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Why strength­training There is actual merit—not just machismo—in strength-training and in progressively moving to higher weights, provided you do it right.

Here’s what you need to know: Push the big muscle groups into service. These include the legs, butt and back. Instead of working a specific muscle, pick exercises that work your whole body— compound lifts. The classics are unbeatable: Squats (legs, gluteal muscles, core, shoulders, back); deadlifts (hamstrings, back, gluteal muscles, arms, core, shoulders); overhead press in a standing position (shoulders, arms, chest, core), and the clean (arms, shoulders, back, legs, core). There is a reason why elite athlete workouts concentrate almost entirely on these movements. Nothing makes the body stronger, spurs muscle growth, or corrects posture better. In each of these, the core is engaged, and this is vital. The core is all the muscles in your trunk starting from just below the chest to the groin—it’s what keeps your body upright and stable.

Ranadeep Moitra, a certified coach from the National Strength and Conditioning Association of America who writes for Mint, says resistance training—lifting free weights—can improve the health of the endocrine system, and keep problems like osteoporosis, and back, neck and knee pain at bay by strengthening tissues and muscles.

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More London bus drivers were dying of heart disease than conductors: This finding helped Jeremy Morris, the UK-based epidemiologist regarded as the father of modern exercise science, establish a link between an active lifestyle and longevity 60 years ago. The conductors were going up and down the stairs in the double-deckers and were on their feet; the drivers necessarily spent their day sitting behind the wheel.

Back then, it was a path-breaking discovery: Sitting is bad for you, being on your feet keeps you healthy. Now, it is commonly ignored knowledge.

Being active doesn’t require you to block 60-90 minutes for exercise daily. It needs a lifestyle change. It requires that you become mindful.

There are some ridiculously easy tips: If your office is on the 17th floor and you can’t imagine hauling yourself all the way up there, climb up one or two floors and take a lift the rest of the way.

Every so often, look away from your terminal, get up from your desk, twist from the waist while sitting in your chair to stretch the back, look side-to-side to relieve the tension in your neck. Walk every day.

B Y C HANPREET K HURANA ········································· artwheels are cool, but stretching the wrists can be mind-numbingly boring.

Balancing yourself on rock faces while climbing is exciting, but standing on one leg in your living room with your eyes closed seems like a terribly tedious task.

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in front of your chest. “People sometimes sway on their feet while doing this,” says Alemayehu. “The idea is to concentrate and find that balance.” This pose stretches the shoulder blades, which can become stiff if you’ve been hunched over papers or a computer all day.

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Positions 2 and 11: Bring the arms up, lengthening the body. Now arch back from the waist. “Every backward bend creates that 65 much136more14space 13 in14the lungs,” says Alemayehu.

“Breathe 12 15in deeply.”

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This position stretches the whole body. Combined with the forward bend in positions 3 and 10, it gives the benefits of the alternate flexion and extension of the entire spinal column.

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From 0­5km Getting to your first 5km is the hardest, says Rahul Verghese, co-founder of the Running and Living community in Gurgaon, Haryana, which organizes marathons across the country. His top tips: —Put your running gear by the side of your bed at night so that when you get up at 6am it is easy to get yourself ready and out for your run —Get a friend, who is also interested in running, to join you so that there is some peer pressure on both of you to get out and run at a fixed time —During long runs on Sundays, run with a friend and talk. This helps build your lung and heart muscles; chatting during a run is not easy —Keep a log of the conditions in which you run: what you were wearing, and how you felt physically and mentally. Then review your great runs and not-so-good runs and start understanding yourself better to become your own best coach —Do strength-training twice a week—push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups and squats, among other things— to build muscle strength —Cross-train by doing aerobic activities other than running. These could include swimming, cycling, playing tennis or badminton.

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This position strengthens the quadriceps or front thigh muscles of the bent leg, the hamstrings of the stretched leg, and it is great for ankle stability.

Position 5: Bring the other leg back, and support your weight on hands and toes to come into a push-up position. This position helps to strengthen the muscles in the back and the abdominals.

Position 4: Push the left leg back, place the knee on the floor. The right leg is bent. The left foot is flat on the ground. Look up.

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knees, then your chest and then your forehead, keeping your hips up and your toes curled. This is one of the most difficult positions in this exercise, because there are exactly eight points of your body touching the floor—the forehead, chest, both palms, knees and toes. The position strengthens the arms, shoulders, back and chest. The body also makes tiny adjustments to stay in this position—that is good news for the core, which remains engaged throughout.

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either side of your feet (if you can’t reach that far, bend the knees slightly).

Try to touch your forehead to your knees.

You’ll feel a posterior stretch all the way from your ankles, up your calves and hamstrings, till your glutes.

Positions 3 and 10: Bring the arms forward, stretching to get a flat back. Now drop down gently till your hands touch the floor on

Another downside, says Moitra, is that people often lose the will to stick to their diet plan.

According to clinical nutritionist Lovneet Bhullar Batra, there’s a happy mean between living to eat and eating to live. Her recommendation: Eat out, but try picking the rasgulla dessert over a deep-fried gulab jamun. A pasta made in tomato-based sauce adds up to about 360kcal, compared with a cheesy lasagna that’s about one and a half times as many calories. There are fixes to everything. Like this one: You know those people who don’t order anything off the dessert menu and then take a bite, or two, or three out of your chocolate mousse cake? Be one of those people. Because dessert gives you diminishing returns with each subsequent bite.

“Throw away your diet books,” recommends Ranadeep Moitra. He explains that calorierestricting diets—sedentary men need up to 2,400, and women around 2,000, calories daily to maintain their weight—don’t work in the long run because they disrupt important hormones and enzymes and set up a series of negative reactions in the body. “Anytime your body misses a meal—yes, just one meal—your body increases the release of lipogenic (fat-storing) enzymes. When lipogenic enzymes increase, the lipolytic or fat-burning enzymes decrease. This effect is much more pronounced in women than in men,” Moitra explains.

“If there was only one exercise you could do and nothing else, do the pull-up,” says Olympic medalwinning boxer M.C. Mary Kom. “It makes you very strong in your back, arms, shoulders and core.” It really is a perfect exercise. It uses your body weight to maximum effect, putting your upper body through the kind of strenuous muscular engagement that you get from compound lifts. And it forces your core to tighten as much as it can, making it rock solid if you do pull-ups regularly. It’s also a great calorie-burner because of the cardio-respiratory effort required.

Mary Kom can do hundreds of these in a day, but here’s what keeps most of us from doing a pull-up: When you try it for the first time, it seems almost impossible.

Be patient. Like all exercise, your muscles need to progress one step at a time, and learn the movement. Kamal Chhikara at the Reebok CrossFit fitness centre in New Delhi and Mary Kom show the way from zero to one pull-up, then five, then 10, and then...

—Hang passively from a bar. Let your muscles get used to this. Maintain a slight bend in your elbow.

Locking your elbow puts the burden of your weight on the ligaments and tendons of the arms instead of the muscles. This little bend on the elbow, says Mary Kom, is important to maintain throughout the exercise.

“Tighten your core and try not to let your body swing,” she says. “This will immediately start strengthening the core and teach your body how to maintain the right posture for the pull-up.”

—Turn this into an “active hang” by pulling up ever so slightly, engaging the latissimus dorsi (lats), or the muscle running down the side from the armpit to the waist. Again, try to control the swing —Do the reverse pull-up. Use support (something to give you height) and jump to the pull-up position on the bar. Slowly come down. This strengthens all the muscles you need to engage for the pull-up —Get someone to give you external support as you pull up. Ask them to just hold the sides of your waist with the fingertips and give you a slight push while you try to pull yourself up. It is amazing how quickly you will progress to a full pull-up with just this little help —Most people, by default, try to use their biceps to do the pull-up. The focus should be on the much bigger lats. Ask your partner to put a finger on your lats while you do the pull-up. This will help you feel the muscle and engage it —When you get to one full pull-up, hold the top position for 10 seconds, then lower yourself slowly.

“Don’t try too many,” says Mary Kom. “Better to do one or two properly and slowly than to try and do a third when you can barely pull yourself up.”

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Worried that you haven’t worked out in a long while and that if you start now you will be felled by muscle soreness? Who has time for aches and pains on top of the already busy and stressful lives we lead? Here’s a way out. Kickstart your return to a fitness regime with a simple set of Surya Namaskars. It will take you 15 minutes, and it acts as 4 5and 6 13 132warm-up, 14 3 strengthening stretching all at once.

Abeba Alemayehu, a yoga 9 the Sivananda 10 11Yoga 12 15 158trainer 16 at 1 2 3 41 Vedanta Nataraja Centre in New Delhi, says that if you can’t do 7 do six 8 rounds 9 of the10 7 anything else, Surya Namaskar. That is, six times 3 side4and six5times on6 13 132on the 14 right

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the left side. It’s not a complete workout—for example, she says, it does not include back stretches like twisting, but it’s a great start. It’s a movement workout, it will work the joints, improve balance and strengthen the core, and it is a low-impact exercise.

The secret to the Surya Namaskar’s effectiveness is a concept called the kinetic chain—multiple joints, muscles, ligaments, tendons 1 in your 21 body:32 43 move in sync The Surya Namaskar is 63 134 14 5 6 9 13 1014 designed to7make this 87 chain 8 9 work perfectly.

You don’t really need any gear for this, but if there is one piece of equipment we would make an exception for, it’s the barbell. But even this can be substituted: with a pair of dumbbells, a medicine ball, even water bottles.

We spoke to fitness experts across disciplines, from yoga to strength-trainers and clinical nutritionists, on their top tips for workouts, and food and lifestyle choices that really work.

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Robin Gogoi of Fitness First in New Delhi says that if you are in office and have only a few minutes to spare, you can still try some of these exercises: —Sit in your chair and extend the legs, opening them out at the knee. This shortens the quadriceps in the front of the leg and lengthens the hamstrings, or the muscles in the back of the thigh—just the opposite of what happens when you are sitting normally. It also engages your knee and keeps it limber, and your core gets a tiny push to keep you balanced —Use your chair to do a push-up. Use the back for an easy option, and arm rests for the more difficult workout —Use half-litre water bottles to do bicep curls and overhead lifts: Raise both arms up over the head, holding a water bottle for what is called “overload”, or extra weight, in exercise-speak.

Gently bend the elbows to drop the hands towards your back.

Keep the arms close to your ears throughout.

Kinetic chains and saluting the sun

The truth is, you can’t get to the first without trudging through the second.

Exercise and fitness, like any acquired skill, happens in stages, through small steps. A no-nonsense fundamental of fitness is that no one ever died of boredom. So, sweat the small stuff. Do it smartly. It’s the only way you’ll get to the big, cool things you want to do—and do them safely.

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An exercise quickie, in the office

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If you’re not able to stand on one leg for any length of time because your ankles are weak, then don’t do this ankle-stability exercise yet. Kamal Chhikara says there is a hierarchy of movement to get the “full range of motion in the joints”—being able, in other words, to fully flex and extend the joint.

Try sitting in the Indian squat, advises Chhikara.

“Start with just 3 minutes,” he says. While it tests and improves overall stability, the Indian squat is also great for the knees. It bends the knee as far as it will go—giving it that full range of motion. We deny our bodies this functionality when we stand (the knees are fully extended) or sit in a chair (this achieves only half the range of motion) for most of the day. And when we don’t use our joints, we lose stability and mobility in them.

The next step in making the knees and ankles stronger: Get in the Indian squat. Turn one knee out slightly so the foot is resting on its outer edge.

Bring the foot back to rest flat on the ground. Now let this knee drop inward. Repeat on the other side.

Try doing this 5-10 times on each side, and increase the repetitions as you get more comfortable with this movement. You’ll notice that you’ll be able to sit in the Indian squat longer and be able to move the knee farther—both in and out—as you progress.

Forget gadgets, apps, machines and fad diets this year—experts tell you the foolproof, no­nonsense fundamentals of staying fit

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STAND, WALK, PUSH, PULL

The document files are stacked on the lowest shelf. A top across two drawers serves as work desk No.1: This is where the phone sits, along with a charging cable and a glass of water.

There’s no chair in sight. There are more shelves stacked with books, and in their midst, on the same level as the eyes, a small cove with a MacBook computer. This is celebrity fitness trainer Ramona Braganza’s “home-made” standing workstation.

“If I were to give one piece of no-nonsense exercise advice, it would be to just stand up,” says Braganza, author of Feel Fit, Look Fantastic In 3-2-1. Braganza, who has trained actors like Jessica Alba, gives a long list of reasons why a stand-up desk works: —Standing raises the heart rate, burning calories and improving blood flow —It shapes and tones muscles —It improves posture, reduces back pain —It increases blood flow and charges up the metabolism.

Not convinced yet? Braganza cites UK-based sports medicine consultant Mike Loosemore’s claim that standing 3 hours a day, five days a week, is as effective as running 10 marathons a year. Yes, 10 marathons.

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Increasingly, fitness experts are also telling you how to work around your schedule. Don’t have 60 minutes to exercise? No problem. How about 30 minutes, five days a week? Celebrity fitness expert Rujuta Diwekar writes in Don’t Lose Out, Work Out that 150 minutes of smart exercising a week is all it takes to “improve blood glucose tolerance, reduce body fat and the risk of all lifestyle diseases that come with obesity”.

Position 7: Lower the hips, point your toes and bend the head back, arching your back to take the Cobra position. Keep legs together and shoulders down throughout. This position helps strengthen the lower back and arms, and stretches the chest and abdominal muscles.

Position 8: Curl the toes, push the hips back and extend the arms in front of you to come into an inverted “V” position. Pushing the heels down increases the stretch along the back of the legs. 1 2 3 4

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Don’t even have half an hour? How about 20 minutes? Walk, jog, swim, cycle.

Don’t miss a workout simply because a meeting has come up suddenly or you’re anticipating a packed day. If you can’t spare 60 minutes, make do with 20, but make them count.

Robin Gogoi says that if you’ve got 20 minutes to work out, treat it like you would an hour-long session. Take 3-4 minutes to warm up, 10 minutes for the exercises, and 2 minutes to cool down.

Position 9: Bring the left leg forward to assume the same position as 4 (except the leg positions have switched). Look up. If you can’t bring the left foot all the way to rest between the hands, adjust the position of the hands.

Position 12: Bring the arms down, standing straight, with feet together.

This is similar to position 1, but with your arms by your sides.

Repeat with the right leg.

Once you have the movements down pat, try and vary the routine—do a mix of slow Surya Namaskars to warm up and cool down, and fast ones for a cardio workout.

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THE TRAVEL ISSUE

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t is 4.10am, and I am already late. I sprint down the Kachidoki Bridge, its spine curving over the gently rippling Sumida River, past inky outlines of the Tokyo Bay, and arrive, slightly breathless and sweaty, at the registration counter. At 4.14am, I am the absolute last person to be allowed in. A couple who arrives just after me is crestfallen. With a sigh of relief, I step into the small holding room and settle down among the more fortunate pilgrims. We wait.

It feels sacred. The pre-dawn awaking, the anxious journey, the fear of being shut out of the sanctum sanctorum, the fervour of all those who seek, the waiting, the jostling to get a vantage point for darshan, and then, when it’s all over, a sense that a veil had been lifted, a deeply held secret revealed.

It could have been a high temple, a grand mosque or a magnificent church, but it is, in fact, the world’s largest fish market. And I am about to go into the holy of holies: a tuna auction of epic proportions.

The Tsukiji fish market, or the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market, is the Vatican of all things piscatorial, the mecca of all who make a living off the global seafood trade. Every morning, from roughly 3-11am, 60,000 people go to work at the market, a space the size of 43 football fields, and get busy with cleaning, cutting, carrying, auctioning, and selling three million kilograms of fish; 450 types of it— everything from delicious creamy sea urchins to octopuses arranged like they were tropical flowers, from silken strips of eel to gleaming shells of abalone, from still gasping groupers to hairy crabs crawling in sawdust, from red-tailed lobsters and blowfish with neurotoxins to the freshest sea bream and most monstrous of marlin. All of it arriving from more corners of the world than I knew existed.

But these statistics reveal nothing about the real significance of Tsukiji to the global seafood trade. For that, you will have to step into the “big fish auction room”.

At 5.25am, uniformed guards guide the first batch of us to the auction—the second, and last, will follow at 5.50am. We pick our way through a stream of motorized carts zipping up and down, sidestepping the big forklifts and waiting for the trucks to pass.

This is peak hour at Tsukiji. And then, just like that, we are inside.

In a room the size of six tennis courts, row upon row of giant, ice-cold bluefin tuna line the length of the floor. From a distance, they look more like smooth stone, with a clean layer of frost upon them, and if it weren’t for their immense size and the bright-red tail

steak that had been cut open and allowed to hang for inspection, you wouldn’t know these were the tigers of the ocean—predators who sit at the top of oceanic food chains.

The award-winning marine biologist and author of Song For The Blue Ocean, Carl Safina, describes the bluefin tuna as “one of the most awesome creatures on earth, a warm-blooded fish capable of swimming at highway speeds and crossing oceans; then finding its way home in a trackless ocean”.

Indeed, their scientific name, Thunnus thynnus, comes from the Greek verb thuno, to rush.

To witness a tuna auction at Tsukiji is to be swept up in the currents of globalization itself. The most valuable giant tuna are, in fact, caught not in Japan but at the other end of the world, off the coast of New England in the US, Newfoundland in Canada, off the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Mediterranean.

The best of them are delivered to Tsukiji.

On any given day, an Atlantic bluefin tuna caught off the coast of Maine will be bought by a local broker with links to Japanese auction houses using prices set by Tsukiji at the previous day’s auction. The fish is then stuffed into a long “tuna coffin” and trucked to John F Kennedy International Airport in New York City, where it will catch a flight to Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. When these fish arrive, they are immediately hauled away to the inspection area, placed next to catch from the rest of the world—Atlantic bluefin from Italy, Spain, Turkey; Pacific bluefin from California and Chile; southern ones from Australia and Indonesia—and also from Japanese ports such as Oma on the northern coast. The importer or auction company will take their bluefin, grade it and decide which of the 86 wholesale markets in Japan the tuna should go to. If it is deemed good enough for Tsukiji, it will be loaded on to trucks and sent to the auction house.

By 11pm, all the fish have arrived and workers start to prepare them for the auction room, labelling each with its country or port of origin, metric weight and the name of the selling agent. By 3am the floor will start to fill up with wholesalers inspecting the fish laid out in rows over wooden pallets. At 5.25am, the auction begins, and it’s all over by 6.30am, sooner if there are not that many fish. A typical half-ton Atlantic bluefin can sell for $30,000 (around `18.7 lakh) or more.

At the ceremonial auction that takes place on the first Saturday of each year, a bluefin might go for millions of dollars—as it did in 2013 when Kiyoshi Kimura, owner of a popular sushi chain, Sushi Zanmai, paid $1.76 million for a 489-pound (around

220kg) catch—or for next to nothing ($37,500), as it did in January. Once sold, the tuna from Maine will be carted away either to the intermediate sellers in the inner market or straight to a restaurant, where, within hours, it will be devoured by sushi eaters across Tokyo.

In some cases, a tuna might head back to Narita Airport for export to New York, London or Paris, where Michelin-starred chefs in sushi bars will serve it to diners for top dollar, pound and euro.

In the global tuna trade, the most feared word is “domestic”. A “domestic” refers to a fish not good enough for Tsukiji. That means a fish that could have gone for $40-50 a pound will now be deemed worth a dollar or two at most. If your tuna is not good enough to make it to Tsukiji, you might as well not have killed it.

This is what Theodore Bestor, anthropologist and author of several papers and books on Tsukiji, is referring to when he says: “Tsukiji creates and deploys enormous amounts of cultural capital around the world.

Its control of information, its enormous role in orchestrating and responding to Japanese culinary tastes, and its almost hegemonic definitions of supply and demand allow it the unassailable privilege of imposing its own standards of quality—standards that producers worldwide must heed.”

Yet, for all its global significance, Tsukiji remains a charmingly old-fashioned and quaint riverside market. Settled in the 1920s, after a great earthquake and fire extinguished the former fish market at Nihonbashi, it has remained more or less the same for decades.

Repeated moves to renovate or relocate it have all had to be suspended for a variety of reasons. The newest plan is to move it by 2016, but for now Tsukiji continues as it always has, doing the most important things the old way, wearing lightly its mantle as the “central node” of a multi-billion-dollar global seafood industry.

In this bare-bones warehouse, buyers from top trading houses work with nothing more than flashlights, metal hooks, pads, pencils and, most importantly, fingers. I watch them walk past the rows of tuna, stop at the ones that catch their eye, bend and shine their flashlight on the exposed tail steak, dig their metal hook to get a sample, rub the crimsonred flesh between their fingers like it was soft putty, turn around and stick their hand into the core (through a long vertical incision in the belly), rub that between their fingers for a moment, give it a sniff and then move on to the next.

Like a diamond merchant peering at a

Fishy business: (clockwise from above) An aerial shot of the Tsu­ kiji market; the prized bluefin tunas at the market; Kiyoshi Kimura with his $37,500 bluefin tuna in January; chefs prepare sushi at Sushi Zanmai, Kimura’s restaurant chain; buyers inspect the bluefin tuna laid out for the auction; and the auction in progress.

AMONG THE

BELIEVERS In the world’s largest fish market, witnessing the grand ceremony of an epic tuna auction

BY ABHIJIT DUTTA

rough cut, they are looking for the right colour, the right fat content, the texture of the flesh and the flavour of the core. They make little notes, scribbling in their wet pads with yellow pencils. By the time the auction begins in earnest, they will have made their decision and know how much to gamble on each bid.

In an exquisitely photographed pocketbook guide on sushi called Jiro Gastronomy, Jiro Ono, the protagonist of the documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, and the only sushi chef to be awarded three Michelin stars eight years in a row, writes: “A day without maguro means a day a sushi restaurant cannot open for business.”

While maguro, the Japanese word for tuna, has been a staple of the Japanese diet for centuries, that country’s obsession with it really began as it was entering the “bubble years”, its two decades of blistering growth.

By the early 1960s, high-speed trucking and the advent of refrigeration had created a whole new market for fresh seafood.

Suddenly, Tsukiji could command not only what was fished out of the Sumida or Tokyo Bay, but also spectacular catch from as far as

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Oma and Hokkaido on the northern coasts, Kyushu in the south, and even international waters.

The interaction with the US had given the Japanese a taste for fatty foods like steak, and toro, the succulently fatty, lustrously bloody, firm yet tender belly portion of the giant bluefin, tapped into this whorl of psychology.

As demand grew to meet supply, prices climbed steadily, making the meat more expensive, and even more popular. A 1994 essay in Harper’s Magazine quotes Sadanori Gunji, author of The Flying Bluefin Tuna, as saying: “In Japan, we are concerned with status in all things, including food. It is necessary to have food with a higher status than any other, and that is the toro of the giant bluefin.”

The final thrust for the bluefin to go truly global—and for Tsukiji’s ascendancy as the “market at the centre of the world”, as Bestor calls it—was Japan Airlines’ (JAL’s) decision to fly tuna back on the cargo planes that took Japanese goods to the US but almost always returned empty.

It was to be an experiment. Desperate to make the return flights commercially viable, a young JAL cargo manager in Tokyo, Akira Okazaki, bet on tuna—he needed something that would demand a high price from Japanese buyers and was perishable enough to merit the high cost of air transport.

With the help of an equally enterprising young cargo manager on the other side of the world, Wayne MacAlpine, he discovered a tiny coastal village on Prince Edward Island in Canada, where anglers and fishermen came to wrestle with massive North Atlantic bluefin tuna that averaged well over 200kg

and had plenty of toro.

Chalked up in history as the “Day of the flying fish”, 14 August 1972 became the first day when tuna—five Canadian bluefins—were put on a truck to JFK Airport and then freighted in the bellyhold of a JAL flight to Narita, to arrive in time for the auction at Tsukiji.

They fetched $4 per pound— a handsome price indeed, considering that till then, the visiting fishermen who caught bluefin would have to pay locals to get rid of the kill.

Since that day, giant tuna from New England and Canada— generically known as the Boston Bluefin— has remained among the most valuable of all tuna auctioned at Tsukiji, with only tuna from Oma giving it competition.

Soon, Tokyo couldn’t have enough of toro. It became a superstar of sushi; no self-respecting sushi place could afford not to have otoro, the most fatty part of the toro, on its menu. Within a few months the value of the bluefin tuna jumped by 10,000% on the Japanese market, with similar spikes throughout the world. By the 1980s, thanks to migrant chefs in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles had fallen in love with sushi. What was once cat food in most of the US had become the trendiest sensation in haute cuisine.

By any reckoning, humans have been catching bluefin tuna for at least 3,000 years, probably more. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians had a taste for it, the Sicilians had the annual rite mattanza, the massacre of tuna, and the Spanish almadraba, a

network of nets that stretch in the sea like walled cities awaiting the migrating tuna, is the subject of medieval poetry.

But it wasn’t until the Japanese developed a real taste for it that global tuna stocks plunged. The worldwide population of bluefins had remained stable through centuries and up to the 1950s, but since then stocks have declined more than 96%.

In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Atlantic bluefin on its endangered list; it categorized the Pacific bluefin as “vulnerable” in 2014.

Japan, which consumes 80% of the world’s bluefin tuna, has consistently maintained that if there was a trade ban on it, as has been proposed by the United Nations, it would simply ignore it. When it came up for vote in 2010, Japan successfully lobbied member countries to defeat the motion. However, Japan acknowledges the pressure on the species and has committed to cutting the catch quotas for juvenile bluefin tuna in the northern Pacific by 50% from this year.

When the time comes, a diminutive man in blue overalls steps on to a rickety wooden box close to me and starts to rock in a soft rhythm, almost as if he were about to break into a mellow tribal dance. He rings a bell, and its peals call the buyers to attention. He speaks continuously to encourage the bidders and drive up prices.

His voice has a certain cadence to it, and it feels like he is reciting a metered verse. In response, the bidders make the slightest, the most inconspicuous, of signals to let him know what they have in mind.

On an average it takes less than 5 seconds for one bluefin to be auctioned.

From where I stand, I count five giants sold for a few hundred thousand dollars in less than 20 seconds.

This is only the buying and selling of fish, but it feels like the goings-on of a secret society, a cult with impenetrable rites and intricate rituals, its peculiar pattern of beats and chants guiding the movement of solemn men and dead fish swiftly and seamlessly.

Standing on the side, squeezed into a narrow space, I feel like a peeping Tom, an intruder. The auction is a popular “thing to do” for tourists, but it is not a tourist act, not a show you can buy a ticket to. I feel grateful for having seen the swirl of oceans, the interconnections in our world, expressed so gently, delicately, in a sliver of sliced fish laid atop a perfectly hand-shaped bit of vinegared rice.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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COURTESY KOCHI BIENNALE FOUNDATION

GROUND REPORT

PHOTOGRAPHS

Art gazing in

BY

ABY P ROBIN/MINT

KOCHI What have two editions of the Kochi­Muziris Biennale, which aims to catapult India to the global map of contemporary art, left in their wake?

The beautiful Kerala city has some compelling answers B Y D HAMINI R ATNAM dhamini.r@livemint.com

····························· Unnikrishnan, a reedy 24-year-old with striking black eyes and a ready, open smile, speaks little English. Sitting in the quaint Teapot café in Fort Kochi, Kerala, a couple of weeks after the second edition of the KochiMuziris Biennale (KMB) ended on 29 March, he refuses to eat the slice of orange teacake that has been placed before him. A film has formed over his coffee.

Unnikrishnan is busy explaining the work he made for his “degree show”, an event that allows finalyear students of bachelor’s in fine art (BFA) courses across the country to showcase their work.

For his annual college exhibition, Unnikrishnan, a student of Thrissur’s 105-year-old College of Fine Arts, created an installation that was unique, if inwardlooking, made with 100 terracotta bricks. On them, he painted scenes of his early life in rural Pezhumpara in Kerala’s Palakkad district—blades, the evil-eye mask commonly placed atop doors, pots and lamps, among other objects. By archiving common, everyday objects on bricks with acrylic and oil paint, Unnikrishnan intended the piece to be a continuation of the visual diary he had begun back home, in his room where “no one was allowed to enter”.

“There is a lot of superstition where I live. I wanted my work to be like a diary,” he says.

Last July, Bose Krishnamachari and Jitish Kallat visited the degree show, scouting for works to exhibit at the second edition of the KMB that was set to begin on 12 December. Krishnamachari is the director of the KMB and Kallat had just been chosen as its curator by an artistic advisory committee.

Unnikrishnan was selected, and the youngster moved to Fort Kochi, the venue of the biennale, for three months. He would walk through the bylanes of the historic district and paint what he saw on bricks. The resulting installation— a freestanding wall of 300 bricks d is pl aye d a t C S I Bu ng a l ow (Church of South India, Shoranur Diocese)—included etchings of his new experiences, besides bricks from his college work. This installation had a triangular hole cut into the centre to “allow good spirits to enter”, a reference to a superstition back home.

They did: His work was selected to be shown at the 12th Sharjah Biennial, which began on 5 March, after curator Eungie Joo visited the Kochi biennale. In March, Unnikrishnan visited Sharjah—his first visit to a foreign country—and continued to add bricks, this time responding to things he saw there, like the use of forks to eat, and his experiences on the aeroplane.

For Unnikrishnan, whose fam-

C

Different strokes: (clockwise from extreme left) C. Unnikrishnan with his terracotta bricks installation; Gigi Scaria’s steel­bell installation Chronicles Of The Shores Foretold; Sosa Joseph at her studio; Chithra E.G.’s bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman; and (below, far left) sculptures from Benitha Perciyal’s ongoing show, Still And Still Moving Life, at Art*ry.

ily has traditionally been engaged in basket-weaving, the KMB was a space to experiment and showcase his work. It got him noticed by an international art community that visited the KMB this time, including Catherine David, deputy director, National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and former curator of the documenta, the equivalent of the Olympics in the art world; Jay A. Levenson, director, international programme, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Linus von Castelmur, the Swiss ambassador to India and Bhutan; Tony Conner, publisher of the international magazine ArtForum; Katya García-Antón, director, Office for Contemporary Art Norway; and Okwui Enwezor, the current artistic director of the Venice Biennale.

There were celebrated names from the Indian art community too, of course. The artistic advisory committee itself comprised people like art historian Geeta Kapur; artists Balan Nambiar and Sheela Gowda; gallerist Abhay Maskara; Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, managing trustee and honorary director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum; Feroze Gujral, director of the non-profit Gujral Foundation; and artist Riyas Komu, secretary of the KMB, who set up the Biennale Foundation with Krishnamachari in 2010.

The icing on the cake was that around 500,000 people visited

the biennale, many of them local residents.

Unnikrishnan, then, got an opportunity to showcase his work alongside that of 93 artists, including renowned national and international artists. At the Sharjah Biennial, his work showed alongside the work of over 50 artists from the United Arab Emirates and other parts of the world, including Nikhil Chopra, a renowned performance artiste from India.

The impact of the Kochi biennale is clearly visible, though it continues to struggle with unsteady state funding and the challenges posed by the lack of rigorous infrastructure.

Artist Piyali Ghosh has left her studio in Vadodara and moved to Kochi for a year to draw inspiration from its natural environs for an installation that is to be showcased in December at Brisbane’s Woolloongabba Art Gallery. New galleries like Dubaibased Art*ry have opened shop in Kochi, and new residencies are being planned by Gallery OED in Mattancherry and the Kashi Art Gallery and Café in Fort Kochi. For contemporary Indian artists, the biennale provides exposure to an international audience, as well as an opportunity to engage with international artistic discourse and practice.

Okwui Enwezor invited artist and film-maker K.M. Madhusudhanan to participate in the 56th Venice Biennale, starting 9 May, after seeing his charcoal drawings at the Kochi biennale.

The 58-year-old artist, known for his 2008 award-winning film Bioscope, will exhibit at the 120year-old biennale, considered to be one of the most prestigious in the world. Only a handful of Indian artists have participated in it so far.

Madhusudhanan will exhibit 65 charcoal works, drawing from Logic Of Disappearance—The Marx Archive, which was exhibited at Kochi, and his new body of work,

Penal Colony, at Venice.

“There are a lot of interesting artists participating in the Venice Biennale who are close to my idea of artistic practice and ideology. I will get to showcase my works alongside them. This is very interesting to me,” says Madhusudhanan.

“Before the biennale, Kochi was a ‘small’ city for artists (with) not many galleries. But after the biennale, there are many developments. People are interested in starting galleries there, artists have taken up studios,” says Madhusudhanan, who has a studio in Chalakudy, an hour’s drive from Kochi, besides one

FIRE­STARTERS

In the land of Raja Ravi Varma, fine art has had many illustrious practitioners

A

rt in the state has a long history.

Raja Ravi Varma, from Travancore, became India’s most influential artist in the 20th century. Ever since, Kerala has produced many illustrious artists—from A. Ramachandran and K.G. Subramanyan to Baiju Parthan, Yusuf Arakkal, T.V. Santhosh and Riyas Komu.

In the late 1980s, the emergence— briefly—of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association proved to be momentous. A group of students from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, came together with sculptor and artist K.P. Krishnakumar to form this group in 1987. C.K. Rajan, C. Pradeep and Jyothi Basu, among others, lived with the fisherfolk of Vettukad and made them the subject of their works. Artists such as K.M. Madhusudhanan, Anita Dube and K. Prabhakaran joined this group, which sought to eschew the “bourgeois­centric” nature of Indian art. It even protested against the art auction

by Sotheby’s at the Victoria Terminus railway station (now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) in Mumbai in 1987.

After Krishnakumar’s death in 1989, however, the group disbanded.

Dhamini Ratnam

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

KM MADHUSUDHANAN

In black and white: A work from Penal Colony, a collection of charcoal drawings by artist K.M. Madhusudhanan, who was part of the Radical group.

in New Delhi, where he is based.

Sosa Joseph, who took part in the first biennale, has seen the change. The 43-year-old artist, who has been represented by Mumbai-based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke since 2009, moved to Kochi in 2004, “at a time when the only important gallery to show works at was Durbar Hall”, where the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi has a centre.

“Young artists have a lot of opportunities here. No one would want to leave Kochi now,” says Joseph, who graduated from the MS University of Baroda in 1998.

Her well-lit studio shares a wall and terrace with the threeyear-old Backyard Civilization gallery, a space for multidisciplinary artistic ventures. Many curators, including Catherine David, visited her studio during the biennale’s second edition.

“The biennale allows us to see what’s going on internationally, to be part of a larger conversation. The atmosphere helps you,” says Joseph, whose new canvases include a 5x6ft painting titled Where Are We Going?, intended as a sequel to her 2012 series What Are We?, which was exhibited in the first biennale.

Like her previous works, Joseph’s new canvases too deal with the commonplace, inspired by the bustle of life in Mattancherry, where her studio

is located.

Clearly, the biennale has infused new life into Kochi’s art scene.

The gallery scene is indicative of the change. Just one of the private art galleries that had opened here earlier, around the turn of the century, survives— the Kashi Art Gallery and Café, which started in 1997 and changed hands in 2012. The Draavidia Art And Performance Gallery, also started in 1997, hosted performances of leather puppetry and Koodiyattam. The Ochre art gallery came up in 2002. They did not last, but new ones are now set to make a mark.

On 14 December, two days after the Kochi biennale started, 38-year-old Rajni Syam and her business partners, including husband Syam Manohar and artist couple Haseena Suresh and Suresh Subramanian, were busy fitting light bulbs and cleaning the floors of their new gallery Art*ry, scheduled to open that morning.

The Dubai-based group, all alumni of the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, opened the gallery on Fort Kochi’s KB Jacob Road, a short distance from the Vypin boat jetty, with a bang—they exhibited the works of the late C.N. Karunakaran, a well-known Kerala painter who launched the state’s first private gallery, Chitrakootam, in the early 1970s (it’s now defunct). This was followed by a month-long group show featuring Kumar Vaidya, Pierre Legrand and Yogesh Rawal.

Art*ry’s latest show, Still And Still Moving Life, is a solo by Benitha Perciyal, a 36-year-old, Chennaibased artist whose sculptural installation, The Fires Of Faith, was showcased at the biennale’s second edition to much acclaim.

Art*ry was formed in Dubai in 2014, but the decision to open in Kochi was, says Rajni Syam, “completely unplanned”—and executed in a mere six weeks.

“We didn’t think about sales and we know that it will take a few years to break even. We are all passionate about art and decided to open the gallery in

“

THERE IS A MARKET FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, AND THERE IS NEVER A TIME WHEN ART ISN’T SOLD. IT’S CYCLICAL. IT’S JUST THAT WHEN THE BALL ROLLS FASTER, IT GATHERS MORE SNOW. Kochi too,” says Syam, who quit a bank job to work at the gallery.

Perciyal’s show is a mixed bag, comprising large-scale, mixedmedia installations, including a well-located, 9ft-tall curtain of cloves and nails placed around a wooden log, a 7x10ft canvas made with mineral pigment on linen, several sculptures, including busts of the artist herself, and found objects. By mid-April, when this writer visited, the gallery had already sold five works.

“There is a market for contemporary art, and there is never a time when art isn’t sold. It’s cyclical. It’s just that when the ball rolls faster, it gathers more snow,” says Tanya Abraham, who co-owns the Kashi gallery with hotelier Edgar Pinto. The gallery, which showcases contemporary artists, was one of the venues for the biennale. This time, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective had a site-specific installation there.

Abraham says they plan to initiate a residency programme in June which will be supported by the Kochi Biennale Foundation. The gallery has already asked international artists to respond to the history of Fort Kochi, and relate their own individual contexts. According to her, the association with the biennale has helped the gallery “amplify the call (for residency), change the perspective (of artists) by giving it heft”.

Dilip Narayanan, owner of Gallery OED in Mattancherry, too is looking to expand.

Narayanan, who opened his gallery in 2007, began collecting art in the early 2000s, and soon quit his IT industry job to become an “art promoter”—he would visit art shows and degree shows in colleges, scouting for young artists who “showed promise”, such as Sujith S.N. and Mahesh Baliga. By mid-2016, he hopes to open a café and create a residency space with studios for international and Indian artists.

The studios will be built in a 3,000 sq. ft warehouse that shares a wall with his 2,300 sq. ft gallery, and Narayanan plans to make use of the high ceilings (nearly 37ft, he informs us) to make space for both living and working quarters for artists.

During the recent biennale, Narayanan lent the courtyard in front of his gallery to an installation by Rijin John called Holi Beads—The Orbit. The gallery also lent its space to two collateral exhibition events, and Narayanan says the number of visitors to his gallery “increased by 40%”. “When I start the residency, I won’t have to do any marketing for people to visit and view works,” he laughs, half serious.

“The biennale is not just an event,” says Abraham. “It’s a story that is still unfolding and we will see the effect in a decade’s time, assuming it manages to sustain itself.”

The environs of Fort Kochi, dotted with trees that are at least several hundred years old, and whose branches arch over the streets, is most amenable to siteand city-specific events of the scale and nature of the biennale.

Signs of the second edition are still visible, in a poster stuck on walls under a staircase—explaining a collateral project, in the ironic cut-outs of the KFC man in a dhoti cooking appams, and

McRonald wearing a sacred thread and pouring water from a mug. In Jew Town’s Mandalay Hall, where the Pepper House residency show was held, Chithra E.G.’s bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman and K.L. Leon’s triptych hadn’t been taken down when this writer visited. Leon took a year to complete his work, a large oil on canvas that serves as an important historical reminder of the syncretic nature of Kochi’s—and by extension, Kerala’s—culture.

Referencing the European tradition of still life, Leon’s canvas is crowded with objects and cultural references like spices, fruits, figurines of St Sebastian, the communist red, and tombs, all of which exude a sense of life that is anything but still. Leon made this work at a residency run by the Kochi Biennale Foundation last year.

Chithra, who took a loan of `1 lakh to make her work, realizes the difficulties in being a sculptor without adequate space for a studio. The biennale gave her an opportunity to experiment with bronze, a material she hadn’t worked with before. Her challenge, she says in Malayalam, is getting funds for her work—quite like the biennale itself.

On 7 April, at Mumbai’s glittering Taj Lands End hotel in Bandra, an auction was under way. Dinesh Vazirani, of the Saffronart auction house, held the gavel in his hand and swiftly worked his way through bids being placed online and over the phone, and those coming at him from the room.

Vazirani, whose Saffronart Foundation made a donation to the Kochi biennale, was attempting to raise funds for the Kochi Biennale Foundation by auctioning works of modern and contemporary Indian artists. All the works had been donated for this purpose, and by the end of the evening, `2.3 crore had been collected as a corpus. The auction house didn’t take a buyer’s premium.

That sum is barely enough.

This year’s biennale cost `17.5 crore, says Krishnamachari; a mix of donations and government funding got them to the finish line.

The state government, which had approached artists Komu and Krishnamachari in 2010 to organize an international platform for contemporary art in India, has given them `3 crore so far for the second KMB, says Krishnamachari—they received `9 crore for the first edition.

An o t h e r ` 1 c r o r e h a s b e e n pledged, but is yet to reach them, he says. “We’ll be safe if we get `1.2 crore. We won’t be in any debt,” he adds.

The attempt to build the corpus continues. But for its organizers, the challenge that lies ahead also has to do with the Indian art community “buying in” to the biennale. Criticism has dogged it, from being described as a clique of men from a specific region, to the biennale allowing the city of Kochi to do all the conceptual heavy-lifting for its themes. Yet, for the likes of young Unnikrishnan, who responded to the biennale brick by brick, its significance cannot be overstated. For it provides contemporary artists a scarce non-commercial, experimental space—a site of production, rather than simply exhibition.

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REWIND

Beyond

bling

KEYS TO AN EVOLVING BUSINESS

How buyer profiles, stakeholders, e­commerce and other developments changed the fashion industry

What has Indian fashion achieved since the first Fashion Week in 2000, besides selling out to bling and excess?

u The Weeks From 2000-05, there was just one fashion week a year.

Today, there are two each in Mumbai and New Delhi. The Lakmé Fashion Week lists its seasons as Summer/Resort and Winter/Festive, while the FDCI follows the international model of Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. A dozen other smaller events across cities also bill themselves “fashion weeks” without trade environments [meaning?]. The FDCI also launched Men’s Fashion Week from 2009-11 and India Couture week from 2010, which continues. u Buyer profile In 2000, the major buyers at IFW [i.e. all Indian fashion weeks?] were international, including Selfridges, Macy’s, Browns—but today, 80-90% of them are domestic. u Sponsors The multiplier effect of publicity and celebrity culture have spurred even nonfashion companies like Tata Nano, DHL couriers, and Phillips, beside half-a-dozen jewellery brands and online sponsors, to join as stakeholders.

YOU CAN’T AVOID THEM 30 Indian fashion staples that will always stay in vogue COURTESY FDCI ARCHIVES

B Y S HEFALEE V ASUDEV shefalee.v@livemint.com

······························· Next week in Delhi, the Amazon India Fashion Week (AIFW) [do we need to say that this is in partnership with Amazon? Also, is this replacing Wills lifestyle fashion week?], mounted by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), will see 25 designers present the grand finale in a rare show of unity and celebration. The number signifies the seasons that fashion weeks in India have gone through since the inception of the Lakmé India Fashion Week (LFW) in 2000, which itself is in its 15th year. Fifteen years and 25 seasons do not add up, but that’s because till 2005, India only had one fashion week a year.

Numbers notwithstanding, a curious split now defines the Indian fashion industry. We now have two flourishing events— AIFW [, which replaces the WLIFW,?] and LFW. The former is a sturdy trade platform, besides trend forecasts, a buoyant handloom sector, designer exhibitions, multi-brand boutiques, a thriving retail scenario hawking designer wear for the masses and a large number of designers with their own flagship stores—all of which makes for a robust scenario. [not clear... what is happening and what is the difference between the two?]

Yet there is a sense of compromise—between creativity and commerce—that seems to ail the industry.

Veteran designers like Tarun Tahiliani describe it as “having sold our soul to bling”; Varun Bahl calls it “coming to terms with commercial reality”, and Rina Dhaka reminisces about the old days as the era of “new discoveries without worrying about commercial outcomes”.

India’s tryst with fashion remains a debate. Its vibrancy is undeniable; its kitsch equally so.

Weddings can be defined through fashion, but not youth culture.

Mumbai and Delhi fashion still slug it out as a war between baubles and brands. Innovative work has made inroads into the global design industry, and led to commercial success that would have been inconceivable once. The kind typified by Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Manish Malhotra. There are stunning couture shows, and Manish Arora’s fiery representation of contemporary India to the world [?]. But what hits the eye most though is the excess. Indian consumers have converted the designers, instead of it being the other way round.

Some of India’s most “saleable” designers reflect every whim of the Mumbai film world and every fancy of the bridal market, no matter how unflattering.

“The buyer has changed. Fashion in the former days was truly fabulous and there was no question of celebrity endorsement,” says Tina Tahiliani Parikh, [executive?] director of Ensemble, India’s first multi-designer store. Designers pushed the boundaries, experimented and stretched themselves.

Today, despite a growing industry, mind-boggling talent and customer evolution, the product has become rather generic.”

The LFW, launched in 2000, was co-created by Anil Chopra, the former CEO of Lakmé Lever, the New York-based Fern Mallis of IMG (the International Management Group that manages sports and media events) [cannot confirm], some core members of the FDCI, and a handful of senior designers [IMG Reliance wasn’t a part of it?]. Ritu Beri opened the first show of the first fashion week; and Wendell Rodricks, Tarun Tahiliani and Raghavendra Rathore were among those who presented the first finale. Beri had already begun working in Paris in 1998 and Rodricks, Tahiliani and Rathore were established names.

Rathore provides an insightful track to the evolution of the fashion industry in India when he says: “the irony is that the designers arrived before the industry...followed by fashion events and finally organized retail, corporatization and the rest...”

Sartorial times What did the fashion industry look like before the advent of the fashion weeks?

Ritu Kumar, the matriarch of Indian fashion, had made a name for herself through her Miss India costumes and the business trajectory [WHAT?] she charted here [?]. There were stores like Kavita Bhartia’s Ogaan and Sal [?] and Tarun Tahiliani’s Ensemble (Tina would join later). Rohit Bal was a star and enfant terrible. J.J. Valaya’s designs were growing on the luxury customer. Suneet Varma and Ravi Bajaj were hailed as entrepreneurial talents, Madhu Jain’s Ikats were being noticed, Poonam Bhagat’s Delhi exhibitions were booked out [?] and Abu Jani & Sandeep Khosla’s sophisticated Chikankari saris defined “fashion” for those growing up in the 1990s.

Mehr Jessia, India’s last supermodel, was about to sashay off the catwalk, on her way to marriage and motherhood.

“Mehr was the top closing girl, we would be so happy if she agreed to walk for us,” remembers Dhaka.

Then she adds that in the first few years, there were no buyers.

From 2000-05, as the LIFW [same as LFW, right?] consolidated itself, with one fashion week a year alternatively in New Delhi and Mumbai, Chopra remembers it as a time when fashion events were ad-hoc and designers were struggling to make a business out of their work.

“The LIFW started on a very good note because for the first time, people understood that fashion was not a society event, it needed international buyers and

Firstword: caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here cap­ tion to come here caption to come here

u Kurti u ‘Lehnga’­gown u ‘Sharara’ jumpsuit u Kaftan dress u Black­white­red Ikat u Chikankari palazzos u Chanderi saris u Draped dresses u ‘Dhoti’­pants u ‘Mulmul’ u Ombre saris COURTESY TARUN KHIWAL

COURTESY FDCI ARCHIVES

“

THE BUYER HAS CHANGED. FASHION IN THE FORMER DAYS WAS TRULY FABULOUS AND THERE WAS NO QUESTION OF CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENT FASHION IN THE FORMER DAYS WAS

media to report it instead of being a ghar ki dukaan (home grown store),” says Chopra. He admits that buyers from international stores like Macy’s, Browns, and Bloomingdale’s did not find Indian merchandise relevant. But learning came quickly, and soon our Indian designers began to find a balance between individualism, adaptation and price points.

The FDCI and Lakme-IMG [?] split eventually and, from 2006, the two bodies started organizing fashion weeks separately every season.

Many would remember this as the worst time for the industry, with disagreements and malcontent ruling the ramp.

Buyers, sellers Today, both events are well established. While the FDCI-run fashion week, till recently the Wills Lifestyle Indian Fashion Week, is seen as the central trade event in India, the LFW’s GenNext [Gen Next?] show and Textile [TextileS?] Day have received consistent applause. For those who care, film stars turn up everywhere to walk for many designers, raising the glamour dec-

ibel (while robbing fashion models of opportunities). Fashion politics still works insidiously but fewer designers take sides—everyone shows everywhere. The fashion media has more real stories to report than captions naming who arrived where, and who wore what.

Many senior designers recognize and salute this change.

“There is a radical alteration in the way fashion is presented now and accepted by the global community in the Middle-East and Europe,” says Valaya. “The FDCI fashion week has managed to bring buyers to one stop, creating an organized business environment,” Rodricks points to “the discovery of new talent, discipline among designers to show twice a year, the opening of flagship stores, the business dialogue between buyers, stores and designers, the appearance of Indian designs on the international scene, the emergence of e-retail, media specialization, the growth of bloggers and fashion websites...”, as well as “the brand building between corporate houses and designer names”.

: u Lycra ‘lungis’ u The ‘anarkali’ u Lycra ‘churidar’ u Banarasi tube tops u Bikini sari u Crocheted foot thongs u Jodhpurs u The ‘bandhgala’ u The white shirt u Khadi ‘choga’ u Linen saris u Strappy ‘cholis’ u Indigo­dyed denim u Block­printed ‘pashminas’ u Tunic ‘sherwanis’ u Manish Arora prints u Madras checks u Machilipatnam chintz u Tunic shirts

u GenNext Labelled as the “future of fashion”, the LFW’s industryaltering platform for debutants has softened the struggle associated with newcomers [is it altering the industry or the fortune of the newcomers?]. u Bollywood’s gain Besides showstopper appearances, film stars have begun recruiting trained stylists, often from magazines, and turn up in designer-wear sent by those whom they endorse. This has changed the way our celebs dress today. u Couture vs. pret Once a royal mish-mash from bridal to resort-wear, fashion weeks now follow compartmentalization between bridal-couture weeks and prêt. Overlaps exist but they are fewer. u E­commerce Fashion portals have taken the elitist tag off fashion.

Jabong, Pernia’s Pop-Up Shop, Myntra, Amazon.in are fast turning fashion weeks into B to C (business-toconsumer) events. See today, buy tomorrow. u Smaller stakeholders

Fashion retail has grown beyond sophisticated designer stores. Now, Westside, Killer Jeans, Shoppers Stop, and Reliance Brands [Trends?], among other mass retail destinations, sell “designer” collections. u Designer directory A handful participated in the first fashion week at New Delhi’s Taj Mahal hotel.

Today, more than 100 designers participate in fashion weeks. u International footprint Our designers now participate in design and fashion fairs abroad like Tranoï, the international fashion trade show in Paris, thus bringing back more business. u Awards Fashion magazines have instituted beauty awards as well as recognition for innovative fashion and young designers, extend popularity [?] and boosting the industry financially. u Education Fashion and design colleges now seek association with fashion weeks. u The textile movement There is a noticeable return to innovation in textiles for both prêt and couture. It defines Indian fashion today.

Nonita Kalra, columnist and Shefalee fashion portals Vasudev or stores, thus overformer editor of Elle, calls herself riding buyer deals at fashion week, “disgustingly positive” about the while younger designers make fashion scene. “In the creative deals based on consignments field, nothing follows a path. But in instead of outright payments— spite of our best efforts we have there is no way to know if these grown,” says Kalra. “Hundreds of actually sold,” says Dhankar. stylists, creative young people findThe big names in the industry ing fashion careers, stylish cam- offer supporting arguments. “The paigns, Rohit Bal tying up with multiplier effects of fashion weeks Jabong, Manish Arora living in should be assessed through the Paris, new voices in the con- widening range of stakeholders,” sumption and display [some says Chopra. word missing?]...Indian fashion is Sethi points to the “steady seditious, but it adapts, it fights,” stream of global buyers” and colshe says. laborations with international There are other concrete gains. brands and designers, adding that “There was little or no interest in business must be measured by the the embroideries of our country— yardstick of new sponsors—from Phulkari for instance or Zardozi— brick-and-mortar brands to the main thing was weaving and e-commerce names—entering the woven textiles. But fashion drew industry. attention to embroideries besides While there is plenty to applaud, stunning the world with the beauti- Suneet Varma says it is also time to ful complexity of (block) printing,” “celebrate the struggles”. says Ritu Kumar, emphasizing that “Nobody talks of the hurdles we no other country is capable of this faced to get here,” Varma says. kind of work.

“Let’s not forget that in all other Multiple factors contributed to countries, the fashion industry has the clearly growing business: “200 the backing of the corporate world stalls, 200 buyers in a trading space and the government. We have of 1,20,000 sq. ft and a reported none. Our fashion graduates do business of more than `1 crore per not get bank loans to start busiseason each for a good number of nesses, some of us have had our designers,” is how Sunil Sethi, the stores demolished on MG road in energetic and effusive president of Delhi, only for a similar fashion FDCI, presents last season’s fig- street to come up later, we have ures. still survived despite all this,” says When he took over in 2008, the Varma.

FDCI fashion week earnings were Today, we have everything from billed at roughly `5-8 crore per a blinding array of bridal couture season. Sethi admits that even to designer Chanderis and modnow, the council is unable to pin ernized black and white Ikats; from down the exact earnings at fashion slinky designer cholis to lehnga weeks. It remains a contentious gowns, drape dresses, the world’s issue in the industry—there is finest bandhgalas, a range of noclearly a boom and, unofficially, a fuss contemporary young fashion fair number of designers agree reliant on the handmade as well as their business ranges from `50 Khadi, the world’s only handspun, lakh to a lot more than `1 crore at a handwoven fabric. We also have fashion week.

Rajesh Pratap Singh’s memorable The story is the same at the white shirts and Sabyasachi’s LFW: “150 Indian buyers, 50-odd ornate saris. Menswear is booming global buyers is what we list,” says in retail even though the Men’s Saket Dhankar, vice-president and Fashion Week, launched in 2009, head of fashion at IMG-Reliance. couldn’t find sustained sponsors as He agrees that it is difficult for a stand-alone event and collapsed them to quote cumulative earnings after three years. We have Rahul every season. “Some designers Mishra waving our flag on foreign claim their businesses are worth shores and Anamika Khanna back `100 crore annually but the fact is home redefining couture. What we, as a fashion body, are left with else do we need? random data points, as some “What we need now is for the designers start selling from the industry to be recog.nized as one next day of the show itself through [meaning what?]. India also needs a sizing system,” says Rodricks, raising the question on why the fashion industry must still pay entertainment tax [on ramp

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2015° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

KEYS TO AN EVOLVING BUSINESS

YOU CAN’T AVOID THEM

REWIND

Fashion times

fifteen

What has Indian fashion achieved since the first Fashion Week in 2000, besides selling out to bling and excess?

How buyer profiles, stakeholders, e­commerce and other developments changed the fashion industry

30 Indian fashion staples that will always stay in vogue u u u u u u u u u u u

u The Weeks From 2000- 2005 there was just one fashion week a year.

Today there are two each in Mumbai and Delhi. Lakme Fashion Week lists its seasons as Summer-Resort and Winter-Festive while FDCI follows the international model of Spring-Summer and Autumn-Winter. A dozen other smaller events across cities also bill themselves “fashion weeks” without trade environments. FDCI also launched Men’s Fashion Week from 2009 to 2011 and India Couture week from 2010 which continues. u Buyer profile In 2000, major buyers at IFW were international, including Selfridges, Macy’s Browns— but today 80-90% of them are domestic. u Sponsors The multiplier effect of publicity and celebrity culture spur even nonfashion companies like Tata Nano, DHL Couriers, and Phillips beside a half a dozen jewellery brands and online sponsors to join as stakeholders. u GenNext Labelled as the ‘future of fashion’, LFW’s industryaltering platform for debutants has softened the struggle associated with newcomers. u Bollywood’s gain Besides showstopper appearances, film stars have begun recruiting trained stylists, often from magazines and turn up in designer wear sent by designers who they endorse changing the way our celebs dress today. u Couture vs. Pret Once a royal mish-mash from bridal to resort wear,

Kurti Lehnga­gown Sharara jumpsuit Kaftan dress Black­white­red Ikat Chikankari palazzos Chanderi saris Draped dresses Dhoti pants Mulmul Ombre saris

: u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u

B Y S HEFALEE V ASUDEV shefalee.v@livemint.com

···························· ext week in Delhi, the Amazon India Fashion Week (AIFW), mounted by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), will see 25 designers present the grand finale in a rare show of unity and celebration. The number signifies the seasons that fashion weeks in India have gone through since the inception of the Lakme India fashion week in 2000, which itself is in the midst of celebrating 15 years.

Fifteen years and 25 seasons do not add up, but that’s because till 2005, India only had one fashion week a year.

Numbers notwithstanding, a curious split now defines the Indian fashion industry. We now have two flourishing events— AIFW and LFW. The former is a sturdy trade platform, besides trend forecasts, a buoyant handloom sector, designer exhibitions, multi-brand boutiques, a thriving retail scenario hawking designer wear for the masses and a large number of designers with their own flagship stores—all of which makes for a robust scenario.

Yet there is a sense of compromise—between creativity and commerce—that seems to ail the industry.

Veteran designers like Tarun Tahiliani describes it as “having sold our soul to bling”; Varun Bahl calls it “coming to terms with commercial reality”, and Rina Dhaka reminisces about the old days as the era of “new discoveries without worrying about commercial outcomes”. India’s tryst with fashion remains a debate. Its vibrancy is undeniable; its kitsch equally so.

Weddings can be defined through fashion but not youth culture.

Mumbai and Delhi fashion still

N

slug it out as a war between baubles and brands. There is innovative work that has made inroads into the global design industry, and crazy commercial success, typified by Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Manish Malhotra. There are stunning couture shows, and Manish Arora’s fiery representation of contemporary India to the world. What hits the eye the most though are not these, but excess.

Indian consumers have converted the designers instead of the other way round.

Some of India’s most “saleable” designers reflect every whim of the Mumbai film world and every fancy of the bridal market, no matter how unflattering.

“The buyer has changed. Fashion in the former days was truly fabulous and there was no question of celebrity endorsement,” says Tina Tahiliani Parikh, director of Ensemble, India’s first multi-designer store. Designers pushed the boundaries, experimented and stretched themselves. Today, despite a growing industry, mind boggling talent and customer evolution, the product has become rather generic.”

Lakme India fashion week was launched in 2000, co-created by Anil Chopra, the former CEO of Lakme Lever, the New York-based Fern Mallis of IMG (the international management group that manages sports and media events), some core members of the FDCI, and a handful of senior designers. Ritu Beri opened the first show of the first fashion week; and Wendell Rodricks, Tarun Tahiliani and Raghavendra Rathore are all among the designers who presented the first finale.

Beri had already begun working in Paris in 1998 and Rodricks, Tahiliani and Rathore were established names. Rathore provides an insightful track to the evolution of

Firstword: caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here caption to come here

the fashion industry in India when he says: “ the irony is that the designers arrived before the industry...followed by fashion events and finally organised retail, corporatization and the rest...”

Sartorial times What did the fashion industry look like before the advent of the fashion weeks?

Ritu Kumar, the matriarch of Indian fashion, had made a name for herself through her Miss India costumes and the business trajectory [WHAT?] she charted here.

We had stores like Kavita Bhartia’s Ogaan and Sal and Tarun Tahiliani’s Ensemble (Tina would join later). Rohit Bal was a star and enfant terrible. JJ Valaya’s designs were growing on the luxury customer. Suneet Varma and Ravi Bajaj were hailed as entrepreneurial talents, Madhu Jain’s Ikats were being noticed, Poonam Bhagat’s Delhi exhibitions were booked out and Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla’s sophisticated chikankari saris defined “fashion” for those growing up in the Nineties.

Mehr Jessia, India’s last supermodel, was already jaunting off the catwalk, on her way to marriage and motherhood.

“Mehr was the top closing girl, we would be so happy if she agreed to walk for us,” remembers Dhaka. Then she adds that in the first few years, there were no buyers.

From 2000 to 2005, as LIFW consolidated itself, with one fashion week a year alternatively in Delhi and Mumbai, Chopra remembers it as a time when fashion events were ad-hoc and designers were struggling to make a business out of their work.

“LIFW started on a very good note because for the first time, people understood that fashion was not a society event, it needed

Lycra lungis The Anarkali Lycra churidar Banarasi tube tops Bikini Sari Crocheted foot thongs Jodhpurs The Bandhgala The white shirt Khadi Choga Linen saris Strappy cholis Indigo­dyed denim Block printed pashminas Tunic sherwanis Manish Arora prints Madras checks Machhalipatnam chintz Tunic shirts

international buyers and media to report it instead of being a ghar ki dukaan (home grown store),” says Chopra. He admits that buyers from international stores like Macys, Browns, and Bloomingdales did not find Indian merchandise relevant in those days. But learning came quickly, and soon our designers began to find a balance between individualism, adaptation, and price points.

FDCI and Lakme-IMG would

split eventually and from 2006, the two bodies started organizing fashion weeks separately every season. Many would remember this as the worst time for the industry with disagreements and malcontent ruling the ramp.

Buyers, sellers Today, both events are well established. While the FDCI-run fashion week, till recently named Wills Lifestyle Indian Fashion Week, is

“

THE BUYER HAS CHANGED. FASHION IN THE FORMER DAYS WAS TRULY FABULOUS AND THERE WAS NO QUESTION OF CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENT

seen as the central trade event in India, LFW’s GenNext show and Textile Day have received consistent applause. For those who care, film stars turn up everywhere to walk for many designers, raising the glamour decibel (while robbing fashion models of top opportunities). Fashion politics still works insidiously but fewer designers take sides—everyone shows everywhere. The fashion media has more real stories to report than captions naming who arrived where, and who wore what.

Many senior designers recognize and salute this change.

“There is a radical alteration in the way fashion is presented now and accepted by the global community in the Middle East and Europe,” says JJ Valaya. “The FDCI fashion week has managed to bring buyers to one stop creating an organized business environment,” Wendell Rodricks points to “the discovery of new talent, discipline among designers to show twice a

year, the opening of flagship stores, the business dialogue between buyers, stores and designers, the appearance of Indian designs on the international scene, the emergence of e-retail, media specialization, the growth of bloggers and fashion websites...” as well as “the brand building between corporate houses and designer names.”

Nonita Kalra, former editor of Elle and now a columnist calls herself “disgustingly positive” about the fashion scene. “In the creative field nothing follows a path. But inspite of our best efforts we have grown,” says Kalra. “Hundreds of stylists, creative young people finding fashion careers, stylish campaigns, Rohit Bal tying up with Jabong, Manish Arora living in Paris, new voices in the consumption and display...Indian fashion is seditious, but it adapts, it fights,” she says.

There are other concrete gains.

“There was little or no interest in the embroideries of our country— Phulkari for instance or Zardozi—

the main thing was weaving and woven textiles. But fashion drew attention to embroideries besides stunning the world with the beautiful complexity of (block) printing,” says Ritu Kumar emphasizing that no other country is capable of this kind of work.

Multiple factors contributed to the clearly growing business. “200 stalls, 200 buyers in a trading space of 1,20,000 square feet and a reported business of more than one crore per season each for a good number of designers,” is how Sunil Sethi, the energetic and effusive President of FDCI presents last season’s figures.

When he took over in 2008, the FDCI fashion week earnings were billed at roughly between Rs 5-8 crore per season. Sethi does admit that even now, the council is unable to pin down the exact earnings at fashion weeks. It remains a contentious issue in the industry— there is clearly a boom and unofficially a fair number of designers agree they make business upwards of Rs 50 lakh going to a lot more than one crore at one fashion week. The story is the same at LFW. “150 Indian buyers, 50 odd global buyers is what we list,” says Saket Dhankar, Vice President and Head of Fashion at IMG-Reliance.

He agrees that it is difficult for them to quote cumulative earnings every season. “Some designers claim their businesses are worth Rs 100 crore annually but the fact is we, as a fashion body, are left with random data points as some designers start selling from next day of the show itself through fashion portals or stores, thus overriding buyer deals at fashion week, while younger designers make deals based on consignments instead of outright payments—there is no way to know if these actually sold out,” says Dhankar.

fashion weeks now follow compartmentalization between bridal-couture weeks and pret. Overlaps exist but are fewer. u E­commerce Fashion portals have taken the elitist tag off fashion.

Jabong, Pernia’s Popup shop, Myntra, Amazon.in are fast turning fashion weeks into B to C (Business to Consumer) events. See today, buy tomorrow. u Smaller stakeholders Fashion retail has grown beyond sophisticated designer stores. Now Westside, Killer Jeans, Shoppers’ Stop, Reliance Brands among other mass retail destinations sell “designer” collections. u Designer directory From the handful who participated in the first fashion week at Delhi’s Taj Mahal hotel, today more than 100 designers participate in fashion weeks. u International footprint: Our designers now participate at design and fashion fairs abroad like Tranoi, the international fashion tradeshow in Paris thus bringing back more business. u Awards Fashion magazines have instituted beauty awards as well as recognition for innovative fashion and young designers which extend popularity and financially boost the industry. u Education In a small but consistently growing way, fashion and design colleges now seek association with fashion weeks. u The textile movement There is a noticeable return to innovation in textiles for both pret and couture. It defines Indian fashion today.

Shefalee Industry Vasudev biggies offer supporting arguments. “The multiplier effects of fashion weeks should be assessed through the widening range of stakeholders,” says Chopra.

Sethi points to the “steady stream of global buyers” and collaborations with international brands and designers, adding that business must be measured by the yardstick of new sponsors—from brick and mortar brands to e-commerce names—entering the industry.

While there is plenty to applaude, Suneet Varma says that it is also time to “celebrate the struggles”.

“Nobody talks of the hurdles we faced to get here,” Varma says.

“Let’s not forget that in all other countries, the fashion industry has the backing of the corporate world and the government. We have none. Our fashion graduates do not get bank loans to start businesses, some of us have had our stores demolished on MG road in Delhi, only for a similar fashion street to come up later, we have still survived despite all this,” says Varma.

Today we have everything from a blinding array of bridal couture to designer Chanderis and modernized black and white ikats; from slinky designer cholis to lehgna gowns, drape dresses, the world’s finest bandhgalas, a range of no-fuss contemporary young fashion reliant on the handmade as well as khadi, the world’s only handspun, handwoven fabric. We also have Rajesh Pratap Singh’s memorable white shirts and Sabyasachi’s ornate saris. Menswear is booming in retail even though the Men’s Fashion Week, launched in 2009, couldn’t find sustained sponsors as a stand-alone event and collapsed after three years. We have Rahul Mishra waving our flag on foreign shores and Anamika Khanna back home redefining couture. What else do we need?

“What we need now is for the