Lounge 20June

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Saturday, June 20, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 24

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

COURT

RAISING A RACQUET >Page 12

Gear up for Wimbledon 2009 with a look at the stars, rivalries and customs that make it the highlight of the tennis season

GAME, SET, WATCH

Get sporty chic with these multifunction timepieces >Page 9

Wimbledon is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and the only Grand Slam played on grass.

REPLY TO ALL

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

A SOURCE OF THE MUMBAI SPIRIT

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he forward press of its residents is called the Spirit of Mumbai. These words are used when, after a day of disaster, citizens pack trains to work the next day, showing they have brushed off the incident. We do not hear of such a spirit in Delhi or any other city, though their people also go to work the next day, and they have had their disasters. So this spirit cannot hold merely the “going back to work” meaning within it, and we know that. >Page 4

A

professional scorecard can mean different things and often, different timelines. A fund manager is measured every day, in fractions—the number of basis points his fund is up or down when the market closes. For the CEO, it is in quarterly earnings reports and annual revenues. For the politician, timelines are even longer—the stealth reforms that Manmohan Singh made when he was finance minister, along with the nuclear deal... >Page 5

The must­sees and should­dos at the All England Club >Page 7

POSTSCRIPT

SHOBA NARAYAN

IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN WINNING

OFF­COURT SHENANIGANS

LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY

WHEN LITERATURE IS PRO­LIFE, PRO­WOMAN

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Supreme Court nominee with a fuzzy record on reproductive rights; worse, a dead doctor, killed by a Christian zealot for performing third-trimester abortions. It’s time for yet another nasty skirmish in the ongoing culture war in America. Barring a few Catholic exceptions, the US is one of the few Western nations where abortion remains an unresolved issue, its moral implications fiercely, sometimes violently, contested. So fraught is the subject that movies, for all their sexual bravado... >Page 15

DROP SHOTS

Three ways to drink Wimbledon’s favourite tipple >Page 13

DON’T MISS

For today’s business news > Question of Answers— the quiz with a difference > Markets Watch

HOME PAGE L3

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYRONE SIU/REUTERS

FIRST CUT

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 MANAS CHAKRAVARTY HARJEET AHLUWALIA JOSEY PULIYENTHURUTHEL ELIZABETH EAPEN VENKATESHA BABU ARCHNA SHUKLA ©2009 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

MAKING YOUR BACK WORK L

ast week I was officially declared spineless.

I had finally allowed myself to be dragged to the orthopaedic surgeon by the husband when a muscular shoulder pain refused to subside despite three weeks of hot water bottles and muscle relaxants.

The good doctor peered at my posture as I sat on the stool in front of him, and began the cross-examination with questions that sounded more motherly than medical: “How often do you exercise?”

“Are you vegetarian?”

“Do you drink milk? And curds?”

With each question my back slumped further (in case you’re wondering why I’m sharing, dear reader, it’s because I know you work your BlackBerrys harder than you work your back muscles).

The husband animatedly listed all my misdemeanours: “She used to be an athlete, you BE ACTIVE know, but now she exercises only sporadically; she hates milk and curds, she always fights with her mother about this.” You get the drift.

After an examination, the surgeon gave his verdict. He declared my back muscles were shockingly weak (as good as non-existent) and that I would have to a) drink one litre of milk every day b) swim every day c) do a daily, hour and a half of back strengthening physiotherapy for the next three weeks to kick-start my recovery.

My husband even got a new favourite party joke out of that examination.

Wife to doctor: Isn’t there any option to milk?

Doctor to wife: Yes, actually. Is there a park near your house? Does it have good grass?

(Eager) wife to doctor: Yes, yes.

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com HOME­GROWN STORIES

Back beauties: Priyanka Chopra and Sushmita Sen at last week’s IIFA awards.

I liked Shoba Narayan’s column on domestic help in India, ‘What ensues when the ‘help’ wants your help’, 13 June.

There’s another peculiarity among Indian domestic help that you can’t avoid: You have to indulge in small talk with them. I am a quiet person and not good at small talk, but my maid insists on telling me her life story and updating me on little details about herself and her family.

Sometimes I don’t like listening to the personal details of her life and I certainly hate divulging details about mine. In India, maids don’t just talk incessantly, they also make sure they can gather whatever information they can about their employers and pass it on as small talk to the next one!

TARANA KHAN

Doctor to wife: You could eat the grass.

Fast forward to four days later.

“Let’s get her to do neck hanging today,” my physiotherapist tells her colleague as I underwent my painful daily contortions. Luckily, neck hanging has nothing to do with any traction device. It’s a simple enough exercise where you lie on the edge of a bed with your neck hanging off.

I swear I read in Cosmopolitan a few years ago that this position enhances the female orgasm.

So, these days I live in a world where computers are villains and electrical machines called K2 and Phyaction make subcutaneous love to my skeletal muscles. It’s a narrow maze of rooms with nearly a dozen beds where angels of mercy gently push/twist your stiff self as you gaze at biology class posters with titles such as Human Spine Disorder and Back…Back to Work. For entertainment, I gaze fixedly through swimming goggles (gifted by the husband) at the silvery patterns the sun forms on the floor of the dinky

swimming pool (because, as my physiotherapist says, your neck should not stick out of the pool while doing breast stroke).

These days my world overflows with the goodness of milk (Nestle Slim and Godrej Soya)—a drink that I cut out of my diet at least 15 years ago. Thus far my mother has resisted the “I told you so” conversation (but I know she’s just waiting for my shock to subside).

As you get ready to watch Wimbledon starting 22 June (hell, we even got the sports journalist who’s writing the official Wimbledon blog to write for you), remember not to slouch on the couch; cheer Federer with milk, not Pimm’s; and stay active i.e. play some tennis of your own.

And don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

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

LOUNGE REVIEW | NOKIA N97

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he N97 is Nokia’s second high-profile mobile phone launch this year after the E75. And the latest in what some are calling the “summer of superphones”: the iPhone 3GS, the critically acclaimed Palm Pre and the N97 were all unveiled within days of each other. Which also means that the N97 faces the huge challenge of matching up to the competition.

To make sure that the handset has a fighting chance of being noticed, Nokia has packed it to its classy steel-and-plastic gills with touch screen, memory and hardware. And then, for full measure, thrown in a QWERTY keyboard revealed by a beautiful slide and tilt mechanism.

But does it answer that most fundamental question, namely: “Assuming I had many thousands of rupees to spare, would I buy this over the iPhone? Or a motorcycle? Or a fourth-hand Maruti 800?”

The good stuff There is no questioning the N97’s gorgeousness. This is a show-stopper of a phone—albeit without entirely abandoning contemporary Nokia styling. So the rounded corners will not surprise you; nor will the menu button askew in a corner or the headphone socket in the middle of the top face.

The N97 incorporates these familiar design nuances into a great-looking package. Yes, it is shiny in places, but no, it won’t raise brows if you pull it out during a business meeting. In short, like most other superphones, the N97 is quite strategically gender neutral in design.

TECH SPECS u Nokia N97 Operating system: Symbian OS v9.4 Developer platform: S60 5th edition Display: 640x360 pixels, 16:9 aspect ratio Interface: Resistive touch screen, stylus and slide out QWERTY keyboard Multimedia: Video and audio playback with FM transmitter, bluetooth stereo for wireless headsets and audio streaming Camera: 5 megapixel, 4x digital zoom, Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus, auto exposure. Second camera in front for video calling Memory capacity: Mammoth 32GB on­board, micro SD slot expandable to 16GB

inbox

ON JOB HOPPING Shoba Narayan’s article on domestic help struck a chord within me (‘What ensues when the ‘help’ wants your help,’ 13 June). Having lived abroad and survived (just barely) without household help for some years, I have developed a healthy respect for all those people who are forced to work in other people’s homes to earn a living.

I am deeply concerned about our general attitude to domestic help. Many women I know demand loyalty, hard work and long working hours from their servants for a monthly pittance, with no medical or end­of­term benefits. I am absolutely unable to fathom this. When a servant leaves, they cry and moan that they don’t deserve to be treated in this cavalier fashion by their help and that servants show no loyalty or “gratitude” for all that they’ve given them (usually old clothes and utensils). When I ask them, “Wouldn’t you or your husband leave your current jobs for a better one no matter how good your present employers have been to you?”, the stock reply is, “It just isn’t the same!”. Really? I think it’s exactly the same. I think we have a responsibility to the people we employ.

KARTI INAMDAR

MY DOMESTIC RULES

WO IT! N

The column by Shoba Narayan, ‘What ensues when the ‘help’ wants your help’, 13 June, really touched me. I have been grappling with how can I do more for the people who work for me. As a one­time trade union activist, I have a simple formula. I will provide to the people who work for me all that I would expect as an employeee.

Even if the wages we pay are low, I ensure that I pay them at least 15% more than the “going rate”. I give them a day off every week and 20 days paid holiday every year, I take care of any medical problems which affect them or their family members. I pay one month’s salary as bonus. I think if we all follow the simple yardstick of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, we can make the lives of the people who help us a little better.

RAJ KHALID

The nerve centre of the N97’s user interface is the widget-enabled home screen.

Through clever use of on-screen real estate, the N97 lets you keep track of a whole bunch of information without having to click your way into a single menu. So with the right widgets enabled, you can get Facebook updates, scrolling news headlines, RSS feeds, stock price movements and Gmail inbox status just from the home screen (a somewhat useful analogy would be desktop services such as iGoogle or Netvibes). Other short cuts let you launch the media player, the browser and maps with the lightest tap.

But if you have some serious typing to do, you probably want to slide the screen up, and reveal the QWERTY keyboard beneath.

The N97, however, functions best as a simple media phone. The sound quality is superb—you can make perfectly audible calls standing bang in the middle of Karol Bagh market with traffic swarming around you. Also, the phone plays radio, music and even podcasts with great quality. And there is a very capable 5 megapixel camera too.

But the two features we liked best were the on-board FM transmitter that lets you broadcast your music to a car stereo or home theatre without wires, and the generous 32 GB on-board memory.

The not­so­good Spend a few moments summoning applications or browsing through Web pages, and you’ll realize how astoundingly unintuitive

the phone is. The root cause is the S60 operating system that does no justice to the touch interface. The interface does not have multitouch, which means you can’t zoom into or out of pictures and Web pages. For anyone used to this feature on an iPhone, it is an immediate deal breaker.

And making the touch experience even less satisfying is the frequently long gap between tapping on an icon and getting a response. Which means you end up repeating taps and making mistakes.

The QWERTY keyboard is also very fidgety to use with the space bar pushed to one side.

All these user-interface issues add up to making the N97 a much less fun phone to use than its hardware and aesthetics lead you to expect.

Talk plastic While the official price has not been announced, the N97, which comes in white and black models, should cost you anywhere between Rs32,000-36,000. You can pre-book your handset at http://www.nokialms.com/N97Preorder. Or quietly wait till August and see if Apple will relaunch the old iPhone at a lower price.

Sidin Vadukut www.livemint.com See a video review of the Nokia N97 at www.livemint.com/nokian97.htm

(The writer of this week’s winning letter wins a gift voucher worth Rs3,500 from Wills Lifestyle, redeemable at any of their outlets countrywide. Wills Lifestyle offers a complete lifestyle wardrobe incorporating the latest fashion trends. Choose from Wills Classic workwear, Wills Sport relaxed wear, Wills Clublife evening wear and Wills Signature designer wear)

SISTERLY FEELINGS Many years ago, we, too, visited the myth­covered blue mountains near Sydney, ‘Those myth­covered mountains’, 13 June. The Three Sisters have always been a remarkable expanse of nature and creativity. We often review those magnificent landscapes. Legends surrounding the peaks speak volumes, but the Aboriginal sisters compel you to just look at them and admire them.

SHAM SUNDER AZAD

MISTY­EYED SATURDAY Last year, our teacher advised us to read Mint in the school library. Now, I’m in class X and have been reading Mint at home too. ‘Mint Lounge’ is the “hero” everyone zeroes in on for perfect “Saturday Day Fever”. I enjoyed Priya Ramani’s ‘10 random thoughts on a hot summer’s day’, 13 June and want to thank her for the idea of using a mist fan in my study room, which is on the terrace.

AKANSHA BHASIN

GOA’S OTHER WRITERS The cover story, ‘Caju and conversation’, 13 June, gave good insight about Goa. However, please note that good books in Marathi are also published every year in Goa. Marathi and Konkani literati meets of many different groups are held every year not only in cities but also in remote places such as Sanvordem, Canacona, Bicholim, Valpoi and Pernem.

SHRIKANT ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

The spirit of Mumbai has its roots in Surat

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AMIT DAVE

he forward press of its residents is called the Spirit of Mumbai. These words are used when, after a day of disaster, citizens pack trains to work the next day, showing they have brushed off the incident. We do not hear of

such a spirit in Delhi or any other city, though their people also go to work the next day, and they have had their disasters. So this spirit cannot hold merely the “going back to work” meaning within it, and we know that.

We mean the pragmatism of Mumbaikars when we refer to the spirit of its people.

But why is Mumbai pragmatic and where did it get this spirit from? The second question first. One source is the British, who planted European culture in the southern part of this city 300 years ago and established it as a place of rule of law, which it still is.

The other source is Surat.

There is a reason south Mumbai, the most civilized part of India, is Gujarati.

The community was imported, but why?

In 1608, the British landed in Surat, then India’s most important port. They were given licence to set up textile factories by the emperor Jahangir. In the years after the eclipse of the Mughals, the British took over the city’s administration, and mercantile Surtis loved them for their ability to maintain order—the traders’ only demand from government.

Surat was where Haj ships departed from. The Haj headquarters, built in 1644 by Shah Jahan in the area called Mughal Sarai (which Gujaratis mispronounce as Muglisara), later became the municipal corporation; the large red-light area that serviced Hajjis waiting for their ship to come in remained till it was shut down under

Narendra Modi. In the 17th century, Surat went into decline as its port silted over. This happened because the port was actually on a river, the Tapi, which flowed a dozen kilometres out to the Arabian Sea. By this time, the mid-1600s, British trade had warmed up and needed a dependable, and much larger, port. The move to Bombay happened, as its natural harbour was discovered. But Bombay was a wilderness and the British needed Surat’s merchants to set up the trade for them. So they decided to bring Surat to Bombay.

In 1671, when Aurangzeb became busy with Shivaji, Gerald Aungier, the second governor of Bombay, “interested himself (in the) settlement of Surat Banias in Bombay.” The Gazetteer of Bombay Town and Island, Vol. 1, noted also that “It appears that the Mahajan or committee of the Surat Bania community desired the assurance of certain privileges before risking the move to Bombay and that the company had given general approval.”

What were these privileges that the Surtis wanted? B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this in his brilliant sketch, Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province (1948): 1) Ground in or near the present town (which we know as Fort), free of rent to build a house or warehouse; 2) free exercise of religion and liberty to burn their dead; 3) freedom from “all duties of watch and ward”; 4) liberty to decide internal disputes and freedom

Inspiration: As in Mumbai, there’s a ‘get­on­with­life’ attitude in Surat. from arrest without notice; 5) privilege of using umbrellas. There were five other demands (including the right to sell paan leaves and supari). The East India Company granted the requests in 1677, noting that the handing out of land free “is very easy, the Company having vast ground enough...” The Surti traders who came to Bombay were not just Hindus but also members of the two other great trading communities of the city: the Ismaili Khoja and Dawoodi Bohra sects; and the Parsis. Aungier gave Parsis the land for their Tower of Silence on Malabar Hill in 1673.

Now we need to explain what this spirit of Surat was that was transferred to Bombay. Three things are unique about Surat. The first is that it is a mercantile society and has been for five centuries. The second is that because of its port, it has had a mixed culture that has brought it a tolerance

that no other Gujarati city has. The riots of 2002 saw very little violence in Surat though hundreds died in monocultural Ahmedabad and Vadodara. There was violence in Surat in 1992, but that was an exception.

The third is that Surat has a culture of leisure and, by Gujarati standards, refinement. All Gujaratis say: “Surat nu jaman aney Kashi nu maran” (Life is eating in Surat and dying in Kashi).

Though they are hard businessmen, Surtis have a playful side to them. The afternoon rendezvous of the trader, who slips away from the shop, with his wife, has a specific word: Baporiyu. Surtis had, till Hindutva arrived, a tradition called Maitrikaran, where a mistress was legally bedded and given certain rights.

Gujaratis are not an honour-driven society. By this we mean that family honour is not reposed in the person of the woman, as it is in the north of India.

This makes Gujarat a more promiscuous society than others. There is a playful phrase that describes promiscuity in Surat, and it is chhapra kuday. It means the act of jumping roofs, and is used for the young man who clambers over the common wall on to the neighbour’s terrace where a housewife awaits.

These are social examples pointing to a culture of pragmatism, a recognition of the world being the way it is. Their effect on life is extraordinary.

Surat is the richest city in India by per capita income, averaging Rs4.5 lakh annually per family.

The pragmatism injected in Mumbai gave it dance bars and the liberal environment that bred Bollywood. The culture of Mumbai is not to quarrel on the road to redeem honour, as we often see happen in Delhi: It is to get on with life. Such a culture can be trained and disciplined more easily than another.

Random acts of violence in Mumbai are few; traffic discipline is better; people queue for the bus. Surat was a filthy city which was struck by bubonic plague in 1994, killing dozens. But in a couple of years the city was cleaned up so effectively that it became, and remains, one of India’s cleanest.

By the 1881 census, Gujarati speakers were only a quarter of the Mumbai’s population. Today Marathi and Hindi people dominate it, and are reshaping its culture, and that is fine.

But the pragmatism that the Surtis brought with them from Gujarat has remained in the spirit of this city.

Aakar Patel is a director of Hill Road Media.

Write to Aakar at replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

L5

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN JUST THE VICTORY Measuring performance is easier in sport than other walks of life. Almost always there are clear winners and clear losers. But is greatness just a matter of winning?

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professional scorecard can mean different things and often, different timelines. A fund manager is measured every day, in fractions—the number of basis points his fund is up or down when the market closes. For the CEO, it is in quarterly earnings reports and annual revenues. For the politician, timelines are even longer—the stealth reforms that Manmohan Singh made when he was finance minister, along with the nuclear deal he orchestrated, might well be his most lasting legacies. For the scientist or inventor, timelines don’t matter. They can work for years to discover something as elegantly simple as a DNA double helix or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and change the world in an instant. The same applies to social entrepreneurs such as Mohammed Yunus, whose Grameen Bank helped the poor in Bangladesh for decades till recognition came by way of the Nobel Prize.

Professional scorecards in the humanities and arts are less tangible.

How do you measure the worth of a poet or a novelist? Editors measure themselves from edition to edition and also by the ideas they grow; the influence they have, both tangible and intangible; and the conversations their newspaper or magazine foster. Artists or musicians are even harder to measure, given that they traverse the realms of the ephemeral and deal with the soul rather than the body.

Considered this way, the sports are

easy in terms of a professional scorecard. The winner and the loser are decided at the end of the game—without doubt or debate. Even among sports, I would argue that individual sports such as chess, golf and tennis are easier to measure than team sports such as cricket or basketball.

Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir may have hit memorable sixes or had a record partnership, but are they solely responsible for winning a match? No. It is the team that wins. In contrast, when Sania Mirza wins a match, all the credit goes to her. When Tiger Woods or Viswanathan Anand win, the victory is theirs alone. Which leads us to an even more interesting question: Among individual sports, which one delivers the most bang for the buck? In other words, which individual sportsperson can rightfully claim maximum credit for his game and win? I would say tennis only because it is more fast-paced than golf, and commands more money (and therefore more pressure) than chess or squash.

So if you are a person who thrives on professional scorecards, being a tennis player will give you immediate and unequivocal feedback—in real time and elongated timelines that track grass versus clay court wins and career trajectories. If you’re a tennis player, and miss a shot, you’ll know right then.

If your serve swerves, you’ll know right away. If you lose a match, it is entirely your fault. With this as preamble, I have a simple, non-controversial question:

AFP

Andre Agassi, and the “god-like” Rod Laver. Agassi in particular, along with Jimmy Connors, was a volatile, dramatic player who enlivened the court. There are game-changers such as Arthur Ashe and Michael Chang, who made headlines not just for their game but also because they were firsts. There are people like Ivan Lendl, a middling player who made much money after quitting tennis and is raising athletic daughters in Connecticut.

There are the pretty ones and the ugly ones—you know who they are. And then there is Rafa—the current darling of the tennis world.

I realize that choosing the “best” tennis player of all time involves qualifying what best means. Superb athletes, whether they are Martina Navratilova or Sampras, are Ice Borg: This man kept his emotions under wraps. great because they expand our horizon of what is possible for a human Who is the greatest tennis player of all body to achieve. Through their reflexes, time? Or as Roger Federer their techniques, their strokes of presumptuously asked after he won the French Open, “Now the question is: Am brilliance and simply the way they get their arms and legs to reach and react, I the greatest player of all time?” they leave us in awe with their Let me just say it: I don’t like rendition of what is possible.

Federer. He has enviable technique for Being a psychology major, I am going sure. He is an elegant player whose to focus here on the mind. Great light touch belies a ferocious ambition.

He cries at all the right times—when he athletes are also masters of their mind.

When Federer goofs, he doesn’t react. lost to Nadal at the Australian Open He simply plays harder and better to and when he won on clay for the first negate the effects of his mistake. The time. Federer is a great player, but he reason Sampras is great is because he lacks soul, something which becomes has risen from the ashes on numerous apparent when you stack him up with occasions when a game is given up for other greats such as Pete Sampras,

lost and ended up beating his opponent. When the odds are stacked against you in plain numbers (0-6, 3-6 and 1-4), it takes a special sort of persistence and self-belief to change the course of the game and win it. You have to psyche yourself to climb out of an abyss and catapult to the top.

We all do this in our professions; we all fight losing streaks in our lives; we all overcome hurdles. But never in real time; never with millions of people watching and millions of dollars riding upon one winning stroke; never with real-time numbers that don’t lie. Losing a set 6-3 is not a matter of your boss’ perception of your capabilities. It is a simple, unescapable truth. Even massive scientific experiments with expensive grant money riding on them can fail—in private. And most professions give you a second chance.

Not sports. Not during that particular game anyway.

For all these reasons, I think Bjorn Borg is the greatest player of all time.

Of all the players I have mentioned above, including Federer, “Ice Borg” was able to control his emotions—and control the match. His classic gesture of kneeling on the court and looking towards the heavens was the only luxury he permitted himself.

Plus he was cute. And he didn’t cry.

Shoba Narayan is rooting for Rafa among the current crop of players.

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

L6

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TRADITIONS A behind­the­scenes look at the old and new things that make Wimbledon the greatest of all tennis tournaments

MATTHEW HARRIS

B Y B YRON V ALE ···························· he two players who walk through the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s (AELTC) doors on to Centre Court on 5 July for the men’s final will do well to heed the inscription written above their heads, taken from Rudyard Kipling’s If: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same It is likely those players will again be Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, who have contested the last three Wimbledon finals, with Federer leading 2-1. Last year’s third instalment of this rivalry captured the world’s imagination as Nadal ended Federer’s unbeaten five-year run at the All England Club and in doing so, became the first player to complete the French OpenWimbledon double since Bjorn Borg in 1980. The only dampener is a serious knee injury, announced after his exit from Roland Garros, that could prevent Nadal from competing.

But there are plenty of talented players in men’s tennis willing to test both title aspirants. Leading the challenge is Britain’s Andy Murray. The 23-year-old has won three titles this year and moved to No. 3 in

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the world, the highest ranking ever achieved by a British player. It will be timely if Murray can end Britain’s 73-year wait for a men’s champion—2009 marks the 100th birthday of Fred Perry, the last British men’s champion. Also, Murray’s first grass court title at last week’s Aegon Championships in London bodes well for the local favourite’s chances.

In the women’s draw, Venus Williams will be the favourite to retain the Venus Rosewater Dish. She has won the two most recent Wimbledon titles to bring her total to five this decade—just one short of greats Suzanne Lenglen and Billie Jean King.

Indian players are well supported in London. I watched a mixed doubles match featuring Sania Mirza and Mahesh Bhupathi on Court 19 last year, and it was easily the biggest crowd I had witnessed for a match on an outside court, with fans occupying any vantage point, as far back as the stairs for No. 1 court. Mirza and Bhupathi were a relatively new combination then and lost, but having won the Australian Open title in January, they are two more players from whom more is expected this time round.

The year’s championships will be the first played with a roof over Centre Court. Construction of the roof began after Wimbledon 2006 and it was successfully tested on 17 May with the Centre Court Celebration that featured Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, Tim Henman and Kim Clijsters —who credits her training for the event as inspiration for her return to professional tennis (the former world No. 1 Belgian had announced her retirement in May 2007 from professional tennis citing recurring problems with injuries).

At the test event, it took

around 7 minutes for the roof to close, but play cannot resume for at least 30 minutes after it’s closed—to allow time for the air management system to take effect. This is to remove condensation from within the bowl and stop the grass sweating.

When the roof is open, the only obvious changes to the appearance of Centre Court are the white trusses that are visible at either end of the court. There are 10 trusses, each one wider than a football pitch, that move and stretch a lightweight fabric called Tenara over the court to close the roof.

The fabric is 40% translucent, and the roof also features 120 lights, which theoretically will allow play indefinitely. In reality, the club is mindful of its patrons and local residents—AELTC chairman Tim Phillips stressed recently that the club considered Wimbledon a “day-time” tournament.

Not only does the roof keep the rain off, it also makes Centre Court an even more intimate environment. Agassi described the atmosphere as “magnificent”, while Clijsters said: “It has always felt on Centre Court as if the old roof brought the sounds of the crowd down on to the court, but now with the new roof it feels as if the crowd is right there next to you on the court.”

Putting a roof over Centre Court was a major project, and the most ambitious undertaken so far as part of the club’s “Long Term Plan”. The plan was unveiled in 1993, and since 1997 the grounds have been in a constant state of improvement, except, of course, for the two weeks when it stages The Championships.

The Long Term Plan is funded by the club’s sale of debentures.

While last year’s tournament generated £25.667 million

(around Rs201 crore) in revenue, all of it was channelled into the Lawn Tennis Association, which in turn invested in British tennis. A debenture buys a court ticket to each day of the championships, plus access to the holders’ facilities for five years.

In April, the club issued 2,500 Centre Court debentures at a price of £27,750 for 2011-2015, which it expected would raise nearly £60 million. By May, the debentures had sold out.

The debentures will fund the Long Term Plan and further evolution of Wimbledon. On 22 May, the AELTC announced its next project; the construction of a 2,000-seat court on the site of the old Court 2—unofficially known by the sobriquet “The Graveyard of Champions”.

The new Court 2 will make its Championships debut in 2009.

Located in the south-west corner of the ground, Court 2 can accommodate 4,000 spectators.

It is a spectacular new arena, with the court built 3.5m below ground level so views across the site are not obstructed.

It is not just on major projects that the club sets the highest standards. For example, the 250 ball boys and girls drawn from local schools are put through a rigorous training programme.

Once a week, for two-and-a-half hours, these 13- and 14-year-

olds are put through their paces, learning the ball boy’s craft—a programme of aerobic exercises, coordination drills and theory.

During the tournament, they are keenly observed, and the very best are used on Centre Court for the semi-finals and finals.

The ball boys and girls are part of an estimated team of about 6,000 officials and staff engaged during The Championships. Their roles range from collecting point-by-point data for the live scores on the website to driving players around.

Eddie Seaward is just the sixth head groundsman the club has had since 1888. He became the ultimate man responsible for the standard of the courts in 1991.

There are 15 full-time staffers and 14 part-time ones for the lead-up to, and during, The Championships. Seaward says a typical day during The Championships will see him awake at 6am, studying the weather and making a decision about whether to leave on the covers.

He will arrive at the ground at 7.30am and talk to the tournament referee; when they are finished, both will hope they don’t see each other again, because that means the weather is good and there should be no problems that day.

Seaward’s sole responsibility is the courts. The other garden-

Game plan: The Wimbledon complex is undergoing a multi­year renovation programme.

ing is left to the staff of local company Denny and Son Ltd, as it has been for the last 30 years. There are around 2 miles of yew, holly and beech hedges that are manicured precisely and more than an acre of flower beds are prepared. Some 50,000 plants and shrubs are planted around the grounds, including hydrangeas that are specially grown to be in full bloom during Wimbledon.

High standards are also what Nadal and Federer have set for whoever walks on to Centre Court on finals day this year.

Whoever that is may also want to bear in mind another line from If: If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

Byron Vale is a freelance sports journalist who will be covering The Championships for Wimbledon.org. He is currently writing the Wimbledon blog and running the AELTC’s social media presence. He also owns and operates the live blogging website Livesportlive.com.

Write to lounge@livemint.com GLYN KIRK/AFP

Under cover: The new retractable roof was tested on 17 May during the Centre Court Celebration.

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

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There is more to Wimbledon than just the tennis. Our map will help you find the must­sees and should­dos

Aorangi Food Court

Centre Court

Aorangi Terrace

Your best bet to sample some of the 28,000kg of strawberries and 7,000 litres of cream that are consumed every year during The Championships.

Last year, the price of strawberries and cream rose by 25p to £2.25 (around Rs190 then); the media blamed the credit crunch.

Above the players’ entrance here is inscribed an apt, inspiring extract from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’: “If you can meet Triumph and Disaster/and treat those two imposters just the same”

A popular site for spectators to watch games on a large screen, Aorangi Ter­ race was renamed Henman Hill, after Tim Henman. British tennis fans also referred to it, at various points, as Rusedski Ridge and Mount Murray, after the other leading British hopes, Greg Rusedski and Andy Murray.

Aorangi Pavilion

Outside the complex And just in case tennis isn’t your thing, the Wimbledon Windmill Museum is within walking distance. This museum “depicts the history of windmills and milling using working models and the machinery and tools of the trade, with hands­on milling for children”. As different from tennis as you can get.

Top players swing by to give short interviews and sign autographs before or after their games, at a spot nicknamed Autograph Island, which is not really an island but a tent.

Play Tennis For £1 for five serves, all of which goes to charity, Wimbledon allows you to compare the speed of your serves with that of pro­ fessionals. Once you’re sufficiently depressed, you can repair to Cafe Pergola, nearby, and drink yourself back into good spirits.

Official suncare kiosk This year, the official suncare at Wimbledon is Garnier Ambre Solaire. There is also an official still soft drink (Robinsons), an official champagne (Lanson) and an official wine (Blossom Hill), none of which sound familiar.

The Museum The oldest exhibit in this museum dates back to 1555, when tennis was a royal game played on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace.

There is a mock­up dressing room as used by John McEn­ roe in the 1980s, male and female tennis attire from 1884, and best of all, a 200­degree movie screen on which they play giant clips of Maria Sharapova.

The Tea Lawn Apart from a champagne bar, the food stalls here sell the famous Dutchees—sausages in rolls. The actor Richard Harris reportedly once called Wimbledon and asked for a case of 36 Dutchees to be sent over to his room at the Savoy Hotel.

ORIGINAL IMAGE: AELTC, WIMBLEDON

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WHITE W

At the Cannes of tennis, traditional white is anything but plain.

A fashion designer picks his favourite grass court show­stoppers

Leading the way: (clockwise from left) Agassi’s Miami Vice look and long mane signalled changing times at Centre Court; Sharapova’s ‘swan dress’ floored fans and fashionistas; Graf stuck to a simple wrap­style skirt; and Borg’s collared V­neck T­shirts now seem subdued.

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uniform, in an individual sport, players nowadays have realized that what you wear reflects your personal style, your personality, the mood you are in, and that further translates into your body language when you play. It even has the ability to affect how your opponent reacts and can give a player that extra edge.

Among my all-time favourites at Wimbledon is Bjorn Borg, who was far ahead of his time. His V-necked, collared T-shirts and shoulder-length hair with headband look may seem subdued now, but I believe that if he had been out there today, he would have outdone many of Centre Court’s current fashionistas.

Like Borg, Gabriela Sabatini and Steffi Graf too were shortchanged as far as Wimbledon fashion went because of the era they played in.

Throughout the late 1980s, when Graf ruled the courts, she stuck to the “skirt pinned on one side” look. Her style was simple because it was such a conservative time. Even Sabatini, who could have carried off an Oscar gown with aplomb on the court, did not get much of a chance to experiment at Wimbledon.

Now it is in the interest of the players to be much more iconic than their predecessors were. I’m sure Graf would have carried the stylish gear we see on Centre Court with much elegance and style and definitely more wins than what we see today.

The breakaway process at Wimbledon started with Andre Agassi in the early 1990s. With his long hair, varied headgear and unshaven Miami Vice look, Agassi showed fans that he had the quirkiness, and could take over the madness of John McEnroe, if not in the way the game is played, then definitely in terms of style. Similarly, in this decade, Roger Federer has taken over the quiet sophistication that Stefan Edberg brought to Wimbledon.

I sometimes even enjoy the garish or almost loud outfits that the Williams sisters turn up in, but I would still not credit them with

shaking up Wimbledon fashion for women as much as Sharapova did. She puts serious thought into what she is going to wear on the courts. What she wore for the French Open took me by surprise. The blue dress was quite innovative…almost like an evening gown on the court. It is amazing that she can wear such stylish outfits and play at the same time. Of late, however, she seems to have become more of a style icon like Anna Kournikova than a serious contender for the title at Centre Court. I specially liked the shorts she wore last year at Wimbledon with the tuxedostyle shirt with a mesh back.

Sexy yet practical. Her much celebrated “swan dress” (Wimbledon 2007) added a twist to a

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BY ASHISH N. SONI ······························ imbledon has a specific connect for me as far as tennis fashion is concerned. I would say that Wimbledon is the Cannes of tennis. It is not just the players who make an effort to dress stylishly here, but even the people who come to watch the matches are far better dressed. No shabby shorts or T-shirts here: From traditional blazers, hats, matching walking sticks, even the kerchiefs are usually perfectly turned out.

The dress code of white makes it challenging for designers and players to come up with something exciting every year. Sure, it is not easy to use white in a way that makes it interesting yet saleable all the time; working with something simple is always difficult.

White has a plainness that is attractive. People may say that you cannot do as much with white as you can with, say, black or a darker shade, but I think if you do it right, white opens up possibilities that other colours cannot. It has purity and a nondistracting quality about it.

While white as the dress code at Wimbledon remains unchanged since the tournament started, the game itself has changed. I can’t imagine the Fred Perry-era of trousers making a comeback on Centre Court. Even in the mid-1930s, when Perry played, I feel wearing trousers was pushing the “English culture” too far.

The game is much more aggressive, more technique blended with power nowadays.

Fitness levels are higher and this creates an opportunity for fashion. Not only do you have goodlooking clothes, but they have to be techno-savvy too. Each fashionable element in sportswear usually has a practical aspect to it—Maria Sharapova’s white tuxedo-shirt at Wimbledon 2008 had an all-mesh back to keep her cool, not just to up the sexiness quotient.

I also believe the emphasis on fashion and personal style at Wimbledon has a lot to do with the fact that tennis is an individual sport. Unlike a team sport, where you are constricted by a

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simple shift dress worn often at Wimbledon.

The men too are showing initiative in terms of style. Federer’s jacket at Wimbledon in 2007 was so simple. Someone should have done that years ago, yet not even Ralph Lauren, who designs court apparel, had attempted it earlier.

All it took was to engrave “RF” on a corner of a jacket, and a style statement was born. My SpringSummer 2008 collection was influenced by players such as Graf and Sabatini, perhaps because I grew up watching them play. That collection looked for ways to use white, to add colours to it, experiment with the 1960s shift dress, and work with heavily pleated short skirts.

As told to Seema Chowdhry Write to lounge@livemint.com

AFP

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GUEST VIEW

ELIZABETH EAPEN

MY WIMBLEDON SKIRT

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t a time when hemlines were defined by parental notions of propriety, no small-town girl from a “good family” would be caught dead wearing a short skirt. At my local tennis club, there were few women were members. The older ones wore white saris with the pallu tucked in tightly at the waist. It flapped in an ungainly way around their ankles and I always wondered how they stretched to execute a shot, or even managed to get

around the court with five-and-a-half metres of fabric around them. Worse, how did they manage to toss the ball up to serve in a tight-fitting blouse?

The younger ones like me had very little choice. We all wore ill-fitting half-sleeved shirts and cotton drill skirts made by Balan, the only tailor in the locality who knew how to make a “divided” skirt. Drill, the dictionary says, is “cotton or linen twill of varying weights, generally used for work

clothes”. It was the fabric of choice for a variety of reasons, none of which made sense to me.

It was thick and heavy, took two days to dry and two hours to iron, and was in no danger of ever riding up to show a bit of leg. In a word, it was “modest”.

And then I went to Chennai (then Madras), complete with wooden racket and two new drill skirts in my kit, as part of the university women’s team, to play in the All-India inter-university championship. It was couture shock, to put it mildly.

The Delhi University girls were a sight to behold, twirling graphite rackets, hair cut fashionably short and wearing the smartest figure-hugging T-shirts and skirts I had ever seen, the latter ending what seemed like a few inches below the waist. To the poised,

cocksure Poonam, Zarine and Rukmini, we must have seemed gauche and clumsy, with our oiled hair, wooden rackets and—horror of horrors—drill skirts.

These weighty concerns notwithstanding, we managed to reach the semis, where we lost to Madras. The ebullient and sweettempered Amrita Ahluwalia (who played for Madras and later went on to become national champion) was friendly and candid. You must get a graphite racket, she told me kindly. And isn’t it difficult to run in this skirt?

Back home I was determined to rebel. I wrote to my aunt in London, asking for a Wimbledon skirt for my 18th birthday. It arrived a few weeks later, simply styled, pristine white, with the familiar green and purple logo and a daring and uncountable

Small wonder: The right skirt yielded instant benefits. number of inches above the knee.

Trying to nonchalantly sidle out of the front door wearing it one evening, I was stopped by my normally laid-back and very indulgent father. What’s this? he said. This? I replied, trying to

sound casual. Oh, it’s just the Wimbledon skirt I got for my birthday. You might as well not wear anything at all, he remarked.

I tried to pull it down an imaginary couple of inches, mumbled something and fled.

At the club, three boys who made up my “doubles set” were waiting. I could see that my Wimbledon skirt had effectively put an end to conversation. As I walked down the steps to the court, they all started talking at once, loudly and inanely. These were boys I had known for years, played and grown up with. But somehow, that evening, things changed. My partner and I won our match, against much stronger opponents. The score was 6-0, 6-0, in my skirt’s favour.

Write to elizabeth.e@livemint.com

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

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ABHIJIT BHATELEKAR/MINT

Carrera: Diver edition, steel and rubber water­resistant watch with luminous hands and one­way rotating bezel to time dives, at Watches and More outlets in Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs13,500.

MEN’S WATCHES Montblanc: Stainless steel automatic sports chronograph with brown alligator skin strap, at Montblanc boutiques in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune, Rs1.58 lakh.

TAG Heuer: Formula 1 chronograph with scratch­resistant sapphire crystal and stainless steel bracelet, at Tag Heuer boutiques and authorized dealers across the country, Rs66,000.

WATCH

Get sporty chic with these multifunction timepieces

Jaeger­LeCoultre: ‘Master

B Y R ACHANA N AKRA

Compressor Diving GMT’ stainless steel watch with black rubber strap, at Exclusive Lines, Camac Street, Kolkata; Ethos, Inorbit malls, Malad and Vashi, and Time Avenue, Bandra, Mumbai; Jaeger­LeCoultre boutique, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, Ethos, Select Citywalk, Saket, and Johnson Watch Co., Connaught Place, New Delhi, Rs4.26 lakh.

rachana.n@livemint.com

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Titan: Titan Octane chronograph with stainless steel strap, at all World of Titan stores, Rs8,000.

Rolex: Oyster Perpetual Submariner Date, at Mahen Boutique, UB City mall, Bangalore; The Helvetica, Spencer Plaza, Chennai; Exclusive Lines, Camac Street, Kolkata; DIA, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, Mumbai; and Johnson Watch Co., Connaught Place, New Delhi, Rs4.79 lakh.

WOMEN’S WATCHES Omega: Automatic chronograph from the Speedmaster collection with white leather strap, at Omega boutiques in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs1.18 lakh.

Cartier: ‘Santos 100’ automatic chronograph with black leather strap, at Ethos, Inorbit mall, Malad, and Time Avenue, Bandra, Mumbai; Cartier boutique, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, Ethos, Select Citywalk mall, Saket, Johnson Watch Co., Connaught Place, and Kapoor Watch Co., South Extension Part­I, New Delhi, Rs3.95 lakh.

Carrera: ‘Featherlight’ chronograph with pink dial and white rubber strap, at Watches and More outlets in Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs6,950.

Puma: Chronograph in pink from the Motorsport collection, at all Puma stores and Watches and More outlets in Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs8,450.

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1980­1981

TITANS AFP

Five of the greatest rivalries at Wimbledon remind us why it is the top ‘single­handed championship of the world’ Numero uno: Nadal has the perfect foil in Roger Federer to keep his tennis in top gear.

Swing king: Federer’s win at the French Open has again kindled talk of the Swiss being the best ever.

F

1978­1985

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or nearly three decades, the 1980 final was considered the apotheosis of tennis, the gifted servevolleyer up against the consummate counter-puncher.

John McEnroe breezed through the first set, but Bjorn Borg’s Zen-like calm and precise passes soon found him a Hard court: Borg countered way back McEnroe’s (below) tantrums into the match. Borg was and sublime tennis with poised to wrap it equanimity and precise shots. up in four sets, but like Jason in the Friday the 13th movies, McEnroe just refused to go away. The tiebreak that followed is part of sporting lore.

Finally, McEnroe clinched it, 18-16. The final set was as epic. The games ebbed and flowed and the sun had long since started to descend by the time Borg collapsed on the turf, arms aloft in weary celebration.

A year later, it was all very different. Borg eased through the opening set, but this time it was McEnroe who dominated the tiebreaks. No final set was required. Though noone present would think it possible then Borg would never win another major title. Soon after, the wooden rackets and that brand of tennis would also be history.

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1988­1990

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fter Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, women’s tennis found two perfect ambassadors in women who were poles apart.

Evert could have been the American Girl that Tom Petty sang about, blonde, pretty, composed, and with a game based around precise angles and deft touches. NavratiWonder woman: lova was the Czech renegade, Navratilova’s (left) the defector with negative public image a booming serve fuelled her desire to win. and a penchant for rushing the net. She was also lesbian, and in some jaundiced eyes, less of a role model than Little Miss Perfect Evert.

Evert was already a two-time champion by the time Navratilova reached her first final in 1978 and there was little support for the underdog.

Evert breezed through the opening set, but Navratilova, clearly hurt by jibes over her appearance and weight, would not yield. The final set was a tense affair, but as Navratilova belied doubts about her mental strength, it heralded a new era for the women’s game. Navratilova’s style would spawn many imitators, and the Steffi Graf generation that followed was as wedded to the power game as any of the men. Navratilova and Evert would contest four more finals, with Navratilova winning them all, but it wasn’t until she started losing to Graf in the late 1980s that she found the acceptance she craved.

Evert won once more in 1981, but the second half of her career was very much in Navratilova’s shadow.

DAVID HECKER/AFP

1994­1998

B

oom Boom Becker was the toast of Wimbledon after his emergence in the mid-1980s, while Edberg was seen as another unflappable and boring Swede, albeit one with a superbly calibrated serve-and-volley game. The reality, though, was very different.

In a recent interview, Ivan Lendl, another much misunderstood man, spoke of how Edberg was a prankster and a real entertainer off the court. On it, he and Becker had known each other since the junior days, and when they met in the summit clash in 1988, many expected a rivalry that would last the best part of a decade. It didn’t, but for three summers they were a class apart on Wimbledon grass, serving and volleying opponents to distraction. In 1988, Edberg blunted Becker’s power with wonderful passes and cool touches at the net, but a year later, he was a helpless spectator as Becker rampaged to victory in a final moved to Monday because of rain. Then just 21, Becker was at the zenith of his powers, but he would never again hold aloft the trophy he cherished above all else.

A year later, on the very day that Lothar Mattheus’ German side won football’s world cup, Becker stormed back to win sets three and four after Edberg had cruised through the first two. But after going a break up in the final set, Becker’s game fell apart, and as he ranted and raved, Edberg cruised to victory.

Becker would reach two more finals, losing to Michael Stich and Pete Sampras, while Edberg would never Power vs poise: Edberg again scale such (left) and Becker’s heights. rivalry lasted just three tournaments.

DAVID HECKER/AFP

2002

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hese two couldn’t have been further apart as individuals.

Sampras was the player of his generation, a model of consistency and on-court poise. Ivanisevic was the temperamental Croat with the whiplash serve and an appetite for self-destruction. In 1992, he had come up short against Andre Agassi in the final. The serve was again his potent weapon as he made his way through to the final two years later, against the defending champion.

The first two sets resembled a Wild West shoot-out, with one blistering serve following another. But in the moments that mattered in the tie-break, Sampras kept his head while Ivanisevic lost his.

Demoralized, the Croat lost the third set in the time it takes some to finish a bowl of strawberries and cream. Four years later, Ivanisevic was back for more.

By then, Sampras was seeking a fifth Wimbledon title that would put him on the same AFP pedestal as Borg. The challenger struck first, and it could have been his day had things turned out differently in a titanic, second-set tie-breaker. But Sampras held on, and though Ivanisevic took the match into a final set, his efforts had drained him. When he later spoke of wanting to kill himself, you feared for the guy.

Fortunately, there was a happy ending for both. Sampras won his seventh and last title in 2000, and a year later, Ivanisevic ended his Wimbledon jinx with a marathon final win Slugfest: Evenly matched for against Patrick Rafter. power, Sampras (above) and He would never again Ivanisevic’s games were often win a Grand Slam. decided by their state of mind.

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GLYN KIRK/AFP

W

hen we look back years from now, we’ll find it hard to believe just how two sisters dominated tennis’ premier tournament for the best part of a decade.

Venus Williams was already a two-time champion by the time she came up against her little sis in 2002, but it was the stockier and more powerful Serena that prevailed with surprising ease.

A year later, she lost the first set but was too strong in the climactic stages as Venus’ game lost both power and focus. Maria Sharapova intervened in 2004, crushing Serena in straight sets, but since then, barring an interruption from Amelie Mauresmo in 2006, it’s been Williams’ power all the way at SW19.

Last year, the two sisters met again in the final, but this time it was big sis who emerged triumphant in straight sets. Though it was her fifth title, the celebrations were muted, and after early losses at the French Open in 2009, you can expect both to surge through the draw when tennis switches from clay to grass. How many more will they win?

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B Y D ILEEP P REMACHANDRAN ······························································ ivalries are the very essence of sport, the heart of the matter, to borrow a phrase from Graham Greene. And few sports have seen ones that can even come close to that between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Not only have they been the best players on the planet for the past four seasons, but they’ve also taken the standard of tennis to a peak that few thought possible. That culminated in the most epic of Wimbledon finals 12 months ago. Even before they walked on to Centre Court, the two knew they were making history. It was the sixth Grand Slam final that they were contesting, a third successive one at SW19 to go with three on the bounce at Roland Garros. Federer had prevailed with difficulty on grass earlier, while Nadal had usually won with ease on clay.

What they served up was the greatest of finals, one that put even John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg in the shade. With two delays for rain, they finished more than 7 hours after they started, having spent 288 minutes on court. Federer lost the first two sets, but then summoned up reserves of courage and skill that only champions can. But Nadal hung in there, his court coverage and passing shots on the run a wonder to behold. Finally, in the 16th game of the final set, Federer, the five-time champion, cracked, and Nadal sank to the turf in exhausted disbelief. No longer was he a one-surface wonder.

As Nadal, if he is able to overcome a knee injury, and Federer eye another campaign, we look back at other modern-day rivalries that have illuminated the All England Club.

R

Dileep Premachandran is associate editor of Cricinfo and Asian cricket correspondent for The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Sister act: Venus (top) and Serena haven’t let family ties come between their on­court rivalry.

GLYN KIRK/AFP

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TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP

RAISING The Bhambri siblings on growing up with tennis and succeeding on the courts HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

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

···························· here is a saying in the Bhambri household: If you are old enough to start school, you are old enough to enrol for tennis lessons. “Our father is a pathologist and mom a home-maker, and neither of them ever played the game,” says Ankita Bhambri, 22, the eldest of three siblings. “We are great fans of both Gabriela Sabatini and Steffi Graf and, of course, Pete Sampras. Ankita always had so much extra energy and so we put her in tennis and Sanaa and Yuki just followed,” says mom Indu Bhambri. What also helped their decision was that they lived in the same neighbourhood as some tennis coaches and there were a few training academies nearby. Yuki, six years younger than Ankita and currently the top-ranked player in the world junior circuit, remembers learning to play the game at Team Tennis, an academy at the Siri Fort sports complex, New Delhi, when he was just five.

“We must have been the only kids in Delhi who knew how to play tennis before we learnt how to swim. Yuki, in fact, only recently learnt swimming and his technique is not perfect even now. He can be an hour in the pool and his hair will not be wet.

We beat him hollow at it, but in tennis, he creams us every time now,” says Sanaa, 21, who played the girls’ doubles semi-finals at the French Open 2003 with Sania Mirza.

We meet at the Bhambri residence in south Delhi on the eve of Yuki’s departure for the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida, US, where he has been training on and off since he was 14.

The living room has a couple of casually displayed trophies and medals hung from the brass frame of a wall-lamp.

As the three siblings saunter into the living room in their casuals, the first thing that strikes you is their “tennis feet”: the feet and ankle are eerily pale while the rest of

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All in the family: (from left) Sanaa, Ankita and Yuki at the ITF $10,000 Women’s Tournament in June. their limbs are well tanned—evidence of the long days spent on courts.

Ankita, the winner of the ITF $10,000 (around Rs4.7 lakh) Women’s Tournament held in New Delhi earlier this month, started playing the junior circuit when she was 13 but her career didn’t jumpstart the way Mirza’s did nine years ago because she lacked both funds and advanced training. “When I started playing professionally, we had minimal funding; also, there was the pressure that we had to keep up our studies. In Delhi, especially, the focus on studies is high and grandparents and parents

want you to balance tennis with education,” she says. It is tough to turn pro when there is regular school and college and the sisters say Yuki is “damn lucky, because by the time it was his turn to play international tennis, things had changed and the pressure had eased up”.

Yuki, the youngest of the three, is quick to counter: “I came back after winning the Australian Open juniors in January and still took my class X board exams. So where is the pressure easing up?” he asks his sisters. But he does admit that the school authorities were lenient about attendance. “When you are

playing serious tennis, it is not possible to take four months off from December to March to study for exams. It will affect your fitness, your game and your ability to participate in key events that happen around this time of the year,” he says.

Both sisters are thankful that their brother has a chance to make it big and say it is a combination of factors such as parental support, sponsorship and accompanied travelling that have helped. “I have four brains— our parents and my sisters— behind me. That’s a huge support,” says Yuki.

However, all the siblings

point out that without proper sponsorship in the initial stages, it is tough for an individual player to make it big.

“You don’t get the right coaches, make it to the right tournaments, and don’t improve your game. The journey is hard and that’s why many rising Indian stars of the junior circuit fade out.

Most take scholarships at western universities and then play the amateur circuit and try to turn pro after they finish studies, like Som (Somdev Devvarman),” says Yuki.

Another example of this is Sanam Singh, who until a few years ago was a rising star on the junior circuit but now plays the amateur circles while studying at a US university.

Yuki pulled out of the French Open juniors in May because of a sprained ankle, and will not participate at the Wimbledon juniors. “The junior games are just a stepping stone and at 16-17 everyone, though friendly, is focused and serious about their game.

All of us who want to play this sport for the rest of our lives know that it must be a means of earning our livelihood too,” he says.

This is the transition period for Yuki, and the family feels he doesn’t need to play the juniors at grand slam after grand slam to prove how good he is. “He has to move on to the men’s circuit because winning there will mean he at least has a chance to get some prize money and definitely improve his game,” explains Ankita.

Winning the ITF $15,000 Men’s Futures in New Delhi in May saw his ATP ranking jump 175 places to 664. Yuki now plans to participate again in the Futures tournament in New Delhi, scheduled to start on 29 June, and will give Wimbledon a miss.

“Apart from the fact that I need to play the men’s circuit to up my ranking, I feel that juniors events are not challenging any more. I am already the junior world No. 1, my game will not improve by playing in this circuit, and there is always that risk of slipping up in one match and losing the ranking,” he says.

Though Yuki was picked up by sports management firm International Management Group (IMG) at 14 and has had a chance to train at the prestigious Nick Bollettieri academy since then, he says his family still finds it tough to pay the bills.

Unlike Mirza, who found a sponsor, Yuki only has racket

Victory lap: Yuki at the boys’ singles final at the Australian Open, which he won in straight sets.

and clothing sponsors right now and IMG funds his training in Florida. In the last three years, Yuki has spent around five months at the academy every year. This year, he has already put in two months of training in Florida. “There was no way my parents would have been able to afford the $2,000 a week at this academy if IMG had not sponsored my training, but we still have to pay for all our travelling expenses,” he explains.

In addition to Yuki’s travel, the family has to make arrangements for his mother Indu, who now accompanies him. Ankita and Sanaa support the decision because they learnt the hard way how difficult it is to be alone while playing the circuit. The sisters, who now travel together for all tournaments, firmly believe that one of the reasons Yuki is going strong is because their mother supports him through his good and bad days. “In a team sport like cricket, you can perform well one day and not the other day. A team’s win seldom solely rests on one person’s shoulders. But in tennis, you are alone. It is all about knockout rounds. One bad day, and you are out, there are no second chances.

Having my mother close helps me to balance the pressure of winning and losing,” says Yuki, who prefers playing on the hard court rather than clay or grass. Besides, being on tour is a lonely affair, especially if you have to be on the road for three-four weeks at a time. “We don’t have the funds to finish a tournament in one part of the world and then come and wait for the next one to start.

Sometimes, even if you have lost early in a tournament, you have to stay in that part of the world because another event will start soon there.

That’s when having your mom or sister around helps,” says Sanaa.

Yuki claims that he is a mix of both his sisters when it comes to his tennis. “I think I have Ankita’s mental toughness and Sanaa’s ability to vary the shots.”

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SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Desi palate: Sitaaray (above) offers generous portions of kebabs; and Tandoori Swordfish with King Prawn at Cinnamon Club.

CUISINES B Y M ARRYAM H . R ESHII ···························· ou don’t want to visit an Indian restaurant in London?”

My friend, chef Vivek Singh of Cinnamon Club, was incredulous.

“That’s plain bizarre! Everyone knows that the best Indian food on the planet is in London.” It was my turn to be shocked. The whole point of visiting a new city in another country is to sample the local food. But Singh’s outrage was palpable. And since he’s not one to indulge in high-pitched rhetoric, I knew I’d have to take his claim seriously.

First on my list was Sitaaray. In Drury Lane, the heart of the theatre district in London’s Covent Garden, it is an Old World Hospitality project—one of the few Indian restaurant companies outside five-star hotels to have operations on another continent.

Taking a cab on a Saturday night is guaranteed to remind you of rush hour in an Indian city: Traffic comes to a grinding halt as tens of thousands of theatre-goers

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The best tandoori mutton is sometimes cooked on the other side of the world

pour out of venues from Piccadilly Circus all the way to Covent Garden. I got to my 9.30 pm reservation largely by praying fervently and paying off the cab a kilometre from my destination and sprinting the rest of the way.

Sitaaray, a whimsical take on the Mumbai film industry, had red walls covered from floor to ceiling with film posters and photographs of stars. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan had come visiting, loved the look of the place (and presumably the food, too) and signed a photograph. I

didn’t think the restaurant had an ethnic feel to it, but the others that I was to visit over the course of the next week had no ethnic stamp at all.

The kebabs came in generous portions. You choose whether you want vegetarian or non-vegetarian kebabs, and go through something like nine varieties of them, an assortment of breads, pulao, raita and dal. I was fully prepared not to like it: It was the first time I was eating Indian food outside the country. But I was in for a surprise.

The cuts of meat and varieties of seafood were streets ahead of anything we get here. Also, inexplicably, the spices had a flavour and strength that you simply don’t find in India, and that is what lifted the experience out of the ordinary.

Next on my list was Amaya,

about which I had heard rave reviews. Apparently, it didn’t have the look and feel of an Indian restaurant. And they were right—it didn’t. On the way in, I counted four MercedesBenz cars parked outside the restaurant—a factor of its being located in Belgravia, London’s millionaires row. My dining companion and I ordered oysters with moilee sauce to start with, and I must say I was blown away by the concept. Moilee in Kerala is usually preceded by the word meen because the coconut milk-based pale yellow gravy usually goes with fish. So it was a surprise, and a classy one at that, to pair it with fresh oysters on the shell.

The food in Amaya ranged from dishes that were barely identifiable as Indian in provenance to those that were more traditional than

nouvelle. Most of the appetizers had been given an Amaya twist; all the main courses were Indian classics with nary a tweak. Only one dish fell a little flat: the dora kebab.

According to the grapevine, it was the star of the show. But the British just couldn’t get the point of a kebab made of mince so fine that you didn’t need teeth to eat it. The result was that it was the least ordered dish on the menu, and Cruella de Ville, our server, wagged her finger at us and, in a piquant reversal of roles, demanded to know if we knew what dora kebab was. Cruella, you see, was British. Sadly, the kebab was a pale imitation of the original.

Amaya was the only Michelinstarred Indian restaurant that I visited on my trip. I wished Cruella had been a mite more pleasant and had changed our plates between appetizers and main

SHOTS melissa.b@livemint.com

···························· he Kentucky Derby has its Mint Juleps. The World Cup has its beer.

And Wimbledon has its strawberries and cream and Pimm’s No. 1 Cup. It is estimated that people consume 26 metric tons of strawberries at Wimbledon and 10,000 units of Pimm’s drinks will be sold each day during the tennis matches.

“In terms of Pimm’s, it’s an English summer drink,” says Ashley Jones, the commercial manager of the tennis museum at Wimbledon.

“It’s just an English thing.”

While strawberries and cream are easy to come by, Pimm’s is

T

>>

PIMM’S ROYAL

Ingredients 60ml Pimm’s No. 1 1 glass of champagne 1 strawberry Method Pour Pimm’s No.1 into a champagne glass. Top it off with any Chardonnay-based champagne.

Garnish with a strawberry.

HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

B Y M ELISSA A . B ELL

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Cheers! (from far left) Pimm Pom, Pimm’s Royal, and Pimm’s Cup.

HENRY CHU

Every day around 10,000 Pimm’s, the Wimbledon drink, keep spectators quenched

courses—then I would truly have been in raptures.

Cinnamon Club has no Michelin stars. But though it makes little attempt at adornment, it still can’t help looking a trifle grand—it is, after all, the old Westminster library. Cinnamon Club’s claim to fame is its ability to maintain a fine balance between the seemingly irreconcilable objectives of modern and Indian. My tandoori loin of Cumbrian mutton with Hyderabadi salan had been cooked rare on request. You’d never get that quality of lamb in India nor that particular cut, but the salan, full of crushed peanuts, til (sesame) and a hint of sourness, was pure Hyderabad.

The fillet of Wagyu beef with stir-fried morels and saffron sauce was far less Indian—it was saved from being an out and out Western preparation by the smidgen of spices that lurked in the sauce. The lassi panna cotta with tamarind glazed strawberries was a more equitable blend of East and West.

My only regret is that I couldn’t visit a Bangladeshi restaurant.

Ever since I’d got my hands on the takeaway menu for Acchar Indian Cuisine—a Bangladeshi eatery that made a distinction between chicken tikka joypuri, chicken tikka rongdonu and chicken tikka moricha—I had been captivated.

But the standard I had set for myself was that any Bangladeshi eatery I walked into had to be at least half full. But not one that I passed by had as much as a table occupied at the time.

Written on the wall: A mural at the museum in Wimbledon. more elusive.

Vaibhav Singh, beverage manager at The Imperial hotel, New Delhi, says that only six people in the world know the original recipe.

It was created in 1823 by James Pimm, a farmer’s son who ran an oyster bar near the Bank of England in London. Pimm mixed gin with herbs to create a digestive drink. The first cup was based on gin, but the company has since made six other “cups”, based on vodka, rum, brandy, whisky and rye. The Wimbledon crowd favours the original No. 1 Cup, mixed with lemonade and cucumber for the beverage Pimm’s Cup. The drink has the colour of iced tea and a slightly nutty flavour. It mixes well with fruits and has a crisp, herbal taste. Singh

says that in keeping with the feel of the hotel as “very British Raj”, The Imperial created its own version of Pimm’s Cup, which has become one of its most popular cocktails. “It’s a tall, refreshing summer drink,” says Singh.

He shares the recipe for this light “day cocktail”, as well as two other Pimm’s drinks. And, with only 25% alcohol content, the drinks are perfect for fans who want an extra kick in the their tennis without the hangover later.

>>

PIMM’S CUP

Ingredients 60ml Pimm’s No.1 15ml Bombay Sapphire Gin

Sliced cucumbers, apples, oranges Ginger ale Method Fill a half-litre beer glass with ice cubes. Pour in Pimm’s No. 1 and the Bombay Sapphire Gin. Add cucumber, oranges and apples. Top it with ginger ale.

Stir slowly with a straw.

>> PIMM POM Ingredients 60ml of Pimm’s No.1 A bunch of basil leaves A glass of fresh pomegranate juice Method Take fresh basil leaves and place at the bottom of a highball glass.

Pour in half a glass of fresh pomegranate juice. Muddle the basil leaves. If you don’t have a muddler, simply crumple the leaves to bring out the juices. Fill a separate glass with ice cubes. Pour in Pimm’s No. 1 and the pomegranate/basil mixture. Top off with remaining pomegranate juice.

Garnish with a fresh basil leaf.

www.livemint.com This Monday, catch ‘Drinking With Lounge’, a show with Pimm’s cocktail recipes, at www.livemint.com/cookingwithlounge

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SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009

Books NIGERIAN FICTION

Their moment under the sun BLOOMBERG

Emerging from the shadow of a giant is not easy. Ask Nigerian writers who’ve painted haunting portraits of their country

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· n ambitious Nigerian novelist has two formidable giants to contend with—Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, and Achebe, the Man Booker International Prize, a lifetime achievement award, in 2007. Together, Soyinka and Achebe have captured the collective emotions—of rage at the colonial power, the aspirations of a newly independent nation, and the frustration of those dashed hopes—in plays, poetry, fiction, and political criticism.

Military dictatorships, a civil war, rampant abductions, corruption at all levels, and bursts of violence make the Nigerian landscape unbearably gloomy, looking like the sepulchral flames of gas being flared across the Niger Delta, day after day.

Fear and despair, one would think, are the dominant themes in the country. Soyinka has eloquently articulated this climate of fear, most memorably in his Reith Lectures at the BBC in 2004. Pointing the blame where it belongs—at home, not abroad—Achebe has said, more pithily: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land, or climate or water or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example,

Young voice: The new novel by Adichie, 32, is about the dynamics of marriage and family.

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which are the hallmark of true leadership.”

And yet, even the depth of misery can spur a burst of creativity. This decade has shown the second flowering, or renaissance, of Nigerian writing.

Soyinka’s magnificent oeuvre and Achebe’s in-your-face wisdom have only encouraged the new writers. Undaunted by their reputation, they have built upon the foundations to enrich the storytelling traditions of Nigeria.

In 2001, Helon Habila won the Caine Prize for African writing for the early parts of what later became the novel, Waiting for an Angel. It was a searing account of Lagos, in which a young journalist finds his room-mate driven to insanity after being beaten up by security forces for no reason; his first girlfriend being forced to marry against her wishes; and the gradual politicization of his neighbourhood threatening bloodshed ahead. Two years later, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, an intense drama about an overbearing patriarch and the wounds he inflicts on his family, and the healing that follows.

The icon: Achebe is one of Nigeria’s towering literary figures.

BLOOMBERG

In 2005, barely out of her teens, Helen Oyeyemi published Icarus Girl, about Jessamy Harrison, an eight-year-old child, and her inability to cohabit the world h e r m o t h e r l e f t behind—Nigeria—and her father’s home, England.

Adichie’s next novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, was published in 2006, and duly won the Orange

Prize for Fiction, given to women writers. Here, Adichie focused on multiple relationships, involving a professor, a politician, a British expatriate and a house-boy, set during the failed war for Biafran independence of the 1960s. That war formed the backdrop of an exciting debut, of Uzodinma Iweala with the novel Beasts of No Nation. Agu is a boy

who knows enough English to create a blunt argot that Iweala uses to superb effect, showing us the brutalization of the Biafran war through the eyes of the child soldier (Iweala has worked to rehabilitate Nigerian child soldiers). Shorn of all innocence, these children turn into beasts.

Achebe won the Man Booker Prize in 2007, the year that saw three prominent Nigerian novels being published. Habila wrote Measuring Time, which was about another dominating father and his cowering twins. One son manages to escape and becomes a soldier; the other becomes a local historian. When tensions rise, the soldier returns, only to face the complexities that conflict imposes. The same year, Oyeyemi returned to the ju-ju (supernatural) themes found in her writing, with The Opposite House, about twice-removed migrants—Africans who went to Cuba and then found themselves in London. The ghosts and spirits Oyeyemi writes about recall the Yoruba beliefs and myths Soyinka writes about in Ake: The Years of Childhood (1982) and, indeed, some critics have wondered if Oyeyemi’s repertoire is limited. But she is young, with a long writing future ahead of her.

This year, Adichie has returned with a collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (see Leaving home below).

Three themes emerge: dominating patriarchs; violent rebellion; and the use of ju-ju, the socalled black magic, to transform the present. Nigeria is hierarchical and patriarchal, and age is respected so much that men in their 30s are called “boys” and men in the late 40s represent “the youth group”. Companies and governments negotiating land transfer do so with men who call themselves kings of their area, who are invariably over 60, and who believe in the god-given right of deciding the future for the entire community. They are backed by an army of unemployed youth, with easy access to guns and drugs, who wreak havoc.

Villages describe conflict with other communities as “wars”.

Boundaries become narrower.

This tension offers enormous possibilities for sensitive writers, who focus on characters that rebel; and to deal with internal turmoil, some characters turn to the supernatural. Rebelling against the powers-that-be leads to conflict, and it is not surprising to see the Biafran war forming a classic backdrop for these writers, born in the quarter century between 1960 and 1985.

War’s devastation of the human spirit is the overarching theme.

Indeed, each of these novels has been circumscribed by the writer’s lived experience—abroad, as in the case of émigré writers, or drawing on Nigeria’s troubled past and present. It is in this respect that Biyi Badele’s Burma Boy (2007), about Nigerian conscripts sent by the British to Asia to fight the Japanese in Burma (now Myanmar), is unusual. Burma Boy goes truly global, shedding light on African efforts in World War II. Melvyn Bragg, in The Soldier’s Return, told the story of the British soldier in Burma. Amitav Ghosh, in The Glass Palace, brought to life the men who joined Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. But the British army in Asia had many African soldiers—boys such as Ali Banana, who was 14, and modelled on Bandeye’s father.

These soldiers were yanked from tropical Africa and sent to fight wars in remote parts of the world, and suffered a combination of diseases, humiliation and racism. Their stories have remained hidden.

Through the eyes of children—as soldiers, as possessed spirits, as witnesses, as obedient sons and daughters of dominant fathers—Nigeria’s new generation of novelists are seizing their moment in history. The stories they tell are painful, haunting, cruel, even grotesque. But they help us make sense of the complex reality of Africa’s most populous nation.

Salil Tripathi writes the fortnightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK | CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP

Leaving home The acclaimed novelist proves herself equal to the demands of the short story B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ··························· hen he asked if she would marry him, she thought how unnecessary it was, his asking, since she would have been happy simply to be told.” Doesn’t this one sentence open up an entire world of gender relations, one that is both static and shifting? The woman is willing to play the traditional role of docility and submission; she is fine with being instructed, and is surprised at being “asked”.

The man, although aware of his own power in the relationship, wishes that there should be at least the appearance of a choice. Instead of confirming his love by asserting his power, he seems to realize that he may be loved more intensely by renouncing it. There are many such splendid moments in Nigerian

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writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck, and we take away from these little encounters an understanding of an entire society tussling with its sense of itself.

Still only in her early 30s, Adichie has earned herself one of the strongest reputations and most substantial readerships among young writers in the world today on the strength of two fine novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Her new book is a set of smoothly crafted and polished stories that revisit some of the themes of the earlier two—civil war and ethnic strife among Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims, corruption in politics and the corruption of society through politics, the cult of the “Big Man” in society, the similarly lopsided power relations

The Thing Around Your Neck: Fourth Estate, 228 pages, Rs299. within homes and the allure of America (where many of the stories are set) for disaffected younger people. But for the most part, these issues are seen through the filters of marriage and family, and it is at complex moments such as these that Adichie’s writing burns brightest.

One story, Ghosts, is told through the voice of a retired university professor who now lives alone after the death of his wife

Conflict zone: One of the backdrops of Adichie’s book is ethnic strife. and the departure of his daughter to America. It is, despite the literarlness of the title, one of the best ghost stories I have ever read.

While on a visit to the university in search of the pension that never arrives, the professor is surprised when he comes across an old acquaintance whom everybody had thought was long dead.

This is one kind of ghost in the story. The two men get talking, and the professor can’t stop him-

self from revealing that he is not as lonely as everyone thinks, because his departed wife, Ebere, has taken to visiting him even after her death. “I do not go to church,” he says “I stopped going after Ebere first visited, because I was no longer uncertain.” The way the past weighs on the lives of old people, the world of flickers and echoes and presences even the most rational of them must feel around them, is beautifully

evoked by the yearning tone of Adichie’s narration.

This is a book about the Nigerian experience of America as much as it is about the Nigeria of the African continent, and one could usefully draw a parallel between Adichie’s characters and the Bengali Americans of Jhumpa Lahiri. But Adichie’s characters are usually more newly arrived and lower in the class structure than those of Lahiri. As a result, they are willing to sacrifice more, pull out more of their roots in culture, food and language in order to be accepted as part of the mainstream and not be ghettoized. Adichie expertly navigates the details of immigrant confusion and striving.

Whether it is a wife longing for the return of her husband from Nigeria and the comforting sight of “another used towel in the bathroom”, or a husband who perversely insists on speaking in English to his wife newly arrived from the motherland, there are many shrewdly observed moments in these stories.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

IF IT IS SWEET | MRIDULA KOSHY

POSTSCRIPT

LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY

Hammer and tong VIRENDRA SINGH/HINDUSTAN TIMES

A collection of rigorous, beautiful short stories about toil and mothering

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. Companion, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as dramatically as in Kafka’s story. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.

The initial surprise and disbelief of this is quickly overwhelmed by the radiance of Koshy’s imagination. The monkey, we are told, was bought off the street by the widow (Maji) and rescued from a life of captivity, cheap stunts and hunger; in return, he brings all his skills to bear on improving Maji’s stuttering life. The alliance of human and simian lives and needs (“His tendency to groom found great satisfaction in her tangled morning hair”) is very endearing. By the time the monkey takes Maji, at the close of the story, back to the old house in Bhutan where he used to live, and we see his tail curl “to lovingly lift the latch of the house gate”, we are totally won over.

The companion echoes the tender love and fidelity of that most devoted of companions in our literature, Hanuman.

Indeed, Koshy’s stories are full of big and small acts of caring—of a sense of duty that does not go away even when the object of that duty is no longer present. In one of the best of these stories, The Good Mother, we see a woman returning to Delhi from Manchester after the

WHEN LITERATURE IS PRO­LIFE, PRO­WOMAN

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Living history: Koshy evokes the beauty of south Delhi’s monuments such as Humayun’s tomb.

If It is Sweet: Tranquebar Press, 284 pages, Rs295. death of her two young sons in a car accident. She carries with her their ashes, to be dispersed in holy waters, but finds herself unable to release them when the time comes. Finally, in a little apartment in Delhi, the claustrophobia of which Koshy evokes with a set of precise details, she brings herself to let the remains go. “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips,” writes Koshy, leaving us to imagine the horror of swallowing a particle of a life that was birthed by that very body.

Koshy—who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in the US for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again—says she was “a trade unionist before she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer”. These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers—construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids—living quietly in the interstices of a thriving south Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover”. There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details, as when the protagonist of The Good Mother hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people.”

At the same time, these stories cumulatively offer a rich portrait of mothering: of the fulfilment of being a parent, but also of its many annoyances and curtailments. Indeed—and this is true to Indian real-

ity—the task of motherhood in Koshy’s work often falls to people other than parents. Several children in these stories are stand-in mothers to their younger siblings, and devise games and consolations to make a bleak reality appear warmer and more exciting.

Koshy’s is a prose that does not surrender its shape or meanings easily. The narration of these stories can seem as dense and tangled as the forest to which her characters often retreat for a moment of peace or rest. If there is a criticism to be made of them, it is that they can be too one-paced: They sometimes lack that rush of speed that would balance out their heavy beauty, the careful accretion of details, such as a bird seen on a tree by a child, perched “not on a branch, but actually on a leaf”. Even so, this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place.

unwittingly look down upon their Pakistani counterparts at events such as the Jaipur Literature Festival. The collection also has a short story from Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and an extract from Sonia Jabbar’s memoirs about Kashmir, to be released by Penguin later this year.

The Great Divide—In dia and Pakistan: Edited by Ira Pande, Oxford University Press, 375 pages, Rs495.

Amir Hamza. Farooqi’s new seminal work of translation is the book of fantasy tales of which The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a part: Tilism-eHoshruba, written between 1883 and 1893 in Lucknow by two Urdu storytellers, Syed Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar. They tell the story of Amir Hamza in an Indian setting, a fantasy tale populated by witches, sorcerers, fairies, demons and cowheaded creatures.

Hoshruba— The Land and the Tilism: Translated

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Random House India, 447 pages, Rs495.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS A weighty addition to Indian fiction

Supreme Court nominee with a fuzzy record on reproductive rights; worse, a dead doctor, killed by a Christian zealot for performing third-trimester abortions. It’s time for yet another nasty skirmish in the ongoing culture war in America.

Barring a few Catholic exceptions, the US is one of the few Western nations where abortion remains an unresolved issue, its moral implications fiercely, sometimes violently, contested. So fraught is the subject that movies, for all their sexual bravado, rarely depict it on screen. Pregnancies, however unplanned or inappropriate (think Knocked Up or Juno), are never, ever, terminated. As it is in Bollywood, so it is in Hollywood.

Luckily for us, novelists are made of sterner stuff. Abortions are not hard to find in literature, including the classics. Earlier novels tended to be written by men, perhaps because they were freer to explore sexual matters than women. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) featured a bloody, graphic description of a prostitute’s backstreet abortion that would make most so-called pro-lifers today wince. In The Age of Reason (1945), Jean-Paul Sartre mapped the morally precarious journey of a young couple as they attempt to get an abortion on the cheap.

Theodore Dreiser made unwanted pregnancy the centrepiece in An American Tragedy (1925); there is no abortion but the reader can’t help but think it to be a better alternative for a woman than being abandoned, or, in Roberta’s case, drowned by a lover eager to rid himself of an unwanted child.

In these pre-legalization novels, abortion most often revealed the moral failure of men to face the consequences of their sexual desire.

John Updike’s Piet Hanema in Couples (1968) agrees to allow his dentist to sleep with his wife, the price he demands for performing an abortion on Piet’s Juno: An American take on pregnancy. lover Foxy.

After abortion became legal in the US and Europe in the 1970s, its literary version has become almost entirely about a woman’s choice. Where male writers pen thinly disguised polemics advocating the right to choose—John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and the more recent Protect and Defend by Richard Patterson—women novelists ponder the after-effects of making that most difficult decision. Their stories are also more likely to be autobiographical. Sue Townsend exorcised the ghosts of her two abortions by writing Ghost Children, a haunting narrative that begins with a bag of abandoned foetuses and traces the relationship of two lovers unable to escape the ghost of a 17-year-old abortion. Marge Piercy more famously recreated her experience of a self-performed abortion at age 17 in Braided Lives.

But change the cultural lens and the issue of rights becomes a lot trickier. In Sisters of My Heart by Chitra Divakaruni, Sudha’s husband and his family attempt to force her to abort a female child. Gender selection is a primary theme in Shobhan Bantwal’s The Forbidden Daughter, which centres on its heroine’s struggle to deliver her second daughter. Indian feminism offers an instructive reminder that abortion is not merely about a woman’s right to choose, it is also about her right to be born. More importantly, this quick romp in comparative literature reveals the limits of the law. As long as we live in a lopsided world that devalues women, abortion can be used against us, whether it’s legal or outlawed.

Write to Lakshmi at postscript@livemint.com

BOOK SPY | SANJUKTA SHARMA Fresh looks at Obama and Marilyn Monroe; musings on the Indo­Pak conundrum Obama mania Those who followed Barack Obama’s campaign may snigger at this book—what’s to know that’s not yet heard, seen or written about the man? This new book won’t really surprise them. Renegade: The Making of a President, by journalist Richard Wolffe, who covered the 21-month-old campaign for Newsweek magazine, has all the familiar stuff. But reviews in the US recommend this book for fans who want glimpses into moments of raw emotion.

Obama is a man whose mask hardly ever slips. The book also has some interesting titbits: For example, did you know that Obama’s reading habits have shifted from non-fiction narra-

tives to academic studies on world financial systems and the history of Afghanistan?

Renegade— The Making of a President:

By Richard Wolffe, Crown, 368 pages, Rs480.

Border blues This is an anthology of writings that do not take the usual journalistic or academic routes on the India-Pakistan conundrum.

Fiction, interviews, reportage and light-hearted observations by contemporary writers make it of interest to all kinds of readers. An interview with author Nadeem Aslam illuminates not only how his Pakistani identity has shaped his creative impulses, but also Pakistani nationalism outside Pakistan.

Lounge columnist Mukul Kesavan, in an essay titled Bad Manners, writes how liberal Indians

Epic reload The scholar on Islamic studies, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who’s also part of the Urdu Project (www.urduproject.com), an online resource for the study of Urdu language and literature, earlier translated the Islamic oral epic The Adventures of

Highs and lows J. Randy Taraborrelli, a bestselling author and American TV personality, reconstructs the

bad, the ugly and the moving in Marilyn Monroe’s life. Not that it hasn’t been done before, but some lives beg fresh interpretation and Monroe’s is one such.

Taraborrelli reveals that contrary to what her fans believe, Monroe’s mentally ill mother was very much a part of her life. So were two other women: her aunt and her legal guardian, who influenced her immensely.

He also dissects, in great detail, Monroe’s own mental illness and her many romantic relationships.

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe:

By J. Randy Taraborrelli, Onyx, 544 pages, Rs995.

Past forward Bernard Beckett, a professor from New Zealand, was on a

research fellowship to study DNA mutations when he wrote this fictional portrait of a dystopian society. Going by its storyline, Genesis is somewhat of a tribute to Aldous Huxley and Arthur C. Clarke, but Beckett’s end, say reviews in the UK and US, make it refreshingly engaging—and shocking. Anaximander, the book’s 14-yearold hero, is questioned by four examiners on her long-dead hero, Adam Forde. As the session progresses, she discovers links with Adam, the dark secrets of the academy that runs the society she lives in, and some horrifying truths about a world where the 21st century is history, and whose events are catastrophic.

Genesis:

By Bernard Beckett, Penguin India, 185 pages, Rs425.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009

Culture TELEVISION

Sony’s fight after the fall ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The cast: (from left) The Sony team of Gurdip Bhangoo, programming head, Manjit Singh, COO, N.P. Singh, acting CEO, and Danish Khan, marketing head.

Three weeks of the new Sony haven’t worked wonders.

Its next attempt to join the TRP wars: a hit celeb show

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA & R ACHANA N AKRA ···························· t was 10 days after the “new” Sony had been launched on 25 May. The first week’s television rating points (TRP) were yet to be clocked in. Till then, some responses had been negative, some positive, and some extreme.

The TV critic of The Indian Express said: “Sony celebrates life instead of bemoaning it... It’s young, urban, middle-class and doesn’t take life too seriously—unlike the other entertainment channels.”

Little of that euphoria could be sensed or heard at the Sony office where we met the team behind this do-or-die relaunch. Housed in a glass-covered skyscraper in a suburban cul-de-sac of Mumbai, it had the workaday air of any corporate office—workers staring into flat computer screens; the air conditioner faintly audible because nobody was talking.

Gurdip Bhangoo, the channel’s new head of programming— whom the senior management of the channel calls “the architect of the new Sony”—was already looking at new idea notes. He was cautiously optimistic, as he told us: “I’m not expecting a miracle, a Colors kind of a rocket launch.

The idea is to take the first steps towards taking Sony back to what it was: the alternative content provider that will also be a leading player in the GEC (general entertainment channel) segment. For that we had to change the look, feel and content.”

After a week of the new primetime line-up, Sony’s gross rating points (GRP) went up from 70 before the Indian Premier League (IPL) began, to 97. GRP is the sum total of the television viewer ratings (TVR) of a particular programme, or a channel over a specific period of time. TVR, in turn, refers to the percentage of people watching a particular programme at a given point in time. It essentially reflects a channel’s or a programme’s viewership share during that time slot. Prime time refers to 7-11pm. Among Sony’s new shows, Entertainment Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega averaged 1.1 TVR and Bhaskar Bharti and Ladies Special averaged 1 TVR. “The most interesting outcome of the first week’s ratings is that the shows have reached the audience we were targeting: urban, upper middle-class families,” says Danish Khan, head of marketing, who was earlier head of Sony Max. The second week coincided with the T20 World Cup, and the GRP dropped to 90 in the week in which six matches featuring the Indian team were aired. The ratings of Bhaskar Bharti dropped to below 1. In its third week, Sony’s GRP dropped further to 82.

Prior to the relaunch, Sony’s research team studied 35,000 people in all the metros and tier II cities before concluding that although Indians below the age of 35 are economically affluent, pro-

I

GIRL POWER

A review of the five major new shows on Sony Entertainment Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega

Show time: Bhaskar Bharti is adapted from a Brazilian series; Ladies Special (inset) is about life in Mumbai. gressive and open to watching new kinds of films and TV shows, they are very rooted to traditional family values and family-oriented stories are the safest bets on prime time TV. According to latest figures released by TAM Media Research, the GEC show with the highest rating is Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai aired on Star Plus, with 5.88 TVR, and Star Plus is the highest rated channel with 266 GRP. It’s now clear that this attempt to understand “the Indian audience” too has backfired. After three weeks of new fiction programming, Sony is behind Colors, Zee TV, Star Plus and NDTV Imagine in the top four spots.

The channel’s fortunes now depend on its next big announcement: the Indian version of the reality show I am a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, originally aired on UK’s ITV and currently a charttopper in the US on NBC. It is being produced by Miditech, shot in Malaysia’s Taman Negara rainforest and is likely to go on air at

There is a dearth of creative talent that thinks out of the box.

Gurdip Bhangoo Programming head, Sony

the end of September, after NDTV Imagine’s most anticipated reality show, Rakhi ka Swayamvar, which premieres on 29 June. With these two shows, Sony and NDTV Imagine will compete for the fourth GEC spot.

For its celebrity show, Sony is likely to have known faces, who are in the news and who can attract eyeballs with their tabloid appeal. Remember Rakhi Sawant and Bhojpuri actor Ravi Kishen trying to outdo each other in histrionics in Bigg Boss, Season 1?

The backdrop of I am a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here is much more extreme: Former “big shots” battle each other in an inhospitable natural environment to emerge “the king” and “the queen”. In the first season in the UK, instead of keeping the prize earnings for themselves, the celebrities chose to donate them to charity.

Bhangoo says the audience for reality shows all over the world tends to be young—in India, that makes up most of the audience: “Reality shows have always worked well for Sony. Bigg Boss and Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa gave us very good TRPs. So we are in the process of finalizing some big shows that have worked in other parts of the world.”

Late last year, Sony’s share in the GEC space dipped to an alltime low of 7% from 29% in 2000.

From the alternative, non-saas bahu, young, hip house of Jassi and the Indian Idol, it became like any other, in dire need of a new life. Manjit Singh, COO, Sony, says: “We kind of lost our way in

the middle and tried to blend ourselves into being all things to all people. But we’re different. A few years ago, it was easier. Today, the TAM meters are spread throughout the country. Our time band evolves through the evening.”

The company’s (earlier called SET and now christened Multi Screen Media) contract with IPL ensured revenue generation and visibility, but it lacked zing as a GEC. The new Sony was launched soon after IPL 2 ended, with six new prime time shows. Like all televised drama in India, the four new shows have women as protagonists—a queen from history, a small-town girl, four middle-class Mumbai women and a woman who used to be a man. Refreshingly enough, they have minds of their own, yet don’t shy away from showing some skin (see box for show reviews). But as with most TV content in GECs, they are poor in production quality. The sets are cardboard-like, costumes are matched for no apparent aesthetic or thematic reason, transitions and cuts are jarring and the dramatic moments and turning points unnecessarily stressed with loud, synthetic music.

Bhangoo, who arrived upon the mix of shows, says: “First, there is a dearth of creative talent that thinks out of the box. Second, the budgets for most shows are a fraction of what’s spent at BBC, for example, which is about £250,000 (around Rs2 crore) per episode.”

He says he rejected many ideas before settling on the five, based on their themes and the calibre of

As the title suggests, everything goes in this show: a man holding his breath so tight five men can’t pull his tucked shirt out of his pants (urgh!); a man burping a hundred times (urrrghhh!); a man swallowing, walking over and under fire. Everything certainly is not “entertainment”. But the feat that entertains judges Anu Malik and Farah Khan (a sometimes witty, sometimes dull and nonchalant duo) the most is rewarded with Rs10,000. This is reality TV for ordinary guys with little talent and nothing to lose.

Monday to Thursday, 10pm; Friday, 9pm

Chittod Ki Rani Padmini Ka Johur Among the new shows, this one has an impressive production value.

Producer Nitin Chandrakant Desai is an art director, known for his sweeping sets in films such as Jodhaa Akbar and Devdas. Chittod Ki Rani Padmini Ka Johur has the same depth and look on a much lower scale—at least someone didn’t use the same tacky, cardboard sets used over and over again for TV shoots. The story of the brave and beautiful queen makes for good period drama, and refreshingly, the acting is stripped of shrill histrionics.

Monday to Thursday, 8pm

Palampur Express A small­town girl saga, complete with family hurdles, an unlikely romance and her own aspirations (winning an Olympic medal in this case) always seems to work. The people making them.

Bhangoo’s appointment can be considered the first small step towards the attempted resurrection of Sony. The content executive, in his early 30s, was a producer for BBC Asia—his last posting was as executive producer of the BBC Asian programmes unit—before moving to Mumbai.

Raised in the UK, he was familiar with India and Mumbai, but not so much with Sony when he got the call for this job. A young audience profile excited him: “In the West, the youth below the age of 30 don’t watch so much TV. But here the TV-viewing audience is

story of Pavni has all these elements, minus good performances and direction. A realistic subject requires, at the very least, life­like sets. But I love spunky girls on Indian TV, so thumbs up to the writers.

Monday to Thursday, 8.30pm

Bhaskar Bharti Adapted from an original Brazilian soap, Bhaskar Bharti is a racy, war­of­the­sexes comedy. Targeted at young audiences, the story is about Bhaskar, a philanderer who suddenly, to his horror, turns into a woman. He’s forced to experience what it’s like to be the other sex. There are many twists in the story, and many comic situations. The show has been produced by the makers of Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin, Sony’s best offering so far in fiction. Some of the performances are over the top and the comedy is too loud.

Monday to Thursday, 9pm

Ladies Special A Mumbai story of four women of different ages who become friends in the local train. They fight their own battles—a violent husband or errant children or other misfortunes—and become each other’s support. But the story is not as much about female bonding as about middle­class Mumbai life.

Neena Gupta adds weight to the show with her seasoned acting. If you ignore the clichéd transitions from one woman’s life to another, and the mediocre production quality, this is Sony’s best new show.

Monday to Thursday, 9.30pm Sanjukta Sharma one of the youngest in the world.”

Singh, Bhangoo, Khan and acting CEO N.P. Singh, who make up the team behind the new Sony, say, cautiously, that it’s going to take months before success shows. “The new trend in the market is that people are loyal to shows and not to channels.

There’s already a loyalty to the SET brand, but we’re trying to build loyalty to the shows so people will stick to the brand,” Singh says.

(Source of ratings: TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd) sanjukta.s@livemint.com

CULTURE L17 SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FILMS

Reclaiming paradise ‘Sikandar’ could make Kashmir a favoured locale for films once again

SAMANTH S

SIX DEGREES OF THYAGARAJA

O

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· iyush Jha’s Sikandar is the second Indian film to have a child as its protagonist and Kashmir as its backdrop. It must be tricky for a film-maker to pull it off: How do you depict childhood in a land and among people habituated to, and bogged down by, violence? How do you pass on a legacy of conflicted identity to your children? Can children of the valley really retain their innocence?

Santosh Sivan dealt with the issue only peripherally in his visually enticing work, Tahaan, last year—the story of a young Kashmiri boy who loses the pet he loves dearly, and as he tries to get it back, unwittingly undertakes a transformative journey. The burden of history does not directly propel Tahaan’s story.

Jha’s protagonist, young Sikandar, on the other hand, gets embroiled in the turbulence of the land involuntarily, so his film becomes more politically charged, even though Jha says he never intended it to be so.

Both films have the charm of a combination that Iranian filmmakers such as Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have used very poetically in some of their films: the innocent trials of childhood unfolding against the backdrop of a beautiful landscape.

Jha has previously directed Chalo America (1999) and King of Bollywood (2004)—both comedies revolving around very specific milieus—which received a lukewarm response at the box office as well as critically. With Sikandar, he enters entirely new territory. He was clear about what he set out to do: “Sikandar is not meant to be a docu-fiction or a boring depiction of the problems of Kashmir. I wanted to reach out to as many people as possible. It is a classic suspense thriller.” He says the story of Sikandar is the main thrust of the film, and the suspense begins when the boy becomes a pawn in an intriguing game played out among militants, the army, politicians and religious leaders of the small

RAAGTIME

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Green peace: (clockwise from above) Jha shot the film entirely in Kashmir; (inset) R. Madhavan (left) and Sanjay Suri play key roles; and Parzan Dastur (seen here with Ayesha Kapur) plays the lead. town where the film is set.

Jha’s story took shape when he decided to travel through India after his second film released. He spent some time in Kashmir, besides the North-East, Chhattisgarh and elsewhere. He happened to meet Merajuddin, a national football player from the state. “It got me thinking about modern Kashmiris and their aspirations. I met so many people who were uninterested in this big cross-border issue. All they want is to rise above their circumstances, buy material things, study, go higher in society.”

Sikandar (Parzan Dastur, who played the Sikh boy in Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) is one such child. The 14-year-old school-going boy lives with his uncle and aunt, who have been taking care of him since he was four, when militants killed his parents. He is passionate about football and aspires to be a famous player. One day, on his

way back from a match with his friend Nasreen (Ayesha Kapoor, who played the child’s role in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black), he discovers an abandoned gun. Nasreen tries to dissuade him but his curiosity gets the better of him and he picks it up and carries it along.

The rest of the story unfolds into how Sikandar becomes the victim of a larger plot, ending in a surprising climax.

Sudhir Mishra, who has coproduced the film with Big Motion Pictures, says: “It’s not a film with big messages. It’s a simple story meant to be an entertainer. Sikandar is also the first film to be shot entirely in Kashmir.”

In Sikandar, Kashmir doesn’t have floating clouds, snowcapped peaks and icy, gurgling streams. Jha filmed in Pahalgam (where Tahaan was shot) in spring, when the entire valley turns green. “I wanted the back-

drop to somehow complement Sikandar’s hopes,” he says.

Both Jha and Sivan seem to have paved the way for filmmakers to rediscover Kashmir as a cinematic paradise. Many Bollywood films were shot in the valley until the separatist revolts began in the state in the late 1980s. In February, at Ficci Frames 2009—the annual entertainment convention held in Mumbai—a delegation of tourism officials from Jammu and Kashmir formally invited filmmakers to the valley. UTV Motion Pictures has already signed on Majidi for a project to be filmed entirely in Kashmir.

Jha recalls: “It turned out to be a very beautiful experience. We shot in Betaab valley, named after the Hindi film Betaab (1983), a film with Sunny Deol and Amrita Singh that was filmed here.”

Sikandar released in theatres on Friday.

n the first and second days of June, two of the few living ties with Carnatic music’s past were snapped.

Eighty-five-year-old Mysore S. Rajaram, once director of Kalakshetra and composer of the music of numerous dance dramas, had attended a performance by another Kalakshetra veteran the evening before his sudden death on 1 June. One report mentioned that he had just made fresh plans to choreograph a set of verses.

Rajaram had a unique and incredibly prestigious musical pedigree. He was the grandson of the early 20th century composer Mysore Vasudevacharya, who in turn could trace his teacher-student lineage back to Thyagaraja himself. This is loosely the equivalent of being the grandson of a pianist whose instructors were a couple of levels removed from Wolfgang Mozart. Rajaram was fortunate enough to assist his grandfather during his own stint as composer at Kalakshetra, and in particular, in setting to music Valmiki’s Ramayan.

Reading through the various obituaries that appeared after Rajaram’s death, I was struck by this emphasis on lineage.

“Everybody is eager to trace their education back to Thyagaraja, and they’ll do it through whatever permutations and combinations it takes,” one singer told me once, rather cattily. But the fact that musicians today can even do that, and vault back to Carnatic music’s most central composer in six or seven steps, THE HINDU speaks very eloquently about how this old art form is, at the same time, surprisingly new.

A day after Rajaram’s demise, one of Carnatic music’s finest percussionists passed on to the great music academy in the sky. On the mridangam, Palghat R. Raghu accompanied artistes across a broad swathe of generations, from G.N. Balasubramaniam in the 1950s to the contemporary vocalist Sikkil C. Gurucharan, who is all of 27 years old. With Balasubramaniam and the violin maestro Lalgudi Maestro: Palghat R. Raghu.

Jayaraman, Raghu once estimated, he must have played around 1,000 concerts in a five-year period. As ensembles go, this was one worth selling a kidney to hear live.

Some of Raghu’s most memorable collaborations, however, were with his fellow native of Palghat, K. V. Narayanaswamy, collaborations that I have listened to repeatedly with delight.

Narayanaswamy was a subtle, emotional, highly classical singer, and Raghu was always able to capture both the subtleties and the emotion, yoking them to his own impeccable technique. He was an ace, also, at combining two seemingly contradictory skills: that of following the main musician like a shadow, nipping at the heels of the music and anticipating its every turn, and that of weaving his own improvised motifs into the larger lattice of his play.

Detecting those motifs, and deconstructing that lattice, is a near-mathematical craft born of pure listening, and it’s something I am not able to do even a quarter as well as I would like. But there is a quality about the well-played mridangam—and Palghat Raghu’s mridangam is a wonderfully played one—that shoots beyond the terrain of rational enjoyment into that of visceral pleasure. The percussive beat is the most primal, elemental form of music, and with Palghat Raghu, even the most rhythm-challenged of listeners (such as myself) can find themselves responding, mysteriously and instinctively, in sync.

Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

KITT and canoodle The new Knight Rider is almost as bad as the old one.

In a good way B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT sidin.v@livemint.com

···························· cene opens outside an ambiguously named “Foreign Consulate, Washington”. Snappily dressed man sashays through diplomat crowd with nondescript brunette on arm. It is clear that the man has more on his mind than international diplomacy. Or slipping surreptitiously into a closet with the brunette for a quick bilateral discussion.

Instead, his eyes scan the room.

And he has spotted the “package”!

S

Cue theme music. At this point the familiar James Bond theme wouldn’t be entirely out of place.

Indeed, looking at the protagonist, played by the entirely pedestrian, wooden-faced ex-model and soap star Justin Bruening, one half expects a budget Bond rip-off. Instead, an oddly familiar piece of music ensues. Wait a minute! What is this? Realization emerges from the depths of your popular television-soaked mind.

The joy! It is, in fact, an updated version of the theme music from David Hasselhoff’s testosterone soaked 1980s TV phenomenon Knight Rider. That moment of realization is sweet for anyone who grew up watching the show.

Yes, much like its namesake cricket team, the original show had neither plot nor performances to speak of. But it had

Knight Industries Two Thousand, a souped-up Pontiac TransAm car installed with an artificial intelligence (AI) computer, and known affectionately as KITT. KITT and his partner in law enforcement Michael Knight, played by David Hasselhoff, provided compelling television viewing for four years from 1982.

While the original show took itself quite seriously, it was clearly targeted at nine- and 10-year-old boys who’d forgive everything—the terrible acting, cheesy plots and reused special effects—just to see a tall man drive a super fast car and save many babes.

The 2008 reboot of the show, which had its Indian premiere on Star World this Thursday, revisits the story of the driver-car duo that works for FLAG, Foundation

Hot rod: Bruening and Russo with the Shelby GT500KR Mustang. for Law and Government, and helps the government fight crime.

But the time is 25 years after the original. The driver is the son of the first Michael Knight and his car is not a Pontiac but a Ford Shelby GT500KR Mustang.

Son-hero-stud Michael Traceur has to evade capture, rescue a crime-fighting partner and

then flee from the Foreign Consulate in the new KITT, Knight Industries Three Thousand (the car’s AI is voiced by Val Kilmer.

So so). The “package” is still at large, and in the course of the pilot episode we are rapidly reintroduced to FLAG, the new hero, the Transformer-like car and the astounding all-round

babe factor that pervades the show. Deanna Russo, the lead female, is a stunner and more than up for a fight with KITT for male eyeballs. The show seems to have advanced its target audience to 15 years and up—an audience that’ll happily make the necessary trade-off of plot for visual inspiration.

The new Knight Rider only ran for a season in the US last year.

That’s not really surprising. There are several better shows out there—albeit few with the “run on constant loop in Maxim magazine’s lobby” virtue that this one has. But for fans of the classic series, this will bring back many memories. For newer viewers, there is Deanna Russo.

Knight Rider airs on Star World every Thursday at 10pm.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009

Style VINCENT YU/AP

ED JONES/AFP

TREND TRACKER

Sweet and low

Spotted: (from far left) Lara Dutta and Raima Sen in a Manav Gang­ wani sari at IIFA; Priyanka Chopra in a Manish Malhotra sari at IIFA; Katrina Kaif at Amrita Arora’s sangeet party; and Mallika Khan in a Manav Gangwani sari at IIFA.

The ‘pallu’ is slipping on our actors as the blouse shares the spotlight with the sari

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

···························· urprisingly it wasn’t the gold swimsuit in Dostana but six yards of metallic beige fabric with silvery sequins that made Priyanka Chopra the “hottest girl in the world”. As she shook her hips to Desi Girl in a Manish Malhotra sari and a bikini blouse with jewelled shoulder straps, the slim pallu went past her waist, between her bosom and over her shoulder, breaking away from the traditional drape of a pallu which buries the bust under fabric. Her low-cut blouse didn’t just play a supporting role, it made an appearance throughout the song.

Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit made the sari sexy, but now it has become hip and risqué.

While the leading ladies of the last decade relied on flowing chiffons, sprinklers, and a well-directed gust of wind to up the sexiness quotient, Bollywood actors now know the trick lies in showing off the blouse, not smothering it in the pallu.

And it doesn’t just stop at wearing sheer saris to show off the blouse. Katrina Kaif, Preity Zinta, Kareena Kapoor, Lara Dutta and Shilpa Shetty have all been seen at off-screen events

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BOBBY YIP/REUTERS YOGEN SHAH

in chiffon and embroidered saris with jewelled cholis that are short, backless, dipping at the cleavage and left uncovered by the pallu on one side.

Chopra’s look in Dostana was such a runaway success

According to him, the only way to do justice to his blouses is by pulling the ‘pallu’ tight over the middle of the bust

that Malhotra went on to do a collection of saris at the fashion week in March, o n e o f which was also worn by the actor at the International Indian Film Academy awards (IIFA) in Macau last week.

Lara Dutta in gold, Sophie Chowdhry in pink, Raveena Tandon in red and Raima Sen in white, all wore saris designed by Manav Gangwani at IIFA. The label wasn’t the only thing they had in common —they all wore the pallu the way Gangwani likes it. The designer says he creates beau-

TYRONE SIU/REUTERS

tiful blouses and likes it when they are showcased as much as the sari. According to him, the only way to do justice to his blouses is by pulling the pallu tight over the middle of the bust and pinning it on the shoulder. “That drape of the

sari instantly makes you look more glamorous,” he says.

For Nikhil Mehra of the ShantanuNikhil designer duo, this trend is about contemporarizing the oldest Indian ensemble.

This trend is “cool” and works well with most body sizes. “It’s best when the sari is understated. The sari and the blouse must not compete.

Be careful about doing this if you have a large bust size. The pallu shouldn’t be too slim then,” he adds.

Nikhil says this look is easy to achieve with his readymade two-piece saris that come with a pleated skirt (made with

about 3.25m of fabric) and a separate pallu (about 2m) that has to be tucked in the skirt and then pinned at the shoulder. “You can bunch up the pallu to a width of about 3 inches, and that will give it a slim drape,” he says.

And if you want a sexier twist to your sari, wear it dangerously low, on the hip, and make sure to drape it tight so there’s no volume around the waist.

Gangwani suggests refraining from draping the pallu too slim if wearing a bikini blouse—or you might end up revealing too much. Revealing just the right amount is the key, according to designer Raakesh Agarvwal: “Play peeka-boo, don’t reveal all.” He also suggests accessorizing the sari with a brooch and the blouse with jewel bells if you want to use the slim pallu drape. “There’s no need to buy an expensive designer blouse.

Instead, get a cap-sleeved backless blouse stitched or wear a halter blouse and let the pallu go up in the middle instead of completely covering the bust,” he says.

But if you believe you have a beautiful blouse to show off, just let your pallu slip.