Lounge for 16 Oct 2010 by HT Media

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

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Saturday, October 16, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 41

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Karsevakpuram, Ayodhya, on 30 September, the day of the verdict.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH CHAMPAGNE TAITTINGER’S PIERRE EMMANUEL TAITTINGER >Page 8

CAMEL SAFARI

Sport a statement accessory in these warm, buttery tones to be with the trend this season >Page 6

The Ayodhya postscript

Sunil Khilnani on why you should be troubled by the verdict on the Babri Masjid dispute >Page 10

THE GOOD LIFE

OUR DAILY BREAD

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE SAFETY PIN SORORITY

he most important thing on my person is not what you think. Not diamonds or an iPhone; not my wallet or my house keys. It is a safety pin. Around my neck I wear what Tamilians call a thali, which is more commonly called a mangalsutra. This is a simple but thick gold chain with a rectangular pendant, embossed with different symbols based on family traditions. Mine has a tulsi-katte, or tulsi-madam... >Page 4

STALL ORDER

SAMAR HALARNKAR

NANDINI RAMNATH

THE FORGOTTEN HERO OF IVF

The Nobel to British biologist Robert Edwards for his work in IVF is a reminder of a tragic Indian story >Page 12

WHEN INDIA COOKS ON TELEVISION Going through the ‘Masterchef’ grind, with a bullying host, are cooks who don’t want to be famous chefs >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

FISH, SPORT AND THE HINDU IDEAS IN GREAT RED FRUIT ANIMATION

irst Lava Kusa and now Ramayana–The Epic (what other kind is there?). Now that the Allahabad high court verdict on the Ayodhya case is out, we could expect films such as “Sita ki Rasoi” and “Lakshmanrekha”. Indian animators seem unwilling to move beyond films based on Hindu epics. They also don’t seem to be worried—or even aware—that their films are propagating the world view of only one faith. Animation is supposedly one of the fastest growing industries in India. >Page 17

PHOTO ESSAY

TEN TO TAKEAWAY

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | PRIDE OF INDIA COLLECTION

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

FRIENDSHIP AND FAIRY TALES KAMAL KISHORE/PTI

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)

atching our team win the 4x400m women’s relay at the Commonwealth Games earlier this week reminded me of a faraway story that was recently updated. Once upon a time there were two girls (born one month apart) who studied at the same convent school. Their paths rarely crossed until they were eight or nine years old, at which time they were both selected to be part of the school’s athletics team. At first, they were wary of each other, and even though they were both the youngest members of the school team that travelled to another state for a month-long, intensive athletics camp, they never really bonded. Many years later, when they were inseparable, one of the girls had a favourite story about those days: “She was FULL CIRCLE such a crybaby. Once we were playing ball, I threw, she didn’t catch, and she just started wailing.” She had such a big butt, the other would say. Nobody remembers the exact moment the wind changed, but soon enough they became best friends. They trained before school, spent the day together and then jumped on the phone to each other as soon as they reached their respective homes. They fought often; it was always easy to tell when—because on those days, their home phones never rang. They became teenagers, and fell in and out of love with the speed of the sprinters they had become. Luckily, they were both attracted to

pieces in the set. Hallmark allows you to place orders by post, over the phone or online at www.prideofindiacollection.com. Each set comes with a lacquered wooden chest (that you can have your name engraved on), handling gloves, a collector’s album, and a special edition of the book Enchanting India. A certificate of authenticity seals the extravaganza.

The notsogood

her life and married him. Now, the two girls had more than a silver jubilee friendship. But that was a few years ago. Nobody remembers the exact moment the wind changed. They became almost-strangers. They rarely met or spoke, and when they did, even their mothers, who could not understand this new non-relationship, pretended nothing had changed. Then, last year, one friend discovered she was pregnant again—unplanned, she said. By the time her baby girl was four months old, the other friend found out that her adoption application had been cleared and that she would be the mother of a daughter—also four (or maybe five) months old. Who knows, maybe the two baby girls will run a relay like their mothers once did?

Some stamps don’t lend themselves to metal engraving. Faces are the most difficult to replicate—which means that Madhubala looks like a poor imitation of herself. If you’re prone to ordering things before they “hit the market”, you’re late on this one. Hallmark has been marketing these sets on a one-to-one basis since 2008. Around 4,300 sets have already been The good stuff sold. However, The craftsmanship is with the Comimpressive: The ingots monwealth retain the dimensions Games traffic, of the original stamp. A t a t h i c k n e s s o f Golden clone: An ingot and its original, the company released the 2.2mm, their average the Kishangarh stamp issued in 1952. first set of weight is 31g. What makes this collection even advertisements earlier this week. The delivery time for these sets starts more special though is the selection of the stamps themselves. Weaving in six months on since they’re manufaceverything from historic events to cul- tured only once an order is placed. So if tural icons, it’s a history of India you plan this as a gift, plan ahead. through philately. There’s Gandhi and Tagore; Kathakali dance from Kerala Talk plastic and Kishangarh miniature art from The entire set costs `1.67 lakh. HallRajasthan. A Pride of India—Part II is mark offers an EMI (equated monthly instalment) scheme so you can pay on the cards. The stamp issued to celebrate Satya- `6,700 a month and receive one ingot at jit Ray’s Oscar award is the largest in a time till your set is complete (individthe set. It has a portrait of Ray as well ual ingots are not sold). For an upfront as a still from his film, Pather Panchali. payment of `67,000, you can avail of a This, along with the Kishangarh minia- fast delivery option. ture of Radha and a stamp depicting Buddha, make for the most striking Anindita Ghose

Write to lounge@livemint.com

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Miles ahead: (from left) Sini Jose, Ashwini Akkunji, Manjeet Kaur and Mandeep Kaur, who won the gold in women’s 4x400m relay. different types of idiotic boys. The only love that overlapped was their love for their superwoman trainer. Before they knew it, they had graduated from the same college, the days of winning inter-school relays (they ran first and third so they never really passed the baton to each other), the many adventures of state athletics camps and the thrill of participating in the nationals, just a collection of growing-up memories. One of them ended college with a broken heart, one found the love of her life and eventually married him. When the unmarried friend returned from her postgraduate stint in the US, it was time for the married friend to move base there. But they remained connected. By the time the married friend returned from the US several years later, with a broken heart and a young son, the one who was in India had met the love of

magine the archways and minarets of the Taj Mahal delicately engraved; a battle scene featuring Rani Lakshmibai, sword held high; and Madhubala’s dazzling smile frozen in time—all in stampsized ingots of gold. The Pride of India collection is the first stamp ingot collection ever produced in India. Twenty-five stamps shortlisted by experts at the National Archives of India have been minted in pure Swiss silver (.999), their perforated edges diamond-cut, and plated with 24 carat gold. An initiative of the Hallmark Group and issued under the India Post, the collection is limited to 7,500 sets. Hallmark, a 30 year-old company headquartered in London, works with governments around the world to produce similar collectors’ editions.

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The quickfix ways of the safety pin sorority

DINODIA

a mangalsutra. This is a simple but thick gold chain with a rectangular pendant, embossed with different symbols based on family traditions. Mine has a tulsi-katte, or tulsi-madam: a raised platform planted with a tulsi bush. Others have shivlings or sudarshana chakras. Maharashtrians wear a black and gold chain with two vatis, or convex circles. Malayalis wear the leaf or ela thali, a custom prevalent even among Syrian Christians. Konkanis wear three gold chains that they call mani, or muhurtmani. Gujaratis and Marwaris, as becoming of rich business communities, wear a diamond pendant. The chain is meant to be long so that the pendant falls deep into a woman’s chest, hidden from prying eyes. Hindu women wear a thali as a symbol of their marriage; because they believe it confers longevity on their husbands. This is a fascinating paradox. Hindus, and indeed all Indians, are fatalists—at some level. Yet we all do things that we believe will change fate. Longevity, for instance, is mostly about destiny (not getting run over while crossing the road or falling prey to dengue) and good genes. Yet, later this month, scores of women in north India will fast all day and watch the moon rise before eating a morsel, all for the longevity of their husbands. The more evolved couples fast together: The husband fasts for his wife’s longevity and vice versa. Wearing a thali or mangalsutra also conforms to the same rationale. Hindu women wear a thali so that their husbands live long; so that they

can die a sumangali, and not a widow. No Hindu woman that I know of in my mother’s generation ever removes her thali. Several Hindu women of my generation do. Many don’t wear the thing at all for all the reasons that I elaborate on below. For modern, professional, global women, the thali is an issue. Some think it is unfair that Hindu men don’t have to wear anything that shows they are married. Why do only women have to wear the sindoor, toe rings and the thali, asks one. Why don’t men wear a noose-like thali around their necks that shows they are taken? Some women dispute the whole notion of thali as a symbol of fidelity. At the most fundamental level, fidelity comes from your heart and soul, they say. Just because a woman doesn’t wear a thali doesn’t mean she is any less married. From a more frivolous point of view—and this, in fact, may be the main reason why women of my generation shun the thali—this long gold chain simply doesn’t go with modern attire. It spoils the “look”, as Rajinikanth might say. When you wear a sleeveless minimalist black dress with a plunging neckline, the last thing you want is a thick gold chain dangling down the front. It distracts from the line of the dress, your neck and pretty much every accessory you wear. The thali competes and takes away from the delicate pendants that most young women prefer. The easiest solution is to lock away the thali in a bank and pull it out for weddings and special occasions.

For her: Most Hindu women sport some mark of marriage, such as a mangalsutra or sindoor. I have been tempted to do this. Yet, I wear a thali pretty much every day—except when I go skydiving or scuba-diving—for one simple reason: because it is important to the people I care about. My mother, for one, would be appalled if I removed it. As would my mother-in-law and every elderly aunt of mine. You could say that I am a conformist. Or a sap. I don’t like it, but I wear the darn thing. Someday, I announce to my mother, I will renounce all jewellery. All jewellery, I underscore. She doesn’t get the undercurrent of my message. Turns out the thali is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to several websites, the tradition of tying a thali originated sometime in the sixth century. Before that, a yellow bracelet or protective cord called kankana-bandhana was tied around both the bride and groom—a sort of equal opportunity knot. Nowadays, the mangalsutra is supposed to bind

the woman and man for a lifetime. There is one huge benefit to wearing a thali though; and that is the two safety pins that I string through it. This again is a normal south Indian practice. Go to any village and you will see women with a cluster of safety pins nestling against their thali. These safety pins serve a multitude of purposes and are the south Indian equivalent of a Swiss army knife. Consider the numerous ways these safety pins are used in the normal course of my day. To hang clothes out to dry on the balcony railing in the absence of a clothespin. To pin together jeans, cushions or handbags when the zipper breaks. To loosen seams or to rip out stitches. To clip saris on the shoulder. As a earbud in an emergency. To excavate all manner of things that are stuck.

To clean combs. To poke through shower holes and increase the water flow. Sure, the safety pins beep when you walk through airport security checks. Sure, it looks funny when your thali inadvertently falls out and you have a cloud of pins hanging off it. But to the women who belong to this Safety Pin sorority, wearing a thali makes complete sense, not only for the long life of their husbands, but also for the toolbox that is at their disposal whenever they need it. Shoba Narayan wonders if a thali made entirely of strung-together safety pins will take off—or hold water—with the matriarchs in her family. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns on www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

Fish, sport and the great red fruit SAMAR HALARNKAR

A light curry based on puréed tomatoes can be high on taste and health benefits

ou say tomato, yuck? I say 60 minutes in the pool with delicious bingeing and no weight gain. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a bit rueful watching the parade of lithe, toned bodies on display all this month, all sinew, power and passion. Regret does not come easy to me, but I felt a gentle tinge for the first time in my otherwise happy life as I asked myself: Could I not have been more athletic earlier in life? The simple answer is “no”. Like most Indians, I did not accord sport high priority. Indeed, I did not accord it any priority. So, I spent most of my life a slob, allowing sundry back ailments to strike me down whenever I felt like serious physical activity. The big change really came only after I turned 40. I was 86kg, and my lower back had broken down for the fourth time. Gradually, I had clawed my way back to good health through a combination of rigorous back exercises and swimming. It wasn’t smooth sailing. My weight ballooned again because I ate vast quantities of food after swimming. Gradually, I learned to mix it up, combining

swimming with walking, light weights in the gym, and, later, running. Making my own food helped enormously. I learnt to sense what my brain craved (pork, mutton, brain) and balance it with what my body needed (fish, chicken, greens). I am happy to report that thanks to my constant fiddling in the kitchen, I’ve now settled into a reasonable, healthy diet without ever consulting a dietitian. My latest challenge came just before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. My back had its latest setback, and my orthopaedic surgeon—who, over the years, has guided me through most of my lumbar issues (if you’re reading this Dr Magazine, thank you)—suspended my running. He was never a big fan of running anyway, so he was unimpressed when I protested. Swimming, I said, was boring and just did not deliver the benefits that running did. “So?” he frowned, unimpressed. “Swim for 1 hour, or 2.” After a great burst of effort, I am happy to report that in just over a month, I gained enough stamina to swim 60 minutes freestyle without stopping. Yet I haven’t gained weight and I feel fitter and lighter than ever before.

Wonder gravy: The trick is to use fresh tomatoes, always, and fresh spices and herbs. This fish takes only a teaspoon of olive oil. Since there is no way I can cut back on dead animals, I started fiddling with the ingredients. Like my family, fish is my No. 1 option. Pork or mutton follow. But the fish option isn’t easy for the Halarnkars because like all coastal folk, we like it fried or soaked in a calorie-heavy coconut milk curry. I have found a powerful new ally, the humble tomato. I’ve been using flavoured purées to great effect with grilled chicken, pork or mutton chops, but as the recipe below indicates, I’ve now cracked the really big one—fish. This is significant because as much as I made other meats healthier, I could never get myself to abandon coconut milk (I still cannot; I’ve just reduced its use) in fish. If you didn’t

already know, the humble tomato—you do know it’s a fruit, not a vegetable?—is vastly underrated. It delivers an array of health benefits, the most well known being its store of lycopene, a cancer-fighting agent. Science regularly uncovers more properties in the tomato. It also helps in fighting heart disease and lowering levels of cholesterol. But how much taste can you impart to a curry that’s based on lightly done, puréed tomatoes? As I discovered, rather a lot. The trick is to infuse the purée with fresh spices and herbs. And never use canned tomato purée. At least I don’t. Canned purée has a distinct tinge of preservatives. It takes no more than 5 minutes to make a purée, but the pleasures

HUNGRY PLANET | CHEF EDGAR LEON

Talking tuber Salty chocolate, llama milk, compotes and other tasty secrets of Ecuadorian cuisine B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

······························ hef Edgar Leon is surprised that the most popular American cuisine in India is Mexican. “Not even Peruvian? The dishes are so similar to Indian food!” exclaims the Cordon Bleu chef from Ecuador. On his first visit to India, Leon speaks to Lounge about the variety in his native cuisine. Edited excerpts:

What is the essence of Ecuadorian cuisine? Ecuador has four main regions: the Galapagos, the coast, the Andes highlands and the Amazonian rainforests. The food varies greatly from region to region. The costeños (people living on the coast) eat a lot of seafood. Plantain and peanuts form the basis of a lot of dishes. The serranos from the highlands like potatoes, meat and lot of grains. In the Amazon, they eat a lot of tubers, like tapioca, yuca (cassava), flowers like artichoke and heart of palm. Describe a typical day’s meals. Lunch is the most important. In the coast, a traditional breakfast will be salprieta, made with roasted and ground peanuts. In the highlands, it’s mote pillo, made of white corn boiled with eggs, pork, beans and habas (a kind of grain). Lunch is a three-course meal: a soup, the segundo (main course) and then desserts or coffee. In the highland, the most popular soup is

locro. It has 27 varieties, but the main ingredient is potatoes. The main course will be a protein, like pork or beef or fish. Dinners are simple one-course meals. What is the main cooking medium? Traditionally, our cuisine uses a lot of palm oil. But I like to use avocado oil. It’s an Ecuadorian speciality. It has no smell of its own. So it can take on a lot of flavour. It’s a more interesting oil than olive. We even wear avocado oil on the hair, like you use coconut oil. What are the desserts like? We love compotes. There’s a great many fruits in Ecuador, many available only locally—papaya, badea, passion fruit, tomato, berries, apples, naranjilla (pronounced naranhija), tamarind. And what about chocolate? Chocolate in South America is not sweet but salty. It’s used in many main courses. Llama milk is popular, especially among the indigenous people.

What drink pairs best with Ecuadorian food? Beer goes best. We don’t pair the drinks. Rather, after meals you usually sit back with a beer to relax. That’s the traditional way. The modern cuisine pairs well with red wine, since we use a lot of red meat. A sugarcane-based drink, Aguardiente, is very, very popular. Do you have any Indian restaurants there? There’s a couple of Indian places in Quito (the capital city) and a few Pakistani restaurants, but they are popular because of the cheap beer you can get there. There are no fine-dining Indian restaurants.

Locro de papas (potato soup) Ingredients 1kg potatoes, cut into cubes 1 litre milk 250ml milk cream 1 pound (around 450g) cottage cheese, cut into small dices 1 leek 4 leaves of coriander 40ml avocado oil (if not available, palm oil) 1 onion, chopped 2 cloves of garlic, chopped 2 litres water Salt and pepper to taste Method Chop the leek and sear it in hot oil. Fry the potatoes with the leek. Add water and cook for about 1 hour. Add the cottage cheese followed by milk and lastly the milk cream. Cook till you get the desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with the chopped onion and garlic, fried to a golden brown, and coriander leaves just before serving. It goes best with a slice of avocado.

Equatorial flavours: Chef Edgar Leon.

The Ecuadorian food promotion is on at The Pavilion, ITC Maurya, New Delhi, till 18 October for `2,250 (weekday) and `3,250 (weekend) per person, plus taxes.

of a fresh tomato-based sauce or curry last much longer. After incorporating tomatoes into my meats, I am happy to report that my efforts to tone up post-45 without dieting are bearing fruit, so to say. As before, swimming has indeed increased my appetite, but increased quantities of salad, fruit, nuts and the great tomato keep my weight stable. It’s too late for me to become an athlete, but, despite my battles with my bulges and my back, I feel lighter and healthier than I’ve ever been. The 1-hour-swim barrier will fall, maybe even as you read this, and one day I will start running again.

Baked fish in tomato curry Serves 2-3 Ingredients Kkg fish (I used black pomfret, sliced long, with bone) 4 large red tomatoes Juice of one lime 1 tsp olive oil 1 tsp garlic paste 1-inch piece of galangal (Thai ginger) or normal ginger, finely chopped Salt to taste Roast and grind the following 4 dried red chillies 3 cloves 1 star anise 1 black cardamom (I used a mortar pestle to pound

the roasted spices. You can use a food processor, but that will make the flavour more intense) Method Marinate the fish in salt and lime juice. Place in an oven dish, cover with foil and bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. While the fish is baking, prepare the purée. Chop the tomatoes into half and purée in a food processor. In a large, non-stick pan, gently heat the olive oil. Lightly sauté the garlic and galangal. Add the purée, stir in the roasted, pounded spices. Stir for around 5 minutes till the spices blend with the purée. Add salt, if required (the fish already has salt). Remove fish from oven, drain some of the liquid if you wish and pour the spiced purée over the fish. Discard the foil and bake for another 10 minutes. Ensure you do not overcook the fish. This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is editor-at-large, Hindustan Times. Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

Style

LOUNGE

t Alfred Dunhill: Wood with brassplated rollerball, at UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `38,999.

t Jean Paul Gaultier: Bracelet, at Kitsch, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. `38,000.

RETAIL THERAPY

Camel safari

p Paul and Shark: Handcrafted leather belt for men in camel and white, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `10,990.

t Bulgari: Metal and enamel sunglasses with crystals, at The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; and The Oberoi, New Delhi, `19,600.

Sport a statement accessory in these warm, buttery tones to be with the trend this season B Y R ACHANA N AKRA S EEMA C HOWDHRY

q Gucci: Leather hobo, at The Galle ria, Nariman Point, Mumbai, approx. `1.05 lakh.

rachana.n@livemint.com

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q Stella McCartney: Bag, at Kitsch, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, $1,295 (around `57,900).

t Diane von Furstenberg: Gloves, at Kitsch, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. `16,000.

q Fendi: Leather peeptoe pumps in camel with gold chain, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `43,900.

q Forever21: Boots with chain detailing, at Ambi ence mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `2,099.

u Zara: Woven belt, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; and Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi, `690.

p Paul Smith: Swami crossstrap slipons for men, at UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Banga lore; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `9,500.

t Kenzo: Leather trainers for men, at JW Marriott, Juhu, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `15,000.

STYLE L7

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

WEAVES

Sari sutra MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

This festive season, an event in Delhi offers you the chance to enrich your wardrobe with saris that are not easy to find

Paithani magic: Most Maharashtrian brides want this sari to be a part of their trousseau.

Classic look: (clockwise from left) Delhibased Sanjay Garg with the collection of Chanderis (above) he will showcase at the exhibition; Chimmy Nanjappa (left) and Pavithra Muddaya at their store, Vimor, in Bangalore; and Naina Jhaveri of Vaidehi Sarees in Mumbai.

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

···························· here was a wedding in the family and Naina Jhaveri of Vaidehi Sarees, Mumbai, was keen to wear a Paithani sari. But even in 1989, she found it tough to find an original Paithani in Mumbai. At a friend’s suggestion she travelled to Pune and found one there. “It was a good design but the quality was poor. Within threefour months the zari on the sari blackened,” she recollects. Determined to own a good quality Paithani, Jhaveri travelled to Paithan, near Aurangabad, Maharashtra, to get weavers to make an original sari just for her. It took three-four months and cost her `11,000. That was 1989. Today, a good quality Paithani sari costs `25,000 and women in Delhi may just have a chance to get one for themselves at the Delhi Crafts Council’s annual sari exhibition next week. “This year we have 16 participants bringing various types of saris in Indian weaves to the exhibition. From batik print saris, weaves from Banaras and Bengal, shibori print saris, Chanderi saris, Bandhanis from Jamnagar, weaves from Assam and khadi saris from Andhra, we have tried to include many varieties from different states,” says Kamayani Jalan, honorary treasurer, Delhi Crafts Council, New Delhi. “While the exhibition is a fund-raising exercise for the council, it also aims to showcase innovation within tradition in sari weaves.” This tag line fits perfectly with the kind of work Anuradha Kuli, a master weaver from Assam, does.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Kuli, who retails under the brand name Naturally, belongs to Upper Assam and says her saris are in sync with the traditional Mekhla of Assam. Yet, Kuli brings an innovative touch to each piece she weaves or designs. It is the clever use of threadwork, which seems more elevated than in traditional Mekhlas, that lends a distinct touch to Kuli’s saris. “Each tribe does a variation of the Mekhla and mine follow the patterns and colour palette popular with the Miri tribe of Assam. The colour of my saris is deep maroon or purple.” According to Kuli, it takes 12-35 days to weave and dye one sari and she uses only natural dyes. Some of the common motifs to look out for in her collection are the barfi or diamond pattern, the fan pattern and the gol buti. Her collection will also include saris made from the muga silk yarn. The saris cost upwards of `6,000. Kuli is not the only one adding a special touch to saris. Sanjay Garg, a 2003 graduate in textile design and development from the National Institute

of Fashion Technology and winner of the British Council’s Young Fashion Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 award, has contemporized the Chanderi sari by insisting on simpler patterns, fewer motifs and a finished product that is easier to drape. “Women still believe that the Chanderi sari is one that puffs up. That does not happen with my saris. The silk yarn that my weavers use is de-gummed silk thread. That’s why they drape better.” Garg, who retails under the label Raw Mango, which he also stocks at Good Earth, believes an authentic handloom sari is an heirloom that should be passed from mother to daughter. For the exhibition, he has replaced the traditional zari borders on Chanderis with Mashroo borders. “The challenge has always been to convince the weavers that simpler patterns on a sari do not mean lesser money. Sure, I work with traditional motifs such as the Mughal motif of the Cypress tree or bird motifs but it is how I use them that makes the design contemporary. Besides, I experiment with the colour palette.” He

A CHOWDHURY/MINT

will showcase Chanderis in charcoal, fuchsia, parrot green and haldi yellow colours and will also bring a few saris woven with Merino wool yarn. The Raw Mango range starts from `3,500, with some Chanderis costing as much as `25,000. The basic problem that Garg faces—convincing artisans to change colour palettes and simplify designs—is something that Jhaveri has grappled with too. “Originally, Paithanis came in three or four colours such as mehendi greens, reds and rani pinks. It took convincing over the years to get my weavers to work with pastel shades such as peaches, pinks, blue, etc., and also to use motifs such as tota-maina (birds) and flowers sparingly. I am not in favour of introducing new motifs on these saris because then they will be something else, not Paithanis,” says Jhaveri. She will showcase Ashavalis (brocade saris with vine and flower patterns) in the range of `20,000-41,000, while the more elaborate Paithanis for trousseau collections will start at `50,000.

Just as Jhaveri has seen changes in the way women of today shop for the sari, Chimmy Nanjappa and her daughter Pavithra Muddaya of Vimor, Bangalore, have also seen a huge change in the 35 years that they have romanced the garment. “It is not just the buyers who have changed. Even the weavers are reluctant to work on a sari that takes them two-three months to complete,” says Muddaya. What started out as a means of earning a livelihood in the mid-1970s, when Muddaya’s father died, is now a passion to document the weaves of south India and help weavers earn a livelihood while keeping traditional weaving practices alive. “When we started out, apart from working at the revival of the Molakalmuru (the Kanjeevaram of Karnataka), we started by buying antique saris that temples sold. We then resold these pieces after doing some touch-up— mostly replacing a torn border, repairing damaged embroidery or removing metal stains—on them.” However, by the early 1980s, the mother-daughter duo found that antique saris were difficult to come by. “The old saris where the donors had their names weaved into the pallu were tough to come by and more and more saris with modern patterns, weaves and designs were being donated. So we shifted our focus totally on to the weavers and revival of weaves,” says Muddaya. From Cubbonpet and Kanna saris (Karnataka silk saris), to Lakshadeepa saris (with minakari work from Karnataka), the idea has been to preserve the dying crafts of Karnataka and the south. Vimor’s prices at the exhibition will be in the `3,000-18,000 range. The Saree Exhibition will be on from 18-20 October at Aga Khan Hall, Bhagwan Das Road, New Delhi, from 11.00am-7.30pm.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

PIERRE EMMANUEL TAITTINGER

The bubbly businessman The champagne maker who bought his heritage back believes the drink matches the flavours of Indian gastronomy B Y V EENA V ENUGOPAL ···························· he Taittinger in my glass is delicate and calm while the Taittinger seated next to me is amusing and excitable. It’s definitely a first for me—the names on the bottle of champagne and the business card of my lunchtime companion are the same. But their personalities couldn’t have been more in contrast. While the Taittinger non-vintage we are drinking is pleasant and subtle, Pierre Emmanuel Taittinger, president of Champagne Taittinger, exudes energy and an overwhelming quality of what can only be described as joie de vivre. So much so that I suspect he’s been drinking the stuff all morning. In truth though, Taittinger, who is on a whirlwind, threeday trip to India, has come straight from Mumbai to our lunch at La Piazza at the Grand Hyatt in Delhi. He has tied up with Prestige Wines and Spirits Pvt. Ltd and is launching the champagne here. But we don’t have much of a culture of champagne drinking here, I point out. “That’s going to change. There are many reasons to think that champagne is going to be successful here. It carries values of happiness and celebration and goes well with your gastronomy. Champagne accompanies Indian dishes well because it does not hide the fragrance of the food,” the 57-year-old says. Though it is his first visit to India, it is not his first brush with Indian businesses. For that, we have to go back five years. Though Taittinger was a family that had owned many businesses for generations, in 2005 they decided to sell out. Starwood Capital, the American company, bought the Taittinger businesses. A year later, they decided to put the champagne business on the block. Pierre Emmanuel Taittinger, who was the sole member of the family opposed to the deal with Starwood, decided to bid to buy back the champagne business. Also in the fray was Vijay Mallya’s United Breweries. When Taittinger’s bid was accepted there were cries that the deal was unfairly given because of French nationalism. “We offered the best cheque and that’s why we got the deal. It was a fair competition and it had nothing to do with nationalism. The newspapers said that but it was wrong and the first proof of that is the fact that a few weeks after the deal, Lakshmi Mittal bought Arcelor,” he says. He met Mallya a few months later. “We had a friendly conversation and he understood well that I wanted to buy my name and my company. He said to me your fight was right and I can’t blame you for wanting to keep your heritage. I think he has a good opinion of me even though I am a small man compared to him. We spent 3 or 4 hours together in Paris,” he says. Unlike most foreign brands that are launching in India now because of the drop in sales volumes in other markets, Taittinger says he is not in India to drive up turnover for his cham-

pagne. In fact, his business is not about volumes growth at all. “We depend on nature,” he says. “If we have a good harvest, we produce more. If we don’t, we produce less. I always say that I am not a businessman—if I were a businessman I would do something in real estate, banks or finance. My mission is not to multiply the sales of Taittinger by 10, first of all we don’t have the grapes to make it, but it is to make Taittinger present in all the good places in the world where connoisseurs can enjoy it,” he says. Also at odds with the industry is Taittinger’s dismissal of scoring systems for wines. “I think we have to leave the wine world out of numbers. The wine world is an art. We don’t give numbers to paintings, we don’t say Picasso is better than van Gogh or van Gogh is better than Rembrandt. It will be nonsense, an insult. It’s the same for wine,” he says, wagging his knife amid mumbling how good our lunch of grilled fish and garlic spinach is. Taittinger has been travelling the world and selling his eponymous champagne for about 32 years now. Though he fought to bring the champagne brand back into the hands of his family, joining the family business was not an obvious choice when he was 24. “I joined the business a little bit by chance. After my military service, I was in the French Alps and I didn’t know what to do. I was discuss-

‘I think we have to leave the wine world out of numbers. The wine world is an art... It will be...an insult.’

ing with a friend in a nightclub. He said you have the name of Taittinger, you are charming, enthusiastic and charismatic. Why don’t you work for the champagne company? I asked, are you sure? He said yes. And I just decided,” he says. Taittinger started as a salesman paid only on commission, not even compensated for expenses for five years. “No car, no telephone. I started without knowing anything really. I got married. Progressively I grew in the company. Now I’ve spent all my life with Taittinger,” he says. Life has come full circle now for Taittinger and legacy clearly is important to him. He could not sit back and watch the Taittinger name being taken over by another company and now that he has regained it, he has firmly re-established it as a family business. Of his three children, two—his son Clovis and his daughter Vitalie—work with him. “The sale was a big tragedy for me. We have a great sense of history, we have wine cellars in Taittinger that are more than 1,500 years old—historic Roman cellars. I think the extended family is pleased that I have bought it back. I always tell myself that I am not in front of my wine, I am behind it. I’ll die one day but the champagne will go on,” he says sombrely. But in the next instant he raises his glass, drinks up the champagne and launches into a raunchy conversation about the links between champagne and sex; and death, fittingly, seems distant and improbable. Write to lounge@livemint.com

IN PARENTHESIS Taittinger is famously quoted as saying the only competition for champagne is from Viagra. Here’s more Taittingerspeak on the champagnesex correlation: “I have been drinking champagne nearly every day for nearly 40 years. The only problem is when we drink a bit of champagne for lunch then we want to make love in the afternoon. Sometimes it is a problem.” “The girlfriends of Louis XVth discovered that when the king was drinking champagne he was in a good shape to ‘take care’ of them.” “The Japanese market for champagne is led by women. When their husbands drink Scotch whisky or cognac, they are tired when they reach home. But when they drink champagne, they are still able to perform.” “Today we don’t speak enough about pleasure. We are far too serious with life. But we have to make love. That’s why champagne is necessary.”

The legatee: Though he has been the keeper of the Taittinger legacy for 32 years, he joined the family busi ness by chance.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

Play

LOUNGE BOARD GAMES

Quick on the draw

With Facebook apps and a special Indian edition, ‘Pictionary’ is celebrating its 25th anniversary in style

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

···························· n 1985, 24-year-old Rob Angel, then working as a waiter in Seattle, US, borrowed $35,000 (around `15.5 lakh now) from his aunt and uncle to launch a new board game he’d devised. For nearly four years, he’d been tweaking and testing the basic idea at parties—he would open the dictionary to a random word, and attempt to draw illustrations for friends so they could guess what the word was. In spite of a disastrous “launch party”, where Angel and his two start-up partners Gary Everson and Terry Langston managed to sell only 42 copies out of a batch of 1,000 they’d prepared, the game took off

LOUNGE REVIEW | NOKIA X2

Loud and clear Nokia’s new budget phone isn’t just a decent musical device. It might yet become a harbinger of social change

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

···························· like to call it “ringtone rage”. It’s a social phenomenon well known to users of public transport. It involves, usually, a man aged between 26-45 boisterously sharing the earworm du jour with other unwilling denizens of his bus/train/ metro compartment. As a form of communal entertainment, this sometimes works. But the biggest problem with this practice has, so far, been the dodgy quality of speakers on budget feature phones. They tend to prefer pure volume over balance, and could probably convert even the staunchest of drum and bass to soundscapes of blackboard-scratching treble. The Nokia X2 is the solution to this problem. It’s probably the

eventually. For the last two-anda-half decades, Pictionary has been eliciting groans of despair and squeals of joy in family gatherings and drunken parties alike. It has sold over 30 million copies in 42 languages, and Angel managed to buy that “nice car” he’d always wanted. The game has spread its tentacles to TV shows, video games and competitive world championships. The basic formula has remained intact throughout—teams take cards with words written on them, and one team member must draw scribbles within a time limit for partners to guess. The sketcher is not allowed to speak. Descriptive words such as “grape” or “ice cream” are easy enough, but try drawing “rejuvenate” within 60 seconds. Pandemonium ensues when an “All-Play” is triggered—this is when sketchers from all the teams draw simultaneously, and guesses fly furiously. Angel has since designed only one more game—a tepid Rorschach test-inspired family title called ThinkBlot, where players attempt to find images in strange ink patterns. Pictionary turns 25 this year, and Mattel is unveiling a number of fresh takes on the formula.

world’s most portable boom box, featuring a pleasingly loud, but remarkably solid set of stereo speakers on its back. We tested sound quality with an eclectic playlist, and found it quite impressive for a phone-embedded set. Bass performance wasn’t always exemplary, but the sound was consistently rich (comparatively speaking), and never grating. “Remarkably solid” describes many aspects of the X2—not all of them good. Its design, for instance, is a half-hearted attempt to move away from Nokia’s trademark bland sturdiness. The back of the phone is all brushedmetal and curvy, but the front sticks to a spartan, straightline geometry that looks disappointingly plain. The blackand-red colour variant is the better of the two available options—making up in vibrancy

DRAWN TO LIFE Like the ‘Pictionary’ brand of gloriously silly fun? Here are four more games you’ll enjoy PHOTOGRAPHS

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

Picture this: (above) A classic game of Pictionary; and the new ‘Indian’ cards. A digital version of the game is being launched for social networking site Facebook. While drawing with the mouse isn’t quite the same thing as scribbling with a pencil, Facebook Pictionary manages to retain the addictiveness of the original, allowing you to play in short bursts with your friends. This version also allows two-player mode (unlike the original, which requires a minimum of two teams of two). The company is also launching a special Indian edition of the game that includes a separate set of 50 cards with Indiacentric words. These include understandable choices such as “Mahatma Gandhi” and “kulfi” and curiouser ones such as “Dhyan Chand” and “Ram Teri Ganga Maili”. “We estimate that around 300,000 families play Pictionary in India,” says Rahul Bhowmik, head of marketing for Mattel Toys India. “The international variant of Pictionary was introduced back in 2003, and proved to be an instant hit among a wide-ranging audience.”

Telestrations (2009, Funagain Games) ‘Telestrations’ is a clever variation on the ‘Pictionary’ theme, with the potential to generate much more craziness than the original. All the players pick words, draw them simultaneously, then pass their drawings to the player next to them. They must then try and guess what the drawing they’ve been handed represents, and pass on the guess to the next player, who has to now draw the guess. Hilarity ensues. Dixit (2010, JeanLouis Roubira) ‘Dixit’, the 2010 winner of the Spiel des Jahres (“Game of the Year”, a popular German board game award), is ‘Pic tionary’ for the talka tive. Players become “storyteller” in turns, and construct a story based on images in a set of randomly drawn cards. Other players attempt to guess what the core images are, depending on the clarity of the said story. But how exactly do you construct a coherent tale with pictures of a woman playing a violin, a magnifying glass examining a hand, and what appear to be two people falling through the air? Identik (2006, William Jacobson and Amanda Kohout) In ‘Identik’, players take turns to be the “Art Director” who has to describe to the other players a bizarre image he/she draws out of a deck of cards. Players have to draw their interpretations based purely on the Art Director’s verbal description. Once time is up, they exchange drawings and a set of criteria for judgement is decided—at which point each player becomes a judge of how well the other “art ists” did. Scribblenauts (2009, 5th Cell) ‘Scribblenauts’ is reverse ‘Pictionary’. It’s a won derfully whimsical video game for the Nintendo DS where you write in the name of any object you can think of, from “sledgehammer” to “jet pack”. Said object appears in the game for your character to use to solve puzzles. A tobe released sequel, ‘Super Scribblenauts’, adds support for adjectives...just in case you needed a “giant baby” to fight that “radioactive spider” you just spawned.

what it lacks in elegance. The silver-andblue just looks tacky. The design reinforces the sheer toughness of the phone—it’s hard and wellconstructed, and could possibly survive many environmental hazards. Typing feels like exercise, and takes a little getting used to. Elsewhere, the X2 runs the familiar S40 Symbian operating system. The music player is functional, and the OS connects to Nokia’s Ovi Store for any apps you might require. The 5-megapixel camera is excellent, though the addition of auto-focus would have been welcome. Perhaps this is a fallout of the flood of inexpensive Indian mobile brands eroding Nokia’s market, but the company seems eager to shoehorn as many “highend” features as it can into its new line of budget phones. The X2 is no exception—it has BlueTwo views: The X2 comes in two colour variants—red/black (pictured) and silver/white.

tooth connectivity, a full-fledged Web browser and a message-client for email. Most of these run smoothly, with no visible lag even while the music player is active. Battery life is good, and there are no visible problems with call quality or reception. You may have noticed that this review has tempered every positive aspect of the X2 with a “But..” disclaimer. We’ve mentioned in Mint reviews before that Nokia phones are no longer purchased out of excitement, but after a cold calculation of what gives you the best value for money. The X2 doesn’t change that situation. It’s a competent phone, but not an exciting one. But it does give you solid software in a solid shell for `5,899. At that price, it’s a great choice as a budget “music” phone, beating other new entrants such as Sony Ericsson’s Spiro or the Micromax X505. And let’s not forget its important social role—in lessening the pain of ringtone rage, it might make commuting easier on all of us.

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SUNIL KHILNANI WITH ITS VERDICT ON THE BABRI MASJID DISPUTE, THE ALLAHABAD HIGH COURT MOVED BEYOND THE REALM OF JURISPRUDENCE, AS THE NATION LOOKED TO THE SENSEX FOR SALVATION. AYODHYA’S HARM CAN’T BE UNDONE BY THE WEALTH OF ECONOMICS OR PRINCIPLES OF LAW, BUT BY THE STRUGGLES AND INVENTIONS OF OUR POLITICS

THE SENSEX CAN’T HEAL

AYODHYA’S WOUNDS

Conflicting moods: Ayodhya on 22 September. Security was beefed up before the high court verdict.

PHOTOGRAPHS

fortnight ago, as the Allahabad high court handed down its judgement on the disputed title to the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Sensex was hovering at an all-time high. While the lead-up to the Ayodhya judgement generated much speculative punditry, for many the more mind-focusing predictive issues concerned the market. Visitors to GaneshaSpeaks.com could take counsel from the “Fortune Mantra” for 30 September: “No matter how good a dealer you are at the stock market, make sure you refer to your birth chart for the yogas in your main horoscope once & move ahead according to the planetary positions...People with birth dates 9, 18 & 27 should wear ‘3 mukhi + Ganesha rudraksh’.” In the wake of the Ayodhya verdict, some have taken hope from the apparent ease with which India’s reservoirs of faith seem to have been rechannelled from mandir to mandi. A new faith seems to be emerging: Economism, the belief that India’s steady economic growth will lift us away and out of all the political vexations we face. Reactions to the Ayodhya judgement have been interesting to watch. For a start, political and intellectual reactions have diverged. In political circles, the response was relatively muted—there was little effort to revive the street mobilization the issue evoked in the past, and even the main political parties were somewhat hesitant to declare too clear a position on the verdict, happy to stay foggy on whether to see the judgement as a “victory” or “defeat”. The commentariat, however, has been more divided and declaratory: some seeing the judgement as a fatal blow to constitutional secularism and as a denial of minority justice—a “second demolition”; others finding in it deft legal rope-trickery which could achieve a peaceable compromise. And the media, while patting itself on the back at not having been inflammatory in its coverage, nevertheless did all it could to try to stoke a Punch and Judy show across its talk-shops. We should all be troubled by the Ayodhya decision—but troubled in a way that does not hasten us into self-righteous claims about what would have been the right or appropriate decision. We should be troubled not least because no possible verdict would have offered resolution—each would have been troubling in different ways: in terms of strict justice, recognition of religious realities, or the maintenance of social peace. Even the judgement’s one potential virtue—that it may have helped to dampen the chance of violent reactions—is itself troubling: because while this is an entirely desirable outcome, it was reached by dispiriting means. The fact is, we’ve once again shunted over to the courts questions and tasks that they are neither designed to fulfil, nor should have to. This increasing reliance on the courts parallels our increasing resort to military and paramilitary forces to deal with domestic dissent. In both cases, the inflated demands we place on the judicial and coercive arms of the state are a symptom of a political failure: the failure to sustain a sense of political community across our citizenry. Why should we be troubled by the Ayodhya verdict? First, at least from a preliminary reading of what is a very long and often digressive trio of judgements, it seems in the first instance to be a failure of the judiciary even on its own terms. The high court bench seems to have failed to confront frontally the act of

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Positive fallout: (above) Lawyers representing the Ram Janambhoomi Punaruddhar Samiti minutes after the verdict was announced; the Sensex has remained above the 20,000 mark this month.

collective vandalism that destroyed the Babri Masjid in December 1992—and has failed to even seek any reparation for that act, let alone find it. There appears to be no acknowledgement in the judgements that the 1992 demolition was an illegal act—in fact it has said surprisingly little about the events of 1992, which is itself astonishing given that all the court’s discussions about reapportioning possession of the disputed plot turned on the fact that there no longer exists a mosque at the site. Further, and in addition to the court’s silence on the central event that led to the case being moved—the destruction of the Babri Masjid by a mob, watched over and cheered by the top leadership of the BJP, all of whose political if not moral careers directly benefited as a result—the court’s construal and attempt to resolve the questions of ownership and title seems puzzling. It’s hard to see the strictly legal basis for partitioning a plot of land that had been in the possession of the Sunni Waqf Board for a very long time indeed. As such, the judgement offers an unnerving conception of the stability of property rights. But of course, the site in question was not about just any plot of land. And this is where we ask too much of the court, pushing it into domains beyond its proper concern. The site at Ayodhya is at once—to some Indians—a unifying symbol in a religious cosmology and narrative, to others a polarizing and divisive reference in our political and public life, and to still others a (now destroyed) historical monument, part of a common Indian heritage. So, while the verdict has chosen silence on the destructive event that actually provoked the case, it has been voluble on the subjects it is less equipped to pronounce upon: religious geography and archaeological history. The result is a sort of curious cut-and-paste history and theology, which has been inducted into the judgements. Although forced into alien terrain, it does seem a pity that the court chose to set itself up as an arbiter on matters of religion and history. It could perfectly well have acknowledged the existence of deep and widely held beliefs among many (though not all) Hindus about the sacred character of one specific area of the site. Without claiming access to a GPS

that can lead us to the exact address where divine delivery occurred—who really knows the exact spot where our favourite god may have decided to be born?—it could have registered the fact that many do hold such convictions about the precise location, and as such these fellow Indians and their views have a claim to recognition. The right of these Hindus to worship at their preferred site could be recognized and incorporated into the always complicated and the now battered-down architecture of the site—in ways that allow access and use, but without partition. And yet, for all its faults, I am not at all clear that this was a disastrous verdict—as some have claimed. I think it may have been nearer to being the least bad one. Why? It’s on the bad end of the spectrum because I don’t buy the “move on” argument—1992 and all that is just so much blood under the bridge, and anyway aren’t we all now simply interested in getting on economically? So let’s forget about those troublesome, divisive matters, and just get on with the business of getting rich. As long as it catches mice, my cat can pray to any god. Those who in the early 1990s might have rallied to collect bricks for shilanyas are now more interested in the annual percentage rates (APR) for mortgages. All this is true. But this is a fair-weather hopefulness—and dangerously precarious as such. What happens when the economy chokes and stumbles—are we disarming ourselves of protections and remedies we may need when money-making distractions run aground? In this sense, economism as faith is misplaced. On the other hand, I also don’t buy the argument that this was somehow a litmus test case over whether Indian Muslims can reliably expect justice, and fair treatment within our republic. On the Ayodhya matter, it was always far-fetched to expect the courts to render justice to anyone—let alone to Indian Muslims. It is through political determination on the part of political leaders that something more than a symbolic justice might be achieved. The real scandal, it seems to me, is the fact that the recommendations of the Sachar Committee remain, four years on, only superficially addressed. Indian Muslims remain extraordinarily disprivileged in all the crucial

dimensions necessary for a citizen to improve her or his life chances. I think it may be the least bad decision because the fact is that politically, large parts of the country have experienced something of a shift towards the right—especially when it comes to religious feeling (this applies to all believers). As some have noted, a verdict more fulsomely in favour of the mosque would have offered fuel to those wishing to reignite old embers. There is truth to this sort of pragmatism—though it is hardly an ennobling truth. Accepting it is to acknowledge that the shift in our centre of political gravity, in our “common sense”, somehow constrains the operation of our justice system. Yet it underlines another truth: that every struggle for justice takes place in a particular context—one that defines the ecology in which courts can operate, and that provides any legal system with its particular constraints and opportunities, in ways that necessarily deform more abstract principles of justice. I hope that the Allahabad judgement will be challenged in the Supreme Court—and I hope the highest court takes its time over the matter, finding for once virtue in delay. I hope that the Sensex keeps climbing. But any resolution to the Ayodhya-Babri Masjid matter will ultimately be found neither in the courts nor in the markets: neither in legalism nor in economism. Making good the tear in our republic’s fabric that Ayodhya caused will lie not in the wealth of economics or the principles of law, but in the struggles and inventions of our politics. What was done to our sense of political community, in the 1980s by the Congress party, in the past two decades by the BJP, is not something whose legacy we shall easily escape. Poison was thrown into the well. We certainly cannot expect our learned judges to remedy this. It will take a good deal more than even the most immaculate judicial opinions, or the most happily ascendant Sensex, to do that. Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India and is currently working on a new book, India in Search of Wealth and Power. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunilkhilnani

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THE SENSEX CAN’T HEAL

AYODHYA’S WOUNDS

Conflicting moods: Ayodhya on 22 September. Security was beefed up before the high court verdict.

PHOTOGRAPHS

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Positive fallout: (above) Lawyers representing the Ram Janambhoomi Punaruddhar Samiti minutes after the verdict was announced; the Sensex has remained above the 20,000 mark this month.

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Science

LOUNGE

SPOTLIGHT

The forgotten hero of IVF The Nobel to Robert Edwards is a reminder of the tragic story of India’s pioneer in this field

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

···························· n 1997, as T.C. Anand Kumar browsed through the diary of Subhash Mukherjee, he realized that the title he bore—creator of India’s first test-tube baby—belonged to someone else. Dr Kumar, a reproductive biologist, was known for having created India’s first test-tube baby. His collaboration with gynaecologist Indira Hinduja had resulted in the widely publicized birth of Harsha Chawda in Mumbai on 6 August 1986. But going through Dr Mukherjee’s handwritten notes years later, Dr Kumar concluded that Dr Mukherjee had preceded him by eight years: India’s first test-tube baby, Kanupriya Agarwal alias Durga, was born on 3 October 1978 in Kolkata. Since the feat had received almost no acknowledgement from India’s scientific community, Dr Kumar had been unaware of it. When the media was celebrating Dr Kumar’s supposed breakthrough in 1986, Dr Mukherjee wasn’t around to reiterate his claims. Frustrated by the way the Marxist West Bengal government had neglected his research, and harassed by the strong gynaecologists’ lobby that saw his work as a threat, he had committed suicide in 1981. Dr Mukherjee’s story is that of a genius. He pioneered in vitro fertilization (IVF) in India with the aid of some general apparatus and a refrigerator in his Kolkata apartment. He had been drawn to innovative gynaecological surgery from his early days as a medical student. The son of a doctor, he studied at the National Medical College in Kolkata before going to Edinburgh University in the UK for a PhD in reproductive endocrinology. When he returned to India in 1967, he started researching ovulation and spermatogenesis. Within a year, with a team comprising Sunit Mukherji, a cryobiologist, and Saroj Kanti Bhattacharya, a

gynaecologist, he announced the birth of the world’s second test-tube baby. The announcement came only 67 days after the British biologist Robert Edwards had announced the birth of the first test-tube baby in England. But unlike his counterpart, Dr Mukherjee had used a method called cryopreservation to preserve the human embryo. And his method is currently the preferred technique of medically assisted reproduction worldwide. Dr Mukherjee’s achievement was obscured by controversy. The West Bengal government set up an enquiry committee to investigate his breakthrough in 1978. The committee concluded that his claims were bogus, flagging off a cycle of ridicule. He was denied permission to travel to Japan, where he had been invited to discuss his work. In a final act of humiliation, he was transferred to the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, Kolkata, in June 1981. He killed himself within a few weeks. Ek Doctor ki Maut (1991), a National Award-winning film made by director Tapan Sinha on Dr Mukherjee’s life with actors Pankaj Kapur and Shabana Azmi, illustrates the vindictiveness of the institutionally backed gynaecologists’ lobby. The governing thread of their campaign against Dr Mukherjee was his lack of documentation. This is an attack that his collaborator, Dr Mukherji, spiritedly refutes. He says Dr Mukherjee had presented his findings at the International

Congress on Hormonal Steroids at New Delhi in 1978; at the Indian Science Congress at Hyderabad in 1979; and had published a paper in the Indian Journal of Cryogenics in 1978. He had even submitted a report, Transfer of In Vitro Fertilized Frozen-thawed Human Embryo, to the West Bengal government. Eighty-year-old Dr Mukherji, who had grown close to Dr Mukherjee during the course of their work, is still livid as he speaks over the phone from Kolkata. “(The West Bengal government) kept saying that he hadn’t (had) sufficient documentation. What else did they want?” he says. The committee that condemned Dr Mukherjee’s procedure reportedly comprised a gynaecologist, a psychologist, a physicist and a neurologist—none of whom had any knowledge of modern reproductive technology. “He couldn’t handle the politics. He was a scientist, not a lawyer,” says Dr Mukherji, who has edited Architect of India’s First Test-Tube Baby (2001)—a book that chronicles Dr Mukherjee’s work. Dr Mukherji says he was horrified when, year after year, scientists from across the world were lauded for having masterminded one or the other of the several novel techniques that Dr Mukherjee’s team had already used. It was Dr Mukherji who got things rolling when he handed over Dr Mukherjee’s diary— which was in his possession—to Dr Kumar, the man who had the ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

courage to research his predecessors’ findings and scientifically present them to the world. As the former director of the Institution of Research in Reproduction at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), he was also in a position to exonerate Dr Mukherjee of the fraud charges. It was due to Dr Kumar’s efforts, in 2002, that ICMR recognized his work for the first time. It was also around this time that Kanupriya Agarwal, who is now married and goes by the name Kanupriya Didwania, emerged from anonymity. Nobody had known of her till then. Her parents hailed from a conservative Marwari family in Kolkata and had been introduced to Dr Mukherjee through common friends. Facing social ostracization for being childless for 13 years, they’d decided to try assisted reproduction as a last resort. “Imagine the degree of stigma associated with being childless in 1970s India that prompted even my otherwise conventional parents to undergo what was at that time a high-risk experiment,” says Didwania, who works as a brand manager for Perfetti India, splitting her time between Delhi and Mumbai. Didwania’s parents weren’t prepared for the media blitz that came with her birth. After several unsavoury exchanges with the press, including intrusive questions about their sex life, they retreated from the public glare completely. Sometimes, Didwania wonders how different things would have been for Dr Mukherjee if her parents had been more forthcoming. “One can’t blame them though. Somehow my whole family was in the middle of a murky controversy... We were seen as accomplices in a fraud,” she says. Things were so bad that a few days after she was born, Didwania was sent to her grandmother’s place. To maintain her privacy, her grandfather even rustled up a name—“Durga”, since she

was born on the first day of Durga Puja. “Everyone forgot in a couple of months. I didn’t grow up with people recognizing me or my name. And I didn’t speak out. It’s not like science is accorded that sort of importance in our country,” says Didwania. Whatever Didwania’s childhood laments might be, her 25th birthday in 2003—also the 25th anniversary of IVF in India—more than compensated for it. She was flown to Bangalore to be “honoured” at a big conference on IVF that Dr Kumar had organized. India has an estimated 19-20 million infertile couples, according to the World Health Organisation. Though only 10-15% of them can undergo IVF, it is still a `1,000 crore business in India, according to some reports. The recognition for Dr Mukherjee came late but a close circle of friends and supporters are doing their best to secure it for posterity. Apart from his work in assisted reproduction, Dr Mukherjee was ahead of his time in exploring

ways to address family planning and studying transsexuals. Indira Chowdhury, a former archivist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, campaigned to include him in the comprehensive Dictionary of Medical Biography published by Greenwood Press in 2006. His works were discussed in detail at an IVF conference organized by the Brazilian Medical Society in Sao Paulo in 2007. Dr Mukherji and several others also set up the Dr Subhas Mukherjee Memorial Reproductive Biology Research Centre in Kolkata a few years ago and they maintain a website that serves as a resource guide to his work: www.drsubhasmukherjee. com Neither Dr Mukherji nor Dr Mukherjee’s wife, Namita, hold a grudge against the Agarwals for not having spoken out. In fact, Didwania speaks fondly of the two of them as family friends. She recalls how, even after Dr Mukherjee died, Namita would drop by ever so often at the Agarwals’ house to meet “Durga”, her husband’s only child.

Out of the shadows: (clock wise from left) Thirty twoyearold Didwania; a portrait of Dr Mukherjee on his graduation; and Dr Mukherjee addressing a seminar on the popula tion crisis organized by the US Information Ser vice in Kolkata in 1974. Dr Mukherji is seated immediately to his left.

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

SUNIT MUKHERJI

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L13

Travel

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TOPTOTOP

RAPID FIRE

The Schwörers on saving the world, one discovery at a time

SAILING

Around the world in 14 years SWISSNEX

A Swiss family rediscovers travel the oldfashioned way—and plans to save the world while at it

B Y S UMANA M UKHERJEE ···························· ario Schwörer is feeling his way around a basic Nokia cellphone. “I’m not very used to handling these,” he confesses, as he looks to return his wife’s call and ends up dialling his own number. Fair enough. When he left his Davos home in 2002, a world where almost every individual had his personal phone was still the dream of an overambitious sales professional. “That’s what gives me hope,” Schwörer says. “Things one never thought would happen in our time do happen.” Optimism is the watchword of this environmental warrior, who fights the global demon of climate change in the most inspiring way possible: by travelling the world, powered only by solar and wind energy and human effort. When this ski and mountaineering guide (also a qualified river-rafting and canyoning guide, hang-gliding pilot and diver) set out on his change-the-world expedition with wife Sabine, the plan was a four-year project that could stretch to five. Eight years, three babies and 47 countries later,

Mariners’ trail: (top) The Schwörers’ yacht, Pachamama, is powered by renewable energy; and the family enjoys a break in Bangalore. the Schwörers say it could easily be another six years before they return home to Switzerland. “We have learnt never to hurry nature,” says the wiry 42-yearold. “So if the winds die down, we are ready to be stranded in the middle of the ocean—as happened for 10-odd days in the early days of our journey in our sailboat, somewhere between the Easter Islands and Galapagos. The two volunteers who were with us got into a panic, thinking they’ll never see land again, but we unwound, read a

book. It was a holiday for us.” For all the light-heartedness, the Schwörers are fully alive to the seriousness of their mission. The TOPtoTOP Global Climate Expedition, supported by the UN Environment Programme and Switzerland (and sponsored by Victorinox and SGS Group), seeks to collect data and create awareness about climate change, work with NGOs in areas affected by the phenomenon, and contribute to the development and testing of clean energy solutions. To that end, the core team has

sailed around 70,000km, climbed 400,000 vertical metres and cycled around 18,000km. Recently in Bangalore at the invitation of Swissnex—a Swiss government initiative focused on education, research and culture—Schwörer says his experience of local technologies in some of the most environmentally vulnerable parts of the world strengthens his belief that “global warming is not a problem, it is a challenge”. “Prior to cycling from Kolkata to Kathmandu (from where we went on to climb Everest), we were in the Sundarbans. We saw homes that used biogas processed by cattle, and channel waste water into vegetable patches. Our documentation of the successful implementation of these technologies gives donors a reason to put up the $1,000 (around `45,000) required for a filtration plant to treat the groundwater—too salty for drinking after Cyclone Aila (in May 2009)—that will take care of the needs of a whole village,” says Schwörer. Consciously steering clear of the gloom-and-doom line preferred by “TV societies”, TOPtoTOP escorts students out of the

Mountains or the sea? Mountains. So far we’ve climbed the highest peaks in Europe, South America, Australia and Asia. The worst moment of the past eight years. In 2004, when our boat rammed into a container in the southern Pacific, making the rudder unsteady and threatening to break the boat. After the accident, we were stranded in Patagonia (Argentina) for one and a half years. Yacht designer Bernard Nivelt used that time to come up with our selfsus taining boat ‘Pachamama’, which runs on renewable energy. The most exciting environmental discovery. A doublelayered clay pot in Vanuatu, an island nation in the southern Pacific Ocean, near New Guinea. Once water is poured between the two layers, the pot can preserve cooked food for up to seven days. Who needs refrigeration? Having kids on the move. I think it was one of our best deci sions. Salina, 5, was born in the Patagonia, Andri, 3, in Chile and Noé, 1, in Australia. As extreme sportspersons, we were far away from people. The kids made us par ents and opened all doors for us. One move to save the world. I’d say riding a bicycle. We’d be healthier, cities would face less traffic problems, energy would be conserved. Most looking forward to. We’d quite enjoy a regular life though, knowing us, it’d only be a matter of time before we take up another project. Besides, we want TOPtoTOP to have acquired a life of its own by then. classroom and into the lap of nature in “give back” efforts. An Amity institution in New Delhi, for instance, wants to send a few students to help in the Schwörers’ project to clean up the Kilimanjaro in August next year. “Space on our boat, the Pachamama, is limited, but we welcome volunteers to join us in our biking and climbing projects,” says Schwörer, now planning how to catch the trade winds to sail to Africa. Write to lounge@livemint.com

Hail to thee, blithe spirit At the blended whisky headquar ters of Jura, a little superstition goes a long way

B Y A MEETA S HARMA ···························· his is the belief: When someone shakes his guest’s hand after caressing the Ankh on the bottle of Jura Superstition malt whisky and pours a glass, the guest may make a wish—and it will definitely come true,” said Richard Paterson, master blender of Whyte and Mackay in his plush office in Glasgow. I have little faith in such claims, so I laughed nervously. “I assure you, the last person who declared it true won the national lottery,” he said next. I’ve never won more than £10 (around `700) on a lottery ticket so as Paterson held my hand all I could think of was a thistle bloom. Not the thistle seen on Waterford crystal or the one crafted often on pewter, but the beautiful purple blossom held up by a bulb and a thorny stalk. I made my wish and grabbed the whisky poured for a tasting. The Jura liquid was seductive, redolent with a light peaty taste and carrying overtones of the honey and spices of the island I was yet to visit, and I soon forgot my wish. The next day, after a short flight from Glasgow to Islay and then a

GETTING THERE Distillery tours are open only to advance bookings between 1 April and 1 October. Email sue.pettit@whiteandmackay.com to book a tour. Fly from Glasgow to Islay on British Airways, and take the ferry to Jura. Alternatively, stay at Islay and do a daytrip to Jura. Myth maker: The distillery turned 200 earlier this year; and (far left) a bottle of Jura Superstition. 5-minute ferry crossing to Jura, Paterson enquired if we could expect to see a thistle blossom anywhere on the island. “No chance, friend, it’s too early in the season,” was the response. No complaints there, for both Islay and Jura were awash in the bright yellow of gorse. The island of Jura, located off the west coast of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides, has a population of less than 200, and everybody knows everybody else. It is an island ruled by nature, with the distillery sustaining most of its economy. On a facility tour that takes me past enormous active copper stills and hundreds of casks in the dark and damp stockroom, I taste whiskies in var-

ious stages of the maturation process, stored in different kinds of wooden barrels for varying numbers of years. A tour of the island is as gratifying. In the graveyard of the local church, Templar knights are interred alongside more recent residents of the island. In the distance looms the property of a member of the British Parliament, a grand old house that still hosts the lords and ladies of the land in approved Edwardian fashion. The other noteworthy building here is Barnhill, where George Orwell retired in the mid-1940s to write his novel 1984. In Jura to celebrate the 200th

anniversary of the distillery earlier this year, though, my biggest takeaway was a promise. On the island, 180 of us sniffed, inhaled and tasted our way through a dozen casks of whisky before identifying our favourites. Based on our verdicts, Paterson will blend a limited-edition boutique barrel, which will find its way into only 500 bottles. While those of us who contributed to its creation get the first opportunity to buy, the rest will be on sale at the distillery shop—and nowhere else. And what of my thistle bloom? Well, Paterson did spot one blossom. Disregarding his expensive suit, silk tie and polished shoes, he clambered up a

5ft-high wall and, with his spotless old-fashioned white handkerchief protecting his hand from the thorns, plucked me a perfect blossom—delicate and pretty yet stubborn. Do I regret not asking for the lottery? Of course not. The dried thistle, and the photograph of the wall atop which it bloomed, take pride of place in my home, even as I look forward to sharing my personal limited-edition bottle with like-minded friends. After all, I think, how long would money last? And that realization is the real charm of the old-fashioned world of Jura. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Books

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MARKETS

How best to ride the tiger Two Indian Harvard professors offer lasting insights on how to negotiate emerging markets

Winning in Emerging Markets: Harvard Business Press, 246 pages, $35 (around `1,550). STUART CAHILL

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· his is an old story: As the growth in the markets in the West declines, multinational firms scan the landscape, seeking markets where the growth rate is high. They rely on insights from market research. They look at demographic trends. They monitor stock market returns. They assume there is a market niche not yet filled. They believe that their superior quality and systems will take them to a vantage position, and they will be able to command a large market share. Then, they will ride on the crest of the wave—the above-normal rates at which emerging markets grow. And often that fairy tale ends poorly. The mood within the firm sours and the executives conclude that emerging markets are not what the projections had promised: There are bureaucratic hurdles; there are procedural delays; there is local competition; there is corruption and nepotism; the data they had relied on was faulty; and even the stock markets are manipulated. But the grapes aren’t really sour. They can be sweet; they too can produce wine, if only you know how to get it right. The logic of management books is that they observe war stories from the marketplace, analyse commonalities and figure out underlying trends, presenting certain simple principles that can guide business decisions in similar circumstances. The book that lasts for a week at an airport best-seller counter tells you simplistically how everyone can get rich; the book that survives the hype explains the caveats carefully and is honest about limitations. The more such books rely on real-life stories from across the globe, and the more they dissect stories of companies not researched adequately earlier, the more robust their conclusions are. One such book is Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution by Harvard professors Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu. Professors Khanna and

Palepu draw their conclusions from several years of research conducted in China, India and other emerging markets, observing the performance of companies that had found unique ways of succeeding, using the materials in executive education programmes they ran at Harvard, before setting out their hypothesis. The origin of the project goes back to the mid-1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when liberalization had been established firmly in China and was taking root in India. Harvard started a programme for senior executives, about managing global opportunities, and the threeweek programme included one week’s field work in India or China. Professors Palepu and Khanna were among the faculty that taught the course. During a recent conversation at Harvard Business School, Prof. Palepu recalls Ratan Tata speaking to the executive seminar participants about his group’s philosophy. Students who heard him felt a bit underwhelmed. They saw Tata as a sprawling conglomerate, with an interest in many businesses. It looked unfocused. It did not seem to suggest that the sum of its components was bigger than its individual parts. Conglomerates are difficult entities to manage, after all: The East Asian crisis of 1997-98, which I reported for the magazine, Far Eastern Economic Review, had shown that

family-owned companies which had expanded without much thought in apparently lucrative sectors (banking and power generation being two such in Indonesia; property development being another such in Thailand) had suffered hugely. An Internet provider in Singapore also owned a bakery—and didn’t think of offering Internet cafés, thus failing to exploit the one advantage synergy offered on that techsavvy island. One consultant in Singapore had referred to conglomerates as providers of inefficient venture capital in markets without sophisticated financial intermediaries. To be sure, while the dominant view in international management schools is to focus on core competence and “stickingto-the-knitting”, or not deviating from what the firm knows best, there are excellent examples of Western conglomerates—GE being one prime example, and to a limited extent, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is another one. Tata told the Harvard class that he believed there’s a future for a group like his. He understood diversification; he could sense and pick opportunities as they emerged. Tata didn’t rely on his gut instinct, nor on reports of market research firms. But within his large group he had access to market intelligence—through his salesforce, through the people who raised capital for the firm, ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Spread out: Tata saw his conglomerate’s diversity as an advantage.

Tricks of the trade: (above) The Tata Steel factory in Jamshedpur; Krishna Palepu (extreme left); and Tarun Khanna.

through his buyers—and he used that knowledge well. Prof. Palepu says: “That stimulated my interest. Are there different principles for operating in emerging markets?” In the early 1990s, Western management experts told family-owned companies in India to focus, otherwise they’d become someone’s dinner when their sector of the economy would get liberalized. But the more Prof. Palepu talked to CEOs, the more intriguing the question became: Focus on what? The depth of the market in individual segments was often so shallow that if you remain firmly focused, you might become a tiny enterprise. Tata Steel was not a large multinational in those days (the acquisition of Corus was a decade away); Tata Motors’ annual volume of trucks manufactured was about 60,000. Focused multinationals had faltered in emerging markets—think of Hindustan Unilever’s struggles with Nirma; Tang’s inability to replace Rasna; the durability of Thums Up in a market with Coke and Pepsi (Coke dealt with the problem by buying Thums Up, but did not kill the brand). Professors Khanna and Palepu then decided to study the issue further: Are focused companies better than conglomerates in emerging markets? If not, why? And what’s the theory underpinning that? Professors Khanna and Palepu define an emerging market as an economy which is poor and not largely industrialized;

where capital markets have few listed stocks, low turnover, and a low capitalization compared with the country’s gross domestic product; and yet the economy has opened, and shown growth potential. The key to succeed, Prof. Khanna told me during a recent conversation in London, is that a successful business from an emerging market is prepared to deal with the hand that history has dealt. This means coping under circumstances where support structures are missing. Professors Khanna and Palepu call these “institutional voids”. These are transaction facilitators, such as institutions providing financial intermediation, as well as law firms; credit enhancers, which include credit rating agencies; information analysers, which include market research firms and consultancies, as well as consumer magazines; and unbiased adjudicators, such as regulators and court systems. The choice for the firm is: replicate or adapt; compete or collaborate; accept, or attempt to change the market; and enter or exit such a market. Drawing on a rich database of examples, they set out strategies for companies that are context-specific, and not one-size-fits-all. There is one danger, though: Emerging markets are informal, and in such informality, relationships are also informal and opaque. The Chinese have a word for it, guanxi, or connections. The informality in relationships in emerging markets is built on trust, and such trust

often means businesses deal with other businesses from the same clan, community or creed. The fine line between specialization and nepotism gets blurred. Prof. Palepu says that ethnic trust of this sort substitutes the formal trust as understood in the West—where you trust, but there is also the threat to sue. Given that you have to deal with the hand dealt to you, what do you do? You create your own knowledge. Companies such as China’s Haier have shown innovative ways of marketing freezers, with separate freezers for ice cream and other foods (so that the ice cream doesn’t need to be thawed or microwaved before your spoon or your teeth can sink into the scoop). Zain, a West Asia-based telecommunications company, has optimized software for dynamic charging. Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical firm, has capitalized on the huge concentration of PhDs in Israel. An employment intermediary in India, which tests candidates, vouches for their calibre and acts as a clearing house for companies looking for employees for the less high-profile sectors of the economy. The book abounds in anecdotes of this kind. These companies’ strengths lie in making things work inside the group; applying capital properly; monitoring performance; making sure that the company’s reputation remains intact so that it can attract talent and be a desired joint venture partner. If the company gets these basics right, then even if contract enforcement is not perfect in the country, partners will come, and opportunities will grow. That’s how you add the value that the economy subtracts. Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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FREEDOM | JONATHAN FRANZEN

STORIES: ALLNEW TALES |

King of suburban angst

Creative common

EDITED BY NEIL GAIMAN & AL SARRANTONIO

JOE KOHEN/AFP

An anthology of imaginative stories by new voices in the ‘scifantasy’ genre B Y S AMHITA A RNI ························································ n the introduction to Stories: All-New Tales, Neil Gaiman, one of the most popular contemporary fantasy writers, articulates his frustrations with the field of commercial fantasy—finding it overrun with Tolkien-esque epics and Robert E. Howard (of Conan the Barbarian fame) imitations. Gaiman’s comments echo an earlier essay, Epic Pooh by Michael Moorcock, who lambasts the works of both Tolkien and Howard, arguing for fantasy that goes beyond the comforting and “infantile” charms of works by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Richard Adams and A.A. Milne. Moorcock’s ideal fantasy would be fresh, well-written and “force” the reader to ask questions. In his short story, part of this anthology, and (appropriately enough) also titled Stories, Moorcock writes about a group of idealistic editors and writers who seek “to write something that has the vitality of good commercial fiction and the subtle ambition of good literary fiction…stuff that would get us high with the sense of enthusiasm and engagement of Proust or Faulkner but with the disciplined vitality of genre fiction pulsing from each and every page.” That, for the most part, seems to be the unacknowledged guiding spirit of Stories: All-New Tales. Editors Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, influenced by Moorcock’s views but clearly not as extreme in their tastes, are careful not to bracket the anthology in the fantasy genre. However, many of the authors are well-known “sci-fantasy” writers: Diana Wynne Jones (Howl’s Moving Castle), Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun), as well as Gaiman (The Sandman graphic novels) himself. Crime writer Walter Mosley also contributes a story. There’s a prickling of “literary” writers who don’t fall into a specific genre: Joyce Carol Oates, Chuck Palahniuk and Roddy Doyle. All the tales are page-turners. Stories: Some, such as Jonathan Carroll’s Hachette India, Let the Past Begin, possess the germ 432 pages, `595. of an intriguing idea, but go no further, hindered by the demands of plot and the constraints of the short story format. Other stories such as Peter Straub’s Mallon the Guru, about a pair of ingenuous foreigners searching for a guru in India, and Richard Adams’ The Knife, featuring a pre-World War II boarding school, verge on the enigmatic. Chocolat author Joanne Harris’ contribution, Wildfire in Manhattan, about a group of old-world mythological figures running amok in New York, reads like an adult version of the Percy Jackson series. But Stories also contains some truly imaginative writing. Septuagenarian author Diana Wynne Jones, famous for her much loved young-adult (YA) fantasy works such as the Chrestomanci series, breaks into new territory with her futuristic tale of a young, featherbrained debutante who struggles to cope with an increasingly bizarre succession of Christmas gifts. Samantha’s Diary is a delightful read and a radical departure from Jones’ earlier works. The pièce de résistance is the last story. Joe Hill’s The Devil on the Staircase recalls Italo Calvino’s surrealist fables The Baron in the Trees and The Cloven Viscount. Hill, (incidentally the son of Stephen King), lays out his story across the page like a staircase, a form that is perfectly married to his simple, lyrical sentences. For Gaiman, the standard is not just good writing; the benchmark of a good story is its ability to provoke a reader to ask that ageless question: “And then what happened?” It’s a simple but demanding standard for a writer to meet. For the most part, Stories satisfies this criterion.

Early bird: Time magazine said Franzen writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7am.

This anticipated followup is bogged down by the weight of its own seriousness and selfconsciousness

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· hen he appeared on the cover of Time magazine this August (the first novelist to be thus honoured in a decade), Jonathan Franzen was acclaimed as a “Great American Novelist” and as someone who, better than anyone else, gave Americans a sense of “the way we live now”. The occasion for this coronation was the release of Franzen’s long-awaited and massive new novel Freedom, his first in the nine years since his best-selling The Corrections. But just as the title of Franzen’s new novel sounds wooden unless read ironically, so too his book deserves to be read a little more sceptically than it has been so far. Like many very fat novels, it does not really earn its length, sometimes singing along, at other times dragging badly, and often sacrificing integrity of character and narrative voice in its effort to paint a large-scale portrait of not just a family, but also

the great issues of our time: 9/11, the war on Iraq, global warming, the impact of technology on human relations. It is notable, mainly, for the extent to which almost all of its main characters are “f****d up” in some way, and make others around them, including the few happy ones, miserable. If this is indeed a representative portrait of the way we live now, we are looking at a very dysfunctional, joyless world. “F**k”, incidentally, is a favourite word of Franzen’s, and he deploys it not just as an expletive and as a verb denoting casual sex, but also as shorthand for making love, as when a woman remembers how “they laughed and cried and f****d with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on”. The English language has a very wide vocabulary, so per-

Freedom: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 582 pages, $28 (around `1,240).

haps the gravity and innocence of the act here required the use of a different verb to make it real. The reliance on “f**k” is emblematic of a certain coldness in the novel’s language, as if determined to reduce the entire palette of human dealings and emotions into something more monotone. The result is a book that is often not just depressing (which is fine), but depressingly written. The story. Walter and Patty Berglund, when first seen in the late 1990s, are a happy, successful couple in the mid-western town of St Paul, with a beautiful house, two teenaged children, and many friends in the neighbourhood. But everything falls apart when the Berglund’s son, Joey, whom his mother loves insanely, rebels against the family and moves next door to live with his girlfriend and her mother. Patty’s equanimity breaks down, and she feels transported back into the world of her teens, when she received only contempt from her family. At that point she was rescued from her gloom by the attentions of Walter, a young man with many familial difficulties of his own who brightened up her life. Patty, Cinderella-like, decides to marry Walter because it is “her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother”. There is only one problem: Patty originally had begun to spend time with Walter because she was attracted to his best friend, the feckless, womanizing rock musician Richard Katz. After some years of absence from their lives, Katz

has now returned and when Patty begins to find life too difficult for her, she turns to Katz. All these events are described to us from a peculiar point of view, that of a retrospective journal entitled Mistakes Were Made written by Patty at the insistence of her therapist, and yet describing herself in the third person. Elsewhere, the narration shifts to more conventional third-person description as it tracks the activities of Walter, Katz and (in one of the novel’s best sections) the now adult Joey, trying to balance marriage with an affair while also attempting to make a quick buck off business operations in post-war Iraq. Franzen has an excellent ear for dialogue, and the exchanges between his characters are often uncannily naturalistic. But this is a novel that, starting from the title, is so self-consciously important that the reader often feels like resisting this grandiosity, and the long sections of narration and plot devoted to the theory of the free market, to American imperialism, and forest degradation are enormously cynical and tiresome. This is an intermittently compelling and dramatic novel that is bogged down too much by its own weight. Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf. Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Too fat for its own good

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BEAUTIFUL FROM THIS ANGLE | MAHA KHAN PHILLIPS

Young and listless Today’s Karachi in the eyes of a rebellious and smart party queen

B Y S UMANA M UKHERJEE ···························· here are no mangoes in Maha Khan Phillips’ novel set in Karachi, as a satirical Granta article decreed is now essential to the Pakistan novel. There are cotton fields, though, and a maid and memsahibs. And there’s also a delicious touch of subversion that takes all the clichéd elements and blends them into an addictive cocktail that is certain to leave you with a hangover. What is Pakistan, after all, except a boring failed state, if you take away the anachronistic landlords and the bogey of radical Islam? Somewhat like Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (the wickedly funny 2008 novel is now the touchstone for all fiction of the genre set in our neighbouring country), Beautiful from This Angle works because the author never takes herself as seriously as she does her subject

and her craft. There’s a lightness in the treatment that belies the tale but which, nevertheless, serves it well. The cover photo and blurb (“Dishing up the dirt… from Karachi’s hottest Page 3 parties”) position the book as chick lit, but its impact goes beyond the pigeonhole. Tracing a year in the lives of three 20-something best-friendsforever, Beautiful uses, like Bangladeshi author Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky, the accepted tropes of rebellion against Islamic strictures: fashion, promiscuity, drugs, alcohol. Wild child Amynah Farooqui has the predictable dysfunctional family, but she’s also smart enough to channel her party queen status into a provocative newspaper column, thereby universalizing a city that’s too frequently in the headlines for the wrong reasons. But there’s a Pakistan outside the bubble of Karachi society, and that is where her chaddibuddy Henna belongs. Daughter of a feudal lord-turned-politico,

Beautiful from This Angle: Penguin India, 234 pages, `250. Henna is the antithesis of Amynah: subservient, sacrificing, dutiful. And caught between the two—though who is to say definitively who is caught between who?—is Mumtaz Malik, bitter, ambitious, self-serving. Deftly painted in shades of grey, these primary characters and their constantly shifting bonds propel the novel through a civilizational confrontation that rings very close to home.

When the three friends set out to rescue a village woman (the maid) from her allegedly abusive husband, Mumtaz films her story as a documentary for CNN as “something we can sell to the West”. But this is Pakistan, and perception is sometimes stranger than reality. The tone is set beautifully in an early scene in Henna’s father’s cotton fields, which takes back Amynah to carefree childhood summers; a few pages later, those very fields, in the shadow of twilight, transform into an ominous presence, accentuated by a rustle from memory. Nothing happens, but the disquiet is impossible to shake off. It’s this sense of impending doom, of the quiet implosion of a society torn apart by multiple contradictory strains and pressures, that lingers long after the final page. From religious “fundoos” to the rich-and-oblivious and from US-pandering politicos to the insidious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the author’s savage wit spares no one and, in

the process, captures a country in dangerous free-fall. The Western media perhaps comes in for the most severe bashing: If one channel wants a documentary on a brutalized woman that ticks every box in the oppressed-under-Islam story, another films a reality show called Who Wants To Be a Terrorist? while a third seeks to censor local liberals from a television interview. As the trio’s film climbs the bleeding hearts’ charts all the way to the Oscars, the fallout causes their lives and their friendships to unravel, crescendoing in a manner that shakes the world. For all the fun, warmth and humour, the laugh-aloud moments, the razorsharp observation of a certain class of contemporary society, Beautiful is ultimately a bleak, unsettling novel about coming of age in an age too corrupt to care. Everyone has to pay a price, Henna says, for what we have done. In Phillips’ Pakistan, the young pay the price for history. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

Culture

LOUNGE

ART

Shopping for a barbedwire cowboy hat COURTESY VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY/WSJ

Galleries are heading to art fairs in greater numbers, hopeful that the recession is over

B Y K ELLY C ROW ···························· hen London’s biggest contemporary art show, the Frieze Art Fair, opened earlier this week, a group of psychics were on hand to help visitors conjure advice from late greats such as Vincent van Gogh. One frequently asked question: Is it safe to go shopping again?

The global art market began recovering this spring, but dealers say collectors returned first to the auction houses, where art often comes with a reassuring track record of past sales. Contemporary art galleries have had a tougher season since they must convince buyers to invest in untested newcomers. Now, in a bid to find strength in numbers, many galleries have rejoined the same fairs they skipped last year, including Frieze and the Paris fair this coming week, called Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (Fiac). Frieze has 173 galleries, up from 164 last year, and the roster includes several New York galleries that stayed home last

fall, including Tanya Bonakdar, Andrew Kreps and Casey Kaplan. At Fiac, the line-up includes 63 new exhibitors such as Blum and Poe from Los Angeles, US. Loring Randolph, Casey Kaplan’s co-director, says she remains “apprehensive” about the art market’s momentum but rejoined Frieze so the gallery could introduce European buyers to a Tennessee artist they just signed, Marlo Pascual. “Have we seen a full-circle turnaround? No,” Randolph says, “but the art world is still event-driven, and the fairs are where collectors come ready to buy.” The highlights at Frieze include Simon Fujiwara’s Frozen, an installation designed to look MAUREEN PALEY/WSJ

How to buy contemporary art ROBERT LESLIE/WSJ

A course for collectors tells them to buy what they love, putting aside financial returns B Y A NDREW M CKIE The Wall Street Journal

································ ew human impulses are as personal and as mysterious as the urge to collect, but the advice given by the financier and collector John Pierpont Morgan on the subject remains the most straightforward. Whatever you choose to collect, he suggested, simply buy the hundred best examples, and then stop. This is sage counsel since, as any collector will tell you, stopping is the tricky bit of the process. But what of the rest of us, who have more limited resources than Morgan and want to know not how to stop, but where to start? In preparation for the annual Frieze Art Fair, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the city’s East End runs a course advising those who are keen to get what the brochure calls “the inside track on how to collect contemporary art”. The course fee of £595 (around `42,000) is enough to suggest that the participants (around 20 of them) are fairly serious in their ambitions, but they are a varied bunch. The current financial climate has winnowed out the ranks of bankers hoping that their bonuses might kick-start a collection to rival that of Charles Saatchi. This is just as well, for if there is one consistent piece of advice that almost everyone addressing the course offers the students, it is to buy what you fall in love with, and not to concentrate too much on the potential for financial return. But the contraction of the global art market during the past two years doesn’t erase the memory of the spectacular rise in prices (by more than 80%

WSJ

Pupils: (above) Mckie (centre) with other course members at the home of collector Domi nic Palfreyman; and an untitled collage by Damien Hirst at Whitechapel. between 1995 and 2006), and of the public appetite for contemporary art, over the previous two decades. In her lecture on the first night of the course, Iwona Blazwick, the gallery’s director, pointed out that the boom in British contemporary art could be dated precisely. It began in 1988 with the Frieze exhibition in an empty warehouse in Docklands that was organized by Damien Hirst while he was still a student at Goldsmith’s College, and ended with the massive sale of his work at Sotheby’s two years ago, on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. “So the Young British Artists began in a recession,” she points out. “In fact, if it hadn’t been for that, which meant that spaces lying empty, the ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude of the Frieze artists might not have happened.” Afterwards, looking around the Whitechapel’s current show, drawn from the collection of the Greek dairy magnate Dimitris Daskalopoulos, there is a sharp reminder of those days, in the

form of an early (and uncharacteristic) collage by Hirst, featuring books, shells and a wooden doorstop. Today, the East End has some 10,000 artists and many galleries operating from formerly industrial spaces. Earlier this month, I joined the course members on a minibus visiting studios and galleries such as MOT International, housed in a half-empty tower block, and the Bow Arts Trust, a self-sustaining charity that provides some 200 studios, some in short-life former council

like an archaeological dig, with objects from a seemingly lost civilization located beneath the fair tent. London gallery Maureen Paley debuted new work from London-based photographer Anne Hardy, known for creating elaborate, yet abandoned, interiors. Stephen Friedman, another London gallery, is showing Glasgow-based David Shrigley, an expert in gallows humour whose works include a taxidermied dog. As for the psychics, they’re part of a performance piece proposed by artist Jeffrey Vallance and commissioned by the fair. Frieze ends on Sunday. Over at Fiac, which runs 21-24 October inside the Grand Palais exposition hall, organizer Jennifer Flay has reassigned spaces typically reserved for design galleries to make room for more contemporary art booths this year. Flay says she’s atoning for the fewer design offerings by erecting French architect Jean Prouvé’s nomad house from 1948, Maison Ferembal, in the

housing, and others next to a gallery in a converted nunnery. It was a tight squeeze to get everyone into some of the studios. “This is a terrible space,” said Patrick Brill, who works under the name Bob and Roberta Smith and is our first stop. “It’s called Cell Studios and you can see why: There are bars on the windows. But it’s a fantastic location, and I have an enormous space in Ramsgate where I can make large sculptural pieces.” Here, Brill produces smaller, textbased work. He said that a relationship with those who collect his work wasn’t particularly important—“What matters is the money, which sounds glib, but it makes a difference and keeps my family going.” This honest message was backed up by a painting on board behind him that read “I like buying art from artists that are still alive.” But the connection between artists, galleries and buyers matters more to others, and became rather a theme through the day. “It’s not just a transaction,” said the sculptor Owen Bullett, while Doug White, with whom he shares a studio, claimed that it varied with the work. “For practical reasons, with large-scale work you often have to install it yourself,” White said. “And of course you’re often willing to offer more to someone who really engages with your practice.” Artist David Batchelor has found a similarly productive relationship with the corporate world, and the floor of his bright, orderly studio was covered with huge, colour-coded piles of electrical cable, which was acquired from the waste material at Bloomberg. “They get turned into large spheres like the rubber-band balls,” he said. He was asked if he would have liked to make a really big version. “I’d love to, but they’re really difficult to make, and even small increases in size create huge differences in weight.” Paul Hedges, director of the Hales Gallery, which was showing a vast installation of hanging beads by the artist Hew Locke, admitted such physical considerations matter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he said that the

Renewal: (above) Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Gar den will be on display at Fiac in Paris; and Rehearsal by Anne Hardy at the Frieze Art Fair. octagonal basin of the Tuileries Gardens during the fair’s run. Yayoi Kusama’s 1966 installation of mirrored balls, Narcissus Garden, will bob nearby. In the main hall, fair-goers are likely to crowd around David Zwirner’s solo show of Adel Abdessemed, a Paris-based artist whose new work includes a barbed-wire cowboy hat. Steve Rosenblum, a Parisbased collector who is opening a private art space during Fiac, says Europe’s fairs might sell better in a rebuilding year such as this one. That’s because choosy collectors “no longer want to travel the world or spend all week looking at galleries. They want to come and quickly see it all”. Write to wsj@livemint.com

first question he would ask a potential client was, “How much space have you got?” Hedges offered another suggestion on where to start: “Film has no storage issues and is interesting and often cheap.” Locke’s work, being sold as an edition of three, with the materials and instructions for their assembly, was certainly unlikely to find a home in a domestic setting. Some of these questions came to the fore at a round-table discussion at the home of the collector Dominic Palfreyman in Little Venice. Palfreyman, a former investment banker, is the founder of the Felix Trust for Art, which initiates and supports, among other projects, social sculpture, installation and performance art. His house, however, was dominated by an extensive and stunning collection, mostly comprising prints, photographs, drawings and paintings. “I think living with works of art is very different from seeing them in exhibitions or museums,” he said. “You need things that you’re happy to look at all day, each day, every day. And so the art that I collect is a very small slice of the art that I like.” Stuart Evans, a lawyer who has built up major collections of contemporary art both personally and for public spaces, said that he hasn’t made that distinction. He and his son John, with whom he now collects, have already acquired work by Doug White, melted recycling bins, which they installed at Evans senior’s law firm, Simmons and Simmons. “And you bought another piece from him while I was away,” Evans reminded his son. “Yes, well the difference is that you have a committee that you have to run things past, while I don’t,” he replied. That, at least, is a freedom that those on the course enjoy as well. They were scheduled to visit Christie’s, to learn how a work is sold at auction, and tour Frieze. If there were an end of term test, I suppose it should be this: Will they get their wallets out? Write to wsj@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | MEKAAL HASAN

RAAGTIME

SAMANTH S

‘There’s this new huge metal scene in Lahore’

WHEN THE MUSIC SOARS

O COURTESY ONLY MUCH LOUDER

The guitarist on socially engaged music and Pakistan’s challeng ing atmosphere

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

···························· ahore-based Mekaal Hasan is the guitarist and frontman of the seminal Mekaal Hasan Band, who are about to embark on their third India tour. The band is often cited as “fusion” done right, building on classical vocalist Javed Bashir’s free-flowing voice with Hasan’s complex jazz arrangements (he studied composition at the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, US, before returning to Lahore to set up a recording studio). It’s been a challenging year for the band. Bashir announced his departure from the band, and they’ve been playing a gruelling set of gigs in Paris, New York and Canada—both to promote their new album Saptak, as well as to raise funds for those affected by the devastating floods in Pakistan. Hasan spoke to Lounge over Skype on new directions, fresh music and why 2010 is the new 1995. Edited excerpts:

Javed Bashir has been replaced by 19-year-old Asad Abbas. How did the change come about? It’s a bit like that movie Almost Famous. In 2007, me and “Papu” (the band’s flautist, Mohammad Ahsan) were judges on this talent show on Indus TV called Pakistan Sangeet Icon. We were auditioning singers when we heard about this talented 16-year-old kid called Asad Abbas in Faisalabad. He was fantastic, and went on to win the first season of the competition. Javed Bashir left our band on the day that our new album Saptak was released. We were in quite a fix, because we had a

High note: Hasan says he likes playing in India’s ‘university towns’, where audiences are more receptive. lot of media commitments and promotional tours to do. So we remembered Asad and found out that he was in Karachi, still working for Indus TV. He couldn’t believe that his former judges were now asking him to join their band. Does this change augur a new direction for the band? Definitely. Javed came from a very technical, classical background, whereas Asad is a folk singer. Papu has spent the last four months training him up, and I think he sounds phenomenal. Just as an example, we recently did a cover of a song by the famous folk singer Tufail Niazi. Niazi is completely crazy, with wild alterations in scale and unbelievable range, and Asad pulled it off brilliantly. Anything exciting that you have come across on the Pakistani music scene? There’s this new huge metal scene in Lahore that I came to know about only recently. Lots of small indie groups, and some very talented guitarists. But as an industry, it’s lost the vibrancy it had about three years ago. The politics and security situation have made it hard to do shows, or get clearances for them. The record companies don’t want to sign new bands, and opportunities are drying up. It

reminds me a bit of 1995, when I first started out as a musician. How are bands responding to these challenges? I think there’s something about the mindset here. People love music, and even when the situation is dire, it’ll never be allowed to die out. It will always resurface. Bands are using the Web very savvily, and are bringing music into everything they can find—to promote reconstruction efforts, concerts for flood relief. Our syncretic music culture is one of the greatest things we have. Many Pakistani bands—Jal, Junoon, Strings—found near-mainstream popularity in India. But is there a sense that they belong to a previous generation of rock musicians? You’re right, there is a sense that these established bands are part of a previous generation. Atif Aslam, Zeb and Haniya, Rahat Fateh Ali are what the new generation is listening to. What about shows such as ‘Coke Studio’? It’s a great programme, and the outreach it has for the musicians who perform on it is widespread. Having said that, however, you have to remember that it’s just once a year. People have latched on to it because of the lack of concerts and playing

space. For the musicians, follow-ups aren’t guaranteed, so it becomes this really insular process. What I’d love to see is Coke Studio coming to other countries like India and Bangladesh, and the performers touring as an ensemble. You called for greater international awareness of the floods in Pakistan on BBC. How can Pakistani musicians help make that happen? A lot of us can’t be anything but socially engaged. I think the community has been instrumental (no pun intended) in a lot of international fund-raising efforts. Our band was part of a “Pakistan in Paris” festival in France, and we did some charity concerts in the US through the Pakistani Peace Builders (a US-based cultural diplomacy group). As musicians, however, we have to be careful not to devolve into angry ranting about politics or security issues. The Mekaal Hasan Band will play at the Hard Rock Café in Delhi on 21 October; at the Jodhpur Rajasthan International Folk Festival (Jriff) on 22 October; and at The Blue Frog in Mumbai on 27 October. For details on Jriff, log on to www.jodhpurfolkfestival.org

ne of the 23 MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants this year has gone to Sebastian Ruth, a 35-year-old violist in Rhode Island and the moving force behind the Providence String Quartet. Founded in 1997, the Quartet is a lively, energetic ensemble, and Ruth himself is a precise, passionate violist; in performance videos, he is seen sitting on the very edge of his chair, swaying and bobbing as he plays. The MacArthur grant has gone to Ruth, however, not so much for his musical skills as for what he has done with them. The Quartet sits within an immensely admirable organization called Community MusicWorks, powered by Ruth’s belief that musical education can improve lives not only aesthetically but materially. Each year, the Quartet’s members train around 100 students, entirely free of cost, working with inner-city children to offer an alternative to the brutal iniquities of life on the street. Further, the Quartet disburses its own music generously, almost always playing in unorthodox venues. “We want people to see the Quartet where they wouldn’t expect to,” Ruth once said. “We’re here on the street, we’re in the community centre, we’re in the soup kitchen, we’re in the nursing home…or an indie-rock club or city hall.” It isn’t difficult to see why The Boston Globe lauded Community MusicWorks for carrying out “a small revolution”. Music is so often referred to, casually and thoughtlessly, as a universal language that we forget how restricted, how decidedly un-universal, access to classical music is. In Europe, this has been the case for some centuries, ever since music moved out of churches—where, for example, Bach’s mighty chorales made their debuts—and into concert halls and opera houses. In India, that shift has occurred within living memory. Every story I’ve heard about villagers thronging Carnatic concerts in rural south India has had, at the centre of the anecdote, a musician such as M.S. Subbulakshmi or Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, somebody from the mid-20th century. Today, Carnatic and Hindustani concerts reside, for the most part, in frigid auditoriums, reaching out only to people who already have at least a glancing acquaintance with the music.

Lifeline: Community MusicWorks members playing at an event. Ruth’s model isn’t a complicated one; there are similar programmes elsewhere in the US, such as the Baltimore Algebra Project and the Charity Music project in Michigan. The model requires a certain stubborn idealism to sustain, but it is one that could easily be cloned anywhere else in the world. There are also precedents of spirited musicians who tethered their music to ideas of social justice. In one essay, Ruth cites Pablo Casals, the cellist who directed his musical career against the Spanish Fascist government; Vedran Smailovic, another cellist who played placidly on a Sarajevo street amid artillery fire; and Yehudi Menuhin, who took on the Soviet Union when it refused to allow the violinist David Oistrakh out of its borders. Best of all, Ruth’s model is hardly an act of charity. If even eight of Community MusicWorks’ 100 annual students take to a life in music, that isn’t merely eight kids taken off the street; it’s also eight new talented musicians, two whole string quartets that can fill old music with new experiences and fresh perspectives. We have, at the end of it, a richer music for ourselves. Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

ANIMATED DISCUSSION

contribution, a result of outsourcing, is mostly in the form of back-end production work. There don’t seem to be any trickle-down effects of working with some of Hollywood’s brightest sparks just yet. Forget movies such as Up or Wall.E—we’re nowhere close to even making Disney-style saccharine romances. Surely, there is no dearth of stories or talent. We make several lovely animated advertisements and short films (Gitanjali Rao’s Printed Rainbow and Vaibhav Kumaresh’s Horn OK Please come to mind), but where are the directors capable of filming a feature-length tale? Instead, we are stuck with

movies about Hanuman, Ganesh and various versions of the Ramayan. The first Hanuman film, by veteran animator V.G. Samant, was enjoyable enough, but it broke little ground in terms of storytelling or visual effects. You’d think that movies based on myths and fables need to make double the effort to look different since the stories and characters are so well known. At least Hanuman is miles ahead of the My Friend Ganesha series, whose characters are so flat and poorly animated that they look like the handiwork of trainee animators. There is nothing easier than making an animated movie about a well-known epic. Audiences are comfortable with known characters and since animation is still a relatively

Old: Ramayana—The Epic is one among many animated versions. young form in India, they don’t seem to want to experiment with untested names. The sequel to Hanuman, Return to Hanuman, was a failed attempt to locate the mythological character in modern times (even though the infant Hanuman looked very cute in schoolboy shorts). Roadside Romeo, produced by Yash Raj Films and directed by former child actor Jugal Hansraj, was a noble but unimaginative and poorly written attempt to move

beyond the epics. Not surprisingly, the film didn’t go down too well. There is tremendous potential and an untapped market, especially since American movies such as Shrek and Up are a bit too sophisticated for young Indian viewers, who may find it hard to follow the dialogues and references to American popular culture. Animation is well-suited to filming stories from the

Arabian Nights—as the Disney studio has done—or the Panchatantra. Animation is certainly not a cheap process, but it seems more affordable than starting a project in present-day Bollywood, where stars don’t get out of bed for less than a handful of crores. The real competition seems to be from television: Several Indian animated series are playing on kiddie channels, alongside the vastly popular Japanese stuff, such as Shin-Chan or Ninja Hattori, which is dubbed into Hindi. It seems we will have to be satisfied with animated Lord Rams and Hindi-speaking Japanese brats for now. Ramayana–The Epic releases in theatres on 22 October. Nandini Ramnath is a film critic with Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TELEVISION

When India cooks with an action hero Going through the ‘Masterchef’ grind, with a bullying host, are cooks who don’t want to be famous chefs B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· n the promotional spots of Masterchef India, the local spin-off of UK’s popular Masterchef series, contestants vying for a spot on the show’s cook-offs weep, quarrel with the show’s presenters and try hard to convince audiences that they want to be Masterchef more than anything else in the world. It seems like an odd strategy for a show that will not rely on audience voting to select its eventual winners, but then perhaps it has become the norm for television programming to be advertised through heartfelt appeals. The show aims to strike a chord with the markets Star Plus, the channel on which it will air, want to capture. On the sets, the Masterchef format lends itself to drama. Even making rumali rotis becomes exciting when it happens to be a do-or-die elimination challenge. The pressure and the scope for mistakes lends it the kind of mental and emotional appeal one associates with the more aggressive physical reality shows. Which is why, perhaps, the show’s chief presenter happens to be actor Akshay Kumar, a man who looks like he has never consumed an unnecessary calorie in his life. Unlike the meticulous, sometimes nasty criticism judges in Masterchef‘s international versions are famous for, Kumar’s modus operandi is good-natured bullying, leaving the food professionals on the judging panel to provide critique. During the rumali roti challenge, he looms over the worktops of nervous contestants. “Your edges are thick. Why are your edges thick?” he booms. “None of you have spun your roti in the air. It will never, I repeat never, achieve the consistency you want unless you spin your roti in the air!” Faces shrink. A young woman dissolves into tears. Kumar’s attitude immediately shifts to gruffly consoling, which delights her, and ends the segment on a pleasing note. Cooking, it turns out, is not so different from scooping live insects from a cage on Khatron ke Khiladi. It is conceivable, that the producers could have found a more unlikely contestant for the show than Ankit Vishwakarma, but

that would surely have taken some work. The 18-year-old from Bhopal became an ice-cream chef three-and-a-half years ago because, as he puts it, “I liked eating ice cream, kept asking mummy to make me some, and she kept refusing.” Something about his handmade desserts must have pleased the judges: Today, alongside experts who improvise their signature dishes and self-professed masters of multiple cuisines, Vishwakarma has made it to the finals of India’s first food reality show. His parents and brother were shocked when he was picked. “But I guess they didn’t want to demotivate me,” he says. Vishwakarma was one among the thousands who turned up at the Masterchef screening rounds in Mumbai, Delhi, Lucknow, Indore, Ahmedabad and Jaipur, casseroles in hand, hopeful of earning a spot on a show that claims it will celebrate “great people who make great food”. In the bigger and more diverse stream of contestants on the European versions of the show, Vishwakarma might not have looked out of place, but he is an anomaly here among stalwarts who have been running their kitchens at home or work for years. His competitors are mostly in their 30s and 40s, and their age and experience give oncamera declarations of wanting to be the next Masterchef a real edge. “Adapting the international format to reflect Indian tastes was a big challenge,” says Ajit Andhare, founder and CEO of Colosceum, the firm which is producing Masterchef India for Star Plus. “The way the food challenges play out on the international versions may have become exotic or elitist here, irrelevant to an Indian audience.” According to Andhare, there is a structural difference in the way we view food “as meals, and not as single dishes”, which demands a modification in format for the Indian version, as compared to the European and Australian versions of the show. The diversity of Indian cuisine appears to have posed a problem too. In spite of its name, Masterchef India is hardly a pan-India competition. No auditions were conducted in cities in the south and east—a “practical decision”, Andhare says, based at least partly on considerations of

Spoilt for choice Mumbai’s biggest movie event is bigger, with films from 58 countries and huge prizes

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· he Mumbai Film Festival has grown bigger and better. Its 12th year is the most impressive so far, with 200 films from 58 countries. The festival will open on 21 October with the screening of David Fincher’s film on the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. For the next seven days, Mumbaikars will be treated to 200 films from around the world in categories such as World Cinema, Real Reel, Indian Frame and Celebration of Japanese Cinema. Oliver Stone, along with our very own Manoj Kumar, will be felicitated with a lifetime achievement award. The Oscar-winning director of Platoon and JFK will also lead a round table with Indian film-makers. The all-women jury also boasts of a well-known Hollywood name, Jane Campion (The P i a n o ) , a s w e l l as National Award-winning Indian actor Suhasini Mani Ratnam, Tanya

Sizzling: (above) Kumar in a promotional video for Masterchef India; and Masterchef hope fuls line up for one of the show’s early cookoffs.

reach and ratings. But viewers can look forward to innovation within the cuisines the contestants will represent, says Ajay Chopra, a chef at the Goa Marriott Resort, Miramar, and one of the show’s three judges. “We have to represent classic Indian cuisine, but we’re also taking it out of the curry bowls, which is an accusation you hear a lot about the way Indian food is presented. We do introduce progressive Indian cuisine into the show’s format, but we adapt them to more advanced challenges.” Its cultural framework is not very different from Star Plus’ other prime-time programming, soap operas that reach out to rural and suburban north India. For most viewers Masterchef India will represent a significant departure

Seghatchian (producer of four Harry Potter films), Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf and South Korean actor Yoon Jeonghee. Campion, who is the jury chairperson, will also conduct a masterclass in direction and another on performance in films from the director’s perspective. “I have been on many juries before and I know that it requires a great deal of responsibility,” says Ratnam. “You have to keep your fascination and judgement aside and look only at content. The advantage of such a diverse jury is that we will be able to guide each other on the context for films from different parts of the world, which will be an enriching experience.” Speaking about the allwomen jury she says: “I wish there was a man! I get along better with them, but the bonding between women is fantastic. There will be some clashes along the way, but in the end there will be only one opinion.” Besides the best of world cinema, the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (Mami) will also feature the Film Business Centre, which will be attended by 25 leading film buyers and sales

in the food programming they do see. “It also represents something different from reality show formats that people are already familiar with,” says Sejal Shah, head of southern and western operations for media investment firm VivaKi Exchange. “If the content carries the show beyond the buzz generated by Akshay, it should attract the most significant segment of any target group for television—women.” For years, Indian cable television depended on the “cookery show” format—half-hour, threerecipes-an-episode shows anchored by celebrity chefs that encouraged little or no viewer interaction. Recent developments in lifestyle programming have seen food as an element in travel or luxury-related shows, in

which presenters discover cuisines by region, or obtain access to unique kitchens and chefs. Contrary to this vein of celebrating the rarefied, Masterchef India’s promos advertise it as a reality show in which ordinary people, especially women—who make up over 60% of the viewers—can make a winning proposition of an everyday activity. “It’s changed my perception of amateur chefs,” says Kunal Kapoor, chef at Gurgaon’s The Leela Kempinski, and a judge on the show. Kumar himself is meant to bridge this negotiation between expertise and amateurism. “He is something of a working-class hero,” Andhare says. “And he brings his own understanding of food to the show.” Kumar’s past in the food

Highlight: Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is in French. agents from around the world. Amit Khanna, chairman of festival sponsor Reliance BIG Entertainment, says: “We hope this marketplace will be the harbinger for a centre for buying and selling films. We see this as an opportunity for small, independent film-makers who may not be able to travel with their films and can avail of the facilities provided by Mami.” Film director Shyam Benegal, who is the chairman of Mami, says, “We have the cream of

world cinema, like the winners of the Berlin, Venice, Cannes and Locarno film festivals, and we are now probably the best festival in India.” Among the films to look out for are Sofia Coppola’s Golden Lion winner Somewhere, Semih Kaplanoglu’s Golden Bear-winner Bal, Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prix-winner Of Gods and Men and Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation. Benegal says he is very relieved to have reliable funding and sponsorship this year. “Funding is

industry—he spent some time operating a food stall in Bangkok—may be unorthodox, but his contestants love him. “I wanted to make Akshay kadhi-chawal, and I’m just waiting for the chance,” says Kanak Kathuria, a 29-year-old finalist and Punjabi/ Italian cuisine expert. Unlike the contestants on Masterchef Australia, whose second season is currently on air in India on Star’s English language channel Star World, the Indian competitors display little interest in becoming part of the food industry—that is, if anyone thinks of their appearance on the TV show as a stepping stone to owning a restaurant, cooking at the world’s finest kitchens, or earning themselves a spot at legendary hotel kitchens. Vishwakarma isn’t even sure if this is what he wants to do for the rest of his life. “A chef, not a chef, I don’t know about that,” he says. “I just want to be the Masterchef.” Masterchef India airs from today on Star Plus at 9pm, and will air on Saturdays and Sundays.

crucial for all festivals,” he says. “Secondly, we have people like festival director Srinivasan Narayanan, who has a great deal of experience of international film festivals. Thirdly, who the sponsor is also helps.” The festival committee’s aim, Benegal adds, is “to make it the next best thing for young film-makers after Sundance because we give such good financial awards.” The 14 feature films of firsttime directors in the international competition (including an Indian film, Aamir Bashir’s Harud) will compete for the cash award of $100,000 (around `44.7 lakh). Other awards include the Golden Gateway of India and Silver Gateway of India trophies for the Best Film. The Jury Grand Prize has a purse of $50,000 and the Audience Choice award has a cash prize of $20,000. Films will be screened at Chandan Cinema, Juhu; PVR Juhu; Metro BIG Cinemas, Marine Lines; and BIG Cinemas, R City, Ghatkopar. For the registration details and schedule, log on to www.mumbaifilmfest.com Write to lounge@livemint.com