Lounge for 03 Sep 2011

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 36

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE For many young Indians, home is in the mind, not a geographical location.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH HARLEY­ DAVIDSON’S ANOOP PRAKASH >Page 8

THE THINKING MAN’S SHOOTER

In 2000, ‘Deus Ex’ was well ahead of its time. ‘Human Revolution’ is a love letter to the original, in gameplay and atmosphere >Page 9

SEARCHING FOR CHICKEN RICE

THE SUITCASE INDIAN REPLY TO ALL

M

ost of us are married under a Vedic ceremony we don’t really understand. We are familiar with the Christian wedding and its vows because of cinema and our familiarity with English.

However, this exchange between groom and bride is quite recent when compared with the Vedic ceremony. The Christian formulation is: “To have and to hold, for better and for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.” >Page 4

>Pages 10­11

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

A MARRIAGE OF EQUALS

Owning a home is no longer the great middle­class dream.

Exorbitant prices, get­up­and­go job opportunities and lifestyle choices have added to our general sense of uprootedness

LUXURY CULT

SHOBA NARAYAN

ANUPAM PODDAR AND HIS ART

A

bove art collector Anupam Poddar’s bed, hangs a Tyeb Mehta painting. It is perhaps the only sedate, if beautiful, objet d’art in his home. Opposite the bed, occupying half the bedroom floor, is a low-slung Sakshi Gupta metal sculpture that rises up and down, as if the earth were breathing. In the centre of Poddar’s spacious dressing room is an elongated, mechanical penis that moves forward and backward—a whimsical work by Sudarshan Shetty, whose hammers... >Page 5

RADHA CHADHA

To know Singapore is to know its food by stall number, clear soup, chilli dip and food court >Page 14

FOLLOWING THE FALLEN ANGELS Mohammed Hanif’s fiercely tender love letter to the human spirit is hobbled by its structure >Page 17

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

A LEAP BACK TO THE FUTURE?

I

am at a sold out 10km run in Central Park, New York. I am not sure what I am doing here as I can barely run for 5 minutes before I run out of breath. But this is a special race—the Boomer’s Cystic Fibrosis Run to Breathe 10K—and among the 5,000-plus participants there are some with the deadly lung disease. My family—they are running too—has talked me into this by pointing out that if people with serious health problems can do it then a relatively healthy woman... >Page 6

FILM REVIEW

THAT GIRL IN YELLOW BOOTS

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)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

inbox

LOUNGE LOVES | CHURROS

Carnivale con chocolate

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

The twisty knots with Spanish­Oriental links are here to stay

COMMITMENT PROBLEM Rohit Brijnath’s “The voice from within”, 27 August, was the first piece of newspaper reading I did on Saturday morning. I was in the typically Indian mood of blaming the world for all my woes, which were aggravated by my delay in reaching office. But his article put paid to my yearning to curse anyone and everyone. He is right—till you commit relentlessly, ruthlessly and single­mindedly to the voice within, you are condemned to a life of mediocrity—at the mercy of circumstances, luck and conditions. I’d like to thank him for such an inspiring article. He saved my day.

KESHAV CHATURVEDI

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

T

here is a country in this world where fried dough dipped in thick, molten chocolate is a justifiable breakfast. That should be hosanna enough. That, for some inexplicable reason, these warm treats have now begun dotting Mumbai’s monsoon food scene is simply salvation in a cup.

Executive chef Clinton Cooper of the Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai, says he introduced them in August in homage to the closure of the Michelin-starred elBulli on 31 July. Churros con chocolate, popular Spanish street food, symbolize everything Catalonian to Cooper. “All great food comes from a great memory. I waited two years for a reservation at elBulli and finally managed one last year (2010). My meal there was a simple grilled fish with some herbs and butter and lime, crispy skin; it was perfection. For me, I wanted to serve up the memory of Catalonia with its square with its cafés, churros and, of course, elBulli,” he says.

Churros were originally a Thai/Chinese street snack made by pulling the dough by hand, a technique which the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors did not know how to copy. So they borrowed the French technique of choux pastry (where butter and water are brought to a boil before flour is added, and eggs folded in) and piped the batter into bubbling oil through starshaped nozzles. Churros come in two sizes; the thinner, knotted variety and the porra (thicker) variety. Chef Cooper serves up the choux pastry base in fried knots of a deep crispy brown. These are dusted with caster sugar, served with a molten Belgian chocolate and a raspberry coulis.

Try the newly opened Australian franchise The Chocolate Room, which serves

Decadent dip: Churros make for great hot chocolate swizzle sticks too. churros (`139 for four) all year round. The fried pastry, though mildly crispy on the outside when hot, remains partly uncooked—perhaps due to too much water in the choux dough. The churros are drizzled with chocolate rather than dusted with sugar.

Another Australian import, The Chocolateria San Churros on Waterfield Road in Bandra, offers a variety of small (`155), medium-sized or large platters, with options of white, milk and dark chocolate dips. You also have a dessert version: the Churromissu. Yet these churros, modelled on the thin version, are disappointing. The small platter came with what could only be described as sweet French fries with hard ridges. They are also part of the Taste Platter (`425), a chocolate tapas.

A Chocolate Affair at Pali Naka in Bandra, the first to bring churros to Mumbai, has since shifted base to Kemps Corner.

The “sexy churros” (`160) here are a lovely balance between those at Sanchos, the newly opened Mexican place in Bandra,

LOUNGE REVIEW | THE POT BELLY, NEW DELHI DIVYA BABU/MINT

T

he Pot Belly, a three-weekold eatery at Shahpur Jat in south Delhi, the hub of Delhi’s designer clothes factories, introduces Bihari cuisine to the Capital. The printed two-sheet menu is somewhat limited (we are told items will be added) and the fare reminds one of home-cooked meals served by a friend’s mum or a long-time household help rather than a gourmet chef. It is a charming space—on the fourth floor with large French windows, the roof covered with green chatai (cane mats), whitewashed walls, bright cushions and a view of treetops and buzzing dragonflies.

The good stuff A bowl of lightly salted makhanas (fox nuts) is placed on every table as you order and wait for your meal to arrive. We were dying to try the Litti Chokha (`190), a Bihari staple. Two perfectly rounded littis (baked dough balls stuffed with sattu flavoured with cumin, finely chopped chillies and coriander) were served with two types of chokhas (auberginebased side dishes) and a bowl of chana dal. The crusty littis were dipped in ghee (clarified butter) that added flavour and softened

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

www.livemint.com

GREATNESS WITHIN

the dough. The first reaction on seeing those greasy dough balls was to ask for a paper towel.

Of the two chokhas—aubergines and potatoes in tomato gravy, and aubergines in a yogurt base—we preferred the latter. The sting of mustard oil and chillies was evident in the latter and it offset the slightly bland taste of the litti.

The Vegetarian Pakora (fritters) Basket (`110) had two pieces each of sabudana (tapioca) pakora, mini potato cutlets, and aubergine and potato chakka.

The surprise in the sabudana pakora was the crunchiness of peanuts; the potato cutlets were coated with semolina and not the usual breadcrumbs.

The Gol Mirch Chicken (`260) served with two mirchi (green chillies) parathas, sabudana poha and salsa, was essentially chicken cooked with cracked black pepper in a yogurt gravy.

The use of spices was minimal, highlighting the flavour of the key spice, black pepper.

The surprise on the menu was egg halwa and while we were disinclined to order it, the dilemma was resolved when we found that it was on the house (as were the makhanas and lauki

kheer). One spoonful led to a second, the khoya, cardamom and saffron subtly masking the taste of egg yolk.

The not­so­good The table attendants are not informed about the cuisine. At present there are eight pre-plated meal options (three vegetarian and five non-vegetarian) within which there are many repetitions in side dishes. The mirchi parathas accompanying the Gol Mirch Chicken were much too thick in the centre and hence remained uncooked. Also, a 1K tbsp sabudana and aloo poha with a main course meal is a waste. Either increase the portion or avoid it. Why serve Apple Cinnamon Iced Tea (`80) when it just means adding chunks of apple to cold tea? Finally, how about some Bihari drinks such as sattu lassi or sherbet?

Talk plastic A meal for one with a starter and two main course dishes as well as a glass of iced tea costs `704. Currently, it levies no service tax.

116-C, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi Seema Chowdhry

and San Churros—a middling size of twisty knots. The milk chocolate dip is a better bet; the dark chocolate one is quite overpowering—chocolate this intense is best served in small doses. The Andheri-based Spanish restaurant Miro has churros on the menu but doesn’t serve them currently.

By far the best churros in Mumbai, though, are those at Sanchos. Plump, light, fluffy and perfectly fried, the platter, at `150, comes with eight churros. The secret, the sous chef on duty informed us, is a Mexican-influenced Spanish twist—not only is their chocolate Mexican, it is cinnamon-infused. The dough sticks are made fluffy by a certain amount of egg (they refused to disclose how much), are fried after the dough is well rested, and dusted with sugar flavoured with a tinge of cinnamon. It adds a whole new dimension to the dish. While churros in Mumbai still aren’t at street-snack level, hang on to the dream; they may be one day.

Gayatri Jayaraman

Saturday, August 27, 2011

LOUNGE

Rohit Brijnath’s article, “The voice from within”, 27 August, was thought­provoking. Yes, before I criticize the performance of the Indian cricket team, I need to see whether I am also giving my 100%, which I am not.

PRIYESH KARIA

THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Behind the defunct chimney of India United Mills No. 1, the skyline of Lalbaug in central Mumbai is changing dramatically.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH DFJ INDIA’S MOHANJIT JOLLY >Page 8

SIX WAYS TO DRESS FOR FALL

The Lakmé Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2011 trends to make your own this season >Page 7

SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET

MEMORIES OF AN ELEPHANT

Beyond the tourist traps, America’s blues city keeps its glorious musical traditions alive >Pages 14­15

In a historic Mumbai neighbourhood, the start of the festive season brings the layers of an ongoing urban transformation into sharp focus

AN AMERICAN QUILT

Hari Kunzru’s new novel is a majestic work with memorable characters and a credible plot >Page 16

>Pages 10­11

THE GOOD LIFE

GAME THEORY

SHOBA NARAYAN

BEST SPORTS WRITER

Vol. 5 No. 35

A PHANTOM AND OTHER NIGHT LIFE

I

got Delhi-envy at 1.43am on a soft summer night when I met a man called Honey. The evening began at 10pm at an art gallery opening. Hotelier Priya Paul (whom I had first met a week ago) and her friends, Vivek Sahni and Nikhil Khanna, were going out with a group of friends and they invited me to come along.

The group included a contemporary artist-couple, a gallery owner, some expat curators, a design guru and some advertising folk. Some 15 of them debated... >Page 4

LEARNING CURVE

ROHIT BRIJNATH

THE VOICE FROM WITHIN

E

ffort is a voice in the athlete’s head. Effort to wake up at 4.17am, which is what Ian Thorpe did every day, effort when confidence is dying and the body hurts. Effort which gives sport a certain nobility. It is Rafael Nadal saying: “I fight, I fight, I fight”, and you can literally see his willingness to pursue his best self. This cliché which suggests a talent fully exhausted—“I gave 100 per cent”—is not easily lived. But it becomes the separation point between athletes. Not just skill... >Page 5

GOURI DANGE

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

LESSONS IN APPRECIATION

T

he process of getting any child—particularly one on whom so much adult attention and hard work has been lavished—to be appreciative and grateful should begin much before the age of 15. Ideally, the seeds for this must be sown early, and not when we see disturbing signs that our children are taking us thoroughly for granted. Teaching a child to be grateful and appreciative of what the adults around him or her do for him doesn’t mean we get our children to feel... >Page 6

Rohit Brijnath is superb! I read his latest article, on hearing the inner voice (“The voice from within”, 27 August), four times in a row. It was that good. Brijnath is probably the best writer in sports journalism today.

RAJAT SATURDAY Q&A WITH

LAVANYA NALLI

DOUBLY ENJOYABLE I really enjoyed Rohit Brijnath’s article “The voice from within”, 27 August. I take this opportunity to thank him for the insight on sporting greats and the amount of passion each puts into his game. Shoba Narayan’s “A Phantom and other nocturnal animals”, 27 August, was great too. She captured the very essence of nightlife in big cities.

MANAN ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: JASPER JAMES/GETTY IMAGES CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “A Phantom and other nocturnal animals”, 27 August, the reference in the context of Chennai’s nightlife should have been to the Bay of Bengal.

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals

M

DIVYA BABU/MINT

ost of us are married under a Vedic ceremony we don’t really understand. We are familiar with the Christian wedding and its vows because of cinema and our familiarity

with English. However, this exchange between groom and bride is quite recent when compared with the Vedic ceremony.

The Christian formulation is: “To have and to hold, for better and for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.” We can find this vow in almost exactly the same shape in a 14th century edition of the Liber Pontificalis (The Book of the Popes).

One line was excised from this in modern times. It is the pledge made by the bride just before the words “till death do us part”. She promises her groom she will remain “bonny and buxom in bed and board”. Buxom is of course full-breasted, while bonny means beautiful, attractive. What could account for this lovely line’s omission? Possibly feminism.

The Muslim marriage ceremony has no romance about it. The marriage itself is conducted by the girl’s guardian with or without her consent, though it is not valid unless she later consents. The Muslim marriage is contractual, and it wouldn’t be incorrect to call it a transaction. The unique thing about the transaction is that it is reversed. The woman must compulsorily be paid a gift of cash by the man, following the instruction in verse 4 of the Quran’s chapter “Women”. From the outside, it appears a more natural exchange than dowry, because it is the woman who will perform service—sexual, domestic and maternal. A woman may ask for as much money as she wishes.

From a later verse in the same chapter, Shias have legitimized an interesting phenomenon called Muta, or temporary marriage. This is reviled

by Sunnis and it is minor differences like these which produce sectarianism.

Let us look at the Vedic wedding.

The best book on this was published

by Kolkata’s Writers Workshop. It was written by Purushottama Lal with help from scholar Suniti Kumar Chatterji.

It reveals the beauty of the ceremony. Lal said his intention was to “present the essentials of the

Hindu wedding, shorn of the excessive ritualisation that has crept into it as a result of regional variations and commercial considerations”.

Lal hoped his booklet would “serve the idealism and sacred bonding needs of all who feel that such a text restores to the ceremony the auspiciousness and sanctity that mechanical performance has deprived it of in modern times”.

Does the ceremony do this? Let’s see if it does.

The wedding begins with the purohit addressing the gathered: “Say these words to bless the wedding: ‘May all be holy (Om punyaham), may all be successful (Om riddhim), may all be well (Om svasti).’”

The guests respond: “Om punyaham, Om riddhyatam, Om svasti”.

The man, karta, giving the bride away then welcomes the groom, who replies: “I am honoured (aham ase).

The bride is blessed by the presence of divinity.”

The couple then receive each other with these words.

Bride: “I respect you with all my mind and all my heart, I respect your soul with mine. Inside the same as outside, and outside the same inside.”

Groom: “I respect you similarly in the presence of all.”

Bride: “My mind will move with your mind in love, like water flowing on the path of life. My life is linked with yours, my mind with yours and my vows with your vows. Let us work together as two friends, seekers of the same goal.”

The groom replies with these words: “Who is giving to whom? It is love that gives to love. Love is giver, receiver, an inexhaustible ocean. You come to me with love, and that is love’s doing.”

The purohit tells the bride: “As Sachi to Indra, as Svaha to Agni, as Rohini to Chandra, as Damayanti to Nala, as Bhadra to Vivasyat, as Arundhati to Vashishth, as Lakshmi to Vishnu, may you be to your husband.”

The bride replies: “May the path of my husband be spontaneous, and I

Meeting of minds: The Vedic wedding rituals did not place the bride in a position subordinate to the groom. shall walk on it with pleasure.”

This is followed by the Kushandika, the fire ritual.

The couple faces the fire with the groom standing behind the bride, reaching out in front to cup her palms in his.

Bride: “May my husband live a hundred years, and my people prosper.”

Purohit: “May you be as steadfast to your family as the Pole Star is to the earth.”

Then follows the ritual we associate most with the Vedic marriage, the seven steps of the Saptapadi.

The couple chants together: “We take the first step for nourishment.”

They continue in this manner, taking the second step for success, the third for loyalty, the fourth for bliss, the fifth for the good of all animals, the sixth for prosperity, the seventh for illumination.

They chant together: “With these seven steps I am your friend, may I deserve your friendship and may it make me one with you, loved and loving, sakha-sakhi.”

The couple then hold hands, and the groom says: “I hold your hand happily, for I am your husband. Let us

grow old together, as lovers, as friends, as guides. Be with me and let’s together build the ideal home. May the universe’s powers bless us and the holy waters unite us. Your heart, my will—may they be one. Your mind and my mind, also one. I hope our words delight one another. May divinity unite us. What is in my heart, may it be in yours, tied in the knot of truth.

In love, may we see a hundred autumns, live a hundred autumns and hear a hundred autumns.”

He then anoints his bride with sindoor.

Bride: (facing Dhruv, the Pole Star): “You are forever stable. May I also be in my new home.”

Purohit: “Witness this bride and bless her. May she be happy in love.

Be as a queen with your husband’s family.”

Facing the couple he says: “May you always follow the principles of dharma, artha and kama (morality, economics and sexual pleasure).”

The couple, together: “I will.”

Purohit: “May this ceremony be blessed by God. Shanti, shanti, shanti.”

One thing is striking in the exchange: This is a marriage of equals.

The text does not excessively put the bride in a subordinate position. There is also no reference to caste, other than of course the word “purohit”, which can only refer to a Brahmin.

The Bengali purohit meant to preside over my marriage declined, quite rightly, because as a peasant I was a different caste from the kulin Kayastha bride. I am quite certain this would have been a problem even when this ceremony was first performed.

And yet to think that this was how Indians were married a thousand years before Athens, founding city of civilization, became a power is humbling. Such beauty and polish is not to be found in any other marriage anywhere in the world, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

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

LOVE MEANS LETTING HER BE ANGRY

A

s I settle at my desk to write this column, I open a diary, put away my phone, read some comments on old blog posts.

Three-year-old Naseem takes her position on the floor with paper, crayons and sketch pens.

She can do a circle and two lines for a human form. She proceeds to create.

Aliza, 6, and Sahar, 8, are in school.

A couple of days ago, we were all together at the school bus stop. It was a special day when they had to go to school in the afternoon for a rehearsal later in the evening. The school bus did not come for a while. For a small pocket of time, the roadside became our adda. No agenda, nothing to read, clean, clear or complete. Wide empty road, a cow and a common

crane on the opposite side.

Post-rain crispness in the air.

We are sitting on the kerb.

I have yelled at Aliza in the morning. She didn’t want to bathe, she was whiny, something was bothering her and she couldn’t tell me what it was. She was distracted. All this made me very upset. More accurately, perhaps it was the trigger that brought out the upset in me. I sorted it out temporarily by raising my voice and yelling at her. Silence and a quick bath followed.

A few hours later, we are here, hair pinned neatly and water bottles as accessories.

Aliza, do you love me? I ask, turning to look at her.

She continues to play with her fingers.

Ali, did you hear me? I am

asking you.

Yes, says Aliza, looking at her fingers as she winds one little one around another.

There is a pause.

I think that was a very silly question, says Sahar, who is sitting on my other side.

Why is it a silly question? I ask.

Sahar gets up. She raises her arms and moves in a circle as if she needs space to say this.

This is a silly question because you already know that we love you very much.

Yes, I do, I say. But sometimes Aliza gets so angry with me that I feel confused.

But Mamma, if you get angry with someone it doesn’t mean you don’t love her. We can love you and still be angry with you sometimes. Sahar is now in front of Aliza and me, using her hands and walking around. Her school uniform and polished shoes add to her authority.

That’s right, is it? I say.

Yes, she says.

I nod my head. Aliza nods more vigorously.

That’s the end of my speech, says Sahar, and sits down next to me again.

Earlier in the morning, I

On her own: Don’t push your daughter to fear her own feelings. had thought to myself, love means letting her be angry.

Her anger is important, powerful and necessary.

I had been thinking about men and women at that time. How can one be a woman and not feel angry at the blatant, deep, random misogyny embedded in everything around us? How can one deny the dissonance?

Sometimes that anger will be misdirected at the lover. We will fight with father and brothers and friends because we are angry

and sometimes we feel helpless.

And they are there. Don’t take it personally, I was saying in my head to my husband.

The thought came back to me at the bus stop. Between Aliza and me. Love means letting her be angry. Her anger is important.

Don’t let your parental agitation push her to fear her own feelings.

Adult life can be so tough.

Bringing ourselves up, as we raise our children along the side. How do we know, in everyday life, whether we are winning or losing?

After all, one could be doing one thing and feeling the other.

We can begin to find out by talking, by sharing, by putting it out there. We can help validate feelings and choices that ring true to us, even when they don’t have high cultural and peer approval ratings.

For now, I said to myself, think of Aliza as a child in distress. Just comfort her. Say sorry, so she knows that things can be mended. The power to clear her confusion is inside her. When she trusts me, she will trust herself. With that self, she will change the world one day.

Meanwhile, little Naseem is at my knee right now. Your time’s up, she says. Now make a duck and colour it. I’ll help you.

I think I am in safe hands.

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, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Why Anupam Poddar collects art

A

bove art collector Anupam Poddar’s bed, hangs a Tyeb Mehta painting. It is perhaps the only sedate, if beautiful, objet d’art in his home. Opposite the bed, occupying half the bedroom floor, is a low-slung Sakshi

Gupta metal sculpture that rises up and down, as if the earth were breathing. In the centre of Poddar’s spacious dressing room is an elongated, mechanical penis that moves forward and backward—a whimsical work by Sudarshan Shetty, whose hammers and moving tables have taken over the living room. Across his long dining table is a sculpture made of human bones by Anita Dube.

The walls of Poddar’s study are plastered with red plates by Pakistani artist Rashid Rana, all depicting rotting meat. Poddar says that they look like landscapes or nudes. I hate them. The other painting in the room—Vivan Sundaram’s ode to Bhupen Khakhar—is much nicer. But nice really is not what Poddar is about. He collects edgy, risky, offbeat pieces by artists whom the world will hear a lot about.

“So we have rotting meat and human bones in this vegetarian household,” says Poddar, as he walks me through the sprawling multi-family compound in Gurgaon that he shares with his parents, Lekha and Ranjan Poddar, who live in the downstairs wing; and his brother, who lives across the undulating lawn.

Poddar, who is industrialist G.P. Birla’s maternal grandson, changes the art in his home once every year, or two. What I am seeing is a small portion of his vast contemporary art

collection, much of which is in storage or travelling with exhibitions.

Poddar, 37, is arguably Indian contemporary art’s most important collector and I am here at his home to figure out what his game is. Is he a hard-nosed businessman, a market maker or a romantic who likes contemporary art and has the wealth to indulge in it? The easy answer would be to say that he is all of the above, which he is. But what is his fundamental impulse—that’s what I am after.

Delhi collectors will tell you that Poddar is a market maker. “Anupam Poddar will buy works he loves, but he will make sure the artists in his stable are rising stars. No, scratch that. He will make their stars rise,” says one Delhi art maven, suggesting Machiavellian manipulation. Many of the young designers and artists Poddar and his mother discovered are now marquee names in the art and design world. Is that a coincidence or is it because the Poddars ensured that their protégés would succeed?

I ask Poddar if he thinks there is manipulation in the Indian art market, where a small group of influential collectors buy a work and bid it up at auctions so that the value of their collections increases. “Absolutely,” he says. “But it’s the same all over the world. Art is not regulated; pricing is ambiguous. A lot of it has to do with perception—whether it is created;

whether it is false; whether it is built up, almost like a brand.”

Art isn’t a brand, but today’s art world has started treating it as such.

Yet, there is a fundamental discomfort about this collision of the artistic and commercial worlds. This is the reason I would even ask the question: Is Anupam Poddar for real or is he is a fake? Had Poddar been a Mittal, you’d expect him to buy a portfolio or company that will triple in value; you’d expect him to have only commercial interests at heart. Art is different.

Underneath all the crap and the hype, underneath the publicity machines and the gallery openings, underneath the rigged auctions and the rabid collectors, art is pure, noble even. It is the human species’ most ancient and necessary impulse. Witness the Ajanta and Ellora cave paintings or the pre-Columbian sculptures. Hordes of cave people beautifying their dwellings for no other reason save to express themselves. Art springs from this romantic world view.

As an artist, you may be associated with the most commercial galleries in the world; you may have morphed into a market-savvy sculptor who knows how to play the game and speak the jargon. But in the beginning, before the galleries and attention, you were a lone, struggling artist, trying to make visual sense of your world. This then is the fundamental tension of the current art world. We expect our artists to be “successful” in commercial terms but we also want them to be “pure” and free of commercial desires. We hold artists to a different standard than we hold, say, a private equity player. We hold the people associated with the art world to be somehow more real.

The stocky, bearded man with a self-designed shirt standing in front of me seems real enough. He seems to

have a real connect with his works and the artists. He tells me stories about them: why Dube used human bones, for instance. Even though I ask him the same question many different ways, Poddar maintains that art is not an “investment” for him. “Nothing here is easily collectible,” he says, waving at the banging, clanging, moving Shetty “circus” around him.

Poddar has expanded his horizons.

In the guest bedroom is burqa art; works by Iranian artist Sarah Rahbar; and Kirti Arora’s photographs of female soldiers. There are small works

by Sreshta Premnath, Ayaz Jokhio, Zarina Hashmi and Baptist Coelho, all of which, he hopes, will end up in an Asian art collection that he is accumulating. “I’ve spent the last decade and a half of my life being broke because I’ve spent all my money on art,” he says. Well, depends on what your definition of broke is.

Poddar has slowed down now. He has become cautious. He now views

work in the context of whether it will fit into the Devi Art Foundation that he has founded. After a couple of hours, I’ve figured out his game; or so I think.

It isn’t money; it is the oldest human instinct: legacy. Anupam Poddar collects art not to multiply his wealth, although that is a collateral benefit. He sees it as a springboard to the eternal.

He is, in that sense, an Asian Saatchi.

Here is a clue to what Poddar might do in the future. Last year, Charles Saatchi donated much of his collection to the British public.

Shoba Narayan likes Alwar Balasubramaniam’s camphor sculpture and Mithu Sen’s Love Letter project, because they are ephemeral rather than eternal. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Connoisseur: At Anupam Poddar’s study in his farm in Gurgaon, with Rashid Rana’s work depicting rotting flesh; and (top) Sudarshan Shetty’s The Party is Elsewhere is part of the collection at Poddar’s Gurgaon farm.

L6 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT

A running leap back to the future?

I

KERSTIN WINTERKAMP/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

am at a sold out 10km run in Central Park, New

York. I am not sure what I am doing here as I can barely run for 5 minutes before I run out of breath.

But this is a special race—the Boomer’s Cystic Fibrosis Run to Breathe 10K—and among the

5,000-plus participants there are some with the deadly lung disease. My family—they are running too—has talked me into this by pointing out that if people with serious health problems can do it then a relatively healthy woman like me can too. I have trained erratically for a couple of months and the best I have done so far is a walk-run mishmash of 9km. As I stand among the throng of runners—a numbered bib on my T-shirt, a timing chip on my shoe—I worry if I will finish. Then I look around and see the girl beside me getting ready with a puff from an inhaler. There are others with a tube going past their nose.

I feel humbled. And inspired.

I am happy to report that I completed the race, a small miracle for me. So many pictures flash through my head—the lush green beauty of Central Park, the amazing assortment of people of all ages and ability, the elderly guy who I locked on to and followed faithfully to the end, the misting stations that drenched me with a cooling spray, the uphill portions where I struggled with dangerous thoughts of giving up, the mysterious biker in black who looked me in the eye and said “remember to finish strong”, and you know what, from God alone knows where, I found a final burst of energy and did just that.

The experience got me wondering what it is that makes people of all ages and ability run. The obvious reasons of weight loss, better health, great exercise, I get those, but there are plenty of other

ways to achieve those objectives. What is the “nicotine” in running that gets people hooked? What makes ordinary people run 42km marathons?

As I looked around for answers, what surprised me was that “running” itself is becoming a global phenomenon, with millions of new people taking to their feet. Take marathons. In the US, over half a million people finished a marathon in 2010, and an amazing 13 million finished some sort of road race.

The New York Marathon, the big daddy on every runner’s wish list, had nearly 45,000 finishers in 2010, up from 38,000 a couple of years ago. 2010 may well be the year when marathons reached tipping point—London, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, all these marathons had 30,000-plus finishers for the first time.

The demand is intense—the 2011 Boston Marathon (the “luxury brand” of marathons, you have to pre-qualify) sold out in 8 hours.

In India too, running is gathering momentum. Rahul Verghese, a compulsive marathoner (he has done 36 so far), and founder of Running and Living Infotainment, estimates urban India has 300,000 runners, up from 10,000 a decade ago. The 2011 Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon—which includes a half-marathon and a 7km run—drew 38,000-plus runners.

I talked to a few runners to understand why they run. Take Penny Minges, who started running in 2007, did the Cincinnati marathon in 2008, San Diego in 2009, New York in 2010,

It’s evolutionary: The answer to the growing popularity of marathons could lie in evolutionary biology.

Vancouver in 2011, and then with her son Ben, did the Gobi March—a seven-day, 250km, self-supported (you carry your own supplies) race in the desert with temperatures rising up to 54 degrees Celsius. Phew!

Why running? The excitement in her voice is palpable, and the reasons come tumbling out, but it finally boils down to two things: “the challenge” and “how it makes you feel”. Explain? It is about setting a goal and pushing yourself really hard to accomplish it. Then there’s the flood of running-induced endorphins and that seems to create a special feeling. “You feel awake, clear-minded, and charged up—you may be physically tired and spent, but it’s so exhilarating, it just feels so positive,” she says. “Even the pain feels good!” It must, because Penny did the Gobi March despite a stress fracture on her foot on Day 3.

Incidentally, what she is describing is known as “runner’s high” and recent scientific research backs it.

Why Gobi? “It was a celebration of where we were in life,” she says. She had turned 50, Ben had just graduated from college, and they wanted something special to mark it. I ask Ben what it was like? “It feels amazing—you realize you

can do anything in life.” That’s pretty deep—how many young people get to start life with that realization?

Hedda Fung—she is so petite, you wonder where she finds the energy—started running in 2009 to improve her cholesterol score (which got sorted in six months) and then simply kept running till she did the 2010 New York marathon, and 2011 Tokyo one.

“You can’t imagine where your limit is,” she says, recalling her first day when she could only do one kilometre.

“Personal challenge” and that heady “runner’s high” are compelling, but there may be a third, more primal reason that makes us run long distances.

Research by evolutionary biologists Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman shows that humans evolved some two million years ago into “endurance runners”. Our speed may be slower, but on extremely long stretches we can outrun almost any animal (since 1980, Wales has hosted a Man versus Horse Marathon, and believe it or not, a couple of times man has won over horse). Our ancestors were after protein, and that meant running the prey down to exhaustion. Bramble and Leiberman studied fossils which show that our

bodies evolved and adapted to help us run better—these adaptations included the Achilles tendon (absent in Australopithecus), the arch of the foot (evolved with Homo habilis), long legs (first appeared with Homo erectus), the ability to balance our head, and even our relatively generous behind (compared with the ape’s flat one) which helps us balance on the run.

I wonder if this recent boom in distance running is a back-to-the-future phenomenon, and hordes of human beings are simply following their evolutionary script. So go ahead, put on your running shoes, and do what you were born to do.

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

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

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

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

BAKLAVA BRAINWAVE

O

ne of the burning questions sparked by my recent holiday in Greece was: “Why didn’t the Mughals bring baklava to India?”

Perplexing—because they certainly weren’t shy in imposing most of their favourite foods like biryani, kofte, kebabs and korma.

Also, baklava suits the Indian palate well—it’s totally vegetarian, has the same tooth-achingly sweet nature as many Indian sweets and uses ingredients readily available here.

I suspect one reason might be that all that syrupy, nutty sweetness is held together with layers of phyllo pastry which requires practice and skill to make (although, in fact, most home cooks in Greece, Turkey, Lebanon and Iran would use bought pastry for their baklava).

Happily, ready-made phyllo is now available at specialist grocers in India too, which means it’s high time the baklava had an Indian incarnation. For my filling I decided chironji might be a fitting alternative to the traditional walnut. It’s a wonderful little nut, no bigger than a lentil, which I first discovered during a trip to Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, where the 100-year-old Chowdhari Mishthan Bhandar makes a unique chironji ki barfi. I also added some jaggery to the mix, spiced up the syrup with cardamom and brushed every layer of pastry with ghee.

Working with phyllo pastry requires a little care—the sheets are transparently thin and tear easily. They also dry out quickly—another good reason to get on and make them now while our kitchens are still humid.

If I say it myself, my Indian baklava was a triumph. In fact, it was so outrageously decadent and addictive I could hardly bear to pass it round. And perhaps there’s the answer to my question. The Mughals brought baklava all right, their saddlebags were probably crammed full of the stuff—but strictly for personal consumption.

Chironji and Cardamom Baklava Makes approximately 24 Ingredients For the baklava 1 pack of ready-made phyllo pastry—375g, about 18 sheets 100g chironji 150g skinned almonds, chopped (or briefly blitzed in a grinder) to about the same size as the chironji nuts 2 tsp cinnamon, ground 2 tbsp powdered jaggery 125g melted unsalted butter or ghee (the Greeks also use a lot of clarified butter in their cooking) 24 whole cloves for decoration For the syrup 350g granulated sugar 2 tbsp honey

Juice and zest of 1-2 lemons—be careful not to add any of the white pith which will make the syrup bitter 6 cardamom pods, crushed lightly to open them 2 cinnamon sticks 300ml water Method Make sure to prepare all the ingredients for the baklava before you start—assembling the baklava needs to be done as quickly as possible.

Brush the inside of a baking tin approximately 20x30cm with the melted butter. Mix the chopped chironji and almonds with the cinnamon and jaggery.

Unwrap the phyllo pastry and lay the sheets flat on the work surface. Cut the pile of sheets to fit the tin, then cover with a clean tea towel. Take one sheet of the phyllo and lay it carefully in the tin. Brush all over the pastry with melted butter/ghee.

Do this until you have seven buttered sheets lying on top of each other in the tin.

Sprinkle half the nut mixture evenly on top of the pastry layers.

Lay four more sheets of phyllo, buttering each one, then sprinkle the remainder of the nuts.

Finish by covering with seven more sheets of buttered phyllo.

Don’t be tempted to reduce the amount of butter—not only will you be cheating yourself of the full buttery, syrup impact of baklava, but the butter crisps the layers of pastry.

Brush the surface with butter, then cut through the top few

Layer it up: (clockwise from left) The baklava is the rare exception that the Mughals did not bring with them; for a desi touch, replace walnut with chironji; and the sugar syrup infused with cinna­ mon and cardamom makes the pastry irresistible.

layers into roughly 5cm diamond shapes. Put a clove into the centre of each diamond.

Bake for about 25 minutes until the baklava is golden brown. Phyllo pastry burns easily so keep an eye on it. In my electric oven, which has optional top and bottom elements, I bake the baklava for 20 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius with only the bottom element, then switch on the top element for the last 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the syrup. Put the sugar, honey, lemon zest and juice,

cardamom and cinnamon into a pan. Add the water and heat until the sugar has dissolved.

Boil for about 5 minutes until it has thickened slightly, then turn off the heat. Leave to steep for about 5 minutes, then strain off the lemon zest, cardamom and cinnamon.

When the baklava is baked, take it out of the oven and while

still warm, pour over half of the warm syrup. Let it soak in, then pour over the other half. The nutty, lemony, syrupy, cardamom-y smells will be impossible to resist, but try to wait until the baklava has cooled before eating.

The baklava keeps well for at least a week in a tin (or saddlebag) although it’s unlikely to survive more than a day’s compulsive nibbling.

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 video on how to bake baklavas, visit www.livemint.com/baklava.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

L7

Style

LOUNGE PICKS

t Seashell pendant: Lemon­yellow blossom pendant, by Salonee Gadgil, at Attic, 5/5, Grants Building, opposite Café Basilico, Colaba, Mumbai; and www.shopo.in, `1,200.

Not a gem!

Put away the rubies and emeralds, glam up with shells, coins, nibs—even Lego trinkets B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

····························

u Earrings: Knotted rubber­band earrings, The Other Side by Purvi Sanghvi, at theotherside@ purvisanghvi.com, `1,050.

q Nibs necklace: Gold­plated steel nibs necklace, The Other Side by Purvi Sanghvi, at theotherside@ purvisanghvi.com, `5,400.

u Crochet earrings: At O Layla, 21, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, `550. u Varanasi earrings: By Daksha Gowda, at O Layla, 21, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi; On My Own, Waterfield Road, Bandra (West), Mumbai; The Orange Bicycle, Indiranagar, Bangalore; and www.shopo.in, `375.

t Coin earrings: Two­anna pre­independence coin earrings, by Puja Bhargava, at www.facebook. com/laionline, `2,150.

p Pendant: Window­seat Lego pendant, by Tania Fadte, at taniafadte@gmail.com, `1,500.

q Necklace: Entwined wool neckpiece by Amrita Hans, at Malini Ramani, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Ensemble, Great Western Building, Churchgate, Mumbai; and F Folio, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `5,200.

u Snowflake necklace: Brass metal frame and handcrafted polymer clay necklace, by Ruchi Mohindra, at www.etsy.com/shop/Floreal, $34 (around `1,530).

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR, ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY AND D IVYA B ABU/M INT

Q&A | GIORGIO GALLI

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Big is better The head of Timex design tells us why you must own an orange watch this fall B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· iorgio Galli, head, Global Design Centre, Timex Group, says Indian youth are great potential customers; this is the customer base he is out to tap with new collections dedicated to the youth of India.

As a designer, Galli says, regular feedback from the marketing department is important for him, more so in a country like India which follows no set rules. International designs cannot always be replicated successfully here and he has to keep this in mind—for it’s the second largest market for Timex. The designer for eight brands for the group, including Versace, Ferragamo and Helix, who was in India recently, tells us how he intends to tap the youth base. Edited excerpts from an interview:

G

What do Indian youth want in their watches? Is it different from international trends?

It usually depends on how the buying decision is made, and that is different in India. Young people here are aware of what is happening around them. In other countries, young people want to experiment with just shape; here youngsters tend to be more aggressive—they want larger, different proportions, colours. Our approach towards this has been to focus more on the introduction of colours.

Internationally, colourful watches are strong. In India, this trend is just starting. Straps, dials, everything in colour. At Timex this will be a great differentiator for us. Indians, however, do not like digital watches, which do well internationally.

Which colours are in vogue now? Do men and women pre-

Time code: (extreme left) Galli wants to reach out to Indian youth; and colour is a must, whether it’s brands like Helix (left) or Versace. fer different colours?

Orange and black combined is huge; green and yellow together is a strong colour palette. Colour choices depend on the sex of the buyer too. Female buyers, in addition to white, which is the top colour, are opting for purple nowadays.

We find colour is a fresh approach towards reaching out to our customer in India. It is different from what our nearest competitor Fastrack is doing.

Are watches going to get slimmer and smaller?

People like chunky, bulky watches actually. In the last few years, the tendency had been to opt for larger dials so that they can show off these watches. But nowadays, while watches for women are getting bigger and wider, for men, watches are getting slimmer. So, in reality, the sizes are getting much closer for both sexes.

The watch is no longer a

utility item. It is a fashion accessory. Does that point of view dictate the way you design watches?

Yes, it does, but it also depends on which segment of society one is designing for. In the mass market, people still buy a watch to tell the time and when we design for them we have to keep that aspect in mind. As the watches get more and more expensive, the watch becomes a pure accessory. It is

no longer a time-telling device.

It must have more functions, and usage interfaces become important. Most (people) who can afford these watches may not even end up using these functions but they want them because it makes the watch look nice or different.

What is the hottest trend in watches this fall?

Colour is big. Also black toneon-tone (different plating) is a strong trend.

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

ANOOP PRAKASH

Man behind the machine The managing director of Harley­Davidson India on being a US Marine, and the next step for the iconic bike maker in the country

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

···························· n a steamy August afternoon in New Delhi, Anoop Prakash, managing director of Harley-Davidson India, allows himself the luxury of a cold glass of Stella Artois beer in the middle of a working day. Prakash, 38, is wearing blue denims and a shirt that has the Harley legend emblazoned across the chest. He’s 15 minutes early for an interview he kindly consented to do at less than 24 hours notice.

Perhaps this promptness comes from his years as an officer in the US Marine Corps, where he was once deployed to Kosovo at a day’s notice. “Check your weapons and gear, take care of your affairs as well as you can and get on to a C-130 to Kosovo,” Prakash recalls. “We had no idea what the briefing was, or how long we would be there.

Even though that’s what we are trained for, it was still crazy going through it.”

Clearly, the maker of such formidable and iconic bikes as the Fat Boy and the Iron 883 needed an equally formidable man to push through its ambitious plans for India.

“I’ve always been interested in places of excellence, and the excellence you see in the Marines is second to none,” Prakash says. “So it was a personal challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it. Joining Harley was no different, and bringing Harley to India was no small job. I felt like I could make a difference.”

That bit about excellence is neither an empty boast, nor an exaggeration—Prakash, whose parents emigrated to the US in 1968, went to Stanford University as an undergraduate, and to Harvard Business School for an MBA after his stint with the

O

Marines. He was a consultant with McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s leading management consulting firms, from 2001-03 and worked as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of housing in 2008-09, the final year of the George W. Bush administration, a time when the US government was trying to recover from a spectacular housing crash.

In 2009, after his stint with the government, his classmate from Harvard told him Harley was looking for the right man to head its operations in India.

“I was a perfect fit,” Prakash says. “I had this affinity for coming to India, and I have a background in strategy, business development and government affairs—which is exactly what you need when you are setting up a business in a new place.”

Harley-Davidson, in fact, opened the door to the recent spurt in high-end bikes in India. In the past three years, Honda, Yamaha, Ducati, Aprilia, BMW, Triumph, and every major bike manufacturer in the world has entered the Indian market. And Harley’s story begins with mangoes.

In 2007, the Union government decided to lift emission norms on over 800 cc bikes to allow Harley-Davidson (their bikes are all over 800 cc) into India, in exchange for the export of Indian mangoes to the US. This also paved the way for other superbike manufacturers to bring in their high-end 1,000 cc-and-over bikes into India.

“Harley had planned to be in India since early 2005,” Prakash says. “So it’s not a reactionary strategy to the economy, this was long-term thinking.”

India also has the distinction of being the first country Harley entered as a fully owned subsid-

iary, offering the full range of bikes—in all other international markets, distributors were put into place first.

“What we’ve done, along with some of the premium car makers, is brought this idea of lifestyle in the automotive industry—a sense of leisure and adventure—and I think it’s only now that the idea is truly taking shape,” Prakash says.

Last year, Harley sold 250 bikes in India (they started taking orders in April 2010), all imported at 110% duty paid on cost price. Their cheapest bike is `5.5 lakh, the costliest, `34.95 lakh.

In January, the bike maker took the next leap in the Indian market, opening an assembly plant in Bawal, Haryana, bringing into effect the complete knock down (CKD) policy, where the parts are imported into India at 30% import duty and then reassembled, bringing down the price of the cheapest bike to `5.5 lakh. At present, the assembly plant, which is only the second such factory Harley has

set up outside the US (after Brazil), produces three of Harley’s Sportster models—the Iron 883, the SuperLow and the 48—and over 250 bikes from the plant have already been delivered.

Though Harley refused to divulge sales figures for 2011, data collected by Mint from four of the company’s five dealers shows that the company has sold around 1,200 bikes so far.

“There’s a six-month wait for the SuperLow right now, and a three-month wait for the Iron,” Prakash says. “The orders are coming in much quicker than we can make them.”

It is easy to understand Harley’s focus on India: It is the second largest market for motorcycles after China, and has seen robust economic growth in the last few years. And Harley is pulling out all the stops: Unlike most bike makers, it allows customers to test-ride the entire range of Harley bikes, and have access to the full range of accessories and customized parts that a customer in the US can buy.

Harley dealers in India organize customers into the Harley Owners Group (HOGS) that goes for weekend rides together; and there’s an annual rock tour featuring popular Indian bands.

“We are still learning what customers here want, and we are developing customization kits,” says Prakash.

“If customers are looking for Harley engines to work with and create their own cus-

tom bikes, we’ll help them. It’s what people have done with Harleys forever—they’ve taken the V-twin engine, arguably the best heavyweight motorcycle engine in the world, and built their bikes around it—and that’s what we would like to see happen here. It would be the next step.”

Prakash himself does not own a bike, and never has. “I have a fleet of 20 to choose from in my office here, so I really don’t need to buy one,” he says.

Outside work, Prakash and his wife Gita, who have been married for 10 years and have two daughters, are devoted to good food. Both Gita, who is on the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, US, and is doing research in India, and Prakash inherited their love for food from their parents. Prakash learnt cooking from his father, and when Gita’s father was introduced to Prakash, he took the young couple to a traditional sushi restaurant in California.

“I felt that he was testing my mettle through food,” Prakash says. “I knew from then on that food will play an important role in our relationship!”

When the couple go on holiday, they plan their itinerary around meals. Their favourite culinary holiday was in Madrid, Spain, around five years ago, and they swear by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s book Culinary Artistry, which focuses on flavour combinations.

“At home we cook in a lot with our children,” says Prakash.

“Now in India you can increasingly get access to really good organic produce.”

How does the former Marine balance his fitness with his love for gourmet food?

“Well…I was in the Marines 12 years and 12 pounds ago,” he says sheepishly.

IN PARENTHESIS In 1997, Prakash was stationed on a ship off Romania with the US Marines, and Gita was doing research in the Philippines. They had not spoken to each other for nearly two months. One day, Prakash called her from a pay phone. “Gita was in a remote part of Philippines and she did not have a phone, so I had to call a neighbour. The neighbour tells me, ‘Wait, I’ll go look for her’. There I was, in a booth, listening to the roosters crow at the other end of the line, waiting for 45 minutes!

Finally, she came on line and we chatted for 10 minutes—I had a $600 (around `27,600 now) bill for that call! But my greatest accomplishment is getting a dozen roses delivered to her in that village, using a computer with a dial­up connection on board my ship.”

Hot wheels: Prakash says Harley is getting a lot of customer feedback so they can tweak their bikes to make them more relevant to the Indian market.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

L9

Play

LOUNGE GAME REVIEW | DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION

The thinking man’s shooter In 2000, ‘Deus Ex’ was well ahead of its time. ‘Human Revolution’ is a love letter to the original, in gameplay and atmosphere B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· he recently released Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the prequel to the original Deus Ex made in 2000 by Ion Storm. Set in 2027 in a future where mechanical augmentations—cybernetic implants—are at the centre of a fierce debate about transhumanism. Themes of hubris, of humanity exceeding its grasp, and of conspiracies by corporations remain a large part of the story, and Daedalus and Icarus are referenced directly to drive home the theme.

The story of the original Deus Ex follows almost 25 years after Human Revolution, in a world where nanomachine implants can turn people into perfect assassins or soldiers. Unlike the other shooters of its time, such as Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike, Deus Ex was a slow-paced game, with the player more likely to rely on stealth, rather than force to stay alive.

The game also

T

introduced the concept of roleplaying to shooting games—you didn’t just shoot everything that moved. Instead, you were solving mysteries, breaking into computers and reading files to save the world. Everything that you did properly—a good kill, a successfully hacked computer, or entering a secure area without being detected—earned “experience” that could be traded in to improve your implants, letting you run quietly, punch through walls and hack computers with your mind.

Human Revolution stays true to the formula, but has gained elements from other games too.

Stealth and exploration still keep you alive and your interactions with others will have

an impact on the way the game plays out. At the same time, the cover system that allows you to hide from guards, and the inventory system for weapons have been improved in many small ways. The biggest change is the addition of regenerating health. Why a cyborg from 2027 can heal itself but one from 2052 can’t is not addressed, but it does improve the flow of the game tremendously.

Exploring rooftops and air vents to avoid guards is a good idea, but players who like a little violence will not be disappointed—there are times when a shooting solution is the only way forward, and Human Revolution handles the gunplay well. The weapons are varied and the audio puts you in the action. Running out of ammunition though—particularly if you’d decided to carry a tranquillizer rifle—is a real risk, and smart players will keep their gunfights to a minimum.

While the writing and gameplay of the original Deus Ex won a lot of praise—rightly so—the same could not be said for the graphics.

They looked terrible even for 2000, and the long trenchcoats

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is available on the Xbox 360, PS3 for `2,499, and on PC for `999.

Sorting the DNA of books Finding the math behind taste so computers can help you pick books B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· never recommend books—it takes a shamanistic insight to know what makes a person pick one book over another. The team of the Book Genome Project believes that a computer can do what many people are no good at, by analysing the building blocks, or DNA, of a book.

Started eight years ago in 2003 as a University of Idaho project of Aaron Stanton’s, founder and CEO of Booklamp, the Book Genome Project analyses books and discovers the different elements of writing in them. The public face of the project, Booklamp.org, launched on 15 August after two years of beta testing. The

I

team scans books acquired through ties with publishers for language, character and theme, to form links between them.

Stanton told Mint about the project on email, talking about the elements of analysis, the “DNA” and “RNA” of books. He writes, “We look at both the story, that is the thematic elements, and the language, things like the pacing, dialogue and descriptive lines in the story.”

The goal is to help readers find new books of their choice more effectively than possible through either their buying history or recommendations from friends—because “how many people will be able to recommend thousands of books across all genres”.

Right now, Booklamp makes recommendations based on a database of just around 20,000 books, so they are not always useful, but this “will get better as we get more books into the database”, says Stanton.

“The database itself comes

from our connections with our ‘content providers’—publishers that have agreed to provide us with content for analysis,” he says.

So what goes into a book, according to the Book Genome Project?

The two components, language and story, are divided into sub-categories. “Language is made up of pacing, perspective, description, density, motion, and dialogue. Pacing refers to the way paragraphs are broken down, and a scene with high pacing will be one where the reader’s eye moves down quickly. Motion has to do with physical motion, action in the book,” says Stanton, “and is about the technical aspects of an author’s writing style. There is also story DNA, the thematic content of a book.

There are more than 2,000 thematic elements that are all measured and categorized.”

Booklamp is able to track elements in books that readers might not have noticed actively,

everyone wore made the game look like a bad Matrix costume party. Talking to other people in the game was particularly appalling, with needless close-ups of badly made faces.

Deus Ex looked a generation behind its contemporaries, only mildly ahead of fellow noir sci-fi video-game classic Beneath a Steel Sky, which released in 1994.

There was also terrible electronic music that created noise, instead of atmosphere. Deus Ex was ahead of its time in concept and gameplay, but its graphics and audio were outdated when it released.

On the other hand, Human Revolution will have no difficulty fitting into the landscape of video games in 2011. The game looks polished and the character designs are (mostly) excellent.

Eschewing the sepia palette that defines modern first person shooters, Human Revolution has lush tone.

The sound design for the background music is still a hit and miss affair but the work on the guards and weapon sounds has been done thoughtfully. It’s easy to feel the difference between firing a tranquillizer dart and live ammu-

nition; you can also hear footsteps fade away, or the click and whirr of a security camera.

In 2000, Deus Ex introduced a branching, non-linear narrative.

All your actions had consequences that could affect your game right away, or hours later.

These decisions were organic, not the “save this orphan’s puppy, or shoot the orphan instead” good/ evil choices that many games offer even now.

With Human Revolution, they continue down this path, and tie in the “pillars of gameplay”, stealth, conversation, hacking and combat, with each affecting the other.

It’s not without its flaws. A major aspect of a shooter is the enemy AI—artificial intelligence—and in a stealth game, this is particularly important to provide the right amount of tension and momentum. This is one area where the flaws in the game become apparent. You can easily turn a tense hostage crisis into a farce with little or no effort.

All you need to do is stand in an open doorway and shoot the nearest enemy, then shut the door. All the guards will gather around the other side of the door and shout, “We lost him! Where did he go!

Look for him there!” and mill around for a while, before walking off, confused. A dozen bodies in a heap just outside the door are no clue either, apparently.

That is an extreme example, of

course, but there are also some baffling level design decisions, such as placing guards who are looking in exactly the wrong direction to guard their target.

This breaks the suspension of disbelief for an otherwise excellent game—it’s clear that the only reason the guard is facing that direction is because a designer wanted to make things easier for the player. But considering that a guard is easy to distract, with a cleverly thrown cardboard box, magazine, trash can or anything else really, why not make him face a direction that would be more realistic?

Despite these flaws, Deus Ex: Human Revolution remains one of the best video games this year. It’s not a flawless shooter, but rather an ambitious game that has set out to do more than others in the genre. Where it falls short is glaring because of how well the rest of the game is executed. Above all, it shares many of the qualities that made the original Deus Ex such an excellent game.

Human Revolution comes at a time when thanks to games like Mass Effect 2, most gamers are finally okay with the idea of managing an inventory, and talking to people for quests, even in a shooter. Given that today most shooters look generic and twitchy, it’s a relief to get a game that lets you think through your actions, and see the consequences of your decisions.

but which form part of why they like a book. “Each ingredient is measured, and each text is broken down and categorized in terms of its thematic ‘expressions’. Some books express more romance than crime, others more nature than cities.”

He adds, “Each ‘gene’ of the Story DNA is measured relative to the other genes in a given book and in relation to the dominant themes of the entire corpus.”

That sounds confusing, but using Booklamp helps understand the process. For example,

search for The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown and the results will show other books about ancient conspiracies, like The Templar Legacy, by Steve Berry.

Click “Show DNA” and you’ll see that the writing is balanced, with equal parts motion, description and dialogue, while story elements like history, religious institutions and culture are prominent, as are secrets.

You can decide which genres to make matches from, so choosing only humour, for example, shows Under the Rose, by Diana

Peterfreund, which has a similar writing style and themes like religion and mystery.

As more books are added to the database, such recommendations will become even more useful, according to Stanton.

“We make no claims to rightness,” he says, adding that Booklamp is continuing to evolve, and that the priority is to add more books. “Sometimes a suggestion is amazing—suggesting the works of Richard Bachman, a Stephen King pseudonym, when comparing against his books. At other times, the connection isn’t obvious.”

In contrast to Booklamp, personal recommendations are based on exposure to fewer books, while buying history (like Amazon) tends to mostly show other books by the same author, or at least of the same genre.

Compare this with searching for Frank Herbert’s Dune, turning off science fiction, and seeing James Clavell’s Gai-Jin. It’s an excellent match, but it’s unlikely that anyone would have thought of making the connection, and it wouldn’t have come up in any buying database either. It’s almost as if a friend who knows me well made the suggestion.

Book genealogy: Booklamp analyses story elements to recommend books.

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

SOCIETY

THE

No permanent address: (clockwise from far left) Jagannath Panda with his painting Alpha Epic, which explores migration and relocation under the tree of life; HDFC Ltd’s Keki Mistry believes the dream of owning a house lives on for the majority; Gauri Gill’s black and white photographs in Home Spun play with notions of memory; utopia under construction in Ghaziabad, near Delhi; the movers and packers industry is growing at 20% every year; and poet­musician Jeet Thayil in his New Delhi home.

Owning a home is no longer the great middle­class dream.

Exorbitant prices, get­up­and­go job opportunities and lifestyle choices have added to our general sense of uprootedness

ASHESH SHAH/MINT RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

SUITCASE INDIAN DIVYA BABU/MINT

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

···························· here are two senses of the word ‘home’. The first, in a wider sense, is where you grew up—your parents’ home, which for me always will be Bombay. The real sense of the term is well, really, in your head, isn’t it?

Home is just a movable notion,” says Jeet Thayil, a poet-musician currently exploring the theme of dislocation, uprootedness and men with no homes in his second novel, with a working title The Book of Common Saints.

Thayil has moved homes too many times to count, and seven times between continents in the last seven years. He recently made the jump from Mumbai to Delhi, “because my lease ran out and when you are moving, it is as much the same thing to move between apartments as it is to move between cities”.

Thayil is no nomad without possessions. Each time he moves, he travels with furniture, kitchen, a lifetime’s collection of books and memorabilia, ties to friends and works in progress, and takes two-three months to start life from scratch, again. “Of course, it is disruptive, disruption is stimulation. I get dissatisfied in cities where I live longer. It is not about the city, it is something in me. When my lease runs out here in Delhi, I don’t know where I will go, but I will go,” he says.

Almost as if describing a peculiar malady of this age, “Metastasis,” writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Emperor of all Maladies, “is a curious mix of ‘meta’ and ‘stasis’—‘beyond stillness’ in Latin—an unmoored, partially stable state that captures the particular instability of modernity.”

To the stable, anchored majority of Indians, this constant urge to stay in a state of self-propagating motion seems to be spreading dis-

T

ease-like among a new generation of urban wanderers who find no virtue in stability or rootedness. To them, the notion of “settling down” is anathema to their cause.

Men and women who have given up on the great Indian dream— owning a home—are dismissed as aberrations at best.

Keki Mistry, CEO and vicechairman of HDFC, Ltd calls them “a negligible phenomenon”.

Policymakers and housing experts alike would rather focus on the trends of the more predictable; those obediently buying into the dream. Yet, isn’t it always the exception—the lone cluster of abnormal cells in a routinely functioning ecosystem—that is the change maker?

According to the National Sample Survey Organisation’s 2009 survey, 29% of all Indians are migrants; the current urban migration rate being 35%. Further, the survey busts the myth that migrancy is the lot of the uneducated; the higher your education levels, the higher your propensity to migrate. According to a 2011 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, 40% of India’s population is pegged to float into its six major cities by 2030, throwing up challenges for affordable housing and for urban infrastructure. The diaspora is silently transmuting to an internal phenomenon.

Juxtapose this to a generation that broke away from joint family traditions; for whom buying your own home became the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

The home had become the safest repository their risk-averse, return-guaranteed vehicles of investment aspired to in pre-liberalized India. It was where they invested the virtues they made of success, stability and social prestige. The Khosla ka Ghosla generation that followed was stuck at the cusp, wondering why their chil-

dren were more excited by jobs that took them wandering than by their land. Evidence of this metastasis is not in economic databases alone; it is in the vacant lots of inherited multi-crore properties in cities, it is in the sociological shifts in cities, it is in the works of our cultural documentarians.

R.N. Sharma, head of the department of urban housing at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Tiss), Mumbai, has been watching the urban home dream dissolve sociologically for some time now. “We call it ‘the dissolving of belongingness’. People are relocating for jobs. Whereas once you invested your savings in a house and then built your life around it, today it has become more important to invest your value in your professional future, and build life around that. One of the reasons for this huge sociological shift is the sheer inability of the middle class to afford the huge investment required to buy a house today. As people migrate for jobs, they lose their roots. They cease to belong. When you cease to belong to a city, the need to own a home in it also dissolves.”

Themes of migration, displacement and loss of the sense of home are documented in the works of Indian artists like Subodh Gupta and Jagannath Panda, says independent curator and art critic Gayatri Sinha. Panda, who is displaying his works at the Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi and Berlin in an exhibition titled Metropolis of Mirage, says migration is a primal urge towards a new utopia. “You outgrow a home— physically or mentally—when you grow in thought and stop feeling connected with the space around you. Culturally, we live in one space, and when you see these new spaces coming up—like a Gurgaon—offering you a new economy, a new life, you reach for

it, but are not able to fully adapt to it. That gap is the desperation of this age, in which most of us exist,” he says.

Home Spun, an exhibition that opened last week at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, spans artistic responses to the notion of home. When curator Girish Shahane asked each of the 40 artists featured to define “home” for the catalogue, most caught a nomadic strain. “Home is such a vast and ever-shifting idea that I still have to find words to contain it,” says artist Sudarshan Shetty, while Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas says, “I have lived in Berlin, Islamabad, and now Massachusetts, and my Internet connection is always conveniently titled ‘Home’.”

Why the trend is changing Highways across India sport billboards featuring men in terrace jacuzzis and arrows pointing the site around the corner for “your dream home”, with prior home loan approval by a major finance company. Most of the billboards are large swathes of picturesque, albeit remote, land. Every potential flaw is sold with a spin—remote being equated with space; lack of infrastructure being greenery; and lack of proximity to a commuter terminal is disguised by multi-storeyed car parks that promise affluent neighbourhoods. Ramesh Agarwal, chairman of Agarwal Packers and Movers, one of India’s oldest relocation service providers, says: “We help 8.5 lakh people relocate every year. People once worked where they stayed and would quit if transferred. The movers and packers industry is growing at the rate of 20% every year and is expected to continue at that rate.” The emotional investment in the notion of home is being substituted by a hard-nosed practicality that has concerns other than ownership.

Terms like “lifestyle”, “tied

down”, “relocation” and “options open” are common among a new generation, says Sanjay Dutt, the Mumbai-based CEO of Jones Lang LeSalle India, a global real estate services firm. “Even 10 years ago, people’s requirements of a house were: Is there a school nearby, a temple, a hospital, how far from the station? Today, choices are driven by lifestyle. Homes are addresses.”

Given the lifestyle choices, the math needs to add up for those constantly on the move.

Anmol Choubey, 35, a general manager in a media company, has lived in Malad, north Mumbai, on rent for five years. Despite pressure from his parents and wife to “settle down”, he has no plans to buy a house in the foreseeable future. To him, it adds up. “I want a certain standard of living, certain amenities, certain kinds of people as my neighbours, certain kinds of children to play with for my son. I get that here for a rent of `20,000.

The 10% hike in rent written into my contract gets covered by an average 15-20% hike in my salary every year. To buy the same place, I’d be spending `80k as EMI on a housing loan, apart from exhausting my savings on down payments. If I try to lower my EMI, I will end up moving to a place I don’t really want to live in,” he explains. He first rented the place in Malad when he worked in that area. Today, he works in south Mumbai. “Tomorrow, I may move closer to work, or out of town, or out of the country. I don’t see why I should be tied down by a large financial commitment,” he says.

Derailing stability is the new social value attached to flexibility.

Whereas once matrimonial classifieds proudly stated “owns own flat”, today “frequently posted overseas” is a far more potent hook. Job recruiters indicate that all things being equal, a candidate’s willingness to relocate, his

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

ability to do so immediately, and his flexibility in adapting to a new location, are decisive factors.

This is also a generation for whom any potential dream of owning a home is satiated by the fact that their parents already do, and a future inheritance appeases any inherent need for ownership.

Choubey admits that his parents’ home back in Ahmedabad fulfils that need for him.

Nikhil Adke, 28, a finance executive with Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai, says a “dream home” simply makes no sense to his generation. “I change cities every eight months on average. If I get furnished accommodation, great. If I don’t, I buy furniture and sell when I move. I hope to be posted overseas shortly. My parents own a home in Belgaum, where I’m from, so I may invest in a house when I need the tax break, but how does a home matter to me?” asks Adke.

In a system already geared towards a pack-and-go lifestyle, the sheer unaffordability of a massive down payment, the volatility of constantly rising interest rates (10 times in the past year alone) and builder

bullying through delayed possession and hidden costs, is pushing those on the brink of a home-owning decision off the edge.

“Let’s face it, a dream’s a dream, but a home today is at best an investment. It is a brutal disciplinarian,” says Aaron Matthias, 32, who lived on rent for two years in Versova, Mumbai.

Today, he owns a “bloody brick window” overlooking the expanse of Aarey Colony’s green lung in Goregaon’s Mantri project.

The sense of ownership of 850 sq. ft has come at a price: “I do not remember the last time I went to a pub. I do not own a credit card. I dine out sometimes, but I do not go to a fancy restaurant. I live a simple, hermetic life,” he says.

With a `57 lakh loan, he even questions the cost of his food. To what end? “I don’t foresee myself living here 10 years from now—infrastructure, water, traffic—this is not the dream. Imagine having children in this state! I can’t even think about it,” he says.

The new diaspora What is this lack of rootedness ach-

ieving? Why should a minimal percentage of people who voluntarily wander across cities, changing jobs and homes, matter to anyone?

For one, it affects the housing industry. According to Knight Frank Economy & Realty Glance June 2011, “the Realty Index on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has dropped by more than 38% in the last year compared to a 4% increase in the Sensex... The Maharashtra state stamp and registration department data has shown a 20% decline in total property registrations for the six-month period ending June compared with the corresponding period, the previous year... residential market transaction volumes have plummeted more than 70% since its 2007 heydays.” In contrast, rental levels have been stable in spite of a spike in prices since 2007, and continue to hold steady. Economists claim that interest rate hikes being cyclical, the market evens out for “genuine buyers” in the long run.

The phenomenon also pushes up purchases in places where people don’t want to live, encouraging ghost towns. Liases

Foras CEO Pankaj Kapoor says: “Walk through new developments in Gurgaon or Goregaon—more than 60% of flats are lying vacant. High interest rates ensure those who need homes—the middle class—cannot afford them. As a result, these new markets, driven by investors and not those chasing the dream, come up without required infrastructure, which further pushes down buying. It is only when the first-home buyer drives the market that there will be a true correction in the market trend.”

Yet economists claim more and more Indians are taking home loans and investing in property; figures based on which new emerging markets pushing multi-storey apartment blocks accommodate the new India. Should it matter to economists or real estate experts why people buy, as long as they do?

“It matters deeply to the housing industry why people buy their homes,” says Mistry. But he believes it is best to take the potential impact of migrant populations with a pinch of salt: “We’ll address migrations to cities in 2035 when we come to it,” he says.

When people don’t live in the homes they buy, it becomes a speculator-driven market. It also breaks up traditional motifs of society. Mistry says that according to his database, migrants are still a small margin, and lack immediate influence. “At best, it is a dream deferred, not a dream given up on,” he says. “Until the age of 35, young people cannot afford homes, and either live on rent or with their parents, especially when their children are small. People migrating to cities like Mumbai look to make this their home for 10 years at least, if not more. I would say 95% of people live in the homes they buy. Paying EMIs just makes more sense. India remains a tra-

ditional market and buying a home remains a dream, if not for current use, then for post-retirement purposes,” he states.

Current statistics holding fort, it begs the question: How impactful can an anomalous floating population be? According to the World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report, in migration lie the answers to many of the questions plaguing development—skill development, education, unemployment, and a better quality of life.

Himanshu, assistant professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, a visiting fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and a Mint columnist, explains: “There is a cost involved with migration. It is obvious, hence, that mobility is still governed by the kind of assets people own, whether it is physical or human capital, or social status.” Ideally, he says, migration is equitable when it is a “pull migration”, where migration is caused by an attraction to the creation of opportunity, rather than a “push migration”, where people are forced to move due to lack of it.

Ironically then, the more assets you own, the easier it is for you to pack up and move.

The easier it is to let go of moorings like stability because your need for them as crutches diminishes. As India moves to a more affluent society, the more your sense of belongingness is likely to dissolve. On the ability of man to take a deep breath and let go of an anchor called home, depends all progress.

Anindita Ghose contributed to this story.

SEE RELATED STORY >Welcome home, Page 13

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

SOCIETY

THE

No permanent address: (clockwise from far left) Jagannath Panda with his painting Alpha Epic, which explores migration and relocation under the tree of life; HDFC Ltd’s Keki Mistry believes the dream of owning a house lives on for the majority; Gauri Gill’s black and white photographs in Home Spun play with notions of memory; utopia under construction in Ghaziabad, near Delhi; the movers and packers industry is growing at 20% every year; and poet­musician Jeet Thayil in his New Delhi home.

Owning a home is no longer the great middle­class dream.

Exorbitant prices, get­up­and­go job opportunities and lifestyle choices have added to our general sense of uprootedness

ASHESH SHAH/MINT RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

SUITCASE INDIAN DIVYA BABU/MINT

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

···························· here are two senses of the word ‘home’. The first, in a wider sense, is where you grew up—your parents’ home, which for me always will be Bombay. The real sense of the term is well, really, in your head, isn’t it?

Home is just a movable notion,” says Jeet Thayil, a poet-musician currently exploring the theme of dislocation, uprootedness and men with no homes in his second novel, with a working title The Book of Common Saints.

Thayil has moved homes too many times to count, and seven times between continents in the last seven years. He recently made the jump from Mumbai to Delhi, “because my lease ran out and when you are moving, it is as much the same thing to move between apartments as it is to move between cities”.

Thayil is no nomad without possessions. Each time he moves, he travels with furniture, kitchen, a lifetime’s collection of books and memorabilia, ties to friends and works in progress, and takes two-three months to start life from scratch, again. “Of course, it is disruptive, disruption is stimulation. I get dissatisfied in cities where I live longer. It is not about the city, it is something in me. When my lease runs out here in Delhi, I don’t know where I will go, but I will go,” he says.

Almost as if describing a peculiar malady of this age, “Metastasis,” writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Emperor of all Maladies, “is a curious mix of ‘meta’ and ‘stasis’—‘beyond stillness’ in Latin—an unmoored, partially stable state that captures the particular instability of modernity.”

To the stable, anchored majority of Indians, this constant urge to stay in a state of self-propagating motion seems to be spreading dis-

T

ease-like among a new generation of urban wanderers who find no virtue in stability or rootedness. To them, the notion of “settling down” is anathema to their cause.

Men and women who have given up on the great Indian dream— owning a home—are dismissed as aberrations at best.

Keki Mistry, CEO and vicechairman of HDFC, Ltd calls them “a negligible phenomenon”.

Policymakers and housing experts alike would rather focus on the trends of the more predictable; those obediently buying into the dream. Yet, isn’t it always the exception—the lone cluster of abnormal cells in a routinely functioning ecosystem—that is the change maker?

According to the National Sample Survey Organisation’s 2009 survey, 29% of all Indians are migrants; the current urban migration rate being 35%. Further, the survey busts the myth that migrancy is the lot of the uneducated; the higher your education levels, the higher your propensity to migrate. According to a 2011 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, 40% of India’s population is pegged to float into its six major cities by 2030, throwing up challenges for affordable housing and for urban infrastructure. The diaspora is silently transmuting to an internal phenomenon.

Juxtapose this to a generation that broke away from joint family traditions; for whom buying your own home became the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

The home had become the safest repository their risk-averse, return-guaranteed vehicles of investment aspired to in pre-liberalized India. It was where they invested the virtues they made of success, stability and social prestige. The Khosla ka Ghosla generation that followed was stuck at the cusp, wondering why their chil-

dren were more excited by jobs that took them wandering than by their land. Evidence of this metastasis is not in economic databases alone; it is in the vacant lots of inherited multi-crore properties in cities, it is in the sociological shifts in cities, it is in the works of our cultural documentarians.

R.N. Sharma, head of the department of urban housing at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Tiss), Mumbai, has been watching the urban home dream dissolve sociologically for some time now. “We call it ‘the dissolving of belongingness’. People are relocating for jobs. Whereas once you invested your savings in a house and then built your life around it, today it has become more important to invest your value in your professional future, and build life around that. One of the reasons for this huge sociological shift is the sheer inability of the middle class to afford the huge investment required to buy a house today. As people migrate for jobs, they lose their roots. They cease to belong. When you cease to belong to a city, the need to own a home in it also dissolves.”

Themes of migration, displacement and loss of the sense of home are documented in the works of Indian artists like Subodh Gupta and Jagannath Panda, says independent curator and art critic Gayatri Sinha. Panda, who is displaying his works at the Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi and Berlin in an exhibition titled Metropolis of Mirage, says migration is a primal urge towards a new utopia. “You outgrow a home— physically or mentally—when you grow in thought and stop feeling connected with the space around you. Culturally, we live in one space, and when you see these new spaces coming up—like a Gurgaon—offering you a new economy, a new life, you reach for

it, but are not able to fully adapt to it. That gap is the desperation of this age, in which most of us exist,” he says.

Home Spun, an exhibition that opened last week at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, spans artistic responses to the notion of home. When curator Girish Shahane asked each of the 40 artists featured to define “home” for the catalogue, most caught a nomadic strain. “Home is such a vast and ever-shifting idea that I still have to find words to contain it,” says artist Sudarshan Shetty, while Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas says, “I have lived in Berlin, Islamabad, and now Massachusetts, and my Internet connection is always conveniently titled ‘Home’.”

Why the trend is changing Highways across India sport billboards featuring men in terrace jacuzzis and arrows pointing the site around the corner for “your dream home”, with prior home loan approval by a major finance company. Most of the billboards are large swathes of picturesque, albeit remote, land. Every potential flaw is sold with a spin—remote being equated with space; lack of infrastructure being greenery; and lack of proximity to a commuter terminal is disguised by multi-storeyed car parks that promise affluent neighbourhoods. Ramesh Agarwal, chairman of Agarwal Packers and Movers, one of India’s oldest relocation service providers, says: “We help 8.5 lakh people relocate every year. People once worked where they stayed and would quit if transferred. The movers and packers industry is growing at the rate of 20% every year and is expected to continue at that rate.” The emotional investment in the notion of home is being substituted by a hard-nosed practicality that has concerns other than ownership.

Terms like “lifestyle”, “tied

down”, “relocation” and “options open” are common among a new generation, says Sanjay Dutt, the Mumbai-based CEO of Jones Lang LeSalle India, a global real estate services firm. “Even 10 years ago, people’s requirements of a house were: Is there a school nearby, a temple, a hospital, how far from the station? Today, choices are driven by lifestyle. Homes are addresses.”

Given the lifestyle choices, the math needs to add up for those constantly on the move.

Anmol Choubey, 35, a general manager in a media company, has lived in Malad, north Mumbai, on rent for five years. Despite pressure from his parents and wife to “settle down”, he has no plans to buy a house in the foreseeable future. To him, it adds up. “I want a certain standard of living, certain amenities, certain kinds of people as my neighbours, certain kinds of children to play with for my son. I get that here for a rent of `20,000.

The 10% hike in rent written into my contract gets covered by an average 15-20% hike in my salary every year. To buy the same place, I’d be spending `80k as EMI on a housing loan, apart from exhausting my savings on down payments. If I try to lower my EMI, I will end up moving to a place I don’t really want to live in,” he explains. He first rented the place in Malad when he worked in that area. Today, he works in south Mumbai. “Tomorrow, I may move closer to work, or out of town, or out of the country. I don’t see why I should be tied down by a large financial commitment,” he says.

Derailing stability is the new social value attached to flexibility.

Whereas once matrimonial classifieds proudly stated “owns own flat”, today “frequently posted overseas” is a far more potent hook. Job recruiters indicate that all things being equal, a candidate’s willingness to relocate, his

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

ability to do so immediately, and his flexibility in adapting to a new location, are decisive factors.

This is also a generation for whom any potential dream of owning a home is satiated by the fact that their parents already do, and a future inheritance appeases any inherent need for ownership.

Choubey admits that his parents’ home back in Ahmedabad fulfils that need for him.

Nikhil Adke, 28, a finance executive with Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai, says a “dream home” simply makes no sense to his generation. “I change cities every eight months on average. If I get furnished accommodation, great. If I don’t, I buy furniture and sell when I move. I hope to be posted overseas shortly. My parents own a home in Belgaum, where I’m from, so I may invest in a house when I need the tax break, but how does a home matter to me?” asks Adke.

In a system already geared towards a pack-and-go lifestyle, the sheer unaffordability of a massive down payment, the volatility of constantly rising interest rates (10 times in the past year alone) and builder

bullying through delayed possession and hidden costs, is pushing those on the brink of a home-owning decision off the edge.

“Let’s face it, a dream’s a dream, but a home today is at best an investment. It is a brutal disciplinarian,” says Aaron Matthias, 32, who lived on rent for two years in Versova, Mumbai.

Today, he owns a “bloody brick window” overlooking the expanse of Aarey Colony’s green lung in Goregaon’s Mantri project.

The sense of ownership of 850 sq. ft has come at a price: “I do not remember the last time I went to a pub. I do not own a credit card. I dine out sometimes, but I do not go to a fancy restaurant. I live a simple, hermetic life,” he says.

With a `57 lakh loan, he even questions the cost of his food. To what end? “I don’t foresee myself living here 10 years from now—infrastructure, water, traffic—this is not the dream. Imagine having children in this state! I can’t even think about it,” he says.

The new diaspora What is this lack of rootedness ach-

ieving? Why should a minimal percentage of people who voluntarily wander across cities, changing jobs and homes, matter to anyone?

For one, it affects the housing industry. According to Knight Frank Economy & Realty Glance June 2011, “the Realty Index on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has dropped by more than 38% in the last year compared to a 4% increase in the Sensex... The Maharashtra state stamp and registration department data has shown a 20% decline in total property registrations for the six-month period ending June compared with the corresponding period, the previous year... residential market transaction volumes have plummeted more than 70% since its 2007 heydays.” In contrast, rental levels have been stable in spite of a spike in prices since 2007, and continue to hold steady. Economists claim that interest rate hikes being cyclical, the market evens out for “genuine buyers” in the long run.

The phenomenon also pushes up purchases in places where people don’t want to live, encouraging ghost towns. Liases

Foras CEO Pankaj Kapoor says: “Walk through new developments in Gurgaon or Goregaon—more than 60% of flats are lying vacant. High interest rates ensure those who need homes—the middle class—cannot afford them. As a result, these new markets, driven by investors and not those chasing the dream, come up without required infrastructure, which further pushes down buying. It is only when the first-home buyer drives the market that there will be a true correction in the market trend.”

Yet economists claim more and more Indians are taking home loans and investing in property; figures based on which new emerging markets pushing multi-storey apartment blocks accommodate the new India. Should it matter to economists or real estate experts why people buy, as long as they do?

“It matters deeply to the housing industry why people buy their homes,” says Mistry. But he believes it is best to take the potential impact of migrant populations with a pinch of salt: “We’ll address migrations to cities in 2035 when we come to it,” he says.

When people don’t live in the homes they buy, it becomes a speculator-driven market. It also breaks up traditional motifs of society. Mistry says that according to his database, migrants are still a small margin, and lack immediate influence. “At best, it is a dream deferred, not a dream given up on,” he says. “Until the age of 35, young people cannot afford homes, and either live on rent or with their parents, especially when their children are small. People migrating to cities like Mumbai look to make this their home for 10 years at least, if not more. I would say 95% of people live in the homes they buy. Paying EMIs just makes more sense. India remains a tra-

ditional market and buying a home remains a dream, if not for current use, then for post-retirement purposes,” he states.

Current statistics holding fort, it begs the question: How impactful can an anomalous floating population be? According to the World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report, in migration lie the answers to many of the questions plaguing development—skill development, education, unemployment, and a better quality of life.

Himanshu, assistant professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, a visiting fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and a Mint columnist, explains: “There is a cost involved with migration. It is obvious, hence, that mobility is still governed by the kind of assets people own, whether it is physical or human capital, or social status.” Ideally, he says, migration is equitable when it is a “pull migration”, where migration is caused by an attraction to the creation of opportunity, rather than a “push migration”, where people are forced to move due to lack of it.

Ironically then, the more assets you own, the easier it is for you to pack up and move.

The easier it is to let go of moorings like stability because your need for them as crutches diminishes. As India moves to a more affluent society, the more your sense of belongingness is likely to dissolve. On the ability of man to take a deep breath and let go of an anchor called home, depends all progress.

Anindita Ghose contributed to this story.

SEE RELATED STORY >Welcome home, Page 13

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

Life Wire

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

RELATIONSHIP

BY

ASHOK DUTTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Destiny’s child Akbar lost his family as a seven­year­old, but was lucky to find a new one in Aiku Lal. Now 14, he could lose his foster father as well

Family matters: Akbar has pleaded with the court to let him stay with his foster father Aiku Lal; and (top) the pair at their tea stall outside Safed Baradari, where Lal found the boy.

B Y G AURAV S AIGAL ···························· iku Lal’s days begin at 5 in the morning. The 44-year-old slips out of bed, looks in on his sleeping son, Akbar, 14, goes out to clean his tea stall, barely 200m down the lane from their home, and prepares breakfast. At 6.30am, Akbar joins him and they share a quiet meal together. Father and son then make their way to Mumtaz Degree College, where Akbar is a student in class VII. The routine has not varied for seven years now—ever since the winter evening when Lal found a lost and lonely Akbar, sobbing on the lawns of Safed Baradari in Lucknow’s Qaiserbagh complex. Lal took in Akbar as a son and they have not lived apart since. But that could change if the boy’s birth mother, who has approached the Supreme Court, wins back custody.

Akbar was 7 when he got lost in Allahabad in 2004.

His biological father had taken him along to his drinking hole and as he proceeded to drink, the boy wandered off. Days later, Lal found him weeping a few feet away from

A

his stall outside the Baradari lawns in Lucknow. The child had no idea how he had come more than 200km from home. Lal took Akbar to the police, but since his parents had not registered any missing complaint, they could not trace his family till his mother Shahnaz Begum surfaced in 2007 to claim her son.

So far, Akbar has refused to leave his “papa”. “My mother never looked for me once I got lost. She suddenly came after several years when I am happy,” he says.

For the bachelor Lal, who had found shelter in a Muslim family when he arrived in Lucknow as an orphan 35 years ago, life has come a full circle. “I am a Hindu brought up by a Muslim, Chaudhury Mujataba Husain.”

So when all his attempts to trace Akbar’s parents failed, he took it as a message from God—to return the love and kindness he had received from the Chaudhurys. “I found Akbar under the same tree where I used to sit as a child. His hair untidy, clothes dirty and a hungry face. I tried my best to get him back to his family but as there were no complaints filed by his parents, the cops could not find any clue to their whereabouts,” he says. Nor did the advertisements he inserted in papers and on television elicit any response.

Lal grew up working in tea stalls and getting some basic lessons in Hindi and Urdu from a kindly Commu-

nist, M.M. Sharma. “I used to spend my days at a tea stall serving tea and during the night I would learn Hindi and Urdu from Sharmaji. I have forgotten all that was taught to me. The only thing I remember is the ratio of tea leaves to sugar to be put in boiling water. But this will not be my son’s fate,” says Lal. Determined to script a different fate for Akbar, he has arranged for extra tuition classes for `100 a month. “He is weak in math and science. I decided to get him to repeat class VII. He had cleared his exams but with poor marks,” says Lal, who has started selling pulao to augment his income. He earns a little more than `100 a day, but ensures that he sets aside `10 as Akbar’s daily pocket money. “So what if Akbar’s father is a street vendor, he can still provide well for his son,” Lal says.

In the by-lanes of the Qaiserbagh neighbourhood, their heartwarming tale is well-known, thanks to the court case and media attention. Neighbours and strangers proudly point out the odd pair as they go about their business. “Aiku Lal could have made Akbar help him at the shop.

Instead, he makes sure that Akbar goes to school and studies well,” says Mohammed Hasan, who runs a small shop opposite Lal’s.

In 2007, their story was featured on a local television channel. The news reached Shahnaz in Allahabad. She travelled to Lucknow to claim her son but Akbar refused to go back.

Shahnaz, now widowed, moved the Allahabad high court but could not explain why she or her husband had never approached the police. Akbar told the court he was happy living with Lal and did not wish to be sent back to his mother. In January 2008, the high court overruled Shahnaz’s contention that Lal had been exploiting the boy as a child labourer and pointed out that on the contrary, he had taken good care of the boy, enrolled him in school and had not even changed his religion.

“We are after all a secular country and the consideration of caste and creed should not be allowed to prevail. If there can be inter-caste marriages, which is not uncommon, there can also be an inter-caste father and son relationship and that need not raise eyebrows,” Justice Barkat Ali Zaidi ruled.

Shahnaz then moved the apex court challenging the verdict.

On 10 August this

year, a Supreme Court bench of Justices D.K. Jain and H.L. Dattu remarked that a mother is a child’s natural guardian but asked, “Why would we order the boy, who has now spent seven years under the good care of the person, be given back to the mother disregarding the child’s wish?” The bench added, “Let the child attain majority and himself decide the question.”

However, the apex court has also asked for details of Shahnaz’s income to ascertain if she can support Akbar since she, as a widow, is also raising two daughters by herself. Her counsel has argued that there have been instances of children being kidnapped and suggested that the court order a meeting of Shahnaz, Akbar and Lal with psychiatrists and representatives of a child welfare society to evaluate the situation.

Shahnaz has not filed any reply on income with the court till now, says Arjun Harkauli, who is the advocate for Lal in the Supreme Court.

Till the Supreme Court pronounces its final verdict, Lal and Akbar live in constant fear of separation. “I fear Shahnaz will take him away forcibly. She has already attempted it once. Three months ago, she came here with armed men but my neighbours called the police and saved us.

The policemen later assured me no one can take my son away unless the court orders,” says Lal. He doesn’t like to leave Akbar unaccompanied for too long. He walks the boy to school every morning, leaving his tea stall to be looked after by a neighbour. He is back at the school gates every afternoon, waiting to take Akbar home.

He has taught Akbar to be wary of strangers, and warned him against eating anything outside the house. “If he wants to eat a simple boiled egg, I make it. If he wants to eat a complicated mutton (dish), I cook it,” says Lal, a vegetarian, who has made it a point to learn how to make Akbar’s favourite dishes.

“I can’t pinpoint the day or the month when Akbar became my son. But once I realized our relationship, I decided not to marry.

A Hindu wife might object to mothering a Muslim child. I would not let anyone come between us or separate us.”

As the festive season rolls in, father and son are content that they have each other to celebrate the festivals with: Akbar got a set of new clothes for Eid; for Diwali, his “papa” has promised him a bagful of crackers.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

Culture

LOUNGE ART

ART WATCH

Welcome home The Devi Art Foundation’s latest exhibition is about the desire to return home—whatever that place might be B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· or the next four months, the Devi Art Foundation’s foyer will have a stack of inflatable gunny bags. A set of buttons will let you pump or deflate the contraption; a surveillance camera will scan the scene from the landing above. The Orwellian dystopia evoked by Panic Room, an interactive installation by L.N Tallur, is matched by Atul Bhalla’s collage of Mumbai drain covers—which looks, at first, like the facade of one of the city’s building complexes. You get the message: You live in a shit hole.

The Devi Art Foundation, the Gurgaon outpost for the private art collection of hoteliers Anupam and his mother Lekha Poddar, opened its latest exhibition of contemporary art on 27 August. Works by 40 artists from six countries come together in Home Spun, an

F

exhibition curated by Girish Shahane, which navigates the locational and emotional dimensions of “home”.

While most of the works are from the Poddars’ vast private collection, six artworks were brought in or commissioned especially for the show, including three from Pakistan, and one each from Oman and Iran.

On the first floor, in a gallery called The Apartment, you encounter a room in which artists such as Sudarshan Shetty satirize the mundane by turning household objects into strange artefacts.

There’s a dining table loaded with wine glasses set in an unceasing see-saw motion; a couch that bleeds; and a fruit that bites you before you can. Minam Apang’s antique typewriter produces art.

These suggest a dysfunctionality more interesting than what daily routine can offer. There is also a grounded ceiling fan by Prajakta

Potnis, covered in what appears to be white moss (fashioned with beads). It stands in for neglected objects that get layered with the memories of the person using them.

Those stuck in this rut have an outlet for fantasy, as Bani Abidi’s video with snatches of Hindi film plots, or Ranbir Kaleka’s fantastical take on a cobbler’s life, show. If the foyer is a scene from Orwell’s 1984, this is an Apartment on psychedelic drugs.

Home is a safe haven. But one that you want to escape.

Once there was utopia In his catalogue essay, Shahane writes of the dawn of the Industrial Age in West Europe and North America, when a new class of migrants moved from country to city, stripped of what is evoked when we think of home: property, sanctuary, community. Borrowing an imperial Roman term, Karl Marx labelled this class the proletariat. He suggested its members were natural revolutionaries because they had “nothing of their own to secure and fortify”, and nothing to lose but their chains.

European romanticism responded

Our picks of the show’s must­watch works

to this rupture by cultivating ideas of melancholy and nostalgia—the latter derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning “returning home”, and algos, meaning “pain”.

Iranian artist Neda Razavipour addresses this pain in the second gallery of the exhibition, referred to as The Palace. Self-Service, the most violent of the exhibits, is a collection of Persian carpets strewn on the floor. Visitors are invited to cut patches and take them home. For Iranians, says Razavipour, carpets are the first thing they bring into a new house.

“They symbolize heaven, nature, comfort and calm.”

For the exhibition documentation, each artist had to define home. “Home is always with us,” was Razavipour’s response, and she quotes from Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, in which the poet Novalis says, “Where are we really going? ...Always home!”

A more direct manifestation of this yearning to return home, the pain of self-exile as it were, is in Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perera’s Dinner PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

DEVI ART FOUNDATION

for Six. Her installation is a dinner table caught in the web of time.

The crochet and lace tablecloths of her childhood memories spin around this idealized frame like a spider would, freezing it as something to go back to.

Unlike the West, Indian workers who moved to industrialized metropolises retained strong connections with their birthplaces.

They had something to go back to. Their extended families continued to reside in the gaon or village, and they returned each year for festivals.

This is evoked most handsomely in the final gallery, across the foundation’s courtyard, which hosts large-scale works, such as Subodh Gupta’s towering cavern of cowdung cakes. My Mother and Me, as the title suggests, is a throwback to his childhood in small-town Khagaul in Bihar, when he would be sent out by his mother to get things for her daily puja: mango leaves and cow dung. Gupta now lives in Gurgaon. He doesn’t visit Khagaul often. But he will always have two homes.

My Mother and Me is also a salute to the audacity and sheer ambition of the Poddar collection.

It was created in 1997—before Gupta’s signature steel installations were in museum collections around the world—and acquired at a time when buying a temporary installation such as this was unheard of in India.

Shahane says Anupam Poddar had called him in March with the idea of an exhibition that explored the concept of home. It was on Poddar’s suggestion that he included found texts to supplement the artworks. These are art pieces in themselves, going from canonical to cult; from The Book of Genesis and Kama Sutra to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Away from home As a survey exhibition, Home Spun covers several definitions of home, from dystopic to fantastical to the “sancturial”. Atul Dodiya’s fiercely individualistic artwork, Destination, imitates rail signage but bears his name. Here, home is geography.

Pakistani artist Noor Ali Chagani creates a man shrouded by a blanket of tiny terracotta bricks, buried in his ambition for a place to call his own. Home is material desire.

Chinmoy Pramanick builds a tower of miniature wooden toy

Fantasy is escape: Anoli Perera’s Dinner for Six freezes a childhood memory; and (top) Minam Apang’s Everyone Denied the Possibility makes an antique typewriter an art object.

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

COVER VERSIONS

A

lbum covers, and the selection of images and graphics for album art, have always intrigued me. With physical sales of music in India supposedly plummeting to frighteningly low levels, it is not surprising to see unimaginative templates being used to design album art for new releases, the logic possibly being that since an album is unlikely to make significant amount of money through physical sales, why expend time, and money on creating stunning album art?

Often, established record labels have in-house design

L13

teams that put together album covers at lightning speed to meet deadlines for releases.

And yet, clichéd and unimaginative though they may be, album covers still manage to give me the giggles occasionally.

In most instances, an unrecognizable picture of the artiste occupies pride of place on the cover. In my experience, three strategies are commonly used for this art disguise. One is to commission a professional photo shoot at a studio, with a make-up artist ensuring that the artistes look nothing like

their actual real-life selves. With airbrushing and Photoshopping going where no botox or facelift can hope to reach, you have a disguise that could fool even the featured artiste!

The second strategy is to use such an unflattering picture that it would take serious attempts to identify how and from which angle the photographer could have caught a usually fairly pleasant-looking individual in such a gargoyle-like moment.

The answer could come from the economy measures often employed by record labels to tide over tough times wherein junior staff are requested to take a quick mugshot of the artiste with their personal aim-and-shoot devices.

The third strategy entails the services of an exceptionally enthusiastic member of the design team letting his or her

imagination run riot to create a “reinvented” image from an older, existing photograph. And I should know, because I have witnessed myself growing a bouffant on an album cover!

My usually staidly braided hair was made to acquire an unprecedented high dome that touched the title of the album imperiously, while I continued

strumming my tanpura happily, unaware of the disfigurement!

Another acclaimed and popular classical instrumentalist fared even better. Since he had played a melody from Rajasthan, his photograph, originally shot perhaps on a concert stage, was carefully cropped out and made to perch cross-legged, with the instrument across his lap, atop a camel amid sand dunes! With him was his tabla accompanist, with the tabla, all arranged over the camel’s hump in a merry huddle, playing away to glory as the camel lurched and swayed across the desert.

With spiritual and devotional music becoming best-sellers, religious iconography is a hot favourite on album covers.

From photographs taken at shrines to calendar art, deities adorn album covers with the featured artistes appropriately

Artworks by four artists, Neda Razavipour (Iran) and Rashid Rana, Hamra Abbas and Ali Raza (Pakistan) were brought in for ‘Home Spun’, while Manish Nai (Mumbai) and Radhika Khimji (Oman) were commissioned to create works. ..

Desperately Seeking Paradise, 2007­08 Rashid Rana’s cuboid sculpture is a play of mirrors and mirages.

Rana contrasts the micro and the macro by stacking images of homes (from Lahore) to form a virtual skyline of an imaginary city with high­rise buildings.

Eye for an Eye, 2009 A video by London­based Sonny Sanjay Vadgama of endlessly collapsing buildings. It is the Hilton Hotel in Beirut, the site of fighting in Lebanon’s civil war. It suggests that when our home is damaged, it can leave us scarred.

Untitled, 2011 Manish Nai makes an intricate wall “painting” that appears three­dimensional. It was created on site for over 15 days and comments on process and material within the idea of home. huts, resembling the Tower of Babel. Home is spiritual quest.

What the exhibition doesn’t explore fully, though, is true exile, a feeling of home-away-from-home brought about by factors beyond one’s control. In a recent show at Gallery Espace, Kolkata-based artist Paula Sengupta explored the changing notions of home that the partitions of 1947 and 1971—the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh—brought about. Though the exhibition includes a few political statements, the exclusion of the biggest events in South Asia, which tweaked the notion of “home” for millions, makes Home Spun distinctly apolitical.

Still, the exhibition is pertinent at a time when a nomadic lifestyle is increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Themes of migration and displacement are forcing us to reconsider and redefine the meaning of “home”. Shahane writes, “Nobody’s idea of home is more fixed than that of the traditional nomad.” With no static dwelling, no possessions, home for them is their habitat, which not only provides a livelihood but contains all that is most sacred to them.

Home Spun will be on view at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, till 27 December. The works are not on sale.

positioned in a lower corner of the album cover, eyes shut and hands folded in reverential prayer or meditation. Or, if the Sufi stamp adorns the album, black robes, windswept hair and a glassy look into space may be deemed more appropriate.

But for a clean and surprising departure from the usual templates, take a look at the recently released album titled Powerful Chants for Driving.

Taking centre stage is the sleek steering wheel of a car with the console in full view, monitors and buttons in full array. Ahead stretches a road across which flutters a saffron garment inscribed with Om! In between the wheel and the fluttering saffron robe, I suppose, lie the “powerful” chants for driving?

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

L14

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE

SINGAPORE

Searching for chicken rice FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/KANSK

To know Singapore is to know its food by stall number, clear soup, chilli dip and food court

B Y A BHIJIT D UTTA ···························· n Singapore, you know it’s a good place to eat when the cab driver gets off at the same hawker centre as you. Not that Chinatown’s Maxwell Road Food Centre is in want of endorsements. Local legend aside, chef Anthony Bourdain has been here, and just this May, The New York Times (NYT) featured it in a list promisingly titled “10 Restaurants Worth Leaving the Ship for”.

It is an unlikely mention. On the list are such names as Selene (Santorini) and Fiskebar (Copenhagen), names that conjure up images far removed from the reality of a Singaporean hawker centre—mildly claustrophobic food courts drenched in the combined smells of fish balls, soy sauce and steaming noodles. Maxwell pulses with the energy of its hole-in-the-wall stalls—over 70—constantly clanging woks, banging cleavers and pushing plates. Rows of roasted ducks hang by their twisted necks next to nude chickens glistening with fat, as their feet are diced, salted and cooked to deep-fried perfection. It all looks like it’s part of some exotic travel show, except the sounds, smells and food are all trying to invade your every pore. For those expecting to find the familiar clinical calm and aseptic hygiene of Singapore inside a hawker centre like Maxwell, it can all be a bit overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what you want.

I, of course, had done my research and knew exactly what I was looking for: the same stall that Bourdain drooled at and Sara Dickerman (author of the NYT article) had come in search of, the stall where celebrity chef Tetsuya Wakuda found the “best chilli sauce in the world”, the stall that evokes national pride and inflames passions in this otherwise genteel city—Stall No. 10, Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice.

For a rather frugal dish (it really is just steamed chicken served with rice cooked in the stock and chilli dip by the side), it is incredible how obsessed everyone is with chicken rice. Along with wet markets, Singlish and kopitiams (the rough equivalent of a Kolkata coffee house), chicken rice is among the few remaining Singaporean things in this country of immigrants and imports. To a question on “how to find the real Singapore”, a local friend had wisely quipped: “To know Singapore is to know its food—and what is food but the perfection of chicken rice!”

To be fair, even chicken rice traces its fragrant roots back to China, through a Hainanese immigrant named Wong Yi Guan, who arrived in this southern island in the 1920s. Wong set-

THE PERFECT CHICKEN RICE Chicken rice is really four separate dishes—the chicken, the rice, the chilli sauce and the soup—each with its own ‘perfect’ recipe The chicken: An old hen, ideally plucked off a farm, and cooked in water that has been brought to boil over hours. The magic trick is the immediate ice­water dunking it gets after it’s done—just so—in the hot water.

The rice: Fragrant, coarse rice cooked in the chicken stock along with chicken fat (crucial), pandan leaves, ginger and garlic The chilli sauce: This is what makes “Hainanese” chicken rice Singaporean, and it’s the make or break factor in serving a perfect plate of chicken rice. Freshly pounded red chillies, knobs of ginger, garlic, lime juice, salt and sugar are blended together to achieve perfection.

The soup: This is really just a vegetable, typically cabbage, soup.

Unless you have the secret Wee Nam Kee recipe, this will just be a warm watery spring onion­strewn accompaniment to the chicken rice.

I

PATRICK KENNEDY/FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/32473600@N04

TRIP PLANNER/SINGAPORE

Singapore visas must be applied for via recognized agents (visit Mfa.gov.sg for a list of agents and the visa form). Current advance return fares to Singapore’s Changi Airport on full-service airlines are: Delhi Mumbai Bangalore AirAsia R19,410 Jet Airways R26,240 R23,510 Singapore Airlines (Star Alliance) R26,300 R22,300 R26,860 Kingfisher Airlines (oneworld) R23,990 R45,280 Fares may change.

Stay

MALAYSIA Pulau Ubin WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

SINGAPORE

Plate of the matter: (clockwise from top) The Maxwell Road Food Centre in Chinatown; the famous Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice; and Khao Mun Kai, the national dish. tled down to a hawker’s life selling an adaptation of a chicken and rice dish he cooked back home. He wrapped his rice balls in banana leaves and sold them for a cent each on Hylam Street.

It seems to have worked for him, for he upgraded, moving to a kopitiam down the same road.

An attentive helper, Swee, learnt to make the same dish, only better, starting his own Swee Kee Chicken Rice stall on Middle Road. And thus Singapore’s national dish was born.

Today, Hylam Street is tucked away inside an air-conditioned mall (Bugis Junction) with faux shophouses filled with trinkets that share no history (or resemblance) with the lively Hainanese and Japanese communities that once called it their home. Swee Kee’s Chicken Rice, of course, is long gone. Stand-alone hawkers and old shophouses with marbletopped tables and straightbacked teakwood chairs have given way to the glam and glitter that characterizes Singapore.

Purvis Street’s Yet Con is perhaps the only establishment left that can claim to have retained a slice of history that Wong and Swee made. If you stay at the Raffles Hotel—another historic remnant that has tidied itself up to offer the packaged charms of colonial-era Singapore—Yet Con is literally across the street. Walk

Toa Payoh

Chinatown Jurong Semakau Island

past the chic Garibaldi (excellent Italian wines) and Gunther’s (modern French cooking) to arrive at Yet Con’s cataractcloudy glass door with faded Chinese calligraphy, collapsible gates blocking a direct view of the duck and chicken cadavers lining its shopfront.

I am the only non-local here, and I feel like I am in a scene out of a cyan-tinted movie that I saw at the Singapore National Museum—about chicken rice being a bond that bridges generations. The cashier, an ancientlooking man, seems terribly busy totalling up bills with his abacus.

My server, who looks much younger, maybe all of 70, decides I should have the chicken rice before I can order, and walks away shouting instructions to the kitchen in Mandarin.

In a few minutes I am staring at the white chicken, the champagne brown rice, the casually red chilli sauce, and the dark soy sauce. It tastes quite ordinary, or “honest and homemade” in travel-writing lingo, and I have to remind myself that 50 years ago, in a Singapore where median incomes were far far away from the current Singapore dollars (S) $2,400 (around `91,530) per month, it was indeed quite special to bring home a capon, or even better, an old hen, and have it with rice cooked in its

rich stock. Every family had its own recipes, and though none likely tasted dramatically different, each meal was sealed with the wholesome goodness of family lore and togetherness.

Chain restaurants such as Boon Tong Kee have successfully built a business model around this sentimentality. Growing from a small stall in Chinatown, it opened its first outlet in Balestier—the definitive Boon Tong Kee location—and is today the first name in casual chicken-rice dining. Any day of the week, its modern airconditioned interiors welcome locals and expats alike to try its “famous” chicken rice. In purely technical terms, Boon Tong Kee is Cantonese, not Hainanese chicken rice, but the only difference I could tell was the particular succulence of the chicken.

Chatterbox at the Mandarin Orchard takes off from where Boon Tong Kee tries to go. At S$25 a pop, this is the most expensive chicken rice you will find on the island, which in itself justifies trying it out. Being a sucker for street-side authenticity, I am bored by its non-greasy flavours and pretentious presentation, but in its defence, it does have a legion of fans who swear by its taste (and its location —the heart of Orchard Road).

My personal favourite turns out to be the Wee Nam Kee

Bedok

Do

Eat

Give hotel chains a miss and opt for Raffles Hotel, a colonial-era bungalowturned-hotel named after Sir Stamford Raffles, the father of Singapore. Rudyard Kipling once famously said, “feed at Raffles”, and everyone from Joseph Conrad to Liz Taylor has been there. And, if that’s not enough, the famous Singapore Sling was concocted right there too.

Doubles start at Singapore dollars (S) $640 (around R24,410). For a more contemporary option, consider the uber-chic Club Hotel in Ann Siang Hill. Doubles start at S$220.

If you went gambling at the Marina Bay Sands casino the previous night and want to redeem yourself, try the intellectual charms of the newly opened ArtScience museum. (http://www.marinabaysands.com/singapore-entertainment/activities/ art-science-museum/) Visit the Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay for concerts and dance performances that have taken the world by storm (www.esplanade.com).

GRAPHIC

chicken rice house in Novena. In most places, your chicken rice comes with an incidental bowl of terribly bland clear soup. Wee Nam Kee’s soup is divine and full-bodied, coursing with untold flavours. Also, the bed of sesame sauce in which the steamed chicken arrives is a welcome change from the regular light soy sauce elsewhere. The rice is visibly rich with chicken fat, which is how I am sure Wong and Swee meant it to be.

Polishing off yet another plate of chicken rice, I come to the conclusion that as Singapore sifts through its history, selectively preserving and obliterating, the continued popularity of chicken rice is really an act of resistance. Where rapidly changing demographics change the face of the city, the ability of a rice ball to get everyone to buy —and bite—into it offers hope that Singapore might yet save its soul. If that means I must order another one, so be it.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

It’s really a candy store. From the Night Safari at the zoo to the Universal Studios and Resorts World, there is enough to keep them happy.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Almost all destinations have senior­ citizen discounts, and are respectful of seniors’ needs. Most places are wheelchair­accessible, including buses.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

The statutes don’t admit this, but the LGBT scene in Singapore is among the brighter ones in the region. Bars like DYMK and Tantric in Chinatown district compare favourably with those anywhere in the world.

TRAVEL L15

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOST WORLDS

The journey of Abdur Razzaq A century after Ibn Battuta created the first Arabic travelogue, this emissary travelled to Vijayanagar

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· n the past six months, this page about old-time travel writing has focused almost exclusively on British writers of the late 18th or 19th centuries.

This was not a conscious decision, but something which arose out of convenience: There were simply more books written in that period.

Sailing technology had progressed to an extent that vast numbers of people could go to far-flung places, and literacy rates

I

were high enough to ensure that books about where they had been would find buyers.

But the years before the 18th century had travellers and explorers—and travel writing—too. Generals, missionaries or ambassadors would bring in details of the places they had visited between descriptions of military tactics or religious practices. Sometimes the person doing the writing wasn’t the one doing the travelling.

Throughout the Middle Ages, scholars would compile geogra-

phies from sailors and merchants who had explored other lands. But the prototype of the travelogue as we know it today was probably invented by the Arabs—Ibn Fadlan travelled from Baghdad to the kingdom of the Volga Bulghars, Ibn Jubayr travelled from Moorish Spain to Arabia, and Ibn Battuta had covered most of the old world in the 14th century.

Today’s book came a hundred years after Ibn Battuta’s. In 1441, Shah Rukh of Persia sent Kamalud-din Abdur Razzaq as an emis-

sary to Vijayanagar. Abdur Razzaq wrote his travels in the Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain, or The Rise of Two Auspicious Constellations and the Confluence of Two Oceans, which was translated into French—and then, in 1855, the translation was translated into English by R.H. Major. It is excerpts from this translation that follow below.

Abdur Razzaq was a reluctant traveller, who left Herat only at the order of his monarch, and who swore in his travelogue that he would never

make a voyage again.

He had his reasons—his brother died on the passage to India, and he himself was caught up in court intrigues that nearly killed him.

But his narrative is fast-paced and exciting, and his vow to stay at home once his journey was done is a loss to readers. Razzaq’s descriptions of China, or the Spice Islands, could have been great fun. Unfortunately, they were never to be.

Write to lounge@livemint.com HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

YASHI WONG/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Abdur Razzaq really does not enjoy travelling As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel, and all the terrors of the sea presented themselves before me, I fell into so deep a swoon, that for three days respiration alone indicated that life remained within me. When I came a little to myself, the merchants, who were my intimate friends, cried with one voice that the time for navigation was passed, and that every one who put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril. All, with one accord, having sacrificed the sum which they had paid for freight in the ships, abandoned their project, and after some difficulties disembarked at the port of Muscat. For myself, I quitted this city, escorted by the principal companions of my voyage, and went to a place called Kariat, where I established myself and fixed my tents, with the intention of there remaining. The merchants of the coasts designate by the word telahi (loss) the condition in which they find themselves when, having undertaken a sea voyage, they cannot accomplish it, and are obliged to stop in some other place. In consequence of the severity of pitiless weather and the adverse manifestations of a treacherous fate, my heart was crushed like glass and my soul became weary

Early traveloguing: Sturdy Arabic dhows were among the first sailing vessels to carry explorers to new lands. markets and the bazaars, without thinking in the meantime of any necessity of checking the account or of keeping watch over the goods.

The care of the elephant

of life, and my season of relaxation became excessively trying to me.

The Victorians aren’t the only ones to do racism As soon as I landed at Calicut I saw beings such as my imagination had never depicted the like of.

Extraordinary beings, who are neither men nor devils/At sight of whom the mind takes alarm/If I were to see such in my dreams/My heart would be in a

tremble for many years/I have had love passages with a beauty, whose face was like the moon; but I could never fall in love with a negress.

In the good old days, people from the Gulf would go to Kerala Calicut is a perfectly secure harbour, which, like that of Ormuz, brings together merchants from every city and from every country; in it are to be found abundance of

precious articles brought thither from maritime countries, and especially from Abyssinia, Zirbad, and Zanguebar; from time to time ships arrive there from the shores of the House of God and other parts of the Hedjaz…

Security and justice are so firmly established in this city, that the most wealthy merchants bring thither from maritime countries considerable cargoes, which they unload, and unhesitatingly send into the

Although the king possesses a considerable number of elephants in his dominions, the largest of these animals are kept near the palace, in the interior of the first and second fortress, between the north and the west.

These elephants copulate, and bring forth young. The king possesses one white elephant of an extremely great size, on whose body are scattered here and there grey spots like freckles. Every morning this animal is led out before the monarch, and the sight of him seems to act as a happy omen. The elephants of the palace are fed upon kitchri.

This substance is cooked, and it is taken out of the copper in the elephant’s presence; salt is thrown on it, and fresh sugar is sprinkled over it, and the whole is then mixed well together. They then make balls of it, weighing about two man, and, after steeping them in butter, they put them into the elephant’s mouth.

If one of these ingredients has been forgotten, the elephant attacks his keeper, and the king

punishes this negligence severely. These animals take this food twice a day...

The mode of catching the elephant is as follows. On the road which the animal takes when he goes to drink, they dig a trench, and cover the mouth of it over, but very lightly. When an elephant falls into it, two or three days are allowed to elapse before any one goes near him. At the end of that time a man comes and strikes the animal with several blows of a stick well applied: upon this another man shows himself, and violently drives away the man who struck the blows, and, seizing his stick, hurls it a great way off; after which he throws some food to the elephant, and goes away. For several days the first of these men comes to beat the elephant, and the second prevents him from continuing to do so. Before long the animal becomes very friendly with this latter individual, who by degrees approaches the elephant, and offers him fruits, for which this animal is known to have a liking. He then scratches him and rubs him, and the elephant, won over by this manoeuvre, submits without resistance, and allows a chain to be passed round his neck.

The English translation of Abdur Razzaq’s travelogue can be found in India in the Fifteenth Century, compiled by R.H. Major, and is available on Google Books for free download.

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

SPOTLIGHT

Kashmir’s literary harvest TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP

This year has seen a blossoming of English­language narratives on Kash­ mir, many from a generation that has never known peace

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

···························· ast August, as droves of rock-hurling boys and young men rallied on the streets of Srinagar, essayist Pankaj Mishra wrote in The Guardian that “apart from the youth on the streets, there are also those with their noses in books...”, a generation, he wrote, that will soon “make its way into the world with its private traumas. Life under political oppression has begun to yield, in the slow bitter way it does, a rich intellectual and artistic harvest.”

Mishra’s words appear to have been borne out by the minor boom in English-language writing by and about Kashmiris. This includes Sanjay Kak’s anthology, Until my Freedom Has Come, in which the film-maker has compiled writing, mostly from the Internet, produced by Kashmiris last summer. India International Centre chief editor Ira Pande’s A Tangled Web: Jammu & Kashmir is an anthology that seeks to provide fresh ways of looking not just at Kashmir, but Jammu also.

The new crop of Kashmir books is a diverse lot. Published last year was Luv Puri’s scholarly Across the LoC, and soon to follow are My Kashmir, by former civil servant Wajahat Habibullah, and a book of Amit Mehra’s photographs. Also forthcoming are reporter Rahul Pandita’s memoir of growing up as a Hindu in Kashmir, and Sonia Jabbar’s book of reportage from the state.

Likewise, works in translation are beginning to trickle out. Prisoner No. 100, Anjum Zamarud Habib’s jail memoir, was published in translation from Urdu this year. First-time translator Sahba Husain said she has had other offers to translate Urdu works, but passed in favour of

L

writing a non-fiction book based on her activism in Kashmir.

The interest in Kashmir among publishers and readers also spawned the Harud literature festival, which was scheduled for late September, and was born out of “interest and enthusiasm from some Kashmiri writers after the success and visibility of the Kashmir sessions at the Jaipur Literature Festival,” says H a r u d p r o g r a m me director Namita Gokhale.

The event, however, has been cancelled. Some Kashmiri writers refused to participate, saying it was a political tool used to promote a false sense of normalcy in the state. An open letter in protest on the website Kafila, calling the festival a “travesty”, attracted more than 200 signatories. In a statement, the festival’s organizers said the platform had been “hijacked by those who hold extreme views in the name of free speech”, and said many authors were “concerned about possible violence” during the festival.

Two novels released this year are widely cited as stoking the groundswell of Kashmiri writing: The Garden of Solitude, Siddhartha Gigoo’s story about the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

NO REAL HEROES

I

t is possible at least some of Mint’s readers may have seen Wanted, one of those movies where Angelina Jolie plays Angelina Jolie, a tough-as-nails woman who can out-shoot, out-drive and out-fight just about anyone else.

Jolie plays Fox in the movie, the unlikely guru of a feckless James McAvoy. She is from a tribe of expert assassins and, so, it emerges, is McAvoy, thanks to his genes. Wanted rapidly degenerates into one of those save-the-world-as-we-know-it movies and by the end I was as bored as some of the actors going though the motions on screen appeared to be.

It must have been the movie

that turned me off the comic books on which it is based. Last week, I finally downloaded them using the comiXology app and was pleasantly surprised. I shouldn’t have been, just as I shouldn’t have assumed the books would be bad just because the movie was—few movies are honest adaptations of the books on which they are based, and Wanted is definitely not one of them.

Written by Mark Millar and illustrated by J.G. Jones, Wanted, a miniseries of six comics, has a wonderful central premise: In a parallel universe, the superheroes have lost. The supervillains have ganged up against them, defeated them,

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, a dark novel of coming of age during the conflict.

Many writers credit Basharat Peer’s 2009 memoir Curfewed Night as the inspiration for the recent proliferation of English-language Kashmiri books. In the book, Peer laments that “people from almost every conflict zone had told their stories: Palestinians, Israelis, Bosnians”, and that he “felt the absence of our own telling, the unwritten books about the Kashmiri experience, from the bookshelves, as vividly as the absence of a beloved”.

That yawning chasm might be closing.

“I think Kashmir has always been of interest and books on the state—from the issues surrounding its accession to India to the present insurgency—have been regularly published,” says Ranjana Sengupta, editorial director, general, non-fiction, Penguin Books India. “Perhaps the difference is that they now reach out to a wider readership.”

Gigoo, 37, was a teenager when the conflict in Kashmir escalated

and then removed their memories. The supervillains have then proceeded to carve out various parts of the world among themselves.

And Wesley (that’s the name of the character McAvoy plays in the movie) finds himself in the middle of it all.

The books have him down as feckless as he is in the movies but that is where the similarity ends. He is not the wannabe-superhero the movie paints him as; instead, he is a supervillain in the making.

Wanted is a wild, violent, rambunctious roller-coaster ride that reverses the traditional roles of the good guys and the bad guys. It is replete with allusions to other comic characters (and Wesley himself looks a lot like rapper Eminem).

There is a certain insidiousness and negativity to the portrayal of the characters as well as the dialogue that makes Wanted a different sort

Speaking up: Young Kash­ miris are taking up their own stories; and (left) books by Mirza Waheed and Basharat Peer.

in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

He says it has taken years for the experiences of writers of his generation to gestate. “Basharat Peer’s book shot to popularity after around 20 years of political turmoil. Twenty years is nothing as far as the evolution of art is concerned,” says Gigoo.

“Curfewed Night was important because it was read not only by Kashmiris and people in India, but people in the West also,” he says. “Previously there had been Urdu poetry and short stories—some of it self-published—but not novels and memoirs.” Likewise, the odd novel set in Kashmir did not deal explicitly with political turmoil, Gigoo says.

For many Kashmiri writers,

writing about the conflict is inevitable, says Waheeda, author of The Collaborator.

“For me it was impossible not to write about the Kashmir conflict. That’s what you saw growing up in the 1990s: the brutal reality of the conflict. If you happen to be from Kashmir, it’s what informs your world view, your sensibility.”

Mirza cautions against calling the flurry of English-language publishing activity a “revival” of Kashmiri writing. “That would be a disservice to people who wrote in a languages other than English, (such as) Kashmiri, Urdu and before that, in Persian. This hasn’t just sprung from nowhere,” he says. “In Kashmir, we’ve had a rich and diverse poetry tradition, from mystic poets to the romantics, to some political poetry as well, all the way down to Agha Shahid Ali.” Waheed cites 16th century poet Habba Khatun, the Sufi saint and poet Nund Rishi, and the mystic poet Lal Ded as inescapable influ-

ences on Kashmiri writers. This year Penguin published a new translation of Lal Ded, and next year it will release a new translation of Tahir Ghani, a seminal 17th century poet from Kashmir.

Still only in their 30s, Waheed, Peer and Gigoo represent the old guard of Kashmiri writers in English. For the younger generation, says Kak, the transition to a relatively more peaceful form of street protest, which began in 2008 and came to a head last summer, was a catalyst. “Halfway through the summer it became quite clear that there was something happening on the streets, but also something else was happening alongside. Writing had been coming in drips and drabs in 2008 and 2009, but

by October of 2010 I was suddenly aware of a sizable surge,” Kak says. “A lot of the earlier fear and anxiety had disappeared.”

The outpouring in writing had a metaphor in the protests. “With this critical mass of writing there was something like safety in numbers,” Kak says. “It was an echo of what was happening on the street.

I tried to hold that between the covers of this book.”

The reading public too has become more receptive to different narratives about Kashmir, Kak says. Five years ago, “there was a blanket of silence and noise.

Silence because what was happening there wasn’t reported, and noise because the little that was reported was the usual government storyline.” Because of the first-hand reporting coming out of Kashmir via the Internet and in magazines and journals, people don’t buy into the old narratives any more, he says. “Publishers are also aware of that.”

Fahad Shah, who is 21, publishes the nascent monthly online magazine The Kashmir Walla.

Like other writers of his generation, he’s known nothing but the conflict. A journalism student at the University of Kashmir, Shah says young writers are tired of being misquoted and misrepresented by journalists and writers from outside Kashmir who swoop in and out of town.

“No one from Kashmir used to speak up. Now Kashmiris want to do things on their own,” he says.

“The generation born around 1988 to 1992 is more interested in reading and writing. They’re more interested in reporting on their own lives.”

Superwoman: Jolie’s character in the film adaptation of Wanted out­fights and out­shoots everyone. of superhero story.

I can understand why the makers of Wanted decided not to stick to the story as told in the books, but opting for a dark, inverted, violent tale of revenge and coming-of-age would have probably helped the cause of the movie which received

neither popular acclaim nor critical praise.

The Wanted books were the first I downloaded using comiXology’s new app. The new interface seems easier and the home screen looks nicer but I had to re-download all the comics I had bought since last

September. The real test of the new app, though, will be how it behaves with time, especially when it comes to organizing comics by story arcs.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

BOOKS L17

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM SHAKIL ADIL/AP

CRIMINAL MIND

ZAC O’YEAH

BOOKS ON CROOKS

O

In the background: The characters in Mohammed Hanif’s second novel evoke the invisible Karachi.

OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI | MOHAMMED HANIF

Following the fallen angels The author’s fiercely tender love letter to the human spirit is hobbled by its structure

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti: Random House India, 240 pages, `499.

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

···························· e never thinks about you,” goes the last line of Saadat Hasan Manto’s brief, searing Manto’s Prayer (the “you” in question being God), “but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you.”

If Manto sticks in the mind when reading Mohammed Hanif, it is because his writing also follows Satan everywhere, through the anxieties of small, helpless people, with no time for modesty and no escape from the naked and shameless. Devastation balances on a knife-edge with a keen sense of life’s joys; degradation and dignity shadow each other all the time.

This was true of his messy, rollicking first novel, A Case Of Exploding Mangoes, a kind of South Asian throwback to the great political novels of Latin America. It shades into deeper meaning in the more troubling Our Lady of Alice Bhatti.

The movie-star rage of Under Officer Ali Shigri, the protagonist of Exploding Mangoes, is not a luxury the characters here can afford.

At the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments in Karachi, no one has the time to dream up political assassinations. They have to keep the hospital going, the police force happy, and Karachi alive.

They are the invisible cogs in the wheel of the big city. And while Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is hardly a perfect success, its biggest triumph is that, half a page into the book, we feel as though we have known them all our lives.

Hanif’s absorbing opening chapters introduce us to Noor, the precocious 17-year-old who has lived in the ward with his cancer-afflicted mother for two years, and now effectively administers the hospital himself; to Teddy, a bodybuilder who assists the police in their extra-legal applications of justice; and to Alice Bhatti, a small, tough ex-convict who has recently been appointed Replacement Junior Nurse, Grade 4, at the Sacred.

Alice Bhatti is a “Choohra”, a Christian from the sweeper community of French Colony in Karachi, treated by most Pakistani Muslims much as she would be by chaste Hindus in India. She has been to prison for attempted murder; she needs no Baudrillard to

H

tell her that jails—like the “charya ward” or mental illness unit of her squalid hospital—are perverse symbols of an un-free society.

Alice’s aspirations for her future fall somewhere between survival and happiness.

To her surprise, she finds herself courted by, and attracted to, Teddy Butt, the police hanger-on who gets someone to break his thumb in order to be admitted to her care. For a horrifying murderer-type, Teddy has a sort of sweet innocence to him.

He isn’t stupid—although he’s no Noor where brains are concerned— but the world is not too much with him.

Teddy is the sort of slightly absurd character Hanif wrote about so successfully in his first novel. Indeed, that knack for the absurd runs throughout his portrait of the Sacred and the lives (and deaths) it harbours. It suspends our sense of normality to experience the charya ward via Alice’s deadpan walkthrough, but it also punctures it when, for example, we read of a cleaner who is said to have died when she slipped down the stairs of an employer’s house; it is not likely that “when you slip on that staircase you’ll also accidentally scratch yourself on your left breast…that during that fall on the staircase you’ll somehow manage to spill someone’s sperm on your thighs.”

This, and passages like it, dwell on the darknesses of Manto’s crisp, fast-paced afsanas and make them brutally explicit. Manto’s most famous stories were written about the carnage of Partition, but some crises do not occur in episodes, as Our Lady of Alice Bhatti suggests: They simply go on.

What he is really writing about, in his madcap story about a man whose gun is the conduit of his eloquence and a woman who once sliced a rapist’s genitals with a razor blade, is violence—as masculine distraction, as power, as a way of life. Everyone espouses it, everyone suffers it; but the novel is, specifically, about what it does to women.

Hanif negotiates a more complex minefield of character and location here than in A Case of Exploding Mangoes. He uses sarcasm to provoke both tenderness and anger, and his writing accommodates both simultaneously.

The pleasing, speech-like rhythms

of his language (like the repetitions in “that during that fall on that staircase you’ll somehow spill someone’s sperm…”) allow us to inhabit the multilingual worlds of Alice, Teddy and their supporting cast with a sense of familiarity.

He can make you laugh and cry on the same page and I—as well as several women reading over my shoulder in a rush-hour Mumbai train—can attest to the fact that he accomplishes this more than once—which makes the bleakness of his story bearable.

But Hanif’s subject demands a more careful navigation of its faultlines. What lets the novel down is a disorientingly loose structure, in which we are walked back and forth in time to piece together the progression of Alice and Teddy’s relationship, and where large gaps appear between one step and the other. Hanif’s compelling characters travel on curiously thin ice; if we are speaking of episodes, it must be said that the book might work better if read as discrete set pieces. The end, with its perverse sense of finality, constitutes an act of violence in itself. Without giving away the details, I may only say that it can colour the whole novel in retrospect.

This is not a minor quibble; a story of such emotional power deserves to be controlled better.

It holds back a significant act of writing from becoming a significant novel. Perhaps, in an overall reckoning, the book will speak more clearly to those who already know and enjoy Hanif’s writing than to those looking for an introduction to it.

But the best parts of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti do recall the spirit of Manto’s Prayer. They evoke something that Hanif himself wrote in 2009, in an essay called Alright In Karachi: “The real spirit of Karachi lies…in those who go through the gruelling cycle of life to earn their daily bread with a heart-breaking dignity—who do not have a TV or time to watch it, and who will never be on TV except as a backdrop to the latest bomb attack.

“Here in Karachi, most people have other things to worry about than the fact that the leading current affairs magazines have declared us dead.”

IN SIX WORDS Of survival and sainthood in Karachi

ne of the best things about Bangalore’s cantonment is how it has become a treasure trove for bibliophiles. With a little detective work in the bookshops here, one can build oneself a respectable and wide-ranging crime fiction library.

Thankfully, several venerable old bookshops have survived in this era of Internet book-shopping, even if others, like the legendary Premier, my main supplier for many years, shut shop some time ago. But for a nostalgic moment, you can still browse best-selling thrillers at the Raj-era Higginbotham’s (a chain founded in south India in the 1800s and once upon a time “official booksellers to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales”). Or go to Crossword (one of the finest shops in that chain) if you prefer a more contemporary scene with easy chairs to sit and test-read in.

If you’re looking for the latest crime fiction from around the globe, the finest resource is Gangarams Book Bureau— apparently about to relocate soon to St Mark’s Road above Koshy’s café (optimal!). I’ve picked up translated detective novels here that I haven’t spotted anywhere else, such as the weird Swedish toy-animal gumshoe adventure Amberville by Tim Davys. The current best crime novel, if you are a genre aficionado, is The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino—a rage in Japan, it reinvents the old puzzle mystery with aplomb, turning misdirection into a beautiful art.

The main trawling zone for book lovers is a string of second-hand bookshops. Select, the antiquarian shop tucked away in an alley off Brigade Road, has been around since 1945, but it has nowadays got company from several other second-hand booksellers, plus a number of more fleeting set-ups: remaindered and second-hand book sales that appear in some alcove or basement. By the time you get used to their presence, some of these shops are gone, as mysteriously as they first materialized, though two of the newer ones, the Bookworm and Blossom Book House, have become permanent fixtures on every book-hunters agenda.

It may take some effort to track down crooked books at Blossom Book House, but sometimes the hunt is as rewarding as the trophies. Although it started as a minor player (the original shop covered some 100 sq. ft), it has grown to fill four floors with a mixture of second-hand books, antiquarian titles and discounted new books. Should you find the prospect of digging through the stacks, piled so precariously that they sometimes cascade avalanche-like off the shelves, daunting, then the proprietor down at the ground-floor counter will help you—he seems to know the whereabouts of every book in the shop.

What makes Blossom particularly attractive is the section labelled “Crime”—and we’re not talking about a few shelves here, but a corridor straight out of a librarian’s nightmare. Tens of thousands of thrillers—reprinted classics, cheap tattered copies of pulp, the latest hits, offbeat rarities—are collected here.

This is where you go to get your fix of James Ellroy or Elmore Leonard, wallow in Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr nostalgia, pick up that Mankell you’ve been missing, sift through musty piles to find one of those Nick Carter paperbacks penned by Martin Cruz Smith in his early 1970s pre-fame days (Inca Death Squad and The Devil’s Dozen were his contributions to that seemingly endless series) or perhaps unearth a copy of The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler.

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Stacked: Blossom Book House is full of unusual crime fiction.

One of my recent findings was a handy encyclopaedia that helps readers decode what goes on beneath the ground floors of civil society: Khallaas: An A to Z Guide to the Underworld by Jyotirmoy Dey, who was tragically gunned down by a team of sharpshooters in June. In August he was posthumously awarded the Prem Bhatia Award for Outstanding Political Reporting of the Year—which hopefully means that more shops will stock his books.

Just the other day I came across another title by Dey; Zero Dial: the Dangerous World of Informers. Through his writings, he is the reader’s knowledgeable guide to dodgy backstreets where intense characters drink masala-strong “cutting chai” in Irani cafés. We experience beer binges at seedy dance bars and meet intelligence officers who walk about unnoticed in their bathroom slippers (James Bond-like stylishness would be an immediate giveaway in Mumbai).

With chapter titles such as Nightmare in Jail and The Art of Double-Crossing, Zero Dial reads like a racy thriller, although it is based on the real stories of a handful of men who risk their lives to help investigators catch crooks. In return they get sporadic cash handouts of a few thousand or sometimes just a few hundred rupees. Known in underworld jargon as “Zero Dials”, they occasionally perform heroic deeds but are fated to remain “unsung heroes”, as Dey puts it.

The bookshops are the places that keep these crooked heroes, and their stories, alive. The possibility of discovering such unique books is the reason why I still prefer going to walk-in shops to do my browsing and buying, rather than logging on to online shops.

Zac O’Yeah is a Bangalore-based crime novelist. His most recent novel is Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

An American in Delhi PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

DIVYA BABU/MINT

The designs of architect Joseph Stein sought har­ mony with nature.

We look at his legacy a decade after his death

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Steinabad: (clockwise from left) The India Habitat Centre; Joseph Stein Lane; the archi­ tect; and the India International Centre.

W

e are walking down Joseph Stein Lane, the only road in Delhi named after an architect. This is the heart of “Steinabad”, the nickname given to Lodhi Estate in central Delhi. The area has a series of buildings designed by the late Joseph Allen Stein, who transformed a small part of the Capital with his vision.

The tree-lined lane cuts through two buildings designed by him: the Ford Foundation headquarters and the India International Centre (IIC). The only sound is of the cascading fountains at the Ford Foundation complex. The lane ends at Lodhi Garden, whose ruins mark a significant architectural era well before Stein’s.

“His buildings represent the best of post-independence construction in Delhi and they must be recognized as landmarks worthy of preservation,” says Ratish Nanda, conservation architect with the Aga Khan Foundation, of the American who made India his home—first Kolkata, then Delhi—for the last five decades of his life.

The other Steinabad landmarks are the offices of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the World Wide Fund for Nature, a conservatory within Lodhi Garden, Gandhi-King Plaza, an open-air memorial in IIC, and the India Habitat Centre. The landscaping of Lodhi Garden, as we know it today, was carried out under his guidance. Stein, who died in 2001, also designed the Triveni Kala Sangam at Mandi House,

the American International School and the Australian high commission in Chanakyapuri.

The steel domes and concrete columns of Pragati Maidan too are his.

Born in 1912 in Nebraska, US, Stein studied in Illinois, New York and France. He worked with renowned architects such as Ely Jacques Kahn and Richard Neutra, and was inspired by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Eliel Saarinen. In 1952, Stein arrived in Kolkata as a professor of architecture. India under prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a liberal land open to ideas and hungry for progress.

Mahatama Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore lived on in people’s minds. Their ideals of high thinking and simple living shaped Stein’s philosophy of integrating man-made construction with nature’s expressiveness. Four years later, Stein moved to Delhi, a city he made his home.

He typically designed two- to four-storey buildings that fused with the surrounding trees, gardens and pools; flowers and vines would spill over the walls.

Stein’s designs were modernistic, but inspired by India’s past. “He brought a ‘California modernism’ sensibility to this country,” says artist Ram Rahman, whose architect father was a friend of Stein. “He was good at working with local materials, be it granite or glazed tiles, both influences of Tughlaq architecture.”

Stein foresaw what the juggernaut of progress would do to the delicate balance of

ecosystems; his designs sought to find harmony. In an interview in 1982, he said: “India has intense and sharply drawn environmental problems. There is probably no possibility of solutions here except along what may be called Gandhian lines, which means essentially seeking simple and ecologically gentle solutions.”

This thought was best translated in the IIC, an oasis for Delhi’s intellectuals. Completed in 1962, this is a world of grassy open spaces, placid pools, paved walkways, jaalis, porticos and canopies. The buildings, instead of soaring high, give a feeling of coming down to meet the earth.

Bougainvillea crawls up the stone walls, mynahs nibble on the grass, and lotus leaves float in the water. The daylight falls soft, and shaded spaces are close by.

“IIC has an understated brilliance,” says author Rakhshanda Jalil, who has been a member for 10 years. Sitting in the lounge, with the windows looking out to the fountains and the Lodhi Garden beyond, Jalil says: “Nothing jars. The building blends beautifully with the garden, as if it’s a natural extension. This year, I finished writing my PhD in a cubicle in the library here. The window looked to a little patch of lawn.

A mongoose would come, pop itself on the glass, peer in, and go away.”

Did Stein influence architecture in the rest of Delhi?

The view from Parikrama, the rotating restaurant just off Connaught Place, suggests he did

not. The grey skyline dampens the grace of the colonial-era corridor. The sleek Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, towards the south, looks like a hamburger. To the north, the Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Civic Centre, the city’s tallest building, is a brazen show of glass—the growing popularity of glass is baffling in a tropical country where it just traps heat.

“The glass buildings are energy-consuming monsters,” says Golak Khandual, an architect who works in the countryside and uses the city as a transit camp. “They lock in the tropical sunlight and then, to handle it, you need more powerful air conditioning, which means more power.”

But this is the idea that Delhi has bought into. The new buildings, with their blinding glass façades, are all examples of architecture working against nature. “Why do we always want our buildings to be sensational and stunning?” asks Jalil. “Why are we not able to see a beauty that is subdued and

understated?” She is sitting at Gandhi-King Plaza. Two giant pilkhand trees, planted by the master architect himself, give permanent shade. Every element calms you.

It’s an irony that modern construction, with all its resources, cannot achieve what traditional architecture did easily.

In the 16th century Adam Khan tomb at Mehrauli, south Delhi, drug addicts sleep inside the dark chamber, bats hang from the roof, dogs prowl the corridor…

Yet, like so many other medieval-era ruins, the building’s elegance has survived the ravages of time. In summer, the tomb stays naturally cool.

“Our buildings were more aesthetically pleasing in the past because we were not technologically advanced,” says Prof. Mandeep Singh, head of the department of urban design at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture. “We used only locally available materials and the design always addressed the need to keep the space

comfortable in Delhi’s harsh weather. No window was wrongly placed. Now we have air conditioning, so we take liberties.

We’re playing with the earth.”

Stein created gently on earth.

The India Habitat Centre, constructed in the late 1980s, was his last major work. The pinnacle of his art, he designed it as a series of blocks, linked by shaded courtyards, stairs and walkways, screened from the sun as well as the noise of traffic. To soften the concrete and tarmac, the vertical face of each building sported flowers and creepers—as do the Ford Foundation headquarters and Triveni Kala Sangam.

Many Indian architects worked with Stein and were influenced by him, especially in terms of sensitivity to material. “From him, I learnt perseverance, not letting my building principles be swayed by clients,” says Praveen Vashisht, who worked with Stein in the early 1980s and whose firm looks after Stein buildings such as Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi and the Express Towers in Mumbai. “He believed in the straightforward expression of the intent of the building and how it was related to the site.”

Writing in 1982, Stein shared his wisdom: “In the 20th century, the pressures of population, land speculation, the tight and often sterile industrialised construction requires that the architect consciously seek not to spoil the earth with his work as he extends hard constructions even onto the last recess of Nature.”

The biography of the man who took the Mughal art of garden monuments to another level was aptly titled Building in the Garden. In 1992, Stein was awarded the Padma Shri.

Devoted to the works of Shakespeare and Arthur Koestler, he managed to learn only two Hindi words: accha and bas. On weekends he dined in IIC, always ordering seekh kebab and naan.

In 2001, he was on a visit to the US when he fell ill—he died in October, aged 89.

Ten years on, in a world of falling standards, his work remains exceptional. mayank.s@livemint.com