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

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Saturday, October 3, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 39

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

In his Bollywood debut, Suriya will play a villain.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH NESTLE’S MARTIAL ROLLAND >Page 8

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE BAD SOCK

Why Indian men should pay more attention to dressing their feet >Page 7

SURIYA:

BOLLYWOOD’S

HOTTEST SIX­PACK

HIGH WINDOWS

THE GOOD LIFE

MUKUL KESAVAN

THE GREEN HUNT RHETORIC

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he government of India recently aired half-page advertisements in the newspapers, featuring corpses with boxed names and a declaration that “Naxals are nothing but cold-blooded murderers”.

Around the same time, the home minister began to talk about an imminent counter-insurgency operation in Chhattisgarh and other states. This, the home minister explained, was the government’s concerted response to the violent... >Page 4

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oes science displace myth? And if so, should we care? Chandrayaan discovered water on the fifth largest satellite in the solar system and all of us in Bangalore—home to Isro—are over the moon.

While I marvel at India’s magnificent achievement in the space programme, a part of me is also a tad sad. This, I guess, is where the arts and the sciences diverge. The arts are about imagery and storytelling; myth and mystique.

The sciences are about the pursuit... >Page 4

Kamal Haasan on Hindi films, 50 years of being in the business and ‘Unnaipol Oruvan’ >Page 16

>Pages 9­11

MUSIC MATTERS

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

AN UNCOMMON MAN

SHUBHA MUDGAL

HARD TO PLAY FAVOURITES

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he inimitable and yet imitated-most-often Lata Mangeshkar turned 80 on 28 September, and nationwide, admirers and fans greeted the living legend and national treasure. There were special programmes featuring greetings and tributes from musicians, many of whom are often asked to list their favourite Lata Mangeshkar tracks. Logically, that shouldn’t be too difficult a question to field—name a few of your favourite tracks sung

by Lataji. With such a vast repertoire... >Page 17

CHANDLER BY THE YAMUNA

Lurking murderers at the Ridge, rival private eyes in Jangpura and sackloads of cash in a Saket gym, all can be found in ‘Delhi Noir’ >Page 18

DON’T MISS

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

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI

©2009 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

HOME PAGE L3

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | BLUE GINGER RESTAURANT AND BLUE BAR, TAJ PALACE, NEW DELHI

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new restaurant at a Taj hotel is always something to look forward to—more so when it comes with an attached trendy bar.

Looking back at some recent launches, I can’t say I was excited by the idea of Varq though you can buy me a vegetarian meal at the reinvented Thai Pavilion in Mumbai or Wasabi (in Delhi and Mumbai) any time. Yes, nearly half the latter’s clients are vegetarian thanks to the restaurant’s exciting selection of modern Japanese vegetarian food.

The best part about a new Taj restaurant is that before they launch, they conduct multiple trials where the restaurant staff tastes the food and sees how it is prepared. So you’re unlikely to find yourself in a situation where you demand to know just what it is that makes the Goi Sen so special and the waiter flashes you a blank look or says, give me only 2 minutes madam.

Last Saturday, I dragged the home-loving husband along for a preview of the new Blue Ginger restaurant and the Blue Bar at the Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi. It replaces the Tea House of the August Moon—I know you loved it, but when did you last visit?

When the sensory overload was over and we had crawled back home, it was clear that it’s not easy to do justice to the bar and the restaurant. So pick depending on your mood.

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

BOXED IN

Double treat: The restaurant (above) and the bar are designed by Singapore’s Poole Associates.

The good stuff We began the evening at the Blue Bar where innumerable heavenly liquid treats await. The dishy bartender Nick (he’s got a wife in Pune) is passionate about infusions and his eyes get a mad chemist’s gleam when he explains how he creates his wild concoctions. My favourite was The Godfrey—Cognac, Grand Marnier, blackberries, crème de cassis and lime juice.

I think Nick likes the way we listen wideeyed as he decodes his formulae because he even brings us a shot of Woodford Reserve bourbon infused with a Montecristo No. 2.

“It’s not yet fully ready,” he warns. “Go slow.” Both the husband and I are used to the strong stuff and this potion is actually quite smooth compared to some of the drinks we’ve sampled in the Indian and South American countryside. Of course, Nick won’t serve it to you sophisticated folk straight up, he’ll use it to make what is bound to be Delhi’s best Manhattan.

More outrageous infusions on the menu include the Tequila Infused Marshmallows and (my favourite, even though they weren’t available that day) the Absinthe Gummy Bears! If you can tear yourself away from Nick and the chandeliers above the bar, there’s lovely sink-in outdoor seating that overlooks an expanse of green and the pool beyond.

In addition to lots of Asian-inspired signature cocktails (the Asian Whiskey Sour uses a Japanese whisky infused with lemon grass) and crazy infusions, the bar also offers all the classics—the Bloody Mary is crafted from 42 Below Vodka, a dash of Tio Pepe dry sherry with their own secret BM mix. And if you

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decide to stay put at the bar, there’s enough on offer here to line your stomach—oysters, mussels, bratwurst, sole, cheeses and err, even paneer. This is Delhi after all.

Drinks done, we staggered to the exquisitely designed Blue Ginger where we opted for a raised semicircular booth, accessorized with silver pillows and lit by a dramatic waterfall of light from the fibre-optic chandelier. We ate on a mother-of-pearl table with bronze legs. Even if you’re a regular at the Blue Ginger in Taj West End, Bangalore, the revamped menu holds enough surprises with its Chinese, Indian, Thai and French influences.

I resisted the urge to order my Asian restaurant staple, curry and rice, and instead scanned the list of hot and cold appetizers.

Van Nguyen, the turbo-charged Vietnamese hostess who has lived in India since 2004 and who’s currently teaching the staff how to pronounce all the Vietnamese names on the menu, persuaded me to be adventurous. I picked baby lotus stem and carambola (star fruit) salad and tofu rock salt. The husband, who needed no encouragement, chose grilled tenderloin picatta on lemon grass stick and crispy fried soft shell crab with chilli plum sauce. The salad, with slivers of lotus stem, oversized stars, carrots and lots of flavourful basil, was brilliant; the tofu rock salt is a much healthier version of the corn curd you usually eat at Chinese restaurants.

The tenderloin, which was served like a kebab on a stick of lemon grass, got the husband’s stamp of approval.

For the main course he picked grilled Basa (a Vietnamese fish) Hanoi style and I yielded to our server Rajesh’s suggestion and ordered the crispy lotus root stuffed with vegetables and topped with tamarind sauce.

Van kept popping by with wisdom on Vietnam and the husband told her about the time he ate a ninecourse snake meal in a village outside Hanoi.

“You want some cat? Some rat? We can catch some and cook it,” she said.

By the time we were done, there was certainly no space for dessert, not even for the lemon grass tiramisu. I know we’re going back after the place opens on 4 October, me to the bar and the husband, the restaurant.

The not­so­good Lounge usually pays for the restaurants we review except when, as in this case, the restaurant hasn’t yet opened and the prices haven’t been finalized. When I received the prices later in the week, I noted that the Tequila Infused Marshmallows and the Absinthe Gummy Bears were priced at Rs950 plus taxes. Hmm. The husband said his crab and fish were extra salty and me, I got the fright of my life when my lotus root appeared. There they were, four giant standing-up wheels stuffed with mincedto-a-paste veggies. The things I try for you, dear reader.

Talk plastic Eats at the Blue Bar are priced between Rs650 and Rs1,250 and cocktails from Rs550 to Rs950. At Blue Ginger, appetizers range from Rs400 to Rs1,200 and mains from Rs550 to Rs4,500 (for the full Vietnamese roast duck with accompaniments). Add 12.5% tax to all the prices.

Priya Ramani

WO IT! N

As always, Aakar Patel’s column, ‘Why Mayawati is casting her legacy in stone’, 26 September, was very interesting.

I agree when he says, “...there is no intellectual engagement with leaders here; there is only worship.

Indians don’t need to actually read Gandhi or Savarkar or Nehru or Ambedkar to know what they stood for or against. We revere them because we have been assured they are great...”

India has a culture of received wisdom. There is no “individual” here. A vast majority of the population is enslaved by casteist labelling of their place in life.

Educationally, the whole ‘guru­shishya’ tradition discourages independent thought; challenging age­old wisdom is out of the question. Our teachers fail to encourage creative and logical thinking. The Enlightenment is yet to arrive here in India. “...Gujarati Gandhi, less sentimental, saw it immediately for what it was: a monument to cruelty. He thought of the peasants taxed to pay for its marble, the villagers who lost their land to its gardens...”

And as far as the naked fakir goes, he had no taste. Despite his time in England, he failed to develop an appreciation of the arts.

FARAH (The writer of this week’s winning letter wins a gift voucher worth Rs3,500 from Wills Lifestyle, redeemable at any of their outlets countrywide.

Wills Lifestyle offers a complete lifestyle wardrobe incorporating the latest fashion trends. Choose from Wills Classic workwear, Wills Sport relaxed wear, Wills Clublife evening wear and Wills Signature designer wear.)

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: G VENKET RAM CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In ‘The capitalism conundrum’, 26 September, Simon Kuznets won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1971.

In ‘Melodies, now and then’, 26 September, Sunidhi Chauhan sang ‘Beedi jalai le’.

TODAY’S BLOG

Jesse, the real ‘khiladi’

BY RACHANA NAKRA

This and more at blogs.livemint.com/livelounge

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUKUL KESAVAN HIGH WINDOWS

Why the Green Hunt rhetoric rings so hollow

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AP

he government of India recently aired half-page advertisements in the newspapers, featuring corpses with boxed names and a declaration that “Naxals are nothing but cold-blooded murderers”. Around the same

time, the home minister began to talk about an imminent counter-insurgency operation in Chhattisgarh and other states. This, the home minister explained, was the government’s concerted response to the violent challenge posed by the Naxals to state authority. As a token of the seriousness of the state, he revealed that the paramilitary forces involved in the action would be allowed to call upon the special operations units of the Indian Army and the helicopters of the Indian Air Force for logistical support.

The advertising campaign, the home minister’s bid to prepare us for the intensity of Operation Green Hunt, the reports that some 75,000 paramilitary personnel had been mobilized, suggests an operation planned on an unprecedented scale. For perspective it’s useful to remember that the current strength of Nato forces in Afghanistan is just under 100,000 soldiers. The deployment indicates that the government of India sees the Naxalite insurgency in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere as a menace comparable to the terrorism of the Taliban and its sponsorship of jihad. This is consistent with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s much-quoted statement that violent, Left-wing insurgencies are “the gravest threat to India’s internal security”.

This should remind us that large counter-insurgency operations in India have so far been confined to India’s borderlands and directed against

secessionist movements: Punjab, Kashmir and the North-Eastern states are cases in point. Operation Green Hunt, on the other hand, is to be staged in central India in a poor, rural, landlocked province surrounded by six other states.

The government of India argues that large parts of Chhattisgarh, indeed scores of districts spread over a dozen states, have, in fact, seceded from India; that Operation Green Hunt is needed precisely to reassert the first responsibility of any state, its sovereign control over its territory.

Put like that, Operation Green Hunt seems like a justifiable initiative. How can the Indian republic call itself a State if its writ doesn’t run in its heartland? In the first round of television discussions after the home minister announced his counter-insurgency plans, anchors and moderators asked the critics of Operation Green Hunt the obvious questions: What choice does the Indian government have when its authority is usurped by insurgents who reject the legitimacy of a democratically constituted state? Isn’t the liberal, civil rights critique of insurgency naïve at best and treasonous at worst, given that it limits the government’s freedom of action and challenges its legitimate authority at the very moment when its energies should be focused on defeating those who would subvert it?

There are two ways of responding to this rhetorically powerful argument.

Tough act: Can the anti­Naxal campaign force rebels in Chhattisgarh to surrender?

One is to say that a citizen’s or a pundit’s brief isn’t, and shouldn’t be, limited to articulating reasons of state.

Instead of ventriloquizing for a government perfectly capable of getting its message across (think of the half-page newspaper advertisements), commentators, reporters, even television anchors, could put their skills to better use by exploring the predicament of those likely to be collateral damage in this war, who don’t routinely command the headlines or prime time: the rural poor of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh and every other state and district where insurgency feeds off the desperation of violently exploited Indians.

A perspective on Operation Green Hunt that concentrates on the costs of counter-insurgency (always borne disproportionately by the poor) might give us something to set against the government’s justifications for this war.

Adversarial journalism, far from being treasonous, is the mark of the patriot: If more American journalists and intellectuals had been sceptical of

George Bush’s reasons for the invasion of Iraq, both the US and Iraq would have been spared a murderous, catastrophic and futile war.

The second way of testing the government’s good faith in setting in motion this massive confrontation is to examine the consistency of its own arguments. The home minister’s primary justification for Operation Green Hunt is that the State can’t allow its authority, its monopoly over violence, to be flouted with impunity. This begins to seem less plausible when a cursory survey of Chhattisgarh’s recent history reveals that the Congress party in that state pioneered the strategy of raising and arming a vigilante army (the Salwa Judum) whose members were given special police officer status and granted the leeway to kill pretty much whoever they wanted in the name of anti-Naxal operations.

The Salwa Judum wasn’t just criticized by liberals, civil rights-wallahs and the usual bleeding heart suspects: It was censured by the higher courts of the republic. The Congress government at the Centre has now backed away from its

sponsorship of this mob, but it’s worth remembering that a government that claims to be so mindful of its monopoly over violence that it will go to war against those of its citizens who would challenge that monopoly, shouldn’t have been in the business of subcontracting its licence to kill to civil society militias.

In 1942, during the Quit India Movement, the colonial government used, for the first time in its history, air power to strafe nationalist rebels. But even in the middle of this ferocious campaign of repression, there were officers of the colonial state who remembered that they were going after human subjects of the British Empire.

One ICS head of a district famously warned his policemen against being trigger-happy: “Remember,” said Mr Niblett, ICS, “you’re not on shikar.”

With paramilitary forces called CoBra (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action), kitted out with mortars, rocket launchers and sniper rifles, for a campaign called Operation Green Hunt, it’s clear that their republican successors haven’t been given the same caution.

They’re loaded for bear and print and broadcast journalists who hitch a ride on this armed safari might consider the credibility of their embedded American counterparts who whistled their way in chorus into a criminal war.

Mukul Kesavan, a professor of social history at Jamia Millia Islamia, is the author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions. Mukul is taking a sabbatical from op-ed writing.

This is his last column.

Write to Mukul at highwindows@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Mukul’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/mukul­kesavan

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The dark (and mysterious) side of the moon

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HO/NASA/JPL/AFP

oes science displace myth? And if so, should we care? Chandrayaan discovered water on the fifth largest satellite in the solar system and all of us in Bangalore—home to Isro—are over the moon.

While I marvel at India’s magnificent achievement in the space programme, a part of me is also a tad sad. This, I guess, is where the arts and the sciences diverge. The arts are about imagery and storytelling; myth and mystique. The sciences are about the pursuit of truth. The truth is irrelevant to storytelling; and storytelling is anathema to fact-based science.

It is not often that an object attracts equal attention of both artists and scientists. Atoms, for instance, fascinate scientists but are of little interest to poets.

Ditto for global warming, biochemistry, epidemics and DNA, all of which made recent headlines in science journals, but scarcely made an appearance in the arts.

Economics is the wild card as David Hare’s play, The Power of Yes, on the global financial crisis eloquently proves.

The moon, I would argue, is the exception to this art-science dichotomy.

It has fascinated scientists and philosophers, astronomers and astrologers, poets and politicians. In demystifying the moon, are astronomers reducing it from a poet’s allegory to a mere astronomical object?

For a minor celestial object, the moon’s “mystical veil” is the stuff of myth and legend. The Japanese held moon-viewing parties that Lady Murasaki described in what some call the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji.

Chinese poetry is full of metaphors about the moon—as a friend to the lovelorn and as an illusion that disappears after a drink. Li Bai, an ancient poet of the Tang dynasty, talks about raising his cup and beckoning the moon. “My shadow included, we are a party of three,” he said.

The moon, when you think about it, is a minor player in the galaxy. Comets, black holes and meteors are more complex and convey more force and influence. The reason the moon is important to earthlings is because of its nearness; and the fact that we have always fantasized about colonizing it. The moon’s size and its dynamism make it compelling. It does things: waxing, waning, disappearing, reappearing. It is huge when compared to the stars and planets, and even though we know that this is because the stars are farther away, we still cannot comprehend this

galactical distance. Most of all, the moon is beautiful; so magnificent that the poet Rumi wanted to surrender to its being. It is distinct—easily spottable in that vast eternity that is the universe. So we worship it, stare at it, dream about it, keep healing crystals under its benevolent light. The moon is cool—both literally and figuratively. We chart our travels based on it; propitiate ancestors when it disappears; map tides and a woman’s hormones according to it.

For all these reasons, the moon occupies a disproportionate stature in poetry, music, verse, theatre, paintings and our own psychic space. So much so, that when Greek philosopher Anaxagoras first suggested that the moon fed off the sun’s light, he was imprisoned and later exiled for removing the romance from the heavens. In partial apology, astronomers named a crater on the moon after him. Vedic astrology, if I am not wrong, is based on the lunar calendar. This unpredictable tractable creature that Vedic sages called Soma—son of Atri and Anusuya— created many myths ranging from Rahu swallowing the moon to Ganesha cursing the moon.

Other scientific disciplines may invite controversy but not the level of romantic nostalgia as the moon does. Genetics, for instance, is drilling into our bodies and discovering that the north-south, Aryan-Dravidian divide is a myth. We are—contrary to caste and religious predilections—all mixed up. This recent landmark study by a team of Indian and Harvard scientists offers provocative

Lunar musings: Chandrayaan’s find is a watershed, but don’t kill the romance. conclusions but inspires little romance.

The moon, in contrast, is the ultimate romantic tool. Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that television could reduce population growth. But how to control desires that waxed and waned on a coir bed under the light of the moon?

Until television became babysitter and distraction, much of India was fed under the moon. Crying infants were taken outside, securely tucked around the hip of an obliging aunt. Unenticing morsels were then thrust into the reluctant infant’s lips using the moon as distraction. “Ambuli kaati amudhu padaithu”, goes a famous Tamil dialogue and it means “I showed you the moon and fed you nectar”. Today, Tom and Jerry play that role.

Even though science is taking it apart and revealing its cratered secrets, the moon might defy the odds. It may be the Black Swan and retain the mystery that made us gaze at it in the

first place. Just as Vikram and Mrinalini Sarabhai coexisted, perhaps the arts and sciences will coexist with respect to the moon. So I want to ask Messrs Annadurai, Madhavan Nair and Kasturirangan: When you gaze skywards at what Chandrayaan conquered, do you see craters and terrae or do you see what D.H. Lawrence said, “brings a fresh fragrance of heaven to our senses?”

Please, I would add to them, view this not as a challenge, but rather, an extended overture for debate.

Shoba Narayan thinks that “a cow jumped over the moon” is just as compelling as water on the moon. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

L5

Play REVIEW | PHILIPS CINEMA 21:9 LCD HDTV

Cinema screen envy

Amar Chitra Katha’s online game could use a coat of polish B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

The gigantic new Philips TV is an odd, flashy thingamajig in these times of austerity

································ he creators of Legend of Katha really love their exclamation marks.

The online game, developed by ACK Media, which owns the comic book brand Amar Chitra Katha, features no less than seven gleeful shouts on its login screen: Sign up! Join Now! Free Forever!

Even the little news box on the side peppers its routine announcements with some enthusiastic punctuation.

The earnest excitement is understandable. Legend of Katha is India’s first domestically developed multiplayer online game. In testing since July, it’s received a fairly brisk response, and ACK chief executive Samir Patil is prepared to throw off the practice covers and begin promoting the game aggressively.

“We received nearly 8,000 registered users in the last month, with several hundred showing up every day. We were pleasantly surprised,” he says.

Legend of Katha is, technically speaking, a persistent browser-based multiplayer online role-playing game. In everyday language, that means a game you can play in short bursts with other people over the Internet as a fun distraction at work or at home. Point your browsers at the website, choose a name, choose your appearance and you’re in the bright and colourful world of Katha—with monsters to slay, puzzles to solve and pots of gold to hoard.

“The gaming market in China is our primary inspiration,” Patil says.

“They had the same problems we do—low bandwidth, high rates of piracy

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

································· hen the people at Philips asked if they could drop off a product for review, I absent-mindedly asked them to leave it with our front desk.

The plan was to later take it home in the office man-bag and test it at leisure. I did not ask them what the product would be, assuming something of the scale of MP3 devices, DVD players and such like.

How stupid of me.

The Philips Cinema 21:9 LCD high definition TV, it turns, is actually bigger than our front desk (no, seriously). It arrived in a humongous coffin of a cardboard box and for many hours after delivery, all we could do was look at it amazed. It’s not the 56-inch size of the TV alone that was overwhelming, but its extra-wide dimensions. One of this spectacular TV’s many USPs is its 21:9 aspect ratio. This makes the screen longer than your usual flat-screen TV, enough to make movies play on it in the same aspect ratio that they are shot on camera. No black bars above or below.

But first we had to get it out of the box.

Or tear the box down.

The 21:9 is a beautiful, show-stopper of a television set. The screen is brilliant to

Legend­in­progress

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Style overload: The Cinema 21:9 features an eerily pretty backlight. look at, thanks to the full HD display at 2560x1080 pixel resolution. No need, even if you can clearly afford it, for a comprehensive speaker system. The TV comes with a concealed set of two woofers and two tweeters that performed well.

But it’s more than just a television set.

The 21:9 comes ready to hook up to an Internet connection. You can plug in an old-fashioned ethernet cable or go wireless. The TV comes with built-in Wi-Fi, and you can browse the Internet with the built-in Web browser and, yes, you can watch YouTube videos too. An added bonus is the TV remote that doubles as a Universal remote. If you are the sort of person who has plenty of media on their computer, you can also plug in a USB thumb drive in a port on the side. No writing DVDs or CDs. The 21:9 has a slick, if simplistic, navigation set-up that allows you to switch

easily between modes and inputs. Given the many functions available, we were able to swap between them effortlessly without once referring to the manual. One problem with the TV is the 21:9 aspect ratio. Sure, it works great for most movies, but for everything else there is an amount of stretching and clipping involved. Also, the TV’s weight is approximately 32kg. For our review we had to prop it up against a table because the Philips guys didn’t have a stand that could support its weight.

But the biggest issue we have is with the price. The Cinema 21:9 will set you back by Rs4.5 lakh, or approximately the price of 1,300 couple tickets at a respectable multiplex. That’s one movie a day, every day, for around three years. That’s an awful lot of money in these times of austerity. Even if the TV is so big that if it ever fell off the wall or your table, it would probably kill you.

Mythologic: Katha is available for free. and a large audience that loves stories and mythology.”

ACK isn’t the first to introduce a game like this in India. In 2004, a free-to-play Korean game called Ragnarok enjoyed a brief spurt of popularity after a tie-up with Indiatimes, the Internet arm of the Times of India group.

Katha has been in development for two years, but the game is still very rough around the edges. Typos and wobbly animations abound, and there is a rawness akin to an unedited movie that just screams “work-in-progress”.

Arjun Gupte, vice-president of ACK’s animation and gaming studio, admits that the title could use a bit of polish.

“We’re working on that now. Balancing the quests, making sure everything feels and plays right.”

“It’s a good foundation for other games,” says Patil. “If we ever decided to make, say, a game based on the Tinkle universe—we could easily do that now.”

Prayers for a Tantri the Mantri-themed game could finally be answered.

Legend of Katha is playable at Legendofkatha.com

L6

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Style MENSWEAR

In praise of the Chinese suit ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG

Warren Buffett is wearing Trands instead of Brioni; says he’s given away his old suits

B Y S KY C ANAVES & S USAN P ULLIAM ···························· merica’s foremost capitalist may not have much in common with China’s top Communist, but Warren Buffett and Hu Jintao do appear to share the same clothier.

Move over Brioni, the truly rich and powerful are wearing Trands. The obscure menswear label is produced by Dayang Group, a clothing company founded by Li Guilian, 63 years old, a diminutive farmerturned-fashion mogul, in north-east China.

Li’s company got a major boost after Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., recently appeared in a Dayang promotional video, posted on the company’s website. He heaped praise on Li, her company, and the nine Trands suits he proudly owns.

Shares of Dayang’s Shanghailisted subsidiary, Dalian Dayang Trands Co., have soared by more than 70% since the video was posted on 10 September.

While not known as a fashion plate, Buffett says his Trands suits transformed his image.

“They’re comfortable and people tell me they look good,” says Buffett, reached at his office. “I went 78 years before I got a compliment on my appearance.”

Buffett, who says he has no ownership stake in Dayang, especially likes that his new suits are wrinkle-resistant. “If I am on a trip and wearing them day after day, they don’t wrinkle,” he says. He says he gave his old suits to charities.

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Dayang can’t openly advertise its affiliation with what it says is another famous customer, China’s President Hu Jintao. The company’s press officer, Zhi Yong, says Hu started wearing Trands in late 2005 after coming across one of its stores in Beijing.

A photo of Hu, donning a Trands suit, is featured in the company’s official corporate history.

But unlike in the US, where leaders’ clothing labels are major fashion news, details of the President’s private life are off-limits to the Chinese media. Indeed, when a reporter tried to visit the Trands store inside Beijing’s Jingxi Hotel, where the President was said to have first spotted the label, she was refused entry.

“This store is not open to the public. We mainly serve Chinese leaders,” a person who answered the store’s phone said. China’s central government information office declined to comment. “It’s a bit sensitive,” says Trands’ Zhi. The friendship between Li and Buffett, unlikely as it seems, developed quite by chance. Two years ago, Buffett came to Dalian to attend the opening of a new factory for Iscar Metalworking Cos, one of Berkshire Hathaway’s recent acquisitions.

David Margalit, Dayang’s global marketing director, had a friend who was an executive at Iscar.

Spotting an opportunity, Margalit suggested that Buffett get fitted for a Trands suit while he was in town.

“Five minutes after I got into the hotel room these guys came bursting into the room and before I knew it, the two of them were sticking measuring tape around my thigh. It seemed a little personal to me,” Buffett says.

“But they sent them to me and I never had to have an eighth of an inch changed.”

Buffett admits his knowledge

NELSON CHING/BLOOMBERG

Suit up: (above) Warren Buffett says Trands suits transformed his image; and Trands suits on display.

of men’s clothing isn’t equal to his investing prowess. “I’m not enthused about buying clothes.

They don’t interest me,” he says.

“But this is a perfect solution. I feel good about these suits. And not just because they are free.”

Li’s rags-to-rag-trade tale of riches appeals to Buffett. Born

The Prada mix A trendsetting Milan show tries ‘to describe the current world’

B Y C HRISTINA B INKLEY The Wall Street Journal

···························· iuccia Prada is not fond of Hollywood celebrities, she prefers intellectuals. So Prada invited architect Rem Koolhaas to her show last season, creating no headlines whatsoever, but she declines to dress movie stars for the Oscars, which could sell a truckload of handbags.

“She only dresses people who interest her,” says a Prada staffer, noting that Prada’s marketing team has tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to chase the easy hype that a Hollywood front row offers the likes of Giorgio Armani, who had Janet Jackson in his front row last week.

Prada’s show, a few hours after

M Blue basics: Prada’s 2010 Spring collection included a variety of beach looks.

Armani’s, was devoid of roiling photographer scrums. Roger Federer was there only because American Vogue editor Anna Wintour was his personal escort.

The rest who stepped within the walls of the stark Prada headquarters on the Via Fogazzaro were a mix of global magazine editors, retailers and terribly welldressed Milanese intellectual and business elite. Many wore iconic Prada clothing from the designer’s previous collections.

There was the Spring 2009 crinkly-paper-like skirts, and Fall 2009’s unlined dresses of the richest lace.

Prada has created two looks that will be identifiably “Prada Spring 2010”. When these clothes arrive in stores in February, the most recognizable will be the silk duchesse prints in florals or a nostalgic 1960s beach scene.

The other look of the Prada season is a series of hacked-off suits.

Light jackets were cut mid-torso, the shorn threads left hanging, and same with the pants, which were sliced just below the knee.

They will be perfect for the corporate executive who is embarking

to a peasant family, Li grew up in a brick shack in the small town of Yangshufang, an hour’s drive from the city of Dalian in Liaoning province. She started tilling the fields at the age of 18 and rose through the ranks of farmers, becoming the Communist Party secretary of her

2,000-member production brigade. She started Dayang Group in 1979 as a collective township enterprise with a 30,000 yuan (around Rs2.1 lakh) loan, setting up an assembly line with 85 employees and dozens of sewing machines contributed from the homes of her neighbours.

The factory started out making simple items used by rural folk like Li: tablecloths, aprons and sleeve protectors. The company slowly introduced more complicated garments and signed up overseas customers. In 1995, Dayang launched its own flagship brand of Trands menswear. Dayang now employs 15,000 people and turns out 10 million garments a year.

on a round of layoffs that will leave her company equally shorn.

The walls of the runway were projected with pictures of a palazzo opening out on to a beach, street scenes and chandeliers.

That was symbolism.

“I wanted to describe the current world,” Prada said while chatting backstage, wearing her traditional ironic motherly look—a dusty pink pencil skirt under a navy blue sweater and sequinned knit tights. “There are the rich and the poor... There is nostalgia.”

She said the chandeliers— which corresponded to a series of tops embellished with crystal-

like baubles—were meant to represent the modern mix of class and “trash”.

Milan Fashion Week is the third week in a global month of runway shows that begins in New York and winds up in Paris this month. Prada’s show is considered the high point of Milan each season, much as Marc Jacobs is in New York. Both designers create unpredictable collections that tend to lead fashion trends rather than follow them.

Prada is something of a cultural weathervane, reacting to the social, political and economic climate, and her ultra-cool styles PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ANTONIO CALANNI/AP

High and low: The collection is meant to be a mix of class and ‘trash’.

Even after 14 years, Trands isn’t particularly well known in China, at least not before Buffett began promoting it. Its 20 stores are concentrated in second-tier north China cities such as Dalian, Shenyang and Taiyuan, where its suits are expensive by Chinese standards. The cheapest cost around 6,000 yuan, and the most expensive, made from fine cashmere, are upwards of 20,000 yuan.

Last week, the Trands promotional video of Buffett played in an endless loop on a giant screen at the entrance to the 20th annual China International Garment and Textile Fair. “I now have nine suits all made in China. I threw away the rest of my suits,” Buffett says, every 3 minutes or so.

Sue Feng and Ellen Zhu contributed to this story.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

often are her own emotional response to the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Her wildly expensive-looking lace, which was ostentatious and sexy, came during the economic boom.

This fall’s dark collection, in stores and magazines now, is based on hip-wader boots and heavy woollen suits, worn by models with frizzy Miss Havisham hair. It’s subversive and escapist with its woods-and-fishing theme—and was created during the financial crisis when the retail world was awash in bankruptcies.

Prada says she wants to be “commercial”—a word that many designers consider a copout because it implies compromising their artistic endeavours.

Yet one of the reasons that Prada’s collections stand out when worn on the street is that she is fond of experimenting.

This season, she says she went to the textile mills that create fabrics for haute couturiers for silk duchesse, a favoured fabric because it is light yet slightly stiff.

But Prada asked the mills to weave nylon threads—more class and trash, rich and poor symbolism—into the duchesse fabric. “It turned out to be more expensive than the (pure) silk,” she says.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

STYLE L7

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TREND TRACKER

The curious case of the bad sock MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

Why Indian men should pay more attention to dressing their feet

BEST FOOT FORWARD

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

···························· o white socks outside the gym!” designer Ravi Bajaj cautions, almost menacingly, when I ask him what’s going on with men’s foot fashion. Bajaj, who opened the Van Heusen India Mens Week last month, harbours a fashionista’s exasperation for bad sock etiquette.

“At no time are white socks to be worn with anything other than gym wear,” he says.

“Unless you’re trying to emulate Michael Jackson.”

The Indian man’s sock drawer needs a sartorial reassessment. Bajaj complains about both—the absence of professional retailers and the lack of demand for smart socks in the country. He used to store designer socks at his own signature boutiques in Delhi and Mumbai, but stopped ordering new pieces a couple of years ago because they didn’t sell.

“Indian men are willing to splurge, or at least put some thought into their suits and club wear, but they neglect innerwear,” he says. It might, however, get increasingly problematic for men to relegate socks to the standard white, black and grey categories.

It’s not just Indian men, though. Even one of America’s most popular television hosts, David Letterman, had to take flak for his staid sock sense.

Some weeks ago, on Letterman’s Late Show, his guest Anna Wintour, the editor-inchief of American Vogue, made a cheeky jab about his plain grey pair.

Bajaj’s gripe with socks doesn’t end with colours. He speaks of ideal length, pointing out that though winter (longer)

N

Van Heusen Price: Rs109­149 Size: Free Stores in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore

Marks and Spencer

and summer (shorter) lengths don’t really apply in Indian weather conditions, it is important to check that your shin doesn’t show when your trousers ride up on sitting. Also, formal sock etiquette calls for socks that are darker than your suit and lighter than your shoes. And loafers, unless they’re black, should not be worn with socks. Bajaj also suggests going sockless with lightcoloured linen suits.

These norms stated, the designer advocates “going crazy”. He lives by his aphorism, too. A peek into his personal sock collection—mostly from the brands Paul Smith and Kenzo—reveals elaborate oriental prints and floral patterns in colours ranging from mauve and plum to parrot green. Some of the pieces are subtle: A pair of simple grey Paul Smith socks, for instance, are quietly transformed by a delicate green pattern. Contrast is key and Bajaj suggests pairing a pinstriped suit with floral socks; a tweed jacket with argyles; blue d en im s with b la c k a nd r ed

Prime numbers These digital dials will make you feel retro and futuristic B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

····························

Timex: Expedition WS4 watch with a wide screen, advanced sensors that calculate altitude, temperature and barometric pressure, and provide the weather forecast.

At all Timex Time factory outlets countrywide and multi­brand watch stores, Rs9,995.

Sole mates: (above) Bajaj believes contrast is key when it comes to sock styling; and Ranbir Kapoor wears a quirky pair in Wake Up Sid, which released in theatres on Friday.

checks. Most of his socks are cotton blended with silk or spandex for a sleek fit.

Stylist Priyanjali Lahiri, who put together Aamir Khan’s wardrobe for Taare Zameen Par, is a firm believer in Bajaj’s “going

crazy” motto. In the posters for UTV’s Wake Up Sid, which released on Friday, Ranbir Kapoor wears orange stars, the Smurfs and snakes and ladders on his feet. Kapoor plays a laid-back city boy and Lahiri says she put a lot of thought into picking his T-shirts, boxers and socks. “Sid is the sort of guy who sleeps in his boxers and socks and so it was really important to make sure his socks had character,” she says. Lahiri picked most pairs from Topshop, a British fashion brand, and odd little shops in

Swarovski: Limited edition ‘D:light’ watch in white rubber and rose­gold featuring 171 crystals.

Pressing the oval push button illuminates a light through the crystals, emitting an orange glow that displays the time before disappearing a few moments later.

At all Swarovski stores countrywide, Rs6.75 lakh.

Diesel: Metallic timepiece with silver leather band and digital LED display. At all multi­brand watch stores countrywide, Rs10,995.

Bangkok. She rates socks as being in the middle of the list on the fashion meter, after T-shirts and shoes. “It’s the first thing you see when a man takes off his shoes to get intimate. That’s got to be something!”

Sonal Bhatia, brand manager for Paul Smith in India, has reason to believe that the Indian man’s sock sense is on the rise. Bhatia says that since the British label’s launch in Delhi and Bangalore last year, there have been several walkins by customers—aged anywhere between 19 and 55—asking specifically for socks. At a flat price of Rs1,700 each, the stores sell around 300 pairs a month. “Our signature pattern is high contrast stripes.

And while ordering patterns, I’ve never once had to think about getting conservative for the Indian market.”

As a stylist, all Lahiri suggests is, give socks a chance. “It can be your thing,” she says. “Wild socks score high as a style statement because you can choose when to reveal them...with a twist of your ankle.”

de Grisogono: Pink gold wristwatch with black rubber strap, titanium and rubber case with sapphire glass front and back and hand­winding mechanical movement.

Analogue display of hours and minutes on top with digital display at the bottom.

At DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, Rs3.13 crore.

Puma: ‘Fluctuation’ series of watches with date, stop watch and alarm functions. At all Watches and More stores in Bangalore, Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai, Rs3,450 onwards.

Price: Rs945 Sizes: 8­9, 10­12 Stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad

Paul Smith Price: Rs1,700 each Size: Free Stores in Delhi and Bangalore

L8

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Business Lounge MARTIAL ROLLAND

Winning innings S

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

The Nestle chief is leaving India after 14 years of working in the subcontinent

Looking back: Rolland regrets that he didn’t learn any Indian language and that he still can’t understand cricket.

···························· oon, Switzerland may get to witness some strange customs. Like the sight of a Frenchman breaking a coconut perfectly down the middle after a puja in a factory. “I have become an expert at it and this will be a nice thing to introduce there,” says Martial Rolland, chairman and managing director of Nestle India. He has spent about 14 years in the subcontinent and now that his five-year tenure as CMD has ended, he is looking for ways to keep a little bit of the subcontinental warmth in the icy mountain air of Switzerland.

I meet Rolland on a hot August afternoon, after an unexpectedly stressful drive through mid-afternoon traffic. The sail-shaped Nestle office in Gurgaon is at the periphery of a jumble of glassand-chrome buildings.

Rolland is cheerful, relaxed, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled to the elbow, and his voice fills the large sixth floor office. He offers me Nestle’s “very, very good green tea” and orders a cup of coffee for himself.

He is trying hard to be optimistic about his new assignment as vice-president, Nestle SA, where he will be in charge of Africa, West Asia, Turkey and

Pakistan. He joined Nestle in 1988, a year after he completed his MBA from Indiana University in Bloomington, US. His first assignment was as area sales manager in Karnataka.

Rolland’s replacement is Brazilian Antonio Helio Waszyk, who moves from Switzerland where he was the head of the food strategic business unit.

Despite the comfort of having worked in two out of his four new territories, Rolland constantly comes back to how much he is going to miss India. His office overlooks the new national highway, which splices the suburb into Bharat and India. “All this,” he says, pointing to shiny, glittering Gurgaon, “came up between my first and second stints in India. I remember driving down this highway. This was a sleepy town on the way to Jaipur, the Maruti factory was the only landmark. When I came back, I couldn’t recognize the place. I was shocked at seeing all these shopping malls. So I have seen the place grow up and it is very hard to leave it,” he says.

Rolland has also been a keen observer of the evolution of the Indian consumer. “In the 1980s, the Indian consumer was very conservative, especially when it came to food habits. It was fairly difficult to break in with new concepts and new products. Since then the consumer has changed radically. These new coffee bars are a great example of how people are willing to experiment.

They are not only open to the cuisine of a different state but are well informed and eager to experiment with cuisines from all over the world,” he says.

What makes selling to the Indian consumer difficult, he says, is the fact that the “Indianization” of Bharat did not diminish our value consciousness. Now not only do we want a great new concept, we also want it at a good price.

Creating that is something Nestle seems to have done right.

Even with the slowdown and sluggish demand in the last year, the company has reported strong growth in the last four years, under Rolland’s stewardship.

Nestle India, he says, is only reaping the benefits of its vision of creating shared value. “We have been here for a very long time, we have invested here and have a strong connect with the people here,” he says.

He illustrates with the example of the dairy farmers of Punjab. In the 1980s, when the state was seized by insurgency, Nestle had a problem on its hands. The company collects milk from a large community of farmers in Punjab. If milk collection is hampered for a day or two, the farmer can find something to do with the milk, such as make khoya

(reduced milk), but after that he would have a huge problem. So, despite the security risks, Nestle kept its promise and managed to maintain business as usual with the dairy farmers. The bond that was built then between the company and the farmer community is still very strong.

Nestle has contributed significantly to the prosperity of villages such as Monga, near Ludhiana.

Since it’s a business relationship and not a philanthropic one, it has sustained. “In a financial crisis like this, the first thing that dries up is charity. But if you have an approach of creating value through business, then it won’t go, because it is a win-win situation, you are not doling out anything,” Rolland adds.

He has only two minor regrets about his India stint. One, he hasn’t learnt any Indian languages (“I follow Hindi or Kannada well enough to understand whether sales are good and to understand if the sales guy is asking the shopkeeper to tell me something I want to hear”) and two, despite 14 years of living in India and Pakistan, he hasn’t been able to understand cricket (“I always wonder about the productivity of the fielder, if the ball does not come to you, what do you do?”). He tried hard to get the senior management of Nestle to play football, but with mixed results. “There were a lot of injuries, some of the guys were very rusty and really, I think, they don’t have the passion for it as much as they do (for) cricket.”

Rolland’s nine-year-old son Max is a cricket enthusiast as well. He has so far managed to stave off the nagging about the lack of cricket in Switzerland with the promise that there would be a lot of skiing there.

“The children are also sad to go,” he says, “and my son knows that in Switzerland they speak this very strange language called French and he is worried he’ll be forced to learn it. I was shocked that he does not even know the word for egg in French,” he complains. One of his biggest regrets, he says, is the fact that Max and his daughter Chiara don’t speak French. But, he concedes, he is so busy with his work that he is not around much to teach them his language. He is hoping that will be one of the perks of his next assignment.

Speaking of languages, Rolland narrates an incident from a training programme a few years ago.

His fu tur e boss at the time wanted to meet him and asked people around how he would be able to recognize him. Don’t worry, the boss was told, Rolland is the only Frenchman who speaks English with an Indian accent. And that’s another strange thing Switzerland will soon be witness to.

IN PARENTHESIS Rolland is a self­confessed foodie. “I love food,” Rolland smacks his lips as he talks, “and in India I have a favourite in every region. In the east, I love fish with mustard oil and frontier food in the north, especially ‘dal makhani’. In the south, I always snack on ‘masala dosa’.

But what I really love to eat is ‘appam’ and fish stew in Kerala. The ‘appam’ has to be really fresh and soft. The stew I don’t mind substituting with Kerala and Goan fish curry.

“I am also grateful to India for introducing me to ‘bhindi’. It’s not something I had ever seen before I came here and it is my favourite vegetable now. Ahhh, okra,” he says.

His favourite Maggi is the masala flavour. His wife, who is from the Philippines, garnishes it with spring onion and dried onion and gives it an Asian twist. “The kids prefer the chicken flavour, though my daughter was recently saying she was finding it bland and she would like to upgrade to the spicier masala flavour.”

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

L9

Cover PROFILE

SURIYA:

BOLLYWOOD’S

HOTTEST SIX­PACK The Tamil superstar, set to storm Bollywood with Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Raktha Charitra’, combines commerce and creativity in winning ways

B Y N ANDINI R AMNATH ································· is latest movie is releasing on Diwali, and there are promotional events to grace and interviews to give. He is also in the middle of a shoot for a new film—by the end of 2010, he will have completed two more projects. In between shoots, he appears in commercials for leading brands and attends fund-raisers for the various charities he supports, apart from the one he runs. He exercises for at least an hour every day. There is rarely a free moment in Tamil superstar Suriya’s life, but lately, a new activity has cut into his busy schedule: Hindi lessons.

For 1 hour every day for the past one month, Suriya has been learning the language that hasn’t lost its potential to raise hackles in his state. Tamil Nadu has been the most vociferous among all the southern states in rejecting Hindi as India’s national language. It is the inability to speak Hindi that prevents many southern stars from acting more frequently in Hindi movies. And it is Hindi that will give Suriya a national platform.

Early next year, he will begin shooting for Ram Gopal Varma’s Raktha Charitra, a two-part biopic based on the life of Telugu politician Paritala Ravi. Vivek Oberoi plays Ravi, while Suriya will appear as his rival, Maatal Suri. “I am in a comfort zone at the moment, and I’m very happy with what I’m doing,” Suriya says. “But I keep thinking of Kamal (Haasan) sir, who acted in so many films in so many languages. He kept breaking stereotypes throughout his career.”

Suriya might ultimately get billed as the second lead in Raktha Charitra, but followers of Tamil movies know exactly where he stands in the pecking order of male leads. He is one of contemporary Tamil cinema’s strongest box-office magnets. His footprint extends across Tamil Nadu as well as to overseas Tamil enclaves in South-East Asia, the US, the

H

G VENKET RAM

UK and the Gulf. His close rival, Vijay, is the darling of rural and small town Tamil Nadu, but Suriya recently made inroads into those territories with action-oriented spectacles Vel and Ayan. Another contemporary, Vikram, is seen as a better performer, but Suriya has also wowed critics with his work in such films as Pithamagan and Vaaranam Aayiram. Besides, the abs have it—neither Vijay nor Vikram possess the perfectly sculpted body that Suriya flaunts in almost all his films.

Ultimately, Tamil movies are quite conservative despite a reputation for raunchy song-and-dance sequences and double-entendre dialogues, but all inhibitions are shed when it comes to showing off Suriya’s bare torso.

“Suriya is the most handsome hero in the south,” says cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran, who worked with him on Aayuthu Ezhuthu and will be shooting Suriya’s upcoming project with Ghajini director A.R. Murugadoss.

Suriya’s dreamy eyes and toothy smile have sealed his reputation as a sex symbol among women. His six-pack takes care of the men in the audience.

Suriya, however, wears his pin-up status lightly and plays down his superhero status. “My father always says that this too shall pass,” the 34-year-old actor says. “I’ve heard too many stories of success leading to downfall at the dining table at home. This fear of losing it all is deep-rooted in me. You have to prove yourself over and over again.

Once you finish a movie, you move on and start another one.”

Suriya’s father, eminent yesteryears actor Sivakumar, has been a source of encouragement as well as a cause for caution. Viewers and critics were unkind to Suriya’s initial films, starting with Nerukku Ner in 1997. He worried about whether he could carry the weight TURN TO PAGE L10®

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G VENKET RAM

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Beautiful south: (clockwise from above) Suriya with wife Jyothika in the 2006 film Sillunu Oru Kaadhal; his brooding, expressive eyes won him critical acclaim in films such as Nandha and Pithamagan; strutting his stuff in the forthcoming film Singham.

‘Suriya is in a very good position at the moment. Tamil audiences want both Kamal Haasan and Rajnikanth. Suriya is a bit of both.’ ® FROM PAGE L9

of expectation of being Sivakumar’s son. Those were desperate times for the young man who had chucked a salaried job and joined the movies partly to help his father pay off a debt.

“I would come home from shooting and cry into my pillow,” Suriya says about the initial days. “I wondered why I had gotten into acting, whether there was a way out.” He began to pay attention to the nuances of performance. “I began to take dance lessons,” he says. “I started watching films on television more closely.”

Suriya’s break came in 2001 with Nandha, about a boy who kills his philandering father and attempts to reconcile with his mother as an adult.

Suriya singles out Nandha’s director, Bala, for transforming his career and, in particular, his approach to acting.

Nandha is a brooder who barely speaks—Suriya had no more than a page of dialogue to deliver. “Bala sir was the one who told me, you have powerful eyes, use them in your acting,” Suriya says. “He taught me body language, how to smile, how to hold myself. Only after Nandha did I think that I was eligible for the movies.”

If Nandha sobered up Suriya, 2003’s Kaakha Kaakha gave him the high he had been waiting for. Gautham

Menon’s wildly successful cop thriller was a big success and sealed Suriya’s screen image as a strong-and-silent romantic. Suriya’s character, Anbuselvam, is an encounter cop who takes on a psychotic villain. The plot is predictable but the movie’s appeal has everything to do with its smooth screenplay and slick Hollywood-style editing and camerawork.

Jyothika, Suriya’s co-star in the movie and future wife (they married three years ago), also made her contribution to popular cinema. Menon had already decided that he wanted Jyothika for the role of Maya, Anbuselvam’s lover. Jyothika had an idea of who could act opposite her. “Jyothika came late for the Nandha preview, ran to the projector room and saw the first 30 minutes from there,” Suriya recalls.

Jyothika recommended Suriya to Menon, who, like Bala, realized the draw of Suriya’s mesmerizing gaze.

The film-making team was nervous before the movie opened. “Very few young actors had played cops,” Suriya says. “We thought the movie would work for college students.” What followed was “magic, just magic,” Suriya says. “For many in Tamil Nadu, Kaakha Kaakha was my first film.” For his role, he had shaved off his five o’clock shadow, beefed up his body and let his eyes do the talking. The heart-throb

had finally been born. “Suddenly, he had became an action hero who could also be extremely confident and subtle in his emotional scenes and perform comfortably in his romantic scenes,” says Venkatesh Chakravarthy, film studies professor at Mindscreen Film Institute and a friend of Suriya’s father Sivakumar. “This transformation of the boy who started out as a shy, reticent actor is amazing.”

Suriya’s ascent is the result of a combination of raw talent, hard work, meticulous image-building and sheer luck. He wasn’t the first choice for Nandha or Ghajini, that are now considered milestones in his career path.

Since Kaakha Kaakha, he has attempted to strike a balance between the roles that suit him best and the projects that he feels he must do in order to widen his base. He has done romance (Sillunu Oru Kaadhal), comedy (Peralagan) and action (Ghajini, remade in Hindi with the same title).

He has tried to shake off the label of being the big-city darling by appearing in formulaic larger-than-life entertainers such as Aaru and Vel, both by G. Hari Krishnan. Suriya is currently shooting for Krishnan’s Singham. He plays a cop yet again, this time from a small town. The movie is targeted at the B and C centres—industry parlance for smaller towns and villages that consti-

tute 40% of the Tamil film market. “I can’t say that I’m experimenting with Hari sir’s film, but I know that it won’t be bad or senseless,” Suriya says. “I do this with every third film of mine. This is the market that caters to Rajnikanth and Vijay. My films don’t always go there.”

Movies such as Ghajini or Vaaranam Aayiram made Suriya a heart-stopper in cities, but they alienated viewers who prefer earthier heroes. Chakravarthy, who had compared Vijay and Suriya in a magazine article some years ago, points out that Vijay started acting in B films and continues to “focus his energies on being the Rajnikanth No. 2, given his popularity with the subaltern Tamil youth”.

In Mumbai, the multiplex has allowed offbeat films to compete with bigger releases. However, “Tamil cinema, like other regional cinema, can’t afford a multiplex film” such as Menon’s Vaaranam Aayiram, Chakravarthy adds. In Vaaranam Aayiram, Suriya plays the double role of an aimless drifter and his inspirational father. The movie has urbane characters and several lines of English dialogue. “Some said that Vaaranam Aayiram was only for double PhDs,” Suriya jokes.

Suriya has spent the last few years coming to terms with what audiences want, and how it is to be delivered to

them. “I was born in Tamil Nadu, and my people are like this,” he reasons about playing the village strongman or the small-town thug. “These are real people and they come to single-screen theatres, sit on wooden benches and watch movies. I have to cater to them. I owe my status to them.” Among Suriya’s lodestars is actor and director Kamal Haasan, who has sampled both commercial and offbeat cinema throughout his career. “Kamal sir has this thirst for cinema,” Suriya says admiringly. “Even if I wasn’t an actor, I would have been drawn to the way he does different things. He has never bothered with success.”

Tamil cinema is full of examples of mavericks who have found ways to merge creativity and commerce. Right from the 1960s, actors and film-makers have tried to tell old stories in new ways, and they have found audiences willing to go along with them. The tradition of experimentation means that young actors like Suriya can pack their resumes with blockbusters as well as vanity projects. However, the absence of multiplexes means that the actors can ignore the mainstream only at their own peril—especially when Tamil movies cost more and make more money than they ever did. Sivaji, starring Rajnikanth, raked in close to Rs80 crore, while Suriya’s Ayan

earned about Rs65 crore.

Suriya’s Diwali release, Aadhavan, sees him once again in populist mode, as does Krishnan’s Singham. If Suriya was larger than life in Vel, he will spill out of the screen in Singham, Krishnan promises. “Suriya is in a very good position at the moment,” he says. “Tamil audiences want both Kamal Haasan and Rajnikanth. Suriya is a bit of both.”

For Krishnan, evidence of Suriya’s growing popularity lies in the crowds that throng his outdoor shoots. One of the shoots for Singham took place in Thiru village in Tuticorin district. It was hot enough to bake a cake, and even the wind, whenever it appeared, bore heat. As Suriya stood on the seat of a jeep, grimaced and growled, and beat up a few rowdies, clusters of open-mouthed fans cheered on from the sidelines. They put their mobile phone cameras to work and resisted half-hearted attempts by policemen to leave the set. The star, in keeping with his nice-guy reputation, remained affable and obliging.

“When we shot outdoors with Suriya earlier, not that many people came to watch,” Krishnan says. “Nowadays, it’s getting difficult to take him to locations.” Suriya has his own analysis of the situation. “They don’t know the real me,” he said. “I’m like

Mickey Mouse for them—they stand with me and get their picture taken.”

Although Suriya is consciously trying to be a hero for the masses, he tries to ensure that “every movie will be special in some way” and that there will be “at least 10 minutes new” in each film.

He insists on retakes even when filmmakers are okay with a shot, often irritating some of them. “Suriya is a director’s actor,” Menon says. “You have to keep talking to him about his role and he will do everything that needs to be done to get it right. My only problem with him is his insecurity. He will insist on two or three takes, whereas I like the rawness of the first take.”

Menon and Ravi K. Chandran are wary of Suriya’s crowd-pleasing moves. Menon says: “I don’t believe that rural roles work for Suriya. The problem is that all heroes feel that they need the masses. He works best in quiet roles because he’s that kind of a guy.” Chandran adds: “I don’t like to see Suriya in commercial films, but I guess he has to do them. A hero in the south has to be everything for everybody. Suriya must keep himself focused and maintain a reality check.”

Perhaps Suriya will never forget his early failures or the reviews that advised him to be a character actor instead of a hero. “The pressure poked me,” he says. “I like to be scared, under pressure. I perform better that way.”

Doggedness has now become a trademark of Suriya’s approach to acting.

For Vaaranam Aayiram, he lost 10kg to look like a teenager. “I would be on the treadmill till 2.30 in the morning,” he says. “My wife used to tell me, you don’t look like the husband I know.”

It is now said that acting is in Suriya’s blood, but the fact is that his father, Sivakumar, built a wall between his profession and his family. Besides, Sarvanan, which is Suriya’s real name, doesn’t have a pleasant first memory of watching his father on screen. “I remember going at the age of 4 to a preview of one of my father’s films,” Suriya says. “He plays a Christian priest, and there’s a scene where he gets beaten up outside a church. I remember crying and I was so agitated that I had to be taken home from the preview theatre.”

Sivakumar kept his distance from the film industry, Suriya says, and

encouraged his wife, two sons and one daughter to do the same. “We didn’t go for parties, and very few people from the industry came home,” Suriya recalls. He took the bus to school and college, and was more preoccupied with his grades than the movies. “I was a reserved kid and I had a complex that I couldn’t speak well,” Suriya says. “I never got good marks in school or college, and that affected my confidence. I didn’t know what to do with my life.”

He eventually graduated in commerce and worked at BNT Exports in Chennai for over two years before joining the movies. “I used to earn about Rs800 a month at the garment unit,” he says. “I earned Rs50,000 for my first film. I was paid in cash in a white envelope—I can still feel those notes.”

Suriya continues to live with his parents, his siblings and his wife and twoyear-old daughter Diya in Chennai’s T. Nagar neighbourhood. Jyothika, a Punjabi from Mumbai who had a successful run in Tamil films until her marriage, is Suriya’s Hindi movie watching companion. The attractive couple endorse a few products together, and are the picture of married bliss. Jyothika acted with Suriya in her first Tamil movie, and they started seeing each soon after. “There was something about her,” Suriya says. “I was a bit protective of her. My fan base expanded after I married her.”

That fan base could exponentially increase if Ram Gopal Varma returns to form with Raktha Charitra. Suriya’s Bollywood adventure would have taken place earlier had he accepted the films he was being offered by Mumbai directors. His rapport with and admiration for Varma helped him decide on Raktha Charitra. Apart from grasping the arithmetic of Tamil cinema, Suriya has also been keeping an eye on his counterparts in Mumbai, even as he complains that the idea of Bollywood can be overpowering. “We envy the budget and canvas to do things in Mumbai,” Suriya says. “Kaakha Kaakha cost Rs3 crore. Ghajini, Rs7 crore.” That too is changing. Tamil movies are now costlier—Ayan cost about Rs20 crore, Aadhavan came with a bill of Rs25 crore. Suriya’s acting fee alone is said to be about Rs5 crore. As Tamil cinema tries to become bigger than it already is, one of its brightest names prepares for new challenges. Raktha Charitra isn’t just Suriya’s Hindi movie debut. He will play a villain for the first time. “I would love to play a black character,” Suriya says. “With Varma, I can see the transition happening.”

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

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

AYESHEA PERERA/MINT

MALAYSIA

Memories of Middle­earth Among ancient caves and millions of bats, adventure is only a step away in a 130­million­year­old rainforest B Y A YESHEA P ERERA ayeshea.p@livemint.com

···························· The road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

B

ilbo Baggins’ ditty on the lure of travel somehow seems to be the most appropriate “walking song” to me while trekking through the rainforest in the Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Borneo. The crude paths, the towering trees and the play of sunlight on the forest floor cannot

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

but call to mind J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

And while the sprawling vistas of New Zealand were possibly more cinematically suited to the filming of Peter Jackson’s epic movies, this 130-million-year-old rainforest might just really have seen hobbits and elves journeying through, heading perhaps to the nearby Gunung Api (which, strangely enough, translates to “fire mountain” in Malay) to destroy a certain ring.

Such flights of imagination also help to distract us from the fact that we’ve been walking for nearly 8km, along a path infamous for its thriving population of leeches.

We are on our way to Camp 5, so named because it was the fifth base camp used by the Royal Geographic Society, which initially mapped the region. Before we started walking, though, we’d had to survive a 45-minute boat ride. Many of those minutes were actually spent negotiating the very slippery riverbed on foot, as the water was too shallow for the boat to navigate.

After that experience, the trek doesn’t prove very difficult at all, though we have to walk along shaky rope bridges, watch out for fallen tree trunks and constantly keep our eyes fixed on the ground to avoid tripping over tree roots.

Camp 5 is a congregation point for outdoor enthusiasts, many of whom are here to see the Pinnacles, razor-sharp limestone points jutting out of the roof of the forest. The viewing includes clambering up 2.5km of the impossibly steep Gunung Api—the feat is advisable only for those with a high degree of physical fitness, and even then only with a guide.

The climb to see the Pinnacles is considered the high point (no pun intended) of the outing.

The next day, we have an option to stay behind and nurse our aching muscles, make our way back or tackle the Headhunters Trail. Of course, we make the toughest choice: An 11.5km path that meanders through the jungle to a river, where a boat waits to take us to a traditional tribal longhouse for the night. The sheer joy of jumping into a river after such a long walk is indescribable. But it’s short-lived, since we spend the next 4 hours in a little banana-shaped boat.

Notwithstanding the primitive modes of transportation, the tribal longhouse is pleasantly supplied

Lord of the trail: (from top) Traversing the Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak involves braving rivers full of snakes; shaky rope bridges; and a squadron of bats swarms out of Sarawak’s Deer Cave.

with all the essential amenities, such as electricity, showers, cold beer and the deceptively smooth home-brewed rice wine.

To our minds, we have quite earned it. After all, not only had we walked 20-odd km, we’d also explored bat-infested caves over the last few days.

It had begun innocuously enough. “Hurry, hurry,” our guide had rushed us down the 4km footpath, afraid that it would soon be too dark for us to see anything. The path ended at Deer Cave, the largest cave passage

known to man at 150m wide, 120m high and apparently capable of accommodating 20 Boeing 747s. There are walkways and railings around the cave, allowing visitors to see the interiors without causing too much damage to themselves or the cave.

Yet, as we walked around in the dimly lit cave, looking at the stalagmites, stalactites and other rock formations in almost reverent silence, there was a very real apprehension of encountering some unpleasant cave monster like Shelob, the arachnid that par-

alyzed Frodo Baggins in the second book of The Lord of the Rings.

The horror, when it did come, however, was not perched on eight legs or even, truly speaking, an evil thing at all. Shepherded out of the caverns at sundown to “watch millions of bats fly out of Deer Cave”, we imagined clouds of bats swooping out of the dark interiors. What we saw, instead, was something much more militaristic and well-organized: Hundreds upon hundreds of small squadron-style flocks flying out one group at a time. Each swarm would await its turn at the mouth of the cave, circle a few times to gather momentum and numbers, and then fly out in a huge mob as the next group took its place.

We sat for a while at the mouth of the cave, watching openmouthed as swarm after swarm took off for the night. But if you thought that experience would put us off caves forever, you couldn’t be more wrong. Within days, we were back in the Clearwater and Wind Caves, connected by a river purported to be one of the largest—and possibly the largest—subterranean rivers in the world. The ground-level Wind Cave is considered historically significant, as it was used for burials 1,500-3,000 years ago. Located at a higher level, Clearwater Cave is much more precarious because, in addition to the possibility of slipping, there is also a very real chance of falling into the rushing waters below.

With so much time spent underground, I had to forfeit the Canopy Skywalk, touted to be the world’s longest walk over treetops. I’d always imagined it to be akin to having a bird’s-eye view over Rivendell or Lothlórien, the two elven cities of Middle-earth.

Maybe next time.

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Conditions are too basic for young children, but the treks could make for a great teenage­parent bonding exercise.

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DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

The anatomy of an artistic scream AFP

In Oslo, you’re never too far away from the Munch masterpiece

W

e were headed for a fjord outside Oslo. It was still early autumn: Icy Arctic winds hadn’t yet brought the winter chill to the town. The warmth of the summer was fading as sunlight rested on the water surrounding the city.

You could see a long trail of people walking up the gently sloped entrance to the national opera house; it was evening.

By the time we reached the restaurant, which sat on the water at the edge of the city, large clouds had taken over the sky, hanging over us like a billowing shroud.

The clouds were soft and looked like layers upon layers of fluffy, cuddly toys, dark blue and grey.

The water, which sparkled in the afternoon, now looked solemn and sombre.

On the horizon, with the sea trembling gently, the clouds pressed in, as though tucking us in bed, as if we were going to get sealed in the comforting embrace of the night, while sunlight escaped through that tiny crevice, still shining brilliantly, making

the water look like liquid silver.

The sunset wasn’t golden, pink or red; the light was bright and white. It had clarity and starkness that I had not seen before. It seemed to penetrate the clouds, pushing them aside, and the clouds moved back, meekly and obediently, making way for the sun, stretching the twilight hour.

Oslo’s autumnal skies are special. The days are clear and crisp blue. The sky turns a warm pink, before becoming red, like the leaves of the trees that populate the hills surrounding the city.

But at some point, the light stops following any precise sequence, and becomes the palette of a painter with an overactive imagination. It is a scream.

The lurid sky that Edvard Munch painted in 1893, which has come to symbolize the age of anxiety, referred to a spectacular twilight in autumn. The light was sharp, but there was a millennial, messianic element to that light, which brings to mind Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem: My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light.

There is that fleeting nature of mesmerizing and yet terrifying light, leading to a range of emotions—excitement, ecstasy, fascination, fear, and the apprehension of imminent end. Munch described the sunset that made him paint his most famous paint-

Icy calm: The evening sky over Oslo’s seafront hides the melancholy and anxiety of Munch’s The Scream. ing, The Scream, thus: “I was walking along the road with two friends—then the sun set—all at once the sky became blood red—and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired—clouds like blood and tongues like fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on, and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.”

Munch painted many versions of that sky, recollected from memory. At the Munch Museum in Oslo you can see various renderings of The Scream. Munch has been described as a natural-

ist, and the artist took care to separate himself from Impressionists (the dominant movement of the time). He said he wasn’t like them: “They paint what they see, I paint what I saw.” The English poet William Wordsworth had described poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity: In the turbulent sky that Munch saw, there was nothing tranquil, driving him to desperation.

Munch’s painting shows a cliff on the left, a path with a railing descending beyond the cliff, and, in the fjord beyond, an island with a hill. Three Texan academics—physicists Don Olson and Russell Doescher and English

professor Marilynn Olson—retraced Munch’s steps and identified a hill called Ekeberg, where Munch probably saw that sunset. And they made the discovery as they looked towards the south-west, where Munch’s sky had caught fire: It was not a vision from hell, as Munch probably imagined—the academics conjecture that it was the afterglow of the eruption of the Krakatoa in Indonesia. With the help of the art historian at the Munch Museum, they found the road with railings similar to the ones where Munch rested, tired, anxious, melancholy, and lonely, left behind by his friends.

My friends hadn’t left me, even

as I felt alone on that darkening island that evening. They were busy talking, the soft sound of their conversation, the clinking of their glasses, the tinkling of their cutlery reminding me that on that September night, as the dark sky threatened to devour the sun, I wasn’t alone. I looked towards the line of lights on the other side of the water, while the clouds had regained their strength, and pressed in, smothering the source of the light in the sky.

You could sense fleeting desperation in that dwindling light, it seemed as if it was gasping, but there was pride in those gasps. The boundaries of the clouds looked singed, as though they had caught fire; the light discovering tiny openings and recesses as it spread out, like the fragile branches of a dying tree, like the fingers of a slipping arm trying to clasp the edge of the cliff, even as it slipped the surly bonds of earth.

The evening was calm now; the water was placid. Others had moved on, and I felt left behind.

I walked faster, leaving melancholia. At the corner of the trail, near the railings, my friends were waiting.

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

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Books PETER FERGUSON/WSJ

SECOND COMING Some of the posthumous releases planned for the coming months

The Suicide Run by William Styron (Random House) Five narratives, loosely based on the author’s experience in the US Marine Corps, include the first chapter of an unfinished novel and a never before published short story about an anxious soldier’s meditation on his childhood stamp collection.

Releases in the US on 6 October

CLASSIC REVIVAL

New life: A few of the revived books were found incomplete and had multiple drafts.

Ghost writers A new wave of posthumous releases by Nabokov, Ellison and others raises thorny questions about what the writers intended

B Y A LEXANDRA A LTER ···························· fter author David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard copies stashed around the cluttered garage where Wallace had worked in Claremont, California, she discovered multiple versions of his final, unfinished novel.

She had no idea which draft he preferred. Wallace’s novel about Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents, due out next fall, is being assembled based on the author’s notes. “A great deal of it is a puzzle,” she says of the novel, titled Pale King.

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

The posthumous works may generate as much controversy as enthusiasm. Many are incomplete or appear in multiple drafts, raising thorny questions about author intent. Others, dug up from the archives of authors’ early and less accomplished work, could be branded disappointing footnotes to otherwise lustrous literary legacies. An unfinished murder mystery by Graham Greene, which is being

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serialized in the literary magazine, The Strand, was slammed on the Los Angeles Times’ literary blog, Jacket Copy, as “a far cry” from Greene’s later works, such as The Power and the Glory.

While some attribute the surge in posthumous publications to macabre coincidence, others say publishers are more aggressively seeking works by famous dead authors because they have established audiences—an irresistible prospect for a struggling industry.

New works by literary giants are “about as much of a sure thing as you could have in a business with few sure things,” says Robert Miller, publisher of HarperStudio, a HarperCollins imprint that released a collection of previously unpublished Mark Twain essays and short stories this past spring.

Mark Twain’s first executor released only a fraction of his unpublished work—a trove of papers that included some 700 manuscripts—for fear that less polished pieces would damage the author’s reputation. Today, nearly 100 years after Twain’s death, all but 50 or 60 of those manuscripts have been published, says Robert Hirst, editor of the recent Harper collection Who is Mark Twain?. Some critics have charged that many of Twain’s posthumous works should have been left in the dustbin, but Hirst argues that even the flawed works have value.

“You can learn a lot about how he thought and wrote that you can’t learn from reading an edition of Huckleberry Finn,” Hirst says. “I don’t think anything we publish can damage his reputation.”

Vladimir Nabokov instructed his family to burn his final novel, The Original of Laura, after his death. Nabokov had sketched out the novel on 138 index cards, a process he used to write Lolita. Nobody, not even Nabokov’s son and literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov, knows the exact order the author intended for the cards.

For decades, Dmitri Nabokov kept the manuscript locked in a Swiss bank vault, allowing only a select group of Nabokov scholars to read it, and occasionally suggesting in interviews that he would destroy the novel. In 2008, more than 30 years after his father’s death, he announced to a German magazine his decision to publish the work, saying that his father had appeared to him in a vision and told him to “go ahead and publish”.

Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar and biographer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, says he initially felt the novel was too “raw” and that Nabokov’s directive to destroy it should be heeded. He first saw a draft in 1985, when Vera Nabokov, the author’s wife, allowed him to read it. After her death in 1991, he reread the manuscript and changed his mind. “The opening few words just blew me away,” says Boyd, who is also editing three other collections of Nabokov’s work, including previously unpublished letters to his

Nabokov had sketched out the novel on 138 index cards, a process he used to write ‘Lolita’

wife. “There’s a kind of narrative device that he’s never used before and that I don’t think anybody else has ever used before.”

Alfred A. Knopf, which will publish the book in November, asked Boyd and other scholars to study the draft, but no one could decipher the order of scenes. The publisher faced a new dilemma: “How do you take 138 note cards and turn them into a book?” says Chip Kidd, Knopf’s associate art director, adding that the cards “go in consecutive order for a good bit, until all of a sudden they don’t any more”.

To highlight the fragmentary nature of the book, Kidd came up with an unusual design. The Original of Laura will have photographic reproductions of the index cards, along with typed transcriptions. The cards will be perforated around the edges so that readers can tear them out and shuffle them, mimicking Nabokov’s composition process.

Some of the posthumous releases claim to offer truer versions of the authors’ original intent. Last month, Vintage published a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—158 years after her death—that for the first time presents the original text without the editing of her husband, Percy Shelley.

This version aims to resolve a long festering debate over whether Mary Shelley or her husband actually wrote the book. Publicity material for what Vintage has titled The Original Frankenstein claims that Percy Shelley wrote just 5,000 words out of 72,000. The more familiar, edited version will appear alongside the original.

Editors who exhume the work of iconic authors can face charges that their tinkering fundamentally

alters literary artefacts.

John Callahan, a humanities professor at Lewis & Clark College who edited Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth, battled rumours that he had extensively revised Ellison’s final manuscript. The book was published in 1999, five years after Ellison’s death. Callahan calls Juneteenth, which revolves around a racist New England senator who is shot on the Senate floor, “a collaborative work.”

This coming January, the Random House imprint Modern Library will release Three Days Before the Shooting, a new version of the novel that’s closer to what Ellison left behind. At roughly 1,200 pages, the new version is more than triple the length of Juneteenth. Callahan says he decided to re-edit and re-release the book in part to show critics what he was up against, but also to offer fresh insight into Ellison’s creative process.

When William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, died in 2006, he hadn’t published anything in 13 years. His last book was a slender collection of three stories, released in 1993. “His reputation was in limbo,” says James West, Styron’s biographer and the editor of The Suicide Run, a new collection of Styron’s writings that will be published by Random House later this month.

The first chapter, titled My Father’s House, appears in the forthcoming collection, and centres around a young marine who returns home after serving in Japan, having apparently suffered a mental breakdown.

It ends abruptly as the protagonist and narrator, bristling over his stepmother’s racist remarks, drinks beer alone at a cafe. The rest of the novel sits scattered among Styron’s papers at Duke University.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton (HarperCollins) This adventure novel about pirates in 17th century Jamaica was found on the author’s laptop, along with an unfinished techno­thriller.

HarperCollins plans to hire a writer to finish the techno­thriller, which is due out in 2010.

Releases in the US on 24 November The Red Book by C.G. Jung (WW Norton) This book, which some scholars have called the most significant unpublished work in the history of psychology, was kept from publishers for nearly half a century by Jung’s family, which claimed it was a private work. A Jungian scholar persuaded Jung’s estate to publish the book, which details Jung’s waking hallucinations and fantasies and contains 212 colour illustrations.

Releases in the US on 7 October The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf) Patchy and unfinished, the author’s final novel centres on a woman named Flora, whose former lover creates a character based on her in his novel ‘Laura’.

Releases in the US on 7 November Three Days Before the Shooting

by Ralph Ellison (Random House Modern Library) Scholars and fans of Ellison have long awaited the author’s sprawling, unwieldy second novel, a portion of which was published as ‘Juneteenth’ in 1999. Editor John Callahan said he published the forthcoming edition in part to address criticism that he had constructed ‘Juneteenth’ himself.

Releases in the US on 26 January Memory by Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime) The famed mystery writer wrote this literary thriller about a man with a damaged memory in the 1960s.

Westlake’s wife Abby had the only remaining manuscript— a yellowed, taped­together carbon copy.

Releases in the US on 10 April

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CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY | SHAHRIAR MANDANIPOUR

POSTSCRIPT

Love and the black lines

LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY

THE CANINE MYSTERIES

ABBAS KOWSARI/BLOOMBERG

H

The author is both creator and censor in this clever and moving love story set in Iran

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759), we are presented with a narrator who tells the story of his life from the very beginning. But Tristram Shandy’s narration is so imprecise, continuously mixing the unnecessary with what we would consider the significant, and his cast of mind is so digressive, that by the time he gets to his own birth, we are already on Chapter 4.

Sterne was one of the first writers in the history of the novel to see that a novel may not be simply a story; it can also be a story about the telling of a story, and can mercilessly tease and vex the reader with many devices of delayed gratification, many of them very entertaining by themselves. Such a novel would today be called “postmodern”, but Sterne was there a couple of hundred years before the concept was. A brilliant variation on this kind of narration is played out by the Iranian writer and film critic Shahriar Mandanipour in his novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story.

Mandanipour’s novel crosses and interconnects two storylines: the love story of two young people, Dara and Shirin, in love-unfriendly Tehran, and the writer’s own battle with the hawk-eyed Iranian censors to let his text stand as it is, without cuts. These four motors, so to speak—Dara, Shirin, writer, censor—generate the peculiar shape and sound of Mandanipour’s text, which rumbles and stumbles with a kind of interrupted energy. We find, for instance, that when a female character is shown as lying down on her bed, or saying something as inoffensive as “It’s hot”, these sentences are scored out by a thick black line—the censor has

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Stifling city: The love story of Dara and Shirin unfolds in love­unfriendly Tehran. got to work, eliminating potentially salacious content. Mandanipour’s challenge is to tell a satisfying love story by circumventing the censor, yet without resorting to clichéd metaphors and euphemisms. That is, the writer is playing games not just for the sake of play. Instead, like Scheherazade, he is playing games so that he may live, metaphorically speaking.

Mandanipour’s book is both a novel and an introduction to the riches of Iranian literature, moving adroitly from one to the other. For instance, when Dara wants to write to Shirin for the first time, he goes to the public

Censoring an Iranian Love Story: Little, Brown/Hachette, 293 pages, Rs550.

library where she has ordered a classic Iranian novel, The Blind Owl. Devising an ingenious system of dots under selected letters, he manages to encode a message into the book, so that Shirin reads the work of two writers and not one. When she returns the book, he erases the dots, thereby eliminating every trace of mind meeting mind.

Later Dara writes to her from within the pages of Khosrow and Shirin, the classic Farsi love story written by the poet Nizami. Mandanipour, butting in over the heads of his characters, launches into a long but diverting digression on the beauty of Nizami’s text, showing how the writer artfully delays the meeting of the two lovers so that when they do come together, we are just as restless and frantic as them. As Dara and Shirin go through their share of quarrels, anxieties and trouble from family and society, we realize that Mandanipour, too, is setting up a plot just like that of Khosrow and Shirin.

Every reader of fiction knows (and tries with the help of the writer to forget) that, no matter how real Anna Karenina or David Copperfield or Apu or Sartaj Singh may seem, they are just mere aggregations of words.

Mandanipour, however, is in the happy position of freely admitting his characters are make-be-

lieve; they are puppets and he the puppeteer.

But, for all that, Dara and Shirin are no less charming than any other pair of lovers in literature. “She wants me to give her a romantic sentence to speak,” remarks the narrator at one point, when the two lovers meet.

At another point, Dara quarrels with the writer for making him such a miserable and luckless person, unable to offer his lover any of the material comforts or financial security she would like.

At yet another juncture, Dara and Shirin meet, and something of the yearning in their respective hearts is fulfilled; at the same time, the narrator poignantly begins to feel “my own loneliness”. The narrator’s abandonment by his characters is complete when they suddenly begin to act independently, ignoring the storyline he has thought up for them. This tender, mischievous and demanding romantic comedy is one of the cleverest novels you will read in years.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Romantic love in an experimental narrative

FAMILY PLANNING | KARAN MAHAJAN

Hormone rush A mediocre debut about a teenager, a minister and some deadpan humour B Y S UMANA M UKHERJEE ···························· f you’re the kind of reader who wants every poem to signal profundity and every novel to make a point, then be warned, Family Planning probably isn’t the right accompaniment to your cup of tea. If, on the other hand, you’re game for a loony romp through a completely implausible domestic drama, you’ve come to the right place. More farce than fiction, more house of mirrors than reality show, Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning may not enchant but it’ll certainly entertain.

At least it looks that way, when you see what debutant novelist Mahajan has lined up: Rakesh Ahuja, a minister of urban development who’s hard of hearing and has resigned some 63 times as a pressure tactic. His 16-year-

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old son Arjun, who’s trying to make sense of his first infatuation and the spectacle of his parents’ lovemaking. His 12 brothers and sisters and another one on the way (no worries about keeping track, they are a largely indistinguishable noise in the background). A super prime minister who came to power after her husband was assassinated with an advanced harvester. A nation in mourning after the death of a favourite character from the television serial The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law. It’s become something of a rite of passage for first-time novelists in India to test the waters by telling their own tales, giving rise to the unkind moniker acne-lit.

Mahajan is more ambitious: His adolescent protagonist’s story is interwoven with that of his minister-dad—a paterfamilias metaphor for the overpopulated socialist state—and though the author is as benevolent with father as with son, Arjun still emerges as the more sympathetic character as he tries to balance his rushing hormones with his dad’s.

Captured over a tight time-

e’s a dog not a person. He can sit anywhere. Just leave it!” snapped a friend at a hapless guest trying to make place on the sofa for Mr Peaches. Dog lovers can be hard to please.

Where some treat the slightest hint of anthropomorphism as a cardinal sin, others a la Paris Hilton are just as likely to dress their chihuahua in a tutu. As for the dogs themselves, their mind, like that of a baby, remains an enigma. Who the hell knows what they really want.

The latest effort to GETTY IMAGES solve the riddle is Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, which aims to help us “see what it is like to be a dog; what the world is like from a dog’s point of view”. In the matter of canine wardrobe, the evidence weighs heavily against the Hilton wannabes.

As Horowitz explains, the doggy raincoat, “a close, even pressing, covering of the back, chest, and sometimes the head”, is likely to give your pooch the unhappy sensation of being dominated. “So the principal Pet theory: Paris and her chihuahua. experience of wearing a coat is not the experience of feeling protected from wetness; rather, the coat produces the discomfiting feeling that someone higher ranking than you is nearby.” I guess it explains why my English bulldog, Gauss, didn’t much like being turned into a giant bumble bee for Halloween.

Inside of a Dog solves many mysteries about our pooches, including what they see, which is limited to “dog things”, i.e., objects that have specific canine functions: cushions or couches to sprawl on (Mr Peaches does indeed prefer to be on that sofa); balls to chase; grass to roll around in, etc. But others are as good as invisible. “To a dog, a hammer doesn’t exist,” writes Horowitz, “At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.”

As helpful as Horowitz’s book may be, it doesn’t solve the real mysteries that addle my brain. She can’t tell me why Gauss can spot a dog 200 yards away but not a dropped treat on the floor, why he must be personally escorted right up to his bowl at mealtime, or why he inevitably starts licking my feet in the midst of grooming his paws. Surely he can tell the difference or am I just wasting money on my Rs500 pedicures?

That said, as someone owned by both a dog and a baby, I far prefer reading about the mysteries of the doggy brain than that of a child, perhaps because the so-called “science” of parenting is notoriously contradictory, unreliable and prone to scaremongering. Compare the cheery title of Horowitz’s book with that of NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children, which (as with all “new thinking” on child rearing) is designed to assure parents that they’re doing everything wrong. “(M)any of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring—because key twists in the science have been overlooked,” ominously declares the book jacket. Maybe so, but only because we poor sods were slavishly following what other scientists were telling us six months ago.

Perhaps we’d all be better off raising our children as we do our dogs, with love and in blessed ignorance. Though you should probably buy one of them a raincoat.

Write to Lakshmi at postscript@livemint.com

span of two days, Arjun’s concerns are Aarti, the girl who catches the same bus as him to a neighbouring school, a rock band he tries to set up with his bumchums, and his slipping status as babysitter-in-chief of the unwieldy brood at home. Rakesh, on the other hand, is worried about Sangita, the wife he finds attractive only when she’s pregnant, a rival in the cabinet who is stymying his fancy flyover projects, and his slipping status in his eldest son’s life.

Mahajan has an eye for the ridiculous and an ear for comic dialogue that bear him out well in this somewhat pointless story. On the positive side, the farce never seems forced, the domestic chaos is well-etched and the humour is deadpan and unselfconscious—a rare enough quality in Indian writing. Consider this exchange between father and son, in which Rakesh tries to explain why Arjun was circumcised.

“What’s circumcised?”

“You know, your penis.”

“I hate you,” said Arjun.

“What?”

“I hate you,” Arjun said, now nearly in tears. “Is this what a son needs to hear from his father? A judgment of the size of his penis?

Hello, son, your penis is not regu-

FREE VERSE | ARUNI KASHYAP

Ghost Sounds

Family Planning: Rupa & Co., 218 pages, Rs395. lar-sized or good-sized or normalsized, but instead, your penis is circumcised?”

There are such episodes through the book and the humour largely holds up despite the occasional lapse into Americanisms—Q-tips and tampons in the middle-class Ahuja household, really?—but, in the end, one is hard-pressed to see quite how they add up. Maybe it’s unfair to expect them to. That said, Family Planning is a relief from the spate of navel-gazing first novels we’ve been subjected to. Mahajan can only get better.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

We huddle around Ma as our gabled tin-roofs vibrate during round-moon nights, when bee-hives drip like wasted howling desires of an elephant tethered to the banyan tree trunk.

Trailing his finger through the map, my brother who thought maps are exact replicas of the world, assures us: father lives just half-a-finger away.

Sometimes we sprinkle charmed mustard seeds and wish they won’t sprout foliage.

During evenings of fish-fry aroma, our wooden doors moan creak sigh.

During full-moon nights, honey coloured, doors don’t take permissions before flinging themselves open like secrets.

Aruni Kashyap is the author of the poetry collection Grandma-lullabies, forthcoming from Sahitya Akademi.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Culture Q&A | KAMAL HAASAN

An uncommon man Bird’s­eye view: Haasan reprises Naseeruddin Shah’s role from the Hindi original.

Kamal Haasan talks about Hindi films, language, politics and ‘Unnaipol Oruvan’ B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· n 50 years in the film industry, Kamal Haasan has acted in around 150 films, put on the director’s hat and excelled as a producer, playback singer, choreographer and lyricist. He’s won four National Awards, and held a Guinness World Record for his 10 roles in Dasavatharam.

In his latest film, Unnaipol Oruvan (Eenadu in Telugu), a remake of the 2008 Hindi film A Wednesday, the spectre of terrorism looms over Chennai instead of the original’s Mumbai as an unprepared police department deals with red tape, political lethargy and

I

the alien nature of a threat that “only ever happens in the north of the country”. Haasan spoke to Lounge over the phone on the eve of the film’s release.

Edited excerpts: Why did you choose to remake ‘A Wednesday’, and what has changed in translation?

This is something I felt was a salute to your peer. When I saw the original film, so many ideas came to my head, and I felt good things should be passed on.

The content itself is not new; we have added certain things that were not there in the original without disturbing the pace of the film. I wanted to make this with greater equipoise

than the original—the common man should have equilibrium, not just anger at a community.

Both sides always have conflicting stories. A clash is never possible without involvement from both sides.

To me, it was also about adapting it for a different audience. We have regionally different politics. The “national agenda”, even during a general election, is never singular. The only unifying things are religion and ahimsa (non-violence), which Gandhiji preached. The other thing now, unfortunately, is himsa (violence) or terrorism.

My film takes a dig at this, at the complacence of “Oh, it’s happening in Mumbai. So what?” My film gets very angry at that kind of attitude. This is a morning alarm and we have to make it ring while it’s still morning. All of this is redundant at twilight.

You’ve worked in many regional films, and in a number of multilingual films.

How important do you think language is in building an identity for Indian cinema?

Language is very important, and this is another area of complacence that comes often from the north of the country… I love the language, but the myopia of Hindi and the Hindi film industry is unacceptable to me. This is a larger nation. It is knit together. You cannot bring a monoculture into it and impose it. I think all actors should understand the strength of working in different languages.

Of course, there’s the attraction of more money, but this, to me, is a very fulfilling way of expanding your audience.

How did working in multiple languages help you grow as a performer?

It makes an artist understand

MOVIE REVIEW | INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Insipid cruelty Tarantino’s latest is cleverly crafted but lacking in taste B Y M ANOHLA D ARGIS ···························· rom the moment the charming, laughing Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps on to the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker. Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col Hans Landa is a vision of bigscreen National Socialist villainy.

Inglourious Basterds, the director’s sixth feature, in many respects looks and sounds like a typical Tarantino production with its showboating performances, encyclopaedic movie references and self-conscious dialogue. The American avenger, Lt Aldo Raine

F

(Brad Pitt), leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the “inglourious basterds” of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative. Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

Tarantino likes to take his sweet time—he can be a master of the slow wind-up—but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes. As usual he gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well. Much depends on whether you can just groove on

how big and how accommodating the country is, given a chance. India is a country where you have to take a linguistic passport every time you cross 300km on the map.

Art should transcend these borders. My so-called “Bharat darshan (discovery of India)” came through my work. It’s a travel worth its while.

Do you see mainstream cinema transcending these borders?

Yes. This was an attempt, even way back, by people like V. Shantaram. You can see in his work attempts to put characters from all over the country.

It seems to be happening again now. It’s not the pop singer, the ma, the beti, the lame sister and vengeance any more.

All that has changed. I was a caustic critic of these themes being regurgitated again and again. You can’t strategically

place an Amar, Akbar and Anthony any more. You must have reasons to put them there.

They must have greater dimensions to their characters.

And that is happening.

Could you give us a few examples?

I’m seeing it in the work of people like Vishal Bhardwaj, who tries it very subtly and effectively, and Ashutosh Gowariker. It’s not propagandist.

It’s a passionate plea to be inclusive and isn’t rhetoric alone. The whole “Gaana nahi hai, fight nahi hai (There are no songs, no fights)” is going away, and audiences are taking this in their stride. I’m enjoying watching Hindi films now.

Over the years, you’ve played characters from across the political spectrum, from a Communist to an anarchist. Which one is the real Kamal Haasan?

Sometimes these are mere roles.

Do you think all the actors on television believe in the products that they’re selling? If they do, then I believe in all my roles too. What I believe is probably close to Anbe Sivam, and probably close to Virumaandi. In Dasavatharam, I played the role of a priest…which I don’t believe in, personally. I’m not agnostic or an atheist, I’m a rationalist.

Are there particular political themes that you try to explore?

I’m not a political commentator, but I’m very sure that we have not reached the “ism” that is the panacea for all evils. We may be the world’s largest democracy, but the democracy of ancient Greece, the republic of Rome, then later the founding of America—these are all different beasts. We are in the process of evolving systems: So, I ask why stick to it and make a dogma or a diktat out of it. When people dismiss an ideology, when they say, for example, “There goes communism”, I ask “Why?” Karl Marx has done his bit. It’s part of a continuous evolution. We are yet to arrive at the promised land, and I’m glad. The ascent of man has happened because of this continuous evolution, and not because of diktats that we believe are the final word. That is why you see me playing various parts: to find the logic in each argument. I’m only a spectator, not a legislator.

Unnaipol Oruvan is currently running in theatres.

FRANCOIS DUHAMEL

his framing and staging, his swooping crane shots, postmodern flourishes (Samuel L. Jackson in voice-over explaining the combustibility of nitrate prints) and gorgeously saturated colours, one velvety red in particular.

The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly—both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath. What matters, to Tarantino, is the film-making.

But too often in Inglourious Basterds the film-making falls short. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B. The conversations in Inglourious Basterds are often repetitive and overlong and they rarely sing, in part because the period setting doesn’t allow him to raid his vast

Glory lost: Eli Roth (left) and Pitt in a still from Inglourious Basterds. pop-cultural storehouse. A joke about Wiener Schnitzel just doesn’t pop like the burger riff in Pulp Fiction.

The film’s most egregious failure—its giddy embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain—can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma.

This isn’t to say that the film’s representation of National Socialism, its repellent invocation of the

Holocaust crematoriums and calculated use of the Jews-as-rat metaphor are not vulgar. Tarantino likes to push hard against accepted norms, as his insistent use of a noxious epithet for blacks has shown in the past. But complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: These are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue. This is, after all, a man who has an Oscar for a movie with a monologue about a

watch stashed in a rectum.

Cartoon Nazis are not new to the movies, and neither are fascinating fascists, as evidenced by Ralph Fiennes’ Oscar-nominated turn in Schindler’s List. Unlike those in Schindler’s List, Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. He’s not making a documentary or trying to be Steven Spielberg— Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history.

In that sense Inglourious Basterds, which takes its title if not its misspelling from an Italian flick in The Dirty Dozen vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Tarantino has polluted that love. ©2009/The New York Times Inglourious Basterds released in theatres on Friday.

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CULTURE L17

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MUSIC MATTERS

STALL ORDER

SHUBHA MUDGAL

NANDINI RAMNATH

Hard to play favourites PHOTOGRAPH

COURTESY

LATA MANGESHKAR

IN

HER OWN VOICE/NIYOGI BOOKS

Shubha Mudgal restarts her ‘Lounge’ column, talking about her favourite Lata Mangeshkar songs

T

he inimitable and yet imitated-most-often Lata Mangeshkar turned 80 on 28 September, and nationwide, admirers and fans greeted the living legend and national treasure.

There were special programmes featuring greetings and tributes from musicians, many of whom are often asked to list their favourite Lata Mangeshkar tracks.

Logically, that shouldn’t be too difficult a question to field— name a few of your favourite tracks sung by Lataji.

With such a vast repertoire of superb tracks to select from, it should be a quick toss-up. And yet, having answered the same question several times in the past week, I decided to sit down and think of what I could truly and honestly call my favourite songs sung by Lataji—songs that I would never like to be without, would never ever delete from my iPod or would want to take with me if I were ever to be marooned on an island!

Don’t laugh or look incredulous because the marooned-on-an-island question is one I have been asked on more than one occasion.

Surprisingly, all the songs I came up with are not from films, but songs recorded by Lataji several decades ago for non-film albums.

I am not sure if any of these would now be easily available in any music store, but I would humbly urge all of you to listen to them if you haven’t already done so.

These may never have been chart busters but are sure to be classified sooner rather than later as near perfect pieces of music.

Two ghazals composed by K. Mahavir and rendered by Lataji top my charts and these are:

Peerless: Mangeshkar did full justice to both ghazals and bhajans.

Aankh se aankh milata hai koi, Dil ko kheenche liye jaataa hai koi... written by Shakeel Badayuni; and Ahd-e-gham mein bhi muskuraate hain, Aansuon ke diye jalaate hain... written by Khalish Dehlvi.

I first heard both these ghazals on the radio probably over 30 years ago, in the days when an afternoon bulletin of ghair-filmi naghme, or non-film melodies, was broadcast regularly on Vividh Bharati. Both left a lasting impact

on my then teenaged ears and I would wait eagerly for repeat broadcasts of the ghazals, glued to the radio set, listening intently, pen in hand to jot down the verses while I also tried hard to memorize the songs. When and if you listen to the two ghazals, you will notice that is no mean task to attempt.

Both melodies are complex, and worthy only of a voice with immense range, breath control and dexterity. It comes as no surprise therefore that Mahavir chose to record them in Lataji’s voice.

But beyond the demands of craft and skill, the expression that Lataji brings to both these ghazals is

what is so unique in many ways.

That mixture of poignance without being maudlin or melodramatic, a sort of magnificently dignified heartbreak that she brings to both ghazals makes them unforgettable for me. For years I tried to sing along as the ghazals played on the radio, and later on the home music systems that we ran through and acquired regularly. But the ease with which Lataji traverses an upward flight of notes as she improvises on the word “aansooun” at approximately 0.36 seconds of the 2.36-minute-long Badayuni ghazal is something I haven’t ever been able to get even close to in all these years.

And then, there is the equally unforgettable “Jo samar mein ho gaye amar, main unki yaad mein, gaa rahi hoon aaj shraddhaa geet dhanyavaad mein...” written by Pandit Narendra Sharma and composed by Jaidevji. Offered in gratitude to the brave soldiers who lay down their lives defending our country, this is another immortal classic that rings in my ears with the same impact it made when I first heard it decades ago.

I could stop at these three tracks, but I cannot resist adding a fourth one that I heard more recently. This one, Aga Karunakara, is in Marathi and is a Tukaram abhang (a form of devotional singing), composed by the venerable Shrinivas Khale for an album titled Abhang Tukayache. I have known even agnostics to be moved by the piety and devotion of Lataji’s rendering of this abhang, and I would not hesitate to be marooned on an island with this song. The good news is that probably all these tracks are accessible at digital music stores if not in retail stores. Google your way to aural bliss if you have the time and inclination.

(For those who may want the text of Jo samar mein ho gaye amar, here’s a link: http://www. bollango.com/movie/-1/lata+ mangeshkar-+ mere+watan+ke+ logon/lyrics/jo+samar+mein+ho+ gaye+amar) Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

A gentle genius An exhibition traces the arc of cartoonist Mario Miranda’s career B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· e began by drawing with pieces of charcoal on the walls of his home in Goa, much to the annoyance of his grandmother. “Exasperated, they got me a notebook and pencils and asked me to draw away to my heart’s content,” says cartoonist Mario de Miranda. Soon thereafter Miranda became famous for carving on desks at the St Joseph’s Boys High School in Bangalore, where he did his schooling. “I did get a few frowns for carving on the desks, but luckily nobody ever discouraged me,” he adds with a chuckle.

Starting today, The World of Mario, an exhibition that chronicles Miranda’s oeuvre right since 1947, will be showing in Bangalore. On display, will be 8,000 panels of his works—ranging from the sketches he drew as a child to car-

H

toons and drawings published in magazines to works exhibited at international exhibitions.

Many of the works can be found in the book titled Mario de Miranda that was published in 2008 by architect Gerard de Cunha who is also the curator for this exhibition. In his preface to the book, de Cunha writes, “I was ecstatic with the 25 volumes of material I collected, but was completely lost in the vastness of Mario’s world, incapable of making a choice or organizing the book.”

Speaking over the phone from his ancestral home in Goa, where he now lives with his wife and younger son, the 83-year-old cartoonist confesses to feeling diffident about his work to this day. “I find it a bit embarrassing to be exposed to the public eye, frankly,” he says. “I used to sketch in these diaries whenever I had a chance. A number of them were meant to be private.”

Miranda says he has always seen himself as a social cartoonist rather than a political one, even when he was associated with mainstream news publications such as The Economic Times and The Illustrated Weekly of India. “I

Wry and warm: Jerusalem will be on display in Bangalore. enjoy drawing, but don’t enjoy politics at all,” he admits. “I enjoy observing people, getting to know them and drawing out their behaviour, but then I am aware that I cannot avoid politics. It is, after all, part of our daily lives.”

Translating thoughts and humour into sketches came naturally to Miranda, who is glad that he gave up plans to attend art school. “When I think of it now, I am sure art school would have ruined my style,” he says. Among his major influences he counts the English artist Ronald Searle, who he met when he was in England for three years in the late 1950s.

Integral to his distinctive style is his emphasis on architectural

detail. “Travelling gives me most of my food for thought,” he says.

“I read buildings, the culture of places, the expressions of faces.”

Characteristically full of expression and gentle humour, Miranda’s works adorn many public places in his native Goa as well as Mumbai.

These days Miranda is trying his hand at something new—painting.

He is careful to point out that he isn’t a natural at it and that his first love will always be drawing.

Miranda’s works will be on sale at the Indian Cartoon Gallery, off MG Road, from 3-24 October. The cartoon panels start from Rs3,500.

ALL IN THE FAMILY W

ake Up Sid’s director Ayan Mukerji is from a family of actors and producers. Lead actor Ranbir Kapoor is from an even more famous clan of stars. Lead actress Konkona Sen Sharma represents Bengali art house royalty. Producer Karan Johar is a second-generation film-maker. Whatever else Wake Up Sid turns out to be, it will remain a truly representative snapshot of the star-family complex that has currently mesmerized Bollywood.

Wake Up Sid is the latest in a long line of films that features second- and third-generation actors and film-makers. Of course, it’s probably only a coincidence that the movie’s list of credits checks off four of Indian cinema’s most well-known surnames.

Mukerji and Johar most likely cast Kapoor and Sharma based on their previous track records rather than their family trees. Yet it is increasingly difficult to escape the hold that biology has over destiny in Bollywood. Movies both big and small feature at least one relative of either a faded or an existing talent. Star kids are propelled into the galaxy with more fanfare than space missions.

The law of the box office catches up with them eventually and many of them burn out, but they get the kind of launch that aspiring actors sweating it out in acting schools and television serials can only dream of.

Clannish: Kapoor (left) and Sharma in a still from Wake up Sid. Just like jewellers and textile tycoons, Bollywood stars are passing on the business to their progeny and trying to keep the wealth within the family. The financial stakes in Bollywood are higher than they have ever been. Movie budgets run into crores.

The profits from some films can wipe out the deficit of a small country. Public relations professionals will tell you that star kids provide the kind of publicity money can’t buy. Star kids, especially those who become actors, remind audiences of their famous relatives and ensure at least some interest in their movie projects.

There is also a sense of security among financiers, producers and even viewers that a movie featuring a big name is in safe hands.

Second-generation Bollywoodwallahs, who are well versed in the ways of stardom and know how to handle themselves in front of the camera, can be a blessing in an age where television coverage of Bollywood is at its peak.

The Hindi film industry used to be a mythical place that welcomed outsiders with open arms. Star kids have always been around, from the days of Raj Kapoor, but there always seemed to be enough place for anonymous characters to make a name for themselves. The Kapoor kids were steeped so deeply in cinema that they couldn’t dream of doing anything else, but that’s why they were the Kapoors—they were special. Then everybody else decided to follow their example. The attempts by Sanjay Dutt and Kumar Gaurav to capitalize on their famous surnames in the 1980s must now be regarded as early signs of the Bollywood star-family complex. Whatever else you think of Shah Rukh Khan, he is remarkable because his ascendancy to stardom took place in the decade when Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, both children of industry captains, had already been put into orbit.

There is still a large degree of meritocracy among directors and writers who are not backed by well-known fathers and uncles.

Contemporary film-makers tend to be urbane, well educated and the children of army officers or public sector bank officials. They bring to the job training and an outsider’s eye. However, the faces that light up the marquee often belong to star kids. It doesn’t seem to matter if the inheritance is dodgy or doesn’t match up to expectations. Anybody remember Mala Sinha’s daughter Pratibha?

Or Manoj Kumar’s son Kunal Goswami? Why should we bet on Prateik Babbar or Imran Khan, neither of whom is a patch on his more famous relative? Yet there are enough success stories—Hrithik Roshan, Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor—for it to seem worth the risk.

There is so much surplus around these days that even if star kids don’t become A-listers, they can be accommodated lower down the pecking order. Flop actors such as Tusshar Kapoor and Fardeen Khan continue to hang around as second and third leads in multi-starrers—probably until they can replace themselves with their likenesses.

Wake Up Sid released in theatres on Friday.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

DELHI BELLY | HIMANSHU BHAGAT

Chandler by the Yamuna Lurking murderers at the Ridge, rival private eyes in Jangpura and sackloads of cash in a Saket gym, all can be found in ‘Delhi Noir’

I

t now seems so obvious—a heaving, seething megapolis, its millions staring fixedly ahead at some distant point which spells survival or gain or fulfilment, their coexistence defined by varying degrees of indifference or uneasiness. Delhi, along with at least half a dozen other cities in India, is fertile ground for the noir genre of writing that is all about crime, violence, sex and intrigue, usually set in a morally ambiguous world. New Yorker Hirsh Sawhney, a Dilliwala for three years and editor of Delhi Noir, grasped the obvious a couple of years ago when he decided to add Delhi to the acclaimed series of city-based noir anthologies brought out

by Akashic Books of New York.

Many contributors are veterans of the Capital’s literary set, others are upcoming newbies and a couple could be classified as outsiders. All seem new to the genre, and within the limited confines of a short story, embrace its dark and fleeting delectable possibilities with a zest that often makes for refreshing reading. Four contributors tell Lounge which locality of Delhi they chose to set their story in and why.

Omair Ahmad, Jangpura Noir fiction is marked by a particular sense of place.

Location matters. It shapes both the victim and the predator, providing them their weapons, their shields, their very identities. When writing Yesterday Man, the place that immediately came to mind is this nowhere triangle—you could call it Jangpura or Nizamuddin East, but it’s not as simple as that. Much of Nizamuddin is a posh locale of gated colonies, and Jangpura lies across the street,

so this little wedge, with the ageing Rajdoot Hotel as its marker, falls somewhere betwixt and between.

Within its alleyways you’ll find a warren of housing. Enter the door of one, climb up a little, and you can come out on a rooftop two buildings away.

It’s impossible to truly tell what lies within.

It was here that I lost my underpants. I was staying there for a couple of weeks, having newly arrived in the city to study at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and waiting to get a room allotted. Having locked a bag which contained my marksheets and my dirty laundry, I came back in the evening to find it missing. And so it left its mark—an odd place of mysteries where not even my chuddies (underpants) were safe.

Dark visions: (clockwise from above) Ahmad on the rooftop of a housing cluster behind Hotel Rajdoot in Jangpura; Prakash; Sawhney; and Chowdhury.

Hirsh Sawhney, Green Park Green Park is certainly the Capital neighbourhood I know best. I lived there between 2005 and 2008. Like so many parts of Delhi, it is defined by an incredibly diverse and sometimes jarring array of elements—Lodi monuments; the offices of a newspaper and a magazine group; an authentic Korean restaurant; rich and poor; migrants from all parts of the country; and more recently, a significant expat population. However, compared with so many south Delhi neighbourhoods, this locale is a particularly apt setting for crime fiction because it is a place where people of all ages and classes actually walk around. People stroll up and down the market eating chaat at Evergreen; they grab a coffee, juice or dosa at one of the area’s various south Indian eateries. In fact, from Green Park you can make it to various other Delhi

neighbourhoods on foot without getting mauled by a bus or Qualis: to SDA (Safdarjung Development Area) via the Rose Garden and to Hauz Khas Village or Safdarjung via Deer Park. Any urban space where people amble is a place where they inevitably interact. And it is this interaction that is essential grist for the dramatist.

Siddharth Chowdhury, Delhi University I was in Delhi University from 1993-98 and found the tribal atmosphere of the place fascinating—students from all over north India, especially Bihar and the North-East, the clash of cultures, the vague cloud of violence and petty politics which always hung over the place. The “day scholars”,

young and amoral, away from home for the first time in their impoverished rented accommodations in Punjabi refugee colonies surrounding the university, with their middle-class dreams of civil services and MBA, as India took its first tentative steps towards liberalization. I always knew one day I would write a novel about the place, about bad education.

I was already making notes when I was invited to contribute to Delhi Noir. As someone was already working on a story set in Connaught Place (my first choice), I happily opted for Delhi University, North Campus.

I wrote Hostel over two months in faraway Scotland when I was a writer-in-residence there. Now it forms the first chapter of my new novel Day Scholar, due out in early 2010.

Uday Prakash, Rohini In 1992, Rohini was a suburban area in north Delhi where, with whatever little money and loan I could manage, I bought a house.

Few traces of that time remain today—flyovers and shopping malls have taken over. I wrote The Walls of Delhi nine years ago when I didn’t have a job and was living on the margins interacting with the kind of people I have written about—paanwallahs, sweepers and roadside tailors. The protagonist Ramniwas is based on a real life character—a poor man who stumbled upon a lot of money. I think I have a fair idea which of our esteemed politicians that money “belonged” to…

In Sector B in Rohini, near

where I live, by the busy GT Karnal road, was the big slum of Razapur populated by people best described by the Hindi word anagarik, or non-citizens—people who don’t have ration cards and lead precarious and pathetic lives. They are mostly Dalits, Muslims and low-caste immigrants from states such as Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Orissa—you would see them shitting in the open, with the stinking smell of poverty about them. Over the years, as Rohini transformed into a metro city, the dependence of the residences on the slum dwellers for various services diminished—earlier they needed maids to do laundry but now they had washing machines. Razapur has disappeared, like it was destined to—some of its residents were relocated to Bhalswa; others disappeared with it. In its place today stands a big shopping mall. himanshu.b@livemint.com

TRAVELLING TIFFIN

MARRYAM H RESHII

FOOD FOR THE GODS P alitana is a Jain place of pilgrimage near Bhavnagar in Gujarat. I have been there thrice, as much for the sheer high it gives me to see 863 temples crowded on a single hilltop, as to eat the dahi (curd) that is sold at one of the gates to this walled temple city.

The dahi, brought up the hill and sold by women from the town below, is cool, refreshing, mouth-puckeringly sour and is sold in black clay pots. It would be quite unexceptional anywhere else. In a place of pilgrimage, however, it acquires a different dimension.

Maybe it’s because of my Roman Catholic background, where eating in church is a strict no-no; I’ve tended to stay away from food served at places of worship because of a subconscious association. How wrong I was! The finest “Punjabi” meal I’ve eaten in terms of taste has to be at the

Sis Ganj gurdwara in Old Delhi, just as the most ambrosial curd was at Palitana.

I’m off to Shirdi shortly, where friends tell me that the bhog (food that is first offered to the deity and then served to the public) alone is worth the trip.

Two other temples—one at Udipi, Karnataka, and the other at Puri, Orissa—not only serve bhog, they have a distinct community of cooks who do nothing else all their lives, except cook for the deity and then serve it to the faithful. In the case of Udipi, an entire cuisine has grown from the temple offerings. What has reached other corners of the country at innumerable Udipi shops doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on what is served in the temple. By all accounts, the food at the Udipi temple is simple and delicious.

My friend Dolly Kukreja, who has made it her life’s

Soul food: Langar at gurdwaras consists of simple dishes for devotees. mission to visit as many temples as she can and partake of the meals wherever possible, says that the Jagannath Temple at Puri has a unique method of cooking. Each giant container contains one ingredient, whether it is dal, rice or vegetables, with the seasonings. The entire contraption is set upon a steamer and left for a couple of hours. In that time, each ingredient gets cooked to perfection because of its

proximity to the source of heat.

Dolly’s theory is that temple food tastes so good for a variety of reasons. First, when ingredients are offered to the temple—pure ghee, sugar and atta (flour) must be top of the list in gurdwaras—they are offered with piety. Second, those cooking temple food have been doing just that all their lives. And it isn’t as if the menu is long, as in a fancy restaurant. Even a streetside stall making just one or two

items every day acquires a measure of skill. Third, in a temple, nobody takes short-cuts, not even the suppliers of grain, vegetables or spices. I guess we have our Indian culture to thank for that: Religion is the last holy cow we have left.

The general rules for making temple food: no onions, no garlic, no chillies, tomatoes or “English” vegetables (they were recent imports).

It’s as small a carbon footprint as possible.

(small-grained) K cup split moong dal (green gram) K cup ghee, or clarified butter K cup mix of raisin, chopped almond, chopped cashew K cup jaggery Pinch of cardamom powder 1 tbsp dry coconut, grated

Sweet Pongal

Method Pick over the rice and lentils, soak for an hour and cook with two cups of water in a pressure cooker for two whistles. Heat the clarified butter, gently sauté the raisins and nuts, remove, and melt the jaggery in the butter. Pour on rice, mix well, add the cardamom powder, grated coconut, leave to cook on very low fire for 5 minutes, then add nuts and serve.

Serves 2 as a complete meal (or 8 as prasad)

Recipe courtesy Dolly Kukreja

Ingredients K cup rice from south India

Write to Marryam at travellingtiffin@livemint.com

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