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Saturday, September 5, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 35

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE NEW STYLE CODE

As the recession bursts the contemporary art bubble, a hidden star comes to the fore. Indian antiques are the art world’s newsmakers >Page 10

>Page 7

VINTAGE

WELL DONE MY BOY! On the occasion of Teacher’s Day, these teachers share memories of the students who have done them proud >Page 6

RUNAWAY LEGEND

How the charismatic, peerless Usain Bolt forever changed the face—and history—of sprinting, and why he isn’t just about records >Page 9

Watson turban jewels, from the 18th century, to be displayed at Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, at the Victo ria and Albert Museum, London.

HIGH WINDOWS

THE GOOD LIFE

MUKUL KESAVAN

SHOBA NARAYAN

FAMILY PHOTOS: UP RESTRAINT AND FOR SCRUTINY EXTRAVAGANCE

hen Edward Kennedy died on 25 August, I thought of a photograph that used to hang in our house when I was a child: a little family group featuring Edward’s eldest brother, John, his wife Jacqueline and their daughter Caroline. It’s a black-and-white picture of the three of them, in which little Caroline is kissing her dad on the cheek while her mother looks on, perfectly coiffed, wearing a pearl necklace and a silk dress... >Page 4

STALL ORDER

his column is about flamboyance and restraint and how to balance the two; or indeed, whether they need balancing. India’s wedding season is just beginning and from now through March, we will witness a parade of weddings—some flamboyant and some restrained. Recently, Bangalore saw a high-profile wedding when IT icon Narayana Murthy’s daughter married her Stanford classmate. While the wedding pictures made front-page news, the local... >Page 4

NANDINI RAMNATH

GOOD ROWDY ACTS IN TAMIL FILMS

BRONZED MEN AND WILD FLOWERS

Our first ever historical romance series gets the history right, but the romance is sorely out of date >Page 14

DON’T MISS

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

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

LOUNGE REVIEW | LAP, NEW DELHI

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

WHY RAVI BAJAJ IS LEADING A DANDY MARCH

ext Friday, 28 Indian designers will participate in the Van Heusen India Mens Week (VHIMW), a first of its kind fashion week that’s dedicated exclusively to Indian men! Most of the men I’m surrounded by don’t really care about fashion (the husband still owns only two pairs of shoes—one black, one brown—and usually wears his best T-shirts to bed). Besides, how on earth did the organizers even find 28 designers who do menswear? Ravi Bajaj would definitely have some answers, I thought. After all, his menswear label has been selling for 22 years now—that’s before cellphones, malls and satellite television came to this country. So I rushed to his four-storey flagship store in south Delhi. Two floors house his classic, ultra-wearable designs, one floor is a café and one will soon be a plush wine bar with 20-30 DRESS UP wines available by the glass, where your conversation can keep gentle pace with the recorded modern jazz. The VHIMW is a first for Bajaj, whose show will open the event. The 44-year-old designer, who has dedicated the last two decades to persuading Indian men to dress up, has never participated in an Indian fashion week, even though he was part of the first brainstorming session where the idea of the Fashion Design Council of India was born. Being actively involved in the fashion scene is too messy and requires you to make too many compromises, he believes. Of course, it’s more difficult to stay away when the organizers of the event are Madura Garments, the country’s largest apparel maker. Since his first “live” fashion show aired on Doordarshan in the early 1990s, Bajaj has tried all the usual (and some unusual) brand-building strate-

Uturn: Classic is crowded, says Bajaj. gies. He launched a ready-to-wear line for Shoppers Stop as early as 1997. He’s tried the wholesale route, written a fashion column, shown abroad and experimented with late-night shopping, keeping his store open until 11pm. Five years ago, he launched Ravi Bajaj Gentlemen and produced accessories in Italy. “It was a very nice feeling to have Made in Italy associated with my name,” he says. These past few years though, he’s focused mainly on the no-fuss retailing of his classic garments from his Delhi store and through a couple of tie-ups in Mumbai. But now Bajaj is ready to embrace change. “Classic doesn’t work. Nobody

wants anything simple any more. I’m vacating that space,” he announces suddenly. That’s almost as radical as Tarun Tahiliani saying he won’t design any more wedding wear. The space Bajaj currently occupies is becoming too crowded. Take the humble trouser. Bajaj says the demand for this daily staple has fallen dramatically. Indian men can now buy a pair of decently made chinos for as little as Rs899 (Mukesh Ambani once told the designer he buys his Dockers online). Many men opt for jeans over trousers. And others stick to suits that are available at international menswear brands that go on hefty sales twice a year. And, says Bajaj sadly, Friday Dressing is killing the tie. So at Dandy March, the title of Bajaj’s show at the VHIMW, the designer will focus on male vanity. Think jamavar trousers, paisleyprint pants, velvet shirts, texturing and embroidery, contemporary block prints, pleating, overshirts, extra wide trousers, cashmere bandhgalas with their own scarfs. Bajaj is designing for the Indian man who thinks he’s a dude, who fears boring over anything else, a man who wants to indulge. “Indian men are getting more and more unabashedly self-indulgent,” he says. In fact, many of the participating designers at VHIMW told us they are experimenting like never before (see The new style code on Page 7) Who knows, the day might not be far when the husband embraces his fashionable side. Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut

his one was long awaited. Lap, an after-hours night club set up by actor Arjun Rampal in association with restaurateur A.D. Singh, opened in New Delhi last week. And the who’s who of Delhi and Bollywood was in attendance.

The good An after-hours party place did not really exist in Delhi until Lap. This members-only club straddles the space between a nightclub and a lounge. You can choose to sink into the oversized sofas and golden chairs and hold a private conversation without the inconvenience of a large dinner table, or shake a leg on the dance floor near the DJ hub. Lap has six resident DJs and the music, which has been selected by Rampal himself, is largely Funky House, and Electro House music. A huge plus is having a lot of waiters around. You don’t have to trudge to the bar and wrestle with the crowd to get your drinks. My server was prompt, yet not cloyingly attentive. A fine-dining restaurant, to be tentatively named Lap Garden, will open in October. This global cuisine eatery will be open to all.

The notsogood I’m not sure Samrat hotel is the

place for an exclusive club. Sure, the hotel may have grand plans to upgrade its F&B outlets, but nothing is evident as of now. The hotel is deserted, the lobby is outdated and resembles the reception area in a public sector unit, the security arrangements are minimal and the X-ray machine to check bags was not in use the night I went to Lap. Luckily, we got a parking spot near the entry; I wonder if we would have dared to hand our car for valet parking. The double doors between the alfresco area and the club and the toilets and the club are heavy, and difficult to navigate; there is a 2ft pitch dark area between the two sets of doors and you literally have to stretch your hands out to locate the second set of doors. Since the doors swing both ways, injuries seem inevitable. Not a good idea for a watering hole.

Talk plastic Membership details haven’t been finalized. Through the month of September, select invitees will be able to use the club. If they choose to become members, they will have to pay Rs1 lakh for a lifetime membership and Rs25,000 for renewal every year. Seema Chowdhry

ON THE COVER: IMAGING BY: RAAJAN/MINT

TODAY’S BLOG

Caravaggio from a couch BY KRISH RAGHAV

This and more at blogs.livemint.com/ livelounge

L4 COLUMNS

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUKUL KESAVAN HIGH WINDOWS

Family photos: hold them up for scrutiny

AFP

hen Edward Kennedy died on 25 August, I thought of a photograph that used to hang in our house when I was a child: a little family group featuring Edward’s eldest brother,

John, his wife Jacqueline and their daughter Caroline. It’s a black-and-white picture of the three of them, in which little Caroline is kissing her dad on the cheek while her mother looks on, perfectly coiffed, wearing a pearl necklace and a silk dress with a boat neck designed to set off those glorious collar bones. This is a scene from Camelot; what’s interesting is that it was hung on a wall in Delhi. The other framed pictures we had in the house were of sacred ancestors: my father’s grandfather, my grandfathers, a grandmother, a photograph of Gandhiji looking down, a painting of Gurudev in a brown maxi and a picture of Einstein and Nehru in conversation, the great man looking amused in a baggy sweater, Nehru smiling eagerly in a suit. Kennedy shared our walls with them because he, like them, was dead. In my mind, his death and Nehru’s were obscurely joined probably because they occurred in quick succession: Kennedy was shot at the end of 1963 and Nehru died in May the following year. But even so, there was something incongruous about this family picture from another world that hung on our walls. The other foreigner, Einstein, was a) so famous that even I had heard of him at age 6 and b) he was there in Nehru’s company so his presence was easily explained, but why were we so keen on Jack and Jacqueline? It couldn’t just

have been that he was the president of the United States: There had been other presidents in that country’s recent past—Eisenhower and FDR—who were both more distinguished and more comprehensively dead, who hadn’t made the cut. Perhaps it was him being the youngest president and the fact that Jacqueline and he were a famously good-looking couple, plus the tragic and sinister circumstances of his death, that made them special. I can only guess. What I know for certain is that our weird sense of connection with John Kennedy was so strong that when Jacqueline married the Greek magnate, Aristotle Onassis, five years after Kennedy’s death, we managed to feel indignant and self-righteous on his behalf. Gold-digger, I thought, with the moral certainty that only an 11-year-old can work up. Tramp. The man I was being loyal to was a Pulitzer Prize winner who hadn’t written the book that bore his name; he was a liberal senator who hadn’t voted when the Senate censured the witch-hunting Joseph McCarthy (he was a family friend); he was a president who had committed America to its wicked war in Vietnam and then presided over the Bay of Pigs disaster and who, despite his reputation as a patron of the civil rights movement, was so ambivalent about it that he allowed the paranoid Edgar Hoover to

misremember the national mood in the early 1960s. Indians tend to see that time through the distorting lens of Mrs Gandhi’s subsequent tilt towards the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. Till Nehru died, India was properly non-aligned, closer, if anything, to America than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary had offended Nehru’s democratic sensibilities; Kennedy, accompanied by Jacqueline, had visited India, and Indians were the recipients of massive US aid, specially the grain shipments under the PL 480 programme, which Kennedy had renamed Food for Peace. This Candid camera: The Kennedys captured in a moment. intense Indian-American honeymoon was cut bug Martin Luther King. short first by Kennedy’s death and then John Kennedy was famous because Nehru’s but the romance was real and it during the Cold War he was, by shaped the way we felt about this couple default, the “leader of the Free from Camelot. World” and he managed to dramatize So there he was, this serial adulterer, that role with killer lines. There was playing the domesticated family man on the crowd-pleasing “Ich bin ein the walls of a conventionally Berliner” when the Russians began to middle-class Indian home. Which build the Berlin Wall and then there brings us back to his brother, Edward was his ideologically brilliant use of Kennedy, who was recently sent off to the space race when he seemed to the hereafter buoyed by a tsunami of commandeer the future by collective affection. The obituaries and committing America to the moon. notices, including a moving eulogy by I think the reason why this Cold War President Obama, made little mention glamour, this Kennedy worship among of the human casualties of Edward Indians of that generation, seems Kennedy’s extraordinary political career: mysterious in retrospect is because we Mary Jo Kopechne, who died in the car

accident at Chappaquiddick, and Joan, his first wife, the mother of his three children, who was helped along the high road to alcoholism by her erratic husband’s infidelities and indiscretions. It’s hard to be robustly plainspoken about the recently dead. Should we ask old photos questions that they can’t answer? Should there be a moral reckoning for public men? Joyce Carol Oates, an American novelist who wrote a novel, Black Water, based on the Chappaquiddick tragedy, raises the question and supplies a bleak, resigned answer: “Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think? The poet John Berryman once wondered: “Is wickedness soluble in art?” One might rephrase, in a vocabulary more suitable for our politicized era: “Is wickedness soluble in good deeds?” This paradox lies at the heart of so much of public life: Individuals of dubious character and cruel deeds may redeem themselves in selfless actions. Fidelity to a personal code of morality would seem to fade in significance as the public sphere, like an enormous sun, blinds us to all else.” Mukul Kesavan, a professor of social history at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, is the author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions. 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

How to balance restraint and extravagance

PTI

parade of weddings—some flamboyant and some restrained. Recently, Bangalore saw a high-profile wedding when IT icon Narayana Murthy’s daughter married her Stanford classmate. While the wedding pictures made front-page news, the local papers repeatedly reported that the wedding was a low-key elegant affair, in tune with Murthy’s persona. Traditionally, the south, except for Hyderabad, has always been about simple weddings, although even here, the displays are getting more and more grand, even gaudy. Nair weddings take the cake with their 10-minute ceremonies conducted at the local temple, followed by a banana-leaf lunch. The bride wears an off-white kasavu sari; the bridegroom wears a sparkling white dhoti; the gold jewellery is tasteful but kept to the minimum. Syrian Christian weddings overdose on the gold jewellery but the outfits remain restrained. The difference between south and north Indian weddings has to do with a single factor: liquor. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, most wedding receptions do not include liquor. While there is a buffet, there usually aren’t multiple counters with monumental

displays of food, serving everything from Thai to thayir saadam (curd rice). Delhi weddings, I am told, particularly Punjabi ones, are gleefully over-the-top with sumptuous spreads, riotous colours, elephant processions and guests clad in Sabyasachi and solitaires. I have been wondering about flamboyance and restraint and which path to follow. It is a tough call because every decision in the flamboyance versus restraint debate falls in the “nice to have” category. Do you really need a Tarun Tahiliani lehenga or is it nice to have? Do you really need a polki diamond necklace or is it fun to wear? For me, part of it is a philosophical issue about how money is used. You can spend Rs25,000 on a Banarasi silk sari. You can also educate about six poor children for one year with that money at St Aloysius School down the road from me. The way most of us deal with this equation is by contributing what we can to charities we care about and showing some restraint in our purchases. In the south, many ladies, particularly in the previous generation, might salivate over a Rs15,000 Kanjeevaram silk sari but the odds are that they will choose one that costs less even if they can afford it. My

Punjabi friends tell me that their parents, on the other hand, will buy not just one sari but two—just to show that they can afford it. The other aspect is whether you are being had. This applies particularly to brand names. Let’s face it: The monogrammed brown Louis Vuitton bags are ugly. They are the colour of cow dung and the logo sprinkled all over the bag looks gauche. Their Murakami bags are slightly less so. Their Epi leather bags, on the other hand, are mighty fine; ones I would love to own. For me, the thing about Louis Vuitton and other brands is the sneaking suspicion that I am yet another sucker who has fallen prey to their marketing tricks. Sure, I might appreciate the quality and workmanship of a hobo bag but I have to wonder if the money I am plonking down shows that I am a creature with good taste or one more bimbo with a Birkin bag as arm candy. There is beauty in restraint but there is a certain joie de vivre in flamboyance. I think that most of us admire Gandhian restraint. At the same time, we enjoy the good things of life, many of which are exercises in flamboyance. The fast cars, the pretty skirts, the sparkling jewellery, the 6-inch stiletto, the tastefully done up home, the art collection are all examples of personal style. You could argue that they epitomize the civilized life; they show that you are a cultured individual with good taste. That said, most of the greatest human beings in the world—ranging from Mother Teresa to Mohammed Yunus; from Albert Einstein to Madame Curie; from Nina Ananiashvili to M.S. Subbulakshmi—

Simple affair: The Murthys at the wedding reception of their daughter Akshata. embraced restraint more than they did flamboyance; or so I have heard. They each had one or two extravagances and eccentricities; but beyond that they were not about “show”; about making other people’s eyebrows rise and jaws drop. I think the answer to this fork in the road—the one that I have come up with anyway—is to permit yourself extravagances in areas that matter to you but choose simplicity and restraint in all other areas. If you enjoy spacious homes—as my husband does—go ahead, build yourself a mansion. But wear khadi in your mansion. The juxtaposition is sexy. If you enjoy jewellery, not just to show off to other people but to wear within your own home when you are expecting no company, go ahead, buy yourself gold, silver and diamonds. My mother is that way. She notices jewellery in other women, loves wearing different pieces, ranging from glass bangles to solitaires,

and changes her jewellery daily. I use the Holden Caulfield barometer in all areas where I am caught between restraint and flamboyance. Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which happens to be one of my favourite novels of all time, hated appearing “pseudo”. The same could be said about the things we like to consume. If you are drinking wine to appear sophisticated in parties, you are a pseudo and you shouldn’t try. If, on the other hand, you drink wine in the privacy of your home, go ahead and have a glass on me. Shoba Narayan is flamboyantly restrained. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Parenting SPELL BEE

The alphabet geeks ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

What does ‘floccin aucinihilipilification’ mean? Ask these young spelling buffs

B Y B LESSY A UGUSTINE blessy.a@livemint.com

···························· ames Maguire, the author of American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture Word Nerds, describes Spelling Bee as a “workaholic’s game. No weekend enthusiasts need apply” (The Wall Street Journal). And the contestants of HDFC Standard Life’s Spell Bee in India that completed its first season on ESPN Sports last month agree. “Preparing for a spelling contest is not about reading dictionaries cover to cover a week before the contest. Rather, you have to be a constant reader,” says Ananya Das, a 14-year-old student at Springdales, New Delhi, who came third at the Spell Bee. Piroune Balachandran of Doon School, Dehradun, who won the contest, is a prolific reader. The 15-year-old has just completed Joseph Heller’s Closing Time, Simon Reid-Henry’s Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Anshuman Mohan, who tied for the seventh position, goes to bookstores armed with a tiffin box so that he can “devour” books without taking a meal break. The 14-year-old student of St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Kolkata, reserves a seat for himself at the Crossword bookstore on Elgin Road and digs into whichever title takes his fancy. Das goes through “book phases”. She started with an Amelia Jane phase at the age of five and is experiencing a Khaled HosseiniJeffrey Archer phase right now. Hina Tolani, who came 25th and was the youngest contestant on the show, lives in the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust Colony, and has alternated between the tennis ground and library since she was 6. The latest word she’s shooting around is “triskaidekaphobia”, the fear of the number 13. These children insist that they never made a conscious effort to learn spellings before enlisting for

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Wordsmiths: Hina Tolani (scribbling on the blackboard) was the youngest contestant at Spell Bee; Anshuman Mohan came seventh.

the competition. “My school informed me only five days before the competition that I had made it to the show. So in those five days I did read parts of the Collins Dictionary that the organizers had recommended. But I did not spend every hour trying to memorize every word,” says Tolani. According to Das, people who read and learn to pronounce words correctly tend to make a mental note of the arrangement of letters and are thus able to spell well. Balachandran’s mantra is “read a lot, talk a lot and pay attention to the way people speak”. Tolani’s mother Neha, an English teacher in Navi Mumbai, says that she throws a random word at Hina during routine chores and asks her its meaning and spelling to “sharpen her language skills”. Interesting words are part of these children’s lives. Tolani reads with a dictionary beside her so that she can look up every word she doesn’t know. She tries

to “trick words into memory” by connecting them to everyday events or weaving stories around them. Das, on the other hand, plays word games with her friends. Each friend has a letter and they go on expanding the word to make a sensible but longest possible word. Hunting for amusing words is what spices up the English language for Mohan. Words such as “antidisestablishmentarianism”, which means opposition to the withdrawal of state support to the church, never cease to fascinate him. Trawling through a dictionary to learn spellings might help win competitions but Das’ parents prefer using innovative ways to engage her with the language. Her mother, Madhavi, used to play the “nonsense story” game with her, where mother and daughter would alternately supply sentences and make up a story. Also, whenever Das was arguing with her younger sister and wanted to

refuse her something, she’d just use “floccinaucinihilipilification” to disregard her demand as worthless. “This made our fights more interesting,” she says. While none of the children who made it to the final list of Spell Bee are rote learners, they come from “reading families”. Balachandran’s parents would read to him every night. When he was 6, his mother began reading out Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to him. After hearing half the book, he was so intrigued that he began reading it himself. He has finished writing 100 pages of his first book. “It’s set in an obscure town during World War II; the people of the town meet each other only once a year during a fair,” he says. Mohan, too, is secretive about his book Potato Chips, which is scheduled to be released by HarperCollins next year. “It’s about a 12-year-old and his perspective,” is all he is willing to say. Mohan’s affair with books began at 3 with Enid Blyton’s Noddy series. His parents got him a library membership at 6, but he exhausted the children’s section soon and had to move to another library. He has changed four libraries so far. Though each of them took home a different lesson from Spell Bee, there is one thing they collectively concluded: French should only be a spoken language.

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

COUSINS CAN PLAY I am the mother of an eight-year-old girl. My daughter has one male cousin, who is a year older. She spends a lot of her time with him. Her conversations are all about this cousin and she includes him in her dreams and imaginary games as well. When she watches a movie, she places this boy as the hero and herself as his counterpart. Recently I found her drawing a family consisting of him as the husband and herself as the wife. How do I change my daughter’s concept? You could simply ignore this, as she is bound to outgrow the idea. You don’t need to actively change her concept, really. At her age, she is becoming aware of relationships, and the model in front of her on a daily basis is the husband-wife duo. And her cousin becomes the most likely to be assigned the role of husband. What you could do, without making a big fuss about it, is that you could casually mention to your daughter that her husband is someone she will meet later, and that her cousin will not be her husband. Model roles: Assigning roles to real and Assure her that her imaginary peers is a part of growing up. cousin and she will always love each other, but in a different way. This is a little difficult to communicate fully to an eight-year-old, but you could do it by giving her examples of brother-sister relationships in your family and around you—between grown brothers and sisters and cousins. Are the two of them playing unsupervised a lot? Do look out for inappropriate touching and explorations of bodies or talk about private parts, etc. I am not saying that this is definitely happening, but it would be a good idea to listen in or watch out for any such signs. If you do find any of that going on, do not make a big fuss, making them feel guilty and rejected. Simply “dismantle” this kind of play by explaining to them that it is not appropriate, and then do not let them play together unsupervised for long stretches. Meanwhile, you can also perhaps broaden her interactions by having her join a play group, or some kind of pursuit such as dance, gymnastics, or craft, or whatever you think she is inclined towards, so that she is not playing exclusively with her cousin. As part of the task of broadening her canvas, you could also, if she is an imaginative child and likes play-acting, get her, the cousin and maybe a few other friends, to do little skits or plays in which there are no gender and partner stereotypes. Your local library or the Internet will provide plenty of fun subjects. All said and done, this is not something you should worry about too much and discuss too heavily with your daughter. You do not want a situation where her interaction with her cousin is blown out of proportion, and turns into a guilt-inducing or forbidden activity. It’s better to be careful and subtle, and find ways to bring in new elements to her play—more children as well as different subjects or areas of play. Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting. Send in your queries to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

UNDER 15 | M VENKATESH

Adults, keep out A mythical creature, a store full of magic tricks and wondrous tales within tales

hades of Enid Blyton’s Amelia Jane apart, Shreekumar Varma’s story about a creature that holds a seaside village to ransom is fascinating. The story starts with the author wondering why a rich old stranger left his house to him— till he finds a book written by Mr Anchanbey, the grandfather of the benefactor. This book is about the reasons (Nu-Cham-Vu is one of the reasons) for the large-heartedness of the old man and about other stories in the village of Anchan Bay, which housed the magic store that NuCham-Vu owned. Nu-Cham-Vu is an oil-barrel-

shaped creature children love and adults hate. The children like him because of the beautiful, magical, children-only store that he owns. The store is unique in the sense that the talking toys sell themselves. No parents are allowed inside. No money changes hands. It is all on barter. If, for instance, a boy wanted to buy a toy monkey, he had to stand on one leg for an hour. Payments had to be made in whatever way Nu-Cham-Vu fancied. Since the children don’t understand a single word of his language, the creature translates everything through the Jasmine Doll. The grown-ups try every trick in the book to throw the monster out of the village, including blaming him for kidnapping the only horse-cab owner in the village. But the children stand by the magic store owner. The elders of the vil-

The Magic Store of NuChamVu: By Shreekumar Varma, Puffin, 134 pages, Rs175.

lage, led by Mr Anchanbey, put up with the antics of NuCham-Vu till he plays a dirty trick on one of the parents. Chhabiya’s father enters the store by mistake and promises his daughter that he will buy her a magic flute. An angry NuCham-Vu lays out his terms. Run all the way (on the knees) to Mount Amorobo, 33 miles away, and get his thumb, which was left behind on the mountainside, within 24 hours. The poor man does as he is told, only to be betrayed when Nu-Cham-Vu refuses to part with the flute. It is the last straw for the elders and they think of unique, lawful ways to throw the creature out of the village forever. Though it is a bit difficult for the reader to keep track of the stories across three generations of the Anchanbey family, as well as the author’s notes, what Kumar has done is weave in the fantasy element that keeps one’s

mind on what else Nu-Cham-Vu has up his sleeve. Also, thrown in between the war of the adults and the creature is the story of Professor Shandilyan, an Australian scientist, and his family who are washed up on the shores of Anchan Bay. Shandilyan promises to bring electricity to the village, though he eventually disappears when the villagers suspect him of actually building a contraption that will blow them out of existence. Illustrated by Varma’s son, Vinayak, the wondrous tales within tales make this book worth a read. The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu comes with a plug by Ruskin Bond. It is the first of the new Puffin series called Ruskin Bond Recommends. The writer is the editor of Heek, a children’s magazine. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Mentors TEACHER’S DAY

Well done my boy!

RAJESH KUMAR SEN

AIJAZ RAHI/AP

On the occasion of Teacher’s Day, these teachers share memories of the students who have done them proud

Initiator: Banerjee (above) first suggested to Dhoni that he try wicketkeeping.

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

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Mahendra Singh Dhoni

as told by coach K.R. Banerjee, Jawahar Vidya Mandir, Ranchi

e were conducting a football coaching camp and Mahendra, who was in class VI at the time, was one of the participants. I noticed that he was a good goalkeeper, adept at making dives to save goals. As it happened, he was a student at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic School and I was a sports teacher there, in charge of the school cricket team. I told him that since he was a good diver, he should try wicketkeeping in school. Some months later, after the monsoons, the cricket season began and he came and asked me if I would take him in the school team. Now, we already had a wicketkeeper, so I told him to practise with the team for a year and we would take a call after that. He agreed, and this is how he began playing cricket. Mahendra never spoke much; if you asked him to do something, he would say “Yes, sir” and proceed to do it. He was quiet, like his father and mother. People from Uttarakhand (where

his family originally hails from) tend to be aggressive, but not him; he channelled that trait into the game. When faced with a situation or a task, he was never beset by anxieties such as “What will happen?” or “How will it happen?” Basically, he was mad about sports. Few know that he is a very good badminton player and

has represented Ranchi district at the state level in the game. Ours is a co-ed school, but he never showed much interest in girls. By the time he was in class IX or X, he knew his future lay in sports. I assured him that if nothing else, he could always get a job as a sports teacher at the government sports college. In 1999, an out-of-town cricket

tournament (he played for the Central Coalfields Ltd, CCL, team) fell smack in the middle of his class XII exams. Board exams are not to be taken lightly, yet he had a commitment with CCL. Mahendra remained cool—he appeared for a paper and after that headed directly to the railway station from the exam hall to catch the train. He

returned four days later, in time to sit for the next paper the following day. He became the school team captain but was never the opening batsman. Once, in an inter-school match, he told me he wanted to open. I didn’t think that was such a good idea but when he insisted, I agreed on one condition—there would be

no batsman padded up to replace him or his fellow batsman. He agreed to this unusual condition and sure enough, Mahendra and Shabbir Husain remained not out for the entire 40-over innings. After seeing him play that day, I told him that he was four or five years away from making it to the Indian cricket.

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Nandan Nilekani

Chetan Bhagat

as told by Deepak Phatak, Subrao M. Nilekani chair professor, IIT Bombay

as told by Sanjeev Sanghi, professor, IIT Delhi

became a teacher in 1971-72 and Nandan Nilekani passed out of IIT Bombay in 1978, so the age gap between us is not that much. I never taught him but I recall him being an active student on campus, with exceptional organizational skills. He was bright, but winning the gold medal (for academics) was never his priority. He did seem to be aware that he would do something extraordinary in life—he moved with that kind of confidence and conviction. Later, when he had joined Infosys, Nandan would come to campus to talk to us about their software products. Those days, I just saw him as an enterprising man and not as someone who is very wealthy. When I was setting up the School of Information Technology, Kanwal Rekhi (the NRI venture capitalist) made a contribution of $1 million for it. One day, Nandan called up saying that he, too, would like to help. I had no inkling that he meant financial help—but he then proceeded to say that he would like to match Kanwal’s million-dollar donation. Taken by surprise, I blurted that Kanwal had actually doubled his contribution to $2 million. Now, Nandan was

quite bent on matching the donation—he told me he would think about it and get back. I spent a sleepless night, thinking I should have kept my mouth shut and accepted the million dollars. Next day, to my relief and elation, he called back saying that he, too, would contribute $2 million. It is important to remember that Nandan made his money legally and ethically in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when wealth creation was not easy in India. In keeping with the

Grateful: Phatak (left) appreciates Nilekani’s help with his time and money. ethos at Infosys and following the example of Narayana Murthy, he didn’t want to publicize the donation. But I felt that society needs good role models, and therefore insisted on making it public. Nandan has also given the greatest amount of time to the institute—time, unlike money, is one-way traffic, and therefore more valuable. It can’t be regenerated.

fter I got my PhD, I joined the IIT Delhi, faculty in 1992 and began taking a tutorial class in fluid mechanics—Chetan was one of my students and he came across as friendly and active. As far as academics go, he was never at the top of the class, but he definitely wasn’t a poor student like the protagonist in his first novel, Five Point Someone. In class, he always asked interesting and practical questions. Students who are keen learners and ask questions bring out the teacher’s creativity—you feel motivated and try to anticipate their questions. Based on our classroom interaction, I expected him to score higher in tests than he actually did. I was a bachelor during my first year at IIT. We would meet outside class and the boys would drop by my place occasionally. He would talk to me freely about other professors—there was one who was conducting a gobar (cow dung) gas project and he had plenty to say about that. According to Chetan, what impressed the professor the

H IN

Buddy: Sanghi (above) was friendly with Bhagat and other students. most was how willing you were to soil your hands with gobar. Recently, Rajkumar Hirani—who directed Munnabahi MBBS and is now working on the film Three Idiots that is based on Five Point Someone—came and met me at Chetan’s behest so that he could get a feel of what the IIT campus is like. For some reason, during his final year, Chetan retreated into a shell, and though I wasn’t teaching him then, I recall asking him why he had turned into an introvert. Regardless, my memory of him is that of a popular young man.

www.livemint.com Listen to the schoolteachers of Sourav Ganguly and Pankaj Advani talk about their early days at www.livemint.com/teachersday.htm

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Style TREND TRACKER

The new style code Men get adventurous and go shopping for bright colours, slim cuts and casual designer wear and welcome a new fashion week dedicated to them B Y R ACHANA N AKRA P ARIZAAD K HAN

rachana.n@livemint.com

······························· here was a time not too long ago when menswear designers were forced to make women’s clothes to stay afloat, when slim-fit shirts and pink wasn’t something “normal” men wore and when shopping for shirts and trousers was something mothers and wives did. Now New Delhi, after only Paris and Milan, will have a dedicated menswear fashion week. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Indian men have never been more experimental in their clothing choices, and designers and corporate firms are so confident about the high-end men’s fashion segment that a three-day event will be kicked off on 11 September. The Van Heusen India Mens Week (VHIMW) 2009 will feature 28 leading, upcoming, and debutant fashion designers who will showcase everything from sherwanis and bandhgalas, to skinny suits, blazers, sports jackets, slim trousers, shirts, bags and shoes. “Men are no longer satisfied with three trousers and six shirts. They want a complete wardrobe with separate clothes for work and parties. They want several pairs of sunglasses, shoes and watches,” says designer Ravi Bajaj, who is known for his classic-but-witha-twist menswear designs. Bajaj’s collection at VHIMW will have colours such as black, aubergine, ivory and “camel gold” and will include crafted jamavar trousers, velvet shirts and jackets with in-built scarves. “In recent years, there’s been a radical shift from the gender stereotyping that fashion is not male,” says designer David Abraham of the Abraham and Thakore label. “Earlier, men would ask for a white shirt, now they want a white slim-fit shirt with a dart in the back or pintucks,” he adds. Designer Narendra Kumar estimates that the big change in what men want in their wardrobes started about three years ago when the designer menswear market shifted from wedding purchases and occasion wear to shirts, jackets and trousers for work and evenings out. He says he has witnessed a four-fold increase in the sales of his menswear in the last few years. Most of Kumar’s shirts are cut

Ravi Bajaj: Black textured jacket, approx. Rs15,000. slim, featuring interesting details and innovative snaps and hooks instead of buttons. “Earlier, men had settled into the baggy look and were not so easily acceptable of change. The slim fit took a while to catch on, but now that it has, there’s no stopping it.” For his upcoming collection, his sportswear-inspired aesthetic is still very much in place. The changing dynamics of social interaction in cities has been one of the main factors for men wanting to expand the variety in their wardrobes. Dedicated men’s magazines, the entry of luxury and high street fashion brands and, more importantly, Bollywood also get credit. Rahul Khanna, of the designer label Cue, calls the slim fit the biggest change and innovation in the menswear segment. And there’s no restrictions these days when it comes to choosing colours or fabrics. Khanna says purple was a big rage last winter and Cue sold men’s garments in every shade of purple. “Men are now wearing pink shirts even to office, which would have never happened even till recently,” he says. Cue, which will share the ramp for the finale at VHIMW with Ashish Soni, has designed shoes in bright colours. Also on the drawing board: suits with bold prints, dropped crotch pants in denim and canvas, “treggings”, which are a cross between trousers and leggings, and printed man bags. Colours will include bright red and green.

Delhi-based designer Rajvi Mohan’s line will have block-printed tees and bright fun colours such as purple, pink and yellow, while Nitin Bal Chauhan’s line will have fluorescent and glow-inthe-dark T-shirts, and batik prints on denim jeans. Gaurav Gupta, known for his draped designs in women’s wear, will show colours such as grey, blues and pinks, with neon green as a highlight; quirky prints featuring everyday objects will be seen, as well as a lot of panelling and draping in trousers and shirts. Gupta says trouser and jacket lengths will be shorter than normal. However, for some, the road to change has been long. Ashish Soni, one of the few designers who started his career by designing only menswear, says it was a tough task trying to change mindsets in a market that had no concept of ready-made clothes for men. “Men bought branded fabric and took it to their tailors to turn into shirts, pants and suits,” he says. “Income levels were low, the market was limited and there was absolutely no way you could make money by being a menswear designer,” he says. As branded fabric makers (such as Raymond) moved to ready-made clothes, it gave a boost to designers like him. After a collection dominated by red, plum and gold at Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in March, Soni’s collection at VHIMW is aimed at the young, fit Indian male, a B-school graduate who is climbing the corporate ladder. The line will feature skinny looks in shades of black and blue, but with bursts of colour. Samant Chauhan, who debuted with an award-winning menswear collection in 2005, says it is only now that he has started receiving orders from designerwear retail stores for the collection he designed in 2005. A few years ago he was forced to design clothes for women because menswear was not profitable, but he now sells only menswear in India. For VHIMW, his collection will feature innovations such as removable trim on shirts, trousers and jackets, detachable collars and cuffs, and denim-like twill fabric made on a handloom. Designer Manoviraj Khosla too has played up the lapels of jackets in his VHIMW collection. He says he has opened them out or made them stand up. There will be fitted short jackets with pleated and ruched textures and bags with prints matching the clothes. As designer Rajesh Pratap Singh puts it, “Soon the man who’ll wear a classic pinstripe suit will become the minority.”

t Ashish Soni: Burgundy jacquard suit, Rs38,000, from Soni’s Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week show in March.

u Abraham and Thakore: Navy shirt with ikat embroidery, Rs5,500.

u Fightercock: Purple felt multipocketed jacket, approx. Rs12,950.

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT MANOJ VERMA/MINT

Ravi Bajaj, Fightercock and Abraham and Thakore’s garments, which have been created for VHIMW, will be available in stores in March. Ashish Soni’s garments will be available in stores from this month.

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Play INTERNET

How Facebook ruins friendships Are you really interested in knowing when a friend is flossing, or what she ate for dinner?

B Y E LIZABETH B ERNSTEIN ···························· otice to my friends: I love you all dearly. But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday”, your child “took 30 minutes to brush his teeth”, your dog “just ate an ant trap” or you want to “save the piglets”. And I really, really don’t care which Addams Family member you most resemble (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook). Here’s where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to “instant messaging” or “texting”. We “friended” each other on Facebook, and began communicating by “tweeting” our thoughts—in 140 characters or less—via Twitter. All this online social networking was supposed to bring us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline. Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress—and send well-wishes and support—thanks to a Web page his mom created for him. But there’s a danger here too. If we’re not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real life relationships. Like many people, I’m experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they

are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on socialmedia sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts (“Anyone know a good restaurant in Berlin?”). One of the big problems is how we converse. Typing still leaves something to be desired as a communication tool; it lacks the nuances that can be expressed by body language and voice inflection. “Online, people can’t see the yawn,” says Patricia Wallace, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth and author of The Psychology of the Internet. But let’s face it, the problem is much greater than which tools we use to communicate. It’s what we are actually saying that’s really mucking up our relationships. “Oh my God, a college friend just updated her Facebook status to say that her ‘teeth are itching for a flossing!’” shrieked a friend of mine recently. “That’s gross. I don’t want to hear about what’s

going on inside her mouth.” That prompted me to check my own Facebook page, only to find that three of my pals—none of whom know each other—had the exact same status update: “Zzzzzzz”. They promptly put me to “zzzzzzz”. This brings us to our first dilemma: Amid all this heightened chatter, we’re not saying much that’s interesting, folks. Rather, we’re breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends. “It’s called narcissism,” says Matt Brown, a 36-year-old business development manager for a chain of hair salons and spas in Seattle. He’s particularly annoyed by a friend who works at an auto dealership who tweets every time he sells a car, a married couple who bicker on Facebook’s public walls and another couple so “mooshy-gooshy” they sit in the same room of their house posting love messages to each other for all to see. “Why is your life so frickin’ important and entertaining that we need to know?” Brown says. Gwen Jewett, for her part, is sick of meal status updates. “A few of my friends like to post several times a day about what they are eating: ‘I just ate a Frito pie.’ ‘I am enjoying a double hotfudge sundae at home tonight.’ ‘Just ate a whole pizza with sausage, peppers and double cheese,’” says the 49-year-old career coach in suburban Dallas.

“My question is this: If we didn’t call each other on the phone every time we ate before, why do we need the alerts now?” For others, boredom isn’t the biggest challenge of managing Internet relationships. Consider, for example, how people you know often seem different online—not just gussied up or more polished, but bolder too, displaying sides of their personalities you have never seen before. Alex Gilbert, 27, who works for a non-profit in Houston that teaches creative writing to children, is still puzzling over an old friend—“a particularly masculine-type dude”—who plays in a heavy-metal band and heads a motorcycle club yet posts videos on Facebook of “uber cute” kittens. “It’s not fodder for your real life conversation,” Gilbert says. “We’re not going to get together and talk about how cute kittens are.” James Hills discovered that a colleague is gay via Facebook, but he says it didn’t bother him. It was after his friend joined groups that cater to hairy men, such as “Furball NYC”, that he was left feeling awkward. “This is something I just didn’t need to know,” says Hills, who is 32 and president of a marketing firm in Elgin, Illinois. “I’d feel the same way if it was a straight friend joining a leather-and-lace group.” And then there’s jealousy. In all that information you’re posting about your life—your vaca-

tion, your children, your promotions at work, even that margarita you just drank—someone is bound to find something to envy. When it comes to relationships, such online revelations can make breaking up even harder to do. “Facebook prolongs the period it takes to get over someone, because you have an open window into their life, whether you want to or not,” says Yianni Garcia of New York, a consultant who helps companies use social media. “You see their updates, their pictures and their relationship status.” Garcia, 24, felt the sting of Facebook jealousy personally last spring, after he split up with his boyfriend. For a few weeks, he continued to visit his ex’s Facebook page, scrutinizing his new friends. Then one day he discovered that his former boyfriend had blocked him from accessing his profile. Why? “He said he’d only ‘unfriended’ me to protect himself, because if someone flirted with me, he would feel jealous,” Garcia says. Facebook can also be a mecca for passive-aggressive behaviour. “Suddenly, things you wouldn’t say out loud in conversation are OK to say because you’re sitting behind a computer screen,” says Kimberly Kaye, 26, an arts writer in New York. She was surprised when friends who had politely discussed healthcare reform over dinner later grew much more

antagonistic when they continued the argument online. Just ask Heather White. She says her college roommate at the University of Georgia started an argument over text about who should clean their apartment. White, 22, who was visiting her parents at the time, asked her friend to call her so they could discuss the issue. Her friend never did. A few days later, White, who graduated in May, updated her Facebook status, commenting that her favourite country duo, Brooks & Dunn, just broke up. Almost immediately, her roommate responded, writing publicly on her wall: “Just like us”. The two women have barely spoken since then. So what’s the solution, short of “unfriending” or “unfollowing” everyone who annoys you? You can use the “hide” button on Facebook to stop getting your friends’ status updates—they’ll never know—or use TwitterSnooze, a website that allows you to temporarily suspend tweets from someone you follow (Warning: They’ll get a notice from Twitter when you begin reading their tweets again). But these are really just BandAid tactics. To improve our interactions, we need to change our conduct, not just cover it up. First, watch your own behaviour, asking yourself before you post anything: “Is this something I’d want someone to tell me?” “Run it by that focus group of one,” says Johns Hopkins’ Wallace. And positively reward others, responding only when they write something interesting, ignoring them when they are boring or obnoxious (commenting negatively will only start a very public war). If all that fails, you can always start a new group: “Get Facebook to Create an Eye-Roll Button Now!” Write to wsj@livemint.com

LISA HANEY/WSJ

PLAY L9

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DILEEP PREMACHANDRAN

PROFILE

Runaway legend How the charismatic, peerless Usain Bolt forever changed the face—and history—of sprinting, and why he isn’t just about records B Y D ILEEP P REMACHANDRAN ···························· t’s quite a sight, if you can stand the smell. Opposite the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, you’ll catch a glimpse of it as you turn left on to Roosevelt Avenue: the Wall of Honour. A stretch of sun-baked, whitewashed wall nearly 50 yards long, next to a drainage canal, with each segment celebrating a sporting hero from the island. Given Jamaica’s love of cricket, the sport is featured prominently, with Michael Holding, Lawrence “Yagga” Rowe and Courtney Walsh all painted in vivid colours. There’s also the man born in Panama and blessed with such sublime batting talent that indignant Jamaicans repudiate the sobriquet of The Black Bradman, preferring instead to call Sir Donald Bradman The White (George) Headley. If he hadn’t chosen to become the most freakishly gifted athlete

Citius: Usain Bolt’s long stride, combined with his lithe frame and impressive height, lets him cover a 100m sprint in 41 or 42 steps, while most athletes would need at least 45.

that the world has ever seen, Usain Bolt might one day have been on that wall as a cricketer. Speaking to the BBC earlier this year, while England were being routed at a cacophonic Sabina Park, he said: “I was a good fast bowler as a youngster. I was quick and I also batted. I was actually good at it. The person I looked up to was Waqar Younis because he had a great inswinging yorker. He was wonderful. Pakistan was my team when I was 6, when I started watching cricket. I enjoyed watching them play.” No postcards from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad then. But back home in Jamaica, they may have to create a new section of wall just for Bolt, the chicken-nuggetmunching, car-crashing champion who makes his peers look like they’re running to stand still. After his conquest of Berlin—the organizers gifted him a piece of the erstwhile Berlin Wall to take home—Bolt couldn’t be accused

Wonderwall: The Wall of Honour near the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, celebrates the country’s sporting legends. of false modesty when he was asked how his compatriots regarded him. “Everybody knows my name,” he said with that infectious grin. “I’m as big as Bob Marley because my name is really everywhere, like Bob Marley’s was when he was alive. I have one of the rarest talents you’ll ever find.” You won’t spend half an hour in Jamaica without hearing the strains of some Marley classic, whether it be No Woman, No Cry or the magnificent One Love,

which the BBC declared to be the song of the 20th century a few years ago. And just as Marley was shaped by the impressionable years spent in the village of Nine Mile, so Bolt has been moulded by a pastoral upbringing in Sherwood Content in the parish of Trelawny. And if his father, Wellesley, is to be believed, one of the secrets of the Bolt speed is the yam that grows plentifully there. Bolt’s achievements must not be viewed in isolation, though. He only happens to be the latest link in a sprinting chain that goes back more than 60 years to the

wonderfully versatile Herb McKenley. Arthur Wint, Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medallist (London, 1948, 400m; McKenley took silver) is the first portrait on the Wall of Honour, and Donald Quarrie, who won the 200m gold nearly three decades later, was so highly regarded that he even became part of daily speak—“I ran so fast, maan, not even Don Quarrie coulda caught I.” What Bolt has done in the space of just 12 months, though, is to relegate even these exceptional athletes to the periphery. When Quarrie won gold in Montreal, his time was 20.22. Bolt ran over a second faster in Berlin, and that too after a car accident that meant he couldn’t practise his bend running for months. To truly fathom what he has done to sprinting, it’s best to listen to one of the finest 100m runners from the generation that preceded him, Trinidad’s Ato Bolden. After Bolt had fried the opposition inside the Bird’s Nest in Beijing last year, Bolden said: “Swimming has its LZR suits and deeper pools. We have a 6ft 5-inch guy that’s running 9.6s and beating the rest of the Olympic field by two-tenths of a second. He’s our new technology.” Bolt’s height is what makes him so unusual. Sprinters, right from the days of Harold Abrahams (of Chariots of Fire fame) through Jesse Owens and up to Maurice Greene, were men of medium height, some lithe and some extremely well-muscled. Bolt has plenty of muscle on a lithe frame, and a loping stride that makes his opponents look like they’ve come from Lilliput. Most sprinters take 45 or 46 strides to cover the 100m. Bolt

DAVID J PHILLIP/AP

usually needs only 40 or 41. Unless he starts really poorly, those next to him have no chance. Once that gigantic frame uncoils from the crouched start and the stride pattern is set, it’s like watching someone with afterburners strapped to him. Bolt’s importance to his sport transcends mere records though. After a succession of drug scandals involving the likes of Marion Jones, the very credibility of athletics was at stake. It needed someone with magic in his feet and oodles of charisma to bring the crowds back. In Berlin, on the days when Bolt wasn’t racing, many of the stands were half-empty. When he was in action, there was bedlam. If the “arrogance” and showboating that he has been accused of is what people come to see, we can only hope that there’s much more of it. Still only 23, where does Bolt go from here? There’s talk of competing in the long jump, and perhaps looking to match the four-gold hauls of Owens and Carl Lewis. There might also be a desire to move up to 400m, a distance that he ran in his teens. There are unquestionably more golds to win, more records to shatter. There are also cautionary tales to keep in mind, should others attempt to lead him astray. Just over two decades ago, another Trelawny boy (albeit wearing a Canadian vest) blitzed his way to the tape in Seoul in 9.79 seconds. A few days later, he was heading home, consigned to pariah status forever. His name? Ben Johnson. Dileep Premachandran is associate editor of Cricinfo and Asian cricket correspondent for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MADHU KAPPARATH/MINT

Miniature marvels: (left and below) Opaque watercolours heightened with gold on paper from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s collection. The miniatures will be part of Sotheby’s 17 September auction in New York. Estimated price: $3,0006,000.

As the recession bursts the contemporary art bubble, a hidden star comes to the fore. Indian antiques are the art world’s newsmakers ANTIQUES

VINTAGE

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

···························· aman Ahuja, associate professor of Indian art and architecture at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, knows his antiques. Seated in his sunlit home office, with a magnificent 5ft 9-inch Shrinathji Pichvai from Rajasthan on the wall behind him, he speaks passionately of Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts exhibit that opens in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) on 10 October. Ahuja is all praise for the sophisticated curatorial focus involved in putting together the exhibition, but he is livid at the stringent Indian laws that would make an exhibition of this scale difficult to organize in the country. It is for the same reason that he calls antiques the silent stars of the Indian art market. “They’ve held their own despite (the) dual problems of the economic downturn and the strangulating laws that govern their trade and exchange in India,” says Ahuja. The Maharaja exhibit is an ambitious undertaking. Not only is V&A exhibiting objects from its own collection, but a number of artefacts are on loan from the

royal collections of erstwhile princely states such as Udaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Baroda, Bahawalpur, Gwalior and Kapurthala. Extremely rare artefacts, such as crystal pieces from the Maharana of Mewar’s collection—the largest private crystal collection in the world—will be part of the threemonth show. There will be a book, guided tours, a recreation from a royal procession and a symposium. Curator Anna Jackson, deputy keeper of V&A’s Asian department, says the exhibition has been in the planning for around four years and took two years of extensive paperwork. Though the museum is not concerned explicitly with the dynamics of the art market, Jackson hopes that the broad range of artefacts on display will boost awareness and clear the shroud of mystery that surrounds Indian antiques and their undocumented provenance. But the international market for Indian antiques has been thriving even without such impetus. It has a small but dedicated collector base dominated by European and American connoisseurs, including museums and non-resident Indians. Sotheby’s auction house has been selling Indian, Himalayan

and South-East Asian antiquities for over five decades at Asian art sales in New York and London. Its upcoming auction on 17 September in New York includes rare miniatures from the collection of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a pioneering figure in the field of Indian and SouthEast Asian art. Coomaraswamy established the first department of Indian art in a US institution at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he was curator from 1917 to 1937. He was particularly known for his scholarship in Indian miniatures. It is only befitting, then, that a highlight of the auction is An Illustration to a Jataka Series: The Sixth Dream of King Pasenadi, circa 1780-90, valued at $50,000-70,000 (around Rs25-35 lakh). The 22.2 x 33cm watercolour is a depiction of an ancient Jataka tale in which a strong tiger slinks away from a jackal. The representation of a fable, it symbolizes how even an upstart can vanquish someone powerful. Explaining the inclusion of the miniatures, Anuradha GhoshMazumdar, assistant vice-president of Indian and South-East Asian art at Sotheby’s in New York, says the auction house was encouraged by the resurgent

Majestic maharaja: Golden throne of Ranjit Singh, circa 1818. ©V&A Images.

The economics of art

Why the antique market was bubblewrapped through the recession

Academic aesthete: Professor Naman Ahuja from Jawaharlal Nehru University believes that antiques are the silent stars of the art market. interest in Indian miniatures among collectors abroad. Through its sales since 1985, Sotheby’s has sold several celebrated miniature collections, including works from the Jucker collection of Himalayan paintings in 2006 and the Albright-Knox collection in 2007. The latter was one of the most important collections of Indian antiquities ever to appear in the auction market. Liv-

SMALL ANTIQUES STRIKE IT BIG he Mumbaibased Todywalla Auction House that specializes in sales of antiques such as coins, tokens, bank and paper notes of South Asian origin is one of the few numismatic auctioneers in the country with an antiques trading licence. Malcolm F. Todywalla, whose father Farokh Todywalla founded the auction house in 2003, says that it took them considerable time and paperwork to get a licence. It has paid off and the auction house today hosts around eight auctions a year, each with an 80% success rate. “It’s a simple demand and supply principle. The volume of demand for antiques will always exceed their supply, since it is limited,” says Malcolm.

Encouraged by their sales, the Todywallas are thinking of venturing into stone sculptures, carpets and paintings in the next few years. A highlight of their upcoming auction (valued at Rs90 lakh) in Mumbai next week is an extremely rare 1835 silver coin with a William IV bust from the Calcutta mint. Todywalla Auction House will hold its 38th auction on 11-12 September at Sunderbai Hall, Churchgate, Mumbai.

ing up to expectations, the auction generated a record-breaking sale for the Indian antiques market: A 10th century granite statue of the Hindu god Shiva was sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art for slightly more than $4 million. But Indian antiques haven’t always been in the news for such celebratory reasons. The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972, formulated to regulate the export

NUMBER OF BIDDERS PER LOT

Mumbaibased numismatic auctioneer records steady increase in sales

esearch conducted by Barclays Capital in 2005 suggested that fine art was the best performing type of asset during periods of high economic growth and inflation. The study was based on the Mei Moses art index, which tracks art auction prices from 1925. The research found that paintings and sculptures generated returns of 10.9% over the course of inflationary booms. This compared with 8.1% for property and 4.7% for stocks during the same periods. Reports such as this are what possibly prompted the purely investment-driven buying in the art during the boom, especially in buoyant markets such as India. Prices fluctuated unpredictably, making the art market a haven for wild gambles. With the recession, the modern and contemporary art market fell as rapidly as it had grown. Between May 2008 and April 2009, the overall Indian art market confidence indicator fell by 71%, according to data collected by ArtTactic, a London-based art market research firm.

in 2003

in 2009

NUMBER OF AUCTIONS

45 8 in 2003

in 2009

TOTAL VALUATION OF EACH AUCTION Old money: An 1878 bank note from Jammu and Kashmir. Estimated price, Rs3 lakh. (left) The two sides of an 1835 silver coin with a bust of William IV. Estimated price, Rs5 lakh.

lakh in 2003

lakh in 2009

Closest approximations as shared by Malcolm F. Todywalla

trade in antiquities and art treasures, was a well-intentioned law that has turned into a draconian legislative instrument over the years. Under this Act, it is illegal for any person other than the Union government to export antiquities that are more than 100 years old, making international trading almost impossible. Bringing them back to the country has proved problematic as well. Member of Parliament and liquor baron Vijay Mallya’s much-publicized difficulties in trying to bring back to India a sword that once belonged to Tipu Sultan (1750-99) is a case in point. Inevitably, this has led to the development of a grey market. Though that doesn’t seem to have deterred collectors. As Ahuja points out: “Antique collectors are by nature obsessive in their pursuit.” Several international auction houses have been under scrutiny for dealing in grey-market artefacts. Maithili Parekh, deputy director of business development, Sotheby’s, insists that the auction house runs thorough checks on an antique’s history of ownership and exchange before offering it to buyers. “Provenance

is key to fetching a good price in the international antiques market,” says Parekh The antiques on exhibit as part of the Maharaja collection draw attention to the fact that apart from artefacts that were pilfered from the subcontinent before and during the colonial era, scores of royal families sold their precious jewellery, furniture and heirlooms to buyers abroad in order to subvert the 1972 legislation that could have jeopardized the future of their family heirlooms. Ostensibly, these are now floating in the international antiques market and museum circuits legally.

Why antiques are still shining Worldwide, the antiques market is driven by elite connoisseurs. “They are not looking for quick returns and are not buying art purely as investment but as something that gives them pleasure, social cachet, and is safe and solid,” says Ahuja. It is for these reasons that extraneous economic factors did not cause much turbulence in demand, supply or prices in the antiques market. Antique prices are arrived at by

carefully studying their price indices and exchange history over several years. “There are set standards, idioms and aesthetics at work to evaluate antiques. Unlike contemporary art, it’s not up to a gallerist who feels like promoting a brand new artist at an exorbitant price,” Ahuja adds. Though stable as compared to contemporary art, the antiques market is not completely immune to trends. Today, Himalayan art is much coveted by Chinese buyers who have been aggressively collecting Tibetan Buddhist art, especially works made under the patronage of the Ming dynasty (which included devout Buddhists). And in the late 1990s, an increased scholarly focus on the Basohli school of Pahari painting from India led to a sudden leap in its prices. Still, the scale and span of price fluctuations and trends can be very different: In SaffronArt’s online Summer 2008 auction, stalwart Indian contemporary artist Subodh’s Gupta’s work (Untitled, 2006) fetched a record $1.4 million. A year later, at SaffronArt’s Summer 2009 auction, work from the same series fetched $200,000. Weigh that

Auction figures illustrate this: The total raised in the secondary art market through the auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and SaffronArt for modern and contemporary art in June was around $7.7 million, 68% lower than the turnover of Indian modern and contemporary art in June 2008. What the Barclays research also suggested—but was glossed over during the buying frenzy in the art world—was that art should be held for at least 35 years to guarantee a positive real return. Fred Hirsch, in his 1976 book The Social Limits to Growth, divides the economy into two parts—material and positional. The material part includes goods such as food and clothes while the postional includes goods whose supply is fixed and inelastic. Antiques, by Hirsch’s definition, fall in the second category. Unlike material goods that can be created with time and effort, they cannot be created, only redistributed. According to Hirsch, since these goods are not subject to value depreciation, there is not much risk in investing in them.

against this: Top-grade Chola bronzes from south India that cost around $1 million in the early 1980s sell for around $3.5 million today. Working in inflation and other factors, their price has remained more or less stable over a 30-year period.

Brushing off the dust Experts are quick to point out that despite the increased attention antiques are getting—because of greater academic interest and curatorial focus—it would be misleading to peg antiques as the new stars on the horizon. Arvind Vijaymohan, director of the arts advisory Japa Arts Pvt. Ltd, puts it succinctly, “They’ve been around; they’re the quiet second cousins to the contemporary market boom and fall.” It has been a slow and steady journey for the Indian antiques market, and one not without its battles. Antiquated laws and a cumbersome licensing system that provide a fillip to illegal export and blatant thievery are major obstacles. Despite all of this, the stone and bronze sculptures that once adorned the temples and palaces of ancient India have proved their worth.

Art crunching : The ArtTactic Indian Art Market Confidence Indicator was launched in May 2007. Data is collected every six months from a sample of 82 key Indian and international collectors, auction houses, dealers and art advisers. Source: ArtTactic.com

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS

DK BHASKAR

NAZCA, PERU

Fate lines Ancient secrets: (clockwise from left) A view of the Nazca valley; a recently unearthed unprotected mummy in a skullladen tomb; a young boy demonstrates gold processing by rotating a huge boulder; and a drawing of a condor, seen from the air.

Touch your inner Indiana Jones at the site of a great unsolved mystery of the universe B Y D .K . B HASKAR ···························· he hum of the single-engine Cessna obscured all other sound as we ascended above the Peruvian desert. Below, flat expanses of dry, brown earth extended in every direction, punctuated only by dry, meandering riverbeds, a landscape bereft of all life. Then, as the aircraft touched 500ft, the pilot’s voice floated in over the microphone: “Look at those squiggly lines...in 2 minutes, you will see the astronaut…in 3 minutes, you can spot the hummingbird, and then the whale, the monkey...” As we watched disbelievingly, the haphazard lines on the ground took on definite shapes. There, that was actually a finned tail. At the other end was a wideopen mouth. Somewhere in between was an eye, so real from this height that I felt it was staring at me. It was a giant line drawing of a whale, carved deep into the landscape. Yet another assemblage of lines yielded, piecemeal, a head, a giant beak, claws and

the open wing tips of a condor in flight. The most easily identifiable of all the drawings was the hummingbird, with its characteristic long beak and serrated wings. Except for the so-called astronaut—the most mysterious etching of all, whose disproportionately large eyes could be responsible for the popular nomenclature—all the figures would have been known to the Paracas-Nazca Indian culture, which archaeologists date between 300 BC and 900 AD. Who drew these lines? Why? And how? Bear in mind that the lines reveal the full picture only to the airborne. A Unesco World Heritage site since 1994, the Nazca lines are one of the mysteries of Andean civilization, 200 sq. km of soft flats and hillsides imprinted with 70 giant figures and some 10,000 lines. The world’s vastest open-air art gallery features recognizable figures of birds, animals, flowers—almost all of them asymmetrical, such as the spider with one leg longer than the other seven or the hand with four fin-

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

gers—as also spirals, mazes, grids and geometric motifs thousands of feet long. It’s tempting, while stunned by the magnificence of these prehistoric artworks, to buy into popular theories of their extraterrestrial origin, wonder if they were actually landing strips for alien ships from outer space. But according to German mathematician Maria Reiche, who lived in the desert for 30 years researching the drawings, the Nazca lines are of astronomical significance, with many of them pointing directly to the rising and setting points of certain celestial bodies. Another school buys partly into her view, claiming that the lines are some sort of astronomical calendar, while yet others believe they were “walking temples”. Regardless of their purpose, or how they were made—Reiche, for one, thinks their designers must have worked from smallscale models—they are as aweinspiring today as they must have been 2,000 years ago. For proof, look no further than Nazca, today a small settlement (by developing world standards) of less than 20,000 people. Seven hours away by road from the Peruvian capital of Lima, this town has a permanent place on the world tourism calendar because of these ancient lines. Curious travellers and visiting academics are the mainstay of Nazca, the reason why a fleet of small aircraft lines up 20 minutes away from town at dawn every day, waiting for aerial charters that last 30-45 minutes. The pilots speak a smattering of English, Spanish and rely on a generous share of gesticulation to communicate their wonder at the lines—which, remarkably, seems as genuine as ours. Part of the reason, of course, is that the lines are almost as good as new. Because of the incredibly dry and relatively non-windy climate (it rains for an average of 20 minutes a year in this region), the Nazca drawings have remained as their creators had intended till early this year, when unusual rains washed off the nearby PanAmerican Highway and deposited inches of sand on top of three fingers of a hand geoglyph (the correct archaeological term for the drawings). However, Maria Cecilia Bakula, director of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Cusco, told me in August that the damage was not significant and had almost been cleared up. A National Geographic documentary we saw before boarding

the plane takes as pragmatic a view of the drawings themselves. It suggests that the miles-long straight lines—all of which point, coincidentally or otherwise, to a mountain that is a water source, and the path of the sun—are “open, two-dimensional temples”, without columns, walls or roofs. If the line is the nave, the mountain or the sun’s location on the horizon is the altar, serving to guide the people as they bring ceremonial offerings for their divine benefactor. Think of it as a rudimentary GPS (global positioning system). A very sophisticated form of that guiding tool would be necessary today to get to Nazca, on Peru’s southern coast, as access lies through sand dunes that stretch as far as the eye can see. The town itself has precious little on offer: An evening tour of the Museo Antonini pretty much sums up the extent of its charms.

Exhibits include ceramics, pottery, stone tools, textiles, trophy heads, shell necklaces, human skulls, mummies, all of which have been excavated from the region since 1982, when the government began excavating the plateau between the Nazca and Ingenio rivers. Just in case one is not impressed by the Nazca lines, the museum displays sketches of ancient underground aqueducts. Some of them, museum director Giuseppe Orefeci told me, were still in working order and were used by farmers to irrigate the pampas. On our way back to Lima, a historian friend from Trinity College, Dublin, began ruminating on one fascinating commonality among ancient civilizations of the region: All of them had built cities that revealed their true shape high above, from the sky. Cusco, for instance, looks like a jaguar to the airborne, and

Machu Picchu resembles a vulture. As anyone who has spent an hour playing with Google Earth will confirm, the bird’s eye is a fascinating perspective, revealing colours, patterns and geographical features never grasped from the ground. All of this has caused some to wonder if the Nazcan civilization actually breached the final frontier. Did they know how to fly? The jury’s still out on that, but standing there, in the strange mythical landscape that nurtured these unfathomable artists and scientists, the wonder is as real as their legacy. CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

Unless they are into ancient mysteries, the Nazca lines may leave children cold. Also, the aircraft ride may be turbulent.

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

UDAYAN TRIPATHI

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

The blue period The colours of the Mediterranean touch everyone who sees them, sometimes with unpredictable but incredible results

he blue of the Mediterranean is special. There is a musical ring to that word, of course; think of Amal telling Charulata: “Mediterranean, jeno tanpurar jhonkar (Mediterranean, like running your fingers over the strings of a tanpura)”. There is a crystal clear quality to it, a certain luminosity that lies deep within the sea, which mirrors the sky. The blue has richness and depth that you don’t find elsewhere, except in some lakes. Everything looks sharper and starker, and however good your camera might be, and however many pixels it can capture, the image on your screen looks artificial, lacking the brilliance of the sea, the fishing villages and the wine estates along the shore. I had come to the Mediterranean the first time in 1994: I was in Nice, to write about a banking conference, but also keeping an eye on the central bankers sneaking off to Monte Carlo to try their luck, and the private bankers presumably exploring tourism potential in the area, by going to the beach. My wife Karuna went off to the home where Henri Matisse lived, and she got passionate as she described how Matisse, losing control over his movements as he grew older, had started cutting sheets of colourful paper, sticking them in patterns that might seem abstract at first, but which were later revealed to

FOOT NOTES

Silhouettes: The town of Collioure, where Fauvism, a shortlived art movement, began. be elegant human forms. The colour he chose was blue. Later that week, once the bankers had gone, we went to Antibes, the town further down the coast, where we saw Picasso’s home. While St Tropez brought the world’s rich and famous to parties during the summer, further along the coast, the painters and writers lived, seeking inspiration from the changing colours of the sky and the mild breeze which made the heat bearable. The colours, seen from Picasso’s windows, were vivid; the aquamarine soothed our eyes. It felt like spring was in the air. We wanted to come again. This August, after all these years, I returned to the Mediterranean with my sons. It was continuing that unfinished journey, showing my sons the region I had once seen with my wife, now no longer with us. We wanted to see the art that made her happy. We stayed with friends in a town called Collioure, where just over a century ago, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy and Matisse experimented with wild colours and launched the short-lived movement called Fauvism. The street we lived on

was named after Dufy, and along the town’s waterfront, flanked by bars and restaurants, you could see reproductions of Fauvist paintings on the wall—the sorbet of a movement between the main courses of Impressionism and Cubism. Fauvism got its name because fauve means wild beasts, and the critics who named the movement were struck by the way the colours leapt at the viewers. The terraced fields around us, with their neat symmetry, grew grapes, not rice; this region produces nearly half of France’s table wine. The water was reassuringly blue; some beaches had stones, others had sand. We saw children building castles, tossing stones in the water. We saw lovers lost in long kisses, as the sun descended gently. The sky blushed, turning pink. The wind caressed us, and you saw the lights coming alive in people’s homes, almost reluctantly, as if recognizing that the fading twilight would soon darken. We walked to the edge of the land, the colours of the buildings light blue and pink and cream and yellow and orange. And there, right at the end, stood a stark, dark cross.

That blue still remained in my mind. Later that week, we drove to Barcelona, in Spain. Our destination was the Picasso Museum, an imposing structure which houses Picasso’s works in Barcelona, or inspired by the city. As we walked through the dark rooms, we saw his pre-Cubist art—the Blue Period. The colour was as much real as a metaphor for the state of his mind. The figures were drawn deftly, human forms recognizable at first glance, and not after peeling through the layers of the cubist iconography that he was to develop a few years later in Paris. And then it happened, with startling clarity. We were in the last room, where the museum had kept its new acquisitions, not connected with Barcelona. There were half a dozen canvases, looking somewhat identical. It was getting dark outside, but the room beamed with good cheer. As you saw the paintings of the landscapes Picasso saw through his windows in Cannes, you could see the white and grey pigeons on the side, and you could almost hear their fluttering wings. The luscious green leaves of the trees seemed

palpable, as you sensed the tactile energy with which Picasso’s brushstrokes had painted those trees. The earthy brown of the wood was rich. And beyond, there was the yellow sand and the deep blue sea, with frothy waves—and the sparkle of the Mediterrenean. My sons recognized the last painting immediately. It is the one that my wife had chosen from the posters we were looking through at a shop in Nice in 1994. We had bought it then, and in the years that followed, it continued to bring some of Nice’s sunshine to our home, even during London’s bleakest autumns and dark winters. I kept staring at my sons looking at that canvas; it made me feel as though she had been walking with us while we walked through the museum, as if she had never left us, completing that journey. Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

GETOFFYOURASS RAJKUMAR/MINT

Fit for a king? The meals are meant to reflect India’s ‘royal cuisines’.

Spreading wings A new meal plan from Lufthansa has many choices, but nothing in it is spectacular

t may be all very well to taste gourmet airline food in a hotel on solid ground, but in my experience, it isn’t quite the same thing. To scientifically replicate aircraft conditions, the hotel would have to seat you next to a neighbour who persists on sneezing into your food, behind a colicky baby who shredded your nerves hours ago, and into roughly half the space required by your body. Your waiters would have to wake you from an uncomfortable nap and then set down a tiny plastic tray of food. With its Star Chef programme, Lufthansa has attempted to control at least the final part of

that process, inviting renowned chefs from across the world to design dishes for its flights. Which is how The Leela group’s chefs Surender Mohan and Farman Ali came to learn some core truths about airline cooking. “Like, we need more sauce, so that it doesn’t dry out,” says Mohan. “And we need more spices, because if you reheat the food and serve it 10 hours after preparation, it can lose a lot of its flavour.” But the challenges go beyond sauce and spice. Kishore Bhutani, a consultant for many flight-catering services, insists that when you eat on a flight,

your taste buds are virtually inert. “But your mental taste buds—they’re still expecting the sort of taste you’re used to at home or in a restaurant,” he says. The menu by Messrs Mohan and Ali is a diverse one, intended to reflect India’s “royal cuisines”, as a press release has it (although which princely state produced the stuffed chicken breast with spinach and ricotta and the bitter chocolate parfait, which we were served, is a bit of a mystery). There was a sterling lal maas, salmon tikkas that tasted like chicken, and an aggressively green palak paneer—all tasty but not spectacular, having succumbed slightly to the vagaries of the second-most hostile serving environment after airline cabins: the buffet line. Bhutani is a fund of information on the physiological changes that occur when you fly, and how they hit your appetite. Wine that may be too sweet on the ground may be just right in the air; the 1% humidity may make bread taste drier than it really is; Indian food survives better because it is usually more moist. But what, I asked Sunil Sandillya, the executive chef at Ambassador’s Sky Chef, is the first thing he would advise airborne passengers to reach for? “Fruit,” he replied. “There’s never any problem with fruit.” Samanth Subramanian Write to lounge@livemint.com

Island adventures: Take a nineday bike tour through Sri Lanka.

The peace dividend C

oming off prolonged years of militancy, Sri Lanka seems to be the flavour of the season for holiday planners. And the little teardrop-shaped island they called Serendip seems determined to get you going—any which way. Take your pick: u Bike tour GetOffYourAss is organizing a nine-day (26 September-4 October) motorbike tour through the island, starting from Negombo and passing through Kandy, Knuckles Range, Mahiyangana, Nuwareliya and Adams Peak. The route is provisional, says GetOffYourAss’ Santosh Kumar, as new routes and areas are opening up every day. As a one-off, the trip is available at special promotional prices. It will cost Rs33,500 per person for a group of six. A group of five will take costs up to Rs38,250 per person. The charges cover bike rental (options: XR 250, Suzuki Djibel, Yamaha Serova), a back-up vehicle with driver, a mechanic with minimal spares and a trip leader with prior experience. It doesn’t include airfare, food or accommodation, local driving licences, refundable bike deposits ($200, around Rs10,000) and incidentals. To sign up for the trip, call Santosh at 09845442224 or email at santosh@getoffurass.com. Participants need to report at Negombo on 26 September.

u Tuktuk race The Great Sri Lankan Tuk-Tuk Challenge starts today. Over the next 10 days, 42 drivers—divided into 20 teams—will drive the tuk-tuks across 1,200km of mountains, rainforests, coastal villages and bustling towns. It starts from Negombo and ends in Colombo, via Sigiriya, Dambana, Kandy. Spot applications are not allowed, but it’s not the end of your dream of driving the humble autorickshaw. Entries for next year’s challenge open in October. For more details, log on to www.lankachallenge.com Sumana Mukherjee

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Books ROMANCES

Bronzed men and wild flowers Our first ever historical romance series gets the history right, but the romance is sorely out of date

History reload: Will the Kama Kahani series be as popular as the last successful historical romance in film, Jodhaa Akbar?

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

···························· he thing about romance novels is that you want to imagine yourself in them. That’s why generations of girls have spent all their school and college years devouring the Mills and Boon books. It’s you in the Spanish villa, with the lingering scent of hyacinths, darting about rose gardens, anguished and confused, waiting for the dark, handsome man who attracts you in inexplicable ways. In the mirror, you may be a foul-mouthed tomboy in yesterday’s cargo pants and dishevelled hair, but within the pages of the romance novel you are doe-eyed, flighty and delicate. Fantasy is the foundation of romance and this makes Kama Kahani, a new series of historical romances, an easy read but a difficult fantasy. It is India’s first historical romance series in English, to be launched tomorrow by Random House India. Three titles— Mistress to the Yuvraj, Ghazal in the Moonlight and The Zamindar’s Forbidden Passion—will be out this month and a fourth will follow in November. The books are set in the 18th and early 19th centuries in Rajasthan, Lucknow and Bengal, respectively. The basic sketch is typically Mills and Boon: a strong (“hard chested”), tall (“towering”), handsome (“bronzed”) man riding horses, camels and carriages. The heroine is fragile, yet with a spark. The man is rich, the girl’s

Kama Kahani: Random House India, Rs150 each. family is not. There is conflict, the potential of an uprising, the threat of partition; and through it all an attraction that is confounding, yet powerful. While the premise of Kama Kahani is interesting, it is so far removed from anybody’s reality in 21st century India that it takes away the joy of fantasy in the

romance. And it is here that the books stumble. Sample this: “But she looked forward to exploring the inner chambers, the outer yards, and she couldn’t wait to meet the zamindar himself. Just imagine, meeting a real zamindar!” It’s safe to presume that imagining a real zamindar is not a prospect that rings any level of excitement in this age of reality television and MMS. And you know you are in trouble when you find yourself mentally rolling your eyes at your heroine. Milee Ashwarya, who edited the series for Random House India, differs. “We grew up hearing stories about princes and princesses and people still love them,” she says. “The romance of

an IT girl does not have that special element in it.” The novels capture the essence of that time well. Ghazal in the Moonlight intricately depicts 18th century Lucknow. The author of the book, Alessandra Shahbaz, says: “I feel the decision to write about Lucknow practically made itself... The opulence of the wazir’s court is legendary. Innumerable colonial documents describe the awe British traders felt when first glimpsing the city’s domes and spires, when catching sight of the elaborate peacockshaped pleasure boats moving up and down the Gomti. Lucknow was, to a certain extent, a city of illusion, where ideas of East and West became fetishized to an

almost delirious extreme.” If Shahbaz’s research came from books, Sangita Rathore, who authored Mistress to the Yuvraj, wrote about a past she knew and a culture she lived in. “Luckily, I belong to Rajasthan and the culture is a part of me. A few conversations with my mother about Rajput festivals, an afternoon lunch session injected with information with Narendra Singh Sarila, author of Once a Prince of Sarila, and a few museum visits to better understand the clothes they wore back then was the extent of my research for the book,” she says. Both Shahbaz and Rathore are first time novelists, and the books are considerably overwritten.

Reading them is an exercise in either skipping to the dialogues or groaning past pages. How else can you survive this: “A flower of such wild beauty was bound to be plucked. The nurse only hoped the hand would not be rough.” Or “That is not yours for the taking,” she said. “You will be so kind as to unhand it at once.” This is the problem with Kama Kahani: The impossibility of placing yourself in a situation where you say “unhand”. Ashwarya says, “Hey, it’s still Prince Charming, not executive charming.” True, but I prefer my Prince Charming in chinos, not churidars and when he comes riding in, I would rather he’s on a Harley than a horse.

such as directors David Lean and Roberto Rossellini concurring, the producer almost considered having the film made by another director. But this did not deter K. Asif, the director. The exquisite set was not demolished, and the dance sequence not dropped. For days, the cinematographer tried to locate one spot that did not reflect light. The unit was ecstatic once that spot was located, but it took another six months before the processing laboratories in London gave the technical goahead. Eventually, it took no less than 8 hours to light the sets before every single shot. The Pyaar kiya to darna kya sequence remains a reference point in the history of Indian cinema—Asif’s directorial imagination, A.K. Sayyad’s immaculate artwork, Shakeel Badayuni’s romantic lyrics, Naushad’s haunting melody, Lachchu Maharaj’s choreography, Lata Mangeshkar’s golden voice and Madhubala’s unmatched expressions and dance came together in this syncretic piece, through the lens of cinematographer R.D. Mathur. Many details of the process of making it and the idiosyncrasies of its perfectionist director Asif

Lovelorn: The author says MughaleAzam is unmatched in technique among films of its era.

MUGHALEAZAM | SHAKIL WARSI

The age of love The details, the technicians and the director who made ‘MughaleAzam’ what it is B Y S UDHIRENDAR S HARMA ···························· undreds of artisans from the nondescript town of Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, worked tirelessly for two years to put millions of small circular mirrors together to create the interiors of Sheesh Mahal. Their goal was to replicate the splendour of the Mughal era in this 3ft-high, 80ft-wide and 150ft-long makeshift glass palace, where one of the finest dance sequences of Hindi cinema was filmed—Pyaar kiya to darna kya from Mughal-e-Azam (1960)— which is deconstructed in Shakil Warsi’s new, engrossing book Mughal-e-Azam: An Epic of Eternal Love. Soon after the sets were ready came the bad news: It was impossible to shoot there because the mirrors inlaid on the walls and pillars would reflect too much light. With experts

MughaleAzam—An Epic of Eternal Love: Rupa & Co., 168 pages, Rs795.

come alive in Warsi’s book. Asif’s demand for a gold shoe for the prince was contested by the producer, but he argued, “When my hero will walk with gold shoes, his gait would be that of Prince Salim, not Dilip Kumar.” Asif was a merciless critic of his own work. Out of the 1 million ft of film that he shot over 15 years, he retained only 20,000ft. Since the story was a fictionalized romance set against a historical backdrop, he tried to blur the line between fact and fiction. But in the end, the film’s message was more philosophical,

with a literary flavour: Love transcends fear, Mangeshkar sang. “Asif firmly believed that the West emphasized on sex in romantic relations because it had failed to understand love,” writes Warsi. Using his unique technique, Asif shot a 200ft-long love sequence that did not contain any dialogue or physical contact, and yet remains one of the most romantic visuals ever in Hindi cinema. Warsi writes at length about the romantic interlude between the two lovers: While Madhubala smiles sensuously at every touch

of the feather, Dilip Kumar’s intense eyes convey the yearning. The erotic undercurrent, the silence, and the song contribute to make this a memorable scene. Mughal-e-Azam: An Epic of Eternal Love is as much about Mughal-e-Azam as it is about Asif. He lived a simple life in a two-room flat in Mumbai. Once, actor Sanjeev Kumar, his close friend, asked him to buy a plot and build a bungalow on it. “I am here to make films, not bungalows,” Asif retorted. Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

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DO YOU SUPPOSE IT’S THE EAST WIND? | MUHAMMAD U MEMON

POSTSCRIPT

Mangoes and talking trees RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

A new anthology brings many great Pakistani writers of Urdu into English

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· he iniquities of globalization have meant that even as a new generation of Pakistani writers in English have found a mass audience and not inconsiderable material rewards, Pakistani Urdu writers of the present day and of previous generations struggle on in the shadow of obscurity, neglect, or even, at best, an audience smaller than they deserve. Translation is a way out of at least the last of these predicaments, but even translation is something to which, in a consumer society, the market attaches the tag of “difficult” and, therefore, not consumer-friendly. Simply put, in a market economy it is incumbent on readers—the last players in the chain of literature, and therefore the custodians of its health as much as publishers—to cut through the hype and hubbub swirling around the front stretches of the literary market, and to look further and deeper to be willing to supply time and mind for more unusual pleasures. Such readers will certainly find much to savour in Muhammad Umar Memon’s anthology of Pakistani stories in translation, Do You Suppose it’s the East Wind? Memon is the editor of the excellent periodical The Annual of Urdu Studies, which publishes a selection of literary criticism, short stories in translation and scholarly essays every year, and can now be read online. He is also the translator of Indian writers of Urdu such as Naiyer Masud. Indeed, many of the writers in his collection, although they lived and died as Pakistanis, were born in the north of an undivided India, and they extol the beauties of a landscape which could just as well be Indian. Memon has left out

Do You Suppose it’s the East Wind? Penguin, 298 pages, Rs299. younger Pakistani writers, as if desirous of first giving the greats of the post-independence generation their due. But his selections are very astute, and there are at least half a dozen stories here of the highest calibre. Unsurprisingly, one of the best stories comes from the familiar hand of Saadat Hasan Manto. Called For Freedom’s Sake, it is set in Amritsar in the years of the freedom struggle and centres around two friends: The first, called Ghulam Ali, is a Kashmiri and wants to be a politician; the other is recognizably Manto himself. Always a sceptic of high rhetoric and noble motives, Manto writes cynically of his friend’s meteoric rise in political circles, saying that “the slogans, strings of marigold, songs of patriotic zeal and the opportunity to talk freely to female volunteers turned him into a sort of half-baked revolutionary”. As always in Manto, the mind wants one thing and the body another. His story of a political worker deeply in love with a woman in the same movement is reminiscent—although the narratorial voice is considerably more sardonic—of R.K. Narayan’s later book Waiting for the Mahatma. Some other Pakistani writers who may be only names, and not really words, to Indian readers are each given a room of their own in Memon’s anthology. In Sunlight, Abdullah Hussein tells a moving story of a man returning to his village after 20 years. Javed Shahin presents a different kind of journey, that of a son

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HOW THE RECESSION HAS FUELLED CHICK LIT

Fruit fest: One of the best stories in the book is about the king of fruits. wandering through small towns and pilgrimage centres in search of his missing mother, in If Truth be Told. While most of the stories follow the conventions of realist fiction, a charming turn is taken at the very end by Tasadduq Sohail’s The Tree, about a man who finds a tree giving him a good scolding. But perhaps the best of these stories is one about the opulence and decadence of the aristocracy of north India as revealed through their quarrels over, of all things, mangoes. In Abul Fazl Siddiqi’s Gulab Khas, every five years, on the border of Avadh and Rohilkhand in what formerly used to be known as the United Provinces, there takes place a competition for the best new breed of mango. During this great mango festival, writes Siddiqi, “The whole world was

nothing but mangoes and life was lived only for the sake of this luscious fruit.” Siddiqi (1908-1986), whose forte was stories about rural and feudal worlds, backs his claim by drenching his story in mango lore, reeling off catalogues of the best varieties, tracking with delight the conspiracies of growers to develop sublime new strains, and stretching every sinew of his prose to find words to convey the beauties of colour, flavour and texture of the fruit. Just as the Gulab Khas mango, bred by a lowly gardener, walks off with the first prize in the competition, so too Gulab Khas is the crowning glory of this excellent collection. Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf. Write to lounge@livemint.com

INSIDE LARRY & SERGEY’S BRAIN | RICHARD L BRANDT

What goes on in the minds of the duo behind Google

LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY

B Y S EEMA S INGH seema.s@livemint.com

···························· hen Richard L. Brandt told Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google Inc., that the title of his forthcoming book on the Google founders was Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain, Schmidt said: “Good luck. I’ve been trying to do that for some years.” The book starts with Schmidt’s quote, setting the pace for this page-turner as the reader tries to figure out what really goes on in the minds of the two most famous, envied and awe-inspiring Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the computer scientists who built Google. Brandt compares the creation of Google to the task of building the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. Going beyond the already documented saga, Brandt also analyses the technology and business strategy Page and Brin follow, including the initial hard bargain that they struck with the world’s two most famous venture capital firms,

and how they alone have guided the path this company is currently taking. Since most books on Google, including The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, and Google Speaks by Janet Lowe, rely heavily on published stuff (because the company rarely gives access to writers), one begins rather sceptically: What’s new? In response, Brandt has a little story. As a long-time technology writer at BusinessWeek, he was convinced that Google’s story was the one he wanted to write, having given up an opportunity to write a book on Microsoft. He invested in the company’s initial public offering (bought stocks at $85, around Rs4,300 now, and sold them for $550 before writing this book) and as a stockholder got to attend all the shareholder meetings which, in the initial years, were not open to reporters. He went to Google parties, listened in on every conference call he could and used every excuse to visit the Google campus. Eventually, when he bagged the book contract from Penguin, Google gave him access to anyone he wanted, except Brin and Page. The duo’s penchant for privacy is legendary. They work with

“paranoid secrecy”, which often makes Google look evil, very much a contradiction to its stated motto of “Don’t be evil”. But when it comes to taking decisions about technology, even the resident tech strategist, Page, decides to throw it open to Google engineers. When the company was deciding which browser to focus on while designing products, Internet Explorer or FireFox, the public debate got too heated for Schmidt’s comfort and he gave the duo a day’s deadline to arrive at an agreement. “This was a test to see what would happen,” Schmidt says in the book. But what happened was unexpected. Brin and Page gave the engineers a new set of assignments and they came up with a totally new approach— the programs would work with any browser. The book is peppered with several candid quotes. In fact, it’s one of the reasons it scores over some others—devoid of long, third-person narratives, it portrays the two characters through the eyes of those who have or still work closely with Google, folks “dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and moving around millions of dollars”.

ard times make for good writing. War, riots, terrorism, famine, anything that involves death is a gift that keeps on giving to scholars and novelists alike. But how do we write about the less spectacular malaise of economic calamity? A first-person account of the crippling loss of work, home, and identity, perhaps? Or a stunning novel laying bare the slow disintegration of love and self-respect in the face of penury. Maybe an insightful analysis that exposes the how, who, where and whys of a catastrophe. The Great Depression of the 1930s inspired all of the above and more in the US and Britain. Now these same nations are in the grip of a double-dip recession, financial meltdown and real estate crash, a perfect storm of economic misery that has prophets of doom predicting far greater woes to come. Bring on the good stuff, right? Here’s the bad news: Recession-lit is, thus, far more likely to be recession-lite, weak in literary value or scholarly heft. The good news? Some of it is a whole lot of much-needed fun in these anxious times. Recession-lit’s most popular character is undoubtedly Bernie Madoff. The colourful, flamboyant swindler-broker who conned not only his investors but all of Wall Street is an author’s dream come true. In Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff, Andrew Kirtzman paints the picture of an insecure teenager “rejected by girls who deemed him mediocre”, spurring him to conceive “a spectacularly ambitious path to conquer Wall Street at an early age”. Low self-esteem leads to hunger for money by all means necessary, creating the requisite conditions for the inevitable fall. It’s melodramatic, predictable and Gatsby-esque. Why read Kirtzman when we have Fitzgerald? If we can’t have DIANE BONDAREFF/BLOOMBERG great writing, it’s best to settle for the always satisfying cheap thrill, as in Sheryl Weinstein’s Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Bernie, Money, and Me. There’s not much “love” in this ex-mistress’ 5th Avenue: No longer for hedge fund wives. tell-all, which lets us know that Bernie dear is a “great kisser” with a small penis. “This man was not well-endowed,” claims Weinstein, confirming the Kirtzman hypothesis. There’s a lot more of the same in Jerry Oppenheimer’s Madoff with the Money, detailing his penchant for blonde secretaries. The literary problem with the current economic debacle is that its architects are irremediably inane, self-absorbed and shallow—and, therefore, perfect for chick lit—the first fictional genre to wholeheartedly embrace the recession. Hedge Fund Wives by Tatiana Boncompagni, Social Lives by Wendy Walker, The Penny Pinchers Club by Sarah Strohmeyer and The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb detail the travails of affluent women suddenly burdened with shrinking bank balances and AWOL or, worse, imprisoned banker husbands. What’s a Fifth Avenue socialite to do? Tap into her girl power, of course. “One of the big motifs in these books is a sort of empowerment,” says Jonathan Segura, an editor at Publishers Weekly, who told The New York Times, “Swathed in Gucci, Prada and what not, their protagonists realign their priorities and realize, ‘Oh, I don’t need that Givenchy gown. I can look great in Eileen Fisher, too’”. Sacrifice, it’s the American way! Recession-fiction may not be all babies and baubles, at least not according to rumours circulating at the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival. William Boyd’s latest thriller, Ordinary Thunderstorms, to be released this month, is all about corporate corruption, while the central character of Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December is John Veals, “a shadily successful and boundlessly ambitious Dickensian character who is trading billions”. Let’s just hope Faulks gives him better taste in women than Bernie. Write to Lakshmi at postscript@livemint.com

FREE VERSE | ASEEM KAUL

War Poetry The shell arrives like a line from a poem, explodes in the city’s heart. Miles away, the guns rehearse their parts, their cracked voices eager as schoolchildren. Listen, poet: can you hear the meter of your verses in the bombs thudding to earth, the bullets punctuating the sky? Step out in the street and see the planes streaking by in perfect stanzas, accents in strict order, contrails exactly rhymed; notice how light death seems, how easy, in their silver, aching lines. Aseem Kaul is the author of Étudés. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009

Culture PROFILE

When Salman Khan turns hit man With ‘Wanted’, the bad boy of Hindi cinema tries to do things his—not the director’s—way

B Y R AJEEV M ASAND ···························· he speakers are blasting a tune that Salman Khan, holding an electric guitar, is lip-syncing to in front of a crowd which is going hysterical—holding up banners, throwing caps in the air, singing along in chorus. Sporting a bright orange bandana and a black vest that he rips off his back and flings into the swarm of screaming fans after wiping the sweat off his face with it, Khan swaggers across the stage and high-fives the drummer. The cheers are deafening. The director yells, “Cut.” At a far-flung mill area in Vikhroli, the producers of London Dreams have constructed a makeshift concert hall where, for the last four nights, Khan has enthralled about 600 extras, playing out the part of a pop star. Jostling among themselves for a spot in the first row from where they can observe the star closely and possibly touch him, the extras, mostly in their 20s, are clearly having a good night. In between shots, you can hear them discuss Khan’s ripped jeans, his “mast smile” and the body they could kill for. Flamboyant star, romantic hero, temperamental, bad actor, the guy with a “good heart”—he is all of these things. But lately, Salman Khan is trying to be more. He is switching to the action genre with his next film, Wanted, in which he’s cast as a cold-blooded hit man who does risky stunts and mumbles his lines. In the period action film Veer, which will follow early next year, he’s gone all brawn again, and sports long hair. “It’s tough these days,” says

the star jokingly, stretching his legs and flexing his muscles. “Everything’s creaking. But it keeps me on my toes.” Wanted is an important film for Khan, who has not had much success in the recent past. Directed by rubberman Prabhu Deva, the film was delayed by well over a year because, according to rumour, Khan was stingy with his dates. It’s hard to put your finger on what makes Khan tick. Over 20 years, he has acted in 70-odd films and emerged as a poster boy for the slacker generation. He’s given hope to thousands of talentless wannabes who are convinced that chiselled features and rock-hard abs can be the passport to tinseltown. Think about it, it’s difficult to come up with even five films in which Khan’s work can be described as a “performance”. And yet, success has never eluded him. Bursting into the public consciousness as the shy, US-educated romantic in Maine Pyar Kiya in 1989 was a “happy accident”, Khan says. “I didn’t want to audition. The Rajshris made very traditional films and I didn’t want to do those dhotikurta kind of roles,” he recalls. It was after his dad, screenwriter Salim Khan, coaxed him to give it a shot that he agreed to show up at Sooraj Barjatya’s office. “But I demanded taxi fare, which my father’s friend ultimately gave me,” he says. Maine Pyar Kiya may have turned him into an overnight heart-throb, but the rave reviews went to his co-star. That trend continued with all his biggest hits. In Hum Aapke Hain Koun, it was Madhuri Dixit who walked away with the accolades; Kuch Kuch Hota Hai belonged to Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol; Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgan got the bouquets for Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam; and Karisma Kapoor staked claim to the success of Biwi No. 1.

Brawn power: (above) Khan’s debut film Maine Pyar Kiya; Khan jokes that he has to work much harder to do an action film now.

PTI

Not that it mattered to Khan, who responded to the incessant criticism against his sleepwalking style of acting by famously declaring: “I don’t know how to act. I simply react to situations.” His best work has been in films in which he wasn’t even the main protagonist. Such as Khamoshi: The Musical, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in which, as the affable musician Raj, he served as the perfect foil to Nana Patekar and Manisha Koirala’s intense father-daughter relationship. He’s had better luck with comedies. Establishing a winning partnership with David Dhawan, who was the first filmmaker after Rajkumar Santoshi (Andaz Apna Apna) to recognize his flair for buffoonery, Khan delivered a string of hits, including Judwaa, Biwi No. 1, Dulhan Hum Le Jayenge, Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya? and Partner. “He’s the only actor, after Amitabh Bach-

Living on the edge The terminally ill come to life in Mahesh Dattani’s new play B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· t’s a relationship that has lasted more than two decades and the chemistry is so evident that the two are often desribed as a married couple when they work together. Sahitya Akademi award-winning playwright Mahesh Dattani and actor and director Lillete Dubey are back in their fourth production as a team. In keeping with their passion for exploring issues that are beyond the familiar and the obvious, Brief Candle, which is being produced by Dubey’s Primetime Theatre Company, addresses not just the joy of life but the pain of dealing with cancer and mortality. “We started with Dance Like a Man in 1995 and the last play we worked on together was 30 Days

in September, which was about child sexual abuse,” says Dubey, adding that the adroit play of emotions in Brief Candle lends an immediacy to issues of life and death. “Mahesh gave me two topics to pick from and I chose this one. The form of the play, I found, was very contemporary, yet surreal.” The play begins with a dying Vikas on a hospital bed, pleading with the ward boy for morphine. Deepika, his doctor, stands at a distance, looking helpless, knowing she cannot do much. The story blends into a rehearsal for a play, written by Vikas, that will be performed by other patients in the hospital, the ward boy and the doctor. This play within the play is a bedroom farce and, through the course of the rehearsal, the actors begin to see startling similarities between themselves and the characters they are playing. A few laugh at their portrayal by the dead playwright, and others struggle when confronted with the truth, and their own demons. “I don’t think I have delved on

Burning bright: The cast includes Joy Sengupta (in a blue shirt) and Suchitra Pillai (foreground). the theme of death and love in my previous plays,” says Dattani, who, with his portrayals of India’s urban middle class over the years, has built an oeuvre that is as much a kind of social record of our particular universe as an empathetic exploration of how people treat themselves and those around them. “I guess I am growing older, and having seen both my parents pass on, I have somehow entered a new phase in my life and hence in my writing. I

felt unburdened in a way after I wrote it. It seems like it was playing on my mind for almost a couple of years.” Once he had finished writing, Dattani wrote a note to Dubey thanking her for asking him to write the play. For the director, the play’s selling point is the form in which the story plays out. In spite of a complex plot, the play has a fairly linear narrative. “The duality of the play really appealed to me. It’s a curious mix of humour

and tragedy with a heady mix of anger, hurt and other emotions thrown in,” she says. “In addition to that, he has used music in a powerful fashion right through the play, and you feel your emotions peak.” While Dattani had visualized an elaborate set that would make a constant statement of imminent death, Dubey has leaned towards a positive projection, making the play more about life instead. In spite of the subject, Dattani

chan and Govinda, who can turn even the most ordinary scenes around with the slightest voice deflection, or by delivering the same dialogue differently,” Dhawan says. To give credit where it’s due, Khan’s lethargic body language and lack of self-consciousness work as a perfect leveller to the more hyperactive players Dhawan casts against him. In Partner, for example, Govinda’s relentless energy is matched step-by-step with Khan’s calm confidence. In Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya? he allows his younger brother Sohail Khan to steal the show with a twitchy, manic tic of the face while he settles for the seemingly simpler straight comedy. The recurring complaint against Khan has always been about his indifference, his lack of respect for people’s time, and his general unwillingness to follow directions—even from his directors. There have been instances of punches being thrown around even on sets. But if there are many detractors, there are many in the industry who vouch for his “good heart”. Directors such as Bhansali, Dhawan, Boney Kapoor and Sajid Nadiadwala have repeatedly signed him on. Khan himself seems to have got a little rattled by the success of contemporaries such as Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar. Ask him the career question today, and the answer is introspective. “For years directors have told me to trust in them and go along with their ideas, their vision. I have disagreed with them vehemently on occasions, but they’ve always insisted that they’ve been around longer than me,” he says. “But when those films flop, they’re counted as Salman Khan’s duds. So now when they ask me to trust them, I say: ‘You trust me. I’ve been around just as long as you have. Let me do it my way.’” Rajeev Masand is the entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN. Write to lounge@livemint.com

insists the play doesn’t even border on tragedy. “Although there is death, I do not want to classify it as a tragedy. In tragedy, you are left with a great sense of loss. It is a comedy in the true sense of the word because it does leave you with a sense that the characters have gained some understanding of their lives,” he says. Brief Candle features a strong cast, which includes Joy Sengupta, Amar Talwar, Suchitra Pillai and Zafar Karachiwala. The story is that of Vikas, but woven around it are the real anxieties of the other terminally ill patients, the repressed ward boy whose reticence is magnified by the class that he belongs to, the breast cancer patient who discovers her sensuality, and finally, their realization of the fragility of life. Brief Candle will be performed on 6 September at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Bangalore. Tickets can be booked online at www.indianstage.in or www.indiaplaza.in. Tickets are also available at select Café Coffee Day outlets in the city. It will play in New Delhi at the Kamani Auditorium on 24 and 25 October, and will travel to Kolkata in January.

CULTURE L17

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FILM

Trials of a nameless hero ‘Mohandas’ uses the classic man againstthesystem theme to interpret modern India

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On location: The film was shot in UP’s Sonbhadra district, which borders MP, in 40 days; it is Kamran’s (below) first feature film.

always his. Many films by Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Chetan Anand, Manmohan Desai, and later, parallel cinema directors such as Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, had messages that reflected the dominant socialist ethos of the times. When Kamran decided to collaborate with his friend Uday Prakash, the critically acclaimed writer of Hindi short stories, for a screenplay of Prakash’s book of the same name, they consciously sought to expand the canvas of the real life story on which the book is based—that of Shobhalal of Gunwari in Madhya Pradesh— and not turn it into a morality tale with song and dance or a dark film about the oppressed poor. In real life, Shobhalal got a job in a coal mine in his youth, but before he could join, his appointment letter disappeared and he later realized that one of his relatives had changed his name to Shobhalal and taken the job. Against many odds, Shobhalal proved his identity and got the job back. It took him about a decade. The farcical, yet very real outlines of the story and what it said about India egged the writers on. “I wanted the film to have a sweep of the nation. Mohandas’ story has a trajectory that moves to the big city (Delhi). As a character, although he lives in a village and moves to a small town, he could be anywhere.

The film is as much about the state of our country as about Mohandas,” says Kamran. The protagonist’s name intrigued many critics in the West. Shobhalal was changed to Mohandas because, says the director, he wanted the “idea of Gandhi” to be superimposed on the story. “Gandhi would have concern for a man like Mohandas. Someone who is naive and comes from a powerless background, but who is bright and needs the opportunity. Gandhi would believe that this guy should

be protected,” says Kamran, an experienced cinematographer who made his debut with Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. Beginning in a village where Mohandas (Nakul Vaid) is born to a poor family, the action shifts to the town of Anuppur, where he gets a job with the Oriental Coal Mines. The film then moves to a newsroom in Delhi where Meghna (Sonali Kulkarni), the reporter, receives a videotape in which a harrowed Mohandas claims his identity has been stolen. Meghna travels to Anuppur and unearths the bizarrely sinister plot that Mohandas is a victim of. The imposter is another local (played by Sushant Singh). Along the way, as identities are unmasked, an activist lawyer (Aditya Srivastava) gets involved. The film is worth a watch. Although its tone is overwhelmingly preachy in parts, Kamran captures the details of the mining town with care, creating a universe teeming with petty bureaucrats, political goons and the silent common man, and cloaked by white dust and concrete. The acting is competent—Nakul Vaid, who plays the lead, is an actor with promise. Prakash’s writing has satire and sarcasm. Mohandas released in theatres on Friday.

Step across this punchline What humour will American standup acts bring to India? B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· ould you believe it? Even comedy’s been outsourced!” English-language Indian comics in the US and Europe have grown steadily in popularity over the last few years, from the now instantly recognizable Russell Peters to newer celebrities such as Papa CJ (responsible for the above joke) and Sugar Sammy. Courtesy YouTube some of their fame has reached India too, where Peters and CJ have earlier performed to sell-out audiences. Come 9 September, and an entire festival awaits stand-up comedy fans. The Big Laugh Festival, organized by the event management company Percept D’Mark, will feature Papa CJ, Sugar Sammy and Palestinian-American comic Aron Kader. “The main idea is to bring international stand-up comedians from around the globe that will appeal to the evolving Indian sense of humour,” says Manuj Agarwal, chief operat-

NANDINI RAMNATH

WHY ROWDY ACTS ARE GOOD FOR TAMIL FILMS

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA ···························· n one of the first few scenes in the new film Mohandas, a feisty television news reporter tries to convince her editor to let her pursue the story of a man in Anuppur, Madhya Pradesh, who has “lost” his name, and subsequently, his identity. The editor is dismissive of her socialist zeal. “Yeh Munshi Premchand ka zamana nahin hai (This is not the era of Munshi Premchand),” he shrugs. But the reporter does not give up. She travels to Anuppur to find the real Mohandas, a young man in his 20s. Talented but without any wealth or pedigree, angry but powerless, Mohandas is Everyman, reminiscent of many of Premchand’s protagonists. His name has been stolen by another man who has taken his job in a coal mine, and by the time the reporter arrives, he has almost given up fighting against a corrupt government and local politicians to reclaim what is rightfully his. It’s a classic motif in Indian cinema: Man pitted against an unjust system. And sadly, never an obsolete one, although only a few filmmakers have explored it in recent times. Mohandas, directed by Mazhar Kamran, uses it in the context of today’s India—where cities are undergoing concrete makeovers, urbanization is changing small towns, and the aspirations of rural and mofussil India are evolving rapidly. Until the 1990s, our cinema thrived on catharsis-inducing revenge of the underdog. If not revenge, poetic justice was

STALL ORDER

ing officer of Big Laugh. Rather than a one-off series, the organizers plan to introduce a more healthy stand-up calendar. “All metropolitan cities that have hosted English comedy acts have had a great turnout. Throughout the year, we will be bringing down artists to perform in various cities under the Big Laugh Festival banner,” says Vishal Shetty, entertainment consultant at Percept D’Mark. The three comics tread familiar stand-up territory in their US shows: racial profiling and discrimination, jabs at outsourcing and the Indian diaspora, and the seemingly perplexing multiplicity of Indian religious traditions and customs (arranged marriage and reincarnation are particularly popular targets). Their material will be explicit, and often half-afloat in the murky, provocative waters of political incorrectness. Most of their stand-up is a mix of improvisation and rehearsed routines, and they promise fresh material at their upcoming shows. “Touring has been amazing. It’s a very unique position to be in for any comedian to travel and I relish the opportunity,” says Samir Khullar, or Sugar Sammy. “I always gear my set to my environment. It changes not only from country to country, but city to city.”

Sammy’s act will shift seamlessly between three languages, “a mix of English, Hindi and Punjabi. A North American vibe with Indian sensibilities”. His acts feature a lot of impromptu interaction with the audience, a style familiar to Peters fans. Kader (pronounced “kayduhr”) is perhaps the odd one out, the only comic in the planned line-up who isn’t of Indian descent. He’s one of the four founding members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, a travelling troupe of Egyptian, Iranian and Palestinian comics in post-9/11 America (sample gag: If I ever have a son, I’m going to name him Al. Al Kader. That’s a good name to have in this country)—and will be visiting the country for the first time. “I have never been to India so I am really excited to see and experience something new,” he says. “I plan to examine the subject of racial profiling and discrimination of Indians and Arabs, maybe have a little competition to see who’re the bigger victims!”

Laughtrack: Sugar Sammy’s routine will be a mix of Hindi, English and Punjabi.

The Big Laugh Festival starts in New Delhi on 9 September, moves to Mumbai on 10-11 September, and to Bangalore on 12 September. Tickets are Rs350-1,500, and can be booked online at www.bookmyshow.com

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A preview of the works in ‘Exhibit A’, a photography show at Tao Gallery, Mumbai, at www.livemint.com/taoart.htm

uddenly, everybody is an expert on Tamil cinema. Everybody knows what Tamil leading men look like (short, plump, hairy) and what the leading ladies dress like (shiny saris, pointy blouses). The average Tamil hero is adept at throwing cigarettes in the air and lighting them with guns, while the Tamil heroine can trump the Egyptians at belly-dancing. Tamil movies are full of declamatory dialogue that’s delivered at glass-shattering volumes. Hollywood has the Wild West. Indian cinema has the Sizzling South. Thanks to YouTube, hip Indians and their nostalgic non-resident Indian cousins who bemoan the death of the masala-laden Hindi film spectacle can take comfort from southern fare. 28 August saw the release of a whole movie dedicated to the lost world of over-the-top cinema. Quick Gun Murugun evokes almost every stereotype associated with Tamil movies and seeks to simultaneously parody and pay tribute to the southern way of storytelling. But the postmodern irony specialists north of the Vindhyas tend to overlook the sea change that has taken place in Chennai in the last few years. Chennai is still cranking out spicy formula-driven fare, but several young film-makers are also reworking well-worn plots and stock characters in new and exciting ways. Among the more interesting Tamil films in recent years are Ameer Sultan’s Paruthiveeran and Sasikumar’s Subramaniapuram. Both films belong to what I call the “rowdy genre”. They are set in the Tamil heartland (Paruthiveeran in a village, Subramaniapuram in Madurai) and are about young and aimless men who deal with forbidden love, violence and caste politics. There have been countless Tamil movies about men being chased with sickles and choppers through paddy fields for falling in love with high-born women. What makes these films special is the casting of relatively unknown actors, the realistic settings, the intelligent integration of songs and dances into the plots, and the attention given to camerawork and production design.

Real reels: Subramaniapuram, a recent film, is set in Madurai. Other movies take the best of mainstream and parallel cinema and manage to be entertaining as well as thought-provoking. Actor Prakashraj, who earns his cheques by hamming it up as villain or policeman, runs a production house that rolls out feel-good films about middle-class families. Mozhi and Abhiyum Naanum, both of which have been produced by Prakashraj, are sweet and endearing movies with simple stories, smart dialogue and believable characters. Offbeat movies such as Bala’s Naan Kadavul and Cheran’s Autograph were box-office hits, making it easier for films such as Paruthiveeran, Subramaniapuram and Sasi’s Poo to get produced and distributed. Of course, Tamil directors have it easier than their Hindi counterparts, in that they’re talking to a much more uniform group of viewers who share a common language and culture. It’s simpler to address one Indian state and the Tamil diaspora than it is to reach out both to Hindi speakers who’re scattered across the country and the globe as well as multilingual Indians who have embraced Hindi cinema over the years. Yet what the new Chennai films possess is the will—and the nerve—to tell old stories in new ways, which isn’t always evident in Mumbai. Contemporary Tamil film-makers are reaping the benefits of experiments conducted in the past. Since the 1960s, K. Balachander has made several domestic dramas that brought taboo topics into the open. Among Balachander’s best-known films is Avargal, in which a woman divorces her sadistic husband and contemplates remarrying her former lover. In Apoorva Raagangal, a young man falls for a woman old enough to be his mother, while the woman’s daughter has a relationship with the young man’s father. Balachander’s films were classic melodramas that eventually upheld the sanctity of the family, but they are also memorable for their use of metaphor-laden imagery, the strong roles given to women, and probing commentary into social hypocrisy. Balu Mahendra, who is best known outside Tamil Nadu as the director of Sadma, pioneered a naturalistic style of acting and cinematography. Mahendru’s influence is most strongly felt in Mani Ratnam’s films. Balachander and Mahendru are just two film-makers who prove that it’s possible to entertain without insulting the intelligence. The next time you google for “Rajinikanth lighting cigarette”, also look out for scenes from Paruthiveeran or Subramaniapuram. They will boggle the mind. Nandini Ramnath is the film editor of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | LIVING JEWELS OF INDIAN JUNGLE

TRAVELLING TIFFIN

A tiger on Malabar Hill PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY

Stanley Henry Prater, a British naturalist and writer, chronicled tiger sightings in Mumbai in the early 20th century. We excerpt an essay by him from ‘Living Jewels of Indian Jungle’, a new book on Indian wildlife published by the Bombay Natural History Society

MARRYAM H RESHII

THE ROAD TO KASHMIR O ne of the few compensations for the long, arduous and boring road journeys that the Reshii family undertakes on its annual migration from Delhi to Kashmir is the eating places en route. Absolutely none of them, let it be said, fall into the category of fine-dining or five-star pampering. Yet every year, by common consensus, we stop at the same highway eateries and eat exactly the same dishes we’ve always had. First outside Delhi is Rajpura, where Eagle Hotel serves an outstanding dal makhni. Eagle was probably a mud dhaba (eatery) in a previous avatar. It’s my belief that it upgraded itself to its present banquet hall status (the highest you can get on this particular route) by virtue of its dal. It’s cooked long and slow; Eagle doesn’t muck around with tomatoes, the way Delhi restaurants do. Each grain of dal plops against your palate with the softest, most liquid crunch, broken only by the flavour of ghee so pure you just know it’s a local farm product. We tend not to stop at Panipat, way before Rajpura, because of many unsuccessful attempts to find the original Pachranga achar. This pickle, Panipat’s chief claim to culinary fame, is made of five vegetables and is bottled or canned by every second shop in the little town. I had been told that the original inventor had a product that was way better than the competition, but all our efforts to locate it (at around 10pm, when we usually pass Panipat) have ended in disappointment. Early morning tea is at Lakhanpur, only because that unlovely town is the gateway to the state of Jammu and Kashmir and authorities tend to check permits and luggage with unholy zeal, while lines of vehicles switch off their engines in resignation, to the delight of an army of tea-sellers. The Jammu-Srinagar stretch is a real treasure trove for good eating. One of the dhabas in Peerah has a fabulous reputation for the best rajma chawal (red kidney beans and rice) on the route. Regular travellers time their lunch halt there. Prem di Hatti in Kud sells the most delicious, buttery, ghee-soaked patisa in the state. The little hill town is cool even in the heat of summer, and first-timers can be seen blundering down the road, trying to figure out which is the original sweet shop among the plethora of pretenders. Closer to Srinagar, but still in the Jammu province, is Narsu Nallah. Two tumbledown huts with a slushy courtyard, it’s the very first place on the route to serve noon chai (Kashmiri salted tea) and has the only maize flour rotis on the entire route. Once we cross the Banihal tunnel, the race is on to reach home as fast as possible, so there are no stops. For sheer consistency year after year, these modest roadside eateries get my vote.

Bean there: Rajma in J&K is different from the Punjabi version.

Rajma

large tiger was shot in the vicinity of the Vehar Lake, Salsette on Tuesday, January 22, 1929. The animal was killed by Mr. J.J. Sutari, to whom I am indebted for the following particulars. Mr. Sutari and a party of friends were out after the usual type of game the Salsette jungles provide, which is mainly wild boar. They took up their positions in the vicinity of the south end of the lake shortly after sunset and waited for something to turn up. Towards 10 p.m. Mr. Sutari’s attention was aroused by the sounds of some animal approaching. One can well imagine his astonishment when a tiger walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The tiger came steadily on, when at a distance of 12 yards, Sutari fired his 12-bore loaded with ball and dropped the animal in his tracks. The tiger in question, a straggler from the main land, probably crossed over by swimming the Thana Creek. An animal doing so would find immediate shelter in the jungles which cover the hilly portions of Salsette. Tigers appear to have been fairly plentiful in Salsette at the end of the eighteenth century. Hector MacNeil (Archaelogia, vol. vii, 1873) tells us that in 1761 “the Governor and most of the gentlemen of Bombay used to

Flora and fauna: (clockwise from top) A painting shows a tiger entering a village; a painting of a Pinkheaded Duck, a bird that was common in Mumbai in the 1920s; and a painting by J.P. Irani.

go annually on a pleasure party to Salsette to hunt Wild Boar and Royal Tiger both of which were found there in great plenty.” Records of the occurrence of tiger in these islands during the nineteenth century are few and far between. In 1806, two tigers were seen near General Macpherson’s bungalow at Kurla, while a few days previously two persons were carried off from a village a little further north, it is presumed by the same animals. On February 9, 1822, a tiger on Malabar Hill came down and quenched its thirst at Gowalia Tank and ran off up the hill between the Hermitage and Prospect Lodge. The imprint of its feet were clearly visible the next morning (Bombay Courrier, February 10, 1822). The Bombay Courrier of December 1829 records the

sudden appearance of a tiger at Mazagon, the animal apparently swam across the harbour and landed near the ruined Mazagon fort. It was driven into the compound of Mr. Henshaw’s bungalow where it was eventually shot by the guard of the Dockyard and several Arabs. It measured 8’ 8”. On March 2, 1858, the crew of the steamer Aden killed a large tiger which was swimming across to Mazagon from the opposite shore. The animal attempted to board a small boat and was kept off with hand pikes by the lascars. It was eventually dispatched with “six balls through its head”. (Bombay Times, March 6, 1858). In May of the same year a tiger was killed in Mahim woods by a young Portuguese, while on January 26, 1863, another tiger was killed at Mahim after mauling a Parsi

cart-owner and committing other damage. (Bombay Times, January 27, 1863). James Douglas (Bombay and Western India) writing about tigers in Salsette gives an amusing narrative of a “traveller (was it Silk Buckingham?) in Salsette who was suddenly surprised by his palkee being dropped and the coolies bolting. The palkee was closed, and he soon felt outside the Jhilmils something of a fee-faw-fum character. Stripes was wide awake and the coolies, up a tree, were wide awake also. He didn’t sleep much that night I tell you.” In 1907, a tiger was shot at Pir Pau, Trombay, near Sandow Castle by Mr. Mullan of the Bombay Port Trust. This with the one cited above are the most recent records. Living Jewels of Indian Jungle, published by BNHS, 204 pages, Rs1,600. The pre-publication price of the book, to be ordered from BNHS directly by 12 September, is Rs1,000. For details, call 022-22821811.

Serves 4 This is an approximation of the way the dhaba at Peerah would make rajma, which differs from the Punjabi way. No tomatoes are used in Jammu and Kashmir, while in Punjab they would not be left out. Since this is a dal, no garam masalas are used, except badi elaichi (black cardamom). Ingredients 250g red kidney beans 1 large onion, sliced 1 heaped tsp Kashmiri chilli powder 1 tsp turmeric powder K tsp fennel powder (saunf) 1 black cardamom 2 tbsp vegetable oil K tsp pure ghee Salt to taste Method Wash the red kidney beans. Soak overnight so that they are easier to boil. The Jammu region has a wide variety of rajma beans: the dhaba at Peerah uses the smallest ones. Pressure-cook in plenty of water, with salt and the black cardamom, till the beans are done. In a small wok, add oil and fry the onion till light brown, then add the turmeric, fennel powder and, lastly, the chilli powder, taking care that the spices do not burn. Pour them into the pressure cooker, stir well and let it simmer with the lid off till the gravy has acquired the desired thickness and any excess water has evaporated. Lastly, heat the ghee and pour on top so that the beans become infused with the fragrance. Write to Marryam at travellingtiffin@livemint.com www.livemint.com

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