Lounge 23 January 2010

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 4

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Salma Husain discovered rare Mughal recipes while researching 16th century politics.

They document recipes and the grammar of Indian cuisines that could soon be extinct.

Meet India’s passionate food historians

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH SPICEJET’S SANJAY AGGARWAL >Page 6

>Pages 9­11

PITCH DIPLOMACY

Cricket relations between India and Pakistan have no parallel in sport, and have been shaped by their peculiar political history >Page 5

KITCHEN ARCHAEOLOGY THE GOOD LIFE

REPLY TO ALL

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE PUBLIC IN THE REPUBLIC

D

rafted under Ambedkar, shepherded by Patel, articulated by Nehru and presided over by Rajendra Prasad, the Indian Constitution espouses the noblest of ideals. It is far more detailed than its American counterpart, which held that all men are created equal, but glossed over festering societal inequalities with respect to blacks and women.

Lincoln had to wage a war to abolish slavery, and the suffragette movement struggled for years before voting rights were given to women. >Page 4

AAKAR PATEL

MEN, WOMEN, POWER, BEAUTY

I

have a game I have been trying out at parties for a decade. I ask women to give it a thought, and then choose the order in which they would be attracted to the following types of men as their partner: a) Good-looking b) Powerful c) Stable. No other quality in these three men is defined, and they are what those words mean. Almost invariably, women choose the powerful man as the one they are most attracted to. This is followed by the stable man and last, the good-looking one. >Page 4

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

TESLA STAGES A COMEBACK

Long­dead inventor Nikola Tesla is electrifying hip techies >Page 7

A DUET THAT DAZZLES

The music of the forthcoming film, ‘Ishqiya’, strikes another harmonious note in a brilliant partnership >Page 16

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE TRADITION OF MUGGING ENGLISH

M

ugging de Queen’s English/ is the story of my life,” says the immigrant who did not “graduate” in the UK-based Caribbean writer and poet John Agard’s excellent Listen Mr Oxford Don, which (incidentally) can be accessed on YouTube in the poet’s own rendition. The tradition of mugging English is a glorious one: from Mark Twain to Agard, from Raja Rao to Salman Rushdie. We know that English contains huge chunks of Germanic-Scandinavian... >Page 15

MUMBAI’S OWN PROJECTS

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

RAM GOPAL VARMA AND THE INDIAN MEDIA

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

MANPREET ROMANA/AFP MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

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

E

arlier this week, I had a truly embedded in Indian journalscary experience. ism. Nobody will dispute the I found myself at a press conferfact that politics and the media ence (PC in journalist lingo) are firmly intertwined. purely by accident. Now I can’t Breaking news was the bigremember the last time I attended gest media phenomenon of the one (editors normally get the privlast decade. So why is it surprisilege of doing one-on-ones and ing that a story set in the crazy, most press meets are attended by blurry world of television got the younger, beat reporters).

Varma’s creative juices flowing?

Since the PC was about Ram Even if the film is based on Gopal Varma’s Rann, a film on the unconfirmed, gossipy stories “news battle” and one whose tag about warring, politically-conline is “312 channels in the country. Under fire: Varma at the press conference in Delhi. nected industrialists and the How many are telling the truth?” I way they manipulate the media, decided to stay on. small-time models whose eventual why should a film-maker share the exact Varma, who doesn’t believe in censor- goal is to be a news anchor. Or maybe root of his inspiration with a roomful of ship and loves to seek attention before it’s because their editors don’t believe idiotic journalists? the release of a film (for Agyaat he hung in old-fashioned journalism. Maybe “This is a democracy and everybody dummy corpses on billboards advertis- the editors’ brief to the reporters was to has a right to express their opinion,” ing the film across Mumbai), make sure they got Varma or lead actor Varma said wearily. “Every film is ficRELAX screened a short “unrelated” Amitabh Bachchan on camera saying tional, though it obviously contains reffilm before the question-and- they hate the Indian media. erences to real life.” answer session began.

Their questions came fast and furiVarma said that Bachchan’s character For the film, Varma’s team asked a ous. Why can’t you say openly that your Vijay Harshwardhan Malik was inspired random sampling of people on the film is against the media? What do you by NDTV’s Prannoy Roy. “When I first street what they thought about televi- think of the media? Why did you organ- saw Prannoy Roy 30 years back, he sion news. Their responses were fairly ize a press conference? Why don’t you looked like a symbol of purity,” he said. standard. The television channels think go straight to the audience? What mesI for one am glad that Ram Gopal the public is stupid. Show us something sage are you trying to convey? How is it Varma’s come out of the jungle and that sensible. Most of the time they exagger- possible that a random sampling of his muse is Prannoy Roy and not Urmate. If there’s no news, they make it up. people on the street said only negative ila, Antara or Jiah. And if the media can They don’t understand the definition of things about us? help Varma make a good film again, I breaking news. Etc, etc.

Why on earth should journalists be say it’s all for a higher cause.

I thought it was quite a smart way to upset by a Bollywood film that spins a kick-start the conversation about the yarn about how the media can be misPS: Please don’t send me diatribes film. But the young television journalists used/compromised in modern-day about the Indian media. Send them to present in the room were enraged.

India? Politicians and celebrities are Varma instead.

I’m not sure if their anger stemmed parodied all the time. Director Madhur from the fact that they had been wait- Bhandarkar’s made a career out of sati- Write to lounge@livemint.com ing for at least 2 hours before the cast rizing different groups in his films such of the film arrived. Maybe it was as Page 3, Fashion and Corporate. www.livemint.com because many reporters today don’t Our profession’s flaws have been know the first thing about journal- documented often enough. Currently Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut ism—television reporters are often we’re debating the way “paid news” is

OBLIGED TO TIP

WO IT! N

This refers to Radha Chadha’s column ‘What is the point of tipping?’, 2 January. The phenomenon of what the Americans call “gratuity” can get to distasteful levels. For them, tipping usually has nothing to do with service. Asking for gratuity is so in­your­face that your receipt comes with your tip helpfully pre­calculated—that too with different percentage levels, usually beginning at 15%. Servers helpfully highlight it before they present you the cheque. It’s as if it’s your obligation to pay, but they are under no obligation to do their duty—to serve you well.

On the other hand, I have experienced superlative levels of service from non­five­star resort employees in India (even in government­run undertakings) without their palms extended for tips. As Japan and India prove, great service has nothing to do with getting something in return.

It’s got everything to do with simply doing your job well.

S KRISHNAN (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.)

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

TODAY’S BLOG BY KRISH RAGHAV

The book of the bizarre This and more at blogs.livemint.com/livelounge

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Bring the public back into the republic

D

AFP

rafted under Ambedkar, shepherded by Patel, articulated by Nehru and presided over by Rajendra Prasad, the Indian Constitution espouses the noblest of ideals. It is far more detailed than its

American counterpart, which held that all men are created equal, but glossed over festering societal inequalities with respect to blacks and women. Lincoln had to wage a war to abolish slavery, and the suffragette movement struggled for years before voting rights were given to women. India’s Constitution, right from its inception, addressed a range of issues that could cause communal tensions. It gave voice to minorities and provided forums for debate.

Unlike the Japanese constitution, which was written in a scant few months by foreigners under General MacArthur and presented to the Diet as a fait accompli, India took three years to write what is arguably the longest constitution in the world. It has 94 amendments.

Japan has none. Although written by the elite, India invited submissions from political parties, religious groups and the general public, testifying, as Ramachandra Guha says in his book, India after Gandhi, to “the baffling heterogeneity of India, but also to the precocious existence of a rights culture among Indians” that harked back to the early gana sanghas or republics of ancient India. The Constitution borrows more from Western liberalism than the flowering republics of Aryavarta. It was

also written amid crises: refugees of Partition, food scarcity, religious riots and intransigent princes. “Fundamental rights framed against the carnage of fundamental wrongs,” as historian Granville Austin put it.

And yet, the Indians engaged.

They—our predecessors—discussed basic human rights, language, minorities, tribals, women’s issues, and how much to borrow from Western norms. As Guha says, “They were many; they were divided; and they were vocal.” Born of this messy consensus, the Indian Constitution is a magnificent document. It also needs to be rewritten, not in the literal sense but in order to popularize it and make it speak to “we the people” who have inherited its doctrines.

Ask 20 Indians in any metro what they know about our Constitution. Ask 100 college students if they know its tenets. I am willing to bet good money that you’ll find one, maybe two Indians who will have some clue about what our Constitution says. Compare this to America or France, republics both. In the movie, The American President, actor Michael Douglas discusses the constitution with his daughter, Lucy.

News anchors and politicians bring up

its “self-evident” truths during programmes that have very little to do with politics. In France, constitutional trivia provides fodder for television quizzes and game shows.

America’s constitution permeates the national dialogue, even today. It stays current and relevant because its citizens still discuss it.

Indians, on the other hand, have placed the We the people: Rajendra Prasad was the president of Constitution on so the Constituent Assembly. high a pedestal that it has stopped resonating with the very dream of an “untouchable woman people it was intended for. Simply put, president” on the big screen and we need to popularize what our republic popularize the tenets of this republic. stands for, somewhat like South Africa We need Mallu, Maadu, Sindhi and has recently done. We need to market it, Sardarji jokes about our Constitution; we not to the scholars who read K.M. need to get Robert and Mona Darling to Munshi but to the teenagers who listen banter about its issues; we need ad to Bollywood rap. We need the Alladi jingles that skew its message; we need Krishnaswami Aiyer-meets-A.R. Rahman saas-bahu serials that invoke its lines; we version of it. need college debates and reality shows This is not hard to do. Karadi Tales based on it. We need our Constitution to can do a sing-along version of India’s speak to us. All it takes is a few first principles. Amar Chitra Katha can celebrities to get the ball rolling. Instead create an illustrated story of how our of tatkal twittering and then blaming the Constitution came to be. Pratham Books media for taking his message out of can commission a Constitution for context, minister Tharoor (who, I Children series, fraught as it is with personally think, has had enough of colourful characters set against a being minister) can tweet about the dramatic backdrop. Rajkumar Hirani Constitution rather than his calendar. could get over his 3 Idiots and write the Chetan Bhagat can write about the state Munna Bhai equivalent for the of our republic after his 2 States. Our Constitution. Just as bumbling Munna rich heritage of folk songs and street contemporized the Mahatma’s message, theatre can be used to make this a wise-cracking, fast-talking Koli important historical document come fisherwoman can enact Gandhiji’s alive for its citizens.

Consider Article 16, which talks about equality of opportunity. The rap version would be, “Yo Bro. You wanna job. You gotta job. Equal opportunity but social justice. Peace, man.” The rap version of Article 19 can dispense with the “notwithstanding” and other legal but necessary jargon and emphasize the basic rights of free speech, assembly, association and movement. For example, the folk version could be a catchy Asha Bhosle tune about a nation of talkers who move within the motherland and love to get together. Or some version thereof.

By making the Constitution accessible, we not only help India’s future citizens know their rights and responsibilities, we also teach both the elite and the common man not to take its blessings for granted. The lofty ideals of the Indian republic are worth fighting for. They just need to trickle down from scholars to schoolchildren; from libraries to lounge bars; from educational institutions to no-name addas. The “Constitution is a living document”, as the government of India’s website says.

Simplifying and popularizing it will mean no disrespect. Rather, it will lay the foundation for the people to understand and enact its tenets more faithfully than we are now doing.

Shoba Narayan is channelling the rapper, T-Pain, as she reads the Indian Constitution. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why she is turned on by power, he by beauty

I

AJIT SOLANKI/AP

have a game I have been trying out at parties for a decade. I ask women to give it a thought, and then choose the order in which they would be attracted to the following types of men as their partner: a) Good-looking b) Powerful c) Stable.

No other quality in these three men is defined, and they are what those words mean. Almost invariably, women choose the powerful man as the one they are most attracted to. This is followed by the stable man and last, the good-looking one. I cannot remember more than a couple of women, and I have polled dozens, who did not choose power as the thing they were drawn to most.

I ask men to choose from the following: a) Beautiful b) Rich c) Homely Men always choose beautiful first; most pick homely second and rich last.

We are uncomfortable with accepting the extent to which our instinct, formed over tens of thousands of years as hunters-gatherers, dominates our intellect. But it is true that our sexual instinct is not entirely in our control, and women are drawn towards the powerful male.

A wealthy man, no matter how ugly—Aristotle Onassis—will bed the most desirable women in the world: Jacqueline Kennedy, Maria Callas. Given that fact, powerful men often practise what is called serial monogamy, monopolizing a beautiful woman for the best years of her beauty and then moving on to the next woman. That’s why rich men often have many

divorces—Larry King is on his eighth wife, Johnny Carson had four, Mickey Rooney eight.

Other powerful men have a different model, a stable family life but constant sexual relationships on the side: Tiger Woods, David Beckham and Bill Clinton.

Evolutionary psychologists attribute this behaviour not to sex addiction but the instinct to spread genes. Man has an unlimited number of potential offsprings because of his ability to generate sperm.

And so the most important aspect of whether or not he will mate with a woman is not love or even attraction, but opportunity. Most males will accept this if asked, and any number of studies show it to be true.

One study, a few years ago, had a beautiful woman on a college campus approaching strangers to have sex with her. Every single man she approached agreed. When an attractive man did the same with the campus women, not one agreed. Again, the reason for this is thought to be primal, and it is this. A woman will have three or four and a maximum of perhaps a dozen or so children (Mumtaz Mahal was rewarded with the Taj Mahal for producing 14).

So, in a species where man is provider, she must be more careful in selecting her mate because she has to ensure he is capable of protecting her limited offspring. This explains the female

recent. This is because a larger organ is more efficient at depositing sperm, thus ensuring fertilization.

We know that organ size matters because it conditions the unusual behaviour of males in the toilet. In the men’s room, when a urinal Power perks: Gujarati women find Modi sexually attractive. is open between two standing men, a attraction to power. third man entering will avoid the spot Gujarati women find Narendra Modi in the middle and head for the fifth very attractive sexually and, even more urinal so as to keep one open space than the man, it is the urban Gujarati between him and the next man. This is woman who has made Modi a heroic because he is conscious of his figure in that state. An ageing woman neighbour sizing him up. does not have appeal in society because Indian men are particularly insecure man is instinctively trained to see that and toilets here have a wall—often as her utility is low. This is why women high as a standing man’s hide their age more than men. It is head—between each urinal. because of her declining fecundity that Incidentally, this competition among age is unattractive on a woman though men for women is a clear indicator that it’s irrelevant in the rich man. This is not the anti-homosexual sentiment of to preclude that a man might find a Christians and Muslims is Old beautiful woman of older age sexually Testament prejudice. Instinctively, all attractive: He will (remember the heterosexual men should like opportunity rule). But this will be a homosexuals because they are not a relationship of casual sex, because man threat. Often we send out sexual signals is first drawn to the nubile woman. that we think are effective, but are Exactly how nubile? The male preference actually meaningless. The man who for shaved pudenda offers an indication. colours his hair black does so without The idea that women are drawn to understanding that his youth isn’t what power opens up doors that many men women primarily find attractive in him. would rather be left shut. The myth in It is important, however, for a woman to health literature that penis size does not colour her hair, and the defiant woman matter is subscribed to primarily by who doesn’t, finds it difficult to get men men. Women would actually have been to view her in a sexually attractive light. attracted genetically to the large organ Despite the male obsession with large before the use of clothing, which is quite motorcycles, and the advertising that

suggests that women find them alluring, an expensive car, say a Mercedes-Benz, is much more effective at communicating a man’s quality. Money power being the key here, and not mechanical power. Similarly, the female predilection for handbags is unfathomable to men, though wearing stilettos is a good idea. Women should wear high-heeled shoes. They make a woman physically vulnerable, teetering, and that makes her attractive to a man, because he likes to think of domination.

The heels reform her posture forwards, and that also has its appeals.

Nail polish and lipstick are most appealing to men when red, because it indicates health and vitality, and that was the original purpose of cosmetics. Brown, blue and black and such other colours are quite useless in attracting men.

So can we escape our instinct? Yes, but only episodically. It keeps coming back and it’s always lurking in our head if we observe it. Our prejudice is quite marked and women who are both gorgeous and intelligent are remembered for their beauty. A man who is striking-looking and intelligent is noted for his brains, even by women.

It’s banal but true: To improve their odds in the love market, men need to focus on making more money and women on looking more beautiful.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

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

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

L5

History ARKO DATTA/REUTERS

Gentleman’s game: The Indian and Pakistani teams after the fifth ODI in Lahore on 24 March 2004.

CRICKET

An uneven pitch

India and Pakistan’s cricketing relations have no parallel in sport, and have been shaped by their peculiar political history

B Y A YAZ M EMON ·································· y late friend Omar Kureishi (whose crusty voice on radio brought Pakistan cricket alive for millions of followers from the 1950s till his death in 2005) had a simple solution for the subcontinent’s most vexing issue. “Keep the ruddy politicians out, and cricket will keep the people of India and Pakistan together.”

This came shortly after the Karachi oneday match had been disrupted by young men who had run on to the field and assaulted India captain Krishnamachari Srikkanth, ostensibly to advocate the “Kashmir cause”. Like a quintessential cricket romantic, Omar, despite his privileged education and understanding of realpolitik, could be reduced to utter dismay at the volatility of Indo-Pak relations, in which cricket would often become the first casualty.

“In 1961-62,” he related to me, after the Karachi incident, “Hanif Mohammad had his hand slashed by a ruffian’s blade.

Why would anybody want to deprive millions of people from watching a master like Hanif, or a young prodigy like Tendulkar (who was making his international debut then) play unless they have been weaned on prejudice?”

M

Cricket romantics, however erudite, tend to see things in black or white and Omar was no exception. Fact is cricket relations between India and Pakistan are unique and find no parallel in the sport.

They have been shaped by the peculiar history of the two countries and have waxed and waned for over 60 years since Partition, depending on the prevailing political dispensation and climate.

Indeed, the burden of Partition was so heavy that its impact was felt immediately and emphatically when India and Pakistan commenced cricketing ties in 1952.

Concerning Bodyline, it was said of Douglas Jardine that while his passion would win the Ashes, he would lose the empire.

But where the captains of India and Pakistan were concerned, in 1952, both Lala Amarnath and A.H. Kardar seemed more intent on drawing a match than winning it; even a minor risk that could lead to defeat was considered anathema.

From a cricketing perspective, the series was terribly boring, what with all five Tests drawn, yet passions ran high, not the least because three players from Pakistan—skipper Kardar, Gul Mohammed and Amir Elahi—had earlier played for India. The complex drama of Indian politics and social life had found instant and telling expression in cricket; this was obviously to be felt on the field of play as well as the minds of the supporters of the two teams.

By 1955, when the two teams met again (this time in Pakistan), cricket had almost become war by proxy, as it were. It was easily the most popular sport in both countries; in this game of “flannelled fools” people of India and Pakistan found refuge, solace, but also the opportunity to score political brownie points. Indeed, the sentiments of people on either side not to lose to the other had intensified so much that players and officials from both teams were also completely spooked by the pressure.

Allegations of cheating (by umpires) and spying (on team tactics, etc) flew thick and fast. Matters reached a crescendo at Karachi when Amarnath (now India’s manager) and Kardar almost came to blows in the foyer of a hotel as the Pakistan captain was suspected of trying to influence an umpire. Amarnath and Kardar, it might be remembered, had played together for undivided India, and had been friends for more than a decade.

Things soured so badly after Pakistan’s tour of India in 1961-62 that the two countries did not engage in any cricket for almost 17 years—till 1978, when the impasse was broken by the new dictator Zia-ul-Haq and the new government of the Janata Party led by Morarji Desai. The two countries had gone to war twice in this period, and just when it seemed that cricket ties between India and Pakistan were interred forever, came the breakthrough, bringing in its wake new hope of renewed friendship.

Indeed, while politics has often been the bane, it has also sometimes been a boon for Indo-Pak cricket.

Cricket in turn has delivered the path for the process of peace to begin again after the two countries had reached a major, seemingly unresolvable crisis.

In 1987, for instance, tensions between the two countries had reached boiling point. Forces across the Line of Control were locked in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. The decibel level of hectoring and hysteria, not uncommon in Indo-Pak relations, had reached unprecedented levels. Imran Khan’s side, which was touring India then, was on the verge of being recalled when, in a diplomatic coup, president Zia-ul-Haq took an instant decision to come to the Jaipur Test match and defuse the crisis. Cricket for peace, he called his mission, and that INDIA TODAY IMAGES

Opening innings: Zia­ul­Haq (shaking hands with Sunil Gavaskar, in white) with the Indian cricket team in 1987.

objective was achieved.

Interestingly, those defined as “hawks” in the lexicon of politics have played the more constructive role in Indo-Pak cricket. Like Zia-ul-Haq in 1987, the BJP government, always accused of fanning anti-Pakistan sentiments, surprisingly cleared India’s tour of Pakistan in 2004.

There was still a formidable lingering opposition to any sort of interaction with the neighbouring country after the Kargil war of 1999, but A.B. Vajpayee’s government, even if only to use cricket as a populist vote-catcher in the elections that were round the corner, made a move that was to bring fresh vigour into the peace process. That the BJP lost those elections is, of course, not germane to the issue, only the irony of political life.

In the six years since, much like the 54 years before that, the fate of Indo-Pak cricket has matched the mood of the political relations between the two countries, all adding up to an extraordinary rollercoaster ride, which has often been thrilling, oftentimes chilling, but never ever boring. The barometer has swung from extreme friendship to extreme hostility, and for the people of the two countries, encompassed almost the entire range of human emotions.

Despite the backdrop of sustained political dissonance since Partition, India and Pakistan have used cricket (and of course Bollywood) to cut common ground. In the best of times, lucrative offshore tournaments were the norm in the 1980s and 1990s to feed the demand of the Asian diaspora. But even in the worst of times, the two countries collaborated to host the cricket World Cup—in 1987 and 1996—to ensure that the balance of power in the sport stays with the subcontinent.

These look to be trying times again for cricket relations between the two countries. The effect of 26/11 lingers and the mood, at least in India, is certainly sombre. Pakistan have had to forsake their share of hosting 2011 World Cup matches along with India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and only this week, none of their players found favour for the third edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Can cricket provide the healing touch once more? It could, as past evidence shows. But again as past evidence shows, not without strong or innovative political will.

Ayaz Memon is a Mumbai-based writer and commentator.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L6

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

Business Lounge SANJAY AGGARWAL

A spicier challenge than salsa This CEO set aside plans of a sabbatical to join a budget airline and turn it around B Y V EENA V ENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com

···························· anjay Aggarwal examines the menu and asks for a glass of Merlot. Then, on an impulse, he says, “What the heck, I’ll have beer,” and orders Amstel Light. We are at The Bar, at the Trident in Gurgaon, and Aggarwal conspiratorially leans across and discloses that his 10-year-old daughter has prohibited him from drinking beer.

“She has this notion that beer is bad, so I am not allowed to drink any beer at home. She lets me drink wine and Scotch though,” he says. It is almost impossible that a meeting which begins on a note of connivance against a 10-year-old, for the forbidden pleasure of a chilled glass of beer, would be boring. I settle in for an interesting session.

Aggarwal joined as the CEO of SpiceJet in October 2008 in what was possibly the worst of times for the Indian aviation industry and the company. A month before that, when he quit his job at Flight Options in Cleveland, US, his plans were very different.

He was going to learn salsa. The dance institute had been identified and he had convinced his wife that she too should take six months off to dance and travel.

But three weeks before the start of his sabbatical, he received a call from a recruiter about a job with SpiceJet in India.

Aggarwal said he wasn’t interested but the recruiter sent him the job profile so he could forward it to other people who might be. He looked at it, saw the list of names of investors starting with Wilbur Ross and after consulting with friends and family, decided it was worth a meeting.

“My last day at Flight Options was 17 October (2008). So when SpiceJet asked when I could start, I did the math and said February or March. They said, well, how about 20 October? The company did not have a CEO for three months. So we postponed the plan to dance and travel and came to Gurgaon on 20 Octo-

S

ber,” he recounts.

Of course, none of this was as easy as it sounds. “My wife and I had numerous conversations about coming back to India. Our impression, from our holidays here, was that life is really tough in India. Then we thought it would be fascinating for the children (anti-beer activist Mahima and her younger brother Nandan) to go through a change. The days of born, raised and worked in the US are over. If you are a professional, you have to travel and work international assignments to be successful,” he says. But there are difficulties in adjusting to life in India, he concedes.

Aggarwal was away for 17 years and the country and its corporate landscape had changed significantly in the meantime. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the government machinery was now efficient, transparent and effective. When he started his career in 1988 in India, fresh out of engineering college (Nagpur University), Aggarwal worked for Microwin, a microwave oven manufacturing company, in Bhopal. In his four years there, he also handled customs and central excise issues, and experienced first hand the labyrinthine ways of the bureaucracy in the 1980s.

He went to the US in 1992 to pursue his master’s degree in operations research from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech University).

US Airways hired him before he completed his course.

In US Airways in Arlington, Virginia, Aggarwal was selected to be part of a “high-pot” group, a group of 40 employees from

‘If you are a professional, you have to travel and work international assignments to be successful.’

among 40,000 whose high potential was spotted and were groomed to become future leaders of the organization. He quit six years later when United Airlines acquired the company. He moved to Marriott International, Inc., where he was part of an internal consulting group, working on cost reduction, revenue generation and even information technology strategy. “Aviation is a 24x7 job, hospitality is an easier industry. I would reach home by 6.30 every evening. It was great work-life balance. But after some time it got to me. I am a fastpaced guy,” he says. So when a former colleague called and asked him to join the loss-making company Flight Options, he allowed himself to be convinced

easily. They moved to Cleveland despite his wife’s aversion to the cold. Flight Options reversed course and from losing $100 million (around Rs455 crore now) a year, it moved to a profitable $20 million. Then a private equity fund bought the company and Aggarwal decided it was time to conquer salsa.

Aggarwal is convinced that he did the right thing by joining SpiceJet. But he is still struggling with the nuances of living in India. He tries to be both American and Indian. He breaks into Hindi every once in a while, but calls cola “soda”. Dressed in standard CEO attire of jacket without a tie and a Rolex watch, he is the quintessential returning NRI. He is sufficiently comforta-

ble with his Indianness to wear a dhoti and fold it in half while on a holiday in Kerala, yet he is American enough to be agitated by the natives’ habits of spitting on the road and inability to maintain a queue.

“I did my own reference checks, heard the good and the bad, and a lot of people told me that going to Indian aviation at this point of time was not a great idea,” he says. “What I believed was that Indian aviation was still in its infancy. I knew that the low-cost model was the right model and that SpiceJet was the right player in the industry. If we needed capital to turn it around, I knew that capital would be available. Now, 12 months later, I feel my instincts were right.

Aviation will continue to grow for the next decade at 12-15% (annually) and SpiceJet is the right model,” he adds.

December was a great month for the company and Aggarwal is confident that if conditions remain favourable, SpiceJet will be able to post its first profitable quarter soon. His focus, since taking over the company, has been on profitability. “It’s not easy, our business is subject to a large number of factors—demand, yield, fuel, currency fluctuation and quality of service. Our quality of service needed some attention. We were on a cost-cutting mode. The point is, you can’t save to profitability, no one becomes a billionaire by saving. Our quality of food was sub-par and wastage was running at about 30%. In the last 12 months, our food sales have gone up 300% and our waste has gone down to 10%. And for the same price, we are selling better quality food. We have become smarter about what we sell and how we handle it,” he says.

Despite this great start, aided by a favourable turn in the economy and consumer spending, there is a lot that Aggarwal has to do. Aviation in India is a very competitive game—at last count about nine low-cost airlines were fighting for 150,000 flyers per day. Aggarwal has enough experience in aviation to make SpiceJet work. The bigger challenge for him is convincing his children to live in India.

IN PARENTHESIS Aggarwal likes to play golf but because he is so busy he ends up postponing games to spend time with his family. “When I am not working, my favourite pastime is to be with my family. Sometimes, I feel I am missing out on my children growing up. I will not go golfing on the weekend because that’s time away from the family,” he says.

In the last 13 months, since his move to India, he has taken his golf clubs out only once, and that too for a tournament the company sponsored. “Unfortunately, I am not the kind of golfer who goes in the morning and plays the 18 holes in 4 hours. I spend 4 hours just searching for the ball,” Aggarwal says.

Turbulent skies: Aggarwal has a tough challenge, with nine low­cost airlines competing for 150,000 flyers a day.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

L7

Play

MARC J SEIFER PHOTO ARCHIVES

TECHNOLOGY

Tesla stages a comeback Long­dead inventor Nikola Tesla is electrifying techies. Edison is ‘so 20th century’

B Y D ANIEL M ICHAELS ···························· ecades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 (around Rs46 lakh) electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. launched a new line of advanced processors in 2007, they called them Tesla. And when video game writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric dam—at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theatres with presentations in which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.

And his rivalry with Edison—called the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet on direct current—was legendary. Tesla won the contest when his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends.

Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America’s greatest inventors.

But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream.

An early hint was Tesla Girls, a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film The Prestige, alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way”.

Tesla, in short, is cool.

“He was a kind of crazy, interesting dude,” says Melody Pfeiffer,

D

spokeswoman for the Dark Void game’s distributor, Capcom Entertainment.

Edison, meanwhile, is less au courant than he used to be, says Paul Israel, director of the Thomas Edison Papers, a scholarly project at Rutgers University, in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Many significant Edison inventions—including the phonograph and the motion picture camera—are becoming historical curios. The European Union (EU) has banned old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, another Edison innovation. The EU is urging consumers to replace them with more efficient fluorescent lights descended from those Tesla favoured.

“Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford,” says Bernie Carlson, a professor of science, technology and society at the University of Virginia.

Once Edison was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park, after the New Jersey town—since renamed Edison—where he built a laboratory and movie studio.

But Edison biographies have started focusing on his role in establishing monopolies in the electricity and movie industries.

Recent portrayals of Edison have highlighted his darker side.

In the 1998 HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon, Tom Hanks plays an assistant to a film director who was financially ruined when Edison secretly copied and then released his 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon, without paying its creator.

The Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because the highly educated young engineer sailed to America in 1884 to work for Edison. But after less than a year in Edison’s labs, Tesla quit in a spat over pay.

Tesla-boosters note that in Edison’s effort to discredit alternating current a decade later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a murderous circus elephant and profited from a popular film of the killing. To sully Tesla’s ideas, Edison’s men also helped orchestrate the first execution by electric chair.

“I can’t imagine writing a song about Edison…too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!” said Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla “a romantic failure figure”.

In 1895—after selling his AC patents to industrialist George Westinghouse for a mint and harnessing Niagara Falls—Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain, J.P. Morgan and French actor Sarah Bernhardt. But troubles

Currently hip: The Tesla roadster.

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG

High voltage: Tesla photographed in Colorado. This photo was taken by Dickenson Alley, one of the earliest special effects photographers. soon began.

Tesla’s laboratory in New York was destroyed in a fire, along with years of work and notes. The secretive experimenter then burned through much of his fortune testing radio transmissions in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1898, he demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled boats—decades before guided torpedoes—but was rebuffed by the US military. When Marconi changed the world with a transAtlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn’t mentioned.

Undaunted, the scientist continued to be far ahead of his time.

His papers suggest he stumbled upon—but didn’t pursue—lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.

“There’s a sort of science fiction aspect to Tesla,” says Prof.

Israel at Rutgers.

For marketeers at chip makers Nvidia, who were targeting the techno-cognoscenti with a new product line, that aura is priceless. “A mythology has built up around Tesla that catches people’s imagination,” says Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla Products at Nvidia.

Tesla’s more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him.

“Tesla’s work is incomplete, so people can read into it what they want to,” says Prof. Carlson at the University of Virginia.

Christopher Priest did just that in writing The Prestige, his novel and then movie about rival magicians in Victorian London. In it, one of the magicians visits Tesla in Colorado and pays him to create a machine unlike anything the real Tesla ever mentioned. “I wanted an ambiguous, mysterious

genius,” says Priest. “Tesla was the man for the job.”

Creators of the Dark Void video game needed a mentor for their hero, Will, who falls from our world into a parallel realm ruled by sinister aliens bent on annihilating humans. “We quickly decided that tapping into the conspiracies and geek mystique built up around Nikola Tesla would be awesome,” says senior producer Morgan Gray. “What is cooler than having Tesla reverse-engineer alien technology to build

weapons of super science?”

At Tesla Motors, the branding isn’t simply an effort to ride the name’s nerdy snob appeal, says spokeswoman Rachel Konrad. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla’s original 1882 design, which he said came to him in a vision.

Still, for all Tesla’s cachet, Edison’s legacy remains inescapable. Konrad says customers note with irony that Tesla Motors’ main showroom is in Menlo

Park, California.

To help boost the Tesla name, the automotive start-up launched a promotional sweepstakes with Capcom around the release of Dark Void. The prize: a Tesla Roadster.

For Nikola Tesla himself, Konrad says, the prize is overdue recognition. “You know you’ve gone into mainstream pop glory when you’re in a video game aimed at 18-year-old boys,” she says.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

L8

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

www.livemint.com

Insider HOMES

Making it personal

United colours: 1. The Aitkenheads use the barn­red shade in their living room with a Chinese lacquered chest and a quilt fragment.

Adding artful but budget­minded accessories gives a basic decorating scheme warmth and personality

B Y S HARON O VERTON Better Homes and Gardens

···························· s a physician, Iffie Okoronkwo Aitkenhead knows that medicine often is “more of an art than science”. The same is true for decorating. Even when the bones are strong and the basic furnishings are in place, a home without charm feels flat. That was the problem Iffie and her husband Ben faced in their Connecticut, U S, h om e. Th e r o om s w ere freshly painted and outfitted with discount designer fabrics, lively artwork and furnishings that could stand up to their three young daughters. But something was missing. “Even with all those things,” Iffie says, “the house lacked a warm connection.”

To find a cure, Iffie enlisted the help of a friend, designer Bartley Johnstone, who quickly determined that what the house needed was that “last layer” of colour, texture and comfort.

The first task was to marry the couple’s eclectic style, which includes English country furnishings (Ben is British), African-American art (Iffie is Nigerian) and Asian accents. To join these elements, Johnstone came up with a tight colour scheme of moss green and mustard yellow with hints of blue and red. Next, she softened the home’s surfaces with colourful quilts, striped seagrass rugs and striking throw pillows. Antique transferware plates, vintage vases and old hardcover books added a sense of age.

The house now has a more warm and welcoming feel, says Iffie. “I think sometimes people confuse filling the surfaces with being cluttered.” But without those details, she says, “a home doesn’t look lived in and loved.”

A

Write to lounge@livemint.com

2. The girls nicknamed their dormitory­style bedroom the ‘Madeline room’ after the storybook character.

3. ‘When you have toile and stripes and antique chairs, things can get serious pretty quickly,’ says Johnstone, who suggested lightening the mood in the dining area with a child­friendly collage

by Georgia artist Cedric Smith. The striped rug integrates the bold artwork and bright linens into the home’s muted palette.

4. Beaded panelling, a cushy window seat and tumbled marble floor tiles make the girls’ bathroom their favourite retreat, and white­painted cabinet drawers and doors are a contrast to creamy walls.

5. The Aitkenheads preserved the barn­red exterior. ‘Red gives you a wonderful sense of peace,’ says Iffie.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL PARTENIO; STYLED BY STACY KUNSTEL/BETTER HOMES

AND

GARDENS

All content on this page powered by

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

L9

Cover

THEY DOCUMENT RECIPES AND THE GRAMMAR OF INDIAN CUISINES THAT COULD SOON BE EXTINCT. MEET INDIA’S PASSIONATE FOOD HISTORIANS

FOOD

Kitchen archaeology

BITES OF LORE Books by Pushpesh Pant and Salma Husain offer insights into the origins of several staples: Indians were the first to taste sugar and share it with the world.

Greek traveller Megasthenes, who visited India in the third century BC, reported seeing Indians drink honey out of giant bamboo canes (the Sanskrit synonym for sugar cane is ‘madhutrina’, or honey­bearing grass).

A dish with a thousand­year­old ancestry was called Purnima—night of the full moon, because of its visual evocation. It is commonly known as the idli today.

Mughal innovation: The biryani was invented as a variation to the yakhni pulao.

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE & P ARIZAAD K HAN ···························· here’s a certain scholastic leaning to it and a great degree of shoeleather reporting. But most importantly, it is about a heightened love for food.

Food historians are a curious lot—neither chefs nor armchair scholars. They often come from disparate backgrounds driven by an all-consuming passion for gastronomy. And much like linguists who travel far and wide in search of the last living speaker of an endangered language, they document the grammar and syntax of complicated cuisines that face extinction.

Take restaurateur and food researcher Jacob Aruni, for instance (see box). His repeated cajoling of a septuagenarian woman, Sigappi, in a small coastal town of Tamil Nadu, led

T

her to share rare recipes with him—such as rice cooked with betel leaves. A few months later, she died, taking with her several other recipes that may well be lost forever.

Pushpesh Pant, a professor of diplomacy at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, believes that food, like monuments, performing arts, language and costume, is an integral part of any civilization, which is why it should be conserved for future generations.

Pant is a food scholar himself. His book, Hindu Soul Recipes (Roli Books-Lustre Press, 2007), takes up the humble khichdi, among other dishes.

The Ayurvedic kshirika, he writes, has mutated in several different directions. In the Mughal emperor Akbar’s time, in the 16th century, it was slow-cooked with aromatic spices and lamb, and befittingly

came to be called laziza, which means tasty. In Bengal, it transformed into a spicy delicacy known as khichudi—strictly vegetarian—cooked during religious feasts. And centuries later, in its avatar as the AngloIndian kedgeree in the mid-18th century, it reintegrated its meat element as a breakfast dish that couldn’t do without fish.

This history is interesting, both from an intellectual and cultural point of view, to understand how our cuisines reflect changes. India had a rich heritage of food prepared in accordance with Ayurvedic principles.

And with the coming of the Mughals in the 15th century, it was infused with culinary influences that are now an inextricable part of our food culture.

Subsequently, the Dutch, French, Portuguese and British, who came as traders and colo-

nizers, also left their legacies either in the form of ingredients or recipes.

THE ETYMOLOGY When we meet food historian Salma Husain in her row house in Gurgaon, she is attending to a kofta and turnip shab tek (translating literally from Urdu to “night vessel”) that has been cooking on embers all night. She regales us with lore: The mutton koftas in the shab tek are meant to be sized the same as the turnips, so that one can’t differentiate between the two. As we polish off the shab tek with sheermal, or sweetened naan, we realize that both the koftas and the turnips taste so heavenly that it hardly matters what we pick.

The trick, says Husain, lies in cooking for long hours on a low flame. “The Mughals knew that TURN TO PAGE L10®

While aromatic rice today is synonymous with the basmati, ancient texts exalt the Mahashali, a larger grain that is rare today.

A disciple of Xuan Zang, the seventh century Chinese monk who travelled extensively across India, wrote: “Mahashali is as large as the black bean and when cooked, its aroma and sheen are unmatched. It grows only in Magadha and is considered fit enough only for princes or high priests.” Pant says the Mahashali was valued for its therapeutic properties over the aesthetics of long­grained basmati, as nutrition is given top priority in Ayurveda.

Saffron and dry fruits entered the Indian kitchen in 1541 with the dowry of Humayun’s Iranian wife, Hamida Banu Begum (mother of Akbar). Husain says we owe the concept of aromatic spices to the Mughals, who brought them from West and Central Asia.

The biryani was invented circa 18th century as a variation to the ‘yakhni pulao’ (rice cooked in meat stock) by cooks in the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. It was imperative for the cooks to present a new dish to the emperor every day, and the biryani was born by layering rice and meat that was otherwise cooked together for the ‘pulao’.

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

® FROM PAGE L9

good food demands time. Something we’re hard-pressed for today,” she says.

A Persian-language scholar, Husain translates recipes from battered manuscripts to recreate dishes from the Mughal banquets. After two books that listed recipes of ancient sherbets and pulaos, her most recent book, The Emperor’s Table: The Art of Mughal Cuisine—which won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award (Paris, 2008)—spans the changing food culture of the Mughal dynasty, from Babar to Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Her venture into food scholarship was born out of happenstance. When she graduated with a master’s degree in Persian from Mumbai University in 1964, she didn’t want to become an academician like her other classmates.

She joined the National Archives of India as a researcher and it was during the process of translating old manuscripts of political correspondence that she stumbled upon rare Mughal recipes dating back to the 16th century. Despite her youthful reluctance about the tag of an academic, no other word can describe her better. As she garnishes a legendary Old Delhi dish, nahari—that has also been cooking for our express benefit all night—with finely chopped ginger, green chillies and strands of saffron, she offers deep chronological insights: Humayun’s Iranian wife introduced sophistication into the Mughal kitchen with saffron and dry fruits in the first half of the 16th century, and his

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

THE WANDERING CHEF S MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

APPETIZING WORDS Food historians navigate libraries and research archives across the country: The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, National Archives of India and the library of Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi, Fort William archives in Kolkata and the personal library of the Maharaja of Benares are some of their recommended picks. But publishers such as Roli Books­Lustre Press, HarperCollins and Random House have condensed this research into won­ derfully produced books that you can enjoy without the legwork. Some forthcoming titles include:

Old gold: Ghose found recipe books at Calcutta Club and Fort William. son Akbar’s Rajput wife brought in an emphasis on vegetarian fare in the latter half of the century.

After Akbar, Jehangir’s era (1569-1627) witnessed European influences. “The reins of the empire lay with his wife Noor Jehan and knowing this, the visiting French and Dutch traders came with gifts that would please the empress,” says Husain. Apparently, the aesthete Noor Jehan had curd set in seven moulds with rainbow-coloured fruit juices and garnished her dishes with floral patterns made with powdered and glazed rice paste.

“India had black pepper, cinnamon, cumin and cardamom in abundance but we owe most of our other spices to the ingenuity of the empresses and shahi khansamas (royal chefs) of the Mughal period,” says Husain.

Her research shows that the Western concept of pre-plated dishes, too, already had currency in the Mughal era. Husain shares a particularly tantalizing one: Three orange shells boiled to eliminate bitterness, and one filled with saffron-infused rice, one with almond halwa, and the third with pistachio halwa.

Translating old recipes is the relatively easy part, despite the reluctance of shy village women and descendants of classical chefs. More challenging is navigating the terrain of apocryphal anecdotes. Was the melt-in-yourmouth kakori kebab indeed created for the toothless nawab of Kakori? And what about the many legends that explain the genesis of the nahari she is serving us? The popular story goes thus: In the 17th century, soon after Mughal emperor Shah Jahan established his capital, a flu swept through the city. The royal physician

Food impresario: Prasad’s book of historical recipes records around 40 types of biryani.

Jacob Aruni explores kitchens in small coastal villages of Tamil Nadu to document little­known recipes

devised a spicy meat stew to keep the body warm. But Husain insists that the inclusion of red chillies—which the Portuguese had already brought to India—was to ward off evil spirits. She concedes that the stories are manifold: “They’ll change with every kucha (alley) that you’ll travel to in Old D el h i, b u t th e c o ns t i tu e nts remain the same: bad water, flu, remedial hot spice.”

FIELD WORK Husain is a food consultant to ITC’s Dum Pukht restaurant, which specializes in Hyderabadi and Awadhi cuisine. As part of the vision of Habib Rehman, the gourmet who recently retired as chairman of ITC Hotels, the hotel group harnesses the research skills of several other culinary scholars to buttress its menu and conduct specialized food festivals. When the group was setting up its Kolkata wing, ITC Sonar Bangla (now ITC Sonar) in 2002, it asked Chitra Ghose, a Kolkata-born ad professional-turned-caterer, to research the cuisine of the Metiabruz area of the city. In her 50s then, Ghose, who had lived in Kolkata for a large part of her life, had never heard of Metiabruz cuisine. And this was precisely what prompted her to take up the project.

In 1856, Wajid Ali Shah, the 10th and last nawab of Awadh, was exiled by the British to Metiaburz, then on the southern fringe of Kolkata. Separated from his beloved homeland, the nawab tried to replicate his palace in an area of Metiaburz which came to be known as Second Lucknow.

Almost 150 years later, Ghose travelled from New Delhi to Kolkata to discover the culinary secrets of Shah’s Second Lucknow. With the few leads she had, she found

Baniyas of Old Delhi

by Gunjan Goela, Roli Books­Lustre Press, price and pages not determined yet ‘Baniyas’ may have been widely perceived as savvy businessmen, pinching pennies even as they sought to accumulate great wealth, but some of the best food was to be found on their tables. There was no scrimping on the best seasonal vege­ tables and fruits, ‘ghee’, butter and milk. High­quality ingredients were used to make simple but flavourful food. Lavish menus were crafted for weddings and festivals, and the measure of a family’s wealth was gauged by the presence of dishes such as ‘matar makhana’ and ‘pista­ badam lauz’. The book brings back to life the traditional cuisine and life­ style of a community that contrib­ uted hugely to making Delhi the megapolis it is today.

Rocky’s Table

by Rocky Mohan, HarperCollins, 150 pages, Rs1,499 Mohan, executive director of Mohan Meakins Breweries, loves cooking and entertaining. The book presents six Indian menus covering cuisines such as Pan­Indian, Kashmiri, Bengali, Rajasthani, Malayali and north Indian barbecue, and wines to match each.

Sood Family Cookbook

by Aparna Jain, HarperCollins, 150 pages, Rs699 A scrapbook­style cookbook by a member of the Sood family, a large clan spread over the world. This comic­style cookbook covers a variety of dishes, from Vodka Penne to Pahadi Mutton curry.

Biryani by Pratibha Karan, Random House, 200 pages, Rs795 A collection of 100 definitive biryani recipes, tracing its journey from the delicately flavoured version of the Mughal courts to its prawn and curry leaves variety in Kerala.

The Kutchhi Menon Cookbook

by Husna Rahaman, HarperCollins, 150 pages, Rs499 A hilarious story by a young member of the community about to be married. She explores her grandmother’s recipes and talks of occasions when the boy’s family comes to visit—the engagement, reception—and all the gourmet cuisine revolving around the events.

people who had grown up with the cuisine and convinced them to part with their recipes. “At first they didn’t want to talk about it, but I explained to them that we wanted to show their recipes to the rest of India,” says Ghose. The food of Metiabruz is like no other Mughlai cuisine, Ghose claims. Many local influences were blended with the Lucknavi food brought by Wajid Ali Shah, which resulted in the creation of a whole new cuisine. This food is much more subtle. Mutton

rezala, the most popular dish, consists of a creamy gravy made with almond paste.

Ghose also specializes in a cuisine that she has grown up eating—Bengali Anglo-Indian food.

“Growing up in Kolkata I’ve eaten it at my convent school teachers’ houses and at the railway hotels, which used to serve very good Anglo-Indian food,” she says. She left her first career—advertising—and took up catering on the urging of her daughter. When she

Ladling history: Husain garnishes bowls of nahari, a Mughal­era dish created to ward off flu. started her catering service, she looked for old recipe books at the Calcutta Club, in the Fort William archives and the railway archives.

She also visited ageing Anglo-Indians and Europeans who had lived in India for over 70 years. She discovered gems such as the East India Mutton Curry, Company Bahadur Ka Steak and Lamb Roast Masala. Painstakingly converting the old measures of seer and chatak to modern weights, Ghose recreated the recipes. “It didn’t really work out in the beginning,” she admits, but they began to catch on and are now popular with her clients. Ghose is also working on a cookbook, using her grandmother’s and aunts’ recipes as well as her own notes, that she hopes to publish soon.

But this process of knowledge transfer is not always an easy one.

Husain recalls travelling to the decrepit home of the erstwhile royal family of Murshidabad in West Bengal. “The women there were in purdah and refused to step out. The possibility of having them conduct a food festival at Dum Pukht was ruled out.” However, Husain’s persistence paid off and the women of the household did part with several of their unique recipes. Her visit to the Kolkata home of the sixth generation of Tipu Sultan’s descendants was a similar experience. While this might seem like an exploitation of intellectual resource, it is somewhat mitigated by a monetary exchange, which can often be a boon for families battling a severe financial crisis.

Husain has had better luck elsewhere though. A recent trip to visit the Babi Nawabs of Gujarat will soon result in a food festival.

“Sharbanoo Begum is very forthcoming and travels with her own cooks to conduct festivals in hotels such as ITC, Chola Sheraton and the Park Hotel,” says Husain. Of the three brothers of the nawab family, says Husain, one migrated to Pakistan, and one to the US. Sharbanoo Begum’s strain is the only one that remains. “It’s important to get the recipes (from them) while they’re still around. Who knows? There might not be anyone left to share this knowledge,” says Husain, summing up her raison d’etre—and that of her ilk. anindita.g@livemint.com

trange things can come of raiding your students’ lunch boxes. You could receive uncomfortable stares and snide remarks. Or you could get intrigued enough by the food to abandon your teaching career and plunge into the investigation of local, often endangered, recipes. Jacob Aruni, once the principal of a catering college in the town of Kangeyam, near Erode in Tamil Nadu, went the way of intrigue.

“That was the inspiration.

That was how I began my travels, six years ago,” says Aruni, 34, one of the most exciting restaurant consultants in south India.

Aruni has crafted restaurants in Chennai—the newest, a seafood emporium named Kattumaram—as well as in Bangalore and Pune. Each emerged out of various legs of what Aruni calls “my researches”: extended rambles around Tamil Nadu, invading the kitchens of homes and small restaurants with his curiosity, eating and asking questions and eating some more.

This departure from the beaten path was not the first for Aruni. After three years of studying undergraduate physics, he decided he’d had enough and enrolled in a catering college. After a year as a professional chef, he decided he’d had enough of that too and began teaching. If there is a still less beaten path leading away from his present role as a wandering food researcher, Aruni will probably find it and take it.

“The first area I researched was Kongunad, around Kangeyam (Tirupur district),” Aruni says. “Then I went back to my own region of Nanjil Nadu, the belt from Madurai to Kanyakumari. That was tougher: I didn’t have students to guide me there.” His next three projects involved digging up recipes from the ancient Tamil Sangam era, a couple of millennia old; developing food that uses flowers as its primary ingredients; and mastering the balance and flavours of Ayurvedic cooking.

“The hardest part of all this is simply getting people to demonstrate a dish—it needs so much persuasion,” Aruni says.

“The cooks are mostly ladies, who rarely leave their kitchens, and here’s an alien like me coming and asking them questions about their food. I often need to convince them that I don’t intend to exploit the rec-

ipe commercially.”

Once in a while, Aruni has even had to settle things with a cook-off. “The best cook in one village was supposed to be a woman in her 70s, named Sigappi, and I was very eager to meet her,” he remembers. “The first time I went, she was ill. So after four or five weeks, I went back. She was better but she was not ready to talk at all.”

So Aruni cut a deal with her: He would cook her a dish, and if she failed to identify what had gone into it, she would share some recipes with him. “I made a halwa with cottonseeds—stuff that is usually fed to cows,” Aruni says. “She couldn’t guess, and I told her what it was. Then she remembered that she’d had similar halwa when she was a girl, when her great-grandmother had made it.” Thrilled, Sigappi unloaded a wealth of recipes on Aruni, including, he says, “ragi (millet) coffee, and rice cooked with betel leaves”.

Shortly after that, when Aruni revisited the village, he learnt that she had died.

In a way, that experience encapsulates the value of Aruni’s venture, yanking recipes and their history into the documented realm before they disappear forever. “In India, every 30km the food changes,” he says. “But people only tend to know Punjabi or Chettinad food, even though there are so many other wonderful cuisines.”

In Kattumaram, Aruni cooks for Mint a Chennai favourite with a seafood subtext: Fish koththu parotta. It’s a small kitchen, but Aruni moves with economy and speed. The shredded paratha that emerges is a picture of fried, goldenbrown goodness.

Aruni, despite his study of Ayurvedic food, refuses to have his food be a bearer of messages or warnings.

“I don’t believe in having food be medicinal or anything like that,” he says. “Food is food. It should be enjoyed and indulged as such.”

Samanth Subramanian samanth.s@livemint.com Travel notes: Aruni’s fish koththu parotta is a dish he learnt on one of his many culinary sojourns.

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

THE CULINARY CARTOGRAPHER Harsh Krishna Prasad studies different branches of Mughal cuisine to construct a comparative tableau

T

here are not just many layers to an onion, but also many different ways to cut it, as Harsh Krishna Prasad gathered from a 108-year-old master chopper of onions in Rampur in Uttar Pradesh.

During his almost 20-year stint as a senior manager at a distillery in Rampur, Prasad fed his epicurean curiosity by inviting retired royal chefs of erstwhile Rampuri nawabs over for dinner every evening. The khansamas were not very cooperative at first. Understandably, they were protective about their art. But Prasad’s persistence paid off. And among delicacies such as the doodhiya biryani and adrak ka halwa, he learnt that the way an onion is cut leads to dramatic changes in the pungency it imparts to a dish.

Every dish of Rampuri Mughal cuisine calls for a specific cut.

And there is a science to it.

Few gourmets would speak in such exalted terms of Rampuri cuisine—a place relatively obscure in India’s modern geographical layout. And this is precisely why Prasad has taken up its cause, along with that of other little-known branches of Mughal food.

Tribal cuisine, with its sparse use of spices and dependence on local ingredients, is another interest of his.

With its distinctive aroma, Rampuri cuisine is an amalgamation of the best of Mughal food from Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad. The nawabs of Rampur sided with the British during India’s First War of Independ-

ence in 1857, and hence retained their cultural importance. And so, after the decline of other seats of power, many subjects migrated to Rampur—bringing with them new flavours and techniques.

Like a student of music, Prasad alludes to gharanas.

Rampuri food with its unique aroma is a gharana. Hot spices characterize Old Delhi; sourness, Hyderabad; sweetness, Awadh. Muslim food from Murshidabad uses predominantly four spices—cinnamon, cardamom, javitri (mace) and jaiphal (nutmeg)—while the food from Jaunpur, which neighbours Rampur, uses exotic ingredients such as sandalwood and khus roots. Prasad was surprised by how identical recipes can yield different results across the country.

“European food works with strict measures. In India, it’s about a sleight of hand,” says Prasad, explaining how his challenge as a food researcher lies in studying proportions.

His dilettante curiosity in mapping these different flavours went the professional way over a business lunch in 1999 at Le Meridien hotel’s Pakwan restaurant in Delhi. Prasad was telling his colleague that the fact that the do pyaaza (literally translating to “something with two onions”) gets its name from a double quantity of onions is a misnomer. It owed its name to the fact that two kinds of onion—regular and caramelized—go into it, Prasad insisted.

A chef overheard the discussion

and intervened, and told Prasad he was wrong. The debate took such a heated turn that the chef offered to go and fetch a book to buttress his point. His boss, chef Davinder Kumar, vice-president of food and beverages at the hotel, was curious to meet the man who had set his sous chef running. And so impressed by Prasad’s knowledge of Mughal food was he that he persuaded him to host a Rampuri food festival at the hotel.

This was in 2000. After this Prasad quit his job at the distillery and moved to Delhi for his new life as a food impresario. He has since then conducted festivals in several other hotels, such as Crowne Plaza in Delhi and Mascot hotel in Chennai.

When we reach Prasad’s residence in suburban Delhi, he is layering rice with a chicken qorma that has been cooking for over 5 hours. The meat has been marinated in curd because “the Mughals never used tomatoes”.

His notebook of recipes has around 40 types of biryanis, 100 types of qormas and several varieties of kebabs and shorbas.

And their organization evokes a stunning scholasticism. Next in line after this biryani that he is making for us is a dish whose very name evokes poetry: Pulao Marmareed, a rice dish made with garlic cloves that are rendered shiny and almost sweet in the process of cooking, giving the dish its name—a pulao with pearls.

None of Prasad’s three children—a lawyer, an engineer and a media producer—are particularly interested in that bulging notebook. Perhaps he’ll publish, he says, but what he knows for sure is that he’ll cook.

Anindita Ghose anindita.g@livemint.com

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

Travel PRERNA SINGH BINDRA

THE SUNDARBANS

Danger in the delta

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Tiger tales: (clockwise from above) The boat that will release Tigress 001 into safe waters; Tigress 001, known from her microchip code; tigers strike terror in the lives of locals.

Man, tiger and cattle battle for survival where the land, river and sea meet

BY PRERNA SINGH BINDRA ··························· his is not a pretty travelogue, though there is no place more exotic and wilder than the Sundarbans.

Because nowhere else is the mananimal conflict—one of the biggest issues confronting wildlife conservation—as acute or as complex as in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, where people and “maneating” tigers are engaged in a prolonged, bitter battle for survival.

Occupying 2,585 sq. km of the 4,000 sq. km of the Ganga delta that lies within India—another 6,000 sq. km of the delta is in neighbouring Bangladesh—the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve is hunting-gathering ground for locals, who venture into the forest for wood, fish and honey, their sole means of livelihood. And tigers, similarly, sneak into human habitation, driven by hunger. Like the tigress that set up camp in Satjelia island for a week in July. Her mere presence struck terror as she roamed the fields and preyed on cattle.

Finally, she took the bait and was trapped by the forest department, to be released later.

Freedom?

By all rights, it should have been euphoric, that precise moment when the tigress escaped from captivity to liberty, from cage to forest. I had witnessed her outrage while incarcerated, as she paced her tiny cage. Yet, even as the heart rejoiced, it was impossible to ignore her bleak prospects in the aquatic forest of the Sundarbans, deprived of prey, vulnerable to poachers.

Tigress 001—that’s her microchip code—had been there, done that and returned for a rerun: This was the second time that she was being captured and then released.

The first instance had happened in July. Barely two months later, she returned, killing a cow and a pig over a week before walking into a trap in Rajatjubli village on Satjelia island. To ensure she didn’t stage a second comeback, she was to be released near Kalash in Dhulibhasani, at the mouth of the Ganga, about 40 nautical miles (74.08km) from where she had been trapped.

T

On the official boat that would release her, Tigress 001 looks scrawny, haunted, terrorized, a far cry from the much-maligned man-eater of the Sundarbans.

Yes, tigers do occasionally prey on man, forced by circumstances such as shifting tides, diminished habitats and unavailability of food. But the fact is, if the Sundarbans’ Royal Bengal Tiger were a habitual man-eater, more than 1,000 people would be killed every year.

“The problem of the Sundarbans is complex,” explains Biosphere Reserve director N.C. Bahuguna, who rides on the boat with us. “No less than four million people live in and around the reserve, more than two-thirds of them below the poverty line. With no employment opportunity, most depend on fishing and honey-collecting for sustenance.” So they venture into the forbidden core area, where the catch is better. Patrolling and monitoring are practically non-existent; most locals admit in confidence that they do not fear the forest department, only the tiger.

Van shramik Ranjit Mondol has just finished cleaning the cage, replenished the fresh water, and generally tried to make a clearly angry—and unhappy—tigress comfortable. Mondol is a daily wager, not a permanent employee of the department, despite having been with them for nearly two decades. Still, he is the department’s go-to man in times of crises such as these. He is an “expert” at capturing tigers (and crocodiles too). It isn’t easy, manoeuvring the predator amid a frenzied crowd.

And it’s risky: In another recent incident involving a captured tiger, when the door slammed shut on the cage, Mondol found himself on the wrong side—with the tiger. It was only his presence of mind that saved him. “I held the tiger tight in a hug,” he says. The beast, still suffering the after-effects of a tranquillizer, simply had no room to attack.

Mondol is a member of the Green Army, a euphemism for the foot soldiers of the Sundarbans, who put their lives on the line for the sake of the tiger for less than Rs100 a day. The irony—and the tragedy, of course—is that Mondol and others like him risk their lives

PRERNA SINGH BINDRA

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

for what is essentially a meaningless effort. Catching and releasing tigers is not a solution in a region besieged by conflict: It’s like applying Band-Aid on a gaping wound.

Experts say the Sundarbans have seen an unprecedented increase in tiger-straying incidents—about 15 in the last year itself—mainly because of the shrinking prey base. The paucity of food drives the tiger to human habitation, and the deepening tussle over territory only serves to heighten the animosity towards the big cat. With just 94 guards to man 4,000 sq. km of jungles and

sea, and hopelessly short of boats and boatmen—even the vessel that ferries Tigress 001 and the director has been hired—the forest department knows it is fighting a losing battle.

Natural disasters such as cyclone Aila, which ravaged the Sundarbans in May, don’t help.

One evening at Satjelia, which doubled up as refugee camp and hospital in the aftermath of the storm, villagers come out with their own tiger tales. The day the cyclone struck, one—no, two tigers—sought refuge in Anpur village. “Ekta bagh dompoti—a

tiger and a tigress under the bed!” narrates Bhupati Mondol with a twinkle in his eye (a forest officer later says there was only one tiger). I marvel at his resilience: Bhupati lost his wife to a crocodile, his brother to a tiger, his home and crops to Aila, yet he has retained a sense of humour and a will to live.

Perhaps some variation of the same doggedness manifests itself in the region’s animals. We see Tigress 001 being released, but all of us are aware that hunger pangs could drive her back to human habitation again—as they did a tiger, three times over, before he was permanently placed behind bars in Kolkata’s Alipur Zoo just over a year ago.

Later on the trip, we go on an aquatic safari through the delta of the Ganga, the largest in the world. As we watch, a rare Gangetic dolphin breaks the waters, and a monitor lizard, a dragon in slumber, perches on a tree. A black-capped kingfisher flashes past, while a pied kingfisher hovers over our boat and then dives into the waters for a meal.

On the banks, we spot pug marks. Deep, fresh. Close to human territory. “After Aila,” says the forest guard, “things have only become worse.” With their means

of sustenance lost to the tide, the local people’s dependence on the forest will increase, leading to yet more conflict as people venture into tiger areas.

It’s a desperate situation and there are no easy answers. But hope swells as our boat glides over the waters, by the villages, through the forests. Months after Aila, the pattern of devastation is visible even to the untrained eye.

Aila was selective in its destruction: Some villages have been ravaged, a few almost erased, but the forest lay untouched, protected by mangroves. When the 2004 tsunami hit, mangroves broke the impact, acting as a shield. For the first time in two heart-wrenching days, I feel a ray of hope. If we protect the mangroves, they will shield us from gathering storms—they are the key to survival in the Sundarbans, and other coastal areas.

Now, if only we would learn.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

The Sundarbans are not an amusement park with tigers on call.

Temper your child’s expectations about the big cat, while opening his eyes to other wildlife.

TRAVEL L13

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MASTERFILE

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

An ode, on a lark In California, Vikram Seth’s ‘The Golden Gate’ provides the inspiration for a brand new beginning 1.1 It is the evening of the first day Of a new year, a new decade: The water sparkling, green as jade The waves lash at rocks and spray Tiny drops my eyes can’t see.

My boys run down, leaving me.

Alone, staring at the ocean Where land ends, and the nation, And the continent, reaching limit, Recedes, aware of the loss of time, Of space, an era, the youth’s prime, Ten years gone, in a minute.

The light will fade, the sun will set, The Vietnamese kids are laying bets.

1.2 They think that we have brought our food Being Indians, on a picnic, But we’ve left old habits in some attic, We’ll have wine, the company’s good, As we walk to a quaint sushi bar Determined to leave the car Even when we are in California: Teenagers, kids, men, mama mia.

But that is later; it is certain We are getting ahead of the tale Of those weeks with friends in the vale, In the shadow of the mountains Of Ansel Adams, the High Sierra: His lens makes icicles into a tiara.

1.3 The beach is now shrouded in mist: It is hidden so well, says the woman Who carries a thick printout of a list

Of sights to see, as she touches her bun So that her boyfriend with the wide-angle lens Can picture her, in front of the fence.

She smiles but has to squint her eyes The sun still warm, the moon to rise.

We live in a digital age, so she can see What she looks like in the photos he took.

She is angry, you can tell from her look She needs good shots. She turns to me Asks if I’d do a better job Of snapping her smile. Yes, but with Bob.

1.4 I say I want both in the shot Together, with smiles, because their friends Will expect them happy, whether or not They will be together as their journey ends.

We part, they walk their hands clasped tight I hope there’s a gap before they fight Again, as she will complain and scowl Because she does not like the wind’s howl.

I enjoy their absence, walk on the rocks, Listening to the birds’ conversation About people, and their observation Of our folly, its humour, pain, and knocks.

“Where are you?” I hear my friends ask, Finding me has become their task.

1.5 I wave, they laugh, their voices rise The valley resounds with their laughter They ask if I’d like some rice At the sushi bar: I want to go after I’ve seen the sun disintegrate Like scattered seeds of pomegranate, Trembling like millions of fireflies, Meanwhile, the waves fall and rise.

The pointillist image before my eye

It’ll lift: A fog­ shrouded view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge.

Like a landscape on a canvas Of Seurat, with dots shaping a mass Of water, rocks, the sea, and the sky.

The wind turns icy, the light fades.

The unseen dominates, as in Hades.

1.6 The trees sway gently, their leaves rustle.

The squall thunders, the sea roars I find today’s San Francisco Chronicle Whose edit page is written by bores.

The state is torn and divided—can two men Marry each other? Or two women?

If that comes to pass, is it not the end, Of civilization, and who can mend?

Kim Tarvesh would sign the petition That respects choice if they want to marry But Bible thumpers want the proposition That would force Sally to kiss only Harry And not Jack with Ennis or Thelma with Louise They insist they’re right. But in love, who is?

1.7 Ah, love: its mysteries unknown To mere mortals who suffer and pine, Driving through valleys, often alone, Looking for warmth, kisses, and wine, Through windy roads and forests deep, By the Big Sur, with valleys steep, The city with a thousand lights

Promising glitter every night.

During the day, when the fog Decides to come out and play Its game of hide-and-seek by the Bay, Brave women step out to jog Wearing their tight, day-glo leotards, Pounding the road, quick as leopards.

1.8 I find the sushi bar by the smell of wasabi Where friends have sat and chosen to wait Before ordering: Empty glasses of sake and Asahi Remind me what I’ve missed, being late.

I opt for the safe starter: tempura Washed down with chilled Sakura Vishal is bold, wants a roll called Avatar: A trendy innovation in the sushi bar.

The food is fresh, you feel the nice And crisp batter around the shrimp: The waitress pops up, like an imp With hot sauce, certain we’d love the spice.

The salmon delicate, fine and pink And Jiten says he will not drink.

1.9 For he will drive through a curvy road Listening to NPR, Monterey to San Jose Shreeya has Chipmunks on her iPod, Fine, all things considered. Tomorrow: idli-dose.

Then, Alicia says, Vietnamese pho

Which isn’t as mild as Japanese miso But nor spicy like Mexican gazpacho The soup to have, if you are macho.

The symmetrical fields bristle with variety, Of fruit and garlic and oranges and wine, Such a joy it is with friends to dine, With clinking glasses, moments of gaiety.

Dawn—fog returns. The Golden Gate disappears.

Moments later it lifts; the icon reappears.

1.10 I think back to another time At Half-Moon Bay, another sunset: The pale sky gleams, yellow as lime, My friends have just seen Jab We Met. The beach looks serene in that twilight My sons decide to walk to the edge Of the water, near the rocky ledge The silhouette they form, a divine sight.

I find leaving that evening hard Others walk. I wait and stare.

Waves crumble, I despair, Over things unsaid, and memories’ shards.

The foam all white, the rocks are dark I pine for what’s not: the skylark.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

L14 TRAVEL

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CULINARY HOLIDAY

A 72­hour Tokyo eating tour Sea urchin, soba, and a melt­in­your­mouth omelette—a tale of 2 foodies vs a stopwatch MASTERFILE

B Y Y UKARI I WATANI K ANE ···························· year after moving from Tokyo to San Francisco, my husband and I craved good Japanese food so much that we ditched our families for Thanksgiving and flew to Japan for three nights of eating.

San Francisco isn’t exactly a culinary wasteland. It has great wine, an abundance of fresh produce and many good restaurants. But in Tokyo, restaurants create beautiful dishes that are assembled to play up the natural flavour of seasonal ingredients such as bamboo shoots in the spring and pike eel in the summer. After months of fruitlessly seeking a San Francisco restaurant that would give us a taste of that experience, we decided we had no choice but to travel.

Autumn—known as the season for strong appetites in Japan—was the ideal time to take the trip because of the abundance of seasonal foods such as mushrooms, scallops, persimmons and delicious bonito fish, fattened after a summer of feeding.

So my husband Patrick and I put together a 72-hour itinerary of multiple dinners, and a trip to a hot-springs inn an hour away from Tokyo. Our goal was to pack in as many of our favourite restaurants (strictly Japanese ones) as possible. Multiple sushi meals and tempura were musts.

And while it’s possible to eat well on a budget in Tokyo, the brevity of our trip led us to throw cost to the wind. Lunches cost roughly $10-20 (around Rs455-910), but we calculated dinners would cost $200 (about 18,200 yen) or more per person, including drinks.

A

Day 1 Sea urchin and Bordeaux Patrick and I left San Francisco on Thanksgiving morning, which got us into Tokyo on Friday afternoon, in time for dinner. The journey—15 hours door-to-door—was all worth it as soon as we took a bite of the deep-fried tofu skin layered with mountain potato chips at Taku, a tiny sushi restaurant discreetly located in our old neighbourhood in central west Tokyo. That was the start to an almost 30-course meal of bite-sized dishes, including uni, or sea urchin, from Japan’s northern-

SO MANY MENUS, SO LITTLE TIME u Uogashi Senryou 4­10­14 Tsukiji; +81­(0)3­5565­5739; Itadori.co.jp/shop/shop_07.html This hole in the wall in a maze of restaurants will (if you can find it) have menus in English. The speciality is the Kaisen Hitsumabushi: a mixture of rice and more than 12 kinds of fish and shellfish for 2,100 yen (around Rs1,050). u Kyubey 8­7­6 Ginza; +81­(0)3­3571­6523; Kyubey.jp/info_e.html Kyubey is one of the top sushi restaurants in Tokyo. The restaurant only takes reservations for the 11.30 seating for lunch (prices start at $92.36) or seatings between 5pm and 7pm for dinner (starting at $173.18).

To avoid a surprise bill at the end, order sets off the printed menu.

On a platter: Multiple sushi meals and tempura were musts on this trail.

most island of Hokkaido, and a white fish called halfbeak that was gently steam-grilled between bamboo leaves.

After a brief stop at wine bar Elevage, where I had a 1982 Bordeaux, we concluded the evening at Shomin, a traditional Japanese izakaya bar that serves little plates of food with drinks.

We stayed up long enough to have another drink and a snack of grilled rice ball, crunchy and toasted on the outside and moist on the inside and flavoured with soy sauce. By the time we got back to our hotel it was 1.30am.

Day 2 The joy of soba A mere 7 hours later, we were at the Tsukiji Fish Market, the world’s largest. Our favourite sushi bar in the market was packed, so we ended up at Uogashi Senryou in the outer market. Their speciality: a threein-one rice dish topped with

many kinds of raw seafood, including uni, salmon roe and small pieces of tuna. The first serving is eaten by itself with soy sauce and wasabi, the second serving is mixed with chopped braised vegetables, and the third is eaten in a light broth. The dish, known as hitsumabushi, is a take on the traditional version made with cooked eel.

After that heavy breakfast, our plan was to have a light soba lunch at another old standby, Hakone Akatsukian, near Roppongi, which is famous for its nightlife. But temptation got the

What to eat and where in Tokyo. Your cut­out­and­keep guide

u Elevage 4­2­13 Nishi­Azabu, 2 Fl; +81­(0)3­6419­3889 A big choice of rare wines by the glass as well as spirits. The tiny bar (two tables and a counter) is a bit tight but coveted by connoisseurs. u Nishi­Azabu Taku 2­11­5 Nishi­Azabu, 1st Fl; +81­(0)3­5774­4372; Eatpia.com/taku/index.html The chef’s selection (omakase) course starts at about $165. u Shomin 4­22­8 Nishi­Azabu; +81­(0)3­ 3400­1666 The speciality is oden, a winter dish of daikon radish and various processed fishcakes, flashballs and meatballs in a light dashi broth. Also

the yakitori (grilled chicken on skewers) and grilled rice balls. Open until early morning, the place gets crowded after 10pm. u Sushi Tempura Aki 2­1­9 Ningyocho B1 Fl: +81­(0)3­3662­5555; Ameblo.jp/sushi­tenpura­aki/ The restaurant is elegantly divided into sections for sushi and tempura.

The sushi is good, but we come here for the tempura, made by the former head chef of the famous tempura restaurant at the Yamanoue (also known as Hilltop) Hotel. Meals can cost from $165­220 a person. u Horai 750­6 Izusan, Atami, Shizuoka; +81­(0)557­80­5151; Izusan­horai.com Until recently a member of the

Relais and Château network, this hot­springs inn boasts of traditional­style architecture, two beautiful outdoor baths overlooking the Pacific and its classically Japanese kaiseki (formal course) cuisine. Rates start at about $374 per person, including dinner and breakfast (drinks are separate). u Hakone Akatsukian 5­15­25 Minami­Azabu 2nd Fl.; +81­(0)3­3441­9006; Hakone­yumotohotel.com/bakery/ an_index.html Lunches are the best deal. A $165 set includes a square of tofu, a tempura of shiitake mushrooms stuffed with minced prawns, and a serving of cold soba.

Yukari Iwatani Kane

better of us, and we ordered soba sets with a square of fresh tofu and a side of tempura vegetables. True aficionados swear by zaru soba, or cold noodles dipped in a broth, rather than the hot noodle soup better known in the US, to fully appreciate the chewiness and the earthy buckwheat flavour. The dark dipping broth is later diluted with the hot water that the soba was cooked in to make a simple soup.

The second day concluded with a lavish tempura dinner at Sushi Tempura Aki in eastern Tokyo, where our favourite chef served us lightly battered vegetables and seafood gently fried in 100% pure sesame oil and placed before us one by one. Real tempura is nothing like the greasy, batter-heavy version that is common outside Japan. Highlights included a fresh scallop that was fried so quickly that it was still raw on the inside to preserve its delicate flavour.

The challenge of planning a weekend trip to Japan is what to eat on Sundays, when most restaurants that are serious about food are closed because the fish market is shut. Our solution was to hop on the bullet train and travel to the seaside city of Atami, about an hour from Tokyo. We planned to spend a night at Horai, an old hot-springs inn known for lavish meals.

After soaking in big baths overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we were treated to a 10-course meal in our room that started with a sesame tofu and clear soup. That was followed by an array of sashimi, including langoustine slices that were so recently cut that the head we were presented with was still twitching. After more courses that included a deep-fried rice cake with radish sauce and grilled scallops, we finished simply with a steamed bowl of rice, miso soup and pickled vegeta-

bles.

Day 3 Ginza gourmands The next morning, the inn made a miso soup for us with the head of the langoustine. That accompanied a traditional breakfast of grilled fish, vegetables, rice and a small omelette made with a delicate broth.

After breakfast, we sped back to Tokyo for lunch—our final meal of the trip. Kyubey in the tony Ginza district is one of the city’s most venerable sushi establishments, favoured by countless politicians, executives and Hollywood stars such as Will Smith.

Rare for a restaurant of its calibre, Kyubey has several locations mostly in Tokyo, which gives them the scale to afford the highest-quality fish (the owner made news earlier this month when he participated in the purchase of a bluefin tuna for $175,000). When we sat down, head chef Taira immediately served us bright orange pearls of marinated salmon roe in a small bowl as we informed him that we were there for the dinner course.

Taking up the challenge, he served translucent slices of various white fish, bonito stuffed with minced garlic and scallions, and a mixture of minced Japanese mackerel, miso, chopped scallions and ginger known as Namero, which is loosely translated as “plate-licking good”.

After cleansing our palates with a sandwich of thinly sliced radish and sour plum paste, we moved on to sushi. The sea urchin was sweet and creamy, the seared tuna fatty and flavourful and the raw shrimp so fresh that they were jumping off the counter as they waited to be peeled.

As we wondered how we could get on an 8-hour plane ride after the meal, Taira pushed one final square of melt-in-your-mouth omelette on us. “Think of it as dessert,” he said.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

L15

Books CIVIL RESISTANCE & POWER POLITICS | EDITED BY ADAM ROBERTS AND TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

TABISH KHAIR

Civil resistance: from theory to practice

MUGGING ENGLISH

M AFP

A pragmatic view of Gandhian moral action sees it more as an effective political strategy

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n the last half-century, what united African-American civil rights campaigners in the American South in the 1960s, antiApartheid demonstrators in South Africa in the 1980s, anti-communist agitators in Czechoslovakia in 1989, discontented citizens and student groups at Tiananmen in China in the same year, striking monks in Myanmar in 2007 and Tibet in 2008? Civil resistance.

A hundred years ago, civil resistance as a political force was not much more than a minor curiosity. Although it had theoretical roots in the ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin, Mohandas Gandhi’s work for the rights of Indians in South Africa was the only feather in its cap. Today, that is no longer so. The idea of civil resistance has a history, a dignity, an allure, a vocabulary. The phrase “civil resistance” immediately brings to mind strikes, fasts, boycotts, demonstrations; a commitment to non-violence; the use of potent symbols and messages; a sense of active community, solidarity and discipline among discontented people.

Insofar as one of the reasons for studying history is to avoid repeating its mistakes, civil resistance offers a sharp, self-conscious break from many centuries of bloodshed and suffering over political, social and religious disputes. Thus, even when it fails, or is stamped out by violent reprisals, it is still on one plane a success, for having neutralized through responsible action the instinct to meet blow for blow. Yet, as recent history shows, civil resistance, while not evenly and universally effective, does not need any charitable definitions of success. As the editors of this vol-

THE READING ROOM

I

ugging de Queen’s English/ is the story of my life,” says the immigrant who did not “graduate” in the UK-based Caribbean writer and poet John Agard’s excellent Listen Mr Oxford Don, which (incidentally) can be accessed on YouTube in the poet’s own rendition.

The tradition of mugging English is a glorious one: from Mark Twain to Agard, from Raja Rao to Salman Rushdie. We know that English contains huge chunks of Germanic-Scandinavian, Norman-French and Latin, followed by hundreds of words from Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Hindustani, etc. In his latest book, Our Magnificent Bastard Language: The Untold History of English, the Manhattan-based linguist, John McWhorter, extends the argument.

He claims, and proves overwhelmingly, that even early “English” was a product of underground mugging. As the invading proto-Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes were pushing the earlier Celtic speakers to the “fringes” of Britain, the language that was assuming shape (or sound) was already being mugged by the “enslaved” Celts. Then came the Scandinavian Vikings, who did their bit of mugging too. The evidence, argues McWhorter, lies in English grammar—and helps explain the so-called “grammatical errors epidemic” as a “hoax”.

This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in English and languages. If I have a complaint, it has to do with McWhorter’s determination to avoid political readings of the phenomena he narrates so lucidly.

ANOEK DE GROOT/AFP

Mediating Muslim

Rallying cry: Buddhist monks in Myanmar protesting against the military regime in September 2007. ume of case studies of modern civil resistance campaigns around the world argue, the idea of civil resistance has helped redefine revolution since the 1960s. Although violence remains endemic in human affairs, civil resistance “has assisted at the birth of a new genre of revolution, one that involves force but not the violence always associated with that word”.

One of the key emphases of Civil Resistance & Power Politics is that it understands civil resistance not as an ideal of moral action and non-violent “conversion” of the adversary through “truth-

Civil Resistance & Power Politics: Oxford University Press, 408 pages, Rs995.

force” as Gandhi saw it, but simply as a strategy of practical politics. Moral transformation of the adversary is not essential to successful civil resistance.

Indeed, as the scholar Judith M. Brown argues in a sceptical review of Gandhi’s civil resistance campaigns, mass action strategized by Gandhi, even though it significantly changed the terms of imperial engagement with the colonized, could not be said, as some do, to have “brought an end to empire”. Political and economic factors, such as World War II, tilted the balance of history in favour of Indian independence.

Gandhi certainly radically enlarged the terms of protest and negotiation available to the disenfranchized, and laid down a frame where any person, even a child, could join the movement as a political actor. Among the lessons we learn from Gandhi’s example is that civil resistance does not usually yield instant results—it shifts the balance of power step by step. We learn also that much depends on the timing of civil protest, and on the adversary’s willingness to engage. During the Quit India campaign of 1942, for instance, the Raj’s attention was directed towards the World War, and Congress leaders were summarily rounded up and thrown into jail. The movement was not a

success. So, as the career of even the most successful exponent of civil resistance shows, skilful strategy (and not just moral rigour) can immeasurably help improve the efficacy of civil resistance.

What factors improve the probability of civil resistance campaigns? The case studies offered here show that since civil resistance is really a form of political theatre, widespread local and international publicity is certainly a factor (the rise of the Internet and the availability of cheap video technology are therefore good omens for civil resistance in the 21st century). Mass enlistment makes for campaigns that cannot be crushed easily, and provides a kind of safety in numbers. International support and the economic and diplomatic pressure of neighbouring political powers can often decisively influence the way domestic power holders perceive their options in dealing with civil resistance. The merit of this book is in the way it takes the reader forward from civil resistance as an idea to civil resistance in practice.

Even as it seeks to reshape history, civil resistance has much to learn from its own history.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

“A mediator is a bridge, and a bridge never belongs to one side only. Thus the mediator is always a little too much on the other side for both the sides,” writes Tariq Ramadan in his just released book, What I Believe. Named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the 21st century, a professor in the faculty of theology at Oxford University and the author of several books, Ramadan has been prevented from entering some Muslim countries as well as France and the US in the recent past.

Building bridges: Ramadan.

So he knows what he is talking about.

Ramadan comes from a practising Muslim background: The fact that his grandfather was the founder of the fundamentalist-nationalist Muslim Brotherhood is sometimes held against him in the West, despite his own boldly reformist and democratic stance. He continues to be a practising Muslim. As I stopped practising my faith in secondary school, and have no intention of practising any faith—no, not even “atheism”—in the future, I inevitably see some of the matters that he discusses differently. Yet, I agree with much of what he says, and admire his sincere, thoughtful effort even across our differences. Ramadan needs to be read by all of us who want to make sense of the world that we share.

Running through all the practical, historical and theoretical issues, there is Ramadan’s conviction that on both the “Muslim” side and the “Western” one, “our contradictions and ambiguities are countless” and that “all of us should show humility, respect, and consistency” in our engagements with each other.

If only.

Verse, novels Going by publishing lists, India is coping better with the global financial crisis than most Western countries. Publishers in India seem positive about their lists for 2010. Of the Indian titles I have heard of, I will be looking forward to new books by Anita Nair, Tishani Doshi and Jeet Thayil. The last two are already established as poets, and deservedly so. They will be debuting with novels this year. Predictably, some reviewers will quibble about the ability of poets to write fiction, or their need to do so. But, having started off as a poet, I, for one, look forward to novels by good poets. At least, they try to write well.

Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of Filming.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

THE RETURN OF KHOKABABU— THE BEST OF TAGORE | TRANSLATED BY SIPRA BHATTACHARYA

Tagore burns bright Translation harms the narrative but the stories more than compensate B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ···························· he young son of his master and mistress drowns in the river, setting the family servant off on a cycle of regret, repentance and, finally, rejection. A dead widow revisits the location of her skeleton, being used by medical students, to recount her crime of passion. A neglected wife gains strength from the tragedy of another married woman to break free of her shackles.

T

Events such as these abound in the short stories that Rabindranath Tagore wrote as part of his humongous literary output, which included poems, songs (alongside the music for them), novels, plays, essays and even question papers. And now, the latest in a long line of translations of his stories—by Sipra Bhattacharya, who has also chosen the stories in the anthology—reminds readers once again why Tagore took to the form so happily once he started practising it.

True to his practice of covering different territory through each of the written art forms he practised, his stories were mostly about the emotionally marginalized. Barring exceptions such as the story translated as The Broken Nest (Nostonir,

made famous, of course, by Satyajit Ray as Charulata), which is more a novella than a short story, all of them dwell on the specific dimension of personality around which the story is built. Background and circumstances provide the theatre where the drama of the marginalized is played out.

What makes them worth reading today then? Perhaps the fact that in that isolation and the resultant exclusion lies a universal continuity of the sensation of loneliness. That raises the question of the appropriate idiom for translating Tagore. Every generation deserves its own Tagore, and translations have the opportunity that the original text does not—of relating the work more closely to the present-day reader.

The Return of Khokababu— The Best of Tagore: Harper Perennial, 384 pages, Rs350.

Of course, as an anthology for a generation that may not be very familiar with Tagore, this one gets half its act spot-on in the stories featured. Sure, the usual suspects are all there—from The Broken Nest to Manihara, from Hungry

Stones (Khudito Pashan) to the eponymous The Return of Khokababu (Khokababur Prottyaborton), from A Wife’s Letter (Streer Pawtra) to Kabuliwala. But so are a number of other lesserknown gems: one of the finest love stories in the world, One Night (Ek Ratri), the sardonic Pride Destroyed (Darpaharan) to the ironic Matchmaking (Patro o Patri), for instance. As a singlevolume anthology, it’s an excellent if orthodox selection.

Unfortunately, Bhattacharya doesn’t take up the second—admittedly more difficult—part of the challenge. Her translated Tagore is necessarily archaic because of her choice to retain the floridity of the language.

Nor does it consistently capture the different registers in his narration—from sardonic to sympathetic, from ruminative to passionate—that the different stories have.

In attempting to faithfully translate

the words from one idiom to another, the blueprint remains but the fluid airiness, stemming from Tagore the poet, is lost.

Still, the stories themselves more than compensate. Romance, heartbreak, humour —and, above all, the terrible tragedies of unrequited and unfulfilled expectations, emotions and relationships—are depicted with a masterly touch that makes Tagore as remarkable today as he was in his lifetime, when his writing rocked the status quo. At a time when so much of writing is about minutiae and fragmentation, his ability to depict a human condition in a few lyrical strokes is bound to make a powerful impact.

Arunava Sinha is the translator of Buddhadeva Bose’s My Kind of Girl, and of Sankar’s Chowringhee and The Middleman.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

Culture MUSIC

A duet that dazzles

as Jungle Book (Chaddi pehenke phool khila hai) and Alice in Wonderland (Tup tup topi topi).

Chaddi actually forged their bond. When Gulzar had penned the lyrics for Chaddi for the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)’s children’s serial, everyone had reservations.

But Gulzar believed there was no better way to describe Jungle Book’s Mowgli, who was after all found among flora wearing nothing but a chaddi (briefs). “The folks at NFDC thought it was vulgar,” said Gulzar. But Bhardwaj had joined in the protest to let it stay, and at Jaya Bachchan’s prompting, the NFDC authorities finally relented, making Chaddi pehenke phool khila hai a household anthem in the early 1990s.

For Bhardwaj, Gulzar is a mentor, lucky mascot, work partner and friend, all rolled into one. Bhardwaj equates him to the father he lost right before they met. They take up each other’s causes. Last month, Bhardwaj and his wife Rekha joined Gulzar on a march in Old Delhi to commemorate Ghalib. Gulzar has penned the words for both Bhardwaj and Rekha’s non-film albums, Boodhe Pahadon Par and Ishqa Ishqa.

Rekha, a trained classical singer, calls Gulzar her sufi saint. “He showed us the path. I really don’t know where we’d be without him today, both in the music industry and outside of it.”

Rekha has sung two Gulzar-Bhardwaj compositions for Ishqiya—the ghazal-based Ab mujhe koi and a semi-classical song based on raga Lalit, Badi dheere jali.

Abhishek Chaubey, the director of Ishqiya, has worked with both Bhardwaj and Gulzar from the start of his career. “I’m ecstatic that I have two such greats collaborating for my debut effort,” he says, equating Gulzar and Bhardwaj’s partnership with the likes of the legendary Sahir Ludhianvi and S.D. Burman. That harmony had ended bitterly, over issues of fame.

This one, as the second line of Dil to bachcha hai ji goes, Daant se reshmi dor kat ti nahi, is hopefully like a silken thread that would be difficult to cut.

GIRISH SRIVASTVA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

The music of the forthcoming film, ‘Ishqiya’, strikes another harmonious note in a brilliant partnership

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

···························· he streaming notes of the accordion marry staccato lyrics, coming together in a manner that makes Dil to bachcha hai ji (My heart is a child) from the soundtrack of the forthcoming film Ishqiya almost organic—a song born, not composed.

Sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, whose virtuoso training under his uncle Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is more apparent than ever here, the song conveys an older man’s (Naseeruddin Shah) love for a young widow (Vidya Balan). It brings the disparate together—a crude Indian vernacular with East European instrumentation. And in doing so, it epitomizes the relationship of its makers: veteran lyricist Gulzar and music composer Vishal Bhardwaj. Since their first musical collaboration for a film, Maachis (1996), their alliance has disproved convention. Paani paani re from that first album, for instance, began with the tinkle of Japanese prayer bells.

Gulzar started his career as a lyricist in 1963 with Bimal Roy’s Bandini. He already had a 33-year career behind him when he first asked Bhardwaj to compose for a film. Since then, he has lent his poetry to several of Bhardwaj’s scores. In the course of the partnership, Gulzar has often surpassed himself, trading his Urduspecked verse for rustic folk lingo in songs such as Beedi and Namak (Omkara, 2006) and for the entirely and refreshingly unexpected in Dhan te nan (Kaminey, 2009).

A few months ago, when Gulzar was felicitated with the lifetime achievement award at the 11th

T

Partners: Bhardwaj (above) sees Gulzar (far right) as a mentor; and a still from Ishqiya.

Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival, he gave his protégé a most precious gift. He called him an extension of himself. “He is doing whatever I have left unfinished,” Gulzar announced to audiences who were perhaps pondering what tied the 73-year-old to the 49-year-old, one born in pre-Partition Pakistan and the other in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district.

Bhardwaj, born to poet-lyricist Ram Bhardwaj, had idolized Gulzar even in his teens, when he harboured dreams of playing professional cricket rather than a career in music. Later, as an aspiring musician frustrated with his role as an artist management executive, Bhardwaj used to set to music Gulzar’s poems in his free time.

Their first meeting, a little more than 20 years ago, didn’t come about by happenstance. Bhardwaj had orchestrated it. One evening, circa 1989, Bhardwaj was overseeing the production of a couple of

Doordarshan soundtracks in a Delhi studio. On learning that Gulzar was to come to the same studio for a recording, he stayed back hours after he was finished.

But things didn’t go according to plan. Gulzar lost his way and phoned the studio for directions.

“I happened to answer his call and went to pick him up at a mithai (sweets) shop that he was waiting in,” recalls Bhardwaj.

The meeting was a turning point for Bhardwaj. He had been struggling, playing the harmonium for little-known ghazal sing-

A well­told tale of courage Geeta Anand’s story of a family’s struggle is Harrison Ford’s latest movie B Y P ARIZAAD K HAN parizaad.k@livemint.com

···························· hen we met, 43-year-old Geeta Anand had a somewhat jumbled to-do list. She had to juggle phone calls from her mother, daughters, nannies and driver to ensure her girls got home from school all right. She was working late into the evening at her Mumbai office to complete a story for The Wall Street Journal, for which she is a senior writer.

Oh, and she had a glitzy Hollywood premiere pencilled in somewhere on the list as well.

When Anand—a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist—was based in New York, she wrote two articles in WSJ and later, a book about the Crowley family. The youngest Crowley children, Patrick and Megan, had been diagnosed with

W

Pompe disease, a rare disorder which causes muscle weakness, resulting in death when the heart and breathing muscles are affected. The Cure, published in 2006, explores the desperate struggle of John Crowley and his wife Aileen to find a cure for the disease. John started a biotechnology company to research experimental treatments.

On 19 January, the Crowleys and Anand walked down the red carpet in Los Angeles at the premiere of Extraordinary Measures, with Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell—the actors who have brought their story to life on screen. The movie will release in India in March.

Anand was covering the biotechnology beat at WSJ when she first heard of the Crowleys. “I’m always drawn to human struggle, and in telling the story, I could talk about the industry I covered,” she says. “The family was so willing to be open about the heroic things they did, but also where they made mistakes.” Though Anand had two young children of her own to care for and a job she

loved, she felt passionate enough to take a sabbatical from work to write the book. Her first meeting with the family was so moving that she almost burst into tears and had to struggle to hold herself together.

Ford too was so moved by the story that he wanted to play John in the film. “The Crowleys and me were unsure how he would play the role, because what was interesting about John’s story was that he was 30 when he started the company. He tried to do it because he was so young and naïve,” says Anand. Ford finally essayed the role of the scientist at the company—a bunch of scientists from the book were combined to form his character—and Fraser played John Crowley.

Anand and her family went to Portland last year to watch part of the movie being filmed. “It was fun to see Brendan Fraser, who acted the same scene in a completely different way with each take while Ford did the scene exactly the same way each time.

So we weren’t sure what to think—if it was good that Ford

ers, trying his hand at the executive job. But in that short window of time in the mithai shop, when the 20-something Bhardwaj told Gulzar he wanted to work with him, his life changed.

Gulzar was gracious enough to consider the novice’s request. He asked him to look him up if he came to Mumbai. The duo first worked together on a Doordarshan serial called Dane Anar Ke (on the song Kissa hai, kahani hai, paheli hai).

That led to other television anthems for serials such

knew exactly how he wanted to play it, or that Fraser was experimenting,” she laughs.

The Crowleys also wanted to enjoy the film and its making as much as possible. “They took the kids to watch the filming. They have to take along oxygen tanks, wheelchairs have to be taken apart and put on planes, but it was really special,” she recalls.

“When Megan met the girl who was playing her, they held hands and went on the sets together.”

Anand says Ford was very concerned about getting the science right. He hired an assistant scientist from John’s lab to be on the set for a lot of the filming, to ensure that the science was accurate.

Anand, meanwhile, is researching her next book, tentatively titled In My Father’s Footsteps, which traces her father’s journey as a refugee from Pakistan to Mumbai.

Anand, who studied in Mumbai’s Cathedral School and was a national swimming champion, moved back to India in 2008 after 20 years in the US, so she could be close to her parents. “I wanted my kids to grow up in India and I wanted to work here,” she says.

As for the Crowley family, “The

PRODIP GUHA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Ishqiya releases in theatres on Friday.

immediate threats to the children’s lives is gone but they’re disabled and the parents live with the fear that they could lose them any day,” she says.

But they take the bus to school, have acted in their school play and have sleepovers.

For their parents and Anand, the struggle has paid off.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Family ties: Anand’s next book will be about her father’s experiences during Partition.

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ART

Lessons from the future

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

MUSIC SANS BORDERS

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

T

Krishen Khanna is looking forward to learning more about his own paintings

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

···························· any artists, according to Krishen Khanna, are less than thrilled at the idea of a retrospective show of their works. This is because they see it as a farewell of sorts, where they are being told to “pack (their) bags and go to sleep”. Khanna says that he is not among them. In fact, he is quite looking forward to his retrospective at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, and for the same reasons as everyone else—a chance to see the paintings he has made over the years displayed under one roof.

The oldest works on display at the show, put together by the Saffronart online auction house, will be the ones he painted in 1943-44. The latest will include the paintings done last month.

Khanna speaks the kind of good English—in complete, g ram m ati c ally co r rec t se ntences, often using words and phrases that are falling into disuse—that goes back to a time when fewer people knew the language. In an extended conversation over the phone, his sense of courtesy comes through, even, for instance, when he expresses his disappointment over “quasi-government bodies” that are not allowing some of his paintings to be shown for “bureaucratic reasons”. These works, which are listed in the show catalogue, and were packed and ready to be shipped, were withheld at the last minute. Khanna’s desire to include in the show works that are in the National Gallery of Modern Art collection also ran into bureaucratic hurdles and he finds the situation “frustrating and sad”.

“We talk about our culture but we don’t really believe in it,” he says, recalling how the late Tyeb Mehta had been promised a retrospective which

M

Classicist: Khanna welcomes the new trends in the art world, but with an air of caution. never happened. “We don’t accord it the kind of importance that we should.”

He says he is looking forward to the show in the hope of gaining greater self-knowledge. There will, for instance, be the opportunity to see the recurring themes in his works—such as his series of paintings of trucks and his depiction of the apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he felt his wounds with his hands.

Khanna reads an East-West divide in this story—he feels that in the Indian tradition “faith is the bottom line”, whereas Europe, with its philosophical tradition, demands proof in the manner of Thomas.

Another instructive shift for Khanna was the transformation of his generals into bandwallahs. He explains how he started out, by painting military people—“showing the teeth of the State”—with their uniforms, caps and epaulettes, but somewhere down the line moved to depicting wedding brass-band players. They share a certain similarity in attire with the generals but lead an altogether more precarious existence. “Colours take over here (in the paintings) because their uniforms are very colourful,” Khanna observes, recalling a

line by the poet Shelly: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Khanna had no formal training as an artist, and was working at a bank when he decided to quit his job and pursue painting full time. He recalls fellow artists M.F. Husain, V.S. Gaitonde and Bahu Chawla waiting for him outside the bank when he quit.

Khanna became a younger associate of the famous Progressive school of artists, which included Husain, Gaitonde, Mehta and S.H. Raza—all artists with their own distinctive styles who came together because of their adherence to the sense of form, or the idea that the “picture had to be formally correct.”

To say that the art scene in India has changed radically since then would be an understatement, and Khanna is cautious in his endorsement of the changes. “There are debits and credits,” he says of the money that has poured into art over the last decade and a half. “We never thought we would get the amounts of money raised,” he says. “We did all right.”

But he believes that the commercial boom in the art mart lulled young artists into a false sense of well-being. “When the sad times came they were left high and dry.”

Khanna sounds similarly ambivalent about new media in art—installations, video art and the like. It is, he points out, a bigger challenge to be a painter today. “It is tougher to continue with painting, seeking changes from within the medium, than abandoning the medium and seeking a new one.” His own inclinations become clear when he recalls visiting fellow artist Akbar Padamsee in Mumbai once. Padamsee handed him a brand new movie camera which he had received as part of a fellowship, and asked him to film whatever he wanted. Khanna took the camera, kept it for a week and never used it.

Having witnessed a lifetime worth of changes, Khanna chooses to keep the faith. “Good painting will prevail, I am very hopeful,” he says. “Even the best of us can paint a bad picture. It is part of a search. Some (works) succeed much more, but that doesn’t invalidate the ones that don’t…” A viewer, he feels, should “have the insight and the compassion to see the works in this light…with empathy”.

The Krishen Khanna retrospective is on at the Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan, Feroze Shah Road, New Delhi, until 5 February.

Q&A | PARESH MOKASHI

here’s nothing quite like a nice, spiffy piece of music to dispel the chill and gloom of a foggy winter morning in Delhi. I got my share of gloom-dispelling, fog-banishing music from Ajay-Atul, the music director duo whose songs for the Marathi film Natrang can bring a smile to even the most depressed. I must confess that I have very little knowledge of folk music or theatre music from Maharashtra. But then, good music just makes you sit up and listen more attentively, and hum the songs through the day.

Hopefully, you also go out and buy a copy of the album, load it on your iPod and perhaps play it for others. That should explain why I have been singing Apsara aali from Natrang quite obsessively.

The really fun part about the songs is their wonderful use of rhythm, the drumming and percussion used in the arrangement.

The tunes are fairly simple, easy to sing along with and, I daresay, modelled on or borrowing heavily from traditional tunes and styles favoured by varieties such as Naandi and Lavni. To spice things up, they have been neatly rendered by singers whose names unfortunately have not been acknowledged on the album cover that I could lay my hands on. But the combination—of melodies that draw inspiration from folk and regional forms, are rendered with gusto, and recorded with imaginative arrangements that reflect an intimacy with traditional music—works wonders and you have a set of songs that would have taken the nation by storm, if only we had music lovers curating content for radio and TV channels. Sadly, that isn’t the case and, therefore, even though Natrang is a super hit, doing great business at multiplexes along with the likes of 3 Idiots and Avatar, the music will be played and promoted only on Marathi channels, and not on national channels. Like me, you would need a Maharashtrian connection, and preferably a spouse who shares his music collection with you, to be able to hear the music made by this splendid duo.

But even if you don’t have the Maharashtrian connection, you can still check out some of the songs on YouTube, even though I am not sure those songs and videos should be there at all.

So notice how at about 0.53 minutes in the video, the chorus sings Apsara aali, Indrapuri tun khaali…which, Captivating: A still from Natrang. roughly translated by a non-Marathi speaking translator, means that an apsara, or celestial dancer, descends from her abode in Indrapuri…touched by the rosy hues of the dawn…etc, etc. The full-throated, almost guttural voices in the chorus contrast splendidly with the much lighter tinkle of Bela Shinde’s voice earlier in the song, and the drumming accompanying the chorus brings a vibrant majesty to the apsara’s gait.

Equally attractive is the smart dholki playing in the upbeat Mala zau dyaa yaa ghari…which borrows generously from the music of the Tamasha. There is a particularly charming stroke played on the dholki on the upbeat just before the start of each antara of the song; a smart little piece of rhythm arrangement that could, but should not, go unnoticed. And of course, there is the expressive singing for the Rahmanesque Khel Mandalaa that also deserves generous appreciation.

I don’t know Ajay or Atul; I have never met them; but judging from their music for Natrang, here we have two young men and music directors firmly rooted in the musical traditions of the region to which they belong, and eager to experiment and share their love for music. I am certain they have a huge fan following that is growing steadily and to which I willingly add my name. Yet, I hope that someday soon, their music will be enjoyed universally and not only in Maharashtra or by Maharashtrians living in different parts of the world.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

‘I sold my house for a factory’ The director of ‘Harishchandrachi Factory’ talks about Oscars and his film­making ethos B Y S ONIA C HOPRA ···························· arishchandrachi Factory got made because the film’s director, Paresh Mokashi, sold his house. Ironic, considering that his debut film chronicles the legendary film-maker Dadasaheb Phalke’s ordeals when making Raja Harishchandra, India’s first feature film, in 1913.

Made with a budget of Rs4 crore, the Marathi film beat competitors nationwide to represent India at the Oscars.

Now, with UTV’s backing, it is slated to release in theatres across Maharashtra, and possibly the rest of the country. Edited excerpts of an interview with the award-winning director:

H

You’re a theatre veteran. What made you switch mediums and

start from scratch?

It’s true that I’m not formally trained and have never assisted a film director. The first time I went on a film set was for my own film. That was also the first time I said “action”. When I read Phalke’s biography by Bapu Watve, I could see a screenplay, complete with visuals. I felt I had to make this story into a film.

Putting it on stage would have been too limiting. Now, it’s going to go all over India and beyond.

That’s the power of the subject.

When did UTV come in, and what was the offer?

UTV came in later, after the festival rounds and the state-level awards had happened. Till then, I was on my own. I didn’t sell my film outright, so I’m still the owner.

UTV is in charge of the film’s

promotion and distribution.

The film is sprinkled with black humour. Did you ever debate the tone of the film?

I never imposed my style on the film. The humour came out of the biography. Phalke was a very interesting, eccentric, scientific person with a unique sense of humour.

I had certain ideas about the making of the film, so I stuck to that. The still-frame treatment that I used has been handled by plenty of masters. It’s just that it has become very rare these days.

It matched with the period feel and the old style of film-making.

Just because a camera can be moved around like a cricket ball, everyone assumes it’s the main facility a camera can offer. All you see these days are pans, tilts and tracks and trolleys.

Despite the acclaim, would you change anything in the film?

Everything! I’d change each frame in the film. That’s how I feel now, to be honest.

Autodidact: Mokashi has had no training in film­making.

What’s the publicity strategy for the Oscars?

I’ve been abroad, holding screenings. The response is good and critics like Kirk Honeycutt (The Hollywood Reporter) have given it encouraging reviews, mentioning it on their Top 10 lists. But the film is our biggest PR agent. When it comes to the Oscar campaign, you can’t do much. You can’t lobby and organize special shows for the jury. It’s a misconception.

You beat several high-profile,

star-studded films to become India’s official Oscar entry.

Which films did you like?

All the Marathi films in the competition category. They were the real films of this year. There were also Bengali and Malayalam films that were noteworthy. The others were run-of-the-mill Bollywood films.

However feeble, there are voices that don’t approve the selection of ‘Harishchandrachi Factory’ for the Oscars, describing the

choice as a mistake.

Yes, plenty of critics have approached me and I’ve read a lot of comments. If someone likes a film other than mine, they have every right to spread the word.

Are you thinking in terms of a Hindi film platform now?

Sure, perhaps even an English one. For me, language is incidental.

You’re an expert on Indian mythology. One hears that there is talk of a film?

I always say that theatre and films are my extra-curricular activities. My main area is conducting an objective study of our ancient books, scriptures and Vedas. I do have a subject in mind based on an archaeological adventure. So yes, it will eventually happen.

At the time of the interview, Harishchandrachi Factory was still in contention for the Oscars.

It has since lost the nomination.

The film will release in theatres in Pune and Mumbai on 29 January.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

DELHI’S BELLY | PRIYA RAMANI

Yellow fever The marigold revolution and a modern­day twist to an age­old agricultural festival

T

he instructions were clear: Wear yellow (no black please); carry lots of yellow genda phool (marigold flowers) and maybe some spring gifts too (lemons, melons, mustard flowers).

“Bring as much genda as you can, bring basket loads… garlands…so we can dance with genda tokris on our head and take them to Khwajaji (Khwaja Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya) like his beloved Amir Khusrau!” the email read. Now who could resist an invitation like that?

Off I went to Lodhi Garden, armed with yellow marigold flowers (which are also available in orange and maroon) and dressed in my best (i.e. only) yellow kurta to celebrate Sufi Basant.

It was easy enough to spot the golden cloud of people—an assortment of Delhiites who were a) organizer Himanshu Verma’s friends b) had lived in the city all their lives but had never visited the Nizamuddin dargah and c) liked the idea of celebrating a traditional festival with a modern-day twist.

The park is one of my favourite hangout spots in Delhi, but I never imagined myself garlanding strangers with happy orange flowers and sitting in a circle with lots of

other yellow people, loudly singing Genda phool from the 2009 film Delhi-6 (Verma even distributed a pamphlet with the lyrics), making DIY marigold earrings and watching Verma, founder of New Delhi-based arts organization Red Earth, do a jig in the centre. Verma, one of the city’s most colourful dressers, wore more yellow than I have owned in my lifetime.

Soon enough we were surrounded by the usual set of unemployed/underemployed men who spend a working day afternoon at the park; many whipped out their mobile phones to take pictures. A gaggle of schoolboys stopped to hoot, but by then we were lost in the world of Hazrat Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya.

We heard the story of Sufi Basant twice, first from Verma and then from Sadiq Nizami, one of the Sufi saint’s descendants, at Nizamuddin.

The saint had just lost his favourite nephew and refused to be pacified. He moped near the grave, locked himself up and didn’t want to interact with people around him for months. One day as disciple Amir Khusrau sat wondering how he could placate the saint, he encountered a group of

Soul food: Sweetened saffron rice with cloves is a Basant favourite.

Hindus dressed in all yellow, singing and carrying mustard flowers. Khusrau had a Eureka moment, borrowed their bright robes and sang and danced in front of the saint. The older man smiled, his sadness finally dissipated and all was well with the world again.

At Lodhi Garden, an irate park official who tried to tell us we were not allowed to do whatever it was we were doing was quickly dispensed with and after some more storytelling, we ate a quick snack of jaggery-sweetened saffron rice and began the urban trek to the dargah at Nizamuddin.

Even the dug-up pavements along the trunk Lodhi Road

from the park to Nizamuddin didn’t dampen the yellow fever of the 50 or so strangers who were enjoying the city together, differently. En route, a silver Mercedes drew up alongside and yet another lady dressed in all yellow hopped out and joined the party.

Every year on Sufi Basant, which falls on the eve of Basant Panchami, the qawwals of Nizamuddin get mustard flowers from outside Delhi. A procession walks the narrow lanes outside the dargah singing qawwalis which include Amir Khusrau’s Basant songs (Phool rahi sarson and Aaj Basant mana lo suhagan). It’s the only day of the year the

qawwals are allowed to sing in the inner sanctum of the shrine.

Sadia Dehlvi, the author of Sufism: The Heart of Islam, who was at the dargah with her family and friends that day, says the Sufi celebration of Basant at Nizamuddin is one of her favourite city traditions. “It’s essentially a Hindu agricultural festival being celebrated at the dargah and is representative of Delhi’s composite culture and the wonderful legacy of the Sufis,” she says.

Verma and friends are planning a Gandhi genda phool walk on 30 January. For details, email himanshu@redearth.com

Flower power: (clockwise from top) Verma paired his yellow robes with his grandmother’s anklets; Saroj Vashisht, who’s reading a story, still remembers how Basant was celebrated in the Lahore of the 1940s; schoolchildren want the marigold flowers; dodging Delhi’s dug­up roads; and marigold flowers come in three colours—yellow, orange and maroon.