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Aamir Khan understands what Indians want to pay for at the ticket counter and why. We met the producer and genius promoter to know how >Page 10

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History was created at Delhi venues such as this one. Now it is a diplomatic residence >Page 6

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ECONOMIST THE GOOD LIFE

REPLY TO ALL

SHOBA NARAYAN

UNDERRATED RESTAURANTS

S

ome weeks ago, I was at a food and wine tasting, put together by Food Lovers, a Bangalore-based magazine with a self-explanatory name. I read the magazine for its restaurant reviews and foodie news.

Occasionally, the magazine invites me to be part of its free tasting panels. A group of us sample food and wine and offer written opinions. Like foodies everywhere, we talk in obsessive and excruciating detail about things that might make a technocrat’s eyes... >Page 4

OUR DAILY BREAD

AAKAR PATEL

SAMAR HALARNKAR

HAPPINESS CENTRAL

As the conflict between tradition and modernity intensifies, Bhutan seeks to rediscover itself >Page 12

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE HUMAN FACE OF THE RIP MANTRA: OUR NATIONAL IDOLS ROAST IN PEACE

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ndians revere their leaders, but don’t read them.

This comes naturally to a culture that worships physical forms, rather than ideas. But it means that the leader remains unexamined. Here are some facts about great people that we would rather not know. In his book A Contemporary’s Estimate, Walter Crocker says Nehru would push and slap the people who got too close to him in public, as Indians tend to do. Nehru was irritable, but also bombastic and verbose, making too many speeches (often three a day) and spending too much time... >Page 5

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f you invite people over frequently, you clearly enjoy the party as much as your friends do. I do. If you enjoy the party and cook the food, you clearly have some secrets that you would like to share. I do. My great—and shameful—secret is roast chicken. It’s shameful because I consider chicken north-Indian vegetarian comfort food, like paneer. The broiler in Delhi is so ubiquitous, and so lacking in flavour (though not as bad as the giant chickens they sell in the US supermarkets)... >Page 9

PHOTO ESSAY

POINT AND SHOOT

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

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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

YOUR VERSION OF INDIANNESS IS OUTDATED. UPDATE NOW?

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VIPIN KUMAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

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t’s becoming increasingly obvious that we need technological help to modernize our outdated “Indian” selves since—unlike the economy that is forecast by some to grow at a robust 9.5% in 2010—our beliefs remain stagnant year after year. Case in point, a classified ad that appeared last month in a Mumbai tabloid: “Looking for a fair and cute newborn baby for a Johnson’s baby wash TV commercial.”

I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before someone creates a computer program that allows us COOL TECH to update our Indianness.

It would be like one of those free-for-download AntiVirus wonders that protect your machine from all the evil bugs out there. You know, the type that automatically updates your software every time you switch on your machine and reassures you that it has identified unsafe elements and suspicious strangers so you can surf and shop with confidence.

It is not that far-fetched an idea. After all, researchers are already using computer algorithms to create vaccines for new flu viruses. Procrastinator, an iPhone application by the

Fighting machines: One day we’ll go from EVMs to EUMs. Duke Center for Behavioral Economics, even “takes the pain out of making big decisions in your life”.

So, all you would have to do every day when you wake up and complete your morning business is to walk to your nearest New Indian booth and place your right thumb on an EUM or an Electronic Updating Machine. The machine (which would only work if you flushed and washed your hands after doing your morning business) would then promptly update your Indian beliefs/habits to ensure you’re more in sync with the global zeitgeist. Of course the program will come equipped with AutoFix technology that diagnoses and fixes common problems for you.

The benefits could be enormous. Nandan Nilekani would definitely find use for this Uni-

versal Indianness Device. Travelling on business/holiday and interacting with women/people of different faiths/colours would suddenly seem a whole lot easier. Our airline behaviour and rape statistics would change dramatically (there could even be a separate version of the program for north Indian males and another for politicians). Overnight, the (updated) world would speak to you in a universal language, and not Marathi or Kannada.

The machine would identify all Indian “types” and promptly update all Indianness that is outdated or harmful to our real national character.

Finally, all of us would know that beauty is not about skin colour; that daughters are not meant to be executed when they disobey your commands; that debate does not equal

LOUNGE REVIEW | SAMSUNG WAVE

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o you suddenly get the feeling that everyone these days has a BlackBerry?

That’s because everyone does. Ever since Research In Motion (RIM) launched the 8520 Curve handset at a sweet sub-Rs20,000 price point, the device is quickly becoming a rage with the non-suit-wearing types. But just when it looked like the value segment of the smartphone market had an undisputed winner in the 8520, Samsung launched the GT-S8500 Wave. While not exactly a smartphone, the Wave is an excellent handset that combines good looks, powerful hardware and thoughtful features with a splendid price tag. It has its flaws, but at that price they are easily overlooked.

The good stuff Samsung by now has a reputation for making decent touch phones at decent prices.

The company’s Corby range of phones might leave iPhone or BlackBerry enthusiasts stone cold, but for young users on a budget, the Corby (with its starting price of Rs7,000) offers tremendous value.

The Wave, the first phone to be based on Samsung’s Bada operating system, takes the Corby proposition to the next level. The phone is built well, with elegant choice of material (a spiffy aluminium body), finish and assembly. This is a handset you can flaunt during business meetings on Monday and at the club on Friday night.

There are signature Samsung flourishes to be seen in the diamond-shaped menu button on the front, and in the camera lens and flash openings on the back. Otherwise Samsung keeps the touch-based design pure, with few buttons anywhere on the body.

One of the Wave’s highlights is the gorgeous 3.3-inch AMOLED screen. The display is bright, the colours vivid, and Samsung’s updated TouchWiz interface works fluidly. Previous Samsung touch phones could sometimes make you pull your hair out in frustration. Clicking and dragging could feel sluggish and slow.

Not on the Wave. Here controls are intuitive, responsive and most users should not need to go into the instruction manual even once. There is, however, no denying that rich “inspiration” has been drawn from Apple’s iPhone operating system.

Spit and polish aside, the Wave is a pretty good day-to-day phone too. Browsing through contacts and call logs is a breeze and both handset and speakerphone call quality is good.

Like most Samsung phones, the Wave handles multimedia well, especially with its ability to play a wide variety of video formats. There is also a surround sound function, FM radio and competent high-definition video recording. Everywhere the interface adds additional oomph to what is good, if unspectacular, software.

While the device has all the standard

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options, the “Mobile Access Point” function is a great idea. With just a few clicks you can convert the Wave into a mobile Wi-Fi access point. Then up to three computers can connect to the phone and share the phone’s Internet connection. What a great idea!

The not­so­good Oh god. Not another mobile operating system. Bada is one of the newest yet, and this is more than apparent when you browse through the Samsung App store. The spread is thin, and most of the apps look thoroughly uninviting, even amateur.

The Wave’s native Internet browser is, well, a joke. Pity that Samsung hasn’t given the browser a complete makeover along with the rest of the interface. Thankfully, there is a version of the Opera Mini browser available for download that alleviates some of the torture.

For anyone currently using a phone with a Qwerty keyboard, think twice. The Wave’s keyboard, especially when used in portrait layout, makes the skin crawl.

Talk plastic At a current market price of Rs19,000, the Samsung Wave is a winner. Even before waiting for the inevitable fall in price, the Wave offers one of the best deals in the market today. It is not a perfect phone. But then so few phones are. Fewer still offer the value this one does.

Sidin Vadukut

abuse; that the tedious art of feminine sacrifice is best forgotten; and that our household help has rights too.

In this world of EUMs we would be able to sense what versions of the software our fellow Indians have uploaded.

Theatres would only let you buy tickets if you were Version 6.0 updated (i.e. if you knew that you should not talk on your cellphone or litter in a movie hall). Think of it as the Twitter equivalent of “blocking” someone.

Of course, India being India implementation won’t be easy.

Someone might create a grey market version of the product after tweaking it to include updates such as women cycling is definitely unIslamic. A politician might indulge in New Indian booth-capturing. Or that big corporation that buys up everything around us might pay millions of rupees to rebrand the program as its own.

Maybe Indianness is best left to become extinct naturally.

THE FIRST STEP I loved reading the article “Baby steps”, 10 July. I possibly started trekking at the age of 3 or 4—the nursery school was 2km away and a climb of 1,000ft from our home (there were no school buses or any other mode of transport available in Almora then). Trekking and climbing the Lesser Himalayas was no big feat for us. Later, I joined a few expeditions. Every time I reached the top, I decided it would be the last. Of course, the lure of the mountains kept bringing me back for one last climb, and at 65 I’m yet to stop.

Why I’m writing to you is to substantiate your observation. In the first week of June, we attempted the Kugti Pass (16,500ft); we had to turn back at 15,000ft owing to heavy snowfall. Our group consisted mostly of 30­ to 65­year­olds. One 13­year­old boy from Mumbai, Pranav, who had never climbed before, was the youngest member. I kept a close watch on him. He carried a weight of 10­12kg, was always cheerful, his diet remained the same while others reduced theirs, and he had no acclimatization problem. We had to walk on slippery slopes through fresh snow for 24km during the retreat—he made it without any hassle.

The mantra taught to me by Tenzing was “slow and steady with your rhythm”. I wish this article could be read by youth in every corner of India. Alas, they do not read Mint.

PCS RAUTELA HONORARY SECRETARY, INDIAN MOUNTAINEERING FOUNDATION ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Bangalore’s most underrated restaurants

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HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

ome weeks ago, I was at a food and wine tasting, put together by Food Lovers, a Bangalore-based magazine with a self-explanatory name. I read the magazine for its restaurant reviews and foodie news. Occasionally, the magazine invites

me to be part of its free tasting panels.

A group of us sample food and wine and offer written opinions. Like foodies everywhere, we talk in obsessive and excruciating detail about things that might make a technocrat’s eyes roll: Wasara tableware, Laguiole knives, Rosenthal stemware, Thai cutlery, food trends, vacuum cooking, ice wine, single malts and such. On that day, six of us sat around discussing why we go to the restaurants we do; and why we don’t go to some restaurants, even if we know they are good. Here then is a list of Bangalore’s underrated but good restaurants.

Graze at the Taj Residency, for instance, gets uniformly good reviews from all the foodies I know. Yet, few of us actually go there frequently. Part of the reason is that getting into a five-star hotel for dinner is a real pain these days, what with the security checks at every stage. The other reason is that even though Graze’s current chef is Indian and very good, the Taj group doesn’t promote him very much, perhaps because of the much-hyped opening chef: Oscar Gonzalez from Mexico. Here is another reason that is hardly politically correct but I will put it out there anyway: the chef’s name. Chef Selvaraju sounds like he would fit right into an Indian restaurant, perhaps a Chettinad one. When it comes to Continental food, do we expect a chef with a Westernized name? Or am I just stereotyping? Tell me, would you go to Bukhara or Dum Pukht if you knew that the chefs there were called, say, Pierre Gagnaire or Giovanni Mastraluca? In other words, should chef Selvaraju change his name, or take up a Westernized moniker?

Speaking of names, West View at the

ITC Royal Gardenia has an unfortunate name for a restaurant so good. The name says nothing about the food or its location and falls right into the category of restaurants with elliptical, almost meaningless names—such as Ebony, Queens and the now-defunct Tai Tai. This is a pity because West View’s all-women staff makes it a trailblazer.

The women sommeliers are particularly good and make thoughtful wine suggestions without being pushy. I just wish the lighting were better. Which brings me right to my pet peeve.

Minimalism is so over. Why, oh why, do restaurants chuck coziness for a spare, ascetic décor and lighting that is closer to pitch dark than well-lit?

Rather than showing off their sommeliers and waitresses, West View’s dim lighting makes them look funereal in their dark suits.

The other five-star restaurants aren’t much better in the lighting department. Oko at the The Lalit Ashok is another example. It serves very good (and very pricy) pan-Asian food. Its rooftop ambience is lovely but it suffers from association. Many Bangaloreans view The Lalit as a conservative hotel where government guests are put up.

How exciting can that be? Its location, opposite the golf course, is also far from the centre of town. But if you are on an expense account and want to get away from the chaos of Bangalore’s Metro construction, Oko would be a good choice.

Some restaurants benefit from their location. The ones at UB City, for instance, can be mediocre but will get their business simply because of the number of visitors. If Shiro is full, people go to Fava; or Café Noir; or Toscano.

Some go straight to Rajdhani. All are

Dim view: West View’s all­women staff makes it a trailblazer, but its name says nothing about the food or its location. reasonably good restaurants; none is a standout. They don’t have to be. Why mess with the formula if it works?

When it opened, I had a wonderful meal at Indian Affair, the restaurant at the Chancery Pavilion, but I haven’t gone back since. I often wonder why. I think it is because the Chancery Pavilion seems like a boring hotel. It doesn’t have that ephemeral but incandescent thing we call buzz.

In Bangalore, there are two stand-alone restaurants that have buzz: Sunny’s and Olive Beach. The old timers all seem to go to Sunny’s. Newcomers like me prefer Olive. Whatever its flaws and there are several, Olive works. You can’t walk through the pebbles in stilettos; you are always in danger of falling into the puddles that they have created, particularly after a few drinks; the rattan furniture is ageing; the food is terrific on some days and spongy on others. Chef Manu Chandra is a big

draw because he manages to do something that most chefs hate: actually converse with his guests. And somehow, you have a good time. You meet people you know and the restaurant is cozy.

Sunny’s, in contrast, is cold. Even people who love the place say that its owner doesn’t take critiques well. “You have to take Arjun aside and gently break it to him,” said one. I haven’t gone to Sunny’s for years.

The restaurant that should have the buzz is Caperberry. Its chef, Abhijit Saha, is hard-working and earnest. The food is beautifully presented. They encourage local photographers and recently had a group of wonderfully abstract food photographs (by Sudeep Gurtu, I believe) on the walls. What Caperberry lacks is a festive feel. It has fallen prey to the whole minimal décor trend and the room ends up looking like an army bunker with little character. A few sheesha pipes, some colour on the walls

and a few billowing purple curtains a la My Humble House’s Singapore branch or even the Park Hotel’s I-Bar, which chef Saha used to head, and the atmosphere would be totally different.

There are many more underrated restaurants but I’ve run out of space and a soapbox. If you know of any underrated but exciting restaurants in Bangalore or other Indian cities, I’d love to hear.

Shoba Narayan wishes she weren’t vegetarian just so she could try Kanua, another underrated Konkani restaurant.

She plans to go to The Higher Taste at the Iskcon temple which a friend described as “high-end sattvik”. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

GOURI DANGE LEARNING CURVE THINKSTOCK

A ‘normal’ child’s needs A sibling with special needs should not take away from the other child’s need for love and attention My sister has two sons. Her younger son, aged 6, has been diagnosed with severe attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, among other things. So when we go out anywhere in public, it is quite a scene at times. Anything can suddenly set him off—even just being confined to a bus seat or a restaurant table.

The older child of 10 is extremely well-behaved most times but sometimes he gets very embarrassed by his brother and shouts at him.

When he does this, all the adults around—his parents, his granny, even me, I admit, tend to shout him down and tell him that he is grown-up and must understand that his brother is not doing it deliberately. Now, I find he tends to just “zone out” when his brother acts up in a public place, and lately I notice he just concentrates on food and stuffs his face, literally, with anything that he can. I sense our approach to the older child is not right, but I am not sure what we can do.

It’s good that you have noticed the older

child’s predicament. Kids with siblings with special needs definitely have their own special needs. And these often get ignored and neglected because the parents are so totally caught up in the struggle with the other child. So many adults who grew up in similar situations have felt the burden of being the “good” one, and have had to make do with only whatever extra energy their parents may have had left.

While I am sure the family has discussed the younger child’s difficulties with the older brother, perhaps it is time to let him express his own irritation, frustration, guilt, anger, social embarrassment, fears and jealousy with his parents or with you. Kids in his situation who don’t get an outlet for their feelings may grow up denying their emotions—your description of him “zoning out” points to this possibility.

This is bound to affect his relationships with others, including the sibling with the disability—all this makes him vulnerable to depression.

And this can manifest itself in different ways. Finding an outlet for his feelings

via eating disorders or other inappropriate ways is a possibility, and you say that this child is already showing signs. Healthy kids who don’t get enough attention may end up having discipline issues because, sadly, they learn that acting out is one way to get noticed.

Your family needs to find ways to acknowledge the older child’s needs—including accepting that for him his younger brother’s public meltdowns are extremely distressing.

Asking him to “deal with it” all the time is not fair and not possible. You could consider taking him out to places or for activities where the younger sibling is not taken. I understand that everyone’s extra time and energy is currently going into the special needs child; however, you could volunteer to take him out or you could volunteer to look after the other child while the parents go out or spend some joyous uninterrupted time with the older son.

Some parents, understandably, are determined to always include a special needs child in all family outings, functions, activities—in their efforts to make him a completely included member of the family. However, this ends up being unfair to the other child at times. It is advisable that some programmes should be planned without

Don’t ignore: Children who have siblings with special needs need time with parents. the special needs child. This would involve planning ahead, to leave the special needs child in the care of someone dependable. It’s important to have this, else the older child may suffer the situation that many do—which is that his parents can never or rarely attend his sports day or concert or match or any of his “high-point” moments.

When the special needs child misbehaves directly with the sibling—grabbing toys, destroying things, hitting, among other things—he or she is more often than not asked by parents to understand and accommodate. The family also needs to work on setting (as far as possible, in the situation) some rules for the special needs child in his behaviour towards his sibling. While this may not be followed always, the other

child at least feels that there are some ground rules, in your mind at least, that protect him from the troubled/troublesome brother.

Do also see to it that the healthy child gets to pursue his interests and studies at his own pace, and is not stuck with striving to excel mainly to compensate for what the special needs child cannot achieve.

Be there in a listening and deeply empathetic way for your nephew, as well as his parents, and you will have done a lot for the situation.

Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

COLUMNS L5

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

The human face of our national idols

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

HINDUSTAN TIMES

ndians revere their leaders, but don’t read them. This comes naturally to a culture that worships physical forms, rather than ideas. But it means that the leader remains unexamined. Here are some facts about great people that we would rather not know.

In his book A Contemporary’s Estimate, Walter Crocker says Nehru would push and slap the people who got too close to him in public, as Indians tend to do.

Nehru was irritable, but also bombastic and verbose, making too many speeches (often three a day) and spending too much time lecturing the West. He was careless with his time, once giving 3 hours to a high school delegation from Australia, while his ministers waited.

Crocker, who served in Delhi as Australia’s ambassador, thought Nehru “had no sympathy for Gandhi’s religion, or for religiousness at all”. But there is a photograph in Mushirul Hasan’s The Nehrus that shows Jawaharlal entering the Ganga wearing a janoi, the Brahmin’s sacred thread.

The thread looks new, however, and it’s not visible in two other photographs of him bare-chested, one in swimming trunks and the other doing shirshasan.

Nehru’s annexation of Goa was illegal, though only Rajagopalachari and Jayaprakash Narayan opposed it.

Crocker writes what many of us will not believe: If Portugal had insisted on a plebiscite, Goans would have preferred Portuguese rule to Indian.

Though Nehru did poorly at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crocker says he was instinctively brilliant, politely demolishing a Nobel physics laureate’s argument once.

Unlike urban Indians, Nehru could identify trees and kept a zoo in his house, including three tigers. He allowed a slum to slowly come up right in front of the prime minister’s house, sympathizing with its occupants rather than turning the police on them. Such things reveal the man.

Indians cannot write biographies, and Crocker’s is the finest book on Nehru even though as a foreigner he cannot penetrate the culture. He thinks “lal” in Jawaharlal stood for the colour red.

We think of Indira Gandhi as being tough (Vajpayee called her Ma Durga after she partitioned Pakistan). But Richard Attenborough wrote that one evening as they were talking, she spoke of how ungovernable India was, and broke down in tears. Though this happened during the making of his movie, Attenborough tells us this not in his 1982 book, In Search of Gandhi, but his 2008 autobiography Entirely up to You, Darling.

The Nehru-Gandhis were sophisticated because they were wealthy, but they were intellectually mediocre. In her biography, Indira, Katherine Frank revealed that Indira failed at Oxford’s Somerville College.

She couldn’t clear Latin twice though she had crammed six months for it. She was advised to take up a diploma instead of a degree, but she dropped out of college at 22.

Like Nehru, Rajiv went to Trinity where, according to Dhiren Bhagat’s The Contemporary Conservative, he couldn’t pass his mechanical science degree, failing after three years. Sanjay Gandhi could not even pass high school, dropping out to become a mechanic. After Sanjay died, his wife Maneka launched a party with the grand name Sanjay Vichar Manch.

What sort of thoughts could a half-literate 34-year-old have had?

Difficult to say.

This lack of a proper education also extended to barristers Jinnah (Lincoln’s Inn) and Gandhi (Inner Temple).

Gandhi wrote in The Story of My Experiments with Truth that after he successfully crammed his Latin, he was required only to attend a few college

dinners to pass. V.S. Naipaul noticed that the book Gandhi was reading during the Quit India movement, in 1942, was How Green was My Valley.

As a student, Gandhi wanted to engage the West and tried to learn the violin and to dance, before giving up and finding his identity. One very strong influence on him was the 25-year-old Jain merchant Rajchandra, about whom little is known, but whom Gandhi adored.

We know Gandhi was kicked out of first class in a South African train, but in his autobiography he writes of a second time he went first class, this time wearing his morning coat and full suit (he wasn’t kicked out). In Ved Mehta’s excellent book Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, we learn that Gandhi allowed people to enter his toilet and chat with him while he was defecating.

Jinnah did not write a book, but he mentioned the ones he read. His favourite book was The Count of Monte Cristo and later, in his “Muslim” phase, he liked a pedestrian biography of Ataturk by H.C. Armstrong called Grey Wolf.

In his book Roses in December, M.C. Chagla revealed that Jinnah ate pork, while Friday namaz in south Bombay’s masjids in 1945-46 would end with shouts of “Pakistan zindabad!” and “Jinnah zindabad!”

The great martial hero of the independence movement was Subhas Chandra Bose. R.M. Kasliwal, the Indian National Army’s (INA’s) medical officer, wrote The Impact of Netaji and INA on India’s Independence. Though he is devoted to his boss, the Bose he describes is incompetent and petty.

Here’s an example: “One day he sent for me in his office at the Supreme Headquarters. I entered his room and saluted him and then he started talking to me about some important medical matters when he suddenly moved his left hand at which

Each to his own: (clockwise from above) Jawaharlal Nehru was irritable, and would push away people who got too close to him in public; Rajiv Gandhi could not pass his degree course after 3 years; and Bose showed his military zeal mainly in inspecting parades.

I thought that he was asking me to take a seat and so I sat in a chair in front of his table and had about 15 minutes of conversation with him and after this I saluted him and returned to my office.

In a few minutes General Bhosle came to my office and told me that Netaji was very annoyed with me because I had occupied a seat in his office without permission.”

Dr Kasliwal writes Bose had the military mind of Shivaji, the catholicity of Akbar and the intellectual genius of Vivekananda.

But actually Bose knew little about how to manage an army and the INA collapsed immediately when the Japanese withdrew air support. Dr Kasliwal’s descriptions of how this happened are almost comic, so poorly run was the INA, raised from soldiers who had surrendered to the Japanese.

Netaji’s interest, going by this book, was mainly in inspecting parades.

Another Bengali hero who deserves closer examination is Vivekananda.

When I first read the story of Vivekananda at Chicago, I couldn’t understand it.

Why was the line “sisters and brothers of America” special? It was only “bhaiyon aur behnon” in English.

How could that excite people enough, as the book claimed it did, to throw themselves at the man who said it? The book did not say. It didn’t sink in that their applause, and it can have been little more than that, was the reaction of a culture unaccustomed to sentiment in public speaking. Further probing revealed that the Parliament of Religions was a body of kooks, and not the equivalent of a religious United Nations that we think it was.

In his 20s, Vivekananda learnt mysticism under Ramakrishna at Belur Math. Ma Sarada’s shrine there has a board outside. It says she encouraged her husband Ramakrishna and others to put her chappals on their head.

In 1890, aged 27, Vivekananda travelled around India for a year. “He began to assume various names in order to conceal his identity that he might be swallowed up in the immensity of India,” according to Advaita Ashrama’s biography. But this isn’t true. Romain Rolland wrote: “Like a diver he plunged into the Ocean of India and the Ocean of India covered his tracks. Among its flotsam and jetsam he was nothing more than one nameless sannyasin in saffron among a thousand others.” This is even less true.

Vivekananda had no wish to be anonymous. He lived with nobility during this time, spending weeks at the palace of Maharaja Ajit Singh of Khetri, and then with Chamaraja Wodeyar, maharaja of Mysore. He was close to Bhaskara Setupati, Raja of Ramnad, who funded Vivekananda’s visit to

Chicago. Common people did not interest him, and he spent his time with wealthy European socialites, urging them to give up sex.

Vivekananda left for America in 1893, returning only in 1897. Coming from a nation that was 95% illiterate, whose people knew little about their history or culture before the British and Germans educated them, he lectured the West on the greatness of India. Should he not have addressed Indians instead? He left again for America and Europe in 1899, returning at the end of 1900, a few months before he died in 1902.

One aspect of Vivekananda that shines through in his books is his vanity. He loved having himself photographed, preferably posing in studios. “Vivekananda as a wandering monk” reads a caption of him with a stage backdrop painted behind him.

This is in Vivekananda: A Biography in Pictures. There are endless pictures of him playing holy man in full costume (like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar) around the world, always posing: pensive, meditating, with his hand stuck in his robe, like Napoleon, and that famous cross-armed posture.

He complains (Letters of Swami Vivekananda) on returning from America, that Indians force him to wear a loincloth and that has given him diabetes. He does strange things, like memorizing Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Why? We do not know and it would be interesting to find out. But we are happy to worship his photographs instead.

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

L6

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

Insider

HOMES HOMES

Partition in the parlour PHOTOGRAPHS

B Y P RIYA R AMANI priya.r@livemint.com

M

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Past life: (clockwise from top) The library is a favourite with Pakistani diplomats; the house is set amid 3 acres of greenery; this central hexagon was Jinnah’s living room—the details on the balustrade are original; so is the staircase; and Hiensch (the marble fireplace is in the background).

History was created at Delhi venues such as this one.

Now this house is a diplomatic residence

······························· any Pakistani visitors like to photograph themselves standing in front of the original fireplace, striking that identical pose, hands in exactly the same position as one of the house’s first dapper owners, all those decades ago.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Mumbai house may be the multimillion-dollar attraction in a two-decade-old controversy between India, Pakistan and industrialist Nusli Wadia, but his other house in Delhi has calmly hosted 16 Dutch ambassadors since The Netherlands bought it for Rs5 lakh in 1951. Ironic, since Jinnah’s Delhi residence, which he bought in 1938 to be closer to the political action, is where it all happened.

It was at venues such as the Viceregal Palace (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) and the wood-panelled

BY

library of Jinnah’s grand residence on 10, Aurangzeb Road that the nuts and bolts of the future of India were hammered out by men such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.

These failed talks eventually resulted in Partition. It was here that Jinnah held his last press conference before he left one newly formed country for another.

It’s definitely the most historic house Bob Hiensch, the current Dutch ambassador and the house’s 16th Dutch tenant, has ever lived in. Tracking the recent Indo-Pak talks from his home undoubtedly gave them a “special dimension”, says Hiensch, who is acutely aware that the walls of his library were witness

to the original precursor of these talks 63 years ago.

“Pakistan was born in that corner,” says Hiensch, pointing to old images that show where Jinnah usually sat in the library. Of course the Dutch inherited the house emptied of all its furniture and books—the library’s current inhabitants are drawn from Hiensch’s diplomatic stints in Israel, New York, Hong Kong, Paris and Kinshasa. Luckily, the desk he bought in Hong Kong in the 1980s and the restored leather armchairs he picked out in New York look like they could have been selected

by Jinnah himself. The room’s antique ceiling fan with little crescent designs too was installed by one of Hiensch’s predecessors, and not Jinnah.

Hiensch says the larger-than-life

dimensions of the structure indicate that it was a model house designed to encourage citizens to invest in New Delhi. The foundation stone was laid in March 1920 by Edwin Lutyens, the original architect of the new Imperial capital, though the house itself was built by his contemporary F.B. Blomfield.

“The house reflects the city

plan of New Delhi,” says Hiensch, pointing out that the design of the central hexagonal hall around which the ground floor sprawls is mirrored on Delhi’s map where often three intersecting roads converge at a roundabout. “That’s the concept of the house too.

From an architectural point of view, it’s very special,” he says.

The first floor has three bedrooms and five bathrooms.

Despite several renovations— the bathrooms are redone every 20 years, central air conditioning was installed, and an airy oval drawing room was added in the 1950s—the house remains pretty much the way Jinnah and his sister Fatima left it. Before leaving for Karachi, he sold it to his friend Ramkrishna Dalmia who briefly turned it into the head office for the anti-cow slaughter movement.

Dalmia was a vocal critic of Nehru; in 2009 his daughter Neelima Dalmia Adhar wrote a letter to The Indian Express clarifying that after Partition, when her father got wind of the government’s plan to requisition the property, he sold it to the Dutch.

Ask Hiensch if he knows more about Jinnah because he lives in this house, and he replies that he definitely feels a connection. He is often gifted Jinnah books and agrees with former foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s analysis of Jinnah as a complex, secular leader.

“Jinnah is much more complicated than to be dismissed as antiIndia,” he says. One mystery he hasn’t yet solved though: Which was Jinnah’s bedroom?

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

L7

Style RETAIL THERAPY

Mirari: A necklace and earrings set. The spinel beads necklace has a detachable gold pendant with old­cut diamonds, rubies and emeralds. The earrings (above) have detachable spinel beads too, and can be converted into ear studs. At DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. Rs14 lakh.

The new convertibles Pendants that double up as USB drives or necklaces that can be deconstructed to form bracelets—get more from your jewellery for the price of one

De Grisogono: Detachable Bocca rings in pink gold, set with 4­carat white diamonds and 4­carat brown diamonds. Available on order at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. Rs25 lakh.

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

····························

Cartier: Panther decor rhodium­plated white gold and diamond bracelet, with emerald eyes and onyx nose and sliding cover for the watch. At DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. Rs6.5 crore.

Tanishq: These diamonds and pink tourmalines in white gold from the Dvaita collection can be worn as a choker and bracelet. At all Tanishq stores, Rs5.7 lakh.

Anuradha Chhabra: White gold ring with diamonds, can be opened into a bracelet.

At Jewels by Anu, S­183, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi, Rs50,000.

Zoya by Tanishq: Choker from the Espania collection with citrine and diamonds, comes with detachable necklace ends and can be worn as a bracelet. At Warden Road, Mumbai, approx. Rs4 lakh.

Ratika Haksar: Gold­plated silver ring encrusted with white zircons. A small loop at the back allows the chain to pass through and the flexible ring bends when worn as a pendant. At First floor, 1st Main Road, Seethammall Extension, Teynampet, Chennai, Rs3,500.

Swarovski: Tortoise ‘Chloe’ plastic pendant with crystals and USB, with 4GB storage capacity. At all Swarovski stores, August onwards, Rs6,000.

Jaeger LeCoultre: Joaillerie 101 Feuille, bracelet set with baguette­cut diamonds with Calibre 101, a watch with miniature mechanical movement and a leaf­shaped cover that can be raised to reveal the watch.

At Rose salon, Breach Candy, Mumbai, approx. Rs1.27 crore.

Poonam Soni: Falcon from the multi­purpose collection, with champagne­coloured diamonds, white diamonds on the wings of the bird, and hand­painted face. The tail of the bird is movable and the piece can be used as a broach, pendant and lariat. At Altamount Road, Mumbai, Rs3 lakh onwards.

L8

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

Business Lounge OLIVIER BERNHEIM

The unstoppable Weil of time When the Raymond Weil CEO is not dealing with a human resources crunch, he’s looking at China and India

B Y V EENA V ENUGOPAL veena.v@livemint.com

···························· hat brings you to India? I ask as a conversation starter. “I came to meet you,” exclaims Olivier Bernheim, president and CEO, Raymond Weil watches. It sounds rehearsed, like the 56-year-old had been telling people that all day, but he looks charming when he says it nevertheless.

Diminutive and trim, Bernheim is dressed in a black suit, jacket hanging off the back of his chair in a suite at Delhi’s Sheraton hotel. I notice he’s wearing two watches—one on each wrist. “When I am in India, it is easier because of the half an hour in the (four-and-ahalf-hour) time difference between Europe and here,” he says. That’s hard to believe, Bernheim is too astute to let 30 minutes throw him off any kind of calculation.

As it turns out, Bernheim is here on an important mission.

His company, the one started by and named after his fatherin-law, is setting up its fully owned Indian subsidiary. It is a demonstration of how key the Indian luxury watch buyer is to Raymond Weil, especially after the global economic shake-up of the last couple of years.

“My father-in-law was the first Swiss watchmaker to start selling in India, we have been available here since the early 1980s. But the market was quite stagnant for at least two decades. It started growing a few years ago, but the last two years have been very exciting. It looks like it will be an unending story here,” he says.

Bernheim’s optimism is well founded. The first fully owned store had opened in Delhi’s Connaught Place earlier in the day and the sixth customer ended up buying the most expensive watch in the store

W

(Rs7.8 lakh). “I wouldn’t have guessed that we would sell the watch on the first day. But I am not really surprised, there is so much money in India,” he says.

Though Bernheim, who has degrees in law and business management, has been working for Raymond Weil for 28 years (“only two other Swiss watch CEOs have that kind of experience”), he didn’t start his career selling luxury timekeepers. “Before all this I was working in Unilever, selling yogurt and margarine in Paris. One day, my boss offered me another position within the company and at the same time, my father-in-law asked if I would be interested in working for his company,” he says.

B e rnh e im wa s ce rt ai n he didn’t want to live in Paris; he was thinking of moving to Strasbourg, where he was born.

“But when this offer came to join the family business, I thought Geneva is heaven. Let’s move there,” he says.

He did not face too many difficulties in the switch. “My father-in-law was an exceptional person to work with. My wife always says I am the son he did not have. I consider him my second father, he thought of me as his son. So that made it easy.

Also, I am passionate about marketing and selling to end consumers. Whether you are selling margarine or watches, it’s nearly the same—you need to understand who your consumer is and you need to be knowledgeable,” he says.

At the time, family owned Swiss watchmakers were going through a metamorphosis. Several families with long watchmaking histories and valuable brand names decided to sell their companies. But Raymond Weil persisted. Partly because the company does not make its

I don’t think one can expect much from the old continent. It doesn’t produce anything any more.

own movements (the mechanism that makes the needles in the watch move), a process that involves investing a lot of money over several years. “We would rather use existing standard movements. Investing in a new movement is not feasible in terms of price. When you are BMW, you cannot suddenly become Ferrari,” he says.

The industry is still recovering from the next shake-up, the global economic slowdown of 2008. Bernheim says Raymond Weil is cushioned since it has a wide global reach, even though the US is a large market. “Last year, we did not sell as much as we wished in the US. But China picked up quickly. This year, (the) US has recovered. Dubai is probably affected for a longer time because it does not have a big local market,” he says.

Bernheim is not optimistic about the prospects of a European recovery though. “I don’t think one can expect much from the old continent. It does not produce anything any more. There is no wealth being created,” he says.

Slumping demand aside, the immediate challenge Swiss watchmakers face is a human resources issue. There simply aren’t many watch assemblers any more. “The whole process is done by hand and it’s getting difficult finding people who have the skills for this job,” he says.

When he’s not pondering over such issues, Bernheim can be found outdoors skiing, horseback riding and gardening. In the evenings, he attends concerts and operas.

His wife, Diana, is a professional pianist, and he himself is a music aficionado—partial to the compositions of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert. “I don’t listen to any of the modern composers. I stopped with Wagner in 1880,” he says.

But he does listen to Rolling Stones and Jimmy Hendrix. “I even used to have the Hendrix hair,” he says.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to ponder how this brisk businessman in front of me would pull off the Hendrix look. The watch on his right hand indicated it was time for me to leave.

IN PARENTHESIS Bernheim says you must check the design and ergonomics of a watch first. Then look at quality, affordability and after­sales service. “The style is crucial,” he says, “it’s something you have on your skin.” So the style has to be something you love.

Ergonomics is the way the watch fits your wrist. You should only buy a watch that you can wear without feeling you have a watch on. Put it on in the showroom and wear it for some time. If you feel the watch is weighing you down and you are constantly feeling it, then it’s not ergonomically right. After you have made these two decisions, you can look at the brand name, price and service. “Take your time,” Bernheim says, “a watch is something you sleep, shower and die with.”

The salesman: There’s little difference between selling margarine and selling luxury watches if you have the passion for it, says Bernheim.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

L9

Eat/Drink OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

The RIP mantra: roast in peace PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SAMAR HALARNKAR

How to enjoy the party with a drink in your hand and a bird in the oven

I

f you invite people over frequently, you clearly enjoy the party as much as your friends do.

I do.

If you enjoy the party and cook the food, you clearly have some secrets that you would like to share.

I do.

My great—and shameful— secret is roast chicken.

It’s shameful because I consider chicken north-Indian vegetarian comfort food, like paneer. The broiler in Delhi is so ubiquitous, and so lacking in flavour (though not as bad as the giant chickens they sell in the US supermarkets) that I refuse to consider it proper non-vegetarian food.

Though I like to fuss over roast duck, pork or leg of lamb when I am so inclined, I serve chicken at parties because: (a) Most people stick to chicken in this era of healthy eating and (b) It’s the easiest meat to handle when you’re having fun.

I have previously written in this column a pretty intricate recipe for roast chicken that involves much pre-roasting and grinding of spices (available on my blog). But I’ve realized there is watch-me-roast chicken and there is forget-me-as-I-roast chicken.

Sometimes, I don’t want to

Bird basics: (above) To get a rich, golden­brown colour, increase the heat and keep basting regularly; forget­ me­as­I­roast chicken.

Five­spice slow­roast chicken Serves 4-5

swelter in the kitchen while everyone’s having fun outside.

At the same time, I don’t want anyone else sharing the duties of my little kingdom, so I’ve learned to evolve recipes that let me rule from the outside.

The key is to use few spices, simple flavours and—most important—a low oven temperature and a casserole with a cover.

The low temperature allows the chicken to roast in peace without burning while you enjoy your cigar and rum, or whatever your poison. The covered casserole gets some juices flowing and allows the chicken to baste itself without drying out.

You do still need to come in

perhaps every 45 minutes and shake up the casserole so that the juices lap the chicken properly, but that’s a small effort.

You can keep the casserole closed and serve the chicken that way, but if you like that golden, roasted look, then you may have to step up the heat for the last 30 minutes and do some old-fashioned watching and basting every 10 minutes.

Last week, when my parents were due from the airport, I popped a chicken—I use full legs cut into three—into the oven at low temperature and even dropped in at a friend’s house in the neighbourhood for an hour.

Fortified by a gin-and-tonic

and some pleasant conversation, I strolled back and peered into the oven. The bird was browning slowly and god was in her heaven. After a shower, all was still well.

Only after 2 hours did I open up the casserole, step up the heat and spend some time creating a golden-brown colour.

I retained much of the liquid because my father loves it.

I’ll say this for the humble broiler chicken: It’s very versatile, and the variations when you pop it into an oven are endless. I’ve used Chinese five-spice powder as the base for the recipe below, but you can use any combination of spices.

Don’t let you imagination limit you. RIP.

Ingredients 1kg chicken, cut into pieces 1 tbsp ginger-garlic or garlic paste 6 tsp Chinese five-spice powder (or garam masala or any combination of spices) 2 tsp chilli powder (you can use any chilli powder; I often use New Mexico chipotle powder, when I have it; this time I used a Konkan fish masala!)

Salt Method Marinate the chicken with all the ingredients for at least 1 hour.

Place in a casserole with a fitting lid. If you don’t have a casserole, spread chicken in an oven tray and wrap with aluminium foil.

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes before putting in the chicken.

Retain same temperature, and let it roast undisturbed for at least

B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

···························· n April, a little-known Indian dish suddenly found itself in the global haute cuisine spotlight. The simplicity of the masor tenga (a sweet and sour stew of fish and vegetables), a staple of Assamese kitchens, had won over the legendary British chef Gordon Ramsay and made it to his list of 100 favourite recipes, aired

by BBC’s Channel 4 as Gordon’s Great Escape. However, if adventurous Delhiites wanted a taste of the tenga, the only option would have been to wrangle an invite from an Assamese friend or settle for a second-rate experience at the Assam stall at Dilli Haat.

Jakoi promises to rectify that.

The Assamese restaurant, which opened at Assam Bhavan in Chanakyapuri recently, brings to the Capital a flavour that has been missing from the dining scene in Indian metros for far too long.

Unlike the famous eateries at

I

the other Bhavans, Jakoi is not a canteen, but a restaurant. However, the food served here is as traditional as at the no-frills Andhra or Tamil Nadu Bhavans.

S.K. Bezbaruah, the managing director of Gateway Paradise (Assam) Pvt. Ltd that runs Jakoi, and his wife Paparee have designed the menu based on his mother’s recipes. The couple selected the dishes keeping in mind north Indian tastes, but there is, thankfully, no attempt to jazz up or tamper with the traditional recipes to make them suitable for different kinds of palates.

Assamese cuisine depends on subtlety rather than complexity for effect and spices are used sparingly. Even in spicy dishes, the flavours rarely overwhelm and always play second fiddle to the main ingredients—the vegetables or the meat.

With a name such as “jakoi”— the word refers to a basketshaped bamboo device used to catch fish in shallow waters— fish, predictably, play the starring role: There are tengas, sorsoris (fish in mustard gravies), fries and curries. This section of the menu is the most extensive, with the choicest picks being the Gooseberry Fish Curry (Rs120), Til Maas (fish in sesame gravy), Sital Fry (Rs180) and Kothalguti

Masor Tenga (Rs165).

The other meats that make up the non-vegetarian section are chicken, duck and pigeon. Mutton is missing, but the unusual chicken preparations (Chicken in Bamboo Hollow, Rs250, or Chicken with Bamboo Shoot, Rs270) more than make up for the absence. Then there are the pigeon and duck curries (Rs200 and Rs250, respectively), two meats rarely found on menus at Indian cuisine restaurants.

The pigeon curry, a spicy, dry preparation available a la carte or as part of the Parampara thali (served in bellmetal crockery), is an acquired taste. The meat is chewy, rather unlike chicken and more like mutton in its texture.

The vegetarian section, though not as extensive, also includes quite a few options unfamiliar to the cosmopolitan palate. The fritters made of pumpkin flowers, considered a delicacy, and dried xiuli flowers, pitikas or mashed

This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is editor-at-large, Hindustan Times.

Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

PHOTOGRAPHS

Brahmaputra banquet A new Assamese restaurant adds a missing flavour to Delhi’s plate

an hour. As you roast more often, you will get a hang of how long.

You will find juices collecting in the casserole. Shake the casserole so the juices lap the chicken. Use oven mitts and be very careful. If you are not used to doing this, remove the casserole, open the lid and use a long-handled spoon to scoop up the liquid and pour over the chicken. Put the chicken back in the oven for another 45 minutes to an hour before basting again. It will be ready to serve. However, if you want to reduce the liquid and make the chicken a rich golden-brown, increase heat to 200 degrees Celsius. Baste every 10 minutes until chicken is golden-brown.

Finally, garnish with chopped parsley or coriander.

Something fishy: (above) Jakoi opened at Assam Bhavan last month; and the Parampara thali. thali for Rs200, and the vegetarian one, Rs180.

Kothalguti­Masor Tenga (Jackfruit seed and fish stew)

vegetables, plantain flowers cooked with chickpea and kharoli (a paste of mustard and tamarind) provide an interesting introduction to the cuisine of the Brahmaputra valley.

The Parampara thali is for Rs350, the regular non-vegetarian

Ingredients 250g rohu (or any other carp), cut into large chunks or fillets 20 kothalguti (seeds of jackfruit) 1 lime 1 tsp turmeric 50ml oil 500ml water 2 green chillies, slit lengthwise K tsp sugar

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Salt to taste Method Wash and clean the fish. Rub a little salt and turmeric into the fish and set aside.

Peel the jackfruit seeds and boil them till al dente.

Heat the oil in a pan and add sugar. Put in the marinated fish and fry for a couple of minutes on each side till golden brown. Add 500ml water and put in the boiled seeds. Add salt and turmeric, bring to a boil and simmer for 3-4 minutes.

Squeeze in the juice of one lime, put in the chillies and let it cook for a couple of minutes more.

L10 COVER

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PROFILE

AAMIR KHAN:

THE BOX­

ECONO He understands what Indians want to pay for at the ticket counter and why, but not the stock market. Ahead of the release of Aamir Khan Productions’ next film ‘Peepli Live’, we met the producer and genius promoter who some consider to be an incorrigible ‘control freak’ B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

································· kay, there’s one thing that unsettles Aamir Khan. The stock market. “The stock market? No!” he exclaimed, and looked nonplussed when I asked him if he followed market trends.

Leaning forward on the couch he was sitting on, he explained why, without choosing his words as he usually does: “I have no idea how it works. I have tried to understand it. When you say somebody is worth 3,000 crore, I’d like to think he has Rs3,000 crore. I am corrected, I’m told his shares and investments add up to that much. So then, if he sells everything, will he have that much? But no, if he sells them, his worth will immediately fall. So what does he actually have and why is he worth 3,000 crore? The market is all fantasy and illusion, you believe me.”

Khan’s public persona is crafted cool.

He has a disarming candour, the kind which, for the short while you are sitting next to him, strips him of star trappings.

He measures his words, but not in an obvious way—like all stars, he wants to be perceived as a good person or an interesting person. His sense of humour comes across as self-deprecating. He can also be a natural mimic. And unlike many stars, actors even, he looks at you intently, and listens to every word you say.

Khan has been acting for 26 years (Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, 1988, was his first commercial success). He has chosen mostly run-of-the-mill roles, with big directors and producers.

In Ghajini, inspired by Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Khan tried to break the mould. But his fullbodied, full-mouthed and ape-ish performance of an amnesiac wasn’t the stuff

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of bold, acting genius.

Khan’s genius is his instinctual un standing of the box office—what Ind pay for at the ticket counter, and why knows how to promote talent, wh includes all the films he is associated in any way. For 3 Idiots, the big prom ional idea was “the vanishing act”— the old Indian Everyman with buck t is like Rancho, people later realized disguise, Khan travelled to small to and villages and talked to people, kept them guessing. Looking back says the lesson he learnt from this c mercial record-breaker is, “Don’t English words in a film’s title unless i commonly used one. Perhaps 3 Id would have reached more people if it a Hindi title.” He must be hard to sat This Khan understands economics simple way, the way a small trader wo Someone gives him a hundred buck invest in something his way, he w that person to get at least Rs500 bac want all those who worked with me to their money and the man who put in money should get double, if not times more.” Incidentally, trade ana estimate Aamir Khan’s net wort around Rs60 crore, below the Rs300 c estimate for Shah Rukh Khan. So h not the richest star of Mumbai’s industry; but he is the star with the m commercial hits.

In the years since 2005, sound, fool proof economics has eluded the film industry. Khans, Kapoors and Kumars, like kids in a candy store, got the crores they fancied. Acquisitions, not production, became de rigueur for corporate houses, with what seemed like inexhaustible funds. But in the past three years, the economic slowdown deepened the dark hole of flops. The total approximate loss the industry has suffered in the last five years, according to trade analysts, runs to a couple of thousand crores.

But the box-office economist got results. The four films starring Khan or produced by him (Ghajini, Taare Zameen Par, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na and 3 Idiots) fetched a sum close to Rs500 crore at the box office.

I met Khan at his office.

Aamir Khan Productions (AKP), in the western suburb of Khar, is based out of a regular Mumbai 2BHK with tile floors and low ceilings converted into an office. It doesn’t have the air of a producer’s office—the over-

NUMBERS GAME

Star seller: Khan says he has always had a sharp sense of marketing, but has put it to use only recently.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Lagaan (2001)

Taare Zameen P

Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker Budget: Rs25 crore Box­office collection: Rs113 crore

Directed by Aamir K Budget: Rs12 cror Box­office collection

COVER L11

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FACTORY MADE

OX­OFFICE

Other production houses that are encouraging variety, new ideas and commercial viability

Dharma Productions

NOMIST

ng genius. nius is his instinctual underhe box office—what Indians ticket counter, and why. He to promote talent, which he films he is associated with For 3 Idiots, the big promotas “the vanishing act”—oh, n Everyman with buck teeth ho, people later realized. In an travelled to small towns and talked to people, and uessing. Looking back, he on he learnt from this comord-breaker is, “Don’t use s in a film’s title unless it’s a used one. Perhaps 3 Idiots eached more people if it was He must be hard to satisfy. understands economics the he way a small trader would. es him a hundred bucks to mething his way, he wants o get at least Rs500 back. “I e who worked with me to get and the man who put in his uld get double, if not five Incidentally, trade analysts amir Khan’s net worth at crore, below the Rs300 crore Shah Rukh Khan. So he is est star of Mumbai’s film he is the star with the most hits. s since 2005, sound, foolmics has eluded the Khans, Kapoors and kids in a candy store, s they fancied. Acquiroduction, became de orporate houses, with ed like inexhaustible n the past three years, ic slowdown deepk hole of flops. The mate loss the indusred in the last five ding to trade anaa couple of thou-

sized posters, for example, are missing.

The staff go about their business quietly and purposefully. Black and white framed production stills of Lagaan hang on some walls; wooden bookshelves hang on some (I spotted Psycho by Janet Leigh, Motion Picture Agreements by Alexander Lindley, An Illustrated History of Guns and Small Arms and The Godfather Book

by Peter Cowie). Khan’s metaphors for the kind of production house AKP is: “a cottage industry” where, he has repeatedly told the media, “one sari is on a loom at a time”.

He did not arrive with an entourage, but with one attendant who seemed to have everything Khan would ask for, including the puff he required for his under-eyes. The tall, docile man sent a driver home for dark-coloured shirts for the shoot, and also helped with the shoot.

“Do you like the promos?” Khan asked me. “I thought I’ll make fun of myself.”

Peepli Live is made with a budget of Rs10 crore. It is a satire about farmers in Peepli, a fictional village—their predicaments and helplessness. A farmer threatens to kill himself and the media converges on Peepli to devour the story. “It is not about farmers’ suicides as it has been reported. It is about any farmer in India whose only option for sustenance is moving to the city.

Why would they not want to Village truth: Omkar Das Manikpuri, an actor from Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, plays the lead role in Peepli Live.

x-office economist he four films starproduced by him are Zameen Par, a Jaane Na and 3 d a sum close to at the box office. han at his office.

Productions (AKP), in uburb of Khar, is based ular Mumbai 2BHK with d low ceilings converted . It doesn’t have the air er’s office—the over-

GAME

live in the village where they are born? It’s a comedy about that,” Khan clarifies.

The star of the promotional videos, already on air, is Khan himself. Characters from the film—a news reporter, an old lady and others—pontificate on Khan in simulated candid camera shots. “Every film is not Lagaan, what does he think he is doing?” asks the news reporter, standing in front of a stall where packets of “Aamir Khan chips” hang from ropes. An old lady lying on a charpoy is sympathetic: “Aamir Khan can definitely do it!”

Khan says he has used the story’s material to promote the film—revealing one character at a time, so that when people watch the film they already know its characters. Last month Khan addressed a press conference that previewed Peepli Live and on the same the day, he also joined Twitter (Peepli Live is following many people I know on Twitter). So far, the director and writer of the film, former journalist Anusha Rizvi, has largely avoided the media.

Khan heard from Rizvi in 2004 while he was in the middle of shooting Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey: The Rising. Rizvi wrote to him saying she had a script called The Falling and urged him to read it. He ignored her. Months later, when Rizvi disclosed that she worked for NDTV, Khan agreed to meet her and asked for an oral narration of the script. He was convinced this film would work. The shooting for Peepli Live began while 3 Idiots was on the floors. “I visited the sets once, a courtesy visit. And then saw the first cut.

It was flawless.”

Khan often takes months to decide if he likes a script. He insists on many meetings and often becomes friendly with some of the writers, but does not necessarily produce their films. Khan says he has recently employed his

brother, Faisal Khan, as the script supervisor of the company—Faisal looks at the scripts that arrive in the mail (he does not accept email scripts) and passes on the appealing manuscripts to him. Once a film’s “first cut”, or the director’s version after his or her first edit, is with him, he is the purveyor and decision maker.

That might explain why director Abhinay Deo’s Delhi Belly has been ready for months but is not, in Khan’s words, “in an advanced stage of post-production”.

Dhobi Ghat, directed by wife Kiran Rao, in which he also acts, is his next release.

For one kind of professional or artist, this is a dictatorial producer. Not for Rajkumar Hirani, who says: “I would any day have an actor who is involved and has suggestions than someone who is clueless. If I know what I am doing, an intelligent actor will respect me. Aamir is involved, but that doesn’t mean I have to take every suggestion he gives me.”

Another writer-director says: “Aamir does not interfere with the idea. The script is yours, but he has a big say in execution at the post-production stage.”

Only some people can understand Khan’s need for control.

The rumour goes that the only time Khan came to the sets of his wife’s directorial debut was when the shoot required him to be there as an actor. He plays the role of a painter who lives in a noisy, crowded neighbourhood. For some scenes, which had to be shot guerrillastyle at Mohammad Ali Road in Mumbai, Khan rented a room and stayed there so people wouldn’t see him coming out of his car every day. He says Rao is a very creative director and knew exactly what she wanted. Speculation is on—how exactly will Aamir Khan promote Kiran Rao. On the longest-running cliché about him, Khan’s own words are, “I don’t interfere with directors when they are doing their job. I never visit sets. In fact, once I was driving down Carter Road and saw a shoot in progress. I stopped to look and saw that it was my film, Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na. I said hi to Abbas (Tyrewala) and Imran and the others and carried on.

But yes, if I am part of a film in any capacity, I feel responsible to my audience and to myself, and I try to ensure that it doesn’t disappoint. So I am not a control freak…you could say quality conscious.”

He goes on to tell me why “control freak” is an overused term, used to mean many things. Some smart people don’t consider it a criticism.

Peepli Live releases in theatres on 13 August.

When Aamir Khan produces or acts in a film, the math is usually not in line with Bollywood’s BO graph The total gross collection of the last five films of Aamir Khan as an actor (Rang De Basanti, Fanaa, Taare Zameen Par, Ghajini and 3 Idiots): Rs1,100 crore (approx).

Taare Zameen Par (2007)

Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na (2008)

Peepli Live (2010)

Directed by Aamir Khan Budget: Rs12 crore Box­office collection: Rs130

Directed by Abbas Tyrewala Budget: Rs8 crore Box­office collection: Rs115

Directed by Anusha Rizvi Budget: Rs10 crore

crore

crore

The total box-office collections include collections from the sale of DVD and satellite rights.

Source: Aamir Khan Productions and BoxOfficeIndia.com

Karan Johar’s production company, founded by his father Yash Johar in 1976, is a romcom factory if you ignore two films where romance is not the pivot of the stories (Kurbaan and Wake Up Sid). The company got its first hit in 1980 with Dostana, with Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha in the lead. The Johars are hit-makers: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Dostana. Their last, I Hate Luv Storys, also did fairly well at the box office. The next scheduled release under the banner is We are Family, a remake of the Hollywood film Stepmom. A 2010 reincarnation of Yash Raj Films with technically superior skill productions, Dharma is now a launching pad for young directors.

Amitabh Bachchan Corp Amitabh Bachchan launched his own banner, Amitabh Bachchan Corp. Ltd (ABCL), in 1996, as a company that would produce big-ticket commercial films, as well as music and DVDs. Its first production, Tere Mere Sapne, bombed at the box office and after a few more unsuccessful films the company was mired in financial difficulties. In the early 2000s, Bachchan relaunched the company as Amitabh Bachchan Corp. In the last two years, the firm has entered the regional language film segment with Umesh Kulkarni’s Marathi film Vihir, and it made Paa last year with both father and son in it. The company has shifted its focus many times over the years, looking for commercial success.

Red Chillies Entertainment Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) and his wife Gauri Khan launched their banner Red Chillies Entertainment in 2002, and followed up with films such as Chalte Chalte, Paheli (a commercial failure, but India’s official entry to the Oscars), Om Shanti Om, a blockbuster, Billu and My Name is Khan (with Dharma Productions). No longer just a film production company, it has ventured into special effects with a specialized banner called Red Chillies VFX, as well as entertainment related to sports and television programming. Red Chillies has never promoted films of a certain kind. The only criterion so far: SRK has to be in it. The next, being filmed now, is Ra.One, a superhero film directed by Anubhav Sinha.

Anil Kapoor Film Company After nearly two decades as an actor, Anil Kapoor launched his banner in 2002 and its first critically successful film was My Wife’s Murder, starring Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, Nandana Sen and the actor himself. He also launched theatre director Feroz Abbas Khan’s debut feature film Gandhi, My Father, based on a play of the same name in 2007, which was received well by critics but was a commercial failure. In his next, Aisha, releasing on 6 August, his daughter Sonam Kapoor plays the lead opposite Abhay Deol, a romcom adaptation of the novel Emma. Just eight years old, Anil Kapoor Film Company is still struggling to find an identity.

Illuminati Films Actor Saif Ali Khan teamed up with the producer of Homi Adajania’s Being Cyrus to launch Illuminati Films in 2007.

Its first film Love Aaj Kal, directed by Imtiaz Ali and released in 2009, was the first major hit of the year and Khan, in a double role, had his first major star success. The banner’s second film, on the floors now, is Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod, a crime thriller that spans more than two cities, with Khan himself and his girlfriend Kareena Kapoor in the lead. Khan has often said that he has plans to introduce niche films under his banner but there have been no concrete announcements yet.

Balaji Motion Pictures After the success of Balaji Telefilms Ltd, Ekta Kapoor launched Balaji Motion Pictures in the late 1990s with a few box-office winners such as Kyaa Kool Hai Hum and Bhool Bhulaiyaa in its nascent years. The company has turned more experimental, beginning with Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha this year—it attained cult status and did well at the box office. Kapoor says she wants to encourage a variety of writing and sensibilities. The next film, which releases on 30 July, is Milan Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, based on the life of Haji Mastan—in look and music, an interesting throwback to the 1970s.

Sanjukta Sharma

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

Travel B Y N AMITA B HANDARE ······························ hen Bhutan’s queen Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck stepped on the stage earlier this year to light the inaugural lamp for the country’s first literary festival, she was not marking just the official opening of a book festival. She was marking a new step forward for Bhutan.

In Bhutan, it is oral tradition—not the written word—that links the centuries. Books are not read for pleasure; they are holy texts to be worshipped, taken out of monasteries and temples on occasion, paraded through towns as part of a shared heritage.

This festival of words signalled the new direction Bhutan is seeking, an opening up of borders both physically and in the realm of ideas. After being shut off from the world, the world’s newest democracy is saying: We are relevant not because we are a giant economy or military power, but because we stand for a unique way of life.

To travel into Bhutan, deep into the heart of a new nation with an ancient history, is to discover that uniqueness. But there’s another journey that Bhutan is making as it emerges from seclusion, walking the fine line between tradition and change.

Encircled by the Himalayas, squeezed between India and China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Bhutan has existed in lofty isolation. Guru Padmasambhava apparently first arrived here in 747 AD on the back of a flying tiger, landing on a cliff in Paro valley, where now rests the famous Tiger’s Nest Monastery. Change is felt acutely because Bhutan has hyper-compressed into 10 years what other countries have taken a hundred years to unravel. Television arrived in 1999; the first roads were built in the 1960s; and until the 1950s there was no hospital or school. Even today, Bhutan has only 12 colleges for its 634,982-strong population, 56% of which is below 24. Bhutan’s elite goes abroad to study. Tshering Tobgay, the opposition leader, has a master’s from Harvard. The Queen Mother’s daughter, Sonam, has a law degree, also from Harvard, and is her country’s first constitutional lawyer. The prime minister studied in India.

When information secretary Kinley Dorji returned from Stanford with a journalism degree, he discovered there was not a single

BHUTAN

Happiness central

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The world’s youngest democracy is on the cusp of significant change. After years of insularity, as the conflict between tradition and modernity intensifies, Bhutan seeks to rediscover itself

newspaper in Bhutan. So he started his own. Today, Kuensel is one of five newspapers which exist alongside the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS). But their competition, says Dorji, remains rumour and gossip. “This is a small country. Not only do we know who is sleeping with whom.

We also know who will be sleeping with whom.”

Bhutan is determined to locate its own groove. New words in Dzongkha, the national language, pop up every day, such as num du (sky boat) for airplane. Namgay Zam, a BBS producer, explains how contestants on Music Spotlight, an English language programme modelled on American Idol, used to warble bad Elton John covers. Today, many contestants write original lyrics—in Dzongkha. “It’s cool to use the national language,” Zam says.

Bhutan does things its own way. Mountaineering is banned and its highest mountain, Gangkhar Puensum, at 7,570m, remains the highest unclimbed peak in the world. “The mountains are the abodes of our gods,” explains Siok Sian Pek-Dorji, head of the Center for Media and Democracy. “We asked ourselves ‘Do we want to have people trampling over our sacred spaces?’ and we decided that we did not.”

Nowhere is the tension between tradition and modernity more amusingly palpable than in the country’s most beloved sport, archery. At the Changlimithang stadium, Paro United battle the Destroyers at opposite ends of a 140m-long range. Archery, Bhutan-style, is more circus than sport. Competing teams are encouraged to jeer each other. When an arrow comes close to the bullseye, celebratory song and dance is followed by swigs of rice whisky.

A few miles away, Bhutan’s Olympic hopefuls are training, and not finding the switch to cold modern sport easy.

“Archery is in our blood,” says Tshering Chhoden, the first Bhutanese woman to make it to the second round at Athens 2004.

Yet Bhutan has never won a medal at the Olympics. “When we play, it is to enjoy ourselves and have fun,” she says.

It is tempting to see Bhutan as a idyllic Shangri-La, a mythical place of unparalleled beauty. Seventy-two per cent of the country is covered by forest. The country’s main earnings come from the export of eco-friendly hydro-

For the love of it: Traditional Bhutanese archery is more of a circus than a cold, competitive sport, with rival teams being allowed to jeer at each other.

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power. And there is an ethereal lightness in walking through a capital city that has no traffic signals and where residents are being trained to use zebra crossings.

But there is a dark side. Years of insularity have led to a closing of identity that can verge on the xenophobic. In the 1800s, people from neighbouring Nepal moved to the mosquito-infested lowlands of southern Bhutan. These ethnic Nepalis were known as the Lhotshampa, or people of the south. In the 1980s, the Druk majority forbade the use of Nepali language in schools and enforced Druk dress codes and customs. Under new eligibility requirements for citizenship, many ethnic Nepalis were disenfranchised. And when the Lhotshampas began to organize themselves politically, leading to large-scale protests, the government retaliated by passing a decree: Those who could not prove residence since 1958 were depor t ed . Ac c o r di ng to th e United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 100,000 ethnic Nepali people lost their homes in this ethnic cleansing.

Bhutan remains selective about who it lets in. Since the arrival of the first tourists in 1974, the country has followed a highvalue/low-volume policy. By law, tourists (not Indians) must spend a minimum of $200 (around Rs9,340) each day; next year, this will go up to $250. It’s a policy that keeps out backpackers.

Lowering the minimum daily spending will make Bhutan “a cheap destination”, says Tashel Laglenpa, a tour operator. “It won’t be long before our youth adopt their (the tourists’) way of life.

Our culture, our tradition is the main binding force of our independence.”

The words culture and tradition resonate through the country. Traditional architecture is

enforced by law, and school uniforms include the traditional long skirt or kira for girls and thegho, a kimono-style costume pulled up to the knees, for boys. Yet tattoos are sported, ears are studded, hair is spiked.

New Bhutan is bursting out of Norzin Lam, Thimphu’s main street. Here you find green chillies, a staple vegetable, sold alongside potatoes, handicrafts and fabric. Here you find the country’s stock exchange, where stocks are traded on four computers twice a week. There are karaoke bars, a Planet Gym, and a T-shirt hangs in a store with a marijuana leaf drawn across it.

“Fuckin’ magic”, it reads. “You can’t be down when you are high.” Above the T-shirt rests a sign: “Long Live Our King”.

Monarchy in Bhutan follows a secular, not ecclesiastical, strain.

There is no concept of a divine right to rule. The rule of the Druk Gyalpo (dragon king) dynasty goes back a hundred years to Ugyen Wangchuck, a powerful governor of the central region who was in 1907 elected by the power elite to be the first hereditary king.

It is the fourth king, K-4 as he’s known, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who is Bhutan’s great modernizer, credited with fast-forwarding his country into the 21st century.

K-4 worked out his country’s draft constitution, travelled with it to his country’s 20 districts and explained to people concepts such as

democracy, elections, political parties and opposition.

Thirty-four years into his reign, in 2006, K-4, then 53, unexpectedly abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, a 30-year-old Oxford University graduate. He is his country’s most eligible bachelor, but the constitution demands he marry a naturalborn Bhutanese citizen. Should he reign long enough, he will have to step down at 65.

K-5 waited nearly two years for

STUART WARD/THINKSTOCK

his official coronation; no auspicious date could be found. Meanwhile, the country charged ahead with its plans for democracy, a planned process that started in the early 1980s. “Elections are not new to my country,” points out member of Parliament Sonam Kinga. People had been voting in local elections for 40 years. But to introduce the concept of a national election, it was decided to first hold mock elections. Four dummy parties were put up and each given a colour: red, yellow, blue, green. When the results of this faux election were declared, the yellow party—the colour of Buddhism and the monarchy—had won. “It was,” says Kinga, “a vote for continuity and against change.”

In the real election, the results were as non-contentious. The Druk Phuensum Tshogpa swept 45 of the 47 seats. The opposition People’s Democratic Party had two.

Happiness is Bhutan’s bestknown export. Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s concept of gross national happiness (GNH) has a complex set of indicators, including the four pillars of a happy society—sustainable economy, culture, environment and good gover-

Standing guard: Druk Wangyal chortens at Dochula Pass.

nance—and the nine domains of well-being, including health, education, living standards, community vitality and psychological well-being. To this empirical soup add 72 indicators among them feelings of selfishness and jealousy, compassion and frequency of prayer and meditation.

No one in Bhutan seems sure of when GNH became the guiding philosophy but, according to Kinley Dorji, this was the king’s retort to journalists who, during a trip to Havana in 1979, asked him about Bhutan’s gross national product. “Oh,” said the king, “in Bhutan we have a more important indicator of progress. It’s called gross national happiness.”

At the literary festival, Prime Minister Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley was at pains to explain happiness. “We are losing our humanness to become robots programmed to be productive through endless labour so as to earn to consume more and more without satisfaction.”

Because happiness is serious business here, the Centre for Bhutan Studies is carrying out a survey on GNH. With a sample size of 6,000 people across the country, the 43-page questionnaire includes such queries as: What are your main sources of stress? Have you ever seriously thought of committing suicide?

Change is never always for the better. Alcoholism is perhaps endemic in a country where even the poorest brew their own liquor. According to a health ministry survey, there are 793 bars in Thimphu. This works out to one bar for every 28 youths aged 15-24.

Drugs are the new addiction and the first rehab centre came up three years ago. Divorce rates are up, with roughly 700 cases pending in the courts. The chief causes? Alcoholism, infidelity, domestic violence, incompatibil-

Transition: (clockwise from above) In Bhutan, books are worshipped rather than read for pleasure; King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is committed to democracy; and the stunning Tiger’s Nest Monastery. ity. Crime is reportedly rising.

“One can’t walk the streets alone even at 7pm these days,” a woman shopkeeper says. But to place things in perspective, Kuensel’s crime reports recently included one “shocking” incident where schoolboys threw stones at their teacher’s house because he had enforced a haircut.

Underlying fears of change, however, lies a strong foundation of confidence. “Democracy is failing in many parts of our region,” says Kinley Dorji. “In Bhutan, despite the magnitude of change, one thing remains unchanged. It is our goal for happiness.”

For many Bhutanese there is no contradiction between tradition and change. Kunga Tenzin Dorji, 36, lead singer of the country’s best-known rock band Who’s Your Daddy, says he is concerned with globalization’s tendency to breed clone cultures.

“Our kids are learning from Internet and TV. They want McDonald’s and other brands.”

How will it be met? Can it? In Bhutan the belief persists that the Bhutanese way of life will help tide over change and keep new generations anchored to tradition. This is a happy nation, determined to remain happy.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Unless your child is totally addicted to McDonald’s, you’ll find that Bhutan is a child­friendly, safe country.

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

Books MEMOIR

The argumentative Anglo­American MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

Contrarian intellectual and polemicist Christopher Hitchens looks back at his life with his characteristic wit and zest B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· o see Christopher Hitchens in the full flow of an argument is a spellbinding experience. The first time I saw this, at a large hall in London, five academics and writers with politically correct opinions were insisting that it was wrong to attack Iraq.

They were so convinced of their views, combining emotion, pragmatism, the law, and realpolitik, that they simply did not see the compelling moral and legal case Hitchens developed. The lopsided majority against him did not bother him then; the overwhelmingly hostile audience didn’t faze him either. With his booming voice, eloquence, wit, erudition and command of facts and references, he held his own. The audience thought it won—unless you asked them privately what they really thought.

The other time was at Politics and Prose, a bookshop in Washington, DC, where Hitchens was talking about his book god is Not Great, the “g” in god deliberately not capitalized. A well-groomed man in white shirt and khaki trousers with neatly combed hair got up to challenge him, saying Hitchens’ criticism of scriptures was wrong. Hitchens relished the moment: He correctly guessed the questioner was a Mormon—and then he cited, chapter and verse from the book the Mormon held dear—and told him that if he were to be true to his beliefs, he’d have to believe in slavery.

As command performances go in the battle between atheists and believers, most people turn to the episode from the second season of The West Wing, when President Bartlet demolishes a talk show host by citing Bible scriptures that show the inherently discriminatory and cruel aspects of the faith.

That was fiction; I’ve seen the real thing.

Hitchens’ long-time friend Ian McEwan is right: “If Hitchens didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to invent him,” he says in the blurb attributed to him at the back of god is Not Great. This polymath man of letters, the Orwell of our times,

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Hitch­22: Atlantic Books, 424 pages, Rs599.

Iconoclast: Hitchens made news after 9/11 for his pro­America views on the war on Iraq. faces off challengers with consummate ease. To the 10 books, four pamphlets, and four collections of essays he has published, Hitchens has now added a memoir, Hitch-22, in which he recounts the engrossing story of his life with verve and passion.

Hitchens tells the fascinating intellectual journey of a young boy, strongly influenced by his mother who he deeply loved. In the moving chapter, Yvonne, he describes her as “she was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes”. The memory of her tragic death (she took her life) has haunted him. She was “much less British than my father but wanted above all for me to be an English gentleman. You, dear reader, be the judge of how well that worked out.” But he has followed her wish; he has lived his life well, challenging dogmas and skewering charlatans. He has been unsparing to flawed presidents such as Bill Clinton, ends-over-means realists such as Henry Kissinger, and religious icons such as Mother Teresa.

Hitchens is supremely confident of his argument, exploring the limits of thought and ideas, loving the power of words, displaying an erudition that can inspire schoolchildren to write better prose, and he has absorbed the collective wisdom of our times with a voracious appetite. But he was not a bookish nerd at Oxford who spent all his waking hours on mahogany desks at a library.

Hitchens grasped the experiences life offered, and standing in solidarity with those less fortunate. He has stayed consistent; it is his erstwhile allies who have changed.

Born in a society where class and privilege matter, Hitchens lives up to his mother’s expectations, going to a private school and working hard to get to Oxford. At Balliol, he will join the picket against a hairdressing salon, which will not serve black women, and he will organize protests against a foreign secretary who defends the war in Vietnam. He will go to Cuba with other young socialists to learn about Castro’s experiment with communism, only to be dismayed when he finds the hypocrisy of a regime built on lies.

He builds lifelong friendships with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan,

James Fenton (to whom the book is dedicated), and Salman Rushdie (who he defends and stands by during the worst, lonely days of the fatwa), and laments the descent into populism and humbug of people he once thought he had common cause with—Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky. The atmosphere he creates of the literary London of the 1970s, of the table where the great and the good critics met, is vivid; the spontaneous wordplay that emerges at those meetings, including risqué puns and ribald poetry, entertaining. Example: Hitchens remembers how Robert Conquest compressed the history of Bolshevism in a limerick: “There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in That’s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.”

Hitchens, as you can see, is a terrific raconteur. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly: Kahlil Gibran’s prose is full of “bogus refulgence”, Kennedy is “a high-risk narcissist”, Salazar is “senescent”, Cuban gov-

ernment today “a wrinkled oligarchy of old Communist gargoyles”, and Stokely Carmichael “a charismatic incendiary”.

It is an axiom in politics that no political party splits as often as does the Communist Party: the smaller the issue at stake, the deeper the division. Hitchens has no hesitation talking about his leftist past—and, as he reminds in an interview recently in the New Statesman, he is not a conservative either—and he provides a crystal clear view of the divisions within the Left, from where it is easy to see its pitiful lurch towards the position where it has become an ally of Islamic extremists today.

Hitchens has been a contrarian, a debater, and a thinker who stresses that it is absurd to balance between good and evil. He has enriched the intellectual life of our times like few others have. Today, he is fighting for his life. Modern science is helping him. If that, and fighting spirit are enough, cancer stands no chance.

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

Write to lounge@livemint.com

DEBI CHAUDHURANI | BANKIMCHANDRA CHATTERJI

Hinduism and modernity A new translation brings alive a key work of India’s first major novelist B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· he contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga.

The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The Englishspeaking reader, relying solely on

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translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

But thereafter Chatterji switched to his native Bengali for his fiction (while continuing to keep up a wide-ranging correspondence, often with fellow Bengalis, in English—this itself is a question worth exploring at greater length). In the dozen or so novels he wrote over the next three decades, he hauled Bengali literary language forward into the modern world by making it more free-flowing, less formal, more idiomatic, while also exploring religious and nationalist themes that were animating the Bengal and India of his day. The most popular of his books was Anandamath (1882), which tells the story of a band of forest warrior-monks striving to rid Bengal of both Muslim and British foreign rule, and contains the song Vande Mataram, one of the rhetorical pillars of the nationalist movement and an

Debi Chaudhurani: Oxford University Press, 276 pages, Rs495. object of controversy to this day.

English translations of almost every one of Chatterji’s Bengali novels are easily available (five of them, in translations by different hands, are in a Chatterji omnibus published by Penguin in 2005).

But so far the late novel Debi Chaudhurani (1884), a key text in Chatterji’s oeuvre, had remained

untranslated. Now that breach is filled by Julius Lipner, a professor of Hinduism at Cambridge, who published a translation of Anandamath also in 2006.

Debi Chaudhurani is the story of a young woman, Prafulla, who is thrown out of her bridal house after some allegations are made against her. Prafulla disappears into the forest and re-emerges some years later as Debi Chaudhurani, a dreaded female bandit embodying both shakti, or female power, and dharma, or a Hindu ideal of righteousness.

Late in his own life, Chatterji had become something of an ideologue, deeply invested in the question of what a revitalized Hindu society would look like (contemporary Hindu nationalism boasts of no such figure who also writes novels).

To his mind, such a society would have to keep up a deep engagement with the glories of Hindu tradition, while also embracing modernity and refashioning its understanding

of caste so that privileges were now meshed to responsibilities.

What is remarkable is that he chooses a woman to embody this regeneration. In the forest, Prafulla is trained in the Sanskrit texts (such as the Gita, from which the novel draws its closing line) and arts by Bhabani Pathak, a benevolent bandit, and returns to society as “a sharpened weapon” in order to reform it.

Lipner’s extensive introduction and notes provide a rich context in which to appreciate the novel.

The contemporary Indian novel in English is usually reluctant to engage with Hinduism, restricting its representation to the odd puja, decadent Brahmin, or saffron-clad right-wing leader.

But the glories and dilemmas of “the Hindu way of life” are vividly explored in this fascinating work by the first great Indian novelist.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

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BOOKS L15

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM INDIA PICTURE

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

BROKEN BARRIERS Satirical fantasy

Green day: Mandanna’s story is set against the backdrop of the coffee plantations in Coorg.

TIGER HILLS | SARITA MANDANNA

Tedious star­crossed love Belying the hype, this novel about two generations of Coorgis fails to inform or entertain

Tiger Hills: Penguin/Viking, 451 pages, Rs599.

B Y S AMHITA A RNI ···························· ook sales soar in India” is the title of an article on the London Book Fair 2010 website. India was the theme for the book fair, and the article makes it clear that Indian publishing is in its heyday. Agents, writers and publishers are producing a slew of formulaic works, attempting to replicate Chetan Bhagat’s astonishing commercial success. A year ago, it appeared that Penguin had found its own money-spinner—a historical romance, Tiger Hills.

David Davidar, then head of Penguin, had shelled out an astounding seven-figure advance (a rumoured Rs35 lakh) to firsttime author Sarita Mandanna.

Expectations for such an expensive work are obviously high, particularly so when Mandanna’s agent, the highly reputed David Godwin, has represented the likes of Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga.

But Mandanna’s book fails to live up to the hype. Advance reviews compared Tiger Hills with Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds. It is clear that those two works have served as the inspiration for Mandanna’s novel, which at moments verges on being derivative. Devi, the determined heroine of Tiger Hills, is a weak evocation of Margaret Mitchell’s powerful heroine, Scarlett O’Hara.

Aspects of the plot resemble Colleen McCullough’s epic romance—like Meggie Cleary of The Thorn Birds, who falls in love with the one man out of her reach (Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart), Devi too falls in love with the seemingly unattainable Machiah, a

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famed tiger-killer, who has sworn an oath of celibacy for 12 years.

Suffice it to say, this is not the only similarity between the two works.

Tiger Hills is the story of Devi and Machaiah’s “star-crossed” love and the consequences this entails for two generations (from 1878-1930), played out against the lush landscape of Coorg. Devi, from the very beginning, is special—she is a seventh child and her birth is marked by the flight of herons. At key moments in the novel, the heron imagery resurfaces, presumably to remind us of the special destiny that Devi’s birth portends. But as there is nothing birdlike or flighty about Devi, nor anything truly unique about her destiny, one is at a loss to understand the heron metaphor.

It’s hard to like the tenacious Devi. Her single-minded, determined pursuit of what she wants would win accolades from any corporate or management guru, but to this reviewer, she is a spoilt, selfish character unable to perceive the effects of her actions on those around her. When realization dawns, it is too late to redeem her character. Mandanna, unlike the authors she is inspired by, fails to provide a foil or a set of circumstances that ennoble Devi’s character. Mitchell, for example, provides Scarlett O’Hara (as determined and selfish as Devi) with a foil (the mild and weak Melanie) and throws into relief her heroine’s admirable characteristics. Mandanna, clearly basing some aspects of Devi on Scarlett, would have been better served to emulate Mitchell’s craft as well.

The most likable character with

QUICKLIT | VEENA VENUGOPAL

The life and times of famous outlaws Some compelling real life stories should be forgiven their bad prose

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am a sucker for a good story, even if it is a little badly told.

Which is why for the last week I have been gritting my teeth, but plowing through pages with terms such as “take lunch”, “catch him by the collar and beat him up”, and “hitting him left and right”.

Even though the writing is mediocre, the real life stories of Roy Moxham’s Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me and Aabid Surti’s Sufi are so compelling that the pictures the stories draw in your head make the actual words tolerable.

The year is 1992 and Phoolan Devi is incarcerated in Gwalior jail. Moxham is a book and paper conservator living in the UK. He reads an article in The Independent about India’s bandit queen.

Outlaw:

By Roy Moxham, Rider Books, 214 pages, Rs599.

Even though he had never heard of her before or taken any interest in India, Moxham finds himself writing a letter to her, offering her his support. He posts it to the Gwalior jail address. Less than a month later, he gets a reply from her. His letter reached her at a time when she had lost all hope, Phoolan Devi replies, and it gave her the will to live. And thus an unlikely friendship was cemented.

the greatest potential is the gentle, sensitive Devanna, Devi’s childhood friend, who wants to be a doctor. Devanna, however, commits the act of violence that the novel hinges on. To drive this mild character to violence, Mandanna facilitates the death of a pet squirrel, a possible concussion and a quarter-bottle of gin. This ordeal takes 30 pages to develop in the plodding hand of the writer.

The language of Mandanna’s novel initially meets with approval—simple and readable.

But as the novel progresses, Mandanna’s language turns monotonous. The only meritorious aspect of this novel is the backdrop—rich, verdant Coorg, with its fierce clans and martial traditions. She demonstrates a certain acumen in developing an interesting subplot that explores the history of coffee cultivation in Coorg. However, the novel displays a few historical inaccuracies, evident even to a layman like myself—Mandanna refers to the “Sultans of Mysore” (Hyder Ali never declared himself such; only his son, christened at birth “Tipu Sultan”, can be referred to as a sultan and, that too, at a stretch).

For the princely advance, one expects many things—a tightly crafted, well-written and well-researched novel or, at the very least, a sensual, tantalizing romance.

Tiger Hills disappoints on all counts, and seems unlikely to generate great commercial success.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Mediocre work after a big advance

From then on, Moxham plans his holidays every year so he can come to India and meet Phoolan Devi. He advises her—as a friend—through her court cases, her release from jail and her new political career. He stays at her home, first in Delhi’s CR Park and later at her MPs’ quarters on Ashoka Road, sharing space with dozens of relatives and a Great Dane. And during these visits, Moxham witnesses a part of Phoolan Devi that we have never seen before. Though there is a lot he does not comprehend—limited as he is by his lack of understanding of the language or the culture— Moxham manages to subtly reveal how India’s famous bandit queen is rendered pliant by not just the politicians who want to make the most of her appeal, but also by her family who want their share of her new-found prosperity.

If Moxham’s book on Phoolan Devi is an incidental one (he claims he never set out to write the book, he only decided on that much after her death), Surti’s por-

Sometimes it is called “fantasy literature” or given some similar genre tag, and reduced to fluently written, at times highly accomplished but never particularly challenging books. In the process, one tends to forget that “fantasy” literature, if one defines the word in a non-market sense, would also include fiction of the most challenging sort: Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, among others.

The American writer Kris Saknussemm is one of the few who restore to successful “genre fiction”—whether fantasy or sci-fi—the hard edge of art. That is, art as a challenge and a questioning and not just entertainment and pleasure. Described by a critic as “a freaky Lewis Carroll”, Saknussemm’s prequel to his acclaimed novel Zanesville will be published by Random House soon. Called Enigmatic Pilot, the new novel is part of Saknussemm’s ongoing Lodemania Testament cycle of novels. The series spans the years 1838-2050 and crosses continents in the unfolding of an alternative history of the 20th century and beyond. Conspiracies, secret societies, chess and the worship of entertainment are some of its key concerns. Western civilization is seen as a giant, out of control theme park where the slightest fad can become a full-blown religion. It is in this blending of fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, history and socio-political satire that Saknussemm bursts out of the confines of commercially defined genre tags, while at the same time remaining highly readable. He does not hesitate to take on larger issues: for example, the question of how we define what is real in an age increasingly fixated on the virtual and the simulated.

Global English We may decry it, but the fact remains that people from all kinds of backgrounds have started writing creatively in English. Of course, this is not altogether new: Conrad was Polish, Karen Blixen, Danish. But the numbers have definitely increased over the last century or so.

Adnan Mahmutovic was born in 1974 in northern Bosnia and moved to Sweden in 1993. He writes poetry and fiction in English.

Published by the small but vigorous British house, Cinnamon Press, his first novel, Thinner than a Hair, is narrated in the convincing voice of a young Bosnian Muslim woman. Even as her country is torn by war, the deceptively simple narrative voice takes the reader on a journey across convictions, assumptions and emotions.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP

Potpourri: Karachi’s residents beat the heat at the beach.

Twin cities Mumbai and Karachi ought to have been twin cities, separated only by a stretch of water. But given the fact that the post-colonial middle class, whether in India or Pakistan or Nigeria, tends to know more about European nations than about neighbouring ones, we in India seldom give a thought to Karachi. I, for one, was surprised by my ignorance of Karachi on reading Rumana Husain’s Karachiwala: A Subcontinent within a City. I had not expected Karachi to contain so many different linguistic, cultural and ethnic communities: not just identifiable “Pakistani” ones such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Makrani, among others, but also Marwari, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Chinese and others. It brought to my Indian mind the image of Mumbai, which used to be Bombay, and it was then that I fully realized how fickle history has divided two cities that, in Bollywood parlance, are basically “twins”.

Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of Filming and the newly released collection of poems Man of Glass.

Write to him at readingroom@livemint.com

Sufi:

By Aabid Surti, Diamond Books, 410 pages, Rs150. trayal of Mumbai’s notorious smuggler Iqbal Rupani is a deliberate one. Surti, the creator of the comic character Bahadur, and Rupani, under whose wing Dawood Ibrahim cut his teeth, grew up in the narrow lanes of Dongri during what is called the “golden period of gold smuggling”. Through weekly meetings over two years, Rupani tells Surti the story of his life, of beginning

his career while still a school student by stowing illicit liquor in his one-room house. Surti alternates between Rupani’s story and his own story (a tattered comic thrown by a soldier from a train is the start of his career) and the irony of how different their lives turned out despite the similarity of their circumstances is manifest.

What takes away from this story is its clumsy translation. The book was first written in Gujarati and then translated to Hindi and Marathi. The translator has merely changed the language word for word, without wasting time on sentence construction or metering. It’s a frustrating read.

But then you close your eyes and think of the early Ram Gopal Varma movies, the little bits of Dongri and the Bombay docks that you have seen and Rupani, Haji Mastan and Ibrahim come alive. Sufi is a story that says you can’t have it all, much like the book. veena.v@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010

Culture FILM

The Alphonso renaissance New directors and quality scripts are revitalizing Marathi cinema, despite pressures from the box office

B Y P RACHI ···························· nterprise versus traditional farming—this debate among members of a Konkan mango-growing family has caught the imagination of Maharashtrian cinegoers, who are themselves at the threshold of a similar change in popular culture. Hapus, the movie that takes its name from the variety of mango that rules the fruit basket, is ruling the box office for the fourth week and inching towards hit status.

Marathi cinema today is like the adolescent who has come of age and suddenly discovered there is a whole world out there to conquer—making some rash decisions, but also showing occasional flashes of brilliance.

Gone are the years when Marathi cinema was all about madcap comedies that put off educated urban audiences. Today, cinephiles find it difficult to believe that the Marathi film Shyamchi Aai won the Swarnakamal, the highest national honour in 1954. Exactly five decades later, Shwaas breathed life into the film scene when it won the National Award for best film in 2004. The market for Marathi cinema has changed completely in the six years since.

This year Natrang, a film that explores the Lavni and Tamasha art forms, exploded on the Marathi movie scene. Tickets to a Marathi film were being sold in black. A bold and unsettling story of gender identity, it had great production values and marked the revival of folk music in contemporary Marathi cinema. The buzz around the movie rubbed off on other releases that followed: Shiksha-

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nachya Aaicha Gho, Zhenda, Lalbaug Parel, Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai and now Hapus. Will the Marathi film industry head the southern way, where regional cinema is bigger than Bollywood?

That may be a far cry, at least commercially. Nitin Datar, vicepresident of the Cinema Owners and Exhibitors Association of India, is frank about the situation: “Of the 35-odd films that have released since January 2010, only three have actually made profit.”

He says it does not matter how long the film runs on screens; a film that is made with a smaller budget can make profit even if it does just average business. By that calculation, very few films qualify as hits. A Marathi film costs Rs60 lakh-1 crore on an average to produce, and another Rs50 lakh is worked in for public-

loyal fan base means every film has to stand on its own.

Production values have to meet Bollywood standards. Marathi cinema cannot be compared with the Tamil or Telugu film industries; it competes directly with Hindi cinema for eyeballs. Hindi is understood and spoken on a par with Marathi in most of Maharashtra, so the audience has a choice between Marathi and Hindi films.

Abhijeet Satam was in advertising until the idea of Hapus ripened after some brainstorming with friends. After tasting success with his first feature film, Satam is now ready to make his next in Hindi. “Marathi audience is conservative. They will not accept an item song or semi-nude babes dancing. I know of grandparents going to watch Hapus with their children and grandchildren,” he

says. Satam says simple ideas work best with Marathi.

Marathi literature also offers a rich base for films. Satam believes the audience for Marathi films is growing, with the youth showing interest and non-Maharashtrians also turning to Marathi films for a different genre of cinema.

Chhabria’s first Marathi film Me Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy became the highest grosser in the history of Marathi films. It grossed Rs20 crore at the box office. Cashing in on the insider-outsider debate, the film reflected the identity politics of the middle-class Mumbaikar.

Mahesh Manjrekar played Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, who guides the protagonist, played by Khedekar, like Munna Bhai’s Bapu. Watching the film meant asserting one’s identity, and not

New wave: (clockwise from left) A still from Jhing Chik Jhing; Hapus is about a family of mango growers; and a still from Me Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy.

just an evening well spent. Chhabria hit the right button and the cash registers began ringing.

This year, he made Shikshanachya Aaicha Gho, on an education system that binds the middle class in its conformist values. The film did average business. Chhabria believes the central theme is the key. “This is an educated audience we are catering to. A film with a message that is not preachy will do well.”

Commercially, Marathi films may be just about gaining a foothold, but when it comes to the art house genre, they seem to be leading. The list of award-winning Marathi films is growing year after year. Shwaas, which received an Oscar nomination in 2005, changed the way people looked at Marathi films. The film, in fact, drew audiences to halls only after it received the National Award, and then made a comeback with the Oscar nomination. However, what worked for Shwaas did not work for Harishchandrachi Factory, India’s entry to the Oscars in 2010. “It’s a tricky business. What’s the point of putting in your life’s savings into making a film that will win awards but not do well at the box office? I feel bad for such producers.

There are more and more people who want to invest in Marathi films, but there are many who lose all their money,” says Chhabria. He is clear that he would not invest more than Rs50-55 lakh in an art house film, and not over a crore and a half in a commercial venture.

But, as Harini Calamur of Cogito Entertainment (India) Pvt. Ltd—which made its debut Marathi film Jhing Chik Jhing last month—puts it, if a story needs to be told and Marathi is the language in which it can be told most compellingly, then she will make the film. Money cannot dictate creative decisions; it is the passion for good cinema that matters.

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Making a Mochrie of everything The ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ comic on how the show changed his life

ity. But it is not just ticket sales that decide the monetary fate of a film. Close to 50% of the revenue comes from sale of home-viewing and satellite rights.

Sanjay Chhabria, the producer of Hapus, says Marathi cinema lacks star value. Unlike the south, where superstars such as Rajinikanth, Chiranjeevi or Mammootty pull crowds, irrespective of the film’s quality, there are no stars in Marathi cinema. Actors such as Bharat Jadhav are now realizing that they should do fewer films, choosing quality over quantity to build their brand value. “It will take another four or five years for actors to slowly become stars,” says Chhabria. There is promise in actors such as Sachin Pilgaonkar, Sachin Khedekar and Atul Kulkarni, who do not “over-expose” themselves. But the lack of a

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

································ let him think for a while because I knew he had the answer. I knew it was a good answer, and he was going to tell it to me. Because when you ask a question, you expect an answer.

That’s the way it works...question, answer, answer, question. If he gave the answer, I’d have to come up with the question. That would be Jeopardy. That’s wrong.”

If this dialogue were to be from an actual movie drama, the writer would have been banished to pluck snow in Alaska, but when it comes under duress, with just seconds to make up, Colin Mochrie gets a roomful of audience cracking up.

Mochrie, the balding, bouncy and buoyant Canadian, was, for close to 15 years, a constant on the hit television series Whose Line is it Anyway? Yeah, the show

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where “everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. That’s right, the points are like a salad bar in a strip club.”

Mochrie is in India with Whose Line... gag-mate Brad Sherwood, performing at the Black Dog Comedy Evenings show today at the ITC Grand Central, Mumbai. The two men, on their first visit to the country, also performed in Kolkata on Wednesday.

“I have absolutely no expectations, no idea how the show will go,” said Mochrie over the phone from Kolkata on the afternoon of his first performance.

As an improviser, Mochrie has trained himself not to have expectations, because this field of entertainment is so unpredictable that he cannot possibly guess what’s going to happen. The reason he does not remember any of his gags from the over 200 performances on the show, except when he tried to use “Richard Simmons (the fitness expert who had a TV show then) as a water ski thing” in the section of the show that uses props. “I was bending him in ways I should not have.”

“Improvisation is so at-the-mo-

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/ MINT

Ad libber: Mochrie is performing in India for the first time.

ment that once you are done, you don’t remember it. When I am flipping channels and see the show, I have no recollection of it ever happening,” he says.

With his sometimes tilted gait and frisky demeanour, Mochrie is the perfect foil for the straightfaced, lanky Ryan Stiles, while his long-lasting friendship with other performers, Sherwood included, is evident from the chemistry on stage. He stresses the importance of that friendship: “It’s important to have someone you trust and know is going to be there for you if you are not, maybe, on top of your game.

You need for someone to jump in and help you, not desert you.”

Born in Scotland, raised in Montreal and Vancouver, where he now lives, Mochrie dared to participate in a school play when he got his first laugh and was hooked. But it took 20 years in the job for fame to knock on his door in the form of Whose Line is it Anyway?, an improvisation comedy show that usually had four participants, started on television in Britain in 1988, moved to America in 1998 and ran until 2006. Mochrie did among the largest number of episodes in the show. “It was the

best job ever. We would go to England for six weeks and work over the weekends; basically, show up an hour before the show, do the show and you are done. Same with America,” he says.

To be able to raise a laugh, he says, is “incredibly addictive.

Everyone finds something different funny. With the whole audience laughing at the same thing, you feel kind of powerful. Of course, the show stops and you are back to being a weak little man.”

Calling comedians “self-centred”, Mochrie admits that he is expected to be funny all the time. “It’s like meeting a doctor on the street and saying there’s something wrong with me, can you check? People I bump into ask me to tell jokes and I have none. I work with funny people and make jokes.”

He adds that talks are on to bring back Whose Line.... He would like that, because of what it’s given him. “It’s put me in public perception, opened opportunities in life and helped (me) work with some great people.”

Mochrie and Sherwood perform at the ITC Grand Central in Mumbai today; entry by invitation.

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ART

An ‘anti­artist’ movement PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Travel and activity drive Raqs Media Collective’s creative impulses. Now their eclectic creations are getting noticed

himanshu.b@livemint.com

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exhibitions and workshops, curating shows, teaching and attending art residencies. “To consider the world, you have to be constantly on the move,” he says.

Skirmish looks like a simple fable simply told, especially when compared with the enigmatic 4-minute audio-visual clip titled I Did Not Hear that is also part of the show. A man is engaged in target practice with a pistol at a firing range—the sound mufflers covering his ears could well be headphones. There is an ongoing dialogue, except that it is the same female voice that is doing the questioning as well as the answering. She seems to be offering evasive explanations to avoid talking about an unpleasant event that is never described.

“This is Unreal resonates with a lot of our concerns,” says Sengupta about the show. “Dream, for instance, is it real? It feels real because there is experiential vividness... There is a conspiratorial tinge to it... The idea that you can conspire with reality to create hyper-real effects like a dream appeals to us.”

RMC has become better known in India over the past three-four years, but it has been around for much longer. In 1992, the three fresh graduates from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, New

On the go: (above, from left) Sengupta, Bagchee and Narula; and a still from I Did Not Hear.

Delhi, decided to band together and make documentary films.

They did this for about a decade and then found their focus shifting. “Our formal concerns were making us move beyond single screen to two or three screens,” recalls Sengupta.

According to him, this shift coincided with changing trends in contemporary art practice internationally and RMC found itself making works that used a variety of material, such as screen and text, sculptures and found objects.

Their third work at Experimenter for instance, titled The Librarian’s Lucid Dream, features wallpaper made out of library index cards.

With works that blended mediums as well as concepts, RMC was charting its own eclectic course.

Validation came in the form of an invitation in 2002 to show at the prestigious Documenta art show held in Germany. Since then the collective has shown at many exhibitions and galleries across the globe, including the Venice Biennale. But the trio are chary of calling themselves artists, prefer-

ring “media practitioners” instead. As Sengupta points out, this is because they never consciously set out to create “Art”.

Another reason would be that the sphere of their activities is very diverse; in the form of Sarai, a centre RMC co-founded in 2000, it involves supporting artists, academics and fostering debate on vital public concerns.

Sengupta says art in India still revolves far too much around talk of prices and investment, though he finds a newer generation of curator and gallery owners who are “more interested, less intimidated and less patronizing”. And they are getting increasingly interested in conceptual works such as the ones RMC creates, which can’t be bought or sold easily.

“Our work is not intentionally difficult or obscure, but I can see it as being tangential or oblique,” he admits. “Chess is a very simple game, but it has a great complexity of moves. That doesn’t stop a seven-year-old or a grandmaster from enjoying the game. You can enter at any level.”

This Is Unreal, featuring Raqs Media Collective, Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nayar, is on show at Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata, until 5 September. For details, log on to www.experimenter.in COURTESY THE SEAGULL FOUNDATION

Aim and shoot The toll war takes on men, captured in black and white B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· n 2007, the intrepid film-maker and photographer Ryan Lobo went to two war zones—Afghanistan and Iraq—and to Liberia on the western coast of Africa, which is still recovering from the effects of a civil war. He photographed mostly people, and some buildings and scenery, at each of the three places, and these photos are currently on display at a show titled War and Forgiveness.

Accompanying the show is a catalogue containing the images and Lobo’s semi-impressionistic account of his experience in the war zones. The text provides the context and explains the circumstances in which the black and white photos were taken. After you have read the text, the photographs by themselves feel incomplete—even though they lyrically convey the reality the photogra-

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SHUBHA MUDGAL

SO SIMPLE TO SAMPLE

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B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT ···························· kirmish by Raqs Media Collective (RMC) is a sad love story told in eight panels. It is one of the three works that the collective is exhibiting at the group show titled This is Unreal, currently on at the Experimenter gallery in Kolkata. It consists of eight photographic images, each with a couple of lines of accompanying text under it.

Four of the eight images show large outlines of keys drawn on a wall that also has a sign in Arabic stuck to it. The text itself—haikulike in its brevity—tells of a woman who is getting the keys sketched on the walls to torment her former lover by reminding him that she had once given him the keys to her apartment. The tormented lover wants to get back at her by getting someone to draw padlocks on the walls. City dwellers, oblivious of this skirmish, think the keys are the handiwork of locksmiths advertising their trade.

The trio that make up RMC—Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula—spotted an outline of a key drawn on a wall in Damascus when they were there for a residency and got the the idea for the story. “When we travel, we take visual notes,” Sengupta says. “We travel a lot. We exchange notes.”

The “visual notes” are recorded with still and movie cameras.

According to Sengupta, travel and movement are central to RMC’s creative output—he terms it “kinetic contemplation”. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron—don’t contemplation and creativity require stillness and calm? Not for him and his partners, all of whom spend threefour months every year travelling outside India, participating in

MUSIC MATTERS

pher seeks to capture.

For instance, the image of a little Afghan girl making faces at the camera amid a ravaged backdrop is unsettling, but when you read that she is the child of heroin addicts and will probably be sold off at some point, it becomes poignant.

Lobo places his subjects and the wreckage surrounding them— shattered buildings, rusting pile of war machinery—against the majesty of the Afghan sky and mountains, throwing in stark relief the human folly of war. The shots of Afghan children—a beggar girl, a boy vendor, son of a poppy farmer—wearing expressions that seem both naive and knowing, reflect the predicament of coping with the reality fate hands us.

There is a preponderance of concrete in Lobo’s Baghdad pictures—in the form of barricades or floors or walls of a prison—as if reflecting blunt military might.

Marooned in this arid photographic landscape are Iraqi men, women and children, either alone

Wages of war: Monster, shot by Ryan Lobo in Afghanistan. or in twos. Suspended in the distance are the helicopters, looking magical—at least to a detached spectator—while also feeling as inevitable and heavy as the concrete. The marriage is complete in a shot of a helicopter painted on the walls of a barricade.

The “forgiveness” in the show’s title comes from the third, and in some ways the most disturbing, place that Lobo photographs. His account of Liberia, and the visit to a slum in the capital Monrovia, where he suddenly finds himself in physical danger, is vivid; seen in its light, the photos of the hostile slum inhabit-

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ants too assume an air of menace.

In Liberia, Lobo is accompanying a former warlord who committed unspeakable atrocities and killed thousands—he was called General Butt Naked because he would fight naked.

But now he is a changed man—his name is Joshua Milton Blahyi and he is seeking forgiveness from his victims and redemption by converting to Christianity.

Lobo seems to accept Blahyi’s transformation at face value and captures Blahyi’s meetings with his victims and his baptism by missionaries. Blahyi recounts to Lobo how he used to kill little children and literally eat their hearts.

Here again, the images capture life playing itself out in a setting ravaged by violence and suffering.

They impress upon the viewer that war or no war, one has to carry on in life—there is no alternative.

War and Forgiveness is on display at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, 36C, SP Mukherjee Road, Kolkata, until 1 August, 2-8pm daily (except Sundays).

don’t know what the business industry gurus have to say about the fate of online shopping, but it does seem as if you can buy just about anything online these days. Among the plethora of products available to hungry-for-more consumers are huge varieties of sample libraries for use in electronic music projects; for mixing, remixing, and creating tracks for commercial use. And since there seems to be a fairly large market for such libraries, it is not too surprising to see the specialists kick in with bigger, better and special products. In the market for sound sample libraries are several specialists who deliver what could be called speciality sounds. For example, www.indiaplays4u.com boasts of hugely popular sample packs such as the Bhangra Elements, which brings to you loops, intros and endings and what have you played on a variety of instruments such as the dhol, dholak, tumbi and tabla. Another site at which samples are available is www.producerloops.com, which currently promotes the Classic Bollywood sample pack. If you have the know-how to use samples to programme a track, sample packs such as those mentioned above can be quite a convenience and a saving, as they do away with the need to book studios and musicians. You just need to be ready and willing to accept templates that are customizable to an extent, but are not earth-shatteringly different from other tracks in the past, present or the near future.

Gaurav Dayal’s www.indiaplays4u.com offers the user the opportunity to now “get real Indian musicians to play for your next hit!”. All you need to do is upload a track in a specified format, select the instruments you would like dubbed on your track, select the price per instrument and style, pay for the same, wait for an email receipt and within the next 48 hours you receive an MP3 file of your track with the dubbing done and completed even as you stayed home and watered the plants. If you are happy with the MP3 file sent to you, you receive a Mixdown in no time, or else you send in your suggestions and comments for further modification until you are completely satisfied. In a nutshell, the site is saving you the bother of booking a studio, hiring a programmer and/or arranger, or musicians to dub on your track. Sounds like a great idea if you are not looking for anything overly original, or want to create a demo.

Easy tech: Sampling devices can now replace studios and orchestras.

Look further and there is the beta version of www.earthmoments.com that comes from the Chennai-based label EarthSync. Even as you admire the stunning website design and interface, you hear samples of the sitar, veena and konnakol, all brilliantly recorded and played. Here, the samples are organized in “bundles” rather than “packs”, and the three bundles currently offered on the site are: u The Distant Rhythms bundle priced at $19.95 (around Rs935), essentially a percussion package u The Indian Emotion bundle priced at $39.95, for Indian strings and woodwinds u And finally, of greatest interest to me, the Voice of India bundle priced at $49.95, featuring vocal samples of Baul singers, qawwals, Hindustani classical vocalists, Carnatic classical vocalists, konnakol and even mantras, Bollywood vocals (what on earth could these be?) and Rajasthani vocals.

The demo samples for this pack feature stunning vocals by Bauls, so if they are any indication of quality this should be a great sample library. My only regret is that none of the sample libraries I browsed through seem to be bothered about acknowledging the performers who played and sang and recited in order for these samples to be recorded in the first place.

You hear great sitar playing and you immediately want to know who played. You hear a good voice, you want to know who it is.

Besides, isn’t it well within the performer’s right to be identified and acknowledged? I apologize in advance if the performers are acknowledged in the literature that comes with the libraries, and if I have failed to see the acknowledgements. But if indeed no performers are acknowledged, please, sample makers, give us tagged samples with the names of the performers, won’t you?

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | CHARLES CORREA

VIJAYANAND GUPTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Great city, terrible place

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

In his new book, the renowned architect explains why, despite bad infrastructure, Mumbai gets better and better as a city

P

erhaps we are paying too much attention to the physical and economic aspects of a city—and not enough to its mythical and metaphysical attributes. For a city can be beautiful as a physical habitat—trees, uncrowded roads, open spaces—and yet fail to provide that particular, ineffable quality of urbanity which we call: CITY. We all know examples of this.

Bombay, of course, illustrates the very opposite. Everyday it gets worse and worse as physical environment and yet better and better as city. That is to say, everyday it offers more in the way of skills, activities, opportunities at every level, from squatter to college student to entrepreneur to artist. The vitality of the theatre (and the evergrowing audiences), the range and talent of newspapers and magazines—there are a hundred indications emphasizing that impact (implosion!) of energy and people which really is a double-edged sword— destroying Bombay as environment, while intensifying its quality as city.

Teilhard de Chardin likened this increasing complexity (which we also experience as we move from village to town to city) with the successive folding of a handkerchief on itself—each fold doubling the layers of the material—i.e., the density of experience. As a biologist, he felt that it was analogous to the blind drive that made life develop all the way from single-cells to more and more complex forms—a movement as compulsive, and as irreversible. It is an intriguing insight, and perhaps explains not only why the migrant goes from village to town but, more

importantly, why after having experienced the physical degradation of his new life, he still does not return to the village.

He has no choice. He only goes back to Walden Pond when he can take his complexities with him. Only the madman—or the mystic—goes out into the desert.

And the mystic is really taking his God, his complexity, with him.

That leaves only the madman.

As planners, we advocate the City Beautiful—but most people live and work in a city which is quite the opposite: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Bombay and so forth—and love it!

What they enjoy is not the beauty of their environment (there isn’t any), but the excitement, the interaction, the networking, the synergy. In short: the city as CITY. An incisive explanation of this process was put forward by the Greek planner Doxiadis, the founder of Ekistics. I remember a slide-show he gave in Bombay, many years ago—huge sixty mm slides throwing clear, monumental images on the screen. The first slide was a diagram of a village: 250 red dots and one blue one.

Who is this blue person?

Einstein? The village idiot?

Anyway, he’s not red. The next slide presented a town of 1,000 people. Now there are four or five blue dots floating around.

The next, a town of 25,000 people. Ah! A historic moment: two people are meeting for the first time. The final slideshowed a town of 100,000 inhabitants with several colonies where blue people reside. And on the fringes of these colonies, some of the red dots are turning purple!

That’s what cities are about.

Blue people getting together.

Communicating. Reinforcing each other. Challenging (and changing!) the red ones. Hence the Quit India movement announced by Mahatma Gandhi from a maidan in Bombay. And Calcutta, in its heyday in the 20s, a powerhouse of ideas and reforms: political, religious, artistic. Hence also the paradox: Bombay decaying as a physical plant, yet improving as a city—as a place where blue people meet, where things happen, where ideas incubate.

And also, of course, as a place where urban skills grow. For the

COURTESY PENGUIN INDIA

City limits: (clockwise from above) Mahatma Gandhi launching the Quit India Movement in Mumbai in 1942; Dharavi, one of Asia’s biggest slums, in Mumbai; and the Bandra­Worli Sea Link is the latest addition to the city’s infrastructure. developing world needs these skills. Today in the Gulf, a surprisingly large proportion of development is in the hands of Third World technocrats: engineers, doctors, nurses, construction firm workers, hoteliers. They are winning contracts in the face of worldwide competition and from clients who have a global choice.

It is truly an extraordinary achievement—and primarily for our urban centres which produce these skills. Development necessitates management, and too often the Third World has to import this know-how (via the World Bank and the United Nations). Fortunately, India has a wide spectrum of urban centres, varying from small market towns to the great metropolises, all producing an incredible range and diversity of skills. Like the farmlands of Punjab or the coalfields of Bihar, they are a crucial part of our national wealth. To let them deteriorate is to squander priceless resources—a blunder of the highest order.

Our criminal indifference to cities like Calcutta or Bombay over the last decades has allowed conditions to deteriorate to sub-human levels. Yet somehow Bombay functions, and with an energy and enthusiasm that is really astonishing—far more

impressive than a showpiece capital like Delhi, where the budget available per capita is several-fold that of Bombay.

Furthermore, cities like Bombay and Calcutta represent a true cross-section of urban incomes, whereas New Delhi has no destitute people (they are all hidden away in Old Delhi), where the poorest you see are government clerks cycling to work—and in winter even they are dressed in woollens! The Third World has too many examples of such capital cities, cities whose apparent affluence is misleading—most of all to the politicians and bureaucrats who live there.

The miracle of Bombay is that despite political indifference and apathy, despite lack of resources, some water does get distributed (at least much of the time), buses and trains do provide public transport all day and most of the night, etc—all accomplished by the skill, energy and dedication of the people of this city. Yet, how long will this last? How long before the neglect, the piles of debris, the stinking garbage, take their toll—and the elan, the enthusiasm, of the citizens slowly disintegrates? Then, as in the case of Calcutta, a kind of apathy begins to set in, a stultifying indifference.

Cities have always been

unique indicators of civilization—all the way from Mohenjodaro to Athens, to Persepolis, to Peking, to Isfahan, to Rome. You can have great music created during rotten times, even painting and poetry—but never great architecture and cities. Why is this? Primarily because they both require two essential preconditions: first, an economic system which concentrates power and decision-making in the hands of a few; and second, at the centre of that decisionmaking, leaders with the vision, sensibility and political will to deploy these resources intelligently.

The first set of conditions prevails only too often—the second hardly ever. The combination is almost unique.

Thus Akbar will always be Akbar. Not because of his military exploits (those have been bettered a hundred times over, both before and after his time). He will always be Akbar because, at the centre of that vortex of power, he exercised those qualities.

Cities grow—and die—much faster than we think. Visiting Calcutta today, it is difficult to understand how turn-of-the-century travellers could have deemed it as one of the great metropolises of the

world—the finest east of Suez, a jewel in the crown and so forth.

Could they not see the grave (perhaps terminal) illness that was already tightening its grip on that marvellously humane city?

No, obviously there is a time lag during which calamity is not overt. So that late into the 1940s and 1950s, we still couldn’t see the fatal symptoms—the writing on the wall.

Obviously this is true of Bombay. As it is getting better and better as a city, and disintegrating (very rapidly and quite unnecessarily) as environment. Perhaps what the people of Bombay are experiencing is the last burst of energy—the spastic twitches before the end. Living in this city one wouldn’t notice it oneself.

CODA: If you drop a frog into a saucepan of very hot water, it will desperately try to hop out.

But if you place a frog in tepid water and then gradually, very very gradually, raise the temperature, the frog will swim around happily, adjusting to the increasingly dangerous conditions. In fact, just before the end, just before the frog cooks to death, when the water is exceedingly hot, the frog relaxes, and a state of euphoria sets in (like those hot-tub baths in California). Maybe that’s what is happening to us in Bombay, as everyday we find it getting to be more and more of a great city…and a terrible place.

Excerpted from A Place in the Shade, a new book of essays on the changing landscape of cities

by Charles Correa. Penguin India, 246 pages, Rs1,199.

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