and, of course, Donald Trump. Ride shotgun with him for the catharsis, if nothing else.

Otherwise we’d all just be screaming at the news.

Ahir Shah will be performing in Mumbai on November 2 and Bengaluru on November 3-5.

Details at Comedywagon.com

FILMS

A murder mystery, an Aaron Sorkin original and more superheroes: These are worth going to the theatre for MOLLY’S GAME

DIRECTED BY AARON SORKIN

The man who created TV gold like The West Wing and The Newsroom makes his directorial debut with the true story of “poker princess” Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) – the mysterious, sexy woman who ran the world’s most exclusive poker games (alleged patrons included Hollywood A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck) during the Noughties.

Expect a mouthy speech or two.

JUSTICE LEAGUE

DIRECTED BY ZACK SNYDER

Another day, another superhero crew, this time with Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash. There’s an aggressor, Steppenwolf, threatening to end the world as we know it. It’s all very predictable, but you know you’re still going to watch it for Gal Godot.

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NOVEMBER 2017

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

DIRECTED BY KENNETH BRANAGH

The last time this many rich people found themselves on a train together was in a Wes Anderson carnival. In this Agatha Christie murder-mystery adaptation starring Judi Dench, Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, among others, as Rich People Of EuropeTM on a lavish cross-Continental trip, things get a little more dramatic, largely due to the one and only Hercule Poirot setting “into motion a chain of events to produce the desirous effect”. In this case, a confession.

WORDS: NIDHI GUPTA. IMAGE: THE OTHER RICHARD (AHIR)

BIG SCREEN BEASTS

GAMES

CARTRIDGE CLASSICS

This month’s batch of games will take you back a decade or two

POKÉMON ULTRA SUN / ULTRA MOON

GAME FREAK

Over 400 Pokémon, old and new, will appear in this diptych of games from everyone’s beloved childhood fictional universe. There’s also cool new Z-Moves and a trip back to Alola to get psyched about. Nintendo 3DS

FESTIVALS

OUT IN THE OPEN

Not all long weekends must be debauched. Here are three stimulating cultural festivals to try out

NOVEMBER 10-19 PANJIM, GOA

The creators of “The Story Of” series call it an “informal, interdisciplinary learning project”, but as their first festival The Story Of Light exhibited in 2015, it’s a showcase not limited to the intellectual types.

Space, like Light, has asked scientists, philosophers, artists, film-makers to put forth their interpretations.

This means experiencing the life and death of a star in a larger-than-life spectacle; delving into stories of crossborder migration; body movement workshops; and a lot of talks, films, art and photography, all across Panjim. The point of the whole thing is to “ignite curiosity”, so maybe don’t turn up looking like Kylo Ren. 78 —

NOVEMBER 2017

DHARAMSHALA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

NOVEMBER 2-5 McLEODGANJ, HIMACHAL PRADESH

Sure, cinema doesn’t have to provide an escape, but there’s nothing wrong with retreating to the hills to experience cinema differently. At DIFF 2017, you’ll find a stellar line-up that includes independent and alternative films from South Asia: We recommend Nepal’s Oscar entry White Sun, Devashish Makhija’s Ajji, Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Mukti Bhavan, Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Angamaly Diaries and Rahul Jain’s Machines. And pay no heed to “curated” lists like this one – just watch everything till your eyes are about to pop.

WONDERFLIP

NOVEMBER 9-12 KHEMPUR, RAJASTHAN

An arts and music festival with two stages, a lineup including international and Indian underground electronica spinners, art installations by Gaurav Gupta and Klove Design Studio, a display of “death-defying” bike stunts, fire-eating dancers – all in a haveli in an obscure corner of Rajasthan.

Yes, it sounds all too familiar, but the price tag on this glamping experience, if you can afford it, promises bragging rights.

CALL OF DUTY: WWII

SLEDGEHAMMER GAMES

The world’s favourite first-person shooter game is back, and has returned to its roots.

Carentan’s once again on the map; zombie soldiers are part of the cast; and it all looks a bit like you’re inside Dunkirk. Marching through the D-Day Landings will have you shook. Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

NEED FOR SPEED PAYBACK

GHOST GAMES

This time, the iconic franchise has turned its focus on action driving: ie, three playable characters working together to pull off stunts you’ve only watched in the Fast And Furious movies. PS4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

WORDS: NIDHI GUPTA

↑ THE STORY OF: SPACE

ALBUMS

IN-EAR ENTERTAINERS Let your mood decide what you listen to this month

LOW IN HIGH SCHOOL

MORRISSEY

#Mood: Just good old grumbling about the world made to sound pleasant by The Smiths ex in his sophomore solo album.

WHO BUILT THE MOON?

HIGH FLYING BIRDS

#Mood: To see what a “beige drip” selling “psychedelic music” sounds like. #MyBrotherLiam

SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT

BILLY RAY CYRUS

#Mood: Sunday afternoon drive with country tunes, featuring Miley Cyrus, aka the living embodiment of achy breaky hearts in 2017.

TV

ON THE TUBE

Veg out on the couch with these web series

BEACH HOUSE 3

TY DOLLA $IGN

#Mood: A mellow fusion of R&B and boisterous rap about love and other drugs from the West Coast polymath.

REPUTATION

TAYLOR SWIFT

#Mood: A primer on the art of bitchcraft, and the latest update on the biggest celeb feud of the decade.

← THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (S2) A young lawyer who moonlights as a highend escort – this is the premise of the anthology series adapted from a 2009 Steven Soderbergh film. It’s all about transactional relationships done the old-school (read: analogue) way. November 5 on Amazon Prime Video

↓ FUTURE MAN What does good science fiction look like in 2017, when robots live on our bedside tables and we’ve got intimate relationships going with the voices in our phones? It takes the shape of Star Trek parodies, crazy dystopic anthologies – and also this comedy about time-travelling. Josh Futturman, a janitor whose “second career” is gaming, gets recruited to travel into the future to help save mankind from (obviously) extinction. How can this be funny? At the helm is Seth Rogen, who once proved North Korea can be funny.

November 14 on Hulu Another Margaret Atwood novel adaptation, another white, innocent-looking woman in an odd hat. This is a serious (and true) story from the Victorian era about a 16-year-old girl convicted for the murder of her master and mistress. You’re not going to read the book anyway; but this is certainly worth your time if you like intelligent drama. November 3 on Netflix 80 —

NOVEMBER 2017

WORDS: NIDHI GUPTA

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86 —

NOVEMBER 2017

SARTORIAL STYLE Pezalli Bespoke showcases some of the masterpieces from their AutumnWinter 2017 collection, which are crafted from luxurious Italian fabrics

by Mario Valentino and custom-styled for every personality

Just like a doctor’s informed advice, Anupama Sachdeva offers perfect style recommendations after a detailed analysis of your body shape, skin tone, facial features and personality.

You will learn how to strategically wear lines, prints, textures and fabrics.

You will even discover whether your natural complexion falls under Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, or between seasons! Once their style consultant has your colour chart and style personality specifications, the master tailors at Pezalli Bespoke will work with you to create masterpieces that will complement your silhouette with absolute precision.

MR CREATIVE

Style Personality: Sporting a peppery Garibaldi and a summer-cool skin tone, this creative soul likes to mix up fabrics, textures and colours.

Art Fair Ready: The glen checked suit with a wine shirt, a paisley printed tie and multi-hued socks brings out his creative side.

Off to Pitti Uomo: The safari-style suit jacket and cream turn-up trousers with standout accessories like a red polkadot bow-tie, black hat and green socks is reminiscent of the Pitti Uomo style.

Fabric Partner: Mario Valentino

P

ersonal styling is not just about following trends. It is about matching new creative looks to the inherent style within every person. Everyone has an intrinsic style personality. These personalities are broadly grouped into Classic, Creative, Dramatic or Natural. Ensembles are usually selected by a person to resonate with their style personality, so that they can relate to it. Pezalli Bespoke brings together impeccable tailoring and styling to help you make the best possible sartorial choices that meet your personality. Helmed by Anupama Sachdeva — a certified image consultant from Style Coach, London and a certified pattern drafter from Savile Row Academy, London — this brand is a neverseen-before amalgamation of Anupama’s unique styling methodology and the expertise of her tailoring team. Pezalli Bespoke’s master tailors, who are guided

by Italian designers and couturiers, take the art of tailoring to the next level of excellence.

Each suit is the result of unique handmade techniques that require 220 steps, over 35 hours of workmanship and more than 7,000 meticulously hidden stitches. Pezalli Bespoke also uses Italian designs and the finest, most luxurious fabrics sourced from the world’s best suppliers. This season, Pezalli Bespoke collaborated with Italian luxury fabric makers Mario Valentino.

MARIO VALENTINO Founded in 1952, Mario Valentino specializes in fashion fabrics, apparels, and leather products. Their new fabric collection dons super 160’s, luxury jacketing, pure cashmeres, newly designed 17.5 micron micro wool, cottons and tweeds that have created the hottest looks for the season.

Model: Nitin Mehta PHOTO CREDIT: ASHISH SAHU

WHERE BESPOKE TAILORING MEETS PERSONAL STYLING

MR CLASSIC

Style Personality: Corporate on the outside and creative from within, he has a cool wintry skin tone, salt ‘n’ pepper hair and carries classic styles effortlessly.

Seminar Suave: The cobalt blue jacket paired with a white shirt and a blue and green university necktie, along with checked pants brings out his creative side but retains the classic look.

Strike-a-deal Style: A livid grey, three-piece suit with a checked shirt and a grey tartan tie, says he means business.

Fabric Partner: Mario Valentino

Model: Jacob Singh

Model: Arjun Zander

MR NATURAL

Style Personality: A naturalist, yet sometimes dramatic, he has a spring-warm skin tone and jet black hair. He loves his casuals, but also experiments with bold colours.

Red Carpet Demeanour: A camel-brown coat over a chalk stripe suit, a bright crimson tie on a crisp white shirt with big roll, button-down collars lets him channel the vibe of a 40s mob boss.

Weekend Mood: A beige turtleneck and checked green and burgundy bomber jacket with orange leather highlights, made of a light checkered tweed, along with burgundy pants spruces up his effortless personality.

Fabric Partner: Mario Valentino

Service available through appointments at : New Delhi | Mumbai | Bengaluru | Pune | Chennai | Hyderabad | Kolkata | Chandigarh To book an appointment, write to us at info@pezalli.com or call on +91-905499000

STRING THEORY MUSIC

Get to know London-based sarod virtuoso Soumik Datta, who’s keeping classical music relevant in an age of ever-diminishing attention spans

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also all about pushing the boundaries.

Everything he does is shot through with the conviction that “art must reflect the world around us.” That’s how the sarod came to be a part of a rock band. Before he goes into a year of hyperactivity, Datta tells GQ about his quest for a “newer sound”.

What was it like to be a teenage boy living in London and playing the sarod?

I think it created two parts of my brain. I’d be out watching bands, figuring out life; and there was the other part, of discipline, dedication, riyaaz. But I realised that classical music wasn’t reaching my generation.

People my age just weren’t coming to concerts. So, as an experiment, I started a band, Circle of Sound, with my Austrian friend Bernhard Schimpelsberger. It had everything: drums and sarod, alaaps and DnB, jods and hip-hop.

Did it help to make that connect?

Yeah, people told me they were jogging to our music on their headphones [laughs]. We did a concert in Malaysia, and a majority of that audience was college kids. I guess it worked because the intention behind the project wasn’t classical. Like Ustad Zakir Hussain – he has classical music

built into his veins, but he isn’t limited by it.

You’ve also collaborated extensively with Talvin Singh.

I met Talvin while I was still at university. I must’ve been skipping class or something, and because he’d seen me play a couple days before, he just came up to me and started talking. He asked if I wanted to go on tour, and I could only say, “I’ve got homework” [laughs]. But finally, I did, and we’ve become great friends.

And yet you once turned down an invitation to tour with Jay-Z and Beyoncé?

[Laughs] Yeah, I felt I wasn’t ready.

Jay-Z and crew were in London to play at the Royal Albert Hall in 2012. Talvin, performing with him, asked if I wanted to be part of the gig. I turned up the next day at this massive warehouse for rehearsals, and turns out Beyoncé’s there too. I ended up playing on a couple hip-hop tracks, and Jay-Z asked Talvin if I’d be interested in joining them on tour.

But I knew the pitfalls of celebrity and that lifestyle, and I just wasn’t ready.

You can’t be a long-distance runner if you climb too fast.

INTERVIEW: NIDHI GUPTA

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hat does it mean to have music in your blood?” asks Soumik Datta.

“I mean, I get muscle memory, but can it be in our DNA?” For the London-based sarod virtuoso, roots are of paramount importance.

But he’s also convinced that it’s just as crucial to be able to build bridges between the traditional and contemporary.

That means re-imagining the opera for a new generation in The Last Rainmaker, an ambitious project with the Royal Opera House in London that involves beatboxers and Korean singers; collaborating with folk percussion artist Cormac Byrne to re-score Satyajit Ray’s 1969 cult classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne as a mix of contemporary orchestra and Indian classical and folk sounds, performing it around the world and producing it as an album with the Globe Theatre; and going on road trips to seek out India’s forgotten music traditions in the second season of his DIY webseries Tuning 2 You. Datta picked up the sarod at age 12 and spent a month every winter in Kolkata, under the tutelage of maestro Buddhadev Das Gupta. Today, he’s at the forefront of London’s more classical-minded music set, but he’s

EDITED BY VIJENDRA BHARDWAJ & SHIVANGI LOLAYEKAR

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

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AMP UP YOUR STYLE GAME

Gone are the days when you could show up in an OTT sherwani and get away with it. Now, what you wear (regal Indianwear) and how you wear it (with elegant accessories) is a reflection of your personality – on-ground and across Instagram. We’ve pulled out the best festive menswear to ensure you always turn up perfectly packaged for every wedding, sangeet and cocktail you have on your calendar this season.

SHERWANI BY SABYASACHI, PRICE ON REQUEST. POCKET SQUARE BY DHRUV VAISH, `2,000. RINGS BY GUCCI, PRICE ON REQUEST. CUFF

BY BE BAJRANG, `6,000. WATCH BY OMEGA, `9,98,000

NOVEMBER 2017

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SHINE ON

Don’t for a minute think that a wedding trousseau is only for the bride. What you wear on your big day can actually work as timeless separates that you can repurpose – from boss slip-on shoes to eye-catching accessories.

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1. SHOES BY SABYASACHI, `27,500 2. SHOE HORN BY SHAZÉ, `10,000 3. SCARF BY ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA, `15,300 4. KALGI BY SABYASACHI, `3,95,000 5. CUMMERBUND BY RAYMOND, `2,400 6. INSTAX MINI 70 CAMERA BY MICHAEL KORS, `12,000 7. POCKET SQUARE BY HUGO BOSS, `7,000 8. POCKET SQUARE BY HUGO BOSS, `6,000 9. TIE BAR BY BROOKS BROTHERS, `7,000 10. CUFFLINKS BY RAYMOND, `2,000

PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY

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LET IT SHINE

A guy who always shows up at a wedding wearing black tie clearly doesn’t own a luxe paisley blazer like this. It’s a statement in itself – so long as it’s cut sharp and snug. And, remember to keep the rest of it neutral. You don’t want to upstage the groom.

BLAZER BY PAUL SMITH, `72,500. TURTLENECK BY SELECTED HOMME, `3,300. TROUSERS BY NIVEDITA SABOO, `17,500. POCKET SQUARE BY THE BRO CODE, `1,000. WATCH BY OMEGA, `7,34,800.

BRACELET BY BE BAJRANG, `2,500

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

GUIDE

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THE LONGEST YARD

Weddings are a great time to experiment with silhouettes.

This season, opt for an asymmetric evening jacket that not only makes you look taller but also helps you stand out in a sea of guys who show up in a classic cut.

JACKET, `68,500, TROUSERS, `17,500, SHIRT, `12,500; ALL BY NIVEDITA SABOO. TIE BY DOLCE & GABBANA, `10,600. WATCH BY TISSOT, `42,400.

LOAFERS BY JIMMY CHOO, `47,400

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

GUIDE

THE

STYLE TIP

GUIDE

Play up a classic black or navy suit with a printed tie

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1. BROOKS BROTHERS, `4,400 2. BURBERRY, `14,000 3. ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA, `15,700 4. GUCCI, `13,500 5. THOMAS PINK, `8,000

ALL TIED UP

You might not reach for a tie that often any more, but that doesn’t mean owning just one or two is a good idea. Here, we pulled out the best styles – from floral to retro patterns – that will energise your wardrobe.

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PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. FASHION COORDINATOR: SHAEROY CHINOY

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A REGAL RHAPSODY

They’ve reigned the runways, made onlookers gush in envy, now more than ever—designer duo Shyamal & Bhumika present their ethnic menswear collection all set to deck the gents of style in regal splendor

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hey marry tradition with modernity, mix eclectic with artisanal crafts and showcase a fascinating play of colours and timeless silhouettes. The result? A Shyamal & Bhumika masterpiece, that adorns men to qualify them as the best dressed ones in the room. The couturiers are known for seeking inspiration from rich Indian heritage and history from ancient culture, using it in their techniques and creating some of the most sought-after collections that appeal to modern style sensibilities. They do it again with ‘The Princess Soiree’. Unravelling the grandeur of ancestral roots, eclectic architecture and picturesque panorama of lush gardens, this collection is an ode to the forgotten lifestyle lived in elegance and regality, and is made f the h modern-day gentleman who for ates fine design. appreciates T ection features European intricacies, The collection V n inflection and Baroque decorations Victorian mated with Indian heritage in a amalgamated colour story of classic blacks with ornate d hand-embroidery. Look closely and gold u will appreciate their craftsmanship you d dedication to detail with and aditional zardozi and aari work. traditional rom foliage made in zari, enhanced From with dabka, satin threads and silk to elegant black jackets with ornately embroidered cuffs densely packed with floral embellishments made in gold zari. From unique asymmetrical uts to regal black matka silk cuts ckets—Shyamal & Bhumika leave no jackets—Shyamal s one unturned with their finely stone d signed ensembles. They made a designed s king statement and stole the striking tlight with a first-time appearance at spotlight h glorious FDCI India Couture Week, the 17. Their bespoke ensembles are 2017. ilable at their Flagship stores in available umbai and Ahmedabad.

Mumbai For more information, visit shyamalbhumika.com

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GUIDE

You’ve probably noticed the bundi making the rounds everywhere. Only, don’t wear it the usual way (with a shirt and trousers). Instead, go traditional, and pair it with a crisp kurta and dhoti.

BUNDI, `30,000, KURTA & DHOTI SET, `28,000; BOTH

BY TARUN TAHILIANI. POCKET SQUARE BY SS HOMME, `3,000. WATCH BY OMEGA, `6,93,000

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

ROCK THE BAND

#TarunKhiwal

THE REGIMENT #AutumnWinter17

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TOP UP THAT TUX

Save the pomp for the groom and look like the freshest guy in the room with a jacquard floral jacket, crisp bow tie and pocket square. You’ll receive a lot of compliments. Trust us.

TUXEDO, `1,20,000, BOW TIE, `15,000; BOTH BY CANALI. SHIRT

BY HERRINGBONE & SUI, `6,500.

CUFFLINKS BY RAYMOND, `2,000.

WATCH BY TISSOT, `42,400

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

GUIDE

CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF LEGACY & LUXURY Delhi/NCR - South Ex | Karol Bagh | Mall Of India, Noida | Grand Mall, Gurgaon Ludhiana | Jalandhar | Chandigarh

THE STYLE TIP

Stick to common colours in uncommon textures

GUIDE

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1. GUCCI, PRICE ON REQUEST 2. THOMAS PINK, `7,000 3. RAYMOND, `3,000 4. BROOKS BROTHERS, `5,200 5. CANALI, `12,000 6. THE BRO CODE, `2,000 7. HACKETT LONDON, `4,500

BOW DOWN

Look closely at these bow ties and you’ll notice that most of them are crafted in fine fabrics like velvet and satin. That’s what’ll separate your bow from the next guy’s and give your suit that extra polish.

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PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. FASHION COORDINATOR: SHAEROY CHINOY

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GUIDE

Break out that velvet embroidered bandhgala.

Then throw a black cashmere turtleneck and slimfit jeans into the mix.

This is your one free pass to wear that one aggressive piece you own – and then really own it.

BANDHGALA, `1,75,000, BREECHES, `14,000; BOTH

BY ROHIT BAL

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PHOTO: ARSH SAYED. STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES. HAIR & MAKE-UP: POONAM SURVE/FAT MU. FASHION ASSISTANT: SHAEROY CHINOY. MODEL: GABRIEL BRAGHIN LOPES/TOABH

GO ALL IN

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DRINK UP, MATE

GUIDE 1

When you have nights of binge drinking and dancing ahead of you, there are no rules, save one: Hydration is key. So, use an undereye serum and a super moisture balm before you call it a night.

Then, roll out of bed and spritz on some dry shampoo and 22k gold beard oil. You’ll feel brand new.

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PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI

1. MOIRÉ BY BOMBAY PERFUMERY, `4,100 FOR 100ML 2. UNDER EYE SERUM BY FOREST ESSENTIALS, `2,200 FOR 20ML 3. TEA TREE 3-IN-1 WASH, SCRUB, MASK BY THE BODY SHOP, `1,295 FOR 125ML 4. MACH 3 TURBO RAZOR BY GILLETTE, `220 5. GOLD EDITION 22K BEARD OIL

BY BEARDO, `2,500 FOR 30ML 6. BACK TO LIFE DRY SHAMPOO

BY B BLUNT, `550 FOR 125ML 7. ROCKSTAR AFTER SHAVE BY ALL GOOD SCENTS, `299 FOR 100ML 8. SUPER MOISTURE BALM BY CLARINS, `2,579 FOR 50ML

THE

GUIDE

HERMÈS, `2,15,515

APPLE WATCH HERMÈS, `80,850

STYLE TIP

The Apple Watch Hermès blends the tech giant’s smartwatch face and kickass capabilities with the iconic French brand’s artisanal sensibility.

And you can change the strap to go with your outfit. Win-win

WRISTY BUSINESS

We’ve always championed wardrobe staples – like dinner jackets and tank watches – that strike a perfect balance. They’re classics, sure. But they’re also in sync with your modern get-up.

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PHOTO: SEBASTIAN MADER. SET DESIGN, PROP & STILL-LIFE STYLIST: JULIET JERNIGAN/CLM

CARTIER, `5,72,100

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LET IT SLIDE

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Sumptuous leather shoes to wear with your sherwani or suit

GUIDE

SALVATORE FERRAGAMO, `1,60,000

BOTTEGA VENETA, `53,000

LOUIS VUITTON, `77,100

STYLE TIP

Pair wingtips with a dark bandhgala

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NOVEMBER 2017

PHOTO: SEBASTIAN MADER. SET DESIGN, PROP & STILL-LIFE STYLIST: JULIET JERNIGAN/CLM

TOM FORD, `60,000

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ALL HAIL THE

KING For Alessandro Michele, the creative force behind Gucci’s resurgence, it’s all about the beauty – and giving the people what they want WRITTEN BY RICHARD CLUNE

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NOVEMBER 2017

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ou are not here.” It’s an inauspicious start to our Milanese date with Gucci’s new maestro, Alessandro Michele. “Sir, I can state again that you are not here.”

And so he does, the burly, black-clad bouncer whose angular physicality suggests Eastern European over Italian, firmly reiterating the error made, that this is not our point of entry. Not today.

It seems the heavy tint and lithe, low-slung lines of the Audi that’s ferried us to Gucci’s so-called Hub, on the industrial outskirts of the city, is to blame, NOVEMBER 2017

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passing an initial checkpoint, the first means of division that we were waved through, and arriving at the velvet rope apparently not meant for us.

Further along we shuffle, to attach to other members of the general public and a moving queue that arrives at a lengthy courtyard informing but a minor piece of Gucci’s recently opened HQ – a dramatic 35,000sqm plot of functional, squared buildings of glass and brick and open space on a site that once housed Caproni Aeronautics.

Our stuttering debut is made all the more amusing on eagerly waving back to a familiar face across the growing crowd, a child-like display of excited expressiveness and flapping... Only to realise his gesturing is actually for the attractive blonde standing directly behind. We smile back.

No cigarettes allowed. Not here, beyond the rope, within the sanctum. Filthy habit, anyway. And so, instead, we take in Alexa Chung – looking surprised, as she does, not a striped Michael Kors top in sight.

The overachieving Brit “It” stares down the multiple phone cameras of kids who’ll have likely spoken about themselves, without hesitation or remorse, in the third person at some point during the previous 24 hours. Today, they’ll immediately post their captures to the millions of followers they apparently have.

Hari Nef joins “It” as A$AP Rocky uses the glare coming from his wonderful smile, stacked as it is with truly luminous teeth, to part the crowd – and contend with hasty captures from the kids with the phones, each craving the further promotion of a supposedly attractive existence.

Elsewhere, actress Salma Hayek’s cleavage wrestles against the confines of a tight, low-cut pink dress as Bobby Gillespie, great man and recent feature of Gucci and GQ’s video series “The Performers”, squints into the soft February sun.

Against a red brick wall, Tom Hiddleston stands tall and alone – a smirk smudged across his private schoolboy face; a smirk that suggests he’s aware that he’s tall and alone. A smirk that also had him chosen by Michele to be the face of Gucci’s Cruise 2017 tailoring campaign.

The Night Manager lead, who blew every chance of ever being Bond by temporarily falling victim to Taylor Swift, 120 —

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wears well the three-piece striped navy suit he’s opted for (or had laid out for him on the firm bed of a large, darkened suite within a centrally located designer hotel).

The Englishman’s a stark, sophisticated contrast to whatever it is Jared Leto’s come as – bearded and buried under a tiger-emblazoned hoodie that stretches from beneath a gothic print denim jacket, coupled with gym shorts over knitted tights, ankle-high kicks and a headband.

It could be that he’s taken cues from a Bostonian roofer working through the cold creases that fold into the latter part of spring. Could be.

Leto’s a firm friend of Michele – their bromance blossoming since late 2015 after the actor and musician was personally asked by the then-newly installed creative director to use his ageless face to flog fragrance for the house. They quickly hit red carpets à deux, and then Leto took the Roman designer to the Academy Awards in 2016, both sporting Gucci loafers and an excitement reminiscent of two 17-year-olds heading for a high school formal.

Leto’s bold and unique – that much can’t be challenged. He’s engaged and intelligent (if that Thirty Seconds To Mars doco is used as a test) and while a curious fit for Gucci, he further cements where Michele wants to play.

“Yves, Karl, Gianni, Giorgio, Christian, Coco. It’s rare that a new name can be added to such an illustrious list,” Leto wrote for Time of his friend, who secured a spot on the magazine’s 2017 global list of “The 100 Most Influential People”. “But Lallo, as he is known to his closest friends, has more than earned his place. I have witnessed firsthand the amount of thought, care and passion he puts into everything he creates. It’s inspiring to behold. People don’t just like Gucci. They desire it...”

The actor’s not quite so verbose today – opting for a quick step from tinted car to frow, a simple “I’m excited to see the show” his response to being hastily asked about the afternoon Italian adventure.

Leto’s right, of course, about the desire, about what Michele’s been able to achieve since being thrown the

keys to the castle in 2015.

Because people are again hungry for their Gucci fix. In fact, for many among the new legion of fans, or even the returned devotees, it’s more than a desire, it’s again a need.

On landing in Milan a day earlier, Gucci shopping bags dominated those being paraded on and around Via Monte Napoleone by grungy, angular fashion kids. It was a simple, observational understanding of the incredible injection of allure Michele’s brought to the storied house since replacing Frida Giannini. It was about the element of cool that’s been again captured by the facing “double G”.

Still, expectation is a devious mistress – as enchanting and desirable, as she can be deceptive and destructive.

And as much as desire and devotion walks among those gathered at Gucci Hub ahead of today’s Autumn/ Winter proceedings, questions are entwined within the anticipation – a thought about whether the man who had, since 2002, worked in the background, could again create a collection that not only inspires, but which drives a narrative for others to tailgate on the seasonal roads ahead?

We head inside the cavernous, blackened space to a front row that delivers as only the front row does.

Shuffle shuffle. “Sorry I think that’s me? No, oh, OK.” Shuffle shuffle.

“Great to see you.” Mwah. “I can’t believe she’s wearing slides.”

It also provides a strong position from which to witness other celebrity arrivals – the ethereal Florence Welch floating as she does in floor-length print, Anna Wintour wearing a two-piece that’s not black, the man who picked up Kate Moss by commenting that she smelled like wee, Jefferson Hack and Bobby Gillespie, again, still squinting despite the darkness. It would appear he’s just squinty.

We stare at the heavy curtain that shields the catwalk and what’s to come – excited, really, to collect firsthand such an experience and engage with a performance that, according to show notes, is built on foundations of an “Alchemist’s Garden”, which is an “anti-modern laboratory”.

The notes also present the Egyptian symbol Ouroboros – that of a snake eating its own tail. It’s perhaps suggestive of the cyclical nature of fashion; that all that is old is again new.

Though is such a symbol not also about the process of self-

renewal, of bettering where things have come from and walking towards an improved future?

We’re about to find out.

Lights up and models stomp along a raised, enclosed plexiglass catwalk – think a human take on the pending Hyperloop. Those walking are far removed from classical etchings of beauty, and instead are angular and mulleted, as unique and striking as the pieces in which they pose, a cast of characters as much as walkers. It’s quickly obvious that Michele has picked up and gently progressed on where things had been left – whimsy and vintage attached to what’s presented, bold pops of colour, lavish touches of embroidery, text-driven logo T-shirts (“Common Sense Is Not That Common”) as scrawled by the street artist Coco Capitán.

It’s wild and elaborate and fun – flowing Seventies suiting in tan meets Eighties punk in ripped denim and a continued affinity for AC/DC T-shirts as high fashion.

The accessories, meanwhile, are a heady slate of designs that run from rock ’n’ roll bull rings to Royal Tenenbaumsesque headbands to an incredible wealth of bags – a line that will alone power the buying passion of fanboys for another season.

The 119 looks, each styled by Michele, are a co-ed combination (territory in which he’s familiar) allowing insight to the man’s full heart – the two sides beating as one – as well as building on his clear desire for inclusivity and blurred gender lines.

The man of the moment appears, dressed in a yellow T-shirt, baseball cap, his hair cropped shorter than before at shoulder length. He employs a staggered jog about the various points of the catwalk to bow and take in the standing applause of all present.

That sense of anticipation has morphed into appreciation and rousing acceptance. While a humble and quiet man, Michele is very much the wunderkind of reinvention who’s pushed the fabled house of Gucci into a contemporary relevance that, arguably, rests parallel to Tom Ford’s “sexy” renaissance period of the mid-Nineties.

Today, he’s again surpassed expectation and driven beyond surprise and answered all questions. For he is fashion’s current king, and his crown’s been more than retained.

”I HAVE WITNESSED FIRSTHAND THE AMOUNT OF THOUGHT, CARE AND PASSION HE PUTS INTO EVERYTHING...

IT’S INSPIRING.“ — JARED LETO

GROWN IN AUSTRALIA, MADE IN INDIA

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• The stars were out in full force to witness Michele’s latest work, each with their distinct take on the Gucci look: (From left) Florence Welch; A$AP Rocky; Hari Neff; Jared Leto; Alexa Chung; Tom Hiddleston

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am not feeling like a special person... It’s not about me.” While Michele is the chief architect of change, his is not a story of ownership or a tale of one man’s singular vision pushing conformity. He allows for the individual to add the personal to his designs – to further interpret and privately engage. As the loftier ends of fashion look to graft maintained aspiration into a greater sense of accessibility – stepping down as dictators with regards to the “how” and “why” – Michele’s approach is very much nuzzled into the now. It’s about freedom within luxury. It’s about the luxury of freedom.

“I think that fashion, for a long time, has been in a prison,” Michele’s previously said. “I think that without freedom, with rules, it’s impossible to create a new story... People want you to suggest the idea that you can really put together and create a personal point of view. You have to belong to a brand that has a story, because obviously a brand needs an aesthetic. But you need also to suggest the idea of freedom. Because when you go in the street, people are free to do what they want.

There are no rules.”

Ultimately, it’s about artistry stitched to singularity, a chance to pen a personal sartorial narrative and break from what’s previously been decreed.

It’s why, at the A/W ’17 show’s official after-party, the fresco ceilings of what is a historic Milanese high school look down over a crowd that’s interpreted modern Gucci in many different forms.

Hiddleston’s at the bar – a bomber jacket and dad jeans replacing his earlier suit; so too is the latest Michele muse, the artist Petra Collins. A$AP Rocky, meanwhile, is now accessorising with a Polaroid camera and girlfriend, Kendall Jenner.

Elsewhere stand Eighties UK punk types with stalagmitespiked hair, goths and drag queens who’ve dressed as if destined for an after-after steam punk party. In the corner sits a bolo-tied cowboy while young kids wander in wire, 124 —

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Unabomber specs atop Gucci logo T-shirts.

Michele has wandered through several of the adjoined rooms of the party – taking in the crowd and the many strong words of “bravo”, “well done” and “wonderful” that are delivered by those who stand and await his move past.

He smiles – a lot. And he’s every right to. For tonight, for all that he’s managed to achieve in just 25 months at the helm.

By 2014, Gucci had become staid. It was predictable, unexciting. There was growing concern about what the fabled Italian label was to become – about what its future would look like were it to simply plod along the pocked path it had been walking. Sales were on a dramatic decline.

Change was needed and three years ago, scouts tapped all-comers about the top design job – securing a shortlist of potential candidates, a grouping of wellknown types who’d delivered elsewhere and would, at the least, bring some fanfare to the Florentine house founded by Guccio Gucci in 1921.

Michele’s name wasn’t on any of those lists. He was a “backroom boy” – having quietly ascended, over 12 years at Gucci, to head of accessories design (cue that eye for some of the pieces now most coveted).

Still, his passion and talents hadn’t gone unnoticed and he came to the attention of then-newly appointed CEO Marco Bizzarri. A meeting was scheduled.

Bizzarri’s since admitted their get-together was more a run-through of some of those he’d been eyeing – though he was quickly entranced by Michele, his desires and historical quirks and honest, passionate understanding of all that’s Gucci. “It was unplanned,” Bizzarri’s said of that meeting with Michele. “Someone said to call him. They said, ‘He’s a good guy.’”

The pair talked for hours – Bizzarri was also engaged by Michele’s interest in antiques, history and what he saw in the Milanese designer’s apartment.

“He was wearing the loafer with the fur, he looked like

Eternity Lifestyles Pvt. Ltd. info@eternitylifestyles.com

”I CHOSE ALESSANDRO WHEN I COULD HAVE CHOSEN THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT DESIGNERS IN THE WORLD.“ —MARCO BIZZARRI the first model exit in that [first] Gucci show. Then I saw the apartment, the attention to detail, the choice of furniture, the passion for this aesthetic – it was there already, I was seeing what he had in mind.”

Michele was named Giannini’s immediate replacement in January 2015.

“I chose Alessandro when I could have chosen the most talked-about designers in the world,” Bizzarri’s said. “And they were happy to come to Gucci because Gucci is Gucci...

I look back and think I was totally crazy [with Alessandro’s appointment]. I put in total danger, at total risk, my career.”

Risk. Without it great artistry surely cannot flourish. And so it’s been with Bizzarri and Michele.

The latter had but five days to send down his first menswear collection in the new job – it was fresh, divisive, ultimately celebrated. It quickly outed what Michele was about and showed what he could do.

And it returned exciting commentary to Gucci. Gender lines were fluid, embellishment was back, so too were florals – 126 —

NOVEMBER 2017

Michele was quickly feted under a swollen set of plaudits.

For the man who first became interested in fashion as a teen – and then studied costume design in Rome – the revolutionary tag is farfetched.

“I don’t feel like that,” he’s claimed. “I just feel like myself.

If the revolution is the beauty, I’m a revolutionary.”

Still, if the revolution’s monetary, then Michele’s influence is Napoleonic.

Since he and Bizzarri took hold, Gucci’s come to own the majority of the Kering group under which it sits. That is, 65 per cent of the group’s luxury-division profits now come via the Italian label, with Gucci’s last quarter profits up an incredible 21 per cent.

Not bad for a recently rudderless outfit. Part of such profit drive is Michele’s embrace of the future – a want to appreciate logos as well as digitisation in the enhancement of the march of the cool.

While that doesn’t extend to an immediate purchase model that’s now attached to other runways – as in Burberry, Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren and others’ “see now, buy now” model – it’s meant encouraging the kids with some hyped-up explosions of colour and the collision of fun and aspiration. It’s also meant a heady level of desirable (read: repostable) memes for the Gucci watch line.

It’s about an understanding of popular culture. It’s about being contemporary while championing what’s gone before. It’s surely about highlighting what is a bright future.

Though, as another text-driven piece from the A/W ’17 current collection espouses: “What are we going to do with all this future?”

Well, according to Michele, the coming days are not about him.

“People don’t want to be soldier-like, everybody wearing the same. There is something of the tribe in fashion, but in the end customers get a bit annoyed if you push a particular bag. I’m a designer but also a customer. I’m not inside a glass case. I go outside, I shop. So I’m trying to make beautiful things for people I love.”

Thanks Alessandro – we love you back.

ROUND TWO Remember all those health resolutions you made on January 1? Yeah, us neither. Here’s how to catch up on 10 months of slacking off, get your traps tuxedo-ready, and get a headstart for 2018

PHOTOGRAPHED BY JIGNESH JHAVERI 128 —

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1

HELLO, WASHBOARD ABS! OK, so you ate a ton of “healthy” (read: sugar-laden) Açai bowls instead.

DAMAGE CONTROL

Nix the dairy, alcohol, carbonated drinks and gluten – it’ll reduce water retention, bloating and alleviate inflammation and heartburn – and make fast friends with leafy greens. Plank more (two minutes each on the front plank and side plank will help stabilise your core and you’ll be a few steps closer to a rock-hard midsection). And, we know, you hate burpees, but they’re just the explosive cardio you need.

#HEADSTART2018 Compound, multi-joint, full-body movements promote more total fat loss and muscle-building than crunches and sit-ups ever will. While those are great to make your mid-section pop quickly, the more sustainable way is with a great core-shaper like the squat jump. Remember to land softly on your feet (bonus: You’ll get great glutes).

2 PARTY SMARTER SO YOU CAN PARTY HARDER Those jaegerbombs are undoing all those deadlifts.

3

DAMAGE CONTROL It’s counter-intuitive, but go straight for the shots. You’re not 21 any more, so you’ll end up doing fewer of them – consuming fewer calories and successfully evading the beer gut. #HEADSTART2018 Sugar is always the culprit, and aspartame isn’t doing you any favours: Steer clear of cocktails, champagne and mimosas and – sorry to be the bearer of bad news – tonic water. Make a habit of drinking scotch neat (it’s the best way), and other liquor with water and a slice of citrus.

You’ll feel less bloated.

BENCH PRESS YOUR BODY WEIGHT Bench wrong and you’ll need shoulder surgery.

DAMAGE CONTROL

WORDS: JIA SINGH

It’s almost impossible to bench your own body weight in four weeks, unless you’re already at least halfway there. Instead, up your push-up game for similar upper body gains: try incline, planche and Archer, which have just as impressive results.

#HEADSTART2018 It’ll take about 16 weeks to really match your body weight, so work with a programme that rotates the bench press with similar movements like the overhead press, incline press and plenty of push-ups.

Have a spotter ready, and increase your weight bracket every week.

1

2

3

4

COUCH TO 21K What kind of person bails on a charity half marathon?

DAMAGE CONTROL

Download a Couch-to-5K app, and get sprinting. In eight weeks, you’ll be able to jog-trot through on final run day. #HEADSTART2018 Join a runners’ group and set a target for your weekly runs.

If you’re trying to make this a regular thing, remember: Recovery is just as important as spending time on the track.

Schedule a massage once a month to promote lymphatic drainage, improve blood circulation and alleviate soreness.

Also, cross-train and incorporate “active recovery” styles like yoga and swimming on non-run days that will enhance your performance.

5

CONQUER THAT #HANDSTAND

Do it for the insta, bro.

DAMAGE CONTROL

The headstand looks intimidating as hell, but paves the foundation for a handstand, and is actually quite simple to get into. Support your neck by resting your entire forearm on the ground and then just go for it. It’ll improve your balance and body alignment and get you comfortable with being upside down. Just have someone nearby to help you get out of it.

#HEADSTART2018 Strengthen your wrists with crab walks, push-ups and prehab stretches, because you’ll need them strong to help you stay upright. If you aren’t comfortable doing a freestanding handstand, start out using a wall for assistance. Transition from having your legs together to apart, and soon you’ll be able to work yourself into a freestanding one.

NOVEMBER 2017

— 129

RANVEER SINGH

He’s the most energetic, indefatigable personality to come out of Bollywood in modern times, his off-screen persona even more compelling than his on-screen one.

But in the midst of completing his most important – and darkest – work to date, Ranveer Singh reveals a mood he hasn’t before: The hours before the court jester hangs up his fool’s hat and retires for the night

PHOTOGRAPHED BY R BURMAN STYLED BY VIJENDRA BHARDWAJ WRITTEN BY MEGHA SHAH

JUMPER BY PAUL & JOE. PANTS BY G-STAR RAW. SCARF BY STELLA MCCARTNEY. SNEAKERS BY ADIDAS

COAT, TROUSERS; BOTH BY ALEXANDER McQUEEN. JUMPER

BY ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA. BOOTS BY JIMMY CHOO. WATCH

BY OMEGA

It’s 1am on a wet, Tuesday night in October, and Ranveer Singh is in a funk. He’s slumped on a single-seater sofa in the living-room-cum-gym of his new 43rd-floor apartment where he lives by himself, wearing joggers, a grey cardigan, Saint Laurent slip-ons and a dark mood. There isn’t much furniture, except for an inanimate TV, primarily used for PlayStation.

The place radiates a feeling of emptiness. Inside his head, thoughts fight for room.

He’s finished shooting for the day, but it isn’t unusual that he is awake. Or that he has chosen to work at this hour, or that his physio is waiting downstairs in the lobby for a routine session. Ranveer Singh suffers from insomnia. He’s awake almost the entire night, catching a couple of hours of sleep on a good day, rising at noon and chain-gulping about 30 cups of double espresso shots with two cubes of ice through the day.

Although it may not seem like it, his altered state of mind, which has rendered him incapable of any kind of chatting or foolery, isn’t rare either – this year, at least.

For most of this time, he’s been shooting for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s next pièce de résistance, Padmavati. And it’s nearly destroyed him.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” he says, oddly still and in a tone much quieter than his usual baritone.

He’s portraying Alauddin Khilji, the powerful

expansionist of the Delhi Sultanate who ruled in the late 1200s. In the film, he’s portrayed as a barbaric psychopath – the trailer, which released only a day before our meeting, shows him ripping animals apart with his hands and devouring the meat raw, dwelling in dark dungeons and crushing the bones of his enemies with a single blow.

While historians have recoiled at this allegedly inaccurate depiction, Bhansali’s Khilji is a menacing villain, and Singh has been attempting to embody him. He even locked himself up in a room for days before the shoot commenced a year ago.

“Once you immerse yourself far enough into a character, it can mess with your mind if you’re not too efficient at compartmentalisation. I haven’t really faced these types of feelings before.”

He rings a bell and orders himself another cup of coffee. His eyes seem small, sunken. His moustache has recently been shaved off, leaving his face looking younger, more exposed.

“SLB’s films are so intense that, typically, he shoots at a stretch of four, six, eight days, and then he breaks for a day, because everybody feels it – not just the performer.

The cinematographer, the still photographer… The entire unit needs to breathe. Because it’s such a relentless process.” He rubs his face hard, as though trying to rid himself of any remnants of the day’s shoot.

“But because of delays, controversies and even attacks on set, there’s no time for a break. I get an off day, twice a month, which is the only day I sleep, for about 16 hours straight.”

He continues, “It’s like you scale one mountain a day and then you have another, bigger mountain to scale the next day, and it’s extremely challenging. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

I ask him if he’s been going for therapy. This subject seems to stress him out. “I don’t feel like I can talk about it.” He exhales, rubbing his face again, distorting it with every touch. “I have to spend a lot of time with my loved ones, which is a unique thing for me – like really, really talk, you know? [To] my mom, my sister, my best friend.

I think that’s a form of therapy I’m undergoing.”

Singh conjures up a woollen blanket from the sofa next to him and wraps himself with it, silent for a bit, watching the darkness outside his French windows. It isn’t cold, but he wraps himself tighter.

He looks at me suddenly and apologises. “I wish we didn’t have to do the interview here like this. It’s like I’m here, but also… not.” It’s tempting, knowing Singh, to wonder, if this is all a bit of play-acting, part of a character he’s assumed today. But his dispiritedness seems to come from some place deeper. Like he’s been living with something difficult for a while.

His vibrant Instagram videos, breathless tweets, exuberant dubsmashes, audacious fashion and even an X-rated roast, although all off-screen, make up a neonbright portion of Singh’s career, and no number of L a contrasting performances – in sleeper hits like Lootera B ji M i – seem to override id and serious biopics like Bajirao Mastani the public impression of him as a man who might, at any moment, pull out a pair of oversized pink sunglasses or start humping the furniture.

SHIRT BY STELLA MCCARTNEY. TROUSERS, SUSPENDERS; BOTH BY ERMANNO SCERVINO. BOW TIE, SHOES; BOTH

BY GUCCI

“ONCE YOU IMMERSE YOURSELF FAR ENOUGH INTO A CHARACTER, IT CAN MESS WITH YOUR MIND. I HAVEN’T REALLY FACED THESE TYPES OF FEELINGS BEFORE”

“I NO LONGER FEEL THE NEED TO HIDE MY INTELLECT. EARLIER, I THOUGHT IT WOULD ALIENATE ME, BUT NOW I DON’T CARE”

The Man Who Came To Dinner, Romeo And Juliet, Othello, monologues from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, musicals.

It was very, very clear what really got me excited. But the challenge was getting into Bollywood. That was always the dream. But an improbable one.

“My mom and Sonam’s [Kapoor] mom are first cousins, but it’s a very big family. They were nine brothers and sisters, so there weren’t close enough connections that I could use to get a foot in the industry.” Singh pauses, as though unwilling to talk about the next part of his life.

“I wish we could have done this interview in a swimming pool,” he muses. “Or near one, if not in one. I used to be a swimmer when I was a kid. I’m a water baby. I’m in my brightest, best, happiest, happy place there.”

Even now, while battling with mind demons and gruelling shoots, in the early hours of the morning he feels compelled to put on a show for me.

And so he tries: What d’yu want to talk about, it’s midnight.

And it’s all about my phys-i-yo, what’s the deal yo, It’s like in the morning I’ve to shoot this song, Ma-an, day’s been long.

The delivery of this impromptu rap in real life is enjoyable – he delivers it with the rhythm and flair of a pro – but it reads horribly on the page. Singh is transcription-resistant.

“I can rap about anything, anytime, because rhymes come very naturally to me. Even when I was a copywriter, I used to be the designated rhyme expert; if you needed a rhyme in a jingle, go see this guy. I can rhyme everything.”

He hopes to be writing some of the rap himself in his upcoming film with Zoya Akhtar, Gully Boy. But that’s all he’ll say about the future. He seems loath to talk about his current project (“I can’t even watch that shit after a take, it scares me”). So I ask him about his past, which is the space he seems most comfortable dwelling in, for tonight.

“I was a fat kid. Let’s call me chubby. Till the third grade, [my classmates] used to poke fun at me, I was a bit timid.

Until I realised that my size meant I could bully all the fuckers. So that’s what I did.” He drains his cup.

“I was really bad. I was really, really mean. I’ve done some despicable things. I tormented them mentally and physically.

There was a touch of sadism to it. It lasted till all the other kids realised that they didn’t need to take my shit.

“So my alpha-male status was challenged, but I was always great with the girls. I went to America for a vacation with my folks, I came back and suddenly I was taller and leaner.

I always had the gift of the gab and soon, even though I was fat in my head, I was dating one girl and then another girl, and then another – and before you know it, I’m dating three girls at the same time, at 14.” He speaks without provocation, jumping from one childhood memory to the next.

“I went to university in America, where suddenly my mind was cracked open. I started taking acting lessons and I had a blast, I was the best in my class. We were doing Shakespeare, period comedies, Waiting For Godot,

e excuses himself at this point, for the third time, to use the toilet (“I need to go like a beast, with all this coffee abusing. I have a porta-potty right outside the door of the set”).

“I’m more comfortable with myself now. There’s less uncertainty,” he continues when he returns, “I have developed very clear likes and dislikes. I’m not confused.

The validation that I received after the release of Bajirao Mastani put me at ease, in a sense. I don’t care if there’s a can’t-miss party happening on Saturday night. I’ll probably stay in and game.” He shrugs.

“I also no longer feel the need to hide my intellect.

Earlier, I thought it would alienate me, but now I don’t care.

However, I genuinely dislike it when things become too serious, I find it very tedious. Except when I’m on set. I’m extremely temperamental and end up barking at anyone in my sight.

“But I’m always professional. I don’t care about this tabloid relationship crap, but when there are false reports about my unprofessionalism, it really ticks me off.

Sometimes it’s news spread by rival agencies, who manage other talent, to try and dissuade a brand from signing me.

It’s cut-throat out there.”

There have also been many reports of his break-up with long-time girlfriend Deepika Padukone, or at least a shift in their status. This seems like another topic that stresses him out. He only says, “I believe that one person can be another’s whole and soul.” And then, “I want to be the best family man possible. I want to raise children, two of them. I think I’ll make a great dad.” He smiles, for the first time tonight.

As I get up to leave, I ask him what he intends to do now.

“I need two to four hours of just being with myself. I’ll be here alone, completely switched off. Not having to entertain anybody for a while.”

JACKET BY STELLA McCARTNEY. JUMPER

BY PAUL & JOE HAIR: DARSHAN YEWALEKAR MAKE-UP: MAHADEV NAIK ASSISTANT STYLIST: TANYA VOHRA FASHION COORDINATOR: RAVNEET CHANNA FASHION ASSISTANT: DESIRÉE FERNANDES PRODUCTION: MEGHA MEHTA, ANOMALY PRODUCTIONS

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Hosted and curated by Suzy Menkes, International Vogue Editor, the conference programme will include keynote speeches, interviews, panel discussions and chats on topics critical to the global luxury and fashion industry.

TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED INCLUDE:

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E D I T E D B Y PA R T H C H A R A N

• The best watch designs of 2017 • Is Fossil’s Q Commuter smart enough for you?

up

WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

SHAPE

Here’s visual proof that the watch industry still has a few aces up its sleeve in 2017, thanks to some bleeding-edge technology, elements you didn’t know existed and just good ol’ freestyle draftsmanship

Bell & Ross BR-X1 RS17

Should an aviation-themed watchmaker venture into F1inspired chronograph territory?

If the results are anything like the new BR-X1, then the answer is a loud, resounding yes. B&R is the undisputed master of square watch design, and the BR-X1 is a fan favourite – it’s bold and undeniably masculine, so it’s a great watch to be given some motorsport-related details. Because with motorsport come exotic materials like carbon fibre, weight-shedding techniques, openwork skeletal movements and, in this case, a swathe of primary colours inspired by an equally busy-looking steering wheel from Renault’s F1 machine.

NOVEMBER 2017

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Hublot

TECHFRAME FERRARI 70 YEARS TOURBILLON

Hublot was so determined to create the ultimate Ferrari tribute watch, it handed the reins to Ferrari design guru Flavio Manzoni. No surprises then that this Techframe is packed with automotive details, starting with a chassislike exoskeleton frame forged from a synthesis of uni-directional carbon and polyether. Much like in a mid-engined Ferrari, the heart of the machine – aka the movement – is visible for all to see, and contains 253 components, including a tourbillon and chronograph. The sub-dials are also designed to resemble a Ferrari’s gauges. At `89.7 lakh (excluding taxes) a pop, it even costs as much as an actual Ferrari.

Rolex

Rolex has managed to update the gold watch for 2017 – to avoid the inevitable risk of looking ostentatious, it gave its Cosmograph Daytona a bold, black ceramic bezel, and introduced a black “elastomer” strap, to accentuate the watch’s sporty vibe. If you’re going to tinker with the aesthetics of a classic, this is the way to do it.

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WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

COSMOGRAPH DAYTONA

A M I T A R O R A

C O M E S

I N

V O G U E !

M U M B A I , H Y D E R A B A D , K O L K A T A , B E N G A L U R U , C H E N N A I , I N D O R E , P U N E , S U R A T, R A I P U R , L U D H I A N A , V A D O D R A

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G R A N D E U R

Panerai

RADIOMIR 8 DAYS GREEN DIAL

Sometimes the simple, timeless symmetry of the Radiomir is the perfect antidote to the busy design of a modern timepiece. Particularly when the dial is bathed in dark green with luminous markers and placed in a brushed titanium case with a classic brown leather strap.

Proof, again, that even the most complex designs in the world pale in the face of untouched classicism.

RM 50-03 TOURBILLON SPLIT SECONDS

This year’s quintessential million-dollar watch, the Richard Mille RM 50-03 Tourbillon Split Seconds, is the lightest split-seconds chronograph in the world. It’s the first watch to be made out of graphene, which is apparently six times lighter than steel and over 200 times stronger. As a result, the RM 50-03 weighs just 43.5g. The strap is also made of forged Kevlar, so it wouldn’t be easy for someone to nick one. You’ll notice its absence pretty quickly.

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2017 GEOPHYSIC TOURBILLON UNIVERSAL TIME The Geophysic is a masterclass in world time watch design. It’s got some fabulous flourishes you could lose an afternoon gaping at, starting with the incredibly intricate blue lacquered guilloche (wavelike) dial any Geophysic fan would be familiar with. What they wouldn’t be familiar with, however, is the bejewelled tourbillon sitting on the bottom right side of the dial: the first world timer to feature a flying tourbillon, without crowding up the entire dial.

WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

Richard Mille

JaegerLeCoultre

S D L R O W

I

Analogue aesthetics meet smartphone compatibility.

Is the Fossil Q Commuter the best of both worlds?

t doesn’t take a psychic to figure out that wearable tech is what the watch industry’s counting on to fill its coffers for the coming decade. Even high-end fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton have thrown their hat into the smartwatch ring. A few brands have made great strides in this department – brands such as Fossil, which has managed to diversify the smartwatch in the short span of its existence.

The modern smartwatch currently suffers from major issues – including dependence on an external charging source, and an arguably sterile pixel-heavy display which tends to alienate a crowd that has preferred, until now, a traditional look. Enter Fossil’s Q Hybrid range, which uses a wholly analogue interface that also offers smartphone connectivity of a less visual and more tactile variety.

And it’s much the same with its latest thirdgen offering: the Q Commuter. The smartwatch is aimed at everyday practicality, and as a result is slimmer and lighter than the first- and second-generation Hybrids. On the connectivity front, it continues to link to your phone, buzzing ever so mildly whenever you get a call or any other notification. It also allows you to control music through its pushers, switch time zones, remotely operate your phone’s camera and chart your daily physical activity.

Of the whole lot of features, it’s the one-click time zone swap that’s the most nifty, though it doesn’t hurt to be able to scroll through your music playlist without reaching for your phone. Like most smartwatches of today, the Q Commuter is limited by BODY: its applicability. But considering that Stainless steel STRAP: it doesn’t need a charging source, Leather you’re getting a bit more from a FUNCTIONS: timepiece than you would with a Sleep tracker; Step tracker; completely analogue, everyday watch Music control; Camera or a pixel-heavy and battery-dependent smartwatch.

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WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

All tracker-related details can be viewed on Fossil’s Android/iOS compatible Fossil Q app

E D I L L O C

O OXLEY

BY FARER

E L B U DO G NEW ENGLAND

BY TIMEX

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0 7 NOVEMBER O R 2017

HERITAGE G 1918 9 8

BY LONGINES O G S

BIG 1917 B G CROWN C O

BY ORIS O S

WW1-97 HERITAGE G

BY BELL & ROSS OSS

DIGITS

Win th e hours numbers ga that le nd ret me with ove PHO ro cred rsized TOG RAP HED

BY M ITCH

PAY

CLUB CAMPUS C C S BY NOMOS NO OS GLASHÜTTE G S Ü

NE

0 7 NOVEMBER O R 2017

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Hublot is the first brand to popularise the use of patinated leather on both the strap and dial

IS THE NEW

BLACK Thanks to these bad boys

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POWER COUPLE HUBLOT CLASSIC FUSION CHRONOGRAPH Hublot meets Berluti; watch meets leather; gentlemen meet the new Classic Fusion Chronograph Berluti Scritto All Black timepiece. After the success of last year’s Classic Fusion Berluti line, the dream team is back with another example of unique craftsmanship.

Limited to 250 pieces, this very wearable 45mm ceramic Classic Fusion Chronograph Berluti All Black again has an embossed leather face, only this time the dial features two counters at 3 and 9 o’clock. Despite a growing reputation as being a bit of a playboy of the pack, Hublot shows that it also does refined luxury well.

While we prefer the less showy ceramic version, the King’s Gold is a shoe-in (sorry) for louder Hublot lovers.

WORDS: WORDS: MIKE PARTH CHRISTENSEN CHARAN

BLACK

WE KNOW YOUR EXPECTATIONS WE ARE HERE. 125 All Suite, 5 Star Hotel & Health Resort

DISCLAIMER: This is an advertisement showcasing the developers intent. All the imagery published are artistic impressions of the proposed project. The developer may make variations and modifications in the plans/designs/dimensions as may be required/deemed necessary or advisable by the developer, without however, substantially altering the intent and the dimensions of the unit. The technical and material specifications mentioned are subject to change and decisions taken by the developer shall be final and binding. The developer may use equivalent brands at their discretion subject to availability.

The project is licensed/ approved by the State Government of Himachal Pradesh and subject to changes as per government regulations prevalent at the time of release.

A ROYAL FIRST AUDEMARS PIGUET ROYAL OAK PERPETUAL CALENDAR Six hundred hours of research to develop a watch case (so Audemars Piguet claims) is no mean feat. But how is that broken down? Well, when it comes to a matte black brushed ceramic case, it’s near impossible to break down. This original and macho take on the legend that is the Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar is a far more complex specimen than it may seem.

Ordinarily, a stainless steel Royal Oak case and bracelet takes no more than six hours to machine, polish, hand-finish and assemble. But for the ceramic bracelet? Try 30 hours. And it’s this kind of technical innovation, and focus, that will continue to drive one of the oldest Swiss watchmakers into the future.

Because not everyone needs smartwatches to stay afloat.

SAYS Black is one of the most versatile colours out there, but these watches work best when paired with a power suit

CIAO, BELLO BULGARI OCTO ULTRANERO

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BLACK GOLD JAEGER-LECOULTRE MASTER COMPRESSOR CHRONOGRAPH One piece that slipped somewhat beneath the SIHH radar this year is Jaeger-LeCoultre’s latest ceramic/rose gold Master Compresser Chronograph. With what looks like a pair of flirtatious red hearts on the crown, this 46mm piece is the sportiest of the Master Compressor Chronographs to date, thanks in part to the increasingly-more-masculine 18k rose gold set against the boldly masculine black ceramic. This timepiece exudes an elegant manliness with the potential to become a classic.

WORDS: MIKE CHRISTENSEN

On the eighth day, God gave us the Octo Ultranero – a sheer force of Biblical proportions. Except, it’s 2017 and Bulgari is the creator. Contrary to the assumption that this eight-sided piece must be named after either a Roman God or Marvel superhero, various attempts to translate it deny any such fact. But don’t let that detract from this rugged beauty.

The case’s black Diamond Like Carbon (DLC) treatment gives the updated watch a new strength and mystery, all very Bulgari in its boldness. And there’s a dexterity to the stainless steel Octo Ultranero befitting the modern-day gent – it’s as much at home in a fast-paced environment as it is sitting, proudly and powerfully, in the Italian sun.

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Sexualities: Sandip Roy Sex: Chastity Fernandes Experience: Uday Benegal NEW Family: Maroosha Muzaffar NEW Culture: Annie Zaidi

L TA K EDITED BY SHIKHA SETHI

S NGLES’

S P E C I A L

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A SINGLE MAN

BY SANDIP ROY

DOES THE ENDGAME ALWAYS HAVE TO BE MARRIAGE?

I L LU S T R AT E D BY S A J I D WA J I D S H A I K H

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SEXUALITIES

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everal years ago, I attended a same-sex wedding in California. Gay weddings were still not commonplace, and this one was even more unusual. My friends were both Indian, one Hindu, one Christian. They got married in a beautiful garden with a three-tiered wedding cake and a sacred fire. But the moment that truly stood out for me was when I watched one of their fathers bless them. He had flown out from India for the ceremony. As they touched his feet, I got a lump in my throat.

We are, after all, a culture built around marriage.

When I went to the US for the first time, worried aunts clucked, “I hope you don’t marry a foreigner. I hope it’s a Bengali.” Over time that changed to, “I hope it’s an Indian.” Eventually it became, “I hope you get married before all our teeth fall out.” A single child, a son or daughter who was not “settled”, was regarded as a parent’s unfinished business.

I’ve often joked that India will warm up to the idea of same-sex marriage before we come to terms with gay rights. It almost feels less alien to us than homosexuality.

At least it’s marriage. As a Gujarati gay friend of mine in Silicon Valley told me wistfully after some romantic debacles, he just wished his parents would find him a nice Gujarati boy from a good family he could settle down with.

He would gladly settle for the gay arranged marriage.

That’s why I was not surprised to see that matrimonial ad in a newspaper by activist Harish Iyer’s mother looking for a suitable, well-placed, animal-loving, vegetarian boy, caste no bar – but Iyer preferred – for her son. Some were outraged at the “Iyer preferred” but why should a gay arranged marriage be free of the biases of its hetero versions?

Being gay had long meant being resigned to being single and ageing alone. Some, unable to come out to their

I’VE OFTEN JOKED THAT INDIA WILL WARM UP TO THE IDEA OF SAMESEX MARRIAGE BEFORE WE COME TO TERMS WITH GAY RIGHTS. IT ALMOST FEELS LESS ALIEN TO US THAN HOMOSEXUALITY. AT LEAST IT’S MARRIAGE 154 —

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families or fearing the prospect of growing old alone, opted for marriages of convenience or marriages to someone who did not know their secret. Some stayed unmarried – the bachelor uncle or spinster aunt slowly receding into the background of the family album.

I’ve known so many cases where it is the gay son who eventually becomes the caretaker of the elderly parent, just because he’s the one who stayed single, he’s the one who never moved out. An activist once told me with a smile that in the end he was the one who inherited his mother’s heirloom recipes. When his brother’s wife needs to recreate some old family dish, she comes to him.

Gay men and women had to, perforce, build their own chosen families. They had to build their own support systems because they could not always count on their blood relations. They knew that at one point their looks would fade, the party invitations would dry up. Even partners might come and go but friends were there to pick up the pieces. In a way, the app-driven social networking culture has disrupted that model. It’s easier than ever to find hook-ups. Making friends that last a lifetime is much harder.

LGBT groups in India get that. If a Humsafar Trust, the oldest LGBT organisation in India, has a youth initiative called Yaarian, it also has a social group for older gays. A new café in Kolkata called Aamra Odbhuth wants to be a place for LGBT people to just hang out, have tea, laugh and gossip.

But it still takes effort to be single in India. To be a man and single sometimes calls for unique challenges. When I tried to get a modular kitchen for my flat in Kolkata, the helpful kitchen designer smiled and said, “Just come back with madam anytime to approve the kitchen design.” When I told him I could approve it myself, he said reassuringly that they could wait a few days for madam. When it dawned on him there was no madam, he seemed genuinely shocked. I never figured out whether it was because a man was approving a kitchen design or because a man who lived alone wanted to design a kitchen.

We might be a long way from same-sex marriage, but I know many gay and lesbian couples who live together and even raise children. My friends Aditya and Michael, who live in Delhi with their twins, told me they have had no issues at all. Indians are pragmatic, and Indians love kids. The first few cooks and nannies might have been a bit puzzled but soon shrugged it off. They actually seemed a little relieved that there was no mistress to contend with in their little household.

Once, to come out as gay meant telling your parents that you were not going to get married. That’s changing around the world as same-sex marriage gains more acceptance. Soon, perhaps even in India, that old, “Mom, Dad, I don’t want to get married” will no longer work as a trusty coming out line. To be gay and single will truly be a choice then and not a compulsion. And my modular kitchen designer might ask if a “mister” is available to approve the design if “madam” is not.

But I suspect he will still balk at the idea of a single man who wants a designer kitchen.

Sandip Roy is the author of Don’t Let Him Know

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THIS IS US

BY CHASTITY FERNANDES

A SELF-PORTRAIT IN WORDS

I

’m a 30-something woman: smart, tall (5’7” without heels), with long legs and dark hair down to my waist. I’m a driven, successful professional. I think long walks on the beach and foreplay are overrated.

I like spending time with my family – but only during festivals and holidays, and when my father drinks his malt.

The rest of the time, I’d rather be watching House Of Cards or scrolling through recipes on Instagram for dishes I’ll never cook but are pretty to look at. I like travelling, but not like a hippie. I don’t want to quit my job and see the world – I want to conquer it. I lean in. I stand out. And, oh yes, in case you’re really old-school, I’m conventeducated, and my complexion is none of your business, and unless your mom 156 —

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is cool, I’m not going to bother with her much.

Do I sound like I’d be right up your alley?

Or do I make you scared? ∆∆∆ I’m also nice, and quite funny. I don’t enjoy gossiping, I hate negativity, I’m not a hypocrite. I love going out and meeting new people, and I don’t have issues with my guy going out with his friends either – men or women. I’m superbly caring when it comes to my friends, I’m there when they need a shoulder to cry on or a wing woman on a night out on the town. I love giving gifts. I order cakes, I organise their birthdays, I remind them when their anniversaries are approaching. I plan trips, I handle the details, I return books.

I coo at their babies, I lend them my clothes, I help them move in and out of apartments. I’m affectionate, and demonstrative, and I send people emojis on WhatsApp. I hold hands with men while crossing the street, I expect doors to be opened for me and I’m happy to sometimes pay for dinner. Sometimes I even like spooning and cuddling.

Do I sound less threatening now?

Does this make you want to fuck me a little?

∆∆∆ How about this: I’m insatiable. I love giving – and getting – head. In fact, they’re equally exciting to me. I like morning sessions, and quickies, and I like doing it doggy-style and against a wall. I like when you brush my ass in public as if it were a mistake, but it’s really very deliberate. I like when you press your chest against my breasts. I like when you make me come, I like when you watch me make myself come. I like when you sext me. I like when you watch porn with me. I like when you watch porn without me and tell me about it later. I like watching porn. I like when you use your tongue. I like when you do it rough. I like when we do it outdoors or on the kitchen counter or in fancy hotel rooms. I like screaming, pulling your hair when your tongue is in me, biting on your shoulders to steady myself as you pound inside me. I like when you flip me over.

I like how we look in the mirror. I like when you buy me lingerie. I like when we shower together. I like when you watch me shower. I like being on top.

Now, admit it: Didn’t this last paragraph make you want me more than anything else I said?

But it’s all true, and it’s all one person.

I’m single, boys, and I want a guy who wants all of me, not just the wild-in-bed part. So stop looking at single girls as if they’re all out looking for suckers who will buy them chocolates and handbags and eventually a ring. Single desi girls are all these amazing things – sexy and sweet, sugar and spice, strong and sensitive. We’re not one-dimensional.

So, don’t be scared. Stop thinking that we’re dying for commitments or children. We’re not. We want what you want – amazing booty with a personality that’s pleasant and funny and a brain that works. We can be the woman you can’t wait to get home to fuck and also watch Netflix in bed with. The new single Indian woman is all that and more. Rewire your brain, detach that umbilical cord and welcome yourself to 2017.

I’ll wait.

Chastity Fernandes often turns up to work after lunch hour, sporting bed head

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BECOMING SINGLE

BY UDAY BENEGAL

WHEN CHANGE COMES, IT’S RUTHLESS

I

wasn’t always single. Most of my adult years have been spent in matrimonial bond, an overwhelming number of them in a happy relationship. Epiphanies can be inconvenient. Sometimes they can come at you in the form of a riptide – stealthily, subversively, unstoppable. The only way to survive a riptide, it’s said, is to not fight it and swim parallel to the shore until you’re past the grasp of the undercurrent. At first, I resisted and was nearly taken down. By the time I realised that the unfathomable restlessness I’d been feeling for some time was a sign of the end of my marriage, it was too late. Devastated at the thought of having to hurt the most important person in my life, I tried to reverse my feelings.

But change is ruthless and you don’t stand a chance when

it comes. So, I gave in and swam parallel. But by the time I was able to reach solid ground, I found myself on a bank different from my till-then life partner.

It’s been more than five years since the balmy isle of Singledom welcomed me. I’m in no danger of leaving.

Being single – as in, having always been single, or for a very long time – is one thing. Becoming single is a whole other. In the case of the former, you will most likely be badgered by cabals of “concerneds” eager to convince you that the only way to happiness is by welding your wagon to another’s for posterity. While they may be annoying and exasperating, at least they’re operating out of love, looking out for your best interest, even if only in their own misguided way.

Becoming single, however, entails mostly one of two reactions from your alleged well-wishers: harsh judgment or deep envy. The first group are the more conspicuous: You’ll quickly notice their self-removal from your circle by their quick deletion of your name from their party list. The second group are their husbands. Both groups are convinced that the only reason you’d end a long and successful marriage is because you suddenly wanted to run out and fuck a lot of women.

Now, while that may be true for some men, I suspect that most have a slightly longer list of reasons leading up to what is essentially a ridiculously difficult decision to make. Either way, what’s so wrong with wanting to go get it on with as many people who are happy to get it on with you?

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eing single is best. For me. It’s not suited for everyone, though.

Certainly not the type of person who bemoans not having someone “to wake up next to”. It’s that kind of statement that blows my mind, being the kind of person who finds untold joy in waking up alone every day. While morning cuddles have their moments, the idea of rising when I want and going about my activities in the exact sequence of how I deem agreeable outweighs the fleeting pleasure of a hug and a nuzzle. And all those shared activities that so many couples are bound to as if they were part of a pre-nup? Some folks are just not wired for that.

I always wanted to travel alone, to stay back longer in the more interesting places my music took me. The unspoken code of marriage is not friendly to such desires, ones that require the exclusion of the partner. I am able to make plans on the fly without the need to check if my calendar had filled up when I wasn’t looking.

While I didn’t leap into some raging singles’ scene or suddenly find myself surrounded by the unhitched (most of my close friends are married), the nature of my socialising changed. Informal invitations became more frequent – single people are easier to schedule at short notice than couples. Events I may have balked at attending in my earlier avatar became more attractive – just because I had opened myself to new experiences. I bought myself a motorcycle, a Triumph Bonneville, and started to plan rides, short and long (I don’t encourage pillion riders… mostly).

“Selfish” is the epithet most often hurled at single people. It’s apt. But it’s equally applicable to the ones seeking soulmates. No one is marrying another person for the benefit of the other. We’re all self-serving; we differ only in the arrangement that suits us best. I don’t care any less for my loved ones because I’m not romantically committed to them. And in that category I include all my 160 —

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“SELFISH” IS THE EPITHET MOST OFTEN HURLED AT SINGLE PEOPLE. IT’S APT. BUT IT’S EQUALLY APPLICABLE TO THE ONES SEEKING SOULMATES. NO ONE IS MARRYING ANOTHER PERSON FOR THE OTHER’S BENEFIT friends, for whom I’m probably more available than those with family units, who have their own shackles of time and responsibility.

Now, a bit of salve for those envious husbands. While sex with more people is undoubtedly more fun, it isn’t as easy to find people wanting to sleep with you as it might seem. Those easygoing girls on Tinder? A rather large number of them are actually hoping to find a wagon to weld theirs to.

But there’s a lot more to singlehood than the revolving door of sleeping partners. It’s waking up every day and deciding exactly what you want to do. For yourself.

Things that will make you a happier person. And everyone knows that happy people are the best to be around. I’ll have a dram of Singleton to that.

Uday Benegal is single-minded in his belief that if it’s not fun, there’s no point

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A SUITABLE MATCH

BY MAROOSHA MUZAFFAR

WHEN YOUR FAMILY SWIPES RIGHT FOR YOU

I

was practising yoga in my room, following the instructions of a teacher on YouTube, when my father called out to me. My heart sank. I shouted back: “Give me 10 minutes.” Panic set in. My mouth went dry. And then I started crying, right there on my yoga mat.

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me on anti-anxiety medication a few months earlier and advised me to start exercising too. For months, I dragged myself to my neighbourhood gym, hoping the endorphins would help me cope. They did, till I got bored and started taking long daily walks instead. And now I did yoga.

I had come back home to Srinagar after two years. In those two years, I’d fallen in love and had my heart broken, changed jobs and moved apartments in Delhi. I’d stayed in touch with my parents throughout, but our telephone conversations were always terse and tense. My parents wanted me to get married. I didn’t. I found these conversations stifling. Eventually, frustrated by my lack of inclination towards “settling down”, my mother stopped talking to me, avoided my calls. My father would WhatsApp me, but then he stopped too.

It was four months before my mother relented and spoke to me. My voice cracked when she picked up my call one morning. “Mamma, why don’t you talk to me?” I asked in Kashmiri,

trying to hide any emotion in my voice. Her blunt reply: “Because you won’t get married.” Her tone softened a bit when she asked me if I would come home for Eid this September.

I missed them, so I booked my tickets the very same day and bought gifts for everyone at home. ∆∆∆ I completed my shavasana and exchanged my sleeveless tee for my mother’s long-sleeved tunic and draped a chador over my shoulders.

Appropriately attired, I climbed down the stairs. I could hear the entire family in the kitchen. I wasn’t prepared for this. And I didn’t have an exit plan.

In the kitchen, my father said, “Rushki, there’s a family the matchmaker has suggested.” And grabbed his notebook.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

This notebook, diligently maintained by my father, lists eligible bachelors. Their names,

family

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Once I was asked tO regIster On a matrImOnIal sIte, kashmIrnIkah.cOm. I refused. my parents regIstered On my behalf anyway. they’ve alsO dIstrIbuted my bIO-data acrOss srInagar, mentIOnIng “unIversIty Of new yOrk” as my usp.

I graduated frOm nyu castes, dates of birth, parents’ names, their addresses, job designations, what their uncles do, the families they’re married into. And in some cases, the phone numbers of the fathers of the sons – never the sons. I think of this notebook as a hard copy of Tinder. Except that my parents and an assorted crew of maternal and paternal uncles and aunts swipe right on potential matches on my behalf.

This notebook exclusively lists Muslim men. Sunni Muslim men. ∆∆∆ I live in Delhi. And my family is based in Srinagar. Both my parents pray five times a day. Fast. Give zakaat.

But they’ve never asked my sister or me to wear a hijab. They “allowed” me to move to America for a graduate degree in journalism. I was the first girl from my family to live in Delhi for a job. My father isn’t very strict, although he does comment on my WhatsApp profile pictures sometimes.

He’ll admonish me, “Change the picture.” Or simply, “Disappointed to see this picture.”

He’s been shooting me emails and texts consistently over the past few years with the details of one or another Kashmiri bachelor. He even scavenged a Harvard medical grad – of course, a Muslim from Kashmir – for me to consider. When I turned 30, the badgering got worse. So did my anxiety.

Now, every time my dad texts me, my mind spirals into a vortex of dark thoughts. Sometimes the stress makes me nauseous. I distract myself by keeping my Instagram game up, uploading pictures of colourful fruit bowls and documenting my visits to Mughal monuments.

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Once I was asked to register on a matrimonial site, kashmirnikah.com. I refused. My parents registered on my behalf anyway. They also distributed my bio-data across the length and breadth of Srinagar, mentioning “University of New York” as my USP. I graduated from NYU. My brother tells me my parents have had quite a few matchmakers visit them in the years I’ve been away.

Every time they come over and share details of a potential match, my family is obliged to pay them. In Kashmir, matchmakers are usually transgender.

It’s one of the few professions where they’ve found acceptance (and a source of livelihood). Some are invited to sing and dance at weddings too, often eliciting laughter and cruel jokes from the guests.

They work independently, but will tap into their network if the need arises. Once, when my mother requested a journalist groom (after my refusal to marry doctors or engineers), the matchmaker fished out her phone and called a fellow matchmaker to ask: “Kyah journalist chuya nazre?” (Do you have any male journalist in mind?”)

For the last few years, while my family has been trying hard to find me a “suitable” match, I’ve been busy swiping right on Tinder. I was lonely, but it was also research for a book I’m writing about dating and urban loneliness in India. One of the hazards has been several unsolicited dick pics.

Men have told me women were “tough to impress these days.” They remain eternally flabbergasted as to how to communicate with the women they find on dating apps.

The other hazard has been encountering people I know. Once on OkCupid, I started chatting with someone whose grammar was

impeccable – every comma and colon and en dash in the right place.

We chatted till 4:30am. He pinged me again a few nights later. We had another great conversation. Finally, he gave me his phone number and asked me to text him on WhatsApp. I began to type out his number, but before I could finish, the screen flashed the name of a senior editor at the magazine I worked at. I already had his number stored. He’d changed his name on the app. So had I. We’d both used photographs that didn’t identify us.

I’ve never had a Muslim boyfriend. Once, I matched with a good-looking Muslim guy on Tinder, and we started chatting.

Soon I found out that he had a wife by his side when he was texting me. Another time, a Muslim man I matched with, again on Tinder, was visiting New Delhi from Colombo.

We decided to meet. We made out a bit. We went out to have burgers later that night. We’re friends now, texting each other on and off. ∆∆∆ I had an early flight to Delhi two days later. My brother was to drive me to the airport. I zipped up my bag and went downstairs to my parents’ bedroom. My father had left for the morning prayers without speaking to me. My mother was asleep, so I murmured my goodbye. There were no hugs this time, no kisses on the forehead. The house was silent. In the distance, the mosque reverberated with the azaan. A morning chill was starting to seep into my skin.

Maroosha Muzaffar is thinking about adopting a puppy instead of a husband

at Serendipity Arts Festival

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Photo credit: Guido van Helten - Brim Silos Mural Project, Australia, 2016

art beyond galleries

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FLYING SOLO

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BY ANNIE ZAIDI

THE UNMARRIED LIFE CAN OFFER RICH REWARDS

hink of an Indian woman who induces wonder and awe in you. Someone who broke new ground, journeyed to distant lands, fought for her own independence or that of her country or is seen as an icon.

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I did this exercise last year while working on a new anthology and here are some names that popped up in my head: Cornelia Sorabji, Pandita Ramabai, Rani Lakshmibai, Noor Inayat Khan, Lal Ded, Janaki Ammal, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Irom Sharmila, Medha Patkar, Fathima Beevi, Leila Seth, Mother Teresa, Mahadevi Varma, Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chughtai, Lata Mangeshkar, Protima Bedi, Malavika Sarukkai, Bhanu Athaiya, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Aruna Asaf Ali, Ritu Dalmia, Urvashi Butalia, Vandana Shiva, Barkha Dutt, Laila Tyabji, Raziya Sultana, Dayanita Singh, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chandralekha, Mira Nair.

These ladies set up businesses, made music, wrote, fought battles, argued law. The anthology, however, was intended as a series of essays on successful, well-known women married to successful, well-known men with an additional caveat that the marriage shouldn’t have ended in divorce. That was a much harder ask. It took weeks to

CULTURE

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TO BE A WIFE INVOLVES COOKING, CLEANING, FEEDING AND RAISING KIDS AND SO ON. PERHAPS THIS EXPLAINS WHY MANY WOMEN FLOWER INTO CREATIVITY, START PARTICIPATING IN PUBLIC MOVEMENTS OR START TRAVELLING ONLY ONCE THEY’RE MIDDLE-AGED OR AFTER THEIR MARRIAGES COLLAPSE come up with a list of 20 names across diverse professions.

Sometimes I would start reading about an interesting couple only to discover that the marriage had broken down at some point.

I was learning about women who did brilliant work, but take a closer look at the names listed above. At least half were (or are) single – unmarried, widowed or divorced through much of their youth. They may have formed partnerships with men along the way but did not make the bond legal.

Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first female lawyer – in fact, the first woman to study law at Oxford and likely the first female barrister in Britain – never married, though that doesn’t mean there was no room for men or love in her life.

Janaki Ammal was a renowned scientist, the first woman to acquire a PhD in botany in the USA. Pandita Ramabai, author of The High-Caste Hindu Woman, had been taught the Vedas and other religious texts at a time when most little girls weren’t even taught the alphabet. She surived famine, got married of her own volition – out of caste, at a time when such things were frighteningly rare – but lost her husband within two years. The rest of her life was given to activism. She set up ashrams for girls, especially child widows, and was furiously committed to their education.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was a child widow herself, but had the rare advantage of education, and re-married as a young woman. She was the first woman to run for political office in India, in the Twenties. She was also one of the first to file for divorce, as early as 1933. Then she travelled, almost around the world. In independent India, she was responsible for setting up the Cottage Industries Emporium, the National School of Drama and several other cultural institutions.

Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi was caught up at a very turbulent moment in Indian history. However, she was not seen as a leader until she was widowed. This is true of several queens and contemporary female politicians too, who were often single or assumed leadership roles when their husbands were no longer available to lead. There have been Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, Chennamma of Kittur, Chennamma of Keladi in history, and Jayalalithaa, Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee in recent decades.

This is not to suggest, of course, that marriage interferes with success. There are hundreds of celebrated married women. However, there are fewer instances where both spouses have gained formidable reputations. Within this narrow category, it is even rarer to find examples of marriages that last a lifetime.

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H

ere’s something that will make you think about marriage and competition. Annapurna Devi is one of our greatest surbahar (bass sitar) players. She was born Roshanara Khan and was married, when she was barely 14, to her father’s disciple, Pandit Ravi Shankar. However, the marriage did not last. Worse, she stopped her public performances, reportedly because her talent was so clearly superior to that of her husband that it upset him.

Then there was Rani Abbakka Chowta of Ullal.

Cursory readings suggest that she was a strong ruler who fought hard for her land and people. But she was up against an estranged husband who actually sided with the Portuguese and helped them take over his wife’s kingdom. The rest is colonial history.

Which brings us to a tricky question: does traditional marriage limit your potential?

I can’t say that I have an answer. However, I have learned to view marriage not just as a unit defined by co-habitation, sex and the division of labour, but as a social and political alliance. On the one hand, it leads to a sharing of wealth, status and social networks – the very things one needs to climb higher and take career risks.

On the other hand, often one partner holds the fort while the other goes off to conquer new lands, discover new formulae, make art and so forth. For both to break free of domestic responsibility and childcare, they need a whole lot of social support and/or wealth.

There’s no denying that for the vast majority of the world’s women, to be a wife involves cooking, cleaning, feeding and raising kids, fetching water and so on. Perhaps this explains why many women flower into creativity, start participating in public movements or start travelling only once they’re middle-aged or after their marriages collapse.

Marriage, however, is also an infinitely malleable and adaptable concept. There’s a tribe in Tanzania, for instance, where, it is said, heterosexual women may acquire “wives”. It has also been known for a while now that certain Native American tribes accepted same-sex unions. In such marriages, to be a “husband” was to do the jobs typically done by male members of the tribe. By that definition, a lot of women these days are “husbands”.

The trouble, perhaps, is that there aren’t enough men willing to risk becoming “wives”.

Annie Zaidi is the editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years Of Indian Women’s Writing and the forthcoming Equal Halves. She cannot stop listening to Iqbal Bano singing “Dasht-e-Tanhai”

The

Vintage Ritual ReTuRns

B

y today’s standards, everyday grooming rituals of the preinternet era were luxurious affairs. Perhaps you recall how your grandfather spent a considerable amount of his time to not only look good but also feel great before he could take on the day. Towel slung over his shoulder, he’d stand before a strategically placed mirror whipping up a soapy lather as tunes from his Murphy floated across the house to serenade him. He’d methodically swirl, massage and dab his face with a grooming arsenal that mostly comprised natural, home-made oils, creams and gels, the ingredients of which were sourced from the kitchen garden.

But as the world got smaller and time constraints set in, grooming rituals began to take a backseat. Swept up in the initial excitement of a fast-paced lifestyle, we barely noticed when the disposable razors replaced the cut-throat or when the shaving cream was swapped for synthetic foam. But with the passing of time, the short-cuts began to take their toll. Men like you and me, began to yearn

Forest Essentials is here to slow down our fast paced world with its exotic range of grooming products – one that is sure to tempt you into investing your time in yourself

for “me time”. Little wonder then as to why so many of us rush to a spa on weekends and between flights.

Forest Essentials understands the yearning for slow, mindful self-care.

Using artisanal methodologies and the purest, freshest, most natural ingredients from Himalayas, they’ve conjured an entire range of grooming elixirs for men like us. Elegantly packaged and bottled, each product has the profound beauty and regenerative power of Ayurveda.

So, while you can’t turn back the hands of time to a more languid day and age, Forest Essentials allows you to bring back the long forgotten ritual of personal care. Simply because, time spent on oneself, is time well spent.

For more information, visit forestessentialsindia.com

EDITED BY PARTH CHARAN

DRIVING THE 2018 MERCEDES-BENZ S-CLASS WITH BOTH ARMS FOLDED IS THE DUCATI SUPERSPORT THE EVERYDAY SUPERHERO YOU NEED?

D R A D D L N O G TA I S

WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

The 2018 Mercedes-Benz S-Class is ready to take on an automated future. All hail the king

t’s a tough task, carrying the “Greatest Car in the World” title on your shoulders, however broad and hunkered they might be.

No one quite knows how or when the phrase came into use – whether it sprang from glossy brochures or exhaustive surveys.

But it’s a claim no one has bothered to contest. Certainly not after they’ve driven the car.

We’re talking about the Mercedes-Benz S-Class – the brand’s flagship luxury sedan whose tireless efforts to intensify comfort, NOVEMBER 2017

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The three-vertical-slat grille now denotes the luxury hierarchy at Merc – with the C and E having one and two slats, respectively

IN ITS SEARCH FOR TRUE, ZEN-LIKE AUTOMOTIVE LUXURY, THE S-CLASS HAS ALWAYS ARRIVED AT TECHNOLOGICAL MILESTONES BEFORE MOST OTHER CARS

particular mood or state of being.

It’s probably the only time the S seems to be overreaching – in every other moment, it sits in a place most cars can’t reach. Sure, everyone’s raved about just how closely the new E-Class could mirror the S-Class experience (albeit a marginally diluted one). But then you get inside the S-Class cabin, acclimatise yourself to the practically sentient seats, the leather upholstery and the car’s totally thorough job at shutting out the rest of the world, and realise just why this is the global benchmark.

But it’s the semi-autonomous driving feature that’s got all the attention. This is the biggest technological revolution to grip the automotive industry in recent times, and since the geeks are so clearly inheriting the Earth, varying levels of autonomy will dictate the extent of luxury a car has to offer.

So the question then is: Should your chauffeur expect the pink slip any time soon? Not quite.

Level 2 autonomous driving still depends quite strongly on human intervention – it’s simply capable of braking hard in an emergency, or taking over the steering once you’ve set a particular speed using cruise control. It’ll also slow the car down to tackle a corner, increasing or delaying the braking based on the driving mode (Comfort, Dynamic, etc). But if cornering proves too tricky for the system, it will politely flash a “hands-on” light, indicating that you’ve reached the limits of its extensive self-driving abilities.

Technically, the car can apply

WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

safety and luxury in the automotive world over the decades have brought us face-to-face with this 2018 version. In its search for true, zenlike automotive luxury, the S-Class has always arrived at technological milestones before most other cars. That’s meant a very long and intimidating resume, only furthering its reputation as the Citizen Kane of cars: The first production car to have ABS; first to have seat belt pretensioners; first to have a driver and a passenger airbag – the list goes on, but the fact that most of these features are commonplace in budget cars today is a testament to just how impactful the S-Class has been.

Naturally then, the new edition had to include something revolutionary, even for a mid-cycle upgrade. What Mercedes came up with: two new inline-six engines, hybrid powertrains and a new grille. 2018’s S-Class also has an advanced Level 2 autonomous driving system. That’s real-world, road-ready artificial intelligence for you.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise that driving the S560 across the SwissGerman border would be my easiest day on the job. This would’ve been relatively true even without the aid of an autonomous driving system, because of the ride the 4.0-litre V8 engine (the S550’s 4.7-litre V8 has been downsized) provides, producing a higher 463bhp and strong currents of hyperbolic power. Unlike the crackling S63, the S560’s growl is subdued and restrained, never really disrupting the tranquility of the cabin but consistently reminding you of the full extent of its twin-turbocharged might.

(Sadly, this isn’t the petrol engine we’re likely to see in India in anything except the Maybach edition.)

The interiors offer an almost corrupting level of fortification.

Massage seats ensnare you into a sort of plutocratic idyll that really ought to come with a disclaimer.

Because once you step out of the car, the real world can hold nothing but disappointment. Two muscular A-pillars appear capable of shielding you from a meteor collision. There’s also a new quirky “wellness” feature that uses climate control, seat, lighting, massage and pre-set music programs to essentially induce a

Mr. Yashpal Agnihotri, CMD, Amila Hills

THE GRAND HIMALAYAN REVIVAL The Summer capital of the British Raj and the preferred choice of the high and the mighty of the Imperial era, Shimla is making a determined comeback to reclaim its glorious past with a modern reincarnation in the form of a unique destination development.

Himalayas long served as scenic getaways for those looking to beat the heat of the plains and soon enough it became the destination of choice for the elite looking to have a slice of Himalayan serenity. The British era saw many landmark settlements come up, but nothing more prominent than Shimla, which is now the state capital, and home to many premier properties.

Leveraging the natural beauty of its surroundings, with pristine air and good weather year round, the wellness spa concepts that provide luxurious, personalised treatments designed to promote emotional and physical well-being became the answer for those seeking refuge from the vagaries of everyday urban life. Improved accessibility, with lane widening of the national highway and opening of an improved runway of the Shimla airport is changing the scenario more rapidly than ever.

Now the game is soon going to get bigger and grander with newer players who are showing serious interest in the location, inspired by the region’s serenity and tremendous potential.

One such lavish development is set to come up just north of Shimla, about 16 km from the Shimla Airport. This landmark project called Amila Hills, when complete, would host Himachal’s biggest health & spa resort, set atop a 54-acre luxurious hill, featuring a 125 all-suite retreat that provides majestic views of the Himalayan range.

“A 125 all-suite Himalayan spa & 5 Star health resort, set to open in 2019, will offer an extraordinary level of style and comfort among the canopy of pines and the majestic mountain views.”

Titled Amila Himalayas, it is borne out of the disconcerting question, which has troubled many Indians, as to how in a motherland as large and bountiful as ours, we are yet to have a world-class mountain resort town like those that dot the European Alps landscape.

“Amila Hills entails uniquely delivering a concept of gracious hospitality to the world. We will do all we can to ensure our destination retreat has a positive impact on the local environment and community, and connects India back to its roots” says Mr. Yashpal Agnihotri, Founder and CMD of Amila Group. This Health & Spa Resort brings luxury wellness to the fore in a sustainable setting that invigorates the mind, body and soul.

Stated to open doors to guests in late 2019, Amila Himalayas has been designed by a team of leading architectural practices and technical consultants from around the world. Through affliations with global operators, the concept is positioned to set new benchmarks for luxury and sustainability. To find out more about this landmark property, visit www.amila.in.

2018 MERCEDESBENZ S-CLASS ENGINE 4.0-LITRE, V8 BI-TURBO PETROL, 3.0-LITRE; I6 DIESEL HORSEPOWER 456BHP; 340 BHP GEARBOX 9G-TRONIC AUTOMATIC

The inline-six, 3.0-litre turbo diesel engine is as smooth as a whipped cream waterfall, and the aluminium and plastic composites housed in its body do a perfect job of masking its weight. Power is bumped up to 340bhp, but it’s the overwhelming smoothness of the motor that really stays with you.

The suspension also scans the road surface and pre-emptively alters its stiffness to optimise ride quality – a standard feature. There’s little the car doesn’t think about in its attempt to give you most the blissful driving experience possible.

Level 2 autonomy has been prevalent in automotive literature for the past few years. And while more complex systems will emerge soon, this is semi-autonomous driving at its most sophisticated and adaptive. Because this goes beyond self-parking abilities and attempts to let go of the training wheels that generally accompany this level of AI. And in that sense, the new S-Class possesses some historic significance.

Because, for the S-Class, being on the brink of something new, is business as usual.

WORDS: PARTH CHARAN

steering and braking inputs, even at 120kph.

Its Active Parking system similarly works as independently as you’d expect. A windshield-mounted camera is used to operate the Active Speed Assist function, which detects speed limits and slows or speeds up the car accordingly. Then there’s the Active Brake Assist function, that detects the curvature of the road and brakes accordingly – including stopping the car dead in its tracks if you absolutely fail to brake in the face of an impending collision.

The new S400d 4Matic is also markedly different from the V6powered S350 currently available here.

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YOUR WEDDING

As a couple stand on either side of the Andaz Shrine.

Put your heads through the hollow and chant ‘Om’.

Your voices will resonate as one.

After this inscribe your initials or wedding vow on it. The stone will then be placed in a significant area of the shrine.

AT YOUR ANDAZ Whether it’s a big fat Indian wedding or an intimate affair, a flamboyant ceremony or the kind that exudes understated elegance, this luxury lifestyle hotel by Hyatt, ensures that your wedding functions reflect your style (or, shall we say andaz)

N

o two wedding celebrations at the Andaz Delhi will ever look or feel the same. That’s because each function is carefully curated, keeping your andaz or personal style in mind. With a banquet area sprawling across 37,500 sqft, it offers vibrant and progressive spaces. While the Andaz Studios are ideal for smaller pre-wedding functions, the pillar-free Oval Ballroom is perfect for larger gatherings. With a minimalist design, the ballroom offers a blank canvas that can be decorated as per your whim. Better still, the ballroom’s massive pre-function area is easily accessible from the unique Elephant Path — an entrance created for the baraat and the groom, who may wish to arrive on elephant back.

Additionally, during the winter months, the al-fresco spaces of the hotel make picture-perfect venues.

Furthermore, while Andaz Chefs create bespoke menus, the in-house maharaj is happy to whip up vegetarian favourites from Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. If it’s a destination wedding or you have guests from out of town, the hotel’s 401 rooms and suites offer luxurious accomodations.

But between functions, we recommend that you unwind by the poolside, indulge at the Andaz Spa,

savour signature dishes at the hotel’s restaurant and bar, or take off on “Andaz Delhi Hero Experiences” that lets you see the culture of the city through the eyes of a Delhi hero.

Andaz Delhi - A Concept by Hyatt, Aerocity, New Delhi For more information, contact your Andaz Host on +91 11 4903 1234, delhi.andaz@hyatt.com or visit andazdelhi.com

SUPER

I

TROOPER

Ducati’s latest tightrope act comes in the form of a spirited, fully faired firecracker

t’s a fantastic time to be a motorcyclist.

They’ve never been lighter, faster or more purpose-built, so regardless of age, size or intent, there’s a sharp-nosed, semi-nuclear piece of two-wheeled tech out there just waiting for a down payment. Brands are selectively breeding them like prized racehorses now, and Ducati appears to be at the forefront of this – proliferating niches with motorcycles like the Multistrada, the Hypermotard and now the new Ducati SuperSport.

The need to create more manageable performance bikes comes from one simple fact: Superbikes are hard work. On really bad

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DUCATI SUPERSPORT S ENGINE 937CC, TESTASTRETTA L-T WIN HORSEPOWER 108BHP TORQUE 93NM

days, they leave your wrists aching, your loins tenderised and unless you’re returning from a racetrack, you arrive at your destination a swearing, cantankerous shell of your former self. And just like any other sensational piece of automotive exotica, their impracticality only heightens their appeal, but limits their usability, particularly in the Indian context.

Until you take a good look at the SuperSport.

At a quick glance, it bears a striking resemblance to the more thoroughbred supersport in the family: the Panigale 959.

Except the engine’s from a Hypermotard and the handlebars are more upright, so the

THE NEED TO CREATE MORE MANAGEABLE PERFORMANCE BIKES COMES FROM ONE SIMPLE FACT: SUPERBIKES ARE HARD WORK riding position is a bit more comfortable. This is a sports tourer with a greater emphasis on the “sport” bit, but the idea is to have a motorcycle that’s at home on a racetrack, the highway and the city roads – basically, the engineering trifecta that’s about as easy to crack as solving a quadratic equation while also pole-vaulting across a snake pit. While on fire. So, how well does the SuperSport – or, in this case, the more track-focused SuperSport S – fare in the trial-by-blazinghellfire that Indian riding conditions are?

To begin with, both the SuperSport and the SuperSport S share the Multistrada 950 and the Hypermotard’s 937cc, Testastretta, L-Twin engine that makes 108bhp and 93Nm of torque.

Peak torque arrives pretty early at 3,000rpm, so it’s easily accessed in the city, and since the power delivery is more gradual, it’s easy around highways and mountain roads as well.

With the SuperSport S you get a set of fully adjustable Ohlin suspension units, making it extremely sharp and balanced around corners.

It also comes with a quickshifter. The seating position is a damn sight more comfortable than the Panigale, since there’s less weight up front.

But if you want something properly upright, you’re better off with something like the Multistrada 950.

The SuperSport S isn’t quite so powerdense as to bite your head off, but turn down the traction control setting or switch to Sport mode and Ducati’s racing DNA makes itself apparent. The Pirelli Diablo Rosso III tyres’ adhesion game remains on point, enabling you to push the bike more. If there are two major niggles that need to be ironed out, it’s heat dissipation and a clunky gear shifter that takes considerable effort to put into neutral.

When it comes down to it, the SuperSport S is exactly what you expect of the modern-day Ducati: visually striking, perfectly balanced, with a greater emphasis on handling and performance than some of its heavier and more touring-friendly counterparts. In a way, it does moderation in extremes – since it’s faster and sharper than any city bike you’ll own. Or, it does extreme in a moderate way – since it possesses the diluted characteristics of a lot of other Ducatis in the stable. Either way, you’re going to want to spend most of your waking hours on it. And that’s all that matters.

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY SIGNE VILSTRUP

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S T Y L E D BY TA N YA V O H R A

WRITTEN BY PALOMA SHARMA

femme fatale Sultry on screen, and off it, ballsy and outspoken, Esha Gupta is the stuff our fantasies are made of

E

SWIMSUIT BY HEIDI KLEIN

sha Gupta is super chilled out.

Still, you don’t want to get into an argument with her.

Though she may not have pursued her legal ambitions, rest assured she’s still got the chops. “I was always good at arguing, even about things I didn’t know too much about,” she laughs. “My dad would often say, ‘Why don’t you try law?’”

The former Miss India did a short stint as a law student, on a scholarship at Newcastle University after winning her title, before the lure of Bollywood brought her back home. Since then, she’s had our attention in films like Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh and more recently Rustom and Baadshaho.

A quintessential Bollywood outsider, Gupta grew up in “a very modest family, my dad was a Wing Commander in the Air Force,” and remembers the thrill of earning `1,000 for her first fashion show. More than a decade later, she has a hush-hush Indo-international project she’s currently working on, plans to “jump out a plane” (just sky-diving, relax) and a penchant for partying in Dubai until 6am – confirming that Esha Gupta carpe diems like nobody’s else. When we caught up with her, she was at her uncensored best.

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BODYSUIT BY MELISSA ODABASH. CUFF BY HERMÈS OPPOSITE PAGE: BIKINI BY ARAKS. JACKET BY TOPSHOP. EARRINGS

BY MARIA BLACK

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Tell us about the evolution of Esha Gupta.

This body is something I had to work on! I think puberty did wonders for me because I was one of those girls who was a tomboy, complete with a unibrow. It was always about sports and studies. But I’ve groomed myself over the years. There’ve been a couple of looks, though, that have been horrendous. I hope they never make it to the internet. I have a whole team taking care of me. It takes a village make an actor.

What’s the one thing you can get away with now that you’re famous?

The one thing I can’t get away with – speaking my mind. But, I still (usually) get away with that. What I can get away with: Throwing a tantrum when I’m hungry. Which I do!

What pisses you off?

I hate the fact that we have to still fight for women to be considered equal.

What kind of role would you like to do next?

A full-on action film, where I’m playing the female lead. I know I’ll be good at it. Being an athlete, and having MMA training, I have a strong body. I really want to do a film like Resident Evil.

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Had you become a lawyer, who’s the first person you’d have sued?

Tom Hardy, for being so sexy.

What do you wish Indian men knew more about Indian women?

Several things. Firstly, Indian men aren’t chivalrous enough. Then, I think, simple grooming. A mani-pedi is basic hygiene. It doesn’t make you less of a man. I always notice men who have nicely done nails and hair. Men should also know more about women – about how their bodies work. When you say the word “period”, men still get freaked out.

Will we ever find you on Tinder?

Hell, yeah. I actually wanted to try it in London. I was there a few months ago and I nearly got on to it, but my friends didn’t let me. I even have an answer ready if I’m caught. I’ll just say, “That was a fake profile.” But I really want to swipe left and right.

What would make you swipe right?

Anything, as long as his profile doesn’t say, “I just want to find love.” You’re not on Tinder to find love.

“I get away with speaking my mind"

BIKINI BY MELISSA ODABASH. NECKLACE BY CORNELIA WEBB

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SWIMSUIT BY ARAKS. CUFF

BY AURÉLIE BIDERMANN OPPOSITE PAGE: SWIMSUIT BY MISSONI AT INFINITE LUXURY. NECKLACE

BY AURÉLIE BIDERMANN PHOTOGRAPHER AGENCY: TOMORROW MANAGEMENT HAIR & MAKE-UP: MEHAK OBEROI/TOABH CREATIVE AGENCY ASSISTANT STYLIST: DESIRÉE FERNANDES FASHION COORDINATOR: RAVNEET CHANNA PRODUCTION: MEGHA MEHTA LOCATION: ALILA VILLAS ULUWATU, BALI

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GQ’S GUIDE TO

CRYPTO

CURRENCY Here’s what we know so far: Crypto, and the digital ledger system it’s based on, blockchain, are here to stay. Some of the world’s biggest brands, from Google to IBM, are in on it. So, while the rest of the world catches up, here’s everything you need to know about digital money and the new economy WRITTEN BY ARSHIE CHEVALWALA

T

here’s a running joke in Silicon Valley that there are engineers who’re convinced they can fix the wildfires of California with blockchain and VR because they’re the future of tech.

Blockawhat, you say? At its most basic, the blockchain is a growing list of records, aka blocks, that are linked and secured using cryptography. The first major spin-off of this revolutionary tech was Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency released in the Noughties. Since then, several new cryptocurrencies have been vying to become the world’s next digital dollar.

It’s like, can you remember a time before Uber? Us neither.

IMAGE: ALAMY

BITCOIN 101 Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an anonymous person/s under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. But, unlike the dollar, it’s not a physical currency – just 31,000 lines of code birthed via an internet announcement. Essentially, it’s a digital “coin” made of “bits” divisible up to eight decimals, meaning you can purchase a very, very small unit too, called a Satoshi. 100,000,000 Satoshis make 1 bitcoin. In August this year, it was also forked into two parts: the classic Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). With the split, everyone who owned BTC received an identical amount of BCH.

HOW DOES CRYPTOCURRENCY WORK – AND WHY SHOULD I SWITCH TO USING IT? Transactions are made using blockchain tech without any middlemen (read: no banks), and with minimal transaction fees.

Think of blockchain as a magical book. All parties involved have a copy. When a transaction’s made, it’s noted in everyone’s copy, and they all tally up. Plus, an entry made can never be edited or deleted, so it’s a 100 on the transparency scale. Which is why everyone from ICICI Bank to Yes Bank, Kotak Mahindra to Axis Bank have run pilots. Air France uses it for supply-chain-tracking; the governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are in the process of digitising land deals and ownership.

ANY DRAWBACKS? The transfer is instantaneous and money once sent is sent. It’s impossible to reverse a transaction the way a bank can.

WHERE CAN I BUY AND SELL CRYPTOCURRENCY? Zebpay or Unocoin in India, or on international exchanges like Coinbase. If you bought a piece early on, you’re already rich (it’s estimated to reach approximately $6,000, or `3.9 lakh, a pop by the end of 2017). If you buy any on an Indian exchange, you’ll pay a slightly higher rate, plus a premium, but it’s a better bet – mostly because you can use an Indian credit or debit card, and you’ll be protected by Indian laws governing monetary transactions.

CAN I USE IT TO BUY REGULAR GOODS AND SERVICES? Only a few merchants currently accept the currency. You can buy air tickets on Flybits, while Pocketbits supports sites like Amazon and Myntra.

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Since the creation of the first bitcoin in 2009, the cryptocurrency has had a roller-coaster ride. A timeline...

First real-world exchange: 10,000 bitcoins for $25 worth of pizza

Bitcoin exchange platform Coinbase opens

WikiLeaks accepts Bitcoin as donation

MAY 2010

JUN 2011

The world’s first Bitcoin ATM opens

The Bitcoin Foundation launches

JUN 2012

SEP 2012

Coinbase raises $75M in venture capital funding

Microsoft accepts Bitcoin for games and apps

NOV 2013

DEC 2014

WHAT ABOUT INVESTING IN IT? Invest only surplus income, and in small denominations to begin with, till you get a hang of the system. Also, check out our guide on the following page.

BITCOIN VS ETHER VS ALL OTHER ALTCOINS The second-most popular cryptocurrency is Ether, backed

by Ethereum’s blockchain, which is slightly different from Bitcoin’s, but also allows for payment customisations. It’s valued at `19,911 at the time of printing, and is your secondbest investment choice. “Try to steer clear of investing in anything brand new and cheap, because we don’t know the future of it. Anything that’s mature, which has gone through a cycle of changes and developments, the way Bitcoin has [Ed’s note: see timeline above], and which has become stable, that’s a good choice,” says Saurabh Agarwal, co-founder of digital exchange and trading portal Zebpay.

Called Altcoins, everything from DogeCoin (the meme) to PutinCoin to PotCoin exists on the market, but the ones worthy of investment are Litecoin, Ripple, Dash and IOTA. DO I GET TAX BENEFITS? No. Cryptocurrency isn’t regulated by the government in India, but by a self-regulatory body called The Digital Assets and Blockchain Foundation India (DABFI).

SO, IT’S ILLEGAL, THEN? No, the rules are just different. “Cryptocurrency players are subject to various laws of general application like the Consumer Protection Act, the Indian Penal Code, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act,” explains Jaideep Reddy, of Nishith Desai Associates, the tax and legal counsel appointed by DABFI that’s petitioning the Ministry of Finance and RBI to pass a regularisation bill.

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1,20,000 bitcoins stolen by hackers from the Bitfinex exchange

Swiss rail operator SBB upgrades ticket machines to sell Bitcoin

JAN 2015

NOV 2016

Bitcoin split into two derivative digital currencies, the classic Bitcoin (BTC) and the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) For the first time, 1 bitcoin soars the price of an ounce of gold

AUG 2016

MAR 2017

AUG 2017

RUSSIA RECENTLY ANNOUNCED ITS OFFICIAL DIGITAL CURRENCY, CALLED CRYPTORUBLE, WHILE JAPAN MADE BITCOIN A LEGAL CURRENCY IN APRIL 2017

MINING Nakamoto’s auto-controlled invention is programmed to release a total of 21 million bitcoins over the next 20 or so years. Every couple of minutes, coins are distributed through a “lottery” process, awarded in exchange for authorising transactions of the digital ledger. Miners – people seeking coins – play the lottery by constantly adding transactions to the ledger, and the fastest computer wins the most money. This has resulted in people setting up mining rigs across India and China (which still is the top contributor of bitcoins) and Ponzi rigs that promise unimaginable returns.

INVESTING IN CRYPTOCURRENCY

THE NEW ECONOMY

Akshay Haldipur, VP of marketing at digital media company Culture Machine, started investing in Bitcoin in 2013, and has a net crypto worth in the six figures (USD); here’s his two cents.

The cardinal rule: It’s a volatile market that dips every time a government (China, South Korea, etc) bans Initial Coin Offerings (which are basically the IPO version of cryptocurrency).

While investing in crypto is one possibility, there’s another school of thought that believes that digital currency has the potential to disrupt the way we think about money, and the way we use it.

“We’re making a shift from the transactional economy to the circular economy, and the new economy is fuelled through an issuance of tokens,” says Siddharth Sthalekar, founder of Sacred Capital, an asset curation firm that matches you to companies you should invest in or buy tokens from. “Think of buying tokens as a way to pre-pay for your needs in advance. Platforms such as Bancor use blockchain technology to create a marketplace for you, so you can exit these tokens at any point of time. You might also want to buy five years’ worth of coffee because you anticipate that the price of coffee will rise in the next 60 months. Essentially, this is like building a portfolio on steroids. Only, instead of using the USD as a proxy that allows you to fulfil needs at a later date, you just buy what you need right away. Of course, you can buy tokens you think will appreciate in value, but you’re much better off choosing tokens that fit your needs, and are relevant to you.”

NEVER CHASE THE PUMP: What goes up must come down. When the market retraces, that’s when you get a good entry.

SAFETY COMES FIRST: Only trade with an amount you can afford to lose. Diversify your portfolio. Keep a certain percentage for daily trading and divide the rest among other opportunities. Enter into trades with a clear plan in mind. Use cold storage, ie offline hardware ledgers like Ledger Nano S or Trezor – flash drives with little LED displays – to store your coins, instead of digital wallets, which may be susceptible to hacking.

KNOW YOUR ICO An Initial Coin Offering is fundraising using cryptocurrency. New businesses are launching their own coins in exchange of goods and services to be provided at a later date. So, it’s like pre-purchasing “tokens” for things you know you’ll need/use/consume anyway. An organic banana vendor, who’s just setting up farms, can release an ICO for “BananaCoin” to purchase now, so you can have a steady supply of bananas once the produce is ready, when you need them (it’s great potassium!) – and it won’t matter if inflation causes the price to go up. Several governments are concerned that ICOs are being used for money laundering, and are thus banning them.

But, Ponzi schemes aside, ICOs are redefining consumerism, distribution of wealth (instead of going to VCs for funding, you can go directly to consumers) and leading the way to the new economy.

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IN SHORT While banks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, the way we think about money is slowly changing.

Inflation is going to matter less if you’ve already pre-brought Netflix tokens for the next decade.

Statistics show millennials prefer to invest in products that they consume, care about, as well as those with great social fabric. In the future, we’ll all be woke and – cash-free.

IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK

DO YOUR HOMEWORK: Look up blockchain, ICOs, Altcoins, trading basics, technical analysis, fundamental analysis and different exchanges. Bookmark dedicated news websites like Coindesk and Cointelegraph to stay up-to-date.

MASTER After the smashing success of Season Two of his Netflix show, Master Of None, Aziz Ansari vowed to go analogue.

No social media. No e-mail. No labouring over Season Three. So we invited the stand-up-turned-auteur to be our plusone at Paris Fashion Week – and got him to teach us the art of unplugging WRITTEN BY MARK ANTHONY GREEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY ARNAUD PYVKA STYLED BY MOBOLAJI DAWODU

CLASS 192 –

NOVEMBER 2017

LOCATION: HOTEL RAPHAEL, PARIS

JACKET, SWEATER; BOTH

BY BALMAIN

NOVEMBER 2017

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H

e’s early. I’m not sure how early he got to Au Passage, a restaurant serving small plates (Aziz’s choice) that’s tucked away on a graffiti-riddled street in central Paris. But he beat me – and I was early. I found him leaning on a wall, alone. Not looking at his phone or speaking with the maître d’. In fact, his posture didn’t project any of the standard anxiety one gets while waiting alone in a crowded place. After a short back-andforth about whether the Gucci Princetown slippers I’m wearing are still cool (when it comes to matters of taste, Aziz has opinions on everything), we sit down, elbow to elbow with other Americans who are excited to overpay for a sliver of duck.

Watching the second season of Aziz’s Netflix hit, Master Of None, was like watching Kobe in a legacy-sealing playoff game. He just kept hitting shot after shot, each one more creative and impressive than the one before it. Season Two has the black lesbian coming-out story. It has eight minutes of silence. (It involves a deaf couple; you just have to watch it.) It has a 12-year-old Indian boy singing pitch-perfect D’Angelo. (It’s Aziz’s character, Dev, in a flashback.) Watching the show is to watch a popular American stand-up comic, who sold out Madison Square Garden but wasn’t exactly threatening Richard Pryor’s throne, evolve into a legit streaming-television auteur – the execution is that original, artful and assured.

If there’s any explanation for Aziz’s total comfort at a small artisanal restaurant in a foreign city, it could be because this has become his comfort zone. Much has been made of the time Aziz spent in Italy before shooting part of Season Two in Modena, but Italy is the least of it. He lived here in Paris for a month. Went to Japan for a summer. Speaks a smattering of the languages. Who knows where he’s plotting to move next?

But there’s another possible explanation, too. Before meeting Aziz, I received a tip that he’d unplugged from everything but text messaging. He’s off social media. He deleted the internet browser from his phone and laptop. No e-mail, either. Technologically speaking, he’s living in, like, 1999. Supposedly, anyway – I was a bit sceptical. I wanted to know: Did he unplug or “unplug”? Does he have an assistant sending him breaking news via messenger pigeon? Does he monitor his inbox for important e-mails but not reply directly? Is this just a really next-level Hollywood way to stunt after finding fame and fortune? And, most important, if it is true, has it made him happier?

Once dinner is over, Aziz and I will walk to La Grande Roue de Paris – the famous Ferris wheel on Place de la Concorde – and go for a spin. Here at Au Passage, it seems wise to let the famous foodie at the table take the lead in ordering the food. He asks if I want some wine, and I tell him I’ve never drunk or smoked. “You’ve never been curious,” he asks, “about either smoking or drinking?” He puts his menu down and never returns to it.

GQ: I’ve been curious about smoking weed, I guess... Especially when people talk about it helping with creativity.

Aziz Ansari: To me, the argument for drugs is that you live your life with this one perspective all the time. Why not just see what it’s like from a different perspective? To be on some crazy drugs.

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What’s the most fun drug you’ve ever done?

I’ve done mushrooms a few times, but I’ve never done much beyond that. I gotta be in the right environment to do drugs. Could you imagine if I was on mushrooms right now? It’s like, everyone in this restaurant knows who I am.

Do you realise how terrifying that would be? So I really have to be somewhere alone, away from everybody.

How are your paranoia levels generally?

I’m pretty comfortable with myself.

You should be, man. You’re coming off of a major win with Season Two of Master Of None.

It seemed like a big evolution from Season One. You get an incredibly different perspective when you do the second season of a show. You know what worked – you know what you were most excited about that you made.

[Co-creator] Alan [Yang] and I looked at the episodes from Season One, and our favourites were the ones that were really ambitious – where we were really trying something new. They really got people talking, like the “Parents” episode or “Indians On TV”. So this season, we’re like, Let’s just make every episode something like that. Not that we didn’t try to do that the first season, but we were like, Let’s be really aggressive about it. There are a lot of crazy things we tried.

The Thanksgiving episode, which was heavy on flashbacks and a total aside from the season’s main narratives, got a lot of praise.

I was sitting at dinner last night after the shoot, and this guy just started talking about that episode: “I’m gay and I’m black and that was my experience.” And it was so cool, because it seemed like it was a specific story, but it’s a really universal experience for a lot of people.

Quentin Tarantino has accused Spike Lee of criticising Tarantino’s work simply because he’s a white man telling a black story. The criticism being: A white person shouldn’t make a movie about slavery or whatever. You explored a lot of other people’s walks of life with Master Of None. Do you think it matters that you’re not gay or black or female?

I’ll say this. I wrote the Thanksgiving episode with Lena [Waithe, Aziz’s co-star in the episode]. And I wouldn’t have done it if Lena either didn’t write it with me or sit down with me for a long, long time and let me write it. If you’re only writing about yourself, that’s limiting as a storyteller, but if you’re gonna go into other people’s worlds, you’d better get it right. If a white dude wrote the episode “Indians On TV”, I don’t think they would have written it in that way; they would have gotten it wrong. And it’s a little offensive for them to be like, Well, this is what I think that experience is. You know what I mean?

What’s the most annoying question that people ask about Master Of None?

You know what I’m glad about? After the first season, I fucking ran out of things to say about diversity. But after the second season, there hasn’t been anything, like, very annoying – there’s just things that you get asked a lot. Like: What about Season Three? Which is obviously a question people have to ask, but for me it’s a little stress-inducing.

SUIT BY GUCCI. SHIRT BY BERLUTI. WATCH BY ROLEX. SUNGLASSES BY SAINT LAURENT

BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

NOVEMBER 2017

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Alan once said it best: It’s like we just gave birth to a kid and they’re like, When are you gonna have another kid?

Well, your last two “kids” were cute as hell, to be fair.

I just feel like I’ve said a lot. Especially if you look at it – instead of two seasons of a TV show – as, like, seven movies.

I mean, those two seasons are really personal, and it’s a lot of content, a lot of ideas. Now I need a minute to refill my notebook. My life has not progressed enough for me to write Season Three yet.

You really don’t feel the need to make anything?

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. We both have more money than we ever imagined. And I was like, Can you imagine if someone called us a few years ago and said, “All right, you’re going to have this much money when you’re this age. What are you gonna do with it?” You would say all sorts of fantastical things, right? No one would say, Oh, I would figure out how to make more money and keep working all the time. Everyone just buys into this, like, Oh, I need to keep making stuff, I need to go make more money.

I don’t need to make more stuff. I’ve made a lot of stuff! I’m financially okay. I’m not gonna make stuff just for the sake of making stuff. I want to make stuff ’cause I’m inspired. Right now I don’t really feel inspired.

So you’re focusing on living good?

It’s not about living good, necessarily. I don’t want to be a guy that’s, like, running away from having a normal life. You know? If I keep living like a vagabond... I’m in Japan for two months, France for a month. I’m going to live in Italy. At a certain point, that feels like you’re running from something.

I heard you deleted the internet from your phone. And that you deleted Twitter and Instagram and e-mail. No way that’s true, right?

It is! Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on The New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. You’re not going to be able to control yourself. So the only way to fight that is to take yourself out of the equation and remove all these things. What happens is, eventually you forget about it. You don’t care any more. When I first took the browser off my phone, I’m like, [gasp] How am I gonna look stuff up? But most of the shit you look up, it’s not stuff you need to know. All those websites you read while you’re in a cab, you don’t need to look at any of that stuff. It’s better to just sit and be in your own head for a minute. I wanted to stop that thing where I get home and look at websites for an hour-and-a-half, checking to see if there’s a new thing. And read a book instead. I’ve been doing it for a couple months and it’s worked. I’m reading, like, three books right now. I’m putting something in my mind. It feels so much better than just reading the internet and not remembering anything.

What about important news and politics?

I was reading all this Trump stuff, and it doesn’t feel like we’re reading news for the reason we used to, which was to get a better sense of what’s going on in the world and to enrich yourself by being aware. It seems like we’re reading wrestling rumours. It’s like reading about what happened on Monday Night Raw. When you take a step back, it all just 196 –

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seems so sensationalised. Trump’s gonna get impeached!

No, he’s not. None of that shit’s happening. But you are going to read all the articles. So if you take yourself out of it, you’re not infected with this toxicity all the time. Also, guess what? Everything is fine! I’m not out of the loop on anything. Like, if something real is going down, I’ll find out about it.

Yeah, but take yesterday’s insane breaking story, for example.

Wait, tell me what it is. I don’t even know if I know what it is.

You didn’t hear about Pence stepping down?

Mike Pence stepped down yesterday?!

Dude! Yes. Mike Pence is no longer the vice president.

He resigned because of the Russia investigation. Wait, wait, wait. That really happened?!

No. It didn’t.

Okay, see! [Laughs] But that could happen! And you could have missed it.

No, see, I would have found out now – like, now. I would have found out, and then I’d be like, Wow, that’s crazy.

But you’re choosing to be uninformed.

I’m not choosing ignorance. I’m choosing to not watch wrestling.

Are you an optimist? You feel like it’ll all work out no matter what?

I’m not saying it doesn’t matter... I don’t think me reading the news is helping anything. I think it’s hurting me. It’s putting me in a bad state of mind. And I could see how someone could hear that about me and be like, Oh, you’re ignoring what’s happening in the world ’cause you don’t want negativity in your head. That seems very selfish. Maybe it is. I don’t know. It’s not like I was reading it and then, like, immediately taking action in a way that was helping to fix problems. I can still cut cheques without reading the articles.

I cut my cheques, man! [Laughs] Are you a religious person? A spiritual person?

I don’t know.

What do you think happens when you die?

I don’t know.

Well, no one knows. But what do you think?

I think you either rot in the ground or maybe find out life is a simulation. Who knows? I don’t think about things like that.

To me there’s no point.

There are plenty of points, though! Curiosity being the first one.

I’m curious, but it’s all just massive speculation. I think it’s more fun to think about whether life’s a simulation than to think about what happens when you die. I love the “Life is a simulation” argument. The idea that you can foresee a future where we’d be able to create worlds that would be indistinguishable from ours. So that means that if that technology exists, they would make millions of these worlds

COAT BY AMI ALEXANDRE MATTIUSSI. TURTLENECK JUMPER BY CORNELIANI. TROUSERS

BY VALENTINO

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“WHEN I WALK BY AND I SEE POSTERS FOR CHAPPELLE’S SHOWS AT RADIO CITY, I’M LIKE: I NEED TO DO SHOWS! WHAT AM I DOING? I NEED TO WRITE A NEW STAND-UP SET! BUT IF I’M IN ITALY, I DON’T THINK ABOUT ANY OF THAT SHIT. I SEE AN OLD MAN RIDING A BIKE AND I’M LIKE, THAT LOOKS NICE”

Okay. Let’s say you were running the simulation.

What would you change about this reality?

I wouldn’t change much. I would probably adjust my personal life to be in a loving relationship, and I’d probably adjust it so I got to spend more time with my parents. And I would create teleportation, so I could see people quickly without worrying about travel. I’m very happy. That’s another reason I don’t really care about work stuff. Look, the conventional wisdom is you come off a win like I had with Season Two, now you can do another thing. But I’ve had that high, twice now, of making something I really care about, that I really believe in, that I’m really inspired by, and having people respond to it. I’d rather figure out other things in my life that I don’t feel as good about. I don’t feel as good about my personal life as I do my professional life.

Why not?

Because I haven’t invested in my personal life the way that I have in my professional life. I’m way more dedicated to my professional life. And I realised that recently, you know?

Are you currently single?

[Nods] Describe Aziz Ansari’s dream girl.

Someone I would be thrilled to do nothing with who would be as equally thrilled to do nothing with me.

Have you ever said that line before?

I’ve said the first part, but I added the second part just now.

I have to be honest, my man. I’m surprised at how sad you sound. It’s a beautiful night in Paris, France, you have the hottest thing streaming, suede loafers on your feet... You don’t seem like someone who has the world by the balls, you know?

I got the world by the balls professionally. Personally, I’m alone right now. And when you have the world by the balls professionally, the balls disintegrate, and then you gotta find new balls when you’re inspired again. So right now, I have it by the balls, but I’m feeling it slowly going 198 –

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away and I’m worried about finding new balls. But another part of me is like, You don’t need to find new balls. The new balls will come when they need to come. Live your life, experience things, and balls will always come your way.

Aziz Ansari looking for balls.

Looking for balls!

Do you want kids?

I think I want to meet someone I want to have that discussion with. Wait! Let’s go back to the balls! What would you think I would do if I felt more sure of myself? Like, I feel pretty confident. I’m not trying to get into a relationship right away.

I’m trying to get mature and evolve as a person. Even cutting out the internet and social-media stuff and reading more, is a good step in the right direction.

Do other comics ever pressure you to do more?

I got lunch with Bobby Cannavale, who plays Chef Jeff, and Louis CK was there. And I say hi to Louis, and he’s like, Yeah, I’m shooting something. And I’m like, Fuck, man! He’s, like, making something he’s excited about. So then I’m like: What am I doing? I need to make something! I need to make something again! You know? Or I walk by and I see posters for Chappelle’s shows at Radio City. I’m like, I need to do shows! What am I doing? I need to write a new stand-up set!

But if I’m in Italy, I don’t think about any of that shit. I see an old man riding a bike and I’m like, That looks nice.

That makes sense.

I hope more people get very successful and then quit.

Shouldn’t that be the game? That you make a bunch of money and just move to Italy and live a quiet life? No one does it! You do a bunch of shit and you just want to do more shit. Tom Cruise! Look at that guy! He will not stop. He’s still making these fucking movies. No one who does what I do – or anywhere related in my world – is ever like, I’m done.

That’s why I travel so much. I always think about this thing someone once told me. They said, patterns are the work of the devil. For some reason that stuck in my head. And I don’t even know if it’s true.

Who said that to you?

I don’t want to say. Because it’s... I mean, I guess I can tell you. Diane Sawyer said that to me... She said, “You’re falling into a pattern, and patterns are the work of the devil.”

What is it about Italy?

I just love the culture. It just clicks with me. I love spritzes, I love espresso. I feel like I’ve talked about pasta too much, but

LOCATION: HOTEL RAPHAEL, PARIS

to test all sorts of different things, right? And if that was the case, there’s millions of realities. How can we possibly think we’re in the one real one? In all likelihood, we’re in one of the fake ones. For all we know, this could be a simulation for some executive to be like, If we gave an Indian guy a show, it would resonate with people! And they ran the simulation and we’re living it and we’re just sims. And they decided to greenlight Master Of None in the real world.

I do like pasta. I just love their whole attitude towards life.

With dinner over, we leave the restaurant and start walking to the Ferris wheel.

Maybe we should grab some candy for our walk. What’s your favourite candy?

I don’t eat a ton of candy, but I like orange Starbursts.

That’s definitely the worst flavour, man.

People like orange! By the way, if you put this in the article, you realise I will get a fucking massive packet of Starbursts sent to me.

You’re welcome?

I don’t want them! If you’re reading this, Starbursts social-media person, please don’t send me the Starbursts. Send them to some needy children that need Starbursts.

What’s your favourite thing that you’ve been mailed unsolicited?

My favourite thing anyone ever gave me unsolicited was one time I did a show at the Largo in Los Angeles and this woman gave me a painting of Soulja Boy. And I still have it. It’s Soulja Boy just kind of looking out the window.

It’s incredible. What fragrance are you wearing?

Tom Ford Oud Wood.

Whoa. So someone gave me that recently. But I put it on – I think it smells great – and it just went away. How do you put it on? I need your spray technique.

TROUSERS, SUNGLASSES; BOTH

BY SAINT LAURENT

BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. WATCH BY ROLEX GROOMING: MARIANNE AGB. PRODUCTION: PRODUCTION PARIS

Tom Ford once told me in an interview that you can never spray too much of a good cologne.

I mean, that can’t be right. [Laughs] He takes so many baths a day, I’m sure he always smells amazing.

That’s a thing I’m into!

Baths?

Baths! I’m really into soaking tubs.

How difficult was it being a young Indian kid growing up in South Carolina?

You know, people always ask me that, and it’s not the answer people expect. It was so different back then. If I was growing up there now, being the only Indian or brown-looking kid, I think it’d be a nightmare, because of all the Islamophobia. But none of that existed back then.

They didn’t have much to make fun of me with, and they’d never really met any other minorities. Plus, I grew up with all these people since, like, kindergarten, so they all just knew me.

That’s ironic, really. American Muslims are probably the only minority who, if you turn back the clock, would be treated better in America.

Much better! Wait! You didn’t tell me your cologne-spray technique. I’ve gotta get the black-dude cologne-spray strategy. I feel like black dudes always smell good and they somehow are doing a different spray technique than I’m doing.

Who’s the best-smelling black dude – myself excluded – that you’ve ever smelled?

Ginuwine smells really good. He did Parks And Rec and… he smelled really good every time I ran into him.

Did you ask him what cologne he was wearing?

I didn’t ask. Q-Tip smells really good! I asked him what cologne he was wearing once. And he was like, Oh, you know, and he walked away. He didn’t want to tell me.

What’s the best advice you’ve received as of late?

I was talking to Spike Jonze the other day, and he was like, Yeah, I’m not really doing anything right now. My rule is, if it’s not more fun than going surfing, I’m not gonna do it. I love when I say no to everything. [Laughs] But are you afraid to let too much time go by? Are you afraid to miss your wave?

Undeniable is undeniable... And I’m not gonna make something else until I think it’s undeniable.

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FOLKS!

image: shutterstock

THAT's ALL

200 —

november 2017

Hollywood thinks it is threatened by technology. In fact, the battle is over – and Silicon Valley has won. With theatre attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, the kind of disruption that hit music, publishing and other industries is already reshaping the entertainment business. From AI Aaron Sorkin to CGI actors to algorithmic editing, Nick Bilton explores what lies ahead

I . The RaindRop MoMenT

S

ome time ago, the vision of Hollywood’s economic future came into terrifyingly full and rare clarity. I was standing on the set of a relatively small production, in Burbank, just north of Los Angeles, talking to a screenwriter about how inefficient the film-and-TV business appeared to have become. Before us, after all, stood some 200 members of the crew, who were milling about in various capacities, checking on lighting or setting up tents, but mainly futzing with their smartphones, passing time or nibbling on snacks from the craft-service tents. When I commented to the screenwriter that such a scene might give a Silicon Valley venture capitalist a stroke on account of the apparent unused labour and excessive cost involved in staging such a production – which itself was statistically uncertain of success – he merely laughed and rolled his eyes.

“You have no idea,” he told me.

After a brief pause, he relayed an anecdote, from the set of a network show, that was even more terrifying: The production was shooting a scene in the foyer of a law firm, which the lead rushed into from the rain to utter some line that this screenwriter had composed. After an early take, the director yelled “Cut”, and this screenwriter, as is customary, ambled off to the side with the actor to offer a comment on his delivery. As they stood there chatting, the screenwriter noticed that a tiny droplet of rain remained on the actor’s shoulder. Politely, as they spoke, he brushed it off. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an employee from the production’s wardrobe department rushed over to berate him. “That is not your job,” she scolded. “That is my job.”

The screenwriter was stunned. But he had also worked in Hollywood long enough to understand what she was really saying: Quite literally, wiping rain off an actor’s wardrobe was her job – a job that was well-paid and protected by a union.

And, as with the other couple of hundred people on set, only she could perform it.

This raindrop moment, and the countless similar incidents that I’ve observed on sets or heard about from people I’ve met in the industry, may seem harmless and ridiculous enough on its face. But it reinforces an eventuality that seems both increasingly obvious and uncomfortable – one that might occur

november 2017

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THE REAL THREAT WAS THAT NETFLIX WAS DOING IT ALL WITH THE POWER OF COMPUTING. SOON AFTER HOUSE OF CARDS’ REMARKABLE DEBUT, THE LATE DAVID CARR PRESCIENTLY NOTED IN THE TIMES, “THE SPOOKY PART…? EXECUTIVES AT THE COMPANY KNEW IT WOULD BE A HIT BEFORE ANYONE SHOUTED ‘ACTION’.

BIG BETS ARE NOW BEING INFORMED BY BIG DATA”

I

n the mid-Nineties, the first time I downloaded an MP3, I realised that the music industry was in grave trouble.

People who were my age (I wasn’t old enough to legally drink yet) didn’t want to spend $20 on a whole compact disc when all we coveted was a single song on the album.

Moreover, we wanted our music immediately: We preferred to download it (illegally) from Napster or eventually (legally) from iTunes without the hassle of finding the nearest music store. It turned out that this proclivity for efficiency – customising your music and facilitating the point of sale – was far from a generational instinct. It explains why the music industry is roughly half the size it was a decade ago.

These preferences weren’t confined to music, either. I also felt the raindrop moment firsthand when I began working at The New York Times, in the early Noughties. Back then, the newspaper’s website was treated like a vagrant, banished to a separate building blocks away from the paper’s newsroom on West 43rd Street. Up-and-coming blogs – Gizmodo, Instapundit and Daily Kos, which were setting the stage for bigger and more advanced entities, such as Business Insider and BuzzFeed – were simultaneously springing up across the country. Yet they were largely ignored by the Times as well as by editors and publishers at other news outlets. More often than not, tech-related advances – including e-readers 202 —

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and free online blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Tumblr – were laughed at as drivel by the entire industry, just as Napster had been years earlier.

Of course, the same logic that had decimated music would undermine print publishing: Readers didn’t want to travel to a newsstand to buy a whole newspaper when they were interested only in a story or two. And, in so many cases, they really didn’t care all that much whose byline was at the top of the piece. Subsequently, newspaper advertising revenues fell from $67 billion in 2000 to $19.9 billion in 2014. Meanwhile, the same pummelling occurred in the book publishing world. Many consumers didn’t want hardcover books for $25 when digital versions were available for $9.99. An algorithm generally provided better suggestions than an actual in-store clerk. And consumers never had to leave home to get the book they wanted. Amazon, knowing this, eviscerated the business. While print sales in the US have finally levelled out (largely through a reliance on science fiction and fantasy), the industry has seen sales fall precipitously over the past decade.

Hollywood, these days, seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption. Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content, its labour is costly and margins are shrinking. Yet, when I ask people in Hollywood if they fear such a fate, their response is generally one of defiance.

Film executives are smart and nimble, but many also

IMAGE: ALAMY (NY TIMES), AFP (BEN-HUR)

to you every time you stream Narcos or watch a former ingénue try to reinvent herself as a social media icon or athleisure-wear founder: Hollywood, as we once knew it, is over.

assert that what they do is mGm’s so specialised that it can’t be ben-hur, which compared to the sea changes was produced in other disrupted media.

“We’re different,” one producer by mark burnett, told me. “No one can do what cost $100 we do.” mIllIon and yet That response – it’s worth Grossed only recalling – is what many $11 mIllIon in its editors and record producers once said. And the numbers openinG weekend reinforce the logic. Movie theatre attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering around $10 billion – or about what Amazon’s, Facebook’s or Apple’s stock might move in a single day. DreamWorks Animation was sold to Comcast for a relatively meagre $3.8 billion. Last year, Paramount was valued at about $10 billion, approximately the same price as when Sumner Redstone acquired it, more than 20 years ago, in a bidding war against Barry Diller. Between 2007 and 2011, overall profits for the big five movie studios – Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and Disney – fell by 40 per cent. Studios now account for less than 10 per cent of their parent companies’ profits. By 2020, according to some forecasts, that share will fall to around 5 per cent. (Disney, partly owing to Star Wars and its other successful franchises, is likely to be a notable outlier.)

Show business, in many ways, has entered a vicious cycle set off by larger economic forces. Some 70 per cent of box office comes from abroad, which means that studios must traffic in the sort of blow-’em-up action films and comic-book thrillers that translate easily enough to Mandarin. Or in reboots and sequels that rely on existing intellectual property. But even that formula has dried up. Chinese firms, including Dalian Wanda, are rabidly acquiring companies such as Legendary Entertainment, AMC and Carmike Cinemas, a smaller theatre chain, with an apparent goal of learning how Hollywood does what it does so China can do it better.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in the summer of

2016, more sequels bombed than did not. Fortune called it “a summer of big flops”.

But the real threat isn’t China. It’s Silicon Valley.

Hollywood, in its over-reliance on franchises, has ceded the vast majority of the more stimulating content to premium networks and over-the-top services such as HBO and Showtime and, increasingly, digital-native platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. These companies also have access to analytics tools that Hollywood could never fathom, and an allergy to its inefficiency. Few have seen the change as closely as Diller himself, who went from running Paramount and Fox to building his own tech empire, IAC. “I don’t know why anyone would want a movie company today,” Diller said at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit last year. “They don’t make movies; they make hats and whistles.” (Half of the people in the audience, likely representing the tech industry, laughed at this quip; the other half, from Hollywood, cringed.)

When I spoke to Mike Moritz, the iconic venture capitalist, backstage at the event, he noted that a nominal investment in a somewhat successful tech company could generate more money than Hollywood’s top-grossing movies. “In my mind,” he said, “Hollywood is dying.”

II. here comes facebook

P

art of the problem, it seems, is that Hollywood still views its interlopers from the north as rivals. In reality, though, Silicon Valley has already won. It’s just that Hollywood hasn’t quite figured that out yet.

When Netflix started creating its own content in 2013, it shook the industry. The scariest part for entertainment executives wasn’t simply that Netflix was shooting and bankrolling TV and film projects, essentially rendering irrelevant the line between the two.

(Indeed, what’s a movie without a theatre? Or a show that comes available in a set of a dozen episodes?) The real threat was that Netflix was doing it all with the power of computing. Soon after House Of Cards’ remarkable debut, the late David Carr presciently noted in the Times, “The spooky part...? Executives at the company knew it would be a hit before anyone shouted ‘Action’. Big bets are now being informed by Big Data.”

Carr’s point underscores a larger, more significant trend.

Netflix is competing not so much with the established Hollywood infrastructure as with its real nemeses: Facebook, Apple, Google (the parent company of YouTube) and others.

There was a time not long ago when technology companies appeared to stay in their lanes, so to speak: Apple made computers; Google engineered search; Microsoft focused on office software. It was all genial enough that the CEO of one tech giant could sit on the board of another, as Google’s Eric Schmidt did at Apple.

These days, however, all the major tech companies are competing viciously for the same thing: your attention. november 2017

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But all those TV workers feel as if they are in safe harbour, given that the production side of a project is protected by the unions – there’s the PGA, DGA, WGA, SAG-AFTRA, MPEG and ICG, to name just a few. These unions, however, are actually unlikely to pose a significant, or lasting, protection.

Newspaper guilds have been steadily vanquished in the past decade. They may have prevented people from losing jobs immediately, but in the end they have been complicit in big buyouts that have shrunk the newspaper industry’s workforce by 56 per cent since 2000. Moreover, start-ups see entrenched government regulation, and inert unions, not so much as impediments but as one more thing to disrupt. Uber and Lyft have largely dominated unions and regulators as they have spread around the world. Unions did not impede Airbnb from growing across American cities. (The company has over 3 million listings in 65,000 cities.) Google, Facebook, ad-tech giants and countless others have all but stampeded demands for increased privacy online from groups such as the ACLU. And that’s just to cite the most obvious examples. In the Fifties, the movies were the third-largest retail business in the US, surpassed only by grocery stores and car dealerships. Look what Silicon Valley has already done to the other two sectors.

Four years after the debut of House Of Cards, Netflix, which earned an astounding 54 Emmy nominations in 2016, is spending over $6 billion a year on original content. Amazon isn’t far behind. Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are all experimenting with original content of their own. Microsoft owns one of the most profitable products in your living room, the Xbox, a gaming platform that is also a hub for TV, film and social media. As The Hollywood Reporter noted this year, traditional TV executives are petrified that Netflix and its ilk will continue to pour money into original shows and films and continue to lap up the small puddle of creative talent in the industry. In July, at a meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, FX Networks’ then-President (now CEO), John Landgraf, said, “I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if one company was able to seize a 40, 50, 60 per cent share in storytelling.”

It would be wrong, however, to view this trend as an apocalypse. This is only the beginning of the disruption.

So far, Netflix has merely managed to get DVDs to people more quickly (via streaming), disrupt the business plan of the traditional once-a-week, ad-supported television show and help solidify the verb “binge” in today’s culture. The laborious and inefficient way shows and films are still made has not been significantly altered. That set I visited in Los Angeles with its 200 workers wasn’t for an NBC or FX show; it was actually a production for a streaming service. The same waste and bloated budgets exist across the entire industry. To put the atrophy into perspective, a single episode of a typically modest television show can cost $3 million to shoot and produce. By comparison, a typical start-up in Silicon Valley will raise that much to run a team of engineers and servers for two years.

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t the heart of the disruption is the most profound element of Hollywood: the theatre.

Just as customers now generally eschew albums for singles (or streaming services such as Spotify), and hardcovers for more economical e-books, we will eventually stop going to the movies, which are already expensive, limiting and inconvenient. Instead, the movies will come to us. If the industry continues the process of “windowing” (in which studios wait weeks, or sometimes months, to release a film that has already been in the theatres, onto other platforms), people will continue to steal a movie they want to see, or they’ll simply stop watching them altogether. (In 2015, the top films in theatres were illegally downloaded more than half a billion times.) Meanwhile, consumers will continue to opt for other forms of entertainment, such as YouTube, Netflix and videogames, or turn to Instagram or Facebook.

And it’s only a matter of time – perhaps a couple of years – before movies will be streamed on social media sites. For Facebook, it’s the natural evolution. The company, which has a staggering 2 billion-plus monthly active users, literally a quarter of the planet, is eventually going to run out of new people it can add to the service. Perhaps the best way to continue to entice Wall Street investors to buoy the stock – Facebook is currently the world’s seventh-largest company by market valuation – will be to keep eyeballs glued to the platform for longer periods of time. What better way to do that than a two-hour film?

This might begin with Facebook’s VR experience. You slip on a pair of Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theatre with your friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.”

IF YOU COULD GIVE A COMPUTER ALL THE BEST SCRIPTS EVER WRITTEN, IT WOULD EVENTUALLY BE ABLE TO WRITE ONE THAT MIGHT COME CLOSE TO REPLICATING AN AARON SORKIN SCREENPLAY

III. AI AARON SORKIN

T

he speed with which technologies can change an industry today is truly staggering. Uber, which is eight years old, is worth more than 80 per cent of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. When Silicon Valley goes after a new industry, it does so with a punch to the gut.

Hollywood executives may invoke their unique skills, but engineers are unlikely to see things quite that way. We generally assume that artificial intelligence poses a risk to lowerskilled jobs, such as trucking or driving cabs. But the reality is that the creative class will not be unharmed by software and artificial intelligence. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are looking at ways to teach computers how to corral information so as to perceive occurrences before they even happen. At present, this application anticipates events that will move markets, or monitors security cameras to help emergency responders before something tragic occurs.

But there are other applications for these kinds of technologies, too. If you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. In such a scenario, it’s unlikely that an algorithm would be able to write the next Social Network, but the end result would likely compete with the mediocre, and even quite good, fare that still populates many screens each holiday season. The form of automation would certainly have a massive impact on editors, who laboriously slice and dice hundreds of hours of footage to create the best “cut” of a film or TV show. What if AI could do that by analysing hundreds of thousands of hours of award-winning footage? An AI bot could create 50 different cuts of a film and stream them to consumers, analysing where viewers grow bored or excited, and change the edits in real time, almost like A/B testing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better.

Actors, in many ways, have been disrupted for years – from the reliance on costumed superheroes to the rise of CGI film-making. Many agents whom I’ve spoken with already seem to know this and have moved their portfolios away from Hollywood to include, among others, clients from professional sports. There is a reason we see so many once-promising actors, from Jessica Alba to Kate Hudson to Jessica Biel to the Mowry sisters, looking to reinvent themselves in new careers

during their 30s and 40s, once their prime. The future augurs less of a need for actors other than – despite Donald Trump’s puerile objections – the Meryl Streeps of the world.

Kim Libreri, who spent years in the film industry working on special effects for films such as The Matrix and Star Wars, predicts that by 2022 graphics will be so advanced that they will be “indistinguishable from reality.” In some respects, that is already on the verge of happening. If you watched Rogue One, you will have noticed that Peter Cushing appeared as one of the main actors in the film, which was shot last year in London. Cushing, who died in 1994, was (mostly) rendered in CGI. The same was true for Princess Leia, played by the late Carrie Fisher, who has a cameo at the end. The CGI-enhanced version of herself hasn’t aged a day since 1977. “While stars used to be able to make a movie, now they can hurt it,” one Hollywood producer lamented to me. His outlook resembled Moritz’s: “The movie star, like everything else in Hollywood, is dying.”

IV. THE AUDIENCE WINS

I

n all of these instances of technological disruption – AI, CGI actors, algorithmic editors, etc – there will be the exceptions. Like everything else involving money and creativity, there will indeed be a top category – those who have great, new, innovative ideas and stand above everyone else – that is truly irreplaceable. (Indeed, this has proved to be the case in music, journalism and publishing.)

There will be great screenwriters and even great actors. The real winners, however, are the consumers. We won’t have to pay $50 to go to the movies on a date night, and we’ll be able to watch what we want to watch, when we want and, most important, where we want.

And while Hollywood could take control of its fate, it’s very difficult for mature businesses – ones that have operated in similar ways for decades and where the top players have entrenched interests – to embrace change from within. Instead, one can imagine the future looking something like this: You come home (in a driverless car) and say aloud to Alexa or Siri or some AI assistant that doesn’t exist yet, “I want to watch a comedy with two female actors as the leads.” Alexa responds, “OK, but you have to be at dinner at 8pm. Should I make the movie one hour long?” “Sure, that sounds good.” Then you’ll sit down to watch on a television that resembles digital wallpaper.

(Samsung is currently working on flexible displays that will roll up like paper and could encompass an entire room.) And you might, through the glory of AI, be able to watch with your spouse, who is halfway around the world on a business trip.

There are other, more dystopian theories, which predict that film and videogames will merge, and we will become actors in a movie, reading lines or being told to “look out!” as an exploding car comes hurtling in our direction, not too dissimilar from Mildred Montag’s evening rituals in Fahrenheit 451. When we finally get there, you can be sure of two things. The bad news is that many of the people on the set of a standard Hollywood production won’t have a job any more. The good news, however, is that we’ll never be bored again.

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MARTAND KHOSLA

A VANITY UNIT BY VILLEROY & BOCH AT THE INTERSEKT SHOWROOM

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A MOST AMERICAN TERRORIST

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NOVEMBER 2017

IMAGE: REX FEATURES. “A Most American Terrorist: The Making Of Dylann Roof” Copyright © 2017, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited

“What are you?” a member of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston said at the trial of the white man who killed eight of her fellow black parishioners and their pastor. “What kind of subhuman miscreant could commit such evil?... What happened to you, Dylann?”

RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH spent months in South Carolina searching for an answer to those questions – speaking with Roof’s mother, father, friends, former teachers and victims’ family members, all in an effort to unlock what went into creating one of the coldest killers of our time

NOVEMBER 2017

– 223

itting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them.

They were a small prayer group – a rising-star preacher, an elderly minister, eight women, one young man and a little girl. But to him, they were a problem. He believed that, as black Americans, they were raping “our women and are taking over our country.” So he took out his Glock handgun and calmly, while their eyes were closed in prayer, opened fire on the 12 people gathered in the basement of Mother Emanuel AME Church and shot almost every single one of them dead.

S

THE CRUCIBLE

A

t the trial last December, two survivors and the many relatives of the victims sat in a courtroom and looked at the back of Dylann Roof’s head, the thinness of his neck. The ever-growing bald patch at the centre of his bowl cut almost made him look like a young, demented monk with a tonsure. He was dressed in the sort of get-up that a man wears when life hasn’t presented him with many opportunities to wear a suit: a worn crewneck sweater and thick polyester khakis that hung low over cheap-looking brown leather dress shoes.

During two stages of his trial, Dylann Roof decided to represent himself. When family members of the victims testified, they listened to him, without looking over, as he lifted himself weakly from his chair and dismissed them from the stand with his deep, always bored, blunt voice, which sounded like his mouth was full of Karo syrup. He didn’t object often, but when he did it was because he was bothered by the length and the amount of testimony that the families offered.

Whenever he stood to be walked back to his holding cell, his 224 –

NOVEMBER 2017

mouth moved with what I first thought was a sigh or a deep exhale – really, it was an ever-present twitch, a gumming of his cheeks that sometimes ended with his tongue lolling out and licking his thin lips.

Felicia Sanders, one of the few survivors, told the courtroom early on that Roof belonged in the pit of hell.

Months later, she said that because of him she can no longer close her eyes to pray. She can’t stand to hear the sound of firecrackers or even the patter of acorns falling. Because of Dylann Roof, Felicia Sanders had been forced to play dead by lying in her dying son’s blood, while holding her hand over her whimpering grandbaby’s mouth. She had pressed her hand down so tight that she said she feared she would suffocate the girl. Eighteen months later, Felicia Sanders pointed that same hand towards Dylann Roof in the courtroom and said, with no doubt in her voice at all, that it was simple – that man there was “pure evil”.

Their vitriol was warranted but also unexpected, since in most of the press coverage of the shooting it had largely been erased. Almost every white person I spoke with in Charleston during the trial praised the church’s resounding forgiveness of the young white man who shot their members down. The forgiveness was an absolution of everything. No one made mention that this forgiveness was individual, not collective. Some of the victims and their families forgave him, and some of them did not. No one acknowledged that Dylann Roof had not once apologised, shown any remorse or asked for this forgiveness. Or the fact that with 573 days to think about his crime, Dylann Roof stood in front of the jurors and, with that thick, slow tongue of his, said without any hesitation whatsoever, “I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it.”

On the first morning that Felicia Sanders testified, I was seated directly behind Dylann Roof’s mother, and because she is skin and bones, it was apparent that she was having some kind of fit. She trembled and shook until her knees buckled and she slid slowly onto the bench, mouth agape, barely moving. She said, over and over again, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She seemed to be speaking to her boyfriend, but maybe it was meant for Felicia Sanders, who was soon to take the stand. A communiqué that was a part of the bond that mothers have, one that was brought up by the radiant shame one must feel when your son has wreaked unforgivable havoc on another mother’s child. Whatever it was, it was Gothic.

When Dylann Roof’s mother fainted in the courtroom, a reporter from ABC and I called for a medic, and not knowing what else to do, I used my tissues to put a wet towel on her forehead and started dabbing it – before I felt out of place, or realised that I was too much in place, inside of a history of caretaking and comforting for fainting white women when the real victims were seated across the aisle, still crying. But even during all of this chaos, this pain that made the courtroom feel swollen with grief, Dylann Roof did not appear to look back at his very own mother.

After he was found guilty, they went up to the podium, one by one, when it was time for the victimimpact testimony, and standing near the jury box, they screamed, wept, prayed, cursed. Some demanded that he acknowledge them. “Look at me, boy!” one raged. He did not. Others professed love for him. He did not care. Some said they were working the Devil from his body. Feel it, they shouted. He did not appear to feel anything.

I had come to Charleston intending to write about them,

the nine people who were gone. But from gavel to gavel, as I listened to the testimony of the survivors and family members, often the only thing I could focus on, and what would keep me up most nights while I was there, was the magnitude of Dylann Roof’s silence, his refusal to even look up, to ever explain why he did what he had done. He remained inscrutable. He remained in control, just the way he wanted to be.

And so, after weeks in the courtroom, and shortly before Dylann Roof was asked to stand and listen to his sentence, I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would.

Which is why I left Charleston, the site of his crime, and headed inland to Richland County, to Columbia, South Carolina – to find the people who knew him, to see where Roof was born and raised. To try to understand the place where he wasted 21 years of a life until he committed an act so heinous that he became the first person sentenced to die for a federal hate crime in the entire history of the United States of America.

IMAGE: REX FEATURES (GUN), GETTY IMAGES (CHURCH, GRIEVING PEOPLE), REUTERS (CCTV)

Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015, armed with a Glock handgun and 88 bullets

 FATHER

D

ylann had always preferred Charleston.

Charleston had history. It was once home to the most enslaved people in the country. It was a city full of relics and buildings that reminded him of a time when white men were mighty, and the masters of their dominions, a time when they had prevailed. Not like his hometown. Not like Columbia.

Dylann Roof’s father lives on a dead-end street at the edge of Columbia, across from a lot that is as vast and empty as the end of the world. Behind the lot, there is a small apartment building that is lit up with too many halogen lights, probably to keep people from loitering and doing the dumb shit people do when they think nobody can see them. But that’s it. There is nothing else at the end of the street except the Roofs’ little house.

The house itself is well made. Low-slung, yellow, a Craftsman-style bungalow. It is in a nice enough neighbourhood, but still looks like a place where people go when their dreams elsewhere have washed up and gone dry. On the mailbox, there is a route sign: end 1 key west.

And on the door there are two faded Ron Jon Surf Shop stickers and a smaller “I Voted” sticker. Someone has tied an American flag to the tree out front. The decals, the rusted wind chimes and the slightly mildewed lawn furniture give the house the feel of one man’s Margaritaville.

I stood there across the street, lying in wait. Waiting for what? An answer. A reason. A detail I could take with me to help make sense of impossibly awful things. Enveloped in that moonless night, I knocked on the door of the yellow house, and in the confusion of having an unknown black woman at his door a few hours before midnight, wanting to talk about his son, Bennett Roof let me come in and

When Dylann Roof’s mother fainted in the courtroom, a reporter from ABC and I called for a medic, and not knowing what else to do, I used my tissues to put a wet towel on her forehead and started dabbing it – before I felt out of place, or realised that I was too much in place, inside of a history of caretaking and comforting for fainting white women when the real victims were seated across the aisle, still crying Mother Emanuel AME Church was founded in 1816 after earlier structures were burned to the ground in violent repudiation of the all-black ministry

NOVEMBER 2017

– 225

handed me an ice-cold beer that tasted like relief in my paper-dry mouth, parched from nerves.

And then I took a seat on the couch where his son used to sleep, feet away from the computer where his son wrote his explanation of why he had to kill nine black people, feet away from the file cabinet where Dylann Roof sometimes stored his jacket with its flag patches from African apartheid states.

Bennett Roof was wary but kind. He watched me closely while I petted the affectionate mackerel tabby cat that his son had taken so many pictures of but still left behind. I watched him closely when I asked him to make sense of something that he said he could not. In a living room full of paintings of Florida and parrots, all that Dylann Roof’s father could say, over and over again, was: “I don’t know what happened, I just know that the boy wasn’t raised that way.”

Even when I pushed him, he said it again, and then he shook his head and kept saying it until he asked me to leave, with the sad look of a man who wanted any other life than this one. After Dylann did what he did, there was no going back to Key West, or to some easy before. There was just this, just intrusions from strangers who wanted an answer and felt the nature of his son’s crime warranted one – and just Benn Roof letting his two giant Rottweilers out the front door to track me and to make sure I’d gone back into the dark street and the black night I’d come from.

Benn Roof never showed up at his son’s trial. In Dylann’s farewell note to his father, found torn out of a journal in the backseat of his car, there is no nostalgia. It is devoid of a loving tone, except to say to his father that he was a good dad. In the card Benn Roof gave his son just four months before, for his 21st birthday, there is that same terse tone. Benn told his only son that he was proud of him, and here was an IOU for $400, so that Dylann could finally apply for a permit and purchase a gun. (Contacted later, Benn Roof declined to participate in this story further, describing it as “fake news”.)

UVUV THE EDUCATION OF DYLANN ROOF

I

t is as if he floated through people’s lives leaving nothing for them to recall. One teacher who spent time with him in her classroom every day says that she typically has a good memory, but she apologises because she really can’t remember anything about him. He did absolutely nothing that would trigger any attention except that he compulsively used hand sanitiser. Dylann Roof emptied bottles and bottles of the stuff into his hands, so much so that

The students were grouped together, with clear affection, almost hugging, giggling with ease. And then I found him. Off-centre, straining at a smile, with sad eyes, standing to the side, in a natty-looking red jacket, with his bowl-cut blond hair, already looking like a boy apart

226 –

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it became something of a running joke in class that Dylann could not do anything, not even go to lunch, until he had disinfected and scrubbed his hands clean. As if he were aware of some stain or some filth that others did not see.

In the aftermath of the murders, many of Roof’s former classmates rushed to do interviews. This infuriated Roof, who cautioned in his journal: “Many of the people who claimed to have known me, I have never heard of in my life.

Anything these so-called friends have said about me should be interpreted as lies. I haven’t had a black friend in years, and have never had a close black friend.”

When Caleb Brown sat down at my table in a restaurant in downtown Columbia, what was surprising was not only how many heads turned when he walked in but also that Dylann Roof’s closest childhood friend is mixed race and looks black.

When I asked Caleb if Dylann knew he was black, he laughed.

“If you look at me, I don’t think you’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s a white boy.’”

Caleb and Dylann were already classmates when their mothers, who had been childhood friends, realised that they both had sons who were the same age and in the same class.

Their mothers’ bond pushed the boys together. Yes, Dylann knew he was black, and it didn’t alter things. Dylann even once asked him about his brown skin, as kids will do. They had similar interests – skateboarding, wrestling, videogames.

So after school, they regularly hung out together, even though Caleb found Dylann to be slow-witted.

“I just remember that he wasn’t necessarily doing that good in school on the easy stuff. And it wasn’t just books; in everything he was just… dull,” he said. “He wasn’t really streetsmart. Let’s say we were at the park, and we had to run away, he’d be kinda slow on getting what we needed to do.” As they grew older and their interests diverged, Dylann wasn’t the sort of kid you took along with you, because “he just wasn’t with it.”

Caleb, a musician and rapper, is thin and tall. The two times we talked, he was dressed in a uniform of red-goldand-green Adidas shell toes, a punk T-shirt, skinny jeans, and an oversize bomber jacket. He had thick dreadlocks that reached his shoulders. The second time we spoke, he wore gleaming gold grills. This is to say, he looks cool, and it makes sense that puberty became a schism between them and that they hadn’t seen each other in years.

They were so estranged by the time of the murders that when Caleb read Roof’s writings, what shocked him was not just the hatred but also that the dull, slow kid he knew could even string together a coherent collection of thoughts: “For a long time, I thought Dylann had to have read someone else’s writing or been coached, because the kid I knew couldn’t write or even think like that.”

When I told one of Roof’s teachers that I’d been in touch with some of his classmates, the mention of Caleb delighted her. This happened with many people, including with Dylann’s mother. She was the only person besides Caleb who confirmed that the two boys had ever been friends.

(Otherwise, Amelia Roof declined to participate in this story.) Their teacher said, “Maybe Dylann’s mother wanted him to be close with Caleb, but I can’t really see it.”

Dylann and Caleb’s elementary-school principal, Ted Wachter, administered Rosewood Elementary for three decades. Before that, he grew up in Queens, and he still has a strong New York accent even after 30 years in South Carolina.

IMAGE: REX FEATURES (DYLANN)

At his home in Columbia, he sat in a tall chair that made him look magisterial, but his gestures softened into the swagger of a liberal-arts professor. After he and his wife handed me a bowl of pistachios and a glass of white wine, Wachter, who talks fast and without shyness, asked me if I wanted to hear his theory on what happened to Dylann Roof. He started at the very beginning. Back when he heard on the radio about “this tragedy in Charleston” and the name Dylann Roof came up, Wachter thought to himself, Hell, I know that name.

Dylann showed up at Rosewood at the age when social relationships become “class driven” and start to “self-sort”.

Wachter, who has a background in sociology, watched in dismay as “those black-white relationships also started fraying. They just broke up, and I don’t think anyone wanted it to, but the social pressures are so strong.

“And when Dylann came,” Wachter observed, “I remember him because he was quiet. I always remember thinking, ‘This is a nice, handsome-looking boy.’ I’ll show you his picture in the yearbook. Handsome, cute, but quiet, and he never was in my office for trouble. He was very quiet, and he wasn’t part of the in crowd, which was more…

The kids of college-educated families. He wasn’t part of that.

He was with the working-class kids.

“To understand Dylann, you need to read The Hidden Injuries Of Class,” Wachter said. What that book revealed was “how white working-class people in Boston, in South Boston, the more you interviewed them, what came out, especially after a few beers, is how inferior they felt to all the Harvard, Cambridge, bright, educated people.” In Wachter’s mind, Dylann wasn’t stupid, but he felt displaced. It was a case of class resentment. “And here’s the funny thing: If I had a dinner party right here with just white PhDs, it would not be socially acceptable for me to make any slur to an African-American person or a Hispanic person or a Muslim, but if I refer to poor whites as rednecks—” “Or crackers or white trash,” I interjected, saying the words he didn’t want to say.

He grimaced but acknowledged them.

“That would almost be socially acceptable to say those things. It just shows you how alienated they are. And these poor white working-class guys, they must realise this. See? So maybe Dylann’s family is a good example of downward social mobility. And Trump showed us this, that we underestimated how vulnerable and precarious self-esteem is for white, working-class people in this society. They not only see the white elites, but then they see…”

“They see us, black people, coming from behind, eclipsing them.”

Leaning forward in that tall chair, Wachter pointed at me for getting the answer right, and then he shrugged with his long arms out and asked the question he knew neither of us had an answer for.

“And, they say, ‘What are these people doing up there?

What has happened to me?’”

Before I left, I followed Wachter into his study, where his wife, Jan, pulled down a bin of yearbooks. They sorted through them until they found what they were looking for.

The three of us huddled around and peered at a picture of a young, small, diverse class full of smiling black students and a few smiling white students, as well. The students were grouped together, with clear affection, elbows on each other’s backs, almost hugging, giggling with ease. And then

I found him. Off-centre, straining at a smile, with sad eyes, standing to the side, in a natty-looking red jacket, with his bowl-cut blond hair, already looking like a boy apart.

UVUVUV THE PURITY OF THE ROOF FAMILY

“M

y blood is mostly from the British Isles, but I have been blessed with a significant amount of German blood, and a German surname,” Roof wrote. “My blood is representative of America.” Roof was preoccupied with the idea of his own purity. He did cursory studies of his family online. I’d been curious about what he might have found and so I spent time in the archives in Columbia, learning what I could about his ancestry.

The Roofs of the 19th century were not what anyone would call an illustrious family, but they did well enough in Columbia to be recorded in local history books as diligent churchgoers and good citizens. Dylann’s great-great-greatgrandfather played a minor role in the Civil War: Jesse Marion Roof had planned to become a minister, and would have if the Civil War hadn’t interrupted his studies. Instead, he married a woman named Tarsy in 1859, and three years later, he enlisted in the Confederate army as a corporal.

He was put on boat duty and ran water to Morris Island, which is best known as the site of the horrendous defeat of the first black members of the Union army. But these were not remarkable lives. If anything, they were wholly typical.

They were so typical that when I was at a local library, the only thing that caught my eye about Roof’s early ancestor was that when Jesse Marion and Tarsy Roof’s household was tallied for the census, along with their names there was listed in the household a small “mulatto” child.

“I wish with a passion that n——s were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves,” Dylann wrote on his website, TheLastRhodesian.com. Although all white Americans have benefited from the centuries of free black labour, it is true that the majority of white southerners were in no position to own anything or anyone. Dylann Roof’s ancestors also had very little, but they owned a child, an enslaved girl. There was no first name listed, but her last name was Roof, and she was 8.

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(From left) Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Susie Jackson, Tywanza Sanders, DePayne Middleton-Doctor

and wondering about her. If she was purchased, she was purchased as a child who was close to incapable of doing much work. And with no other enslaved people in the household, why was it just her? Who was her mother? Who was her father? Or was she the product of the rape of an enslaved woman, which, of course, could very well make her Dylann Roof’s ancestor, a most American part of his pure blood? The fact that he felt like he knew so much about race but didn’t know about her is why, in all of Dylann’s investigations into his family, in all of his interpretations of history and his rants against race mixing, there is the cognitive dissonance of a man looking for what never was, especially in this country: any kind of racial purity in the first place. Bennett Roof was in his mid-20s when he met Amelia. Amelia, who went by Amy, worked at a bar called the Silver Fox. She was a waifish, young divorcée, only 29, a bartender with blonde hair that was so long that some people said it went down to her ankles. It did not, but she must have looked just like a pale version of that country singer Crystal Gayle. Did Benn sense that Amy, too, came from a family that fared better in the before? Or did they sense the social decline they were both caught in and seek to plunge into it together, hand in hand?

There was no birth announcement when he arrived. In fact, on his birth certificate, there is no father even listed.

Amy named her boy Dylann Storm Roof because she liked how the name sounded from a character on the soap opera General Hospital.

In his “manifesto”, Dylann says that it is absurd to suggest that being the child of a divorce means that he had a hard life, since many people are the products of divorce.

But Dylann wasn’t really the product of divorce. His parents weren’t together when he was born; Dylann was either an accident or a love child. And the reunion did not last. For Amy, there were five addresses in just as many years – more addresses than almost seem possible. Maybe those many moves explain why no one remembers much about Dylann Roof as a boy. In the classroom and around town: He was an unmemorable ghost, until he wasn’t.

VUVUVUVU A CHURCH

T

hat Dylann Roof walked into a church and brought such violence into a sanctuary was the detail that most white people I met in South Carolina found so disturbing. That the church was predominantly black and he was white was an aside to them. To harm anyone in a church is something that you just don’t do.

Church is the centre of one’s moral education and basis for one’s life, they told me. So early one Sunday morning, I woke up and went to a service at the church that Dylann’s father and grandparents attend in Columbia.

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This black body of mine cannot be furtive. It prevents me from blending in. I cannot observe without being observed. At Dylann Roof’s church, I was greeted warmly at the door by a young white woman and a middle-aged white man. But when I entered the chapel and was seated in a rear row, many eyes turned on me, making me feel like I was a shoplifter trying to steal from their God. Was it because I didn’t know the hymns, because I didn’t take Communion, or was it because I was black? I do not know.

After the service, I told Dylann’s pastor, Tony Metze, how uncomfortable I felt being there. And even though he didn’t really have much time, Metze agreed to give me a few minutes to talk about his most famous congregant. For as long as Roof was held at the Al Cannon Detention Centre, Metze continued to visit him, and a few days after our interview in Columbia, Metze also attended the trial with Roof’s grandparents. When the murders occurred, Metze was approached by lawyers to ask kids who knew Dylann what they remembered about him, but none of them remembered much.

“What I’ve seen is: He’s a really smart kid that’s always been very interior, where stuff goes on that you’re not aware of. And there wasn’t a whole lot of interaction with the other kids,” he told me.

Out of everyone, it was his grandfather who was closest to Dylann, Metze said. “He just would not give up on Dylann. Dylann just doesn’t talk, so I think his grandfather did what grandfathers do: spend time with him, hope and pray I can nourish and strengthen this kid, bring something out in him.”

When I got the opportunity, I asked Metze about what happened to me in his church, if it was indicative of a larger inability to deal with race and racism. He pointed to a Korean church out the window and said he did not know why people liked to worship with their own. Then he told me there was one black parishioner, who comes to an earlier service.

When he finished speaking, Metze’s shoulders slumped as if he was facing a certain ruinous defeat, and he admitted that he could be wrong, but he felt like times had changed since when he was a boy in South Carolina. “I don’t know what’s going on with Dylann, but I know there’s a wickedness or evil in the world. I’m not making the connection necessarily.

There’s things I just don’t understand that get into a realm that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. How do you make sense out of that which makes no sense?”

I asked if they’d reached out to the victims.

He told me they were not sure if it would be appropriate yet to visit Mother Emanuel. He told me that they sent them cards and books about how to grieve. I did not tell him that to me this felt somewhat insulting. It came across as a weak defence. One that perhaps I shouldn’t have charged him with answering to. But in that room, we had become proxies for the people who weren’t there.

Had Dylann changed at all since the crime? I asked Metze.

Do you see a difference? I was searching for a shred of

humanity, and I think Metze saw that, because he looked disappointed to have to tell me the answer.

“Honestly?”

“Yeah?”

“No.” Metze slowly stood up. He had duties to attend to, so I told him I would let myself out. I went out the way I came in, but the doors were locked. The lights had even been turned off.

But gleaming on a windowsill was a plastic laminated binder labelled “St. Paul’s Safety & Security Plan”. I opened it. It contained instructions for the greeters, the same people who had welcomed me at the door. Without knowing what I was looking for, I started to read: “Shocking events reported in the media can cause congregations to take immediate action on emergency and security issues, but emergency planning is a long-term process… If a questionable unknown visitor arrives, be polite, engage in conversation, steer him/her to a rear row seat where you can have an Usher assigned to keep an eye on him/her… Threats can come in many forms… You are the eyes and ears for the Safety/Security program at St. Paul’s.”

I flipped through all of it, but the St. Paul’s safety binder had no instructions for what to do if the shooter was one of their own.

VUVUVUVUV THE TRAILER, THE KIDS & THE STRANGENESS

F

IMAGE: REX FEATURES

or two months in 2014 and 2015, Roof worked for Clark’s Termite & Pest Control in Irmo. There, his boss and his co-workers noticed that Roof was “often spaced or zoned out while working”, that he would “go sit somewhere else by himself, even though the rest of the crew was sitting together” and that he would fall “asleep virtually any time he was stationary.”

One co-worker told Roof’s lawyers that Roof wandered off one morning and started working on “edging three houses down from the house they were working on.” The co-worker had so much trouble getting Roof’s attention that he had to “get in front of [Roof] to get him back on the right property.” Another said he once asked Roof about hobbies and Dylann said he “did not do anything; he just went home and sat in his room.” When the co-worker asked Roof if he played videogames, Roof said, “No, I literally look at the walls.” He was a ninth-grade dropout with an online GED whose laziness was legend.

In February 2015, four months before the murders, an ad with a picture of a young man appeared on Craigslist. Roof was anonymously looking for a companion to join him on a tour of historic Charleston, and he was seeking anyone except “Jews, queers, or n——s.” The foulness and bigotry of the ad caught the eye of Dr Thomas Hiers, a retired psychologist. He reached out to Roof to try to help him, but in their exchanges Roof continued to use the same hateful, derogatory language.

Hiers offered to pay Roof to watch TED talks, because he felt Roof needed an expanded worldview or, as he later explained to Roof’s lawyers, “a different way of looking at the world.”

Roof replied to thank Hiers and told him that he seemed like a nice man, but he refused the help because “I am in bed, so depressed I cannot get out of bed. My life is wasted. I have no friends even though I am cool. I am going back to sleep.”

The day after the murders, while talking to FBI agents, Roof described a life that sounded cloudy with the same haze of idleness his co-workers spoke of. What were his days like?

They were a blur. There was a day spent at the movies; and the day of the “incident” – but he could not remember which day he had done what. Roof told them that he did not own a cell phone and that the few “friends” he did have were kids he’d reconnected with in the months before the shooting, when he went to a local library and used the computer there to create a Facebook account. He added 88 “friends”, and the majority of them were black kids who went to high school with him.

Eighty-eight because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet and two H’s is Nazi shorthand for “Heil Hitler”.

Among the friends he reconnected with that summer was Joseph “Joey” Meek, who knew Dylann in middle school.

Meek, a young white man with bloated chipmunk cheeks, had a serious marijuana habit and a permissive mother who had been asked by Amy years before to encourage the boys’ friendship. When Roof found him again, Joey was living in a rented trailer in the unincorporated area outside Columbia with his mother, his girlfriend, Lindsay Fry, and his two younger brothers, Justin and Jacob. As the summer passed, Dylann would start to crash there at times. Later, Joey would do a flurry of interviews in which he described his friendship with Roof and explained why having a friend he hadn’t seen in years stay in an already crowded trailer wasn’t at all strange. He was just that kind of person, who helped people who were down and out.

The Meeks’ rented trailer is tucked away in a circle of mobile homes that are not mobile at all. Instead, they look very lived-in, bolted down to the rough times and the twists of fate that landed their owners there. It was drizzling when I pulled into the Hideaway Park development, and a man whose face I could not see stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in an oversized hoodie and was carrying a small pit bull puppy in his arms. He walked out towards the road without saying a word to me, even when I asked him if he knew the Meeks. Out front, there was a child’s play kitchen with a sink full of stagnant, reedy water and a white car whose whole front had been sideswiped and deeply dented.

During the time he stayed there, Roof would often drive Meek and his friends to swimming holes, but then he would leave because he complained that his body could not bear the South Carolinian heat. Even in the trailer, Roof kept to himself. Meek’s mother noticed that at times Roof would get agitated and retreat to his car, where he would blast

In February 2015, four months before the murders, an ad with a picture of a young man appeared on Craigslist. Roof was anonymously looking for a companion to join him on a tour of historic Charleston, and he was seeking anyone except “Jews, queers, or n——s”

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herself proudly sticking out her pink tongue and her piercing’s Confederate-flag decal.

In a parking lot near railroad tracks, the friend speaking anonymously – and nervously, and trembling – told me that none of them are racists, they never heard Dylann say anything bigoted, the press made that up. It was a moment, a wild summer, they were just kids, and now it is all over, their friend tells me. Meek’s brothers and his mom no longer live with him; all of them have moved away from the trailer in Hideaway Park. Shortly after Roof was identified as the killer, a story circulated in the press that Dylann had been upset about a white girlfriend who had rejected him for a black boy. But Roof himself denied this in court. There was no girl. In fact, no one, not a single person anywhere, remembers Dylann Roof ever dating anyone. Occasionally he went to strip clubs; in an interview with the Charlotte Observer, Meek’s girlfriend recalled that Dylann had a preference for black strippers.

On a whim one night, I sent a series of messages to the other Meek brothers, Justin and Jacob.

I asked them lots of things about Roof that they ignored.

But when I asked Jacob if Dylann Roof was a virgin, I saw the text bubbles that meant he was typing a response.

Finally, his answer appeared: Yes. Then I saw more typing, and then another reply, containing an answer full of the immaturity and ambivalence that marked those weeks in the trailer: IDK…

The Gun On April 11, eight days after Dylann Roof turned 21, the legal age for purchasing a gun in South Carolina, he took the money his father had given him for his birthday and drove to a gun store in West Columbia called Shooter’s Choice, where he picked out a Glock .45-caliber pistol.

Since he had been arrested for drugs the year before, Roof was no longer legally able to carry a gun. But he lied on his concealed-weapon-permit application and wrote “No” on the line that asked, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

As an applicant with a criminal record, Roof should have been flagged and stopped by the FBI’s background check, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, whose task is to not let “guns fall into the wrong hands” – eg, an opioid user. The FBI has three days to deny an application. If it doesn’t, as Ronnie Thrailkill, the manager at Shooter’s Choice, testified, “the law allows dealers to transfer that gun to the potential buyer. That’s standard practice.” Without any reply from the FBI, on April 16, Dylann Roof walked out of Shooter’s Choice with his gun and five magazines of bullets.

Two-and-a-half months after the purchase, and 12 days after the shooting at Mother Emanuel, Ronnie Thrailkill, an imposing, shaggy-bearded man whose thick old-school glasses look like Cazals, received a phone call from the FBI’s NICS. They were calling to say there had been a mistake. The sale of a gun to Dylann Storm Roof should have been denied.

imaGe: GeTTy imaGes

classical music and opera to quiet his nerves. But what had made him so upset remained unknown.

In most of Roof’s friends’ accounts, there is one indisputable fact: That summer, they all did a lot of drinking and a lot of pot smoking. Roof had already been arrested the year before for possession of a Schedule III controlled narcotic. He was stalking employees at the Columbiana Centre Mall and asking them “out of the ordinary questions.” When police responded to a call, they searched him and found a “small unlabelled white bottle containing multiple orange in colour square strips.” Suboxone is typically used to wean opioid addicts off their dependence, but it can also give non-addicts a sense of euphoria, coupled with intense nausea.

In his jailhouse journal, Dylann wrote: “I don’t like it when people try to read into things, or try to find, or create meaning that isn’t there. I don’t like it when people put so much weight on the things I say. Sometimes, more now than before the incident, I feel that the people I talk to hang on my words as if they were all important or offer some sort of insight into my being. But this isn’t the case; it never is with anyone. For example, I stated before I never used drugs to ‘drown the pain’, or ‘self medicate.’ I used drugs because they get you high.

There is no deeper meaning behind this. There is no deeper meaning behind any of my behaviour.”

One person who spent time in the trailer park with Roof agreed to talk with me on the condition that I didn’t name them. When I asked what was most memorable about Roof, the answer came quickly: “He was quiet, uncomfortably quiet, strangely quiet. I mean really strange.” But in this wasteland, with this group of listless friends, Roof could talk about shooting up a college, brandish his gun, use racist slurs, all without being considered outlandish. These instances evaporated into their ears as liquored-up loose talk. To this day, Roof’s friends seem to have a striking inability to process the gravity of what he did. They have said things like: “He would talk about killing people, but none of us took him seriously.”

Perhaps some of this ennui can be attributed to age, but nothing can excuse the fact that in the days after the murders, Meek took it upon himself to encourage the rest of their friends to lie to the FBI investigators. For that crime, Meek was indicted, tried and convicted of withholding evidence and was sentenced to 27 months in prison. And one month after her roommate committed a hate crime so horrendous that it shocked the entire nation, Meek’s girlfriend posted a picture of

The Matriculation of a Murderer He travelled far to prepare for the crime. He drove that black car back and forth across the state so many times that when his GPS was recovered by the FBI, the route looked like a cat’s cradle strung out by evil.

The hatred animated him. The dots that connected it all were historical sites related to slavery and Confederate history, and practice runs to Mother Emanuel. He drove to the 400-yearold Angel Oak on Johns Island, the Museum & Library of Confederate History in Greenville, a graveyard of Confederate soldiers in his hometown and plantations like Boone Hall in Mount Pleasant. And he spent one evening at the beach on Sullivan’s Island, a place that at one point was the largest disembarkation point in the United States for ships carrying enslaved Africans.

When he was done criss-crossing those dank swamps, those barren fields that once held rice and indigo, he must have felt as accomplished in American history as any naive ninth-grade dropout can feel. He’d downloaded books about the Klan, he’d made lists of other nearby African Methodist Churches, he’d weighed the pros and cons of shooting up a church versus a black cultural festival, and he’d jotted down the name of a white church, with a note that this one was just “to visit.” He’d scribbled down Nazi crosses and Klan runes in his journal.

He’d inserted and implanted himself onto the few sites in South Carolina that recognised or incorporated the history of black Americans in the antebellum story of the state. He’d also taken portraits of himself that logged his travels, which by virtue of the medium also captured his solitude, his intense loneliness.

That Roof’s crime was a metastasisation of socially acceptable racism into something more rugged and violent was what for most southerners signalled his outsiderness. He’d killed because he was trash, they said. But in Columbia, during the trial, the gossip about what some said was the real reason had blown around the city like an ugly, chilly storm wind. It was how some of those who knew the Roof family made sense of the crime.

They said that a rape had occurred of someone close to Dylann Roof at the hands of a group of black men, and while it had been kept a secret, there was a possibility that Roof had found out and decided to seek payback on the most cowardly terms. This was why he kept saying things like “I had to do it”, and why he told the nine victims, who were predominantly women, that “they were raping our women.”

People said, one after another, that they felt compelled to tell me about it because they wanted to rip the cloak of silence away from Dylann. They felt like those families in Charleston needed to know the truth. If the story was true – that someone in Roof’s life was sexually assaulted and, because of that, he went into a church and rendered such complete destruction on nine innocent bodies – it was such an old, foundational excuse. It was a kind of twisted mythology birthed long ago in this nation, one that had been leaned on to absolve guilty men of their crimes on the innocent for centuries.

What the internet has done is transmogrify the old nature of racism. Roof was perhaps suffering from undiagnosed mental disorders. He was definitely raised in a hotbed of racism. And maybe he was activated by the rumour of the rape. But it is inarguable that he found the answer to his problems online, one of the growing number of supremacists who experience a “racist realisation” on the internet, an awakening to the fact that

they are engaged in a race war that pits white against black.

Whites against Jews, Latinos, feminists, socialists, the LBGTQ community and all non-white immigrants. They call it the “red pill” – a reference to a character’s awakening to the true state of things in The Matrix. They use lightning-bolt emojis to signal their SS sympathies on social media, subtle cues that signal their sympathies. Roof even wore shoes to federal court decorated with neo-Nazi codes and Klan runes. He thought himself part of a secret fight for the future, in which, Roof wrote, he imagined he would one day be pardoned by a sympathetic president.

Dylann Roof, then, was a child both of the whitesupremacist Zeitgeist of the internet and of his larger environment. He grew up in a state that derives a huge part of its economy from plantations that have been re-purposed as wedding venues. When I attempted to go to Boone Hall Plantation to see the exhibits and the stuffed enslaved-people dummies that Roof posed with in some of his pictures, I was told I was not welcome there unless I submitted a media request, since I might have a negative view of the plantation.

I am a black woman, the descendant of enslaved people, so I went anyway and walked along the same path that Roof did, where the quarters are set on something cheerfully marked as “Slave Street”. I stood next to the dummies that are supposed to represent black people in their deepest ignominy, and noticed that there were no dummies that were supposed to represent the masters or the mistresses of the plantation. I listened to a group of young white women sigh at the Alley of the Oaks, a corridor of trees near Slave Street. One of them lamented, “It was so beautiful that pictures couldn’t really do it justice.”

South Carolina is the sort of place where, out one evening in Columbia for dinner, only minutes after I sat down, I was accosted by six drunk upper-middle-class white women who were out with their grown daughters. After pointing in my direction, one of them staggered over and sat down, and with her thick tongue and her red eyes, she asked me if I was her Uber driver and demanded that I drive her somewhere, “girl.”

Dylann Roof was educated in a state whose educational standards from 2011 are full of lesson plans that focus on what Casey Quinlan, a policy reporter, said was “the viewpoint of slave owners” and highlight “the economic necessity of slave labour.” A state that flew the Confederate flag until a black woman named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and pulled it down. A place that still has a bronze statue of Benjamin Tillman standing at its statehouse in Columbia.

Tillman was a local politician who condoned “terrorising the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable… to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor and the semi-barbarous negroes.”

Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race. The rise of groups like Trump’s Republican Party, with its overtures to the alt-right, has emboldened men like Dylann Roof to come out of their slumber and loudly, violently out themselves. But in South Carolina, those men never disappeared, were there always, waiting. It is possible that Dylann Roof is not an outlier at all, then, but rather emblematic of an approaching storm.

Flight The 17th of June was hot and humid in Columbia. The air would’ve felt like a warm towel pressed over your face.

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he murdered Ethel Lance. Ethel Lance, unlike Roof, was needed in this world. Her deaf son, Gary, needed her, her daughters needed her, and the church that she proudly cleaned and maintained with “her special touches” – real wood wax and fresh flowers – needed her. Now she is gone.

Polly Sheppard, a retired nurse, was also in the room that night. She is a woman who has serious eyes. Her gaze can make you feel as if you’re in the grip of something vast and unwavering that just won’t let go. And her face, the high cheekbones, the depth and the lustre of her brown skin, gives her the look of a woman from a Benin plaque – proud, regal and knowing. From under a table, she watched his dirty boots circling, stopping so he could shoot her friends, “a skinny white dude” stepping through the blood and broken glass. She stayed in her prayer, she said the words out loud. When he came to her, he told her to shut up. Polly Sheppard is 72 years old. He asked her if she was shot. She told him no. And then, with those eyes on him, as if it was his choice and not their otherworldly command, she asked if he was going to shoot her, too. “I’m not going to,” he said.

“I’m going to leave you here to tell the story.”

Dylann Roof was still in the room when Polly Sheppard reached for her phone and called the police.

mother emanuel Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church looms over the downtown street where it stands and makes you stop. It is an austere but resplendent structure, made of whitewashed stucco and brick, so tall and steep that on some mornings its chapel seems to pierce the blindingly bright sun that makes its white walls gleam.

The ministry was founded in 1816, but its earlier churches were burned to the ground to punish its congregants, who had dared to test the laws of the land and believe that they, too, had a right to be religious and interpret the Scripture as it applied to them as oppressed people. In 1822, one of the church’s founders, Denmark Vesey, a free black man who was married to an enslaved woman, was accused of being the architect of a massive slave revolt. Vesey and his army of enslaved men were purported to have come up with a plan to slaughter all of the slaveholders in Charleston, free the rest of the enslaved people, and then escape to the new black republic of Haiti. Instead, he was betrayed and lynched. To

image: getty images

Smothering. After a few sleepless nights of heavy partying, sometimes staying in his car, or sometimes crashing at Joey Meek’s trailer, Dylann Roof dashed off one last post on his website: “[At] the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”

Dylann Roof arrived in Charleston at 7:48pm. In the preceding weeks, he’d purchased 88 bullets at Wal-Mart. He drove into the gated parking of the Mother Emanuel around 8:15pm. Then he walked into the basement entrance where the 12 members of the Bible Study were gathered in the Fellowship Hall.

They say he killed him, but really Roof assassinated Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

Pinckney was a state senator and a prodigious preacher whose sermons were full of black liberation theology and a rare kind of intellect. He was shot first, with three bullets, and he was the one who’d pulled out a chair for the man who would murder him. Pinckney’s death alone would have been a grave loss. But Roof, undaunted and unmoved by the prayers and the weeping of the others, continued.

The oldest man in the room, Daniel Simmons, was a veteran who always carried his gun, but that day he had left it on the seat of his car. Unarmed, he still tried to charge the shooter. Roof shot him four times, and later, he stepped over Simmons’s body on his way out.

The oldest woman in the room, Susie Jackson, was three years away from being 90. She was shot the most, 11 times.

The youngest man in the room, Tywanza Sanders, tried to reason with Roof, but when that failed, he stood up and faced Roof’s barrel so that his mother, Felicia Sanders, his aunt Susie and his niece might live. Sanders was a poet, a barber and a family man. He doted on the women in his family, in particular his aunt Susie. He died with his arm stretched out towards her.

The stranger shot and killed Sharonda ColemanSingleton and DePayne Middleton-Doctor. Women who were ministers, educators and mothers to young children.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton had three children, who look so much like her that as they sat in the courtroom, they seemed to have their mother’s face. DePayne MiddletonDoctor had four daughters, who went everywhere with her, often lined up according to height. The Doctor girls were supposed to attend the prayer meeting, but at the last minute their mother had let them stay home.

Myra Thompson had received her preaching certificate that afternoon, and after weeks of study, she would lead the group for the first time. Nothing in life had been easy for Myra Thompson. But her faith, her happy second marriage to the Reverend Anthony Thompson and her taste for St John dresses were the result of her keeping on and working hard until things had finally gotten good.

Cynthia Hurd was headed home that evening, but Felicia Sanders asked her to stay for the prayer meeting.

Cynthia Hurd was a librarian. They say kids didn’t leave her library without a library card in hand. If you love me, you will stay, Felicia Sanders teased her. For all the hate in the room that night, there was also an aegis of undiminished, undying love. We know this because Cynthia Hurd stayed.

To pull the trigger of a Glock, you must exert about six pounds of force. Roof pulled that trigger seven times when

this day in Charleston, he is regarded as a dishonourable man and homegrown terrorist, with much less said about the Charleston businessmen and slave traders who brutalised and murdered millions of enslaved Africans to make the city rich, and ultimately the effete destination that it is now.

The church structure that stands today was erected in 1892 by people who were beside themselves to finally be able to worship in public as free people, but very few know much about its history. Or that in the vestibule of the church, tucked away from the street in a nook, behind gates, is a brass diorama meant to honour Vesey and the other founders of the church. (One person who did know about Denmark Vesey, however, is Dylann Roof. Roof is even alleged to receive mail in jail from someone using Vesey’s name to antagonise him.)

The last time I saw Mother Emanuel was a week before Christmas. I’d been in town for weeks for the trial and was walking back to my hotel from the dry cleaners. It was raining, I was overdressed in a wool sweater and the combination of the dank air and the heat and the wool was making me feel sick. The church, though, shone in the evening light and the shadows. The large white cross out front and the blooming camellia bush were set against the church like a cameo silhouette. Near the gate, a man I hadn’t at first seen yelled out to me. “Why are you out there in this rain, staring? Come on in, girl,” he said. In any other situation, I would have declined, but the sickness, both for home and the feeling of coming fever, made me want to go in. I felt vulnerable and alone in a new city. I wanted to be around the familiar, my people, so when the smiling man pointed to the doors, the same doors that had let the murderer in, but also ones that were still flung open to the world, I walked in. “Tonight,” an old woman inside patted my hand and told me, “you are Rachel, but you are also our special Elijah. The stranger who is always welcome.”

What Roof didn’t understand when he walked into that church was the genius of black America’s survival and the nature of our overcoming. Nothing in his fucked-up study of black history had ever hipped him to this: The long life of a people can use their fugitivity, their grief, their history for good. This isn’t magic, this is how it was, and how it will always be. This is how we keep our doors open.

In Charleston, I learned about what happens when whiteness goes antic and is removed from a sense of history.

It creates tragedies where black grandchildren who have done everything right have to testify in court to the goodness of the character of their slain 87-year-old grandmother because some unfettered man has taken her life. The ability

Polly Sheppard is 72 years old.

He asked her if she was shot.

She told him no. And then, with those eyes on him, she asked if he was going to shoot her, too.

“I’m not going to,” he said. “I’m going to leave you here to tell the story”

to stay imaginative, to express grace and refusal to become like them in the face of horror, is to forever be unbroken. It reminds us that we already know the way out of bondage and into freedom. This is how I will remember those left behind, not just in their grief, their mourning so deep and so profound, but also through their refusal to be vanquished.

That even when denied justice for generations, in the face of persistent violence, we insist with a quiet knowing that we will prevail. I thought I needed stories of vengeance and street justice, but I was wrong. I didn’t need them for what they told me about Roof. I needed them for what they said about us. How we rise.

On my last day in Charleston, I went to Sullivan’s Island, where in the dappled light of the setting sun, on a beach being washed clean by the tides, Roof once wrote “1488” and other neo-Nazi symbols into the sand. He had defiantly squatted under the sign that honoured the stolen dead and the many enslaved who had trudged across that sandy expanse towards the unknown and faced a future that for centuries only held grief. This is what is written on that sign: This is Sullivan’s Island. A place where Africans were brought to this country under extreme conditions of human bondage and degradation. Tens of thousands of captives arrived on Sullivan’s Island from the West African shores between 1700 and 1775. Those who remained in the Charleston community and those who passed through this site account for a significant number of the African-Americans now residing in these United States. Only through God’s blessings, a burning desire for justice and persistent will to succeed against monumental odds, have African-Americans created a place for themselves in the American mosaic… This memorial rekindles the memory of a dismal time in American history, but it also serves as a reminder for a people who – despite injustice and intolerance past and present, have retained the unique values, strengths and potential that flow from our West African culture which came to this nation through the middle passage.

I’m sure some of those people’s descendants were in that courtroom. I know that some of those enslaved people’s descendants were shipped like seeds and dispersed throughout the country, with all records of who they were and where they came from lost forever. But for as many who died or were killed or perished and went to watery graves on the way here, millions have survived the incomprehensible, and they have prevailed despite each and every attempt to destroy them.

Roof told the jury in his closing statement, “Anyone… who thinks that I am filled with hatred has no idea what real hate is. They don’t know anything about me. They don’t know what real hatred looks like.”

Because I know exactly who Dylann Roof is, I know that he is hatred, and because I know that he is hatred, I understand why he thought he could do the impossible and trump the everlasting, the eternal. But he could not, and no one ever will.

And so where on that beach he wrote down hatred in the sand, I carved into it all nine of their names: Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Daniel Simmons, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Susie Jackson.

“A Most American Terrorist: The Making Of Dylann Roof” Copyright © 2017, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited

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THE MERCHANDISE FEATURED EDITORIALLY HAS BEEN ORDERED FROM THE FOLLOWING STORES. SOME SHOPS MAY CARRY A SELECTION ONLY. PRICES AND AVAILABILITY WERE CHECKED AT THE TIME OF GOING TO PRESS, BUT WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT PRICES WILL NOT CHANGE, OR THAT SPECIFIC ITEMS WILL BE IN STOCK WHEN THE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED. WE SUGGEST THAT, BEFORE VISITING A STORE, YOU CALL TO MAKE SURE THEY HAVE YOUR SIZE

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NOVEMBER 2017

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PRESENTING THE FIRST DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE COUNTRY’S FINEST RESTAURANTS

AS DECIDED BY INDIA’S FOREMOST TASTEMAKERS

The evolving Indian palate, the boom of the standalone restaurant, the rise of new culinary formats such as pop-ups and experimental kitchens as well as bold gastronomic philosophies all mark a shift in urban India’s approach to food. We’ve gone back to our roots to rediscover and interpret ancient recipes. We’re seeking cleaner, sustainable foods and worrying about how they get from the farms to our tables. Food has increasingly become the reason we seek out new experiences and travel to unknown destinations. Condé Nast Traveller and Himalayan have partnered to create India’s most credible list of top restaurants, embodying the spirit of the global Indian. cntraveller.in/cnt-himalayan-top-restaurant-awards

DECEMBER 2017 For sponsorship queries please contact pallavi.guha@condenast.in SAMODE BAGH

GQ CENTRAL

The team at work

T A E R T E R IN GQ flew to Bali to shoot Esha Gupta, and came back with some #travelgoals

L

ocated in the dry savannah landscape of the Bukit Peninsula, Alila Villas Uluwatu is Bali’s most spectacular hotel. Poised on an elevated plateau that meets with limestone cliffs sweeping down into the Indian Ocean, the view from this hotel is nothing short of breathtaking.

Our three-bedroom villa turned out to be a haven for weary travellers, designed with traditional Balinese accents – gorgeous wooden doors and soothing pools of running water. The best part: the private pool and ocean-view cabana.

Having turned in early the previous night, we woke up ready for a power-packed day. Our muse? The stunning Esha Gupta, who probably had the most fun of us all, splashing about in the pool for photographer Signe Vilstrup.

A break for lunch saw us ordering in from The Warung, whose menu is packed with wholesome, traditional Indonesian and Balinese fare. Our favourite, the Sambel Udang, a typical Balinese prawn curry with herbs served with jasmine rice.

It being our last night in Bali, we went all out for dinner, with a seven-course Balinese meal and a stunning sunset for company.

There could be no better end to our short but memorable stay at Alila.

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For m ore, see FE

MME F ATALE

on

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ALILA VILLAS ULUWATU Jl. Belimbing Sari, Tambiyak, Pecatu, Kuta Selatan, Badung, Bali 80364, Indonesia Tel: +62 361 8482166 www.alilahotels.com

NOVEMBER 2017

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NOVEMBER IN STANDOUT STYLE

For her eyes

Wondering what to give your lady this festive season? Consider a pair of shades from Ferragamo Eyewear’s newest collection. Featuring four iconic themes that give the brand’s style fundamentals a contemporary twist, the side arms showcase Ferragamo’s iconic floral and animal scarf patterns, gold metal elements on the hinges and a Ferragamo logo on the left temple. `13,440. Available at leading opticians

Suite Stays

Offering sophisticated minimalism and contemporary luxury, the new Apollo Suites at the Taj Mahal Tower, Mumbai have been lavishly designed, each with a large living area, expansive bedroom and a marble-finished bathroom. Spacious, airy and edgy, the suites offer breathtaking views of the Arabian Sea. So, if you’re visiting the Maximum City, consider staying at the Apollo Suites and surrender to its opulence.

Opposite The Gateway of India Apollo Bunder, Colaba. For more information, call +91-22-66653000 or email tmhbc.bom@tajhotels.com

and select department stores across the country

Gift of writing

This festive season, Montegrappa, a world-renowned Italian brand of writing instruments, brings you uniquely curated gift boxes. Each of these boxes can be customised to suit a budget or indulgence. You can pair a Montegrappa Nero Uno Pen and watch, choose a Parola Pen with a pair of cufflinks or team an Italian leather wallet with a Fortuna Pen – the choices are aplenty. So, go ahead and make someone feel special with a Montegrappa set.

Price on request. Available at Montegrappa boutiques in Mumbai at Palladium, call +91-22-42668602 and in Delhi at DLF Emporio, call +91-11-41431010

Stylish drive

Pocketful of style

Last month at Ambience Mall, Gurugram, Dia Mirza launched the Nissan Micra Fashion – a limited-edition car with styling elements inspired

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Better still, you can choose from two exciting colour options: Fashion Orange and Fashion Black. `6.09 lakh onwards (ex-showroom price).

Join the league of well-dressed gentlemen like Jay Gatsby, Don Draper and James Bond by accessorising your suit with a pocket square. Warp & Weft – a leading label of fashionable fabrics – brings you a wide range 100 per cent Silk Printed Heritage Handmade Pocket Squares. Choose from a flurry of prints and colours that have been carefully selected to complement your style. Better still, each pocket square is tastefully packaged, making it a perfect gift this festive season. `3,000. Available at leading fashion retailers

Available across all Nissan Showrooms in India

across India

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Golden time

The new Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar

by Audemars Piguet celebrates the timeless allure of yellow gold by combining it with the most classic and romantic complication. To begin with, while the perpetual calendar is given pride of place on the dial, the leap year indication takes centre stage at 12. The self-winding watch’s new calibre 5134 is fully visible through the glare-proof sapphire crystal caseback, but the warm, natural glow of precious gold has been brought fully to the fore.

Price on request. Available in Mumbai at Time Avenue - The Watch Boutique, call +91-22-26515757 and in Delhi at Kapoor Watch Company, call +91-11-46767777

Hello Halloween

This year, through its “Join the Fearless” campaign, Budweiser gave Mumbai and Delhi their biggest Halloween experiences ever. From transforming venues and handing out customised Clydesdale masks to serving “Bloodweiser”, the brand’s very own Halloween edition, these events were truly “spooktacular”. Building up to the celebrations, Budweiser also booked 13 venues across India to simultaneously host 13 experiences on Friday the 13th.

Charged for fitness

With a modular design and easy-to-read, tap-sensitive display, the Fitbit Charge 2 brings an engaging, motivating and personal experience. In addition to the PurePulse® heart rate tracking, it features new tools and smart notifications.

For its interchangeable bands, there’s a wide range of pop and neutral colours.

But the special-edition gunmetal series with premium gold and satin-finished, stainless steel frames is to die for. `14,999, Available online exclusively on

For more information, visit budfactory.in

Amazon India and official retail partners – Reliance Digital, Croma, Helios and Vijay Sales.

For more information fitbit.com/in/home

Vacation at home

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If you’ve always dreamed of owning a holiday home in Goa, consider Rio de Goa in Dabolim. Located in close proximity to the airport, this resortstyled residential property by Tata Housing offers beautiful two bedroom residences with a wonderful sunset view and unmatched amenities like a rooftop infinity pool and deck, a fullyequipped gym, a sauna and a lounge.

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OPEN LETTER

Democratic ing the leader of the New Congratulations on becom party in al ion nat a of colour to lead Party, and the first person you should be one and , ent em iev ach Canada! That’s a legitimate rightfully proud of. ved on the world tory meant that you’d arri But if you thought this vic ng looked at bei ape esc leader, and could stage as just “a” political happening not just t’s tha e, rac r of you primarily through the lens become ’ve we rs yea of the past couple any time soon. ICYMI, in ist. rac ngbei utabo adel-b post-fe less post-racial and more now on, need to remember. From So, here’s the first thing you ts, or your uen stit con r you or lf, yourse you’re not just representing ple peo of s ion be representing bill party. Now you’re going to every ject pro to ng goi are s And folk who share your skin tone. ple onto you. stereotype about brown peo NDP’s itics (“With a full When you were elected as rn of the alpha male to pol In fact, it’s already begun! led your election as the retu ha male politicians hai ts alp e nis Lik um ). il col of Ma ber and umnist in The Globe leader last month, a num col one te wro !” e parents never tch hos ma – w to ious kirpan insecure douchenozzles ugh eno e hav luxuriant beard and a ser ady alre n’t 2017. And like we did weren’t already a thing in ng big-boy leaders. und pretending to be stro aro g nin run – m hugged the tion through ng to Hulk Smash his legisla th Asian Hercules who’s goi dork than Sou e of t twe a sor of e re som mo be n to eve ’re you ount to realise that you In this case, they imagine acc ram tag covers”.

Ins r um you alb ck an y need to che more “Belle & Sebasti Parliament. In fact, they onl “future Prime Minister” and less is tic the aes dia me Justin Trudeau. Your social events. You pose for ride bicycles to campaign “Jagmeet & Greets”. You as ls hal n tow r you to r Seriously, you refe Rupi Kaur. nial social media celebs like ple awkward GIFs with millen ut ISIS and Sharia law, peo Ontario to yell at you abo in l hal n has tow ant r par r you you ted maple syrup on lady who interrup so Canadian that you put The thing is, just like the to see. Even though you’re nt uced to your skin colour. wa y red be the to at ng wh goi see is to are going ects, your entire existence obj ate nim ina to ” you ntiate and even say “Thank e been using style to differe ns. For ages, politicians hav ntio that inte has low en Wh ing ! ean suit ll-m iece we otry of son is wearing a three-p per wn bro a And don’t forget the soft big e, s is her k ade par Loo ! e do it, it’s a statement nded a couple of prid themselves. But when you ’re a feminist and have atte who you e t eon tha som fact the how d r An nde ? anywhere special thing. Yeah, it’s a wo a is y happened in the history of enc dec an hum ic How do you do it? ut, as if having bas marginalised communities. going to be brandished abo e to empathise with other abl is self him tion ina rim faced disc where people of ndal, it’s that in a country y long monologues on Sca full rparts. So if you aw nte se cou tho an from tari g jori thin ma f as successful as their Look, if we’ve learned any hal be to d goo as . ce him twi as have to be be twice as good colour are a minority, they ral boyfriend, you need to position as the world’s libe u’s dea Tru rp usu to nt wa apons to Saudi Arabia. Or ce and then secretly sell we pea t por sup to d footprint. ten pre ’t ocrisy. You can increase in Canada’s carbon You cannot afford his hyp loration that will cause an exp oil re mo for h pus do support climate change and e of your policies. They’ll for you won’t do it becaus e vot to y’re nt the wa h, wit and ee you ing they don’t agr munity who like the minute you do someth Much of the majority com d about themselves. And goo l fee m the g. kes ma thin it e clo s it becaus mp in sheep’ al and act like you’re a Tru ryone: going to treat it as a betray the same thing we tell eve are. We’re going to tell you you o wh nge cha m the Don’t let So don’t pander to them. who they want you to be. ’t let the world turn you into You do you, bae. And don With love and courage,

246 —

NOVEMBER 2017

WORDS: OVERRATED OUTCAST. IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

Dear Jagmeet Singh,