01 Jan 2011

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Saturday, January 1, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 1

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

FACING THE MUSIC >Page 17

HOW TO KEEP A RESOLUTION

Forget willpower, reaching a goal means retraining the brain to form new habits >Page 11

UP IN THE AIR With new planes and new airports, air travel got a fresh coat of paint in 2010.

Time for policies and practices to follow suit >Page 20

WHEN THE END IS NIGH You have two options: ignore the 2012 apocalypse predictions or spend 2011 preparing for doomsday >Page 22

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

PHOTO ESSAY

SAFE PASSAGE

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE 2011 PREVIEW ISSUE

FIRST CUT

SANJUKTA SHARMA

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

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

THE YEAR OF CORRECTIONS

A

round the time hundreds of gigabytes of leaked conversations riveted the world, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s multi-crore gobbler Guzaarish bombed. Its cosmetic banality amused audiences.

A review copy of a 760-page hardcover of Mark Twain’s autobiography arrived in our office by snail mail. Samuel Langhorne Clemens wanted this tome to be published 100 years after his death, but it appears the book’s weight can be felt only before you read it.

2010 was a year when the big fell and the small triumphed. The world faced up to an activist whistleblower, England demolished the Aussie Goliaths, a choir from Shillong reinterpreted Bollywood music, the Dongria Kondh tribals who live in one of the country’s remaining few WATCH pristine forests kept big corporations at bay and a small film called Band Baaja Baaraat made money for Yash Raj Films. Our judicious and knowledgeable prime minister is a smaller man after a scam involving thousands of crores and the who’s who of the power elite.

The crash was absolute at the movies. Kites, Tees Maar Khan, Housefull, Raavan—these multicrore films had no chops, and they disappeared without a whimper.

Smaller films were fuelled by creativity. Ishqiya, Love, Sex aur Dhokha, Udaan, Peepli (Live) and Tere Bin Laden can work anywhere in the world. The Hurt Locker won the Oscar, over James

‘7 Khoon Maaf’: Priyanka Chopra plays Susanna, who kills her husbands.

Cameron’s spectacularly beautiful Avatar. The small film left an impression, redefined tastes.

2011 will be the year of corrections. Big media will have to rethink their ethos, and public figures will fear the power the Internet bestows on Everyman. Film producers will rethink budgets. For them, the abiding lesson from the past decade, and indeed last year, is: Stars and budgets can’t camouflage bad writing. Expect more midbudget films in the next two years.

Some of the most promising films of 2011 don’t scream `100 crore.

The ones I look forward to: In Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, Ranbir Kapoor plays the title role, a grungy rocker with dreadlocks—interesting, only if it does not ooze sanitized goodness, as Rock On!! did. In Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi na Milegi Dobara, three men and two women in designer

Priya Ramani is currently on leave

wear journey through Spain. The insider gaze of Akhtar in her debut, Luck By Chance, was searing yet non-judgemental. Her confident direction has me looking forward to this. There is Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod—a thriller revolving around a world-roving spy. Vishal Bhardwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf, releasing in February, has a story to die for: Its skeleton is Ruskin Bond’s short story, Susanna’s Seven Husbands, about a woman who murders seven husbands. Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn may shatter the Tintin magic forever, but it is full of promise. I won’t miss Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

But at the top of my wish list is a respite from no-brainer Hindi comedies with English titles, and racist and sexist jokes. sanjukta.s@livemint.com

2010 was a year of the unexpected. Who would have imagined journalism would change dramatically because of a website? Dramatic upheavals and unexpected trends in society, culture and technology stomped on predictions and analysis with glee.

So how will tumultuous 2010 affect the coming year? Should we be optimistic or cautious? What do we make of the changes?

This special New Year issue of ‘Lounge’ tries to answer these questions.

From the right to education Bill to the world’s largest cricket extravaganza, experts preview and decode the events likely to shape the year. Some changes are obvious—cheap mobile phones fuelling a new handset revolution; a resurgent independent music scene becoming commercially viable. Others are more subtle: How will WikiLeaks alter the way we think about democracy, governance and transparency? Or how can a minor change in copyright law upend the publishing business?

And there are the shifting priorities of everyday life. We tell you how to keep your New Year resolutions and, on the off­chance that the Mayans were right, how to prepare for the end of the world.

ON THE COVER: IMAGING: MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Irresistible lightness”, 25 December, the main photograph is of Vipul Gupta, sous chef, WelcomHotel, New Delhi.

In “Toy Central”, 18 December, the Red Bug store website is www.redbugstore.com

LISTEN TO THE

LOUNGE PODCAST We list 2010’s best

films, round up the craziest video games and discuss what to expect from the silver screen and computer displays in 2011. www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

In 2011, Indian society will transform. The right to education Bill, which will be applied this year, requires all private schools to set aside 25% of their seats for the poor

The leap: (clockwise from top) A footbridge near the Bandra mosque; children going to school in the area; and a student practises English at the nearby Urban Community Development Centre classroom.

Every afternoon, by the rear entrance to St Andrew’s school in Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood, gather dozens of women.

Some are in burqa, most work as servants, all are from the large Muslim slum at the edge of the suburb.

From the balcony of my ground-floor flat next door I watch them squat in the sun, awaiting the bell signalling the return of their children. Girls in blue pinafores, boys in blue shorts and white shirt (and a tie after class V) come out to mothers who carry tiffin boxes. Almost inevitably, the women pass a hand over the child, fondling it, ruffling hair, proud. What were the tiffins for, I wondered, till I understood. The children weren’t going home directly but elsewhere, a tuition class perhaps.

The school-going children from the slum are many and rising, and a newspaper reported the school’s response: applying a system of reservation by religion. A third of the children admitted would be Hindu, a third Christian and a third Muslim. Because the slum dominates the local population, this ratio works against them. Middle-class Muslims in the area, and there is a range of them, from Gujarati-speaking Bohras and Khojas to Urdu-speaking Shias and a few Sunnis, also favour this division by faith. Their thinking, which is correct, is that even if the entrance pool were narrowed, their English-speaking children were safe because they would edge the slum children out in the admissions process. Few Indians are enthusiastic about their child studying and sharing a bench with someone from the slums, who is thought to be dirty and foul-mouthed.

The slum Muslims are Urdu speaking,

going by the banners for religion and politics that clutter the area, and their homes are across the road from Bandra’s largest mosque.

Raised in Surat, trained to place people by caste, something about the people who left and entered that mosque disturbed me. In traffic slowed by the crossing devout, I often scanned the calligraphy on the mosque’s signboards out of a moving car trying to pick out a clue. One evening, I realized I was looking at the wrong language. On the mosque’s wall, in English, were the words I sought: Kasai

REPLY TO ALL

aakar patel

Jamaat (butchers’ community).

My discomfort, and perhaps that of the parents of middle-class Muslims, fell into place.

In an old building on Bandra’s 14th Road is the Urban Community Development Centre. Asked for directions, the pretty girls working for the dental clinic on the floor below do not know of its existence, but it is easy to find for those who seek it. They are English seekers of the current generation: drivers, maids, cooks, all in their 20s. I spotted the young man who delivers my laundry take a class for class I. They hope English will get them out of servitude. It will be difficult to learn a language and its grammar at that age, difficult to persist, but they look quietly resolute, running their fingers over children’s texts, mouthing the unfamiliar words.

The man who teaches them is Creswell D’Souza. When I first visited the place, we chatted and he asked me if I could come and teach. When I offered to give money instead, he told me to get copies of a textbook, N.K. Aggarwala’s Elementary English Grammar and Composition, Book 2. It is for some reason a difficult book to get, and Creswell telephoned me three times till I managed a few copies, each costing `55, for people who might find it difficult to buy or locate.

The book’s opening line, for students to rearrange into a proper sentence, reads: “is girl a good Mary”.

About Mary I cannot say, but about her son there is little doubt. Christ introduced a horizontal relationship into religion, from man-God to man-man. “Do unto others...” What an exceptional message: simple, effective and powerful enough to have produced the most mighty and most civilized culture on earth.

The message of individual redemption through good work, unselfish work, is easy to see in action in Bandra.

As we leave the Bandra mosque and go towards the old business district, just before the Shiv Sena building, is the turn into the municipal corporation’s sweepers’ colony. There I visit the Purabiya family. Ramji used to be a sweeper, cleaning toilets and collecting garbage, and after he retired a couple of years ago, his son inherited his job.

Neither man is particularly bright, and the house is managed by the daughter-in-law, Mina, who sweeps offices, including mine.

She has two children, Varsha and Rohan, and they go to a private school

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run by a charity. Mina’s husband draws `3,000 a month as salary. Of this, `1,000 is deducted against rent for the house—one room and a kitchen—the family of five lives in. The houses are 12 to a row, four rows in all, with three toilets to a row, one for every 20 people.

The Purabiyas are Harijans—they admit this easily—but vegetarian. The pictures of gods are all around the room, but not the usual ones. There is the headless warrior goddess Ful Jogani Ma, whose picture also has two women lying on top of one another. And, like many Gujaratis, Ramji believes in Ramdev Pir, whose Hindu-Muslim shrine is near Jaipur. The green standard of the saint is on one wall.

None of the Purabiya adults can read, but Varsha, who is 10, can. The children are too shy to talk to me in English. I look at their notebooks, and see the writing on it, perhaps replicating what the teacher is saying: “Monday is for English.” The teacher had corrected a page, and marked a lesson: “Good!”

Mina makes `3,000 cleaning offices.

The Purabiyas wish they had the money to send their children to a computer class, which they say is `500 a month, but they cannot afford that. The children’s school fees are `200 a month and their monthly electricity bill alone is `700. How do they manage to pay that, I ask. They let it gather till the power is cut, and then they go to the moneylender.

In the corner are a bat, a pair of pads, gloves and a helmet. Rohan, who is 12, isn’t that keen on school, but goes to Shivaji Park for coaching every day. I ask how much the coach is paid: `1,000 a month, a fifth of the family’s income. It is not easy to come to terms with such sacrifice, and such ambition.

Pushpa works at the home of scriptwriter Arpita Chatterjee, who wrote the movie Bheja Fry. Pushpa is 25, or perhaps 24, she isn’t sure. She is slim and quite beautiful. She must know this, for she is quite confident in her manner, face thrust out in conversation. Pushpa cleans seven homes, starting at 6 in the morning and working through till 5, making `10,000 a month. With that money, she sent her daughter Sneha to boarding school in a distant suburb of Mumbai called Vasai five months ago.

Sneha attends St Anthony’s, whose fees are `325 a month. Her hostel is part of a Christian family’s home where 30 children, boys and girls, stay. This costs Pushpa `5,000 a month, leaving enough money for her own `3,000 rent. Sneha’s hair is cut short, because Pushpa found lice in it during one visit. She does not see her daughter often, perhaps once every three weeks, and takes wafers and biscuits when she does, though she must surrender these to the family (“I make sure Sneha sees me hand them over,” she says). Sneha does not like being away on her own and when she first brought her to the hostel, Pushpa told her they were going on a picnic. Why did she not send Sneha to a nearby school, I asked. Sneha would never learn English if I were around her, she says. She wants to keep her daughter away from her for another four years, till she is in class V. At that point, Pushpa feels, Sneha will know English enough not to be affected by her environment.

“I have a cousin, he studies in the 15th class,” Pushpa said, perhaps referring to college, “and I asked him a question in English. I had learnt these words because I was interested and I asked: ‘Where do you stay?’ He said he understood the question but he couldn’t reply. He could read and write English, he said, but he couldn’t speak it in conversation.” She would ensure Sneha didn’t turn out like that, and she was happy with her life. She says with Sneha not around, she does not need to cook, eating what she is given in the homes she works in.

Ordinary lives: English and vocational training classes take place side by side at a community centre classroom in Bandra.

She heard of the boarding school when gathered around the slum’s tap, when a man she knew called Suresh spoke of having sent his daughter there. A friend of Sneha’s, also a maidservant, decided she would send her daughter too. Suresh gave them the magic contact, and Pushpa showed it to me. It was a crumpled chit with a phone number and the words “Faustin Aunty”, the lady who ran the hostel in Vasai.

Of the children in Pushpa’s slum, in the suburb of Andheri, most go to private school. Of those that do, most go to English school. Girls may study Marathi for free but they must pay for English.

Parents with two or more children had a problem, Pushpa said, because they did not want a child to be more privileged than the other. This was leading to one-child families.

A problem had arisen in these schools, Pushpa said. Slum children have no training in doing “potty”—she used the English word. Parents would drop the child off at school where the child would defecate in class. The school calls to complain about this. The parents felt they paid much money to the school, and expected that the school provide this service of cleaning the children up. This matter of raising a child correctly occupied Pushpa first when she was a sweeper at a kindergarten school. She watched parents bring their children to class. “Maine dekha phool ki tarah rakhtein hain apne bachchon ko. Uski koi wajah hogi (“there must be a reason they raise their children like flowers”),” she said. She is determined to raise Sneha that way.

Doing research for a book I am writing on servants, I have come across many such people. I know of a cook, Renu, working for CNBC’s Udayan Mukherjee, a Bengali woman living alone, who put her nephew through IIT and sent him to Germany. I know of another, Manju, cooking at director Saeed Mirza’s home, both of whose children are corporate executives. Many of the servants are shy, and do not wish to speak of their lives.

Their children are not as reticent; access to English, to middle-class friends has given them confidence.

These stories are all just from my circle of acquaintances. How many million such stories are being written across India?

How many people are poised to obliterate the disadvantage of birth, of caste, of faith? More than we might think.

A storm is gathering on the horizon. It is called the right to education Bill, and it will be applied this year. It requires all private schools, every single one, to set aside 25% of their seats for the poor, whose fees the school’s other students

Moving on: Pushpa’s daughter is at a boarding school in Mumbai.

must effectively bear. How will this affect the children of Dhirubhai Ambani International School, where parents pay `7.57 lakh just for classes XI and XII? Middle-class Indians are trained to ignore the poor, but our children will grow up with school friends who share their bench but who do not watch television, or go on vacation, or eat pizza or have shoes. How indifferent can our children be to them?

The great missionary schools that raised a century of middle-class Indians efficiently and cheaply can no longer cope with the rising numbers of those who demand English education. Can India produce solutions internally? I do not

know, but I am not optimistic.

And yet the faces of those women waiting in the sun are touched with certitude: They know their children will get there, and while we may wonder, they have already set off.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

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

L6 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Cricket’s devious advertising innovations take hold, the World Cup returns in all its raucous glory, and the IPL is back with less glam and more confusion PTI

Welcome, Twenty Eleven! This is how Indian cricket is going to fill you up.

South Africa tour in progress, the World Cup, the Indian Premier League (IPL), a tour of the West Indies, one of England, probably a tour by the West Indies too, then a tour of Australia, and the Champions League, and only a fool would bet against the World Twenty20 popping up because that is what it does. In short, a pretty hectic and crucial year across formats, the first time, as far as I can tell, that India will play Test matches on all five continents in the same calendar year, besides participating in the great 50-over and 20-over galas. There’s only a couple of syllables between Twenty Eleven and Twenty-four Seven.

As you read this, torn-down stadiums all over India are confidently missing their deadlines, so everything seems to be in order for the 10th cricket World Cup. It will commence as soon as confirmation has come in from the Caribbean that the 2007 edition has indeed concluded. After numerous global summits in the wake of that endless event, the International Cricket Council (ICC) used its collective wits and spreadsheets to compress the competition to...43 days, or two-and-a-half times the length of the Olympics. And not to worry, India will not crash out in the first round, as it did four years ago. The whole structure has been designed to achieve this purpose.

The format—a long, quasi-warm-up league phase meandering towards quarter-finals—is much like the last subcontinental World Cup, in 1996. So forgiving was that format that teams could forfeit league matches, as Australia and West Indies did to Sri Lanka out of security fears, and still qualify for the knockouts. Following those forfeitures, in a display of Asian

solidarity, India and Pakistan fielded a joint team to play an exhibition game in Colombo. The situation today, alas, is far beyond that. And though it is being held in the subcontinent, with Pakistan no longer hosting any part of it, this is not a truly subcontinental World Cup. One Day cricket itself has come full circle since that tournament. The tidal wave of 50-overs cricket was cresting then, rather than lapping against indifferent feet as it does now. You can see the trend: The World Cup of 2015 is to be pared to 10 teams from 14, the Champions Trophy is to be done away with altogether, and Australia have begun to play their domestic One Day matches over four innings. So it will be interesting to see if One Dayers can show people a big night (or 43) on the town. For what it’s worth, I think it will be a flat five weeks and a raucous, rousing last week. One of Bangladesh or West Indies will make the semis.

Not just One Day cricket but the entire landscape has changed since 1996. To leaf through War Minus the Shooting, Mike Marqusee’s polemic about cricket’s tryst with the global economy in that World Cup, is to be transported to those nascent days of cricket profiteering: Jagmohan Dalmiya and I.S. Bindra and Mark Mascarenhas, Pepsi and the Nothing Official About It campaign at a time when ambush-marketing was not a term in any cricket fan’s lexicon, the proliferation of VIP enclaves and hospitality boxes in stadiums.

Observing it all, the venerable Pakistani critic, Omar Kureishi, tells the author of his fear that in “coming years private sector interests would organize their own mini World Cups and the ICC and the boards would lose control of their players”.

In 2010, Kureishi’s fears were partially borne out as a

THE TICKLED SCORER

rahul bhattacharya corporate-franchise tournament, cricket’s richest, found itself embroiled in a financial scandal. Only partially, because the IPL was not a rebel start-up but an establishment creation, and because almost as dismal as the scandal was the Indian board’s ultra-establishment response.

For better or worse, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had sold franchises for millions of dollars, and having slept at the wheel thereafter, with no respect for due process, it decided to terminate two of them without so much as a notice.

It was classic BCCI arrogance, founded on vengeance rather than principle. In trying to decimate the monster they’d created, they themselves turned into monsters. `1 crore per season was the slightly excessive token paid to governing council members to rubber-stamp Modi’s decisions. So Shashank Manohar and N. Srinivasan decided to apply that cutting-edge BCCI fix: It turned the governing council into an honorary committee. The honorary committee acted as honorary committees do. They came up with a tournament format so convoluted that it requires an honorary sub-committee to decode it (the short version: Some RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP

On a high: (top) Shane Warne and his Rajasthan Royals teammates celebrating a victory in the IPL of 2008; and fans waving Indian flags dur­ ing the Twenty20 Cricket World Championship match between India and South Africa at Kingsmead in Durban in 2007.

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teams will play each other one time and some teams will play each other two times—no more questions!). They crafted rules for player retention which, one cannot help but suspect, were pushed through by the board president-in-waiting, who by one of those innocent little coincidences, also happens to own the team which retained the maximum number of players.

The fourth IPL is slated to get off the ground some five days after the World Cup. Many things about Modi will not be missed, but his energy and execution skills probably will. It promises to be less of a Page 3 tournament than its predecessors, which will be nice, but with a slew of court cases in progress, I’m not sure if anyone will be able to get it off Page 1.

Otherwise, from his bunker in London, Modi can look back at 2010 with satisfaction. His legacy to cricket coverage was further secured. Not content with turning commentators into hucksters, his last idea—and one of his many dodgy deals under the scanner—was to insert advertisements not just between overs but between deliveries. He had this done by zooming into the giant screen at the stadium which beamed the commercial.

Or so we thought. The truth, it emerges, is far more cunning than that. The commercial only appeared to be coming from the giant screen. In fact, it is simply a television recording played on loop so that we are lulled into thinking of it as ambient advertising.

With such innovations, little wonder that commercial intrusions invaded even Test cricket. Watching, and listening to, television coverage of India’s Tests in Sri Lanka on Neo, Suresh Menon mused in a column: “Great car. Stupendous phone.

Incredible bike. The IPL-ization of cricket commentary is complete.” And a

BLACK DAY THEMBA HADEBE/AP

Front foot forward: Sachin Tendulkar (second from right) and teammates during a recent Test match against South Africa. few months later, from the Tests in South Africa on Ten, viewers were subjected to advertisements not between deliveries but during them, in the form of branded patches leaping into view on either side of the batsman as the bowler let go the ball.

Most right-minded fans are all for commercial support for their sport, but only if it leaves it in better shape.

In this respect, there was one board initiative in 2010 which deserves proper applause: It increased Test-match fees, and by almost threefold, so that it is no longer the poor cousin of the

limited-overs formats. Its motive was probably the same as it was when it conjured up Test matches out of nowhere in 2010: to keep India at No. 1.

Any incentive will help, because 2011 is the year that India’s hold on the position will be seriously challenged.

Apparently some nefarious souls have been complaining about Test cricket, but with away series in England and Australia, there is much to look forward to. It’s going to be a grand rock show year, or an extended dirge, and if nothing else then at some point Sachin Tendulkar will score his 100th

international hundred and all will be right with the nation.

Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the forthcoming novel The Sly Company of People Who Care. He writes a monthly cricket column for Lounge.

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

The spectre of match­fixing still haunts the guarded optimism of fans When the most exhilarating bowling combination in the world, Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif of Pakistan, overstepped the crease against England at Lord’s, the commentators on Sky were alarmed by the scale of the transgression.

Yet neither they, nor anybody else, could have suspected that these seemingly innocent lapses might have been at the behest of a man in a sweatshirt captured on camera collecting a table­full of hard cash on the cricketers’ behalf. Mazhar Majeed was the man, agent to Pakistani captain Salman Butt and several other players, and ‘News of the World’ (NoTW) was the tabloid which stung him.

“They’ve all been organized, okay,” Majeed is seen telling NoTW’s undercover reporter, “First ball of the third over... the last ball of the 10th over.” Investigations continue, but for cricket fans the sinking feeling from a decade ago, when the filth of match­fixing came to light, was all too familiar.

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EUGENE HOSHIKO/AP

There’s much to learn from China if we let go of our blinkered predispositions and see for ourselves the elements driving its transformation

LIU JIN/AFP

I am sitting in bed looking outside my window in Shanghai. Snow-capped cobbled roofs march out into the distance, their slanted angles glinting in the early morning sun. A clump of tall thin trees—they look like elongated Christmas ones—in the garden below have turned rusty orange, some have shed their leaves altogether, their scrawny branches striking surrealist poses. I hear the hum of traffic building up in the distance. A bus screeches to a halt. A lone cleaner carries a big fat broom across the basketball court yonder.

The washing machine in my kitchen gushes in water. My daughter, sitting beside me, keys in strange beautiful Chinese characters as she completes her college essay on the singer Wang Lee Hong. Our cups of tea, on both sides of the bed, steam invitingly.

I have always come to Shanghai as a visitor but this is the first time I have set up temporary home. This unexpected interface with everyday China makes me realize just how deep and wide its development is, and

LUXURY CULT

radha chadha what a transformative effect it has had on daily life. Some recess of my mind has always clung to the notion that one day India will catch up with China, but as I stand at the checkout counter of the world’s biggest Carrefour store—trolley loaded with milk and eggs, bananas and persimmon, tomatoes and tofu, frying pans and kitchen knives—in this most mundane setting, the penny finally drops for me. They have arrived.

Shanghai’s comparison point isn’t Mumbai; it is New York, London, PETER PARKS/AFP

Sky’s the limit: (from top) High­rise buildings in the Pudong New Devel­ opment Zone in Shang­ hai; a billboard promo­ ting company trademarks at a shopping mall; and shoppers outside one of the metropolis’ many gigantic malls.

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Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

It isn’t just the mammoth size of the store that tips me over—two floors of absolute household heaven teeming with shoppers—it is the vicarious peep into the Chinese home that it provides, a curated show of day-to-day materialism if you will, symbolic Lego pieces that construct ordinary lives. It is all “first world” and more—and it is all made for China. We may have started the development race together with similar sized economies in the 1980s but they have reached a different finish line. Their economy is nearly four times ours. And just like the Carrefour store it isn’t about size alone, it is the palpable quality difference at every turn.

I have a New Year resolution that I’d like to invite you to share: Open your eyes to China. Go there if you can. Feel the pulse of the nation.

Analyse what makes it tick. And figure out how we can outdo it.

My conversations in India in multiple forums have led me to believe that the simple act of seeing China’s accomplishments is hard for us, to learn from them is harder still.

Pat rationalizations cloud our thinking. That China is a complex khiladi on many fronts is obvious—the recent Wen Jiabao visit shows just how hard-nosed they are—but is there any point in being mein anadi to their tu khiladi?

Whether you see China as a friend or foe, whether you see it as a market to sell to or as a supplier, whether you see it as a potential partner or as a business competitor, my singular point is: See it with an open mind, and learn from it. A clear-headed understanding of China is crucial to competing and winning against them.

Biggest, fastest, latest, best, first—all these adjectives come alive for me in encounter after encounter in Shanghai. I meet a friend for breakfast—at the newly opened Langham hotel in Xintiandi—he works for a German shipping company, and tells me how Shanghai’s Yangshan Deepwater Port, developed in just a few years, has become the world’s busiest. The weather turns freezing cold and my daughter and I head out to the Cloud 9 Mall for woollies—it’s a massive mall, stuffed with mid-range brands, swarming with people—we end up at the Japanese brand Uniqlo, buying “Heattech” innerwear, amazing stuff, super-light, super-warm, great design, great price. China is Uniqlo’s biggest Light years ahead: (right) The Apple store in Shanghai; and the high­speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai.

international market with 58 stores, which they plan to multiply to 1,000 by 2020. We warm up over coffee at the Starbucks below—it’s packed, every table taken. Starbucks too has frothy plans for China, wanting to whip up its current tally of 400 stores to 1,500 by 2015.

We catch up over drinks with another friend—he heads a big multinational—and the China forward theme continues. A Shanghai-Beijing high-speed train link is in the works that will cut the current travel time of 14 hours to 5 for a rail distance similar to Delhi-Mumbai. They are building their own aircraft—military and civil. They are dredging the Yangtze river to allow access to bigger cargo ships, which will enable moving factories westward into lesser developed areas. Airports like our Delhi T3 are a dime a dozen.

The luxury retail scene deals in superlatives too, entirely appropriate given the Chinese consumer is the biggest for most major brands. I visit the spanking new IFC Mall which has lined up all the biggies such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Hermès, Tiffany, and more. The mall itself is a luxurious 1.1 million sq. ft extravaganza—developed by Hong Kong’s Sun Hung Kai, it has brought along many familiar names such as Isola (Italian restaurant) and City Super (Japanese supermarket) to the Shanghai IFC. I check out the Apple store there—Shanghai’s first—and it is a stunner just like the one on Fifth

Avenue, New York, the glass cube entrance replaced with a glass cylinder here, the store below sprawled out over 16,000 sq. ft.

Back across the river, on the bustling Huai Hai Road, luxury retail takes a nostalgic turn at the Dunhill “Home”, one of four in the world, at the twin villas at No. 796—exquisitely restored identical 1920s buildings, one housing Dunhill, the other Vacheron Constantin, and the top floor merging to house the Kee Club (another Hong Kong favourite), the gardens below lit up with Christmas lights. I meet Tim King, who heads Alfred Dunhill in the region, for tea—Dunhill has grown to 90-plus stores in 50-plus cities in China.

Further on Huai Hai Road, I shop for Christmas gifts at Shang Xia, the first Chinese luxury brand launched by Hermès—we are served by a young Japanese man, and it is the finest service I have experienced in years, his unabashed joy in the beautiful products he shows us makes them twice as beautiful.

There are many things one can learn from China—the grandness of their vision, their ability to think long term, their implementation skills—but the one I admire most is their ability to “learn” from the outside world.

China hasn’t got where it has on its own—it has leveraged the resources of the world to fuel its development, and here’s the big a-ha, it has still kept the upper hand. The Chinese are as feverishly nationalistic as we are,

but it doesn’t stop them from embracing foreign know-how or managerial talent—they see it as a way to get their nation further faster.

That the Chinese welcome learning is best demonstrated by IBLAC, the International Business Leaders Advisory Council. Set up in 1989, IBLAC consists of heads of major global companies who meet every year to brainstorm and advise the mayor of Shanghai on the city’s development. Indra Nooyi has been a member. The advice is taken seriously and a report card of what has been implemented is presented the following year. (It’s quite a who’s who, but even here the Chinese keep the upper hand—if you don’t turn up for two years in a row you are dropped from the council.)

Which brings me back to my New Year resolution: Open your eyes to China, and open your minds to new learning.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury.

Write to Radha at luxurycult@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Radha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/radha­chadha COURTESY APPLE

CHINDIA MYTHS The two central concerns of our ambivalence towards the country are largely unfounded There are two classic arguments that tangle up our thinking on China. The first: “China has developed faster because it is a Communist dictatorship, we haven’t been able to do as much because we are a democracy.” The second: “We have so much corruption, that’s the root cause of the mess around.” Both are red herrings.

Democracy is not divorced from development (look no further than the G6 nations) and neither are Communist dictatorships a guarantee for progress (North Korea is a case in point). As for corruption, China is in the same league as India according to Transparency International—not a good thing by any means, but my point is, corruption hasn’t slowed the China train.

Another pet fear: Does opening the doors to foreigners kill local businesses? Not in China. Chinese businesses are thriving—Haier, Huawei, Lenovo, Li Ning, Taobao, to name just a few—usually by playing the twin trump cards of competitive pricing and catering to local preferences. The lively sparring between Starbucks and 85C—which sells a cup of coffee at half the Starbucks price, and offers bakery products that appeal to the Chinese palate (anyone for sponge cakes coated in pork floss?) demonstrates how the tables are being turned on Western brands. 85C has 150 cafés on the mainland, 320 in Taiwan— where it is headquartered—and plans to open another 1,000 cafés by 2015.

AP

L10 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

The solution to a year dominated by compromised ethics, conniving lobbyists and spectacular scams isn’t distance from local politics, but a more active engagement with it

THE GOOD LIFE

shoba narayan It began, as things sometimes end, with garbage. Divya Nahender, 35, wasn’t planning on getting involved. She belongs to an old Bangalore family and leads a comfortable life—husband at a multinational, two kids, a web of close relatives, and a black labrador named Zorro. Over months, maybe years, she watched garbage being dumped in front of her home. “I couldn’t bear it. I decided to do something about it,” she says.

Divya (her manner is far too young for her to be called Nahender) convened a meeting at her home with the area’s health inspector and invited residents to attend. Together, they questioned the garbage contractor and health inspector about the litter on their roads. Using six giant chart papers, Divya made an area map and walked the streets to find “black spots” that were full of rubbish. She followed the garbage trucks and cleaning women to find out where and why they didn’t clean. After several such meetings, Divya got the garbage that used to be dumped in front of her house removed.

Today, flowering plants grace that spot. “I know people who use their connections to get things done. Overnight, you can get a dump site moved. But I didn’t want to dump my problems on others. So I chose this route. It took one-and-a-half years but we got it done,” says Divya.

Emboldened, Divya got together with some like-minded people in the neighbourhood and soon, the Annaswamy Mudaliar Road-St Johns Road-Osborne Road-Tank Road residents’ welfare association was born. To simplify the awkwardly long name that accurately depicts the area’s communal history and character, they called it ASOT. When Divya called me asking if I could initiate a recycling programme in my 72-apartment complex, I accepted without really knowing what I was getting into.

Divya had contacted ITC Ltd, which was going around our area collecting paper and plastic as part of their corporate social responsibility initiative. A retired gentleman, Mr Venkatesh, came and talked to us dubious apartment dwellers about separating paper and plastic at source. ITC distributed blue and white bags for each household. Two women who are part of the Clean Bengaluru (www.cbengaluru.com) initiative came and talked about composting, segregating and creating zero waste. Everyone in my complex agreed it was a great idea but much debate ensued over the logistics.

Six months later, after much discourse and discord, several buildings in my neighbourhood recycle their waste. ITC comes—in fits and spurts—to collect our paper and plastic. Mr Venkatesh’s building also composts.

Civic activism is a pain. Attending weekly meetings where much of the time is spent nit-picking fumigation practices and arguing over waste management seems like a waste of time.

Venkatesh uncle suggests strictness: “Tell people you won’t pick up their waste unless they segregate.” Mr Purushottam, ASOT’s president, suggests we work with the local politicians. Our treasurer, Mr Rao, asks me, “Madam, why don’t you invite some of your press people over? We can do a dinner for the press and ask for a write-up.”

Each person thinks he is right; wellmeaning folks want the same goal but take opposite routes to achieve their end; people argue over trivialities; value

systems clash; debate leads to disengagement. Time’s a wasted. Nothing seems to get resolved. And yet…

And yet, this is precisely why citizens ought to engage in local, state and national politics. So said Aristotle in the fourth century and today, as we stand on the cusp of the new year and take stock, it seems an appropriate time to pay attention to the ancient philosophical values propounded by the man who wrote one of the first books on politics.

For Aristotle, politics was not so much about distributing income and opportunities. It wasn’t about political parties and national offices. For Aristotle, politics was about—get this—cultivating character; about developing virtues. The telos (purpose) of any polis (city), he said, is not only to create and enforce laws; or to provide the right to life, liberty and property. The goal of politics, according to Aristotle, is to cultivate good moral character in its citizens so that they can realize their higher potential. Aristotle had a phrase for it. He called it “the good life”.

The narrative arc of this past year has been about many things; but more than anything else, it has been about morality in public life. It has been about phone taps, compromised ethics, conniving lobbyists, Machiavellian CEOs, complicit media, spectacular scams and mute leaders. It has been about what Sonia Gandhi calls the shrinking “moral universe” of India, and if she cannot correct it, who can?

Ten of us from ASOT are at our Ulsoor ward corporator’s office. The corporator’s name is Uday Kumar and he is the driver of the previous corporator, Saravana.

Members of ASOT explain that since Ulsoor became a reserved seat, Saravana couldn’t stand. So, the story goes, he fielded his driver as candidate and won by paying `2,000 per voter at the last minute.

Saravana enters after half an hour. A

lackey brings tea. Uday Kumar stands behind Saravana and doesn’t speak a word. We give our de facto corporator a list of demands: regular garbage cleaning, no black spots, better pavements, regular fumigation. Saravana listens carefully, calls the health inspector and the garbage collector and fires them for not cleaning the roads properly. He shows us a sheet where he has listed the public works he wants to undertake and a budget request that runs over `25 lakh. The BBMP hasn’t even sanctioned `100, he says. Saravana gives us all his mobile number and promises to do what he can.

When we return, there are five cleaning ladies standing outside Divya’s house with a shamefaced garbage collector, Lakshman, who promises to get the garbage collected twice a day. He hands us his mobile phone. “Please call the health inspector and tell him that we have done the needful,” he says. “And please don’t go to the corporator for these small things.”

Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York, said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Great line. The muckety muck of local politics can make a professional wince. In politics, you see the basest elements of our nature— people who are in it for the money and power. I told you about our meeting with our corporator. What I am not telling you is the infighting and power-mongering in even our tiny ASOT; the people who are simply part of the group for access to real estate or connections. And this is just a tiny neighbourhood. Think of national politics.

Governance is all about nuance. Ethics may be in black and white but politics is all in shades of grey. It is about choosing your battles and playing to win; about realizing when to push your point of view to people who aren’t at all like you.

It is about holding your tongue and learning to negotiate for what you want without bruising fragile egos. But above all, politics is a test of your moral compass; about your ability to discern right from wrong.

Modern political philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Rawls had a different view. To them, politics was about freedom. Aristotle differed entirely. In his seminal work, Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle said that cultivating moral virtues could not happen in isolation or in the privacy of homes. It had to be practised.

Just as a skill would flourish with practice, just as the body needed exercise, morality

needed to be exercised too and the way to do that was through dialogue, discourse, debate and disagreement. Ergo, politics.

Aristotle could not have foreseen the ugliness of the current political sphere. He lived in ancient Greece in the dawn of civilization when social networks were not so complicated. Men went to assemblies and sorted things out in person, not through Twitter. Through debates with their fellow citizens, they discovered their own moral plane and polished it. In their pursuit of “the good life”, they became better people. Politics humanized them.

India’s history before independence was full of such engagement. They say that times of crisis increase citizen participation. The 2G spectrum scam has reportedly cost the exchequer `1.76 trillion. It is our money that has been squandered. These are our leaders who are failing us. How much more corruption will our politicians have to perpetrate before the Indian public stands up and says, “Enough!”

It’s an old cliché: Citizens get the governments they deserve. The path to change is through politics. Get engaged, not for our country’s sake but for your own. It can be an interesting learning exercise.

Shoba Narayan is learning the Aristotlian way of the good life. It isn’t easy. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Clean­up act: (above) Litter dumped on Church Street, Ban­ galore; and Divya Nahender (in purple) and members of ASOT with Ulsoor corporator Uday Kumar (fourth from right, in white shirt) and former corpora­ tor Saravana (next to Divya).

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011

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L11

Living Forget willpower, reaching a goal means retraining the brain to form new habits

Rolling stock: Consultant Sherry Watts uses a special wheeled cart to keep her home office organized.

When it comes to making New Year resolutions, most people, behavioural experts say, approach the process exactly wrong: They rely on willpower.

Willpower springs from a part of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex, that is easily overloaded and exhausted. What works far better, researchers say, is training other parts of the brain responsible for linking positive emotions to new habits and conditioning yourself to new behaviours.

When setting a resolution, simply deciding to change your behaviour may work for a while. But when the cognitive parts of the brain responsible for decision making become stressed by other life events, that resolve is likely to succumb to an emotional desire for instant gratification, says Baba Shiv, a Stanford University marketing professor who specializes in neuroeconomics, the study of the biological bases for making economic decisions.

Keeping a resolution requires a detailed plan, with emotional rewards when milestones are reached—and even a strategy when there’s a setback. And don’t wait for 1 January, experts say: Plan ahead to increase your chances of success.

“Keeping a resolution isn’t a 100 yard dash. It’s a marathon,” says John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, US. Most people get stuck thinking willpower is the answer. In a survey of 1,134 adults released in November by the American Psychological Association, willpower was the top reason people cited for failing to make positive changes.

Pam Hild has been trying for years to get her holiday preparations organized.

She left decorating and party arrangements until the last minute, and sometimes forgot about gifts she had bought and stashed in closets. “I was always a raving maniac over the holidays,” says Hild of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Several weeks ago, she resolved to try a new approach. With help from a professional organizer, she started planning weeks in advance, posted a calendar of tasks with deadlines on her refrigerator and figured out how she would get back on track when she slipped up. For the first time, she is completely ready, days in advance. Getting there required going beyond just making a resolution. “You have to change your thinking and be able to maintain it.”

In one study of how emotion and cognition interact in decision making, Shiv asked some subjects to complete a challenging mental task, memorizing a seven-digit number, while others were asked to remember only two digits. When the same subjects were later given a choice between eating a delicious piece

of chocolate cake or a healthy fruit salad, Shiv says, those who had memorized seven digits were more likely to choose the cake, suggesting that the mental exertion affected their ability to repress the desire for instant gratification and make a healthy choice.

Shiv recommends a carrot-and-stick approach to a resolution: Focus most of the time on the emotional rewards you will reap for changing your behaviour. If you want to lose weight, visualize yourself feeling the benefits, thinking, “If I work hard, I will look so good, and feel so good,” he says. As a stick to help you get

WORK & FAMILY

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JASON HENRY/WSJ

started on your new habits, evoke the emotional consequences of failing to change. “Visualize yourself feeling fat, and think, ‘If I don’t work out, I will look like a heavy thing,’” and be less satisfied with yourself and your social life. Over time, your resolution “is going to get tagged with those emotions”, which will kick in automatically even when the cognitive parts of your brain are worn out, he says.

Linking your new habits to other pleasant changes can help. Kate S. Brown, a professional organizer in Sarasota, Florida, says some of her clients who struggle with disorganization do better when she has them buy new files that are aesthetically appealing. “If you like colour and you create a colourful file system, it creates happy feelings when you use it,” she says.

Mary Dykstra, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, professional organizer, coaches people to set specific, realistic goals, then to break each goal into small, measurable steps, with a timetable. This will help avoid the common pitfall of attempting too much, such as losing 40 pounds in two months, and setting yourself up for failure, she says. Also, line up in advance the supplies and resources you need for each new step. If you plan to organize your office, get the shredder or files you need. If you are quitting smoking, get nicotine patches and other cessation aids.

It may be possible to strengthen your self-control before starting your resolution by exercising it on small tasks, says Mark Muraven, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany. In a study, college students who practised self-control for two weeks by consciously improving their posture or keeping a food diary, performed better afterwards on tests of will, such as squeezing a hand grip for an extended time, he says.

Any technique that requires you to suppress a normal impulse should work, such as cutting back on swearing or using your non-dominant hand for routine tasks. “By doing small things that take a certain amount of self-control, you can build up your ‘muscle’” for tackling larger changes, Muraven says.

Planning ahead to reduce other stress will increase chances of success. Tired of spending hours processing mail and searching for lost files, Sherry Watts, a Sarasota, Florida, consultant, made a resolution to get her home office better organized. But she failed, and the stress just kept mounting. With help from a coach, she realized that her office set-up was already stressing her out and draining her energy for making other changes.

“I don’t like to feel confined,” Watts says. She felt much more relaxed working while standing up at her kitchen counter or moving from room to room. The coach helped her design a rolling cart to hold her files, supplies and out-baskets, enabling her to work anywhere in her house.

Another part of planning is training yourself to focus on positive new behaviours. Tomo Jahn of Gilbert, Arizona, has lost 37 pounds since August, partly by keeping a food journal that forced her to pay attention to food choices. Her trainer held her accountable by reading her entries and pushed her to work out, she says, so that picking better foods became a habit.

Finally, reward yourself when you succeed. When Shirley Worthington of Cheektowaga, New York, managed to stop smoking after an eight-year struggle, she took part of the $40 (around `1,810) a week she had been spending on cigarettes and hired someone else for a chore she disliked—mowing her lawn. The biggest help for her, she says, was telephone coaching from a 1-800-QuitNow worker, who reminded her that slip-ups are normal. “You’re going to want to smoke,” she says the coach told her, “but just because you want to, doesn’t mean you have to,” Worthington says. “I accepted that, and I haven’t smoked since.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

L14

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011

Essay

Julian Assange is not a crazy media vigilante. Whether his wishes are horses or not, he will force the democratic world to rethink secrecy and privacy

ANDREW TESTA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

It tells you something about the world today that the founders of two Web-based organizations established as recently as 2004 and 2006 slugged it out for Time’s Person of the Year.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg beat WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to the top spot. Facebook’s business model depends on persuading sane people into making their personal lives public, while WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization that publishes classified and secret information about oppressive regimes from sources that it keeps anonymous. Facebook and WikiLeaks testify to the startling power of the Web over what we used to think of as our “real” lives, but in the context of 2011, Time’s editors picked the wrong man.

WikiLeaks is important in three separate, though overlapping ways.

First, WikiLeaks is important as a clearing house for news that you can’t get elsewhere. It is crucial as The trial: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outside the Frontline Club in London.

investigating the illegal kidnapping and rendition of German citizens.

The journalistic credentials of ‘WikiLeaks is a WikiLeaks have been challenged on metaphorical alarm clock two main grounds. One, that everything that’s been leaked was well shrilling in our ear, telling known before. This is self-evidently us to wake up because untrue. Even if this criticism was qualified to mean that WikiLeaks has the digital world changed only confirmed earlier suspicions (as in Saudi Arabian complicity in the our lives as we slept.’ campaign to bomb Iran), surely the documentation of speculation is the first principle of good journalism. The second criticism has to do with procedure: WikiLeaks is repeatedly journalism. Second, WikiLeaks presumptively open and transparent, a accused of “dumping” information deserves our attention because it is venerable idea that has suddenly been without processing it editorially. trying to pioneer a digital insurgency given teeth by the digital revolution.

For example, hostile critics against what it thinks are Finally, WikiLeaks is important as an constantly refer to the indiscriminate unaccountable bureaucracies and example of the way in which “dump” of 250,000 diplomatic cables conspiratorial states. In this avatar, it individuals, corporations and states released by WikiLeaks in November. is a rallying point for a radical politics are constantly ambushed by a virtual The truth is that WikiLeaks has that’s based on the premise that the world that we’ve come to take for shared copies of these quarter of a workings of a state should be granted over the last decade without million cables with four mainstream stopping to think of its impact on our papers and has only published those ANDREW TESTA/THE NEW YORK TIMES “offline” lives. cables that have been edited, Even if WikiLeaks’ significance was selected and redacted by those to be measured solely by its newspapers and magazines. At the contribution to journalism, its place in time of writing, exactly 1,897 cables the history of the 21st century would had been published by the WikiLeaks be secure. WikiLeaks website, nearly all of MARTIN SCHOELLER/TIME/BLOOMBERG documents have which had also been helped bring to light, published by its among other things, media partners. If you corruption in Kenya, read the pages of The an oil scandal in Peru, Guardian or Der membership lists of Spiegel or The New the British National York Times it Party, possibly illegal becomes obvious that Swiss bank WikiLeaks has acted transactions, a nuclear as an enabler of accident in Iran’s responsible, Natanz facility and the investigative behaviour and policies journalism, not as a of the US military in crazy media vigilante. the Afghan war. The Not only does the recent release of US Pentagon Papers diplomatic cables has whistleblower Daniel made us aware of the covert US war in Ellsberg think of Julian Assange as a Yemen, Hillary Clinton’s instructions remarkable investigative journalist, to state department officials so do politicians as different as instructing them to spy on UN President Lula of Brazil and ministers diplomats in breach of the 1961 in Angela Merkel’s conservative Vienna Convention on diplomatic government in Germany. In the US relations and the fact that German itself, Ron Paul, a Republican, spoke officials were intimidated and up for WikiLeaks in Congress, dissuaded by the US from warning the Obama administration

mukul kesavan

ESSAY L15

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TERTIUS PICKARD/AP

Protest 2.0: (clockwise from left) Hundreds march to protest the detention of Julian Assange in Brisbane, Australia; the site has seen support from politicians such as outgoing Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but drawn the ire of others such as US secretary of state Hillary Clinton; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers; and WikiLeaks sup­ porters wear masks of the ‘Anonymous’ activist group during a demonstration.

ERALDO PERES/AP

PAUL HANNA/REUTERS

SUSAN WALSH/AP

SUSAN WALSH/AP

that “lying was not patriotic”.

While the journalism Wikileaks enables is important, for its founder, Julian Assange, it is incidental.

Assange, unlike most reporters, isn’t interested in specific revelations; he wants to use these leaks to promote systemic change in the way unaccountable bureaucracies create policies invisible to the people in whose name they rule. Assange’s central idea is that by leaking the internal communications of oppressive bureaucracies, WikiLeaks forces them into becoming more opaque within themselves and thus degrades their ability to function.

Specific revelations are useless against the hydra of the security state: Cut off one head and it’ll grow two more. But if an organization like WikiLeaks can create a sense of general anxiety within a bureaucratic apparatus or a state, it makes the exchange of information more guarded, more limited and less effective.

It’s not clear that Assange’s wishes will turn into horses; states and bureaucracies weren’t born yesterday: They are adaptable creatures and it’s likely that they will react in ways that might see the Net become more supervised, more authoritarian.

Already in reaction to WikiLeaks’ revelations, the threatened displeasure of the US government has successfully bullied Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa into withdrawing services from WikiLeaks. The second largest corporation in the world, Apple, pulled a WikiLeaks app from its App store a few days after it went on sale.

This blowback has brought home to

us the fact that the portals of the Net are guarded by huge private companies which are easily “persuaded” by powerful states such as the US and China. Some transparency advocates who work in conventional, incremental ways are concerned that Assange’s work threatens the concessions they have won from governments.

These are legitimate concerns and need to be debated but it’s fair to say that bureaucracy’s reflexive need to classify has created a security state that needs to be reformed and whistleblowers like WikiLeaks force both civil society and the state to examine what kinds of information ought to be kept from public view. For example, the state department cables were not top secret cables, they were available to three million government employees, right down to lowly soldiers such as Private Manning who is accused of leaking them. Which raises the question, why were most of them classified at all?

The US, at least, has the First Amendment to protect newspapers such as The New York Times when they publish documents that the government has classified as secret.

Criminal prosecutions are very hard to bring, even though Obama’s government is doing its best to revive the notorious 1917 Espionage Act as a weapon against Assange. But nowhere are WikiLeaks-like revelations more urgently needed than in India, where an Official Secrets Act criminalizes the publication of everything our political and bureaucratic masters think is For Their Eyes Only.

In a recent television show, one of India’s former ambassadors to Washington argued that the Official Secrets Act was the law of the land and, therefore, had to be respected in a democracy. This might have been a reasonable position had he not, later in the programme, waved away the laws that the US breached in spying on diplomats in UN headquarters in New York by arguing that all diplomats knew they were spied on all the time. What this tells us is that civil and military apparatchiks are outraged by any classified information about themselves leaked to ordinary citizens but completely blasé about diplomatic elites spying on each other. It is exactly this form of mandarin

knowingness and secrecy that WikiLeaks very properly threatens.

The imbalance between what the state knows and what its citizens know grows daily in this digital age.

The Obama administration has maintained and extended the Bush regime’s surveillance apparatus.

Closer home, the Radia tapes remind us that the Indian state can legally listen to your private conversations for years on end and then connive in leaking them selectively to the press to serve anonymous agendas. Instead of railing at the magazines that published the leaks, the journalists and businessmen caught on tape ought to ask questions of a bureaucracy that uses private

conversations not for legitimate law enforcement but as a way of influencing news headlines.

Finally, WikiLeaks is a metaphorical alarm clock shrilling in our ear, telling us to wake up because the digital world changed our lives as we slept.

Except for the very young, we’re all Rip Van Winkles now. Bill Thompson, a columnist for the BBC, summed up the political implications of WikiLeaks brilliantly: It was, he wrote, “...democracy’s Napster moment, the point at which the forms of governance that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society prove wanting in the face of the network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the Internet could transmit perfect digital copies of compressed music files.”

And just as the music industry grudgingly adapted to the digital world, not necessarily on its own terms, so will bureaucracies…and so will we. If Julian Assange is right, secretive states might become more open and less powerful. If Mark Zuckerberg has placed the right bets, more and more of us might make our private lives public on Facebook. The most mandarin and the most reclusive individual, whether they like it or not, will have to rethink both secrecy and privacy in this brave new world.

Mukul Kesavan teaches social history at Jamia Millia Islamia and is the author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16 ESSAYS

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

After a year of drowning in noise and scandals, the future will hopefully restore credibility to television and facilitate a change of guard own scams. So if one channel could hog all the glory on the Commonwealth Games (CWG), another Hindi one could specialize in godmen scams. The neat division of outrage helped convert scams into media properties. In a subtle way, news did not merely get influenced by advertising, it became advertising, in the way it sliced the truth in order to generate viewer effect. The coverage of the Barack Obama visit took this phenomenon to a whole new level.

Here, some channels took a negative position on his trip before it even began.

Interestingly, the motivation was not ideological but a calculated commercial gamble. When everyone else will drool copiously, why not stand out by taking a contrary position, no matter what Obama says, was the implicit thought.

It was the year of loud scams and shamed silence. Through the year, media screamed outrage at every chance it got and in a twist of irony, went deathly quiet, at least for a while, when its own turn came. Looking back on the year is difficult, not only because of the number of sordid scams it contained but also because the noisiness of the coverage has served to deaden the ability to separate one shrill scream of outrage from another.

Detaching oneself from this stream-of-unconsciousness is not easy but some patterns did emerge that were noteworthy and that will shape the nature of television in 2011.

Trials of inconsequence The studio discussion has now stabilized into a set piece of constructed theatre, with an overbearing anchor whose job is to accuse people of terrible things in a loud voice, a cast of well-rehearsed panellists that includes inconsequential politicians who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, one or two journalists who are experts on everything, and Suhel Seth. Almost no one of any real political significance attends these things and news channels are utterly incapable of getting a Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Mayawati, Karunanidhi, Nitish Kumar or anyone who actually has anything to do with running the country. When they do deign to appear on television, it is usually to a set script (more on that later) and to anchors who seem curiously defanged in front of them.

Who watches the watchmen?

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘Barkha Dutt’s self­trial—a thoroughly avoidable piece of drama. There was no apology, little by way of dialogue and everyone came off looking worse. You can’t invite people to challenge you and use the control you have over your own platform to attack them instead.’

santosh desai

The celebrity tinderbox

The reality of self­hate

The practice of presenting news through celebrities was less in evidence, in part also because of the glut in harder stories, barring hoary jamborees such as the NDTV Priyanka-a-thon and sundry film releases. The more striking use of celebrities came in the way they attracted controversy every time they touched something or, in Amitabh Bachchan’s case, looked out of their windows and saw a new flyover. Almost every new film gave someone a reason to protest and news channel a reason to break news. The SRK (Shah Rukh Khan) I am Khan imbroglio, his feud with Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan’s presence at an inauguration ceremony were all examples of the celebrity-as-controversy-machine.

Along with the flood of disillusioning news on television came the torrent of unsavoury reality shows that rubbed our noses in our own filth. Mounted as well-packaged exercises in public humiliation, these shows were extremely influential and ended up lowering the tone of reality programming across channels. Rakhi Sawant too got into the act.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

Post­catharsis amnesia The ability to exhaust all of one’s anger and move on to the next scam with innocent forgetfulness has increasingly become a hallmark of news coverage.

We saw this at work in the case of the Bhopal gas tragedy, where after a few weeks of vituperation and some symbolic swishes at action, following the highly delayed court judgement, things came back to normal and have stayed there. We are seeing the same process at work in the cases of the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the

CWG, both issues that are beginning to peter out from our consciousness.

Nationalistic posturing The uncritical identification of a class or an interest group with that of the nation state is increasingly making mainstream media another instrument of the state.

Whether it is with respect to Kashmir, our relationship with Pakistan or with the Naxal-affected tribal regions, more channels are blurring the distinction between the government and the nation, leading to a self-generated suppression of dissent. Times Now coined a new word “splittists” that bands together Kashmiri separatists with Naxal activists and serves as a catch-all phrase describing what it sees as enemies of the state. The semantic innovation allows for more self-righteous invective to be directed at this mythical combination of all forces inimical to the state’s interests and marks a new phase in the identification that a large part of mainstream media feels with the establishment.

RAJ K RAJ/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Nothing has characterized 2010 more than the revelations that link media with big business and murky political manoeuvring. The Niira Radia tapes have blown the lid off the self-righteousness that media carries itself with. While it is possible and even necessary to separate the role played by different individuals, for not all of them are equally culpable, the overall picture was unmistakable. The idea that television news is a staged spectacle carries even more currency now. In particular, the extraordinary silence which prevailed on television channels, including those that look upon every wardrobe malfunction as an international catastrophe, is an indictment unlike any other of media in India. In any other day and age, this blatant act of cronyism would have destroyed our faith in journalism.

While 2011 will see an amplification of some of the patterns we have seen this year, some things are likely to change. Here are more of the key possible shifts:

Cleaning up the muck It is possible, even likely that stung by the undermining of credibility of some key people and of the profession at large, we might see efforts to restore some credibility to journalism. Stories more critical of the powerful, particularly of those belonging to the corporate sector, might have a greater chance of reaching us. The nexus between politics, media and business is likely to come under greater scrutiny this year, but it is unlikely that the cosiness, based as it is on deeper structural realities, is going to disappear anytime soon.

Crowd­sourcing credibility We already got a strong sense of the power of social media this year and this is only likely to grow in 2011. A parallel narrative is likely to emerge as social media will provide a running commentary of alternative opinion. Of course, given its scattered and extremely transient nature, it will exercise real influence largely in the case of big stories where its power gets concentrated.

The sting goes out of the ‘sting’

The exclusive scam This was the big discovery of 2010.

Individual channels could own their SUNIL SAXENA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

The leak has replaced the sting as the provider of news shocks. Over the years, we have seen a slow decline in the power of the sting operation.

Increasingly, it gets consumed as another reality show, and leaves little residue by way of memory or impact. Unless something dramatic happens, the sting might now reside in the by-lanes of channels rather than its highways.

Celebrity fatigue This might involve some wishful thinking but there are signs that the obsession with celebrities is beginning to wane. Having used them mercilessly for the last few years, we have reached a situation where we have overdosed on their mannerisms, causes, feuds and jokes. 2011 might just be the year when we start rolling back the red carpet that we have laid out in our minds for these magnets of attention.

The old guard gives way

The frenzy: (clockwise from top, left) Shah Rukh Khan was a target of camera­savvy political hooligans; actor Priyanka Chopra in NDTV’s Greenathon; and Sharad Pawar in the wake of the IPL scam.

This is definitely an exercise in wishful thinking but there is a small possibility that channels will wake to the sameness that viewers have been subjected to, day after relentless day.

The same debates run by anchors with the same mannerisms, featuring hardy perennials with pre-packaged views.

Something needs to give.

Santosh Desai is CEO, Future Brands, and author of Mother Pious Lady.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

ESSAYS L17

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Album sales are dead, business models are changing, festivals are aplenty and everyone loves a good panel discussion. Indian indie is finally open for business

As a fan of Indian indie music, I thank God for Bollywood. My favourite artistes can get their album sponsored by a liquor brand, tie up with a mobile phone manufacturing company for their video, and become judges on TV talent hunt shows, and they still won’t be considered sell-outs. In the West, an indie band would be ripped into for such transgressions, but in India, Bollywood is such a big bad behemoth that it dwarfs every other creative art form. And this past year, Indian indie decided it wasn’t going to take it any more.

In 2010, the Indian non-film music industry decided to consolidate forces and chart a plan. It seemed like everyone—from classical vocalist Shubha Mudgal (Baajaa Gaajaa) and mobile makers Nokia (Music Connects) to cultural organizations such as the British Council and the Goethe-Institut (Soundbound), and popular Mumbai venue Blue Frog (Future Music Conference)—wanted to organize a conference and talk about the Indian independent music industry.

With the exception of Mudgal, whose annual seminar in Pune puts part of the spotlight on Indian classical and folk music, the rest seemed to find the Indian non-film industry synonymous with the Indian indie music scene, comprising mainly rock, electronica and their various sub-genres. To any fan of Indian indie music, this was a source of immense joy, because it meant that our music had finally become important enough for people to hold seminars and panel discussions around.

Sure, they all talked about more or less the same things. We heard repeatedly how Bollywood dominates all other genres, how musicians are

clueless about things such as publishing, and how artistes can use the Internet to further their fan base. But the point was that there were enough people, from musicians and managers to concert promoters and (yes, even us) journalists, who had something to say about Indian indie and solutions to offer.

In other words, Indian indie was finally big enough to be treated as a business. But while some of the talk at these conferences focused on selling albums, one of the strongest trends that emerged in 2010 was that bands started doing away with the idea of “selling” albums altogether. It wasn’t just upcoming acts trying to get the word out about their music that gave away their albums for free. Delhi-based, folk-fusion rockers Indian Ocean tied up with Johnnie Walker to release their new album 16/33 Khajoor Road in the form of seven, monthly, free downloads off their official website from July 2010 to January 2011. In September, Mumbai electro-pop duo Shaa’ir + Func followed suit by putting up for free download their long-awaited third album, Mantis.

The logic was simple: In an industry where only 5% of consumers legally download music—a statistic I learnt at one of the aforementioned conferences—why bother with trying to make money off your album anyway? As any act with a year or two of experience

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘With patched instrumentation from the West, melodies from Pakistani rock acts, and cliché­filled lyrics inspired by Hindi films, bands such as Prayag and Rio were the most derivative form of Indian indie, something we should certainly hear less of.’

amit gurbaxani knows, the money is in concerts. In 2011, we’ll see such popular names as Mumbai’s Pentagram and Bangalore’s Swarathma release new albums and, while both acts are yet to fix on release dates (leave aside distribution models), I’m pretty sure they aren’t depending on record sales to bring home the bread.

One artiste (he may not be from India but is considered part of the Indian indie scene) who does have a release date is New York-based musician-composer Karsh Kale. His new solo album Cinema, out in April, will be bundled into the entrance fees for his gigs. It will thus be free, ROYCIN D’SOUZA but only for those who come to watch him play, perhaps the ideal way of reaching your target audience.

But while music sales continued to fall, audience numbers continued to increase. In May, Blue Frog had to turn back 200 fans standing in line for an Indian Ocean gig because the club was packed way beyond its 500-people capacity. The band played a second, and almost-as-full “bonus” concert for the dejected fans later that week.

Concerts were clearly a money-making proposition for clubs, and 2011 will see Delhi’s Fashion Bar and Lounge, which is primarily a nightclub in the Capital, open in Mumbai with a focus on food and live performances. By the end of the year, Blue

Frog—perhaps the country’s premier music venue—will open in Delhi.

Perhaps Indian indie’s biggest story of 2010 was Bacardi NH7 Weekender, the country’s first bona-fide indie music festival. Not a single-venue, one-day event but a three-day extravaganza featuring around 40 acts performing on five different stages, Weekender, which took place in Pune during the second weekend of December, may have drawn a maximum crowd of only 4,000, but it was a resounding success. Organized by Mumbai-based Only Much Louder and two British music industry veterans—festival organizer Martin Elbourne and artiste manager Stephen Budd—the execution was on a par with that of festivals in the US and UK. While the scale may have been smaller—we’re still a long way from Glastonbury-like affairs—everything from the lights and sound to the security arrangements at NH7 Weekender was of international-quality standard.

The second edition of NH7 Weekender comes with a promise of more international acts (there were just five in 2010) and the positive-word-of-mouth its predecessor has generated can only mean that more such festivals will be organized in 2011.

As early as February, Nokia and Channel [V] will host the Nokia India Fest in Goa, a two-day event that will be both an inter-collegiate and a music festival, where the line-up will again be a mix of Indian and international acts.

In 2011, expect to also read about more Indian indie acts performing at festivals abroad. The Raghu Dixit Project, who appeared on the popular UK music TV show Later… With Jools Holland in November, will perform at Celtic Connections in Scotland this month and

is also slated to play some big international gigs during the upcoming music festival season.

But along with performing more often, Indian indie acts also seem to be performing with each other more often.

Some of my favourite gig moments of the past year came when two different acts collaborated, often unexpectedly, on stage. At Shaa’ir + Func’s album launch concert at Blue Frog in September, they shared the mike with no less than four different counterparts: electro-pop duo Sridhar/Thayil, DJ-composer Mayur Narvekar of electronica act Bandish Projekt, Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy of metal band Scribe and Vishal Dadlani of rock group Pentagram. Singer Suman Sridhar of Sridhar/Thayil and Krishnamoorthy also showed up at Swarathma’s gig at Hard Rock Café in Mumbai.

Krishnamoorthy, who trades in his trademark growls for a rapper avatar when he collaborates, also did guest spots with Pentagram and Swarathma at their concerts at NH7 Weekender.

Swarathma, in fact, decided to collaborate regularly for their shows, and in November, played the first of a series of gigs featuring guest artistes that they’re calling “Swarathma and Folks”.

With so much happening, Indian indie got reported in the press more extensively than ever before (I can personally vouch for this, having written profiles of Indian indie acts for three different women’s fashion magazines).

Given its associations with terms such as “underground” and “counterculture” and its attachment to that all-important marketing demographic known simply as “the youth”, Indian indie has always been a sexy subject for editors. Now that the genre is finally taking itself more seriously, let’s hope that in 2011, sexy indie will finally get the respect it deserves.

Amit Gurbaxani is senior editor with Mumbaiboss.com and contributing editor of Nh7.in/indiecision Write to lounge@livemint.com

COURTESY SWARATHMA

Leading the way: Folk rockers Swarathma; (above) Monica Dogra of Shaa’ir + Func; and Raghu Dixit.

COURTESY RAGHU DIXIT

L18 ESSAYS

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

A seminal change in copyright laws could alter the way books are sold in India.

Expect more middle-of-the-road fiction, the equivalent of multiplex movies The Indian writer may well remember 2011 as the year in which her royalties changed dramatically. But whether for better or for worse will depend on whether this is the year in which the biggest fear of India’s English-language publishers of fiction and non-fiction comes true or not.

For, hanging over their heads is the spectre of a seminal change in copyright laws. Put simply, the country is planning a revision in the legislature to allow books published abroad to be sold in India at any price. What’s so cataclysmic about that?

Well, the implication is that it may not be worth an Indian publisher’s while any more to bid large sums to acquire Indian rights to publish, print and sell, say, a Salman Rushdie, a Vikram Seth or even a John Grisham.

And that in turn could set off a spiral that flattens their revenues, throttles their margins, and cuts off the vital flow of publisher investment in original writing from India in English.

Along the way, it could make billionaires of Indian distributors, alter the priorities of booksellers, and completely change the way publishers pay writers.

Still doubtful about the impact of what sounds like nothing but a tweak in legislation? Well, making all these changes inexorable could be a significant drop in book prices, the one factor that can make these changes an industry-altering experience rather than a flavour of the month. Warns Thomas Abraham, managing director, Hachette India, “Publishers and authors will have a rough time of it if the copyright amendment (proviso 2M) is passed.”

Scheduled to culminate at the Jaipur Literature Festival later this month, a protest campaign is being orchestrated with gathering momentum by the publishing business, with the support of writers enlisted for the cause. At stake is the future of everyone in the game. For, as envisaged by Kapil Sibal’s human resource development (HRD) ministry, the new laws envisage doing away with the requirement of having publishing or territorial rights for selling a book in India before actually selling them. This can—and probably will—lead to a rash of books

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘The publishing strategy that only wants to sell 1,200 copies because that’s enough to break even, books with titles such as ‘Oh Shit, Not Again!’ and stores where books are stacked at the back while stationery, music and movies are in your face.’

arunava sinha published abroad becoming available in India at affordable prices.

But what’s not to like about that?

Well, it will set off a complex chain of events that will force India’s publishers to fight hard for market share. Anyone, from another publisher to a well-entrenched distributor, can start bringing in books published in the UK or the US and selling them in India at prices that will make buyers very happy.

The casualty will be the Indian publishing programmes of publishers, for they will be unable to sustain the costs involved in editing, marketing and selling a large number of English-language books—especially those by lesser-known Indian writers.

In India, that’s just about everyone.

Try to think of a single home-grown writer who can compete even with globally established Indian writers such as Rushdie, Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri or Amitav Ghosh. Add to that the delectable possibility of relatively

cheap books—price points of `250 or so are not ruled out—by a Mario Vargas Llosa, a Jonathan Franzen, a Haruki Murakami or an Ian McEwan.

Produced abroad as parts of large print-runs, and made available in India at less than half of the cover price, such titles will delight book lovers—and garrotte publishers.

In the global publishing business, such rights are usually a prerequisite for selling in major markets, such as the US or the UK. For instance, the Indian publisher of a novel published in India cannot simply start selling the book in the US without paying substantial import duties, which will make them far too expensive. But under the new law being considered, territorial rights will no longer be necessary to sell a book in India at a competitive price.

Consider the outcome through a hypothetical scenario. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Girl, sequel to his best-seller A Suitable Boy, is PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Shelf life: (top) Amazon’s Kindle e­reader has become the site’s biggest selling item; and a customer in Yodakin, one of Delhi’s independent book stores.

ESSAYS L19

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

RONJOY GOGOI/HINDUSTAN TIMES

published in the UK with a cover price of £20 (around `1,430). Within three months, it goes off High Street and begins to be sold at a hugely discounted £4 in the UK. An enterprising Indian distributor decides to import thousands of copies at a further reduced price; the publishers are happy to provide a large discount because of the high volumes. So the book becomes available in India at, say, £5.

Meanwhile, the Indian publishers who had bid for the rights in the country find that they must price their edition at a minimum of `600 to cover their costs for buying the territorial rights, and for publishing and printing and marketing the book. They decide not to publish the book at all.

The reader is happy, but the publisher finds a pipeline of profits suddenly drying up. How, then, will the company compensate for this?

By shrinking its Indian publishing programme instead of taking chances with new writers and books, it decides to stick to established names. And, of course, to enter the import game itself, which in turn means a loss of business for printers, among others.

Hypothetical as it may seem, this eventuality could hit Indian publishing smack in the face this year if the copyright law is indeed amended. It’s an ironic situation—for the reader will probably get a good deal, but Indian literature may not. A chain of changes will be set off—as new price points emerge, publishers will consider only those books that they can safely print in large enough numbers to ensure lower prices through economies of manufacturing scale. The large swathe of writers who are published through print runs of 3,000 or 5,000 copies today—giving Indian writing in English its breadth, not depth—will shrink.

As deep discounting begins, those writers that are published may have to accept royalties based on a percentage of the actual selling price and not the cover price. From 10% on a cover price of `300, for instance, a writer may find her royalties halving to 10% of `150. Predicts Hachette’s Abraham, “Authors may get an unpleasant surprise.”

While it does work the same way in foreign markets already, the fact is that more than 80% of a new book’s sales in the West come from the full-priced version in the first three months. And where discounting hits earlier, publishers get into trouble.

Is all this inevitable, however? Not yet. A lot still depends on whether the law is indeed amended in the form it has been envisaged in. If it isn’t, however, and it is business as usual for Indian publishing after a deep collective exhalation, what will 2011 bring? For starters, there may be reverse swing on prices—books could actually become more expensive.

SHAUN CURRY/AFP

BLOOMBERG

Word wise: (clockwise from top) A sale in progress at a book store; Aravind Adiga holds up his Man Booker prize; author Amitav Ghosh; and a visitor at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2010.

Publishers are hoping for higher prices so that they can invest more in marketing, an aspect that has been largely missing so far. And the entry of new booksellers—a small beginning has been made with the legendary WH Smith setting up shop at New Delhi airport—may accelerate that. The deployment of BookScan, a system to track book sales online and, therefore, in near real-time, rather than through delayed word of mouth, will deepen and widen in 2011. Explains Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief, Random House India, “Although BookScan’s coverage of retail isn’t 100%, in fact substantially less, it will be the first time we’ll have properly accounted sales figures for national titles for everyone to see.”

With better information, publishers will be able to streamline their production and editorial decisions better, aligning them closer to market needs. And this could lead to fewer experiments and more use of formula in choosing what to publish. That will prove particularly true for non-fiction. Picador’s Shruti Debi provides the alert: “It’s a World Cup year so expect a glut of cricket books.”

Of course, no story is as big as that of fiction. Says Debi, who has published a distinguished line of Indian writers at Picador India, “Fiction is more dazzling when it clicks.” But while editors will continue to push for identifying the next big thing in Indian writing in English, the larger focus is likely to shift further towards

middle-of-the-road fiction, the equivalent of multiplex movies, as it were.

The year may see a big change in book selling—not just because of the entry of foreign brands, but because book chains may finally enter small-town India. With the metros saturated and land prices still rising, small-town India is where both publishers and retailers are training their sights. Will this bring about a change in the publishing catalogue?

Most publishers are unanimous in steering clear of the new-found genre of campus-lit and BPO-lit being quickly and loosely put together by a different brand of publishers to appeal to an emerging segment of users. These are readers who, thanks in no small measure to social networking and SMS, are familiar with English but are intimidated by its literary flavour.

Such books will continue to be available in large numbers through 2011 as well—partly because many of them are funded by a form of vanity-publishing that ensures returns for the publisher even before a single copy is sold—not to mention satisfaction for the writer. But will any of these publishers grow enough to challenge the incumbents? It’s possible, but not probable. On their part, the established publishers are aware that they lack the skill—if that is the right word—to produce these modern-day equivalents of the “penny dreadful”. “This trend will not last, today’s 20-year-old may find them appealing, tomorrow’s won’t,” contends Hachette’s Thomas.

The breakthrough moment of 2011?

It may not come in the form of specific books. As Random House’s Sarkar says, “It’s the year of follow-ups—Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga, for instance.” The thunder will be stolen by the first release of Indian writing on e-book platforms. Several publishers will be putting their Indian titles on the Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks and Sony eReader platforms. Readers can expect lower prices—provided they’ve sprung for the devices, or are happy to read on their phones—while writers can expect to be read around the world.

There will be a minor epiphany, too, when the winner of the DSC South Asia literature prize is announced this month. With a purse of nearly `25 lakh, the winner will be seriously motivated to keep writing.

But the real pivot for publishing in India, of course, will be the outcome of the copyright law amendments.

The writing will soon be on the wall.

Arunava Sinha is the translator of Rabindranath Tagore’s Three Women and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s The Chieftain’s Daughter.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L20 ESSAYS

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

New planes, new modes of communication and new airports—air travel got a fresh coat of paint in 2010.

Time for policies and practices to follow suit

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘The government is conveniently forgetting much­needed reforms like the formation of an independent accidents investigation board, which was called for after the Mangalore accident.’

devesh agarwal Cheap and best Air travel is directly linked to economic activity, and it is globally recognized that the industry grows at roughly twice the GDP growth rate.

Conversely, the industry shrinks twice as fast too. Across the world, the harsh economic conditions of the last two years have forced the air travel industry to make its organizations leaner and meaner, and find ways to efficiently offer customers significantly better value, along with an improved travel experience. Here are the trends and events that shaped these changes in 2010 and what we can expect in 2011.

Sasta, sundar aur tikaoo (cheap, beautiful and durable) is the ethos of a value-conscious nation. With different value perceptions and expectations, we won’t see a traditional low-cost carrier in the Ryanair mould soon. Instead, existing value carriers such as JetLite and SpiceJet, along with low-fare services Kingfisher Red and Jet Konnect, will continue to thrive and enter the international segment. These value carriers, which run on the business model of JetBlue or Virgin America, focus on lean value chains and operational efficiencies to deliver a lower fare with some freebies, like a 20kg baggage allowance. However, with the Indian economy resurgent, we’re already seeing a drift back to full service carriers, putting pressure on the value carriers that had gained 55% of the market in 2010. Expect higher fares in 2011 as oil prices and airport charges rise.

Terminal envy 2010 saw the inauguration of the massive integrated Terminal 3, or T3, at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. Integrated terminals are a key part of large hub airports, and drive the fortunes of leading airlines based there.

London Heathrow’s T5, Beijing’s T3, Dubai’s T3, Hong Kong and Singapore Changi T3 are examples of how mega terminals deliver economic benefits. In the next few years, Mumbai and possibly Bangalore will get their integrated terminals.

Going social The air travel industry embraced social

media to increase passenger engagement and build brand awareness and loyalty. SpiceJet, Kingfisher and Jet Airways are using Facebook, but are yet to catch up on the preferred social network in the air travel world—Twitter. The micro-blogging site is perfectly suited to the “here and now” world of air travel. Airlines, hotels, car agencies and others use the service to announce last-minute deals.

The new trend in 2010 was the increasing use of Twitter by service providers not directly connected to the passengers: Airports such as London Heathrow, Dallas Fort Worth and Detroit, and even air traffic control agencies such as Eurocontrol, tweet not only about flight delays because of congestion, weather or a volcano, but also about possible delays on highways or subways to the airport.

The Robin Hood act More passengers in India travel by rail in a day than by all airlines in a year, which helps maintain the wrong image of air travel as a luxury and air JENS GOERLICH

Have funds, will fly Fragmented families living in distant cities, stressed workers taking frequent but shorter breaks and business executives using airline miles and hotel points for family vacations will all spur air travel, coupled with a lack of proportional growth in surface transport capacity. The sky-high air fares seen recently testify to the increasing demand.

Fleet refresh The next few years will see a wave of new aircraft, which will dramatically improve the flight experience. In 2010 Boeing started delivering 737s fitted with new Sky interiors, and finally conducted the first flight of the much delayed 787 Dreamliner. Hopefully the dream will come true in 2011. Airbus announced the A320neo (new engine option) and its gargantuan A380 became mainstream. SpiceJet is expected to introduce Sky-interior fitted 737s in the next three years, and IndiGo is rumoured to be an early customer for the A320neo. Globally, in-flight Internet connectivity has taken off in the US, and internationally, with Emirates and Lufthansa. How long before Indian carriers jump on this money-earning service? Don’t hold your breath.

Strength in unity

Trouble in transit Integrated terminals need updated government policies and procedures to ensure that they efficiently deliver the benefits of transit hubs. Domestic transfers in North America and Europe reflect the integration of airport security systems across a nation’s airports.

But in India, airline and airport employees can enter the arrivals concourse without being frisked or having their bags X-rayed, which means airport security must no longer treat it as a sterile area. Convenience for employees becomes a nightmare for passengers.

A transit passenger arriving in Delhi has to walk almost a kilometre to the security checkpoint, undergo another check, then walk back to the boarding gate of the connecting flight. And if he is unlucky enough not to have had his boarding pass or baggage tags properly stamped at security check, he’ll have to go all the way back to security. Imagine the impact on flight schedules, let alone the 1.5km walk to and fro.

The concept of the stamp should be done away with altogether. If the departing passenger is properly checked and the system is strong, the concourse will be sterile. If the system isn’t leak-proof, no amount of stamping will ensure security.

Instead of using the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) as mere guards bunched at the security checkpoint, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security should drive efficiency through increased use of modern surveillance systems, profiling and roving CISF personnel within the terminal.

travellers as rich people. The government, government-controlled companies such as oil marketeers, and both private and public sector airports impose punitive taxes and levies in the belief that air travellers will pay whatever they’re charged. During the economic crisis, governments and airports across Asia-Pacific cut fees and taxes to keep air travel stimulated. India was the only country to increase them.

The forecast of the International Air Transport Association (Iata) for 2010 was that five of the world’s top six airlines by market capitalization would be from Singapore, Japan, and China.

Indian carriers, though, have losses of $1.75 billion (around `8,000 crore), and are barely able keep their heads above water. To liberate the industry and realize the massive potential of the Indian market, government and airports will have to abandon their myopic policy of fleecing the “rich” to ostensibly subsidize the aam aadmi, money which in reality leaks to other, non-intended beneficiaries.

DEVESH AGARWAL

Taking off: (clockwise from above) The iconic, torch­shaped control tower at the Hyderabad airport; Lufthansa’s new slim ‘Recaro’ seat; and planes at the Bangalore airport.

Cost pressures created a wave of consolidation. Delta and Northwest merged, as did United and Continental.

This year, British Airways will complete its merger with Iberia. Even the conservative Lufthansa acquired Swiss and Austrian airlines.

In India, GVK Power and Infrastructure Ltd acquired Bangalore airport, effectively creating a trio-poly along with GMR Infrastructure Ltd and the Airports Authority of India (AAI).

2010 also saw airlines signing alliance membership deals which should fructify in 2011. Kingfisher is due to join the Oneworld Alliance and hopefully Air India will finally complete its merger with Indian Airlines and join the Star Alliance. Can we look forward to Jet Airways announcing their joining SkyTeam in 2011? I think it’s a perfect fit.

The Maharaja’s demise Enough has already been said about the decline of Air India, along with reasons and remedies, so I’ll just provide a simple statistic. The accumulated losses of Air India will feed every hungry citizen of India for a year through the Akshaya Patra programme. It’s time to ask whether we need a national carrier on taxpayer life support. Across the world, national carriers that can’t hack it—Alitalia, JAL and others—have faded away. European governments have long exited their national carriers. The US never had one.

However, the Indian political, bureaucratic and labour aristocracy sees Air India as a Kamadhenu. But the milk has been exhausted, and they are now sucking its lifeblood.

Devesh Agarwal is a technology innovation award winner, a 4 million miler in the air and has been listed sixth on Mashable.com’s list of aviation analysts and journalists to follow on Twitter. He blogs at BangaloreAviation.com Write to lounge@livemint.com

ESSAYS L21

SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Forget about changing to the latest ringtones and wallpapers. The mobile phone business is growing up to deliver services that will blow your mind

It’s a perplexing set of facts. Mumbai’s Rafiq Nagar slum is in the news because 18 children have died here since April, many due to malnutrition.

Rafiq Nagar is an unforgiving garbage dump with not a toilet to show for its 10,000-odd residents. And yet almost every single resident of the slum has a mobile phone.

In September, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), there were 687.71 million mobile phone users in India. Trai says 17.71 million subscribers were added in the month of September. That’s a growth of 2.55%. India now has a wireless tele-density of 57.99. It’s an incongruity difficult to assimilate. UN figures show that more than half the nation—665 million—does not have access to a private toilet. Half this nation has never read a newspaper. Half this nation does not have access to public healthcare. But more than half this nation owns a mobile phone.

We created this landmark irony in 2010. As Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and managing director of Delhi-based One97 Communications, a leading mobile value-added services provider (services such as ringtone downloads and stock market updates), is fond of pointing out, “This is the biggest penetration for anything: banking, food, water, you name it.”

Fifteen years ago on 31 July 1995, the first mobile call in India, made by CPM chief Jyoti Basu to Union communications minister Sukh Ram, set India on its date with this absurdity. But, of course, no one could have foretold the sweeping economic, social and even cultural changes a mobile phone would bring about. Be sure, the country is changing, one SMS at a time.

In fact, 2010 has seen the most dramatic reordering of the mobile landscape. For one, the industry reached a point of maturity with the announcement of the National Do Not Call Registry. India got a low-cost smartphone—Android, what else?—for under `5,000, making access to data, social networking services and applications a breeze. The cost of a phone call fell to 1 paisa for 6 seconds (on DoCoMo), the lowest anywhere in the world. And don’t you want to know this—we were burning up the data pipes with a searing 100 million song downloads a month! India became one of the few countries to assign spectrum to WiMAX. The 3G spectrum was assigned (yeah, video calls and all).

And 2G delivered the most spectacular scam of our times.

Quite easily, 2010 has been an outstanding year for the mobile business in India. And it is best captured in the exciting but rarely told story of One97 Communications itself.

The company, launched at the end of 2000, has seen investment from Intel Capital, Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund and Silicon Valley Bank. Today, over 400 million telecom consumers use its services. In early 2010, One97 was named the Emerging Company of the Year by Voice & Data magazine and was rated a Top 10 Fastest Growing Indian company in the Deloitte Fast 500 (by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd). At the time, One97 had an eye-popping sustained growth of 428% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). When US President Barack Obama visited India, One97’s mobile application Dakia blew his socks off—it

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘I hope people don’t use cheap mobile capability for nonsense like getting support for petitions that go nowhere and sharing dumb PowerPoint presentations.’

arun katiyar was hot enough for him to include it in his speech in Parliament. Dakia is a kind of personalized voicemail service that provides the farmer with regular updates about some of his critical farm related concerns—such as the price of onions at the wholesale mandi or when electricity for running tubewells will be available. By early December, its 31-year-old founder Sharma was declared the “Mobile VAS Person of the Year” at the Internet and Mobile Association of India’s (Iamai) India Digital Awards. The young company accurately reflects what the mobile business holds for 2011: One97 is doing a `120 crore IPO in 2011. Everyone is invited to the party. The mobile industry is smokin’.

Not surprisingly, as wireless networks connect the nation, innovation is making more than its customary cameo. Applications such as Dakia may seem mundane, but they create new low-cost ways of doing things that are accessible to the poor at the very bottom of the pyramid.

Professor C.K. Prahalad, in what was to be his last paper published in the Harvard Business Review, called it, with telling insight, “Gandhian Innovation”.

I believe the mobile industry will pivot around Gandhian Innovation in the year to come—innovation that is environment-friendly, that which overcomes barriers imposed by the lack of education, and which creates affordable services.

One such innovation from Bangalore-based Comviva is the result of studying the needs of the extremely poor who cannot even afford the cheapest mobile handset. Vikram Shanbhag, vice-president of mobile messaging solutions at Comviva, asked himself a simple question: “How do we overcome the hardware barrier?” In response, his company has begun to create mobile identities for people who can’t afford handsets. Shanbhag says that in several African nations users buy a mobile number and a PIN, but no handset. Using a handset that belongs to a friend, community or is

ASHESH SHAH/MINT

ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

borrowed temporarily from a local store, the users dial their number, enter the PIN and for a short while are able to use the handset as their own (they get the bill for the services used) to make calls, send SMSes, return missed calls and listen to voice messages. “It’s ideal for those like plumbers and electricians who need mobile access to conduct business but cannot afford a handset,” says Shanbhag. “Without this service, they would lose out to competition that has no greater skill or tool than a mobile phone.”

In other parts of the world, innovation from India is helping the poor instantly transfer small amounts of money over mobile networks using a simple SMS without having to pay exorbitant bank fees. The money is transferred between the retail touch points of mobile companies. In India, no bank would be willing to service customers with savings in the range of `500-5,000, let alone transfer money without a hefty clearing fee. But the next time your driver or gardener wants to send a small amount of money to his parents back in the village, he can do so over a mobile network. It’s only a question of a few months before mobile fund transfer regulations are lifted, making it possible for 60% of this country that remains unbanked to enjoy what you and me take for granted.

But I am placing my bets on the development in the mobile labs of Bangalore’s Symphony Services.

Mohan Hebbar, vice-president, embedded and telecom business unit at Symphony, says they are in the throes of delivering a video streaming service for a Bollywood producer. You guessed it: First Day First Show will now be right there on your cheap but smart phone that has the ability to manage digital rights, video streaming and payments over mobile networks.

Frankly, I am rooting for it. Anything that liberates me from bad multiplex popcorn is an exciting proposition.

Arun Katiyar is a content and communication consultant with a focus on technology companies. He is a published author with HarperCollins and has extensive media experience spanning music, print, radio, Internet and mobiles.

Write to lounge@livemint.com RAJARSHI CHOWDHURY

Connected: Indians have greater access to mobile phones than to most basic services; (above, left) customers at a mobile store; and brisk business at a mobile phone retailer.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011

Humour You have two options: ignore the 2012 apocalypse predictions and carry on living or spend 2011 preparing for doomsday. The second option is more fun My late grandmother, bless her soul, spent the last few years of the 20th century obsessed with the apocalypse.

She was convinced, starting sometime in 1998 or so, that the world was definitely going to end in or around 1 January 2000.

When an otherwise clear-headed, rational family elder begins to believe in something so earnestly, it is only a matter of time before the rest of the family, even the sceptical college-going lad, begins to get sucked into it.

And grandmother had a compelling yet questionable mix of biblical interpretation and pure speculation for fatalistic beliefs: Have you seen all those paintings where Jesus Christ holds up his hand with two fingers pointing upwards? That definitely stands for 2000. The end is nigh.

Doesn’t the Bible say that mankind will not see more than 2,000 years of peace? We are doomed. Didn’t Nostradamus say that the third Antichrist would appear around the year 2000? Who could it be? Saddam Hussein? Gulshan Grover?

As you can see, the scientific justification in these arguments and speculation is as thin as the upholstery on a low-cost airline. Not to mention the plenty of paintings in which Jesus Christ held up fingers in every possible combination of number and direction.

But as we got closer to the date, not just granny, but the entire family, my village and most of the world seemed to be in a tizzy. What added explosive fuel to the fire was the whole Y2K controversy.

Let me refresh your memory. A few years before 2000, some information technology experts suddenly realized that millions of lines of computer code had been written with only two digits to represent the year in dates. But what would happen at midnight on 31 December 1999? Would computers move from 1999 to 2000? Or get confused and start back again at 1900?

The computing world erupted in panic.

Would computerized banks wipe balances from accounts? Would planes, with confused computers, drop from the sky? Would power plants and nuclear reactors explode? Would ATMs stop working?

Would planes drop from the sky on

Apocalypse now: What south Mumbai might look like if the Mayans are to be believed; (right, inset) a poster for the film 2012; and a still from the post­apoca­ lyptic video game Fallout 3.

nuclear reactors, killing thousands of employees who had lined up at the reactor building’s ATM to withdraw salary which had been credited wrongly by their banks?

For my grandmother it made complete sense. “See I told you,” she’d say at the dinner table while the TV relayed news bulletins, “Nostradamus saw this centuries ago. Now believe and pray...”

Things came to a head when in December 1999 a well-meaning neighbour went around the locality distributing flyers: “How to prepare for the day of the apocalypse”.

The flyer explained the modus operandi in detail. On the last day of the year, all true believers were to have an early dinner—it did not make dietary recommendations—lock themselves indoors from sunset onwards, and immerse themselves in prayer. Around 10pm or so the apocalypse would begin. Believers may hear the sounds of thunder and lightning and howling winds, and bright flashes of light may be visible through the windows. That was the sound and light of the disbelievers and Satan’s followers battling with the powers of good. A titanic, terrible struggle.

The family was to emerge from indoors only when three whole nights had passed without light or sound. At which point they would walk into a new world.

Thankfully for me, I spent New Year’s Eve in Kodaikanal, a hill station in Tamil Nadu. I had an early dinner and then immersed myself, through the rest of the night, in Old Monk. And so on for three days and three nights.

Except for one trip to a Tibetan restaurant to top up on chilli beef, I did not venture out even once.

The year 2000 thankfully unfolded without incident, and the Y2K scare, in fact, turned out to be a blessing in

THE DO­NOT WISH LIST

‘All ills will be suffered gladly if we never have to hear another press conference by 2011’s great communicator: Lalit Bhanot. Absolve him of all corruption charges. Give him all the toilet paper he wants. Just don’t make him speak in public.’

sidin vadukut disguise for thousands of IT engineers, who all made handsome profits and copious green cards.

I recount this incident because once again we are being told that the apocalypse might happen in 2012.

Apparently this is based on the fact that the calendars of a certain ancient South American civilization, the Mayans, indicate that one giant cycle of creation will end in 2012. And then the gods will begin a new one.

What happens to all of us?

Exactly. Apocalypse.

Maybe the Mayans know something we don’t? Maybe they know that this mankind will never see 2013 (maybe that is why 13 is unlucky?).

But now who will be the Antichrist?

Saddam Hussain is with us no more.

This only leaves Gulshan Grover.

As a card-carrying member of mankind you have two options ahead of you. Either you can ignore these predictions and carry on living. Or you can spend 2011 preparing for doomsday. The second option is much more fun.

Now preparing for the end of

mankind is not something that comes naturally to most people. And human tendency will be to postpone this for as long as possible: till either the Wikipedia entry is up, or there is an iPhone app for this.

We do not recommend this plan of action. Don’t leave things for the last minute. That way you can avoid the rush and enjoy the final few weeks and months of this creation. Here are some pointers to prepare for the end.

Assume liabilities Except for maybe Goldman Sachs, no bank is expected to survive the apocalypse. This means that you should be free to take as many loans and EMI offers as possible. Subscribe to plenty of credit cards. Buy many consumer durables on instalment-payment plans.

In some cases banks offer to defer payments by three-six months.

Time your payments to start no earlier than September 2012 (they’ll give you three months grace period before sending people to persuade you with compound fractures. By

which time it will be too late and both parties to the contract would have ceased operations).

Make that career change You are an accountant. But your true calling is in freelance poetry book illustration. This is the last and final chance to follow your passion.

Again there are benefits to timing your move. Wait for the first bonus cycle to end in 2011. And then put in your papers. Use the bonus to pay off your notice period. And start illustrating immediately. By the time you’ve run out of savings…it won’t matter.

Travel to your dream destination Always dreamt of living in a chalet in Switzerland? Or a castle in Scotland?

Or a prison in North Korea? Then plan 2011 wisely. The great benefit here is that you will probably only need a single-entry visa valid for a few months. Which is easy enough to get (some countries require proof of hotel booking and return tickets. Book both on credit card and refer point 1 above).

Once you enter the country, just unpack and settle down. Mostly the world will expire before your visa does.

Liberate your children Young people only have 12 months to live it up. So please let them. Give the young ones all the chocolate and ice cream they can eat. Give older ones high-speed broadband, computer and privacy.

Buy that iPhone There is no time left for an upgrade.

This is the best Steve can do.

You can stop worrying about how everything will change once Sachin Tendulkar retires This is one of the upsides of the apocalypse. We will never have to see the little master bid farewell.

These are just six ways of coping with the cataclysm that cometh.

Hopefully they will inspire you to come up with your own. And to get cracking.

Have a wonderful new year in 2011.

Celebrate it like your last.

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