Mint Lounge on 15 August 2009—Modern Day Freedom Fighters Part 1

New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Chennai, Chandigarh, Pune Saturday, August 15,Vol.2009 Pune Saturday, July 11, 2009 3 No. 27Vol. 3 No. 32

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MODERN DAY

SATISH KALRA

SUNITI SOLOMON

DEEP JOSHI

NAVIN KISHORE

SUMAIRA ABDULALI

ARUNDHATI NAG

MAHESH JAYACHANDRA

ANIL SADGOPAL

FLAVIA AGNES

ANEESH PRADHAN/SHUBHA MUDGAL

NITIN KARANI

HARSH MANDER

DHARANIDHAR BORO

FREEDOM FIGHTERS They’re fighting for the freedom to smile, to be wild, to read and to communicate.

We celebrate the new Indian patriot

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, THEN AND NOW

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

T

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA

heir stories are embedded in our collective consciousness. Even today, 62 years after they won us our independence, India’s freedom fighters never fail to make us feel good about ourselves. Many of our roads, stadiums and parks are named after them. For over six decades, they have inspired our books, music, theatre, films, and even comic books. But some of us are not content to live with the sepia memories of the unadorned, unfussy men and women who changed our history; some of us believe the fight for freedom isn’t over yet. The British may have gone, but today’s freedom fighters wage a war that is, in some ways, tougher than the one that was fought back then. India’s modern-day freedom fighters fight the enemies within us—they help us conquer our fears and prejudices and protect what should be sacred to us. They work hard to guard our forests, preserve our cultural differences, help INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL us dream of a better future, instil self-confidence in women and ensure that our children will smile. And they do it with the same zeal that was found in abundance in the India of the 1930s and 1940s. When the Delhi high court effectively decriminalized homosexuality in a recent order on section 377, modern-day freedom fighters rejoiced.

To celebrate Independence Day, we entered a world where people still fight for the idea of India. This is not an exhaustive list of people—and we fought our own battle before we finalized it. We tried to pick people you haven’t read too much about. So, enjoy the issue and get inspired!

(MANAGING EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY MANAS CHAKRAVARTY HARJEET AHLUWALIA ELIZABETH EAPEN VENKATESHA BABU ©2009 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

IT WAS A DIFFERENT STRUGGLE The semantics of freedom are far and varied. But for Shrimati Satyawati, possibly the oldest living freedom fighter, there was one kind that reigned supreme

E

TEXT BY ANINDITA GHOSE PHOTOGRAPH BY HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

ven until a year ago, the very frail Satyawati would spin the charkha (spinning wheel) for 3 hours a day, propped up on her bed. For the 104-year-old—possibly the oldest surviving member of India’s independence movement—it was pure habit.

Today, she lies in bed in her house in Delhi under a portrait of her son, the former Indian vice-president Krishan Kant, who died in 2002. She is immobile after a recent injury but the wheelchair-bound centenarian lucidly recollects episodes and anecdotes from the freedom struggle.

“Maine (Chandrashekhar) Azad ko apne haathon se khilaya tha (I fed Azad with my own hands),” she says as she attempts to sit up.

Born on 23 February 1905, Satyawati took to khadi after her marriage to Lala Achint Ram, a zealous swadeshi activist who later became a member of Parliament. Ram was too busy with his political work to bother

about marriage. But he was told that apart from being strikingly beautiful, Satyawati was different. And so he relented.

Having studied at an all-girls boarding school run by the Arya Samaj in Jalandhar, his bride was intellectually equipped and willing to partner him in his political quests.

And partner him she did—protesting on streets, giving refuge to other young activists and allowing herself and her three young children to be taken into custody on more than one occasion.

Satyawati is a proud mother. Her son Krishan Kant held various positions of authority over the years and her two daughters, Subhadra and Nirmal Kant, braved jail with her at the ages of 13 and 5.

Subhadra, now 80, recalls being rounded up for attending a satyagraha rally in Lahore.

“We were protesting in response to a nationwide call by Mahatma Gandhi. We were hungry but we weren’t scared; we had

our mother to look up to.”

Satyawati recalls how she kept members of her family on their toes, ready to protest or be imprisoned at any hour. Their possessions were kept to a bare minimum.

The charkha was a powerful symbol of solidarity and self-reliance and she dressed her family in khadi to keep them rooted in the spirit of the time.

In a rare public appearance to introduce a photographic guide to the freedom struggle, The Illustrated History of the Freedom Struggle by Pavan K. Varma, a few months ago, she expressed her disenchantment with today’s political leadership.

Speaking of the difference between then and now, she says the young men and women of today have the basic threads of progressive thought in hand but no responsible leading figure to help weave these together.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM TO BE WILD

dharanidhar boro

‘NATURE NEVER BETRAYS THE HEART’

TEXT BY SANJUKTA SHARMA PHOTOGRAPH BY SUBHAMOY BHATTACHARJEE/MINT

Inspired by

BR Ambedkar He was a visionary who brought issues of backward classes into the limelight.

U

ntil the late 1990s, the national highway that connected Assam’s capital Guwahati with the Kaziranga National Park, around 215km away, was a dusty, choppy road, eroded by years of devastating floods. In the past decade, Assam has become a tourist-friendly state.

The same highway is a cruise now.

My last visit, in 2008, was an eye-opener. Beyond the smooth roads and the new tourist resorts that have sprung up on the forest’s periphery, Kaziranga is one of the country’s few success stories in wildlife preservation.

The one-horned rhinoceros, an animal poached for years for its horn (sold for up to Rs15 lakh in markets in India as well as China), is far from being an endangered species. Thanks to Dharanidhar Boro, the forest range officer who has been at the helm of this preservation drive since 1987, I saw a Kaziranga where animals roam freely in their natural habitat and the forest thrives on fertile land. Cloaked in muddy silt, hefty, thick-skinned rhinos stared indifferently at us through lush, tall lokasa grass.

Boro and his team of around 250 forest guards have been keeping vigil in the 862 sq. km forest round the clock for the past decade. Although an employee of the state’s forest department, he has not been transferred from his post because the government is perhaps convinced that nobody knows the forest or its nooks and animals as well as this 52-year-old range officer. He has been invited to international wildlife seminars to talk about his efforts (around 100 poachers have been arrested since he joined, and around 40 killed in encounters), although a promotion has not come his way since 1987.

I met Boro at his bungalow on a Sunday evening, the only time during the week he takes time off for himself. It is an old bungalow with wooden floors and bamboo furniture. Photographs in which he has posed with rhinos and famous tourists crowd a big table in the living room, and his office, on the ground level, has the workday drone of locals going in and out with complaints—even on a Sunday evening. “The forest and the animals never stop working, so I also can’t afford to,” Boro says.

He belongs to the Bodo tribe, still a backward one in the state’s multi-tribal, multi-ethnic demographic. Boro was the first graduate from Kasaighat village in Golaghat district, where Kaziranga is located. “Even though our village had many families from the Bodo tribe, the school I went to mostly had children from upper

caste families. We were’t encouraged to study subjects such as Sanskrit. But I did well in math, and finally completed my BSc in botany.” Not surprising that Boro developed a penchant for Sanskrit early on.

He has a habit of reciting Sanskrit verses while talking about his work and his struggle. It’s his way of philosophizing his years of struggle, which has gone largely unrewarded in material terms.

He recites a line in Sanskrit, indicative of one of his deepest beliefs, and translates its essence into English: “Nature never betrays the heart”. Boro appeared for the state civil services examination, the Assam Public Service Commission, in 1986, and got the job as range officer of Kaziranga National Park the next year. “My wife and daughter still live in Kasaighat because here I am married to the forest,” Boro says.

His strength really is the openness with which he has embraced the local population—people who live in neighbouring villages, who are making a shaky transition to urbanization. “Most of the village population here is not skilled, and they are insecure because more and more immigrants, mostly from Bangladesh, are settling in neighbouring villages. Due to the lack of infrastructure and education until a few years ago, some villagers helped poachers get into the forest area to earn their bit.”

Boro encourages young people to join the forest department and offers small perks to families, such as vegetables from his own garden. “The worst crisis that the forest department will face in a few years is the reluctance of village boys to work in the forest. Now I have more casual labourers than the department’s own forest guards, because people think why go for something as risky as this when there are better job opportunities in tourism.”

Last month, some of Boro’s workers were reportedly assaulted by two state MLAs who entered the restricted forest area for fishing, armed with AK-47s. When they were told that fishing was banned in the forest, they beat up a forest guard and threatened to kill Boro. “Such incidents have happened before, but because the media is more active now, everyone came to know,” he told me on the telephone soon after the incident.

Boro says one of the things Kaziranga has taught him is to be a cautious optimist. He says, of the forest’s future, “According to the census taken in April 2009, the number of rhinos has gone up to 2,048 (from 1,855 in 2004). But the real task is to make this a place where animals and human beings benefit from each other in a wildlife-friendly way.”

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FREEDOM FROM HUNGER

harsh mander

‘YOUNG CHILDREN OF TODAY ARE NOT LESS IDEALISTIC’

TEXT BY PADMAPARNA GHOSH PHOTOGRAPH BY MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

Inspired by

Mahatma Gandhi In many ways he’s more relevant to the 21st century than the 20th. His words ‘Be the change you want to see’ are pertinent in the personal and socio­political spheres.

F

or someone who gave up a coveted and cushy government job to walk down an unsure, idealistic path, Harsh Mander, 54, is surprisingly unassuming. “Icons have become a short cut to understanding issues. To my mind, the biggest icons are people who stood up, ordinary people who have saved people’s lives despite crippling odds,” Mander tells me when we meet at his nondescript, open-air office in south Delhi.

After witnessing the complicity of civil servants and police officers in the Gujarat riots in 2002, Mander resigned from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). But not before he told the authorities exactly what was on his mind.

In a scathing, emotional essay in 2002, he wrote, “There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are: Sare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara… It is a song I will never be able to sing again.”

Now the soft-spoken Mander is a Supreme Court commissioner (i.e, he advises the Supreme Court) on issues of food security. He is a columnist who works towards bringing young people together to fight homelessness and communalism. Mander also teaches “poverty and governance” at IIM Ahmedabad—in the capital of a state he forsook a long time ago. He enjoys a bit of cinema whenever he gets the time.

“Hate, hunger and homelessness”, he says, are the three issues he feels passionately about. When asked to choose among the three, he fidgets with the recorder in front of him and says, “I think a life of dignity for people who are most marginalized, that is closest to my heart. It is the belief in equal dignity of every human being, an equal birth of every human being.”

In ways that only India makes possible, he is a powerful man despite the circumstances under which he quit the IAS. He has the ears of the Congress leadership on issues that he champions.

His views have found place on the aam aadmi agenda of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. He and his team have also floated a draft on the proposed Food Security Act, the big-ticket reform the Congress promised in its pre-election manifesto.

Mander has a tough job on hand: to be an interlocutor between those who make the decisions and those for whom the decisions are made. But along with his colleague N.C. Saxena, another former bureaucrat, he has literally forced the food agenda into the mainstream of Indian polity. As Supreme Court commissioners on food issues, they have

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convinced a reluctant state to universalize the Integrated Child Development Scheme. They have got at least a part of the state apparatus to buy into their argument that one cannot allow middlemen and contractors to profit from the multi-thousand-crore food schemes which provide food for 80 million children.

Mander had to take on some heavyweights in the previous UPA government to win these battles. Very few survive a bout with Renuka Chowdhury, says a cabinet colleague of the erstwhile women and child development minister, but the Supreme Court commissioners defeated her in a battle she fought till the end—to introduce packaged food in nutrition programmes, especially for children.

But it’s young activists, not ministers, who have a special place in Mander’s plans. Mander is the convener of Aman Biradari, an organization that builds diverse local-level institutions for youth and women to strengthen bonds of tolerance, fraternity, respect and peace.

“Young children of today are not less idealistic. But they don’t have space to engage,” he says. Mander, with his group of social workers, has built four homes in Delhi and Hyderabad for streetchildren.

But even after accomplishing more than his share, Mander fondly recounts one of his first encounters with the other India as a young, inexperienced civil servant armed with ideals and enthusiasm in Bharwani, Madhya Pradesh. He remembers how, mainly due to his efforts, a group of leprosy patients raised their hands in unison and vowed to quit begging. Even today, he says he is just as thrilled when he sees the raised palms of streetchildren as he was moved by the raised stumps of the leprosy affected that day in Bharwani.

As a young civil servant, Mander confronted such harsh truths for the first time. But as the son of an IAS officer, he wasn’t unfamiliar with the challenges. His school years were spent wherever his father was posted—the Andamans, the North-East and Sikkim.

Despite the journey Mander has already undertaken, he says he cannot understand why it is taking India so long to “walk” to the underprivileged.

“Sometimes, I think, where our child sleeps and where that streetchild sleeps might be one kilometre (apart), but it’s a journey we never seem able to walk to that other child.”

To Mander’s mind, the ideal future is one where no one sleeps on the streets and no one sleeps hungry. “The idea of India is very important for the world; that in all our diversity, we can live together peacefully. We have the space to do that.”

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM FROM PREJUDICE

nitin karani

‘AFTER SECTION 377 WAS STRUCK DOWN, THE BATTLE HAS BECOME MORE REAL’ TEXT BY SANJUKTA SHARMA PHOTOGRAPH BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Inspired by

Mahatma Gandhi Gandhi’s grace and ahimsa in the face of hatred are inspirational.

I

n 1995, his life changed and 24-year-old Nitin Karani decided to tell his parents he was gay. Bombay Dost, the magazine, and The Humsafar Trust, its parent organization, both founded by Ashok Row Kavi, had organized a three-day conference on homosexuality and HIV/AIDS in Mumbai. Through a friend, Karani got the opportunity to work as a volunteer there.

Until then, he would hide copies of Bombay Dost from his family. He would look for inspiration from gay men featured in American television shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Phil Donahue Show, or in the pages of Michelangelo Signorile’s Queer in America, which is a bible for Karani.

During that conference, he met Kavi and his comrades, who were mostly young men who had found a new life, and who called their charismatic and articulate leader “amma” (“He is still called that,” Karani says). The circle of support that Kavi had already garnered for Bombay Dost was a revolution in itself in the 1980s and 1990s, and for young men such as Karani, it was liberating.

“Those were the best three days of my life,” says Karani, now one of the key members of The Humsafar Trust, and as Kavi says, “my deputy”.

Karani is involved in the overall functioning of Humsafar. Their office in Kalina, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, is a drop-in centre, reference library and medical clinic, possibly the only place in Asia where an NGO working for issues of Men who have Sex with Men (MSM, a World Health Organization term) is on the premises of a government-run building, in this case the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

Karani, whose day job is that of a financial editor in a leading corporate house, was instrumental in the makeover of Bombay Dost—relaunched as a glossy cultural and queer lifestyle magazine in April after getting funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The magazine, which is available at newspaper stalls for Rs150, features films with queer themes, profiles of gay men, reviews and lifestyle features. “The relaunched Bombay Dost reflects what we are today. When I was young, it was a voice for Men who have Sex with Men. Today, thankfully, the realities are

different, at least among English-speaking, educated people.”

According to Karani, among the catalysts for greater acceptance of MSM in the country are Manvendra Singh Gohil, the only son of the erstwhile maharaja of Rajpipla, who was disinherited by his parents after he went public with the fact that he was gay; the success of the film Dostana; and Sean Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk in the Oscar-nominated movie Milk.

Bolstered by the Delhi high court’s recent verdict on section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, under which consensual “unnatural” sexual acts of adults, even in private, were treated as a criminal offence, homosexuality has become a topic of public and media debate. On the day the verdict was announced (2 July), Karani’s telephone wouldn’t stop ringing.

In his south Mumbai office, Karani spoke to many cousins and relatives who had never openly accepted his sexuality.

Volunteers of The Humsafar Trust marched on to the road, doused in gulal.

But Karani says it will take years for the impact to be felt. “Historically, it is important, but as far as acceptance is concerned, this is the first step. After section 377 was struck down, the battle has become more real.”

Karani believes that because homosexuality is now legally acceptable and more public, opposition is likely to be more openly aggressive. “We will be able to gauge some reactions on the annual Queer Azadi March on 16 August.”

Karani is the only child of his parents—his father was a tax consultant and his mother has always been a housewife—and he shares a flat with them in Khar, a Mumbai suburb. “After coming in touch with Humsafar Trust, I decided to make my coming-out as public as possible.

Somebody had to do it. But before that I had to tell my parents. They were shattered and thought I was abnormal, but they have been supportive ever since.”

Karani is one of the few gay men in India who have “come out” through newspaper interviews and on TV several times. “It is important to say ‘I am gay’”—that’s the first thing he tells young men who walk into the Humsafar office.

“We don’t have many gay icons in India, as in the West, so the need to be public is more important.”

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FREEDOM TO MAKE MUSIC

aneesh pradhan shubha mudgal

‘WHENEVER WE WERE TRAVELLING, WE WERE HEARING GREAT MUSIC’ TEXT BY HIMANSHU BHAGAT PHOTOGRAPH BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Inspired by

Vidyadhari Bai of Varanasi The tawaif who at the request of Gandhi began including songs of protest in her repertoire.

I

f you want to live life and make music on your own terms, it is very difficult,” says Shubha Mudgal. “The world of classical music comes with its own set of baggage (as does) the world of film and pop music.” She should know, since she has traversed both these worlds with aplomb and to much acclaim.

“I have been lucky,” she says of her own journey, attributing her good fortune to two factors: the support of her family and, she adds, “because I am obstinate”. The robust singing voice is soft during a conversation but it does convey calm determination—and also slight agitation, which stems from Mudgal’s deep sense of grievance at the treatment meted out to musicians in India. Citing many examples, she explains how they are usually paid too little and, are often expected to play or sing for free uncomplainingly. They can ask for what is their due only at the risk of being labelled “too commercial”.

Particularly egregious over the past years has been the role of the recording companies, say Mudgal and her husband Aneesh Pradhan, the noted tabla player. In 2003, the husband-wife team established Underscore Records, a music company that seeks to nurture a very different kind of relationship with the artists whose recordings and albums it sells on the Internet from its website www.underscorerecords.com “For about 10 years now, major recording labels have stopped recording new music; they have been rehashing old stuff in their archives,” says Pradhan, explaining why they set up Underscore. Mudgal points out that in a typical agreement with a recording company, an artist is expected to record the music himself, has to give away the rights to his music and his royalties are abysmally low.

“Whenever we were travelling in India, we were hearing great music—different kinds of music—rock bands, fusion, tribal music,” she says. But recorded versions were never available. To ensure that new as well as neglected music found a way to reach listeners, that artists were not beholden to record companies, got decent royalties, had control over the kind of music they wanted to make and owned its copyright, They launched Underscore as a Web-based distribution platform. This means that Underscore does not produce any albums (with some exceptions); it only sells them via the Internet—the onus of production or publication, as it is also called, lies with the artist.

Its two debut albums, both produced by Mudgal, were recordings of her revered and beloved guru Pandit Ramashrey Jha of Allahabad, a giant in his own right but little known outside the world of Hindustani music connoisseurs. However, Underscore has been

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set up to become a hub for all kinds of Indian music—classical, as well as folk, rock and jazz.

From two, the number of albums available at the website has gone up to 125. On offer is such varied fare as En Route by Artist Unlimited, the Delhi-based collective of young musicians, field recordings of folk music in Punjab titled Khissa Punjab and a reissue of the first recording by Kesarbai Kerkar, the doyenne of Hindustani music, done in 1935.

Pradhan and Mudgal are looking ahead—besides the artists, she says, the goal is to empower others involved in music, for instance instrument makers such as the reputed tanpura makers of Meraj in Maharashtra. She is pleased with the response they got at Baaja Gaaja 2009, a music expo organized by Underscore in Pune in February that brought people and businesses associated with music under one roof. “The instrument makers were the heroes,” she says with evident pride.

The Underscore website also offers books on music, in regional languages such as Marathi and Bengali along with English and Hindi, as well as posters and other merchandise related to Hindustani classical music. The initiative to make available model contracts which artists can download has been much lauded.

Those who know them say Pradhan and Mudgal form a formidable team because theirs is a meeting of minds—neither are from khandani families of professional musicians and both were born to working parents who raised them in an atmosphere steeped in music—Hindustani, as well as film, folk and Western music. They met at a recording studio in 1993, and went on to collaborate in concerts and various other projects—two of which, presaging Underscore, were dot-com ventures. They married in 2000; it is her second marriage.

After five years, the distribution component of Underscore is self-supporting and it recently received a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation which will enable Pradhan and Mudgal to work on many of their plans.

“Their whole effort is to give musicians the freedom which the record companies were curbing,” says Sudhir Nayak, a long-time associate who often accompanies them on the harmonium. “They are thorough and meticulous, so they are able to take projects forward.” Sarangi exponent Ulhas Bapat, who has three albums for sale on the Underscore site, is all praise for them.

“Sale is fast, then sometimes slow, but the main point of satisfaction is that (the music is now) available to the people out there,” he says. “The main benefit is (that) artists duniya ke saamne aa gaye hain—they are getting the exposure.”

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM FROM ABUSE

flavia agnes

‘I OWN UP TO ALL MY EXPERIENCES’

TEXT BY PARIZAAD KHAN PHOTOGRAPH BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Inspired by

Jawaharlal Nehru He gave a new, modern perspective for the development of the country.

A

n intelligent, confident and pretty client has left Flavia Agnes, 61, baffled. The young woman comes from a family of privileged means, is well-educated, runs her own business and has supportive parents. Yet, she has silently endured an unconsummated and violent marriage for eight years, and only laid bare the details to her mother two months ago. “Why did she get into and stay in such a marriage for eight years? Why doesn’t she know her rights?” asks Agnes, women’s rights activist and feminist scholar, as she recounts this story at our meeting at the suburban Mumbai headquarters of Majlis, the organization she set up in 1990 to champion the rights of women.

Leather-bound volumes of the All India Reporter series of Supreme Court cases cover one section, while the opposite wall, painted a startling lime green, enlivens the otherwise drab room. Too often the room is occupied by modern, educated and independent women who come to consult Agnes about their rights in a marriage or relationship. One of the biggest problems facing Indian women, Agnes says, is their lack of knowledge of their basic rights.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong in the way social conditioning happens. Indian women have no survival instincts. Inside or outside a marriage, they don’t know their basic rights and how to survive with dignity,” she says. “These girls have all the gloss—they go out to nightclubs, and think they are confident and can handle their lives, but they can’t,” she says.

At some level it seems Agnes is disappointed in them. It is a well-documented fact that she was married at 20 and spent 13 years in a violent marriage. She says she understands why women of her generation—many often married young and were not highly educated—suffered such problems. “Back then no one would believe me and thought something was wrong with me. You would think that the next generation wouldn’t have similar problems, but they do.”

Agnes talks in soft tones but rapidly, without many pauses, allowing a cup of coffee to cool by her side. Her black hair is streaked with white and kohl is smudged around her eyes, as if she rubs them constantly.

Agnes grew up with her aunt in Mangalore.

After she finished schooling she joined her parents, who lived abroad. Her father and aunt died soon after, so she returned to India, got married, moved to Mumbai, and has been there since. Thirteen years and three children into her marriage, Agnes had had enough of her abusive husband and filed for judicial separation because “back then Christian women could not get divorced on the grounds of cruelty” (the Bombay high court struck down that section of the Indian Divorce Act in 1997, in a ruling in favour of one of Agnes’ clients). She then enrolled at the SNDT Open University and graduated in 1980, following that up with a master of law (LLM) degree in 1992 from Bombay University and an MPhil in family law from the National Law School, Bangalore.

Over the years, Agnes has handled cases about marital disputes and violence, brutality and sexual abuse of women and minors. She has authored and edited books on women’s rights and has been involved in high-profile

cases such as the ban on Mumbai’s bar dancers in 2005. Some of her big victories have remained unpublicized to maintain client confidentiality, but her biggest contribution in the debate for women’s rights has been her opposition to the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC). “A few years ago, the view among women’s groups and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) right wing was that Muslims are fundamentalists and women have no rights under their laws, so there should be a UCC. I argued that you don’t need the UCC to give rights. Even Hindu women don’t have rights in some issues. That was just a way to deny communities their separate cultural identities. I wanted to give dignity to the community and community practices,” she says.

The campaign for a UCC has now been dropped by rights activists and the BJP. Despite the violence she has faced personally and the kind she comes across every day in her professional life, Agnes does not give the impression that she has allowed her experiences to harden or desensitize her.

If anything, it seems she feels too much for each of her cases. “I don’t go to court for individual cases any more. I began suffering from a burnout after being in these do-or-die situations for so many years.” Her time is now taken up by her academic pursuits, such as A Reader on Law, Justice and Gender, a comprehensive textbook for students and teachers, to be released in a few months. Agnes is writing this book to combat the misinformation about women’s rights that often stems from media and TV shows.

Majlis has dealt with clients who think that working women are not granted custody of children and illegitimate children are not entitled to maintenance—information they have gathered from soaps or serious shows such as ex-cop Kiran Bedi’s Aap Ki Kachehri. Majlis, in association with two-time National Award-winning film-maker Madhusree Dutta, tries to get correct messages across in the form of films, plays and cultural festivals.

Agnes believes she is different from other activists because “I own up to all my experiences”. She sees the world not from her position in society, but from the viewpoint of those who are most downtrodden. “The ban on bar dancers was put into effect because men would go to dance bars, drink and come home and beat their wives. But the dancers were making a living and feeding their children,” she argues. “Is it okay for these girls to starve for the safety of middle-class wives? As an activist or as a feminist, your activism and feminism should work at the least denomination. It cannot start at the Hindu middle-class level and see the whole world from there and only be concerned if it works for them. You have to go layer by layer—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Dalit, bar dancer, trafficked woman, migrant woman, sex worker—it should work for everybody. If it doesn’t, it is not feminism at all. ” My clearest insight into Agnes’ personality comes when at one point she asks me in perfect Bombay-Christian English, “How you know all this about me?” There’s no ego or sense of entitlement. Her concern is getting the right message out there. Today, that in itself makes her unique.

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FREEDOM TO LEARN

anil sadgopal

‘I FEAR THE POSSIBILITY OF INDIVIDUALS GETTING BIGGER THAN THE CAUSES THEY ESPOUSE’

TEXT BY PALLAVI SINGH PHOTOGRAPH BY MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

Inspired by

Bhagat Singh He not only fought for India’s freedom but also fought for a vision for post­ independence India based on equitable distribution of resources and a just society based on equality.

E

very important event in Anil Sadgopal’s life has its roots in a classroom. He says if he were 17 today, he wouldn’t have done what he did as an aspiring botanist at St Stephen’s College in Delhi five decades ago.

A panel of academics resisted admitting him to the prestigious college because he had been educated in the Hindi medium. Sadgopal insisted on being interviewed until he was told, through a note scribbled on a piece of paper, that he had been rejected. “I returned that piece of paper to the panel and asked them to stamp their decision on an official letter, explaining the reasons why they were denying me admission.” The panel was appalled, but the young man had a ready explanation: “I will take this chit, take a bus straight to Rashtrapati Bhavan and ask the President why we ever fought for our independence when I don’t even have the freedom to study in my mother tongue.”

Ten minutes later, the “Hindi-medium” student of science from Birla Vidya Mandir, Nainital, had been admitted to St Stephen’s College to study botany and biochemistry.

From then on—1957 onwards—he dedicated himself to fighting for a host of issues, including children’s right to education, learning in one’s mother tongue and teaching science in government schools—a struggle that won him the Jamnalal Bajaj award in 1980.

The 69-year-old botanist-turned-educationist spent two decades teaching before he finally made a small, creeper-lined house in Bhopal his home.

He had a brief teaching stint at Delhi University and then taught science in government schools in the villages of Madhya Pradesh’s Hoshangabad district.

Along the way, he served long tenures as member of various government-appointed committees, including the Central Advisory Board of Education (Cabe), where his role was to recommend academic reforms in the education system.

After a five-year gestation period, the legislation to make education for children in the 6-14 age group free and compulsory was passed by the Lok Sabha last week. But in contrast to the generous welcome the legislation has received in most quarters, Sadgopal’s newspaper editorials and sit-in protests on the law are full of dissent, in keeping with his record of speaking up when he feels he has to.

The Bill, in his words, is “a law to snatch away the rights of children” since it only guarantees right to education for children in the 6-14 age group and creates “layers of education” with its classification of government-run and private schools.

Sadgopal believes that he is part of a larger struggle for basic constitutional rights. “I fear the possibility of individuals getting bigger than the causes they espouse,” he says, when we meet him at his home at Sahkar Nagar, Bhopal, on a Sunday. He is about to leave for a public meeting on the proposed new legislation. He has an old stitched-up khadi jhola slung on his arm and is clutching a bunch of files as we leave for the meeting.

The meeting is on the veranda of a temple, where 35-odd people have congregated. A variety of complaints are heard in the next half-hour: government schools charging tuition fees, denying admission to students, loopholes in admission interviews. With disarming candour, Sadgopal simplifies some of these issues. The crowd listens intently, given his gifts of interpretative

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clarity and communication.

Sadgopal’s journey as an activist perhaps began in the late 1940s, as a schoolgoing boy in Nainital.

When his father, who taught chemical technology at Banaras Hindu University and later became a chemist, shifted him to an English-medium school, all he could read on the first day in class was Hindi poems. As he kept reading one Hindi poem after another, his teacher angrily asked him to leave. “I ran and did not stop till I reached home. That was a turning point in my life,” Sadgopal recalls. He later switched back to a Hindi-medium school, only to return to the English-medium St Stephen’s College. His mother, a homemaker, gave him his first lessons in spoken English.

The experience led him to campaign for learning in the mother tongue in primary schools in the early 1970s, one of his first campaigns in education.

Two more life-altering experiences were to come through the two women in his life: Meera, whom he married in the 1960s and later separated from, and Shashi Maurya, a social activist whom he met in Hoshangabad in the 1980s and married in 1993. Sadgopal learnt a great deal about gender issues from them and worked with Meera for the Bhopal gas tragedy victims in 1984.

But in 1961, he left for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, California, to pursue research in molecular biology, unaware that his destiny lay elsewhere. He failed the qualifying exam for a PhD. “I flunked the paper on genetics at a time when Har Gobind Khorana received the Nobel in the subject. I have never been so depressed in my life,” he recalls. His second attempt at the qualifying exam was a success, leading to a 150-page paper on genetic code, which got published in the British journal Annual Review of Genetics in 1968. This led to many job offers in the US, but a group of Indians at Caltech decided to return home, moved by the severe Bihar famine of 1965. Sadgopal returned to India in 1968 with his American girlfriend Meera.

He joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where he even set up a tissue culture lab. Around the same time, he says: “I began visiting villages in remote areas of the country to understand them better. Those were life-altering years.”

In 1971, Sadgopal quit his job and moved to Hoshangabad, around 100km from Bhopal. There he, with a handful of friends, launched the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, which brought together teachers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, TIFR and Delhi University to introduce innovations in the way science was taught in the government’s primary schools. “The idea was that children should learn science through experiments with their own hands.” In 1978, the programme was expanded to all upper primary schools in Madhya Pradesh.

In the years that followed, Sadgopal wrote half a dozen books on education, focusing on the working of government committees. But his disappointment with such committees is evident: “To all my objections, there has been abject silence from the government’s end,” he says.

In the colonies where he spends all his time even today, motivating people to send their children to school, he is deeply admired. “There is nothing that can stop him,” says Ram Handia, his associate and stepson.

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM TO COMMUNICATE

mahesh jayachandra

‘HOW DO YOU PUT A VALUE ON THE EFFORT AND TIME?’

O

ne day in February, Farah Rahman visited the office of the bureaucrat who oversees the Indian government’s efforts to use computers and the Internet to better service citizens (e-governance it’s called).

The office is in Lutyens’ Delhi, the part of the Indian capital planned by British architect Edwin Lutyens, and Rahman met the officer a little after 6pm, by which time most officials in the e-government department had left. She found the officer sitting in darkness—there had been an electricity breakdown—behind a table loaded with files, books and documents.

Rahman is a petite criminal lawyer from Minnesota whose family moved there from Hyderabad in the mid-1980s. She moved back to India to work with a scientist who had invented a normal 101-key keyboard that could handle Indian languages.

The way she says it, the officer was disappointed that all she had to offer was a keyboard. He asked for a sample, inspected it, and thrust it back at her. “Keyboards? We have (local language) keyboards,” he said.

And then the officer deputed another officer to walk Rahman through what she describes as a shiny new e-governance centre.

The entrepreneur Rahman works with is Mahesh Jayachandra, a neurophysician who has both US and Indian patents for keyboards in Indic languages—a group of Indo-European languages including Sanskrit, most modern Indian languages, even some Asian languages. In a show of obvious symbolism, he plans to launch the keyboard, which was ready a few years back, today.

Behind the story of the Brahmi keyboard, as Jayachandra has termed his product, is the story of how a neurophysician who hopes to one day build an electrical model of the brain ended up inventing a keyboard. And the story of efforts by several scientists before him to solve a problem that, on the face of it, appears unsolvable.

The keyboard

TEXT BY R. SUKUMAR PHOTOGRAPH BY HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Mahesh Jayachandra invented the Brahmi keyboard for regional Indian language users, which works by simply arranging the keys in a particular order, and assigning one key for matras and another for halants

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The Qwerty keyboard most computers are equipped with has 101 keys. That’s more than adequate to represent the 26 letters of the English alphabet comprising five vowels and 21 consonants. Each letter is assigned a distinct key, which means users do not have to press multiple keys to type a letter.

Indic languages have far more vowels and consonants. Hindi, for instance, has 11 vowels and 33 consonants. Then there are the squiggles called matras and halants in Hindi that lend an entirely different sound to the letter they are attached to. The matras are attached to vowels and the halants to consonants. Were each letter of an Indic language to be assigned a distinct key, the keyboard would need to have at least 1,500 keys.

While users may like to think of it in terms

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

of keys, scientists think of it in terms of Unicode, an international standard applicable across languages where each letter, number or symbol is given a unique numeric value that works across various computing programs.

Apart from letters and numbers, anyone working on a local language keyboard in India also has to allow for special characters such as Om (Sanskrit originally but used in almost all Indian languages) and others that are specific to one language. Tamil has one, Marathi a few, and even Telugu has some that serve as small weighing units (they were probably created to weigh the fabled diamonds of Golconda).

India thought it had the problem licked when Mohan Tambe came up with the Inscript keyboard in the 1980s. Tambe came up with the idea for the keyboard at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, and perfected it at India’s then freshly minted Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, or C-DAC. Inscript, a phonetic keyboard, forms the basis of most local language keyboards currently in use in the country.

Such keyboards, though, require users to perform multiple operations before they can type a particular character. Given the level of complexity involved, it could take anyone between six and nine months to be trained in using an Inscript keyboard. That may not seem like much, and, indeed, one reason why there hasn’t been much progress in developing alternatives to the Inscript keyboard could simply be that many scientists and the government thought they had this particular problem sorted.

But there are some who think that the unavailability of a simpler Indic languages keyboard is one of the factors behind the digital divide. And the quest for an alternative has continued.

In 2004, researchers from IIT Bombay came up with the concept of a local language keyboard designed on the basis of the structure and usage of languages.

In 2007, C-DAC partnered with an Israeli company to create a LooKeys keyboard, where a camera on top of the monitor captured the position of the user’s fingers on the keyboard and read the corresponding letter.

In between, in 2006, HP Labs won a Wall Street Journal technology innovation award in the consumer category for a so-called gesture keyboard. Only, it wasn’t really a keyboard.

One of the scientists behind it, Shekhar Borgaonkar, department director, HP Labs, says it was created more to address the issue of access than to facilitate typing (one reason why it isn’t a keyboard). The product is simply a tablet on which the vowels, consonants and numbers of the Indic language are arranged. To get a matra derivative, the user simply uses a pen to scribble the matra on top of the

corresponding letter. Borgaonkar claims the product has 95% accuracy. This writer tried it out for a few minutes—he isn’t an expert in Hindi—and discovered that the accuracy was closer to 100%. But it isn’t a keyboard.

Still, HP hasn’t really pushed the technology because, Borgaonkar says, it doesn’t see much demand for it. The product, however, is available through a test marketing company with which HP has a partnership.

Jayachandra’s Brahmi keyboard is a real keyboard. And it works by simply arranging the keys in a particular order, assigning keys for matras and halants, and making use of the Shift key (much like English keyboards do). Nitu Thakur, at St Joseph’s Boys High School (also called the European School to differentiate it from another school of the same name) in Bangalore, was one of its first users. A teacher of Hindi, it took her no time at all to master the keyboard. And she tested it out by typing a question paper for a Hindi examination. “It’s just like typing in English,” she said.

Jayachandra has both US and India patents for the keyboard. The patents cover all Indic languages, so apart from several languages spoken in India, he can also look forward to producing keyboards in Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka) should he wish to.

Jayachandra thinks no one will be interested in just a keyboard—a CD with the software and a keyboard-shaped sticker with both Hindi and English letters can convert any keyboard into a Brahmi keyboard in minutes. His company, called Brahmi Computing, is looking to launch a computer, also branded Brahmi.

The box will come bundled with a Linux-based Hindi operating system, and loads of free software utilities—math, painting, games, astronomy, the works.

The scientist Jayachandra is hoping to make enough money by licensing the technology or selling PCs to get back to his first love— electrophysiology. He wants to be the first to build a proper electrical model of the brain.

Now 47, Jayachandra is a dark wiry man with a jet-black beard and equally black mane of unruly hair that has been made to submit to some sort of order on the day this reporter meets him. He is dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, a black waistcoat and Oxfords— concessions to the meeting, he confesses.

Born in Bangalore to an academically and medically inclined family—his grandfather was a general physician—Jayachandra graduated from the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune in 1985. After spending some time in Bangalore at St Martha’s Hospital and St John’s Medical College, he went to the US to study further (he has an MD and a PhD from the SUNY Health Science Centre, New York). While there, he became interested in the brain, more specifically the cortical column.

Over the years, scientists have come to regard the cortical column as the key to the holy grail—building an artificial or electrical model of the brain.

The cortical column is just a group of neurons or brain cells located in the cerebral cortex. The cortex is the part of the brain that deals with memory, awareness, thought, consciousness, and language. The cortical column is of interest to scientists because probes can be inserted into it at a right angle.

It is also of interest to them because the neurons there have almost similar receptive fields, or area where a stimulus will generate a response from the corresponding neuron.

Put simply, the cortical column is like an even or uniform electrical conducting field.

Understanding the cortical column and mapping it is at the core of an ongoing effort to build a simulated brain, the Blue Brain Project, the result of a partnership between IBM and Swiss university Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). As the man behind this initiative, Henry Markham, project director at the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL, said in a 2005 article in New Scientist (the same year the initiative was launched): “It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time…”

Markham added in the New Scientist article that he and his team hope to use the model to understand how certain malfunctions of the brain’s microcircuits could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression.

Jayachandra’s interest in the column arises from his belief that chips of the future could be modelled on it. “Think of the cortical column as a chip,” he says.

So, when he came back to India in 1999, Jayachandra, who had become interested in computing, built a rudimentary supercomputer and started studying the monkey cortical column.

The effort—building the supercomputer, not studying the monkey’s brain—resulted in a company, Peacock Solutions Pvt. Ltd, one of India’s earliest supercomputer companies.

It was at the Peacock Solutions stall at IT.com, an annual IT industry jamboree in Bangalore, that Jayachandra experienced his moment of truth.

Mornings at IT.com, even today, are meant for business. On most afternoons, the exhibition is thrown open to the public—part of an effort to popularize computers and computing. Jayachandra had some interesting show-and-tells running at the Peacock stall.

The audience was impressed but some left muttering that it would have been better in Kannada. Jayachandra thought so too.

The challenge For the past eight years, Jayachandra has been working on the Brahmi keyboard. He was ready with the product by 2006, but says he thought it would be best to launch it after he had the patents for it. In 2008, he received US patents 7414616 and 7420543 for the Indic language keyboard. In 2009, he received Indian patent number 230234 for the same.

He hasn’t spent the intervening period building an organization because that isn’t what he does. There are a few people like Rahman who work with him. The money for developing the keyboard, much lower than $2 million—“How do you put a value on the effort and time?” Jayachandra says when asked to come up with a number—came from family, friends and IT projects Jayachandra did, in Bangalore, and in Minnesota, where he spent some time raising money, setting up an open-source and local language software company Kalibonca, and practising his rifle shooting (the good doctor is into guns).

There has been a smattering of interest, from investors, media and users in the product. In 2007, Kalibonca, named after 19th century London street herbalist Dr Bokanky’s miracle cure, the Kalibonca root from Madras, received a rash of publicity from Indian media for its Hindi keyboard.

In February, Jayachandra met Mohanjit Jolly, the head of the local arm of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Jolly was initially enthusiastic and then, says Jayachandra, suggested that the doctor build a team and an organization around his idea.

Jayachandra also says that Jolly suggested he get in touch with the Helion Fund, an Indian venture capital firm. Jolly didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. Jayachandra says he decided there would be enough time to meet venture capitalists after he had the product ready.

In 2008, Ashish Sinha who runs PluGGd.in, a site that lists and profiles start-ups, reviewed Jayachandra’s efforts positively. Sinha says he was impressed by the Brahmi keyboard, but adds that its success will really depend on Jayachandra’s efforts to forge partnerships with companies such as Microsoft or license the technology out to them. Sinha is a sort of weathervane in the start-up space in India, but even his write-up didn’t induce much interest in Jayachandra—except from one person who thought the doctor’s efforts to build a local language keyboard were an affront to earlier keyboards that had been in existence for at least three decades.

That’s a common reaction in the keyboard fraternity. Some of it may have to do with the lack of knowledge of Jayachandra’s patents and products. And some of it may have to do with the fact that some scientists consider the local language keyboard problem solved. In February, after the officer walking Rahman through the e-governance centre was finished, he told her why he thought her product wouldn’t work—the Inscript keyboard was there and worked well.

Rahman says the officer then seemed to wrestle with his thoughts till he found exactly what he was looking for. It was a piece of advice for Indians who went to the US and then came back with magic cures for everything—including local language computing issues.

“You should go back to the US,” he said. www.livemint.com To find out how the keyboard works, log on to www.livemint.com/brahmi.htm

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM TO COMMUNICATE

mahesh jayachandra

‘HOW DO YOU PUT A VALUE ON THE EFFORT AND TIME?’

O

ne day in February, Farah Rahman visited the office of the bureaucrat who oversees the Indian government’s efforts to use computers and the Internet to better service citizens (e-governance it’s called).

The office is in Lutyens’ Delhi, the part of the Indian capital planned by British architect Edwin Lutyens, and Rahman met the officer a little after 6pm, by which time most officials in the e-government department had left. She found the officer sitting in darkness—there had been an electricity breakdown—behind a table loaded with files, books and documents.

Rahman is a petite criminal lawyer from Minnesota whose family moved there from Hyderabad in the mid-1980s. She moved back to India to work with a scientist who had invented a normal 101-key keyboard that could handle Indian languages.

The way she says it, the officer was disappointed that all she had to offer was a keyboard. He asked for a sample, inspected it, and thrust it back at her. “Keyboards? We have (local language) keyboards,” he said.

And then the officer deputed another officer to walk Rahman through what she describes as a shiny new e-governance centre.

The entrepreneur Rahman works with is Mahesh Jayachandra, a neurophysician who has both US and Indian patents for keyboards in Indic languages—a group of Indo-European languages including Sanskrit, most modern Indian languages, even some Asian languages. In a show of obvious symbolism, he plans to launch the keyboard, which was ready a few years back, today.

Behind the story of the Brahmi keyboard, as Jayachandra has termed his product, is the story of how a neurophysician who hopes to one day build an electrical model of the brain ended up inventing a keyboard. And the story of efforts by several scientists before him to solve a problem that, on the face of it, appears unsolvable.

The keyboard

TEXT BY R. SUKUMAR PHOTOGRAPH BY HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Mahesh Jayachandra invented the Brahmi keyboard for regional Indian language users, which works by simply arranging the keys in a particular order, and assigning one key for matras and another for halants

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The Qwerty keyboard most computers are equipped with has 101 keys. That’s more than adequate to represent the 26 letters of the English alphabet comprising five vowels and 21 consonants. Each letter is assigned a distinct key, which means users do not have to press multiple keys to type a letter.

Indic languages have far more vowels and consonants. Hindi, for instance, has 11 vowels and 33 consonants. Then there are the squiggles called matras and halants in Hindi that lend an entirely different sound to the letter they are attached to. The matras are attached to vowels and the halants to consonants. Were each letter of an Indic language to be assigned a distinct key, the keyboard would need to have at least 1,500 keys.

While users may like to think of it in terms

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

of keys, scientists think of it in terms of Unicode, an international standard applicable across languages where each letter, number or symbol is given a unique numeric value that works across various computing programs.

Apart from letters and numbers, anyone working on a local language keyboard in India also has to allow for special characters such as Om (Sanskrit originally but used in almost all Indian languages) and others that are specific to one language. Tamil has one, Marathi a few, and even Telugu has some that serve as small weighing units (they were probably created to weigh the fabled diamonds of Golconda).

India thought it had the problem licked when Mohan Tambe came up with the Inscript keyboard in the 1980s. Tambe came up with the idea for the keyboard at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, and perfected it at India’s then freshly minted Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, or C-DAC. Inscript, a phonetic keyboard, forms the basis of most local language keyboards currently in use in the country.

Such keyboards, though, require users to perform multiple operations before they can type a particular character. Given the level of complexity involved, it could take anyone between six and nine months to be trained in using an Inscript keyboard. That may not seem like much, and, indeed, one reason why there hasn’t been much progress in developing alternatives to the Inscript keyboard could simply be that many scientists and the government thought they had this particular problem sorted.

But there are some who think that the unavailability of a simpler Indic languages keyboard is one of the factors behind the digital divide. And the quest for an alternative has continued.

In 2004, researchers from IIT Bombay came up with the concept of a local language keyboard designed on the basis of the structure and usage of languages.

In 2007, C-DAC partnered with an Israeli company to create a LooKeys keyboard, where a camera on top of the monitor captured the position of the user’s fingers on the keyboard and read the corresponding letter.

In between, in 2006, HP Labs won a Wall Street Journal technology innovation award in the consumer category for a so-called gesture keyboard. Only, it wasn’t really a keyboard.

One of the scientists behind it, Shekhar Borgaonkar, department director, HP Labs, says it was created more to address the issue of access than to facilitate typing (one reason why it isn’t a keyboard). The product is simply a tablet on which the vowels, consonants and numbers of the Indic language are arranged. To get a matra derivative, the user simply uses a pen to scribble the matra on top of the

corresponding letter. Borgaonkar claims the product has 95% accuracy. This writer tried it out for a few minutes—he isn’t an expert in Hindi—and discovered that the accuracy was closer to 100%. But it isn’t a keyboard.

Still, HP hasn’t really pushed the technology because, Borgaonkar says, it doesn’t see much demand for it. The product, however, is available through a test marketing company with which HP has a partnership.

Jayachandra’s Brahmi keyboard is a real keyboard. And it works by simply arranging the keys in a particular order, assigning keys for matras and halants, and making use of the Shift key (much like English keyboards do). Nitu Thakur, at St Joseph’s Boys High School (also called the European School to differentiate it from another school of the same name) in Bangalore, was one of its first users. A teacher of Hindi, it took her no time at all to master the keyboard. And she tested it out by typing a question paper for a Hindi examination. “It’s just like typing in English,” she said.

Jayachandra has both US and India patents for the keyboard. The patents cover all Indic languages, so apart from several languages spoken in India, he can also look forward to producing keyboards in Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka) should he wish to.

Jayachandra thinks no one will be interested in just a keyboard—a CD with the software and a keyboard-shaped sticker with both Hindi and English letters can convert any keyboard into a Brahmi keyboard in minutes. His company, called Brahmi Computing, is looking to launch a computer, also branded Brahmi.

The box will come bundled with a Linux-based Hindi operating system, and loads of free software utilities—math, painting, games, astronomy, the works.

The scientist Jayachandra is hoping to make enough money by licensing the technology or selling PCs to get back to his first love— electrophysiology. He wants to be the first to build a proper electrical model of the brain.

Now 47, Jayachandra is a dark wiry man with a jet-black beard and equally black mane of unruly hair that has been made to submit to some sort of order on the day this reporter meets him. He is dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, a black waistcoat and Oxfords— concessions to the meeting, he confesses.

Born in Bangalore to an academically and medically inclined family—his grandfather was a general physician—Jayachandra graduated from the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune in 1985. After spending some time in Bangalore at St Martha’s Hospital and St John’s Medical College, he went to the US to study further (he has an MD and a PhD from the SUNY Health Science Centre, New York). While there, he became interested in the brain, more specifically the cortical column.

Over the years, scientists have come to regard the cortical column as the key to the holy grail—building an artificial or electrical model of the brain.

The cortical column is just a group of neurons or brain cells located in the cerebral cortex. The cortex is the part of the brain that deals with memory, awareness, thought, consciousness, and language. The cortical column is of interest to scientists because probes can be inserted into it at a right angle.

It is also of interest to them because the neurons there have almost similar receptive fields, or area where a stimulus will generate a response from the corresponding neuron.

Put simply, the cortical column is like an even or uniform electrical conducting field.

Understanding the cortical column and mapping it is at the core of an ongoing effort to build a simulated brain, the Blue Brain Project, the result of a partnership between IBM and Swiss university Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). As the man behind this initiative, Henry Markham, project director at the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL, said in a 2005 article in New Scientist (the same year the initiative was launched): “It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time…”

Markham added in the New Scientist article that he and his team hope to use the model to understand how certain malfunctions of the brain’s microcircuits could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression.

Jayachandra’s interest in the column arises from his belief that chips of the future could be modelled on it. “Think of the cortical column as a chip,” he says.

So, when he came back to India in 1999, Jayachandra, who had become interested in computing, built a rudimentary supercomputer and started studying the monkey cortical column.

The effort—building the supercomputer, not studying the monkey’s brain—resulted in a company, Peacock Solutions Pvt. Ltd, one of India’s earliest supercomputer companies.

It was at the Peacock Solutions stall at IT.com, an annual IT industry jamboree in Bangalore, that Jayachandra experienced his moment of truth.

Mornings at IT.com, even today, are meant for business. On most afternoons, the exhibition is thrown open to the public—part of an effort to popularize computers and computing. Jayachandra had some interesting show-and-tells running at the Peacock stall.

The audience was impressed but some left muttering that it would have been better in Kannada. Jayachandra thought so too.

The challenge For the past eight years, Jayachandra has been working on the Brahmi keyboard. He was ready with the product by 2006, but says he thought it would be best to launch it after he had the patents for it. In 2008, he received US patents 7414616 and 7420543 for the Indic language keyboard. In 2009, he received Indian patent number 230234 for the same.

He hasn’t spent the intervening period building an organization because that isn’t what he does. There are a few people like Rahman who work with him. The money for developing the keyboard, much lower than $2 million—“How do you put a value on the effort and time?” Jayachandra says when asked to come up with a number—came from family, friends and IT projects Jayachandra did, in Bangalore, and in Minnesota, where he spent some time raising money, setting up an open-source and local language software company Kalibonca, and practising his rifle shooting (the good doctor is into guns).

There has been a smattering of interest, from investors, media and users in the product. In 2007, Kalibonca, named after 19th century London street herbalist Dr Bokanky’s miracle cure, the Kalibonca root from Madras, received a rash of publicity from Indian media for its Hindi keyboard.

In February, Jayachandra met Mohanjit Jolly, the head of the local arm of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Jolly was initially enthusiastic and then, says Jayachandra, suggested that the doctor build a team and an organization around his idea.

Jayachandra also says that Jolly suggested he get in touch with the Helion Fund, an Indian venture capital firm. Jolly didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. Jayachandra says he decided there would be enough time to meet venture capitalists after he had the product ready.

In 2008, Ashish Sinha who runs PluGGd.in, a site that lists and profiles start-ups, reviewed Jayachandra’s efforts positively. Sinha says he was impressed by the Brahmi keyboard, but adds that its success will really depend on Jayachandra’s efforts to forge partnerships with companies such as Microsoft or license the technology out to them. Sinha is a sort of weathervane in the start-up space in India, but even his write-up didn’t induce much interest in Jayachandra—except from one person who thought the doctor’s efforts to build a local language keyboard were an affront to earlier keyboards that had been in existence for at least three decades.

That’s a common reaction in the keyboard fraternity. Some of it may have to do with the lack of knowledge of Jayachandra’s patents and products. And some of it may have to do with the fact that some scientists consider the local language keyboard problem solved. In February, after the officer walking Rahman through the e-governance centre was finished, he told her why he thought her product wouldn’t work—the Inscript keyboard was there and worked well.

Rahman says the officer then seemed to wrestle with his thoughts till he found exactly what he was looking for. It was a piece of advice for Indians who went to the US and then came back with magic cures for everything—including local language computing issues.

“You should go back to the US,” he said. www.livemint.com To find out how the keyboard works, log on to www.livemint.com/brahmi.htm

L11

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FREEDOM TO EXPRESS

arundhati nag

‘I SPENT YEARS CONVINCING CEOS ABOUT MY DREAM’ TEXT BY PAVITRA JAYARAMAN PHOTOGRAPH BY HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

tanding in the middle of her messy office on the third level of Ranga Shankara, Bangalore, thespian Arundhati Nag gets ready to clear up some space, promising that my questions will get her undivided attention. “I have a habit of keeping small things because they serve as a reminder of some occasion, or can be used in the future,” she says, pointing to a block of teak wood lying on her table. It was a sample that came when the theatre, a prized landmark of the city, was being built around a decade back.

Her office is tucked away in a corner, away from the bustle of rehearsals and ticket counters in Ranga Shankara. But she says she likes to watch who is coming into the theatre, or at least hear the rehearsals from the corridors, and spends little time in the office.

S

Nag, now 53, is the woman behind one of India’s most vibrant cultural spaces—a space for performing arts, meant for promoting new talent and reviving forgotten ones. Ranga Shankara’s circular stage is modelled on the Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai, founded by Jennifer Kapoor in 1944, and Nag’s passion for the stage and her doggedness have ensured its success.

Built on land reserved for civic amenities in a residential area in south Bangalore, Ranga Shankara, which opened its doors in 2004 in memory of Shankar Nag, her late husband, follows an at least “a play a day” policy, six days a week. It may be by amateurs or professionals, in regional languages or in English. It’s not uncommon to see a Kannada-speaking housewife from Bangalore’s traditional Jayanagar area walk into Ranga Shankara to watch a Kannada play with her friends, or Bangalore’s Bengali residents reunite during a Bengali theatre festival.

“Every theatre person wants to create that unique space dedicated to drama; some do it in their gardens, I just went a few steps ahead,” Nag says.

Nag was born in Delhi, but her family moved to Mumbai when she was 10. Acting and drama came naturally to her. “My mother used to play the tabla as a child. Her grandmother ruled that a Brahmin girl will not be seen on stage, so at the age of 4, she performed from behind the curtains,” she says. At 17, when her acting talents were just about taking shape, she met Shankar Nag, the acclaimed Kannada actor, through theatre. Six years later, the two got married and she moved to Bangalore.

“Bangalore had the Kalakshetra, which was open to all kinds of performances.

There was no space dedicated to drama, like there was Prithvi or the Shivaji Mandir in Mumbai. Ever since then, building a theatre was a dream that I never shook off,” says Nag. In 1990, Shankar died in an accident. It was so sudden that it took

Nag a year to set foot on stage. “A year later, the moment I said my first line, when my sound broke, I knew it was all okay. I knew that the absence of Shankar was not going to destroy me.

The last sentence that Shankar and I shared was about theatre and the first act of sanity after his death was theatre,” Nag says.

Two years later, Nag, with other members of the theatre community such as Girish Karnad and M.S. Sathyu, created the Sanket Trust. “We used to have weekly meetings of like-minded people, and like all movements, this one also had its share of people drifting in and going out. After several visits to the chief minister’s office, the trust was allotted a plot of land at JP Nagar on a 30-year lease. From then on, I began collecting money from anybody and everybody I was able to convince. I am sure there must have been people who gave me money to stop me from constantly pestering them,” she laughs. The contributions ranged from Rs5 from ordinary theatre lovers to big sums from industrialists. “I spent years convincing CEOs about my dream. I must say some of them were really generous.” While someone donated glass, someone else offered to cut the glass.

Ten years later, in October 2004, the complex designed by architect Sharukh Mistry was opened to the public.

Performing groups pay the trust Rs2,500 for a show, and tickets are priced mostly at Rs50. “We take a cut of the ticket money only when it’s priced above Rs50, but no ticket here costs more than Rs221,” she says, pointing out that the rent of Rs2,500 barely serves to pay the electricity cost for a day. “We almost never break even; this isn’t a business, it’s public service,” she says.

Nag’s only dream for Ranga Shankara: “We should be able to influence the direction that Indian theatre takes from here.”

S

“activist” doesn’t sit heavily on her shoulders. Soft-spoken and polite, Abdulali talks about her journey in a matter-of-fact way—the mundane paperwork, the long waits in court, the struggles with those in power and even a case of physical assault.

In a country like India, where the issues that need attention are many more than the people addressing them, it surprised everyone that Abdulali chose to fight noise pollution. No heart-rending personal backstory made her choose this cause. “I was more inclined to go back to a job after my kids. But I did not need to work for money. There are other important things in life and if each of us with some extra time took up an issue, our country would change,” she says.

Born and bred in Bandra, Abdulali helped her father with the family business till her marriage. A few years after her daughter’s birth in 1990, she found she had some free time and decided to work with her uncle Saad Ali, who was the chairman of Beag.

Noise pollution was his pet cause, but he couldn’t make enough time for it,

and Abdulali took it up.

It was through her efforts that noise pollution started getting attention, at least in Maharashtra. Small white boards saying “Silence Zone” can now be found outside the high court, schools and hospitals. On 7 April last year, Mumbai observed a “No Honking Day”, thanks to Abdulali’s efforts. Fifty NGOs and citizen groups participated in the campaign along with the Mumbai traffic police. Around 7,000 motorists were fined that day by the police.

After the court order in 2003, a newspaper published her number along with the news. She was inundated with calls. “People would cry on the phone with sad stories. There were sick people who couldn’t recover. A baby got convulsions because of loud festival noise,” she says.

But the passage of the order, like many others in our country, did not mean implementation. There wasn’t even any real data. It took her three years to collect and organize the data on noise levels in the city. She went to around 100 sites in the nine days of Navratri to get readings.

In 2006, she registered Awaaz Foundation as an NGO to work solely on the issue of noise pollution. As her two children grew up, she took up other environmental issues such as air pollution and illegal sand mining. In fact, in 2004, she says, she was assaulted at Kihim Beach in Alibaug by the son and employees of an MLA. They were allegedly trying to get away before the police arrived, but she blocked their way. “The sand mining still hasn’t stopped and it took me five years to finally get a hearing for it in the Alibaug court.”

And that, for her, is the hardest part.

“It’s frustrating when people (politicians) who should be supporting you oppose you. But having said that, I have got a lot of support also.”

She already has her next battle lined up. The Maharashtra government has given the nod for helipads atop residential buildings. “Imagine the noise of a helicopter landing on that building,” she says, pointing at a building next to hers. “Why should we even be fighting this when it’s so obviously wrong?”

Inspired by

Mahatma Gandhi I believe his saying: ‘There is enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed’.

FREEDOM FROM NOISE

sumaira abdulali ‘A BABY GOT CONVULSIONS BECAUSE OF LOUD FESTIVAL NOISE’ TEXT BY RACHANA NAKRA PHOTOGRAPH BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Inspired by

My great grandmother Sakina Lukmani In spite of being a Muslim woman and not having much freedom, she participated in the freedom movement.

umaira Abdulali had been waiting her turn in court since morning and she could be there the rest of the day. It was 6 August, and the Bombay high court was supposed to decide on an appeal by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for relaxing noise rules in the silence zones for the 10 days of Ganeshotsav.

But she is used to waiting. In 2002, when Abdulali was working for Bombay Environmental Action Group (Beag), her team filed a public interest litigation on noise pollution in the high court.

The first court order banning loudspeakers in silence zones was passed a year later. This time, the wait turned out to be two weeks long.

The matter was adjourned and it’ll be another day in court for Abdulali and her lawyers. But Abdulali doesn’t mind.

It’s part of her job.

When I meet the 48-year-old lady at her residence in a leafy, charming bylane in Bandra, she’s just as composed as she was in court. As she describes her 10-year journey from a rookie NGO worker to battle-hardy activist, you realize that the mantle of

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FREEDOM TO READ

navin kishore

‘WE’RE NOT JUST AN INDIAN PUBLISHING HOUSE’ TEXT BY RAJDEEP DATTA ROY PHOTOGRAPH BY INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Inspired by

Mahatma Gandhi I grew up on ideals that Gandhi lived by.

In fact, our Peaceworks Programme has been inspired by the teachings of Gandhi.

N

avin Kishore pulls out books at random. Andre Gorz, Slavenka Drakulic, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tariq Ali, Guillaume Apollinaire—the names come tumbling out. A heavy downpour has brought traffic outside to a grinding halt and drivers are letting their horns rip. But despite the open windows, the room in the first floor Seagull Books office in south Kolkata is quiet. “The road outside was an avenue lined by trees when we rented this place in 1976, but it’s getting worse by the day,” says Kishore, who founded the independent publishing house that brings out books on art and culture.

“We’re not just an Indian publishing house,” he says, rattling off names of a fast growing international list of authors. “In today’s globalized world, we should be able to publish anything and everything in our chosen field of interest regardless of where we are physically as long as we can provide quality and assure our authors the courtesy of a worldwide distribution. We are bringing back thought that had disappeared from bookshelves because it doesn’t sell vast numbers,” says the man whose publishing house has the world rights for Paul Celan, Rabindranath Tagore and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

“For instance, Sartre’s The Aftermath of War may not find favour with mainstream publishing companies, for whom it’s all about figures,” says Kishore, lamenting the fact that most bookstores nowadays, especially the chain bookstores, don’t stock the works of most such authors. He recalls a small store at The Oberoi Grand hotel arcade, named Foreign Publishers, which he used to frequent in his college days. “Not only did the old gent who ran the place know what authors a reader liked, but would also lead the reader into other realms,” says Kishore, adding that many of the authors he loves to read now were introduced to him by “Mr Chatterjee of Foreign Publishers”.

“Chain bookstores need to train their staff better. The young men and women wearing red, yellow T-shirts try hard, are earnest, but

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don’t know anything about books,” says Kishore. “What is needed are more independent bookstores such as Foreign Publishers, where the owners are good at reading the mind of the buyer.”

According to Kishore, whose parents came from Lahore during Partition, the independent, stand-alone bookstore which lost ground initially to chain bookstores is gradually staging a comeback and is the only way forward for serious book lovers. “Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones are all in trouble, but independents are surviving because of their specialist stocking and lack of complicated overheads.”

Besides buying world rights, and not merely the rights for India or South Asia, to the published and unpublished works of serious authors, Seagull also commissions original work such as the What Was Communism? series, which includes Drakulic’s book Two Underdogs and a Cat, to mark 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Offence series, a collection of six books that discuss offence from the perspective of the offender, the victim, and the religious context of Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians. “We are trying to change the traditional India-West relationship and not end up merely reprinting their original titles for the Indian market,” says Kishore. “We print books here and in the UK and distribute in the rest of the world.”

Outside the subcontinent, Seagull’s books are distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “The interesting thing is that we have no offices in the UK or the US, only good distribution which is fed by books being shipped by sea and by air from the different printing locations, Kolkata, London and soon, Chicago. We want our books to originate and resonate through the world as a complete entity—designed and edited by us in Kolkata, printed as we want, where we want, on the kind of paper we want,” says Kishore.

Seagull, which also publishes the works of eminent author Mahasweta Devi, artist K.G. Subramanyan and film-maker Mrinal Sen, among others, invited representatives from Germany’s Suhrkamp Verlag, a leading European publisher of fine literature, to Kolkata to meet a number of Bengali publishers last year.

Kishore rues the fact that the Bengali publishers who are doing exemplary work in promoting young, upcoming Bengali authors as well as the established ones are not organized enough to move to the world stage. “For instance, they have to learn to prepare their advance information of future books at least a year in advance so as to be able to circulate it at venues such as the Frankfurt Book Fair.”

Kishore’s association with the arts, particularly theatre, started at the age of 16.

He worked as a theatre lighting technician after ill health forced his father to leave his job with the Oberoi hotel chain. “As children in the 1950s, we would spend eight months at the Oberoi Palace hotel in Kashmir and the remaining four at the Grand (Kolkata),” says Kishore, who still remembers how he and his sister would play at the alfresco restaurant of the Kolkata hotel, Scheherazade, which used to be where the hotel’s swimming pool is now. His involvement with theatre continued as an English literature student at St Xavier’s College from 1970-73, though he also started working for a motor parts company. His job was to dictate letters and he got paid Rs65 every month, of which Rs19 went in college fees and books.

“From 1974, I did a lot of lighting under the watchful eyes of Sumit Roy (whose group Red Curtain is one of the oldest English theatre groups in the city). We also did a lot of popular theatre to subsidize the so-called ‘workshoppy’ theatre.” In 1982, while working at a theatre festival with scholar and critic Samik Bandyopadhyay, whom Kishore calls his mentor, they felt the need for a publishing house for theatre. “Over Bloody Marys on the lawns of Astor (The Astor hotel), the plan was hatched,” says Kishore.

With a loan from Syndicate Bank and ITC Ltd’s support, Seagull launched on 20 June, 1982. ITC gave seed capital of Rs5 lakh and over the next five-six years the company gave a total of Rs13 lakh. “I was already doing some promotionals for them and they bailed me out, with practically no strings attached,” says Kishore.

The name Seagull came from a 1972 rock concert Roy had produced, in which a band called Great Bear, which later became High, performed a song titled Seagull Empire.

“Afterwards, I started doing a lot of concerts on my own under the Seagull Empire banner, so when the book business was launched in 1982, Seagull was a natural choice,” says Kishore. www.livemint.com Navin Kishore talks about his philosophy on publishing at www.livemint.com/navinkishore.htm

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM TO DREAM

deep joshi

‘MY BROTHER WOULD ASK ME, EVEN THREE YEARS AGO: ARE YOU OKAY?’

TEXT BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN PHOTOGRAPH BY HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi

He was intuitive like me. Even if I sound too big for my shoes to be saying this, that’s one affinity I have with him.

W

hen Deep Joshi was 8, a young community development officer arrived in his village in the hills of Uttarakhand, to teach its residents about the dry-bed cultivation of paddy.

He wore trousers and polished shoes, and Joshi remembers thinking: “How is this sahib going to cope with village life?”

But he did cope. He worked with the earth, and he used shovels like everybody else, and he measured off distances with a piece of string, with Joshi holding on to the other end. “It was my first encounter with community development,” Joshi says. “So until I went to America, I would continue to think that development was only the government’s arena.”

The evolution of Joshi’s career—including with the sustainable livelihood NGO Professional Assistance for Development Action (Pradan), which he co-founded in 1983 and which helped win him a Magsaysay award this year—has been, in a sense, the evolution of the image of who should be working in development. Pradan was established because Joshi saw that NGOs were “bleeding hearts but little more”, and because he saw their crying need for top-tier professionals, or for graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

Joshi himself is an example of just that sort of professional. After studying mechanical engineering at Allahabad’s Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, he turned lecturer at the same institute out of, as he puts it, “some sort of idealism”. In 1971, the Union government announced a scholarship for overseas studies, which Joshi stumbled across and decided to apply for. “The idea was to do a PhD and return, so I took a sabbatical,” he says. “But of course, I didn’t come back there. So essentially, they fired me.”

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researching friction-temperature gradients, Joshi rapidly lost interest in his subject.

Simultaneously, as he spent time with the small community of Indian students—“over beer, discussing politics and so on”—he acquired an interest in economics. So after completing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, he switched to MIT’s Sloan School of Management, got an MBA, and returned to India with $200 (around Rs10,000 now) in his pocket, not entirely sure what to do with his education.

In 1977, Joshi joined the Systems Research Institute in Pune—just months after N.R. Narayana Murthy had left it—and was sent to rural Maharashtra on his first project, where he met the Aroles,

a doctor couple. Joshi never fails to mention the influence of that meeting.

“There was Mabelle Arole, God bless her soul, with a degree from Johns Hopkins University, sitting on the floor, talking animatedly with these Maharashtrian women,” he says. “The image of a doctor is the image of authority, and authority didn’t sit down with poor people.”

The Aroles, with their excellent qualifications and their zeal for village work, were the first shining examples that Joshi encountered of professionals in development. It is, he admits, a challenge to convince young graduates of this path.

“Personally, if I hadn’t met Sheela, a (life) partner who understood that I’d be working with an organization with uncertain finances, that it would be modest salaries and third-class train travel, I don’t think I could have done it,” Joshi says. “People will always say, ‘Why are you joining an NGO?’ That tension is always there.”

Joshi met Sheela at the Ford Foundation, when they were working there in the early 1980s. “He’s a very different man,” Sheela says. “He’s very quiet—we’ve gone out for dinners where the whole occasion he won’t have said a single word. Once, some guy was going on about the New India, and how India was developing so fast, and so on—and then he said one thing too many, and finally Deep spoke: ‘Developing for whom?’”

“Deep has strong values, and he’s interested in their practical application—he’s not one of those armchair types that train the world while sitting in Habitat Centre,” says Vijay Mahajan, Pradan’s first executive director, now chairman of the microfinance group BASIX, and a self-confessed soulmate of Joshi’s. “And I have to say, in favour of Indian society and government, that whatever good work we did has, with some lag time, always been supported and recognized.”

Since Pradan’s first recruits, its base of employees has broadened beyond the IITs and IIMs into agricultural colleges and bigger public universities. But image-wise, development work isn’t quite into the safety zone yet. “My brother would ask me, even three years ago: ‘Are you okay? Is Pradan getting funded? Are the salaries coming?’” Joshi laughs.

Sheela knows, for a fact, that “many of Pradan’s younger hires—even those who have been there already for a few years—are still asked why they want to work for an NGO.” This summer, though, they found their answer. They simply printed out, and sent to their parents, copies of the citation of Joshi’s Magsaysay award.

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suniti solomon

‘MY BIGGEST FEAR IS A RESISTANT VIRUS’

TEXT BY ANUPAMA CHANDRASEKARAN PHOTOGRAPH BY M LAXMAN/MINT

Inspired by

Mahatma Gandhi He was so simple, humble and quite unlike what we see in the politicians of today.

S

he was a little over 13 when she was kidnapped and forced into the sex trade. In 1986, this young girl was one of the first six people in India that Suniti Solomon detected as being infected by the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Since then, Chennai-based Solomon’s life has revolved around people affected

by AIDS, the condition that HIV causes.

“The minute someone says he or she is HIV positive, the word which crops up in most people’s mind is ‘immoral’,” says 69-year-old Dr Solomon, sitting in her office in south Chennai. “She was the first girl we tested that I spoke to, and she changed me.”

The young girl, who resisted her assailants for three days, gave in after being starved for 72 hours. Six months later, she managed to escape, reached a remand home in Mylapore and was one of the 100 sex workers that Solomon tested. After spending six years at the remand home, she joined Dr Solomon’s non-profit YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE), established in 1993, but died soon after.

“It was frightening really,” says Dr Solomon, herself the only girl among eight children born to the Gaitondes, a Chennai-based Maharashtrian Hindu family in the leather trade. “My husband was a little worried and didn’t want me to work with HIV-positive patients, most of whom at that time were homosexuals, those who self-injected drugs and sex workers. And I said, look, you have to listen to their stories and you wouldn’t say the same thing.”

The former teacher of medicine continues to be a counsellor, matchmaker, doctor, researcher and educationist for HIV patients. While most of the work in this field in India is geared towards spreading awareness about the disease, Dr Solomon’s organization provides medical help, counselling and employment opportunities for HIV/AIDS patients.

Her interest in medicine was triggered by the health officer’s annual visits to the Gaitonde home, when the eight children would line up for smallpox vaccine shots.

She studied at the Madras Medical College, where she met her husband, a cardiac surgeon.

For a little under a decade, she trained in pathology in Britain, the US and Australia, while travelling with her husband. But in 1973 the couple returned to settle in India, and work at a government-run hospital.

She went on to do her doctorate in medicine (MD) in microbiology and after serving as an assistant professor for a few

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years at the Madras Medical College, became a professor. That is when Dr Solomon, who was reading up on HIV/AIDS, decided to track the virus in India. With no openly gay community in the country in the 1980s—the first cases of HIV in the US were detected among gay men—she and one of her doctoral students decided to check the blood samples of female sex workers in Chennai. “The results of the first six tests were frightening,” she recalls.

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, an estimated 2.5 million people in India are HIV-positive or are afflicted by AIDS—the third largest population, after South Africa and Nigeria, among the 33 million people affected by the virus worldwide. “Even if three million are infected, only 20-30% of them know their status,” Dr Solomon says.

The weekly traffic at the YRG CARE clinic has gone up by 10 times since 1993; it now has 12,000 registered patients. More and more people are able to live longer with the help of drugs that in some cases now cost just 2% of the earlier rate.

But what is distressing to Dr Solomon is the rising percentage of Indian women infected by this virus (from 10% of the affected population in the 1990s to 50% now) even though 80% of them have single partners. Several Indian men often don’t disclose their illness to their families and give in to parental pressures to marry, endangering the life of an uninfected woman. Even if the man practises safe sex after counselling, there comes a time when the wife wants a child. “In some part of India, being childless is still a bigger stigma than being HIV-positive,” adds Dr Solomon, who herself faced a lot of societal pressures before she had her son, nearly 13 years after her marriage.

For Dr Solomon, the biggest joy is when she tests children of infected parents, usually brought in at 18 months, and the result is negative. At the time of our interview, her fridge was stocked with Mysore pak, a sweet, because a girl who had been brought to the centre had tested negative. Her HIV-positive mother had contracted the virus after a transfusion.

The problems persist. Parental disclosure to HIV-positive children is an issue most elders choose to postpone.

And then there is the constant pressure of ensuring her patients take the prescribed medicine. “My biggest fear is a resistant virus,” says Dr Solomon. “Then we would need new drugs, which means more money for research to find new drugs.”

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FREEDOM TO SMILE

satish kalra

‘THERE IS SOMETHING INHERENTLY ADDICTIVE ABOUT WORKING WITH KIDS’

TEXT BY ANINDITA GHOSE PHOTOGRAPH BY HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

Inspired by

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel India owes more to him than any other leader.

Working quietly, efficiently—with no flamboyance or thought for personal glory—he created an ‘integrated and unified’ nation.

S

atish Kalra is a curious kind of mechanical engineer: He engineers smiles.

Having worked for around 30 years in senior management positions with Hindustan Unilever and Ciba-Geigy in India, Switzerland and Singapore, Kalra was drawing a blank on post-retirement plans as he neared the end of a globetrotting career in 2000. He wasn’t interested in spirituality or keen on golf, and a consultancy job didn’t seem appealing enough.

So, when Kalra met the folks at Smile Train, an international organization that provides free cleft lip/palate operations to children in need, in Singapore by happenstance, he got drawn to the idea of working with a global charity. However, he was sceptical of international charities wanting to work in developing countries. He travelled to China, where Smile Train’s operations had just started, at his own expense. And after being convinced of the charity’s mission and ethics, got on board.

He also recalls meeting Wang Li—the first cleft-lipped child that Smile Train was going to be operating upon.

A cleft lip is an opening in the upper lip between the mouth and nose. A cleft palate is created when the roof of the mouth has a hole in it. Kalra explains a cleft abnormality in an infant as a “communication error” between chromosomes during a foetus’ development, which results in a condition that affects the lives of around four million children across the world.

Being born with a cleft in a developing country is largely a curse. Every baby born with a cleft in Uganda is given the name Ajok, which literally means “cursed by God”. Superstition and myth about cleft-lipped children abound. In India, for instance, there is a common belief that if a pregnant woman wields a knife during an eclipse, she will have a cleft-lipped baby. So strong is this belief that the phrase for a cleft lip in Telugu is grahanam-morri, translating to “eclipse-lip”.

In countries such as the US, clefts are corrected right after an infant is born, but in poorer countries where not everyone can afford surgery, they are often not operated upon. This renders the child unable to eat or speak properly and likely to end up facing a life of shame and isolation.

Yet, Kalra has no illusions that clefts warrant unique attention. “There are far greater problems than cleft palates in the world,” he observes, adding, “But one has to start somewhere.” He underlines the fact that a surgery which takes only around 45 minutes and costs Rs10,000 to conduct, can change a child’s life dramatically.

Over the last couple of years, Megan Mylan’s 2009 Academy Award-winning documentary, Smile Pinki, has helped raise awareness and funds for the cause. But there is still a lot of work to be done. According to Smile Train, India alone sees around 32,600 children born with clefts every year, and since its inception, Smile Train’s India programme

has helped at least 197,000 children.

While talking about Smile Train’s domestic reach, Kalra is reluctant to take any credit for the organization’s pioneering success. But as his colleagues from the New York headquarters explain, it really has been a one-man show.

Kalra spent his first two years without even seeing anyone from the corporate headquarters. He figured out how to build the programme, what type of partners would work best, raised funds and then relentlessly travelled around the country signing up the best hospitals and recruiting the best surgeons. His years in this field have warranted a busy itinerary that calls for travelling the length and breadth of the country, to the most remote locations, and identify local doctors with the potential to become Smile Train surgeons.

Leaning over the work desk at his office-residence in a quiet Delhi neighbourhood, dressed in simple formal wear, the self-starter light-heartedly admits to being both the “CEO and chief stamp licker” of the organization. Very mindful of its emphasis on keeping overheads to a bare minimum, he works without any support staff. “Social work requires more than just an altruistic heart,” he says. Kalra brings in the “more”—his business acumen and strong interpersonal skills are assets.

Kalra’s latest achievement is a programme called Smile Grants. Smile Train hospitals distribute Smile Grants to special families who are in desperate need.

These stipends help the families afford simple transportation to and from Smile Train hospitals; make up for lost days at work due to waiting in the hospital for their children to receive cleft care; and sometimes cover registration fees for their children to return to school.

Growing up, Kalra stayed away from medical school because he was terrified of blood. The youngest of six children, he was constantly chided by his siblings—all of whom are doctors—for not following suit.

Today, he is somehow in the thick of medical science.

Hirji Adenwalla, head of the Charles Pinto Centre for Cleft Lip and Palate in Trichur, Kerala, and a board member on Smile Train’s medical advisory panel, recalls one of his first meetings with Kalra: “He sat with me in my old consulting room, pad and pen in hand, and started making extensive notes.

When we met a year later, he spoke to me on equal terms like a cleft surgeon. I was staggered by the information that he had accumulated. I realized then that Smile Train in India was in safe hands.”

On his desktop, Kalra shows me numerous pictures and videos of cleft-lipped children before and after surgery. The children who have been operated on beam as they swing and run freely in playgrounds, possibly after years of isolation. Kalra is all smiles: “There is something inherently addictive about working with kids and watching their lives transform. It makes you want to carry on.”

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AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

THE BRITISH LEFT SIX DECADES TOO EARLY M

umbai’s Sea Link bridge took 10 years to make, cost Rs1,600 crore and was inaugurated last month.

For Rs50, it carries drivers across the Mahim Bay from Bandra to Worli’s Seaface. The bridge is designed to shorten the drive from north Mumbai suburbs to the city’s south, where the business district is.

Once the driver gets off the bridge at Worli, however, he cannot continue south.

This is because the Maharashtra government planned only for the Sea Link to bridge the bay: No thought was given to what the driver was to do once the bridge ended.

Blocked by a divider, the only way the driver can move is back north. So he drives in the opposite direction. Going around a signal, he travels an extra 1.2km before returning to the exact spot where he exited the bridge, but this time facing the right direction. We accept this mindlessness because it’s normal in India.

Indians don’t fully understand modern infrastructure because we have made no contribution to its advance, though we can purchase its designs. For us a bridge is an independent thing. Its environment is a different thing.

Our response to terror attacks is to add a security layer to five-star hotels. The idea of controlling the environment rather than the venue, the idea of a system and its process is alien, and difficult. We can learn about this, but we have nobody to teach us.

The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic.

Mumbai, not Hong Kong, would have been the centre for finance in Asia, instead of the second-rate city it has become since the British left.

Delhi would have more bits like the ones the British built, the only elegant parts of the city, just as British South Bombay is the only elegant part. Cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and Indore would have become civilized. Under English and Scottish bureaucrats, architecture, certainly civic architecture, would not be as ugly as it is.

Justice would mean something. Gandhi and Nehru repeatedly got arrested voluntarily because, correctly, they trusted British justice. Today’s politician resists arrest even though he may be innocent, because he’s liable to get stitched up, like Omar Abdullah.

What else would be better?

Education, through the Macaulay plan.

Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago.

Our Aryan ancestry (or fantasy) was gifted to us by William Jones in 1786, when he reported the link between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin. The barbarism of Muslims at Vijayanagar was revealed by Robert Sewell, when he translated the 16th century work of Fernaos Nunes and Domingos Paes. Between 1879 and 1894, Max Muller translated the entire Upanishad, Vedas and Dhammapada. This helped Vivekanand go lecture the Americans on India’s greatness at Chicago in 1893.

The great German tradition of Indology continues through men such as Heinrich von Stietencron, but a sustained engagement through colonial government would have resulted in more attention to Indian studies.

Growing up in Surat, the only books I had access to were in Andrews Library, built in 1850.

This is because Gujaratis, a mercantile people influenced

by Jains, have no use for literature. The British stuffed it down our throats like medicine, educating the first reformers, people such as Narmada Shankar who attended the Elphinstone Institute. Shankar compiled Gujarati’s first dictionary in 1873, but the native instinct was strong and he reverted to Vedic tribalism in the last decade of his life.

That is the cycle South Asians normally follow: illiteracy, awakening through contact with European culture, and then a belief in our superiority.

But our bombast is groundless. America’s First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Article 19(1)(a) of our Constitution also gave us the absolute right to freedom of speech. Within one year, the government amended that, denying us that freedom—and wisely. That was because we cannot have freedom of speech in a country where you can get killed for what you say. Or start a riot. It was different for Periyar and Manto because they lived under rule of law.

Nirad Chaudhuri was hated in 1951 for saying that British rule shaped and quickened all that was good within us. Today our best minds accept colonization

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

by migrating to nations where they cannot vote. But they go anyway, because they can succeed under the other man’s law, where the environment is better controlled than in the Indian city.

The Indian city would have benefited from remaining colonized, but what of the village? In 1981, Amartya Sen concluded that famine was better managed under democracy. But famine is an exceptional situation. Millions die every year in India from malnutrition, and independent India has been no good at changing this.

Watching Doordarshan a couple of days ago, I saw an advertisement. “You can build a

toilet in your house now!” it said, “contact the municipal department”.

Why did the villager need to be told in 2009 that he could build a toilet in his house? I could think of two reasons: He did not understand hygiene, and he was stopped from building one by the village’s upper caste.

A people who block each other and themselves need a patron.

Aakar Patel is a director at Hill Road Media.

Write to Aakar at replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR OWN ‘I QUIT’ MOVEMENT? O

n this, our nation’s Independence Day, I would like to ponder over a less weighty topic: my own independence. Not for me the crests and troughs of parenting and pet-tending. Been there, done that. The victories and vicissitudes of job and home too, have lost their sheen.

So I, like our nation did 62 years ago, want independence—from home, hearth, family, friends, and most important, schedules.

I want to hang upside down on a rainbow, balance on a butterfly, surf a dolphin’s crest, and attempt better imagery; perhaps even poetry.

The thing with freedom is that you have got to know what to do with it. Idiotic allusions to butterflies and rainbows aren’t enough. Like Lounge pointed out in an excellent cover story two years ago, all of us dream of leaving the urban grind for a rural idyll. Not everyone who retires to the farm, however, gets what they bargained for.

Some are bored with the slow pace; some struggle with friendships and children’s extra-curricular activities.

Dreams, however alluring, are not enough. You need a plan.

My plan was simple. I wanted a day off in which I was not accountable to anyone. With the diligence of an accountant before tax day, I went down my list. I told the sabziwallah who calls me daily on my cellphone to discuss the day’s vegetables that on 15 August, I would be incommunicado. He could deliver any vegetable he wanted to my house. This bit of freedom gave the man heartburn.

Cauliflower, he asked. Even if it is Rs24 per piece? Send four, I said expansively. What about hari mirch (green chillies)? Send a kilo for all I care, I replied.

Where is madam going, he wanted to know. Ah, but my dear fellow, I smiled. I cannot tell you.

Like Alice’s Cheshire cat, I am going to partially disappear.

So it went with the people who interact with me daily—the ironing man, baker, coconut-breaker. I tackled the family last. I happen to live in what might be called an extended joint family. Although we don’t live under one roof, my parents, brother, niece and nephew, my own family and a few good friends know where I am—geographically and emotionally.

One day, not so long ago, I rounded everyone up and said that I wanted liberation. My eight-year-old didn’t know what the word meant. So we went through a long and tedious explanation in which I tried to slip in some education. Just like Gandhiji marched in Dandi, I too am going to march for my own personal freedom, I said. My husband understood the words but not the concept and

this, I think, is a man thing.

Most men I know don’t want freedom. They want to watch cricket for hours, read The Economist, play pool, shoot hoops, watch Borat or Baywatch, all within the constraints of home and hearth. Unlike women, they are unfazed by leaking taps and rain pelting on newly washed clothes. These minor matters don’t interrupt their focus on the remote. A famous Tamil verse says that the ideal way to live is like dew on a lotus leaf. Men do that. The collective chaos that surrounds them only adds to their sense of relaxation.

Men, in other words, don’t crave independence. Nor do many women. My sister-in-law, for instance, is a paediatrician.

Patients call and page her at all hours with questions about vomiting, and emergencies ranging from swallowed nails to side effects of surgery. Being needed in this way doesn’t seem to bother her at all; in fact, she revels in being reliable and depended upon. The desire to escape then must be a personality thing. Some men have it and never commit to relationships.

Other women commit and then demand independence.

Independence means different things at different ages—crossing the street without holding an adult’s hand; going to a movie with a group of friends without adult supervision; the first school excursion without parents; going out with a forbidden male; leaving home for college; getting your own bank account and income; and onward till death. Every life stage confers with it some more independence—and dependence. Just ask a new parent, tied by umbilical cord to a diaper bag, what freedom is and they will answer—a potty-trained baby. Ask me what freedom is, and I will give you that most clichéd of answers. A road trip without a destination.

Samuel Coleridge has said that the inviting ‘V’ of the horizon while gunning down the highway gave him his first glimpse of an unfettered existence. Actually, it was my friend Sahasranamam Panchapakesan from Chennai who said that. His vagina monologues and dirty allusions to a V-shaped thing offering a glimpse of eternity cannot be printed in this respectable paper. But the point is that a road without destination seems to be a common enough fantasy for freedom, be it for Garrison Keillor or yours truly. Toss some

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bubbly in the trunk, grab a cold beer, put down the top of your Mustang, turn on the stereo, and let it rip. One day, one road trip, no destination. That was my dream. And here comes the tragic ending.

The plan was to do it today.

The use of past tense will not have escaped you. What can I tell you? Reality intervened in the form of bridge lessons, brunch invitations, soccer games and spa appointments that somehow cannot come undone.

Too many people to please and too little time to plan.

As we celebrate India’s independence from British oppression, I am just launching my “I Quit” movement. Even

God took a day off and every religion has its version of sabbath. I ask for little. I don’t seek sanyas, merely salvation from minutiae. The soaring octaves of the Jaya He in our national anthem create little flutters of longing in my heart.

Perhaps the next Independence Day will be mine too.

Shoba Narayan is studying Indian maps to create her one-day road trip sans destination. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan