Lounge 07 april 2012 by HT Media

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Saturday, April 7, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 14

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A lychee vendor refreshes his wares on a street in Allahabad.

HIGH ON HATS >Page 9

THE DAY OF THE PEACOCK

Aung San Suu Kyi’s win in the recently held byelections in Myanmar heralds a new wave of hope for the Burmese >Page 5

THE GREAT INDIAN SUMMER

Summer means sunshine, but it also means shade. Remembering the colours of the hot season over the subcontinent >Pages 1011

THE HEAT IS ON

The season of sherbets, superheroes and mountain vacations: Our guide to nourishing mind, matter and soul during the warm holiday months

REPLY TO ALL

AAKAR PATEL

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

BLAME THE BRITISH ETERNAL SUNSHINE RAJ ON BANKERS OF MY MIND

THE COOLING DRAUGHT

his month, 350 years ago, an event occurred that changed India. In April 1662, England’s King Charles II took possession of Bombay, given to him as dowry. Though the Portuguese lied to him earlier and had promised everything up to Borivali, Charles II was given Bombay from Colaba to Mahim. I believe this event, more than any other, and the thinking of a small group of Indians, more than any other, led to British rule in India. Let’s see how. The traditional narrative of... >Page 4

TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU This summer promises some serious celluloid action. We round up the season’s blockbusters >Page 16

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

PHOTO ESSAY

FEATHERWEIGHT HISTORY

HOME PAGE L3

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

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

HOT TROPIC A

ngels are unthinkable/in hot weather,” begins a Monica Youn poem. We know. We feel the heat so intensely that we spend the first quarter of every new year feverishly planning trips that will take us away to places where we can laugh at locals complaining about the heat, like Europe, or Bangalore. In his essay for this issue (pages 10-11), novelist and Lounge columnist Tabish Khair suspects (quite correctly, I’m afraid) that “the Great Indian Summer gets split into two extremes in our big cities: the cold and dark of enclosed air-conditioned spaces, and the shadeless glare and heat of asphalt, denuded parks and sidewalks outside”. But while our summers are difficult, we also find ways to take pleasure in them. For this special issue of Lounge, we wanted to create a guide of the things that bring vibrancy and purpose to these months. In a season which can sap you of the will to live, we wanted to tackle both heating up and cooling down as sources of inspiration and energy. I’m relieved to report that as our ideas took shape, it became clear to us that we weren’t just indulging in 40-degreesCelsius magical thinking. In short: The weather as a topic for complaint has exhausted itself. So take a moment to contemplate the wonders of a snowy mountain summer (pages CLIMATE 14-15), or beautiful, quirky hats (page 7). You’ll CHANGE find some suggestions for the best use of your well-earned downtime, but we also know you are ready to move into fangirl mode, squealing at the oncoming train that is Joss Whedon’s The Avengers movie (page 17). While you are training to keep awake, fingers crossed for Serena Williams at the European Grand Slams, we thought you should have the lowdown on what playing tennis in India is like (pages 12-13). Each story carries a stamp: We categorized them as “Mind”, “Matter” or “Soul” as broad indications of which buttons each one will press. It’s time to shoo the pigeons out of the air-conditioning vents, and time to worry about this year’s mango crop. It’s time to picnic with the ghosts of emperors in Delhi’s stepwells; time for the benign neglect of your children so that they can get in some dreaming of their own. “Angels are unthinkable/in hot weather,” as that Youn poem goes, “except in some tropical locales.” Supriya Nair Issue editor ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP

LOUNGE REVIEW | TRISHNA, NEW DELHI

onfession: The only time I have visited Trishna in Mumbai was five years ago and at the time, since I was not allergic to prawns, almost every dish we ordered had prawns. At the less than a month-old Trishna, New Delhi, I was determined to try the Butter Pepper Garlic Crab, a speciality of the restaurant. But since I am no expert on Trishna’s cuisine, I decided In two places: The terrace seating at Trishna; and to take along a companion the Butter Pepper Garlic Crab. who is a regular at Trishna, Mumbai, and almost never orders a burst of flavour. We were greedy anything else on the menu but the and ordered Mutton Trishna Special and Dal Kolhapuri. The meat was Butter Pepper Garlic Crab. tender and the coarse gravy of ginger, onions and tomatoes not too spicy. The good stuff Location, location, location—that You can see the crab you are about to devour, and for us in Delhi, that is is where Trishna, Delhi, scores big a new experience. We were told that time. Bang opposite south Delhi’s the seafood is procured fresh in Qutub Minar, the eatery is easily visiMumbai and flown to Delhi daily. ble. Inside, the atmosphere is relaxed The crabs come in two sizes though: and unhurried, unlike the Mumbai jumbo and regular. Our regular- branch, where you are expected to sized crab more than satisfied the finish your meal and scoot. The two of us on the table. The dish itself was fantastic; cooked and served in the same way as Trishna, Mumbai, does, vouched my companion. The meat was juicy and not overcooked, and there was enough garlic and butter on the plate to smother the meat with. We ordered Rawas Hyderabadi Tikka and once again the fish was cooked to perfection. The freshly cracked pepper coating on it gave each of the six pieces

decor is in all-white and the terrace seating is a great idea, especially for the evenings, because it also overlooks the Qutub (you can’t see much of it though, thanks to the trees which block the view).

The bad stuff When we asked our server the difference between Mutton Trishna Special (below) and Mutton Kolhapuri, all he said was that the spices were different. And that was his answer to pretty much everything. A little information about the dishes would help someone not familiar with the menu decide better. A minor irritant: We were served the dal, rotis but had to wait for the mutton dish to arrive. While we waited, the dal become a cold, lumpy bowl of goop. Of course, it was reheated and re-served with the mutton on our request, as were the rotis, but these are basics at any restaurant: Serve all the main course dishes at the same time with hot rotis.

Talk plastic Our crab dish cost `3,000 (dishes are charged as per the size of the crab). The meal for two adults and a child cost `6,485, minus alcohol. The Vila Haven, Ten Style Mile, opposite Qutub Minar, Mehrauli, Delhi. For reservations, call 8586929001. Seema Chowdhry

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AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Blame the British Raj on bankers

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

his month, 350 years ago, an event occurred that changed India. In April 1662, England’s

King Charles II took possession of Bombay, given to him as dowry. Though the Portuguese lied to him earlier and had promised

everything up to Borivali, Charles II was given Bombay from Colaba to Mahim. I believe this event, more than any other, and the thinking of a small group of Indians, more than any other, led to British rule in India. Let’s see how. The traditional narrative of the British capture of India focuses on the east rather than the west. It runs like this: Enraged by the Black Hole incident, Robert Clive bribed Mir Jafar to betray Siraj ud Daulah, the governor of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. At Plassey in 1757, a small force of Britishers and sepoys defeated the governor’s army and installed a puppet. Britons took the revenue collection (diwani) rights of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa from the weak Mughal emperor in Delhi after the Battle of Buxar. From here they expanded till 1857, when they took Delhi. This narrative misses one important element that, to my knowledge, has not been considered. It is the role of one community’s members in making sure the British succeeded in both east and west. I suspect, and as I gather more evidence I am convinced, that this community’s individuals wanted the British to take over the administration of the country. The community is the Jain baniyas, who financed the Mughals in Bengal, and the Jain and Hindu baniyas who financed the two (the Mughals and the British) in Surat. Let’s look at the east first. What exactly happened before the Battle of Plassey? Sir Penderel Moon (The British Conquest and Dominion of India) says “some influential Hindu bankers in Murshidabad, alienated by Siraj ud Daulah’s violence and caprice, had secretly informed (the British) that they were meditating his removal”. These influential bankers were Oswal Jains, led by a man whose title was Jagat Seth, meaning “banker to the world”. His name is not known for certain, but it might have been Madhav Rai. The Muslims had no confidence in running the economy and usually trusted the Hindu mercantile castes to do this. Akbar’s economist Todar Mal was Punjabi Khatri. The problem the Oswal Jains had with Siraj ud Daulah was that, only in his 20s, he was not mature or knowledgeable. He did not understand interest or finance, and did not apply the rule of law. He preferred rule by whim. He became violent when it was learnt that he had no money to pay salaries to the army. Sir Penderel writes: “He is said to have

struck Jagat Seth, the leading Hindu banker, in the face and threatened him with circumcision... It seems to have been Jagat Seth who took the lead in approaching the English for help in overthrowing him.” Jagat Seth played from the shadows. History records the broker of Plassey’s treachery as another trader in Bengal, a Punjabi Khatri called Amin Chand. He is said to have cemented the deal between Clive and Mir Jafar, but then blackmailed the British saying he would tell Siraj ud Daulah unless he was paid `30 lakh. Clive went along, but duped him with a fake signature on their agreement, and Amin Chand is said to have fainted in shock on finding out. But later books show that Amin Chand was back in British favour and doing business with them. This does not strike me as being normal. My speculation is that Amin Chand was unimportant to Plassey, and the main character was Jagat Seth. Jagat Seth ran the economy for Siraj ud Daulah, Mir Jafar, and later for Mir Qasim. It is recorded that `3 out of `4 collected as revenue in the state went straight to Jagat Seth, against loans he had already advanced to the nawabs. After Mir Jafar refused to fight at Plassey and Siraj ud Daulah was defeated, Jagat Seth was the person who crafted the terms on which Clive and other officers took their payback. Mir Jafar had promised the British £2 million, or around `16 crore now (as damages in war) to instal him but the treasury only had £1.3 million. Jagat Seth decided how and when the balance would be paid in instalments. Most importantly, it was Jagat Seth who went to Delhi to convince the Mughal emperor to accept the English victory and instal Mir Jafar as nawab. He was clearly a man of enormous reach and influence with the Mughals. So why did he keep going out of his way to help Clive and the British? It is because he had done business with them. The newly founded city of Calcutta, which was under British control, was where the Jain and Hindu baniyas kept their money and papers. They trusted the rule of law that the British brought to their possessions. They knew from their fellow baniyas in the west how carefully the British managed trade in their new city of Bombay. They observed the fact that the British risked life to make sure that a violation on their sovereignty, such as the Black Hole

Partners in war: Popular narrative believes Robert Clive colluded with Mir Jafar to win the Battle of Plassey. incident, was punished. Jagat Seth’s next move was to soften his support to Mir Jafar and his successor, Mir Qasim, leading to a shortage in finances. With the economy unmanageable and the army unpaid, the path was open for Clive to seize Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. For this, Jagat Seth paid the price, and two of his family members were killed by a desperate Mir Qasim. Their bodies were fed to animals, by Qasim’s mercenary Soomro (a butcher from Strasbourg whose name was Reinhardt). But Jagat Seth ultimately won. Murshidabad lost its glory and power moved to British Calcutta. Now let’s look at the west. The English set up a warehouse (what they referred to as “factory”) in Surat, where they stocked the items they were allowed to trade with India by Jahangir in the early 17th century. In 1617, Sir Thomas Roe declared Surat was the “fountainhead and life of all the East India trade”. B.G. Gokhale writes (Surat in the 17th Century) that Surat was “perhaps the only great city of its time in India where the humble, submissive and much maligned baniya broker was the hero, the creator of its values”. Surat’s Mughal governorship was a post that was bid for. The man promising highest revenue to Delhi got it. To secure this money and make his own, he would squeeze the Hindu and Jain merchants. The leading merchant of this period was Virji Vora, a Sthanakvasi Jain. Like Jagat Seth, Vora funded British trade. Like Jagat Seth, Vora was not fond of Mughal rule. In 1638, Shah Jahan fired Surat’s governor Masih uz Zaman for wrongly jailing Vora, after the angry baniyas protested. During Aurangzeb’s reign, Shivaji looted Surat twice. First he came in 1664, sending a letter demanding that

governor Inayat Khan and Virji Vora come out to meet him, else he would burn the city. Khan shut himself in the fort, refusing to defend Surat, and Shivaji came, looting `1 crore from merchants, including Virji Vora, and burning Surat down. He returned in 1670. Again the Mughals were unable to protect the merchant citizens from loot. Both times, only the British factory kept the Marathas out, with sepoys expertly shooting their rifles from its rooftops. Vora and the baniyas would have noted this. In 1669, Surat’s qazi had ordered the baniyas to convert to Islam, according to John F. Richards (The Mughal Empire). The qazi forcibly converted and circumcised a baniya working as an accountant. The man killed himself in shame. Surat’s 8,000 baniyas abandoned the city in protest, travelling to Bharuch and leaving their wives and children with their next of kin, according to Sushil Chaudhary (The Surat Crisis of 1669). Vora died soon after. Richards, who has written the Cambridge history on the subject, thinks Vora was a Dawoodi Bohra. But this cannot be the case, as a letter published by Makrand Mehta (Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective) shows. After Vora’s death, the most influential baniya was a Hindu, Bhimji Parikh, who moved to Bombay to set up its first printing press. In 1672, the French East India Company’s Abbe Carre wrote in his The Travels of the Abbe Carre in India and the Near East From 1672 to 1674: “...many Hindus and their families were leaving the town to avoid (the Mughal governor’s) extortions and from fear of another attack by King Shivaji.” The baniyas went to Gerald Aungier (later to COURTESY RUPA

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

ENGENDERED NOTES

hy are there few women composers in India? This stock question, frequently asked of women musicians, comes loaded with the suggestion of a gender bias tilted in favour of male composers. There is no simple answer to the question, but to begin with, it could be mentioned that in the absence of any data to prove that this is indeed so, we would be relying largely on conjecture. More importantly, it would have to be stressed that in order to reach any conclusion for or against the inference, an examination of diverse forms and genres of Indian music would be

required. Reaching a conclusion based almost entirely in the context of film music, where, indeed, women composers have been a rarity, would not be an acceptable solution. The moment one looks beyond Bollywood, things begin to look considerably different, because an inexhaustible treasure house of women’s songs from different regions, in styles ranging from folk songs to protest songs from the women’s movement, in a mind-boggling number of languages and dialects, confirms that women compose prolifically, as they have possibly always done. It is possibly a consequence of our own inability

to look beyond Bollywood that we neglect this treasure, and do not consider the women who created these songs as “composers”. In the context of Hindustani classical music, there is no serious dearth of women composers. Gauhar Jaan, one of the first Indian musicians to be recorded as early as 1902, was also a composer in her own right, or so we learn from her pen name “Gauhar pyari” or “Gauhar, the charming” that she wove so elegantly into some of the classic compositions she recorded. Mogubai Kurdikar was, and Naina Devi, Prabha Atre, Shruti Sadolikar Katkar, Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande and Alka Deo Marulkar are, all women performer-composers, to name just a few. We are also told that Begum Akhtar routinely composed many of the ghazals that she immortalized, and I could keep adding more names to this fast-swelling list of women composers, but I’m compelled to

become governor of Bombay) for asylum from the Mughals. In 1679, Aurangzeb imposed jaziya, the property tax on non-Muslims, but by then the baniyas had already made up their mind. Jain and Hindu baniyas were united on this. In 1672, only 10 years after Charles II got Bombay, Aungier was already farming out free land and trading rights to Surat’s merchants, flocking to the city. Surat’s decline and Bombay’s rise came in the west, mirroring the decline and rise in the east. Perhaps this story is not as clean as historians would want history to be. For instance, Surat’s subsequent decline was slow rather than precipitous. Other reasons exist for Bombay’s rise than the migration by baniyas, but the sequence is revealing. I am writing a play on Plassey that carries this background. And what drama there is in this story. All the bribing in Bengal, which for the Indian was second nature, could not have been swallowed as cleanly by the English. Clive killed himself in England, stabbing his throat repeatedly with a penknife, according to Burton Stein. He was condemned for taking £234,000 of the company’s plunder. He was honoured for setting up British rule in India. But my belief is that without the baniya’s enthusiasm, the British could not have had their Raj. Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist. Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakarpatel

In her own right: Gauhar Jaan was a performer and composer.

raise another question. Is there anything that distinguishes a composition made by a woman from that made by a male composer? And if there isn’t, then what’s all the fuss about? Is it at all possible to listen to a musical work and be able to guess whether or not it has been composed by a man or a woman? Is there a gender tracer embedded in each composition that actually provides pointers? Not that I come armed with any data to prove the point, but I doubt if it would be possible for anyone to sit back, close their eyes, and listen to a melody and decipher the composer’s gender. Song texts and lyrics may, in some instances but not always, offer some clues. But then what of compositions meant for instruments? Compositions written for instruments like the sitar, sarod, sarangi, flute or tabla would not contain any textual clues that could reveal

the gender of the composer. How then can one decipher feminine or masculine traits in the composition? Thankfully, there is no such method available or else the creative process of composing would fall prey to a stereotypical typecasting. All compositions by women composers would have a common feminine style and vice versa. I think we are better placed in a tradition of androgenized creativity where male qawwals with robust, distinctly male voices ecstatically sing verses like “Chhaap tilak sab chheeni re…” adopting a woman’s stance; and an Ustad Faiyaz Khan, masculine both in appearance and his gravel-laden timbre of voice, sings “Na maanoongi, na maanoongi, na maanoongi” with a conviction that transcends gender. Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2012

Spotlight

LOUNGE

REUTERS

POLITICS

The day of the peacock Aung San Suu Kyi’s win in the recently held byelections in Myanmar heralds a new wave of hope for the Burmese

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ·································· usiness is brisk at the headquarters of the National League for Democracy (NLD), Myanmar’s opposition party, on the afternoon of 30 March. Byelections are two days away—the first test of the NLD’s hold over Myanmar’s masses since 1990, the year the party won an overwhelming majority in nationwide elections which the ruling military regime refused to recognize. In the time that followed, thousands of party activists, including its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, have spent years in jail. But there is no time to wallow in self-pity; volunteers are busy wrapping T-shirts, key chains, posters, calendars, mugs and other memorabilia for eager customers—Burmese and foreigners. The mood is cheerful and optimistic as party workers issue instructions, hand out lunch packets, and smile for photographers. Large images of Suu Kyi and her father, Burma’s independence hero General Aung San, stare down at the happy commotion. A French journalist asks me what I think of the elections, and if I am an official observer. I say I am not, and suggest he speak to the Burmese instead. He walks away, avoiding the language barrier, but I turn to a woman who smiles shyly as she tells me, in precise English, that she is voting for the NLD. She gives her name only as Na, and I have no way to tell if it is her real name, but I can’t blame her for choosing anonymity. Myanmar has been that kind of place for long, and this sudden openness is too new for everyone, and nobody can predict how long it might last. Na looks too young to have voted in 1990, the last time Burma, as the country was then known, held free and fair elections. She lives in Mingalar Taung Nyunt, a township where electoral rolls had grown mysteriously, making the NLD suspicious that there could be foul play. Eventually, NLD’s candidate Phyu Phyu Thin won, but two days before the elections, Suu Kyi called a news conference where she complained of many irregularities. But this was an election where even the government didn’t want the NLD to do badly. The Hindu reported that electoral workers were saying they had orders not to cheat this time. On Sunday, the street where the NLD office is located is a sea of humanity in red, the colour of NLD. Suu Kyi has won her seat, Kawhmu, a rural constituency ravaged by cyclone Nargis in 2008. The results from across the country are similar, as NLD officials first say they will win 20, then say 30, then 35, and finally, boldly proclaim they might win 40 of the 45 seats for which elections were held. Even in Naypyidaw, the purpose-built new capital where the residents comprise civil servants, the NLD is winning. Whichever way I turn, I see the NLD’s flag—red, with a star and a yellow peacock. If women like Na vote for the NLD, it is for two reasons. One is the history Suu Kyi represents. Her father Aung San was a true independence hero, who manoeuvred his way to ensure Burma’s independence during World War II by first working with the Japanese to fight the British, and later, joining the British to roll back the Japanese. He was assassinated in 1947. The other, more immediate, reason is her personal sacrifice. She lived in Britain with her husband and children, and came

to Burma in 1988 to look after her ailing mother. Following her mother’s death, she stayed, because the country was going through tumultuous changes. Decades of socialist rule under General Ne Win was ending, and the government was opening up the economy. But there was no political change, and students were on the streets, demanding democratic freedoms. The nation was crying out for her to take leadership. She became the conscience of the troubled nation, and captured the imagination of everyone. She was arrested, but her party won 392 of the 492 seats, securing 52% of the popular vote. The generals refused to give up power. They agreed to release her from jail if she promised to leave the country, never to return—she refused. She persisted, even when she learnt that her husband, the noted expert on Himalayan culture, Michael Aris, was dying of cancer. She never saw him again (he died in 1999). In introducing her essays, “Freedom from Fear”, Aris wrote: “She always used to say to me that if her people ever needed her, she would not fail them. As I re-read her old letters to me, I noted how again and again she expressed her worry that her family and people might misinterpret our marriage and see it as a lessening of her devotion to them. She constantly reminded me that one day, she would have to return to Burma, that she counted on my support at that time, not as her due, but as a favour.” It is difficult not to feel utterly moved by the devotion the people I met in Yangon showed towards her. “Those are real, tremendous sacrifices,” a diplomat tells me. A taxi driver says he loves her, tears welling up in his eyes, pointing out her photograph, which he now feels confident enough to display on his windscreen. A former associate, who parted company with her over her uncompromising stance on calling for economic sanctions, says that while she disagrees with her, she loves her and respects her. “The poor in this country know what she has gone through for their sake,” the diplomat continues. By remaining in Myanmar in the face of having to make such gutwrenching decisions, she has shown her strength, how unjustly she has been treated, and stressed to the people that she would never abandon them. Even after winning the by-elections, she asked her followers to be dignified and restrained in their celebrations. That call for restraint is understandable; the road ahead for Suu Kyi remains long and won’t be easy. The NLD has less than 10% of the seats in Myanmar’s parliament, whose term ends only in 2015. Given the current constitution, which ensures the military’s dominance in parliament, the NLD will find it difficult to build the kind of majority needed to bring about political changes. To amend the constitution, the party will need the support not only of other opposition parties, but also members of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party. While President Thein Sein deserves credit for making the necessary, bold moves to earn the trust of Suu Kyi, the ruling party has leaders unsure of the direction of the changes, which, if they take effect fully, will erode the party’s hold over government. Then there are other problems of federalism. While the government has signed ceasefire agreements with several ethnic insurgencies, there haven’t been any comprehensive peace agreements, paving the path for normal development activities. The ethnic groups demand greater autonomy, a demand which the military has considered anathema. Balancing these forces will not be easy. Meghna Guhathakurta, a Bangladeshi expert on peace and reconciliation who has worked on the Rohingya crisis between Bangladesh and Myanmar, says: “She is a human rights activist, but she is also a political leader. She will have to create national consensus, which may

The return: Aung San Suu Kyi waves to supporters outside the National League for Democracy headquarters in Yangon, Myanmar, a day after the byelections. require compromises.” As if these political challenges weren’t formidable enough, there are economic realities to deal with: A United Nations Development Programme household survey estimates that a third of Myanmar’s population is below the poverty line. The currency kyat has been gradually floated only this week, but it will take time to stabilize. Economic sanctions from Europe and the US will be eased soon, but there is no guarantee that investments will flow

immediately in a country where entrepreneurs face bureaucratic hurdles. Yet, you have to add the expectations of the people, who look up to Suu Kyi as their aunty, their mother-figure, who can transform the nation’s future. And then contrast that with the reality—that she is a member of parliament, leading a party heavily outnumbered in parliament, dealing with a government in which there are some leaders she trusts, a few she doesn’t know, and many who have sought to keep her jailed.

Myanmar is a predominantly Buddhist nation; the central tenet of that faith is the middle path. Suu Kyi will have to negotiate that with great dexterity. If her past record is any indication, she will succeed. In a world starved of leaders to revere, Suu Kyi belongs to that small group of unblemished men and women of integrity—Nelson Mandela of South Africa, the late Václav Havel of the Czech Republic. They remain committed to their principles: Mandela took the long walk to freedom, abandoning violence; Havel believed in living the truth, irrespective of the consequences; Suu Kyi has declared freedom from fear, to lead an ethical life. “The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical beliefs. It is man’s vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer and build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power,” she wrote in her address to the European parliament (delivered in absentia) when she was given the Sakharov Prize in 1990. Truth against power—that simple idea has rarely been articulated so clearly. Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com

LOUNGE

SUMMER SPECIAL

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THINKSTOCK

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF MY MIND W

hen I think of summer, my mind’s eye gazes on scenes from other times, forever resident in the archives of my memory. I see the family sheep, Curly, swimming with the family dog, Bimbo, in an ancient well on a hot, still Deccan day. I hear the clack of marbles that I religiously clean and put away every night. I see the silent tombs of sultans buried, I hear the stories of sultanates lost and won. I can still smell the 1970s; paya, that rich soup of trotters, and the fragrant, spicy biryani of Gulbarga, Karnataka, which last week was one of the hottest places in India. I see the great, green expanse of Cubbon Park, Bangalore; the seasonal death of the jacaranda and the birth of the crumpled, pink-lavender Queen’s flower. I see dosas being delivered to our tables under lush, living canopies of creepers, swept away, each one, by progress. I can taste the rich pork curries from Mangalore and Coorg (now Kodagu), as I can the special Eid haleem of Bangalore. I see the great shrub jungle—also gone—behind the Soviet-style concrete blocks of RK Puram, New Delhi, the pail of water beside my charpoy, the string-bed I sleep on in our balcony during steamy nights without electricity. I

pour the water on myself. I feel the water soaking into my skin. I feel it drying up within minutes. I smell the 1980s, the tandoori chicken of Kake di Hatti (now Kake da Hotel), Connaught Place, basted with the pot-bellied cook’s sweat in the days before air conditioning. I feel the heaviness in the air. I can taste the dust from the approaching loo, the hot summer storm blowing in from the western desert. I see the open spaces and big skies of Missouri in the American Midwest, where I eat 99-cent (around `50) McDonald’s burgers because it is all I can afford (which is not to say I do not enjoy them). I feel my surprise at the humidity and heat that follows a long, freezing winter. I see the superstore on the edge of town. I see the cheap catfish and cheaper pork brain. I can smell the 1990s, endless rounds of barbecued meat marinated with whatever spices I have at hand, immersed in whatever liquor I drink. I open my eyes while lying under the big oak tree outside a library in Columbia, Missouri, and meet a man who becomes a close friend. “You are lying in my spot,” he says. “Well, it’s mine as well,” I respond. He frowns and asks, “Are

SOUL

MIND

MATTER

you from the Third World?” He is too, a South African, who grew up in the township of Soweto. He asks if I can cook biryani. I never have, but I invite him over and I do. I see the smiling faces of my nosy, generous Punjabi landlords and ladies in Delhi, asking why I return from office so late. I smell the paneer, chholey and chapatti being shoved at me by Mrs Malhotra from a window in the kitchen wall. I smell my own cooking in the makeshift kitchen out on the terrace of my top-floor barsati flat. I like my roast mutton and fish curries, and I dish them out by the kilogram for the stream of visitors, all of us sweating, MINT smoking, drinking and eating in the furnace that is Greater Kailash-I, made worse by the smoke from a thousand generators trying to stave off one of the worst summers on record. I recall love gained and lost, passions found and expended. I see my aunt ahead of me, visiting the garrulous Koli (fisher) women of Grant Road Market, Mumbai, on a sweaty summer morning. I smell the 2000s, dried prawns from Mumbai’s fishing villages and fresh fish from Machiwala Mohammed, the hard-working Bihari fishmonger. I smell my latest attempts in the kitchen, the roast chicken, lamb and duck, lapped in freshly

THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE COOLING DRAUGHT W

hen my Chinese room-mate got acne on her face, she ate a porridge made of green mung beans. Soaked mung beans are considered cooling foods in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). They support the yin earth and disperse yang heat. Indian Ayurveda, too, has its own theories of heating and cooling foods. Ripe yellow mangoes are considered heating. My grandmother always ate mangoes with some yogurt to balance the fruit’s intrinsic heating properties. The mango theory didn’t make sense to me, I told my Dad. Nature, after all, doesn’t make mistakes. If it bestowed a bounty of mangoes all through the summer months, the fruits had to be there for a reason: to cool us off. No, said my Dad. Mangoes were indeed heating fruits; and yes, nature didn’t make mistakes. The reason mangoes came to us in the summer was answered in a pithy Sanskrit saying, “Ushnam Ushnena Shamyati”, which is akin to the Latin “Similia Similibus Curantur”. Like cures like, in plain English. Heating fruits like mangoes help dispel

the heat of summer. Healing foods are a complicated business. Mangoes are heating but only the ripe ones. Green mangoes are cooling—witness their ubiquitous usage in summer sherbets, including the famous aam panna, which incidentally includes some cooling cardamom, should there be any residual heat in the mangoes. Yogurt is cooling and damp. Many elderly Indians will not eat yogurt at night because it causes kapha or mucus. A better option is buttermilk, particularly blended with heating spices such as ginger, pepper, curry leaves and asafoetida. This chhaas, or sambaaram as it is called in Kerala, is a soothing digestive. Sugar cane, which thrives in the summer, is heating, so you balance it with some cooling rock sugar or kalkandu. Panakam is another drink that is served around this time of year. Made with jaggery, pepper, dried ginger and cardamom, it balances electrolytes and quenches thirst. The bael (Bengal quince) fruit is famously cooling. Starting now, bael sherbets will

be sold in by-lanes all over India. The green fruits, about the size of a small football, will be stacked like a pyramid. The yellow insides will be scooped out, made into a pulp and served with spices and sugar. Sandalwood is cooling; and chandan sherbet infused with rose or mogra petals is another visually arresting cooling drink. In my home, I am making a short-cut sherbet. I have submerged a stick of sandalwood in water and floated some mogra and rose petals on top. For good

Flavours of a season: The heat should not stop you from cooking.

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

good place to challenge your mind, body and faculties. Shop, chop, baste, marinate, sauté and stir. There is a reason why there is nothing more memorable than the memory of a fragrance, a smell and a meal, why summers tend to stay more eternal than winters, why a year without summer is like a life without love. At the end of a summer’s day, you must produce a meal with flavours more intense than ever. Have a bath. Cool off. Eat what you have cooked, feed your friends and family. There is no better way to experience the summers of our lives.

ground spices and Old Monk rum. As the decade wears on, I see new flats, cities and people, gaining a wife and child but keeping up the nomadic life, registering my 28th home in life. You will forgive my extended ramblings about summer. It is a season I treasure, for it is when I have done my best cooking, when I have wiped

endless lines of sweat from my brow, when I have ignored the power cuts and the flies and stood there, feeling like one man against the elements, unbowed. All right, so I exaggerate a bit. But I hope you understand. So, wriggle out of the air-conditioned bubble that surrounds you in the summer, and you will find the kitchen a

Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times. He is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Write to him at ourdailybread@livemint.com

measure, I am preparing this concoction in a copper vessel. In two months, I expect that the fountain of youth will have found me. Either that, or my hair will turn yellow from all the sandalwood I am imbibing. Are sherbets being overtaken by mocktails? Most restaurants serve mocktails but few include sherbets in their menu. Nimish Bhatia, regional executive chef (south), The Lalit Ashok Bangalore, serves sherbets at his Baluchi restaurant. “We have tukhmalanga sherbets made of those round seeds (called “sabja” in Mumbai) that are part of faloodas,” he says. “These are perceived to be thirst quenchers and coolants.” Other Baluchi sherbets are infused with hibiscus and rose flowers. Before mocktails were marketed by hotels and restaurants, we all drank sherbet: made of kokum, mango, screw pine or kewra, khus or vetiver, and sugar cane. Raj Sethia, chef and CEO of

Gangotree restaurant in Bangalore and Chennai, is a sherbet purist. He says that mixing a number of ingredients does not a sherbet make. Milk too is a no-no in the sherbet category, but forms the basis of the thandais that we all drink. “Anything that is an amalgam of many ingredients comes into the mocktail category,” says Sethia. “They are not sherbets.” He speaks effusively about the sherbets of his childhood—such as keri ka panna and bael sherbet—their history that began when the Mughals came to India, and how sherbets can trace their lineage and names back to Arabia and Turkey. But you know what? He is writing a book on mocktails—not sherbets. Mocktail seems to be the drink of today, and sherbet, a summer drink from yesteryear. There are two schools of thought when it comes to summer drinks. The West reaches for instant quick fixes: ice creams, slushes, “soda” or fizzy drinks and chilled juices. The East is more convoluted. Most of our sherbets are made with three ingredients: fruits and flowers, spices, and herbs like mint. I posted a request for sherbet recipes on a Facebook page that I highly recommend called Foodies in Bangalore. The name is self-explanatory but the people populating it are from all over India. Within a couple of hours, I had a hundred responses. I found a lot of information on the Gourmet India forum, an online community, as well. The

enthusiasm of the responses suggests to me that sherbets are the stuff of summer nostalgia. These are drinks that transport us to our childhood, when we came home to chilled juices and sherbets made of seasonal fruits and spices—red rhododendron in Himachal Pradesh; a delicate green aam panna in Rajasthan; spiced buttermilk in Gujarat and Kerala; red jil jil jigarthanda in Madurai, made of rose syrup and sarsaparilla; Rooh Afza and Rasna coolers all over India; chocolate-coloured panagam in the midst of south Indian weddings; kesar faloodas at Crawford Market in Mumbai along with the ubiquitous tender coconut water; bael panna in Lucknow; the prized Bengali kaancha-mitha mango panna; and a variety of red watermelon-based sherbets in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. These are the drinks of an Indian childhood, along with sucking on chuskis and ripe tamarind fruits that grow so profusely on the roadside in south India. Climb up a mango tree, lean back on its branches, allow the wind to rustle your hair and suck on a ripe mango or tamarind fruit. Better yet, drink an imli (tamarind) sherbet, Bhojpuri barley sattu, ragi kanji or fresh lime soda. Arrey, lace it with vodka, if you must.

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Stirring up memories: Sherbets are the drinks of an Indian childhood.

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

Shoba Narayan is currently drinking green Brahmi sherbet. 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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HOLIDAYS

NOTHING DOING

ADD SOME IMAGINATION TO YOUR SUMMER HOLIDAYS Children’s books provide the best ideas on how to chase mystery and adventure with friends PHOTOGRAPHS

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uthor Jerry Pinto says that for him summers were about reading and rereading. “When I was a child, this meant rereading, which is often the coziest, most beautiful form of reading because there are now no surprises, just the slow unfolding of a story.” It was never a parent’s job to “solve” a child’s boredom, he adds. Boredom was a delicious part of summer. A number of parents we spoke to said they often took inspiration from their books. So between the books and the people who lived them, we’ve crafted a pageturner of a summer.

How long has it been since your child slouched around the house? Here’s why it’s important to have an unstructured summer B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· “Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all. summer was Dill.” — To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

hen did summer become about parents having to worry about what to fill their children’s free time with? For generations, summer was about waking earlier than you did on school days because it meant you got to play more. More badminton, more hide-and-seek, lagori (a traditional Indian game), mangoes, and lemonade. It was train travel, relatives, cousins, friends, and escaping a bath only to come home covered in mud. But at some point, summer moved from the state of right to the state of a luxury. Panicked parents of bored children began booking camps and classes. “Children today have forgotten what childhood is. Packing a summer with classes is never about what a child wants to do, it’s about what a parent wants to do,” says R.K. Anand, paediatric surgeon, former medical director of the department of paediatrics and neonatology at Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai, and author of Guide to Child Care. “Maybe children just want to lie down and stare at the ceiling for a bit or just daydream, has anyone thought about that?” he asks, warning against the habit parents have of dragging children to psychiatrists at the faintest hint of boredom or lethargy. In 2010, when the New York state supreme court famously called a pair of brothers “overscheduled” in a custody ruling, it brought the term into the domain of children’s right to free time. Psychology Today’s 1999

article The Power of Play has been often touted as the go-to piece of research for why parents should step back. Child psychologist David Elkind’s book by the same name, and The Hurried Child, earned him many a speaker fee in the 1990s when he pointed out to worried parents that children had lost over 12 hours of spare time a week in the last couple of decades. Yet, in a world where achievement trumps free-spiritedness, families just threw their hands up and fell in line with the frighteningly organized world of children’s spare time. “The danger with structured time is that children get habituated to it,” says Shital Ravi, director of Disha Counselling Centre, Mumbai. “When a child is attuned to the predictability of routine, he is unable to cope with any ambiguous situation. These are the children who grow up to be adults who just don’t know how to cope when life throws them an unexpected turn.” A child whose life is so directed by others that he doesn’t know how to direct it himself, is not a desirable result. It’s the difference between giving a child a paper with a figure printed on it and instructions on how to colour it versus giving a child a blank piece of paper to draw as he pleases. The former fetters the mind, the latter frees it. “Always remember, in classes, it is someone else who is telling a child what to do. Children need to learn to be on their own. It’s only when they reach a state of boredom that their imagination and creativity kicks into play and forces them to come

The Hardy Boys Summer Exploring the neighbourhood is a great way to spend the summer, with the thrill of secret clubs, adventure and mystery. Shantanu Bhattacharya, father of fiveyearold Teesta, recollects: “My cousins and I created our own secret detective club, with a gun logo. The most difficult case was to try and keep out my irritating brat of a little sister out of the club! Slightly older, my friends and cousins pretended to be the Hardy Boys, when not playing cricket.” Musthaves: passwords, a space for the club, and if no mystery is to be found, then a watchman or neighbour to be stalked. Also, “outsource the club to someone who can set up a treasure hunt,” Bhattacharya suggests to parents who are working and want their children to have some supervision.

up with solutions,” says Ravi. Of course, children need an adult to keep an eye on them or to provide them with mental stimulants like books, drawing material, or organize play dates or take them to a picnic area. But the power of freedom is increasingly underestimated. The lack of unstructured play is also one of the leading causes of childhood obesity, diabetes, and a host of other lifestyle diseases, warns Anand. Children who don’t know how to entertain themselves are the ones plonked in front of television sets, demanding to be entertained. “Unstructured sport is always better than even organized sport because the child is actually enjoying himself,” Anand says.

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The Swami and Friends Summer Most neighbourhoods in India already have a cricket group. A bat, a ball, a field or an alley and friends are all you need really to get summer done. The friends union club is also a great way to help children deal with the pressures of rivalry, jeal ousy, group dynamics and economic differ ences. Ravi Subramanian, a software engineer from the US, sends his sons Suresh and Rohan home to his parents in Madurai every summer. There are just about five children to play with but lots to explore. Musthaves: “They ask for picnic baskets, so my mother gives them sandwiches, lemon rice, cake and some juice boxes. They cycle to the field where they can splash about, or play cricket. We just have to keep an eye out for the cows and monkeys,” he says. The children fight, get bored, and tan considerably in the heat, but have the best memories summers can pos sibly give, adds Subramanian.

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Winnie The Pooh Summer If you think about it, Winnie the Pooh is really about a child who has no real friends. So he imagines them. He makes his stuffed toys his closest friends, giving them voices and character, and weaves an entire world for himself. Christopher Milne, for whom the books were written by his father, had said his father would drive him down to the forests for two months every summer, “just to count the trees”. If that’s not evidence of what can come of doing nothing, what is? Veena Salian, a Bangalorebased IT consultant, spent her childhood in her uncle’s garden with a big dog. Now, she has a threeyearold daugh ter. “She makes our summers such fun. Soft toys are a great help. She can have her own tea parties, take them for treats and weave whole worlds around them,” she says.

The Enid Blyton Summer

Free time: Give your child a chance to explore on her own this summer.

Who hasn’t imagined packing a picnic basket and riding into the woods looking for the Faraway Tree? Or looked for clues, adventure, formed a Secret Seven club, made passwords and looked for space under the stairs to hold a club meeting? If you haven’t, you should teach your children to. Writer Lubaina Tyebji recalls her childhood in Hyderabad, where the Banjara Hills were for exploration. If there are spaces your children can safely explore, pack them a picnic basket and send them off, she suggests. Don’t worry: Climbing rocks, trees, scraping their knees or running from a dog isn’t going to hurt them. Gayatri Jayaraman

THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

CULTIVATING PATIENCE How do you teach a child to be patient and wait his turn? Our son, and some of his cousins in the 3-5 age group (ours is a joint family), create a huge fuss if they have to wait for anything. Not only is it really hard on everyone, but it is embarrassing in public when our son begins screaming even if we take a little time to open his chocolate wrapper or pass a toy to him. It’s hard to get him to stand in line at amusement parks. They all seem to be this way, and we don’t know how to reason with them since they don’t really listen to what we say. Teaching a child to “delay

gratification” is an ongoing process, and parents need to find ways to do this in many little ways in the home setting as well as outside. Trying to drive home a lesson in patience and waiting your turn in the middle of a “high-intensity” situation—where the child is already excited and wired up (like in an amusement park, or in the vicinity of sweets/soft drinks or other such “usually forbidden pleasures”)—is not going to work. You may get him or her to stop shouting and clamouring for that thing for a bit right then, but you’re not inculcating patience. It is through daily

interactions and rituals inside the home and in quieter situations that you can pass on clear messages and lessons— for instance, if the child comes with you to visit a neighbour, or you take the child into a shop for groceries. First, you must introduce the idea (to the child as well as the adults in his life) that every outing, even a walk to the corner store or a ride in the car to fill petrol, does not always mean that the child will be bought something. This is important, and some parents will actually spell it out when a child wants to go along on a short outing: “I’m going out to buy some fruit, and we’re not buying anything that you can eat there (or play with, etc.).” Second, young parents need to learn to switch children on to the “non-consumable” aspects of the world around them on an outing—count this, or look at that, or touch this. Too many parents can be seen talking continuously into their cellphones while pushing a stroller or walking a

Waiting in line: Teach children how to be patient through daily rituals. toddler, and this robs a child of a whole lot of casual interaction and inputs, and the only time they do have your attention is when they can scream for something in the shop! While some children are temperamentally easier to train in this aspect—to wait, to take a “no”, to delay their gratification and to tolerate frustration—almost all

children can be trained. For this the work must begin in small measures, including finding decisive, effective and palatable ways to not let a child interrupt conversations between his or her parents, at all times. You can also, at times, agree to buy chocolate or some other treat for a child, but have him agree that he will not eat it immediately.

Add it to the ritual of one piece after your meal, or some such thing, so that again the child gets what he likes, but learns that instant gratification is not the order of the day. Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting. Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Finding Nemo: The Machanis feeding their koi.

DECOR

GONE FISHING SOUL

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Beauty, family bonding and healing—a koi pond at home has several undercurrents MATTER B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

····································· roximity to nature has always been a human desire. “The more life you have around you, the better,” says Ravi Machani, who had a cascading koi pond—a decorative, artificially created pond—built in his Bangalore home about a year ago. Koi, a variety of the common carp, became popular as ornamental fish in China, Japan and South-East Asia. A burst of colour—orange, white, red, yellow—koi are a common sight in aquariums, ponds

and other water bodies. They are gradually making their way into Indian homes and gardens. Landscape consultants say keeping koi brightens up gardens. Pune-based landscape designer Latika Sanadi says that for clients who believe in alternative healing, koi is a favourite. Fish are known to have a relaxing effect on the mind. For the Machanis, the koi pond has enhanced family bonding. “They say a family that eats together stays together. I believe that a family that relaxes together stays together,” says Machani. “The pond has

also taught our children to be more respon-

MIND sible since they have to feed the fish.”

If it’s aquatic life that fascinates you, you could take up a koi pond as your summer project. But having koi at home doesn’t come easy. It needs effort, money and constant care to create and sustain a koi pond. You’re creating a whole ecosystem, maintaining the precarious balance of life. Enlist the help of a professional landscape designer, a good plumber and someone who understands filtration systems as well as aquatic flora and fauna.

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The flora

Design

Filtration

Caring for koi

Space

Cost

Aquascapist Adip Sajjan Raj runs Still Water Aquatics in Banga lore. The company looks at flora and fauna found naturally and recreates it in water bodies. From selecting the correct filter to algae growth and the correct aquatic plants, it takes care of everything. “Aquatic plants are not just for aesthetics. For instance, though lilypots are quite common in underwater bodies, the koi have a tendency to be bottom feeders. They dig up the mud, which releases excess nutrients in the water which, when exposed to direct sunlight, makes the algae growth go crazy,” says Raj. But the Water Canna, Little Giant Papyrus, lotus and a whole bunch of aquatic plants will make your koi’s home cozy. An outdoor pond should be away from trees that shed too much, since that’s extra waste and will need extra cleaning.

Whether you go for an indoor aquarium or an outdoor pool, make sure the look merges with the rest of your home. Reena Chengappa of My Sunny Balcony—a Bangalorebased company that specializes in gar dens, terraces and balco nies—helped design Machani’s koi pond. “We decided to go with a distressed, livedin look (for Machani’s pond), since the entire house is done in a rustic theme,” says Chengappa. Whether you go for a ceramic mosaic in a rectangularshaped pool, or an amorphous shape like a natural flowing stream, the options are many. Make sure your design doesn’t create any spaces or crevices where waste can accumulate. There should be free movement of water at all times, according to Chengappa.

The key to a beautiful pond, the long life and health of your koi is the filtration system. Avoid mechanical filters that work in swimming pools. Opt for a biofil ter. Rufus Monteiro, who runs a company called Living Water Systemz in Bangalore and deals with koi ponds and other tropical ponds, explains: “The koi is a large fish that poops a lot, which releases toxic ammonia into the water. The biofilter works by completing the nitrogen cycle in the water. With the help of cer tain bacteria, it converts the ammonia into nitrates, hence cleaning the water.”

Koi may need to be acclima tized before being introduced into a pond. Vendors at aquari ums will suggest putting koi in tubs of water and leaving it near a pond for a few hours before putting it in. They warn that a few may die in the pro cess. You also need to protect the fish from other pets you may have at home.

You need a fairly large garden, upwards of 700 sq. ft. The pond should be at least 30 inches or 2.5ft deep. For the Machanis, this was important since their four children are aged between two andahalf and nine years—the pool couldn’t be deeper than the height of their youngest. Kozhikodebased Shahier Singh has built a deck overlooking his pond (see above) where the fam ily spends evenings.

This depends on the size of the pond and the number of fish, but it can cost anywhere upwards of `1.5 lakh. Imported fish cost anywhere between `5,000 and `8,000 each. Locally bred fish are available for much less.

PHOTOGRAPHS

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MILLINERY

t Aldo: Woven floppy, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Atria—The Millennium Mall, Worli, Mumbai; and Forum, Elgin Road, Kolkata, `1,600.

HIGH ON HATS

COURTESY RITU BERI

With worldclass milliners as well as the right excuse to wear a hat, there’s no reason why Indians shouldn’t experiment more

PICKS

TOP GEAR

B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· here’s no arguing that you really have to be able to pull one off. A hat, of course. Off your head, of course. Lady Gaga wears them exotic, and judging by what’s on her head, she thinks India has much to offer by way of inspiration. Mumbai-based milliner Shilpa Chavan, whose Little Shilpa design of henna and gold Gaga last sported, also works the quirky with handmade paper and folds of finely pleated silk in a giant teal bow. She even has one in which bathroom slipper toe holds are intertwined to form the hat. “Exotic is always good, but influences are an evolution,” when it comes to hats, Chavan says. Hats, unlike fashion, don’t have seasons. There are no trends you should be following, Chavan says. There’s big and there’s small. It’s always exotic, and outlandish is normal. Jewels, feathers, what have you—it’s all good. Delhi-based designer Ritu Beri, whose hat designs are assembled in France and retailed out of her Sainik Farms boutique, adds: “The romantic hats which are floppy and large never go out of style. They can be worn with a flowing kurta or a dress. The fedora is a classic style and looks great with formal outfits, especially with blazers and trousers.” Beri’s current collection, she says, “is stirred by the rich heritage of our country. The spirit is intrinsically feminine, romantic but flamboyant; the collection is about rich, artistic handwork modelled into contemporary silhouettes with subtle embroidery.” Spring/ Summer is hat season, Beri says, adding, “I would like people to wear hats as a part of their daily outfits, a bit like jewellery.” Chavan says the point is to be noticed, always, so there is no such thing as an out-of-season hat. So if Kate Middleton brings it with the elegant fascinator, Princess Beatrice’s “toilet seat” hat at Prince William’s wedding stole the show equally, as do Gaga’s outlandish headpieces. Gallerist Abhay Maskara says he has a penchant for wearing hats because “they keep me cool”. Both literally and figuratively. Maskara picks them up in felt and cotton or

Floppy, cap, cloche and sun hat—take on the summer with some stylish headgear

COVER STORIES

B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

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t Zara: Crumpled floppy, at Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, Mum bai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `1,190.

u Claire’s: Floral floppy, at DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `1,200. COURTESY CLAIRE’S

t Accessorize: Denim cap, at Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, and Inorbit mall, Malad, Mumbai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and Garuda Mall, Magrath Road, Bangalore, `1,395. Exotic Indian: Ritu Beri designed this white feminine silhouette to go with the sari.

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suede, in bright shades and various styles while on his travels in Goa, Europe and South Africa. While Indians are still a bit squeamish about wearing hats on an everyday basis, expats facing our torrid sun love the excuse to do so. Anne Solène F. A. d’Orchimont is a New Delhi-based Belgian who loves wearing large, stylish hats, which she usually sources from Belgium. She never really wore hats back home, but is using the weekends in New Delhi to flaunt them. “To me they’re all about style. I love these big floppy hats in summer. (They) go superbly with a summer dress. I think the weather here is perfect for wearing hats; it is sunny most

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of the time and women don’t like to tan here,” she says. Urban Indians have moved away from wearing headgear that were traditionally used to ward off the elements (see Cover stories) and hats are yet to replace that. “India is a nascent millinery industry, as a result we can’t follow seasons. Hair combs, and hats that don’t cover the entire head, are popular with people with the confidence to be edgy. The market is growing,” says Pune-based designer Delna Poonawalla. Beri says the hesitation to don a hat is something Indian women need to overcome. “Indian women are conservative, and wearing a hat is taking the Western look to another extreme.” Nisha Jamvwal is one of the few Mumbai fashionistas who rarely

COURTESY TRUSTEES, CHHATRAPATI SHIVAJI MAHARAJ VASTU SANGRAHALAYA, MUMBAI

India has a long, varied history of headgear

hile traditionally it was the Indian dandy who flaunted some sort of headgear, Indian women typically pulled their ‘pallu’ or ‘chunni’ over their heads. Art historian B.N. Goswamy points to Anant Joshi, who held an exhibition ‘Shirobhushan’ in January at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, to showcase part of his collection of 1,500 hats and headgear from around the world. A booklet of the same name was also released at the exhibition. India has always had traditional forms of hats designed to protect one from the hot tropical sun—such as the Bastar straw hat worn by farmers, the embroidered woollen hat

Historical heads: Images from the booklet Shirobhushan. worn in hilly regions like Kashmir, the humble ‘rumal’ or a towellike tie still worn by the farmers of Karnataka and tribes in the north; to the ‘pagdi’ or the Gabardine, or the Gandhi ‘topi’ (also sometimes called the Nehru ‘topi’) of the independence struggle. The status of the Kashmiri is known by the quality of fur in his headgear. Sufi turbans are distinguished from those of the Sikhs by cloth, texture and manner of tying them. Spiritual achievement in some communities is

signified by taller ‘topis’. The Kulavi hats of the Vijayanagara empire were brightly coloured and 68 inches in height. Satin, velvet and taffeta were imported from China, Alexandria and Damascus for their crafting and they were set with precious stones. Length, colour and jewellery were adapted to signature styles and each told the story of nobility, social status, wealth and the allround foppery of the Indian male.

steps out without a hat. “I was walking down the mall at Shimla with my father and I saw a hat store and insisted, to my father’s utter surprise, on getting a few, not just one. Several tears later, I had three hats that day, age 5,” Jamvwal says. She now has over 500 hats in her collection which range from delicate Japanese structures to large Australian sun hats. “Hats were originally designed to protect women from the sun at the races. But not just in India, anywhere in the world, you will find few people able to adhere to the dress code even at the races,” says Chavan, who attributes the decline of hats in India to two reasons. First, the lack of availability, and second, sheer attitude. “(Actor) Jackie Shroff always wore a hat, as did Dev Anand, but they bought them abroad. Hats were not available in India. For any trend to actualize, it has to be carried by young people.” She points to the abundance of casual hipster hats, headpieces, headbands and berets now available at Bandra and on Fashion Street in Mumbai. “Thanks to the China, Hong Kong markets opening up, hats are available everywhere and cheap too,” she says, confident the trend will grow. “I’ve been making hats for the past eight years but it’s only in the last one to one-and-a-half years that I’ve seen regular sales actually happen.” Jamvwal takes delight in the newfound availability of hats. She shops at Aldo, Nine West in Mumbai for casual hats, Ritu Beri, Delna Poonawalla for flamboyant ones and hits Missoni, Burberry, Donna Karan, Emilio Pucci overseas. Don’t overthink the hat, she suggests. Just go with what grabs you.

u Zara: Tan straw hat, at Palladium mall, Phoe nix Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `1,190. t Accessorize: Reversible floral floppy hat, at Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, and Inorbit mall, Malad, Mumbai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and Garuda Mall, Magrath Road, Bangalore, `1,795.

COURTESY RITU BERI

u Ritu Beri: Sun hat with feather detailing, at 22A, Ashoka Avenue, Sainik Farms, New Delhi, `6,800.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

t Marks & Spencer: Cloche hat, at DLF Place, Saket, New Delhi; Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Express Avenue mall, Royapettah, Chennai; and Inorbit mall, Cyberabad, Hyderabad, `999.

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THE GREAT INDIAN SUMMER Summer means sunshine, but it also means shade. Remembering the colours of the hot season over the subcontinent B Y T ABISH K HAIR ·································· Days I have held,/days I have lost,/days that outgrow, like daughters,/my harbouring arms. —Derek Walcott

t is seldom that we Indians manage to write convincingly about our summer in English. To an extent, this has to do with the expanse of the country: Summer in the foothills of the Himalayas is different from summer along the southern coasts, which in its turn is different from summer over much of the northern and central land mass. When it comes to this “great” summer that sweeps through north India and parts of other regions too, this summer of beaten gold light and loo winds, mangoes, melons and lychees, afternoon naps (not really siesta) and bright insistent dawns, the English language misleads Indian writing in at least two ways.

One of them is derived from England and English experiences; perhaps its earliest extant rendition goes back to a 13th century madrigal:

SOUL Sumer is icumen in,/Lhude sing cuccu!/ Groweþ sed and bloweþ med/And springþ þe wde nu,/Sing cuccu! (Summer has arrived,/Loudly sing, Cuckoo!/The seed grows and the meadow MIND blooms/And the wood springs anew:/ Sing, Cuckoo!) This is an experience of summer that MATTER does not tally with much of the “Great Indian Summer”. Indian efforts to write along these lines are mostly imitative. Perhaps this vaguely resembles the early part of our summer—those days around Holi, when flowers still bloom, birds chirp, and the sun fills with warmth but the wind stays cool. But that is basically spring. As soon as Holi, the festival of spring, is over, the breeze starts whispering of heat. SANKET SANJAY KHUNTALE/‘FRAMES

MY CITY’

A few days or weeks later, the occasional gusts are no longer cool: You can sense the resolve of summer heat in them. And a week or two later, by late April if not earlier, the Great Indian Summer has arrived. The sun is a knife dangling over you; the wind slowly grows into a furnace. Most flowers wither, plants turn grey. Those bundles up there in the sky are dust, not rain, clouds. Dogs look dazed and exhausted, their tongues lolling. Birds largely disappear during the afternoons, though you still see and hear them in the mornings and evenings. The weeks seem to stretch on and on. The Great Indian Summer is not a mild and short season, like the English (north and west European) summer. As Shakespeare puts it in his sonnet 18: “And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” In that poem, Shakespeare’s summer, while essentially temperate, does show flashes of heat and glare. But in India we are not talking of just flashes. The Great Indian Summer is an extreme season. In that sense, it compares more to north European winters than to north European summers: Winter is icumen in,/Lhude sing Goddamm,/Raineth drop and staineth slop,/And how the wind doth ramm!/ Sing: Goddamm. This is Ezra Pound parodying the 13th

Fury and respite: (clockwise from below) Harsh light in big cities masks the nuances of summertime; bathing in the river to cool off during holidays; mango time; and the sun doesn’t deter sportspersons.

century summer madrigal in 1905. It does not rain and snow during the Great Indian Summer, but Pound’s sentiments, with subtle translation (Burneth sun and staineth sweat/And how the loo doth ramm!), would not seem inappropriate. And actually, that is the other dominant strain in accounts of the summer in English by Indians—or, more often, by Europeans who have been to India. The famous “heat and dust” school which, in various Raj nostalgia incarnations, continues to provide success stories in Western publishing. This too, I feel, does not do justice to the Great Indian Summer. For the Great Indian Summer is not just sun; it is also shade. It is a season of extremes as well as nuances, delicately balanced against each other—though perhaps this is less evident now in cosmopolitan landscapes than it once was in rural and small town environments. The best Indian English poets grasp, instinctively it appears, one or two aspects of the difference between our summer and their summer. Sarojini Naidu’s poem Summer Woods teems with the names of trees: gulmohur, tamarind, molsari, neem. Flowers make an appearance too, as they do in early summer, but at least in the parts of north and central India that I know, most flowers do not survive into the heart of our summers. Hence, perhaps, flowers are secondary to Naidu’s poem, despite her Romantic affiliations.

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KALPAK PATHAK/HINDUSTAN TIMES

MATT MAWSON/GETTY IMAGES

REINHARD KUNGEL/DPA/CORBIS

This is apt. Flowers dominate temperate European summers. Poems on the English summer are cluttered with flowers. The Great Indian Summer is much more a season of trees: of fruits and birds in their branches, of people and animals in their shade. Kamala Das gets another aspect of our summer in her Summer in Calcutta, which is basically a “love poem” that associates summer with dozing and drinking. The Great Indian Summer is also a season of naps and cool drinks: lemonade, Rooh Afza, lassi, sherbet, thandai. Oh yes, and beer or gin and tonic in the big cities. But big cities do something strange to the Great Indian Summer too: They accentuate it towards sun or shade, erase its nuances. In his excellent novel, Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid has an interesting narrative about a street urchin in Pakistan (note: most parts of Pakistan also get the Great Indian Summer), who is convinced that the master classes mean “hot” when they say “cold”. This is so because he has only experienced the hot exhausts of air conditioners outside chilled air-conditioned rooms and offices! I suspect the Great Indian Summer gets split into two extremes in our big cities:

The cold and dark of enclosed air-conditioned spaces, and the shadeless glare and heat of asphalt, denuded parks and sidewalks outside. This is perhaps best expressed in our middle-class fear of power cuts during the summer. The Great Indian Summer loses many of its nuances of shade and sun, heat and rest, sweat and breeze, thirst and sherbet in the big cities. One cannot help suspecting that something was torn out of the Great Indian Summer with the air conditioner replacing the khus-ki-tattie (or its equivalents in other dialects), as well as the palm-frond fan and the sagging charpoy under the mango tree. Perhaps that is the reason why my favourite evocations of our summer seem to exist in other Indian languages, ranging from Sanskrit to Urdu. I remember summer as it descended in Gaya, the small town in Bihar where I grew up and lived until the age of 25. The sun would harden in March-April; the breeze fill with an intimation of the heat to come. The mango trees would bear yellow flowers, hardening into small hard green fruits. Insects would come out, as would geckos. There would be trails of ants up tree trunks and round the corners of houses. In the afternoons, the streets would seem a bit empty, a little dustier than before. That was when the stored mats of khus were brought out and inspected; khus mats that had rotted were replaced. Before the summer really arrived and the fields were visited by occasional dust devils, the khus mats would be already installed—blocking all the windward

doors and windows which were not shuttered. When the summer heat fell like a huge iron clamp on the world outside, every afternoon from late April-July, water would drip down the khus, filling the curtained rooms with shade and fragrance. When I was a child, everything depended on the placement of the khus mats, and water was rigged to drip on them through a mechanical arrangement: Even motors came a bit later, I think in the 1970s. The afternoons of the Great Indian Summer are distinctive, or were so when I was growing up. The world went back to sleep then. But it was not the sleep of the night; it was a series of short convivial naps, broken by cool drinks, delicious fruits and lazy games, like chess, Ludo, carom and flush. In families like mine, it was also a great time to read. Outside, the sun raged, the loo shrieked. You went about, if you had to, with a towel wrapped around your head. But as the afternoon tapered towards evening, birds started coming out, though still keeping to the shade of trees. We would usually place a bowl of water under a tree-shade, if only to watch the birds. With adults usually having finished their novels or card games and fallen asleep for a while, children could sneak out into verandas or the shade of trees. And then the evening was there, with something like a sigh of relief. Water was sprinkled over the areas where chairs would be placed for the evening tea. The sky filled with birds. In those days, people still slept in the open during the summer months—in lawns, on verandas or on rooftops that had first been cooled with a sprinkling of

water. Charpoys were used for the season; unlike the “Western” beds that were in the rooms inside, these could be dragged out and rigged up with mosquito nets on crossed bamboo sticks. Those nights were deep: much darker than any summer night can be in north or west Europe. You could see each and every star. You woke up with the dawn, into the unbelievably cool and spacious early morning of the Great Indian Summer. Then the sun drew closer, and the first intimation of another summer day touched your face. The Great Indian Summer is not “Indian summer”, which, as one commentator has noted, is the “type of American weather” that has been accorded most “widespread and unstinted praise”. Neither is it the exotic summer of “heat and dust” or the English summer transported to India. It is not even the summer of places like Delhi, against which the rich barricade themselves in air-conditioned spaces or from which they flee, following the footsteps of our colonial masters; and in which the poor slog away, regardless, on heated asphalt. The Great Indian Summer, as it used to fall in Indian villages and small towns, changed the rhythms of both the poor and the rich for the duration of its passage and in the same spaces: mixing sun with shade, dust with the clarity of stars. I hope it still falls somewhere. Tabish Khair’s new novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position, will be released by HarperCollins in India later in April. Write to lounge@livemint.com

Extreme season: A child cycles on a sunny day.

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One of them is derived from England and English experiences; perhaps its earliest extant rendition goes back to a 13th century madrigal:

MY CITY’

SOUL

MIND

MATTER

KALPAK PATHAK/HINDUSTAN TIMES

MATT MAWSON/GETTY IMAGES

REINHARD KUNGEL/DPA/CORBIS

Extreme season: A child cycles on a sunny day.

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A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE SEASON What, how and where to start this summer’s tennis Equipment

SPORT

SURFACE TENSION Playing on natural courts doesn’t just have its own charm, it also enhances your game to suit all conditions B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com

···························· he Indian summer dovetails perfectly with the most exciting part of the professional tennis calendar. This is when the world’s top pros must go from surface to surface, adjusting their game as they move from the fast hard-court tournaments of the US to the slow red dirt of the seven-week European claycourt season which culminates with the French Open in late May. They then move back to the slippery, quick grass courts of England and Wimbledon in the last week of June, the sport’s biggest stage. While hard courts, because they’re cheap and easy to maintain, are by far the most common in the country, Indian players need not feel their own summer playing season can’t mirror that of the pros. Playing surfaces in India vary by region, says Krishna Kumar, director of the Kinesis Tennis Training and Coaching Academy in Bangalore. In cities like Mumbai that have a

heavy monsoon, most courts have been converted to synthetic hard courts—like the ones used at the US Open and the Australian Open—which require little maintenance. You can find grass courts in the North-East, in places such as Kolkata and New Delhi, where they were left behind by the British. But their numbers are dwindling, says Kumar, for the grass needs to be slaked constantly with water and requires money to keep it manicured. In the south, however, where the British didn’t build grand tennis clubs, courts are traditionally made of indigenous clay, by “locals who have mastered the technique of mixing clay with mud and covering the court with sand”, Kumar says. “It’s a local skill transferred down over the years.” Even clay courts differ from region to region, says Kumar, because they’re often improvised from whatever materials are handy. In Bangalore, for example, Kumar remembers the courts he grew up playing on as being made from local red clay mixed with anthill

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RACKET: Racket technology has changed a lot in the last decade and novice players would be well served in using newer frames, which have bigger sweet spots—the area on the strings that produces a solid, controlled shot—and are more forgiving, meaning, more shots will land in the court. STRINGS: As crucial as using a modern racket is playing with fresh strings. Strings are like rubber bands: the more they are stretched, the more they lose elasticity, shrinking the sweet spot. If you haven’t picked up your racket since last season, have it restrung before you play. SHOES: Tennis is a game that requires a lot of lateral movement, so it’s important to wear trainers that provide lateral support. Running shoes, for example, are only meant to go forward, so playing tennis in them can lead to sprained ankles. Also, shoes with large treads chew up grass and clay courts. PHOTOGRAPHS

THINKSTOCK

Beat the heat Krishna Kumar, director, Kinesis Tennis Training and Coaching Academy, Bangalore, says: “When playing tennis in the summer, try to play as much as possible in the early morning or later in the evening. Make sure you hydrate before, during and after your game. Wear sunscreen. Indians tan and burn also!”

Where to play Hone your game on all three Grand Slam surfaces Kolkata: Calcutta South Club The “Wimbledon of the East”. One of the best tennis addresses in India. Don’t forget to wear allwhite. www.southclub.co.in Mumbai: Maharashtra State Lawn Tennis Association The raucous cradle of tennis in the city. Five fullsized courts and three halfsized courts for children and beginners in the heart of south Mumbai. www.mslta.org Bangalore: Kinesis Tennis Training and Coaching Academy Learn to coach young players or nurse your Roland Garros fantasies on the red clay. www.kinesisnet.com Delhi: Delhi Gymkhana Club If you know a member, get an invite to play on one of the gymkhana’s 26 grass courts and seven clay and synthetic courts. www.delhigymkhana.org.in/index.php

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Little dirtballers: dirtballers: Children learning ground strokes on a red clay court at the Calcutta South Club in Kolkata.

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soil—moistened by the saliva of multitudes of ants—which is used as a binding agent. In Chennai, which Kumar calls the cradle of Indian tennis because it has produced the former pros Ramanathan and Ramesh Krishnan and Vijay Amritraj, clay court makers often use cow dung as a binding agent. Today, most clubs and public courts in India employ professionals as opponents for hire called “markers”, so named for the local court-makers who, before hard surfaces came into vogue, had to regularly mark and re-mark the lines on clay and grass courts. Jaydip Mukerjea, a former Davis Cup player and captain, says clay is the best surface for new and young players to learn on because the ball—and therefore the game—moves slower. Since the surface is softer than a hard court, it’s easier on the joints of growing

children as well as players who are no longer in their prime. “Hard courts are regular, you hardly get any bad bounces. On clay, you must learn to adjust your game,” Mukerjea says, adding that learning to slide on the clay, hit with topspin to keep your opponent on the run and stay in rallies longer makes for more creative and consistent players. “This is why the Europeans are dominating the game right now, because they all learnt on clay,” he adds. Mukerjea is also the president of the Calcutta South Club, known to its members as “the Wimbledon of the East”. Established in 1920, it’s the oldest tennis club in India and has hosted yesteryear stars such as Roy Emerson as well as today’s leading lights of Indian tennis, Leander Paes and Sania Mirza. The British, still the keepers of the grass court flame, left behind seven grass

Manicured: (top) A grass court at the Calcutta South Club; and a hard court at the Kinesis Tennis Training and Coaching Academy, Bangalore.

courts, in addition to eight red clay and two hard courts at the South Club. It’s one of the only places in India where one can play on all three Grand Slam surfaces in one day. The Calcutta South Club’s grass courts are comparatively slower than Wimbledon’s mercury-quick courts, but are still much faster than clay. A ball hit on the grass at the South Club will not bounce as high as one hit on, say, the red clay in Bangalore, instead seeming to skid low across the court. Players new to the surface often find themselves lunging for balls that don’t quite reach the heights they would on a different surface. It’s crucial to take the ball on the rise, moving forward all the time, the goal being to finish a point at the net. A rally on grass is typically much shorter than one on clay. South Club member Raj Dadhich says grass is the “classic” playing surface. Aesthetics aside, he says, “grass suits my game. It’s comfortable on my knees, and as a lefty who hits with a lot of under-spin, it tends to play to my advantage. The ball just skids away (from my opponent),” he adds. Indeed, during a recent game at the South Club, this writer had a difficult time returning Dadhich’s serve, which seemed to dart to the left after bouncing in the service box. Though a player’s choice of surface is a matter of personal preference, recreational players and pros are nearly unanimous in their disdain for the synthetic “outdoor carpet” courts, made to resemble grass, that have begun appearing at hotels in unforgiving climates like India’s. For these yield unpredictable bounce and don’t play like any surface used in competitive play. If a player has honed his or her skills on clay or grass, playing on hard courts, where the ball bounces the same way every time, will seem easy. Once comfortable on all surfaces, club bangers can move on to the task of mastering the mental challenges of tennis, which can take a lifetime.

THE SUMMER PRO CALENDAR Watch the clay and grass court seasons on TV or organize your European holiday around these tournaments MONTECARLO ROLEX MASTERS Clay, MonteCarlo, Monaco 1622 April BARCELONA OPEN BANC SABADELL Clay, Barcelona, Spain 2329 April ESTORIL OPEN Clay, Estoril, Portugal 30 April6 May MUTUA MADRID OPEN Clay, Madrid, Spain 513 May INTERNAZIONALI BNL D’ITALIA Clay, Rome, Italy 1420 May MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES

ROLAND GARROS Clay, Paris, France 28 May10 June AEGON CHAMPIONSHIPS Grass, London, England 1117 June WIMBLEDON Grass, Wimbledon, England 25 June8 July OLYMPICS Grass, Wimbledon, England 28 July5 August CLIVE BRUNSKILL/ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES

GAMING

HEAT VISION

Powerpacked: Visuals from Prototype (left) and Steel Battalion, both of which release new versions this summer.

This offseason period is the time for creative, risky game releases B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· he video-game industry focuses most of its attention on the Western “holiday season” from October till December, when the bulk of annual franchise refreshes are released. Summer isn’t a dry spell for gamers, however. It’s often the time more creative and risky games come out, since there is less chance of their being upstaged. Games to look forward to this season:

Prototype 2 27 April The multi-platform action game is expected to follow closely in the footsteps of the original surprise. The original was, in many ways, a dumb game, with an AI (artificial intelligence) that barely lived up to the word “intelligence”, with an excuse for a plot and terrible acting. Luckily for publishers Activision, it was still an enjoyable game. While Prototype wasn’t a big hit, it did well enough to warrant a sequel and has built up a devoted cult following. The controls were done perfectly, and the selec-

tion of powers available to our ever-mutating hero were varied and exceptional.

Diablo III 15 May Along with Warcraft, Diablo is the series that made Blizzard Entertainment one of the biggest names in gaming. Their forthcoming PC game, Diablo III, looks amazing. Instead of trying to build a huge portfolio, the developers have taken their time building the best games in the industry, and they have been successful. While the hype around Diablo III is at fever pitch right now, there is little that anyone outside Blizzard knows about the game, except for a handful of videos. Going by the developers’ past credits, though, this one is a sure thing.

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Dragon’s Dogma 25 May Capcom is betting heavily on Dragon’s Dogma to bring the Japanese developers back to prominence on the global stage. With games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim becoming successful in Japan, Western studios are now dominat-

ing the scene. Japanese developers have been releasing more games with Western “influences” in the last few years, such as Vanquish. Dragon’s Dogma seems to be a blend of Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The clips from the game so far show an impressive variety of combat moves and characters. But little is known about the writing and world

building, a crucial element of the genre, as of now.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor 22 June From Software is one of Japan’s most successful developers—probably most famous for being the people behind Dark Souls and

Demon’s Souls. It has series like Ace Combat and Armored Core to its credit as well. In 2003, with Steel Battalion, the developers did something radical. They released a game which would only work with a special controller that looked like the inside of a tank, and had dozens of buttons and switches. The controller cost as much as the system it was played on, and the game, while much admired, was not a big financial success. With Heavy Armor, From Software hopes to change the way we play games. The game, exclusive to the Xbox 360 with Kinect, doesn’t ship with a custom controller. Instead, there will be a graphical representation of a tank control panel—and the player will be flipping buttons and pushing switches, reaching out to slap unruly crew members and stab saboteurs who crawl into their giant tank, even as they use the standard Xbox 360 gamepad to control some of the functions of the tank. This innovative blend of controls could bring about a new wave of popularity for the Kinect peripheral. It can make it a part of “core” gaming, and not just the dance and sports games that it has been used for so far.

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CLOUD MOUNTAIN The pristine Mt Shasta in California’s Cascades offers a celestial getaway from the temperate Bay Area B Y R ISHAD S AAM M EHTA ·························· stood on the Wagon Creek Bridge, poised over Lake Siskiyou. The sign at the approach to the bridge said “No Horses, No Fishing from the Bridge”. There was a line of fresh paint, under which I could faintly make out the word “Jumping”. My guide explained that schoolchildren enjoyed jumping off the bridge so much, the authorities had removed that restriction. It was her way of telling me that even children didn’t hesitate as much as I was. So I took the plunge. The water was shockingly cold, of course, but after a few rapid strokes it became quite okay. It had the unique icy quality and taste that comes only from snow melt, the

source of Siskiyou’s water. Mt Shasta is a secret California has kept well, but the well-informed concierge at San Francisco’s lovely RitzCarlton Hotel had tipped me off to it when I asked him about driving trips. Situated in northern California’s Siskiyou County, Mt Shasta is named after the dormant volcano that dominates its skyline. A small town, it has a population of about 3,400 people. One of them is Robin Kohn, an expert hiker and skier, and also the author of a book on what to do around Mt Shasta. The reason I was jumping the Wagon Creek Bridge was that we had come for a swim in Lake Siskiyou to cool off from the walk up Mt Shasta. I hadn’t known, though, that

entering the lake would call for some daredevilry. Kohn had arrived at the hotel, the Best Western Plus Tree House on Morgan Way, and we had driven the superbly scenic road up the mountain. Lined with sequoia trees at the beginning, and then fir trees as we gained altitude, this was a drive that had me reaching for my camera often, to capture the contrast between the snow-capped volcano, the blue sky, and the green lay of the land. The fir trees here are so regal and shapely that a few years ago, The White House called for a Christmas tree from Mt Shasta. One can hike right up to the summit of the mountain, though this involves a lot of walking through snow. This is easy if you have the right gear, which I did. But even then, there is a knack to walking in the snow, because sometimes you can sink right up to your knees. A trained eye like Kohn’s can distinguish hard snow from soft,

and so we made it to the top without mishap. Standing near the summit, I could hardly believe that the previous morning I had been trudging up the urban incline of San Francisco’s Stockton Street to pick up my Buick Enclave from National Car Rental. Then, the temperature had been around 10 degrees Celsius. I had driven the Buick to Mt Shasta in an easy five hours, at the end of which, I was tapping my car’s temperature gauge in surprise because it read -4 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a malfunction though. I had left the temperate Bay Area behind, and entered the Cascade mountain range, which is snow-decked all the way up to American Independence Day in July. At 14,180ft, Mt Shasta is the second highest peak in the Cascades, and the fifth highest in California. It stands like a beacon and can be seen from far away. Many have waxed eloquent about it, including naturalist John Muir and former US president Teddy

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TRIP PLANNER/MT SHASTA You will need a visa for the US. Apply for one through VFS (www.vfs-usa.co.in/USIndia/ Index.html). There are long waiting times for an Lake appointment with the Siskiyou embassy or consulate, so book well in advance. Catch a flight to San Francisco, and then hire a car to drive yourself to Mt Shasta. Advance return fares to San Francisco on full-service airlines:

MT SHASTA

Cathay Pacific (oneworld) Air India/Lufthansa/United (Star Alliance) Air France / KLM (Skyteam)

Mt Shasta City Park Dunsmuir

Delhi R69,480 R69,260 R87,040

Yuba City NEVADA

San Francisco

CALIFORNIA Los Angeles

No r th Pacific Ocean

To Mexico

Mumbai R59,060 R59,280 R50,520

Bangalore R61,430 R61,900 R75,630

Fares may change.

Stay

Play

In San Francisco, stay at The Ritz-Carlton (www.ritzcarlton.com). Weekend rates for double occupancy start at $419 (around `21,000) a night. Check for available discounts and benefits. In Mt Shasta, stay at the McCloud River Lodge (www.mccloudlodge.com), starting $98 a night for a room for three, or the Best Western Plus Tree House (www.bestwestern.com/treehouse), with rooms starting at $145 a night for double occupancy.

Scenic: The contrast between the snowcapped volcano, the blue sky, and the green lay of the land has visitors reaching for their cameras often.

Mt Shasta retains its snow cover from January-June, so it’s possible to go skiing in the summer—but do check weather conditions before you make plans. For a good guide around Mt Shasta, contact Robin Kohn at www.mountshastaguide.com. Even if the snow isn’t suited to skiing, temperatures will be low and you can go hiking up the mountain’s many faces. To ride the Dogsled Express with Pat, visit dogsledexpress.net For more details on the attractions nearby, visit www.visitcalifornia.in GRAPHIC

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Roosevelt. To quote the latter: “I consider the evening twilight on Mt Shasta one of the grandest sights I have ever witnessed.” I agree with Roosevelt. I visited Lake Siskiyou again just before dusk, and the orange glow on Mt Shasta had an almost spiritual aura to it. Of the many landscapes I have seen during my travels around the world, this one will stay with me for a long time. It is perhaps because of this latent spirituality that hovers above it that many believe in the legends that surround the mountain. The most popular (and fervently believed) is that inside it live the “Lemurians”, the long-lost civilization of the continent of Lemuria that sank under the Pacific 13,000 years ago. This is probably also why there are a few tiny shops, like The Crystal Room and Soul Connections, which sell crystals and minerals, and cater to locals as well as the spiritual pilgrim. Even the water is considered sacred. At Mt Shasta City Park, where the headwaters of the Sacramento River bubble out of the base of the mountain, there is a regular crowd of people filling canisters to take with them, just as at our Indian rivers. But instead of matted hair, the Californian spiritualist usually sports faded jeans and a few tattoos, and drives a VW van bearing the circular peace sign. The water at the mountain base first

In the right spirit: The Black Bear Diner; and (left) Hedge Creek Falls, Mt Shasta. fell as snow on the mountain top 50 years ago, and made its way through the mountain over half a century. Even if you doubt its spirituality, you can’t deny that it’s been saturated with the goodness of the pristine earth of the region. But don’t let this make you think it is a town that is all about abstinence. You can eat well and drink well. For the former, the

Black Bear Diner does super sandwiches and shakes and Lilys does a mean prime rib. For a good after-dinner party, the place to head to is Roxy’s Vets Club, which is not a place to take your pets to socialize, as the name suggests, but a cocktail bar. Sharron, the bartender here, had a dog called Roxy and the pub is named after her. My next morning was spent

in the company of Pudges, Rupert, Seenja, Casper, and Lady: all Alaskan huskies led by Pat Campbell, who took me on a fantastic dogsled ride through the snowed-out forests around the town. The most exciting moment was when the dogs started howling their heads off as we approached a corner, and we realized the reason as soon as we rounded it. A big black

Children will have a blast walking in the snow, dogsledding, jumping off bridges and swimming in the lakes.

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This is California.

SENIORFRIENDLY RATING

LGBTFRIENDLY RATING

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

INDIA’S ICES

CROP OF THE CREAM

A short guide to homegrown cold desserts u In Pune, you can spend time in the old bylanes, or enjoy the feel of the cantonment area. Ideally, you should do both, for persuasive reasons. Like its famed namesake, a good Mastani could tempt the noblest of men. This is a rich, thick milkshake topped with a scoop of ice cream, both of the same flavour, best had at Sujata Mastani, in Sadashiv Peth. MarzoRin puts up a good fight at Mahatma Gandhi Road with innovative slush drinks (called Chillers) but the big seller is the “thick as it gets” shake.

From cassata to ‘chuski’, a memoir of life as a progression of sweet, icy treats

CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

Enthusiasts can do the gentle trail walks, of which there are plenty around Mt Shasta.

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parents’ place in Vile Parle, we would board a bus to Juhu Chowpatty, and every pav-bhaji binge ended in a small shop in JVPD Scheme which, almost magically, made ice cream taste of real fruit—and it was, naturally, called Natural. The goodness of almost home-made ice cream was enough for us to forgo the kala khatta stalls and the prohibitively expensive Baskin Robbins. At Bombay weddings, I was introduced to kulfi, the serious older cousin of ice cream, with its richness, dry fruits and inability to be served in a cone (but sometimes in a matka). Every once in a while, it came dressed up with vermicelli, flavoured syrup and tukmaria (tiny, slimy basil seeds). Bombay’s falooda is an overthe-top desi milkshake dressed up with the above-mentioned ingredients and a dash of Rooh Afza, a combination that is pointless without a scoop of ice cream (always vanilla) floating on top. Even now, I never agree to accompany my mother on a sweaty trip to Crawford Market without a promise of falooda at Badshah. Meanwhile, newer brands of ice cream began creeping into the Goa market. As I recall, the first was Dollops, by Cadbury’s. We were thrilled by ice cream packaged in a plastic ball, and I still find some balls every time I clean my childhood hoards. Unfortunately, that’s all that lasted of the company. Walls’ Ice Cream, on the other hand, stayed on. To our delight, my grandfather began to sell the new brand in his shop. In summer, my grandmother would lead us to

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bear stood there wondering what all the din was about. Fortunately, he went his way and we went ours, breathing sighs of relief. Those two days remain embedded in my mind as a wholesome experience. I’m glad that I had followed the advice that my concierge had given me.

COLD WORLD

B Y A MBA S ALELKAR ···························· ce cream—or any avatar of cold and creamy deliciousness—is one of life’s great joys. Growing up in New York, my first frozen memories were of my parents enjoying tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream while I sought out “Italian Ice”—scoops of brightly coloured sorbets packed into tiny paper cups, available from friendly pushcart vendors every summer. Taste was irrelevant as a child—what counted was being able to stick my brightly coloured tongue out at other children. I found the “black sheep” of the frozen dessert family when we moved to Goa in 1993. For 50 paise, “pepsi” (flavoured ice packets) was the best thing money could buy. I would lose my voice after overdosing on the cola flavour (never the orange, because the resulting stained lips gave me away to my parents), but I still excitedly buy it whenever I can. In Goa, ice cream was institutionalized as part of the Hindu wedding ceremony. Guests were treated to ice cream while the couple changed into their wedding gear. If the wedding budget was generous, there would be slices of cassata—a layered ice-cream cake frosted with vanilla ice cream, and topped with nuts. If not, and if I was particularly unlucky, it would be my nemesis, Tutti-Frutti. What you could be sure of was that the ice cream would be supplied by Goa’s ambitiously named icecream conglomerate, Yummy. Goa, in those days, still lagged behind Bombay (now Mumbai). Films released there six months later. Our summer vacations in Bombay had special ice-cream experiences too. From my grand-

u In Madurai, if you’re sweating after visiting the Meenakshi Temple in summer, don’t be horrified if someone suggests you get a shot of ‘jil jil jigarthanda’—cold condensed milk flavoured with syrup and topped with tasteless shreds of jelly (china grass—not gelatin) and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Tonnes of shops and handcarts sell it, but always follow the crowds to find the real (and safe) McCoy.

Cooling off: Try a chuski (above) or the more serious cousin of ice cream, kulfi. the back of the shop every evening and insist on feeding us whatever we liked from the freezer—the prepacked waffle cones were a particular novelty—cheerfully oblivious to cost accounting and my feeble protests. Years later, in Bangalore, I was sequestered on an isolated campus. Our Sunday treks to town would inevitably take us to Corner House. The ice cream itself didn’t matter. It was what you ate it with, whether the daunting Death By Chocolate sundae or the luxurious French Apple Pie, or my personal favourite, the Junior Hot Chocolate Fudge. Corner House got me through college heartache, stress, and the munchies. I finally gave in to kala khatta in Delhi, away from my parents’ protectiveness. I watched as shredded ice was furiously packed on a stick by hand, doused with your choice of syrup (and masala, if you were adventurous), and served with a plastic glass to catch the sweet syrup as it melted off the stick. When my Delhi-bred room-mate used to gravitate towards the stalls at Chowpatty, balancing the ice and the cup had looked like too much effort to me, and let’s not get started on the graphic manner in

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which it had to be consumed. In Delhi, however, I lunged for the thing now named chuski, and suddenly, nothing mattered any more—it was gratifyingly cold and soothing in the parching heat, and the sugar kick was welcome. By the time I moved to Mumbai for good, in 2006, Natural had begrudgingly started franchises, introduced home delivery, and allowed patrons to taste flavours before deciding what to order, all thanks to competition from the new gelato shops. Gelato and its derivatives left me cold—not in a good way—and I sought refuge in other discoveries: old-timers like the ice-cream sandwiches at K Rustom Ice Cream in Churchgate, and strawberries and cream at the Haji Ali Juice Centre. In the latest frozen dessert trend, you can get ice cream mashed up with everything you like on a cold stone; which is all

quite good, but less about the ice cream itself. I want the real deal—good ice cream with good flavours and no chocolate sauce. While Natural isn’t as good as it used to be, the city has other options, in ways to fit every budget, from the zany flavours at Bachelors’ (home of the famous green chilli ice cream), to Indigo Delicatessen’s Dulce De Leche and lemon-basil flavours. Life is a lot more complicated now. Eating ice cream has gone from “cold lips” to “straight to the hips”. But there’s some solace in the fact that throughout the country, in the sweltering heat, there are those two words understood in every language and within any budget, be it a `5 cone from the Mewar ice-cream cart or a `200 scoop at Häagen-Dazs. And we’re all screaming for it. Write to lounge@livemint.com

u Udupi’s culinary contributions include the Gadbad, the mother of all sundaes. You can lose count of the layers of different flavoured ice creams stuffed into the glass. Garnished with fruit, nuts and jelly, it’s a great counter to coastal Karnataka’s humidity. Pro tip: You have to dig in, literally. u Bengalis will make sure you have to hunt for perfection, with Tero Parbon’s Nolen Gurer ice cream in Kolkata. Noveau Bengali cuisine champions realized that once they were done stuffing ‘nolen gur’ (jaggery made from boiling the sap from date palms) into ‘sandesh’, it would make a smashing icecream flavour. As if the creamy but not overpowering sweetness wasn’t enough, it comes topped with a spoonful of the ‘gur’ itself. Branches of Oh! Calcutta and Bhojohori Manna serve it too.

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MOVIES

TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

Bittersweet charm: Sharman Joshi in Ferrari ki Sawari.

This summer promises some serious celluloid action. Here are our picks of this season’s forthcoming blockbusters. Don’t forget to book your tickets B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA

Ferrari ki Sawari

anupam1.v@livemint.com

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27 April Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s new production, Ferrari ki Sawari, will provide Sharman Joshi a long-due opportunity to display his mettle as a lead actor. The film revolves around a family and its dreams, particularly Joshi’s cricket-obsessed son, who wishes to play at Lord’s in London one day. Rumour has it that Sachin Tendulkar also makes a guest appearance. The trailer hints at another bittersweet comedy from the Chopra stable. With Rajkumar Hirani writing the dialogues and debutant Rajesh Mapuskar, who assisted Hirani during 3 Idiots, directing, we can expect a charming film.

The Dark Knight Rises 20 July Without doubt the most anticipated Hollywood blockbuster this summer, The Dark Knight Rises is set eight years after the events of the last film, which ended with Harvey Dent’s death. With each instalment of his Batman films, director Christopher Nolan has steadily clawed towards altering the blockbuster, seeding it with genuinely intriguing moral and social conflict. Heath Ledger’s Joker, the heart of the previous film, is set to be replaced by murderous criminal Bane, played by the massively talented Tom Hardy. Indeed, Nolan’s most formidable task will be to present a villain whose complexity justifies pulling Christian Bale’s Batman out of the shadows after so long.

Prometheus 8 June For a film that shares its name with the mythological martyr who dispelled darkness by stealing fire from the gods for the mortals, Ridley Scott’s latest has been shrouded in appalling secrecy. Doubts about whether or not it is a prequel to Scott’s 1979 Alien still persist, fanned further by the director commenting that Prometheus possesses Alien’s DNA. What we do know is that Prometheus marks Scott’s return to science fiction, a genre he reinvigorated with Alien and Blade Runner. We also know that Prometheus is the name of a spaceship plumbing the depths of the universe to discover the origins of mankind. While Internet forums have been simmering with debate, the film’s first official trailer set the cat among the pigeons with its delectable blend of intrigue, subtle revelation, desperate screaming, a morbidly suggestive palette of blue and black, shots of alien eggs incubating in perfect symmetry, and explosions, all throbbing to a thunderous background score.

Brave 22 June The release of Brave will mark a couple of firsts for Pixar—the studio’s first fairytale and its first female protagonist. Pixar’s first non-sequel since 2009’s Up, Brave ferries the viewer to the Scottish Highlands. Merida is of royal blood and a skilled archer, intrepid and impetuous. She chases her own destiny while fighting tradition. The film’s trailers suggest a tale spilling over with adventure. The world conjured to stand for the Scottish Highlands has been bestowed with a welter of cliffs, woods and waterfalls—all displaying the animators’ usual attention to detail. A strong story and endearing characters have always been the hallmark of all successful Pixar efforts.

Intrigue: Emraan Hashmi (left) and Abhay Deol in Shanghai.

Shanghai

SOUL Scissorhands), and Johnny Depp in the role of a vampire, who returns to his family’s old manor. Depp plays Barnabas, a playboy who’s transformed into a vampire and buried alive by a heartbroken witch in the middle of the 18th century. Freed from his coffin by accident in 1972, Barnabas returns to his Americ a n m a n o r , Collinwood. Ruined and ravaged, the mansion now houses his family’s descendants. Barnabas’ dealings with the motley bunch of eccentrics—a Burt o n t r a d e mark—form the heart of the film. Burton’s imagination and style sprout forth from the Gothic template, much like a cinema-savvy, more macabre Edgar Allan Poe.

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8 June Arguably the most consistent film-maker in Bollywood today, Dibakar Banerjee abandons social satire in favour of an inquest into India’s political system. The lives of the film’s three protagonists—played by Abhay Deol, Kalki Koechlin and Emraan Hashmi—intersect with a single accident: the death of a political activist. This accident threatens to alter the course of their lives. Shanghai is an adaptation of Z, Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel. Shanghai’s writing duo grafted the central idea of the novel into the Indian political framework. Banerjee’s challenge will be in pursuing his own trajectory while keeping faith with the novel, and perhaps most importantly, the Indian film-goer’s imagination.

Gangs of Wasseypur June This one is being labelled as Anurag Kashyap’s magnum opus: a big-budget (Kashyap’s most expensive yet) film, with a narrative spanning three generations and more than 60 years. A massive cast of over 150 actors, including Manoj Bajpai, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Piyush Mishra, as well as film-maker Tigmanshu Dhulia playing an antagonist, contribute to a long film split into two parts. Set in Jharkhand, the film revolves around the city’s coal mining mafia, and is reportedly based on a true story.

Barfee 13 July Fresh from the acclaim he received for Rockstar, Ranbir Kapoor slips into the skin of Murphy, who can’t speak and is deaf, in Barfee. A happy-go-lucky character, Murphy charms people, especially women, with consummate ease. Joining him in the cast is Priyanka Chopra, who plays Jhilmil, a mentally challenged girl, whom he runs into after a relationship goes awry. Anurag Basu directs Barfee, which appears to have a small town for a backdrop. Theatrical release dates are subject to change.

Dark Shadows 11 May Dark Shadows witnesses a return to the family theme for two major stars: Tim Burton, the director, using his outrageous imagination to tell the story of a single family’s fortunes (years after his earlier triumphs in Beetlejuice and Edward

Blockbusters: Prometheus (top) brings Ridley Scott back to scifi; and the caped crusader returns one last time.

Quiet murmurs: Ranbir Kapoor in Barfee.

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COMICS

A VERY MARVEL ASSEMBLY LINE A fanboy weighs the pros and cons of the forthcoming superhero extravaganza on celluloid B Y A BHIMANYU D AS ···························· cannot recall a summer release schedule more primed for raging disappointment, or fannish ecstasy, than the one being unleashed this year. The millions of us who shed tears of validation (“I told you these movies can be good!”) as the Joker talked scar tissue in that glorious summer of 2008 have held our collective breath for The Dark Knight Rises. Others have been waiting decades for Ridley Scott’s return to xenomorphology with Prometheus. But the event that has been built up most methodically, by inspired casting coups, over four audience-baiting years, is the Summer of Marvel. Composed of the one-two punch of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and freshly rebooted The Amazing SpiderMan, the collective investment in dollars, professional futures and fanboy/girl hopes is inestimable. It is difficult avoiding the obvious nerdgasm metaphors, given how much anticipation is roiling behind these projects. There is some serious pedigree involved. These are not just franchise builders, they’re artists. Whedon is one of the undisputed gods of the pop-culture pantheon, and the cast assembled for him over four years is populated with real actors, some of whom practically are the characters they’re playing. Robert Downey Jr, for example, has trained his entire life to play addicted-to-alcohol-and-himself

Tony Stark. Don’t even get me started on Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Never before has an ensemble like this been assembled to play something as simultaneously ridiculous and epically awesome as Marvel’s signature superhero team. The scale of conflict has been hinted at by the cryptic post-credits sequences tacked on to Captain America, Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Thor. It will involve all the aforementioned heroes (plus the Hulk and assorted S.H.I.E.L.D. employees), renewed Loki antics by the manically inspired Tom Hiddleston, misbehaviour by unrevealed additional villains (Skrulls?) and enough planet-wide destruction to make Roland Emmerich’s head spin. Why, then, am I still dubious? The previous Marvel films were mostly superior pieces of entertainment. They did, however, showcase tendencies that are bound to be magnified in The Avengers. The most worrisome is authorship by committee. As much as the auteur-ish eccentricities of the casts and directors struggle to shine through, the work still drifts towards the executive-approved blockbuster templates of “one-liner, set piece, one-liner”. With bloated budgets at stake, the studio keeps a tight rein on the creatives, resulting in interchangeable explosion-filled third acts and two-dimensional supporting characters being forced into the screenplays. All you can

Super cinema: (above) Andrew Garfield in The Amazing SpiderMan; and a still from The Avengers.

do afterward is hire Kat Dennings and hope she rescues your bland material from the page. Instead of acquiring the direction bestowed by a strongly individualistic creative mind, the films end up airbrushed by consensus. Often, this is the consensus of a group of people who don’t read comics and perceive fans as mouthbreathers. Why, for example,

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should valuable effort be spent on writing a real female character? Scarlett Johansson’s bodysuit can take up the slack. Another Marvel shortcoming is wholesale adoption of the Michael Bay school of impersonal action and indiscriminate destruction. Conflict on a personal scale is always more compelling. If it is physical conflict, a

visceral, deftly choreographed fist fight is infinitely more exciting than another CGI (computer-generated imagery) explosion (see the Bourne movies). If it is conflict of a more internal nature, intimate scale gives the performers more to work with (see The Dark Knight). Instead, the interpersonal exchanges in Marvel films are frequently generic, elevated only by the strengths of the actors. The action sequences become an excuse for constellations of pixels to crash into each other, investing the resultant sturm und drang with minimal physical weight or emotional investment. The Amazing Spider-Man is another example of Marvel Studios’ occasional lapses in inspiration: the reboot of a series that began a mere decade ago. SpiderMan’s origin, hardly Shakespearean in its scope, is to be told yet again, in all its angsty glory. As always, the casting choices are uniformly strong. Andrew Gar-

Hugo Child-friendly rating: 4 out of 5 Martin Scorsese’s first venture into 3D is a love poem to the history of cinema. It’s a must-watch on the big screen but with its India release uncertain, do settle for a home viewing.

Grab the DVDs of these cinematic gems that aren’t scheduled for a theatrical release in India yet B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

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field and Emma Stone will make a charming Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. Rhys Ifans might not even need make-up to play either iteration of Curt Connors. Regardless, all the personality in the world can’t conceal the redundancy of this project, apparently designed to dip once again into the pockets of fans coming down from their Avengers high. The films will probably be adequately entertaining. It is even possible that the superhuman collection of talent involved will trump encroaching Disneyfication; that the executives will trust the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to write some intelligent dialogue for Black Widow or retain the soaring imagination of Jack Kirby’s original vision. More likely, the Avengers project will shoot itself in the foot by taking a group of pop culture’s most gloriously outré characters and forcing them into the most conventional of cinematic templates. My hopes for the summer lie with Christopher Nolan. When in doubt, Batman. Write to lounge@livemint.com

Based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times bestseller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and set in 1930s Paris, Hugo is the fantastical adventure of a 12-yearold orphan boy. The film follows its eponymous child protagonist, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who lives in a train station. He’s on a mission to complete his father’s most ambitious project: repairing a broken automaton. On his adventures, he meets George Méliès (Ben Kingsley), a former film-maker and shopkeeper, and his adventure-seeking god-daughter, Isabelle. The film has noteworthy performances by everyone involved. The set design, music, costumes and state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery are glorious. Hugo had 11 Academy Award nominations for 2011 (it won five). But the better marker is Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times who gave the film four out of four stars saying, “Hugo is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life.”

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Shame Child-friendly rating: 0 out of 5 British director Steve McQueen plumbs the depths of sexual addiction in Shame. Thirty-something Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) is a tortured, sex-obsessed New Yorker who engages in masturbation, one-night stands and wild threesomes. His sordid life spirals out of control when his younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) arrives to live with him. Critically acclaimed performances by Fassbender and Mulligan lift this otherwise banal film. Of Fassbender’s performance, Joe Morgenstern of the The Wall Street Journal says, “He is handsome, virile (not just because of a few flashes of frontal nudity), nuanced and fiercely focused, with a commanding physical presence that recalls Burt Lancaster in his prime.”

Child-friendly rating: 0 out of 5 Another film based on a literary blockbuster, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first film in Columbia Pictures’ three-picture adaptation of Swedish writer and journalist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Directed by David Fincher, this English-language adaptation follows journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) as he investigates the disappearance of a wealthy patriarch’s niece along with a punk computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Comparisons to the original Swedish film made in 2009 are difficult to ignore, but convincing performances by Craig and Mara validate this remake. Fincher’s film version is brutal and rife with sexual politics. Sony Pictures India had earlier announced its release on 10 February but Fincher’s refusal to cut the graphic scenes requested by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) turned that upon its head. Find another way to watch this gritty crime thriller with a human edge.

Moonrise Kingdom Child-friendly rating: 2.5 out of 5 Wes Anderson’s first PG-13-rated live-action film is set in the 1960s. Early trailers peg it as a delightful, if twisted, fairy tale. Moonrise Kingdom is about a pair of young “lovers” who flee their New England island town, prompting a local search party led by the Sheriff (Bruce Willis) and the girl’s parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand) to spread out in search of them. The film is set to premiere on 16 May as the opening film of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, after which it will release in theatres in Europe and the US. DVD dates haven’t been announced yet, but keep your eyes wide open for this one.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

THE WELL OF HISTORY

RAVI NILESHBHAI DAVE

Delhi’s ‘baolis’ are its ‘hamams’, its picnic spots, its rubbish dumps, its swimming holes, and repositories of its heritage

he heat is oppressive. Down the stone stairs. Shade. The wet sari clinging to her skin, Zeenat Begum is washing herself in cool water. The pool is covered with the yellow leaves of kikar. “It’s my hamam,” says the elderly woman. Picking up her blouse from the steps, she says, “I’m a beggar and I bathe like a queen.” Zeenat Begum’s hamam is Gandhak ki Baoli, Delhi’s oldest surviving stepwell. Because of its sulphur-rich water, said to have healing properties for skin ailments, this baoli was used as a spa. Believed to have been built by Sultan Iltutmish in the 13th century, it is a beautiful otherworldly abyss close to the Qutub Minar in south Delhi. A water monument of sculptured columns and lattice walls, a baoli is a secret world linking light to shade, earth to water. A flight of stone stairs, punctuated with landings with pavilions and chambers, leads to the bottom. In the monsoon, water comes up to the upper steps. In the dry season, it recedes to the lower levels. On the cover of the book Steps to Water: The Ancient Stepwells of India, novelist Anita Desai describes baolis as “a profound world of myth, philosophy, belief, beauty, and understanding”. “Connected with well and groundwater aquifers,” says Delhi-based conservation architect Ratish Nanda, “baolis were built to collect rainwater during the monsoons and allow people to access the receding water through the year.” K.K. Muhammad, superintending archaeologist of the Delhi circle of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), describes baolis as air conditioners, “their chambers and passageways kept cool by the water”. “Baolis were also social networking sites,” says Jutta Jain-Neubauer, author of The Stepwells of Gujarat, the first book ever written on baolis, “where people gathered to escape hot afternoons.” Unique to India, about 3,000 baolis were built between the seventh and mid-19th centuries,

most in the arid regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat. “Baolis attained unsurpassed monumentality and elaborateness in Gujarat alone,” says Jain-Neubauer, who is getting ready to prepare a second edition of her 1981 classic. “The baolis of Delhi stand nowhere to those of Gujarat,” admits Muhammad. “Dedicated to gods, stepwells in Gujarat were lavishly carved. Delhi’s baolis date from a much later period and are less artistic.” The most neglected of the city’s monuments, baolis tell of a time when men followed their quest for water through means more gentle and humble. “Then, men dug earth to reach water and now, we steer the course of rivers to force water to reach us,” says Rakhshanda Jalil, author of Invisible City: The Hidden Monuments of Delhi. “Compared to dams that destroy nature and communities, baolis were ecologically friendly.” American photographer Morna Livingston, the author of Steps to Water, has perhaps described the baoli most evocatively: “Wherever a stepwell links brilliant Indian sun to a clear pool of water, two separate worlds are joined. In the well’s stone corridors people move between one realm and the other. The diminishing light descending the stairs conveys a sense of passage deep into the earth, moving further into darkness. Excavation is balanced with construction—one pair of opposites in a series that includes sky and water, solid and liquid, empty and full. The experience is mesmerizing.” At the turn of the last century, Delhi had more than 100 baolis, says Nanda. Today, many of them have caved in or dried up owing to the declining water table. The number has shrunk to about 15, according to the ASI. One baoli lies adjacent to the high-rises of Connaught Place. Another, the city’s biggest, is in the Firoz Shah Kotla ruins, where it’s pumped to water the gardens of the complex. Tughlaqabad Fort has five baolis. Purana Qila and Lal Qila have a baoli each. There’s a stepwell in Vasant Vihar that can be viewed from the roof of an

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Oldworld ACs: (clockwise from top) The Rajon ki Baoli in Delhi’s Mehrauli Archaeological Park; the Adalaj stepwell in Gujarat; Gandhak ki Baoli in Mehrauli; and Agrasen ki Baoli near Connaught Place in Delhi.

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adjoining building. One baoli-like structure was accidentally discovered a few years ago in the congested Ballimaran in Old Delhi. The baoli behind Hindu Rao Hospital in north Delhi has been taken over by dry grass. The baoli in the dargah of Khwaja Qutub Kaki in Mehrauli is claimed by plastic bags. The few baolis that remain accessible must be visited in summer. Cold, damp and quiet, these stepwells are an oasis of solitude, rare in this crowded, noisy, smoggy metropolis. “Delhi-wallahs gathered in baolis to flee from summer heat,” says academic-activist Sohail Hashmi, a walking encyclopaedia on the city. “There they lounged, slept, played chauser and pacheesi with friends or smoked hookahs.” Today, the few who visit baolis go there either to meet their lovers, or to get away from the world. Amid the business towers

and residential apartments of central Delhi, the 14th century Agrasen ki Baoli has its own fan club on Facebook. Flanked by niches, chambers and passageways, the 104 stone steps, descending into the well’s dry depths, have three landings. Although the baoli is dry, the air is cool even at the peak of summer. Until 2002, it had water. In the baoli’s lower reaches, the sunlight fades. The gurgling sound of hundreds of resident pigeons echoes off the stone walls. Hidden in the various nooks and bays of the baoli, the birds frequently fly out with a great flapping of wings. Photographer Raghu Rai took his famous photo of a boy diving into the water one late afternoon in 1970. Since a baoli is built below ground level, its architectural aesthetics can only be appreciated once you enter it. At

Agrasen ki Baoli, the experience is more intense because the steps of the baoli and the highrises of Connaught Place present a dramatic contrast: the 14th century joining the 21st century in one straight line. The high-rises, Muhammad says, are the reason why baolis cannot be restored to their original self. “Multi-floor buildings claim more water and so the level of Delhi’s water table has plunged. We cannot refill baolis with water.” The baoli in the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Basti is the only stepwell in Delhi to have an active underground spring that ensures a continuous supply of fresh water. For centuries, pilgrims stopped at the baoli to sip its blessed water. For years, the boys living in Nizamuddin Basti dived into the baoli—especially when it was flooded with monsoon rain—from the roofs, windows

and ledges of the surrounding houses and from the top of the baoli wall from the other side. Over the decades, the water of Hazrat Nizamuddin’s baoli became toxic with decomposed muck. In 2009, a renovation project undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and ASI managed to reach the well’s foundation. Today, the water looks clean. A new generation of neighbourhood boys climb on the roofs, jump into the water, swim and go back to the roofs to jump again. It’s a late afternoon in March. The sun’s glare is white. The Rajon ki Baoli in the Mehrauli Archaeological Park is empty. The well is dry. In her book Delhi: A Thousand Years of Building, Lucy Peck calls it “the prettiest baoli in Delhi”. With 66 steps, the baoli’s top floor has a row of arched niches, which are cool inside. There is no noise save that of aeroplanes preparing to land at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. Bring a novel, a flask of chilled beer and it becomes a perfect place to while away a summer afternoon. mayank.s@livemint.com