lounge for 09 Oct 2010

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Saturday, October 9, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 40

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

At the Nalini Sarkar Street puja, artist Sanatan Dinda works on the concept of the goddess’ relation with nature, using environment­friendly natural colours and hay mixed with glue.

THE WRONG SORT OF BLACK? >Page 8

MOUNTAIN CHORUS

How the Shillong Chamber Choir won over India and opened a window to Meghalaya >Page 6

A BEAUTIFUL MAN

Javier Bardem reveals why he mixes the darkness of ‘Biutiful’ with the light of ‘Eat Pray Love’ >Page 16

DRESSING DURGA THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

IN THE SPIRIT OF GLOBAL CHARITY

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o Anand Mahindra has given $10 million (around `44.3 crore) to Harvard. I know, I know. I saw the emails too. “Why do India’s rich make large donations to foreign universities?”

His money; his prerogative. And others have done it before him. The Murthys have donated $5.2 million to Harvard to establish the Murty Classical Library of India; the Nilekanis have donated $5 million for the... >Page 4

This year, around 200 established artists and art college graduates are infusing a carefully crafted artistic energy to Kolkata’s `40 crore Durga Puja industry >Pages 10­12

THE TICKLED SCORER

PIECE OF CAKE

RAHUL BHATTACHARYA

PAMELA TIMMS

WHAT AILS MUMBAI’S TREES? A variety of factors have led to the decimation of what was left of the city’s green cover >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WHY CRICKET HAS NO A BAKEOVER FOR PLACE FOR SINNERS THE DELICATE PEAR

W

hy is it, someone asked, that sportspersons are expected to inhabit a higher moral universe than others? Why judge them with different standards? Corruption is a way of life in the subcontinent. People with far more sordid crimes on their hands than agreeing to bowl the odd no-ball occupy high offices. This is true. Mohammad Azharuddin, for instance, was banned from cricket for life but could still be voted into Parliament. When India’s ruling party put him up as a candidate, they were safe... >Page 5

I

n his wonderful new book Tender:Volume II, Nigel Slater captures the elusiveness of that rare thing, a delicious pear. “Like a snowflake,” he writes, “the perfectly ripe pear is a fleeting thing. Something to be caught, held tenderly, briefly marvelled at, before it is gone forever.” The 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once calculated that a pear is at its peak for approximately 10 minutes—one minute it’s bullet-hard, turn your back... >Page 7

PHOTO ESSAY

GAME GUARDS

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

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 ©2010 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

POSTMODERN VIPASSANA AND 9PM BATTLE

B

y the time I write this, four episodes of Bigg Boss are over.

That’s four days of the husband reiterating, “I don’t know how you can watch this stuff.”

It’s possibly because, with the `100 crore-plus advertising revenues it attracts, Bigg Boss is India’s biggest TV show. Because where else in India can you get ringside seats to watch a bona-fide dacoit from the notorious Chambal ravines interCOUCH POTATO a c t w i t h a M u m b a i model while Pakistan’s most famous crossdresser and the sacked lawyer of the only surviving terrorist of Mumbai’s 26/11 attacks look on?

Because of the build-up. The names of people you are likely to see on Bigg Boss “leak” a couple of months before the show airs and range from Pamela Anderson to Zeenat Aman. Because the format of the show is such that even

LOUNGE REVIEW | Fever Radio Ramayan

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t’s touted as one of the biggest properties on radio. Based on Valmiki’s epic, Fever Radio Ramayan showcases some of the most talented names in the film industry, including Anupam Kher (as Dashrath), Naseeruddin Shah (as Ravana), Ratna Pathak Shah (as Manthra) and Om Puri (as Kaal or time). Besides the heavyweights, the show, being aired by the Fever 104 radio network, features 200 voices in all, many of them theatre artistes. The first episode of the Hindi-language show went on air on 8 October in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, coinciding with the beginning of the auspicious Navratri season. The coming month will see it going on air in Kannada in Bangalore.

The good stuff Fever Radio Ramayan is really “theatre of the mind”, in which listeners can visualize the epic while listening to it. This alternative to the clutter and overdose of Bollywood music is a throwback to the days of radio dramas aired on All India Radio (AIR).

All the episodes are in crisp digital sound, which make for clear and easy listening over mobile phones, car stereo systems or home radio sets. Footsteps, gushing wind and tinkling bells—all resonated at a larger-than-life level in the first episode.

The not­so­good Fever’s biggest challenge will be to sustain listener interest over six months.

Though fresh episodes will be aired from Monday to Friday at 7am, with repeats three times a day, the duration of these capsules is only 12 minutes. There will be an hour-long compilation of all the capsules on weekends.

Given that time is at a premium in this format, it is surprising that so much of it was lost on just music in the second episode when dialogues could have taken the storyline forward. Fever might struggle to hold the attention of listeners who see radio as a “snacking medium” and are quick to change channels.

While the presence of veteran actors has already given the show a branding of sorts, many other voices will find it tough to live up to the standards set by them. However, even seasoned actors are not foolproof—a colleague was uncomfortable hearing Puri say “Shiri” Ram instead of “Shri” Ram in his impressive baritone.

Talk plastic Fever plans to bring out a dedicated merchandise line based on Fever Radio Ramayan that will include T-shirts, mugs, canvas bags and refrigerator magnets. So far, the station has given away nearly `1 lakh as prize money to listeners in quizzes.

(Mint is published by HT Media Ltd, which owns the operator of Fever 104 radio station.)

Abhilasha Ojha ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

and, clearly, a romance is brewing. There are at least two women who say they were abused by the men they dated, two men with above average biceps, at least two women who have dated bad boy cricketers, two people previously involved in an MMS scandal and God knows how many who have been chastized by Bigg Boss: Housemates Ali (left) and Patel. the law.

There’s also one Bhojpuri though it’s a reality show, viewers a c t o r w h o h a s a D u t c h s t a m p expect it to have the drama of a fic- named after him—although a webt i o n s h o w . S o f a r , r e a l i t y h a s site later reported that the stamp always delivered for Bigg Boss. was actually placed on order at Already, in the first four episodes postal operator TNT Post, where of this show, the Shiv Sena has pro- you can upload a photo and get t e s t e d , D e l h i ’ s b e s t k n o w n multiple stamps home-delivered. thief—immortalized by director Of course, by the time we’ve Dibakar Banerjee in the 2008 film spent 11 hours with these crazies Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!—has made a and criminals in the glamorous dramatic exit, three people have new house, Amitabh Bachchan will sobbed on camera, one is known be ready to go head-to-head with for the heels she never gets out of Kaun Banega Crorepati (Monday to

Thursday on Sony, from 11 October). The `5 crore prize is the highest ever on Indian television. Five days later, on 16 October, Akshay Kumar will jump in to host Master Chef India, every Saturday and Sunday on Star. Like on Bigg Boss, the winner of Master Chef will get `50 lakh; the latter will also offer the winner a chance to host a food show on national television. The only day Bigg Boss won’t have competition in the 9pm slot will be on Fridays. You’ll see high-energy host Salman Khan, whose inaugural episode ratings at least were better than his predecessors, twice every week on Fridays and Saturdays.

Khan was all nicely pleased and puffed up from the success of his last release Dabangg. In the first episode, in the midst of introducing the contestants and the house, he flung himself on the dining table, kissed the camera, did stomach crunches on stage, made jail jokes, flirted with the women and took one of them for a staged spin on a sponsored Suzuki bike.

The sponsers are everywhere this

season. All the red and white you see on the coffee mugs and bean bags are courtesy Vodafone (there’s even a lifesize Zoozoo in the activity area; the common loo is stacked with Garnier Men products; and all the white goods in the house are courtesy LG).

This year, says Ashvini Yardi, programming head at Colors, the channel worked to make the show younger. Yardi says she sees more than one love story unfolding in the house. Ask her why anyone would want to spend three months locked up with a dozen strangers and she says people participate for various reasons. “They come on to clear their name, for money, for fame, or purely to understand themselves better.” She likes to liken it to a kind of postmodern Vipassana where an urbanite must survive without a phone, a book, pen or paper. Whether you and me stick with crime and Vipassana over food and big-ticket quizzing will only be clear in the weeks ahead.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

In the spirit of global philanthropy

S

WIKIPEDIA

o Anand Mahindra has given $10 million (around `44.3 crore) to Harvard. I know, I know. I saw the emails too. “Why do India’s rich make large donations to foreign universities?” His money; his prerogative. And others

have done it before him. The Murthys have donated $5.2 million to Harvard to establish the Murty Classical Library of India; the Nilekanis have donated $5 million for the Yale India Initiative; Ratan Tata gave $50 million to Cornell. Both the Ambani brothers have given to Stanford and Wharton respectively, for a fund and an auditorium named after their father.

And now Mahindra has given his alma mater money it doesn’t need to establish a humanities programme in honour of his mother. Is this sincere or philanthropic social climbing?

Methinks it is both.

Mahindra went to the film studies programme in Harvard and has spoken in forums about the value of a humanities education. Harvard had probably been hitting him for a donation for a while now; and boy, these foreign universities are persistent. The Boston Brahmins probably cultivated Mahindra for years. What was smart was the way Mahindra carefully calibrated this large gift so that he got the most bang for the buck. Had he given $10 million to the Harvard Business School, which he also attended, they would have said, “Gee, thanks,” and poured him a champagne toast, if that. Humanities programmes on the other hand are so poorly funded that even Harvard lapped up his donation like a hungry puppy; and gave him a centre for it. If Mahindra had to give to a foreign university, the way he did it was maximum paisa vasool (bang for the buck), as we Indians call it. Should he have given to a foreign university?

That’s a different matter.

Let’s assume this: India’s rich, whether it be Mahindra or Murthy, are Indophiles. Most of them want to give back to India. They balance donating their money abroad by donating as much, if not more, to Indian causes. Even if they do give to foreign universities, they don’t do so disingenuously—to get a honorary degree for instance. Usually, there is a personal connection. Now we come to the crux of the issue. Put yourself in Mahindra’s shoes. Say you wanted to donate $10 million, either to get your name noticed in the global philanthropy world; or to get a building at Harvard—no less—named after you; or because you were simply fed up of the smooth arm-twisting; or because Warren Buffett dared you to; what would you do? Giving to a university is better than giving to, say, Lincoln Center, isn’t it? At least the money goes towards education and you could make your peace with that.

In that sense, for a wealthy Indian, writing a large cheque to a foreign university is like the Commonwealth Games are for India. You can argue, as Azim Premji did, that the money could have been better spent elsewhere. Premji is fundamentally right but that’s not really the point.

The Commonwealth Games are not about substance; they are about style.

Donating to a foreign university too is about style; Rajini style if you wish. It is about throwing your hat in the ring and telling the world—not just India—that you have arrived.

Mahindra has done terrific work with Nanhi Kali—the NGO dedicated to providing primary education to

Well­endowed: Wealthy Indians often donate to alma mater overseas, such as Harvard University. underprivileged Indian girls—but do you think Charlie Rose or Jon Stewart are going to ask him about Nanhi Kali (if they can even pronounce it) or the Harvard donation? The only guy who will view Nanhi Kali higher than Harvard is Nicholas Kristof but then, you win some; you lose some.

Let’s take the other side now. Bill Gates gives; as does Prince Charles. A fair chunk of their money comes to India. Are Indians being parochial in suggesting that India’s super-rich should give only to India? Absolutely.

In politicizing Mahindra’s gift, I am ignoring his strong and genuine ties to his alma mater. I went to Mount Holyoke College for my undergraduate degree. It changed my life. I went from being a psychology major to becoming a sculptor. When I lived in New York, I got invited to lunch with the president of the college because they had somehow found out that my husband worked for Wall Street and

wanted a big cheque. We got wined and dined, at the Harvard Club, ironically enough, and donations with a lot of zeros were suggested. I owe my feminism to Mount Holyoke; I owe my love of art to that college. I haven’t given it a penny. Why? Because I am a parochial Indophile Indian; because I think India needs the money more than Mount Holyoke; and because I don’t have enough money to get a centre named after my mother.

When we lived in New York, there was a blow-out between the Tisches and the Everetts, both prominent families, over their donations to the Central Park Zoo. Both families wanted the zoo to be named after them. The Tisches eventually won. It was hilarious. I guess my point is that when we Indians gripe about our rich giving globally, we fail to realize that in the high-stake world of global philanthropy, that’s how it’s done.

Mahindra’s donation, in a sense, will

open doors for India.

Nanhi Kali is a terrific effort. I downloaded its latest annual report to find out how much Mahindra has given to this cause that he founded and which is clearly close to his heart.

I couldn’t get all the numbers so I don’t know for sure. Again, it’s his money, but may I respectfully suggest to Mr Mahindra that he should consider a matching and very public donation to Nanhi Kali? A $10 million cheque will catapult its efforts. If nothing else, it will silence wags like me.

Shoba Narayan is considering following Mahindra’s example and donating to her alma mater. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RAHUL BHATTACHARYA THE TICKLED SCORER

Why cricket can’t afford to pardon its sinners

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CARL COURT/AFP

hy is it, someone asked, that sportspersons are expected to inhabit a higher moral universe than others?

Why judge them with different standards? Corruption is a way of

life in the subcontinent. People with far more sordid crimes on their hands than agreeing to bowl the odd no-ball occupy high offices.

This is true. Mohammad Azharuddin, for instance, was banned from cricket for life but could still be voted into Parliament.

When India’s ruling party put him up as a candidate, they were safe in the knowledge that Azharuddin’s misdemeanours did not compare to those of many other parliamentarians. Even so, few cricket lovers—including, possibly, those who elected him—would disagree that the cricket ban on Azhar was perfectly just. Likewise, few Pakistanis think that Mohammad Amir can touch President Zardari on the corruption scale. Zardari is not about to get banned for anything, not even getting creepy with Sarah Palin.

Yet, I don’t think this is a plain case of hypocrisy. There is a reason that sportspersons are held to a different standard, and it is based on the sound principle that the idea, the beautiful illusion, of sport is otherwise untenable. The thing absolutely collapses.

Sport is metaphor. Its essentially trivial rivalries in a giant triviality that is a game—cardboard heroes versus cardboard villains—only assume monumental stature in our imagination because we invest in

them the power of metaphor. An innings can come to stand for a phase in your life, in a relationship, the state of the nation. A defeat can be elevated to tragedy because its participants have been bestowed with the metaphoric power of dramatic actors. The drama is premised on the point that ultimately the best effort, the highest skill, must win (though “fate” or “luck” may intervene, which makes the drama all the grander).

This is the bond between sports player and sports watcher. They may occasionally forget, but professional players are aware of this, because they were once, as children, as amateurs, on the other side of the fence. Without this bond, they know sport is nothing. Ironic then, that when sportspersons deliberately underperform, they are charged with conspiring to defraud bookmakers, rather than the public. Which is to say, the relationship between sportspersons and those who watch them is so abstract that it cannot be framed in legal terms. Matters of money, on the other hand, belong to the real world.

A fixing scandal is especially fascinating in that it puts in conflict these worlds of sport, the metaphoric versus the real. The real world of sport has always operated within a gambling den; the challenge always has been to keep it insulated. Eight Men Out, the film on the baseball fixing scandal of 1919, superbly captures this conflict.

SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Redeemed? Despite the ignominy of a life ban from cricket, Moham­ mad Azharuddin won a seat in Parliament by a margin of more than 50,000 votes last year.

Tainted: (from left) Pakistani cricketers Amir, Asif and Butt were accused of accepting money from bookies to underperform.

It shows you that sports players are also disgruntled employees, or struggling family men, vulnerable people with economic insecurities, driven by naked greed or worn down by real-world cynicism, surrounded by sharks.

“I must have made 10 times more betting on you than you did slugging it out,” a shark tells a former boxer and tanker in the film. “And I never took a punch.”

“Yeah, but I was champ.

Featherweight champion of the world.”

“Yesterday. That was yesterday.”

This is the context in which Pakistan’s young trio could be seen falling prey to the likes of Mazhar Majeed.

We’ve read about it: the poor payments, the humble backgrounds, the meagre education, the short professional careers. Over this the lack of playing opportunities—an indictment of Pakistan, its most talented citizens denied a right to a living because of the state’s failure to safeguard visitors.

Yet, as Chicago’s baseball conspirators found, it is harder than it seems to take the money and run. Once in the mouth of sharks it is almost impossible to ease out. Like it says in the film, “What you going to do, tell the cops?”

More harrowing still is the struggle with one’s own conscience. Sportspersons know sport, they feel it. Well into the fix, one conspirator says to another: “I don’t care about the money.”

“Yeah,” his teammate concurs. “Peculiar way to find that out, ain’t it?”

The eight players of the Chicago White Sox were found not guilty in a court of law. Yet, each—including one who did not accept a cent, did not underperform, simply was privy to the dealings—was handed a life ban by Judge Landis, appointed as baseball’s first commissioner, tasked with restoring public confidence in the sport. That is, like Azharuddin, they were deemed okay for the world, but not sport.

Severe action against Pakistan’s beguiling young

talents, therefore, would not be exceptional. Dishonesty in life is dishonesty in life. Dishonesty in sport is dishonesty in all we’d like to believe about life. Take that away and there’s not much in it.

Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, if corrupt, could become political leaders or business tycoons. But I’m not sure cricket can afford them.

Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the cricket tour book, Pundits from Pakistan.

Write to Rahul at thetickledscorer@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Rahul’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rahul­bhattacharya

L6

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

Television

LOUNGE Clincher: The Shillong Chamber Choir’s semi­final act of Yeh Dosti from Sholay.

SPOTLIGHT

Misty mountain chorus How the Shillong Chamber Choir won over India and opened a window to Meghalaya

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

···························· he Shillong Chamber Choir are doing their very best to hide just how much they want to get back home. Out of the glitzy silk jackets and gauzy saris they’ve worn on stage for television reality show India’s Got Talent Khoj 2—which they’ve just won by a thumping margin—they are just exhausted young men and women, wilting a little in the afternoon heat. They are being lauded, feted, and asked to describe how they feel by each journalist who meets them—and there have been many. It’s been a television season’s worth of drama, emotion and hard work.

When they assemble to sing, the transformation from unremarkable young people to bona-fide superstars is so complete that it’s easy to understand what the country’s voters were thinking when they powered them through to the title.

“It’s been so hectic,” says Jessica Lyngdoh, 23, one of the choir’s sopranos. “But we won.”

“Oh, is that all you came for?

To sing and win?” asks Neil Nongkynrih, choir director—who also describes himself as “manager, and father figure, and everything”—rhetorically.

“No, but it was the cherry on the top,” Lyngdoh demurs. It’s not the effect of sleeping at 5am or snatching meals just as the hotel buffet shuts down. They had no idea they would win at all. They didn’t even want to be here. “They called us to the screening rounds in Guwahati,” Nongkynrih says. “I said no—I was preparing for China at the time.” He is talking about their appearances at the World Choir Games in Shaoxing, a somewhat more likely stage for this group of 13—its boutique size more suited to a glee club than a classical choir—than a raucous reality show.

The competition in China was in July. The Shillong Cham-

T

ber Choir went up against groups from all over the world, some of them 50- and 60-strong, and won three gold medals, one for each category in which they appeared. They returned, and the TV guys were calling again. “They said, ‘Let India hear what you are doing, come to the Kolkata round,’” says Nongkynrih. “We were suspicious and apprehensive at first, we thought we’d be used—typical Bollywood story—but it turned out everyone was very nice. So we came, because I wanted the choir to have a chance at performing at this scale. But no, we had no thought of winning.”

Winning does not figure in the Nongkynrih scheme of things, he says. Honesty and integrity, character, devotion—these are more important than even music. “When you see the choir, and you wonder, ‘Why did they make me feel like weeping? Why do they give me goosebumps?’, this is what you are hearing,” Nongkynrih says. Since he is the founder and the moving spirit of the Shillong Chamber Choir, the choristers follow his lead in matters of the soul.

They have been together for over four years—although Nongkynrih began the choir itself in 2001, with a different group of singers—and have travelled around the world, performing and collecting the odd medal, but the choir is not a school that inculcates competitive spirit. That would be beside the point.

They are a motley collection of individuals, aged between 16 (Ryan Lamin, bass) and 29 (Donna Marthong, alto, and a former L’Oréal model), most of whom live together under the supervision of “Uncle Neil” (also Neil Sir, or Mr Neil, depending on who’s asking).

They spend their days rehearsing, learning and teaching music.

Thanks to an arrangement that allows them to home-

study, they go to college twice a year for exams. Performing in historic halls in Europe, China and Korea is an education all on its own.

On India’s Got Talent, they’ve showcased a mere fraction of their traditional range, but singing Bollywood numbers was a major amendment to their usual style. Coming as they do from a town big on choral music but largely bemused by Hindi film songs (“It’s only the old people who liked it! Well, before our win.”), they haven’t just opened a window on Meghalaya to Hindi-speaking India, but also achieved the reverse.

Mumbai has been a learning experience too. “I didn’t think I would meet nice people here,” says Riewbankit Lyndem, 19, bass. “But I’ve met so many from all over the country, and they have all been so...good!”

He sounds surprised.

They’ve loved interacting with their competitors. They first sang their semi-final hit, Yeh Dosti, backstage with the Sai Sufi Pariwar from Delhi.

Before the final, Rajasthani drag artiste Queen Harish called to tell them he was praying for their victory. Now, on their last evening before they return to Shillong, they have been invited to the home of India’s Got Talent judge Kirron Kher.

Kher, one of their staunchest champions, is celebrating their introduction to showbiz over tea in the company of her friend Pamela Chopra, wife of producer-director Yash Chopra and a musician of no mean gift herself. “It’s almost genius,” Pamela exclaims to Nongkynrih. “Such a rich sound, and so much discipline. How do you pick these singers?”

Nongkynrih is circumspect about their stories. The choir is essentially a self-teaching and mutual support group. Some of the children drift into the choir’s house from harder, more precarious lives. They keep praying—and, of course,

GIGS CALENDAR Here’s where they’re headed next November Egypt, followed by Israel December Rashtrapati Bhawan, for the Pres­ ident’s annual Christmas concert Follow the choir’s updates on their Facebook page, and on www.shillongchamberchoir.com

playing music. It’s a tight ship.

“There’s a standard of professionalism that set them apart,” Kher says of their performances on the show. “It was a standard you don’t see often on reality shows. They weren’t the most flamboyant act on India’s Got Talent, unlike the more physical performers. It’s wonderful to know that India voted for them in spite of that. I used the Hindi word sabhya on air to describe you,” she says to them.

“It means ‘cultured’. You’re all very cultured.”

If there is an air of dutifulness in the way they assemble in her living room to reprise their greatest hits off the show, it vanishes the moment they begin to sing. The Shillong Chamber Choir are astonishing. Their rendition of a piece from Nongkynrih’s Khasi-language opera Sohlyngngem is like hearing a rousing Verdi chorus in an atrium.

“Like Beijing opera meets Italian!” Kher says.

The choir’s repertoire, which ranges from classical music to reworks of Queen hits, has expanded to include Bollywood numbers this year. But their choral-style revamps of Hindi film classics such as Kabhi aar kabhi paar and Ajeeb dastaan hai yeh are no bloodless Gregorian chant-like affairs. The pure, sweet voice of soloist Ibarisha Lyngdoh, 17, a soprano if there ever was one, leads them through the performance, as their versatility encompasses a sound that is deep and varied

enough to suggest a choir of many more numbers. The words are unfamiliar to them, but that doesn’t stop them from entering into the arrangements with gusto. By the end of their reworking of Sholay’s buddy classic, Yeh Dosti, their audience is both moved and delighted. In their rendition, the boisterous, bromance-ish vibe of the original shifts into sublime harmony, almost wistful as they sing about the wish to live and die together.

They don’t have time to do much more than quaff their tea before they speed off to a television interview. In the car, everyone is trying to catch naps. Mumbai has taught them about traffic too. It’s a new perspective on life—outside, after, beyond everything they’ve already achieved.

“I never thought I’d like Bollywood,” says ex-metalhead and recent classical music enthusiast Johanan Lyngdoh, 21, tenor. “But there’s just something about the arrangements that makes me love it now—Uncle Neil makes it so grand, so complicated. Before, it sounded,” he stumbles over the word, “cheap to my ears.

Now it doesn’t.”

“I chose classical music because it’s about joy,” Jessica Lyngdoh tells me, as the others fall asleep in bumper-to-bumper dinner-time traffic. “There’s some music that just makes you want to die—especially when you’re at an age where everything is about emotion and feeling.

But this music makes you want to live.”

Watching them come alive on television as their voices glided delicately over songs about the deathless love of friends, their Bollywood-savant audiences across the country probably felt the same way—as much, perhaps, as do the denizens of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the aficionados in St James’ Church, London, or the audiences waiting back home, in the concert halls of Shillong.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

L7

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

Pears get a bakeover with star anise PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Flirting with a classic recipe leads to a happy marriage of East and West

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n his wonderful new book Tender: Volume II, Nigel Slater captures the elusiveness of that rare thing, a delicious pear.

“Like a snowflake,” he writes, “the perfectly ripe pear is a fleeting thing. Something to be caught, held tenderly, briefly marvelled at, before it is gone forever.” The 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once calculated that a pear is at its peak for approximately 10 minutes—one minute it’s bullet-hard, turn your back and it’s become tasteless, grainy mush.

Emerson would find very little changed in modern times, as most varieties are now grown for looks and durability in transit rather than the soft juicy indulgence pear lovers long for.

If you do find such a pear, eat it immediately and greedily, swooning loudly over every nibble. If, more likely, you’re stuck with a bowl of stubborn fruit refusing to ripen, a little kitchen creativity might be called for.

We’re right in the middle of the Indian pear season now with tonnes of fruit from Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh in the markets, so it’s a time of highs and lows for pear fanciers.

One way to soften unyielding pears and tease out their flavour is to poach them in a light syrup with aromatics such as vanilla or ginger. Recently, while working on our autumn tea-party menus, my baking partner Laura struck on the idea of poaching pears with star anise. Our Pear and Star Anise Galettes had their first outing last weekend and received

Peerless: (clockwise from above) Poaching pears with star anise adds a touch of the exotic; bake the pastry in individual tart tins or a flan tray; and the French­style tart. many compliments. The pear flavour was intensified and the anise offered a delicate Far Eastern flirtation.

Here, I’ve used small Kashmiri pears, which have a wonderful flavour but never reach Slater/Emerson levels of toothsomeness, in a classic French-style tart recipe. It makes a wonderful dessert for a special occasion. And as we know, there are plenty of those coming up.

Pear and star anise tart Ingredients For the poached anise pears 6 Kashmiri pears 6 whole star anise Half a vanilla pod 300g sugar 600ml water 1 lemon For the pastry 100g caster sugar 200g cold butter 300g flour A little iced water For the tart filling 100ml sour cream or malai 200ml double cream 50g sugar

60g butter Icing sugar Method You will need one 25cm metal flan or tart tin or six individual-sized tart tins.

First, the poached pears. Peel the pears and cut in half from top to bottom. Put them in a bowl and squeeze over the lemon juice to stop them from going brown.

In a large, heavy-bottomed pan, heat the sugar and water with the star anise and vanilla pod. When the sugar has dissolved and the syrup is boiling, gently lower in the pear halves. Simmer the fruit

Kolkata’s oldest kitchens will be serving sumptuous fare for the Puja B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

A

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at http://eatanddust.wordpress.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a slideshow on how to bake pear tarts, go to www.livemint.com/peartart.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

COURTESY BROWN SAHIB

Pray, eat

···························· fortnight before Durga Puja, Aloke Krishna Deb is proving difficult to track down. The septuagenarian scion of the Sovabazar royal family of Kolkata, which organizes two of the oldest Pujas in the city, is busy dividing time between home and the thakurbari (family temple) down the lane named after his ancestor, Raja Naba Krishna Deb. Quite a few missed calls later, when Deb comes on the phone, he sounds tired but enthusiastic as he narrates the history of the 220-year-old family puja. The other puja organized by another branch of the family is even older and, according to family legend was attended by Robert Clive, of the Battle of Plassey fame. Given the legacy, the prasad offered to

gently until tender but not mushy. I gave the Kashmiri pears about 10 minutes in all, turning them over half way, but European pears would need less. Turn off the heat but leave the pears in the syrup to take on more of the anise and vanilla flavours while you make the pastry and filling.

If using a food processor, put in the sugar, butter and flour and blitz until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Then add a tablespoon of water at a time until the mixture starts to bind together. Use as little water as possible—the less the water, the lighter and crumblier the pastry

will be. Wrap the dough in cling film, then put in the fridge to rest.

Melt the 60g butter in a pan. In a jug, measure out the creams, then beat in the eggs and sugar.

Lastly mix in the melted butter.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Roll out the pastry as thinly as possible and place it in the tart tin. This pastry dough is fairly crumbly so don’t despair if it doesn’t transfer neatly from board to tin, simply press the pastry into the tin with your fingers and use excess pieces to patch up any holes so that the filling doesn’t seep through.

Next, bake the pastry shell “blind”, that is, without its filling.

To do this, place a piece of foil or baking parchment on top of the pastry and pour enough pulses or rice on to it to flatten the paper. This is to stop the pastry puffing up during baking.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes until the pastry is cooked but not brown, then take out and remove the paper and pulses.

When you’re ready to assemble the tart, take the pear halves out of the syrup and gently cut out the core. Reserve the syrup. Place the pear halves in concentric circles in the pastry case, cut side down. If making individual tarts, put one pear half in the centre of each pastry case.

Pour over the egg/cream mixture—you may not need all of it—then bake the tart(s) for about 30 minutes, until the custard filling looks set.

While the tart is baking, boil the syrup again until it becomes very thick. Strain the syrup through a fine sieve. When the tart is ready, carefully brush the top of the tart with the syrup to make it beautifully glossy. Dust the edges of the pastry with a sprinkling of icing sugar.

If left to cool, the anise syrup permeates the custard and pastry and, for elevenses, as I discovered while writing this, that’s no bad thing.

Festive spread: Traditional banquets are an integral part of Durga Puja. the goddess at the Debs’ is legendary. Since the Debs are not Brahmins, cooked rice meals can’t be offered. Besides uncooked rice and fruits, the prasad is an assortment of around 20 traditional half-forgotten sweets and savouries such as kheertakti, radhaballavi, jibhe goja, mithe goja, pokkan, khaja, kotkoti naru.

Collectively called methai, these Bengali sweets pre-date the sandesh and rasgulla.

The royal indulgence extends to family meals as well. While the meals on the first three days are family-only affairs, the grandest banquet on Navami is

for friends and invitees too. The menu includes pulaos, mutton korma, bhetki paturi, prawn malaikari, sandesh, rasgulla and even a tipsy pudding, as a doff of the hat to Raj officials who used to be guests.

A few neighbourhoods away, at the Daw household, the puja is into its 152nd year. Here too, the goddess is not offered any cooked meals. “We offer Durga lots of fruits, sweets, uncooked rice and vegetables as naivedya.

On Ashtami, when the most important puja is held, the naivedya is made of a mon of rice, which is about 37kg,” says

Sulagna Daw. The cooked repast is for family and friends. “Around 100-odd relatives have lunch and dinner together every day from the day of Mahalaya (the start of the Navratras) to Dwadashi (two days after Dussehra),” she adds. The menu of khichuri, luchi and other very traditional Bengali dishes varies from day to day, the only concession to modernity being the replacement of the family cook with a catering service.

At the relatively newer puja by the Mallicks of Bhowanipur, in south Kolkata, such concessions are still unthinkable. The retinue of staff engaged for the puja comprises descendants of the staff employed when the puja first started in 1924. “Our cooks, our priest, our kumor (idol maker), our dhaakis (traditional drummers) have all been with us for generations,” says Tapan Mallick. The cooks from Midnapore prepare lunches and dinners for the nearly 400-member clan for the four days of the Puja.

“The Dashami lunch is the grandest. And the must-have on that day is a mete chochchori (liver curry), whose recipe is a family secret,” says Nandita Ganguly, a daughter of the family.

EVERYONE’S WELCOME Not invited to a family feast? Pick from one of these Puja spreads The Park, Kolkata Pujor Mahabhoj banquet lunch, with unlimited alcohol, on 15­16 October, `675 (veg) and `975 (non­veg), inclusive of taxes.

Eden Pavilion, ITC Sonar, Kolkata Special buffets all October, `1,500 (lunch) and `1,800 (dinner), plus taxes.

Oh! Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Bangalore Special menus on Puja days. Buffet

Jhinge Kumro Paturi (Sweet pumpkin and ridge gourd steamed in banana leaves) Serves 4 Ingredients 500g ‘jhinge’ (ridge gourd or ‘tori’) 250g ‘kumro’ (red pumpkin) 2 onions, sliced 1 tsp turmeric powder N tsp chili powder 2N tbsp mustard paste 4 green chillies, chopped Half a coconut, grated Salt to taste 4 pieces of banana leaves, cut into 6­inch squares Method Peel the ‘jhinge’ and cut finely. Sprin­

prices vary from `575­725 depend­ ing on the city and whether it’s lunch or dinner. Taxes extra.

Bhojohori Manna, Kolkata and Bangalore Special ‘thalas’ on Puja days, `320 (veg) and `450 (non­veg), inclusive of taxes.

Brown Sahib, Delhi Puja Maha Bhog ‘thalis’ all October for `450 (veg) and `750 (non­ veg), plus taxes.

Esplanade, Bangalore Buffet on Puja days, `595, inclusive of taxes. kle with a little salt and leave it to release water. Squeeze out the water. Peel and cut the pumpkin into juliennes.

In a bowl, mix the vegetables and all the masalas. Add a pinch of salt.

Take each piece of banana leaf and place equal quantities of the mixture in the centre and fold the leaf to make a parcel. You can tie it with a string.

Place the parcels in a steamer and steam for 10­15 minutes. Alterna­ tively, place the parcels on a ‘tawa’ on medium heat and cook for 12­15 minutes, taking care to turn them around a few times.

Recipe courtesy Brown Sahib.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

Style

LOUNGE BOTTEGA VENETA

KARL LAGERFELD/CHANEL/WSJ

TREND

The wrong sort of black?

The colour continues to be an important part of any wardrobe—in moderation

B Y T INA G AUDOIN ···························· don’t mean to come over all “fashiony” so early on in our relationship, but I hope you will forgive me if I discuss “black” this week. Why? Well, for starters, this is the season for black. When I say season I’m not talking about autumn retail, I mean the approximate 28-day mayhem that constitutes the fashion weeks of New York, London, Milan and Paris, beginning in early September (from which, paradoxically, the news has been all about colour for spring 2011). “Why do so many people in fashion wear black?” It’s a question I have been asked countless times.

Depending on my mood, the answers have been variously “Because fashion is such a dark business,” “Because they can” and “Because it’s chic and easy”. The answer, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Black is an important part of any wardrobe, but like anything else that offers an easy respite, only in moderation.

There has been much commentary about the fact that Alexander McQueen’s moving memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral last month must have been unnervingly familiar for us fashion folk, seated as we were in tightly packed rows, according to rank, with what could have easily counted for a catwalk running up to the pulpit of this esteemed place of worship. Naturally (and appropriately), most of us were wearing the aforementioned colour. Some had clearly put a lot of thought and effort into which particular black outfit we would be wearing for the occasion (also not unlike attending the shows).

McQueen would definitely have approved of the quality of the outfits on display and the historical referencing. Pre-Coco Chanel,

I

black was primarily thought of as mourning attire or ecclesiastical garb. McQueen, of course, harnessed the power of both these concepts in many of his collections, but what he—like Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) and Helmut Lang before him—recognized was that to do black well, the fabric needs to be expensive and the cut immaculate. Tortured, brilliant tailoring was McQueen’s genius. I know women who are still wearing his broad-shouldered, narrowhipped black satin trouser suits from 12 years ago or his magical little black dresses, with an inner bodicing that narrows the waist and emphasizes the breasts.

There’s a misconception promulgated mainly by those of us who are somewhat lazy about what we wear that any sort of black will do.

Not true. Cheap, badly cut High Street black looks worse than almost anything else (bin bags and safety pins included). Wellcut black silk, stretch wool, lace or chiffon (preferably a mix of at least two of these) still has the ability to mesmerize and bestow confidence like no other outfit. That’s the real truth of course about why black has become such a fashion uniform—if you worked in a world where people looked you up and down for a living, you’d probably want to wear something that was beyond reproach too.

When American Vogue previewed Chanel’s LBD in 1926 with the caption “Here is a Ford signed Chanel,” they were, as Justine Picardie remarks in Coco Chanel, The Legend and The Life, predicting that the LBD would become “a uniform as widely recognized as a Ford automobile: fast and sleek and discreet”. What they perhaps couldn’t have foreseen were the other inferences that would accompany black—the S&M undertones, so brilliantly

morphed into acceptable modern-day fashion by designers such as Helmut Lang; the overtly glamorous, sexually promiscuous cues metaphored by Versace’s tight satin pants and Dolce & Gabbana’s lacy dresses; the deeply “cool” androgyny of designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garcons and, more recently, the Gothic mixed-media “anti-fashion” collections of the Rodarte sisters. All of which is to say that black has been part of the fashion lexicon for 80-something years; the trick is to not let it become the dominant player in your wardrobe.

How does one know when one has gone too far? I offer my own salutary tale as an example. A non-fashion friend once pleaded with me to show her my wardrobe. After the pressure had been applied a few times, I relented, not wishing to seem stand-offish. After she had spent a good 20 minutes poking around in my closet, she turned to me with a grimace. “This is all very nice,” she said politely, “but where is the stuff you wear during the day?”

Dark dreams: (top, from left) Bottega Veneta Nero matte gaberdine jacket and pant; Lanvin black ostrich feather and washed jersey skirt; and reconstruction of the ‘Ford’ dress by Chanel.

To avoid the “sea of black” scenario, I recommend spending significantly on your black outfit (the received fashion terminology here is “investing”, but really what this means is handing over your credit card, feeling rather queasy for the next 24 hours and then making damn sure no one else sees the receipt or the bill). Readers, you will thank me. Buy the right piece and you will still be wearing it—as I am with a particular Chanel number—10 years later.

On that note, Chanel’s pre-collection and ParisShanghai collection offer, as you might expect, the perfect LBD, starting at £1,100 (around `77,220).

For trouser suits, look to Bottega Veneta’s gaberdine jacket, £1,260, and trousers, £410. For evening drama and sex appeal, see Lanvin,

where Alber Elbaz has created what can only be described as an exuberant ostrich-feather skirt (warning: it does sit above the knee), £1,950. YSL revolutionized the women’s market with “Le Smoking” during the 1960s; a modern-day version will set you back by £1,610 (wear the jacket and pants separately to the office for greater flexibility). There’s a lot of black lace and chiffon around this season, with Dolce & Gabbana leading the charge. Instead of a lacy dress (lots of bad ones on the High Street), try its timeless chiffon blouse with neck tie, £290; you will be wearing it long after lace has lost its allure.

The key to wearing black is to recognize that it isn’t a style panacea. It is best worn sparingly and mostly after the sun goes down. As a maturer (and, therefore, wiser) sales assistant on the designer floor at Selfridges recently noted: “It’s amazing how many women come in here hell bent on buying black. The moment they put it on, it sucks the light right out of their faces.” Readers, we should consider ourselves strongly cautioned.

with her suit, she’ll typically wear a plain scarf that picks up on a colour. “Long scarves are my favourite,” Baraschi says, because of their versatility. She has several lightweight cashmere versions that she wears year round. She favours a looser look with these scarves, sometimes folding one in half to make a loop, putting it around her neck and then pulling the ends through.

Often, she simply drapes a scarf around her shoulders, saying this gives dresses and pants a “fresh and modern look”. This is a good way to wear a scarf with a shorter dress, which can get overwhelmed by long, dangling ends. With pants or jeans, she loosely loops her scarf once or twice around her neck and lets the ends hang down—preferably no farther than just past the waistline.

Baraschi avoids wearing necklaces with scarves that are wrapped around her neck, noting that the scarf is “the major statement” near the face. Earrings should be small—“nothing dangling”, she says.

If her scarf is very colourful, Baraschi keeps her eyeshadow to a minimum so she doesn’t have two strong colours competing.

And if her scarf bears red or pink, she makes sure that her lipstick colour doesn’t clash. But if the scarf is in a neutral colour or a cooler shade such as grey or blue, she’ll make her lipstick colour a little bolder. “You want to play with contrasting elements,” says Baraschi.

While she likes patterns of all kinds on her scarves, she finds that traditional paisleys can look “old-fashioned”. She prefers paisleys that are “only on a part of the scarf” or “very tight and dense”.

For a modern look, she sometimes likes scarves that are made in a very light, see-through silk, which has an airy effect.

Otherwise, there are few rules for choosing a scarf. “Be creative, be courageous,” she says.

“Scarves are a way to express a more interesting and perhaps deeper side of you that’s not always visible.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

LANVIN MIMI RITZEN CRAWFORD/WSJ

Knot complex A designer’s tips on how to tie the perfect scarf

B Y C HERYL L U-L IEN T AN The Wall Street Journal

···························· carves have long been a staple of a chic look for European women, but many Americans still regard them as difficult to pull off.

Designer Yoana Baraschi believes that anyone can wear them. Indeed, they’re best worn in an insouciant way—no complicated knotting needed.

A square silk scarf—Baraschi has collected vintage Hermès and Gucci—is great for dressing up a conservative suit. Baraschi, whose scarves and clothes are sold in Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and other stores, chooses a patterned scarf with a colour that picks up on the hue of her blouse. Then she folds it in half to form a large triangle, asymmetrically drapes it over one side of her jacket, and makes a small knot with the ends on the other side of the body.

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Twist and turn: Yoana Baraschi believes scarves should look ‘natural’.

“It should look natural,” not stiff, she says, noting that the knot shouldn’t look “meticulously tied”.

Sometimes, she’ll twist the folded triangle a few times and drape it around her neck before knotting it lightly to one side. “It shouldn’t look very tight around your neck, or it’ll look like you have a cold,” says Baraschi, who

leaves her collarbone exposed for a more “playful” look. The designer sometimes pairs a dress or a dress shirt and pants with a scarf tied in this way.

Baraschi generally likes square scarves that are 30 or 32 inches wide. With anything larger than that, there could be too much fabric billowing around the neck.

If she is wearing a patterned top

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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Play

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Q&A | ATINDRIYA BOSE

I like to move it, move it

The state of play The country manager of Sony PlayStation on the future of the console in India

The PlayStation Move may be late to the party, but it’s an excellent example of how to do it right

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

····················································· tindriya Bose hopes the launch of PlayStation Move will convince more non-gamers to pick up game consoles, which, he says, are perfect “digital distribution platforms” for all kinds of entertainment. He spoke to Lounge about Indian gamers, street cricket and the success of Hanuman: Boy Warrior. Edited excerpts:

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

···························· alfway through a game of table tennis with the PlayStation Move, I realize that I play better if I stop treating the wand-shaped controller in my hand like a controller. I’m currently playing with cautious restraint, flicking the controller tentatively every time the ball approaches my player’s side of the court. I’m losing more points than I’m winning, but the second I start treating it like an actual racquet, things begin to look up.

Move is Sony PlayStation’s answer to the Nintendo Wii, and soon, I’m delivering smashes, topspin backhands and looping serves with none of the vague approximation one gets with the latter. Armed to the teeth with accelerometers, gyroscopes and a glowing orb that’s tracked by a camera placed on top of your PlayStation 3, Move detects tilts and slants with pleasing accuracy and in spite of my constant movement, doesn’t seem to require frequent recalibration.

Motion-based controllers are the Farmvilles of console gaming.

Nintendo is the Zynga of this space, having successfully pitted the Nintendo Wii in 2007 against Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Now Sony and Microsoft are playing catch-up—Sony with Move, Microsoft with Kinect.

While the Kinect is attempting a dramatic science-fiction upheaval

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In motion: (from above) Sports Champions; a still from EyePet; and the camera that tracks the Move controller.

of how people play games, Move is a gentle, safe bet—a quietly efficient piece of engineering that delivers an evolution of what the Wii made possible.

This is, of course, not always a good thing. A lot of games (Sports Champions is the obvious analogue to Wii Sports) are derivative, and many of the launch titles feel like tired retreads of popular Wii games.

Happily, there are exceptions—the endearing EyePet uses the bundled camera to project a furry creature into the room you’re playing in, allowing you to pet, interact and play with the thing. The wonderful Echochrome 2 puts the controller as a light source, allowing you to manipulate shadows to solve puzzles.

It helps that the PlayStation 3 is a graphical

power horse—the visuals for Move-enabled games are topnotch, and the sense of immersion is stronger than Wii. Sony’s promised a much wider variety of Move games by the end of the year, including patches that will make existing PlayStation 3 titles such as Heavy Rain playable with Move.

Those who have a Nintendo Wii (with the MotionPlus add-on) should probably wait to see what kind of eclecticism Sony will bring to the Move library. But for those who’ve never jumped on to the casual gaming, motion-controlled bandwagon, Move is an excellent place to start.

The basic PlayStation Move controller costs `2,499, with the add-on controller at `1,899.

A “starter pack” with a basic controller, PlayStation Eye camera and a disc of demos for Sports Champions, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 and EyePet is priced at `3,650.

How many PlayStations are there in India?

We’re adding about 400,000 consoles a year—50% of that is PlayStation 2 (PS2) sales, and the PlayStation Portable (PSP) makes up about 35%.

The PlayStation 3 (PS3) shifts about 4,000-5,000 units a month, and we hope to have an install base of 100,000 PS3s by March 2011.

What games do well in India?

Charged: Atindriya Bose.

All the international biggies do well here. Core gamers are up-to-date and well-versed with what’s big and what’s upcoming. A God of War III, for example, sold around 20,000 units. A big PS2 title does about 15,000 units, while a PSP title does about 8,000.

With Move, we’re hoping to broadbase this. It could work—it’s casual, yet high quality.

Last year, you released two games with India-specific content developed by local studios ‘Hanuman: Boy Warrior’ and ‘Desi Adda: Games of India’. How have they done in the market?

As stand-alone titles, pretty decently. Hanuman sold about 9,000 units, while Desi Adda did around 5,000. If you count total sales after we bundled the games with the PS2 and PSP, respectively, it’s 90,000 units for Hanuman and 40,000 for Desi Adda.

But with bundles, you’re essentially forcing people to play those games. Is that a good indicator of how well they’ve done?

Yes, we are pre-deciding what a buyer’s first experience with our consoles will be, but you have to realize that this first experience is important to us. We don’t want new gamers picking up a PS2 and having a poor first game. With these bundles, we have received a positive response.

What other India-specific games is Sony working on?

We have three titles coming up. The first, tentatively titled Street Cricket Champions, will be launched by Diwali for the PS2 and PSP. It’s developed by Trine Game Studios, and it’s an interesting take on street cricket. We expect it to sell about 10,000 units stand-alone by the end of the year.

The second is a bullock-cart racing game that Gameshastra is working on. The third is a historical strategy/war game that features Chandragupta. These we hope to release by December.

Are you planning to open the PlayStation Store in India?

The PlayStation Store will be switched on by the end of the year.

All the games will be available for purchase in Indian rupees. But movies and comics will not be available just yet.

LOUNGE REVIEW | BLACKBERRY PEARL 9105 & NOKIA C3­00

Smart economy Two new phones that provide cleverness on a tight budget B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT sidin.v@livemint.com

····························

Pearls of wisdom Is a BlackBerry a BlackBerry if it doesn’t have a full Qwerty keyboard?

Depending on which side of that fence you sit on, the new BlackBerry Pearl 9105 is either an immediate buy, or a device that has one niggling fault that makes it a pain to use.

The rest of the package, however, is a no-brainer. The 9105 is one of the best BlackBerry devices we’ve used in recent times. It is alluringly proportioned, adequately powered and really good to look at. For once, this is a BlackBerry handset that combines the best of both the new Curve and the old Pearl series with the excellent fifth version of the BlackBerry operating system.

Almost perfect.

Take it out of the box. Hold it

in your hands for a bit. Let the weight, size and design settle into your conscience. Yes, yes it is small. But without being feminine. Thanks to those signature BlackBerry curves around the edges and the combination of shiny and matt textures, the 9105 is both classy but also a little bit macho. And my God, is there a little Vertu going on here with the overall shape and keyboard layout? Switch it on to enjoy the smooth interface, the bright, beautiful screen and that joyful trackpad.

If you’re a regular user of BlackBerry’s Qwerty keyboard, the 14-key regular phone pad here will drive you up the wall.

SureType, BlackBerry’s predictive input system, is a valiant attempt. The software does useful things such as add contact information to the predicted text.

But typing long emails with unconventional words (ossum!) or complicated names (Vadukut!) can be exhausting.

There are also some issues with build quality. Hold up the phone in a dark place and you can see the light bleeding from around the keypad.

And finally there is an infuriat-

ing software bug.

Sometimes when the phone gets a call, it rings without doing anything else.

Nothing happens to the screen display.

Nothing at all. The phone just rings while the rest of it carries on as if nothing happened.

Madness.

The 9105 will cost you approximately `19,000, but as with all Berrys, prices will drop subsequently. But at a similar price, the 9100, with a regular Qwerty keyboard, might work much better.

NOKIA C3­00: `7,000 BLACKBERRY PEARL 9105: `19,000

Borrowed knowledge This is interesting. And a little sad. It appears to me that Nokia’s new C3 phone is pretty much a rip-off of those popular Micromax and Maxx Qwerty phones, that themselves are ripoffs of Nokia’s E63 phone. The E63 is a wonderful phone, a great combination of hardware and software. And it had a highly user-friendly keyboard.

The C3 then is a rip-off of a rip-off. But can two rip-offs make a right?

As much as we like Nokia and everything the brand has done for mobile enthusiasts over the

last few years, we have to admit that their handsets have stopped exciting us for some time. Let’s face it. When was the last time you really, really wanted to buy a Nokia phone? Sure most of the E series phones are superb. And the MusicXpress series with the

free music deal is a bargain. Not to mention the fact that most Nokia phones are still well put together. But of late buying a Nokia phone has become a question of calculations. A value proposition rather than a passion proposition.

Your decision to buy the C3 will be a similar one.

Is there a phone with such a high-quality Qwerty keypad and Wi-Fi connectivity available at a price of `7,000? This is comparable with any branded, unbranded or some-branded phone on the market. Yet typing on the device is a dream, thanks to large, well-shaped keys.

Another key feature of the phone is the tight social networking integration. The device comes with inbuilt Facebook and Twitter clients that also hook up with the home screen to show messages and

message count. Signing in and out of the service was easy enough, though we did experience some instability with the Twitter app over Wi-Fi. The phone has all the necessary multimedia features. There were two standouts in this department. One was the onboard speaker that plays audio nicely even at high volume. The quality was much better than the BlackBerry Pearl 3G. The audio recorder also impressed. It records clips up to 1 hour long and does so at good quality.

And finally there is the Wi-Fi. The C3 hooked up to a home network without a glitch. Within moments I was able to jettison the on-board browser for Opera and surf away.

The C3, however, also has many tiny botherations. The screen is good for the price. But very small. The 2MP camera shoots poor photos and even worse videos. And for some bizarre reason you can’t charge the phone via the USB port. You HAVE to use the charger. And finally there is the S40 operating system. Very old. Very, very old.

The hardware and software (except the keys) are both underwhelming, but at least the phone looks quite pleasant. Highly recommended for students and other buyers on a budget. Will it save Nokia? Tee hee.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

Finishing touches: (clockwise from left) Art college graduate Sanatan Dinda is designing the Nalini Sarkar Street pandal; the Ajeya Sanghati puja site near Tollygunje is being designed by artist Purnendu Dey; Bhabotosh Sutar is conceptualizing and design­ ing the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha puja; and art­ ist Sushanto Pal is designing the Vivekananda Park Athletics Club as part of an art restoration project of a neighbourhood undertaken for this year’s festival.

ART

The Durga Puja

zeitgeist With awards and corporate sponsorships, Kolkata’s centuries­old community culture is now a `40 crore industry. This year, around 200 established artists and art college graduates are infusing a carefully crafted artistic energy to the annual event

B Y S HAMIK B AG ····························· ome months ago, 64-year-old Sudip Chatterjee woke up one morning to a remarkable request. The local Durga Puja organizers wanted to paint and design the facade of The Breeze—Chatterjee’s house, built in 1937 near Kalighat in Kolkata, with balustrades and a pagoda-style clock tower. His response to the plea of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja organizers was a determined “no”. Further pleas were similarly turned down.

While Chatterjee resisted any change to his “heritage property”, neighbouring houses were getting a coat of fresh paint and innovative ideas. Chatterjee finally gave in too; his three-storeyed house now has a new colourful look. “I realized that the bigger objective was art,” says Chatterjee.

It’s dusk and the area around the pandal (a makeshift structure where the Durga deity is worshipped) seems charged with the spirit of the extraordinary. Children flit through open doors that are at the base of a gigantic representation of the sun, young girls stand in balconies framed by decorative designs, the ladies of the locality are huddled together before an intricate wall of art and the neighbourhood houses blend in tastefully with the pandal that is under construction.

Here, everything and everyone seems to have become part of the grand puja canvas.

Behind the concept, and Chatterjee’s consent, is Sushanto Pal. A city boutique owner and costume and

S

interior designer with a master’s degree from Kolkata’s Government College of Art and Craft (GCAC), Pal is a National Award winner who has worked with director Rituparno Ghosh on 10 of his films.

For the three months leading up to the four-day Durga Puja festival, which begins on 14 October, Pal assumes an altogether different identity—as a Durga Puja artist, he is responsible for the concept, design and execution of individual pujas.

The artist is part of the changing visual profile of Durga Puja in Kolkata, particularly over the last few years. Today’s Durga pujas no longer have the staid, unimaginative look of yesteryear. The professional involvement of trained artists and art students has seen them transform into discerning pieces of public art. While some of the biggest names in the Indian art circuit, such as Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen and Bikash Bhattacharjee, have sculpted or drawn Durga idols since the 1970s, the newer lot of artists have creative control over the entire puja arena: the pandal, the mandap and the idol, from the point of entry to the exit.

Their interpretation of the puja as thematic, site-specific art installations comes against the backdrop of an increasing inflow of corporate money into the festival through sponsorships and awards. This combination of factors has also seen a growing clamour for Durga Puja in Kolkata to be recognized as one the world’s largest exhibitions of public installation art.

This year, approximately 200 established artists and art college graduates will help in giving aesthetic interpretations to Durga Puja

across the city, and through their individual efforts, infuse a carefully crafted artistic energy into the more than two centuries old community puja culture in Bengal.

“At art college, we were often told about the struggle of an artist. So far, my struggle has been to establish myself in the sphere of Durga Puja,” says Bhabotosh Sutar, who graduated in Western painting from GCAC in 2000. At the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha puja, which Sutar is conceptualizing this year, craftsmen and junior artists are hard at work, creating a puja themed on Hindu spirituality. The work combines elements of sculpture, architecture, painting and Indian mythology.

All activity in the pandal arena revolves around Sutar. “What happens at art galleries is that I’ve earlier found my name erased so that viewers can’t access me directly and have to go through the art dealer.

How many people go to galleries anyway? Here, over five days I’m assured of at least five lakh viewers,” Sutar adds.

Since 2000, when he worked for the first time on a Durga Puja pandal, Sutar has come to occupy the top rung of contemporary Durga Puja artists—among them Sushanto Pal, Amar Sarkar, Rono Banerjee, Purnendu Dey, Prasanta Pal, Tarun Dey and Sanatan Dinda. They all have formal art education and a string of Durga Puja awards to their credit. Many of them belong to the category of artists whose fees for each Durga Puja assignment are in the `2-4 lakh range, depending on the scale of work. Some of them have multiple Puja assignments this year. Sutar and Sushanto Pal have three projects each.

They are among those who have taken over much of the business from the traditional artisan community, the Pals of Kumartuli, the hub of clay idol makers in Kolkata.

For generations, the Pals—a large group of idol makers whose expertise in the craft has essentially been handed down from generation to generation—enjoyed an almost complete monopoly. No longer, though they continue to maintain a strong presence at the traditional puja pandals. And quite often, their expertise and experience in sculpting is used by artists when they are making the initial drawing of the deity.

The Durga idol the Pals would create on their own was almost standardized, says Sutar. Together with a roster of pandal decorators and electricians, Durga Puja, even a decade back, was quite often an experience in kitsch, glitz and conventionality. Rarely did the discourse throw up issues of art installations, deconstruction, exploration of folk art forms and theme-based craftsmanship.

All that is changing. In the Barisha Club’s puja arena, artist Tarun Dey effortlessly weaves in subjects such as expressionism, the Impressionist movement, Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre, and the limitation of proscenium theatre, while explaining the backdrop to his artworks.

The concept of open theatre supports his current theme for the Barisha Club puja—an ode to all that is fertile and natural in a world where an ecological crisis is imminent. We are surrounded by a circular gallery where 15,000 clay pots have been closely cemented together, their gaping mouths facing the sky to catch the artist’s impression of rain.

A thin fibre of transparent sheet forms the ceiling and mutes the sunlight filtering in. Some 25,000 white plastic balls used to keep fishing nets afloat are stuck to the transparent sheet ceiling like tufts of cumulous clouds. The deity, once installed, will sit in the middle of an amphitheatre of creativity.

“The art movement in Kolkata has steadily incorporated strong doses of postmodernism and Durga Puja has become an exposition of conceptual art,” says Dey, who graduated in painting and sculpture from GCAC in 1980 and is heading a group of 30 trained artists and students of the Environmental Art Group, who have teamed up for the Barisha Club puja. This Kolkatabased art collective stresses on the study of natural science through art.

“Artists are coming out of their studios and bringing all their ideas along,” says Dey. Of the 4,000 pujas in the city and its suburbs, around 1,000 are said to be theme-based—with issues ranging from the spiritual and environmental to historical and mythological. This provides ample scope for conceptualization, and the contribution of trained artists. A common aesthetic strain runs through the design of the outer pandal area, the mandap, the idol and lighting scheme. Usually, at least 150 of the theme pujas are strong contenders for awards from a battery of companies competing for maximum mileage from their Durga Puja award initiatives. This year, 40-odd companies, from multinationals to local electrical goods manufacturers, are in the fray. A far cry from the time when there was just one corporate TURN TO PAGE L12®

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

Finishing touches: (clockwise from left) Art college graduate Sanatan Dinda is designing the Nalini Sarkar Street pandal; the Ajeya Sanghati puja site near Tollygunje is being designed by artist Purnendu Dey; Bhabotosh Sutar is conceptualizing and design­ ing the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha puja; and art­ ist Sushanto Pal is designing the Vivekananda Park Athletics Club as part of an art restoration project of a neighbourhood undertaken for this year’s festival.

ART

The Durga Puja

zeitgeist With awards and corporate sponsorships, Kolkata’s centuries­old community culture is now a `40 crore industry. This year, around 200 established artists and art college graduates are infusing a carefully crafted artistic energy to the annual event

B Y S HAMIK B AG ····························· ome months ago, 64-year-old Sudip Chatterjee woke up one morning to a remarkable request. The local Durga Puja organizers wanted to paint and design the facade of The Breeze—Chatterjee’s house, built in 1937 near Kalighat in Kolkata, with balustrades and a pagoda-style clock tower. His response to the plea of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja organizers was a determined “no”. Further pleas were similarly turned down.

While Chatterjee resisted any change to his “heritage property”, neighbouring houses were getting a coat of fresh paint and innovative ideas. Chatterjee finally gave in too; his three-storeyed house now has a new colourful look. “I realized that the bigger objective was art,” says Chatterjee.

It’s dusk and the area around the pandal (a makeshift structure where the Durga deity is worshipped) seems charged with the spirit of the extraordinary. Children flit through open doors that are at the base of a gigantic representation of the sun, young girls stand in balconies framed by decorative designs, the ladies of the locality are huddled together before an intricate wall of art and the neighbourhood houses blend in tastefully with the pandal that is under construction.

Here, everything and everyone seems to have become part of the grand puja canvas.

Behind the concept, and Chatterjee’s consent, is Sushanto Pal. A city boutique owner and costume and

S

interior designer with a master’s degree from Kolkata’s Government College of Art and Craft (GCAC), Pal is a National Award winner who has worked with director Rituparno Ghosh on 10 of his films.

For the three months leading up to the four-day Durga Puja festival, which begins on 14 October, Pal assumes an altogether different identity—as a Durga Puja artist, he is responsible for the concept, design and execution of individual pujas.

The artist is part of the changing visual profile of Durga Puja in Kolkata, particularly over the last few years. Today’s Durga pujas no longer have the staid, unimaginative look of yesteryear. The professional involvement of trained artists and art students has seen them transform into discerning pieces of public art. While some of the biggest names in the Indian art circuit, such as Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen and Bikash Bhattacharjee, have sculpted or drawn Durga idols since the 1970s, the newer lot of artists have creative control over the entire puja arena: the pandal, the mandap and the idol, from the point of entry to the exit.

Their interpretation of the puja as thematic, site-specific art installations comes against the backdrop of an increasing inflow of corporate money into the festival through sponsorships and awards. This combination of factors has also seen a growing clamour for Durga Puja in Kolkata to be recognized as one the world’s largest exhibitions of public installation art.

This year, approximately 200 established artists and art college graduates will help in giving aesthetic interpretations to Durga Puja

across the city, and through their individual efforts, infuse a carefully crafted artistic energy into the more than two centuries old community puja culture in Bengal.

“At art college, we were often told about the struggle of an artist. So far, my struggle has been to establish myself in the sphere of Durga Puja,” says Bhabotosh Sutar, who graduated in Western painting from GCAC in 2000. At the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha puja, which Sutar is conceptualizing this year, craftsmen and junior artists are hard at work, creating a puja themed on Hindu spirituality. The work combines elements of sculpture, architecture, painting and Indian mythology.

All activity in the pandal arena revolves around Sutar. “What happens at art galleries is that I’ve earlier found my name erased so that viewers can’t access me directly and have to go through the art dealer.

How many people go to galleries anyway? Here, over five days I’m assured of at least five lakh viewers,” Sutar adds.

Since 2000, when he worked for the first time on a Durga Puja pandal, Sutar has come to occupy the top rung of contemporary Durga Puja artists—among them Sushanto Pal, Amar Sarkar, Rono Banerjee, Purnendu Dey, Prasanta Pal, Tarun Dey and Sanatan Dinda. They all have formal art education and a string of Durga Puja awards to their credit. Many of them belong to the category of artists whose fees for each Durga Puja assignment are in the `2-4 lakh range, depending on the scale of work. Some of them have multiple Puja assignments this year. Sutar and Sushanto Pal have three projects each.

They are among those who have taken over much of the business from the traditional artisan community, the Pals of Kumartuli, the hub of clay idol makers in Kolkata.

For generations, the Pals—a large group of idol makers whose expertise in the craft has essentially been handed down from generation to generation—enjoyed an almost complete monopoly. No longer, though they continue to maintain a strong presence at the traditional puja pandals. And quite often, their expertise and experience in sculpting is used by artists when they are making the initial drawing of the deity.

The Durga idol the Pals would create on their own was almost standardized, says Sutar. Together with a roster of pandal decorators and electricians, Durga Puja, even a decade back, was quite often an experience in kitsch, glitz and conventionality. Rarely did the discourse throw up issues of art installations, deconstruction, exploration of folk art forms and theme-based craftsmanship.

All that is changing. In the Barisha Club’s puja arena, artist Tarun Dey effortlessly weaves in subjects such as expressionism, the Impressionist movement, Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre, and the limitation of proscenium theatre, while explaining the backdrop to his artworks.

The concept of open theatre supports his current theme for the Barisha Club puja—an ode to all that is fertile and natural in a world where an ecological crisis is imminent. We are surrounded by a circular gallery where 15,000 clay pots have been closely cemented together, their gaping mouths facing the sky to catch the artist’s impression of rain.

A thin fibre of transparent sheet forms the ceiling and mutes the sunlight filtering in. Some 25,000 white plastic balls used to keep fishing nets afloat are stuck to the transparent sheet ceiling like tufts of cumulous clouds. The deity, once installed, will sit in the middle of an amphitheatre of creativity.

“The art movement in Kolkata has steadily incorporated strong doses of postmodernism and Durga Puja has become an exposition of conceptual art,” says Dey, who graduated in painting and sculpture from GCAC in 1980 and is heading a group of 30 trained artists and students of the Environmental Art Group, who have teamed up for the Barisha Club puja. This Kolkatabased art collective stresses on the study of natural science through art.

“Artists are coming out of their studios and bringing all their ideas along,” says Dey. Of the 4,000 pujas in the city and its suburbs, around 1,000 are said to be theme-based—with issues ranging from the spiritual and environmental to historical and mythological. This provides ample scope for conceptualization, and the contribution of trained artists. A common aesthetic strain runs through the design of the outer pandal area, the mandap, the idol and lighting scheme. Usually, at least 150 of the theme pujas are strong contenders for awards from a battery of companies competing for maximum mileage from their Durga Puja award initiatives. This year, 40-odd companies, from multinationals to local electrical goods manufacturers, are in the fray. A far cry from the time when there was just one corporate TURN TO PAGE L12®

L12 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Home work: (above) A part of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja which is being designed

by Sushanto Pal; and Tarun Dey uses concepts from Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre in his theme for the Barisha Club’s puja.

L11 ® FROM FROM PAGE PAGE L10

award—the Asian Paints Sharad Samman, still considered the most prestigious.

Prize money for the best puja ranges between a modest `25,000 and `1.5 lakh, but multiple prizes can often assure organizers of fairly decent lump sums.

But it is the lure of instant recognition—and increase in corporate sponsorship in the following years—that has upped the stakes for puja committees.

On an average, a big-budget theme puja spends `16-20 lakh—400-500% more than it would have spent earlier.

The four-day festival is now a `40 crore industry, says Mani Shankar Mukherjee, a senior corporate executive. He has authored many novels under the pseudonym of Shankar, and is a regular writer on Durga Puja.

“This is just an estimate of the amount spent on the puja by organizers and sponsors. If you consider the money spent on many other puja paraphernalia, like buying clothes and travel, the amount will well exceed `100 crore,” he adds.

One of India’s preeminent painters, Jogen Chowdhury, has watched the evolution of the contemporary Durga Puja and advises caution. Large-scale commercial interests, he warns, have reached what is essentially a religious festival. “Undoubtedly, the contribution of artists has made a difference to the puja and added an extra dimension. Also, sometimes in their zeal to create theme pujas, artists have gone overboard and their creations have clashed with our idea of Durga,” says Chowdhury.

An alumnus of GCAC, Chowdhury had conceptualized the design of a Durga Puja in south Kolkata’s Selimpur a couple of years ago at the request of a relative. He has since “not found enough time” for other puja projects. “Much of what is happening now is driven by an award-getting attitude among organizers and hunger for publicity by corporates. Corporate money is not necessarily a bad thing, but the current trend, I think, is but a reflection of contemporary society where every aspect of life is being governed by business,” Chowdhury says.

When it comes to the voluntary involvement of the top rung of India’s artistic fraternity, all roads invariably lead to the 83-year-old puja premises of Bakul Bagan Sarbojonin at Bhowanipur. From 1975, when the legendary artist Nirode Mazumdar created his vision of the Durga at Bakul Bagan, the puja has seen a continuous stream of luminaries working without a fee—Rathin Mitra, Paritosh Sen, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, Shanu Lahiri, Sarbori Roychowdhury, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Shyamal Dutta Ray and Isha Mohammad.

For the senior artists, the stated agenda was to bring their art to the masses—but recent entrants can expect `75,000-1.5 lakh for their work. Quite often the beginners start with the designing of their local para (neighbourhood) pandal before their work is noticed and their talent tapped by bigger puja organizers.

Almost as testimony to the popular appeal of the contemporary Durga Puja, this year the Bakul Bagan puja theme and idol has been visualized by Union railway minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee. For

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and a well-known art historian, the graph of the Bakul Bagan puja has veered from “the sublime to the ridiculous”.

But Guha-Thakurta believes the concept of theme pujas has been beneficial. Currently writing a book on the Durga Puja festival in contemporary Kolkata, she studied the evolution and spread of theme pujas since 2002, and says there has been an “enormous outburst of creativity”. She stops short of labelling it as high art though.

“A lot of tastefulness is prevalent now compared to the flashy spirit that was rife earlier. Thanks to the influx of artists for whom Durga Puja has become a fullfledged vocation, it has truly become a spectatorial public art event, unlike any other festival in Indian cities. The worlds of contemporary art and the puja have overlapped,” says GuhaThakurta, the author of two books on the art of Bengal and India.

There are some negatives. “Being awards- and sponsorship-driven, an artist who gets an award for a

puja is automatically selected next year. The unsuccessful artist often gets shoddy treatment from organizers. These are fickle and ephemeral qualities for being considered as art. Good thing is that even the smallest theme puja can get an award,” she says.

At the Ajeya Sanghati puja site near Tollygunje, artist Purnendu Dey, who did his master’s in painting from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, recounts the instance when he unwittingly become part of a tacky “African theme” for a south Kolkata puja.

And an occasion when another artist had to hurriedly redesign the idol’s costume after Nagaland government officials objected to the use of traditional Naga patterns on the idol’s dress. “Whatever theme one chooses, it shouldn’t clash with the idea of puja,” Dey says, as artisans create uneven lines from acrylic sheets to go with Dey’s concept of achieving a lyrical whole for the Ajeya Sanghati puja.

Other artists such as Samir Aich, an established name in the gallery art circuit and a 1978 GCAC graduate, are all for breaking conventions. Seated on an Art Deco sofa in his studio and surrounded by large canvases of unfinished work, Aich details his contribution to artistic dissidence while conceptualizing puja assignments—a Durga idol broken along Cubist lines with uneven glass pieces on the floor reflecting the goddess’ image, Aich’s idea of seeing “Durga through destruction” during the Iraq war; a translucent and backlit fibreglass idol to highlight which the pandal was done up in the never-before-used taboo shade of black; a child’s impression of the goddess, among other talked-about creations.

“Why should our art be restricted within galleries? Durga Puja is as good an opportunity to bring it to the masses,” he says.

For art students, it’s become a source of work.

Around 400 students graduate from the GCAC every year, says

college principal and artist Dipali Bhattacharya, who has on two occasions been associated with the Bakul Bagan puja. Along with the three other established art education institutions—the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, the Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata and Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavan—the total number of art graduates every year is estimated to be around 1,000. Durga Puja has become an additional avenue of work for them, says Bhattacharya.

“It can be public art, but it is not lesser art. I have been a judge for Durga Puja awards and have been amazed by the quality of work,” she says.

Another convert is Laurent Fournier, a French national and architecture student who recently completed a thesis on “Durga Puja in Kolkata in relation to urban space” for his institution, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville.

Having overcome his initial impression of the festival being a waste of money in a poor country, Fournier was impressed by the structural design of pandals, and the physical and perceived space they occupy during the four days.

“I have been captivated by the sheer creativity. And the spirit is unique to Kolkata. Unlike the carnival in Brazil and Europe, when people try to shed their otherwise disciplined and moral lives, during the Durga Puja I have found people trying to achieve a higher kind of aesthetics and a better life,” he says.

At the Nalini Sarkar Street pandal, artist and art college graduate Sanatan Dinda is hard at work.

He stands on a high platform and spray-paints the impressive figure of Durga with earthy shades.

Draw a straight line from the mandap and there is Dinda again, this time smiling benignly from a giant street hoarding put up by the puja organizers to cash in on Dinda’s new-found fame as a gallery artist. A smaller image of the goddess and logos of sponsors occupy the remaining half of the billboard. It could well be a snapshot moment of the Durga Puja zeitgeist.

Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com For a slideshow of theme ‘pujas’, log on to www.livemint.com/durga.htm

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

L13

Travel

LOUNGE VIENNA

Street music

:

PHOTOGRAPHS

B Y S UJATHA B AGAL ···························· he drone of early morning traffic trickles in through the thick double-paned kitchen windows and into our apartment in the heart of Vienna. I hear buses, cars and a couple of motorbikes, usual fare for a modern city. Then, distinct from the mix, I hear a familiar sound from a long time ago—the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. In an instant I’m transported to my grandmother’s house in Mysore, to the sounds of jataka gaadis packed with children going off to school.

The memory propels me to look outside. I leave the water for the tea to boil on the stove and open the windows wide.

There are no bars or screens and I can lean out far enough to see the ends of the street on both sides. Crisp sunshine bathes the multi-storeyed building across from our window. The air is fresh and holds the promise of pleasant weather. Stylishly dressed women walk briskly on the pave-

Europe’s classical capital leavens the solemnity with a lot of fun. Watch the stars light up at the 50th year of the Viennale

A Schengen visa is valid for travel to Austria.

Apply for an Austrian visa at five visa facilitation service centres across India (www.vfs-austria.co.in). Visas cost R3,660, plus R607 in service charges. Fly Aeroflot from Delhi (R25,000 economy round-trip) or EgyptAir from Mumbai (R26,000) to Vienna.

VIENNA HundertwasserKrawinahaus

Schönbrunn Palace

Prater

VIENNA Vienna

AUSTRIA

THINKSTOCK

SUJATHA BAGAL

T

TRIP PLANNER/VIENNA

Mariahilfer Strasse

BY

To airport

Stay

Do

Eat

Vienna offers the usual complement of chain hotels. Hilton Vienna (www1.hilton.com; from €180 per night, or around R10,980) and Vienna Marriott Hotel (www.marriott.com; from €100 per night) both offer a central location. For stays of more than two or three days, or if you're travelling with family, nothing compares to apartments in terms of deriving maximum bang for the buck. Try www.viennaapartments.net or www.viennasapartments.com

Vienna is one of those cities where having fun does not mean having to feel the pinch in your pocket. Strap on your walking boots and hit the old city. Historic buildings, shops, museums and restaurants abound. A guided tour of Schönbrunn Palace (www.schoenbrunn.at/en/home.html) is an insight into Viennese culture, history and architecture all rolled into one. Make room for Kunst Haus Wien (www.kunsthauswien.com/en) and Hundertwasser-Krawinahaus, within walking distance of Kunst Haus Wien (www.kunsthauswien.com/en/museum/ hundertwasser-buildings), on your itinerary. Head to the Prater (www.wien.info/en/sightseeing/ prater), let your hair down and have some old-fashioned fun at the fairground. If shopping's on your mind, the trendy Mariahilfer Strasse—Vienna's “shopping mile"—is your go-to place. If the Viennale (21 October-3 November) is the main draw, keep an eye on www.viennale.at/en. The schedule of films will be released on 12 October; tickets go on sale online from 16 October.

Restaurants offering multinational cuisine are ubiquitous and convenient when you just want to grab something on the go. After a long day on your feet, however, the legendary Viennese coffee houses are perfect, and not just for the coffee. Head to the closest one, give traditional Viennese fare (schnitzel, anyone?) a try, but seek refuge in the exquisite coffees and a lavish selection of pastries. Caffé Milano on Mariahilfer Strasse, Café Diglas (www.diglas.at) near the old city and Café Residenz (www.cafe-wien.at) in the premises of the Schönbrunn Palace are worth trying.

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

ment, jackets and sweaters swinging on one arm. The owner of the art store downstairs rolls up the shutters. A couple of taxi cabs roll by and then the horse carriage comes into view.

The driver, sitting straight on his perch, guides his two horses and the carriage between rows of parked cars on either side of the street. A bus and two cars follow slowly behind, their drivers seemingly patient, their pace forced but stately. Then, as the carriage slows for cross-traffic at the intersection to my right, one of the horses decides to answer nature’s call and deposits copious amounts of waste in the middle of the street.

The sight rings a discordant note in the otherwise harmonious tableau outside the window, only because the street is otherwise spanking clean. The carriage continues on out of sight, as do the cars and the bus, leaving a messy street and making me wonder how the street manages to stay as clean as it does.

Half an hour later, I get my answer. An enormous machine slowly rumbles up the street, spraying water, scrubbing the street clean and scooping the mess right up into its bowels.

The new has figured out a way to live with the old.

When the Viennale, Vienna’s highly anticipated annual film festival (first held in 1960, this year will see the 48th event), lights up movie screens from 21 October-3 November, judges and film buffs new to the city are likely—in addition to settling disagreements on their way to crowning the winners—to notice one or two or 10 such discordant notes. They are bound to dis-

Snapshots: (clockwise from top) Vienna at night; two opera house employees on a cigarette break; the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Hapsburgs; and the Imperial Palace. cover, however, that in a city so comfortable in its skin, such dissonance merely forms happy interludes in the mellifluous magnum opus that is Vienna.

Nowhere is the push-and-pull of the old and the new more obvious than at St Stephen’s Square (Stephansplatz) in the old city. The jaw-drop inspiring 12th century church of the Gothic variety dominates the pedestrian-only city centre.

Straight across the cobbled street stands Hasshaus, a modern edifice of the shiny glass variety, whose catoptric facade offers a resplendent mirror image of the church.

Vienna’s most visually striking (and popular) example of departure from the norm, however, is Hundertwasser-Krawinahaus, an apartment complex designed by Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Nestled in a quiet street off Weissgerberstrasse, amid street upon street of identical, mono-

chromatic, linear buildings, the apartments of HundertwasserKrawinahaus are a world apart.

They appear to be stacked whimsically one on top of the other—we don’t detect straight lines other than in the window frames—the walls and pillars coloured in as if by a child. The interiors are closed to visitors (a note on the front door politely explains how discombobulating it is to have strangers traipsing through their homes), but a few blocks away, Kunst Haus Wien, a museum, is a visual and tactile journey into Hundertwasser’s philosophy. The floor is bumpy and uneven; the walls are wavy; colours seem to explode, rarely ending in straight lines.

Hundertwasser-Krawinahaus confirms what we have been feeling ever since our jaunt around the old city on the day of our arrival in Vienna—this city likes to have fun. And it doesn’t hesitate to call upon monuments and other historical land-

marks in its pursuit of modern versions of entertainment.

So what if Vienna is not on the sea? Its denizens are not about to pass up a day at the beach. The 21km-long Danube Island, the byproduct of Vienna’s elaborate flood protection system, is the go-to place for summer fun.

For year-round fun, the city boasts an expansive fairground for children and adults alike, the Prater. The century-old Giant Ferris Wheel which has come to symbolize Vienna dominates the Prater. Not only is it not cooped up in a museum, it still functions well enough to offer rides. More than 60m off the ground as you reach the highest point, it offers a bird’s-eye view of the tile-roofed, chimneyed, steeple-chased inner city, the glass and steel high-rises and the apartment buildings in the outer reaches.

At Schönbrunn Palace, the magnificent summer residence of the Hapsburgs—itself an ode to the good life—we find workmen constructing a massive stage with floodlights and speakers for a concert the next day.

Inside, the private rooms, salons, galleries and reception rooms are a remarkably well-preserved window into the life of an empire that lasted six centuries. They offer a view of a monarchy appreciative and encouraging of the arts—Mozart performed for Maria Theresa in the Hall of Mirrors when he was six years old.

Perhaps one may find warm, welcoming cafés, lively city centres, rich museums and palaces or a prolific artistic legacy in other world cities. But to find them all, and to find a love of tradition, an enthusiasm for innovation and a hankering for fun, all in one neatly wrapped brown paper package tied up with strings, is a tall order indeed.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Vienna is a big city with the heart of a cozy, family­friendly town.

Schönbrunn Palace is especially welcoming to children.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

Books

LOUNGE

CRIMINAL MIND

ZAC O’YEAH

Horror and homicide in Melbourne PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ZAC O’YEAH

The land of Ned Kelly and Kill City is endless enter­ tainment for true crime fiction buffs

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etting off the plane at Sydney airport, I felt as if I was about to enter a maximum security prison, what with oxymoronic signs saying “prohibited items are prohibited” and the threat of $10,000 fines (around `4.63 lakh). It was a wee bit rattling to be picked out of the immigration line for a merciless grilling and scrutiny, which included the brutal officers dipping a gunpowder-scanner into my underwear.

An hour later, they hadn’t found anything “prohibited” so I was let into the country.

This exercise somehow seemed a befitting welcome to Oz—after all, Australia was set up as a British penal colony in the 1780s. The first fleet that reached Sydney Cove (today renamed Circular Quay, where you snap yourself before the famous Opera House) carried 586 male and 192 female convicts transported to the end of the known world, a harsh wilderness surrounded by shark-infested seas. By 1870, the practice of shipping crooks Down Under had been abolished, but I guess the prison spirit lives on among the immigration officers.

Back in the early days there was a thin line between crooks and cops: Due to the lack of a non-criminal population, the best behaved convicts were appointed policemen. Sydney was built by them too, for to woo civilian settlers the government offered free convict labour. Not far from the quays, the prisoners lived in Hyde Park Barracks, designed by an English convictarchitect banished for forgery.

Visitors can get a taste of oldfashioned jail life and check out the view from the judges’ bench over an 1858-style courtroom.

Across from the quay, the Justice and Police Museum (housed in an 1858 police station) details the 19th century epoch of bushrangers, displays forensic evidence, knuckledusters, sawn-off shotguns and the exhibition Sin City: Crime and Corruption in 20th Century Sydney (until May) teaches you that up to the 1950s bars had to close by 6pm, so organized crime thrived on illicit booze, gambling, drugs and prostitution, while the cops got rich on the bribes. The Sydneysiders seem to view all this as hilarious elements of their culture. I heard a toddler in the museum ask, “Dad, what are they doing?” The duo was looking at an old print on the wall. “Gouging out some guy’s eye while disembowelling him,” said dad. “Gross,” giggled the kid and dad laughed heartily.

Today Sydney’s infamous Kings Cross remains the preserve of thugs, drug-pushers and sex clubs, and this year’s most celebrated new writer, Mark Dapin, set his award-winning debut King of the Cross in these shady parts.

Other Sydney crime writers are Kathryn Fox, who writes about a

Canvas: (clockwise from left) Graffiti in an alley in Melbourne; Chris Womersley, winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel 2008; and Ned Kelly mints.

female forensic physician dealing with rape and violence against women; and the godfather of Australian crime fiction, Peter Corris, creator of the hard-boiled private investigator Cliff Hardy, spanning 34 novels, whose latest released in 2009.

The underworld holds a deep fascination, presumably for historical reasons—the earliest Australian prose frequently dealt with crime and the stories were barely fictional. The first Australian-born novelist, John Lang (1816-64), whose grandfather was banished with the first convict fleet for stealing spoons, based his famous story, The Ghost on the Rail, on an 1826 Sydney crime case.

Lang, incidentally, moved to India and lies buried in Mussoorie’s old cemetery on Camel’s Back Road. Another influential writer of 29 detective novels set in the outback, Arthur Upfield (1890-1964), wrote about half-Aboriginal genius investigator Napoleon Bonaparte, based on a real-life “tracker” who worked

for the police.

When I browsed bookshops for local detective novels, I couldn’t help noticing how the shelves devoted to True Crime were always abundantly stocked (I even spotted a book called The Cochin Connection about Australian tourists who got mixed up with drug traders in Kerala). The highest rating ever for a nonsporting TV show in Australia belongs to Underbelly, a dramatization of the early 2000s gangland wars. A friend who guided me around town, and does occasional jury duty, told me how a real-life crook of those gang wars had just been assassinated under highly suspicious circumstances, and despite CCTV cameras, inside his cell at Barwon maximum security prison.

Flying to Melbourne it was too cloudy to see the bush below, but the bush holds great sway over the Australian imagination.

The traditional Aussie heroes are those convicts who “bolted” and became bushrangers, rebelling against the colonial authorities, robbing stagecoaches, harassing miners and raping settlers’ wives. The last were hanged in 1900, but the greatest mythology

is around Ned Kelly (1855-80) who apparently planned to set up his own republic and is likened to Robin Hood.

There’s a literary prize named after Kelly, and in Melbourne the Old Jail where he was hanged has been lovingly preserved as a shrine of sorts, where visitors view relics such as the gallows, Kelly’s revolver and death mask. With 2010 marking the 130th anniversary of his execution, the jail will have a courtroom re-enactment of Kelly’s trial and on execution night one can partake in the last supper of Kelly (www.oldmelbournegaol. com.au). A l s o o n o f f e r i s another adventure tour (www. nedkellyadventuretours.com) into “Kelly Country” where he grew up, committed murders and was captured in Glenrowan. If you just want to look like Kelly, most Australian cities have specialized shops for bush outfits, boots and cowboy hats.

Among Melbourne bookshops, the three to visit are Readings on Lygon Street in the Italian quarter, which has the best selection of Australian crime fiction I saw anywhere; Kill City, in a cavernous Swanston Street basement off Federation Square, specializing in second-hand detective novels, forensic guidebooks, Ellery Queen pulp magazines, criminal biographies, studies of psychopaths, gay/lesbian crime and any other subgenre you can think of; finally, there’s Minotaur in Elizabeth Street, where you get Freddy Krueger puppets, zombie survival kits, bottled drinkable blood and a large True Crime section.

The most Melbournian crime writer is Shane Maloney whose naughty slapstick books are vivid with local colour—I’ve just started reading The Brush-Off (1996) that features a wonderfully horny and drunken political Mr Fixit. Generally acknowledged as the greatest crime writer in Australia (five times winner of the Ned Kelly Award), Peter Temple writes about a Melbournian criminal lawyer called Jack Irish. One of the newest female genre novel-

The clean­up act Intended to promote a national movement on civility, it lacks a clean raison d’être anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· void excessive use of hand gestures as it can cause stress to others” reads an instructional nugget, part of a chapter called Day to Day Decency in a book on etiquette and hygiene by former cop Kiran Bedi. The book, Broom & Groom, has been co-authored by Pavan Choudary, who calls himself a wisdom educator.

Let’s face it: Indians aren’t known to have the most evolved standards of social etiquette and personal hygiene. But is a guidebook—one that fashions itself as a nation-building exercise, no less—an answer to that? Will people who make revolting guttural noises to cough up phlegm divorce their long-standing morning ritual after they read:

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“Be aware if you get phlegm and get treated for it.”

Bedi is the winner of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. She has authored books in the past and hosts a popular television show, Aap ki Kachehri. Choudary has authored several books and also hosts a television show on Doordarshan called Hum Aise Kyon Hain.

The book has a foreword by former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. It is evident that Bedi, Choudary and the publisher—Anu Anand of Wisdom Village—have grand plans for the book. It has had a staggered launch since August and more city launches are in line. Wisdom Village, which specializes in “social wisdom” books, has eight regional language transla-

Iron woman: Kiran Bedi in her office in New Delhi.

Broom & Groom: Wisdom Village Publications Division, 168 pages, `195. tions under way. The book is dedicated to the Right to Civility, with the authors declaring that they yearn for a social renaissance in civil behaviour.

But this high-mindedness is lost when one comes across the hackneyed instructions and school-textbook illustrations. A disclaimer to the book makes it clear that the book suggests “globally accepted manners”

Zac O’Yeah is a Bangalore-based writer of crime fiction whose last published novel is Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

BROOM & GROOM | KIRAN BEDI & PAVAN CHOUDARY

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE

ists is ex-stripper Leigh Redhead who explores the seediest sides of Melbourne; her Thrill City (2010) features the murder of a best-selling crime writer and is set in the publishing world! Redhead is notorious for having demonstrated a striptease at the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards.

That last little titbit was imparted to me by Chris Womersley whose Ned Kelly-winning hard-boiled noir thriller The Low Road—about a petty criminal, a suitcase full of stolen money, and a morphine-addicted doctor in the outback—was a big cult hit.

He isn’t your standard pulp writer and isn’t interested in formulaic genre fiction, but he tells me that neither can he bear the thought of writing domestic literary novels where nothing much happens.

“Fiction has to have high drama,” he explains, and I begin to understand what makes Australians tick.

His latest mystery, the neo-gothic Bereft (2010), is set in 1919 when the Spanish flu epidemic raged in Australia and apocalyptic movements flourished.

Finally, and not to be missed, are Melbourne’s alleys, away from the posh streets, where it is easier to imagine shootouts, where the lowlife slept in mud hovels and died outside drinking booths. The place to feel ghosts of yore come alive is in two narrow alleys, Crossley and Liverpool, which used to be named Romeo and Juliet (depending on the gender of prostitutes); here Von Haus, a drinking den dating to the mid-1800s, is grimy but chic so nowadays you’re more likely to hobnob with yuppies on a gastropub lunch than with pimps.

In conclusion, for those with an interest in crime, real or fictional, there’s no better amusement than visiting Australia.

and does not intend to softpedal issues that need addressing. Twenty-four chapters are dedicated to Grooming (Manners), which takes up the bulk, while seven chapters make up the Brooming (Hygiene) section.

The book is useful in parts—such as the chapters dedicated to appropriate greetings and parking etiquette. But some pointers are either downright fascist (“Do not utter frivolous stuff amongst learned men”) or totally absurd (“Do not use your towel or bed sheet to wipe your shoes”). There’s a chapter on Interacting With Your Spouse that does not belong to the book at all. That

said, it might elicit a few stifled laughs (“Do not embarrass your spouse by being overfriendly with the opposite sex”).

The authors intend for the book to trigger a national movement. Wisdom Village plans to release new editions every year with readers’ additions via a website dedicated to the book (www. broomandgroom.in).

“Interacting with foreigners” seems to be a lynchpin. Bedi doesn’t disagree. “National pride is very critical to the book,” she says. “Both Pavan and I are sensitive to how we are perceived as Indians.” Bedi says the book’s release was carefully timed ahead of the Common-

wealth Games to enhance Indian citizens’ social and professional acceptance globally.

Yet the premise of the book seems dubious. Bedi was embarrassed by fellow Indians during her extensive travels abroad.

“We tend to have high decibel levels, we litter indiscriminately and we spread out our belongings in public spaces,” she says.

But she believes that the book can be used by citizens of any “developing country”.

Her co-author, Choudary, explains why people from developing countries are generally less well-mannered than their First World counterparts: Their governments haven’t invested in the education, infrastructure and legal framework that makes for a civil society. “We were extremely civilized centuries ago but lost our civility along the way. And we have multiple foreign rulers to blame for that,” says Choudary over the phone, pointing out that the US had the same problem till the 1900s, till a responsible government took over. Both believe that it isn’t too late to change. But perhaps it is too big a task for a pocketbook to achieve.

BOOKS L15

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE | SALMAN RUSHDIE

CULT FICTION

The myth meister HINDUSTAN TIMES

The author weaves another engrossing yarn, all the while addressing some of his perennial con­ cerns about human life and expression

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· early two decades ago, Salman Rushdie wrote a novel while he was in hiding after Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on him, over his novel, The Satanic Verses. That delightful novel was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an in-your-face response, showing that he could not be silenced and he would not disappear into oblivion.

There, a little boy called Haroun travels to the source of all stories to restore the gift of gab, which his father, Rashid Khalifa, had lost. It dazzled readers, even as it had a particular poignancy and relevance—it was a stirring defence of free speech—of arguments, talkativeness, and verbal anarchy, against khatam-shud, or silence, the dark place where only one voice could speak. Rushdie had written that novel for his son Zafar, who was, to borrow a word Rushdie coined in Midnight’s Children, “nearlynine” at the time of the fatwa.

With Luka and the Fire of Life, Rushdie returns to the Khalifa family. Written for his second

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Luka and the Fire of Life: Jonathan Cape, 216 pages, £12.99 (around `915).

Free thinker: Rushdie takes up the issue of free speech in the new novel. son, Milan, who is now 13, the story is about Haroun’s brother, Luka, who is determined to help his father. The Shah of Blah, as Rashid Khalifa is known, is back, but only just: He is ill; life is seeping out, and tubes sustain him by feeding him and people worry around him. Twelve-year-old Luka has to complete a hair-raising journey through the world of magic, and in a nod to the Promethean myth, he must bring the fire of life to the earth, to revive his father.

Like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, Luka wonders if this too is somehow his fault. He has set in motion events beyond anyone’s control, by shouting and screaming at a circus owner who treats animals cruelly. The animals rebel and the circus owner threatens revenge. One morning Rashid doesn’t wake up, even as a smile flickers on his face. Determined to get his father on his feet

LOUNGE PODCAST Salil Tripathi on why Rushdie is like Satyajit Ray www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

again, Luka embarks on the adventure with unlikely companions—a dog called bear and a bear called dog—and finds support from Insultana, the sultana of insults, with her magic carpet, dragons, coyote and elephants who remember everything.

Luka’s quest requires him to reach certain levels, as in a game console, and there are allusions to the virtual worlds of teenagers.

But you won’t find too many allusions to contemporary culture here. Rather, we get introduced to half-forgotten gods from old cultures—Incan and Norse, Chinese and Egyptian, Sumerian and Aztec, Assyrian and Greek.

There is a deeper point: These are different cultures, but the myths about eternal ele-

ments—earth, wind, fire, and water—are similar. Are they all drawn from different myths or has Rushdie created new myths?

You can check that in an encyclopaedia of myths, or you can suspend disbelief, because that’s irrelevant: Does it even matter?

The yarn he weaves is engrossing, and that’s all that matters.

Reading Luka’s story only as an action-packed adventure would miss half the point—or some of Rushdie’s perennial concerns: the self-righteous, injured innocence of those easily offended, who want to silence anyone who criticizes anything they hold dear, and their rivals, the Otters (where the “OTT” stands for Over-theTop) who revel in their freedom to outrage; the meanness and powerlessness of divinities; the supremacy of human imagination; and a moving meditation on time. Milan Kundera would call these “heavy” themes, but Rushdie adopts a light touch in making such complex ideas accessible to his young readers. For example, the trinity of past, present and future—Jo-hua, Jo-hai, and Jo-aiga—have a vice-like deterministic grip around human existence, but Luka tells them that the past has gone and will not return, and lives only because of our memories; the present vanishes into the past every time you blink your eyes; and the future is but a dream.

Writing for children, explaining good and evil without adopting a moralizing tone and instead to take on a humane tone, isn’t easy. Talking down to kids is silly; talking with them feeds their sense of wonder and imagination. One reason Satyajit Ray got such exceptional performances from children was because he would stoop to their height and bend on his knees, and whisper in their ears and bring to life Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali and in many more films. Rushdie, an admirer of Ray, does something similar with words.

He talks with the children, respecting their intelligence and celebrating their freshness, sharing their sense of amazement.

The cynic might ask: But what’s the point of such stories if they are not true? That, exactly, is the other point of his fiction.

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

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Vintage storyteller, provocateur and eloquent Rushdie

R. SUKUMAR

A SERIAL AFFAIR

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country that doesn’t exist on maps, an engine powered by thoughts and dreams, Amelia Earhart and an air hostess with a fear of flying. These are the ingredients of what was, until it was cancelled earlier this year, a comic series aptly titled Air by G. Willow Wilson (illustrated by M.K. Perker).

I first encountered this team (Wilson divides her time between Egypt and the US and Perker is based in Istanbul) through the pages of the wonderful Cairo, a rambunctious and sometimes picaresque thriller where five people are on a quest (in Cairo) to find a powerful hookah that has been stolen. I liked the book, and the work of Wilson and Perker, so I made a mental note to pick up more books by either.

Last month, I bought the first two volumes of Air. I am glad I did so. Not just because I enjoyed the books, but because I may not have written this piece if I had just bought the first volume. That’s because Air is a story that needs a lot of telling and Wilson, a skilled writer but one

Super heroine: In Air people move from one world to another. who believes everything must be told, doesn’t spare the ink.

My feeling after finishing the second book (Flying Machine; the first is called Letters from Lost Countries) was that all the context that needed to be set had been set. Indeed, the second half of the second book progressed at a healthy rate, and I have since ordered the third book (the fourth, which will likely be the last volume, is not out yet). Wilson tweeted at the time Vertigo announced that it would end the series after 24 issues that she had had adequate warning of the coming end and would manage to finish telling her story by then.

Maybe because Air involves people moving from one world into another, it reminded me of another comic book series that does this, Alan Moore’s Promethea. The connection was also probably prompted by the fact that like Promethea’s Sophie Bangs, Air’s Blythe discovers that she is actually a super-heroine. I liked Air’s plot and Perker’s illustrations. I didn’t like the inelegance of some of the dialogues and was struck by how thin some of the characters seemed. Still, after I finish Air, I will, in all likelihood, wait for more from Wilson and Perker.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to Sukumar at cultfiction@livemint.com

NO WAY DOWN | GRAHAM BOWLEY

Death Mountain tales The triumphs, tragedies, bravery, follies on K2—one of the world’s most lethal mountains B Y S OUTIK B ISWAS ···························· n 1 August 2008, the Death Mountain began devouring its challengers—again. K2, the world’s second highest peak in Pakistan’s Karakoram range, is a fiendishly difficult mountain to climb. It is steeper than any peak with precipitous faces and ridges, and its weather is colder (20 degrees Celsius below freezing point, often) and notoriously unpredictable. On this “violent, shape-shifting mountain”, 11 climbers lost their lives on 2 August 2008.

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Death comes easily on K2 though. It has the highest death rate among the tallest peaks in the world—for every 10 climbers who made it to the top, one did not survive. The mountain has killed at least 66 climbers, a much higher death rate than the Everest. Only 254 climbers have made it back safely from K2, compared with a couple of thousand climbers who have made it back from the Everest. In the summer of 1986, 13 climbers died on K2.

On that fateful August day in 2008, almost an equal number were killed in a single day.

Graham Bowley, a reporter with The New York Times, picks up the story of one of the worst days in the history of the lethal mountain, and hunts down survivors of the expedition who came down alive. No Way Down is a meticulously pieced together account of the triumphs and tragedies and bravery and follies on the

mountain that day. After a slow beginning it picks up pace and ends up as a fairly gripping offering, not a small achievement for a writer who was not witness to the carnage. It is not in the same league as Jon Krakauer’s mountain masterpiece, Into Thin Air, a personal account of 9 May 1996 when eight climbers died in the worst tragedy on Everest. But No Way Down is a valuable addition to edge-of-the-seat mountain narratives.

What killed nearly a dozen climbers on a single day?

What emerges from Bowley’s telling of the story is a dreadful combination of the usual reasons—a veritable traffic jam of climbers slowing ascent, botched decisions during delayed descents, crossed communication lines, and a huge collapse of the serac. It was a recipe for disaster for climbers on the way down (the

descent is always the most dangerous part of a mountain climb. On K2 it’s riskier: More than a third of the climbers who have reached the summit have died on the way down).

Bowley sketches lifelike portraits of the climbers and their agonizing moments on the mountain. Some slip to their deaths in the darkness of icy nights, others are swept away by avalanches, or die trying to rescue debilitated mates, hurt by falls in the dark. There’s a 60-year-old climber who dies on what turned out to be the third attempt to ascent. A Dutch mountaineer survives two savage nights on K2, nearly blind and brain dead, and manages to climb down with frostbitten toes. There’s a woman climber whose husband is swept off the mountain, and who has no time to grieve as she climbs down with others, the weather taking a turn for the worse.

It just keeps getting worse, the weather conspiring with the mountain. Numbed by cold and hallucination, climb-

No Way Down—Life and Death on K2: Penguin/Viking, 253 pages, `499. ers lose their way and wander off the mountain into darkness. Others are stuck in the higher reaches, fumbling in the dark for the missing ropes. Three climbers spend a freezing night dangling upside down tangled in ropes after a fall and survive, only to be gobbled up by an avalanche later.

Bowley, unlike Krakauer, is

not a mountaineer and leaves the reader with many unanswered questions. Has climbing become ridiculously reckless? With its rampant commercialization, have mountaineers become overambitious and incautious in trying to summit at any cost?

Has their respect for the mountains waned? Should society continue to celebrate such bravado? As Krakauer once wondered: “It is natural in any sport to seek evergreater challenges; what is to be made of a sport in which to do so also means taking evergreater risks? Should a civilized society continue to condone, much less celebrate, an activity in which there appears to be a growing acceptance of death as a likely outcome?” Go tell it to the climbers. Survivors of that dreadful day on K2, like most mountaineers, tell Bowley they will be back on the peak. Soon.

Soutik Biswas is the India editor of BBC News online.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010

Culture

LOUNGE FILM

A beautiful man Javier Bardem reveals why he mixes the darkness of ‘Biutiful’ with the light of ‘Eat Pray Love’

B Y S HRADHA S UKUMARAN ························ or five months, Javier Bardem immersed himself in the role of a cancer-stricken hustler from Barcelona’s slums for the film Biutiful. When shooting was done, he knew he had to purge himself of the darkness that his character Uxbal journeyed through. So he chose to play the hunky Felipe romancing Julia Roberts’ character Liz on the island of Bali in the film Eat Pray Love.

“I did this straight after Biutiful,” says Bardem, thoughtfully chewing on a toothpick, “I needed to go outside and be in a lighter mood, a lighter character. I needed to heal myself from the process in Biutiful. Not because I was sick, but when you do that for five months, you really need to escape from what’s inside. Otherwise, you get down. That happened to me after Biutiful. So I said, ‘Stop!

Let’s go some place else.’”

There is a reason why 41-yearold Bardem is regarded as the Marlon Brando of this generation. The actor has dived deep within himself for characters he’s played, be it the persecuted Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls or the dignified quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro in The Sea Inside. Josh Brolin, his co-star in No Country for Old Men, remembers Bardem being

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London dream Kolkata­based Experimenter art gallery gets invited to the prestigious Frieze Art Fair B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· n the morning of 15 August 1975, junior-level army officers entered the residence of Bangladesh president Mujibur Rahman in Dhaka and killed him, his wife and his three sons. In a very personal, allusive and elliptical manner that is not unusual in contemporary art, Naeem Mohaiemen’s work titled I have killed Pharaoh I am not afraid to die takes this gruesome episode in his country’s history as its subject.

The work will comprise three walls—and on each wall will hang a row of six individually framed photographs, under which will be another row of six framed panels, each bearing a few lines of unpunctuated text.

Kolkata-based Experimenter gallery, which turned a year old in April, is taking I have

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killed Pharaoh to the prestigious Frieze Art Fair in London, along with a sculptural installation by the artist Sanchayan Ghosh. “It was a pleasant surprise to be invited to Frieze,” admits Prateek Raja, who with his wife Priyanka runs the gallery and acts as the curator for most of the shows.

“Frieze is important,” he says.

“It is exploratory and not necessarily market-driven.”

Mohaiemen’s work will be on display at the section of the fair called Frame, which is devoted to galleries that are less than six years old and tends to show younger artists as well as more experimental works.

Experimenter will be the only gallery from India showing at Frieze this year and Raja attributes the gallery’s early recognition to its curatorial strength. “Our approach is research-based, whether it is our programme, (or the) choice of artist, sales and

creepily quiet on the sets so he could best portray the chilling Anton Chigurh with the killer pageboy haircut. That heavyeyed performance launched him into the big league and landed him the Oscar.

Even for the soufflé-light role of the Brazilian businessman Felipe in Eat Pray Love, Bardem tortured himself over the accent.

“A Portuguese friend of mine taught me how to not really f*** it up. Beyond that, what I needed to be was relaxed as a Brazilian.

In Spain, we have more of a sense of weight,” says Bardem. In May, he received the Best Actor prize at the Cannes film festival for the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-directed Biutiful, for a role that required him to wear an adult diaper in a scene. Bardem did it without any qualms.

“At the end, it’s what you believe when you see the movie.

It doesn’t matter if I’m suffering when I cry. The important thing is that you get emotional when I cry. I’m not saying every actor suffers. Some actors can go to even a better place in a different direction. I’m not a technical actor, I’m an emotional one. I can’t see it from the outside. But there are amazing actors who do that. I envy them,” he says, with a chuckle.

There’s self-deprecating laughter lining his words when I meet Bardem at a sprawling resort in Cancun in June. He’s rescheduled a bunch of interviews because he cannot bear to unglue himself from a live televised World Cup battle between the Portuguese soccer team and his home country Spain. In fact, when asked earlier if he’s religious, Bardem says, his voice deep with feeling, “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Al Pacino.” Then he adds, his hands clasped in prayer, “But if there really is a God, please, please help Spain today!”

When he does sit down for the interview, Bardem is relaxed and stretches his lean tall frame, sheathed in a black shirt and jeans. His brown hair is casually ruffled and there’s a light stubble

Hitched: Bardem plays Roberts’ lover in Eat Pray Love. on his jaw. He’s charming, funny and when he switches on that warmth, it’s simple to understand why he’s one of the sexiest men on the planet. Bardem opens up easily on whatever he’s asked, but keeps the door to his personal life shut.

A few days after our meeting, Bardem married his girlfriend, Hollywood actor Penelope Cruz, in a secret wedding in the Bahamas, and the couple recently revealed that Cruz is pregnant.

The two first met 18 years ago on the sets of Cruz’s debut film Jamon! Jamon!, a Spanish film ripe with sexual allegory. But they fell in love in 2007 as they filmed Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In a rare moment at Cannes this year, Bardem dedicated his Best Actor prize to Cruz, “My joy, my friend, my companion, my love”, and the two are now labelled by tabloids as Hollywood’s golden couple.

What adds to Bardem’s attraction is his ability to laugh at what the world terms his “sex appeal”.

“I don’t see the point,” he says, grinning. “That’s why I work so hard to make people believe it! In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, when Scarlett, Penelope, Rebecca… I mean who in the world is going to believe that they are killing each other for me? Come on! But Woody Allen thought it, so I had to lose a lot of weight and become that character.”

Bardem finds it much easier to believe in the process of acting, because it is one he’s seen as a child. From a family of actors since the dawn of Spanish cinema, Bardem made his film

debut as a six-year-old. His parents separated when he was young and he says he was raised by his mother and sister. “That’s why I’m not intimidated by women,” he confesses. Yet he did feel overwhelmed being Roberts’ love interest in Eat Pray Love.

“But she was not judgemental of me, even though I was the new kid in town.”

Bardem may still feel like a newbie in Hollywood, but there’s already a buzz that he could win his second Oscar for Biutiful.

The actor talks of the deep sense of guilt he felt as a movie star, walking the Barcelona streets and pretending to work in the slums. Critics who viewed the film at the recent Toronto film festival say his empathy has helped him nail the role.

When Bardem talks of the guilt that propelled author Elizabeth Gilbert to set out on her journey of Eat Pray Love, he might as well be speaking of his Biutiful experience. “We live in a society where having it all isn’t enough and we have to go to the roots of what it is to have nothing,” he points out. “The more society reminds us of how we have to be happy, the more depressed you get.

Guilt is a major energy that makes you move ahead.”

Eat Pray Love released in theatres on Friday. Biutiful will be screened at the 12th Mumbai Film Festival which begins on 21 October. For the registration details and schedule, log on to www.mumbaifilmfest.com Write to lounge@livemint.com

COURTESY EXPERIMENTER

placing of work,” he says. He also points out that almost all the shows in the gallery’s short life have been political—featuring artists such as Bani Abidi and Mehreen Murtaza and shows such as the ongoing Say Everything that looks at evolving norms of individual privacy.

Mohaiemen’s choice of subject is very political even if his mode of treating it can be described as poetic and evocative. The photo sets on each of the three walls are like a clip from a film reel—the first set shows a plane in the sky; the second, two shadowy human figures silhouetted against tubelights; and the third, a series of images of a shattered glass pane. They act as props for the free-flowing text which, in a few words, talks about, among other things, an exile whose family fled Bangladesh ahead of the assassination; the unexplained and troubling absence of standard security measures on the day of the assassination; and the feelings of a woman whose father was the lone army colonel who lost his life trying to protect the president. Mohaiemen is reminiscing, reflecting and posing questions about the fateful day.

Lights off: Frames from I have killed Pharaoh by Mohaiemen.

“I work through research,” he says, “excavating the history of post-liberation Bangladesh as a way of looking at Asian epochs, especially the history of failure.” This work is the latest in a series that, as he

puts it, “has been conducted over multiple platforms—longform essay, video, photography and installation.”

He points out that unlike a written historical tract, the museum and gallery space

offers room for ambiguity and experimentation.

Mohaiemen adds to the ambiguity by inserting many fictional elements in the work, as well as clues that help separate fact from fiction. For instance, there were no tubelights or shatterproof glass in use in Bangladesh at the time, and yet both feature prominently in the photo sets. He says he wants the viewer to decode his work, which he likens to a puzzle.

He sounds keen, as well as a little apprehensive about Frieze. “At an event of this scale,” he says, “the audience comes partly to look at work, and partially to look for a commercial exchange.

It will be interesting to see how that viewer responds to research that attempts to engender open-ended dialogue.” Speaking about the gallery, Raja seems to echo the sentiment. “At this juncture, the world is looking at us (Indian art) with some interest, so it is important to present ourselves in the right light,” he says.

The Frieze Art Fair will be held in Regent’s Park, London, from 14-17 October. For details, log on to www.friezeartfair.com

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MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

ALL IN (LIP) SYNC

I

Q&A | RAM GOPAL VARMA

Gang war: Suriya (centre) plays a major role in Rakta Charitra­I.

Playing with fire The director on his new film, brickbats from the past and creating human rivalry on screen

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· e was burnt by his own ambition when he remade Sholay as Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag in 2007.

Film lovers and his fans were shocked. Even more so when he followed up that debacle with no-brainers such as Agyaat.

The failure of Aag prompted him to write on his blog: “I learnt a lot from that experience such as not to be arrogant and overconfident and I am a much wiser man today after being badly and nicely burnt in the Aag of Sholay.”

But Varma is also the man behind Satya and Company.

These two films redefined the gangster genre in Indian cinema, even transcended the genre and became examples of extremely well-crafted films. With his realistic and gritty, yet stylistically uncompromising language, he influenced a generation of aspiring directors and writers which emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s. His latest venture is a twopart film set in Andhra Pradesh, based on the real life story of the Telugu political leader Paritala Ravindra (played by Vivek Oberoi) and his rival Suri (played by Suriya). Made in three languages in two parts that will release within a month of each other, Varma says Rakta Charitra-I is a violent and intense film with a body count that will be hard to keep track of. Edited excerpts from an interview:

H

People believe ‘Rakta Charitra-I’ could be your return to form. Do you agree?

I feel any director is as good as the script or subject he chooses or gets, and an actor is as good as the role he gets. To that extent Rakta Charitra-I is the kind of subject you won’t get your hands on very easily, especially in terms of the characters. It is a very different film even though it looks like it’s my genre. Company was studied and composed; Rakta Charitra-I is a very

Realistic: Varma believes a director is as good as his subject. volatile film in terms of its theme of revenge, the characters, etc., partly because it’s based on a true story. Company is politics within an underworld organization. Rakta Charitra-I has pride, family feuds and political-criminal nexus.

Describe the journey from idea to script to screen.

This is a real story and it took me nearly a year to gather the material and put it in a cinematic script. Many of the people involved are dead, and I was not present (when they died)..., so I had to rely on news reports, eyewitness accounts, police reports and people close to the characters to build the story. But it is not necessary that those people are telling the truth so I have derived what I think is reasonably close to the truth. I met Suri a few times in Anantapur jail. I was interested in understanding the mindset of the man who can nurture revenge in his heart for 12 years and plot an assassination from inside jail. We think a man in jail is over, but he has his mind and from behind bars he is plotting ways to kill the man he hates. This is fascinating.

How different is this film from your past work?

It was quite enriching because while the film is a technical thing, meeting such people, going through their experiences and trauma, trying to understand them is a unique experience. I have a strong feeling it will have a great impact on my films after

this. My understanding of cinema, people and characters has taken a leap with Rakta Charitra-I. In terms of human psychology it has exposed me to things that are much deeper than what I imagined.

The technique used in Rakta Charitra-I comes from the core emotion of the story—of the people and an extremely vengeful act coming. I have never dealt with this before, and in trying to capture that mindset my technique has advanced. I might have used more technique in Aag, but if the core emotion doesn’t work then the technique will go unnoticed. Satya works because the core emotion, characters and subject matter are correct so even if you don’t use technique, it still works in more or less the same way.

Why make it in two parts?

Firstly, to cover the span of time, but also because it’s the story of two people—Paritala Ravi and Suri, the man who killed him. I thought it would be interesting to see a break-up of these two stories: Paritala Ravi’s rise is one story and a guy deciding to kill him is another story.

How do you assess your work of the last decade?

I don’t think beyond tomorrow and yesterday. I have no clue what I did last also. I am too busy doing what I am doing right now. I don’t think of anything as a high or a low. I am living life every day—getting up in the morning and doing what I want

to do till I sleep. I am more driven now by my desire to make films than when I began. I don’t think I have taken a break in 30 years. I don’t feel the need to take a break. I enjoy my work.

How do you look back at the spate of flops such as ‘Naach’, ‘Nishabd’, ‘Agyaat’ and ‘Aag’?

Rangeela was a hit; Daud was a flop. Then Satya was a hit, but Mast didn’t work. I have always oscillated and taken up different kinds of subjects. I made three flops after my first hit, so I have never been consistent in that sense. It’s just that the media caught on. It happens in phases and I am used to people talking about me since my first hit or flop. Then a new generation of media guys comes along and asks “why is this happening”.

Arre, it was always happening—it’s just that you were not there at that time. During the Factory (RGV Film Factory Ltd) days, I was doing too many productions and didn’t have control over the creative. Then I slowed down production. The two films in my career that took the longest to make were Aag and Daud and both of them flopped, so clearly taking time does not assure anything. Things just have to fall into place.

You have influenced many young film-makers. Do you recognize that when you watch those films?

It is not for me to say if I am influencing someone, but I guess every film-maker is influenced by somebody. I very rarely watch movies but, in the little time I get, I see foreign films. A film in totality does not interest me. I look at the technique and the director’s point of view, his style and storytelling. I don’t look at subject matter. I look at it like a study. I do not see films for entertainment. In fact, when I like the first 10 scenes of a film, I see those 10 scenes 10 times, which means that sometimes I don’t finish the film at all.

How do you react to criticism?

I don’t care about praise or criticism; it makes no difference to me. If 100 or 1,000 people write or say nasty things about me that’s fine, that is the world we live in. One reason it happens is because I turn out so much work. Sanjay Leela Bhansali makes one film in three years so you will not have a chance to bark at him till he comes back. I give a chance every three-four months. Doing is my job. Liking or not liking is the job of others.

Rakta Charitra-I will release in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu on 22 October.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

confess I always experience bouts of nervousness ahead of a concert, even if I look unfazed and calm. But what I found strange was my nervousness as I watched the spectacular opening ceremony of the troubled Commonwealth Games (CWG) on television. As the fanfare and extravaganza unfurled, I found myself anxious, hoping that cobras, dogs, collapsing ceilings or exhausted performers fainting for lack of food and rest would not bring further ignominy to India. Phew! It was a big relief that the ceremony was a success.

There must have been many like me who were so relieved that they forgot to take note of the fact that most of the music one heard during the opening ceremony was, in fact, a recorded track with the performers just “acting” as if they were performing. In musicians’ jargon and also among event managers, these are called “plus one” or “plus” tracks which are used to ensure good sound and cut down on the expense, effort and infrastructure involved in engaging a large number of musicians to play live. Now mind you, this is no “Breaking News” revelation. It is, in fact, standard practice at most events of this magnitude. In some ways it is practical too, because if you had hundreds or thousands of drummers and musicians playing live, it could take a few days to get them all tuned up, soundchecked, and playing as per plan.

Who knows, the heat generated by so much artificial lighting could even make the hide and skin stretched over acoustic drums crack open, or lead to strings of wooden instruments snapping and breaking. So, to avoid further confusion and mishap, maybe it was best that the entire soundtrack, barring the speeches and the announcements, was recorded beforehand in the sanitized environment of a studio, probably in Mumbai.

MANAN VATSAYANA/AFP But it is also necessary to point out that the hordes of been players who swayed as they played after the national anthem, didn’t have to huff and puff into their mouthpieces quite as hard as they normally would have to.

Neither did the drummers have to beat a rhythm for real, although they danced and whirled and raised their arms and sticks as energetically as they would in a live concert. The only difference being that the sound of the drums was generated probably by a state of-the-art programming machine or workstation in a Mumbai A cute act: Keshav on the tabla. studio, either from one of the many “ethnic” sound cards available in the market, or perhaps with a single percussionist adding a bit of the “live” feel to it. Of the several drumming styles showcased at the opening ceremony, the Manipuri and Kerala drummers seemed to have possibly recorded separate segments to which they then synced their actions, but in other segments there were occasional mismatches in sound, and lack of synchronization.

Even ace performers A.R. Rahman and Hariharan turned actors as they performed to a “plus” track, and appeared to be crooning, mike in hand. Maybe, just maybe, Rahman actually performed the very last line of his act live.

I join the nation in declaring that the “cutie pie of the CWG” award be bestowed on little Keshav, but didn’t anyone notice that the little tyke didn’t have a mike as he sat and mimed with the tabla? Had he played the tabla live in the stadium without a mike, he would have been fortunate if the sound were even as loud as a pair of knitting needles clicking together. He looked adorable and cuddly, and his confidence and poise was amazing, but did anyone hear any tabla in that segment (http://www.allvoices.com/ contributed-news/6939661-child-prodigy-keshav-tabla-playing-video/ video/64743571) with heavy, intense drumming? And if not, did we need to use a child as lovely as him as a prop? Now please don’t you go calling me India’s answer to Simon Cowell or “anti-national”.

What could have been done, though, is to acknowledge and document, in some way, the names of all the artistes who have actually played for the soundtrack, as well as those who acted as if they played on the opening night. If this has been done already, I will accept in advance that I am unaware of it. But if not, then for a historic event such as the opening ceremony, I would like to research and publish a monograph documenting an unofficial version of what went into the making of the soundtrack, who recorded what, and who mimed what. It will make for an interesting read.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

KEEP LOOKING The Religare art gallery is doing its bit for the Commonwealth Games by hosting ‘Looking Glass: The Existence of Difference’, a big­ticket art show that features works by 20 contemporary Indian artists displayed across four venues. The “names” are all there—Subodh Gupta, Riyas Komu, T.V. Santosh, Atul Dodiya, Bharti Kher and others. Curator Gayatri Sinha’s note says the show “seeks to reflect on the role of the artist as mediator/interpreter/witness”.

Looking Glass will be on view till 31 October at the Religare art gallery, British Council, Max Mueller Bhavan and American Center. For details, log on to www.religarearts.com Himanshu Bhagat

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MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | SUPRIYA NAIR

What ails Mumbai’s trees?

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Many factors, and not just the BMC’s pruning drive, have contributed to the decimation of the city’s green cover

M

umbai’s monsoons provide the city a brief window of lushness before it settles into its chalky, deciduous winter. But those looking forward to the annual greening have seen a more dramatic fallout this year. After a series of accidents in which falling tree branches seriously injured pedestrians and damaged property, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) fulfilled its pruning and trimming duties with unusual seriousness, going on an extensive and widely publicized treetrimming drive across the city.

The accidents haven’t stopped—earlier this month, a Kalina resident suffered massive spinal damage, thanks to a falling branch.

Mumbai’s green cover has certainly felt the effects, however. All over the city, from LBS Marg to Juhu, Lalbaug to Malad, the shorn tops of trees lining public spaces are beginning to suggest environmental catastrophes, not the roughand-tumble of an above-average monsoon. Around 10,000 trees have been trimmed since June, according to Chandrashekhar Rokade, deputy municipal commissioner.

“We say pruning and trimming,” says environmental expert Nilesh Baxi, “but those are scientific terms. The correct term for the BMC’s operations is hacking.” For the last three years, Baxi has been on the Tree Authority, a body of corporators and nominees constituted to protect and enhance urban greening, as mandated by the Maharashtra (Urban Areas) Protection and Preservation of Trees Act, 1975. He is yet to see any of the equipment or expertise that the BMC acknowledges it needs for tree trimming, put to use. “Just as an architect uses ultrasonic projections to detect flaws in the pillars and beams of a building he is about to renovate, you have technology to inspect a sick tree. The BMC’s stated goal is to inspect and trim trees four times a year, but they simply don’t have the equipment. I’m not even sure that the equipment you do see, like the BEST vehicles, is used within rules,” says Baxi.

If administrative inefficiency is the prime actor in this drama, its roots go beyond the single issue of a resource crunch. For years now, people across Mumbai have protested the decimation of tree cover in their neighbourhoods. It’s particularly bad this year.

Tree transplantation, the BMC’s programme to maintain green cover in areas where foliage has to make way for development projects, is related to problems of falling branches. “Look at the stumps of palm trees at the Oval Maidan,” Baxi says. “Those were transplanted from Marine Drive, but there is no new growth. They now pose a major hazard to sportspeople and walkers on the Maidan because they have not taken root properly.” Baxi calculates that the

Mutilated: (clockwise from top) Trees hacked to make way for the annual Ganesh festival hoardings in Lal­ baug; palms transplanted by the BMC at the periphery of Oval Maidan; and the effects of tree­trimming along Link Road, Malad.

BMC has transplanted around 28,000 trees so far—Baxi’s repeated requests for records of their growth and survival rate have remained unanswered over the last decade.

“Look, you shouldn’t be transplanting trees to Mumbai’s outskirts,” says Ranjeet Walunj of The Sapling Project, which started giving out free saplings across Mumbai and other cities in January. Walunj, with fellow tree warrior Satish Vijaykumar, has done everything from riding a tempo across the length of the city and distributing saplings, to flagging down passers-by at Shivaji Park—the project’s point of origin—and gifting them saplings sourced from a nursery in Dadar. “We

need these trees in the heart of the city. Future generations need explanations from us about the world around them,” says Walunj.

The Sapling Project collects feedback every quarter. They consider 50% a poor rate of survival for saplings, but Walunj says they have reports of up to 80% survival in densely populated neighbourhoods in Borivali, Vile Parle, Bimbisar Nagar and Shivaji Park, thanks to local interest. “Their contractors don’t do a good job maintaining the trees which the BMC plants,” Walunj says. “So we rope in citizens.”

But citizens aren’t necessarily the good guys or silent bystanders in this affair. The BMC’s

attitude to trees does not diminish the significance of the other major factor in this season’s tree disasters—public callousness. “Tree cover is supposed to be fantastic after the monsoons,” says Vithal C. Nadkarni, journalist and long-time observer of the changes in Mumbai’s environment. “But it’s terrible this year because of the way extortionate and diabolical Ganesh mandals and their hoarding sponsors have hacked away at branches to make way for advertisements.

Look around Lalbaug, Byculla and Kalachowki. It’s no wonder that recently planted trees look etiolated: They never have a chance to achieve growth and base girth that allows them to

rejuvenate after trimming. It’s the great Indian cretinism.

Trees aren’t here as an aesthetic privilege for the elite.

They’re necessary for everyone’s survival.”

Over a decade ago, the US’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) estimated that to absorb the human generation of carbon dioxide, a settlement would require 20 trees per person. In Mumbai, there are, conservatively, eight people to a tree.

The Sapling Project gives out neem and Ashoka trees in Mumbai, which they say are both economically viable and good for the environment.

But these two species themselves represent a broader conflict within Mumbai’s biodiversity—the problem of non-indigenous species. In a city where questions of nativity and provenance bubble up among human residents now and again, perhaps it’s inevitable that Mumbai’s trees aren’t spared the debate over whether they really belong on island soil either.

A majority of this year’s treerelated accidents have occurred because of rotten or dead branches of the gulmohar, a ubiquitous tree that is nonetheless botanically exotic to

Mumbai, and has a shallow root system that poses dangers in dense urban environments.

The Ashoka, as the Asupalav (D) is somewhat inaccurately known, is another such species.

Tall, narrow and elegant, it seems perfect to line crowded roads and small apartment complexes, but unlike neem, mango or coconut trees, it does not take easily to Mumbai’s natural conditions: a spoke in the wheel of biodiversity, inhospitable to fauna and unable to flourish in the same way as neem or mango trees.

Yet it is Mumbai’s most common tree, making up 241,000 of the 1.9 million-odd tree population. In a city where trees have to contend with asphalt, tiling, encroaching buildings and a severely depleted groundwater table, among other things, the Ashoka’s continued survival is a testament to immigrant hardiness.

The tree-trimming drive has demonstrated one thing: In Mumbai’s continual, elemental struggle for resources, the decimation of green cover is simply a visible symptom of a community grotesquely eating its own limbs. supriya.n@livemint.com