Lounge 04 jan 2014

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Saturday, January 4, 2014

Vol. 8 No. 1

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

FOLLOW YOUR SPORTY PASSION >Page 10

STUDY MORE, ONLINE

A vanilla flan can reveal wonders about the science of cooking, besides gratifying your senses >Page 6

RETHINK, RECHARGE

Go minimalist, adopt a stray, get a life—50 experiences to try this year

BE A STAY-ATHOME DAD

Plucking roadside weeds with a toddler and being the only father in an otherwise all-mommy group >Page 13

BUILD AN ENVIABLE SARI COLLECTION

Be prepared for segregation, colourcoding, muslin-packing, and then labelling yourself ‘international behenji’ >Page 15

LIVE YOUR FAVOURITE LITERARY FANTASY Shut out the world, stop eating and immerse yourself in the search for past sensations >Page 18

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

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

A YEAR OF FIRSTS

LOUNGE LOVES | SNUGGLEWITHPICTUREBOOKS.COM

Read the picture

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t the end of every year, a colleague—and now friend of around six years—and I share notes on what we did in SEEMA CHOWDHRY the year past. After several attempts at making overSANJUKTA SHARMA ambitious resolutions that we would ditch by March, we came MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM up with this quieter, more efficient way of accomplishing the R. SUKUMAR goals we set for ourselves. We make a pact—like his plan to (EDITOR) read 25 books; and mine to try my hand at a kitchen garden— NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA so we can monitor and motivate each other when we run out (EXECUTIVE EDITOR) of steam. The pact comes up in conversations over coffee, and ANIL PADMANABHAN in the office lift. We nudge each other, act as a sounding board TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY MANAS CHAKRAVARTY and, at the end of the year, compare notes. How did we do?

MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL And most recently, what did we have to show for 2013?

SIDIN VADUKUT THE NEW YEAR For me,ISSUE 2013 was a year of firsts—as protesters marched to SUNDEEP KHANNA ANIL PENNA India Gate in January to speak up against the rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in the Capital, I agreed for the first time ©2014 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved to keep a pepper spray in my bag. Mid-year, I found myself reading business books for the first time. I signed up on Khan Academy—voluntarily opting to learn math after successive THE NEW YEAR ISSUE high school teachers had made the subject unbearable for me for decades. Another first came towards the end of the year—my first time as issue editor for Mint Lounge.

This issue, too, is about firsts—about gathering new experiences. The 50 ideas THE NEW YEAR ISSUE here are based on things our writers have tried—and found rewarding. From travelling around the world to watching live sporting events (page 10) and taking in a stray (page 11) to writing a book (page 14), the issue presents a range of experiences.

Go ahead, take a peek, select the ones THE NEW YEAR ISSUE that appeal to you. We have included a “Field Search” guide with some articles, in the hope that these will help you to try the experiences out for yourself.

I hope some of these stories will tempt you take up an activity you never thought you’d attempt, or try something counter-intuitive. Sign up for something new, there’s a good chance you’ll come back with an adventure. And when you do, share your story with us at lounge@livemint.com.

DEPUTY EDITORS

A publishing start-up with an exclusive focus on picture books B Y S OMAK G HOSHAL somak.g@livemint.com

························ t takes real conviction to launch a publishing start-up devoted exclusively to picture books, especially at a time when gadgets and e-readers are gaining momentum even among the youngest users.

Richa Jha—former editor, journalist and reviewer—has taken the plunge and just launched an independent imprint, Snugglewithpicturebooks.com, with two titles.

The first, The Unboy Boy, charmingly illustrated by Gautam Benegal, tells the story of Gagan, a gentle, sensitive and kind little boy. Unlike his brother Pavan, who is a bit of a bully, Gagan is attached to his teddy, Bingo; he loves building homes for ants; and greets the sun, birds and flowers when he wakes up in the morning. He is mocked at school as “baby girl”; his grandfather calls him “chooha” (mouse); but his mother assures him he is the “loveliest, gentlest one, who always makes me proud”. In the end Gagan proves himself to be way smarter and braver than his peers at the camping ground.

Although Jha was drawn to picture books as a child, her interest in the format deepened when she started reading them to her chil-

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Chanpreet Khurana Issue editor

Fun read: The Unboy Boy and The Susu Pals! offer life lessons to children without being didactic.

dren. She started a website, Snugglewithpicturebooks.com, to review and promote the books she was reading to her children— a practice she continues, though her son is now over 12.

Growing up in Dhanbad, in Jharkhand, Jha went to Kolkata each year to attend the book fair in January. “I was particularly fond of picture books by Russian authors in translation,” she says. Later she worked with publishing house Wisdom Tree as a commissioning editor, an experience that, she says, has proved valuable in her own venture.

The Susu Pals!, illustrated by Alicia Souza, tells the story of two little girls who go from being best friends to having a fight, before

LOUNGE LOVES | SHAHMINA SHAWLS

LOUNGE REVIEW | CLUE HUNT

The wonders of wool

A PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Luxurious shawls made of an ethically correct fibre, with the softness and warmth of ‘shahtoosh’ and ‘pashmina’ B Y S HEFALEE V ASUDEV shefalee.v@livemint.com

······························ uxury fuels its demand in the absence of need, and often has a story worth telling. Shahmina, a cross between the shahtoosh and pashmina wool fibres, surely does.

Shahtoosh, derived from the tender down hair of the Tibetan chiru antelope, has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species since 1979—the animal was being hunted for wool—but the demand for fine woollen shawls has only increased all over the globe.

So pashmina, very delicate cashmere wool from the pashmina goat found in the higher regions of Nepal and Kashmir, has become a much exploited word in ethnic markets from McLeodganj to Goa and the local bazaars of Delhi.

Small placards everywhere hawk “pure pashmina” but many of the products are not authentic. Also luring the budget consumer is the cheaper “semi-pashmina” which, as any true-blooded Kashmiri craftsperson will tell you, is a misnomer.

“There is nothing like semi-pashmina—it is just a market-made word for pashmina mixed with wool or a softer quality of wool,” says Srinagar-based Tariq Kathwari, owner of the website www.kathwariofkashmir.com that sells Kashmir-made goods, including antique and contemporary

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Warm and woven: Shahmina shawls at The Carpet Cellar in Delhi. handwoven carpets. “Most traders claiming to sell pure pashmina may be selling shahmina, popularly called shimina,” adds Kathwari.

“Shahmina it is,” says Dhruv Chandra of Delhi’s well-known store The Carpet Cellar, which has a deep inventory of tribal carpets and silken carpets, dhurries, Persian rugs, antique Kashmiri shawls and stoles. “Shahmina fibre has 13.5 micron fibres of wool per strand sheared from baby lambs in ethically correct conditions,” says Chandra. Technically, shahmina is closest to shahtoosh, whose fibre ranges between 12-14 microns (the lower the micron count, the finer the fibre). The Carpet Cellar supplies shahmina to Western markets, including brands like Cerruti, Loro Piana and Ralph Lauren, which use it for ready-to-wear garments, not just drapes. Global luxury houses which scrutinize fabrics under microscopic quality control tests to assess authenticity now greatly favour shahmina given the luxuriousness of the texture and its customer-friendly cost.

A shahmina shawl is soft to the touch, offers a luxury experience, and the most elegant ones are in natural shades with broad white panels. At The Carpet Cellar you also find numerous dyed versions in mustards, reds, pretty blush pinks, blues, mauves and textured blacks.

Kathwari says even pure pashmina is best bought in natural colours without any embroidery. “It is the softest wool one can buy, it is hand-spun by expert weavers and so fine that it is difficult to do embroidery on it,” he says. On the other hand, Chandra alerts customers to guard against “Ludhianamade Kashmiri shawls”, especially the machine-embroidered ones, adding that it is a good idea to buy from stores that guarantee a quality-controlled process.

Shahmina stoles (for men and women) are priced at `8,500 and shawls at `14,500 at The Carpet Cellar, 1, Anand Lok, August Kranti Marg, New Delhi (011-41641777). On Kathwariofkashmir.com, shahmina shawls cost `10,000-15,000.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO COLLAGE: MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: The photographs with the story, “Flight to freedom”, 28 December, are by Ramki Sreenivasan.

fter popularizing recreational oddities like cat cafés (where a fixed cover charge allows you to pet and hang out with a variety of cats) and maid cafés and host bars (where patrons pay to chat with dolled-up strangers), the Japanese have a new kooky pastime that’s turned into a worldwide craze—the real escape game. Sort of like a reallife equivalent of the escape-the-room subgenre of video games, the real room escape game is exactly what you think it is: A group of people are locked in a themed room with only a set of random clues as a means to break out in 60 minutes or less.

Since the concept was launched in Mumbai on 1 December with a murdermystery themed room, Mr. Spylock’s Chamber, I saw it as an opportunity to finally live out my “Miss Scarlet-in the library-with the candlestick” Cluedo fantasy.

being reunited. The book was supposed to be published by Wisdom Tree, but encouraged by her mentor, Shobit Arya, the publisher of Wisdom Tree, and with the support of her husband, Jha decided to go indie.

“Unlike the usual practice of having text-heavy picture books in India, I wanted to tell my stories largely through visuals,” she says.

In both the books, the text is minimal, but the images are evocative, made alive by a pleasing balance of muted and bright colours. Jha, who is currently based in Lagos, Nigeria, gets to the core of a certain truth about children—their idiosyncracies, politics, joys and anxieties—which most adults have very little access to.

The Unboy Boy and The Susu Pals!, each priced at `300, are now available online and in book stores in Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore and New Delhi.

Without a backstory or a step-by-step checklist, there was no way to tell real clues from false leads or match riddle solutions to the padlocks. We spent nearly 25 minutes circling the room like a pair of headless chickens before the game master bombarded us with obvious hints. Thankfully, the puzzles we attempted were of the wordplay and mathematical variety and didn’t require knowledge of trivia or actual crimesolving. More about the puzzle would be to give away the mystery, but it challenged and befuddled us.

The not-so-good

We’re not sure if it was intentional but the set-up in the inaugural theme room resembled CID more than CSI. The good news is that another room, Kaboom!, with a bomb-disposal end-goal, will be launched in the coming week and the themes for The good stuff both rooms will be After a simple registration updated routinely or on KyaZoonga.com, a switched completely. friend and I arrived at Chamber secrets: (top) A prop at Internationally, the Clue Hunt, situated on the the Clue Hunt; and a picture at themes are based on TV shows and movies like first floor of a nondescript the entrance of the gaming room.

Prison Break, Catch Me If apartment building in Bandra, for a late-night time slot. The only You Can and The Da Vinci Code and often instruction we received from the quiet staff feature motion-sensor lasers and other before they confiscated our mobile phones high-tech gadgetry. and locked us up in the game room was to Talk plastic “pay attention to everything you see”.

The walls of the matchbox-sized room A n h o u r - l o n g g a m e s l o t i s p r i c e d a t were crammed with framed photographs, `700-1,000 per person, depending on the vintage maps of the city and grooves hold- size of the group (a team of two-five only) on ing assorted props, including a smoking weekdays and at `800-1,100 per person on pipe, a chess set and vintage books. There weekends and public holidays. was a giant chalk outline straight out of a crime scene on the floor and the study desk, Clue Hunt, 101, Roha Orion, 16th Road, near the only piece of furniture, was chock-a- Mini Punjab restaurant, Bandra (West), block with a retro typewriter with a half- Mumbai. For details, visit www.cluehunt.in written note and an electronic safe. A dozen or call 26005225. For an online booking, visit other keyholes and padlocks meant we were www.kyazoonga.com going to have to search and decode more Prerna Makhija puzzles than we had anticipated.

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LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

RETHINK, RECHARGE THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

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here did the last year go? In conversations with friends, family and colleagues, year after year, we bring up the same question. It’s a good question; asking it is a way to sort our experiences of the year into high and low points, and to file them away in memory. But how about scripting what we’d like to be able to say about 2014 as the year progresses? In this special issue, there are 50 ideas based on personal experiences that you can try—from adventure biking and adopting a sustainable lifestyle to becoming a geisha and learning to dance—and things you can buy, to make the new year richer and much more fun.

SHIMMY AND TWIRL, STAY FIT I am a sucker for trying new things but this turned out to be a big stretch—and probably a couple of ungainly twists—from what I was expecting. I am pole-dancing, or some hang-on-for-dear-life version of it—arms threatening to pop from their sockets, one leg clutching the mean steel pole, mind willing this deadweight of a body to somehow twirl-glide down its length, and hopefully muster a modicum of grace along the way. And while I am stuck there defying gravity, the rest of the class—consisting of ladies half my age, and definitely half my weight—are doing the same manoeuvre with maddening ease.

We are 45 minutes into a pole fitness class—the pole is very fit, I am not—and it is increasingly obvious that I have a severe learning disability as far as this dance form is concerned. I don’t have the requisite muscular strength either—yeah, I didn’t realize how fit one has to be to do these deceptively simple-looking movements. Any notions of looking oomph-y, feminine, comehither-ish have evaporated with the realization that this is first and foremost about brute strength. Core.

Upper body. Legs.

In case you are wondering what I am doing in an exotic dance class, let me clarify. I am here at the invitation of a friend who has started Capella Club, a fitness studio in Dubai, and it seems all these exotic dance forms—besides pole, there is belly dancing, burlesque, flamenco, and many more—are the new route to fitness. It is a workout with lots of fun thrown in, she promised, and my utterly-boredwith-the-gym mind promptly fell for it. What’s there to lose, anyway, besides some flab?

It is a lot of fun all right—my lungs got a workout just from the laughing—and while it was hard for me, it clearly wasn’t for others.

Even I managed to learn some of the moves—the turn, for example, where you hold the pole with one arm, walk around it (“walk sensuously, ladies,” the instructor urges) and do an on-the-spot turnaround.

Seeing that I had no future in pole-dancing, I decided to give belly dancing a shot.

Besides, as we live in Dubai, it seemed the natural thing to learn the dance of the region. The class turned out to be very diverse—a dozen nationalities from Croatian to Japanese to British to Lebanese represented, and more reassuring for me, a range of ages and fitness levels. The instructor walked in, a beautiful Brazilian lady, long hair tumbling to her hips, Latino accent (if you closed your eyes, you’d think it was Salma Hayek speaking), and dressed in an outfit impossibly held together—some sort of jumpsuit

SPILL YOUR GUTS

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with a web of strings and straps keeping up the top half. I’d go back just to see what she wears next.

She packed in a lot of learning into an hour, building slowly from simpler moves, and adding on complex manoeuvres as we progressed—all accompanied with happy rhythmic music that gets your hips swinging from the get-go. Of course, the first thing to learn is how to swing your hips like a belly dancer. Then the hip drop. The kick with the hip drop.

The Egyptian walk. The turnaround with the Egyptian walk. The shimmying. The camel wave—this one was tough—a kind of undulating movement using the upper body.

Shimmying, it seems, is one of the essentials of belly dancing—a frantic movement of the knees while holding the upper body still— so the instructor encouraged us to practise it a lot at home. Do it in the shower, she suggested. Do it in the elevator. Do it while you are heating something in the microwave. Get in a couple of minutes of shimmying at every opportunity, so your body can shimmy effortlessly and endlessly without tiring. What breathing is to living, shimmying apparently is to belly dancing. I took that to heart, so much so that now I can’t use the microwave oven without shimmying.

While not exactly a breeze, belly dancing is much easier than pole.

The challenge here is activating and controlling parts of your body that you have never used. Harder still is isolating other parts and keeping them completely motionless. It is a funny realization—it might be your body, but the parts don’t dance to your tune, they seem to have an annoying will of their own.

Beyond these technicali-

Gliding with grace: Pole-dancing is first and foremost about brute strength—of the core, the upper body and legs.

ties, of course, there is the whole area of grace, sensuality, provocation, delight—the raison d’être of belly dancing— and I am not even sure where to begin to acquire those!

We collected together in a circle at the end of the class, clapping loudly and giggling helplessly, while each one of us stepped in the middle to demonstrate a move, and dance solo for a bit. Which move did I do?

Shimmying, of course.

Radha Chadha writes the monthly column Luxury Cult.

CAPELLA

COURTESY CLUB, DUBAI

hen I first heard about the theme of this special issue, I jumped at it because I had a wonderful personal story to tell. I said, “Yes, yes, yes, I did something very unconventional in my 20s and I want to tell everyone about it.” It is a fullbaked story. I even typed out most of it hastily, it is a story so ready to be shared.

The editor got back to me. Write about your writing, she suggested.

About spilling your guts.

I knew what she meant. I had just sent in a piece about my personal experience of being sexually harassed in my office when I first started working as a media professional. I had written about feeling isolated and emotionally abused and how I eventually healed from it.

I had felt both compelled and repulsed by the idea of writing it. It had been hurtful and scary to revisit old wounds, yet it had felt imperative for me to share the story. As if the story had chosen to tell itself.

I had spilled my guts. I felt raw and vulnerable. I had opened a door that had been locked for years and was dealing with a rush of memories.

There were the old familiar fears. What if someone misunderstands you? Is this important enough? Will I seem like I am always trying to draw attention towards me?

Why do I matter? What if the people I speak about are hurt by my version of this story? I don’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable.

Are you sure you want this to be on the Internet forever?

I was surprised at the battles I had had to fight internally before the words began to appear on the computer screen. I literally had to laugh away some of the doubts. I was recounting an experience of healing from trauma in my life and almost two decades later, I was still worrying about hurting other people?

About betraying trust? I felt like I was in a dust storm designed to obscure the core of the story.

Calm down and be exact, I instructed myself. That’s all I have to say finally to the neurotic self who ties me up in knots before she will allow a simple personal story to tell itself in words typed through my fingers.

A few weeks before that, I had written about my mother and me. In my everyday conversations with my children and husband, we talk about my mother a lot. We even call her Sudha, echoing her name among us.

I struggled to write about my thwarted conversations with my mother. Something came in the way and distracted us from our love and I wanted to confront that.

A struggle to express is a struggle to heal. I completed that article and sent it to my brother. He read it at work and sent me an SMS: all good.

“What about Dad’s reaction?” I asked him.

“Don’t be silly,” he texted back.

I went over to my mother’s home with our youngest child, who prefers to visit nani ka ghar over school any day of the week. I read out the article

NATASHA BADHWAR

Noted: A snippet from the SMS exchange between the writer and her brother. to my mother. Somewhere near the second-last paragraph, my mother put her fingers on her eyes and pressed back the tears. I continued to read.

“Why did you cry?” I asked her.

“Mataji ki yaad aa gayee.” She said she was reminded of her own mother. She allowed herself to cry.

“I’m just thinking of how alone my mother was in her last years,” said my mother about my grandmother.

I didn’t show it but I was astounded. I had written the piece trying to loosen the knots in my connection with my mother, hoping that it would make readers reflect on their own relationships. I was worrying about how my Mum might feel and here she was reflecting on her own relationship with her mother. I quickly texted her son again and shared her reaction with him.

“Hmmm,” came his reply.

I have begun to send text messages to my mother now. She calls later and tells me where she was when my message arrived. After years of blogging, Facebooking and tweeting, I am sending messages straight to the person they were meant for in the first place.

The most played song in our home is Aik Alif, a Coke Studio production of Bulleh Shah’s poetry performed by Saieen Zahoor and the Pakistani band, Noori.

Parh parh ilm te faazil hoya, wrote the 17th century Punjabi poet, te kaday apnay aap nu parhya ee na.

You have read so many books and know it all, but you have never read your own self. You run to visit temples and mosques, but you have never entered your own heart.

Jo na jaane haqq ki taaqat, Rabb naa devey usko himmat.

These lines speak to me. It is only when I acknowledge the life-affirming power of truth that I find in myself the courage to claim it.

Don’t allow the cacophony served up by the mass media and the marketplace to drown your voice.

The power to write your own story will come to you when you give up the fear that your truth will somehow hurt you.

Personal stories have the power to heal us. Sharing them has the power to console. When we go searching for who we were and what changed us, we find the strength to transform who we have become.

Natasha Badhwar writes the fortnightly column My Daughters’ Mum.

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE NEW YEAR ISSUE ANOTHER CULTURE I

SEIICHI CHADHA/MICHI TRAVE L

t is late evening in the geisha district of old Kyoto. Red lanterns sway in front of patchworked windows covered with rice paper. I walk down the street and knock on a nondescript door.

“You are late. Come, come,” cries Midori-san. She ushers me upstairs, into a room where four women sit.

Without saying a word, they take charge of me. They pull open a screen.

Inside are kimonos in blue, green and grey. Spring colours, I am told. “Choose one,” says Midori-san.

I am about to become a geisha: not in life but for work—on assignment. I am to be trained in etiquette and manners, dress and poise. Everything other than the last bit: I won’t receive clients. It takes a lifetime to become a geisha, not 10 days, says the agent at Michi Travel, a luxury travel company that arranged for me to be introduced to geisha training schools in Kyoto.

Four women work on me. One wraps a kimono around me, nipping and tucking the garment like a plastic surgeon on steroids. Another meanwhile is tying the obi (sash) rather tightly around my middle. She waits till I exhale and pulls tighter—like Mammy in Gone With the Wind. After a point, I hold my breath in rebellion. My face turns red. My waist has never looked smaller or more shapely. My tormentor stares expressionlessly at my reflection, waiting for me to exhale.

When they are done, I find that I can’t sit; only kneel. I hobble around, taking small steps. The other two women are beauticians. One paints my face white—not Fair & Lovely white; not Jolen bleach white. This is white paint applied to my face till it resembles a kabuki dancer. My lines vanish, as does any semblance of expression. The proud disdain that I feign disappears.

The other woman draws black lines around my eyes and paints my lips a rosebud red. I look like a very white Mona Lisa. Nobody, not even me, can make out what I am thinking.

Midori-san reappears. “Kawaii (cute),” she exclaims, spinning me around like a Kathak dancer who can’t move her legs. I feel fragile and wobbly, like I need a man to steady myself. Is this how the geisha are subdued—by simply tightening their clothes till they cannot breathe, let alone think?

Now comes practice. How to walk, talk, kneel, serve tea and laugh. Midorisan wants me to draw a figure 8 when I

walk. It is called “shinayakasa,” she says. It sounds like a snake. Maybe that is the reptile I should channel. I slip into the wooden high heels they have placed in front, take one step forward and promptly fall on my face. Even then, the white make-up stays in place. I am getting worried. Is it rubber cement? Or plaster of Paris? Will I lose all expression and become totally Zen? How to intimidate the taxi driver then?

The four women help me up, tittering soothingly. We try again. I walk, shake my hip to recreate the bottom half of the number 8, cross the other leg, swivel, and take another step. All the while, the women shake their heads. I am not doing it right. “Too fast,” says Midori-san. “Too much straight line.

Don’t walk as if you own the world.

Walk as if you are gliding through it like an unobtrusive butterfly.”

Butterflies aren’t unobtrusive, I try to say. They attract attention. But I get her point. Geishas are like beautiful butterflies. We try again and again till they are satisfied. They lead me out into a cobblestone street. “Hell, no,” I say. The Japanese men walking by almost fall on their faces. “Shhh,” Midori-san scolds.

“Geisha never swear. Only sweet voices.

Only soft touch.”

I roll my eyes to no effect. They can’t see it under the make-up anyway. The women hold me on all sides and make me walk up the street. “Shinayakasa, shinayakasa,” I mutter to myself, sounding like a bullet train crossed with Indian Railways.

We go into a restaurant down the

FIELD SEARCH Ø Travel companies in Japan can connect you with the geisha world in Kyoto. I used Michi Travel, but there are others (a geisha experience with Michi for a week to 10 days can be tailored for $10,000, or around `6.2 lakh, all inclusive. Immersing yourself in a culture through icons is a terrific way of seeing the world differently—whether it is learning t’ai chi in China or cooking pasta in Italy; or becoming a flâneur in Paris; or creating scents in Morocco. The world has many pleasures. Take a dip into it.

EMBRACE ‘GHEE’ I should first declare an interest. I love ghee. I love eating it, I love cooking with it, I even love the beautiful retro tins it comes in. But most of all I love eating it for its power, perhaps more than any other ingredient in the kitchen, to transform everything it touches.

Ghee came to me relatively late in life, when I arrived in India eight years ago. Ghee, or clarified butter, is used very little in the European kitchen and the first time I became aware of its extraordinary powers was in a cookery class in Delhi. For our first class, the teacher was showing us how to make her version of Chana Pindi, and if I’m honest, I wasn’t paying too much attention. Living in Scotland, I was accustomed to chickpeas being either worthy but dull vegetarian fare, or Indian restaurant dishes adapted and de-spiced to cater to local preferences—neither of which have ever set my tastebuds tingling. As I watched the teacher that night boiling the chickpeas, then adding the spices, I was secretly wishing she would move on to making the deep-fried bhatura.

She made us taste the chickpeas at every stage of the cooking; first, when they had just been cooked, then after adding the spices, showing us the importance of achieving a balance between those which are used for subtle layers of flavour and aroma like cumin and coriander, the heat of chilli,

the sour of dried mango powder and the right amount of salt. Tasty but hardly earth-shattering. Then she took out a frying pan about the size of a teacup, heated a couple of teaspoons of ghee, added a teaspoon of cumin seeds, then let them crackle for a couple of minutes. She sprinkled the sizzling, aromatic ghee over the surface of the chickpeas and handed around spoons, and waited for the surprised gasps of delight. They duly came as we all expressed our amazement at the incredible metamorphosis of a simple dish. We’d been initiated into the mysterious art of tarka (tempering) and the delight of ghee and I, for one, was an instant convert.

road into an anteroom, where tea has been laid. Midori-san makes me kneel beside the screen. Gravity battles geisha-gear as I struggle to fold my lower limbs and crouch. I end up collapsing.

You would think that opening a ricepaper screen is a no-brainer: Just roll it across. My instructions are very specific: where to place the left hand, then right, how many inches apart, and how much to lean forward while doing it. It all has to do with grace and beauty. No culture has studied it more than the Japanese.

The four eagles watch me with an unrelenting gaze and I measure and move the screen. Satisfied, they teach me how to pour tea. It is like holding a dance mudra. Two fingers on the top of the teapot, the others splayed out straight, and pour. The water from the teapot arches out. “Look up, look up,” says Midori-san. “Flutter your eyelashes. Never hold the gaze of a man.”

An elegant kimono-clad lady enters to begin another lesson. The idea is to make your guests feel comfortable, she says in broken English. Some instructions are easy and make sense. Geishas never wade through the middle of the room in case the conversation flow is broken. They walk near the walls. Nothing is loud or raucous. Laughter becomes giggles. “Cover your mouth with the back of your hand,” she says.

“Fingers together.” She adjusts my arm, nudges my back so I kneel straighter and pushes my shoulder down. “Pay attention to posture,” she says.

My lessons continue for days. By the end, I am awed by these women. Some

of their behaviour will outrage feminists but if you suspend that judgement, the grace they exhibit is inspiring. A geisha sees details. Her aesthetic is trained over years to become what I call “just so”. You know those people who walk into a room and adjust a flower or cush-

ion with one simple motion and then, suddenly, everything looks right; everything looks just so. They are the ones who could be geishas.

Since then, I’ve found that ghee, as well as adding a dash of fairy dust to home cooking, performs similar magic on the humble ingredients in streetfood dishes, turning everyday staples into supercharged comfort food. For the past few years I’ve been working on a book about Old Delhi’s street food and ghee is at work in most of my favourite dishes. It glistens in the early morning plates of nahari near the Jama Masjid; it turns korma into a royal feast and has taken a British nursery staple like bread and butter pudding and created Shahi Tukda, a dessert which makes every day feel like Christmas.

I’ve also discovered that ghee has a place in western-style baking. Some of my Saturday Mint Lounge recipes have experimented with ghee, producing the perfect crisp flaky layers of Baklava and deliciously light, crumbly nan khatai-

inspired shortbread biscuits.

Unfortunately, ghee, like butter in the West, has had bad press in recent years, blamed for everything from obesity to heart disease. I personally don’t pay much attention to the constantly changing nutritional advice and prefer to take a “moderation in all things” approach. But if you’re not convinced by the life-enhancing hedonism of consuming ghee, perhaps the science will help. Recent research has shown that modest amounts of ghee in our diets pose no threat to our cardiac health. In fact, there is increasing evidence that in small doses, ghee can actually have health benefits.

Ghee has always performed an important role in religious ceremonies in India as well as being used to purify the body in Ayurvedic treatments. It is full of vitamins A, D, E and K, omega 3

and omega 9 essential fatty acids, and is thought to be good for the eyes and aid digestion. It is also now believed that ghee can improve the ratio of highdensity lipoprotein (good cholesterol) to low-density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol). Recent research at the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) in Karnal found that in tests on rats, the consumption of ghee actually inhibited the spread of breast cancer when compared with rats fed on soybean oil.

The researchers at NDRI did warn against overindulgence though, stressing that this could have the opposite effect and pose a risk to cardiac health.

Even I am willing to admit that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

There was a moment a few weeks ago when I honestly believed I would never eat another spoonful of ghee. I was testing the recipes for my book on Old Delhi and almost every one contained lashings of the stuff—mutton korma, Amritsari kulcha, chana bhatura, chirota, sooji halwa, puri, jalebis. After days of tasting and testing I felt as if I was drowning in ghee. I think, perhaps, it is better to use ghee in the same way as truffles, as an ingredient which is luxurious, and to be used sparingly.

If I’m honest, I’m not really interested in whether ghee makes my cholesterol go up or down. I think the greatest health benefit of food is whether it makes you feel better. And the occasional dish containing ghee makes me feel very good indeed.

An elegant art: A geisha’s aesthetic is refined over years of practice; and (top left) the writer as a geisha.

KOICHI KAMOSHIDA/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPHS

Crisp in layers: The chirota, a Maharashtrian dish, is best made with ghee or clarified butter.

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Shoba Narayan writes the weekly column The Good Life.

Pamela Timms writes the fortnightly column Piece of Cake.

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

STUDY MORE, ONLINE THE NEW YEAR ISSUE L ater this afternoon I will be baking hot vanilla flans at home. I’ve never made them before, but I expect them to feel and taste like warm, set caramel custards with a slightly more dense, baked texture. The flans may or may not come out well. Even the best domestic ovens are notoriously temperamental, I have learnt over the last eight weeks. But my recipe, handpicked by a team of Harvard professors and some of the greatest living chefs in the world, is simple enough with precise directions.

These flans will be the latest in what has been a list of culinary projects of ever-escalating complexity that I have embarked on since early October. So far I’ve caramelized sugar in the oven, made my own batch of ricotta cheese, and made simple homemade vanilla ice cream using an ingenious method involving plastic bags and a mountain of salt. Next week, once the flans have been baked and inhaled in nanoseconds, I will be making ceviche.

What has gotten into me? Am I cooking from some bizarre cookbook?

Perhaps it is training for a reality cooking show? Or am I preparing for a drastic course correction in my career trajectory? Is a Brasserie Vadukut in the works?

Hardly. I am merely being diligent about my homework.

On 8 October, your writer, along with hundreds of other people from all over the world, started a Mooc, or Massive Open Online Course, on the edX.org website. The course, titled Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science—course code SPU27x—brings together teachers of science from Harvard University, US, legendary chefs like Ferran Adrià, Joan Roca and José Andres, and writers such as Harold McGee, to offer an inter-disciplinary look at food, cooking and the wonderful things that happen to food as it metamorphosizes from raw to edible.

“At the end of the course,” the syllabus says, “students will be able to explain how a range of cooking techniques and recipes work, in terms of the physical and chemical transformations of food.”

The idea of Moocs has traversed a “rise and fall” narrative faster than most other such “Internet ideas that will change everything”. The term “Mooc” itself was coined half a decade ago but the idea of delivering courses over the Internet pre-dates

The science of cooking: Professors at Harvard devised this edX.org course. that by at least two decades. But it was in 2012, with the launch of edX.org and other such initiatives, that the concept really captured public imagination. Many things played a part in this new dawn for online teaching— better online delivery tools, widespread availability of the bandwidths required to view videos, and no doubt the familiarity that faculties and administrators at universities have developed with the hardware and software needed to broadcast lessons.

In November 2012 The New York Times said that 2012 was “The Year of the MOOC”. “MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace,” the paper said about the Coursera.com MOOC website, “it now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in post secondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOCbuilding online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.”

The enthusiasm for Moocs cooled somewhat in 2013. It seems unfair to give such a path-breaking idea just 12 months to prove itself. But the chief criticism that has emerged, that Moocs have massive dropout rates, is worrisome.

But this attrition is also understandable. Just because the course is available online 24x7 and the assignments come with generous deadlines

doesn’t make it all that easy.

I am currently around three-and-ahalf weeks behind the SPU27x course schedule. Hot flan is the laboratory assignment for week 4—“Elasticity”— and I am currently also working through the lectures for week 5—“Diffusion and Spherification”. The course is currently at week 8, “Emulsions and Foams”.

When one goes through a Mooc course’s requirements it is easy to think that you can find 4-5 hours a week to view the lectures and the assignments. But in my experience life has a tendency to get in the way.

Given that most Mooc students are probably working professionals or otherwise incapable of going to a classroom regularly, it is important to schedule this into your routine. Wellrun Moocs update their course websites relentlessly. Reading materials, videos, handouts and assignments pile up with brutal regularity. Fall behind a week or two and you can soon find the very act of logging into the website demoralizing.

Like many other Mooc participants I executed the first two weeks with tremendous enthusiasm and regularity. I then began to slack off a little bit. The good thing with this particular course is that it is so rewarding in so many ways. First of all there are all these videos of these great chefs showing us how they cook some of their signature dishes. By themselves these videos are fascinating. But combine them with the lectures that explain the

underlying science and the experience is, frankly, transformational.

I can never look at an egg again without seeing it as a sea of tightly bundled up proteins just waiting to be denatured.

And then there are the lab experiments—the wonderful recipes.

There is something truly therapeutic about standing in a kitchen reeking of vinegar as delicate lumps of ricotta form in a curdling bowl of milk. I almost had tears in my eyes as I later slathered on the delicate ricotta on crackers, drizzled some honey on top and munched it all down.

So while I may be a few recipes behind the rest of the class, I fully expect to keep up and complete the course.

My Mooc experience also seems to have flipped a switch in my brain that has lain dormant for years. I am now eager to learn again. Both online and off. I’ve just enrolled for a second set of offline Japanese classes, and am slowly progressing through a Mooc on Chinese history.

RECONNECT WITH FAMILY ON FACEBOOK A few years ago I logged on to Facebook one evening to find a message in my inbox. “I’m not sure you remember me,” it said, “but we are cousins.” A couple of hours and several messages later, I found myself at the house of my favourite aunt, whom I had not seen in 20 years.

I lost touch with my mother’s family shortly after her death. I was eight years old at the time, with needs that were lovingly met by my father and stepmother, so I must have learnt to make my peace with the circumstances, for my enduring memory of my childhood is one of reasonable happiness.

Over the years, I kept wondering about the sudden and complete disappearance from my life of people whose presence I had taken for granted. And yet, I did nothing to find them. I was fearful of disrupting the fragile order that the grown-ups around me were struggling to establish—till the past ambushed me one dull September evening as I sat at my workstation in my Kolkata office.

My experience of Facebook is by no means unique. Since the coming of the Internet and explosion of social media, there has been a quantum increase in our aspiration to connect. “In or around June 1995 human character changed,” journalist Rebecca Solnit wrote last year in an essay on technology’s impact on our lives. So obsessed are we with our screen lives that reality seems to have

no meaning until it has been endorsed by “likes”, “retweets” and “comments” on social media.

But the primary reason behind Facebook’s mass appeal goes back to the idea that brought it into existence: of creating a gigantic yearbook, with its tentacles spreading out far and wide, in time and across geographical distance.

Critics of social media rightly deplore its physical, psychological and cultural costs. If the arguments against Facebook are obvious and well-rehearsed, the praises tend to be more reticent and cautious. Yet, whether we like it or not, Facebook has decisively changed the nature of human intimacy and complicated the realm of the possible.

Thanks to the traces we so generously leave behind on social media, it is easier than ever now to find, or reconnect with, people we thought we had lost for good.

Reconnecting with family and friends who have drifted apart is, more often than not, a means of seeking closure rather than re-establishing lasting bonds. The development of social media, for instance, has effectively ended the possi- Long way

bility of closed adoptions. Facebook has enabled many adoptees a chance to come to terms with the truth of their early lives, the circumstances that led to their biological parents giving them up for adoption.

In 2012, Saroo Brierley, an Indianborn Australian national, found his biological family by using a combination of Facebook and Google Earth.

Born in a village in Madhya Pradesh, Brierley was separated from his mother and brothers at the age of 5,

home: Go online to search for your roots.

when he fell asleep on a train where he was foraging for leftovers. Unable to articulate the exact details of his home, the child Brierley spent some miserable months in poverty and danger, sleeping on the streets and working odd jobs, before being taken into a shelter for vagrant children. Months later he was adopted by John and Sue Brierley, an Australian couple, and given a new home in a foreign land.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Boys, adopted by a family in Indianapolis, US, as a baby, found her biological family after 29 years in less than two days with the help of Facebook.

A woman, writing under the alias of “Anastasia Beaverhausen” on a website that helps adoptees find their birth families (www.findmyfamily.org), claims she has traced her birth father on Facebook (“at least I think it is him.”)

An unwanted child of a teenage pregnancy, adopted as a baby, she draws a portrait of a philanderer, asking readers whether she ought to contact him.

Jono Lancaster, born with a condition that affects the bones of his face, began searching for his biological

It is important, though, to not get carried away. It is tempting to think that you can use these free Moocs to catch up on all your lost humanities or science education. Not all courses will turn you on or set your brain alight. My dabblings in philosophy and literature Moocs have all ended badly. I dropped out of two within the first week.

So it is important to choose your Moocs wisely and persist with them.

But they are truly rewarding. We are, or at least the curious among us are, lucky to live in a time when such worlds of information and such excellent teachers are all available to us at little to no cost. It seems a crime to let this opportunity pass on.

I ended 2013 on a high intellectual note, with a brand new, admittedly inchoate, set of skills and knowledge.

But now that I am going back to school, 2014 too is looking very exciting indeed.

Sidin Vadukut writes the monthly column Watchman.

family on the Internet in 2009. “The fact they’ve given me up for adoption because of how I look made me wonder how could anyone else love me if they, my own parents, couldn’t,” he said in a recent interview in The Independent.

“As I grew up I thought about how they must have felt—that this was supposed to be the happiest day of their life and turned out to be a nightmare for them.”

Stories such as these abound. Then there are others, like me, whose lives would have probably remained incomplete had there been no social media.

Knowledge is not the most comforting of states; but denial is worse.

I continue to use Facebook warily, impersonally, taking long breaks from it, but feel drawn to it as well for the glimpses it offers into personal discoveries. Much of it tends to be banal, but there are little gems once in a while.

Such as this one: In 2010, a Facebook page was created to help a knitted soft toy find its owner after it was left in a tearoom in Thorpeness, Aldeburgh, in the UK. The page “I’m lost. Help me find my family” was liked by more than 10,000 people and widely shared on social media, leading to the cuddly cat’s eventual reunion with its owner, a toddler named Ned. Few children of a generation past would have grown up with such a lovely memory.

Somak Ghoshal

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WORK IN ANOTHER THE NEW YEAR ISSUE COUNTRY I ’ve always thought that the 18th century writer and critic Samuel Johnson was a man of fairly solid opinions. This was a guy who suggested to his Scottish pal James Boswell that they only speak in Latin to each other while travelling through Europe, so that the French wouldn’t have any advantage over them. And if that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.

But when it comes to Johnson’s famous advice to Boswell—“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”—I have to object.

We live in a smaller, better-connected world than Johnson’s; it’s easier for us to get out of our comfort zones and see what else is on offer. That’s why I recommend packing some bags and going to work abroad for a bit. It doesn’t have to be a huge career move; an exchange programme or a stint of volunteering abroad will do.

As of 2006, almost one in every 10 (about 5.5 million) UK citizens was living abroad permanently, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research in London, UK. The Union ministry of home affairs estimated in 2012 that there were nearly 22 million Indians working overseas.

I’m not talking about a holiday.

Drifting around museums and markets taking artful pictures on Instagram is therapeutic. But this isn’t about therapy. The experience of

working abroad gives you two precious things: an awareness of your own ignorance and a healthy dose of terror.

I moved from London to Delhi to work for this newspaper at the beginning of 2010. It’s been less an “Eat, Pray, Love” experience than an “Eat, Work, Sleep” one, and has been much more interesting for that. While, in theory, I replaced one home-to-office routine with another, the challenge was performing that routine in an environment about which I was totally ignorant, without the accumulated social shorthand on which we all rely.

Four years ago I knew practically nothing about India. I’d never travelled here, or anywhere in Asia. I was not a fan of cricket or Bollywood. I was pretty sure, but not certain, that Sonia Gandhi was no relation to Mohandas Gandhi. It seemed tautologous to me when newspapers talked about the Congress government.

This was all part of the attraction. In my first few months, I spent an incredible amount of time on Google trying to catch up. In April 2010, when the “Right to Education” Bill came into action, a conversation in an editorial meeting might have gone like this: “So… what does this mean for UPA II? It’s about 22 crore children it’s going to affect? There’s some event at Jantar Mantar; we need a bite from Sheila. Cordelia can you do that? You know she’s Delhi CM? It’s right by CP.” I would nod—rather sagely, I hoped—and return to my desk where I

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

FIELD SEARCH

Eat, work, sleep: Constantly learning new things is exhausting and exhilarating. would Google the following: “UPA 2”, “Right to education”, “Jantar”, “Mantar”, “Delhi CM”, “Crores”, and half an hour later I would have a pretty solid idea of what the day would hold.

The process of constantly learning new things is exhilarating and exhausting, in much the same way that it is profoundly tiring to sit for a day in a room full of people who are all speaking a language that you don’t understand. But it’s good for you too.

The brain, while seemingly supine, is constantly alerting itself to sounds it recognizes and struggling to make sense of them, like a cellphone trying to attach itself to an elusive network.

An unpublished study from Columbia University, US, suggests that ignorance might have unintuitive advantages. Providing people with less infor-

mation enables them to judge more precisely what they do and don’t know, which in turn enhances long-term memory, according to the authors.

Behavioural scientists have also written papers asking whether living or working abroad might make people more creative and professionally successful. The answer, according to another study done in 2012 for the Kellogg School of Management, US, is a resounding yes—provided the emigrant makes a real attempt to integrate on arrival (in other words, as long as you don’t adopt Johnson’s attitude of belligerent mistrust). You need just enough novelty to disorientate you, but perhaps not so much that you have to resort to speaking Latin.

Cordelia Jenkins

Ø If you work for a large company, with offices overseas or around the country, an internal move is an obvious choice. Even moving cities within India (from the north to the south, say, or vice versa) offers you a radically different living environment. On the other hand, with international postings, visas are probably your biggest hurdle.

While job opportunities are available all over the world, getting a company to sponsor your visa can be tricky, and often it will first have to prove that there are no superior candidates from your destination country.

While there are around 52 countries where Indian nationals either don’t require visas to visit (many of them are in South America) or can get them easily on arrival, that doesn’t help much if you want to earn money.

Organizations like Teach for All, which have offices all over the world, actively search for employees from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. You can find out more about working with them here: www.teachforall.org/join-ourstaff. Alternatively, www.tefl.com has job opportunities for English- language teachers all over the world.

For prospective students, the British Council launched 370 new scholarships under their GREAT programme this month (www.ihe.britishcouncil.org/news/ opportunity-uk-universities-greatscholarships-initiative-india).

KONSTANCJA HERBERT

START A BAND

TRAVEL WITHOUT A CAMERA

F

I

f you want to start a band, it helps to love music, not just the superstars who make it.

It helps to shut your eyes and imagine your fingers, especially the uncontrollable pinky, flying all over the electric guitar (or bass) fretboard before an adoring crowd (of a few thousand).

Nothing beats playing music. But there’s an element of uncertainty in every great piece of music—a sense of fragility, and of an unknowing that comes from knowing your scales well.

As the Scottish pop diva Amy Macdonald once sang, And how do I know if you are feeling the same as me?/ And how do I know if that’s the only place you want to be?

Ironically, for an assertive art form, uncertainty is the hallmark of rock music. From the very start of your attempt to form a band (that’s after you’ve learnt your scales and theory, no getting away from that), you are beset by doubts. Is that the best lead guitar player for the band? Isn’t the drummer a bit of a cowboy? Why doesn’t the singer read music?

I started out when I was a boy of 10 or 12, learning to play the chords on a beat-up acoustic guitar that someone gave me. It had five strings, or maybe four, which is why the bizarre guitars of someone like American bluesman Seasick Steve make perfect sense to me. Good engineering isn’t always about adding, like blades to an electric razor.

There used to be great books to learn to play the guitar, and there used to be some wonderful young people who would take the time out

to show you the ropes, including some tricks no book will ever tell you. Now the Internet is full of resources and YouTube, an ocean of handy lessons.

I started learning Indian classical at around the same time, and if that sounds strange then you should know that by my late teens European avant-garde jazz too was taking roots in my head. Which is why I love to create noise on electrified esraj, to the celestial music of Rabindranath Tagore.

Back in the mid-1970s when rock music was living through its golden age, fully conscious of the fact that this was a one-off, there used to be great excitement around music and people learnt to share with the generosity of pioneers. Universities were full of rock bands, including some really superb ones.

Some veered into jazz and were suddenly discovering jazz-rock.

Some labels stuck, some didn’t. Caste and religion were unknown.

When I was sent off to London on a posting more than 25 years ago, a British diplomat informed me that there was a foreign correspondents’ jazz band in the British capital. I looked for it but never found it.

What I did find soon enough was a bunch of wonderful Irish musicians who were looking for a bass player.

Actually, they weren’t, but I was looking for a band and they didn’t mind.

On weekends, after feeding the insatiable appetite of my editors, I would sometimes play in pubs along with the band. It had some truly phenomenal musicians who would bend jigs and reels (Irish folk forms) and then

Read music: Brainstorm playing at The Half Moon pub, a popular rock music venue, in London in 2013. send those bent forms hurtling down some crazy musical highway at unbelievable speeds.

Much later I met up with some other fine musicians and we formed a rock band. We wrote songs, I was playing guitar more and started recording. We are still doing that—over long distances, helped by the kindly guiding hands of some celebrated English musicians from the 1970s.

Modern technology (electric power, amplification) was what made rock music—possibly the greatest musical form since Western and Indian classical. And technology makes long-distance collaboration possible. You can record music in your living room (the bedroom’s better) and email it to your collaborators, wherever they may be.

People can add to it and you soon have something that’s in half-decent shape. Book a studio someplace that’s rural, buy some beer and gather on a cool autumn day. The creative juices start to flow, the strings start to bend, some strange chords and melodies spring up from nowhere, and then, all of a sudden, everything falls in place. Everything seems worth it. If only for a moment.

Dipankar De Sarkar’s Irish folkrock band in London was called Trim the Velvet. His new project is a band called Brainstorm, which is currently recording.

or most of human history, people travelled without a camera. The world’s greatest travellers did not take photographs. Marco Polo did not take a selfie on top of the Great Wall of China. Nor did Hiuen Tsang snap himself with the Nalanda varsity’s volleyball team.

But today, the camera has virtually taken over the experience of leisure travel. The moment of truth came for me during a recent trip to Paris, France. Despite my old temperamental hostility to the camera, I could not restrain myself from posing—feeling like an idiot the whole time—in front of the Eiffel Tower. Nor could I desist from shooting every sunset on sight.

Or every gargoyle glowering at me from the rooftops of “Rue Breakez Votre Camera S’il Vous Plaît”.

Things came to a head at the Louvre Museum where, after standing in queue for three hours and walking 2km through endless corridors, when I finally made it to Room No.6 on the first floor of the Denon wing for a rendezvous with the Mona Lisa, I could not see the picture for the cameras.

There must have been a hundred people in the room. All armed with shooting devices. Many had “stand-alone” cameras. Others held smartphones. Some had both. And with their arms raised above the heads of each other, it looked like all these people had gathered to collectively surrender before La Gioconda. The reality, of course, was the opposite—an absurd attempt to make La Gioconda surrender to the camera.

When I got back from the trip, I discovered I had clicked about 2,200 photographs. Truth be told, every time I took a picture, I was repelled by what I was doing. But I did it anyway. Stronger than my revulsion was my desire to appropriate something of the present moment—so that I could revisit it, and perhaps access some G SAMPATH part of this experience once again Tourist spot: The Venus in my imagination. de Milo on display at Yet even as we try to squirrel The Louvre in Paris. away discrete parcels of reality in the form of image souvenirs, something is lost every time we take a picture. We can capture the surface, not what lies beneath, which is something that can only be accessed through consciousness, not light. A camera-driven holiday will necessarily be one devoted to the collection of surfaces. It comes at a cost—the objectification of reality and a consequent diminution of experience.

Surfaces are more than adequate for the social rites of Facebook. A more ambitious traveller, however, would want to experience and understand more than to see and remember. So I have resolved that my next travel project will not include a camera. As for recording memories, I’ll make do with notebook and pen. Just try it once.

G. Sampath is the author of How to Make Enemies And Offend People.

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ATTEND A FILM FESTIVAL M y year is determined by the festival calendar. Not the religious one, but the movie one.

My own private almanac is divided into the busy period (October-December) and fallow phases (nearly every other month of the year). There’s the Mumbai Film Festival in my hometown, which always necessitates a paid leave application (reason: personal). There is the International Film Festival of India held in Goa, which I have abandoned in recent years but which I plan to return to. And there is the annual pilgrimage to the wonderfully idiosyncratic International Film Festival of Kerala, held in Thiruvananthapuram. There are many other festivals in other parts of the country that I am unable to go to, but I keep tabs on them remotely, scrolling up and down the schedules to see what I am missing, swallowing my disappointment at not being able to make it, and wondering if I should break my no-piracy rule.

Festivals, those seemingly endless days of wallowing in cinema where one movie flows into the next to the point where you will be hard-pressed to remember what you last saw or what you plan to watch next, are an essential part of any movie-goer’s experience. This is where the old and new expressions in cinematic language come together in one place.

However, movie-watching is only one part of the experience. There are few

HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA

Dreamcatchers: A 2004 protest in New York City, US, shot by the writer.

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

better places than film festivals to lose and regain faith in humanity. A festival is where you meet the sophisticates and the upstarts, the experts and the charlatans, the faddists and the fanatics. The true-blue festival regular isn’t usually the most opinionated one, nor is he the delegate who is glassy-eyed and somewhat breathless after having watched four films and rushing into the fifth. The genuine article is the one who would like nothing better than to watch films all alone, who quietly slips out of one screening and disappears into another, who doesn’t like to pull up to the shore but keep floating along from one wave to the next.

Festival-going sounds like an anachronism in the age of downloads and private viewing, where a large-canvas movie gets squeezed into a 12-inch screen. However sophisticated the home theatre system (such as the minitheatres in the homes of affluent suburban Americans and some very wealthy Indians), there really is no better place to watch a movie than in a cinema hall, where its true destiny lies.

All my good, bad and tiresome movie experiences have been in theatres. And the best experiences, however tedious or overrated the movie, have been at film festivals. I am quite pathetically addicted to making fervid inquiries first about festival dates and then about the line-up of films. Once this line-up has been revealed, a familiar sensation

BE OVERQUALIFIED FOR YOUR JOB

was good at math and physics in school. Which meant that like most good Andhra boys, I was expected to become an “ingineeru”, get a job and get married with a fat dowry. At least that’s what most of my friends did.

My grandfather was a clerk in a rice mill who could barely pay for my father’s education. My father was the first in his family to graduate and got a government job as an accountant. When I cleared the mother-of-all-engineering-entrance exams, the Indian Institute of Technology-Joint Entrance Exam (IIT-JEE), my parents gave me no option but to join electrical engineering at IIT, Madras. I did not want to be an engineer. I had wanted to study physics at IIT. I got into photography literally by accident. After graduating from IIT, I mustered the courage to rebel and went to study physics in Pune. My parents gave up on me as a hopeless case. A motorcycle accident on

GK SIVAPRASAD/VIA IIFK

the university campus grounded me for a month with a broken leg.

Having nothing much to do, I picked up a book on photography.

From thereon, photography turned into an obsession.

My move from physics to photography baffled my parents. For them, cameras come out of the closet only during weddings and vacations. My maternal grandmother was inconsolable. A proud woman, she had ruled like the feudal mistress of a large mansion in Vijayawada in her day. She refused to accept photography as a legitimate profession, certainly not after an IIT degree. She had grand visions of how I would become CEO of a company after my IIT, and drive her in a Mercedes car. Much to her horror, I was chasing grumpy CEOs for a photo-op and I drove an old beat-up Ford to work. There was also the predicament of “Which Andhra girl would marry a photographer?” Peace returned to

The best seat: The most rewarding cinema experiences are at film festivals, when one film flows into the next. starts unfolding in the body, usually similar to the early warning signs of a heart attack, which results from the difficulties of navigating the festival schedule. How does one deal with clashes between two masters? Badly, usually.

How does one fit lunch, caffeinated beverages and toilet visits between screenings? Will one get a good seat, which is in the rear and right in the centre? Like so many others I know, I have spent several precious hours and minutes worrying over what appear to be trifles, all in the name of feeding the sweetest addiction of them all.

the family home after we agreed on my job description as “someone who takes pictures of Americans and foreigners”.

When I disclose my IIT background, people react with the suspicious you’re-pulling-my-leg looks or the incredulous you-are-a-freak look. Some also give me the dismissive you-are-a-total-loser look.

A recent addition to this repertoire is the filmi so-you’re-one-of-those3-Idiots look, referring to the Bollywood excess with Aamir Khan in the lead role.

A few years ago, I bumped into The Hindu editor N. Ram outside Columbia University in New York, US. I had met him earlier at IIT, where he was the chief guest for our annual hostel day. When he heard that I was a photographer, he semi-growled, “Photography? What a waste!”

Many IIT graduates have gone on to become musicians, writers, painters, poets, farmers and now even chief ministers (Arvind Kejriwal joined mechanical engineering at IIT, Kharagpur in 1985). Some sell soaps and shampoos. And they’re damn good at it too. They found their calling, and I found mine. The great Czechoslovakian photographer Josef Koudelka was trained as an aeronautical engineer before he saw the light and turned to photography. One less engineer didn’t kill anybody.

Top business leaders are always hard-pressed for time and they barely give more than a couple of impatient minutes to a photographer. On an assignment with Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder, chairman and group CEO of Bharti Enterprises, the reporter with me cheekily introduced me as someone “more qualified than the rest of us put together in the room”. Mittal registered those three famed letters of my qualification and gave me a quick approving look. That also brought out the greatest smile he could muster in those 3 hurried minutes I got for the photo shoot.

His portrait turned out great and ran along with his interview on the front page of Mint. That was one instance where over-qualification worked for me.

Bitten by the Bollywood bug, Harikrishna Katragadda has finally moved to Mumbai to pursue cinematography.

Festivals can actually be fun, once you have stopped worrying about them.

A festival is where you meet forgotten buddies and find new ones, and it’s also where you decide to end a relationship purely based on another person’s taste.

I have festival friends whom I see but once or twice a year, usually in some queue or the other, clutching a festival catalogue, soliciting or handing out recommendations and opinions, and shaking their heads about how this edition was simply the worst of them all. I usually meet them again at the same place the following year. I doubt we would

have anything to say to each other if we met in the harsh light of day, without a film screening or a whining session for a context. I doubt that we even want to.

Like pilgrims who surge forward towards the light, festival regulars congregate and make their way as one towards darkness. At that moment, it is the only truth that matters, and the only way to repeat the experience is to scan the calendar, list out the dates, apply for leave and start the process all over again, and again, and again.

Nandini Ramnath

TEACH TO CHANGE I n 2011, I was dissatisfied with my lem was that our students didn’t job as a technology consultant respect us. Through the first few and looking to parlay my experi- months of our fellowship, we spent ence into a masters in business hours with them after school—in administration (MBA). I was trying to their homes and communities, and answer a question on my applica- taking them on field trips across the tion—“Why are you applying for an city. These interactions showed our MBA?” I couldn’t answer it, and real- students we cared, gave them reason ized I had to pursue a vision that to trust us, and eventually respect us would actually make me happy. enough to behave themselves.

My heart was telling me to try and Once we captured their attention, dedicate myself to a cause greater Omar and I had to work on shaping than myself. My intuition was telling our students’ character. Unfortume to leave the comforts of my Los nately our students come from comAngeles home and return to India. I munities that lack role models. The applied for the Teach for India fel- unsavoury behaviour they witness all lowship—a prothe time causes gramme where colthem to exhibit antilege graduates and social behaviour in FIELD young professionals class.

SEARCH commit two years to One of the values teach full-time in Omar and I focused Ø To apply for the 2014 under-resourced on was empathy. To fellowship programme at schools in India. explain this, we Teach for India, visit Once that came asked our school’s www.teachforindia.org/apply through, I sold cleaning staff to tell almost everything I the students what owned and moved to Mumbai in kind of disgusting things they would May 2012. After a month of training, I have to do cleaning up after them. I’ll was sent to the Supari Tank Munici- never forget the time when Vasid, pal School in Bandra. one of our worst-behaved children, Till then, I don’t think I really fished out a plastic bottle obstructing understood what “misbehaved” one of the toilets because he undermeant. From my privileged, Western stood that it wasn’t right for the upbringing, the only sort of misbe- cleaning staff to have to do that. All it haviour I was accustomed to was took was a situation that the students people not doing their homework or, could relate to in order for them to at worst, playing truant. Little did I understand what empathy looked know that the class VI students I was like in practice. teaching would not only fight each Have I left a lasting impression? other, but in some cases, turn violent Only time will tell. towards my co-teacher Omar Iyer and I. Kiran Palukuri is a fellow with We realized the root of the prob- Teach for India.

COURTESY TEACH

FOR I NDIA

Timetable: Teach for India fellows teach full-time in under-resourced schools.

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LIVE AND WORK IN THE A VILLAGE NEW YEAR ISSUE C hoose your dates, come along with me and meet some of the most unassuming people. These people have overcome many difficulties to adopt digital tools, and access devices and Internet connectivity.

Most of them have little education, they are “backward” and live in abject poverty. But they represent key milestones in India’s great journey towards becoming “Digital Bharat”.

And yes. For you, these remote destina-

tions may be worth exploring and asking yourselves simple questions: Can I expect connectivity in these parts when I travel here next? And can I help enable one person in a cluster of village households to become digitally literate?

Internet and information communication technologies (ICT) can address significantly our deprivations and problems of alienation in remote parts of the country. With this real-

Milestone 2: Baran, Rajasthan

Milestone 1: Alwar, Rajasthan

Shahpur, a Muslim-majority panchayat in Umrain block in Alwar district, Rajasthan, is known for its backwardness.

Literacy and education are a 21st century challenge here. In 2010, DEF organized a digital panchayat workshop for the elected members to become digitally literate and make use of the digital resource centre set up on the outskirts of Alwar. That was where up-sarpanch (vice-president) Nawab Khan first began using the computer and Internet. By November, Nawab had created a new digital ecosystem in his village, imparting digital literacy to youths and girls, panchayat members and community fellows—something that is still difficult for many of his panchayat brethren in other parts. Today he represents his panchayat at the annual Digital Panchayat Summit in Delhi.

FIELD SEARCH Ø In 2009, DEF launched the Digital Panchayat Programme wherein selected digital panchayat fellows work with a cluster of panchayats at a district level for three months. The fellows are supposed to make elected members digitally literate, and digitize the records of the panchayats to make these available through dedicated digital

Baran is a tribal-dominated area in Rajasthan. Forty per cent of its residents are from the Sahariya and Bheel communities, and the majority are destitute, bonded labourers. Amid them, you will meet Vijay Roy. In his mid-20s, Vijay is a vagabond turned barefoot network engineer. The first time I met Vijay years ago, he showed great eagerness to learn about everything digital—computer, mobile, Internet, video and radio. As a member of our wireless networking team, he learnt about the Internet and broadband. His contributions have helped to build eight community digital and access resource centres with wireless broadband network, many of them 40-60km apart. He mobilized youth and children to avail of the services at the centres—to acquire digital literacy, learn vocational skills, and use telehealth and e-learning packages.

Osama Manzar is the founder and director of the Digital Empowerment Foundation.

Milestone 3: Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh

ing cluster based on traditional skills that has a digital design centre run by weavers and the community. If you are in Chanderi, you must meet Kalle Bhai.

A grass-root writer, historian, precision handloom weaver and development activist, Kalle Bhai has also donned the mantle of a digital ambassador. He will talk to you about how a traditional skill-based cluster can be developed holistically if the residents are digitally enabled.

The Chanderi cluster today is completely Wi-Fi-enabled; more than 70% of the youth are digitally literate, and an e-commerce portal connects the weaving entrepreneurs with national and global markets. locations. For details, visit www.wforc.in

Ø The Wireless for Communities (W4C) initiative establishes wireless-based broadband Internet clusters and provides connectivity in remote areas. As a digital wireless fellow, you can join the W4C programme for a minimum of three months and explore on the ground how to connect rural and remote

Ø The Chanderiyaan project (www.chanderiyaan.net) was initiated by DEF in 2009 as part of the digital cluster development flagship programme. As a fellow, you can join the digital fellowship of The Loom programme and contribute in textile and apparel designing, and in making entrepreneurs out of weavers.

Ø Always carry a shopping bag with you. Ø Cycle or take public transport to your office. Cycle or walk within a 4km radius of your house to run errands. Ø Buy vegetables from the vendor who comes to your street instead of driving to a supermarket across town to get organic fruits and vegetables. Ø Grow fruits, vegetables and herbs in your garden. The Vishwanaths even grow grains. Gar-

FROM

DIGITAL EMPOWERMENT FOUNDATION

Milestone 4: Muzaffarpur, Bihar

panchayat websites. Visit online panchayats at www.epanchayat.in

through a sand bed which contains plants such as bamboo and reeds. This water can be used for plants. The Vishwanaths point out that leading a sustainable life need not be about getting all that infrastructure in place, but more about changing lifestyles. Here is their guide to getting started:

PHOTOGRAPHS

Let’s make inroads into Madhya Pradesh and travel straight to Chanderi, the historical weaving township. The municipality has around 40,000 residents, with more than 3,500 weaving families. Today, Chanderi is perhaps the only weav-

GET STARTED ON A SUSTAINABLE LIFE C hitra and Vishwanath have been married for 25 years and can’t remember a time when they were not ecologically conscious. “We come from families where driving around in cars is not a given,” says Chitra, an architect who designs eco-friendly homes.

Husband Vishwanath S., known as the rain man in Bangalore, spread the word on rainwater harvesting and runs Rainwaterclub.org, informing people about its process and benefits.

The family lives in a house built with bricks made from soil excavated from the plot itself. In addition to a rainwater harvesting system, the terrace has a grey-water treatment system— water that comes out of the washing machine, bathroom or kitchen sink is made to pass

ization, I launched the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) 10 years ago. Today, DEF’s efforts extend to 30 locations in India, mostly in remote areas.

Let me take you to four milestones of our “digital Bharat yatra”, traversing Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

dens attract butterflies and birds. Your home will become your getaway. Ø Set up a solar water heater. Ø Set up a rainwater harvesting system. Wash some of your clothes by hand instead of running many washing machine cycles every weekend. Ø Don’t waste food. Give the food away to someone if you find yourself overstocked. Ø Compost your kitchen waste and use it in your garden.

Reduce the amount of garbage that goes out of your house. Ø Carry your own bottle of water. Ø Your home doesn’t have to be cleaned with detergent every day. Just water will do to get rid of the dust.

Pavitra Jayaraman

Ratnauli is a village panchayat in the Maniari block of Muzaffarpur district in Bihar.

Most people here are dependent on daily-wage work, especially Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) jobs. Amid the thousands of households, let me take you to the families of Heera Devi, Basmati Devi and Savitri Devi—none of them is literate or can speak anything but Bhojpuri, and all of them lost `4,000 in MGNREGA job opportunities as others took up the jobs in their names and withdrew the money by conniving with a few panchayat functionaries. They got their lost jobs with the support of the Community Information Resource Centre (Circ) that DEF established in Ratnauli. Run by Sanjay Sahni, Circ provides access to all MGNREGA-related information, including the names of each person allotted a job, and payment details. Ø DEF has established more than 30 Circs across India. These provide information services, digital literacy, ICT skills, governance, citizen services and livelihood opportunities. As a fellow of the digital information fellow programme, to work with Circs you can join a three- to sixmonth programme and help make one person in each household digitally literate. For details, visit www.defindia.org

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

BE A MENTOR

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substantial part of my 25-year professional career has been with Wall Street firms. The model these firms have generally followed is to hire bright people and get them to hit the road running. Some technical training was available but little if anything was on offer to develop soft skills and nurture employee growth. The culture was to sink or swim. I swam against this for my entire career because I had had an excellent organizational behaviour (OB) professor in business school who carefully coached us students into believing that people were the most valuable asset for a modern firm. I consciously adopted these principles very early in my career and vowed to learn, listen and nurture as best I could.

Winston Churchill, the former British prime minister, once said: “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” In the people context, there are many ways of giving. Mentoring is one excellent way. It gives of your time and experience to others and that helps them to dream, deliver or navigate. Sometimes, mentoring can be powerful enough to reset that potential dramatically upwards.

Mentoring can be done in different ways. One model is to engage with your mentee at a transactional level. I prefer the light-touch version.

By making gentle suggestions at the right moments, the idea is to encourage your colleagues to think bigger, let go, take risks or simply pick themselves up in difficult circumstances. The magic of mentoring is that it not only helps the mentee but it also aids the mentor. I have little hesitation in saying that I have gained greatly from various mentoring relationships. The very construct of these relationships requires you to be in a learning mode all your life. Subliminally, you are organizing your experiences as they happen into nuggets and lessons to be shared.

THINKSTOCK In this way you are challenged and self-aware on a continual basis.

Your interactions with your colleague can be about specific work-related issues, tricky people situations or alternative strategic paths. But it needn’t be just that. A young trader and I regularly share book lists and exchange notes about what we learnt from certain books. I am able to share nuggets of my experience and thoughts simply by this exchange. In return, I get her to open up on her perspective in a non-threatening workplace context.

Strictly speaking, a mentoring relationship does not even have to be one-on-one, it can be done with a small group. During the financial crisis years of 2008-09 I had regular conversations with small groups. One purpose was to communicate the latest and put their minds at ease but a larger purpose was to impart the idea to future leaders that communication in times of business stress can be a great healer.

So reach out and become a mentor this New Year. It will enrich your life and that of a colleague.

Narayan Ramachandran is the former country head of Morgan Stanley in India. He is currently chairman of Inklude Labs, which deworms millions of schoolchildren in India.

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Grounded: Chitra and Vishwanath S. harvest rainwater and minimize wastage in their Bangalore home.

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BIKE 100KM IN A DAY T

Metres from Messi

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hree hours before kick-off on game Sunday, Barcelona’s streets started turning red and blue—the team colours of the football club (FC).

It wasn’t even a high-profile game—just home team Barcelona with its holy trinity of Xavi Hernández, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi going up against Celta Vigo. But the home fans’ party starts in buses and metros and continues at the nearby bars, many of which are run by Pakistanis. My friend and I got falafel rolls and beers at half-price, thanks to a “shukriya” instead of “gracias” when the owner handed the rolls to us.

From these bars, waves of fans walked into the majestic Camp Nou. The stadium’s size, clean architectural lines and facilities make it one of the best in the world and the largest in Europe.

Even on non-game days people pay upwards of €24 (around `2,030) for a tour of Barcelona’s most famous club.

To someone who grew up watching cricket from the concrete bleachers at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens through a 20ft-high wire fence and a wall of lathi-wielding policemen floating around the ground, the unhindered view from the red and blue fibreglass chairs was far from usual fare.

A party was already on in the stands behind the goalposts at either end of the ground.

Drums, vuvuzelas, trumpets and singing had

filled the stadium even before the players came out for their warm-up.

It was an easy game, but the chanting fans were supercharged. Every time a decision went against Barcelona, fans passionately blamed everything on arch-rivals Real Madrid: “The ref is (Cristiano) Ronaldo’s pal”; “The ref is on (Real) Madrid’s pay roll”.

Though Jordi Alba and Alexis Sánchez scored the goals, the moment of magic came when Messi received the ball after a link-up play between Xavi and Iniesta and dribbled it past six players to the edge of the box for what seemed like a minute—before being fouled.

If you thought chants of “Sa…chin, Sa…chin” at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium were loud on 16 November, you have to hear the chant of “Messi… Messi” at Camp Nou whenever the Argentinian has the ball at his feet.

Supercharged: Lionel Messi.

Shrenik Avlani

Inside Roland Garros

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KAYEZAD E ADAJANIA

nlike the All England ice creams and about an Lawn Tennis Club— hour later, we were inside the venue of the Wimbledon Court Philippe-Chatrier.

Tennis Championships— Our seats looked a mile that overwhelms even from away from courtside. I a distance, you don’t quite could barely open my eyes notice Roland Garros till in the bright sunlight for you’ve reached its gates. It’s the first hour. But despite small; just three large tennis the unforgiving sun and courts and about 16 smaller the 27 degrees Celsius ones tucked tightly and Seat of action: A Roland Garros court. heat, Nadal and Djokovic you’re done. produced some of the best A friend and I had managed, after much tennis of their careers—for 4 hours, 37 minutes. difficulty, to buy tickets online, for €114 Djokovic threw everything and the kitchen sink (around `9,650), to the men’s semi-finals in at Nadal, who kept pounding all the same. the French Open Tennis Championships, Eventually, Nadal won and collapsed on court held every year from 20 May. in joy. He had finally figured out the Djokovic As we walked through the gates on 7 June, we riddle that had been bugging him for over two spotted a space where fans could get their faces years. Last month, that match was voted the painted, to cheer for their teams. After many best Grand Slam men’s tennis match of 2013 by promises that the paint would come off eventu- the Association of Tennis Professionals. ally, I opted for the Serbian flag. Serbia’s Novak But the best part of my day came later, when I Djokovic was up against Spain’s Rafael Nadal in got a volunteer to collect some Centre Court clay one of the two semi-finals. for me in an empty jam bottle I had been carryA quick tour of the facility, spotting Russia’s ing with me all morning. Who says clay is dirt!

Maria Sharapova (who was practising for the next day’s ladies’ singles final), some hotdogs, Kayezad E. Adajania

Spectator sport

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t was one of those sessions with my friend where we usually knock back a couple of beers and make ambitious travel plans—most of which never materialize. This time, however, we got talking about travelling to London to see a match at Lord’s—and found several reasons to pack our bags in a hurry.

I am a die-hard fan of the game. Growing up, I spent many long hours at the nets every day, practising my straight drive. Even today, at 41, I play the odd club match in the Delhi and District Cricket Association league. Watching a match in the home of cricket was a lifelong dream. As it happened, the match I saw was the last Test that Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar played together at Lord’s.

It was July 2011; and Day 2 of the Pataudi

Trophy tournament saw us seated to the right of the famous Lord’s balcony. Skipper M.S. Dhoni had won the toss and elected to bowl the previous day. As my friend and I prepared to see some Indian batting on the second day of the Test, we treated ourselves to beer and snacks—a luxury you don’t have at any of the Indian grounds. At the stadium that day, we met seven retired colleagues who have been watching every Test match at Lord’s for the past 25 years—they even quizzed us on our knowledge of Indian Test statistics for fun.

When you see champagne corks flying from different sections you know that the close of play is near. By the end of the day, we knew India would be chasing leather for the rest of the Test. By this time, however, the result of the MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

The Mecca of cricket: The famous media centre at Lord’s.

match held less interest for me than the excitement of being in that space. Everything from the architecture and history of the place to the security arrangements wowed me. We also witnessed some cricketing milestones—it was the 2,000th International Test Match and the 100th between India and England; and Dravid’s 100 meant 100 Test hundreds between the three greatest Indian cricketers of our generation— Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman.

After this experience it’s small wonder that for our next trip we made a beeline to Australia’s Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG)—the 110,000-seater battleground of the tournament called the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

he night before, I’d only wanted to break my old record.

I had started cycling in the beginning of 2012, as a way to commute and get around my neighbourhood. Within six months, I had upgraded to a sixgear bike, and by September 2012, I had done my first marathon distance—and cycled 42km. For almost a year after that, though, I’d stagnated, once managing to ride 48km in a single day, but never going beyond that.

So when I visited Chennai in August, I asked my friend Srini Swaminathan, who runs ultramarathons and cycles brevets, to help me beat my 48km best. Srini told me I could borrow his spare bicycle, and we could ride from Adyar towards Mahabalipuram and back on the East Coast Road, the scenic coastal road that runs south from Chennai.

We started at 5.30am, well before sunrise.

By the time it was light enough to switch off our headlamps, we had already covered 10km, and were close to Injambakkam. Less than an hour later, Srini told me that we’d covered 25km, and were close to Muttukadu Boat House. If we rode back now, I’d have cruised past my personal best.

It was a gorgeous day, just right for cycling. Cloud cover and a brisk wind ensured that Chennai’s notorious humidity didn’t feel too bad. I told Srini that I felt up to doing at least 60km for the day, so we might as well ride another 5km before deciding to turn back.

Five kilometres later, I asked to go on, saying we could have breakfast at Mahabalipuram.

When we did ride into Mahabalipuram, Srini grinned at me, and said that by not turning back until we’d ridden ahead another 8km, I could do my first ever 100km ride.

For the third time that day, I decided to keep riding in order to chase a better record. I told Srini I was up for it. The next 58km included one long breakfast break, many shorter breaks for me to catch my breath and swig Electral, and one agonizing puncture at the 88km mark which could only be fixed by carrying the cycle in a share-auto for repairs, and then starting the last 12km from a wholly new point.

Adyar But I finished.

On that day, I’d been blessed with Injambakkam good weather, a fantastic partner, a year and a half of accumulated practice, and a Muttukadu mixture of determinaBoat House tion and stubbornness.

I ended up more than doubling my personal distance record.

I am determined to do it again, or maybe even Mahabalipuram outdo it. I haven’t yet, though. Maybe that’s what 2014 is for.

i

DAVID RAMOS/ GETTY IMAGES

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FOLLOW YOUR THE NEW YEAR ISSUE SPORTY PASSION

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INDIA

Aadisht Khanna manufactures both standard and bespoke conveyor belts for the mining and construction industry.

SRINI SWAMINATHAN

The Boxing Day match

Waking up early in the morning to commentary by Australia’s Richie Benaud and Bill Lawry had been a religion for me. Being at the MCG, and watching a live match there, was beyond anything I could have imagined. To this day I wonder how 70,000 people got inside the stadium without chaos. It was 26 December 2011, and Day 1 of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy tournament ended with Australia six down. Just as we had hoped, India were batting by lunchtime on the second day. Sachin Tendulkar went in to bat at No.4—and got a standing ovation. Tendulkar didn’t put 100 runs on the board that day, getting out at 73. Australia went on to win the series, taking the lead by 122 runs. But I still get goosebumps when I think back to that day when 70,000 people stood up and a roar went up from the crowd to pay homage to Tendulkar.

Manoj Madhavan

Tireless: The writer on the East Coast Road.

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ADOPT AN INDIAN STRAY DOG

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Four is company: Shobitha Mani and Gautam John with their dogs Ella and Sparky, at their Bangalore home.

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lthough they had discussed adopting ing. “It is a huge responsibility and we were seem, they come from extremely cold places a dog at length, Shobitha Mani and dealing with two new personalities in our and, however beautiful, will always be Gautam John’s dogs, Ella and Sparky, home,” says John, who believes dogs should grossly overdressed for our balmy tropics. came into their lives serendipitously. not be bought.

“They (Indian dogs) are extremely intelli“Sparky was brought in by my sister-in-law, “We live in a country that has been gent and fiercely loyal. Contrary to popular Shonali, as a puppy, asking if we could foster obsessed with all things ‘foreign’ for too long belief, that’s where the fierceness ends, if him while a permanent home was found,” now. Even when it comes to the animals we they are brought up well,” says Anand. says John. The decision to keep him was choose to live with,” says Anoopa Anand, Canine behaviour counsellor Natasha easy because they had planned to adopt founder of Animal Aid Alliance, a trust that Chandy says Indian dogs tend to be more anyway. “We knew we wanted to adopt and works for the rescue, rehabilitation and resilient. “Because breeding processes, not buy a dog. We hadn’t discussed the rehoming of injured, abandoned animals. especially in India, are conducted in such breed, it just turned out that he was an Anand points out that the local breed is best a haphazard way, the pure breeds often Indian puppy,” says John, a Bangalore- suited to Indian conditions and exotic as a have genetic health issues. This is almost based lawyer.

Siberian Husky or the Saint Bernard might nil for Indian dogs, since the ones that are Within a few months, Ella was rescued by on the street are the fittest that survived,” Shonali, having been spayed says Chandy. too young, with her stitches The rules of adoption opening up and infected by apply. One has to make sure Ø Each of these the parvovirus. She was that the personality of the organizations will ensure nursed back to health by Shopuppy matches that of the that the vaccinations are nali and Compassion Unlimfamily. “Indian dogs are also Ø If you’d like to already done or will tell ited Plus Action (Cupa), a highly energetic. Are you set adopt an Indian dog, get you how and where you can public charitable trust that to take them on multiple in touch with Compassion take care of the basic healthcare. works for the welfare of all aniwalks? You can’t pick up a Unlimited Plus Action (Cupa) in Ø Andy (pictured here) is a fourmals. While fostering her durdog from the street and and-a-half months old Indian cross. your city, Let’s Live Together ing her recovery, the couple expect him to be happy in He has been vaccinated and (www.letslivetogether.wordpress. fell in love with her and knew the confines of your home. neutered, and he is looking for a com)—an organization that works that most people would hesiThey are used to the freefamily. To adopt him or other Indian for the adoption of Indian puppies tate to adopt her, so she stayed dom,” says Chandy. puppies like him, contact Animal Aid —or Animal Aid Alliance (www. as well. For the first-time dog Alliance on 9845430054. facebook.com/animalaidalliance). parents, the first year was taxPavitra Jayaraman

FIELD SEARCH

COPING WITH YOUR LOSS P hysical and emotional deaths are viscerally different. This realization enveloped me like a dark shroud yet exposed me to a deep vulnerability. What a convoluted sentence, you would say. It is.

Editorially acceptable language escapes me as I try to express the burning embers of grief.

Hours after cremating my mother last year, I switched on the TV to watch Grey’s Anatomy. Nothing else could have distracted me from the swirling visuals of my mum’s last days in hospital and her body wrapped in sterile white. The memory of her laboriously reaching the end while my father and I stood bewildered and bombed in the hospital ICU holding her hands was like a lonely wander in an icy, dreary terrain where all trees were black. She was gone and here I was watching on TV a woman slide down the septicaemia cliff just as mum had. Barely a month back, my housekeeper, a 24-year-old, warm and emphatic girl, too had died of septicaemia in a mishandled childbirth. “Why is everyone dying of septicaemia?” I asked no one in particular.

So no one replied.

Just after I had finished queuing up for my mother’s death certificate, put together her concluding pension papers and dusted her résumé, mandated before receiving her posthumously declared Sahitya Akademi Award for Sindhi writing, my father died of a massive heart attack. In less

than six months after I had cremated my mother, I held the body of another parent in my arms.

Known as the pioneer of new Sindhi writing, my father’s literary work is layered with existentialist melancholy. “Life is no gain; death is no loss,” he said for years. After my mother’s death, he would lucidly discuss his desire to die, repeatedly asking me if there was a spiritually forgiving way of committing suicide. As I cried while cremating him, I felt he was laughing at my lack of philosophical maturity.

He died on me before I could set things right, I screamed as I sat across Madhu Sarin, a close friend who is also an analyst and therapist. Seeing that I desperately needed help, Madhu offered healing conversations that continue till date. I embarked on a journey of dialogues—choked with my troubled expressions, half-sentences and confusions. My father’s meditations on death reverberated in my hurting head and I wanted to let out that melancholy before someone.

I needed to say that the sun had set, so what if it was only noon.

But my disillusionment was only trapping me further in its web. That’s when Madhu urged me to seek out someone professionally for grief counselling. Being a close friend, she said, meant she was not the right person for what I needed: a deep, intense, if scary, process of healing.

In India, mourning is ritualized. We

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TAKE SELFIES AT THE UN I

spent six months last year working as an intern at the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations (UN) in New York City, US. It all started on 9 April, when I accompanied my boss to my first meeting at the UN. It was a Group of 77, or G-77, meeting to discuss a draft resolution on migration. The diplomats were in the midst of negotiating the minutiae of the procedural law. My lawyer-heart skipped a beat. This was starting to look good.

For the next few months, I ran and walked to meetings which were usually held in the underbelly of the secretariat building and the North Lawn Building of the UN, or one of the dozen UN organization and mission offices scattered around midtown east. These meetings often ranged from the absurd (27 minutes discussing the placement of a preposition in a resolution’s title) to hilarious (a diplomat wryly suggested that the word “Africa” be deleted in a sentence that read “… in countries including Africa”) to gripping (a stalemate which was resolved only after the ambassadors were called in to settle the whole thing).

One of the perks of the job was sighting and meeting celebrities. I often bowed to UN secretary general Ban Kimoon. My fellow interns and I lunched with ambassadors who told us funny stories about the UN. I hung around famous ex-diplomats who gossiped about the latest news.

Of course, for me none of these experiences was quite as awesome as taking a selfie in the 68th session of the UN general assembly (UNGA) with the Prime Minister of India in the background.

It was the fifth morning of the UNGA when I walked into the North Lawn carrying copies of the statements that the Prime Minister would deliver later at the session. The streets in front of the iconic C-shaped building were uncharacteristically bereft of tourists and political protesters. Inside, there was palpable excitement as the press and everyone else jostled to get a glimpse of world leaders. I entered the room, handed over the copies, and quickly grabbed a seat right in front. Soon, it was Manmohan Singh’s turn to speak. As soon as he began, I took a selfie of myself grinning, against the backdrop of him speaking. I looked around hoping nobody had noticed. My boss had.

Choosing not to think about the wave of embarrassment that would sweep upon me later, I sat down, listening to the statement.

We were ushered out before the start of the next speech.

Before walking out of the room, I gave myself a minute to appreciate the fact that I was there—and how cool the last six months had been. Then I took another selfie.

Malaveeka Chakravarthy is a lawyer in New York City.

MALAVEEKA CHAKRAVARTHY

Selfie point: The UN general assembly.

THINKSTOCK

hug relatives, shed copious tears, and then privately deal with our heads and hearts. The rest is well-meaning advice: “It is God’s will”; “Everyone has to leave”; and the worst “Don’t you think they are happy together?”

No, I don’t think they are happy together. No, I don’t think they are in a better place. There is no place after death. It’s over. It’s the final snuffing of a candle, I wanted to yell. But my parents had forbidden all death rituals; they didn’t even want a prayer meeting. No relatives were to be informed about the cremation. I have no siblings either.

So I took Madhu’s advice and Dialogue: A way to heal. sought a therapist who specializes in systemic work. Without taking change. It mirrors your guts but only recourse to “It’s God’s will”, she if you agree to slant the mirror urged me to express my emotions towards your wounds yourself. For instead of philosophizing everything me, it was about coming to terms with as an escape. “What do you feel, tell death as the presiding reality of life, me, describe your emotions, don’t one’s own most importantly. I learnt intellectualize it,” she would say, tak- to take responsibility for the residual ing me through half-buried memories regrets I had about my parents, and of childhood, the tales of Partition my that there is only so much time in life mum would recount, and my many and no more.

Has the sadness passed? Not really. conversations with my father about the Buddhist way of life. Over ses- I have also lost the sunny disposition sions, while reliving the relationship I used to have. My mother, who I one builds with parents as a child, I miss more, was an optimistic, funny began to accept the two deaths that and steely woman. I have truly crehad left me devastated. I could dig mated her by laughing less. Surprisdeeper into my consciousness using ingly, as grief counselling revealed, sleep and sleeplessness to create a my father lives on in my intellectualizations of everything—that’s all he personal mourning matrix.

Therapy is hard work. It impels did through his life. I now think naked honesty and commitment to about the difference between physi-

cal and emotional death. One is inevitable. The other may never happen, or as Celine Dion sang in Titanic, “…the heart will go on, wherever you are”. People live on in our hearts, hurting (or gladdening) us more than they ever did when alive. Others die for us only when we die.

Well-wishers expect you to read their condolence SMSes and move on. But you don’t. You falter. You drown. You bob up. You drown again.

It’s okay to do all that in a psychologically nurturing set-up.

Admittedly, I have gained a sense of dark peace.

Grieving with a professional could be a good idea because no friend, spouse or relative may be able to brave the winds which blow to dry us inside out.

Nobody indulges your lament for months. Ask your doctor to suggest who to go to. A clinical psychologist, a counsellor, a therapist and an analyst are differently trained experts so you need to make an informed choice. You clearly don’t need a psychiatrist for this. Therapy works only if you can strike a rapport with your therapist. Go for a few trial sessions before committing to long-term work. Even then, it is absolutely okay to apologize and stop if you think it’s taking you nowhere. Psychological counselling costs `1,000-3,500 an hour depending on the kind of expert you seek.

Shefalee Vasudev

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

EXPLORE THE NORTH-EAST THE NEW YEAR ISSUE L oktak lake, it is said, reflects life in Manipur. As a small fishing boat navigates the grassy floating islands on the lake, its placid waters mirroring the boat’s meandering, life in the North-Eastern state would seem utterly serene to any visitor.

The sight of the lake from atop a hill is enough to draw out a whistle. Spread across the vast expanse of the largest freshwater lake in North-East India are many floating islands, locally known as phumdi. The phumdis are not easily discernable if one doesn’t follow the narrow water channels separating them. The thatched huts of fishermen are built on some and newly-formed floating islands are known to get unmoored on particularly windy days, when the fisherfolk might wake up a little farther from where they went to sleep.

Closer to the viewing hill, large circular foliage formations on the lake are like Olympic rings floating separate from each other. Unlike the phumdis, these are man-made patterns used to round up schools of fish, and are often cited as ecologically untenable. Nevertheless, the spectacle of a 286sq. km lake, fringed by low hills, and the astounding display of floating islands is idyllic—arguably, a sight unmatched in India.

Yet Manipur, a state raked by secessionist and ethnic conflicts, lives with its multiple realities. From a tin shed next to the viewing area atop the hill, a gunman keeps guard.

There is an Assam Rifles camp at the bottom of the hill with its paraphernalia of sandbags, checkposts and a general state of gun-toting, red-light readiness. The Assam Rifles soldier on duty, his stern eyes grazing the lake’s horizon while we admire the view, informs us that the phumdis are often used as a base by rebels. Therefore the watch. Some 48km from Imphal, the Loktak beat is possibly a job hazard for the soldier—a modest count pegs the number of active underground outfits in Manipur at well over a dozen, with some being no more than extortionists.

In the rest of Manipur, whose people were referred to in an ancient Chinese text as the sons of the wide lake, the Loktak is venerated and is often the inspiration behind Manipur’s rich cultural life.

We were there for the music. This was my third visit to the state and on this occasion I was part of a documentary film team led by veteran film-maker Ranjan Palit researching— or, at any rate, trying to—the North-East’s penchant for Western music. At every bend, Manipur was taking us back to its roots.

Like when Imphal-based musician Rewben Mashangva—a pioneer of what is known as Naga folk-blues and otherwise given to performing Bob Dylan and Bob Marley at concerts—draws out the endangered four-hole bamboo flute, yangkahui, or the string instrument, tintella—traditional instruments that were lost to missionary-led modernity but are now part of Mashangva’s revivalist gambit.

Mashangva is a musician of humble means; his wife largely runs the family. His young son Saka, head shaven clean barring a pigtail, hangs around in their cramped hut and occasionally joins his father in singing songs of the paddy fields.

The roots are visible again when we visit the hard rocking band Kanglasha. Accompanied by a robust guitar riff and in between singing about a mythical hero returning to resuscitate Manipur, the lady vocalist makes her anger known against the Union government’s indifference to rights activist Irom Sharmila—who has been fasting for over a decade while demanding the repeal of The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from Manipur. The guitarist maintains a heavy metal grimness against the vocalist’s outburst; summer sweat melts the Vaishnavite markings on her forehead.

We seek out Tapta—a maverick Manipuri singer popular for his bawdy but hard-hitting satirical songwriting and drunken spirit. Tapta is absent from his ancestral home, but a huge crowd has gathered; there’s been a death in the family the previous night. The camera and sound recording equipment are embarrassing in the circumstances, but we are earnestly requested to wait. Tapta returns, punch-drunk, having completed the rituals at the waterfront.

His speech is slurry, but he makes it clear that Manipuri tradition disapproves of guests leaving without a bite.

Shamik Bag BY

SHAMIK BAG

Musician and muse: (top) Manipur-based musician Rewben Mashangva; and floating islands on Loktak lake are locally called phumdis.

And Beauty in Germany, historian Michael Hau describes the fascinating evolution of the “Lebensreformbewegung”—the life reform movement—over these two periods when many Germans organized themselves into voluntary associations concerned with natural therapy and lifestyle reform. Supporters of this movement were worried not only about the health of individuals but also about the healing process of society as a whole.

They believed that modern civilization, urbanization and industrialization had alienBLOOMBERG

****** The German proclivity for getting naked is well-known, and there are few places where it is more on display than in Berlin. “FKK” or Freikörperkultur, which roughly translates to “free physical culture” and is today the shorthand for a nudist space, has a long and complex social history stretching back to the imperial Wilhelmine period or the “Kaiserreich” (18711918) and the post-war Weimar period (1918-33).

In his fascinating book, The Cult of Health

from Loktak lake, the eminent Manipuri theatre personality and scholar Lokendra Arambam had told me once in Kolkata. On an earlier visit to Imphal I had tried to get in touch with Arambam on two consecutive evenings. He had dissuaded me—there had been a bomb blast and evening outings were risky. In Kolkata, over a drink, he was effusive about the symbolic imprint of Loktak on Manipuri literature, music, classical dance and theatre as the origin of all things simple and pure.

Author and journalist Sudeep Chakravarti, writing in his non-fiction book Highway 39 on life around the North-Eastern lifeline, describes watching a play in Imphal where Loktak is mentioned. “There is a hush in the audience. The area around the lake has for long been known for both real and fake encounters.” Chakravarti too is struck by the “mind-numbing beauty” of Loktak.

At the lake, I remember a Manipur Tourism brochure with a photograph of the sangai—the brow-antlered deer with benign eyes endemic to Manipur. With Loktak its prime habitat, for many years the sangai was thought to be extinct, though it remained alive as a cultural icon. Luckily, a few of them were spotted on a phumdi and a conservation drive was launched. Looking past the soldier’s gun facing Loktak lake and its phumdis, I dwell on hope.

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BARE IT ALL IN BERLIN Y ou could call it the quintessential German summer experience—or my moment of truth.

It’s the last week of June. The sun over Strandbad Wannsee, Berlin’s most famous (and Europe’s largest) lido, is a toasty warm. The sand is fine, the water a bed of brilliant blue, and all around me are naked people of all shapes and sizes, from potato sacks to Oscar statuettes, lolling in the sand, lounging in their wicker strandkorbs (beach chairs), eating sandwiches smeared with onion jam and taking brisk walks with the sun shining on every part of their body.

I am in the “FKK” section and I have no choice but to do as everyone else. Resolutely ignoring all the big and little insecurities about my body that I had stored away in subcutaneous parts of my consciousness, I removed every piece of clothing until I stood without a stitch on my body. I felt ugly, awkward and simply unnatural. Why on earth do they call this “naturism”, I wondered.

GET A LIFE

On the way back, we stop at a village temple near the old town of Moirang bordering the lake. There’s music. Overseen by women priests, men and women move around to the loopy plucking of a string instrument, the steady rhythm of a hand drum and exquisite high-pitched singing.

Much of the state’s rich cultural life draws

ated human beings from their “natural” living conditions, leading them down a path of progressive degeneration that could only be reversed by living in accordance with human nature. These anxieties led to popular experimentation with vegetarianism, therapeutic baths, psychotherapies; rejection of corsets and confining clothing; and explorations into “the therapeutic value of nudity and sunlight”.

What essentially began as a response to advancements in modern medicine (“allopathy”) in imperial Germany turned into a thing of rebellious leisure practices and a rejection of social hierarchies in the new republic, beginning with a 1918 petition by the German League for the Encouragement of Naked and Free Swimming for a general repeal of prohibition of nakedness. Stripped of their clothes, these Weimar life reformers argued, people would rid themselves of artificial markers of status and wealth, and be their authentic selves. Today, this laborious history has evolved into a casual and recreational non-erotic naturism enjoyed by men, women and children across Germany (albeit more in the east than the west). ******

Skinny-dipping: A nudist gathering.

Lying exposed on the warm caramel sands of the beach at Wannsee, the cool summer breeze teasing my private parts, I considered my own feelings. Devoid of sexual tension or fear of judgement, my paranoid sense of inadequacy had eased and I could enjoy the sensations of sun, sand and wind on my skin—all of my skin.

I felt a sense of abandon, a greater acceptance of

my own body; it felt like reclamation.

I understood why so many people around the world swear by the nudist movement. I was hooked. Over the next two days I hopped across Berlin from one FKK destination to another, criss-crossing Roman baths and saunas, public parks and outdoor pools. Through all of this, if Berlin saw a bit more of me, I too saw a bit more of Berlin—the working-class district of Neukölln where one of Europe’s grandest baths stands, complete with Corinthian columns, gargoyles and water heated to a luxurious 28 degree Celsius; the hip Plötzensee outdoor pool in Wedding which sits between the Berlin juvenile detention centre and the Plötzensee Memorial to the victims of National Socialism; the Liquidrom on Möckernstrasse, which is redefining “urban badekultur” (urban bath culture) with its modern sauna and saltwater pool resonant with elliptical sounds; and perhaps the most memorable, a patch of ground inside the sprawling Tiergarten park which lies a stone’s throw away from Berlin’s most famous sights—the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Berlin zoo—and hides a popular clothing-optional space.

At Tiergarten, there isn’t even an FKK sign to warn you, just a meadow dotted with naked men and women soaking in the sun as joggers, cyclists and picnickers walk past them, unthreatened and indifferent.

I was prepared by now: my clothes came off without hesitation, and I spent hours luxuriating in my skin.

Abhijit Dutta is a travel writer based in Singapore.

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I

went to engineering college and business school with lots of smart people. Then, they graduated and went to work selling soap or managing money or telling other companies what they should be doing. They married, raised families, bought houses. They became bald and diabetic, gained weight, wore out their backs, and had by-passes.

Now, when I look at these people, I can’t recognize them at all. Those who were athletically inclined are no longer so. Voracious readers rarely read anything more than the day’s newspapers (and if they do, it’s usually non-fiction).

Many haven’t listened to music in ages (worse still, some have allowed their tastes in music to atrophy). It’s almost as if the curriculum of life leaves them no time for extracurricular activities (unless one expands this definition to include the birthday parties of children or social drinking). And when they do socialize, the conversation invariably revolves around real estate.

They are, almost all of them without exception, good people. They are good workers, good parents, even good citizens. But they have managed to convince themselves that “me-time” is bad.

They feel guilty when they do something they’ve always liked to do. And they are also very boring. There is no music in their lives—no unpredictability, madness, or adventure.

I too married and raised a family. I too have become bald, gained weight and worn out my back. I too spend long hours at work (longer than any editor I know). But I continue to read—almost as indiscriminately as I did in college, and a lot of fiction. Thanks to the indulgent editor of Mint Lounge, I write a column on comics and graphic novels—a genre I have loved ever since I encountered Maus in college. I have expanded my musical horizon, which once began and stopped at the Grateful Dead, to include several new jam bands. There’s always music playing in my room in the office.

When I turned 40, my wife gifted me guitar lessons and I now have a Fender Stratocaster that I play very badly. Most weekends between October and March, the family goes out birding. It is actually my son’s interest, but we have made it ours too; my wife organizes the logistics and totes around the camera with the big lens that’s too heavy for my son; I carry the scope that’s too heavy for both of them.

And so, as we begin another year, my advice to you, Constant Reader, would be to do something you used to enjoy doing and which you think you should no longer be doing. Be reckless. Drink absinthe. Smoke a joint. Reread the Sudden books. Buy sexy underwear if you are a woman, a sex toy if you are a man (or vice versa). Cook. Play an instrument (or try to learn to play one). Bird (as in the verb). Rewatch Kurosawa and Fellini and Sergio Leone. Organize a quiz party. Walk the woods with your child. Let this be a year of new experiences.

Live.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

BE A STAY-AT-HOME DAD THE NEW YEAR ISSUE S ometimes, feeding the goats is a little tiresome.

Really, how often can you go to a goat pen, pluck roadside weeds—usually moistened by a passing dog—and hand them to your toddler and her friends, so they can feed a herd of everhungry goats?

I do it every day at noon after playschool, and I wonder, “How long am I going to do this?” I watch my three-year-old squeal and prance as the five goats follow her friends and her up and down the wire fence. Their smiles are broad, and their mood is buoyant. A soft breeze blows down the lane, through the rain trees and gulmohars, warmed by a winter sun traversing a blue sky, in a season when it is obscured in other cities by grim, grey smog. It is the perfect end to a school day.

I am not alone with the goats. A gaggle of mothers gathers here, opposite the madrasa, around the corner from the playschool on Standage Road, a little lane in Bangalore’s leafy old Cantonment area. I know them well by now, this group of intelligent, sparkling women. We are part of a Whatsapp group, messaging each other to organize play dates, to swap recipes, to meet in the park, to go out for a drink, to find the best place for “trainer pants” that can help toddlers kick the diaper habit when sleeping, to talk about spouses (rarely), to be sounding boards for matters at home and work, and to ask each other if we are meeting today at the goat pen.

I am also the only father on this Whatsapp group, the result of a decision I took nearly three years ago to be a part-time writer and full-time father. At 48, I am also the oldest in the group, populated by mothers in their early 30s and a couple over 40. The group started this year as “Creative Mommies”, named after the school, Creative Foundation. When I jokingly pointed out that I, er, wasn’t a mommy, they sportingly changed it to “Creative Parents”.

There is much I have learnt from this talented, effervescent bunch of women, most of whom do a marvellous job of balancing child-rearing with diverse interests, including managing two branches of a micro-finance organization lending to poor women; co-founding a relationships start-up; working at a tech start-up; working with handmade objects; running a boutique; homeschooling. We are Hindu, Christian and Muslim, sharing cultures, festivals, fears and hopes.

This is why we moved to Bangalore, a city full of dissimilar, accommodative people always doing something new or exciting, or both. There is no better place in India to be a full-time father. My mommy friends accept me freely, and few people express shock or awe at my age or what I do—cook for my family,

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Year of the goats: Toddlers gather at this goat pen in Bangalore after playschool to feed the animals. raise my child (who, on weekends, it must be admitted, cruelly discards me to follow her mother around like a little sheep). My parents live here, a 3-minute walk away, and to watch my mother, her Ajji, sing songs and read my daughter books and laugh when her three-year-old mind tries to cheat my father in musical chairs, is to experience life at its fullest.

These are truly the wonder years. Before we get to the goats, I wait for my daughter at the playschool gate. Every day, every day, she bursts out of class and tries to spot me. When she does, her mouth creases into a huge grin. She finds her snack basket among the others lined up and skips towards me. Mostly, I don’t pick her up. My reasoning is that she must be independent and strong, as soon as she can. Sometimes, my resolve and reason collapse, and I offer her both hands. She grabs them, crouches, and like a little human spring leaps into my arms. She likes to bury her head in my neck and hold me tight.

The day is filled with such moments. When she runs wildly around the house, naked, trying to give everyone “nangu hugs”, when she violently splashes around in her bath, when she, hand over hand, confidently swings herself across a parallel bar, like a miniature army commando. Of course, she has meltdowns, when she is tired or hungry or thirsty and does not know it. She is, I have to tell myself, only three years old. From being a discliplinarian and unyielding father the first three years, I have mellowed, learning with much self-control that dis-

traction is the best way of getting my daughter to listen to me.

It’s funny, I often think, it was easier to be the editor of a national newspaper and manage a few hundred employees than manage my feisty little toddler.

I also think—I do much of my thinking when she is mucking around in the playground or in her bathtub—that I would never want her to be anything other than feisty. Not in a country that undervalues its girls and expects subservience from them. I taught her early to “push back” if anyone pushed her around, especially boys. At the playground, I am secretly filled with pride when she takes a swipe at a boy harassing her. It helps that a steady dose of eggs, milk, fruits and non-vegetarian food has made her tower over boys her age, often older. I am happy to live out my thoughts through my daughter, as she grows and glows.

And, so, I stand by the goats, talking to my new friends, awkwardly telling my daughter why the big billy goat disappeared after Eid (“he’s now biryani, no?” she says sweetly). When I sigh at the goat routine, one of the mums reminds me that this is but a fleeting period. She asks: “Do you see anyone aged 4 here?” Apparently, by 4, the year of the goats will be history. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next, but I will miss the goats.

Samar Halarnkar writes the fortnightly column Our Daily Bread.

LEARN SIGN LANGUAGE T hank God I did not choose to become an actor—I am incapable of conveying my thoughts through facial expression. The realization hit me as I watched my sign-language teacher, Sunil Patidar, at the Noida Deaf Society struggle to get me to emote while I gestured to indicate “I don’t understand”, “I am fine”, “thank you”, and many more such common phrases. Most of the time, I did not even need to glance at Sunil’s hands to understand what he was trying to tell me because his face depicted his thoughts clearly.

I decided to learn sign language while researching for a story. I had been told it takes eight-10 lessons to be able to communicate easily with a deaf and mute person, and really there is no reason for companies and human resources people to think that hiring someone with such a disability will mean a breakdown in communication. But yes, it does mean spending 4 hours a week for two months or so to master the basic signs that can help you to communicate and understand what someone who cannot speak or hear is trying to tell you.

My first class was tough. I will admit that.

There was a sense of unease, a fear that I would make a fool of myself, perhaps even a concern that I would not be able to make myself understood. It was all about me. But when Sunil smiled and showed no signs of strain at the struggle to understand me or get his point across, I relaxed a little. Throughout the 2-hour session he kept urging me to emote (he would flash his palm in front of his face and make a sad or smiley face, depending on what he wanted me to do) and if I did well, he would make a ring with his thumb and index finger to let me know I had done a good job.

I learnt that one fist on top of the other with the index finger pointing out indicates “a teacher”, turning your wrist 180 degrees and making a circle with your index finger with the thumb indicates “do it again”, and rolling your palms with distance between them indicates

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Pared down: Sunil Patidar shows the hand signs for good job; (below) do it again; and teacher.

“sign language”.

Wherever there was a breakdown in communication, we would scribble or draw to understand each other. The hardest part while learning to convey full sentences in sign language was to let go of the articles and use words in an order that is different from the written or verbal format.

At the end of the second class, I learnt to communicate about 100 words and 35 sentences. I can gesture to express unhappiness at bad food, joy at knowing sign language, convey my marital status, explain what my teacher likes. And most of all I learnt to emote my thoughts using contorted facial expressions, something that always brought a smile on the face of my 23-year-old teacher.

To learn sign language, contact the Noida Deaf Society at www.noidadeafsociety.org Seema Chowdhry

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

EXPLORE THE NORTH-EAST THE NEW YEAR ISSUE L oktak lake, it is said, reflects life in Manipur. As a small fishing boat navigates the grassy floating islands on the lake, its placid waters mirroring the boat’s meandering, life in the North-Eastern state would seem utterly serene to any visitor.

The sight of the lake from atop a hill is enough to draw out a whistle. Spread across the vast expanse of the largest freshwater lake in North-East India are many floating islands, locally known as phumdi. The phumdis are not easily discernable if one doesn’t follow the narrow water channels separating them. The thatched huts of fishermen are built on some and newly-formed floating islands are known to get unmoored on particularly windy days, when the fisherfolk might wake up a little farther from where they went to sleep.

Closer to the viewing hill, large circular foliage formations on the lake are like Olympic rings floating separate from each other. Unlike the phumdis, these are man-made patterns used to round up schools of fish, and are often cited as ecologically untenable. Nevertheless, the spectacle of a 286sq. km lake, fringed by low hills, and the astounding display of floating islands is idyllic—arguably, a sight unmatched in India.

Yet Manipur, a state raked by secessionist and ethnic conflicts, lives with its multiple realities. From a tin shed next to the viewing area atop the hill, a gunman keeps guard.

There is an Assam Rifles camp at the bottom of the hill with its paraphernalia of sandbags, checkposts and a general state of gun-toting, red-light readiness. The Assam Rifles soldier on duty, his stern eyes grazing the lake’s horizon while we admire the view, informs us that the phumdis are often used as a base by rebels. Therefore the watch. Some 48km from Imphal, the Loktak beat is possibly a job hazard for the soldier—a modest count pegs the number of active underground outfits in Manipur at well over a dozen, with some being no more than extortionists.

In the rest of Manipur, whose people were referred to in an ancient Chinese text as the sons of the wide lake, the Loktak is venerated and is often the inspiration behind Manipur’s rich cultural life.

We were there for the music. This was my third visit to the state and on this occasion I was part of a documentary film team led by veteran film-maker Ranjan Palit researching— or, at any rate, trying to—the North-East’s penchant for Western music. At every bend, Manipur was taking us back to its roots.

Like when Imphal-based musician Rewben Mashangva—a pioneer of what is known as Naga folk-blues and otherwise given to performing Bob Dylan and Bob Marley at concerts—draws out the endangered four-hole bamboo flute, yangkahui, or the string instrument, tintella—traditional instruments that were lost to missionary-led modernity but are now part of Mashangva’s revivalist gambit.

Mashangva is a musician of humble means; his wife largely runs the family. His young son Saka, head shaven clean barring a pigtail, hangs around in their cramped hut and occasionally joins his father in singing songs of the paddy fields.

The roots are visible again when we visit the hard rocking band Kanglasha. Accompanied by a robust guitar riff and in between singing about a mythical hero returning to resuscitate Manipur, the lady vocalist makes her anger known against the Union government’s indifference to rights activist Irom Sharmila—who has been fasting for over a decade while demanding the repeal of The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from Manipur. The guitarist maintains a heavy metal grimness against the vocalist’s outburst; summer sweat melts the Vaishnavite markings on her forehead.

We seek out Tapta—a maverick Manipuri singer popular for his bawdy but hard-hitting satirical songwriting and drunken spirit. Tapta is absent from his ancestral home, but a huge crowd has gathered; there’s been a death in the family the previous night. The camera and sound recording equipment are embarrassing in the circumstances, but we are earnestly requested to wait. Tapta returns, punch-drunk, having completed the rituals at the waterfront.

His speech is slurry, but he makes it clear that Manipuri tradition disapproves of guests leaving without a bite.

Shamik Bag BY

SHAMIK BAG

Musician and muse: (top) Manipur-based musician Rewben Mashangva; and floating islands on Loktak lake are locally called phumdis.

And Beauty in Germany, historian Michael Hau describes the fascinating evolution of the “Lebensreformbewegung”—the life reform movement—over these two periods when many Germans organized themselves into voluntary associations concerned with natural therapy and lifestyle reform. Supporters of this movement were worried not only about the health of individuals but also about the healing process of society as a whole.

They believed that modern civilization, urbanization and industrialization had alienBLOOMBERG

****** The German proclivity for getting naked is well-known, and there are few places where it is more on display than in Berlin. “FKK” or Freikörperkultur, which roughly translates to “free physical culture” and is today the shorthand for a nudist space, has a long and complex social history stretching back to the imperial Wilhelmine period or the “Kaiserreich” (18711918) and the post-war Weimar period (1918-33).

In his fascinating book, The Cult of Health

from Loktak lake, the eminent Manipuri theatre personality and scholar Lokendra Arambam had told me once in Kolkata. On an earlier visit to Imphal I had tried to get in touch with Arambam on two consecutive evenings. He had dissuaded me—there had been a bomb blast and evening outings were risky. In Kolkata, over a drink, he was effusive about the symbolic imprint of Loktak on Manipuri literature, music, classical dance and theatre as the origin of all things simple and pure.

Author and journalist Sudeep Chakravarti, writing in his non-fiction book Highway 39 on life around the North-Eastern lifeline, describes watching a play in Imphal where Loktak is mentioned. “There is a hush in the audience. The area around the lake has for long been known for both real and fake encounters.” Chakravarti too is struck by the “mind-numbing beauty” of Loktak.

At the lake, I remember a Manipur Tourism brochure with a photograph of the sangai—the brow-antlered deer with benign eyes endemic to Manipur. With Loktak its prime habitat, for many years the sangai was thought to be extinct, though it remained alive as a cultural icon. Luckily, a few of them were spotted on a phumdi and a conservation drive was launched. Looking past the soldier’s gun facing Loktak lake and its phumdis, I dwell on hope.

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BARE IT ALL IN BERLIN Y ou could call it the quintessential German summer experience—or my moment of truth.

It’s the last week of June. The sun over Strandbad Wannsee, Berlin’s most famous (and Europe’s largest) lido, is a toasty warm. The sand is fine, the water a bed of brilliant blue, and all around me are naked people of all shapes and sizes, from potato sacks to Oscar statuettes, lolling in the sand, lounging in their wicker strandkorbs (beach chairs), eating sandwiches smeared with onion jam and taking brisk walks with the sun shining on every part of their body.

I am in the “FKK” section and I have no choice but to do as everyone else. Resolutely ignoring all the big and little insecurities about my body that I had stored away in subcutaneous parts of my consciousness, I removed every piece of clothing until I stood without a stitch on my body. I felt ugly, awkward and simply unnatural. Why on earth do they call this “naturism”, I wondered.

GET A LIFE

On the way back, we stop at a village temple near the old town of Moirang bordering the lake. There’s music. Overseen by women priests, men and women move around to the loopy plucking of a string instrument, the steady rhythm of a hand drum and exquisite high-pitched singing.

Much of the state’s rich cultural life draws

ated human beings from their “natural” living conditions, leading them down a path of progressive degeneration that could only be reversed by living in accordance with human nature. These anxieties led to popular experimentation with vegetarianism, therapeutic baths, psychotherapies; rejection of corsets and confining clothing; and explorations into “the therapeutic value of nudity and sunlight”.

What essentially began as a response to advancements in modern medicine (“allopathy”) in imperial Germany turned into a thing of rebellious leisure practices and a rejection of social hierarchies in the new republic, beginning with a 1918 petition by the German League for the Encouragement of Naked and Free Swimming for a general repeal of prohibition of nakedness. Stripped of their clothes, these Weimar life reformers argued, people would rid themselves of artificial markers of status and wealth, and be their authentic selves. Today, this laborious history has evolved into a casual and recreational non-erotic naturism enjoyed by men, women and children across Germany (albeit more in the east than the west). ******

Skinny-dipping: A nudist gathering.

Lying exposed on the warm caramel sands of the beach at Wannsee, the cool summer breeze teasing my private parts, I considered my own feelings. Devoid of sexual tension or fear of judgement, my paranoid sense of inadequacy had eased and I could enjoy the sensations of sun, sand and wind on my skin—all of my skin.

I felt a sense of abandon, a greater acceptance of

my own body; it felt like reclamation.

I understood why so many people around the world swear by the nudist movement. I was hooked. Over the next two days I hopped across Berlin from one FKK destination to another, criss-crossing Roman baths and saunas, public parks and outdoor pools. Through all of this, if Berlin saw a bit more of me, I too saw a bit more of Berlin—the working-class district of Neukölln where one of Europe’s grandest baths stands, complete with Corinthian columns, gargoyles and water heated to a luxurious 28 degree Celsius; the hip Plötzensee outdoor pool in Wedding which sits between the Berlin juvenile detention centre and the Plötzensee Memorial to the victims of National Socialism; the Liquidrom on Möckernstrasse, which is redefining “urban badekultur” (urban bath culture) with its modern sauna and saltwater pool resonant with elliptical sounds; and perhaps the most memorable, a patch of ground inside the sprawling Tiergarten park which lies a stone’s throw away from Berlin’s most famous sights—the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Berlin zoo—and hides a popular clothing-optional space.

At Tiergarten, there isn’t even an FKK sign to warn you, just a meadow dotted with naked men and women soaking in the sun as joggers, cyclists and picnickers walk past them, unthreatened and indifferent.

I was prepared by now: my clothes came off without hesitation, and I spent hours luxuriating in my skin.

Abhijit Dutta is a travel writer based in Singapore.

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went to engineering college and business school with lots of smart people. Then, they graduated and went to work selling soap or managing money or telling other companies what they should be doing. They married, raised families, bought houses. They became bald and diabetic, gained weight, wore out their backs, and had by-passes.

Now, when I look at these people, I can’t recognize them at all. Those who were athletically inclined are no longer so. Voracious readers rarely read anything more than the day’s newspapers (and if they do, it’s usually non-fiction).

Many haven’t listened to music in ages (worse still, some have allowed their tastes in music to atrophy). It’s almost as if the curriculum of life leaves them no time for extracurricular activities (unless one expands this definition to include the birthday parties of children or social drinking). And when they do socialize, the conversation invariably revolves around real estate.

They are, almost all of them without exception, good people. They are good workers, good parents, even good citizens. But they have managed to convince themselves that “me-time” is bad.

They feel guilty when they do something they’ve always liked to do. And they are also very boring. There is no music in their lives—no unpredictability, madness, or adventure.

I too married and raised a family. I too have become bald, gained weight and worn out my back. I too spend long hours at work (longer than any editor I know). But I continue to read—almost as indiscriminately as I did in college, and a lot of fiction. Thanks to the indulgent editor of Mint Lounge, I write a column on comics and graphic novels—a genre I have loved ever since I encountered Maus in college. I have expanded my musical horizon, which once began and stopped at the Grateful Dead, to include several new jam bands. There’s always music playing in my room in the office.

When I turned 40, my wife gifted me guitar lessons and I now have a Fender Stratocaster that I play very badly. Most weekends between October and March, the family goes out birding. It is actually my son’s interest, but we have made it ours too; my wife organizes the logistics and totes around the camera with the big lens that’s too heavy for my son; I carry the scope that’s too heavy for both of them.

And so, as we begin another year, my advice to you, Constant Reader, would be to do something you used to enjoy doing and which you think you should no longer be doing. Be reckless. Drink absinthe. Smoke a joint. Reread the Sudden books. Buy sexy underwear if you are a woman, a sex toy if you are a man (or vice versa). Cook. Play an instrument (or try to learn to play one). Bird (as in the verb). Rewatch Kurosawa and Fellini and Sergio Leone. Organize a quiz party. Walk the woods with your child. Let this be a year of new experiences.

Live.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

THINKSTOCK

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

BE A STAY-AT-HOME DAD THE NEW YEAR ISSUE S ometimes, feeding the goats is a little tiresome.

Really, how often can you go to a goat pen, pluck roadside weeds—usually moistened by a passing dog—and hand them to your toddler and her friends, so they can feed a herd of everhungry goats?

I do it every day at noon after playschool, and I wonder, “How long am I going to do this?” I watch my three-year-old squeal and prance as the five goats follow her friends and her up and down the wire fence. Their smiles are broad, and their mood is buoyant. A soft breeze blows down the lane, through the rain trees and gulmohars, warmed by a winter sun traversing a blue sky, in a season when it is obscured in other cities by grim, grey smog. It is the perfect end to a school day.

I am not alone with the goats. A gaggle of mothers gathers here, opposite the madrasa, around the corner from the playschool on Standage Road, a little lane in Bangalore’s leafy old Cantonment area. I know them well by now, this group of intelligent, sparkling women. We are part of a Whatsapp group, messaging each other to organize play dates, to swap recipes, to meet in the park, to go out for a drink, to find the best place for “trainer pants” that can help toddlers kick the diaper habit when sleeping, to talk about spouses (rarely), to be sounding boards for matters at home and work, and to ask each other if we are meeting today at the goat pen.

I am also the only father on this Whatsapp group, the result of a decision I took nearly three years ago to be a part-time writer and full-time father. At 48, I am also the oldest in the group, populated by mothers in their early 30s and a couple over 40. The group started this year as “Creative Mommies”, named after the school, Creative Foundation. When I jokingly pointed out that I, er, wasn’t a mommy, they sportingly changed it to “Creative Parents”.

There is much I have learnt from this talented, effervescent bunch of women, most of whom do a marvellous job of balancing child-rearing with diverse interests, including managing two branches of a micro-finance organization lending to poor women; co-founding a relationships start-up; working at a tech start-up; working with handmade objects; running a boutique; homeschooling. We are Hindu, Christian and Muslim, sharing cultures, festivals, fears and hopes.

This is why we moved to Bangalore, a city full of dissimilar, accommodative people always doing something new or exciting, or both. There is no better place in India to be a full-time father. My mommy friends accept me freely, and few people express shock or awe at my age or what I do—cook for my family,

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Year of the goats: Toddlers gather at this goat pen in Bangalore after playschool to feed the animals. raise my child (who, on weekends, it must be admitted, cruelly discards me to follow her mother around like a little sheep). My parents live here, a 3-minute walk away, and to watch my mother, her Ajji, sing songs and read my daughter books and laugh when her three-year-old mind tries to cheat my father in musical chairs, is to experience life at its fullest.

These are truly the wonder years. Before we get to the goats, I wait for my daughter at the playschool gate. Every day, every day, she bursts out of class and tries to spot me. When she does, her mouth creases into a huge grin. She finds her snack basket among the others lined up and skips towards me. Mostly, I don’t pick her up. My reasoning is that she must be independent and strong, as soon as she can. Sometimes, my resolve and reason collapse, and I offer her both hands. She grabs them, crouches, and like a little human spring leaps into my arms. She likes to bury her head in my neck and hold me tight.

The day is filled with such moments. When she runs wildly around the house, naked, trying to give everyone “nangu hugs”, when she violently splashes around in her bath, when she, hand over hand, confidently swings herself across a parallel bar, like a miniature army commando. Of course, she has meltdowns, when she is tired or hungry or thirsty and does not know it. She is, I have to tell myself, only three years old. From being a discliplinarian and unyielding father the first three years, I have mellowed, learning with much self-control that dis-

traction is the best way of getting my daughter to listen to me.

It’s funny, I often think, it was easier to be the editor of a national newspaper and manage a few hundred employees than manage my feisty little toddler.

I also think—I do much of my thinking when she is mucking around in the playground or in her bathtub—that I would never want her to be anything other than feisty. Not in a country that undervalues its girls and expects subservience from them. I taught her early to “push back” if anyone pushed her around, especially boys. At the playground, I am secretly filled with pride when she takes a swipe at a boy harassing her. It helps that a steady dose of eggs, milk, fruits and non-vegetarian food has made her tower over boys her age, often older. I am happy to live out my thoughts through my daughter, as she grows and glows.

And, so, I stand by the goats, talking to my new friends, awkwardly telling my daughter why the big billy goat disappeared after Eid (“he’s now biryani, no?” she says sweetly). When I sigh at the goat routine, one of the mums reminds me that this is but a fleeting period. She asks: “Do you see anyone aged 4 here?” Apparently, by 4, the year of the goats will be history. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next, but I will miss the goats.

Samar Halarnkar writes the fortnightly column Our Daily Bread.

LEARN SIGN LANGUAGE T hank God I did not choose to become an actor—I am incapable of conveying my thoughts through facial expression. The realization hit me as I watched my sign-language teacher, Sunil Patidar, at the Noida Deaf Society struggle to get me to emote while I gestured to indicate “I don’t understand”, “I am fine”, “thank you”, and many more such common phrases. Most of the time, I did not even need to glance at Sunil’s hands to understand what he was trying to tell me because his face depicted his thoughts clearly.

I decided to learn sign language while researching for a story. I had been told it takes eight-10 lessons to be able to communicate easily with a deaf and mute person, and really there is no reason for companies and human resources people to think that hiring someone with such a disability will mean a breakdown in communication. But yes, it does mean spending 4 hours a week for two months or so to master the basic signs that can help you to communicate and understand what someone who cannot speak or hear is trying to tell you.

My first class was tough. I will admit that.

There was a sense of unease, a fear that I would make a fool of myself, perhaps even a concern that I would not be able to make myself understood. It was all about me. But when Sunil smiled and showed no signs of strain at the struggle to understand me or get his point across, I relaxed a little. Throughout the 2-hour session he kept urging me to emote (he would flash his palm in front of his face and make a sad or smiley face, depending on what he wanted me to do) and if I did well, he would make a ring with his thumb and index finger to let me know I had done a good job.

I learnt that one fist on top of the other with the index finger pointing out indicates “a teacher”, turning your wrist 180 degrees and making a circle with your index finger with the thumb indicates “do it again”, and rolling your palms with distance between them indicates

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Pared down: Sunil Patidar shows the hand signs for good job; (below) do it again; and teacher.

“sign language”.

Wherever there was a breakdown in communication, we would scribble or draw to understand each other. The hardest part while learning to convey full sentences in sign language was to let go of the articles and use words in an order that is different from the written or verbal format.

At the end of the second class, I learnt to communicate about 100 words and 35 sentences. I can gesture to express unhappiness at bad food, joy at knowing sign language, convey my marital status, explain what my teacher likes. And most of all I learnt to emote my thoughts using contorted facial expressions, something that always brought a smile on the face of my 23-year-old teacher.

To learn sign language, contact the Noida Deaf Society at www.noidadeafsociety.org Seema Chowdhry

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

VICKY ROY/MINT

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

On set: Poking fun at yourself helps break the ice.

MAKE STRANGERS LAUGH B y the time I went up on stage, I had been prepping for my stand-up comedy performance for months.

The idea was planted in my head by Delhi comic Rajneesh Kapoor. “Try it,” he had gently suggested to me months ago when I was researching for a story on stand-up.

In the weeks that followed, I had misgivings. What if my material was no good?

What if I couldn’t forge a connect with my audience? What if my act fell flat?

Gosh, I thought, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

But part of me also wanted to compose an act like Russell Peters’ “Somebody gonna get a hurt”. And that takes a lot of work, and practice. I took solace in videos where top comics—Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K.—said their first acts were horrible. I watched HBO’s Talking Funny, and let Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock tell me in under 50 minutes how they find the funny in everyday events.

A lot of comics look into their own lives, their own observations of the times they live in, to create comedy. They put so much of their personality into the show that it’s near-impossible to separate the performer from the performance. Delhi-based comic Raghav Mandava had told me how that can sometimes be a bad thing. “In the other arts, people judge the performance. If they don’t like it, they say it’s a rubbish song or choreography or play. In stand-up, it’s the comic himself they’re judging. The audience have to like you. You’re the one spilling your guts, opening up your thoughts for them to judge.”

Uh-oh.

Before cold feet could set in, like so much quick-dry cement, I signed up for an open mic performance. Mandava’s

WRITE A BOOK E

veryone’s got a book in them, you’ve heard it said. There’s also a reason the book’s still inside everyone, and not out. Writing a book is time-consuming, seriously humbling, and pays less than a week’s wages of your day job. The only compulsion to write a book shouldn’t be to replicate J.K. Rowling’s billions, but when there’s no other way out, the itch consumes you and the fever keeps you awake at night.

I wish I could say I wanted to be an author when I was 5. I wanted to be a zookeeper. I still do. It’s just something that happened to me, that first book, it refused to stay inside me, and bubbled to the surface like a bad meal. I first began writing in secret because I could not allow myself to believe that someone would buy my book, read it, like it. I’d turn my two little boys in for the night, and then hunch over my laptop and let loose the strange ideas that inhabited my head. I created a world I began to live in,

company, Cheese Monkey Mafia, was organizing an open mic night in three weeks. It was perfect—it gave me no time to procrastinate.

Mandava helpfully gave me some pointers too—statistics are a good place to start, he said. “Point out the anomalies,” he said. Everyone gets how messed up our systems are. Everyone relates to the small inefficiencies we live with every day. Everyone is willing to laugh at our pretensions to grandeur.

So in my script I wrote about how signs, and things, fall apart in our cities and nobody bothers to fix them up again; how we love to state the obvious; how we try to spruce things up to make them seem classier, and often fail. How stereotypes about Delhi’s bad women drivers are false (I drive wonderfully, once I locate the keys

FIELD SEARCH Ø New Delhi’s Cheese Monkey Mafia organizes open mic nights every month. It puts up an event notification on its Facebook page (www.facebook.com/cheesemonkey mafia) at least two weeks in advance. To register, email cheesemonkeymafia@gmail.com.

Entry is on first-come, first-served basis. Beginners typically get 5 minutes on stage. Ø In Mumbai, The Comedy Store gives 5- to 7-minute open spots to amateurs between professional acts.

To apply, make a short video of your performance (home videos are accepted), and email it to sanjiv@thecomedystore.in or call 9004978839.

in my bag and can find my car in assorted parking lots).

But you don’t know if a joke is funny till you’ve tested it on someone else. The husband was the most obvious, and willing, litmus. He alternatively smiled and shook his head. He nervously walked up and down our living room, even as I walked nervously up and down the living room trying to commit the script to memory.

He gave me cues on where I needed to tweak or completely rework a joke. I must have done a hundred rewrites in those three weeks. And by the time I took the stage at The Pot Belly Rooftop Café in Shahpur Jat for my act, I had done what seemed like 200 dry runs—practising in front of mirrors, turning the phrases in my head, getting the feel of them as they rolled off my tongue.

Come performance day, I went up on stage and introduced myself to the 30-odd people crammed into the third-floor restaurant. “Hi, I am Chanpreet.” Mandava told me to hold the microphone closer. I gave an exaggerated nod and complied (see my overly long earrings swing wildly in the video of the act on www.livemint.com). And then my first joke spilled out of me, a little faster than I had practised: “If I had a penny for every time I have been called Chandpreet sir…I’d be retired.”

A gentleman in the second row laughed loudly. That was all the affirmation I needed. The audience could relate to what I was telling them (a joke about MENSA got a lot of laughs). Before I knew it, my time was up. I had done it.

Back among the audience, the husband said: “You look flushed. It’s a good look on you.”

Chanpreet Khurana

and as the days went by call away from an “intervenwith school drops and clition”. While Picasso had his ent meetings, I yearned for blue period, mine was burnt the nights, when the real sienna, because that was the world grew less real, while reigning colour of every the imaginary one of utensil I cooked in, and Gulabi, the loony sleuth in burnt up, at that time. my book, took over. Every When the book writing night, I’d sort of slip into, ended, I felt bereaved, like the spandex tights of exposed and was absolutely Superman, the skin of terrified of letting it out into Gulabi, and allow her to the public. It’s one of the write the story. bravest things I did—send it For the six months or so out to publishers. My book that I wrote the book, I led was picked up in less than Rib-tickler: Jane De Suza’s book The Spy this existence—this sleepa week to be published, Who Lost Her Head deprived, truth-denying, and only then did I allow was published in April. borderline schizophrenic myself to believe I was any existence. I’d be torn good. Months of waiting between loving to write and hating what and many more of editing and it was out.

I’d written. My eyes conjured up the The day I slunk into the local book store book’s characters across the room from and saw my first book on the shelf made me, while my lips moved incessantly in every chewed-off fingernail worth it. I’m the conversations they were having in addicted now, and have just begun my my head. My family got used to me walk- second, third and fourth books. I owe it ing around in my pyjamas through week- to myself and to my readers and to my ends, with a concussed look, letting the neighbours, of course. Their curtains lunch burn while the kitchen smoked up. have dusted over.

My neighbours hid inexpertly behind their curtains to spy on me talking to Jane De Suza is a writer and creative conmyself. And I’m sure I was only a phone sultant who works out of Bangalore.

LEARN TO DANCE M

y feet declared independence from my brain a long time ago. It’s not that I could not walk or run any more, it’s just that my feet would occasionally do something without permission. It’s the reason I could not play spinners well in cricket (because my feet would not move forward), or football (my school won a competition with me as the only member from the team of 14 who did not play a single match—I was selected because I could run fast); it’s why I am always stepped on in crowded places or I step on people when I hug them.

Needless to say, I do not dance. So when our friends, M and V, suggested some months ago that we learn formal dancing from guru JB, I panicked. But vetoed 3:1, I showed up on a Tuesday evening at M and V’s home.

Day 1, minute 1 posed two big challenges. JB asked us to “feel” the music before we start counting our steps. I prefer songs with words, not the one that was playing, which I condescendingly call elevator music.

Two, and this was trickier for my wife and partner, was that I, the male, was supposed to lead—an unheard of situation in our marriage.

Counting steps in my head—slow, slow, quick, quick—we started off. Soon, the obvious issues came up—since my wife is shorter, my steps were longer and, therefore, my feet were on top of hers rather too often. Unused to being led, she refused to cooperate habitually, doing her own thing, which made us look like we were dancing to different tunes.

I had recently seen television reruns of Shall We Dance? and Take the Lead, as preparation, where everyone looks good and dances elegantly. It was a lesson on what good editing can do to a movie, but I digress.

We started with the foxtrot, a gentle motion, with easy moves to follow, two steps forward, two steps sideways. We got into the rhythm, encouraged enthusiastically by JB, and by the second week, I had stopped tripping over myself, everyone else in the room and the sofa. After lulling us into this false sense of security, JB mentioned the one word that we all shudder to hear: “a variation”. This basically means a change in steps or direction of movement while sticking to the same rhythm. This adds drama to the dance, which can otherwise get monotonous, and surprises the partner who is being led, making her most unhappy.

Over the course of the next 10 weeks, we were taught the waltz, Viennese waltz, cha-cha-cha and rock ’n roll, with some “variations” in each. All of them require moving to the music, sensing its beat and changing the pattern frequently. The cha-cha-cha calls for a swaying of the hips and rapid steps forward and back. The rock ’n roll is rambunctious and aerobic as you frequently swap places with your partner. The waltz is stately and dramatic—its “variations” the most complicated and difficult to remember. They all require trust and focus. It helped me, otherwise notoriously shy, to shed some inhibitions.

To learn something new as an adult comes with its own set of fears— but that fear is within us. It’s not about how we will be judged but whether we can make fools of ourselves. Surrounded by friends and family, it’s actually not that difficult.

JB says the next step will be to dance in a social gathering, on one of those Friday evenings at the club, which needs greater courage. I have set the bar low—I want to be smoother on my feet than Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing the tango in True Lies.

Arun Janardhan

Take the lead: Prepare by watching films like Shall We Dance?

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BUILD AN ENVIABLE SARI COLLECTION THE NEW YEAR ISSUE PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Organizer manual: Choose to build depth, adding colours and motifs in two-three styles.

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craps from random sari conversations. “It must be a headache to take care of saris….” True, I cluck. “Where do you buy saris?” Anywhere—mostly weaver exhibitions. “Do you get new blouses made for every sari?” No. “Do you segregate saris seasonally?” Yes. “Next time you go sari shopping will you text me?” No. I am a sari fanatic who experiences meditative bliss the moment I open my closet. DIY happiness? Not quite. It mandates persistent segregation, putting them up on hangers, colour-coding, muslinpacking, steam-ironing, dry-cleaning, gentle hand-wash and dhobi (washerman) wars to keep the game going.

An earnest sari spectator as a child, I mutated into a sari admirer by late adolescence and a collector in my late 20s; now, I am like a woman possessed. It was in my adolescence, after reading a line that Sigmund Freud found the “Indian sari the most elegant garment”, that I began fighting with my mother to wear her saris. She insisted I looked like a presumptive grown-up instead of a carefree teenager but as a sucker for planet psychology, I owed allegiance to Dr Freud, you see.

The sari was also my way out of fashion’s temptations. As a small-town girl whose only fashion lessons came from Eve’s Weekly and Femina, I figured that handloom saris ensured distinction. We neither had the money to splurge on trendy alternatives nor would my Gandhian parents have sanctioned an indulgence even if I had thrown wardrobe tantrums. The sari was a compromise acceptable to all.

Many years later, while working with the

Cosmopolitan magazine in the mid-1990s, I realized that my saris were a relief amid the hip styles expected from “Cosmo girls”.

My then editor urged me to write a piece titled: “I work for Cosmo but don’t wear a Little Black Dress”.

That’s when the sari began to play a key role in turning me into the international behenji I now call myself. So rule No.1: Find a damn good reason to stoke your passion instead of pursuing blind fandom.

Loyalty is important in fashion. That is rule No.2. With a career in fashion writing, including editing a fashion magazine, I have had a front-row view of thousands of global-local designer garments. But the sari unflinchingly remains my only clothing statement.

Rule No.3: An enviable collection is not synonymous with amassing everything.

Instead, invest in specific weaves. My wardrobe is enormous, not eclectic. Kanjeevarams are my top favourites, with immense contributions from my husband, who found distinctive recruits in Chennai stores like Nalli, Aavaranaa and Sundari Silks. I have a mix of graphic patterns, modernized monochromes with tiny temple borders and old-style Mallapur maami varieties with wide zari borders. Some are woven with jute. South India is obviously the place to find the best Kanjeevarams though I also love the handlooms at Delhi stores like Kamla and Utsav.

My summer bests being Chanderis, I have had some uncontrolled shopping bouts at Sanjay Garg’s Raw Mango. A few Upadas (this Andhra weave is becoming rarer by the day), Assamese Geechas, thoughtfully curated Leheriyas and Bandhinis, hand-blocked Ajrakhs on gajji silk

and dozens of cotton Khadis form the rest of my collection. I staunchly keep cottons and chiffons for summers, wear crepes in the transition months of spring and autumn, and silks in winters.

At overwhelming stores like Nalli, where outstanding pieces get drowned in a wave of variety, I walk up to a salesperson requesting his time to show me many saris, clarifying that I may buy only a couple, if at all. Salespeople usually love engaged customers; they soon begin to guess your thoughts and guide you to the treasures buried beneath the heaps. I also follow two shopping diktats. One: Never buy anything, however lovely or affordable, unless it is exceptional. Two: Search for an authentic handwoven piece, which brings with it the story of a family or a craftsperson, a skill group, a region or a weave. Whatever the price, it will be worth it.

Despite constant exposure, designer saris don’t fascinate me. The ones that do are too expensive. I am immune to the cult of crystals and modern prints, nor do I lust for fluid drapes to look slim. Many women tell me they run miles from Tussars and woven tissues because they are bulky. I argue instead for their uniqueness. I do own a couple of Sabyasachi Khadis but find them too pretty to wear (middleclass mentality of hoarding the best stuff) and not so easy to carry off casually.

It’s really about working on the sari as an ensemble. So I mix and match textures, fabrics and colours, pairing floral print blouses with Kanjeevarams and Chanderis, coarse Khadi ones with slinky chiffons, Gaurav Gupta blouses with Leheriyas, black lace with Kerala cottons. I even turned a Gucci scarf into a strappy blouse.

My sari falls too are funkily mismatched: an Ikat fall on a silk Banarasi, for instance.

This sari fanaticism touched a disturbing level when, recently, I opened my closet and pointed to a gold tissue sari. “Dress me in this when I die,” I told my husband. No saris have come home since.

Shefalee Vasudev

FIND A FITNESS SOLUTION THAT WORKS FOR YOU W here physical fitness, workouts and diet are concerned, I’ve always had a singular approach—who needs that? You see, growing up I was the classroom Fido Dido, a weakling feigning all sorts of aches, pains and illnesses to the PT (physical training) teacher. When I enrolled in junior college, the “size zero” mania had just reached fever pitch and naturally I began to take pride in my 2D appearance. A slightly tubby, gym-obsessed friend in college once predicted that my teenage metabolic rate would wear out in a couple of years and that I would need a regular exercise regimen by the time I was 25.

What a load of baloney, I thought, when I completed two years at my first job, still slim as a spindle.

Sure enough, my luck ran out shortly after I turned 23 two years ago. I gained over 10kg and suddenly I had all sorts of never-before-seen, grabbable, pudgy parts—love handles, round bottoms, jiggly arms and dimply thighs. While friends and family, formerly envious of my naturally thin frame, were “glad” to see me getting “healthy”, I struggled to button even my sister’s bigger jeans and

squeeze into my mother’s party dresses.

At first, I did what any seasoned and sensible couch potato would do in this situation—absolutely nothing. Next, I tried to hide my problem areas—wide hips and tummy flab—under a new wardrobe, made up almost exclusively of A-line and babydoll dresses. But without exercise, it didn’t take long for even these to feel tight.

I had read about Zumba and its “ditch the workout and join the party” motto, but the only class closest to it and within walking distance from my house was a Shiamak Davar-style Bollywood dance and fitness class. Lucky for me, up to 40 minutes of the hour-long class were dedicated to high-energy cardio workouts and just 15-20 for the Madhuri Dixit-Nene medley. Every now and then the instructors would even throw in a little bit of Zumba and kickboxing into the aerobics mix.

For the first three weeks or so, even the loud music in the studio couldn’t drown the snap, crackle and pop sounds of my creaky joints. I would tire after just five-six jumping jacks and if I attempted mountain climbers or squat jumps, I would simply skip the next

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RUN, RUN, RUN A new high

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n the fall of 2011, I did something I had never done before. I joined a small group of people, none of whom I’d ever met before, to run a 100km race in the Himalayas. On stony trails, up 65-degree inclines to 12,000ft at Sandakphu on the Indo-Nepal border. We met few people—locals; sometimes the Indian Army; and once a travel writer who was waiting with her crew for a sunny shot of the world’s third highest mountain.

It wasn’t like me to join a group like this. I’d never been on such a trip before. At the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, there were treks to Sikkim, and even a boat journey down the Sunderbans, but something kept me away. Then one day, I discovered running. My three girls would race along Mumbai’s Juhu beach, where we lived. “Go mama,” they said when I spoke to them about the Windchasers, a small group of runners that organizes five-day, 112km runs in the Himalayas.

The group was started by Ram Sethu. A tech entrepreneur based in North Carolina, US, Sethu had run the Sahara and Gobi desert ultramarathons. At the Windchasers, he was assisted by race director Priya Darshini, who had run her first 100-mile race in the Himalayas in 2007.

I joined the Windchasers, and began to plan my life around the trip. Still, if I was looking for signs, they weren’t propitious.

Four days before I was due to leave for Bagdogra in Darjeeling, West Bengal, the earth moved. Literally. The earthquake in Sikkim was 6.9 on the Richter scale, and there were tremors in the surrounding Himalayas. The group discussed the situation with Pemba Sherpa, our guide for the race. He felt our trail was safe, so we decided to carry on.

At 9am on 23 September, when we began, it was misty. Soon it began to drizzle. The mist and the rain were to recur through the five days, halting the race for two days at Sandakphu, and then clearing magically for our first look at the magnificent Kanchenjunga.

Running the level paths, walking up the steep inclines, the five-day race was exhaustTHINKSTOCK ing. My muscles ached, my lungs felt like they were exploding. One day I got a leech in my shoe. But the cold, the damp and the exhaustion brought its own exhilaration—the delight of hot food and drink after many kilometres spent running and climbing; sitting at 12,000ft in a Sherpa family’s hut and drinking steaming tea with yak milk; and the violet aconite flowers that grew wild by the wayside. Even being marooned in a tiny lodge at Sandakphu, while the rain lashed outside, had its moments. In the evenings, sitting around the fireside, the talk was of running.

The day we finished our race, we had a celebratory dinner. The cooks, Sangay and Lakpa, conjured up a grand meal of dim sums, noodles, rice and dal. No drink had ever tasted better than the warm millet beer served in traditional wooden mugs with wooden straws.

The next Himalayan race (112km) is scheduled from 27-30 April. For details, visit w w w . t h e w i n d c h a s ers.com/or www.facebook.com/thewindchasers Sonya Dutta Choudhury

Training for the long run

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class, still in excruciating pain. In the touch-the-toes stretching exercise, my fingers would painfully reach my knees.

For the dance routines, I was politely relegated to the back row, made up of middle-aged aunties who, genuinely concerned, would ask me from time to time if I suffered from early onset of arthritis.

Towards the end of the three-month programme, I had enough stamina to finish workouts with just one tiny break. I also joined my mother for her 4km evening walks on the Worli Seaface thrice a week (I go alone running instead now) and I had lost just enough inches to ditch the long, loose T-shirts. As for the dance number, let’s just say I won’t be getting the part of the slightly uncoordinated extra in an item number anytime soon.

have a theory on why I managed to finish my first 10km run in 2013 but failed to show up for the second. Three months before I ran my first race, the TCS World 10K Bangalore in May, I had a punishing schedule that included changing my eating, sleeping and workout habits. From February-April, I minimized late-night TV watching and reading sessions. Internet surfing past midnight was not an option. On my trainer’s advice, I started finishing my dinner by 7.30pm and included as much protein and as little carbohydrates as possible.

My daily workout included waist-high kicks, walking on my toes, five 100m repetitions of walking backwards and ten 100m sprints followed by a 1.5km brisk walk which graduated to a run. It took me nearly seven weeks to build my stamina and increase my walk-run cycle from 3km to 10km. I didn’t miss workouts even on Sundays. Once I was able to complete the 10km walk-run, I focused on improving my timing. The 10K rules stipulate that the race be completed in 95 minutes.

Before I left for the race in Bangalore, for my last two runs in Delhi I clocked an average of 93 minutes.

Unfortunately, all the discipline went out of the window as the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon in December approached. Two months before the run, I was struggling to get on the track daily, and hardly managed to finish 4.5km a month ahead of the race. I gave up trying to make it for the race by mid-November. My only rule for the next event I sign up for (The Fastest Running And Living Half Marathon at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida in March): some discipline, starting now.

Prerna Makhija

Seema Chowdhry

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

STRIKE OUT ON YOUR OWN THE NEW YEAR ISSUE A nd those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” So said Friedrich Nietzsche, reportedly. I also know that Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, so he may have been sympathetic to individuals who were labelled insane.

When I tell people that I gave up plum jobs in two magazines that I founded 14 years ago and started an adventure motorcycling outfit, I get the same vibe: “This guy is completely nuts.”

I’m 52 years old, no longer young yet not too old to seek adventure on a motorcycle. With two wheels at my disposal, I have the means to willingly succumb to that mysterious force which draws me away from the comforts of home and feed the insatiable desire to unearth the source of the drumbeat only a few of us hear, and even fewer march to. I want to ruminate in the shade of old whitewashed chortens on some ancient trade route, to feel the blur and bite of the atmosphere in the way that’s so exclusive to motorcycle riding. I want to point my bike up that trail I spotted last year that people say leads to a place of indescribable beauty 14,000ft high. I want to expand the horizon of my personal geography by riding in the mysterious North-East.

Adventure motorcyclists are a twisted lot, craving dirt, dust and rock, extreme temperatures and a gruelling environment, all in the interest of riding on two wheels. This is what riding is about, actually being there and doing what can’t be done, then reminiscing about the journey, sharing it with your friends and family, while all the time knowing at the back of your mind that because they weren’t there, they won’t comprehend the scope of your tale. Still, you are compelled to tell it, and still they are compelled to listen.

However, the great truth about

adventure rides—indeed, motorcycle rides of any kind—is that there is no single standard for what someone else finds rewarding. If you get on a motorcycle, any motorcycle, and ride it somewhere, anywhere, as long as you come back feeling recharged and full of tales you want to share—well, congratulations, you’ve had an adventure.

Some of my favourite rides go through unpaved roads in Himachal Pradesh, and include ferry rides to travel along the western coast.

Pangi Valley, Himachal Pradesh

This road trip challenges your bike and you to the core. With Rohtang Pass on one side and the almost mythical Sach Pass on the other, you ride along the ever-narrowing valley of the Chandrabhaga river. The roads are unpaved and narrow. It’s a route of seemingly endless twists, turns and elevation changes that turn each day into a most excellent adventure on two wheels.

Mountain high: Dodra-Kwar in Rupin Valley and Pangi Valley (below) offer some of the most challenging routes in Himachal Pradesh.

There are no fast-food chains or five-star hotels on this route and it is much the better for that.

Mumbai-Goa on the coastal route

Till a few years ago, I had to follow the estuaries and creeks back to National Highway 17 at several points on this route and double back to the coast as bridges were few and the “jungle” ferries would refuse to load my heavily laden Royal Enfield aboard their traditional passenger boats. Today, one can do this ride without touching any major highways, starting with a ferry ride from Ferry Wharf in Mumbai that will take you across to the mainland at Rewas, near Alibag. After this, four ride-on, ride-off ferries and countless bridges will take you to Goa all along the coast.

The ride adds about 200km to a normal Mumbai-Goa ride via the national highways, but it is a ride that is best enjoyed at leisure.

Dodra-Kwar Ride, Rupin Valley, Himachal Pradesh

If you have a week to kill, then head out to the Rupin Valley. What makes this ride special is that for centuries the only way to reach Dodra-Kwar was a multi-day walk. In 2009, a road was finally built to Dodra-Kwar from Rohru in Himachal that loops through thick woods of rhododendron, deodar and Himalayan birch, and waterfalls and fast-flowing streams. Over all this towers the Chanshal range—the barrier to the Rupin Valley and Dodra-Kwar for so many years—and the eponymous pass at 12,600ft high that grudgingly allows access beyond.

Harsh Man Rai runs Helmet Stories, an adventure travel company that offers motorcycle tours in India. Formerly, he was the co-founder of Man’s World and Rolling Stone India.

FIELD SEARCH A few pointers before you start your epic road trip: Ø Know your limits: If the longest ride you have ever taken is 200km in a day, don’t plan a trip with a string of endless 500km days. Ø Upgrade your mechanical skills: The most common breakdown you’ll face on the road is a flat tyre. Removing the wheel, pulling the tyre, switching the inner tube, replacing the wheel, while alone, is physically the hardest mechanical job on a motorcycle. If you complete this task successfully, there is nothing you can’t fix while riding a bike. The toolkit in most motorcycles is at best junk. Use the toolkit as a guide and purchase quality replacement tools. Ø Atgatt: All The Gear, All The Time is the mantra. If you ride a bike, you will fall at some time.

Invest in the best riding gear you can afford, from helmet to boots. Ø Ergonomics: Pick a bike that fits your body. A simple adjustment to the handlebars for a more comfortable stance can make or break a ride. Ø Pack smart, pack light: Pack as light as you can get away with—remember you’ll be wearing bike kit in the daytime, so you won’t need much. Learn how to efficiently roll apparel. Put items in sealed plastic bags if you expect rain. Ø Homework: Research the ride before you set out and the ride will become far more fun as you seek out the places, the food, the people and the local lore that inspired you to take the trip.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BECOME SELF-SUFFICIENT I t was years before I acted on my long-time dream of working towards a self-sufficient lifestyle.

Bangalore, where I grew up, had been changing. And with that change, I found myself growing more and more discontented with city life. Then, four years ago, I bought a piece of land in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. About 18 months ago, with a rough pencil drawing and even rougher plan in hand, I started building my 640 sq. ft house with cob. In 2013, the structure (shala) was ready, complete with 750 watts worth of solar panels and a water storage tank that could hold around 25,000 litres. I am still some years away from self-sufficiency, though.

I am developing my food farm, preparing the earth through techniques like mulching. I have planted some pear trees, and this year will start working the land in small tracts, planting carrots, beans, potatoes, onions, garlic; all things that grow well together. My next big project in 2014 is to grow a natural boundary on my property to keep out animals and trespassers. Perhaps I’ll plant some cacti.

To be sure, I am still dependent on the outside world for things like food

and Internet connectivity. I have no grand illusions of achieving 100% self-sufficiency, perhaps ever. But it feels good to have built my own home—placing a tin roof on a wooden structure and excavating the earth onsite to build the self-standing walls (an architect friend recently expressed amazement at how the structure was built entirely without cement).

What I am doing is by no means pathbreaking. People have lived like this in villages for thousands of years. Of course, it is a change from my city life. But I find I am more attuned to nature now—I go out more on full moon nights and try to stay indoors on new moon nights. I don’t have a conventional set-up with a fridge, washing machine and television—these things draw too much power. But I have other, more interesting things to occupy my mind. I meditate a lot. And tasks like getting the water heated on a woodfired stove for a bath daily also feel meditative. I read a lot. Friends come over often. And I am connected to the rest of the world on social media; I work from home and build my selfsufficient life piece by small piece.

When I want to go on vacation, I go to the city. Usually, I time it so I can

attend a music festival.

How I did it:

Ø The first step is preparing yourself to give up city life, and the amenities that come with it. I can’t go to a supermarket if I run out of something, for example. I have to make a groceries list in advance and shop for an entire week at one go. Ø Decide on a natural building method. There are pros and cons to building in styles ranging from earthship construction to cordwood. You can learn more about these styles in workshops designed by groups at Auroville or Karuna Farms in Kodaikanal (www.karunafarm.in/workshops.html). The next set of workshops at Karuna Farms is scheduled for February, Personalized: Hand-craft your own house. and will focus on earthship— a building technique that uses recy- could be a lot quicker, but cob offers a cled rubber tyres and earth. The style lot of aesthetic value. The amazing I have used in my own home is called thing about using cob is that you can cob—it’s basically mud mixed with a sort of hand-craft your house— fibrous material that acts as a binding putting in shelves in the walls and agent. Cob is a little more labour- and carving out windows where you like. water-intensive than, say, rammed Ø Begin construction. Have a big picearth or earthbag buildings which ture in mind rather than fretting over

BY

HARSH MAN RAI

the details. I tried planning in detail initially and ordered a truckload of coconut fibre, which acts as a binding agent for the mud in cob buildings— it turned out to be too much; I had a lot left over after construction. I took help from Jackson Porretta of Green Chakra (www.greenchakra.org/greenchakra.org/Welcome.html) to get started. Ø Make sure you have a financial safety net on this. I didn’t build the house entirely singlehandedly. I had to pay local help. I know that over the next two-three years I will still have to put money into the house and land; I am still three-four years from having a productive farm. Ø Calculate how much power you consume, provide for at least twice that much in solar panels. I have 750 watts of solar panels, to be precise. I use about 300 watts, mostly to power my laptop, mobile phone and for lights.

Avijit Michael is country director of Change.org India.

As told to Chanpreet Khurana

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

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CARRY FORWARD LESSONS FROM YOUR PAST THE NEW YEAR ISSUE T No good decision ever pleases everyone

hirty years ago, in 1983, I was elected president of the students’ union at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Rajasthan. Those were exciting and chaotic days, full of idealistic fervour and impulsive student activism. Looking back, there are lessons I have taken with me from my students’ union presidency into my office as CEO of a Tata company. Some lessons are noble, others not so honourable.

Some which I can mention here, and others which I can only share privately, over a drink.

As president of the union, I was authorized to declare any three days as holidays on the college campus.

Don’t ask me why, but that was the rule at BITS Pilani. Several students wanted long weekends before Diwali, so they could go home. Others insisted that the day after the college cultural festival, Oasis, ended should be a holiday. Some students even petitioned me for a holiday on the birthday of a very popular girl student. In any case, each of the three decisions I made that year (and I believe they were all good, balanced decisions) were very unpopular with large sections of the student population. Until this day, I know that a good and tough decision I make as CEO won’t please everyone. It is the same, whether you’re on a college campus or occupying a corner office.

Be bold, cast away all fear

In the first week after I was elected president of the students’ union I took a few quick decisions, and a big fight broke out between two groups on campus. As a consequence, I was kidnapped for a day by some superseniors and locked up in a dingy hostel room. But when a large crowd gathered outside, the captors set me free with a warning that I should not make any radical decisions, else I would be beaten up. I chose to ignore those threats, and called for an immediate gathering in the college quadrangle. Here, I delivered one of the best speeches of my life—3 hours of spirited speaking—with assertions that I would do what had to be done and would not be cowed down. I carry that same spirit with me today.

Being bold and rubbishing threats is the only way a leader can function, whether he be president of a students’ union or a CEO.

REDISCOVER YOUR HANDWRITING

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ost of us only ever pick up a handwriting was often employed as a pen these days to sign the odd tool—to disguise identity or for detection cheque. Books are written on of crime.

In the 1770s, novelist Fanny Burney, the computers, emails have replaced letters, and it’s infinitely simpler to send a text Danielle Steel of her times, tried to hide message than, say, a handwritten note. her identity by copying out the manuSchools are moving towards screen- script of her first novel, Evelina Or the Hisbased teaching; children are learning to tory of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the use touch screens and to type faster World (1778), in a hand that was different than to form perfect letters on paper in from hers (Burney, who acted as her music historian father’s amanuensis, cursive writing.

Writing longhand may be passé, but its feared she would be identified by potenchampions, few as they may be, continue tial publishers and that would scupper to sing its praises with cultish enthusiasm. her chances as a woman writer).

Sherlock Holmes, true to the spirit of But a preference for pen and paper over the computer or phone is not necessarily the 19th century when graphology was a sign of technological illiteracy. Often it is the “in” science, claimed to know a pera matter of MINT son’s character simply by lookchoice, and its ing at their gains, especially handwriting. for those who are In 2012, Henin the business of sher wrote The writing, can be Missing Ink: The immense and Lost Art of Handunexpected. Novwriting, a book elists of an earlier that is more a celgeneration— ebration than an Ruskin Bond and elegy for the art of Anita Desai, for writing by hand. instance—conAlthough his surtinue to use pen vey only goes as and paper, while far back as the a small pool of writing: Ruskin Ruskin Bond Bond still useswrites pen and paper. 1 8 t h c e n t u r y , Penmanship: by hand. c o n t e m p o r a r y Novel leaving out the writers, like Daisy Rockwell or Philip Hensher, are passion- wealth of medieval and early modern Anglo-European manuscript culture, ate advocates of the practice.

Rockwell, who is currently working on Hensher does manage to connect the disan English translation of Upendranath appearance of handwriting with a fundaAshk’s Hindi novel Girti Divarein (literally mental shift in humanity’s experience of Falling Walls), decided to move to pen modernity. and notebook recently and felt her powers If typing on computer enables us to be of concentration improve phenomenally. fast, writing longhand slows down our “I felt too intruded upon by the Internet thinking, and makes us better writers. As when I was writing on my computer, even Rockwell says, the latter “makes one lazy if I turned off my connection,” Rockwell and creates a tendency to not properly said in an email interview. “The computer proofread and review exactly what one just no longer feels like a place where I has written”. Apart from having a chance can focus and be alone. It’s full of noise.” to indulge in exquisite stationery and the There was a time, not too long ago, sensual pleasures of paper, this itself may when writers had no choice but to work in be a good reason to give your handwriting a bubble that was relatively insulated a second life. from the chatter of the world. Further back, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Somak Ghoshal

Lead with the heart

Past forward: Harish Bhat addressing the student body at BITS Pilani, 30 years ago.

The best and most memorable decisions I made as president of the union were to help individual students. If there was trouble, the student in trouble had to be rescued at all cost. No second thoughts, no value judgements. This learning has stayed with me. Even today, some of my most fulfilling moments as CEO are when I listen to team members with my heart, and find ways to help them overcome personal and professional challenges, and achieve their goals.

You don’ t need to lead all the time

I discovered as union president that many of my colleagues were far better

leaders than I. Therefore, I quickly put them in charge of various big initiatives. One of them was made head of the organizing team of the cultural festival, another became the chairman of the committee that redrafted the constitution of the students’ union. All of them performed fabulously in their roles. I only provided them support and helped them resolve some tricky matters. I find this same approach works well in my role today—while I head the organization as CEO, on specific initiatives I sometimes choose to play a subordinate or support role to other competent senior leaders in the company, who are quite happy to assume active leadership.

A conversation over a drink can resolve most things

The most important conversations I had as union president were not across the big wooden table of the students’ union. They were always informal one-to-one meetings, over a quiet drink in my room or over a cup of hot masala chai at the institute canteen. I learnt that a leader should never underestimate the power of personal connect, and there is nothing better for building this strong bond than frank conversation over a few drinks (my favourite then was Old Monk). I have followed this principle as CEO, and I can tell you that it works, almost always.

Harish Bhat is managing director and CEO of Tata Global Beverages Ltd and author of Tatalog: Eight Modern Stories From a Timeless Institution.

VISIT THE ANCESTRAL HOME WITH YOUR CHILD S ometimes, the past is closer than it seems. It had been a decade since I last visited my family’s ancestral home, a traditional Marwari haveli in Bagar, a small town in Shekhawati, 180km from Jaipur. Marriage, living abroad, pregnancy, two young children and a busy husband provided what seemed to be genuine reasons to postpone the long (and bumpy) road journey.

But I remained keen to visit Bagar and stay once again at the haveli. I also wanted my husband, children, in-laws and our nanny to experience our family’s roots and the well-known Shekhawati landscape and cuisine. It was important to me that our sons, then aged 5 and 2, be exposed to a different world—a small town with far fewer amenities than the countryside holiday resorts they had visited before. Finally, a string of public holidays in the last week of March provided the perfect opportunity for our trip.

The biggest surprise for me was how accessible it was—a short flight to Jaipur, a 4-hour drive on a smooth highway, and there we were: standing in the courtyard of a pillared, tiled and frescoed structure which didn’t seem to be a decade older.

The haveli was built in 1928 by

FIELD SEARCH

Ø Plan the trip like a regular holiday. Make sure there are enough activities for the children, as historic architecture and scenic beauty are usually lost on them. Ø Don’t expect your children to necessarily forge an instant connection with the place or the property. Consider including other destinations to make it an interesting holiday. Ø For young children, animals, festivals and other children to play with are always a draw. In the case of older children, you could draw up a family tree to get them interested in the trip.

my great-grandfather, Piramal Makharia, who, like many of his contemporaries, migrated from Shekhawati to Mumbai to begin life as a trader. The property languished for many years until a restorative partnership, with the Neemrana group of boutique hotels, resuscitated eight of the 16 rooms in the mid-1990s. The restored wing, now a boutique hotel, was a delight, especially to my boys.

They ran up and down the stairs to the terrace in their pyjamas, to

see peacocks in the mornings or the moon at night. We celebrated Holi in the garden with organic colours, hosepipes and water guns (“lots of water and lots of grass”, my older son remarked). It was an entirely outdoor holiday—drawing or colouring in the courtyard in the afternoons, playing with sand at any time of day, walking through the fields behind the haveli or visiting temples (at least one a day).

Visiting the homes of our staffmembers was also a novelty. Our cook’s home is now urbanized, just a few minutes away from a main road, but our driver’s home is still very rural. Both boys were fascinated with his farm animals, especially the goats and their babies. For me, it was a close-up glimpse of shy women in ghunghat sitting at wood-fired cookstoves, with very few young girls in sight.

My children are still quite young, so I didn’t share too much of my family history with them, or expect them to relate to the haveli in any special way. But since we’ve come back to Mumbai, my older son has started asking me questions about his greatgreat-grandfather.

Aparna Piramal Raje writes the monthly column Head Office for Mint.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Striking roots: The writer’s ancestral haveli in Bagar, Rajasthan.

BY

APARNA PIRAMAL RAJE

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

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BE MINIMALIST

JAMMINGLOBAL.COM

Locally sourced: A Sudanese fisherman shows off the day’s catch.

T

he first morning rays tore through the mesh of my one-man tent. Soon the Sudanese Sahara would shimmer in the scorching sun. It was time to pack up the camp I had set up on a barren rock face flanked by the expanse of the desert on one side and the green palms of the Nile on the other.

A little over a year ago, I had stepped back from being a product design engineer, homeowner and stuff accumulator to take on a minimalist, nomadic life on a motorcycle. The plan was to slowly journey back to India after a decade in the US along a route that meanFIELD SEARCH dered through South America and Africa. Ø The simple mantra is to pare your In the build-up to my life to the essentials that allow you to journey, a one-way trip, I focus on what’s important to you. realized that everything that Start by taking an inventory of couldn’t fit on my motorcyeverything you own and reduce that cle had to go. I sold whatever number to 100. That’s counting every was of value in my house piece of clothing, gadget and utensil. and the house itself. I gave Coming from a life of mass the rest away. It felt incrediconsumerism, this can seem bly liberating not to be impossible and unrealistic. It might be defined by my possessions. I if you continue living your old life. To had a highly capable motormake this transition, perhaps a cycle and top-quality gear, journey is needed. It will give you the but that was it. Minimalism impetus to take a hard look at how in this context is not simply a you tread on this planet. Owning the sell-everything-and-be-free bare essentials will focus your life on mantra, but one in which quality. Declutter junk, debt and toxic you pare your possessions to relationships so that you can expend suit your lifestyle. your time on this planet on the I was getting ready to fire quality of things, connections and life. up my petrol stove to make my staple oatmeal breakfast when a swarthy young man dressed in tattered denim shorts and a faded Chicago Bears T-shirt emerged from the palm grove. With a warm smile he waved me over with that universal gesture for food. This stranger’s invitation, as I knew by now, was not unusual. Packing up my stove I followed him through the palms and down the embankment to a small beach in a bend of the Nile. Another man, his companion, was feeding a small fire in the midst of their rudimentary fishermen’s camp, cooking a thick, flat bread on an open pan. Surrounded by beached dhows and strewn nets, we ate the bread with some of their leftover fish stew flavoured simply with onions and salt.

More than being a minimalist, I was now used to a simple life.

The freedom that comes with this lifestyle choice has been extolled in numerous studies. The shifting away of focus from material wants allows one to live a truer life that concentrates on personal connections and being mindful of every waking moment.

I had my fill and as I got up to leave, Saleh, the head fisherman, arrived. He encouraged me to stay, which I did for the next four days. Being a nomad on a motorcycle allowed me to roam and go with the flow of life. Saleh had a spacious mud house that insulated us from the sweltering afternoon temperatures that soared past 50 degrees Celsius. We ate meals of fish, pigeon, greens, rice and dates with sweet mint tea. All of it, except the tea, was grown right there by the Nile or came from it. These men lived on essentials, owning little, and thriving. They understood that in my own way I, too, was living on essentials.

Jay Kannaiyan recently completed a three-year motorcycle journey that took him to 33 countries from the US to India, through Latin America, Europe and Africa. He is now about to launch an adventure travel company.

LIVE YOUR FAVOURITE THE NEW YEAR ISSUE LITERARY FANTASY I t is 9pm. I’m in the guest room of a friend’s apartment in Delhi’s fashionable Nizamuddin East, along with a bedside lamp, a silver coffee pot and two croissants. I switch off all the lights, get into bed with a notebook and pen, and turn on the lamp. Propped against two pillows, my face lies hidden in the shadows.

I am Marcel Proust.

After reading his seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time early last year, I longed to experience Proust’s exhausting writing hours. The French author rested during the day and wrote at night; still the book took 13 years of his life. I’m recreating this life for a night. To be Proust, I need to possess his supremely cultivated aesthetics as well as his wealth— both denied to me. But I can be Proust for a single night.

Proust never worked for a living; he lived on his inheritance. As a gentleman of leisure, he never wore the same underwear twice. His towels were of fine cotton; there were 25 of them at any given time in his toilet. He knew the most influential salon hostesses in Paris; he was a regular at the Ritz.

I have had high tea at The Imperial hotel on Janpath only thrice.

Besides, to be like Proust, I would need to be an aesthete of the highest order. It would require an innate appreciation for music, architecture, history, painting, philosophy and cuisines. I would need to become a skilled raconteur and develop an ear for society secrets. Most of all, I would need a gift for sustained concentration, whether I’m listening to a Wagner opera, or gazing at a Vermeer painting, or reading a John Ruskin volume, or minutely examining a pattern on an evening gown. And even with all of these gifts, I would not yet be Proust. I’m denied asthma, a condition that shaped Proust’s hypersensitive persona. A temperamental man, he was forced to spend the most productive years of his short life in bed, from where he lorded over all the characters in his life, both fictional and real.

But I can still strive to be Proust. All I have to do is follow the lines I read in an old Modern Library edition of his novel in which he was described as a victim of chronic illness who “barricaded himself in his apartment, swathed himself like an Egyptian mummy, drew his shutters and curtains to exclude the light, and there recorded his chronicle of things past”.

I too have barricaded myself in this room. This experiment demands such a minimalist setting that it could have been easily performed at my home in east Delhi, but Proust would not have been seen dead on the wrong side of the river.

It is nearing 10pm and I’m attempting to write the opening passage of a novel that, like Lost Time, will convey a set of feelings and ideas its author has experienced and analysed over the years.

The friend is watching news in the

FIELD SEARCH Four literary fantasies Socialite Bina Ramani has written a book. You can also do it. Here are the routines of four writers: Ø Haruki Murakami Wake up at 4am and write for 6 hours. Then run 10km or swim 1,500m, or do both. Later, read a book and listen to music—in that order.

Sleep by 9pm. Ø Vladimir Nabokov Write your novel on index cards. Use sharpened pencils capped with erasers.

In summer, swim daily. Go for frequent butterfly-hunting trips in nearby gardens. Ø Ruskin Bond Rent a small cottage for summer in the least touristy part of a hill station.

Wake up at 5 to see the sunrise from your bedroom window and then again go to bed. Wake up after an hour, eat a heavy breakfast, and start your novel in longhand. After lunch, read a book. Go for evening walks. Ø Maya Angelou Book a hotel room on a monthly basis and write there daily—not in your home. The room should have a bed, a table, a bathroom, a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary and the Bible, and nothing else. Make sure to ask the staff to strip the wall of all paintings and clear all decorations from the room to avoid distractions.

Mayank Austen Soofi

DISCOVER THEATRE T he explosion shook the narrow confines of the submarine. The captain frantically scrambled up the stepladder that led to the engineering room and barked out instructions.

The crew members muscled their way through breathless spectators.

I could swear I felt the room shake, my neighbour whispered. But of course it hadn’t—it was just a play, Kursk, named after the Russian nuclear-powered submarine. But instead of a traditional stage the whole auditorium had been rebuilt to resemble the inside of a submarine. The audience could stand anywhere and the “crew” navigated around them to go to their posts.

Walking out of the Young Vic theatre that day, I determined to go on a full tour of London’s theatres. The problem is, with 50 conventional theatres and

several more unconventional ones— The Railway Children at an abandoned platform on Waterloo station springs to mind—the sheer number of options at any given time is staggering.

For me, coming from a family of freedom fighters turned Anglophiles, my natural starting point was the classics—Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen and Samuel Beckett.

A summer evening at The Globe is not a bad start as it recreates Shakespeare as it was staged in the 16th century. If only my 15-year-old self, the one struggling through Hamlet for the board exams, could have seen this.

And I sat star-struck as Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart sniped at each other in boredom while Waiting for Godot and Kevin Spacey limped

other room. Proust also always had someone present in his apartment. He lived with his parents until their death, and for the last nine years of his life, he was under the care of his housekeeper.

Celeste Albaret was also Proust’s cook, secretary and a confidante with whom he talked for hours. However, when he worked on his manuscript at night, nobody entered the room unless summoned by his bedside bell—his life symbolizes our romantic idea of a writer who shuts out the world and immerses himself in searching past sensations. Those experiences are then recovered and interpreted to create a profound truth.

If I could become Proust by imitating his habits, I would immediately embark on a starvation diet. In her memoirs about her employer, Celeste wrote that the novelist daily consumed only two bowls of café au lait and two croissants— and sometimes just one.

I have finished both the croissants and the coffee too within 2 hours of becoming Proust. And now my stomach rumbles gently, reminding me that I am not the author I pretend to be.

On a lighter note, the Proustian novel that I have yet to start on tonight can repeat the legend of Lost Time only if its fortunes follow the exact footsteps of the original. For that to happen, at least the first volume of my novel should be utterly unreadable to its initial readers, and must be rejected by all major publishers. I must be forced to publish it with my own money. But once the novel enters the world, it must give the literary circles a taste of unknown pleasures.

Gradually, the world that had failed to understand it would marvel at the new territories charted by the novel. I would, however, remain a recluse and continue to work on the final volumes until the afternoon of my death.

It has grown very quiet except for the long drawn-out whistles of train engines from the Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station. We must have entered the second half of the night. I look at the watch. It is a few minutes after 2am. Somewhere in his vast novel, Proust wrote that “one hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates”.

I have been Proust for about 5 hours, but have written not a single line. Perhaps it is a vain attempt to bring forth a dream novel. It is probably somewhere beyond my reach. Maybe I should give myself a few more years and return to the novel when not much of my present remains, when some of my friends are gone, when things that look so lasting today are broken and dispersed. In that rubble I shall stumble upon the feelings of the past, waiting for deliverance.

Until then, I must read and write and observe the rich life of Delhi, so that when I do become Proust, trapped in bed with my quill in hand, I will have much to remember.

OLI SCARFF/GETTY IMAGES

Starting point: Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. through a modernized version of Richard III. But fun as it is to name-drop the stars I’ve seen, it is when I went past the West End that theatre changed from cinema-in-the-flesh to something more intensely personal.

Take the Tricycle theatre for exam-

ple, a politically inclined playhouse in a dodgy corner of north-west London.

When I was there, I sat at the edge of my seat as a Russian and an American diplomat negotiated nuclear disarmament (a production of Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods), only for their supe-

riors to block their every advancement.

Away from the kings and queens that populate the Shakespearean stage, these smaller spaces championed the joys and sorrows of the forgotten men and women: at the back of the King’s Head pub in Islington, a tiny 50-seater, The Boat Factory saw a shipyard worker and his crippled companion cry and laugh together on the crow’s nest of an unfinished ship. The Pitmen Painters at the Duchess Theatre recreated the true story of a group of coal miners in England whose paintings briefly lit up the art world before the world moved on to the next fad.

Nothing short of a full tour does justice to the sheer depth and width of the London theatre scene—from the brilliance of its mainstream veneer to the raw, experimental edge beneath. And all of it tugging at your heartstrings.

Abhinav Ramnarayan is a financial reporter with Reuters in London.

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MAKE ‘KHICHDI’ IN SNOWY WILDERNESS THE NEW YEAR ISSUE W

FARSHID S AHRESTANI

hen my friend Satish Vangal asked if I would be interested in a cycling and camping trip to the Denali National Park in Alaska, US, it took me 5 minutes to say yes: 2 minutes to realize that cycling among grizzly bears, wolves, moose, reindeers and America’s highest mountain peak (Mount Denali/McKinley) screamed fun and adventure, and another 3 minutes to check flight prices.

Two weeks later I was on my way to Denali from New York City. In less than 24 hours, we had rented a car, bought our supplies, and left Anchorage to spend our first night in a cabin in Talkeetna, the last big village before Denali. Next day at the Denali National Park’s headquarters, we watched a mandatory 20-minute movie on how to remain safe, and collected a mandatory bear-safe container to store our food. It began to dawn on me that the trip might not be all fun and games.

After parking our car at the Teklanika river campground, we set out with the gear strapped to my bike’s handlebar and in a backpack, and on the rear carrier of Satish’s bike.

Denali has one road that is 92 miles (around 148km) long. This road is unpaved after the first 15 miles. Less than 5 minutes into our ride, we stopped to look at a covey of spruce grouse strutting and showing off beside the road, but Satish urged me on—we had 25 miles to go to our

Freezing point: In the snow, it took less than 15 minutes to heat water for two cups of hot chocolate.

campsite and we had to reach before sundown. But after cycling for another 20 minutes, we stopped again, this time to gape at a grizzly female and her two cubs on the higher reaches of a hill. Looking at the bears I realized that the presence of predators here added to the magic, and the danger that I missed when visiting parks in eastern US. We encountered a couple of more bears that day, one of which I only got to see in the photo that Satish snapped of me riding past, oblivious, less than 20m away. We set up camp rather late that night, and managed to

cook and eat dinner using flashlights.

Travelling with Satish, a vegetarian, meant that we cooked a khichdi of rice and dal in a mini Hawkins pressure cooker both nights we were in the park. I had brought the rice and dal with some spices packed as individual meals from home, and we cooked our meals on a camping stove out in the open near a running stream in the middle of the stony bed of the Toklat river.

We woke up to a dusting of snow on the ground; the overcast conditions forced us to cancel cycling the 30 miles to Wonder Lake. We spent

the day taking a short bike ride and trying to retrieve a Ganesh statue that Satish had left behind during his last visit. Since it was an easy day we got the opportunity to soak in Denali’s magnificence—views of mountains and broad river valleys covered with yellow, red, green and orange vegetation, brown and black mountain sides, and white snow-capped mountain tops, all set against blue skies.

The sheer vastness of Denali (it is larger than the state of Massachusetts), and the realization that this was an ancient natural ecosystem that had remained intact for millen-

BECOME A COFFEE NERD W hen people find out I used to run my own cafés they naturally assume that I am a coffee enthusiast (true) and that I favour the espresso as my drink of choice (false).

While it is true that I am a coffee enthusiast, I don’t consider myself a snob. The problem is that even the most basic conversation on good coffee quickly becomes too technical and, consequently, offputting for most people. I have been guilty of this sin in the past. But this piece is my attempt at redemption.

There are several problems in trying to achieve a good cup of coffee. Notice how I don’t use the word “perfect”. Where taste is concerned there can be no absolute ideal.

The first problem is mindset. For those of us brought up on spray-dried instant coffee or even chicory-rich filter coffee, it is hard to imagine that a good cup of coffee isn’t bitter. That the base notes are sweet.

And that good coffee has subtleties that reveal themselves with the patience and perseverance of the drinker. Once you accept that good coffee is a cause worth pursuing, half the battle is won.

The next problem is that of availability.

While the demand for better-than-instant has grown in India, it still doesn’t make sense for specialist roasters to be set up at every corner, source single-origin beans and courier 100g packs to customers. In an ideal world we would source fresh green beans and roast our own coffee. But, as I have discovered, getting even a half-decent roast at home involves specialized and expensive equipment and more time than someone with a full-time job can devote. Craft solutions for roasting coffee—like corn poppers or even stove-roasting—result in lifeless cups of joe.

I currently source my coffee from a roaster in Bangalore who supplied to my cafés earlier. Those without easy access to such a

set-up could look to the aisles at the larger supermarket stores. Another option is to buy from the café chains themselves. In any case, look for a medium-roast and go from there. In no case should you buy preground coffee. Grinding increases the surface area available for oxidation and things go downhill from there very quickly. Roasted whole beans are the absolute minimum we need for a cup that uplifts and refreshes.

Once the beans have been procured, there are four variables that affect the final brew. Master these and you should be on your way to great coffee. The first is quantity. By quantity we mean weight. Volume measures are too inexact for our needs.

Get yourself a kitchen scale—one that can measure in 0.5g increments and which allows you to reset the “zero” by subtracting the container. Different methods use different amounts of coffee per cup. And changes in the other variables also affect the quantity needed. A simple Internet search should get you started, though.

The second variable is the grind size. So, the next thing we need is a grinder. More specifically, a burr grinder. One that crushes coffee beans uniformly between rotating planes—like a stone flour-mill— and doesn’t decimate them with blades.

This, again, is an area of no compromise.

Trust me on this.

The problem is that these just aren’t available in India. I use a $26.99 (around `1,675) Hario slim hand-operated grinder that my sister-in-law brought for me from the US. Try looking for that here and the only option I see is a `6,026 option (at www.zansaar.com/hario-skerton-handcoffee-grinder-p-SALSP1925). Get that unless you have someone who can order it for you from a retailer abroad.

The third variable is temperature. As a general rule the higher the temperature the more the acid or bitter in the final brew. For this reason one of my favourite methods is cold brewing—200g of

Cup of joe: Cold brewing is the best way to make your coffee.

coarse-ground coffee beans stirred into 900ml of room-temperature water and then thrown in the fridge for 12 hours.

Sieve through a cheesecloth and you have yourself a concentrate that gives you the cleanest, non-acidic coffee you have ever had. Make hot coffee by adding one part of this concentrate to one part boiling water or milk (protip: water). For cold coffee, use cold milk but I would recommend adding three tablespoons of condensed milk to 100ml of the concentrate and pouring over a tall glass filled with ice for a killer Vietnamese Iced Coffee. Get yourself a digital kitchen thermometer if you insist on precision with temperature.

The last variable is steeping time. The higher the temperature of water, the lower the time. A timer helps here. The one on your phone should do just fine.

And that’s it. With the basics in place, you are free to try different methods. Pourovers are a good place to start. These involve pouring hot water over ground coffee in a filter and allowing the water to percolate down. Moka pots and vacuum pots use vapour pressure rather than gravity to move the water.

My daily staple is the AeroPress. I use a 6:1 blend of Arabica and Robusta at a medium roast and medium grind. Seventeen grams of coffee and 95 degrees Celsius water poured in three increments in an inverted Aeropress method (don’t ask).

If that sounds too snobbish consider that this is my home set-up. At the office I drink three-four cups of Nescafé Gold instant coffee a day. And I’m happy.

Rajjat Gulati is assistant vice-president at an e-learning organization.

nia, was a humbling experience.

That night again we cooked our khichdi and made hot chocolate while it snowed. I was amazed at how well a stove the size of my fist cooked the khichdi and heated the water for the hot chocolate in less than 15 minutes in freezing weather. It snowed the entire night and was still snowing when we woke up the next morning.

On our way out, we slipped and fell numerous times on the snow-covered downhill from Sable Pass. We were lucky, however, to encounter a herd of Dall sheep feeding close to the road, that were not bothered by either the snow or our presence while feeding close to the road, and a hooting conversation between a pair of Great Horned owls in the wooded region closer to Teklanika. We had fun racing down some of the last downhill slopes in the road, and it took us 6 hours to complete the 25 miles from our campsite to the car.

Although reaching our car signalled the end of the trip, it also signalled that we could now thaw our frozen fingers. Looking up at the beautiful Mt Denali and the Alaska range, I knew I would be back someday, but probably without the bicycles and Hawkins pressure cooker.

Farshid S. Ahrestani is an ecologist and wildlife conservationist working as a research scholar in the department of biology, The Pennsylvania State University, US.

DISCARD THE SMARTPHONE PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Not-so-smart: Basic phones can be liberating.

O

ne day last year my Sony Xperia stopped working. It felt as if my wife had died. The touch-screen phone had everything I would need if I were to be stranded on a deserted island—my Gmail, my Google, my six Jane Austen e-novels, and my contact list of more than 500 phone numbers.

The most crushing thing was the loss of the hundreds of special text messages I had exchanged and saved over the years with some very special people. Many a lonely evening I’d relived old memories rereading those precious SMSes. Now, the archive of my recent history was lost.

The first evening following the tragedy, I walked, and walked, in the bylanes of Old Delhi, feeling utterly ruined. The next morning I went to a shop around the corner and, as a stop-gap arrangement, purchased a fist-sized Nokia phone; it was an old and cheap model that everyone once had and no one now has.

This mobile has no Internet. It cannot take photos. It cannot save even 100 contacts. In fact, it deletes old SMSes automatically. No wonder then that it took me a few days to readjust my habits and manners to the Dumbphone—and then my life changed.

Since my ears could no longer be plugged to FM channels, I relearned to hear the music of street sounds and birdsong. Since I could no longer take photos of decisive moments in real time, I learnt to cultivate the art of seeing those clickable scenes with more feeling.

Yes, it was frustrating to not read my emails the moment they were sent, but I soon discovered the pleasure of checking my inbox after a gap of a few hours (sometimes 24 hours) and finding so many friends and enemies lined up to have a word with me.

Today I feel lighter. I’ll never marry a Smartphone again.

Mayank Austen Soofi

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THE NEW YEAR ISSUE THINKSTOCK

TIME YOU BECAME TECH SAVVY Switch smartphones

Buying a new phone? Don’t ask for help in moving your contacts and calendar appointments. Instead, just take a few simple steps: First off, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter are all Web-based services, so getting them across devices is as simple as signing in on the new machine. Your calendar and contacts can be synced with a little help from Google.

If you are using an iPhone, that means going into the Settings, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and setting up a new account. On a Windows phone, go to Settings, Email+Accounts and then add an account. With Android, go to Settings, Accounts, and add an account. And with BlackBerry, just go to the Setup Wizard and tap the New Account button.

Create a Google account or add your existing account to the device, and sync all your contacts and calendars by visiting m.google.com/ sync from the old handset. Then, repeat the process on the new handset to get all your data across.

Automate your online life

Do you copy all email attachments to Dropbox for quick access, or save all your email receipts to Evernote?

Do you like to save your favourite author’s articles to Pocket for reading later? Are you manually clicking everything to complete these tasks?

Stop wasting time and go to IFTTT.com, create a free account and start adding your Web services like Dropbox, Pocket and Instagram.

Then start creating “recipes”, rules that IFTTT (if this, then that) uses to automate your work.

Recipes could be to save all mails with a set subject line to Evernote, or use the location data from your phone to post to Facebook whenever you visit a particular place.

Popular recipes are highlighted on the site, and it’s really simple to create your own rules as well.

Chromebook: a new kind of computing experience

Chromebooks have some serious advantages over PCs at the same price. Computing tasks for most people are either based around Web browsing, or word processing. This doesn’t really require a powerful PC any more.

A specialized device like a Chromebook has its own advantages—it can boot up in seconds, like a tablet. Thin and light, it’s as portable as those mobile devices, but the full body design still makes it a productivity machine. The interface is

Learn to code

Make your smartphone smarter

Your phone knows where you are, when you’ve got a meeting, what your schedule is like, what time you normally leave work, and a lot more. Short cut: Create ‘recipes’ for saving date It just doesn’t use this information in any meaningful way. computer user, make sure the basic On Android at least, there’s a security and maintenance systems solution to this problem—download in Windows are up and running.

Llama, a free Android app, and start Visit the system tools folder and creating rules. The process is pretty make sure the system is automatisimilar to IFTTT, but instead of cally running the disk defragmenter; responding to the Web services, it ensure you’ve got Microsoft Security r e a c t s t o i n f o r m a t i o n o n y o u r Essentials (it’s free, and one of the phone. best anti-virus programs around) up So, for example, use IFTTT to set and running too, and that it’s set to up calendar entries by scanning carry out scans and update virus your inbox, and then have the definitions automatically. There are phone automatically switch to mute better ways to do these things, but during meetings; or have it go into this is a pretty foolproof method. battery-saver mode when the battery is below 50%; or lower the play- Get your devices talking back volume automatically when Setting up a Wi-Fi network in your you’re wearing a headset. house is very straightforward; most devices are plug and play, and all Automate Windows you have to do is buy a Wi-Fi router, updates plug the LAN cable in, and you’re This stays on by default and is so good to go. Connect to the router simple that most people don’t need from your phone and set up a Wi-Fi to be told this, but if you’re a novice password, please. In the old days,

NOW YOU SEE ME W e sometimes forget that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. So while a high-end, super-specialized desktop might be very exciting for a limited number of people, sometimes the best examples of technology are the ones we take for granted in our day-to-day life.

We looked at some of the coolest products of 2013:

THE NEW YEAR ISSUE

simple and easy to understand, and configuring the device is as simple as logging into your Gmail account.

It’s not an all-purpose device, but for the average buyer, the Chromebook is the best computer you can get for the budget, with the design of an ultrabook at the price of a netbook.

The exact specifications don’t really matter—the Chrome OS is not demanding, and while laptops such as the Lenovo S210T are excellent little machines, they take longer to boot and struggle when you’re running multiple applications. The HP Chromebook 14, which is the same price, was running in 2-3 seconds, and launched Quick Office, the offline document editing suite, equally quickly. In the middle of working on a document, we decided to launch Bastion (a free trial of the game is available on the Chrome Web Store), and continued to play the game without closing the document editor—it performed smoothly.

All for `26,990.

in order to automate your online life. networking took some knowledge, but there’s no excuse not to have a Wi-Fi network today.

Once you’ve done that, step 2 is to get all your devices talking as well.

For example, you can use the UPnP protocol to stream music and movies between devices—game consoles, some newer DVD players, or an HTPC attached to your big screen can make use of this.

Use the cloud

Services like Dropbox let you save data on the cloud. Which is great, of course, but you can use them for much more than just data storage.

For example, if you have a torrent client (which you only use for legally available material, of course), then all you need to do is set it to check a Dropbox folder. After that, just save the .torrent files you want to download at home into that folder from

3Doodler: learn to draw in thin air

Most people can’t afford to buy a 3D printer yet. These are getting cheaper, and will eventually be a part of every household, but for now, they’re found in universities and some workplaces.

3D printers “print” an object in layers. You “cut” the object into thin horizontal slices that you print using melted plastic instead of ink. Each layer cools and sets in the time it takes to print the next one. This way, you can build a 3D object layer by layer. Today, the cheapest 3D printers cost around $500 (around `30,950).

The experience of creating objects with these is limited—you’ll be able to print small plastic shapes in one colour, and it’s most likely going to be a jagged design. A small toy takes a couple of hours to print.

A new product called the 3Doodler—funded through Kickstarter—lets you experience 3D painting, instead of 3D printing. The 3Doodler is cheaper, faster, and more fun. It costs $99, and is a big fat pen which heats plastic and squeezes it out where a nib would be. So you can wave your hand in the air and create an arc, draw a spiral rising out of the page, and if you’re talented—and patient—enough, you can create bigger designs (the developers have a demo video showing you how to make your own model of the Eiffel Tower).

You get plastic which can be fitted into the 3Doodler; once you’ve charged it up, you start painting in air. The pen is not easy to hold because it is thick and heavy. It becomes hot, and the smell of the heated plastic isn’t pleasant.

But the first time you make a design out of plastic, the experience is magical.

LG HomBot Square

Chromebook: These computers are cheap and convenient for work.

your work computer or on your phone, and your home machine will start the download automatically.

You can also use Cloudy, a Chrome extension, to save attachments from Gmail to Dropbox selectively, in case you don’t want to back up all your attachments using IFTTT.

When we’re thinking about robots or cool gadgets, vacuum cleaners rarely enter the discussion. But take something like the Roomba from iRobot, or LG’s HomBot, and you’re talking about some smart computer programming that can find

No one is suggesting that you need to be able to build your own operating system. But everyone should build a basic understanding about how computers work.

Download Scratch—it’s a free tool from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a visual editor that you can drag and drop objects into, and do some very rudimentary programming. There’s a huge online community to teach you how to use it properly, and you will learn to understand how computers work as a result.

This will be useful with all techrelated learning, whether it’s learning how to code a website or build an app.

Fix hardware problems

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with your phone, tablet or computer. Things like proper maintenance and software updates will help you with the software side, but what if something goes wrong with the hardware? There’s enough that you could learn to fill a book, but the first, and best, tip is to visit www.ifixit.com—it’s the most detailed website on repairing gadgets you can find, and it also rates all repairs based on how easy/hard they are, so you can easily decide if something is beyond your skill level.

Bookmark this site, because it’s great.

Gopal Sathe

3Doodler: We’re a long way from 3D printing, but toys like this offer a peep into the future.

its way around the real world.

Place obstacles in its path, and the HomBot uses its binocular vision (there are two front-mounted cameras for optimal pathfinding) to carefully work its way around them. It is able to define its territory, carefully scanning and crossing the room so there is no wasted effort and no missed territory. The latest version, the LG HomBot square, also happens to understand voice commands.

As soon as you set it up, it scoots off with cheerful efficiency. The square design lets it reach into corners that were just out of the range of its agitating brush earlier. A turbo mode lets it pull up everything without any worries, though the round design in the previous version, particularly when you set it to spiral cleaning, was a lot more manoeuvrable.

The new HomBot, expected to launch in India this year, is expensive—you will be spending `50,000 on what is, at the end of the day, a vacuum cleaner.

While it’s possible to justify spending that much money on an iPhone, given the wide range of uses it has, with a vacuum cleaner—no matter how smart it is—that’s kind of hard.

That said, it is small, without the bulky bumpers of its competitors, and fast. There are still some issues with the HomBot— much like the second one, which released in 2012, this version also has some problems with wires. It’s a

low-slung machine, and the wires can get stuck in the wheels. The little robot just gets hopelessly stuck and looks utterly pitiful as it tries to figure out what to do next.

Other than wires, obstacles around the house weren’t a problem. The HomBot climbed on top of carpets like a trooper, and scooted under the bed (which has fairly low clearance) with elan.

In case it’s going anywhere you don’t want it to, all you have to do is clap. Yet, this is clearly a device you will buy because you want it, not because you need it.

Gopal Sathe & Dhruv Rathore.

Rathore is a computer engineerturned-artist and musician living in Ontario, Canada.

LG HomBot Square: A highly effective smart vacuum cleaner.

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JOIN THE QUANTIFIED FED UP WITH THE SELF ISSUEMOVEMENT HEADLINES? CREATETHE NEW YEAR YOUR OWN NEWS I T here’s a lot of content on the Internet, but side of things, with the rest taking charge of confinding the things you want can be hard tent. After just a month, though, one of their stowork. In case you want something to read ries went viral. that suits your tastes, then there are some cool “After that, we got a lot of attention and have apps that can help. All you need to do is high- become a funded company with a long-term light your interests, choose what you want to plan. By the end of November we had quit our follow, and things happen automatically. day jobs to focus full-time on Scoop Whoop!,” Our favourite tool for this is Flipboard—the Mukherjee says. Part of this focus is getting app made waves when it first launched on the coders for the website and also a professional iPad, and today you can run it on iPhones and redesign.

Android phones as well. Select topics, The articles on the webnews sources, and cresite are a mix of curated ate your own customcontent and original posts. ized newspapers to “If we find something read at leisure. You can good that we want to also use Pulse for simishare, something that lar results; Zite and people might have Paper.li too are good missed earlier, or somealternatives—besides, thing that is getting all of these are free. attention, then we have What if you’re not to spend a lot of time to content with merely repackage it to make it reading the news but fit with the site,” want to put your own Mukherjee explains. personal spin on it?

Another new site, Dfuse.in, is Scoop Whoop! India’s BuzzFeed.

These tools are great for doing something similar, but grouping content that’s already out there, but the focus is almost entirely on original content, what about sharing it with your friends? with a few video links. Storypick.com curates a Given the huge amount of information that’s lot of videos, and makes its own text-based available on the Internet, there’s actually great content, such as “28 must-have dishes from 28 demand for sites that do just that—curate qual- Indian States”. ity content. Building your own content aggregaThe key for building a strong online commutor isn’t a challenge really—the basics are fairly nity, Mukherjee argues, is to keep things cheap now (around `3,000 will take care of your snappy, and do a lot of analysis. He credits the costs). And you don’t need any specialized skills ad background that the Scoop Whoop! team has because templates and blog codes are available for their success, because it’s given them freely on the Internet. If you want more than a insights into the audience and a chance to see basic blog though, then a little work needs to go the trends online. “We were working in adverinto it. tising and also in digital—that has been a big Sites like Scoop Whoop! (which launched in help. We know what works online, and the othAugust) can help you take this kind of curation ers have worked as copywriters, so we know to the next level. Scoop Whoop! was started by how to do this kind of content,” he says. “But four colleagues who had also been friends there also has to be a huge amount of data analfrom their days at the Indian Institute of Mass ysis. We check all kinds of figures using analytics Communication, Delhi—Rishi Pratim tools on the site, and social analytics on FaceMukherjee, Satvik Mishra, Sriparna Tikekar book are also very powerful,” adds Mukherjee. and Saransh Singh. They were all working So the site has to check every variable—testtogether in the digital marketing agency ing multiple headlines, even the kind of images Webchutney, but had discussed the lack of they use to promote a story on Facebook.

India-specific content on the Internet, and “These sound like small things, but they make a decided to create a site themselves. huge difference,” Mukherjee says.

Initially, they held on to their day jobs in advertising as Mukherjee handled the business Gopal Sathe

n my first job after a master’s in business administration, across the desk from me sat the data analytics guy. I knew he made, roughly, half what I did. And yet he outdid me in every manner possible. He took weekend vacations to Thailand and Singapore every three months and he upgraded to the latest Nokia phones every six months (this was 2007, you have to understand). I assumed he was piling on credit card debt till he expressly ruled that out. Now I really had to know. So I asked and he showed me.

He had a spreadsheet open at all times on his laptop where he tracked every bit of income and expenditure; down to the last 50 paise. He knew at all times how much he had in the bank and on his person. And he had set limits on what he could spend on the staples and on indulgences. Aided by data, he was always on top of his financial situation.

We generally accept that good data helps us make good decisions. What we don’t usually do is turn the data inwards towards ourselves. Any successful dieter knows the value of a food journal. Why not take it to the next level? And that, simply, is the premise of the Quantified Self Movement (QSM)—using technology to capture data about the quantifiable aspects of a person’s life to help make better decisions. While the first few applications to go mainstream under the Quantified Self banner have been under the health and wellness category, QSM is far more encompassing.

The idea of using data to improve oneself is not new. Sportspersons and coaches pore over the minutiae trying to get that extra 1% of performance. And now with improvements in technology, with sensors becoming smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient, these strategies are being adopted by tech enthusiasts, fitness nerds and lifehackers.

The term “Quantified Self” seems to have been coined

by Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly. Quantified Self conferences are

now held in 50 cities across the globe. And it is here that the most extreme examples of the Quantified Self are showcased. A member of this QSM, Chris Bartley used his statistical model for locating landmines to help him fight his chronic fatigue. Other users are collaborating to see which medicines work best to combat migraines and which habits and supplements give you the best sleep.

If you aren’t looking to commit yourself to 40-column spreadsheets and advanced statistical analysis, there is still a lot you can do to dip your feet in the pool of the Quantified Self. Track your dietary inputs with the MyFitnessPal app or website. You can set dietary limitations—low carb, Paleo, vegetarian—and track your nutrient intake.

Track your physical output with any one of a range of activity monitors. The popular ones include Fitbit, Up by Jawbone and the Nike+ FuelBand. Most of these also include sleep monitors that can estimate the duration and quality of your sleep. Use the Withings WS-50 smart scale to keep track of your weight, body composition and heart rate.

The associated app can maintain profiles for up to eight family members. You can set weight targets and they will get broken down into weekly tasks. Apps like AskMeEvery, MercuryApp and Track Your Happiness can be used to track your mood and the factors that affect it.

A word of warning, though. QSM isn’t a panacea to treat all that ails you. Remember that all this technology and jargon is useful for is adding transparency to the process of evaluating your choices and actions. It is up to you to make all the actual change.

That said, let the latest gadgets, apps and services help you the best they can.

BUILD YOUR OWN INTERNET OF THINGS Y our fridge isn’t really ready to send you a reminder to buy more apples on the way home, but there are already several cool ways in which you can get your electronics talking to one another.

One of the most exciting trends in technology is getting all the devices in a house connected to each other and to the Internet. The Internet of Things, as the idea is described, suggests a world where everything is interconnected, letting your washing machine order detergent when supplies run low, letting your phone switch on the air conditioner automatically as you get close to home, even letting you store music on your phone and play it from the big speakers in the house.

It’s still work in progress, but that’s changing quickly, and thanks to new devices like the Raspberry Pi (a low-cost computer that’s small enough to fit in your pocket), we’re starting to see a lot of home-made hacks that can slowly bring that idea to fruition.

For example, I had a 14-year-old surround-sound system that is just a little too big, and very limited in functionality today. To get the most out of it, the receiver is used just as a dumb box to pick up the signal and pass it over to the speakers. Does that mean tying up your laptop to get good use out of the speakers? To avoid this, I used a new audio protocol called MagicPlay which connects multiple speakers to Wi-Fi networks, for synchronized wireless streaming of audio.

You could buy new Wi-Fi speakers or, by spending around `3,000, you could make some using a Raspberry Pi and some old speakers. You need to down-

load the AllJoyn source code, or a compiled version of it, from the Internet (www.alljoyn.org), and aside from your old speakers, you’ll also need a Raspberry Pi (`3,290 on eBay).

Plug the Pi into your monitor and boot it up so you can connect it to the home Wi-Fi. Once that’s set up, install the MagicPlay service on the Pi—its default setting is to start running as soon as you switch the Pi on.

Then you can take the Pi, attach it to the speakers, hide it in a corner somewhere and just power it on with the speakers. To play the music on the speakers, you can stream it from your phone using the doubleTwist music player app (free on the Google play store). More outputs supporting MagicPlay are expected this year.

Another simple trick is using apps to control an HTPC (home theatre personal computer) from your phone. If you use a small computer to stream movies using the XBMC media player, then there’s a free, official XBMC remote app for both Android and iOS that lets you do everything, from browsing movies, TV shows and music, to setting up a playlist, starting functions such as downloading subtitles, or even using it to switch off the HTPC.

For the tech savvy

Those are very basic hacks anyone can do, but if you’re okay with circuits and soldering, one very cool project that’s possible is building an Internet-controlled power switch. With this, you could use your smartphone to control the lights in your house even when you’re travelling, for extra security.

This isn’t the easiest project, though.

Aside from a Pi, you’ll need remotecontrolled outlets, transistors, cabling, and a breadboard to make a basic circuit, and you will need a soldering iron to put it together.

To make this work, you need to take a remote-controlled switch, take it apart using a screwdriver, and then connect a transistor to it which can be controlled using the Pi. You can find a very detailed explanation at Jack.minardi.org, but essentially, you need to solder the circuit from the switch to the Pi, so that the

Pi can pick up a signal from the Internet and send it to the transmitter, which replicates the effects of the remote control.

That’s actually the hard part. After that, you just need to search for jminardi/lamp_control on GitHub, download his code, and install it on a Web server running Flask.

The code includes on and off—go to the page from your computer or phone, click the appropriate link, and the switch goes from on to off. It worked

Rajjat Gulati By the numbers: The Nike+ FuelBand and the Fitbit Flex.

well for a simple lamp, and would probably work with everything else too, but we only had one Pi to try things with. So we couldn’t, for example, use this as a power switch for a second Pi connected to our speakers.

While the simple tricks we talked about earlier are a great starting point, it’s projects like this one which start to really show how the Internet of Things can change our lives.

Gopal Sathe

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FOLLOW YOUR NEW YEAR ISSUE ENTREPRENEURIALTHE DREAM Programming for children

F

rom working at Amazon Payments to creating programmable toys for children is a pretty big leap, but Vikas Gupta was no stranger to the idea. He had worked at Amazon for seven years till 2006, developing the payment system before quitting to start a virtual currency system, Jambool, which Google acquired for around $70 million (around `435 crore) in 2010.

He left Google two years later, to follow an equally strange idea—that fiveyear-olds could learn to program.

In an email interview, Gupta says: “A five-year-old does have the cognitive ability to grasp the ‘programming con-

cepts’... However, at that young age, children need tangible interactions to engage with—interactions that would make abstract concepts more concrete.”

So Gupta founded Play-i along with Mikal Greaves, who had until then led engineering at frog design and Flextronics, and Saurabh Gupta, who had been heading the iPod software team at Apple for six years.

Their project, Bo and Yana, two robots designed to be programmed by children, is in production now. Bo ($169) and Yana ($59) work with a touch interface on the iOS and Android platforms to teach children to program using their toys.

The robots are available for preorder at www.play-i.com

Riding the wave

I

n 2005, Rohan Kini rediscovered his love for cycling with friend Nikhil Eldurkar. “We were so happy being back on our bikes that we wanted to spread the word,” says Kini, who started a cycling community called Bum On The Saddle (BOTS). “Even as we connected with other cyclists in Bangalore we were aware of the difficulty to choose and buy a good bike,” says Kini. In 2007, Kini started selling cycles from the US-based Trek Bicycle Corp. which had just entered the Indian market.

Both Kini and Eldurkar kept their day jobs and operated their bike store from the latter’s home terrace on weekends. In early 2012 Kini quit his job as a software professional to run the first BOTS store in Jayanagar in south Bangalore. “The first year was tough, because life in IT (information technology) is very easy and you tend to become soft and take the comfort and money for granted,” says Kini. While Eldurkar continues to have a day job, Kini runs two stores in Bangalore where they sell bicycles and associated accessories. They also organize cycling events for Bangalore’s 5,000-plus cycling community. In the years to come, BOTS hopes to set up shop across India.

See their ranges of bicycles and accessories on Bumsonthesaddle.com.

No Net to tweet

A

nkit Nautiyal and Sumesh Menon worked together at Bubble Motion, a Singapore-headquartered firm that offers services such as social messaging on mobile phones. In 2010, both quit and moved back to India to build their own company.

The result, U2opia Mobile, gives you smart features on dumb phones, using the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) protocol, which employs technology similar to text messages to let you access services like Facebook and Twitter.

Though smartphones are becoming cheaper and more accessible by the day, a large segment of the population in countries like India, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo— where U2opia Mobile is present—cannot afford smartphones and data plans.

In some of the 30 countries where U2opia offers its services, the mobile Internet network is, at best, patchy, which means that the potential of the service is tremendous.

t’s time to capture your adventures with more than your smartphone. GoPro HD HERO cameras are popular the world over for capturing adventure sports in high-definition. The small, sturdy cameras come in a waterproof housing and can be mounted on your chest, helmet, bike, car or anywhere else you can think of to produce immersive videos.

GoPro cameras first caught people’s attention in a surfing video where the small camera was stuck on the front of a surfboard, and now YouTube is flooded with stunning footage of surfers riding tunnels of water. It’s now spread to mountain biking, winter sports, motorsport and any other activity where the user can be his own cameraman.

There’s no viewfinder or built-in screen in the GoPro HERO cameras. In the latest HERO3+ cameras, however, your smartphone acts as the viewfinder.

The GoPro App connects your GoPro: Shoot adven- smartphone through Wi-Fi to the ture sports with ease. camera and allows you to control what you’re shooting, and makes it easy to quickly share your videos online.

The camera measures 3.81x5.84x2.03cm but packs incredible video-recording capability. The HERO3+ Black Edition can shoot video up to 4K (2,160p) at 15 frames per second (fps), take stills at 12 MP and comes with a Wi-Fi remote. The HERO3+ Silver Edition can record up to 1080p at 60 fps and take stills at 10 MP. The entry-level HERO3 White Edition records 1080p at 30 fps and has the original 5 MP sensor. Besides the high-quality video, the wide-angle lens has been central to the GoPro camera’s popularity. With a field-of-view going up to 170 degrees, the frame captures almost everything the person wearing it can see. In addition to video, the HERO cameras have a time-lapse feature, where they can take a still image every 0.5-60 seconds.

GoPro finally made it to India at the end of 2012 and is widely available through specialist stores. Prices range from `21,000 for the low-end White Edition to `37,000 for the high-end Black Edition. If you’re shooting primarily to share your adventure holiday with family and friends, the White Edition should be sufficient. However, if you’re a professional videographer, the Black Edition and its ProTune feature that records with minimal processing (allowing for richer post-production processing) is the way to go.

Jay Kannaiyan

A DAY WITH GOOGLE GLASS

For details,visit www.u2opiamobile.com

Climb every mountain

K

SHARE YOUR ADVENTURES I

T

Visit the microbrewery at Toit.in.

he Google Glass is yet to come to India. But thanks to a friend who runs a start-up which develops an app for Android phones that allows users to click and share panoramic images, and is now working on a similar app that will feed into the Glass stream, I got to play around with the gadget for an entire day.

To be honest, I wasn’t quite blown away by Glass in the first 5 minutes. It resembles a pair of spectacles, with a transparent screen in front of your right eye. The hook that goes over your right ear serves as a speaker, microphone, battery, processor and a host of other things. My first impression when I tried the Glass on was not that of awe but of utter bewilderment. My 20/20 vision went hazy for the first 10 seconds. I couldn’t see anything except moving shapes and figures on the tiny screen that switched on in front of my right eye.

After about 20 seconds, the screen cleared up. And boy, what a ride it was after that.

Speak short, crisp commands and the Glass responds quickly. Swipe a finger across the right earpiece, and then speak—menu options are activated by an “OK Glass” command. Outdoors, features such as GPS, language translation, photo and video capture were great. Once you get used to it, the screen is also large and clear enough to navigate—scrolling up and down is controlled by tilting and nodding your head. It’s responsive too; I barely said “take a picture”, and a snapshot flashed across the screen.

At $1,500 (around `93,000) and still at the developer stage, this isn’t a consumer product. Hopefully, the price will come down once it is produced on a large scale.

I know I sound like a teenage comic fanboy, but here I refer to David Pogue in his The New York Times consumer technology column describing the Glass—It has the potential no other machine has ever had before.

Chanpreet Khurana and Pavitra Jayaraman

Anirban Sen

arn Kowshik worked with two big media companies before he quit to retreat to the mountains. “I guess life as a crime journalist was not exciting enough for me,” he says, laughing.

After working as a journalist for three years, he took a break to travel in 2008, spending most of the next four years working as a mountain guide in the Himalayas to sustain himself.

“All I ever wanted was to spend my time climbing,” says Kowshik. In early 2012 Kowshik, along with business partner Archit Rakheja, who quit his

At your service

T

hree school friends taken in by the idea of freshly brewed beer decided that Bangalore, India’s pub capital, should have its own brewpub. Together with Glen Williams, who runs the Sweet Chariot chain of bakeries in Bangalore, Sibi Venkataraju, Arun George and Mukesh Tolani started the Toit brewpub in Indiranagar. Venkataraju and George quit their day jobs to get the pub, which served its first brew on Christmas in 2011, going.

It began in 2005 when Venkaratraju and George, both IT consultants in Singapore, were introduced to the microbreweries of the city.

After five years of back and forth on the idea, and saving for the day when they would take the plunge, they moved to Bangalore in 2010.

Despite being a newbie in the business, Toit has never seen a dull day. “We brew around 15,000 litres of Weiss, our popular wheat beer, every month,” says Venkataraju.

job as a financial analyst, started Geck & Co Adventurers.

The company organizes boutique climbing tours in the mountains. Most of their clients come to them by word of mouth. “By starting a business I am now learning how to sell. The technical part, organizing logistics and of course climbing, all that is easy. We are running a business like mountaineers,” says Kowshik.

Look for a climbing holiday that works for you on www.geck-co.com

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August 2012 | Vol 1 | No 5 | Price R15.00

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