Lounge 12 December

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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 49

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

GILT TRIP >Page 6

HAS TIGER WOODS FAILED US?

We may have been unfairly harsh on the world’s best golfer. Sports heroes can be weak and human >Page 8

ALWAYS IN SEARCH OF A GOOD STORY

India should look inward for a new blueprint of power, which the world would want to follow, says Sunil Khilnani >Page 10

Reporter or storyteller? Genius or gadfly? Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage for ‘The New Yorker’ doesn’t have a clear answer >Page 14

BY INDIA, FOR THE WORLD THE GOOD LIFE

CRIMINAL MIND

SHOBA NARAYAN

GIFTS TO REVEAL ANOTHER YOU

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ifts are tricky. They have to elicit that “ooh, I love it” but at a cost that is wallet-friendly. Here are 20 gifts for you to consider, for others and for yourself. A list of choices, dreams, and suggestions. 1.

Wear a sexy watch and then disregard time.

Might I suggest Titan’s Tandem, Cartier’s Santos 100, or Corum’s Ti-Bridge? 2. Walk, nay skip, down the bridal aisle to the glorious sound of Pachelbel’s Canon in D at any cathedral in Goa. Fragrant white... >Page 4

OUR DAILY BREAD

ZAC O’YEAH

MURDER IN THE INDIAN CITY

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hahjahanabad—Old Delhi, to us laypeople—seems an unlikely setting for a detective novel. Especially if it takes place in 1656, way before modern forensics and scientific police work made crime fiction into what it is. But just before Diwali I found myself at the launch of Madhulika Liddle’s The Englishman’s Cameo, where the author spoke about her reasons for writing a book in the “historical mystery” genre, and how she had done the plotting and planning... >Page 15

SAMAR HALARNKAR

DIGITAL NATIVES

With two forthcoming festivals, a number of new albums and growing popularity, electronica is hitting a high note in India >Page 16

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

A SONG FROM THE UTTARAKHAND HILLS

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very spice has a song. Didn’t you know that? Haldi’s is Aayega aanewala, raw and overflowing with longing; garam masala’s is Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan, unchanging but exuberant; East Indian bottle masala is Bohemian Rhapsody, all highs, lows and trembling excitement. I couldn’t quite figure out the song when the new spice didn’t sputter like mustard seeds. It was a balmy November day when I dumped them in olive oil for the great Indian tadka (tempering). >Page 18

THE TESTING MOMENTS

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2009 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | SKULLCANDY HEADPHONES

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’m not a big fan of headphones. I believe that music needs to be listened to streaming out from speakers—and nice speakers, not the high-PMPO variety everyone advertises and sells in India—filling the room with sound.

Still, there are times when you need ’phones.

When you’re running, for instance (in my running days, I used a pair of Sennheiser sport earphones in neon-green; they’re still around somewhere), or in an aircraft, where the ’phones need to be as much noise-cancelling as they are nice-sounding.

S ome how , h ow ever, I ’ve n e v e r gotten around to buying noise-cancelling headphones, from Bose, Sennheiser, or even Sony. It could be the cost, although I don’t think it is entirely that. I had heard of Skullcandy ’phones and even seen them, and so was happy to review a pair that someone thoughtfully sent to the Mint office.

The good Skullcandy products have always been as much about looks as performance. The pair we got were the CMYK (named thus for obvious reasons) ones featuring the Skullcandy motif and I have to admit that they looked very cool.

The true test of ’phones, however, isn’t just how they look, but how they perform, and how they feel. Let’s get to the feel first. The Skullcandy ’phones are those that cover your ears—the technical term for this is circumaural.

These ’phones sport ellipsoid heads and were a perfect fit around my rather large ears. The leather on the outside and the foam on the inside felt fine too, although it remains to be seen how they age. The heads also sport a nifty little hinge on which they swivel, making it possible to sort of lift each head independently, should one want to let the outside world in.

inbox

WO N LOST IN THE PAST IT! Aakar Patel tells the full story of a 5,000­year­old culture in ‘Parsis have civilization; other Indians don’t’, 5 December. We are a society living with sentiments of the past and not by the values and principles that make a robust civilization. The sentiments are based on false beliefs. If you arouse the sentiments of people, though downright false, one can mobilize not less than 85% of the population. This is what’s keeping us backward—economically, socially and spiritually. Bill Clinton, when he came to India, described India as “a nation living in the past”.

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com FALSE IMPORTANCE I was perplexed after reading Aakar Patel’s column, ‘Parsis have civilization; other Indians don’t’, 5 December.

I remember the words of Humayun Kabir: “There can be a civilization without culture, but there cannot be a culture without civilization. Culture is an efflorescence of the civilized society.”

No doubt Parsis have contributed a lot to the Indian economy, but culturally they prefer to remain segregated.

Comparing Parsi culture, their generosity and valour with Indian (or, you may say, Hindu) culture is like comparing the Maldivian economy with the Indian economy.

GILBERT D’SOUZA (The writer of this week’s winning letter wins a gift voucher worth Rs3,500 from Wills Lifestyle, redeemable at any of their outlets countrywide.

Wills Lifestyle offers a complete lifestyle wardrobe incorporating the latest fashion trends. Choose from Wills Classic workwear, Wills Sport relaxed wear, Wills Clublife evening wear and Wills Signature designer wear.)

SUHAS LIMAYE

TATA­CRACY As for the sound, I tested them out on a variety of music, and at several volume levels, and am happy to report that the ’phones did well. The ’phones have to be switched on for any sound to be heard, and the small control widget also sports a scroll wheel which controls the bass. I’ve never been a basshead, and these ’phones are unlikely to convert me into one, but some of the music I tested did sound very nice with the bass turned all the way up.

Would I buy these? Well, if I were in the market, I would—simply for the way they look and feel.

The not­so­good The phones are large and are a bit unwieldy to carry around. Also, Skullcandy must provide a better case and not the small cloth bag that the ’phones come in now. Bose has a stylish carrying case.

Talk plastic The ’phones cost Rs3,469. Comparable model from Sennheiser costs about Rs5,800, and Sony’s noise-cancelling headphones are at Rs4,490.

R. Sukumar

Aakar Patel has written one more superb piece on my community. Parsis have given back a lot to India, which gave them refuge from the Islamic Arabs, and continue to do so. Yet, other communities walk away with awards and rewards. India should realize the greatness of the Tatas. I believe that under Ratan Tata, India can become a superpower.

ARNAVAZ HAVEWALA

IN RETROSPECT Aakar Patel’s ‘Parsis have civilization; other Indians don’t’, 5 December, may have sounded a bit harsh, but it called a spade a spade. Apart from running Air India to the ground, do we even remember how our government didn’t allow the Tatas to start an airline of their own in partnership with Singapore Airlines? I am more than certain that had the Tatas been allowed to start that airline, it would by now be giving tough competition to the best airlines companies in the world. ‘Mint’ and Patel should continue voicing their opinions against our hypocritical nation.

RAJ AGRAWAL

MARITAL BLISS I am an ardent reader of Priya Ramani’s First Cut. ‘The one luxury I can’t do without’, 5 December, was especially enjoyable. I too completed 10 years of marriage recently and her views exactly match mine.

ANUJ

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY: JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

LISTEN TO THE LOUNGE PODCAST This week we discuss India’s new status as the world leader in Test cricket, Chetan Bhagat’s Twitter fiasco, Rajmohan Gandhi’s new book and the latest Ranbir Kapoor starrer, ‘Rocket Singh: Salesman of The Year’. www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

L4 COLUMNS

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Twenty gift ideas that can reveal another you

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DINODIA

ifts are tricky. They have to elicit that “ooh, I love it” but at a cost that is wallet-friendly. Here are 20 gifts for you to consider, for others and for yourself. A list of choices, dreams, and suggestions.

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Wear a sexy watch and then disregard time. Might I suggest Titan’s Tandem, Cartier’s Santos 100, or Corum’s Ti-Bridge?

2

Walk, nay skip, down the bridal aisle to the glorious sound of Pachelbel’s Canon in D at any cathedral in Goa. Fragrant white lilies optional, but what a wedding that would be.

3

I am no fan of Maarten Baas, the product designer of the moment.

His burnt wood furniture is the colour of pigeon poop. But his “Melting” collection of crystal glasses for the venerable champagne house Dom Ruinart offers the witty juxtaposition of drinking vintage champagne in a thoroughly modern glass.

4

Befriend a group of people that you can travel with once you retire. This is a long-term goal, and trickier than it appears. The people have to be opinionated but not too inflexible; they have to come from the same income bracket so that you are not negotiating rates all the time; they have to have broadly similar interests, whether it be nature, wine or history, but have some expertise so you can learn from them.

Most important, they have to have similar body rhythms and tolerances.

There is nothing worse for a morning person than to be surrounded by late-night revellers and vice versa. Ditto for a meticulous planner to accompany someone with a high tolerance for chaos and spontaneity. They would drive each other nuts. But travel is pleasurable, and to do so with amenable company is even better.

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A simpler version of the above is to start or join a group you can meet on a regular basis for dinner, wine and music. A book, film or quiz club is good. Ideally, the group should not have a commercial

Off the beaten track: (above) Cultivate a passion such as photography and fol­ low it with discipline; walk down the aisle of an old cathedral in Goa. purpose. Nothing wrong with networking, but friendship is for fun.

For the rest of it, you have Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn.

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Listen to the Boys Choir of Harlem singing Joy to the World on Christmas Eve. Roaring fire and hot toddy optional.

7

Cultivate a hobby that stirs your soul. Again, it is not easy to pursue a passion. How do you identify it?

Ikebana or calligraphy? Cooking or salsa? Photography or yoga? Soccer or karate? First, you have to choose your path; then follow it with discipline to reap the rewards. Have tried and failed.

Consistency is key and for some of us, that is very hard.

8

Spend a lazy Sunday afternoon on a hammock by a river, rereading the books that made you laugh and cry as a child. Mine would be My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Your list might be much more

erudite and include Tolstoy, Melville, Marquez, Mahfouz and Morrison.

Perfectly chilled Reisling or nimbu paani optional.

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Go to a great sporting event, preferably with someone who loves sports.

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Scuba-dive and touch a fish. Or chase a butterfly; or pet a dog; or feed a squirrel. You aren’t the only species on this planet, you know.

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A signature sari from every Indian state would be quite wonderful.

Vijai Singh Katiyar’s book, Indian Saris, is a good starting point. Katiyar, a designer and faculty member at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, writes about our textile traditions—Paithanis, Kotas, bandhinis, Venkatagiris and ikats—with passion and expertise.

To behold these weaves is to feel proud, and be seduced. My current favourites are translucent Kota doria saris in jewel tones.

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Read A Book of Luminous Things—an international anthology of poetry by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Simply the best poetry anthology there is.

First line: “Epiphany is an unveiling of reality.” aff Enjoy the tangled web of family.

Functional or dysfunctional, Varietals aplenty: (above) To appreciate good wine you don’t need to know about labels; scuba­dive in the ocean and touch magnificent marine creatures.

nothing else comes even close. Ditto for babies, even and especially if they are not your own. Their belly laugh; their smell; their untouched purity.

Go to “Insane Baby Laugh” on YouTube for a sample. Best of all: You can cuddle them and return them to exhausted, sleep-deprived parents at bedtime.

Pay attention to the spontaneous unexpected comedy that makes life in India such a riot.

Drink good wine. If you cannot be bothered with labels, vintage, terroir and estate, permit me to give you a non-expert’s tip. Fine wine doesn’t stick to your tongue. It isn’t astringent. Rather, if you swirl it around your mouth, you get a well-rounded flavour without the acid aftertaste. If wine causes you to pucker your lips, it ain’t good. Fine wine, in words, is the opposite of Tamilian Mysore Pak which, if good, ought to stick to your tongue.

Wear pretty things and go to a party. How about antique vankis (arm-bands) paired with sleeveless swirly dresses?

Smell good. Buy Forest Essentials’ bath oils and attars.

dsf

Spend the weekend in a hotel.

The Imperial in Delhi, the Taj in

Mumbai, The Park, Kolkata, the “green” ITC Gardenia in Bangalore or the Oberoi Amarvilas in Agra.

India has great hotel brands. I personally don’t like Aman. Too cold for me. t Treat yourself to a gizmo you enjoy: Lumix cameras, Sennheiser headphones, Macbook Air, or, if I may, Bluelounge’s nifty device called The Sanctuary, which unentangles all those charging wires into a neat little box.

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Do something good. You don’t have to be Snehalaya in Ahmednagar which works with victimized women in the flesh trade and their children. You don’t have to be its founder, Girish Kulkarni, who routinely gets jailed, goes to court and gets beaten by local pimps when he tries to pry minor girls away from the clutches of prostitution. You can simply think of such good samaritans with awe and write them a cheque.

Shoba Narayan wrote a cheque to Snehalaya this Christmas season.

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, DECEMBER 12, 2009

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Parenting INTERNET

u Eco Kids

Copenhagen’s a click away

www.ecokids.ca/pub The site has 10 interactive games. One of them teaches children how to reduce the use of energy around the house. Once the children have understood the link between global warming and efficient energy use, they can play this game.

Suitable for children aged 8 and above

u BrainPOP

www.brainpop.com/science/ ourfragileenvironment/globalwarming/

Have questions about climate change? These sites have answers for you and your children

This is an excellent site for showing children animated movies on a variety of subjects. The movie on global warming gets a definite thumbs up. To view all the movies, however, you need to subscribe.

B Y U MA K OGEKAR ··························

Suitable for children aged 8 and above

u Global Warming Kids www.globalwarmingkids.net

u Climate Change Education

From games in 32 languages, postcards and a space where children can put up stories related to the environment, to signing up with clubs, etc., there is much for children to do here. The layout is messy but colourful, and the site is updated frequently, featuring even a forum to discuss the Copenhagen summit.

www.climatechangeeducation.org/videos/youtube/ hippoworks­santer.html The music, songs and commentary at the site are enjoyable, and children will not be bored. Who knew hippos could be such effective teachers?

Suitable for children aged 7 and above

Suitable for children aged 7 and above

Globetrotting: An art installation representing the planet in downtown Copenhagen.

u EPA Climate Change Kids www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids

This website has interactive animation that explains the causes of the greenhouse effect. Divided into six scenes, a child can move to the next level as one set of explanation finishes.

Your child can also take a quiz on global warming and go back to the main site to read more about climate change.

Suitable for children aged 8 and above

u Gamesolo

http://www.gamesolo.com/games/ecoego.swf An interactive game, where your child will have to move the character in different situations and make eco-friendly choices as he/she goes along.

Suitable for children aged 7 and above

u Tiki the Penguin

http://tiki.oneworld.net/global_warming/climate_home.html From 12 really important things you can do to help stop global warming to taking a crossword puzzle after reading their guide, the website uses cartoons to interest children in the topic.

Suitable for children aged 6 and above

Krish Raghav contributed to this story.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOB STRONG/REUTERS

www.livemint.com Watch a video tour of what the Internet has to offer to kids for learning about climate change: www.livemint.com/kidsclimate.htm

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009

Style u Jimmy Choo: ‘Cosma’ metallic suede clutch with gold studs, at The Galleria, Trident, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi,

TREND TRACKER

Rs88,000.

Gilt trip Roughed up and toned down are among the new ways to wear an old favourite B Y P ARIZAAD K HAN parizaad.k@livemint.com

································· t is arguably every Indian’s favourite celebratory colour. Our gold lust gets a bit more pronounced this time of year, when the colour of the season—whatever that may be—is just not, well, gold enough.

“In India, the demand for gold bags and accessories is constant, increasing around the Indian wedding season, Diwali, Christmas and the New Year,” says Marielou Phillips, Chanel India’s head of public relations and press.

This season, however, it’s not only bags and accessories which have been gilted.

Fashionistas from Shilpa Shetty and Ramona Narang Rodella to Nandita Mahtani and Ayesha Thapar have been seen wearing dresses, jumpsuits and skirts in the colour.

Designer Raakesh Agarvwal showed a line consisting of flapper dresses, jumpsuits and lehengas in gold at the Lakme Fashion Week in September. He says designers’ obsession with gold this season has taken inspiration from Michael Jackson as well as the Studio 54 era.

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t Louis Vuitton: Gold brocade pumps, at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; The Oberoi and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and UB City mall, Bangalore, Rs66,500.

“Also, after the economy has improved, gold is a sign of hope and victory,” he says.

If you’re wearing gold to go clubbing, Agarvwal says, it should be monochromatic to look contemporary. “Gold and silver stilettos or a steel bag give it a futuristic look. Shoes in another colour will make it look dated, harking back to the 1980s,” he says.

Apart from gold’s appeal to unashamed lovers of bling, designers are trying to make the colour acceptable to those who might not want to look that reflective. Roughing up gold and making it grungy is another trend. At the Lakme Fashion Week, Anamika Khanna sent out a model in a gold lehenga; wrapped around the model’s torso was an unglamorous, crushed black cotton sari.

Kalyani Chawla, vice-president of marketing and communications for Christian Dior Couture in India, recently wore a vintage Dior trench coat in gold, but over a grey Halston shift dress, which muted the bling.

“I would wear a short, sequinned gold skirt with maybe a plain white T-shirt.

Worn with the right accessories, it’s very chic,” she says.

Maithili Ahluwalia, owner of lifestyle store Bungalow 8 in Mumbai, is also a believer in the muted beauty of gold and uses it as an accent to glamourize a grunge look. “Torn shorts, a white ganji and a dusty gold waistcoat” is how she sees herself wearing the colour. “Gold should be counterbalanced with something casual. Then it can take you from the day to the evening, which is what most people keep in mind while dressing these days,” Ahluwalia says.

Mahtani and jewellery designer Queenie Singh both say gold is their all-time favourite colour, both for day and night. Singh says she mixes the colour with white if she is wearing it during the day, so it doesn’t look flashy. “I would wear a gold shirt with white jeans, so it doesn’t stand out too much,” she says.

Mahtani uses a gold belt to lift a plain black or white shirt dress, or to make jersey fabric look dressy. “On wintry evenings, a matt-finish, skin-toned gold blazer thrown on over jeans is chic,” she says.

u Chanel: Hanging multi­chain metal bracelet, Rs1.33 lakh; two­tone gold and silver pleated leather clutch, approx. Rs1.8 lakh, at Chanel, The Imperial, New Delhi.

t Mango: Black and gold dress, at Mango stores in Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs2,350.

p Chanel: Gold embellishment and mirror­work on a crepe evening dress from Chanel’s Cruise 2010 collection.

u Anamika Khanna: At the Lakme Fashion Week in September, Khanna teamed a rich lehenga with a rough cotton sari.

YOGEN SHAH

p Gold standard: Actor Shilpa Shetty in a gown designed by Tarun Tahiliani, at her wedding reception.

u Day glow: Gold is designer Nandita Mahtani’s favourite colour for day and night.

t Bungalow 8: Gold linen trench coat, at Bungalow 8, Colaba, Mumbai, SHRIYA PATIL SHINDE/MINT

Rs10,500.

t Alberta Ferretti: Gold brocade dress from the Autumn/Winter 2009 collection.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009

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Insider HOMES

In­house artist

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANAY MANN; STYLED BY RAGINI SINGH/BETTER HOMES

A bachelor pad­ cum­office space in an unabashed, ret­ ro­inspired style

BY G E E T I K A S A S A N B H A N D A R I Better Homes and Gardens

··························· hen 25-year-old digital and installation artist Pushkar Thakur moved out of his ancestral home, he was clear that his new pad needed to be something he was comfortable with. Since the house is rented, any structural changes were ruled out.

Thakur was going to use the place as home, and as the base to run his design firm, The Grafiosi, from, hence the place had to reflect Thakur’s design sensibility and his work. True to this vision, the three-bedroom flat in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, now looks anything but a run-of-themill flat. In fact, you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’d walked into a pub, since you are greeted by muted light, black sofas, artistically organized CDs and books, lots of digital art, and walls splashed with colour.

As you soak in the details, you notice that floral grills have been replaced with straight lines, teak windows and doors have been put in, wooden flooring has replaced ordinary mosaic, and bathrooms have been completely transformed with charcoal tiles and modern fittings.

Thakur has also utilized space well by dividing the drawing and dining areas into two, courtesy a TV unit. He used a big block of teak over the unit along the ceiling to embed recessed lighting, which now services both areas. “I believe in 100% efficiency,” says the self-taught artist, who uses

Flashback: (left to right) Thakur has converted one of the bedrooms into his office and the walls of this room are lined with shelves laden with stationery; classic rock CDs are arranged alphabetically and form a grid over the bookshelf; and the dining area serves like a modern art gallery.

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only compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), and fashioned a six-level CD rack from waste wood leftover from doors. Thakur is partial to black, and there is ample use of dark hues in furniture, and even linen, juxtaposed with white walls on which he has created textured art using bright acrylic splashes.

In fact, while he was painting, some of the paint flew on to his self-designed Leatherite sofa and even on the floor, which he has left untouched. Though the room may appear cluttered—he has an open shelf where he keeps his “souvenirs of life”—there is a method to the madness. “I like it to look chaotic, but I know exactly where everything is,” he says. If there’s a lesson to be learnt from his home, it’s this: Be unapologetic about how you want your home to look, and don’t be afraid to experiment.

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GARDENS

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009

Play ESSAY

Has Tiger Woods failed us?

We may have been unfairly harsh on the world’s best golfer. Sports heroes can, after all, be as weak and human as any of us B Y A YAZ M EMON ························· ill just the other day, these two words meant something special to everybody all over the world, but “Tiger” and “Woods” in conjunction now describes something other than the greatest golf player to have walked this planet.

You know what I am referring to, of course. We are witness to arguably one of the biggest scandals to have hit the sports world, and if you are one of those who shies away from sports pages and sports TV, surely you could not have escaped the post-mortems that have inundated the media over the past couple of weeks.

Humour feeds on scandal and inevitably, Tiger has become the butt of jokes as more and more salacious details of his sexual exploits have crawled out of the woodwork. The wired world provides a massive multiplier effect to such communication and the golfer, the epitome of perfect conduct and a global role model so far, finds himself reduced to a snivelling caricature of his stately former self.

Most of the jokes have been corny, some outrageously funny—and I am not referring here to the speculation that Tiger and Elin Woods will, in due course of time, arrive at the altar of Oprah Winfrey to cleanse their souls, though that is not without humour either.

In the surreal world where celebrity and materialism meet, Oprah is the goddess of confessionals. Give or take $80 million, or about Rs370 crore (which is what Woods is reportedly ready to pay Elin for staying married to him for six years), all wrongs can be corrected on this show, which seems like jolly good fun all around.

Among the more rib-tickling ones I have come across is from David Letterman in which the celebrated talk show host says, “President Obama is sending troops to Afghanistan. Hell, he ought to be sending them to Tiger Woods’ house.” Given the current disposition of the beleaguered golfer’s wife Elin, I won-

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Of all our heroes, those from sports are assigned the most daunting virtues as role models

der whether even these troops would stand a chance.

But I am being facetious. This is serious stuff. This is about why and how sports heroes fail us.

This could also be about whether we fail our sports heroes.

At one point in his show, Letterman quips that he wishes Woods would stop calling him for advice. Looked at another way, this is deadly serious stuff masquerading as a joke. Everybody knows of Letterman’s scandal about dalliances with women in his workplace which had led to a $2 million blackmail case that had grabbed headlines only a few months earlier. He had beaten the rap by coming clean on television.

And therein is the tragic component of the Woods saga.

Of all our heroes, those from the sports arena are assigned the most daunting virtues as role models. Letterman’s transgressions can be rationalized.

Surrounded by fame, money and so many women, the temptation may have been too much to resist. Ditto politicians, and to some extent, even clergymen. If rock musicians and filmstars don’t lead wild lives, surely something is wrong with them.

But sportspersons are imbued with the extraordinary qualities that ordi-

nary mortals either do not have or cannot live up to. Society vests in them virtues to which it can only aspire, never fulfil.

They are deemed heroic not only because they have special skills, but also great valour, honesty and a sense of fair play that is beyond the pale for most of us. When such a role model is seen to have the same follies and foibles as anybody else, the disappointment is so acute as to leave us crushed.

It is an unreal expectation, and the history of sport is littered with so many examples of

flawed and failed sports heroes, that it seems remarkable that sportspersons should be seen as paragons of virtue at all. Olympic sport is infested with drug abuse; soccer, baseball, cricket, tennis—to name only a few other disciplines—with corruption. Bad behaviour and cheating are rampant in almost every sphere of sporting activity.

Even a cursory sweep of modern sport shows how endemic the problem really is, and that Wood’s transgressions were really limited in damage to his own persona, not the sport. For instance, O.J. Simpson was an all-American hero till it was alleged that he had murdered his wife. His melodramatic arrest, after a widely televised car chase, and subsequent trial marks one of the great media sagas of our times.

When the match-fixing scandal broke in cricket circa 2000, the biggest setback was in the people allegedly involved, for Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin seemed the most unlikely villains. They had impeccable credentials and squeaky-clean images.

They were adored all over the cricket world, not just as captains of their respective teams, but also as brand ambassadors for their countries (in Azharuddin’s case, the matter is still

sub judice).

Marion Jones, multiple gold medal winning Olympian, seemed the perfect athlete in every way till she was overcome by guilt and confessed to taking performance-enhancing drugs.

In a few sentences of confession, she had demolished the myth of clean competition.

More recently, Andre Agassi opened up about how he not only wore a wig to hide his balding pate but also lied about taking drugs so as to escape detection during a tournament.

The examples are endless.

Why people who have the world at their feet would indulge in such chicanery is a poser that ignores the human condition.

Naked ambition, greed, disloyalty and other such venal passions rule sportspersons as any they do any other human being, but are camouflaged by diligence to keep the image intact, often because of the sheer pressure of expectation from the public.

In professional sport especially, where money is now plentiful, “millionaire athletes become corporations on legs, their allegiance primarily to themselves and their sponsors”, as an American journalist put it.

Image becomes paramount to create an ideal environment which is hard-sold to the public.

But veneer of respectability is often just that—a veneer.

My cynicism about Tiger Woods, ergo, is muted. His shenanigans resonate no louder than any other human being’s.

But he is the greatest golfer who has ever lived. That’s why he is still different from anybody else.

Ayaz Memon is a Mumbai-based writer and commentator.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Fallen heroes: Woods (left) is the latest example of sportspersons involved in scandals and controversies; others before him include (below, from left) Andre Agassi, Hansie Cronje, Mohammed Azharuddin and Marion Jones.

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GADGETS

Turn of the screen Amazon’s electronic book reader, the Global Kindle, is as satisfying as read­ ing an actual book

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT sidin.v@livemint.com

···························· he 6-inch Global Kindle, the recently launched international version of Amazon’s “electronic book reader”, is a device that supremely replicates the essential reading experience of a book.

It is easy to use, easy on the eyes, entirely non-intrusive when you read, and light enough (290g) to ignore in your knapsack.

In short, it is worth almost every kilobyte of hype surrounding it. There are shortcomings, of course, and most of our cribs have to do with available content, pricing and some technology. As an achievement of transformational engineering, the Kindle is disruptive and pathbreaking. It is the beginning of something great—or terrible, depending on which side of the book-device fence you are.

Now, how does the device

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READER FRIENDLY We recommend six more devices that will make your transition from a book to a screen easy and exciting In the last six months, almost every major technology company has announced plans to jump into the e­book reader market. From fancy prototypes to cut­throat pricing, the coming year promises to be an exciting one for the digitally inclined. We look at six e­book readers already out in the international market.

The Sony Reader Family

u Pocket edition The entry­level e­book reader from Sony features a 5­inch e­paper display, and is available in multiple colours. It retails for $199 (approx. Rs9,300). u Touch edition The Touch edition Sony e­book reader has a 6­inch touch­screen panel that makes flipping pages, highlighting and note­taking easier than the other e­book readers available.

Available in red, black and silver, it retails for $299. u Daily edition The wireless­ready Daily edition has a 7­inch screen (that means 30­35 lines of text visible at any point in time) which is also touch enabled. Users can connect wirelessly to Sony’s e­book store as well as load books and documents through USB. It retails for $399.

Fujitsu Flepia Fujitsu’s futuristic Flepia is the world’s first colour e­paper reader, with an 8­inch screen capable of rendering up to 260,000 colours (compared with the Kindle’s 16 shades of grey). It promises 40 hours of battery life, and is currently available only through online purchase from Japan. It sells for 99,750 yen (approx. Rs51,400).

Barnes and Noble Nook The Barnes and Noble Nook has two screens—one 6­inch e­paper display for reading, and another colour LCD touch screen for browsing books, catalogues and changing options. It’s wireless enabled, runs on Google’s Android operating system, and retails for $259.

Samsung Papyrus Samsung’s first e­book reader is a tiny, compact device with a 5­inch screen. Launched in July, it’s currently available only in South Korea (through a tie­up with a local book store chain).

It’s expected to be available outside the country in 2010, and currently costs 339,000 Korean Won (approx. Rs13,600).

Krish Raghav

work? The heart, soul and creative mojo of the device lies in an innovation known as E Ink. Every image you see on the Kindle’s 6-inch monochrome display is composed of millions of charged white and black particles. Depending on the electrical charge applied to a region, it turns white, black or a shade in between (the Global version of the device we reviewed has 16 shades of grey, which makes pictures, book covers and illustrations look passable).

So every time you flip a page, a series of electric signals rearrange all these particles, forming a new page.

The power then shuts down. This means the Kindle only uses power to change pages, and not to display them (which is unlike any other device you

At your fingertips: Surf news on the go with the Kindle.

use today, from phones to gaming consoles).

This is why on a full charge the Kindle will last for anywhere between one and two weeks, depending on your use of the wireless.

When you buy a Kindle Global from Amazon, the device is preconfigured to work off mobile networks in around 100 countries. You don’t have to worry about connections or subscriptions.

It just works out of the box.

This is the connection you will use to buy books, magazines and newspapers from the Kindle store.

Yes, this content is expensive—a subscription to The New York Times will put you back by around Rs1,000 a month—but the assurance of delivery is unmatched.

One of the most amazing experiences of using the Kindle is when you buy something from the store. Less than a minute after confirming a subscription for a newspaper, an email in your inbox informs you of the purchase. Another minute,

and the latest issue is ready on your Kindle for reading. Download sizes are minuscule.

Which is also why the Kindle Global can hold up to 1,500 books at one time. Most people’s entire library would fit into the device effortlessly.

But if you’d rather not spend dollars, convertors that can change most documents into Kindle-friendly formats are freely available online and a recent upgrade made the device support PDF files natively.

Besides expensive content, we also disliked the lack of a backlight. There is no way to read the Kindle in the dark. You need a light source. The Kindle is currently available for sale from Amazon.com for $259 (approx.

Rs12,100), plus around $120 in shipping charges and import duty deposits. Some of this import duty might be refundable. Reliable sources tell us that the device will set you back, in total, by around Rs18,000.

Enough to buy 30 good books, you say hoarsely?

Please do not disturb while we are trying to read.

Click.

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PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

BY INDIA, FOR THE WORLD

Ascendent: (clockwise from left) Call centre workers have benefited from emulating the US; the Bombay Stock Exchange alone can’t reflect our economic health; an American military airplane on display at the Bangalore air show in 2007; Manmohan Singh and Barack Obama at the White House last month; it’s worth revisiting Gandhi’s model of development.

PRASHANTH VISHWANATHAN/BLOOMBERG

America still remains the great looking glass of our self­fashioning. It’s time India looked inward for a new blueprint of power that others in the world would want to follow JOSHUA ROBERTS/BLOOMBERG

BLOOMBERG

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ndia’s cities and towns are now dotted with classrooms that promise tutoring in the American self-confidence and international manners deemed necessary to succeed. Competent but demure in Mumbai? Programmes like Personaliteez, Persona Power, Spark Personality and Livewires will help you Westernize yourself and stand out. In Ahmedabad, the personality-development outfits front names such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard—promising you the hauteur of the global elite. And should you be too shy to leave the house for training, you can enhance confidence online at, for instance, the menacingly named Enoma Institute.

All this is, of course, part of a long tradition: The Self-Improving Indian.

Mahatma Gandhi’s best-selling book to this day is not Hind Swaraj, but his self-help Guide to Health. But much of our self-improving is emulative: learning to conform to the expectations of faraway others.

In a global economy, some emulation is useful. A Hyderabad call centre employee doing debt recovery in the US may improve his results when he wishes the bankrupt farming family in Kansas “a blessed day”, or tells the broke Manhattan banker, “I feel you”. But things get more tricky when the emulation coursework is prescribed not for individuals but for the national state.

These days, a regular fixture of Delhi’s winter months are “summits” of world leaders, policy pundits and businessmen flown in to tell India how to improve its global ranking.

The formula is uncomplicated. Wheel in a few retired “great leaders” to tell India how much the world expects of it. Bracket these pensioners with the younger pups, preferably Harvard MBAs, who PowerPoint their way through nation-improving presentations. Finally, sprinkle in a few extra-worldly “minds” to spiritualize the world-conquering ambitions. There you have it: a short course in improving India’s backbone and comportment. The subtext of many of these performances: Existing powers are willing to cede power to new claimants such as India, provided the newcomers are willing to make themselves over to look like the existing power. It’s a seductive contract, and we Indians seem to be willing to sign.

As we tumble over ourselves to copy more successful nations, America remains the great looking glass of our self-fashioning. Every month we take on more of its superpower paraphernalia, as if these things have talismanic quality. Think tanks sprout, as experts worry about the dearth of strategic “culture” and doctrines and call for national security committees. But our pursuit of global power shouldn’t be a matter of borrowing some other power’s well-worn tools. Many of those tools won’t work for us. The US achieved dominance in a polarized world where other Western powers, devastated by war, were dependent on the dollar economy; moreover, the US had won the race for nuclear weapons. Those in search of newer, non-Western models will point to

China, but its reinvented mercantilism and authoritarian rulers hardly provide a model path.

In considering what sort of international power we want to be, we’ll need to define for ourselves what we want power for, and how that power will address the particular challenges we face internally and in the region. With deepening global involvement, we need to confront three critical issues, each requiring distinct conceptions of power.

The first issue is that, for the foreseeable future, our citizenry will remain predominantly poor, while our state will be increasingly rich.

Given the absolute size of the Indian economy, we’ll be taken seriously by other global powers. We thus have a unique opportunity—indeed, an obligation and, in the case of our elected politicians, even an incentive—to use our international status to imprint the interests of our poor upon the global architecture of decision-making. In matters of international trade, access to natural resources, and the environmental effects of economic growth, we’ll need to demand terms that are fair to the poor. That means we’ll need the nerve to disrupt the status quo. We will face international criticism as we did on the nuclear issue (and as leaders like Gandhi and Nehru did in the past), and we’ll have to do even better at negotiation and persuasion.

Realistically, we’re a long way from superpower status in its conventional forms: military or economic power.

But we have status that derives from our legitimacy in the eyes of the rest

of the world, a power that can allow us to sustain profound arguments for global justice.

Second, we must cultivate a stronger authority as a regional power, since we live in a dangerous neighbourhood, with Pakistan at its explosive core. Our strategy towards that country has been threaded around assumptions now invalid: that it is a unified state, and that we can outsource our Pakistan policy to the US. In fact, Pakistan is disaggregating rapidly. Power is split among a civilian political elite, its military chiefs and their intelligence agencies, and numerous extremist groups, none of which is sovereign over the country’s whole territory. America’s response to regional instability—throw economic aid and military hardware at it (Kerry-Lugar + F-16s)—has proved disastrous. India has most at stake here, and we must devise a more creative, calibrated policy. We need to bring the world around to our ideas, instead of suffering the consequences of other people’s policies.

The third great challenge will be to handle, at India’s own doorstep, two great powers who are shaping Asia’s destiny: China, expanding influence among all of India’s neighbours while its economy strengthens, and the US, enmeshed in that contemporary dystopia, “Af-Pak”.

India is trying to build relations with both China and the US (perhaps the last great classical sovereign entities of modern times) through economic diplomacy and engagement. But our economic relationships with both

will be tested by conflicts of interest—and in each case we’ll need to deploy different forms of power: persuasion with the US, diplomacy and counter-force with China.

There are no tutorials or Western blueprints for the kind of international power we seek. We will not arrive at it by populating our cities with as many think tanks as self-improvement centres, or by asking McKinsey how to turn our Mumbais into Shanghais. Power, as it’s conventionally understood, is a struggle over the resources to coerce others. But equally, power is a function of belief.

I’d argue that the struggle for power today is also a struggle over meaning: for control over how terms such as democracy, legitimacy, international justice, civilization and terrorism are applied. And it’s a struggle over the definition of power itself. The greatest economic and military superpower of modern times has revealed some deep vulnerabilities lately. It turns out military force and financial wealth are precarious without legitimacy and trust.

This was something that one of the most powerful personalities of the 20th century, Gandhi, knew very well.

A tutorial in some of his ideas on power: Now that would improve our national posture. Instead of striving to be more like others—conforming to their definitions of power—wouldn’t it make more sense to work out our own conception? If we must take something from the American idea of global power, then

it ought to be the American conviction that the rest of the world should become more like it. We’ll know we’re a power to reckon with when others in the world want to become more like us.

Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India and is currently at work on a new book, The Great Power Game: India in the New World. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com

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Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

COOCH BEHAR

BY

CHITRALEKHA BASU

Fit for a queen In the North Bengal district the late Rajmata called home, they worship strange gods B Y C HITRALEKHA B ASU ···························· ooch Behar’s is a story about water. The Torsa, traipsing downhill from Bhutan, skirts the south and west boundaries of the eponymous capital of this erstwhile princely state, going off at a tangent, running southwards towards the Bangladesh border.

The river—turgid during the monsoons and lean through the rest of the year—is like a backdrop against which the city’s skyline is painted.

Large tanks (dighis, as they are locally called) filled to the brim with dark water seem to materialize every 200m. There is Bairagi Dighi, located in front of the Madan Mohan temple, doubling as a base for festive pandals, Rajmata Dighi next to the bus terminus, Shiv Dighi, sandwiched between Cooch Behar Government College and the Cooch Behar rail station, Chandan Dighi to the west of the district hospital and 20-odd other water bodies. The Baneswar Shiv temple is adjacent to a tank packed with tortoises that stick their necks out to snatch the morsels offered by devout onlookers. In fact, the hub of the city’s office district is an enormous lake, Sagar Dighi, reflecting the 19th century colonial mansions in its still waters.

The other conspicuous feature of Cooch Behar is its religious fervour. A catholicity of views finds expression virtually everywhere. The security officer in front of the Madan Mohan temple points out that the architecture is a mix of Hindu (lotus and pot on top), Islamic (the low, trellised boundary around the first-floor terrace) and European/Central Asian (dome and arches) styles. Built by Maharaja Nripendra Narayan in the

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1880s—the heyday of the Koch dynasty, granted 13 gun salutes by the British for being a friendly vassal and later a proponent of liberal Western education—this unobtrusive structure, painted bright white, we’re told, was open to people from different communities.

The major deity here is a bronze idol of Madan Mohan (Lord Krishna), playing the flute. Traditionally, a family of Muslim carpenters carves the elaborate raaschakra (wheel with embellishments), the focal point at the annual raasmela, said to be one of the oldest fairs in the country.

Strange gods may be found in Cooch Behar. At Madhupur Dham, 10km west of Cooch Behar town, for instance, an

anachronistic mosaic-tiled arch leads to a temple and monastery. Inside the sanctum, there are no deities, only the relics and personal effects—ink pot, clogs, a rosary—of Shankar Dev, to whom the temple is dedi-

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

cated, covered with fabric from Assam, woven with gold and red thread. Shankar Dev, a Vaishnav preacher hounded out of Assam in the early 16th century, found asylum with the Koch kings Pran Narayan and Bir Narayan, who would spend time at his sanctuary in quiet meditation. The present temple, of course, was built rather recently, in 1964, hence the confounding mixture of styles.

Decked-up young women arrive on pillion with their boyfriends or demurely follow mothers, queuing up at the temple of Mashan Baba, en route to the temple of Kamteswari in Gosanimari. The giant idol of Mashan Baba—supposedly a cross between the mighty Bhim from Mahabharat and Yama, the Hindu god of death—is a favourite of the local women for solving their personal crises.

The light-skinned Mashan Baba, who stares rather menacingly into the distance, is in fact a benign presence, the reason why two rather weather-beaten pigeons are found perched on his left knee at all times.

On our way to Gosanimari, the site of Rajpat Mound, the remains of the old capital, our car is flagged down every half a kilometre. Pint-sized children, struggling to pull up their oversized knickers, thump on the windows.

“Subscription for Kali Puja?

Sure. On our way back. Can’t you see we’re on our way to the temple,” says Joydeep, our driver, trying to gulp down a self-congratulatory smile, contemplating how the diminutive “devotees” would be left waiting all day while he took an alternative route back home. Joydeep

Royal insignia: (clockwise from above) Cooch Behar Palace; the Benfish Tourist Lodge; jute handicrafts being woven; and the royal coat of arms on the palace gates.

seemed to have a mystic ability to locate the odd shrine, temple and monastery behind the curtain of rice fields, teak forests, bamboo groves and pati (a variety of cane) on either side of the winding state highway.

Talking of pati, it’s difficult to imagine how this innocuous plant (reeds, really) could induce a large-scale movement.

The story is narrated by Tagar Rani Dey, who won a national award in 1990 for her imaginative reinvention of the humble sleeping mat. The widespread cultivation of cane—artisans process and weave the fibre into the cooling sitalpati to international acclaim—had led to a clash with local farmers, who resented the artisans’ “easy money”. How Tagar’s

husband, a Vaishnav kirtan (religious songs) singer, resolved the crisis, managing to win over some of the hostile peasants and educate them in the fine art of making pictures on rattan, is a tale that will sustain a few more re-tellings.

From the humble to the majestic—the Cooch Behar palace is unequivocally the most spectacular of the district’s attractions. This grand structure was built during the reign of Nripendra Narayan in 1887 by English architects, who borrowed freely from classical European styles. The dome, for instance, is supposedly designed after the St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Corinthian columns are Grecian, the floral patterns on the frosted

glass panels are Belgian in style, the turrets with weathercocks at the four ends are very British and the pleasing mosaic tiles in the hexagonal Durbar Hall are distinctively Italian.

Once a royal residence, the majestic house with heavy black mahogany doors and a glittering silver dome is now partly a museum. The Italianstyle marble busts of maharanis Suniti and Indira and maharajas Nripendra and Jitendra look down on a huge mosaic-tiled image of the Koch dynasty’s coat of arms—an Indian adaptation of the lion and the unicorn, with the latter replaced by an elephant, and the figure of a mace-wielding Hanuman added on top.

The person who’s sorely missed is the gorgeous Gayatri Devi, a daughter of the house who married into the royal house of Jaipur. There isn’t much evidence of her presence, except maybe a few uncaptioned sepia photographs from her childhood. But with her death in July, the town lost its biggest icon.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

While not specifically geared towards children, Cooch Behar has plenty to intrigue slightly older children.

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HOLIDAY POSTMORTEM | AMIT SEN

Arctic desert Glacial ice for drinks, Siberian grass in Russia and a promise to go back to polar nights Director of United East Bengal Football Team Amit Sen, 60, and his wife Upaneeta travelled to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle in August for a summer holiday in the freezing cold. Edited excerpts from an interview.

What made you travel to this remote part of the world?

We have a core group of friends, all in our late 50s, who take travel and leisure very seriously. Every year, my wife Upaneeta, a travel professional, throws up one offbeat destination in combination with a popular tourist spot for us to explore. Last year, we went for an Alaskan cruise and also visited the Kenai fjords and the Denali National Park. While there, we were shocked to see the Davidson glacier about three-fourth of the size since we’d seen it on our first visit, in 2003. It didn’t take us long to decide we had to go to the North Pole before global warming hit it in a similar way.

Could you describe your route?

Well, we visited Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm and did a four-night cruise that took us to Tallinn and St Petersburg. Nine of us did the Scandinavia trip but on 8 August, only four of us—my wife, myself and another couple—caught a flight to Longyearbyen in Svalbard, a small cluster of islands between mainland Norway and the North

Pole. It’s a significant base for polar research, and also home to some 3,500 polar bears.

Spitsbergen, where Longyearbyen is located, is the largest of the three populated islands in the archipelago. It literally means “jagged mountain”. Not a single tree or plant grows in Svalbard.

And Longyearbyen—is it a one-horse town?

At 78 degrees North, it’s one of the northern-most towns in the world—serviced only by a seasonal commercial airport—and the largest population centre of Svalbard, with 1,700 people. Snowmobiles far outnumber automobiles here.

There’s a church, a junior school, three hotels, four guesthouses, 10 shops and three restaurants. It’s a popular base camp for adventure tourists, which explains the profusion of accommodation options. We stayed at Hotel Spitsbergen, perched on a hilltop and in between two small glacial slopes. Tradition demands you take off your shoes upon entering the hotel and put them back only when you go out.

Would you count yourself among adventure tourists?

No, we aren’t adventure tourists in the strict sense of the term, but we wanted to explore the region as much as possible on foot. We did a 10-hour boat ride to Pyramiden and the Nordenskold glacier. It’s difficult not to be impressed by the layers upon layers of mountains all along the

FOOT NOTES | SUMANA MUKHERJEE

The last party of 2009 Say goodbye to the year with a kiss, some self­pampering and a party

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o what are you doing over the last week of the year? We rounded up the best offers, the secret getaways and the parties you don’t want to be missing in India. u Free Spirit, the weekend activity arm of Countryside Adventure Holidays, has a Mumbai-Goa coastal cycling tour planned over 10 nights and nine days, from 25 December to 2 January. The actual cycling part of the trip is contained to the section between Murud Janjira and Tiracol, averaging around 50km per day. For Rs16,900 per person, Free Spirit will take care of accommodation at camps and home-stays, Mumbai-Murud Janjira and Tiracol-Mumbai travel, all meals, helmets, jerseys, back-up vehicles, et al. The last date for signing up is 22 December. Go to www.countrysideindia.com u Living in Bangalore but can’t bear the idea of spending Christmas in the city?

Head out to a secret destination 250km away in the Western Ghats with Getoffurass. An “easy style” trip, Santosh Kumar of Getoffurass says it’s customizable any way you want: Go trekking, picnic by a pool, go birdwatching, or explore the jungle. Choose to camp or stay in an open bungalow (no dedicated rooms, though) bang in the middle of an 8,000 acre estate surrounded by reserve forest. The trip runs 25-27 December (there’s a chance departure may happen late on 24 December) and costs Rs4,800 per head, inclusive of dedicated transport, all food, camping equipment, cook and guide. Call Kumar on 09845442224 or go to www.getoffurass.com for details. u If that sounds like too much work, head to the Amanvana spa, on the banks of the Kaveri in Coorg. About 230km from Bangalore, this seven-acre property has 18

bungalows and a massage hut that overlooks the river. The spa has a 30-strong treatment menu. For this season, Amanvana has a two-night/three-day package for Rs24,999 for a couple, inclusive of a candlelight dinner near the river, special cooking classes in the open, and a picnic lunch on an island. For details, go to www.amanvanaspa.com or call 08276-279354/5. u If you are in Delhi, to get away from it all, head to Camp River n Range on the Ganga, 28km from Rishikesh. Alongside bonfires and barbecues, the three-day getaway, organized by TopCamp, packs in a 10-hour forest trek, rock-climbing, rappelling and rafting, not to mention parties that continue into the night on 25 and 31 December.

Available as Christmas (25-27 December) and New Year (31 December-2 January) packages, the trip costs Rs9,999 per couple if you drive down to the camp in your vehicle and Rs11,499 if you use TopCamp transportation. For details visit www.thetopcamp.com or call Baljit on 09212186719 or Punit on 09350991750. u Or move further north, to Nathuakhan, near Nainital, where the Ek Chidiya Holiday Home promises a Christmas you won’t forget, complete with a real chimney.

The 25-27 December weekend will be replete with the aromas of home-cooking and the freshness of mountain air. Arrive on Christmas Day to lunch or tea, followed by an indoor party and buffet dinner.

Boxing Day begins with a tree-planting and buffet breakfast, succeeded by a trek and a drive down to Mukteshwar for lunch, a visit to a local NGO and a movie and dinner by the fireside. The package costs Rs5,500 per person on double occupancy for two nights; children below 5 go free, while those between 5 and 12 are charged Rs3,500. Go to www.ekchidiya.com or call 09810169522 for details.

Write to lounge@livemint.com FREE SPIRIT

Countdown to 2010: Bikers on the Mumbai­Goa coastal cycling tour.

BY

AMIT SEN

Cold country: (left) Longyearbyen is between Norway and the North Pole; Sen in Peterhof, Russia. way to Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian mining town, 6 hours away. It was the world’s northern-most mine before being closed down after the break-up of the USSR in 1993. With its abandoned mining pits, housing structures for more than 1,000 workers and even a 400-seater auditorium, it looks like a ghost town today. The 30 present-day residents, all Russians, carry shotguns with them all the time, since Pyramiden is part of the polar bears’ seal-hunting territory. That’s not the most interesting part of town, though—or even the bust of Lenin that still stands there—it’s the grass that grows here.

Apparently, the Russians brought soil and grass from Siberia and planted them here to prove a point to the Western world, which believed nothing would ever grow here.

On another boat trip to Barentsburg and the Esmark

glacier—also over 9 hours long—we crossed Isfjorden and sailed towards the calving glacier face of the Esmark glacier, a majestic and magnificent mobile glacier. It’s quite the done thing on the boat to have whisky or a soft drink on chunks of glacial ice collected from the Arctic Sea. Barentsburg is the last of the Russian mining towns still active in the region.

The crucial question—how cold was it?

On my first walk around Svalbard, I realized that despite the proximity to the North Pole, the archipelago has a relatively mild climate in comparison to other areas in the same latitude.

August is the end of summer and the temperature ranges between 4 degrees Celsius and -3 degrees Celsius. With just 200-300mm annual rainfall, Svalbard is also called an “Arctic desert”.

Around the glaciers, the temperature could dip to as low

as -12 degrees Celsius. Though the interiors of the boat were heated, on the upper and lower decks temperatures ranged between 0 and -6 degrees Celsius.

On the boat trips we were dressed in layers complete with double socks, gloves, skullcaps and woollen scarves, topped with heavy weatherproof jackets.

As told to Sumana Mukherjee.

Share your last holiday with us at lounge@livemint.com

GETTING THERE Longyearbyen is most easily accessed from Oslo. Round­trip flights cost upwards of $771 (around Rs36,000) on SAS. Arrive at Oslo from Mumbai on KLM (return economy upwards of Rs37,000); from Delhi on Finnair (upwards of Rs37,000); from Bangalore on British Airways (upwards of Rs47,000).

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Books NON­FICTION

Always in search of a good story BROOKE WILLIAM/HACHETTE BOOK GROUP/BLOOMBERG

Reporter or storyteller? Genius or gadfly?

Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage for ‘The New Yorker’ doesn’t have a clear answer B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas.” Yes, you’re right—this is the first sentence of an essay from The New Yorker. It features the now-familiar “hook”—a moment of dramatic tension, a set of precise visual details (Skilling is not attending his trial, as some writers might have put it, but sits at a table at the front of a federal courtroom), and the selection of a protagonist who is an entry point into the story— practised and perfected by generations of writers for that magazine, and other American longform magazines such as Esquire and The Atlantic Monthly, at least since the 1960s, when writers such as Tom Wolfe began to plunder the techniques of fiction for their reportage. The current incumbent of the position of star New Yorker writer—a position held in the past by such greats as E.B. White, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and the current editor David Remnick—is Malcolm Gladwell, the smoothtalking mind behind the best-sellers The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, all of which offer provocative theses on modern life.

Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, has no central thesis like the previous ones, but instead brings together the best of his essays, on subjects as varied as ovens, hair dye, football quarterbacks and money markets, published in The New Yorker over the past decade. The general philosophy of these pieces seems to be, on the one hand, that human behaviour and wants are endlessly variable and complex and cannot be reduced to a system, which is why we require writers such as Gladwell to explore its oddities, and on the other (and somewhat in contradiction to the first emphasis), that human behaviour is endlessly fascinating and is therefore worth theorizing about in all its quirks, particularly if such studies yield counterintuitive or logic-tickling results.

Two favourite Gladwell sub-

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Gladwell explores human behaviour in the public sphere much more than the private sphere

What the Dog Saw: Allen Lane, 410 pages, Rs599. jects, popping up repeatedly across these essays are, one, the variables involved in human choice-making, and two, adroit salesmanship or transactional ability. Gladwell explores human behaviour in the public sphere much more than the private sphere; some emphasis on commerce or a judgement of economic worth is present in most of his essays, and he uses the phrase “the new economy” a lot. He seems both an adept guide to, and at the same time a child of, the highly consumerized, commoditized world in which we now live, showing us how “the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives” as emotions and interpersonal relationships.

All the strengths and novelties of this approach are on view in the best essay in this volume, True Colors. Like all the other essays in the book, it begins with a protagonist—Shirley Polykoff, a copywriter—who managed to make the newly available use-at-home hair dye dramatically popular among American women in the 1950s with her hit line for Clairol, “Does she or doesn’t she?”

Polykoff’s influence on the minds of middle-class American women was soon rivalled by the slightly more upmarket message projected by the brand L’Oreal that said, “Because I’m worth it.” Gladwell’s key point is that the revolution in hair dye technology and the representations of hair dye

Genre bender: Gladwell has been writing for The New Yorker since 1996 and has written three more books. users in the advertising of the time were not trivial matters. “Between the fifties and the seventies,” he writes, “women entered the workplace, fought for social emancipation, got the Pill, and changed what they did with their hair. To examine the hair-colour campaigns of the period is to see, quite unexpectedly, all these things as bound up together, the profound with the seemingly trivial.”

But at many other points Gladwell’s need to turn data into a dramatic story (two essays in the book have as their closing image men breaking into tears, while another ends with a spike, with a room full of people cheering for the protagonist) and blithe fly-onthe-wall approach towards reporting raise difficult questions that cannot be simply brushed aside. Take, for instance, the opening essay of his book The Pitchman, which is about a family

of inventors of kitchen gadgets, the Popeils, who sell their own products with such a charming, smooth-talking pitch that consumers lap them up. But Gladwell appears to have become so mesmerized by his subject that he himself begins to pitch for Popeil, turning hearsay into fact. “S.J. Popeil was a tinkerer,” he writes, building up a portrait. “In the middle of the night, he would wake up and make frantic sketches on a pad he kept on his bedside table.”

Is this true? Possibly. But how does Gladwell know this? Only S.J. Popeil was on the scene during his bursts of late-night inspiration!

It makes sense, then, for Gladwell to say that this is how Popeil said he worked. But no—Gladwell here, and at several other points in the book, prefers to practise what the media critic Jack Shafer has called “mind-meld journal-

ism”, giving the impression that he has uninhibited access to his subject’s mind and life. I can’t but think this is dishonest, corner-cutting reportage, even if it makes for a good, smooth story; it turns human beings into puppets, even as the larger argument may insist they are vastly complex creatures.

As in Gladwell’s other books, there is no shortage of intriguing hypotheses and surprising insights in What the Dog Saw, but the overall effect of smart-aleckiness and the absence of sustained human encounters swiftly becomes wearisome.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Compilation of Gladwell’s clever, fly­on­the­wall writing

TIMES NEW ROMAN & COUNTRYMEN | VISHWAJYOTI GHOSH

Postcard kitsch A joyous ode to classified ads offers a unique insight into India

Times New Roman & Countrymen: Blaft Publications, 26 pages, Rs295.

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

···························· t all began with trying to sell a car. Graphic artist Vishwajyoti Ghosh was trying to dispose of his old wheels but met with no success even after placing several classifieds in newspapers. Then a trader friend of his, “a classifieds pro” in Ghosh’s words, stepped in and reworded his copy. Among other things, he added the word “shiny”.

The car was sold.

This was two years ago and it was then that Ghosh realized that classifieds have their own culture and operate within a specific psychological and social code. He began collecting the oddest ones and a book was born: Times New Roman & Countrymen, an illustrated book of 25 postcards

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inspired by classified ads.

Ghosh has been illustrating children’s books for Penguin and Tulika over the last decade. He has contributed to graphic anthologies such as When Kulbhushan met Stockli (Phantomville/HarperCollins) but his first book allows him ample room to express a unique brand of kitsch, layered with intertextuality and pop culture references.

While the advertisements retain their original form in terms of content and lettering layout, the illustrations bring them alive in different ways, evoking codes one might otherwise have missed.

For instance, one marriage classified for a “teetotaler” has a young boy straight out of one of those instructional charts used in Indian classrooms in the 1980s.

Two goddess-like mother figures hold out milk bottles for him. A halo of fresh fruits frames his head. The illustration for another classified for a telephonic chat that promises “pure and sure

Pop art: Ghosh adds his own touch to the original classifieds. friendship” shows a phone cord leading to an apparently chaste woman from the painter Raja Ravi Verma’s stable. “Soft silky escorts” and “smell-free pesticide solutions” are similarly illustrated by borrowing from cinema posters, more Raja Ravi Verma images, instructional picture charts and old calendars.

In using antiquated visual ref-

erences for relatively modern-day services, Ghosh creates a schism.

And it is this paradox that elicits a laugh, or at least a wry smile.

The format of the book is neither coffee table nor art brochure.

The rationale was to make it usable and interactive. Readers can tear each of the 25 postcards off a dotted line and actually mail them. Or even frame or pin them

up. Blaft Publications, a year-old independent publishing outfit based in Chennai, earlier produced a book of Hindi pulp-fiction covers in the same format.

Kaveri Lalchand, director, Blaft Publications, says this postcard book is meant to offer an insight into the real India.

While that might seem like a far-fetched claim, the book’s content has much to offer in terms of incisive humour and outrageous kitsch. Ghosh’s artwork is intricate and arresting, and in keeping with this, Blaft also plans to make a travelling art exhibit of them.

While this isn’t the first Indian visual concept book or the last, Times New Roman & Countrymen occupies a very niche sector both in terms of publishing and buyers. The postcard format might be on shaky ground—how many of us send postcards any more? But there is nothing not to love.

One can only wait to see on which shelf bookstores display this book.

BOOKS L15

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

A TALE OF TWO REVOLTS | RAJMOHAN GANDHI

CRIMINAL MIND

United by revolution

ZAC O’YEAH

MURDER IN THE CITY AFP

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A leading Indian historian brings together Mangal Pandey and Abraham Lincoln

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· istorians, like monarchs and statesmen, are always looking to expand the territories under their command. Rajmohan Gandhi, now in his 70s, and arguably the most prominent Indian historian in English today, has over a long career written excellent biographies of Vallabhbhai Patel and C. Rajagopalachari, a survey of Indian Muslims called Understanding the Muslim Mind, and a wider study of South Asian history called Revenge and Reconciliation.

Gandhi’s last book, a magisterial 700-page biography of Mahatma Gandhi (2007), took him out of India to South Africa and England, the two countries where the Mahatma put himself together intellectually and morally. Now, in his latest work, Gandhi touches down in the US for the first time. A Tale of Two Revolts is a comparative study of two rebellions that occurred at opposite ends of the globe in the 19th century: the Indian Mutiny of 1857, fought over issues of religion by soldiers against an imperial power, and the American Civil War of 1861-65, fought over issues of race and law by governments, civilians and finally, armies.

This makes for an unusual book where Abraham Lincoln stands alongside Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and the African-American reformer Frederick Douglass suddenly gives way to the Muslim thinker Sayyed Ahmed Khan.

There are significant parts in the ensemble for Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Scotsman Allan Octavian Hume (significant thinkers on nationalist questions who were both in the employ of the British government) and for

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Rebels: The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 was documented in paintings and drawings, as in this one from 1880.

Bahadur Shah Zafar and Peshwa Nanasaheb, the Mughal and Maratha regents toppled by the British who saw hope of resurrection through the rebellion.

The character who holds Gandhi’s world-spanning story together, however, is Irish. William Howard Russell, a correspondent of The Times of London, was perhaps the only person to have been present in India during the time of the Mutiny and in the US at the time of the Civil War. An indefatigable traveller and to some extent a sceptic of Britain’s imperial projects, Russell’s voice was one of the main channels

A Tale of Two Revolts: Penguin/Viking, 402 pages, Rs599.

through which British citizens got wind of what was happening in India. Gandhi reprises the story of the Mutiny of 1857 in his own voice and sometimes through Russell’s: how it broke out, what were the passions that animated it, how many died and how many were slaughtered in cold blood.

One of the merits of Gandhi’s study is that, when compared with the American Civil War, it becomes all too clear that the Mutiny of 1857 was not India’s “first war of independence”, as some nationalist historians have seen it. It broke out not over a grand issue or contested principle, but over suddenly provoked caste and religious sensitivities: the alleged presence of pig fat in the casing of cartridges used by sepoys in the Indian army. Even if it did bring Hindus and Muslims together against the British, this alliance “seemed to require the glue of rage, and it lacked the promise of permanence”.

Large sections of contemporary Indian opinion chose to side with the British rather than with the rebels because their interests seemed more closely aligned with the former, and neither the dotard Bahadur Shah Zafar nor the scheming Nanasaheb inspired confidence as alternatives to British rule. Economic and political

critiques of British rule were conspicuously absent in the Mutiny’s manifestos. Further, the Mutiny was hostile not just to the white man, but to Indian converts to Christianity. Not only was there no unifying principle in the Mutiny, there was no comparable figure of Lincoln’s moral power and dignity on either the Indian or the British side, to heal the wounds after a truce had been established.

Gandhi’s use of the American Civil War as a point of comparison for Indian affairs has a distinguished precedent. In 1873 the low-caste and anti-Brahminical reformer Jotiba Phule dedicated his book Gulamgiri, or Slavery, to the Americans who fought for the abolition of slavery in the Civil War, thereby implicitly aligning Indian Shudras with American blacks.

Many other such connections between two disparate universes are illuminated by Gandhi, even though it understandably struggles to keep its material within a unified field. Despite its occasional longueurs, there is much to take away from this tale of two revolts.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS An incisive work of comparative history

hahjahanabad—Old Delhi, to us laypeople—seems an unlikely setting for a detective novel. Especially if it takes place in 1656, way before modern forensics and scientific police work made crime fiction into what it is. But just before Diwali I found myself at the launch of Madhulika Liddle’s The Englishman’s Cameo, where the author spoke about her reasons for writing a book in the “historical mystery” genre, and how she had done the plotting and planning during heritage walks.

The fictional crime-solving nobleman Muzaffar Jang owes, according to Liddle, “his existence largely to the places and stories I discovered as I meandered along on those many walks”. With poisoned paan and the whole shebang, she then conjures up a splendid cityscape in which the reader encounters bustling bazaars with their qahwa khanas (coffee houses) that herald the coming of a new-fangled beverage: One spots the occasional gawky youngster “walking swiftly but sure-footedly along the street, carrying a small earthenware cup full of what was presumably coffee”.

There and then, while at the book launch, it occurred to me that Indian cities provide rather remarkable backdrops for mystery novels. My favourite Feluda adventure is The Secret of the Cemetery (a novella originally published in 1977 as Gorosthaney Sabdhan); you may recall that Satyajit Ray got the inspiration from one of Kolkata’s oldest cemeteries, the spooky one down Park Street.

Recently, I rediscovered this Ray novella in a comic book version, Beware in the Graveyard, INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT by illustrator Tapas Guha in which Kolkata’s splendid milieus come alive once again.

But an even grander setting must be Mumbai, for in the last couple of years, some truly heavy crime novels have been written about the “maximum city”: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games Spy city: Kolkata’s Park Street, the clocks in at 900 pages setting for some Feluda stories. and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is a few ounces heavier at 936 pages. In their hard-cover editions, both can be used as murder weapons.

Slimmer and much more hard-boiled are three striking crime novels written by Ashok Banker many years ago. I still remember reading The Iron Bra, a blood-soaked story of a female investigator, Sheila Ray, whose finger rests lightly on the trigger as she defends her family’s reputation. The city’s construction sites were a crucial component in the tight plot. So Mumbai has had its share of writers who have painted the city as black as noir gets, but as regards other cities, I have run out of examples. In most Indian detective novels, cities remain a hazy background contour.

Abroad, however, there’s no dearth of city-centric action—from the grimness of Los Angeles as described by James Ellroy to the seediness of Stockholm in Sjöwall-Wahlöö’s cop novels.

In case I’m missing something here, I’d be grateful to hear from readers who can think of crime novels where any Indian city shapes the plot in a significant way. Are there perhaps books that haven’t come out in English—Malayalam murder mysteries that make use of Fort Cochin’s alleys and waterways? Shelves of Punjabi penny dreadfuls that take advantage of Chandigarh’s futuristic town plan? A Telugu thriller where the twin cities Hyderabad-Secunderabad serve up cybercrime alongside some deadly biryani (as in, arsenic-laced)?

Zac O’Yeah is a Bangalore-based author of crime fiction.

Write to him at criminalmind@livemint.com

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009

Culture CRASH COURSE Curious but not quite sure how to start listening to Indian electronic dance music? Arjun S. Ravi, editor of music magazine ‘Indiecision’, lists the five tracks that should get you started: Atomizer by MIDIval PunditZ (Hello Hello, 2009) Listen: www.punditz.com/ Tonic by Teddy Boy Kill (The Exit Plan, 2009) Listen: last.fm/music/ Teddy+boy+kill Tough Cookie by Jalebee Cartel (OnePointNothing, 2009) Listen: http://www.myspace.com/ jalebeecartel Destructive Forces by Tempo Tantrick (stand­alone track, 2008) Listen: http://soundcloud.com/ tempotantrick Hilltop by Medusa (stand­alone track, 2009) Listen: http://www.gimmesound. com/Medusa

MUSIC

Digital natives

The Global Groove festival is on 19 and 20 December at Tivoli Gar­ dens, New Delhi. Passes are avail­ able for Rs500 (www. globalgroove.in). The Sunburn fes­ tival will be held from 27­29 December at Candolim, Goa. A three­day pass costs Rs3,000 (www.sunburn­festival.com).

Electric version: (clockwise from top) Jalebee Cartel playing live in Singapore; Avinash Kumar of Basic Love of Things (B.L.O.T.); Gaurav Malakar (in the fore­ ground) of Qilla Records.

With two forthcoming festivals, a number of new albums and growing popularity, electronica is hitting a high note in India B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· ack in 1997, the instructions to DJ Arjun Vagale were clear—he could play half an hour of electronic music at the Delhi club where he worked, but that was it. After that he had to go back to the usual repertoire of Bollywood songs.

Today, Vagale, a founding member of the electronic group Jalebee Cartel, is helping organize the third year of the Sunburn festival in Goa—three days of unadulterated blips, beeps and beats of what is called electronic dance music (EDM).

Most EDM is produced on laptops and synthesizers, and usually played at nightclubs. While some EDM compositions are intended purely for dancing, and played as part of “sets” that last hours, many electronic artists also write songs—often with the use of multiple instruments (actual or mimicked) and digitally enhanced vocals.

“The EDM scene in India is growing really fast,” says Vagale.

“In any given week you can catch a big international act playing in one of the metros.” When Western rock bands go on an “Asian tour”, it usually means stops in Japan and Singapore before flying to Australia. But when it comes to electronica, the trend’s changing: An India stop is fast becoming mandatory for most DJs and groups.

At a typical EDM concert in a Delhi club, Jalebee Cartel plays to crowds of over a thousand people—the “band members” stand crouched over laptops, faces shrouded in smoke and reflections from the psychedelic light shows that accompany their music. An EDM “concert” follows a certain arc: The music builds over time, with the DJs layering new elements on top of a basic beat and bassline; once at a crescendo, the songs break down into skeletal elements like a stack

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of building blocks—the beat disappears, a discordant guitar line plays on repeat—and the pieces are rejoined in different combinations. Every hour or so, the music is put on autopilot while the group takes a break, sometimes even joining the dance floor. “India is a new hub,” says Vagale. “It is often compared to the burgeoning underground scene in Europe 10 years ago.

Everything is raw and fresh and edgy, and the audience welcomes experimentation and isn’t judgemental.”

In the last two years, the Sunburn festival has attracted names such as the Dutch trance duo Growling Mad Scientists (GMS) and Armin van Buuren, both electronic artists with large international fan bases.

Local talent has also come to the forefront. “We have loads of Indian DJs who can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best international artists and play incredible music,” says the former MTV veejay Nikhil Chinapa, who now runs Submerge, an event management firm that organizes EDM concerts. A telling sign of shifting trends is Global Groove, a second EDM festival starting this month in New Delhi. Its main

sponsor? That venerable institution of rock-and-roll journalism in India—Rock Street Journal.

In 2009 alone, three Indian electronica acts have gone on national tours to promote their new albums—Delhi-based MIDIval PunditZ, Goa-based TaTvA Kundalini and Jalebee Cartel.

Electronica-centric record labels such as Mocha Musica, ChillOM Records and Qilla Records have emerged to scout for new talent.

Jalebee Cartel tracks appear in Nokia advertisements, and Indian artists are now regulars on the international circuit.

But electronic music has also had to face uncertainties along the way—from unsure audiences and wobbly access to technology, to Bollywood’s dominance over club culture. In the mid-1990s, when electronic music in India was nothing more than “a few parties on the beach in Goa”, artist and producer Ma Faiza remembers selling cassettes at the Anjuna flea market in north Goa. “No one here had access to this kind of music,” she recalls. “You only heard new songs when ‘aunty’ went to America and bought you a Michael Jackson CD.” At first, only some foreign tourists were

interested, but then Faiza began to notice a lot of Indian youth trying out electronica—first as “a cool new tape they could put in the car” and later as dedicated, discerning listeners.

Around 1995-96, childhood chums Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj of the group MIDIval PunditZ began to throw EDM-focused parties in Delhi. “The parties were called Cyber Mehfil, where we’d play some DnB music (short for ‘drum and bass’, a subgenre of EDM characterized by fast beats and heavy basslines) we’d gotten from the West,” says Raina. The mehfils (gatherings) initially attracted small crowds of 20-30 people who, Raina recalls, “listened to the music more than dance”. Gradually, the fan base started growing. “That following became a lot. Cyber Mehfil started attracting people in three figures. Our gigs become larger, and bigger,” he adds.

At the turn of the century, clubs in the metros began to get interested in EDM, and the demand for DJs grew. On certain days of the week, most clubs would take a break from Bollywood music to give electronic music a chance. “At the time, it didn’t matter what genre you

played. You could be playing alongside a tech house artist (an EDM genre that mixes ethereal, ambient sounds with prominent beats) and a DnB person and it would just be called ‘Electronic Night,’” says Vagale. With the divisions between genres becoming clearer, it would be musical sacrilege to put them together today.

It was the arrival of cheap broadband Internet access that catalysed that change. Electronic musicians now had easy access to sounds, inspiration, and the chance to promote their own music online. “Compared to, let’s call it the ‘pre-broadband’ era, a lot more original ideas are coming out of Indian electronica. Acts have been creating their own original sounds,” says Arjun S. Ravi, editor of online music magazine Indiecision.

Indian EDM is now spread across the genre spectrum—from trance music (driven by artists such as DJ Sanjay Dutta and Pune band Lost Stories), tech house (Jalebee Cartel) and techno (artist Madhav Kohra, band Bhavishyavani Future Soundz). Festivals, says PunditZ’s Raina, are the culmination of this long, steady, and now rapid growth—from advertisements and websites to even the background music for news, EDM is “one of the most prevalent genres today”.

For Vagale, the the surest sign is in omnipresent Bollywood finally taking notice. “Electronica has always been the anti-Bollywood. Now, they’re taking influences from us—the remix culture, the production techniques,” he says. Faiza found affirmation from another unlikely source. “I was watching a Godrej advertisement the other day, and the background score was, like, full-on 135 beats per minute, pounding dance music,” she recalls, “and I’m thinking, c’mon, Godrej is using electronica?!”

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THEATRE

MUSIC MATTERS

Song spoils the party PHOTOGRAPHS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

PAEAN TO THE UNSUNG

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

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Ruddhasangeet will be staged today at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata. It will be shown in the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, organized by the National School of Drama, in Bhopal and Delhi on 18 and 20 January, respectively.

nce every month I receive an e-paper called Swar Aalap in the inbox of my Thunderbird email client. In these days of spamming and unsolicited marketing messages, it would not be unwarranted if I were to delete it without a second look, since I haven’t actually bought a subscription. But then, for a student of music, a document that bears terms like swar and aalaap is hard to trash, and even a casual look at the e-paper is riveting enough to ensure that you are hooked. The marvellous archival photographs and detailed features on musicians from the Indian film industry are, without doubt, a delight for music lovers. Take, for example, the September issue. Under the masthead you see the main feature titled “My Name is Anthony Gonsalves” with a gorgeous black and white picture of the young violinist and arranger Anthony Gonsalves conducting an orchestra. And if you are wondering whether the gentleman has anything to do with the chart-buster song from Manmohan Desai’s 1977 multi-starrer Amar Akbar Anthony, you’re absolutely right. He is, indeed, the eminent violinist from whom music director Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma (better known as Pyarelal of the Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo) learnt the violin and whose name was inserted in the song that became a huge hit. A wonderfully detailed interview conducted by Kushal Gopalka from the Swar Aalap team is accompanied by a more recent picture of Anthony Gonsalves, now in his 80s and living a retired life in Majorda, Goa. The Swar Aalap magazine was launched in May 2002 by percussionist Dinesh Ghate as a tribute to the unsung contributions of arrangers, singers and musicians from the film industry—musicians who played on or arranged tracks that are immortal and evergreen and are Chronicled: A Swar Alap cover. performed even today.

These were musicians whose contributions were immense but who remained virtually anonymous and unsung at a time when the practice of acknowledging sessions musicians on album sleeves or notes was either unheard of or ignored by the music industry.

Ghate initially launched Swar Aalap as a print publication, but decided to convert to the e-paper format in 2009 to counter the huge cost involved in printing. He still plans to print an annual compilation for collectors. The annual subscription for the e-paper is a meagre Rs300, and yet there has not been any substantial increase in subscriptions, reports Ghate, not without a tinge of regret. How does he manage, then? Obviously, it is the passion for the subject that drives the small but dedicated team Ghate works with, but he also acknowledges with gratitude the support he has received from collectors Arun Puranik and Gopalka. Others such as banker Shankar Iyer joined hands with Ghate a little later, as did friends who helped him set up a website, www.swaraalap.com, as well as the e-paper for him. That, in short, is the story of this wonderful little publication that has kept its chin up and persevered for seven long years in its print avatar and now in e-format. I guess that’s also what makes Ghate say without a second of hesitation or without any intention of raking in subscription fee that he prefers the e-format because it is so easy to reach to people across the globe who can then, in turn, forward it to others!

Personally, the high point of my telephonic interview with Ghate was when he explained that Swar Aalap is his tribute to “woh pachees musician (those 25 musicians)” or a handful of musicians whose contribution to film music is even today providing a livelihood to thousands of others—“hum pachaas hazaar musicianon ka ghar chal rahaa hai… unke gaane bajaa bajaa ke (50,000 of us musicians are surviving on tunes made by them)”. To the spirit and sincerity and sensitivity of this statement I offer my humble salaam.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

A play on the life of the maverick artist Debabrata Biswas finds con­ temporary echoes

B Y S HAMIK B AG ···························· is school, Bangur Multipurpose, recalls playwright and director Bratya Basu, did not lay too much stress on uniforms and occasionally allowed students to stroll in in sandals. Bunking classes, understandably, was par for the course—Basu would use the opportunity to go fishing. One day, disgusted by the small fish he caught, Basu threw it back in the lake, much to the chagrin of his friend Boncha. “Boncha’s dad, a bus conductor, hadn’t brought fish to their house for days, while for me fishing was merely a hobby. It was my first brush with society’s class divide,” Basu says.

Going by the response to his latest play, Ruddhasangeet (Song of the Stifled), one can safely assume that Basu’s concerns find a resonance with Kolkata’s theatre-going audience. It was first staged in March and 25 shows later, not a single seat has gone unsold. An estimated 25,000 people have watched the play so far, according to Rajarshi De, who enacts the role of music composer Salil Chowdhury in the play. “You need to be swift, for tickets disappear within hours of booking opening,” advised the person behind the ticket counter at the Academy of Fine Arts couple of weeks ago, ahead of the next staging of Ruddhasangeet.

Basu, 40, contends that his career in theatre has seen upheavals similar to those experienced by Debabrata Biswas, widely acknowledged as the greatest and most daring exponent of Rabindrasangeet (Tagore songs) in Bengal, and on whose life Ruddhasangeet is based. The play centres around Biswas’ estrangement from the Left-leaning Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) movement and Communist politics in Bengal, and his falling out with the music board of Viswa-Bharati university, which held the copyright of Tagore’s works and barred any experimention with time signature, style, melody or instrumen-

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Voice of dissent: (above) Ruddhasangeet being performed in Kolkata; and Bratya Basu.

tation of Tagore’s tunes.

The play begins with the banning of the Communist party in 1948, followed by the introduction of a cross section from Bengal’s erstwhile socio-cultural and political life. Characters of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, singers Hemango Biswas and Suchitra Mitra, poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay, danseuse Manjushree Chaki-Sircar, theatre director Sambhu Mitra and political leaders such as Jyoti Basu and Pro-

I’ll always need an opposition, be it the audience or the establishment.

Bratya Basu Playwright and director

mode Dasgupta appear at various moments. The play ends with the spotlight on Biswas—brought alive on stage with remarkable conviction by actor Debshankar Halder—a year before his death in 1980, by when he had become a marginalized figure.

Basu points out similar attempts to marginalize him. He had moved out of the Communist party fold after his years at Presidency College in Kolkata (“Here it is all about the CPM, not communism”), and the turn of events at Nandigram and Singur in 2008 prompted Basu to share the stage with Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee. He says gradually, the statefunded theatre groups he was associated with began moving away from him, with one even organizing a press conference to publicly disown him.

For months Basu was left with no work, even as he became a prominent face of the anti-CPM intellectuals’ collective in West Bengal which includes author-ac-

tivist Mahasweta Devi, and filmmakers Aparna Sen and Rituparno Ghosh. With Ruddhasangeet—which is based on Biswas’ autobiography, Bratyajoner Ruddhasangeet (Stifled Song of the Outcast)—the theatre group formed and led by Basu (named, incidentally, Bratyajon) has been quick off the block with its maiden production.

Still, Basu’s penchant for formulaic polemical content in many of the 20-odd plays he has penned, where he has taken a dig at the establishment and the established in Bengal, has not escaped critical scrutiny. The staging of Ruddhasangeet just ahead of the last Lok Sabha elections was also criticized by some as Basu’s effort to serve his own political agenda through theatre. “If the play was for the elections, we wouldn’t have got capacity audiences even now,” he vigorously counters, adding, “Power corrupts, and I think if the Trinamool comes to power in West Bengal, they shouldn’t be allowed to stay for too long.

For me, I’ll always need an opposition, be it the audience or the establishment.”

Q&A | DANA GILLESPIE

‘I was drawn to India’ The blues singer on David Bowie and Sathya Sai Baba B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· he began singing when she was 15, went on to work with names such as Bob Dylan and Jimmy Page, acted in films, and was the first Mary Magdalene in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar on West End. Blues singer Dana Gillespie speaks with Lounge about her musical journey. Edited excerpts:

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Folk, rock, teen pop, acting, Sanskrit bhajans and then the blues. So many transitions?

It’s been interesting (laughs). I’ve

been singing blues for 30 years and I grew up in the 1960s when blues was the thing in England. It was always my big love. When I was young, I always did whatever came my way, be it acting or singing folk songs, but then I would always run off in the evening to sing in a blues bar.

Blues, I think, is spiritual music.

You need experience in your life to be able to sing the blues. I didn’t have that when I was, say, 16, and even if I sang, I wouldn’t have been able to get the right emotion in my voice.

And you have that now?

Well, I sing with a band that’s considered the cream of blues (The London Blues Band). That must say something. I think it’s an honour I have earned. Now, I also run my own yearly blues festival at Mustique, a private island in the West Indies.

You tried many things before you settled on the blues.

Yes, in spite of the deep influence of blues musicians on me. The kind of musicians you see when you were young, they shape your life. I saw Muddy Waters perform at an American folk blues festival... In addition to that, all hit musicians like Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck (of the Yardbirds) were good friends. So, in a sense it was an embryonic ground for me to learn everything but I couldn’t concentrate on it.

Strangely enough, it was because of the way I looked. I kept getting these film roles that expected me to show a bit of cleavage on the top of the shirt, which was all you did in films in those days, and I was happy to do any work.

You worked under the pseudonym “Third-man” for your bhajan-based

Many hues: Gillespie in concert. devotional albums. What triggered these projects?

Even as a child I was drawn to India. I first came here on a holiday 35 years ago and felt like I had touched home ground. Then, 26 years ago, I came to see the Sathya Sai Baba at Puttaparthi. I loved the bhajans and felt I should record and spread them in the Western world.

How did you land the role of

Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar?

I read an advertisement in a music magazine asking singers to come and audition for a play. I was out of work at that time. Even as I rehearsed as a back vocal, I knew I was going to be Mary Magdalene... I did an audition and I sang Don’t know how to love him just with the piano, and I got it. I am not the sort who has premonitions but there was something about it—I just knew.

You have done projects with stars such as David Bowie, Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger.

What is it that they like about Dana Gillespie?

People forget that they are not just big names and stars, they are also normal people. I have known David Bowie since I was 14. I was growing up in London, which was a melting pot at that time, and all these people who were just normal pals of mine went on to become major stars. I

guess Bob Dylan asked me to tour with him because there were not that many women singers in those days. Women in the music business, the moment they get married and have children, they quit... I did not want to fall into that trap.

But there were romances.

Yes there were, but several more rumours that were false.

You’ve performed in India earlier. Are you looking forward to the Indian audience?

The blues is for people who want to have a good time unlike jazz, which I think is slightly more intellectual. You can dance to the blues and although not every person in the audience might get what I am singing about, I thing the swing makes them connect.

Gillespie will perform on 13 December at UB City, Bangalore, as a part of the Bengaluru Habba festival. For passes and festival details, log on to www.bengaluruhabba.co.in

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

A song from the Uttarakhand hills In which the writer discovers the Hima­ layan notes of the mysterious and versatile ‘jakhiya’

PHOTOGRAPHS

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very spice has a song.

Didn’t you know that?

Haldi’s is Aayega aanewala, raw and overflowing with longing; garam masala’s is Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan, unchanging but exuberant; East Indian bottle masala is Bohemian Rhapsody, all highs, lows and trembling excitement.

I couldn’t quite figure out the song when the new spice didn’t sputter like mustard seeds. It was a balmy November day when I dumped them in olive oil for the great Indian tadka (tempering). They released a nutty aroma that I had never encountered before.

It’s all very exciting, isn’t it, infusing your food with something new and strange?

The seeds were smaller than mustard, black but flecked with a dark yellow in parts, and I knew nothing about them—not even their name. It all seemed quite romantic though, and as the seeds sputtered, I sensed music, a remote, out-of-the-way melody wafting into my kitchen from the lower Himalayas.

I asked the man I bought them from (at an Uttarakhandi stall at a crafts mela near Delhi’s India Gate), but he didn’t know. “Yeh toh pahadi tadka hai ji (This is a tempering from the hills),” was his unhelpful explanation.

Two weeks later I had my answer. The intriguing little seeds were jakhiya. Sorry, I haven’t found a translation, despite asking around and buying three books on Uttarakhandi food. I’ve stocked up on jakhiya, and I’m finding wonderful new interpretations of old favourites. Here’s what

I’ve tried thus far: 1. My grandma’s Goan fish curry tempered with jakhiya.

2. My grandma’s Goan fish curry tempered with jakhiya, curry leaves and asafoetida.

3. A curry with a stronger base to absorb the earthy flavours of jakhiya.

I am happy to report everything worked out well, and jakihya is my latest, favourite kitchen melody. If you know more about it than I do, I would like to hear from you.

I also picked up some Uttarakhandi thyme, Uttarakhandi garlic (rougher looking and much stronger than its city cousins) and some jhangora, or barnyard millet, which I intend to try—as the hill people suggested—as a rice substitute.

We were never given to organic foods as a family, but I must say that my encounters with Uttarakhandi flavours (all grown without pesticides as part of a strong government-sponsored grass-roots organic programme)

are strongly encouraging me to listen to new tunes and notes.

The latest is amaranth (translation: er, pigweed), a hardy grain that we added to our ITC atta (chapatti dough) as calcium fortification. The wife needs stronger bones, and amaranth has about 60% more calcium than other grains.

It’s also rumoured to prevent greying, but I have no confirmation on this. We buy our amaranth from the Navdanya organic store in the crafts market of Dilli Haat in south Delhi. I’m sure you can get it in Mumbai. I’ve found that an online company called thealtitudestore.com stores a lot of organic produce and will deliver—if you live in Delhi, Gurgaon or Noida. I haven’t actually ordered since I’ve found stalls at sundry fairs and bazaars.

But do make it a point to visit any Uttarakhandi fair that comes your way. I’m curious enough

···························· here’s something about watching a juicy chunk of meat as it goes from pink to brown over a coal-fired grill. Restaurateur and chef Rahul Akerkar believes it takes us back to our ancestral instinct of hunting and cooking our meat over fire. So his swanky new restaurant, Tote on the Turf, at Mahalaxmi, one of the very few places in Mumbai with a large al fresco dining area, had to have a live grill. Besides the leg of lamb, pork and chicken cooked over a grill, diners can enjoy wood-fired pizza made before their eyes. But Akerkar wants to add to the variety of meat being served at Tote and hopes to have a menu that will list ostrich, rabbit, venison and the much desired cut of steak, the T-bone, when the grill opens later this month.

At West View, ITC Maratha’s grill room, you can identify a meat lover at a glance. With their backs turned to the salad buffet, they are the ones piling plates with juicy, rosy pink chunks of meat. The chef takes their plate to his gas-fired grill after seasoning the meat with a few herbs and spices, and it arrives at the table ready to eat. There is an option of the lava stone grill, which involves heating the stone in an oven for hours before it’s placed

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on your table with a piece of lamb on it. The meat cooks in front of your eyes in 3 minutes.

Wild Fire at Crowne Plaza Today, Gurgaon, brings a concept similar to the Brazilian churrasco. The meat is grilled using a charcoal and gas grill and carved at the tables of diners. During the winter months, the restaurant is busier than usual.

Located by the Juhu beach in Mumbai, Aurus recently decided to make the most of its surroundings with the Aurus Sundown on Sundays. It’s a potent combination of a gorgeous sunset, live performances and live grills. For the Sunday brunch at Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai, the live grill has the choicest cuts of lamb imported from France, Ireland and Australia, guineafowl and pork loin from Holland and Italy, ostrich from South Africa and Japanese venison, both of which are available on request. “Ostrich and venison aren’t very popular with our Indian customers yet. We had to list guineafowl as chicken on our menu because people didn’t know what it was,” says executive chef Giancarlo de Francesco, adding that the meats available locally aren’t juicy or fatty enough for grilling. “I like the meat to be cooked in its own juices without any extra oil or butter,” says executive sous chef Kedar Bobde,

now to make a trip to the hills and into their kitchens. If I find it, I know one Uttarakhandi spice that I intend to try: bhanga or hemp seeds. Botanical name: Cannabis sativa. Sounds familiar?

That’s one song I would like to hear.

Dastakar Fish Serves 5 (Note in my food diary: Inspired by ingredients bought from Himalayan spice producers at the Dastakar Mela in Delhi, November 2009) Ingredients 1 kg fish (I used singhada, or John Dory) 2 onions chopped fine 2 heaped tsp ginger-garlic paste 3 tomatoes finely chopped 2 2-inch sticks of lemongrass Red-wine vinegar 2 tbsp of soy sauce 1 tbsp sesame oil Grind all the following into a paste: 10 dried Himalayan red chillies 6-7 (or 3 large) small garlic pods 1 tsp cumin seeds

½ tsp turmeric powder 1 tsp soy sauce 2 tbsp olive oil 2 tbsp red-wine vinegar Method In a pan, heat sesame oil. Fry onions till golden brown. Add the ginger-garlic paste and fry.

Add the masala paste, bhunno (stir fry) with sprinklings of red-wine vinegar and 2 tbsp of soy sauce. Add the tomatoes and fry till reduced. Add 1 mug of water and bring to boil.

Simmer. Add 1 kg of fish, add salt, and let the fish cook on low heat. Switch off when ready and add lemongrass.

Now, heat 1 tsp of sesame oil, sputter jakhiya seeds. Pour over fish and cover with lid.

Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is the managing editor of the Hindustan Times.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

available in the market—coal, electric, Teflon and gas grills.

“Most important is to have the right safety equipment like apron, gloves, tongs and rods to move the coal. Have bread, sauces and some vegetables and corn to go with the meat and you’re set for a barbecue at home,” he says.

With ostrich, venison and guineafowl on the menu, the grill gets juicier this season rachana.n@livemint.com

SAMAR HALARNKAR

Finishing touch: The tempered seeds release a nutty aroma.

Fire up the coal B Y R ACHANA N AKRA

BY

Marinated rabbit loin with fresh herbs The Grill, The Lalit, New Delhi Serves 6 Ingredients 6 portions of rabbit loin (boneless) 3 sprigs fresh thyme 2 sprigs fresh rosemary 300g French shallots or red onions 60g fresh garlic 100ml olive oil 2 tbsp Dijon mustard

Winter treat: Chef Bicky Ratnani of Aurus, Mumbai, works the grill.

Grand Hyatt, Mumbai. Although the price difference is about tenfold, most chefs don’t mind paying between Rs1,200 and Rs6,000 per kg of imported meat.

Executive chef Mark Wilson, Intercontinental The Lalit, Mumbai, says lamb is his favourite meat for grills as it requires simple marinades. Chicken is bland and needs some herbs and spices, while pork lends itself well to liquor-based marinades. “Where I

come from, barbecue is a national pastime. Most people won’t even use the kitchen for dinner,” laughs the Australian. For those who enjoy barbecue as a social event, Wilson suggests buying the best quality meat one can find. In fact, he gets requests from customers to purchase meat from the hotel sometimes. Nachiket Shetye, chef and owner of East, a pan-Asian restaurant in Mumbai, says there are many kinds of grills easily

Method: Thoroughly mix the chopped garlic, shallots, rosemary, thyme and Dijon mustard and spread over the rabbit loin. Add 100ml olive oil and cover the dish with cling film. Refrigerate for 24 hours. Cook over a charcoal grill for about 8-10 minutes and serve with bread and choice of grilled vegetables.

Pork chops with ‘achar’ jus and green apple butter Tote on the Turf, Mumbai Serves 4 Ingredients 1.5kg pork chops

100g each of ginger and garlic 40g kasturi methi (fenugreek leaves) 4g nutmeg 100g sugar 200ml white wine 40g mango achar (pickle) 200g pork sausages 1l chicken stock 1kg onion 1kg carrot 250g celery 200ml sunflower oil 150ml olive oil 200g butter 200g green apple 3 tsp salt and pepper each Method: Make ginger-garlic paste, add kasturi methi, nutmeg powder, salt, sugar, pepper and olive oil. Marinate the pork chops in this mixture and let stand for at least 3-4 hours. Grill the chops to order. For the sauce, sauté onion, carrot, celery in sunflower oil and add the white wine. Reduce the white wine by half and add the pork sausages and chicken stock.

Reduce the liquid on a low flame till it is of sauce consistency. Finish with puréed mango achar. Adjust the seasoning and strain. For the green apple butter, boil the apple with water and sugar till soft. Purée it and season with salt, pepper and sugar. Slowly cook the purée and incorporate clarified butter. To serve, pour the achar jus around the chop and put a dollop of apple butter on top.

www.livemint.com Every Monday, catch Cooking With Lounge, a video show with recipes from well­known chefs, at www.livemint.com/cookingwithlounge