Lounge 17 Jan

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

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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 3

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A BREAK OF ANOTHER KIND >Page 8

THE WOLF’S SOFT HOWL

In the world’s first designated national park, the predator rules the winter terrain >Page 13

THE KISS PRINCIPLE

The PechaKucha presentation format asks you to Keep It Short and Simple, and creatives love it >Page 17

Debut author Sidin Vadukut’s ‘Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese’ chronicles the intimate thoughts of a naïve trainee in a tumultuous corporate environment. Where evil and PowerPoint await >Pages 10­12 PUBLIC EYE

WINTER RHAPSODY: LEFTOVER WINE AND LAMB’S LEG You don’t have to be French to use wine in cooking. The old rule of white with fish and red with meat holds true >Page 18

THE GOOD LIFE

SUNIL KHILNANI

SHOBA NARAYAN

DO BIG GUNS MEAN MY PONGAL PLAN: BETTER SECURITY? NO ‘I’ FOR AN ‘I’

O

f the many supposed lessons of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, few have thus far yielded real changes: The outraged middle classes did not come out to vote, no civic sense or community arose phoenix-like in our cities. But the attacks did create one soft consensus: that India needs to spend more, much more, to assure the country’s security. More Black Cat units. More speedboats. More and better guns for the police. >Pages 4­5

GAME THEORY

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he cows look dazzling. They have bells on their horns and garlands around their necks. Proud milkmen and women parade their herds on the streets.

South India is ablaze with the sounds and smells of Pongal, also called Sankranti.

Urbanization and technology have muted the verdant ethos of this harvest festival, but vestiges still remain. Green sugar-cane stalks wave from street corners. Tiny streets are covered with rangoli. >Page 6

ROHIT BRIJNATH

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

CLIMB, REDEFINE YOUR BOUNDARIES

O

n Sunday morning two weeks ago, I looked up at a never-ending wall that seemed like a ladder to God. Fear nestled somewhere close by. After 33 years, I was back at a rock-climbing face, roped but not ready. Climbers, creatures of a beautiful insanity (could you climb sheer walls with no rope, would you?), have a weird humour. One once wrote: “Climbing is the only cure for gravity.” But nothing feels funny right then. >Page 6

Q&A WITH KISHORE MAHBUBANI

HOME PAGE L3

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

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

FIRST CUT

LOUNGE REVIEW | INDIGO, MUMBAI

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

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

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE INDIAN TELEVISION GOD

D

ear television god, Where have you been? What do you have against Indian women? What twisted misogynist scheme of yours draws Indian women to watch prehistoric television serials where they are raped, insulted and slapped around with alarming frequency?

I’ve been wrestling with this one for a while. After all, we’re the ones in control. Why don’t we just use the remote to move on instead of watching glassyeyed women who stare into space—as the camera circles them like a vulture on steroids—and mouth dialogues about how it’s brave to commit suicide. I swear I saw this on Bairi Piya—easily the worst television programme currently on air—earlier this week. In fact, the first SWITCH time I saw this serial a few weeks ago, I could only watch 18 minutes of it before a serious wave of nausea forced me to switch channels.

But it’s us women who ensure that the scary serials score robust TRPs of 5 and 6 week after regressive week.

The upwardly mobile, progressive, urban creative teams at the channels that air these shows say we love them because they are the Village Voice, i.e. real India.

They depict hardships we don’t encounter and thus make us feel more comfortable about our lives. They even claim to “educate” us about child marriage. The TV types’ favourite line of defence is that these things really happen in India. Child marriage, rape, abuse and all manner of assorted crimes against women actually exist in India.

As I am writing you this letter I just thought of an idea that could become a TRP-magnet of a television script on any of

No more tears: Rishta.com and other YRF shows give the glycerine a miss. our leading Hindi entertainment channels. I recently read that last year in Delhi, a majority of rapists turned out to be the neighbour. Why not a serial about a friendly rapist neighbour who lives next door to a couple that, alas, has only daughters (the younger the better, since India is full of paedophile perverts) even though they tried four times for a son and aborted three foetuses. Guaranteed hit. And it happens in India, wouldn’t you agree?

Anyway, I’m digressing (please don’t switch channels). When I asked my mother, an avid watcher of these serials, to tell me if there was a single “womanoriented” serial that hadn’t featured rape, she couldn’t name any. So why did she watch them then, I asked her for the millionth time.

Because there’s nothing better to watch on Indian television, she said.

But that was a few weeks ago, before Yash Raj Films (YRF) launched its shows on Sony. Actually god, I’m writing to thank you. I know this letter starts off a little rudely, but really, thank you. Could it actually be that you’ve decided to give Indian

television viewers another chance?

I loved YRF’s new shows. What great production values. No garish outfits.

Women actually dress in skirts. And trousers. And they have proper crime-fighting jobs. They tackle real world sexist pigs smartly (i.e. not by crying). In fact, I could be wrong, but I can’t remember a single mother-in-law on any of the four new fiction serials. Storytelling, it seems, is finally back on the small screen. Thank you dear god.

Now all you need to do, and I will be your humble slave if you succeed, is to convince Indian television viewers that this is a more authentic depiction of real India today. That they should switch channels with immediate effect.

Director Kabir Khan, who’s part of the YRF creative team responsible for these shows, says that if anyone can do it, this team can. And really, there’s no reason why television should be so regressive in an age when Hindi films are more experimental than ever. Khan says the main reason television and film “seem to be on two different planets” even though the same people are watching both is because there’s no viable alternative offered on the small screen.

Maybe, just maybe, more television viewers will make the switch. Maybe the YRF shows will propel Sony’s TRPs slowly but steadily. Maybe there’ll be another revolution. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be your humble slave, dear god.

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

LOUNGE LOVES

Anything Gustav Klimt Like the photo exhibition that pays tribute to the artist’s sensual canvases

Because it’s smaller, more convenient, and just as smart

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ew other artists evoke sensuality and magic, both at once, like the Austrian painter and muralist Gustav Klimt. The symbolist artist’s radical imagery and painstaking detailing have made many of his works iconic, most notably The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Who can forget their swirls of gold, the glinting squares that come together in kaleidoscopic permutations, the drunken spirals and intricate circles?

Both of these were painted circa 1907, in the decade that marked the artist’s golden period. But more than a century later, Klimt doesn’t cease to be an inspiration. The Italian art mosaic house, Sicis, offers the 1901 Judith and the Head of Holofernes as a wall mural. The store that opened its first showroom last month in India will let you have, for Rs11 lakh, a 75”x55” rendition of the master artist’s understated eroticism, put together with over a thousand handmade mosaic chips.

The most recent Klimtization is Delhi-based photographer Rohit Chawla’s calendar images. On being commissioned to do a five-part tribute series to the old masters by the Bird Group for its upcoming chain of boutique hotels Dusit Devarana, Chawla picked Klimt and recreated elaborate costumes and sets to photograph the women in his 13

DELHI METRO SMART CARD­ CUM­KEY CHAIN

Cast in gold: Chawla’s photo replica of Portrait of Adele Bloch­Bauer I. images. His exhibition, Klimt—The Sequel, opens today with portraits of several models and actors, such as Ayesha Thapar and Chitrangda Singh, shimmering with gold dust and draped in layers of golden fabric as they hold abstract props. Chawla has cast his models according to the physical features of Klimt’s women. And some of his images do manage to look like new-age replicas, even retaining some of Klimt’s aesthetics, though perhaps not his magic.

We love Klimt for his frank eroticism, his dominant women, his ecstatically intertwined bodies. We like that he took traditional allegory to new heights and ruffled conservative norms, for which he had to face public outcry and criticism in the late 19th century. His golden period was short and much of his success has been posthumous. In 2006, Portrait

of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was purchased by the Neue Galerie in New York for a reported $135 million (around Rs610 crore now)—the highest reported price ever paid for a painting till then. We also love Klimt because he didn’t care. In his 1899 Nuda Veritas, a stark naked woman holds up the mirror of truth. Above her, a quote by the German poet Friedrich Schiller reads: “If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.”

Rohit Chawla’s Klimt-inspired photo exhibition The Sequel will be on at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Delhi, from 16-20 January. Ten limited edition prints of each photograph will be available for Rs1 lakh each.

Anindita Ghose

espite all the recent bad press about accidents and safety lapses, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) continues to surprise with its smaller, less-than-train-size innovations.

Over the last few weeks the DMRC has unveiled a photo exhibition, super-detailed models of DMRC coaches costing Rs10,000 each, and identity cards for officials authorized to charge fines.

The last due to “instances of arguments between the staff and offenders who objected to their imposing fines without any authority proof”. The sternly named “Authorization For Penalty” card has a spiffy DMRC logo inside in brass.

But what Lounge really loves are the new DMRC smart cardcum-key chains. According to a statement on the DMRC website, the key chain was particularly targeted at consumers who drove up to Metro stations and parked their vehicles there. The new card, which works exactly like the old one, is just about half the size, but built of the same unbreakable plastic and acrylic. There is a ring at one end for keys and the card’s corners are rounded, the edges tapered, to prevent injuries.

The new card costs Rs50, and you can exchange your boring uni-functional old one for the multifunctional new one, but not the other way round.

Sidin Vadukut

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

Right key: The new DMRC smart card.

I

ndigo, that south Mumbai temple of oysters on the halfshell and lobster risotto, changed how and what the city ate 10 years ago. To celebrate, Rahul Akerkar’s restaurant has just launched a new menu, with the most popular dishes which have featured on its menu over the decade.

The good stuff I visited on the day the menu was being launched, and got to sample small portions of a variety of dishes. It started with the creamy roast corn chowder, for which the only complaint is that it had too much garlic. The quantity I got was just perfect; the full portion would have forced me to forego a course.

Next up were two Indigo hits—beef tenderloin carpaccio and a fresh raw tuna Gravad. Both were good, but I’ve had better beef carpaccio at Indigo in the past—it was sliced finer and the anchovy-caper drizzle was more intense.

The six raw oysters that came next can probably take a good amount of credit for Indigo becoming such a hit. As always, they were like taking in a mouthful of briny ocean, with popping beads of black mustard seed-sized caviar.

The Saffron Ravioli of Pumpkin with Sage and Pine Nut Butter was a beauty, despite the excess of a generous quantity of butter. The Chive Gnocchi paled in comparison.

Though rich cream sauces are not a personal favourite, I really enjoyed Fresh Green Garlic Fettucine with a roasted root vegetable ragout. Though I couldn’t taste the garlic, it was brilliant. Tiny dice of pumpkin were scattered through the cheesy pasta that was enriched with ribbons of spinach.

The Pan–Seared, Anise Rubbed Rawas with Artichoke Hearts is a hit or miss—either you love the Indian flavours in the Panchamrut-inspired sauce or you don’t. I’m surprised I liked a creamy vegetarian pasta better than subtle, seared fish, but the fettucine was almost soul nourishing.

In desserts, the Grand Marnier Cheesecake managed to be intensely cheesy, fresh and citrus all at once, which was enjoyable. The bitterness of liqueur overpowered the chocolate in the Chocolate Amaretto torte and I enjoyed that.

The not­so­good I have no prior experience of Indigo’s Camembert Souffle, but what I tried was not impressive. It could have been lighter, airier and Camembert-ier. The service was slow; with a restaurant full of celebrities, we were expecting to bask in the reflected glow of great service, but no such luck.

Tiger Prawn with Beetroot Couscous and Lobster Butter was forgettable; I had no memory of it till I looked at my notes the next day.

Talk plastic A meal for two is about Rs4,000-4,500 with alcohol and Rs3,000 without. For reservations, call 022-66368999.

Parizaad Khan ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION: JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

TODAY’S BLOG

Delhi’s veteran rockers

BY KRISH RAGHAV

This and more at blogs.livemint.com/livelounge

LISTEN TO A SPECIAL PODCAST Student suicides have been on a rise in Maharashtra. Johnson Thomas of Aasra, a Mumbai­based helpline for people with suicidal tendencies, tells us how they counsel depressed children and what parents, friends and teachers can do to help a suicidal child.

www.livemint.com/depression.htm

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

DO BIG GUNS MEAN

BETTER SECURITY? O

f the many supposed lessons of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, few have thus far yielded real changes: The outraged middle classes did not come out to vote, no civic sense or community arose phoenix-like in our cities. But the attacks did create one soft consensus: that India needs to spend more, much more, to assure the country’s security.

More Black Cat units. More speedboats. More and better guns for the police. More fighter planes and faster fibre-optic networks. Several months after the attacks, the government increased the non-nuclear defence expenditure by more than a quarter. One of the highest one-time increases in our history, it pushes the military budget to approaching $30 billion (Rs1.3 trillion).

Today, defence spending consumes around 2.35% of GDP—though small in comparison to, say, the US (4.7%), it is in fact larger than it looks, given the idiosyncratic way the Indian military budget is defined. The major part of

that increase is for buying new arms and equipment.

Our most distinguished political figures of the 20th century, whose intellectual energies were applied to thinking about how to minimize the role of force, might have been dismayed by this military expansion. The goal, back then, was to keep India away from military conflicts and wars, which were viewed as a product of the Western will to world domination. But our world is different from the one in which they lived. And as nice as it would be to transfer our entire defence budget to efforts at improving education, as little Costa Rica did after World War II, the fact is that India lives in a particularly turbulent part of the world—a place in which force is a necessary precondition for survival.

Even as I foresee the role of force increasing in our collective lives as a nation, I remain troubled by the general consensus that we can simply spend our way to safety. As it happens, this concern is occasionally shared by our own

defence minister, A.K. Antony. “Allocation of money has never been a problem,” he said at a conference last year.

“The issue has rather been the timely and judicious utilization of the money allocated.” But the question of whether, in fact, we are making judicious use of our monies is only part of my worry. I wonder as well whether we’ve thought hard enough about the role of force itself: what it can and cannot do, in a world of new and various threats.

In what is effectively a globalization of our military force, Indian arms increasingly are being sourced from a range of international suppliers. The numbers are large: India plans to spend some $100 billion over the next decade on defence purchases, and US and European aircraft manufacturers are anticipating an Indian order worth over $10 billion for jet fighters alone. At

At a time when the state is likely to use more force to solve internal and external conflicts, we need a more evolved and nuanced view of the role and purpose of force as a tool for securing our national aims

KRISHNENDU HALDER/REUTERS

Vision required: The mere alloca­ tion of money for equipment (can­ nons, left, and border fences, below) is no guarantee of increased safety. a time when the US administration, as well as European governments, are contemplating their own defence cuts, it’s hardly surprising that the world’s military suppliers have fastened their sights on India. But those suppliers are selling a strong bias: that India should think of security in technical terms—as a question of improved

weaponry and equipment.

When Lockheed Martin rents half a wing of Delhi’s Taj Palace Hotel and sets up shop, when retired military men from abroad troop through the capital city lobbying for the international firms who pay them, what I see is our own version of a “military-industrial complex” emerging—the very thing that US president MUNISH SHARMA/REUTERS

COLUMNS L5

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MUNISH SHARMA/REUTERS

DINODIA

USMAN KHAN/AFP

Hemmed in: India’s fear of conflict now stems from newer sources, such as neighbours China (Tiananmen Square, above) and Pakistan (left) but its tendency to concentrate debate on weaponry (Lockheed Martin’s F­16 jet, below) has seen it acquiring instruments of force in advance of a strategy for optimizing use of them. The example of Costa Rica (far left), which focused spending on education after World War II, is more difficult to achieve in today’s geopolitical landscape.

Eisenhower, a former general himself, warned his own countrymen against when leaving office in 1961. We have known the enormous political weight of this interest group in the US. But in the US, over the years since Eisenhower issued his warning, systematic checks on military power have emerged, in the form of a range of independent watchdogs such as the non-profit National Security Archives and aggressive investigative reporters, who work hard to invigilate military-industrial interests and to scrutinize government purchases.

We Indians lack such critical eyes. While from time to time brave journalists have exposed corruption in government deals for artillery or phantom night-vision goggles, we are short on the independent agencies and institutions that regularly monitor and hold to account private suppliers and government purchasers. And this lack matters not just because of the public money involved, but because our national security is at stake. Are we equipping ourselves for wars we shall never fight, and failing to equip ourselves for the wars in which we are already embroiled? It’s extremely difficult for me, and I suspect for most citizens, to judge.

Personally, I don’t pretend to have a view about whether the F-16 banks and flips more sweetly than the Dassault Rafale, nor do I know whose 155mm howitzer gives a more satisfying thump. What I have are questions that I’d like some help in thinking through.

Take, for instance, our spending over $2billion on a second-hand Russian aircraft carrier. A carrier is a status symbol, quite possibly a necessary one—and it might indeed be justifiable in practical terms. But one also has to set

such an investment in the context of actual threats identified by our own officials: threats such as the growth of China as a naval power, manifest in its build-up of a substantial submarine fleet; and seaborne terrorism and piracy.

How does an aircraft carrier (which, I imagine, would line up rather nicely in the periscope of a Chinese stealth submarine, and which would be as useful for chasing down a pirate boat as a Ferrari would be for pursuing a bullock cart) address such threats? In the months leading up to 26/11, the government was buying IL-78 airborne tankers and C-130 transport planes. Again, it’s quite possible that these were right and timely investments.

But when so few of us ask the government to justify such decisions, we create a climate in which defence decisions are less likely to be right or timely than they might otherwise be.

Historically, our tendency to concentrate debate on weaponry itself has meant that we have sometimes acquired instruments of force in advance of a strategy for optimizing these augmentations of our capacities. The classic case of this is nuclear weapons: Our nuclear “doctrine” began to be publicly articulated long after we had tested our capacity to explode such a weapon. This wasn’t just a matter of enwrapping the doctrine in high secrecy. It was a matter of devising the doctrine post hoc.

In general, as we make our technical upgrades, we need to invest in conceptual upgrades too. We need a more complex view of the role and purpose of force as a tool for securing our national aims.

Conflict is now for us a condition, not an event. The idea that the primary purpose of military force is to deliver decisive, knock-out blows—with the resultant photo-op banners

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

announcing “Victory” and tickertape parades—is an illusion. Given the broad and diverse range of threats we face, we need to think in terms of managing conflict, not ending it once and for all.

In our first four decades or so, we were much exercised by the threat that we might be drawn into conflicts whose causes originated elsewhere —superpower rivalry during the Cold War, for instance—and over which we would have no control. Keeping out of such conflicts was essentially what national sovereignty, autonomy of judgement and action, meant: being able to choose our battles.

Now, however, we face different kinds of threats—rooted in our region, linked to neighbours such as Pakistan and China, and even emanating from within India itself.

The most basic fact about our greater Asian neighbourhood is that it is inhabited by a number of rising, aspiring powers; and at

the same time it lacks any agreed structures or shared norms that might harmonize such jostling aspirations. It is states in India’s broad region, stretching from Iran to North Korea, that are most likely to acquire nuclear weapons in the near future. And it is non-state actors in India’s immediate environment— “AfPak”—that will pose lethal and fugitive challenges to us.

In fact, the sorts of military conflicts we potentially face stretch from classical battles (gaining and defending the commanding heights: the battle for Tiger Hill) to, unimaginable as it is, nuclear blasts. Those conflicts encompass along the way situations where the battlefield has “dematerialized” and the enemies are formless— rubber dinghies drifting in the night; bomb-laden people who slip into railway carriages or park scooters in crowded markets.

This awkward conjoining of

different types of threat, in some ways quite unique in historical terms, is epitomized at our doorstep in the shape of Pakistan: a state whose destructive weaponry encompasses the entire range of human ingenuity. A country awash in conventional as well as nuclear weapons, Pakistan is also host to thousands of men armed in the most basic of ways, prepared to wreak maximum damage and at best weakly under the control of their state.

We also have, beyond our northern border, a neighbour that has grown faster in economic size than any other society ever in history, possesses one of the largest military forces in the world, and is still trying to make sense of what it has achieved and what it wishes to do in the world. Its intentions and ambitions remain obscure —perhaps even to itself.

Finally, within our own country, the expansion of

“disturbed areas” and the ready deployment of growing paramilitary forces continues apace: We are a state at war with our own people. This increased use of force domestically equally demands vigilance and debate. When used at home, force must work with and be subordinate to—rather than seek to negate—law. If the domestic deployment of force is not strictly governed by the rule of law, and if there is not visible redress when the rule of law is violated in the name of public security, we may achieve tactical gains—but our more serious strategic ends will be subverted.

It’s a basic point: If the end one wants to bring about is to establish the rule of law, it cannot be achieved by means that ignore law.

It is likely that states will need to use force more, not less, in coming years—not in pursuit of conclusive, decisive outcomes (“decapitating” the enemy, as the gentle phrase goes); not as an act of “last resort”; but as a way of managing long-term confrontations and conflicts. It follows that questions about the proper use of military force will loom large. We will need greater public engagement with questions about the purpose and means of force, not because I imagine that public debate should determine the choices our professionals make— successful military decision making requires leadership, not committees. But a more informed public engagement will mean that the experts and professionals, and politicians, will have to justify and account for their decisions—never, I should think, a bad thing.

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

L6 COLUMNS

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

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

My Pongal resolution: no more ‘I’ for an ‘I’

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DINODIA

he cows look dazzling. They have bells on their horns and garlands around their necks.

Proud milkmen and women parade their herds on the streets. South India is ablaze with the sounds and smells of Pongal, also

called Sankranti. Urbanization and technology have muted the verdant ethos of this harvest festival, but vestiges still remain. Green sugar-cane stalks wave from street corners. Tiny streets are covered with rangoli. Mud pots filled with sweet rice pongal bubble away—in huts and modular kitchens. A well-made pongal remains one of the most satisfying and simple breakfast dishes for a south Indian.

The cantonment on my street celebrates Pongal in style. They buy their daily milk from about 10 cows and on Pongal day, the bovines are feted. The washed and turmeric-laden cows and Kangeyam bulls stand in line, their limpid eyes patient, as ladies take turns feeding them with bananas and fresh grass. The priest does an aarti. Everyone stands with folded hands. Then we eat.

I chew sugar cane and shoot the breeze with the herd-owner, Lakshmi.

She is looking for brides for her sons and is distressed because the boys want an urban-type and she is worried about whether she can get along with such a daughter-in-law. “So many nice girls in my village, but what’s the use?”

Lakshmi laments.

I promise to look for a suitable urban but ruralish girl for her son.

Apropos of nothing, she suddenly asks, “Aama (okay), rejolution-na enna (what does resolution mean)?”

Apparently, all her sons’ cellphone conversations are peppered with this word post-New Year and Lakshmi, in

the manner of parents everywhere, wants to know what the heck her kids are talking about.

I am glad you asked, I reply, for I’ve been researching this very topic.

Resolve is an interesting word, I say, after spitting out some sugar cane.

From 1374, when the word was first recorded, it clung to its Latin root, resolvere, which has nothing to do with the New Year resolutions that your boys are talking about. Resolvere means “to loosen, undo, settle”, as in loosening a mathematical problem into parts or undoing a knotty issue.

Only in 1592 did the word come to mean determination. That’s what your sons are saying on the cellphone.

They are making a plan, a determination for the year, which could be dieting, exercising, learning a foreign language, something like that. “Or getting married,” Lakshmi says hopefully. A cow urinates. She yells at her boy-Friday who hurriedly places a bucket near its rear. “Cow dung is like gold during Pongal,” she mutters. “Everyone wants it to clean their courtyards.”

The young priest drapes his cloth over his bare chest and prepares to leave. Lakshmi treats him with a deference that galls me. Here I am, trying to explain the meaning of resolution to her and all she cares about is attending to a urinating cow.

The priest says goodbye and all of a sudden, she is bowing and scraping.

The Sanskrit word for resolve is

Festive colours: The harvest festival of Pongal is celebrated with gusto in Tamil Nadu. sankalpa, I say, trying to one-up the priest. Before a priest begins a havan or puja, he will recite the sankalpa or what he intends for the puja to deliver.

The typical sankalpa is a beautiful vocalic alliteration that wishes for ayur (longevity), arogya (health), aishwarya (wealth), abhivruthyartham (great growth), along with vijaya (victory), virya (bravery), and other good stuff.

Lakshmi stares at me. Finally, she gets it. I smile. Is there anything for increasing cow’s milk, she asks.

Go eat some more pongal, I reply sourly. Our discussion degenerates into how many milk tokens I owe her.

“Don’t you have resolutions?” I ask, trying the interactive approach.

“Yes, I wish that my customers would give me the milk tokens that they owe me.” She glares.

The easiest way to bring a resolution to fruition is to say it aloud, I say approvingly. The venerable Latin

monks who came up with the meaning for resolvere were no slouches either.

Another useful way to make and keep a resolution is to “loosen” it into parts.

Rather than cursing your reneging customers, you could ask your boy-Friday to approach them individually. “Dai, inga vaa da (Boy, come here),” she yells and impishly asks him to collect tokens from her most errant customer: me.

Enough about Lakshmi. She doesn’t care a jot for resolutions anyway. A resolution that I am toying with is to reduce the personal anecdotes that I reveal in each column, not because I’ve suddenly become coy and private, or because I don’t want to, but because memoirish prose comes easy to me. Resolutions usually involve challenging yourself into doing things that are uncomfortable, such as going to the gym every day. Mine would be in the same spirit.

I began with a severely ambitious resolution: I would never use the word “I” in my writings, I told myself.

Writing this very sentence negated that approach. Then, I decided the more forgiving “resolvere” approach of breaking it down into manageable parts. How about fewer than five “I”s per column? That seemed doable.

So, here is my sankalpa. From next week, there will be fewer anecdotes and less than five “I”s in my column.

Let’s see how long this resolution lasts.

Shoba Narayan gave Lakshmi the three one-litre tokens that were owed her in exchange for which Lakshmi gave Shoba a bucket of cow urine. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

Why climbing can redefine your boundaries

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n Sunday morning two weeks ago, I looked up at a never-ending wall that seemed like a ladder to God. Fear nestled somewhere close by. After 33 years, I was back at a rock-climbing face, roped but not ready.

Climbers, creatures of a beautiful insanity (could you climb sheer walls with no rope, would you?), have a weird humour. One once wrote: “Climbing is the only cure for gravity.”

But nothing feels funny right then.

At 14, I first climbed a rock in Darjeeling during a course at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.

Then, young fingers searched for tiny holds on cold stone. Now before me was this artificial wall, full of helpful holds, yet no less intimidating. What I needed was what Abhinav Bindra, the shooter, told me over breakfast in India two weeks ago. He won Olympic gold, he said, partly because he took a “leap of faith”. It’s what you need for victory, not just over other men but over yourself. Not just in sport, but in life.

This leap is one of belief. This leap is also one of discovery, it helps you locate physical reserves you weren’t sure you owned, it takes you to hideaways in the mind where a faint bravery might rest. It is a finding of the self, a pushing of the body through unsureness. It is why I admire

climbers, solo sailors, North and South Pole walkers, Sahara crossers, for whatever their mode of transport, they are nevertheless leaping, and they have a magnificent faith.

Climbing is alarming yet soothing. It requires this faith. On mountains, roped together, a man puts his life literally into another’s hands. Hold me, friend. Then he steps into the unknown. Climbing requires trust. In instinct, technique, skill, equipment.

On another rock wall near me, one that curved fearfully backwards, a climber simply dangled from a short rope and a carabiner high above the ground, contemplating his options. It was beautiful.

Waiting for my turn on the wall, I abruptly summoned a man from the crevices of my memory. Years ago, a climber called John Bachar intrigued me, astonished me. He climbed complex, smooth, unhelpful rock faces, 200ft high, with nothing, no rope, no bolt, no carabiner, only toothbrush to clean tiny cracks and chalk to assist with his grip. It was him and the rock, alone,

Up the ante: To be a successful climber takes a leap of faith. imagination against stone, an artist communing with his rough canvas.

Except that to fall was often fatal.

I knew Bachar through a piece by author Craig Vetter, written over 20 years ago. How he hung a 70ft ladder from a tree and climbed it, using only hands, three rungs at a time. Walked a wire for balance. Did one-armed pull-ups, one-finger pull-ups. To see a film of Bachar is to rethink the law of gravity and I found him strongly heroic. He redefined for me in a way what was possible in life, that boundaries could be reset, that

achievement had no real finish line.

Bachar had faith, I need this faith.

So I put a foot on the wall and start.

Climbing is pensive, personal, private, challenging, maybe like a runner and the road, but laced with risk. The ground is our comfort zone, we are safe on it, and so to take just the first step up a wall, even if roped, is to walk past fear.

What I’m searching for (and can’t find) is to be encased in concentration, where nothing exists, not rope, not ground, just the hold, just going higher. Pushing myself. Literally. And

otherwise. Behind me, people are doing brilliant manoeuvres on more intricate walls, but they don’t matter to me. For me, 10ft is a start, it seems nothing but it is something. A beginning. A small leap.

Vetter in his piece all those years ago, captured climbing beautifully: “In Yosemite (in America), the grapevine ethic...is that you do not climb to be famous or to make a living. You climb to climb, and if you do it with intensity, the rewards are deep and private. At its purest, you go alone, and when you get back, you might not even say where you’ve been or what you’ve climbed.”

I am climbing with two friends. A young woman, Rhea, who climbs wonderfully to the top, her legs shaking but not her resolve. Her mother, Sherene, strong, driven, gets halfway up. Me, I don’t get far, maybe 25ft, and my hands are fine but my faith gives way. I let go. To not go back and try again will be a failure to leap.

It is a good Sunday, but Monday brings quiet. I pull out Vetter’s story on Bachar, reread it, savour it. Then I wonder where he is and search on Google. I wish I hadn’t.

On 5 July last year, near Mammoth Lakes, California, Bachar fell from a rock face and died. He was 52.

Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent with The Straits Times, Singapore.

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com

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L7

Style ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

OUT OF THE CLOSET | ANDREW HOLLAND

Following suit This CEO believes clothes are important for a good first and lasting impression

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

···························· s the CEO of Ambit Capital, Andrew Holland believes in making a powerful impression. He has been wearing a formal suit to work daily for over 10 years, ever since he moved to India. “If you’re wearing a good suit, people take notice,” he says. But as soon as he’s home, the power suit is replaced by T-shirts and track pants. The father of a newborn daughter doesn’t want “drool all over my suit”.

Holland has a traditional British style of dressing in dark, two- or three-buttoned suits with a colour palette dominated by blue, white, grey and black.

But since his move to India,

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there are glimpses of purple, orange and even lime green in his wardrobe. For casual dressing, he wears the two pairs of jeans he owns, and he will continue to wear them “till they fall off”. Edited excerpts from an interview: What do you look for in a suit?

The most important thing is how the suit feels on me rather than what it looks like. My priority is the fit and how I feel inside of it. I don’t know how to describe it, but you can wear a suit and know there’s something not right.

The shoulders should not be drooping or too broad and the trousers should fit just right.

Where do you shop for suits?

It took me a long, long time but about five or six years ago I discovered Canali and have stuck to the brand since. I’ve worn brands such as Gucci and Ferragamo but none of them made me feel like this is where I want to be. Now that I’m comfortable with Canali, I’m happy to keep wearing that. I do buy shirts in other brands like Hugo Boss and Marks & Spencer, which are quite good for work.

I’m not one of those people who need to shop. I look at my wardrobe once in a while and

decide what needs to be replaced and then buy it. A few months ago I felt I need more suits. So I went to Canali and bought three.

How has your sense of dressing evolved over the years?

When you’re young, you create your own style. You wear what you like without necessarily thinking about brands. As you grow older you wear what you think fits well. You’re not trying to be fashionable any more; it’s more about comfort. Also, my wife is very fashion and brand conscious. It helps when you have someone around who can say what’s looking good and what’s not or ask you to try something you never would. Like wearing an orange shirt. I think I have got a lot more colour in my wardrobe now but that’s mainly because of her. She has literally brought more colour in my life.

Any piece of fashion advice from her that you didn’t follow?

She once wanted me to buy what I can only describe as a Bollywood kind of shirt. I said I don’t think so.

How do you like to accessorize?

I end up buying my ties usually while buying my suits. So I mostly have Canali ties. I look for basic work shoes as opposed to anything flashy; I like shoes by

Well suited: Holland in his favourite black and purple pinstripe suit.

Dunhill, Canali, Ferragamo and Gucci. I wear cufflinks to work every day and get them made from our jeweller in India.

Do you dress differently for work here and overseas?

I always wear a suit to work, wherever that might be. I’m so used to working in suits that when I wear casuals, I don’t feel like I should be working. There’s no difference in the way I dress.

What difference do you see in the way people dress in India as opposed to internationally?

Over the years I’ve noticed that people have become more fashion conscious here. They are wearing better shirts, more colour, nicer ties and even cufflinks to work. There’s a lot more choice now and so people don’t look like they’re all dressed the same. As the

disposable income has increased, people are changing their wardrobe more often.

In a job interview, how much importance do you give to a person’s appearance?

First impressions mean a lot, whether you’re meeting someone socially or in an interview. But if someone were very talented and not very well dressed, you may have to overlook that. But a lot of companies these days have courses on etiquette just to help people learn how to dress or how to sit at a dinner table. At the end of the day, we’re all brand ambassadors for our company and if someone sees you and you look terrible, they will associate that with the company.

How do you pack for a three-day business trip?

It depends on what the business trip is for. You need to look at how important your meetings are and pack accordingly. I pack my best suit for the most important meeting. My favourite suit in my wardrobe is a black one with purple pinstripes and I like it because it looks good on me and I feel good in it. If the trip is for two days, then I carry one suit with two shirts, if it’s three days then two different suits with three shirts. I probably wouldn’t carry different shoes.

Did the economic downturn affect your purchasing?

No. Actually, yes it did, but only in the fact that there are so many sales. So recession actually made me spend more than I usually do.

When you see such large discounts in India or overseas, you end up buying more clothes than you actually need.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010

Play SHREYA PATIL SHINDE/MINT

PROFILE

A break of another kind With one world and two national titles, 2009 was a significant year for this billiards champ

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

···························· t’s been a little over four months since Pankaj Advani won the world professional billiards title, rode on a wave of euphoria, swung from one tournament to a promotional event and back in quick succession, walked in fashion shows, and lived the life of a budding star. Reality is now beginning to take over.

“You are as good as your last win. I have realized I can’t win all the time even though people expect me to. I am human, I will bleed if you cut me,” says Advani.

He just took a break in Goa for the Sunburn festival and to welcome the new year. He says he needed the holiday as the elation that followed his world title was wearing off and he had to “take a step back and do some things differently”.

At 24, Advani is being touted as perhaps the best billiards player ever from India. It’s a slippery pedestal to be placed on, considering the country has a rich legacy in cue sports—starting with Wilson Jones, through Michael Ferreira and Geet Sethi, among several others. Advani’s victory in the world billiards final over Mike Russell in Leeds, England, in early September was the crowning of a prodigious talent who has grabbed attention since he was 12 years old. His career

I

resume now boasts of seven world titles—including professional and amateur billiards, and an amateur snooker title.

The amateur circuit is conducted by the International Billiards and Snooker Federation, while the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association holds the professional events. Billiards has fewer professionals and is played in fewer countries, while professional snooker is more competitive.

Advani’s first world professional billiards title took a weight off his shoulders. Not because the question haunting him was “will he”, but more of “when will he”. He followed that up with his third national snooker and billiards titles, respectively, taking his total of national titles to 17.

The rest of 2009 went in a blur for the Bangalore-based Advani, who then lost in the amateur world snooker championships in Hyderabad and finished third in the Asian Indoor Games in Vietnam, both in November. He then lost in the semi-finals of an invitation snooker tournament in Chennai in December. The reason why he felt “stale” and in need of “switch off” for a month: Because he couldn’t “think too much about the game”.

“I may have become complacent, so I need to pull up my socks, stay sharp. The mind starts playing games, you know,” says Advani, dressed in one of those jeans that only people on one side of 25 find appealing.

His opinion on clothing is the best indicator of his age, for he manages to cloak his youthfulness with the poise of the seasoned champion when he plays.

For instance, he wants to change what he wears at work, preferring to play in a colourful, snazzy waistcoat instead of the black formal wear which he believes takes something away from cue sports as a television

has never had a 1,000-point break. But Advani dismisses that statistic as a mere number.

“Players have had breaks of over 500 against me and still lost,” he says. His best has been 867, but few would bet against Advani getting the four-figure mark eventually.

Ferreira explains: “He has not had the opportunity to play

long games like we did. You have to judge him by the quality of his peers. So far he has been outstanding internationally. Whether he can be compared to greats of the past…if he had the same experience in playing longer games like we used to have, then he would match up to us.”

As a 10-year-old, he watched elder brother Shree play in a neighbourhood parlour till he could wait no longer. Barely able to reach the table, he pocketed the first shot he ever tried.

Former national snooker champion Arvind Savur initially refused to take him under his wing because, at 5ft 1 inch, Advani was too short. A year later, an enduring partnership began. Two months after they started training together, Savur told Shree that little Pankaj could reproduce any shot immediately. In 2003, at 17, Advani was the national snooker champion.

“It’s the result of his dedication and hard work,” says Savur over the phone from Bangalore. “You have to be focused and not succumb to distractions, which is what I have always told him. He has never deviated from that goal; for instance, he does not have late evenings,” adds Savur, who would pick up the brothers from the Karnataka State Billiards Association (KSBA), drive them to his home to coach and then drop them back at the KSBA. Success can spoil, but Advani remains grounded thanks to “father figure and the man who taught me everything” Savur, Shree and mother Kajal who, the siblings say, remains remarkably nonchalant about his achievements. Support also came from others, like the college principal in Bangalore who shooed him away from college to practice, insisting he bring laurels instead of attending classes.

“I was 6 when I lost my father.

I was not mature enough to realize the impact. Mom played the role of both parents, which is why we did not miss him. My mental strength also comes from mom,” says Advani, whose traditionally business-oriented Sindhi family has never had a sportsman in its ranks.

Their relative is now the world’s best in the business.

of golf clubs and the whole metal versus wood debate (when they were originally launched in 1991, their making more people fall, stainless steel design so to speak, into the was considered a category of those who significant departure can consider golf a from the mostly leisure activity. The wooden clubs of the recent vote of the time), we introduced International Olympic fusion technology that Committee to include golf puts multiple materials in the Olympics has into the club head in increased the profile of the order to distribute sport for the youth who weight more evenly. want to get involved with Then there were the the game, and it’ll heighten aerodynamic hex interest in the game. designs on the golf What sort of technology ball, which actually goes into creating a come from people who Callaway golf product? had worked in the When Callaway started 27 aerospace industry. years ago, golfing was a So what branches of quiet, placid industry. science are involved Our founder believed that in the making of golf bringing tech and equipment? innovation would Iron man: Callaway president George Fellows.

We have metallurgists, essentially change the physicists, mechanical character of the game. We right now, while we’re talking, engineers and aerodynamics therefore had a philosophy engineers will be working on experts working through our that allowed us to be the 2012-13 products. process. We have developed largest spender of research We’ve brought a lot of some proprietary software that and development money. We technology into golfing in the allows us to predict outcomes have a development cycle that time that we’ve been and test variables before we takes up to three years, so around—like the Big Bertha line have an actual physical

prototype. We also work with universities, and we share technological inputs with, say, the aerospace industry, or racing cars—anything that can gain from the work on aerodynamics and materials that we’ve done.

What’s the most exciting technology you’ve seen come out of Callaway’s research?

The chemistry of a golf ball centre. It’s very complex—most of us see it as just a piece of rubber covered by some polyurethane or plastic, but in reality—the compressibility of a golf ball determines the amount of spin, distance, the control you’re able to exercise—it’s a very complex chemistry and physics problem. You add in the complexity of the covering—how thin it is, how soft it is, and how able it is to transfer the power of a swing into the inner core, which in turn determines how it reacts to the collision, if you will. These are remarkably complicated interactions requiring some very sophisticated analysis in order to make improvements. I came from outside the industry and I was astounded at the amount of science that goes into each and every one of these things.

FACTFILE WORLD PROFESSIONAL BILLIARDS 2009

ASIAN BILLIARDS 2009, 2008, 2005

WORLD AMATEUR BILLIARDS (TIME FORMAT) 2005, 2007, 2008;

(POINT FORMAT) 2005, 2008

ASIAN GAMES DOHA, 2006

GOLD MEDAL WORLD AMATEUR SNOOKER 2003

SENIOR NATIONAL SNOOKER 2003, 2007, 2008, 2009

SENIOR NATIONAL BILLIARDS 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009

Cued in: Advani dismisses the fact that he’s never had a 1,000­point break in billiards as a mere statistic. event. “The formal wear has to go. Sports is all about packaging now,” he says.

Despite a slightly nervous body language, Advani speaks with confidence, sure of what he wants to say or do. It’s one of the attributes that appeals to former world amateur billiards champion Ferreira. “He has to watch out for his admirers.

The sultans of swing The head of golf equipment firm Callaway talks about the science of a nine­iron B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· he Callaway Golf Company has over 3,000 patents worldwide for its golfing equipment. A quick look at their catalogue reveals golf clubs that sound like experimental fighter jets—the “X-22”, the “FT i-brid”, among others—each of them boasting numerous scientific breakthroughs in design and engineering.

Callaway has just launched a wholly-owned Indian subsidiary, and signed golfer Jeev Milkha Singh as its brand ambassador. President and CEO George Fellows spoke to Lounge about golfers in India, Callaway’s connection to jet planes and the problem with designing golf balls.

Edited excerpts:

T

How has golfing changed in India?

The Indian golfing market has been expanding dramatically in the last few years. We think it’s at an inflection point, where something that’s already a very aggressive growth might turn exponential. There are approximately 500,000 golfers in India today, and they consider about 150,000 to be avid golfers, meaning they play regularly around the year. But there are certain things happening here that we think will seriously accelerate this.

What are those changes?

The infrastructure: Just four-five years ago, there were 80 courses throughout India, and now there are 250, with many being built. So the accessibility of the game has really increased. The economic development here is

When you feel like you are God Almighty, a stage which he has not reached yet, then, as they say, pride goes before a fall,” says Ferreira. “But he is levelheaded and makes strong statements, which comes from the confidence of being the best in the business.”

Critics often point to the one chink in his armour—that he

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L9

Parenting LESSONS

Young fists of fury Got smacked in the face by your child? Is it just a discipline issue or a genuine cry for help?

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

································ aurav*, 7, is the only son of a couple in their 40s, both of whom have extremely demanding professional lives. His aunt Lata* says that since the age of 3, he has been a difficult child.

“Earlier, he used to hit only his mother.

Then he started biting, pinching and hitting not just his parents but other people around too. We have heard of classmates who have refused to attend his birthday parties. He is cruel to my dog whenever he comes over and pulls his ears and tail. I don’t think it is because he dislikes animals but it is just that Gaurav is always angry and wants attention. I think he senses that all is not well between his parents and is constantly seeking attention from both,” says Lata.

Last year, Gaurav’s father took a year’s sabbatical from work to spend more time with him since his mother found it impossible to handle the child alone.

“When a child between 2 and 4 hits out at a parent, it is a way to express himself. But when this behaviour continues between 4 to 7 years, then it is a learned behaviour. He or she knows that this is a way to seek attention and that is worrying,” explains Maya Kirpalani, a clinical psychologist and family therapist at the Jaslok and Bhatia hospitals in Mumbai. “As a parent, you have to teach your child to express his feelings through language and not fists,” Kirpalani adds.

There are many reasons why young children are aggressive and hit out at parents, peers, siblings or sometime even other adults such as teachers or caregivers. Hitting is a form of seeking attention, an expression of extreme anger or frustration by a child or simply a result of inconsistent disciplining by the parents. “Just as too little attention is a problem, parents who stand to attention at a child’s every whim are doing him harm too. The child will feel frustrated if he doesn’t get the kind of attention that he is used to in other social situations, such as in school, and can hit at people around to get noticed,” says Gouri Dange, a Pune-based psychologist, Lounge columnist and author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Abha Adams, a New-Delhi based education consultant, believes there is a distinct correlation between the violent images young children see in video games and on TV, and their own inappropriate violent behaviour.

“Frankly, in eight out of 10 cases, this unprovoked aggressive behaviour in a child is rooted in some family issue. Parents are reluctant to open up about their family atmosphere, marital issues,” explains Dange. At times, there may be no overt violence in the house. But an overworked mother and an absent father make for a fairly fraught atmosphere. The child may get the feeling that he is a “big chore” for his mother.

“Whatever the circumstances, no parent should accept being hit by their children.

As soon as a child hits you, be firm in your response. Hold their hand, look them in the eye—and depending on their age—very firmly tell them that they are never to hit again because it hurts,”

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Unprovoked: Is your child hitting his classmates?

advises Adams, adding that teachers need to follow the same course—swift intervention is critical in school—setting boundaries, making the child understand what is acceptable and what is not. “If a child continues to hit other children in class, isolate him. He should be made to understand that his actions will have consequences and he will not be allowed to play or sit next to other children. Also, inform the parents immediately and encourage them to seek counselling with the child,” says Madhulika Sen, principal, Tagore International school, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi.

One of the key factors in discouraging aggressive behaviour is to try and get an aggressive child to empathize with others.

This can be done effectively by teachers.

“Take his hand and help him touch things, people, very gently. Not during a meltdown, but sometime during the day, encourage him to touch a flower, or a fragile object, and explain how a harsh touch can hurt or destroy the object,” adds Dange. Teach such a child to express his emotions and feelings in words.

Parents should do the same. “But don’t make all communication about negative emotions and feelings only—I am angry, I am sad. Include positive expressions as well,” says Kirpalani.

Both counsellors advise parents whose child hits them or others against hitting the child as a means of instilling discipline. Work on soothing the child. Never slap and chastize him in front of other children or their parents. If you have to deal with complaints about your child, never react offensively or defensively to the person making the complaint or shrug off all blame. “But don’t turn around and yell at your child either. It is advisable to apologize and promise to look into the matter,” adds Dange.

Try and include physical games—yoga, martial arts—in such a child’s schedule.

Even physical activities such as childfriendly carpentry, where “legitimate” force may be needed to hammer a nail into a board, could be worked into his routine. * Names changed to protect identity.

ADAGIO RIDING STABLES Parents in Delhi and Gurgaon have a new outdoor spot to visit with their young ones. The Adagio Riding Stables, Chhattarpur, New Delhi, runs a pony club for children between 5­15 years and has eight ponies and three horses. “Our club is not only about riding but also (about) bonding with the horses.

We encourage children to help with cleaning the ponies, brushing their tails. They lead the ponies from the stable to the ground too. After the class, they can feed carrots or jaggery to them,” says Rudrika Singh, coordinator and junior instructor. An hour­long riding class costs Rs500 without an instructor and Rs700 with one. You can organize birthday parties at the stables as well. Call ahead (Rudrika at 9818485302) to make a booking.

Seema Chowdhry

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

‘NEPHEW’S PICKING UP NANNY’S HABITS’ I find my nephew, 12, being increasingly influenced in a not-so-nice-way by his caregiver. She has been with them since his birth and is integral to the household—to the extent that they can’t function without her. Yet she has many repulsive habits that I see reflected in my nephew.

For instance, she is addicted to TV soaps. Even if he isn’t allowed to watch them, she narrates the stories to him, down to the goriest detail. I don’t find this a healthy situation. Without suggesting that she be sacked, how do I communicate that the caregiver isn’t a healthy influence on a growing boy?

It’s understandable that the child’s parents cannot function without this lady running the household, but surely if you point out these aspects of her influence on him, they could find a way to have him spend less time with her? At 12, he doesn’t need constant supervision and tending; however, as the lady has

TV troubles: Watching soaps daily is not healthy for children. been around since his birth, no one seems to have been able to stand apart (like you as an “outsider-insider” can) and see that the time has come for some separation and boundaries.

Avoid painting the nanny as someone who is a “bad influence”, as this may not go down well with the parents, who seem very dependent on her.

However, you can point out that he’s watching too much family drama garbage on TV. What you can do is focus on

the child and talk about how he needs more and better inputs—come up with positive suggestions about how he can and should spend his time. It could be sports or a hobby or music or gaming, or anything most 12-year-olds are naturally drawn to. You could offer to do the coordination, if that is needed. Usually parents who let their children hang around the daily help so much are by default hard-pressed for time, or they don’t have the ability/energy to follow through with these ideas.

So any concrete suggestions that you can offer would probably ensure that they agree something different needs to be done.

Don’t make it a “campaign” against the woman, as this will be unfair. There must be a strong emotional bond between the child and her, for sure. And that is something to respect.

Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Send your queries to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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

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ILLUSTRATIONS

BY

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

DEAR DIARY… LOVE EINSTEIN EXCERPT

Sidin Vadukut’s ‘Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese’ traces the career of Varghese from trainee to associate. Written entirely in the form of diary entries typed by Varghese when he comes back home from work, ‘Dork’ chronicles the most intimate thoughts of a naïve, earnest entrant into a tumultuous corporate environment.

Where evil and PowerPoint await

Dork—The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese: Penguin, 240 pages, Rs199, in bookstores in February.

2 APRIL 2006 4 p.m.

I HAVE DONE IT! I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD! THE UNIVERSE EVEN! Bow to me, Diary! I am now officially a Business Process Analyst—Trainee.

Who knew, three months ago, when I got a C minus in advanced business strategy that I would join the elite international strategy consulting firm of Dufresne Partners one day? The world mocked me when I sent my résumés to consulting firms and investment banks. Rahul Gupta’s exact words were: ‘Einstein, you are a complete idiot!’

IN YOUR FACE, RAHUL GUPTA! PODA PATTI! Bastard. Just because you topped the batch does NOT mean you can screw around with Einstein.

Phew. Wow. I need to hold my breath. This is a big moment—my first job. And that too a Day Zero job. Wow. I called Dad on his cell three times but he cut the call each time.

He’s started taking tantric yoga classes in the evenings. Perhaps I caught him during his ‘Sensory Deprivation Kriya’.

Okay, now let me describe everything that happened after I updated you last week and told you I’d been shortlisted for interviews

by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., JP Morgan and Dufresne Partners. I know I haven’t written entries since then, but you know how it is with placements and the pressure to get a job on Day Zero.

Oh! My fingertips tingle with earnestness.

At the time, I may have told everyone that I was all set to join Goldman Sachs, the greatest bank in the world. I may also have suggested that Dufresne Partners was my ‘safety application’ and I had no intention of joining a ‘second-grade consulting firm of questionable pedigree’.

Diary, I was deeply mistaken.

Little did I know that Dufresne Partners, despite the lower revenues, lower profile, and near global bankruptcy in 2001, stood

shoulders and head above the others when you considered the job in a holistic fashion. Especially with that exciting and sensible ‘performance and global marketplace dependent variable bonus payout scheme’ that was introduced earlier this year.

My impression of firms was corrupted by the likes of Rahul Gupta. By the way, that pig made it into Goldman Sachs. His work–life balance is so screwed. Does he even know how many more hours bankers have to put in compared to consultants? In a way I feel sorry for him, my arch-nemesis. I look forward to hearing from him soon with a request to refer him for a vacancy at Dufresne. I will first promise to help him. Assure him that I hold no grudge.

And then I will ignore him and dash his hopes. Awesome.

Now, onward I go with my tales of triumphant employment.

My first interview for the day was with JP Morgan.

I had sat up all night watching CNBC in the common room, trying

to keep myself up to date with the bleeding edge of news and information from the global financial markets. Unfortunately I fell asleep on the wooden bench in front of the TV and woke up only at nine after Shashank from the placement office rolled me off the bench on to the floor and kicked me in the underbelly.

Apparently JPM had started interviews at 8 a.m. as scheduled and if I didn’t get my first interview started in ten minutes they would skip me entirely for the second round. I tried to calm Shashank down by telling him that this was part of my optimal interview preparation programme whereby I reduce my metabolism to impossible lows just before peak performance. He walked away shaking his head in disbelief at my nerves of solid steel.

I had approximately eight minutes to be interview ready.

Which meant I had to prioritize: Brush teeth? bathe? shave? loo?

I decided to go to the loo, brush and change into my suit. My hair

had been crushed into the armrests of the stupid bench and pressed into a reverse Mohawk: nothing in the middle, nice stiff peaks on both sides. It was embarrassing.

BUT I HAD NO TIME FOR A BLOW DRY! With one minute left in my deadline I ran to the classroom block with my tie flapping around my neck and the twin peaks of my hair rock-solid.

I was gasping for breath when I reached the student pool, but once I entered the room I acted nonchalant and relaxed. This was a little psychological warfare to weaken the morale of the competition. Most guys get nervous when they see people like me take it so cool.

The atmosphere in the pool was sombre. People were beginning to get eliminated. A cold shiver passed down my spine. Shashank stood in the centre of the pool screaming out instructions. And then he saw me, looked at my head and went completely silent.

He came up to me and said I had

ten minutes to get my hair straightened out. Or they would debar me from campus placements under the ‘Potential cause of institutional ill-repute’ clause.

I ran to the water cooler outside in the hallway and stood in line behind Bardan, Suddu and a somewhat short, skinny girl in a suit. I figured she must be one of those first-year kids who were hanging around to help us seniors. I made a mental note to seek her out later and chat her up Einstein-style.

When it was my turn I took the cup, filled it with water and then tried to splash a little with my palm into my hair. I managed to get the back of my suit wet and ticklishly cold. So I walked over to the girl in the suit and asked her if she could tip the glass of water gently over my head so I could pat my hair down.

She was taken aback and looked a little lost in the way women do when they’ve been asked to do something and hope that someone else will do it for them. (Remember carpentry practicals in engineering college?) But I grabbed her hand, gave her the glass and bent over.

She dutifully poured the water while I patted my hair down. It took a few minutes but I finally managed to get my mop into some sort of order.

I thanked her profusely but she walked away without a word. I think I felt a certain spark of chemistry . . .

Just then I heard Shashank call my name and I ran into the pool without delay.

He immediately sent one of his minions to take me to the JP Morgan interview room. There was no one outside the room except Pathak, the student coordinator, who wished me best of luck (not necessary) and then turned away quickly with a magazine over his face. Bad breath?

I walked into a particularly cold and harshly lit room. That and the water in my shirt made me shiver a little. But I took a couple of deep breaths and focussed all my energy in my kundalini point on the tip of my nose.

There were two gentlemen in the room—very sharply dressed in shirts and ties and with shiny BlackBerrys on the table. The very sight of the gleaming Berrys—that’s what all the bankers and corporate types call them—made my heart race and my pulse pound.

For a brief moment I imagined myself sitting in my office at JPM and typing a very professional message on my own Berry: ‘Okay.

We will buy General Motors in all cash . . .’ or something like that.

They asked me to wait a second till a colleague joined them. I sat quietly in my chair, looking at them while they fiddled with their Berrys.

Ten seconds later the third member of the group walked in.

And at that moment I knew that my immediate future as a young management professional would probably not involve toiling in the venerable corridors of JP Morgan and earning obscenely large salaries in a foreign currency.

The third member on the panel was the same girl whom I had accosted at the water cooler and asked to pour water over my head. I tried to make a little joke of it by smiling at her and smoothing my hair down. She looked at me with eyes like those of a black widow spider about to eat its mate.

They asked me a few questions about my résumé and then invited me to talk about the state of the global economy. While I spoke, the lady passed around a

small sheet of paper. The gentlemen looked at it, then at me and then at each other. Then at me again. And then at my hair.

I made a little joke about inflation being a serious problem for ‘both the Economy and Mahima Choudhury!’ which was followed by laughter. Mostly my own.

The JPM people wished me best of luck and asked me to leave. As I left I heard laughter.

When Pathak asked me how I did, I told him I answered everything and I felt positive.

I actually did.

Humour, Prof. Kumar had told us in our interview techniques lectures, was a powerful way to shine in an interview. Had it been good enough to get me a second round with JPM? Only time would tell.

I walked back to the pool mildly optimistic and waited for my next call: McKinsey & Co. Prince among recruiters, king among consultants, er . . . emperor among employers. Half the people in the institute would give an arm and perhaps a leg to be shortlisted by McKinsey & Co. But not me.

I, Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese, merely had to submit my résumé with full academic qualifications and the shortlist came looking for me. After all I was ranked forty-first in the batch. As I sat waiting for Shashank to shout the magic words—‘Einstein! McKinsey needs you right now!’—I mentally patted myself on the back and tried to think of all the possible questions they might throw at me. These consulting interviews could be tricky.

I focussed and went into a somewhat zen-like state.

Suddenly Shashank came and stood next to me. I straightened my tie, took a long pranayamic breath and stood up. I felt a pulse of positive energy thrum through my body. And the taste of adrenalin in my mouth; metallic with a hint of red wine.

‘Is it time?’ I asked him.

‘Dude, McKinsey have finalized their people and they’ve stopped all interviews. They wanted me to inform everyone who was left on their shortlist. Sorry, man.’

For a brief moment the room began to spin around me. Then I instantly collected my emotions admirably and stopped sobbing in another thirty seconds or so.

Shashank didn’t say anything but he put his arm around me.

‘Don’t worry, Einstein. You have more interviews lined up. And besides, Pathak told me that JP Morgan were very happy after you left them.’

I said nothing. I tried to think happy thoughts. I tried to think of Chandler Bing. It always helps.

Shashank walked away and I decided to step outside for a cup of coffee and one of those terrible sandwiches they supply every year during placements.

As I went down the stairs to the snacks counters I began to wish, just a little bit, I had converted my summer internship into a job like Shashank. He had interned with UBS in London. They liked him so much that they had offered him a full-time job.

Shashank is a good egg though.

None of the airs that those banker types put on as soon as they smell an offer letter from London or New York. Not like the Rahul Guptas of the world.

There was a girl giving away sandwiches behind the counter. I approached her and gratefully

accepted two sandwiches. Of course I accepted them only after she insisted that she did not work with Goldman Sachs or Dufresne Partners in a Human Resources capacity.

Once bitten twice shy has been one of my lifelong mottoes, as you know.

I had barely settled into a quiet corner of the adjacent lawn with my sandwich and a machine-churned coffee when a placement committee member approached me at a fair clip and told me to go ‘at once’ to the Dufresne Partners panel for my first round interview.

I took a couple of deep pranayamic breaths and told positive things to myself, as Deepak Chopra tells us to in his weekly email newsletter. ‘Dufresne Partners needs you, Einstein.

Dufresne Partners needs you, Einstein. You don’t need them.

They need you. They want you.’

I kept repeating that mantra to myself till I reached the Dufresne interview room. There was nobody around. Not a single soul. Not even

the student representative. I stood around awkwardly for a while before deciding to grab the initiative and create some momentum: I walked up to the door, knocked twice and then walked in, a look of determination on my face.

Inside there was a gentleman with his back to me, facing a corner of the room with his pants down around his knees. His shirt, thankfully, was long enough to cover his behind. There was a tube of some sort of ointment on the table next to him. He turned his head around and looked at me.

Oddly enough, he looked calm and cool, collected even.

I nodded at him solemnly and walked back out closing the door behind me.

And then I tried to completely erase the previous seven seconds from my life.

A moment or two later the door opened and the gentleman stepped out and asked me if I was Robin Varghese. I nodded. He walked up to me and extended his hand. I shook it, and made a mental note:

HANDWASH. ‘Hi Robin. I am Swami. Great to meet you. Why don’t you go through this material while I prepare for our interview, eh? It will help and won’t take more than ten minutes. Okay?’

I nodded. He walked away. I vigorously rubbed my palm on the seat of my trousers and then opened the file Swami had given me. I immediately felt much better.

Dufresne had prepared individualized material for each candidate and the file had my name emblazoned in bold letters across the top of each page: ROBIN WERE GEESE—WIMWI Swami popped his head out of the door. ‘Come on in, Robin!’ he said with a flick of his head.

When I entered the room and did not see the tube of ointment on the table, I let out a quite audible sigh of relief.

‘Don’t be nervous, Robin. We are all nice people here at Dufresne. Relax. Sit down and chill, won’t you?’

L12 COVER

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

FIRST PERSON

HOW TO WRITE A

FIRST BOOK Mint’s in­house author tells you how Bloody Marys and the dream of being another William Dalrymple helped him write his soon­to­be­released book

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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

···························· he first thing to do when you’re writing a novel is to write. Anything. And lots of it.

My book is, as it were, a pure crystallized expression of the post-modern dialectic that envelops us all in the modern workplace. It is a startling, unsettling piece of fiction that cuts perilously close to the existential reality that is us. By which I mean you and me. All of us. Firmament.

Actually no. Dork is a 240-page-long humour novel that captures approximately the first 12 months in a naïve MBA graduate’s professional life. But enough of the book. How does one go about writing a debut novel?

I can’t vouch to speak for every author out there. Some of them struggle with their writing. Some of them don’t. Some of them plan books over many years. And some, like James Patterson, launch one book before and one after lunch daily, except on weekends. When he catches up on his pending work.

But in my case I began my book with equal amounts of inspiration and desperation. I was desperate first, and then went seeking inspiration later. The desperation came out of realizing, in 2005, that I wanted to be William Dalrymple. I’d just finished reading his From the Holy Mountain, and realized immediately that I wanted to write for a living.

I promptly quit my proper MBA-like job, installed an Internet connection, arranged for a hardy laptop and began to write.

Driven by a mad desire to be Dalrymple as quickly as I could, four months later I had a manuscript ready. It was born, not out of inspiration, but out of desperation. Pure, rabid desperation.

I had to finish a book. So I did.

Dork is not that book. In fact I have no intention of publishing that book right now. It was written in youthful impetuousness, devoid of real thought. One day, perhaps I shall resuscitate it.

When I have the time and energy to edit and rewrite around 130,000 words.

But that first manuscript helped me immensely with one thing: dealing with the process of writing.

Whenever I listen to an author interview I am amazed when anyone says that the writing comes easily to him or her. Or that the process itself was enjoyable in any way.

Because for me the process was long, hard and exhausting.

By the time I started writing Dork,

T

sometime in mid-2008, I was already working as a journalist in the day, and running back home to write at night (by then I had inspiration though. I had the plot in my head, and I was obsessed with the character of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese).

And what made this doubly difficult is the fact that Dork was always meant to be a funny book. It wasn’t a novel with a little humour thrown in for flavour. Here humour was the only flavour.

And humour is awfully, painfully, excruciatingly difficult to produce on demand. Especially at 1am when you are at least 3,000 words behind your weekly schedule. And you’ve had a teeth-baring fight at work. And suddenly, after dinner, the next scene involves a joke with ball bearings.

Thankfully I never had to come back after a bad day and scrap thousands of words. I recently read an interview where an author said he did this on a regular basis. Scrap thousands of words every once in a while.

How dreadful!

One way to cope with this focus and productivity problem, and sadly I only did this for the second half of Dork, is to make two documents: first, a list of all the characters that would appear in the book. This list had their names, quirks and purpose in the story. I used this to trim some useless characters who served no purpose, and focus on other more important ones.

The second document was a plot outline.

For years I’d written columns, stories and articles without ever outlining anything (that’s also because I’m writing everything at the last possible moment). Then when I began work on Dork, my publisher wanted to know where I was going with the plot. How was I going to end the book? This forced me to draw up a somewhat detailed plot outline comprising scenes. Each scene would be a mega-gag that would break down into several individual diary entries and funny incidents.

The moment I drew up this outline, writing became much easier. And actually fun. When you have that particularly funny

gag 2,000 words away, you’re dying to reach there and put it into words. It makes you impatient, eager to type again when you get back home.

Otherwise my process was simple. All night after work, and most Sundays, I sat at a quiet table over a laptop and typed. To avoid disturbances, I would usually listen to some form of classical or instrumental music on my iPod (someone once told me that any music with lyrics you can understand would make the brain wander. Hence Gypsy Kings. Yanni).

On the last weekend before the manuscript subscription deadline I went to my in-laws’ house, had a heavy breakfast, arranged for a supply chain of black coffee and then wrote for 10 hours straight. Till I was done. I was overjoyed, over-caffeinated and never wanted to type anything ever again.

If you do this long enough, i.e. type continuously to a plot outline, you eventually end up getting a novel (which is also why there are so many budding novelists).

But then there is the little matter of getting your baby published.

I tried pulling every publishing string I could, but the one that eventually worked best was a search for publishing company names on Linkedin.com, the professional networking site. I knew someone, who knew someone, who knew somebody at Penguin.

A flurry of emails followed and contact was made (at the time I had only half the manuscript. I emailed it and waited).

Penguin and one other publisher reverted. I went with the big P. What next? Cash the advance.

Alert bank on forthcoming royalties. Retire and buy 2BHK in the hills. Correct? Not quite.

Getting a publisher to accept a book is just half the work. There are books. And then there are books. I recently heard that a million new titles are published each year worldwide. Hundreds of fiction and non-fiction book titles are published in India alone.

So if all anyone reads are Bhagats, Wodehouses or Ludlums, where do all the other

LISTEN TO THE LOUNGE PODCAST Tune in to first­time author Sidin Vadukut sharing his theorems as he introduces us to his protagonist Robert ‘Einstein’ Varghese. We also chat with the musicians of the Black Mozart Ensemble, who are touring India, and the Tokyo­based founders of PechaKucha. www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

books go?

Nowhere.

Publishers are perfectly happy to pick up a book, print around 3,000 copies, recoup their investments plus a little, and send you a little cheque. Sure you’ll have a book on your resume. But that’s not the point no? Booker is the point, no?

This, unfortunately, is not entirely up to the merit of the book. You also need to sell it to your editor at the publishing house. Who must then sell it to the marketing and sales guys.

Who must then sell it to the shopkeeper who will ask him why he is shipping him books called Dork by people called Vadukut.

In short, there are many random variables. Sometimes they come together nicely. Often they don’t.

Which is why you must be thankful for Facebook, Twitter and spam email. If you massage your social networks nicely, you can create a buzz for your book cheaply. And if you don’t have any friends you can still do that old trick: Book a nice restaurant, invite random people and one kebab-fellow, arrange for Johnnie Walker by the case and do a reading.

The Indian literary scene likes nothing better than a book reading with booze and a handful of ex-MLA/parallel cinema types.

The only thing left after this is to deal with the bitter feelings of insecurity. The moment your editor tells you that the book has gone to press you realize a few things: The book sucks. People will laugh at you. Your writing career is over. You will never ever become William Dalrymple. The whole thing was a horrible idea to start with.

No one will buy it. And for the rest of your life you won’t be able to visit a bookstore without seeing copies of your book in the discount bin.

“Buy two Dorks and get four free.”

I have realized that non-stop Bloody Marys work best in this situation.

As for your first book, a good place to start is perhaps with a few audio interviews with the best authors. These interviews will tell you not only how these writers find inspiration, but also how, where and, most importantly, why they write. Get them here: u BBC World Book Club: www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ wbc/ u CBC Writers and Company: www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/ u New York Times Books: www.nytimes.com/ref/books/ books-podcast-archive.html

THE WRITE STUFF Here’s how these authors did it

AFP

u Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie Adichie said in an interview that the Internet is a huge sink of time for her. So she spends a little time in the morning reading the news.

And then silence. I agree. It is fine if you’re going through a bout of writer’s block and need distraction.

Otherwise turn off the Wi­Fi, pull out the ethernet cable or forget to pay the Internet bill.

u Antony Beevor Beevor moved his writing location so that he would NOT have a wonderful view of a valley out of his window. He said it was too distracting. This also holds true for the wall behind your computer.

Some people like little posters and paintings. I have nothing. Instead I have a window to one side to let in the light and air (not that there are any valleys in Dwarka). And occasionally look outside while thinking of what to call the secretary who appears in just one scene. But she needs a name.

AFP

u Eric Hobsbawm I was sick of trying to keep my workplace tidy. And the missus was getting sick of telling me why the potted plant was ok, but bundles of back­issue ‘New Yorkers’ and empty coffee cups were not. Then I saw a photo of Eric Hobsbawm’s office on the ‘Guardian’ website. The coffee cups stayed and now have plants growing out of them. u Sue Townsend Townsend deserves a hat­tip (and not just because she convinced me that the epistolary style for a book works). Apparently she also listens to a lot of BBC radio and classical music while working. I optimistically installed a BBC Radio widget on the iMac. Then I tried www.musicovery.com that freely streams music based on the mood you choose. Which worked very well. Once you don’t care for the music, it crowds out everything else, you just zone out.

Sidin Vadukut

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010

L13

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

DK BHASKAR

YELLOWSTONE

The wolf’s soft howl Snowscape: (left) Coyo­ tes on the prowl; and participants viewing wolves through the spotting scope.

In the world’s first designated national park, the predator rules the winter terrain

B Y D .K . B HASKAR ··························· long the ridge of the valley, seven of us sat quietly in the minivan, gazing intently through our binoculars.

Twenty-five metres away, on a snow-covered mound, a lone coyote scanned the landscape.

An absolute silence reigned in the snowy wilderness. Just then the coyote took to its heels, plunging into the woods. The chirpy voice of our guide, naturalist Shauna Baron, broke the eerie quiet. “That’s a good sign, I think there could be wolves around,” she said.

Straddling Montana, Wyoming and Idaho in northern US,

A

Yellowstone is a landscape of superlatives: the first designated national park in the world, with the highest elevation lake, the greatest congregation of geysers and hot springs, and so forth. Spread across 20 million acres and dotted with hot springs and fumaroles, it is home to bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn antelopes, bison and coyotes. The star attractions, however, are the packs of grey wolves—the top predator in these regions—that roam freely from one creek to the other, trawl the meadows and play hide-and-seek with prey.

Participating in the non-profit Yellowstone Institute’s five-day

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Wolf Discovery Program was something of a dream come true, but when I signed up I’d had no idea that our adventure would begin even before the sun rose, or just after or during a heavy snowfall. Part of the challenge of embarking on an adventure in sub-zero January temperatures and snow flurries was to be covered adequately from head to toe—a 20-minute exercise, starting with thermal inners and ending with balaclava—before we could begin tracking the landscape and its early warning signals.

True to Baron’s heads-up, minutes after the coyote had disappeared, the soft howls of wolves rent the air. Then, as we watched, four young wolves emerged from the forest, caution imprinted in their approach to the tiny creek 10m away. “That’s the Slough Creek Pack! There should be seven of them,” Baron said excitedly.

I couldn’t believe my luck that they should be so close—park officials urge a distance of at least 30m—or even just the sight of them. For 10 whole minutes, the foursome prowled around the creek, looking for new prey and picking over the carcass of the previous day’s kill, before they were summoned back by the now-familiar howls from the rest of the pack, never to be seen again for the rest of our trip.

I had just brushed away a layer of snow from my 400mm lens and put a hand-warmer on my scarlet face when the radio crackled to life. A guide from another vehicle enquired, “Any wolf sighting at your end, Shauna?” All of us grinned ear to ear in response.

Some 70 years ago, wolves became extinct in Yellowstone.

Despite large numbers of cougars, grizzlies and black bears, the absence of a keystone species led to an increase in elk numbers, affecting new vegetation. “It needed political will and important acts of wildlife protection to reintroduce them after nearly 50 years,” says Baron.

Under the successful reintroduction programme in 1995-96, biologists captured 31 wild wolves in the Canadian Rockies and set them free in Yellowstone. The project so far has been an unqualified success. Today, there are more than 150 wild wolves in Yellowstone. A few have become part of local lore, such as Cinderella and 21M (one of the earliest males), who reared two dozen pups and contributed inestimably to the revival of wolf glory at the park, paving the way for annual average tourist income of $35 million.

The reintroduction of the grey wolf was also of major importance to the local environment: They controlled the elk population, thereby helping in the recovery of deciduous woody species such as upland aspen and riparian cottonwood, says Baron. “We’re learning so much about wolf behaviour in the wild that we didn’t know before,” she says, adding, “Captive wolf populations, which had been our primary source of knowledge, are very different from those in the wild.”

Often described as North America’s Serengeti, the wilderness of the Lamar valley—the venue of our five-day wildlife sojourn—is starkly beautiful, with its long, wide and open glacier-scoured basin. Apart from the wolves, we feasted our eyes on strings of elk moving along the iced river bank, an eagle swooping to pluck a hapless goldeneye from a break in the frozen river, herds of bison using their massive heads to shovel aside the snow for the scrubby brown grass, even as howling wolves echoed around the majestic landscape.

Early one morning, we witnessed a pack of 13—the Druid Peak pack—through a spotting scope. As we watched, the wolves played merrily on the soft snow, cuddling, nipping, nuzzling, teasing, romancing and taking turns to play with a dry tree trunk, an exquisite display of the soft side of nature in a species not universally known for its gentleness. Our feet and hands turned numb, but the sub-zero temperatures seemed to have no effect on the wolves, thanks, I learnt, to their thick coats and waterproof oily underfur.

If one could tear one’s eyes away from the wolves, one could also appreciate the winter landscape, breathtaking in shades of white, grey and black.

In the distance, thick forests were enveloped in grey clouds,

the spectacular terraces of mammoth hot springs in the northern range—one of the park’s greatest attractions—sending clouds of steam into the frozen temperature.

Three miles from the Roosevelt Arch, the park’s main winter entrance, is the 45th Parallel, a geographic line midway between the Equator and the North Pole. Here flows the cool, clear river called the Gardiner.

Along its banks, hot springs bubble to the surface; the steaming water merges with the cold to produce very comfortable temperatures. It’s easy, as one slips

into this natural spa pool surrounded by the Absaroka mountain range, to be disturbed only by the occasional elk or bison, to believe this is how nature meant it to be—and far-sighted conservationists, over a decade ago, just helped it on its way.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

If your children have an interest in wildlife and the outdoors, they will take to Yellowstone.

L14

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010

Books DEUTSCHES HISTORISCHES MUSEUM/BLOOMBERG

Liberation: The fall of the Berlin Wall was an epochal moment in history.

THE HUMBLING | PHILIP ROTH

Switch to a darker side The prolific American writer’s stark and melancholic work lacks his earlier sauciness NANCY CRAMPTON/HOUGHTON MIFFLIN/BLOOMBERG

B Y S ANJAY S IPAHIMALANI ··························· iven that there’s usually been a hallway of mirrors between Philip Roth’s life and his fiction, it’s hard not to think of this, his 30th novel, as an allegory for his own situation.

“He’d lost his magic,” is how The Humbling begins, and though at 76 Roth’s output remains undimmed, his books have of late verged on the stark and the melancholy, dealing with loss of powers and imminent mortality.

This, of course, wasn’t always the case. The best of Roth’s novels feature characters who erupt with vitality, be it Alexander Portnoy or Mickey Sabbath. Even American Pastoral’s tragic, conflicted Swede Levov is tireless in his attempts Themes: Roth on sex and death. to unravel the mystery of his daughter’s whereabouts. All break-up when she takes up that changed from 2006 with with the ageing actor. the elegiac Everyman—though Axler goes about remaking g l i m m e r i n g s e m e r g e d i n her, at least in externals, buying 2001’s The Dying Animal—and her clothes, lingerie, jewellery continued with Nathan Zuck- and shoes in “an orgy of spenderman’s swan song, Exit Ghost. ing and spoiling that suited Though Indignation’s inno- them both just fine”. After a cent, hard-working Marcus stylish, expensive haircut, Messner appeared to buck the there’s something of an epiphtrend, we now have the slim any: “Wasn’t he making her The Humbling. pretend to be someone other Unfolding in three acts, the than who she was? Wasn’t he novel introduces us without any dressing her up in costume as ado to the predicament of though a costly skirt could disSimon Axler, “the last of the pose of nearly two decades of best of the classic American lived experience?” Ignoring this stage actors”. Now in his 60s, still, small voice, he convinces and facing the aftermath of a himself of the validity and lonstring of disastrous perform- gevity of the relationship, ances, Axler finds himself bereft speaking to her parents and lisof self-confidence and talent. tening patiently to her accounts His wife leaves him to stay with of what they have to say to her. their son and, alone in his isoHere, the compressed, terse, lated dwelling in rural New almost sketchy prose style that York, Axler contemplates sui- made the first part forceful cide with the aid of a shotgun isn’t up to the job of delineathe keeps in the attic. ing their affair. In particular, Pooh-poohing his agent’s giv en the context, the sex plea that he sign on for a pro- scenes are blatant and verge duction of O’Neill’s Long Day’s on the ludicrous, involving a Journey into Night, Axler spends dildo, a cat-o’-nine-tails and, 26 days in a psychiatric facility on one occasion, a threesome bonding with the other inmates (not for nothing was a passage and attending art therapy ses- nominated for the Bad Sex sions. Though the predicament a w a r d ) . I t ’ s n o t t h a t R o t h of the others makes him realize h a s n ’ t b e e n t r a n s g r e s s i v e that he is not alone in his help- about sex before—that’s an lessness, the retreat does little understatement—but here, to restore his self-belief. there’s a grim, almost voyeurMuch of this first section istic, tone completely lacking carries a convincing, compel- his earlier sauciness. ling cha rge, bu t it’s w hen In addition, there’s the probPegeen enters Axler’s life that lematic portrayal of Pegeen as the narrative’s waters become stereotypically butch, especially muddied. She’s the 40-year- during the episode when the old daughter of Axler’s former two pick up a woman at a bar. theatre friends, has been in The stage now is set for the final lesbian relationships from the act—compelling again—in time she was 23, and is just which we witness the fallout of r e c o v e r i n g f r o m a m e s s y the liaison and the effects on Axler’s life, readying him for a last private performance.

Woody Allen, that other eminent chronicler of the Jewish-American psyche, once typically remarked that the difference between sex and death is that with death, you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you. In taking sex and death as the themes of his late-stage novels, Roth shows that he’s better at the latter than the former.

G

THE YEAR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD | MICHAEL MEYER

When East crossed over to West Twenty years on, a vivid and rousing history of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· he 9th of November, 2009, marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—that colossal event, both climactic and generative, that stoked uprisings and revolutions across Eastern Europe, eventually broke down the Soviet Union, and brought an end to the Cold War that, for four decades, had sucked in not just America and Russia into confrontation but also most of the world into a series of proxy wars. The story of this marvellous and multi-sided event is thrillingly told by Michael Meyer, then News-

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week’s correspondent in Eastern Europe, in his new book The Year that Changed the World.

Meyer’s presence at the great events of 1989 as an eyewitness, and then his distance from those events writing in 2009, make this a work both of journalism and of history. In particular he is keen to play down, if not to refute outright, the American triumphalism that greeted the fall of the Wall, and to criticize the sense of unbounded power and manifest destiny that has been the feature of the foreign policy measures of successive American governments ever since.

If his book is subtitled The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, it is because he wants to highlight the many forces big and small, the contributions of individuals and masses, the connections and misunderstandings, that shaped the historical phenomenon that we may understand a little too neatly today, with the com-

FREE VERSE | ASEEM KAUL

Carry Over I’ve always thought of Heaven more as magnitude than space— a power to be raised to— the notional 10’s place to which what’s left gets carried over when it’s time for summing up.

Or perhaps it’s just the tail of that great pi in the sky— an infinity stretching beyond death’s last decimal— this would explain, for instance, the difference I now feel living minus a loved one in a world that’s rounded off.

Aseem Kaul is the author of Études.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

placency of hindsight, as something inevitable, the victory of capitalism over communism.

Nemeth, Honecker, Walesa, Havel, Schabowski, Jaruzelski—these are the names of statesmen, alongside those of Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, that Meyer would have us know as essential protagonists in this story. Perhaps the most influential protagonist—the entity which, when toppled, brought everything down with it—was an inanimate one: the Wall itself.

For 28 years the Wall had stood, 12ft high and more than a hundred kilometres long, between East Germany (the GDR) and West Germany (the FDR), closing off the countries of Eastern Europe behind the “Iron Curtain” of the Communist world. Built with Russian backing by the East German government in 1961 as a way of barricading mass emigration to the West, its featureless concrete soon became a repository of meanings. “Nothing has ever been so weighted with symbolism, ideology and history,” writes Meyer.

“The Wall was World War II, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the high tide of totalitarianism and communist dictatorship, the frontier of democracy.”

Meyer takes the reader on a country-by-country tour of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania), showing how reformists, often from within government and the ruling party, were at work strategizing against hard-line Communists in each country. The fall of communism in each state had an individual character, sometimes as a revolution, sometimes as a brokered truce, sometimes as a peaceful transfer of power. Some were top-down, plotted by a few courageous intellectuals and dissidents; others were bottom-up, gathering force from spontaneous mass gatherings and the voice of “people power”.

News of a successful rebellion in one country emboldened longsuppressed citizens and dissidents in others; reverses suffered by one regime made others queasy and indecisive. It became hard to distinguish between cause and effect. Just as inertia

The Year that Changed the World: Scribner, 256 pages, $26 (around Rs1,200). and repression had long allowed repressive governments to dictate every decision of their populaces, so now a new energy, passing around like wildfire, worked itself up into a motor that fired up every corner of Eastern Europe.

Even as he sketches in the larger picture, Meyer is alive to many individual moments of irony, tragedy, wonder and farce. As the gates of the Wall are suddenly opened under the pressure of surging East German crowds on 9 November 1989, he sees, among the first few people to freely break through for the first time in four decades, a woman in hair curlers and a coat thrown over her bathrobe, suddenly not a subject but an agent of history. Touchingly, she doesn’t want to leave her homeland. “I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” she calls to a friend. “I just want to see if it’s real!” In Prague a few days later, exuberant demonstrators invented a new gesture of solidarity: The shaking of their house keys above their heads in their thousands, creating an enormous, soul-stirring jingling that literally sounded the death knell of the old regime. Rich not just with a telling of a particular history but with a thinking about history in general, this is a narrative that anyone remotely interested in politics will enjoy.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS History and journalism in one book

The Humbling: Jonathan Cape, 140 pages, Rs550.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based critic and an advertising executive with Bates 141.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010

L15

Culture 2010 FILM PREVIEW

Scorsese visits the asylum PARAMOUNT PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION/WSJ

The veteran director returns to Boston with DiCaprio; Russell Crowe grabs a bow and a ‘Twilight’ star goes punk

B Y L AUREN A .E . S CHUKER ····························

Extraordinary Measures 22 January

In this real-life drama, a couple (Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell) faces heartbreak when their two youngest children are diagnosed with the same fatal disease which renders them unable to walk or feed themselves. The couple finds an under-appreciated but brilliant scientist, played by Harrison Ford, to help them find a cure. To create the life-saving drug for the children, they must raise milCBS FILMS/WSJ

lions to fund scientific research for a disease few are interested in. Along the way, they battle medical and pharmaceutical industries. Ford was an early champion of the project.

Inspired by a 2003 Wall Street Journal article by Geeta Anand, Extraordinary Measures focuses on the controversial nature of “orphan drugs”—pharmaceuticals that cater to rare diseases but which seldom get the funding that those for more common disorders do. Double Feature Films, which produced the movie with CBS Films, also produced Erin Brockovich. That real-life drama won actor Julia Roberts an Academy Award.

Shutter Island 19 February

Shutter Island raised some eyebrows when Paramount Pictures moved the film out of 2009 to February. Wouldn’t Martin Scorsese’s first narrative feature since

Bandit king: Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.

UNIVERSAL PICTURES/ EVERETT COLLECTION/WSJ

The Departed, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, want to be out in time for Academy Award nominations? The studio says it was trying simply to defer spending the marketing money until fiscal 2010, and there’s no evidence that this film was troubled in any way: The subject is squarely in Scorsese’s wheelhouse. A US marshal is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a murderess from a mental institution for the criminally insane on an island in Boston Harbor.

DiCaprio, and a partner played

by Mark Ruffalo, soon begin to

question their assignment—and each other—after a series of traumatic events plague the island, including a massive hurricane during which inmates escape from their cells.

Scorsese agreed to direct Shutter Island, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone), about a week after receiving the script, says producer Brad Fischer of Phoenix Pictures. “After we sent him the script, his agent called and said it reminded (Scorsese) of this old German film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which was one of the first movies ever made about psychological terror.” And the terrain wasn’t entirely foreign to Scorsese: His Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro as a rapist who gets out of prison to stalk the family of his former lawyer, is nothing if not psychologically terrifying.

To help set the tone, Scorsese held night-time screenings for the cast and crew, from Orson Welles’ 1962 The Trial to Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir tale of double-crossing, Out of the Past, and Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 oncebanned documentary Titicut Follies, which follows inmates who were stripped, chained and force-fed at a Massachusetts mental asylum.

Scorsese shot the movie in Massachusetts, from Peddocks Island off the Boston coast to the old industrial mills of Taunton, a stand-in for the Dachau concentration camp, which appears in the film in flashbacks. The one element that the producers had to import to Boston from Hollywood was wind-blowing equipment to create the hurricane.

This is the fourth collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio, following Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed. While the director is probably the most

APPARITION/WSJ

WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES/WSJ

Coming soon: (clockwise from top) A still from Shutter Island; Oliver Stone; stills from The Runaways and Extraordinary Measures.

Robin Hood 14 May lauded of his generation, his films never attained blockbuster status at the box office until The Departed, which grossed nearly $300 million (around Rs1,362 crore now) at the worldwide box office—and also was set in Boston.

suited for eight-year-old “twitards”, however: Some themes are dark, including the girls’ drug and alcohol use. Stewart sings in the film; the real-life Jett served as an executive producer.

The Runaways

23 April

19 March

In some quarters, Kristen Stewart is already Hollywood’s biggest rock star. So who better to play a real one, Joan Jett? Sporting a shag haircut, Stewart of Twilight fame plays a young rocker in this coming-of-age biopic about the 1970s band formed by teenage girls living near Hollywood, including the 16-year-old Jett (née Joan Marie Larkin). The film is loosely based on lead singer Cherie Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel. The girls in The Runaways were all younger than 17 when they broke into a rough, male-dominated rock scene, just ahead of the Go-Go’s and the Bangles. While the band never hit the big time, Jett did, and the Runaways managed to play alongside the Ramones, Tom Petty and Cheap Trick.

Music films generally have a mixed box-office track record, but this one could be a magnet for Twilight fans, with Stewart in a lead role. Child-turned-adolescent star Dakota Fanning, who plays Currie, even has a small part in the most recent Twilight sequel.

The Runaways isn’t perfectly

Wall Street 2 Gordon Gekko might have been a greed-ridden rogue in Oliver Stone’s original 1980s Wall Street, but he was a glamorous one. Stone’s upcoming Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, presents a more chastened Gekko, struggling to adjust after years in prison. Michael Douglas is still a ruthless corporate raider at heart, but the financial world has drastically shifted, markets have gone global, and the entire system is on the brink of a major collapse. Will Gekko find redemption?

Perhaps in a bid to add a fresh perspective to the movie as the immediate financial crisis fades, Stone focuses more on Gekko’s personal life than the earlier film did. While Fox has kept the details of the film under wraps, some of the movie is known to explore Gekko’s attempts to rebuild a relationship with his daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan of An Education), who blames him for her brother’s suicide. He bonds with her Wall Street trader fiancé, Jacob, played

by Shia LaBeouf, helping him investigate financial foul play.

In his fifth collaboration with Ridley Scott since 2000, Russell Crowe plays the legendary wealth redistributor in this $130 million remake of the timeless tale. It was originally titled Nottingham; Universal Pictures changed the title when the film began to focus less on the evil sheriff and more on Robin Hood.

To play the part, Crowe trained with a bow and arrow for several months to be able to shoot as accurately as possible.

Set in 13th century England, the film follows the original story in which Robin—abandoned as a child—and his fellow bandits in Sherwood Forest resist the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Robin’s early childhood issues have long prevented him from falling in love—until he meets Maid Marion, played by Cate Blanchett (Sienna Miller was cast originally, but the studio says it opted for Blanchett after the role evolved into an older character). Although the film’s steep budget figure has some executives worried, Scott’s previous collaborations with Crowe have a good track record at the box office. Gladiator made more than $450 million worldwide in 2000; American Gangster grossed more than $260 million.

Gladiator and Crowe also won Academy Awards.

All the film release dates are for the US. Write to wsj@livemint.com

16 CULTURE SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010, DELHI ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FOLK ART

The return of Lavni SHIRISH SHETE/DANCING MAIDENS

Tamasha is back on the big screen with ‘Natrang’, but that’s just a part of its revival story

BY PRACHI JAWADEKAR WAGH ······························ he dancer raises her outlined eyebrow and bites her glossy lower lip with practised innocence, and the crowd goes crazy. Had they been wearing traditional pink and saffron phetas (turbans), they would surely have tossed them in the air.

But this is 2010, and the setting is a multiplex in Mumbai. An audience that includes women and children is swinging to the Lavni Mala jau dhya na ghari (Let me go home) as the movie Natrang plays to full houses across Maharashtra.

The film starring Atul Kulkarni released on 1 January and has been having a successful run.

The return of the Tamasha to the silver screen is just a part of the story: of the rise, fall and rise of Maharashtra’s folk music and its star attraction—Lavni. This is not just a filmi comeback; Lavni, in its authentic theatrical form, is spreading to the national and international stage too.

The success of Natrang mirrors the social graph of hundreds of Tamasha artists over the past century or so. Marathi cinema in its prime was based on Tamasha—which includes play, song and aradhana, besides Lavni—drawing both themes and artists. From 1960-75, the bold voice of Sulochana Chavan recorded some unforgettable Lavnis before the decline began, with cinema adopting modern themes. When it came to performing for a live audience, veterans such as Yamunabai Waikar could cast a spell—but the 1950s were a different era.

Circa 1980s, the jingle of ghungroos (dancing bells) was drowned in a chorus of catcalls. Art was incidental; it was raw entertainment for a usually drunk crowd. In the flaking rooms of Kala Kendras—public cultural forums with options of private shows—along the Pune-Solapur Road, Lavni was the rustic’s delight. The dance form that is a combination of nritya (dance), adakari (acting) and sangeet (music) was left to survive just on its erotic strain. Usually dressed in gold-bordered, nineyard saris, hair tied into floweradorned buns, artists were worth their availability, not art, as customers replaced connoisseurs. But the slide down the social order is now in reverse mode.

Lavni comes from the Sanskrit word lavanya, which means beauty. Although it is identified today by its erotic lyrics layered with multiple meanings and seductive dance movements, few know that it originated in the devotional music tradition of Maharashtra. A combination of shringar rasa and bhakti makes Lavni unique. The form became popular with the Mughal armies that were entertained by troupes in areas that were under invasion or influence of the north. “That also explains the influence of Kathak on Lavni,” says Prakash Khandge, head of the Lok Kala Academy at Mumbai University.

But the art of seduction through dance and music found true patronage with the Peshwas in the 18th century. That was when beautiful dancing damsels could

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

THESE SIX PACKS PACK A PUNCH U

ntil a few weeks ago, the Salman Khan starrer Veer was supposed to be released alongside a couple of other films.

The competition has since abandoned the fight and left the arena open to the desi swords-and-sandals epic, which is set in 1875. The online grapevine is rustling with rumours that Veer rips off the Hollywood adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 18th century novel Taras Bulba, but the trailers also look and sound like Troy and Gladiator. There are several whinnying horses, computer-generated soldiers and a bare-chested Salman wearing armour, shiny leather pants and a scowl that makes Nicolas Cage look cheerful.

The scowl is part of Salman’s appeal, as is the shaven chest.

Salman’s ancestors in the shirtless department include Dharmendra, but Salman probably holds the record for the maximum number of upper body exposure shots. Perhaps no star has ever made his bare chest a part of his performance. It is said the mark of truly great actors is that they can convey emotions even with their backs to the camera. The reverse is true for Salman: Watch how his ribcage both heaves with joy and weeps with pain.

It’s easy to see why Salman became a star in the late 1980s with such films as Maine Pyar Kiya (remember the shirtless Salman on the poster?), Saajan and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!

Along with Aamir Khan, Salman represented a new crop of actors who stepped in to replace fading stars such as Jeetendra and Anil Kapoor. Salman was achingly young and aggressively fit. As the years went by, the galaxy became more crowded with such names as Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, but Salman endured.

Only his fans and kind-hearted critics believe he is a good actor. But nobody disputes his ability to draw the crowds—the same reason why people of dubious talent such as Rajendra Kumar and Rajesh Khanna have managed to linger in the public eye for so many years.

The fact that no other movie wants to compete with Veer when it opens on 22 January is proof of Salman’s ability to

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Evergreen: (clockwise from top) A photo from the book Dancing Maidens: The Seduction Called Lavni; a poster of Nat­ rang; and Lavni artist Surekha Punekar.

SHIRISH SHETE/DANCING MAIDENS

make the elite and moneyed classes drool at their feet. Many believe (though other historical factors can hardly be overlooked) that the later Peshwas’ love of Lavni played catalyst to the end of the Maratha empire in 1818. This Lavni for the classes, known as sangeet bari, thrived on its seductive and erotic flavour. Lavni for the masses continued with the travelling Tamasha troupes. Ballad poets, or shahirs, such as Honaji Bala, Parshuram and Patthe Bapurao, composed some of the most versatile Lavnis, replete with everyday humour and wit.

The peak period for Lavni ended with the fall of the Peshwas in the early 19th century. With royal patronage gone, over the next century Lavni moved to private kothas in the Marathwada and Pune regions. Shunned by the educated and affluent, it was no longer con-

sidered respectable to be a Lavni fan. Ravindra Jadhav, the director of Natrang, holds the cinema of earlier years responsible for further tarnishing Lavni’s image.

“Most plots showed artists as fallen women responsible for corrupting the feudal lords or village Patils,” he says.

In real life too, sangeet bari parties were now performing in Kala Kendras for a purely male audience, often in private settings for the highest bidder. The traditional structure of the show, which began with tarana followed by mujra, gaulan and different types of Lavnis, was tweaked to the demand of the patron.

Lavni was crumbling from a folk art to plain titillation.

Travelling Tamasha faced tough competition from popular entertainment such as cable television and cinema. So much so that Lavnis now came in filmi flavours, with few takers for traditional songs.

At present, Lavnis can be seen in the approximately 50 Kala Kendras across Maharashtra, most of them in the Marathwada region.

There are around 130 travelling Tamasha troupes that perform seasonally and approximately 15 full-time troupes that perform all through the year.

The last decade and more has seen Lavni return to the limelight.

Chaya Khutegaokar, a Pune-based performer, credits this change to state-level Lavni competitions.

“The Akluz Lavni Mahotsav unlocked Lavni artists from the private chambers of Kala Kendra and put them on centre stage.

Today, even women come to watch Lavni shows. Dancers are no longer from the nomadic Kolhati and Dombari tribes alone.

Even daughters of doctors want to

learn Lavni,” says Khutegaokar, who has completed over 500 shows of her production Karbhari Jara Damana (Take It Easy).

The change is visible in the popularity of urban musical theatre productions such as Marathi Bana and Mee Marathi, where the rhythmic percussion of the dholki is met with thundering applause.

“I was confident that a Tamashabased movie still had a market after seeing the way people in cities responded to folk music, especially the youth. I knew that Lavni and Tamasha reside in the heart of every Maharashtrian, even if they are never exposed to the authentic Tamasha,” says Jadhav.

Endorsing his view is 22-yearold MA economics student Kiran Takle from Latur, who is learning Lavni at Mumbai University.

“Watching Sandhya V. Shantaram and Lila Gandhi sparked my interest in Lavni. I realized that foreigners were studying and performing our art, but we were not giving it the recognition it deserves. I wish to return Lavni to its place of pride,” says Takle.

The international success of stage production Sundara Manat Bharli (You Stole My Heart), by US-based artist Meena Nerurkar, in the 1990s is one of many reasons that spurred the Maharashtra state government to join the chorus. It recently announced a package for Tamasha troupes, a lifetime award and pension for ageing Lavni performers.

With Sulochana Chavan’s son Vijay Chavan playing the dholki in Natrang, there is reason to hope the next generation may accept this art form.

When a velvety voice beckons “Naka sodun jau, rang mahal” (Please don’t leave my kotha) how can the show not go on?

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Crowd­puller: Gladiator Khan in a still from the forthcoming Veer. pack the movie halls. Trade analyst Vinod Mirani, who is the managing editor of www.boxofficeindia.com, points out that Salman is a box-office magnet who hasn’t lost his draw. Mirani says: “One or two flops don’t affect Salman. If you look at his hits, they include all types of films.” Salman is a mass hero, Mirani adds, the kind of star who appeals to the front-benchers and rear-stall acolytes who like their stars to be larger than life.

Although Salman has been involved in several criminal cases (the shooting of a blackbuck; accidental death of pavement dwellers; assault on girlfriends), his aura refuses to fade. “The bad boy image helped Sanjay Dutt and it has also helped Salman,” Mirani says, adding that audiences say, “Kya kare bechara, uska naseeb hi aisa hai (he is a victim of misfortune).”

Salman’s unreconstructed self may be anathema to discerning viewers, but his appeal seems to lie in the fact that he lives by his own rules despite being so deeply entrenched in the film industry. So what if a few deer and poor people have to die for it?

Each of the reigning stars represents a different facet of Indian manhood. Shah Rukh is the poster boy of aspirational India. Aamir is the urbane, intelligent and pragmatic hero.

Saif Ali Khan is the maverick and somewhat unpredictable.

Hrithik stands for perfection and is the closest we have to a fully certified hunk. Salman is a tragic figure who falls deeply in love, wears his heart on his sleeve and almost always ends up hurt. He soldiers on in pursuit of the woman who will accept him, vices and all. Meanwhile, he donates to charity and paints—hard evidence of the tender soul that is hidden by the abs. If there was any actor born to play Devdas, it was Salman. If Guy Ritchie could envisage Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes, what’s stopping a local director from casting Salman as a heart-broken spoilt boy-man who just happens to have a six-pack?

Nandini Ramnath is the managing editor of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

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

PLATFORMS

The KISS principle

RAAGTIME

SAMANTH S

A FILTER­COFFEE TABLE LAXMAN ANAND/MINT

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The PechaKucha presentation format asks you to Keep It Short and Simple, and creatives love it

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

···························· ay it with us first: “Pechak-cha”. And now say it many times over. Let this rising cultural buzzword be firmly embedded in your phonetic memory.

Devised by two Tokyo-based architects, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture, in 2003, the first PechaKucha Night was held in their art space called SuperDeluxe—a gallery, lounge and bar which was an extension of their office. To help kick-start this new space, the young architects held a simple show-and-tell event.

It was the time digital cameras had come into vogue. Keynote, a Mac software that allows users to create presentations with easy-touse tools, had just surfaced. And as co-founder Dytham tells us over email, it was easier to show-andtell than ever before. Things were casual: a bottle of wine, some cheese and snaps of the duo’s latest construction sites and travels.

This four-syllable phenomenon draws its name from the Japanese word for chit-chat. The 20x20 slideshow presentation format rests on a simple idea: 20 slides of 20 seconds each, with a total presentation time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

It’s not that Klein and Dytham harbour a particular fascination for mathematics. The peculiar time restriction, it seems, came about because “architects talk too much”. “The problem was how to get them off stage when they were in full flow,” explains Dytham. “We came up with a simple idea. Each presenter only gets 20 slides, with the slides auto advancing. No ‘next please’, no ‘oh back one please’.”

Since its serendipitous invention, this casual format of presentation has been fast gaining popularity among creative classes the world over. PechaKucha events are presently organized in 266 cities. And though Klein and Dytham have intellectual rights over the

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Show and tell: Ad man Swapan Seth (right) presenting at the PechaKucha event in Delhi in December. format, other groups can organize city chapters after a simple handshake agreement with the founders. Presently, the Klein Dytham office receives around 10-20 city applications a month.

Born in a time of flux, this cultural by-product of changing technology has come to India during a period of upheaval. “In the last couple of years, the Indian design community has grown in leaps.

There are new venues and models catering to them,” says Aditya Dev Sood, founder and CEO of the Bangalore-based research firm Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS). Sood held India’s first PechaKucha event in Bangalore in August 2006 after hearing about it from a business associate who’d attended the first-ever Tokyo event. The gathering in Bangalore, Sood says, “was bubbling with the promise of something new”.

Sood believes that back then, no Indian city other than Bangalore would have been receptive to such an idea. But after the success of this maverick one-off evening, the British Council Library invited Sood to organize events in Delhi.

More recently, Mumbai and Pune have got their own chapters as well. Mukund Athale, who heads the Pune-based design consultancy Sarvasva Designs, held the city’s first PechaKucha in October.

Apart from the three more he is to host before March, he also plans to create a student wing of the event. And with city organizers like him furiously drawing up schedules, it is likely that the number of PechaKucha events in the country will almost double this year.

At the forefront of these networking events are think tanks and design houses. Presenters range from architects, film-makers and painters to photographers. And they cover a gamut of topics, from sustainable architecture to art history.

Priya Kapoor of Roli Books, whose Delhi bookstore CMYK was the venue for a PechaKucha in December, learnt about it a few months ago from a National Institute of Design graduate who’d helped design her store. Intrigued, she sent a blind mail to the founders in Tokyo about the possibility of hosting one. The organizers put her in touch with Sood, who helped her put the event together.

Among the presenters at this PechaKucha was Naman Ahuja, associate professor of arts and aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who says that for him the challenge lay in covering book art from 100 BC to 1780 AD in his 6-minute, 40-second presentation.

“Jain painting is something I’d spend four months on in a classroom. At the PechaKucha, I had to cover it with a 20-second slide,” says Ahuja. He thinks it would help to be more selective about audiences so presenters can tackle complicated subjects without having to give introductions.

One could argue that in many ways, Ahuja’s suggestion would be the anti-thesis the core of what a PechaKucha is meant to be.

According to the PechaKucha website, it is designed for “anyone” to make a presentation on anything they love—from their new design blueprints to their vin-

A welcome infiltration Bold, contemporary artworks from Pakistan question man­made barriers B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· fter many years, the Indian cricket team was in Pakistan in 2004 and Rashid Rana was really hoping for a Pakistani victory. It wasn’t a simple case of rooting for his own country though—he was worried about how the visiting Indian spectators would be treated by Pakistanis if India won. When the final was being played at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Rana was not too far away, busy editing one of his video works as he kept tabs on the score.

“It proved to be similar to a

A

Bollywood film ending,” he recalls. “You have this tension throughout the film and in the end, everyone is happy. India won and Pakistani spectators hugged them (the Indians). It was too good to be true.”

At Sirpur House in Gurgaon—which houses the Devi Art Foundation—Rana narrates this parable to underscore the importance of people-to-people contact between the two neighbours. He is in town to curate Resemble Reassemble, a group show of contemporary art from Pakistan that features works by 45 artists from the Anupam and Lekha Poddar collection. “Had it not been for the relaxation of the visa policy back in 2003-04, which tempted me to come and meet Indian friends...some of the things that I am doing now would not have been possible,” he says.

Rana is among Pakistan’s leading contemporary artists and his

works have made him famous internationally. He is perhaps best known for his signature photomontages, where an image is constructed out of thousands of tiny “pixels” of images, closer inspec-

tage record collection.

The prospect of a shrouded-inmystery PechaKucha event at a hip new art bookstore drew scores to the CMYK event. “We hadn’t expected such a huge turnout. I would definitely scale back audiences by around 10% if we were to do it again,” says Kapoor, who is contemplating a PechaKucha themed on erotica in February.

PechaKucha has inspired other presentation-based events in India. Manit Rastogi, managing director of the Delhi-based architecture firm Morphogenesis, attended a PechaKucha night in Sydney in 2006 and, inspired, started an event series with a slight variation, calling it “manthan”. Its 3x7 format, however, is far less rigid than a traditional PechaKucha, with a minimum of seven slides, seven presenters and seven minutes to complete each presentation.

This creative event is also making inroads into the boardroom.

“The World Economic Forum uses the format in its idea lab sessions.

And we’re working with several corporations and learning centres using PechaKucha as a presentation tool,” says Dytham.

Attend Pune’s second PechaKucha event on 22 January at the Sawai Gandharva Hall on Ganeshkhind Road at 8pm; email pknpune@gmail.com. Find out about more PechaKucha N i g h t s i n cities near you on www.pecha-kucha.org Krish Raghav contributed to this story.

tion of which can often be an unsettling experience. The traditional burqa-clad woman’s head, for instance, has been fashioned out of thousands of images taken from hard-core pornographic films; and an exquisite Persian carpet has been similarly created from less edifying images taken at slaughterhouses. He has also made portraits of Bollywood stars MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

At home: Rana at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon.

eldom does a coffee-table book manage, simultaneously, to look gorgeous and deliver the last word on its subject.

That is the most remarkable accomplishment of Four Score and More: The History of the Music Academy, Madras, by V. Sriram and Malathi Rangaswami. The book was released last month—appropriately at the Madras Music Academy, and even more appropriately at the outset of the December music season which was started by the academy four score and more years ago.

Only briefly did I mistake Four Score and More for a regulation coffee-table book, and perhaps I couldn’t be blamed. The book is priced, after all, at a steep Rs2,000, the approximate lower bound of the price bracket in the coffee-table genre. Its pages are so glossy that they reflect sunlight quite fiercely, and they are filled with large, rare, archival photographs. Most crucially, it comes in the awkward, slab-like shape and heft that make a book difficult to store in a bookshelf (although easy to keep on a coffee table).

But the book is a deep reflection of the erudition of its authors. A few years ago, I watched Sriram give a lecture on the academy’s history, and I was struck by what a perfect topic this was for him. It allowed him to merge his natural loves—of Chennai’s history and Carnatic music—and provided an enormous fund of telling anecdotes, which he loves and has used to great effect in his earlier books on music. When I read in Four Score and More, for instance, of an early 20th century audience so aggressive that “a faulty percussionist was” yanked from his usual seated position and “made to stand and perform on the mridangam for a full concert”, I could instantly imagine Sriram’s impish delight in narrating that story.

Rangaswami, one of the academy’s secretaries, wrote her PhD thesis on the institution’s history, and Four Score and More relies heavily on her research and on Rare delight: Despite being a coffee­ her access to the table book, Four Score and More academy archives. is one of the authoritative works on It is here, in fact, the academy. that the book could have used a better editor, not only to clean up punctuation and the occasional spelling error, but also to take the difficult decisions of what to leave out. Some sections of Four Score and More read like a recapitulation of the minutes of a conference, and as the book proceeds virtually year by year, it would have been wiser to drop the minutiae and focus on capturing the spirit instead.

(Although, doubtless, referring to Four Score and More for a future Raagtime, I will find those very minutiae invaluable and thank Sriram and Rangaswami silently for the meticulousness of their research.)

Even to the inveterate Carnatic music enthusiast or the most regular concert goer, it can be a revelation to find out precisely how central the academy is to Carnatic music—far more so than any other institution is to any other breed of art. Hosting concerts is the least of it. Like a giant engine, the academy has driven the progress of Carnatic music, and it has moulded and shaped its form from within. The story of the academy’s nine-odd decades is a riveting one, and Sriram and Rangaswami do a terrific job of narrating it.

Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

such as Salman Khan and Hrithik Roshan from tiny photos of men taken on the streets of Lahore.

Rana acknowledges the role Indian patrons and galleries have played in making his career stand out as an example of what’s possible when national boundaries aren’t viewed as barriers. “India in a way symbolically became a home gallery for me,” he says. “The galleries which presented me internationally were Indian galleries... It was all a very pleasant surprise.” He says he dreams of a future in which the subcontinent will be a confederation of states, like the European Union is today.

This aversion to hard nationalism extends to his artistic concerns and Rana admits that he was confronted with a dilemma when asked to curate this show.

Group shows of artists from a country can serve as a helpful introduction to a particular artistic tradition but after a while they can be restrictive. “The viewfinder is smaller,” is how he puts it. “People are only looking at it from that small hole.”

To “expand the viewfinder” in this instance, Rana says he has made the viewing a “linear experience”. “I forgot about classification and took one work. And the next followed because of some visual connection,” he says, admitting that this connection could be “superficial at times”.

The works placed next to each other could have similar colours or just similar sounding titles.

“I am going to use a funny analogy,” Rana says about the exhibition. “It dissembles and reassembles, just like a Transformer.” The reference to the cartoon action robots which morph and change shapes is apt: The works are all made in the decade that has just gone by—like Rana’s works, the show reflects a young, forward looking and often iconoclastic and unafraid sensibility that seeks to both affirm and transcend its roots.

Resemble Reassemble will show from 17 January to 10 May at the Devi Art Foundation, Sirpur House, Gurgaon. For details, go to www.deviartfoundation.org

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

Winter rhapsody: leftover wine and lamb’s leg PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SAMAR HALARNKAR

You don’t have to be French to use wine in cooking. The old rule of white with fish and red with meat holds true

H

ave you wondered what to do with leftover wine?

Well, of course you can drink it.

But if, like me, you often find a quarter bottle that’s been sitting in the fridge for weeks, use it to whip up your next meal.

I find leftover wine ideal for sprinkling on veggies or diced and shredded meats in a sizzling wok. I am—alas—no expert on French cuisine, but if you are willing to try your hand at it, you will find much good use for wine.

Here’s the great thing about wine when used in cooking: The alcohol evaporates, leaving only the wonderful flavour of the wine. That happens pretty quickly since alcohol starts turning into sharp steam at 77.7 degrees Celsius, well below the 100-degree boiling point of water.

One good use of wine is as a marinade for fish, chicken, pork, beef and lamb.

As 2010 rolled in, I found myself back home in chilly Delhi after two weeks in the sunnier climes of Bangalore, Coorg and Mumbai. I shivered and surveyed my empty fridge—empty except for two deep-frozen lamb legs and the lonesome, last dregs of a Jacob’s Creek Shiraz Cabernet 2007.

I was freshly inspired by Adventures in Wine Cookery By California Winemakers, a well-preserved gem of a book I found in a Bangalore second-hand bookstore. The blurb said it was “A new

collection of recipes published

by Wine Advisory Board, San Francisco”.

Well, it was new when it was published—in 1965, the year I was born. Nevertheless, in this age of celebrity chefs, it’s quite exciting to read a simple, inventive collection of recipes by homemakers from the 1960s.

As is usual, I couldn’t find a recipe that quite fit my leg of lamb. So, I crafted my own.

I don’t have rules about using certain kinds of wine with certain kinds of meats, mainly because I don’t know enough, and I don’t know if it matters. As a rule of thumb, I use white wines with fish, and red wines with heavier meats.

Many of the recipe books speak of 24-hour marinations.

But given the problems of advance planning, I find 4 hours adequate. You can vary marinations endlessly. What you see here is simply the result of my mood that day.

A word about the leg of lamb you see in the pictures above: It was really quite small, and on a winter evening it was just about enough for two people. It was incredibly tender and I could roast/bake it to coming-off-the-bone tenderness in quicker time than a full chicken. Make sure you get a larger leg if you want to serve more people, especially in the cold season, when meat gets consumed in larger quantities than in the summer.

This really is the time of the year to drink and eat, isn’t it?

The wine warms your innards,

Leggy lovely: (clockwise from top left) Make small cuts in the leg and stud the lamb with cloves, star anise and cardamom. Rub in wine and spices, marinate for at least 4 hours and grill. A little charring will lend character and flavour to the meat. the oven your kitchen, and a good roast your soul.

2 tbsp sunflower or olive oil Salt to taste

Winter Leg of Lamb

Method Clean the leg of lamb. With a knife, make cuts all over, some deep enough to stuff larger spices such as star anise or cardamom (or stick anise and cardamom under loose skin). Push cloves into the cuts. Rub in spice powders, wine and salt.

Reserve leftover marinade and use for basting. Let marinated leg stand in the

Ingredients 750g leg of lamb For marinade 12 cloves 1 black cardamom K star anise 1 tsp red chilli powder 1 tsp Chinese 5-spice powder 1 heaped tsp ginger-garlic paste K cup red wine

Unconvectional cooking A new range of microwaves offer single­ touch auto­cook options for over 40 dishes B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

···························· ords such as “instant” and “touch of a button” are attention-grabbers, especially with food. When Godrej launched its range of InstaCook convection microwave ovens recently, it was tempting to try what was designed almost as a magic box. The oven promises to bring the “joy of cooking to your finger-

W

tips” by single-touch programmes with which you can make everything, from tea and omelettes to pizza, baingan bharta, grilled fish and tandoori chicken.

Convection models of microwave ovens usually had eight basic dishes on their auto-cook option. But now appliance companies are adding more Indian dishes to the auto-cook option.

The Godrej range makes 40 dishes seem idiot-proof. The company says all you have to do is put the raw materials in a microwave-safe dish, press a few buttons and pull out a

ready-to-eat meal.

Ramesh Chembath, a senior general manager with Godrej Appliances, says Indians find operating electronics in the kitchen cumbersome and have limited their microwave usage to heating and boiling. The InstaCook range is their way of “Indianizing” the microwave.

LG too recently launched its auto-cook range, with 101 dishes on offer.

Having tried and not quite succeeded in replicating chicken kebabs in an electric tandoor at home, it was tempting to test Godrej’s claim of making tandoori chicken in a microwave oven. The oven comes with a booklet that gives the recipe for the marinade while providing instructions on the buttons to press. After

fridge for at least 4 hours.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Place the leg of lamb on a roasting rack with a drip tray underneath. Grill for an hour, basting frequently with the leftover marinade and sunflower or olive oil. Don’t be alarmed if the outer skin starts to char. Remove the leg, wrap it in foil and put back into the oven, increasing the temperature to 240 degrees Celsius. Keep the oven on for another hour.

marinating a whole chicken in a mix of spices, yogurt and corn flour for a few hours, the manual instructed, place the chicken on a lightly greased glass plate and into the oven, choosing InstaCook 7, punching in the weight of the chicken and pressing start.

The instructions were easy enough to follow and literally involved pressing three buttons. The time display read 38 minutes. At half-time, when the kitchen w as fill ed w ith the aroma of meat cooking, the instructions went, turn the bird over on the plate for even cooking. The microwave pinged about 15 minutes later and the chicken was ready to eat.

The top layer of the chicken looked crisp, the exposed bone was charred and although the chicken didn’t really look tandoori, judgement was reserved till it was tasted. The meat was evenly cooked and succulent, but neither the texture nor the taste came even close to tandoori. That trademark smoky flavour was missing and the texture of the meat was too smooth to compare to meat that’s been in a clay oven.

All black and steel, the oven looks good. It’s easy to under-

Note: Time will vary, depending on the quality of meat. A goat leg could take up to 3 hours.

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

MAGIC WAVES These microwaves promise to make cooking easy u Godrej InstaCook microwave oven with 40 auto­cook options, 25 litres, Rs10,290. u LG with 101 auto­cook options, 30 litres, Rs13,490. u Samsung with 44 auto­cook options, 28 litres, Rs11,900. u Onida with 80 auto­cook options, 20 litres, Rs9,990.

stand, operate and is less messy than cooking on a flame.

The InstaCook option makes it less confusing but basically, instead of punching in the time yourself, you are relying on your microwave for it.

Rather than providing any major benefit, it works more as a new sales proposition. Also, it’ll work better if they take the word tandoori out of their menus and replace it with grilled. That smoky flavour of the tandoor is so entrenched in our senses that there’s no way microwave grilled chicken can compare.

www.livemint.com

Godrej: The latest offering is all black and steel.

LG: The company says this one takes 25 minutes to make yogurt.

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