Lounge for 04 June 2011 by HT Media

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

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 23

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE A practice match in progress inside Central Jail No. 1 in Tihar Prisons.

LINKED IN >Page 9

THE NEW TOAST OF THE TOWN

Historically looked upon as the cake’s poor cousin, the good ol’ bread has its moment >Page 5

FREEDOM AT MIDNIGHT A ‘Globe and Mail’ exclusive report by the only journalist allowed on the shoot of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ in Sri Lanka >Pages 67

CELL CRICKET As the IPL buzz dies down, India’s favourite sport crosses the barrier to provide hope and solace inside Tihar Prisons >Pages 1011 LUXURY CULT

RADHA CHADHA

BEIRUT: A CITY OF CONTRASTS

am watching a Lebanese bride posing for a bevy of photographers at the poolside setting of my hotel in Beirut. She is so lovely—and the photographers so many—that for a moment I think she is a local celebrity. Her fashionable white wedding gown is daringly cut—what Kate Middleton walked down the aisle in is nun-like by comparison—this one is so off-off-shoulder that the bodice seems to be held up solely by magic. Her tiny waist is scrunched up with a decorative belt. She throws back her head... >Page 4

THE NEW HAUZ KHAS VILLAGE

A guide to the new landmarks and hot spots of south Delhi’s eclectic designer village >Page 18

LEARNING CURVE

CULT FICTION

GOURI DANGE

THE HOLIDAY GROUND RULES

atching your children defying every rule and spinning out of control, even if they’re having fun, is not easy. This level of excitement in children is rather high-frequency, and can be a bit too much for everyone around. What can you (and other parents) do for such holidays with the extended family/friends? You could prepare your children by telling them a little about what to look forward to, and also tell them that many usual rules... >Page 4

R. SUKUMAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE ANTICHRIST NEW YORKER

PHOTO ESSAY

GETTING AROUND

HOME PAGE L3

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

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE LOVES | HALF PRICE

Affordable bibliophilia

LOUNGE REVIEW | FOODHALL, MUMBAI PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Delhi’s first store that offers new books at concessional rates now opens in Pune

(EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

ome of Delhi’s best independently owned book stores (Fact & Fiction, the Bookshop, New Book Depot) don’t encourage discounts. Concessions kill the small players. The 31-year-old Bookworm, a landmark store in Connaught Place, shut down in 2008; its owner complained that book-store chains were doling out great discounts that he could never afford to give. Like compulsive shoe shoppers, most book-buying consumers need instant gratification. The newly opened Half Price bookstore in Select Citywalk mall, Saket, is unabashedly on the side of shoppers. Another Half Price opened this week in Pune. Run by Roli Books, a Delhi-based publisher, the store in the Capital has 4,000 titles on a range of subjects—fiction, cookbooks, photography, history, design, art, architecture, management, and so on. Fancy stationery is also available. Though knick-knacks, such as designer pencils, each for `100, are selling for `50, not everything is 50% of the original price. Some books can be bought for less than that, such as the hard-bound copy of David Priestland’s The Red Flag. The list price is `2,600, the label charge is `895. The section on photography is a little less exhilarating, only half as impressive as the collection at CMYK, Roli’s showroom in Mehar Chand Market that specializes in coffee-table volumes. There is no Cartier-

ood shoppers often confuse quality with price and imported food. Expensive foreign food is not necessarily better or healthier. The Future Group enters the food retail market with its first premium food store at a time when foreign food is equated with a desirable lifestyle. Foodhall is neither a supermarket nor a boutique. In sheer size (15,000 sq. ft) and variety—coupled with the fact that it is a food-only store—it is one of its kind in Mumbai.

The good

It’s a steal: The book store at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, Delhi. Bresson, no Robert Capa, no Steve McCurry, but we did spot an old Raghu Rai. The consolation is in the discount. The original price of Raghu Rai’s India is `3,000, but here it can be bought for `1,495. Roli’s own photo books start at `75 (we fell in love with the one on Satyajit Ray, Bijoya Ray Remembers Satyajit Ray at Work). Anybody wanting to build a personal coffee-table library, or just developing an interest in photography, should definitely walk in. For fiction readers—those who are into Anita Shreve perhaps, and not Alice Munro—this book store could be addictive. At `100 each, they can pick paperbacks of authors such as Stephanie Bond, Jim Grace and Hal Duncan. At `225, they can get bestselling authors such as Jeffrey Archer, Ken Follett and Mario Puzo. Most pulp fiction titles are in the range of `400-500.

In a shelf reserved for South Asian literary fiction, we spotted only a few familiar names, such as Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Vikram Chandra. Since the store assistant claims the stock will be replenished every fortnight, there will hopefully be more interesting choices by the time you read this. The shop’s most exciting section is on cookbooks: dozens of recipe volumes, autobiographies and exquisitely designed food books. The steal is food editor Judith Jones’ excellent memoirs The Tenth Muse. Priced at `1,125, it’s selling for `375. Half Price, basement, Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; and Goldfields Enclave, Row House No. 4, South Main Road, Koregaon Park, Pune. Mayank Austen Soofi

There are options for every kind of shopper—from Arabic dry fruits to African sauces. There are some organic brands, including Morarka Organic Foods, which has rice, oils and ghee (half a kilo of organic ghee costs `530). There’s a sampling of some of the best: Kalamata olives (`315 for 200g); Tipiak couscous (`290 for 250g packets); Japanese wholewheat Soba noodles (`175 for 250g); Guylian Belgian chocolates (`1,950 for 360g); French Confi-

ture jams (`380 for a bottle of 125ml); organic coffee from Papua New Guinea (roasted and grounded, `675 for 275g). In breads, the best are Moshe’s flavoured focaccias (`40-70).

The notsogood The staff isn’t knowledgable. I was taken on a tour by a manager, after which I decided to navigate the store myself. Most salespersons could not answer simple questions. Foodhall is meant for those who know their brands. The non-vegetarian section is limited, with only chicken and turkey. Ready-to-go meals and sandwiches aren’t of gourmet quality.

Talk plastic It’s a wide range, starting from around `40. Prices of Indian foods are on a par with the supermarket prices. At Palladium, Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai. Sanjukta Sharma RAJENDRA GAWANKAR/MINT

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRADEEP GAUR/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Skyscrapers and sweatshops”, 28 May, the photograph should have been credited to Abhijit Bhatlekar.

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT JORDI CAMI/GETTY IMAGES

Beirut’s charming contrasts

am watching a Lebanese bride posing for a bevy of

photographers at the poolside setting of my hotel in Beirut. She is so lovely—and the photographers so many—that for a moment I think she is a local celebrity. Her fashionable white wedding gown is

daringly cut—what Kate Middleton walked down the aisle in is nun-like by comparison—this one is so off-off-shoulder that the bodice seems to be held up solely by magic. Her tiny waist is scrunched up with a decorative belt. She throws back her head, veil billowing in the gentle evening breeze, and smiles confidently at the cameras. I congratulate the groom who is watching spellbound, and tell him how gorgeous his bride looks. “And she is all mine,” he says with awe. When is the wedding? Two days ago! At his home. As per Muslim custom. And tonight? The big reception at the hotel for family and friends. Beirut has many such “Go figure” moments for me. What is a Muslim bride doing in a Christian wedding gown? Why is she happily displaying a creamy expanse of shoulder and bosom? In the meantime, I cover up head to toe in a “borrowed” black abaya (with a lingering fragrance of Chanel No. 5 from past wearers) as I visit the Mohammad Al-Amin mosque (blue-domed, Hagia Sophia-like, built by Rafik Hariri, a newly created icon of the city). Beirut is ridden with such contradictions at every turn, and that’s what adds to its fascination, making it top The New York Times’ list of must-visit places a couple of years ago. A history of violence doesn’t seem to hinder it from being a party town like no other—one gets the sense instead that living dangerously makes it

celebrate life to the hilt. It has a dazzling array of nightclubs and bars to keep you up till sunrise: Skybar, Centrale, B-O18, Crystal, to name a few, many frequenting the Top 100 List of the World’s Best Bars. The per capita income is only $7,000 (around `3.15 lakh), but the streets are full of luxury cars, fine restaurants are chock-a-block (book the restaurants before you book your flights, seriously), Chanel and Vuitton bags are everywhere, and the city wears the air of a sophisticated fashion-and-design capital. The women are gorgeous (I hear murmurs of rampant going-under-the-knife) and, high heels notwithstanding, appear taller than the men. Is it an illusion? Go figure. The physicality of the city is also marked by breathtaking contrasts. I see scores of bullet-ridden buildings—remnants of the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990—nestling cozily next to swank new edifices. There are umpteen mosques adjacent to umpteen churches, and sometimes a mosque that was a church that was a mosque (like the Al-Omari mosque) and without fail they are all as stunningly lovely as the bride. There are painstakingly restored buildings, many in mustard sandstone, with cafés spilling out on cobbled streets, and you think you might be in France or Spain or Italy. Ruins from a Roman bath—extremely tech-savvy, those guys two millennia ago devised ingenious heating systems—just sit there placidly,

their innards laid bare, while you stroll alongside. The old, the new, the destroyed, the reincarnated, all co-mingle in a strange cycle of birth and rebirth. Even the Hindu notion of reincarnation finds a hold here—the Druze, although Muslim by faith, believe that everyone is born again. Being born over and over again is one thing Beirut—indeed Lebanon—specializes in. It is like a history book with the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Armenians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and French throwing their weight around this tiny nation. The result is constant churn and reinvention. Beirut, founded in 3000 BC, has been rebuilt several times over. At Byblos, a World Heritage site an hour’s drive from Beirut—and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world—I am amazed to see beautiful Roman columns from the first century, cut and recycled by the Crusaders in the 12th century to build a fort. The French, although here briefly from 1920 to 1941, have left their mark—French is spoken everywhere, alongside Arabic and English, and sometimes all three in the same sentence. This plethora of influences has left a complex and highly fragmented religious trail. There are not just Muslims and Christians as I had thought, but 18 distinct sects within those—the aforementioned Druze are one of them—each with their own set of laws, beliefs and political affiliations. Recurring friction is inevitable—I innocently asked a woman how the civil war affected her life, back came the answer that she was shot in the leg as a child on her way to school! Sharing the border with Israel has its own consequences—there are half a million Palestinian refugees who have been living here for decades, and that’s a lot given that the total population of Lebanon is just four million. In the

Uptown girls: A Lebanese bride and her friends cruise in a luxury car in Beirut. meantime, the Lebanese have been migrating out into the world—now there are four times more abroad than at home. People of Lebanese origin have been making their mark in varied fields: poet-philosopher Khalil Gibran, richest-man-in-the-world Carlos Slim, businessman Carlos Ghosn, singer Shakira, actor Salma Hayek, designer Elie Saab (exquisitely cut clothes, his Beirut store is a must for fashion lovers), the honour roll is long and varied. The one thing that unites the country is a great love for food. It is simple food celebrating the ingredients of the Mediterranean—what makes it so special is the freshness, every dish bursting with flavour. We breakfast at the Farmers Market held every Saturday in downtown Beirut and I fall in love with manakeesh—a cross between a roti (it is made on a large ulta tawa) and a pizza, topped with a scrumptious mixture of olive oil, wild thyme, roasted sesame seeds and sumac (a new spice for me, it looks like chilli powder, but has a sour taste). We have a memorable meal at the seaside restaurant Mhanna Sur Mer—where we run into the Lebanese author Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame—the chef is renowned for his

superb mezze. Our host must have ordered the entire mezze menu—or so it seems to me from the overloaded table—and we dig into Lebanese classics such as tabbouleh (parsley salad), moutabal (like a baingan bharta dip), hummus (chickpea dip), fattoush (mixed salad), warak (wine leaves stuffed with rice), fatayer (like spinach samosa), batata harra (that’s right, potatoes spiced up), different kinds of goat cheeses, and many more dishes that I didn’t catch the names of. And that’s just for starters! If you are looking for a short sumptuous holiday, Beirut should definitely be on your menu. Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury. Write to Radha at luxurycult@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Radha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/radhachadha

PIXLAND

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

ESTABLISH SOME GROUND RULES FOR HOLIDAY BEHAVIOUR My children, aged 6 and 9, are usually well behaved in public. However, we have just returned from a family reunion holiday and both my husband and I were appalled at how they behaved. They, along with a few other children, ignored most of the ground rules about bedtime, meals, cold drinks, politeness, among other things. Sometimes they laughed so much that the younger one would throw up his food. They became enthralled by one of their cousins, who was the “ringleader”, and we could do really nothing about it. My children, so far, have a reputation of being good to be around, but I think people began to shun them this time and there were many comments particularly about them. There will be a similar gathering later this year for a wedding, and I would like to know how to keep them under some control there. One consolation for you in the scenario that you paint here is that your children seem to have had the time of their lives and will remember this holiday with great pleasure for long. Your chagrin, however, is understandable. Watching your children defying every rule and spinning out of control, even if they’re having fun, is not easy.

This level of excitement in children is rather high-frequency, and can be a bit too much for everyone around. What can you (and other parents) do for such holidays with the extended family/friends? You could prepare your children by telling them a little about what to look forward to, and also tell them that many usual rules will be relaxed during the vacation, for them as well as for you, and that is part of the fun of a vacation. Mention a few things you will not insist on—say, bedtime, or meals at a certain time. Include in this conversation a few things you adults too will indulge in or allow yourself. Acknowledge that they are excited and want to have fun, just like you do. But do mention that to enjoy the holiday and make it enjoyable for everyone, broadly they do need to listen to you on certain things. Perhaps you can come up with a preplanned signal between you and them, when you think things are getting out of hand. Children don’t like being pulled up or chastised in public, and particularly not when they are so excited, so see if you can tell them that you too don’t like to shout at them in front of people, but would need to agree on some way you can signal they need to stop doing what they’re doing.

Also come up with areas of behaviour that are non-negotiable, and tell them you will publicly stop them if they ignore the signal. What are these areas? a) Doing something that endangers themselves or others; b) irritating other guests at the place that you’re staying—this is a big one, and something you must establish early in a child’s public behaviour; c) destroying or spoiling public property, including tearing plants or stomping on them, among other things; d) chucking food here and there (a bowl of peanuts is tempting to use as pellets). Understandably, you feel judged by some of the other adults for the way your children behaved. I would urge you not to be overly caught up in this, and convey to your children that you need them to be a little less boisterous at times on vacation, not for the impression they make on people, but because it is just more enjoyable for everyone when children are having fun but not being pests. As for the “ringleader” kind of child around, you can’t really paint that child as “bad”, but perhaps tell your children not to slavishly follow him or her. However, do keep in mind that the ringleader is a fascinating figure, and your children are going to go a bit

Remote control: Children don’t like being chastised in public. ga-ga over him during a vacation. If the ringleader’s parents aren’t going to get all prickly about it, perhaps you could tell him at the beginning that your children really look up to him and love him, so he needs to lead them into fun, not outright crazy behaviour. My 15-year-old son refused to come on vacation with us this year. From the time we started planning it, he told us he didn’t want to come. We had to let him stay with his grandparents. He spent his days playing football with friends and was on the computer. My mother gave him chores and errands, which he did and seemed to enjoy. Last year too he was reluctant to go with us and wanted to stay in the hotel room and watch TV, though we had gone to Turkey, a country he is studying in history classes. I don’t want to make a habit of him dropping out of family

holidays—what should we do? His father and I both felt quite hurt that he didn’t want to come with us, but we didn’t say this to him. Adolescent behaviour and choices can be bewildering and hurtful to parents on several counts. One, the child no longer enjoys your company and sees you as a unit, to enjoy holidays together. Two, he cuts himself off from experience, whether of another country or of other people. A family vacation without the child is something you hadn’t thought would happen, but it’s here, and it would be best to accept it with grace, as you seem to have done. However, it is important that you feel less hurt and shut out. Part of his refusal to come on vacation with you is genuine adolescent preoccupation with the self, and part of it is also to see how you respond. Adolescents “want to be

accounted for” but in a convoluted way—the 10-year-old that was wildly happy to go on holiday with you is now replaced by this guarded young boy who is a “problem” when you want to go on vacation. Continue to communicate that you would have liked him to come along, not because he “should have”, but because you enjoy his company. This continues the emotional connect, at least from your side. Being too nonchalant and shrugging him off with a “have-it-your-way” is not a good idea either. Acknowledge that you understand that he doesn’t want to come along, and make other arrangements for him in a non-hurt, matter-of-fact way. When you do go away, stay in touch with him in a non-worried way, communicating that you miss him, but steering clear of “why couldn’t you have come with us” conversations. When you plan your next vacation, ask him if he wants to come with you, and if he says no, plan something which just the two of you adults would enjoy doing. The other option is to try and find another mopey adolescent friend of his and see if he will come along too. Perhaps your son will appreciate the company, and consider coming. The third option, if he is willing, is to send him on a holiday designed for a group his age, which is something quite a few tour companies do within the country or outside it. Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting. Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE TREND

nutritional value of the breads.

The new toast of the town

Straddling class and mass

Historically looked upon as the cake’s poor cousin, the good ol’ bread has its moment PHOTOGRAPHS

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

···························· raditionally, the Indian kitchen has thought of bread as the lump of carb that goes with the eggs; that slice of something you smear the butter on. For years, it’s been the quintessential supporting actor, watching from the sideboards as “main dishes” take centre stage. But slowly, bread is assuming an identity of its own. No longer sliced ol’ commoner, bread is the new toast of the town. It is the ambassador of a Belgian deli in Mumbai; and the latest status symbol to hit Delhi’s Khan Market. In Chennai and Bangalore, a patisserie chain, hitherto known for its grand cakes, has decided to enter people’s homes on a daily basis with breads. From foreign delis to local grocers, five-star hotels to fancy patisseries, they’re all competing for the best basket of bread, be it soft or lean, baguette or croissant, dalia or multigrain. Historically, India’s bread-eating practices have evolved from its colonizers: the toast from the English, and the pao from the Portuguese. “The toast was what the English came up with to use up the previous day’s bread: You toasted

DIVYA BABU/MINT

the stale bread the next day. That’s become a habit for us to the extent that we even toast fresh bread,” says restaurateur Ritu Dalmia. But the well-travelled Indian of recent years, having developed a taste for European-style country bread, is becoming increasingly discerning—and demanding—about his daily bread.

The high and mighty At the just opened Oberoi Gurgaon’s 361, the pride of place in the 10,000 sq. ft-restaurant is occupied by a massive wood-fired oven that runs 24 hours a day. It turns out croissants, ciabatta and lean bread every 45 minutes that taste quite unlike the microwaveheated fare that “fancy” bakeries have delivered hitherto. The Hyatt in Delhi has hired a German chef to produce perfect lean breads. La Baguette, at The Imperial, New Delhi, has innovated with mango bread, seven-cereal bread, rye bread and Kraft corn bread. “We’re looking at bread as a main course item, and put a lot of work into different combinations of grains, herbs,” says The Oberoi Gurgaon’s executive chef Ravitej Nath. Some of the breads at 361 include Yogurt and Multigrain, Brown Rice and Chives, Potato

Bread basket: Brioches, baguettes and other French breads at L’Opera in Khan Market, New Delhi. and Rosemary. Its fine-dining restaurant Amaranta innovates with Indian coastal food, using bread instead of rice or roti. They reinvent the flavours of the chaat in a tamarind and mint bread, and the southern flavours with the Curry Leaf and Mustard Seed Ciabatta. There’s also a Basil Naan and Chettinad Multigrain bread. Foreign-owned patisseries L’Opera in Delhi and Le Pain Quotidien in Mumbai, in a departure from the common patisserie culture of celebrating their cakes, are bread loyalists. L’Opera in Khan Market started on the premise of wanting the perfect French bread in the city. “We started trials in the French embassy, and later at the DLF golf course in September. Our clientele is high-end and demand-

ing. We even brought in a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, a bread expert of the highest calibre, to test our bread,” says Kazem Samandari, whose son Laurent has set up the business. Meanwhile, Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien in Colaba, Mumbai, has an entire section on its website devoted to breads and what makes them special (there’s no equivalent page for cake). “Most commercial breads are factory produced using additives, preservatives and improvers (such as extra gluten or yeast) to shorten the production cycle, alter their taste and texture,” says Alain Coumont, founder, Le Pain Quotidien. “We use a traditional labourand time-intensive process to make our breads and we use only basic and natural ingredients such

as organic wholewheat flour, water, salt and natural levain (mother dough).” Cakes, in these chains, are slightly incidental. Chennai-based food chain Oriental Cuisine, which ran Hot Breads in Delhi’s Greater Kailash-1 through the 1990s, previously focused on cakes (and puffs) but is now concentrating on bread. Its chain, French Loaf is present in Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata, and plans to enter Delhi, Mumbai and Pune soon. Realizing that the health-conscious customer wants more than just brown bread, it offers low glycaemic-index bread, high-fibre breads with fibres from flaxseeds, linseed, soya, etc., and has on board food technologists to break down the

Although this latest avatar of bread is an elitist privilege, there are efforts to make it available outside the scope of the five-stars or foreign-owned outlets. A host of manufacturers now produce bagels, pita, focaccia, olive, tomato and garlic bread for retail stores. But herein lies an interesting contradiction: Although the idea is to make it available to the masses, it still needs to maintain a degree of exclusivity, which is why the regular kirana (grocery store) won’t stock these breads. Bread chain Golden Crust, for instance, stocks its products mainly in “high-end” stores in the tonier Khan Market, Defence Colony and Greater Kailash areas of New Delhi, says Lalit Puri, who heads marketing and distribution, Golden Crust. The Golden Crust produces tortilla (corn and flour), pita (white and brown) and khabz (Lebanese bread). Such has been the rise of bread that a school of professionals now wants to “demystify” bread. Baker and pastry chef Claire Dutta, whose ramdana (amaranth) bread was the talk of many a Khushwant Singh column, will open a bread-making school in Delhi later this year. Trained professionals and specialists will hold classes and live demonstrations. “Natural yeast, what every baker in Old Delhi uses (they haven’t washed their pot of yeast since they inherited it from their father), is packaged fancily and called sourdough; other breads have exotic names,” she says. “Artisan bread shouldn’t cost as much as it does. You can use cereals like ramdana or dalia, any cereal that is available in India. Bread needs to be more readily available,” she says. Or perhaps, you can just eat cake.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011

Spotlight

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

STEPHANIE NOLEN

FOR ‘T HE

GLOBE

AND

MAIL’, CANADA

FILM

Freedom at midnight Deepa Mehta has just finished filming Rushdie’s ‘Mid night’s Children’. The only journalist allowed on its sets in Sri Lanka reports

B Y S TEPHANIE N OLEN Courtesy ‘The Globe and Mail’

···························· eepa Mehta steps from the shadows between two slum shacks, into the path of a young man a foot taller and 30 years younger than she is. She plants a swift right hook on his jaw, then a knee in his gut. He slumps forward, and she pulls his limp body on to her slight shoulders, and hefts. “There,” she says, brushing hands briskly against her cargo pants. “Like that.” And then one of Canada’s most celebrated directors releases the body of her star and steps back into the shadows. Now her two young actors know just how she wants them to brawl, and Mehta can resume her customary on-set demeanour, a sort of Zen pixie in braids, poised to roll the camera on a pivotal scene. The fight scene comes a few days before Mehta wraps her film version of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. It’s the largest production ever by the controversial Mehta, of the book that won the even more controversial Rushdie the Booker of Bookers prize. Because of that potent combination, the filming had to be kept ultra secret, hidden away in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in an effort (only partly successful) to keep the funda-

mentalists at bay. “He’s got the Muslims,” says Mehta, wryly assessing the field of people who might want to stop this film. “And I’ve got the Hindus.” The book is set in India and Pakistan—but it would have been a huge risk for Mehta to try to shoot the film in either country. Cinemas in India were burned when her movie Fire was released; production of the last film in her “elements trilogy”, Water, was delayed for four years after she was shut down by Hindu militants. Rushdie, meanwhile, has had few fans in the Muslim world since The Satanic Verses and the furore around the Iranian fatwa. That ruled out shooting in Pakistan. The film-makers soon thought of Sri Lanka, where Mehta had found a refuge to finish Water. In many ways, Colombo made a better Mumbai than the real city does: More of the century-old architecture has survived here. But the long reach of the fundamentalists has found them here too. Two weeks into the 69-day shoot, Mehta’s husband and producer, David Hamilton, received notice from the government saying permission to film had been withdrawn after displeasure was expressed by Iran (Sri Lanka’s government, increasingly isolated from the West, has been cultivating the friendship of China and Iran).

Double take: (top) Mehta (in red) supervises the rehearsal of a fight scene between the characters of Saleem (Satya Bhabha, right) and Shiva (Siddarth) on the sets in Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Mehta with Kulbhushan Kharbanda, who plays Picture Singh.

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Displeasure from Tehran was enough to shut the shoot down. Distraught, Mehta and Hamilton appealed to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who decreed they could go ahead. So they changed the working title to Winds of Change (“Very Hallmark,” says Mehta, acidly) and they have kept it secret as much as they can. A huge challenge, when there are 800 extras in the crowd scenes. The Globe and Mail was the only media organization permitted to visit the set. “We really wanted to do this film,” Mehta says. “And the price is silence.”

A Midnight’s conference Midnight’s Children is a vividly cinematic book, but like most of Rushdie’s work, had never been made into a film because of hesitancy over his reputation. BBC tried to make it as a fivepart miniseries in 1997, but the government withdrew permission for that production after Muslim protests. No one has tried to film it since. Three years ago, however, Rushdie was in Toronto on a book tour, and dropped by Hamilton and Mehta’s house for dinner—they have been friends for about seven years. She had been daydreaming about filming his Shalimar the Clown; Rushdie said, “Let’s work together.” But instead of Shalimar, she said, “The only book I’d like to do is Midnight’s Children.” She was aghast as she heard herself speak—she loves the book, but it’s as fantastically complicated as it is adored. “I don’t know why I said it. It came from some place that amazed me. It was like committing hara-kiri.” Just as quickly, she tried to retract. “I said, ‘No, forget I said that.’ ” But Rushdie was already answering: “Done.” Hamilton, she says, was fortunately out of the room at the time, and didn’t learn what Mehta had just committed them to until later. Rushdie was initially resistant to the idea of writing the script but, Mehta says, she insisted, fearing no one else could do it justice; she added her “director’s two cents” along the way. She had huge trepidation every time she made a suggestion or, once, added a whole

scene. “You don’t say to Salman Rushdie, ‘I think you forgot this one scene.’ ” Rushdie, by email, says that turning a 600-page novel, which he wrote more than 30 years ago, into a 130-page screenplay has been “an immense challenge” but a pleasurable one. “It’s a question of preserving the essence—the heart and soul—of the book, but then making a film rather than adhering slavishly to the book. Maybe I could be more disrespectful to the original than anyone else!” Once they had a script, Mehta and Hamilton turned to the challenge of how on earth to film it: The script requires 62 locations—with a staggering scope, from 1917 to 1974, from Karachi to Kashmir to Old Delhi to Bombay (now Mumbai). The logistical challenges have been unending and near-biblical. They needed, for example, seven cobras, which were obliged to rear and hiss in unison, next to an actor who has a pathological terror of snakes. No animal wranglers here; instead, they brought in a snake charmer. Still, two of the animals escaped. “They found one of them,” Hamilton points out in the voice of a determined optimist. The roof of a crucial location collapsed in heavy rains. They littered a meadow with fake corpses for a “killing fields” scene, and stuffed them with fish heads to lure crows, inadvertently also drawing an infestation of nasty monitor lizards. When they arrived in the vast warehouse where they were to shoot, the temperature was more than 43 degrees Celsius and their local production company had supplied three window air conditioners. Their child actors were limp and miserable. Overnight, Hamilton had 30 tonnes of air conditioning installed. He declines to provide a precise total on the film’s budget. Mehta roped her younger brother Dilip, a Delhi filmmaker, into acting as her production designer. A brooding, chain-smoking presence on set, as dour as his sister is prone to cackles of glee, Dilip scrutinized everything from locations to belt buckles for authenticity. While Colombo is more atmospherically South Asian than any of their other production

The ugly truth: Stills from Mehta’s Water, which evoked the ire of the Hindu right when it was being filmed in Varanasi.

options, it’s also not India in many crucial ways—the people have much darker skin than those in the cities of Midnight’s Children; women wear their saris differently. “If it wasn’t for Dilip, I would be dead,” Mehta sighs, pacing between shacks in the slum they built. “Curtains, photographs, wall paintings, props from Delhi, the right kind of fireworks... He’s making it look right.” To add another complicating layer, Mehta brought her core crew from Canada—20 people, including assistant director Reid Dunlop, most of them a close-knit band who have worked on many of her films, but they do not share the Mehtas’ intimate knowledge of India. Filming a scene where police rampage in the slum, Mehta watches a take and then says she wants one fleeing man to jump down from the roof. Dunlop frowns: “What would he be doing on the roof in the middle of the night?” he protests. Dilip, slumped in a plastic chair by the camera, does not look up, but interjects. “Because he’s sleeping on the roof on a summer night,” he snaps. Dunlop pauses, then speaks into his radio: “Let’s get a guy on the roof.” Dilip also oversaw the construction of the slum on a dirt playing field abutting a real slum. The crew shot there for weeks, then they bulldozed it, and burned it to the ground. For Mehta, this was particularly nerve-racking, since there could be no second takes. The last of the flames went

Red letter: Rushdie; and (left) his controversial novel. out just before dawn a few days ago, and Mehta was suddenly filled with doubt. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be crappy. What have I done? The most beloved book of all time...I’m an idiot. Salman is going to hate it.’” She texted him to say all this. Rushdie immediately texted back: “Every time I finish a book, I think it’s crap. And sometimes it isn’t.”

India, with irony Mehta’s cast includes some big names in Bollywood, but for the main character of Saleem Sinai she chose a near-unknown, Satya Bhabha, a half-Indian, half-German-Jewish actor who grew up in England and the US and has the mushy, ever-shifting accent to match that pedigree. Mehta had dreamed of a

Bollywood megastar such as Imran Khan playing Saleem, but couldn’t afford that. She heard about Bhabha (who had a brief breakout role in last year’s Scott Pilgrim vs The World), saw footage of him in a play, tried him in front of a camera, and sent him to see Rushdie, who approved. Mehta is motherly and gentle on the set, full of gifts and pats and words of praise for her actors. The theatrics of the extras—slum residents who embrace their new jobs with gusto—make her hop up and down in delight. But she can also be impatient, narrowing her kohl-lined eyes at Dunlop over perpetual delays with the lighting. And she is demanding, barking at Bhabha when he insists on rushing an entrance in a scene that has half the slum burning. “She is intensely emotional, while at the same time cold almost to the point of clinical in terms of getting what she wants,” says Siddarth (he goes by that single name), a heartthrob in the huge Telugu and Tamil industries who plays the role of Shiva, Saleem’s nemesis. Used to swooning scenes where he gets the girl, he relished the chance to play a range of emotions for Mehta. “She makes you want to be a better performer and a better technician.” Rushdie says Mehta was the “perfect” director to finally take this book to film. “It was Deepa’s passion for the book that attracted me, as well, of course, my admiration for her work. She is able to work on both an intimate and an epic scale, she has a great sense of humour as well as of history, (and) she is famously a great director of actors, including child actors.” Mehta wanders her huge set frowning in concentration, dressed in bright print salwar kameezes, or cargo pants and flannel shirts. She wears her hair—a mane of black curls streaked with grey—pulled back in braids and tied with chunky Punjabi ornaments, like a girl’s. Hamilton is usually nearby, slouching in jeans and golf shirts, as unprepossessing as Mehta is striking. At 61, she looks barely past 40; the girlishness contrasts with her air of authority. Her chin is almost always tilted up, her gaze is a challenge. Yet she also has an

almost tangible shyness, as if braced at all times for disaster, or at least mild unpleasantness. Mehta originally wanted Rushdie to have a cameo role in the film, but he deemed that gimmicky. They both hoped he would spend much of the shoot on the set, but after the Iranian threats, they scrapped that idea too. He came to Mumbai to help with casting, and from Sri Lanka, Mehta sent him pictures every day, and he talked with the actors over Skype. “Now I hope he likes it,” she frets, scuffing her feet through another lighting delay. The two have a similar sense of irony that unites them in their telling stories of India, the land they left so long ago and can’t stop talking about. And irony, Mehta notes, is in short supply in India these days, as the country crows about its growth and successes even as the poverty that stifles half its billion citizens remains unchanged. The film is presold in a halfdozen countries including Canada, Britain, France and Japan; it has significant Canadian investment, including over $4 million (around `18.49 crore) from the Canada Feature Film Fund (Mehta says with a shrug that people are willing to invest in a project by her and Rushdie, although it seems risky, because the controversy will help market the film). But their Midnight’s Children is still without a deal for distribution in India. Clearly this troubles Mehta, and Rushdie too, she says. “It is a pity, because I’d like to hear what people say about it in India.” Midnight’s Children will be released in the second half of 2012. Mehta planned to sleep the entire week we met, then plunge into editing. Talking about seeing it all knit together as a film, she drums her broad hands on the table in front of her, sending the red and gold bangles that line her wrists jangling. Rushdie, for his part, articulates but one hope for the film: “That it’s good.” ©2011/THE GLOBE AND MAIL INC.

This article first appeared in The Globe and Mail, Canada, on 14 May. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Goodearth,

Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi Divya Kapoor, stylist at Goodearth, gives us a few tips on how to use bone china: u While picking the plates, go with the mood of the space. For instance, in a room with colonial furniture and bright furnishings, try Goodearth’s Mughalinspired Baradari collection. u If your wall is painted in solid colour, your plates can have lots of motifs. But if it has a wallpaper with intricate design, keep the plates simple. u Use different sizes of plates. It will make a better visual. u When hanging plates, use springloaded hooks that grip the entire circumference of the plate. u The height at which you start your collage is important. You don’t want people brushing against your mini collection and breaking it. Porcelain is fragile. Handle with care. u Different spaces in a home can support a porcelain collage—a large wall in a kitchen with lots of natural light or an area in the verandah that doubles up as a bar with mood lighting.

DIY

Wonder wall Have an empty wall crying for attention? Three decor stores show us how you can create a gallery in your home B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

·································· ressing up a wall often leaves most of us stumped. While art and photographs are common features, there are many other things you could use—framed movie posters, stamps, tribal masks, clocks, lamps and bone china. For collectors especially, a wall can be a showcase. Pick one object you like, find its variations to display on that oh-so-boring wall and make it the focal point of your house. A friend’s father, a sailor, has decorated a wall with anchors, a steering wheel and other ship-related objects. We asked three stores that specialize in interiors and design-related objects to style a wall each.

Prices for quarter plates range from `700-1,250; dinner plates and platters go up to `4,500.

DIVYA BABU/MINT

apartment9, Greater Kailash1, New Delhi Vaishali Kaul, CEO, apartment9, has a few suggestions for those who want a mirror wall: u With mirrors, you must be careful with the lighting. They are reflective surfaces and light should fall in such a way that it brings out the best in them. u Oversized furniture and large spaces call for large

pieces of wall art. Strike a balance. Putting multiple mirrors could lend the visual weight that is required. u The main feature wall in your home is a good place to put up these mirrors. u A metallic mirror could go well on a dark teal or burgundy wall and create a contrast. In case of a nude sand wall, mirrors would blend in with the background. They are versatile pieces. Prices range from `1,000-23,000. JAVEED SHAH/MINT

Play Clan, Meher Chand Market, Lodhi Colony, New Delhi This brand created a madetoorder Osho installation. The handpainted pieces are made by compacting thermocol. The idea was to create a sense of depth. Himanshu Dogra, founder of Play Clan, tells us more: u A large art installation needs breathing space around it. Devote a full wall for impact. u Use a complementing colour story as the base

colour of the wall. It works like a large canvas. The Osho installation is done in muted colours so the pale green wall goes well with it. u Directional lights enhance the drama and bring out dimension. It should take away the flatness from it. u Accentuate the installation with things such as sheesham wood furniture and a tabla. Try to mix and match, it will make the whole space a part of the feature. Prices of Osho installations start at `1 lakh.

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q Tom Ford: 18carat white gold skull cufflinks studded with diamonds, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `5.50 lakh.

PRADEEP GAUR, PRIYANKA PARASHAR

AND

DIVYA BABU/MINT

p Signature Armani cufflinks: At Emporio Armani, Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `11,995.

PICKS

Linked in

p Robert Tateossian: Limitededition stainlesssteel cufflinks featuring a fully functional compass, at The Collective, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai; and Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `10,000.

Cufflinks don’t have to go only with formal wear if you know how to give them a creative twist B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY

p Paul Smith: Playingcard cufflinks, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `5,900.

K OMAL S HARMA

seema.c@livemint.com

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p Tom Ford: 18carat yellow gold intertwined snake cufflinks, at DLF Emporio mall, Vas ant Kunj, New Delhi, `1.50 lakh.

t Paul Smith: Bicycle cufflinks, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `5,900.

u Canali: Aquarimmed cufflinks, at DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai, `13,600.

p Robert Tateossian: Rhodiumplated owl cufflinks, at Robert Tateossian, The Collective, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai; and Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `6,000. p Robert Tateossian: Sterling silver and goldplated cufflinks with rotating globe, at The Collective, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Palladium mall, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai; and Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `14,000.

u Ermenegildo Zegna: Cufflinks, at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, Apollo Bunder, Mumbai; Taj Krishna, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad; DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `10,400.

u Dunhill: Nautical wheel cufflinks, at UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and DLF Empo rio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `14,999.

Q&A | ROBERT TATEOSSIAN

Off the cuff The expert view on cufflinks, and why they’re not just for conservative dressers B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· e is often referred to as the “king of cufflinks”, and his brand, Robert Tateossian, launches close to 300 designs every year. But Robert Tateossian didn’t start out as an accessory or men’s jewellery designer. After seven years of working with Merrill Lynch, he left in 1990 to start his own jewellery and cufflinks business. Apart from his personal label Robert Tateossian, his firm also works on private collections for Zegna, Canali and Corneliani. Tateossian tells us why you can wear cufflinks with floral shirts and gives tips on how to choose the right pair for your man. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Don’t cufflinks represent a conservative image? Twenty years ago cufflinks were not really a fashion item. They were viewed as heritage pieces handed over from father to son or grandfather to grandson. Most were 18-carat gold or had gemstones, usually monogrammed with the family name or initials. We started out in 1990s with trying to change the perception about cufflinks. When men go in to buy a new shirt (or) tie, we want them to also buy a new pair of cufflinks. The men’s jewellery market is changing and we find bracelets, tie-clips, cufflinks and neckpieces are doing well. In fact, we have seen maximum growth in bracelets in the last couple of years while cufflinks are still going strong too. What kind of bracelets do men like? Mostly, a plain or a braided

Button up: Cufflinks are the new ties, says designer Robert Tateossian. leather band with a sterling silver clasp or even talismanic ones with an evil eye stone. Guys like to stack bracelets up, hence they don’t want bulky single pieces. It’s not just fashionable young boys in Europe and America, executives are driving this market. Cufflinks are so formal. Aren’t men dressing more casually nowadays? Yes, they are. I believe that cufflinks are the new ties. You can discard ties and still retain the formal look with cufflinks. In

many boardrooms across the globe, it is too hot to wear ties. Men are letting go of their ties there but not cufflinks because they do finish your look and help you look elegant and polished. Should you wear cufflinks only with cuffs in solid colours? No, absolutely not. Apart from us, people who are changing this perception are brands like Richard James, Paul Smith, Etro. You can wear cufflinks with cuffs that have stripes or checks and even floral patterns. You just

have to choose the right pair. With a pinstripe shirt, don’t choose cufflinks that have a stripe or a check pattern. Go for a pair that is in a solid colour. For example, with a floral shirt, opt for silver cufflinks with an animal design. With a solid-coloured shirt and cuffs, opt for a pair of cufflinks that will stand out. So on a dark navy shirt wear the globe cufflinks with a silver lining. Avoid such a pair on a shirt that has an intricate pattern. Depending on how complicated the cufflinks are, choose the shirt. What kind of cufflinks do you think will sell in India? Are our guys likely to be more adventurous or conservative? In India you have a lot of raw material and many talented jewellers. For anything to be successful in this market you have to be totally different; you have to offer something exciting with a twist. So here I don’t think cufflinks with gemstones will work, but the animal designs, or compass or the watch designs may work better. What should you keep in mind while buying a pair? Buy something you are comfortable wearing. Match it to the occasion. No point in buying

Swarvoski studs if you are not a guy who likes bling. Do buy a pair of blue cufflinks—they match with navy, grey and blue suits. Mother of pearl and onyx cufflinks work well for those who are super conservative dressers. These pairs are also good to wear with tuxedos. If you have to wear a pair for your wedding, then go for a rare stone piece or glitzy one. I would do that. No point wearing plain onyx studs on your wedding day. If you are a girlfriend or a wife buying cufflinks, ask yourself if he will like this pair, where will he wear it, what is his favourite colour and when in doubt just buy a mother of pearl or sterling silver pair. Which new cufflinks design are you currently excited by? I love movement in cufflinks. We have these glass cubes with enamel on the side, with different substances in them like gold leaves, silver leaves, diamond dust. When you move your wrist, these elements will move too and it can be seen. Robert Tateossian cufflinks are available at Collective stores across India and are priced at `7,000-19,000.

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GROUND REPORT

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Cell cricket As the IPL buzz dies down, India’s favourite sport crosses the barrier to provide hope and solace inside Tihar Prisons B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

································· unil Kumar Lakra is preparing to face a new fast bowler. He takes careful guard in his white flannels, a baseball cap firmly stuck on his head to block the sun. He takes a hefty swing, putting his sizeable bulk behind the shot and connects with a crack that sounds like a gunshot. The scattered guards around the small cricket field look towards the pitch and then look away again in disinterest. The ball loops over the 40-yard boundary and travels another 15 yards over the treelined path surrounding the field before sailing over a 20ft-high wall. A ripple of applause runs around the ground, with some whistled encouragement and a few wisecracks. If it wasn’t for that wall, it would be hard to imagine this was a prison. To reach this unusual cricket field in New Delhi, outsiders need to enter through high steel gates into a brightly lit holding area teeming with policemen. Wallets and cellphones are deposited outside the gate. Inside the holding area, everyone, including Delhi Police personnel, are thoroughly frisked— twice—and shoes are passed through a scanner. Then another set of metal gates swing open, leading to the gardens and paths of Central Jail No. 1, one of the nine prison compounds inside Tihar Prisons—the largest incarceration facility in India, and one of the largest in the world. Barely 50m from the gate, the cricket field buzzes with action from 11

S Bat behind bars: Shishir Mishra is serving a life sentence for kidnapping.

every morning till 5 in the evening. On one side of the field run a series of walled compounds with cells. Lakra, 25, is an undertrial charged with murder and has been in Tihar since December 2009. Before his arrest, he ran a water packaging plant and was busy bringing up his first child, a girl, with his wife. Now, his business has folded and he meets his children (a son was born when he was in prison) and his wife twice a week for half an hour. His first year inside Tihar was one of utter despair. “I was in severe depression,” Lakra says. “Undertrials have no work, so you have the whole day and the whole night to think of your family, obsess about the case and kill yourself from the inside with anger and frustration. I was numb with pain.” In February, while the Indian cricket team was en route to winning the World Cup, Lakra found a way to break this cycle of despondency. The Tihar jail authorities, in collaboration with Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan, an NGO that works on prison reform and post-release rehabilitation, began an ambitious cricket training programme inside the jail. Some 200 inmates went through a rigorous selection procedure that included bowling at the nets, batting, fielding, throwing, catching and running. The original list was pared to 134, and after another week’s training and trials, to 64. Now, after almost three months of practice, Lakra captains the Central Jail No. 1 team, leading his ragtag squad with a quiet, commanding presence. “I spend all my energy and focus on training now,” he says. “Instead of rotting all day in a cramped cell, we come here and play, get tired, go back and eat and sleep. I get to know the other inmates according to their cricket skills and not their crime; it’s easier to make friends.” It’s ironic that cricket is Lakra’s lifeline now—he even dreams of rebuilding his life around it after his release, pushing for a corporate job on a sports quota or even a stint with a club—because he

Men on the field: (clockwise from above) Mahinder Bisht strikes a pose in front of the scoreboard; Nazir Khan takes a catch; Sunil Lakra tosses the ball up; coach Rajinder Pal gets his wards to warm up; and a match in progress at the Central Jail No. 1 ground.

had set his mind on being a cricketer while in school, but got no support from his parents. “They stopped me from playing. I would be beaten if they found me practising even though I was in the school team. They wanted me to focus on my education.”

ment ground into a meditation area and an open school. Khan built the current ground, now covered in grass, with his own hands, along with other inmates.

22 yards of reform The cricketers in Tihar cover every possible crime between them—murder, kidnapping, rape, honour killing, robbery, peddling or smuggling drugs, embezzlement, even terrorism. There’s Manu Sharma, Jessica Lal’s killer; and Santosh Singh, who raped and murdered his fellow law student Priyadarshini Mattoo. But many are also undertrials, and some, even though they have spent more than a decade behind bars, still vociferously proclaim their innocence. On the field though, they are bowlers, batsmen or wicketkeepers, listening attentively to their 74-year-old coach Rajinder Pal’s instructions, padding up in anticipation, shadow-practising under the shade of a tree, running into the field with water bottles when needed, helping each other stretch or warm-up. It’s the power of India’s most popular sport. Every player touches Pal’s feet as a sign of respect before going in to bat. “I was warned, and I still am—‘be careful of these men’—but I don’t care, I treat them like I treat any other student,” says Pal, who has been a coach for over 30 years, and runs an academy in Dehradun. As Delhi and North Zone captain in the 1970s, Pal is credited with turning Kapil Dev from a tearaway pacer into a well-rounded swing bowler. When Pal first met the prisoners, he told them he wasn’t interested in knowing about their crimes. “My concern is only with their present and their future,” Pal says. “What they have done can’t be undone, but what they do next is at least partly in their hands.” The 64 players are now divided into four teams and Pal says he is confident that at least one of these teams will be able to compete in the Delhi and District Cricket Authority (DDCA) leagues and

Crime and rehabilitation

corporate tournaments. There are no other examples in the world of a sports team made up entirely of inmates competing in a professional league, so if Pal’s prediction comes true, it will be a huge leap in the field of prison reform. Shishir Mishra, 34, serving a life term for kidnapping since 2004, says cricket will also help the prisoners reintegrate into society after release. “This way, we stay better connected to what normal life is like,” says Mishra. “Otherwise spending 10, 12, 15 years inside, you lose all touch of living in normal society.” Inside Tihar, it’s a rare privilege to be part of the cricket team. Only 15 out of the approximately 1,200 prisoners in each of the six jails that the programme now covers get to train. Raju Chakraborty, a 24-year-old serving a life term for murder, uses sport to fight the urge to do drugs. “Cricket is my addiction,” he says, “and keeps me away from more dangerous addictions.” Swami Vishalanand, project coordinator for Divya Jyoti at Tihar, points out that cricket is the perfect medium for reform and rehabilitation because of its potential to inculcate a wide range of positive behavioural patterns—dedication, discipline, decision making, concentration,

crisis management, man management and, of course, physical well-being. “Imprisonment is a big shock for anyone,” says Vishalanand, “and all the inmates who come in spiral down a path of negative thought processes. With cricket, we want to break through that and make them focus on learning life skills.” More coaches are being brought in from Pal’s cricket academy in Dehradun and plans are on to teach prisoners umpiring, as well as how to make grass

and concrete pitches. “All these things can help them find a profession,” says Vishalanand. “They can work with sports equipment manufacturers, where knowledge and experience of the sport is essential, or as groundskeepers or pitch builders for other academies.” Tihar introduced sports as one of its many prison reform initiatives in 2004 when the first annual “Tihar Olympics” was held. Prisoners got a month to prepare for the multidisciplinary event

that includes chess, carom, cricket, badminton, volleyball, kabaddi and kho kho. Inmates trained each other and basic equipment was provided by the jail authorities. “This is the first time we have introduced a structured sports training programme that will run year-round under the supervision of accredited coaches,” says Tihar Prisons public relations officer (PRO) Sunil Gupta. The equipment and infrastructure costs come from the prison welfare fund. Nazir Khan, a 40-year-old Pakistani national serving a life term for his involvement in the kidnapping of an American in New Delhi, says that till the cricket training programme was introduced, sports was just paid lip service because “even Tendulkar will not be able to put bat to ball if he played only for one month a year”.

Khan, who has spent 17 years in Tihar, looks like he could fit right into any cricket team in the world. Standing at a shade over 6ft, he is built like an athlete and plays with the straightest of bats, a skill he acquired facing seriously fast bowlers in the streets of Karachi, where he grew up immersed in sports and martial arts. “Before 1994, when Kiran Bedi started changing things, you couldn’t step out of your wards,” Khan says. “If they called your name on the loudspeaker and asked you to come to this ground here, which was just a dirt patch, you would be trembling and stuttering in fear. Prisoners assembled here for punishments.” Bedi, who was originally responsible for making Tihar the first prison facility in India based on reform instead of punishment when she was appointed inspector general of prisons, turned the punish-

Tihar’s reform-based system of incarceration includes meditation and spiritual classes, yoga, vocational training in carpentry, electrical repair, baking, a papermaking unit, a unit making herbal colours and recycled bags, and a job-placement programme introduced in 2010 that found post-release work for all 43 prisoners who posted their CVs. “We measure the success of our rehabilitation programmes by looking at the number of repeaters,” says Gupta. “It used to be as high as 30% around six years back. It has been steadily dropping since then and now stands at 19%. The jail population is reducing every day as well. We had around 14,000 inmates in 2007, and now we have around 11,500” (the sanctioned capacity for Tihar is 6,250). There is proof too in the effusive environment of the cricket ground and the tireless work inmates put into the training. “We still need to complete our mushakkat (daily labour) before we can come on to the cricket ground,” says Mahinder Bisht, a 31-year-old serving a life term for murder. “I have to produce 1.5 quintals of mustard oil a day, which usually takes about 8 hours. Now, I finish my work in 4 and I’m exhausted, but I make sure I get to training every day. When I come here, the exhaustion melts away. “I’ve got two-three years left in my sentence and I’m holding on to cricket for dear life,” says Bisht. “The time will pass quickly and I’ll be free.” Not likely. Bisht is also under trial for a double homicide in Uttarakhand. Scepticism about the reform method

though remains widespread among the guards and officers in Tihar. Most prisoners say they have a hard time convincing the guards to let them play. “They want us to live like slaves.” The kind of empowerment sports gives you, they point out, undermines the iron control of the warders and the police. “The top officers are supportive of this system,” says Pal, “but still we find it hard to get all 64 prisoners to come for training every day because the authorities stop them.” Sometimes, in quiet moments, the strained veneer of optimism among the inmates starts cracking. A certain melancholy drapes the players towards the end of training. The undertrials are the worst affected and they comprise almost 88% of Tihar’s population. “You can spend six years inside this jail as an undertrial and then get acquitted,” says Khan. “What kind of a system is that? What’s left of your earlier life after so many years in prison for a crime you didn’t even commit?” At the end of the day, the talk inevitably turns to crime and punishment, corruption in the judiciary and police, the plight of the poor in finding justice, and the hopelessness of being behind bars. Most prisoners claim they have been framed, except for a thin young man who is introduced as an honour killer. He smiles widely and says, “There’s a lot of bad press about honour killing isn’t it?” And then in a whisper: “But it’s necessary, right? Otherwise all the girls will turn into whores.” Bisht proudly volunteers that Khan’s name was on the list of prisoners the Kandahar hijackers wanted in exchange for the hostages in 1999, and Khan calmly denies it. Others speak of the murder of a police officer in Meerut which led to the residents of the town distributing sweets in celebration. “You know, I came here when I was 26,” says Mishra, who claims he was framed in the kidnapping case. “My life was just starting, business was going well, I was going to get married, have children…” “Can the poor survive without crime?” he says suddenly, “Can you survive in Delhi with a family earning `3,000-4,000 a month?” Only so much despair, it seems, can be swallowed up by a cricket pitch.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

GROUND REPORT

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Cell cricket As the IPL buzz dies down, India’s favourite sport crosses the barrier to provide hope and solace inside Tihar Prisons B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

S Bat behind bars: Shishir Mishra is serving a life sentence for kidnapping.

ment ground into a meditation area and an open school. Khan built the current ground, now covered in grass, with his own hands, along with other inmates.

Crime and rehabilitation

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Travel

LOUNGE ADRIN SHAMSUDIN/THINKSTOCK

MALACCA

Straits ahead At one of Malaysia’s few Unesco world heritage sites, history appears as readily as an easy smile

Melting pot: (clockwise from left) The ruins of St Paul’s church in Malacca; worshippers offer incense sticks for prayers; and the town’s famous, brightly decorated trishaws. CHARUKESI RAMADURAI

B Y C HARUKESI R AMADURAI ···························· am trying hard not to laugh at my guide. He has been very friendly, chatting in Tamil on the bus to Malacca. He has also organized a vegetarian lunch for me, after he’s recovered from the shock of encountering someone who doesn’t eat meat. The reason I am having trouble is that, talking about the history of Malacca, he keeps mentioning the Chineast and the Portugueast. Finally when he says, “After this, you all get into the bust”, a giggle escapes; I hastily turn it into a cough and end up choking. Malacca (or Melaka as locals call it) is one of Malaysia’s few Unesco world heritage sites. There is a lot of dispute over when the city was founded but my guide authoritatively says it was in the early 15th century. It flourished as a trading port, attracting the attention of invaders. In many ways, Malacca reminds me of Fort Kochi: Portuguese, Dutch, British and Chinese influences are scattered around the city. My first stop is the Dutch Square, where most of the action is. The terracotta red façade of Christ Church (which gives the surrounding area its name—Red Square) looms large over the neighbourhood. Queen Elizabeth II is supposed to have offered prayers here during a visit in

TRIP PLANNER/MALACCA Delhi

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It’s possible to get cheaper seats on the budget carrier AirAsia, but these sell out quickly. Visit the website to hunt for deals though.

MALACCA Jonker Street

Malacca Strait

Kuala Lumpur To Singapore

Kampung Bukit Cina Pulau Besar island

Taman Seng Heng

Stay

You will need a Malaysian visitor’s visa; applying through an approved travel agent is the fastest and simplest option. Malacca is a 2-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur. Current airfare to Kuala Lumpur on full service airlines is:

To Kuala Lumpur

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1972. The narrow street in front of the church is packed with locals and tourists. Obviously, vendors can spot the outsiders at once, and they call out to me to buy their tacky souvenirs, hats, sunglasses, water bottles and camera rolls. It is a mild day (by Malaysian standards), the kind of day when you are tempted to take time off from work to walk in the open park with its rows of cheerful flowers and antique fountain. So I skip the church visit and sit under the Clock Tower by the fountain, enjoying the bustle around me. The main road is lined with the brightly decorated trishaws (with plastic flowers—so some would say garishly) that Malacca is

MALAYSIA SINGAPORE

Eat

Stay overnight to enjoy the town at your leisure. It’s best to play safe and avoid smaller hotels. Book a room at the Holiday Inn (double rooms from $100, or around R4,500) or The Majestic Hotel (from $150). Many tour operators in Kuala Lumpur offer a day trip with a fixed itinerary and lunch thrown in.  Malacca is compact enough to experience by walking around, or hopping on to a ‘trishaw’ if you’re tired. Grab a map from the Tourist Information Centre at Jalan Kota.  If you stay the night, take a boat ride to Pulau Besar, an island 10km off Malacca, and take part in water sports.  Shop for porcelain at Jonker Street. Most shops ship merchandise internationally. There’s also a lively night market on weekends.  Try the spicy Baba Nyonya food available at most local restaurants. Famosa restaurant round the corner from Jonker Street is known for its chicken ball rice.  If you crave familiar food, Geographer Café on the same road is the place for you.  End any meal with Malaccan Cendol, a dessert made with coconut milk, plain noodles and sugar made of local palm sap (it tastes better than it sounds). GRAPHIC

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

famous for. I am not sure of the fares, but in attitude the drivers are comparable with the ones I encounter in my hometown Chennai. I assume they are part of the tourist sights and step closer to take pictures. One rickshaw man grimaces and turns to the other side, one shields his face with his hand, one rides away, one yells at me. What did I do? “If you want to take their picture, you need to pay them,” a local passing by grins at me. Our guide is clucking impatiently by then, so we head to the other famous church, St Paul’s. There is nothing left of the church but the ruins on top of a hillock. It was originally built by the Portuguese in the early 16th century and was known then as Church of Our Lady of the Hill (Nossa Senhora da Annunciada). Under the Dutch, it was renamed St Paul’s and later, when Christ Church was built, converted into a burial space. Its most famous occupant was St Francis Xavier (before his body was moved to Goa). Instead of the Chinese fishing nets that call out to visitors in Kochi, the Eye on Malaysia Ferris wheel winks from a distance, the shimmering straits behind it. People around me are talking in hushed tones, as if inside a functioning church. It has all been peaceful. So far. As I walk down the steps, I stop to watch the artist with his watercolours till he waves me away, frowning in annoyance. Then I am on the main road, to the blaring beats of Dil toh pagal hai. Another group of trishaws. I am not fall-

ing for it this time. But no, these guys are much friendlier and one of them waves to me to come closer. That is how I meet Bob. He poses for me patiently on his seat and asks me a hundred questions. Turns out, Bob is a fan of Bollywood music. He has never seen a Hindi movie but recites the names of popular heroines and one popular hero. From his Visitors Diary, I see that tourists from as far as Australia and Germany have fallen for Bob’s toothy charm and written nice things about him. I do too; I owe my “tourist on trishaw” photo to him. The next destination is Jonker Street, the best place, I am told, to experience Malacca’s mixed heritage. The street has a row of squat buildings that shine with brightly coloured balconies and windows. I walk in and out of the antique shops lining the road, thinking again about Jew Town in Fort Kochi. Kitschy kettles and classy ceramics, old brass lamps and shining new framed paintings—all of them are passed off as antiques. I have read mixed reviews about the Baba Nyonya museum on Heeren Street nearby but decide to pay a visit anyway. The private museum managed by the local Baba Nyonya showcases the lives of the rich, influential Chinese merchants (also known as Straits Chinese or Peranakan) who married local Malay women, creating this community. They speak neither Chinese nor Malay but a unique patois called Baba Malay. My guide speaks English but she is clearly

bored and waiting for us to move on quickly. The exhibits are fascinating; I am especially charmed by the ceramics in unusual colours such as pink and yellow and find it easy to overlook her brusque tone. It is surprising nonetheless since people everywhere else in Malaysia have been easy with their smiles. Even in Malacca, the rudeness of one group of trishaw drivers is set off by Bob’s friendliness. In the latest Bollywood news, I see that actor Shah Rukh Khan is shooting for the sequel of Don in Malacca. I wonder if Bob met him. I wonder if he sang his favourite “Kooch kooch hota hai” to his favourite Khan. Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

Malacca has many destinations children will enjoy: the zoo, butterfly park and the giant ferris wheel Eye on Malaysia. SENIORFRIENDLY RATING

Things in the city are generally accessible to everyone. Some seniors may find it difficult to climb the hill to St Paul’s Church. LGBTFRIENDLY RATING

Homosexual people have been prosecuted in Malaysia under both indecency and religious laws, and it may be difficult to find support.

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EXCERPT

Guns, germs and steel B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

Thrilling high jinks and imperialist arrogance mark Richard Francis Burton’s 1856 voyage to Ethiopia

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· ravellers such as Richard Francis Burton gave the world many dubious gifts—first-hand English accounts of parts of the world hitherto unknown to Europeans, a robust appreciation for the unfamiliar and unknown, and contact with people and cultures who were rarely connected with societies distant from them. Respected, adored and read widely during his lifetime, Burton is today best remembered for high jinks that would not be

out of place in an Alexandre Dumas novel. These include: infiltrating a Mecca pilgrimage in disguise (inter-religious respect? Clearly for weaklings); translating the Arabian Nights and commissioning a translation of the Kama Sutra; his secret marriage to a Catholic Englishwoman, who was to produce a fawning two-volume biography detailing his triumphs after his death; his eventful, but highly successful quest to locate the present Lake Victoria and his quarrel with the far less talented but more powerful John Hanning Speke, his nominal leader in

his African expeditions. First Footsteps in East Africa is one of Burton’s early works, detailing an expedition to the city of Harar, on the edge of the Great Rift Valley in present day Ethiopia. A prophecy that the city would decline were a Christian to enter it clearly did not impress him much; on the other hand, a sanguinary encounter with Somali waranle or warriors, which ended up with him being impaled by a javelin, which flew through his left cheek and exited through his right, did. It was a thrilling expedition, a clear hint of the glory that lay in store for Burton’s difficult but

was based, and the orientalism that marred global discourse through centuries of colonialism, also hints at the more ominous aspect of the Victorian spirit of exploration. In his resolute consciousness of racial and intellectual superiority, it is possiIntrepid traveller: Richard Francis Burton. ble to glean the attitude that characterlegendary career. His anthropo- ized Britain’s “Cape Town to logical curiosity, generously Cairo” boast in the late 19th leavened with the moral arro- century; a boast that would gance on which the self-regard bring unparalleled destruction of the British imperialist project to Africa in the future.

New shores: One of the illustrations in Burton’s book.

First Footsteps in East Africa: Originally published by Tylston and Edwards, digitized by Project Gutenberg, 544 pages.

Richard Francis Burton’s ‘First Footsteps in East Africa’ is now in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg. Selected excerpts: Burton meets the Emir of Harar The Amir, or, as he styles himself, the Sultan Ahmad bin Sultan Abibakr, sat in a dark room with whitewashed walls, to which hung—significant decorations— rusty matchlocks and polished fetters. His appearance was that of a little Indian Rajah, an etiolated youth twenty-four or twenty-five-years-old, plain and thinbearded, with a yellow complexion, wrinkled brows and protruding eyes. His dress was a flowing robe of crimson cloth, edged with snowy fur, and a narrow white turban tightly twisted round a tall conical cap of red velvet, like the old Turkish headgear of our painters. His throne was a common Indian Kursi, or raised cot,

about five feet long, with back and sides supported by a dwarf railing: being an invalid he rested his elbow upon a pillow, under which appeared the hilt of a Cutch sabre. Ranged in double line, perpendicular to the Amir, stood the “court,” his cousins and nearest relations, with right arms bared after fashion of Abyssinia. I entered the room with a loud “Peace be upon ye!” to which H. H. replying graciously, and extending a hand, bony and yellow as a kite’s claw, snapped his thumb and middle finger. Two chamberlains stepping forward, held my forearms, and assisted me to bend low over the fingers, which however I did not kiss, being naturally averse to performing that operation upon any but a

woman’s hand. My two servants then took their turn: in this case, after the back was saluted, the palm was presented for a repetition. These preliminaries concluded, we were led to and seated upon a mat in front of the Amir, who directed towards us a frowning brow and an inquisitive eye. Some inquiries were made about the chief’s health: he shook his head captiously, and inquired our errand. I drew from my pocket my own letter: it was carried by a chamberlain, with hands veiled in his Tobe, to the Amir, who after a brief glance laid it upon the couch, and demanded further explanation. I then represented in Arabic that we had come from Aden, bearing the compliments of our Daulah or governor, and that we had entered Harar to see the light of H. H.’s countenance: this information concluded with a little speech, describing the changes of Political Agents in Arabia, and

alluding to the friendship formerly existing between the English and the deceased chief Abubakr. The Amir smiled graciously.

Burton plays the world’s smallest violin You see, dear L. (James Lumsden, a friend in Bombay), how travelling maketh man banal. It is the natural consequence of being forced to find, in every corner where Fate drops you for a month, a “friend of the soul,” and a “moon-faced beauty.” With Orientals generally, you must be on extreme terms, as in Hibernia, either an angel of light or, that failing, a goblin damned. In East Africa especially, English phlegm, shyness, or pride, will bar every heart and raise every hand against you, whereas what M. Rochet calls “a certain rondeur of manner” is a specific for winning affection. You should walk up to your man, clasp his fist, pat his back, speak some

unintelligible words to him,—if, as is the plan of prudence, you ignore the language,— laugh a loud guffaw, sit by his side, and begin pipes and coffee. He then proceeds to utilise you, to beg in one country for your interest, and in another for your tobacco. You gently but decidedly thrust that subject out of the way, and choose what is most interesting to yourself. As might be expected, he will at times revert to his own concerns; your superior obstinacy will oppose effectual passive resistance to all such efforts; by degrees the episodes diminish in frequency and duration; at last they cease altogether. The man is now your own.

Burton admires Speke’s great escape Lieut. Speke’s captor went to seek his own portion of the spoil, when a Somal came up and asked in Hindostani, what busi-

ness the Frank had in their country, and added that he would kill him if a Christian, but spare the life of a brother Moslem. The wounded man replied that he was going to Zanzibar, that he was still a Nazarene, and therefore that the work had better be done at once:—the savage laughed and passed on. He was succeeded by a second, who, equally compassionate, whirled a sword round his head, twice pretended to strike, but returned to the plunder without doing damage. Presently came another manner of assailant. Lieut. Speke, who had extricated his hands, caught the spear levelled at his breast, but received at the same moment a blow from a club which, paralyzing his arm, caused him to lose his hold. In defending his heart from a succession of thrusts, he received severe wounds on the back of his hand, his right shoulder, and his left thigh. Pausing a little, the wretch crossed to the other side, and suddenly passed his spear clean through the right leg of the wounded man: the latter “smelling death,” then leapt up, and taking advantage of his assailant’s terror, rushed headlong towards the sea. Looking behind, he avoided the javelin hurled at his back, and had the good fortune to run, without further accident, the gauntlet of a score of missiles. When pursuit was discontinued, he sat down faint from loss of blood upon a sandhill. Recovering strength by a few minutes’ rest, he staggered on to the town, where some old women directed him to us. Then, pursuing his way, he fell in with the party sent to seek him, and by their aid reached the craft, having walked and run at least three miles, after receiving eleven wounds, two of which had pierced his thighs. A touching lesson how difficult it is to kill a man in sound health!

FOOT NOTES | KRISH RAGHAV

Destination Bihar Tourism along the state’s Buddhist circuit is changing its image

s a tourist destination, Bihar has plenty going for it. There’s history—the world’s most sacred Buddhist sites cover its northern edge, and a thread of vast empires and local kingdoms runs back thousands of years. There’s also no scarcity of fiercely vibrant local culture, from Madhubani paintings to Bhojpuri cinema. On 21 May, the state government announced that marketing firm Percept Activ had been chosen to “promote” Bihar tourism, and draw attention to the state as a possible “major tourist destination”. As part of the mandate, Percept organized a two-day road show in Thimphu, Bhutan. Sanjay Shukla, the chief operating officer of Percept Activ, spoke to Lounge about unconventional advertising, Bihar’s culture and reviving the

Buddhist circuit. Edited excerpts from the interview: How has tourism in Bihar performed in the last few years? Why the decision to promote it heavily now? The Bihar government noticed a fair bit of growth in tourist figures in the last two years. The number of domestic tourists went up to 15,787,256 in 2010 from 15,784,679 in 2009, which is only a growth of 1%. But the number of foreign tourists went up 16%, from 423,042 in 2009 to 492,913 in 2010. Most of that growth come from places like Gaya, Rajgir, Bodh Gaya and Vaishali—which constitute what’s known as the Buddhist circuit. We have plans to revive that. How will you do this? We’re trying to make it more active. The route exists in this informal manner and pulls in many foreign tourists, but we hope to formalize it. Introduce packages, for instance. During our

Bhutan road show, (chief minister) Nitish Kumar announced his intention to allocate land in Rajgir for guest houses. We hope more tourism infrastructure like that comes up. Most of your mandate is marketing and promotion—are you planning to organize more road shows? In the first phase, we’ll have more road shows across Indian state capitals to increase domestic tourism. We hope to draw attention to parts of Bihar that people don’t know too well. We’ll have exhibits of Madhubani paintings, samples of Bihari and Bhojpuri cuisine and information on the state’s famous melas (fairs). These include the Sonepur fair, which is one of the largest cattle fairs in Asia, and the Sorath Mela in the north of Bihar. In the second phase, we go international. I can’t reveal too much right now since it’s still being planned, but we have a lot of ideas. krish.r@livemint.com

Pilgrimage: The Buddha at Bodh Gaya, part of Bihar’s tourist circuit.

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Books

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MUSH

Dewdrops and dunes Romance novels are the world’s bestselling fiction category. In India, the market picks up B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· ew people predict a happy ending for the publishing industry in the West these days. The combined after-effects of the Internet and the volatile financial situations of the last decade have created a genteel death cult around the inkand-paper industry, forever worrying about “the death of the book”, both the cause and effect of a larger anxiety about the death of publishing. But in the romance novel business, everyone is apparently too busy reading—and writing—to care. A 2009 survey by the Romance Writers of America stated that 74.8 million Americans read at least one romance novel a year. In 2005, almost 22% of all Americans read romance novels; in 2008, almost 25% did. Romance novels are the world’s best-selling category of fiction on a global average; like the proverbial lipstick sales and skirt hemlines, they are, perhaps, another weapon in the arsenal against recession. In 2008, Harlequin Mills & Boon (M&B), which claims to sell more than four books a second throughout the world, set up a local business wing of its company. Mills & Boon India, which would produce and distribute M&B’s already popular books locally, coasted in on a wave of optimism, in a country already insulated from the worst consequences of the financial crisis, with its growing English language publishing industry. “Mills & Boon was a legacy brand in India,” says Clare Somerville, general manager, Mills &Boon. “We had no local activity, so it was still viewed as rather traditional—not of the moment.” To re-establish the brand, among other things, they began to look for local stories. Their Passions contest, run first in 2008 as a competition to locate a new Mills & Boon author in India, culminated in last December’s publication of The Love Asana, advertising professional-turned-novelist Milan Vohra’s debut. Its textbook romance ingredients—the spunky yet innocent woman, the moody but fundamentally decent hero, an elaborate sequence of emotional and sexual missteps, resolved in a happy ending—all took place between a yoga instructor and a fashion house tycoon in Delhi. The protagonists ate aloo chaat and—eventually—called each other “jaan”. The Love Asana sold four times as much as any of Mills & Boon’s international titles in India, doing so well, Somerville says, that the company will now export it to other countries with large Indian communities, such as South Africa. Unlike the course of true love, Mills & Boon India is finding the going smooth. In a typical Indian book store, 30% of all books sold are either children’s books, or romance novels. Romance “comes in just behind

children’s fiction as the largest selling category of English books in India,” says Manish Singh, country head, Mills & Boon India. Some of that optimism informed Sandhya Sridhar and Sunita Suresh’s decision to begin their own publishing house, Pageturn Publishers, in Chennai last year. “We’re both avid readers of romance, and have always dreamt of filling this odd gap in the Indian media,” Sridhar says. They both quit their jobs to set up Pageturn, which now puts out two titles a month under its imprint, Red Romance. The model, like Mills & Boon’s, is to publish slim, wellprinted, affordable books, “category romances” (identified, like magazines, by who publishes them, rather than by who writes them) that can then be recalled within weeks or months of their publication as new titles come out. The stories are all Indian. In Dewdrops at Dawn, Sukanya and Sundar seem to bring out the worst in each other, but must find a way to work together. In Call of the Dunes, journalist Shalini’s tragic past may come in the way of happiness with mysterious Rajasthan royal Suraj. In Eyes on You, inspector Sameer Khan must protect Nethra from a terrorist at all costs. All the books capture a growing intersection between the urban and the urbanizing India; small-town locations—or antecedents—with broader social outlooks, urbane men and women who struggle with traditional mores. “Books in India are still seen as catering to the intellectual,” Sridhar says. “But there is a hitherto untapped market for our romances, in tier II and tier III centres as well as in urban markets.” “There is a large market in our country,” she continues, “for stories about ourselves. As one of our readers reacted, the stories should say—‘this could be happening to me’.” Sridhar acknowledges that the “this could be happening to me” market in average India is already served well by film and television. Publishing in other Indian languages has also long served up romance fiction, whether as magazine writing or in cheap “romance digest” formats. “This is precisely the market Red Romances wishes to appeal to,” Sridhar says. “I feel

English language publishing exists in quite a different market in India so far.” But when Singh and Sridhar talk about an existing market for romance novels in India, they are referring to a market that still largely devours nonIndian fiction, where historical romance is about dukes and earls, and contemporary romance about Mediterranean playboys and Midwestern cowboys. Paranormal romance, including Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling Twilight series, is the industry’s current flavour, but it’s still vampires and werewolves doing all the wooing, not dashing rakshasa-princes. Atypically among large publishing markets, India’s Englishlanguage readership appears to skew male. A 2009 survey by Tehelka magazine suggested that men made up 85% of English fiction readers in India. There is also a globally reinforced bias that assumes women readers will read fiction created for every gender, while men tend to read only malecreated, male-centric books. Perhaps this explains why so much of massmarket fiction today is driven by books in the Chetan Bhagat mould—written by, about and, in a sense, for men. General women’s fiction continues to grow, but with a dividing line between traditional ideas of the “romance novel”, and stand-alone books that might broadly, but not exclusively, be classified as “chick lit”. “‘Chick lit’ is bubblegummy,” says Kapish Mehra, managing director, Rupa Publications. “I think there’s a lot of growing interest in new kinds of romance fiction—questioning assumptions of traditional views of marriage, love.”

Readers are turning to fast reads about young characters—but these do not necessarily encompass the classic romance novel, according to Mehra. “When you talk about targeting an audience of young women, you talk about a large category,” he says. “It does have potential; but you don’t see a lot of high-quality romance, do you?” “The West is a totally different market,” says Milee Ashwarya, commissioning editor, Random House India. “We don’t have, for example, the sort of book club culture that keeps romance going among women readers in the US. It’s a tricky market here.” In 2007, Random House put out three slim volumes of what they called purdah-jharokha romance, love stories with settings in historical Lucknow, Bengal and Rajasthan. The books “did well”, Ashwarya says, but their research also indicated that readers would turn more willingly to contemporary stories. Mills & Boon India is set to bring out three more Indian novels later this year, and with Bollywood tie-ups (last year, actors Imran Khan and John Abraham appeared on Harlequin covers—sadly, not together) and aggressive local marketing, are keen on continuing what Somerville calls their “exponential growth” of the last three years. Pageturn’s Sridhar says that they are planning to double their output in 2012, and introduce innovations such as graphic novels and travelogues to their

THE RIGHT SPOTS A Mills & Boon writer’s cardinal rules Journalist Aastha Atray Banan, who won Mills & Boon’s ‘Passions: Aspiring Author Auditions’ earlier this year, wrote her winning entry 6 hours before the contest dead line. “I asked myself, ‘what is the wildest ‘romantic’ thing I could write about?’ and let go.” Bolly wood offers the template for India’s formula romances, she says, but “the best practice you can have to write Mills & Boon novels is to read Mills & Boon novels.” She’s now working with an edi tor in the UK to spin a 50,000word novel out of her story, which will be published later this year. Has she run up against Mills & Boon’s famous guidelines for writing romance yet? “You know the spots you’re supposed to hit when you’re writing a story like this,” she says. “There has to be a kiss here, a quarrel there. But if you mean things like, ‘It’s Chapter 6, so they should kiss’? No.” Supriya Nair

romance imprint. Manish Singh says Indian readers of romance are, on an average, younger than those in the West. “Our audience here are young, urbane working women,” he explains. “Between the ages of 21 and 30-32, they have time and the income to read. Then, after a five-year gap that corresponds to marriage and motherhood, they return to the habit. As they grow older, what you have is a loyal readership, over 45 years old, who keep coming back.”

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THE DHAMMA MAN | VILAS SARANG

CULT FICTION

Left turn at enlightenment

R. SUKUMAR

THE MESSIAH MEN

CHINA PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them Behold the Man. —Gospel of John

A new retelling of Buddha’s life is often charming, but doesn’t quite manage to go the distance

B Y M ATT D ANIELS ···························· ho was Buddha? A historical figure about whom much is known, thanks to the writings of his devotees. An object of reverence. An abjuring prince. A man. The last of these may be the most difficult to prove. For if Buddha’s following has survived the millennia, it is only because he was perfect—not, in other words, a man at all. Or is it possible that this man— perhaps history’s most famous stoic—was kept hidden, in the folds and involutions of the public pronouncements in which he cloaked himself, vast emotional registers and intimate personal contexts? This hypothesis animates The Dhamma Man, a fictional life of Buddha by Vilas Sarang. Where the historical record falls silent, Sarang detects meaningful lacunae in the accepted narrative of Siddharth Gautam (as spelt in the novel). He has a poet’s ear, attuned to strangulated emotions. The Dhamma Man looks closely at the time in Siddharth’s life when, as a wandering sraman (mendicant) in search of insight, he struggles to escape the bonds of family and princely caste. Sarang paints a portrait of a man of iron resolve who cannot quite forget about the son he abandoned at birth, of a sceptic impatient with received wisdom, and of an uneasy diplomat. All the while, Sarang hews to the recorded facts with Boswellian faithfulness. Yet to the questions that might preoccupy the “straight” biographer or intellectual historian, Sarang devotes no consideration whatsoever. Siddharth’s concern with dukkha (suffering) as the central condition of life—the inevitable result, he will later teach, of birth—is presented not as an evolving theory, but as an idée fixe carried from the cradle, the leitmotif running through all of Siddharth’s experiences. Alert to historical confluences, Sarang notes contemporaneous developments in Hindu thought

In faith: Monks pray during a ceremony to mark Buddha’s birth anniversary in China. issuing from other great souls. He illustrates compellingly the illicit appeal of private audiences with certain renowned teachers, who w e r e t h e n d e v e l oping what became known as the Upanishads (the word itself means “to sit down with”). And plotted on the map in close proximity to Buddha’s peregrinations are the travels of Mahavir, whose enduring and largely local influence is contrasted with Buddha’s vast but diffuse following. The philosophical survey suffers, however, from anachronistic and pedantic digressions on “Kierkegaardian leaps” and “Dantesque” journeys. Sarang is no adherent to Buddha’s counsel of self-discipline; he is, however, the former head of the English department at the University of Mumbai. The Dhamma Man’s narrative

The Dhamma Man: Penguin India, 171 pages, `250.

framing proves equally dissolute. At first, the characters take turns speaking casually, as if these events were not historical but, Rashomon-like, a matter of ongoing debate. Much of the imagery from Buddha’s time survives to the present day: The spokes of the sugar-cane press remind one character of those of the bullock cart. Time truly is a wheel. The effect is frequently charming. But it is only a matter of time before an omniscient narrator emerges; then the voice that can only be described as Sarang’s own hijacks the page. Fragmentary narratives accompanied by jarring shifts of perspective have marred many an approach to Buddha’s life, as though a direct recounting would have been somehow inadequate to the task. Take Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering, which chronicles the life of Buddha alongside other, more intimate portraits. Another fine example is the delightfully modern silent film The Light of Asia (screened two years ago at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, or NCPA, to original musical accompaniment), which reverently depicts Siddharth’s life story before making a quick segue into an infomercial for Raj-era luxuries. At its best, The Dhamma Man is reminiscent of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, which is narrated at turns by a coin, a coffee cup and a drawing of a horse. Pamuk’s inspired forays, however, borrowed the form of comic monologues delivered in the bohemian coffee houses of the Otto-

man period. Sarang’s style is, one feels, sui generis. Sarang himself is keenly aware of the complaint. His progress from Karwar, in Malwan—where he spoke and read only Marathi until graduation—was astonishing. He has called himself a “questionable sort of Marathi writer” in so far as his Marathi stories are often translated from their original English. From other quarters, his English prosody has been impugned. One feels his weariness at having weathered the battles of so-called vernacular writers, only to emerge into this brave new world of MFA-honed, polished, Americanized prose. Sarang has dared more than most. His short stories can be both genre-defying and stupefying; their psycho-sexual flights of fancy include, in an oft-cited instance, a parable of an island in which all women are divided at the waist. In his essays Sarang has sung paeans to what he calls the “guerrilla” methods of the short-story writer. It hardly bears pointing out that a novel, even a brief one such as The Dhamma Man, is a different sort of undertaking. It is not a hillside ambush, nor even a lengthy campaign. It is relentless, total warfare. Like life itself, it is a battle to the death. Sarang doesn’t appear to have the stamina for it. Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS A novel look at the Buddha

reread Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man last weekend. Apart from size—it is a slim novella—it was the plot and the brilliance of Moorcock’s writing that encouraged me to read the book again (the same reasons ensure that I have a well-thumbed copy of James Cain’s Double Indemnity). Moorcock’s book was written in 1969 and would have probably been banned had it been written in India and about an Indian god. It’s a deviant little story, of a marginally dysfunctional individual, Karl Glogauer, who travels through time and crashes in Israel around the time of Jesus. Except, he finds out that Mary is a foul-mouthed slattern and her son, mentally disabled. Glogauer has a bit of a messiah complex and soon finds himself in Jesus’ role. He dies on the cross and his last words are: “It’s a lie….” There isn’t a comic book version of Moorcock’s book—not to my knowledge, at least; there are comic book versions of other Moorcock books though—but this rather lengthy preamble is relevant because of the comic book that’s the subject of this fortnight’s column. Like most good science fiction, Behold the Man left me feeling a bit grey. So, as a sort of pick-me-up, I reread a relatively old comic (it came out four years ago, and was reissued in 2009) which is also about Jesus. I am sure it too would have been banned in India had it been set in an Indian context; we’re big on banning, you see. The comic book in question is Chronicles of Wormwood. Its Jesus’ pal: Danny is a cable TV executive. protagonist is Danny Wormwood, the Antichrist (son of Satan); he lives in New York and is a cable TV executive. His best friend is Jesus (called Jay), a black man with Rasta locks who lost some of his logical faculties after a run-in with LAPD. Neither Wormwood nor Jay want Armageddon although their fathers do. The rest is a wild, wicked, filthily hilarious or hilariously filthy story (Chronicles of Wormwood also features a talking rabbit and a deviant Australian pope). Garth Ennis clearly has an issue with religion; he is the author of the wildly successful Preacher comic book series that I must have written about in a previous edition of this column (it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten). Chronicles of Wormwood is far smaller in scope than Preacher; it is also a lot less violent and a lot more funny. I read somewhere that Avatar Press, the publisher, tried to revive the comic book series in 2009, but haven’t come across that comic book yet. That said, Chronicles of Wormwood is a nifty miniseries. And the perfect pick-me-up after Behold the Man. R. Sukumar is editor, Mint, and rapidly running out of new comic books to write about. Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

THE PRINCE AND THE SANNYASI | PARTHA CHATTERJEE

The battle for Bhawal The rerelease of a book on the Bhawal Sannyasi case brings up old ques tions of identity B Y A DITI S AXTON ···························· t’s no coincidence that the retitled release of Partha Chatterjee’s monograph summons that old chestnut The Prince and the Pauper. Life-swapping may now be a humdrum topic on reality TV but it was once the rosetta stone of the enduring identity puzzle. When a person is removed from the bindings of his life, is that an abdication of the self? This reverse rags-to-riches retold calls forth the archetypal fable and a primal question—what is “I”? The backdrop, briefly: Twelve

years after the putative death in 1909 of the second Kumar of Bhawal, a sannyasi turned up in Dhaka and was widely acknowledged as the allegedly dead prince. The successive passing of the Kumar’s two brothers had put Bhawal, a very wealthy estate in British Bengal, under the administration of the Court of Wards. The sannyasi did not legally levy a claim to the title or rent from the landholdings for almost another dozen years. By the time it came before the judiciary, the case for and against the sannyasi as prince had been dissected in newspapers and pamphlets, living rooms and public meetings in exhaustive minutiae. Chatterjee is a historian with the Subaltern Studies Collective and more usually encountered as prescribed reading in post-grad seminars. Expectedly, he renders the undulating private-publicpolitical landscape of the first few

decades of 19th century India vividly. With an over 600-pagelong, meticulously annotated tome, it is moot to commend his thorough scholarship. If the heft seems excessive, it is because the convolutions and the complexity of this protracted dispute are immense. To educe the impact on, and the implications for, overlapping identity constructions—the colonial and nationalist, the elitist and populist, the linguistic and religious—requires detail, and a certain dexterity. Readers are able to glean the sub- and super-texts because Chatterjee delves deep. For this deft handling, he deserves a hand. Consider district magistrate Lindsay’s report to his superiors in Kolkata: “The people of this country, however, are all very fond of miracles and the tenants resent as blasphemy any doubt as to his identification.” Compare this with the

The Prince and the Sannyasi: Hachette India and Black Kite, 674 pages, `395. written testimony by Satyabhama Debi, grandmother of the princely family, “I propose to have the evidence examined by six eminent lawyers...unconnected with the Bengal Court of Wards or any member of the Bhawal Raj family.” It is a riveting tale, the better

because Chatterjee heeds the exactions of novelistic rigour. In his preface, he parallels the task of the historian with the forensic detective. Chapter 1, The Facts of the Matter, could well be an introductory brief by Colonel Hastings or Dr Watson. Mise en scene, mini biographies of major players, the suspicious circumstances of a death in Darjeeling, the mysterious appearance of a loincloth-clad sannyasi, and his subsequent heralding as a prince—this is the page-turner stuff of private-eye fiction. But Chatterjee decides to doff the showy mantle of detective for the unassuming cloak of scribe. And the pen proves mightier than the monocle. Spoiler alert! Three courts were to declare in favour of the sannyasi, but the author remains “agnostic”, choosing to privilege a perspective “in which the truth turns out to be undecidable”. Such ambiguity would be unsatisfying in a linear plot line. For a spiralling narrative on identity, it is the necessary eye at

the centre of many a swirling and entwined “I”. Expositions on philosophical thought get equal deliberation as the inconsistency of the shape of the sannyasi’s nose. Derek Parfit’s radical reductionist position (if “I” am replicated precisely, psychologically and physically and the original “I” is destroyed, I survive in my clone) or Paul Ricoeur’s gentle ipse (numeric) and idem (qualitative) character reconciliation are suddenly, surprisingly lucid when tethered to actual facts and incidents. The immediacy of reportage braided with scrupulous analysis creates a resilient cable from the present into the past. This is Chatterjee’s purpose and his justification. It may not be the pioneer of armchair time travel, but The Prince and the Sannyasi proves a very able guide when the foray into another world brings home questions of self. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011

Culture

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ART

What it means to be an ‘Indian’ artist The country’s first national pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennial hosts some unusual choices

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

··································· n 2007, the Indian government inexplicably turned down an invitation to participate in the 116-year-old Venice Biennial, one of the world’s most prestigious art exhibitions. Four years later—with the support of the Lalit Kala Akademi (the national academy of art) and the ministry of culture—India is all set to host its first national pavilion. The budget for the 250 sq. m pavilion is `2 crore; it’s a sum entirely drawn from the commissioning organization, the Akademi. While Indian artists such as Riyas Komu have shown at the biennial as part of other delegations, this national debut at the highly rated non-commercial international art space is momentous for Indian contemporary art.

The overall theme for the biennial this year, which is not binding on the national pavilions, is “Illuminations”. The India pavilion’s theme is a critique of the idea of the nation state. Mumbai-based art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote, who has been charged with the pavilion’s organization, titles it Everyone Agrees: It’s about to Explode. Among other things, the exhibition inquires into the notion of cultural citizenship. What does it mean to be an “Indian” artist? What forms of attentiveness to India are involved? For Hoskote, to be a cultural citizen is a deliberate act of affiliation, stronger than the simple facts of birth and nationality. “I am looking here at practices that extend the ‘idea of India’, to adapt a term made famous by Sunil Khilnani; practices that show us how India is not simply a territorially bounded entity, but a set of

dynamic propositions that extend into the global imagination,” says Hoskote over email from Venice, where he is busy finalizing the display of the works. His selection of artists breaks down the conventional wisdom of the art market, which emphasizes Top 10 lists, medium-specific judgements, generational differences, and narratives of arrival and success. Hoskote has looked beyond auction catalogues, the market hubs of New Delhi and Mumbai, and tapped lesser-known artists. In accordance with the theme, the pavilion is designed around the idea of history, migration and displacement. Hoskote weaves in sub-themes as well, such as the transformation of the studio or the way in which artistic practice now blurs across a series of related fields and venues of practice.

Instead of having a vast number of artists—the kind of showing that gets cancelled out in a vast polyphony such as the Venice Biennial—to illustrate the booming Indian contemporary art scene, Hoskote has chosen four powerful positions to make a strong symbolic statement about contemporary India. His curatorial proposition for the India pavilion is that Indian art has multiple horizons of emergence, and is produced from a diversity of locations—from the metropolis, but also from the North-East, which is so neglected by mainstream discourse; by resident Indians, but also by bearers of diasporic histories and trans-cultural practitioners; by artists who migrate among regions and media. “It was important for me to point to the variety of locations from which contemporary Indian culture is produced,” says Hoskote.

Meet the India pavilion Gigi Scaria Who: A Kerala-born artist, now based in Delhi, who poses questions about displacement and class prejudice in his installations, videos and photography. Why: He articulates the critical energy of the internal migrant, who brings an empathetic anthropological eye to the social contexts he moves through. Mobile art: A still from Scaria’s video installa tion Elevator from the Subcontinent, which was commissioned for the exhibition. Praneet Soi Who: A painter and photographer who produces paintings and sculptures on war and global issues. Soi’s art is an outcome of his search and observation of cultural contrasts between two places: Amsterdam, where he now lives, and his native Kolkata. Why: He develops a zigzag practice that connects his work on the global residency and biennial circuit with his collaborations with entrepreneurs in Kumartuli, Kolkata.

Zarina Hashmi Who: A veteran printmaker, long based in New York, whose minimalist works tend to explore spatial boundaries. Why: She relays the birth moment of India, the moment of independence, Partition, migration and diaspora.

Squared: A 36part woodblockprint ensemble, Home is a Foreign Place is one of three works by Hashmi to be shown in Venice.

Processed: An image from Soi’s slide projection work Kumartuli Printer, based on his obser vations of a printmaker in north Kolkata.

Hunting with the Seals Barely a month after Mission Osama, a film pieces together the backstory of the encounter

B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

···························· n the end, the end came in a matter of seconds. The man who had hogged international intelligence resources for close to two decades, had a $25-million (around `112 crore) bounty on his head and evaded the largest manhunt for 10 years, didn’t even find the time to pick up his trusted AK-47 when a crack team of US Navy operatives burst into his hideout in the middle of the night and took him out. But the death of Osama bin Laden is almost an anti-climax in a Discovery Channel documentary which will air tomorrow. The account of months of painstaking intelligence gathering, and the technology used to ensure that the stealth operation remained a secret till the last possible moment, provides a more interesting narrative.

Death of Bin Laden, an hourlong film, pieces together a second-by-second account of the Navy Seals raid, with archival footage and interviews with anti-terror experts weaving the background of the operation. The channel claims the film “seeks to answer key questions that are to date unresolved”. It does keep that promise, but only to an extent. Produced by Peacock Productions for Discovery Channel, the film relies heavily on accounts from an international team of local reporters, fixers and cameras on the ground in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as it follows the trail of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the unsuspecting Al-Qaeda courier whose call to a known terror suspect was the breakthrough moment in the decade-old hunt for Osama. The producers try a mix of graphics, animation and dramatization to tell this part of the story,

Desire Machine Collective What: A duo that hails from Guwahati in Assam, runs an alternative art space on a ferry and experiments with works such as a “sound map” inspired by a sacred forest. Collaborating since 2004, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya work through image, Mechanized: A still from Residue, a film shot moving image, sound, by the duo in a redundant thermal power plant on the outskirts of Guwahati. time and space. They confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice, both regionally in Assam and around the world. Why: They relay the cusp position of the North-East as a site from where we may begin to imagine a new trans-regionality, a cosmopolitanism that connects us with South-East Asia. The Venice Biennial opens in Venice, Italy, today and will run till 27 November.

but are seriously hamstrung by the absence of live footage owing to the secretive nature of the operation. Another reason, possibly, is the haste with which the film was obviously put together. So it makes do with still images—like the famous one from the White House situation room—and stock photos and footage. Even the interviews are not with people directly associated with the operation. The only exception is John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor, whose

account of the raid is, naturally, most authoritative. Discovery’s other Osamathemed production, Channel 4’s two-part Jihad: The Men and Ideas behind Al Qaeda, that aired days after Osama’s death, was bonechilling in its exhaustive narrative of the rise of Al-Qaeda and Osama. That film—scheduled for telecast later but aired when Osama was killed—provides a more comprehensive history, with its extensive research and video footage spanning two decades and three continents.

In the crosshairs: The film is a secondbysecond account of the raid.

In comparison, Death of Bin Laden seems tepid—the animated dramatization of the actual storming of the hideout looks videogame-ish, that too not of the highest quality—but it is explained by the haste to tell the Osama story before it loses its newsworthiness (the film premiered in the US on 15 May, barely a fortnight after the killing). The film also answers some of the questions about the elite Seals Team 6—how many operatives were involved, from where they were deployed, the technology used to conclusively identify that the body as Osama’s. There’s nothing, obviously, on the identity of the team members. According to the film, even President Obama does not know the soldier whose bullet felled US’ most wanted. The day he met the Seals unit to congratulate them on their successful mission, the operative was not pointed out to him. Death of Bin Laden premieres at 9pm on 5 June on Discovery Channel. The repeat telecast is at 8pm on 6 June.

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MUSIC

STALL ORDER

Twist in the tale

NANDINI RAMNATH ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Singer Vishaka Hari modernizes a 150yearold form of musical storytelling with IT quips in English

B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· n a balmy evening in Bangalore, Chowdiah Memorial holds a packed audience. Though women clad predictably in Kanjeevaram saris and men in crisp white dhotis fill up a large part of the hall, young office-goers too are conspicuous, rushing in just on time. They’re here to watch Vishaka Hari perform the harikatha—a traditional art form that combines music and storytelling. On a raised platform, Hari begins with the Nada Tanumanisham, a keertana by Thyagaraja that holds the audience’s attention almost immediately. Trailing out of the song, Hari begins to talk about Thyagaraja, one of the greatest composers of Carnatic music, and his devotion to Hindu god Ram. She narrates this, not in Tamil (her mother tongue) but in English. Sprinkling anecdotes from everyday life, about IT jobs and its associated stresses, Hari weaves in stories from the Ramayan, keeping the audience transfixed to her melodious renditions. Hari’s art goes back to the 19th century, and in its traditional form is still practised in several villages and towns in south India. “I don’t consciously weave in modern references, they exist there to be spoken about,” says Hari, who has been trained in Carnatic music by violin maestro Lalgudi Jayaraman. Hari learnt her skill largely from her father-inlaw Krishna Premi, a wellknown and respected raconteur. Kathakalakshepam, the harikatha format she practises, is one that combines music and narration to form a concert-discourse. “I generally uphold the way my father-in-law delivers his harikatha, while the musical aspect is directed by Lalgudi

THE ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT

The narrator: Vishaka Hari performing a harikatha that combines music and storytelling. Jayaraman...I am just mixing them both,” says the 32-yearold whose stage presence in a traditional nine-yard silk sari—known locally as the Madisar—has been a topic of discussion as few Tamilians wear it, except during festivals and weddings. “This is not a stage attire, this is what I wear every day,” smiles Hari, who has lived in the religious town of Srirangam since her marriage at age 22. A chartered accountant by education, she muses if that might be an undercurrent in her understanding the minds of working people. “I don’t ever read the newspapers,” she says. Hari’s discourses are also sold as DVDs and are widely popular on YouTube, indicating the comeback of the art form not only among the older generation, but also the younger generation that seems keen to rediscover its cultural roots. The Kathakalashepam originated in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district in the 1850s, with heavy influence from the resident Marathi population in the area. The discourses remained popular for more than 100 years, receding in the 1960s, only to make a comeback about a decade ago. “At the beginning, the storyteller would stand in the middle of the stage, sing, and talk, sometimes even dance and act.

It was the ultimate art of communicating stories,” says Premeela Gurumurthy, head of the music department, University of Madras, whose expertise is harikatha. Gurumuthy adds: “It was a superb show; there was dancing, they had instruments on stage for sound effects. This style of harikatha can still be found in parts of Andhra Pradesh.” Though Hari is seated during the discourse, more in the style of a Carnatic music concert, she communicates by switching to a language which her audience understands, yet maintaining all the sensibilities of the Kathakalakshepam. “If it has to be in English, which is not my mother tongue, I have to be 200% sure, it calls for a lot more preparation than I would need usually,” says Hari. Given the age group (20-35) of her audiences, there is often a need to simplify the narration. According to Gurumurthy, what works in Hari’s favour is her ability to sing well, and her selection of short, crisp songs that take the story ahead. Traditionally, harikathas go beyond entertainment and narration. “A harikatha often involves the artiste dispensing some advice, so it used to take years before one could be respected as a harikatha teller,” explains Gurumurthy. She speaks of Kalyanapuram Aravamudan, now a well-known harikatha

teller, who quit his job in IBM in 1979 to dedicate himself to the art. For three years, Aravamudan dedicated himself to the study of texts and music. “I sat and wrote out narrations and songs for 8 hours a day,” Aravamudan recalls. Choosing to stay with the old method of standing during his performance, he says that from 1991, there has been an immense demand for harikatha. Like Hari, he also switches languages, when required, in order to communicate with his audiences. Unlike harikatha tellers, Delhi-based dastango Danish Hussain, who along with Mahmood Farooqui revived the Persian art form of storytelling called Dastangoi, believes a performance is not constrained by language. “We are an intuitive species,” says Hussain, adding that though his audiences rarely understand the exact meaning of his narratives, they comprehend it through gestures and acting. “A lot of the words are not in parlance today but they somehow exist in your consciousness,” says Hussain. It is a view Hari shares. “One does not need to understand and learn music, or know the Ramayan to understand my narration,” she says. “They just tell themselves.” Vishaka Hari will perform at Sri Ramakrishna Bhajan Samaj, Bangalore, on 12 June.

heja Fry 2 is being promoted as India’s first comic franchise. Its film-makers seem to have overlooked Golmaal (2006), Golmaal Returns (2008) and Golmaal 3 (2010). It doesn’t really matter who got there first: The movie business is running a bit low on ideas and hits at the moment, so there’s no harm in getting infected by sequelitis just like Hollywood and producing a rash of Part IIs, No. IIIs and Chapter IVs. But the real reason to look forward to Bheja Fry 2 is Vinay Pathak. The talented actor never actually went anywhere—it’s just that of late, audiences seemed to have stopped coming to him. Pathak is one of the few actors in Hindi cinema who can make the unwatchable watchable, like the silly Chalo Dilli and the first Bheja Fry, an unacknowledged copy of the French movie Dinner with Friends. His talent extends far beyond the comic—director Sriram Raghavan used his dramatic range beautifully in Johnny Gaddaar. Mostly, though, Pathak has played variations of a cuddly clown, whether it’s in Aaja Nachle or Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Second-fiddle actors routinely get put into boxes just like marquee names, but unlike the stars, they are not as handsomely rewarded. There are stars in Bollywood and then there are the so-called “real actors”—the ones with the formal training, years of struggle on stage and in television, and the lists of unreleased low-budget films or aborted projects. Reporters and critics love these actors and slobber over their every release, but their fans don’t seem to add up to a critical mass. Credibility isn’t the same thing as saleability. “Alt actors” such as Pathak, Irrfan Khan, Kay Kay Menon, Ranvir Shorey and the newer ones of the lot, such as Deepak Dobriyal and Amole Gupte, headline “Hindies” and bring gravitas to big-name movies, but there simply isn’t enough work beyond formula-driven fare for them. Age catches up more cruelly with alt stars such as Pathak and Menon than with, say, Saif Ali Khan or Salman Khan. Stars are not minted every day, we are told, but there is a large enough young talent pool between Mandi House and Prithvi Theatre to keep the “Hindies” well staffed. It doesn’t help that Bollywood keeps trying to co-opt

Alt actor: Vinay Pathak (right) in a still from Bheja Fry 2. Hindiewood in its attempt to reach the notoriously fickle and impatient youth market that would rather download a film than patronize a multiplex. Why risk investing in an unknown but talented name when the telegenic scion of a film family is more than willing to take on a hatke role? The reason Pathak got access to a mainstream audience—his superb comic timing—has the potential to both rescue and imprison him. His risk-taking role of a gambler in Johnny Gaddaar and his compromised cop in Manorama Six Feet Under will always have fans, but the moolah only follows the parade of cheerful losers that he seems doomed to play. On the all-important Friday, Bheja Fry’s foolish Bharat Bhushan matters far more than Johnny Gaddaar’s wordly wise Prakash. Bheja Fry 2 releases in theatres on 17 June. Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

Q&A | BEJOY NAMBIAR

Youth, and other demons Mumbai, music, at breakneck pace—discuss ing everything ‘Shaitan’ with its director B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA anupam1.v@livemint.com

······························ he trailer of Shaitan seems to be doing what Ishqiya’s (2010) trailer did—spread the word like wildfire. A slick thriller set to a rambunctious soundtrack and with a host of young faces, Shaitan is an invitation to confront one’s inner demons. Jointly produced by Anurag Kashyap Films and Viacom 18, the film is the directorial debut of 32-year-old Bejoy Nambiar, who ventured into films by assisting Mani Ratnam on Guru and Raavan. In 2008, he won Gateway, a short film reality show featured on Sony Pix, and the chance to work with producer Ashok Amritraj on a film. That didn’t work out, however. He talks to Lounge about his

Inward gaze: Bejoy Nambiar.

decision to cast new actors, the musical choices, and portraying Mumbai. Edited excerpts from an interview: Tell us about ‘Shaitan’. Shaitan can be slotted as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Based on true incidents, it’s a topical film. It deals with how well you can keep your inner demons in check. My six young protagonists are faced with a conflict and their journey demands that the demons that it draws out of them be exorcised in the process. There seems to be quite a history behind this film. How did it develop? After winning Gateway in 2008, I travelled to Los Angeles to pitch my film to Ashok Amritraj. I had the first draft of my script and I pitched it as an English film set in Mumbai. Unfortunately, he wanted me to work on something else. So I returned to India and fleshed out the script, now in Hindi. No one seemed to be

Fast: A poster from the film, with Kalki Koechlin in the centre. interested in producing my film though. I think every production house in Mumbai must have the script and a demo CD of Shaitan in their office. The film could not go on the floors, and I had to keep (actor) Kalki (Koechlin) and the others waiting. Finally, Anurag Kashyap decided to back my film. We began shooting in November and completed it in a 40-day shooting period. Your film features several new faces. It is difficult to cast the age group that my characters belong to. Firstly, there aren’t many good actors who fit the bill. And the ones who are available turn the

offer down, citing the film’s ensemble cast as the reason. Shaitan was always going to have an ensemble cast, with all the characters contributing equally to the film. So it demanded new faces. Seven months of rigorous auditioning finally paid off because I know that this film works because of its cast. Gulshan (Devaiah), Kalki, Shiv (Pandit), Neil (Bhoopalam) and Kirti (Kulhari) have taken it to another level altogether. Was it hard lending a fresh face to Mumbai, encumbered as it is by cinematic history? Madhie, my cinematographer, has never shot in Mumbai. So

he inadvertently brings a fresh way of seeing. Has your experience of working with Mani Ratnam influenced your approach? Since I have no formal training in film, all that I have learnt, is while working with him on Guru and Raavan. So it is only imperative that a bit of his influence seeped into my film. But I have maintained my own style throughout. The trailer of ‘Shaitan’ reveals an uncanny musical diversity. The visual design and the music of the film were worked out well in advance. That’s why I call it a treatment-heavy film. I didn’t want to make Shaitan boring but more accessible to people. The musical choices complement the pace of the film, right from the Tamil rap to death metal, by way of Sufi rock and a Marathi song. I always wanted to blend different styles in sonically correct ways. The narrative is heavily dependent on the music. (Music directors) Ranjit Barot, Prashant Pillai and the others have done a great job. Shaitan releases in theatres on 10 June.

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LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

DIVYA BABU/MINT

DELHI’ DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

The new Hauz Khas Village

A guide to the new landmarks and hot spots of south Delhi’s eclectic designer village

aken in by its faux bohemian spirit, some consider Hauz Khas Village in south Delhi to be somewhat like a John Lennon song. People come here to soak in its slapdash alternativeness. One club plays jazz, one book store showcases books by non-conformist publishers and one restaurant (glowingly reviewed in Time magazine’s Europe edition) has stapled printouts for a menu. Most people walking in the village lanes are spotted with SLR digicams and Apple Macs. As the Capital’s chic hangout zone, the

14th century village has seen the best and worst of times. Three new eating places have come up recently. More watering holes are on the way. A bakery called Elma is almost ready to open (opposite Yodakin book store, on the first floor; it will serve fresh baked bread from 8am onwards). The young owner of Natural Selection furniture store has shut shop and is turning it into a high-style Italian speciality restaurant. And the village got its first ATM last

month, proof it’s now a serious shopping destination. Despite the razzmatazz, however, the village is trying hard not to lose its character. Like an ideal Incredible India, it has buffaloes, BMWs, imported cigarettes, hookahs, cleavageshowing models, veiled village belles, brick hovels and glasspanelled designer studious co-existing harmoniously. We take you to the new landmarks that are making the village buzz with action.

To Ch Harsukh Marg

Hauz Khas Tank

Gunpowder restaurant

BUY

Grey Garden restaurant

SEE

Naivedyam restaurant

The Living Room Café & Kitchen

Delhi Art Gallery

NEW DELHI

HAUZ KHAS VILLAGE

Hauz Khas monument

Ch Harsukh Marg

Kunzum Travel Café

Sri Aurobindo Marg

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi GRAPHIC

p Flipside Café, which opened in April, makes 18 types of crêpes. Run by Italian-Indian Raavi Chowdhury (just ask for Raavi Chou), it serves pizzas by the slice. If you’re not hungry, you can spend hours on the coffee and the free Wi-Fi. Framed artworks are for sale and house music is rock ‘n’ roll. Where: 7, Hauz Khas Village; price for two, `600; 10am-8pm, Tuesday closed.

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

q The Living Room Café & Kitchen has a well-stocked bar, comfy sofas, mirrored toilet, liquor-bottle vases and a charming dowdy character. It comes to life at night. When all of Hauz Khas has gone to sleep, it is still awake with the sound of music. Rock bands perform on Friday nights and DJs take over on Saturdays. Gigs happen on weekdays too. Having opened in November 2008, The Living Room is now going for a change in décor and menu—the new look will unveil this month. Where: 31, Hauz Khas Village; 11am-1am, open daily.

LISTEN

EAT

Green Park Deer Park

Yeti restaurant Firoz Shah Tughlaq’s tomb

To Sri Aurobindo Marg

PARKING

Maati

mayank.s@livemint.com

q Reopened in January, the revamped Delhi Art Gallery holds new exhibits every month. It deals only with masters such as Tyeb Mehta and M.F. Husain. Come here to inhale the rarefied air of high-value art. The price range oscillates between `4 lakh and `4 crore. A library on the second floor can be accessed if you can convince Kishore Singh, the gallery’s head, that you have more than a passing interest in art. Where: 11, Hauz Khas Village; 11am-7pm, Sunday closed.

Yodakin book store

Flipside Café

Bagel’s Café

u Maati, which opened in April, specializes in handmade T-shirts painted by rural artisans from states such as West Bengal and Uttarakhand. The tag gives the artist’s name. You may also get custom-made designs featuring anything from India Gate or the Gateway of India, to autos and BMWs (`700-1,800). Where: 26, Hauz Khas Village; 11am-7.30pm, open daily.

Maya Art and Apparel

TALK

t It’s free spirits such as painter Usha Hooda, 54, who keep Hauz Khas Village hip and young. Her studio, Maya Art and Apparel, is stunning—it has a piano, period table, soft bed, a window with a view and her pet Rottweiler, Maya. The music is usually the electronic tunes of the Swedish group Solar Fields. Hooda’s arty conversations are intelligent and humorous. If she is at work, pick through her daughter’s handmade jackets, reversible and lovely (`12,000-18,000). Ask to see the handmade tapestry Tree of Life, priced at `24 lakh. Where: 24/1, Second floor, Hauz Khas Village; 11am-7pm.