Lounge for 11 Dec 2010

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

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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 48

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

CITY OF THE

WHITE TIGER

THE HUE OF 2011 >Page 8

THE CHIEF WINE EVANGELIST Sula Vineyards is set to double with new foreign equity. CEO Rajeev Samant tells us how he is changing wine tastes in India >Page 6

MIRRORS TO OUR DEVICE­DRIVEN LIFE

Two books address our new wired reality where reading means negotiating ever­changing digital platforms >Page 14

Booker­winning author Aravind Adiga on Delhi’s extreme class barriers and its free­roaming peacocks—and why he had his life’s biggest epiphany here >Page 10 THE GOOD LIFE

THE TICKLED SCORER

SHOBA NARAYAN

FACEBOOK CAN’T HIDE YOU

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elative to some of my friends (real-world college friends, not the online ones who I have never met), I am a Facebook novice. Recently, I had a debate about journalistic ethics with several other journalists who live all over the world.

It was the sort of argument that routinely happens in Bangalore’s Koshy’s or whatever your neighbourhood café happens to be. A group of opinionated people get together, start a topic; and proceed... >Page 4

RAHUL BHATTACHARYA

WHY TEST CRICKET IS IN A SLUMP

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ecline, decline everywhere in Test cricket.

Australia are in gloat-worthy decline. New Zealand have declined to a small spot on the horizon. Pakistan are declining in concentric implosions. West Indies, perhaps, can no longer be accused of being in decline; they have simply settled into a permanent beach-chair recline. And yet managed to come out looking better in rain-drenched Sri Lanka who, no longer levitating on Murali’s magic carpet, are themselves not flying up, up and away. >Page 5

MUMBAI’S ELECTRIC ‘OTHERNESS’

What went into the making of ‘Dhobi Ghat’ and why director Kiran Rao’s Mumbai is akin to Wong Kar­wai’s Hong Kong >Page 16 Delhi’s Lodi Gardens is a walker’s paradise.

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

NANNY NELSON’S XMAS PUDDING

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uch as I would like to be the kind of cook whose diary reads: “1 Jan: make Christmas pudding for next year”, the truth is, I’m not. Which goes some way to explaining why I’m bringing you this festive recipe weeks after more organized cooks have their puddings made and stashed. This year, though, I have an excuse—on “Stir-Up Sunday”, the day towards the end of November on which Christmas pudding... >Page 7

PHOTO ESSAY

BEFORE THE CURTAINS FALL

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

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

HOME PAGE L3

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | THE NEW IPOD NANO

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t’s a curious one, this new iPod. The first dramatic shift in form factor since the Nano’s brief portly era back in 2007. The click wheel and wafer thinness of Apple’s “mid-range” MP3 player have disappeared, replaced with a square touch-screen form that’s either the coolest watch face or tiniest photo frame in the world.

The interface has been overhauled in favour of an iPhone-esque navigation system. Some features, such as the video camera and video playback, have disappeared altogether, while long-due tweaks like a physical volume control have finally got their due.

It’s interesting to ask if the Nano really needed this change. The click wheel was once the iPod line’s iconic centrepiece but has fallen out of favour since the iPod Touch’s popularity. The deletion of features is also strange—it appears that Apple wants to focus on the “audio” part of the Nano, while trimming everything it deems superfluous. The new Nano is lighter, smaller and more prone to being lost in the cavernous confines of your handbag. But is it better?

The good The new Nano carries forward many of the strengths of the product line, while adding the useful interface advantages

that the iPod Touch brought with it. Navigation is a joy, and minor response problems notwithstanding, very intuitive.

The FM Radio, in particular, has a great interface. Swipes across the screen take you forward and back, and a long press boots you back to the home screen.

The battery life is fantastic. You can comfortably get a day’s worth of music on a full charge. The anodized aluminium shell feels versatile and the build quality is solid. Sound is also fairly wellrounded, though Sony’s Walkman delivers better bass.

The built-in pedometer is useful for fitness tracking, although you’re locked into creating an account with Nike.

The not­so­good Here’s the problem: While the strengths of the new Nano are evident in isolation, they break down when compared with its past. The screen is tiny to the point of being difficult to use for some. Navigation was equally easy on the old click wheels, especially on the move (try creating a playlist in an autorickshaw). Battery life was just as good. Contacts and calendar functionality are gone, along with notes and alarms. While one could argue that these features were secondary (maybe even tertiary) concerns, it is important to remember that the new iPod retails for exactly the same price as the previous, fifth-generation Nano. This means you have to make a trade-off—marginally lighter, smaller form factor or a larger list of features (including a camera)?

The answer, for most people, would lean towards the latter.

Talk plastic The new iPod nano is available for `10,700 and `12,700 for the 8 GB and 16 GB variants, respectively.

Krish Raghav ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

L4 COLUMNS

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Facebook posturing can’t hide your true self

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AFP

elative to some of my friends (real-world college friends, not the online ones who I have never met), I am a Facebook novice.

Recently, I had a debate about journalistic ethics with several other journalists who live

all over the world. It was the sort of argument that routinely happens in Bangalore’s Koshy’s or whatever your neighbourhood café happens to be. A group of opinionated people get together, start a topic; and proceed to fly off the handle. We yell and scream a bit; posture, preen and show off our knowledge; use logic; drop names; drag statistics in; and basically try to out-argue the other. This is what we used to do in college, remember?

This is what you do when you meet friends and acquaintances in cafés.

Or used to.

These days, social networking sites are the new cafés. It is where you meet people and exchange views. But there is one significant difference. In the real world, you have visual cues.

You can massage your message based on real-time reactions from the other parties. If something you say makes the other person uncomfortable, you can tone it down instantly; or not. Not so online.

When you say, “Come on, yaar,” it is not a conversational pause while you marshall your thoughts. It sounds forced and flippant. When you drop names, it reads exactly like what it is: posturing. All the foolish words you say in the heat of the moment don’t simply fly in the wind and disappear.

They are recorded for all to see.

Sometimes, when I go back and read what I’ve said on Facebook, I squirm.

I consider deleting it but it seems like a cop-out.

Recording your off-the-cuff remarks can have real-life consequences as the CNN journalist who got fired from her job when she posted an admiring

comment about a radical cleric on Twitter discovered; or the family that posted a vacation message and found their house burgled on return realized. The biggest problem that Facebook sceptics have with social networking sites is that everything seems like an announcement, since updates are read by a whole community of people, most of whom you don’t see on a regular basis. “No matter what you type, it seems like you are posturing,” said one entrepreneur who lurks on Facebook but posts next to nothing. “Even the most innocuous message seems like a boast.” I get what he is saying.

Sharing emotions is what you do with friends. “I miss my kid; I have the flu; I feel crappy.” That kind of thing. All this is natural when you talk to friends. When you post the same thing as a status update, it seems like a town hall meeting, or therapy, where you reveal intimate details to perfect strangers.

Lots of people don’t have this issue. They live their lives out on Facebook. One 20-something woman posted minute-to-minute photos of her water birth with every anatomical detail, including placenta, revealed. This alarmed some of her “friends” enough to deactivate their Facebook account.

For others, Facebook updates can seem like bragging. If you don’t want to confess or brag, then what do you post? What is the value add? I think the trick is to view Facebook as a tool for information gathering and a vicarious dip into another person’s reality. To read too much into status

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG

Virtual reality: (top) CNN journalist Octavia Nasr who paid the price for her tweets; and Facebook status updates and posts can make innocuous words seem boastful. updates and comments will cripple your ability to engage with any social networking site. I am trying to figure out how to do this, given that people like me are a minority in the Internet world. Hordes of others have managed to figure out how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to their advantage. And pretty soon, I want to be one of them.

I shouldn’t worry so much about

posturing and bragging and appearing to be something I am not.

As psychologist Sam Gosling points out, studies prove that no matter how you portray yourself on Facebook and other sites, viewers are surprisingly good at figuring out exactly who you are. What Gosling did was this: He chose 236 people who he knew pretty well. Then he presented their Facebook profiles to strangers and

asked the strangers to assess the profiles. To his surprise, the assessments matched reality.

“I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves,” said Gosling in an interview with Science Daily. “In fact, our findings suggest that online social networking profiles convey rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.”

Gosling’s findings are reassuring to Facebook sceptics like me. To know that even if you try to posture, most people figure out exactly who you are is a great relief.

The amount of time we spend online is its greatest flaw for most of us. Facebook and Twitter swallow up many of our working hours. There are tools such as “Freedom”, a downloadable paid application which will “lock” up your Internet after a certain length of time so that you cannot go back online. Time online is not my greatest issue; not being able to touch someone is.

You see, I am a vata, according to Ayurveda. Vatas enjoy touch and smell, just as pittas enjoy sight and sound. Touch is highly underrated.

When you meet people in real life, you shake hands. As the conversation continues, you press their arm to make a point; or slap their back. In Facebook, you cannot touch anyone.

That, to me, is its biggest drawback; and the crucial difference between real life and a social network.

Shoba Narayan dreads the day when Facebook designs an app that will allow you to reach through the computer and touch someone. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

ATTENTION GRABBERS My son is eight and my daughter two years old. From the time my daughter was born, I was particular that my son should not feel neglected.

So I escort him to his various classes, treat him to Sunday movies and otherwise spend lots of time with him. Yet at a recent parent-teacher association (PTA) meeting, his Hindi teacher said there’s been a drastic change in his behaviour: He bullies other children, hits them, is inattentive and disruptive in class. His class teacher, on the other hand, says his classroom performance is good, though he is a bit overconfident. I am familiar with both streaks of behaviour: He does bully his sister, because of which he is forever being scolded, and he is overconfident, to the extent of not studying for an exam because he knows everything.

Is this the effect of having another child in the house?

I can’t see where I am going wrong.

You could be doing nothing wrong really; children go through phases of self-assertion—and the easiest form of self-assertion is to become loud and brash.

However, having said that,

perhaps you have been overcompensating for the coming of the new child far too much? To the point of appearing that you are apologetic about the presence of a second child, and are kind of appeasing your son?

Children pick up on that, and if you’ve been walking on eggshells around him, he may be misbehaving because he can see that he is expected to act up.

And if this is the case, at some level, you may be reinforcing his behaviour each time you scold him for bullying his sister. In a way, it becomes his identity—“I bully my sister”—and it’s also the perfect way for him to drag your attention away from the younger one and on to himself.

Along with the other adults in the house, you could try one thing: Stop him or reprimand him only if he is actually physically endangering his sister. The rest of the bad behaviour relating to his sister, you could completely ignore or take casually. Once he sees that his actions have lost their charge with you, he may lose interest in behaving that way.

It’s possible that though you’re doing so much for him so that he doesn’t feel neglected, he just hasn’t had a chance to

Speak up: Expressing resentment can be healthy for an eight­year­old. process his feelings of resentment and insecurity once the baby came into the picture.

He needs to work it out—in a few harmless ways, and not be stopped each time. Moreover, your (quite natural) feeling of “I’ve done so much to make this easy on him, and yet he’s misbehaving” is also possibly getting communicated to him. So he has the additional burden of good behaviour that you feel he owes you. Taking all this out on unrelated people in school might be one of his ways of dealing with it all. So perhaps you do need to re-examine your strategy of appeasement”—“we’ll go out, do stuff that you like, I’ll take you to your classes, but please don’t get jealous and hurt the baby” is how your actions just might be coming across to him ever since

the baby arrived. Maybe you just need to be more natural, and let him deal with the pain of sibling rivalry for a bit?

The overconfident studies-related behaviour is possibly tied in too—a kind of defiant “I’m fine exactly as I am” stand. I would suggest you let that one go. Let him be overconfident and not get such great marks in school. I’m guessing that once the atmosphere at home is more natural and he’s allowed to feel and express some amount of his resentment, this little boy will feel a little less watched, monitored and “managed”.

We live in a semi-joint family (all in one building with each family having its own kitchen).

All of us parents of children

(there are three couples) have decided consciously never to compare the children (four of them) with each other on any level. However, the grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and the maids tend to do this a lot. When we have tried to talk this out, they say we are being too fussy and that, in fact, this is a way to get children to do better. As these people are the care-providers throughout the day, since we all work, we can’t do much.

How do we drive this point home better, and how do we not let it affect our children?

Well, for caregivers hard-pressed for strategies to get children to complete tasks and chores and to behave, it is a quick-fix strategy, this comparing. Some degree of this kind of a thing can be used as a tool to motivate children: “See, how well he’s eaten; see how nicely she’s done her homework,”, etc. And sometimes it does work to get a child to get on with the task at hand. So a hard and fast rule is not something that can be easily followed when there are several children around and people who have to take care of them through the day using various devices and techniques.

Moreover, you say that the caregivers are older people and domestic help, then they are probably fairly set in their ways.

However, as I have said before, comparisons are of limited use, and can work negatively. Most children react to comparisons with some “defence mechanism”, such as ignoring

what you’re saying, or coming up with a sullen and unreasonable response such as: “Well, she does it because she’s stupid” or “Because she’s a goody-goody”. So, in fact, your comparison has not only not worked, it has pushed the child further away from what you want him to do. Moreover, this could cause unhealthy rivalry between the children.

What you need to perhaps look out for, is that one (the angelic, obedient one) is not being held up as a shining example all the time. This really sets children against each other, and both the “good” child as well as the ones being pulled up, suffer from this kind of constant, one-way comparison. If this is happening, you’ll need to sit your care-providers down and really request them to not do this too often.

The other thing that you can do is request them to try to compare each child with its own best behaviour.

The bottom line on this, you could convey, is that the comparison tool has to be constructive and should never target a child’s sense of self—comparisons about physical appearance would then be a complete no-no, as they do nothing but create anxiety, embarrassment and low self-worth.

Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Send your queries to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

COLUMNS L5

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RAHUL BHATTACHARYA THE TICKLED SCORER

Why Test cricket is going through a slump

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ecline, decline everywhere in Test cricket. Australia are in gloat-worthy decline. New Zealand have declined to a small spot on the horizon.

Pakistan are declining in concentric implosions. West Indies, perhaps, can no longer be accused of being in decline; they have simply settled into a permanent beach-chair recline.

And yet managed to come out looking better in rain-drenched Sri Lanka who, no longer levitating on Murali’s magic carpet, are themselves not flying up, up and away.

Bangladesh, decline being impossible, are at any given time supposedly in incline—till whoops! A collapse here and another there and ’tis but an illusion it turns out. Hence they remain secure at the intersection of X and Y axes.

Zimbabwe have declined off the co-ordinates altogether.

Who does that leave? India, England and South Africa. This trio may appear to be in gentle incline, but I don’t know. As with relative speeds of bodies in opposing directions, I suspect they could be merely reaping the advantage of relative angles. One cannot be sure. These are puzzling matters. There’s a black hole out there in Test cricket.

Who is winning all the matches that everyone is losing? How is it that each of the International Cricket Council’s (ICC’s) press releases talk of some team or the other slipping two places down the rankings while nobody seems to be climbing? Is the decline of Test cricket causing the decline of its teams or are declining teams causing the decline of Test cricket?

What I do know is that the multiple declines have taken their toll on cricket watchers. In the same way video games inure children to violence, we have begun to numb to weak, declining cricket. The television stays on, futile commentary to futile cricket, till, glazed, we don’t see or hear anymore. The scoreboards, matches, tournaments tick over and like sad robots we wait for passages to rouse us into feeling human again.

Look at the West Indians.

Many of us weren’t around to watch Roberts, Holding, Marshall and Croft target-practising, but we did grow up with Patterson, Ambrose, Walsh and Bishop. From there to the emaciated offerings of, say, Lionel Baker, is so crushing a fall that if one happens to chance upon Kemar Roach running in quick for an entire spell, it feels like the world may turn a circle yet. Such are the deceptions of the deluded—and Test-cricket viewers tend to be nothing if not deluded. ICC’s media managers only reflect our state of mind when they supply us sentences such as: “Meanwhile, the West Indies has gained points for managing to avoid defeat in the series and is now placed just three ratings points behind Pakistan in seventh position.”

Downturn: Australia’s decline under captain Ponting is reiterated by their recent defeat to England in Adelaide.

Three rating points above West Indies: this is a pretty good reflection of Pakistan’s own decline. For years, we relied on Pakistan’s prodigious natural talent to generate a revival, but this too seems deluded. Not only must a player be prodigiously talented, he must: a) Be averse to drugs, beating teammates with bats, and biting balls, b) Not rub Ijaz Butt the wrong way, c) Not procure an agent d), Not be made captain, e) If in possession of an agent and made captain, then not share agent with players who fulfil the first four criteria.

These are more filters than any reasonable system can endure.

With the decline of West Indies and Pakistan, something’s gone out of cricket.

Nobody of my generation imagined such a fate would befall Australia. Admittedly a collapse to those levels is beyond them, but with every passing series, one can watch them try. Up at our 5.30am to greet cricket from Australia, we would be tyrannized once upon a time by Craig McDermott and Merv Hughes, their zinc creams and swear words; later by Glenn McGrath eating up batsmen’s very souls, Jason Gillespie streaming in like a particularly nasty witch, Shane Warne bluffing out of the rough. Nowadays, we find Australia at 2 for 3. Or England resuming at 309 for 1. Or England resuming at 317 for 2.

Or 551 for 4. With Xavier Doherty waiting to have a go.

Indeed, nothing describes

MICK TSIKAS/REUTERS

Australia’s decline better than poor Doherty. Regionalism was supposed to be the bugbear of Indian captains, but it is hard to attribute anything other than Tasmanian brotherhood to Ricky Ponting’s backing of a lad with a first-class bowling average of 49.

Indian viewers suspect a conspiracy that has been two years in the making, from the time fake Tasmanian Jason Krejza’s 12-wicket debut haul in Nagpur was undone by legendarily dim captaincy. Krejza only ever played one Test thereafter. Apparently, he goes for too many runs. Twelve wickets for 350 runs? Australia’s recent going rate has been five for a thousand. They could play an attack for four Krejza’s.

Word is that Australians are in denial of their decline. Well, even lifelong Aussie-dissers seem to be. For a month now, a friend has been plying me with all manner of uncharacteristic offerings—they look pretty decent on paper; they’re just not taking their chances—but, after years of manfully talking down the Australians when they were properly invincible, I can tell he’s only guarding against complacency. How on earth to deal with insufferable Australian supremacy should it return? It is an admirable mechanism, but perhaps he should have more faith in Test cricket’s graphs. It’s all going downhill, into oblivion.

Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the forthcoming novel The Sly Company of People Who Care.

He writes a monthly cricket column for Lounge.

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

L6

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

Profile KEDAR BHAT/MINT

ENTREPRENEUR

The chief wine evangelist Sula Vineyards is set to double with new foreign equity.

CEO Rajeev Samant tells us how he is changing wine tastes in India

B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· t’s a lazy November afternoon and the newly opened resort Beyond in Nashik buzzes with activity as children chase imaginary mice, adults shiver in a small infinity swimming pool and the staff waits attentively. Rajeev Samant watches the action from one of the sunbeds, the customary glass of white wine in hand, alone for just that small moment before he is interrupted—either by the conversation of a friend or the concerns of his staff.

Samant, the founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards, mostly looks at peace—he said in a magazine interview once that he could live with little, like a monk—but he admits he is never content. Not when there is so much to do.

Beyond is the new 20-room resort opened about 3km from Sula Vineyards near Nashik. It is Samant’s latest offering, an extension of his growing business, a place that welcomes tourists with countryside delights of kayaking in the nearby Gangapur lake or cycling through rough rural roads watched by water buffaloes or merely lazing in the pool under the unusually hot winter sun. Of course, a trip to the winery, vineyard and the Tasting Room are

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naturally thrown in.

But this is just a small diversion to Samant’s greater plan.

A Belgian family-owned investment holding company Verlinvest SA recently bought a stake in Nashik Vintners Pvt. Ltd (NVPL), the company that owns the Sula brand, for an estimated $15 million (around `68 crore). Samant, who does not mention figures, says it’s not a strategic sale. “It’s not another booze company, so it doesn’t restrict our options down the road. It’s more of a financial sale but at the same time bringing strategic depth. We get expertise in the beverage area but like from a private equity investor.”

This effectively means Sula will double in size in the next three years after it starts a new winery that needs to be ready for the January 2012 crush. The expansion plans include this winery that needs to be built in 12 months at a new site separate from the existing one which is operating at capacity; planting another 1,000 acres of grapes in the next three years to add to the existing 1,200

acres; and supplementing the existing Sula staff strength of around 300.

The Sula CEO says the company needed the infusion of equity as their debt was a little bit on the high side. “If there had been another slowdown, it would have been tough. So this was a good time, sales are up 55% over last year. They say the best time to raise money is when the going is really good.”

The going wasn’t really too good over the last few years. Luxury products are typically the first to take a hit from any economic setback and wine is one of them.

Several growers of grapes in Nashik, for instance, removed their vineyards due to the uncertainty, but Sula had a plan.

In 2008, they launched a few “value brands” at around `200, which turned out to be a success.

“We realized that the paradigm (of pricing) was `400-600. This was the sweet spot,” says 43-yearold Samant.

He adds that people who want to drink wine but can’t afford

`400 on a regular basis were dismissed as cheaper alcohol consumers but there were enough people out there who wanted decent wine. At `200-250, the wine would not be complex, adds the winemaker, but would be drinkable table wine. “Sula was always known as the most premium producer but we stood everything on its head and have become the leading value wine producer because that whole fortune at the bottom of the pyramid makes sense in India. You can’t get away from it. Today again, premium wine sales are going strong. Over the last couple of months, premium wines are outpacing value wines in growth. So we are back on track.”

The moral of the story: “If somebody wants to get on the

bandwagon, the pricing has to be right. Once the person gets on with the right pricing, he can climb the ladder.”

The wisdom is completely selftaught. Samant’s over 10 years in the business came after the Stanford graduate quit a job as a finance manager with Oracle in San Francisco to chase a passion with family-owned land in Nashik. The wine business in the country was dominated by old businesses; Indians were typically not interested in what’s perceived as a more sophisticated alcohol; licences were difficult to get; and he had no experience. Today, Sula has 70% share of the estimated `500 crore wine market in India.

“I do not spend much time dwelling on milestones,” says Samant. “The only thing that’s on my mind always is what has to be done next. We did throw a series of parties and celebrations across the country to celebrate 10 years of Sula and invited all our supporters and consumers.

That was nice for sure. But it seems like a new milestone is happening every couple of months, so we just need to get down to the job on hand.”

A week later, far from the quiet of Nashik’s farmlands, Samant is at the Cointreau (Sula distributes Rémy Cointreau’s brands) party at Shiro, Mumbai, where cocktails in plas-

Upswing: (clockwise from top) Samant in his Mumbai office; a restaurant at Sula in Nashik; the vineyard; and (bottom) not all wines go well with Indian cuisine. tic shakers are passed around, foreign models pose for tabloid pictures and loud music dominates any possible conversation. The company’s ability to adapt with the vagaries of the economy reflects in its founder’s ability to blend—with farmers in Savargaon and fashion models in Mumbai.

It’s a duality that keeps him strong in business, being able to interact with both ends of the spectrum, to negotiate with farmers and network with businessmen. Employees are seldom known to leave Sula while grape farmers have stood steady over the decade because of the company’s “integrity and consistency”. “A grower is not going to leave Sula even if he is offered double the price,” he confides.

“I am never content,” Samant adds. “Let’s look at it this way. As far as what I have done in life, in material things, I am content. But with work and Sula, we have to move on to the next step, next level. Whether it’s quality, quantity, introducing India to wine...” he trails off.

“I am the chief wine evangelist in this country now,” says Samant, “there’s lots of work still to be done.”

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

L7

Eat/Drink

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

Nanny’s pudding A ‘Stir­Up Sunday’ recipe from another era, which requires less planning and more rum

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uch as I would like to be the kind of cook whose diary reads: “1 Jan: make Christmas pudding for next year”, the truth is, I’m not.

Which goes some way to explaining why I’m bringing you this festive recipe weeks after more organized cooks have their puddings made and stashed.

This year, though, I have an excuse—on “Stir-Up Sunday”, the day towards the end of November on which Christmas pudding is traditionally made, our family recipe, Nanny Nelson’s Legendary Xmas Pudding recipe to be precise, was reported missing after a pre-Christmas tidy-up by my father-in-law, the recipe’s custodian.

In terms of our family’s culinary legacy, this was a major blow. I never met my husband’s grandmother but I know she was a great cook. During the pre-war years, people travelled for miles to eat the meat pies she made at the pub she ran with her husband in the East End of London.

It was Nanny Nelson who was responsible for turning her

daughter-in-law, my husband’s mother, into an excellent cook. It was her wonderful dishes—pies and puddings from another era—that sustained us when my mother-in-law stepped in to feed us all when our first child was born. And since I joined the family I can’t remember a Christmas without Nanny Nelson’s pudding to follow the great turkey feast.

Happily the pudding recipe surfaced in the nick of time and I pass it on here. I checked, and even without months of maturing, the taste is the thrilling grown-up equivalent of waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa has paid a visit.

Nanny Nelson’s Christmas Pudding Serves 8 Ingredients 450g currants 450g sultanas 450g raisins 285ml of Guinness or stout (I couldn’t find either in Delhi so used a dark beer)

150ml rum 450g Demerara sugar 450g plain flour 225g suet 4 eggs, beaten 2 tsp mixed spice (see method) 50g chopped, candied peel A pinch of salt Method At this point in the recipe I could leave you with the simple one-line instruction that follows: “That’s it, boil for a least 6 hours and then again before you serve on Christmas Day…should turn out lovely!” But I’ve taken the liberty of reading between the lines—this is what I think Nanny Nelson meant: You will need two heat-proof pudding basins in which to steam the puddings. This quantity will be enough for two large (1.7 litre) or four small (1 litre) basins. I made two large, one in a lidded plastic pudding basin I had brought from home and one in a glass bowl with a plastic lid which I bought in Delhi. Both puddings cooked beautifully. You will also need either a pan large enough to hold the basin or a large steamer.

The day before you plan to make your pudding, put the currants, sultanas and raisins in a very large bowl and pour over the beer and rum. Give it all a good stir then cover and leave to steep overnight.

To make the mixed sweet spice powder, put 1 small cinnamon

stick, 1 tbsp each of cloves, mace, nutmeg, coriander seeds, ginger into a small food processor and grind to a fine powder. You will only need a small amount for the pudding but keep the rest in a screw-top jar and use for all your festive recipes.

Next day, lightly grease your pudding basins. If you’re using a normal pan, fill it with enough water to come about half way up the side of your pudding basin and put it on to boil. If you have a steamer, boil the water in the bottom part.

Add all the remaining ingredients to the steeped fruit: sugar, flour, eggs, mixed spice, chopped candied peel, salt and suet. Traditionally, the suet used in Christmas pudding and mince pies is beef fat. If beef suet’s not for you, a lighter vegetarian version is also available. If you can’t find suet, use hard-grated unsalted butter.

Stir the ingredients until they’re all evenly distributed throughout the mixture. The Stir-Up Sunday tradition is for every member to stir the mixture and make a wish.

You can also stir in some silver coins—as children, our puddings always had a couple of silver sixpences—but if you do, make sure your coins are thoroughly washed. Spoon the mixture into the pudding basins and press down firmly. Cut out a circle of greaseproof paper to place on top of the mixture then put on the lid.

A strict no­no: Never pressure­cook or bake a Christmas pudding.

It’s important not to let any water into the pudding as it cooks, so you could also wrap the whole basin in aluminium foil.

Put the basins into the pan/steamer and leave to steam gently for 5 hours, watching to make sure the water is topped up.

There is no alternative to this long slow steaming—don’t be tempted to put it in the pressure cooker and under no circumstances must a Christmas pudding be baked.

On Christmas Day, all you have to do is pop the pudding back in a pan/steamer and cook for another couple of hours.

The best accompaniment to Christmas pudding is brandy butter although be warned—it’s addictive. To make it, cream together 100g of soft unsalted butter, 200g light brown sugar then stir in a couple of tablespoons of brandy (or rum) until you have a nice smooth

blend. The butter will keep (but won’t last!) a week in the fridge.

To serve your pudding, heat about 100ml of rum in a small pan (don’t let it boil, you don’t want to burn off the alcohol).

Light a match and carefully hold it to the rum and let it catch light then pour the flames over the pudding and take it quickly to the table to the delight and amazement of your friends and family.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at http://eatanddust.wordpress.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

Design FORECAST

2011’s hue is a new floral pink NANETTE LEPORE/AP

How ‘honeysuckle’ pink was chosen to be everywhere—from the ramp to furniture

B Y C HRISTINA B INKLEY ···························· he new year is looking brighter in at least one respect. On Thursday, colour authority Pantone plans to announce that its colour of the year for 2011 is an intense pink it calls “honeysuckle”.

Pantone predicts we’re about to see a lot of this colour, appearing on everything from designer dresses to pillows, water bottles, nail polish, sofas and appliances. A sherbety shade of pink, with a hint of red and orange zest, honeysuckle is seen by designers as a pick-me-up at a time when many people have had their fill of misfortune.

Pantone polls graphic, industrial, fashion and other designers from around the world each year to forecast the colours that will have broad appeal. After many design experts told Pantone they were using versions of a hot pink, the company narrowed the field to this precise shade— known specifically as Pantone 18-2120 TCX. “It’s a very Mad Men pink. It’s like the lipstick our mothers wore,” says Tom Mirabile, head of global trends and design at Lifetime Brands Inc., the company behind Mikasa, Cuisinart and other houseware brands.

“There’s a retro aspect to it that’s going to be very popular.” The company has glassware and dinnerware coming out in a hot pink much like honeysuckle and is using the colour in all sorts of home accents.

The word “honeysuckle” doesn’t signal bright pink to everyone. In some parts of the country, the flowers are yellow, white or other shades. A Pantone spokeswoman says people’s opinion of honeysuckle’s colour derives from the flower they saw as children.

“There’s an innate optimism to pink,” says Jonathan Adler, an interior and housewares designer, who is using hot shades of pink widely in his 2011 collections. “As we speak, I’m wearing a hot pink shirt,” he says.

The honeysuckle colour evokes nostalgic feelings of summertime, says Leatrice Eiseman, a colour psychologist, who has been director of Pantone’s Color Institute for 25 years.

Strategically, colours of the year are supposed to help sell all manner of products and packages. “We also want (people) to stop and say, ‘Oh, neat colour. Maybe I need to buy those plates’,” Eiseman says.

Pantone, part of Grand Rapids, Michigan-based X-Rite Inc., offers systems for identifying, matching and communicating colours to industries, including printing, industrial, fashion and home design. It also puts out colour trend reports several times a year and has been expanding its consumer licensing division to put its name on everything from Pantone mugs to a hotel in Brussels.

T

It’s not entirely clear how pink rose to the top. Most designers won’t admit to any inspiration other than their own. “It’s funny how some colours just start to look good. It’s in the air,” says Adler, who says he never looks at trend predictions.

Designers have been toying with loud pinks on and off for several years. Two years ago, there was a flurry of pink in menswear and in decor. When manufacturers discovered that consumers were recoiling to seek traditional heritage looks during the recession, colours went earthy.

But when Eiseman saw hot pinks this year on men’s sports equipment, such as the graphics on skis, it really caught her attention. “Graphic designers today are right there at the cuttingedge,” she says. Then honeysuckle pinks appeared all over the fashion runways in September in startling contrast to the camel/grey looks in stores.

In choosing her spring 2011 colours, New York fashion designer Nanette Lepore says she reasoned that people need optimism after years of depressing economic news and bland colours. Lepore focused on pinks and orange. “We wanted to look through rose-coloured glasses,” she says, letting loose a string of rosy clichés. The colours have sold brilliantly, she adds.

The exact shade of pink gets careful thought from designers.

Mirabile of Lifetime Brands notes that honeysuckle has less orange than coral pinks, so it looks better against most skin tones. Also, it reflects a colour found in real flowers.

Some designers have chosen variants within the hot-pink family. Crate and Barrel used both honeysuckle and a similar Pantone shade called “pink flambé” in everything from furniture to dishware. Lepore calls her orange-tinged version of the colour “hot melon”. Ken Downing, fashion director for Neiman Marcus, referred to “orange coral” when he described his pick for the colour of the spring 2011 season.

The Pantone colour-of-theyear announcement isn’t likely to alter designs for 2011, which are already in the works. While colours used to trickle down Inspiration: The honeysuckle flower, after which the hue is named.

PANTONE

from European fashion runways to Target and the like, the interplay happens more quickly these days—though mass retailers tend to use colours more conservatively. Mikasa is using honeysuckle as an accent in a floral pattern, because loud solids don’t “have high-volume potential”, according to Mirabile.

But the colour of the year will likely be seized on by marketeers deciding, for instance, which products to feature in promotions.

Confusion over colours is the reason Pantone came about, back in 1963 when Lawrence Herbert was working as a colourmatcher at a New York City printing company. Herbert recognized that the printing and graphics industries needed to communicate colours with a tool more accurate than words. His first system was essentially ink recipes for 500 colours.

By the 1980s, he had added a separate fashion and home colour system that would work on fabric. Today, Pantone’s products and systems include 10,000 colours defined for various industries. Pantone recently came out with a $650 (around `23,980) gizmo called CAPSURE that works a bit like a point-andshoot camera—but, when pointed at an object, will produce the Pantone colour recipe for it. A “My Pantone” iPhone app identifies the primary colours in a photo.

But the core of Pantone’s services is helping creative people identify just the right colour.

Lepore sends Pantone swatches to her fabric manufacturers so there’s no mistaking the tone she’s aiming for.

The arrival of pink doesn’t mean that other colours will disappear. Turquoise, the Pantone colour of 2010, and other shades of blue-green are expected to be popular in 2011. Adler notes that honeysuckle goes well with a “punchy turquoise” he’s been using. At Crate and Barrel, which used turquoise extensively in its collections this year, the colour was a big seller and continues to be popular, says Beth Eckerstrom, Crate and Barrel’s director of trend and product development.

Turquoise was chosen for its ability to soothe and calm, says Eiseman, who is the author of a number of colour books, including the recent Colour: Messages and Meanings. Blues evoke tranquility for most people, she says. Eiseman also saw the use of turquoise in the movie Avatar as very colour-influential.

It’s no coincidence that most Pantone colours of the year are vivid. Five of the past dozen colours of the year have been a zesty reddish, pink or orange hue. Reds are a marketeer’s delight, says Eiseman.

Pink hues in particular generate the need “to pick it and chew it” like fruit. Flowery colours attract people as well as hummingbirds, and “encourage propagation”, she says.

“Chili pepper” was the colour of 2007, the last year of the economic boom: It seemed appropriate for a year that started out so hot, yet ultimately burned so many so badly.

Hot picks: The honey­ suckle pink showed up in (clockwise from left) designer Nanette Lepore’s creations; Sony’s Cyber­shot DSC­W310 camera; Jonathan Adler pillows; designer Cynthia Steffe’s spring 2011 collection; Crate and Barrel’s Surf chair; and Mikasa’s dinnerware.

SONY ELECTRONICS

JONATHAN ADLER

KIM KENNEDY

MIKASA

Yellows—which can reflect unflatteringly on many skin tones—have been few and far between. The golden “Mimosa” colour of 2009 was the decade’s only yellow hue. And the only truly bland colour of the year was 2006’s off-white “Sand Dollar”. Eiseman says that reflected the interest in organics and sustainability. But it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling they just must have those off-white plates.

Now that red-pink has bubbled up so widely, it’s a sure sign that designers will be cooking up something different for 2012.

Mirabile, for one, says that for 2012 he’s leaning toward “more mineralized brights”, which are toned-down colours, after the brilliance of 2011. For instance, adding some grey would tone down a chartreuse green to the colour of moss.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

CRATE

AND

BARREL

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

L9

Play BOARD GAMES

Devanagari game changers ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

It took three IITians five years to create a unique Hindi version of ‘Scrabble’. Now, it’s easing the pain of language teachers B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· or 25-year-old Manuj Dhariwal, it started with a simple enough question—why were there so few word games in Hindi? English had complex crosswords, Scrabble, Boggle and a thousand variations thereof, but the world’s fourth-most spoken language had surprisingly little.

This was in 2005, when Dhariwal was a student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, working on a design project to create a board game for Indian languages. Five years later, his pet project has morphed into a fully fleshed-out board game that’s easing the pain of language teachers around the country.

“What better way to learn a language than through a game?” he asks, excited. Called Aksharit, the game is an Indian language version of Scrabble. “Playing board and card games were a part of our growing up,” he says, looking at his older brother Rajat, 27, who co-founded their company MadRat Games Pvt. Ltd along with Madhumita Halder, Rajat’s wife and classmate from IIT Mumbai.

The rules of the game are similar to the English version, yet the peculiarities of the Indian languages forced them to innovate and create an entirely unique set of gameplay mechanisms. Players pick seven “akshars” and form a word with it, but the distribution of letters is different. If they had 12 tiles each of commonly used letters, like the English language Scrabble, they’d have enough tiles to cover a king-sized bed. To get the scoring and distribution right, the team analysed Hindi newspapers to understand which letters were used the most. “The ones that are used the least are assigned most points while those that are commonly used get fewer points,” explains Haldar, who

F

Wordplay: (from left) Rajat Dhariwal, Madhumita Haldar and Manuj Dhariwal with a game of Aksharit.

handles the design.

The biggest complication came with the “matras” or vowel signs.

“It took us a while to figure out matras,” Manuj says, unwilling to reveal the specifics while they await a patent on design.

Like the English Scrabble, one player forms a word on the board and gets points based on the location. The next player attaches his word to an existing word. The catch lies in the fact that Indian languages have matras attached and even have half letters. “If the tile on the board has a matra or is used as a half letter, then it remains and the new word can only be made by including them in the existing context,” says Rajat.

The team never imagined they would be one day creating board games. When Rajat completed his postgraduation at Carnegie Mellon University and returned to India, he did not want a corporate job. He and Haldar, then working with a graphics design company, decided to teach at the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh.

“That was a great time. We had students who were experimental, an administration that allowed us to teach with our own methods,” says Rajat, explaining that the idea to do something related to education came to them between 2006 and 2009. “By around then, Manuj had come up with Aksharit,” Rajat says. In early 2009, he and Haldar took a sabbatical and travelled to Chhattis-

‘We have been thanked several times by teachers for making their lives simpler.’

garh with a prototype of the game in the hope of selling Aksharit to the state’s education department.

“We spoke to bureaucrats, educationalists and went over several trial sessions in government schools,” says Haldar. The effort ended in an order for 6,000 game sets that would be distributed across the the state and in Manuj quitting his start-up job in Bangalore. “We travelled across the country to get less expensive raw material, sat at factories, spent hours on the design and within months, sent two truckloads of games to Chhattisgarh,” grins Rajat.

Since then, MadRat Games has sold 12,000 Aksharit sets to private and government schools across the country and estimates that over 120,000 students now play their game. In August, they clinched a deal with Nokia. An Aksharit app now comes bundled with Nokia’s N8 smartphone, and is available on the Ovi app store.

“The Nokia deal gave us credibility, especially considering their long due diligence process,” says Rajat, adding that pitching the idea to companies has been much easier since. MadRat Games is also in talks with Intel, which is thinking of bundling Aksharit in the company’s branded netbooks and ILS (Intel Learning Services) where the game will be available in five Indian languages. They are set to release the board game version in 11 different languages, including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali early next year. Aksharit also has a “lite” version for young children that involves placing tiles on already made words. The company is hard at work on its next set of board games, and is putting together an online store so that people can buy the games there.

The team travels to schools with the offer of making languages easier to learn through Aksharit. “We have been thanked several times by teachers for making their lives simpler,” Haldar says, smiling.

For more information, log on to www.aksharit.com or contact MadRat Games at 080-40989792.

Q&A | JON S VON TETZCHNER

Against the tide The Opera co­founder on browsers, smart stoves and swimming across the Atlantic B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· n April 2005, Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and then CEO of Opera Software, promised that he’d swim across the Atlantic Ocean from Norway to the US if the latest version of the company’s Opera browser crossed one million downloads in four days. Opera is a pioneering Web browser available for PCs, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Unfortunately for Tetzchner, that figure was reached comfortably, and Opera’s communications department urged him, “as any respectable CEO and gentleman”, to stand by his word.

“Do you know how that one ended?” he says, smiling. “The

I

guy who got me into this problem—Eskil Sivertsen, the public relations (PR) manager—was supposed to be my guide. So he was on this tiny inflatable raft with a map and compass.” The boat, named Phantom, was punctured a few hours into the marathon swim.

“He couldn’t swim, so I had to rescue him and bring him back,” Tetzchner says. The company issued a irreverent press release detailing these turn of events, ending with a statement by Sivertsen: “I owe my life to Jon, and I can only hope that he doesn’t fire me for ruining his dream of swimming to America.”

Tetzchner was in India this week as a speaker at a Delhi summit on the future of the Internet. He spoke to Lounge on

the future of the browser and how stoves can also be connected to the Net. Edited excerpts: How important is India to Opera? A lot of the new mobile brands here, such as Micromax, are bundling Opera Mini with their basic handsets.

India is important. It’s our No. 3 country for Opera Mini, and it’s growing faster than anywhere else. The user base here, especially on the old Symbian Series 60 phones (used by Nokia), is huge. Phones like the Nokia N70—they seem to live forever.

We’re happy to co-operate with the new brands. I bought this really unique phone for my daughter—the Micromax Bling?

The um, girly phone. It’s actually a really interesting design. Indian manufacturers are coming with these innovative devices, and they’re becoming Internet-friendly at a great price point.

Do you think the move towards apps and app stores reduces the importance of the browser?

On the PC side, we’ve actually seen a gradual move away from

apps and towards the Web. We don’t have a problem with apps, but we see problems for the developers. Suppose a developer wants to reach as many people as possible. If you analyse the market—to reach a sizeable number, you have to develop an iPhone version, then Android, Windows Phone 7 and the BlackBerries. So the cost of delivering services and data is too high. It doesn’t scale.

There’s been big discussions

in Norway, with people who make apps saying “we can’t make money from this”. You can make small money, which are also the guys who get a lot of media coverage, but it’s difficult to build a large business.

That’s where the Web comes in?

Yes. From this perspective, what we need to make it easier for developers is that we need one platform. But you don’t want one platform like Windows, PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Omnipresent: Tetzchner sees the browser spreading everywhere.

because that stops innovation.

What you want is a compatibility layer—and that is the Web. No one owns the Web, and all the competitors sit around the same table and quarrel about the next set of standards. That’s good. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

You’ve talked in the past about Opera being available in all kinds of devices. Where all do you see the browser being embedded?

Everywhere. This year, televisions are seeing a lot of activity, especially in Europe.

We’re already present in cars and trucks, in photo frames, media players, gaming consoles, shops and retail systems.

In the future, I believe even your stove will be connected. We built a fridge version of Opera for an IBM project a while ago, and a stove makes sense. You have guests for dinner and you’d like to “enable” a timer remotely and have a camera monitor your steak while you’re driving home.

If it starts to burn, then you...well, panic and call someone to fix it.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

ESSAY

CITY OF THE

WHITE TIGER For the Booker­winning author, Delhi is a city of extreme class barriers and peacocks roaming free. But here, for the first time, he understood what he really wanted from life

Old and new: (above) Devo­ tees at the Nizamuddin Dargah; and the busy Greater Kailash­II market. were third-rate people turning up at thirdrate book launches and cultural events.

Outside the red wall, life was raw and beautiful; wild peacocks still roamed through New Delhi. Outside was where I was going to stay from now. ********

BY A R A V I N D A D I G A ··································· ome years ago, I was near New York’s Times Square, leaning against a lamp post at sunset, when a black man in a suede jacket came up to me.

“What are you here for, champ?” He asked. “Girls?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Looking for boys, then?”

“No.” “Dope? Cocaine?”

“No, really.” I smiled. “I don’t want anything.”

The pimp inspected me from head to toe with professional curiosity.

“Champ: everyone wants something.”

For most of my life, I have felt like a Darwinian failure. Men with sharper teeth surrounded me. They wanted the normal things—sex, money, power. I just drifted from place to place. And that is why of all the cities I have lived in, I am most grateful to New Delhi: for it was where I learnt to want something.

S

******** India, to which I returned in 2003 after 12 years abroad, was a sequence of shocks: and the biggest shock of all came from the women. In New York, it had been so simple; they asked you out. I had no family in Delhi and almost no friends; the Time magazine bureau, where I worked, had just three reporters. Without any normal social network, it became clear that meeting women in the Capital could happen only in the classic Delhi way: through a scam.

One Tamil businessman, the son of a famous babu, took pity on me.

“New Delhi is full of beautiful, sensitive Sikh women interested in painting and

music. And they are stuck with these big hairy men drinking Royal Challenge.

They’re all looking for south Indians to have affairs with, trust me.”

A portly Bengali public relations man told me the secret of his success: language lessons. Years ago, when the Indian economy opened up, he had figured out that Delhi would soon be full of lonely Swedish businesswomen looking for someone to talk to. His insight had paid off handsomely. “Keep away from Danish,” he said—he was learning that now. “Go for Finnish. Icelandic.”

I took my troubles to a woman; she got to the heart of the problem.

“Why don’t you have a car? You’ve got the money.”

I told her I had lived in New York for most of my adult life; I didn’t know how to drive.

“Then get a driver.”

I had been out of India for so many years that I was uncomfortable with having servants. I could not order people around.

“Then you can kiss your chances of getting laid in Delhi goodbye,” she said. ******** In late 2003, I was still paying taxes in America, so it horrified me that the US consulate was hosting a “Gallo drinking appreciation event” one evening on the lawns of the ITC Sheraton. What a waste of my tax money, I thought, walking past the people quaffing free Californian Chardonnay. Behind them, a pianist was playing old film tunes, and a slim short woman in a green dress was dancing around him.

The friend who had brought me there noticed my noticing her.

Open windows: (clockwise from above) Lodi Gardens, one of the city’s green oases; the iconic Purana Qila; and a food vendor on the streets of Old Delhi.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

“Speak to her,” he said. “She’s into books.” He whispered: “Bengali.”

Noticing my reticence, he brought the woman over by the arm to where I stood.

I was 28 then; she looked a few years older. Almost as soon as we began talking she told me she had been divorced.

I was not sure about the cultural significance of this; did she not want me to make a pass at her?

To confuse me further, she added, “Twice divorced.”

Having no idea what she wanted me to say, I asked if she had read Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

No, but she had all his books at home. She lived in Greater Kailash-II. What was I doing after this?

The pianist left; the lights flickered.

Gallo appreciation evening was over.

People left the lawns.

Now came the dreaded part of the evening. When we got to the lobby of the hotel, I confessed: “I have no car.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, with a smile. “I have one.”

I met her four times. When I called for a fifth meeting, her secretary picked up the phone and said: “She is in Calcutta.”

The next time I called, she said: “She is in Bangalore.”

The next time the phone was not picked up. ******** All through the 1990s—in New York, Oxford, then again in New York—I tried to write. I woke up at 5 in the morning to finish my novel; and I slept at 2 in the morning to finish my novel. Yet I could not write it. It seemed to me that my problem had begun in 1990, when, to protect myself from a trauma, I had withdrawn from others. I was not emotionally engaged with people as a writer ought to be: the syringe of the world had not penetrated my epidermis. And what worried

me most was the ending of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, when the hero realises his terrible fate: to be the one man in the world to whom nothing ever happens. ******** In the early days what I did was still, by and large, sane.

I bought the music she had played when I stayed over at her place. My landlord in Nizamuddin East, a tall gracious man named Bijlani, knocked one morning on the door: “I did not know you liked Hindi film music so much, Mr Adiga.”

“I don’t,” I said.

He picked up a CD cover: “Then why are you playing Kal Ho Na Ho all night long?”

I bought several dozen tapes of Sufi music, to search for a riff that went, Ali, Aaali, Ali, Aaali, syncopated by the stamping of her foot as she danced round and

round and round her living room.

She owned a small Raja Ravi Varma, which she had bought in Mysore, and I went searching through catalogues for it: a green, red-eyed demon is spying on a chaste woman in a sari. She ran a small public relations firm. I read the business papers for articles about the companies that she worked with.

I began a double life. In the morning, I went to my office in the P.T.I Building, interviewed people, and filed boring articles on how exciting India was. My Punjabi office manager liked to tell people I was the “most Madrasi Madrasi” he had ever met: “This man has Bisleri in his veins. Not a drop of warm blood.”

Around eight in the evening, I started texting and emailing her. Then I began calling.

One night I finally got through. The moment she recognized my voice—even before I had finished a word—the line went dead.

“This is shameful,” I told myself. “You come from a family of respectable lawyers and doctors. You can go to jail for something like this.”

And then I called her again.

Things became worse and worse, until one evening, I turned up uninvited to her door in GK-II—a gurdwara nearby served as a landmark—and pressed the bell.

There was a paper lamp in the shape of a Chinese dragon above her door. Her Bangladeshi maid opened the door and told me, in Bengali, that no one was in; the grin in the corner of her lips, and a sudden movement of the dragon in the wind, told me otherwise. ******** Around this time, in early 2004, I began writing in earnest. One evening, as I was stepping off an autorickshaw in front of the Lodi Gardens, the driver asked: “Can you buy me a ticket?”

“Ticket for what?” I asked.

“To go into the garden. It looks so beautiful inside.”

I told him the garden was open to anyone, regardless of social class, but he was too frightened to come in. I took a few steps into the garden, stopped, turned

and ran back, determined to drag him in.

But he was gone.

I thought of something that had happened a few days earlier, in old Delhi, where I went every Sunday to the second-hand book market in Darya Ganj. An old Muslim man sat by a stack of New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines, which he sold at `20 each; he got them from a foreign embassy. He had no interest in the magazines he sold; all he read was a book of Urdu poetry. I wanted to know what was in the book. Each time I bought a pile of New Yorkers, I squatted by him, and he read me a couplet or a quatrain, usually by one of his four favourites—Iqbal, Rumi, Ghalib and Hafiz.

That Sunday, I thought about the poem he had read out, and then got down on my knees again: “But uncle, what does that mean?”

He was a dark, sweaty man, with a fringe white beard. He glared: “You look stupid, beta—but are you actually stupid?”

To placate him, I bought another New Yorker. “Please, uncle…please.”

So he read it again, the line from Iqbal that had confused me: “They are slaves because they cannot see what is beautiful in the world.”

He closed his book. “Go home and think about it. I have customers here.”

There was a connection between Iqbal’s words and the autorickshaw man’s timidity. One morning, I was walking around the Delhi zoo—past the broken wall of the Purana Qila, past the pelicans that were being fed, past the painted storks that looked like gandharvas on the palm trees—when I saw the connection.

The white tiger was locked up in the heart of the city, like the biggest secret in Delhi: like an Iqbal poem behind black bars. And the secret that the white tiger knew was this: Beauty is freedom.

All through south Delhi runs a red wall, stained with bird shit and paan, and guarded by men with guns; behind this red wall live the powerful and important of the Capital. From my first day in the city I had been trying to breach this wall—get myself invited to book launches and cultural events—to join in the Capital’s inner life.

But all I had found behind the red wall

By 2005, I had learnt to stop my phone calls to the lady in GK-II. I developed a writing routine after my day as a journalist ended. There was a store in Khan Market in those days called Bengal Sweets—the name seemed grimly ironic to me—where I went to write. The waiters let me stay as long as I wanted. One of them, a man with a handlebar mustache, stood by my side as I revised my printed sheets, and asked if I was a “kavi”.

After my work in the café, a walk in the Lodi Gardens: the medieval battlements lit up by golden lights, men’s faces illuminated by cellphones. From there, the walk continued, on big broken slabs of pavement, all the way back to my home in Nizamuddin.

One evening I sat down on the street, wiping my face, and watching the ripple of light made by the traffic along the neem trees. To my surprise, another man was sitting down a few paces next to me. We stared at each other.

Further down the road, near the Nizamuddin dargah, there were scores of homeless men, reading newspapers in the dim light. New Delhi at night turned into a vast Tophet, an infernal city full of secret fire. In the flashing headlights of cars and buses, a vivid face: an old man, his long, white beard blowing in the wind, looked up at me with his finger on a journal.

What were these men reading by night? Were they all Naxalites gathered in the Capital? Was there an insurrection being planned?

But the insurrection was in my heart: against the way I had lived until then. ******** In November 2006, I left Delhi after three years that smelled to me of failure; I had been at a job I did not really care about, had not married or settled down, as I had hoped to do.

Only now do I realize how productive my three years there had been. I finished my book of short stories—which has still not been published in a proper form in India. I began the draft of what would become, in Mumbai, The White Tiger. I started other books that I hope to complete soon.

Most of all, during my time in Delhi I understood what I was meant to want on earth. More than money, fame, or life—O, much more than life—I wanted to write.

Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in the Tower, will be published in 2011 by HarperCollins India.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

ESSAY

CITY OF THE

WHITE TIGER For the Booker­winning author, Delhi is a city of extreme class barriers and peacocks roaming free. But here, for the first time, he understood what he really wanted from life

Old and new: (above) Devo­ tees at the Nizamuddin Dargah; and the busy Greater Kailash­II market. were third-rate people turning up at thirdrate book launches and cultural events.

Outside the red wall, life was raw and beautiful; wild peacocks still roamed through New Delhi. Outside was where I was going to stay from now. ********

BY A R A V I N D A D I G A ··································· ome years ago, I was near New York’s Times Square, leaning against a lamp post at sunset, when a black man in a suede jacket came up to me.

“What are you here for, champ?” He asked. “Girls?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Looking for boys, then?”

“No.” “Dope? Cocaine?”

“No, really.” I smiled. “I don’t want anything.”

The pimp inspected me from head to toe with professional curiosity.

“Champ: everyone wants something.”

For most of my life, I have felt like a Darwinian failure. Men with sharper teeth surrounded me. They wanted the normal things—sex, money, power. I just drifted from place to place. And that is why of all the cities I have lived in, I am most grateful to New Delhi: for it was where I learnt to want something.

S

******** India, to which I returned in 2003 after 12 years abroad, was a sequence of shocks: and the biggest shock of all came from the women. In New York, it had been so simple; they asked you out. I had no family in Delhi and almost no friends; the Time magazine bureau, where I worked, had just three reporters. Without any normal social network, it became clear that meeting women in the Capital could happen only in the classic Delhi way: through a scam.

One Tamil businessman, the son of a famous babu, took pity on me.

“New Delhi is full of beautiful, sensitive Sikh women interested in painting and

music. And they are stuck with these big hairy men drinking Royal Challenge.

They’re all looking for south Indians to have affairs with, trust me.”

A portly Bengali public relations man told me the secret of his success: language lessons. Years ago, when the Indian economy opened up, he had figured out that Delhi would soon be full of lonely Swedish businesswomen looking for someone to talk to. His insight had paid off handsomely. “Keep away from Danish,” he said—he was learning that now. “Go for Finnish. Icelandic.”

I took my troubles to a woman; she got to the heart of the problem.

“Why don’t you have a car? You’ve got the money.”

I told her I had lived in New York for most of my adult life; I didn’t know how to drive.

“Then get a driver.”

I had been out of India for so many years that I was uncomfortable with having servants. I could not order people around.

“Then you can kiss your chances of getting laid in Delhi goodbye,” she said. ******** In late 2003, I was still paying taxes in America, so it horrified me that the US consulate was hosting a “Gallo drinking appreciation event” one evening on the lawns of the ITC Sheraton. What a waste of my tax money, I thought, walking past the people quaffing free Californian Chardonnay. Behind them, a pianist was playing old film tunes, and a slim short woman in a green dress was dancing around him.

The friend who had brought me there noticed my noticing her.

Open windows: (clockwise from above) Lodi Gardens, one of the city’s green oases; the iconic Purana Qila; and a food vendor on the streets of Old Delhi.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

“Speak to her,” he said. “She’s into books.” He whispered: “Bengali.”

Noticing my reticence, he brought the woman over by the arm to where I stood.

I was 28 then; she looked a few years older. Almost as soon as we began talking she told me she had been divorced.

I was not sure about the cultural significance of this; did she not want me to make a pass at her?

To confuse me further, she added, “Twice divorced.”

Having no idea what she wanted me to say, I asked if she had read Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

No, but she had all his books at home. She lived in Greater Kailash-II. What was I doing after this?

The pianist left; the lights flickered.

Gallo appreciation evening was over.

People left the lawns.

Now came the dreaded part of the evening. When we got to the lobby of the hotel, I confessed: “I have no car.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, with a smile. “I have one.”

I met her four times. When I called for a fifth meeting, her secretary picked up the phone and said: “She is in Calcutta.”

The next time I called, she said: “She is in Bangalore.”

The next time the phone was not picked up. ******** All through the 1990s—in New York, Oxford, then again in New York—I tried to write. I woke up at 5 in the morning to finish my novel; and I slept at 2 in the morning to finish my novel. Yet I could not write it. It seemed to me that my problem had begun in 1990, when, to protect myself from a trauma, I had withdrawn from others. I was not emotionally engaged with people as a writer ought to be: the syringe of the world had not penetrated my epidermis. And what worried

me most was the ending of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, when the hero realises his terrible fate: to be the one man in the world to whom nothing ever happens. ******** In the early days what I did was still, by and large, sane.

I bought the music she had played when I stayed over at her place. My landlord in Nizamuddin East, a tall gracious man named Bijlani, knocked one morning on the door: “I did not know you liked Hindi film music so much, Mr Adiga.”

“I don’t,” I said.

He picked up a CD cover: “Then why are you playing Kal Ho Na Ho all night long?”

I bought several dozen tapes of Sufi music, to search for a riff that went, Ali, Aaali, Ali, Aaali, syncopated by the stamping of her foot as she danced round and

round and round her living room.

She owned a small Raja Ravi Varma, which she had bought in Mysore, and I went searching through catalogues for it: a green, red-eyed demon is spying on a chaste woman in a sari. She ran a small public relations firm. I read the business papers for articles about the companies that she worked with.

I began a double life. In the morning, I went to my office in the P.T.I Building, interviewed people, and filed boring articles on how exciting India was. My Punjabi office manager liked to tell people I was the “most Madrasi Madrasi” he had ever met: “This man has Bisleri in his veins. Not a drop of warm blood.”

Around eight in the evening, I started texting and emailing her. Then I began calling.

One night I finally got through. The moment she recognized my voice—even before I had finished a word—the line went dead.

“This is shameful,” I told myself. “You come from a family of respectable lawyers and doctors. You can go to jail for something like this.”

And then I called her again.

Things became worse and worse, until one evening, I turned up uninvited to her door in GK-II—a gurdwara nearby served as a landmark—and pressed the bell.

There was a paper lamp in the shape of a Chinese dragon above her door. Her Bangladeshi maid opened the door and told me, in Bengali, that no one was in; the grin in the corner of her lips, and a sudden movement of the dragon in the wind, told me otherwise. ******** Around this time, in early 2004, I began writing in earnest. One evening, as I was stepping off an autorickshaw in front of the Lodi Gardens, the driver asked: “Can you buy me a ticket?”

“Ticket for what?” I asked.

“To go into the garden. It looks so beautiful inside.”

I told him the garden was open to anyone, regardless of social class, but he was too frightened to come in. I took a few steps into the garden, stopped, turned

and ran back, determined to drag him in.

But he was gone.

I thought of something that had happened a few days earlier, in old Delhi, where I went every Sunday to the second-hand book market in Darya Ganj. An old Muslim man sat by a stack of New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines, which he sold at `20 each; he got them from a foreign embassy. He had no interest in the magazines he sold; all he read was a book of Urdu poetry. I wanted to know what was in the book. Each time I bought a pile of New Yorkers, I squatted by him, and he read me a couplet or a quatrain, usually by one of his four favourites—Iqbal, Rumi, Ghalib and Hafiz.

That Sunday, I thought about the poem he had read out, and then got down on my knees again: “But uncle, what does that mean?”

He was a dark, sweaty man, with a fringe white beard. He glared: “You look stupid, beta—but are you actually stupid?”

To placate him, I bought another New Yorker. “Please, uncle…please.”

So he read it again, the line from Iqbal that had confused me: “They are slaves because they cannot see what is beautiful in the world.”

He closed his book. “Go home and think about it. I have customers here.”

There was a connection between Iqbal’s words and the autorickshaw man’s timidity. One morning, I was walking around the Delhi zoo—past the broken wall of the Purana Qila, past the pelicans that were being fed, past the painted storks that looked like gandharvas on the palm trees—when I saw the connection.

The white tiger was locked up in the heart of the city, like the biggest secret in Delhi: like an Iqbal poem behind black bars. And the secret that the white tiger knew was this: Beauty is freedom.

All through south Delhi runs a red wall, stained with bird shit and paan, and guarded by men with guns; behind this red wall live the powerful and important of the Capital. From my first day in the city I had been trying to breach this wall—get myself invited to book launches and cultural events—to join in the Capital’s inner life.

But all I had found behind the red wall

By 2005, I had learnt to stop my phone calls to the lady in GK-II. I developed a writing routine after my day as a journalist ended. There was a store in Khan Market in those days called Bengal Sweets—the name seemed grimly ironic to me—where I went to write. The waiters let me stay as long as I wanted. One of them, a man with a handlebar mustache, stood by my side as I revised my printed sheets, and asked if I was a “kavi”.

After my work in the café, a walk in the Lodi Gardens: the medieval battlements lit up by golden lights, men’s faces illuminated by cellphones. From there, the walk continued, on big broken slabs of pavement, all the way back to my home in Nizamuddin.

One evening I sat down on the street, wiping my face, and watching the ripple of light made by the traffic along the neem trees. To my surprise, another man was sitting down a few paces next to me. We stared at each other.

Further down the road, near the Nizamuddin dargah, there were scores of homeless men, reading newspapers in the dim light. New Delhi at night turned into a vast Tophet, an infernal city full of secret fire. In the flashing headlights of cars and buses, a vivid face: an old man, his long, white beard blowing in the wind, looked up at me with his finger on a journal.

What were these men reading by night? Were they all Naxalites gathered in the Capital? Was there an insurrection being planned?

But the insurrection was in my heart: against the way I had lived until then. ******** In November 2006, I left Delhi after three years that smelled to me of failure; I had been at a job I did not really care about, had not married or settled down, as I had hoped to do.

Only now do I realize how productive my three years there had been. I finished my book of short stories—which has still not been published in a proper form in India. I began the draft of what would become, in Mumbai, The White Tiger. I started other books that I hope to complete soon.

Most of all, during my time in Delhi I understood what I was meant to want on earth. More than money, fame, or life—O, much more than life—I wanted to write.

Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in the Tower, will be published in 2011 by HarperCollins India.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

JAYATI VORA

CAPE TOWN

Shark­struck HIGH FIVE Favourite expression “Just now” in South Africa means anything from 10 minutes to never, while “now now” refers to something slightly sooner. If you want to say “immediately”, say “now”—but only once.

Must try Seafood so fresh it probably jumped out of the sea and on to your plate. Or if you’re feeling adventurous, try a springbok steak.

Watching the men in white in SA? Schedule some viewing time with the great whites as well

B Y J AYATI V ORA ···························· e counted eight in all.

The largest one was 4m long, the smallest a mere 2m. A couple obliged us by surging out of the water, jaws wide open, in a perfect photo op.

I forgot to click.

When confronted by great white sharks a few feet away from our boat, jaws dropped open and a collective “wow” swept the onlookers. We forgot everything we had seen in scary movies and on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and just stared.

They were beautiful. They were powerful. They swam just under the surface of the water almost as though they were trying to give us the best view they possibly could. I don’t know why they’re called great white sharks, as they’re mostly grey all over.

We were on a boat called Shark Fever, in the waters of Shark Bay, 20 minutes off the coast of Kleinbaai, which was a 2-hour drive away from Cape Town. This is the shark capital of the world. My friends and I, a trifle seasick, were about to get into the water with some big fish.

We had arrived at the meeting point, Great White House, a couple of hours earlier and

W

checked in, arming ourselves with a disposable underwater camera purchased from the attached gift shop. Lunch— which was part of the package—consisted of a soggy hamburger with our choice of tea or coffee.

After eating just enough to stop our stomachs from growling, we were herded upstairs, where a slide show of fantastic photographs and factoids about great white sharks awaited us.

Alison Towner, the leader of our trip, talked us through it. A British marine biologist, Towner was collecting data for her research on great whites. Every trip undertaken by Marine Dynamics, the tour operator we used, enables her to gather information on these mysterious creatures, and the money they generate helps fuel their shark conservation trust. It was the prime factor that helped us choose this company over myriad others that service the Cape Town area.

We learned about the transoceanic migration habits of the great whites. Even if there were repeat customers among us, we were told that there was little to no chance that they would encounter the same shark twice, as they migrated long distances—all the way from the Western Cape of South Africa to Australia, roughly 10,000km one way! This spot was merely a pause, where they fed off the abundant seal colony on the nearby Dyer Island and replenished themselves for the demanding journey ahead.

A great show: (above) A great white shark at Shark Bay; and the six­person cage used to view sharks being secured.

What to buy Township art, sold by hawkers at traffic junc­ tions, featuring slum landscapes with real corrugated tin and kitschy advertisements pasted on the canvas.

What to avoid Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. It’s super touristy and expensive. Waste of time.

Towner took us through what we should expect on board the boat and admonished us to “keep our hands and feet inside the cage at all times—you’d be surprised to find out how many people forget to do this”. Giant, pointy teeth, easily torn human flesh, keep the two apart—got it.

The six-person cage was long and thin. Towner assured us that just the previous week, “we fit six large rugby players in there, comfortably”. There were strips of black rubber on the inside of the cage at hand and foot height, and yellow railings to hold on to.

The cage was attached to the side of the boat (“don’t worry, it has never floated away”), with the top above the water. We had

Favourite sport It’s a toss­up between rugby and soccer.

to hold on to the railing, heads above water, until a member of the crew spotted a shark heading our way. Then we would duck our heads and hold our breath and watch it swimming a few feet away from us until we had to come up for air.

It was my turn. I flip-flopped awkwardly over to the cage, and dropped into the water. It was early September, and winter lingered in the water temperature.

“Shark!!”

As one, my fellow divers and I took a deep breath and plunged

our heads underwater. There she was. One of the larger females we had spotted earlier, longer than the cage even. She was swimming from my left to right, and she passed right in front of the cage as though putting on a show. Her right eye was round and black and she looked right at us for half a second, these strange black rubber-clad creatures with ungainly limbs who splashed too much, and her tail flipped the end of the cage, playfully saying hello as she moved out of sight. The murky blue water closed over her and I stayed down a bit longer than everyone else, hoping to spot her again.

We saw young juvenile males—all sharks less than 10 years of age are called juveniles—and older females. One curious male head-butted the cage just as it had been attached to the side of the boat.

No one was in the cage then, just a severed fish head dangling as bait inside (perhaps it was at that moment that the older Indian couple on board decided against getting in the water. It didn’t faze their son, who took two turns).

One female shark had an injured dorsal fin. The team recognized her, and knew that the injury was recent. They thought it might have come from a clash with a boat or trawling lines.

The flesh looked red and rumpled and raw, the tip folding to the side like origami gone wrong. I couldn’t get the image out of my head. In the briefing session, Towner had taken us through a slide show about the sharks we were about to see, ending it on a startling statistic: Humans kill about a million great white sharks a year. The great whites cause a handful of fatalities in the same period.

Who are the real predators?

As we powered our way back to shore, I pumped Towner for more information about the creatures I was lucky enough to see in their natural environment. How long did they live?

How big did they grow? What did they eat? Surprisingly, she couldn’t answer all my questions—too much remains unknown about these saltwater giants. I hoped that our trip helped her find one more piece of the puzzle. And I knew that Jaws would never have the power to scare me ever again.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

On the spot: (top) African penguins on Boulders Beach; and a view of Table Mountain, Cape Town.

Children need to be above eight years of age to go down in the shark­viewing cage.

TRAVEL L13

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

VIETNAM

BY

HARISH BHAT

Soup style Leaping conches, grilled eel and Ba Ba Ba— Ho Chi Minh City is a culinary adventure B Y H ARISH B HAT ···························· ietnam’s history lines the streets of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). It lives in impressive French colonial mansions such as the magnificent Hotel de Ville, and in evocative exhibits in the War Remnants Museum and the Reunification Palace. Its heroes cannot be missed either. Statues and portraits, most of them depicting Ho Chi Minh, Uncle of the People and Father of the Nation, stare out at you wherever you look.

The local cuisine, on the other hand, does not leap out at you in the same way. It has to be discovered in the alleyways and markets of HCMC. A good place to begin is the bustling Cho Ben Thanh market, marked by its large cupola and belfry. Within the indoor market and on the surrounding streets are scattered many food stalls offering a wide variety of roasted, fried and spiced meat and seafood. I chose the tom rich rang toi, a fried mantis shrimp cooked with burnt garlic.

This was a lively dish, the crushed brown garlic coating my tongue even as I crunched through the spicy, soft shrimp meat. A can of the local 333 beer (also called “Ba Ba Ba” by the locals, since three is ba in Vietnamese), bitter but frothless, was the perfect antidote

V

Street­smart: (above) The facade of the Cho Ben Thanh market in Ho Chi Minh City; and a bread seller peddles French baguette. to this pungent dish.

Other offerings included the grilled blood cockle, the grilled leaping conches and cock’s testicles, indicating the Vietnamese fondness for virtually every form of meat, organs and blood included. They are presented surprisingly well for street stalls, a reflection perhaps of the French heritage, which surfaces at surprising places across HCMC. France appears, for instance, on the carts of bread sellers and sandwich-makers, all of whom display and use only long French loaves. Vietnamese wine, served in a few food stalls, is also a happy hangover from the days of colonial rule, though beer is by far the preferred drink.

Just outside Ben Thanh market stands a small but famous food shop called Pho-2000 which serves pho, the signature dish of the city, comprising rice noodles in soup traditionally cooked with slices of beef or chicken. At Pho-2000, my dish came with a side offering of bean sprouts and herbs, which added a nice crunchy texture. The soup was piping hot, the noodles creamy soft and the chunks of beef succulent. Yet it is the heavenly combination of subtle spices that

defines pho and makes it such an iconic dish: Without its herbs and spices, pho would be just another ordinary noodle soup.

I was, of course, looking forward to eating at Pho-2000, since I had read somewhere that former president Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea had specifically dropped in here for breakfast some years ago. Clinton had apparently relished the pho ga (pho with chicken) and liked it so much that he had an additional serving of the pho bo (pho with beef). He then suggested he would like to end his meal with Vietnamese mangoes. The outlet has since rebranded itself with the words “Pho for the President”, and displays prominent photographs of the former US president enjoying his meal.

A different facet of HCMC’s historical tryst with the US can be experienced at yet another small pho shop located on Chinh Tha Thang Street. Binh Soup Shop was the secret headquarters of the communist Viet Cong (VC) in the city, as they planned guerilla attacks on American installations.

I wonder how many steaming bowls of pho were consumed by American soldiers completely unaware that they were being

spied on by the servers at this eatery. The bowl of pho I quickly slurped up at this place was mediocre compared with the excellence of Pho-2000. Clinton certainly knows good Vietnamese food, even if he did not inhale and did not fight the war.

Leaving these noodle soup shops and walking down the backstreets of Dong Khoi in central Saigon, you encounter vendors of spiced eggs, elderly women with broad smiles, who call out to you loudly with a cackle and a laugh. They have large baskets full of hard-boiled eggs, which they serve with small bowls of a spicy mix and a dipping sauce, a thin oily liquid with strong top notes of the sea, garlic, chilli and fresh lime. Undoubtedly, a refreshing new way of eating eggs, but the sauce is the real secret, and I could not really establish what it is made of. I read later that many of these streetside sauces are inexpensive variations of nuoc cham, which uses fermented fish as its base.

Which brings me to the amazing variety of fish and seafood on the streets. Saigon revels in seafood. In places as diverse as the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Nha Rong Wharf, I found street

vendors displaying dried octopus, squid, cuttlefish, eel and a host of other seafood. They also carry a small pot filled with hot charcoal, which is used to barbecue the seafood on the spot. I chose the eel, and using the services of a passer-by who knew some English, asked for it to be well spiced. The barbecue was heavenly, its crusty flavours and salty fragrance sparking fresh energy in my limbs.

My last stop was at a Trung Nguyen coffee shop, Vietnam’s answer to Café Coffee Day. These shops are all across the city, and the coffee is brewed right at your table using a steel dripper. Vietnamese coffee (ca phe) is strong and best consumed black. As I sipped my ca phe rang xay, an excellent local blend composed of Arabica and Excelsa beans, I reflected on all the delicious pleasures of Saigon’s street cuisine. Simple, cheerful and wholesome food. Sometimes unusual, but always delicious.

Harish Bhat is chief operating officer, watches, Titan Industries Ltd. He is an inveterate traveller and foodie, with a weakness for cities where seafood is celebrated.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

FOOT NOTES | SUMANA MUKHERJEE

Cushy Christmas Making plans for the Christmas­New Year week or just a weekend? Here’s the best of deals on offer u If you’re thinking of a White Christmas, we suggest Tallinn, in Estonia, which lays claim to the first recorded celebrations of the festival with a tree, back in the middle ages. At the Schlössle Hotel (www.schloesslehotel.com), in the heart of Tallinn’s Old Town, you could find yourself stepping back in time through thick stone walls and ancient tapestries. Roaring fireplaces, high-ceilinged rooms, antique furniture somehow integrate seamlessly with the latest in technology (did you know Skype was invented in Tallinn?). Schlössle’s Christmas in Tallinn package is priced at €617 (around `36,830) for double occupancy, including round-trip transfers, two nights in a deluxe room, a private guided tour of the Old Town, a four-course dinner in an award-winning restaurant and

dinners on 24 December and 31 December—bonfires, welcome beverages and fruit baskets and lots more, all for `4,900 per person. For details, call Anurag Tomer on 09810169522 or 07500974466, or email ekchidiyacottage@gmail.com

a Christmas present too! Valid till 30 December. u England, though, is celebrating Christmas the Russian way. At The Grove in Hertfordshire —what they call London’s country estate—you could find yourself back in Romanovian times, with all its signature luxury and opulence. A five-star hotel, a grand country house, a luxury golf resort and a health spa rolled into one, The Grove (www.thegrove.co.uk) offers all kinds of activities over Christmas, from ballet classes to KGB bodyguard training. Join a candle-light Christmas eve service at the local church, and dig into a 50-dish spread for Christmas Day lunch. Two-night packages start from £415 (around `29,299) per person per night, including breakfast, all Christmas Day meals and entertainment. u Or head to New York City, where Robert de Niro’s Greenwich Hotel (www.thegreenwichhotel.com) in TriBeCa is pulling out the stops to ensure a holiday season you won’t forget in a hurry. No two

Season’s best: (clockwise from left) The Ek Chidiya resort in Kumaon; The Grove in Hert­ fordshire; and New York’s The Greenwich Hotel. rooms of the 88 are alike, but each breathes a sense of old world luxury that seems miles away from the frenetic shoppers on Fifth Avenue. The Ultimate Christmas in New York package is priced at $8,500 (around `3.8 lakh) for single or double occupancy, and includes three nights’ accommodation, stockings by the fireplace, a Christmas tree that you can decorate yourself (or just ask for service), a five-hour chauffered drive to see some of NYC’s classic Christmas destinations—from Rockefeller

Center to ice-skating in Central Park—and a dinner for four at Locanda Verde (www.locandaverdenyc.com).

Valid till 9 January. u If what it takes to make the holiday season even more memorable for you is a discount, look no further than the World Heritage City of Bruges, in West Flanders, Belgium, where scores of boutique hotels are offering a three-night deal for the price of two nights for arrivals on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday till 17 March. Book online on

www.bruges.be/winter. And if you’re there, don’t forget to visit the Christmas Market (till 2 January), which comes up around the Bruges market square.

Remember to try the Glühwein, a delicious mulled wine. u If you want to stay in India, head to Ek Chidiya, a resort with a difference promoted by two jaded urban souls who headed to Nathuakhan in the Kumaon hills.

For the Christmas and New Year weekends, their package includes accommodation for two nights with all meals—including festive

u For a New Year’s eve that’s even further off the beaten track, sign up for Getoffurass’s annual secret getaway. While they will not divulge the name of the destination just yet, they do promise that it’s in the Western Ghats, in a private sanctuary set amid gorgeous forests and grasslands. No dedicated rooms though, but you’re assured the company of like-minded people—and also lots of space, should you feel like it. This is no “tour party”, the Getoff guys encourage you to do your own thing, be it a day-long picnic by a shallow stream, or an arduous hike up a four-wheel trail.

Ex-Bangalore, the trip costs `5,500 per person, inclusive of travel, food (except meals en route), camping and equipment, guide and accommodation. For more information, log on to www.getoffurass.com, or call Sandhya on 09916192000, or Santosh on 09845442224.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

Books E­READING

Mirrors to our device­driven life Can our brain and emotional impulses suffer in the new wired reality? More than we can imagine, say two new books B Y B ROOKS E NTWISTLE ···························· he plane lands in Delhi, all conversation stops and hundreds of people simultaneously reach for one or more devices, searching for a signal, determined to figure out what earth-shattering news has come across via text or email during the flight from Mumbai.

Every reader will recognize this scene. In the US—now that Wi-Fi is set to become ubiquitous in the air—the last hours of device-free bliss are soon to be relegated to the dustbin of progress. In offices in India and around the world, people interrupt meetings to look at inbound text messages, send emails to someone sitting in the cube next to them and send 140-word tweets that substitute for thoughtful analysis and in-depth communication.

We live in a device-driven

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world where the tsunami of information and communication through multiple channels is dictating the way we live our lives, absorb information and communicate with others.

Two well-written and thoughtful books released this fall address us and our world—one a work of fiction and the other of non-fiction.

Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, which followed his original and widely discussed article, Does Google Make Us Stupid?, in The Atlantic, takes a scientific approach and studies the impact of new media on the human brain. Carr’s core thesis, as he writes, is that “our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow” as our brains are slowly changed by the constant and ever-increasing impulses hitting us.

Gary Shteyngart, one of America’s young literary bright lights

and the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, has taken on this same phenomenon in his terrific new work of fiction, Super Sad True Love Story.

Shteyngart’s narrator Lenny Abramov, is, like Shteyngart, a Russian immigrant to the US. He is a middle-aged lover of his piles of old and musty books in his apartment which Eunice Park, his on and off girlfriend in the novel, refers to as “doorstops”. Lenny is nearing 40, Eunice, a Korean immigrant whose every aspect of life is online, is in her early 20s. In Shteyngart’s dystopian world, this age and technology gap is something that many of us—who hover around or above Lenny’s age and deal daily with more tech-savvy colleagues and children—can relate to.

Eunice’s every interaction and communication with friends, Lenny and the world is via a gadget called an apparat, presumably a several generation later version of the iPad. Talking to people directly, which seldom happens in Lenny and Eunice’s world, is known as “verballing”

and emailing is known as “teening” as all email is now controlled by Global Teens.

Lenny, with his love of old books and old authors such as Leo Tolstoy, figures large in this and much of Shteyngart’s work struggles to keep up with Eunice on all fronts after she tells him during their first night together in Rome, “You’re old, Len.” Much of Carr’s work is based on a study at the UCLA Memory and Aging Research Center by Dr Gary Small which concluded that the structure of the brain has been changed by new media; specifically that the brains of those of a younger generation are more wired now to receive multiple impulses from various streams of information and data and have difficulty sitting down and reading, say, for Shteyngart’s benefit, Tolstoy’s

Wired: Both Carr and Shteyngart focus on the possible negatives of new media tools such as (right) the Kindle; and the Sony Reader.

Super Sad True Love Story: Random House, 331 pages, `899.

The Shallows: Norton, 276 pages, $26.95 (around `1,210).

War and Peace.

To those of us who have children who play Webkinz on the iPad while listening to music while streaming iCarly on You Tube while sending emails while texting on their parent’s phone, all simultaneously, this is not big news. But the larger point is important, in the world that Carr describes and in which we live, those of us raised on long-form journalism and books (reviewer disclaimer: I am the son of an English teacher who from an early age made us read one book a week, a habit I continue to this day) have an increasingly tougher time concentrating and digging in to one f o r m o f media given the multiple distractions in our lives.

Post their one-night stand in Rome, Lenny is successful in convincing Eunice to move in with him in his Lower East Side apartment-cum-library upon her return to New York and they begin a dysfunctional romance told in an alternating narrative.

Appropriately, Lenny’s chapters are recorded from his old school handwritten diary while Eunice’s chapters come from her GlobalTeens online postings. Events

in New York soon thereafter, specifically a violent uprising between veterans of the Venezuelan War and the low networth individuals force Lenny and Eunice to take shelter in his apartment where Eunice is forced to endure “The Rupture”, a complete electronic information blackout rendering the apparat useless. During this tense time, Eunice finally picks up an actual book, a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “her fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness.” The book trial ends when Lenny tries to read to her, and she finds the thread incomprehensible. Lenny, at that point, is as Shteyngart describes him earlier in the book, indeed “the last reader on earth”.

Our reality today, whether in Mumbai or any other place where people are reading newspapers this morning, is that those of us in our 30s and 40s have a bit of Lenny and a bit of Eunice in our DNA. We are indeed the crossover generation, our brains confused and afflicted by the yearning to focus all of our concentration on a new launch by one of our favourite novelists on one hand and to check the latest news, text, Facebook update or tweet on our iPad the next. For the generations following us, as Carr shows in The Shallows, this will not be an issue as their brains will be wired differently with the ability to absorb multiple streams of information while showing little interest in the singular focus of reading a book.

My suggestion for a remedy to this conundrum: Read Carr and then Shteyngart back to back, disciplining yourself to only checking your device of choice every few chapters.

Brooks Entwistle is country head of a major financial services firm and has been living in Mumbai for five years.

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THE AVENUE OF KINGS | SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI

Victims and assassins What the momen­ tous events of 1980s’ India tell us about our present

The Avenue of Kings: HarperCollins India, 299 pages, `222.

B Y S AMHITA A RNI ···························· hen a mighty tree falls,” Rajiv Gandhi famously remarked on the riots of 1984 that followed his mother’s assassination, “it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”

It is only natural, then, that the cover of Sudeep Chakravarti’s The Avenue of Kings, a set of three linked novellas, features a fallen tree—roots upended, barring the road (Rajpath: “the avenue of kings”) to India Gate. For this is when Chakravarti’s first, eponymous novella opens, on the day after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when young Brandy Ray witnesses the murder of a Sikh boy at the hands of a vicious Delhi mob.

In language that is brutal, acrid and visceral, Chakravarti gives us a series of characters, encounters and confrontations that together form a portrait of the pivotal moments (the death of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and the demolition of Babri Masjid) in the

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1980s and the early 1990s in India.

In the first novella, Ray, also the protagonist of Chakravarti’s earlier book, Tin Fish, is living in a squalid one-room tenement and is fresh out of college. Full of frustrated yearning, he is desperate to prove himself. He finds solace from frustration and the memories that haunt him in the arms of the beautiful Suya.

But their love, so strong and comforting in the first novella, begins to chafe in the second novella, The Cradle of Innocents.

What is the Real India? That’s what Ray and Suya are searching for, and their quest to find it in different places tears them apart, as their country is torn apart. Ray, older and now a journalist—like Chakravarti himself—watches as the once young hope of India, Rajiv Gandhi, becomes embroiled in scandals, and corruption taints both politicians and the press.

In the third novella, The Well of Three Wishes, set in the time just after the Babri Masjid demolition,

Ray grows increasingly unhinged as society around him is polarized, the country becomes increasingly divided, while Suya and him find themselves even more estranged.

There isn’t a dramatic climax, nor does the plot twist and coil to confuse and beguile us.

Chakravarti’s premise—of an angry young man, seeking answers and coming into conflict with his society—is a familiar one. Nor does the romance between Suya and Ray offer any-

thing new; for it plays out in an expected, predictable manner.

The history against which Chakravarti maps out his stories is well-known to us, and holds no surprises for those who live in a nation shaped by that history.

Yet somehow, impossibly, Chakravarti’s book is greater than the sum of its parts. Chakravarti evokes—through the character of Ray, frustrated, torn, confused and full of anger, haunted by the ghosts of dead friends and AFP

Turning point: One of the book’s key events is Rajiv Gandhi’s death.

dreams—the pain and experience of the larger national narrative.

The language in the first novella is occasionally contrived and Ray is a little incomprehensible. Yet

by The Well of Three Wishes, Ray is a fully developed character, whose motivations and impulses a reader can understand and sympathize with.

The idealistic fury and passion of Chakravarti’s characters would be ill-suited in the increasingly corporate world of today: The India that we live in today is far removed from the India of Indira Gandhi’s time. Yet, one can’t help wondering at the end of reading The Avenue of Kings—what transformations would Chakravarti’s characters take in a tale that chronicles our present age and what hidden truths would such transformations reveal? Perhaps Chakravarti will answer this question in another sequel, but for now, it is refreshing to come across a bold, impassioned work that seeks to remind us of the past and doesn’t shy away from asking the elusive, difficult questions that are as relevant today as in 1984.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST | MATT RIDLEY

CULT FICTION

Ode to Homo economicus

R. SUKUMAR

ANDROIDS ARE BACK

JOHN WATSON

The best­selling author’s engaging, but one­sided anal­ ysis of what drives human progress in the 21st century

BY S A N J A Y S I P A H I M A L A N I ···························· n September 2007, the financial institution Northern Rock experienced a bank run, the first time this had happened in Britain for over a century. When it was nationalized a few months later, the £25 billion (around `1.76 crore) bailout was the largest sum any government had ever given to a private company. The non-executive chairman, Matt Ridley, science writer and former editor of The Economist’s American edition, resigned shortly after.

It appears that he’s spent his time since writing a cheerful paean to free markets. After acclaimed works on sexuality and the human genome, among others, Ridley’s The Rational Optimist can be read as his most ambitious book. It’s also the most misguided.

The Rational Optimist is about “the rapid, continuous and incessant change that human society experiences”.

The reason Homo sapiens progress in this manner, according to Ridley, is because of exchange: free trade, ideas, goods and services, leading to specialization and comparative advantage. In his overheated phrase, it’s all because “ideas start having sex with each other” that cultures progress and prosper.

Adam Smith, then, is the presiding deity of this enterprise, and Ridley takes us on a panoramic journey through human history to illustrate his thesis.

Civilizations that have opened their doors to exchange have thrive d; t ho se t ha t h av en’t have regressed (come to think of it, it could well be the other way round: Trade as a consequence of a civilization’s rise and not a condition).

The problem with words such as “progress” and “betterment”

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Positivist: Ridley is a former journalist with The Economist.

The Rational Optimist: Fourth Estate, 438 pages, `399. is one of perspective. Certainly, there is now more prosperity than before, along with significant advances in healthcare and labour-saving amenities. It’s a fallacy, however, to imagine that because of this, human beings are moving towards some homogeneous, utopian goal, as critics

of liberal humanism have pointed out. On this larger issue, Ridley is silent.

An unabashed proponent of increasing urbanization— because, he feels, it provides opportunity as well as frees up land for agriculture—he also doesn’t have much to say on matters such as population density and competition giving rise to alienation, stress, heart disease and other lifestyle ailments.

He dismisses surveys that don’t find a correlation between wealth and happiness because of their margins of error, quoting others to suit his purpose. Such errors are, however, present in every study, making forecasting an inherently unstable exercise.

Ridley, of course, isn’t as naïve as to close his eyes to humanity’s problems, but asserts that “the population explosion is coming to a halt, that energy will not soon run out, that pollution, disease, hunger, war and poverty can all be expected to continue declining if human beings are not impeded from exchanging

goods, services and ideas freely”.

Africa too will shake off its problems with unimpeded trade.

He claims that global warming scaremongers are simply wrong, picking research to back his claims. Moreover, he says, we ought to embrace genetically modified (GM) foods because of their increased output. The rising cost of inputs—much of them monopolistic—doesn’t bother him.

Fossil fuels too should be used as long as they last, as they enhance means of production, and before they run out, human ingenuity will find other sources of energy. This is nothing but conveniently shifting responsibility to coming generations.

History and economics apart, Ridley also makes use of biology.

He writes of the prevalence of the hormone oxytocin in human brains that makes people more liable to trust and cooperation, jumping to the conclusion that “there is a direct link between commerce and virtue” (ah, that explains modern Russian capitalism). He recognizes that large corporations aren’t always motivated by the best of intentions—for example, Walmart—but affirms that their advantages always outweigh anything else. That ought to console sweatshop employees and local firms going out of business.

In essence, Ridley’s arguments are built on the foundation of the human being as Homo economicus, a creature inherently rational and inclined to maximize profit. In the real world, as we know, all of us act on compulsions other than those of the strictly pragmatic. Fundamentalism is one consequence. The nuclear arms race is another.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs, “the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive”.

According to Gray, the good life then “means making full use of science and technology—without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable or even sane”.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Adam Smith in a new garb

Eastern idyll A haphazard and occasionally charming travelogue through North­Eastern India supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· f the title of Siddhartha Sarma’s North-Eastern travelogue, East of the Sun, hints at its generally whimsical attitude, then its subtitle, A Nearly-Stoned Walk Down the Road in a Different Land, should indicate the degree of whimsy involved. The book is not a stoner memoir, thankfully. It is an easygoing collection of essays, addressed directly to “peoples” (as in the book’s first words, “Hey, peoples”), about travelling through the Seven Sisters (Sikkim “was not and never will be a part of what the North-east is all about,” we are unequivocally told. So no stopovers in Gangtok, peoples).

Sarma wanders through each of the seven states, stopping at odd moments to dwell on memories, fiercely held opinions,

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amusing anecdotes about food, and local jokes, among other things. Almost half of the book lingers in Assam—Sarma’s birthplace, also the largest state of the seven—as Sarma provides a beginner’s guide to the history and cultural diversity of the region.

His tone is breezy; perhaps too breezy, trapping readers in odd gaps of perception. Are restof-India readers to know who, for example, the historic military general and ruler Lachit was? If yes, is Sarma justified in providing us a retrospective of his glorious career anyway? If not, how are we to react to Sarma’s bald declaration that Lachit is “a personal hero”?

Readers sensitive to perspective on matters of military and political history may find several such moments to give them pause in Sarma’s narrative. His

cience fiction lends itself to graphic novels. Several popular sci-fi works have been successfully translated into the medium, including stories by Ray Bradbury and Michael Moorcock. The most pop, and also (sometimes) the most abstruse of sci-fi writers is the late Philip K. Dick. Pop, because everyone claims to have read his work. Pop, also because the likes of John Woo (Paycheck) and Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) have made movies based on adaptations of Dick’s works (because the originals are near-unfilmable and near un-watchable except by diehard Dick fans like this writer as exemplified by A Scanner Darkly).

Woo and Verhoeven also had to have the source material rewritten and expanded; as pointed out by Wired magazine some years ago, most of Dick’s stories are missing a third (and final) act. If most of Dick’s works are dystopian, many of the titles of his books are almost poetry. Everyone must have heard of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book that inspired Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott movie starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and some futuristic billboards, but there are also, in no particular order: Flow my Tears the Policeman Said; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Rogue saga: Dick’s book inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

Boom! Studios, a comics book publisher of some repute (the editor is the venerable Mark Waid of Kingdom Come fame) has released a comic book version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The story and the text are Dick’s.

Do Androids... isn’t one of Dick’s works from his abstruse phase.

It is a straightforward enough (for Dick) story of rogue androids being pursued by investigator Rick Decard. Dick uses the pursuit to explore the concept of humanity (as in, what makes a human?) one reason for the book’s enduring appeal 42 years after it was first published. Illustrated by Tony Parker and coloured by Blond, a man rapidly making a name among comic book fans, the comic is everything the book was, and more—like only a comic can be.

At one level, it made even minor characters stand out. But at another level, it was also lazy reading, bereft of the challenges a book by Dick usually holds for readers. Still, this will likely make the book more accessible to many people put off by Dick’s sparse writing. As for me, I devoured the books (the comic version comes in two nice hard-bound volumes) and, thus revitalized, set down to re-read all the Dicks in my library starting with We Can Build You. R. Sukumar is Editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

EAST OF THE SUN | SIDDHARTHA SARMA

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

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East of the Sun: Tranquebar, 249 pages, `295. quick recounting of the Battle of Kohima (which repelled an invading Japanese army on India’s eastern front in 1944) includes several casual references to “Japs”, a puzzling choice of inappropriate language from a writer who, elsewhere, is clearly able to articulate why the Indian use of “chink” to describe people with East Asian features is offensive.

Sarma’s conversational tone often swaps subtlety for narra-

tive ease; sometimes, like the moments when he lapses into third person and calls himself “the Cid”, it can be exasperating.

But “the Cid” is also the book’s one great advantage. Lapses and all, Sarma can be a charming writer, and India’s North-East is both home and a source of endless, fascinating discovery to him. Perhaps this sets East of the Sun apart from any travelogue yet written on North-East India.

It is written with a sense of love and ownership that allows us to fully enter into his emotional engagement with the region.

Sarma makes no bones about his preconceptions; he is not out to learn something about himself; there is no sense of false familiarity or false distance.

Instead of setting out to create meaning, Sarma becomes part of his own book’s meaning. This, if nothing else, makes you long for more travel writers who would spend time discovering their own homelands.

It also makes you long for what might have been. A little less of the friendly email tone and a little more rigour might have made East of the Sun a great book, instead of an eccentrically readable one.

FREE VERSE | ANITA SATYAJIT

Journeying with a Mandala A circle of patterns drawn from intent curls, loops, swirls, bodhisattvas, stories etched with fine flowing sand in colours of virtues slip with purpose from funnels and tubes.

Fingers search for control hard-found in a rambling mind learn lessons in impermanence engaging senses five Till a venerated object of beauty resonates as a prayer on the floor Incense lit, is worshipped, then brushed together and destroyed with meditative focus, as when made.

Offered to Buddha, surrendered to water the Mandala flows spreading its blessings around.

Anita Satyajit is a Hyderabad-based freelance writer whose poems have been published in Kritya and Muse India.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010

Culture FILM

Mumbai’s electric ‘otherness’ What went into the making of ‘Dhobi Ghat’ and why director Kiran Rao’s Mumbai is akin to Wong Kar­wai’s Hong Kong

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· n trailers for writer-director Kiran Rao’s debut film Dhobi Ghat, the camera follows four characters in worlds of their own, each silent and separate from the other, anchored only by a hypnotic background score. Around them, like a picture dictionary, Mumbai’s different landscapes form clues to their identities, and the borders that Munna the dhobi, Shai the banker, Arun the painter, and Yasmin the housewife cross as their lives collide.

“I feel like being an island, Mumbai has a certain otherness, a sense that has developed outside the mainland,” Rao muses.

“All the characters in my film are in some way islands as well, all of them outsiders. That excites me.

I’ve been a floater myself.”

For someone so busy that her day is divided into 15-minute meetings, “floater” is no longer an accurate term. But Rao, now recollecting the genesis of her film with practised ease, is not the same person as the maker of the intensely personal, slice-of-life experiment Dhobi Ghat. That, she says, is the girl who stepped off the train from Kolkata years ago to come to college in a city of “an electric energy, a feeling that included me.”

That train journey and the years to follow have gone into the more autobiographical elements of her first feature. Rao remembers being a white-collar itinerant, moving from house to house around the city in her early years.

“It became such a personal story, sticking closely to these four people, trying to build a multiplicity of perception,” she says.

The Mumbai film industry eventually became home base, bringing both professional suc-

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cess and major personal change (she first met future husband Aamir Khan on the sets of 2001’s historic hit Lagaan, where she was assistant director). But Dhobi Ghat is not a film in the great Hindi tradition of Bombay-merijaan movies. Its antecedents are better located in the slice-of-life, criss-crossing narratives that have formed a bedrock of independent cinema in several world languages over the last couple of decades. “I’ve never really connected with the mainstream commercial narrative style, which is true of Hollywood as well as Bollywood.”

She stops. “Not ‘not connected’,” she corrects herself. “‘Bombay’ films have always interested me, particularly the ones with street characters—Rangeela, Ghulam” (both are Khan hits from the 1990s). “But I’ve never been really strongly influenced by the structure of that kind of storytelling.

I’ve personally been influenced by experimental and avant-garde cinema; even animation. I didn’t set out to write something that drew on a genre I haven’t watched enough of, to be honest.”

Rao and the producers are overtly keen to dissociate their film from mainstream Bollywood.

There is no soundtrack release, no brand tie-ups, no charm offensive from the actors. They shot their film guerilla-style over the last couple of years, struggling with on-location shoots in parts of Mumbai where everyday life can overwhelm the demands of a young film crew, even—or especially—one that includes Khan. In a press conference, Rao described shooting on Mohammed Ali Road akin to “a military operation”.

But sets simply wouldn’t do; nothing could recreate the character of the neighbourhoods now submerged beneath the JJ flyover, ignored, Rao says, in public perception. “These old parts of South Mumbai are not conventionally pretty locations. For example, we went to this fish market called Lokmanya Tilak fish market off Lamington Road. It’s one of the most spectacular places: the light in these old high-ceilinged, tiledroof markets!”

It’s the sort of thing Mani Ratnam might exclaim over, but he doesn’t come up in the conversation. Wong Kar-wai, whose Hong Kong films have been more successful than almost any others in defining the new century’s globalized cities, does.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Viewfinder: (above) Singer Monica Dogra as the bank­ er­photographer Shai; and Rao.

‘I was hoping to find people who could be the character, somewhat organically.’

Dhobi Ghat’s reflective, moody sensibility is closer in energy to contemporary East Asian cinema than Rao’s old European favourites, Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni.

“Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour (Taiwan, 1994) is one of my favourite city films,” she says.

“It beautifully captures alienation in this quickly developed nation and the results of that. And Karwai gets under the layers of a city so beautifully.”

Unusually for urban Hindi cinema, Rao enthusiastically takes on class boundaries in her own attempt to unpack urban layers.

So the figure of the washerman (Munna, played by Prateik Babbar) becomes key, as does the young housewife played by debutante actor Kriti Malhotra. Like Kar-wai’s Hong Kong, Rao’s Mumbai is only as real as the people who make it. “Kriti is my great find,” Rao says. “She’s actually a

costume assistant, who I found when I was looking through my assistant director’s Facebook pictures, as creepy as it sounds.” She laughs. “Her character needed an untarnished quality, someone who didn’t look cynical or worldly wise at all. She was completely incredulous when we asked her, of course, but she said she’d try because she wanted to know what a screen test was like. And we

A playful mosaic Eight linked plays address facets of contemporary urban realities B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· t’s a befitting testimony to our times that a play about India is a melange of many Indias. That characters include everything from a beleaguered bureaucrat, a small-town couple in Mumbai, a socialite masquerading as a social worker, a disgruntled accomplice of 26/11 convict Ajmal Kasab, to a lamp post that is prone to much reflection. That the play adopts a very contemporary, snappy Twenty20-ized format which also simultaneously

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marries it to one of the oldest traditions, that of the sutradhar, on the Indian stage. One on One, the latest offering from Mumbai-based Rage Productions premiers in Delhi on Saturday and Sunday.

The play is a mosaic of eight stories, told by seven directors and essayed by 10 actors. The only thing that binds the stories together is the sutradhar-like device of all characters directly addressing the audience. “The series of monologues and duologues in English and Hindi started off as an attempt by us to find and encourage new writing in theatre,” says actordirector Rajit Kapur, who along with playwright-director Rahul da Cunha and actor-director Shernaz Patel forms the Rage collective. The way One on One has shaped up in content and form is a comment on contem-

Ugly truths: Neel Bhoopalam and Preetika Chawla in the sketch, Bash. porary Indian reality.

The 10- to 12-minute pieces dwell on the depleting powers of the Indian bureaucracy to the trauma of bad airline food (Dear Richard is a plea to Virgin Atlantic president Richard

Branson), the legalization of homosexuality, the politics of naming and renaming roads, to the smallness of life in a big city, laughingly. “They are stories of modern India that amuse, annoy and concern us

didn’t even need a call-back, because she was amazing.” The film’s other female character, played by singer-songwriter Monica Dogra—Shaa’ir of popular funk duo Shaa’ir + Func—was a similar miracle find.

Rao was keen on casting nonactors in her film, because “I was hoping to find people who could be the character, somewhat organically. They would either

all,” says da Cunha whose earlier plays Class of 84, Pune Highway and Me, Kash and Cruise have been similar parthumorous, part-dark snapshots of urban India.

In The Bureaucrat, writer Anubhav Pal (whose work includes Loins of Punjab Presents), for instance, shows one character in three different stages of his life (portrayed by Mumbai-based actors Neel Bhoopalam and “Bugs” Bhargava Krishna) from his days as a young recruit, to the height of his glory in the 1990s, and then downfall in the 2010s. “I’ve wanted to write something on the bureaucracy for a long time because there is something so terribly fascinating about the whole ethos of Delhi, the corridors of power, men in safari suits, etc. The great thing about this collection of sketches is how real and representative they are.

Also a complete departure from the ‘Hello Bartholomew, how are you?’ school of Indian urban theatre,” he says.

come from the same class of people, or have a real connection with their characters.” She pauses, and then continues, deadpan. “It didn’t quite work out as planned.”

In press notes about the film, Khan writes, “I recognize superior talent when I see it,” which is not an idle boast from one of India’s most successful producers.

“When I see that talent in my life partner, it makes me feel very proud and secure.” Khan offered not only to produce the film when he heard Rao’s narration, but also to act in it. It may have skewed Dhobi Ghat’s proportions, but Rao insists that she turned out to have the best of both worlds.

When you have the sort of producer who can ask you, “Who do you want to compose your film’s music? Name anyone in the world,” and then proceeds to find you the legendary Gustavo Santaolalla, it can be difficult to complain. “My partner is backing me because he thinks my film is worth it. And I’m able to be led without compromise by my creative instincts,” she says. “I guess I lucked out.”

Dhobi Ghat releases in theatres on 21 January.

The departure in this production really is the form, conversing with the audience and the linked format. Both, according to da Cunha, would help engage the audience better, which he feels has been getting increasingly restless. “The tradition of speaking to the audience directly is such an effective way to engage them and we’ve decided to revive a tradition that has been around already.” Also, having multiple stories in the same evening means you’re not bound by one story stretching for an hour. In this case, if you’re not enjoying something, it’ll be over in 10 minutes. This is remotecontrol theatre. There are eight stories, eight voices, eight totally different experiences,” he says. If you don’t like it, wait for the channel to change.

One on One will be staged on 11 and 12 December as part of the Old World Theatre Festival at the India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi. For details, log on to www.habitatworld.com

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM COURTESY MORRISON HOTEL GALLERY

Starry eyed: Diltz shot the cover for The Door’s 1970 album Morrison Hotel.

PHOTOGRAPHY

An eye for rock In his new project, Woodstock’s pho­ tographer Henry Diltz makes Goans look like rock stars

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

···························· uring a photo shoot for the cover of Life magazine in 1971, Paul McCartney had asked him if he was going to do his “fly on the wall” thing. These were only the early years of what would roll out to be four decades of music photography, but Henry Diltz’s portraiture of rock giants already had the trappings of a signature style.

Diltz is the Jane Goodall of music photography: The pioneering British anthropologist observed chimpanzees for 45 years; Diltz studies rock stars.

As a musician in the late 1960s America, immersed deep in its vibrant milieu, Diltz had the sort of access that few photographers could hope for. He went on to make images for over 200 album sleeves, including best-sellers such as James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, the Doors’ Morrison

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Hotel, and the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. And there was Woodstock—the most pivotal event in the history of popular music—of which he was the official photographer.

Diltz’s images have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines around the world.

Apart from digital licensing agency Corbis, he sells them through a New York outfit, the Morrison Hotel Gallery, that he co-founded. His best photos have also been compiled in a limited-edition book called California Dreaming.

Diltz has finally—somewhat befittingly, given his self-identification as a “hippie”—made his way to India. We met him while he was here on assignment to shoot Goan villages for an upcoming boutique hotel in north Goa called Shanti Morada, which will be housed in an old Portugese mansion.

At 72, with long silver hair tied COURTESY SHANTI MORADA

Flower power: (left) Diltz in India; and one of his Goa images.

at the nape, he really is a flower child. Of his casual foray into photography, he says one must “lie back and let things happen”.

This is his first trip to India although he says he’s been here “in his mind and through books” (Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda is his gift of choice on any occasion).

Born in Kansas City, US, Diltz grew up all around the world, including Japan, Thailand and Germany. It was in Hawaii— where he started off attending college—that he met the band members of his folk revival band, the Modern Folk Quartet.

The photographs began with a $20 (around `900) second-hand Japanese camera purchased when Diltz was on tour with his band. When the group split, he embarked on photography. He submerged himself in the world of music: the road, the gigs, the social consciousness, the psychedelia. The rapport he’d developed with his musician friends enabled him to capture candid shots that conveyed a feeling of trust and intimacy. He believes “hanging out” is the most important part of what he does. “It’s your attitude, you know,” he says in a Californian drawl. “If you don’t fit in, the musicians don’t want you around.”

With a veritable archive to his credit, he still doesn’t call himself a professional photographer, only a musician who likes to take pictures (Diltz frequently contributed on banjo or clarinet, to the albums he was shooting for). And photos aren’t the only one of his resources. Through his years backstage, Diltz started recording quotes. He has cartons of notebooks and loose sheets filled with what he calls “found poetry”.

There are revelations he shares without much prodding: Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were quiet, sensitive souls who were only aggressive when drunk or drugged. “Guitar was their release…that (The) Doors movie got it all wrong,” he says. “In the green room, you have to sit quietly…,” he adds, “only when they forget that you’re there, do you get the best picture.”

This was McCartney’s reference. And this is something that translates on to Diltz’s images from Goa, where he spent close to two weeks in November, shooting around three villages a day. The fisherwomen of Siolim caught his particular fancy and he recounts how he pretended to be interested in the trees and birds and shot them only when they’d stopped noticing him.

Though Diltz’s Goa photographs reveal the colour-rich exotica that international artists are prone to take to—flea markets, canary yellow walls, bright pink saris—his photographs do something distinctive to the people. In his pictures, they look like rock stars.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

DARD­E­RETRO

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new genre of film-making has emerged in Bollywood in recent years. It’s called the “dard-e-retro” genre. A movie that belongs to this category pays subtle or open tribute to Hindi films from the 1960s and 1970s, even though it seems a bit too early to do so.

Such films fondly evoke the way actors in the good old days dressed, wore their hair and make-up, sang songs and danced.

Sometimes, film-makers doff their hats to specific songs, characters, or pieces of dialogue. Sometimes, a whole movie is set in rewind mode, such as Om Shanti Om or Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai. Viewers are made to travel back in time to share the director’s deep-seated love for a kind of larger-than-life film that is apparently not being made any more.

The most blatant example of the dard-e-retro genre is the recently released Action Replayy by Vipul Shah, which is based on a Gujarati play which, in turn, borrowed many ideas from Back to the Future. In Action Replayy, a young man goes back in time to revisit the love story of his parents (played by Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan). The plot gave Shah a great excuse to excavate bell-bottomed trousers, floppy wigs, polka-dotted dresses and hoop earrings.

Audiences didn’t seem to share Shah’s taste for sartorially embarrassing times. The movie flopped at the box office. Rewind: Akshay Kumar and Katrina One of the premier Kaif in Tees Maar Khan. nostalgists of Bollywood is Farah Khan, who wants to be known as the Manmohan Desai of modern film-making and who wants to deliver the same kind of all-round entertainment that Desai excelled at. Khan’s upcoming Tees Maar Khan, about a charming con man played by Kumar, hopes to evoke the same madcap quality of Desai’s movies. Khan’s Om Shanti Om started off as a pastiche to a kind of over-the-top film-making that we have apparently abandoned, but she didn’t have the emotional distance or the critical faculty to maintain the momentum. Unlike seasoned practitioners of pastiche such as Quentin Tarantino or Todd Haynes, most Bollywood film-makers don’t actually have a well-developed perspective on older storytelling styles. Retro films are little more than better-dressed versions of tacky 1970s movies, and are mostly interested in creating a kind of cool that will especially appeal to younger audiences. Throw in a disco song and the package is complete—never mind the fact that disco music came to Hindi movies only in the 1980s, many years after shiny pants and glitter balls had invaded dance halls in America. Neither film-makers— nor audiences, for that matter— seem to care too much for verisimilitude. The crime drama Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, which claims to recreate the 1970s, isn’t recommended viewing for students of production design.

The real nostalgia of such films as Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai and Om Shanti Om seems to be for a time when film viewing was a far less complicated business than it currently is.

Although 2010 hasn’t ended, it’s safe to predict that this is the year when the film industry realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Viewers want to be served the same comfort food, but in shinier packaging. The humongous success of Dabangg proves that audiences haven’t lost their appetite for masala fare. Film-makers want to make the all-encompassing film that embraces all kinds of viewers. What better place to look for tried-and-tested fare than the 1970s, which is a golden decade for the mostly 30-something film-makers who dominate Bollywood in the same way the 1950s were for older film-makers?

Tees Maar Khan will release on 24 December.

Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

HINDUSTAN TIMES

RAAGTIME

SAMANTH S

TUNE IN TO HAPPINESS

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fter my last column, on the link between the minor third and the sensation of sadness in music, I received an email from Shantala Hegde, from the Center for Cognition and Human Excellence at Bangalore’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (Nimhans). For much of its history, Nimhans emphasized clinical practice above all else, but over the last couple of years, Hegde told me, its research has started to really accelerate. The centre was founded a year and a half ago, and it is there that Hegde has been studying the focus of her expertise: music cognition.

Hegde is a trained Hindustani musician, and her PhD dissertation dealt with perceptions of music. Last year,

with Meagan Curtis (one of the authors of that minor third study by the Music Cognition Lab at Tufts University), she ran cognitive experiments on American opera singers and Indian classical singers, using the Western major scale and Hindustani music’s Bhairav scale.

That research was presented, by a collaborator, at the World Science Festival in 2009.

It was, however, her paper from a recent conference at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar that most interested me, because of its parallels with Curtis’ work on sadness in music. Hegde wanted to test out Hindustani music’s own classification of happy and sad ragas on untrained audiences, who had no notion of

Mind­altering: Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia giving a flute recital. ragas or raga structures. “A lot of musical cues play important roles in generating emotion, and no doubt one is the cue of enculturation,” she explained to me. “But when I listen to music from an unknown culture, even then I can appraise emotion through acoustic cues.”

For her study, Hegde played, for 30 participants, six ragas: Yaman Kalyan, Behag, Bageshree, Lalit, Gurjari Todi and Marwa. Musical theory classifies the first three ragas as positive or “happy” and the

last three as negative or “sad”.

To render these ragas, she chose flute recordings, because “the flute delivers something very close to a pure tone”. To mix it up a little, she played two excerpts of each raga: one from the alaap section, without any tempo, and one from a jor-jhala section, with a tempo (as her presentation takes care to mention) of 64 pulses per minute.

Hegde’s results were fascinating. A striking majority of responses reported feeling either

happy or neutral during a happy raga, and either sad or neutral during a sad raga. With the addition of a tempo, a raga—any raga—invariably sounded livelier and happier. Then Hegde asked her subjects to describe their responses qualitatively. “That was so interesting,” she said. “We associate Yaman Kalyan with devotion, and Bageshree has a yearning tinge associated with longing for Krishna—and I was surprised when they came up with exactly these kinds of imageries. With Lalit or Gurjari Todi, 89% of the listeners talked about death and grief and loss.”

All the major research on music cognition thus far, Hegde says, has involved “Western music, or Indian music and Western listeners.” She’s clearly excited by her studies, and even over the phone, her excitement is contagious. “This is just the first step in looking at the effects of Indian music on Indian listeners.”

Write to Samanth at raagtime@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

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few weeks after the death of 81-year-old Purushottama Lal last month, the poet-professor and publisher who ran the Writers Workshop (WW) in Kolkata, his family is bracing itself for a future without him. Each book that WW has published since its inception in 1958 has come with the distinctive calligraphic flourishes by Prof. P. Lal himself.

The words flowing from his Sheaffer fountain pen have given each WW title an individual, signature style, which is now at the risk of discontinuation.

This was just one of the many routines that gave the process of publishing a book at WW a human touch; “an artefact that enshrines the book-feel, as my father used to say,” says Ananda Lal, son of P. Lal and a professor of English at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, who is committed to continuing his father’s legacy.

Lal realizes the constraints of imitation. “The printer mentioned that there is a possibility of individually separating each letter of my father’s calligraphic writing.

These can be used in future publications. Otherwise we will have to revert to the usual fonts.”

Lal, who is currently going through manuscripts, will publish three or four titles by early 2011. Among them, he reveals is a “particularly interesting” reconstruction of a

journal that a young author’s grandfather kept as a civil servant during the British era.

In its 52 years of existence, WW has published around 1,500 individual titles, mostly poetry and experimental fiction, and well over 3,000 titles if one includes issues of the literary journal Miscellany and serialized works. Since its inception as a publication started by a group of aspiring Indian writers in English led by P. Lal (“Nobody was around to publish me. So I published myself,” he explains on the website, www.writersworkshopindia.com), and its emergence as a literary movement, the imprint’s “book list” has become long, with much to commend in it.

At its modest press, set up in Lal’s neighbour’s garage in 1958 (the premises have since shifted to Lake Gardens), were typeset the first or early works of writers such as Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Shashi Deshpande, Ruskin Bond, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Sasthi Brata, Pritish Nandy, Dilip Hiro, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Arun Kolatkar, Meena Alexander, Adil Jussawalla, Agha Shahid Ali and Keki Daruwalla.

“Most of these people were little known when WW published them. Publishing young and unknown authors was my father’s vision and that shouldn’t change,” Lal says. Its non-profit character is at the core of WW’s credo, underlined at the back of each book.

Without any professional help, P. Lal—who also taught at Kolkata’s St Xavier’s College for many years—worked almost single-handedly, doing all the editing, proof-reading and the rest; the books came without any “ephemeral, glossy” jackets but employed the binding

skills of Tulamiah Mohiuddin, a humble professional who operated out of a cubbyhole in the Sealdah area of Kolkata. The books carried the binder’s own touch—gold-embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-bound with handloom sari cloth, a style of work that won the Best Binding National Award for William Hull’s Visions of Handy Hopper in the late 1960s from the then president, Zakir Hussain.

Everything in WW is designed to cut down on unnecessary expenses, which has allowed the publication to survive “while covering production costs” for the past 50 years and not merely run on the scholarly and literary passions of P. Lal. The non-profit approach has also led to accusations of “vanity publishing” against WW, which in its standard contract with the authors asks them to buy 100 copies of their published title. It is their way, contends Lal, of offsetting probable losses and a safeguard against WW’s lack of warehousing infrastructure and book distribution network.

“While it is true that buying back 100 books wasn’t the only criterion for an author to be published, it also happened that my father would sometimes spend his own money to publish a book when its meritorious author didn’t have the financial means to buy back the books,” says Lal. “Even now, when Indian writing in English is big

BHOUMIK/MINT

Cornered: (above) Ananda Lal at the Writers Workshop book kiosk; (left) P. Lal; and books published by Writers Workshop with their trademark covers bearing Lal’s calligraphy.

Biblio­beauties Will the Writers Workshop remain the same after its architect P Lal? We visited this oasis for book lovers and writers to find out

BY I NDRANIL

business, only an exceptional publisher would not ask for subsidies from the new author.

Besides, publishers hardly ever venture into poetry or experimental writing, which will continue to be our focus areas.”

That hard selling is not WW’s style is apparent on a visit to Book Nook, the book outlet attached to the Lals’ residence at Lake Gardens. The shop is nothing but a nook; hundreds of WW titles, which occupy every conceivable space, cramp things up further. Two books catch my fancy—a hardback English translation of essays of the noted Bengali travel writer and explorer, Uma Prasad Mukherjee, titled simply, Album, and a book on Calcutta nostalgia

by Sadhan Kumar Ghosh called, naturally, A Calcutta Book of Nostalgia. The shop attendant pleads with me not to buy Ghosh’s book. “It’s a rare book and we have only five copies left,” he implores. “You can, of course, buy a photocopied version,” he says. “But that will cost you more than the original (`60).” I am though allowed to buy Album, which first

came out in 1997, for `200.

In an age when Indian writing in English commands aggressive promotions, pre-bookings, celebrity-endorsed launches and seven-figure author advances, WW and Book Nook definitely seem to have retained some of the old-fashioned values and charm of the book trade. At a time when the future of the book, as it is known, is being debated, WW has stuck with the original form, Lal asserts.

“Possibly, this explains why we have published so many foreign writers who are amazed at the human involvement in the book publishing process,” he adds.

But back in those days, not everybody was impressed about the use of English as a creative medium and by the standard of work produced by the WW authors. In 1963, the well-known Bengali author Buddhadeva Bose tore into the English poetry published by WW and portrayed such creative efforts as “a blind alley lined with curio shops”.

Some years later, in 1975, the German writer Gunter Grass—who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature—dropped in at a Sunday morning reading session at the Writers Workshop’s Lake Gardens address. Unlike other

Sunday visitors such as R.K. Narayan, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Christopher Isherwood, Mulk Raj Anand, Peter Brook, Geoffrey Hill, Raja Rao and Allen Ginsberg, Grass, who was on one of his long visits to Kolkata, made his displeasure with the proceedings loudly known, unable, as he was, to reconcile himself to what he saw as the elitist practice of Indians writing in English.

While P. Lal’s response to Bose’s criticism was through the publication of Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo, a 600-page book based on the writings and reactions of 134 poets to Bose’s criticism, the fact that English is as an official language in India repudiates Grass’ observation, reasons Lal. The focal language for publication at Writers Workshop will continue to be English, he says. “Indians have been writing in English for over two centuries since the time of Rammohan Roy and it surprises me that such issues often crop up, especially when many think that currently the best writing in English is coming from Africa and India,” he points out. “We had published the English translation of Marathi author Shivaji Sawant’s brilliant novel Mrityunjaya, which was known mostly in Maharashtra. How would the rest have read him if not for the translation?”

After the death of Tulamiah Mohiuddin, his wife Aktarun Begum has taken over the task of handcrafted book binding; and there is no dearth of talented and young writers, hungry to gift the world with their first book, says Lal. His daughter, 29-year-old Shuktara, says she is planning to start an e-journal of new writing; WW is also considering digitizing its rare titles.

Yet, as Writers Workshop moves on, Prof. P. Lal will be dearly missed, his son admits.

And not just for his calligraphy.

Write to lounge@livemint.com