Lounge for 02 Oct 2010

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Saturday, October 2, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 39

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Be minimalist or folksy, go edgy in leather or be feminine in lace—we tell you how to update your season’s wardrobe with what’s hot this fall

PUNJAB’S CHAMPION FARMER >Page 16

>Pages 10­15

FALL LINE in

THE ELEPHANT WARRIORS

The elephant may not be endangered, but it is in danger. We profile five people who’ve worked tirelessly for India’s tuskers >Pages 7­9

HOW TO CLONE A SUPERSTAR

What went into making the `60 crore Rajinikanth lookalike in India’s most expensive film yet >Page 20

BAPU IN THE BYLANES Indian, South American or Russian, pick a folksy look that inspires you.

THE GOOD LIFE

LUXURY CULT

SHOBA NARAYAN

RADHA CHADHA

NOT AN IMAGINARY CAN LUXURY SAVE HOMELAND INDIAN CRAFTS?

H

er name is Silpa Kaza and she is almost surreally overqualified for the work she is doing in Gujarat. Kaza has a bachelor’s in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), master’s in economics from the London School of Economics and is on her way to Harvard for a second master’s in public health. She speaks in Telugu with her mother; and is now speaking Gujarati into her mobile phone to a little girl in faraway Bhuj. “Alykhan theek che,” she says. >Page 4

OUR DAILY BREAD

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ast month, Hermès delivered its new baby: Shang Xia, the world’s first Chinese luxury brand fathered by an iconic Western brand. Shang Xia, which means “up down” in Mandarin, draws on deep-rooted Chinese traditions—Ming dynasty chairs, for example, made from rare hundreds of years old zitan wood, or delicate teapots made from eggshell porcelain encased in finely woven bamboo—and translates them for a modern sensibility. The result is a back-to-the-future experience... >Page 4

SAMAR HALARNKAR

The Father of the Nation has a tendency to pop up at unexpected places—as graffiti, street art or pop art >Page 22

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE SEEDS OF NEW IDEAS

I

t was a stifling curfew—stricter than any this decade—in sunny, troubled Srinagar last month that got me thinking about coriander seeds. The streets were deserted. I was the only guest in the hotel. The only employee was the receptionist, who took his pick of the empty rooms each night. The hotel cook, who valiantly tried to come to work to ensure I didn’t go hungry, was thrashed at a security checkpoint, as Kashmiris often are.

Only a few hours ago, a police van... >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

A FRESH SLATE

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

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

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2010 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEWS The Museum Shop, National Museum, Delhi The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg—all have well-stocked souvenir shops selling books and artefacts, usually in designs linked to their collections.

The Capital’s National Museum finally has one that can hold its own too. The Museum Shop, that opened to visitors earlier this week, has a modest but tasteful collection of replicas of stone busts and Chola bronzes. The shop also stocks craft work from different parts of the country, such as papier mache works from Kashmir and bidri ware from Bidar, Karnataka. There are paperweights resembling Harappan seals, cushions and tote bags with Mughal motifs and pietra dura works in white marble that evoke the Taj Mahal.

The store is an initiative by four women from civil society—Malvika Singh, Mohini Menon, Lalita Phadkar and Neha Prasada—in conjunction with the government-run Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation (HHEC), and the museum

administration. The HHEC has collaborated with designers and vendors from around the country, some of whom have slashed their prices for this project.

good buys. At `1,125 and `2,450, the replica stone busts are definitely a steal. They are artworks on their own merit and the Museum Shop is a must-visit if only for these.

The good stuff

The Museum Shop is open MondaySaturday, 10am-5pm, at the National Museum, Janpath, New Delhi.

The store is small but impressive, especially in contrast to the dated design of the National Museum itself.

A 30ft-long painting by artist Premola Ghose adorns the shop wall.

The not­so­good While there are a significant number of artwork replicas, the majority of the store stocks work that gives the shop an “emporium feel”. The National Museum branding is missing, but the organizers say they are working on incorporating subtle branding in the next batch of products.

Talk plastic Smaller stationery items such as pens and paperweights start at `90 while the replica Chola bronzes—the most expensive pieces in the shop—go up to `4-5 lakh. The cushions and bags are priced below `1,500, making for ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

Bouquets and bric­a­bac: The Museum Shop at the National Museum.

Anindita Ghose From the East: Edo is ITC’s first restaurant brand in eight years.

Edo, ITC Royal Gardenia, Bangalore Close to a year ago, when ITC Royal Gardenia opened its non-existent doors in Bangalore, the biggest buzz surrounded Edo, the group’s flagship Japanese restaurant, projected to launch by year-end. It is nine months overdue but the delay is explained away by the need for perfection.

Edo—the name for the ancient city of Tokyo—is ITC’s first new restaurant brand in eight years and there’s a great deal staked on its success.

The good stuff From crockery to cuisine, and from décor to deportment, Edo (pronounced Y-edo) raises the bar for the Japanese experience in India. It opts for a semi-casual environment—not entirely easy, considering the essentially ritualistic construct of the Japanese dinner. But the smiling waitstaff ease us into the space. If the deep bows and quickfire Japanese greeting startle you, there’s no mistaking the warmth. Even as we admire our square plates, our welcome drinks, a colourless cold tea, and the Japanese equivalent of the amuse-bouche, sautéed spinach with sesame sauce, arrive.

We pore over the hefty menu,

crafted by master chef Miyazaki Yoshikatsu, and finally surrender to the staff, only specifying we prefer sashimi over sushi, like vegetables and are quite happy to skip the teppanyaki. The sashimi (we try yellow fin tuna, scallops and black cod) is, quite easily, the best to be had in India: The fish is flown in from across the world thrice a week; the cut and quality are impeccable. The customdesigned Robatayaki grill—a step aside from the commonly seen flattop teppan—can be temperature-controlled and produces perfectly done meats and vegetables.

We try the Chilean sea bass and black cod, but it’s the fresh shitake mushroom that blows us away.

Even hard-core carnivores would abjure meat for mushrooms such as this. For form’s sake, we sample two steamed dishes: Yose Mushi is a medley of seafood and vegetables in a light broth; Una Don comprises steamed rice topped with strips of unagi (grilled eel, whatever Ross of Friends may say). Dessert is something we’ve defined before the main courses—wasabiand-lime sorbet and sour cherry ice cream—and neither is a taste we’ll forget in a hurry. We also try a

LOUNGE LOVES COURTESY PAUL DUGDALE

Firestarters

Have you read these new books on Delhi?

T

Electronica giants The Prodigy are headlining a new Indian music festival

T

hey’re India’s first choice for backing music in college fashion shows.

Three out of seven cars sending out shockwaves of pure bass at traffic signals are probably blasting their songs.

Less impressively, they’ve sold 25 million records worldwide and are pioneers of 1990s-style booming electronica. The lyrically sparse, shouty epic punk trio The Prodigy (responsible for Firestarter and Smack My Bitch Up) are coming to India in January, playing two shows in Bangalore and New Delhi (13 January and 15 January, respectively).

They’re headlining a new festival called Invasion that hopes to move India’s big-ticket live concerts away from classic rock to current international livewires. The Prodigy, whose live shows are exercises in loud, frantic energy, make perfect poster boys for this endeavour. A typical concert of theirs features much psychedelic lighting, jumping around, and MC/vocalist Maxim Reality working up the crowd with his shrill screech.

It’s being organized by Motherswear, the festival’s division of artiste management firm Only Much Louder, in collab-

THE DELHI WALLA

Electric: The Prodigy are big­beat pioneers. oration with the UK-based artiste events company UKNY Music. Invasion will also feature other international acts, as well as top acts from across the country.

The festival will be a single-day event, and it comes a month after the planned three-day NH7 Weekender in Pune in December, which is also organized by Only Much Louder.

he Delhi Walla blog’s mix of gentle exploration and candid street photography finds a perfect alternate home in this new set of three guidebooks to Delhi. Mayank Austen Soofi’s writing is peppered with wry observation and amusing historical nuggets (an example: When Pakistan dictator Zia-ul-Haq visited St Stephen’s College, his alma mater, he first looked for a cart selling “Banta” lemon), and the books cover the length and breadth of the National Capital Region, from the amusement parks in Rohini to the temples in Chhattarpur.

The three guides cover “Hangouts” (which include routes for tranquil walks through Delhi’s quieter neighbourhoods), “Food+Drink” (which includes recipes sourced from long-time Delhi denizens) and “Monuments”.

The photography, also by the author, is consistently excellent, and the text always interesting, even if some of the descriptions seem to end rather abruptly. It’s an unavoidable problem with the form—the blog seemed to allow for a much more languid and focused exploration, while the guidebooks need to rush through every possible sight and sound. Another sticking point is the price—`199 for each book in the set, which is a little steep for a modest 110-page volume.

Krish Raghav

The ticket prices and details of other performers will be announced later this month. Go to Invasion Festival’s Facebook page, or the official website, www. invasionfestival.in, for details.

Krish Raghav

LISTEN TO THE

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LOUNGE PODCAST

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Rajinikanth

Capital: The set of three books.

few spoonfuls of a seaweed crème brulee and a green tea tiramisu—novel, but we may not go back for them.

But Edo is a resto-bar, so as important as the food is the drink. It’s stocked with the best collection of sake in the country, and also serves Japanese single malts, beer and a delightful plum wine, Ofuku Masamune. Highly recommended.

The not­so­good The 80-seater Edo fashions itself as an izakaya, but it’s not very clear why a high-end restaurant would model itself after a quick-drink pit stop. But if the positioning doesn’t bother the diner, the sometimes over-officious waitstaff can. They take pains to explain every ingredient and every step of the meal, which can be a bit intrusive.

Talk plastic A meal for two, with sake and cocktails, costs around `7,000.

Edo is open only for dinner, 7-11.30pm. For reservations, call 22119898 (extension 5120).

Sumana Mukherjee

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com GO FOR GOLD It’s lovely to see such a well­researched story on boxers as “Is boxing the new cricket?”, 25 September, in the middle of all the Common­ wealth Games controversies. It made me feel proud of our players.

NEHA GEDAM

KNOCKOUT READ Apropos “Is boxing the new cricket?”, 25 September, I never thought Lounge would do such an in­depth story on sports. This one is a gem—great writing, and a lovely feel for boxing. I really hope that India’s sports culture changes and boxing becomes something people throng to see on weekends. I know I would watch fight nights.

RAVI ACHRK

SATURDAY STAPLE I loved Shoba Narayan’s “Your wardrobe their pity”, 25 September, and “At Cubbon Park, under the greenwood trees”, 4 September. There are so many things and day­to­day observations that I can relate to, and there are always parts where I find myself smiling, such as the one where the ‘bai’ and the carpenter share their “harsh” views!

PALLAVI NAUTIYAL BHARDWAJ ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: AVINASH GOWARIKER; MODEL: LIZA GOLDEN/ANIMA CREATIVE MANAGEMENT Tie­and­dye skirt with embroidered jacket and bustier, Jade, `34,500; gold bib necklace, Nitya Bajaj, `6,100; beauty pumps with bow, on request at Louis Vuitton, €570 (approx. `35,000).

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In some editions, an incomplete sentence was not edited out of the Business Lounge story, “The insider with outside connections”, 25 September.

READ THE

LIVE LOUNGE BLOG Games Insider

A CWG volunteer spills all blog.livemint.com/ livelounge

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

When India’s not an imaginary homeland

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SHOBA NARAYAN

er name is Silpa Kaza and she is almost surreally overqualified for the work she is doing in Gujarat. Kaza has a bachelor’s in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT), master’s in economics from the London School of Economics and is on her way to Harvard for a second master’s in public health. She speaks in Telugu with her mother; and is now speaking Gujarati into her mobile phone to a little girl in faraway Bhuj. “Alykhan theek che,” she says. Or something like that. “They all love Alykhan,” she says with an American accent. Waif-like Kaza has spent the last year working on a solid waste-management project in the slums of Bhuj. She has lived with a tailor’s family and is speaking to the tailor’s seven-year-old daughter who has been her pal and sleeping companion for the last year.

His name is Rikin Tank and he’s a smiling California boy on the path to become a doctor. For the last year, he has given up beaches, clean bedlinen, friends and family to live with migrants in their huts in Ahmedabad, working on a public health project.

Tank and Kaza are among 25 Indicorps Fellows—American college graduates who are taking a year off to do “service for the soul”, as the logo says. Each of them is a child of privilege: born and raised in the US to professional Indian parents; with private schooling, three-car garages, vacations in the Amazon and Africa, the latest gizmos for Christmas and Diwali, the whole bit. Most have visited India to see relatives before; some, like Alykhan Mohammed, a graduate of Tufts

University, who worked with Kaza in Bhuj, never have. Yet after getting a bachelor’s degree at an Ivy League university, and often working in high-earning jobs for a few years, each of them told their flabbergasted parents that they were leaving the well-trodden path of sure success—at least from their immigrant parents’ point of view—to work in the slums of India for a year.

It is the end of that year, and they have gathered in the Environmental Sanitation Institute of Ahmedabad to take stock, trade stories and say goodbyes. I am there because my niece, Nithya Krishnan, has been an Indicorps Fellow, working in Naxalite-affected Gadchiroli and interior Karnataka for the last year. When Nithya announced that she was going to work with tribals for a year, everyone in her (and my) family was shocked. Her parents are both very successful doctors with flourishing private practices; her grandparents retired from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS); she grew up in a six-bedroom mansion, the kind that appears in Hindi movies. She was on track to be a doctor—a paediatric surgeon, she used to say as a child—till she told us that she was going to spend a year doing tribal healthcare. A year in service. Why? I am in Ahmedabad to figure out why 25 high-achieving students spent the last year in slums or India’s remotest villages, living on less than `2,000 per

month. Are they merely slumming it in the land of their parents; or are they in it for real—to do good work; to give back? Well, the short answer is the latter. You can slum it for a month, maybe two. But to live in the Dharavi-equivalent for a year takes courage, idealism, and what Steve Jobs calls staying hungry and staying foolish.

If you want to be cynical, you can say that these American-born Confused Desis knew that this was a finite stay with an exit route, so nothing (not fly-infested toilets or carrying firewood) would make them feel bad. After all, at the end of the year, they could go back home. As one friend said, “It is one thing to be poor for a year; it’s quite another to have poverty extend indefinitely.” But the point is that these youngsters are not “trying” to be poor.

They are undergoing an immersion experience that will likely transform the way they interact with the world in a significant manner. Plus, they are infused with extraordinary idealism to change their world, if not the world.

The woman in the middle of this maelstrom of mismatched expectations between immigrant, high-achieving parents and their equally high-achieving Indian-American children is Roopal Shah, herself a heavy-hitting lawyer with an undergraduate degree from Harvard. She surfs, runs marathons and she has “crazy beautiful” eyes, a cross between Aishwarya Rai and Arundhati Roy. Shah’s sister, Sonal, works in the Obama administration.

Her brother Anand and his wife Shilpa, both born and raised in America, live in Ahmedabad getting people to think differently, mostly recently in social enterprise.

I sit through multiple intense workshops, listen to their stories and play frisbee with them. What are they doing here in India when they could be

Slumming it: The Indicorps Fellows are on a year­long stint in India. in New York or LA? Part of it is figuring themselves and their homeland out; making peace with their past so that they can embrace the future. But it is also the age-old Indian thing—honouring ancestors by giving back to their home country, if a few passports removed. The Jews have been doing it for decades and Israel is richer for it. For that simple reason, I am all for Indicorps. I’ll go further. If you have a cousin, nephew, niece or child who wants to give back to India in a fairly professional, yet personally intense environment, ask them to consider being an Indicorps Fellow for a year. If they can get in, that is—the competition is pretty stiff. It will do India good; but equally important, it will do the kid good.

For every diaspora, the relationship with the home country is both compelling and conflicting. The Indian diaspora is just reaching a critical global mass. They have made good, done well

and achieved all their material goals.

Now, they are looking to assuage their souls and India should be poised to receive this help. Indicorps is one way, as is the Piramal Foundation Fellowship, Teach for India, and a growing number of NGOs which cater to this NRI desire to give back. India should take advantage of it.

I’ve pondered the diaspora connection with home country pretty deeply. It’s exactly like Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Or in this case, the home country wins.

Shoba Narayan wishes she could be an Indicorps Fellow for a month. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT

An Hermès to the rescue of Indian crafts?

L

PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP

ast month, Hermès delivered its new baby: Shang Xia, the world’s first Chinese luxury brand fathered by an iconic Western brand.

Shang Xia, which means “up down” in Mandarin, draws on deep-rooted Chinese

traditions—Ming dynasty chairs, for example, made from rare hundreds of years old zitan wood, or delicate teapots made from eggshell porcelain encased in finely woven bamboo—and translates them for a modern sensibility. The result is a back-to-the-future experience: spare clean lines, familiar Chinese objects peeled and polished till their inner beauty glows, innovative design twists that make you gasp with pleasure, a futuristic Zen-like setting (Shanghai store designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma) showcasing centuries-old artisanal techniques. You try on one of their Han dynasty-inspired cashmere shawl-cum-jackets, a design masterpiece that makes you time-travel back and forth: You feel like a princess in a Chinese court, and at the same time, you feel utterly trendy and with-it.

For the past few decades Asia’s luxury-hungry shoppers have been gobbling up Western brands, embracing Western traditions of dress and decoration, and in the process systematically dismantling their own.

The same is beginning to happen in India—Bollywood hotties, who shape the stylistic taste buds of the nation, are

increasingly donning Western dresses rather than saris (the poor salwar-suit is fading into fashion’s last season bin).

The long-term implication of this trend is that Asia’s craft heritage is dying a slow death, and in some cases it is as endangered as the tiger. Who do you make exquisite kimonos for when the entire Japanese female population is dressed in skirts or pants? Or try buying a real gold zari Banarasi sari like your grandma might have worn—they aren’t made in ample numbers any more.

But if a hundred Shang Xia’s bloom, Asia’s fast-evaporating artisanal heritage will not only get a second lease of life, it will be raised to a whole new level. At their core, luxury brands are cultural products, their heritage coded and reinterpreted for contemporary times.

Western norms of dress are so universally accepted that we do not stop to think or question, but the reality is that when you buy an Hermès scarf, a Louis Vuitton bag, or a Cartier necklace, you are buying a piece of French culture. And now with Shang Xia, one of Asia’s cultures gets the same chance: to be coded and reinterpreted by an experienced hand like Hermès, to be

bringing alive its heritage. Ditto for quality— impeccable across the entire range of products.

The brand itself is so sharply focused— Chinese heritage, contemporary rendition—and that comes through faithfully on all fronts, from the logo reminiscent of a Chinese seal, the products’ minimalist The launch: Shang Xia’s artistic director Jiang Qiong Er (left). design aesthetic, the choice of materials moulded into a luxury brand of global (zitan wood, bamboo, porcelain, stature (the next Shang Xia store is jade), the white cave-like store that planned for Paris). makes an emphatic ultra-modern To be a protégé of Hermès is to hit design statement. the luxury jackpot. There are few (Comparisons with Shanghai Tang brands that understand the art and and Vivienne Tam are inevitable, both science of luxury like Hermès are brands channelling Chinese culture, does—this is the brand that has but Shang Xia is positioned differently. women the world over waiting for Shanghai Tang is suffused in months, some for years, to get their colour—rich, deep, vibrant—whereas hands on its Birkin and Kelly bags, Shang Xia is muted and subtle, even the happily shelling out nearly $10,000 reds are blunted. At the Shanghai Tang (around `4.55 lakh) for one of the basic store you rewind into old world charm, models (multiply that by three for whereas at Shang Xia you fast forward special leathers)—and now that same into 21st century minimalism. Vivacious expertise is being applied to Shang Xia. colour and delightful whimsy are Heritage, innovation, quality, service, trademarks of Vivienne Tam’s the basic building blocks of a luxury clothes—it is lush-and-plush compared brand have been expertly aligned. The to Shang Xia’s less-is-more). service is top-notch—very attentive and So far there has been a theory that a knowledgeable, the saleslady both able luxury brand can’t be created from and willing to spend time explaining scratch, it has to have its own long the nuances of each product line, heritage to be truly

successful—Hermès itself goes back to 1837, Louis Vuitton to 1854, Cartier to 1847. Designers may come and even be commercially successful, but it will take them a lifetime to accumulate the heritage needed to be a true-blue luxury brand. Shang Xia attempts to sidestep this theory and demonstrate that you can borrow the heritage of a country, and with imaginative design (Jiang Qiong Er is Shang Xia’s talented artistic director) and experienced leadership, you can create a luxury brand from the ground up.

What does the birth of Shang Xia mean for India? Our cultural heritage is so rich and so diverse with hundreds of traditional arts and crafts. Imagine if we did a Shang Xia on them, coding and reinterpreting our heritage for modern times. Fabindia and Anokhi are examples of brands that have achieved that at lower price ranges. Up that game, add a sturdy Hermès-like luxury framework, and you could be creating a dozen Indian luxury brands for the global market. Any takers?

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

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Parenting

LOUNGE AFTER SCHOOL

The homework hassle Learn to beat the stress of home assignments: take responsibility, manage your time and prioritize

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· rish Kalra is new to the world of homework. This class II student at Shri Ram School, New Delhi, gets home assignments four times a week; Wednesdays are “no homework days”. The assignments are easy and he is able to wrap them up with minimum fuss. Yet his mother Ritika Kalra, a marketing professional, thought it was important for her to be a part of a Home Work—Stress or Fun? workshop conducted at the India Habitat Centre (IHC), New Delhi, on 23 September.

“I wanted to understand the right approach to handling homework issues. I am a working mother and as my son moves on to higher classes, it will be important for both of us that he develops and uses a correct methodology to handling home assignments,” says Ritika.

After complaints about the increased pressure on students owing to the implementation of the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) programme, the Central Board of Secondary Education sent out a circular in early September, asking schools to cut back on home assignments and tests. The CCE scheme is a school-based evaluation (as opposed to being evalauted by an external body) of students that covers all aspects of a student’s development.

While less homework makes it to the wish list of most children, parents are undecided on the idea of a homework-free environment. Parents such as Ritika and

K

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Arundhati Jairam feel that some amount of home learning is important for children. “Homework is one way for me to know what my son is learning in class currently. We get lesson plans from the school, but assignments give parents a chance to understand where their child may need that little extra help,” says Ritika.

Jairam, a homemaker, says it’s impractical for children not to have homework. “If they don’t come back with some amount of work, it becomes tough to keep them from wasting their time on computer games, social networking or just watching TV. Some amount of project work instills discipline and also helps us, the parents, to know where our child is faltering or doing well. I don’t want to find out everything in a PTA (parent-teacher association) meeting,” says Jairam, mother of 12-year-old Khanak.

Abha Sehgal, principal of Sanskriti School, New Delhi, believes that some homework, especially in the senior classes, is important because it helps reinforce new concepts taught in class. “Having said that, I also believe homework should not only be about what has been taught in class. It should go beyond classroom education and should help a child apply all that she has learned in various subjects in one place.”

Homework tends to become stressful when the assignments do not challenge a child to do something beyond what has already been taught in a classroom. “How can anyone motivate a child to do the same thing over and over again? It is up to the school and the teachers not to make homework a duplication of class work,” says Gouri Dange, psychologist and the

Lounge parenting columnist.

“Also, I have noticed that children tend to complain more when parents lay unnecessary emphasis on performing well at academics suddenly. Homework has a place in your child’s life. It gives your child a chance to understand concepts better, but if your child is spending more than an hour daily at homework, then there is something wrong.

Either genuinely there is too much work, or he or she is not managing their time well.”

The interactive workshop at the IHC conducted by Yellowcat Theatre Co., a Delhi-based group of theatre professionals who use the medium for educational activities in schools across the National Capital Region (NCR), had one basic purpose: to get parents and children to communicate. “It is not up to us to decide whether children should be given homework or not. We wanted the workshop to be a place for people to realize that homework stress is less about rebellion and more about misplaced aspirations on the part of the parents and lack of communication between children and parents. In all my years as a practitioner of theatre in education, I can tell you that most issues between children and adults occur when both stop communicating properly,” says Sukhesh Arora, founder of Yellowcat and one of the people who conducted the workshop.

He finds that though parents are much friendlier with their children nowadays, from classes VIII or IX onwards there is a sudden shift in the way parents react to academics. “Children find the transition tough to handle, get stressed and blame their ability to not perform well in academics on

FOUR WAYS TO SKIP THE STRESS Here’s how some parents deal with homework­related issues u Never ask your child to do homework the minute he or she comes from school. Give them some time off or let them take a nap and play for a while. u Break up the homework into smaller assignments and let your child work on a maximum of two subjects at one time.

Then take a break for a couple of hours and work on the

remaining assignments. u Fix a schedule and make sure your child agrees to it—then stick to it. u If you have a young child, it is tempting to finish the work for him because it is faster that way.

Do not ever do this. You would be teaching your child not to take responsibility for his “job”, that is, homework.

the most convenient scapegoat: too much homework and too little time to do it,” says Arora.

While the aim of the workshop was not to provide quick “do this, do that” types of solutions, Arora hopes that it helped parents realize that “there are three basic issues with homework: First, children have too much to do in terms of extra-curricular activities. “You cannot expect a child to go for dance, tennis, theatre lessons, read good books and then also excel in academics.”

Second, most children (and parents) don’t understand how to prioritize their time. “If children are going to do many more things with their time than just play and be at school, then they must have the discipline to manage their daily workload and parents have to help them develop this discipline.” Lastly, children are not self-motivated to complete homework. “If you are holding their hand every step of the way, they will never learn to take the responsibility for their own actions. Set up a schedule and then let them take charge.”

“In most cases, you will find that homework assignments are left to the last minute. It then becomes an issue and a stress factor for both the child and the parent. Rarely do children get that much excessive work to finish all in one day,” says Sehgal.

One way to reduce homeworkrelated stress, according to Samiran Gupta, is to motivate your child to finish it in time. Gupta, who has two daughters, 13-yearold Treya and 17-year-old Chandrika, says this has helped his wife and him manage homework stress for the last 10 years and not let it rule their lives. “When our girls were young, we oversaw their work. But now we help only if there is a special project.”

Both girls understand the importance of prioritizing and also of time management. “That is really the key. They have deadlines that they must adhere to and as parents we try and not interfere too much in the how and when of their deadlines. We only check if they are following their schedule.”

COUNTERPOINT | MAHESH PRASAD THINKSTOCK

Touchy­feely: Children learn best when they experience things.

Involve the head, heart and hands Simply repeating what’s taught in class is as detrimental as watching too much TV

P

rogressive thinkers on education, around the world, have never believed in homework. In fact, in his The Homework Myth, Alfie Kohn argues compellingly about the damage that homework does to children. He says that a mistrust of children, misconceptions about learning and parents’ focus on competitiveness are the reasons the education system embraces homework and this has resulted in more conflict within families.

I think the fault lies in the nature of homework.

Traditionally, the idea of homework is that once a chapter has been taught, the student goes home and copies the answers to some questions based on that chapter from the textbook to the notebook. Naturally, this serves no purpose whatsoever.

Ultimately, homework is work; and if we examine the connotations of the word “work” and see the emotional response it evokes, work is clearly seen as a burden. However, if a child derives intrinsic joy from that work, engaging with head, heart and hands, then the negativity disappears.

Incidentally, in contemporary civil discourse, I find an increasing infatuation with work-life balance. To my mind, this is absurd. Work should be a stress-buster, not a source of stress. And this is true about homework also.

So any homework at all must be crafted as an activity that is meaningful and has relevance. It should create a context for children and parents to work together; more so in the formative years, thus leading to superior emotional bonding.

Our philosophy is that children are born with an innate capacity to comprehend this world and nothing can be taught. So, the role of a truly progressive school is simply to co-create an environment in which students go through an experience, reflect on it, understand it in the abstract and then conceptualize and learn. Dialogue and enquiry reinforces the process and the student evolves into a lifelong autonomous learner. Unfortunately, most schools are didactic, a one-way, autocratic instruction-led classroom engagement.

We often notice that quite a few parents are uncomfortable with our policy of not assigning too much homework. At times they come to us and ask us to assign more homework.

This comes from their sense of insecurity as parents. They find it difficult to engage children at home and think that there should be something to keep them busy. Parents also want some time for themselves and they would rather see the child doing some work than, say, watching TV. Meaningless repetitive tasks turn children into mindless conformers or active rebels. This can be just as damaging as watching too much TV. The most important kinds of homework I recommend are the ones that involve parents spending time with children—reading a story, finding answers to questions, exploring, experiencing and then talking about it.

The only exception to the foregoing views is for subjects where a high degree of practice is required. Practice has its own benefits. So in subjects such as mathematics and languages, for example, teachers can assign a maximum of 30 or 40 minutes of homework in aggregate to students in higher classes.

Our problem, as parents who have been raised in the traditional system of education, is that competition has been drilled into us. So we assume that any additional effort will help us have an edge over others, that spending 3 hours a day after school, right from Day 1 in school, will ensure admission into an IIT. But this method ends up creating robots out of us. It kills the natural curiosity and creativity of children and force-fits them into highly structured compartments. That’s why we now have engineers who have studied in the best engineering college, but don’t know how to screw a light bulb on.

Mahesh Prasad is the principal of The Heritage School, Gurgaon.

THINKSTOCK

As told to Veena Venugopal.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L6

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

A curfew and the seeds of new ideas SAMAR HALARNKAR

and toss well. Add eggplant and sauté until well done. Adjust masala if you wish. Top with fresh coriander or parsley (I used parsley) and serve hot.

Hard times help the author rediscover the possibilities of a spice he long ignored

I

t was a stifling curfew— stricter than any this decade—in sunny, troubled Srinagar last month that got me thinking about coriander seeds.

The streets were deserted. I was the only guest in the hotel.

The only employee was the receptionist, who took his pick of the empty rooms each night.

The hotel cook, who valiantly tried to come to work to ensure I didn’t go hungry, was thrashed at a security checkpoint, as Kashmiris often are.

Only a few hours ago, a police van rolled by with this cheery message: “Do not move out of your houses. You could be shot.”

So there I was—eternally hungry me—without food for more than 14 hours.

Now, whatever their issues with India in general, Kashmiris are very hospitable. So, the receptionist, a young man in his early 20s, was profusely apologetic. “I told him (the cook) to somehow come through the curfew,” he said, worry lines on his forehead. “But he had to go back. I am so sorry sir.”

I was hungry. So was he. I had to fix this.

“Listen,” I said, “Your hotel must have a kitchen?”

“Yes sir, it’s on the roof.”

“Open it up,” I said.

I’ve never cooked in a hotel kitchen before, so I scratched my head a bit at the sight of the giant burners, huge kadhais and 2ft-long ladles.

I soon discovered more serious problems. After days of curfew and no guests, the kitchen food stocks consisted of: two rotting cabbage, six rotting tomatoes, nine onions that had sprouted, one that was—hurrah—fine, half a loaf of two-day-old bread, and five eggs.

Ah well, it was what it was. So, I got to work.

The receptionist, thankfully, knew how to fire up the gas

system. He opened two valves, one for a flame, another for the gas. Then as the gas spewed out with an alarming hiss, he ignited it with his cigarette lighter, jumping back when it lit with an alarming whoomp!

The onion was chopped, the eggs were beaten, but surely I could do better?

Apart from the basic red chilli and turmeric powder, the only whole spices seemed to be a few green cardamoms and lots of coriander seed. I was reacquainted with coriander seed after many years. I remember grinding them with coconut in the days before coconut milk short-circuited my take on my grandmother’s Goan fish-curry recipe.

I hastily pounded a spoonful of coriander seeds, threw in a couple of cardamoms and suddenly the egg bhurji gained much verve and vigour. When it was done, the receptionist and I toasted some bread, rationed out portions for lunch and dinner, and sat down to eat our humble meal in the hotel reception, washed down with milk.

Outside our window, the Jhelum flowed silently, in tune with the eerie, discomfiting stillness that marks a daytime curfew. Never did a plain, old bhurji taste so good, suffused with the earthy, grassy fragrance of the coriander seed.

When I returned to Delhi, I had coriander seed on my mind.

My parents were visiting, and there was rather a lot of cooking at hand. So, I did what I do at such times: roast my own spices, prepare a batch of my own masala and use it for many main dishes.

My time in Srinagar fresh in my mind, the spice I first scattered on the roasting pan was coriander seed. No surprise there.

I was surprised how the

Couscous with peppers, zucchini and Srinagar masala Serves 4 Ingredients 1 large cup of couscous 1 zucchini, cut lengthwise and sliced into slim half-circles 1 red pepper, cut into N-inch pieces or juliennes 1 yellow pepper, ditto 5 large garlic cloves, crushed 1 tsp sesame seeds 1 tsp Srinagar garam masala 2 tsp parsley, finely chopped K tsp coriander seeds, pounded Salt to taste Master mix: This garam masala requires nine ingredients and can be used to spice up a variety of dishes. coriander seed variously blended with chicken, eggplant (baingan) and couscous. The aroma of roasted, pounded, or roasted-and-pounded coriander seeds is distinctive. To me, it speaks of blue skies, autumn winds, windswept grasslands and open windows.

Now, and forever, coriander seed will also speak to me of that lonely, curfewed day in Srinagar.

Samar’s Srinagar garam masala Ingredients 2 tsp coriander seeds 1 tsp fennel (saunf) seeds 1 tsp sesame seeds 1 tsp poppy seeds 2-inch piece of cinnamon (dalchini) 12 dried red chillies (Kashmiri chillies, or any other) 2 black cardamoms 5 green cardamoms 12 cloves Method Roast these spices on a medium flame until the seeds start to snap and crackle. Stir constantly for a minute, as the aromas release, but take care not to let

HUNGRY PLANET | CLIFFORD PERERA

them burn and blacken. Either pound the spices in a mortar pestle or in a mixie (which is what I normally use). Empty into an airtight glass bottle.

Once I had my masala, I found it enough for these three dishes.

B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

···························· n Sri Lanka, the day is not complete if the focus is not on the menu for the day,” chef Clifford Perera says, when we meet at The Leela Kempinski, Mumbai. The Sri Lankan chef from the Cinnamon Lakeside hotel in Colombo was in Mumbai to present his country’s cuisine. The coconut milk base and the spices of the curries make them similar to Indian and Thai meals. According to the chef, the combination of spices gives Sri Lankan food its uniqueness. Edited excerpts from an interview:

I

What are the three meals of the day in Sri Lanka?

Breakfast is usually hoppers, which is a pancake made with rice flour and coconut milk. It can also be topped with an egg.

Lunch is either a chicken or mutton curry or devilled chicken eaten with rice or string hoppers.

The meal includes vegetables and accompaniments such as Lunu Miris, that is a mix of dried Maldive fish, onion and spices.

Dinner could be red rice with fish ambulthiyal, which is a sour black fish curry, eaten with poppadum and coconut sambol, that is a combination of grated coconut, chilli and spices.

What are the similarities and differences between Sri Lankan and south Indian food?

We also use coconut and make dishes such as string hoppers that are called idiappams here, but most of our food tastes different. It is much more spicy.

Like the Indian garam masala, we have our own curry powder.

Eggplant with coriander and sesame seeds Serves 4

Roast chicken Serves 4 Ingredients 1 full chicken, skin intact 4 tbsp Srinagar garam masala 1 tbsp olive oil N cup rum Salt to taste Method Marinate the full chicken, skin intact but slashed with a knife, with the garam masala and olive oil. Add salt and rum (I always use Old Monk). Let it marinate for 4 hours, at least.

Place chicken in a casserole with lid and roast on oven mark 4 (or 180 degrees Celsius) for 2 hours or slightly more.

You may not need to do anything for the first hour. Use the liquid released to periodically baste the chicken as it starts to brown.

Serve whole, with roasted

Ingredients 12-14 small eggplants, quartered or smaller 1 large onion, sliced 1 large tomato, chopped fine 2 tsp coriander seeds, roughly pounded 2 tsp sesame seeds 3 tsp Srinagar garam masala 1K tsp ginger-garlic paste (better, use freshly chopped ginger and garlic) 1 tbsp olive oil (more if needed) Salt to taste Method Splutter the sesame seeds in gently heated olive oil in a non-stick pan. Add the coriander seeds and stir for 30 seconds.

Add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add ginger and garlic. Add the Srinagar garam masala and sauté (with a dash of red-wine vinegar or water) till the masala blends. Add the tomato

This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is editor-at-large, Hindustan Times.

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

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Hoppers and ‘ambulthiyal’ Sri Lankan cuisine differs from Indian cuisine in its unique combination of ingredients

potatoes and onions if you wish. Carve on the table. It should yield to the first plunge of the knife.

Method Lay the couscous on a flat dish.

Pour boiling water or vegetable stock, as per instructions on couscous packet. Add a few drops of olive oil, salt and fluff up with a fork. In 1 tbsp of olive oil, splutter sesame seeds. Add the garlic and sauté until it starts to brown. Add zucchini and sauté. Add salt.

Sprinkle the masala and toss. Add 1 tbsp of red-wine vinegar or orange juice while sautéing. Add peppers and toss for a minute before taking off flame. Pour the vegetables over the couscous.

Sprinkle with parsley and pounded coriander seeds. If this is too vegetarian for you, add—as I did—leftover kebabs or sausages (after chopping into small pieces) to the couscous.

We also use Thai ingredients such as pandan leaves and lemon grass. Cooking styles differ. The pan we use for making appams is different. The batter consists of ingredients such as palm sugar and yeast that are not part of the south Indian appam.

What are the kinds of curries eaten in Sri Lanka?

There are so many types of curries in different colours with different flavours. Cashew curry will be different in colour and flavour from carrot and green pea curry, then there’s devilled chicken which is different because it does not use coconut milk.

There’s a black curry called fish ambulthiyal that gets its colour from gamboge paste, something like the kokum used in India. A red curry will have red chillies and coconut milk and green curry will be made using green pea.

How do food preferences change in different parts of the country?

In the northern part of Sri Lanka,

sambol. In Galle, the southern part of the island, Muslims eat Kattu Shoru, plain rice eaten with about 30 accompaniments.

The Christians opt for Western dishes, but will always have rice, and the accompanying curries and vegetables.

Which are the most popular desserts?

Wattalappan is a custard made with coconut milk, eggs, jaggery and cardamom and is widely eaten. Kalu Dodol is a traditional dessert made with rice flour and coconut milk and is usually prepared on special occasions.

Sri Lankan prawn curry Serves 2 Taste twister: Chef Perera.

Jaffna, the Tamil community is predominant. They eat a lot of vegetables and their main carb components are dishes made with ulundu flour for thosai, idli, vadai, etc. Since there are many ethnic races in Sri Lanka, the preparations are varied. Muslims eat biryani made with mutton or chicken along with chicken korma, raita, mint sambol, pineapple salad and fried-onion

Ingredients 500g shelled and deveined prawns 1 small onion, sliced 5 cloves of garlic and 1 piece of ginger ground together K tsp turmeric 1 tsp chilli powder 2 tsp unroasted curry powder—grind together 3 tbsp of cumin seeds and 6 tbsp of coriander seeds, 1 tsp of whole black peppercorns and

K tsp of dill 1 tsp fenugreek seeds 2 green chillies, cut diagonally into three slices 1 cup of coconut milk 150g ripe tomatoes, cut into quarters 1 lemon 6 curry leaves 2-inch piece of pandan leaves 2-inch stalk of lemon grass 2 tbsp vegetable oil Salt Method Wash the prawns and drain.

Marinate with lime juice, turmeric, salt, chilli powder and curry powder and leave aside for 20 minutes. Heat oil in a saucepan. Sauté the onion till transparent. Add the curry leaves, fenugreek seeds, garlic and ginger paste and simmer for 40 seconds. Toss in the prawns, tomatoes, green chillies, pandan leaves and lemon grass.

Stir for 1 minute, add thick coconut milk and cook quickly on very hot flame for 5-8 minutes till the prawns are ready. Add salt to taste. Serve with hot rice or roti, coconut sambol and mango chutney.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

L7

Wildlife

LOUNGE SPOTLIGHT

The elephant warriors The elephant may not be endangered, but it is in danger.

We profile five people who’ve worked tirelessly for India’s tuskers

O

n the night of 22 September, seven elephants were mowed down by a speeding goods train in northern West Bengal.

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. The NorthEast Frontier Railway, under which the track falls, had scheduled a meeting for 26 September to discuss ways of reducing animal hits. Just a few weeks prior to the accident, the Elephant Task Force set up by the Union ministry of environment and forests in February had given its report, recommending detailed and overarching changes in India’s elephant conservation effort. The accident has lent a much needed sense of urgency to what ele-

phant conservationists have been saying for sometime now—that our conservation efforts have been slow, piecemeal and far too limited.

Part of the reason for the indifference lies in the numbers. The 2007 elephant census puts the total number of wild elephants in India at over 27,000. The figures and census methodologies are disputed but most conservationists agree that the number is well over 20,000.

So the elephant is by no means endangered. But that is not the same as saying that the elephant is not in danger.

The numbers mask a skewed sex ratio. Most estimates put the number of males at 1,000-1,200, the bulk of them

having fallen prey to poachers in the late 1990s when poaching was at its worst. Elephant habitats and movement corridors have been shrinking rapidly, hemmed in by roads, mining and development projects.

Designed with a little more care and attention, these projects could have coexisted with the elephant.

That, however, hasn’t happened, and as a result humanelephant conflict has been on the rise. Every year an average of 400 people are killed by elephants and nearly 100 elephants are killed in retaliation. Elephants annually damage around 1 million hectares of land, affecting nearly 500,000 families.

That the elephant population remains as large as it is is only because of the tolerance of communities that live around elephant areas. However, if things continue the way they are, it’s only a matter of time before they run out of patience.

Any further delays in implementing conservation measures carry the risk of irreparable damage to elephant numbers and their complex behavioural and social structures.

The good news though is that conservationists and activists who’ve been crying themselves hoarse all this while are finally beginning to be heard. These are people who’ve worked tirelessly for the elephant, but have been relegated to the back-

ground while tiger conservation and conservationists have taken centre stage. They’ve tracked the movement of elephant herds, worked with villagers in minimizing damage to their crops, and studied the effects of train accidents on the behaviour of elephants. And there are quite a lot of them.

We’ve picked a few. Each of them relates differently to the elephant. Their work is not without controversy or disagreement, but they share a passionate desire to protect and preserve these magnificent creatures.

Akshai Jain Write to lounge@livemint.com INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Jumbo tales: In Lahiri’s view, elephants are in dan­ ger of losing not just their habitat, but their place in the national consciousness.

A

THE HISTORIAN

Dhriti Kanta Lahiri Choudhury AWARD­WINNING AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR

day after a train killed seven elephants in north Bengal, Dhriti Kanta Lahiri Choudhury is unfazed. One doesn’t quite expect such cold practi­ cality from the author of six endearing and awarded books in English and Bengali on the animal, one of which, ‘A Trunk Full of Tales’, says the author spent “70 years with the Indian elephant”.

“A few elephants killed isn’t so alarming,” says the 79­year­old. He backs up his statement with facts—since 1976, when Lahiri participated in a cen­ sus and around 14,000 elephants were counted, the number had increased to 27,000­30,000 by 2006.

“Elephants are nowhere close to being on the endangered list yet. Nevertheless, I haven’t found the Environment (Protection) Act raising the issue of rail lines cutting through forests.”

In his words, the recent subject of elephant deaths is overshadowed by a long­continuing sequence of loss. Elephants have suffered not just because of shrinking habitats—with humans, livestock and loco­ motives taking over areas where jumbos foraged for

food—their plight has been compounded by their gradual slide in public consciousness.

Elephants, Lahiri observes in an international compendium of essays published by Johns Hopkins University Press, were mentioned in ancient Indian texts such as the ‘Rig Veda’ and ‘Atharva Veda’ as fit for domesticity; in Kautilya’s ‘Arthashastra’, the elephant was eulogized for its use in the battlefield.

“Even the British used them during the Third Anglo­Burmese War in 1885, when around 450 ele­ phants were transported from India via Chittagong.

They were also used for logging and hunting and to survey forests,” says Lahiri, who has a doctorate from the University of Leeds and was a professor at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. In keeping with the animal’s importance, the Elephant Preser­ vation Act, 1879, closely followed the Indian Forest Act, 1878.

Machines have replaced the slow­moving crea­ tures in most spheres. “With so many elephants in the wild, population control is difficult. I had earlier

suggested that forest officials use elephants instead of jeeps to survey forests. If two elephants are domesticated for use in each forest range office in elephant habitats, it will be a huge figure,” says Lahiri, who became a member of the IUCN specialist group on elephants in 1977 and of the project ele­ phant advisory committee of the government of India in 2004. “Using elephants for forest surveys can also minimize timber smuggling, for the animals venture deeper than jeeps.”

Born into a ‘zamindar’ family in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, Lahiri grew up in a household that owned well over 15 elephants—a world where the Sharmilas and Chandrachurs, as the elephants were called, participated in estate surveys and hunting expeditions. With the family shifting to Kolkata around Partition, Lahiri has not been unfa­ miliar with the sense of loss now facing the Indian elephant population.

Shamik Bag

L8 WILDLIFE

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

VINOD KARIMATT/MINT

Healing touch: (left) A mahout gives an elephant a wash in Trichur, Kerala; and Dr Cheeran.

J THE NUTRITIONIST

Jacob V Cheeran VET AND C0­FOUNDER OF THE ELEPHANT WELFARE ASSOCIATION

acob V. Cheeran, 70, a retired professor of veteri­ nary medicine from Trichur, Kerala, has been treating elephants for four decades. The co­founder of the Trichur­based Elephant Welfare Association has treated hundreds of domesticated and some wild elephants in Kerala and beyond. One area he focuses on is nutrition. It’s an area, he says, that needs urgent attention.

“In the West, and in the prominent wildlife reserves in Africa, you often find animals are over­ fed and obese—but they are fed things keeping their nutrition in mind. It’s the opposite here. We starve our animals, or don’t feed them the right things. Also, as part of veterinary science one is taught about the nutritional aspects of animals in colleges in the West. It’s not so here, apart from one or two institutions,” he complains. This means an elephant population that is prone to disease and a wildlife reserve force unable to understand the dietary characteristics of wild elephants.

“One of the basic health problems is parasitism.

If we can control that, we can ensure the elephant a good life,” says Dr Cheeran. As part of the Ele­ phant Welfare Association, Dr Cheeran conducts deworming exercises routinely for captive ele­ phants in Kerala. During the course of his work he

discovered elephants weren’t getting the right amount of minerals, salts and calcium. So he con­ ducted nutritional experiments on the domesti­ cated elephants to begin with and then on wild ones. His team went into the forests with a half­ open box filled with a mix of jaggery and minerals such as calcium, lime and a little bit of urea. Some­ times they replaced the jaggery with mangoes.

“The elephants walloped the box’s contents and the box also!” he says.

At the training sessions he conducts in the Vazh­ achal forest range on the Tamil Nadu­Kerala border, locals and range officers get the lowdown on the medical side of dealing with an elephant on the rampage. They are taught to use tranquillizer shots with xylazine—the trick is to ensure the animal doesn’t fall down. The animal may wobble but must stay standing. If it falls, it will be impossible to lift it. “It needs to be standing so that the team can do a quick check­up,” Dr Cheeran explains.

He even set up the animal health division of Cheerans Labs Pvt. Ltd, a group of companies that otherwise makes non­ferrous alloys. The jumbo doc­ tor is always on call for his jumbo patients.

Rahul Jayaram

ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

B

ig animals require big solutions, or so Mahesh Rangarajan, social scientist and wildlife historian, seems to think. The big solution he proposed in ‘Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India’, the recently released report of the Elephant Task Force, is a paradigm shift in how we perceive and deal with our elephant population.

So far, maintains Rangarajan, India’s approach to elephants (and to most other creatures) has been ad hoc and often reactive. This worked for a while, but now as elephant habitats and movement corri­ dors shrink, falling prey to expanding min­ ing in central India, rapidly growing infra­ structure (roads, canals, among other things) in the south, industrialization in the north and development projects in the North­East, human­elephant conflict is increasing alarmingly.

“It’s time we moved beyond our ‘fenc­ ing the forest’ approach to conservation,” he says animatedly. “If we’re to save an animal like the elephant which is spread out across different parts of the country and moves over vast tracts of land, we need adaptive management that involves all the stakeholders.”

As he travelled around the country, interacting with researchers and activists and holding public hearings, Rangarajan realized that this would involve an incredi­ ble amount of cooperation between vil­ lage­level institutions such as the gram panchayat, local MLAs and wings of the government such as the forest, revenue, irrigation and public works departments.

What he proposed was the creation of elephant landscapes, which would include elephant reserves (26 already exist) and the corridors connecting them. Of the 10 that the report mentions, Rangarajan thinks a start should be made with the Kaziranga­Karbi Anglong­Intaki, Kameng­ Sonitpur, North­Western (primarily in the

Terai region of Uttar Pradesh), East Cen­ tral and Brahmagiri­Nilgiri­Eastern Ghats landscapes.

The bulk of the areas in these land­ scapes would of necessity lie outside the current protection framework of national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserved forests. But all development here would have to take elephants into account.

Mitigating conflict would require a care­ ful study of elephant behaviour and move­ ment, local infrastructure such as roads, canals and factories, and cropping patterns.

Most important, however, would be helping local communities erect elephant­ proof fences, increasing compensation for the grain loss they suffer because of ele­ phant depredation, and establishing a sys­ tem of “local hearings” to facilitate inter­ actions between villagers, park authorities and government officials.

In his excitement Rangarajan rattles off the minutiae of his plans, the amount of compensation to be paid, how information should be shared with villagers, and the modalities of inter­state cooperation.

The apex agency proposed for implement­ ing this complex system is a National Ele­ phant Conservation Authority, on the lines of the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

Rangarajan doesn’t stop there. The ele­ phant, he says, should be declared India’s National Heritage Animal. It needs a makeover, a “Haathi Mere Saathi” cam­ paign that would change perceptions and bring “‘gaja’ and ‘praja’ closer”.

For Indian conservation all these sug­ gestions are radical and require a re­orien­ tation of current efforts. Have any of them been tried on a smaller scale any­ where? “No,” he says. Aren’t his plans too ambitious? “To make even a small impact we need to think big.”

Akshai Jain

THE IDEAS MAN

Mahesh Rangarajan SOCIAL SCIENTIST AND CHAIRMAN OF THE ELEPHANT TASK FORCE

Thinking big: Rangara­ jan’s proposals mark a paradigm shift from the piecemeal conservation efforts at present.

WILDLIFE L9

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

COURTESY ECLECTIC MAGAZINE

Lady courageous: Barua, who has been both lauded for her efforts and criticized for her methods, takes it all in her stride.

THE TEACHER

Parbati Barua ELEPHANT TRAINER

W

hen we speak, Parbati Barua had just returned after attending to a captive elephant that was playing truant and risked being deemed rogue and put to death.

From her temporary base close to the Darrang­ Sonitpur district border in Assam, she sounds upbeat. “I could calm it and the animal is under observation. Killing elephants is the easiest and sad­ dest option,” she says.

As India’s best­known and reportedly first lady catcher and trainer of elephants, Barua has trained around 400 elephants across India. Her expertise in the traditional method of ‘Mela shikar’, where wild elephants are captured by lassoing them from atop a trained one, has been supplemented by awareness campaigns, conservation efforts and mahout train­ ing—all aimed at the “well­being of elephants”. Her

vision is simple: “Elephants indicate forest health and if they perish, humans will follow.”

In Assam, a state where around 5,000 elephants roam and where, according to one report, around 600 humans and 250­odd elephants died in man­elephant conflicts between 1990­2003, Barua is bracing for the ensuing cultivation season when animal raids might add to the toll on both sides. Not far from her current temporary base in Sonitpur district, 30 ele­ phants were found poisoned to death in 2001.

“Humans are the problem. I don’t care for scientific study or sitting at computers. I believe in fieldwork and consider forest depletion by humans to be the biggest cause of conflict,” says the 57­year­old. Dur­ ing her awareness programmes, she gives the exam­ ple of Sindh in Pakistan where elephants reportedly roamed before the forests disappeared. “With rail

T THE PEACEMAKERS

Sandeep Kumar Tiwari and Anil Kumar Singh WILDLIFE TRUST OF INDIA

hey couldn’t look more different. Sandeep Kumar Tiwari has the clean, manicured look of a white­collar worker, while Anil Kumar Singh, in his camouflage pants and boots, has the rough­hewn air of someone who’s just emerged from the forest. But once these researchers­turned­activists start talking about elephants they mirror each other, complementing each other’s stories and laughing at shared memories.

It started with a project in Orissa nearly a decade ago. The landscape of the Mahanadi had been divided into a jigsaw by irrigation canals that spread in thin veins across the land. The Rengali canal had cut right through areas that were traditional elephant migration routes between grasslands. In frustration, the elephants had starting attacking villages and crops.

That’s when a team from the Delhi­based Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) was called in to help. “Similar patterns had started appearing in other parts of the country,” says Tiwari. It was too late to do much about the Rengali canal, apart from building a few bridges and ramps, but it was a warning “that the only way to prevent the conflicts from escalating was to secure these vital corridors”.

It sounds straightforward on paper, but it was complicated on the ground. Local communities which owned the fertile agricultural land had no reason to believe that surrendering land to elephants would in ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

tracks and roads cutting through elephant habitats, the situation now is akin to having a thoroughfare through your drawing room.”

Over the years, Barua’s work has seen her as the subject of an award­winning book, ‘Queen of the Ele­ phants’, by Mark Shand and a BBC documentary with the same name. While this made her internationally known, it was followed closely by infamy when ques­ tions were raised by people such as wildlife docu­ mentary film­maker Mike Pandey and politician­green activist Maneka Gandhi on her methods and ethics.

In 2003, Pandey shot 3­hour footage of a young elephant in Barua’s charge apparently being tortured in Chhattisgarh, where she had been invited by the government to rein in a rogue elephant. The Union environment and forests ministry gave her a clean chit. “As a woman in India if you get a little publicity,

the long term reduce damage to their crops.

Land acquisition was never really an option, Tiwari says, since it alienated the villagers. Instead they would require convincing and cajoling.

So the team decided to build schools and dispensaries. They created economic opportunities by training villagers to start fisheries, or in the case of the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, piggeries. In states such as Arunachal Pradesh, they experimented with the “Grain for Grain” programme, which promised to return every bit of grain the villagers lost to elephants.

The results did not take long in showing. In most cases, villagers set aside land which was part of elephant corridors; and in others, WTI, using funds from international donors, purchased the land from the villagers (and subsequently handed it over to the forest department).

They’ve managed, says Tiwari proudly, to secure eight corridors around the country, from the Kollegal corridor in Karnataka to corridors in the Garo Hills. These corridors range in length from 700m to 3,000m.

Equally significantly, in a 2005 publication titled ‘Right of Passage’, the team surveyed and listed 88 important elephant corridors that need to be conserved.

While Tiwari was busy working on securing the corridors, Singh had embarked on a different project.

In 2001, 20 elephants had been killed in separate incidents while crossing a busy railway track that ran through the Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand. The fault, according to Singh, lay in the way the track was laid, with sharp turns and steep embankments that blocked the line of sight of locomotive drivers.

The route of the track, separating elephant grasslands on one side from perennial water sources on the other, was also faulty. With that started the National Train Hit Mitigation Programme.

What Singh needed to do was to get the railways to realign the track in some parts and trim the embankments. Locomotive drivers needed to be familiarized with the terrain and sensitized about elephants. Information about herd movements would need to be shared between the forest guards, railway officials and drivers. Sounds simple, but in practice it required quick coordination between the railways and the forest department, both big bureaucratic set­ups. Slowing a train is a difficult procedure since it has ramifications across the network. Once a herd of elephants was sighted by a forest guard, a message would make its way to the divisional forest office and the closest railway station, from where it would go to the divisional railway

you draw detractors,” she contends.

A member of Assam’s erstwhile Gauripur royal family, Barua is a niece of Pramathesh Barua, who acted in the Bengali film ‘Devdas’ (1935) and directed its original Hindi version. Her elder sister, the late Pratima Barua, was a renowned folk music exponent known for her singing of Mahut Bondhu, a number that explores the human­elephant relationship, while her father, Prakitish Barua, was a nationally recog­ nized elephant expert.

These days, her parental property is home to three elephants. “I was told that I first touched an elephant as a month­old child. Since then, elephants have been part of my family. They have become part of me.” It’s a message Barua reserves for the world.

Shamik Bag

office, and then to all trains passing on the route.

Fine­tuning the system and getting forest guards to cooperate with locomotive drivers has taken many years, but the outcome has been so successful that there hasn’t been a single elephant death in Rajaji since the project started in 2001. Every night a six­man team, with two people each from the forest department, railways and WTI, patrols the tracks, looking for animal movements. Different railway boards have since sought WTI’s help in reducing train hits. “It’s when Southern Railway approached us, instead of it being the other way around, that we knew we’d made an impact,” says Singh, smiling.

Akshai Jain

Sanctuary: (above) Tiwari with a calf rescued from a village near the Chandaka Wildlife Sanctuary in Orissa; and Tiwari and Singh (left) at their office in Delhi.

L10 COVER

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FASHION

FALL in

LINE Be minimalist or folksy, go edgy in leather or be feminine in lace—we tell you how to update your season’s wardrobe with what’s hot this fall

VELVET TOUCH

Draped or ruched, a tunic or a long dress, feel like royalty in the plush, luxurious fabric.

Purple velvet and chiffon tunic, Varun Bahl, `28,000; Dynasty jewel cluster watch­strap bracelet, Mawi, `22,500; leather booties, Just Cavalli, `25,000.

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LOUNGE

COVER L11

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LUXE LEATHER

Leather becomes a wardrobe staple this season in all fashion forms. Wear trousers, a leather dress, jacket, waistcoat or a leather patch on your coat. Black leather dress, Christian Dior, `6.8 lakh; Serpent necklace, House of Nilaya, `9,000; wedge­heel sandals in silver mirror­finish leather and light grey satin, Christian Dior, approx. `65,000.

FALL HAIR TRENDS Carole Robequin, head of training, Jean­Claude Biguine, India, on the season’s hair trends u This might turn out to be the right season for haircuts as women get more comfortable flaunting shorter styles. The modern, contemporary and chic asymmetric bob will pick up. u For longer hair, the fringe is still in vogue. Adding a layer of fringe to straight hair which falls on your forehead can take away a couple of years from your face. u Ponytails will be a sure­shot hit this season. Nothing too fancy, as Indian women are always pressed for time and need something uncomplicated. Creating a section of hair in the front and clipping it neatly to either side will create a perfect frame for your face. A tight, low pony will give an elegant, professional yet preppy look that goes with every outfit. Braids are also going to be hot this season.

Rachana Nakra

L12 COVER

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LOUNGE

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MUTED METALLICS

Bling is still in but it’s now understated. Turn heads in copper, silver or gold, but keep it muted. Copper­sequinned sheeted dress, Namrata Joshipura, `16,950; Sunset Boulevard pomme d’amour clutch, Louis Vuitton, `44,500; dull gold bangles, Jade, `490 each; crystal earrings in silver and zircon, House of Nilaya, `12,000.

COVER L13

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NEW MINIMALISM Make a statement with minimalism. A small detail, such as gathers on the dress, will add to the look. Black silk crêpe soft drape dress, Gucci, `73,500.

MAKE­UP DIARIES Looking for smokey eyes and natural lip colour? Copy the looks with these tips

M

ake­up artist Sonic Sarwate of MAC, Mumbai, hydrated model Liza Golden’s skin with Fix+ and used a bit of Select Coverup concealer on it. He set the make­up with Select Sheer loose powder. He gave the classic eyeliner an unexpected twist to make it more futuristic and modern. For this striking look, he used Blacktrack Fluidline gel eyeliner and put some Carbon eyeshadow on it to define and intensify the look. He then added lots of Opulash mascara to the lashes. The cheeks were left bare and Brave lipstick was used to enhance her natural lip colour. Later, the look was changed slightly by adding Mocha blush to give Golden’s cheeks a healthy flush of colour. He used Fig1 eyeshadow to smudge and give the eyes a smokey look. Smolder Eye kohl was used on the lower lash and Fig1 was added to smudge the kohl. The upper lash was topped with All That Glitters for the glamorous shine and the lips with lots of Clear Lipglass. The eyes were made smokey and dramatic later with Blackground paint pot used as base.

Blacktied eyeshadow was used to intensify the colour and the lashes were topped with Zoomlash mascara.

Rachana Nakra

L12 COVER

LOUNGE

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUTED METALLICS

Bling is still in but it’s now understated. Turn heads in copper, silver or gold, but keep it muted. Copper­sequinned sheeted dress, Namrata Joshipura, `16,950; Sunset Boulevard pomme d’amour clutch, Louis Vuitton, `44,500; dull gold bangles, Jade, `490 each; crystal earrings in silver and zircon, House of Nilaya, `12,000.

COVER L13

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

NEW MINIMALISM Make a statement with minimalism. A small detail, such as gathers on the dress, will add to the look. Black silk crêpe soft drape dress, Gucci, `73,500.

MAKE­UP DIARIES Looking for smokey eyes and natural lip colour? Copy the looks with these tips

M

ake­up artist Sonic Sarwate of MAC, Mumbai, hydrated model Liza Golden’s skin with Fix+ and used a bit of Select Coverup concealer on it. He set the make­up with Select Sheer loose powder. He gave the classic eyeliner an unexpected twist to make it more futuristic and modern. For this striking look, he used Blacktrack Fluidline gel eyeliner and put some Carbon eyeshadow on it to define and intensify the look. He then added lots of Opulash mascara to the lashes. The cheeks were left bare and Brave lipstick was used to enhance her natural lip colour. Later, the look was changed slightly by adding Mocha blush to give Golden’s cheeks a healthy flush of colour. He used Fig1 eyeshadow to smudge and give the eyes a smokey look. Smolder Eye kohl was used on the lower lash and Fig1 was added to smudge the kohl. The upper lash was topped with All That Glitters for the glamorous shine and the lips with lots of Clear Lipglass. The eyes were made smokey and dramatic later with Blackground paint pot used as base.

Blacktied eyeshadow was used to intensify the colour and the lashes were topped with Zoomlash mascara.

Rachana Nakra

L14 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

STRAIGHT LACED

The delicate look dominates and it isn’t just about black lace any more. Short and sweet dresses or long and sexy gowns, try lace in nude and pastels this season.

Nude lace dress, Ayesha Depala, approx. `48,400; Dynasty triple cluster necklace, Mawi, Ozel, `28,500.

LOUNGE

COVER L15

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

GORGEOUS GOURMAND

Look fashionable in rich hues of red wine and chocolate. Wine­coloured dress with drawstring on the neckline and back, James Ferreira, `9,500; bronze pumps, Nandita Basu, `2,000; crystal and metal cuffs, House of Nilaya, `5,000 onwards.

SHOPPING GUIDE u Ayesha Depala: Soon to be launched in India. For details, email info@ayeshadepala.com u Christian Dior: Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. u Gucci: The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; The Oberoi, Dr Zakir Hussain Marg, and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. u House of Nilaya: Neha Agarwal, call 9820036474. u Jade: Kemps Corner, Mumbai. u James Ferreira: D­Studio, 47­G, Khotachiwadi, Girgaum, Mumbai. u Just Cavalli: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. u Louis Vuitton: UB City mall, Bangalore; Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, and The Oberoi, Dr Zakir Hussain Marg, New Delhi. u Mawi: Ozel, M7, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi.

PHOTOGRAPHER AVINASH GOWARIKER MODEL LIZA GOLDEN/ANIMA CREATIVE MANAGEMENT ASSISTED BY RACHANA NAKRA/MINT AND ANUSHKA RAJAN MAKE­UP SONIC SARWATE, MAC HAIR HARSHIDA BAVKAR AND CHETAN RASANIA, JEAN­CLAUDE BIGUINE

u Namrata Joshipura: D7, Khar Danda Road, Mumbai; and The Crescent at Qutab, Lado Sarai, New Delhi. u Nandita Basu: G7, The Crescent at Qutab, Lado Sarai, New Delhi. u Nitya Bajaj: Chamomile, 14th Road, Khar (West), Mumbai. u Varun Bahl: Ensemble, Fort, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Play

LOUNGE

SPORTS

Punjab’s champion farmer One man’s resolve to turn his children and grandchildren into athletes has produced three Olympians; two more are in line

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

···························· hen Olympian Harwant Kaur was five years old, she witnessed a curious sequence of events. Her grandfather Sardar Dalip Singh, an imposing man who had just returned after working for five years with the Indian Navy, was flattening out part of their 150-acre farm in a village called Sabhra bordering Pakistan, 65km from Amritsar.

She saw him level the ground in the large clearing, helped by his three sons, and sow grass that they then carefully cut to form a flawless carpet. Then they used white chalk to make circular lanes. At the back of the house, adjacent to this track, Singh and his sons were simultaneously working on building a large shed with a tin roof, and filling it with strange rods and discs.

In a few months, when the construction was complete, Harwant saw her aunt, Singh’s daughter Gurmeet Kaur, training on the tracks, lifting weights, throwing large discs and balls, and even a huge stick that sailed surprisingly far through the air.

“Gurmeet still holds the national record for the javelin throw, which she set in 2000,” Harwant, now 30, says smiling.

“Watching her train with my grandfather every morning while the rest of the family were out doing their daily chores on the farm was so thrilling! I wanted desperately to join her.

So when my grandfather woke me up at 5 one morning and asked me to join him, it was the most exciting day of my life.”

Harwant was six then.

Singh was turning his farm into a factory for athletes,

W

We are family: Patwant and brother Kuldev warm up at NSNIS in Patiala; and Harwant (right) is aiming for a medal at the Commonwealth Games.

:

culled from his own family, and building the necessary infrastructure himself.

Sitting outside her hostel at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports (NSNIS) in Patiala a month before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Harwant, India’s top qualifier in discus throw for the Delhi event, recalls in detail how different and strange her world was compared with that of other girls in the village.

“My grandfather had seen the world when he was in the navy and he loved sports,” says Harwant. “I think he felt really trapped by the village and its social beliefs.”

Within the village, there was stiff opposition to Singh’s initiatives. Relatives and neighbours joined forces to criticize the former navy physical trainer, and ask him to stop.

“But he was totally focused on us,” Harwant says. “He knew that women have no real future in these villages. So he ignored all those people who taunted him and told him he was turning the women in the house into men.”

Singh, who played a variety of sports in school but had to stop after a back injury, could not

He knew that women have no real future in these villages.

So he ignored all those people who taunted him

train his sons because they were too old by the time he finished his stint with the navy. There was another reason for his focus on the women of his family. “Men get everything anyway, he used to tell us,” says Harwant. “They also inherit all the land. The women have nothing.”

In 1992, when Harwant was 12, she won her first gold medal at a national-level school competition in Delhi. By 1994, Harwant was training not just with her aunt Gurmeet, but also with her brother Kuldev, sister Patwant, and her cousin Rajwinder, who came from a distant village to stay and train under Singh. As the number of trainees grew, so did the criticism, which sometimes turned into threats.

“We even thought that our grandfather was wrong if so many

people were against him,” Harwant says. “We told each other that maybe we should not practise. It was tiresome anyway, waking up at 5 every morning, practising for hours, and then going to school. Then practise immediately after returning from school, then homework, eat and sleep.”

Singh, of course, would have none of it, and by 1999, Harwant was winning medals at international junior competitions; a year later Gurmeet was making her way to the Sydney Olympics after breaking the national record in javelin, and Rajwinder was dominating 400m races at the junior national level.

In 2004, both Harwant and Rajwinder were part of the Indian athletics squad for the Athens Olympics. That’s three Olympians from one farm in a nondescript village in Punjab.

“Now I thank God I wasn’t allowed to give up,” says Harwant, “because most girls in my village got married early and have never been out of the village. I’ve seen the world, and no one can order me around.”

At 5.30pm, Harwant is joined on the practice track at NSNIS by her siblings, who are all part of the national athletics camp. The trio warms up, catching up on the day’s conver-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

sation, before heading off to separate parts of the field for individual training. Patwant works on her stretching. Kuldev does allout sprints. Harwant is in the thrower’s circle, holding her starting position, and waiting for the right moment—before spinning swiftly on her toes, and channelling the force of her entire body into her throwing arm to hurl the discus with a heavy grunt.

Just a week earlier, at the InterState Athletics Meet in Patiala on 8 August, the three had walked up to the podium in the space of a few minutes. Harwant and Kuldev won gold in discus and 400m hurdles respectively, and Patwant won silver in shot-put. Harwant’s 60.66m throw was enough to put her on top of her field in India for the Commonwealth Games.

Kuldev and Patwant both missed qualifying by one spot. Rajwinder will join Harwant at the Games, though, as part of the women’s 4x400m relay team that also won silver at the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games.

Kuldev and Patwant have already turned their focus to the 2012 Olympics, trying to ensure that two more of Singh’s family become Olympians.

“This time we have promised ourselves that we will come back with medals,” Kuldev says.

“People in our village still don’t understand the worth of what our grandfather did. An Olympic medal is the only way to change that.”

Kuldev tells us that Singh also turned to organic farming in the early 1990s, and their farm still continues that practice. “We had the best diet in the world.

Everything was from the farm, everything was organic,” says Kuldev. “We still get loads of seasonal fruits from the farm to Patiala.”

Kuldev also remembers Singh’s improvised desi training methods.

“Any farm implement that could be used for training was used,” he says. “We would run with trolleys filled with wood to build strength and stamina. We would throw logs of different weights over a 20ft wall to build strength. Sometimes we had to do it 400 times a day.”

But behind the story of emancipation and athletic excellence, Patwant also remembers the hardships, and the long whip Singh used to keep his trainees in line.

“Most of my childhood, I was hurt, angry and scared,” Patwant says. “My grandfather was a hard man, and everyone, including his whole family, was scared of him.

If he decided to do something, you could not oppose him.”

Singh’s recipe for realizing the Olympic dream called for an iron will, and sacrifices that his grandchildren felt were unfair and harsh. This included a complete ban on attending functions, holidays, weddings or festivals—so the training schedule could go on undisturbed.

“How do you think we felt as children?” asks Patwant. “I didn’t like sports at all because it was all too hard. But when he died three years ago, something snapped in me. I finally felt the drive to be a sportsman. To follow his dream.”

Kuldev and Patwant’s dream will have to wait. For the moment, they will focus their energies on cheering and supporting Harwant and Rajwinder at the Commonwealth Games.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Travel

LOUNGE DETOURS

Q&A | KEVIN BRAUCH

SALIL TRIPATHI

The looking glass

Street smart in Vietnam THINKSTOCK

The streets around Hanoi’s Ho Hoan Kiem lake reveal much about the city and its past

S

aigon is rough and fast-paced, but Hanoi, I was warned, would be slow. The businessman who sat next to me in the airplane taking me north said this, indicating his disapproval. For him, time was money; the flight had sat on the tarmac for an hour, and he was getting restless. Saigon is the city of business, he told me. Hanoi is for politicians and bureaucrats.

Hanoi was slow-paced all right, but it didn’t seem to matter. All roads led to Ho Hoan Kiem, the lake at the centre of the city where all roads lead, and the quaint geometry surrounding it, of 36 streets, each named after a particular craft. There, long houses stretched like slim green beans lain neatly around the lake.

The lake is calming: Trees provide the shade to the benches facing the water, where lovers sit in the evenings, admiring the timeless view. As I walked along the lake, looking for those streets, I felt a strange sense of tranquillity, with the breeze mild, the trees swaying lightly, and the evening sun pouring yellow light on the lake’s shimmering surface.

There was always a sense of randomness about the number 36, for some said there are as many as 70 such streets, and others said some streets, such as the one named after cotton, had no shops left where you could buy cotton.

Trades congregate in specific areas in many cities around the world, and it is not unusual to find rows upon rows of shops selling identical wares. I remember the roads near Taksim Square in Istanbul, leading up from the

B Y F ATIMA B HUTTO ···························· arachi is my city, allow me to show you around? We have four days. But first, a caveat: There are many Karachis. There is the international Karachi, its narrative performed by states and corporate news channels that tells the tale of a city lost in fear and suffering. There is the Karachi of the well-heeled, an elite that transformed the city of their youth into a metropolis of luxury shopping, Hummers and Frenchfusion cooking. There is the Karachi of millions, the poor and disenfranchised for whom water and electricity are scarce, whose homes are dispossessed by the monsoon. They are all true, they all exist in this bustling monster of a city with a population of somewhere between 14 and 18

K

He travels the world sampling the finest spirits, wines and beers. But what he savours more are the stories that go with them B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

························································ hose of you who have seen the television series, The Thirsty Traveler, are likely to have said to yourself, “That guy has the best job in the world!” The show’s Canadian host Kevin Brauch will agree, having travelled around the world sampling the finest spirits, wines and beers.

Starting 6 November, Indian viewers can see Brauch globe-sipping on the lifestyle channel TLC in new episodes of The Thirsty Traveler.

We caught up with the beverage connoisseur in Delhi over what he calls an essentially Indian cocktail: vodka garnished with green chilli and served in a glass rimmed with red chilli powder. Edited excerpts:

T

Languid: A footbridge over Ho Hoan Kiem lake in Vietnam’s capital city Hanoi.

Bosphorus with dozens of shops selling mannequins. London has its Ironmonger Lane, which is now renowned for Harry’s Bar. Mumbai has its Lohar Chawl.

Some areas continue those trades, but many streets turn out in different attires, while retaining old names and links to the past.

For cities get gentrified— sometimes over generations, sometimes within a decade.

Trades that cannot afford increasing rents move away from the centre to the periphery and beyond.

Walk through those streets, and you can see a town and its community emerge, of how its geography was shaped by economic needs, the names drawn from craft guilds. The old and the new coexist. Street vendors sell Coke, but an older craft—of twisting and turning Coke cans to manipulate them into fascinating toys, including motorcycles, airplanes, even cycles—survives. Pirated editions of Graham Greene’s novel set in Vietnam, The Quiet American, are available at virtually every newsvendor. Lanterns abound, as do old men in conical hats, and women in ao dai.

The streets are clean, and the steam from the stalls selling pho, the Vietnamese soup, makes the lanterns look hazy, the image losing its sharpness, turning painterly. When it rains, as it did the following afternoon, the sound of running water and the rhythm of the pitter-patter become a

gentle backdrop to the street, interrupting the set beat of metal being beaten in the shops where old men continue to practise old trades. Water dripped from the awnings of the shops, and the temperature fell.

Some streets retained their homogeneity: the one with precious stones had dozens of shops selling stones of amazing colours. I had tea at a stall, and requested the shop’s owner if I could look inside the long house.

He let me in. The house was like a long passageway, with rooms on one side, and in the past, each room would have a workshop and home, where workers would toil making clothes, polish stones, beat iron, mould clay, or paint fabric.

Each craft was self-contained, travelling from one generation to the next, but always within the community. It showed harmony, but it also showed how hard it would be for someone to break free from the web that intricate pattern of rooms created. The network became a maze of warrens. I thought again how I had pictured them first—as those slim green beans. This was more like a beehive, with busy bees working, the queen bee monitoring everything. Suddenly, the image did not seem quite that pleasant.

At one time, the queen bee here would have been the leader of the Vietnamese revolution, Ho Chi Minh. The bargain the East Asian peasant made when he

supported the revolution was just that: His rice bowl would be full, if he obeyed, and did as he was told.

Uncle Ho lay in state at his mausoleum, where his embalmed body continued to attract visitors.

He had imposed order over chaos, discipline over anarchy. Down in Saigon, the city where people spoke its old name in whispers, there was disorder, but there was energy. In Hanoi, the 36 streets showed harmony, but it seemed ordered.

Human nature challenges imposition. As you came towards the shops facing the lake, a different kind of pattern emerged.

The shops were no longer from those old trades. The names remained, but the goods they sold inside the shops were different.

There were a couple of art galleries, showing bold art that captured the zeitgeist of the new Vietnam. See beyond the obvious, the symbols, and some paintings carried political allegory. Hanoi retained its name and exhibited its patriarch, even as it was flexing its arms to become like Saigon. In the south, Saigon was told it could not call itself Saigon any more. But it had the bustle which the 36 streets wanted, those streets pining for what was not.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

ASIM HAFEEZ/BLOOMBERG

Karachi, the challenge For the first issue of ‘Condé Nast Traveller India’, a bespoke tour of an enigmatic city

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million. There are a myriad Karachis, each of them beautiful and frightening. Nothing is easy here, but if you like your cities challenging, let’s begin.

Karachi’s Gothic architecture meets you from the corners of the city. Look behind the Bata Shoe signs and the Pizza Hut hoardings in Saddar, Karachi’s central business area, and you’ll find collapsing sandstone facades. Lose yourself in the maze of electronics stores, textile and garment bazaars covered from the heat of the midday sun, money traders, real estate agents and stalls selling antiques and car parts. The Hindu Gymkhana, an elite club built in the Mughal Revivalist style, now houses an arts school. At Empress Market—an uncovered equivalent of Mumbai’s Crawford Market—named after the dour then Empress Victoria, you can bargain over mounds of spices, buy an exotic pet smuggled into the country, or visit the butchers (suspiciously close to the illegal pet section). These are all Saddar’s architectural feasts. And drop into Liberty Books to pick up K’architecture, a great new coffee-

Hidden cities: There isn’t a monolithic Karachi. table book on Karachi’s beautiful but neglected buildings.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s house is nearby—just get a rickshaw.

Spend the afternoon watching the building and people. You’ll pass tourists gingerly snapping pictures, Karachites going about their daily business, newspaper hawkers and families out for a jaunt.

Bypass the Karachi Zoo, and visit the Gandhi Gardens for a stroll instead. There’s something romantic about the wild jasmine that grows unchecked while hordes of families line up to visit the vast (and depressing) zoo.

You’re tired: It’s nighttime, and you’ve only just arrived. But don’t turn in just yet—Bar-B-Q Tonight awaits. This Main Clifton restaurant started 20 years ago as a bunch of plastic chairs and tables

on a pavement at the end of Karachi’s Boat Basin food street, set up by two brothers who came newly to this city by the sea. So good was the fare—the fish tikkas so fresh they melt in your mouth; the Afghan kebabs, succulent legs of lamb, garlic naan and gooey plum chutney so addictive—that BarB-Q Tonight grew into an actual restaurant, with walls and an indoor kitchen to go with their outdoor flame pit.

Fatima Bhutto is a contributing editor to Condé Nast Traveller India and author of Songs of Blood and Sword. This is an extract from a story that appears in the magazine’s launch issue, which hits the stands this month.

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What does a drink or spirit say about the culture where it is produced?

It doesn’t necessarily identify a country but it’s a great way to get under the skin of a local culture. Some wines, beers or spirits speak of certain customs and traditions. Some were integral to celebrations and traditional family gatherings. In Canada, for instance, one could take the Molson Canadian or the Labatt Blue and build cultural significance around them as the representative beers of our national phenomena: our obsession with hockey.

In Japan, business is only conducted when business partners have had enough to drink. It is believed that intoxication can bring out the devil in one’s personality. And the sake—a slow, ceremonial drink—fits into this modus operandi.

If you come to India to film, what drink would you profile?

When The Thirsty Traveler comes to India, like we’re planning to soon, we’d have to make it a 1-hour special (laughs). It would be impossible to pick a single drink but I’d say feni, palm-wine and definitely Kingfisher!

What about Old Monk?

Haven’t tried it yet but The Thirsty Traveler is about trying new things. So Old Monk may be the next one.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

High five: Brauch has sampled spirits in around 60 countries so far.

You say you’re fascinated by the stories that surround drinking cultures around the world. Tell us one.

This one’s universal: the etymology of “Cheers”! According to one theory, the Vikings used to clink their pewter vessels against each others’ as if to slosh poison from one vessel to another.

The “clinking” ritual was a gesture to prove the safety of the drink; that they hadn’t poisoned their rival’s drink. In time, the tradition changed and has now come to be performed amongst trusted companions.

What about the various rituals involved in drinking?

Oh, those aren’t confined to lost tribal communities. In Korea, it is considered improper to have an even number of drinks. So on any evening, you’d either have one, three or five. Friends will always pour out soju for each other and you will always accept it with both hands.

Most interestingly, younger women will turn away to sip their drink if they’re in the presence of an older gentleman. It’s a throwback to the times when it wasn’t considered proper for young women to be drinking in public.

What’s been the most bizarre drink featured on the show so far?

There was the snake baijiu from Taiwan. A distilled rice spirit with the glands, testicles and penis from a King Cobra. But my scariest experience was with the chicha—an indigenous drink from Peru made with ground corn, river water and yeast. Traditionally, the brewer spits into the concoction to speed up the fermentation process. It’s an easy home brew with 5-6% alcohol. When a family has chicha they’re ready to sell they stick a bamboo pole with a red flag out of their window.

I was warned beforehand about drinking it...untreated river water and all that. But I believe it’s my duty to sip anything that is presented to me…even if I don’t finish it. The first day we went to film, I had some and quite liked it. The spit didn’t really bother me but the thing is that sometimes the drink is still fermenting while you’re having it. The next day’s brew had this strong acidic bite and I fell deathly sick. I lost about 11 pounds in five days.

What’s your signature cocktail when you’re at home entertaining?

Ah, something I made myself: The Stag’s Head cocktail. It’s a concoction of Jägermeister, rum and Cointreau—it’s sweet and savoury.

You must suffer from a lot of hangovers. What’s your secret?

Denial. End of story! Failing that—a morning run, espresso and sunglasses.

The Thirsty Traveler will air on TLC from 6 November, every Saturday, at 11.30pm.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Books

LOUNGE BRENNAN LINSLEY/AP

Battle weary: Woodward’s narrative of the Afghan war is all facts and num­ bers, with little analysis.

OBAMA’S WARS | BOB WOODWARD

Backstage drama Policy infighting over the Afghan war: Who dissed whom? And who cares?

B Y M AX B OOT ···························· bama’s Wars, Bob Woodward’s latest epic of insiderdom, quotes US national security adviser James Jones telling his deputy, Tom Donilon, that he had made a mistake—“he had never gone to Afghanistan or Iraq, or really left the office for a serious field trip. As a result, he said, you have no direct understanding of those places... The White House, Situation Room, interagency byplay, as important as they are, are not everything.”

Good advice. Too bad Woodward hasn’t followed it himself.

While chronicling the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy, Woodward apparently visited

O

Afghanistan only once, travelling with Jones. His description of the trip is inadvertently hilarious and revealing. He recounts flying “into the heart of the Taliban insurgency in Helmand province”. Here, he proclaims, “was the war without the filter of a Situation Room briefing. The cool evening air hit my face as the plane’s rear loading ramp was lowered... All that was missing was the haunting and elegiac theme music from Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon.” The experience, he continues, is “exhilarating and frightening”. The camp is “supposedly safe from sniper and mortar fire”, but when he makes a midnight head call, he is decidedly nervous, “anticipating a random shot”.

You would think that Battlefield Bob had bivouacked in a foxhole a few hundred yards from an enemy position. Actually he is in Camp Leatherneck, a giant Marine base (1,500 acres housing 10,000 personnel) in the middle of nowhere. The greatest danger at Leatherneck is overeating in

Obama’s Wars: Simon & Schuster, 441 pages, $30 (around `1,350). the chow hall. That Woodward makes it seem like a frontline position is indicative of how far removed he is from the war.

To read Obama’s Wars is to feel trapped in a day-long meeting in an airless room. That’s because much of the book consists of a near-verbatim account of meetings—specifically the National Security Council meet-

No laptops, no Wi­Fi and no couches—a globe­trotting coffee­shop snob’s pick of the lot B Y M ALCOLM G LADWELL The Wall Street Journal

···························· he problem with writing in coffee shops is that everyone hates the kind of people who write in coffee shops—especially the kind of people who write in coffee shops. You see the guy in the corner hunched over his laptop and you think (forgetting, for the moment, that you are also hunched over a laptop): “For chrissake, get an office.” As someone who writes in coffee shops for a living, I have wrestled with this paradox for much of my adult life.

The coffee-shop writer needs to be, as the sociologists would say, an outlier and not a pioneer. You don’t want to be the laptop cowboy who signals to other laptop cowboys that this is the place to be. You want the club that won’t have you as a member. Extreme case in point, the quite delightful Grumpy Coffee on West 20th Street in Manhattan, which bans

T

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

CLARA TUMA/WSJ

That jerk? C’est moi laptops. To write there, you have to print out and use a pen, two radical moves that automatically exclude anyone under the age of 30 (I have seen hipsters, lugging their 7-pound PowerBooks and 12ft extension cords, look at the no-laptop sign at the counter and let out a low, uncomprehending moan—whoa—the way they did when they heard they were waitlisted at Bard).

The token looks for the coffee shop that is other: no comfy chairs, no Wi-Fi, no outlets, and coffee so ridiculously expensive that it functions as a tax on lingering. A good example: La Stanza on the Bleicherweg in Zurich, which I stumbled across this past spring. Simple, highceilinged room; long counter, small wooden tables, brusque white-shirted waiters, no food except for tiny, perfect, toasted pastries filled with sweet cream.

(Yum!) The clientele largely consists of shady-looking types in pinstripes from any one of the area’s dozens of private banks. I recommend the table in the far corner. Do not be tempted by the cafés of allegedly hip Zurich West, which is hip only by virtue of its proximity to Zurich.

On to London. Here, I believe, the key is to embrace the cliché.

ings last fall where the administration hashed out its Afghanistan policy. As we know, the US President ultimately decided to send 30,000 additional troops while pledging to start pulling them out in the summer of 2011.

This decision was a compromise between Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who wanted 40,000 reinforcements to pursue a classic counterinsurgency strategy, and sceptics led by vice-president Joe Biden, who proposed a smaller troop figure (20,000) focused on a narrow mission of hunting down terrorists. The contours of the internal debate have long been known; what Woodward does is fill in details about who said what at which meeting.

He probably deserves credit for getting his hands on what appear to be minutes of those sessions—although by now one supposes that all such documents are routinely cc’d to this Washington institution, Mr Behind-the-Scenes. As usual, the reader has to take on faith that his reporting is accurate, because the sourcing is so vague (“background interviews” with “firsthand sources”). Faith is strained when Woodward, like a novelist, tells us what various people were thinking (“McConnell worried that the temptation of covert action might entrance Obama”). But even assuming that his “revelations” are largely accurate, it is hard to know what they amount to.

Woodward tosses out facts seemingly at random, with no context or analysis. At one point he recounts a dinner conversation in a Georgetown restaurant between Gen. David Petraeus and Richard Holbrooke. Suddenly they are interrupted by White House reporter Helen Thomas, who demands, with her usual subtlety: “What the hell are you doing in Afghanistan?... This is Vietnam all over again.” Gen. Petraeus tries to explain, but Thomas “didn’t feel reassured”.

The book then moves on, leaving us to puzzle out why this encounter was included. Does Woodward transcribe everything in his notebook? Or are we supposed to be disquieted by the fact that

Helen Thomas thinks Afghanistan is another Vietnam? No one familiar with her wacky views could possibly take anything she says seriously. Yet Woodward presents her opinion deadpan, as if she were a sage worth quoting.

He does this, it must be said, with pretty much everyone else who wanders across his narrative. Thus we hear charges and countercharges with no attempt to sort them out. This is particularly noxious when Woodward uncritically quotes Obama’s aides complaining that the military is “boxing in” the President by not presenting him with serious alternatives to the war plan devised by Gen. McChrsytal.

In fact, as Woodward elsewhere makes clear, the deputy chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. James Cartwright, did cooperate with Biden’s office to present an alternative—a small troop increase with most of the forces concentrating on a counterterrorist mission. The reason this plan didn’t get the endorsement of senior Pentagon officials, or Obama himself, is that it wasn’t realistic: A handful of commandos couldn’t stop the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan. Woodward quotes Gen. Petraeus making this point, and he quotes Biden disputing it, but mostly he is concerned with the rivalry among these power players: Who dissed whom? To which one might respond: Who cares?

Obama’s Wars would matter more if it changed one’s view of the President. But it doesn’t.

Woodward shows a cold, calculating President overseeing a sometimes chaotic policy process and, by including a deadline for withdrawal, pandering to his base. But, unlike Biden, Obama realizes that he “owned” the war and had “to get Afghanistan and Pakistan right”. Thus he came to endorse the McChrystal strategy.

It is too soon to know whether this decision will be judged wise. That will depend on the outcome of the war itself. And that, in turn, will be determined by a lot of factors, including the views of Afghans, which are absent from Woodward’s hermetically sealed narrative.

WRITERS’ CAFÉ Non­laptoppy cafés around the world New York Café Grumpy, 224 W 20th St Zurich La Stanza, Bleucherweg 10 London Fernandez and Wells, 73 Beak St Paris Chez Prune, 36 Rue Beaurepaire Toronto Swan Restaurant, 892 Queen St W Quiet corner: La Stanza in Zurich is designed to discourage the lingerer, and the coffee­shop writer.

That thing that is vaguely annoying about, say, Notting Hill—the over-representation of tightsuited, Oxbridgy, slow-food eating creative consultants in need of a haircut—ought to be the coffeeshop writer’s natural habitat. I suggest Fernandez and Wells on Beak Street in Soho, a charming narrow room with wide-plank floors and surprisingly good espresso. Crouch down on one of the uncomfortable stools in the window, squashed in next to someone dreaming of pitching the Body Shop account. You will be the only person on a laptop, I

promise. No one’s done any work in this part of London since the Thatcher years.

What of Paris? There are, famously, Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore on the Left Bank.

Very early on, while my café philosophy was still a work in progress, I will admit to having written there—amid the sea of Vassar girls with their Gitane cigarettes and their Thomas Mann. Then I came to my senses and moved on to the much more congenial Chez Prune, just off the Canal Saint Martin in the 10th Arrondisement—only to find a sea of Vassar

girls with their Gitane cigarettes and their Thomas Mann. How many Vassar girls are there anyway? My advice: Write in your hotel room.

One more: Toronto! High-end espresso has come to Toronto with a vengeance recently. I like to sit in one of the back booths in the Swan Restaurant on Queen Street West, after the lunch crowd has left, and order the delicious bread pudding. Due to some quirk of the acoustics in the Swan, the eavesdropping is exceptional—although it usually involves some member of the

avant garde bemoaning the cancellation of her government arts grant. Best not to bring too flashy a laptop here or, if you do, put a giant, red maple leaf on the front and tell everyone it was paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. Better still, don’t come at all! If I’m working there, the last thing I want is to see you hunched, pathetically, over your computer. For chrissake, get an office.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of The Tipping Point and Blink.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE MASQUE OF AFRICA | VS NAIPAUL

The harsh eyes of an ageing giant MIKE HUTCHINGS/REUTERS

Powerful in parts, Naipaul’s account of his travels in Africa reiterates his old, negative ideas about the continent B Y S ANJAY S IPAHIMALANI ···························· frica has no future.” That is how V.S. Naipaul ended a 1979 interview with Elizabeth Hardwick in The New York Times Book Review. This was just after the appearance of A Bend in the River, his novel set in Africa—a continent to which he wasn’t a stranger, having lived in Uganda as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in 1966. Then again, he visited the Ivory Coast in the early 1980s, the fruit of which was the nonfiction account, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. It’s here that one finds the first glimmer of the theme that runs through his new work, The Masque of Africa.

Despite his bleak pronouncements on the continent, Naipaul clearly feels impelled to return every so often; this journey may well be his last.

He revisits Uganda and the Ivory Coast, and travels to Ghana, Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa, seeking what remains of primordial African belief: “the older world of magic”, and how it has changed, or not, with the advent of Christianity, Islam and the “modern” way of doing things. He seeks out the grass-thatched palaces of Africa’s original rulers, visits shrines and other reliquaries, meets soothsayers, shamans and witch doctors, and speaks to those whose lives have been altered by initiation rites. He finds common themes: “Doubles, astral journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest.”

For Naipaul, clear-sightedness has always been the writer’s supreme virtue. Here, however, his view of things is coloured by the past. At the book’s start, he recalls visiting a British-laid botanical garden at the edge of Lake Victoria and adds: “Sometimes (a reminder of the wildness by which we were surrounded, but from which we were protected) the ground of the Garden was flooded in parts by water from the Lake seeping through.” This, then, could be a metaphor for what follows: fear

A

The Masque of Africa: Picador, 324 pages, `595.

CHRIS ISON­PA/AP

of intrinsic chaos overcoming external order.

He sees dirt and garbage everywhere. On a single page, describing his arrival at Kano, a city to the north of Nigeria, one comes across the words “dust” and “dirt” twice, and “garbage” thrice. The word “garbage” appears thrice on the very next page itself. In addition, he makes much of the supposed African tendency to eat dogs and cats, as well as much of their wildlife.

That some of the heartless methods of disposing of felines appear to be the merest hearsay doesn’t seem to bother him.

Time and again he obsesses over the amount of money he will have to spend on guides, interpreters, witch doctors and the like—although this obsession does yield a fresh insight on one occasion: “…it is strange that rituals which would once have seemed necessary and vital, serving what was divine, beyond money, have to be disregarded when there is no money.”

There are powerful passages, such as the description of an initiation at Libreville, and his marshalling of detail is as acute. Not everyone, for example, would be able to describe a soothsayer’s

No magic: Naipaul (left) is unimpressed with modern­day South Africa (above) and its neighbours in his latest trip to the continent.

attire as a “white gown that came out grey in a wash from the local water”. Equally, though, there are other times when his precision and command of the language seem to falter, such as when the local legend of an Ivory Coast chieftain’s rise to power is repeated twice for no reason, or when Unilever is quaintly referred to as “the multinational firm of Lever’s” and then, just a few pages later, as “the international firm of Lever’s”.

In the closing section, on

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

MAN­MADE MANEATERS

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harpen your knives, file your teeth, tuck into cannibalism.

It is not that Hollywood thrillers about zombies, mutants and assorted cannibals have become predictably common. It is not just that pulp fiction about cannibals or “fact books” such as Nigel Blundell’s fresh-from-the-press Serial Killers: Butchers and Cannibals have exploded in recent months. There are actually at least three new academic studies of cannibalism in the market right now: Catalin Avramescu and Alistair Ian Blyth’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly’s Eat Thy Neighbour: A History of Cannibalism, and Nathan Constantine’s A History of Cannibalism: From Ancient Cultures to Survival Stories & Modern Psychopaths.

Cannibalism is in. There is no

doubt that it has always haunted the European discourse of identity and difference. To construct the non-European as non-European was often to imply that he was a potential or actual cannibal. Whether or not cannibalism existed in the recent past, we do know that many supposedly “cannibalistic” sights reported by European explorers in Africa and Australia were mistaken readings of complex funerary rites. As Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen point out in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, whatever the actual fact of humans eating humans, the European discourse of cannibalism in the non-European world was in gross excess of the evidence.

A paradigmatic case, as they illustrate, is the account of Diego Alvarez Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his

Continental fare: Cannibalism has always fascinated Europeans. second voyage to the Caribbean.

On 4 November 1493, according to Chanca’s account, a captain went ashore and found a hastily abandoned village in which a house contained “four or five bones of the arms and legs of men”. From this Chanca concluded that the Caribbean island was inhabited by cannibals. This account was circulated as an eyewitness account in Europe, but—as Hulme notes—it was not. It was a report of something

purportedly reported to Chanca, and a culturally mediated conclusion based on no objective evidence.

But a few years later, in the influential account of Peter Martyr, who never even went to the Caribbean, Chanca’s account had been embellished with skewered human flesh, boiling pots and a dripping head. The myth continued to grow, and to some extent continues to grow. Even today, it is common to come across

South Africa, he says, “I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder.” As before, he’s disappointed. Here, “race ran as deep as religion elsewhere”: hardly a new observation. Here too he segues into a brief account of Gandhi’s doings in South Africa, which seem out of place as they have no connection to the stated theme of the book.

“popular” books that regurgitate such accounts with little or no introspection and contextualization.

If the splurge of popular accounts of cannibalism still carries this taint of colonialism, at least the better academic studies try and engage with its gaps and silences. Cannibalism, it appears, allowed Europeans to construct others in certain ways and justify their conquest, conversion, enslavement, among other things. There is no doubt about that. But cannibalism—even in early texts, such as those by Jean de Léry and Montaigne or in Melville’s great 19th century novel, Moby Dick—was also an engagement with essentially European matters. It was used, as it is by Melville, to criticize the selfishness and gluttony of “civilized” people; it was used, as it is in a story by Mark Twain, to criticize American politics; it was used, implicitly in Karl Marx, to criticize capitalism.

One is less certain of the uses to which cannibalism is being put in recent fiction and films.

Has it become just entertainment in a postmodern world of play? Or does it

Throughout, Naipaul is frank about his limitations because of the age at which he is travelling (at one time, his legs give way while venturing to a witch-doctor’s village; a wheelbarrow appears as a vehicle, and this, understandably, does not suffice). While one can admire such intrepidity, there are other statements that shock: “It was hard to arrive at a human understanding of the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.” Pronouncements such as these remind one of Vivian Gornick’s observation that though much of his writing is strong and original, “the lack of tenderness wears on the nerves”.

It is this absence of empathy, in the end, that creates a distance between him and his material.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS The dirt and garbage of Africa

address some deep anxieties about our cultures of waste, excessive consumption and xenophobia? One is tempted to say, as some critics do, that cannibalism continues to fascinate the “European” mind.

Tempted, but one refrains, if one is Indian and remembers that even in our epics cannibalism is sometimes attributed to our internal “villains” too—starting with the post-Vedic asuras.

Light on jihad Maulana Yahya Nomani’s The Truth about Jihad (translated by Yoginder Sikand and just published) seeks to address popular misconceptions regarding the concept of jihad.

This necessary book by a major Islamic scholar argues that the ideology of violence in the name of Islam as articulated by various terrorist groups is a crass misinterpretation of the Islamic scriptures.

Tabish Khair is an Indian writer based in Denmark. His latest novel is The Thing about Thugs.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010

Culture

LOUNGE Futuristic: Futuristic: Pre­production required more time and planning in Endhiran.

Endhiran.

FILM

How to clone a superstar What went into making the `60 crore Rajinikanth lookalike in India’s most expensive film yet

Octoberfest

Sanjay Gupta’s earlier films. Sanjay Dutt plays the lead role, with Irrfan Khan and Kangna Ranaut in important roles. Ranaut and Khan sport looks that are different from those of all their earlier films and from the first look, it appears that Dutt plays pretty much the same brawny, no­brainer roles in which his physical power is shown to be a foil to the innate goodness of the character. Expect big blow­ups and chase sequences. It’s not for action buffs who can’t help but compare Bollywood action with the best of Hollywood.

Releases on 15 October.

We help you choose from the nine movies that release this month

I B Y N IRANJANA R AMESH niranjana@livemint.com

··························· he mega-budget, trilingual, sci-fi Rajinikanthstarrer Endhiran: The Robot was conceived 10 years ago and made over a period of three years. This comes as no surprise to those familiar with Tamil cinema director S. Shankar, who is known for his preoccupation with awe-inspiring technology and the time he takes to film movies.

But here is the deal with Endhiran—it is not loaded with futuristic sets that take ages to make, or with complex visual acrobatics. All the `60 crore worth of special effects (out of a total budget of `162 crore) have been lavished on one character—the robot, a clone of the superstar.

The challenge here was to build a robot that was a replica of Rajinikanth and have it act right next to him. “The scientist and his robot appear together frame to frame, but the robot has to keep becoming more and more human as the movie progresses,” explains V. Srinivas M. Mohan, visual effects supervisor for Endhiran—the man behind the cloning of Rajinikanth.

Half the time taken to make the movie was spent on just pre-production work. The team took a year and a half on just story-boarding—basically, charting out each scene as a picture, as in a comic strip, with camera angles, character positioning, et al.

While this saves artists time during shooting, it requires much more effort on the part of the “backstage” crew during pre-production.

“The essential difference here is that the whole process was done using computer animation, as opposed to hand drawing or still digital art,” says Mohan. “This way, at each scene, we knew exactly where the characters would stand and how the camera would focus on them, even

T

t will be an unusual month at the theatres.

Following ‘Endhiran’ and ‘Anjaana Anjaani’ (which was postponed by a week to avoid coinciding with the Allahabad high court’s verdict on the Ayodhya conflict), nine films will be released in four weeks (the release dates for two films, ‘Ramayana The Epic’ and ‘Dunno Y Na Jaane Kyon’, are not final yet; they may be released next month).

Some of these films have been in the news, some are debut features and some are counting on star value. All of them will be battling at the box office. Here’s what you need to know before buying a `300 ticket.

Rakta Charitra

Magnum opus: Varma’s Rakta Charitra is based on caste­based political rivalry.

Anjaana Anjaani Director Siddharth Anand’s films, including his debut ‘Salaam Namaste’ (2005) and the last ‘Bachna Ae Haseeno’ (2008), tend to be urban love stories with all the trappings of a traditional candyfloss Bollywood romance.

‘Anjaana Anjaani’, produced by Sajid Nadiadwala, looks like a road romance but has been promoted as “the greatest love story between two strangers”. With Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra in the lead, it is bound to attract the young metro crowd. Don’t expect intelligent humour or economy of emotion.

Pitted against the mammoth ‘Endhiran’, it rests largely on star power.

Released on Friday.

Crook ‘Crook: It’s Good to be Bad’, produced by Vishesh Films, has the stamp of a Bhatt camp staple. Director Mohit Suri’s film is set in Australia, and is inspired by racial discrimination and the attacks on Indian students there. The victim here is an Indian girl played by Neha Sharma. The other lead is played by Emraan Hashmi. Unlike most successful films from this banner, the soundtrack of ‘Crook’ has not created a noticeable buzz.

Releases on 8 October.

Do Dooni Chaar There are three firsts in this film—it’s Walt before we began shooting.”

“In Indian cinema, it’s common for the scene to take shape on the spot, evolving with inputs from the artists as well.

But we were producing Endhiran Hollywood-style, right from the blank canvas, quite literally,” he says. This, of course, is in keeping with director Shankar’s fascination with Hollywood and all things American in his movies. Shankar, for instance, borrowed the technique of morphing from Hollywood, turning Kamal Hassan into a bird, a lizard and other reptiles in a song in his 1996

Disney’s entry into the Hindi film market, the director, Habib Faisal, is making his debut and Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh are acting together as a pair after three decades (their last lead couple role was ‘Dhan Daulat’, if you ignore the small appearance together in ‘Love Aaj Kal’). The story is set in Delhi and is about the Duggals, a family of four that runs on the schoolteacher’s salary of the father, played by Kapoor. They dream big and give in to temptations that snowball, landing them in hilarious situations. It has the stamp of a heart­warming comedy.

We know the Kapoor magic, and the old Rishi­Neetu one. The director will make or break it.

Releases on 8 October.

Jhootha hi Sahi After his debut, the successful teenage romcom ‘Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na’ (2008), director Abbas Tyrewala is ready with his second feature film, also a romantic

comedy, set in London. John Abraham plays a lonely, nerdy guy in love with a girl who happens to connect with him on a mistaken telephone call (Pakhi, Tyrewala’s wife, who has also written the story). The music by A.R. Rahman is on air, but is not half as eclectic or brilliant as Rahman soundtracks go.

Abraham’s films have not been successful in a long time, so this is a bit of a gamble.

Releases on 15 October.

Aakrosh Based on the honour killings in north India, ‘Aakrosh’ marks a shift in director Priyadarshan’s oeuvre—a return to the genre of some of his earlier films. With Ajay Devgn, Akshaye Khanna and Bipasha Basu in the lead roles, it is being promoted as a gritty film. But the language is over the top. It is set in Jhanjhar, Bihar, where three students from Delhi University go missing.

The investigation into their whereabouts turns the film into a thriller.

Releases on 15 October.

Alter ego?

John Abraham plays a nerd in Jhootha hi Sahi.

movie Indian. Ditto with the technique of freeze-framing, used in a song sequence in his 2003 movie, Boys.

Mohan says that all the computer graphics (CG) and other special effects used in Endhiran add value to the storyline. “It is very easy to use CG for everything these days, and it’s not realistic enough, especially when we are trying to depict a robot developing human characteristics,” he says. “So we have minimized the use of CG and gone in for Animatronics instead—which is really nothing but the tech-

nique used by Vittalacharya et al in their mythological and supernatural movies of the 1970s.” He is referring to the technique of electronically animating physical lifeless forms, sort of like electronic puppetry. “Developed by Stan Winston in his Hollywood studio, it has been used in bits in movies right from Jurassic Park; we have used it on the robot extensively.”

For the robot, Mohan, Shankar and Rajinikanth packed their bags for Hollywood, where they spent days capturing the actor’s facial texture,

Based on the conspiracy theories surrounding the slaying of Paritala Ravindra, a political leader from Andhra Pradesh, this film, being made in two parts, is directed by Ram Gopal Varma. Caste politics, ugly political rivalry, love, betrayal and a mirror of Telugu society—‘Rakta Charitra’ is an ambitious project with Vivek Oberoi, who plays Ravindra. It is a make­or­break film for the actor. His opponent is played by Surya. The film also has Shatrughan Sinha and Priyamani. The first look is indicative of its grittiness and powerful visuals.

The first part releases on 22 October, the second part will be released in November.

Paan Singh Tomar The biopic of ‘Paan Singh Tomar’, a ‘subedar’ with the Indian Army and a runner who won the national championship medal seven years in a row and then became a ‘thug’ in the Chambal valley in Madhya Pradesh, is directed

by Tigmanshu Dhulia. Paan Singh was notorious for having created havoc in the Chambal valley. Irrfan Khan plays the lead in the film produced by UTV Motion Pictures.

Releases on 22 October.

Hisss

Knock Out

This film has been in the news for around a year. Directed by Jennifer Lynch, this Hollywood production is expected to have a big release in India because of Mallika Sherawat, who plays the lead role—that of a snake woman. It may be ‘Nagin’ redux, wrapped in Hollywood finesse. It is a horror film—and Sherawat’s first home production.

Releases on 22 October.

Mani Shankar’s ‘Knock Out’ is an action thriller reminiscent of

Sanjukta Sharma sanjukta.s@livemint.com

emotions and movements with a patented technique called Doom Lighting also used in Avatar, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the Spiderman series. The face was then digitally affixed on a silicon body hand-sculpted by about 40 artists.

“They’d give Madame Tussauds a run for its money,” Mohan says about his team.

“If only the robot didn’t have to get stripped down to its skeletal circuitry in the movie, the audience couldn’t really figure out the difference between the scientist, Rajini

playing the robot and the silicon robot.”

But why did Rajinikanth have to go to all this trouble?

Why did he have to act like a robot, get into sci-fi, when the stylish stride, the casual flick of a cigarette, the stroking back of the hair on his forehead would have done the trick? “Because he can’t perform all the robot stunts, of course,” Mohan replies. “Who said anything about this being a Rajini movie?”

Endhiran released in theatres on Friday.

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BALLET

Ram’s a charm

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

A relationship with an epic hero’s tale of woe and triumph has endured for over 50 years and is still going strong

N ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

Myth stars: (clockwise from left) A still from last year’s production; the woven reed crown which will be used this year; and a still from the 1957 production.

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

···························· hobha Deepak Singh remembers fidgeting in the wings when the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra put up its first production of Ramlila in 1957.

She was 14 at the time and more taken up by the costumes than anything else. Two years later, Singh—who has trained under Kathak stalwarts Birju Maharaj and Shambhu Maharaj—played a monkey in the Ramayan-inspired ballet’s large ensemble cast.

Today, Singh is the production director of the 54-year-old dance drama that is staged annually by the Kendra. Though the ballet continues to be hosted to coincide with the festival of Dussehra, the institution has made efforts to distinguish it from its folk antecedents. A decade ago, it was renamed Shri Ram and the venue shifted from the Feroz Shah Kotla grounds to the Kendra lawns.

The message was sent out: This was a contemporary dance ballet.

With around 2,000 shows over its historic half-century run, the ballet remains a staple in Delhi’s performing arts calendar. The Kendra, founded by Singh’s mother Sumitra Charat Ram, counts Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Indira Gandhi among its distinguished past audience. This year, the Delhi government has booked the first 10 shows of the season—endowing the Kendra with `1.5 lakh per show—as a cultural showcase for the international delegates at the Commonwealth Games.

The ballet’s history wields a strange power on the preparatory routine of the 550 students of the Kendra. Since its inception, the institution has produced 50 ballets. But the Shri Ram ballet stands in like a lead dancer in a chorus. Every year’s production is given the careful treatment usually accorded to a new project. Casting and rehearsals for the 140-minute dance-drama start in July. The

‘LIVE’ FROM THE RED FORT

SHOBHA DEEPAK SINGH

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SHOBHA DEEPAK SINGH ARCHIVES

logistics are exacting: 70 artists and technicians work for 120 days, some 40 more artisans are involved in the sets, costumes and props, and 200 musicians are involved in the soundtrack recording.

On a visit a couple of weeks before the show opens, the corridors of the Kendra are bustling.

The younger students practise, dressed in churidar-kurtas and light ankle bells, in the corridors.

The senior dancers rehearse for the ballet in a large practice hall. It is the first scene, and eight perfectly coordinated young men, dressed in dancer’s whites, leap aggressively. They swivel mid-air, all the while maintaining eye contact with their audience. They’re dancing the Mayurbhanj Chhau—a martial dance form from Orissa that the Kendra has done much to popularize. The choreographer, Chhau veteran Shashidharan Nair, and Singh sit on a raised platform. They do not communicate verbally with the students. A raised eyebrow here, a hand gesture there, and the students know when they must

retrace their steps.

Later in her office, Singh speaks about the challenge of presenting a popular myth as a ballet year after year, and of straddling a traditional dance idiom with contemporary awareness. In contrast to the traditional Ramlilas staged across the country, the production incorporates digital imagery, an accompanying slide show with English subtitles and updated costumes and sets. This year, the sets are going to be completely minimalist for the first time in the production’s history.

The story presented is based on Valmiki’s and Tulsidas’ version of Ram’s story and, until 10 years ago, the narration was in Awadhi. “In 1957, people understood Awadhi, but it is important to make links with today’s world,” says Singh of the new Hindi dub.

Though photographs taken over the years show a relatively conservative stage ethic, it is clear that the production rises above its period groove. And Singh seems like the right person to spearhead this project. A Padma Shri awar-

dee who has trained in music under Ravi Shankar and Amjad Ali Khan, the 67-year-old will use nothing other than a MacBook to take me through her photographic archives.

Singh also studied direction under Ebrahim Alkazi and claims that theatre helped her take a relook at the epic with a little less reverence. She is vocal about her modifications to the story’s narrative. She says that this year, Sita is more assertive and likens the mirage of the golden deer in the Ramayan to the frustration and temptation that arise in an old marriage. “Why was Sita suddenly drawn to a beautiful beast after 13 years of a quiet domestic existence?” she asks.

Singh’s theatre background also makes casting an important part of the whole exercise. Three years ago, she picked Rakesh Saibabu, a 25-year-old student of Chhau who plays the role of Ram, not for his skills but for his personality. Ram doesn’t necessarily have to be the best dancer in the production, Singh asserts.

“Ravan is the most difficult role,” she says. “Imagine having to stomp around and dance with those heavy crowns.”

Singh picks up an ingenious crown fashioned out of chatai (woven reed). Golden in appearance and studded with faux gems, it looks opulent but will sit light on the dancer’s head. An artist has been working on it for around a month. It won’t be reused next year. The show though, will go on year after year, as it always has. Its rich heritage is registered in the fact that in 1959, when Doordarshan inaugurated its broadcast waves, it chose to do so with a telecast of Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra’s Ramlila.

Shri Ram will play at the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, 1, Copernicus Marg, New Delhi, from 4 October-2 November. Prices for the ticketed shows are `100, `200, `300 and `500.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

CRYSTAL BALL CLASSIC

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ctor Ravi Baswani’s death in July prompted several commentators to revisit one of his best-loved films, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. As it turns out, residents of Mumbai and Delhi don’t have to wait for an untimely death to remind themselves of the movie’s importance and its prescience.

Mumbaikars and Delhiites are reminded every single day of the corruption and political cynicism that director Kundan Shah and his writers skewered so brilliantly 27 years ago.

Both cities have been in the news for the wrong reasons in the last few weeks. Until very recently, Mumbaikars were getting green under the collar at the thought that Delhi, of all cities, would dislodge Mumbai as the urbs prima of India. The infrastructure that Delhi has

been putting into place—the Metro, a mass bus transport system for the Games—was the subject of envy in Mumbai, which is approaching meltdown one pothole at a time. Thanks to the Commonwealth Games, Mumbaikars can stop complaining about their miles of lousy roads and mountain ranges of garbage and indulge in some schadenfreude at the expense of the nation’s capital.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro predicted it all in 1983. Its two hapless photographers, Vinod and Sudhir, stumble upon a scam by builders and civic officials to build substandard flyovers and siphon money from the public exchequer. Although Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was made at the height of the licence raj, during which many government officials awarded building contracts on

Licence to laugh: Kaushik (left) and Shah in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. the basis of bribes rather than on the track record of builders, nothing seems to have drastically changed. There is almost no transparency in the awarding of contracts for infrastructure projects. Major businesses are cornering vast tracts of land in rural India without too many questions asked. A character in the film asserts that in Mumbai, drinking water and sewage water flow through different pipes, which is laughable when you consider the quality of the liquid

that flows out of our taps every morning. In India, says the movie’s oily municipal commissioner, we eat a little and chuck away a little (“thoda khao, thoda pheko”), a neat joke about the graft inherent in any kind of development.

Good movies often act as mirrors, reflecting a society at a particular juncture. Sometimes, a film can do almost as good a job as Paul the Octopus in predicting the direction in which a society is headed. A series of movies made

ow that classical music has all but disappeared from television screens, barring the occasional telecasts on Doordarshan channels, I can’t help but reminisce about earlier times, some 20-odd years ago, when frequent attempts were made to present classical music on television.

My very first shoot for television took place about 25 years ago for a programme called Suprabhat that attempted to present really short capsules of classical music. I remember being briefed about the shoot by the respected music critic Raghava R. Menon. Each episode of the programme was to be a short 4 minutes in duration, and I can still recall the anxiety I felt about this challenging restriction. But nothing, absolutely nothing, could take away from the excitement of being on television for the first time. Which is perhaps why I remember each little detail of the shoot so vividly, even the shock of discovering the wonders of video technology. While waiting my turn to shoot at the south Delhi studio, I peeped into the control room. Lo and behold, what do I see but a familiar young turbaned sitar player seated cross-legged on a platform that was draped in a vivid blue satin sheet. The wall behind him was draped in the same blue, and he and his tabla accompanist were playing a morning raga with a fair degree of involvement.

Imagine my horror then as I turned my gaze to the many monitors in the room and saw the very same artistes now perched on the spiky ramparts of the Red Fort! I mean, any human who can sit on those spikes for even a second without letting out an agonized cry, leave alone play the sitar or tabla for a few hours, has got to be a hathyogi.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

The producer-director noticed my expression and whispered “Chroma” with a knowing smile. A little later he explained that he was using what is known as Chroma Keying or “blue screening” where you shoot a performer in front of a blue screen and later replace the screen with a background of your choice. He pointed to a large coffee-table book in front of him from which the image of the spiked Lal Qila ramparts had been sourced. And then I was given the option of selecting where I’d like to be err... spiked or positioned for my shoot! The director suggested a rugged cliff, against which huge waves dashed picturesquely, but I decided to play safe and chose to be posited at the Diwan-i-Khas at the Red Fort. And that’s where I can be found, singing away amid Mughal splendour.

I share this anecdote to provide some comic relief, but also to give you an idea of the well-intentioned but hilarious ways in which classical music has often been presented on television.

One of the most majestic and fiery male singers of our times was once shown on television, seated within a huge pink thermocol lotus singing in characteristic flamboyant style, wild eyed and gesticulating madly, knocking off a couple of the hideous pink petals of his lotus-seat as he flailed an arm in a characteristically dramatic sweep. Perhaps if classical music could be presented in a more imaginative and aesthetic fashion, there would be more takers for it.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

during the inter-war years in Germany, such as the The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and M, foretold the rise of Nazism in that country. Closer home, the films of the 1950s crystallized the hopes and worries of a nation emerging out of decades of colonial rule.

Most of our Friday releases are too far removed from reality to act as crystal balls, but films such as I Hate Luv Storys and Aisha say as much about the state of the nation as Gabhricha Paus and Peepli (Live). The fact that Bollywood is so deeply invested in self-fulfilment at a time of rising income gaps and vast unrest among the economically disadvantaged tells us two things.

One is that our great nation is so vast and forgiving that it can comfortably accommodate both hedonism and extreme want.

The other is that we are in the midst of one huge mess.

Nandini Ramnath is a film critic with Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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COMMEMORATION

Bapu in the bylanes A CHOWDHURY/MINT

t Bangalore

The Father of the Nation has a tendency to pop up at unexpected places—as graffiti, street art or pop art

This Gandhi statue stands in a lane that cuts through the Chinmayananda Mission Hospital (CMH) Road in Indira Nagar in Bangalore.

Till last year, the feet were visible. Then the municipality decided to raise the road level to prevent waterlogging during the rains. The residents complained about the fate of the statue.

Initially, the local authorities decided to remove it, but there were protests.

Ishwaran, a long-time area resident, who runs an automobile parts shop opposite the statue, says there was a statue of Jawaharlal Nehru in an adjoining lane which was removed. The lane dwellers decided they wouldn’t allow this one to go.

On Independence Day, Republic Day and 2 October, residents conduct a flag-hoisting ceremony and occasionally, the statue gets a wash. Nobody in the neighbourhood or the municipality knows who put up this sculpture.

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t could have been a crazed fan or just a peace-loving person who recently spray-painted the wooden gate of Hollywood actor Halle Berry’s home in Los Angeles with a rendition of Mahatma Gandhi’s face in hot pink. The LA police attributed it to vandals. Gandhi’s appeal crosses many boundaries. No world leader is as ubiquitous. To commemorate Gandhi Jayanti, we looked for Gandhi in unlikely places all over the world and found him on road junctions in Indian and European cities, on crowded beaches and nondescript walls.

Here are five memorable ones: JAYDIP BHATT/PTI

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

t Ahmedabad Ehjaz Saiyed Painter gives the final touches to a painting which portrays Gandhi and the Babri Masjid. Gandhi had to pay with his life for his unwavering espousal of communal harmony in the wake of Partition.

The Babri dispute is a potent reminder of his unfinished task and of the resonance of his message 60 years after his martyrdom.

p Kolkata A corner in Phoolbagan has a wall where a graffiti artist painted a smiling Gandhi a few years ago, as part of a local municipality initiative to prevent the city’s residents from damaging public walls.

Every monsoon, dense foliage frames this painting of Gandhi.

PTI

q Jodhpur Take a left past Jodhpur’s Clock Tower (where you get the best omelettes in town), head down the narrow lane towards Manak Chowk and you’ll see a curious stencilled Gandhi near the gates of a 500-year-old haveli. Sporting a white vest and flashing a thumbs-up sign, this Gandhi seems to be admitting his love for both “curry” and “Yogi”, the name of the guest house the haveli is now home to. “There are four of them,” says proprietor Pankaj, “two near the gates, one on the water tank on the terrace and one on a bit of plywood that my friend took away.” He says it was the work of a “dreadlocked Spaniard” who stayed at the guest house six years ago. “He created a stencil blueprint over which he then used spray paint,” Pankaj says. “We all loved it.”

KRISH RAGHAV/MINT

p Ahmedabad A visitor with the sculpture Mahatma—The Youthful Perspective by Debanjan Roy at the Hathisingh Visual Art Gallery in Ahmedabad. “I portray through Gandhi what is happening in today’s world,” says Roy. “It is easy to communicate with the viewers through him. I am not representing his ideology.”

Krish Raghav, Shamik Bag, Rahul Jayaram and Sanjukta Sharma contributed to this story.

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