Lounge for 02 July 2011

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

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 27

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Man and machine: Mumbai­based custom bike builder Akshai Varde has inscribed one of his creations with the Hanuman Chalisa.

LOAFING AROUND >Page 8

THE SILENT EPIDEMIC

Endometriosis afflicts 176 million women in their productive years and is worsened by society’s taboos about gynaecological health >Page 6

THE ENEMY IN OUR HANDS

The world’s best bike manufacturers are making a beeline for India, launching their high­performance machines for a niche, passionate yet growing market >Pages 9­11

Following the trail of the Afrikaner pioneers, you discover wild beauty and reconciliation >Page 12

THE NEW WHEEL BARONS GAME THEORY

LUXURY CULT

ROHIT BRIJNATH

RADHA CHADHA

THE HONG KONG RELIVING THE OLD MAGIC, MOMENTARILY ADVANTAGE

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always wondered if Roger Federer collects art, visits museums, shrugs on a tuxedo and wanders off to the ballet to see racket-less versions of himself. Dancers, in their exquisite athleticism on a stage, in their suppression of pain during performance, are clearly athletes. The reverse occurs less frequently when an athlete produces such a harmonious yet lethal rhythm we liken it to dance. Dutch TV was so taken with footballer Marco van Basten that they did a split-screen comparison between him and a ballet dancer. >Page 4

CULT FICTION

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was in Hong Kong last week, and the buzz in this luxe-loving city wasn’t about the latest “it” bag—it was about the newest luxury IPO. Prada just raised $2.1 billion (around `9,500 crore) and began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 24 June.

You may well ask why a deep-rooted Italian company like Prada is saying pass to the Milan Stock Exchange—and for that matter, Paris, London, New York, all arguably better roosting places for a luxury stock... >Page 4

R. SUKUMAR

THE ANGRY OLD MAN

Aravind Adiga’s new novel chronicles the real estate wars of Mumbai and creates its own riff on the ‘Bombay novel’ >Page 14

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

INSIDE THE BATMAN GYRE

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f you are into math—this writer is, at least a teeny bit—and know a bit about William Butler Yeats’ fascination with geometry, the word gyre is sure to have some appeal for you. The gyre, of course, refers to the set of intersecting conical helixes central to Yeats’ world view, and is part of pop culture thanks to its appearance in Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall... >Page 15

FILM REVIEW

DELHI BELLY

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

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | STRIKER, GURGAON

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI

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Flavourful: Striker, the new beer brewery at Gurgaon, serves four varieties.

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love my beer really frosty and for a change I was at a beer bar that got it just right. Striker is said to be the fifth brewery to set up shop in Gurgaon, Haryana, and every glass of beer at this month-and-a-half-old brewery is served in a pre-chilled beer mug. At least that was the case the afternoon I was there.

The good stuff Finally, not another sports bar disguised as a brewery. Sure, all the arrangements are there to ensure you don’t miss your “important” cricket or tennis matches, but in the evening (“unless the World Cup or Wimbledon final is on”), music rules the house.

Our server, who did not know we were there for a review, insisted that we try out the four-beer sampler rather than order the 500ml mugs of each variety straight off the menu. But was he independently knowledgeable about which beer to order? When we asked him to explain the different types of beers, he hollered for help from the brewery manager.

Of the four beer varieties available, the only one that had a snappy taste was the Weiss Blues. This wheat beer stood out perhaps because it is brewed using a yeast that is different from the other three (Jazzy Light, Country Pilsner, Rock Bock. The

brewery only plays four genres of music: jazz, country, rock and Blues, and the beers are named after these).

Another good thing about this one was that it had just about enough flavour without being overbearing, and had a malty taste that set it apart from the others. One of them was way too bitter (Rock Bock) and the others just plain insipid and uninspired.

Striker offers packages for corporate groups (a minimum of 20 people). For `699 per person (taxes extra), a group can enjoy an unlimited supply of four pre-ordered snacks and beer for three hours. As of now, no advance booking is necessary.

Currently, Striker has live band performances twice a week (Monday and Friday). The food menu is not too extensive but has Indian, Chinese and Continental sections, and the nonvegetarian and vegetarian platters are value for money. We tried crispy corn with roasted garlic (`225), a zingy preparation of batter-fried corn kernels mixed with red bell peppers, fresh coriander and green chillies.

The not­so­good We were there for the beer and when only one of four beers works, a revisit is unlikely. There was hardly any difference between Jazzy Light and Country Pilsner—you are sup-

posed to tell a beer apart from its taste, not its colour or cloudiness. In true bitter-beers-are-dark tradition, Rock Bock was a dark mustard colour but it was almost impossible to taste the smoky flavour described on the menu or whether the alcohol content was higher than the others—it’s almost a per cent higher than the other three. Perhaps having a Bangalore-based brewmaster (who, we are told, visits the brewery every week) is not such a good idea in the life of a new brewery.

The house recommendation of Beer Batter Fish (`395) fell flat because the batter had no flavour/ taste of beer and the accompanying condiment could do with some serious rethinking.

PS: Handing grubby and stained menu cards to customers within the first couple of months reflects poorly on hygiene standards.

Talk plastic Each 500ml glass is priced at `165 and a 1,500ml pitcher is priced at `1,435 (taxes and service charge extra). Cocktails start at `295 and snacks at `225 (taxes extra).

I enjoyed Mayank Austen Soofi’s thorough survey of conventional wisdom about Delhi Belly (“We’re landing in Delhi, loosen your belts”, 25 June)—great idea for a story. However, I want to challenge R.V. Smith’s claim that the phrase originated among British soldiers encamped on the Ridge in 1857. I don’t doubt that the phrase has existed since English was first spoken in Delhi, but to be fair, soldiers laying siege would have eaten military rations, not local food, which is implicitly what gives you Delhi Belly.

I would give the credit to a different set of soldiers—the American GIs posted in Delhi during World War II whose non­combat duties gave them plenty of time to dine and drink around Connaught Place. They also published army newspapers, such as the ‘CBI Roundup’, which gave fair coverage to “what the waggish Queensway literati (i.e., themselves) have affectionately named the ‘Delhi Belly’” (‘CBI Roundup’ , 3 December 1943).

The ‘Roundup’ of 24 September 1942 records that the US armed forces hospital that opened in Delhi was mainly occupied with treating 43 cases of Delhi Belly. Mock­defending the rigours of life in a rear­echelon headquarters, the issue of 12 April 1945 explains that “latrine­trotting by GIs with the ‘G.I.s’ is a highly developed art”. Nationalists will be glad to know that Karachi, the troops’ entry point to this theatre of the war, was also cursed with “Karachi Krud”—although that doesn’t seem to have stuck.

Whether or not the American GIs first invented the phrase, they certainly owned it.

RAGHU KARNAD

IN DEFENCE OF KAPALBHATI Apropos Gayatri Jayaraman’s “Is Kapalbhati killing you?”, 25 June, I have been practising Kapalbhati the way Baba Ramdev teaches it for seven years. I know at least 50 people, family and friends, who have learnt it from Ramdev and have been practising it. We’ve seen wonderful results, in both mind and body. To prove this, my friends and I are ready to get medical tests done anywhere in the world. I live in the US and my annual health reports can be given on demand.

SIDDHARTH

DANGER AHEAD Gayatri Jayaraman’s “Is Kapalbhati killing you?”, 25 June, was a great article. I wish people would understand that the article was not about a particular person or practice, but about the fact that “treatment” of any kind has to be done in the correct way and under the right guidance. A simple medicine like Crocin, taken incorrectly, can damage the liver.

Never learn yoga from a friend or by just watching it on TV. If you want to do it seriously, then learn it “correctly”. Go to the camps held by Baba Ramdev, etc., where experts can verify that “you are doing it the right way or if not, correct you”.

If readers take the article in the right sense, they would understand that it has a totally different perspective.

SP

EYE­OPENER

At Global Foyer mall, Sector 43, Gurgaon.

Firstly, I’d like to thank Gayatri Jayaraman for her article “Is Kapalbhati killing you?”, 25 June. My husband saw it and forwarded it to me. Any form of excessive or careless and unsupervised exercise regimen, be it yoga or some other format, is bad. I do practise Kapalbhati, though not regularly. Thanks to the article, I’ll now be more careful during my yoga sessions.

SHIKHI DAS NATH

Seema Chowdhry

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

The perfect dancer rules, though momentarily

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KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AP

always wondered if Roger Federer collects art, visits museums, shrugs on a tuxedo and wanders off to the ballet to see racket-less versions of himself.

Dancers, in their exquisite athleticism on a stage, in their suppression of pain during performance, are

clearly athletes. The reverse occurs less frequently when an athlete produces such a harmonious yet lethal rhythm we liken it to dance. Dutch TV was so taken with footballer Marco van Basten that they did a split-screen comparison between him and a ballet dancer. In our imaginations, we have done the same when Michael Holding ran in, Michael Jordan climbed air, Cubans boxed. But Federer owned more grace that appeared legally permissible.

From 2004-07, when he won 11 of his majors, his winning was rivalled by the method of his winning, his whispering feet, the symmetry of his stroke, or what we might call his elegant reinterpretation of tennis. Some days I wanted the scoreboard to be shut off, the umpire dismissed, the opponent required only to complete the illusion of a contest.

But this was the was of Federer, the past. The present of Federer is being “amazed” by Jo-Wilfred Tsonga at Wimbledon, when once he did the amazing. The present is a mail on Thursday from my mother—who has no affection for sport but like so many others was lured by his beauty—that read poignantly: “Inconsolable—no

more tennis viewing for me.” Federer may still have life, as Brian Phillips wrote wonderfully, but it doesn’t alter the reality that this Federer, whose months without a major title we now prosaically count, is different.

Yet I am taken by this experience of watching an old Federer (or a new Federer occasionally finding his old self).

His matches contain a tension, they are almost stressful, for once you sat back calmly as if at a theatre, now you crouch forward on the couch, you might not change a sitting position, the sort of superstitious nonsense that was never associated with him. His face seems different, though maybe it’s only our own uncertainty reflected back on him.

Once he casually strode courts as if they were athletic catwalks, now he looks as if he’s in a match, as if he is forced to compete, as if he’s not entirely sure. His polish has worn off and he won’t admit to it—for how can he admit to it, for this would be Superman accepting he can’t locate a phone booth any more. And so he cries, he’s been sarcastic, he’s been defensive, he’s been human, saying after Wimbledon, “I don’t feel discouraged,” when this is what the others were

Out of tune: This was the first Grand Slam match Federer lost after leading 2­0. supposed to say.

Age is tugging at his designer collar just enough. When he got to the French final it was a surprise and since when did Federer in a final surprise? At Wimbledon, even when fluent, there was just the suggestion that if he’s not on his game then he’s in trouble. That aura of command now has small rents of hesitancy. It’s there against Rafael Nadal, it was there against Novak Djokovic at the French where he had 25 break points but converted only four, it was there against Tsonga. But he beat Djokovic in Paris, despite all this, and for people who are new to tennis, this is

instructive: One way to tell how good he was—the best ever I have seen—is by how good he is as he descends.

But mostly, what is fascinating and different about this Federer is the waiting. In his prime, he had 6-0 sets on four occasions in Grand Slam finals, one long majestic dance through a set, but now he is a limping Baryshnikov, so now you must wait for the one shot no one else can imagine, or construct, because they neither have the wrist nor daring nor conceit nor dazzle to play it. Once the shot just came.

Forehands of audacious angle; slices of such nuance that they dazzled Martina

Navratilova when she knocked with him; half-volley drives which was art at its most nonchalant.

Now the anticipation is sharper for even if he doesn’t win, and it doesn’t matter for me because he’s won so much and anyway so many can win, not everyone can do this. But the anticipation is longer because forehands that had the sound of a cane cutting air and ended points like a full stop now come back and those flicks are errant in angle or length. But then from a hideaway of a tired imagination, from an arrogance not yet eroded, from feet that remember a dance step, it comes. A sudden running backhand flick, with no backswing, as he did against Djokovic at the French; a lob against Tsonga so fine it belonged in an embroidery catalogue.

And then, right at this moment, all rhythm and timing and grace, time freezes, and what will happen later, that he might fold, that he may follow it with a chunked backhand, that doubt will infect him two service games later, is irrelevant. For right now at least this long kiss goodbye is just fine, for now at least the perfect dancer has returned. It is enough for me.

Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent with The Straits Times, Singapore.

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rohit­brijnath

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT KIN CHEUNG/AP

The Hong Kong advantage

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was in Hong Kong last week, and the buzz in this

luxe-loving city wasn’t about the latest “it” bag—it was about the newest luxury IPO. Prada just raised $2.1 billion (around `9,500 crore) and began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 24 June.

You may well ask why a deep-rooted Italian company like Prada is saying pass to the Milan Stock Exchange—and for that matter, Paris, London, New York, all arguably better roosting places for a luxury stock—and heading East instead to Hong Kong? And it is not the only upscale Western brand turning eastward for money—a couple of weeks ago, the 100-year-old American luggage firm Samsonite’s IPO raised $1.25 billion, also in Hong Kong. The French cosmetic brand L’Occitane pulled off $700 million the year before. The American brand Coach, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans to double-list in Hong Kong by the end of the year.

Why is Hong Kong suddenly the “it” bourse for luxury IPOs? There are two forces that are driving this trend—one, a heavily skewed “Asia-centric” luxury demand, which has companies thinking “let’s IPO where my consumers are”; and two, in a jittery world Hong Kong is a relatively better place to raise money.

Let’s look at each of these forces.

Asians, the world’s biggest luxury consumers For most industries the centre of gravity is rapidly shifting (or has already shifted) to the high-growth economies of Asia—for the luxury industry the shift is that much more pronounced. In fact, it is utterly lopsided—Asians have been

the world’s largest luxury consumers for over two decades. In the 1980s and 1990s the Japanese were head over heels in love with luxury; as development spread, other Asian nations began their own love affair with designer brands; and now the Chinese are besotted so much so that they are already the biggest consumer base for many major brands. Here is where the fun begins—the Chinese are still in the early stages of luxury consumption, in the coming years they will grow from big to huge to ginormous, and brands are gearing up to ride that growth wave.

And then there is India, which is showing all the early signs of luxe-infatuation. If the present and the future of luxury are anchored firmly in Asia, why not raise money right here.

This trend is a significant break from the past, when luxury companies safely listed on home turf—Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH) in Paris, Burberry in London, Tiffany in New York—whereas the new line of thinking seems to be to “make your consumer your investor”. This blurring of lines is interesting, creating a new breed of Asian “consumestors” who buy your products and your shares. Perhaps a luxury share is a product in its own right—reportedly many retail investors asked for Prada shares in paper format to frame and hang on the wall! Coach sums it up well—its Hong Kong listing, if

approved, will raise awareness among “investors and consumers in the China market as well as throughout Asia.”

“Expansion plans for China” was a major part of the IPO pitch for Prada, but bear in mind that expansion plans for pretty much any part of the world will ultimately serve the Chinese as they globetrot in droves. According to the Chinese Tourism Academy, 65 million mainland Chinese were expected to travel abroad in 2010, spending an estimated $55 billion—a hefty chunk of which would no doubt go towards their favourite travel activity: shopping for luxury brands.

Samsonite, too, highlighted its solid Asia credentials during its IPO roadshow. Asia made up a third of its net sales in 2010, it was the most profitable region, and grew a whopping 45% over 2009. Three of Samsonite’s top five markets are in Asia—China, India, and South Korea.

Hong Kong, the world’s biggest IPO market If there is one company that understands black swans, it is Prada. It has made several attempts to list its stock, but like a bride jilted at the altar, it had to withdraw each time, struck by one calamity or the other, including 9/11 which sent markets tumbling. To break that jinx, Prada turned to Hong Kong—the world’s biggest IPO market for the last two years.

In 2010, the Hong Kong Exchange raised $57 billion, which according to Ernst & Young, accounted for 20% of the global total. As a comparison point, the Bombay Stock Exchange raised $8.3 billion in IPOs in 2010.

Prada started well enough with sales to institutional investors— reportedly subscribed five times over—but sales to Hong Kong’s normally ebullient retail investors the

The luxe factor: China’s demand for luxury goods has fuelled a boom in Hong Kong. week after were hit by choppy weather: The Hang Seng slumped, mirroring falling markets worldwide, on fears around Greece defaulting, and a pesky Italian dividend/capital gains tax discouraged them further. It affected Prada’s pricing—at HK$39.50 (around `230) it went towards the lower end of its guidance, thereby raising $2.1 billion as against a best-case scenario of $2.6 billion.

I still call that success. A share price of HK$39.50 values the company at 23 times its 2011 forecast earnings, well above its peers LVMH, Burberry, Richemont, Coach, which trade at a much lower 18-20 times 2011 earnings.

Sweet. According to JP Morgan, kingpin LVMH is trading at 19.3 times 2011 earnings—which pegs Prada at a 20% premium to LVMH. That is the Hong Kong advantage—a higher valuation is possible.

The city’s strong base of retail investors is another Hong Kong advantage. The fact that they are ardent luxury “consumestors” is best demonstrated by the curious case of Milan Station, which notwithstanding its

name, is a Hong Kong company that has a chain of stores selling second-hand luxury handbags. The public portion of its IPO in May was oversubscribed 2,180 times, an all-time record for Hong Kong, and possibly for the world. The share sale froze $7.5 billion in margin financing orders alone.

While Hong Kong seems to be suddenly in fashion for luxury companies, it has got me wondering about a question closer home: Could it be worthwhile for Indian companies, long accustomed to looking West for international IPOs, to turn East instead?

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts.

She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury.

Write to Radha at luxurycult@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Radha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/radha­chadha

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011

Parenting

LOUNGE

THINKSTOCK

MOVIES

Cinema paradiso Beyond the Hollywood fare is a world of children’s films, from Iran to Scandinavia and regional Indian cinema

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

BE INEFFICIENT, TAKE MIDNIGHT SHOWERS

O

B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

·································· hat director Priyadarshan—blatantly commercial in language and appeal—even thought of remaking Iranian film-maker Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven is indicative—irrespective of Bumm Bumm Bole’s artistic merit or box-office success—of the gap in the market and the existence of a world of untapped cinema out there, believes Mumbai-based critic and film curator Meenakshi Shedde.

“The comfort level of the new generation with film as a medium is way beyond anything their parents have achieved,” says Shedde.

Even as parents attempt to control TV viewing hours and reduce video-gaming time, the hunger for new and appropriate material at both ends—parent and child—is evident. So what’s new out there besides a regular Friday release that’s clean and accessible viewing? “Indian parents were scared away from world cinema by the mindnumbingly boring National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) films and animations of yore. It was always serious, issue-based or boring,” says S. Narayan, festival director of the Mumbai International Film Festival. Nandita Das, actor and chairperson of the Children's Film Society, India (CFSI), admits India does not have enough of children’s films: “Very few. As there aren’t enough children’s films made in India. The so-called family films are pushing out the children’s films even further, and not everybody is privileged to see films from other countries.”

Das, Shedde and Narayan recommend looking at films from Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, erstwhile Czechoslovakia, Japan, China and Iran for innovative and healthy children’s cinema.

Jugu Abraham, a former film critic, international film festival consultant and an expert on Japanese cinema, recommends animation ace Hayao Miyazaki for Indian children. “The Japanese children’s cinema of Miyazaki will be accepted by Indian children because of the content (family values and good deeds being underscored) and his skill with animation.”

Parents shouldn’t worry about accessibility and language, the three say. Das explains: “Often, good children’s films are audio-visually rich and rely less on dialogues. I have seen that in our CFSI’s international children’s film festival, kids from across the country connect with good films from all over the world, without understanding the language.

We as a film-watching country also need to encourage the habit of reading subtitles to increase the range of films that we can watch.” Shedde says.

“When it’s a good film, you realize you connect with it—say, with Satyajit Ray’s films—without always understanding the entire language.”

Das suggests parents “pick up films while travelling, look up YouTube and look out for short films that are not part of the mainstream distribution network”. Shedde suggests “memberships of the Taj Enlighten Film Society, Lumiere and Palador, venues such as the Max Mueller Bhavan and Alliance Française that hold screenings of world cinema”.

Here’s a compilation of contemporary and classic films for children, based on recommendations by Shedde, Das, Abraham and the curatorial team of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image’s Mumbai International Film Festival. Some of these

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Treasure trove: Children’s movies such as Gubbachigalu delight all audiences— young and old. films may not have been released commercially yet, but they will be screened at various film festivals as well as special and embassy screenings.

Le Gamin Au Velo (The Kid with a Bike) 2011/French/Belgium

This Grand Prix Honor winner at Cannes 2011 was made by the Dardenne brothers. The film is the tale of a boy who clings to a hairdresser caretaker when his father abandons him.

Suggested age group:12+ Available: Forthcoming film festivals/embassy/ film society screenings. To open Sundance 2012 film festival.

Le Havre

2011/Finnish­French/Finland This Aki Kaurismaki film won the Fipresci prize at Cannes 2011. It is the story of a shoeshiner, Marcel Marx, who notices an illegal immigrant boy from Gabon escape from the clutches of Inspector Monet. He sets out to help the boy and a comic caper ensues.

Suggested age group: 8+ Available: Forthcoming film festivals/embassy/ film society screenings.

Hier Kommt Lola!

(Here’s Lola!)

2011/German/Germany Lola has a Brazilian dad, a mom called Viktualia and a two-year-old aunt. Nineyear-old Lola is terrified of frogs and turns into a pop star every night in her dreams. Her grandmother believes, “Sometimes, life is more fantastical than any dream.” Lola couldn’t agree more.

Suggested age group: All ages Available:Forthcoming film festivals/embassy/ film society screenings.

Krish, Trish & Baltiboy 2009/Hindi/India

Krish is a monkey, Trish is a cat and Baltiboy is a donkey. The three minstrels traverse India, discovering an enchanting land of folk music and folk tales. The stories span Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal and Kerala and use Madhubani art, traditional leather puppetry and miniature paintings, among others, to tell the story.

Suggested age group: All ages Available: Children’s Film Society screenings

Gubbachigalu

2008/Kannada/India This Kannada film won the National Film Award for Best Children’s Film in 2008. It is about two children—Ila and Anuradha—who feel responsible for a missing sparrow, and set off to find it in the urban jungle.

Suggested age group: All ages Available: You can request an online screening at http://www. cultureunplugged.com/play/552 www.livemint.com For the golden oldies list of films for children, visit www.livemint.com/kidsfilms.htm

n the day I had to write this piece, I got lucky, in a lopsided way. We have three children, and in the last week of summer vacation, they really have us. Besides holiday homework, our three children are also battling four infections right now.

Kanta mausi, who cooks for and feeds us, has called in sick. As we get through this day, I feel uniquely qualified to dispense practical tips for hassle-free parenting. So listen to me.

Be inefficient. Parenting is not a spectator sport. It’s more like a party game. Don’t try to do everything yourself. No one helps the super efficient.

I realize that if you are a regular reader of Mint, you may not know how to be inefficient. Let me help.

Leave jigsaw puzzles on the floor, grubby hand impressions on the wall, paintboxes in the lawn and shoes in the car. Carry on with life, things will stay exactly where you left them last.

They’ll be easier to find. I know your home was like an art gallery before.

Now think of it as a toy museum.

Be beautiful, because there is no time for make-up any more. Children love beautiful parents, don’t ask me why. Just be.

If you snap at someone unexpectedly, go to the loo. You definitely need to pee.

Don’t deny it, all parents forget. Keep some books in the bathroom.

Make friends. Your true friends usually vanish and the strangest people turn out to be rather useful around children. Put everyone to good use.

Being inefficient also helps in making more friends.

Go for hurried baths, and then forget all about hurrying. Take

midnight showers. Turn off the light and stand in the water.

Be forgetful. I know it makes you feel foolish, but while you were away, Take a break: Just let the mess pile up. short attention spans that is towards the light. became fashionable.

Being a parent is hard work. We While we are on the topic, forget make rules, draw boundaries and lead about sales, discounts, flea markets. Be Zen about it. Spend more money in less by example (my most un-favourite part).

We stuff antibiotics down screaming time. It’s your promotion. throats and wipe their spittle off our sad Make mistakes. Mistakes are useful. faces. We go to the corner and wipe our They don’t have to be fresh or unusual, tears as we hand over our babies to just your own. Those are the only ones nurses and teachers. It’s confusing and with good lessons in them.

Have an affair. Does that sweet, sexy it takes a lifetime to figure out.

Every now and then, we sit back and person you once married now seem wonder at the purpose of it all. Three like a stranger? When you feel up to it little girls are playing in the room as I again, that stranger may be just the type. Why do we have children? I ask person to have an affair with. Again. five-year-old Aliza gently. She seems to And this time there will be toddling ignore me as she rearranges all the hurdles between you. More adventure chairs in the living room for her game. than before. Go on, take a break and Suddenly she bolts towards me and fantasize about the possibility.

Be an agreeable sort. Agree with the whispers in my ear, “To learn funny things”. A warm, fuzzy feeling runs children. In the end we have to agree through me. Nainu? I ask her friend. with them any way. Agree with your “People have children so that they can mom, mother-in-law, maid, with everyone who gives you free advice. You love them,” says Nainu.

“Some of us have kids so that we can don’t have to do anything, just nod learn to love ourselves,” I say in my agreeably. Practise now. mind, looking back at them.

Cry freely. Old toys, colourful sandals, the pyjamas she wore when In the end, another secret tip from she first started walking—give them all me. Your friends will often say, “Wow, I away. Cry freely. Crying is highly don’t know how you do it.” Smile and underrated in this area of work. say thank you. Stay quiet, be mysterious.

Be powerful. All parents are required to change and challenge their Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, world. Their stakes are so high and media trainer and mother of three. She personal. All of us have experienced will write a fortnightly parenting column. the sense of utter powerlessness that accompanies new parenthood. There Write to Natasha at is only one way out of that pit, and mydaughtersmum@livemint.com

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MIKE COPPOLA/ GETTY IMAGES/AFP

The silent epidemic THINKSTOCK

Spread the word: (clockwise from above, left) Former model Padma Lakshmi at an awareness event for the Endometriosis Society of America in New York in March; most women with endometriosis complain of excruciating pain; and Parimita Chakravorty set up a Facebook page for fellow sufferers to share information.

Endometriosis afflicts 176 million women in their productive years and is worsened by society’s taboos about gynaecological health B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· he first wave of pain I experienced was on a pavement in Mumbai. It was crisp daybreak, and some vodka-tonic was rumbling inside me. When the sharp, scraping pain set in, radiating down to my thighs, I remember telling my friend it was a weird pain. After a shot of injectable painkiller at the emergency ward of Breach Candy Hospital, a pelvic sonography showed that at 22, I had Stage II endometriosis.

The elderly, unfriendly doctor asked, after examining me, “Do you plan to get married?” Apparently, endometriosis had no permanent cure, but while a woman is pregnant or breastfeeding, the disease remains silent.

At that time, uppermost on my mind was how to land the best journalism internship in town.

Numerous consultations followed. The pain which crept up during the two weeks following my period became progressively debilitating over 12 years (during which time I got married). Anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers became de rigueur. I am free of pain during two weeks in a month; and the other two weeks are analgesic-induced normality. There were no specialists for endometriosis in Mumbai till recently, and some of the gynaecologists I consulted sounded hollow and silly: “Your uterus is weeping, you should go for IVF (in-vitro fertilization) to get pregnant and take care of the problem.” “Pain is your friend now, accepting it is the first step.” I have undergone three laparoscopic surgeries and taken menopause-inducing hormones and other kinds of hormone therapy, which were temporary reprieves with some harrowing side effects.

In 2009, I read a provocative essay by Booker Prize-winning British author Hilary Mantel in The Guardian. She was misdiagnosed for depression and other lifethreatening diseases before it was established that the cause of her agonizing battle with staying nor-

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mal was endometriosis. She wrote, “People talked—and still do—of a ‘low-pain threshold’. I didn’t want anyone to think I had that. I blamed my frequent gut-ache on everything from constitutional nervousness to school dinners... No one will like me for saying this, but I’ve often noticed that it doesn’t seem to matter whether a woman goes in for yoga or reiki or dancing on hot coals at the full moon—she starts to get better when she starts to take charge.”

Mantel could be talking about 176 million women worldwide who suffer from various stages of the disease—the 2010 figure tabled by the World Endometriosis Research Foundation headquartered in London. In India, says Kolkata-based Pramathesh Das Mahapatra, the founder general secretary of the Endometriosis Society of India, the latest demographic study on the incidence of the disease points to around 26 million women suffering from the disease. “It is higher in tea- or coffee-growing areas like Assam and Kerala,” says Dr Mahapatra.

“Taking charge”, as Mantel says, translates to understanding the patterns of the symptoms. Being “on top of the pain”, as my last doctor, a specialist in endometriotic laparoscopy, told me. A fibre-rich, dairy-free diet, regular but nonstrenuous exercise and a combination of drugs for pain management have largely kept my pain at bay (see box). But endometriosis symptoms have surprising ways of showing up when you least expect them to—like sudden, severe leg aches accompanied by nausea and headache. But foremost, taking charge for most women is to believe that having biological children or trying to have one should not have anything to do with managing endometriosis. Society, and in turn most families, often equate the two.

The exact cause of endometriosis is inconclusive, but various theories can explain the painful condition. Endometrial cells, similar to those that form inside the uterus, grow in locations outside

the uterus. These cells are shed each month during menstruation, but in those with endometriosis, they attach themselves to tissue outside the uterus, in the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, outer surfaces of the uterus or intestines, and on the surface lining of the pelvic cavity. Due to hormonal stimulations during menstruation and ovulation, they get inflamed and bleed, and cause pain.

Through diagnostic laparoscopy, implants can be excised by

FOOD FOR LIFE

I

t’s a bible for many who suffer from endometriosis. UK­based reproductive health physicians Dian Shepperson Mills and Michael Vernon authored ‘Endometriosis: A Key to Healing and Fertility through Nutrition’, which was first published in 1999. A summary of the ideal diet that the authors recommend: u Drastically cut down, if not eliminate, wheat in your diet.

Supplement with brown rice, millet and oats. A gluten­free diet heals inflammatory conditions such as endometriosis. u Buy the freshest food you can find and eat when they’re fresh. Avoid

specialists, but in about 60% of cases, they are likely to grow back.

There is no permanent cure, although some specialists outside India are single-mindedly pursuing new methods. Ashwini Trehan, consultant at the Spire Elland Hospital in Halifax and Dewsbury, UK, has recently developed the Total Pelvic Peritoneal Excision, which requires the entire skin of the pelvic lining to be removed to prevent recurrence.

This development coincides with awareness initiatives in the US, especially by the Endometriosis Foundation of America set up

by Dr Tamer Seckin and chef and former model Padma Lakshmi, who has been suffering from the disease for more than a decade. In March, Lakshmi hosted an event in New York to raise awareness about the disease which was attended by actors Whoopi Goldberg, who has been treated for endometriosis, and Susan Sarandon, who spoke

about her struggles with the disease. It was an event that, for the first time, publicized this silent epidemic on the global map—and goes to demystify gynaecological diseases, most of which are curable, but which most cultures in the world—especially many parts of India—are secretive about.

In India, awareness about endometriosis is abysmally low.

We are a culture prejudiced about women who have gynaecological disorders because they are considered infertile. Many regional languages have specific words to describe a “barren woman” and among some Hindu communities, including orthodox Hindu families in Assam, where I lived till I was 18, menstruation is considered unhygienic. Women and teenage girls are confined to separate rooms in a household, made to eat in cutlery meant just for the first three days of menstruation.

Girls in their early 20s are often not treated for endometriosis because parents believe menstrual pain can be cured by pregnancy—to be diagnosed with a gynaecological illness before marriage is considered a taboo. Anshumala Shukla-Kulkarni, one of the few specialists in laparoscopic surgery for endometriosis, works in Mumbai’s Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Medical Research Institute, Andheri-West.

She says: “Awareness is the biggest hurdle for this disease in India.

Many women come in with advanced stages because menstrual pain is ignored. Doctors are often handicapped too because while doing our medical education, we rarely come across women diagnosed with endometriosis.”

Dr Shukla-Kulkarni says it is a disease that largely afflicts women from economically higher stratas of society, and the relation between an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and rich diets and endometriosis is a subject of research globally. The Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Medical Research Institute is one of the biggest private hospitals in Mumbai, with up-todate and expensive surgical and testing facilities. Dr ShuklaKulkarni says, “In the past three years, I have seen the number of women coming with endometriosis rise dramatically.”

Compared with other chronic diseases, research in endometriosis is limited worldwide. Heather Guidone, chief coordinator, medical and scientific endeavours, Endometriosis Foundation of America, says: “While research is limited due to limited funding, we are making slow progress. Studies have begun detailing the link between endometriosis and certain cancers, for example, highlighting the truly

The ideal diet recommended in the most authoritative book on endometriosis and nutrition packaged vegetables and meats. u Eat four fresh vegetables (not overcooked) and two fresh fruits every day—preferably organic. u Use only cold­pressed oils in your cooking. Half your diet should consist of alkaline­forming foods such as vegetables, fruits, sprouted seeds, almonds, and the other half should

be acid­forming, such as grains, pulses, egg, fish and poultry. u Cut your intake of tea, coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Drink lots of water/fresh fruit juice and avoid bovine dairy products—choose goat’s milk or soy milk over cow’s milk. u Avoid refined sugar and any food containing refined sugar as much as possible. It is the most commonly used, highly inflammatory ingredient in foods around the world.

(Most physicians say regular exercise helps, but usually, strenuous weight training regimes don’t suit a patient of endometriosis.)

Sanjukta Sharma

insidious nature of what is considered by some, mistakenly, to be an insignificant disorder.”

Dr Mahapatra of the Endometriosis Society of India, the only Indian organization dedicated, to research in the disease, says: “We have sadly not received support for our work. We approached the Indian Council of Medical Research, but no funding was allotted.” Lone Hummelshoj, chief executive, World Endometriosis Research Foundation, says: “It is extremely difficult to get public bodies to understand the necessity of funds for research into benign women’s health diseases, such as endometriosis. We have not received public funding at all.”

Parimita Chakravorty, a 28-yearold gemmologist in Mumbai, was diagnosed with Stage IV endometriosis in 2007 when she was living in London with her husband. In 2010, after she moved residence to Mumbai, she underwent a laparoscopic surgery that disentangled her uterus and ovaries, stuck together because of endometriotic deposits all over her pelvis.

It is a capricious, tenacious and destructive disease which often goes unnoticed because of the absence of extreme pain. “I had no symptoms and so the diagnosis was late,” Chakravorty says. She has been free of the disease since 2010. Recently, she introduced a Facebook page on endometriosis.

“Many women wrote in from all parts of India for information, and some just because they wanted a sounding board for their experiences with the disease. Menstrual cramps are taken lightly and it is difficult to convince family members that it is not just simple menstrual cramps. One woman wrote in to say her friends call her a ‘drama queen’. Because there are no overt symptoms, families tend to not take it seriously,” Chakravorty says. She wants to increase awareness in the city with the help of her doctor, Prashant Mangeshikar, a specialist, but has not had access to resources. “I approached some actors who I know have been treated for endometriosis, but some of them refused to acknowledge it and some said no.”

Neha Kulhari (name changed on request) from Borivali, Mumbai, is 24, and a student of hotel administration. She is training to be a chef—her dream is to work with the Taj group. She has been on painkillers every month during and soon after her period since she was 17. A year ago, she could not stand upright during her period and had to be hospitalized. She was advised immediate surgery for Stage III endometriosis. “My family is totally against it because a surgery before marriage is a no-no,” she says.

Kulhari is athletic, and is part of a group of trekkers who travel to the Himalayas every summer for three weeks of trekking. She says she can’t recognize herself during her period. “Over the last one year, it has become worse, so I think it’s time to convince my parents to have the surgery,” Kulhari told me when I met her in her college canteen.

Hummelshoj gives the most abiding reason why endometriosis demands attention: “We must remember that endometriosis affects women during the prime years of their lives. It is defined as a disease affecting women during their reproductive years, but these years are also their productive years. If their ability to finish an education or maintain a career is affected, then this has a socio-economic effect which is potentially huge.”

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When wallpaper stands out SWAROVSKI ELEMENTS WALLPAPER

Wallflowers: (clockwise from left) A Swarovski Elements paper with synthetic flock feathers; floral textured paper from Arte for Koroseal residential wallcoverings; and Cristina Niccolini’s dining room is a magnet for guests.

Try pearls, bamboo, suede, cork, recycled glass and other textures for a 3D effect that will alter your room

RON BLUNT/WSJ

ARTE

B Y H EIDI M ITCHELL ································· hen guests walk into the powder room of Katie Stein’s Darien, Connecticut, US, home, “people’s first reaction is to reach out and touch the walls”, says Stein. That’s because the walls are completely encrusted in glass beads.

Desiring a look that was ”sophisticated but with a little whimsy,” Stein, a 41-year-old mother of three, called in interior designer Annie Mahoney to spruce up the previously neglected room. Mahoney chose a three-dimensional wallpaper called Bianca Beadazzled by Maya Romanoff, a designer who has been creating textured papers since 1969. “The light hits the surface in different ways, it creates a kind of a magical feeling,” Mahoney says.

As wallpaper enjoys a revival in popularity, embellished papers are a particularly bright spot. Sales of three-dimensional wall coverings are the fastest growing of all residential wallpapers, according to the Wallcoverings Association, a trade group that represents more than 60 manufacturers and distributors in the US. The industry is projecting an increase in sales of residential tactile, dimensional and embellished wallpapers of more than 21% by 2013, according to market-research firm Freedonia Group. Global sales of wallpaper have gone up 30% over the past five years.

Wallpaper can be embellished with recycled windshield glass, mica, even mother of pearl. Sometimes those elements are embedded in materials such as bamboo, suede and cork. The 3D looks alter a room without the investment of, say, a structural renovation or major plasterwork. Textured wallcoverings generally range from about $40 (around `2,000) to $1,000 per roll.

Tactile wallcoverings used to be seen only in large-scale, commercial projects.

Los Angeles-based manufacturer Astek Wallcoverings attributes the rise in glit-

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FOR

KOROSEAL

tering walls to enhanced technology.

“Until recently, silk-screening was very expensive and you needed large runs to make the numbers work,” says Jeff Dey, Astek head of business development.

Higher-quality digital printers and computer software mean the firm can create custom wall coverings as small as 1,000 sq. ft and still make money, Dey says.

The firm’s velvet-flocked wallpaper costs about $39 per roll.

Brewster Wallcoverings, based in Randolph, Massachusetts, has seen a fivefold increase in sales of embellished grasscloth wallcoverings in the past five years. “With more materials available today, consumers are experimenting,” says Paula Berberian, the company’s creative services manager. “We’re moving away from minimalism, especially in the younger markets, where consumers are looking at pattern and sparkle to make a bold statement.”

Gina Shaw, vice-president of product development at York Wallcoverings, the oldest and one of the largest wallpaper manufacturers in the US, sees the trend as a result of better adhesive materials and printing machinery. Consumers also like its variable nature, she says.

“The tactile surfaces bring in a different visual aspect to wallcoverings because the light play changes with the time of day,” Shaw says. She noticed the popularity of grasscloth a few years ago and says the trend now has moved to glitter, sand, printed cork and mica sheets.

The technology to create grasscloth wallcoverings first emerged in the 1940s, when it was popular in kitchens, though modern versions include thinner cuts of bamboo with mylar, gold and Swarovski crystals woven in. The roots of tactile wallpaper go back further. “Stanford White had bamboo glued to the walls of his summer house, and Marcel Proust had cork on the walls in his bedroom,” says Charles Riley, a New York interior designer, who recently incorporated

embedded beads and strategically placed pearls into the wallpaper of homes in Englewood, New Jersey, and San Francisco. “It’s a high-glam look, and it starts to approach an architectural treatment of a space,” he says.

Swarovski Crystals, which has been offering its gems to wallcovering manufacturers for a few years, is getting in on the game itself. The Wattens, Austriabased company recently launched its Elements wallcovering collection. Set to arrive in the US later this year, the line of mica, crystal and Geode, which mimics the look of crushed quartz, has been a huge success, says Christoph Kargruber, vice-president of global marketing, since its March debut in Europe. Prices range from $800-2,100 to paper a

10x10ft wall.

The papers can be overwhelming, and decorators underscore the importance of incorporating shimmery and 3D surfaces only on to small areas, such as accent walls and powder rooms—or to the ceiling for a subtle effect. Riley notes the look is a style commitment, as it is more work to switch it out after a season or two than a painted surface.

“Maybe you’ll like it in five or 10 years,” he says. “Maybe you’ll change it out.”

Most designers agree that these embellished papers, even those with high dimension and serious sparkle, mesh well with the modern and midcentury furniture designs that have been so popular in recent years, adding a layer of richness that doesn’t clash

with the minimalism.

To clean textured wallcoverings, grasscloth manufacturer Phillips Jeffries Ltd recommends vacuuming walls with a soft brush attachment, though the Fairfield, New Jerseybased company says textured wallpaper is more forgiving of dirt than flat paint. Annie Mahoney agrees: “Paint shows handprints, dings, etc., while a textured wallpaper will show far less.”

She adds that many wallpapers are treated with a stain-repellent finish.

Designers recommend experienced wallpaper-hangers. “Because the papers are so heavy, you really need someone who knows what he is doing,” Riley says.

Home improvement retailer Lowe’s, on the other hand, feels differently. It says most of its customers are prepared to hang these papers themselves.

“To meet our customers’ evolving demand for trend-forward wallpaper styles, all of Lowe’s in-stock wallpaper now offer textured and embellished features,” says a spokeswoman for the company. She notes that raffia, stucco, and grasscloth with mica and other shimmery embellishments are rapidly gaining popularity. Marketers for Lowe’s say DIY is an option for these types of papers, though most designers agree that matching corners can be tricky. Lowe’s 3D wallcoverings start at $42 to cover a 10x10ft wall.

Cristina Niccolini, who lives in the Roland Park neighbourhood of Baltimore, Maryland, says she wanted a few modern touches when she gut-renovated her 1920s Lawrence Hall Fowlerdesigned home.

For the dining room, her interior decorator, Carey Jacobs, chose a handmade Ronald Redding paper with a traditional trellis pattern, but with metallics woven in to add some shimmer and dimension.

Jacobs says using dimensional wall coverings creates enough visual interest that homeowners should go light on accessories or art. “The paper becomes the focal point, and you get a lot of value for such a small investment,” Jacobs says.

Niccolini, a 39-year-old homemaker, says her dining room walls are now a magnet for guests. “People always want to get up close to our wall and see why is it shimmering,” she says. “Embellished wallcoverings have totally converted my husband and me into wallpaper fanatics.”

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WATCHMAN

Loafing around

SIDIN VADUKUT

THE FLAGSHIP SHIPS BEST

t Church’s: Luig, bright red classic loafers, at The Collective stores in Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and Ambi Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `20,000.

Slip on a different colour every day to change your look at work and play

D

B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com

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t Zara: Ochre leather with patch detail, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; and DLF Promenade Mall, Saket, New Delhi, `4,590.

q Pavers England: Pale green suede moccasins with brown lacing detail, at the Oberoi Mall, off Western Express Highway, Mumbai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Inorbit mall, Hitec City, Hyderabad; and Express Avenue Mall, Whites Road, Chennai, `3,799.

p Trèsmode: The Loafer, perforated suede loafers with applique detail, at Trèsmode’s stand­alone store at Linking Road, Khar West, Mumbai; and multi­brand footwear retailers countrywide, `6,490. p Alberto Torresi: Scarlet faux suede with embossed emblem, at multi­brand footwear retailers countrywide, `1,995.

p Aldo: Compiseno, ash suede loafers with metal­tipped tassel detail, at Aldo stores in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune, `5,000.

u Salvatore Ferragamo: Parigi, dark green leather with brass detail, at The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `28,000.

t Tod’s: Gommino, suede loafers with knot detail and classic Tod’s stud­ ded sole, at The Galle­ ria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vas­ ant Kunj, New Delhi, `20,000.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HEMANT MISHRA & ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

PUMA FLIP­FLOPS Last August, Puma gave local artists and passers­by an opportunity to walk into its Linking Road store in Mumbai, and create works of art on the soles of flip­flops. “Pimp Your Sole” entries were evaluated by a jury and then displayed on the brand’s Facebook fan page to be voted on by any of the five million­odd followers. Designer Narendra Kumar Ahmed, who led the jury, says, “International brands are mostly designed abroad and this is a wonderful way to inject local flavour and make it more relevant to a younger generation.”

He adds that each of the my face” scribbled across. Siblings Zainali and four winning designs was Azra Jetha featured a vibrant avian theme strong in its own right and with a hip hop angle. Vandhana Rajan Swamy, was thought to a Mumbai­based writer, says her be commercially winning entry was derived from an viable, which is why they earlier work created for a friend. were chosen.

These four designs are now Duncan Viegas, a Goa­based available as a limited edition in tattoo artist, sketched a Puma stores around the country, composition featuring a for `1,499 each. knife­wielding, gas Also, all Puma stores started mask­sporting bee, while a sale on Friday, offering Webchutney copywriter Girija discounts of up to 50%. Feel free Naiksatam’s design throws to indulge. attitude straight at you with Vibrant: Zainali and Azra Jetha’s design. Viseshika Sharma the words “Quit stampin’ on

e Grisogono’s (DG’s) London boutique is not unlike one of those popular new espresso bars that have opened up all over the city with their proprietary blends, warm tones, miniature furniture and diabolically friendly Australian or Kiwi baristas. The DG store is a little more than a rectangle of tastefully designed retailing real estate with prominent store windows that look out over posh New Bond Street. Both sides of the street are lined with watch boutiques.

Vanity flags emblazoned with brand logos hang limp in the cold London drizzle and, at street level, doormen-cum-security guards watch everything and everyone grimly.

This is one of the great watch markets of the world.

“There are always people just waiting to get some space in this area,” says Rual Kana, director of DG’s London boutique, when I meet her inside the rectangle Best­sellers: (top) on a typically confused The Instrumento cold/warm/wet/dry/windy London Grande Chrono by morning. Kana has the sniffles—“Maybe it DG; and DG’s is hay fever”—but gamely talks me Instrumento Uno is through DG’s collection, starting with its simplicity itself. signature Instrumento Uno timepiece.

The watch has been a best-seller since it was launched in 2000, says Kana, and subsequently the original model and several variations have done very well. “We have customers who buy every variant of the Instrumento,” Kana says.

Such loyalty is remarkable for a brand that is as young as De Grisogono and for a model that is as new as the Instrumento Uno. In traditional watchmaking terms De Grisogono is not even a child. Not even an embryo. At best you could call it a glint in its parents’ eyes. Established in 1993, the brand was set up by designer and black diamond specialist Fawaz Gruosi and started as a maker of premium jewellery. It only diversified into watches 11 years ago (to put things in perspective, some Rolex models have been around for 40 years).

Since then the brand has developed a niche in the luxury watch segment—models at the London boutique start from around £8,000 (around `5.8 lakh). Business was challenging through the economic slump but De Grisogono weathered the storm, Kana explains, and now the watch division accounts for a significant part of the brand’s business.

At the BaselWorld watch fair in Geneva earlier this year, De Grisogono made a splash with a typically big, lavish, opulent booth.

In other words it was perfectly reflective of the brand’s jewellery and watches, a look and philosophy Kana calls “controlled bling”. For instance, the brand uses copious amounts of coloured gemstones and bright yellow gold in its timepieces. But flip through a catalogue and you get a sense of balance.

Yes, there are pieces that would perhaps work only on the wrist of an oligarch.

But then there is the basic yellow gold version of the Instrumento Uno that is simplicity itself. It is a no-frills dual time watch with the second time zone at the 6 o’clock position and a date window at 7.35. The strap is attached to the watch with solid, monolithic lugs—there is a lot of metal here—and the end product is simple, clean but quite strong.

There are other interesting models in the DG collection— including the Instrumento Doppio Tre, a macho chronograph, and the steam-punk-y Meccanico DG—but I’d find it hard to stray from the Instrumento Uno’s classic, some might even say retro, good looks (incidentally, the smaller steel and diamonds ladies version of the watch, called the Instrumentino, has unmistakeable similarities to the Cartier Santos. I can’t exactly put my finger on the specifics, but there is something about the shape and proportions of the piece that is so reminiscent of the Cartier classic), What is it about flagship models that makes them so crucial and emblematic for brands? The Royal Oak, for instance, is no doubt a huge majority of Audemars Piguet’s sales. Think of a Cartier watch and it is impossible to not think of the Ballon Bleu or the Santos. For many people a Chanel watch is the J12 and nothing but the J12. The Diastar has not only been an ambassador for Rado for years, this year the brand announced a revival of sorts with its new collection.

For brands this is a double-edged sword. Flagship models are often cash cows that work for them across seasons, across geographies and across economic ups and downs. However, depend too much on one model or collection, and suddenly you find yourself unable to diversify, or without a backup in case your flagship falls out of favour.

For buyers a flagship model is comforting. If you’re thinking of buying a Tag Heuer Monaco or a Rolex Daytona you don’t mess with reviews or websites or buying guides. These models are certified legends. The only thing you have to worry about is liquidity.

I asked Kana why the Instrumento had become a classic. We discussed several factors—design, branding, customer fit—but in the end we came to a simple conclusion.

De Grisogono’s flagship model just works.

Write to Sidin at watchman@livemint.com

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The world’s best bike manufacturers are making a beeline for India, launching their high­performance machines for a niche, passionate yet growing market

BIKES BIKES

WHEEL BARONS

THE NEW

BY RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

············································ t 7 on a slightly nippy Sunday morning in March, shopkeepers at the eggs-and-bread and fruit juice shacks near Gurgaon have their eyes glued to NH8. Nearby, at a gas station, the attendants are watching the road as well.

Soon, you can hear the rumble. The next second, they have zipped past in a Doppler scream, receding in little flashes of bold reds, greens and black along the white lines of the highway.

“I’ve got a bike just like those ones,” jokes a shopkeeper, grinning widely at the empty road on which a dozen or so super-brawny bikes just went past in a blur.

“That’s right, he gets these eggs on that bike every morning,” the eggs-and-bread guy comments, pointing to the large stack of eggs piled up neatly outside the shop.

It’s a sight that’s become a bit of a ritual for the shopkeepers here, this fraction of a second of sound and fury every Sunday morning, as Delhi’s “superbikers” lovingly coax their racing machines out of the garage for their weekly run on the near-empty stretch of road that snakes its way to Jaipur.

Arun Theraja, 50, is at the front of this group, riding a blue 1200cc Ninja ZX12R, arguably the world’s most coveted superbike. Theraja, an ENT and head, neck cancer surgeon who heads the unit at Maharaja Agrasen Hospital in New Delhi, is hopelessly in love with the fastest street-legal production vehicles that money can buy. He is the founder-member of the Group of Delhi Superbikers—smugly shortened to “Gods”—a mixed bunch of doctors, CEOs, bankers, pilots and real estate consultants with a common passion: superbikes.

Loosely defined as street replicas of motorcycles used for track racing, superbikes usually feature engines between 750cc and 1200cc, cranking out anything between 150-180 horse power—and they are increasingly becoming an obsession with

A

Horse power: Cancer specialist and superbike enthusiast Arun Theraja on his Ninja ZX12R.

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well-heeled urban Indians with a love for speed and sophisticated machines.

Dr Theraja’s passion for these bikes began in 1989, when he went to Thailand for his honeymoon.

Superbikes are widely available in Thailand for hire, and he succumbed to the temptation.

“They turned me upside down,” says Theraja. “Every day, I hired a different bike.”

His wife literally took a backseat.

Once back in India, Theraja started saving money for “project superbike”. In 1994, he bought his first one—a black Kawasaki Ninja, imported from Singapore, with more than 100% paid as import duty. Since then, he has bought and sold 15 superbikes, and now owns, besides the ZX12R, a Honda CBR1000RR, and a “naked” Suzuki Hayabusa—so called because it has an exposed engine.

“The main excitement, of course, is acceleration and speed,” says Theraja. “The torque! The litre bikes (1,000 cc) are instantaneous—the moment you twist the throttle, they take off. And they are drop-dead gorgeous.”

Theraja hit 270km per hour (kmph) on his Ninja, on a beautiful stretch of empty desert highway in Rajasthan, with fellow bikers stationed as “spotters” to avoid accidents. “The moment you cross 200 kmph it’s a tunnel vision—your periphery is just a blur,” he says.

“You feel invincible.”

Though the market for superbikes in India was opened up by Yamaha in December 2007, when it launched the MT-01 and the R1 purely as a public relations exercise, it’s only now that these machines are gaining proper traction on Indian roads.

“We just wanted to communicate to people in India that Yamaha makes sophisticated, advanced, and aggressive bikes like these,” says Roy Kurian, national business head at India Yamaha Motor. “We had no sales expectations.”

The response, though, was unexpected. Yamaha sold 107 of these bikes in 2008. Ducati, Suzuki, Honda and Kawasaki soon joined the fray. By the end of 2010, more than 3,000 superbikers were taking their machines out for Sunday morning rides on Indian highways.

“Ducati has grown at more than 100% year-on-year,” says Ashish Chordia, CEO, Precision Motor India Pvt. Ltd, the sole distributors for Ducati in India. It launched its latest superbike, the Diavel, in India in April, a month after its global launch.

Priced at `10-35 lakh, these motorcycles are the highest expression of vehicular performance, and can make the best sports cars eat highway dust. The iconic Porsche sports car Boxster, for example, available in India for around `50 lakh, can accelerate from 0 to 100 kmph in 5.9 seconds, and tops out at 261 kmph.

The Ducati 1198, the flagship monster from the Italian bike makers, will roar from 0 to 100 kmph in 3 seconds flat with a simple twist of the throttle; and if you have the safety of a racing track, you can jump out of your skin at an indecent 300 kmph.

Despite the thrill of speed, superbike owners in India are usually not reckless young bikers careening murderously through traffic. They are more likely to be bespectacled, soft-spoken, and successful professionals such as Gulshan Rishabh, 32, a partner and managing director with the Boston Consulting Group in Delhi, and the owner of a 1,100 cc Ducati Streetfighter and a 1,360 cc Ninja ZX-14—“the biggest, baddest Ninja”.

Rishabh, who describes himself as a “conservative rider”, bought his first superbike three years ago, and when he is not talking business strategy, biker language flows from his tongue effortlessly—inline engines, L-twin engines, torque, race filters, traction control.

“You have to be passionate and involved,” says Rishabh. “It’s not just the thrill of speed or the adrenalin rush. It’s a long-term love. You want to be able to savour

it and enjoy it for years to come.”

Theraja adds: “You are nothing without control, patience and focus on these bikes. These bikes can take you down any time. Pulling the throttle is the easiest thing to do. It’s also the most dangerous.”

Most superbikers are not just passionate riders, but also make the time and effort to understand these sophisticated and highly advanced machines inside out.

Theraja has modified his bikes himself, patiently scouring the Internet for parts, and then changing the exhaust, adding a computer module for increased fuel delivery, race filters and carbon-fibre trimmings, among other things.

“The first modification a biker will typically do is change the exhaust,” says Rishabh. “The stock exhaust is quite muted, so you want to make it more peppy, get more engine sound, better airflow.

But basically it’s for the noise—you want to hear a superbike!”

The noise of a superbike is unlike any other. Start the engine, and it sparks to life with a warm, throaty growl that’s muted, but bassy enough to make you feel the awesome power purring underneath. Release the throttle a bit more, and a wall of sound hits you—a visceral, unfettered roar that somehow still retains a rich, clean timbre, held together with an almost supersonic whine running beneath the bass notes.

Ambica Sharma, the 32-yearold chief operations officer of Jagran Solutions, a part of Jagran Prakashan Ltd, bought her Honda CBR1000RR in May 2010 for `14 lakh. She added a K&N racing filter and a True Brothers Racing exhaust. Sharma, who took her baby steps in learning how to ride a bike at the age of 5 on her father’s Enfield Bullet, comes from a family of bikers, and is one of the few women with a superbike in the country.

“Any guy on the street wants to race me,” she says, “even if he’s on a 100 cc bike or a Santro. Usually, I don’t engage in these races, but sometimes, if the setting is just right, it’s great to just zoom away and leave these guys in a complete daze.”

Sharma loves speed, but she loves spending time on “the little things” even more. “On an advanced machine like this, even changing the filter takes a lot of learning and precision, and that’s something I love,” she says.

Sharma spends 6-7 hours every weekend on her bike, performing all the maintenance and cleaning work herself. “A superbike is actually maintenance free,” she says. “The involvement is only out of passion.”

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

This year has seen and continues to see the launch of a stunning line-up of bikes from most Indian and foreign bike manufacturers in the country, and none of them are the 100 cc or 150 cc bikes that you ride to office. Yamaha will introduce two more superbikes, BMW will make its debut with two superbikes, Harley-Davidson has two versions of its iconic Sportster cruiser ready for launch, Hyosung will re-enter the Indian market with a superbike and a cruiser, Bajaj-KTM has two futuristic bikes in the pipeline that look like a cross between a street racer and a dirt bike, and car manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra will introduce its second bike—a 300 cc with a radical design.

“It’s a huge step in a country where, just three years ago, buying a high-performance bike meant importing it from a foreign country and paying more than 100% duty,” says Kurien. In 2007, the government legalized the import and sale of bikes with engine specifications of 800 cc and above, relaxing emission norms for these machines.

“Bike makers around the world realized that a massive potential market had opened up,” says Kurien.

But to experience the whackiest manifestation of India’s newly maturing love for high-performance bikes, you have to enter a tight knot of streets in Mayapuri, an industrial area in west Delhi. Hidden behind high stacks of greasy metal scrap, a basic two-storeyed building houses a workshop that turns the Royal Enfield Bullet into monstrous custom choppers—handcrafted bikes, in which everything except the engine is created from

scratch. These machines can be up to 9ft long, with handlebars that are 3ft wide. The man behind the operations is a 72-year-old former air force officer with thinning silver hair, a gravelly voice, an eye which was damaged by cancer and reconstructed, and an upright gait.

In 2007, Air Commodore A. K. Mehta, along with his son Manu Mehta, an IIT and IIM graduate, started Dream Riders, one of the first shops to offer full customization of bikes in India.

“We were the first in India to fit a 300mm tyre on a bike—that’s 1.5 times the size of a Gypsy tyre,” says Mehta.

The former test pilot, who served for 33 years in the force and flew in all three of India’s wars, began his affair with bikes in 1955, when he bought a Sunbeam, a classic British post-war bike.

Manu acquired this love for motorcycles, and in 2007, Mehta decided he had enough money saved up to turn this collective obsession in to a profession.

“We scoured Delhi to find the best mechanics and metalworkers, searching for months for the right people,” Mehta says.

All their metalwork is done by 38-year-old Javed Khan, whom Mehta found working at an ordinary roadside shack. “He was making beautiful precision parts for bikes sitting on the pavement with minimal tools. We doubled his salary and gave him a place to stay. You just can’t find someone like him.”

Khan now creates the signature stylings of a custom chopper—the teardrop-shaped fuel tanks, the massive handlebars, and the monstrous exhausts.

MY MOTORCYCLE DIARY A simplified look at the laborious stages involved in building a bespoke bike 1. The client comes in with an idea or design in mind and the technical details of the bike he or she wants changed. Over multiple meetings, the custom builders and the client give shape to the final design of the bike, keeping in mind that it has to be roadworthy.

2. Illustrations of the final design of the custom bike are drawn up, and a technical specification sheet for all the required parts is filled.

3. The illustrations, along with the technical specs, are run through a computer program to check the feasibility of building the bike, and its roadworthiness.

4. The old bike is stripped completely, and a new frame is made according to the custom design.

Mehta’s team of five mechanics, who have remained unchanged till now, began by modifying one bike every three months.

“Till the beginning of 2009 we made around 10 bikes in a year,” says Mehta. “Now we make close to 20. I got 300 inquiries between June and December 2010. We have a waiting list right now.”

Jassi Singh, the chief mechanic, has been working on bikes for 43 years. He started in a street-side shack when he was just 15, and he specializes in recreating or restoring vintage bikes. “I’ve made three of them since I joined Dream Riders,” Singh says, “A Triumph, a BSA and an Indian. The oldest bike I’ve restored is a 1942 Triumph.”

Mehta boasts that his men can take apart an engine and put it back together in 3 hours—“Like a pitstop crew at a race.”

“It is a high-creativity game,” says Mehta. “Our work is as intricate as that of a goldsmith. It takes us weeks

to make a tank. It might take months to make a special hub, or a special rim for the fat tyres. Everything is based on precision. You are going to drive these machines on the road and your safety depends on the precision of our work.”

Dream Riders charge anything between `1 lakh and `4.5 lakh for a bike, depending on the kind of modifications needed.

Only the nuttiest would want to road-race custom choppers though. These machines are about self-presentation, about the metaphor; to dial up the design to its extravagant extreme, yet keep the motorcycle roadworthy.

That’s exactly what Mumbaibased custom bike builder Akshai Varde had in mind when he made the “Skeletor” for actor Jackie Shroff in 2009. Built on a Bullet, this is possibly the whackiest custom chopper in the country.

“It took us almost five months to create the bike,” says the COURTESY HARLEY­DAVIDSON INDIA

5. The various metal parts—the fuel tank, the shock absorbers, the handlebar, the rim, etc.—are handcrafted.

6. The old bike’s engine is loaded on to the frame, and the various parts are fitted according to a strict sequence, starting with the wheels.

7. The entire wiring of the bike is done.

8. All the systems—the engine, the clutches, the drivetrain, brakes, etc.—are tuned and checked.

9. The raw bike is test­driven for around 80km, and then fine­tuned.

10. The customer is called in to test­drive the raw bike.

11. The bike is stripped apart again, the various parts are electroplated and then painted, and the final custom bike is reassembled.

DIVYA BABU/MINT

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

A burgeoning middle class, the lack of a reliable public transport system, and narrow, potholed roads mean two-wheelers are the perfect vehicular choice just about anywhere in India. The incredible mileage on Indian bikes, often close to 100km per litre (in test conditions), makes them affordable too. Sales figures back that—India is the second largest market for motorcycles in the world, behind China. In fiscal 2011, India’s most successful bike manufacturer, Hero Honda, posted best-ever sales, more than five million bikes. In the same fiscal, both Bajaj and TVS, India’s other major bike makers, reported record sales.

It was only a matter of time before India’s love affair with the motorcycle crossed the realm of the practical and began making inroads into the domain of passion. A few celebrities are the most visible examples of this phenomena—the Indian cricket team’s World Cup-winning captain M.S. Dhoni has a stable of 22 bikes, including Harleys, superbikes, dirt bikes and custom choppers. Actor John Abraham owns two superbikes and a custom chopper.

Rahul Gandhi has an unspecified number of superbikes. Actor Gul Panag rode up to her wedding in March at a gurdwara near Chandigarh on a Royal Enfield bike with her husband-to-be.

The ultimate cruise Custom choppers were born in post-World War II America, when American GIs returning from war, and with a knowledge of bikes, began modifying Harley-Davidsons. In the 1960s, the modified Harley-Davidson became as much a part of Americana as Coca-Cola or the hot dog with the release of the cult movie Easy Rider, which followed Peter Fonda, the late Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson as they traversed American highways on modified Harleys in search of “freedom”.

Vikram Bhalla, 36, was bitten by the biking bug when he saw Easy Rider as a teenager. An obsession with Harleys was insidiously ingrained in him as he was exposed to more such movies—Marlon Brando in The Wild One at one end of the spectrum, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator at the other.

So when he found out the Harley was coming to India in mid-2010, Highway stars: (clockwise from top) Vikram Bhalla with his Harley­Davidson Nightster; Ambica Sharma on her CBR1000RR; members of the Group of Delhi Superbikers make a pit stop; and Mehta with one of his custom bikes in his workshop.

he began chasing them for a booking. “I knew I had to get one, there was no other option,” he says.

Bhalla, who runs an event management company in Delhi and has been an avid biker since his college days, regularly goes on long, crosscountry rides. In December, he rode from Guwahati to Bhutan on a Bullet. The Harley, built for easy and long cruising on highways, is the perfect bike for him.

“The Harley is me,” he says. “I’m never going to sell it. I’d rather be riding it in the heat than be inside an AC car. My wife, most of my friends, don’t understand this obsession, and I don’t expect them to. We bikers are fucking mad. “ Bhalla, who owns a 1200 cc H-D Nightster, is one of the 250 people who bought Harleys in the first six months of its launch in India in June 2010.

Bangalore-based Vijay Bhardwaj was another. “Order No. 001 in Bangalore,” he says proudly.

Bhardwaj, who is the vice-president, human resources, at a multinational firm, bought a VRSC Nightrod, a powerful all-black cruiser with a 1250 cc engine.

“For bikers, the motorcycle is an emotional bond that’s impossible for a non-biker to understand,” Bhardwaj says. He started riding on a Yezdi when he was in college 20 years ago, and though he gave up riding the Yezdi a decade ago, he has kept it in perfect running condition.

UK-based Triumph, the oldest bike manufacturer in the world (its first bike was made in 1902), also announced its India launch this month. Its flagship Rocket III cruiser is expected to make its debut on Indian roads by mid-2012.

Bhardwaj points out that owning a classic bike is not about material possession.

“It was unbelievable when I got my Harley,” he says. “We did not allow imports of these bikes for so long in India that it felt unreal to get my hands on one.”

“You don’t own these bikes you know,” he says.

“The bikes own you.”

ROADIES: THE NEW SEASON The most anticipated bikes that will hit Indian streets in 2011 DUCATI DIAVEL Ducati’s latest superbike was launched in Europe in March, and received gushing reviews across the board. The 1,200 cc 162 hp bike, now available in India, features racing specifications such as computerized traction control that cuts the engine power if the bike starts going out of control.

Bajaj KTM 200 A cross between a dirt bike and a racing bike, the latest product to come out of Austrian bike maker KTM’s partnership with Bajaj will feature a more powerful engine than their international best­seller, the KTM Duke 125.

H­D IRON 883 An all­black, no­chrome, stripped­down and aggressive throwback to Harley­Davidson’s classic cruiser design. An old school bike with new school specifications, the 883 is now available in India.

www.livemint.com For a slide show of the bikes and bikers featured in this article, visit www.livemint.com/superbikes.htm

HIGHWAYS TO HEAVEN Though Indian roads have a terrible reputation, there are a surprisingly large number of driving routes which feature pristine tarmac and dazzling scenic beauty. Here are a few: SANTOSH RAWAT

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

From practical to passionate

30-year-old, whose shop is called Vardenchi Motorcycles (Vardenchi means “belonging to Varde” in Marathi).

“The first layer of the Skeletor is actually metal wires and plates.

This was then wrapped with cloth for bulk, which was then layered with plaster of Paris. Then we curved out the details on the plaster, and then that was coated with a fibreglass hardening compound, which was again ground down for details. But the real challenge was to make this bike actually run on the road.”

Varde, who started with just one other mechanic in 2005, now employs 16 people at his workshop, and creates four bikes a month on an average. He rides a “Stealth”, one of his own creations—a beautiful black, vintagelooking cruiser that is far removed from the hammer-horror aesthetics of the Skeletor.

The Manali­Leh road India’s top biking route for decades now, the Manali to Leh road trip is de rigueur for every serious biker in India.

Usually spread over four days, the route goes through some of the highest passes in the world, including Lachung La (16,300ft), and cuts through the surreal cold desert and high mountain landscape of Ladakh. Great roads through most of the trip, but the altitude demands tough, cruiser­type bikes. The Royal Enfield Bullet is by far the most popular choice for this almost 480km trip.

Delhi to Bikaner Some of the best roads in India, a mix of hard concrete highways and soft black tarmac through desert landscapes, ancient forts, and stopovers at beautiful heritage hotels. The route follows the Delhi­Jaipur NH8 for about 200km, and then the fantastic six­lane Jaipur­Ajmer bypass till Samode, a small village with an old palace that is now a heritage hotel. Then the narrow but pristine highway to Bikaner, which is mostly traffic­free, and a perfect place for hitting the kind of speeds you wouldn’t dream about anywhere else. This 500km trip can be done in two days on any kind of bike, including superbikes.

Bangalore to Dharamsthala A 275km trip following NH4 (the Pune­Bangalore highway) and then NH48 (Bangalore­Mangalore highway) before hitting the back roads through Hassan and the temple town of Belur. Though the highways have rough patches, the back roads are superb, with thick forests on either side. There are sinuous trails that cut through the Western Ghats, with misty, densely forested hills, waterfalls and coffee plantations. Dharamsthala is a quaint temple town in Karnataka with, believe it or not, a vintage car museum filled with classic cars in excellent condition.

Guwahati to Tawang The new destination of choice for the adventurous biker, the approximately 500km trip from Assam to the monastery town of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh features some of the best high­altitude roads in India. The route passes through spectacular rainforest­covered mountains, waterfalls and high­altitude passes, crosses the Brahmaputra, and runs along the Kaziranga National Park for some distance. The trip can be done in three days, and Indians need an inner­line permit to enter Tawang.

Mahindra Mojo The bizarre and futuristic­looking 300 cc bike—part racing vehicle, part street ride—will be outfitted with a Ducati fuel injection system and Pirelli tyres.

BMW S1000R BMW’s entry into the Indian bike market is an unapologetic 1,000 cc racing bike that was widely regarded as the best superbike of 2010 in Europe.

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

® FROM PAGE L9

well-heeled urban Indians with a love for speed and sophisticated machines.

Dr Theraja’s passion for these bikes began in 1989, when he went to Thailand for his honeymoon.

Superbikes are widely available in Thailand for hire, and he succumbed to the temptation.

“They turned me upside down,” says Theraja. “Every day, I hired a different bike.”

His wife literally took a backseat.

Once back in India, Theraja started saving money for “project superbike”. In 1994, he bought his first one—a black Kawasaki Ninja, imported from Singapore, with more than 100% paid as import duty. Since then, he has bought and sold 15 superbikes, and now owns, besides the ZX12R, a Honda CBR1000RR, and a “naked” Suzuki Hayabusa—so called because it has an exposed engine.

“The main excitement, of course, is acceleration and speed,” says Theraja. “The torque! The litre bikes (1,000 cc) are instantaneous—the moment you twist the throttle, they take off. And they are drop-dead gorgeous.”

Theraja hit 270km per hour (kmph) on his Ninja, on a beautiful stretch of empty desert highway in Rajasthan, with fellow bikers stationed as “spotters” to avoid accidents. “The moment you cross 200 kmph it’s a tunnel vision—your periphery is just a blur,” he says.

“You feel invincible.”

Though the market for superbikes in India was opened up by Yamaha in December 2007, when it launched the MT-01 and the R1 purely as a public relations exercise, it’s only now that these machines are gaining proper traction on Indian roads.

“We just wanted to communicate to people in India that Yamaha makes sophisticated, advanced, and aggressive bikes like these,” says Roy Kurian, national business head at India Yamaha Motor. “We had no sales expectations.”

The response, though, was unexpected. Yamaha sold 107 of these bikes in 2008. Ducati, Suzuki, Honda and Kawasaki soon joined the fray. By the end of 2010, more than 3,000 superbikers were taking their machines out for Sunday morning rides on Indian highways.

“Ducati has grown at more than 100% year-on-year,” says Ashish Chordia, CEO, Precision Motor India Pvt. Ltd, the sole distributors for Ducati in India. It launched its latest superbike, the Diavel, in India in April, a month after its global launch.

Priced at `10-35 lakh, these motorcycles are the highest expression of vehicular performance, and can make the best sports cars eat highway dust. The iconic Porsche sports car Boxster, for example, available in India for around `50 lakh, can accelerate from 0 to 100 kmph in 5.9 seconds, and tops out at 261 kmph.

The Ducati 1198, the flagship monster from the Italian bike makers, will roar from 0 to 100 kmph in 3 seconds flat with a simple twist of the throttle; and if you have the safety of a racing track, you can jump out of your skin at an indecent 300 kmph.

Despite the thrill of speed, superbike owners in India are usually not reckless young bikers careening murderously through traffic. They are more likely to be bespectacled, soft-spoken, and successful professionals such as Gulshan Rishabh, 32, a partner and managing director with the Boston Consulting Group in Delhi, and the owner of a 1,100 cc Ducati Streetfighter and a 1,360 cc Ninja ZX-14—“the biggest, baddest Ninja”.

Rishabh, who describes himself as a “conservative rider”, bought his first superbike three years ago, and when he is not talking business strategy, biker language flows from his tongue effortlessly—inline engines, L-twin engines, torque, race filters, traction control.

“You have to be passionate and involved,” says Rishabh. “It’s not just the thrill of speed or the adrenalin rush. It’s a long-term love. You want to be able to savour

it and enjoy it for years to come.”

Theraja adds: “You are nothing without control, patience and focus on these bikes. These bikes can take you down any time. Pulling the throttle is the easiest thing to do. It’s also the most dangerous.”

Most superbikers are not just passionate riders, but also make the time and effort to understand these sophisticated and highly advanced machines inside out.

Theraja has modified his bikes himself, patiently scouring the Internet for parts, and then changing the exhaust, adding a computer module for increased fuel delivery, race filters and carbon-fibre trimmings, among other things.

“The first modification a biker will typically do is change the exhaust,” says Rishabh. “The stock exhaust is quite muted, so you want to make it more peppy, get more engine sound, better airflow.

But basically it’s for the noise—you want to hear a superbike!”

The noise of a superbike is unlike any other. Start the engine, and it sparks to life with a warm, throaty growl that’s muted, but bassy enough to make you feel the awesome power purring underneath. Release the throttle a bit more, and a wall of sound hits you—a visceral, unfettered roar that somehow still retains a rich, clean timbre, held together with an almost supersonic whine running beneath the bass notes.

Ambica Sharma, the 32-yearold chief operations officer of Jagran Solutions, a part of Jagran Prakashan Ltd, bought her Honda CBR1000RR in May 2010 for `14 lakh. She added a K&N racing filter and a True Brothers Racing exhaust. Sharma, who took her baby steps in learning how to ride a bike at the age of 5 on her father’s Enfield Bullet, comes from a family of bikers, and is one of the few women with a superbike in the country.

“Any guy on the street wants to race me,” she says, “even if he’s on a 100 cc bike or a Santro. Usually, I don’t engage in these races, but sometimes, if the setting is just right, it’s great to just zoom away and leave these guys in a complete daze.”

Sharma loves speed, but she loves spending time on “the little things” even more. “On an advanced machine like this, even changing the filter takes a lot of learning and precision, and that’s something I love,” she says.

Sharma spends 6-7 hours every weekend on her bike, performing all the maintenance and cleaning work herself. “A superbike is actually maintenance free,” she says. “The involvement is only out of passion.”

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

This year has seen and continues to see the launch of a stunning line-up of bikes from most Indian and foreign bike manufacturers in the country, and none of them are the 100 cc or 150 cc bikes that you ride to office. Yamaha will introduce two more superbikes, BMW will make its debut with two superbikes, Harley-Davidson has two versions of its iconic Sportster cruiser ready for launch, Hyosung will re-enter the Indian market with a superbike and a cruiser, Bajaj-KTM has two futuristic bikes in the pipeline that look like a cross between a street racer and a dirt bike, and car manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra will introduce its second bike—a 300 cc with a radical design.

“It’s a huge step in a country where, just three years ago, buying a high-performance bike meant importing it from a foreign country and paying more than 100% duty,” says Kurien. In 2007, the government legalized the import and sale of bikes with engine specifications of 800 cc and above, relaxing emission norms for these machines.

“Bike makers around the world realized that a massive potential market had opened up,” says Kurien.

But to experience the whackiest manifestation of India’s newly maturing love for high-performance bikes, you have to enter a tight knot of streets in Mayapuri, an industrial area in west Delhi. Hidden behind high stacks of greasy metal scrap, a basic two-storeyed building houses a workshop that turns the Royal Enfield Bullet into monstrous custom choppers—handcrafted bikes, in which everything except the engine is created from

scratch. These machines can be up to 9ft long, with handlebars that are 3ft wide. The man behind the operations is a 72-year-old former air force officer with thinning silver hair, a gravelly voice, an eye which was damaged by cancer and reconstructed, and an upright gait.

In 2007, Air Commodore A. K. Mehta, along with his son Manu Mehta, an IIT and IIM graduate, started Dream Riders, one of the first shops to offer full customization of bikes in India.

“We were the first in India to fit a 300mm tyre on a bike—that’s 1.5 times the size of a Gypsy tyre,” says Mehta.

The former test pilot, who served for 33 years in the force and flew in all three of India’s wars, began his affair with bikes in 1955, when he bought a Sunbeam, a classic British post-war bike.

Manu acquired this love for motorcycles, and in 2007, Mehta decided he had enough money saved up to turn this collective obsession in to a profession.

“We scoured Delhi to find the best mechanics and metalworkers, searching for months for the right people,” Mehta says.

All their metalwork is done by 38-year-old Javed Khan, whom Mehta found working at an ordinary roadside shack. “He was making beautiful precision parts for bikes sitting on the pavement with minimal tools. We doubled his salary and gave him a place to stay. You just can’t find someone like him.”

Khan now creates the signature stylings of a custom chopper—the teardrop-shaped fuel tanks, the massive handlebars, and the monstrous exhausts.

MY MOTORCYCLE DIARY A simplified look at the laborious stages involved in building a bespoke bike 1. The client comes in with an idea or design in mind and the technical details of the bike he or she wants changed. Over multiple meetings, the custom builders and the client give shape to the final design of the bike, keeping in mind that it has to be roadworthy.

2. Illustrations of the final design of the custom bike are drawn up, and a technical specification sheet for all the required parts is filled.

3. The illustrations, along with the technical specs, are run through a computer program to check the feasibility of building the bike, and its roadworthiness.

4. The old bike is stripped completely, and a new frame is made according to the custom design.

Mehta’s team of five mechanics, who have remained unchanged till now, began by modifying one bike every three months.

“Till the beginning of 2009 we made around 10 bikes in a year,” says Mehta. “Now we make close to 20. I got 300 inquiries between June and December 2010. We have a waiting list right now.”

Jassi Singh, the chief mechanic, has been working on bikes for 43 years. He started in a street-side shack when he was just 15, and he specializes in recreating or restoring vintage bikes. “I’ve made three of them since I joined Dream Riders,” Singh says, “A Triumph, a BSA and an Indian. The oldest bike I’ve restored is a 1942 Triumph.”

Mehta boasts that his men can take apart an engine and put it back together in 3 hours—“Like a pitstop crew at a race.”

“It is a high-creativity game,” says Mehta. “Our work is as intricate as that of a goldsmith. It takes us weeks

to make a tank. It might take months to make a special hub, or a special rim for the fat tyres. Everything is based on precision. You are going to drive these machines on the road and your safety depends on the precision of our work.”

Dream Riders charge anything between `1 lakh and `4.5 lakh for a bike, depending on the kind of modifications needed.

Only the nuttiest would want to road-race custom choppers though. These machines are about self-presentation, about the metaphor; to dial up the design to its extravagant extreme, yet keep the motorcycle roadworthy.

That’s exactly what Mumbaibased custom bike builder Akshai Varde had in mind when he made the “Skeletor” for actor Jackie Shroff in 2009. Built on a Bullet, this is possibly the whackiest custom chopper in the country.

“It took us almost five months to create the bike,” says the COURTESY HARLEY­DAVIDSON INDIA

5. The various metal parts—the fuel tank, the shock absorbers, the handlebar, the rim, etc.—are handcrafted.

6. The old bike’s engine is loaded on to the frame, and the various parts are fitted according to a strict sequence, starting with the wheels.

7. The entire wiring of the bike is done.

8. All the systems—the engine, the clutches, the drivetrain, brakes, etc.—are tuned and checked.

9. The raw bike is test­driven for around 80km, and then fine­tuned.

10. The customer is called in to test­drive the raw bike.

11. The bike is stripped apart again, the various parts are electroplated and then painted, and the final custom bike is reassembled.

DIVYA BABU/MINT

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

A burgeoning middle class, the lack of a reliable public transport system, and narrow, potholed roads mean two-wheelers are the perfect vehicular choice just about anywhere in India. The incredible mileage on Indian bikes, often close to 100km per litre (in test conditions), makes them affordable too. Sales figures back that—India is the second largest market for motorcycles in the world, behind China. In fiscal 2011, India’s most successful bike manufacturer, Hero Honda, posted best-ever sales, more than five million bikes. In the same fiscal, both Bajaj and TVS, India’s other major bike makers, reported record sales.

It was only a matter of time before India’s love affair with the motorcycle crossed the realm of the practical and began making inroads into the domain of passion. A few celebrities are the most visible examples of this phenomena—the Indian cricket team’s World Cup-winning captain M.S. Dhoni has a stable of 22 bikes, including Harleys, superbikes, dirt bikes and custom choppers. Actor John Abraham owns two superbikes and a custom chopper.

Rahul Gandhi has an unspecified number of superbikes. Actor Gul Panag rode up to her wedding in March at a gurdwara near Chandigarh on a Royal Enfield bike with her husband-to-be.

The ultimate cruise Custom choppers were born in post-World War II America, when American GIs returning from war, and with a knowledge of bikes, began modifying Harley-Davidsons. In the 1960s, the modified Harley-Davidson became as much a part of Americana as Coca-Cola or the hot dog with the release of the cult movie Easy Rider, which followed Peter Fonda, the late Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson as they traversed American highways on modified Harleys in search of “freedom”.

Vikram Bhalla, 36, was bitten by the biking bug when he saw Easy Rider as a teenager. An obsession with Harleys was insidiously ingrained in him as he was exposed to more such movies—Marlon Brando in The Wild One at one end of the spectrum, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator at the other.

So when he found out the Harley was coming to India in mid-2010, Highway stars: (clockwise from top) Vikram Bhalla with his Harley­Davidson Nightster; Ambica Sharma on her CBR1000RR; members of the Group of Delhi Superbikers make a pit stop; and Mehta with one of his custom bikes in his workshop.

he began chasing them for a booking. “I knew I had to get one, there was no other option,” he says.

Bhalla, who runs an event management company in Delhi and has been an avid biker since his college days, regularly goes on long, crosscountry rides. In December, he rode from Guwahati to Bhutan on a Bullet. The Harley, built for easy and long cruising on highways, is the perfect bike for him.

“The Harley is me,” he says. “I’m never going to sell it. I’d rather be riding it in the heat than be inside an AC car. My wife, most of my friends, don’t understand this obsession, and I don’t expect them to. We bikers are fucking mad. “ Bhalla, who owns a 1200 cc H-D Nightster, is one of the 250 people who bought Harleys in the first six months of its launch in India in June 2010.

Bangalore-based Vijay Bhardwaj was another. “Order No. 001 in Bangalore,” he says proudly.

Bhardwaj, who is the vice-president, human resources, at a multinational firm, bought a VRSC Nightrod, a powerful all-black cruiser with a 1250 cc engine.

“For bikers, the motorcycle is an emotional bond that’s impossible for a non-biker to understand,” Bhardwaj says. He started riding on a Yezdi when he was in college 20 years ago, and though he gave up riding the Yezdi a decade ago, he has kept it in perfect running condition.

UK-based Triumph, the oldest bike manufacturer in the world (its first bike was made in 1902), also announced its India launch this month. Its flagship Rocket III cruiser is expected to make its debut on Indian roads by mid-2012.

Bhardwaj points out that owning a classic bike is not about material possession.

“It was unbelievable when I got my Harley,” he says. “We did not allow imports of these bikes for so long in India that it felt unreal to get my hands on one.”

“You don’t own these bikes you know,” he says.

“The bikes own you.”

ROADIES: THE NEW SEASON The most anticipated bikes that will hit Indian streets in 2011 DUCATI DIAVEL Ducati’s latest superbike was launched in Europe in March, and received gushing reviews across the board. The 1,200 cc 162 hp bike, now available in India, features racing specifications such as computerized traction control that cuts the engine power if the bike starts going out of control.

Bajaj KTM 200 A cross between a dirt bike and a racing bike, the latest product to come out of Austrian bike maker KTM’s partnership with Bajaj will feature a more powerful engine than their international best­seller, the KTM Duke 125.

H­D IRON 883 An all­black, no­chrome, stripped­down and aggressive throwback to Harley­Davidson’s classic cruiser design. An old school bike with new school specifications, the 883 is now available in India.

www.livemint.com For a slide show of the bikes and bikers featured in this article, visit www.livemint.com/superbikes.htm

HIGHWAYS TO HEAVEN Though Indian roads have a terrible reputation, there are a surprisingly large number of driving routes which feature pristine tarmac and dazzling scenic beauty. Here are a few: SANTOSH RAWAT

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

From practical to passionate

30-year-old, whose shop is called Vardenchi Motorcycles (Vardenchi means “belonging to Varde” in Marathi).

“The first layer of the Skeletor is actually metal wires and plates.

This was then wrapped with cloth for bulk, which was then layered with plaster of Paris. Then we curved out the details on the plaster, and then that was coated with a fibreglass hardening compound, which was again ground down for details. But the real challenge was to make this bike actually run on the road.”

Varde, who started with just one other mechanic in 2005, now employs 16 people at his workshop, and creates four bikes a month on an average. He rides a “Stealth”, one of his own creations—a beautiful black, vintagelooking cruiser that is far removed from the hammer-horror aesthetics of the Skeletor.

The Manali­Leh road India’s top biking route for decades now, the Manali to Leh road trip is de rigueur for every serious biker in India.

Usually spread over four days, the route goes through some of the highest passes in the world, including Lachung La (16,300ft), and cuts through the surreal cold desert and high mountain landscape of Ladakh. Great roads through most of the trip, but the altitude demands tough, cruiser­type bikes. The Royal Enfield Bullet is by far the most popular choice for this almost 480km trip.

Delhi to Bikaner Some of the best roads in India, a mix of hard concrete highways and soft black tarmac through desert landscapes, ancient forts, and stopovers at beautiful heritage hotels. The route follows the Delhi­Jaipur NH8 for about 200km, and then the fantastic six­lane Jaipur­Ajmer bypass till Samode, a small village with an old palace that is now a heritage hotel. Then the narrow but pristine highway to Bikaner, which is mostly traffic­free, and a perfect place for hitting the kind of speeds you wouldn’t dream about anywhere else. This 500km trip can be done in two days on any kind of bike, including superbikes.

Bangalore to Dharamsthala A 275km trip following NH4 (the Pune­Bangalore highway) and then NH48 (Bangalore­Mangalore highway) before hitting the back roads through Hassan and the temple town of Belur. Though the highways have rough patches, the back roads are superb, with thick forests on either side. There are sinuous trails that cut through the Western Ghats, with misty, densely forested hills, waterfalls and coffee plantations. Dharamsthala is a quaint temple town in Karnataka with, believe it or not, a vintage car museum filled with classic cars in excellent condition.

Guwahati to Tawang The new destination of choice for the adventurous biker, the approximately 500km trip from Assam to the monastery town of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh features some of the best high­altitude roads in India. The route passes through spectacular rainforest­covered mountains, waterfalls and high­altitude passes, crosses the Brahmaputra, and runs along the Kaziranga National Park for some distance. The trip can be done in three days, and Indians need an inner­line permit to enter Tawang.

Mahindra Mojo The bizarre and futuristic­looking 300 cc bike—part racing vehicle, part street ride—will be outfitted with a Ducati fuel injection system and Pirelli tyres.

BMW S1000R BMW’s entry into the Indian bike market is an unapologetic 1,000 cc racing bike that was widely regarded as the best superbike of 2010 in Europe.

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE

SOUTH AFRICA

The enemy in our hands THINKSTOCK

Down the Karoo: (clockwise from left) The endless road with no man­made installa­ tion in sight; the Piet Retief statue of the Voortrekker monument outside Pretoria; the night sky can make you forget warnings about driving at night; and ostrich farms dot the Karoo.

THINKSTOCK

DILIP D’SOUZA

THINKSTOCK

Following the trail of the Afrikaner pioneers, you discover wild beauty and reconciliation B Y D ILIP D ’S OUZA ···························· hey told us not to drive after dark. But given the distances involved as we drove between Johannesburg and Cape Town, on at least two evenings it turned dark with an hour of driving still ahead of us.

Our initial trepidation gave way to awe at the blazing sunset sky as we drove, and the even more spectacular view of the stars once it turned inky dark. This was the Karoo we were driving through, desert country that sprawls across the middle of South Africa.

Now I’ve seen books that get poetic about the charms of deserts, the Karoo too, and those books invariably leave me cold. Yet when we stopped somewhere with no man-made lights in sight in any direction, when we emerged from the car and gaped in wonder at the night sky, at the Milky Way like an ethereal scarf, at a myriad stars arranged in unfamiliar southern constellations—I could well have turned poetic myself. And we had long forgotten the warnings about driving.

This is gorgeous country to drive through, vast and sparse, the occasional small town—Beaufort West, Three Sisters, Hopetown—only underlining the great emptiness. One, Britstown, lies almost exactly halfway between the two cities: 700-odd kilometres from Johannesburg, 700-odd kilometres from Cape Town. We looked at the map and stuck a figurative pin on Britstown: That’s where we would stop for the night, at

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the Transkaroo Country Lodge.

Darkness fell before we reached, but buoyed by the stars, we pressed on. On the phone, the lady at the lodge gave us instructions to find the place, but she had clearly not bargained for the poor spotting capabilities of Indians used to great crowded cities. We swept into Britstown in a rush, we started to slow to look for her landmarks, and just like that we were through to the other end of town. We made the U-turn and returned, passing the “Welcome to Britstown” sign for travellers in the other direction, and just like that we shot back out again.

No, we did find the lodge.

Within minutes we were checked in and gasping at dinky appurtenances everywhere. In the charming room they gave us, the furniture and fittings were like vestiges of an earlier, curvier era: pink striped curtains, and a rack of elegant cups and saucers on the wall to serve tea in. In the lobby, a rather solemn, rather fat white cat that sat stolidly below a chair, staring unblinkingly at us.

The lodge has been around for over a century. It was originally a way station for fortune-seekers en route to the diamond mines of Kimberley, 250km north-east.

After the mines closed, it drew largely Jewish vacationers searching charms in the desert, far from the city. Adlene Potgieter, the lady on the phone, and her husband Rian bought the lodge in 1973, renovated it extensively and, at some point in the intervening years, installed the resident cat.

Adlene was all charm and

TRIP PLANNER/SOUTH AFRICA

South African visas are provided through VFS Global, and visa fees are R2,000 per traveller. For details, visit http://www.vfsglobal.com/southafrica/india. The best way to get to South Africa is to fly to Johannesburg. Current advance airfare on full-service airlines to Johannesburg is: Jet Airways Emirates

Delhi -

Mumbai R40,410

Bangalore -

Chennai -

R47,210

R33,620

R48,560

R44,930

Fares may change.

Stay

Do

South Africa is unusually well-oiled for tourism, with well-appointed guesthouses and B&Bs in every town.

SOUTH AFRICA In Cape Town, we stayed at the Britstown Redbourne Inn (www.redbourne.

At l a nt i c Karoo co.za), with rooms starting at ZAR O cea n 1,050 (around R7,000) per night for double-occupancy rooms.

Oudtshoorn Cape In Oudtshoorn, we stayed at the AFRICA Town Cape Agulhas Yotclub (www.gardenroute-yotclub. com), with rooms and cottages starting at ZAR 250 per person, per night.

In Britstown, the Transkaroo Lodge (www.transkaroocountrylodge.co.za) charges ZAR 550 per night for a double-occupancy room, and offers dormitories for backpackers at special rates.  Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point in Africa: The drive there is gorgeous, and the spot itself is a wild, windy, barren landscape that grows on you.  Outside Cape Town, there's a cheetah outreach project on the Spier wine estate: They rehabilitate and captive-breed cheetahs (and several other animals) and you can actually touch one. Quite a thrill.  Visit Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, the site of the new highest court in the land, where you can simply walk in (it's deliberately designed that way). It also has a small museum devoted to Mahatma Gandhi in the jail cell he used to occupy. It must be one of the few places in the world where you can hear Gandhi's voice—from a BBC interview in 1947.

Johannesburg

GRAPHICS

warmth, just as we might have expected. But the real reason I remember her name was because I later learnt it had a long pedigree, and a connection with travels in this desert. Starting in the 1830s, bands of Boers—whites in South Africa of Dutch descent, speaking Afrikaans—left the mainly British Cape and roamed through the heart of South Africa, searching for somewhere to live in security.

These were “Voortrekkers” (“pioneers”), and this was their “Great Trek”, the legendary quest for, even a statement of, Afrikaner identity and purpose.

The brutal battles for survival

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

they fought with Zulu and Ndebele people—the slaughter, treachery and victories on both sides—shaped a people for generations to come. Afrikaner nationalism found expression in the states they carved out for themselves, and then their governments began pushing blacks into barren “homelands” and the misery of apartheid.

In a real sense, the tragic future of South Africa was forged in both the bloodshed and the promise of the Great Trek.

One band of Voortrekkers set out from Cape Town in 1836, led

by Andries Potgieter. No, I didn’t find out if he was an ancestor of

the Britstown Potgieters. But the name echoed through the years.

The flag he first used (the Potgieter Flag) was adopted as the Voortrekker’s own. His son Piet, commandant to Paul Kruger—another Great Trek hero—was shot dead during the Voortrekker siege of hundreds of black tribespeople in Makapansgat in 1854. The imposing Kruger monument in Church Square in Pretoria has a mural featuring both Piet and Paul. Outside Pretoria, Andries’ great granddaughter, K.F. Ackerman, helped lay the cornerstone of the stern, hulking Voortrekker Monument on 16 December 1938.

It wasn’t a randomly chosen date. It was the centenary of the hopelessly one-sided Battle of Blood River, so named because the river ran red with the blood of 3,000 dead Zulu warriors. That date was observed for years as the “Day of the Vow”, one the Voortrekkers took before the battle. This was the vow: “Here we stand before the holy God of heaven and earth, to make a vow to Him that, if He will protect us and give our enemy into our hand, we shall keep this day and date every year as a day of thanksgiving like a sabbath, and that we shall erect a house to His honour wherever it should please Him, and that we also will tell our children that they should share in that with us in memory for future generations.

For the honour of His name will be glorified by giving Him the fame and honour for the victory.”

Of such strands of felt honour and divine righteousness, of heavenly invocations against the enemy, were woven the fabric of repugnant 20th century apartheid.

Yet in the 21st century, apartheid exists only where it should: in a museum. On the sunny day we visited, Church Square was overrun by crowds of cheerful black South Africans, several actually sitting for photos next to Paul Kruger and his Afrikaner mates: surely the ultimate repudiation of what Kruger, Potgieter and the Voortrekkers trekked and stood for. They still observe 16 December in South Africa.

But since 1994, it’s no longer the Day of the Vow; it’s the Day of Reconciliation.

Somewhere outside Britstown one night, with no lights in sight, we stopped again, looked up in wonder again.

White stars, inky black night sky, thoughts aplenty.

Apartheid grew in this land of great beauty. But so did the stillfledgling idea of reconciliation.

For me in South Africa, that’s promise enough.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

There’s plenty for children to do and see. My 11­year­old loved abseiling down the side of Table Mountain, Cape Town.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

People are solicitous and there are always ramps for seniors to avoid taking the steps. But there are a lot of climbs and walks, some of which are hard for older tourists.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

South Africa has legal and NGO support for LGBT people, and levels of prejudice are low, especially in cities.

TRAVEL L13

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOST WORLDS

Crouching tiger, hidden Fortune The Oriental route: The illustrative panels capture (clockwise from left) a bird’s­eye view of the stream of ‘nine windings’; roadside altars that dot the tea gardens; and Weeping Cypress trees that were introduced to the West. when the Emperor of China, very considerately no doubt, wanted to conquer the English by withholding the usual supplies of tea and rhubarb, without which, he supposed, they could not continue to exist for any length of time, we might have returned the compliment, had it been possible for us to have destroyed all his bamboos. With all deference to the opinion of his celestial Majesty, the English might have survived the loss of tea and rhubarb, but we cannot conceive the Chinese existing as a nation, or indeed at all, without the bamboo.

Gender roles in different Chinese provinces All the Yen-chow and Nan-che boats are what we may call family boats, that is, the captain or proprietor carries his wife and family along with him, while the Hwuy-chow people, who go up the other branch of this river, leave their families at home. The women always take a prominent part in the management of the boat, sculling and poling as well as the men. If they equal their better halves in these laborious duties, they far exceed them when any disturbance takes place in which the tongue has to play a leading part. In the evening in question, as the numerous boats came in to anchor in the creek, they drove each other about in great confusion.

How a Victorian horticulturist stole China’s tea secrets for the East India Company, and the birth of India’s tea industry B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ······················································ n the 19th century, gardens were big business in England. The newly rich merchant class was buying estates and landscaping them. Simultaneously, the next wave of England’s exploration of the world beyond Europe was taking place, and naturalists were fanning across the globe, looking for new flowers and trees to plant in gardens or hothouses. England was celebrating people who brought back drawings and specimens of plants from faraway lands.

Robert Fortune, the son of a Scottish gardener, was one such horticultural celebrity. In 1843, he was appointed botanical collector of the Horticultural Society of London, and travelled to China, where the British had established five trading ports after defeating the Chinese empire in the Opium War. He spent three years there, returning with azaleas, roses and ornamental trees—and a manuscript titled Three Years Wanderings’ in the Northern Provinces of China.

In 1852, Fortune was sent to China again—not by the Horticultural Society, but by the East India Company.

The Company was motivated not by love for pure science, but strictly commercial considerations. The Celestial Kingdom refused to allow foreigners into the Chinese mainland, which meant no European had any idea how tea was grown. The Chinese empire allowed only finished tea leaves to enter ports. The mystique around the tea plant was so great that Europeans believed black and green tea were two different species.

The East India Company was desperate to break the monopoly of the Chinese state and grow its own tea in India, but had neither the know-how nor the raw materials. Fortune was enlisted for a mission of agricultural espionage, and commissioned to smuggle tea plants to Calcutta (now Kolkata), and find out how tea was grown.

Fortune travelled into the Chinese interior disguised as a high-ranking Chinese official, speaking only basic Chinese. Fortunately for him, his disguise was rarely penetrated, because the Chinese empire had been so successful at keeping out foreigners that nobody in the interior knew what a white man looked like. Fortune successfully convinced his interlocutors that he was a mandarin from a distant Chinese province.

Fortune succeeded in his mission, but before the East India Company could do anything with his tea plants and know-how, the 1857 rebellion had broken out and their monopoly on trade with India was annulled. Even so, the knowledge was out of China, and the Indian tea industry was born—thanks to the efforts of one taciturn Scotsman.

Fortune published A Journey to the Tea Countries of China, an account of his espionage mission, in 1852.

Lounge presents selected excerpts:

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A Journey to the Tea Countries of China is now in the public domain and available on Google Books.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Driving away the mosquitoes Our boatmen…asked Sing-Hoo why he did not go and buy some moscheto (sic) tobacco, which they said might be had in the village, and which would drive all the moschetoes out of the boat….

Two of these sticks were now lighted and suspended from the roof of the boat. They had not been burning five minutes when every moscheto in the boat sought other quarters. We were quite delighted, and enjoyed a sound and refreshing sleep, for which we were most thankful.

Fortune goes native

Fortune predicts world Fortune disguises himself peace through botany When I rose on the morning of Chinese plants have not only been introduced to Europe and America, to enliven and beautify our parks and gardens, but we have also enriched those of the Celestial Empire with the productions of the West. Nothing, I believe, can give the Chinese a higher idea of our civilisation and attainments than our love for flowers, or tend more to create a kindly feeling between us and them.

the second day, we were some distance from Shanghae (sic), and the boatman suggested that it was now time to discard the English dress, and adopt that of the country, according to our agreement. To put on the dress was an easy matter, but I had also to get my head shaved—an operation which required a barber….

He did not shave, he actually scraped my poor head until the

tears came running down my cheeks, and I cried out with pain. All he said was, “Haiyah—very bad, very bad,” and continued the operation. To make matters worse, and to try my temper more, the boatmen were peeping into the cabin and evidently enjoying the whole affair, and thinking it capital sport.

The botanical aspects of warfare At the time of the last war,

Talk of knives and forks indeed! One cannot eat rice with them, and how very awkward it would be to pick out all those dainty little morsels from the different dishes with a fork! In the first place, it would be necessary to push them to the bottom of the basin before the fork would take a proper hold; and in many instances we should do what the novice in the art of using chopsticks frequently does—drop the food on its way from the dish to the mouth.

There is no such difficulty or danger with the chopsticks when properly used. The smallest morsel, even to a single grain of rice, can be picked up with perfect ease. In sober truth, they are most useful and sensible things, whatever people may say to the contrary; and I know of no article in use amongst ourselves which could supply their place.

Excepting the fingers, nature’s own invention, nothing is so convenient as the chopsticks.

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

LAST MAN IN TOWER | ARAVIND ADIGA

The angry old man HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

The author’s new novel chronicles the real estate wars of Mumbai and cre­ ates its own riff on the ‘Bombay novel’

Last Man in Tower: HarperCollins, 419 pages, `699.

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· he (English) Bombay novel is an over-flexed genre, as are novels set in any hypercosmopolis of the world—where humans constantly negotiate with the city to perform tiny businesses of living, where the weight of history, geopolitics and power struggles unique to the city define its people’s personal decisions and wounds. There is inexhaustible fodder for stories in a mega-city’s entrapments and progressions.

Mumbai is Saleem Sinai’s retribution (Midnight’s Children), Ganesh Gaitonde’s puppet (Sacred Games) and Shantaram’s ruthless refuge (Shantaram)— and is many other things, when you include the few other works in which the city is not simply a convenient backdrop against which human struggles supposedly acquire meaning. Aravind Adiga’s third novel, Last Man in Tower, is another important Mumbai novel.

In Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie—by turns violent, tragic and deliciously comic—a seething microcosm of life in a Central Works Department chawl becomes a comment on the Bombay age that the novel chronicles (that the city ages ahead of India and has its own “age” is inarguable and can be said without sentimentality).

Without a sweeping, grand narrative of the city or utilizing obvious references to its history, Nagarkar makes a Bombay universe riveting. In the way it delineates a milieu and exposes its idiocies

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Bylanes: The suburban neighbourhood Adiga sets his novel in is Vakola, a residential hub that has experienced huge growth in real estate. and frailties, Last Man in Tower is similar to the dazzling Ravan and Eddie, though both works triumph in very different ways.

Through the residents of a middle-class housing society in Vakola, Adiga coheres a universe in which greed, hypocrisy and arrogance destroy human relationships for a larger, quintessentially amoral Mumbai good. It’s a neighbourhood that Adiga describes as “a cluster of ambiguous dots that cling polyp-like to the underside of the domestic airport”—coincidentally, peripheries of the corrugated setting of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. The variegated bunch of families of Vishram Society are selling their residential building to a powerful real estate don, a simulacrum of the all-powerful in Mumbai. In the process, everyone’s facade drops and the foundation of this “pucca” housing society crumbles.

Yogesh Murthy or “Masterji”, a

widower and former teacher who takes “top-up” physics classes for children in the building, is the story’s emotional centre. He is a Luddite, a man whose will to stay true to his emotions and tragic attachment to the home he has known all his life overpowers his need for a better-looking home—in Mumbai, this translates to a better-looking life. As the story progresses towards a predictable but brutal climax, you will get glimpses of Masterji’s inner impulses, marvel at his tenacity and also be irked by his self-importance. In other words, it is a robust, consummate portrait.

As evident in his earlier novels, most strikingly in the Booker-winning The White Tiger, Adiga is not interested in nuances. Often brazen, and hardly layered, his characters are one-dimensional, made to represent a type. In the first book, the types seemed to exist for narrative convenience, to facilitate propelling a certain idea of

Imaginary beginnings Famous first lines would’ve read like this in the Internet age. Can you guess the authors?

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· hat if the world’s leading novelists, who wrote memorable first lines of their novels, were to rewrite those lines to reflect the age of the Internet? Spurred by a challenge, and as a tribute to an excellent compilation in McSweeney’s magazine, I offer the following:

u It was a bright cold day in April and the clock played the Nokia tune.

u Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembered that distant afternoon when his grandfather poked him on Facebook.

u “You too will marry a boy I choose from Shaadi.com,” said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.

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u It was a dark and stormy night and the Wi-Fi was erratic. u It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of Match.com.

u I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time.

No, that won’t do, ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came, and a voice said, “You’ve got mail.”

India. Yogesh Murthy is a surprise that lingers after you have read the book’s last page.

But most of the other characters are line sketches, exaggerated by one peculiarity laid bare by things that their trash bins contain. Every morning, the building cat rummages through the bins kept out by residents for the garbage collector, revealing bottles of foreign liquor, used condoms and other assorted personality defining objects. Ms Meenakshi, Masterji’s next-door neighbour, is aloof and sexually active. Ah well, she is a journalist.

Georgina Rego is a “communist” who, in speech, is unequivocal about the rights of the slum dwellers living adjacent to the building. Ashvin Kothari, the secretary of Vishram Society, who has bouts of crass philosophizing to justify his subservience to real estate, is a quiet, sold man. Shah, the builder, buys old buildings through Shanmughan, his lynch-

u You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter, you can download it on ScribD.

u Let us go then, you and I, as the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon the table and Farmville is down and quite unstable.

u Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was locked out of Facebook.

u To squeeze the universe into 140 characters...

u The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,

IN SIX WORDS Small stories in a big city

RONJOY GOGOI/HINDUSTAN TIMES

sky and I press mute. u Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, my Orkut profile must show.

u It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was the longest novel, it was the shortest tweet; It was :-), it was :-( u I am an invisible man, my privacy settings the highest— even I can’t see my profile.

pin, who lives in a flat in Versova and makes a young woman aspiring to Tinseltown fame his easy and willing sex slave.

After 250 pages of this 417-page novel, one waits for how the end will arrive and not what the end will be. Vishram Society’s exposed residents no longer hold promise or interest because there are no organic progressions in or through them. Although there is no obvious moralizing, Adiga’s moral voice is Masterji. The others are based on observation, not chiselled by his feeling.

The triumph of Last Man in Tower is its sense of the city. The narrative is built, layer upon layer, by roadside temples, drawing rooms, beach joggers, particular kinds of silk shirts, street dogs, pigeons and debris on roads flooded by incessant rain. The two neighbourhoods, Vakola and Versova, get the author’s unflinching attention and the minutiae of life here is deeply observed: “The face

of this tower, once pink, is now a rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey, although veins of primordial pink show wherever the roofing has protected the walls from the monsoon rains”; “The rains had turned the pit into a marsh: cellphone, eggshell, politician’s face, stock quote, banana leaf, sliced-off chicken’s feet and green crowns cut from pineapples. Ribbons of unspoiled cassette-tape draped over everything like molten caramel”; “An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai-chi, yoga, or spot-jogging.

Behind the exercising crowd, a woman in a billowing red dress posed against rocks as a photographer snapped.... Homeless men stood in a semi-circle round the photo-shoot, from where they passed loud and accurate judgement on the model’s physique and posing skills.”

The author’s lived-in experience of the city is that of a newcomer obsessed with finding it.

Like a new immigrant, he is angry with its enormity and unfriendliness, but open to its suffering and to embracing its contradiction.

Some of the descriptions of the city and its neighbourhoods—not, however, the way most characters speak—have compelling narrative power.

Last Man in Tower is immersed in the small of a big city, and through these miniatures, a portrait of today’s Mumbai emerges.

It is also a testimony to Adiga’s growing narrative sophistication.

u The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel on YouTube. u All this happened, more or less, on an adult website. u They shoot the white girl first.

Then they Photoshop her to make her look black.

Which one’s his? Vikram Seth. as I waited for my dial-up modem to connect. u If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth just see my goddam MySpace page. u A screaming comes across the

u He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish—but man, could he write a terrific blog! u It was a pleasure to burn—then he started writing e-Books. Damn. u In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. But then I took a poll among my Facebook friends and ignored the old man.

u “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die, and there are ways to kill your profile on Facebook. Ask me later.” u Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me—but my Facebook profile has the highest privacy settings, and I can bang my drum loud, and he can’t hear me. u In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains and if not for eBay we wouldn’t have got such a great deal for so little. u The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there because they had no Internet at that time.

Which of these works do you recognize? Write to us with the authors’ names and works at lounge@livemint.com

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MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN | JOSHUA FOER

CULT FICTION

The memory­keeper’s story

R. SUKUMAR

THE BATMAN GYRE

DON EMMERT/AFP

A journalist’s take on competitive memorization gives ‘cramming’ history and humanity

B Y J ACOB P . K OSHY jacob.k@livemint.com

···························· here’s a lot that actor Aamir Khan, educationists, academicians and parents of schoolchildren find reprehensible about India’s education system.

Apart from the ossified curriculum, a disproportionate student-teacher ratio and hackneyed teaching aids, they are in unequivocal agreement that the biggest scourge of them all is the inordinate emphasis on cramming, or rote learning.

The necessity of memorizing multiplication tables till 20, mugging up the elements of the periodic table and reproducing the sanguineous twists of the frog’s circulatory system on paper, kills the average high-schooler’s appetite for scientific enquiry, it is said, and therefore nothing stimulating can ever come out of this competitive memorizing that passes for learning in our schools.

US-based science journalist Joshua Foer’s first book, Moonwalking with Einstein, begs to differ. It is the story of his zestful and ultimately successful entry into the kooky, relatively obscure art of competitive memorizing. Here the ultimate prize isn’t a seat at medical school but a shot at the USA Memory Championship, where memorizing a well-shuffled pack of cards in under a minute, learning

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Moonwalking with Einstein: Penguin India, 307 pages, `550.

SALMAN HAARETZ/PENGUIN GROUP/BLOOMBERG

Learn by heart: (above) A contestant at the USA Memory Championship in March; and author Joshua Foer. by heart the names and faces of at least 100 people in a fixed sequence are mere qualifying prerequisites.

However, instead of a self-indulgent gonzo narrative of his quest (into which similar works of participatory journalism often lapse), Foer weaves an engaging history of mankind’s obsession with memory, with a lithe autobiographical account of how he, of “average memory”, went on to win the championship.

While it’s generally held that some people have good memories and the rest have sieves, Foer assiduously skims several disciplines—cognitive psychology, the ancient and medieval history of Europe, American school education history, synesthesia and the self-help book industry—to argue that being able to commit random phone lists to memory is more a matter of artful training than being blessed (or cursed, as some characters in his narrative exemplify) with innate ability.

The core principle underlying all these techniques is transposing numbers and words into visual images and placing them in familiar mental geographies. To memorize a pack of cards, for instance, mental athletes (as competitors in memory championships are called) create vivid mnemonics for every card. The king of hearts for Foer was Michael Jackson moonwalking with a white glove, the king of clubs was John Goodman eating a hamburger and the

king of diamonds was Bill Clinton smoking a cigar. Memorizing all three cards in that order would mean creating an image of Michael Jackson eating a cigar.

Each of these images is further “stored” or located in a room or location such as the house he grew up in. Thus, remembering a sequence is akin to navigating a bungalow with many rooms. The more incongruous and lurid an image, the better it sticks, he says.

So entrenched were these techniques in classical educational systems that historian Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History—among the world’s first travel books—says that “… King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army, Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people, Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they’d been given to him…”

How did we get to today, where memorizing textbooks to get through examinations is considered dehumanizing? Books and the continuing externalization of mem-

QUICK LIT | THE 6PM SLOT

The fall girl Take 2 on the Indian television industry’s sleazy side

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· eepli Live started it. And The 6pm Slot carries it forward. If you thought Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live focused too much on caricaturizing Indian television’s larger-than-life anchors, then as you read The 6pm Slot, you cannot help but wish that ex-TVemployees-turned-film-makers or authors would cure themselves of the affliction of giving space to TV personalities in their scripts and books.

While Rizvi restricted herself to TV anchors, Naomi Datta casts her net wider—she has included a Jesus-crazy item girl and a sexchange operation candidate in one character; a self-obsessed, holier-than-thou prime time TV anchor (is there no way to be rid of this bearded gent in avatar

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The 6pm Slot: Random House India, 294 pages, `199. after avatar?); a Marathi mulgi pretending to be memsahib as a host; and, of course, Stetson Ganesh (unfortunately in a tepid, teeny-meeny role in spite of a fabulous CV), who is perhaps a tribute to the man who spent a large part of the 1990s establishing the Indian music channel cul-

ory, answers Foer. Our hard drives, textbooks, photographs, blogs and Wikipedia accumulate and digitally preserve our knowledge, opinion and things we know and render them at our disposal as soon as the appropriate search terms are googled in. If devoting enormous energy and time chugging factoids into our heads when they can be summoned at a fraction of the effort does seem like a big waste, why memorize at all?

In answering this Foer recounts interviews with medical curios such as EP, then an 84-year-old amnesiac, now deceased—so grievously afflicted that he could not remember anything said or done beyond a few seconds.

Another interviewee and EP’s antithesis is Kim Peek, a savant and autistic (and inspiration for the Dustin Hoffman-starrer Rainman) who’s memorized close to 9,000 books line-for-line, but barely understands a fraction of them.

What we pick and choose from the infinite sensations that bombard us is what defines us. Sure, our brain has a tremendous capacity to absorb a kaleidoscopic breadth of trivia and sensations.

But it is in filtering out most of these and mixing and matching what we retain, that intelligence comes into play.

Then again, if what we remember is who we are, shouldn’t our blogs, our lovingly accumulated book collections and our iPhones—which “remember” the dates, contact details, messages of our personal networks—count as valid extensions of our brain and consciousness? In choosing what we remember, how much—and at what peril—are we editing out information that matters? We may be collectively more knowledgeable than our ancestors, but are we individually smarter? With the increasing externalization of knowledge, what shifts are under way in the way our brain processes information?

Several of these intriguing questions are only partially addressed.

Ultimately, this is a work of narrative fiction, not a scholarly treatise on evolutionary or cognitive psychology and—to underline—the closing chapters detail the Memory Championship, the formidable competition, Foer’s eccentric training crew and his eventual triumph.

All this, compared with the philosophical meat in the middle of the book, is at best amusing. That said, as a pleasant introduction to the mysteries of the brain and how neuroscience tries to answer what makes us who we are, few books offer as much thoughtful entertainment as this one.

ture in the country.

The 6pm Slot is about Tania, a television producer/director who is asked to work on an agony aunt show for a channel that targets young viewers. The brief is clear: It has to be sexy, sleazy and in your face, and it must garner TRPs almost as soon as it hits the 6pm slot. Tania is either a “helpless” or “naive” (take your pick) professional, who must do whatever her obnoxious but stupid boss and his “sweaty triplechinned sweat factory” sidekick throw at her.

Why she puts up with this nonsense is really never clear in the book—and it’s perhaps the most glaring stumbling block in the story. In a bid to secure TRPs, Tania does what most TV producers seem to succumb to—cross the line between real and imaginary. She gives in to fabricating questions, ropes in fake callers to get more interesting problems for her host and commits professional hara-kiri by not monitoring every fake call that goes live, and she is finally overruled by her boss when she

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f you are into math—this writer is, at least a teeny bit—and know a bit about William Butler Yeats’ fascination with geometry, the word gyre is sure to have some appeal for you.

The gyre, of course, refers to the set of intersecting conical helixes central to Yeats’ world view, and is part of pop culture thanks to its appearance in Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold A few months ago, I came across a comic, a Batman comic called The Widening Gyre (by Kevin Smith, illustrated by Walt Flanagan) and I couldn’t help but pick it up. Regular readers of Cult Fiction will know the appeal Batman has for me (so much so that every once in a while I have to write a column on a new Batman comic).

It turned out that the book was, in some ways, a sequel to Smith and Flanagan’s earlier Batman comic, Cacophony, that I’d read a few years ago. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Cacophony. The story was weak, the dialogues seemed forced and theatrical, and the art was dodgy in parts.

The author is an actor and director (Chasing Amy and Cop Out) and he is clearly what’s called a fanboy. At 40, he has made movies, written comic books, and even owns a comic book store, according to Wikipedia.

Turning and returning: Batman is continually reinvented by writers.

Anyway, his follow-up to Cacophony was The Widening Gyre, which came out as trade hardback (collecting individual issues) last year. Unlike other sequels, the story doesn’t take off where Cacophony ended. Indeed, the first book’s only intersection with the second is at the end (which makes it pretty much like a gyre, though I don’t know whether this is what prompted Smith to name his book). In The Widening Gyre, Batman makes a new friend, another crime fighter called Baphomet (a popular symbol of black magic in the medieval ages, and represented by the image of a satanic-looking goat with horns; the origin is widely believed to be from a corrupted version of Mohammed dating back to the Crusades), almost gets married, and is eventually betrayed (no more details shall be forthcoming).

The ending seems to have been prompted by the desire for another miniseries, but there’s no indication as to when this can be expected, if at all (oh yes, the history of superhero comics is replete with instances of series threads left loose).

The Widening Gyre reminds me that it’s been a long time since I have read a truly great Batman comic. Ed Brubaker’s police procedural Gotham Central dates back to the middle of the last decade (although the books are enjoying a reissue).

Grand Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. came a few years later. And Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? came in 2009. Still, I am convinced it is only a matter of time before the franchise is reinvented by someone else.

Like many others, I believe in Batman.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

wants to delete that call on the edit table.

How she survives the ordeal after being made the fall girl for this mistake is dealt with in literally the last 31 pages of the book; 263 pages are spent on the twists and turns of on-screen styling disasters, shaving legs, ponytailed creative directors, 40-something “mood of the nation” dictating prime time anchors and their “decorative prop” teary partners, with “sneaky but lazy” reporter boyfriends.

That Datta knows the Indian television business inside out is a given. She brings to life not just the glamorous people of showbiz with her amusing descriptors, but also highlights the absurdity of demands made on production managers and heads of sales—a breed often glossed over when we talk about television and its absurdities.

This multitude of characters sprinkled throughout the book delight, and keep the story from spiralling headlong into just another cheesy chick-lit novella.

Datta knows how to introduce

and build her male protagonists: the suave Rahul, the sleazy Harish and the charming Aditya—will all leave a lingering resonance in your mind. But with the female characters, Datta flounders. In fact, poor Tania is never given a chance to create an impact on the reader because she comes across as a simpering people-pleaser who cannot save her job from a two-bit intern, and finally needs the largesse of the prime time rabble-rouser to vindicate her. Even to do that she needs her almost-boyfriend Aditya to prod her into fighting for her rights.

Hence it becomes tough to applaud Tania’s comeback and not see it as a gimmick. After all, Tania has no proof (in the form of emails or memos) of her side of the story. Yet her 5 minutes of fame gets her a new, much improved assignment and her idiot boss the sack. And please, being a sex symbol does not automatically qualify one as a bimbo. The stereotyping of Marathi mulgi Vrushali’s character is just plain lazy writing.

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Culture

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The voice surgeon: Nandi Duggal at his studio in Mumbai.

RAJENDRA GAWANKAR/MINT

INNOVATION

An eye for music Visual and aural aids help singers find their true voices at Nandi Duggal’s studio in Mumbai

B Y S ATHYA S ARAN ···························· here are over 110,000 mentions of his name on the Web, but Nandi Duggal has never googled himself. “I’m famous,” he says, as he peers at the monitor and sees his name running down the lines on the search engine page.

He is the man behind a programme that uses software to help people sing correctly.

Duggal has a voice that has been recorded in three successful collections; in one of them he rendered the songs originally sung by C.H. Atma. “My voice resembles Atma’s, so they asked me,” Duggal says.

But I am not here to hear him sing. At 79, the singer in Duggal has been completely replaced by the Pygmalion, who helps aspirant singers find their true voices. Sitting in his Showbiz Studio on Mumbai’s Rafi

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Ahmed Kidwai Road, he explains his modus operandi.

I am not new myself to ideas about voice training. I have prepared for theatre with exercises that helped me locate my sound resonators in the throat, chest, head. I have learnt to throw my voice so it reaches the last row in a theatre without my having to shout. Most of those exercises centred around using breath in a controlled manner, in holding and releasing the breath to get the volume and pitch the words demanded. More important: As the director Veenapani Chawla was experimenting on using breath to create emotion, and culling from traditional dance forms to supplement her own work, there were other aspects involved, the most interesting of which was running till one was out of breath, then finding the reserve in the lungs to speak out lines from the play. It told me a lot about breath and

conserving and releasing it.

Almost parallel to my work in theatre was my instruction phase with Dhondutai Kulkarni. One of the most revered exponents of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, her voice training techniques are almost unparalleled. Destiny forbade my continuing my tutelage with her, as work overshadowed all else, but her voice training taught me some valuable aspects of singing. That the voice had to come from deep within to resonate, that the singer needs to sing with an open throat and mouth, that the spine must be straight, and that making faces or frowning did not help improve a note or help reach a pitch in any way.

A purist in the true sense, Dhondutai’s voice training took precedence over the actual music lesson, till she felt the voice was ready to take in the music. I almost got there when a student coming up the six floors told me she could hear me in the courtyard outside as I sang the scales.

Now as I listen to Duggal, I realize that his experiment is similar yet different. Like Chawla he believes in the importance of breath control. Like Dhondutai, he gives importance to how one uses

one’s eyes, mouth and throat, and to posture. Then, he takes these abstract instructions that need a lot of understanding and comprehension to follow, and converts them into a visual, digital mode.

The “invention” of this mode of teaching others to sing came from his own love of singing, which won him his Air Force officer father’s acute displeasure and made him abandon his medical studies.

When his pursuit of a career in films led nowhere, Duggal tried various jobs, including driving a taxi, till he was invited, in 1956, to put together a music troupe to tour East Africa. He requested singers Talat Mahmood and Atma, instrumentalists Van Shipley and Enoch Daniels to go with him. The four held shows through three months to full houses that paid around 6 shillings a seat. Sometimes Duggal managed the show, other times he played the dholak to replace the tablas that would not play in the changed weather conditions.

Mostly he learnt that stage shows could be a way of earning money and nurturing his love of music.

“I started the tradition,” he says, of stage shows, “though it was through trial and error.” It was while touring with Hemant Kumar,

Q&A | VIKAS BAHL

The co­director of ‘Chillar Party’ on working with child actors, and childhood dreams anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· n the second week of July, Mohit Suri’s Murder 2, starring Emraan Hashmi, will be challenged at the box office by a brigade of children out on a mission to help a friendly dog. Chillar Party, the first film to be produced by actor Salman Khan, is an attempt to portray the irreverence, innocence and spontaneity of children on screen. The story, set in a housing society in Mumbai, deals with a so-called egalitarian society’s class distinctions, and how children can bridge them.

The founder of UTV Spotboy, Vikas Bahl, has directed the film along with Nitesh Tiwari, executive creative director, Leo Burnett.

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Nandi Duggal can be contacted at 022-24122663.

Sathya Saran is a former editor of Femina.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

NANDITA BERY

Heroic childhood B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA

(“who I booked for a world tour”), and with Kishore Kumar (“whom I had to persuade over months”) that he realized that the riyaz (practice) classical singers advocated was not the only secret of good singing. “Neither of these greats were serious about riyaz, nor were (Mohammed) Rafi or Lata (Mangeshkar),” he says. “Yet their singing was flawless. I realized they had the gift and were privy to secrets we could not understand and they did not know how to explain. Little wonder few singers can train their children to be inheritors,” Duggal says.

It started him on an experiment that would lead to his breaking up the act of singing into small digital components that could use software to show the singer deviations in pitch, rhythm, tone and volume.

It took him 10 years to develop a formula that would work in teaching a singer how to sing for a recording.

“A recording notices every flaw, every deviation from perfection, and since it is repeatedly heard by listeners, needs to be perfect. If one sings well for a recording, one can sing anywhere,” says Duggal.

As we talk, amateur singer Rakesh Kansara enters, flushed from a ride on his bike. He has been taking Duggal’s crash course, and is here to record one of the three CDs the course entitles him to. Duggal explains: “I teach 4 hours worth of theory that explains, with diagrams, the way voice and breath works, and then follow up with recordings, and corrections. When a mistake is made, I stop and show how to correct it.”

Kansara chooses Kishore Kumar’s song from the film Saagar. We watch him sit with the text and break it up into bits to suit his breath. Then the recording begins.

Duggal has an ear that spots the slightest deviation, his eyes watch the monitor and explain exactly where the note falls short, is too high or a notch too low, the breath faltering. In three takes, the song is recorded, effects added, and Kansara has a professional product to show off. Duggal says: “I tell every aspirant, singing must be your second love, pehle bhojan phir bhajan. Fill your stomach first…”

Duggal’s twice-a-month courses cost `6,000, just enough to break even and give him bhojan for his needs. The bhajan, however, continues.

Edited excerpts from an interview with Bahl: Tell us something about ‘Chillar Party’.

Chillar Party is a story of a bunch of kids who live in Chandan Nagar in Mumbai. The film revolves around their friendship and the extent to which they are willing to go for it. It’s about what sets children apart from us grown-ups: their spontaneity, their fearlessness and their non-manipulative approach to life. A child wears his heart on his sleeve. In my film, they stand up against the system, parents and others simply to help a friend.

This is your debut film as director. Why one with children as protagonists?

Child’s play: (left) A still from the film Chillar Party; and co-director Vikas Bahl.

You never know when you wake up with a story in your head. As a grown-up, my childhood seems heroic and full of wonderful anecdotes. I remember many incidents from my childhood. When I saw the youth of our nation take to the streets to protest the Mandal Commission’s recommendations and fight the government, I decided to meld these two into a film. I began writing the script with Nitesh (Tiwari) in 2008 and worked on it for a year and a half. But all this time I never thought about directing the

film. There came a time, though, when we decided to direct it ourselves. We completed the shooting for the film around two years ago. We didn’t release it last year since we missed the summer holidays window.

The film has been produced by Ronnie Screwvala and Salman Khan. How did Khan come on board?

It was a stroke of luck. I always wanted Salman to see the film since it has the attitude that he is identified with. When I finally

managed to show him the film, both he and Sohail Khan fell in love with it instantly. So two months ago, Salman jumped on to the Chillar Party bandwagon and decided to make it his first production effort.

How was the experience of shooting with children?

Honestly, I loved every moment of it. We shot in the summer holidays. The production of this film turned into a party for the children. I would admit that there were certain days on which they

worked more than usual, though.

We ensured that we adjusted our characters according to the acting abilities and inclinations of the children, since we didn’t want to miss out on their natural flair.

Do you think the space for children’s films is yet to be explored in Bollywood?

I think most genres have not been explored in Bollywood. It is baffling since parents are always looking for new ways to keep their children occupied nowadays. We do make films with children but they tend to be ones that tackle certain social issues. This is precisely why my film can be slotted as very much a Bollywood film. It is all fun and masti.

Were you ever circumspect about the box-office potential of a low-budget film devoid of any stars?

No, since I have handled all this before during my years with UTV Spotboy, which produced Dev.D and Aamir.

All I can say is that if you don’t have a star in your film, your story better be the hero.

Chillar Party releases on 8 July.

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ART

The republic of trash What happens when you give a plastic touch to patriotism’s greatest symbol?

B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· lags, according to a Delhibased novelist, are bits of coloured cloth that governments use to first shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

In an exhibition starting today at the American Center in Delhi, flags are bits of coloured plastic that corporations use to first seal-wrap people’s junk food and then as trash to be recycled in countries such as India and China.

Delhi-based American artist Zachary Becker has married Land O’Lake’s butter with Stars and Stripes, and Parle-G biscuits with the tricolour. In his first exhibition, the 23-year-old artist has used discarded packets of branded tobacco, biscuits, tea, burgers, bacon, nuts and popcorn to make 11 flags.

All the represented nations in the show are emerging economies, barring one, the US. “The selection reveals the anxieties of Americans,” says Becker, who comes from Davenport, Iowa, and has been living in the Capital for a year. “America is in decline while countries like India, China, Russia and Brazil are players of the new world order.”

Perhaps unintentionally, the branded flags have ended up crystallizing the free market philosophy of The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In his first book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman made a case for mixing militant nationalism with business.

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist,” he wrote.

“McDonald’s cannot flourish

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Different strokes: (from top) The Brazilian flag; the Indian tricolour; Becker collecting raw material for his project; and the Indian flag.

without McDonnell Douglas... the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

In this exhibition, one of the

four Indian flags has its saffron strip represented by packages of Pure Gold Mirch Powder, its green strip by Pure Gold Dhaniya Powder and its white strip with Aastha Chai. Since the more combustible combination consists of adding religion, another tricolour has its white strip showing thousands of images of “holy” cows.

A confluence of styles Chitresh Das will perform his Kathak to a combination of Hindustani and Carnatic music B Y P RACHI ···························· f feet could speak, Pandit Chitresh Das could easily be credited with having mastered the language.

The Kathak maestro, who is known for his dynamic footwork, is all set to start a new conversation today, in Mumbai.

Ever heard of Kathak being performed to the reverberating beats of mridangam and ghatam? Add to that the musthave accompaniments of tabla and pakhawaj. What results is a treat for those who believe that music has no boundaries of language or region.

The blending of Hindustani

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and Carnatic music for what is essentially a north Indian dance form is an experiment to discover the dynamism of Indian classical traditions. The brain behind the concept, called Dynamic Feet Dynamic Rhythm, is Das, who many would call the master of improvisation.

“Please don’t call it fusion,” says Das, who is affectionately called dadaji by younger artistes.

But when a 66-year-old dancer makes younger percussionists struggle to keep up with him while he is moving across the stage with his ghungroo-clad bare feet, the last thing one can question is his faith in tradition.

Recently awarded the National Heritage Fellowship by the Barack Obama administration, Das has been based in San Fransisco, US, for the last 40 years.

On this tour to India, he has paired with some of the top percussionists from the country for the show at the National Centre for the Performing Arts

(NCPA) today.

“I have danced with tap, flamenco and Congolese West African dance and drumming, Balinese Kecak and Kathakali in the past. They use their techniques and I use my Kathak techniques,” says Das, who has also invented Kathak Yoga, a technique where he dances, sings and plays an instrument at the same time.

Keeping taal (rhythm) on the tabla is Yogesh Samsi, whose 23 years of training with Ustad Alla Rakha Khan have helped him build a rare reputation as a soloist as well as accompanist. Samsi believes the concert is a confluence of rhythmic thought.

“Dance ideas from the south will have to be imbibed into Kathak because the expression created by instruments like mridangam and ghatam are different,” says the percussionist, who has played with greats such as Pandit Birju Maharaj. So will he also have to play the tabla differently?

It is, of course, one way of looking at things. “You may read my flags as an intersection between consumer identity and national identity,” says Becker, “but as an artist, it’s not my job to proscribe one ideology.”

In 2009, while pursuing a music course in trumpet performance, Becker came across a garage sale in his hometown where pyramids of empty consumer packaging were piled up in a corner. Discarded by corporations because of incorrect nutritional information or some such defect, the packaging was to be shipped to India or China for recycling. Happy to be rid of them, the sales team gave them to Becker free, who did to packages of McEnnedy beef burgers and Oscar Mayer bacon what Andy Warhol did decades ago to Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s Soup cans.

He tried placing the brand labels in the cultural setting of his times. In the 1960s, the Coca-Cola, drunk both by actor Elizabeth Taylor and a suburban housewife, represented equality to Warhol. And now?

“Every brand image tells a story of executives deciding the most saleable narration that would tempt the consumers to buy their product,” says Becker.

“The art of branding resonates with the symbolism of national flags, which entices people to gather under a single tribe.”

In Delhi, Becker buys consumer packaging in Khari Baoli, a wholesale spice bazaar in the Walled City. “America’s plastic trash is shipped to India and China, melted down into consumer goods like McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, and goes back to the US to be bought again, discarded again, shipped again,” says Becker. In India, the cycle is often interrupted.

The packaging is not always melted. Instead, it serves as shelter for the homeless and display sheets for street vendors. Some packaging ends up in places such as Khari Baoli.

“After one year of wandering in Delhi, I discovered a street in the old quarter where I found stacks and stacks of packages of my local grocery store in Davenport,” says Becker. That’s the globalization of trash.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

RINSE AND REPEAT

A

mitabh Bachchan never really went away, but the time has already come to welcome him back. The 1 July release Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap seems to be a “best of Bachchan” from his 1970s and 1980s hits. Younger audiences who are more familiar with his son and daughter-in-law will get to hear the punch dialogues that made Bachchan famous. Older viewers are supposed to feel gratified that he has returned. Film-goers are never going to be allowed to forget that they are watching Bachchan the star, not Vijju the character.

The Amitabh Bachchan cult is based on a man named Vijay. He has played variations of the tormented yet romantic soul in 21 films, with varying degrees of success. The name changed over the years, but the conceit remained the same. Bachchan has played several other roles over the years—a lascivious old man in Kabhi Alvida na Kehna, a curmudgeonly chef in Cheeni Kum—but Bbuddah takes him right back to where it all started for him and for viewers.

The fate of Hindi movie stars as they grow older seems to be to play themselves or rehash their past roles. It can work like magic, as it has for Salman Khan. Ready is supposedly about an action hero named Prem, but it’s really only about Salman Khan the superstar. He is an unrepentant “bad boy” who is irresistible to anybody who crosses his path. Khan has arguably been playing himself all his life—an unapologetic romantic who wears his heart on his sleeve and gets hurt in the process. Dabangg and Ready reflect his new-found optimism and the fresh connections he has forged with audiences. Khan is a happy man these days, and his movies reflect that mood.

Rewind: Bachchan brings back the angry young man persona.

The danger with playing the memory game is that you are forced to confront the reality of the passage of time, Botox or no Botox. Some stars are best left untouched. I don’t think anybody mourns Rajesh Khanna, but do shed a few tears for the present-day sight of a portly and lush Vinod Khanna, especially if you remember his smouldering 1970s self. Dharmendra too dragged himself out of retirement recently to recycle himself in Yamla Pagla Deewana—if only he could have crawled right back.

Rishi Kapoor still has what it takes, probably because he isn’t trying to be cute and dashing any more. Once a bon vivant, always a bon vivant, give or take a few kilos.

Bollywood’s leading lights are either pushing 40 or well past it.

Many of them have signed up to play potentially interesting characters, but how long till the temptation to rest on their laurels strikes? Already, Shah Rukh Khan’s Ra.One has become less of a movie and more of an acid test for his superstar status. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Sean Penn is playing Brad Pitt’s son in The Tree of Life, while Robert de Niro and Al Pacino are content to play second fiddle to young blood in various films. Sylvester Stallone, however, is still playing Rocky and/or Rambo—guess whose example some film-makers in Mumbai want to follow?

Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap released in theatres on Friday.

The exhibition is on at the American Center, New Delhi, from 2-30 July. It will be on at the Ojas Art gallery, Mehrauli, Delhi, from 5-28 August.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

Bhawani Shankar. Adding melody is sitar player Jayanta Banerjee, who has performed with Das several times, so he knows he must expect the unexpected.

“Panditji’s speciality is improvisation, jo hoga stage par hoga (whatever happens will be on stage),” says the young artiste. But the idea of upaj or improvisation takes on a different meaning when you realize that some of the artistes will meet each other for the first time on stage, performing live. Take, for example, N. Ramakrishnan, who Music talk: Chitresh Das will mix rhythms will respond to the tabof the north and south for his show today. la-pakhawaj duo with his mridangam.

“I have only seen Panditiji on “Oh yes, there will be a compromise, but it is a healthy com- YouTube. He is spontaneous, so promise. I will have to feel the for me there will be no musical e n e r g y o f t h e s o u t h I n d i a n notes,” says Ramakrishnan, who artistes and catch their pulse,” has only accompanied Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancers Samsi adds.

Holding aloft the north Indian earlier. Thrilled about this totally banner with him is one of the new challenge, Ramakrishnan best-known pakhawaj players, says he will have to fall back on

experience. He is looking forward to the unrehearsed jamming session between the diverse artistes, music that will create itself on stage before a 1,000-plus audience at the Tata Theatre, NCPA. As Samsi puts it, “Aesthetic unpredictability is lost when you rehearse together, and that is the essence of Indian classical tradition”.

So will there be subtle competition between the north and the south? The artistes believe it is more of a rhythmic discussion, a sharing of syllables. But no points for guessing what the high point of such a concert will be.

Expect the “sawaal-jawaab”, which will mark the climax of the concert, to be a rapid fire between the artistes as they try to establish the supremacy of their own sound.

So while Das will pose teasers with his feet, each musician will reply with his instrument.

Who’ll win? Music, of course.

Dynamic Feet Dynamic Rhythm will take place at 7pm today, at the Tata Theatre, NCPA. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

FATEMA ZOYEB/MINT

CHENNAI KOTHU | NIRANJANA RAMESH

Rooms without a view

The city’s hostels offer a regulated life to its young workforce—often at the cost of individ­ uality and freedom

M

oody roommates, bunk beds, piled-up laundry, bad food, tyrannical wardens—hostel life is the stuff of nostalgia. Not quite so for some of Chennai’s young professionals. High rents, moral policing and overbearing parents —concerned about their children’s safety—have made working women’s and men’s hostels popular, though restrictive, ways of living for the city’s young workforce.

Chennai has had a long tradition of migrant working men staying in hostels, which are called “mansions”. Most of these traditional “mansions” were concentrated in the Triplicane locality, in the northern part of the city. These mansions have now found a place in popular culture—they have even inspired film songs.

S. Gopalakrishnan, a senior bank official, lived in one such hostel in the 1970s.

“Triplicane was a magical place to stay for bachelors, with the beach a stone’s throw away and a row of cinemas bordering along Mount Road,” he says. “Living in a shared mansion at the cost of `65 per month was a blessing.”

Fast-forward to the present.

The women’s hostels are unlike the men-only Triplicane mansions of yesteryear. The rents are high and it is tough to find residents with good stories to share. Most interestingly, the hostels have sprung up in the past decade in south Chennai, where the IT companies are clustered and where real estate is booming.

Why would a young, educated, financially independent woman choose to live in a hostel, and not in an apartment of her own?

“Working women are more free in hostels than they would be if they took their own apartments,” says Jayashree Menon, a former playschool teacher who runs the KPS Ladies’ Hostel in Mylapore, central Chennai. “Their meals, laundry and housekeeping are

We run a respectable women’s hostel, not anything else, hence the strict rules.

Warden, MM Women’s Hostel

taken care of, and that’s a big relief, considering these women will have to shoulder all these responsibilities themselves once they are married.” The parents of these girls, many of them from small towns in Tamil Nadu, prefer hostels, which are perceived as being safer. They don’t mind the hostel rules; after all, the thinking goes, it can’t be bad for their girls.

In most women’s hostels, the residents have to be in latest by 11pm. “If someone has to work extra hours or do the night shift, she has to get a letter from her office supervisor,” Menon says. The hostels also arrange for cabs to pick up wards right at their gates and take them to their offices.

Hostels are serious business in the city. Some have expanded into chains. The Nissi Ladies Hostel is a chain of 10 hostels, each with 40 rooms that are home to around 350 residents on an average.

Company ID cards and appointment letters are the easiest ways to gain entry into these hostels. Rents are not obscenely expensive. The KPS

Ladies Hostel, for instance, charges `4,300 a month for a shared non-AC room and `5,000 for a shared AC room.

People seldom ask for single rooms—and there is a reason for that. Says 26-year-old Subashree Vinayak, a BPO professional who has been staying in hostels in Chennai since she moved from Madurai in 2007: “A single room in Chennai’s hostels is essentially a room that has space only for a single bed. It gives you the feeling of living in a prison cell.” To put it crudely, it’s a choice between personal space and breathing space.

The Royal Women’s Hostel, where Subashree stays, is wedged between a warehouse, a bus stand and a railway station in the busy T Nagar market. “Being in the middle of a crowded marketplace ensures

the safety of girls,” says M. Lalitha, the hostel warden.

“They also don’t have to go far to do necessary shopping.”

An old lady is sweeping the floor as we enter the MM Women’s Hostel, essentially a bungalow partitioned with cardboard walls, in Adyar, an upmarket locality in south Chennai. Peeling paint and a strong smell of garlic greet you.

The rules sheet of MM hostel reads: “Men not allowed to drop women at the hostel gate; resident not allowed to loiter around with men”.

“What we run here is a respectable women’s hostel, not anything else, hence the strict rules,” the hostel warden says. She says any girl who enters her hostel will be “safely passed” on from her father’s hands to her husband’s hands.

“Parents often accompany

their daughters when they join the hostel. Since these girls are coming from small towns, we make it our moral responsibility to treat the girls as if they were at home, with care and discipline,” says Lalitha.

Four years ago, Vinitha Murugavel, a 28-year-old media professional and a resident of Nissi hostel in Guindy, actually had to carry a letter from her father—addressed to her hostel warden—saying that his daughter was completely responsible for herself. He also said she needed no moral disciplining and that he would not hold the hostel accountable for anything.

Perhaps conservatism is beginning to make way for a more modern outlook in at least some ways. “But I still can’t have my room lights on beyond 11pm, the lights-off hour at the hostel,” Vinitha says. “Besides, even if I decide to stay independently in my own place, and even if I could have afforded the monthly rent, the problem would be the 10-month rental advance as security deposit,” she says, referring to the common practice in Chennai. “Also, it is not as though landlords are open-minded and liberal.

The drill: (clockwise from top) Girls chatting in the KPS hostel’s common area; Hemavathi returns from work; hostellers watching TV; and chatting in a hostel room.

It would be difficult to find one willing to rent out to a single woman.”

Being single is a stigma even for a man house-hunting in Chennai, says Kanagasabapathy S., a public relations professional. That is how he ended up in Chennai Hostel, a mansion in Triplicane.

“Hostellers are expected to inform us when they go on long vacations. Apart from that, we do not interfere in their lives,” says Kanagasabapathy’s hostel manager Faiz, who goes by his first name.

Twenty-five-year-old Diana Ningthoujam, who is from Manipur, lived in Chennai’s hostels for seven years before moving to Delhi to pursue her studies. “Thanks to Delhi’s melting-pot character, the life of a young, single, working woman is less intrusive and more independent there,” she says. niranjana@livemint.com