Lounge for 11 sep 2010

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

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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 36

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH EICHER GROUP’S SIDDHARTHA LAL >Page 6

Dan Brown revived them in popular imagination. Ahead of the golden jubilee of the Grand Lodge of India, we decode the secret world of India’s Freemasons

THE 4KG LIFE LESSON

Ahead of the wedding season, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla tell us what goes into making the perfect lightweight ‘lehenga’ >Pages 8­9

>Page >Page 10 10

REAL BROTHERLY LOVE THE GOOD LIFE

LEARNING CURVE

SHOBA NARAYAN

A MOSQUE NEAR GROUND ZERO

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o be human is to bear witness to events, both tragic and comic, and occasionally of epochal proportions. Historic, we call them, and some of us have been lucky—or unlucky— enough to be there when such events occurred: Mumbaikars in south Mumbai on 26/11; the Americans who thronged Hyde Park in Chicago on the night of Obama’s election victory; Europeans when the Berlin Wall fell; the Japanese when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed; the Chinese who thronged Tiananmen Square in terror... >Page 4

GOURI DANGE

THE RETURN OF ROTH AND RUSHDIE

A polio epidemic in Newark and a fable that blurs the line between children and adult fiction—and other highlights of the season >Page 14

In November, Balaram Biswakumar was declared the 14th Grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of India.

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

A DOOR TO DONGRI

A minor communal flare­up put this ghetto in the news. For Aabid Surti, Dongri is home without the charm of its past >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

HELP YOUR SON BE A TANGY MADELEINE GENDER SENSITIVE MOMENT

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erhaps it is a phase, or a current need to dismiss and belittle (big words to use about a little boy, I know) the very people who have nurtured him, minus the presence of a prominent male figure. It could be a way of asserting his emerging male identity. Most boys his age assert “I hate girls, yuk”, or words to that effect! All of this could be aided by the atmosphere of an all-boys’ class, anxious and confused in the extreme about the opposite sex.

However, having said that, I would... >Page 5

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any years ago, when I first arrived in Paris as a young and foolish student, my means were low but my pretensions grand. I had recently skim-read the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and believed I was ready to take the salons of the French capital by storm. While I waited for literary recognition I decided to get into the spirit of things and have my very own proustian, madeleine-related revelation at the earliest opportunity. >Page 7

PHOTO ESSAY

DOGS OF WAR

HOME PAGE L3

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

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

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FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

OUR CRIMINAL RECORD GOES AGAINST SHINEY

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

SANDEEP MAHANKAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES 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

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id Shiney Ahuja rape his maid? I can’t say I know the answer to that question. But do I believe Ahuja when he says he didn’t rape his maid? Certainly not. My answer stays the same even though the maid reversed her statement earlier this week and suddenly announced, after a year, that Ahuja didn’t rape her.

For a moment let’s put aside the CSI-style semen/DNA evidence.

Among the things Ahuja has said in his defence is that he doesn’t have a criminal record and that he comes from a good family. His wife has defended him through this past year.

Alas, the abysmal criminal record of the nation’s “good families” vis-à-vis their domestic help goes against the actor when we wonder about the truth in this case. Besides, unluckily for Ahuja, Indian men are known serial offenders when it comes to their inability to distinguish consensual sex from rape. And Indian women have a reputation for ignoring the misdemeanours of their spouses.

If your eye is tuned, the horror stories are everywhere.

There’s the 11-year-old SOCIETY domestic worker who was tortured with a hot iron rod and whose head was banged against the wall. The 10-year-old who was burned and starved. The 12-yearold who was tortured, raped and then committed suicide. All these cases happened in the homes of “good families”; often the husband and wife were both responsible for the crimes.

We live in a country of sexual predators where our neighbours, relatives, fathers—all from families as good as Ahuja’s—routinely stalk our children.

What chance does a poor, uneducated, young, live-in maid have in this perverse power structure?

Domestic workers are the largest sector for female employment in urban India. National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data from 2005 says there are 4.75 million domestic workers, but the actual number is estimated to be much higher—maybe even as many as 90 million. Most of these are women.

The women who work at our houses are often underage, migrants in their

REPORTERS’ RANT

The perfect wife: Shiney Ahuja and Anupam arrive at a hearing in June. first big city and don’t know the first thing about fighting back. Take the case of the Bangalore-based software engineer and his wife who allegedly poured hot oil over their 14-year-old household help from West Bengal. The girl said they routinely hit her, made her work without clothes, and from 4.30am until midnight. She was eventually rescued by a rights organization.

Of course we’re not the only ones who treat our help worse than slaves.

Recently a Saudi couple hammered 24 nails into their Sri Lankan maid when she complained she was working too hard!

Stree Jagruthi Samithi’s Geeta Menon has worked with women for the last two decades and in 2006 she began the hard work of organizing Bangalore’s domestic workers. Menon points out that even supposedly empowered Indian women rarely share stories of abuse and sexual harassment. Domestic workers have even less confidence—and no real forum—to share the truth. “The issue is a very hidden one, the women don’t know how to talk about these things. It happens in the privacy of the home and usually stays there. Even the sexual harassment guidelines don’t apply because there is no workplace,” she says.

Often, says Menon, the harassment can even come from older men in the employer’s household. When domestic workers are asked to take care of older family members, they may find themselves being taken advantage of.

When they protest, they are threatened with the loss of employment. Or accusations of theft.

The lack of any institutional support structures only makes matters more difficult. “Everything is very, very arbitrary and based on an individual’s personal relationship. If I’m nice I’ll treat her as a human being,” says Menon.

Many of you Lounge readers from good families may not be guilty of torture or sexual harassment. But how many of you can say your maid has all the basic rights of any self-respecting worker—paid leave, health insurance, a weekly off, regular increments, at least minimum wages? Why not start by upgrading her from maid to housekeeper since she is responsible for helping you run your home.

Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com Priya Ramani blogs at blog.livemint.com/first­cut

LOUNGE LOVES | HALEEM

The original ‘slow food’ staple

BHARATH SAI/MINT

A GI tag for the iconic Hyderabadi dish is reason to raise a toast

NO COMPARISON Thanks for the report “Lost in paperwork”, 4 September. It would have been much more useful if you had also reported how the accreditation procedures for journalists here compare with those in other countries, say, the US, UK, France, Germany, and how they treat foreign correspondents. Without that kind of comparison, one is not able to find out if this is par for the course or worse or better than other countries.

VENKI

GROWTH VS PUBLIC WILL Apropos Radha Chadha’s “China vs India: our Games, their Games”, 4 September, why don’t we talk about their ability to implement decisions against the common will of the public? While India has a tough time even talking about minor changes to the reservation Bill (to scrap it or reduce it), China can throw out entire towns to create industrial hubs. If you give me a choice between people’s choice and growth, I might choose the first, even if that means slower growth—whatever growth we have would be democratic.

VIGNESH

NITISH SHOWS THE WAY This refers to Priya Ramani’s “From Churchgate to Champaran”, 4 September. It’s nice to see someone who has so much faith and respect for a chief minister operating almost 2,000km away from India’s financial capital. I would like to add a couple of points: As far as education, especially education for the girl child, is concerned, I am witness to the fact that It has improved tremendously. The number of school buildings renovated and new ones opened in these five years is much higher than the 15 years of Lalu Prasad’s regime.

Development and law and order are the other areas where we must give credit to Nitish Kumar. With elections approaching, I am pretty sure that Kumar is going to have a second term. I hope that in his next term he will tackle issues such as health, public transport, higher and professional education and, most importantly, an overhaul of the bureaucracy.

NANDLAL

COMIC EFFECT The song fragment R. Sukumar mentioned in the column “Wertham and comic danger”, 4 September, is a number by the String Cheese Incident in their album ‘Born on the Wrong Planet’. The lyrics are probably by Bill Nershi.

I am not writing this merely for a comic book. I probably have read more than are good for me. I wanted to mention a couple of things. First, it’s good to see you writing on Paul Pope, a favourite of mine. I would also like to see Alex Robinson featured. Second, I was delighted to read about ‘Genesis’ by Robert Crumb, an all­time favourite author. But I would really like to read a bit more about his contribution and influence. I was reminded of him on your mention of the CCA. Modern comics, particularly the so­called underground and alternative genres, owe a lot to him.

KIMOTA

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arjeeling tea, Tirupati ladoo, Goa’s feni. Last week, Hyderabadi haleem joined the list of these protected species when the Haleem Makers’ Association of Hyderabad was granted a Geographical Indication (GI) certification. The certificate ensures that haleem makers outside, and even within the city, will not be able to tag the dish “Hyderabadi” unless they meet strict quality and production standards.

M.A. Majeed, president of the association and owner of the Pista House chain, says the criteria for the GI certificate is very specific: The haleem must be made only with goat meat; the ratio of meat to wheat must be 10:4; the ghee used must be certified by a lab as 100% pure; and the haleem must be cooked for 12 hours, in a copper vessel over firewood.

It all sounds very scientific, but that’s not why we love haleem.

The certificate, we think, is a mere endorsement of its lovability. We love the haleem for its wholesome, melt-in-the-mouth richness—of history, cross-cultural mingling, nostalgic memories of shared meals, and, of course, taste.

It was a pastoral West Asian

I do not know if the story is about “Reporting India” (4 September) or ranting about how unfairly foreign correspondents are treated in India. In my opinion, they are treated much better than Indian journalists.

In general, getting PIB (Press Information Bureau) accreditation may be a cumbersome process. But to say that foreign journalists are not being provided PIB accreditation, or are being kept away from India, is absurd.

Going by my own experience, I can say that it is much easier and a lot faster for a foreign journalist to get PIB accreditation than an Indian. In my own case, it took the PIB seven years to provide one even though I had worked for some of the biggest names in the industry. I am an Indian. How would you explain that?

There are hundreds of foreign journalists/photojournalists who have worked and are working in India on tourist visas and creating problems for those who work legally. They do not pay tax and have an unfair cost advantage.

It is those without proper papers and on a mission to build their portfolios rather than “Reporting India” who seem to be the ones complaining the most. It is for the government to find out who is working here legally and who is not, and sometimes they are denied visas or asked to leave, but it does cast a shadow on the entire community.

AMIT

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: NATHAN G/MINT Toiling away: Cooks pound the dish at a haleem­making contest in Hyderabad on Wednesday. dish, primarily Persian, that travelled across continent and time to finally find fame and sophistication in Hyderabad. As food historian Pushpesh Pant explains, “Haleem is prepared with char ghaf—gehu, gosht, ghee, gur (four Gs—wheat, meat, ghee and jaggery). The gur is the typically Hyderabadi addition. They like their food sweet and sour.”

Given the Persian origin, haleem is eaten during Muharram and Ramzan by Shias—a reason, Pant says, why it didn’t gain popularity in places with predominantly Afghan or Burrani influence, such as Delhi, Rampur, Bhopal. It’s probably why a degh (cauldron) of haleem remains a rare sight in Delhi to this day (among the notable exceptions is Purani Dilli, a restaurant on the main road in Zakir Nagar, near

Jamia Millia Islamia, which serves a must-try haleem all year).

In its robust rusticity, haleem is much like the other Ramzan dish, nihari, which was lashkari khana (cantonment food) before being adapted for more refined tables. Haleem too began life as an unsophisticated, one-dish meal prepared by soldiers and sailors. Its popularity in the Barkas area near the Charminar in Hyderabad, where the Nizam’s barracks were, is probably testimony to its military past.

Later, as it started being served in the finest homes of Lucknow and Hyderabad, two royal courts with a larger congregation of Shias, the recipe evolved. According to Pratibha Karan, author of A Princely Legacy—Hyderabadi Cuisine and Biryani, cracked wheat, meat and pulses are cooked

together in a sealed pot on a slow fire overnight, cooled, and then pounded to get a thick, porridgelike consistency.

On the Malabar Coast, where harees, as it is known in West Asia, first arrived with the Arab traders, it is flavoured only with ghee, says Karan. The spicier Hyderabad version is flavoured with lime juice and garam masala, and garnished with mint, red chillies and fried onions.

What makes the haleem such a memorable dish is its association with celebratory meals—the halfa-day-long, labour-intensive cooking process rules it out as an item on the daily menu. It has come to stand for community dining and cherished memories—at iftaar, during weddings.

Amrita Roy

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Eyes wide open”, 4 September, the height of the Delhi Eye is 148ft.

LISTEN TO THE LOUNGE PODCAST Samanth Subramanian speaks to Bharat Epur, senior Freemason and an expert on the history of the Freemasonry movement; Tabish Khair tells us why he’s looking forward to Rushdie’s next; and Sanjukta Sharma reviews the Salman Khan starrer ‘Dabangg’.

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L4 COLUMNS

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

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

A mosque near Ground Zero will open wounds

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SETH WENIG/AP

o be human is to bear witness to events, both tragic and comic, and occasionally of epochal proportions. Historic, we call them, and some of us have been lucky—or unlucky—enough to be there when such

events occurred: Mumbaikars in south Mumbai on 26/11; the Americans who thronged Hyde Park in Chicago on the night of Obama’s election victory; Europeans when the Berlin Wall fell; the Japanese when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed; the Chinese who thronged Tiananmen Square in terror, and later in jubilation to witness Hong Kong’s handover; the British on 4 June 1940, when Winston Churchill gave what is now considered the defining speech of World War II; the South Africans on 10 May 1994, to watch Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela be elected president of their country; and the New Yorkers who were in Manhattan on this very day nine years ago when the twin towers collapsed into rubble and altered the course of history—and the niceties of civil aviation—forever. 11 September 2001; or 9/11 as it has come to be known.

On that day, bleeding New Yorkers rallied around to help strangers and salvage their broken city. Today, those very people are engaged in a harsh, divisive debate about whether a mosque can be built in the shadows of where the World Trade Center once stood. Two-thirds of New Yorkers are opposed, according to a The New York Times poll. President Obama has weighed in and said that Muslims have as much right to build a mosque at Ground Zero as anyone else.

Subsequent to his stance, Obama has had to fend off critics who have

demanded his birth certificate as proof of his American-ness; to show them that his patriotism trumps his middle name—as if defending Muslims was unpatriotic.

The man who won an election based on his fine ear for the pulse of his people seems to have become tone deaf.

The man whose speeches and books reflect a nuanced understanding of the human condition seems to have become galactically insensitive. Obama is right.

Of course, Muslim-Americans have a constitutional right to build a mosque in a location of their choice, once the necessary approvals are sought and met.

The question is not whether they can; the question is whether they should.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Arab-American author who is spearheading the $100 million (around `470 crore) Cordoba Initiative that is behind the mosque, has a long record of building bridges between the Muslim and Western worlds. As a Sufi teacher, he has condemned the terrorist attacks and repeatedly stated that the purpose of constructing a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is to heal long-festering wounds. Few doubt his intent or his integrity. Even his staunchest supporters, however, wonder if the mosque will accomplish what he hopes it will. If the mosque’s purpose is to promote understanding and tolerance, it has failed, even before the first brick has been laid.

The building where the mosque

Voices: A group of bikers protest the plan for a mosque near the Freedom Tower. and cultural centre are being planned used to be a musty Burlington Coat Factory—where legions of college students used to duck in for winter coat bargains.

When it closed, no one mourned. But a mosque in its place seems so shocking as to seem inconceivable.

Why a mosque? Why there?

Sure, whatever building rises at, or near Ground Zero is going to be controversial. Most memorials are. Early memorials celebrated victories. Later, they morphed into gestures of sympathy towards the losers and commemoration of the dead. The area surrounding Ground Zero isn’t technically a war memorial site but it is sacred ground for New Yorkers. The blogosphere has been rife with vocal dissenters. Putting a mosque at Ground Zero, some say, is like rubbing chilli powder into an open wound; like

building a Jewish temple in the Gaza Strip; or like raising a Swastika sculpture in Auschwitz. It ain’t illegal but it isn’t right.

President Obama and New York mayor Bloomberg are both right in defending the mosque constitutionally.

But they aren’t being pragmatic.

Politics, after all, is the art of the possible. A good politician views the gamut of possibilities through the prism of appropriateness. With malice towards none but sensitivity towards all.

What was appropriate was Willy Brandt’s Kniefall von Warschau, or the Warsaw Genuflection, in which the German chancellor kneeled in humility before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial, an act that subsequently earned him a Nobel Prize.

There are so many logical ways by which New York City can determine what goes up in and around Ground

Zero—ranging from getting the families of the dead involved to building a multi-faith complex, to building a museum that documents what exactly happened on 9/11 for future generations. A mosque seems like such a knee-jerk reaction. Why not a Jewish temple; or a Baptist church? Or for that matter, why not a Ganesh temple?

President Obama should take a page from how we Indians manage religious discourse and discord. We accord our myriad religions equal rights—to build temples, churches, mosques, gurudwaras, and synagogues. But we keep matters of church separate from the state. All our memorials are resolutely secular; and no one religion can coopt them, figuratively speaking.

So by all means, let the Muslims contribute towards a centre at Ground Zero. Let them even fund the project entirely and be known for doing so. Let Imam Rauf use his considerable diplomatic skills to build bridges and heal breeches.

But let’s not call it a mosque. Let’s call it a memorial; a cultural centre; a secular sacred space where loved ones come to grieve. A space that is a monument but more than that, secular.

PS: Interestingly, in a recent essay in The New York Times (that ran after I submitted this column), Imam Rauf has stressed that the building will be a multi-faith complex. Not once, in his 1,076-word essay did he use the word “mosque”.

Shoba Narayan was 20 blocks from Ground Zero on 11 September 2001. She doubts that she will visit Ground Zero.

Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

L5

Parenting ADOLESCENCE

Let’s talk about sex, baby SARANG SENA/MINT

Talking to your child about the birds and the bees cannot be postponed. Get there before some pop­up window on the Internet does B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· or those of us growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, watching television with our parents was about mastering a unique skill. We had to sniff out the exact moment that an interaction between a male and female character on screen progressed from relax-it’s-aimless-conversation mode to the run-it’s-asex-scene mode. Some of us coughed and politely excused ourselves from the room; others suddenly discovered unfinished homework. The skill was critical to our TV-watching experience because as far as parents were concerned, we liked to pretend that sex didn’t exist.

Cut to the era of open economy, HIV/AIDS and MMS scandals. A mother of a 15-year-old boy is horrified to learn about a version of spin-the-bottle her son’s classmates at a prominent Delhi school play during free periods. It goes like this: A boy spins the bottle and whichever girl it points to will have to read a chapter from a textbook while the boy holds her breasts. If in the course of reading the chapter the girl giggles, she has to read it all over again.

Of course, children are growing up faster. Even until 10 years ago, adolescence hit around the age of 14-15, nowadays it comes as early as 12, says Mamta Sharma, psychologist, Delhi Public School, RK Puram, New Delhi. It is becoming increasingly important for parents to have the bird-bee discussion with their children sooner rather than later, because if they don’t some pop-up window on the Internet will.

“Information on sex is simply everywhere and kids have easy access to it. Along with the Internet, even the print and television media has

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Along with the excess of information comes the ‘perversion of information’

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

GENTLY HELP YOUR SON BE GENDER SENSITIVE I lost my husband a few years ago, and am bringing up my son virtually single-handedly. The only constant male presence in his life is an old, trusted domestic help who has been around since before my son’s birth. Other than me, the dominant people in my son’s life are his grandmother and aunt.

He is now 10 and goes to an all-boys’ school. I see him referring to girls as “cows” or “sheep”, and I find it disturbing.

Am I overreacting? Is it just a passing phase? Or does it indicate a deep-seated attitude towards women? How can I inculcate in my son respect for all genders, and a sense that women are equal?

Perhaps it is a phase, or a current need to dismiss and belittle (big words to use about a little boy, I know) the very people who have

nurtured him, minus the presence of a prominent male figure. It could be a way of asserting his emerging male identity. Most boys his age assert “I hate girls, yuk”, or words to that effect! All of this could be aided by the atmosphere of an all-boys’ class, anxious and confused in the extreme about the opposite sex.

However, having said that, I

become a lot more prone to featuring sex; Femina and Cosmopolitan regularly have questionnaires on techniques, mindsets of men/women and so on,” says Sharma.

But with the excess of information comes the “perversion of information”, says Ameeta Wattal, principal, Springdales School, Pusa Road, New Delhi.

“The overload of information hasn’t necessarily made us a freer society because the sexual revolution has been accompanied by these disturbing stories of images being circulated and incidents such as the MMS case, and more recently, the Nithari murders (serial murders of children in Nithari, Uttar Pradesh, in 2005 and 2006),” she says. In fact, many children have had their introduction to sex through this dystopic lens.

Twelve-year-old Ahona Chatterjee, for instance, first learnt about sex in the context of the Nithari killings that she saw splashed across newspapers. Her mother Ajanta Dutta, who teaches English literature at Delhi University, explained to her that this was only a violent manifestation of sex and that sex wasn’t necessarily a “bad thing”.

“She’s still been a bit wary of the concept. Then just a couple of months back I told her about the reproductive process, actually explaining the science of it.

I told her that if it happens with romance and marriage, it’s a good thing,” says Dutta.

Not all parents find it easy to have the “talk” with their children. Wattal, who has been a member of the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE’s) Adolescent Education Programme training module, has over the last 7-10 years had more parents asking her to conduct sex education talks in school.

What helps is that children are forthcoming and will come up to you and ask questions if the home environment is liberal, says Gona Singh, a homemaker. She recalls her six-yearold son (now 14) going up to her husband and asking him the

would say that you need to intervene in some way. It doesn’t call for serious lecturing, shouting or sternness. At this stage, perhaps just find ways to laugh him off, or laugh with him, so that he realizes that his statements are absurd and are not taken seriously. Find a way, if you get an opportunity, to indicate that there are some “cow-sheep” kind of girls, and there are “cow-sheep” men too!

If you want to get into a deeper discussion some time, bring up various girls and women you know, and ask him if he would label them cows and sheep. Resist the temptation of overtalking the point—just have casual conversations with him in which you cleverly weave in the “non-cowness” of all the THINKSTOCK

Confused: Your son’s disparaging remarks about women might just be a phase.

Growing up: Twelve­year­old Ahona gets a lesson in human reproduction from her mother Ajanta. meaning of the word sex. “My husband asked him what he thought it was, upon which he said, ‘It’s when people take off their clothes and kiss for 2 hours’. My husband said, ‘That’s pretty much what it is and anytime you have any more questions on the subject, please come and ask me’,” she says.

There doesn’t have to be just one “talk”. It can be spread across several instances, to constantly reinforce some of the things you’re trying to communicate, says jewellery designer Shyamali Anand. She uses even a news item on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as

women and girls he knows.

Second, many city and town schools are waking up to the need for gender sensitization.

You could speak to his school about doing this through a counsellor or activist who knows how to talk to young boys on the subject. Perhaps you could arrange to have someone come and talk or run a small gender-sensitization programme for the boys at various levels.

The third thing is to literally recruit a male friend or relative, who you think has the right values on this issue, to chat with your son on a regular basis—again, not lecture him, but have conversations where these issues get touched on in a way so that your son feels he does not have to join the herd in his school that calls girls cattle.

An all-woman family may be doing admirably well in bringing up this child, no doubt, but secure, good and responsible males would add a dimension that is missing from his life.

Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Send your queries to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

an opportunity to alert her 16-year-old son about the dangers of HIV/AIDS. The trick lies in keeping the line of communication open.

Anita Dhawan, who coordinates exhibitions for women entrepreneurs and runs a company, Great Indian Bazaar, doesn’t necessarily approve of the kind of activities her 16-year-old son’s peer group seems to engage in (“making out” is what makes you “cool”), but says she doesn’t try to stop or scold him. “I don’t preach safe sex, I preach no sex; I have made it clear that when they’re capable and financially inde-

pendent, they are free to get into a relationship, but this can’t be done casually,” she says. “I don’t let them spend nights out, and am strict about money. They know what I discourage although I don’t ever say ‘don’t do it’ outright,” she says. “Saying ‘no’ won’t necessarily stop them but it will, for sure, stop them from communicating with me,” she says.

The idea is to keep them talking. If need be, like Dhawan, befriend them on Facebook.

Keep track, but don’t snoop.

Importantly, don’t try to tell them how things were when you were an adolescent.

SPORTS STARS Tired of vampires and werewolves?

Pick up ‘Let’s Play! The Puffin Book of Sports Stories’.

A collection of 12 short stories written for readers who are 10 years and older, ‘Let’s Play!’ illustrates the winners, losers, underdogs, bullies, heroes and cheats of sports. Realistic plot lines about rivalries between schools and the challenges of balancing studies and sports make these stories easy to identify with. The book goes beyond cricket and covers sports such as hockey, table tennis, cricket, golf and basketball.

Introduced by Harsha Bhogle and written by an assorted group of previously published children’s authors such as Nandini Nayar, Anuradha Kumar and Khyrunnisa A., as well as bloggers and first­time writers such as Imran Kureshi and Varsha Seshan, each story is a perfect tale of passion and competition.

Let’s Play!

Puffin, Veena Venugopal 182 pages, `175.

L6

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

Business Lounge SIDDHARTHA LAL

The Bulletproof man The MD and CEO of the Eicher group is finally off the roller­ coaster and feeling entrepreneurial

Easy rider: Lal says the Enfield has been successfully repositioned as a cool urban bike.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

B Y P RIYA R AMANI priya.r@livemint.com

···························· hat’s not to like about Siddhartha Lal? He and his wife Natasha do the Lounge couple’s tussle every Saturday (me first, no me first—the woman always wins); he is the man responsible for the miraculous rescue of the iconic Royal Enfield motorcycle in this past decade; and, oddly enough for

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someone who works in the automobile sector, he worries about pedestrians and believes that “walkability is the killer app of urban mobility”.

Even before we meet for lunch at Latitude 28°, the trendy restaurant that sits above his mother’s iconic Good Earth design store in Delhi’s Khan Market, an enterprising colleague has informed me that he is working on “sustainable urban mobility”. Sure enough, he brings up walkability 10 minutes after we meet.

For a while now, Lal, the 37-year-old head of the Eicher group, has been working his head around the problem of urban mobility. By the year 2050, he says, our cities could hold nearly a billion people, and the problems surrounding our already creaking urban infrastructure will only get messier. More highways are not the answer, says Lal, who believes in sustainable solutions.

So he brainstorms with all kinds of kindred spirits, from IIT professors Dinesh Mohan and Geetam Tewari and differently abled activist Sminu Jindal to Danish bicycle designer Jens Martin Skibsted and the MIT professor and co-founder of car-sharing service Zipcar, Robin Chase. He’s on the World Economic Forum’s global agenda council for transportation and there are plenty of opportunities to meet mayors from all over the world. If I let him, he would spend the entire lunch talking about how other cities have tackled their urban transport problems.

In 2003, for instance, Seoul broke down a busy highway that ran through the centre of town and reopened access to a nullah (stream) around which the city built a big urban park. The

Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project created a vibrant public space in the heart of that city.

“I don’t know where the interest and the business collide but eventually we’re an automotive company and we have interests in these areas. Our business is clearly in mobility, it’s not in making a vehicle,” he says. For now, he’s happy to become an expert on the subject.

“I feel like an Italian mafia don sitting here,” he says as the staff scurries to do his bidding. I resist the temptation to point out that with his curly dark hair and the mole on his right cheek, he could easily pass off as a good-looking European gangster.

It’s only recently that Lal is relaxed enough to meet for leisurely lunches with people such as myself. The past few years have been a blur of 12-hour “full immersion” work days, structuring and getting a joint venture with Swedish truck-maker Volvo off the ground. Volvo partnered with group flagship Eicher Motors and invested `1,082 crore for a 50% stake in the new company VECV (Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles) in December 2007. Lal’s job was made tougher because the economy slowed just after the two firms signed on the dotted line, but this year sales are back on track.

In June, the company announced it would spend `288 crore to set up a new engine-making facility, making India Volvo’s global manufacturing hub for these particular engines. “We’re very well placed now to meet our future needs and targets so I’ve taken a step back as far as the joint venture is concerned,” says Lal. I can barely tell my driveline from my chassis so I’m relieved when Lal says that since July he no longer spends 90% of his time on this partnership. While he’s still managing director of VECV and spends about half his time tracking the big picture in the heavy vehicles business, he’s handed over the operational reins to new CEO Vinod Aggarwal. And, among other things, Lal has gone back to being more involved with Royal Enfield.

He’s also working on hiring a new corporate team for Eicher Motors, finding ways to deploy the surplus cash on his company’s balance sheet and becoming an expert on sustainable urban mobility. Recently, he convinced Siam (Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers) to

hold a session on the subject at their annual conference.

Last month he went on a testosterone-fuelled, Enfields-only motorcycle trip from Manali to Ladakh with six friends. It’s a trip he’s wanted to do for 15 years though it ended up being a bigger adventure than he had bargained for when the group got caught in the Leh floods and had to be airlifted back.

“Personally I feel like I’m in a brilliant space,” he says. “The business is going well, I’ve got time. I can be more creative and entrepreneurial, the tension is easing and my life is opening out more.”

Lal’s been on a rollercoaster since 2000 when, as corporate legend has it, he prevented his father from selling Royal Enfield. I ask him if he really raised his hand in a board meeting and announced he could save the loss-making motorcycle company. “I didn’t raise my hand the way you are right now, but that’s pretty much how it happened,” he laughs. “I was so naïve, and I’m happy I was. If I hadn’t been so naïve it would have been horrible. I would never have taken up the challenge,” he says (see box, How Enfield was saved).

At Enfield, where Lal is just finding his new rhythm, the business model is finally working after more than a decade-long struggle.

In the past few years the brand has been successfully repositioned as a cool urban bike though a third of Enfields are still sold in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. “If our all-India market share is 0.5%, our Sardar market

share is 10-15%,” he says.

Thanks to its new-found popularity, the waiting time for an Enfield can now stretch up to nine months and the company recently announced it would invest `200 crore to double capacity in the next two years. Since it addressed the safety concerns of its consumers (for example, traditionally brakes were always located on the “wrong” side; starting it once required incredible patience), Lal says, there’s been an explosion in the number of 18- to 21-year-old Enfield buyers. Café Racer, the next new model, is due at the end of 2012 and new launches will follow every two-three years.

“The really long-term master plan is to take Royal Enfield to a very different space. Our brand must be intricately woven in with long rides. When someone buys this bike it should be because he thinks he can drive it to the Himalayas,” says Lal. He also plans to look at areas such as after-market service, spare parts, customization, accessories (though Enfield has tried the last before and failed), and exports to developing markets. “It’s counterintuitive but developed countries were buying us earlier because of the vintage factor. Now that our products are much better in terms of reliability, we can sell to developing markets,” he says. The company recently launched its motorcycles in Colombia and will also export to other countries in South America, Africa and South-East Asia.

“At `500 crore revenue, it’s not a huge brand, but it’s got this whole aura which we’re trying to build on,” he says.

IN PARENTHESIS How Enfield was saved “We’re not a typical business family. We don’t sit around the table and shake our legs and talk business,” says Lal. So it was only chance that he accompanied his father Vikram for a brainstorming meeting in 2000, a loss­making year for the Eicher group. There, senior executives decided it would be best to sell or shut down Royal Enfield—the division had made a loss of some `20 crore that year. Lal asked his dad for two years to turn around the company.

After all, how difficult could it be to sell 500 more motorcycles? His targets: cash break­even in 12 months; net break­even in 18 months; net profit in 24 months. He started as head of sales, marketing and product development but soon realized that he needed the top job to effect change. The first thing he did after he took over was to shut down Enfield’s new Jaipur plant.

Next, he stopped the dealer discounts that were costing the company up to `80 lakh a month. He was warned that sales would fall.

He wrote a letter to all dealers asking them to tell buyers that if the company reversed this policy and gave discounts in the near future, they would get the benefit too. Sales dipped only briefly before bouncing back. Lal says the do­or­die deadlines made them take tough decisions they may not have taken under normal circumstances.

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L7

Eat/Drink VIR SANGHVI REVIEWS | KOH, INTERCONTINENTAL MARINE DRIVE

Chilli twist to chocolate As Bangkok struggles with smart Thai dining, Mumbai gets its second fine­dining Thai restaurant, with an outstanding menu

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t’s a funny thing but until recently there were few good smart Thai restaurants in Bangkok. There was lots of great food to be had of course—you’d have to try very hard to eat badly in Bangkok—but it tended to be found on the street and in dhabas.

If you went to an expensive restaurant, you were likely to be disappointed. You got tarted-up versions of Thai staples at prices that were six times higher than those on the street and usually, the flavours were much worse.

It is ironic that the only Thai restaurant with a Michelin star is Nahm in London run by David Thompson, an Australian who is something of an honorary Thai and author of the definitive Thai cookbook. A year ago, when I interviewed Thompson, I asked him about his recommendations for Bangkok. He conceded the general point that it was hard to eat well at proper restaurants but suggested some places.

One of them was Bo.lan a new restaurant on Sukhumvit 26 Road located in an old house and set up by two chefs who worked with Thompson at the London Nahm.

The food was nothing like the usual rubbish you get at expensive Thai places, the dishes were made from old recipes and you had the sense that you were enjoying the richness and complexity of authentic Thai cuisine.

If you are craving for Pad Thai, don’t go. But if you want the real thing, Bo.lan is worth exploring.

Thompson’s influence on the global Thai food scene is immense. Many years ago he came to Mumbai and cooked at the Thai Pavilion at the President Hotel and retains a high regard for Ananda Solomon, the chef.

It is hard to imagine but this November, the Thai Pavilion will be 16 years old. Virtually the first proper Thai restaurant in Mumbai, it was a brave and pioneering effort by Ajoy Misra, the then general manager of the President, and his chef, Solomon.

Sixteen years later, the fashion for Thai cuisine has come and gone but the Thai Pavilion remains the Taj group’s most consistently successful restaurant in terms of food quality and revenue.

Part of the reason for the Pavilion’s popularity with people who are not on expense accounts is the pricing. Solomon wants real people to eat there so all of his starters are priced at `525 each.

For this money you get two large pieces of foie gras with sea asparagus in mango sauce, soft shell crabs with pomelo, scallops with an orange and rice wine reduction and much more.

Main courses are similarly priced. For `750, you can get roast duck on spinach (Solomon’s great hit—it has been on the menu for 16 years)—lobster with pepper and garlic, tiger prawns with kaffir lime leaves and scallops that combine sweet, spicy and sour Thai flavours. I have been eating at the Pavilion ever

Downtown Thai: (left) Koh, which opened last month, is fre­ quented by celebrities; and lemon grass­ speared chicken. since it opened and I have never had a bad meal there. Ananda Solomon is our David Thompson.

Among the chefs who worked with Thompson when he ran a Thai restaurant in Sydney was Ian Kittichai. According to Thompson, he was not just a talented chef but “a really sweet and gentle guy”.

Kittichai has gone on to fulfil his early promise. He was executive chef of the Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok (the first Thai to get the job), and then opened Kittichai, a restaurant at New York’s trendy 60 Thompson hotel. A parallel career as a TV chef has led to superstar status in his own country. He is now Thailand’s bestknown chef and a global ambassador for Thai food.

Over the last year, Kittichai has broken off with his New York partners, become part owner of Hyde & Seek, an excellent gastrobar on Bangkok’s Soi Ruamrudee and planned new restaurants in such far-flung destinations as

Madrid, Brussels, London and yes, Mumbai.

Last month his Mumbai operation, Koh, opened to a rapturous reception at the InterContinental Marine Drive, a lovely, small hotel run by two ex-Taj veterans (Raman Mehra and Romil Ratra). Koh is aiming for a different crowd than the Thai Pavilion (the Wasabi regulars I would guess), the prices are higher than Solomon’s (but lower than Wasabi’s) and it has been flooded with celebrities.

On the night I went, Kittichai, who knows me, was in the kitchen and Romil Ratra, who I have seen through a variety of Taj restaurants, was in the dining room. So I cannot pretend that I was anonymous or that I had the same experience as the average punter.

That said, the food was absolutely brilliant.

The yellowfin tuna ceviche (`895) is Kittichai’s answer to Wasabi’s whitefish carpaccio and should fly out of the kitchen;

pan-seared scallops on a pomelo salad (`775) married the taste of good quality fish with such Thai flavours as makroot and chili.

The rock shrimp tempura (`655) took a Nobu idea and transformed it with eggplant and tamarind flavours. Kittichai’s signature baby back ribs had the chocolate flavour of his Bangkok version but a naughty chilli twist distinguished them.

The main courses were uniformly good but a slow-cooked Lamb Loin (`1,425) was a standout. In Bangkok, Kittichai does a slow-cooked Kurobuta pork (using Thai pork) and I do wish he would import that here. Two other dishes came with interesting presentation. The garlic fried rice (`595) was finished at the table in a hot stone pot and the curries (`695-825) came in fireproof paper bowls with a flame heating them from below.

At present, Koh imports its ingredients, mainly from Bangkok and Kittichai promises to be in

Mumbai every month. As long as these two conditions persist, the restaurant seems set to be a huge success. It is strange that while Bangkok struggles with good, smart Thai dining Mumbai has two outstanding up-market Thai restaurants. David Thompson opened a Nahm in Bangkok this month so the Bangkok scene may well be hotting up. But, as of now, you can stay in Mumbai and still eat excellent Thai food!

Hyde & Seek, Soi Ruamrudee, Ploenchit, Bangkok, +662-16851523 Bo.lan, Soi 26, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, +662-26029623 Nahm, the Metropolitan hotel, Sathorn, Bangkok, +662-6253333 The Thai Pavilion, the President, Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, 022-66650808 Koh by Kittichai, The InterContinental Marine Drive, Mumbai, 022-66992222.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

MADELEINE MOMENT

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any years ago, when I first arrived in Paris as a young and foolish student, my means were low but my pretensions grand. I had recently skim-read the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and believed I was ready to take the salons of the French capital by storm. While I waited for literary recognition I decided to get into the spirit of things and have my very own proustian, madeleine-related revelation at the earliest opportunity.

I rushed to the nearest Monoprix—a kind of Gallic Big Bazaar but more depressing—grabbed a bag of madeleines and dashed back to my dingy little garret. I rustled up a lime flower tisane and sat down to dunk. Carefully, reverentially—I probably closed my eyes in silent contemplation of the great literary genius I was surely about to become—I dipped the dainty shell-shaped sponge into the tea and waited.

Nothing. Or perhaps worse than nothing: soggy cake. For Proust’s narrator—“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the cake…a shudder ran through

my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place”—the memories released by the taste of his tea-soaked madeleine were powerful enough to fill seven volumes. I tried and tried to feel something important but was eventually forced to concede there was only faint disgust at a sweet little cake rapidly disintegrating into a greenish liquid.

Ever since, I’ve avoided eating madeleines, probably because of the painful reminder of the lofty academic heights I never reached. But also, frankly, the traditional version, when stripped of all its proustian pretension, is a bit boring. The recipe is believed to date back to 1755 and the town of Commercy, when Duke Stanislaus Leszczynski became enchanted by the wares of a local peasant girl named Madeleine. The young lady’s legacy lives on in the form of an immutable two-bite morsel made from sugar, flour, melted butter and eggs, usually lightly flavoured with lemon. And for over three centuries not much has changed.

Of course, there’s the occasional heated flare-up over whether the “head”, the little bump on one side, is authentic or not. And there’s the odd rumour of a Parisian baker daring to daub a newfangled lemon glaze, but that’s usually as far as innovation goes. Stuck forever in 18th century provincial France, there has been no macaroon-type makeover for poor little madeleine.

Last week, however, I was working on some new recipes for an Oriental tea party I’m organizing and decided I wanted to include madeleines—their size makes them ideal for afternoon tea; small enough to feel no guilt about eating half a dozen. But in their traditional form they are far too bland for an event where strong and vibrant flavours will be called for.

With some trepidation, I toyed with a few more modest adjustments—lemon grass, kaffir lime—before resolutely striding down a bolder path.

And, you know, I think I may have finally liberated the madeleine. Replacing the traditional lemon with tamarind offers an exotic and mysterious Chinese tea-house tang, while the rose-water icing offers a reassuring echo of proustian parlours.

The cakes retain their turn-of-the-century airiness but

Fusion: The French madeleine could do with some Oriental zest. hint at adventures ahead and new memories to make.

Try dipping them in some lime flower tea—you never know what might happen.

Tamarind madeleines with rose­water icing Makes about 36 depending on the size of your moulds Ingredients 100g unsalted butter 90g tamarind paste 140g plain flour A pinch of salt 4 large eggs 140g vanilla sugar or caster sugar Icing 150g well-sifted icing sugar 3 tbsp rose water Method You will need a madeleine mould tray. I used a silicon one and the cakes popped out

without any need for greasing. If using a metal tray, grease well with butter. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius, gas mark 5.

Gently heat the butter in a small pan until just melted, then put aside to cool completely.

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. Put the eggs and sugar into another large bowl and using a hand-held mixer (or a hand whisk and very strong wrists), whisk until the mixture becomes as thick and pale as mayonnaise.

When you lift the whisk, the mixture should leave a trail on the surface. The mixture will by now have puffed up into a glorious, bouffant froth—this could take up to 7 minutes but is crucial to give the madeleines

their characteristic almost not-there quality.

Gently, so the egg mixture doesn’t deflate, sprinkle over the flour and fold in. Then fold in the cooled melted butter and tamarind paste until all the ingredients are completely blended.

Put about 2 tsp of the mixture into each madeleine mould—don’t fill to the top because the cakes will rise in the oven.

Bake for 10-11 minutes until the top of the madeleines spring back when touched, then turn them out on to a rack to cool.

Make the icing by mixing the rose water with the icing sugar until you have a smooth paste.

With a teaspoon drizzle the icing over the ridged side of the cooled madeleines. I also made a batch with a lemon and cardamom icing but I may have been pushing my luck with the purists.

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 For a slide show on how to bake madeleines, go to www.livemint.com/madeleine.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

Style BEHIND THE SCENES

The 4kg life lesson Ahead of the wedding season, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla tell us what goes into making the perfect lightweight ‘lehenga’ B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

···························· n a partnership that completes 25 years this year, designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla have dealt with a lot of brides-to-be. There have been the coy and indecisive, the I-know-exactly-what-I-want bride, the bridezilla and even the overzealous one who strips down in front of everyone to try on her lehenga. But there was one request recently that left them flummoxed. A bride wanted them to make a leather and lace lehenga.

Khosla laughs as he recalls the incident. “What could I do? I just told her you have come to the wrong people and asked her to approach another designer.”

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That’s the kind of bride that the designer duo fear even more than the bridezilla—the one who wants something “different”.

“But they don’t know what’s different. You’re getting married, you’re going to wear a lehengacholi. What can be different about that?” asks Khosla.

The first meeting We are at their factory in Andheri, Mumbai, where the bridalwear couturists also have an office and a meeting room for clients. Rose essence envelops you as you enter this room. With a large chandelier twinkling in the dull light, thick drapes, gold seating and silver stands, a lifesize painting of a man dressed like royalty on one wall, and a throne with a lion’s face carved on its arms resting next to another wall, the place is reminiscent of Indian palaces or, well, a venue for an opulent Indian wedding. It is unlikely you will get a combination of leather and lace here.

In a corner, a couple of racks are lined with pieces from their collection. There are some garments in their signature chikan, and some with intricate sequins, beads, resham and badla work.

It’s been a few weeks since their couture week collection was unveiled in New Delhi but the designers are now back in Mumbai to deal with the bridal rush. “The brides are all about red this season. They want to match red with diamonds, but I think red goes best with gold,” says Khosla, the more affable of the two. Personally, he says, he always tries to push for his favourite shocking pink because it works on most skin colour types. But the final decision lies with the bride. The embroidery of the ghagra is decided based on the jewellery—traditional if jadau, slightly contemporary with Western motifs if it’s a necklace with diamonds and coloured gemstones.

Khosla and Jani get two kinds of customers. One who will buy

PHOTOGRAPHS

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clothes off the rack and one who would like to meet and order bespoke couture. Most clients take appointments at the store, where the store manager is the first point of contact and conducts the first meeting with the bride-to-be to understand the type of wedding and venue, among other things. The designers then meet her either at their factory in Mumbai or at their Delhi store, depending on where the customer is. They even fly to London to meet clients at their store there. The bride gets two meetings with them.

“The first one is about understanding where the bride is coming from, her mother, her family, which community is she from, how long will her wedding ceremony be, what is her jewellery like. Which functions are we designing for?” says Khosla.

For the sangeet, the outfits could be lighter and brighter, with Swarovski and sequins; for the mehendi, the outfit is more fun, with lots of colour and per-

haps some gota, but the wedding outfit has to be traditional. “We are known more for our traditional work. It’s best that brides have fun for the other functions and keep the weddings as traditional as possible,” says Khosla.

The outfits for other functions are kept light to allow free movement for the bride, but the designers don’t want her to feel burdened on her big day either.

Their bridal lehengas don’t weigh more than 4-5kg. “We don’t believe in making 20kg lehengas,” says Khosla. To do this, they balance out the work on the garment using appropriate embellishments. Materials such as bugle beads or pure metal sequins that would weigh down a ghagra are used in a relatively small amount. They provide two dupattas, the heavier one is pleated on the shoulder and the lighter one is for the head.

To make sure the dupattas don’t get messed up by the varmalas, the designers’ tip is to get ones with hooks at the back.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Work in progress: (clockwise from left) A red wed­ ding lehenga with Isfahan embroidery in resham, sequins and beads; Sandeep Khosla (left) and Abu Jani in their meeting room; Gyasi Ram Verma has worked as a tailor for the designers for 17 years; and a karigar hand­finishing a blouse.

STYLE L9

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

The rocks Pick your life partner carefully and choose your shopping companion shrewdly. Khosla has a warning for those who are planning to come with their best friends. “We have had experiences where the friend is wearing the same colour as the bride.

They get influenced, the embroidery looks the same and they end up with a bad replica and you wonder if she’s your best friend really,” says Khosla. Even worse is coming with the mother-inlaw. The need to please her may backfire. Mothers and sisters, according to them, are the best shopping partners. If both, the bride and groom, want their outfits designed by them they are also encouraged to come separately. “It gets too confusing.”

Another complete no-no for this first meeting—don’t ask them to make a bridal outfit in nude or shades of brown. “They are all colours of shit. Why would you want to wear that? Nude and gold just washes you out,” says Jani. Old rose (onion pink) is another colour they dislike.

The second meeting is when a sample is shown to the bride and her measurements are taken.

Experience has taught Jani and Khosla many lessons. One lesson: Take the blouse measurements only a month before the wedding. “Brides give us their measurements and come back for trial after crash dieting and we have to restitch the blouse entirely,” says Khosla. If the blouse needs to be made less risque for “dadaji’s benefit”, now is the time to say so. Another thing they have learnt is to tune out when there are too many opinions. “At times when there are 15 family members for the first meeting, coming to a compromise is the best way,” says Jani.

The union Like one would do for one’s children, Jani and Khosla have names for all their embroidery patterns. Shabb, Isfahan and Abaan are a few of them.

Depending on the final design, these are copied on to life-size paper cut-outs of the outfit and traced on to the fabric. About 25-30 people work on one garment at a time, and it takes 60 days to design, cut, embroider, stitch and finish the garment.

Wedding finery: (clock­ wise from left) Sample sheets shown to the brides; tassels for a lehenga; and a wed­ ding lehenga with a pattern of leafy motifs and a Swarovski­ sheeted blouse.

Through all this, only the duo know what the outfit will finally look like. The bride is not shown the garment at any stage of the making. “We have to be the final editors of the work,” says Khosla.

Of course, they also don’t want the bridezilla breathing down their necks. They have learnt to control brides who want to control everything. No one is allowed to come to the workshop or keep calling about the progress of the work.

“People start fantasizing, and get obsessive. You need to keep

her away from her obsession or she’ll go mental. We try to involve them only to the point that they are required,” says Khosla. Usually, what most of them want is to look slimmer. “Even if they are thin as a stick,” he adds.

So they strategically place the belt of the ghagra to tuck in a tummy or drape the dupatta in a way that’ll hide the extra bulge.

They demonstrate the draping of the dupatta for the bride and her mother to make a note of. How conservative the family is, sets the parameter for how

Designs uptown Colombian coffee, four­course lunches, and a library: all this the next time you walk into a JJ Valaya store

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

···························· f J.J. Valaya has his way, he would make sure that something or the other that carries his signature makes its way into your home. The Swarovski Sardar, as he is sometimes referred to, last week opened a 10,000 sq. ft store, JJ Valaya Life, in Delhi that houses not just his couture and prêt lines, but also showcases home décor items.

Valaya claims JJ Valaya Life is a high-end experience for people who want luxury while shopping for their trousseaus. “These days, brides- and grooms-to-be come together to shop for wedding outfits. That’s why we decided to

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Luxury central: (right) The Alika jacket; and an entire floor is dedicated to men’s wed­ ding­wear and prêt lines.

have a floor dedicated to each, so that they can decide together.” At the La Chambre (the chamber), the bridal couples and families can consult Valaya if they are looking for bespoke bridal outfits (prices start at `14 lakh). “Here, we house the Muse collection—and only one piece per outfit is made. When the outfits are ready, we hand over everything from the patterns to the embroidery panels to the bride along with (the) finished outfit, so that she knows there will be no other outfit like hers,” says Valaya.

much skin the bride will show.

“Marwaris carry the dupatta across the stomach, the diamond merchants usually don’t like backless cholis,” says Khosla. In general, Indian women prefer a backless choli to the one cut low at the neckline. Once ready, the lehenga is wrapped in an organza fabric and delivered to the bride’s home without much ceremony.

A stitch of Swarovski there and a pearl of wisdom in between,

their work doesn’t end with the designing and draping. Over the years, the two of them have learnt to play shrinks to the nervous bride. From suggesting dermatologists and make-up artists to prescribing multi-vitamins, the designers even have to help build selfconfidence in the bride. “They can be so critical of themselves. We are short so we can’t wear this, or we are dark so that colour won’t suit us. We have to tell them that they are beautiful and should keep

themselves in a happy place,” says Khosla.

The 4kg ghagra with life lessons thrown in (“marriage is not about the honeymoon”) comes at a price starting at `2 lakh and could go up to “anything”, as Khosla puts it. “We don’t make bridal outfits for fashion victims. We never cut corners and we want our lehengas to be heirlooms that you can wear again,” says Khosla.

If the outfit costs as much as the wedding ring, we’d like it to be an heirloom.

The other highlight of the store is The Home of the Traveler Line (THTL): artefacts that Valaya has collected during his travels. Vases (start `25,000) from South-East Asia, large stone busts, kilims (tribal carpets, start at approx `45,000) and tapestries from West Asia—all handpicked from flea markets and eclectic stores as individual pieces are on display and up for sale for those who identify with Valaya Home’s sensibilities.

The store also showcases a line of glass light installations (chandeliers for the rest of us) which Valaya will design in association with Klove Studio. “My signature will be that each installation will have a Venetian mirror base plate for the ceiling. I sketch the lamp

ideas and send them to Prateek (Jain) and Gautam (Seth) (owners of Klove) and then they work on making them feasible.” Officially, the line will be launched just before Diwali but the store already showcases four such installations (prices are likely to be `5lakh and above). If large glass bulbs and beakers, some encased in metal frames, are your thing, this could be the place for you.

JJ Valaya Life also houses Ethos, a library-cum-book store with coffee-table books for sale. “At a store like this, when trials take place the people accompanying the bride or groom get bored, hence I thought a library-cum-book store will be a good way to keep them busy.”

Though pieces from the THTL are eye-catching, would you really

look at rugs, carpets, paintings, tapestries and vases when you are out to buy couture outfits? We are not sure whether mixing couture and prêt lines with home décor, furnishings and even lights is such a good idea.

With the launch of the store, Valaya also announced a line of Alika jackets—a cross between shirts and jackets that can be worn over pants, skirts, lehengas and even with saris. And thank God, the first edition piece has just one Swarovski, and a tiny one at that, on the back. These jackets will be limited-edition items— only 12 pieces of a particular pattern will be made. “I want this to be what the tweed jacket was to Chanel. Or what the Birkin is to Hermes.”

Every month, the pattern and colour will change, but some salient features, such as the silhouette, the side flap slits, the raglan sleeves and the yoke on the back, will remain trademark styles.

The jacket will be tailored to fit the person who buys it but Valaya is very clear that he will not change the colour or the length to suit an individual buyer’s sensibilities.

The current Alika, christened Iconic, is dull red and black with an antique burnished metal finish. It has beads and katori work and a line of muted green-grey tassel-like beads in the front. It will cost `2 lakh and will be made to order, with a delivery time of 60-90 days.

The stage is set

JJ Valaya Life, 222, Gallery on MG, Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, New Delhi.

L10 COVER

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

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

FREEMASONS

Real

brotherly love

A BRIEF HISTORY The milestones and turnarounds in the history of Freemasonry in India

I

n 1730, 13 years after the Grand Lodge of England had been founded in a London alehouse, a Provincial Grand Lodge came up in India—“in due form at Fort William in Bengal in the East Indies”, as the Grandmaster’s deputation proclaimed at the time. More Provincial Grand Lodges followed in Chennai (in 1752) and in Mumbai (in 1758), but these were still under the aegis of the English Freemasonry, with all the implicit exclu­ sivities. When one P.C. Dutt wanted to join a Kolkata lodge, he faced so much resistance that he was initiated in 1872, a full nine years after he was first proposed.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of emi­ nent Indians became Freemasons, but still technically Freema­ sons under foreign Grand Lodges. Only in 1961, at the Ashok

hotel in New Delhi, was the Grand Lodge of India constituted.

Peaceably, the new Grand Lodge invited the 277 individual lodges in India at the time to join with it only if they so desired; 145 decided they did. There are now 367 individual lodges in the country.

Nobody can simply apply to become a Freemason. A candi­ date must be nominated by members of a lodge, the only pre­ qualifications being that he must be of good character, believe in God, and be well educated (the last stipulation, although it does not say as much, involves the knowledge of English, since the rituals of every lodge are conducted in English). Once proposed, candidates can be blackballed, although this happens rarely; in his 33 years, Biswakumar has only seen one candi­ date being rejected by his home lodge.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

S BURMAULA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

HINDUSTAN TIMES

HINDUSTAN TIMES

Samanth Subramanian Famous Masons: (clockwise from top, left) J.R.D. Tata, Praful Patel, Rajendra Prasad and B.R. Ambedkar.

GRAND LODGE

Dan Brown revived this coterie of men dedicated to ‘self­improvement and charity’ (and not just Happy Hour swigging from skulls) in popular imagination. Ahead of the golden jubilee of the Grand Lodge of India, we look inside the secret world of Freemasonry

B Y S AMANTH S UBRAMANIAN samanth.s@livemint.com

································ n the interests of integrity, a full disclosure first: I used to be a Freemason.

Five years ago, when I was living in Chennai, two friends—both senior members of the Freemasonry—nominated me into their lodge. For just over a year, I attended every one of the lodge’s meetings, togged up in the full, regulation suit and tie (vest optional). I remember clearly how that suit used to feel at the end of a classically humid Chennai evening, clammy from being sweated into. Once, a light blue shirt became so thoroughly soaked that it passed very nicely for a dark blue shirt.

Soon afterwards, I left Chennai, and my active participation in the Freemasonry ended. In that time, I’d risen successfully through a couple of degrees, I’d learnt a couple of code words, and I’d ascertained whether or not there really is a secret handshake (there is). So while my first-hand accounts of those experiences wouldn’t exactly unleash a cloudburst of global sensation, they might set off a ripple in your millpond of Saturday-afternoon reading.

That I choose to leave the millpond unrippled puzzles even me. It isn’t as if the Freemasons have any prosecutorial powers, and in any case, I signed no non-disclosure agreements. The Freemasons are also emphatically not as fearsome as the mafia. Whenever a Masonic friend of mine is asked what it is the Freemasons really do, he turns the question genially aside, saying, “I’ll have to kill you if I tell you.” But he

I

means it (I’m fairly sure) as a joke.

I can only surmise, then, that what Balaram Biswakumar says is true: that the cohesion and fraternity of the Freemasonry gets to you even during as brief a membership as mine, encouraging you to hold its secrets. “Real brotherly love,” Biswakumar says, that phrase sounding oddly out of place when spoken through the tufts of a fierce military moustache, “is something you’ll only feel in a Masonic lodge.”

Last November, as he was being installed amid great pomp as the 14th Grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of India, Biswakumar launched his mission to share the love—to open up the Freemasonry.

The investiture ceremony in Chennai was the first such, anywhere in the Masonic world, to be attended by the general public. A panoramic photograph of the ceremony, hanging on a wall of the Grand Lodge in New Delhi, shows an audience divided neatly into two: one section of 1,600-odd Freemasons, and across the aisle, nearly 600 family members, friends and curious strangers. Still more people, it is said, had to be turned away at the door because the hall was full. “It was just packed,” Premkumar Karra, a longtime Freemason and a friend of Biswakumar’s, recalls. “Even we were forced to stand at the very back, against the wall.”

Over the last decade, the Freemasonry around the world has begun, slowly, to acknowledge the drawbacks of its famously zipped lips—and although most Freemasons deny the direct connection, it is no coincidence that the decade has also been one paved with Dan Brown literature. “If enough muck is thrown at you, and if you don’t respond, then some of it is bound to stick,” says Bharat Epur, a senior Freemason based in Chennai and a fund of information about the fraternity’s past.

For much of its lifetime, dating conclusively to the 14th century and conjecturally even to Biblical Jerusalem, the Freemasonry never shrank from publicity, Epur contends. “The

Statue of Liberty, for instance, was a gift from French Freemasons, and it was received very publicly at the dock by the Grandmaster in New York,” he says. Only in the 20th century, hounded first by anti-Masonic factions in the US and then by Fascists in Germany and Italy, did the Freemasons begin to fade from the public gaze.

But while secrecy thus became an external mechanism of protection, it had always been an internal tenet of Freemasonry—a way of segregating its own members, such that an initiate learns more only as he attains higher degrees. When Karra first joined, in 1993, he remembers being puzzled by all the mystery.

“But then I accepted it—I even saw that it was important, because the members are bound that much tighter because of it.” Epur phrases it as he would an aphorism: “The student is taught by a teacher only as much as the teacher thinks the student ought to know.”

In a television interview that aired shortly after he took over as Grandmaster, Biswakumar was asked: “Is it a secret that people drink from a skull?” The camera doesn’t catch Biswakumar’s reaction, but we hear him draw an indignant breath and exclaim: “Nooooo, rubbish!” The reference is obvious. In his prologue to The Lost Symbol, Brown writes: “The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with blood-red wine.

Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.”

Biswakumar cannot blame anybody for nursing these inaccuracies about the Freemasons. “My own

mother thought, for many years, that the Freemasonry was just a club of drinkers, and whatever I said, I wasn’t able to convince her otherwise,” he says, with a straight face.

“Then she came to the ceremony and learnt a little more about it and said: ‘Oh, I didn’t know this was such a nice place, and I didn’t know Swami Vivekananda was a Freemason!’” Now, as the Indian Grandmaster, Biswakumar realizes that he is in a position to erase these misconceptions—even if, in so doing, he must beat back some inevitable opposition from within the Freemasonry.

The torch­bearers In 1977, at a party, Biswakumar was introduced to some members of Lodge Vidya, one of the many such “craft lodges” in Chennai. Right there, he was invited to join. At the time, he was a practising neurologist, having retired from the Army Medical Corps as a captain nearly a decade earlier. “So I signed up to become a Freemason, and I was like a fish taking to water,” Biswakumar says. “Maybe it was the discipline, and the symbolic betterment of oneself, that reminded me of the army—I don’t know.”

Biswakumar, a barrel of a man even in his early 70s, is a marvellous compaction of industry. His friends, even those many years younger, talk with awe of how Biswakumar gets to the Madras Cricket Club so early, for his morning game of tennis, that he has to shake the watchman awake.

He hasn’t given up his medical practice, and only in 2004 did he cease teaching on the side. “It’s been like juggling with five balls in the air,” Biswakumar says. “Right now, I

travel practically every weekend, much of it for Freemasonry work.”

Asking a Freemason about what exactly “Freemasonry work” constitutes will usually draw forth a preordained sequence of responses.

The first will deal with “improving one’s own self”—morally, ethically and spiritually—and the second will touch upon commitment to one’s fellow man. However sincerely explained, though, both these responses can sound abstract and platitudinous, and so the Freemason will move on to the third, more tangible task: charity.

“The Freemasons in America do charity on the order of $1 million (around `4.7 crore) per day,” Biswakumar says. “We’re not at that level, naturally,” he adds, before plunging into a nonetheless substantial recitation of the old-age homes, orphanages, hospitals, polyclinics and schools that the Indian Freemasonry supports. “We haven’t, traditionally, made too much of a noise about it,” he says. “But next year is going to be our golden jubilee, and I think it’s time we did make a noise about it.”

The Grandmaster’s own work, of course, goes beyond this. He is r e s p o n s ib l e f o r e a c h o f t h e 3 6 7 lodges and the nearly 18,000 Freemasons in the country, and part of Biswakumar’s plan is to expand that membership during his tenure: “That’s far too small for a country this size.” Ironically, he will have the benefit of Brown’s assistance in this.

In the years since Brown’s novels hit their high-pitched whine of success, the Indian Freemasonry has received more and more applicants—some possibly hoping to spend Happy Hour swigging from skulls, but many

who are genuinely interested.

In India’s smaller towns, Biswakumar says, you can find the local lodge only if you ask around for the bhooth bangla, the haunted house (this is, in fact, true: The Freemasons’ Hall in Pune, built in the early 1800s, is called precisely that). These are the towns Biswakumar hopes to tap for his new members, but he can’t if they think the Freemasonry to be a dubious cult. “The impression is that if it’s secret, it’s illegal or unnatural,” he says. “That’s why I want to open it up.”

In this, he has considerable support, but also significant opposition.

Arun Chintopanth, who served as the Indian Grandmaster between 2003 and 2006, and who is still a member of the grand Board of General Purposes, remembers that when Biswakumar broached his vision for his installation ceremony, “there was a lot of debate about it. And naturally—it would set such a precedent.” The board needed multiple meetings before it was convinced.

Chintopanth was one of the board members who disagreed with Biswakumar, although he now phrases his memory of that dissent most tactfully. “We don’t need to dilute Freemasonry in the name of educating the public about ourselves,” he says.

“We still need to figure out what we can disclose, what we can go to the public with. To throw a Grand Lodge meeting open like that to the public was perhaps a little premature. We aren’t still ready for such openness.”

John Reginald, a Chennai-based surgeon and a veteran Freemason, was—and is—another sceptic.

“There are certain things that should remain sacrosanct,” he says,

OF I NDIA

Landmark: (above) The investi­ ture ceremony of Balaram Biswakumar as the 14th Grand­ master of the Grand Lodge of India in November was the first Masonic event to be open to the public; and an engraving from 1805, based on an earlier work

by Léonard Gabanon, shows the initiation of an apprentice Free­ mason into a lodge in England. “and we went through with the installation only because he was very insistent and because his predecessor was also for it.” The ceremony congealed Reginald’s convictions further. “It turned out to be prolonged, and people got restless. I thought it didn’t have dignity. And I felt bad that, when he was being installed, we couldn’t salute him.” A Freemason’s salute reveals his rank, and is thus not allowed to be performed in public.

Reginald isn’t, in any way, against the Freemasonry discussing itself.

“In fact, I give a lot of lectures myself about the movement, and there are other ways of disseminating information,” he argues. “The Grandmaster in England, for instance, went on the BBC to talk about Freemasonry. I just don’t think throwing our rituals open to the public is the answer.”

To Biswakumar, these apprehensions are natural, only to be expected of an organization that clings to tradition, that is so particular about its rituals being performed one specific, ancient way and absolutely no other.

“Whether we like it or not, people have become curious about us,” he says. “We don’t have to tell them all about what we are. But we have to show them what we are not.”

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

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

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

FREEMASONS

Real

brotherly love

A BRIEF HISTORY The milestones and turnarounds in the history of Freemasonry in India

I

n 1730, 13 years after the Grand Lodge of England had been founded in a London alehouse, a Provincial Grand Lodge came up in India—“in due form at Fort William in Bengal in the East Indies”, as the Grandmaster’s deputation proclaimed at the time. More Provincial Grand Lodges followed in Chennai (in 1752) and in Mumbai (in 1758), but these were still under the aegis of the English Freemasonry, with all the implicit exclu­ sivities. When one P.C. Dutt wanted to join a Kolkata lodge, he faced so much resistance that he was initiated in 1872, a full nine years after he was first proposed.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of emi­ nent Indians became Freemasons, but still technically Freema­ sons under foreign Grand Lodges. Only in 1961, at the Ashok

hotel in New Delhi, was the Grand Lodge of India constituted.

Peaceably, the new Grand Lodge invited the 277 individual lodges in India at the time to join with it only if they so desired; 145 decided they did. There are now 367 individual lodges in the country.

Nobody can simply apply to become a Freemason. A candi­ date must be nominated by members of a lodge, the only pre­ qualifications being that he must be of good character, believe in God, and be well educated (the last stipulation, although it does not say as much, involves the knowledge of English, since the rituals of every lodge are conducted in English). Once proposed, candidates can be blackballed, although this happens rarely; in his 33 years, Biswakumar has only seen one candi­ date being rejected by his home lodge.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

S BURMAULA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

HINDUSTAN TIMES

HINDUSTAN TIMES

Samanth Subramanian Famous Masons: (clockwise from top, left) J.R.D. Tata, Praful Patel, Rajendra Prasad and B.R. Ambedkar.

GRAND LODGE

Dan Brown revived this coterie of men dedicated to ‘self­improvement and charity’ (and not just Happy Hour swigging from skulls) in popular imagination. Ahead of the golden jubilee of the Grand Lodge of India, we look inside the secret world of Freemasonry

B Y S AMANTH S UBRAMANIAN samanth.s@livemint.com

································ n the interests of integrity, a full disclosure first: I used to be a Freemason.

Five years ago, when I was living in Chennai, two friends—both senior members of the Freemasonry—nominated me into their lodge. For just over a year, I attended every one of the lodge’s meetings, togged up in the full, regulation suit and tie (vest optional). I remember clearly how that suit used to feel at the end of a classically humid Chennai evening, clammy from being sweated into. Once, a light blue shirt became so thoroughly soaked that it passed very nicely for a dark blue shirt.

Soon afterwards, I left Chennai, and my active participation in the Freemasonry ended. In that time, I’d risen successfully through a couple of degrees, I’d learnt a couple of code words, and I’d ascertained whether or not there really is a secret handshake (there is). So while my first-hand accounts of those experiences wouldn’t exactly unleash a cloudburst of global sensation, they might set off a ripple in your millpond of Saturday-afternoon reading.

That I choose to leave the millpond unrippled puzzles even me. It isn’t as if the Freemasons have any prosecutorial powers, and in any case, I signed no non-disclosure agreements. The Freemasons are also emphatically not as fearsome as the mafia. Whenever a Masonic friend of mine is asked what it is the Freemasons really do, he turns the question genially aside, saying, “I’ll have to kill you if I tell you.” But he

I

means it (I’m fairly sure) as a joke.

I can only surmise, then, that what Balaram Biswakumar says is true: that the cohesion and fraternity of the Freemasonry gets to you even during as brief a membership as mine, encouraging you to hold its secrets. “Real brotherly love,” Biswakumar says, that phrase sounding oddly out of place when spoken through the tufts of a fierce military moustache, “is something you’ll only feel in a Masonic lodge.”

Last November, as he was being installed amid great pomp as the 14th Grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of India, Biswakumar launched his mission to share the love—to open up the Freemasonry.

The investiture ceremony in Chennai was the first such, anywhere in the Masonic world, to be attended by the general public. A panoramic photograph of the ceremony, hanging on a wall of the Grand Lodge in New Delhi, shows an audience divided neatly into two: one section of 1,600-odd Freemasons, and across the aisle, nearly 600 family members, friends and curious strangers. Still more people, it is said, had to be turned away at the door because the hall was full. “It was just packed,” Premkumar Karra, a longtime Freemason and a friend of Biswakumar’s, recalls. “Even we were forced to stand at the very back, against the wall.”

Over the last decade, the Freemasonry around the world has begun, slowly, to acknowledge the drawbacks of its famously zipped lips—and although most Freemasons deny the direct connection, it is no coincidence that the decade has also been one paved with Dan Brown literature. “If enough muck is thrown at you, and if you don’t respond, then some of it is bound to stick,” says Bharat Epur, a senior Freemason based in Chennai and a fund of information about the fraternity’s past.

For much of its lifetime, dating conclusively to the 14th century and conjecturally even to Biblical Jerusalem, the Freemasonry never shrank from publicity, Epur contends. “The

Statue of Liberty, for instance, was a gift from French Freemasons, and it was received very publicly at the dock by the Grandmaster in New York,” he says. Only in the 20th century, hounded first by anti-Masonic factions in the US and then by Fascists in Germany and Italy, did the Freemasons begin to fade from the public gaze.

But while secrecy thus became an external mechanism of protection, it had always been an internal tenet of Freemasonry—a way of segregating its own members, such that an initiate learns more only as he attains higher degrees. When Karra first joined, in 1993, he remembers being puzzled by all the mystery.

“But then I accepted it—I even saw that it was important, because the members are bound that much tighter because of it.” Epur phrases it as he would an aphorism: “The student is taught by a teacher only as much as the teacher thinks the student ought to know.”

In a television interview that aired shortly after he took over as Grandmaster, Biswakumar was asked: “Is it a secret that people drink from a skull?” The camera doesn’t catch Biswakumar’s reaction, but we hear him draw an indignant breath and exclaim: “Nooooo, rubbish!” The reference is obvious. In his prologue to The Lost Symbol, Brown writes: “The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with blood-red wine.

Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.”

Biswakumar cannot blame anybody for nursing these inaccuracies about the Freemasons. “My own

mother thought, for many years, that the Freemasonry was just a club of drinkers, and whatever I said, I wasn’t able to convince her otherwise,” he says, with a straight face.

“Then she came to the ceremony and learnt a little more about it and said: ‘Oh, I didn’t know this was such a nice place, and I didn’t know Swami Vivekananda was a Freemason!’” Now, as the Indian Grandmaster, Biswakumar realizes that he is in a position to erase these misconceptions—even if, in so doing, he must beat back some inevitable opposition from within the Freemasonry.

The torch­bearers In 1977, at a party, Biswakumar was introduced to some members of Lodge Vidya, one of the many such “craft lodges” in Chennai. Right there, he was invited to join. At the time, he was a practising neurologist, having retired from the Army Medical Corps as a captain nearly a decade earlier. “So I signed up to become a Freemason, and I was like a fish taking to water,” Biswakumar says. “Maybe it was the discipline, and the symbolic betterment of oneself, that reminded me of the army—I don’t know.”

Biswakumar, a barrel of a man even in his early 70s, is a marvellous compaction of industry. His friends, even those many years younger, talk with awe of how Biswakumar gets to the Madras Cricket Club so early, for his morning game of tennis, that he has to shake the watchman awake.

He hasn’t given up his medical practice, and only in 2004 did he cease teaching on the side. “It’s been like juggling with five balls in the air,” Biswakumar says. “Right now, I

travel practically every weekend, much of it for Freemasonry work.”

Asking a Freemason about what exactly “Freemasonry work” constitutes will usually draw forth a preordained sequence of responses.

The first will deal with “improving one’s own self”—morally, ethically and spiritually—and the second will touch upon commitment to one’s fellow man. However sincerely explained, though, both these responses can sound abstract and platitudinous, and so the Freemason will move on to the third, more tangible task: charity.

“The Freemasons in America do charity on the order of $1 million (around `4.7 crore) per day,” Biswakumar says. “We’re not at that level, naturally,” he adds, before plunging into a nonetheless substantial recitation of the old-age homes, orphanages, hospitals, polyclinics and schools that the Indian Freemasonry supports. “We haven’t, traditionally, made too much of a noise about it,” he says. “But next year is going to be our golden jubilee, and I think it’s time we did make a noise about it.”

The Grandmaster’s own work, of course, goes beyond this. He is r e s p o n s ib l e f o r e a c h o f t h e 3 6 7 lodges and the nearly 18,000 Freemasons in the country, and part of Biswakumar’s plan is to expand that membership during his tenure: “That’s far too small for a country this size.” Ironically, he will have the benefit of Brown’s assistance in this.

In the years since Brown’s novels hit their high-pitched whine of success, the Indian Freemasonry has received more and more applicants—some possibly hoping to spend Happy Hour swigging from skulls, but many

who are genuinely interested.

In India’s smaller towns, Biswakumar says, you can find the local lodge only if you ask around for the bhooth bangla, the haunted house (this is, in fact, true: The Freemasons’ Hall in Pune, built in the early 1800s, is called precisely that). These are the towns Biswakumar hopes to tap for his new members, but he can’t if they think the Freemasonry to be a dubious cult. “The impression is that if it’s secret, it’s illegal or unnatural,” he says. “That’s why I want to open it up.”

In this, he has considerable support, but also significant opposition.

Arun Chintopanth, who served as the Indian Grandmaster between 2003 and 2006, and who is still a member of the grand Board of General Purposes, remembers that when Biswakumar broached his vision for his installation ceremony, “there was a lot of debate about it. And naturally—it would set such a precedent.” The board needed multiple meetings before it was convinced.

Chintopanth was one of the board members who disagreed with Biswakumar, although he now phrases his memory of that dissent most tactfully. “We don’t need to dilute Freemasonry in the name of educating the public about ourselves,” he says.

“We still need to figure out what we can disclose, what we can go to the public with. To throw a Grand Lodge meeting open like that to the public was perhaps a little premature. We aren’t still ready for such openness.”

John Reginald, a Chennai-based surgeon and a veteran Freemason, was—and is—another sceptic.

“There are certain things that should remain sacrosanct,” he says,

OF I NDIA

Landmark: (above) The investi­ ture ceremony of Balaram Biswakumar as the 14th Grand­ master of the Grand Lodge of India in November was the first Masonic event to be open to the public; and an engraving from 1805, based on an earlier work

by Léonard Gabanon, shows the initiation of an apprentice Free­ mason into a lodge in England. “and we went through with the installation only because he was very insistent and because his predecessor was also for it.” The ceremony congealed Reginald’s convictions further. “It turned out to be prolonged, and people got restless. I thought it didn’t have dignity. And I felt bad that, when he was being installed, we couldn’t salute him.” A Freemason’s salute reveals his rank, and is thus not allowed to be performed in public.

Reginald isn’t, in any way, against the Freemasonry discussing itself.

“In fact, I give a lot of lectures myself about the movement, and there are other ways of disseminating information,” he argues. “The Grandmaster in England, for instance, went on the BBC to talk about Freemasonry. I just don’t think throwing our rituals open to the public is the answer.”

To Biswakumar, these apprehensions are natural, only to be expected of an organization that clings to tradition, that is so particular about its rituals being performed one specific, ancient way and absolutely no other.

“Whether we like it or not, people have become curious about us,” he says. “We don’t have to tell them all about what we are. But we have to show them what we are not.”

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

Travel SANJAY GULVADY

STOK KANGRI

Summit at sunrise SOMASEKHAR SUNDARESAN

The flood havoc in Leh did not touch Stok Kangri, south of the town.

Respond to the call of the peak now

B Y S OMASEKHAR S UNDARESAN ···························· t wasn’t the first time on this trek that I had lent a hand with pitching tents. However, it was the first time I felt a hammer pounding inside my head.

It was late morning. We were at High Camp, 5,200m above sea level, scheduled to start our attempt around midnight on the summit of Stok Kangri, a trekkable peak in Ladakh that stacks up to 6,152m. The mules and horses had arrived from the base camp at 4,900m, shed their load on to the rocks, and were ready to trudge back down, neighing and braying.

Their bells sounded louder against the quiet nagging headache. The strong sun reflected a white glare off the glacier next to the campsite.

Grey clouds loomed at a distance, teasingly robbing us of the visibility of the peaks on the horizon.

The signs were clear: The weather gods may not play ball.

However, gambling on the fact that mountain weather is fickle, we would initiate the summit attempt after midnight anyway.

Giving up was the last resort.

And yet, here I was, sitting back and watching the support staff level just enough earth amid the rocks to pitch a tent. There was never any obligation to help set up camp, but straightening a few foldable tent rods was as far as I could go. Self-doubt mounted with every pound of the subtle pain at the tip of my neck.

The past four days, in contrast, had been a dream run. I was among the few in my group of trekkers who were not on Diamox, the blood-diluting drug mountaineers use to pre-empt mountain sickness. I had had no symptoms of either a loose tummy or plantar fasciitis (an inflammation of the sole), two common mountain ailments, as we hiked up from the Stok Kangri base camp, or earlier, during the short trek to the base camp from Mounkarmo (4,250m), our previous stop.

The climb to the base camp had been rather easy but, at the camp, several of us began displaying symptoms of fatigue.

Clear skies had held out hope of a fantastic summit view. However, after an acclimatization climb, the higher altitude trig-

I

GOPIKA PILLAI

High up: (clockwise from above) The view from the Stok Kangri peak; con­ ditions on the last leg are dire; however, all but one of the group made it to the summit. gered serious anxiety pangs.

Given the dropping confidence levels, Avilash, our guide, decided to spend the extra day built into our time budget at base camp. Aussie Catherine seemed to have sorted out the diarrhoea she had contracted en route, but welcomed the added rest, as did Gopika and Suman, who had pulled along slowly but steadily. American Patrick, who had trotted up to base camp with no visible discomfort, woke up with a scare at night when his wife Nisha began whimpering in the cold despite wearing multiple layers. She would eventually sleep with two sleeping bags over her. Sanjeev and Manmeet, who had carried their own baggage, started showing the first signs of tiredness.

It was our second spell of downtime on the trek. We had set out after a drive from Leh to Zingchen under a scorching sun. Halfway to Rumbak (3,870m), where we were scheduled to camp for the night, we learnt that our mules had not yet arrived in Zingchen. Since there was no point in arriving in Rumbak without our equipment, we settled for a siesta in a shady meadow, and launched our own forays into the green countryside. News of the mules came just

GRAPHIC

ahead of sunset, and we made our way up to Rumbak through homestay villages and herds of pashmina goats. A scheduled 4-hour day had extended to 7 hours, but we were at emotional peace with the Himalayan terrain by the time we pitched up at Rumbak. Our first “Big Day”—the very second day of the trek—lay ahead.

It revolved around a long and hard “mini summit climb” up Stok La, a high mountain pass at 4,890m. “If you do this one well, you’ll be mentally confident of the main summit,” Avilash had said, suggesting we take this day seriously. Breathtaking Himalayan country unfolded all around us as we trudged up, but the steep trek took the wind out of some in the group. Behind us, Rumbak and its surroundings slowly moved from life-size to minia-

tures and then to mere specks beneath our feet. Up ahead, all we could see was the steep trail that would eventually lead to Stok La. As we neared the top of the trail, it began to snow, first just light flakes and then heavily, blurring visibility. Huddled against the mountain wall, we gradually began our descent to Mounkarmo.

Snow eventually gave way to sunshine and then to rain, and then hail. Ten hours after we had set out, we reached the wet campsite.

Each one of us was relieved to be able to crawl into our tents—and no sooner had we than the skies opened up again.

“For me, it is the journey that matters, not the destination,” I had assured my mother in an email from Leh. “If I find that I cannot make it, I will be true to myself and turn back.” At High Camp, mem-

ory of that email came back to me.

One of the group had dropped out at the base camp after the extra day of rest. And now, every single one of us looked knackered.

Before the trek, I had read Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind and the need to conquer the mountain in my own mind was clear. After imagining the climb in my mind’s eye and hydrating myself with several dozen cups of hot water and salty soup, I found the nagging headache dissolving before the resoluteness to summit.

Besides, I had sought pledges of financial support for Akanksha, a child education NGO, on the back of the summiting. There had to be a strong reason to give up the trek at this advanced stage.

We broke into two groups later that night, with the slower one—to which I belonged—starting earlier.

We crossed the glacier and crisscrossed our path up the moraine to clamber on to the mountain

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AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

ridge. A steady snowfall kept us company through the night as we took the ascent step by careful step, focusing our head lamps on just the immediate path ahead.

What the eye does not see, the mind does not fear.

As the day broke, we were atop Stok Kangri. Clouds barred our view from the top in all directions, but for a slight parting as we assembled for our descent. But it did not matter. Every single trekker from High Camp made it to the top. Not only had the journey been completed, the destination too had been reached.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

A death zone trek (above 6,000m) should be attempted only by the experienced.

Tough climb: The Stok Kangri peak.

SANJEEV GANJU

TRAVEL L13

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

ITALY

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THINKSTOCK

Not just dessert On the streets of Venice and Rome, hunting down the perfect tiramisu B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· he word tiramisu cropped up during an Internet search for places of interest in Rome. I salivated through the appropriate changes in the Google keyword, and decided that the Coliseum could not possibly be a more satisfying experience.

The interest heightened further with an article in the online edition of The Independent, which mentioned a place in Rome called Enoteca Corsi: “The menu is delicious downhome Roman: pasta e fagioli, gnocchi, carbonara, tripe, oxtail broth, and the tiramisu to end all tiramisu debates.”

The debate could not possibly end without starting. So, armed with useful suggestions from a well-travelled and well-fed friend who could not come due to anticipation anxiety, we set off on a journey to find the ultimate tiramisu in Italy, or at least within a few kilometres’ radius of Venice and Rome.

The tiramisu is typically a layered Italian cake with eggs, cream, mascarpone cheese, coffee, ladyfinger or savoiardi biscuits and liqueur or rum. It’s built in layers, with varying tastes and texture, and is supposed to have originated in Venice. So the best place to begin the search seemed to be Venice.

The first sampler came at a small confectionery in one of those narrow, cobbled Venetian lanes which you will never ever find again. The small, square, firm, plain-looking tiramisu disappeared in one bite. There was

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no moist middle, no coffee sprinkled on top and no “hmmmm…” moment. It was a gentle start.

At lunch in Trattoria Al Corazzieri the next day, the friendly waiter, who spoke of social equality and immigration patterns vis-à-vis the Africans selling fake Gucci bags on the roadside, said his tiramisu was the best even as theme music from The Godfather played as his cellphone ringtone. It was at least larger, but cold enough to freeze all senses and not layered enough to be anything more than just a cake.

It just kept getting better as the day progressed though, admittedly, the window display at Ristorante La Tavernetta did not promise much at dinner time. It looked squidgy and old, worn down as if by expectation, saddened by the perpetually abusive Italians.

But it was popular—going by how rapidly the display plates diminished to two within minutes—and I quickly booked mine with the grumpy waiter even before he brought the customary bread basket. Grumpy looked at me as if I had asked for tomato ketchup to supplement perfect Italian cooking but, when the last of the displays did appear on my table, it did not disappoint. Maybe it was the rock-bottom expectation that made this latest version appealing, good in texture, suitably layered, though perhaps the middle

Trickster city: (above) Venice; where the tiramisu changes form from street to street.

was a bit too soggy.

It did occur to me that Venice, which has only tourists, might be bettered by Rome, which seemed to have residents as well. Plus, armed with The Independent review printout and well-fed friend’s list, the stage was set for the grand finale—or the last five leading up to the grand finale.

The Nino near the Spanish Steps is one of those old establishments where gladiators probably roasted their meat.

The tiramisu here comes with the strongest dose of sprinkled coffee yet: a thick layer on top that bites into the sweet of the rest. The amalgam of bittersweet makes you feel like a part

FOOT NOTES | SUMANA MUKHERJEE

THINKSTOCK

of you is going into blissful slumber while the other part is jolted awake by the shot of caffeine.

The taste lingers till the cappuccino arrives. I made a mental note to buy elastic-waisted pants.

We skipped dessert at dinner because the hyped pizza at Pizzeria da Baffetto had taken so long to come (over an hour) that any craving for a sweet finale had dissolved like melted cheese.

The adventure would resume at lunch the next day: another day, another tiramisu.

This was the one: After thanking the lord at the Vatican for blessing me and the world with the tiramisu, we headed to Enoteca Corsi, the one that was supposed to end all debates. I wanted to skip the first three courses and get to the point; after all, as a morbid friend once said, the older we get, the less

Go Galapagos!

Whether your biggest passion is wildlife or photography, this is one trip you cannot afford to miss

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he Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador in South America, is where evolutionary science was born, after Charles Darwin observed how the fittest of the species survived in inimical conditions. And now travel outfitters Abercrombie and Kent (A&K) promise to take you up close to Lonesome George, the world’s last known Pinta Island tortoise, sea lions and iguana, penguins and frigate birds.

Tourism at the Unesco World Heritage Site is monitored closely because of the danger posed by foreign elements—it was uninhabited till the 17th century, but many native species have already become extinct since thanks to “imported” rats, goats and feral cats. A&K promises your

visit will have minimal impact on the environment. In the six days you will spend anchored off the island in MV Eclipse, you’ll have your meals on board but remain free to explore the archipelago and landmark sites such as Pinnacle Rock and Punta Suarez, where you’ll find Galapagos’ weird and wonderful wildlife regarding you with as much curiosity as you regard them. Shutterbugs would be advised to sign up for the 10-day trip starting 18 November, which will have award-winning wildlife photographer Jonathan R. Green guiding a special photo safari.

The trip costs $500 less than other similar trips, with stateroom accommodation going for $6,195 (around `2.9 lakh) per person for double occupancy, for the cruise and internal airfare (Quito-Galapagos-Quito), if you book by 30 September. Log on to www.abercrombiekent.com for details.

with every bite yet firm enough not to wobble, which disturbs some people. It also had a thicker biscuit layer, which made some bits crunchy and, unlike others, was layered vertically.

By the next afternoon, after walking many endless miles, the temptation for Enoteca Corsi had waned but the Armando al Pantheon presented the most unique tiramisu so far—without caffeine and without layers. It was fruity, and could have passed off as a torte, despite the hints of cheese and egg yolk.

The Armando also demolished the belief that the tiramisu is a standardized creation: It can actually vary by many shades and ingredients, probably depending on the moody Italian chef.

Do I know which one was the best? That decision cannot be made till I have sampled the one that, apparently, ends all debates, but I loved most of them anyway. They were all worth the waist.

Chartered waters W

Seeing blue: Among the many highlights of Galapagos’ wildlife is the adorable blue­footed Booby.

sure we can be of living till the dessert order. Better sense prevailed though; we waited till all else was consumed (all excellent) before the final order.

The moment, followed by the disappointment. No tiramisu today. No, it had just not been made that day and would be available only the next day. No, they could not make an exception. No, the chef would not like a foot massage. No, the Pope does not take calls from tourists.

Recovering with grace, we left with dignity—no, you cannot check the kitchen—the prospect of tomorrow shining bright.

Meanwhile, dinner had to be dealt with, at Osteria del Sostegno, in an obscure lane near the Pantheon. The waitress, a postgraduate in West Asian politics looking for a career as a political analyst and speaking English with an American accent, said their tiramisu was creamy.

It was: the creamiest, richest one we got on the trip, dissolving

hat with hordes of foreign tourists landing in Goa and Manali, chartered flights have got something of a bad name in India. That may be changing, as MakeMyTrip’s third “group” scheme takes off.

This time, after Ladakh and the Maldives, the destination is Andaman islands, says Keyur Joshi, co-founder and COO of MakeMyTrip, adding that they ferried 7,000 tourists to Leh in summer. With the first flight taking off on 9 October, the package includes return economy fares on Kingfisher Airlines, seven nights’ accommodation in standard rooms in three-star hotels in Port Blair and Havelock Island, snorkelling off Elephant Beach,

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luxury cruise boat transfers, the regular sightseeing (Cellular Jail, Naval Maritime Museum, et al), a 2-hour harbour cruise, and umpteen hours of sun, sea and sand. On a twin-sharing basis, the seven-night/eight-day package costs `25,999 per person,

ex-Bangalore. Residents of other cities will need to fly to Bangalore and spend a night there to make the trip. For costs for residents of other cities (Delhi/Ahmedabad, Mumbai/Pune/Hyderabad and Kolkata/Chennai), log on to www.makemytrip.com THINKSTOCK

Andaman calm: The post­monsoon period is the best time to visit.

therapy and rebirthing breath, but their 21-day holistic health package may be just what you need to reverse lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, cholesterol,

allergies, obesity and auto-immune diseases. Using a healing foods diet, Ayurvedic therapies, acupressure techniques, naturopathy, sound healing, meditation, yoga and pranayam, the protocol promises to send you away healthier, fitter and whole.

You need to stay at the village for all 21 days of the programme—no short cuts there—with each day costing `9,000, inclusive of stay, food, consultancies and therapies. For details, log on to www.ournativevillage.com

he month of fasting-feasting may be over for Muslims, but a long season of excesses stretches ahead. This is when you should be making a note of Our Native Village, a 100% eco-resort located about 40km from Bangalore. Kitted out with 24 rooms, two spas, a restaurant and an all-natural swimming pool, this is where you need to head to reconnect with your innermost self. Okay, so you may not buy all that they say about past life regression Escape: This resort’s a good place to detox.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

Books FALL PREVIEW

The return of Roth and Rushdie LLUIS GENE/AFP

NANCY CRAMPTON/HOUGHTON MIFFLIN/BLOOMBERG

A polio epidemic in Newark and a fable that blurs the line between children and adult fiction—and other highlights of the season

B Y C YNTHIA C ROSSEN ····························

Luka and the Fire of Life Borrowing characters from his earlier novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie has created another magical fable that he hopes will “abolish the boundary” between children’s and adult fiction.

Luka and the Fire of Life is the story of a young boy who tries to save his father’s life by going on a journey to the Magic World, accompanied by his companions, a dog named Bear and a bear named Dog. Luka, like its predecessor, is filled with whimsical wordplay, freaky animal hybrids and nefarious villains such as the Badly Behaved Gods. Rushdie says Luka, which he wrote for his youngest son Milan, is the most enjoyable writing he has done since Haroun, published in 1991, which he wrote for his elder son Zafar.

Releases in the US on 16 November.

third volumes are scheduled for publication in 2012 and 2014.

Following on his best-selling Pillars of the Earth, Follett surveys 20th century history through the stories of five families in Europe and the US. The pivotal events in Fall of Giants are World War I, the Russian Revolution and women’s suffrage. Follett tells epic yarns in prose he calls “transparent”.

That makes his books so popular that last month, Forbes magazine named him the fifth highest-paid author in the world.

Releases in the US on 28 September.

Nemesis Philip Roth doubles back to his childhood—Newark in the 1940s—in this short but biting novel about a polio epidemic.

The main character, Bucky Cantor, is a young playground director rejected by World War II because of poor eyesight. He spends the war years watching his equatorially hot baseball fields gradually empty of boys carried away by a germ. Roth, 77 years old, would have been 11 in the summer of 1944, so he witnessed first-hand the savagery of the disease and the resulting panic and paranoia.

No one knew how the virus spread, so everyone, including Bucky, was suspected of transmitting the demon. And though there was no way to prove it, polio did seem to follow in some people’s path.

Releases in the US on 5 October.

Fall of Giants

The Wake of Forgiveness

Ken Follett’s new novel is big: 1,008 pages, with a cast of characters of well over 100. The first printing is a mind-boggling one million copies; the cover price is a steep $36 (around `1,690). Fall of Giants is the first of a trilogy whose second and

Bruce Machart’s debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, has reminded early readers of Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck and Deadwood with a little less swearing. Set in early 20th century Texas, the book follows three generations of a

Age of war Why publishers are rediscovering the great war­time writers of Europe B Y T OBIAS G REY The Wall Street Journal

···························· he great Soviet-era Russian author Vasily Grossman believed it wasn’t just a writer’s duty to tell terrible truths but also a reader’s civic duty to learn these truths.

Grossman initiated this pact in his newspaper article The Hell of Treblinka, which he wrote in 1944 after witnessing the Red Army’s liberation of Treblinka II—a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, where approximately 900,000 Jews and 500 gypsies were murdered in 13 months.

Grossman’s unsparing, literary account of the horrific ways Nazi Germany implemented its ethnic-

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cleansing programme at Treblinka was one of the first reports of a death camp anywhere in Europe and eventually provided prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal with crucial background information. The surprise is that until now an English language translation of Grossman’s lengthy article has never been published in its entirety.

That will soon change with the publication of The Road, a collection of some of Grossman’s best short stories and war-time articles, including The Hell of Treblinka, which is being brought out in the UK on 30 September by MacLehose Press and in the US on 28 September by New York Review Books Classics.

The coming publication of The Road has been made possible thanks to the commercial and critical success of Life and Fate in particular, but also because there is a growing demand for new translations of European fiction and non-fiction from the years

The who’s who: (clockwise from left) Krauss’ new novel is about four characters and a piece of furni­ ture; Rushdie returns to the genre of Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and Roth doubles back to his childhood. farm family whose members carry a hoe in one hand and a gun in the other. Machart’s prose is so evocative that you can smell the men’s cheap tobacco and corn mash and feel the bare, hard-packed earth from which they coax crops.

Their dialogue, rural south Texas vernacular, is spare, gnarled and often funny. In addition to the violence, betrayals and cruelty of an old-fashioned Western, The Wake of Forgiveness also finds redemption among men who have never “not known the sting of weeping blisters and the weight of caked mud on

their boots.”

Releases in the US on 21 October.

leading up to and including World War II. The trend is most prevalent in France and Britain, where rediscovered European novelists from the 1930s and 1940s, such as the French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin Irene Némirovsky, the Austrian-Jewish writers Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth and Germany’s Hans Fallada, have each sold hundreds of thousands of books over the past few years.

At the same time, a growing number of war-time memoirs have begun to be unearthed by

discerning French and British publishers. These include moving first-hand testimonies of the Holocaust such as The Journal of Hélene Berr, which came out in France and the UK in 2008 and Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, which will be published in the UK in January by MacLehose Press.

The Paris-based English writer Alan Riding, whose cultural history of Nazi-occupied Paris And the Show Went On will be published by Knopf on 19 October, says he believes that a changing mood in Europe has slowly brought about the translation and publication of literature and memoirs that were often shied away from in the past. “I think the whole World War II question, and particularly the Holocaust, assumed fresh relevance with the end of the Cold War,” says Riding.

“Only when the Communist bloc—notably East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania— disintegrated did the extent of the persecution of the Jews become fully apparent. In a way, the Cold War had frozen history.”

The German-born poet and translator Michael Hof-

Alone in Berlin: Penguin, 608 pages, $12 (around `560).

Great House Nicole Krauss’ last novel, The History of Love, was an international best-seller and won several literary prizes; her new book, Great House, also promises to be a popular and critical success. In it, four narrators describe how their lives intersected with the same piece of furniture, an enormous desk with 19 drawers, stolen from its Jewish ERIN PATRICE O’BRIEN/WSJ

mann—who was widely praised for his English-language translation of Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin—believes that Fallada “was coming out of a Silver Age of German Letters” where the standard of writing was exceptionally high: “Fallada’s just a great and greatly gifted popular writer. Alone in Berlin, which is based on the residents of this house, and what happens to them, is like a super, Dickensian page-turner, amplified because it’s set in Berlin in the 1940s, in the civilian world.”

Suite Française: Random House 416 pages, `650.

owners in Budapest by the Nazis during World War II. The peripatetic desk inspires and intimidates its successive owners, who understand that they no more own this object than they could own another person.

Krauss, 36 years old, was a poet before she began writing fiction, and in Great House her satin prose turns a piece of furniture into a symbol of the freight given and taken from those we love.

Releases in the US on 12 October.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

“It’s a period that still fascinates people,” says French writer Pierre Assouline, whose literary blog La République des Livres is the most popular of its kind in France. “The popularity of writers like Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, especially in a country like France, has a lot to do with an acute nostalgia for Mitteleuropa (middle Europe), a nostalgia for a highly cultured and diverse Europe, with its Jewish dimension, that existed between the wars.”

But for some publishers, such as MacLehose Press’ founder Christopher MacLehose, even the best storytelling doesn’t do World War II, and the Holocaust in particular, adequate justice. MacLehose, who published The Journal of Hélene Berr in the UK in 2008 and is also responsible for coming titles such as The Road and Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, says: “I think there has to be a real literary response to the tragedy of the Holocaust. In my view, you don’t need Schindler’s List, you don’t need Sophie’s Choice, but you do need Hélene Berr and Chil Rajchman.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM US NAVY, CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER’S MATE ERIC J TILFORD/AP

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

FABLES AND FAIRY TALES Rushdie’s new song

Razed: The site of the World Trade Center towers.

SPOTLIGHT

The spillover effect The tomes about Islamist terrorism after 9/11—and how they have altered the Islam­West narrative

B Y S AIF S HAHIN saif.s@livemint.com

···························· T is nine years since 9/11.

Writers dwelling upon the rage of Islamists, and how to deal with it, have shed about as much ink in these years as their subjects have shed blood. Neither appears to be done.

“Radical Islam is the greatest threat facing the world today,” Tony Blair bellowed this month in a BBC interview, part of his promotion campaign for A Journey, a memoir about his days at 10 Downing Street. Much of the book is an attempt to justify the former British prime minister’s actions as a junior partner in the US-led war on terror, waged against alleged Islamist groups and regimes in the aftermath of 9/11.

His critics point out that the war only fed the rage of Islamists and led to a global spread—its most recent example being a triplebombing in Lahore, Pakistan, a day before Blair’s interview, in which at least 25 Shias were killed and 170 injured.

But their blood is just a drop in the ocean that Islamists began spilling much before 9/11 and the war on terror—just as Blair’s hollering, expected to earn £4.6 million (around `33 crore), is a humble cog in what Saudi-British scholar Madawi al Rashid has called an “industry” of studies on radical Islam and its impact, spawned by 9/11.

Much of this industry continues to be manned by “outsiders”, people who have little understanding of Islam and no patience for history. An example is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell. The American neoconservative finds Islam a religion of war-mongers and fears that immigration of Muslims who “retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, market-

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places, and mosques” will convert Europe into “Eurabia” and distort Western civilization.

Caldwell is right in pointing out that immigration was encouraged by the elite to work menial and underpaid jobs, and they failed to grasp its long-term effects on Europe. He is wrong in imagining European and Islamic societies as timeless absolutes rather than diverse and evolving phenomena.

Europe was on the verge of becoming “Eurabia” as early as the eighth century, when Muslims captured Spain and made inroads into France—it was only internal schisms that kept them from pushing deeper. Centuries later, it was Muslim translation of ancient Eastern thought that helped usher in the Renaissance and turned Europe into the proud civilization it is today. Similarly, it was Europeans who brought the concept of constitutionalism to the Muslim world, while Christian Arabs were the first to raise the banner of Arab nationalism.

Also on the list of ill-informed “outsider” attempts is Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.

Reilly argues that under the influence of Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Muslims gave up critical thinking in favour of a literal reading of the Quran. This caused the decline of the Islamic civilization at the turn of the 12th century and has culminated in the spread of Islamism today.

That is a rather ambitious leap through time, and Reilly’s attempt falls flat on its face. Seminal works by two French scholars, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, in the days following 9/11 offer a detailed analysis of the historical causes of Islamism.

In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Roy demonstrates how Islam changed from

being a people’s religion—deeply rooted in local cultures around the world—to a politician’s religion over the past century. He focuses on the US-initiated and Saudi-funded spread of extremist Wahabi Islam as an antidote to communism in the 1970s and 1980s. This created jihadi-manufacturing factories on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It is these factories that run the global Islamist enterprise today.

Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam traces the other variant of Islamism—Shia militancy —and the role the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran played in its spread.

For many writers, religious orthodoxy and Islamist terrorism are two sides of the same coin.

This notion is challenged by British-Indian scientist Kenan Malik, who says Islamist violence is a socio-political rather than a theological phenomenon. While acknowledging Roy’s historicist narrative, Malik’s book, From Fatwa to Jihad, explains why bloodletting in the name of Islam has been particularly severe in the past two decades: It’s the impact of globalization, exacerbated by the faulty policies followed in the West as well as Muslim countries. “Far from being an expression of ancient theological beliefs,” Malik writes, “(Islamist terrorism) is really a reaction to new political and social changes: the loss of a sense of belonging in a fragmented society, the blurring of traditional moral lines, the growing erosion of the distinction between our private lives and our public lives.”

Some call this escapism—an inability to accept that there may be problems with Islam itself, that even if the religion isn’t inherently bellicose, it is susceptible to radical and obscurantist interpretations and is thus in

need of reform.

The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito is teeming with empirical data that should lay to rest claims that Muslims are at perpetual war with infidels. Extensive surveys cited in the book show that common Muslims’ expectations are no different from those of others: economic development, democracy, human rights and an end to war.

The book suggests that Islamist thought is undergoing a reformation similar to the one witnessed by Christianity centuries ago. Esposito gives an overview of the works of modernizers such as Tariq Ramadan, Amr Khaled, Shaykh Ali Goma’a, Mustafa Ceric, Tim Winter and Heba Raouf.

Ramadan, among these, is the loudest reformist voice in Islam today. As the grandson of Hasan al Banna—who launched the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the first and largest Islamist movements, in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1928—he is the ultimate insider. Ramadan has argued that Muslims worldwide should marry their faith to local cultures and develop local identities—an idea similar to the “sociocultural religion” that Roy says Islam has historically been.

His latest book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, is one of the most radical attempts at de-radicalizing Islam. Ramadan says that “adaptive reform”, through which Islam will sit more comfortably with modern society and developments in science and technology, is not enough. Muslims need a “transformational reform”, which challenges the very sources of Islamic laws and norms that prevail today. This will rid the religion of centuries of ossification that has bred radicalism and violence, and bring it in tune with its original rational and spiritual values. Scholars of modern science and social science should be given equal space with religious scholars in this process.

Two decades ago, when Salman Rushdie questioned notions such as religious revelation in The Satanic Verses, he faced a threat to his life. Today, Ramadan’s growing readership reflects how much the Muslim milieu has matured. Yet the debate is still about the degree to which reforms are required—rather than what these reforms should be and how they should be popularized.

That shows how much further Islam has to go before it meets its own Renaissance.

It cannot be easy to be Salman Rushdie.

Let’s not confuse the author with the man. Rushdie the author has been a literary phenomenon for a long time, and his significance for Indian writing in English should not be underestimated. What he launched with Midnight’s Children might have led to a stylistic blind alley, but it did open up side routes previously unavailable or invisible to Indian writers. He followed it up with at least three major books, of which the last one was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a masterpiece of its kind.

Since then, Rushdie seems to have either repeated himself or even, at times, imitated himself. This is perhaps inevitable, given the brutal brickbats and easy accolades often showered on him, but it is also sad, given the talent and vitality of the man. Perhaps all this is going to change. He has just finished a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories: The new 240-page novel is titled Luka and the Fire of Life, and it is scheduled to be launched around October.

In it, Rushdie takes up the story of Rashid, the storyteller-father of Haroun, and of Haroun’s younger brother, Luka.

The publicity material describes the novel in the following words: “On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay, a terrible thing happened: twelve-year-old Luka’s father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him. To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life.”

Rumours circulate that with this book, Rushdie is back at his best. But then the rumours around his last few novels have always exceeded the reality. I can only hope that this time they are true.

For, despite complaining about his recent works and critiquing some of what he did earlier on, which in any case is what the younger generations owe the older ones, I remain a great believer in the power of Rushdie at his best.

STEIDL VERLAG/BLOOMBERG

Evergreen Grass Günter Grass, the 83-year-old German Nobel laureate, has written his last book. Or so he claims. At least some German editors doubt that because Grass seems to be going as strong as ever.

But if it is Grass’ last book, it cannot be more appropriate.

Titled Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung (Grimm’s Words: Nobel laureate: Günter Grass.

A Declaration of Love), this 368-page book is the third and last part of Grass’ autobiography, of which the first book got into the news for disclosing the author’s involvement with the Waffen-SS in the last months of World War II. But Grimm’s Words is not just an autobiography of Grass; it is a declaration of love for the German language. To do so, Grass goes back to the Grimm brothers: yes, the authors of those famous “fairy tales” and figures central to the rise of the modern German language. In the mid-19th century, the Grimm brothers started working on an extensive German dictionary. The first volume, on the alphabet “A”, was published in 1854. When Wilhelm Grimm died in 1859, they had reached Durst (thirst). When Jacob Grimm died in 1863, he had finished the entry on Frucht (fruit). It was only in 1961 that all the 32 volumes of this historical project were completed.

It is this ongoing tradition that Grass links to, while narrating his own story: It is, in his hands, not a narrow, nationalistic tradition.

Afterword Seven Fair Tales: Contemporary Mexican Fiction, edited by Jeannine Diego Medina and just published by the Indo-Hispanic Society in India, is a big relief from the usual middling Anglophone anthologies. Why don’t major publishers give us more literature in translation from countries such as Mexico and Brazil?

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

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

BOOKWORM HUB “Nobody should ever walk out of a book store empty­handed.” This and several other aphorisms fill up the ‘About Us’ section of Literaturemachine.com. The new Kerala­based outfit, a Web book store, was set up by a group of friends who were unhappy with the kind of books in popular book stores. They set up the Web store with a database of around 22 million imported books.

It has 44 categories— everything from philosophy to gardening.

Apart from classics and pop culture must­haves, there are eclectic offerings such as ‘10 Bad Dates with de Niro’ (Overlook On the shelf: The home page.

Press) and ‘A Book of Scoundrels’ (Tutis Digital Pub). The selection is the website’s strong point since there is no real cost advantage over existing Web stores such as Flipkart.com.

Besides selling directly to readers, they take orders from neighbourhood bookshops to give them access to Literaturemachine’s extensive resources. Books can be bought using a credit or debit card, as well as through netbanking. The delivery frame is almost a month long, and like Flipkart.com, it allows returns within seven days of delivery.

Anindita Ghose

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2010

Culture COURTESY CHEMOULD PRESCOTT ROAD

FOCUS

Violence­inspired: (clockwise from far left) Detail from an installa­ tion in Shrapnel by Munshi; Going Away by Sheikh; and a scene from King Lear.

The art of pain COURTESY VEER MUNSHI

ANANT RAINA

Artists with roots in the Kashmir Valley react to the violence and loss with nostalgia, satire and dissent

B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· he artist Nilima Sheikh grew up in Delhi and is married to a Gujarati, but Kashmir has always had a special place in her heart. “I spent a lot of my growing-up years in Kashmir and like most north Indians have a vexed relationship with it,” she says. The inner turmoil she felt after the Gujarat riots of 2002 spurred her to commence a longplanned art project on Kashmir.

The poetry of the late Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali—“beautiful and full of pain”—was her guide.

Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams, her second show inspired by Kashmir, was on view earlier this month at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi. Eight years in the making, it almost didn’t happen. As the opening date for the

T

show approached, the Kashmir Valley unexpectedly exploded in violence. Sheikh wanted to cancel the show. “What meaning does it have, given the reality?” Ram Rahman, photographer and founder member of Sahmat, recalls her asking him.

Rahman and others prevailed on her to continue with the show.

Emphasizing the complex and varied history that has shaped Kashmir, Sheikh says, “The turmoil there is due to our lack of understanding as Indians.” For instance, while most are aware of Kashmir’s Hindu and Islamic heritage, few know about the deep imprint of Buddhism there. The role of the artist then is to bear witness, to the past and present: “All that an artist can do is make visible,” she says.

Sheikh’s predicament prompted Rahman to organize a

seminar under the aegis of Sahmat—a trust that, among other things, combats communalism—on the role of the artist in the face of the turmoil in Kashmir. Among those who participated were actor and director M.K. Raina, and artists Veer Munshi and Inder Salim. All three belong to the Kashmiri Pandit community which was exiled en masse from the Valley in 1990. They all grew up in Kashmir and, along with their extended families, are now part of the Kashmiri diaspora.

“In the 1990s, terrorism was at its peak and no one dared perform. Cinemas, auditoriums, bars and restaurants were closed,” says Raina, who studied theatre at the National School of Drama in Delhi and has acted most recently in the film Aisha. He first went back to Kashmir in 1999 and since

then has been instrumental in reviving theatre there, including the traditional folk theatre Bhand Pather. Over the years, Raina has organized many theatre workshops for schoolchildren, orphans, youth and folk actors.

To revive the Bhand Pather tradition, he introduced works such as Shakespeare’s King Lear into their repertoire. “I worked with village actors and all of us translated (the text) together (into Kashmiri),” he says. Other plays include those written by Brecht, Camus and Dario Fo. These are not as far removed from the folk tradition as one might assume.

“Traditional Bhand Pather is about radical humour and subversive, hard-hitting satire,” Raina points out. For children and adults brutalized by conflict, the theatre workshops have been as much about healing and an

exchange of ideas as about acting.

Munshi echoes Raina’s concerns about cultural impoverishment in the Valley. “For 20 years, the new generation…(has) not known any creative activity,” he says. “The gun dictated everything.” After graduating in Fine Arts from MS University in Baroda, Munshi worked as an artist for six years in his hometown Anantnag, until he had to leave in 1990.

He feels that the biggest target and casualty of the conflict has been Kashmir’s composite Sufi culture. Like most of his work over the last 20 years, the theme of conflict and loss in Kashmir dominates Shrapnel, his travelling solo show that was recently on view at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata. The show features archival documentation of abandoned medieval houses in Kash-

mir, installations and video works. “My show is about architectural decay which reflects cultural decay,” Munshi says. The double projection video work, Leaves like Hands of Flame, features an animated video of a burning house and shows him walking through lanes as the seasons change—he is trampling on red Chinar leaves in autumn and, a little later, treading through thick winter snow. Munshi says he is “anti-right wing” by political persuasion. “I have lived as a minority (in Kashmir),” he says.

“So I can relate to minorities, whether at the time of Babri (masjid demolition) or in Gujarat.”

Inder Salim, known chiefly for his provocative performance art, says he has taken the nom de plume of “Salim” to reflect Kashmir’s Sufi culture and the intimacy of its Hindu and Islamic heritage.

He too laments the dearth of art in the Valley: “No visual artist in Kashmir can dare express himself because they might be booked for treason and their body discovered in the river…India doesn’t tolerate any dissent in Kashmir.”

This, he feels, is unfortunate as given a chance, the young will pick up acting or photography over guns or stones. One of the stops of Art Caravan—a touring troupe of artists organized by Salim, held earlier this year—was Srinagar. Activities there included theatre workshops attended by enthusiastic school students, performance by a music band and a skit on Kashmir based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “It ended with Ophelia lying on a boat in Dal Lake with the Indian flag painted on one palm and the Pakistani flag on the other,” he says.

The artists’ presentations at the Sahmat seminar underscored Kashmir’s suffering, but also held out hope in the form of art’s capacity to heal, redeem and uplift. “(As an artist) you are not addressing the immediate issue,” admits Sheikh. “You are not being politically useful.” She adds that her works depict violence but they are not all about mourning.

“There are openings,” she says.

Q&A | ABHINAV KASHYAP

The seventies’ show The director on his debut, brother Anurag Kashyap and working with Salman Khan B Y A NUPAM V ERMA anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· earless, corrupt, Robin Hood—Chulbul Pandey can be given many monikers. He’s the protagonist in the film Dabangg, played by a moustachioed Salman Khan who sings, dances and thrashes goons in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh in the promotional spots. As we chat with the man behind the film, director Abhinav Kashyap, on his debut, he lets us in on working with stars, setting the film in the Hindi heartland and his brother Anurag Kashyap.

Edited excerpts:

F

You are one of the few directors to have directed Salman Khan in one go, that is, in one shooting schedule. What was it like working with him?

It was fantastic; it was a dream

come true. There were certain things I wanted to do with him, which I wouldn’t have thought possible, but I still put it across to him and he surprised me. He did just about everything that I wanted him to. One was that I wanted to shoot the film in one go and did not want him to go on another project, which he did not. Then, I wanted him to grow a moustache, which he couldn’t grow because he was shooting for Veer. He wore a moustache for the film. He also took off the bracelet that he is known not to take off.

With ‘Dabangg’, we are witnessing a hinterland macho hero after a long time, although we have seen the Hindi heartland in slightly different films such as Vishal Bhardwaj’s films. What inspired you?

The cinemas of the 1970s. The hero was always from the

hinterland in those blockbusters.

Manoj Kumar, Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan—they all did films set in small towns and it just got lost somewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, I think. So there is that space when a new director comes in and he wants to create his own identity. You want to look different from the others, that is what you have to offer to cinema. I thought not many people were setting their stories in small places. So this was one good opportunity for me.

Any particular anecdote during the shoot that you would like to share with us?

The first day was the most interesting. I think Salman still wasn’t sure if he wanted to put on the moustache or not. He came on the set and we met, and I refreshed the story for him. He had come from out of town straight to the set. Then I went off into the set to compose the shot and everything, and I got a call saying Salman wants to meet me. He was wearing a moustache. That was a huge surprise. He was wearing one

Kitsch factor: (left) Abhinav Kashyap; and Salman Khan and Sonakshi Sinha in Dabangg. and he asked everyone around how it is looking.

Anurag Kashyap, your brother, is a path-breaking director. How much has he influenced you?

I am very proud to be his brother. I have looked at his growth very closely. And I have learnt from him. There are certain mistakes he made, I didn’t want to repeat them. He always believed that he has to create his own space because he didn’t come from a film background. It is difficult for

any new person to come in and start dictating how he wants to make his cinema, then the potential investors run away.

But he did things differently and now I’m happy he has been able to create his own space. Coming back to Dabangg, this is why I wanted to do something which is not regular on screen. I could have tried starting out with a film set abroad or set in Bombay. I can attribute some bit of it to what I have learnt from Anurag.

Which Bollywood directors

have influenced your style of film-making?

I don’t know. Every story is different; every film commands its own style. But I think subconsciously there have been some film-makers whose work I have liked consistently. One being Bimal Roy, the other being Hrishikesh Mukherjee, then there is Anurag, whose work I really like. I also like most of Mani Ratnam’s work.

Dabangg released in theatres on Friday.

CULTURE L17

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

Q&A | VIJAY NAIR

RAAGTIME

SAMANTH S

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Highway to indie

TUNES LOST AND FOUND

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Going global: Indian bands such as Swarathma (left) have toured the world; Nair hopes the reverse will now happen with NH7.

The man behind NH7 aims to convert music fans to the cult of Indian indie with his venture

B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· t’s named after an epic stretch of highway that spans six states and 2,300km. Its promos featured a grinning Bappi Lahiri in the stylized red and blue of the iconic Obama “Hope” posters, and it hopes to help Indian indie music turn the corner it’s been poised to turn for quite a while now.

Vijay Nair is the co-founder of Indian artiste management firm Only Much Louder (OML), and the man behind the just launched NH7. A year in the making, the NH7 project seeks to contribute to every aspect of the Indian independent music industry. Its online home, NH7.in, is an intriguing new platform (and magazine) for discovering local acts. In December, OML will host a two-day, 5,000-capacity music festival in Pune, modelled on big European and UK events such as the Glastonbury Festival or All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Nair spoke to Lounge on getting people to discover new bands, organizing a truly “Indian” music festival and fixing crater-sized holes in the local indie scene. Edited excerpts:

I

Are there precedents to what you’re hoping to do with NH7?

Gigpad.com (a popular portal for all things Indian rock that became defunct in 2009) was my entry into the independent music industry—it was the first thing here that got the community together, and the impact that had was huge. Once you get people organized in that manner, things start happening on their own. So we’re hoping that NH7 does something similar—one, become a platform for people to discover independent music and two, bring more people into the independent music fold. We’re looking specifically at what we call the “fringe”, people who can get interested in this genre, come and attend gigs and then become converts.

Are you hoping for NH7 to act as a site for music “discovery” as well, similar to, say, US-based indie blogs such as Stereogum or sites such as Last.fm?

Yeah, the code works in very interesting ways, which is part of the reason it took about a year to finish. There’s a lot of active data mining—once you create an account, it tracks what you’ve been listening to and draws connections to new music you might like. The problem right now is that there isn’t a massive amount of independent music out there, so what’s going to happen over the next few months is that a lot of folk, electronica and classical music will be available on the platform.

Then things get interesting. A lot of Shubha Mudgal fans, for example, like the music of the Raghu Dixit Project and vice versa. Now Raghu Dixit fans already like alternate acts like

Avial or Swarathma—but this gives us the chance to cross-pollinate between these (previously impassable) genres.

It’s kind of similar to services like Last.fm.

Was this an attempt at fixing a hole that existed in local indie music?

It’s more like a massive crater, actually. Music blog Indiecision (www.indiecision.com, now integrated with NH7) was the only thing, and that’s essentially one man writing one blog. So we bought Arjun Ravi, who edits Indiecision, on board, and we’re trying to create an “Indian” website for all things indie. I must clarify that NH7 is a product, and NH7.in, which is the website, is just one of (the) many things that it’ll consist of.

Where did the idea for the two-day festival, the NH7 Weekender, originate?

It was about a year and a half back. I won the 2009 International Young Music Entrepreneur award that the British Council gives out, and it was awarded to me by Martin Elbourne, who is a veteran at booking artistes for music festivals like Glastonbury. We got along famously, and we were discussing the idea of a big festival—which is another big hole in the scene here. So about a month ago, when I was in the UK, someone called someone who put me in touch with Stephen Budd, an artiste manager, and he and Martin came on board along with Jon Mac, who organizes The Great Escape festival.

What’s been finalized? What form is the festival taking?

So it’s scheduled for 11 and 12 December in Pune. It’s a capacity festival—that means we

have a fixed capacity of 5,000 people a day, and tickets will be “sold out” once we reach that number. We have about five stages and 65 acts in all. This will cover everything from the top names in Indian indie—Raghu Dixit, Swarathma, et al—as well as the best new exciting live bands from around the world.

These could range from experimental, two-piece acts to punk rock to the best metal bands in existence. We’re looking at a really eclectic mix, and we want to charm and surprise people. And, of course, blow their mind. We’re announcing the tentative line-up in about a week’s time.

Was Pune an automatic choice for the festival’s location?

We had a huge discussion about that. It was initially going to be Bangalore, but a lot of stuff already happens there and one of the aims we had with NH7 was to really spread this out across the country, and bring the fringes in. Pune, I think, is the most ready place for something like this. It has a huge student population, and it’s close enough to Mumbai and Bangalore for folks there to hop over for a weekend.

Is it modelled on other Indian festivals such as, say, Eastwind (which was cancelled this year) or Great Indian Rock?

The first truly Indian festival, I think, was the Big Chill in Goa, which we helped produce. Three stages, 45 bands, and it was a huge success. Now, others like Sunburn have come in too. So we have experience in doing this kind of stuff. But the NH7 Weekender is modelled more on the UK and European festivals like Glastonbury. That’s where we’re coming from.

t’s no secret, within the community of Carnatic music enthusiasts, that the most enviable recordings are to be found not in record stores or iTunes, but in private collections—in boxes and boxes of mouldy cassettes or in portable hard drives, containing hundreds of live concerts recorded over the decades.

Last year, one of the most formidable of such collections —owned by a gentleman named R.T. Chari, to whom we owe bushels of unfading gratitude—went public, entirely on his own coin and initiative.

The Tag Digital Listening Archives is located in a lovely, wood-panelled, slightly too ferociously air-conditioned room on the Madras Music Academy’s premises. The archive holds, at present, 3,000 hours of Chari’s music, newly digitized; I was told that, as soon as the academy’s own cassettes are converted into digital form, that database will swell to 15,000 hours. At an average of 3 hours per concert, that translates into 5,000 concerts; at an average of two concerts per day, that translates into seven years of listening. I think I’ve now discovered a new plan for my post-retirement life.

Lining one wall of the archive is a row of 10 touch screens, with a pair of enormous headphones hanging off a hook next to each screen. For `23, anybody can buy a day’s worth of listening in the archive; a monthly membership costs `111, and an annual one `552. The stark oddity of these prices, I was informed, had to do with the contours of sales taxes. Even more puzzling, though, is the fact that the archive receives perhaps three daily visitors during the week, and a peak of five on weekends. I saw no one else during the half-day I spent there.

Given the riches of Chari’s collection and the comforts of the archive, I had really expected to wait in line even to pay my admission fee.

COURTESY TAG DIGITAL LISTENING ARCHIVES

Golden oldies: The listening room at the Madras Music Academy.

The touch controls of the software running these listening kiosks are a little sticky, but the software makes for easy browsing—by artiste, composer, song or raga. The archive’s truest worth lies in Chari’s vast, deep, extremely catholic tastes.

Sitting right under a photo of D.K. Pattammal, I listened to one of her concerts from 1967. Then I dug around a little and came up with some truly offbeat gems: compositions of Rabindranath Tagore and Guru Nanak, sung as part of full-fledged Carnatic concerts, and an English hymn set to music by C. Rajagopalachari, sung by M.S. Subbulakshmi to the accompaniment of a piano. Then I found not one but two jugalbandis, fine blends of south and north Indian classical music, featuring the resonant, pliant voices of T.N. Seshagopalan and Ajoy Chakraborty.

I’ve grown so resigned to the thought that there are only half-a-dozen known concerts of my favourite singer, Balaji Shankar, floating around that I searched for his name only as I was leaving to keep an appointment. I found a mother lode: four absolutely unfamiliar concerts from the mid-1990s. So I sat on for another 2 hours, listening to a 1994 performance during which, among other pieces, Shankar sang a long, complex Bhairavi. He seemed to have a cold, but he still sounded magnificent. My appointment, predictably enough, remained thoroughly unkept.

Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

MUSIC REVIEW | MANTIS

Electric sounds S+F’s third bends their experimental edge into the indie album of the year B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· isten to this album.

Shaa’ir + Func’s third album has an assured confidence that pulses right across it, and an energy that almost manages to capture the intensity of their live performances. The pop hooks come fast and easy throughout the 14 tracks, and while that muddles some of the songs into me-too sameness, it makes for a mostly memorable listen. An album-liner length summary of Mantis, for convenience, would read: “Mantis is one of Indian indie’s albums of

L

the year so far.”

Shaa’ir + Func is singer-songwriter Monica Dogra (Shaa’ir) and Pentagram guitarist Randolph Correia (Func). They formed the group in 2007, and have released two albums prior to Mantis—2007’s New Day: The Love Album and 2008’s Light Tribe.

Their live shows are extremely popular (and feature Func’s fantastically oddball eyegear), and their sound pleasingly “global”—they’ve performed across the US and Europe, and in festivals such as The Big Chill, and Glastonbury in the UK. Mantis sees them settling into a trademark sound—synth-heavy electro pop, Dogra’s soaring vocal lines, Correia’s occasional display of guitar virtuosity and stuttering beeps and basslines.

But it’s not all predictable. Early tracks such as Take it Personally have a dark piano counterpoint to

Funk overload: Mantis is an assured, confident album from the duo. the clubby funk beats, lending them a deeper edge. Opener We’re not Alone similarly features a Portishead-esque breakdown halfway through its pounding verses, and builds up slowly to Correia’s measured, restrained guitar solo.

Then there’s the Ganpati-bappa-morya exuberance of My Roots.

It’s the album’s freshest song, featuring raucous street-procession percussion complete with the sound of those cheesy 16-note

keyboards that usually belt out Anu Malik covers.

Love Love Love is a nice ballad, although it sounds a bit sedate in comparison with its live cut.

All in all, the weak tracks only conspire to drag Mantis down to consistently above average, and the album’s highs (and there are many) shine out pretty strongly. The production is excellent throughout, unsurprising for an album that’s been

two years in the making.

Finally, there’s an aspect to Mantis in particular and Shaa’ir + Func’s music in general that’s worth pointing out. Their lyrics sometimes touch political themes, a tendency best exemplified in their live shows, which feature quite a bit of banter. Sure, it doesn’t have the in-your-face verbosity of, say, Asian Dub Foundation, but there’s an affirmation here, however slight, of an outside world. There’s catharsis and anger directed at things beyond one’s personal experience—and things not quite right.

Electronica usually falls into comfortable transcendental trappings (“Electric Universe”, anyone?) and while there’s nothing wrong with that, Shaa’ir + Func’s music seems to be heading in a more exciting direction. Some may find it all a bit ham-fisted, but this is engaged electronica— and it’s well worth encouraging.

Mantis can be downloaded for free at www.shaairandfunc.com

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

MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | SANJUKTA SHARMA

A door to Dongri

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Microcosm: (clockwise from left) Surti in Palla Gully, which appears in his novel Sufi; streetside iftaar treats; the terrace of the building in which Surti grew up; an iftaar dinner hosted at Khwaja Hall for NCP leader Sharad Pawar; and a crowded iftaar evening in Dongri.

A minor communal flare­up put this ghetto in the news.

For Aabid Surti, Dongri is home without the charm of its past

W

hen dusk and its magic light descend on the choked lanes of Dongri, its tumult becomes tolerable.

Outside Jaffer bhai’s Delhi Darbar, a relatively new entrant in this south Mumbai ghetto, kebabs fresh out of bubbling oil attract people who are breaking their Ramzan fast. It is a particularly muggy evening, one of those when the monsoon showers are blocked by a dense layer of clouds.

Police vans are parked on almost every corner of the neighbourhood. Besides the residual tension of a communal flare-up that had made local news recently, the cops are lining up for a visit by Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar, to an iftaar party hosted at Dongri’s Kesar Baug Hall.

All the local newspapers reported the fracas between the owner of a cyber café and four other Muslim residents, and

Hindus demanding donation for Ganesh Utsav. Within a day, Shiv Sena and Congress representatives met and negotiated peace. The visit by Pawar and other NCP leaders was another gesture of peace, some residents of the area said.

Some said it was just a normal Ramzan ritual—politicians come and go.

But Dongri only belongs to its own people, as its famous dons—Karim Lala, Dilip Aziz, Haji Mastan, Yusuf Batla, Mamu Langda, Tariq Takla, Moin Totla and Dawood Ibrahim—would say. In the last decade, the godowns where once smugglers stored gold, radio sets and cash, now belong to Hindu traders who use them as godowns for factory goods or as offices. A Hindu-Muslim population is beginning to emerge.

In films, Dongri has mystery and danger, and an exotic edginess. Parts of the recent Hindi film Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, about Haji Mastan, the legendary smuggler from Dongri, were filmed here. A new film, Bhindi Bazaar, directed by Ankush Bhatt, was showcased at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. It’s a thriller revolving around two pickpocket mafias in this area. A few years ago, Aamir, another thriller, reiterated Dongri’s reputation as a dangerous Muslim ghetto.

I am in Dongri with a man who can defy all the stereotypes associated with it. Author, painter and cartoonist Aabid Surti, whose famous Hindi

autobiographical novel Musalman (1995) is now an English paperback with the intriguing title Sufi: The Invisible Man of the Underworld, grew up here. The book is the story of Aabid, the painter, and his friend Iqbal, an underworld kingpin under whom Ibrahim worked in his younger days. The characters, lanes and buildings of Dongri appear in Surti’s book with their real names. In English, Sufi is stripped of linguistic beauty. But every detail of conversations and situations that eventually force Iqbal and Aabid to go their separate ways is reported assiduously from memory. More importantly, it is a map of Dongri in words.

Surti, 75, is a Khoja Muslim from Gujarat whose grandparents chose to stay in Dongri during Partition. His grandmother was a staunch Gandhian. “Her one meeting with Gandhi was a story she recreated to every visitor to

our house, adding a lot of her own colour,” Surti says. Surti is not a devout Muslim, seemingly indifferent to the freshly cooked food on the streets of Dongri and the adjacent Mohammad Ali Road, a food mecca during Ramzan.

Our companion for the walk through Dongri is Surti’s cousin Sajjad Wadiwala. The second-floor Wadiwala apartment absorbs the cacophony of the streets outside without any filter. The living room has photographs of his daughter Alina, an aspiring model, who was a contestant in the TV reality show Bigg Boss in 2008. Wadiwala first takes us to the apartment—in pure Mumbai vocabulary, kholi—where Surti grew up. The terrace where Iqbal and Aabid spent hours is now made of glittering marble. “The only thing that crosses my mind when I come to this spot is a blast that I saw in the early

1940s. The nearby docks where Haji and his men used to smuggle goods and gold were ablaze. Severed hands and fingers and slabs of gold exploded into the air. A chunk of gold fell here. I couldn’t believe my eyes,” says Surti.

The terrace directly overlooking Khwaja Hall has people watching Pawar at the dinner, greeting local leaders and waving to men and women from the mohalla who are looking out of their matchbox windows.

Walking past the Hazrat Abbas Dargah on Palla Gully, through Munda Gully (a serpentine alley that tapers out into two exits on the main road and was once famous because petty smugglers escaped from cops through it) and Charnulla, we were jostled by barricading policemen, shopkeepers and residents. “It is like this every evening,” Wadiwala tells us.

Dongri was once the hub of the Khilafat movement in Mumbai. Saadat Hasan Manto met Muslim intellectuals and poets here for soirees over alcohol, Urdu poetry and debates on nationalism and colonial rule.

It was the first neighbourhood of immigrants who came to make it in Mumbai’s film industry. “K. Asif and Mehboob lived here. It

was what today Mira Road is,” Surti says.

His years as an adolescent and teenager in Dongri were not exactly ghetto life. “Students from the JJ School of Art used to come here to hang out. Some of them were my first influences to pursue art,” he recalls. Surti joined the JJ School in the early 1950s. Later, he dabbled in commercial art and created many characters for Indrajal comics. He has returned to painting after a gap of 30 years with mixed media works; an exhibition is on the cards as soon as he finds a sponsor.

In Dongri, Aabid bhai is not a familiar sight. Many old acquaintances approach him as we walk through Dongri towards Mohammad Ali Road. “It’s a neighbourhood that does not have much charm for me any more,” Surti says. Economically, Dongri has been in a limbo forever. It is south Mumbai’s “other”, a ghetto imagined and interpreted by film-makers, and the home of famous dons, its self-proclaimed protectors.

“I decided to leave Dongri, when one day, in the years just before the Emergency, my son came home after playing cricket and told me India defeated Pakistan by cheating them. I realized it was time to leave home,” Surti says, signing a fresh copy of Sufi he has in his bag.

I later discover it’s a book written with love for, and lament about, a lost home. sanjukta.s@livemint.com