Lounge for 03 March 2012

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 9

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

DREAM GIRLS Four women from Haryana tell us how they are forging a life and career for themselves in a state that seems to have no place for girls >Pages 10­12

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH STANDARD CHARTERED’S JASPAL SINGH BINDRA >Page 9

KITCHEN DRAMA

Turn up the tech quotient of your cooking zone with these new gadgets and appliances >Page 6

NOT JUST FORTY WINKS The Supreme Court recently said sleep is a ‘basic’ right. But human behaviour says it takes more than just the basics to get sleep >Page 8

WHY EVERYBODY LOVES VIDYA

Khatoon Bano (in blue), 18, has worked for a year and her father ensures that her entire salary is deposited in her bank account.

She breaks every convention that defines Hindi film actresses of today, and deliberately keeps away from glamour >Pages 16­17

REPLY TO ALL

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

ALLAH ON PRIME TIME TELEVISION

T

he top four channels watched in Pakistan are Star Plus, Geo News, Sony and Colors. Of these, Star Plus has over three times the viewership of Geo News. Pakistanis get their news from local channels but their entertainment from Indian channels. This is so because it is not possible to produce entertainment in a moral society. If we think about it, entertainment can only be produced on the cusp of immorality. Because Pakistan is a pious society, it must borrow... >Page 4

PIECE OF CAKE

SHOBA NARAYAN

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WHAT IS PRIYANKA BRITAIN’S QUEEN GANDHI AFRAID OF? OF BAKES

P

riyanka Gandhi Vadra is a magnificent campaigner. In terms of sheer charisma, she beats her brother hollow. She has that preternatural ability to gauge the pulse of the people. It is much more than empathy—every good spiritual guru has empathy. The currency of campaign politics, however, is connecting to a crowd and giving voice to their dreams. It is the ability to deliver the same feel-good factor to a crowd that empathy offers to an individual. This emotional connect combined with... >Page 5

T

here was a wonderful drama series on the BBC, Call the Midwife, which reminded me how fortunate I was to have my children in the 1990s rather than the 1950s. At that time, with the National Health Service only a few years old, women were still birthing and dying at home, attended by midwives carrying bags full of scary looking contraptions. Fetching hot towels and boiling water was the order of the day, mainly as something for the men to do instead of pacing up and down and... >Page 5

PHOTO ESSAY

THE ‘MELENG’ JOURNEY

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI SUNDEEP KHANNA ©2012 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEWS | HOM BOT 2.0; POWER VAC LINES OF VACUUMS

T

he first Roomba, by iRobot, was introduced in the US 10 years ago, in February 2002. While iRobot’s devices are still not available in India, intelligent vacuums are finally here.

Last month, Korean consumer electronics giant LG Electronics launched the Hom Bot 2.0, and Indian firm Milagrow HumanTech, the Power Vac line of intelligent vacuums. Resembling w e i g h i n g machines with wheels, both the r o b o t s a r e equipped with ultrasonic sensors, cameras and basic intelligence which allows them to map the room being cleaned.

The robot knows when to turn to avoid furniture, and “remembers” areas it has already cleaned.

Brushes on the sides and under the robot agitate dust, a vacuum sucks it up and into the dustbin which you empty out later.

Cleaning up can be set to automatic, so everything happens without intervention, including recharging the battery. The robots have 2 hours of battery life but this doesn’t matter because they automatically return to a docking station and recharge themselves.

The LG Hom Bot 2.0 is a sleek disc (3.2kg) that moves faster than the Milagrow and offers voice instructions at every stage. The Milagrow robots are bulkier (3.5kg), but even the most expensive one is at least three times cheaper than the Hom Bot. The first time you run one of these, you will be shocked to see the amount of dirt that has built up over time in your house, in areas that manual cleaning would miss, such as under beds and behind couches. After the first few runs, though, the amount of dust that builds up should be less, and changing the dustbin would be required only once or twice a

The not so good Sleek: The LG Hom Bot 2.0 vacuum cleaner.

week. Slippery surfaces and slight inclines are no problem, though, naturally, stairs are.

The good stuff The LG Hom Bot remembers its last location. So if you have to switch it off for any reason, it will resume cleaning and not waste time going over spaces that have already been vacuumed.

With a height of only 9cm, the Hom Bot can get under just about any furniture in the house, and assiduously works to find those impossible-to-reach corners. Its ultrasonic sensors also mean that it doesn’t bump and retreat, unlike earlier robot cleaners—instead, it can more intelligently detect obstacles and turn in time.

The RedHawk model of the Milagrow Power Vac we tested also comes with a very useful accessory: an emitter which creates an infrared “wall”. It acts as an invisible wall the robot will not cross. So, for example, if you want to clean the house but not the bedroom because you don’t want to be disturbed while sleeping, you can set the emitter near the bedroom door, to keep the robot out.

The Milagrow RedHawk and the far more expensive LG Hom Bot both have one common problem—sensing wires. Heavy wires, like your AC’s power cable, aren’t an issue, but light wires such as speaker cables don’t register as obstacles until they get tangled in the wheels.

It’s bad wire management to leave them out in the open, but if you do have them on the floor, this is something to watch out for.

The same is true for thin carpets—the machines are able to get on to and clean a thick carpet, but a thin one or a light bathroom mat, will crumple under the wheels. Hom Bot has a lower surface clearance (1cm), compared to the 2.3cm on the Milagrow robot, and with the mop attached, it doesn’t go over carpets.

The Milagrow robot will go over a carpet even if the mop is attached, but the additional friction can slow it down, potentially wasting a lot of the battery.

In case of a power cut, the Milagrow docking station loses its cleaning schedule memory, so unless you have a battery backup, you need to keep an eye on the dock, once in a while.

Talk plastic The Milagrow Power Vacs start at `9,900 for the basic model; this does not have the additional modes such as spiral cleaning or wall cleaning, or a UV filter. The model we tried was the RedHawk, for `16,990. There is also the BlackCat, similar to the basic model but with a silent compressor for noise-free cleaning (`15,990). The LG Hom Bot 2.0 costs `43,990.

LOUNGE LOVES | DELHI: 14 HISTORIC WALKS

Footloose in Delhi Red Fort and Purana Qila. A few are paths less travelled, like the trails through Kashmiri Gate, Mehrauli Village and Khirki Village.

Liddle writes, “The selection criteria for each route… was first and foremost that there should be enough to see.

There should be an interesting story t is tough to believe that the Capital is behind the buildings and a background a city meant for leisure walking. You history of the area....I have also tried to can spend a day in Lutyens’ Delhi, include only those buildings that are walking past white colonial-era bunga- easily accessible to the public.” lows lined with trees. You can also walk The walks are arranged in an order around the hilly slopes and monu- that takes you from the city’s oldest area ments of the Mehrauli Archaeological to its newest. If you begin at No. 1 complex. Then there are professionally ( Q u t u b M i n a r c o m p l e x ) a n d conducted nature walks in walk—each weekend—by parks and gardens. But if the list, ending dutifully at you are a true Delhiite, No. 14 (Central Vista), you you should trudge through might get a linear underthe alleys of Old Delhi. standing of the Capital’s Delhi: 14 Historic Walks unfolding history. is perhaps the first guide Each walk begins with a that focuses on exploring page about the nearest the monuments of the city Metro station, amenities through walking routes. and, most helpfully, diffiWritten by Swapna Liddle, culty levels. In Shahjawho has been leading hanabad, for instance, walks for years, the guide“The walk goes through book has double-page the narrow lanes of the maps, lovely black and old city, which can be white photos and smart quite crowded particuDelhi—14 Historic tips. Liddle has a PhD on larly after 10am, when the Walks: 19th-century Delhi, an shops open.”

Westland, accomplishment that might The book is spiced with 291 pages, `495. frighten a lay reader. Fortuhighlighted quotes from nately, she explains the famous travellers (Ziaudmonuments that fall in each of the 14 din Barani), tyrants (Timur), and walks crisply. scholars (R.C. Dutt) swooning over Some trails in the book, such as the various aspects of Delhi. Too big to fit ones through Hauz Khas, Lodhi Garden into your bag, the book is handy and Old Delhi, are well-known, if not enough for a walk. well-explored. Some go through tourist traps like Humayun’s Tomb complex, Mayank Austen Soofi

Get to know the Capital through the touristy as well as lesser explored walks

I

LOUNGE REVIEW | FLYTE

Gopal Sathe

LOUNGE LOVES | G­SPOTTING

A Zen sexual puzzle Ahead of International Women’s Day, a docu­ mentary explores the female erogenous zone

T

he film begins with the clicking of high heels. We follow their sexy and definitive click-clock on a sidewalk, up a long flight of stairs and into an office.

Appropriate, given the film’s strapline says we’re about to watch “a story of pleasure and promise”.

G-Spotting, a 52-minute documentary

by French science journalist Ségolène Hanotaux, navigates the complex history of the G-spot—and here you might think the “G” stands for God—from ignorance to acceptance to disputed existence.

The film starts with Swiss clinical psychologist Andrea Burri (owner of the formidable heels), who researches female sexuality at King’s College in London.

Burri’s work received little attention till 2009, when she published a paper which claimed that the G-spot may not exist; that the elusive female erogenous zone wasn’t an anatomical feature in women but a “subjective phenomenon”.

Disputed territory: G­spot, pure invention or scientific truth?

Burri’s findings, which were lapped up by the media, cast a dark shadow on the history of the G-spot, which has lived a half life since the German gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg first indicated its existence in 1950, giving it its name—the Gräfenberg-spot.

With that to start with, the narrative takes us back and forth in time, across London, Paris and New York. We meet Beverly Whipple, professor emerita at Rutgers University, US, who co-authored the best-selling book The G Spot: And Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality, the first book on the subject, published in 1982. We meet characters across the spectrum: new-age priestess Deborah Sundahl, an expert on female ejaculation; and pornographic actor Nicole Ray, whose advice is succinct: “Look for the walnut”.

Days ahead of International Women’s Day, which is celebrated worldwide on 8 March, G-Spotting is an important inquiry into female sexuality. “How, in 2012, can there still exist myths about female sexuality? How can the simple mention of (the G-spot) provoke such argument and salacious laughter?” asks Hanotaux, who will screen her film in Delhi on 7 March.

For Hanotaux, who is presently based in Delhi as a television correspondent for the

French television channel La Chaîne Info, what started off as an argument with a fellow journalist in 2008, unfolded into a fulllength documentary over the next three years. Since its completion in 2011, G-Spotting has travelled to film festivals in Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands and South Africa.

Is the G-spot pure invention or scientific truth? In her often witty commentary, Hanotaux calls it a Zen sexual puzzle: It’s a secret and it cannot be found.

The film culls television footage from the 1950s and 1980s—covering the feminist movement, the lesbian movement, and the division of the feminist movement when feminists began to reject the G-spot claiming its regressive focus on intercourse (What would Freud say?).

It also brings us up to date with the latest strands. Whipple’s new work involves studying women who can orgasm from imagery alone, or what she calls “thinking off”. We meet an American cosmetic surgeon who offers a $1,050 (around `51,300) surgical enhancement to “create” a G-spot: An 8-second-long collagen injection as a magic button for pleasure.

Organized by independent curator Rébecca Peshdikian, the screening in Delhi will be accompanied by a quiz and a talk by Hanotaux and Madhu Khanna, a tantra specialist. The idea is to share Western and Eastern points of view on female pleasure. “In the West, we imply openness about sex and pleasure…but all historical evidence proves the contrary. It points to Asia! This is an attempt to share references,” says Hanotaux.

Don’t miss the chance to watch this earnest biography of the sexagenarian G-spot, object of so many fantasies, and controversies—call it the C-spot, if you will.

E

asily the most serious attempt yet at selling music online in India, Flyte, Flipkart’s digital music service which kicked off on 27 February, offers “over a million tracks from 150,000 unique albums” for download, according to a statement from the website (you can buy albums as well as individual songs). Comparisons to Amazon Music and the iTunes Store are unwarranted; neither of those services are available in India. Like Flipkart, Flyte offers a service specifically designed for this country. Will it change how we buy music?

The good stuff

bulk downloads, which should come in useful if you want to buy Wagner’s Ring cycle (310 tracks over two CDs; Flyte’s collection of Western classical music is nowhere close to the vast array of music on digital music stores abroad, but it’s a good start).

The not so good Flipkart offers music from several Indian languages, but none as comprehensive as the Hindi list. International labels have been slow to authorize online sales here, so Flyte’s global collection currently has puzzlingly large gaps. Vast areas of music go unrepresented; fans of J-pop or Cuban jazz will have to continue to forage in secret. Flyte’s English-language catalogue also contains many rude surprises—you can buy seven vile Beatles cover albums but not a single original Beatles performance.

G-Spotting will be screened on 7 March at Les Parisiennes, 5B, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi.

The answer is yes (probably), because Flyte is the most meaningful alternative yet to piracy of Indian music online. The individual track download allows you to buy that hit song you’ve been hearing non-stop on the radio without getting the whole album. Most tracks come with sound quality options, ranging from the lo-fi 64 Kbps to the bell-like 320 Kbps. The site layout is cluttered but fairly user-friendly, much like Flipkart itself.

Flyte improves the market for fans of well-recorded but poorly distributed forms, like ghazals and classical music. We can’t speak to connoisseurs of rare recordings, but fans of, say, Ustad Sultan Khan, will be able to browse most of his work in one place.

You can buy individual performances instead of a collection you may not want, or which appear on an album you already have. The service offers a download manager that helps control

Anindita Ghose

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Talk plastic Song downloads start at `6, and albums at `25. You can currently buy a super-successful album like A.R. Rahman’s Rockstar for `113, or hotoff-the-press stuff like Vishal-Shekhar’s Kahaani for `54. The music is digital rights management- or DRMfree. You can download a track up to four times after payment. If you listen to most of your music on your computer or MP3 player, Flyte is a steal.

You can access Flyte from the Flipkart.com homepage.

Supriya Nair

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL ROBERT NICKELSBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Talk time: Hamid Mir (right) before his talk show Capital Talk goes on air on Geo TV.

Allah on prime time

T

he top four channels watched in Pakistan are Star Plus, Geo News, Sony and Colors. Of these, Star Plus has over three times the viewership of Geo News. Pakistanis get their news from local channels but their entertainment from Indian

channels. This is so because it is not possible to produce entertainment in a moral society. If we think about it, entertainment can only be produced on the cusp of immorality. Because Pakistan is a pious society, it must borrow entertainment from India. This is why Pakistanis watch the same Bollywood movies as we do. What actually separates us from them is their news channels. Let us look at them.

The first observation is that Pakistani news anchors begin their shows with a religious salutation.

Geo’s flagship show is Capital Talk, hosted by Pakistan’s most famous anchor, Hamid Mir. He begins every show with: “Bismillah ir rahman ir rahim. As salaam o aleikum. Capital Talk mein khushamadeed (In the name of Allah, most beneficent and merciful.

May peace be upon you. Welcome to Capital Talk).”

Why assume all Pakistanis share your religion? And why inflict your piety on those who do? It is the equivalent of Arnab Goswami beginning his nightly broadcasts with “Jai Shri Ram!” Mir is not alone. This greeting is sounded out by Shahid Masood and

Javed Chaudhry on Express News, Asma Chaudhry on Dunya News, Mushtaq Minhas on Aaj TV and any number of anchors. Geo’s Kamran Khan always ends his show with “Allah hafiz o nasir (May Allah protect you).”

The second aspect is that the channels are in Urdu. There are a few Sindhi and Punjabi channels that aren’t significant.

The urban Pakistani has an attractive bilingual character, and the quality of his Urdu is very good. It is pleasing to the ear, and it is one good thing to have come out of the Pakistani imposition of Urdu on all its citizens. India’s urban middle classes are notionally bilingual, but mostly read and write English, while speaking a broken version of their mother tongue.

The third observation is that the channels have strong religious content.

This includes scholarly debate, often by first-rate intellectuals such as Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, but mostly it is reinforcing of faith. Frequently there is an attack of the most bigoted kind against fellow Pakistanis, such as those of Ahmedi confession.

While the language is pleasing, therefore, the content is otherwise and

often it is unhinged. One of the most repeated words in Pakistani media is “saazish” (conspiracy). Conspiracies are usually the doing of “Yahood-o-Hanood (Jews and Hindus)”, besides of course “Amrika”.

This lunacy has no bounds.

Nawaiwaqt’s Muhammad Ajmal Niazi once abused Geo News for being too soft on the West. Niazi did not refer to Geo by name, but said he meant the channel “jiska naam Yahoodi say milta hai” (whose name resembles “Jew”).

Pakistanis see the Hindu’s evil hand in many things, including in acts that harmed India. Ajmal Kasab is not really Pakistani, but the Indian agent Amar Singh. This is the analysis of Zaid Hamid, who appears in his red beret as strategic affairs expert on Dawn News, Aaj TV, Dunya News and Samaa TV. He champions Ghazwa-e-Hind, a prophecy predicting Muslim conquest of India.

This is debated as fact, the question being when it will come to fruition.

Ahmed Quraishi is an anchor, column writer and international expert.

In 2010, he reported stories on the monstrous doings of Indians he got from WikiLeaks. These were repeated by newspapers, and by former ambassador Zafar Hilaly in his column. Then it turned out Quraishi had invented it all.

To be fair to Pakistanis, he was exposed as a fraud by a fellow (anonymous) Pakistani who runs the media blog Cafe Pyala. But Quraishi remains an anchor, columnist and expert. These warriors prosper because of the closed minds of the channels’ audience.

Their free media is mostly a negative

influence on Pakistanis. It validates their prejudices and makes it difficult for them to negotiate the modern world. And it isn’t all harmless. Samaa TV’s Meher Bukhari skewered Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer for his empathy towards a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. Taseer was then shot by his enraged bodyguard.

Blogger Zia Ahmad wrote that Bukhari had “Taseer’s blood on her hands”.

The damage is done on Urdu television and cannot be undone by English bloggers. Ghamidi, the Islamic scholar, fled Pakistan and now lives in Malaysia. He questioned the blasphemy law, and was savaged on the channels. “It became impossible to live there,” he told The Guardian.

Pakistan had two English channels, Dawn News and Express 24/7. Dawn News went Urdu and Express 24/7 shut down. One reason both failed is that fewer Pakistanis speak English than they do Urdu. But English is also spoken by fewer Indians and yet English news channels take in most money here. The fact is that Pakistan’s wild discourse cannot be properly communicated in English. The Economist attacks me in its Johnson Language column of 6 February for holding this view with reference to Gujarat, but I believe it to be true.

Pakistan does have balanced minds also on television. One is Geo’s Najam Sethi, for whose Lahore publication I write a column surveying the subcontinent’s Urdu, Hindi and Gujarati media. But it is a case of rotten apples comprising most of the basket.

India is fortunate that its news television was early on dominated by those with open minds like Prannoy Roy in English and S.P. Singh at Aaj Tak in Hindi. Roy gave us the wonderful line-up of stars who dominate today across channels: Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, Vikram Chandra and Arnab Goswami.

Familiar to us when only in their 20s, they have been on air for 17 years.

The first three clung to Roy’s secular liberalism. Goswami was perceptive enough to understand that for middle-class Indians, the fault always lies outside, never within. He has created his angry persona, positioning himself as one of them, though I suspect this is an act.

In Hindi, after Singh’s death, his tradition was carried forward by Uday Shankar at Aaj Tak and Star News. He made Hindi news television more urgent and tabloid-like, but kept it leaning on the liberal side. Shazi Zaman, Dibang, Naghma, and the rest have kept the medium respectable.

True populism came to Hindi news with Rajat Sharma’s India TV. It was a relief that it appeared as stories about cows being kidnapped by aliens rather than the hardening of identity as happened in Pakistan.

It must be admitted that the media in India is run by people who service a readership that is to the right of the editor on homosexuals’ rights, encounter killings, Muslim issues and such things.

This separates us from Pakistan.

The Times of India may have its faults, but its editor Joydeep Bose brings out a liberal and humane paper which is considerably to the left of its readership.

Its website peddles soft pornography (on 28 February, the links included “Indian babes who love to pose topless”) and that is fine. America’s free speech laws governed under the first amendment have been challenged, defined and strengthened by Playboy and Penthouse, not The Washington Post.

Our media is sometimes corrupt, often inept and always less than brilliant, which is why intelligent Indians seek solace in Nytimes.com and Aldaily.com (how many Americans bookmark Timesofindia.com?). But it means well and has been a positive, warm and constructive influence on Indian society.

For such things, we must be grateful.

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

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

BE SURE TO DOUBT YOURSELF

W

hat should I write about this time,” I ask the children.

“Is this your article where you write about us?” asks Sahar.

“Yes. I write about family.”

“Ice cream,” says Aliza. “Tell all the parents that children want ice cream every day.”

Sahar sits down on the sofa in the office. “You should tell everyone to be less angry. And not keep saying, ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’”

Naseem, the youngest, is listening to them. “I like blocks,” she says. “Billdin bocks. I make cakes with them and throw a party. I also make Qutub Minar.

Then it topples.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was thinking of writing about fears.

And confusion.”

They look at me.

“You know, how one is always trying to figure out what is the right thing to do.”

“Fears,” says Aliza. “I am afraid of ghosts, but I know

that ghosts don’t exist.”

“My friend says ghosts live on trees,” says Sahar.

“Ghosts don’t have bodies,” says little Naseem. She is the all-knowing three-year-old. “They live in the air. Sometimes I scare Papa by saying, ‘Look, there’s a ghost behind you!’”

Hahaha. We all laugh as we picture Papa jumping out of his seat, his cup of tea rattling in his hand.

“Err,” I say, “we were talking about the column, right?”

“You can write about family fights,” suggests Sahar. “When Aliza and Naseem were screaming at each other in the afternoon, I just went upstairs. I feel very bad when these two are fighting.”

“You did a good thing by going upstairs,” I say. “I was stuck here. I just had to watch them.”

Aliza and Naseem don’t want to pretend that this is about them.

“You know what is very

funny,” says Aliza. “How your words come out all tumbledumble when you are scolding us.” She imitates me speaking gibberish with a raised voice.

I laugh. I am flattered.

“What to do,” I say. “What is the point of saying the same things again and again? You know what is right and what is not. Most of the time it’s just that one of you is very hungry. Or tired. Or needs to go to the bathroom. Sometimes you all are actually enjoying chasing each other and shouting.”

“But Naseem took both my baskets,” says Aliza.

“I had to keep my things in them,” says Naseem.

“In both of them?”

“Well, now they are both free.

You can have them.”

“My darlings,” I say, “sometimes you just want me to stop doing what I am doing and come to you. That’s all.”

Naseem offers me a

me, and the other routes are still foggy?

Or have I just got myself stuck?

I am sure of one thing. It’s OK to be unsure. Sometimes it is critical to doubt. It’s the only way new paths are charted and creative lives lived.

What are you doing these days, friends will always ask. Sometimes we are in the middle of a change. Or we haven’t changed a Baby steps: Sometimes it’s okay to be unsure thing for years. of what you’re doing as parent and child.

Maybe we don’t know what we are Lego cupcake. doing. Often we don’t know how “Eat it,” she says. I bite. It is to say it. Perhaps you don’t want lovely. I make appropriate faces. to make a big deal of it.

“Here have another one, this Sometimes the friend doesn’t has chocolate, with a cherry really want to know. on top.”

Either ways, it is a lovely I can see cherries in her eyes. question to face every now I don’t know what I am doing, I and then. think to myself. It feels like I’ve Some questions are so lenient been standing at this crossroad for they come with a hint of their a few years now. Am I standing answers embedded in them. So here because I won’t walk the long as we continue to dare to path that doesn’t make sense to frame the questions, the answers

will keep revealing themselves.

“Are you going to get me the chart paper with glitter in it?” asks Aliza. “I will show you how to make flowers.”

“You can use the green wedding card,” I suggest.

“OK,” she says, excited. “Where are the scissors?”

“Where you left them,” I say.

“I also want to make flowers,” jumps up the little one.

“No, no! She always ruins everything.”

“I won’t, I promise I will share everything.”

“Mama, if your work is done, come and learn a new way to make flowers.”

You know what is the joy of knowing too much? In the end you realize you still don’t know very much. Strange as it may sound, that is very reassuring.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three.

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com To read Natasha’s previous columns, visit www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

What is Priyanka Gandhi afraid of?

P

ATUL YADAV/PTI

riyanka Gandhi Vadra is a magnificent campaigner. In terms of sheer charisma, she beats her brother hollow. She has that preternatural ability to gauge the pulse of the people. It is much more than empathy—every

good spiritual guru has empathy. The currency of campaign politics, however, is connecting to a crowd and giving voice to their dreams. It is the ability to deliver the same feel-good factor to a crowd that empathy offers to an individual. This emotional connect combined with force of personality equals charisma. Indira Gandhi wasn’t born with it but she developed this quality. Her granddaughter has it in spades, and yet, she doesn’t use it nearly enough.

What is Priyanka afraid of? Why doesn’t she reach for the national office that could be hers for the taking?

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg says that women aren’t ambitious enough. They compromise before they need to. They opt to be dentists rather than surgeons because dentistry offers more work-life balance—this at age 20, before they’ve met their spouse. They put off their childhood dream of starting a school or a restaurant because they are busy helping their husband fulfil his dream—and holding the family together while he does. Women rein in their ambition because they believe success will come with costly sacrifices. Worst of all, many women don’t even try; they don’t “lean in”, as Sandberg says. They compromise from the get-go. Why? Bangalore-based Sujata Keshavan, founder of Ray+Keshavan, one of India’s top design firms, believes that it may have to do with economics— and perhaps genetics. She talks about how difficult it was for her to persuade young women to continue to work after they got married. These weren’t women with constraints. They were talented and highly educated. They didn’t fit the conservative stereotype in which the in-laws forced them to resign from jobs to become homemakers. What’s more, they had supportive husbands and were not

planning to have babies anytime soon.

“Even so, if their husbands could support them financially, they chose to stop working,” says Keshavan. “This leads me to believe that women are wired to be homemakers, perhaps because of centuries of social conditioning that is now embedded in their psyche.”

The fact that Keshavan believes this is particularly damning because her career is testimony to the fact that women aren’t “wired” this way.

She founded Ray+Keshavan, ran it successfully and sold it to global brand company The Brand Union.

Perhaps she is an anomaly. Or perhaps early financial exigencies forced her to work. So what’s the way forward? I ask her. What do we tell our daughters if we want them to be strong, successful career women?

“Tell them to marry a poor man,” she says with a laugh, voicing exactly what I have been thinking.

After 50 years of feminism, it has come to this. Or has it? Are women the resilient gung-ho crusaders who have broken glass ceilings? Or are we escapist homemakers (and I do say this pejoratively in this context) who don’t have the courage to pursue our convictions—or our careers?

Human resources adviser and Mint columnist Hema Ravichandar disagrees with this analysis. “There are two types of women—those that take a job to find a life partner; and those who take a job to make a career of it,” she says. “Sujata’s take might hold true for the former but not for the latter. Of course, even those women who are not quitters may fall into the Mommy trap, or the transfer trap, or the H-4 visa trap, where they cannot work and have to compromise.”

I was raised by a mother who believed that women ought to be like “creepers” that hold the family tree together. I came of age at Mount

“web-thinking” are more suited to this information age.

Women will start businesses, she says, and get ahead in the fields of medicine, education and philanthropy. With fascinating anecdotes and hard science, Fisher links the part of the brain that will help women fly—quite literally (Fisher is an identical twin, and her twin sister is a hot-air balloon pilot).

That said, even Fisher admits that women will not break into the top levels because they are more willing to strive for work-life balance.

That doesn’t matter, she says.

There will be a few men at the top, a tonne of women in the middle, and a lot of men at the bottom—construction workers “too drunk to zip up their pants”, as she says.

What women need are role models who shifted the paradigm; who played the game, not by men’s rules but by their own. Sarojini Naidu stands out as a shining example of this paradigm shift.

She wasn’t born to dynastic power. Yet, she navigated her way through the male-dominated Congress party and held her own with style and substance.

Priyanka seems like a Charismatic: If she chooses, Priyanka Gandhi could have a role model in Sarojini Naidu. woman who is trying hard to strike this masculine-feminine Holyoke College, Massachusetts, where venture capital firm Seedfund, sees balance. Should she decide to take the something similar in women strong successful women taught me plunge into full-time politics, she has a entrepreneurs. “I often see women the trenchant politics of feminism. I role model in her mother. Should she start businesses and the moment it am married to a man who believes choose to ignore the salacious starts to scale, and they think they that nurture can trump nature; that Jawaharlal Nehru-Padmaja Naidu link, need outside money, they rope in their she might also be well-served by women can trump the “wiring” that husbands. Why don’t they have the may cause them to be like creepers or studying the style of this “Nightingale confidence to do it on their own?” she homemakers. My personal belief is of India”, and imbuing it with a asks. Put another way, why is Robert that we women have a fear—not of charisma that is all her own.

Vadra (Priyanka’s husband) involved failure but of success. We are afraid to in her campaign? reach for the stars because we are Shoba Narayan is neither creeper nor Biological anthropologist Helen worried about what it will cost us— career woman. Like all women, she and our families. We are biologically Fisher, who authored The First Sex: tries to be both, and therein, perhaps, and psychologically more invested in The Natural Talents of Women And lies the problem. Write to her at our children. So we don’t reach; we How They are Changing the World, thegoodlife@livemint.com don’t push forward because we are disagrees that women entrepreneurs already calculating the costs, before we cop out. Rather, she says, “Tomorrow www.livemint.com need to. When the going gets tough, belongs to women.” Women’s natural Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at we compromise and pull back. talents: networking, people skills, www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan Bharati Jacob, founder-partner of connecting, nurturing and PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

DIVYA BABU/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

THE QUEEN OF BAKES

T

here was a wonderful drama series on the BBC, Call the Midwife, which reminded me how fortunate I was to have my children in the 1990s rather than the 1950s. At that time, with the National Health Service only a few years old, women were still birthing and dying at home, attended by midwives carrying bags full of scary looking contraptions. Fetching hot towels and boiling water was the order of the day, mainly as something for the men to do instead of pacing up and down and smoking.

As well as the highs and lows of life in the East End of London in the days before the artsy crowd took over, there’s also a brilliant cake-themed sub-plot.

Set in a convent, one of the ageing nuns, Sister Monica Joan, is starting to lose her marbles and one of her foibles is prowling the corridors at all hours of day and night in search of sweet things. The young midwives invariably return after a long night shift in search of something to go with their cup of

tea, only to find the battered old tins with “cake” stencilled on the side empty. They’ve tried hiding the cake tin in sock drawers and the outhouse but Joan is always one step ahead, and the corridors of Nonnatus House echo to the sound of young midwives wailing “Crivens! Sister Monica Joan’s been at the Victoria Sandwich again.”

In an ideal world, no one would ever be without a Victoria Sandwich, the cake that made Britain great—or at least launched a million of its village fêtes. It’s a cake we all learnt to make at school and in the Women’s Institute (WI), it’s the cake by which home bakers are judged. Yet in the fickle world of cake fashion, this glorious spongy, creamy, jammy confection has sadly been eclipsed by more glamorous, more delicate, more French fancies.

As well as being a perfect cake in its own right, once you’ve mastered the art of a perfect Victoria Sandwich, the recipe forms the basis of a whole world

Layered: It’s the cake which is part of British lore, and by which home bakers are judged. of cakey delights. The mixture can be used to make fairy cakes, butterfly cakes, coffee and walnut cakes, chocolate cakes and zesty lemon cakes. But first, let’s give the wonderful Victoria Sandwich another moment in the limelight.

Victoria Sandwich Serves 6-8 Ingredients 175g caster sugar 175g soft (not melted) butter (unsalted French makes the nicest sponge) 3 large eggs, beaten with 1 tsp pure vanilla extract

175g plain flour (maida), sifted with 2 level tsp baking powder 2-3 tbsp milk For the filling 200ml whipped cream 5-6 tbsp strawberry jam Method Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease and line two 2x19cm cake tins with baking parchment.

In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until pale and light. We were made to do this with a wooden spoon at school but you could use an electric mixer. Beat in

the eggs a little at a time, along with a little flour to stop the mixture curdling.

When all the eggs have been added, take a metal spoon and gently fold in the rest of the flour.

To test if the mixture is the right consistency, take a spoonful, then bang it on the side of the bowl. If the mixture drops off easily (although it mustn’t be runny), it’s ready. If not, add a

couple of tablespoons of milk and mix again.

Divide the mixture equally between the two tins and spread it out evenly. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes.

In my electric oven, I leave the top and bottom elements on for 10 minutes then switch off the top element for the rest of the time to avoid burning the tops of the cakes.

The sponges are ready when you touch the top and the cake springs back, or when a skewer placed in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Turn the cakes out on to a baking rack to cool completely.

When the sponges are cool, put one on a plate or cake stand, and spread with the jam and whipped cream. Place the other sponge on top, then dust with caster sugar. The Victoria Sandwich is best on the day it’s made but will keep for a day or two in the fridge.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to make Victoria Sandwiches, visit www.livemint.com/victoriansandwich.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

L6

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

Insider

LOUNGE

PICKS

Cooktop range by Miele (above, from left) Salamander: Taken from the ancient notion that a salamander can survive the fiercest heat, this top­heating appliance is used for browning, glazing and caramelizing food (`2,89,990).

Gas hob: In stainless steel trough or black ceramic glass flush surface, the Miele gas hobs come in a variety of widths and configurations (`89,990 onwards).

TepanYaki: A stainless steel cooking plate for grilling, roasting and flambéing. Good for cooking seafood, meat and

Kitchen drama Turn up the tech quotient of your cooking zone with these new gadgets and appliances B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

·······················

Hood by Häfele: A stainless steel and glass chimney called Island, it comes with an extendable hood and an additional charcoal filter for maximum air filtration. `28,980; for details, visit www.hafele.in

Celsius by Sub­Zero: Cherrywood shelved exteriors, soft interior lighting and custom cabine­ try—with this wine cooler you can display your impressive wine collection. With two inde­ pendent storage zones, you can digitally control temperature and humidity and provide UV protection. It comes in two sizes: 132 bottles and 147 bottles.

Starting at approx. `7 lakh; available at Top Products India Pvt. Ltd, off Linking Road, Mumbai; and Splendor Forum, Jasola, New Delhi.

ILLUSTRATION

BY

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Drawer and pull­out systems by Poggenpohl: These drawers work on power­assisted opening and pull­out mechanism, and have concealed LED lighting which illuminates on opening the drawers. These come as part of the Poggenpohl kitchen furni­ ture and hardware. `6 lakh onwards; available at B­87, Defence Colony, New Delhi. For details, visit www.poggenpohl.de

CoolDrawer by Fisher & Paykel: Traditionally, refrigerators block a corner in a kitchen.

To break that stereotype and free up precious space, CoolDrawer refrigerators are designed in fully integrated drawers that can be installed near the food preparation area. They come with five specific temperature controls. `2.15 lakh for each drawer.

For details, visit www.fisherandpaykel.in

vegetables (`1,59,990).

Induction wok: Great for stir­fries, it comes with its own made­to­measure wok pan. And a ceramic bowl that is easy to keep clean (`1,99,990).

Induction hob: The ability to precisely control the temperature makes induction perfect for all types of cooking. The cooking surface is cool apart from the heat where the pan sits (`1,84,990).

The combined set price range is from `10 lakh upwards; available at Miele distributors countrywide.

For details, visit www.miele.in

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

L7

Style

LOUNGE TREND

Imprinted identity Patterns of all shapes and sizes are the new logos to identify a brand

B Y C HRISTINA B INKLEY ···························· ou say, “hot rods.” I say, “Prada.” You say, “fluorescent paisley.” I say, “Jil Sander.”

Thanks to strides in inkjet technology and the never-ending search for innovation in design, fashion houses are going patterncrazy. They’re innovating original prints that stand out more than any logo could. And because you must know fashion to recognize a print’s meaning, they have become a secret handshake to an undeniably stylish club.

This season, Prada’s rumbling car prints represent the label loudly and clearly. In previous seasons, they used rococo bananas, hotly coloured wide stripes and prints that morphed from black to green.

More subtle and creative than a logo, prints are a way for designers to brand their creations without slapping initials on them—making prints a new, more understated approach to creating brand icons. “It’s a way to say who we are without putting a logo on it,” says Erin Beatty, codesigner of the emerging New York label Suno.

British-Canadian designer Erdem Moralioglu’s dreamy watercolour-like flowers create instant brand recognition. Dries Van Noten’s prints are coveted each season, verging on collector’s items. Proenza Schouler has become beloved more for its prints and patterns—created with materials that vary from unconventional eel and rattan to lace and cotton—than for the shapes of its clothes, which tend to be conventional. “We’re making pretty simple clothes out of really complicated fabrics,” says Lazaro Hernandez, one of the label’s co-founders. “That’s to me what’s modern about fashion.”

Of course, brands like Missoni and Pucci have built empires based on versions of one iconic pattern. Missoni’s zigzags are so aspirational that an inexpensive limited-edition Missoni-for-Target collection last September sold out in many stores on the first day. The swirly Pucci patterns are practically synonymous with the psychedelic 1960s, but those labels hardly varied their patterns from season to season, instead changing the silhouettes of their garments to stay current.

What we’re seeing now in prints is far more variable. It is probably the greatest innovation of 21st-century fashion—and one with great promise for further advancement as ancient methods of fabric printing are unearthed and new ones developed. There are few silhouettes that haven’t been explored by now—every length, every breadth and then some. But prints are the Wild West, with plenty of untrodden space for experimentation. The opportunities afforded by vastly improved digital printing technologies allow designers to innovate while beefing up their brands.

“I love them because it’s a way to personalize the brand,” says designer Maria Cornejo, who has created prints based on

Y

her own distorted iPhone photos of graffiti, a feathered mask and other things she comes across. “Nobody has that print. It’s ours.”

One reason that prints have become increasingly important over the past five years is that it has become less expensive and simpler to create them.

As recently as the early 2000s, prints required an artist to paint on screens—one screen per colour—which would then imprint fabric with dye to make the print. That method creates a more three-dimensional feel, but is expensive and timeconsuming, especially for designers who may produce only small quantities of each print after incurring the expense of building those screens.

Digital printmaking is much like printing a photograph on paper. Recent improvements in inkjet technology have allowed designers to create sharp edges and to use intricate colour variations, as well as to base a print on almost any image.

It’s extraordinary what can be turned into a print. Suno, which leapt to fast fame two years ago for prints modelled after a jumble of African kangas and other textiles, produced the unimaginable for spring: prints based on photographs of cancer cells. The look isn’t creepy—until you know what it is. “It’s a way for us to say who we are without putting a logo on it,” says Beatty. Her design partner, Max Osterweis, feared women might be deterred from buying clothes depicting cancer cells, but Beatty dismissed his concern. The designs, she says, are meant to appeal to “intellectual” fashion consumers.

And there you have it. The art of prints can lift the appeal of a label to smarter, more educated shoppers. It’s possible to have a lengthy conversation about a swirly print derived from layered photographs of stones and water—as Helmut Lang did in 2010—at a cocktail party. But how much can you say about kissing C’s?

A master of patterns, Antwerp designer Van Noten prefers to create his prints before he works on his garments each collection.

He works with both digital and screen-printing techniques, and travels to Lyon, France—a centre of textile production—to study vintage print archives while trying to drive modern methods of

Design central: (clockwise from left) A spring 2012 Dries Van Noten look; Erdem’s Watercolor Floral; Burberry Pror­ sum’s Artistic Batik; and Jil Sander’s Mid­ century Paisley. printing forward.

For spring 2012, he worked with photographs, creating large panels of impressionistic digital prints that swirled with colour.

But he cut up the panels, forming blocks of patterns that he sewed together with solid colours. This fabricblocking technique was a robust trend during the recent fall 2012 collections in New York.

Van Noten’s acclaimed fall 2008 collection was a tribute to Orbis Wirth, a Swiss inventor who in the 1920s came up with a method of laying colour on to fabric much the way today’s inkjets do, without screens. His technique layered fragile wax imbued with pigments on to a metal cylinder, which was then rolled on to fabric.

Van Noten and his team discovered references to the forgotten method in a Lyon textile library, and set about finding several remaining cylinders, which he used to produce a vividly hued limited-edition collection of prints. “No two pieces of fabric were the same,” Van Noten says, because of the handwork involved.

To set his prints apart, the designer also blows up his images, cuts them into pieces and reassembles them in blocks on clothes, leaving the original unrecognizable. “A woman is not a wall to hang a

picture on,” he says. “If a print is too important, you don’t dare to cut it up.”

Albert Kriemler has transformed his grandparents’ Swiss apron company into Akris, one of the top-selling ready-to-wear brands in the US, in part by exploring digital prints. Now a signature of his collections, these prints are based on everything from a sideways photo of an Alpine lake (two years ago), to photo-like reproductions from Monte Carlo’s Formula One races (for this spring). An unforgettable look for this season was a photograph of people sitting on a high wall, printed on a dress in his collection. The bright orange and green on a beige background formed by the wall evoked Monte Carlo’s sunlight, while the wall created a block of colour for the sheath dress.

At Proenza Schouler’s spring show, designers Jack McCollough and Hernandez used Hawaiian florals on a yellow background, then textile-blocked them with solids, creating high fashion out of a print usually worn by sunburned tourists in Waikiki. The idea, says Hernandez, was to

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STYLING BY A NNE

F MARTIN RAMIN; CARDENAS

explore mid-century tiki culture—a futuristic time when people expressed their longing for something primitive by creating something expensive that looked “cheap and plasticky”.

It isn’t prints they’re aiming for so much as three-dimensional fabrics that tell their story. “It’s not just an inkjet print, which is so first-degree, or silk screens, which is so 100 years ago,” Hernandez says. “It’s more interesting to actually weave the prints into a jacquard.”

Raf Simons at Jil Sander updated old-fashioned prints—like gingham and paisley—by blowing them up or stretching them almost beyond recognition for his spring collection. The paisleys were bordered in hot pinks and purples and Kelly green, in some versions, and in chartreuse and black in others.

With his references to patterns popular in the 1950s and 1960s, Simons has modernized obscure prints. His florals for fall 2011 were based on a vintage couture design from the French fabric house Bucol, founded in Lyon in 1924 and now a subsidiary of Hermès, which is famous for its clothing and upholstery fabrics.

In Simons’s hands, an oversize 1950s shift dress with dolman sleeves, for instance, appears as simple as a muumuu. But the volume-creating fabric, designed to look like something blowing in the wind with giant poppies and daisies, will be recalled as iconic Jil Sander for seasons to come.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

Spotlight

LOUNGE

ESSAY

Not just forty winks ©P ABLO

asleep as soon as they clamber onboard, shuffle and shake barely consciously for an hour, and then miraculously wake up seconds before their designated stop, refreshed and ready to take on another working day.

For centuries, indeed since the beginning of time, man has been sleeping without smartphones watching over him. Indeed by now, you would think, we know everything there is to know about sleeping: Slip into something comfortable, put out the lights, close your eyes, and then stay that way for 8 hours.

How wrong you are. First of all, it seems, we might be wrong about those 8 hours. Just this month, the BBC published a story that all but trashes that traditional notion. Instead, the article says, human beings are perhaps more suited to a bi-modal sleep pattern: where a night’s sleep is broken into two pieces of around 4 hours each, with an hour or so of activity—wink, nudge—in between.

The article shows plenty of proof to suggest that this indeed was the norm till the 17th century by which time street lighting, domestic lighting and coffee shops open at night began to make night social activity more viable. People began to stay up later and longer.

While most people have since adjusted to the single block of sleep, researchers say that any sleeping problems, in particular, and medical problems, in general, may lie in our resistance to the body’s “natural preference for segmented sleep”.

So quite possibly, modern uncoached human beings no longer sleep right. But thanks to the Supreme Court, at least sleep itself is a right.

And that should make all of us sleep a little better.

The Supreme Court recently said sleep is a ‘basic’ right. But human behaviour says it takes more than just the basics to get sleep B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· f all the things that the Anna Hazare–Baba Ramdev–civil society imbroglio could have done for the country, perhaps the most enduring thing, so far, has been a whimsical ruling by the Supreme Court.

Last fortnight, the Supreme Court severely upbraided the Delhi police for imposing prohibitory orders, under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, on Baba Ramdev’s anticorruption rally at Ramlila Maidan last year. On the early morning of 5 June 2011, a force of several thousand policemen and anti-riot forces stormed the maidan and evicted the yoga guru and several of his supporters.

This was done, however, when the huge retinue was asleep.

The Supreme Court has now said in what should be a landmark judgement, that this raid was a violation of “fundamental” and “basic” rights: “Sleep is essential for a human being to maintain the delicate balance of health necessary for its very existence and survival. Sleep is, therefore, a fundamental and basic requirement without which the existence of life itself would be in peril.”

“To disturb sleep, therefore, would amount to torture which is now accepted as a violation of human right,” said the court, standing up for something that is rarely defended in this particular epoch of human existence where, on the contrary, we glorify ceaseless activity. Our airports, mobile phones, Internet connections, fast food restaurants, television channels, and

O

BARTHOLOMEW/PHOTOINK

even some of our workplaces not only function 24 hours a day, but also take great pride in their relentlessness.

So much so that sleep, that most natural of animal tendencies, is now being subject to the same analysis, research and technological intervention that medical disorders are usually subject to.

In September 2010, an entrepreneur called Julia Ho presented a new iPhone app called Lark at the TechCrunch Disrupt show in San Francisco, US. Lark, which is now commercially available, does two things: First, it uses a series of random vibrations via a wristband to wake you, and only you, up. Second, it analyses your sleeping patterns to help and coach you into sleeping better.

The product has received positive reviews and the Delhi police will do well to think of somehow generating massive random vibrations in order to wake maidan-fulls of people, instead of their current tools of citizen interface: assault and battery.

But how can something like sleep need coaching? On the spectrum of human activities, sleep, one assumes, comes much closer to a spontaneous activity like breathing than a more deliberate one like sex.

Most people, this writer included, don’t have to do much to fall asleep. Some people don’t even have to be lying down to fall asleep. Or be in a comfortable environment (much like sex, you might say, but here you don’t even need another person.

Or thing). Regulars on the Mumbai suburban train system must have seen those mystics who fall

Write to lounge@livemint.com DHRUV MALHOTRA/PHOTOINK

Sleeping beauties: (clockwise from above) Untitled, from the series Sleepers by Dhruv Malhotra; Mother and child sleeping, by Pablo Bartholomew, part of the ongoing exhibition, Chronicles of a Past Life: Bombay (1970s–80s), on till 25 March at Photoink, New Delhi; and Delhi, 1984, by Prashant Panjiar,

PRASHANT PANJIAR

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

L9

Business Lounge

LOUNGE JASPAL SINGH BINDRA

Long­distance runner The CEO of Stan­ dard Chartered Asia says their focus has always been long­term, whether with the bank or the marathon

B Y J OEL R EBELLO & A RUN J ANARDHAN ···························· t’s the rooftop of the Trident hotel in Mumbai on a surprisingly cool Saturday afternoon in mid-January. Jaspal Singh Bindra, group executive director and CEO (Asia) of Standard Chartered Bank, is whipping up some pasta in front of 100-odd people, including bank colleagues, reporters, photographers, two actors, and a bunch of international athletes.

The setting was perhaps unconventional for Bindra, who, contrarily, swears by conservatism, which is also the philosophy of his employers. He may owe his sporting spirit to years of decentlevel college cricket, which allows him to embrace an opportunity of doing something atypical, like making Italian food with actor Rahul Bose. Ultimately, that was the need of the hour for him, to mix bonhomie with conservatism, as the pasta-making programme was a promotional event for the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon to be held the next day on 15 January.

Bindra, 51, is wearing a suitably casual striped Lacoste T-shirt, underneath the apron, which comes off before he steps into the conference room. He has bravely pushed back his lunch for this meeting, despite having dealt with pans and pastas for the last many minutes. The bright sunlight streaming in through the large glass windows that expose a vast expanse of the city from the 35th floor, adds to a general mood of affability that exists in Mumbai only for a few winter weeks.

Hong Kong-based Bindra is

I

also a member of the board of Standard Chartered Plc since January 2010, the only Indian on the board (which also has a Singaporean of Indian origin). Perhaps it’s an endorsement of the bank’s strong presence in Asia; it’s definitely a validation of his position in the company he joined in 1998 as a time when it was not really a “talent magnet”.

“In the last four years,” he says, “when the industry is troubled, we have become a talent magnet. We can pick people at will, from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Co., Citibank, Blackstone…which wasn’t possible in 1998 when I joined. Only stray guys like me were keen to join.

The reputation we enjoy today is as architects of restructuring.”

Standard Chartered was 100th in size (market capitalization) when Bindra joined them; they are in the top 25 now across all markets.

They have now a fullfledged consumer bank, unlike 1998; they also have diversified a lot and are present in 70 markets with India being the single largest

employer across the bank globally. In 2000, Standard Chartered bought out the Indian business of the erstwhile ANZ Grindlays Bank, which was then the largest foreign bank operating in India, with 56 branches. That acquisition has fuelled its ascent in India where it today has 94 branches, the highest among foreign banks.

Trendsetter: Cricket is Bindra’s other passion—he watches it as often as he can.

IN PARENTHESIS Besides his passion for banking, Bindra is a Bollywood movie buff. “I see every film,” he says and doesn’t mind sacrificing precious sleep to catch the new ones on flights.

“My current favourite is Vidya Balan,” he says.

“She is phenomenal and will go down in history as the only one to have won best actress awards for three consecutive years and three different genres of movies—‘Paa’, ‘Ishqiya’ and now I predict ‘The Dirty Picture’. Clearly, the one I adore at this point,” he says, adding that he has a new favourite every three­five years.

This fascination for films is shared by his family—Bindra’s only son Amritpal is an assistant film director living in Mumbai who worked on ‘No One Killed Jessica’, which featured Balan.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Bindra says what’s made it possible for them is largely the diversification. “The fact is that we are the only international bank that has got rated upwards by all the rating agencies during the period of crisis alone. Everyone (else) has, at best, stayed where they are,” says Bindra.

Here again, the conservatism comes into play. He says lessons from the Asian crisis from the 1990s stood them in good stead.

“It was tempting in 2003-04 when the world was booming to say why we should stay 80% secure when there is no credit problem.

The world is growing, you could go 70% and make a huge difference to the profit but we said no, so all credit to the management.”

Standard Chartered became the first and only overseas firm to have listed Indian depository receipts (IDRs) in the local stock market in May 2010, in what the bank termed was a reinforcement of its commitment to India.

IDRs are securities that represent an ownership interest in a fixed number of underlying equity shares of the issuing company.

One Standard Chartered share is equal to 10 IDRs. Standard Chartered’s profit before tax in India fell 33% in the year ended December because of lower income as interest rates rose and economic growth slowed.

The bank also had to set aside $112 million (around `547 crore) anticipating rise in bad loans. Profit before tax in JanuaryDecember 2011 at $804 million was 33% lower than what the UK-based bank earned in the same period last year—$1.19 billion—making its India operations the fifth placed contributor among eight regions, down from first place in 2010.

Bindra acknowledges that 2011 was difficult but points out that the bank’s investments in the country have still grown by 15% over 2010. “Every year, we have some markets that show uncertainty. The IDR issue took our chairman, CEO, finance director and Asia CEO one month of travelling the roads in Baroda, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Gurgaon for just $500 million, which we could have raised easily with one phone call. We did this because we have not lost our comfort or confidence in India.

“Our view is that India will be a

rich source of raising capital and at that stage, we want to say we saw this coming. It’s like the marathon, when we, nine years ago, said we will pay millions of dollars to sponsor it in a city which doesn’t wake up early, doesn’t believe in running. It was a pretty difficult decision and today, it’s an envious property to own.”

Under Bindra’s stewardship, the British bank has not let go of any opportunity to make an acquisition in India without taking a hard look. “We have succeeded in acquisitions or have passed them. We passed RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland’s India business was up for sale in 2009).

(But) every transaction that a foreign bank could do we have done, starting with Grindlays Bank, the first and the biggest,” Bindra says.

Bindra’s early years were spent in West Bengal, including Goethals Memorial School, a boarding school near Darjeeling, because his father’s transferable job would not have otherwise given him a steady base. He would not trade boarding school for anything because in hindsight, he says, it gave him independence without the protection of a home.

His affection for Kolkata stems from these early years, of his parents living there, studying in St Xavier’s College, of his son being born there and of his first day of work in Bank of America. “The bank I work for today started on 12 April 1858 in Calcutta. There are many milestones which will always remain extremely significant. No city will match it in terms of clubs and culture; plus my parents-in-law live there, so I have both reason and obligation to visit,” he says, smiling.

After Bindra had finished chartered accounting and was auditing for Citibank, the glamour of a foreign bank got to him. The flavour of the time was an MBA; it was a ticket to a job in a foreign bank, which “incentivized” him suitably. He chose XLRI School of Business & Human Resources, Jamshedpur, because with the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, not being available, it allowed him to be closer home. At the end of the MBA, he says he got more rational about his career; but then as destiny would have it, the highest paying job on campus and one that gave him a posting in Kolkata (where his parents lived) was Bank of America in 1984.

“I hadn’t lived with my parents since class II and the appeal to live with them was quite strong.

Because I lost my parents so soon after, I am grateful I could spend some extra time there,” he says.

“Plus, it was a great time to be a young (foreign) banker in 1984 Calcutta. That was the hottest thing happening for girls.” joel.r@livemint.com

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

KHATOON BANO STUDENT AND FACTORY WORKER, 18

N

BY S E E M A C H O W D H R Y seema.c@livemint.com

······························· hat a succession of Haryana governments, politicians and bureaucrats are insensitive and ill-equipped to handle the issue of female foeticide in the state is a well-established fact. Haryana has an abysmal record in female literacy and one of the worst sex ratios in the country: 877 females per 1,000 males compared with the national figure of 940 females per 1,000 males in the 2011 census.

Its female literacy rate is also among the lowest in the country.

But what is it that stops girls who have survived from forging a better future for themselves? Is it family pressure, lack of infrastructure, harassment from men, or all these?

We visited parts of Haryana to meet four women and their fami-

T

lies who have found a way out of the quagmire. When you read about the challenges these women have faced to get ahead in life, you will find common threads.

To make the road less fraught with struggle, the women need a little help.

Safe public transportation for girls; facilities for higher education; knowledge centres where girls can find out about career options; better policing and stricter rules to deal with harassment; dedicated sporting arenas where girls can be coached and then pushed ahead to take their place in national squads; and the creation of safe livelihood opportunities that can economically empower women—the solutions sound simple on paper.

The administration needs to sit up and take notice now if it wants the world to see a different Haryana in 2021.

ai Nangla is about two-and-a-half hours from Gurgaon in Haryana’s Mewat district. There are about 250 families in this village, where the average girl child is educated only up to class V and is then confined at home—till her marriage. Most families have limited access to television and girls are not encouraged to venture outside once they reach puberty.

Yet it’s here that a small garment manufacturing unit where only girls are employed was set up last year by the Rasuli Kanwar Khan Trust, run by Mehmood Khan, the former global head of innovation at Unilever and a managing trustee of the trust. The white building is somewhat of an oasis and stands apart not just because it’s the cleanest place within a 5km radius, but also because it is a place where 62 girls from Nai Nangla and the villages around have found a livelihood.

The sound of giggles echoes through the complex as young girls with their heads covered scurry around looking at visitors with open curiosity. “My heart has been beating fast since morning when we heard that you will come and visit,” confides

18-year-old Khatoon Bano, one of the nine “lucky” girls from Nai Nangla who have been allowed to work in the factory by their parents. “My father asked me last year if I wanted to work, and I told him I would try it out. I like coming here. Before this, life was boring. We girls hardly ever got to meet even though we stay so close,” says Khatoon. Most days were spent inside the house doing chores or taking care of siblings. “Here, we can talk our hearts out and earn some money too,” says Arshida Hussain, another 18-year-old who earns about `3,000 a month.

“There are only three men inside the complex: a manager and two masterjis (tailors).

When I went around the villages trying to convince people to send their daughters here, their major concern was men. They did not want men working alongside their daughters.

Their other concern: Will the boys of this village do any badtameeze (misbehave) with their girls?” says Asha Sharma, 20, a supervisor at the unit, who comes from Uleta village in Mewat, to work at Nai Nangla. When Sharma joined this unit, her tauji (uncle) refused to speak to her for three months.

“They felt that as a woman, I should not be travelling 2 hours for a job. But my father knew that this was a good place to work and that I would learn new skills here.” Perhaps it

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

know how to sign their names earlier. I have taught them so that they are not angootha chaap any more.”

She is also the only one in the factory who is skilled in the art of stitching two separate panels of garment using a double needle. “I don’t know why only I learnt how to do this.

Whenever I take leave, the next day there are so many garments on my sewing table that I cannot even see the machine,” she says with a giggle.

Mukund Upadhaya, the manager at the factory, adds: “It is tough, and none of the other girls seem to understand how to do this. It is a good skill to master and later if she wants to work in any other garment factory, she is likely to get more money.”

“Sure, a lot of people in the village think I am being foolish letting my daughter study but I want my children to go beyond what I have done in life. When I see Mehmood sir, I see that if even one person in a family ends up studying, the fortune of all the members can change,” says Kamruddin, vowing that he will give his younger daughter and son a better education than Khatoon. www.livemint.com To see a slide show of the factory at Nai Nangla, visit www.livemint.com/mewat.htm

ET:

SURVIVAL SECR

Y L R A E D N A N IO EDUCAT CE N E D N E P E D IN ECONOMIC

Road Road less less travelled travelled:: Khatoon Khatoon Bano Bano is is one one of of the the few few girls girls in in Nai Nai Nangla Nangla to to have have studied studied beyond beyond class class V; V; and and (inset) (inset) her her father father Kamruddin Kamruddin encourages encourages her her to to study study further. further.

SOCIETY

DREAM GIRLS Four women from Haryana tell us how they are forging a life and career for themselves in a state that seems to have no place for girls

was this logic that convinced Khatoon’s father Kamruddin, a school bus driver, too.

Currently in class XII, Khatoon is among a minority in the village to have studied so far.

She studies for 2 or 3 hours daily since she is appearing for her board exams this month and is allowed to take off every Monday so that her father can take her to school. “The school is far from here and my father does not want me to go there alone. That’s why he ferries me up and down every Monday because he is free that day. I study at home mostly.” Khatoon says her father is the one who encourages her three siblings and her to study hard. “He says education will be helpful to make us move ahead in life. He even tells my mother not to ask any of us to work around the house if it interferes with our study schedule,” she says, sitting in her two-room house, a 5-minute walk from the factory, sipping sweet tea made from fresh buffalo milk.

Khatoon knows she is different from the other girls in the village factory, something that is emphasized when “Khan chacha” (Mehmood Khan) singles her out for praise for not just working 9-5 in the factory, but also studying alongside. “I keep telling my friends here to study more with me. Some of the women who work with us did not even

BY

SURVIVAL SECR

E

FOCUS. EVERYT T: HING TAKES A BACKSEAT IN THE QUEST FOR A SPOT IN THE OLYMPICS

NEHA RATHI WRESTLER, 27

S

he has been married for a year, but has not spent more than a few days at a stretch at her marital home in Daryapur Kallan village, on the west Delhi-Haryana border. Neha Rathi, the winner of a bronze medal at the Asian Wrestling Championships 2012 in the women’s 51kg category, is a woman on a mission. She wants to qualify in the 48kg category from India for the Olympic trials to be held in Kazakhstan from 28 March.

India will hold its trials later this month at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, run by the Sports Authority of India (SAI), in Patiala, Punjab. These trials are awaited just as eagerly by her father, Jagroop Singh Rathi, husband Neeraj Kumar and brother-in-law Anil. All three men have been wrestlers at some point and are rooting for the only family member among them who has a chance to make it to the Olympics.

Sitting in Neeraj’s palatial allmarble house in the middle of Daryapur Kallan, a ramshackle village with mostly brick houses and unpaved roads, the jeans-and-jacket-clad Neha looks anything but the traditional Haryanvi daughterin-law. However, the 27-year-old Haryana police sub-inspector makes all the right noises around her mother-in-law and grandmother-inlaw and even insists on posing with them for the first few pictures. “I showed my husband the video of my Korea bout. He is building a practice gym in the basement complete with mattresses and fitness equipment for me.” Among her occasional training partners at Daryapur is Anil, a former wrestler who has seen her perform from their dangal (local wrestling tournaments) days.

Neha started wrestling in 1998, at the age of 13. “Wrestling is in my blood and my great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all pehelwans,” says Neha. Her father, who retired from the

TURN TO PAGE L12 u

The push ahead: Neha Rathi with her husband Neeraj at their home in Daryapur Kallan, on the west Delhi­Haryana border.

DIVYA BABU/MINT

Haryana police, holds a Commonwealth gold medal in wrestling, and is an Arjuna awardee, was keen to see at least one of his three children carry on the family legacy. He started training his son Joginder, but the latter had to give up wrestling because of health problems. “I remember watching the training from the sidelines and practising the steps with my older sister,” says Neha.

When women’s wrestling grew in India in the late 1990s, Jagroop’s guru Chandgi Ram (of the Chandgi Ram Akhara in Old Delhi) called him a number of times to get Neha initiated in the sport. “There was a lot of pressure on my papa from guruji. When he saw that guruji had opened a special akhara (wrestling pit) for girls and was insisting on women-only bouts too at all dangals, my father felt that this sport could be good for me.” Neha trained over the years alongside Sonika and Deepika Kaliraman, Chandgi Ram’s daughters, at the akhara, as well as at Madhuban, Haryana, where her father was posted at the Haryana Police Academy.

“They had an indoor wrestling hall and we used to practise there.” But the real turn in her training came when her father signed her up for an international wrestling training camp at Hisar after her class X exams.

In a state where the girl child is not often welcome, Jagroop and Neeraj are anomalies. For the last 14 years, Jagroop has not just worked on Neha’s training but also accompanied her for every single bout and training session around the world or in India. “No other girl from my circle in Madhuban took to sports the way I was encouraged by my father. In Madhuban, people were scared to let their girls try out wrestling. They used to say, ‘pehelwaani ladkon ka khel hai (wrestling is a man’s game)’, but these taunts did not deter my father once his mind was made up.” Neeraj, a businessman, says that to him, Neha is like a child with a special ability that needs constant care and motivation. “I am connected to the game because I too come from a family of pehelwans. I want her to win.”

Anil remembers laughing when the women bouts were launched in the dangals.

“It used to look more like a catfight and less like a wrestling match.” But today he is proud of Neha and says that Indian women wrestlers have the ability to do as well as the men’s team. “From the start, I have seen that Neha has a good command over technique.”

“My greatest strength has been the encouragement that I have got from my family and now from my husband and his family too,” says Neha. “When I could not participate in the Commonwealth Games because of a nose fracture, I had almost decided to give up. But Neeraj insisted that I continue and has facilitated me in every way. If I qualify from SAI for the Olympic trials, I am sure my father and he will immediately pack me off to Colorado Springs, US, for better training opportunities.”

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

KHATOON BANO STUDENT AND FACTORY WORKER, 18

N

BY S E E M A C H O W D H R Y seema.c@livemint.com

······························· hat a succession of Haryana governments, politicians and bureaucrats are insensitive and ill-equipped to handle the issue of female foeticide in the state is a well-established fact. Haryana has an abysmal record in female literacy and one of the worst sex ratios in the country: 877 females per 1,000 males compared with the national figure of 940 females per 1,000 males in the 2011 census.

Its female literacy rate is also among the lowest in the country.

But what is it that stops girls who have survived from forging a better future for themselves? Is it family pressure, lack of infrastructure, harassment from men, or all these?

We visited parts of Haryana to meet four women and their fami-

T

lies who have found a way out of the quagmire. When you read about the challenges these women have faced to get ahead in life, you will find common threads.

To make the road less fraught with struggle, the women need a little help.

Safe public transportation for girls; facilities for higher education; knowledge centres where girls can find out about career options; better policing and stricter rules to deal with harassment; dedicated sporting arenas where girls can be coached and then pushed ahead to take their place in national squads; and the creation of safe livelihood opportunities that can economically empower women—the solutions sound simple on paper.

The administration needs to sit up and take notice now if it wants the world to see a different Haryana in 2021.

ai Nangla is about two-and-a-half hours from Gurgaon in Haryana’s Mewat district. There are about 250 families in this village, where the average girl child is educated only up to class V and is then confined at home—till her marriage. Most families have limited access to television and girls are not encouraged to venture outside once they reach puberty.

Yet it’s here that a small garment manufacturing unit where only girls are employed was set up last year by the Rasuli Kanwar Khan Trust, run by Mehmood Khan, the former global head of innovation at Unilever and a managing trustee of the trust. The white building is somewhat of an oasis and stands apart not just because it’s the cleanest place within a 5km radius, but also because it is a place where 62 girls from Nai Nangla and the villages around have found a livelihood.

The sound of giggles echoes through the complex as young girls with their heads covered scurry around looking at visitors with open curiosity. “My heart has been beating fast since morning when we heard that you will come and visit,” confides

18-year-old Khatoon Bano, one of the nine “lucky” girls from Nai Nangla who have been allowed to work in the factory by their parents. “My father asked me last year if I wanted to work, and I told him I would try it out. I like coming here. Before this, life was boring. We girls hardly ever got to meet even though we stay so close,” says Khatoon. Most days were spent inside the house doing chores or taking care of siblings. “Here, we can talk our hearts out and earn some money too,” says Arshida Hussain, another 18-year-old who earns about `3,000 a month.

“There are only three men inside the complex: a manager and two masterjis (tailors).

When I went around the villages trying to convince people to send their daughters here, their major concern was men. They did not want men working alongside their daughters.

Their other concern: Will the boys of this village do any badtameeze (misbehave) with their girls?” says Asha Sharma, 20, a supervisor at the unit, who comes from Uleta village in Mewat, to work at Nai Nangla. When Sharma joined this unit, her tauji (uncle) refused to speak to her for three months.

“They felt that as a woman, I should not be travelling 2 hours for a job. But my father knew that this was a good place to work and that I would learn new skills here.” Perhaps it

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

know how to sign their names earlier. I have taught them so that they are not angootha chaap any more.”

She is also the only one in the factory who is skilled in the art of stitching two separate panels of garment using a double needle. “I don’t know why only I learnt how to do this.

Whenever I take leave, the next day there are so many garments on my sewing table that I cannot even see the machine,” she says with a giggle.

Mukund Upadhaya, the manager at the factory, adds: “It is tough, and none of the other girls seem to understand how to do this. It is a good skill to master and later if she wants to work in any other garment factory, she is likely to get more money.”

“Sure, a lot of people in the village think I am being foolish letting my daughter study but I want my children to go beyond what I have done in life. When I see Mehmood sir, I see that if even one person in a family ends up studying, the fortune of all the members can change,” says Kamruddin, vowing that he will give his younger daughter and son a better education than Khatoon. www.livemint.com To see a slide show of the factory at Nai Nangla, visit www.livemint.com/mewat.htm

ET:

SURVIVAL SECR

Y L R A E D N A N IO EDUCAT CE N E D N E P E D IN ECONOMIC

Road Road less less travelled travelled:: Khatoon Khatoon Bano Bano is is one one of of the the few few girls girls in in Nai Nai Nangla Nangla to to have have studied studied beyond beyond class class V; V; and and (inset) (inset) her her father father Kamruddin Kamruddin encourages encourages her her to to study study further. further.

SOCIETY

DREAM GIRLS Four women from Haryana tell us how they are forging a life and career for themselves in a state that seems to have no place for girls

was this logic that convinced Khatoon’s father Kamruddin, a school bus driver, too.

Currently in class XII, Khatoon is among a minority in the village to have studied so far.

She studies for 2 or 3 hours daily since she is appearing for her board exams this month and is allowed to take off every Monday so that her father can take her to school. “The school is far from here and my father does not want me to go there alone. That’s why he ferries me up and down every Monday because he is free that day. I study at home mostly.” Khatoon says her father is the one who encourages her three siblings and her to study hard. “He says education will be helpful to make us move ahead in life. He even tells my mother not to ask any of us to work around the house if it interferes with our study schedule,” she says, sitting in her two-room house, a 5-minute walk from the factory, sipping sweet tea made from fresh buffalo milk.

Khatoon knows she is different from the other girls in the village factory, something that is emphasized when “Khan chacha” (Mehmood Khan) singles her out for praise for not just working 9-5 in the factory, but also studying alongside. “I keep telling my friends here to study more with me. Some of the women who work with us did not even

BY

SURVIVAL SECR

E

FOCUS. EVERYT T: HING TAKES A BACKSEAT IN THE QUEST FOR A SPOT IN THE OLYMPICS

NEHA RATHI WRESTLER, 27

S

he has been married for a year, but has not spent more than a few days at a stretch at her marital home in Daryapur Kallan village, on the west Delhi-Haryana border. Neha Rathi, the winner of a bronze medal at the Asian Wrestling Championships 2012 in the women’s 51kg category, is a woman on a mission. She wants to qualify in the 48kg category from India for the Olympic trials to be held in Kazakhstan from 28 March.

India will hold its trials later this month at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, run by the Sports Authority of India (SAI), in Patiala, Punjab. These trials are awaited just as eagerly by her father, Jagroop Singh Rathi, husband Neeraj Kumar and brother-in-law Anil. All three men have been wrestlers at some point and are rooting for the only family member among them who has a chance to make it to the Olympics.

Sitting in Neeraj’s palatial allmarble house in the middle of Daryapur Kallan, a ramshackle village with mostly brick houses and unpaved roads, the jeans-and-jacket-clad Neha looks anything but the traditional Haryanvi daughterin-law. However, the 27-year-old Haryana police sub-inspector makes all the right noises around her mother-in-law and grandmother-inlaw and even insists on posing with them for the first few pictures. “I showed my husband the video of my Korea bout. He is building a practice gym in the basement complete with mattresses and fitness equipment for me.” Among her occasional training partners at Daryapur is Anil, a former wrestler who has seen her perform from their dangal (local wrestling tournaments) days.

Neha started wrestling in 1998, at the age of 13. “Wrestling is in my blood and my great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all pehelwans,” says Neha. Her father, who retired from the

TURN TO PAGE L12 u

The push ahead: Neha Rathi with her husband Neeraj at their home in Daryapur Kallan, on the west Delhi­Haryana border.

DIVYA BABU/MINT

Haryana police, holds a Commonwealth gold medal in wrestling, and is an Arjuna awardee, was keen to see at least one of his three children carry on the family legacy. He started training his son Joginder, but the latter had to give up wrestling because of health problems. “I remember watching the training from the sidelines and practising the steps with my older sister,” says Neha.

When women’s wrestling grew in India in the late 1990s, Jagroop’s guru Chandgi Ram (of the Chandgi Ram Akhara in Old Delhi) called him a number of times to get Neha initiated in the sport. “There was a lot of pressure on my papa from guruji. When he saw that guruji had opened a special akhara (wrestling pit) for girls and was insisting on women-only bouts too at all dangals, my father felt that this sport could be good for me.” Neha trained over the years alongside Sonika and Deepika Kaliraman, Chandgi Ram’s daughters, at the akhara, as well as at Madhuban, Haryana, where her father was posted at the Haryana Police Academy.

“They had an indoor wrestling hall and we used to practise there.” But the real turn in her training came when her father signed her up for an international wrestling training camp at Hisar after her class X exams.

In a state where the girl child is not often welcome, Jagroop and Neeraj are anomalies. For the last 14 years, Jagroop has not just worked on Neha’s training but also accompanied her for every single bout and training session around the world or in India. “No other girl from my circle in Madhuban took to sports the way I was encouraged by my father. In Madhuban, people were scared to let their girls try out wrestling. They used to say, ‘pehelwaani ladkon ka khel hai (wrestling is a man’s game)’, but these taunts did not deter my father once his mind was made up.” Neeraj, a businessman, says that to him, Neha is like a child with a special ability that needs constant care and motivation. “I am connected to the game because I too come from a family of pehelwans. I want her to win.”

Anil remembers laughing when the women bouts were launched in the dangals.

“It used to look more like a catfight and less like a wrestling match.” But today he is proud of Neha and says that Indian women wrestlers have the ability to do as well as the men’s team. “From the start, I have seen that Neha has a good command over technique.”

“My greatest strength has been the encouragement that I have got from my family and now from my husband and his family too,” says Neha. “When I could not participate in the Commonwealth Games because of a nose fracture, I had almost decided to give up. But Neeraj insisted that I continue and has facilitated me in every way. If I qualify from SAI for the Olympic trials, I am sure my father and he will immediately pack me off to Colorado Springs, US, for better training opportunities.”

L12 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

u FROM PAGE L11

RAJ RANI

HOCKEY PLAYER/REALITY TV PARTICIPANT, 25

T

onight, Raj Rani will fight another battle. A smaller one. If you follow the TV show Survivor India on Star Plus, you will see this player from Haryana get into a cat fight for the first time in the 36 days she has been on the reality show as a participant.

Yet, most of her co-contestants have had only praise for Raj Rani, hoping to see her as a finalist. One of them, J.D. Majethia, who is likely to be up against her in the show’s final stages, has even said he wants his daughters to be like Raj Rani. “This girl is a hard slap on the faces of people who hanker after the male child. Look at her, she has defeated the strongest of men many times on Survivor India,” he said on the show.

Raj Rani is from Kheri Safa, in Haryana’s Jind district, and plays statelevel hockey tournaments on and off. She says her mother decided to name her Rani because she was to be the last child in the family. The last of five children, and the fourth girl in the family, Raj Rani, or Raji as she is fondly called, recalls growing up as a tomboy. “I was always out playing. Working around the house? I don’t think I ever did much of that. Once I even got thrashed for playing chor-police, was trussed up with a rope and thrown inside a room because I did not listen to a chacha (paternal uncle) who wanted me to come back home for some work. I must have been in class V, and I remember crying myself to sleep that day.”

Raj Rani narrates this story quite nonchalantly, as we sit in the afternoon sun at the Panjab University sports grounds in Chandigarh. She has just returned from the local Shiva temple, where she had gone to pray on the occasion of Shivaratri. On the field, she shows us her hockey skills. Around six months ago, Raj Rani returned from Caramoan Islands, Philippines, where the first season of Survivor India was shot, and is eagerly waiting to be part of the finale episode to be aired in midMarch, for which she will travel to Mumbai.

A reality TV addict, it was Raj Rani’s dream to participate in MTV Roadies or Zee TV’s Dance India Dance. When she heard that Survivor India was conducting auditions in Chandigarh, she signed up. This week, the girl who did not even have a passport until two days before leaving for the show’s shooting schedule, is among the show’s top eight contestants and is rumoured to be among the top three. “To lose my temper with Payal (Rohatgi, another contestant) is so unlike me. I learnt early in life that confrontation over trivial matters is just not worth it, and that fight was over a small thing,” she says.

She has learnt to keep a rein on her emotions since childhood because, “in villages, girls have to keep quiet even when boys harass them because if the girls report it or fight back, it can lead to a bloodbath. And in the end, the girl suffers more because she is married off in a hurry. My own sister complained about a boy winking at her and my family was ready to kill the boy.”

Raj Rani says she has been fortunate to have experienced only the mildest form of harassment. “Very few boys have the courage to touch you in the village. Yes, I have dealt with winking, catcalling and even leering when on the field but I chose to ignore it because I wanted to continue playing. If I had complained or indulged in loose talk with any of the boys, I would never have been allowed to come this far.” These lessons, she says, helped her navigate the tense atmosphere on the Survivor India sets. “But after living in Chandigarh for so long, I have realized that girls should not put up with any kind of nonsense.”

Chandigarh has been Raj Rani’s home for the last 12 years. She moved there at the age of 13 after she secured a place at trials for a scholarship at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI’s) training centre and hostel in the city, which has now shut down.

“I was in class VII at the government school in Narwana (in Jind) when a coach came to our class and asked who wanted to play hockey.

I just put up my hand. I had never played the game before.” Within a year, Raj Rani was playing so well that she was among the few girls from her school who got a chance to play at the district level. “At that time, people in Haryana did not think sports would help their children get jobs or make careers, just maybe better education. That awareness has happened now.”

Raj Rani believes her parents were confident she could take care of herself. “If a girl wants to change her life, she has to work hard for it. TV has made a big difference in our lives; people are seeing what all girls can do. But the girl has to inspire confidence in her parents that she will not cross the line. My parents had that confidence in me and they knew I loved sports.” Raj Rani’s parents never said no to her gruelling hockey practice schedules—it meant travelling 10km, one way, in a public bus every morning and evening, wearing a track suit throughout the day instead of a salwar-kameez, or going away from home for a couple of days at a time to Yamuna Nagar or Ranchi to play in tournaments. “In a village, it is a big thing for a girl to be wearing pants and T-shirt all the time. I also had a ‘boy cut’ for my hair. When I look back I realize that my parents must have felt that if I was going to be travelling in buses alone, I should not look attractive enough for boys to tease me,” she says, breaking into a wide grin.

Though Raj Rani played hockey for Chandigarh, she never got selected for a team India camp. She reasons that the coaches at SAI in Chandigarh were always at odds with the national selectors; and that she herself understood the game very late in her career. “I was just a fast runner, and could dodge and hit the ball hard. My coach wanted me to play at centre-half position, but I always thought being a right or left forward. Other girls said that newspapers only wrote about girls who scored goals. I wasted a lot of time.”

Raj Rani has almost hung up her hockey boots for now. Reality TV is her new playground. She lives in a small two-room rented flat, close to the university grounds, and recently quit her job as an aerobics instructor-cum-receptionist at the Oceanic Gym, Chandigarh, where she worked for three years. “Well, since the show got aired, people who came to the gym wanted to know who will win. They got upset when I refused to tell them what will happen next. So I quit.”

She is also a guardian to three nieces and two nephews (her eldest sister’s children and their cousins from Madan Heri village), who live with her. Four of the five play badminton and have been sent to live in Chandigarh so that they have access to better coaching. “People do a lot of dekha-dekhi in villages. If one girl achieves something, then the parents of other girls feel encouraged and are willing to allow their daughters to try that out... In Chandigarh, all of them are studying and are being trained to play badminton. They will be national-level players, I hope.”

ET:

SURVIVAL SECR

T SHE A H T G IN V IE L E B AN M Y N A O T L A IS EQU

www.livemint.com To see a related video, visit www.livemint.com/rajrani.htm

Survivor instinct: Raj Rani at the Panjab University grounds in Chandigarh; and (inset) on the sets of Survivor India.

SANGEETA RANI IPS, 32

S

he recalls being in class V or so when the dream took hold—to be a police officer. In the late 1980s, in Bhiwani, Haryana, which was yet to become the boxing capital of the country, Sangeeta Rani used to watch the Hindi serial Udaan, about a woman IPS officer, on Doordarshan, with great interest and dedication. “I observed that the police officer, even though she was a woman, could solve all the problems of the villagers. I saw how hard she worked and how polite she was. I asked my father, ‘Papa, kya main bhi aisa kar sakti hoon (can I also do this)?”

Sangeeta’s father did not discourage her, but didn’t believe that two decades later, his eldest child (she has two younger brothers) would be an IPS officer—and that too in her home state.

We met Sangeeta at the mini secretariat, Gurgaon, her current office, 10 days after she was attached to the deputy commissioner of police (DCP), headquarters, Gurgaon. She has completed an 11-month training programme at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy, Hyderabad, and is waiting to be “allotted an area”.

Initially reluctant to talk about her journey because she felt it was too early in her career, Sangeeta gave in after persistent calls and an SMS. “When you sent the message that my story could be

an inspiration for other girls, I became emotional. Once, I was on the other side; I needed guidance; I needed information to make my dream come true.

Often, it seemed like there was no hope but I would gather myself and believe that I could do it.”

In uniform, Sangeeta seems already at home in the durbar-like office, complete with red curtains and chairs covered in white linen. Brushing aside questions about her wedding (her chooda—the red bangles worn by a new bride in the north—peeks through the tightly buttoned shirt cuffs), she says her father retired from the Haryana police as a painter, and comes from a family of farmers. When she first spoke to him about the female protagonist in Udaan, he had said “a good police officer is akin to a god in a village”. “That left a deep impression on my mind. I used to daydream about that character whenever I did household chores.”

Sangeeta studied for at least 7-8 hours daily while in school and college. “I don’t think I have done anything else but study.” For postgraduation (PG), she opted for a distance-learning programme since PG classes in Bhiwani were held from 5-9pm and her father worried about her attending classes at night. “This is the culture in Haryana. When a girl grows older, she finds it harder to step out of her house…even if it is just to go to college.

Though parents in smaller towns may want to send girls out, they can’t. It is like inviting social stigma. The biggest fear is that the girl will have an affair, and then

SURVIVAL SECR

there will be a Khap panchayat. Parents are also scared that if a boy harasses their girl, they will find it tough to cover up the issue in society. Things are changing now, but very, very slowly.”

Sangeeta got a job as an assistant professor at Swami Shraddhanand College (affiliated to Delhi University, or DU), Alipur, Delhi, in 2005 after she cleared the state-level eligibility test. Most students at the college were strapping Haryanvi men who were surprised to find a petite young woman as their lecturer.

“Every time they would find out I was their teacher, they would ask, “Ya madam se (She is the madam)?”

By this time, there was family pressure on her to get married, but she resisted. “My father was not confident that his daughter could become an IPS officer. For him becoming a professor in DU was enough.”

In 2005, she took the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam for the first time and could not even clear the preliminary level. “I was worried about what to do next. I had promised my father that within one year I would clear the exams.” Her younger brother came to her rescue, convincing her father, who wanted her to marry, to let her try again. Her second attempt at the exam was in 2008 (illness forced her to skip it in 2006 and 2007, and she continued her job at the college until 2010).

This time, she qualified for the railway services—but not the IPS. “But I did not join. For me, it was hard to let go of my childhood dream.” Sangeeta believes there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who get tired of their dreams when they don’t come true and those who are driven by failure. “I am like the second type.

Maro-pado, magar karna hai (do or die)— that’s my motto.”

She finally made it in her third and final attempt in 2009, the year she completed her MPhil in economics. “It was an amazing feeling to know that I had achieved my dream. I have seen hard times from a close angle.

My parents had faith in me and sent me out to study and work. I was always aware that if I took one wrong step, there would be a chain reaction whether I wanted it or not. Some other girl would have lost her chance to study or work because her parents would say: See that girl did this, so can you. I knew I must present a good example…because that is the only way people in my state will let their girls progress.”

ET:

DREAM BIG; BE CAUSE DREAMS CAN BECOME A REA LITY

AA solemn solemn promise promise:: Sangeeta Sangeeta Rani Rani says says that that wherever wherever she she is is posted, posted, she she will will work work to to pro­ pro­ vide vide aa safer safer envi­ envi­ ronment ronment for for girls. girls.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

L13

Travel

LOUNGE

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

THINKSTOCK

PORTO, PORTUGAL

Port­o­Call B Y R OHAN D ’S A ···························· he São Bento station’s delicately painted blue tiles depicted scenes from Portugal’s history. As we walked ahead, sombre stone buildings glistened in the light of dusk like grumpy old men judging my actions. And I felt guilty. Guilty of not expecting more, guilty of not doing my homework before the trip. I avoided their gaze as we walked from the station to our hotel through the historic centre of the city of Porto that has been around since the fourth century. I knew then that this visit was going to be about more than just port wine.

I admit that when I thought of visiting Portugal, Lisbon was the first city that came to mind.

Maybe it was my terrible knowledge of world geography, or the many Lisboetas I had met, but I had never considered Porto as a destination. Two things changed my mind—some cajoling by friends from Porto, and a good low-cost carrier deal.

Porto offered us many ways to move through its winding roads and along its sliding slopes: metro, bus, cable car, funicular, tram. The funicular provided a great perspective, and the bus was useful when we got lost after being chased by an aggressive alms-seeking lady. The throb-

Though Lisbon is the city that comes to mind first, Porto is a quaint Portuguese town you must not miss

T

TRIP PLANNER/PORTUGAL

Porto lies in Portugal, which is part of the Schengen Visa zone. Apply for a Schengen Visa through VFS Global service (pt.vfsglobal.co.in/). However, residents of Maharashtra, Goa, Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli must apply through the consulate general of Portugal in Goa (www.consuladoportugalgoa.com).

Advance return fares to Porto on full-service airlines at the time of going to press were: Lufthansa/ TAP (Star Alliance) Jet Airways (Codeshare with TAP/ Brussels Airways) Qatar Airways

Delhi R49,440 R47,480 -

Mumbai R44,980 -

Bangalore R47,940 R49,840 R63,000

Fares may change.

Paranhos

PORTO Foz do Douro Pestana Porto Hotel Vila Nova de Gaia

São Bento station

No r th Atl a nt i c Ocean

Lisbon

Ribeira

D ou ro r i v e r

PORTUGAL SPAIN

Stay

The Pestana Porto Hotel is a Unesco World Heritage Site. It occupies a building that was built over three centuries, in the middle of the city walls, and overlooks the Douro river (www.pestana.com/en/pestana-porto-hotel/). Rooms start from €130 (around R8,500) a night for a room with a city view, and go up to €156 a night for a room with a river view (prices are for double occupancy and rise with other inclusions).

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

bing of a city’s heart, however, is best felt by walking through it, and so, we walked.

We walked through the market—reminiscent of Indian mandis, with familiar spices and fruits.

The modern Casa da Música music building and the Santa Catarina mall felt like anachronisms, when contrasted with the old buildings that line the Avenue dos Aliados. Christmas was just over, but the nip in the air, the lights in the streets and the roasted chestnuts sold everywhere made the season linger.

Almost every special sight in Porto was punctuated by either the sea or the ocean. The city is situated where the Douro river meets the Atlantic Ocean in an estuary, these two large water bodies seemingly making a pact to keep the city under their protection. This view also made the ascent of the Clérigos Church tower well worth the €2 (around `130) entry fee and the hundred-and-something steps it took to get there.

We took a tour of one of the wine cellars at the ribeira (the riverside), including a sampling of their wines at the end. I learnt more about port and I appreciated the many varieties, but for me port still means the sweet Ruby port of my childhood, the one that underlines so many Christmas memories of dinner with family. As children, we were allowed to taste a little bit of this wine, and I had never at that time imagined I would be in Portugal, visiting its home.

Snapshots: (from above) The landmark Maria Pia Bridge across the Douro river was built by Gustave Eiffel; the Coimbra university is one of the oldest in Europe; and Portuguese custard tarts.

The ribeira was a microcosm with its own identity. The river transports the only genuine port wines in the world, from the vineyards to the cellars by its banks.

The narrow alleys that led down a slope to the river were like little rivulets flowing into the Douro. By day, they bore witness to the daily humdrum of life in Porto. Houses wore clotheslines on their walls. People met on the corner over a café. Old folks looked out of their windows in thought or boredom or both, as they do throughout the world.

At night, these streets were thrilling, adventurous, dark.

The lit-up logos of Porto’s famous wine houses lay scattered across the landscape, each shining like Portugal’s own version of the “Hollywood” sign. “The city of bridges” was in all its glory, with the bridges like an illuminated finger of a giant hand, connecting Porto to Gaia, the other side.

Taking in a city’s history and culture is incomplete without ingesting some of its cuisine, and that we did extensively.

My first lunch in Porto was a francesinha. If I could eat only one thing in Porto, this would be it.

Every bite made me feel that I would soon be full, but I still keep eating, because the frances-

inha—slices of bread stuffed with ham, sausages, beef, topped with melted cheese, a fried egg, and served in a sauce made from beer, with a generous side of fries—is not something I would easily find again.

Francesinha translates to “little French girl”, but it is anything but dainty, delicate, or giggling.

Other versions exist, but even a friend from Lisbon confessed this was the best he’d ever eaten.

I washed it down with a panache—a blend of the local beer and 7UP. Experiencing Porto cuisine would not have been complete without the codfish (bacalhau).

Unlike most other fish, this is cooked after it is salted, stored, and then de-salted by soaking in water for a few days. There was also tripas—soup with stomach or intestines of cow as its main ingredient, along with sausages (chouriço), a sow’s ear, lard, some other parts, and white beans thrown in for good measure.

Porto has a sweet tooth and the egg tart (pastel de nata) is a well-known pastry. I had many a quick bite in coffee houses there without burning a hole in my wallet. I will never forget the torrada, my most favoured breakfast. I noticed two old ladies next to us ordering it, and although I’m not a big believer in ESP (extra sensory perception), there was a sense of prescience about the torrada. It was just bread toasted with salted butter, but it was special because my earliest memories of breakfast are those of bread toasted in Amul butter,

dunked in sweet tea with milk— an occasional quick breakfast from a working mother. The first bite of the torrada was my own Ratatouille moment. Another day in Porto, another childhood memory revisited.

Portugal is one of the most religious countries in Europe, and Fatima, a major Catholic shrine, is a couple of hours from Porto.

Apart from a square, which is bigger than the Vatican’s, there is also a radically modern church in Fátima that feels like a giant auditorium. It is a flat building with 12 massive doors, one representing each of the 12 apostles.

We stopped by in Coimbra, one of the oldest university in Europe, on our way to Fátima. The university library is an ornate work of art and is considered to be one of the most beautiful in the world. It even has a prison attached to it. Yes, you read that right—a students’ prison.

Any visitor to Porto will find the city endearing. I had moments where I felt a deep connection with it, which is not common in a strange city. I can only hope that one day I will visit Porto again, and relive the charm of this city by the Douro.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Porto’s attractions are medieval churches and port wine. While children are welcomed, few attractions are geared towards them.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

The city is easily walkable, but can get tiring for senior citizens as there is no specific infrastructure for them.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

There are many tourist options for LGBT travellers, and Porto has an annual Gay Pride event.

L14

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

Books

LOUNGE

CIVIL LINES 6 | EDITED BY ACHAL PRABHALA, KAI FRIESE AND MUKUL KESAVAN

A very long engagement IMAGES COURTESY GAURI GILL

The famed ‘literary miscellany’ returns after a decade’s absence with a collection of fresh new writing

Civil Lines 6: HarperCollins India, 248 pages, `350.

B Y T RISHA G UPTA ···························· ivil Lines 6 begins with an editors’ note that makes apologetic reference to the “elephantine gestation” of the current issue. Since practically every issue, except the first, seems to have been inaugurated with statements about how long it’s been in the making, this feels almost traditional; even the phrase “elephantine gestation” has already appeared before in the introduction to Civil Lines 4 (2001).

In other ways, though, Civil Lines 6 does seem to be a departure from the previous volumes of what the editors tell us was conceived as a “literary miscellany” rather than a literary magazine.

Simply put, there is less of a Stephanian air about it: no smartalecky contributor bios (“This bit about Tenzing is all perfectly true because he just sent it to us, asking incredulously if…”), no sardonic poem about literary authenticity (“Sternest are the guardians of Hindi:/can alien okra ever taste/of bhindi?”), even a reference to cleverness having “a sell-by date”.

The collection contains 16 contributions, of which two are poems by Rimli Sengupta and one a photo-essay by Gauri Gill.

A lot of the fiction is from unexpected sources: the literary critic and columnist Nilanjana Roy, the academic Ananya Vajpeyi, the designer Itu Chaudhuri (who contributes two stories, containing such lines as, “I shall not describe the beauty of the scene, you have seen it on television”).

Roy’s Sugarcane evokes an adolescent anger against the stifling mustiness of old age, giving us a carefully wrought coming-of-age tale in which the arrival of adulthood rests, among other things, on understanding the thin line between a grandmother’s omnipresent power and her immanent frailty.

T r e a d i n g o n l ess familiar ground, Vajpeyi’s The Archivist also involves an encounter with age. A young doctoral researcher called Nira keeps an appointment with an old Poona librarian, and is struck by how feeble he seems: “It was his usual energy that ought to

Monochrome: Images from Gauri Gill’s photo essay in Civil Lines 6.

C

{

FIRST WORDS: ‘CIVIL LINES’ WENT TO BED IN 2001 AND ROSE A DECADE LATER IN AN UNRECOGNIZABLE WORLD.

have amazed her, not his present exhaustion.” Although the end is rather mystifying, The Archivist has a pleasingly straightforward sense of place—and of how people might deal with placelessness: “The place Nira lived in most of the time made little sense to her...

But she had to be there, so she switched into a different mode of being in order to cope with it. In this mode, she never sought meaning, she never found it.”

The fiction I liked most was Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel, a cinematic arrangement of characters who brush past each other in the crazily crowded streets of Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 7 August 1941: the day of Rabindranath Tagore’s funeral. It is a piece redolent with the sights and sounds of an imagined Calcutta day, recognizable even across the 70-year gap: the street

}

full of abandoned chappals (slippers) outside Jorasanko Thakurbari, the man who clambers on to the truck to pull some hairs off the dead poet’s famous beard, the sound of the radio in the surprising emptiness of a north Calcutta gali (lane).

Of the non-fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed Benjamin Siegel’s Raagtime, an archivally informed but un-footnoted account of the rise and fall of the fascinating Alice Richardson, a mezzo-soprano from Yorkshire who married the art historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. He pieces the tale together beautifully, recreating the rich and strange world in which a British memsahib could take a summer of music lessons in a Dal Lake houseboat and emerge into the light of the Western hemisphere as Ratan Devi.

The erudite Coomaraswamy

comes off rather badly, with his misogyny (“Indian women, he posited, found in intercourse sacrament, while their Western counterparts could, through sex, only vitiate themselves”) and his depressingly museum-izing view of culture, but Siegel retains a poised historian’s distance.

Then there is a range of pieces that might be described as autobiographical. Manu Herbstein’s episodic but detailed, honest account of what it was like to be a white South African in 1960s’ Bombay (now Mumbai) stands in stark contrast to U.R. Ananthamurthy’s too-slight, distressingly romantic account of his “remembered village” (“The jathre was also the place where women from all communities came by… I might have learnt logic from the Brahmins but my aesthetic education came from all communities”). There is also Achal Prabhala’s affecting memoir of a year he spent teaching at a boys’ boarding school in Dehradun. Officially the squash coach, he finds he is also director of the school play, escort for the school trek and unlikely counsellor to various school misfits, per-

haps precisely because as Prabhala puts it, “My attitude towards the students, and my feelings about their general self-development, mirrored their favourite word: whatever.”

Naresh Fernandes’ exploration of the death of community in Bandra, Mumbai, through the death of one Peter Rebello is readable, even engaging, but ultimately unsatisfying either as personal or communal history. Shougat Dasgupta’s piece, without trying to be either, is both. Though sometimes unnecessarily wordy (“The Iraqi invasion barely made a scratch on the resilient carapace of my fantasies”), Dasgupta’s is an insightful, often brutally honest look at the shaping of his “twelve-year-old cosmopolitan” self in 1990s’ Kuwait, and raises again the question of place: “(People like my parents) had found homes, not in Kuwait… but in each other, in the idea that it was people who mattered, not place. I had acquired something else entirely in Kuwait—the armour of solipsism.”

West Asia is also at the core of Anand Balakrishnan’s superb, elliptical account of how the idea of failure—the word in Arabic is fashil—keeps cropping up in his physical and readerly travels through the Arab world.

Balakrishnan’s Arabic teacher, a US political science student in Cairo, and a whole host of texts, from the newspaperly to the jihadi, come together to create a piece that deserves a second reading.

A lot of the pieces here are reproduced from elsewhere, which feels a bit like cheating in an anthology that pronounces itself “written for ever”: A version of Herbstein’s piece was first published in Chimurenga, a version of Balakrishnan’s in Bidoun, and Ananthamurthy’s derives from an Outlook Traveller magazine interview. But this collection of “new writing from India”—and the idea of India here is clearly that, an idea rather than a geographical entity—has enough newness despite that.

‘First Words’ features the opening sentence of the book under review.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

THE BUTTERFLY GENERATION | PALASH KRISHNA MEHROTRA

Moth smoke The kids aren’t all right in this book of essays about young middle­class India

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

···························· his is the first book about New India to be written from an insider perspective,” says the dust jacket of Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s seductively titled The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth. The butterfly is a powerful metaphor for transformation, but Mehrotra’s series of essays about India’s young and upwardly mobile also makes his protagonists, inhabitants of metropolitan India between 25 and 35 years old, seem like fireflies: shiny, flighty, short-lived and not as bright as they think they are. Over three sections of personal essays (“part memoir, part travelogue, part social commentary”), Mehrotra doesn’t quite build a case for armed revolution, but substantially redeems India’s

T

existing demand for one, by eviscerating any illusions of beauty, charm or singularity we may hold about post-liberalized urban India.

It is not clear, however, if he actually meant to do this. The first third of his book describes the people Mehrotra meets on trips through enclaves filling fast with new wealth: a roster of self-involved fatheads who seem uniformly to travel to big cities in order to escape the yoke of their birthplaces, make money in unfulfilling jobs, and navel-gaze. He calls some of his interviewees friends, some acquaintances; in one instance he reproduces the story of the death of a call-centre employee in the voice of the dead man’s friend. In Mehrotra’s telling, these essays are not reports so much as gossip about people we don’t know. Reading through stories of emotionally unavailable dancers and burned-out photographers, hustling scriptwriters and rootless pilots, we are left with such a weary sense of familiarity that it seems justified that the author chooses to

outline, rather than examine, these lives and ambitions for us.

Of course, Mehrotra’s people are crashing bores because his attention to them is sloppy, not the other way around. His most frequently employed device in this book is the airy assertion.

The second section, which contains his own hypotheses about changing Indian society, is a sort of elaboration of the subtext of the individual stories, and what they say about Indian servants, Indian women, Indian students, and other sub-groups of citizens. He reads Cosmopolitan and Femina to “understand the codes that women follow”, which will surprise many female readers.

There is a laughably reactionary essay called Servants of India, of which you don’t have to read more than a page to predict that the author will finish by musing about an earlier India, in which our grandparents forged more meaningful relationships with their serfs (well, naturally, in a country where land reforms are something that happen to other people).

The Butterfly Generation: Rain Tree, 263 pages, `450.

Any number of sentences here begin with phrases like “That’s India for you” or “This is new for India.” “We are, without doubt, a country of first-rate cranks,” he writes at the start of a piece about stand-up comedy.

“Nothing gives an Indian more pleasure than throwing a spanner in the works,” he states, later in the same piece. “Simply put, we like to pull people down.”

This truth-like rhetoric may afford hours of harmless plea-

sure to garrulous relatives at family dinners, but it is moderately repellent to encounter in serious writing. It isn’t news that every culture carries ugly baggage which guides its present and may dictate its future; surely the work of the social commentator goes beyond confirming or denying these bromides.

The book’s last section is a collection of cultural criticism, and clearly emerges from more familiar territory. A Doordarshan nostalgia piece will please readers who haven’t thought about the indelible Ek titli anek titliyan in a while, and Mehrotra’s essays tracing the birth of the alternative music scene in India offer up history which is only slowly being discovered by the mainstream. The new bands of which he writes have done some of the most creative work in urban India in recent years, and it is a pleasure to end this book with a glimpse into a scene which, uniquely among Mehrotra’s subjects, is not just passively transformed, but also transformative.

BOOKS L15

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FATHER MAY BE AN ELEPHANT AND MOTHER ONLY A SMALL BASKET, BUT… | GOGU SHYAMALA

QUICK LIT | DAVID SHAFTEL

Dragon fire

Twists in the old tales SHREYANS BHANSALI

A Dalit feminist writes engaging short fiction about life controlled by caste in rural India

B Y S RIDALA S WAMI ···························· ere’s a provisional definition: A short story is a story you can tell in one sitting, perhaps in the time it takes to feed a circle of hungry children as they sit with hands held out for the next spoonful of food, and where food and story come to a simultaneous and satisfying end.

This oral quality, this sense that the story could change unexpectedly depending on the mood of the audience, could—and does—break into song or take diversions via social history, is the most striking thing about Gogu Shyamala’s first collection of short stories, Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...

Shyamala is a senior fellow at the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad and is a Dalit feminist working on creating biographies of Dalit women political leaders. These stories, translated from Telugu by several people, including her colleagues, have something of the autobiographical about them.

Shyamala herself grew up in the Madiga quarter of the kind of Telangana village described in these stories. While the rest of her family worked, sometimes as bonded agricultural labourers, Shyamala was sent away to finish her higher education. The world these stories describe is not born of nostalgia; neither is it an imperfectly imagined idea of what village life must be like; this is Shyamala’s world and she knows it very well indeed, even if she no longer lives in the kind of village she describes.

Shyamala’s village is a site of many contradictions: the Mala, Madiga and Sabbanda communities have a close relationship with the land and its seasonal rhythms; their oral histories and identities are inseparable from the landscape and its stories. Yet it is impossible to escape the con-

B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com

Close to reality: A woman in Nalgonda, in rural Andhra Pradesh, the setting of Shyamala’s stories. sequences of caste unless the village is left behind.

In Raw Wound, clearly the most autobiographical and powerful story in the collection, Syamamma is sent away to school in order to save her from becoming a “jogini” (a lower-caste woman who is declared the sexual property of the whole village).

Her father leaves her at a school, and pleads with the warden of the hostel to keep his daughter safe.

“This was the first time I had seen my father weep uncontrollably and I felt the village’s lake flooding with sorrow. I held fast to my father and could not help but cry myself,” Syamamma says.

Shyamala’s language is

Father May Be An Ele­ phant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...: Navayana, 263 pages, `350.

straightforward yet lyrical—the village lake flooding with sorrow elevates individual suffering into the entire community’s suffering.

In another story, The Village Tank’s Lament, the tank itself speaks to a child. There are tonal shifts and changes in perspective that make each story a fresh experience: In one, a couple of visitors to the village watch some boys dive and swim in a village well; it’s an instance of straight reportage told as story.

Often, there is an overwhelming sense of suspense that is constantly confounded with an ending that, if not always happy, at least manages to avert the worstcase scenarios we expect; even though we know—with the 2006 Kherlanji massacre and other examples before us—how terrible the possibilities are. Many things can and do go wrong, but there are no burnings, killings, maimings and rape (though there are threats of, and attempts at, some of these things).

This is an interesting tactic because when stories end well—such as Braveheart Badeyya or Tataki Wins Again—the reader is forced to question her expectation of violence in fiction and ask what it means that the author refuses time and again to offer it. That Shyamala avoids a bleakness of tone while leaving alive the possibilities of violence is a tribute to her mastery over the short story form. Indeed, Shyamala’s greatest achievement is the note of

HOMESICK | ROSHI FERNANDO

humour and lightness that sounds through this collection.

If there is a striking absence in this book, it is that of the Communist movement in the Telangana region. The stories touch upon many of Shyamala’s own concerns, after all: land, agriculture, Dalit politics, feminism and oral history. It seems impossible that the Naxal movement, which has a long history in the region, should find absolutely no mention in these stories. After Shyamala’s own early involvement with the movement, and her subsequent departure from the political positions the Maoists hold, I read this absence as an act of power by a Madiga who, by such a deliberate erasure, reverses the classical Indian Communist’s blindness to caste.

When I began reading, I was struck by the title’s resemblance to Yasujiro Ozu’s film, I Was Born But... It occurs to me that this book shares other qualities with that particular film: a respect for the perspective of children as they negotiate the adult world, the ability to create their unique world without descending into nostalgia for one’s own childhood, and the hard-won lightness of an adult who has known bitterness and loss.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Breaking caste boundaries in inner Telangana

I

relocates her story to the Holocaust and finds herself the author of a best-seller.

The twist, clever though it is, counters another widely held view among non-Western writers: that the West, in fact, demands “exotica” from foreign literature in the form of suffering, poverty and, well, war, if not colourful weddings and pungent cuisine. Orhan Pamuk, for instance, had denounced this tendency in the 2011 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, saying, “When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can’t love be general?... When nonWestern authors express this humanity through their work their humanity is reduced to their nation’s humanity.”

One may or may not agree, but the fact is that Fernando’s book shines brightest when it

Brave Dragons—A Chinese Basketball Team, An American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing: Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95 (around `1,320). ries were saying.”

Likewise, the brand of basketball was a shock. Games were at the mercy of corrupt referees’ “black whistle” and played in a frigid arena under huge clouds of cigarette smoke.

Game plans were at the whim of Wang, who fancied himself a great basketball mind. Teams practised incessantly, running drills but never scrimmaging, until players were spent (Yao Ming, by far China’s greatest export to the NBA, retired at 30, his body used up). “(F)or China to reclaim its place in the world, China must be great at every endeavor,” writes Yardley.

“Yet, the price was that daily life was a grinding stone.

Everyone worked hard, often separated from family, as rebuilding and rebranding Chinese greatness was a round-the-clock enterprise.”

Basketball was no different.

Yardley declares at the outset that “basketball would help me understand China, and China’s relationship with the United States, in ways I never imagined.” That a particular work of reportage is a prism through which to view the wider world is a common conceit which, in the hands of lesser journalists, can seem ponderous. Yardley, however, manages to present basketball and young China’s growing fascination with it as an apt, pacy metaphor for a China cautiously engaging with the West.

LISA FELLOWS

Gleaming cadences B Y P ARVATI S HARMA ···························· n the last story of her first collection, Roshi Fernando inserts a sly dig at the travails of publishing. Our heroine—or, at any rate, the most constant protagonist of this series of linked short stories—Preethi is doing the round of British publishers with a non-fiction account of the war in Sri Lanka. One reply expresses worry that the subject “would simply not interest an audience: it is a small island, its infighting only interesting to those connected to it, and perhaps some pinko-Marxist Guardian readers”. So Preethi

··························· he funniest passages in Jim Yardley’s entertaining book, Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach and Two Cultures Clashing, concern Wang Xingjiang, known to his minions and enemies as Boss Wang, the often irate steel baron who owns the Shanxi Brave Dragons of the Chinese Basketball Association.

Wang “wore a cheap nylon jacket and could have passed for a guy loitering at a street corner labor pool”, writes Yardley of the owner’s appearance at a pre-season press event.

Wang was “the only person in the room worth almost $300 million. He had not bothered to comb his hair. He was so unpolished for such a public event that it seemed deliberate, as if he was offended by the softer men in suits.”

Yardley, who is now The New York Times’ South Asia bureau chief, followed the Brave Dragons’ 2008-09 season, for which Wang hired the journeyman, former National Basketball Association (NBA) coach Bob Weiss, to modernize the team. Weiss was tasked with leading a bottom-of-thetable team of Chinese strivers and foreign ringers, typically economic migrants or NBA cast-offs such as Bonzi Wells, a talented scorer and notorious disciplinary case once rated by GQ magazine as one of the US’ “top 10 most hated athletes” in their article The Ten Most Hated Athletes.

The polluted coal town of Taiyuan, which is the Brave Dragons’ hometown, was a culture shock for Weiss, Wells and the rest of the foreign contingent, which included a Nigerian centre and his entourage, and an overweight Kazakh who could neither score nor defend. Wells, the best foreign player ever to play in China at the time, writes Yardley, was “tossed into the sea, ignorant of the language, unaware of what is happening around (him), grateful that McDonald’s and KFC have made it over... He knew he was a big story in China. He just did not know what those sto-

T

H

A beautiful new Sri Lankan voice that shines when it doesn’t tackle big cultural questions

Sino­American cultural differences, told through the story of a basketball team

The author: Roshi Fernando. doesn’t address Big Sri Lankan Questions. Homesick tells stories from the lives of a group of expatriate Sri Lankans in England and their British friends and lovers. In the best possible sense of the word, the stories are ambitious, unafraid to explore the most intangible emotions in prose of such gleaming cadence that it begs to be quoted. Here, for example, Preethi’s father

Homesick: Bloomsbury, 292 pages, £11.99 (around `920).

Victor imagines going to bed with his wife after a party: “their warmth in the dark, the smell of her neck, the soft flabby skin of her stomach, crushed and stretched and worn”; and here a beaten face is described as “mushed like a stubbed-out cigarette”; and here a boy addresses his new father as “Daddy”, “in a formal manner, as if addressing a newly bought

dog that needs to learn his name” then later (my favourite), the boy’s mother responds to a compliment from her husband in a triumph of punctuation: “‘Oh, my, you are lovely,’ and she smiles, she—smiles. At least, she smiles.”

The most powerful story of this collection addresses the least—the most tangential, unworthy—of its characters, the paedophile Kumar. “They are like puppies,” he thinks of his tiny nieces, “watching their bottoms wobble. They are like week-old dogs”. Fernando unpeels Kumar’s scaly innocence and corruption with a rare, Munrovian empathy that defies summation and informs too many of her other stories: that of Preethi and her parents who beat her for not being able to trot out the periodic table, of the aged, latent, widowed, gleeful lesbian Gertie, of Mumtaz dumbstruck by his mother’s murder.

Why then, given its plenitude of surprises, must the plot grow viscous with Mumtaz’s adoles-

cent flirtation with terrorism?

Because he is Muslim? Or with Preethi’s plunge into Tamil refugee camps? Because she is Sri Lankan? Both subjects are certainly worthy of literature, but in Homesick these stories are told in platitudes that are all the more stark for the (less exotic) complexities that surround them.

So, Gertie meets Mumtaz on a bus, he has explosives in his backpack, and she tells him how if “women were given freedom, if they were given the same as men—if they had power, if they were allowed to follow their hearts—then…” But then what, exactly? Perhaps, like Preethi in a camp, such a woman would be “busy and helpful” until “she realises one day, reduced to nothing, she has achieved a purity of happiness”.

The ellipses and abstractions tell a more discomfiting story: of a peremptory call to explain that manages to drown what is a writer’s more natural instinct— to explore.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012

Culture

LOUNGE ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· he female security attendant stares at Vidya Balan’s bulging stomach as she steps out of her car at the ITC Grand Central hotel in Mumbai. Balan, hand on her stomach, looks the attendant in the eye, shyly, knowingly, apologetically, as if assuring her that the cushion that masquerades as a pregnancy bump is unlikely to set off the metal detector. As their eyes meet, Balan smiles, the attendant beams, while waving her through.

Vidya Bagchi, Balan’s character from the forthcoming film Kahaani, is a pregnant NRI looking for her husband who has disappeared in Kolkata. Balan’s extension of the role into real life, as part of the film’s promotion, has been necessitated by the fact that she is the film’s only selling point.

Of late, she seems to be the only selling point of any film she does.

Balan’s rise into Hindi cinema’s top echelons seems more sudden than it is. Her career graph in the industry dates back to at least seven years but it’s only recently that a bunch of powerful roles have thrust her into a bracket that’s unique to her. It also puts her in a spot where opinion is divided on whether she is an exceptional or an overrated actor—a position easy to gain in an industry where Katrina Kaif gets nominated for an acting award.

The cause for debate is also because she does not fit into the conventions of the Hindi film heroine. She does not have a famous last name, does not shoot yoga videos, is at least a size 6, not nimble footed on the dance floor, is over the age of 30 and sucks at the so-called glamorous roles that require collagen and Western designer wear. For all practical purposes, she should not be a mainstream actor doing lead roles, for she defies every single requirement of a Hindi film heroine except for her stunning looks.

Yet, in the weeks leading up to the release of Kahaani, scheduled for 9 March, Balan is chased by reporters for interviews, adorns many magazine covers and on the day after this meeting, she says, there are 46 channels waiting to interview her.

So why is Vidya Balan, a postgraduate from Bombay University and raised in suburban Chembur, this season’s hottest Indian actor?

“She is an explosive talent who has not yet analysed her craft,” says Milan Luthria, the director of The Dirty Picture. “She is extremely clever, has a high aptitude and is sharp. She is supremely talented, right up there with the best.”

T

PROFILE

Why everybody loves Vidya She breaks every convention that defines Hindi film actresses of today, and deliberately keeps away from glamour. But the interesting scripts just don’t stop coming to her

Breaking a pattern

A long journey: Balan did commercials and a TV show before she got a break in Pradeep Sarkar’s Parineeta in 2005.

Luthria cajoled Balan out of her comfort zone into uncomfortable clothing that showed more of her carefully cultivated extra flesh than covered it. The Dirty Picture, one of last year’s major hits, has tilted the balance a bit—there are more believers in Balan’s abilities than detractors. That’s also the reason why, unusually for a Hindi film actor, she was the lead in three women-oriented movies—No One Killed Jessica, The Dirty Picture and Kahaani—over the last one year.

“Going by the number of scripts I get, I don’t know why there is this myth that there aren’t women-centric films.

Maybe that’s got a fillip with the The Dirty Picture and Jessica, which was the break point, like they call it in tennis,” says Balan.

She occasionally curls up on a sofa in her room at the ITC Grand Central, tired from a day

CULTURE L17

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

of walking around with the cushion, promoting the film, changing costumes, posing for pictures and giving interviews. She shakes her right leg continuously, does not once check her BlackBerry, looks straight at whoever she talks to, her deep, dark eyes as if probing for some meaningful answers.

“It’s a hopeful time for women in Indian cinema,” she continues, her gaze unwavering. “Not only are those scripts being written, but they are also doing well because they are being made as entertaining and engaging films. Women are being humanized. You were either being glorified or demeaned (in the past). But there is a middle path today, reflective of the way society is evolving.”

Her debut role itself was strong; as Lolita in the 2005 film Parineeta, she was forced to make complex choices on screen while dealing with clingy relatives and an indecisive lover. It was the sort of role that suits Balan, who has a vulnerability that’s offset by an inherent sensuality. A sequence of roles followed that did not necessarily challenge her as an actor or propel her career to great heights, though there was mixed commercial success.

Ironically, in a world where glamour sells more than anything, where heroines seem to be perpetually shot in front of a pedestal fan so their well-conditioned hair can flutter gloriously, Balan’s least memorable films have been ones in which she had to glam up—like Heyy Babyy and Kismat Konnection.

“I don’t think I suit it and it does not suit me,” she says of those films, expressing no embarrassment or apology. “I am happy keeping away from it.

Someone close to me once said I saw Lolita, Jhanvi, Silk, Sabrina and I saw two Vidya Balan films, Heyy Babyy and Kismat Konnection. There was a complete lack of conviction on my part. Just playing myself doesn’t excite me, which is why I thought I could sleepwalk through it. I couldn’t sleep or walk after that,” she adds, laughing.

She shed her girl-next-door image, built on films like Parineeta, to get into boots and skirts disastrously for Heyy Babyy; but her career took a turn with a succession of unconventional roles—from playing mother to Amitabh Bachchan in Paa, a slutty small-town belle in Ishqiya, and a big city victim seeking justice for her sister in No One Killed Jessica to a B-grade actress in The Dirty Picture.

In the 2009 film Paa, she was the mother to a child (played by Bachchan) with an unusual disease. Ishqiya (2010) pitted her against Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi where, for the first time, she was not just a coy little villager. In No One Killed Jessica, she wore huge spectacles, shirts many sizes larger, slouched and shuffled as a perfect foil for the over-the-top Rani Mukherji.

Sujoy Ghosh, the director of Kahaani, explains how Balan added her own touch to the character of Bagchi as a means to understand her commitment.

“For example, in the film, her character lands in Kolkata and goes to the police station to file a report. It’s simple enough. But the way she works is she asks me questions and forms her timeline. The girl stays in London, she must have started her journey one-and-a-half days ago, must have taken a taxi to the airport. She is a pregnant woman in an uncomfortable economy seat. Taxis in Kolkata are not the most comfortable either; so by the time she reaches the police station, she has been sitting on her bottom for 20-24 hours. So when she is sitting on that wooden chair, she shows that

discomfort and fatigue.”

“It would not be noticeable to the audience,” he adds.

Balan adds that years of travelling by train to college from Chembur to Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) gave her some ideas on how to play pregnant, after watching similar women negotiate the local trains every other day. “We were big nautankis. I would play pregnant often. I knew the walk; that’s instinct for a woman but I still got it cross-checked. I needed to know the script pitpat. If you told me the page number, I would be able to tell you the scene.”

For The Dirty Picture, Balan added oodles of weight, showed six packs of fat through sleazy, midriff-exposing clothes while seducing three men of various ages on screen. It was the sort of preparation familiar in Hollywood and never attempted by a Hindi film actress, not required to do anything but look good.

Size matters “I have had my battles with the bulge, so to speak,” says Balan, a constant tabloid victim for not being the conventional anorexic film star or a fashionably dressed one. “It’s been something I have dealt with for the longest time but it doesn’t bother me any more. If you feel desirable, then you can look it. People said I was the hottest in The Dirty Picture, where I put on 12kg. Indian bodies are curvaceous, we have certain features. There was this certain homogenization a while ago where everyone wanted to look like their Western counterparts.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but I love Indian features, the Indian body. That homogenization is fading because even as

people, India is coming into its own, whether in music, technology, arts or culture.”

“I think the smartest thing she did,” says film-maker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, “was to listen to her heart and not to give a damn that the world was trying to bring her down because of one wrong choice (fashion sense).”

The slow build up to her career—she screen-tested for almost six months before signing Parineeta—is also a consequence of the fact that she is neither a beauty contest winner nor has familial connections, two easy routes up in the Indian film industry, an incestuous conglomerate where a family name allows people to be themselves rather than characters they play on screen. The lack of any trappings of stardom allowed Balan to come into her own once challenging roles and fringe directors sought her out from a crowd.

“I think it (success) is sweeter because it’s taken so long, but it’s happened because I wanted it. I had it on my own terms and there is nothing more fulfilling than that,” says Balan. What can illustrate the 33-year-old actor’s late start is Kareena Kapoor, who, for instance, has already spent over a decade in the acting business and is still only 31.

An advantage Balan has, and she also admits it after some thought, is that Hindi films have always been partial to actors from the south. From Padmini to Vyjayanthimala, Hema Malini, Jaya Prada, Rekha, Sridevi and Meenakshi Sheshadri, women with southern origins have ruled during their times. But here again is the difference—while most of them have been given to melodrama perpetuated by

A wide range: (clockwise from left) Balan romanced an older and a younger man in Ishqiya, was the central character in The Dirty Picture, plays a pregnant woman in Kahaani, and was the mother of a child with progeria in Paa.

their trained dancer’s exaggerated expressions, Balan is an average dancer who underplays on screen.

“We go all over the world and retain a certain south Indianness about us. We are proud of our roots, which is great. It’s a combination of intelligent women who have lived life on their own terms, who have strength of character along with being good performers. We are very rooted, yaar,” Balan says.

She pauses before training her piercing gaze again: “You have to work hard towards getting wherever… I am almost a sadist in the sense if something comes easy, I don’t enjoy it.”

Love her, hate her In the hotel room, a fan wants a picture with Balan, finding a connection with the actor by saying she too is from Chembur.

“Really?” says Balan (who now lives in Khar), her face lighting up as she looks at the fawning female. “Where in Chembur?”

The connection she makes with people, even in a few min-

utes, explains why everybody loves Vidya. “She is a lovely, lovely, girl… add lovely at least five times,” says Aziz Mirza, her director in Kismat Konnection.

“She is a fine actress because she is a good person.”

“Not one note is repeated when she moves from one scene to the other,” says Luthria.

Ghosh, who insists he would have made the film only with her, says he sees the movie three times every day. “I can find faults in my directing but not in her acting,” he says.

“She brings grace to the profession,” says Chopra, who produced three Balan films, Parineeta, Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Eklavya: The Royal Guard, which he also directed.

Despite that, and to add to her bursting bag of myth-breaking virtues, Balan has not worked with a director more than once, which is unusual given film-makers’ penchant for “repeating” their favourite actors. Nor does she belong to what, in Bollywood parlance, is called a “camp”. The only exception will be Raj Kumar

Gupta, the director of Jessica, who will make her next film, Ghanchakkar, with Emraan Hashmi.

She also has a lavani “item number” in the Chopra-produced upcoming Ferrari Ki Sawaari.

She says this independence allows her to be free of obligations. “It works fabulously because you don’t have to say yes to scripts you don’t like and no one is obliged to offer you something that won’t suit you. I love my independence and don’t feel disadvantaged by it.”

She is not concerned either if the country’s best-known leading men will share screen space with her, considering none of the three Khans—Aamir, Shah Rukh and Salman—have acted with her.

Balan’s last few male co-stars have been Shah, Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor and Hashmi, none of them capable of causing stampedes at the ticket counter.

Luthria explains her popularity, particularly with men: “She is uniquely Indian. She has the Khajuraho voluptuousness and a face that says take me home to your mother. It’s a heady mix.”

But as the fan who took a picture and the security attendant who saw her dazzling smile would vouch, Balan has an inexplicable connection with the audience, whether in person or on screen.

She gets you, once those deep, dark eyes are locked in.

L18 CULTURE

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

FEROZ ABBAS KHAN

COMMEMORATION

A love letter to Indian theatre ‘Tumhari Amrita’ completes 20 years. The actors and the director tell us what went into making it an icon

Yours, truly: (above) Shabana Azmi (left) and Farooq Sheikh at their latest show on 27 February in Mumbai; and one of their earlier performances.

B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· e hadn’t expected his latest play to be a roaring success—four shows is how long he’d expected this piece of experimental drama to run—but the play’s dress rehearsal, a day ahead of its debut, was a rude shock for director Feroz Abbas Khan. Eight out of the 10 technicians had dozed off in the course of the one-anda-half-hour epistolary romance.

That was 1992. The play was about to be staged at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai as a tribute to the late Jennifer Kapoor, and here he was, about to put not just his, but the reputations of his actors Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh on the line.

The director’s fears be damned, Tumhari Amrita, a play comprising two actors reading out letters to one another on stage, has gone on to acquire cult status in Indian theatre. Twenty years and still running, the play is now 350-odd shows old, and continues to command an audience that would put many a glitzy Bollywood film to shame. For context, the longestrunning Indian film till date, the

H

Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, completed 16 years in October 2011.

This is how it all started: Feroz Abbas Khan was gifted a copy of the American play A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters (1988) and he decided to stage it. But it had to be Indianized, and if there was one language

MANY HAPPY ENDINGS

A few other productions that have had a long innings on the Indian stage Hai Mera Dil Ank Theatre Group, Mumbai Having made its debut in 1979, this comedy directed by Dinesh Thakur is one of Ank’s longest running Hindi productions. More than 1,000 shows old, the play is among Ank’s more than 75 productions, and certainly their most successful.

Love Letters Rage Theatre, Mumbai Incidentally, A.R. ‘Love Letters’ was staged by Rage Theatre in English about the same time as its Urdu

version ‘Tumhari Amrita’. Directed by Rahul da Cunha, the play had Shernaz Patel and Rajit Kapoor in the lead roles. With a 1993 debut and more than 250 performances, it is said to be one of the longest­running English plays in India. Clearly, unrequited love is a subject that touches a chord.

Ghalib in New Delhi Pierrot’s Troupe, New Delhi First staged in 1997, this comedy made its debut in the basement of the Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts in Delhi, also as an experiment.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

WITHIN CITY LIMITS

A

t the rate at which our cities are going, Hindi film-makers are going to run out of places in which to set their films. Mumbai’s widespread squalor and tendency to build, rebuild and demolish every piece of concrete in sight have resulted in one ugly megapolis. Delhi is very pretty—and the Metro is a boon for the sprawling Capital—but regular reports of people getting beaten up or shot and women being raped hint at a scary atavistic anger bubbling away beneath the elegant surface. The cities south of the Vindhyas have a

big red mark against their names—Hindi isn’t their dominant language. Thank heavens then for Kolkata, which still has charming neighbourhoods that haven’t yet been painted blue by Mamata Banerjee’s government.

The Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani uses the story of a woman on a quest in a strange city to explore the sights and sounds of the forgotten metro.

The Bengali capital has been beautifully explored in the films of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. It’s now up to Sujoy Ghosh, who has previously directed Jhankaar Beats, Home Delivery and Aladin, to rekindle

Playwright­director M. Sayeed Alam didn’t want to run it for more than a couple of months (“We didn’t want to be known just for one play,” he says), but it has been impossible to discontinue the play because of its insatiable audience. The play takes the character of Mirza Ghalib to raises issues in contemporary India.

The first few shows had Ghalib giving Urdu and Hindi lessons to the then prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda; and in the last few shows, he’s been interacting with social activist Anna Hazare.

Kolkata’s romance for non-Bengali viewers.

It’s not that film-makers aren’t trying to provide realistic portrayals of other places—Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan travelled to Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, for instance, while Chandan Arora set his Main, Meri Patni... Aur Woh! in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Delhi and Mumbai, however, continue to hog the attention, one of the reasons being that the multiplexes in these cities determine the opening weekend fate of new releases. Film-makers and writers from Delhi and Mumbai also find it easier to set their films there because of familiarity. But since when did geography come in the way of creativity? Even though Indians are insular to a fault, there is no reason to believe that a Dilliwallah or a Mumbaiite won’t watch a movie set in, say, Bhopal or Jaipur, if it tells its

that could “paint word pictures” and have the power to “emotionally move the audience”, it was Urdu, he believed. Khan came in touch with the writer Javed Siddiqui, who then took on the project. The letters between Amrita and Zulfi (Amrita is said to be modelled on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil) tell the story of unrequited love that plays out over 35 years. The first letter is written by Amrita when she’s 8, and Zulfi 10.

Once he’d written the script, Siddiqui read it out to the director and the two actors, and was met with a stunned silence. Azmi, who’d earlier questioned the need for an Urdu version, had walked out of the room. “Once outside, she wept and wept. She came in and told me—I’m doing it,” recalls Khan.

The rest, of course, is their story.

After the disastrous dress rehearsal, Khan decided to add an introduction to the play where he would explain the play’s form to the audience. The two characters sit on either side of a table reading out letters to one another. Actors were strictly instructed to not

memorize lines. “They needed to look like they were reading this for the first time,” says Abbas. The drill has remained the same through the two decades. There’s a halfhour warm-up before every show—their only rehearsal—to “get them used to the reading, and to watch out for any false quality of histrionics”, says Khan.

In the last 20 years, the production has travelled all over the world, and has had its fair share of chaos. They’ve left costumes behind at an airport, got lost on their way to a show. And once, their female lead was arrested, minutes before a show. “I was at a demonstration and got arrested with 16 slum dwellers,” says Azmi.

“We had a show at the NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts) at 6pm. My family turned up at the police station, asking them to let me go. My mother even told the police that they’d bring me back after the show.” The actress, however, refused, saying that she wouldn’t leave unless all the others were also released.

“Finally, we reached the NCPA

The canvas: Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan was set in Jamshedpur. story well enough.

More interesting than the landmarks and sights of a city are dramas about the lives of its residents. Ray’s Calcutta trilogy from the 1970s (Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya) memorably explored the impact of the city’s

changing political landscape on its middle classes. After all, there’s a limit to how inventively you can shoot the Gateway of India or India Gate, although film-makers haven’t stopped trying. Mumbai’s slums and so-called gangster ghettoes are more yawn-inducing than

at 8pm, and by 8.07pm, I was on stage,” adds Azmi. “It turned out to be the finest performance. We got the longest standing ovation that day,” says Khan.

Another time, untimely rain disrupted an outdoor performance in Bangalore, recalls Sheikh. “Our letters were strewn all over the stage and for a few minutes, Shabana and I were chasing letters while the audience patiently watched,” he says.

As a counterpoint to Amrita and Zulfi’s intense romance on stage, is the playful banter backstage. The standing joke between the two actors and the director is the nervousness of Khan and Azmi before and during a show versus the infuriating composure of Sheikh.

“Farooq is always telling us: kabhi toh tum relax karo (why don’t you relax for a change?), and we say, kabhi toh tum stressed ho (why don’t you get stressed for a change?),” says Azmi.

Off stage, Sheikh and Azmi have also known each other for 35 years, when they were both undergraduates who set up the Hindi Natya Manch at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. “He’s always teasing me and making my life miserable,” says Azmi. “If we haven’t met in ages, I tease him with one of the lines from the play: Itne din se miley nahin ho zinda kaise ho (You haven’t seen me in so long, how are you alive)? by Amrita; and he promptly responds with a “isiliye toh zinda hoon! (that’s why I’m alive).

“That’s not from the play, that’s an original,” she laughs.

Tumhari Amrita will be staged in Dubai on 30 and 31 March at the Dubai Community Theatre & Arts Centre, and in Mumbai through April.

ever before, simply because nobody is saying anything new about them. Where are the independent films about the metropolis’ mortgage-burdened middle-class families, its old-money clans and its nouveau riche? The small bunch of Delhi-centric films has felt more real than anything we’ve seen in a while, but films like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Band Baaja Baaraat are ultimately mostly about Punjabis. I’m still waiting for the murder mystery set at the India International Centre or the domestic drama that plays out in Maharani Bagh, Delhi.

Kahaani releases in theatres on 9 March.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com