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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 14

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

sky EYE IN THE Avid planespotters will brave anything just to stand by an airport fence and scour the skies for airplanes. We visit an exclusive club of the extremely obsessed >Page 10

KAREENA KAPOOR’S BEAUTIFUL LIFE >Page 8

LANDSCAPE ART Towering sand dunes, scared rhinos and an Indian connection in this land of contrasts >Page 12

THE BEAUTY OF SELFISHNESS

A new biography brings alive Ayn Rand’s fascinating life and reminds us why her ideas are woefully outdated >Page 15

A SECOND SHOT Spotter Mayank Khanna with his exact replicas of aircraft, which are built to a scale of 1:400.

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

A ‘RESERVATION’ DEMOCRACY

REPLY TO ALL

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

SHOBA NARAYAN

Back to one of his favourite subjects for a second time, photographer Raghu Rai discovers how Calcutta has changed in 21 years >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WE STILL CLING TO WHY THIS INDOPAK ‘MANUSMRITI’ MATCH IRKS US

e want to think of people as individuals, but the Indian conforms to his caste. Outsiders won’t notice that nurses in our hospitals are Christian girls from Kerala. Bollywood reveals their identity through use of the convent word “sister”. They are among the best nurses in the world, and the reason Europeans see India as an attractive place for cheap operations. Underpaid and cheerful, their caring comes to them through Christianity’s view of suffering. >Page 6

o matter how the Sania-Shoaib saga pans out and I write this a full week before her announced wedding date of 15 April, the question now is: Did this headstrong girl from Hyderabad choose the right man? Sania is standing by her fiancé with laudable, and some would say, misguided loyalty. What about her judgement—or her family’s judgement—in choosing a man with so many strings attached? >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY: THE MAKING OF A GOD

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE LOVES | NERO’S GUESTS

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

Inside hunger republic

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

THE SILVER LINING IN THE SANIASHOAIBAYESHA MESS MAHESH KUMAR A/AP

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

his past week many the Hindi film industry, news channels prethe portrayal of the dictably tweaked the title community rarely rises of the new cult Bollyabove stereotypes on wood hit Love, Sex aur the big screen. Dhokha to illustrate the This was underlined Sania Mirza-Shoaib when Star News used Malik-Ayesha Siddiqui the dated Salma Aghalove triangle. They also starrer Nikaah to illusdrew comparisons trate the mechanics of a between golfer Tiger Muslim marriage. IroniWoods and cricketer cally, when this blockMalik. Both are sportsbuster released in 1982 men, both got into trouit was bitterly criticized ble because of a phone for its simplistic depicand both made a woman tion of a Muslim divorce seriously angry. The two (you know you can’t just sportsmen coincidentally mutter talaq, talaq, even gave press confer- Prime time: Something positive actually came out of this news story. talaq and walk out of a ences 8 hours apart in marriage, right?). their parts of the world. be a divorce if the nikah is valid,” Much has been written about how Personally, Mirza reminds me of a Malik said at one point. On television, Bollywood stereotypes our minoricousin who can never identify the elu- they lined up the mullahs to explain ties. Christians are always alcoholics sive Mister Right in the midst of all what’s what. Experts debated whether or floozies in our films, Muslims those men you shouldn’t it was legal to get married on the tawaifs and gangsters. Until very marry. In such a situa- phone (some said yes, some said not recently you never saw Bollywood’s tion, it’s usually the case really. The first is correct). And can you four superstar Khans (I’m counting that everyone except the woman in even say nikahnama and dowry in the Saif too) even hint at their Muslim love can see the one she’s picked is same breath? Why all the fuss if it’s not identity (on or off screen). Mister Wrong. illegal for Muslims to have two wives? So when we publicly debate the Personally, I also don’t understand And is it a criminal offence if you don’t intricacies of Muslim marriage (and why we continually pass moral judge- actually have the first wife’s consent the theology of the four schools of ments on the sex lives of our sports before you marry the second? Islamic law), however poor the quality and film stars. If cricketer Yuvraj Singh “Why should they have different of that debate, we’re bound to end up wishes to leave his hotel room for a laws?” a younger colleague suddenly with more knowledge than we previmidnight rendezvous, more power to said, in the midst of a discussion about ously had. And that, in my book, is the him. And if playing the field is more why we even care whether or not silver lining in the Sania-Shoaib-Ayeimportant to Singh than playing on the Malik consummated his first marriage. sha mess. field, it’s his employer’s headache, not There was silence as four pairs of eyes national news. looked accusingly at him to explain Write to lounge@livemint.com But the Sania-Shoaib-Ayesha case is why he had used the word “they”. interesting because it’s fun to watch But how often does the modern www.livemint.com India’s largely Hindu-run media’s Muslim’s way of life make it to our awkward attempts to analyse Muslim popular culture? Even though Mus- Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut personal law. “In Islam, there can only lims are extremely well represented in

LEARN

An engrossing film on India’s agrarian crisis as seen through P Sainath’s work

hen journalist P. Sainath talks in public—be it in Parliament, addressing political leaders, or to a motley group of Mumbaikars at an auditorium, as shown in Deepa Mehta’s documentary Nero’s Guests—it is impossible to let the words breeze by. You have to listen, react—even feel guilty. He is an impassioned speaker about India’s agrarian crisis and its unsavoury manifestations. He gesticulates a lot, his voice changes timbre as he describes families who have lost sons and fathers to suicides. He knows how to be heard. One of his friends once told Sainath, and he says this at a public forum filmed by Mehta, “Give us some good news sometimes!” For the past two decades, Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, has chronicled the plight of India’s farmers, the seats of drought, hunger and suicides. Mehta’s documentary, on the growing economic inequality in our society as seen through the works of Sainath, gives us all the ugly truths. There is no respite from Sainath’s moral voice. But the refreshing as well as inspiring part about his work—and also his rhetoric—is that unlike many commentators and journalists of his stature, Sainath does not speak against a particular political system or party. He is not an ideologue. His pleas for Survivors: A family in Vidarbha. the urgent need to address poverty and hunger at the policy and civil society levels are backed by years of rigorous research and field work. Mehta records Sainath in the crumbling bamboo huts of farmers who have committed suicide in Vidarbha, on a train where he travels with rural women who are forced to work 12 hours a day as manual labourers, at his home where he preserves reams of papers about—and hundreds of photographs of—people he has met. There are parts in the film that seem to be there simply to make those who don’t acknowledge the issues Sainath is talking about look small and inhuman. These parts are sweeping, preachy and affected. But Nero’s Guests is a must-watch. Sainath’s subjects must be heard and seen. To buy the DVD of Nero’s Guests (Rs500 for individuals and Rs750 for institutions), write to nerosguests@gmail.com Sanjukta Sharma ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

FROM REPRESENTATIVE TO India has long relied on legal and legislative fiat to bring about social reform. In the aftermath of the women’s reservation Bill, we need to ask how electoral reservations fit into the larger picture of our democracy’s evolution

RESERVATION DEMOCRACY? VIJAY JOSHI/PTI

VIPIN KUMAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

e Indians are proud of our democracy, and with reason. Over six decades, we’ve enfranchised hundreds of millions of people who were long excluded from the most basic of civil and social rights. Starting with the 1950 Constitution’s electoral set-asides for the lowest in the social order, extending to reservations for BCs and OBCs in other realms, and coming back to expanded electoral quotas now for women, we’ve used legislation to give a wide range of citizens a real voice in our political democracy. In this respect, we’ve leapfrogged ahead of some of the older, self-satisfied democracies —Germany, for instance—where minority racial groups, the poor, and women are still rarities in public office. But perhaps we too are becoming a little intellectually lazy about our version of democracy. The thought crossed my mind as I considered the impending legislation that will triple the number of women MPs currently in the Lok Sabha to one-third of the available seats, and which will maintain that level by law for at least the next three general elections. There is no doubt we have far too few women in decision-making positions, and this measure offers a swift remedy to that problem. But like most remedies, this one too comes with side effects. While some of those effects have

Victorious: (above) Congress president Sonia Gandhi greets supporters; and women celebrate after the passage of the women’s reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha in March.

received a good deal of attention in the debate over the new legislation, other, more insidious consequences may require more thoughtful attention than we’ve yet paid. Thus far, the loudest objection to the reservation of seats for women has been a caste complaint: that the primary beneficiaries of reservations will likely belong to upper castes. This critical chorus argues that seat quotas for women must come with additional reservations: seats restricted to women of lower castes, seats restricted to Muslim women. This view fully embraces the logic of reservations and quotas, and demands their further extension. The great question, though, is where those extensions stop. If followed to its

logical conclusion, the argument leads to a reductio ad absurdum where virtually every citizen might—on account of some felt disadvantage—demand a “quota” for themselves. A second line of criticism couches its objections in terms of institutional design. This group accepts the utility of quotas, but it disagrees about the mechanisms chosen to give women greater representation. They argue cogently that the Bill’s adopted means—reserved constituencies, which are rotated every election—weaken both accountability and political parties. Indeed, with constituency rotation, elected candidates will represent their constituencies for just one term—so nullifying the only real form of sanction that electors

have over whom they elect: to reject them when they stand again. Since two-thirds of all constituencies at each election would be such movable feasts, the attempt by such means to remedy a representational deficit will in fact create a massive accountability deficit. Instead of slapping a “Women Only” sign for candidates in certain constituencies at election time, such critics argue, we should require political parties to field a specified number of women candidates—but leave it to them to allocate constituency tickets. The third line of objection is the line I find probes most deeply into the heart of the problem. It’s more philosophical than political, and it also happens to be the core reason our founders rejected separate electorates: because such electorates are premised on the idea that only like can represent like. In this view, conceding the principle of quotas and reservations in the electoral process, in whatever form, serves ultimately to entrench identities, and fragments efforts to build a community of individual citizens. While the principle serves expedient purposes,

long-term it undermines both unity and individuality. For better or worse, India has long relied on legal and legislative fiat, rather than politics and economics, to bring about social reform. But as we weigh the great positive gains of having more women leaders against the problematic ways in which we hope to accomplish this, it’s useful to step back from the current debate over legislation, to ask how electoral reservations fit into the larger picture of our democracy’s evolution. Currently, 131 parliamentary seats are already reserved, for candidates from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. If one then adds the 137 general seats to be reserved for women, at the next general election, in just under half of all Lok Sabha seats (268 to be precise) the social and gender identities of candidates will be predetermined by law. The result will, I suspect, be a profound change not just in the texture of Indian democracy, but in its meaning. That democracy was founded on an idea of political representation that went something like this. Given India’s vast scale, and its manifold forms of social life, the only way to give it a unified, legitimate modern state was to enable competition for state office among political parties that appealed across social identities. Parties would have to win support and create allegiances based on political ideals and values, rather than on massaging social commonalities of religion, caste and region. To that end, the colonial-era electorates that separated Indians along religious or caste lines were abolished. Instead, political parties were required to compete within a single electoral arena, divided into territorial constituencies that contained randomly grouped citizens. Success in these conditions required parties to offer political visions that appealed to a range of different social profiles. It required building social and political coalitions. Yet now, as we install an order that we imagine mirrors our society, we are replacing the idea of political representation with that of social reflection. Motivating this shift is an implicit belief that an order which more directly mirrors society as it is will be more legitimate than one that attempts to articulate a vision of what it could be. I wonder, though, if we are being clear-headed about what sort of democracy we are building. Democracy, wherever it has appeared, has been an answer to a particular local problem. As it emerged in England and America, it was an attempt to restrain the power of the crown or of a federal executive, and as such it tried to reconcile a

COLUMNS L5

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM AFP

conflict between the claims of state power and the rights of individual citizens. In France and continental Europe, on the other hand, democracy was seen as a means to reconcile a society at war with itself: where there were fierce divisions along partisan lines, marked by revolution and civil and religious wars. Democracy in those countries offered a way of resolving conflict between groups who sought to capture the state and to turn it to their own purposes—to build a revolutionary future, for instance, or restore a usurped monarchy. In each case, distinctive forms of political representation were invented. In the Anglo-American model, a random mix of citizens in a defined unit of territory were asked to choose a single person to represent their interests. Once elected, the representative was expected to exercise judgement not just in favour of all within his territory but in the interests of the nation as a whole. This model, organized as parties of government and opposition, worked to check overweening powers accruing to the executive. In many parts of the continental European model, the idea of representation was somewhat different. Here, the elected assembly was supposed to reflect, in proportional measure, the political affiliations, social composition and religious beliefs of the electorate. Electoral systems were not designed to represent mixed territorial constituencies—rather, they aimed to entrench in the political system the existing antagonisms of the social order, and so to mitigate their destructive capacities. In the Indian case, representative democracy served to legitimise an inherited, largely undamaged colonial state. But, and more importantly, its purpose was also to politicize a social order at once rigid and

riven by local loyalties. The problem Indian democracy had to address was the idea that certain forms of identity—whether of religion, of caste, or of language and culture—were primary and could trump other claims. By drawing such groups into political and electoral competition, the founders hoped to make those groups more malleable, and thereby neutralize their potential to corrode India’s unity. Still, they immediately qualified the model of territorial representation that they adopted—single members representing geographical constituencies—by creating reserved seats for the lowest castes. Electoral democracy alone could not lead to the social justice to which the founders were committed, and so from early on they used law and administrative means to balance democratic numbers. What we seem to have forgotten, 60 years on, is that those special provisions were conceived as temporary ones—expedients that the founders never envisioned as permanent features of the system. And indeed, reservations can make sense if thought of as something like a stimulus package—to kick-start participation in public life by excluded groups. Yet not only have we failed to devise exit strategies from such stimulus measures, we’ve actually gone on expanding them further—with the result that we are fundamentally redefining the nature and purpose of our representative democracy. Political representation is by definition a claim to speak on behalf of others. As such, it is an inescapably political idea, since it is always open to active dispute. When Gandhi declared, ‘‘I am a Harijan”, when Nehru claimed to represent all Indians, Muslim and

ARVIND YADAV/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Dissenters: (above) Bahu jan Samaj Party president Mayawati; and (from left) Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad and Sharad Yadav are among the prime critics of the Bill. non-Muslim, their claims had to be sustained by arguments and actions. And their claims were vigorously disputed, by men like Ambedkar and Jinnah: men whose own arguments invoked their identities (to bolster their claims to be more authentic spokesmen) but also appealed to reasoned views about social justice and minority protections. We are now unravelling that idea of political representation. We have embraced a politics in which claims have to be prefaced by the locution: “As a…” after which one inserts one’s caste, gender or cultural identity in order to silence other arguments. This “As a-ism” marks the triumph of an idea of democracy as expressive of social voice rather than representative of political vision.

In such a democracy, if one can assert an identity between leaders and followers, then leaders no longer need account for their actions. Thus, when an elected Dalit woman leader arranges to have herself festooned with a wreath of thousands of Rs1,000 notes, merely the latest display of her amassed illegitimate wealth, she relies on her identity to absolve any need to explain her actions. Her wealth avenges the past oppressions of “her” people. As the most important decision maker in India’s largest state, she doesn’t have to actually do anything—just be. At her worst, she exemplifies our new national motto: not “Just do it”, but “Just be it”. Reasoned action has ceded place to stupefied being. But in far more places across our land, we seem to have moved from a view of reservations as a necessary if regrettable supplement to the workings of representative democracy to one where reservations are the basic operative principle of the system. And with that comes a troubling irony. The great achievement of 60 years of Indian democracy has been to politicize the social order: to transform apparently age-old social allegiances—of caste, religion and culture—into allegiances of political choice. The great risk, now, is that we will accomplish the reverse: socialize the political order, and entrench within it social identities and divisions. Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India and is currently working on a new book, The Great Power Game: India in the New World. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunilkhilnani

L6 COLUMNS SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

3,000 years on, we can’t cast aside Manusmriti

PTI

e want to think of people as individuals, but the Indian conforms to his caste. Outsiders won’t notice that nurses in our hospitals are Christian girls from Kerala. Bollywood reveals their

identity through use of the convent word “sister”. They are among the best nurses in the world, and the reason Europeans see India as an attractive place for cheap operations. Underpaid and cheerful, their caring comes to them through Christianity’s view of suffering. Hindus have a horror of bodily pollution and it would be embarrassing to see a census of upper caste Hindus in nursing. There’s no question of Muslims letting their women work with undressed patients. The murder and abortion of female foetuses is not a generic problem in India. It is concentrated in peasant castes, above all Haryana’s Jat and Gujarat’s Patel. Their average is one daughter killed for every three born. The peasant works with his hands and not his head, and so women are useless to him, presenting only an expense at puberty. The Patel has butchered his daughters so efficiently that now other castes must supply brides. There is evidence he is marrying eastern Gujarat’s tribals, bringing them into Hindu culture. This is an instance of the Gujarati becoming inclusive through violence. The Patel is the sword-arm of Gujarat’s Hindutva movement (Pravin Togadia is Patel). Like all peasants, he is intellectually primitive and easily roused by symbols. He’s also familiar with violence because he handles cattle. But unlike the Jat, the Patel does not do honour killings. Why not? Because Gujarat’s culture is dominated by the Baniya, both Jain and Hindu. Gujaratis say Vaniya ni mooch neechi (the Baniya turns his moustache downward). Baniya instinct means always picking benefit

over honour. Since honour has no premium in Gujarati society, it is not reposed in the woman’s body. If Europeans understood the Bengali contempt for Marwaris, would they still adore Satyajit Ray? Unlikely. The Marwari in Ray’s movies is represented by Maganlal Meghraj, a dreadful stereotype, like Shylock. The villain of Mahapurush, a superb film about a cheating holy man, isn’t the swamiji. Ray etches his rogue lovingly, giving him knowledge of Latin, and letting him escape with his loot. Ray’s wrath is reserved for swamiji’s vulgar followers, like the Marwari seth who is given three brief scenes, but is nailed in them. Why does the Bengali revile Marwaris? Bengalis have no trading castes. The Marwari occupies that space profitably in Kolkata, and so is hated. The Bengali’s inability to build his state’s economy is explained away as the incompetence of Communists, but it is a problem of caste. In PNB’s Krishi Card advertisement, shown daily on Krishi Darshan, the sahukar (Baniya) is a shifty man the peasant must avoid. But the state cannot underwrite 30 million farmers who lack collateral, and whom the Baniya services. Communal violence disturbs us, but it is quite easy to understand. Because the Indian’s identity comes not from the individual but his community, we are comfortable with collective punishment. Muslims are punished for doing Godhra, and Sikhs are punished for killing Indira. Gujaratis are irritated when scolded for their behaviour in 2002, because “Muslims started it”. The Indian riot is marked by two things: participation of civil society, and retreat of the state.

Because his identity is also collective, 20s, Aditya was a star, working on India’s policeman and magistrate mergers and astonishing his feels the anger of rioters. The state bosses with his fluid permits settling of scores by relaxing understanding of balance sheets. its monopoly over violence, breaking This comes to him from his Weber’s rule. The British Baniya training, superior to administrator was able to stop business school. Indians going berserk because he India has the world’s fifth didn’t feel the anger of community, largest foreign exchange reserves. and his interest was served by peace. Unlike China, Russia, Japan and Our leaders easily reveal their caste. Taiwan, however, our reserve Manmohan Singh is Khatri. The word hasn’t been built on trade surplus is derived from Kshatriya, but the but on capital inflows. These are great Punjabi Khatri community of vulnerable and must be protected. Guru Nanak is mercantile. This From being 18.6% of inflows, explains Manmohan’s sobriety. foreign portfolio investment Manmohan’s favourite Montek collapsed after Pokhran and Ahluwalia is also from the trading turned negative (-0.8%). Growth Kshatriyas. Gujarat’s Khatris are also was affected for over a year and mercantile. They are an egalitarian investment left India because of community where women drink with the BJP’s act. Why? Capital is a men, and these aren’t cocktail parties. coward and flees uncertainty, Chidambaram is Chettiar (trading Target: Riots reflect the logic of collective punishment. especially that brought about by communities are identifiable by their such mindless acts of bravery as “st” names: Seth, Sheth, Shetty, Chettiar, tradesman instead: carpenter, butcher, playing with the atom bomb. The BJP’s and Muslim Sait). He is what all Indian weaver or mechanic. monkeying around with India’s poor, leaders should be like. Lalu and Let us see how caste touches Muslims. who suffer when growth dips, would be Mulayam are peasant Yadavs, and that’s Draw up a list of India’s Muslim unpardonable in a civilized nation. unsurprising. Muslims are separate by businessmen, and you notice something Advani is from the Luhana caste that both caste and religion. Sunni is quite strange: They are Sevener Shia, and Azim Premji and Jinnah are also from. different from Shia. Shias await the return Gujarati. Wockhardt’s Khorakiwala is But his exile has imbalanced him, as his of their beloved Imam Mahdi, who is in Vohra, Wipro’s Premji is Khoja, Cipla’s autobiography shows. He wants to hit occultation. Shias often have haunting Hamied is Kutchi and Zodiac’s Noorani back at Pakistan, but the militant instinct names, like Muntazar (Iran’s Ayatollah is also Gujarati. Their community is less is misplaced because it hurts his country. Montazeri), which means “the awaited”, than 500,000 people, but India’s other Manusmriti is wrong in this sense: from the root intezar. Disinterested in the 150 million Muslims can’t compete Nations are best ruled by traders and present world, Shias are quietist. because they’re converted from not warriors. It shouldn’t worry Indians The great scholar Kalbe Sadiq of the non-mercantile castes. that someone wrote a book about caste Muslim personal law board, who says The greatest trader in India is the Jain rules 3,000 years ago. What should there’s no problem with Vande from the Gujarati village of Palanpur terrify us is our inability to break out of Mataram, is Shia. Shias are more willing (population 100,000). He dominates the the book’s stereotypes. to compromise with Hindus: The BJP’s global diamond business, and is the only Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi is Shia. So is Asif man with the talent to compete with that Aakar Patel is a director with Zardari, and he is good for Pakistan, with other superb trader, the Ashkenazi Jew. Hill Road Media. his inclination to make peace with India. The diamond bourses of Tel Aviv and The Sunni intellectual, like the brilliant Antwerp are full of these two Send your feedback to Arif Mohammed Khan, is also drawn to communities. Palanpur’s Jain is replytoall@livemint.com compromise, but Indians have no use for understated and the rare flamboyant intellectuals. Sunnis should be attracted specimen is unpopular in the www.livemint.com to trading since Prophet Muhammad community, like film-maker Bharat Shah. Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at was a trader. But India’s Sunni isn’t Lakshmi Mittal’s son Aditya interned www.livemint.com/aakarpatel converted from trading castes, so he is at Credit Suisse First Boston. In his early

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

MAHESH KUMAR A/AP

Why this IndoPak match irks us

Sania is standing by her fiancé with laudable, and some would say, misguided loyalty. What about her judgement—or her family’s judgement—in choosing a man with so many strings attached? A foreigner at that. Let’s put aside the religion, nationality and politics of this match (pun intended), even though they are the three white elephants staring us in the face. Instead, let the question be merely this: If someone you care about, be it a beloved sister, a daughter or even a dear friend, chooses to marry a man who is a foreigner, “not one of us”, how would you feel? How should you feel? Before she became prone to injuries, before she began to slip in the semi-finals, before her personal life became volatile, this nose-ringed, spunky girl from Hyderabad served and volleyed her way into our hearts. Just as Saina Nehwal is doing now. Psychologists must have a word for this process by which an athlete or movie star goes from being an unknown entity to a national sweetheart; from

being a stranger to becoming one of us. Perhaps it happened because we watched and cheered Sania countless times on TV from our living rooms. But that’s not the only reason. I have watched Katrina Kaif and Kareena Kapoor countless times on TV but I am not emotionally invested in them. Neither Kat nor Bebo have been invoked as role models in the same way that Sania was. Hundreds of Indian parents told their daughters: “You can be the next Sania. You can be like her too.” Perhaps it is because racquet sports are less risque than Bollywood. Perhaps it is middle-class Indian prudishness where we don’t mind our daughters being on centre court but don’t want them to be on the silver screen. I think it is because Sania and Saina are pioneering world-class champions who have broken the mould. Sania, in addition, happens to be more confident as a celebrity than the more reserved Saina. The nose ring, the dimpled smile, the mini skirt and let’s face it, the fact that she is a Muslim girl, all contributed

to her presence, both on and off court. She was, if not unforgettable, not exactly forgettable either. And now she is entangled with a guy with prior entanglements. As she combats the Siddiquis instead of cutting her losses and distancing herself from Shoaib’s past, one that she had nothing to do with; as she answers questions and lobs accusations, Sania in her personal life resembles the spirited headstrong player that we loved on court. That’s the problem. As countless athletes including Tiger Woods have demonstrated, the traits that serve you well on court are not the ones that you need off court. Sensitivity to nuance, for instance, has nothing to do with winning a match but everything to do with a happy married life. In India, marriage is as much about nuance as it is about all the other stereotypes associated with it. Stereotypes that are being broken with every passing generation, I might add. Yes, the average Indian probably places the sanctity of a marriage much higher than his Western counterpart; yes, the average Indian will probably think longer about breaking off a marriage than her Western counterpart even if she cannot stand her husband any more. But the same Indian, thanks to Tamil actor Khushboo and her laudable victory in the Supreme Court, is beginning to accept—and in a few cases, revel in—live-in relationships sans marriage or legality. Yes, Indian arranged marriages were precipitated on ticking a number of boxes (caste, sub-caste,

religion, vegetarian, fair, etc.) and not just blind love. Yes, they are “alliances” between families and this familial web was thought to be the reason for their Love all: Sania and Shoaib are likely to marry on 15 April. success—for the low divorce rate in our country anyway. But sort this all out and get married at the as a growing number of love marriages appointed hour. They may be deliriously prove, the Sindhi daughter-in-law can happy and I hope they are. I wish them forge just as close a familial bond with well. They have much in common: her Kannada father-in-law to the point sports, religion, family values. Except that where the father forgets his earlier she is Indian and he is Pakistani. That’s unease over his son choosing a wife who the nuance. She gets asked to play for wasn’t a Kannadiga; wasn’t one of them. Pakistan, but never once is he asked if he Love marriages can strengthen (or will play for India. That’s nuance. weaken) the great Indian family just as You know the feeling of going to a much as traditional arranged marriages. party and feeling vaguely uncomfortable Now, here comes the nuance. even though everyone there is perfectly A long time ago, a family friend nice. That’s nuance. You know the feeling “uncle” of mine explained his sadness at of having to explain Mallu or Sardarji his Indian daughter marrying a Pakistani jokes to a firang (foreign) brother-in-law man this way, “It would have been and how unfunny they become in different if she was a son and brought in translation. That is cultural nuance. a foreign wife. But to give a daughter up That’s why it will take us Indians a while to a Pakistani...” He trailed off. to get used to Shoaib. It’s not that he and At that time, I didn’t get what he was his family are not nice. It is just that they saying. I didn’t understand the difference are…different. And she is ours. between “losing” a daughter and “gaining” a daughter-in-law. Son or daughter—both Shoba Narayan wishes Sania a happen to be your children. What’s the wonderful married life. Write to her difference? But there is a difference at thegoodlife@livemint.com although it is hard to vocalize or put down in a pros and cons spreadsheet. It is a www.livemint.com feeling; a nuance really. Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at This is why we are uncomfortable with www.livemint.com/shobanarayan our Sania marrying Shoaib. They may

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SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010

Play GADGET REVIEW | BLACKBERRY STORM 2 & INQ CHAT 3G

Connected: iNQ Chat 3G (far left) and BlackBerry Storm 2 both offer instant access to social networking sites.

Under the weather One phone seeks to exorcize the ghost of its past, the other doesn’t like your popularity

here’s plenty of activity in smartphone land. While the iPhone has been bitten by a radioactive spider and has mutated into a gigantic 10-inch version of itself (some call it the iPad)—the Windows Phone 7 Series has made Microsoft look cool for the first time in a decade, and Google’s Android platform is being happily co-opted by a host of mobile manufacturers, Sony Ericsson and Samsung being the latest among them. We look at two phones that haven’t sided with any of the big camps. The BlackBerry Storm 2 hopes to repress any surviving memory of the ill-fated Storm 1, and the iNQ Chat 3G brings social networking to a new low. Price-wise, that is.

Cloudy skies The BlackBerry Storm 2 is supposed to be an upgraded, glitchfree version of Storm, developer

Research In Motion’s take on Apple’s iPhone. But reviewing the Storm 2 is entirely an exercise in imagining how bad the original Storm must have been and shuddering at the horror of it. The tactile touch screen in Storm 2 contains electric “buttons” placed under the screen layer. This means that you can’t merely activate a key by touching it, but have to exert a little pressure, thereby eliminating unwanted clicks and mistakes. There are three ways you can type—a predictive text copyrighted as “Smart Type”, a regular keypad and a full Qwerty keypad. The problem with the last is that the letters are too close to each other and if your fingers are any larger than the pointy ends of chopsticks, there is no way you can type an SMS, much less an email, without urges of extreme rage and violence. At the end of

one week of fiddling around with the Storm, my accuracy had improved about 60% but it was nowhere near being a pleasant experience. Touch-screen troubles apart, the phone is nice. The browser is quick (though starting up the Storm is quite a long process; the review copy we received took 1 minute and 42 seconds to come alive). The menu screen is really cool with a smooth up and down scroll. The text editor is also quite fetching. You can choose parts of text to copy or cut by simply placing your fingers—divider style—at both ends of text. The landscape and portrait switch of the phone is quick, with the screen sensing even the early stages of the tilt action. The high-resolution 480x360 pixel colour display is sharp and the 3.2 megapixel camera (with flash) and the BlackBerry music player do their bits reasonably well. The phone, unlike its predecessor, is Wi-Fi enabled and the browser really zips on a good connection. The touch screen makes browsing a joyous experi-

The FarmVille formula Facebook’s popularity as a gaming platform caught the big studios completely unawares B Y V ARUNI K HOSLA varuni.k@livemint.com

···································· omething strange happened to video games in 2009. A low-budget Facebook title involving the care and upkeep of farm animals became one of the industry’s hottest properties. Now, gaming’s big studios have finally taken notice. There are more players in Zynga Game Network Inc.’s FarmVille (82.4 million, or 1% of the world’s population) than there are Twitter accounts. The collective bafflement of game companies the world over was best illustrated at one of the industry’s major annual conventions in March, the DICE summit in Las Vegas, where Facebook was called “strange, big and terrifying”. “Facebook kind of knocked us all on our collective backsides, don’t you think?” said academic and game designer Jesse Schell in a keynote lecture. FarmVille was launched in June, and it’s taken names such as Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and publishing giant Electronic Arts nearly a year to brave the wilds that is the Facebook game market. In March, SOE launched PoxNora, a combination of a turnbased strategy and collectable card game set in a fantasy world of creatures, relics and spells. The object is to accumulate nora or magical energy which helps collect decks of cards called “runes”. The runes allow you to battle creatures your friends control. In an email interview, Chris Barnhart, consumer insights manager at SOE’s San Diego office, likens the gameplay to board game Risk, with a fantasy bent—strategy heavy, where other Facebook games are more casual. The game has around 2.5 million registered accounts. Around the same time, the Electronic Arts-owned Playfish Studios launched Hotel City, in which players managed and ran their own hotel franchises. “It’s similar to our previous game Restaurant City, which is Playfish’s second most popular game with more than 16 million players monthly around the world,” says Tom Sarris, director of communications for Playfish, via email. Digital Chocolate, a popular mobile phone game maker, considers social networking games integral to the “Facebook experience”. After their Facebook debut with Tower Bloxx in 2008, they’ve increased their presence with a number of new launches. One of them, Safari Kingdom, brings with

Animal planet: A still from Digital Choco late’s new Facebook game Safari Kingdom. it 20 wild animal species, 100 different characters and around 80 types of decorations to personalize it. All animals, (genus and species notwithstanding) begin their existence as eggs. Players can also visit their friends’ kingdoms and help take care of their pets while they’re away. The developer hopes the game will give players a positive vibe about protecting the environment. Facebook games make money through “micro-transactions”, or sales of virtual goods. While all the games are free to play, certain “premium” items require real-world money. Players spend real money to buy virtual credit in a game’s currency. A mystifying side effect of the popularity of this model has been the rise of a virtual finance industry—advertisements in Facebook now offer “virtual credit cards” that generate in-game money the more you play a certain game. Indian game companies are not far behind the Facebook trend. Zapak Digital Entertainment currently has two games on Facebook. Mahindra Great Escape, started in February, and Crazy Idiots Test (C.I.T.), started in December. Mahindra Great Escape allows players a 4x4 experience of a sports utility vehicle (SUV). It has three camera modes—the top, dashboard and hood views. The SUVs can be customized and let you drive along the roads of the Himalayas, the Kanha National Park and the Thar desert. The game has attracted around 50,000 players so far. A slightly different experience from their sporting game, C.I.T. lets users test and flaunt their IQ (Idiot Quotient in this case). So should dormant gamers become part of the craze? Barnhart feels social gaming is here to stay. “Facebook makes it that much easier to play games with people you already know,” he says. “They also extend your Facebook network as you find new friends who share the same interests as you.”

ence. Also, unlike other smartphones, the Storm allows you to switch between multiple windows, which makes it much easier to, say, pick a telephone number off the Internet, add it to an excel sheet and dial, all at pretty much the same time. All told, what fails the Storm 2 is what differentiates it from other BlackBerrys—the touch screen. I met someone who’s a month-old user of the phone. “I now like it,” he said, “but it took several weeks of staying up all night, trying to get used to the touch screen and figuring out how exactly to touch it to make it error-free.” At Rs31,990, the Storm 2 is less of the stunner you fall in love with at first touch, and more the colicky baby you have to forgive before you can start adoring it. Veena Venugopal

Turning antisocial At the other end of the budget spectrum is iNQ Mobile’s Chat 3G. It costs Rs7,599, half the price of the cheapest BlackBerry, packs in a Qwerty keypad and a full suite of “social networking” features in a striking black and red design. First impressions of the Chat 3G are excellent—the packaging is great, the bundled wallpapers are pretty and the instruction manual comes in the form of colourful flash cards. The Chat 3G’s home screen, which is bright and clear, gives you easy access to Facebook, Twitter and Google search. Email is easy to set up and there’s even a decent browser. The device charges via USB and manages to hold up for an entire day on full charge—impressive for powerhungry smartphones. In spite of this impressive debut, working with the Chat 3G is a quick, traffic-free short cut to

frustration land. The phone has 3G support, but until we reach that promised land, you’re stuck with GPRS. GPRS stunningly recreates the experience of a dial-up connection from the 1990s, right down to frequent network outages and impossibly slow speeds. The browser, while competent, has trouble rendering complicated sites. Facebook and Twitter work as advertised, but the continuous monitoring of updates slows the phone down gloriously. My modest 359 Facebook friends and 300 Twitter followers managed to bring the phone to a halt, necessitating restarts on two different occasions. Definitely not a phone for the popular. Otherwise, the phone itself is fairly straightforward. It’s light and sleek, the camera is passable, and making and receiving calls is as you’d expect. The Chat 3G is a power-packed, feature-perfect phone at a superbly economical price. The key to getting the most of the phone is, strangely enough, being a little less social. Krish Raghav Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010

Style OUT OF THE CLOSET | THERON CARMINE DESOUSA

Fit to a T

PHOTOGRAPHS

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

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

Why are you so fond of wearing polo shirts? The utilitarian T-shirt became an outfit of choice for all occasions a couple of years ago when I quit as a strategist of an advertising firm and decided to become a consultant. As far as I can think back, I only remember wearing collared T-shirts. My dad introduced me to riding and he would make me wear polo shirts then. I think the only time that I ever wear V-neck or round-neck T-shirts is to bed. My dad dressed in what made him happy and that’s exactly what I have learnt to do now. How does your daily schedule lend itself to wearing polo shirts all day? I work in a creative field and I don’t need to be dressed

Utilitarian: (above) DeSousa prefers polo shirts in soft fabrics and solid colours; and his Hackett polo belt.

formally. I made a conscious decision to dress comfortable at all times. I like polo shirts for the flexibility that they provide, seamlessly going from the field to a client meeting and to a night out with friends. After work, I often stop by at the Mahalaxmi Race Course, where I love (to) ride. I don’t play polo, but while riding I’m comfortable in polo shirts, jodhpurs and knee-high leather boots. Why is a polo shirt most comfortable while riding or for outdoor activities? On the field, it serves a more utilitarian purpose. The fabric (of these polo shirts) is

My beautiful life She’s always in the limelight—for her roles and her glam footprint. Here, Kareena Kapoor spills her beauty secrets MAKEUP MANTRA During the day, I wear no make-up at all. For a night out, I line my eyes with black kohl. I also love a smoky-eyed look with Yves Saint Laurent’s brown eye pencil. Plus, I curl my eyelashes and use lots of YSL mascara. For lips, I prefer to use a pale pink lipstick.

HANDBAG ESSENTIALS Under all the junk (my wallet, credit card and odd papers) you’ll find my favourite “Cherish” MAC lipstick, the MAC blush “Improper Copper” and a Chanel kohl pencil in black. I can’t live without my kohl pencil.

SCENT OF A WOMAN I love Jean Paul Gaultier. For special occasions, I apply Un Jardin en Méditerranée by Hermès.

HOLIDAY HOT SPOT: ST MORITZ

We went shopping with DeSousa to understand how to choose a polo shirt

We wanted to find out how DeSousa decides which Tshirt to pick or reject from the large variety of polos available. We went to the The Collective, a menswear store at Blue detail: the Palladium, and Fred Perry as we walked to polo shirt with the Ralph Lauren a narrow con section, he trast collar. immediately picked a polo in light pink with the ubiquitous logo in bright green on the chest. He prefers Tshirts without noticeable logos or numbers. “The new Ralph Lauren polos have large logos. I did buy a few in those but only because they fit better.” He rejects the Hugo Boss zippered polos. “Too avantgarde. I’m an old school guy,” he laughs, and ignores a striped Tshirt for the same reason. The section with Hackett polos excites him the most. It’s one of his favourite brands besides Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie and Fitch and Real Crush, which he loves because it has “the softest fabric”. DeSousa is surprised and impressed by the price points. “They are pretty competitive to those abroad. United Colors of Benetton is another brand that’s priced well and has good polos.”

This endurance rider and ad man loves polo shirts for their flexibility and comfort

···························· s a person who juggles three careers with his passion for sports, it’s no wonder that Theron Carmine DeSousa, 32, likes to “play with fashion”, a phrase you hear him use often as he talks about his sartorial choices. DeSousa owns Café Goa Bistro & Grill in Mumbai, and is an advertising consultant who also moonlights as a dubbing artiste. And he spends all his free time riding horses and attending the races at the Mahalaxmi Race Course. His work in the creative fields and his passion for riding has influenced his sense of style, and it doesn’t come as a surprise that polo shirts are his attire of choice during the day and at night. Edited excerpts from a conversation:

TALK SHOP

Thoroughbred: DeSousa’s passion for riding has influenced his style choices.

comfortable and keeps you cool, the stiff collar can be turned up to avoid neck burn and the fit is great. I even own a (polo) T-shirt with rivets under the arms that prevent sweat accumulation. What do you keep in mind

while shopping for T-shirts? As a rule, I avoid loose-fitting clothes and shirts. Fitted T-shirts force you to hold yourself better. There’s no room to hide anything and so you take care of yourself. Even your posture is different. Earlier, I used to wear mostly muted colours but recently I switched to wearing bright colours. I thought if I am wearing T-shirts I may as

Avantgarde: Hugo Boss’ zippered polo.

well have fun with them. Although charcoal is still my favourite (colour). How do your accessorize your polos? When I’m wearing polos in colours such as black, grey, navy or white, I add colour to my look with argyle-patterned socks and multicoloured polo belts. These belts were originally worn by cowboys in Argentina. I found them at Hackett while I was travelling. How do you take your polo

shirt from work to an evening out? I always have a semi-formal linen-wool jacket in my car that I pair with polo shirts in solid colours, a dark pair of denims or khakis, and tan brogues for a client meeting. In the evenings, I switch the semi-formal jacket for a sporty one, the brogues for loafers, and I’m ready to hit the bars. This is how the fashion aspect of the polo shirt came about. I suddenly realized how convenient it is.

THE BEAUTY BLACK BOOK

almond, castor, coconut and olive oils. I do this once a month. I use a Kérastase shampoo specifically for dry hair, and follow it with a blow-dry.

RAM SHERGILL/VOGUE

u Trainer Twinkle at Cosmic Fusion by Payal Gidwani Tiwari, Mumbai. Tel. 02261427178 u Spa and manipedi Oberoi Rajvilas, Jaipur. Tel. 01412680101 u Hairstylist Pompy Hans, Mumbai. Tel. 09867728214

BEAUTY RITUALS I use a Lancôme face wash. I try to avoid creams because of their chemical content. In cold weather, I use Clarins’ HydraQuench Rich Cream, and on a beach I use a Clarins sunscreen. I don’t believe in facials.

BEAUTY ICONS

DIET CHART

I think Scarlett Johansson is beautiful. I like her face, her body and her hair. I also love Julia Roberts for always looking fresh.

TRESS TALK

I’m a vegetarian and believe in eating lots of green vegetables, like spinach, fenugreek and broccoli. I eat healthy meals with lots of whole grains and don’t cut down on carbs. I eat every 2-3 hours. At night, I usually have dal, vegetables, curd and roti or brown rice. I try to drink at least 6-8 glasses of boiled water every day.

I love oiling my hair with a mix of

FITNESS REGIME I do ashtanga and power yoga for an hour every day. As told to Rishna Shah.

This column courtesy:

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SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010

Insider PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANAY MANN; STYLED BY R AGINI S INGH

HOMES

Oneman show In a sleepy bylane just off Panjim, fashion designer Saviojon Fernandes’ workshopcumresi dence is a study in contrasts

B Y G EETIKA S ASAN B HANDARI Better Homes and Gardens

···························· ost Goan homes have a very 1970s retro vibe. They are often chaotic with carved, classical pieces. And I can’t connect with a really old house. My soul doesn’t fit in. I like a new house with old things, or an old house with new things,” says Goa-based fashion designer Saviojon Fernandes. So when he needed his own space, Fernandes decided to demolish and rebuild a unit adjacent to his family home. The result: a twostorey pad that houses a living room, a kitchen, a workshop and a washroom on the ground floor, with a bedroom and balcony on the first. Compact and self-contained, this was “supposed to be my space, with no one telling me what to do”. At that point, the designer confesses he was going through a minimalist phase, so the house acquired a stark, industrial feel—a style he loves. “I wanted a space that was slightly deconstructed; it’s a technique I use in my garments too,” says the designer, who managed to get the look bang on. The home is truly reflective of the myriad influences that have honed the designer’s sensibility and adheres to his love for contrast. It has that raw, laidback Goan feel on the outside, using a common red laterite stone you see all over Goa, exuding a no-fuss charm. “The laterite stone I’ve used is locally available, and it breathes. It’s porous. For the inside I’ve used simple grey kota throughout the house,” he says. But once you enter, you are transported—you could be anywhere, in New York, in London. Strains of Carla Bruni waft through the air, and you find yourself admiring how an old

altar sits comfortably next to a digital clock, or how a plebeian pedestal fan blows air towards Hermès boxes which Fernandes has cleverly used for style and storage. The living room functions as a workspace and doubles as a pad to “entertain on a quiet scale”. The roof has terracotta tiles interspersed with glass (typically Goan) for sunlight. In true Goan style, the front of the house is lined with hammocks; the only furniture is an easy table and bench that Fernandes designed and built. The house wows in its simplic-

ity—the stunning industrial effect on the living room wall was achieved by just scraping the paint off and letting cement peep out—and in its wonderful fusion of the contemporary and the classic. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Space craft: (clockwise from left) The living roomcumworkspace doubles as a pad to ‘entertain on a quiet scale’; the typewriter, radio and glass paintings are from Chor Bazaar in Mumbai; in true Goan style, hammocks line the front of Fernandes’ home; the sunkissed cottage sits in a garden planned by the designer himself.

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

HOBBIES

sky

Eye in the Avid planespotters will brave anything just to stand by an airport fence and scour the skies for airplanes. We visit an exclusive club of the extremely obsessed

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SEAN D’SILVA

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

························· ike most 22-year-olds, Sushank Gupta would like to have a girlfriend. But finding one is proving difficult since he spends most of his time standing by the fence of the airport, looking up at the sky. Gupta is a plane-spotter, a small but growing tribe of people who are obsessed with watching, hearing and photographing aircraft. Being the “hard-core” spotter that he is, Gupta is looking at the positive side of being girlfriendless. “Ideally, I would like to have both—a girlfriend and lots of free time to spot planes—but not having one is great in a way because there is nothing to distract me from spending all my time looking at planes,” he says. Organized plane-spotting is a relatively new phenomenon in India and has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. In February, the Delhi Police arrested two British nationals, Stephen Hampston and Steve Martin, who were here to plane-spot. They had a room in Radisson hotel with a clear view of the runway and they had crammed it with equipment—powerful binoculars and high-tech recorders to capture conversations between the pilots and air traffic control. Not surprisingly, the hotel staff reported to the police that the duo was indulging in “suspicious activities”. Plane-spotters around the world were outraged, but concede that the limited awareness about their hobby is part of the appeal—it is an exclusive club of the extremely obsessed. Though all spotters start with “reggers”—registration numbers of planes—they have individual obsessions. For some, it is spotting all the planes of a particular fleet; for others, it is spotting as many different kinds of aircraft as possible. But ask any spotter when he began this hobby and you will get the same answer—as a child, when I ran out of home to look at the sky on hearing the sound of a plane overhead. Sean D’Silva, 30, works in a business process outsourcing unit in Mumbai. When we spoke, he was in Hyderabad, attending an air show. “Can you hear the sound of that? Isn’t it awesome?” he asked as the deafening roar of a plane

taking off or landing filled the phone line. “I started planespotting when I was 5. Just watching planes, sitting with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and writing down registration numbers. About four years ago, I got my camera and from then I have been hooked to taking photographs of planes. I have shot civil airlines, business jets and propeller planes. But my favourites are cargo airlines of Russian vintage, as they are very rare,” he says. D’Silva knows his planes and is articulate about them. He is stuck for words only when I ask him why he is so obsessed with planes. He finally stutters, “It’s an inexplicable love.” If the spotter was once an isolated geek with a notebook and a camera, today the Internet has brought his ilk together, and to an extent pulled the group into some kind of mainstream existence. Websites such as www. airliners.net and www. jetphotos.net are where spotters from around the world congregate. They share information on planes, spotting locations and equipment and are the sources for any kind of aircraft information you need. These sites have also taken the spotters’ notebooks to a global audience, so registration numbers and plane data can be uploaded and shared with other enthusiasts. The resources for spotters featured on these sites range from the obvious to the ridiculous. Not only can you find the details of the ideal hotels for spotting in cities across the world, you can even find out the specific room numbers that give you the best view of the runway. A website dedicated to listing ideal hotel rooms for the hobby, www.plane-spotting -hotels.com, recommends rooms 415-428 at Orchid Hotel in Mumbai. Hampston and Martin had insisted on room 464 in the Radisson on the recommendation of a fellow spotter, who was previously a guest at the hotel. In Delhi, Mayank Khanna and Sankalp Sinha have earmarked spotting locations along National Highway 8 depending on the runway that is in use. Even when the plane is barely more than a speck on the horizon they know what it is. “This one is Air-India’s A777 and is coming in from Tokyo. There are crosswinds,

SPOTTER TURNONS Registration numbers, collectibles, binoculars and fullfleet goals keep them going

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

that’s why the plane is coming this way,” Khanna explains before the plane is fully visible. They know the schedules of all arriving flights. But the real thrill is in spotting unusual flights. “The Delhi Metro coaches are carried in by these huge Antonov aircraft. We get tipped off whenever they are expected and we leave everything else to come and spot them,” he says. Khanna flew from Dubai to London only because he wanted to experience an A380. Though most spotters are men, some women are now getting initiated. Annapoorani Shanmugam heard about spotting from some of her colleagues and on Republic Day this year, woke up early and went to the Bengaluru International Airport. She took her eight-year-old daughter along. “I was curious about what this was that people were willing to wake up so early on a holiday for. But it’s amazing how much the spotters know about planes,” she says. “The experienced spotters can tell you which flights are heavy and which are light. And they are so passionate about the hobby and so welcoming of people that it didn’t matter that I was the only woman spotter there,” she says. In case you are wondering, a heavy plane takes off from the end of the runway, while a light plane does not have to taxi all the way. Shanmugam is now a committed spotter and is in the process of augmenting her equipment and buying more powerful camera lenses. Collecting miniatures is another branch of spotter obsessions. The only models that mean anything are exact

Bird’seye view: A spot ter’s shot of the Mumbai international airport; (left) Mayank Khanna’s miniature airport.

replicas of aircraft built to a scale of 1:400. Khanna owns a host of them, including a miniature airport with aerobridges. David Morel, a UKbased plane-spotter, not only plans his annual holidays based on his spotting goals, but throws dinner parties at home with the theme of an airline. “I have eight sets of trays, cutlery and crockery of three airlines—British Airways, Qantas and Emirates. I throw dinner parties only for groups of eight or less and serve the food wrapped in airline-style foils on these trays,” he says. Internationally, most airports have specific spotter points that offer the best location for watching and photographing. In India, plane-spotting is not an easy task. Spotters are seen as a security threat and are routinely chased away by the police. It is not against the law to watch or photograph planes. But

accessing the radio frequency used by air traffic control without permission is an offence. It is in fact for “listening” that Hampston and Martin were arrested (they were released on bail on 23 February). India is not the only country to be suspicious of this hobby. The most notorious clash between spotters and the authorities occurred in 2001 in Kalamata, southern Greece. Twelve British spotters were arrested and jailed for 37 days. They were held guilty in the first verdict, but 11 were acquitted on appeal. Their own lawyer was at a loss to explain why anyone would spend a vacation writing down registration numbers in a notebook. “We are lucky in Greece,” he told the court. “We do not have this hobby. Here, we have the sun.” Local spotters also frequently fall foul of the police. Gupta was once taken to the police station where he was

made to delete all the photos he had shot. In Bangalore, spotters led by aviation enthusiast Devesh Agarwal have managed to gain some sort of official approval for their hobby. The Aviation Photographers of India (API) has 35 members who are allowed access to a spotting area within the airport premises. “It was initially difficult to register spotters. But the Bangalore airport authorities played a proactive role. We understand the dilemma of the security officials because they really won’t be able to distinguish between a genuine spotter and someone with evil intentions,” Agarwal says. Genuine spotters (who can be vouched for by someone in the spotting community) will be given a letter of recommendation by API and they can take this along with proof of identification and address and submit it to the airport security office

in Bangalore. “Spotters bring tremendous benefits to airports. They work as extra pairs of eyes. We have at several times alerted the airport officials on security breaches,” says Agarwal. Plane-spotting’s origin, in fact, was to augment security. During World War II and especially the battle for Britain, civilians were assigned the task of watching the sky and warning of the approach of enemy planes. It’s only in recent history, after 9/11, that spotters began to be viewed with suspicion. “Recently in Sweden, the engine of a plane was on fire and it was the spotters’ group which warned the airline about it before takeoff,” Khanna says. This has not made it easier for spotters to get permission at other airports. Mumbai and Delhi airports are the most difficult and despite several attempts, security officials have evinced no interest in registering spotters. “It’s difficult but spotting is worth this difficulty,” says Gupta. “Each time I see a plane, I think of it as a special moment. Once, I saw this A380 try to land in extremely bad weather. It came very low, almost hit the runway and then took off again. The rain, the sound of the plane, the sight of it flying so low, it was incredible. I don’t mind any trouble just to see a sight like that,” Gupta says.

u Registration number: Indian registrations begin with VT—Viceroy Territory. Located at the rear of the aircraft, next to the fuselage, the registration number is a source to access the history sheet of the plane. By plugging the registration number into a database, a planespotter can match it to the serial, which is then indexed by airline, aircraft and dates of service and manufacture. You can get all the information—where the plane has been, who its previous owners were, among others—based on this. u Livery: It is the paint and design on the aircraft. Spotters watch out for new colours and designs. Some airlines sport a different livery for a short term—as a promotion. Shooting these is high priority for the spotter. u Airline shots: Spotter websites have strict rules for photographs that can be uploaded. Reasons for rejection include bad angles, window reflections, photos showing an aircraft far in the distance or just a part of an aircraft. The real thrill is when pilots who were guiding the aircraft get in touch with the spotter to ask for a copy. This happens often enough. u Collectibles: Spotters collect most things planerelated—baggage tags, boarding passes, cutlery, crockery, napkins and miniatures. u Goals: Fullfleet goals are most common internationally. Spotters travel the world so they can spot all the planes of a particular airline. The first flight of a new plane is a major event. As are last flights of planes that have been sold or are going out of commission. u Equipment: Notebook, binoculars—the more powerful the better—and cameras with telephoto lens.

Shoot at site: Sankalp Sinha and Mayank Khanna (in red) have earmarked spotting locations along NH8.

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Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

DILIP D’SOUZA

NAMIBIA

Landscape art LILI ROSBOCH/BLOOMBERG

Towering sand dunes, scared rhinos and an Indian connection in this land of contrasts B Y D ILIP D ’S OUZA ···························· here I was, finally. Drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, weak-kneed from 2 punishing hours, but finally at the top of the dune. So I promptly did what I know all intrepid climbers do on reaching a summit. I knelt down reverently, looked up at the sky, bent over and...threw up. Then I flopped down, too exhausted even to take a drink from my bottle, on top of the highest dune I found at Sossusvlei in Namibia. If I had scoffed at being told that climbing a pile of sand was hard work, I now knew better. As piles of sand go, Sossusvlei’s dunes are among the world’s highest. They curve gracefully but

sharply, to as high as 400m. Foolishly, I had climbed without first scouting around. Thus what I had chosen was the hardest possible route: straight up the steeper side, and then along a ridge that by the end was near vertical. I swear it didn’t look so hard from below. So...there on top, done with the retching, I looked around. Carefully, because a fierce wind blew continuously, assaulting me with a barrage of fine sand. Dozens of dunes all around, each as gracefully curved and shaped. As the late afternoon sunlight played on them, they glowed orange, red, yellow, even purple. Like some giant’s sprawling palette. Jan, my travelling buddy, was a short way along the ridge from me, smoking as he watched the sun. We had started the climb together. But he had reached the summit a good half-hour before me. Smoking destroys your stamina, I thought, but Jan here didn’t even seem to have broken a sweat chugging up the dune. “Youth!” I muttered grumpily. After a while, we looked for a way down. The most direct was

GRAPHIC

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

along the ridge that stretched away and down from the peak, nearly all the way to where we could see our little VW parked. Why hadn’t we come up this way? I was asking myself that as I started striding down the ridge, but a sudden and different thought nearly felled me. On anything but a sand dune, I would have been in fear for my life. For on either side of this knifeedge, the dune sloped steeply down for hundreds of feet. There had been a similar heartin-the-mouth experience the day before. This was at Sesriem Canyon, the nearest campsite to Sossusvlei. Not quite the Grand Canyon, it is still a couple of hundred feet deep. But at the top, just yards from our tent, the canyon is only 3ft or 4ft across at its widest point. In several places, only a few inches. Of course, it was safe to step across, but I couldn’t avoid a flash of fear as I did, aware of the chasm below me. Must be one of the more unnerving natural formations on the planet, this canyon. Speaking of fear. One balmy fullmoon night at a waterhole... The waterhole was in Etosha, the great national park for which Namibia is famous. We’re talking picture-book African scenes: herds of wildebeest, clumps of zebra, giraffes munching elegantly at leaves, elephants watching you balefully as they stomp through the bushes. That’s Etosha, and it has dozens of waterholes where animals gather to drink. One is at Okaukuejo, one of three rest camps in the park. Conveniently for lazy tourists who prefer their African scenes spoon-fed, it is floodlit and ringed with benches. Spoon-fed describes me to a D, so I grabbed a bench early that evening. As evening turned into floodlit night, animals began appearing. First a few springbok, the small elegant antelopes. Then a couple of lionesses. Later, a family of jittery giraffes the lionesses kept chasing away. Suddenly, a massive rhino trundled up, scattering the smaller beasts. Having made his presence felt, he stood there for an hour. Maybe it took him that long to decide whether he really was thirsty. Then he began drinking. Only minutes later came a loud trumpeting from the trees beyond the hole. Friend rhino stopped drinking and looked up in obvious alarm. An enormous elephant bar-

Windswept: (from top) The dunes of Sossusvlei curve gracefully into the horizon; a luxury camp at the Etosha National Park; and ‘Freedom Murals’ on Windhoek’s walls celebrate the country’s independence.

relled into view, trunk raised high to herald his arrival. The rhino, suddenly not so massive, turned and fled as fast as his stubby legs could carry him. That boy was frightened, no doubt about it. Namibia became independent in March 1990, after years of bitter warfare. But the years under South African apartheid left their mark. Windhoek, the capital, is a bustling little town with tree-lined streets, gardens and sidewalk cafés. Naturally, it was once populated mostly by whites, and that’s taking time to change. But on its outskirts is its own Soweto, the township of Katutura: a sprawling, dusty slum. Even post-independence, Katutura is largely black. In a depressing legacy of the war, I found many people, largely black, on crutches. Even so, freedom is definitely still in the air. The national museum, housed in an old fort on a hill in Windhoek, is filled with memorabilia from the early heady days of independence: T-shirts and buttons of the political parties that fought the first elections, insignia from the UN observer teams who monitored them, a poster announcing Ziggy Marley’s Independence Concert. That spirit of freedom is

nowhere more evident than on several “Freedom Murals” in the city. Long walls on which people have painted their emotions about independence, these are a colourful riot of joyous, thankful slogans and sketches. “Thank you, UN”, and “Africa is coming South”, and even an Indian tricolour somewhere, acknowledging India’s support to the struggle for self-rule. On my last Windhoek morning, I stood before one for a long time, musing about this desert country’s Indian connection. It takes in, of all things, a seal colony: Cape Cross, on Namibia’s windswept Atlantic coast. As Jan and I parked, I was conscious of an odd smell and a cacophony of barks. Just beyond a low wall, tens of thousands of sleek, fat seals lay on the beach. Barking in gentle alarm, they scrambled a little further when they saw me, but otherwise were not particularly wary. A unique vista, yes, but why is this spot called Cape Cross? Ah, now there’s a story. In 1485, Diego Cao, a Portuguese sailor, came ashore here. Portuguese seamen had a tradition of erecting wood or limestone crosses wherever they landed. Not for religious reasons, but as land-

marks for passing ships. Cao’s cross here was a signpost for his compatriots who plied the sea lanes that hugged the African continent. It told them that at least one Portuguese adventurer had safely reached this far south. Those adventurers had been pushing south for years, beyond several points on Africa’s western coast—Cape Bojador, the presentday Liberian coast, Guinea, Angola, Cape Cross—all searching for the point where the African coast would turn decisively east, indicating, almost certainly, the sea route to the East. To India. In 1497, another adventurer sailed past Cao’s cross, struggled around Africa’s southern tip and set his sails to ride the winds north and east. In Malindi, in presentday Kenya, he found an Arab pilot to guide him across the Indian Ocean. On 20 May 1498, after 12,000 miles and 316 days at sea, Vasco da Gama touched land near Calicut (now Kozhikode). The link to India is not just the Indian tricolour on a Windhoek Freedom Mural. It was also intangibly here, where the smelly seals bark. CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

Animals in the wild, camps in the open and lots of stories. Children will love it.

TRAVEL L13

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM NAT GREEN/SILVERSEA

WENDELL RODRICKS

CRUISE CHRONICLE | WENDELL RODRICKS

A bite of Chile NAT GREEN/SILVERSEA

NAT GREEN/SILVERSEA

Postcardperfect: (clockwise from above) The tiny train modelled on the original prisoner trains; the port city of Ushuaia; Torres del Paine; Rodricks (right) and his partner Jeremy.

Away from disaster zone, the Andes and snowcapped peaks are a balm like no other

Fashion designer Wendell Rodricks writes a cruise column exclusively for Lounge from on board the ‘Silver Spirit’ (www.silversea.com).

s the ship sails into Ushuaia, the last Argentine port city at the end of the world, we hear in horror the breaking news of Chile’s 8.8 disastrous quake. It is still early morning and no one seems to have proper information about the extent of devastation. Considering we are a few hundred miles from Chile, it is not good news. In Ushuaia, the sheer beauty of the Andes and the snow-capped peaks helps paper over our sorrows and worries. On a catamaran ride through the chilly islets of the Beagle Channel, we see cormorants cling to sheer rock surfaces, hear sea lions roar in unison and watch seals play on the waves. It is magical and magnificent. On shore, we take a coach through Tierra del Fuego National Park and on to the breathtaking Patagonian landscape. A tiny train, modelled on the lines of the original prisoner trains, billows clouds of steam on a voyage to “the end of the world”. The city of Ushuaia boasts of many restaurants which serve the famed spiny king crab. Back on the Silver Spirit, we learn about the tsunamis that

threaten to hit Hawaii, Japan and Australia in the wake of the earthquake. But mercifully, none of that happens, though the sea is a choppy roller-coaster ride, even at 10 knots. The beauty of the fjords is quite literally under a cloud. Our first day in Chile, however, dawns bright with sunshine. Punta Arenas is a modest city on the Straits of Magellan, with a bustling central square. After sampling the food at La Luna and visiting the Maritime Museum, like all serious travellers we head to Torres del Paine. After checking into the Altiplanico boutique hotel—an eco-statement with chic rooms, good food and built into the hillside in such a way that all the roofs are grass—we visit Torres del Paine. A Unesco heritage site,

it rates among my best 10 destinations. With grey rivers, curaçaoblue icebergs, towering mountains, amazing glaciers, hundreds of guanaco llamas, rhea ostriches, pink flamingos and a perfect blue sky, what more can one ask for? Apparently, a God-blessed sunset. It is so incredibly golden that I feel we are swimming in a Glenmorangie bottle. In Torres del Paine, one experiences the hand of God. It is simply divine. A sea-day away, past towering fjords, is a lagoon called Laguna San Rafael. There we watch the 10-storey-high, ice-blue San Rafael glacier calve into the laguna. The deafening sound and the water spray make for an unforgettable vista. The catamaran floats up to the wall of glacier ice

amid hundreds of ice floes. This experience comes complete with caviar canapés, smoked salmon sandwiches and foie gras drizzled with champagne. The captain of the catamaran procures a chunk of glacier ice, which we shatter later in the ship’s bar. We sip vodka with million-year-old glacier ice. If you have a million dollars to spare, go to Puerto Chacabuco and ask for Deer Island. A short boat ride away is the 330ha. island, with 217 deer roaming the forest and a single chalet. The trekking trail offers grand panoramas with mountains veiled in clouds. The 5km-long, 1.5km-wide island is truly on sale for a million dollars. Puerto Chacabuco also offers splendid horse rides in the wild

HOLIDAY POSTMORTEM | NEERAJ SAINI

Pedal power Preparing for and surviving India’s toughest biking route, and then going back for more Neeraj Saini, 26, an information security administrator with Adobe Systems India, answered the call for an exhilarating 10day mountain biking expedition from Shimla to Manali over SeptemberOctober

Cycle diaries: Saini finds the idea of cycling through inhospitable terrain inspiring.

How did you get interested in bicycling? The idea struck me during a solo motorbike ride to Leh in August 2008, when I met a cyclist on the same route. I found the idea of taking on inhospitable terrain on a bicycle inspiring. With a friend from work, I did a Chandigarh-Kasauli ride and realized I’d need a lot of conditioning before taking on Ladakh. Cycling became a hobby, but riding in and around Delhi got boring after a bit. That’s when I read about Mountain Biking Himachal (MTB Himachal), the toughest event in India: It ignited an old interest in off-roading, and I decided to take part. Deciding to ride was probably the easiest step. What did the preparation involve? I did a few distance cycling gigs, including one from Shimla to Narkanda, during which my riding

buddy Chandresh met with a major crash; he eventually had to pull out of MTB Himachal. Besides, I gym regularly and also watch what I eat. But I underestimated the level of fitness and training MTB requires. One needs to train like a soldier and have the mental strength to channel the stamina. One also needs some off-roading experience, especially for the downhill sections. Then there’s gear: A helmet is mandatory, as also good gel gloves, sunglasses, bibs/shorts, shoes with cleats for uphill sections and, yes, the ability to service the bike. I was riding a Trek 6000D. Tell us about the logistics of the trip. MTB Himachal is organized by the Himalayan Adventure Sports and Tourism Promotion Association (Hastpa) with Himachal Tourism. The registration fee of Rs15,000 included everything, the Delhi pick-up and drop-back. The routes were all mapped on GPS. Each day, we got complete briefings with the elevation and gradient details. The organizers did an impeccable job of handling 120-plus people. Support included medical backup and 16-odd vehicles with wireless radios for the emergency marshals. We also had bike marshals and sweeping trucks to pick up stragglers. We got ample hydration and food but it was essential to carry a survival kit: On

and many trekking trails. At Puerto Montt, the adventurous traveller can go on a canopy ride over the forest and the Osorno Volcano. Not for the overweight or the faint-hearted, the zip ride is guaranteed to thrill athletic youth. It is time now to sail at sea for a day and enjoy the captain’s formal evening before the Silver Spirit enters the Valparaiso port near the Chilean capital of Santiago. Sections of the capital’s airport have been affected by the quake and all arrivals and departures are done in tents near the runway. Valparaiso is where many passengers disembark. We bid fond farewells and look forward to new friends arriving on board. This is the sixth of an eight-part series. Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com To read the first five parts, log on to www.livemint.com/cruisechronicle

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

NEERAJ SAINI

Downhill: The Gumma Rohru stretch in Himachal Pradesh is difficult cycling terrain. Day 8, I got stranded in heavy rain without my jacket and food. It was extremely cold. I remember trying to light a fire with twigs and stones… I was picked up after 3 hours. How was the event structured? Like a typical off-road rally, including a competitive section with a designated distance of 80-100km per day. A typical day began with a briefing around 8.30-9am, followed by a “free ride” section, usually 5-10km, leading into the first of the day’s competitive stages. At the end of the day, there would be another free ride to take us to the camp for the night. Then we’d clean bikes, repair any damage, shower, eat and crash, usually in twin-share tents. That sounds demanding. It was! As the days go by, the body gets used to the beating and one’s stamina increases but the muscles wear out. So my goal was to take it easy, not to push myself

too much, and finish the stage in reasonable time. It helps to observe and pick out the riders of your class—not someone stronger or faster—and stay together. A few riders tried to cut time on the downhill stages, but they ended up crashing and breaking their bones: It’s in the uphill sections where you gain time. I think about 30 people dropped out. Were there any really difficult moments on the trip? Day 2 was a killer: The terrain was relentlessly uphill, the sun was strong, there was no tarmac and, at 27km, the stretch was one of the longest. It was tempting when the marshals offered me a ride, but I walked nearly 10km uphill and completed the stage. Once I’d finished, I became confident that unless I broke my bones or my bike, I would complete the race. What, for you, was the most rewarding moment of the trip? It came at the end of the fifth

day, when I finished the stage last at 8pm, 2 hours after deadline. We’d crossed the highest elevation of the trip, the Jalori Pass. I was exhausted, my left knee was acting up, my bike chain kept breaking every few kilometres. It was getting dark and extremely cold and the jungle stretch was full of wild animals. But I sprayed an ointment on my knee, switched on the headlamps and finished the stage in pitch darkness. Actually, I was a different person at the end of those 10 days: I realized it’s all in the head. Whenever you think that your body can’t take any more beating, you can’t cycle another 5km, you can take a call and push your body to achieve milestones you can’t otherwise. As told to Sumana Mukherjee. Share your last holiday with us at lounge@livemint.com

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Books ESSAY

What is ‘common’ about this prize? MANOJ PATIL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

CECILIE BRENDEN

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is anachronistic in the diverse landscape of world fiction

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· s literary awards go, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize appears to be as anachronistic as the institution itself. Neither a geographic entity, nor one uniting similar cultures and societies at similar stages of development, the Commonwealth is a group of highly diverse countries brought together only because Britannia once ruled the waves, and the Union Jack fluttered over the official buildings in those colonies (only just, though: Mozambique, which was never under British rule, is now part of the Commonwealth, and the US, which overthrew British rulers more than two centuries ago, has never been part of the Commonwealth). Today, authors of the Commonwealth write in a remarkably disparate manner, and Britain, or the shared experience of being part of the empire, is only marginally part of the writers’ consciousness. Ironically, the one author who has written most interestingly about the shared links across countries once ruled by the British empire, Amitav Ghosh, famously turned down the prize for Eurasia for his 2001 novel, The Glass Palace. Indeed, his current project, starting with the novel Sea of Poppies, suggests a ruthless examination of the cultural dislocation the empire brought about in India, Mauritius and Hong Kong. But Ghosh had good reasons not to be part of the celebrations: Celebrating a shared experience without reflecting on the pain was wrong in itself; not recognizing the rich profusion of languages spoken in the Commonwealth, and focusing only on English was, to him, another major problem. That has not prevented other authors from agreeing to be nominated for the prize, and accept-

Winners: (left) Amitav Ghosh turned down the prize in 2001; Daniyal Mueenuddin won this year’s prize for his debut novel.

RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP

ing the honour when they have won the prize. And the decision to accept—or not—an award or nomination can only be up to the individual’s conscience. John Berger famously gave half the money he received from the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G., to the Black Panthers (and the other half to fund a project on migrant workers), to protest the activities of the company which funded the prize—Booker-McConnell—in the African sugar market. Other writers, including some from Africa who have strong views on slavery, did not object to being nominated for the prize. Ghosh’s was a major political response to the Commonwealth prize. But it is fair to ask what is the rationale of the Commonwealth prize. If the writers do not share commonalities, except high school education disproportionately influenced by Keats and Wordsworth, and similar penal codes with similar sections outlawing similar types of behaviour Victorian moralists did not like, what is their common identity? Romesh Gunesekera of Sri Lankan origin, who has lived in the Philippines and is now in Brit-

All smiles: Mandla Langa, the 2009 winner of the African section. ain, once said that it was odd to bracket Sri Lankan writers with their cousins from India or Pakistan. This is not because he shunned competition, but he felt writers from islands have a different sensibility. There are probably more interesting linkages between writers from Sri Lanka and the Caribbean, than between Sri Lanka and India, for example. A shared post-colonial sensibility is a good starting point, but it is not strong enough as a glue to

CHANGE | MO YAN

Working communism One of China’s bestknown novelists mines his own life for his new book B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· ome novelists are great banterers, raconteurs—they are the gossips of literature, using the freedom and licence of fiction to present richly embroidered versions of material they may have picked up from real life, and bringing an obvious love of good cheer and life’s small pleasures to their narrative art. Their books are themselves pitched at the level of conversation, they love tangents and set pieces, and they populate their fiction heavily with charming minor characters. They are naturally dramatic, just as another class of novelists are naturally reflective. The Chinese

novelist Mo Yan—perhaps the best-known resident Chinese writer in the world today—is one such writer. Mo Yan’s name is actually a pseudonym that means “don’t speak”—a moniker that becomes all the more funny when one considers that many of the writer’s novels (Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out) are more than 500 pages long, generating massive comic capital out of the many disruptions of 20th century Chinese history. Mo loves to play off communism’s vision of order, selflessness, discipline and ideological unanimity against its almost inevitable worldly expression as hierarchy,

chaos, corruption and greed. Communism, in a way, is the enabling fiction of his own fiction. Indeed, Mo’s new novel Change is the latest volume of a Seagull series called What Was Communism?, including both non-fiction (such as Tariq Ali’s The Idea of Communism) and fiction (Mahasweta Devi’s Bait: Four Stories). If Mo’s earlier novels made one think of him as a musician pouring all his breath into a trombone, then in his latest book we merely imagine him puffing on a cigarette, thinking about times gone by. Loosely autobiographical—the protagonist is called Mo Yan—and running to not much more than 100 pages, this is a work in a minor key. “After 50, you can’t remember what happened yesterday,” says the narrator late in the book to a former schoolmate, “but the

hold the structure together, because the very idea of post coloniality implies resistance to the empire, and the implied purpose of the prize is to celebrate what unites the new nations of the former empire. Furthermore, many of the countries draw inspiration from elsewhere: Hong Kong is now firmly Chinese; Singapore and Malaysia don’t look to Britain for leadership in almost any sphere; African states are far less dependent on technical cooperation from the Commonwealth, now that China is willing to assist without preconditions; and Canada’s existential quest is to remind itself—and others—how different it is from the US. Among South African writers, it is the politics of apartheid and its aftermath that often appear predominant, and understandably so. Nigeria’s best writers are focused on their internal conflict. Within the South Asian region, the resurgence in Pakistani fiction is shaped far more by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, including the unending war on terror, which has made the Pakistani narrative complex and exciting. Indian fiction may have emerged from the

distant past gets clearer every year.” If childhood occupies a special place in human consciousness, it may be because it is the only time in our lives when we live entirely in the moment, without memory and nostalgia, and with the grandest dreams for the future. This truth about life and about the remembered experience of time is dramatized in Change, which recounts, over a few short episodes, a fairly typical life spent across the fields, factories and work units of Communist China, with only the memories and attachments of family and friendship to make life more bearable. At the beginning of the story we see Mo as a student who has been rusticated from school for some minor misdemeanour, but who nevertheless dutifully turns up every day because he cannot bear to be away. The two stars of his life are the strapping schoolboy He Zhiwu, who heroically invites his own expulsion by an act of arrogant insubordination, and a beautiful Russianmade Gaz 51 truck, which belongs to the local state farm.

shadow of Salman Rushdie, but is far more interested in the society within, than in the influences without. And when it does look at the world beyond, it does so with decidedly Indian eyes, with Britain—or the Commonwealth —appearing only in the periphery. The links to the “mother country” are weak. The mother country itself is interested less in the former colonies (except in some romantic, nostalgic novels) and more in looking at itself. The Commonwealth is absent in the writing of Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, or Will Self; even among hyphenatedBritish writers, the stories are about assimilation within the island, and not so much about the lands their parents came from. That has to do with Britain politically veering further away from the Commonwealth than at any time. Its starkest reminder is at the arrivals lounge of British airports, where black, yellow or brown visitors are more likely to be asked to step aside, questioned more closely, and their bags searched more thoroughly. Britain has also made it harder for students from the Commonwealth countries to get here to

Change: Seagull Books, 118 pages, Rs350. Without the education that will give him a chance to go to university, the young Mo works as a labourer, joins the army, suddenly lands a teaching assignment that requires him to study intensively, and finally decides to become a writer. All the while he keeps an ear out for news of his old school friend He Zhiwu, who has apparently made good in business in Mongolia, and of

study (there is always that lurking fear, that Britain will be overwhelmed by immigrants, and European legislation which requires Britain to open its borders to EU nationals first doesn’t help people from former colonies to come to the mother country.) As those gaps widen, the shared experiences shrink. That does not make the works by writers from the Commonwealth any less interesting; it remains useful to ask, though, what’s common about this wealth. Rana Dasgupta’s Solo will charm and delight in any case, as would Chandrahas Choudhury’s Arzee the Dwarf, exploring the humour of a city’s underbelly. Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohur Tree, perhaps the one coming closest to that shared experience, is an evocative recreation of a vanishing generation in Pakistan. In the competition this year, there are other fine works in contention, and many books are a joy to read. But the question remains: What has the Commonwealth got to do with it? The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize will be presented on 12 April at the India International Centre, New Delhi. Salil Tripathi write s the fortnightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com

the old Gaz 51. Later, He Zhiwu, now married to a Russian girl, appears to buy the truck and to explain to Mo, over three days (none of Mo’s characters ever know how to say something economically), all the secrets of working the Communist system to make substantial profits in business. Reflecting on some of the more unbelievable twists and turns of their lives, the two old friends come to the conclusion that “the affairs of the world are always in flux, that a happy fate can bring lovers together, that accidents happen all the time, and that the strange and the curious are always with us”. It’s not at all surprising, though, that this sounds like an accurate description of the universe of Mo’s own novels. Change is a little too slight, though, to be wholly satisfying, and is probably best seen as a minor work by a major writer. Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf. Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

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GODDESS OF THE MARKET | JENNIFER BURNS

The beauty of selfishness A new biography brings alive Ayn Rand’s fascinating life and reminds us why her ideas are woefully outdated

Goddess of the Market— Ayn Rand and the American Right: Oxford University Press, 369 pages, $27.95 (around Rs1,260).

B Y M ONIKA H ALAN monika.h@livemint.com

···························· hat it has taken till 2010 for the biography of a person who has influenced the intellectual agenda of capitalism to come out, is in itself proof of the challenge any biographer of Ayn Rand would face. To document a controversial life that has a cult following at one level and is dismissed as bad writing on the other, and a life of stark public and personal dichotomy, is no easy task. While one may bow to Rand intellectually, her personal life, caught in the rigid grid of her own philosophy, makes her irrationally human. In her biography Goddess of the Market—Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns manages to do the unthinkable: She keeps her opinion out of the book so that the reader has the liberty to react to facts, to the contradictions and the duality. Burns brings out Rand’s grandeur of thought but poverty of emotion, without overpowering the narrative with her own voice. Rand came into the world as Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest child from a wealthy household in tsarist Russia that would transform into a Communist

nation in a few years. As a child with a precocious intellect, she was socially isolated; she was “serious and stern, uncomfortable with gossip, games, or the intrigues of popularity”. High marks ensured respect, but not affection from her peers—she was “abrasive and argumentative”. She would force conversations and had a “violent intensity to her beliefs”. The magnificent intellect turned this social isolation into a belief system that made her see herself as a victim, being punished by mediocrity. If introspection gave her the beginnings of a thought system, her early journey from extreme wealth to fighting over a dry pea to keep off hunger in Communist Russia gave that belief system a direction. The transformation of Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand began when she became a junior Hollywood scriptwriter who struggled to survive as an immigrant who had escaped from Communist Russia. That she would one day be traced back as the root of the global crises of capitalism, influencing the former US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan into believing that unfettered laissez-faire capitalism works, would have been unthinkable to those

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

HISTORY GOES POP T here was a time—all of the 19th century—when the educated read history books and the slightly less educated read historical novels. This trend petered out sometime around the mid-20th century, under the impact of decolonization (which exposed much of “history” as Eurocentric), the rise and defeat of fascism (which exposed some of “history” as racist) and later, feminism and postmodernism (which, in different ways, revealed “history” to be often “his story”). Lately, however, there has been a revival—both of popular histories (as in the “Mughal” books by William Dalrymple) and of historical fiction (as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace or Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winner from last year, Wolf Hall). Jonathan Phillips’ Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades and Ira Berlin’s The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations are sterling examples of good history books written, once again, for a large readership and not just for scholars. A crusade against Christians? Calls for jihad against Muslims? Sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? But Phillips, who occupies the unusual position of a “professor of crusading history” at the University of London, has such and other fascinating facts to narrate in his book. Berlin’s The Making of African America does not simply trace the history of black America from slavery to Obama—for this has been done in recent times—but, more significantly, reads this history in the light of the demand for labour and, particularly, immigrant labour (including slaves) in America. In this sense, perhaps, we are also coming to a welcome return in mainstream Western discourse: If “labour” was obscured under the colours of “immigration” in the second half of the 20th century, now immigrants are again beginning to be increasingly read as necessary and often exploited “labour”.

Short and simple The first story in Mridula Koshy’s debut book of fiction, If it is Sweet, begins with this sentence: “At the end of her tenure as mother, she leaves Manchester for her parents’ home in Dehra Dun to enact what she doubts they will recognise as a pilgrimage.” Notice not just the subtle irony and the lack of throat-clearing that this line indicates, but also its suppleness of thought and narrative. Here is a sentence that

Promise: Koshy’s an author to watch. appears to have survived the advent of screen-reading: A line that can move without having to lean on a full stop after every clause. Koshy writes well. She can use short, simple (or simply compound) sentences, which are so much the vogue these days, or longer flowing sentences. She writes mostly about the professional, urban middle classes, but her characters and themes rise—like middle-class colonies in Delhi—against a larger and more disparate background. An author to watch.

Yet another prize The prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (best book, South Asia and Europe section) for 2009 went to Rana Dasgupta’s Solo. With novels by Keki N. Daruwalla, Aamer Hussein and Amit Chaudhuri shortlisted along with Solo, it was a strong field to run this year, and strongly dominated by South Asians. The Pakistan-based author Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders won the best “first novel” award in the category. More good news for South Asians: Here comes a new prize! The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature celebrates the rich literature from, and connected to, the subcontinent. Starting from 2011, the prize will award $50,000 (around Rs22.45 lakh) to the winner. The award promises to “recognize writers of any ethnicity writing about South Asia and its diasporas. The books competing for the prize must be an original work of fiction published during 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2010, written in English or translated into English.” Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of Filming. Write to him at thereadingroom@livemint.com

who knew her as a “crackpot”, after she wrote unpublished romantic short stories such as The Husband I Bought, Good Copy and Escort. But what began as the Night of January 16th in 1933 and We the Living a year later would carry the seeds of what would become a powerful but rigid ideology variously called libertarianism, conservatism and objectivism. It w a s a n a b s o l u t e Iconic: A painting of Rand by artist Nicolas philosophical sys- Gaetano, made for a postal stamp in the US. tem that insisted on primacy of reason and the exist- around Rand, ran the risk of vioence of knowable and objective lent expulsion, accompanied by reality implicit with the belief that unprovoked rage, if they so much the moral purpose of man is his as watched a movie that was not pursuit of individual happiness or approved of by Rand. rational self-interest. Extended The person and the philosophy into an economic system, it is a were at odds, where a tight textbook of free markets with rational system had in its core an minimal government control. emotionally unstable person who Rand’s iron-clad thought sys- could suffer no doubt. tem would suffer not the slightest The years between her unpubquestioning. Members of The lished romantic short stories to Collective, a small group of achieving a cult status after Atlas thought insiders who clustered Shrugged were a struggle. But if

the heroic popularity among students in transition between a post-depression America—that was perilously close to discarding capitalism for communism— gave her a band of followers, Rand never got what she deeply wanted: intellectual acceptance from academics. Dismissed as a novelist by the peer group, her own abrasive and combative stance did little to ease the way. The intellectual giant had a flaw—she was human. As is the rest of the world. That makes dry logic, rationality and the tautologic fixation of proving that “A is A” for all human thought and action, unequal to the task of explaining the emotion-driven, tumultuous, untidy human world that would keep escaping from the neat orderliness of Randian thought. As I finished reading Burns’ book, US President Barack Obama had signed the healthcare Bill that will cost America $940 billion (around Rs42.4 trillion) over 10 years and cover 32 million uninsured Americans. In 2010, Rand would be out of place in the country she adopted and wanted to transform into a working example of the success of her intellectual belief that had no place for altruism, social welfare and service to others. Pure Randian thought now seems based on a premise that was flawed. IN SIX WORDS An unbiased examination of Ayn Rand

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SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010

Culture THEATRE

Floyd takes centre stage PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

he says, adding, “I think we Indians inherently love the spectacle of a massive production.” The road that got him here was long. Pulkeshi got interested in staging The Wall back in 1997 as a student of Barry John. It was actually John who wanted to remake the 1982 film version by British director Alan Parker, but with the divide between Roger Waters and other members of Pink Floyd, getting permissions became a cumbersome process. After his mentor gave up on his dream project, Pulkeshi took it up. A few years ago, when it became clear that the film rights would never materialize, he decided to go with an original script. Floyd’s music has been licensed for a limited number of shows with the help of the Indian Performing Rights Society, the sole authorized body that issues licences for the usage of music in India. In its six-year incubation period, Bring Down the Walls has seen actors and directors come and go. Pulkeshi has doggedly pursued his dream. “I’ve done a boring broker’s job. I’ve acted in other productions. I’ve done everything I could to raise funds for this,” he says. With this rock opera just getting ready for the stage, Pulkeshi speaks of his next production—the Mahabharat. He plans to host it in a circus ring. That’s never been done before, I say. To this Pulkeshi responds, “I’m the shepherd, the herd will follow.”

With a mega production based on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’, iDreamTheatre is building up to a new kind of spectacle theatre B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· ollocks!” he says, settling into a chair in the rented studio space where actors are rehearsing for his forthcoming production. Rahul Dasinnur Pulkeshi is prone to react violently if you broach the topic of theatre for art’s sake. He is critical of the jholawallahs who’ve romanticized the notion of theatre and distanced it from its market trappings. He calls his productions “products” and wants them to reap profits. With Bring Down the Walls, a 2-hour rock opera with licensed music from Pink Floyd’s bestselling album The Wall, he wants to do just that. The concert theatre will run for 20 days in a specially designed enclosure with a seating capacity of 2,000 people outside a Delhi mall. Pulkeshi is confident that 40,000 people will show up to watch the mega production which opens next week. It will travel through the country during the year, though the dates have not been finalized yet. When I look bewildered at the phrase “concert theatre”, he says somewhat graciously, “Don’t worry, I made that up.” Pulkeshi founded iDreamTheatre six years ago with the aim of creating a sustainable revenue stream for theatre practitioners. He lays claim to two prestigious London schools as his alma

mater—the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Desmond Jones Mime and Physical Theatre. His last project, three years ago, was a production based on William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. With a cast of around 50 musicians, dancers and actors—including veterans Zohra Sehgal and Tom Alter—the play had an 11-day run in the Capital. Even with that track record, Pulkeshi’s plans for Bring Down the Walls seem ambitious. He’d have it on a grander scale if he could. Before he’d devised this plan to build an enclosure to host his play (it makes economic sense, he explains), he’d wanted to stage it in a 1,000ftx400ft abandoned parking lot in central Delhi. But permissions for that didn’t work out. Bring Down the Walls is meant to be an exploration of freedom in modern India through the journeys of six characters in search of their individuality. Tracking their progress are two characters who represent the rebellion of the previous generation. These two critical roles are played by Tom Alter and Lushin Dubey, whose interludes tie together the other stories. The motley cast of singer-actors includes Imaad Shah and opera singer Reuben Israel. The play has been written by film director Ram Gopal Varma’s protégé Manish Srivastava. And thespian Barry John’s long-standing assistant, N. Kumar, has directed it. Floyd’s tracks retain their lyrics

Noida by night A strong debut show captures a city’s desolation, and its mystique B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· ts proximity to Delhi, indeed the fact that it is steadily becoming a part of Delhi, has ensured Noida’s growing prominence nationally. Like Gurgaon, the other township that adjoins the Capital, Noida is fast becoming an “engine” of the Indian economy and is now home to many businesses and industries, as well as to a large population. Gurgaon rose to prominence earlier as an affluent hub of the IT industry and back-office outsourcing for multinational corporations—its malls and towers rising mirage-like out of flat, dusty farmland. Noida, by comparison,

has been lacking in such glamour. It lies across the Yamuna from Delhi in Uttar Pradesh and, in a way, has been a prisoner of its geography—viewed askance by Delhiites as a rustic outpost and tainted by prejudices about the badlands of UP. All this is changing as Noida gets more shopping malls and gleaming office buildings. Yet, both Noida and Gurgaon retain the feel of a rural outpost trying to make a quantum jump into the 21st century— which leads to a situation that feels faintly absurd. At first sight, Dhruv Malhotra’s untitled colour photographs— which comprise his debut show Noida Soliloquy— reinforce some of Delhiites’ notions of what Noida stands

Bring Down the Walls will run from 16 April-8 May (except Mondays) at 7.30pm at the amphitheatre, DLF mall, Saket, New Delhi. Tickets will be available through www.bookmyshow.com Not just another brick: The cast of Bring Down the Walls with Pulkeshi (far back, corner); and (inset) an image from the 1982 film version of The Wall. and chords but have been rendered in various styles—including acoustic, a capella and with Indian instrumentation—by the Mumbai-based duo Yogesh and Lokesh Bakshi. Pulkeshi’s definition of concert

theatre is being able to take a large audience into an arena for a spectacle of sound and light. When questioned on his gumption in going large scale in an age when theatre practitioners are complaining of waning audi-

ences, he speaks of the Padma Shri-winning Ratan Thiyam, who works in the North-Eastern states with troupes comprising as many as 200 artists. “Our traditional theatre forms, including Jatra from Bengal, are all large scale,”

for. Malhotra says he chose to live in Noida and not Delhi after he was done with college because “it is on the edges and inhabits this intriguing space that is urban and built, but also contains vast and vacant plots that are undeveloped, and waiting for something”. Malhotra captures Noida’s urban landscapes in the nighttime—when there are no people to be found and when one has the space to observe and reflect upon how human activity alters landscapes. “I am attracted to still

spaces,” he says. “And I find the night more malleable. I can do a lot more with no one looking at me.” The air of isolation heightens the sense of the absurd, but Malhotra is also exploring the allure of darkness. “I like the aura of the night. Everything is layered in darkness,” he says. “To see (into the night), you need patience to sit and the patience to look.” The seemingly easy marriage of nighttime mystique and commentary on human activity in the photos means that there is beauty in

them, as well as insight. The long exposure shots allow us to see vividly into the darkness—shrouded statues, concrete flyovers, silhouetted electric pylons, tangled vegetation and forlorn trees, all bathed in ghostly and unnatural light, paint a desolate picture. But the blues, azures and burnt reds of the sky and the overbright halos of street lights ensure that the images are not bleak. The photos speak of acute powers of observation and an evolved perspective—key

requirements for any good work of art. While they do carry a sense of resignation, they withhold judgement—they are fascinated by the spectacle of development, peculiar to 21st century India, that Noida presents, and they are detached without being unconcerned. Noida Soliloquy opens today at the Photoink gallery and will be on display till 12 June. For details, log on to www.photoink.net

PHOTOGRAPHS

Nocturnal: Malhotra’s subjects are unadorned but awash in surreal hues.

COURTESY

PHOTOINK

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RAAGTIME

STALL ORDER

SAMANTH S

NANDINI RAMNATH

Man, machine and music Software generates Bach chorales and no one can tell the difference. It is time to ask anew: What is music?

n what constitutes good music, opinions may vary, and often fractiously, but there is a far wider consensus on the importance of music itself. Incredibly, all the age-weary platitudes still sound true: The ability to make music separates us from the animals; it expresses our humanity; it is the cornerstone of culture. But that consensus has now been severely tested by the work of David Cope, whom I read about recently in the online magazine Miller-McCune. In a superb profile titled Triumph of the Cyborg Composer, journalist Ryan Blitstein describes how Cope is questioning the very philosophy of music, and how he may be, in a strange way, one of the most influential composers of our age. Cope embraced composition, he tells Blitstein, because he wanted to create one work as great and moving as Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. But in 1980, when he was commissioned to write an opera, he was laid low with an acute bout of composer’s block. In desperation, he turned to his other passion—computer programming—hoping that he could write software to produce music in the David Cope style. He went one better. Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI or, more lovingly, Emmy) could produce music in anybody’s style, as long as she had been fed with enough samples of the composer’s canon. One day, when Cope started up Emmy and stepped away for a sandwich, Blitstein writes, “she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce”. When Cope performed Emmy’s compositions as well as authentic Bach to an audience of classical music aficionados, few were able to differentiate between the two. The reaction to Emmy, and to her more advanced successor Emily Howell, has included some genuine marvel but has consisted largely of debate and anger. Record companies refused to give Emmy a contract, and musicians refused to play her music. And unlike in a certain Stanislaw Lem short story, in which poets kill

A STRANGE MARRIAGE

delicious documentary is waiting to be made on Paul Schrader’s adventures in Mumbai. Although Schrader is best known the world over for writing Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the Hollywood writer and director has an enviable body of work behind him, including his own films Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, about maverick Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, and Affliction, a psychodrama about a cop who slowly loses his mind. A couple of years ago, Schrader declared that he was disgusted with the ways of Hollywood. Rather than decamping to London or Paris, as others before him have done, Schrader sought refuge in Mumbai. Over the past few months, he has been collaborating with former Star & Style editor Mushtaq Shiekh on a movie titled Xtrme City. Shiekh is best known for co-writing Om Shanti Om with Farah Khan and also for two coffee-table books that extol the virtues of Shah Rukh Khan (Still Reading Khan and Shah Rukh Can). What happens when American and Indian sensibilities meet? What—or how—do Schrader and Shiekh break down scenes and discuss motivations for characters? Little is known about this rare and historic collaboration. A report in the trade journal Variety on 6 October said Xtrme City will combine elements of the thriller, drama and comedy genres. Its producers are as wildly different as its writers: Behind the $10 million (around Rs45 crore) movie are David Weisman, who produced the acclaimed Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Anubhav Sinha, director of the duds Dus and Cash. More strange collaborations are in the works, and will emerge before Xtrme City, which is scheduled for a 2011 release. Brett Ratner is editing the English-language version of the Rakesh Roshan production Kites. Whenever the DVD of Kites

Fusion: Deshmukh and Fernandez in Jaane Kahan se Aayi Hai. JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

themselves after a machine begins to write verse, this reaction to Emmy doesn’t appear motivated by insecurity. Instead, it emerges because Emmy has put in doubt that sacred consensus about the creation of music, and thereby put in doubt our very notions of what makes us human. Technically, all music is born by arranging and rearranging seven notes, an exercise in permutation that a computer is primed to execute. No music, therefore, can be utterly sui generis. “Nobody’s original,” Cope says, devastatingly. “Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.” If you borrow and tweak a phrase from another work, it’s a knowing tribute; if you smuggle away a section wholesale, it’s Anu Malik at his most “inspired”. But the process, Cope points out, is precisely the same, and although he doesn’t say it, the implication is clear: If all music is made up of temporary loans from all other music, why

A SUMMER OF ART

not let a computer do that job? This rubs uncomfortably against the grain of our concepts of both music and musical genius. Music, we like to believe, is a product of the human soul and, further, a channel between composer and audience, carrying a sentiment too frail to be communicated in words. Musical genius discovers not the most efficient or time-tested way but the most sublime way of parsing that sentiment. And yet logic tells us that Cope is right: Music really is just mathematics, just seven notes marvellously combined. Bach may have arrived at his combinations instinctively, and Emmy may have patiently crunched a million prior possibilities, but the chorale sounds the same. The purists, though, needn’t yet slit their wrists in despair; in fact, I think there is still cause to celebrate man’s bond with music. Tellingly, neither Emmy nor Emily Howell has helped Cope compose his one truly great work, a slender hint that there may be more to this art than intelligent

dren in Delhi until I googled ‘art for children’ and Anjali’s name popped up.” Raghbeer is looking at a group of around 30 Want your child to know her M.F. Husain from participants, aged between 8 and 14. “We aim to Amrita SherGil? Enrolling her in CMYK’s art appre teach the children about the three contemporary ciation course could do the trick. Kalyani Chawla, Indian artists, M.F. Husain, Jamini Roy, Amrita vicepresident, marketing and communications, Dior SherGil, and about Raja Ravi Varma, who is con India, has already signed up her 10yearold, Tahira, sidered a traditionalist,” she explains. The young for the classes. “My daughter is always dragged to art enthusiasts will also be taken on a tour of the museums and art galleries. After this, hopefully, Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi she will learn to differentiate a Souza to see original works by from a Raza, a Husain from a Roy,” these renowned artists. says Chawla, who found out about Meanwhile, in Mumbai, the course on Facebook. Arzan Khambatta will be Starting 17 April, Anjali Raghbeer, conducting metal sculpture author of Tulika’s ‘Looking At Art’ classes for children in two series of books, will conduct these batches from 21 April—for sessions over four Saturdays at the ages 510, and 1015. Kham CMYK bookstore, Mehar Chand batta started these classes Market, Lodhi Road, New Delhi. “I seven years ago as a favour got the idea after a friend who to his friends who wanted was based in Hong Kong men their children to do something tioned that her child used to creative during the summer holi attend such sessions in muse Barefoot Husain: days. The interest and dedica ums there,” says Priya Kapoor, By Anjali Raghbeer and tion shown by the children led director, CMYK. “I did not know who Soumya Menon, him to turn this into an annual could conduct an art class for chil Tulika Books, Rs200. workshop. Khambatta introduces

note-juggling (although even that might be false comfort: EmmyCope’s masterpiece may be languishing in his vault of computergenerated compositions, unappreciated and unperformed). Then too, the software can only mimic a style, not create one. Emmy can give us more Bach, but she cannot give us a brand-new genius, simply because she needs us to tell her what we consider “beautiful music”. With time, and with newer computer technologies, these too will change. What will not change, however, is that our ideals of aesthetics will still be shaping the music we listen to. We will still find a cello solo intensely stirring where a flourish of woodwinds would have passed with a bare murmur of approval; in that sense, we are still “making music”, bending sound to our unique sensibilities. We aren’t human because we can compose music. We’re human because we can respond to it. Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

children to the basics of sculpture and demon strates the process of creating sculptures. The children are then encouraged to sift through scrap metal and pick up shapes that fascinate them. They make drawings of what they would like to make and a welder welds the metal according to the child’s instructions. The children are not allowed to weld anything themselves. “Children love making threedimensional art and metal sculpting has an added charm because of the tech nicalities involved,” says Khambatta. CMYK art classes in Delhi will cost Rs500 per child per 1-hour class. You can sign up for one class or for all. Email priyakapoor@rolibooks.com Arzan Khambatta’s sculpture class will be held in Sewri, Parel, Mumbai, from 10.30am to 12.30pm, five days a week. Charges are Rs8,500. For details, call Khambatta at 9821232742. Seema Chowdhry and Blessy Augustine

comes out, its “making of” featurette is unlikely to contain Ratner’s frank observations on Bollywoodian storytelling modes or his reaction to the punctuation of the narrative with songs. There is also unlikely to be candid footage of Anil Ambani’s meetings with Steven Spielberg, after which Ambani and Spielberg signed a deal worth $825 million to produce six Hollywood films a year. Out of curiosity, how many Hindi films has Spielberg seen? We’re never likely to know. Back home in India, Hollywood’s flirtation with Bollywood is producing interesting results. Saawariya, Chandni Chowk to China, Saas Bahu aur Sensex, My Name is Khan, Thanks Maa, Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge?, Lahore and this fortnight’s release Jaane Kahan se Aayi Hai all represent attempts by American studios to break into one of the world’s most lucrative film industries. Each of these movies opens with the all-powerful logo of the American studio that has co-produced them. In most cases, the Hollywood weight behind the Bollywood production seems to have achieved very little apart from briefly raising the movie’s profile. Except for My Name is Khan and, to a smaller extent, Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge?, most of the joint ventures have failed to create an impact. Yet another unrecorded nugget that film historians will sorely regret: How did films such as Chandni Chowk to China and Lahore go down at preview screenings in Los Angeles? Of all the Hollywood studios trying to make sense of Bollywood, only Fox Star Studios seems to have had any success. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that both Fox and Star, the principal players in the partnership, are entertainment conglomerates that specialize in populist fare. Fox Star picked up the distribution rights of Slumdog Millionaire in India and benefited hugely from the international awards glory showered on the movie. Warner Bros., meanwhile, is trying its luck yet again with Jaane Kahan se Aayi Hai, starring Riteish Deshmukh and Jacqueline Fernandez literally as star-crossed lovers (he’s from earth, she’s from outer space). There are so many Hollywood ex-heavies and current lightweights floating about in Mumbai, either out of boredom or want or a bit of both, that there can be only one sane reaction to the increased traffic between Los Angeles and Mumbai. Make a movie about it. Is that what Schrader is secretly here for—to observe and report on the country whose enviable economic growth in recent years has made it a force to reckon with the world over? Jaane Kahan se Aayi Hai released in theatres on Friday. Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

RAGHU RAI

KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

A second shot Back to one of his favourite subjects for a second time, Raghu Rai discovers how Calcutta has changed in 21 years

wenty-one years after photographer Raghu Rai’s first book on the city, most jingle-jangle tin buses have made way for air-suspension, even air-conditioned, public transport. Glass-topped trams ply on concretized tram lines while swankier cars swish past the Ambassador. Post-plasma viewing experiences have replaced Uptron TV and terry-cotton bell-bottoms have been swapped for frayed denim. Even communism—a constant fellow traveller in the city’s contemporary life and a motif in Rai’s earlier book—has got some serious competition. In the interregnum between Rai’s Calcutta, released in 1989, and his forthcoming Calcutta, Kolkata: It Never Begins… Never Ends…, to be released in September, it is not insignificant that Calcutta has become Kolkata—a city that is forcefully re-emerging from the debris and hubris of its colonial past. For the much-feted photojournalist

though, the city’s present is decidedly about the continuation of its past. Rai’s association with the city began in the late 1960s when he covered the Bangladeshi refugee influx as a photographer with the Kolkata-based daily The Statesman. If Mother Teresa, on whom Rai has produced three books, has been his biggest source of inspiration, Kolkata too has played its part. “No other city is as overpowering and expressive,” says the 68-year-old Magnum photographer. “However much you photograph Calcutta, it isn’t enough.” Both in his words and throughout the 150-page coffee-table book, it’s still largely Calcutta—the old city of glorious colonial crumble, the grit of migrants, the coup of human spirit over penury, the exercise of tradition, the river front, warts and all. Rai has sourced “40%” of the photographs from his previous book, thus lending to Calcutta, Kolkata (Timeless Books) an air of recycled predictability,

despite the stunning candidness of frozen moments. In the few frames where he has strayed from old city areas, such as the photograph of elderly and young Bengali ladies in cotton saris talking on their mobile phones in the glass-and-glitz confines of a shopping mall, the result is both sociologically illuminating and aesthetically characteristic of Rai’s photography. It is a pity that spelling errors (Chourangee for Chowringhee, Barbon Road for Brabourne Road, filsh market for fish market, among others) indicate the rashness of putting together a book where the publisher’s address too is misspelt (46, Housing Soceity). If Rai has avoided documenting the city’s many social and physical shifts, he indicates a deliberate artistic ploy. On a shooting trip to Kolkata in late 2004, Rai had gone back to the familiar spaces that reappear in his forthcoming book: the artisans’ district of Kumartuli (the traditional potters’ colony is now being shifted to a sanitized built-up area) and the vast green expanse of the Maidan, from where Rai has presented charming city situations—families out on walks, children playing football

Frames: (clockwise from top left) Wrestlers and tree roots near Howrah; a painter at Esplanade; carrying sand across the Hooghly; the artisans’ colony in Kumartuli; and Central Avenue.

and trapeze artists at work. At Kumartuli, a group of boisterous Spanish tourists broke the calm studio atmosphere, but couldn’t dent Rai’s opaque concentration while trying out a new digital SLR. At the Maidan, he exhibited a childlike curiosity while meeting migrants from Bihar. It was while crossing the then newly constructed Park Street

flyover, which has blocked the earlier undisturbed views of the Maidan and elegant colonial façades, that I popped the question: “What do you think of Kolkata’s changing cityscape?” He chewed on the question, eyebrows knitted. “Calcutta is beginning to look a bit like Delhi,” he finally mentioned, with the remorseful temper of an artist being slowly dispossessed of his muse. “All bloody Indian metro cities are beginning to look alike,” he says when I ask him the same question now over the phone, six years later—when Kolkata has many more malls and flyovers to flaunt. “The architecture and aesthetics are borrowed and Indian cities are trying to be second-hand versions of Singapore and Hong Kong. Globalization, after all, has no identity of its own.” The bulk of Calcutta, he

adds, continues to maintain its architectural and social heritage. “Bengalis are a very emotional people and believe in the past and in relationships. Nowhere else in India will you find doors being opened to poor families from villages. The city was also home to the two greatest Indians, Mother Teresa and Satyajit Ray,” says Rai. The forthcoming book, understandably, begins and ends with portraits of the two. “Traditional Bengali culture also blends well with the old architecture and as a creative person it’s my right to document certain aspects,” Rai responds to a long-held criticism of his portrayal of the city. “After all, I don’t work for the government that I have to flog such modernity.” Write to lounge@livemint.com