Lounge251210.pdf

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

Saturday, December 25, 2010 Vol. 4 No. 50

DRESS DOWN, DRESS UP Couture gown and bed head; sari and jackets—irreverent is the new dress code

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L4 I CONTENTS

HERITAGE

WILL AND GRACE

STYLE

DRESS DOWN, DRESS UP

Once a regal breed and now a preserve of the elite, the Marwari horse is a power house of energy and charm. We revisit the legacy >> Page 18

travel

>> Page 26

Cover photo: avinash gowariker

Red lehenga, Anamika Khanna, approx. R6 lakh; off-white sweater with satin lace detailing, R1.45 lakh; platform bootie in brown calfskin, R75,000, both Christian Dior.

PLUS: mEN’S AFTERHOURS LOOKS >PAGE 23

THE GOOD LIFE I SHOBA NARAYAN

What’s all the fuss about a Christmas cake?

>> Page 16

Don’t save your teeth from Scotland’s best-loved tablet

>> Page 33

STALL ORDER I NANDINI RAMNATH

How to deal with being 30 in the noughties

MELTING POINT >> Page 41

books

We are what we read. A library of what you’ve read

Books that can help us understand the tenuous relationship between a journalist and his source >> Page 42

>> Page 49

COMPLETE SATISFACTION

>> Page 45

culture

Cult Fiction I R. Sukumar

Keith Richards’ tell-all memoir is insanely funny

>> Page 44

THE SPACE AGE

>> Page 6

Our monthly mixed bag of what’s new, quirky, interesting and controversial in the world of fashion, technology and more—in a short and snappy form >> Page 8

Food

>> Page 46

India’s biggest dance music festival turns into a brand

>> Page 48

PLAY YEAR TO THE GROUND

IRRESISTIBLE LIGHTNESS

The most calorie-conscious among us can dig into these party entrées

Art moves out of ‘the white cube’, making exhibition design crucial to viewing it

BURN AFTER LISTENING

TRENDING

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>> Page 36

LITERATURE ON JOURNALISM

piece of cake I pamela timms

FIRST CUT I EditOR’S NOTE

After generations of conflict and centuries of violence, the Irish ‘no surrender’ axiom faces yet another stern test

‘Hamams’, mule rides and gourmet Mediterranean spreads

columns

IN EVERY ISSUE

RUNNING OUT OF LUCK

>> Page 34

From eyepiece-free 3D to resurrected franchises—the tech world in 2011

>> Page 50

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L6 I EDIT First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI

SEEMA CHowDHRY

DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

first cut

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI

www.livemint.com © 2010 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

Unpredictability: don’t ditch this fashion rule

W

hether you agree or not with Lady Gaga’s infamous meat dress being named by Time magazine as the most “iconic” fashion statement of 2010, you have to give this pop diva your vote on one count: the absolute conviction with which she disregards every fashion diktat and twists all rules to make way for new ideas. From the custom-made Giorgio Armani Privé dress she wore to the Grammy Awards in January, to the Alexander McQueen dress paired with the Armadillo shoes and a Mohawk head piece for the MTV 2010 VMAs, and finally, the “iconic” meat dress—Lady Gaga is one fashionista who knows the importance of being unpredictable. And she has shown us that over and over again in 2010.

Every home has a fashionista and in my household that honour goes to my almost seven-year-old. From dictating the design and the colour of her new lehenga for a friend’s wedding last week to already scouting around for an outfit she would like to wear for her birthday in March, my miniature style diva’s mind is always ticking. Nowadays I can see (or maybe I imagine it) a maniacal gleam in her eye when we are within a 50ft radius of a mall, a tailor or our neighbourhood sequins store.

But the big surprise she sprung on me this year was not that her fetish for fashion went past my comfort level, but that she has started taking baby steps towards unpredictability—well, the lehenga she chose was orange and not pink and yes, that is a huge experiment when you are a seven-year-old and your mother is not Katie Holmes.

And though she is (hopefully, fingers crossed) light years away from going the Lady Gaga way, her little experiments away from the norm (read that as pink, pink and more pink) bring to the fore that she is beginning to understand the oldest rule that every style diva swears by: There are really no ironclad conventions when it comes to fashion.

NOTE TO READERS We’re experimenting with the format of Mint Lounge. On the last Saturday of every month, you’ll get Mint Lounge in this new, premiumpackaged avatar. Tell us what you think about this second edition.

What’s next?

Lady Gaga’s ‘iconic’ flank frock.

So we decided to end this year with some serious rule-flaunting too. Our cover story “Dress up, dress down” is all about doing away with the matchy-matchy heels, coordinated handbags, not-a-hairout-of-place look. This is the time to pair a couture gown with a grungy jacket or a lehenga top with an LBD, work at mixing textures, mismatching fabrics, and creating what we call the “the tadka look”.

In our book, there is no better way to bid adieu to 2010 and usher in 2011 than by living up to the most important rule of a true fashionista: Break all rules.

As your social calendar fills up with invitations to New Year’s Eve parties, black tie dos and casual brunches, keep this little mantra in mind when you put your party look together: Irreverent is in. Juxtapose evening wear with everyday wear to introduce a little bit of the unexpected in your ensembles. And then watch how adding a dash of dishevelled to ultra glamour becomes intoxicating simply because it creates a look that is unpredictable.

And those of you who still want a style bible: Well, camel was big this year, and will not rule the racks any more. Replace it with honeysuckle or sherbety pink.

Saris are everywhere. Guys, ditch checks and move to florals, invest in statement sandals, and forget toons—opt for the tees with a paint-splattered feel.

Write to lounge@livemint.com MARK RALSTON/afp

Priya Ramani is currently on leave WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TRENDING The accidental artefact

Happy feet: Black Nappa leather ‘Marine’ stilettos with 15 circles of crystal to signify the anniversary year, R95,000.

If there’s a lesson to be learnt from the curious case of Bob, it’s ‘never throw away old stuff’

By Sidin Vadukut Fifty-two years ago, an aviation medicine student called Bob, studying to a be a doctor on a US naval base in the Marshall Islands, bought a watch for himself. At the time the Rolex Submariner cost him $70 (around `3,160), not cheap by any means. But being an avid diver himself he wanted a diving watch that was designed for prolonged use under water.

Then earlier this month, he decided to sell the old watch along with some other personal belongings on eBay. The auction began at $9.95 for the old watch without a reserve price. And ended on 5 December, much to Bob’s surprise, at $66,100. Turns out that the watch is an extremely rare model made famous

by Sean Connery in the James Bond movies. Few pieces ever come up for auction and fewer still that are being sold by the original owner.

There was some controversy over the authenticity of the watch. But Bob, who prefers not to share his last name, sent watch blog Hodinkee.com several pictures of him wearing the piece over the years. This has helped quell doubters, but also will probably push more people to rummage in their cupboards and storerooms for more such treasures.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Submariner: From the starting price of $9.95, Bob’s piece was auctioned for $66,100.

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Shoe shine Old bling in a new, edgy avatar in Jimmy Choo’s latest anniversary collection Jimmy Choo brings bling back in its 15th anniversary commemorative collection. The Crystal Collection takes inspiration from the brand’s signature jewelled shoes, which catapulted it to iconic status. The bejewelled footwear has been modified to look edgy. From subtle glitter to full-blown, high-voltage sparkle, the dazzling collection includes pointy toe pumps and strappy stilettos. A cool way to strut this party season.

Rachana Nakra

Doc-yard

Rare documentaries from the world are a click away at a specialized Indian portal Since September, Sophy Sivaraman’s website, Sophodok.com, has become the go-to destination for documentary film lovers in the know. Sophodok sells DVDs of documentaries that are otherwise usually confined to Non-fiction: A website the festival circuit. Sivaraman for real storytellers. and her partners’ passion for the form is the website’s driving force: She believes the documentary is the only non-corporatized media format left and wants to introduce it to students as an alternative to “compromised” storytelling forms. Spotted in their store: Deepa Bhatia’s Nero’s Guests (`560), the Romanian Andrei Dascalescu’s Constantin and Elena (`350) and Audrius Stonys and Arnas Matelis’ Lithuanian Flight over Lithuania (`350). The site entertains orders from across India.

Supriya Nair

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L10 I TRENDING

Get over ‘Farmville’ Finally, games that won’t make you look like vacuous Facebook addicts

By Krish Raghav krish.r@livemint.com

I

s there a more shame-inducing online taunt than “Farmville addict”?

Zynga’s pastoral simulator may be a runaway hit, but it’s dragged Facebook games down to an intellectual vacuum.

The site is now plagued with legions of imitators and cheap cash-ins—from

crime romps to café simulators. Zynga’s new title, Cityville, seems to be pretty much a continuation of the firm’s previous efforts, and is already on course to be the next big Facebook hit.

But a new slew of announced Facebook titles are infusing some much-needed creativity into the genre. Here are three you won’t be ashamed of getting hooked to:

The Ministry of Silly Games

http://www.ministryofsilly games.com An official ‘Monty Python’ video game. Need we say more?

We do?

Ok, ‘The Ministry of Silly Games’ is a collection of gloriously silly mini games based on the Monty Python universe, drawing on skits from comedy classics such as ‘The Holy Grail’. “For years, people have wondered what it would be like to catapult livestock at French fortresses or play Russian roulette with an upper-class twit,” Python troupe member Terry Jones said in an interview. “Well, now they finally can, thanks to ‘The Ministry of Silly Games’.”

Echo Bazaar

http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com Set in a dark, alternate London, ‘Echo Bazaar’ is a fantastically written romp through noirish urban fantasy, Lovecraftian lore and Victorian weirdness. It’s also one of the most inclusive video games out there, with a smart set of diverse characters and a welcome openness to themes involving queer politics.

Civilization Network

http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork Yes, it’s a year late and yes, we still have no idea how it works, but Sid Meier rarely lets us down. And this is the famed ‘Civilization’ franchise we’re talking about. Even if a fraction of its deep, strategic gameplay, historical sweep and intelligent mechanics translate to the upcoming Facebook variant, the world will be a better place.

Nano mania At the forthcoming India Art Summit, the people’s car is a kitschy sculpture

By Anindita Ghose anindita.g@livemint.com It may not have the mileage and the desired number of takers, but the Nano continues to make statements.

It is now an artist’s muse. The Singapore-based, Kenyan-born artist Ketna Patel is part of a new generation of Indian diaspora artists who are drawing on India for inspiration. Her latest is an installation titled Stop! Indians Ahead that uses the Tata Nano as its canvas.

The “people’s car for the masses” WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

wrapped in pop art will be presented by the Singapore gallery Indigo Blue Art at the forthcoming edition of the India Art Summit (20-23 January).

Stop! Indians Ahead is meant to be a candid portrayal of the lives of everyday Indians. Patel’s kitsch imagery has been transferred on to the car in mosaic by the Italian mosaic company SICIS using a method similar to that employed by artisans of the Byzantine

courtesy Indigo Blue Art

period. The collaboration has resulted in rendering the new iconic Nano a symbolic “jewel for the masses”.

In addition to presenting the Nano at the summit (an identical car will be produced for the Tata Collection), Indigo Blue Art will be showcasing Patel’s work in its booth: 3D collages on wood and limited-edition acrylic screen prints.

Artist’s impression: Patel uses Indian pop art iconography in the piece.

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L12 I TRENDING

Reflective

They killed the CAPS LOCK!

Get noticed in the new year in suits with a sheen

Google’s new Chrome laptop says it can do without the Internet’s most beloved key. But can they get away with this?

By Rachana Nakra rachana.n@livemint.com Men needn’t be outshone at events this year. Sporting shine and looking stylish will be easy in the coming season. Using a satin finish, polyester and silk blends and fabrics coated with lurex, designer duo Rohit and Abhishek showed some radiant bandhgala suits at the recent Men’s Fashion Week in New Delhi. According to Rohit Kamra, shiny suits are the way to go this season. “It’s a great way to stand out at any wedding or party,” he says.

If you want to tone it down, get a combination of matte with shine with either the trouser or the jacket in a lustrous fabric. Or there can just be a panel or patch of shine on a matte suit. Balance the look with a simple shirt and a slim, textured tie.

Designer Troy Costa likes to blend silk for that glossy look.

“Wearing a tuxedo in this finish with a cravat or a bow tie is the perfect look for a red carpet event,” he says.

By Krish Raghav krish.r@livemint.com Notice anything odd in the picture?

This is Google’s CR-48, the reference laptop for its upcoming Chrome operating system. On the left edge of the keyboard, below the [Tab] key, you might notice the curious omission of THE GREATEST ENEMY OF CIVILITY ON THE INTERNET. Yes, Google’s killing the Caps Lock key, replacing it with a “search” button. A spokesperson for the company was quoted as saying that this will “improve the quality of comments on the Internet”, which, as explanations go, is as baffling as Chrome OS itself (a laptop running a locked-in browser? Really, Google? This took two years to build?). Of course, Caps Lock functionality can be restored if you really want it. But it’s an interesting experiment. Apple once thought, wrongly, that it could do away with the right mouse button. Can we, similarly, live without the Caps Lock?

Shine on: Suits by (clockwise from above) Troy Costa; Rohit and Abhishek; and Armani.

Fuss over time

Wrist wrap: A piece from the Tarun Tahiliani collection.

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The watch to match your vibrant bandhni lehenga or elegant chikankari sari may be hard to find. The Tarun Tahiliani and Timex wristwatch collection, which started retailing recently, has 14 styles, some of which have traditional jadau work with encrusted stones and pearls. Choose your watch from Tarun Tahiliani, a bridal collection (R15,000-30,000), or OTT

by Timex, a ready-to-wear collection (R12,000-18,000).

Seema Chowdhry

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L14 I TRENDING

u Ogaan: Gold necklace with spheres, at Santushti Shopping Complex, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, R3,150.

t Minawala Jewellers: 18 carat whitegold necklace and square and oval pendant, with diamonds, at UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; Waterfield Road, Bandra, and Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai, R28,800.

Angularity

p Mawi: Stacked tube ring, at Ozel, Greater Kailash-1, New Delhi, R18,500.

Add geometry to your jewellery chest with the shapes in vogue this season

By Rachana Nakra & Varuni Khosla rachana.n@livemint.com

p Malaga: Goldplated cuff with three semi-precious stones, at Palladium, Lower Parel, Mumbai, and Aza and Ensemble, Mumbai and New Delhi, R6,670.

p Fabindia: Silver hexagon ring from the Ananya Collection, at all Fabindia stores, R1,090.

u Craft House: Sterling silver pendant with semiprecious blue topaz stones, at The Metropolitan Hotel, Bangla Sahib Road, New Delhi; and Time Tower, Gurgaon, R1,700.

t Ogaan: Metal mesh earrings, at Santushti Shopping Complex, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, R3,200.

u de Grisogono: Multi-boule earrings, available online at www. eboutique.degrisogono. com, R23 lakh.

q Chopard: Yellow gold ring set with diamonds, from the Ice Cube collection, at The Oberoi, Nariman Point, Mumbai, R71,400.

t Ogaan: Lata Khan bracelet, at the Santushti Shopping Complex, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, R3,950.

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p Popley Eternal: Square-shaped diamond earrings set in white gold, Turner Road, Bandra (West), Mumbai, R8 lakh onwards.

Seema Chowdhry contributed to this story.

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L16 I COLUMNS

SHOBA NARAYAN | The Good Life

The Rolls-Royce of cakes It is usually made with a variety of dry fruits, soaked in brandy, rum, red wine and even vodka. It can be made with marzipan or not. Nuts are optional. And sometimes, it is an expletive, as in, “What a fruitcake!” It is, of course, the common Christmas cake. But this isn’t a mere cake.

Oh, no. It is the taste of tradition; a peck of nostalgia; the touchstone being your mother’s cake—the Rolls-Royce against which all other cakes are measured and fall short.

In Christian and other households—mine included—today is the day for fruit cake, eggnog, plum pudding, mulled wine, stollen, and Santa. Merry Christmas, everyone!

It may be particularly heretical to ask this today but are Christmas cakes an acquired taste—like sushi and wine? Do children love Christmas cake at first shot, or do they learn to love it because they associate it with happy memories, family, festive cheer, and lots of goodies?

My problem with plum cakes is that they have too much fruit. I imagine, kids would feel the same way. Christmas cakes could, very easily, fall in the same category of sweets that we all eat on festive occasions out of obligation.

Take the til ka laddu that Maharashtrians make for Sankranti. Or the pori urundai that Tamilians make for Karthigai Deepam. This is a sticky rice ball, made with puffed rice, jaggery and get this, dried ginger. Who puts ginger in a sweet? The rationale of festive cuisine is to complement the season. You eat sesame sweets in winter because they are warming, and dried ginger for digestion. I am sure plum cakes have a similar rationale but I cannot put my finger on it.

So I called Stanley Pinto, the finicky founder of the Bangalore Black Tie, to ask what the fuss was all about. “It’s tradition,” he said. “Most of our festivals have special sweets that are only made on those days.

Christmas requires a special cake and it happens to be a rich plum cake.”

Pinto gets his cakes from Harrods or Fortnum & Mason during trips to London and freezes them. He also orders cakes from Bangalore’s Michelle Gafoor (michelle.gafoor@ gmail.com), who charges R450 for her moist 1kg plum cake.

Lily Paul, who works in education, buys hers from Ann’s Bakery in Palai, Kerala; or Kottayam’s Omana Paul, retailed in Bangalore by Jani (080-22212441; R410 for a 1kg rich plum cake). Can I mention these as your recommendations, I ask Paul as we are about to hang up. “Yes, but WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Chef’s pride: The Christmas cake by Anurag Barthwal, pastry chef at The Oberoi Bangalore.

please don’t forget to mention that I make my own cake,” she replies quickly.

There you have it. Christmas cake is a homemaker’s pride. Paul is an intelligent, articulate, well-travelled and thoughtful woman. And yet, one measure of her self-worth is the girth of her cake. Don’t we all? Every talented superwoman I know has one dish (or more) that she is proud of.

It isn’t just a dish; it is part of her identity. Kavita’s chaat; Annie’s bread; Aunty Ria’s mithai. A woman measures herself in many ways: the shade of her lipstick, the quickness of her wit, the number of zeros in her salary cheque; the height of her heels; and the moistness of her cake. Secret recipes passed down the generations, sharing cake, a bit of womanly pride. Isn’t that what the holidays are about?

Anurag Barthwal, pastry chef at The Oberoi Bangalore, is well aware of the weight of this tradition. You know, he says ruefully, there are so many creative trends in the culinary world. There’s molecular gastronomy and slow food. You could do so much to a cake; but as far as the Christmas cake goes, we don’t dare mess with the recipe.

For Barthwal, as with other pastry chefs who end up making about 1,500kg of Christmas cake during the season, the art lies in the consistency. “We fuss over the fruit like a winemaker fusses over his vines,” he says. They begin soaking the dry fruits in October and roll out the cakes in December.

If you can’t mess with the recipe, you mess with the marketing. The ITC Royal Gardenia tried that this season with a measure of success.

They invited whoever they invite to these cake-mixing events that five-star hotels do; except with a twist. You bid for a cake and donate the money to charity. Yeah, right, I thought. That’s going to fly. Turns out, eight people bid and won the cakes and the hotel donated the money to their favourite charities. I wasn’t there, but that’s what chef Madhu Krishnan told me. According to the Gardenia’s pastry chef, Arvind Prasad, they have fudged around with fudge and macaroons this year. Their cakes, however, follow traditional recipes. They grind and sieve spices such as mace, candied ginger, star anise, cinnamon and cardamom and soak the spices along with the dried fruits “so that the spice flavours meld with the fruit”. Most places let the cakes sit for a week or two after baking and dip them in brandy a day or two before serving.

The words most often used to describe Christmas cake are “firm” and “moist”. Both terms are deceptive. Sure, the cakes look firm and moist. But cut a slice and they crumble from the weight of the stuff that is stuffed into them.

Minimalism has its place but it certainly is not inside a Christmas cake. I eat mine with hot toddy.

Shoba Narayan is yet to meet a Christmas cake that she cannot live without. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com

HERITAGE

will AND grace Once a regal breed and now a preserve of the elite, the Marwari horse is a power house of energy and charm. The ‘Maruti 800 of horses’ suffered neglect, ironically, because it was venerated. We revisit the legacy photograph by VIJAY SONEJI/MINT

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HERITAGE I DECEMBER 25 I L19 I LOUNGE

Rising up: Ahmedabadbased businessman Virendra Kankariya with his stallion Humayun.

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L20 I HERITAGE

By Krish Raghav krish.r@livemint.com

J

ust this once, His Highness Prince Mahipendra Singhji of Danta prefers a Maruti 800 over a Maserati.

“Would you drive a Maserati down Chandni Chowk?” he asks. “Racehorses are like that.”

The image of a saddled thoroughbred barrelling down a narrow, crowded lane comes unbidden. “They’re speed first, everything else second,” Singhji summarizes dismissively. “But the Marwari horse is different. It’s smart. Intelligent.

Perfectly adaptable. Just right. Like a Maruti 800.”

The description is delivered with the practised precision of a sales pitch, but Singhji has 25 years of experience with the breed and a stable full of equine Maruti 800s to back his opinion. When he says the Marwari horse is “special”, he says it slowly—like a word he’s summoned out of years of proximity to them.

“I believe it is as much an Indian icon as the one-horned rhinoceros or the Royal Bengal Tiger.”

By all accounts, the Marwari breed has seen a “remarkable transformation”, in Singhji’s words, over the last decade—but this is not a journey from near extinction to healthy survival. The Marwari is an “indigenous” breed of horses whose numbers dwindled in the last century, but never to the point of being endangered. Instead, the breed stagnated due to lack of professional breeding practices, and the pure lineage (the pedigree of the horse) was in decline. Since 1997, however, it’s been the recipient of a two-pronged offensive—the first to partially lift the ban on its export and, therefore, bring international interest to the peculiarities of the breed, and the second to revive its image as a royal, regal steed.

“You can trace the Marwari back to about the 12th century, when the Rathore clan in Mewar started a rigorous, selective breeding process for war horses,” says Raghuvendra Singh Dundlod, secretary general of the Indigenous Horse Society of India. Dundlod is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the Marwari breed, and is one of the frontline evangelists for its cause. He encountered the Marwari horse while assisting with the production of HBO’s first ever miniseries in 1984. Called The Far Pavilions, and based on the 1978 book by M.M. Kaye, the shoots in Rajasthan required 25 local horses on set for “authenticity”.

Dundlod took them off the film-maker’s hands after the show wrapped up and they’ve been with him ever since.

“Before that, we believe the breed was called the ‘Jangla’,” he says. The Marwari was bred for battle, and survival in a harsh climate—a combination that gives

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it many of its distinctive characteristics.

“It has these wonderful lyre-shaped ears,” Dundlod says, “which can swing 180 degrees—keeping it always alert to its surroundings.” The Marwari’s ears curve inwards to sometimes touch at the tip—every owner of a specimen seems to choose a different metaphor to describe it, from Dundlod’s “lyre” to a “scorpion’s stinger”. The horse is said to have legendary endurance and stamina, able to survive on frugal feeding and ward off most diseases. It is also physically and behaviourally intimidating. It’s taller than most Indian horses at around 65 inches, and it’s said to be hot-blooded and temperamental. Dundlod uses a peculiar phrase to describe this: He calls the Marwari “bomb-proof”. “It’s not afraid of anything—be it loud noises, explosions or a war elephant,” he says.

The Marwari’s history of battle scars

also gives it one very peculiar trait: It’s a fantastic dancer.

At horse shows in Pushkar and Jodhpur, the grooving Marwari is a common sight—switching gaits with consummate ease, rearing on its hind legs like a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. “Horses in battle were trained to rear up so the rider could aim his spear,” Dundlod says. “They’re also taught these complex gaits so they can dodge a rampaging elephant.” Over the years, these battle tactics have become dance moves, metal armour switched with jewellery.

The most famous Marwari horse is Chetak, the horse of 16th century Rajput ruler Maharana Pratap Singh. The story of the Battle of Haldighati in 1576 (described as the “Thermopylae of Mewar”) is particularly recounted as a poignant summary of the Marwari horse’s

HERITAGE I DECEMBER 25 I L21 I LOUNGE FRILET Patrick/afp

wikimedia

qualities. It’s more pop-culture lore than actual history, however. It’s difficult to ascertain Chetak’s exact breed from historical evidence, and the specifics of the battle have grown in the telling.

Pratap Singh, on Chetak, led his small force in battle against the mighty Mughals. The Mughal forces were commanded by Man Singh on a war elephant. Chetak charged into the heart of the battle and reared up on to the elephant to allow Pratap Singh to attack. Pratap Singh’s hurled spear missed and the elephant’s sharp swing of the tusk fatally wounded Chetak. The horse, in obvious pain, still managed to take its rider to safety in the nearby hills before collapsing.

The Marwari’s fierce and loyal reputation made it a target of British concern in the coming centuries.

Hardy: (above) The Marwari is built for Rajasthan’s harsh climate; and a statue of Maharana Pratap Singh on Chetak in Udaipur.

“The British were partly responsible for the breed’s decline,” says Virendra Kankariya, an Ahmedabad-based owner.

Kankariya’s stallion, Humayun, was the Marwari horse featured on an Indian government series of commemorative stamps of indigenous horse breeds.

The Marwari were often at the frontlines of skirmishes against the Raj, so their endurance and strength were undesirable. “Each state that the British conquered, they started a systematic campaign to eliminate the Marwari,” says Kankariya. “They were replaced with Australian imports called Walers, which were brought in during World War I.” Walers are still used in the President’s Guard, and by the army.

The other major cause for the Marwari’s slip into obscurity came, strangely enough, from its veneration. The horse’s image was inextricably tied to Rajput Kshatriya pride and it was a symbol of nobility and the elite. Post-1947, Indian governments saw it as a remnant of imperial pride and princely feudalism.

“The princes were forced to sell off large parts of their land, because of legislation starting with the Rajasthan Land Acquisition Act in 1953,” says Nirbhay Singh Deora, a Jodhpur-based breeder who runs a horse farm. “With no land, the first to go were their horses.” The law only permitted up to 132 “bighas” or 30 acres of land, which Deora says is “not even enough for one horse”.

The Rajput princes preserved a few specimens and post-1960, interest rose slowly as the havelis and palaces of the Rajputs became focal points for “heritage” tourism. Horse safaris brought tourists into contact with these animals, and forays into successful businesses meant financial stability for Rajput horse owners, who began buying Marwari horses for their stables.

There’s a curious elitism on display when Marwari horse owners are asked about this period of the horse’s history.

All of them cite the breeding of the horse by “countrymen and peasantry” or “farmers” as a reason for its “loss of purity”. While poor breeding practices are a legitimate factor, it wasn’t until foreign interest in the horses (starting from the late 1990s) that the processes were given scientific and professional rigour.

The turning point came in the mid1990s, and especially in 1999, thanks to confusion over some documentation.

How to ship a horse?

When you ask Francesca Kelly about the first time she saw a Marwari horse, she sighs (“It’s been told and written about so many times”) and begins like a fairy tale (“it’s an old, old story that begins in the desert”).

In 1995, Kelly, a US citizen who spent part of her childhood in Cairo and the

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L22 I HERITAGE

deserts of Egypt, was in Rajasthan on holiday. “The Marwari is an animal of great beauty,” she says. “I bought a mare on that trip, but found out that I couldn’t take it back with me.”

The Marwari horse was among the “indigenous” breeds that were banned for export, and it looked unlikely that the policy would be changed any time soon.

Kelly joined forces with Dundlod and in 1997, he formed the Indigenous Horse Society of India, which sought to engage with the government on policy issues centred around indigenous breeds. “While the export policy made sense, the government wasn’t doing anything else to maintain the breed,” he says. At the time, a lot of local breeders’ associations were sprouting in Jodhpur and Gujarat, but no apex body existed that could bring them all together. In 1999, after two years of negotiations with the ministry of agriculture and the department of foreign trade, Dundlod managed to convince the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) to change the Marwari’s status from “banned” to “restricted”.

“This meant that they’d look at it case by case. If a good seller could prove that the sale was beneficial, and they obtained a no-objection certificate from the ministry, it could be allowed,” he says. The battle was finally won in early 2000, when the DGFT allowed Kelly to take six Marwari horses back with her.

But while the US agreed to the import, it also demanded a rigorous set of documents to process the shipment.

“We saw this list that said ‘studbook’, ‘breed specification’, and we were completely lost,” Dundlod says.

Internationally, pure-bred horses are codified under what is called a “studbook”, that records offspring and lineage of pure bloodlines. The set of physical characteristics of a breed (height, colour and size) are also set in stone via official breed specification documents, which serve as a reference for breeders and horse owners.

The Marwari horse had neither. Help from the Pune-based National Horse Breeders Society was not forthcoming, so Dundlod decided he’d work on standardizing the breed himself. This meant uniting the feuding local societies into deciding a common set of specifications.

“Since 2008, we have a Marwari Studbook Registration Society,” says Kankariya, who is now on the board of the society. “Before that, it was all hearsay and word-of-mouth, but now we have properly codified breed standards and maintaining organized pure specimens is possible.” The board examines every horse registered with it, brands with a number and enters the details in the studbook. Kankariya says about 4,500 horses have been registered in the

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PHOTOGRAPHS courtesy virendra kankariya

Picture perfect: (above) The Indian government postage stamp featuring the stallion Humayun; and Humayun in real life.

last two years mainly from Rajasthan and Gujarat, owned by rich Rajputs or stable owners. The price of a Marwari now ranges between `3 lakh and `15 lakh.

But there’s still a lot left to be done, says Dundlod. The European Union, for example, does not allow the import of animals from India because of its noncompliance with strict World Health Organization (WHO) protocols. “In the last two years, we’ve been sending a representative to negotiate on our behalf,” Dundlod says. “We’re trying to get a ‘disease-free’ zone approved in India so we can export horses.”

All of India, Dundlod snorts, would take more than “a century” to pass the WHO protocols. “The norms are tough.

Our best bet is to get them to agree to one disease-free zone within the country from where exports can be possible.”

On target It’s not just the economic value of the Marwari horse that’s on the rise. Attempts are under way to establish its usefulness in sports.

“The Marwaris are being used for

About 4,500 horses have been registered in the last two years mainly from Rajasthan and Gujarat, owned by rich Rajputs or stable owners.

The price of a Marwari horse now ranges between R3 lakh and R15 lakh

endurance races—these are 40, 80 and 120km races held annually,” Kankariya says. Endurance riding is a sport recognized by the Fédération Équestre Internationale (FEI) and is being considered as an Olympic event. “The Marwari outperformed all breeds here, including the army hybrids,” he says. Another local Marwari monopoly is tent-pegging, where a rider gallops at full speed, and uses a lance to scoop out a peg placed at a precise distance. “Marwaris are awesome at this—their intelligence means they know exactly when to lower balance,” Kankariya says.

But the gold standard for equestrian events is dressage, an Olympic discipline that’s like gymnastics for horses (it’s often called “horse ballet”). The Marwari’s smooth dance moves makes it potentially suited to the world stage. The Marwari’s prowess at basic dressage was recently showcased at the World Equestrian Games in Kentucky, US, where Kelly’s exported horses performed to “a great response”, in Dundlod words.

For Kelly, these advances are important, but she can’t shake the feeling that some things have remained unchanged.

“A friend in India once told me that you can go on and on and keep working on an issue, but it won’t change anything.

That’s so demoralizing to hear.”

She remembers an incident at a recent Pushkar horse show, where a horse from Punjab was declared “Best of Breed” at the competition. “There was an enormous fight over this,” she says, “with people demanding to know how a Punjab horse could beat the local ones.”

Tents were overturned, threats were made and the whole competition had to be rigged and redone to declare the local breeds triumphant. “This kind of crap happens all the time. It’s stupid and pathetic and after 16 years, I’m weary of it.”

The amount of abuse and exploitation that horses suffer in India has also not changed. “India’s progress as a global economy seems to involve ruining the countryside with concrete,” she says.

“Taking care of the environment and the animals, or promoting humanity and compassion towards how they’re treated, seems to be low on the priority list. There seems to be no increase in concern about taking care of these animals.”

She’s not quite sure if the Marwari’s future is secure. A small community is reaping the economic benefits of newfound interest in the breed, but they’re still the victims of petty infighting and pure market considerations. “I’m not a foreigner smitten by the image of India.

I’ve had years to scratch at the surface,” she says. For the near future, in a strange inversion of images, it looks like the Maruti 800 of horses will remain the preserve of the privileged.

BOOKS I NOVEMBER 00 I L0 I LOUNGE

STYLE

Date night at a Lounge Floral print shirt, Ashish N. Soni, R4,250; belt, Woodland, R1,595; trousers, Zara, R2,590; quilted jacket with knitted back, Salvatore Ferragamo, R74,000; shoes, Kenzo, R20,300.

Style BASIC While experimenting with floral patterns, opt for “prints that are either tone-on-tone or contrasting ones. These look good with denims and loafers,” says Ashish N. Soni, designer.

Who said there aren’t strict dos and don’ts for men’s casual wear? We tell you how to dress smart on weekends

Downtown

men Photographs by: Yashasvi Sharma Concept and styling: Vasudha Rai & Seema Chowdhry Model: Namik Paul/Elite Model Management, New Delhi Make-up: Neeraj Arora/Mint

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LOUNGE I NOVEMBER 00 I L0 I BOOKS

On a road trip Jeans, Canali, R16,500; T-shirt, Nike, R1,995; Cacomistle sweater, Diesel, R16,895; quilted sleeveless jacket, Paul & Shark, R43,990; shoes, Emporio Armani Reebok, R17,999.

Style BASIC Look for military detailing on your sweater such as epaulettes on the shoulder or a pocket on the sleeve.

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BOOKS I NOVEMBER 00 I L0 I LOUNGE

Shopping Guide

Pub night with the boys Fur-lined jacket, R7,990, and woollen scarf, 1,790, both at Zara; T-shirt, Diesel, R5,295; Ben original skinny jeans, Jack & Jones, R4,945; winter ankle boots, Tod’s, R25,000.

Out to brunch Linen trousers, Timberland, R4,490; muslin self-print shirt, Ashish N. Soni, R3,400; jacket, R12,250, and opentoe sandals, R4,350, Rajesh Pratap Singh; sunglasses, Gucci, R19,000; scarf, Jack & Jones, R1,045.

Style BASIC Linen trousers make a great style statement and so do statement sandals, which will be huge in 2011.

“Concentrate on soft tailoring silhouettes rather than going in for tiers, frills or layers in casual wear,” says Soni.

Style basic Ditch T-shirts with cartoon characters or clever one-liners, and also say no to bright colours. Tees in black, white, navy and khaki are chic.

Ashish N. Soni: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Canali: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and JW Marriott Hotel, Juhu, Mumbai.

Diesel: Ambience mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; UB Mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and Palladium, Lower Parel, Mumbai.

Emporio Armani Reebok: All Reebok stores countrywide.

Gucci: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai.

Jack & Jones: DLF Place mall, Saket, New Delhi; and Colaba, Mumbai.

Kenzo: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and JW Marriott Hotel, Juhu, Mumbai.

Nike: All Nike stores countrywide.

Paul & Shark: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Rajesh Pratap Singh: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Salvatore Ferragamo: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai.

Timberland: DLF Place mall, Saket, New Delhi.

Tod’s: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai.

Woodland: All Woodland stores countrywide.

Zara: Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and Palladium, Lower Parel, Mumbai.

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L26 I STYLE

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STYLE I DECEMBER 25 I L27 I LOUNGE

DRESS DOWN, DRESS UP Couture gown with woollens and bed head; sari with jacket and tights—irreverent is the new dress code this party season

Down to earth

Silk burgundy dress, Christian Dior, R85,000; gold and off-white sweater, Mango, R2,850; black stilettos with metal studs, Just Cavalli, R22,000; raw, uncut agate neck piece, R19,500, and ring, R6,850, both at Breathing Space.

Photographs by Avinash Gowariker Model Gabriella Le Fatima Leopoldino Bertante/ Toabh Model Management, Mumbai Styled by Ameeta Shankar Co-styled by Rachana Nakra/Mint Make-up Sonic Sarwate, MAC Hair DilIp BHosale, Jean-Claude Biguine Location Courtesy Tryst, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L28 I STYLE

Grunge glamour

Taupe silk chiffon gown with sequins, Ayesha Depala, R1.5 lakh; brown leather jacket, Zara, R4,590; agate neck piece with Gothic influences, Breathing Space, R18,500.

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STYLE I DECEMBER 25 I L29 I LOUNGE

Luxe layers

Teal tube dress, Cue, approx. R17,500; black chiffon inner (part of Anamika Khanna ensemble, not for sale separately); metallic sheeted top (with a lehenga, R6 lakh) worn as jacket, Anamika Khanna; agate neck piece with Gothic influences, Breathing Space, R18,500; black pony-skin boots with leather detailing, Tod’s, R66,000; purple satin clutch, Love Moschino, R8,000.

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SarI style

Gold foil georgette sari with 3D Swarovski flower embellishment, Gaurav Gupta, R43,000; high-neck bomber jacket, Gucci, approx. R44,775; origami tights, Gerbe, R1,799; studded belt, Zara, R990; yellow pumps, R25,000; and gold necklaces worn as bracelet, R10,000 each, all Just Cavalli.

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STYLE I DECEMBER 25 I L29 I LOUNGE

Location Tryst, Mumbai With futuristic interiors and a hi-tech lighting system, Tryst is the latest entrant to the night life of Mumbai. The club has private tables and enclosures which come with a personal butler service and mini screens. The unique lighting concept reacts to sound and works on beat synchronization, providing expression through 16 million colours.

(022-66614366) Make-up diaries Get the favourite smoky-eyed look for your night out with a touch of green. Make-up artist Sonic Sarwate of MAC, Mumbai, hydrated model Gabriella Le Fatima Leopoldino Bertante’s skin with Studio Moisture cream.

To perfect her skin he used yellow Color Corrector to cover slight patchiness. He set the make-up with Select Sheer loose powder.

The cheeks were given a touch for colour with Sur and the cheekbones highlighted with Gaana. For the eyes, Sarwate blended Oomph eyeshadow and Carbon eyeshadow.

He added a touch of glitter to the eyelids with Reflects Gold for the glamorous party look. The look was completed with Smolder Eye kohl and Zoom Fast mascara. The lips were left nude and later Sarwate added Yash lipstick and topped it off with some Ample Pink Plushglass for a rosy hue.

Rachana Nakra Get the look Carole Robequin, creative director, Jean-Claude Biguine, India, on hair trends for the party season l Do away with poker-straight, flat hair.

Voluminous blow-drys and styles are a favourite this season. With well-defined bangs and fringes circling your face, you can flaunt the new bouncy look with long layers at the back. l For those who like their hair up, sport a chignon with slight bounce atop a messy bun on the nape of your neck with a few stray curls hanging out. l Grow out your short crop slightly and maintain the cut with a proper blow-dry before stepping out. Edgy long bobs are in with an added touch of elegance with longer layers. l Add some colour to your tresses without looking out of fashion. Instead of going for highlights, get your stylist to add lowlights. Lowlights darken and deepen your hair and add vibrancy. Reds, plums and auburn are the defining shades of the season for lowlights.

Sequin tops

Sequinned dress with shoulder detailing, Cue, R32,500; lace cardigan, Mango, R2,850; gold brooch, Breathing Space, R7,850; black bag with gold chain strap, Just Cavalli, R18,000.

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LOUNGE I NOVEMBER 00 I L0 I BOOKS

Knit of time

Black lace tank top, Promod, R1,750; red knit vest, R6,895, and black full sleeves knit jacket, R12,895, both at Diesel; black tights with shimmer, Zara, R1,499; deep purple cage heels, Nine West, R4,990; metallic belt, Charles & Keith, R1,499.

Shopping guide Anamika Khanna: Outram Street, Kolkata; Kimaya Fashions, Juhu, and Ensemble, Lions Gate, Mumbai; and Santushti Shopping Complex, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.

Ayesha Depala: Soon to be launched in India. For details, email info@ayeshadepala.com Breathing Space by Eina Ahluwalia: Ensemble, Lions Gate, Mumbai; and Santushti Shopping Complex, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.

Charles and Keith: All stores in Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata.

Christian Dior: Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Cue: Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna, D-19, Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Diesel: Juhu Tara Road and Palladium, Lower Parel, Mumbai; UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Gaurav Gupta: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Gerbe: Available online at www.strapsandstrings.com Gucci: The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; The Oberoi, Dr Zakir Hussain Marg, and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Just Cavalli: DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Love Moschino: The Collective, Palladium, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai.

Mango: All stores in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata.

Nine West: Atria mall, Worli, and Linking Road, Bandra, Mumbai; and Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi.

Promod: All stores in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Tod’s: The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

Zara: Palladium, Lower Parel, Mumbai; and Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi.

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COLUMNS I DECEMBER 25 I L33 I LOUNGE

PAMELA TIMMS | PIECE OF CAKE

Maw Broon’s tablet It’s no great surprise that one of Scotland’s best-loved poems is Address to the Toothache by our national bard, Robert Burns.

With a fondness for deep-fried Mars bars, shortbread and boiled sweets, Scots have every reason to fear what Burns calls the “hell o’ a’ diseases”. One of the main reasons Scotland is a place where teeth decay and dentists thrive must surely be our national sweet, “tablet”. The best way to describe tablet is like barfi, but sweeter.

Which is presumably why my mother only ever made tablet at Christmas. We kids would hover round the pan while she patiently stirred up the sweet, creamy, buttery, fudgy mass, waiting for all the precious scrapings left behind after she’d poured it into a tin to set. She would then hide it and ration it out one piece at a time, leaving us constantly craving more.

Unfortunately, the recipe I’m passing on today is not my mother’s even though hers was the best I’ve ever tasted. The recipe my sister and I inherited is incomplete and has led, over the years, to much festive frustration as we try to recreate mum’s tablet for our own children. In fact, our annual struggle to coax the tablet to setting point has become something of a Christmas ritual in itself.

Another festive family ritual in our home was poring over the Broons annual compendium which was always tucked in our Christmas stocking. The Broons are a fictional Scottish family whose antics have been captured in a cartoon strip in The Sunday Post newspaper since 1936.

To this day, Maw and Paw Broon continue to live with their eight children in a tenement building in the fictional Scottish town of Auchentogle where, despite acquiring computers and iPods over the years, they seem to remain firmly rooted in the 1940s. They have old-fashioned names like Horace, Eck and Hen, wear aprons and zoot suits and are constantly trying to scrape together enough money to buy a tin of “baccy” (tobacco). They speak in a broad Scots dialect and, judging by the hairstyles, Maw, Maggie and Daphne still set their hair in pin curls at bedtime. Recently, the stout-chested Broon matriarch has been persuaded to record her recipes for posterity in a series of wonderfully compiled, scrapbookstyle books. With all the Scottish favourites—Clootie Dumpling, Cock-a-Leekie, Arbroath Smokies—it takes me back to the cooking of my grandparents and aged aunties.

The recipes are in a pre-health police time-warp—Hen’s favourite breakfast is “fried tattie (potato) scone, fried soda scone, fried tatties, fried bacon, twa (two) fried eggs, scrambled eggs, Lorne sausage, black pudding, mealie pudding, fruit pudding, and broon (brown) sauce. Serve with toast an’ butter an’ jam an’ strong tea wi’ three sugars”. Needless to say Hen Broon never made it as a supermodel.

Here, loosely translated from the Scots, is Maw Broon’s recipe for tablet and, unlike my own Maw’s recipe, this one actually works.

Tablet (makes enough to keep your dentist busy for quite some time) Ingredients 125g salted butter 1kg caster/breakfast sugar 1 (250ml) cup full-cream milk 400g tin condensed milk 1 tsp vanilla extract

Sugar rush: In shape and consistency, the tablet is close to the Indian barfi.

Method Grease a baking tray approximately 25x35cm. Melt the butter in a large heavy-bottomed pan over low heat. Add the sugar and milk, and keep stirring until PRADEEP GAUR/MINT the sugar has completely dissolved.

Pour in the condensed milk, turn the heat up “a wee bitty” then bring to the boil “awfy slowly”. When the mixture has reached boiling point (and from now on take great care, boiling sugar equals nasty burns), turn the heat down and let it simmer for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally to make sure it doesn’t catch on the bottom of the pan. After about 20 minutes, put some cold water in a cup and with a small spoon, drop a tiny amount of the mixture into the water. When the tablet is ready, you should be able to hold the mixture between thumb and forefinger—it should be like a small, soft ball. If not, keep boiling the mixture until it reaches the right consistency.

Then take the pan off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. You now need what Maw Broon calls “a guid strong arm” as you have to beat the tablet solidly for 5 minutes. As it cools, the mixture will become thicker and harder to beat but keep going for the full 10 minutes before pouring it into the greased tray.

Score the surface of the tablet into one-inch squares—this will make it easier to cut later.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at http://eatanddust.wordpress.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

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EAT/DRINK

Irresistible lightness The most calorie-conscious of you can dig into these light but luscious party entrées

By Amrita Roy amrita.r@livemint.com

Chicken in cranberry sauce VARUN TULI, co-founder, The Yum Yum Tree, New Delhi

T

he pies have been baked, the pudding is ready to serve. But few things spoil the fun as watching guests barely pick at a welllaid table because your spreads are too rich to risk. We asked four chefs to dish up signature entrées that don’t compromise on flavour, but which even the strictest dieters can’t fault.

Dill-flavoured steamed fish VIPUL GUPTA, sous chef, WelcomHotel New Delhi

Calorie count: 60 cal per serving (serves 4) Ingredients 400g Indonesian basa or sole (cut into fillets) 50g seasonal vegetables A pinch or two of oregano A bunch of dill sprigs For the marinade Salt (to taste) 1 tsp pepper Juice of half a lemon 1 tsp olive oil WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

the hot, steamed fish. Garnish with dill, sautéed vegetables and serve hot.

Chef’s word: The basa is a very lean seafish and goes wonderfully with fresh seasonal vegetables. Steam it, or lightly grill, and serve with a light sauce. Steaming retains all the flavours and nutrients. In the case of vegetables, steaming retains the colour and texture as well. This recipe is a favourite with my wife and friends. Every time I’ve served it at parties at my home, my guests have loved it.

A few sprigs of fresh dill For the sauce 40ml olive oil Juice of 1 lemon ½ tsp chopped garlic 1 tsp white wine Salt and pepper to taste Method Marinate the fish for an hour and steam it till done. Heat olive oil in a pan, sauté chopped garlic, add lemon juice, wine and seasoning. In a separate pan, heat some olive oil and toss the seasonal vegetables with oregano. Arrange the fish on a plate and pour the sauce over

Lean meal: (above) Steaming retains the flavour of the fish and the vegetables; and (top) chef Varun Tuli in his kitchen at The Yum Yum Tree, New Delhi.

Calorie count: Around 750 cal (serves 3) Ingredients 500g chicken breast 1 onion 4 cloves garlic 2 bird’s-eye chilli 3 tbsp cooking or white wine 1 cup fresh cranberries Oil as required 1 red bell pepper, cut into long strips (No salt is required, the saltiness of the sauces suffices) For the sauce 2 tbsp oyster sauce 3 tbsp Thai Maggi seasoning 1 tbsp fish sauce 1 tbsp brown sugar 2 tbsp lime juice Method Combine all the sauce ingredients in a pan. Keep aside. On medium flame, heat oil in a wok, add chopped onion,

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sarang sena/Mint

garlic and chillies, and lightly sauté.

Put the chicken and sauté for 3 minutes.

Add the wine. Next, add the bell pepper. Lower the heat. Add the sauce and cranberries. Simmer for a minute.

Chef’s word: I make a version of a classic chicken krapow, a Thai stir-fry, with fruits that are in season. So in winter, I substitute the original basil with cranberries. You can use raisins, almonds or prunes for more Christmas flavours. The base of the chicken is very mildly flavoured, so it will perfectly complement the added flavours.

Ravioli stuffed with beet and goat cheese

ORIANA TIRABASSI, Italian chef, JW Marriott, Mumbai Calorie count: 400 cal (serves 1) Ingredients 120g flour 1 egg 10g salt 20ml extra virgin olive oil 50g goat cheese 30ml beetroot juice 30g onion 50ml cream 20g Parmesan 50g asparagus 30g sun-dried tomato 5g red chillies 50ml vegetable stock 1 fresh tomato Some parsley A dash of truffle oil to garnish Method Make the pasta dough with flour, egg

Seared BlueFin Tuna Niscoise DEEPAK MISHRA, executive chef, Swissôtel Kolkata and beetroot juice. Roll the dough into sheets and cut in squares. For the sauce, heat extra virgin olive oil in a pan, add sliced onion, red chillies, sundried tomatoes, fresh tomato and parsley, cream and goat cheese, and cook for a few minutes. Blanch the pasta in boiling salted water. Steam the asparagus. Place a pasta sheet on a plate and cover with a spoonful of sauce and a piece of the goat cheese mixture.

Repeat the process thrice. Garnish with the steamed asparagus and drizzle with truffle oil. Sprinkle Parmesan on top.

Chef’s word: Ravioli is traditionally prepared with little cheese and many vegetables such as asparagus, tomatoes, onions. You can also add broccoli.

For a contemporary touch and unique flavour, I add beetroot juice.

Slim picks: (clockwise from above, left) Varun Tuli’s Chicken in Cranberry Sauce; Deepak Mishra’s Seared Bluefin Tuna Niscoise; and Oriana Tirabassi’s Ravioli Stuffed with Beet and Goat Cheese.

Calorie count: around 460 cal per serving (serves 1) Ingredients 100g bluefin tuna 30g Kalamata olives 25g baby potato (boiled) 20g asparagus 30g haricot beans (boiled) 15g cherry tomato 70ml olive oil 1 lemon 1 tsp mustard paste 5ml anchovy essence A sprig or two of chervil Method Marinate the tuna in olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon zest. Toss the sliced baby potatoes, haricot beans, asparagus spears, cherry tomatoes with olive oil and lemon juice to make Niscoise vegetables.

Sear the tuna on a high flame and cook to rare. Rest the fish for a while, then slice it. Make lemon vinaigrette with lemon juice, anchovy essence, olive oil and seasoning. Plate the tuna and the Niscoise vegetables. Garnish with marinated cherry tomatoes and chervil sprig.

Chef’s word: You’ve probably seen chefs with big bellies. I’m not one of them. I like to eat low-cal dishes. This one is a favourite when I’m entertaining at home. With its fresh flavours, it always gets a wow.

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TRAVEL

Running out of luck After generations of conflict and centuries of violence, the Irish ‘no surrender’ axiom faces yet another stern test

By Sidin Vadukut

L

ondonderry may be the most interesting city you’ve never heard of. Also known as Derry, especially if you’re Catholic or hate the English, Londonderry is best known for being the location of one of the flashpoints in the torrid history of Northern Ireland’s troubles. Over a three-decade-long period starting sometime in the mid1960s, Northern Ireland was the victim of an ethnic and political conflict that split the island’s people down the middle and caused the death of over 3,500 civilians and armed forces.

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Irish folk, on both sides of the border, still refer to this as The Troubles.

Often the bloody conflict spilt over into the Republic of Ireland in the south and, across the Irish Sea, into the rest of the UK. And when it did, the world noticed. The Provisional Irish Republican Army, which fought against British forces in Northern Ireland and outside, was feared the world over for its brutal attacks and for its perfection in the art of bombings. Especially car bombs.

“Derry is a city with origins that dates back centuries. It is one of the oldest cities in all of Ireland. Yet you don’t see old buildings as you would in cities like London. Why do you think

that is?” asks Garvin Kerr. “Because a third of all the buildings in all of Derry were destroyed by bombs during The Troubles.”

Kerr is a guide with a popular local outfit (www.derrycitytours.com) and is taking a group of us on a walking tour of the ancient walls of the city. Visitors to Derry are blessed with a continuous system of gates and walls that surround the city. This is rare, we are told, not just in Ireland but all across Europe where most cities burst through their walls as they grew. Derry managed to leave the walls standing.

The walls are in almost perfect structural condition and a slow circuit

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Fault line: The small town of Londonderry has been witness to some of the most violent incidents in Irish history.

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with a dramatic guide is the perfect way to experience and understand the outsized impact that this tiny city of less than 250,000 people has had on history.

After a quick explanation of why it is called Derry—from the old Irish Daire, meaning oak grove—Kerr goes on to explain two pivotal incidents. The first is the Siege of Derry in 1689, and the other is 1972’s infamous Bloody Sunday, the flashpoint I referred to in the opening paragraph. Both incidents shape much of what modern Derry looks like.

On 18 April 1689, in the aftermath of England’s Civil War and Glorious Revolution, deposed Catholic King James II and his forces made it all the way to the gates of Derry. The locals, however, remained fiercely loyal to the Protestant King William III. Just as James was about to enter, 13 young apprentice boys sealed the gates of the city. “And just before they closed them, the boys said two words to James’ army,” Kerr says holding up two fingers. “No surrender.”

Over the years it has become a slogan that has been adopted by Irish on every side of every conflict.

James laid siege to Derry for 105 days before the city was relieved. Almost one-fourth of the inhabitants died of disease. Many of them are buried under a huge unmarked grave in the courtyard of the cathedral that looms over the city.

Almost three centuries later, Derry once again witnessed violence. On 30 January 1972, British forces opened fire on Irish civil rights marchers.

Thirteen people died. The movement to unite the British-ruled north with the independent south dramatically picked up steam. Enrolment into the Provisional IRA soared.

When Kerr is done talking about WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Bloody Sunday and the innocents who died, his eyes well up. More than one tourist is too choked to speak. After a moment of silence, Kerr moves on.

“That is where cannons from inside the city shot on James’ forces on the hill there,” points out Kerr before walking a few steps ahead backwards (he does this to maintain eye contact with us tourists. Kerr has it down to a fine art.

Don’t try this at home).

And then he points down a road.

The red building on the left, he says, was once the house of the bishop of Derry. And in that house lived the wife of one such bishop, Cecil Frances Alexander, who wrote the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful. And right across the road is the courthouse, “the most bombed building in Derry”.

All this makes Derry sound like the dourest place in the world. Not so, but far otherwise.

Derry is a charming little place steeped in history old and new and full of the nicest people. Not to mention excellent shopping and some outstanding restaurants (in fact, all of Ireland is dotted with cafés, bistros and restaurants that offer superb local produce. A cold pint of Guinness is almost always available, and most chefs are more than happy to invent a few vegetarian options on the fly. No place on the emerald isle for MTR packets or frozen rotis).

Ideally located between the ancient Bishop’s Gate area, where the apprentice boys slammed the gates shut, and the slightly more modern Foyleside Shopping Centre is Halo Pantry and Grill. The eatery is highly rated in the city and I am treated to a great no-frills burger. Afterwards the manager shares his concern about recent economic developments. The Republic of Ireland,

‘It has been hard. We’re just three years old.

We’ve seen nothing but a bad economy.

I don’t know how we’re going to survive next year. A lot of people used to come from the Republic to shop here.’ less than 16km away from Derry where the border came closest, is almost broke. “It’s been hard. We’re just three years old. We’ve seen nothing but a bad economy. I don’t know how we’re going to survive next year. A lot of people used to come from the Republic to shop here.

Especially when the euro became very strong. They used to come in their cars and go back with the boot full of shopping bags. But now things look bad,” Kerr says.

Up in the north there is nothing but sympathy for the travails in the Republic. While the global slowdown has affected Northern Ireland as much as any other part of the UK, they’ve been spared the chaos down south. Each day the local papers talk of nothing but the crisis unfolding in the Republic.

“Like everywhere else they got done in by the banks.” Talking to me is Andrew Beggs. Beggs is a driver-guide,

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photographs by sidin vadukut

someone qualified to guide tourists around Ireland but also trained to drive large passenger vehicles. He is a short, stocky 60-year-old man with wisps of white hair on his head and a bottomless reservoir of trivia inside it. “But you know what,” Beggs tell me over coffee at a small café a few hours outside Derry, “we Irish have always been poor. This island never really had any money.

We’ve had all the wars and then the famines and the great migrations. We’ve been poor before. We may become poor again. But we can deal with that. The Irish know how to be poor.”

Over the next few days we wind our way southwards, closer and closer to Dublin where the Irish government scrambles to stay afloat. En route we stop at Bushmills, a whiskey distillery.

A Polish fellow from Gdansk takes us through a tasting session where we sample Irish and Scotch whiskies and

American bourbon.

Then we stay for a night at Castle Leslie, a wonderfully preserved old castle property on sprawling grounds that is endowed with a few ghosts, some of the oldest flushing toilets in Ireland and a history of owners bestowed with eccentricity. The current owner, nonagenarian Sir John Leslie, is a connoisseur of loud thumping music and is a frequent visitor at the nightclub in nearby Monaghan Town. Sir John also occasionally conducts tours of the castle himself. Hearing him refer to an old British prime minister as “cousin Winston”, while energetically speeding up and down several flights of stairs, faster than much younger visitors, is quite remarkable. Castle Leslie is also where Paul McCartney got married to Heather Mills. The marriage, like Ireland’s brush with prosperity, was brief and ended expensively.

Once in Dublin, however, there is no mistaking the sense of embarrassment and anger that pervades the city. A scramble to visit the National Museum of History comes to nought as the gates are shut early. A watchman tells us that there was a protest outside the nearby office of Brian Cowen, Ireland’s Taoiseach or prime minister. Thousands of angry protesters flooded the streets.

Soldiering on: (clockwise from above) Dublin at night; medals on display at Castle Leslie; and a panoramic view of Derry.

There was no violence but most nearby buildings were shut early.

The supermarkets and department stores are full of shoppers nevertheless.

With Christmas shopping starting earlier each year, Dundrum Town Centre in Dublin is packed with families. Retailers such as Marks and Spencer and Harvey Nicols show no sign of an impending crisis that will, according to most newspaper editorials, make Republic of Ireland citizens service debt payments for years. Dundrum is a good showcase for the kind of Irish prosperity that made people call it the Celtic Tiger. The shopping centre is Ireland’s and one of Europe’s largest with a floor space of over 80,000 sq. ft. Some 70 million people have shopped here since its opening in 2005. “We can’t drop everything because of some stupid bankers, can we?” says a Marks and Spencer salesman when I ask him why so many people are still spending. His job that day was to hard-sell a Sony iPod dock at 30% discount. “Until Christmas people will buy. But after that I don’t know. Things will probably get very tough.”

Upstairs, in the Eason’s book store, things are much more obvious. Entire shelves are dedicated to books on the Irish crisis. One thing, however, stands out. The titles sound nothing like the sombre, serious books that came out from the US or UK. There is none of that grave, gloomy foreboding. One book by John Waters is called: Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland. There are quite a few books in that vein. Many covers have cartoons and caricatures. Yet they all convey a sense of collective throwing up of arms in disgust and frustration— how could this happen to us?

Bill Shipsey is still optimistic: “The Irish are resilient. We are still far better off than we ever were.” Shipsey is a wellknown lawyer in Dublin whose clients include the bands U2 and The Cranberries (he was also recently in the news for a case about a businessman found sleepwalking in the nude. It makes for essential googling). He responded to a set of emailed questions. Shipsey says he got a sense that things were going downhill “when most of the commercial property deals in London involved Irish investors—outbidding Arab sheikhs”.

What does this mean for him and his family? “Spending less. Paying off debt.

Licking wounds. And being resigned to working for years longer than I would have wished.” But the true barometer of Irish sentiment, my guide Andrew Beggs tells me, is to be found in an Irish pub. There are at least 900 in Ireland.

I manage to visit two. McDaids pub is outside the splendid Westbury Hotel, just off Grafton Street, a prime shopping area. Nearby is a famous statue of local boy and member of 1970s rockers Thin WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L40 I TRAVEL Scotland

Engalnd

Derry Northern Ireland

Ir i sh S ea

IRELAND

UNITED KINGDOM

Dublin

At l a n t i c O cea n

Wales

Cork

MAP BY AHMED RAZA KHAN/MinT

TRIP PLANNER I ireland Good to know Travelling across Ireland is a pretty seamless experience.

But it’s good to keep in mind that there are two governments here. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and the Republic of Ireland is an independent nation which is part of the European Union. So you need to carry both sterling pounds and euros when you travel (though towns on the British side of the border, such as Derry, tend to accept both). Also, if you’re the sort to carry cellphones on holiday, beware.

There are many places where you’ll get signals from both sides of the border, and you could run up huge roaming bills.

Getting there You need a UK visa for Northern Ireland and an Irish visa—they are not part of the Schengen that applies to mainland Europe—for the Republic. However, don’t be surprised if you travel back and forth across the border willy-nilly. There is no border control when you travel by road. It is best to get both visas before you leave.

The Irish usually don’t issue visas to foreign tourists if they apply from the UK. Republic of Ireland visas can take up to a week to be issued.

Contact the embassy of Ireland, New Delhi, at 011-41608608 or log on to http://irelandinindia.com

Lizzy, Phil Lynott.

More than a hundred years old McDaid’s has a rich history, having at some point ejected such litterateurs as Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Liam O’Flaherty.

“When I was growing up being Irish was about family and neighbours.

Those were our values,” explains a well-dressed man in a sweater vest and jeans. He has a Rolex on his watch and looks like he has taken many a ride on the Celtic Tiger. But he is very angry.

“Bloody bankers blew it all away. How embarrassing is this? We are a country of just four and a half million people.

Just four and a half million! And we can’t manage our own accounts!”

He asks me where I am from and how many people we have. I assure him that Gurgaon alone probably has more people than the Republic of Ireland.

“See. You guys manage things. We just fecked it up. But the good thing is we’ll go back to family. That is what is going to happen. If you have family and neighbours and hold tight to those people then you don’t need more than a penny in your pocket.”

Which is all good. But how will he manage with the economy crashing?

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Ireland is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, with a bailout by the EU and the IMF. The Irish are no strangers to troubled times and have a knack for survival. We travelled through Londonderry and Dublin eating good food, seeing good things and talking to good people. The economy may be in tatters, but the pubs are full, the songs are still playing and there’s plenty of Guinness for everyone.

Scratch the surface The Emerald Isle is infused with history both ancient and modern. So you will find Oscar Wilde, Yeats, rock ‘n’ roll, medieval manuscripts and an 800-year-old pub all within walking distance of each other. Unless you have plenty of time, or are planning multiple trips, it is best to go with a reasonable itinerary and a good guide who can help you prioritize. Good guides will know plenty about both the north and south. You can get in touch with Andrew Beggs and other qualified guides on www.bluebadgeireland.com.

And walk up and talk to people. The Irish love to talk.

He staggers a little and leans on the counter for balance. And then he points at a pint of Guinness on the bar. “As long as I can afford one of those, there is no such thing as a recession.”

Further away from Grafton Street is the equally famous O’Donoghue’s Pub near St Stephen’s Green. The pub is famous for being old, for the atmosphere and for being one of the birthplaces of The Dubliners, an Irish folk band that once charted above the Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Here I spoke to a man who sat huddled in a corner drinking both wine and beer simultaneously.

His first question was illuminating: “Why are you asking me about this? Are

Shelf life: Relevant tomes on Irish history on sale in a local bookshop.

3 ways to do it...

REST

T��������� here are options for people on all budgets, from large chains to small inns. In Derry, the Beech Hill Country House Hotel (www.beech-hill.com) is a plush, friendly hotel. In Dublin, there is the five-star Westbury (www. doylecollection.com).

EAT

Ireland is a haven for all foodies.

Most chefs will be glad to whip up something with legumes, mushrooms or goat cheese for vegetarians. Non-vegetarians can find beef, lamb, pork, venison, pheasant, fresh seafood, duck and rabbit. Keep an eye out for wheaten, an Irish wholemeal soda bread that goes great with local butter. If you must have Indian, Maloti in Dublin isn’t bad.

SEE

Dublin and Derry have several great museums and places of worship.

Out of the city you’re never too far from a castle or garden. If you’re prepared to drive, try Castle Leslie in County Monaghan and Malahide Castle in County Dublin.

There are also the mesolithic tombs at Newgrange. Ireland is a compact, well-connected country that’s easy to drive around.

you from the World Bank?”

I assured him I was not. I asked him if he was angry.

“Aye. I am angry. But what can I do now? We’ve made fools of ourselves. I am never voting for the Fianna Fail (the Republican party) again. The prime minister is a buffoon. The whole world is laughing at us Irish. They think we are like the bloody Greeks!”

Will the Irish bounce back?

“Of course, we will. Of course. No surrender! No surrender!”

That night, as I run back to the hotel on frozen roads, I notice a snow man built into the corner between a wall and shuttered shopfront. The snow man looks like it has been decapitated and then trampled on. On the wall next to it someone has written with snow: “Cowen”, and then an arrow points downwards at the battered frozen carcass.

The next day images of prime minister Cowen flash on news channels as the European Union agrees to bail the Republic of Ireland out to the tune of €85 billion (around R5.1 trillion). The government has surrendered. But not the people.

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THINKSTOCK

Melting pot

‘Hamams’, contemporary art, mule rides and gourmet Mediterranean spreads

By Anindita Ghose anindita.g@livemint.com

M

aithili Parekh, deputy director, Sotheby’s, has a pact with her best friend: to travel to a novel destination sans spouses every year. This year, Marrakesh— given its eclectic mix of Europe, the East and Africa—was their pick.

Edited excerpts from an interview:

What were the highlights of your late summer trip?

Visiting my friends Priti Paul and her husband Jaouad Kadiri at their stunning home in Marrakesh for a traditional Moroccan meal and a walk into the Jardin Majorelle—the incredible botanical gardens of designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge. Our stay at the gorgeous Sir Richard Branson-owned hotel Kasbah Tamadot in the midst of the Atlas mountains was definitely a high point, so was haggling in the souks of the hippy-esque town of Essaouira.

What was the itinerary?

We flew from London to Marrakesh

and back on EasyJet, a 2-hour flight which was very convenient. Our trip began in Marrakesh where we spent three days, followed by two days in the seaside town of Essaouira and then another two days in Asni, a little village in the Atlas mountains.

Tell us about the places you stayed in.

We love little, cosy, boutique hotels!

Much of our time in planning our trips goes into finding the right place to stay and being the gourmands we

Two worlds: (top) The souk at the heart of Marrakesh; and Parekh at designer Yves Saint Laurent’s botanical gardens.

are, we also call and reserve dinner tables at coveted culinary spots ahead of time.

In Marrakesh, we stayed at the charming Riad el Fenn, a traditional 19th century house with an inner courtyard and garden tucked away in the quiet alleys, but only minutes away from the hustle and bustle of the souks and the main square of Djma el Fna. Riad el Fenn, which means “Riad of the art”, houses incredible works by contemporary artists such as Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley, Francis Upritchard, which made for an interesting juxtaposition to the older architecture of the Riad. I highly recommend the restaurants Dar Moha and Le Fondouk. Essaouira is a small, sleepy seaside town with quaint alleyways, skilful artisans, tucked-away restaurants and a vast port. We had booked a Chateau & Relais property, L’Heure Bleue, which is a stunning boutique hotel, with an indulgent hamam, or traditional bath, and a terrace overlooking the medina and the ocean.

In our final leg at Asni, about an hour outside of Marrakesh, we picked Kasbah Tamadot, which is an old fort converted into a hotel by Sir Richard Branson. A magical walled complex with peaceful courtyards, intriguing staircases, landscaped gardens and breathtaking views, one of the highlights of staying here is the mule ride (or trek for the more adventurous and physically fit) into the mountains.

What did you enjoy most about the cuisine?

The fact that it was a wonderful blend of Africa, European, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines—our favourites remain the freshly made tagines and couscous.

How was the weather when you visited? What would you advise one to pack for the trip?

Very pleasant during the day, maybe a light sweater in the evenings. Depending on time of year, I’d recommend casual cotton in the day and a touch of glamour for the evenings.

Would you describe Marrakesh as a chic or adventurous vacation?

Our holiday was a mix of both—a little adventure, some chic but mostly a carefree week of unwinding while experiencing a new country and culture.

What would you go back for? And if you did, what would you do differently?

I’d go back in a heartbeat, perhaps this time include Fez and Casablanca too, if we had more time.

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BOOKS

Literature on journalism Books by Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm and Michael Ignatieff help us understand the precarious and tenuous relationship between a journalist and his source Lucien Aigner/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

By Salil Tripathi Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

—Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, Vintage Books, 1990

I

Chronicler: In The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair provided a seminal account of American journalism.

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n her pitiless analysis of a reporter’s behaviour, Malcolm is on to something when she talks of the detachment so essential for the profession: to gain the trust of a source, and then betray the source without remorse.

Malcolm was writing about the reporter Joe McGinniss, who betrayed a convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald while writing about him. McGinniss’ conduct wasn’t exemplary—he was at the opposite end of Bob Woodward, who steadfastly protected his source, Deep Throat, during the Watergate scandal.

McGinniss didn’t care what happened to the doomed MacDonald, so long as he got his story. Woodward waited nearly three decades for W. Mark Felt to reveal himself as the source for Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who as young reporters

BOOKS I DECEMBER 25 I L43 I LOUNGE

of The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, which eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as the US president, a story they recount in All the President’s Men. Woodward published The Secret Man, his book about Felt, only after Felt talked about it himself.

Where does a reporter sit between these extremes—the discreet Woodward, or the careless McGinniss? This question becomes urgent in the context of the astonishing saga of Niira Radia, the formidable lobbyist, and her leaked conversations with industrialist Ratan Tata, former CII chief Tarun Das, Rajya Sabha member N.K. Singh and leading journalists—NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, the former advisory editorial director of Hindustan Times Vir Sanghvi and others.

The outcry isn’t restricted to the Internet. Journalists are outraged too; many are stunned by the erosion of the profession’s standing because of the conduct of a few. Some consider themselves lucky that their conversations are not yet public and young aspiring journalists may feel dismayed, unable to distinguish between journalism and public relations, and think of more meaningful careers.

A journalist’s primary asset is her credibility; the main currency, curiosity; and her sole driving force is the desire to tell. True, a journalist must meet many people, her Rolodex should bulge, and her connections in real and virtual worlds would run into thousands. Access is one privilege, but it is not to be confused with power. Foreign correspondents are trained to keep that distance, which may seem callous. Edward Behr titled his autobiography Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? He refers to the reporter who comes to a refugee camp and nonchalantly asks that question. He knows rape is traumatic; he will feign empathy, get the details, and then leave for the next disaster.

Recall how the reporter Guy Hamilton walks on the tarmac, boarding the last plane leaving chaotic Jakarta in Christopher Koch’s novel about the Sukarno era, The Year of Living Dangerously. Hamilton’s assistant Billy Kwan ends his life—when you are writing about your own country, the situation is more complex than how the foreign correspondent sees it; you end up being part of the story.

Even the macho heart melts.

The fictional cynical correspondent Charlie Johnson, veteran of many wars, finds his emotions hopelessly entangled in Kosovo, in Michael Ignatieff ’s novel, Charlie Johnson in the Flames. The detached reporter succumbs in that human drama.

Compared to such dilemmas, what Indian journalists have faced in recent weeks is almost trivial. Should an editor help a lobbyist develop the legal strategy for her client? Should a leading broadcaster agree to carry messages between political parties trying to form a coalition? Should the broadcaster ignore the story when a lobbyist representing two of India’s biggest business groups, and close to a political party, is so keen to see a particular politician get a specific cabinet post? And should a leading columnist be willing to rehearse a TV interview with a businessman who doesn’t want any uncomfortable questions?

The answer, in each case, should be a resounding no. And yet, the mighty fell.

Fundamentally, the journalist’s job is to reveal, not to conceal. An equity research analyst, a diplomat and an academic do what a journalist does: seek information, analyse data, connect dots and draw certain conclusions. But their roles differ. The equity researcher writes for his firm’s clients. What he tells stock market reporters is often guided by his firm’s interest in playing up, or down, a specific stock. The diplomat writes for his political and bureaucratic masters. He is paid to remain silent; he cannot reveal his thinking publicly.

And while the academic researcher publishes her thesis, the methodology often requires her to show preliminary drafts to her interlocutors, and she publishes her findings only after their approval. The journalist writes for everyone; she is paid to reveal; and she should not show any draft to her interviewees before publication.

It is her story, and she earns readers’ trust by building her credibility through unbiased writing.

That independent detachment seems to have disappeared. Sources become friends with whom reporters routinely socialize.

When I asked Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University, about the Indian case, he suggested I look at the seminal account of American journalism at the turn of the century— Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check. In that candid critique, Sinclair wrote: “American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.” The title referred to the chit issued to the patrons of urban brothels, and Sinclair said journalists were beholden to the agenda of the moneyed class. With meticulous detail he attacked the Associated Press and others for looking down on socialism and trade unions, extolling the inter-

Inspired classics: Sinclair and Behr have different takes on the role of a journalist.

Even the macho heart melts.

The fictional cynical correspondent Charlie Johnson, veteran of many wars, finds his emotions hopelessly entangled in Kosovo, in Michael Ignatieff’s novel, ‘Charlie Johnson in the Flames’

ests of the oligopolies that published newspapers. In the century since, American journalism has hugely improved, seeking to occupy the centre, keeping facts separate from opinions, with professional journalism schools reinforcing the idea of transparency and conflicts of interest, nurturing the virtue of being objective, and reminding reporters to go only as far as facts take them. Keep certain sources always confidential; identify all newsmakers by name; never accept gifts; and keep distance with sources.

Sinclair remained unimpressed, but it is a better world for those changes.

But challenges remain. I also asked Steven Strasser, former editor at Newsweek who now teaches at the City University of New York, about the Radia tapes.

He told me: “The Indian case looks very familiar from the US perspective. Our journalism has become so chummy with politics that journalists now are contributing (financially) to political candidates,” referring to the liberal journalist Keith Olbermann contributing to Democratic campaigns and conservative Fox News anchors contributing to Republican campaigns without disclosing their financial contributions.

Strasser added: “Little off-therecord, back-rubbing exercises take place all day, every day in Washington. Journalists always have to walk that line between cultivating sources and doing their real job, which is serving news consumers. Journalists want something from sources, and sources want something from journalists. And everybody does favours: To get a good story, a journalist often will do a favour of some sort for the source who provides the key details.

To minimize the ethical damage, all a reporter can do is minimize the favours handed out and maximize the transparency of his or her reporting— telling readers as much as possible about who provided the information and in what circumstances. It’s always going to be a messy business, and news consumers can only hope that the process, in the end, produces more information than it covers up.

In the end, I think it does.”

With the Radia episode, that churning has begun, and it should force us to look at the mirror, identify the blemishes, remove them, and rediscover the basics, serving the sole interest that matters: the readers.

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

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L44 I BOOKS

Complete satisfaction Mick-and-Keith adventures in a memoir that is insanely funny and is mostly about the music

By Soutik Biswas

K

eith Richards’ autobiography opens with a drug bust in Fordyce, a hick town in Arkansas. Travelling in a car stashed with drugs, he and fellow band mate Ronnie Wood and a few friends stop for lunch at an eatery. It is 1975, and the Rolling Stones are on another grinding tour of America, “inciting” and “corrupting” the young. The police find some cocaine and a knife in the car and haul them in front of a drunken judge, who adjourns the hearing to go off to buy a bottle of bourbon across the street. He returns to the courtroom, the bottle hidden in his sock, and lets off Richards and his friends with a fine.

The judge also poses for a photograph with the outlaw Stone. In typical irony, the police escort them next morning to their aircraft, stacked with Jack Daniel’s and waiting to fly them away to the next destination.

For Richards and fellow members of the self-proclaimed world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, such brushes with the law came with the job. Early in their career, their wunderkind manager Andrew Loog Oldham packaged them as scallywags, an antidote to the schmaltzy Beatles. So the Rolling Stones got thrown out of hotels for dressing inappropriately, urinated in public places, and did all kinds of things that Oldham spun to the media slyly with the poser to harried parents: “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” As Richards writes with barely concealed glee in his new memoir Life, “We were obnoxious...the media was so easy to manipulate.”

Disarmingly honest, insanely funny, savagely in-your-face, pulling no punches and with enough musical insight, Life is a roller-coaster ride of a story of the guitarist who laid down the riffs and co-founded a band of shaggy haired, hugely talented Englishmen who play rock ‘n’ roll with the best bluesy undertow. The Rolling Stones may have become a giant corporation cashing in on nostalgic baby boomers with their spectacular world tours today, but as Richards tells it, it all began in a rather dull and dreadful town in England.

Dartford was where “everything WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

unwanted by anyone else had been dumped—isolated and smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, gunpowder factories, lunatic asylums.” He led a desultory childhood, hating school, getting shot in the bum by an airgunwielding tramp in the woods, and singing in a choir till he met Mick Jagger, who lived a street away with a stash of the choicest blues records from across the Atlantic. The rest, as we know, is history.

In Richards’ story, there are plenty of drugs—cocaine, heroin, downers, uppers, you name it. There is some sex—caring groupies who only Richards can get away with by calling “nurses”, who would bathe and feed him too. But there’s loads of rock ‘n’ roll.

Of how Satisfaction, possibly the greatest rock song ever recorded, was actually taped with an acoustic guitar on a cassette player at Richards’ London apartment, while Jagger wrote the lyrics by a pool in Florida. The growling fuzz tone which elevated it to an anthem was added later at a Hollywood studio. Sympathy for the Devil, another grimy gem, turned from a “turgid folk song into a rocking samba”, and from a “turkey into a hit”.

The hypnotic Gimme Shelter, most fittingly, was written on a stormy day.

There are peerless observations about peers and friends. John Lennon is a likeable “silly sod” who wore the guitar too high and couldn’t keep up with him in his consumption of substances, inevitably ending up in his bathroom “hugging the porcelain”.

Or Jean-Luc Godard who looked “like French bank clerk” and shot Sympathy for the Devil, an incomprehensible film based on the Stones song. Richards tears Godard’s labour of love to pieces—“the film was a total of crap”.

How the rogue Richards and the mercurial Jagger have stuck together in one of the world’s abiding musical partnerships for close to half a century remains a riddle. Richards confesses

Deborah Feingold

that he is a yokel compared with Jagger, and says he is one of the best natural blues harp players. But over the years the relationship has strained (remember the execrable Dirty Work?) and their work together has suffered—why haven’t they written a single truly great song since Start Me Up in 1981? There are no clear answers. He blames Jagger for drifting away. “I used to love to hang around with Mick, but I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t know, 20 years. Sometimes I miss my friend.

Where the hell did he go?” Where did the Stones go, musically?

They are still rolling but gathering a lot of moss. But like his idols, the venerable bluesmen, Richards says he won’t retire “till he croaks”. “I’m not here just to make money and records. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: Do you know this feeling.” Yes, we do.

Life: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 564 pages, R995.

Soutik Biswas is the India editor of BBC News online.

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COLUMNS I DECEMBER 25 I L45 I LOUNGE

R. SUKUMAR | CULT FICTION

Living by the book We are what we read.

It’s a ritual. And it plays out, the way it always has, during every rare visit to Chennai, where my parents still live in the house in which I grew up.

Sometime on Day 1, maybe a few hours after I arrive, I find myself standing in front of a large cupboard that houses my books. An old copy of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands; a second-hand copy of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon; pulp Westerns featuring Sudden; pulp Fantasy stories featuring Conan; Kerouac; Burroughs; James Joyce and John Barth and Bertrand Russell; Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; Poe and Wilde and O. Henry and Doyle; Pirsig and Zukov and Sagan; Niven and Asimov; assorted classics—just the kind of books one accumulates through one’s growing years.

And I remember most things about most of the books in that cupboard—where I bought them; who gave them to me; when I read them. Not all the books I read in my growing years are there—many have made the journey with me to New Delhi where I now live. But some still remain in Chennai, where I spent the first 17 years of my life.

Some of these books made me laugh. Others made me sad. Still others were sheer escapist fantasy. All made me think. And, like many other people who read voraciously, I learnt the nuances of grammar and language from the books.

We are what we read. The Night Bookmobile is a comic (or a picture book) about books and our love of them and it’s obviously written, and drawn, by a book lover. That book lover is Audrey Niffenegger, who shot into prominence with her work of fiction, The Time Traveler’s Wife, one of those lovely touching stories you like because it is lovely and touching, and hate

Bibliophilia: Alexandra finds her Night Bookmobile while walking down a street.

because they are so popular that even the Paulo Coelho set starts swearing by them.

Niffenegger is also a visual artist and not new to the graphic novel medium, having written two before The Night Bookmobile, which was first serialized, in comic form, in The Guardian. It has just been published as a book.

The short graphic novella tells the story of Alexandra’s life, death, and enduring love of books. Walking the streets early one morning after a fight with her boyfriend, a young Alexandra runs into a Night Bookmobile, a library of all the books she has read in her life—we learn later that every reader, every reader who is still alive, has one of his or her own. We also learn more about Alexandra: that there is nothing remarkable about her life except her love for books.

So, her chance encounter with the Bookmobile, and her librarian Mr Openshaw, soon turns into an obsession. She begins looking for the Bookmobile (and finds it a few more times). Meanwhile, she says in the book: “I began reading all the time. On the El, on my lunch hour, during every meal, I read. I looked forward to finding each book again someday on the shelves of the Bookmobile. I wondered if Mr. Openshaw was impressed with my choices, and my dedication.

Like a pregnant woman eating for two, I read for myself and the librarian.”

The enduring themes of The Night Bookmobile are loneliness, sadness and yearning, and the illustrations, also by Niffenegger—flat, and in solid colours on some pages; monoand dual-chrome on others—highlight these.

I didn’t like the way the book ended—a little too abruptly—but Niffenegger tells us that The Night Bookmobile is the first part of a larger work, The Library. I have always been a sucker for books, especially good books about books (like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels) and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. We are what we read.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to Sukumar at cultfiction@livemint.com

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CULTURE

The space age

Contemporary art in India has moved out of ‘the white cube’, making exhibition design a crucial contributor to our viewing experience

By Anindita Ghose anindita.g@livemint.com

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arly on in her career, in a 1984 show called When Champa Grew Up, artist Nilima Sheikh had created 12 folio-sized narrative artworks. She’d intended for these to be bound and exhibited as a book. But as the exhibition date approached, she abandoned the idea as “too outrageous”.

The paintings were then just put up on the wall.

This year, for Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams, an exhibition that travelled from Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai to the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, Sheikh wanted viewers to “walk into” her 6x10ft scrolls of large-scale miniature paintings. At the Akademi, her scrolls hung on a barely visible aluminium substructure, creating the illusion of floating canvases—most befitting, given the fantastical nature of the artwork.

This change of heart on the part of a senior artist such as Sheikh in experimenting with exhibition space and design is revealing of an increasing focus on museology in Indian contemporary art practice. Not too long ago, she also had a digitized version of one of her miniatures projected on the walls of Gallery Espace in New Delhi. “That hesitation has gone,” says Sheikh, “that time has gone.”

The most spectacular aspect of British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s first show in India, for many, is his Shooting into the Corner exhibit at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai. Sree Goswami of Project 88, Mumbai, has seen the cannon installation in its original avatar at the Royal Academy of Arts in London but believes that its manner of display at Mehboob Studios makes it a new artwork altogether. “In London, the cannon fires into a room. Mehboob gives it a raw, WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

giant canvas to play with. It looks like the cannon has conquered up to 20ft of one wall,” she says.

Kapoor, whose work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture and art, is known to be very invested in the layout and sequential ordering of his exhibitions. He self-designed the layouts of both his ongoing shows in India—Mumbai and Delhi—but had project managers handle the logistics of set-up. Delhi-based artist Vishal K. Dar worked with a team of around 20 people, including representatives from Kapoor’s London studio and the National Science Centre, over a period of three weeks to install the show at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).

Dar calls himself a scenographer, borrowing from the 18th century French term for stage designer. “It’s the science of guiding the viewer’s eye to appreciate the artwork displayed to its fullest,” he says.

A practising artist with a background in architecture and product design, Dar first got pulled into exhibition design for the large-scale retrospective on Binod Behari Mukherjee in 2005 at the NGMA and has since worked on several projects (he was also the force behind Sheikh’s floating scrolls and the digitized miniature projection).

This brings one to the fact that India doesn’t have too many qualified exhibition designers or museologists, a fact that Karan Singh, president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, brought up in a recent interview with PTI. While gallerists and curators are increasingly paying heed to exhibition design, Dar argues that it is the domain of specialists. “A museologist can’t replace the curator—who is in charge of the thematics of the show—but is needed right from the develop-

A step ahead: Viewers had to climb a ladder to view an artwork at Gallery Mirchandani & Steinruecke’s 2008 show Anxious.

CULTURE I DECEMBER 25 I L47 I LOUNGE

Courtesy The British Council

No boundaries: (left) Scrolls hanging on a barely visible substructure at Nilima Sheikh’s 2010 show at the Lalit Kala Akademi; and Anish Kapoor’s Shooting into the Corner at his ongoing show at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai.

Courtesy Nilima Sheikh

ment stage of an exhibition,” says Dar. He believes that the onus of high-end museology lies with public institutions and cites, besides the Kapoor show, the ongoing Raja Deen Dayal photography exhibition at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (on view till 28 February) as a case in point. “It’s so well designed...that show could be anywhere in the world,” he says, also adding to his list the Homai Vyarawalla photo exhibition put up by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts at the NGMA earlier this year.

“If public institutions come forth and take museology seriously, galleries will follow,” he says.

With increasing demand, a few specialists are making an appearance on the scene. Mark Prime moved from the UK to Mumbai five years ago and has been working on several art projects as a consultant exhibition designer. For Kapoor’s Mumbai show, he was brought on board as a consultant by Amrita and Priya Jhaveri, who run a full-spectrum art service.

Prime was responsible for the phenomenal transformation of the vintage studio space into a space for hosting cutting-edge sculptures. He is evidently a busy man and concedes to having his hands full. Within a month of opening

Anish Kapoor, he was called for designing Ranbir Kaleka’s solo at Volte in Mumbai, Sweet Unease, that opened earlier this month (on view till 15 February).

Dar reiterates that exhibition design is about directing focus to the art and not adding frills. “Everything else should be invisible,” he says. In his own show, Brown Nation, at Gallery Espace a few months ago, Dar did away with all wall text. Titles and dates were on the floor.

A few bold moves over the last couple of years have helped stretch the boundaries of conventional display. Gitanjali Dang, a young curator, tends to frill it up.

At her 2009 show, Caturday Is Cleaning Day, at The Loft in Mumbai, a take-off on the Internet obsession with cute cat images, she’d swamped the space with wool balls and paw marks. Her 2008 show, Anxious, at Mirchandani & Steinruecke had spelt “outrageous” in a different way altogether. Taking off from avant-garde playwright Peter Handke’s 1966 play, Offending the Audience, Dang had paintings displayed on the ceiling, on the floor, upside down and even atop a ladder.

There were no titles or date markers.

Mirchandani & Steinruecke’s Ranjana Steinruecke allowed her this experimentation and is of the opinion that curators and artists should be given a free hand.

“Only short of bringing down the house!” she adds.

Artists themselves are getting increasingly conscious of space and harnessing it for greater impact. Steinruecke rates Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 3—which lights up the Grand Staircase at the Art Institute of Chicago—as one of the best examples. “He transforms the space into a seamless part of his work, indoor or outdoor,” she says.

On cue with this, an ongoing group show at Project 88 called Form & Phenomenon (on view till 30 January) is about experience within the space and time continuum.

London-based artist Rana Begum’s sleekly lacquered aluminium sculptures, for example, employ geometry, form, repetition and colour to investigate the ways in which objects are viewed as we move around them. One of the most exciting emerging artists in India today, Hemali Bhuta, is also part of the show.

Bhuta’s work has always responded to space, perhaps a reflection of the fact that she studied interior design before enrolling in art school. For her first solo, The Hangover of Agarlum, in January this year, she used the gallery space of Project 88 as inspiration. She replicated two existing columns in the gallery in alum because, as she explains, Project 88 is a problematic display space with two pillars cutting across the centre. Creating two additional columns on the only long wall that was available to her was an artist’s response (the alum columns were bought by an undisclosed collector from Mumbai, an architect).

A month later, Bhuta’s husband and fellow artist, Shreyas Karle, divided up the Project 88 space with a diagonal wooden wall for his solo show. When Karle says it was because he “didn’t want to place (his) works in a white cube”, it seems that he speaks not just for himself, but for all his fellow art practitioners.

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L48 I CULTURE

Burn after listening The heat builds up around India’s biggest dance music festival as ‘Brand Sunburn’ begins to take shape

By Supriya Nair supriya.n@livemint.com

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oa, in late December, begins its busiest time of year, as tourists and partygoers from across the world begin to pour in for New Year celebrations. For people returning to the Sunburn Electronic Dance Music festival, the revelry will feel like homecoming—if home has been taken over by three times the number of people they saw last time, and gone from being just Sunburn to “Brand Sunburn”, as the festival’s organizers are calling it this year.

At a Sunburn contest offering festival tickets to creative posts on the popular Miss Malini blog, the sentiment keeps cropping up—everyone wants to be at Sunburn to party, either with friends or in the hope of making new ones.

But when your dance music festival makes it to CNN’s Top 10 list of best festivals in the world, it’s safe to say that you’re no longer at a chilled-out little beach jam. In its three-year history, Sunburn’s “one big dance party” atmosphere has been closely connected to festival-goers’ feeling of being part of a small, close-knit scene. Thanks to the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festival’s niche—though now growing—popularity in India, the Sunburn vibe has always been closer to an underground project than better-known stadium extravaganzas that mark India’s more mainstream music festivals.

Last year, during Dutch DJ Armin van Buuren’s gig, it may have seemed as if Candolim beach was exploding in a whirl of colour and noise, but in truth, the number of festival-goers didn’t number more than 15,000.

But Sunburn is now at a turning point. “We started off with 5,000 people in 2007,” says Shailendra Singh, joint managing director of Percept Ltd, the communications firm that helps organize Sunburn. “This year, we’re expecting 50,000.” With growth comes inevitable change. Sunburn is looking to spread beyond its beach festivities this year.

The festival kick-off has spanned multiple cities, with a Sunburn Anthem Tour Party and contest that brought international superstar DJ BT to Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. A mixing contest has given amateur DJs a chance to be

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featured on the Sunburn compilation that features DJ BT, with the other international acts who will play at Candolim (DJ BT, one of Sunburn’s planned headliners this year, pulled out of the festival for personal reasons earlier this month). Percept plans to market merchandise beyond the customary T-shirts and accessories, and also open India’s first ever Sunburn Café in Pune soon, and subsequently in Mumbai and Delhi.

“It’s going to be more of a music carnival than festival,” Singh says.

“But we are not trying to divert guests’ attention. We just want them to enjoy everything around them even as they focus on the music.”

To Nikhil Chinapa, the festival’s guiding force and its creative director, the balance between the indie vibe and a growing focus on the brand isn’t even a challenge. “The essence of the festival is always going to be the same,” he says.

“At its core, it’s a place where you come by in flip-flops and shorts, with your

Sidelights: This year’s Sunburn includes an Anthem Tour party and a DJ mixing contest.

friends, to listen to music you love.”

He repeats a sentiment he expresses on the Miss Malini blog, where he responds to commenters saying, “When Pearl (his wife, DJ and Sunburn performer) and I first travelled to Ibiza (Spain), all we used to think after every single night out was, ‘I wish we could share this with our friends…’ It’s exploding in my heart to know that there are others who feel what Pearl and I feel when we stand in front of the speakers, with our toes in the sand.”

According to him, the festival’s growing numbers cannot dilute its emotional connect. Chinapa remembers 2008, when Sunburn went ahead in spite of grave misgivings and government fears that public gatherings were a target for terrorist violence after the Mumbai attacks. “With everyone ducking for cover, it seemed like there was still space for love, and for music. It’s just grown since then.”

And Sunburn’s quantum leap, he says, just reflects the leap in popular-

CULTURE I DECEMBER 25 I L49 I LOUNGE

NANDINI RAMNATH | STALL ORDER

Being 30 in the noughties A whole film about turning 30 is releasing in three weeks. Somehow, I feel that I should be completely invested in this project both as a reviewer and as a cinephile, being in the exact middle of what is touted to be the most exciting decade in a woman’s life.

In the line-up: UK-based EDM artist Nadia Ali will perform this year. ity EDM has made in urban India.

This year’s bigger audience comes despite the absence of someone with the stature of van Buuren among their acts. “There’s the sand, the palm trees, the sparkling Arabian Sea,” Chinapa responds wryly to a question about which of his acts might turn out to be exceptionally dazzling. “The main reason Sunburn is an end-of-year ritual for people around the world. It’s about so much more than any one act, or a name.”

He says there’s a very complicated strategy to deciding the Sunburn lineup. “I think of DJs I love around the world, and in India. And I book them.”

The Sunburn Electronic Dance Music festival is at Candolim, Goa, from 27-29 December. For details and the final schedule, log on to www.sunburn-festival.com

PLAY SAFE

Nikhil Chinapa’s tips for first-timers at the Sunburn festival  Pick up a pair of noise-cancelling ear plugs if you want to dance near the speakers and still keep your hearing for life.  Dress light (wax your chest hair), carry sunscreen, and drink lots of water.  Do not attempt to do or consume anything illegal; you will be caught and banned for life. If you think your friend is in danger, don’t hide or wait to ask for help, though; Sunburn has a drugcounselling and emergency response centre that will provide help immediately.

Thirty is the new 20, goes the slogan, so not too surprisingly, the film Turning 30!!! (with three exclamation marks, one for each decade) is about a woman who, on reaching the age at which it’s all downhill afterwards, has a hissy fit about her life and her romance status.

In real life, turning 30, with or without exclamation marks, is more than just about agonizing over recently acquired love handles or lost love interests. It can actually be empowering for some urban working professionals: greater financial security and personal independence for some; the freedom to reject desk jobs and conventionally accepted wisdom for others. Of course, the group in question is the small and privileged majority that lives and works in private companies, media houses and advertising firms in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore and has the kind of lifestyles that television commercials celebrate.

It’s complicated: Naina in Turning 30!!! panics because she is ‘jobless and manless’ at 30.

This is the income bracket that recent romcoms and movies such as Turning 30!!! target—the pleasure-seeking men and post-feminist women for whom the inability to make the most of the latest Croma or Zara sale represents a new weekly low.

There’s so much more to crossing 29 than agonizing over whether the rakish and still-single boss is actually suited to your ultimate plans of settling down, or whether or not your college sweetheart is indeed the man or woman for you.

There’s no doubt that romantic desire is an inescapable truth of adult life, but most films are still about footloose 20-somethings, who are starting off their careers and who are as petrified about growing up as they are about wearing the wrong combination of clothes. We’re far away from the time when 40-plus actors would play college students, but we still like our stars to be virgins in love, unscarred by pain and unsullied by heartbreak.

The lead character of Turning 30!!!, by first-time film-maker Alankrita Shrivastava, has been a bit more around the block than most Hindi film heroines.

Naina (Gul Panag) loses her job and breaks up with her boyfriend just when it is deemed that she is hormonally perfect for him. She mopes to her friends, “I’m turning 30. It’s f****** hell! Jobless and manless!” The problem is a relatively simple one, and will no doubt have resonance with the small but influential group of those Mumbaikars for whom the next big squeeze is a far greater issue than deciding who to work or vote for.

Getting between the sheets isn’t just a more entertaining way of confronting the terrible 30s—it’s perhaps the best way to deal with a world deemed too complicated to sum up in a running time of 120 minutes.

Turning 30!!! will release across theatres on 14 January.

Nandini Ramnath is a film critic with Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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LOUNGE I DECEMBER 25 I L50 I PLAY

Year to the ground From eyepiece-free 3D to resurrected franchises, here is what to look forward to in 2011 and what to take with a pinch of salt

By Krish Raghav & Sidin Vadukut krish.r@livemint.com

DEVICES The iPad 2

The second coming Experience has shown us that the second generation of a new Apple product is always the defining one. Think of the iPod that introduced the click wheel, or the iPhone 3G. Reliable sources (i.e., American tech blogs) say the iPad could see its second iteration as early as April.

Some of the new features are a given—front-facing camera for Facetime (Apple’s video chat service) and an improved display. But could Apple have a few surprises up its sleeve? Given the deluge of moderately successful 7-inch tablets coming out, could Steve Jobs capitulate on his gut hatred of the form and introduce an iPad mini? 2011 is a year to keep a close watch on Cupertino. It could be the year iOS really enters offices, the year the Macbook Air becomes the beacon for ultra-portables everywhere, or even the year Android begins to bury the iPhone in sheer numbers. Any which way, interesting times.

The Nintendo 3DS

3d or not to be?

3D was a strange word in 2010. We were all wowed by ‘Avatar’, but put off by the drek that followed.

Are we really tumbling into a future filled with ugly red-and-green eyepieces? Unlikely answerer Nintendo says nay—their “glasses-free” 3D on the upcoming 3DS games console blew away previewers and consumers. They’ve also assembled a fantastic library of launch titles (‘Kid Icarus’! ‘Metal Gear Solid’! ‘Legend of Zelda’!) to show off 3DS’ “parallax display” technology, where looking into a screen is like looking into a small window. The 3DS arrives in the first quarter of 2011.

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Dubious mention The RIM Playbook Watching Research in Motion CEO Mike Lazaridis at the All Things Digital conference on 7 December was an experience in incredulity. Not only did he have difficulty articulating BlackBerry’s strategy for the upcoming Playbook tablet, he confused the audience with an artillery assault of meaningless jargon. He brought out that old favourite—“paradigm shift”—and threw in some other gems, such as “by focusing on the tablet market, we see it as a way of freeing where smartphones can go”.

Right. The Playbook is “tracking first quarter”, whatever that means.

VIDEO GAMES Microsoft Kinect

Hacks of kindness Microsoft’s Kinect gaming device has already come in for positive reviews from gamers and critics alike. The device is the first massproduced gaming device that operates without any controller whatsoever.

Hackers have begun to make the Kinect do things way beyond what Microsoft has designed it to. At least two research groups have made an interface that makes it operate like that popular device in the Tom Cruise film ‘Minority Report’. In the film Cruise operates a device by just waving his hands in space, scrolling through images and picking icons. It looked highly futuristic. And now there is a YouTube video of MIT researcher Garratt Gallagher doing something similar hooked up to a Kinect. Expect more awesomeness in the months to come. So if your Christmas shopping includes a Kinect, make that two. One for the game, and one for the future.

App store gaming

Angrier birds ‘Angry Birds’ was the definitive mobile game hit of 2010—selling around 40 million copies (resulting in a gigantic vortex of workplace productivity loss). 2011 could see the rise of the “App Store” game as the new outlet for indie creativity. iPhone owners have the brilliant “Game Dev Story”. PC indie posterchild ‘World of Goo’ is heading to the iPad and small studios are hard at work, creating touch-screen masterpieces.

Dubious mention Duke Nukem Forever What a year for gaming’s most famous non-existent title. First announced in 1997, the game’s studio, 3D Realms, shut shop last year after working on this one unfinished game for 12 long years.

In September, it was unexpectedly announced that the project was back in development at Gearbox software, with a release within 12 months.

This time we’re actually hopeful: Could 2011 finally be the year to kick ass and chew bubblegum?