Lounge for 02 Apr 2011

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Saturday, April 2, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 14

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Entrepreneur Free­ man Murray (left) and programmer Kiran Jonnalagadda peer out of Jaaga, a ‘creative common space’ in Bangalore.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH IGNIGHTER’S ADAM SACHS >Page 8

JUST THE CRUMBS

The traditional bakeries of the Walled City are dead—except for a few >Page 6

SPRING FLING

THE NEW

The season is everyone’s inspiration in Kashmir as new life blooms in shades of white and pink >Page 12

GEEK

SHEET MUSIC, SOUL NOTES

From ambitious wireframe structures to nationwide communities, India’s new techies are more networked, more open and more artistic >Page >Page 10 10 THE GOOD LIFE

REPLY TO ALL

SHOBA NARAYAN

IS AN IPOD THEIR BIRTHRIGHT?

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he summer holidays are looming. The children will be home. What are you going to do? Send them to camp? Fly off on a holiday to the Caribbean? Ask them to do chores around the house? Or all of the above?

One of the first things Michelle Obama did after entering the White House was tell the staff not to make her children’s beds. She wanted her girls to do chores, just like she did while growing up. Later, in a television interview, Obama told Barbara Walters... >Page 4

A new A.R. Rahman biography strikes a personal chord—of his musical journey from Chennai to global stardom >Page 17

PIECE OF CAKE

AAKAR PATEL

THE BANALITY OF THE INDIAN FAN

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ne of the disappointing things about the World Cup was that it was played on the subcontinent. It is thought that India loves cricket. This is incorrect. India loves India. Cricket gives us the opportunity to express this affection. The local cricket match in India is unattended. Even World Cup matches featuring two other sides will be played without spectators, no matter what the calibre of the players. This is unlike World Cup football, or American football and basketball... >Page 5

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

ANNA PAVLOVA AND THE KIWIS

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ll sweet things are a luxury but everyone needs a bit of cake-shaped indulgence from time to time. Many treats at the top end, though, flatter to deceive—those impossibly glamorous and complicated confections that beckon from five-star bakeries are often a terrible disappointment when you actually eat them. Pastry chefs often seem so intent on constructing the perfect nougatine tuile that they forget the flavour. Which is why, for me anyway, a well-made... >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

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

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

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FIRST CUT

THE ART OF MAKING BABIES

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THE CHOICE DILEMMA

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

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

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

oday new technologies have taken the sex out of the act of “making babies”. Now all you need is a credit card. Instructions can be found on YouTube.

Google Baby, HBO’s gripping 2010 documentary on surrogacy begins with this brutal line.

An Israeli gay couple has just bought home a surrogate baby—Talia’s so cute, friends want one too. Yet, most of them can’t afford the $100,000 (around `44.7 lakh) that Doron Mamet and his partner paid for the procedure in the US. That makes Mamet wonder if there’s an outsourcing opportunity.

The film tracks him as he turns entrepreneur, sourcing eggs from women in the US and FedEx-ing them to surrogacy star Dr Nayna Patel in Anand, Gujarat to produce babies at a fraction of what he paid for Talia.

Towards the end of SCIENCE the film, he abruptly switches allegiances to a clinic in Mumbai, possibly because most Indian surrogacy centres are not LGBT friendly.

These days Mamet’s organization Tammuz works with Dr Hrishikesh Pai in Mumbai.

Google Baby’s opening shot of Patel, in a fire engine red sari with a matching sleeveless blouse, telling an international caller that she doesn’t have surrogates, that there’s a big waitlist, that perhaps they can give “simple IVF” a shot, certainly leaves an impression.

These days the business of ART (assisted reproductive technology) grows more furiously than the bounty of hormone-induced eggs retrieved from a young, healthy donor. There’s certainly enough interest in the subject. Made in India, another film that’s been winning awards on the documen-

tary circuit, also outlines the issues of cross-border surrogacy without passing judgement on whether it’s right or wrong. Some experts estimate that surrogacy is now a $450 million business here. Delhi-based fertility expert Dr Shivani Sachdev Gour says her business has risen tenfold in the last year from two cases a month to 20 cases now.

I began thinking of surrogacy when I met Swiss film-maker Barbara Kulcsar, on a recce trip for a feature film inspired by the story of Baby Manji.

Kulcsar was working on a documentary about the alternative creation of a family, telling the story of people such as the young woman who is the child of an anonymous sperm donor. “I wanted to explore on one hand how far people go for their wish for a child, and on the other hand how these so-desired children feel towards their roots,” she says.

That’s when she read about Japanese surrogate baby Manji whose parents were divorced before she was born in India. The Supreme Court eventually granted Manji’s grandmother custody of the baby.

Kulcsar even made the trip to Anand to meet Patel at whose clinic Manji was born.

Google Baby’s Patel is a multitasker. She stitches up a C-section delivery (all surrogate deliveries at her clinic are Caesareans so the baby’s international parents can time their pick-up perfectly) while talking on her cellphone. The camera pans to the tears in the surrogate mother’s eyes as she gives up the baby she carried for eight months.

Yet Patel has a good reputation in surrogacy circles. She’s one of the more responsible doctors who offer surrogacy as an infertility option. She views herself as a fem-

LOUNGE LOVES | BANDSTAND REVIVAL PROJECT

Moonlight sonata Rare and free outdoor gigs in Mumbai bring the city’s parks alive with music and cheer over weekends

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o attend a concert on a Saturday after- Ronit Bhattacharya, lead singer of Hinnoon on Holi weekend during the city’s di-rock group Rang, asks. We are too bizarre mid-March heatwave on Malabar few and too diverse to chorus back in Hill, where there are more trees than people one voice. There aren’t many more peoanyway, comes perilously close to suffering ple here than you would find squeezed for someone else’s art. into a BEST bus during peak hours.

Having attended Dischordian and Rang’s Project manager Stuart DaCosta tells performances at Kamala Nehru Park last me that last year’s finale packed more month, I can report with the conviction of than 2,000 people in this space.

Mumbai’s film industry invented cities the pilgrim: Reader, the Bandstand Revival Project is worth it. An initiative of the Bom- where heroes sing in public. Listening to bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Rang funk up A.R. Rahman songs under the project, now in its third season, lures fairy lights and an enormous moon, there is local bands and artistes out of their natural a glimpse of a world where music does not SHEKHAR SIDHAYE/MINT habitat to perform outdoor gigs. This year, in addition to their usual venue here, they will host concerts at Dadar Chowpatty and Carter Road, Bandra.

Under the spreading boughs of a cannonball tree in the amphitheatre at the park’s westernmost end, we listen to the three-man band Dischordian. Their alt-rock draws only a small complement of the sort of fans you might find at, say, their Blue Frog gigs. Pensioners on their evening walk sit down; Musical night: Rang plays at Kamala Nehru Park. sneaker-shod joggers and child hawkers peek in curiously. A few peo- need the occasion of a festival or procession ple look like they’ve stopped off before the or, indeed, a Bollywood shoot. We just hapevening’s parties; at least two could only pen to be here on a summer evening, the have trooped in from a day at the bank. leaves of the cannonball tree falling into our I turn and ask the elderly couple across hair and laps, listening to the music. from me if they’re enjoying the show. “Very We are doing quite well tonight. much,” smiles Katie Panthaki. “We read about it in the papers, so we came by to see The Bandstand Revival Project is on every what was going on.” The Panthakis do not Saturday till 28 May at various venues across wave their arms in the air when the bands Mumbai. For the full schedule, log on to ask us to. I see them applauding sedately at on.fb.me/bandrevival the end of each song.

“How are you all doing tonight?” Supriya Nair

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

Baby boomers: Surrogates line up at Patel’s clinic in Anand, Gujarat. inist who’s helping women change their lives. She doesn’t mince words when explaining the procedure to women who want to rent their wombs for the current rate of about `3.5 lakh a pregnancy: “There’s a chance the pregnancy may not go well. That you may have to have your uterus removed. If you die we’re not responsible. You will have no rights over the baby.” You can’t get clearer than that.

The women say they will use the money to educate their children, to buy a house. One surrogate’s husband is excited about the new house they have managed to buy. “I will have to send her again,” he says. “I want to make my son an army officer—not on the border with a gun but in a desk job.” It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

They say couples that can’t have babies will do anything for one.

Without picking sides on the surrogacy debate, I must say I’m always amazed by the tenacity people display in the effort to have their “own” baby. They try once, twice, three times, and keep trying—even halfway across the world—until they get their 6 pounds of flesh. Four months ago, the husband and I chose to adopt a baby girl.

Ironically, the laws that govern adoption are much stricter

than the rules for surrogacy. In one undated interview on a medical tourism website, Dr Gautam Allahbadia, an ART expert and director of Rotunda, a Mumbai infertility clinic, points out reassuringly that anyway, “medico-legal problems or litigations are infrequent. This is not a litigious society.”

The unbelievably vague Indian Council of Medical Research guidelines, conjured in a world when surrogacy was a stillborn industry, can be summed up in one page. The new draft ART Bill cleared by the health ministry is currently being reviewed by the law ministry. Who knows when it will be introduced in Parliament.

Kulcsar says her recent trip to India made her think a lot about the issue. “It was very interesting to see, that the Western point of view is always about us exploiting the poor, whereas the Indian focus is about possibilities for them. In India the focus is more on the financial benefit for the surrogates than on the possible psychological trauma we always point our finger at,” she says. Think about it.

Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com Priya Ramani blogs at blog.livemint.com/first­cut

Last Saturday’s issue of ‘Lounge’ was interesting for more than one reason. It was great to read Shoba Narayan’s article (“Discretion is the better part of luxury”, 26 March) that started with a reference to one of my friends. Sidin Vadukut’s column on the Jorg Gray 6500 (“Personality cult”) almost convinced me that I must grab the chronograph US President Barack Obama endorses.

My wife says I am too brand­conscious. But I am also attracted to the idea of simplicity.

There are so many examples in Indian society: Infosys’ N.R. Narayana Murthy and social activist Anna Hazare, to name a few. I tend to vacillate between being brand­conscious and being grounded and simple. Perhaps Narayan too has faced this dilemma. I’d love to know her take on it.

RAVI AWATE

ENCORE, PLEASE The style piece by Ravi Bajaj in the luxury special, “Dress like an icon”, 26 March, was a terrific spread. Apart from the choice of the icons (those were some lovely vintage images), I enjoyed the sketch and product mix. As I embark on a hunt for Pataudi’s blue suede shoes, may we hope to see this as a regular feature henceforth?

POONAM BHAGAT ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Frills attached”, 19 March, caption No. 7 misspelt yoke; the trip planner with “A matter of life and death”, 19 March, should have said Varanasi has an airport; in “Five ways to perfect your paella”, 19 March, the rich man’s version of the paella has lobster and other premium seafood; The Good Life column “What does your email say about you?”, 19 March, used a pseudonym when giving the example of a multinational firm executive; and in “Heartbreak hill station”, 19 March, Anuradha Roy’s ‘The Folded Earth’ is published by Hachette India, has 262 pages and costs `495.

L4 COLUMNS

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE DARIO LOPEZ­MILLS/AP

Is an iPod their birthright?

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he summer holidays are looming. The children will be home. What are you going to do?

Send them to camp? Fly off on a holiday to the Caribbean? Ask them to do chores around the house? Or all of the above?

One of the first things Michelle Obama did after entering the White House was tell the staff not to make her children’s beds. She wanted her girls to do chores, just like she did while growing up. Later, in a television interview, Obama told Barbara Walters that her children definitely believed in Santa Claus. Why? Because their parents would never buy them so many gifts at one time.

Obama’s quest to keep her daughters “grounded” while in the White House reflects a conflict that most upwardly mobile urban parents face today: how to enjoy the fruits of your labour without turning your children into spoiled brats.

The realization usually comes as a wake-up call after a question or a comment. Your teenage son casually asks for another iPod because he lost his barely month-old one during a school excursion. You take your Delhi-bred children to a beloved aunt’s home in Dharwad and your nine-year-old refuses to go to the Indian bathroom at her house. Your seven-year-old asks, right in front of your retired relatives, “Why aren’t we staying at a five-star hotel?” It is usually after events such as these that realization dawns: You are raising your children with a warped sense of the world. Not intentionally, but not wholly without fault either.

It is a familiar tale among the upwardly mobile and here are some conversational snippets that I hear over and over again.

“Both my husband and I grew up in middle-class families. Summer

holidays were spent with grandparents and cousins. Nowadays, we travel abroad for holidays. We think of our vacations as annual indulgences. The only problem is that our children see this as a way of life—because they know no other.”

“My wife and I love gizmos. Our home is filled with them. After working 60-hour weeks, we feel that we have earned our right to enjoy them. The problem is that our children see our gizmo-laden large home, and multiple cars as their lifestyle, as their birthright. They don’t realize how much hard work went into it.”

“I celebrated my son’s fifth birthday with magicians, face painters, the works. I give him all the things I never had growing up. But he is no happier than I was, growing up. Rohan is always looking for the next new toy.

What worries me is the thought that I am foisting a skewed set of values. Am I buying him things because I cannot spend time with him?”

“Does consumerism reduce character? As a parent, is it your duty to build your child’s character? What is the role of a parent?”

As with almost everything with respect to parenting, there are no formulas, else the world would be full of perfect children. One school of thought takes the “less is more” approach. In lectures and articles, steel baron Andrew Carnegie asserts that successful people have the “advantage of being cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty”.

Carnegie goes further. He says there is

“nothing so enervating, nothing so deadly” to great achievement than hereditary wealth. More recently, on his trip to India, Warren Buffett said, “Personally, I would much prefer not to be born rich.”

Most parents of this generation intuit that. We want to indulge our children but not spoil them. We want to give them the opportunities that were denied to us but don’t want them to feel entitled. We resist putting them on what happiness scholars call “the hedonistic treadmill” where they want more and more instead of being contented, even happy, with what they have. Simply put, we don’t want them to feel deprived but we don’t want them to feel rich either.

Carnegie believed that character springs out of hardship. Troubles test our mettle and conquering hurdles builds character. The trick is identifying what characteristics you want your children to imbibe. Most of us cherish this nebulous construct called “middle-class values”, but would be hard-pressed to define it.

Some of it has to do with hunger, ambition and hard work; but most of it has to do with grace in the face of adversity, a porous sense of personal space, unconscious acts of generosity and never giving up.

Growing up privileged doesn’t automatically mean that you will become, as Carnegie fears, a wastrel.

Witness Bill Gates or Anand Mahindra.

Can children learn character in a comfortable setting, untested as they are in Carnegie’s school of poverty?

Even if you buy into Carnegie’s theory, translating that into action is difficult.

Does gifting your daughter an iPhone prevent her from learning the virtues of thrift? Where is the line between indulging our children and giving them a false sense of entitlement?

Solutions might include examining your own choices and seeing how they affect your children. For example, you might decide to fly business class when travelling alone and economy

GOURI DANGE

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH about this matter. Frankly, it is not a good time to lecture her about “those more unfortunate than us”. You will not make any real impact by taking this tack and will certainly alienate her further.

You need to possibly give her more of your own time—some of her resentment probably comes from wanting more of your emotional time. As for your helpline work/ volunteering, it would be much better to take your conversation out of her earshot, and ideally do it when your daughter is not home or when you can be at another location.

No one can be empathetic about something they fear, don’t understand or resent. That is why this is not the right time to sensitize her to the subject and circumstances of suicide. Young people have to be encouraged to generally grow in empathy on less serious fronts, so that later they could be expected to feel empathetic on big issues. Once she has stopped feeling so overwrought, you could perhaps introduce her to different ways of being empathetic about the world around her. Do keep in mind that an adolescent is preoccupied with herself and her peer group, and there is only so much empathy or sympathy that

when travelling with your children.

Another method would be to give your children routine responsibilities and chores such as making the bed or setting the dinner table. One family I know takes their children to volunteer at an orphanage during Christmas.

In the end, what helps (or hinders, depending on your point of view) parenting is the fact that there are so many factors involved. All we can do is make choices that seem right at that moment and hope that things turn out okay. After all, “slumdogs” can become millionaires and a black man

not to badger them into being supportive of causes that are essentially close only to your heart. It’s best to just have them subconsciously and non-verbally pick up on and then appreciate the good causes that you work for at their own pace.

LEARNING CURVE

I volunteer for a suicide helpline some hours of the week. My 14-year-old daughter has suddenly begun to resent this, telling me it depresses her to hear me talk to these people.

She ends up thinking about the subject of suicide many times in the day. If I receive the calls in my room and shut the door, she sometimes says angrily that these people are just “attention-seekers”. The first time she said this, I admonished her, explaining the desperate state such people found themselves in and telling her to be more empathetic.

However, I am confused. Why is it affecting her so much?

Should I give it up? Can I somehow get her to see the value of the work I am doing?

I would urge you not to jump to the conclusion that your daughter is being selfish and unsympathetic by expressing her angst and irritation.

While your feeling that she must empathize is understandable, perhaps this is not the time to get a troubled 14-year-old to take a “world view” on the issue of suicide.

Your daughter is not able to process this sobering and, yes, depressing subject at the moment. It is more important right now that you be there for her in a non-intellectual way

Grounded: Michelle Obama and her daughters help students with a mural in El Salvador.

she can have for something so removed from her life. Since this cause is so important to you, you could continue with it and make no secret about doing that, but it’s important that you keep it in the background when it comes to your interaction with your daughter.

It is important not to expect full understanding and total cooperation from children about their parents’ hobbies, pursuits or volunteering activities. Some resentment or insensitivity is expected, and it is best

With news reports of children aged 9 and 10 attempting suicide, many parents are worried about what is going on in children’s minds and whether they too will toy with drastic measures if unhappy about something. How do we prevent our children from going into depression about minor matters and prepare them to face the bigger challenges of life?

While some of these cases possibly come from genetic factors and/or families and situations where there are extreme but hidden reasons for such young children to go into deep depression, your concern is understandable. How do we know a child is depressed or heading towards depression? We are Fear factor: Don’t expect young people to be empathetic about something they are scared of.

THINKSTOCK

with an Islamic middle name can live in the White House, both of which, as it turns out, happened without much parenting at all.

Shoba Narayan hopes that her children have good genes. They need all the help they can get, given her erratic parenting style. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

talking here not of momentary sadness or being out-of-sorts, but depression.

First, depressed children do not look like depressed adults—rather than being sad and withdrawn, they are often irritable. In fact, at times, it can easily be confused with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Some depressed children are also prone to displaying elated moods, grandiose thoughts and daredevil acts, which can resemble hyperactivity.

There are, of course, genetic factors at play too, and all depressed children don’t necessarily come from dysfunctional homes. But what are the factors that could ensure a positive atmosphere at home and are reasonably within the control of family members?

Festering and ugly family relationships should not be discussed and acted upon in front of children. u Money worries and strategies need not be discussed and agonized over around children.

Giving a realistic idea of disposable income and liabilities to older children is a good idea, but constant talk of money, earning it, spending it, comparing other families’ living standards, etc., is something that begins to weigh down on even young children. u Marital discord, even overt, is an important hidden factor that many children react to with depression. It is essential that both parents be reasonably contented with themselves and with each other. Many families pour love and affection on their

children, but the equation between the parents is joyless, even hostile. This should be worked upon. u Talk of hopelessness, public apathy, corruption, scams, murders, “how the good and hard-working get nowhere and the crooks always win”, have become the subject matter of dinner-time conversation. Surely, there are many better things to talk about with our children. u Regular food and sleeping habits as well as adequate light, fresh air and exercise are other factors that steady a child—these are obvious and much-talked about lifestyle issues, but not followed a lot in many families. u Family setbacks—whether it is a child’s bad grades, or something like a parent losing a job or money, or illness—should be seen and projected to children as isolated incidents that need remedying, not as a sign of having continuous bad luck, or as divine punishment, and other such overwhelming interpretations. u Teaching and encouraging our children to freely give of themselves in loving acts as well as to receive love with grace and gratitude on a daily basis, and not only on birthdays and festivals, is another key to stability and a feeling of security. It is also some kind of insurance against feelings of isolation and alienation.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AP

The banality of the Indian cricket fan

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GURINDER OSAN/AP

ne of the disappointing things about the

Tedious: (above and left) Banners in India are often unimaginative; and Sachin Tendulkar.

World Cup was that it was played on the subcontinent. It is thought that India loves cricket. This is incorrect. India loves India. Cricket gives us the opportunity to

express this affection. The local cricket match in India is unattended. Even World Cup matches featuring two other sides will be played without spectators, no matter what the calibre of the players.

This is unlike World Cup football, or American football and basketball. What attracts Indian spectators isn’t cricket the sport in that sense.

Let us observe the pattern of crowd behaviour.

Indian spectators express themselves physically, through dancing, screaming and jumping about. This is done communally, in groups often including middle-aged men. It is done emotionally, with strong facial expression. Sunil Gavaskar says he was amazed to first play at Lord’s 40 years ago because of the way the audience applauded. It was, he said, always three claps. Clap-clap-clap-silence. But that is why cricket is an English sport. We behave like a WWF audience. Strange things excite us. Like Kolkatans setting their stands alight at the end of a match, a neanderthal fascination with fire.

In European nations (I mean race, not geography and so: England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand), spectator behaviour is more individual. Where communication is visual, it is not through facial expression, but fancy dress.

Instead of screaming, expression is through the written word: banners.

In India, signs are held up which are either obvious or embarrassingly banal.

A decade ago, they were also poorly spelled. These days they’re not because advertisers hand out printed ones. This defeats the purpose of spectator banners, and that is spontaneity. There is never real humour, which can only come when we are able to laugh at ourselves.

In February 1993, South Africa were chasing 208 against Pakistan at Durban.

From 158 for 1 they were all out for 198, five of them clean-bowled by the great Waqar Younis.

As his yorkers were bringing doom to the last few, a South African held up a large sheet on which she had scrawled “WAQAR THE SPRINGBOK FAQAR”. So clever, I remember it 18 years later.

Indians write rubbish.

Foreign commentators often say that the crowd in Chennai is “knowledgeable”. In saying this, they mean that they don’t go off on bump balls, like the crowd does elsewhere in India.

One unique thing is how Indian spectators are silent when the other team scores. On television it’s as if the screen has gone mute. It’s not about enjoying a sport and appreciating the ability of professionals to play it. It’s about nationalism, which in India is narrow and zero-sum. If they score even a little victory, a boundary, our tumescence droops. The Bengali thinks he’s different, but this is untrue.

Imminent defeat against the Lankans in 1996’s World Cup resulted in Kolkatans rioting in Eden Gardens, and, as Indians tend to do, damaging the property that they could barely afford.

The Indian team is overrated because our fierce nationalism inflates its capacity. This has been amplified recently because of our economic power.

Ten years ago, opponents thought little of us, and rightly. Against the quality team, India’s record is to fold. We regularly get a thrashing from Australia (won 36, lost 61), old enemy Pakistan (47:69), and newcomers South Africa (24:40). Even West Indies, 25 years in decline, have a superior record (39:54).

Usually, Indians are happy if their team wins the skirmish and loses the battle. This is because national honour is often safeguarded by the hero.

The astute Ian Chappell noticed that Indians were content if Sachin Tendulkar scored his hundred even if India then lost. In Australia, this would never happen, he said, and it would be seen as defeat, which it is. Since his audience telegraphs this, the Indian cricketer plays for himself much more than players of other sides. An analysis of Tendulkar’s scoring pattern between 90 and 100 will be interesting.

The other thing that separates the Indian audience from the European is the level of security.

David Gower remarked on why Indians flung things at fielders on the boundary. The intent wasn’t to hurt, he said generously, just to distract, “though there were one or two good arms out there”.

Why do we throw things? It’s difficult for others to follow our manner of forcibly inserting ourselves into the

action through such simian behaviour.

The Indian is deeply prejudiced against Africans and black players have always been targeted (some will be offended by this sweeping allegation. I am open to the suggestion that the Indian is an equal-opportunity vandal).

A bottle hit Vasbert Drakes at Rajkot in 2002. This sort of thing has now stopped.

Why? Because Indian spectators are watched over, like inmates.

GURINDER OSAN/AP

On all Indian grounds, a wire mesh now separates players from the unpredictable Indian audience. This is shameful, but passes unnoticed in our culture. In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, West Indies and England, this isn’t needed.

The policing here is excessive, but necessary. Geoffrey Boycott was upset after his sandwiches were confiscated by security in Delhi in February. I sympathize with him for being forced to eat the crew’s Mughlai lunch. Sir Geoffrey is working class and sees no appeal in the exotic. I think a bit of racial profiling is fine, and we should be firm only with Indians.

The greatest commentators in sport are Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen who for years have guided Tour de France viewers through the countryside. Their quality has elevated the event. Second best is Channel 9’s team of Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell (I don’t like Bill Lawry: too excitable). Of the others, West Indians Michael Holding and Ian Bishop are first rate: polished, elegant speakers.

Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri are second rate: no lucidity, little insight and speaking only in stock phrase and cliche. In Shastri’s case, this is often incorrect cliche: “You can be rest assured...” Sanjay Manjrekar is better and so, though more evidence is needed, is Sourav Ganguly.

Navjot Singh Sidhu is original, and perfect for Indians. He’s Wodehousian, spouting rubbish with an air of magnificence. A sort of developing world’s Psmith. It is why he’s so popular with us, because the equation is: content < spectacle. Harsha Bhogle works on his language, and is committed enough to wear a hairpiece, but he’s fluffy and boring—a unique double whammy. If we must have fluff, I prefer Mandira Bedi. Lovely body and she puts it on

display well.

The one way Indian commentators could immediately improve would be to talk less. Gavaskar says his best lesson in commentary was in Australia when he was with Benaud. When an Indian batsman hit his hundred, the crowd applauded. Gavaskar brought the microphone to his mouth, but stopped when he felt Benaud’s hand on his wrist.

Gavaskar said later he realized Benaud wanted the TV audience to take in the moment of the batsman in his solitude, a gladiator in an arena.

Lesson not learnt and no chance of enjoying this in India, with Bhogle and Shastri twittering over everything, and the crowd screaming all the time (silent only during enemy advance).

Between its spectators and commentators, Indians have ruined cricket for everybody. With the growth of our economy, this has got worse.

Indian money has been poured into cricket, sloshing in its crevices, spilling out of its guts.

For Indian players this has meant more cash—vast sums from advertising. For Indian spectators it has meant more advertising.

Advertisements between overs, advertisements between balls.

Intrusive, invasive, relentless, shameless flogging. Strokes renamed by sponsors, sixes renamed after sponsors. Such vulgarity is not off-putting to Indians, which is why it continues and has increased in time.

This could never happen in Australia or England. These places are the refuge for fundamentalists who like cricket played, shown and seen in the orthodox fashion.

Those who wake early to watch the beautiful Test match telecast from Australia are inevitably rewarded. The crunch of the ball hitting the pitch is always clear. The ads for cricket memorabilia are always tasteful. There is the restrained commentary, the women in bikinis (unthinkable in Delhi), the glasses of cold beer (unthinkable in Ahmedabad). Relaxed bodies on sloping green knolls.

No danger of such small rewards of civilization ever reaching our shores, but at least we have Sachin.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

L6

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

SNACKS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

FOR ELEVENSES

Just the crumbs

Five Old Delhi classics to spice up your teatime u Fen: Made of refined flour, flaky and light.

Some say it is so named because it is fan­shaped.

Goes well with tea. `70*

p Rusk: These double­baked slices of bread are hard, dry and crisp. Another variety called cake rusk, made with eggs, is softer. `70 for rusk; `120 for cake rusk

The old nibbles: (clockwise from left) A karigar inside the Sikander Bakery kitchen; a young customer inspects biskuts; and owner Jalaluddin is at the shop every morning.

The traditional bakeries of the Walled City are dead—except for a few B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· t’s cramped and dark, except for the orange glow from a hole in the wall. Two men in lungis squat in front of the woodfired oven. Blackened iron trays are stacked against one of the cell’s sooty walls. Ten minutes later, one man inserts a long iron spatula into the oven and brings out a tray of paape. This goldenbrown bread and the Dickensian world in which it is made has vanished. Well, almost.

Opened in 1942, Sikander Bakery is in Kucha Faulad Khan, a congested mohalla in the Walled City named after a Mughal-era kotwal. It is one of the few traditional bakeries of Old Delhi which have survived the onslaught of factory breads and industrial biscuits. Spot them in neighbourhoods such as Matia Mahal, Ballimaran, Pahari Bhojla and Farash Khana. A few exist in central Delhi’s Nizamuddin Basti and some are in south Delhi, in the Muslim localities of Okhla.

At four each, Kucha Faulad

I

Khan and Matia Mahal bazaar, which is opposite Jama Masjid, have the largest cluster of bakeries in one neighbourhood. Sikander Bakery—open from 6am-11pm— is the oldest. Every day its single wood-fired bhatti (oven), eight workers and 400 baking patris (trays) produce a sackful—or 90kg—of baked goods. Cramped and airless, its walls are stained black with decades of soot and the floor is dusted with refined flour.

The workers in these bakeries are called karigars, or craftsmen.

However, they are essentially treated as unskilled labourers. At Sikander’s, three karigars in the room adjacent to the bhatti work exclusively to prepare dough for the two most fast-moving products—rusks and paape, while the rest work on the other side of the bhatti, kneading dough for the other products (see box). The karigars’ world is invisible from the street that, unlike this 69-year-old landmark, has transformed completely.

“Before 1947, this lane had only half a dozen stores,” says 75-yearold Mohammad Ahmad, a neigh-

bourhood elder who has been starting his mornings with Sikander’s paape and fen since the pre-independence days. Today, the lane teems with tea houses, butcheries, clinics, groceries, biryani kitchens, bead stores and cellphone kiosks. The old Sikander patron, known as Chacha Ahmad, spends his afternoon sitting across the bakery, reading Urdu newspapers. “This mohalla belonged to the rich. But most were (Muslim) League supporters who went to Pakistan after Partition. The educated Muslims who worked as bureaucrats, teachers and police officers too migrated there after the bureaucracy was divided between the two nations.”

Pointing to the bakery, Chacha

Ahmad says, “It attracted more crowd during the time of Haji Sikander, the bakery’s founder.”

Jalaluddin, Sikander’s 64-yearold son and current owner, knows the customers by their first names.

He has an extra rusk for those who have a parrot at home—parrots like rusks. “Most old bakeries have shut down. Some new ones have opened but there are no longer as many as there were in the past,” he says. Jalaluddin’s father, who died in 1967 aged 70, came from a UP village.“There was nothing there,” Jalaluddin says.

The story of Sikander’s exodus from poverty is replicated by the successive generations of labourers in his bakery. Manzoor, the oldest employee, came from Bihar

35 years ago. “In my village, half the year there was drought, half the year there was flood,” he says.

Shripal, a senior karigar, came 30 years ago from UP “to escape from hunger”. At 18, Ashiq is the youngest worker. He came from Bihar two years ago. “There’s nothing back home,” he says. Like the unchanging profile of its employees, the quality of Sikander Bakery’s products too hasn’t changed.

“Good then, good now,” says Chacha Ahmad, dipping a paape in his chai.

Sikander’s paape dough is made of refined flour mixed with water, yeast, sugar and aniseed; each piece is sprinkled with poppy seeds. After about 10 minutes in the oven, as the paapes grow light brown, the position of the trays is changed for uniform heating. Ten minutes later, the trays are taken out. If eaten straight out of the oven, gol paape is warm, sweet, soft, chewy and a little greasy. If eaten later, it is hard and crisp.

Serve with tea.

t Tabarakh roti: Made of semolina and refined flour, it’s a dark brown flat disc dusted with aniseed and poppy seeds. Hard and crisp. `110

p Chaiwalla samosa: There’s no filling inside. Instead of being triangular like a regular ‘samosa’, it is shaped like a rhombus. `75 u Biskuts: Salty and flavoured with different spices, the ‘biskuts’ come in many varieties. Try ‘jalebi ajwain walle biskuts’. Twirl­shaped, they carry the delicious pungency of carom seeds. `100 *All prices are per kg

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

Anna and the Kiwis A heavenly dessert from Down Under is a tribute to the Russian ballerina

A

ll sweet things are a luxury but everyone needs a bit of cake-shaped indulgence from time to time. Many treats at the top end, though, flatter to deceive—those impossibly glamorous and complicated confections that beckon from five-star bakeries are often a terrible disappointment when you actually eat them.

Pastry chefs often seem so intent on constructing the perfect nougatine tuile that they forget the flavour. Which is why, for me anyway, a well-made, but decidedly rustic-looking apple pie with perfect fruit and buttery pastry will always be preferable to a bland, oversweet, patisserie-by-numbers

Tartelette Pomme Verte.

Sometimes the simplest combinations are the most inspired and delicious and today’s recipe is a great example—even if you’re terminally clumsy, pavlova always manages to taste divine and look as if you’ve just graduated from the Cordon Bleu.

The origins of the dish are hotly disputed—no one can quite decide whether it’s from Australia or New Zealand—but it was definitely created in honour of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova when she toured Down Under in the 1920s.

Whether Oz or Kiwi in origin, a perfect “pav” always consists of the made-in-heaven combination of meringue, cream and fruit. Needless to say, with such simplicity, each element has to be perfect. The meringue base has to be crisp on the outside with a soft, almost marshmallow interior.

The cream has to be thick and

fresh—at home in Scotland, I buy tubs of double (heavy) cream. In India the closest to this is the cream from the top of the milk which I save every day for a week if I’m going to make a pavlova. The fruit should be something that’s at its ripe best and right now the strawberries are wonderful.

I couldn’t resist a slight cheffy affectation—my version has the merest hint of rosewater—but please feel free to leave it out.

Rosewater pavlova with strawberries and cream Serves 6-8 Ingredients 4 egg whites 200g caster sugar 2 level tsp cornflour 1 tsp vinegar 1 tbsp rosewater 300ml thick (heavy) cream (preferably from the top of the milk) 400g strawberries, washed and hulled

Lush: The pavlova’s charm lies in its crisp meringue and creamy heart.

A handful of dried rose petals, to decorate Method Line a baking tray with parchment paper and draw a circle approximately 20-23cm in diameter. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius. If using an electric oven with an option to turn off the upper element, do this—it will stop the top of the pavlova browning.

In a large bowl whisk the egg whites till stiff, then gradually add the sugar—in about four batches—and continue whisking until the meringue is thick, glossy and can stand up in stiff peaks. Now whisk in the

cornflour, vinegar and rosewater.

The cornflour helps to keep the inside of the pavlova pillowy.

Carefully spoon about three quarters of the mixture on to the parchment, then spread to fill the circle you have drawn. At this stage, you can be as meticulous or free-spirited as you like. Somehow, I think the more rustic-looking pavlovas have more charm but you could go all out and pipe stars around the edge to encase the cream

and berries later. Whatever you do, make sure the sides are slightly higher than the middle.

Put the pavlova in the oven and immediately lower the temperature to about 110 degrees Celsius. Bake for about one and a half hours but keep an eye on it—if it looks like it’s starting to brown, turn the temperature down a little more.

When the pavlova is baked, turn off the heat but leave it inside the oven until cold. You could even make the meringue case the day before you need it.

Gently peel the pavlova from the parchment. Don’t worry if the meringue cracks slightly, you’ll be able to patch it up with cream. Just before serving, beat the cream until thick, then pile it on top of the meringue base, followed by the berries. Strew with rose petals for a touch of not trying-too-hard luxury—the best kind.

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

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to bake pavlova, log on to www.livemint.com/pavlova.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011

L7

Insider

LOUNGE TREND

The rise of the personal THE SELBY/WSJ

The ideal home is lived­in, unfussy, creatively imperfect. Call it ‘undecorating’— cleverness over money, taste over expense

B Y K ATIE R OIPHE ···························· erhaps now is the time to undecorate, and by that I mean it’s time to embrace the new design trend of undecorating. In her book, Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design, Christiane Lemieux, the founder of the innovative fabric and furniture company DwellStudio, documents a widespread new trend in interior design, which is to say the lack of it, or rather the profusion of do-it-yourself style: “Perfection,” she writes, “is overrated.”

The ideal the book puts forth is of unfussy, lived-in, creative, imperfect homes; it’s a postcard taped to a vanity mirror, or two children scootering across a loft’s exquisite floorboards, or cheap blue vases from Chinatown wired into lamps. The premise here is cleverness over money, taste over expense, personality over hired expertise, idiosyncrasy over polish; it’s a welcome development, reflective of a recession-fuelled revelation that money is not the same as beauty.

The origins of the “undecorating” movement lie in the rise, in the past decade, of blogs such as Apartment Therapy and Design Sponge, and the creation of shelter magazines such as Domino and in Italy, Apartamento, that began disseminating informal, accessible, personal design to the stylish amateur. The Internet provided new access to anyone even moderately interested in design, or even just bored at work, to a whole realm of design ideas, no decorator required. The emphasis is on freshness, on individuality, on places one would really want to live in, and not just look at.

Its values are reflected in websites such as The Selby, which celebrates extremely personal style, and in other new books such as Details by Lili Diallo, or Summers in France by Kathryn Ireland.

The profusion of “undecorating” has some connection to the economic times, the idea, suddenly, that lavish is not entirely cool. It is not coincidence, surely, that in a world in which US President Barack Obama tells Wall Street guys that they should be ashamed of their bonuses, that the ideals of do-it-yourself, and cheap, eccentric, idiosyncratic expressions of personality should be in the ascendant. Lemieux says this particular mode of creativity is, on some level, a response to an interior decorator being out of the question for many.

“In figuring things out yourself,” she says, “including what you can afford, you make interesting decisions that wouldn’t be made if money were no object—the imperfections, the real-life demands are what inspire us.”

There are people within the decorating world who are suspicious of the idea of “undecorating”. Kevin Sharkey, executive editorial director of deco-

P

rating at Martha Stewart Living, for one, says: “I don’t like the word. It conjures up a negative feeling.” Yet, he adds, “if there is a trend, we probably initiated it.” Lemieux believes Stewart had a role in the shift towards the do-it-yourself underpinning of “undecorating” and casts this new movement as more Martha deconstructed or Martha on the fly, or maybe, one might add, Martha minus the turning of tea towels into curtains.

Those who are averagely interested in their surroundings will find something liberating in this new modus vivendi.

It’s true that many of the people featured in these gorgeous, glossy new books are “stylists”, or “prop stylists”, or otherwise employed in fashion.

Gazing at their done-over barns and railroad apartments in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one gets the definite sense that their “undecorated” spaces are a bit THE SELBY/WSJ

MELANIE ACEVEDO/WSJ

Home trends: (clockwise from above) The apartment of decorator Jacques Grange, from The Selby, illustrates the undecorating trend; DwellStudio partner Jennifer Chused’s room is featured in Undecorate; and the trend towards informal, idiosyncratic decorating is exemplified in designer Inès de la Fressange’s Paris apartment.

more decorated than our own undecorated spaces, and one secretly suspects that one’s own life may not yield up the time to stumble across handpainted Chinoiserie wallpaper by the storied French firm de Gournay or antique Etruscan pottery brought back from a trip to Beirut.

However, this book does make one reconsider one’s own home, and see the accidental splash of colour, the bike helmet perched on a coffee-table book, the bewildering collection of Ganesha statues, say, the giant clamshells on the mantel, in a different light. The idea of an accidental aesthetic, of the things that you pull together for private reasons, gives you a new perspective, a n d l i b e r a t e s y o u from the more rigid dictates of good taste. Take the orange striped Moroccan rug you bought after a break-up out of a sudden desire for colour and warmth and an exotic new something,

along with the forest-green art deco couches, which some might say clash in both colour and style.

Instead, according to these principles, they now give your living room a certain undecorated panache; they are expressive of a moment, a private history. The fantasy of the undecorated house is Tuesday morning as it is actually lived, not as we would like other people to imagine it; it is the idea of energy, of chaos, of motion, of mess (well, mess within very circumscribed and aesthetically pleasing limits: children lying in a pile of books, artfully unmade beds, one piece of clothing strewn across a couch).

This “democratic” impulse in design, of course, is not entirely new. Periodically there is a design revolution that imagines itself in opposition to the formal, overly polished aesthetic of the previous generation.

Take, for instance, Roger Fry’s

‘Undecorating’ has some connection to the economic times, the idea, suddenly, that lavish is not entirely cool Omega studio, founded in London in 1913, where Bloomsbury artistes designed fabrics and furniture in Venetian reds, salmons and lemon yellows, to reflect the fresh air of the changing times, in direct rebellion against the formal antiques and heavy draperies of Victorian interiors. One of the newspapers of the day called the stu-

dio’s creations “immoral furniture”, and that immorality was an early glimmer of the impulse to “undecorate”.

The cynical among us might imagine that if the movement towards “undecorating” truly takes off, this will simply mean enormous amounts of effort poured into looking effortless; that a whole new breed of undecorators will be spawned, who will scour Parisian flea markets to unearth that perfect, quirky, idiosyncratic expression of their client’s innermost self—and, in fact, there already are some hard at work doing just that. The cynical might even argue we are simply creat-

ing a new rigorous set of standards—Eclectic! Personal!

Quirky! Casual!—for the average individual to live up to. But even those hardened cynics will have to admit that they would rather go to a dinner party at one of the splashy, inviting, inventive houses featured in Undecorate than step into one of the daunting interiors on the cover of Architectural Digest, where you are very likely to be quizzed on obscure Renaissance artists and will almost definitely spill red wine on the impeccable expanse of white couch.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

L8

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

ADAM SACHS

The accidental Indophile How three New Yorkers became a key part of the online dating scene here. This week, they even made Ignighter a free site

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

···························· hen the founder of a group dating website tells you he met his girlfriend three years ago on a group date, you can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the poster boy posturing. But New Yorker Adam Sachs, the 28-year-old CEO of Ignighter.com, explains the romance is set in Boulder, Colorado, when he and his partners Kevin Owocki and Daniel Osit travelled to participate in TechStars, a competitive start-up accelerator programme. Current TV, the television channel launched by climate champion Al Gore, wanted to make a documentary about their website. “The film-maker said it would be awesome if we could get you guys on a group date,” says Sachs. The trio knew only one girl in town and asked her if she could rustle up a few friends for a night out at the neighbourhood bar.

“One of the girls she brought became my girlfriend,” says Sachs.

W

Ignighter’s been in the news recently for its almost accidental India business plan.

Three New Yorkers set up a group dating site in 2008, to help their fellow men skip those awkward one-on-one Friday night blind dates. Unsurprisingly, the almost conservative, safety-innumbers idea of going out with a group of strangers of the opposite sex doesn’t find too many takers in the US. But they noticed a dramatic spike in the number of users from Indian cities, where it’s so much easier for the website’s mostly 18- to 25-year-old users to just tell their parents: I’m going out with friends.

When Sachs and his partners first registered the traffic from India, it didn’t result in an epiphany. It was more a case of “What the hell is this? Okay let’s go back to normal life.” But by January 2010 they couldn’t ignore the Indian wave and they made some changes—like replacing the image of the American couple on the home page with one of an Indian couple, and switching the word US with India in their tag line, “the number one group dating site in the US”. The National Review recently called their experience “the future of American entrepreneurship”.

By that August, Ignighter.com (ignite your night life, etc.) had crossed a million Indian users (the number has since doubled). Overnight, Sachs and his partners were networking furiously with Indians in Manhattan to find out more about this faraway country that none of them had ever visited.

In February, after raising nearly

@ARSACHS IN INDIA Adam Sachs’ Twitter timeline reflects the fun he’s had here 4 March Off to India tonight. Who’s been and has some must sees/eats/dos?

8 March To the tens RT @somakc: After a busy day of mtgs, @arsachs gets dressed to the nines for his India debut http://yfrog.com/h2y53uuj 8 March They didn’t have enough cloth for my big head. :( RT @amitklein: @arsachs where’s the turban?

9 March 27­story building in the background is the $1 BILLION home of the Ambani family in Mumbai. http://twitpic.com/47nybz 10 March Full day of meetings on the rooftop of the Oberoi Mumbai—360 view: http://occip.it/pt4809ug

$3 million (around `13.4 crore) from venture capitalists, Sachs was finally ready to hit the road.

“We had so little money we didn’t even want to pay for a trip to India, so once we closed the round the first thing I wanted to do was get here,” he says.

Earlier this week the website even dropped its average monthly $40 charge per group and decided it was time to indefinitely be a free site. “We don’t anticipate an increase in traffic but we’ve already seen dramatic increases in engagement,” says Sachs.

It’s always a relief to interview an iPad CEO who wears a suit only a couple of times a year, and Sachs is no exception. Of course, on his first trip to India, he’s ordered two suits (he’s already had four fittings when we meet) from Vaish Tailors in Delhi’s Connaught Place. As he says in his blog about the trip: “First rule of doing business in India. You gotta look good.”

It doesn’t take long for us to break the ice. Especially as both parties are in agreement that the live singer at The Oberoi Delhi’s Club Bar is killing Sting’s Fields of Gold. We move our beers to a quieter spot where he regales me with his observations about local culture.

Sachs has figured that pop music equals Bollywood. Or, as he puts it: “There is no Lady Gaga in India.” He’s noticed that we overstaff every business. When he visited the office of matrimonial website Jeevansathi—“the pinnacle of Web success”—he was overwhelmed by the number of people who worked there. “Our team is five people,” he says worriedly.

Also, he’s unlikely to reach the venue of a Delhi farmhouse party by 10.30pm, because he now knows from experience that he’ll be among the first ones there.

He’s confirmed that men do actually hold hands in India, that Smoke House Grill is Delhi’s hottest nightspot and that life is so much easier with a full-time driver. And, of course, he’s posed with that ultimate stony Indian beauty, the Taj Mahal.

Sachs is interested in my view of the Indian dating scene—when I play back the recording of our interview, I realize he asked me more questions than I asked him.

But to make Ignighter an Indian relationships site based in India, it’s important for its founders to understand the complicated neoconservative man-woman dating

dynamic of New India. Also, are Indians only interested in the website because it’s from New York and this is what the cool people in that coolest of American cities are doing? Currently the website is in the process of analysing its overwhelming database. So far, all Sachs can say is that Indian users send an unbelievable 1,000 messages a month on the site.

In a previous lifetime, Sachs never had to worry about decoding the dating habits of an alien culture. After a double major in film and history at Chicago’s Northwestern University, he joined the television department at Sony Pictures, where his job consisted mainly of inserting commercials in TV shows. “So if you were watching Jeopardy, which I’m a big fan of, I would be the one arranging the commercials in the breaks,” he says. Eventually he linked up with college pal Osit and common friend Owocki to start Ignighter.

In the last year, the efforts of the overnight anthropologists have been also backed by several investors of Indian origin, such as Google’s Rajan Anandan, Kae Capital’s Sasha Mirchandani, GSA Venture Partners’ Somak Chattopadhyay, Exclusively.in’s Sunjay Guleria, and others.

On this breathless trip too, where Sachs has interviewed potential country heads in four cities, begun the process of incorporating an Indian company, clarified the logistics of setting up a payment gateway so he can sell services off the website, met users and potential users to find out what exactly they want from Ignighter, he’s squeezed out some networking time. “People keep passing me around.

After just two weeks, my Rolodex in India beats my Rolodex in New York,” he says.

12 March Delhi hotel rooftop on a Saturday evening catching up on email with a bottle of red wine.

12 March I’m pretty sure I just got malaria.

17 March The pinnacle of web success in India (@ Naukri.com) http://4sq.com/fI0yg5 17 March Dinner with an old college friend. Supposedly one of the best restaurants in Delhi. (@ Bukhara) http://4sq.com/fnvdB9 18 March When in doubt, have lunch at Google.

19 March Abdul pulled an illegal u­turn. Delhi cops not happy. http://instagr.am/p/CW7oj/ 21 March Just experienced my first earthquake. Rushed from 7th floor down to ground level. Other people don’t appear nearly as “shaken”.

26 March 3+ weeks in Delhi and still haven’t seen the Taj Mahal. Finally, today is the day.

Photo opp: Sachs got the ‘I’m holding up the Taj Mahal by its roof’ pho­ tograph during his trip.

27 March @Danny_DeVito I’m in India. Want to come hang out? 90 degrees and sunny. A dry heat.

31 March DEL­>EWR. Month long India trip done. Excited to get back to NYC. (@ Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL)) http://4sq.com/eBIG0z JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011

L9

Play

LOUNGE Q&A | IAN ROBERTS

The world is on fire Your mission, as in most video games, is simple: Solve the climate crisis. But, like life, this strategy game is not quite that easy B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· ime is running out.

You have 200 years to find a way to protect the earth’s depleting resources and climate, while reconciling the needs of a growing world population which demands more food, power and living space.

That’s the compelling premise for an unlikely new video game called Fate of the World, a dramatic, sweeping strategy title that covers the next two centuries of the real world.

Unlike most other games, Fate of the World doesn’t put armies and missiles at your disposal. Instead, you have the steely power of energy efficiency policies and organic farming subsidies.

Powered under the hood with tomes of real world data and climate prediction models based on the research of the department of physics at Oxford University, the game attempts to simulate the real social and environmental impact of global climate change.

Lead designer Ian Roberts says developers Red Redemption didn’t “set out to make an educational product”.

“This is a video game that became education because its content (is) related to the real world,” he says. In a phone interview, Roberts spoke about the game’s pedagogical potential, fusion power and the advantages of being journalistic. Edited excerpts:

T

You’ve mentioned in interviews that the “old media” frequently mistakes correlation for causation in reporting climate change,

Battlefield earth: Fate of the World requires players to make difficult decisions about the future of the planet.

and comes off as being alarmist. You say games are better, in certain circumstances, in explaining complicated systems.

Absolutely. What I find is that conversation about climate change is too simplistic.

People talk about individual issues without considering the combinatorial, whole picture that arises. Games, I think, give them the ability to try out their assumptions, to see scale and the inter-relatedness between issues.

This changes the conversation. By experiencing a system, you get a better sense of it than a newspaper article. You gain an understanding you’d never have had without reading large amounts of research.

Games give you that.

They’re an experience rather than a lecture.

Most strategy games have a “winning strategy”, a set of steps that lead to victory.

How did you approach the dangers of a magic solution in a game that’s rooted to

real world concerns?

I think “magic solutions” are about compromise. You choose one path to the detriment of another. When you care about “winning”, as you do in most strategy games, that’s not a problem. Take a game like Civilization, for instance. You can either build up your armies to aim for a victory via military might, or downplay that factor to focus on a peaceful cultural victory.

In our game, these choices are always difficult. If you focus on propping up standard of living, like many governments around the world do on GDP and growth, that will cause a major problem with emissions, which in turn leads to GDP hits later. On the other hand, lower emissions right away means lower growth, and the inability of economies to commit to emissions cuts. The connectedness of the world makes it hard to find a sweet spot.

We do, however, have silver bullets. Like fusion power. It’s a real lifesaver in the game and

Compute in colour Pink and green are the new upstarts in a laptop market dominated by black, blue and red

B Y K RISH R AGHAV ···························· here’s something odd about Sony’s new Vaio YB series of 11-inch laptops.

The oddity doesn’t manifest itself in the usual markers of a laptop purchase decision—the machines have good technical specifications and come bundled with all the requisite software. Instead,

it’s the growing importance of an oft-overlooked design factor—colour.

The Vaio YB can only be bought in green, pink or silver.

No conformist black. No Appleaping white.

The long-held dominance of black and white is being challenged on multiple fronts. Silver is now the hue of choice for premium executive laptops, from Dell’s Adamo to Apple’s MacBook Pro. India’s laptop makers have also seen

ASUS: Eee PC Karim Rashid edition, `26,990.

SONY: Vaio C Green, `54,990.

krish.r@livemint.com

T

solves a lot of problems, but it’s the result of a major technological commitment that may or may not pay off.

The so-called “social change” games have a strong simulation bias, in the sense that there’s a sense of “preachiness” to what the simulation is trying to teach you. How did you avoid that?

We try and make it about balancing and managing multiple risks, rather than a “good vs bad” dichotomy.

You can, for example, early in the game, completely ban oil.

Entirely. You can do that, but you run the risk of economic collapse if you don’t prepare the world to shift to a post-oil scenario.

We didn’t want to be preachy in the sense of ramming “obvious” solutions down players’ throats. We wanted to set up as realistic a world as people are currently describing. We’ve put in all this available real world data on fuel production, and reserves and recoverable resources. The results coming

out of the game closely match real world situations. We’ve seen that if players maintain growth at current levels, and push unconventional oil and fossil fuel use, they start having problems with supply around 2065. That’s in agreement with real world data.

It’s not an easy game. It’s hard because the subject is hard. It’s difficult to come up with a set of policy decisions that will solve this complex knot of problems.

Were there a set of literary influences on how situations develop out in the game? Did you look at science fiction books to extrapolate what might happen in the future?

The problem with research is that it’s focused on specific aspects. If you have a study on the hypothetical collapse of the Amazon rainforest, it will tell you what circumstances would lead to that happening. We used a lot of studies like that to inform how that situation might come about in our game. But if you want to know what consequences that will

have, research ends up short.

We try and talk about combinations of effects. A good example is Mark Lynas’ book Six Degrees, which tries to examine what the world might look like if we raise the earth’s temperature by 1-6 degrees (Celsius). But a lot of journalism talks about tipping points—this is what would happen if the permafrost melted—but the game is like a chaos engine—what would happen if the permafrost melted AND the Amazon collapsed AND something else happened?

We hope that these combinatorial and stacking effects give players an understanding of how crippling these effects can be, and I hope we never have to confirm these hypotheses in the real world.

an increase in sales after launching special edition variants based on the work of famous designers. Asus launched a series of notebooks designed by product designer Karim Rashid (in hot pink and coffee brown), while Hewlett-Packard (HP) launched a special edition “Mini” laptop by fashion designer Vivienne Tam, both in 2010. Dell India launched Design Studio, which lets users personalize their laptop lid with a choice of artwork.

“Dell Design Studio was a huge hit with our customers and we are coming with a whole new set

of colour and pattern offerings this summer,” says Shishir Singh, Dell India’s director for product marketing.

Then there’s pink. The colour is a constant presence, across categories, models and brands.

There’s Lenovo’s floral design for the IdeaPad S10-3s, which bleeds on to the palm rest. Pink even makes an appearance in usually dour “executive” models, like Sony’s S series. “The consumer base is getting increasingly diversified,” says Sachin Thapar, the head of Sony India’s gaming and IT business. “Colour preferences are blending with lifestyle requirements and demand for

vivid colours is on the rise.”

But most of this experimentation takes place at the lower end of the market, with the socalled sub-`20,000 “netbook” category. “When people see a price point of `30,000 or above, they tend to get a little conservative with colour,” says Ashish Gupta, the category head for mobility and product development at HP PSG India. He calls black, red and blue the “core colours” of the laptop business, responsible for 75% of all sales.

But the rest are infecting new categories, establishing a presence even in mid-range and premium laptops. “What we tend to do is introduce a special edition, or a new colour variant, at least four times a year, once in each quarter,” Gupta says.

For those looking for a bit more vibrancy in their daily computing, some of the options are pictured here.

HP: Mini Vivienne Tam edition, `21,990.

Fate of the World is designed for ages 12 and above and can be downloaded from www.fateoftheworld.net or from online game stores such as Steam for $9.99 (around `450).

DELL: Inspiron Mini Pink, `18,000.

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

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

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

BY P A V I T R A J A Y A R A M A N & K RISH R AGHAV ······························· t’s called the procrastination principle.

An unwavering belief that the problems confronting a project can, and most likely will, be solved later by other people.

It’s the unlikely cornerstone of the Internet’s existence—everything from Google’s Android operating system to Wikipedia relies on it. Its loose philosophy (forever a draft) is the guiding principle for anyone wanting to build something online. It doesn’t matter if your world-changing free encyclopaedia is incomplete. Your users become participants, constantly improving your foundational efforts.

Now, Bangalore has a brick and mortar building as testament to the principle’s effectiveness. “It’s intentionally incomplete,” says programmer and independent researcher Kinal Jonnalagadda about this pallet-rack wireframe structure off Bangalore’s Richmond Road, which looks like a cross between a jungle gym and the cross section of an architectural blueprint.

“Incomplete because it forces you to put some thought into it and do something yourself.”

Called Jaaga, it’s a modular, makeshift, multi-level metal space run by Freeman Murray, a former computer programmer and entrepreneur, and artist Archana Prasad. The structure is designed so that it can be dismantled easily and moved elsewhere at short notice. Their official website even details a succinct five-step process to do just that.

Inside, bent over their laptops, typing lines of “code”, the five-member team of the Bangalore-based start-up HashCube wouldn’t be out of place in one of the city’s several glass-wall buildings. But seated as they are on moulded plastic chairs in Jaaga’s collective space for “technology and art”, something seems different.

Their laptops sit on foldable metal tables as they create online games for social networking sites and mobile platforms such as the iPhone. Next to them is Anusheel Nahar who, after quitting his day job at an IT firm in Bangalore, has set out to establish his own business. A glance away, seated at a level below them and separated by two art installations, is Justin Alva, who co-founded Whoopey, a group-buying company designed on the lines of www.groupon.com Every day, these entrepreneurs come together to work on their initiatives. Jaaga encourages those eager to start their version of the next big thing to work on their projects under one roof, feed ideas and even help each other. People can use Jaaga as an office space—a huge luxury for start-ups with limited funds—for as long as they want. The Jaaga website, for instance,

I

TECHNOLOGY

IT

Do Yourself From ambitious wireframe structures to nationwide communities, India’s new techies are more networked, more open and more artistic

Network savvy: The founders of 9 Circuits in Delhi.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

is currently offering programmers a three-month fellowship to build an “installation” using Microsoft’s Kinect video game device. But while initial expenses for Jaaga are being backed by art grants and the personal funds of the proprietors, they don’t rule out charging for use of the space in the future.

Started in August, and formalized in March, Jaaga wants to encourage a free flow of ideas in both art and technology. Murray oversees technology, and Prasad, art. In the last eight months, Jaaga has hosted research projects that chronicle the livelihoods of Bangalore’s 850,000 migrant workers, and helped create digital 3D models of India’s heritage sites in a project with Microsoft Research India. Jaaga also has an online “Ideas Pool” that anyone can contribute to. Currently, there are proposals to make a film about one local cow, investigate the potential of radio frequency identification (RFID) cards to create personalized art experiences and build local mobile phone networks that will let citizens communicate in the event of an Egypt-style Internet shutdown.

“We want people to use this as a long-term space for exchanges of ideas,” says Murray, adding that users are slowly learning to leave behind their “comfort zones in cubicles” and becoming a part of Jaaga’s “open culture”.

Jonnalagadda says this difference is vital. “The software industry currently works much like the construction industry where programmers are given a task with specifications and are expected to build accordingly,” he says. “What is not being explored is the artistic element to software, that is the experimentation. Where one can say, I have no idea what the outcome is, but I am going to experiment.”

This kind of free-form dabbling has always existed in India, but mostly in separate, isolated silos. Now, it’s not uncommon to see citywide communities of artists and engineers, driven by Twitter and Facebook, collaborating.

Six months ago, Jonnalagadda figured that code jams and “hackathons” (group exchanges in creative engineering and problem solving, made famous recently by Facebook) that last for a single day and aimed at a single topic would be instantly popular. He also hoped more open-source projects would percolate out of India, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai-based MayaVi, a free tool that helps visualize complex scientific data that is now used widely around the world. Most “open-source” projects such as the Linux operating system, called so because their internal workings are freely modifiable, rely on small contributions from thousands of volunteers across the world.

Jonnalagadda was previously a planner at Barcamp Bangalore, a loose association of techies which organizes what are called “unconference” style events, where the schedule is ad hoc and participation is open.

In October, he founded HasGeek.in, a company that organizes day-long hackathons and seminars on coding and technology. It also has an active online job board, where “awesome” companies post requirements for “kickass” developers. “Both hack events and the concept of co-working spaces like Jaaga were a parallel movement that began in the West,” he says, explaining that in both cases the idea is to share and discuss. Each event produces a flood of speculative blogs, tweets and wikis—letting participants tackle complex ideas one piece at a time, across multiple events.

Hackathons and codejams encourage people to swap ideas for quick projects, which could range from plans for a business to fixes for social and civic problems. In March, both Bangalore and Delhi hosted 54-hour “Startup Weekends”, in which groups of participants go from brainstorming ideas to showcasing a prototype to venture capitalists in two days. “There’s been a sharp rise in ideas around these aspects,” says Arindam Bhattacharjee, the chief architect of business intelligence at analytics firm SAP India.

“Technology is being used to solve perennial urban problems.”

There have been six such sessions in HasGeek’s six months—their latest was an Android camp on Friday. Not surprisingly, Jonnalagadda found registrations full. “Android is the new

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

COURTESY FREEMAN MURRAY

COME OUT AND PLAY Here are the five commandments, if you will, of being a new geek • Have multiple interests. Your love for films world needs it, you will find help. can inform the video games you design, and coding skills can make your art projects cooler. • The tools don’t matter. You don’t need an expensive Mac to become a film­maker.

• Trust in collaboration. Share freely, and don’t Everything can be started cheap and, in many hoard ownership of ideas. Other people can cases, free. help make it better.

• Put your personality into your work. Think • If something doesn’t exist, start building it. It eclectic, and be idiosyncratic. Leave the cold doesn’t have to be perfect, or complete. If the professionalism to the big firms.

craze, the techies are loving it,” he says. When Google announced a similar camp last year with 5,000 seats, the event was packed but it took weeks. This year, he recalls that it was packed in 59 minutes.

At an average hackathon, a theme or problem is put forth, and ideas are furiously debated. Challenges, usually with a time limit, are issued, and people, alone or in teams, hammer out a basic prototype solution. These, in turn, are incrementally improved by participants.

“It is almost like people are waiting for an event like this to happen,” he says, laughing. “What I am trying to create with HasGeek is that kind of an environment that lets you be creative.”

Murray agrees. “Whenever we organize weekend hackathons, we see crowds pouring in,” he says, adding that he hopes to have day-long sessions at least once a week.

Taking the idea further, Murray would like to blur the lines between hacking and partying. “Maybe an allday event, where people can code with a beer break. Why not?” he says, smiling. “You don’t have to pretend to be coding all the time.”

A part of this infectious energy has also carried over to the country’s many software start-ups.

Deepak Ravindran is the co-founder and head of a mobile start-up called Innoz Technologies Pvt. Ltd. His official corporate bio has a photograph of him in a racing suit, leaning against a sports bike.

His company, which started as a final-year college project at the Lal Bahadur Shastry College of Engineering in Kerala, now provides an SMS service called SMSGyan that is used one million times a day by Bharti Airtel subscribers. Users send an SMS query (match scores, movie titles, academic references) to 56161, and the system crawls the Internet to get you your answer. “The new wave of tech start-ups will be product companies, which build something relevant for users here,” he says. “Not those geared towards providing services to the West.”

Ravindran works out of an eighthfloor apartment in Gurgaon, which serves as his “marketing office”. His company has followed a successful trajectory, from engineering college project to incubation by a programme sponsored by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), that is becoming increasingly common. “The ecosystem is very comfortable with start-ups, and I think we’re building the same kind of base that Silicon Valley did,” he says, referring to technology-centric startups around the country. “India badly needs more small success stories to get people to follow this path more often.”

Similarly, Jaaga’s Murray met the founders of HashCube, friends Deepan Chakravarthy and Ramprasad Rajendran, when their company was being incubated in a unique programme at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) in 2009. On the inception of Jaaga, Murray invited them to use the space free of cost. It was a deal the two new graduates couldn’t refuse.

“This cut our costs; plus the idea of a co-working space was exciting. The energy at IIM-A was high, and Jaaga promised the same,” says Chakravarthy, stressing that the presence of other innovative minds pushed their own creativity. Co-working spaces also create opportunities for serendipitous encounters, something HashCube has benefited from. “We are engineers and we think like engineers, so we sometimes get help from artists here on the look or the colours we use in a game,” says Chakravarthy. Likewise, the HashCube team has helped another start-up put up its website, for a fee.

What Jaaga and HasGeek are attempting to do with software, four engineers in Delhi are hoping to replicate for hardware.

Nandeep Mali, Harry Samson, Priya Kuber and Pronoy Chopra are the founders of 9 Circuits, an online store that hopes to kickstart the country’s fledgling do-it-yourself (DIY) hardware community.

Hardware engineering includes everything from building prototype vehicles to experimental gadgets. The store sells an entire range of programmable Arduino Boards (the engineering founda-

tion for everything from a robot to a GPS module), hardware components, sensors and spare parts.

It operates out of a single room on the first floor of a shopping complex in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar. Their unlikely neighbours include a detective agency called Omniscient Detectives. Inside the 9 Circuits office are four desks arranged haphazardly, stacked with miniature mountains of electronic components. “Everything is about software here, so the hardware hobbyists in India are largely fragmented. There’s lots of knowledge but very little networking,” says Mali, rooting through a box of touch screens. “The entry barriers become very heavy.”

9 Circuits is a result of the four’s frustration with procuring items for college projects and DIY ideas.

“We saw that nobody catered to the hobbyist market here,” Mali says.

“Nobody makes components at the individual scale. If you want 100 pieces, good, but one? Nobody will do that.” He contrasts this with the US, where open-source “3D printers” such as MakerBot (www.makerbot.com) let hobbyists fabricate single units of anything they want made. Mali says 9 Circuits hopes to procure a MakerBot within the next year.

“When you study abroad, every student is exposed to some broader arm of DIY culture,” Kuber says. “We want to recreate that atmosphere. Create documentation and videos that can be replicated locally.” While detailed instructions exist on the Internet for just about every conceivable engineering conundrum, many of these assume that you’re living in a society with easy access to specific components. “Try going to a hardware store and asking for an M3 screw,” Kuber says. “They’ll blink.”

Kuber conducts workshops on DIY at engineering colleges around north India, and wants to encourage more women to take up hardware engineering. “The problem here is that there are middlemen and organizations willing to sell you complete college projects, so a lot of people don’t have to solder a thing to get through the system.”

In the absence of a strong, networked DIY community, college projects are most students’ sole opportunity for an education in these topics.

“The awareness levels for concepts like open hardware (components and microprocessors that can be customized and reused in other projects legally, like open-source software) are very low,” says Mali.

Mali says things are beginning to change as scattered hardware groups now have a common go-to place.

He is also one of the founders of Indie GameDev India (www. indiegamedev.in), which is trying to do for game development what 9 Circuits does for hardware engineering. Here, again, there’s that belief in the procrastination principle.

If we start it, Mali believes, they will come. In the last few months, he’s met people buying components to improve their car’s mileage, or to build customized GPS equipment for use in harsh terrain.

“There are lots of people doing very cool things,” he says. “Everyone wants freedom to express their creativity.” pavitra.j@livemint.com

Geeking out: (clockwise from left) The five­member team of HashCube; Deepak Ravindran of Innoz Technologies; Freeman Murray and Archana Prasad; and the multiple levels of Jaaga in Bangalore.

HACKATHONS AND CODEJAMS ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO SWAP IDEAS FOR QUICK PROJECTS, WHICH COULD RANGE FROM PLANS FOR A BUSINESS TO FIXES FOR SOCIAL AND CIVIC PROBLEMS

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

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

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

BY P A V I T R A J A Y A R A M A N & K RISH R AGHAV ······························· t’s called the procrastination principle.

An unwavering belief that the problems confronting a project can, and most likely will, be solved later by other people.

It’s the unlikely cornerstone of the Internet’s existence—everything from Google’s Android operating system to Wikipedia relies on it. Its loose philosophy (forever a draft) is the guiding principle for anyone wanting to build something online. It doesn’t matter if your world-changing free encyclopaedia is incomplete. Your users become participants, constantly improving your foundational efforts.

Now, Bangalore has a brick and mortar building as testament to the principle’s effectiveness. “It’s intentionally incomplete,” says programmer and independent researcher Kinal Jonnalagadda about this pallet-rack wireframe structure off Bangalore’s Richmond Road, which looks like a cross between a jungle gym and the cross section of an architectural blueprint.

“Incomplete because it forces you to put some thought into it and do something yourself.”

Called Jaaga, it’s a modular, makeshift, multi-level metal space run by Freeman Murray, a former computer programmer and entrepreneur, and artist Archana Prasad. The structure is designed so that it can be dismantled easily and moved elsewhere at short notice. Their official website even details a succinct five-step process to do just that.

Inside, bent over their laptops, typing lines of “code”, the five-member team of the Bangalore-based start-up HashCube wouldn’t be out of place in one of the city’s several glass-wall buildings. But seated as they are on moulded plastic chairs in Jaaga’s collective space for “technology and art”, something seems different.

Their laptops sit on foldable metal tables as they create online games for social networking sites and mobile platforms such as the iPhone. Next to them is Anusheel Nahar who, after quitting his day job at an IT firm in Bangalore, has set out to establish his own business. A glance away, seated at a level below them and separated by two art installations, is Justin Alva, who co-founded Whoopey, a group-buying company designed on the lines of www.groupon.com Every day, these entrepreneurs come together to work on their initiatives. Jaaga encourages those eager to start their version of the next big thing to work on their projects under one roof, feed ideas and even help each other. People can use Jaaga as an office space—a huge luxury for start-ups with limited funds—for as long as they want. The Jaaga website, for instance,

I

TECHNOLOGY

IT

Do Yourself From ambitious wireframe structures to nationwide communities, India’s new techies are more networked, more open and more artistic

Network savvy: The founders of 9 Circuits in Delhi.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

is currently offering programmers a three-month fellowship to build an “installation” using Microsoft’s Kinect video game device. But while initial expenses for Jaaga are being backed by art grants and the personal funds of the proprietors, they don’t rule out charging for use of the space in the future.

Started in August, and formalized in March, Jaaga wants to encourage a free flow of ideas in both art and technology. Murray oversees technology, and Prasad, art. In the last eight months, Jaaga has hosted research projects that chronicle the livelihoods of Bangalore’s 850,000 migrant workers, and helped create digital 3D models of India’s heritage sites in a project with Microsoft Research India. Jaaga also has an online “Ideas Pool” that anyone can contribute to. Currently, there are proposals to make a film about one local cow, investigate the potential of radio frequency identification (RFID) cards to create personalized art experiences and build local mobile phone networks that will let citizens communicate in the event of an Egypt-style Internet shutdown.

“We want people to use this as a long-term space for exchanges of ideas,” says Murray, adding that users are slowly learning to leave behind their “comfort zones in cubicles” and becoming a part of Jaaga’s “open culture”.

Jonnalagadda says this difference is vital. “The software industry currently works much like the construction industry where programmers are given a task with specifications and are expected to build accordingly,” he says. “What is not being explored is the artistic element to software, that is the experimentation. Where one can say, I have no idea what the outcome is, but I am going to experiment.”

This kind of free-form dabbling has always existed in India, but mostly in separate, isolated silos. Now, it’s not uncommon to see citywide communities of artists and engineers, driven by Twitter and Facebook, collaborating.

Six months ago, Jonnalagadda figured that code jams and “hackathons” (group exchanges in creative engineering and problem solving, made famous recently by Facebook) that last for a single day and aimed at a single topic would be instantly popular. He also hoped more open-source projects would percolate out of India, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai-based MayaVi, a free tool that helps visualize complex scientific data that is now used widely around the world. Most “open-source” projects such as the Linux operating system, called so because their internal workings are freely modifiable, rely on small contributions from thousands of volunteers across the world.

Jonnalagadda was previously a planner at Barcamp Bangalore, a loose association of techies which organizes what are called “unconference” style events, where the schedule is ad hoc and participation is open.

In October, he founded HasGeek.in, a company that organizes day-long hackathons and seminars on coding and technology. It also has an active online job board, where “awesome” companies post requirements for “kickass” developers. “Both hack events and the concept of co-working spaces like Jaaga were a parallel movement that began in the West,” he says, explaining that in both cases the idea is to share and discuss. Each event produces a flood of speculative blogs, tweets and wikis—letting participants tackle complex ideas one piece at a time, across multiple events.

Hackathons and codejams encourage people to swap ideas for quick projects, which could range from plans for a business to fixes for social and civic problems. In March, both Bangalore and Delhi hosted 54-hour “Startup Weekends”, in which groups of participants go from brainstorming ideas to showcasing a prototype to venture capitalists in two days. “There’s been a sharp rise in ideas around these aspects,” says Arindam Bhattacharjee, the chief architect of business intelligence at analytics firm SAP India.

“Technology is being used to solve perennial urban problems.”

There have been six such sessions in HasGeek’s six months—their latest was an Android camp on Friday. Not surprisingly, Jonnalagadda found registrations full. “Android is the new

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

COURTESY FREEMAN MURRAY

COME OUT AND PLAY Here are the five commandments, if you will, of being a new geek • Have multiple interests. Your love for films world needs it, you will find help. can inform the video games you design, and coding skills can make your art projects cooler. • The tools don’t matter. You don’t need an expensive Mac to become a film­maker.

• Trust in collaboration. Share freely, and don’t Everything can be started cheap and, in many hoard ownership of ideas. Other people can cases, free. help make it better.

• Put your personality into your work. Think • If something doesn’t exist, start building it. It eclectic, and be idiosyncratic. Leave the cold doesn’t have to be perfect, or complete. If the professionalism to the big firms.

craze, the techies are loving it,” he says. When Google announced a similar camp last year with 5,000 seats, the event was packed but it took weeks. This year, he recalls that it was packed in 59 minutes.

At an average hackathon, a theme or problem is put forth, and ideas are furiously debated. Challenges, usually with a time limit, are issued, and people, alone or in teams, hammer out a basic prototype solution. These, in turn, are incrementally improved by participants.

“It is almost like people are waiting for an event like this to happen,” he says, laughing. “What I am trying to create with HasGeek is that kind of an environment that lets you be creative.”

Murray agrees. “Whenever we organize weekend hackathons, we see crowds pouring in,” he says, adding that he hopes to have day-long sessions at least once a week.

Taking the idea further, Murray would like to blur the lines between hacking and partying. “Maybe an allday event, where people can code with a beer break. Why not?” he says, smiling. “You don’t have to pretend to be coding all the time.”

A part of this infectious energy has also carried over to the country’s many software start-ups.

Deepak Ravindran is the co-founder and head of a mobile start-up called Innoz Technologies Pvt. Ltd. His official corporate bio has a photograph of him in a racing suit, leaning against a sports bike.

His company, which started as a final-year college project at the Lal Bahadur Shastry College of Engineering in Kerala, now provides an SMS service called SMSGyan that is used one million times a day by Bharti Airtel subscribers. Users send an SMS query (match scores, movie titles, academic references) to 56161, and the system crawls the Internet to get you your answer. “The new wave of tech start-ups will be product companies, which build something relevant for users here,” he says. “Not those geared towards providing services to the West.”

Ravindran works out of an eighthfloor apartment in Gurgaon, which serves as his “marketing office”. His company has followed a successful trajectory, from engineering college project to incubation by a programme sponsored by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), that is becoming increasingly common. “The ecosystem is very comfortable with start-ups, and I think we’re building the same kind of base that Silicon Valley did,” he says, referring to technology-centric startups around the country. “India badly needs more small success stories to get people to follow this path more often.”

Similarly, Jaaga’s Murray met the founders of HashCube, friends Deepan Chakravarthy and Ramprasad Rajendran, when their company was being incubated in a unique programme at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) in 2009. On the inception of Jaaga, Murray invited them to use the space free of cost. It was a deal the two new graduates couldn’t refuse.

“This cut our costs; plus the idea of a co-working space was exciting. The energy at IIM-A was high, and Jaaga promised the same,” says Chakravarthy, stressing that the presence of other innovative minds pushed their own creativity. Co-working spaces also create opportunities for serendipitous encounters, something HashCube has benefited from. “We are engineers and we think like engineers, so we sometimes get help from artists here on the look or the colours we use in a game,” says Chakravarthy. Likewise, the HashCube team has helped another start-up put up its website, for a fee.

What Jaaga and HasGeek are attempting to do with software, four engineers in Delhi are hoping to replicate for hardware.

Nandeep Mali, Harry Samson, Priya Kuber and Pronoy Chopra are the founders of 9 Circuits, an online store that hopes to kickstart the country’s fledgling do-it-yourself (DIY) hardware community.

Hardware engineering includes everything from building prototype vehicles to experimental gadgets. The store sells an entire range of programmable Arduino Boards (the engineering founda-

tion for everything from a robot to a GPS module), hardware components, sensors and spare parts.

It operates out of a single room on the first floor of a shopping complex in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar. Their unlikely neighbours include a detective agency called Omniscient Detectives. Inside the 9 Circuits office are four desks arranged haphazardly, stacked with miniature mountains of electronic components. “Everything is about software here, so the hardware hobbyists in India are largely fragmented. There’s lots of knowledge but very little networking,” says Mali, rooting through a box of touch screens. “The entry barriers become very heavy.”

9 Circuits is a result of the four’s frustration with procuring items for college projects and DIY ideas.

“We saw that nobody catered to the hobbyist market here,” Mali says.

“Nobody makes components at the individual scale. If you want 100 pieces, good, but one? Nobody will do that.” He contrasts this with the US, where open-source “3D printers” such as MakerBot (www.makerbot.com) let hobbyists fabricate single units of anything they want made. Mali says 9 Circuits hopes to procure a MakerBot within the next year.

“When you study abroad, every student is exposed to some broader arm of DIY culture,” Kuber says. “We want to recreate that atmosphere. Create documentation and videos that can be replicated locally.” While detailed instructions exist on the Internet for just about every conceivable engineering conundrum, many of these assume that you’re living in a society with easy access to specific components. “Try going to a hardware store and asking for an M3 screw,” Kuber says. “They’ll blink.”

Kuber conducts workshops on DIY at engineering colleges around north India, and wants to encourage more women to take up hardware engineering. “The problem here is that there are middlemen and organizations willing to sell you complete college projects, so a lot of people don’t have to solder a thing to get through the system.”

In the absence of a strong, networked DIY community, college projects are most students’ sole opportunity for an education in these topics.

“The awareness levels for concepts like open hardware (components and microprocessors that can be customized and reused in other projects legally, like open-source software) are very low,” says Mali.

Mali says things are beginning to change as scattered hardware groups now have a common go-to place.

He is also one of the founders of Indie GameDev India (www. indiegamedev.in), which is trying to do for game development what 9 Circuits does for hardware engineering. Here, again, there’s that belief in the procrastination principle.

If we start it, Mali believes, they will come. In the last few months, he’s met people buying components to improve their car’s mileage, or to build customized GPS equipment for use in harsh terrain.

“There are lots of people doing very cool things,” he says. “Everyone wants freedom to express their creativity.” pavitra.j@livemint.com

Geeking out: (clockwise from left) The five­member team of HashCube; Deepak Ravindran of Innoz Technologies; Freeman Murray and Archana Prasad; and the multiple levels of Jaaga in Bangalore.

HACKATHONS AND CODEJAMS ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO SWAP IDEAS FOR QUICK PROJECTS, WHICH COULD RANGE FROM PLANS FOR A BUSINESS TO FIXES FOR SOCIAL AND CIVIC PROBLEMS

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Travel

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

KASHMIR

Spring fling And wake the purple year: (clockwise from top) Badam­ vaer, the biggest almond garden in Srinagar, is a riot of pink and white; forsythia, another early spring flower, blooms at the botanical garden in Srinagar; and with many gardens in neglect, spring brings fewer migratory birds.

The season is everyone’s inspira­ tion as new life blooms in shades of white and pink

B Y P EERZADA A SHIQ ···························· ahaar aav, bulbuloav janay bahar aav/Ranga-a-rang gul tchi phalmeath/Noav bahar aav (Spring has come, o’ bulbul, flowers of varied colours are in full bloom, new spring is here), wrote Ghulam Ahmad, better known as Mahjoor, Kashmir’s national poet, born in 1885. More than a century after that paean, spring continues to inspire poets and laymen alike in Kashmir, its riot of colours and balmy breeze soothing and enlivening a conflict-torn people.

“Spring brings all kinds of singing birds to the trees of my garden.

They perch at peace on the

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branches of my lawn, and I also find solace. It turns everyone happy in the Valley,” says renowned poet and satire writer Zarif Ahmad Zarif, 66, adding: “The season turns my ‘beak’ green too. I go silent. Eyes are pleasurably moist with the morning breeze and the colours the spring brings along.” Zarif has started visiting the almond garden behind the Hari Parbat fort in downtown Srinagar. The trees are in blossom—their white and purple flowers heralding the end of grey, gloomy winter.

Traditional spring festivals died long ago in Kashmir. “The Sheikh (Mohammed) Abdullah-Indira Gandhi accord in 1975 brought an end to celebrations of (the) spring festival at Badamvaer (almond garden) at the heart of Srinagar, spread over hundreds of acres of land,” says Naeem Akhtar, 60, spokesman of the People’s Democratic Party, who worked closely with Abdullah as a government servant at the time.

The reason Abdullah stopped the festivals was his rivalry with Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad,

who went on to become the prime minister of Kashmir when Abdullah was toppled in 1953. Muhammad used to galvanize support by organizing grand musical festivals at the garden.

“I remember thousands of people carrying samovar (a copper kettle with a base for coal storage for heating tea), sheets and water nuts gathering at Badamvaer,” recalls poet Abdur Rehman Rahi, 85, a Padma Shri and Jnanpith awardee.

The 1989 armed uprising further choked the few public spaces in the Valley. The National Conference government rehabilitated displaced Dal Lake dwellers on dozens of acres of the garden, shrinking it to a fraction of its size.

Badamvaer was later restored by the J&K Bank and reopened to the public by then chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in 2008.

“I miss those days when spring was a festival. Birds like woodpeckers and koels rarely visit my

garden. I spotted one a few days back and the whole family rushed to see it,” says Rahi. That sighting moved him to write a couplet: Yuhaes ti aev, ra’tchikhande korith yeathi voaf’raar, aesi zatayov tchu kul, aesi ma yae’man kaeth sanaan (That bird came again to my garden, only to flutter wings for a while, I think we have cut that tree, about which we never ponder).

While almond blossoms announce the start of spring in the Valley, it is the yellow flowers of narcissus, acres of mustard fields in full golden bloom and the shedding of white, yellow and purple tulip petals that mark the beginning of summer.

For Rahi, spring symbolizes the “sound of prosperity as it melts away the sadness of winter for people and brings peace”. Psychiatrists see science behind the flow of poetry. “Winter allows less light and little colour to enter the eyes, and reach the seat of moods inside the brain. Spring brings bright light, colours and lifts people’s mood.

For artists, it’s the time to vent their feelings,” says Arshad Hussain of the Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, housed next to Badamvaer, the city’s biggest and best loved almond garden.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

SPRING SERENADE

by Zarif Ahmad Zarif Haend, Sikh, Muslmaan, lolae Badamvaeri samaan aaes, paez paeth basaan aaes pirvaer jinabav (Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, all would assemble at almond garden, in real sense would reflect Kashmir as seer’s abode, my dear) Sher sher samaan aaes, lola poshan mala karan aaes, beayi aes shoki beazeth khevan gaer jinabav (People from all towns would assemble, make garlands of flowers, and binge on roasted water nuts, my dear)

TRAVEL L13

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EXCERPT

The archipelago of Alfred Wallace How Victorian England’s most famous natural scientist wrote its most famous travel book

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

·························································· t is difficult today to imagine a name other than Charles Darwin associated with the theory of evolution and its enormous cultural and philosophical consequences for Western thought. But Darwin was hardly an isolated genius.

His theories, and his reputation, were built on the work of fellow natural scientist Alfred Russel Wallace: In their own day, the theory of natural selection was known as the Darwin-Wallace theory.

Thanks to a glittering scientific career that touched on everything from glaciology to land reform, the younger, more prolific Wallace was easily the more famous scientist at the time. His magnum opus, The Malay Archipelago (published 1869, in Britain and the US), was a best-seller in its day. It is a journal of his studies in Malaysia, Singapore and the Indonesian islands from

I

Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘The Malay Archipelago’ is now in the public domain and is available as a free download on Google Books and the Internet Archive. Selected excerpts: Visiting Pangerango and Gedeh, Java

The Malay Archipelago: Originally published

by Harper & Brothers, digitized by the Internet Archive, 689 pages.

At about 7,500 feet we came to another hut of open bamboos, at a place called Kandang Badak, or “Rhinoceros-field,” which we were going to make our temporary abode. Here was a small clearing, with abundance of treeferns and some young plantations of Cinchona.

As there was now a thick mist and drizzling rain, I did not attempt to go on to the summit that evening, but made two visits to it during my stay, as well as one to the active crater of Gedeh. This is a vast semicircular chasm, bounded by black perpendicular walls of rock, and surrounded by miles of rugged scoria-covered slopes.

The crater itself is not very deep.

It exhibits patches of sulphur and variously-coloured volcanic products, and emits from several vents continual streams of

smoke and vapor. The extinct cone of Pangerango was to me more interesting. The summit is an irregular undulating plain with a low bordering ridge, and one deep lateral chasm. Unfortunately there was perpetual mist and rain either above or below us all the time I was on the mountain; so that I never once saw the plain below, or had a glimpse of the magnificent view which in fine weather is to be obtained from its summit. Notwithstanding this drawback I enjoyed the excursion exceedingly, for it was the first time I had been high enough on

Seminal: Alfred Russel Wallace. a mountain near the Equator to watch the change from a tropical to a temperate flora.

Singapore: Asia’s next top holiday The island of Singapore consists of a multitude of small hills, three or four hundred feet high, the summits of many of which are covered with virgin forest.

The mission house at Bukit-tima was surrounded by several of these wood-topped hills, which were much frequented by woodcutters and sawyers, and offered me an excellent collectingground for insects. Here and there, too, were tiger-pits, carefully covered over with sticks and leaves, and so well concealed, that in several cases I had a narrow escape

1854-62. With the peculiar stubbornness with which Victorian cultural imperialism infiltrates our postcolonial, postmodern perceptions, it continues to be the most influential English-language study of the region.

Like so many great works of Victorian cultural imperialism, it also remains annoyingly, deliciously readable, much like that other seminal work of the natural science canon, Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. From volcanoes in Borneo to an ethnography of “Hindoo”-influenced Bali, Wallace’s scientific rigour and his pioneering interest in the biogeography of the region come together in a long, learned, but terrifically lucid work.

The “land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise” chronicled in his book would capture Britain’s interest in a region where, as Wallace politely put it, they had “few possessions”.

Years later, Joseph Conrad would take to sleeping with a copy at his bedside. We might speculate that Darwin, to whom The Malay Archipelago was dedicated, did the same. from falling into them. They are shaped like an iron furnace, wider at the bottom than at the top, and are perhaps fifteen or twenty feet deep, so that it would be almost impossible for a person unassisted to get out of one.

Formerly a sharp stake was stuck erect in the bottom, but after an unfortunate traveller had been killed by falling on one, its use was forbidden. There are always a few tigers roaming about Singapore, and they kill on an average a Chinaman every day, principally those who work in the gambir plantations, which are always made in newly-cleared jungle. We heard a tiger roar once or twice in the evening, and it was rather nervous work hunting for insects among the fallen trunks and old sawpits, when one of these savage animals might be lurking close by, waiting for an opportunity to spring upon us.

In which Wallace adopts a baby orangutan While carrying it home it got its hands in my beard, and grasped

The colonizing eye: (left and above) Wallace’s book is peppered with illustrations of local foliage and detailed anatomical sketches.

so tightly that I had great difficulty in getting free, for the fingers are habitually bent inward at the last joint so as to form complete hooks. At this time it had not a single tooth, but a few days afterward it cut its two lower front teeth. Unfortunately, I had no milk to give it, as neither Malays, Chinese nor Dyaks ever use the article, and I in vain inquired for any female animal that could suckle my little infant. I was therefore obliged to give it rice-water from a bottle with a quill in the cork, which after a few trials it learned to suck very well. This was a very meager diet, and the little creature did not thrive well on it, although I added sugar and cocoa-nut milk occasionally, to make it more nourishing. When I put my finger in its mouth, it sucked with great vigor, drawing in its cheeks with all its might in the vain effort to extract some milk, and only after persevering a long time would it give up in disgust, and set up a scream very like that of a baby in similar circumstances.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

ECONOMICS

The millennium’s unlikely prophets MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Two new books make a powerful case for reading Marx and Keynes, unfashionable but profound economic thinkers

B Y N IRANJAN R AJADHYAKSHA niranjan.r@livemint.com

···························· oth Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes seemed to have been permanently banished into the dark shadows of obscurity until the bright boys of Wall Street almost brought the world economy down in a speculative fit. Few economists and pundits emerged from the wreckage with their reputations intact.

Marx and Keynes came out with enhanced status.

This is a paradox. The North Atlantic financial crisis does not fit quite well with the standard Marxist and Keynesian view of the world. Both had said that a market economy/capitalism was prone to periodic crises because of a fall in the rate of profit in industrial and service companies, and a lack of aggregate demand.

The crisis of 2007 and 2008 did not fit into this neat narrative. The main damage was done in a financial sector stuffed with excess leverage and risk.

Keynes’ prophetic disciple Hyman Minsky had a better explanation for what happened in his thesis on financial instability, while the American economist Irving Fisher’s theory of debt deflation offered a better explanation of the subsequent demand collapse. Keynes mattered only at the third stage, when governments around the world ran huge budget deficits to keep the demand engines chugging despite the global panic. One could also argue—contra Marxist belief—that it was the users of capital (bankers and derivative traders) rather than the owners of

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Money shorts: (left) The crisis of 2008 gave the global economy serious cause for thought; and Karl Marx. capital (the shareholders of global banks) who were the villains of the piece.

“Keynes had little to say about the accumulation of debt and the possibility of associated financial bubbles,” writes economist Lance Taylor in Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics, his combative and tightly argued book on the collapse of the recent consensus in econom-

How to Change the World—Tales of Marx and Marxism:

By Eric Hobsbawm, Hachette India and Little Brown, 470 pages, `795.

ics. Taylor strives to reinstate not just Keynes but an entire school of economics. Though not a book for the popular market—as the recent Keynes biography by Robert Skidelsky is—the tone of the book fluctuates between being clinically academic and sharply polemical, a delightful combination often seen in the writings of Keynes himself.

So Taylor can at one place dis-

Maynard’s Revenge—The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics:

By Lance Taylor, Harvard University Press, 385 pages, $39.95 (around `1,800).

cuss Gaussian distribution of asset prices (the well-known bell curve), while at another place tartly dismiss Milton Friedman, who along with Robert Lucas was responsible for placing some of the most potent sticks of dynamite under the Keynesian edifice in the 1970s, as someone who merely gave a modern spin to the doctrines of 19th century Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. At another place, Taylor dismisses what is called new classical economics, which arose out of the socalled Lucas critique and is a centrepiece of contemporary textbooks, as “a restatement of extreme nineteenth-century neoclassical ideas decked out in mathematics borrowed from 1960s rocket science”.

However, the deeper point Taylor makes is that much of modern economics is actually derived from insights provided by economists in previous ages. He powerfully illustrates this in almost every chapter in his book.

The great masters have been forgotten as the history of economic thought has disappeared from university courses and mathematical elegance has become an end in itself. Economics has suffered because it turned its back

on its own rich heritage.

How to Change the World by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is a collection of essays written between 1956 and 2009. The long period it covers ensures that the tone is calm, though always profound. Hobsbawm is from a generation of Marxist intellectuals who were rattled by events ranging from the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1992. Yet he has resolutely stuck to the hope that a better and more humane society is a possibility.

The title of his collection of essays, though it seems a bit presumptuous, is clearly inspired by a famous statement by Marx that philosophers should not just interpret the world but change it.

Though Hobsbawm remained a party animal (as the term was understood in another age), he steered clear of the two extremes that many of his contemporaries embraced: becoming a party hack or settling into world-weary cynicism. Nor did he go down the rabbit hole of postmodernist cultural criticism, which became the sorry refuge of a lost ideology.

Hobsbawm argues in his introduction that “Marx is, once again, very much a thinker for the twen-

ty-first century” though he also adds later: “The Marx of the twenty-first century will almost certainly be different from the Marx of the twentieth.” Nor does he shed tears for the Soviet Union and its several clones, uniformly brutal social and economic disasters. For Hobsbawm, the continuing relevance of Marx is threefold—as a thinker on the economy, about history and human society. One almost gets through the book feeling that Hobsbawm has more hopes for Marx as a thinker than as a guide for political action, which makes the title of his book even more puzzling.

Neither Marx nor Keynes can fully explain what to do about the challenges facing us in the new century, as both Hobsbawm and Taylor freely admit in their books.

Yet they deserve to be read and studied—for their insights into economic cycles, the nature of government, radical uncertainty, the hope of human freedom, and much more. The two books under review offer a window to the worlds of Marx and Keynes.

couldn’t wait to get back home and make myself a huge cup of cocoa. But when we arrived back in Wiesbaden, the cocoa powder would be all gone. Julian had at some point torn open the packages and poured the contents straight into his mouth.”

When Assange goes away so does our attention.

This is not entirely DomscheitBerg’s fault. You can’t blame him for having a vanilla personality in comparison with Assange’s mad tutti-frutti genius.

He is a bully: “If there were four slices of Spam, he would eat three and leave one for me.”

Assange is a publicity hound.

Assange is a hypocrite. Assange is a child. Assange is a liability.

Yet despite all this insight into what it is to live and work with Assange, the book is unsatisfying.

It somehow leaves you with the feeling you get after reading a good Wikipedia entry—that’s all very nice, but I think I will buy a good book about this now.

However, there are some aspects of the book that are disturbing. Or at least worth thinking about. For one it never really tells you what motivates the people, including

Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who worked at WikiLeaks. Why are they doing this? To achieve what ends?

This is only ever explained in broad, hazy strokes.

Second, in several places WikiLeaks comes across as an organization as susceptible to the skulduggery and misrepresentation that it is trying to expose in others.

Domscheit-Berg says that they often lied about how good their tech was: “To create the impression of unassailability to the outside world, you only had to make the context as complicated and confusing as possible… It was the same principle used by terrorists and bureaucrats. The adversary can’t attack as long as he has nothing to grab hold of.” In reality their infrastructure was weak: “We were acting irresponsibly, playing a risky game with our sources’ trust and our supporters’ donations.”

WikiLeaks, it appears, wants you to give it the benefit of doubt. But only it and nobody else.

Domscheit-Berg’s interesting but incomplete book will hopefully be the first of many on this organization and its leader.

IN SIX WORDS Political economy, past and perhaps future

INSIDE WIKILEAKS | DANIEL DOMSCHEIT­BERG WITH TINA KLOPP

Sleeping with the enemy An insider look at WikiLeaks reveals how much the group resembles its nemeses B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· hink back on the last few years in Julian Assange’s life. Ignore some of the specifics of the story—the website, the rape allegations, the diplomatic controversies, the paranoia—and instead focus on the boom and bust (and boom?) cycle, if you will, of the man’s public reputation.

If you’ve been following Indian cricket closely for the last few years it is easy to find an interesting parallel here at home. Assange, in many ways, is living the life of the small-town cricketer who suddenly makes it big. Maybe even becomes captain of the Indian cricket team.

In the beginning the love for him is universal. All the profiles in print and on TV are thinly veiled puff pieces.

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And then slowly the story begins to change. The small-town boy is less than humble in a press conference. Perhaps he is spotted in one too many television advertisements. And then the final straw—he makes the wrong call on the field. India lose.

He is a national embarrassment. We hate him. Down with this arrogant upstart. Who does he think he is?

How dare he?

And so it has been with Julian Assange.

When the Assange-founded WikiLeaks first began airing the world’s dirtiest, most sinister linen, he was hailed as a hero. The ultimate subversive living the subversive dream. Here was one man with a small band of supporters bringing governments and corporations and investment banks to

their knees.

Assange and gang believe that public and private organizations hoard too much information from the public, the same public these organizations are supposed to serve and often depend on for survival. WikiLeaks believes that by revealing the truth and by “providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices” we could hope to rein in these organizations a little.

Subsequently Assange’s fortunes have fallen somewhat. Daniel Domscheit-Berg was perhaps Assange’s most important lieutenant in the early days of WikiLeaks.

Starting with setting up hardware to eventually becoming a spokesperson, Domscheit-Berg was always a part of the innermost WikiLeaks circle.

And then earlier this year he fell out with Assange.

Inside WikiLeaks is DomscheitBerg’s version of the AssangeWikiLeaks story told from the perspective of a key insider.

Inside WikiLeaks: Jonathan Cape, 279 pages, `499.

In theory this book should be compelling reading. For all its media ubiquity, not a lot is known about the organization itself or about Assange.

Inside WikiLeaks provides a readable but ultimately unmoving account of these things.

Assange, unsurprisingly, looms over everything and everyone else in this account. Whenever he appears our ears prick up and we take notice: “I love the Swiss chocolate drink and for the rest of our tour I

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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CRIMINAL MIND

QUICK LIT | SUPRIYA NAIR

ZAC O’YEAH

Street talking

Crime and reason

Ira Trivedi’s new novel is a shallow cautionary fable about Wall Street ANSHUMAN POYREKAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

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Popular crime stories depict what disturbs people.

Here’s what the books we read say about us

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ne of my highly unscientific pet theories is that popular crime fiction in every country mirrors the collective psyche of its population.

To put it in another way, a popular crime writer’s stories reflect exactly what disturbs people, for readers have a natural tendency to gravitate towards books that address issues that bother them. This means that in ideal circumstances crime novels can be psychotherapeutically helpful and perhaps lower the mental healthcare budget. If any psychoanalyst out there has a better theory, you’re welcome to email your suggestions to this newspaper.

Let’s look at specific cases. For instance, Agatha Christie’s popularity mirrored, in my view, the feeling of loss the British experienced when their empire crumbled. Her novels are essentially about preserving a conservative idyll of rural manors and country chaplains in a world with no or little manoeuvring space for the lower classes (except in cases where the butler turns out to be the killer). Life in that bucolic world can be disturbed by a heinous murder but, in the end, order prevails.

American noir is, on the other hand, a big city phenomenon: The pulp crime stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and their ilk mirrored the dark side of urbanization, depicting crimes that were made possible by the anonymity of metropolises where everything and everybody was for sale.

The currently popular Swedish—and Scandinavian— crime fiction often features both male and female cops who eat too much junk food, get drunk way too often, are divorced and have troubled relationships with their own children and/or parents. You

Captured: Our engagement with terrorism spills over into the books we read. don’t need a degree in psychology to figure out what that means in terms of the problems that a modern welfare state is facing.

In India, I’ve noticed that there’s one subgenre of crime fiction that’s doing better than others—namely the terrorist thriller. We are, of course, constantly reminded of this threat walking through metal detectors at railway stations, shopping malls and cinemas, or facing elaborate identity and address proof checks in order to acquire a prepaid SIM card.

Reading fictional accounts of terrorism then, it would seem, helps us process these stress factors that lurk in the backgrounds of our lives and keep us from turning paranoid.

Consider Jimmy the Terrorist by Omair Ahmad, a story of a boy branded as a terrorist after he knifed a police inspector in a small north Indian town. As we go deeper into the narrative, it turns out that the boy himself is a stray victim of communalist tendencies that conspire to make an otherwise gentle and sensible person commit one random criminal act.

A suitable follow-up read might be C.P. Surendran’s Lost and Found, a tragicomic story that weaves together the lives of a number of people in Mumbai during those dark days that we remember as 26/11. Here, one of the terrorists loses his way and, separated from the flock, ends up

taking hostages that represent a microcosm of the metropolis: a middle-aged woman who runs a smutty website, a sleazy tabloid journalist (who has been tied up by the aforementioned woman in a bathtub), a Hindu fundamentalist rickshaw driver, and a beggar-slash-kebab cook-slash-Bollywood wannabe.

This somewhat unlikely menagerie turns out, in a horrific plot twist, to be closely related and the reader gets to know a seriously depraved and imploding family.

Another recent novel that touches on the spiral of vengeance that terrorism and counterterrorism are part of, is It Can’t Be You by Prem Rao; in it an army colonel finds that his years in a special unit fighting militants in the Kashmir valley come to haunt him after retirement.

Moving to the sphere of tautly scripted pulp, plots are less inclined towards understanding the mindset of those who take to terrorism, but they do shed light on the complex logistics of preventing terror attacks. Just last year, Mukul Deva published the third instalment about the valiant men of Force 22, Blowback, in which the top secret counterterrorism squad foils yet another attempt to destabilize the country. Undercover operative Iqbal infiltrates a terrorist cell that recruits cannon fodder for bomb attacks and there are some highly memorable shoot-outs that spice

up the drama. If you’re hooked by the Lashkar series, the last book in the quartet is being published this year: Tanzeem, in which Iqbal goes for the final arm-wrestle with the foreign hand.

A 15-year-old classic in the same genre, The Night of the Krait

by Shashi Warrier, was recently reissued. It shows that our concerns about terrorism have remained largely the same. As usual the foreign hand plays the puppeteer, as Special Operations Force’s Colonel Menon hunts “The Krait”, an evil mastermind, in a series of steroid-brimming adventures that take us through Indian metros. Menon comes across as a macho who is occasionally troubled by his brutal job. During one of his soft moments with his love interest Sandhya, he has to justify the use of violence and torture in the combat against terrorists, and as he does so he begins to turn pessimistic. It becomes one of the most intense scenes in the book, because Col. Menon suddenly just wants to get back to his army quarters where he can watch the cricket match in peace which, in some way, appears to be easier than having a face-to-face discussion about the psychology of violence.

oung people besotted with glamour want to become movie stars, or World Cup winners. For Riya Jain, the protagonist of Ira Trivedi’s There’s No Love on Wall Street, a dorky premed student who bestows pet names on the frogs she dissects, the fantasy is less predictable. She wants to be an investment banker on Wall Street.

Anyone who has ever had an 18-hour day in their life might find this dream a little impoverished, but Wall Street’s vistas of money, power, nightclubs and expensed cab fares are too much for Jain to resist. Once she schemes her way into a summer internship at “Goldstein Smith”, the view inevitably loses its sparkle, and Jain must claw out of the abyss of amorality, boredom and free junk food into which she fell so eagerly.

Watching her do it is not pretty. Trivedi recreates a Wall Street that is more The Devil Wears Prada than Tom Wolfe, but her callow young heroine is so lacking in self-awareness that the reader is never sure if this criminally vapid world is a satirical construct. One devoutly hopes it is. If investment bankers are required by their jobs to be quite so bored and boring, no wonder they’re paid so much to stay in them.

In Hollywood’s versions of Wall Street, as in Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the inanity of the world is as clear as its devastating appeal: To the lupine men who work here, banking is dangerous, obsessive fun. But Wolfe and Oliver Stone, flaws and all, are fiercely ambitious stylists. Trivedi is not.

There’s No Love on Wall Street: Penguin India, 260 pages, `199.

When Jain explains how her obsession with the job has to do with the “glamour” of the lifestyle, enraptured by banker women in skirt suits and pearl necklaces, you wonder why she never opened a copy of Vogue in her life. It’s difficult to feel sympathy as she complains on page after page about having to work through endless slides of PowerPoint and correcting pitch books—isn’t this precisely what office sitcoms are for?

The book’s plot gathers steam in the final third as Jain, rescued by a journalist friend, finds her feet and wins through. But it’s too little, too late. The formula that usually requires us to sympathize with the girl who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing cannot apply in a world where no one, least of all the girl herself, even knows the difference. supriya.n@livemint.com JIN LEE/BLOOMBERG

Zac O’Yeah is the author of Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

Vapid: There’s no fun on the Wall Street of Trivedi’s novel.

THE GOOD MUSLIM OF JACKSON HEIGHTS | JAYSINH BIRJÉPATIL

Queens and country An immigrant’s New York is a chaotic, cacophonous disappointment B Y M ATT D ANIELS ···························· f the past is another country, it may look something like the block of 74th Street north of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York. For the many thousands of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who reside there, the surrounding neighbourhood, known as Jackson Heights, is where they can pick up Sosyo in glass bottles and snap the tips off bhindi (okra) to test its freshness.

It is where memory is preserved like parathas in the freezer case.

It’s also where myths are being modified. The film Today’s Special, starring The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi and a rather bemused Naseeruddin Shah, told the tale of a failing restaurateur whose assimilated son picks up

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the family business and runs with it. Harder than leaving behind one’s home is allowing the next generation—born American—the freedom to return to their traditions of their own accord.

Try as they may to dissolve the bonds of communal identity in the shared immigrant experience, the characters who inhabit The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights find the past catching up with them. Jaysinh Birjépatil’s torturous, patience-testing novel follows a Muslim Indian immigrant as he weathers religious crises real and fictional. Real: the fatwa against The Satanic Verses, the demolition of Babri Masjid and, inevitably, 9/11. Fictional: his wife earning a law degree and becoming a crusader against domestic violence and forced marriage, air-

ing the South Asian immigrant community’s dirty linen.

The erstwhile Nawab Sirajuddin of Inderpur (a fictionalized Raipur), Prof. Siri Amolini now resides in Queens and teaches English at the fictional Kingman College. Through him, we learn much about India’s descent into violence, through the journal of Amolini’s anthropologist colleague. We get an outsider’s view of a police-sponsored assault on nearby adivasis and the ensuing riots fomented by venal politicians. Not a political novel, The Good Muslim is, rather, concerned with the ways in which we can become unintelligible to one another, even to ourselves.

The Good Muslim lurches in time and perspective drag it towards a dramatic culmination—in an epilogue, far too late for satisfaction—but away from its emotional centre. The epistolary format permits Birjépatil rather too much leeway with his eclectic

The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights: Penguin India and Ravi Dayal, 244 pages, `275. vocabulary. Every character, Indian or American, comes to sound exactly like Amolini—which is to say, like an overstuffed, pompous academic.

This character couldn’t have been much of a stretch for Birjépatil, who once sported his accent aigu around Marlboro College in Vermont. That the character is nominally Muslim is beside

the point, for he is secular to the bone—not to mention an insufferable snob, fond of opera and arcane allusions. It is difficult to imagine what he talks about with his neighbours, mostly paanchewing grocers.

All they share is the experience of having been tossed into the proverbial melting pot. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christian, shopkeeper or webmaster, everybody finds commensal solace at the Peacock Diner, no doubt inspired by the real-life Jackson Diner.

Birjépatil alludes fleetingly to the arepa con queso stalls and Irish pubs flanking Jackson Heights’ few Indian blocks. He stumbles frequently over details. The neighbourhood seems to interest him less as a real place than as a locus of immigrant memory.

The immigrant experience has now been fodder for a generation of graduates of American college writing programmes. This “wellcrafted” but unreadable fiction came under fire in a recent essay

by Elif Batuman in the London Review of Books. She attacks MFA fiction for privileging marginalized voices over literature’s duty

to its readers, lamenting “the large-scale replacement of books I would want to read by rich, multifaceted explorations whose ‘amazing audacity’ I’m supposed to admire in order not to be some kind of jerk.”

If anybody could side with Batuman in this dispute, it is Amolini. Had Birjépatil heard Batuman’s call for fiction without “real or invented sociopolitical grievances”, he might have reined in his orotund narrator on matters such as the Rushdie fatwa and instead sifted more carefully through the wreckage of Siri’s salvageable marriage.

Making matters more difficult, Birjépatil (who we are told is a poet) cares too much for the sound of his words and not enough for their sense. He hurls similes like the dishes a battered wife finds in the kitchen cupboard to fend off a brutal husband. Even if a few volleys make stinging contact before crashing to the floor, the result is an empty cupboard. And the aftermath is painful for everybody.

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Culture

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FILM

Half­ticket at the movies Our round­up of what’s on offer in the world of children’s films this summer

Animated travel: Rio is a cruise through the Brazilian rainforests.

SIT THROUGH Single watch. Escort your nephew or six­year­old if you must

B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA & A NINDITA G HOSE ···················································

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides English; releasing 20 May

MUST WATCH Go all out. Unleash your inner pre­teen

Why: Jack Sparrow, as always, and a new director’s fresh perspective Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) returns to set sail in search of the elusive fountain of youth in the fourth instalment of the Pirates series.

This film marks a shift in directorial duties for the hugely successful franchise, with Chicago’s Rob Marshall replacing Gore Verbinski—a change that is bound to inject fresh perspective. An interesting trend in the series has been its rising budget and dwindling critical appreciation with every instalment. This time, the budget has come down by almost $100 million (around `448 crore), which makes one ponder if the producers are playing it safe.

While the original Pirates of the Caribbean was fresh, the sequels suffered from franchise fatigue and bloat. The second film was an hour longer than it needed to be, and the third was a portentous, 170-minute bore. Film No. 4 doesn’t look like it’s changing much.

Rather than fresh wind in the sails, On Stranger Tides might turn out to be another unhelpful puff of hot air.

Rango English/animation; releasing 15 April Why: Depp’s histrionics meet the Wild Wild West It’s a Western, a drama, a comedy, a mystery and a parody—all rolled into an animation package. Johnny Depp’s verbal histrionics befit Rango’s quixotic thespian fancies as he stumbles into the hostile town of Dirt. He crafts his way into hearts, spars with vicious enemies, discovers a lady love, scents a conspiracy reeking of greed and returns to town after a self-imposed exile for a final showdown. He does all this while being a chameleon.

The triumph of Rango lies in its seamless blend of different genres, and its tightrope walk between parody and homage to the many films it alludes to—Chinatown, various spaghetti Westerns and Apocalypse Now, among others. Depp delivers the crisply written dialogues with aplomb, and is sure to endear himself to audiences with Rango’s many charms and flaws.

Rango marks the first instance of Industrial Light & Magic creating computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation for any feature, and the effort made to get the details just right is there for all to see—the eerily foreboding atmosphere of the town complemented by oblique camera angles and dimly lit interiors lends uncanny beauty to the film.

The joyride that is Rango threatens to derail due to its emotional flatness; in part due to the charisma of the main protagonist who overshadows every other character around him. Yet Depp, the cinematography and the animation will go a long way in enhancing your experience of this film. “No one can walk out on his own story,” the Spirit of the West tells Rango in the film. You surely won’t walk out on this one.

Cars 2 English/3D animation; releasing 24 June Why: Pixar, speed, suspense and great music—a heady concoction High-speed racing frenzy and the intrigue of international espionage is scrawled all over Cars 2, the sequel to the 2006 hit from Pixar that hurled us into the world of anthropomorphic cars. Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy reprise their roles as Lightning McQueen, the race car, and Tow Mater, the tow truck. This time McQueen attempts to win the title of the world’s fastest car at the first World Grand Prix and satisfy that most primal of all Hollywood urges— saving the world.

The original film, despite receiving mixed reviews for its lengthy storyline, raked in two Oscar nominations. While it lacked the visual appeal which is the signature of Pixar—Toy Story, Wall-E are good examples—the characters’ camaraderie was heartwarming. With the sequel promising to take the characters “where no car has ever gone before”, Oscar-winning Pixar veteran Michael Giacchino providing the soundtrack, and a pan-European landscape for McQueen and Co. to zoom through, one can expect the magicians at Pixar to come into their own.

Why: Rainforests and baby macaws During the opening minutes of Rio, hundreds of macaws in a carnivalesque mood in the Brazilian rainforests disperse to reveal a fledgling macaw that plummets to the ground while attempting to fly. The creators of Ice Age return with the story of Blu (Jesse Eisenberg), a rare blue macaw, and his quest to win over Jewel (Anne Hathaway), as they course through picturesque Rio de Janeiro while dodging poachers. The characters are drawn in keeping with the animators’ tendency to lend them the cuteness that endears them to children, which might be a bit too much for adults. A version of the film dubbed in Hindi will have Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak and Sunidhi Chauhan.

Zokkomon Hindi; releasing 22 April Why: It stars Darsheel Safary Darsheel Safary is on the verge of discovering the hero within, in an obvious throwback to Spiderman. The pretext of a boy forsaken by his cruel uncle (Anupam Kher) and left to navigate the world seems trite enough, leaving room for his transformation into a superhero.

One can only hope that the special effects aren’t cringe-inducing.

STAY AWAY Avoid. Some things are really designed for

Kung Fu Panda 2 English/3D animation; releasing 26 May Why: It’s 3D happiness in a 260-pound panda package “Prepare for the return of awesomeness,” says the trailer, and we have every reason to revive the Wuxia film fan latent in us.

The bumbling panda, Po (Jack Black), is back in a more confident avatar in this sequel (no, really, he sings “We will rock you”, among other things). In Kung Fu Panda, which released in the summer of 2008, Po was unwittingly destined to bring peace to the land, much to the chagrin of the more capable kung fu warriors. We now see him living his dream as The Dragon Warrior, alongside his friends and fellow kung fu masters, The Furious Five—Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Crane (David Cross), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu)—and his master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). But Po’s newly coined life of bliss is threatened by the emergence of a villain who plans to use a secret weapon to conquer China and destroy kung fu. It is up to Po and The Furious Five to vanquish him.

When DreamWorks made Kung Fu Panda, the computer animation was more complex than anything they’d done before (remember those lovely cherry blossoms?). The film became the highestgrossing animated movie of the year. After three years, rushes from this second coming lead us to believe it isn’t just another uninspired sequel. These are the guys who gave us Shrek, after all.

Rio English/Hindi 3D animation; releasing 8 April

Rock ‘n’ roll: EB in Hop.

children—or not Shin Chan: Bungle in the Jungle Hindi/animation; released 1 April

Stars: (top) Jack Sparrow and an accomplice; and Po.

Why: Shin Chan is annoying Bart Simpson was mildly cute.

Shin Chan—the foul-mouthed six-year–old Tokyo child— stretches it. First televised in Japan in 1992, Shin Chan made its way to India in Hindi in 2006 and became the highest-rated programme on Hungama TV. The series was banned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 2008 for nudity and profanity; it eventually resumed in 2009. Now, its success with Indian audiences has paved the way for a theatrical release by Disney. While the gags are less vulgar in this “family” version, Shin Chan remains a one-child disaster squad. Stay away and keep the children away, unless you want them to go about asking your 80-year-old neighbour, “When are you going to die?”

THE THINGS YOU USED TO LOVE Board and video games not for you any more? Two new releases warrant a rethink THE ISLE OF DOCTOR NECREAUX (board game) Board games are fine, the flawed thinking goes, when you’re 13 and on summer vacation at your grandparents’. Nothing more. But board games can be fantastic, low­impact social experiences which are built around great design and clever mechanics.

Rediscover this with ‘The Isle of Doctor Necreaux’, a cooperative board game by Jonathan Leistiko for up to five players, in which players join forces against the game, and not each other.

In ‘Necreaux’, you play an espionage team sent to the lair of the nefarious Dr Necreaux to rescue a team of scientists. The madman will trigger a doomsday device within 4 hours if his (thor­ oughly unreasonable) demands are not met. The game has a clever “time” mechanism that counts the amount of time you have left. Dr Necreaux

Get spellbound: A screen shot of Drawn. will throw monsters, traps and obstacles at the team, and the game often hinges on difficult decisions (“Go on without me!”) at the end stages. The pulp­inspired artwork is brilliant and each playthrough is a tense 40­minute experi­ ence, one that can be replayed many times.

‘The Isle of Doctor Necreaux’ can be purchased online at Amazon.co.uk (which also offers free shipping to India till May on packages worth more than £25, or around `1,800) for $12 (around `540).

DRAWN: THE PAINTED TOWER (video game) It is perhaps telling that the world’s most interesting

Hop English/live action, animation; releasing 20 May Why: The chipmunk scarred us This comes from Tim Hill of Alvin and the Chipmunks, and we’re convinced it’s as cloying. The story follows EB, the Easter Bunny’s teenage son, who heads to Hollywood determined to become a drummer. Every film is not a Ratatouille. anupam1.v@livemint.com

video games come out of genre combinations that are deemed wrong. But like all the best mistakes, they’re revealing snapshots of hidden potential in the medioc­ rity of mainstream gaming. ‘Drawn: The Painted Tower’ builds its house at the border between these two worlds, between mainstream and niche.

From the outside, it is a humdrum adventure game—mixing elements from hidden­object games (a genre barely above ‘Farmville’ in video game respectability) and point­and­click adventures (a genre in coma since its glory days in the 1990s). But step inside and you’ll find an intelligent world, some stellar artwork and music, and gameplay that is never condescendingly “casual”.

The game tells the story of Iris, a girl who can create imaginary worlds by painting them. She’s filled an entire tower with them, opening out into dimensions unseen. But now the tower has fallen to a mysterious dark force, and Iris has disappeared.

The game tasks you with finding her. Inflict this one on non­gamers and you’ll find them caught in a video game’s alchemical spell.

Purchase ‘Drawn: The Painted Tower’ via game stores such as Steam (Store.steampowered.com) for $9.95.

Krish Raghav

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MUSIC

Sheet music, soul notes PETER CHAPPELL

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

FARAWAY VOICES

ANUP SUGUNAN

O

A new AR Rahman biography strikes a personal chord—of his musical journey from Chennai to global stardom

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· ou could say that composer A.R. Rahman’s story began with his first film score for Mani Ratnam’s Roja. But his journey began much earlier, as a boy called A.S. Dileep Kumar who had to give up school to work when his father died; whose life changed at the age of 22 when his mother sold the jewellery set aside for her daughters’ wedding so that her son could buy his first Fostex 16-track mixer recorder. That was 1989, two years before he started working on Roja.

In the latest book on the Chennai-based Oscar- and Grammywinning music composer, A.R. Rahman—The Spirit of Music—Conversations with Nasreen Munni Kabir, Rahman says: “All those years of struggle, humiliation, being ordered around by other people, seeing worry on the faces of my family, remembering the feeling of being overwhelmed by an inferiority complex, the lack of self-esteem, and even at times, fighting suicidal thoughts—all that seemed to fade away.

Sitting in my studio that night, and staring at my new recorder, I felt like a king. The new me was born

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AR Rahman—The Spirit of Music—Conversations with Nasreen Munni Kabir: Om Books International, 216 pages, `495. and the future seemed glorious.”

Film historian Kabir’s book, described as an authorized biography (unlike Kamini Mathai’s A.R. Rahman: The Musical Storm), is a detailed conversation with Rahman, conducted via personal interviews and over Skype, in Chennai, London and Toronto.

Kabir took three years to compile these conversations and time, she says, played the greatest part in helping the reputedly reticent composer to open up. “When you spend time with someone, they start to relax and trust you. A.R. is a reserved person, but he enjoys

Kabir’s book on Rahman is focused on the insights provided

by Rahman alone and on listing his achievements (discography, awards). The two unique elements are the inclusion of sheet music for the theme from the movie Bombay and the title song from Roja as well as a limited-edition CD with eight officially unreleased tracks (only with the first edition).

Kabir is clear that analysis is an intrinsic part of the book. “Analysis is achieved through discussion of process. Ultimately you create a space for him to look at his work in finer detail. I am not a musicologist so (I) can’t pretend to ask specialist questions. Perhaps that is another way for someone in the future to write on Rahman,” she says.

No conversation with Rahman is complete without mention of his mother, whom he paid homage to during his Oscar acceptance speech when he said “Mere paas maa hai”. Kabir asks him why he quoted from Deewar that night and with disarming candour he says “…I thought if I had lost that first Oscar that night, there would be one person who would still love me—my mother.”

And did Rahman ever replace the jewellery his mother sold in 1989? “Yes. Tenfold,” he says.

n 19 March, the online edition of The New York Times featured a riveting video in its opinion pages. Titled Spring, it spotlights Egypt in my Heart, an art video by Iranian artiste Shirin Neshat. Barely 4 minutes and 25 seconds in duration, the film includes a video clip from a 1965 recital by Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, whose work and deep commitment to Arab culture earned her titles such as Mother of Egypt and the Voice of Egypt. Shot in black and white, the live concert footage has none of the airbrushed, colour-manipulated gloss and slickness that our current home-grown music videos air. On the contrary, it retains even those irritating horizontal lines that scroll up and down on a television monitor, usually when there is some electrical interference. Photographs by Larry Barns are juxtaposed with the concert footage to create an art video that uses images, both still and moving, along with music, to signify a time when “As spring arrives, so too do the seeds of a new era for the Muslim world”. It is meant to be a tribute to the scores of young protesters who, in Bahrain, Libya, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, have made a vociferous demand for change and reform.

The video worked for me in many ways. For one, it introduced me to the art and artistic sensibilities of the artistes—chief among them being Kulthum herself and Neshat.

Before I received the link to the video on 20 March in an email sent by my sister-in-law Deepti Pradhan (who generously feeds my more than considerable appetite for music and information related to music and the arts), I had no idea who Neshat was, and Kulthum was a name, vaguely familiar, but one with whom I could neither associate a voice or a face or a piece of music—just one of those figures somewhere in your mind with a “isn’t she a famous musician” tag on them. Admittedly, this is MANFRED WERNER/WIKIMEDIA a regrettable lapse in my education, and I wish we could adopt a system of music education where students could be introduced to the world of artistes such as Kulthum alongside lessons in Indian music.

But the video also reminds me of a world, outside the one in which we live, where artistes and musicians create works that comment unabashedly on politics, religion and society. I cannot speak for other forms of art, but India’s music industry today will without doubt brand any work that is associated Cine revolution: Artiste Shirin Neshat. with social, political or religious overtones absolutely untouchable. Representatives and decision makers in our music industry are unshakeably convinced that songs associated with a cause have no takers and, therefore, can be dumped without further thought to their promotion and distribution. It isn’t surprising then that we placidly watch images of nature’s fury and the devastation in Japan, and the unrest in the Middle East, but continue to remain largely unaffected at least in our musical responses. We’d rather concentrate on inane remixes and even more unimaginative remakes of earlier hit films and songs. If we do get really creative and imaginative, we start talking of collaborations that entail the grafting of the vocals of one of our current divas on to a track by an international star without the twain ever meeting, discussing or making music together. And oh, even a kiss between the two digitally conjoined collaborators will be specially grafted on for the music video! And that is sure to herald a new era in the world of Page 3 art of India.

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Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Different beats: Rah­ man rehearsing for the Jai Ho­The Journey Home tour; (below) with Dido; and at home in Chennai with wife Saira. talking and speaks much more than he did when I first met him in 1999. He also has a great sense of humour and is basically an honest person, and doesn’t censor the conversation,” says Kabir.

When she asks him how he circumvents a musical block, Rahman says he turns to the poetry of Subramanya Bharathi (Tamil) and uses “his words for inspiration”. For a Hindi or Urdu tune, he finds inspiration in the poetry of Hazrat Amir Khusrau or Bulleh Shah. So Chaiyyan chaiyyan from Dil Se... was based on Shah’s O tere ishq nachaya kar ke thaiya thaiya and Khusrau’s Ae sharbat-e aashiqui resulted in Ae hairathe aashiqui in Guru.

Another momentous occasion in Rahman’s career was working on Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Even though his tryst with the West began with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, he acknowledges that winning two Oscars did change things. “In a way they gave credibility to my musical journey, and gave me the confidence to continue trying different sounds. I’m an entity in the West now,” he says.

Following her earlier work, Lata Mangeshkar in her Own Voice (2009),

ANNE­MARIE O’SULLIVAN

Keats on canvas At 86, artist Satish Gujral says change and a sense of wonderment fuel his work B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· 6ft-wide canvas hangs at Satish Gujral’s home in New Delhi. It will move to the Lalit Kala Akademi later this week, where the 86-year-old artist will have a solo exhibition. Above it hangs one of Gujral’s earliest works, painted circa 1950.

It is important for Gujral to see the two together. “To see my journey,” he interjects.

Few artists can claim as long an existence on the changing art scene of India as Gujral—showing across Asia, Europe and Latin America while still being rooted in his home country.

In an age when contemporary artists are expected to produce gigantic expositions on a yearly

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basis, Gujral says he can only get himself to exhibit when he is convinced that the nature of his work has innately changed. At the start of his career, this used to take as long as a decade. Now, it’s closer to half a decade.

This solo exhibition, Ascending Energy, Merging Forms, comes after four years and will have around 60 artworks, comprising drawings, paintings and sculptures in bronze. It will also include nine large-scale bronzes—a rare sight beyond the realm of public commissions—with experimental patinas or surface colouring.

I ask if it’s a retrospective.

Even as his wife is translating the question for him in sign language, he says: “If I had to show what I have already shown, I

JAVEED SHAH/MINT

wouldn’t have an exhibition. A joke repeated is no joke.” He laughs in his gentle, most Zenlike manner.

Gujral believes this is one of the most exciting times for Indian art and that at no point earlier have as many experiments been done as are being done today.

In his own quest for the new, Gujral has gone through several styles and mediums in his career. Oil, acrylic and automotive paint for canvas; and wood, bronze and fibreglass for sculpture. He even shifted from art to architecture for 20-odd years, and with no formal training in the field, designed outstanding structures, such as the Belgian embassy in New Delhi (for which he received an Order of the Crown from the Belgian government). “I quit architecture when I realized I was drawing no inspiration from it any more,” says Gujral. When he embarked on his second innings as a painter, it was with a renewed burst of energy.

His most significant discovery was a product of happenstance,

Wall of fame: Satish Gujral with his paintings at his Delhi residence. though. When Gujral arrived in Mexico as a scholarship student in 1952, the Mexican government had just commissioned the development of a new kind of long-lasting paint for local muralists to work with. This was what is known as acrylic paint today and Gujral brought it with him to India when he returned a couple of years later. He speaks fondly of

this first overseas trip: a train from Delhi to Mumbai, three weeks by ship to London, another week by ship to New York and a three-day train ride to Mexico.

Despite his veteran status, Gujral is a humble man. Does he still care about what critics would say of this new show?

“Without hypocrisy, of course, everyone is a little affected by

approval and disapproval,” he says. “But I’m not affected to a point that it infects my art.”

He goes on to say that everytime he’s tried a new style, it has been met with disapproval at first (this time it’s black and white bronzes). “Few artists or writers can claim to coin a personal style. And then, few have the courage to drop it,” he says.

But he does it, he says, because that’s the only way he feels compelled to keep creating.

He’s changed the specifics of this show so many times now that with the exhibition a week away, the line-up and the catalogue still aren’t ready. But Gujral is far from worried. He’s a genial man who quotes from John Keats’ A Song about Myself to describe himself: So he stood in his shoes And he wonder’d, He wonder’d, He stood in his Shoes and he wonder’d.

Ascending Energy, Merging Forms will run from 7-13 April at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.

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COURTESY INVISIBLE CITY

DELHI’S BELLY | SEEMA CHOWDHRY

Unknown city

Perfect proportions: Qila­e­Kuhna Masjid, Purana Qila.

Glimpses of Delhi’s past through monuments that dot almost every neighbourhood

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rowing up in Green Park in south Delhi, my friends and I spent a large part of our summer holidays skipping in and out of the many monuments that dot the area. We would cycle down the road near Aurobindo Place Market and along just that one road leading up to Hauz Khas Village, we had access to five monuments, then some more within Deer Park, and even a chance to explore two smaller monuments near Green Park market.

But as we played hide and seek in the arches and had mini picnics inside those cool spaces, we had no idea about the people in whose memory these monuments were built. That’s why when the third edition of Rakhshanda Jalil’s book Invisible City: The Hidden Monuments of Delhi was released, I could not resist thumbing through it to find out about the monuments that are part of my childhood memories.

“There are so many beautiful old buildings in Delhi, but there is very little information about these places,” says Jalil, who used Delhi: The Built Heritage—the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage’s (Intach’s) two-volume listing of Delhi’s monuments—for her bare-bones research. She also

Invisible City—The Hidden Monuments of Delhi:

By Rakhshanda Jalil, photographs by Prabhas Roy, Niyogi Books, 342 pages, `795. relied on Asarus Sanadeed by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Monuments of Delhi by Maulvi Zafar Hasan. “Both these books have information translated from Urdu and Persian from many of these monuments,” says Jalil. She also looked through Steven Carr’s The Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi.

Jalil picks five places she thinks make for a great journey of discovering Delhi through its not-so-well-known neighbourhood monuments. seema.c@livemint.com

qJAMALI KAMALI The tomb and mosque of Shaikh Fazlullah, better known by his nom de plume, Jamali Kamali, are almost invisible. The archaeological park in which Jamali Kamali is situated has a profusion of domed buildings, dalans (courtyards) and mosques but none is preserved as well as these two buildings are. Constructed during Babar’s time by Fazlullah himself, the tomb was complete in 1536 and the mosque a little later.

Built in Lodhi style, the mosque has a jharokha (window) above its recessed inner arch and is decorated with mihrabs (decorative arch in a wall). The central arch juts out from the others in a row and is flanked by fluted pilasters.

From a small gate to the north, there is an entry into the funerary enclosure where a square tomb houses two small graves. The ceiling is covered with exquisite stucco in blue, green and white and a border of blue tiles runs on the outer walls.

Find it: Between Delhi and Gurgaon on the Mehrauli-Mahipalpur road Why it makes it to Jalil’s list: Unusually well-preserved, with a beautiful surrounding ambience.

Exquisitely pre­ served: (left) Tile work inside the Jamali Kamali tomb; and a view of the monument in the Mehrauli Archaeological Park.

uAROUND THE SUNDER NURSERY According to Jalil, this is a treasure trove of tombs and pavilions. Facing the entry to the nursery is the Sunderwala Burj: a simple, unadorned square building with a single, squat dome. A close inspection reveals the most detailed Quranic inscriptions on the internal walls and the underside of the dome. To the southeast of this monument lies the Sunderwala Mahal, a rectangular rubble-built monument.

This is a tomb, not a mahal.

Two staircases leading up to the roof suggest there may have been another structure here earlier. The entire building has been renovated with help from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Find it: Near Sunder Nagar Nursery, off Mathura Road Why it makes it to Jalil’s list: Exploring this area is tantamount to taking a short heritage walk.

p QILA­E­KUHNA MASJID While it may not have the grandeur or scale of Jama Masjid, this mosque has the most pleasing proportions. Built in 1542, it shows the transition from squat, sloping-walled Lodhi-style mosques to more refined Mughal period mosques. The east-facing rear wall is studded with oriel windows and flanked on either side by double-storey semi-octagonal towers topped with chhatris (canopies). A red and white border with traces of blue tile work can be see along the edges of the windows. The western facade has five perfectly proportionate, equal-size arches, with the central one framed within a projection and flanked by fluted pilasters decorated with inlay work. Red sandstone, black and white marble and grey slate have all been used.

Find it: Inside Purana Qila, next to Delhi Zoo, Mathura Road Why it makes it to Jalil’s list: Different building materials have been used well together.

Simplicity of style: Sunderwala Mahal, near Sunder Nursery.

q TOMB OF ATGAH KHAN One of the few Akbar-period buildings in Delhi, this is a spectacular Mughal-style monument. Atgah Khan was believed to be Akbar’s foster father and the husband of Ji Ji Anagah, one of Akbar’s wet nurses. Atgah Khan was murdered by Adham Khan, the son of Maham Anagah (if you have seen the movie Jodhaa Akbar, you cannot miss these characters), another wet nurse.

Atgah Khan’s tomb,

built by his son Mirza Aziz Kokaltash, is a handsome red and white structure, with elaborate detailing in red sandstone and white marble interspersed with tiles. The four walls have deeply recessed arches with lattice stone screens. You will also find the tombs of Amir Khusrau, Mirza Ghalib and princess Jahanara nearby.

Find it: In Nizamuddin West Why it makes it to Jalil’s list: The delicate red and white stonework looks beautiful.

Intricate work: Atgah Khan’s tomb in Niza­ muddin West.

In ruin: Bara Batashewala Mahal.

p BARA BATASHEWALA MAHAL AND CHHOTA BATASHEWALA MAHAL The Bara Batashewala Mahal is the tomb of Muzaffar Husain Mirza, the grand nephew of Humayun. It stands on a platform and has five arches on each side. It looks simple from the outside but the walls within are ornamental, with incised and painted plaster. Built in 1603-04, the monument shows signs of serious deterioration.

There are staircases leading up to the roof but the first floor is all gone. Close by is the Chhota Batashewala Mahal, which was once an arcaded octagonal building with a domed ceiling and stone jaalis (screens with geometric patterns).

Find it: Inside the Bharatiyam Complex, towards the Boys’ Scout Camp, facing the Humayan’s Tomb parking Why it makes it to Jalil’s list: Because the guards will stop you.

These are public monuments and we should all be allowed to see these hidden gems.