Lounge for 09 Apr 2011

New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune

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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 15

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE A young girl fetches water for her family in rural Gujarat.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH AUDI’S MICHAEL PERSCHKE >Page 8

OLD­TIMERS

This year, watchmakers update their collections by going back to some classic, retro designs >Page 7

WHY WE HATE OUR

GIRLS The 2011 census reveals our abysmal child sex ratio. Is it poverty, deep­rooted cultural conditioning or our ignorance about what it means to be a woman, asks Shoba Narayan >Page 10

DETOURS

OUR DAILY BREAD

SALIL TRIPATHI

YELLOW IN THE OUTFIELD

W

e had been driving around Lake Ullswater in the picturesque part of northern Britain matter-of-factly described as the Lake District, admiring the hills and woods, stopping at parking areas to climb the velvety green hills, and then returning to quaint inns for lunch. The landscape was dotted with sheep posing for photographs, the menus at the inns with boasts of rare, juicy varieties of Cumberland sausage. My sons were keen to see Scafell Pike, the highest fell in... >Page 4

CULT FICTION

SAMAR HALARNKAR

REBIRTH OF THE HOME PIZZA

O

nce upon a time, I liked pizzas. My favoured toppings were jalapenos, sausages and pepperoni. I liked meatiness on my pizzas, and I liked the tang and bite of pickled chillies. To me, a pizza was comfort food. More than anything, it meant I did not have to cook. For someone who has spent a lifetime cooking for self, friends and family, an occasional meal out of a box was a big deal. Sometime, maybe about 10 years ago, I stopped liking pizzas.

I grew tired of the thick crusts... >Page 5

R. SUKUMAR

DREAMING IN WATERCOLOUR

Patron Jehangir Nicholson’s private art collection will finally be accessible to the public >Page 13

THE QUIET REVOLUTIONARIES

Two journalists unearth illuminating stories of the activist lives their fathers led >Page 16

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WORLDS IN RED AND BLUE

S

ometimes, when you buy comic books in lots of six and seven (or maybe a dozen) and then, before you finish reading them all, buy another lot, it’s quite possible that you overlook a little gem that gathers dust till you rediscover it (usually when you are looking for something else). And so, last weekend, I came across Matt Kindt’s Revolver, a book I bought sometime last year and then forgot. A quick read and another more considered read later I was convinced that I had just... >Page 17

FILM REVIEW

THANK YOU

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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FIRST CUT

LOUNGE LOVES | MUSIC

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

FESTIVALS

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN VENKATESHA BABU SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT (MANAGING EDITOR, LIVEMINT)

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

Season of sound

THE HASHTAG REVOLUTIONARIES

A

s I write this, almost everyone on my Twitter timeline is hashtagging Anna Hazare, India’s most marketable social activist. Head-in-sand Lounge readers should know that the new world routinely uses the # symbol with a keyword in a tweet to categorize it and so it shows up more easily in a search. @probablytrippy, who describes himself, among other things, as a smoker, joker, midnight toker, is all seriousness today. He wants to lead a simultaneous flash mob fast in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bangalore. He’s currently looking for someone who can take responsibility for each city and marshal the full-day fast tentatively being planned for Sunday. Let’s do this, he is urging.

Others are reviving must-read stories about #annahazare and sharing video links. One gent recalls how he first heard of Hazare in Reader’s Digest and became a fan, someone else is recommending replacing Twitter and Facebook profile pictures with Hazare’s.

DEBATE Offline, the response to Hazare’s protest to enact a stronger version of the anti-corruption Lokpal Bill has been swifter. Thousands of political workers have already been there, done that in support of Hazare’s fast outside Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Mumbai’s Azad Maidan and elsewhere across the country.

But why should speed matter? “They” have more experience at raising their voices than “us”, right? Now, thanks to social networking, at least we no longer need to end every cocktail party discussion with that dreaded question: But what can we do? And so what, if in this case, just the act of anointing Hazare the poster boy of anti-corruption makes us feel like we actually have contributed something to modern India. Anything’s a start.

Thus far, social networking in India doesn’t have a very impactful resume. Yes, thanks to all the badgering on Twitter and Facebook, Indian Premier League team Indi Commandos Kerala did become the

much nicer sounding Kochi Tuskers. A certain tweet did result in a certain minister losing his job. Public art effort The Wall Project got tremendous online Long road: Are you support when a stretch of freshly painted wall in Mumbai was defaced by movie posters. Members of the film fraternity eventually apologized on Twitter. Alas, since then more posters have been stuck on the wall.

Of course the smaller revolutions go mostly unreported.

Recently on the Delhi Metro, when a man inappropriately touched Dharini, and slapped her when she protested, Roselyn D’mello, a friend of hers, wrote a note about the incident on Facebook. “I urge you not to let this go. Let’s make a f****** mountain out of a ‘molehill’ (this is what the men in the metro accused Dharini of doing). Let’s start a serious debate about the reservation for women in the Delhi metro. Don’t stay silent about this. We need to protest! We need to have our voices heard. It’s our city too,” she said.

D’mello says her note last month went viral and resulted in much online debate.

Eventually, a group of 30-35 people met to debate what they should do next. In addition to planning the details of a flash mob to protest the incident, the group now has a list of demands it plans to present to the DMRC (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation).

I know all female commuters in Delhi would be happy if the Metro okays their charter: regularly announce that harassment is a punishable offence; ensure that CCTV footage is available on all trains; set up a help desk at every Metro station; tell women what procedure they should follow when they are sexually harassed on the Metro; ensure the Emergency Button is clearly visible, within reach and working on all trains; enforce the no-men-in-awomen’s-compartment rule etc.

But in a world with a 140-character

LOUNGE LOVES | I AM KALAM

A fairy­tale beginning A film about universal education will open the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles on Tuesday

T

welve-year-old Chotu starts off like the millions of boys working in small industries. He doesn’t have a name. Till one day he watches A.P.J Abdul Kalam on television in the dhaba he works in. “I am Kalam,” Chotu finds himself saying. And, why can’t he be Kalam? The former president of India, he learns, grew up poor, selling newspapers.

I am Kalam is a contemporary fable that will steal its way into your heart. The film is the feature debut of award-winning documentary film-maker Nila Madhab Panda. It betrays that first-time film-maker ethic— the bookish narrative graph, the homage to cinematic greats such as Satyajit Ray. I am Kalam will be the opening film at the ninth Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Iffla) on 12 April. This red carpet event caps a year-long tour of the festival circuit, starting with the film’s world premiere at Cannes last May, and a dozen other Indian and international festivals subsequently.

The film stars Gulshan Grover as Bhati the dhaba owner, and Harsh Mayar plays the precocious Chotu. It was shot in Bikaner and Delhi on a budget so low that the producers aren’t willing to talk about it.

While focusing on the grave issues of child labour, the narrative doesn’t fall into the easy trap of pitting Chotu against a slave driver. Bhati is actually an incredibly sweet man who is concerned about taking Chotu on. Instead, the story draws its strength from Chotu’s friendship with the local prince his age, Ranvijay (Husaan Saad—you’ll want to take him home).

At its core, I am Kalam is the story of a child and his struggles to pursue his dreams.

There is something to be said about the producers of the film. The Smile Foundation, a development organization founded

Inspiring: Chotu in the film’s poster. in 2002, focuses primarily on child health and education. Its programmes currently benefit 200,000 children across 22 states in India. But as one of the founding trustees, Santanu Mishra, says, “We’ll never be able to make a dent on the fact that 30 million Indian children don’t go to school.” What Smile can do, he concurs, is sensitize a larger donor group. And this was how I am Kalam was born.

Mayar, who’s never acted before, will fool audiences with his perfect Marwari diction.

He hails from a slum in Delhi and is one of the beneficiaries of Smile, with dreams comparable with his character. “I have had to struggle to get a good education,” says Mayar, who met Kalam at his residence during shoots.

But don’t love the film because of its genesis. Love it for its fairy-tale essence and emotional landscapes. One can hope that Kalam’s message, which charges Chotu and sets the narrative rolling—“Destiny isn’t written but can be made”—holds true for the film too. The producers are presently finalizing its much-delayed release, and hoping that it will hit theatres this June.

Anindita Ghose

Big concerts, good vibes, pretty Europe. What’s not to like?

F an overnight protester or a marathon man? attention span, the thing that sets apart any truly successful campaign is staying power.

One ongoing online marathon initiative that wowed me was conceptualized by bloggers Kiran Manral and Monika Manchanda on a long drive. They came up with the idea of a month-long awareness campaign on child sexual abuse, something that (officially) 53% of Indian children have encountered while growing up.

The campaign hasn’t attained #annahazare cult status, but I’m a huge fan of this type of activism. All through April, around 40 people will blog on this subject, share gut-wrenching, matter-of-fact true stories and offer expert help on dealing with sexual abuse. Many NGOs such as Arpan, Enfold, Rahi and Tulir have supported this effort.

Responsible traditional media has increasingly realized that they can “own” an issue too. So Hindustan Times and Mint have relentlessly pursued their Tracking Hunger campaign for nearly two years now. Last month, CNN announced that throughout 2011, it will take on the issue of human trafficking with its “The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery”. The network said that through the year, its reporting would “expose the horrors of modern-day slavery, highlight the growing efforts to stop the trade and exploitation of human beings and amplify the voices of the victims.” And, of course, who can forget The Times of India’s now-on, now-off Aman ki Asha campaign.

Go on, pick your channel of communication, be a revolutionary.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

estival season is go.

A raucous, impossibly complicated South by Southwest (SXSW, an annual festival held in Austin, Texas) finished on 20 March, marking the start of the 2011 music fest calendar. Here are some choices for the summer:

The Great Escape, 12­14 May, Brighton, UK Tickets: £22 (around `1,590) for a single-day pass.

Highlights: Indie eccentric Sufjan Stevens with his flamboyant live set, and electronica legend DJ Shadow.

Rock Am Ring, 3­5 June, Nurnberg, Germany Tickets: Event passes start at €175 (around `11,025).

Highlights: The often-wonderful System of a Down reunite after their 2006 hiatus.

Hurricane, 17­19 June, Scheeßel, Germany Tickets: Event passes start at €125.

Highlights: Foo Fighters, broody indie supergroup Arcade Fire, and broodier trip-hop group Portishead.

Glastonbury, 22­26 June, Glastonbury, UK Tickets: Sold out, though day passes may still be available.

Highlights: U2 and pop superstar Beyoncé Knowles.

The Big Chill, 4­7 August, Ledbury, UK Tickets: To be announced Highlights: Big Chill provides three days of unadulterated electronica. The line-up is coming soon.

Leeds and Reading, 24­28 August, UK Tickets: Single-day passes start at £82.

Highlights: Epic rockers Muse, with The National and The Offspring.

Krish Raghav ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: SAM PANTHAKY/AFP CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: Programmer and independent researcher Kiran Jonnalagadda’s name was misspelt in “Technology—Do IT Yourself”, 2 April.

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

SALIL TRIPATHI DETOURS EUCHIASMUS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Yellow in the outfield Golden words: (clockwise from far left) A field of daffodils; poet William Wordsworth; and Lake Ullswater.

CROSS LANES, US/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

W

e had been driving around Lake Ullswater in the picturesque part of northern Britain matter-of-factly described as the Lake District, admiring the hills and woods, stopping

at parking areas to climb the velvety green hills, and then returning to quaint inns for lunch. The landscape was dotted with sheep posing for photographs, the menus at the inns with boasts of rare, juicy varieties of Cumberland sausage.

My sons were keen to see Scafell Pike, the highest fell in England, because at their primary school, the House to which they belonged was named after that peak. We reached a spot surrounded on all sides by hills and valleys, and somewhere in the distance was Scafell. It was hard to tell, and the others who had made it to the top of a hill with us vaguely pointed us in one direction, saying “that’s Scafell”. So be it. For good measure, I took a wide-angled photograph of the hills.

On the way back, our car had broken down; we spent 2 hours at a pub with wilderness surrounding us, and more sausages keeping us company, until

help arrived. The car fixed, we were back on the road in a race to beat the sunset. Susan Cheever was to title her memoir about her father John Home Before Dark. At a place like this, it was good advice, for the roads were unlit, without signs, and it was raining lightly, reducing visibility.

The following day we drove even further, taking breaks near quiet sites along the lake. There was no purpose to the journey, no plan; there were no maps to follow. There were no sounds along the road, and only a few cars drove by. The woods were quiet too.

The sun’s rays snaked their way through the gaps between the leaves of the trees along the road, resting lightly on the ground. The lake was clear and blue; occasionally we’d hear the sound of the engine of a boat as it carried visitors across the lake. There are 14 lakes in the district, and their names—Coniston and Rydal, Thirlmere and Derwentwater,

Grasmere and Windermere—greet you unexpectedly in far-flung corners of the former British empire, as names of streets, houses, cottages, inns, pubs, and sometimes entire villages.

Along Lake Ullswater, more than 200 years ago this month, Dorothy Wordsworth had gone for a walk with her brother William. In the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, they saw daffodils alongside the lake. As they walked closer, they saw there were many of them, like a long belt along the shore.

Dorothy hadn’t seen anything quite so cheerful as that before. Later, she was to write in her journal about the flowers she discovered among mossy stones: “Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.”

Many of those words and feelings were to permeate into her brother’s thinking and imagination, but it took two years. In 1804 Wordsworth wrote one of the most widely quoted poems in English literature: All at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils We were there during Easter, with schools on vacation: the businesses along the lakes waking up from the long

slumber winter imposed, anticipating tourists in their Wellingtons, walking through the slush in the surrounding countryside. We made our way to Dove Cottage near Grasmere, which was the Wordsworths’ home in the first decade of the 19th century. When the Wordsworths lived there, they would have had an uninterrupted view of the lake, as the cottage faced the main road, and there were no buildings between the cottage and the tranquil lake.

Tranquillity mattered. Wordsworth described poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity”. Wordsworth had seen those flowers on a walk with his sister.

The flowers had left a deep impression in his mind. But he didn’t write his thoughts immediately. It took time, more than two years, when the experience stopped dripping into his subconscious, condensed, and transformed into the inspiration that spurred him to write a poem to recollect those spontaneous feelings, and he found the words that encapsulated that experience.

When we were driving along the

lakes, we were dimly aware of that story, but we had no idea of the precise spot, if there was one, where the Wordsworths paused. We didn’t want to be literary detectives, and fortunately, there were no signs announcing “Wordsworths’ Daffodils—5 miles”, with a cross marking where you could see the flowers as they saw them, with a café and a petrol pump standing by.

But we knew the time was right, as was the place; that we were likely to have an accidental encounter with freshly sprung daffodils emerging in the green; they’d flutter and dance merrily, like alert Australian fielders in their prime.

That’s just how it happened. We walked towards the lake, towards the thick foliage, and by the patch of grass, which met the gently trembling lake, swaying happily, were hundreds of golden daffodils.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

A CHILD DOESN’T EASILY FORGIVE My seven-year-old daughter has seen some bad fights in our house, to the point where my husband and mother-in-law would abuse me, even slap me when she was 4. Then I went away with her for one year and stayed with my aunt and uncle.

Later, my mother-in-law was hospitalized for mental illness—she died last year. Since then, my husband has really changed, we have gone for counselling and are on a much better footing. I have forgiven him and wish to work on this marriage. Seven months ago, I moved back to my husband’s home with my daughter.

However, my daughter is so angry and withdrawn from her father that he feels she will never ever forget or forgive.

How do I handle this?

Your daughter (as well as both of you) need to see a counsellor on a sustained basis, not just for one session. While a counsellor has helped you with your marital issues, there is now another aspect to be tackled. The counsellor will speak to your child alone, as well as to your

husband alone, and also have some sessions with you as a family or with just father and daughter together.

In the adult world, we are able to make our peace with a spouse (even though that in itself has not been easy for you, I am sure) and process the past in our own way, make some compromises, take into account some practical considerations, etc. A child would not have access to any of these processes—for her, the initial breach of trust and love with her father remains uppermost and dynamic. She continues to feel unsafe and afraid in his presence.

While it is also a question of giving her enough time and space, do keep in mind that some of those traumas and her deep mistrust of her father may never fully go away. What he can do, perhaps under the guidance of a counsellor, is to put in words the fact that he was wrong in what he did, and assure that he has made a clean break from his past behaviour and is, in many ways, a different person. She may not accept this or be able to believe it right away, but it is

something that she needs to hear. I would also caution you and him not to beg and cajole and insist on her forgiveness, because this puts her in an awkward and painful position.

Beyond a point, it will be your husband’s behaviour, trust-building measures, and also your being happy again that will get her to let the past go, at her own pace. As you must know, it is not easy for a child who has at one time seen her mother being traumatized by someone to accept that person back in the mother’s life. There is bound to be rage, confusion, hurt and fear, and she will need reassurance at many levels, verbal and non-verbal, to feel good about the family again.

My daughter is 13 and till last year she used to complain about a few girls being mean to her—about her clothes, her accent (she grew up in another part of the country till she was 10), and even the car in which she was dropped to school. We taught her to ignore this and sometimes even come up with a

Mind the gap: Children need time to come to terms with the past. smart comeback. Now, to our dismay, we find that she has turned pretty mean herself, and while she may not say things about other girls’ clothes or accent, she is quite cutting about people who don’t have as much general knowledge as her, or who are “dumb” or who don’t read, or who watch Hindi serials, etc. How do we change her behaviour?

This could well be a passing phase in a child who has till recently felt like the underdog.

Now she feels she has found her own “voice” and identity, after putting up with the humiliation that the other girls heaped on her. In this phase, she has found a way to feel good about herself only by being as mean or

dismissive as the other girls were.

However, even if it is a phase, it is important that you and other adults close to her help her find a balance—between feeling good about oneself and being derisive about “the other”. Perhaps the coping strategy of being “counter mean” to the mean girls was needed at that time. Now that she can hold her own, perhaps you can help her to come off this stance in some small ways.

Currently she is making the distinction that laughing at accents and cars and clothes is not cool at all, but being scornful about less reading or TV watching is cool. Teaching her that it is not cool to be mean to and about anyone is now something that you could work on.

It is well known that children (and even some adults) pass on their traumas in the same coin as they suffered them. Gently teach your daughter that while it is important to be strong and come up with ways to handle “meanies”, passing on the meanness to someone else serves no real purpose. Of course your daughter is young, and you will have to find age-appropriate ways to explain these things to her. I would suggest that you could let her “indulge” in some of this sharp talk for a bit though, of course, not directly with any person.

After some time, you could draw her into a chat about how it feels to be mean—and whether it isn’t easier to understand other people’s choices and let them be, even if she doesn’t particularly like them. However, do keep the conversation easy and flowing and avoid making her feel bad about herself. The attempt here should be to gently nudge some new perspectives in place, rather than lecture her too heavily. After all, she has been dealing with being pushed around and ridiculed, and needs to be given the time and space to process all of that in her own way too.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

L5

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

Rebirth of the home pizza SAMAR HALARNKAR

Odds and ends. Plastic­wrapped ‘naans’ and ‘kulchas’. A dash of kitchen creativity. You don’t need fine ingredients for a fine pizza

O

nce upon a time, I liked pizzas.

My favoured toppings were jalapenos, sausages and pepperoni. I liked meatiness on my pizzas, and I liked the tang and bite of pickled chillies. To me, a pizza was comfort food.

More than anything, it meant I did not have to cook. For someone who has spent a lifetime cooking for self, friends and family, an occasional meal out of a box was a big deal.

Sometime, maybe about 10 years ago, I stopped liking pizzas.

I grew tired of the thick crusts, layers of cheese and the general feeling of eating flavoured cardboard. However, I will deign to eat a slice or two of the thin-crust pizzas now common in major cities. Most of these are delicate, smoky—thanks to the proliferation of wood-fired ovens—and often delicious, though I do think they need to slap more meat on them.

So, I was sceptical when the wife coerced our cousin and great impromptu cook, Gyan, to make pizzas during his Delhi visit. Pizzas? I frowned.

In my kitchen?

Now, I do remember that making pizzas at home was fun.

I often mass produced them—once making 20 to cater to a drunken evening—and enjoyed mixing and matching ingredients you wouldn’t find in a Pizza Hut or Domino’s. But given my recent antipathy towards pizzas, I had stopped all such experiments.

Pizzas? I could see my father perk up. For some reason, Halarnkar Senior is a fan of Pizza Hut. I have no idea why.

At a recent dinner at an Italian restaurant, he wanted pizza. He stared suspiciously at the elegantly made thin crust before

him and after wolfing it down declared that it was good but Pizza Hut is better. Sigh. Yes, apparently he did beget me.

As I watched, Gyan got to work. We had bought only two wholewheat pizza bases from the market the previous day, which clearly wasn’t enough for the hungry Halarnkars. But we did have packaged kulchas and naans—you know, the kind that are mass produced in Okhla Industrial Area (no, really, these packets were from south Delhi’s grimy industrial heartland) and packed in plastic.

I’ve always believed that the best home food is sometimes produced from leftovers, and Gyan soon confirmed this. Using bits and bobs lying around in my refrigerator, he produced vegetarian and non-vegetarian pizzas atop the naans, kulchas and pizza bases.

We all agreed that the wholewheat pizza bases were unnecessary (they are healthier though). The best pizzas that evening came from the industrial kulchas and naans. I am putting down what Gyan used for these pizzas, but you can use pretty much anything that’s lying around—of course, that doesn’t mean you should sprinkle olives on paneer… actually, why not? That’s the

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should sprinkle olives on ‘paneer’… actually, why not?

Top notch: With some imaginative use of the leftovers in your refrigerator, you can make your own gourmet pizzas. wonder of leftovers.

Am I a reconvert to pizzas?

No, not from the big chains or restaurants. But you can be sure I will make many more at home.

Gyan’s Kulcha­leftovers Pizza Serves 4-6 Ingredients 4-6 kulchas and/or naans (ours were from the grocery store) 1-2 large onions, cut into rings 1 green pepper, deseeded and julienned Dried or fresh herbs (we used dried rosemary/oregano and fresh basil) Leftover meats—sausages (we had some leftover from breakfast), ham, fish (we had

leftover canned tuna) Splash of red wine K cup grated mozzarella K cup grated cheddar For the sauce K onion, minced Leftover pasta sauce 1 can of tinned tomato purée (or 4-5 fresh tomatoes, blanched, skins removed and chopped) 1 tbsp olive oil 6-8 pods of garlic, chopped Method To make the sauce, heat the olive oil, sauté the garlic lightly.

Add minced onion and fry till soft. Add the tomato purée and sauté for 3-4 minutes. Add leftover pasta sauce (if you don’t have any, add deskinned,

Q&A | ALAIN COUMONT

Dough re me The founder of Le Pain Quotidien on what it takes to make bread that doesn’t need butter

B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

···························· his story began about 20 years and four months ago in Brussels, when a chef couldn’t find bread he liked enough to serve at his restaurant. So Alain Coumont decided to switch his chef’s hat for a baker’s and got down to the basics: He bought a 3-tonne oven and went back to the traditional way of making sourdough bread, which is now broken on communal tables at Le Pain Quotidien (LPQ) cafés in 19 countries.

The founder of the chain was in Mumbai this week and we discussed bread as he brushed egg wash on his croissants and watched them turn golden in the oven. Edited excerpts from an interview:

T

How can you tell good bread from an excellent one?

Bread is like wine. You have to

deseeded fresh tomatoes and fry till they disintegrate) and keep blending till you get a smooth consistency. Add dried herbs and sauté. Add a dash of red wine (if you’re drinking any at the time). Remove when everything is well blended.

Important: Let the sauce cool for about 30 minutes. Otherwise your pizza is likely to get soggy.

In a non-stick pan, lightly sauté sausages, onion rings and green peppers. There’s no need for oil; the sausages release their own.

Now, apply sauce on the pizza base. Spread the cheddar and then the sautéed vegetables. Scatter the meat (use tuna on one pizza, sausage on another) on top and grated mozzarella above that.

Prepare a hot oven by preheating to gas mark 5. Put the pizza in for 12-15 minutes.

When the cheese has melted and the pizza is ready, remove and sprinkle with fresh basil.

Serve immediately.

This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is editor-at-large, Hindustan Times.

Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

have the knowledge that when you eat it you feel the difference.

Nowadays bread is like white sponge with no taste and you put a spread on it and eat. You can eat excellent bread just by itself, and it is nourishing.

What makes the bread at LPQ different?

Most bread is made with commercial yeast and they turn out bread in an hour or two.

Sourdough bread was the way it was made in the Middle Ages, before the invention of commercial yeast. It’s a much longer process, about 7-9 hours.

You get better flavour and the texture is different. It’s not that you want to make it sour, that’s just part of the natural process.

You have to create the mother dough. For that you just mix water, flour and salt. Then every 12 hours you add a little bit of fresh flour, water and a pinch of salt. Natural fermentation takes two weeks. After two or three days, the natural yeast starts developing and you cultivate it.

After two weeks, you have increased the population of the wild yeast. You keep part of this

Thoroughbread: Coumont’s techniques date back to the Middle Ages. dough to put in next day’s bread and the process goes on forever. It’s time consuming and requires patience, but once the process has started it is easy.

How did you learn baking?

How do you train your staff to ensure a standard quality of bread at all LPQ outlets?

Google didn’t exist those days.

So I read a lot. There are plenty of books. It’s not secret information. Bread is important

because most of the food we make is based on bread and served with bread. We start the training process six months before we open. Every three or four months, we have someone coming from Europe to see if there’s any problem or any requirement.

Can one bake good bread at home?

You have to cook bread on stone. It has to be a thick

stone that can accumulate heat. At home, it’s hard to reproduce. The water in the base of the dough is transformed into steam and that raises the dough and gives it lightness, which is difficult to produce in a home oven.

Even I try to bake at home but it’s not the same.

How did the idea for the communal table at LPQ come about?

I was looking for furniture for my new bakery that was in harmony with the type of bread we were doing. It was old-fashioned bread from the Middle Ages, so I was looking for antique furniture. I went to a bazaar and saw a big pinewood table. It had legs eaten by bugs but it was inexpensive so I got it. My first shop was small so I had enough space for one big table with 14 chairs. It was fun. This became the DNA of the brand and people were talking about it. You don’t want to change a formula that works, so it became a standard feature at most places.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

Health

LOUNGE

BEDTIME

The sleepless elite

THAT ALL­NIGHTER FEELS GOOD— TEMPORARILY Scans show a short­term dopamine surge in sleep­deprived brains

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Why some people can run on little sleep and get so much done with the extra time

B Y M ELINDA B ECK ···························· or a small group of people—perhaps just 1-3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time.

Natural “short sleepers”, as they’re officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and

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EYES WIDE OPEN People are of three types, depending on their sleeping patterns Wannabe short sleeper

Short sleeper• Short sleepers, about 1­3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without getting tired during the day.

They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing.

Geneticists who spotted a gene variation in short sleepers were able to replicate it in mice—which needed less sleep than usual too.

One­third of Americans are sleep deprived, regularly getting less than 7 hours a night, which puts them at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems.

Normal sleeper Most adults have normal sleep needs, functioning best with 7­9 hours of sleep, and about two­thirds of Americans regularly get it.

Children fare better with 8­12 hours, and elderly people may need only 6­7.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.

While it’s unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.

Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. “There aren’t nearly as many as there are people who think they’re short sleepers,” says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of US adults who get less than the recommended 7 hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they’re hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don’t think they have a disorder.

A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. “These people talk fast. They never stop.

They’re always on the up side of life,” says Dr Buysse. He was one of the authors of a 2001 study that had 12 confirmed short sleepers and 12 control subjects keep diaries and complete numerous questionnaires about their work, sleep and living habits. One survey dubbed “Attitude for Life” was actually a test for

hypomania. The natural short sleepers scored twice as high as the controls.

There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers. Still, scientists hope that by studying short sleepers, they can better understand how the body regulates sleep and why sleep needs vary so much in humans.

“My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco.

“Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.”

Dr Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4am but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual too.

News of their finding spurred other people to write to the team, saying they were natural short sleepers and volunteering to be studied. The researchers are recruiting more candidates and hope to find more gene variations they have in common.

Potential candidates for the gene study are sent multiple questionnaires and undergo a long, structured phone interview. Those who make the initial screening wear monitors to track their sleep patterns at home. Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only 5 or

6 hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says.

To date, Dr Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

“They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr Jones says.

Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own children, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr Jones says.

“Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they’ve been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than 6 hours of sleep,” says Dr Jones. “There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don’t understand.”

Doctors Jones and Fu stress that there is no genetic test for short sleeping. Ultimately, they expect to find that many different genes play a role, which may in turn reveal more about the complex systems that regulate sleep in humans.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo Da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts.

Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which may disqualify them as true short sleepers.

Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields such as blogging, video-game design and social media, where their

leep deprivation makes most people grumpy. It’s sometimes used as a form of torture. Oddly enough, it can also bring on temporary euphoria, according to a study in the journal ‘Neuroscience’ last month.

Researchers had 14 healthy young adults stay up all night and all of the next day and then compared their reactions with 13 subjects who had slept normally.

In one test, sleepless subjects asked to rate a series of images uniformly saw them as more pleasant or positive. “We saw this strange lopsided shift,” says lead author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brain scans also showed that the subjects who had pulled all­nighters had heightened activity in the mesolimbic pathway, a brain circuit driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that typically regulates feelings of pleasure, addiction and cravings.

The boost of dopamine after an all­nighter may help explain why sleep deprivation can alleviate major depression in about 60% of patients, although the effect is only temporary. “As soon as they get recovery sleep, all that mood elevation is lost,” says Dr Walker.

Could the sleep­deprived brain be somehow compensating for the lack of downtime with a surge of dopamine to keep on going? Scientists don’t yet know.

Earlier studies have also shown that sleep deprivation amplifies activity in the amygdala, the primitive emotional centre of the brain, and reduces it in the prefrontal cortex, where higher, more rational thought occurs. It may be that the brain reverts to a more basic mode of operating when it is sleep deprived, Dr Walker speculates. Alternatively, he says, “we know that different parts of the brain are more sensitive than others to sleep deprivation. It may be that the prefrontal cortex just goes down first”.

Although the feelings of euphoria sound great, Dr Walker warns that operating more on emotion than reason can be very risky. “You are all gas pedal and no brake,” he says. That can be dangerous, indeed, if you are in a job that requires both long hours and difficult decision making. sleep habits come in handy. “If I could find a way to do it, I’d never sleep,” says Dave Hatter, a software developer in Fort Wright, Kentucky. He typically sleeps just 4-5 hours a night, up from 2-3 hours a few years ago.

“It’s crazy, but it works for me,” says Eleanor Hoffman, an overnight administrator at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York who would rather spend afternoons playing mahjong with friends than sleep more than 4 hours. Sometimes she calls her cousin, Linda Cohen, in Pittsburgh about 4am, since she knows she’ll be wide awake as well—just like they were as children.

“I come to life about 11 at night,” says Cohen, who owns a chain of toy stores with her husband and gets up early in the morning with ease. “If I went to bed earlier, I’d feel like half my life was missing.”

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

L7

Style

LOUNGE OUT OF THE CLOSET | CECILIA MORELLI PARIKH

From Celine to saris

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

KEDAR BHAT/MINT

The French co­founder of Mumbai’s newest lifestyle store Le Mill is learning to dress colourful and sexy to keep up with India B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

···························· ike a little secret, Cecilia Morelli Parikh’s wardrobe is safely tucked in one corner of her spacious bathroom. “This is my summer wardrobe,” she says, opening the door. If you have lived in Mumbai long enough, you know the only wardrobe you have is a summer wardrobe.

But then Parikh, who is French, has spent only two years in the city. “The biggest challenge of living in India is that you get to buy so much in spring/summer and so little in winter. I miss my winter clothes,” says the 28-year-old.

Parikh moved from New York to India after a two-year stint as a buyer at Bergdorf Goodman. For the last year she has been busy working, along with her three partners, on a concept store called Le Mill located at an old rice mill in Wadi Bunder, Mumbai. She has brought some of her favourite fashion and lifestyle labels, many of which have never been retailed in India, under one roof.

Having lived in Paris, London, New York and India, she has had various influences on her style sensibility. In the upper section of her closet, Pero shares space with Marni, and a Tarun Tahiliani sari hangs next to a check Comme des Garçons skirt. We spoke to her about graduating from Marni to Celine. Edited excerpts from an interview:

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What was your first tryst with fashion?

I went to an all-girls boarding school in London and we would spend weekends tearing through fashion magazines. My British friends got to wear cool bright coloured flared pants. But my mother used to dress me in a very French way, buy me twinsets with matching brown pants. Finally, I bought purple flared pants and that was when I realized that fashion is also about what your friends are wearing. My biggest

fashion explosion was when I went to America to study. I loved Marni as an 18-year-old.

How has your sense of style evolved over the years?

When you are 18 you are body-conscious, so I used to wear more flowing things. In New York, I had a hipster aesthetic.

We wore corduroy jackets and paisley shirts and lots of bad stuff. Now I like more adult pants from Celine and Chloe. My look is classic but slightly daring, although I should take more risks.

I love jackets and I never wear anything flouncy or pink. I think sexy doesn’t have to mean showing your breasts and your legs. It can also mean wearing a masculine jacket and shorts.

What is your style obsession?

Today I have to say that I am quite obsessed with Celine.

I love Phoebe Philo’s trousers and formal shirts. The nice thing is that they make really sophisticated blouses that are also fun. Besides that I am obsessed with my The Row leggings, which I have had for four years. I never travel without them.

What kind of accessories do you like?

I love jewellery, but I am not an accessory person at all. I like my jewellery to be delicate. I love Sara Beltran’s designs. She uses uncut diamonds with 22-carat gold. It’s

Wardrobe staples: (clockwise from left) Parikh in a Heimstone dress; her daily handbag; her favourite Celine heels; shoes by Nicholas Kirkwood; her only pieces of chunky jewellery, Celine cuffs and a necklace gifted by her mother; her first Marni purchase; and a Comme des Garçons skirt.

precious but you can wear it every day.

How has your sense of style changed since moving to India?

Till two years ago my wardrobe was either black or prints. That’s the sensibility in New York, but since (in) India I have started wearing brightly coloured things.

People here dress up a lot in the evenings. I used to dress up more at work in New York and go out

Old­timers D

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it (laughs).

I also wear my wedding bangles all the time. As a European, I never really wore so much precious jewellery earlier.

How do you prepare for the Mumbai summer?

It’s a question of silhouettes, when trying to cope with the heat. Looser forms are really great and I wear loose, long sleeveless dresses in the day. I pull out my shorter sexy dresses in the evening. Shorts are another must; white is must and I have lots of whites in light cotton and

t Breitling Transocean Chronograph: Breitling launched the original Transocean in 1958 for aviators. This tribute will be available in limited edition steel and red gold, approx. $7,500.

This year, watchmakers update their collections by going back to some classic, retro designs B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ················································ riven by a market that wants to distance itself from the oversized, bling watches that symbolized economic excess, and eager to please sober Chinese consumers, many top-end watch brands this year have turned back time. Carrying on the trend that started last year, cases continue to shrink in size and thickness. Classic designs from brand archives are being resuscitated and everyone is talking “heritage”.

Young brand DeWitt has gone for an unabashedly art deco look with its new skyscraper-themed piece.

Breitling has a new limited edition Transocean Chronograph, complete with a classic woven Milanese bracelet, heritage logo and classic aviator dial. The piece is a tribute to Breitling’s aviator watches from the 1960s.

For watch connoisseurs it is a good time to buy some classic designs at contemporary prices.

straight. But here everyone goes home to change. I feel like I have more events to attend here so I buy a little bit more of evening wear. I show much more skin than I used to.

I got married to an Indian and had a fully Indian wedding in lehengas and silk saris. I love wearing saris and always wear them to weddings. I just bought a cool Tarun Tahiliani ikat print sari, which is stitched, so I don’t have to scuttle up to my mother-in-law to drape

mul fabrics.

Where do you shop?

The best shopping in the world is Paris. I shop at Celine. Le Bon Marche has great stuff. I love designers such as Heimstone and Tabitha Simmons. I discovered Pero, Anamika Khanna and Savio Jon in India. I shop at Ensemble and Aza. Can you give us some efficient packing tips?

I carry my leggings and four blouses for day and evening with one key piece of jewellery for the evening. I never take dresses for short trips. I wear clothes from The Row all the time because they have some really amazing basics. When travelling abroad, I take just one coat for day and night. This season beige is in.

u Chopard LUC XP Tonneau: The elegant piece has one of the thinnest automatic movements, made in­house, in the world, approx. $23,000 (around `10.28 lakh).

u Jaquet Droz Petite Heure Minute Art Deco: The watch has an exquisite mother­of­pearl dial with two finishes—plain for the small hours and minutes, and a sculpted Arabesque design for the rest, `15.65 lakh (with diamonds), and `11.35 lakh (without diamonds).

p DeWitt Twenty­8­Eight Regulator ASW: The limited edition watch has several art deco embellishments on the front, back and case, and a new movement with a peripheral rotor that maintains optimum torque, approx. $280,000.

L8

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

MICHAEL PERSCHKE

No Audinary task The head of Audi India wants the company to move up the podium from bronze to gold in luxury car sales within five years

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· ichael Perschke has been married twice…to the same woman. In 1998, when Perschke was a general manager with Mercedes-Benz in Pune (1997-2000), he went home with his then girlfriend Kathrin to Garmisch, a village on the border of Germany and Austria, to get married. When they returned to Pune, his colleagues in India insisted on taking Perschke shopping for a kurta.

“They told me to wear it the next day and be at Koregaon Park. When my wife and I arrived, we found that they had arranged for a traditional Maharashtrian wedding for us—complete with a priest and rituals such as kanyadaan.

“I wonder, if I were ever to get divorced, would I have to do it twice—the Indian way and the German way? Nobody has been able to answer that for me,” he says with a laugh.

India is a country of relationships and warm people. At least that is what Perschke, 42, says he and his wife believe, thanks to lovely memories and some good friends made in India during their first stint in Pune, a decade ago. In July, Perschke returned to India for the second time as the head of Audi India, based in Mumbai. He did not hesitate to take up the job, just as he had not hesitated when he left a consulting job in Germany in 1994 to move to Hong Kong to be with Kathrin. “We had visited Asia earlier and had liked Hong Kong. So when Kathrin moved there for a six-month project, I followed, giving myself a month to secure a job there.”

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After many cold calls to every German company in Hong Kong—from banking and insurance to cars—he landed a job in the finance department of Mercedes-Benz. “I always knew I was better at sales or marketing, but I also wanted to stay in Hong Kong, so I took that job.” Two years later, he got a chance to work in sales, but in India. Once again, Perschke seized the opportunity.

Within three months of his return to India in 2010, he had visited Audi dealers in all 15 locations—from Chandigarh and Ludhiana to Kochi and Chennai.

Audi’s goal is to be the top-selling car in the luxury segment by 2015—and car dealers will play a key role. “A luxury car sales experience has to be like the service experience of a great five-star hotel. I like how the Oberoi group manages to give a consistent, high-quality experience in its service across India. We hope to do the same at all Audi outlets,” he says. That’s why Perschke says he needs to know his dealers, and through them, understand Audi’s clients in this country.

“India is all about that—knowing people, building relationships. It’s a networking thing.

Besides, our business model is also not so much activity-based as it is relationship-based. If you want to reach out to a certain target audience, you have to be in the same clubs as them; you have to meet them on the golf course in their city.”

Yet Perschke does not believe that the way to woo an Indian customer is to hot-tail him. “India has the strong silent strength to resist if you push too hard. It is like a shy animal in the woods. If you run after it, it will flee. If you stand still and let it come to you, there is a much bigger impact.”

Perhaps it was this thought process, the cautious approach, that went in his favour when his name came up for the India posting.

“The car market, especially the luxury segment, is in an embryonic stage. India is not China; you still sell more motor scooters and bikes than cars. The Chinese are 8-10 years ahead of India in terms of car-buying decisions. That is why I always press for a cautious approach here.”

Perschke should know. He has worked with two rival brands (BMW, Mercedes), run

his own BMW car dealership in Germany, worked in India as a Benz employee in Pune until 2000, and on an India-specific project when Volkswagen was looking to set up a plant here in 2004. So Perschke’s insights make him a unique player in a nascent market where Audi’s real competition comes from two compatriot brands: German giants Mercedes-Benz and BMW. “The top three players in the luxury market are Germans and all three of us are fighting for the same space. The podium is set up: The question is who will get gold, silver and bronze.”

Though Perschke agrees that Audi currently holds the bronze position in the Indian market, he adds confidently, “I have just started in this competition.” Being a sportsman—he used to be a ski instructor, claims to be an above-average mountain biker and trekker—Perschke enjoys the challenging position he is in.

In the last 13 years, a lot has changed in the luxury car sector.

“Twelve years ago, whenever youngsters wanted to buy a new car, an official blessing from the head of the family was a must, maybe from the father or grandfather. Earlier, children could not drive cars bigger or more expensive than their parents. All that has changed now. I find all these people take their own decisions and want newer models.”

Audi has that advantage, being the new kid on the block, so it represents “new toys for boys”.

The latest car on offer from its collection is the super sports car Audi R8 Spyder, which Audi India launched at the Mint Luxury Conference in Mumbai in March. The car was launched internationally in the first quarter of 2010 in Germany.

India, says Perschke, is strong on word of mouth, or a customerto-customer endorsement system. Yet Audi does not subscribe to the brand ambassador approach to selling cars. Perhaps that’s why it believes in gifting its cars to top performing cricketers.

“The Audi voyage to India started when Ravi Shastri won the Audi 100 (in the 1985 cricket World Championship in Australia). I don’t think there can ever be a better unofficial ambassador than Ravi for us.” In line with collecting “unofficial brand ambassadors”,

Audi India announced that it would be gifting an Audi (the model is yet to be announced) to Yuvraj Singh, the Man of the Tournament at the recently concluded ICC Cricket World Cup. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, between April 2010 and February, BMW sold 6,052 units compared with the 5,839 and 3,528 units sold

by Mercedes and Audi, respectively. As Perschke begins work on increasing the Audi share in India, one thing he is keeping a close watch on is the management of expectations.

“When someone buys an expensive car, they expect it to be flawless. People think that a car with the biggest wheels in India can run on full steam over potholes from Delhi to Chandigarh and come out unscathed. Sometimes, expectations are just too high, and you have to be able to tell your clients that in spite of the superior technology, even an Audi is bound by the law of physics and cannot perform impossible feats.

“I always tell my people, don’t over-promise and underdeliver.”

Been there, done that: Perschke has worked for Mercedes­Benz as well as BMW—Audi’s two main rivals.

IN PARENTHESIS The one thing Michael Perschke vows will be part of his belongings when he goes back from India is an Enfield diesel motorcycle. During his earlier stint in the country, Perschke was fond of borrowing his neighbour’s Enfield to ride around Pune. “This is the only diesel motorcycle on the planet. These bikes have developed their own pedigree, they have a vintage charm.” Now, of course, he says he doesn’t find it comfortable to ride on Indian roads. “Maybe I will buy one now, put it on a trailer and take it out of Mumbai to ride around Lonavala or Amby Valley, but riding in Mumbai is too dangerous.”

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

L9

Play

LOUNGE

SPACE

The final frontier It’s been 50 years since Yuri Gagarin’s maiden flight, and the cosmos appears to be returning to our popular imagination PHOTOGRAPHS

B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

····························· n 12 April 1961, at 8.05am, a bright orange figure fell from the sky near the city of Engels in western Russia.

A farmer and her daughter watched, first with bewilderment, then fear, as the humanoid shape lumbered towards them after impact, dragging a parachute behind it and shouting indistinctly.

They began to back away.

At that point, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took off his white helmet, telling them: “Do not be afraid, I am a Soviet like you! I have descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow.”

2011 is the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s 108-minute sojourn aboard Vostok 1, and it’s a half-century that’s seen both the spectacular rise and fall of space and the cosmos in our collective imaginations. Now, it appears to be making a comeback.

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On 30 March, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Messenger probe sent back the first images from Mercury’s orbit, photos of the planet’s battered surface rendered in unprecedented detail. On 1 April, China’s Chang’e 2 probe, currently orbiting the moon, finished its six-month mission to find suitable landing spots for future Chinese rockets. Russia launched a manned Soyuz mission to the International Space Station on 5 April. India’s space agency Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), although caught in the middle of the spectrum scandal, is still on track to launch three satellites this month from the Sriharikota launch facility off the coast of Andhra Pradesh. Here’s a brief look back at five decades of leaving Earth behind:

The space race (1957­1969) Gagarin’s success in 1961 intensified the first “space race” between the erstwhile Soviet Union and the US, and came to

dominate the Cold War period.

The Russian space programme was headed by the enigmatic Sergei Korolev (known throughout his life just as “Chief Designer”, since his existence was kept a state secret).

Russia seemed to be in the lead throughout the 1950s and 1960s, notching up a series of firsts: the first satellite (Sputnik in 1957), the first to reach the vicinity of the Moon (Luna 1 in 1959), and the first woman in space (cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963). But the Russians weren’t as focused as thought at the time. Many details, from the frequent infighting to the failed launches, came to light only after glasnost in 1989.

The US programme relied on the leadership of German engineer Wernher von Braun, under whom the space agency Nasa coalesced into the manic energy of the Apollo missions. The successful American moon shot on Apollo 11 in 1969 established the country’s supremacy in space, and marked the beginning of the end for the Russian space programme, which gradually faded away in the 1970s.

GADGET REVIEW | SONY ERICSSON XPERIA PLAY

Myth­busting The long­awaited PlayStation Phone gets the phone part right, but forgets the play bit B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· eep down in the hearts of every tech-inclined person—from the fervent fan to the cynical naysayer—are the world’s most potent gadget myths. The winged unicorns of technology.

The stuff promised to us in our early days. Flying cars. Virtual reality. Duke Nukem Forever. The PlayStation Phone.

2011 is truly a strange year.

Two of those myths have come to life—long-promised, quasilegendary, risen-like-a-phoenix video game Duke Nukem Forever

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arrives in stores in May, and the PlayStation Phone, now called the Xperia Play, can be purchased now for R35,000. Just like that.

The Xperia Play is a 4-inch, Android-powered, touch-screen phone with a slide-out gamepad, much like Sony’s PSP Go game console. The pad consists of fourway directional keys, left and right triggers at the back, two touch-sensitive pads, and a standard four-button set-up. It feels comfortable to hold, though extended play results in mild discomfort. The touch pads are a poor substitute for an analogue stick, and much less precise.

The Play runs Android version 2.3, or “Gingerbread”. The “phone” part of the Play is fantastic. Call quality is excellent and everything runs without much lag. Email and Internet features are top-notch, and the bright vivid screen makes most tasks painless. Battery life is so-so, no worse than one’s modest expectations from an Android device.

The phone looks excellent, if a little chunky. The shoulder buttons make the position of the volume rocker a little awkward, and the headphone slot is located on the top left, not an ideal position. The slideout mechanism, it must be said, is super smooth.

Slide out the gamepad, and the phone launches a bundled Xperia Play application, which lists the four games that come pre-loaded and a library of other titles that can be purchased.

Pricing is well done—a lot of the

NASA

Flights of fancy: (clockwise from far left) Yuri Gagarin; Earth as seen by Apollo 8; Wernher von Braun (centre) with then US president John F. Kennedy; and Valentina Tereshkova.

Isro’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The first batch of undergraduate engineers in avionics and aerospace engineering will graduate this year, creating the country’s first batch of trained space engineers and astronauts.

Space on a budget (1975­2008) There’s an iconic 1966 image by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson of one of India’s earliest space launches.

Taken at a launch centre in the village of Thumba in Kerala, a location chosen by physicist Vikram Sarabhai, it s h o w s a n advanced rocket head being transported by

COURTESY

Staring into the deep (1990­2011)

bicycle to the launch site.

India’s space programme is unbelievably economical (Isro’s budget is around 3% of Nasa’s), but the achievements are no less remarkable—a series of telecommunications satellites (Insat) in 1983, an indigenous launch vehicle (the PSLV) in 1993 and a successful moon probe (Chandrayaan 1) in 2008.

In 2007, the government opened the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, close to

HD titles are `50 each, and others are `66-200. Most of these games require hefty downloads, so getting them on the go through a 3G network is out of the question.

Also remember that most of these games are not unique to the Xperia Play—they’re just optimized to use the easier controls.

The second way to play is the PlayStation Pocket app that presumably will contain the promised Play-specific games. I

The science fiction dream of manned flight to other planets is still many decades away, but humankind’s unmanned probes have given us an unimagined view of the cosmos. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, sends back spectacularly vivid snapshots from the far reaches of space, while Nasa’s Spirit Rover and Huygens Probe sent back stark images from the surface of Mars and Titan, respectively.

The Russian Centre of Science and Culture will be hosting a series of events to commemorate Gagarin’s launch. These include film screenings, lectures and exhibitions. For details, log on to Russiancentre.org.in

say presumably because all it contains right now is the preloaded Crash Bandicoot, a game from PlayStation1, and a stern warning that the PlayStation Store is “not available in your region”.

The games are largely underwhelming. Fifa 10 looks blurry and awful, like it was optimized for a much less powerful device.

The Sims 3 is better played with a touch screen than the gamepad. Bruce Lee is a fun fighting game, but nowhere

Trigger­happy: The Xperia Play has a slide­out gamepad, much like the PSP.

close to what you can play on a Nintendo DS or PSP. Crash Bandicoot is good fun, but c’mon, it’s a 15-year-old game. If the PlayStation Pocket app is going to consist of oldies resold to consumers for a price, that’s not going to cut it.

The problem is, what standards are we supposed to hold up the Play to? Compared with other smartphones and tablets, this is a decent start. It could beat the iPad with a few signature titles, and is easily the best Android gaming device available. Compared with the DS and PSP, it’s like Minesweeper versus Legend of Zelda.

The Xperia Play needs a library, fast. It needs the PlayStation Pocket app to get its act together, and deliver the eclectic experimentation and quirky games that the PlayStation Network is known for. It needs more than just rehashed ports and rush jobs.

Unless that happens, and happens soon, say hello to the 21st century’s Nokia N-Gage.

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Skewed future: (left) In Jhajjar, Haryana, that has the lowest sex ratio in the coun­ try, the number of girls per 1,000 boys is 774, while the state average is 830, in the 0­6 age group; and many girls at the Aarti Home orphanage have been aban­ doned at birth.

SEX RATIO

WHY WE HATE OUR

GIRLS The 2011 census reveals our abysmal child sex ratio. Is it poverty, deep­rooted cultural conditioning or our ignorance about what it means to be a woman? An IAS officer may not have the remedy, because India needs to convert minds subliminally for a real change

ANNABELLE BLAIS/COURTESY AARTI HOME

B Y S HOBA N ARAYAN ········································ ome stories find you. This one began with bags—1,000 unbleached cotton bags, to be specific. My sister-in-law in the US needed them to hand out to guests at a new Hindu temple in Southwest Florida. I started trawling online sites and spamming friends for recommendations. Days later, a stranger named Namrata Vora emailed me. There was an orphanage for girls named Aarti Home in Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh, she said, with a tailoring unit that could make the bags. After discussing shape, size, price and design, we ordered 1,000 bags.

A 2007 BBC documentary titled India’s Missing Girls, which can be found on YouTube, features Aarti Home. Its remarkable founder, Puchalapalli Sandhya, speaks about India’s gender bias with understanding and compassion.

She cradles a beautiful two-year-old girl whom they have named Harshita—abandoned at birth in a basket with a feeding bottle. “We don’t know who her parents are, or her name or her birthday. But since today is an auspicious day, we are celebrating her birthday,” says a smiling Sandhya in the documentary.

There are many poignant moments. A grandmother walks into Aarti Home and hands a dayold girl to Sandhya. The baby’s mother, her daughter, is missing, she says, and walks out.

Thirty-six hours later, the premature baby dies.

Sandhya speculates as to whether the mother tried to abort the baby using crude methods or eating poisonous herbs. The foetus survived the womb to die just after birth.

The case that spears your heart is of a pregnant woman who once worked at Aarti Home.

She knows she is pregnant with a girl and wants to abort her baby. “I’ve had such a tough life,” says the woman. “Why should I subject my daughter to it also? Maybe I will give up my baby to Aarti Home.”

She eventually doesn’t abort her daughter or give her away to Aarti. “Once I saw my daughter’s face, all my love came pouring out,” says the woman in Telugu. “How can I give her away?”

The 100 girls at Aarti Home range in age from a few months to more than 18 years. Many have been abandoned at birth; some have been rescued from brothels when they were seven or eight years old; some of the older girls have found jobs and moved out. They return occasionally and are received with joyous cries of “akka” or elder sister. The Home invites young men to become elder rakhi-brothers to the girls.

Sandhya posts advertisements on Telugumatrimony.com, trying to marry off the older girls on the condition that no dowry shall be asked for or given. The Home has three grandchildren, says

S

the website proudly, and it will remain the “maternal home” for every girl who passes through it.

The 2011 census has brought forth India’s abysmal sex ratio, something that even our vaunted economic growth has been unable to stem. The number of girls per 1,000 boys has fallen 13 points, to 914, in the 0-6 age group in the past decade. Authorities admit that the programmes they had initiated to stem female foeticide and infanticide are not working.

It’s not just among the poor. The latest census figures show cities don’t fare too well either—in Delhi, for instance, the ratio is down 2 points, to 866. In the BBC documentary, a rich woman in Ahmedabad left her husband because he forced her to abort her five-month-old foetus when they discovered it was another girl. In 2007, more than 90 female foetuses were found stuffed in polythene bags and dumped into a well near an ultrasound-scanning clinic in Odisha, even though sex determination is illegal.

Why do we kill our daughters?

Economists have long tried to explain the “missing women of Asia”, first noted by the Nobel prize-winning Amartya Sen as early as 1990 in a seminal paper he wrote for The New York Review of Books. In it, he tried to wrap economics around biology and explain why 50 million women in China and 100 million women in India were “missing”. At birth, he said, boys outnumber girls everywhere. But women are hardier than men. They live longer and have a higher survival rate. Women outnumber men in much of the developed world. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, ravaged as it is by calamities and enervating poverty, women outnumber men. In Asia, however, particularly in India and China, the opposite is true. Even within the countries, there is a difference in sex ratios. Punjab and Haryana have a lower sex ratio relative to Kerala.

“These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women,” writes Sen in an oftquoted line. Two explanations, one cultural (the East is more sexist than the West) and the other economic (women fare better in developed economies) have been “implicitly assumed”, as Sen says, to account for the lower number of women. Sen dismisses both explanations—read his paper for reasons—and lays the blame squarely on gender discrimination, suggesting that employment, literacy and economic rights, including property rights, are factors that would help right the wrong.

Later, economist Emily Oster questioned Sen’s view and suggested that the prevalence of the Hepatitis B virus in Asia would account for the higher survival rates of boys. Oster later publicly admitted that her hypothesis was wrong.

“

WOMEN FEEL LIKE FAILURES WHEN THEY GIVE BIRTH TO DAUGHTERS; THEY FEEL VICTORIOUS WHEN THEY BEAR SONS...

IF YOU’VE EVER EMPLOYED A MAID WITH A DRUNKARD HUSBAND, YOU KNOW THAT HE IS THE BURDEN AND SHE IS THE FINANCIAL PROVIDER

”

Hepatitis B, as it turned out, had nothing to do with the survival rates of girl babies.

The most hopeful research, and the one that interests me the most, is by Monica Das Gupta, a senior demographer at the World Bank’s Development Research Group. In her paper Is There an Incipient Turnaround in Asia’s “Missing Girls” Phenomenon?, Das Gupta and her colleagues use data from South Korea to show that the son-preference reduces as societies develop, not simply because of economic improvement but because of “normative changes across the whole society”. Normative—I looked up the term—means a complex conglomeration of values, standards and judgement. It is what society thinks of as “normal”. Son-preference is strongest in patrilineal societies such as China, India and, until recently, South Korea. They viewed having sons as superior and normal. As patrilineal societies modernize, they develop political, legal and social tools that recognize “patrilineages as a threat rather than an asset to society”.

This is slowly happening in India. Second, urbanization and industrialization will render

women as valuable as men, both in their own minds and in society at large. The norms, in other words, are changing, even in India (I’d like to think). The modern state, says Das Gupta, has “unravelled” the underpinnings of a society’s son-preference.

Unlike Das Gupta, who views the world in wide swathes, I am not a demographer. I am a storyteller. I am interested in the psychology of India’s son-preference; about why we value sons more than daughters; and how we can change this.

The home front Aloma Lobo and I are sitting in Bangalore’s Caperberry restaurant sipping wine and nibbling on canapés. Lobo is a medical doctor who used to be the chairperson of Cara, or Central Adoption Resource Agency. She continues to work with the Karnataka chapter of Cara and has six children—three boys and three girls. “Must you say that my girls are adopted?” she asks before giving permission.

I meet Lobo once a month at foodie events in

Bangalore. With her slim frame, short hair and Herve Leger-type bandage dresses, she cuts an elegant figure. Her youngest daughter, Nisha, is visually impaired and has ichthyosis, a genetic condition that causes the skin to become scaly and flake away. Adoption specialists say that girl-babies with special needs are the hardest to place, something Lobo knows first-hand. “You know, our daughter didn’t come from a poor family,” she says. “Nisha’s parents were well-off but they still gave her away because she was challenged. The other day, she asked me, ‘Mama, what will you say if you meet the people who gave birth to me?’ I said, I would thank them because they gave you to us. I asked her: ‘What would you say?’ My Nisha said, ‘I would ask them why they weren’t there for me when I needed them most.’”

When my second daughter was born, I have to admit that I felt a pinch of disquiet. It would have been nice to have one child of each sex.

I’d like to think that I would have felt that same disquiet had I given birth to two sons. But now, it is hard to fathom life without my little Malini.

Could I adopt? I didn’t think so. When we contemplated adopting before my second child was born, I told my husband that I was worried I would treat the adopted child different from my own. Worse, I would treat the adopted child as more special, just to overcompensate. My husband was more sanguine. He had no qualms that “after the first few hours, your heart will embrace the newborn—any newborn—like it was your own”. Then I got pregnant and we didn’t do it. But I think to myself, why don’t we place adoption centres and orphanages beside IVF clinics so that people who try so hard to have a child know there are other options? Why don’t we build orphanages in districts such as Jhajjar, with India’s lowest sex ratio? The irony is that there is a waiting list for people who want to adopt girls and across the psychological border, there are parents who abandon or kill their daughters.

The oft-quoted, and very real reason why daughters are not desired is dowry; but it goes much deeper than that. To even begin to address India’s skewed sex ratio requires vision, extraordinary empathy, and a leap of imagination. Simply quoting numbers, getting on the moral high ground and condemning the parents who kill their daughters is not enough. “Indian women have been raised to devalue themselves and we perpetrate this on our daughters,” says Lobo. “I get very irritated when women tell me that they won’t eat before their husbands. Do it if it’s important that you have a family dinner. But don’t do it because he is the man. Till we learn to value ourselves, we won’t value our daughters.”

Valuing ourselves has to do with self-esteem, but it also has to do with the psychological burdens that women bear. Before you condemn the woman who kills her daughter, think about the sleep-deprived despair and fury that you have felt at whiny, cranky babies night after night.

Were there moments when you wished the child would keep quiet; wished the child away? Now transpose that quiet rage to a different self. You are dispossessed; live in a hut in arid interior Rajasthan; work like a farm-horse; are malnourished and barely literate. You have never experienced maternal love (your father killed your mother in a drunken fit when you were a child), let alone the milk of human kindness, and civilization’s little courtesies that we city dwellers take for granted. In this morphed form, your body and mind have hardened like the land around you. You are already on edge and you know that you are carrying a girl. You dread the eyes that will view you with pity and censure when your daughter is born. You have no food for yourself or your first daughter. And now another? What are you going to do?

In Usilampatti taluk in Tamil Nadu, women give the newborn milk laced with erukkam paal (sap of Calotropis gigantea). The infant sucks the milk greedily and dies within an hour. Penn-sisukolai (girl-baby murder), it’s called. Mothers did this, but more often, mothers-in-law, by mixing pesticides, sleeping pills, rat poison or saps with mother’s milk and feeding it to the newborn girl.

It is not true, what they say, about maternal instinct gushing forth when you see your newborn. That happens in movies where the heroine sheds tears of joy and violins pierce the high note. In parts of India, the fierce, protective maternal instinct that those of us sitting in comfort feel for our children, is submerged, staunched and often runs dry—especially when the newborn happens to be a daughter. Maternal love is a luxury for poor, despairing women in Usilampatti, Jhajjar and other areas. They have no control over their lives or destiny; they lack individual identity, let alone self-esteem, education or financial independence. Most important, they believe they have no choice but to kill their daughters. If there were street plays or television campaigns in these villages with images of smiling, well-off parents who look these desperate mothers in the eye and say, “I will take care of your daughter,” they wouldn’t kill her. They’d give her up instead.

Many state governments, including Tamil Nadu, have attempted solutions for women teetering on the edge. They leave cradles outside orphanages for mothers who are ready to dump their daughters; have caseworkers monitor pregnant women.

While easier access to adoption agencies and orphanages might address the problem of female infanticide, it doesn’t prevent female foeticide, which requires step-by-step checklists and engineering solutions, along with a good dose of female psychology. Make sex determination illegal? Done. Shutter ultrasound clinics that violate the law? No. Slap fines on ultrasound technicians who reveal the sex? No. The PNDT (Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques) Act needs to be enforced because seeing an infant daughter’s face can change a mother’s mind.

Psychological issues are more complicated.

Women feel like failures when they give birth to daughters; they feel victorious when they bear sons. The son is the carrier of the family name and business; the daughter takes away the family wealth. Sons take care of you in your old age; and they can light your funeral pyre. But all that is no longer true; not even in traditional or rural homes. As numerous microfinance institutions that lend mostly to women have figured out, it is the women who earn and save money. If you’ve ever employed a maid with a drunkard husband, you know that he is the burden and she is the financial provider. The problem is that this anecdotal evidence doesn’t apply to large swathes of India where women are painfully dependent upon and dominated by their fathers, husbands, and then sons. Among middle-class or wealthy families, the son-preference has to do with passing on businesses. Even here, daughters like the Paul and Reddy sisters have shown that girls can run and elevate a father’s businesses just as well as any son and they too keep their family name, even after marriage.

You can make logical arguments like these to convince women to keep their daughters, but at the end of the day, they just aren’t enough.

India needs to convert minds subliminally to displace centuries of cultural conditioning.

The problem is that this bias is so culturally ingrained and so complex that it is hard to know where to start. People say the oddest things.

When my second daughter was born, an educated feminist sympathized with me because she came from a family of girls. My conservative mother, on the other hand, rejoiced over my daughters because she comes from a family of four brothers and one sister (my mom). She didn’t have the baggage associated with being a girl. A close friend in New York told me to try for a son who could light my funeral pyre. I expected this statement from a Brahmin priest, not from an investment banker. It is moments like these that make you a revolutionary.

Bollywood can help; as can our cricket heroes.

If Sachin Tendulkar or M.S. Dhoni urge fathers to cherish their daughters, would it change minds? I love masala movies, but I cannot think of a single one, either here or in Hollywood, where a woman does Mission Impossible or is a Don. Why can’t Farah Khan or Kathryn Bigelow make women-centric movies? For that matter, why can’t Vishal Bhardwaj or Rajkumar Hirani change the paradigm, by using heroines as the “3 Idiots”? Easy to say, but in order for successful directors to embrace this concept, you need one runaway women-centric hit. Would that J.K. Rowling had written her series using her own daughter as heroine, instead of Harry Potter.

That would have changed the minds of countless young girls, who currently have fairy tales in which the prince “saves” them as opposed to stories where they take charge of their destinies and save others in the process.

Reimagining realities is a central component in the fight against female foeticide. If I were Sonia Gandhi and I were serious about rebalancing the sex ratio of our country, I wouldn’t just hire a politician or an IAS officer to head this effort; I would hire a crackerjack team of demographers, caseworkers, implementers, ad men (or women) and media people. Lest I sound self-serving, let me add that in her paper, Family Systems, Political Systems, and Asia’s “Missing Girls”: The Construction of Son Preference and its Unravelling, Das Gupta concurs.

“Studies of the impact of the media suggest that states can accelerate the resultant decline in son preference through media efforts to help parents perceive that daughters can now be as valuable as sons,” she says.

We are all stakeholders in this battle to save the girl child. Census 2011 is the tipping point beyond which the pendulum should not swing.

If Indian society doesn’t save our girls, we will spiral downwards into the realm of science fiction decades later in ways that boggle the mind: inflicting sex-change operations on effeminatelooking boys in Nayagarh, Odisha, for instance, simply to provide a bride for a family of brothers.

Holding Mahabharat-like swayamvars in families who have the daughters that society suddenly finds valuable; and killing off those boys—Greek-mythology style—who don’t qualify. You think this is impossible? As the country prospers and birth rates drop, who will be wives and mothers if there are no girls?

India needs to save our girls. The future of our boys, and indeed our civilization, depends on it.

Till we change our minds, we cannot change our world.

Shoba Narayan writes a popular weekly column The Good Life for Lounge.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Skewed future: (left) In Jhajjar, Haryana, that has the lowest sex ratio in the coun­ try, the number of girls per 1,000 boys is 774, while the state average is 830, in the 0­6 age group; and many girls at the Aarti Home orphanage have been aban­ doned at birth.

SEX RATIO

WHY WE HATE OUR

GIRLS The 2011 census reveals our abysmal child sex ratio. Is it poverty, deep­rooted cultural conditioning or our ignorance about what it means to be a woman? An IAS officer may not have the remedy, because India needs to convert minds subliminally for a real change

ANNABELLE BLAIS/COURTESY AARTI HOME

B Y S HOBA N ARAYAN ········································ ome stories find you. This one began with bags—1,000 unbleached cotton bags, to be specific. My sister-in-law in the US needed them to hand out to guests at a new Hindu temple in Southwest Florida. I started trawling online sites and spamming friends for recommendations. Days later, a stranger named Namrata Vora emailed me. There was an orphanage for girls named Aarti Home in Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh, she said, with a tailoring unit that could make the bags. After discussing shape, size, price and design, we ordered 1,000 bags.

A 2007 BBC documentary titled India’s Missing Girls, which can be found on YouTube, features Aarti Home. Its remarkable founder, Puchalapalli Sandhya, speaks about India’s gender bias with understanding and compassion.

She cradles a beautiful two-year-old girl whom they have named Harshita—abandoned at birth in a basket with a feeding bottle. “We don’t know who her parents are, or her name or her birthday. But since today is an auspicious day, we are celebrating her birthday,” says a smiling Sandhya in the documentary.

There are many poignant moments. A grandmother walks into Aarti Home and hands a dayold girl to Sandhya. The baby’s mother, her daughter, is missing, she says, and walks out.

Thirty-six hours later, the premature baby dies.

Sandhya speculates as to whether the mother tried to abort the baby using crude methods or eating poisonous herbs. The foetus survived the womb to die just after birth.

The case that spears your heart is of a pregnant woman who once worked at Aarti Home.

She knows she is pregnant with a girl and wants to abort her baby. “I’ve had such a tough life,” says the woman. “Why should I subject my daughter to it also? Maybe I will give up my baby to Aarti Home.”

She eventually doesn’t abort her daughter or give her away to Aarti. “Once I saw my daughter’s face, all my love came pouring out,” says the woman in Telugu. “How can I give her away?”

The 100 girls at Aarti Home range in age from a few months to more than 18 years. Many have been abandoned at birth; some have been rescued from brothels when they were seven or eight years old; some of the older girls have found jobs and moved out. They return occasionally and are received with joyous cries of “akka” or elder sister. The Home invites young men to become elder rakhi-brothers to the girls.

Sandhya posts advertisements on Telugumatrimony.com, trying to marry off the older girls on the condition that no dowry shall be asked for or given. The Home has three grandchildren, says

S

the website proudly, and it will remain the “maternal home” for every girl who passes through it.

The 2011 census has brought forth India’s abysmal sex ratio, something that even our vaunted economic growth has been unable to stem. The number of girls per 1,000 boys has fallen 13 points, to 914, in the 0-6 age group in the past decade. Authorities admit that the programmes they had initiated to stem female foeticide and infanticide are not working.

It’s not just among the poor. The latest census figures show cities don’t fare too well either—in Delhi, for instance, the ratio is down 2 points, to 866. In the BBC documentary, a rich woman in Ahmedabad left her husband because he forced her to abort her five-month-old foetus when they discovered it was another girl. In 2007, more than 90 female foetuses were found stuffed in polythene bags and dumped into a well near an ultrasound-scanning clinic in Odisha, even though sex determination is illegal.

Why do we kill our daughters?

Economists have long tried to explain the “missing women of Asia”, first noted by the Nobel prize-winning Amartya Sen as early as 1990 in a seminal paper he wrote for The New York Review of Books. In it, he tried to wrap economics around biology and explain why 50 million women in China and 100 million women in India were “missing”. At birth, he said, boys outnumber girls everywhere. But women are hardier than men. They live longer and have a higher survival rate. Women outnumber men in much of the developed world. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, ravaged as it is by calamities and enervating poverty, women outnumber men. In Asia, however, particularly in India and China, the opposite is true. Even within the countries, there is a difference in sex ratios. Punjab and Haryana have a lower sex ratio relative to Kerala.

“These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women,” writes Sen in an oftquoted line. Two explanations, one cultural (the East is more sexist than the West) and the other economic (women fare better in developed economies) have been “implicitly assumed”, as Sen says, to account for the lower number of women. Sen dismisses both explanations—read his paper for reasons—and lays the blame squarely on gender discrimination, suggesting that employment, literacy and economic rights, including property rights, are factors that would help right the wrong.

Later, economist Emily Oster questioned Sen’s view and suggested that the prevalence of the Hepatitis B virus in Asia would account for the higher survival rates of boys. Oster later publicly admitted that her hypothesis was wrong.

“

WOMEN FEEL LIKE FAILURES WHEN THEY GIVE BIRTH TO DAUGHTERS; THEY FEEL VICTORIOUS WHEN THEY BEAR SONS...

IF YOU’VE EVER EMPLOYED A MAID WITH A DRUNKARD HUSBAND, YOU KNOW THAT HE IS THE BURDEN AND SHE IS THE FINANCIAL PROVIDER

”

Hepatitis B, as it turned out, had nothing to do with the survival rates of girl babies.

The most hopeful research, and the one that interests me the most, is by Monica Das Gupta, a senior demographer at the World Bank’s Development Research Group. In her paper Is There an Incipient Turnaround in Asia’s “Missing Girls” Phenomenon?, Das Gupta and her colleagues use data from South Korea to show that the son-preference reduces as societies develop, not simply because of economic improvement but because of “normative changes across the whole society”. Normative—I looked up the term—means a complex conglomeration of values, standards and judgement. It is what society thinks of as “normal”. Son-preference is strongest in patrilineal societies such as China, India and, until recently, South Korea. They viewed having sons as superior and normal. As patrilineal societies modernize, they develop political, legal and social tools that recognize “patrilineages as a threat rather than an asset to society”.

This is slowly happening in India. Second, urbanization and industrialization will render

women as valuable as men, both in their own minds and in society at large. The norms, in other words, are changing, even in India (I’d like to think). The modern state, says Das Gupta, has “unravelled” the underpinnings of a society’s son-preference.

Unlike Das Gupta, who views the world in wide swathes, I am not a demographer. I am a storyteller. I am interested in the psychology of India’s son-preference; about why we value sons more than daughters; and how we can change this.

The home front Aloma Lobo and I are sitting in Bangalore’s Caperberry restaurant sipping wine and nibbling on canapés. Lobo is a medical doctor who used to be the chairperson of Cara, or Central Adoption Resource Agency. She continues to work with the Karnataka chapter of Cara and has six children—three boys and three girls. “Must you say that my girls are adopted?” she asks before giving permission.

I meet Lobo once a month at foodie events in

Bangalore. With her slim frame, short hair and Herve Leger-type bandage dresses, she cuts an elegant figure. Her youngest daughter, Nisha, is visually impaired and has ichthyosis, a genetic condition that causes the skin to become scaly and flake away. Adoption specialists say that girl-babies with special needs are the hardest to place, something Lobo knows first-hand. “You know, our daughter didn’t come from a poor family,” she says. “Nisha’s parents were well-off but they still gave her away because she was challenged. The other day, she asked me, ‘Mama, what will you say if you meet the people who gave birth to me?’ I said, I would thank them because they gave you to us. I asked her: ‘What would you say?’ My Nisha said, ‘I would ask them why they weren’t there for me when I needed them most.’”

When my second daughter was born, I have to admit that I felt a pinch of disquiet. It would have been nice to have one child of each sex.

I’d like to think that I would have felt that same disquiet had I given birth to two sons. But now, it is hard to fathom life without my little Malini.

Could I adopt? I didn’t think so. When we contemplated adopting before my second child was born, I told my husband that I was worried I would treat the adopted child different from my own. Worse, I would treat the adopted child as more special, just to overcompensate. My husband was more sanguine. He had no qualms that “after the first few hours, your heart will embrace the newborn—any newborn—like it was your own”. Then I got pregnant and we didn’t do it. But I think to myself, why don’t we place adoption centres and orphanages beside IVF clinics so that people who try so hard to have a child know there are other options? Why don’t we build orphanages in districts such as Jhajjar, with India’s lowest sex ratio? The irony is that there is a waiting list for people who want to adopt girls and across the psychological border, there are parents who abandon or kill their daughters.

The oft-quoted, and very real reason why daughters are not desired is dowry; but it goes much deeper than that. To even begin to address India’s skewed sex ratio requires vision, extraordinary empathy, and a leap of imagination. Simply quoting numbers, getting on the moral high ground and condemning the parents who kill their daughters is not enough. “Indian women have been raised to devalue themselves and we perpetrate this on our daughters,” says Lobo. “I get very irritated when women tell me that they won’t eat before their husbands. Do it if it’s important that you have a family dinner. But don’t do it because he is the man. Till we learn to value ourselves, we won’t value our daughters.”

Valuing ourselves has to do with self-esteem, but it also has to do with the psychological burdens that women bear. Before you condemn the woman who kills her daughter, think about the sleep-deprived despair and fury that you have felt at whiny, cranky babies night after night.

Were there moments when you wished the child would keep quiet; wished the child away? Now transpose that quiet rage to a different self. You are dispossessed; live in a hut in arid interior Rajasthan; work like a farm-horse; are malnourished and barely literate. You have never experienced maternal love (your father killed your mother in a drunken fit when you were a child), let alone the milk of human kindness, and civilization’s little courtesies that we city dwellers take for granted. In this morphed form, your body and mind have hardened like the land around you. You are already on edge and you know that you are carrying a girl. You dread the eyes that will view you with pity and censure when your daughter is born. You have no food for yourself or your first daughter. And now another? What are you going to do?

In Usilampatti taluk in Tamil Nadu, women give the newborn milk laced with erukkam paal (sap of Calotropis gigantea). The infant sucks the milk greedily and dies within an hour. Penn-sisukolai (girl-baby murder), it’s called. Mothers did this, but more often, mothers-in-law, by mixing pesticides, sleeping pills, rat poison or saps with mother’s milk and feeding it to the newborn girl.

It is not true, what they say, about maternal instinct gushing forth when you see your newborn. That happens in movies where the heroine sheds tears of joy and violins pierce the high note. In parts of India, the fierce, protective maternal instinct that those of us sitting in comfort feel for our children, is submerged, staunched and often runs dry—especially when the newborn happens to be a daughter. Maternal love is a luxury for poor, despairing women in Usilampatti, Jhajjar and other areas. They have no control over their lives or destiny; they lack individual identity, let alone self-esteem, education or financial independence. Most important, they believe they have no choice but to kill their daughters. If there were street plays or television campaigns in these villages with images of smiling, well-off parents who look these desperate mothers in the eye and say, “I will take care of your daughter,” they wouldn’t kill her. They’d give her up instead.

Many state governments, including Tamil Nadu, have attempted solutions for women teetering on the edge. They leave cradles outside orphanages for mothers who are ready to dump their daughters; have caseworkers monitor pregnant women.

While easier access to adoption agencies and orphanages might address the problem of female infanticide, it doesn’t prevent female foeticide, which requires step-by-step checklists and engineering solutions, along with a good dose of female psychology. Make sex determination illegal? Done. Shutter ultrasound clinics that violate the law? No. Slap fines on ultrasound technicians who reveal the sex? No. The PNDT (Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques) Act needs to be enforced because seeing an infant daughter’s face can change a mother’s mind.

Psychological issues are more complicated.

Women feel like failures when they give birth to daughters; they feel victorious when they bear sons. The son is the carrier of the family name and business; the daughter takes away the family wealth. Sons take care of you in your old age; and they can light your funeral pyre. But all that is no longer true; not even in traditional or rural homes. As numerous microfinance institutions that lend mostly to women have figured out, it is the women who earn and save money. If you’ve ever employed a maid with a drunkard husband, you know that he is the burden and she is the financial provider. The problem is that this anecdotal evidence doesn’t apply to large swathes of India where women are painfully dependent upon and dominated by their fathers, husbands, and then sons. Among middle-class or wealthy families, the son-preference has to do with passing on businesses. Even here, daughters like the Paul and Reddy sisters have shown that girls can run and elevate a father’s businesses just as well as any son and they too keep their family name, even after marriage.

You can make logical arguments like these to convince women to keep their daughters, but at the end of the day, they just aren’t enough.

India needs to convert minds subliminally to displace centuries of cultural conditioning.

The problem is that this bias is so culturally ingrained and so complex that it is hard to know where to start. People say the oddest things.

When my second daughter was born, an educated feminist sympathized with me because she came from a family of girls. My conservative mother, on the other hand, rejoiced over my daughters because she comes from a family of four brothers and one sister (my mom). She didn’t have the baggage associated with being a girl. A close friend in New York told me to try for a son who could light my funeral pyre. I expected this statement from a Brahmin priest, not from an investment banker. It is moments like these that make you a revolutionary.

Bollywood can help; as can our cricket heroes.

If Sachin Tendulkar or M.S. Dhoni urge fathers to cherish their daughters, would it change minds? I love masala movies, but I cannot think of a single one, either here or in Hollywood, where a woman does Mission Impossible or is a Don. Why can’t Farah Khan or Kathryn Bigelow make women-centric movies? For that matter, why can’t Vishal Bhardwaj or Rajkumar Hirani change the paradigm, by using heroines as the “3 Idiots”? Easy to say, but in order for successful directors to embrace this concept, you need one runaway women-centric hit. Would that J.K. Rowling had written her series using her own daughter as heroine, instead of Harry Potter.

That would have changed the minds of countless young girls, who currently have fairy tales in which the prince “saves” them as opposed to stories where they take charge of their destinies and save others in the process.

Reimagining realities is a central component in the fight against female foeticide. If I were Sonia Gandhi and I were serious about rebalancing the sex ratio of our country, I wouldn’t just hire a politician or an IAS officer to head this effort; I would hire a crackerjack team of demographers, caseworkers, implementers, ad men (or women) and media people. Lest I sound self-serving, let me add that in her paper, Family Systems, Political Systems, and Asia’s “Missing Girls”: The Construction of Son Preference and its Unravelling, Das Gupta concurs.

“Studies of the impact of the media suggest that states can accelerate the resultant decline in son preference through media efforts to help parents perceive that daughters can now be as valuable as sons,” she says.

We are all stakeholders in this battle to save the girl child. Census 2011 is the tipping point beyond which the pendulum should not swing.

If Indian society doesn’t save our girls, we will spiral downwards into the realm of science fiction decades later in ways that boggle the mind: inflicting sex-change operations on effeminatelooking boys in Nayagarh, Odisha, for instance, simply to provide a bride for a family of brothers.

Holding Mahabharat-like swayamvars in families who have the daughters that society suddenly finds valuable; and killing off those boys—Greek-mythology style—who don’t qualify. You think this is impossible? As the country prospers and birth rates drop, who will be wives and mothers if there are no girls?

India needs to save our girls. The future of our boys, and indeed our civilization, depends on it.

Till we change our minds, we cannot change our world.

Shoba Narayan writes a popular weekly column The Good Life for Lounge.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE ARUNA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

THRISSUR

Trunk call One of the biggest mass festivals, Thrissur Pooram is a tireless carnival of sound and fury

B Y S HAMANTH R AO ···························· hen I had called up hotels to book a room, receptionists had laughed and said every hotel had been booked months in advance.

A friend said there’d be “a million people” attending, and “it’ll be so crowded there is no space to walk on any street in town”.

I was visiting Thrissur in central Kerala for the 2010 edition of the annual festival of Thrissur Pooram.

The festival is associated most with the caparisoned elephants that have come to symbolize Kerala.

More than 50 elephants are selected for Thrissur Pooram, and a fortune is spent decorating them.

More than 400,000 people throng Thrissur for the event. Most go through the 36-hour-long festivities without a break for sleep or rest.

Given the scale, it is easily one of the biggest mass festivals in India.

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The beginnings A pooram is an annual temple festival, typically held after the summer harvest. In the late 18th century, there was a dispute among 10 temples about participation in the temple festival at Arattupuzha.

Raja Rama Varma, the ruler of Cochin, decided to unite these feuding temples and organize one temple festival. Thus the Thrissur Pooram was born in 1798. Because it was attended by the residents of the 10 villages where these temples were situated, it became the largest pooram in Kerala.

The first of the elephants On the morning of pooram day, I made my way to Thrissur’s Thekkinkadu Maidan. I caught a glimpse of rocky grey in the distance. Eleven elephants stood in a row. Golden caparisons covered the elephants’ heads. The clearing

in front of the Vadakkumnathan (Shiva) temple was completely packed with people.

Music piped up. Kombus (wind instruments resembling trumpets) blared. Chendas and elathalams (variants of drums and cymbals, respectively) resounded. A sea of hands went up in the air, one and all swinging to the beat of the music. Feet moved, dance steps were executed, a slow headbanging began in the dense, near-congealed crowd.

Music picked up speed, and the frenzy was transmitted to the crowd. Cardboard caps swung in the air like lighters at a rock concert. The elephants joined in and swished their ears in tune with the music. Then, abruptly, the music stopped. For just a moment, arms, fans, elephant ears flailed without guidance. The crowd gave way.

The elephants walked forward one by one and entered the Vadakkumnathan temple.

The ceremony that had just concluded was the Madathil Varavu (temple entry). The first of the 10 participating temples had just taken a procession of its resident deity into the Vadakkumnathan temple.

Battle of the umbrellas The evening brought the highlight of the festival—the Kuda Mattom, or the “umbrella swapping”.

One row of elephants stood on the road in front of the maidan (ground). For half a kilometre, the road on either side of the elephants was crammed with people.

Another set of elephants stood at the far end of the maidan, some 200m away. A vast ocean of people completely packed the field in between. Human presence filled your view, no matter where you looked. Movement was impossible. Not an inch of space was to be seen anywhere on the entire stretch of road.

The action began. Young men atop the elephants lowered a red parasol that they held, swapping it for another yellow parasol from down below and raising the latter parasol.

TRIP PLANNER/THRISSUR To Mumbai Wadakanchery

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Thrissur has no airport, so you can fly to Kochi (60km away) or Kozhikode (80km away), and take a taxi from there.

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Thrissur is connected to Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai by train.

Stay

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Irinjalakuda

KERALA Kochi

INDIA

The River Retreat is a lovely seaside resort in Shoranur, some 30km from Thrissur. A doubleoccupancy room is available at R2,400 a night.

Hotels in the town include Joys Palace, Elite International, and Dass Continental, for R3,000-4,000 a night.  Try the local ‘appams’, and visit a toddy shop.  Visit the Vadakkumnathan temple and Sakthan Thampuran palace.  Get an Ayurvedic massage, and follow it up with a walk around the Swaraj Round, the centre of Thrissur.

GRAPHIC

PRAJITH PRABHAKARAN

Parashurama, as a yellow sunset coasted down the road brimming with people.

Fire in the sky

They did this in one fluid, nonchalant movement. As the new parasol was raised, the hum of the nearly 400,000-strong crowd swelled into a roar of approval.

Across the road, men atop the other elephant team deftly executed the same parasol-swapping manoeuvre. Both teams did this time and again, flaunting parasols of different colours. The roar of people spread across the road swelled and ebbed with the raising and lowering of parasols.

The display of multicoloured parasols began to resemble a jugalbandi between the parasol swappers and the crowd’s thunderous cheering. One team raised a parasol with an idol of Krishna in front, the other shot back with one of Bhagavathi.

One team’s Shiva was countered by the other’s

Pachyderm country: (from top) A temple lit up at night; chendas and elathalams (drums) in the procession; and the parasol jugalbandi or Kuda Mattom.

Do

The grand finale of the Thrissur Pooram was the fireworks display (the vedikettu) at 3am.

I reached the Swaraj Round at 2am. This is the circular road surrounding the Thekkinkadu Maidan. Its entire 1km circumference was packed. I was confronted by a wall of stationary people at the entrance to the round. It took me an hour to move 100m through the sweat-drenched crowd.

Time inched ahead. 3am, 3.30am, 4am—the fireworks refused to begin. My eyes grew bleary, strained. 4.15am, 4.30am.

More people poured in—the approach roads were overflowing.

4.45am. Nothing yet. 4.50am.

Silence. BOOM. People hesitantly perked up, as if unwilling to believe their sleep-worn senses. Pause. BOOM. A third and a fourth boom followed in quick suc-

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

cession. Those sitting and sleeping were up on their feet. The first big sparks went up as a massive green flower of fire bloomed 50m above.

More colourful fire-flowers erupted in the sky, to the beat of a progression of firecracker-thuds.

People covered their ears. The rattles of a firecracker-chain filled the air. I was 40m from the fireworks, yet the ground under my feet shook with throbbing explosions.

Pounding explosions, sparkling fire-flowers, clatters of crackerchains packed the air, pausing briefly, only to start on the other side. It had been a long day. It was 5am; nobody had slept a wink; everybody had used up enough energy for a week. Yet the moment was so riveting that everybody stood in rapt attention, gazing at the sky.

As abruptly as they’d begun, the fireworks stopped. Silence smothered the surroundings. The chill of early morning crept into the grey air. There were wisps of smoke, and the first faint rays of the sun began to peer through them.

The Thrissur Pooram will be held on 12 May. Write to lounge@ livemint.com

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L13

Culture

LOUNGE

ART

Dreaming in watercolour ARTWORKS

COURTESY

COURTESY JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION

SAFFRONART

Patron Jehangir Nicholson’s private art collection will finally be accessible to the public

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· n her office in the newly designed annexe of what was formerly known as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, curator Zasha Colah has a tiny blueprint of a museum. The design was commissioned by art collector Jehangir Nicholson to house his growing collection of Indian modern and contemporary art.

A successful cotton merchant in Mumbai in the 1960s, Nicholson is said to have made routine trips around the city, architects in tow, to scout for possible locations to build a public museum. When he died in 2001, aged 86, his dream remained a blueprint.

On Monday, Nicholson’s entire collection of close to 800 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints—from 1930 to 2001—will open to the public at the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), where it will be on a long-term loan.

This is, possibly, the best fate for Nicholson’s formidable art collection; and for the man who spent half a lifetime trying to build his dream museum. A tenacious man, he’d even requested the Maharashtra government to provide him with 3,000 sq. yards in south Mumbai for the proposed structure, with no success.

But even in death he persisted.

In his will, Nicholson directed the liquidation of all his assets to support a foundation that would manage his art collection, appointing his nephew Cyrus Guzder and his lawyer Kaiwan Kalyaniwalla as trustees. In a fortuitous move, and with the support of CSMVS director Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the two men managed to convince the museum board to accommodate

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Canvas of life: (clockwise from top) Nicholson in front of a Laxman Shreshtha painting; artworks by Shreshtha and Raza (not from JNAF); and (below) Nicholson with his wife Dina. the “Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation” (JNAF) in its historic auspices. It is a coup for both parties: Nicholson’s legacy finds a home in prestigious real estate while his collection updates the museum’s collection of ancient Indian art.

A large part of CSMVS’ newly built second floor annexe is taken up by JNAF. When we visited early last year, in a room next to a sophisticated visible storage system where the collection is mounted on movable slides, Colah and her team were already preparing for the foundation’s inaugural show.

The Jehangir Nicholson Gallery opens with an exhibition titled Six Decades: Celebrating the Bombay Artists from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection and will run a curated programme of changing exhibitions thrice a year. The foundation also houses a research centre with an archive of letters, books and a workspace for long-term projects. Nicholson’s own photographs— an abiding passion since he was 12—are an important part of this archive.

W h a t w i l l p i q ue the keen observer is that many of his photographs are of museums: of their architecture, display and lighting. Two months before he died, Nicholson had travelled to Spain to see the newly opened Guggenheim Museum Bilbao designed by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry. At 86, Nicholson was still making notes

for his dream museum.

According to Geetha Mehra, director of Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery, it was this trip that weakened him, and eventually led to his death.

Priming the palette Nicholson’s own portraits show a determined spirit. He was a slight man, no more than 5ft tall. Born to a wealthy Parsi family, he was the director of his family’s cotton selection and purchasing agency Bruel and Co., established in 1863.

Among his various maverick roles was that of the sheriff of Bombay, a post he held for one year.

He bought his first painting in 1968, a year after he lost his wife of 27 years. And his relationship with art filled a personal lacuna which was apparent in the way he addressed his artworks, often

using terms of romantic love. That first canvas was bought from the Taj Art Gallery for `500: A Scenery

by Sharad Waykool.

Nicholson started frequenting the Pundole and Chemould art galleries soon after. It was during this time that Kali Pundole, the founder of Pundole, introduced him to 24-year-old Laxman Shreshtha, who had just returned from art school in Paris.

Over the phone from Mumbai, Shreshtha recalls the beginnings of a tender friendship. He called him “Jangoo”, like all his friends.

Nicholson would call him ritualistically at 8am to debate matters of art. “His curiosity to ‘get’ what art was about consumed him,” Shreshtha says.

Shreshtha introduced Nicholson to several other artists—Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, S.H. COURTESY KAI NICHOLSON

At 86, Nicholson was still making notes for his dream museum, studying architecture, display and lighting

Raza and M.F. Husain. On Shreshtha’s advice, he made studio visits and developed close friendships with many artists, most notably with Krishen Khanna. Nicholson’s understanding of contemporary art was formed from his conversations (and arguments) with those who made it, and other pioneers, gallery owners such as Kekoo Gandhy of Chemould. “He told me not to tell young artists that he was a collector. He wanted to talk to them on an equal footing,” says Gandhy, now 91.

Nicholson travelled across the country to pick up art. He bought 25 of Shreshtha’s works—the most of any one painter in his repertoire.

While his collection is deemed strongest in its wealth of modern masterpieces, he bought the works of contemporary painters such as Baiju Parthan, Jitish Kallat and Sudarshan Shetty as well. An important indicator of the value of this collection is that two of F.N. Souza’s most significant works ever—according to a list of five drawn by modern art expert Yashodhara Dalmia—belonged to him: Death of the Pope (1962) and Mammon (1961).

As a collector, he got progressively more methodological about what he bought. As he became increasingly conscious that he was collecting for a museum, his collection grew archival. According to Colah’s research, in 1996 Nicholson had about 150 paintings.

In 1998, about 300. By 2001, he had collected around 800 works of art. He not only wanted one work from every important artist (the collection has 250 artists in all), he also wanted art that defined each artist’s distinct periods.

Raza’s shifting phases, for

AND

CSMVS

instance, are most dramatically characterized in the collection.

Nicholson bought Razas through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and in 2000.

Nicholson’s restless rearrangement and reordering of his collection—he would change the position of a painting in the middle of the night—reveals an obsessive streak. Kartik Mahyavanshi, who stayed with Nicholson in the last decade of his life, says he would be woken up at odd hours to move around canvases. These exercises have made Mahyavanshi such a warehouse of information that he has been hired as the foundation’s collection supervisor.

Evidently, Nicholson started to believe in the idea of a public museum early on. In 1976, he even loaned a part of his collection to the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, but few knew of its existence.

He called it the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery of Modern Art and donated substantially to have the space extended to house his entire collection, which did not happen.

This preceded the opening of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai by 20 years, so it was the first public museum of modern and contemporary art in the city.

Colah says contemporary artists such as Atul Dodiya recall spending their student days in its precincts because back then it was the “only place to see modern art”. This early donation is indicative of the rare merit of Nicholson’s patronage.

With the NCPA having agreed to restore the works in its possession to the foundation, the JNAF now boasts of Nicholson’s entire collection.

In a 1999 interview with The Indian Express, Nicholson had said his greatest concern was what would become of the art he had collected, after him: “Such a magnificent collection cannot be an inheritance to be enjoyed by just a few people.”

When the foundation opens its doors on Monday, a dream will come full circle, albeit posthumously.

The Jehangir Nicholson Gallery will open on Monday with Six Decades: Celebrating the Bombay Artists from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection, which will run till 28 August.

L14 CULTURE

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

JOHN KOBAL FOUNDATION/GETTY IMAGES

Oriental avatars: (clock­ wise from left) Sabu in a still from the 1947 film Black Narcissus; a poster of The Thief of Baghdad; and Sabu.

CINEMA

The elephant man A new book tells the astonishing tale of Selar Sheikh Sabu, India’s first Hollywood star

B Y S IDHARTH B HATIA ···························· ong before Irrfan Khan got roles with the likes of Angelina Jolie or Aishwarya Rai Bachchan acted alongside Andy Garcia, an Indian boy from Mysore with no acting experience at all became the first ever Indian superstar in the West. Film roles were written for him, presidents feted him and by the age of 17, he was leading the glamorous, fast life of a bona-fide star.

Selar Sheikh Sabu, or Sabu Dastagir as he is often mistakenly called, had four huge hits before he turned 18—Elephant Boy, The Drum, The Thief of Baghdad and Jungle Book, all films where he was the main draw. Discovered by the documentary film-maker Robert Flaherty, the 11-year-old orphan was a mahout in the employ of the maharaja of Mysore. It was the producer of Ele-

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phant Boy, the legendary Alexander Korda, who fully grasped the significance of this new find. The boy was quickly shifted to London and thus began a remarkable career.

Curiously, hardly any books have been written on him. He was never a big name in his home country, but even in Hollywood, where he still has a star on the sidewalk in Los Angeles, he is all but forgotten. A well-researched new biography by Philip Leibfried called Star of India: The Life and Films of Sabu (published

by BearManor Media) seeks to correct this anomaly, and succeeds admirably.

It tells a compelling story. After Sabu’s shift to England with his brother (whose name “Dastagir” got attached to Sabu’s), he was sent off to a British public school while the producers mulled over how to best exploit this exotic new discovery.

He was given a role in The Drum as a pro-British prince in colonial India, which did not go down well with many fellow Indians. The audi-

ences, however, loved it and Korda began preparing for Sabu’s next—and most remembered— vehicle, The Thief of Baghdad.

The 1940 film, shot in glorious technicolour, is a pastiche of Orientalist fantasia, full of genies, palaces, flying carpets, a beautiful princess and an evil vazir. Korda spared no expense on the lavish sets for what was then the most expensive film made in Britain.

To a demoralized British public, facing bombings and privations because of the war, The Thief of Baghdad was perfect escapism, the magic carpet taking them far away from their worries. The young star had flattering coverage, with critics noting his lack of affectation, which more than made up for his lack of formal training.

The book quotes critic Leonard Maltin, who w r o t e , “Sabu’s wonderful naivete was just right for the role of the thief, and he made it his own.”

The next project was,

inevitably, Jungle Book. It was as if the role of Mowgli was written for him. The ensuing film was a hit and at 17, the boy from the jungles of India was at the peak of his career, squiring around beautiful ladies and driving fast cars.

Sabu then moved permanently to the US, where Universal Pictures offered him a $1,000 (around `45,000 now) a week contract.

Then began the second phase of his career, which was characterized by supporting roles in films designed for the studio’s star Maria Montez. Films with titles such as Arabian Nights, White Savage and Cobra Woman followed.

Sabu’s job was to contribute to the exotic feel of these films but little else—he remained the Elephant Boy all his life. Pachyderms became the leitmotif of his career—fans sent him small toy elephants all the time. During his very first visit to the US, Leibfried writes, “Mrs (Eleanor) Roosevelt greatly impressed the young Indian with her own knowledge of elephants, indeed an odd choice of animals for a life-long Democrat.”

His 1947 film Black Narcissus, based on a book by Rumer Godden, was an exception, where he did an excellent job as an Indian general.

But for the most part it was films such as Song of India, Savage Drums and The Black Pan-

Fishing in death sea The director of a banned film on Tamil fishermen escaping Sri Lanka seeks a review B Y R AHUL J AYARAM rahul.j@livemint.com

···························· engadal in Tamil means “dead sea”. It is also the name of Leena Manimekalai’s “factual feature film” which takes stock of the lives of fishermen on the southern tip of India. The village of Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu is home to boats washing ashore bodies in the middle of the night: corpses of Tamil fishermen who had been looking to escape Sri Lanka.

In the course of its 100 minutes (with subtitles), you meet people such as Rosemary, a victim of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) conflict, who joined the Christian Refugee Service in Dhanushkodi. Rosemary is conducting a mass burial for dead fishermen one day, and helping out Tamils who have landed on the Indian coast on another. Soori, a radio-obsessed young man,

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vouches for Tamil liberation and wants to escape to France as a political exile.

Set during the last stages of the LTTE’s existence in 2009, the film depicts a littoral community hemmed in by the forces of two nation states. Sengadal’s characters also rail against Tamil political parties. That no one has come to the help of Dhanushkodi’s fishermen is the movie’s main argument. Often, their helplessness slips into Tamil invective.

In December, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) refused to give Sengadal clearance. “There are not only unparliamentary words used in the film, it aims to provoke the audience into taking an anti-India and anti-Sri Lanka stand,” explains a censor board official who does not want to be identified. Manimekalai is seeking review of the

decision from the board.

Most of the cast are local fishermen. For Manimekalai, making them a part of the film was the real struggle. “They didn’t trust me initially,” she says. “But as I spent more and more time with them, they opened up.”

For the fishing folk, the sense of let-down from India is immense.

“These people became the inspiration for the film. It’s their language, their voice that you hear.

The censor board says the film uses unparliamentary language but the words the censor board finds offensive are part of the everyday language spoken by these people,” says Manimekalai.

The film was already difficult to market—and then Manimekalai ran out of funds. Her first producer backed out. Subsequently, help came from the Global Film Initiative (GFI), a San Franciscobased body that helps promote independent film-makers from the developing world. The $10,000 (around `4.4 lakh) grant helped finish the film, but Manimekalai is yet to pay associates

Dream sequence: A still from Sengadal, one of the film’s lyrical visuals.

ther, all designed to capitalize on his original Elephant Boy image.

The author points out that in most of his films, he had virtually no love interest; perhaps audiences were thought to be uncomfortable with a handsome dark man kissing a white woman.

A variety of careers followed, including as a circus star (again with an elephant), a real estate businessman and a tail gunner in the US armed forces.

He also faced—and won—the almost mandatory scandal of a paternity suit.

A stint in India to act in Nanabhai Bhatt’s forgotten Baghdad, audition for Mother India and also launch Sauda, an aborted film for Kishore Sahu (which the author does not mention), did not result in the much needed career fillip; by then, the Indians found him too American.

But though his career was floundering except for cheesy films capitalizing on his image, he remained a happy man, settled comfortably in California with his American wife and two children.

At 39, he died suddenly of a heart attack; the funeral was sparsely attended, but letters of condolences came from all over the world, including from the newly elected president Lyndon Johnson.

Today he is remembered as a curiosity, though many of his better films—The Thief of Baghdad, Jungle Book and Black Narcissus—still remain very watchable.

This is a much needed book.

Leibfried writes fluidly and with wit, though it is intriguing to note that there is no Indian name mentioned in his acknowledgements. Perhaps that shows how feeble Sabu’s connection with India was after he left the country to seek fame and fortune.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

who helped in the production, which makes its commercial release critical for her.

The film has some graphic scenes which show the Sri Lanka Coast Guard stripping Tamil fishermen suspected of being Tamil Tigers. Television footage of bodies landing on the coast makes for gory viewing. One of the problems with Sengadal is its length and the realistic but very staged behaviour of some of its characters.

However, Manimekalai has a clear purpose, and captures the contours of the landscape, and the bleakness of its people, precisely. For all its sombre quality, the movie does break into lyrical visuals.

Like the one of the protagonist film-maker dreaming. In it, she is holding the hand of Soori, the amiable rebel, and walking into the sea to knock on the main gate of a Buddhist stupa. The camera freezes for a moment. You expect an epiphany. But the reverie is broken when the police knock on Manimekalai’s door.

It’s an evocative metaphor for a Tamil community that’s not welcome in a land that was home to them for centuries. It’s the price they pay for a sense of belonging.

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TELEVISION

How to speak Dothraki HBO’s latest fantasy adventure series spares no detail. It even has its own man­made language

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· n 17 April, HBO will premiere in the US a 10-part medieval fantasy series based on the first of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice novels. Game of Thrones stars Sean Bean and Lena Headey and tells of a bloody struggle between families for the throne of the fictional continent of Westeros.

Featuring prominently in the plot is a tribe of horse warriors called the Dothraki. HBO hired language creator David J. Peterson to construct a Dothraki language, complete with its own vocabulary, phonology and grammar. For many, it will seem like a throw-back to J.R.R. Tolkien, who manufactured a language family called Elvish for The Lord of the Rings.

We spoke to Peterson and Sai, founder and former president of the Language Creation Society (www.conlang.org) about the process of constructing languages (con-langing) and the Dothraki. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Ice and fire: A still from Game of Thrones, with actor Sophie Turner; and (below) Lena Headey.

Spanish. Sometime in high school I got interested in even more languages and started learning French, German and Latin. And then in college I found a class on Esperanto. That was the first time I encountered the idea of creating a language. And then I took a basic class in linguistics. From there I got the idea of creating my own language.

Later, I discovered that I was part of a very large community. I continued with my education in linguistics and then went on to get a BA at Berkeley (University of California) and a master’s from UC (University of California) San Diego.

When HBO asked language creators to work on the Dothraki language, what conditions did

they have in mind?

Sai: There was a competitive process to decide who would make the language. HBO wanted us to do specific things. The final product had to be fidelitous to what was already in the books. It had to express the aesthetics of the Dothraki people. It had to be easy for the actors to pronounce.

And the actors had to be able to say their Dothraki lines in whatever screen time they had to say it. They wanted something naturalistic...

This was a rare set of demands because languages are usually constructed on the whims of the creator. He or she just does it for personal satisfaction.

David, what was your process to construct Dothraki once you had decided to enter the competition?

Peterson: First we took a list of all the words in the book. A con-langer called Jim Henry, who was on the review committee for HBO, found every single word and name in Dothraki that is mentioned in the four books published so far. And it came to about 30. My goal was to create a language from which, it would seem, those words and names were lifted. So that when the fans saw it, it wouldn’t contradict anything in the books.

Most of the 30 words—more than half—were names. But there were a couple of phrases that suggested grammatical structure. So I remained faithful to the phrases and took it from there.

For example, the longest sentence in the series of books is “Khalakka dothrae mr’anha”, which is said in

the books to translate as “A prince is riding inside me”. If you translate this using my Dothraki it would read as exactly that.

When George R.R. Martin looks at your Dothraki, does he recognize it? Did he think of grammar or syntax when he wrote Dothraki?

Peterson: He said repeatedly that he is not a language person.

And that when he comes up with it, it’s on the fly. But that cannot be entirely true. All the Dothraki in the book is remarkably coherent. This is really tough for fantasy authors.

So, for example, there’s that sentence “A prince rides within me” which looks like it is the subject followed by a verb followed by a preposition followed by a first-person singular pronoun. That suggests a head-initial structure, where the verb comes before the object, and prepositions come before what they modify. Now separately in the book there is a small section where there is a chant—“Rakh! Rakh! Rakh haj!”—which is translated as “A boy! A boy! A strong boy!”. The word rakh means boy. And haj means strong. So the adjective follows the noun. Which agrees with the head-initial structure.

If Martin did this unconsciously, then he is unconsciously brilliant. And he really made my job easier.

Game of Thrones releases in India later in the year. For video clips and a review of the first two episodes, log on to http:// blog.livemint.com/livelounge Write to lounge@livemint.com

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· am against telling a particular story, about a particular issue, in any work,” declares Manjunath Kamath, standing in the middle of Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery. Surrounding him is the work of a year in his studio. It is a mélange of sculpture and painting that forms his first solo show in the city, Collective Nouns Kamath, born in Mangalore and a long-time Delhi resident, brings his characteristic flair for disrupted narratives to the work in this show. Born in 1972, he has practised art for almost a quarter-

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THE NUPTIAL LENS

century now, but his earliest concerns with how to free the visual story from its verbal equivalents have developed consistently through his work.

The sheer diversity of forms and skill on display in Collective Nouns (with prices ranging from `60,000 to `21 lakh) only accentuates their harmony. In small watercolours on paper, in the ambitious canvases and works in fibreglass, wood and terracotta, among others, the motifs and themes embodied in this display speak to each other. Speech bubbles and quote marks appear repeatedly; rabbits proliferate through surface after surface; little figurines of gods pop out; in painting after painting, a balloon appears, waiting to be burst.

He has been called an artist of deconstruction, rather than creation, but one could argue that the stories in Kamath’s work are actually in the process of assem-

bling themselves.

These are not linear or simple narratives, but they command attention with wit, playfulness and beauty. “Artists and philosophers always want to search for the truth,” he says. “But you can’t find one. Every truth belongs to a particular time, and it fails after some time.

“That’s why I’m still painting,” he says. “Because once I finish with the canvas, you and I are the same. If I ever find a truth that doesn’t fail, I may stop painting the next day.”

The show’s notes say Collective Nouns is a tribute to the late Mumbai artist Prabhakar Barwe, and Kamath himself says that much of the work here represents a conversation with Barwe’s own work. “He is my favourite artist,” Kamath says. “He took very simple objects—tables, pins—and created so many problems in simple references. I can’t speak with him,

few conclusions can be drawn from the extremely healthy box-office returns of the recently released Tanu Weds Manu.

Film-goers don’t seem to mind too much if a movie has a sparkling first half and a dull second half. It also doesn’t matter that the movie’s leads, Madhavan and Kangna Ranaut, show no spark and that the supporting characters are far more electric.

Tanu Weds Manu uses its small-town setting mostly for a change in scenery from the foreign locations preferred by most big-budget productions, but viewers have been vastly accommodating of the movie’s superficiality. They appear to have been too distracted by the wedding sequences to have noticed.

There have been enough accounts of the journey to the mandap in recent years to warrant a new sub-genre: the wedding film.

Movies about marriages (Anubhav, Abhimaan) have given way to scenes of wedding preparations strung together by a slim and predictable boy-meet-girl story. The wailing shehnai has been silenced by the rambunctious dhol. Blame it all on the 1994 giga-hit Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, which gave us further evidence of Madhuri Dixit’s elastic waist, helped take antakshari out of the college picnic bus and into the movie hall, banished the canard about the floor-level intelligence of the Pomeranian, and ushered in a national obsession with wedding films. Ever since the stupendous success of that movie, we have been doomed to watch families go into hysterics to organize the nuptials of their young ones.

Give and take a few plot twists, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! and Tanu Weds Manu have much in common. All of them end happily ever after—the Indian version of the climactic Hollywood liplock is the exchange of garlands. The difference between one wedding film and the next is in the planning of the nuptials. In fact, a whole movie was made about it, last year’s vastly successful Band Baaja Baaraat. Although the realism bug has been nibbling at Bollywood of late, it is perfectly kosher in a wedding film to have all the elements that escapist Hindi cinema is best known for: colourful sets and costumes, elaborately choreographed song sequences and socially sanctioned flirtation. Very few films, like Do Dooni Char, question the pressure to put on appearances on such occasions.

Bridal bounty: A still from the box­office hit Tanu Weds Manu.

In Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap brilliantly subverted the need for a movie to have a big fat Punjabi wedding scene by showing his conflicted hero getting trashed and passing out as his beloved ties the knot with another man. The smartest wedding film in recent years was also made away from the mainstream. Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is a feel-good drama that is sensitive to ugly truths and unsavoury family secrets. The movie’s episodic structure nods both to American maverick Robert Altman’s ensemble films as well as Korean great Im Kwon-taek’s Festival.

The screenplay, written by Sabrina Dhawan, balances a tone of affection with a clear-eyed perspective on the tensions that simmer beneath the surface in many Indian families. Monsoon Wedding, in turn, heavily influenced Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married—the films even shared cinematographer Declan Quinn and his rough, hand-held aesthetic. Seen through Quinn’s jerky, yet fluid, camera, the Punjabi wedding antics didn’t just become tolerable, they were worth a thousand shava shavas.

Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The reluctant storyteller Artworks that invite viewers to create their own narratives

NANDINI RAMNATH

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What kind of person creates languages for a living?

Peterson: The real answer is, not many! Only a handful of people have ever been paid to create a language. There’s Paul Frommer, who created N’avi for Avatar and is working on a language for the upcoming Disney film John Carter of Mars. And also Marc Okrand, who was paid to make Klingon and then the Atlantean language for Disney’s Atlantis.

Sai: Usually, the type of person who creates languages is someone who has been bitten by the language bug. I’ve met dozens of creators personally, and hundreds online. It’s a wide range of people: men, women, young, old, and so on.

David, how did you start constructing languages?

Did you study linguistics?

Peterson: I grew up pretty much bilingual with English and

STALL ORDER

Anti­conditioning: Kamath’s been called an artist of deconstruction. but in some ways, this is a silent communication with his works.”

Kamath’s work, here and elsewhere, collapses boundaries between representational and non-representational art. More than ever in this show, it is preoccupied with wordplay. Foot in Mouth is a sculpted sight gag—an intricately carved table leg (another recurring motif in this show) emanating from the mouth of a primate. There is something

absurdist about the juxtaposition of the skill and delicacy of Kamath’s lines, evident across the media he works with, and his broad jokes. Each of the works is playful. Some, such as Pregnant Bed, present a sort of sophisticated slapstick. Others evoke a sense of wonder.

“This is my relaxation,” Kamath says. “Art is relaxation, and I want to bring a meditative feel to my work.”

His processes are all about capturing this sense of spontaneity.

The framed watercolours of Collective Nouns, for example, are picked from the leaves of his own pile of everyday painting, what he calls a diary of his work. Their craft has the light touch of fairy-tale illustrations, and some of their mystery as well—the crucible of Kamath’s concern that nothing is quite what it seems. The show’s corpus recalls art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s pronouncement about Kamath’s narratives, “compressed and deceptively simple, by turns tender and abrupt in their treatment”.

That work, and Kamath suggests that all his work, is about “collecting the new”. “The thing is, your whole education makes you conditioned,” he says. “If you try to follow my thinking through my painting, there’s no exercise for your brain,” he smiles. “So be an artist. We can tell a story together.”

Collective Nouns is on display at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, till 30 April.

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Books

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MEMOIRS

The quiet revolutionaries NEELESH MISRA

Two journalists unearth illuminating stories of the activist lives their fathers led B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· emoirs are most readable when they transcend the lives of their protagonists to give a sense of their times.

Two men—a Gandhian and a geologist—accomplished that with help from their journalist sons. Civil Disobedience by Lakshmi Chand Jain, who died in November, is based on the interviews he gave to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library’s video/oral history project and to his son Sreenivasan Jain, managing editor of NDTV Profit. Dream Chasing by Shiva Balak Misra is an as-told-to autobiography written by his son Neelesh Misra, a former deputy executive editor of Hindustan Times and now a Mumbaibased scriptwriter.

Both books are miles apart in the way their authors put themselves in their stories. Civil Disobedience, careful about hagiography accusations, underplays the individuality of its memoirist with the subtitle Two Freedom Struggles, One Life. “For my father, the idea of the collective is a deeply embedded personal and public philosophy,” says Sreenivasan. “So there wasn’t this constant sense of ‘me’ in the interviews, which form the basis of the book.”

Dream Chasing is more personal with the subtitle: One Man’s Remarkable, True Life Story.

Explaining why his father’s life should interest more people than just his sons, Neelesh says: “His is a universal story, which starts in grass-roots India, travels to North America and then returns to its origins. The idea of dreaming big and still remaining rooted is what new India is all about.”

The two books are set in different Indias. When read in succession, they show the country’s stark dissimilarities, and how that shapes the lives of its people. Jain was born to a family of jewellers in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk.

Misra was born to a family of farmers in a village in Uttar Pradesh. Jain’s father was a political

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Civil Disobedience: The Book Review Literary Trust, 266 pages, `395.

Dream Chasing: Roli Books, 200 pages, `250.

Stalwarts: (above) Shiva Balak Misra visiting his school in Itaunja, UP; and L.C. Jain. activist who procured the first revolver for revolutionary freedom fighter Chandrashekhar Azad.

Misra’s father raised cattle, cultivated the land and made laddoos (sweets) for a living.

In 1942 when the Quit India Movement was launched against the British, Jain, an idealistic college student, immersed himself in the freedom movement. Misra was a toddler, born three years earlier in 1939 when “an old midwife raised an iron sickle to cut the umbilical cord that attached me to my mother”. After independence in 1947, when Partition refugees arrived in Delhi, Jain, a voracious George Bernard Shaw reader, was given charge of one of the three areas of Kingsway Camp, the Capital’s biggest refugee camp.

Around the same time, Misra would walk barefoot daily to a makeshift village school, which had dry grass for the roof, jute mats for students and a charpoy for the teacher. The village had never seen electric bulbs.

In Jain’s memoir the various phases of his life chronicle India’s political, cultural and economic evolution: work among the Partition refugees, his role in the All India Handicrafts Board headed

by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, involvement in Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan land-reform movement, and life in the turbulence of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency from 1975-77. Jain became a member of the Planning Commission in the V.P. Singh government in 1989. In 1997, he succeeded Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson as the high commissioner to South Africa.

Jain’s generation had come of age in a newly free India and had plunged passionately into public service. “In the book one comes across several such characters—Sudhir Ghosh, Kamaladevi, Sucheta Kripalani—who have received little attention,”

says Sreenivasan, “and who were behind some very remarkable experiments—Faridabad, Super Bazar, Cottage Industries, and so on.”

Misra’s memoir has no famous names, but it is dramatic. A village boy who once walked 24km daily to his school wins a scholarship to study geology in Canada. There, on a June afternoon, while eating sandwiches, he discovers 565-million-year-old fossils, the oldest records of multi-cellular life on earth. The young geologist could have furthered his career in the West. Instead, he returns to his village to set up a school for the area’s children.

This in itself is an inspiring story. A twist makes it more emotional. Years after Misra returned to India, he discovers that the credit for finding the fossils has been usurped by other scholars.

Redemption follows. In 2007, 40 years after the discovery, a fossil category is named Fractofusus misrai. That same year Misra is invited to address a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) conference in Delhi. “At the last moment they changed the format and my father was not allowed to speak,” says Neelesh. “I was furious, and I decided that his story would not be restricted to a conference and that everyone would read about my father’s struggles in the form of a book.”

There was a different motivation for Jain’s son. “My father had written three books but none of them came even close to capturing his extraordinary personal journey,” says Sreenivasan. “I decided to have a go at it and I discovered so much—about my parent, his family, and about that extraordinary period in our history. It was like a sort of archaeological exercise in one’s own past.

It was one of the best years of my life.” Neelesh says: “Working on the book was like journeying into an era that shaped the lives of my parents and which I knew so little about. Although my father did not consider his life worthwhile enough to be talked about, I believed it mirrored the struggles of many ordinary Indians.”

The epilogues of these two life stories are a study in contrast.

Misra starts his book with a description of his visit to the Uttar Pradesh Raj Bhawan in Lucknow, where the “honourable governor” presents him with a bouquet and press photographers click his pictures with the VIP. Finally, the recognition of his life’s achievements has become official.

In Jain’s life, the official honour was turned down. That episode is not in the memoir. Last month, when Jain was chosen posthumously for the Padma Vibhushan, the nation’s second highest civilian award, his family refused to accept it. “We were honoured but father was never comfortable with these state awards,” says Sreenivasan. “And so we decided to return it.”

MAFIA QUEENS OF MUMBAI | S HUSSAIN ZAIDI & JANE BORGES

The life of gangster girls True stories of women in Mumbai’s underworld—this is pulp at its gritty best B Y M ATT D ANIELS ···························· eading, like crime, can be a guilty pleasure. As you turn the pages of a particularly enjoyable read, do you ever find yourself looking over your shoulder?

Do you, like me, have trouble banishing the thought that some worthier book is mouldering in the catacombs of the classics?

That you ought to have picked up something more “educational”?

Or, possibly, something more of the moment that you’ll be quizzed on at a cocktail party? Any of these categories occupies enough mental shelf footage to ensure that even the most engrossing page-turner retains a faint tinge of guilt.

Guilt, of course, is the fear that

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retribution awaits us around the next corner. And we may fear that by committing an act of reading we do harm—to ourselves, by addling our brains with sensationalism, or to others, by inuring ourselves to real pain and hardship (or to real joy) through escapism. Stories, in any form in which we consume them, have the power to supplant reality and inject themselves into our imagination. Should we not worry that by devoting our attention to a subject we begin to endorse, legitimise, even celebrate it?

Mafia Queens of Mumbai is too much fun to care. Thirteen true stories of black marketeers, prostitution ringleaders, and trained assassins hit these pages with a convincing splatter. They may

call it trade paper, but this is pulp at its gritty, graphic best, steeped in juicy detail and relishing every suspenseful twist.

The biggest twist of all, as you will already have guessed, is the fact that each of these menacing underworld figures is a woman.

The authors of Mafia Queens make a feeble attempt to describe it as a dispassionate examination of the psychology of women in Mumbai’s underworld, which it is not. It is a gripping thriller that will leave you wanting more.

By turns dry reportage and first-person confessional, Mafia Queens depicts the troubled lives of female gangsters and mobsters’ molls with a deft storyteller’s hand. Unfolding against the backdrops of Nagpada, Dongri and Byculla, the tales immerse us in the underworld with the sinister ease of film noir. At times we forget the meticulous reporting that produced them, com-

Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Tranquebar, 290 pages, `250. piled by S. Hussain Zaidi from his decades with the Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age, with original research by reporter Jane Borges.

Zaidi is also the author of Black Friday, the investigation of the minds behind the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts made into an incisive film by Anurag Kashyap and promptly banned. Its crime was

its acuity. Zaidi peers not only into gangsters’ clandestine operations but into their even more subterranean inner lives.

“Crime is juicier than spirituality,” writes Vishal Bhardwaj in the foreword. Notwithstanding its authors’ half-hearted warnings, Mafia Queens portrays life outside the law with a sordid glamour—infamy as celebrity. This is hardly a flaw. Are these women so different, after all, from other badly behaved celebrities whose stories captivate us? Yes. They have only two journalists shadowing their moves. In hiding or on the run, in glitzy bungalows or in chawls, whether raking in cash or penniless, these women are operators, fully in control of their worlds. As Zaidi and Borges put it: “Where can an educated, crafty and ambitious woman with dreams of possessing a fortune of billions go if she ends up marrying a small-time thug with no identity of his own? Answer: Anywhere she wants.”

By contrast, feckless police fall repeatedly for the most transparent of ruses. Dons hide in holes

dug beneath the gas cylinder; contraband is stashed inside household shrines. The police are played like a harmonium by their informants. The equally impotent judicial system never fails to botch a conviction. In passing, Mafia Queens offers us a tour of Mumbai’s legal landscape past and present by slyly noting such trivia as the location of the former Prohibition Intelligence Section (on the site of today’s Haj House).

Our anti-heroines are never guilty—not in the technical sense, nor in their refusal to compromise. These are a handful of women who lived fearlessly, and Mafia Queens celebrates their spirit. But the real heroes are Zaidi and Borges, who ventured undaunted into the dark corners of the city to illuminate them. The rare book that, like Mafia Queens, peels back Mumbai’s thin veneer of civilization isn’t merely sensational; it’s essential to completing the portrait of a corrupt city. The pleasure of that revelation is one we can embrace without guilt.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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CONTROVERSY

India after Gandhi

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

IN RED AND BLUE WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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ometimes, when you buy comic books in lots of six and seven (or maybe a dozen) and then, before you finish reading them all, buy another lot, it’s quite possible that you overlook a little gem that gathers dust till you rediscover it (usually when you are looking for something else).

And so, last weekend, I came across Matt Kindt’s Revolver, a book I bought sometime last year and then forgot. A quick read and another more considered read later I was convinced that I had just finished a minor masterpiece.

That’s because Revolver is a comic book that oscillates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the apocalyptic and (bear with me a moment) red and blue.

Revolver, published in 2010, is the story of Sam, a feckless young man who is a loser at work. The world in which he lives is our world, with concerns about career progression, relationships, consumption, and wealth. Then, one night he goes to sleep, wakes up at 11.11 and is transported to a different world, one that is the victim of nuclear attacks and flu epidemics and where the only issues of concern to anyone are survival and safety. The switch lasts for 24 hours, and Sam then lives his mundane life for the next 24 hours. And then the switch happens again.

Kindt, who writes and illustrates his work, uses blue panels to reflect the ordinary and red to reflect the other.

Strangely enough, Sam finds himself more able than others to survive in the dystopian world in which he finds himself, even rescuing his boss who doesn’t particularly like him in the other world (he doesn’t like her either). In the blue world he has a girlfriend and loves her; in the red, he finds her boring and is drawn towards his boss. The only constant between the two worlds seems to be a motivational speaker.

The mundaneness of one world and the extremity of the other are reflected in a news ticker at the bottom of every page that incorporates the page number, as in X people bought Y brand of lipstick today or Y people were killed in city A because of bomb attacks today.

Fallible: Gandhi’s life, Lelyveld says, was marked by a ‘tireless striving towards perfection’.

What Joseph Lelyveld’s ‘Great Soul’ says, and why banning it is imbecilic

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· ast year, the historian Madhusree Mukerjee wrote Churchill’s Secret War, a scathing critique of Winston Churchill’s role in and responsibility for the Bengal famine of 1943, in which up to three million people died.

She showed how Churchill ignored the looming food crisis in India and actively contributed to it. She even challenged Amartya Sen’s famed 1981 analysis of democracy and famines.

Sen postulated that democracies don’t have famines because rulers have an incentive to get reelected, as a result of which they must keep channels of communication open. Imperial officials don’t want to expose their rulers to information they don’t like; communication is restricted, and such rulers neither find out about the agony in the countryside—nor do they care.

Mukerjee took it a step further, arguing that Churchill was not only callous, he may have even intended the disaster.

Writing about Churchill’s Secret War in The Times, journalist and historian Max Hastings said British readers would find it “distressing”. But he also called it “sound” and “shocking”, even as he disagreed with some of Mukerjee’s political conclusions, including her assertions about Churchill’s role in the violence at the time of Partition.

The left-leaning magazine New Statesman, heaped praise on the book. Right-leaning The Daily Telegraph reported on it; The Independent had a positive review.

Curiously, no veteran of World War II, no politician of the Conservative Party, of which Churchill was the standard bearer and one of the most successful prime ministers, and no member of the House of Lords condemned the

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book. Nobody picketed book stores. Nobody asked for its ban.

No effigies were burned.

It isn’t as if Britain has forgotten Churchill, or that he has fallen into disrepute. A few years ago, following demonstrations in London, some anarchists had cut grass and pasted it on the bald pate of Churchill’s statue, giving it a mohawk. Many were offended, and there were editorials condemning the vandalism.

But nobody suggested that Britain needed to pass a law to outlaw dishonouring Churchill.

Now contrast that with what happened in India last week.

Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of The New York Times, wrote Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India, a biography of Gandhi. Lelyveld is uniquely qualified to write about Gandhi.

He doesn’t bear the burden of being British; he is an American.

His scholarship is without doubt: His account of apartheid-era South Africa, Move your Shadow, published in 1985, is not only a sobering account of the harrowing reality of apartheid; it also won him the Pulitzer Prize. He was a reporter in India in the 1960s, and has been an admirer of India’s valiant journey to become a democratic society after two centuries of colonial rule. Crucially, he understands how societies divide themselves—South Africa’s apartheid, the US in the 1960s, and the caste and religious divisions of India—and how people attempt to overcome those divisions.

And he has a deep interest in Gandhi, the man whose formative years were spent in South Africa, and who later implemented techniques developed there in India.

While Lelyveld admired

While Lelyveld admired Gandhi, he was aware of his limits...he’s written a nuanced interpretation of Gandhi’s life

Gandhi, he was aware of his limits—and of India’s limits in accepting his absolutist principles—which is why the book is subtitled Gandhi’s Struggle with India, and not just for India. Lelyveld wrote a nuanced interpretation of Gandhi’s life, which showed his triumphs and failures. And he revealed that the great soul was a man of flesh and blood, prone to make mistakes.

What made Gandhi great was not that he was flawless, because he wasn’t, but that he was willing to admit the flaws, analyse them, to improve himself, in his “tireless striving towards perfection”, which he understood as truth.

The week the book was released, Andrew Roberts, a British historian who has said General Dyer was right at Jallianwala Bagh and that the British empire was a jolly good thing to civilize the heathen and the unwashed, wrote a review in The Wall Street Journal, where he used the Lelyveld book as his point of departure to hold forth his views about Gandhi: “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent, and a fanatical faddist” (thank you, but that wasn’t the exam question).

Roberts has the right to say what he pleases about Gandhi, but nowhere in his book does Lelyveld say anything that can remotely justify such assertions.

Lelyveld does refer to Gandhi’s close friendship with Hermann Kallenbach, who gave Gandhi a plot of land near Johannesburg that Gandhi turned into his ashram of satyagrahis, and at his suggestion, named it after Tolstoy. But he did not hint that their relationship was anything other than platonic (and if it was, so what?).

Those were details that Roberts ignored. And Indian politicians didn’t want facts to get in the way of a good tamasha, a cheap entertainment show, a word Lelyveld remembers well from his time in India. And so Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who has taken his state further from the social, political, or economic vision of Gandhi, decided to defend Gujarat’s gaurav (pride) and banned the book. He hadn’t read it, of course, but that’s the nature of fundamentalists. Not to be outdone, the Congress opposition in Gujarat complied immediately, and promised to burn a few effigies of Lelyveld, taking competi-

tive intolerance into uncharted territory—since they were expressing outrage over a review, but condemning the author of the book being reviewed.

At around the same time in neighbouring Maharashtra, Narayan Rane, the battle-scarred veteran who was once in the Shiv Sena, felt he had to defend the apostle of non-violence too.

Alarmed, Union law minister M. Veerappa Moily didn’t wish to be left behind. Fortunately, there are some adults left in the government and someone who can actually read and think prevailed.

Now the Centre is rethinking both a nationwide ban, as well as the lunatic legislation that was being proposed, which would have made denigrating Gandhi’s honour a punishable offence (in itself, that would be honest, for India has made Gandhi into a deity, to be remembered on 2 October and 30 January, and then mothballed).

You can make a virtue of necessity and claim that India is actually a robust democracy like the US’s, where a governor can say something supremely idiotic, but the checks and balances—of the press, the legislature, and the judiciary—prevent the equivalent of an Internet troll’s rant from becoming public policy. If only. Because in reality, author V.S. Naipaul was on to something when he said that India’s institutions were borrowed, while noting the speed with which the institutions folded during the Emergency. In the end, it is worth remembering that the books against which the left or right rant don’t get banned in the US; in India, they do.

Three of Gandhi’s descendants—Gopalkrishna, Rajmohan, and Tushar—have, in their own ways, expressed their disapproval over the proposed nationwide (and actual Gujarat) ban. Gandhi would be proud of his progeny. Churchill, on the other hand, would have the last laugh: Maybe India isn’t ready to be a democracy, as he used to emphatically say to that half-naked fakir. Which is why Gandhi’s struggle with India will have to continue.

Trapped: Revolver is the story of Sam, a man caught in two worlds.

But Revolver isn’t as simple as The Office becoming I am Legend. Sam is disturbed by the red world, one where, ironically, he is almost an alpha male. He has to figure out which one is real and which one isn’t, and if both are, then which one he wants to belong to.

How does it all end?

I suggest you buy the book to find out.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

FREE VERSE | SUMANA ROY

July 21, 1969: A Wedding She was crushing earthen lamps under her red-alta feet as Armstrong was putting his on the moon.

From that night, heaven stopped being heaven, and moon the chaand.

The priest chanted mimic mantras, they walked around a fire seven times as Armstrong said, “One small step for man...”

Later, discovering nicknames and blood-days on a lunar calendar, she asked, “Did mosquitoes bite him, too, that night?”

He smiled, “No, only the woman on the moon”.

And space was conquered again.

Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.

An early draft of Sumana Roy’s first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. She lives in the Chicken’s Neck.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

DIVYA BABU/MINT

Generation gap: gap: Ramesh Chandra Jain with son Ajay.

Ajay.

DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

National shelf life A store in Delhi’s book publishing hub has the country’s largest collection of non­fiction on India

I

f it were a book, it would be thick, dense, informative, wonderfully engaging, but wrapped in unattractive grey paper. Manohar book store in central Delhi is that sort of hidden gem. “It has India’s best collection of scholarly books on Indian history, politics and society,” says historian Ramachandra Guha. “Regular visits to the shop are mandatory for scholars working on India, whether desi or firangi (local or foreign).”

The book store’s new regular is the New York-based American author Geoffrey C. Ward, winner of six Emmy awards for his screenwriting (and also the winner of the prestigious US National Book Critics Circle award). Currently working on a book on Partition, Ward says: “Manohar was a revelation. If it’s about India, they have it—or can get it. They have hundreds of thousands of books on every conceivable aspect. They’ve shipped scores of books to New York for me and I couldn’t possibly

do my book without them.”

Situated on Ansari Road, home to India’s leading book publishing companies, the store is opposite the office of the Oxford University Press, a popular landmark. “No,” says Ramesh Chandra Jain, Manohar’s white-haired owner. “Oxford is opposite us.”

The bookshop doubles as a publishing and distribution company. Books from here are parcelled daily to Kyoto, Kolhapur, Heidelberg, Prague, Patna, Toulouse, Dublin, Bangalore, Boston, London and Lahore. “We have religion and arts, music and crafts, politics and cultural studies,” says Ajay, the owner’s son. “Which means we are a one-stop shop for academic needs,” adds his father.

What is scholarly for professors could simply be a pleasure read for a

lay reader. The shop’s eclectic collection comprises titles that give a tantalizing glimpse into a world right under our noses, yet unexplored. Sample a few: From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute; The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India; Muslim Architecture of South India; Boats of South Asia; Pied Pipers in NorthEast India; Frogs in a Well—Indian Women in Purdah; and Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees.

The shop, spread over five floors, has 25,000 books. Many lie locked in the basement. The browsing area on the ground floor is divided by wooden shelves into two rows, with a seating space that has two coffee tables with eight low chairs. The late scholar Simon Digby, who divided his time between Delhi and the UK, was a regular. He would make two piles of books; one for immediate reading went to his apartment in Nizamuddin West, the other would be shipped to England.

The collection often springs surprises. In January, an Australian researching India’s IT

industry jumped with joy on spotting The History of Telegraph. One visitor, looking for books on ghosts, returned with Ghost: Life & Death in North India. Another visitor picked up half a dozen volumes on pepper. A professor from Gujarat comes every month to get books on hijras (eunuchs).

When it first opened in 1967, the shop was known as Prabhu Book Service. It was the second branch of its namesake, the original Prabhu is in Gurgaon, known for rare old books. That store was started by Jain’s eldest brother, Satyaprakash. Interested in books on Gandhi, natural remedies and personality development, he would buy books from the Sunday market in Daryaganj.

Sometimes not knowing that he already had it, he would pick up another copy of the same book.

Soon his room was overflowing with books and he decided to dispose of the spare stock by setting up a shop at home. The year was 1962, and customers would come by appointment.

Noting the books that sold the most, Satyaprakash hunted for more copies of these at the weekly Sunday bazaar. Soon a loyal clientele grew. Ramesh and another brother joined Satyaprakash’s business. A printing press came up nearby and, in 1967, the brothers opened shop on Ansari Road.

A year later the family business was divided and, as part of the settlement, Ramesh got the Ansari Road establishment. He renamed it after his father, Manohar Lal Jain. Ramesh was 25 at the time.

In the early 1960s, Ansari Road was a sleepy neighbourhood, home to the paper merchants of Chawri Bazar and the jewellers of Chandni Chowk; most of them Jains who rarely dabble in any business that might involve animal matter in any form. Delhi then had no hub of high-end academic publishing along the lines of London’s Charing Cross. Nai Sarak in Chandni Chowk was known for school textbooks; Chawri Bazar had stores selling Hindu holy books; Urdu Bazar specialized in Islamic books. After UBS Publishers’ Distributors moved from Kanpur to Ansari Road in 1965, followed by Oxford and Mcmillan, the locality—close to the New and Old

Delhi railway stations—became the first choice for publishers to set up offices. Today there are more than 200 publishing companies in the area. “We arrived before Oxford,” says Ramesh.

The initial years as an independent bookseller were tough. Help came from the US, where about 18 universities set up academic centres of Indian studies around that period. Scholars who joined these centres needed specialized books on India. Ramesh would send catalogues to the American universities. Word-of-mouth publicity helped. “People started dropping in,” says Ramesh. “They found the books and returned satisfied. If we didn’t have what one asked for, say, a book on the Brahmins of Maharashtra, we would search for all the books that were published on that subject and notify the customer.”

Over the years Ramesh built a system of searching for specialized books, based on experience and intuition. “We learnt that titles could be deceptive,” says Ajay.

Showing me a book called Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History, he says: “You would think that perhaps only those interested in the Middle East would go for this book. But dip into it and you discover details on maritime trade in the Arabian Sea and maps of trade routes between western India and the Middle East.” The book has been finding many buyers, and not all of them are scholars on Oman or Muscat.

In 1970, Ramesh made his debut in publishing with Sikhs and their Literature, written by an American scholar at the University of Missouri. Today, his company publishes one book a week. He’s come a long way from the first year, when the shop’s annual turnover was `2 lakh.

In 2009, Ramesh went into semi-retirement. Son Ajay handles the customers and coordinates the staff while Ramesh sits upstairs, tracking share prices on business channels. He’s still restless. “I will truly arrive,” Ramesh says, “when people will start saying that Oxford is in front of Manohar’s and not vice versa.” mayank.s@livemint.com Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 4753/23, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi. For details, log on to http://manoharbooks.com, or call 23284848.

DOWN THE ROAD Home to some of the most well­known book publishing and distribution companies, Ansari Road hasn’t lost its neighbourhood feel. Both sides of the road are lined with elegant old mansions. Some are topped with tem­ ple­like towers and a few have mosque­like domes. One end of the road is marked by Old Delhi’s fabled wall, only parts of which survive. We guide you to five must­ visit book stores on Ansari Road that deal in specialized books. Since the stores chiefly serve as wholesalers, individual customers get generous discounts.

Wisdom path: Ansari Road in Old Delhi is home to some of India’s leading publishing houses.

Pages Bookstore

Scientific International Facing the Mughal­era wall, this store specializes in medical science, technical and educational books.

The shop’s large floor is covered with about 40,000 books. It offers a 20% discount.

Where: 4850/24, Ansari Road; tel., 23287580; time, 9.30am­6pm

Opened in January, the store—with its marble floor­ ing and strobe lights—deals in “general” books. This means that you get every­ thing from Ian Kershaw’s his­ torical works to the memoirs of former prime minister I.K. Gujral and former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee.

There are 10,000 books to browse through. It offers a 35% discount.

Where: 4834/24, Ansari Road; tel., 40055555; time, 10am­6pm

Commercial Book House It specializes in law and management, so you can get reference books with titles such as ‘VAT Manual’, ‘Practical Approach to Income Tax’, ‘Intellectual Prop­ erty Law’ and—if you are interested—the ‘Labour Law Digest’. It offers a 15­20% dis­ count. Credit cards are not accepted.

Where: LG­2, Akarshan Bhawan, 23, Ansari Road; tel., 23267860; time, 10am­7pm

Oxford University Press Of course, you get books by Oxford India in almost all the leading book stores of any Indian city. But the collection here under one roof is massive. Every title of the publishing house is here.

From ‘The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India’ to ‘The Tigers’. Plus, there are books on eco­ nomics, business and engineering. And don’t forget the dictionaries. It offers a 10% discount.

Where: 2/11, Ansari Road; tel., 23273841; time, 10am­6pm

BR World of Books From the outside, it looks like a hole­in­the­wall establish­ ment. It’s not. It is stocked with 20,000 books. Step in to get books on religion, philoso­ phy, art, history and literature.

It has the thick ‘A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture’ as well as doctoral works on novelists Anita Desai and Virginia Woolf.

Where: 4737­A/23, Ansari Road; tel., 23259196; time, 10am­6pm