Lounge 20 February 2010 by HT Media

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

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 8

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A Shiv Sena activist defacing a poster of My Name is Khan and hoisting the saffron flag at a movie theatre in Mumbai last week.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH YAHOO INDIA’S ARUN TADANKI >Page 6

KABADDIGITAL Carrom, ‘gilli danda’ and ‘teen patti’— traditional Indian games are being resurrected in videogame form >Page 7

THACKEROLOGY

101

THE GOOD LIFE

CULT FICTION

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE SIMPLE, BUT EXOTIC BRINJAL

s a mother whose kids read her articles, let me begin by saying that this column is R-rated. Keep it away from kids. To paraphrase the title of an iconic food essay by the late great David Foster Wallace in Gourmet magazine: Consider the brinjal. Genetically modified but roundly rejected by farmers; placed in limbo by India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh; spearheaded by the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco) through... >Page 4

What’s the Shiv Sena’s appeal? The Mumbai Marathi is disinherited from his city, and the Thackeray clan gives him an illusory sense of power >Page >Page 10 10

MUSIC MATTERS

R. SUKUMAR

SHUBHA MUDGAL

YOU NEED VISA POWER Inaugurating a series on his 51day cruise around South America, Wendell Rodricks recounts how the merrygo round began at home >Page 13

‘I FEEL OLD!’ Farhan Akhtar on inspiring others, his acting skills, and his alter ego >Page 17

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

MIDDLE AGE: READING THE SOUND OF AN COMICS ON MATH INDIAN HARMONY

CELLULOID COUTURE

HOME PAGE L3

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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

LOUNGE LOVES | SURENDER MOHAN PATHAK

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

Murder, he wrote

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

SHAH RUKH KHAN REVEALED…AGAIN

n the year since Discovery possibly because he allowed the Travel and Living channel crew free access—to his new Dilip planned and shot a 10-part docuChhabria-modified van which has mentary on Shah Rukh Khan, we a gym and a bathroom stocked know more than we’ve ever known with Ralph Lauren towels, his about Bollywood’s richest star. A Mumbai fortress-home Mannat, recent Business Today article caland even to his never-seen-before culated that Khan and his busiDubai home in Palm Jumeirah. nesses are worth approximately The camera’s a friend (literally Rs1,500 crore—or as much as because Khan’s own Red Chilpaper maker Ballarpur Industries. lies’ Idiot Box co-produced the For the first time since he entered show) and it happily trawls the Bollywood two decades ago—yes globe with him on the sets of My he’s the original poster boy of new Name is Khan, in Johannesburg India—we even heard Khan’s as he faces defeat in last year’s political voice in the controversy Indian Premier League, and in that preceded the release of his latLondon as he holidays with est film My Name is Khan. friends and family. For a couple of months now, his Maybe it was just my imaginaTwitter followers have had daily tion, but ever so often Khan actuaccess to his thoughts. We know ally seemed to relax and take a that when he was small he wanted breather from the endless volley to be an astronaut at night and a of smart one-liners he usually fires hockey player in the day. Instead, in his media interviews. So while he became an actor and now (in he tells us he understands how his words) he can do both. We Michael Jackson loved kids, he know that when negativity surfollows up the slick line with an rounds him he goes quiet, that his anecdote about how he’s shared stubble is greying and that his his biggest depressions with his favourite colours are black and children when they were young white. His wife and didn’t understand what he was saying. SPOTLIGHT Gauri never cooks, he dislikes spiders, Even if you’ve OD’ed on Khan likes tandoori chicken and both these past weeks, it’s fun to watch his children recently won gold him buy his own coffee, pause to medals in taekwondo. Son Aryan is His name is Khan: London, on a holiday with the kids. enjoy street performers and play a “crotching tiger” because of his soccer with his children in Lontendency to aim kicks at a specific part even if Khan did have juicy secrets, he don’s Hyde Park where he can “do the of his father’s anatomy. would be unlikely to share them in a things normal people do”. Of course Khan is a master of any tell-all confessional such as Agassi’s “Aryan don’t bully them or I’ll kick medium so when he casually shares the recently released autobiography Open. you,” he yells to his son, who Khan says name of the energy drink he drinks, you Indians don’t do that sort of thing. has a tendency to cheat a bit. There’s a know that, in all likelihood, it’s a brand Would Discovery be able to tell its lot about Shah Rukh Khan the father in he has endorsed. 30.5 million urban viewers anything this episode on holidays. And, for the Fans, journalists and even disinter- new about the star in Living with a first time, you get a glimpse of how his ested citizens who don’t actively track Superstar, I wondered as I settled down children deal with his stardom. Khan know a lot about the man. His life to watch a couple of episodes. The Rs25 The series doesn’t analyse his metehas been scrutinized and analysed crore mega show premieres on 26 Feb- oric rise or pontificate on his impact on more than any of his contemporaries. ruary and will air on Fridays at 9pm. Indian society and that’s a relief. And In 2005, Nasreen Munni Kabir proIn the foreword to her book, Chopra Khan, as he can always be counted duced a two-part documentary titled says Khan didn’t exactly hit go when upon to do, shares yet another sliver of The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh she told him she wanted to record his his present-day self. Khan. A year later Khan’s pal Mushtaq story. “He hesitated and didn’t think he “Is there going to be a day when I’ll Sheikh wrote Still Reading Khan. Film deserved it,” she says. Discovery’s wake up and I’ll have nothing more to critic Anupama Chopra recounted the Rahul Johri recalls a similar response. give?” he wonders aloud at one point. star’s life beautifully in 2007’s King of “He said I’m a normal guy, I wake up in He’s already calculated that even if he’s Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the the morning, go to work, come back given just one per cent of himself to Seductive World of Indian Cinema. and play with my kids.” each film, 65% is already gone. So what’s left to reveal in a 10-part Discovery persisted and this ambiAs for us viewers, we’ve still got 35% prime-time serial? tious television series was born. Each of waiting to be revealed. After all, Khan is no Andre Agassi, the the episodes has a different theme, temperamental tennis god who had a such as holidays, 24/7 (SRK’s life barely Write to lounge@livemint.com scary childhood, was, for a while, pauses; he dubs after midnight because addicted to Crystal Meth, married actor his voice is “sexiest at night”), his global www.livemint.com Brooke Shields, divorced her and then appeal and SRK as a brand. fell in love with contemporary Steffi Unlikely as it may seem, the show has Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut Graf and lived happily ever after. And lots of new trivia about Khan. That’s

The grandmaster of Hindi crime fiction on his style, career and prodigious output PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

urender Mohan Pathak can distil almost any field of inquiry into a clever little idiom. The 70-year-old “grandmaster” of Hindi crime fiction can wax eloquent on urban society (“Dilli mein do cheezon ki keemat hai—ek zameen, ek kameen”, best not translated), the art of writing (“There are three things you can’t teach a man—singing, writing and generosity”), and the purpose of libraries (“They are museums to show people what a book is. Look all you Prolific: Pathak has written 270 books. want, but don’t touch”). In the last 47 years, he has published around 270 novels—mixing and matching lurid crimes, devious criminals and morally ambivalent heroes. His “pocket” novels have print runs of 100,000, and new ones appear with unnerving frequency every three months. Blaft, a Chennaibased publishing house, is translating his work into English—and the second such effort, Daylight Robbery, was released on 5 February. Pathak began writing early, in his late teens, and submitted his early stories to the popular magazines of the day—Nayi Sadi, Niharika and Manohar Kahaniyan, among others. “I wrote mainly family dramas—short stories on the problems of joint families, unrequited young love, things like that,” he tells Lounge. Spurred by his senior contemporary crime writer Om Prakash Sharma to give mystery novels a shot, he started work on Samundar mein Khoon in 1963. “I wrote it in three days, working like a devil—day and night, without a break. It was around 130 pages,” he says. Pathak was paid Rs80 for that novel, a sum most attractive to a man earning Rs200 a month as a manager at Indian Telephone Industries (his first and only job). Pathak researches his stories by maintaining a scrapbook that he updates all the time—newspaper articles, passages from other books and Internet links, all go in there. “But let me be frank with you,” he says. “What I write is a concoction, it’s an assembly line. It’s not creative writing at all. You know how writers say they were “inspired” or “struck by an idea”? I can’t wait for inspiration or creativity to strike. I have to literally summon it, seize it. I have to churn these things out, come hell or high water.” He maintains a strict regimen, writing four months in a year. “My writing speed is tremendous, by the grace of god and 30 years of government service. I write a book in 20 days. Then I take 10-12 days to revise it twice,” he says. He writes in longhand, with a fountain pen. No typewriters, no computers. “Each of my books is around 180 sheets of paper, which is around 350 paperback pages. I aim at finishing 10 sheets a day, going up to 15 once I’m halfway through because all the elements and characters have been introduced,” he says. Pathak has a simple tip for aspiring crime writers. “You have to get to your point, the core of your story, within the first 20 pages. If your reader can skip even two lines in your story and still go away understanding your plot, then those two lines are unnecessary,” he says. It’s a yardstick, he feels, many writers fail to measure up to. “Too many authors tend to indulge in their own style—whether or not the reader wants all that detail. They go into way too much detail about unnecessary things. It’s like they want to impose their knowledge and wisdom upon the reader.” Krish Raghav ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: KUNAL PATIL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

LOUNGE REVIEWS Prego, Mumbai From the Western Express Highway, as you make your way to the Westin Hotel, the 32-storey tower in the midst of lush greenery is an impressive sight. The new hotel that marks the entry of the Westin brand in Mumbai has 269 rooms and the usual clutch of eateries, which includes the Italian restaurant Prego. The city has recently been dotted with hoardings of people in funny glasses and plastic noses, inviting Mumbaikars to experience the loopiness of Prego, which is positioning itself as a “fun dining” place.

The good stuff The large trattoria-style restaurant has an outdoors section as well. Bright and cheerful in yellow, red and orange, Prego has two live food stations serving paninis, wood-fired pizzas, pasta and meat courses. There’s an extensive wine list, but if you choose to wash down your pasta with beer, no one here will scream sacrilege. If the antipasti set the tone for our meal, the oven-baked sea scallops wrapped in pancetta and served with asparagus, pinenuts,

tomato, diced eggplant and fresh basil set the bar really high. The fresh, meaty scallops along with smoky ham made for a succulent mouthful. The rich mushroom soup was redolent with truffle oil and we couldn’t get enough of the tortellini either. The oven-baked tortellini stuffed with smooth mortadella, spinach and mozzarella made for a dazzling dish, without being too rich or heavy. By this time, two cocktails (rosemary green apple Martini and bitter chocolate and orange mojito) had passed through the table but there was no sign of the promised loopiness. Just as the perfectly done grilled tenderloin arrived at our table, a waiter accidentally dropped a fork and the staff started clapping. The service staff is cheerful, friendly and wears T-shirts. The music is perky and the open kitchen adds to the casual air. There’s a “wall of fame” with photos of guests in funky masks. On our way out, after the meal had climaxed with the tiramisu and hazelnut chocolate, we posed in large plastic glasses for snaps and left the restaurant grinning.

Talk plastic The antipasti start at Rs450, the pastas at Rs650, the meat and seafood course is priced at Rs750-1,100. For reservations, call 022-67361050. Rachana Nakra

Kidology, New Delhi

The notsogood After hearing so much about it, we were expecting some more gimmicks and felt shortchanged. The other disappointment was the wood-fired pizza. The limp pizza we were served was flavourless. The smoked salmon pizza with cream cheese and mozzarella turned out to be a good idea only on paper. The mushroom risotto, though made well, was too rich and buttery. The grilled Norwegian salmon served with lentils also disappointed.

This month-old store at the DLF Promenade mall stocks clothes designed by Gaurav Gupta, Gauri and Nainika, Ritu Kumar and Malini Ramani for children up to the age of 7, besides offering mommies-to-be a chance to feel chic in maternity gear.

The good stuff Gupta steals the show. He has experimented with plaid prints and anti-fit silhouettes for children. His is the only infant collection (age group up to 1) and includes bodysuits with appliqué cats (for girls), Rs2,990, and appliqué owls (for boys), Rs2,490, in bright reds, pinks and lime greens. These characters add a quirky touch to the outfits. His collection of plaid jackets with trousers is trendy, not outfits you

are likely to find for toddlers and children elsewhere. Traditional Ritu Kumar gear for girls includes kurtas with kalis, Rs2,990, and lehnga cholis with smart jackets. Kumar sticks to her forte and does it well. Gauri and Nainika’s collection is not totally in line with the chic and ultra-feminine dresses they dish out for women but their “princess” collection will have many takers, especially the bright yellow daisy dress in georgette, Rs5,490. Kidology has an in-house designer who stocks at lower price points (blouses and infant bodysuits start at Rs1,200). The store also stocks accessories such as the lap tray (a tray on a soft bean bag-like cushion, Rs2,990), which doubles up as a breakfast table or a laptop table for pregnant women. The store has a lim-

ited furniture collection on display and the store representatives say the surface coating they use for children’s furniture has no lead and is non-toxic.

The notsogood The maternity outfits are buried at the back and not displayed in a way women can access easily. The number of designs per designer is limited to five or six options per season. Unless you are supremely label-conscious and adamant about dressing your child in a Ritu Kumar, for example, you will find the store’s collection limited. Perhaps it is not easy to get A-list designers to produce more than six-eight designs per season (with two colour variations per design).

Talk plastic Apparel for children is priced at Rs1,200-7,500, while matern ity ou tfits by Gupta, Ramani and Gauri and Nainika cost Rs4,500-11,000. Seema Chowdhry

There will be no issue of Lounge next week because of a special Mint edition on the Union Budget. Lounge will be back on 6 March.

L4 COLUMNS

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

An ode to the simple, but exotic brinjal

PTI

Gourmet magazine: Consider the brinjal. Genetically modified but roundly rejected by farmers; placed in limbo by India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh; spearheaded by the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco) through a licence from global seed giant Monsanto; reborn and renamed as Bt brinjal; cheered on by Indian scientists and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who has spoken out publicly in favour of the genetically modified version, the poor brinjal is not used to such attention. It is a soft vegetable, used to being pounded, mashed into bharta and baba ganoush; a nightshade that shies away from the limelight; a temple offering—the storied mattu gulla variety reduced Udupi Krishna’s blueness; and an example of the nexus where food, sex and politics meet. At the recent Kala Ghoda festival in Mumbai, blogger Amit Varma asked one of the food-writing panellists to give an example of how food and sex are intertwined. Food, as Mary Eberstadt (who has been described as intimidatingly intelligent by George Will) proclaimed in her 2009 essay for Policy Review magazine, is the new sex. Victorians moralized about sex but had no compunction about gorging on food. Today, in a curious reversal of morality, sexual pleasures are freely available but gustatory ones are taboo,

at least in urban cultures. You can smoke, drink, have sex, drop acid but heaven help you if you are fat. So goes the social more anyway. The humble Solanum melongena—elegantly called the aubergine by the English, crassly referred to by Americans as eggplant, and breezily called brinjal by us—is an example of how food and sex collide. On New York’s Upper West Side is a store called Zabar’s that sells in plastic tubs a dish called “eggplant caviar”. Laden with olive oil and fragrant with garlic, this beaten eggplant has been spooned, licked and swallowed by Russian lovers for centuries, and oversexed but poor New Yorkers for the last 20 years. Like the caviar it attempts to unsuccessfully emulate, this eggplant dish is smooth, even slimy. And slime, for obvious reasons, connotes sex. Whether it is the avocado, caviar, whipped cream or honey, most foods that serve as sex toys to those with a predilection to drip and lick them off human skin, are slimy or at least smooth. So it goes with our baingan. Herbalists call this the doctrine of signatures. It suggests that plants that look like a part of the human body can affect that part. A mystical German shoemaker called Jakob Böhme wrote the book on this. In it, he argued that nature left a signature on plants to

Veggie delight: Ramesh was garlanded with brinjals by protesters last month. show which parts could be used to cure or affect various human conditions. Walnuts looked like the human brain and were thought to be brain-food; liverwort was good for curing liver ailments. By the same token, eating banana, zucchini and the long green brinjal is good for masculine (shall we say) robustness. In her book, Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, Isabel Allende lists foods, both ancient and modern, for seducing lovers, kindling sex, prolonging the act, and reviving lowered virility. Truffle omelettes dusted with caviar, she says, produce pheromones or scents that stimulate sexual ardour. Pigs ate these omelettes and grunted their way to ecstasy. In the book’s accompanying recipes, Allende says that erotic foods “should

make you salivate and increase secretions in other parts of the body”. Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses also touches upon the erotic nature of food. She quotes a medieval recipe for a mixture that includes burdock seeds, the left testicle of a goat and crocodile semen. “Rub mixture on genitalia and await the result,” the recipe concludes. Somehow, I think a dildo is safer. Ayurveda considers the brinjal to be an aphrodisiac. The genetically engineered version should have capitalized on that, rather than giving it the unfortunate name: Bt brinjal or Bacillus thuringiensis brinjal. Tell me, would you eat a thing called bacillus brinjal, never mind that it is insect-resistant and gives higher crop yields? I can think of far more

seductive expansions for the acronym Bt that involve human body parts. Focusing on its aphrodisiac qualities doesn’t do the brinjal justice. It is a versatile vegetable, the lead actor in a number of wonderful dishes, starting with the vangi bhaath of Karnataka and Maharashtra to the baingan bharta of Punjab to the ennai kathirikai of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, to the Kashmiri dahi baingan to the Bengali fried brinjal. Andhra-style stuffed brinjals require hard round tiny purple ones while the long green brinjals do well with delicately spiced dishes. Simple bhartas require nothing more than a charcoal fire and a hand-pounder. A few chilli flakes, some desi ghee and rock salt, all drizzled and mixed with the mashed brinjal, are all it takes to raise this rustic dish to an eggplant caviar. As for me, I love my vangi bhaath. Traditionally done with the hard purple brinjals, I prefer the softer squishier green variety. The masala is complicated, with many ingredients. Coriander provides the base note while a hint of clove and asafoetida provide its unmistakable kick. Garnished with fried cashew nuts and fresh cilantro, the vangi bhaath is a passionate, if not an erotic, dish. It can be eaten with a simple raita, but a few deep-fried vadams or papads make it sing. Shoba Narayan recommends a stormy afternoon as accompaniment for a piping hot vangi bhaath. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Parenting TRENDS

Lessons in simple living Connecting with nature, inexpensive birthdays— some schools are urging a rethink on lifestyles B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

······························· rchana Saraf’s daughters Annora, 7, and Aanya, 3, love planning their birthday parties, but they know the rules—no expensive décor, only home-made food and no branded merchandise. For her last birthday, Annora’s cake was baked by her mother and the sisters decorated it with multicoloured candies. “Project return gift” had begun two weeks before the birthday. Annora gave bookmarks she had designed, printed on colourful paper. “You have to be consistent about pointing your children in the right direction,” says Saraf, a marketing executive. Annora’s school Tridha introduced Saraf and her husband to the concept of encouraging a simple lifestyle for their girls. This included staying away from processed foods, expensive, flashy toys and extravagant birthday bashes; and building a connect with nature. This decade-old school in Mumbai promotes the philosophy of anthroposophy. It encourages the understanding of a person and his or her place in the universe, laying emphasis on activities such as gardening, adopting an environment-friendly lifestyle and shunning processed foods. “A regular part of the activity plan for children at our school includes gardening, carpentry and learning to cook so that children can get a better understanding of nature and their relationship with it,” says Sejal Poladia, Tridha’s spokesperson. “At Tridha, we followed simple practices, such as parents taking turns to bring home-cooked lunch for their child’s class, so that children would not eat processed or packaged food. (These) were easy-to-follow ideas and made a real impact. For the last couple of years, there is just no question of packaged or processed foods in our life,” says Saraf, who moved to Bangalore in December 2007. Her beliefs were reinforced when she attended a workshop conducted by the Bangalorebased Bhoomi Network. This non-profit

organization trains schools and parents on sustainable living, stressing healthy eating practices and inexpensive lifestyles. Seetha Ananthasivan, director, Bhoomi Network, says the challenge lies in changing the mindsets of children and their parents. “Children become dependent on processed food and drinks. We have to explain to parents and children why they should avoid these. It’s important for schools to take responsibility, along with parents, about what the next generation is consuming,” says Ananthasivan. Step By Step Nursery School, a preschool in New Delhi’s Panchsheel Park, gives parents a healthy tiffin plan, complete with recipes, which has been designed by nutritionist Shikha Sharma and revamped by dietician Nita Mehta. Children are expected to carry food items indicated on the menu for particular days, from baked namak paras and sprouts chaat to moong dal chila. Processed foods such as instant noodles are a no-no. The School, Chennai, under Krishnamurti Foundation India has been advocating the concept of “no processed foods for children” since its inception nearly four decades ago. This school, like Step By Step, gives guidelines to parents on diet regulations and discourages parents from sending snack boxes with chips, refined flour-based items or chocolates. “We provide a simple morning snack such as fruit, lunch, and an evening snack that includes milk or juice or buttermilk,” says

Sumitra Gautama, a coordinator at The School. She says they even include Indian food items such as kozhukattai, dhokla, medhu vadai and sevai in the meal plan. “We want to introduce children to healthy Indian snacks that might soon be forgotten. Our guidelines have influenced our parent body and they cooperate by sending home-made sweets such as groundnut or sesame balls as birthday treats,” she says. The School sources organically grown rice and vegetables required through the year. Students also visit farms around the city at least twice a week so they can connect with nature and see that a simple life on a farm can be fun too. Yet, as Gautama points out, countering the influence of commercialization on a child’s life outside the school is a tough task. Rishal Sawhney, co-founder of Ida, a new preschool-cum-daycare centre in Gurgaon, has found a way around this, especially as far as inculcating healthy habits is concerned. “Just making the food healthy is not enough. We tried understanding what makes processed food so attractive to children and figured it’s a lot about the packaging. So we put smileys on the healthy food to make it look attractive for children and they are ready to try anything.” He advises parents to try this at home too. Ida has a small garden patch where preschoolers learn the names of fruits and vegetables that are grown locally and help the gardener tend to plants, so that their interaction with nature starts early. Ishita Bose Sarkar, a teacher at Bangalore’s Prakriya (which calls itself The Green Wisdom School), says her school has always been oriented towards environment-friendly practices. “For example, we don’t allow children to carry drinks in tetra paks to school. But to make the child understand why we discourage it, we had a workshop where we taught them to read the nutrition labels on packages and told them what’s good and what’s not,” she says. But schools and teachers can do little about the lavish birthday parties parents throw for their little ones. “The good news is that parents are more informed now than ever before. An increasing number of them understand that the most expensive toy does not replace an evening of fun, games and wholesome homecooked food,” says Sarkar.

Grounded: Preschoolers at Ida, Gurgaon, at the school’s vegetable patch.

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

‘MY CHILD’S FRIENDS ARE HEADED ABROAD FOR HIGHER EDUCATION’ After class XII, most of the choices dawn on us. children in my daughter’s However, right now, you school (she is in class X now don’t want to simply tell her to and goes to a premium “deal with it”, of course. What school that we are very you can do is emphasize that a happy with) head for hard-won scholarship is all-expenses-paid-by-parents something worth waiting and undergrad education in working for. This may sound countries such as the US. to her like some old-fashioned They, and their parents, talk insistence on your part, but so despairingly about the poor be it. The other thing you standard of education here. could do is get her to meet But we can’t afford to send Be secure: A scholarship slightly older youngsters who our children abroad without is worth the wait. have opted for courses in India scholarships, and we don’t and are quite happy with the think things are so bad here. However, our education they are getting. Along with your elder daughter is beginning to feel upset daughter, you can research—on the Internet that she is not part of the “club” discussing and other such sources—what her options SAT scores, “statement of purpose” essays are, so that she doesn’t see her future as and foreign universities. How do we deal some “choose-from-the-best-of-a-bad-lot” with this? kind of scenario. Currently, with everyone A parent had written in once about her around her flapping their wings (and their dilemma of sending children to elite schools. parents flexing their wallet muscles), she is Premium schools may provide great beginning to feel left behind. It is this that academic exposure; however, there is a you have to tackle sensitively and yet problem of over-exposure to affluence and decisively. Avoid getting defensive with her. easy privilege. Don’t go on the offensive either, with In a way, the issue that you have brought statements such as “What’s wrong with our up seems to come with the territory, so to country, we have a glorious tradition of say. It’s a tricky balance for you to not education”. Be secure in the knowledge that dismiss your daughter’s classmates as you will do what you can for your children. “spoilt” while underscoring the merits of When we work hard for our children, and being on-the-ground here in India. First, you they make us feel like we are not “measuring have to be totally unapologetic about not up”, it is tempting to say something scathing being able to foot the bill for her foreign to get them to appreciate your position. education the way her classmates’ parents Avoid this at all costs. may. There are many things that we simply had to lump about what our parents could Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs or could not do for us, or would or would of Parenting. not do for us. We may not have liked it then and felt most sorry for ourselves—only many Send your queries to Gouri at years later did the wisdom of our parents’ learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Business Lounge ARUN TADANKI

The twoinone man The Yahoo India managing director is as serious about the Internet as he is about being a DJ

B Y V EENA V ENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com

···························· run Tadanki has a split personality. By day, he is the jeans-sporting head of an Internet company and by night, he is a disc jockey who spins his tracks in nightclubs. So this edition of Business Lounge required two meetings—one over machine-brewed tea at the Yahoo India office and the other spiked with rum and coke, spent mostly in the smoking room of Gurgaon’s spot for rock music, Turquoise Cottage. Perhaps because he works these two professions (he is emphatic that playing music is not just a hobby), 39-year-old Tadanki has to pack a lot into his day. He manages this by talking very fast and sleeping very little. My extensive research (on Wikipedia) showed that the average human speech consists of about 150 words a minute. Tadanki packs in about 270 words (including 15 “you knows”). That’s 80% more than the average. On the night we met at Turquoise Cottage, he walked me to my car at 1am and then went back upstairs to hang around a little longer. “I can manage four nights a week of going to bed after 2 in the night and getting to work by 9am,” he says. Which is just as well because there is a lot he is trying to change at Yahoo India. Tadanki joined Yahoo last year, a few months after Microsoft’s deal to acquire it fell apart. “I was following the news and my opinion was that something positive was emerging after the debacle and the company was clearer about where it wants to go. I knew at the back of my

mind that there could still be some frustrations and a lot of baggage here, so I wasn’t expecting things to be hunkydory,” he says. Before he joined Yahoo, Tadanki was president, Asia-Pacific, of the job search company Monster. He was then an advertiser with Yahoo. “There are so many things about Yahoo that I didn’t know, even though I used to advertise with them. Yahoo is the leading property in categories like mail, messenger, movies, news and sports. But all of that gets hidden by what happens in one little category called search,” he says. Since he brought it up, I ask him about Google and how Yahoo has been left agape as Google seduced us first with search and now mail and messenger. That is the Internet equivalent of waving a red rag at a bull. Tadanki gets aggressive. “As far as the consumer is concerned, Yahoo is the leading mail service provider in India, the largest in the globe, and significantly, the leading player in markets like the US. The numbers are strongly in favour of Yahoo,” he says. I am not convinced and he mumbles, “Sometimes, I feel the media is predisposed towards Google.” Tadanki is excited about Yahoo’s plans for India. There are two areas of focus now. One is to build an editorial team and provide a Yahoo voice to the content on the site. Prem Panicker, who was editor at Rediff.com for 14 years, has been hired as an editor and is building a team in Bangalore that will rewrite news for the young, non-

The numbers are strongly in favour of Yahoo. Sometimes, I feel the media is predisposed towards Google.

newspaper-reading Indian Internet user. The other area of focus is the mobile phone user. “There are 50 crore mobile phones in India, but only 1.4 crore people use Internet on the mobile. That is only because the cost of accessing the Internet from the mobile is pretty high,” he says. “But we have seen time and again in the telecom category that some price wars get triggered somewhere and somebody slashes it, and it will become Rs50 for unlimited access or something. We just need a trigger for it.” In the developed markets, Internet applications are made largely for smartphones—the iPhones and BlackBerrys. But in India, Yahoo anticipates that a large number of users will be accessing the Net from handsets that cost Rs5,000-8,000. “Their experience will be important and that will be the most important driver to winning on the mobile space. There are plenty of possibilities about what can be done,” he says. “Some we’ll learn as we go along. But we are very focused on the user we know we are gunning after.” Tadanki should know what he’s talking about. He has been working in the Internet space since the first dot-com crash. He joined Nestlé in 1992 after graduating from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and assumed he would retire from there. Then the dot-com boom began and he started following the industry closely. In April 2000, he moved to JobsAhead.com even though the Internet bubble had burst. “But by then the excitement had already gone to my head, and I shifted from stable, reliable Nestlé to the rocky dot-com world nevertheless,” he says. After two years, global job search giant Monster set up shop in India and Tadanki moved to head the company here. Monster was looking to buy out a large player and Tadanki recommended his previous employer. At the end of the deal, Tadanki found himself occupying his previous office (as JobsAhead had a larger office, the Monster team shifted

in after the acquisition) and working with the same team of people he had left. Tadanki is serious and methodical about everything. Four years ago, he decided he had to do something about his interest in becoming a DJ. His wife, Sippy, who shares his interest in rock music from the 1970s and 1980s, spurred him on. So he went to Singapore and attended a crash course. When he came back, he spent an enormous amount of time digitizing all his CDs, aggregating music and building a large collection. Then he made a sample CD, attached his resume and the course certificate and went around pubs and discotheques asking for a chance to play. They asked him to “get lost”. He got his break in Hyderabad. He used to visit the city on work and always stayed at the ITC Kakatiya. “I knew the general manager of the hotel well, so I took a wild shot and asked if I could play at Dublin (the hotel’s pub) sometime. He said if you have your stuff you can start today. I was very, very nervous. I gave my first performance and asked the hotel staff for their opinion. They were positive, said the music was very good. But I knew there were a lot of technical gaps,” he says. So he came back and meticulously started working on the gaps. He does his deejay gig two evenings a week and on weekends, spends about 15 hours a day working on his music. Listening and learning seriously, methodically, and, I am assuming, about 80% quicker than the rest of us.

Spin a web: Tadanki swapped a stable job for the rocky world of the Internet soon after the first dotcom crash.

IN PARENTHESIS Tadanki’s favourite genre of music is rock and he is partial to Pink Floyd and Steely Dan. He says he has “rediscovered Pearl Jam, The Who and Nirvana”. Initially a snob about Bollywood music, he began listening to it a couple of years ago. “In Mojo (a Gurgaon nightclub), the crowd prefers Bollywood. I discovered this great Punjabi number called ‘Nee Nachle’. It’s fantastic,” he recalls, and then adds, “My wife hates Bollywood and insists I focus on rock.” Tadanki’s tip for nightclub visitors: Go to a place you are sure will play your kind of music. You can’t go to an Italian restaurant and order ‘masala dosa’. Oh! and if the DJ tells you he does not have a particular track, he’s lying. JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Play GAMING

Kabaddigital Carrom, ‘gilli danda’ and ‘teen patti’—traditional Indian games are being resurrected in videogame form

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

···························· n 2008, when game developer Abhishek Balaria bought an iPhone, the first game he searched for on Apple’s app store was carrom. He’d grown up playing the game and figured that the iPhone’s responsive touch screen would be perfect for a video-game variant of the sport. He found one game, simply titled Carrom, developed by Singapore-based Personae Studios. Balaria felt the game “was simple, not playable, and even annoying. I decided that if I were to get an enjoyable carrom on the iPhone, I will have to build it myself.” He started the project with his firm Zentity s.r.o., based in Prague in the Czech Republic, in the summer of 2009 and sent it to Apple for approval in October. All applications developed for the iPhone are centrally routed through an “approval process” for both content and quality. “I have had this idea of building Indian traditional games for mobile phones ever since I got my first handset about 11 years ago,” says Balaria. “We did extensive research online, studied championship videos and implemented the official rule book. The game sound, friction and mass of the individual carrom-men (gotis or wooden

Zentity s.r.o.’s carrom is the first official iPhone game associated with a Bollywood film, ‘Striker’

coins) and striker are based on the real equipment.” The team even consulted players from a carrom club in Prague. The result is the first official iPhone game associated with a Bollywood movie— in this case, Striker, starring Siddharth. “We found out about the Striker movie in December 2009. When we discussed the idea of integrating the game with the movie with producers Studio 18, it seemed like a perfect fit. We agreed to the tie-up, integrated the game and got it approved by Apple,” says Balaria. Carrom may seem like an odd choice for a fledgling games studio, but Balaria, conceding a personal preference for the game, insists it made sound business sense too. “Carrom was of the right size and complexity as our first game. It required strong graphics, physics and sound implementations—which we could manage.” Since its release, Touch Carrom: Striker Edition has been in the top 100 sports games in 15 countries, including major markets such as the UK, Canada, France and Australia;

Game on: (clockwise from left) Zentity s.r.o’s Touch Carrom on the iPhone; and screenshots of the gilli danda and kabaddi games in GameShastra’s Desi Adda.

and in the top 10 in India, Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. “The game was originally targeted at any person of Indian origin who has any exposure to carrom and has an iPhone,” Balaria says. “We were, however, surprised to find out that the game was quite popular in Germany and France too. Singapore was a surprise for us as well in terms of volume and popularity.”

One of the game’s fans, who wrote to Balaria, was a 73-yearold American who played the game with his 12-year-old grandson on his iPod Touch. “Listening to warm feedback from our users in 30-plus countries worldwide has been a great motivator,” he says. The team is now working on a multiplayer version of the game playable over Bluetooth and the Internet. A number of recent videogame attempts have been made to digitize Indian traditional games. On the Internet, games website www.zapak.com has a multiplayer version of kancha, or marbles. On 2 November, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe released Desi Adda: Games of India, a video game for Playstation 2 and Playstation Portable consoles that included kabaddi, pachisi, gilli danda and kite-flying. While it got a lukewarm reception, thanks in part to a ponderously clichéd storyline about a non-resident Indian’s (NRI’s) visit to an “Indian vil-

piece of interface design. The old trackball was erratic and often failed in mysterious ways (thereby generating several how-to video tutorials online). The optical trackpad, on the other hand, has no moving parts, needs no cleaning and is intuitive to use. So much so that browsing through long Web pages and dozens of email is now almost enjoyable. For some users, the sensitivity and response of the trackpad can be quite unnerving the first few times. In a good way. The Bold 2 uses the BlackBerry OS 5.0 operating system most users should be familiar with, but it does come with some minor but pretty changes. Drop-down menus have been redesigned, and setting clocks and alarms uses a nice new number wheel interface. The Bold 2’s weight reduction also trimmed some screen size but the display quality is as good as it was before. The keyboard also received a little squeeze. I found the new keyboard harder to use than those of both the old Bold and the 8520 Curve. I kept hitting the wrong buttons or hitting two at a time. The guitar fret-style dividers are good to look at but add nothing to usability. The phone also has a good 3.2

megapixel camera with auto focus, picture stabilizer and flash. As good as most good camera phones these days. My two big grouses with the phone were not the ones I expected. First, the phone seemed sluggish with multitasking. Switching from a Twitter application to email, or the browser and then back, seemed slow and ponderous. Second, the Web browser was slower than the one on 8520 Curve (even using the downloadable Opera browser didn’t help. The phone just seemed to handle data slowly). A final complaint was not so surprising though: The Bold 2 costs Rs31,990. That is way too much money for a phone when you can do so many of the same things on 8520 Curve that costs half as much. Or get an iPhone or Android phone for a similar price. Still, if your employer is buying it for you...then enjoy the Bold 2. It is the best Qwerty BlackBerry yet.

lage”, it was notable as one of the first attempts outside cricket and Bollywood to market a game specifically for Indian gamers. But where developers such as Zentity are targeting older gamers (18+) who own smartphones, traditional Indian games, argues Alok Kejriwal, co-founder and CEO of online games site www. games2win.com, don’t quite cut it with a teenage audience. “Kho-kho, kabaddi, etc., are ancient in today’s teen/tween mind. They don’t remember what these games are— probably some stuff that they saw randomly on national Doordarshan,” he says. Desi Adda developers GameShastra are now at work on an action game based around Indian martial arts such as Kalaripayattu. Zentity is hard at work too on its next project, adapting another quintessential Indian game. “We will be releasing teen patti, the card game, a few weeks from now,” says Balaria. Any resemblance to an upcoming Bollywood film of the same name is just a coincidence. For more information on Touch Carrom: Striker Edition, including a link to the app itself, go to http://www.touchcarrom.com

GADGET REVIEW | BLACKBERRY BOLD 2

A little bolder, a little better The slimmer, sleeker 9700 overcomes its predecessor’s faults but is slow to multitask B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT sidin.v@livemint.com

···························· hen the first BlackBerry Bold, or the 9000 handset, was released, I was initially impressed mightily with the phone. Then, as I used it more, quite underwhelmed. The 9000 was powerful and had an outstanding display. It was perhaps the first BlackBerry handset to combine serious multimedia capabilities with its trademark messaging functions. Above all, in that model, makers Research in Motion (RIM) tried to incorporate a little oomph. The 9000 had rounded edges, shiny metal finishing and leatherette back cover. A potent combination. At least at first glance. But then, once you actually tried using it for a while, the chinks began to show. The phone was too big, too heavy, too expensive and some of the design elements just didn’t work. There were too many curves, and the faux leather back

cover was a little too...faux. All this flawed genius for a price not that much less than the so-sexy-it-aches iPhone. The reborn BlackBerry Bold 2, or 9700, overcomes most of these faults adequately. With the Bold 2, BlackBerry seems to have finally nailed that elusive device: a full Qwerty smartphone that looks great and has performance to match. First of all, the phone has received a comprehensive facelift. Gone are the curved corners that made the old Bold look like a giant squashed Halls mint. Instead, we have a sleeker handset with a distinctly more stylish silhouette. RIM seems to have picked up a few design cues from the Curve range of handsets, especially with the chrome trimming around the bottom of the keyboard. This is not a handset you want to hide in a holster. This is the BlackBerry you flaunt with pride. Sleeker and lighter, the most significant change is the new optical trackpad. BlackBerry has been using this alternative for the trackball in several new models, including the 8520 and 8900 Curves. It is a brilliant

Sexedup: The BlackBerry Bold 2 gets the style quotient right.

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Insider GARDENING

Tend to saplings Get children interested in plants, give a hasbeen garden bistro table a makeover and expand your garden

ere are some small gardening techniques your children can pick up and work on. 4 For children of 5-7 years: In a glass jar, get children to put wet cotton balls and throw in a few rajma (kidney bean) or white chana (gram) on it. Keep the jar at a windowsill to catch sunlight. In a few days, young seedlings will sprout. 4 For children of 7-9 years: Send them scouting for dry marigold flowers. Separate the petals. Put the seeds in the soil, in a pot. Wet the surface slightly and cover with a newspaper. Within a few days, new plants will sprout. Remove the newspaper and let the plants grow further. 4 For children above 9 years: Cut off a stem from a rose plant and remove the top. Plant this into semi-wet soil to get a new plant. Colourful plants such as coleus will also make for interesting lessons in multiplying greens. In a pot of sand, place multiple cuttings and leave it in the shade. Water it every second day and watch the cuttings grow. 4 Make older children into green citizens: Ask them to hunt under neem or peepul trees for

Flower power: (above) Hollyhock plants can grow up to 8ft; easyto grow plants such as daisies and sunflowers are ideal for beginners. new plantings. These can then be dug out gently with their roots and transplanted in a new spot.

All content on this page courtesy

Lori Nudo with Aruna Ludra/ Better Homes and Gardens Write to lounge@livemint.com

Norot iron

Vertical growth W

hen Sangeeta Relan moved from Delhi to Gurgaon, she could not bear to leave her plants behind. But her new house could take only that much. Determined to fit in as many as possible, she decided to expand her outdoors vertically rather than horizontally. Trips made to roadside markets threw up enough options. Relan picked up outdoor tiles in white to offset the brown wall, had them silicone-coated to withstand dirt stains and pasted them up as shelves. The wall now proudly holds her pretty greens. Relan has more plans. “I will add pots of flowering plants to add to the vibrancy of my outdoors space,” she says. Ankita A. Talwar/Better Homes and Gardens CHANDAN AHUJA/BETTER HOMES

Before

After

ake a rusty old bistro table look new again with a little paint (and some sweat equity). After removing the rust with a wire brush, apply a rust-inhibiting primer. When it’s dry, apply a top coat; semi-gloss oil-base paint was used here. Have a piece of quarterinch tempered glass cut to fit the top; purchase clips to hold the glass in place. Dress up your chairs with cushions made from no-fuss material. PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREG SCHEIDEMANN; STYLED BY PAMELA S PORTER

AND

GARDENS

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Style SHOES

The foot behind Jimmy Choo PHOTOGRAPHS

SCOTT PASFIELD/WSJ

Tamara Mellon knocked down a wall to make room for her accessories collection

B Y R ACHEL D ODES ···························· ast April, before she could move into a 7,140 sq. ft penthouse duplex previously owned by beverage scion Edgar Bronfman Jr, Tamara Mellon had to first make more room for her shoes. Mellon, founder of the Jimmy Choo label, known for its towering stilettos worn by characters in Sex and the City, hired a contractor to knock down a wall and expand her closet by 6ft to help accommodate her collection. She’s unsure how many pairs she owns, having lost count after 800, but says that virtually all are Jimmy Choo, with the exception of a pair of Ugg boots and a couple of pairs of Nike sneakers. Her new closet, an L-shaped space about 15x23ft at its widest, uses angled shelves that provide more visibility to her hundreds of shoes, which sit two pairs deep (roughly half of Mellon’s shoes are stored elsewhere). The blond wood shelves and hanging bars allow nearly everything to be seen, an arrangement she finds more efficient. “My big issue in life is time. I never have enough,” says Mellon, 42. “If I am trying to find something in my closet and I can’t find it, it drives me crazy.” Excavating her iPhone from a large Jimmy Choo alligator bag,

Mellon demonstrates her other organizational trick: photographing herself in various outfits so she won’t forget about them later on. She pulled up an image of herself in a black Prada dress, which she was considering for an awards event. Aside from her shoes and a sizeable number of handbags, Mellon’s clothing collection veers towards simpler pieces. A sliver of solid-coloured dresses is at the end, with a sea of black and navy dominating the hanging area, and jeans get their own section. The basic styles help offset more flamboyant accessories such as a pair of fluorescent yellow heels and tasselled black bag that Mellon likes to pair with jeans for a hard-edged bohemian

Best boot forward Choosing the right kind of tall boots for short women B Y T ERI A GINS The Wall Street Journal

···························· I enjoy the knee-high and thigh-high boots trend, but I am 4ft 11 inches. What style and colour would be most flattering and stylish for my height? Tall boots are now seasonless fashion basics. Stylish women have many boots with a variety of heel heights and jazzy details, including trendy versions with cut-out “peep toes” and lacing, in materials from leather to stretch nylon and denim fabric. Always wear your preferred skirt length or your skinniest jeans and leggings when you shop for tall boots, so you can study which silhouettes look the best. Boots should elongate your legs with an unbroken line, and shouldn’t be too tight or too loose. Shorter women will find the

most flattering versions are the sleekest, such as styles in stretch nylon. Avoid boots that bunch up around the ankle and those with a lot of embellishments, such as buckles and straps, which can make legs look thicker and shorter. As you expand your boot wardrobe beyond black, try brown, burgundy and charcoal shades, as well as tan suede. Super-stiletto platform boots will make you taller, but the trade-off

CHRISTOPHE HITZ/WSJ

look. Her evening wear is stored in the basement in garment bags, with photographs identifying what’s inside. While her go-to styles change by the season, Mellon, who designs all of Jimmy Choo’s collections, says she perennially returns to “Private”, a platform sandal with a zipper running up its back. “It’s a shape that every woman can wear and it’s got a modern volume to it,” she says of the shoes, which reveal a thin sliver of skin atop the foot. She’s also partial to the lizard-clad version of the “Glenys” gladiator pump, which has a zipper running up its centre. Mellon, who by 5pm on a recent weekday had worn three different pairs of shoes, calls herself “the inspiration, the heart and soul” of Jimmy Choo. Her jetsetting lifestyle certainly draws attention as the paparazzi nip at her high heels. Following a 2005 divorce from American banking heir Matthew Mellon, she was romantically linked to singer Kid Rock, among others; she confirms she dated actor Christian Slater (who couldn’t be reached for comment). Recently, she was awarded $9.5 million (around Rs44.17 crore) in a lawsuit filed in the Jersey Islands, UK, against her mother (her mother’s attorney had no comment). Mellon says

is loss of comfort. When a woman teeters around in too-high heels, she loses as much as she gains in height. Boots should reach the lower edge of your kneecap. Avoid those that are shorter, such as mid-calf lengths that visually cut off your leg, or bridge the gap of exposed skin with black tights. Before buying thigh-high boots, spend a few minutes walking around the store and getting out of chairs to make sure they stay up without your having to constantly tug at them. Write to wsj@livemint.com

she’s estranged from her family and moved to New York partly because she wanted her daughter to be closer to her ex-husband. “I didn’t realize people would be so interested in my personal life,” she says. There’s been drama in her business life as well. In 2007, a boardroom scuffle resulted in the departure of former chief executive Robert Bensoussan, and Mellon orchestrated a deal to sell a majority stake to TowerBrook Capital Partners for $350 million. “This (company) is my baby,” says Mellon. “I was fighting for that.” Bensoussan, who now runs

Closet truths: Mellon (above) likes pairing her fringed bag with yellow shoes (top left) for a bohemian look; the back of her closet (left) is reserved for jeans and a few pairs of sneakers. his own private equity fund, had no comment. In 1996, Mellon believed there was room in the high-end footwear market for a brand that could capture Hollywood glamour. With a $250,000 investment from her late father, the entrepreneur behind the Vidal Sassoon haircare empire, she created a luxury brand from scratch, part-

nering with Choo, a custom footwear maker for elite clients such as Princess Diana. Accustomed to designing shoes one at a time, Choo was unable to sketch an entire collection, so Mellon became “a designer by default”, she says. The luxury-shoe boom of the 1990s catapulted Jimmy Choo, which sells shoes ranging from $350 flats to $1,395 for over-theknee boots, into the big league. The brand now operates around 100 stores globally and does an estimated $200 million in annual sales. Since the downturn, Mellon has been focusing her brand on conveying enduring value. To that end, she turned to her closet for inspiration, designing a new line called “24/7”, featuring recreations of about 30 of her favourite styles from seasons past. “I want great investment pieces that look modern, that I can pull out of my closet in two years and they will still look great,” says Mellon. Outside her closet, along the wall of her bedroom, sat 37 pairs of shoes lined up in three rows. The shoes, for the company’s Spring 2010 collection, had just arrived and she had nowhere to put them. “I wanted to keep my guest bedroom clear,” she says, adding that she may have to turn it into a shoe closet after all. Write to wsj@livemint.com

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM SHIRISH SHETE/PTI

PUNIT PARANJPE/REUTERS

Face value: (clockwise from far left) Members of a fan club gather outside a multiplex screening of My Name is Khan; the film’s lead actor Shah Rukh Khan returns to the city after the world premiere of the movie; Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray at an exhibition of cartoons by his father; and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi rides a suburban train on 5 February.

REPLY TO ALL

AAKAR PATEL

SANTOSH HIRLEKAR/PTI

THE THACKERAYS’

PRIMITIVE CHARISMA The Senas have nothing constructive to offer Marathis. So what’s their appeal? The Mumbai Marathi, better at renaming things than building something himself, is disinherited from his city, and the Thackerays give him an illusory sense of power

oliticians respond to constituencies. Their positions are deliberate. What is the Thackerays’ constituency? Mumbai’s Marathis, whom the Thackerays speak for. Congress does not represent Marathis in Mumbai, and they have surrendered this space politically to the Thackerays. This can be seen in their organizational structure (www.mumbairegionalcongress.org). Neither the Mumbai regional Congress committee’s president Kripashankar Singh nor its treasurer Amarjit Singh is Marathi. Of Mumbai Congress’ 18 vice-presidents, 12 are not Marathi. Of its 19 general secretaries, 13 are not Marathi. Of its 13 secretaries, eight are not Marathi. Of its seven executive members, none is Marathi. Of Congress’s seven members of Parliament from Mumbai, six are not Marathi. Of its 17 MLAs, 12 are not Marathi. Of its two housing board chairmen, neither is Marathi. This surrender hasn’t come because

RAJNISH KAKADE/HINDUSTAN TIMES

AFP HEMANT PADALKAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

The cast: (clockwise from right) Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and his estranged nephew Raj, founder of MNS, together control 42% of Mumbai’s votes; and north Indian taxi drivers have had to bear the brunt of their hate campaigns.

Congress does not want Marathi votes, but because it cannot get them. Congress is inclusive by nature and cannot offer Mumbai’s Marathi what the Thackerays can, which is anger and resentment. When Raj Thackeray left his uncle and launched his party it was inclusive, because he initially read the Mumbai Marathi wrongly. His flag makes space for the green of Muslims and the blue of Dalits. Marathis didn’t find that inclusiveness appealing and his party struggled. But after his calibrated violence against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in which people were killed by his boys, Raj demonstrated his nastiness and Marathis gave him their

HEMANT PADALKAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

approval and their vote. Between Raj (24%) and Uddhav (18%), the Thackerays control 42% of Mumbai’s vote, which corresponds to the city’s Marathi population. In the last election, not one opposition seat in the island city of South Mumbai went to Shiv Sena. They all went to Raj after his violence, and that is the reason why Uddhav is currently acting the way he is. The more unhinged the message, the more appealing it is to the Marathi. Elected to power in 1995, Shiv Sena renamed Bombay. This began the series which has gifted us Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru. The Indian’s renaming of his cities is thought to be a positive assertion of identity, but it is actually

negritude. Shiv Sena’s renaming did not stop there. It renamed Victoria Terminus (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Prince of Wales Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangharalaya). Why is the Marathi angry with the British, who gave him his fine city? The answer is that he isn’t. Those things were renamed because the British are gone and cannot defend themselves. Their property was available for the Marathi to stamp his ownership upon. So the question is: Why does Mumbai’s Marathi want to assert himself? The answer is that he is disinherited from his city. Of the 30 companies in Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex, the number of those

owned by Marathis is zero. Of the 50 on the National Stock Exchange’s Nifty, the number owned by Marathis is zero. The Marathi is quite good at renaming things others built, but at building them himself he’s less able. Three-fourths of India’s capital transactions happen in Mumbai but the participation of Marathis in this activity is irrelevant. There is a reason for this. If we observe Marathi society we notice the total absence of mercantile castes. Into this space the British imported the multi-religious trading community of Surat—Vohra, Khoja, Luhana, Memon, Jain, Parsi and Vaniya. They control the economy of Mumbai and its capital markets, and

occupy the city’s best real estate. Lower down, space opened up for others with enterprise, like the Bhaiyya, Bihari and Sikh taxi drivers of Mumbai. They are actually very good at their trade, hard-working and honest. Against them, the Marathi displays his valour and, like all Indians, he can be quite brave in a mob. The second big industry in Mumbai is media, especially Bollywood. Bollywood is dominated on the trade side by Punjabis and Sindhis, on the talent side by Punjabis and Urdu-speakers. The participation of Marathis is not of consequence. In some ways it is negative. If we think about it, popular ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

entertainment can only be produced on the cusp of immorality. Bollywood liberalizes India through its content which slowly pushes that cusp outward. Bollywood is based in Mumbai because it is India’s most liberal city. But the Marathi peasants who now control the state respond to their constituency in the village, which is illiterate and moral. As home minister, R.R. Patil banned this city’s unique dance bars where young women entertained men. Such acts pull the cusp inward. The Marathi isn’t bothered about My Name is Khan being released, and by itself the matter is irrelevant, but he’s impressed by Thackeray’s ability to make Shah Rukh Khan grovel and to disrupt Bollywood’s business. It reassures him that Marathis control Mumbai. Shiv Sena’s issues are always those where they can demonstrate to Marathis their ability to block events—we won’t allow Australian players, we won’t allow Valentine’s Day, we won’t let Pakistanis come in and so on. Shiv Sena has nothing constructive to offer Marathis, nor is it expected: Someone else will do all that. All these events blocked eventually come to pass anyway, because the control is cosmetic, and it wilts when the state decides to apply rule of law. But that moment of theatre—when the media exhibits anguish—produces the spotlight that nourishes the Thackerays. This is the pattern to Shiv Sena’s actions. It might appear that these actions are irrational, but the Thackerays’ method is cold and reasoned to squeeze out advantage. Witness the discipline of Raj. He works his strategy with great care. On national television he speaks Marathi no matter what language he is questioned in. The Marathi loves this because it reflects his defiance. There is a second reason why the Thackerays are compelled to make a nuisance of themselves every so often. Unlike other parties, Shiv Sena has a physical presence in neighbourhoods. These offices, run by local toughs, are self-funded, meaning that they approach businesses and residents for “donations”. This activity can be smooth only so long as Shiv Sena radiates menace. The party is not effective if it isn’t feared, and the grass roots reminds the leadership of this. The Marathi pattern of resentment we have observed is visible elsewhere in time. India’s nationalist debate a century ago was dominated by the Marathis: Tilak, Gokhale, Agarkar and Ranade. All four were Chitpavan Brahmins, whose members are fair-skinned and unique for their light eyes (like cricketer Ajit Agarkar and model Aditi Govitrikar). Going against the current noise about Marathi in schools, Chitpavans actually demanded to be educated in English. By 1911—100 years ago—Chitpavans were 63% literate and 19% literate in English. This gave them the edge over other Indians.

All four were on the most influential body in western India of the time, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. But English education had not exorcized the native instinct. There they unleashed their pettiness on each other. Agarkar and Tilak fought over leadership. Tilak was forced out in 1890 after quarrels over social status and money. Gokhale took his place but was opposed by Tilak who said the job required 2 hours of work daily and so it couldn’t be done by a college principal. Ranade was attacked in Tilak’s newspapers and Gokhale quit in 1895 because he couldn’t work with Tilak’s friends. A jealous Tilak sabotaged the Congress session held in Pune the same year. When the Gujaratis—Jinnah and Gandhi—entered Congress, they immediately eclipsed the Marathis, because they had the trader’s instinct towards compromise. The Marathi Brahmin’s energy was then channelled into resentment, this time against Muslims. RSS, founded in 1925, is actually a deeply Marathi organization. Hindutva author Savarkar, RSS founder Hedgewar, the great Golwalkar, his successor Deoras and current sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat are all Marathi Brahmins. Marathi resentment cuts down its own heroes. The first was Shivaji. Marathi Brahmins refused to crown him though he controlled dozens of forts in the Konkan. This was because he was a peasant from the cultivator caste and not a Kshatriya. He had to invent an ancestry, perform penance and bring in a Brahmin from Kashi before he could crown himself in 1674, with the title Chhatrapati, meaning leader of Kshatriyas. The second was Ambedkar. A first-rate mind, he is seen by Marathis for his caste. The term “Ambedkarite” refers purely to the Dalit movement. Educated in America unlike Jinnah and Gandhi, he absorbed the pragmatism of John Dewey at Columbia. Ambedkar was methodical, unemotional and persuasive in all that he wrote. Europeans would classify him as an Aristotelian, against the Platonism of Gandhi. When the merchants of Mumbai voted for the city to join Gujarat during the reorganization of states, Ambedkar wrote a response that skewered their claims with finality. He did this without being parochial. He was above his caste, above his community. Mumbai’s Marathis should be proud to own Ambedkar’s message of a universal civilization, but they cleave to the primitive charisma of the Thackerays instead. Aakar Patel’s book on the changing world of Indian servants will be published by Random House India in 2011. Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

FARSHID AHRESTANI

MARRAKESH

Souk for the soul In one of the world’s oldest marketplaces, the sights, sounds and smells are priceless

BY S A V I T A I Y E R ···························· here’s no denying it. In Marrakesh, they love Indians. Everywhere I go, people call out to me: “Indienne—you are welcome in my country!” “Hindustan Zindabad!” And then, completely arbitrarily, “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham!” “Shah Rukh Khan!” “Amitabh Bachchan!” “We see very few Indians in Marrakesh,” an elderly gentleman I meet in the souk tells me wistfully. “And here in Morocco, we love India.” I tell him that if I shut my eyes for a quick second and then open them again, I can actually believe I am in India. The heat, the crowds, the noise. The sweaty bodies, the narrow lanes, the speeding bicycles and scooters. Even the somehow familiar Arabic pop music blasting from the shops. But then the elderly man and I agree that Marrakesh is also totally unique. Its Grand Souk is one of a kind—in exactly the opposite sense to, say, Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates. This centuries-old labyrinth of lanes, which forms the core of the city’s Old Medina, is the heart and soul of Marrakesh, a cornucopia of sights and sounds and smells I will never see or hear or inhale anywhere else in the world. One lane has carpets in all sizes, shapes and colours. Another has mounds and mounds of silver jewellery. A third carries only babouches, the soft leather shoes favoured by Moroccans. The colours are dazzling—canary yellow, royal blue, silver and aquamarine. They carry over into the leather handbags I find as I turn the corner, an endless array of perfectly finished creations in fuchsia, turquoise and emerald green, finished with the most exquisite trimmings and adornments. “How much?” I ask, for a rust suede satchel with crimson embroidery.

“500 dirham,” the young man tells me. He starts high, knowing that I will bargain; it’s the done thing here. “300,” I say. “No, 350.” “No,” I stand my ground. “300. Yes, 300. That’s my last price.” “Okay, Yallah, take it for 300 then,” he says good-naturedly. Observing people in the Grand Souk can be as intense an experience as shopping. Old men in hooded djellabas sit outside food stalls sipping cup after cup of sweet mint tea, watching life go by. Berber women with covered heads and tattooed chins sell slabs of spongy lemon cake and almond macaroons from large trays held at their hips. Young girls in jeans walk past, chatting on their cellphones, indistinguishable from young girls almost anywhere in the world but for their colourful headscarves. Housewives in elegant silk kaftans, their eyes lined with kohl and their mouths painted red, haggle over the price of fabric. Young men with beards grill kebabs and bake flat breads.

Dark tribesmen from the Sahara sell djembe drums and, of course, there are the stately Touareg, clad in their signature blue, who sit silently by their wares. In the spice lane, turmeric, paprika and chilli powder are piled high in perfect cones. I admire the rough slabs of kohl, the baskets of rose petals and potpourri of fragrant mountain flowers. I draw in the scents of cumin, dried mint, saffron and fresh henna. I ask about the beauty quotient of black soap and huile d’argan, a natural oil (from the argan tree) from the south of the country that Moroccans swear by. “What’s this for?” I ask, pointing at a piece of jagged black rock. “Pour chasser le gris-gris—to chase away the blues,” the Berber vendor says. He beckons me into his cramped stall and opens an old tin box. It’s full of scorpions itching to emerge. I recoil instantly, but the vendor urges me not to be afraid. “Buy one,” he insists. “Set it on fire with the black rock and

you will feel better about life.” It is easy to get waylaid in the souk and it’s easy to get lost. I round a corner and find myself in the middle of a noisy crowd of men selling snakeskins. Around another and I stumble in on a Berber auction. A throng of women, some with only their eyes visible, sit in concentric circles around men holding up carpets. There is a sweaty intensity and purpose to the raised, controlled voices that completely overwhelms me. “Madame—would you like to see the Berber tanneries?” someone behind me asks. Visitors to Marrakesh are always cautioned against accepting such offers, but I am so eager to get out of the crowd, I’ll follow anyone. The young man leads me out of the cool confines of the souk into the afternoon. The Marrakesh sun is baking hot, but the city, with its low rust-red buildings, is sublime. This colour is de rigueur in Marrakesh, my guide says, even in the newer parts of the city. And then the stench from the Berber tanneries overpowers me. “Here,” says Hassan, who has worked there since he was a boy. “A natural mask for you.” I stuff my nose into a bunch of fresh mint and look out upon a vast expanse of camel, goat and cow skins stretched out in the sun, listening as Hassan explains how

they will eventually end up looking like the handbags and jackets I saw in the souk. My guide takes me on a circuitous route back to the centre of the Old Medina via the tombs of the Saadien kings who made Marrakesh their capital, and the Bahia Palace, which apparently belonged to the favourite slave of Morocco’s beloved King Mohammed V. When the slave died, the palace was ransacked, its treasures looted and pillaged. “Shall I show you how to get to the Place Djemaa el Fna?” my guide wants to know. This time, I say no, I can find it myself. Indeed, there is no way I can miss the centuries-old central square of Marrakesh’s Old Medina: All of Marrakesh, resident and visiting, heads to this United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) World Heritage Site in the late afternoon, the crowds increasing as the skies get darker.

Arabian delights: (top) A lane dedicated to carpets in the Grand Souk; and a spice vendor near Bahia Palace. Food vendors stoke their fires. Juice sellers squeeze oranges and grapefruit. Handcarts on the outskirts of the square threaten to spill their load of almonds, figs, pistachios and olives. Further along, a group of musicians from Mali are entranced by their own drumbeats and several gnarled old men try to convince tourists to sample a bowl of fresh snails. Acrobats and jugglers perform their acts, actors and storytellers narrate their skits. Snake charmers playfully attempt to curl a python around a passer-by. The sounds of drums and flutes combine in the smoky air as the evening breeze lightens the afternoon heat. The muezzin calls out from the mosque, but only a few faithful heed his summons. The rest, such as me, are too deeply caught up in the action. On my way out of Djemaa el Fna, I hear someone call out: “Hey, Kajol!” I turn. “Me?” “Yes,” he smiles. “You. Come, khaana taiyar hai (the food is ready).” “Oh no, I can’t eat a single thing more,” I reply with a smile. “Okay,” he says. “But remember for next time, stall number ek sau chauda.” “Sure,” I say. And I mean it. Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

GRAPHIC

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Beat it: Musicians from Mali playing in Djemaa el Fna.

For children, Marrakesh is a treat for all the senses.

TRAVEL L13

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WENDELL RODRICKS

CRUISE CHRONICLE | WENDELL RODRICKS

You need visa power Paradise: (from top) Grenada is still untouched by mass tourism; the highly recommended Laluna hotel; and a drink served at the hotel.

Ahead of a 51day cruise around South America, the merrygoround begins at home

Fashion designer Wendell Rodricks will write a cruise column exclusively for Lounge for the next six weeks

ay Gren-a (as in hey)-daa. It is not Gran-aa-daa. That’s in Spain,” I am told by local Grenadians, who are justifiably proud of their “Island of Spice”, an emerald in a pale turquoise Caribbean Sea. Life moves slowly, more naturally here, barely touched by the horrors of mass tourism. At the Laluna hotel in Morne Rouge, recommended by every single luxury travel site and travel connoisseur, the cove is a private paradise. Early one morning, I see my first “moonset” ever. When jet lag drags me out on to the silver sands, there, shining like the final scene in Mamma Mia, is this giant orb, lending a silver touch to the waters before it slides into the sea. On this island, with its light muscovado beaches and cinnamon-scented fields, it makes perfect sense to sit on the beach, local rum punch in hand, and watch as the sailboats of the annual Grenada Sailing Festival flutter by.

The adventurer can trek to the Grand Etang National Park and see the Seven Sisters Waterfalls in St Andrews. Apart from the delicious Italian at Laluna, sample the culinary delights at Carib Sushi, La Belle Creole, Karma Club, Rhodes Restaurant or Nutmeg Café. Shopaholics will find comfort and more at the Best Little Liquor Store (buy the Clarke’s Court Rum and the local chocolate) and the St George’s Saturday market. Even as I sip the rum punch, I wonder that we are in Grenada at all. It was never part of the plan. For many years now, we’ve had this dream, to see the entire continent of South America in one grand go, on a cruise. On an earlier trip with cruise company Silversea, we heard about a new ship that would do an inaugural 51-day voyage through Barbados, French Guiana, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Cape Horn, the Chilean fjords, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and end up on the Mexican Riviera in Acapulco. So finally, we did the once-in-alifetime thing and booked two berths on the Silver Spirit. That was the easiest part. A trip as long and as varied as this comes with its own complications. For instance, visas. We could not apply too early since the papers would be valid for six months only. So in December we filled out forms: I had valid US, EU and UK visas in my passport, but as an Indian, I still needed seven more visas—for Brazil,

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

Point of return Idyllic beaches sand over chapters of war and inhumanity in Kuantan. But the turtles still come

ere, on the east coast of Malaysia, just beyond the town of Kuantan, it is difficult to tell where the sand ends and the water begins. I am at a white sandy beach called Teluk Cempedak (pronounced Chempadak), which shimmers beneath the moonlight along the South China Sea. Casuarina and pine trees line the coast, their leaves fluttering in the light breeze. Then, as sunlight nudges the horizon, the beach comes to life, as it has for centuries. Between March and September each year, the life you see is of turtles laying eggs. At other times, the bounce, the life, come from the fishing community leaving for their catch each morning. But this idyllic tranquillity has been shattered in the past—by

war, and by its aftermath. In the early 1940s, this region was devastated when the Japanese invaded Malaya. Forty years later, hundreds of Vietnamese turned up in their sampans, seeking a place that would have them, fleeing the Communist state. They could build a semblance of life, before they were flown back to Vietnam, after spending nearly a decade in the country now known as Malaysia. The turtles lay their eggs at Rantau Abang, north of Kuantan. Archaeologists believe that a Khmer city lies buried under the vast Lake Chini, a series of 12 connecting waterways about 60km west of the town. Between June and September, Chini is carpeted in lotus blossoms. There is a cave where you find a reclining Buddha. That’s a good posture to adopt in this part of Malaya—reclining, the better if it is in a hammock. The east coast of Malaysia is called the sleepier coast, which suits the fishing village of Beserah just fine. Nobody is in a hurry in that village, and it

Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and Barbados. Along the way, we discovered that Barbados has no representative in India. “Ask for a visa in Singapore,” someone suggested. “Get on with the other visas,” I bellowed. Two visas later, we were told, “Barbados is not represented in Asia. You have to call London.” I did. They asked us to courier our passports. But no courier was willing to do this. Besides, our passports were in Delhi, doing the visa rounds. “Call the immigration at Barbados. Maybe they will grant you a visa on arrival.” A week later, I was told, “No visas on arrival, sir. But you can apply and we can give you the visa in three weeks.” Three weeks? We are two weeks away from departure! Meanwhile, Argentina was throwing a fit: “Your ship is going to the Falklands. We don’t recognize that name. Reapply with

‘Islas Malvinas’.” I curse the Falklands War and reapply with newly attested fingerprints and affidavit. Finally, all visas are in the bag—except Barbados, the embarkation point. Five days away from departure. So, we cancel Barbados and land in this paradise called Grenada, the Silver Spirit’s second port of call. Arriving in Mumbai from Goa after an hour-long plane ride, we catch an Etihad flight at 4am, land in Abu Dhabi and, after 4 hours, board the plane for New York. Fourteen hours of pampering later, we touch down at a freezing JFK, New York, and take off again 10 hours later, amid snowfall, for San Juan, Puerto Rico. Just the sound of those words is enough for my heart to sing West Side Story songs—or maybe the sunshine has something to do with it. A delicious Creole lunch at Raices restaurant later (my partner

seems as though they measure their time not in hours, not in days, but in seasons. One warm morning I decided to explore what the tourist office had enthusiastically called a forest reserve near the beach. The officer had a bored look, and he handed me some brochures grumpily. The brochure promised me birds, insects, squirrels and monkeys. I saw none of those, and the forest itself failed to inspire, but there was another inspiring sight, of the water beneath, which was enchanting. As I climbed higher, the scattered rocks along the seashore looked like giant hippopotami lying in water, their thick hides glistening as waves lashed against them.

The British navy suffered one of its most humiliating defeats not far from this beach. During World War II, the Japanese had landed in southern Thailand on 8 December, and raced southward, defeating the British in Kota Bharu, Malaya, heading towards Singapore. To repel them, Britain sent two major warships, Prince of Wales and Repulse. Singapore saw off those ships with much fanfare. But the royal navy was unprepared for aerial attack, and it had no aerial defence of its own. The two ships became proverbial sitting ducks, and the Japanese bombed them, sending them sinking in the South China Sea. British morale suffered a major blow; Singapore was to AFP

Water travellers: Vietnamese refugees came to Malaysia in sampans.

Jerome has a pork chop double the size of his thighs, while I savour a Mahi Mahi fish), we see the sights over our 6-hour transit: Old San Juan, a beautiful Caribbean city within high fortress walls, is a delight. Then to Grenada, where we would board the Silver Spirit, a 2-hour ATR flight away. The ship will be our home for the next 50 days. Our verandah will keep the coast in view all the way. The bathrooms are stocked with Acqua di Parma and Bulgari toiletries. The bar is overflowing with Grey Goose vodka, single malts and Champagne. We unpack and explore the ship: Eleven decks of splendour, with six dining options—including Seishin, a Japanese restaurant, and a sixcourse gourmet experience in the Champagne restaurant—three dance floors and evening entertainment, besides a spa, two fitness studios, a pool, two jacuzzis, a library and an Internet room. It is now time to sip champagne and watch the sunset from our private suite while the valet steams our sherwanis for the Captain’s formal gala. A fitting first night for the next 50 on our cruise of a lifetime. While we dine, the Silver Spirit will sail gracefully towards Port of Spain, where she will berth tomorrow morning. Write to lounge@livemint.com

fall within nine weeks. Beyond the forest, on the other side, was the more secluded beach, Tanjung Pelindung. It means the cape of refuge, and there is a sound reason why it is called that. During the Japanese invasion, villagers from places such as Beserah fled to this secluded spot on the coast to take refuge, hoping they would not get discovered. Decades later, Vietnamese seeking refuge turned up on these beaches. Asia has a peculiar fascination with the tragic and the morbid. There is an ahistoric sense, where businesses appropriate the past, obliterate the meaning, and bet on collective amnesia to create an opportunity to make money. Tragedies get transformed into brand names, into objects of commerce. For example, Beijing has a restaurant which recreates the Mao era of Cultural Revolution, with waiters in Mao-style uniforms, and a dish with chilli called The East is Red, an anthem from those times. A Malaysian textile company used to make casual wear and branded it British India. In Kuantan, a bar at an upscale hotel is called the Sampan. Made out of a converted boat, it is like any other bar, except that it has a poignant story. A sampan is a Chinese houseboat, about 15ft long, in which families can stay. This sampan was the real thing in every sense: It had carried Vietnamese refu-

gees to Malaysia, and the hotel had bought the boat and donated the proceeds to a fund for refugee relief. Once the political situation stabilized in Vietnam, Malaysia decided to send most refugees back, many against their will. That made the story so poignant: The refugees lost everything in Vietnam, came in a boat to Malaysia; their boat was sold, and after some time, they had to return to Vietnam, completing two journeys too many. As I thought of the sad way the wheel turned for them, the sky changed its colour, from being shiny yellow to mellow crimson, the water turning the hue of a generous Bloody Mary. Later that evening, I walked on the beach with some tourists who were staying at my hotel. We saw newly hatched turtles. The turtles were small—some could fit the palm of your hand. They calmed down when you patted them gently. The breeze blew gently; the moon was back. With high tide, the female turtles would surface, coming ashore to lay eggs. Malaysia may have returned the boat people to Vietnam; it still had room for turtles. Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Books AUTHOR Q&A | H M NAQVI

WhitmanmeetsPuff Daddy MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES/AFP

The debutant Pakistani author on fusing hip hop and Yiddish, being poor and finding a new voice for a ‘very American’ novel B Y V EENA V ENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com

···························· hoever told us not to judge a book by its cover clearly did not see Husain Naqvi’s Home Boy. The sleeve is a grainy matte print of a painting of the characters by Pakistani painter Faiza Butt, with a smooth glossy border in rich black. This mélange of textures seeps between the covers and tells a coming-of-age tale of a Pakistani boy in post-9/11 New York in a style that is highbrow literature and lowbrow art, Walt Whitman-meets-Puff Daddy. Home Boy is the story of three young Pakistani men: Chuck, who came to New York to study literature and ended up becoming a banker; DJ Jimbo, a gentle, moon-faced man-mountain; and AC, a “charming rogue and an intellectual dandy”. They are worthy of their double hyphenated adjectives as only New Yorkers can be. The events of 9/11 hide between paragraphs but effectively drive the plot forward.

Home Boy: HarperCollins, 216 pages, Rs399.

When we met, Naqvi had run out of Davidoff cigarettes and switched to Gold Flake. Between puffs, amid the din of a south Delhi shopping mall in the throes of a discount shopping Friday, he told us how Home Boy came to be. Edited excerpts: You moved from Karachi to New York and worked in a financial institution. How much of Chuck, your protagonist, is based on you? Home Boy is not a memoir, it is fiction. Chuck, the narrator, draws on my experiences but he is a construction. I guess he is some sort of an incarnation of me; he is my literary doppelgänger. First novels inevitably draw from the author’s life. So Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, Salinger’s (The) Catcher in the Rye, Michael Chabon’s (The) Mysteries of Pittsburgh are all very close to the author’s lives. And you have this imperative to exorcise yourself especially in the first novel. And there are some novelists who remain with this imperative through the course of their oeuvre and some that

City limit: Naqvi (left) writes about how 9/11 affected the Pakistani diaspora in New York, but the event itself is absent from the book. manage to move away from it. Where were you when 9/11 happened? I am wary of answering that question. Geographically, I was close by. In the novel, 9/11, the event, actually never takes place. I want to inhabit the figurative space between the paragraphs where I don’t want to commit to my proximity to the event. It unnecessarily colours the perception and I want the reader to think of it only as a background, not in the foreground. How long was the process of writing the book? I began in 2003. If I remember correctly, I was sitting in a bar in the Bowery (New York). I’d had a few drinks that evening and I think I scrawled a few lines on a cocktail napkin. It was verse, not prose. I used to, in an earlier incarnation, be a slam poet. This novel began as a poem. Later, in

a more sober moment, when I transcribed the sentiments to the page, I felt that a poem could not treat my anxieties faithfully. So I kept writing and I think I must have written 10 or 15 pages by the end of 2003. Then I earnestly began in 2004. So it altogether spans about four years. It was a very tough time. I had no money. And so that led me to apply to schools in the hope of receiving money. I got money from the Boston University. I spent a year or two there. Then they asked me to teach, and all this while, the novel was in process. And then in 2007, when I had written about half of it, I found that I could budget only another month. So I called my agent and told him, “Listen man, you need to sell my novel.” And he said, “Great, so you have finished it.” He tried to explain that these things tend to take time and

there are lots of publishers who won’t even take a look at a half-finished manuscript of a first-time writer. And so I left for Karachi because there at least I would have a roof over my head—although I didn’t have any money for cigarettes. But by November 2007, we managed to sell it and there were four publishers who were interested and I got enough money so I can write for the next few years without having to worry about things. Your voice in ‘Home Boy’ is starkly different from most diaspora novels. I don’t typically write like this. I had to think about the subject matter. Home Boy is a very American novel although it’s written by a green-passportholding Pakistani. And so I had to think about creating a voice that does the subject matter justice. I could summon neither

Shakespeare nor Ghalib. So I had to summon Walt Whitman and Bruce Springsteen and The Wizard of Oz. I wanted it to be very American even in its sub-textual level. On the surface, I wanted the style to fuse Urdu and Yiddish, hip hop and street vernacular, as well as the high literary register. What are you writing now? I am working on a story set in Karachi that will feature a family interacting with each other, set against the political unrest of Karachi in the early 1980s and late 1990s. I moved to the city because I was poor, I am staying because I love Karachi. The only city I was able to complete a novel in is Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is, in comparison, dramatically quiet. So when I am done with my research, I may have to pack up my bags and move to a hole in the world to write.

WHERE THE STRESS FALLS | SUSAN SONTAG AFP

Ways of seeing The final essays of one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· ooks, celebrated American essayist and cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote—and the books page of a newspaper is the place to be repeating this—“are a way of being fully human”. Without books, we are more likely to be without history, without memory, without imagination, without good language, without that kind of scepticism or doubt that stimulates reflection and an appreciation of complexity. Books expand inwardness: The experience of them, in a hyperkinetic age full of carefully plotted stimuli, is tantamount to a kind of meditation. Before there is a book, there must be a reader—a mind that has the space in it for the experience of extended connection with a book. “By books, I mean the conditions of reading that made possible literature and

its soul effects,” Sontag writes in an essay, wondering if books will survive the assault of our “advertising-driven televisual reality”. Here, undoubtedly, is a combative and adversarial thinker with a very high-minded view of reading. But as the pieces in Sontag’s final collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, demonstrate, the truly remarkable thing about Sontag (1933-2004) was not so much the gravity of her pronouncements as the range and catholicity of her interests. Where the Stress Falls contains essays on books, films, music, dance, art and photography, each one of them a felicitous combination of close interpretation of particular works and larger arguments about the history of the medium itself. This high view of multiple art forms informs all of Sontag’s work, generating rapid cross-connections (“As the statue is entombed in the block of mar-

Last words: Sontag, who lived in New York, died in 2004 at age 71. ble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it.”) Like all great critics, Sontag brought to her work a combination of perspicacity and personality: The erudition of a trained and subtle mind applying itself to a careful observation of its highly individual reactions to art, and able to reproduce its journeys in lithe, allusive prose. Among the 40 or so essays here, surely the most widely circulated and discussed was Sontag’s essay from 1995, A Century of Cinema. For Sontag, cinema was the greatest contribution of the 20th cen-

tury to the corpus of human art forms, a form rooted first and foremost in a wonder “that reality can be transcribed with such magical immediacy”. There was something total about the cinematic experience. “Lovers of poetry or opera or dance don’t think there is only poetry or opera or dance,” she writes. “But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema.” But much as Sontag’s essay was a reprisal and a stocktaking of where the movies had gone over 100 years, there was also some-

Where the Stress Falls: Penguin, 358 pages, Rs599. thing deeply elegiac and pessimistic about it. For Sontag, the 1960s and 1970s represented the peak of what she termed “cinephilia”—a highly informed, highly personal love of the movies held by a substantial number of aficionados committed not just to films, but to film-watching in a darkened theatre, so that they might be overwhelmed “by the physical presence of the image”. But over time, this cine system had been broken down on the supply side by the simplifications of capitalist production, which had eliminated the

tension between cinema as industry and cinema as art, and on the reception side by the sheer proliferation of images and the expansion of private home viewing. These observations could profitably be applied to the story of India’s own popular cinema. Perhaps the first skill of the good literary critic is knowing how to quote—that is, knowing how to supply the part that will rouse in the reader a need for the whole. Attention to a work of verbal art involves stepping back at times and letting the work speak for itself. This becomes especially important if the essay is an argument for the beauty of a novel or a poem or a play few have ever heard of. Sontag was an especially adept practitioner of quoting, and there are wonderful passages here from the work of such masters as W.G. Sebald, Witold Gombrowicz and Adam Zagajewski. Where the Stress Falls is not just eloquent invitation to the pleasures of reading, of watching, of inwardness, but itself an incarnation of some of these pleasures. Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf. Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

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CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

MATH IN MIDDLE AGE

WAY TO GO | UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE

Good going

Black humour, flawless cameos and a breadth of emotions help the author pull off his new novel

Way to Go: Hamish Hamilton, 359 pages, Rs499.

B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ···························· new novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee evokes both expectations and apprehension. Is he going to delight once again with the kind of impact that the now legendary English, August, his first work, had? Or is he going to descend into a sordid saga of frustrated, even grotesque, sexual activity and the search for salvation that Weight Loss, his last novel, represented? Very early into Way to Go, his latest—and fifth—novel, it’s clear that he’s doing both. The trademark black humour is alive and kicking: At the police station where the son is reporting the disappearance of his father, the officer on duty asks, when filling in the inevitable form, whether the missing father is male or female. Soon afterwards, the son recounts—in his head, of course—the singular lack of pleasure he experienced in his sexual relationships with both the female retainer at home and her son. Mercifully, he confesses to having given up on sex a few years earlier. The son in question is Jamun, younger brother of Burfi, son of Shyamanand and the now-deceased Urmila. The characters continue some time from the point they left off in Chatterjee’s second novel, The Last Burden. And the novel begins with the disappearance of Shyamanand, now a half-paralysed octogenarian who can scarcely move about, leave alone run away from home. Jamun, whom he’s been living with, sets off on a search for his father, a journey that is as much through his own mind as it is through police stations, morgues, neighbours and service providers. Along the way, his elder brother

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

WHY ‘MUD’ IS NOT ‘SILK’ Alpha but American author Roy Blount Jr belongs to that endangered species of writers who care for words. His book, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; with Examples of their Usage Foul and Savory, is not a dictionary but a “glossographia”. It presents an eccentric selection of words and phrases with comments (ranging from objective to idiosyncratic) on

their usage, origin, etc. You can dip into Alphabet Juice before going to bed, and dip into it again on waking up. Its entries are often illuminating, and sometimes funny. I just wish Blount had published it without its five-six-page introduction, where he takes linguists to task for proclaiming the arbitrary nature of language. He argues that words are not arbitrary: They often resemble, in sound, shape and texture, their meanings. The “grunt” of a pig, for instance, sounds like a pig; the “peep peep” of a chicken sounds like a

Burfi joins his quest. Frequent flashbacks reveal the symbiotic relationship between father and son as they chat in their small balcony, inevitably swatting mosquitoes and the reputations of neighbours. As with most of Chatterjee’s works, you don’t read on for the story. To be honest, not a great deal happens by way of events, and the smell of decay, disappearance and death—ways to go—hangs like a pall over everything. You read, instead, for the characters caught in comic suspension between the absurdity of the world they live in and their personal conviction that nothing has much meaning anyway. This even as they diligently pursue their trade or craft. Here, Way to Go does not disappoint, its cast including Monga the property shark who’s clearly got a mysterious secret; Naina the neighbour whose house is being razed to the ground and who herself disappears, like Shyamanand; Madhumati the globetrotter with an affinity for cats; Mukherjee, the doctor-tenant who smokes grass with Jamun and inexplicably—or not—hurls himself on to the rocks below. Looming large over all of them, however, is Jamun himself—a loser by today’s social standards, still cowed into servility by the work he does, compulsively suicidal. The cameos are flawless, as is always the case with Chatterjee. Neighbours, office colleagues, the servants—all are described with admirable attention to their physical appearances and angularities, offering visual, auditory and, always, olfactory insights that make both the people and the scene uncomfortably graphic. Look no further than Monga powdering his testicles

chicken; it is not arbitrary that “mud” is not “silk”, and linguists make a “muddle” of such matters. But, surely, no serious linguist has made the claim that language is arbitrary in that sense. Sounds and textures might have a role to play in the origin of a word, its development and its selection over synonyms. But language is arbitrary because words make sense due to the network of “relationships” they have to each other, not with the reality out there. Hence, “mud” is “mud” not because it sounds muddy (which it might), but because it is not “mug”, “mid”, “mat”, “mad”, “mull”, etc. It is in this sense that linguists talk about the arbitrary nature of language. So skip the introduction and read the rest of an entertaining and often illuminating collection of words by someone who loves

Double role: This is Chatterjee’s fifth novel. profusely just in case sex is on offer later in the evening. The real theme, however, is the relationship between father and son, coloured by a palette of emotions—from companionship to greed, from antagonism to anger. The quest for the missing father is perhaps a little too pat in symbolizing Jamun’s—and, by extension, all just-past-middle-age men’s—quest for meaning in his paternal relationship. The appearance of his pre-teen daughter in the narrative—her mother is Kasturi, the TV producer who has artlessly woven Jamun’s personal life into her soap operas—provides an additional decorative touch to the motif. But even so, Jamun’s consciousness, through which the story is spun, delves into the depths of his experiences often enough for startling insights such as this one as he reflects on his body: “A temple it was, he had always believed without being religious, a temple, so he had taken care of it, ready, or so he had thought, at a moment’s notice to crawl out of it when summoned. His readiness, he realized, staring at a cobweb between wall and desk silvery in the moonlight, was way off the mark, inadequate, unapt, pointless.” There’s truth about our lives in there, and its discovery is intended to be painful. Only a twist, quite literally, in the end provides redemption. Arunava Sinha is the translator of Buddhadeva Bose’s My Kind of Girl, and of Sankar’s Chowringhee and The Middleman. Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Father, son, loss and black humour

Logophile: Roy Blount Jr. them, knows them well, and uses them with economy and elegance.

Danish gem Having read Carsten Jensen’s Vi, De Druknede in Danish, it is a pleasure to learn that all 700 pages of it have just been published by Harvill Secker in English as We, The Drowned. Jensen is one of Scandinavia’s leading writers: A novelist, travel writer and newspaper columnist,

veryone has a midlife crisis. Mine, funnily enough, is math. Funnily, because I studied pure math in college, the kind of stuff where you spend 30 minutes proving that 1 is indeed greater than zero and then another 45 proving that 2 is greater than 1. One did this by assuming the reverse (that 0 was greater than 1 and 1 greater than 2). Then, you would proceed logically from this assumption till you arrived at something totally illogical. Or absurd. And since the result was absurd, the process would go, the original assumption must have been wrong. There is a name for this technique—reductio ad absurdum. I don’t remember but I may have written about the agonies of this kind of math earlier too—it has obviously left deep scars. Interestingly, over the past few months, I have rediscovered math. One of the finest books I have read in the recent past is The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time by Jason Socrates Bardi. So, it seems in the fitness of things that I restart my column for Lounge with a graphic novel on math, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. Logicomix, published towards the end of 2009, isn’t just any other graphic novel. It is among the best I have read (and believe me, constant reader, I have read a few). I was so taken in by the book that I presented the first copy I bought to a friend whose daughter is into math. And then, because I couldn’t stand the emptiness in my library, I went out and bought another copy. One of the reasons I gave the first copy away to a young student is because I believe that school takes all the fun out of math. The early mathematicians were tricksters, magicians and philosophers, but do you get any of that in school?

Adds up: Logicomix brings home the truth about math problems. That is one of the things that makes Logicomix special. At one level, the book is about Bertrand Russell and his early work as a mathematician, during which he shook the foundations of logic and math by coming up with the famous Russell’s Paradox (the one about the barber in a town which has a strict law that everyone must shave that says “those who don’t shave themselves are shaved by the barber” which makes it impossible for the barber to shave himself for then it would mean that “he is shaved by the man who shaves only those who don’t shave themselves”). Russell came across the paradox while looking for a basic truth on which all of math and logic could be based. It was in search of it that he authored Principia Mathematica, which, in all likelihood, dealt with the kind of proofs I have written about at the beginning of this piece. It may be easy for us to dismiss this search as a foolish quest for a non-existent thing, but remember, this was the early part of the 20th century, a time when everyone, as evident from the galaxy of famous mathematicians who walk through the pages of Logicomix, was obsessed with this. Doxiadis and Papadimitriou, who are already rock stars of sorts among the nerds of the world—the two have separately written novels on math—say this story simply (helped by the fact that the comic is presented as one about the two of them collaborating with two artists for a comic about Bertrand Russell and the search for mathematical truth). The art, by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, is functional and quietly effective. Logicomix deals with a complex subject and at first sight, the art, more Tintin than Watchmen, seems out of place, till you read on (the book is almost 350 pages long), and realize that nothing else would have worked as well. Logicomix is a book that requires dedicated reading. Was it worth it? I would think so. I finally understood what we were trying to do in those math proofs. And I realized why it mattered. R. Sukumar, editor, Mint, restarts Cult Fiction as a fortnightly column in Lounge. Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

he is a staunch champion not only of human rights but also, what is rarer, of human values. We, The Drowned is a major historical novel of recent years. It is a sweeping, spell-binding tale of several generations from a small fishing town of Denmark, structured by a lucid narrative technique that seems simpler than it is. As one Danish critic, Ide Hejlskov, put it when the original came out, it is “a master-work about sailors’ lives, war and death, and love.” Read it!

Anarchist publishing It is a common lament of literary, experimental and offbeat writers: The publishing industry in the West is getting more conservative by the year, and the current financial crisis has not helped. But the French writer, Sebastien Doubinsky, who also writes in

English, has done more than complain: He is at the head of a new concept in Internet publishing. He has launched a free press and a free literary magazine, Le Zaporogue, which publishes known and unknown writers from around the world. The originality of his concept lies in the fact that all works and the magazine are downloadable for free, or can be bought on the print-on-demand principle. Inspired by an “anarchist idea”, as he puts it, publisher and writers share the same non-profit basis. Some of the writers discovered by him have later been noticed by mainstream publishers too. Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of Filming. Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

L16

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010

Culture MOVIES

The Oscars’ battle of the exes AFP

Titanic clash: (clockwise from left) A still from Avatar; Bigelow (left) and Cameron at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles in January; and a still from The Hurt Locker.

‘The Hurt Locker’ director Kathryn Bigelow faces off against exhusband and ‘Avatar’ director James Cameron in 2 Oscar categories

B Y L AUREN A .E . S CHUKER ···························· he Academy Awards aren’t announced until March, but one verdict is already in: It’ll be a battle of the exes. Kathryn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker, the low-budget war film set in Iraq about soldiers who defuse bombs, will face off against her ex-husband James Cameron, director of Avatar, the $300 million-plus (around Rs1,395 crore) sci-fi flick about mining “unobtanium”, in both the best director and best picture categories. In a close-knit place such as Hollywood, family ties have long been written into the script. Jason Reitman, nominated this year for best director for Up in the Air, a movie about a man whose job is to fire people, is the son of Ivan Reitman, the famous Hollywood producer and director who made Ghostbusters. Sofia Coppola, daughter of Hollywood godfather Francis Ford Coppola, took home a screenwriting Oscar in 2004 for Lost in Translation. But family ties aside, not since Kramer vs Kramer won for best picture 30 years ago has the Oscar race been so obsessed with a starstudded split. It’s a cliché that in a divorce, men side with the man and women side with the woman. If that carries over to the Oscars, the deck might be stacked against Bigelow. Only about a third of the Academy’s 5,777 voters are female, according to people in the industry. “Going back to the beginning of Hollywood, couplings were usually between directors and their stars,” says Howard Suber, who has taught courses on film and television at the University of California, Los Angeles, for around 40 years.

“There were so few female directors that the mathematical odds of something like this happening were impossible.” Meanwhile, some are already calling the race for Avatar. “In terms of where the industry needs to go, Avatar should be the favourite,” says David Poland, editor of Movie City News. “It’s going to give the Academy Awards show the ratings it needs, it’s broken ground in 3D and set records in China… Avatar is an industry-changing movie. (The) Hurt Locker is just a really good movie.” “Will the industry really get behind a little movie?” he adds. The fact that Bigelow snatched the Directors Guild of America award for feature film direction from Cameron and her other male competitors last month hints at an Oscar win. Bigelow is only the fourth woman ever to be nominated for best director prize—none has ever won—and some women have already begun rooting for her. Jackie Collins, writer of around two dozen best-sellers, including Hollywood Divorces, is in that camp. “Kathryn is such a talented woman—she deserves to win,” says Collins. “Plus, Jim looks like he’s aged 10 years and Kathryn looks like she’s lost 10 years. She looks like a movie star!” (Bigelow is 58; at 55, Cameron is three years her junior). Collins adds that when it comes to competing on the red carpet, it’s easier to fly solo. “It’s a good thing that Kathryn and Jim aren’t still married because whoever won the Oscar, it would wind up in divorce. It would just create so much resentment. I don’t care how much in love people are, in Hollywood, careers come first.”

At long last, Sade is back ‘Soldier of Love’ doesn’t pander to current trends B Y J IM F USILLI The Wall Street Journal

···························· n Soldier of Love (Sony), its first new disc in a decade, British band Sade adds to its reputation for making music that’s supple, sensual and pensive. Throughout the 10 tracks, Sade Adu’s voice floats over a light, meticulously rendered jazzy pop mix. Much like Sade’s previous albums, which have sold around 17 million copies worldwide, Soldier of Love doesn’t pander to current trends. It presents itself and allows us to nestle in. Once we do, it seems like only yesterday that we last welcomed these old friends. It didn’t seem like a decade to the quartet’s members either,

says Andrew Hale, who plays keyboards and contributes to composing the music. When we spoke by phone recently, in advance of the album’s release, he told me they spent a while in the studio reconnecting after their long hiatus. “To be honest, we were catching up,” says Hale. “In the beginning, it felt like a four-week holiday with best friends.” But much has changed in the past 10 years in how pop records are made. On their 2000 album Lovers Rock, Hale was listed as responsible for programming, which more or less meant he had expertise in digital recording and editing. Now, just about every modern musician knows how to record digitally. “Programming seems like such a superficial word now,” he says, adding that he and guitarist Stuart Matthewman arrived with songs stored in their laptops. But the band, which

ALBERTO E RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES/AFP

AFP

Raoul Felder, a noted lawyer who handled the celebrity divorces of Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolph Giuliani and others, says, “Let’s just hope that whoever does the seating can make sure that they don’t sit next to one another.” As is perhaps fitting for any movie-making twosome divorced for nearly two decades, their films couldn’t be more different. Avatar has become the highest-grossing movie in history, taking in around $2 billion worldwide and shattering the previous records held by Cameron’s last feature film Titanic. The Hurt Locker was made for about $11 million and took in just slightly more than $16 million at the box office. Still, this isn’t exactly The War of the Roses. By all accounts,

Cameron and Bigelow, who were married from 1989 to 1991, have an amicable relationship and even continue to share their work with one another. In mid-January, Cameron complimented his ex-wife in his acceptance speech for best director at the Golden Globes. “Frankly, I thought Kathryn was going to get this. She richly deserves it,” he said. Cameron also showed Bigelow an early cut of Avatar and Bigelow did the same with her own film. After reading the The Hurt Locker script, she consulted Cameron, who encouraged her to do the project before others on her plate. While their marriage ended in 1991, the two have continued to collaborate professionally since their divorce. In fact, written into their divorce settlement was that

includes bassist Paul Denman, came in with no expectations of what Soldier of Love ought to sound like. “I like the idea of a blank canvas,” Hale says. “There’s a dynamic among us. We understand the connection and we deal with that.” In the studio, the quartet played until it found its groove and the music began to take form. “It’s the result of four people who know each other intimately,” he says. “We’d get something down, then chop and change. We’d find fragments we kept going back to. For a while, we were feeling guilty about being fairly unfocused.” Much of the music on Soldier of Love, and the Nigerian-born Adu’s unmistakable voice, which is both earthy and angelic, immediately evoke memories of the band’s earlier works. The opening track, The moon and the sky, rises from a slinky guitar and crisp percussion that support Adu’s gentle yet assertive vocal. Similarly, Skin features Adu’s multitracked voice over a plucky electric guitar and behindthe-beat percussion. But the band toys with the formula. The title track is built on jabbing synth strings and a military drum cadence. Be that easy has a country lilt and In another time is an old-fashioned soul

stroll with gorgeous, unexpected changes. Babyfather has a reggae feel, a familiar touchstone in the band’s music, but it’s sweetened by a touch of country-soul guitar and a choir comprising Adu’s daughter and Matthewman’s son. Dissonance is a stranger to Sade’s music, but amid the sweetness emerges the occasional raspy guitar or haunting chord on electric keyboards. “We always wanted to make music with a certain rawness. We’re described as slick, but there’s not a conscious effort to be smooth,” Hale says, adding that on the new album “there’s a sonic quality that’s crisp and crunchy. Even when things can be quite regimented, they can be softened or darkened.” In their 27th year together, the members of Sade understand their role is to provide alluring support under Adu and not draw attention to their skills. “Anything that feels like it’s coming from technical prowess, we tend to shy away from that,” Hale says. “We like the ‘less is more’ approach.” Adu came to the sessions with notebooks filled with lyrics, Hale says. The group has a reputation for its lights-down-low romantic hits such as Smooth operator and The

Cameron would produce three of Bigelow’s films. “There is always a price for doing what you want,” she told The Sunday Times about the settlement in 1996. “And I guess that price was my marriage.” Cameron both wrote and produced Bigelow’s Strange Days, a 1995 sci-fi thriller about snuff films. It performed poorly at the box office, however. Cameron executive-produced Point Break, a movie about bank robber surfers that she directed in 1991. That movie quickly turned into a cult hit and box-office success, becoming one of Bigelow’s most commercial films. Bigelow has not made many films and she has only tied t h e k n o t

WSJ

No. 1: Sade’s new album has topped the US charts.

once—to Cameron. He has more experience in both departments. His previous blockbuster, Titanic, won the Oscar for best picture in 1998. He’s been married five times, and divorced four. Dennis Wasser, a prominent Hollywood divorce lawyer who handled Cameron’s divorce from Terminator actor Linda Hamilton, says the 55-year-old director was composed. “He realized what most people should do in a divorce, which is to have a cordial, rational relationship with the person,” Wasser says. A spokesperson for Hamilton agrees the divorce was amicable. Wasser adds, “A lot of smart people figure that out early on—and smart people are the ones who win awards.” Write to wsj@livemint.com

sweetest taboo, but Adu writes from a variety of viewpoints. Long hard road is a tender ballad about confronting loss and moving on and Babyfather about what a father’s love can mean to his child. Her strongest subject is love, though—be it bitter or sweet, for a child or a deity. In Bring me home, she writes, “I’ve been so close but far away from God. My tears flow like a child’s in need of love.” I ask Hale why the band takes such a long time between albums—it was eight years between Lovers Rock in 2000 and its predecessor Love Deluxe. “This time, it was about family,” he says. “Sade is a mother and she wanted to be home with her family.” But, he adds, there’s more to releasing an album than gathering with friends and recording music. “For us, it involves a whole process of getting it down, promoting it and touring with it. It can be a four-year commitment.” Of his colleague Adu, he says: “The public side of what she does is what she enjoys the least. She sort of feels she wants to wait until she has something to say. Then we get together, look at each other and think this is actually good.” Write to wsj@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Q&A | FARHAN AKHTAR

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

‘I feel old!’

The ‘Lakshya’ director on inspiring others, his acting skills, and his alter ego

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· n 2001, 27-year-old Farhan Akhtar directed Dil Chahta Hai, making a dream debut in the world of Hindi cinema. One of the defining films of the decade, Dil Chahta Hai introduced a new sensibility and approach to film-making that has, nine years later, already inspired new film-makers. Akhtar, meanwhile, hasn’t looked back—after directing two more films (Lakshya and Don), he decided to step in front of the camera. His first film, The Fakir of Venice, is yet to see a cinematic release, but Rock On!! and Luck by Chance earned him a big fan following, as well as a clutch of awards. From next week, he will be seen romancing Deepika Padukone and being tormented by a voice at the end of a phone in Karthik Calling Karthik. Later in the year, he will return to the director’s chair with Don 2. Edited excerpts from a conversation with Akhtar on his many roles:

‘Karthik Calling Karthik’ is not a romantic film, is it? It’s a suspense drama. But given how stories cannot just be straight to the point and need digressions, the romance plays an important part in the film. This character wants change in

his life because of this girl. His desire for her is the thrust of the conflict. Once she is in his life, she helps him with this phenomenon of receiving a phone call from himself. There has been speculation that you play a double role in the film. Is the voice at the other end of the phone yours? Unfortunately, for reasons well known to you, I cannot say. I will say that it is a really interesting script and challenging part for any actor because there is such a swing in Karthik’s personality. Are you ever aware in real life of having an alter ego? No, but there was this point when I felt that I had become somebody else. Maybe being in Ladakh for five months during the shooting of Lakshya, in a very hard place and dealing with that mentally, required certain changes to be made to cope with the stress. When I returned home, I found I was a different person, maybe even negatively so. I felt a little invincible. Karthik has a secret in the film? Karthik lives with the guilt of feeling responsible for the death of his brother. He feels guilty because he was the only (one) present when his brother died. This has made him timid and introverted, unable to deal with problems. This is where the film starts. Do you enjoy working with first-time directors? I have only worked with directors who are relatively new. I am looking forward to doing a film with Sudhir Mishra next year and hopefully, I will be in the grand scheme of things of experienced directors. But no complaints about the people I have worked with so far. I think that stems from them being the writ-

AN INDIAN HARMONY

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

···························· n the summer of 1998, with the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party focusing its nation-building efforts on nuclear power, a group of artists and intellectuals in Delhi began to feel uneasy about the absence of a critical public culture. Three members of the Delhi-based artists’ group Raqs Media Collective—Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula—realized that real criticism and creative approaches to culture would only be possible under a facility that was independent of state and market control. They teamed up with Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan, both scholars at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), an inde-

pendent research institution, to create their own oasis of dissent and counterculture. Since its formal inception in 2000, Sarai has been functioning as a programme of the CSDS, nestled in its picturesque north Delhi campus. The programme draws more than just linguistic weight from the word sarai or caravansarai, which in several Central Asian and Indian languages refers to shelters for travellers and pilgrims. Sarais have historically fostered rich exchanges of languages, stories and ideas. Earlier this month, over a cup of coffee during Sarai’s weeklong celebrations to mark its 10th anniversary, Sengupta told us about some of its research projects, ranging from detective novels from the Hindi belt to

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Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Connected: Akhtar (above); and a still from Karthik Calling Karthik. ers of their own material. I would be a lot more cautious of directors who bring a script written by someone else. Maybe because I wrote and directed my first film, and I know the clarity with which I was approaching the direction in that movie. You have a busy year ahead. Yes, I start Zoya’s (Akhtar) road film in May in Spain with Hrithik Roshan and Abhay Deol. Then I move on to directing Don 2 from October in Berlin. I am looking forward to it. After four years, I am really missing directing. The script is done; we are in pre-production, location hunting and casting the new cast. We already have Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Boman Irani, Arjun Rampal and Om Puri. You are also adapting Chetan Bhagat’s novel ‘The Three Mistakes of My Life’ as a film. Have you sorted the credit issue with him? Maybe Chetan has learnt his hard lessons. He is working on the screenplay with Abhishek Kapoor, so he will get a screenplay credit. That whole thing on 3 Idiots is a bit complicated... but I do find it hard to believe that

Innovative pilgrims A decade after its inception, Sarai cofounder Sengupta talks about its philosophical turns

Karthik Calling Karthik releases on 26 February.

f my ears were ringing with songs from the soundtrack of the Marathi film Natrang the last time I wrote for Music Matters, this fortnight I’m going around humming and trying to sing Bengali and Assamese songs, even as I take delight in the news that the Natrang soundtrack won a National Award for its music composers. Now I have two more gorgeous Indian voices to thank for filling my ears and my heart with the wonderful sounds of their music. Despite the fact that one of these voices hails from the state of West Bengal, and the other from Assam, I think of them as Indian, and take pride in their being fellow countrymen and women. You will agree, won’t you, that some people around these parts need to be reminded these days that we are Indians, even though we may belong to different states, castes, communities, creeds? I first heard Bengali singer Lopamudra Mitra when I bought her album Chhata Dharo on www.emusic.com and was struck by her expressive singing on the tracks “Tomaye hrid majhare rakhbo, chhede debo na…” (a sample is available at http://www.emusic.com/artist/Lopamudra-Mitra-MP3Download/11574003.html) and Mahut bondhu re. She sings in a voice that is sweet but not syrupy, at times poignant, and at other times playful, dramatic SUBHAMOY BHATTACHARJEE/MINT but never melodramatic. Above all, it is a voice that rises above the craft of singing to communicate and express and touch the hearts of listeners. That is exactly what she did when I heard her in concert for the first time earlier this month. As she concluded her recital with the Bengali classic Beni Madhab to an audience that for the most part was unfamiliar with Bengali or her music, the audience rose to its feet spontaneously to give her a standing ovation. I do so Riveting: Mahanta is at ease with wish that the record labels folk as well as electronic music. that produce and distribute her music had been there to savour the moment and the experience. Perhaps they would have been prompted to distribute and promote physical sales of her music nationally and internationally instead of restricting themselves to Bengal. Fortunately the world of online distribution makes it possible for music lovers to discover music and artistes who would otherwise have remained unfamiliar. Mitra is, of course, a star in Bengal, but what a pity it would be if music lovers in other parts of the country remained ignorant of her splendid voice and dignified persona. Delhi-based Assamese singer Angaraag Mahanta, who goes by the name Papon, is another voice that is riveting and superbly expressive. Extremely popular with young listeners, Papon sings and composes, and like Mitra, is deeply influenced by the folk music of his home state as well as with Hindustani classical music. He is at ease with lounge and electronic music and wields laptops, processors and gadgets with the same familiarity that he tunes an instrument. His website www.papon.co.in has lots to say about him, his background, influences, accomplishments and more. But for me, the proof of the pudding remains firmly in the eating, which is why I would recommend you skip the site, go directly to http://www.myspace.com/papon and switch on a track titled Jonaaki raati or try out Dhouwe Dhouwe. And don’t bother about not being familiar with Assamese, or the song texts, and what they mean. Listen, and the music will reveal its stories and secrets as it always does to listeners. It will also introduce you to a beautiful Indian voice, and you know as well as I do that we need more Indian voices these days.

print culture in pre-colonial Bengal. A good indicator of the breadth of Sarai’s interests is a fellowship that supported a pensioner who spent a year documenting citizen agitations over inflated electricity bills. Working bilingually in English and Hindustani, this latter-day sarai was designed to be a convivial place where people from different backgrounds could work together. Its brightly painted basement offices host a research centre that focuses on media practices, urban issues and contemporary culture. This is supplemented by a dedicated publishing and translation programme, a software laboratory, workshop and screening spaces, and an atelier for contemporary art and design. Through its annual fellowships, Sarai has also been supporting independent research. Ten years down the line, these efforts have yielded results. It was under the aegis of Sarai that the

he would not know where his credit is. However, he deserved a story credit. After four films, how do you see your progress as an actor? Each film has given me a certain amount of strength and confidence to go ahead and try something more. I hope that will keep happening. Right now, I am somewhere at the bottom of the learning curve and trying to make my way as far up as I can. ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ has become a landmark film. How does that make you feel? I feel old! No, really, it’s great. I think of all the movies I have grown up watching and the movies that have inspired me to do the work I do; and it’s fascinating that you can do a piece of work that can encourage, motivate and inspire others to make films...I feel lucky and grateful. A new generation is coming up—I am senior now, can you believe it? I need a moment to wipe my tears.

ancient Urdu storytelling tradition of Dastangoi was revived by scholar Mahmood Farooqui, who used his 2004 fellowship to research the texts. Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor was composed partly on a 2002 fellowship, paving the way for other Indian graphic novels. Journalist Basharat Peer started work on his

evocative book, Curfewed Night, that documents his experiences growing up in war-ravaged Kashmir, as a Sarai fellow in 2004. Sarai’s goal of working independently of formal institutional frameworks is very marked. “We have no threshold for entry. We don’t really consider previous work or qualifications when we PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Innkeeper: Sengupta with a display from a Sarai project.

award fellowships,” explains Sengupta. “What matters is the research proposal at hand.” Today, Sarai reaches out to a dynamic community through its expanding network of members. It has links with organizations such as the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore and the Waag Society in Amsterdam as well as initiatives in São Paulo, Beirut and Mexico City. But there’s a lot more to be done, observes Sengupta. “To make a serious difference, we need at least 50-100 organizations across India with the scope that Sarai has,” he says. To streamline its focus, Sarai will trim the number of independent fellowships to support consolidated projects from this year onwards. This is a time for philosophical turns. “We’ve realized that what we wanted to do has caught on. We don’t have to spread ourselves thin trying to support every new creative wave,” he says. The most significant contribution of Sarai in its first decade has been spreading the virus that initiates change. And as we speak, it floats in the air.

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | PARIZAAD KHAN

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Super ‘hijrotic’ Despite good intentions, a transgender beauty contest is like most others—beauty before the cause

itu is a Mumbai girl brought up in Goregaon and Mira Road. She was born a man but as an adolescent she realized that being in a man’s body did not make her one. Luckily for Ritu, her south Indian parents were supportive and understanding—they didn’t tell her not to dress like a woman and her mother often helps her pick out which sari to wear. Ritu, who loves dancing, became a bar dancer and was one till the ban on dancers in 2005. Recently, she got the chance she had been waiting for—to walk the ramp. Indian Super Queen, a transgender beauty pageant, was meant to be a way for hijras (eunuchs) to take pride in themselves and show their unity. At first, it smelt like a revolution. For people who had been feared and marginalized for decades, what better way to assert their humanity than by having an in-your-face celebration of their uniqueness? For Ritu (she auditioned for the contest in New Delhi, not Mumbai), it resulted in learning how to walk the ramp properly. “The way we walked earlier wasn’t the right way. It was what we saw on TV. But we were taught to do it right—walk, turn and make eye contact,” she says. The 23-year-old, who lives with her parents and younger sister, has reached the finals of the contest. Even if she doesn’t win, she says she is happy she could go through the training sessions, learn how to answer questions, walk well and make new friends. The pageant has been organized by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, considered an icon by some of the city’s and country’s eunuchs. Tripathi wants the winner to be her heir of sorts, to unite and represent the community, spread awareness about its problems and be a role model. Auditions have taken place in 10 cities and the finale will be in Mumbai on Sunday, where 16 contestants will try their luck. Ritu will be one of them. Yet, what could have been a meaningful way to raise awareness and cultivate sensitivity hasn’t quite done that. At the Mumbai audition on 24 January to select semi-finalists, Shabana, elegant in a black salwar-kurta, walked out

Runnersup: (from left) Muskaan Bhosale, Nishi Sheikh and Tamanna Sheikh did not make it to the final.

Dancing queens: (clockwise from top left) Contestants getting ready to go on stage; a contestant strikes a pose before the judges; Tripathi, the organizer of the show; the focus was more on the contestants’ moves than their responses in the questionand answer round. slowly, with one arm extended. Her eyes were beautifully made-up, but she could not conceal the greenish shadow of stubble on her face. She is part of a Marathi Lavni orchestra and sang for the judges in a beautiful voice. She seemed older than the rest of the girls; almost old-worldly. It was easier to imagine her in an orchestra than on a ramp, though she said she was happy to be there. Neha, a giggly young

contestant, made everyone smile when she joked about the guy whose initials she had tattooed near her heart before he left her. Thirty-year-old Tripathi has worked for years to raise awareness about her people. She was the first transgender to represent Asia Pacific in the United Nations general assembly’s president’s office as a Civil Society Task Force member and runs an NGO, Astitva, to support sexual minorities. She’s

also a celebrity who has been a contestant on game shows such as Dus Ka Dam and Sach Ka Saamna. Tripathi adores the media and the attention it bestows on her. She’s flamboyant, controversial, funny and titillating. A celebrity fighting for a cause is irresistible to news channels and that applies to Tripathi also—she’s an unofficial spokesperson of sorts for the eunuch community. The Mumbai audition started a

couple of hours late, presumably because the organizers were waiting for more contestants than the six who showed up initially—the figure rose to 20 eventually. The judges included Bollywood actor Nauheed Cyrusi; models/actors Vandana Gupta and Archana Gupta; Rohini Ramnathan, a radio jockey on 93.5 Red FM; Yogesh Bharadwaj, director of Border Hindustan Ka, and social worker S. Gauri, who runs Sakhi for Chowky, an NGO. They were an encouraging, boisterous lot; they saw themselves as enthusiastic cheerleaders rather than discerning judges. For half an hour till the contestants came in, Tripathi held court, dressed in a red and gold sari and a halter blouse. She entertained the audience with suggestive jokes and witty repartee. Though Tripathi is earnestly trying to make the pageant a success, she seems wistful at the prospect of giving up her throne. “I should not have had this pageant. I should have just crowned myself and declared myself the winner. I am the queen, I don’t want to give it up,” she says. It was an attempt at humour, but it was telling nonetheless. She walked the ramp to Fashion ka jalwa to show the contestants how it was done. Theatrically twirling, shimmying and blowing kisses, she earned screeches of approval from the judges. Finally, the contestants took the stage. Some of them, such as Tamanna Sheikh, who was picked as one of the three semi-finalists, had been waiting for this opportunity. “My quest to do a ramp show is over,” she told the judges, after a slow, seductive entrance and come-hither looks at the

audience. She was in a short purple tunic with an ornamental maang tikka on her forehead. She and her friend Nazia Sheikh are social workers at Triveni Samaj Vikas Kendra. Nazia was tall and plump with a pretty face and dressed in a demure bridesmaid’s dress. The duo had been “preparing (for the) catwalk and interview” rounds for the past few days. Many of the contestants were beautiful, and like Thailand’s “ladyboys”, it would be difficult at first to identify them as men. Tripathi kept making cameo appearances and sometime during the proceedings, she coined the term “hijrotic”. Most of the contestants were eager, but there were a few who didn’t seem so happy to be there. Some said they had been ordered to take part in the contest; others walked the ramp with indifference or extreme nervousness. Despite Tripathi’s beliefs, the show seemed to be objectifying the very people she was trying to liberate. The question-andanswer round was quick and pointless and the three semi-finalists—Tamanna, Nishi Sheikh and Muskaan Bhosale— were the most flamboyant, but not necessarily the most dedicated to the cause. Ritu is honest about what she will do if she wins. “I’d like to take part in more contests, enter Bollywood or hopefully do something similar,” she says. She doesn’t want to save India from HIV like some others. Ritu just wants hijras to be respected when they walk on the street. “This contest has its pros and cons,” says Ashok Row Kavi, one of India’s most prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists, founder of Humsafar Trust and editor-in-chief, Bombay Dost. “The real problem transgenders face is violence by the police, stigma and discrimination. The question of self-worth is a different one,” says Kavi, who is also the technical officer, sexual minorities, UNAIDS, Delhi. Tripathi has overcome those problems but other hijras have not. “Laxmi feels she’s made it. She’s involved in film and dance, and she has a disposable income,” says Kavi. Kavi and Tripathi are friends, but he is also sensitive to voices from the community who are not in favour of the contest. One of them is Sita Kinnar, president of Kinnar Bharti, an NGO she started in 2009. The most important thing for a hijra, according to her is, “Samaj me rehne ka, na ki make-up karke nautanki karna” (To live in society, not apply make-up and put on a show). She says the contest will only benefit the winner, not thousands of repressed hijras. For Tripathi, her work has just begun if she is still serious about serving her community. What hijras need are workers, not just queen bees. parizaad.k@livemint.com