Lounge for 05 May 2012

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

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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 18

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth centenary is being celebrated by his readers.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH OUP’S NIGEL PORTWOOD >Page 8

VINTAGE VERVE

Stylist and designer Pernia Qureshi prefers timelessness and minimalism in her wardrobe >Page 6

VERTICAL LIMIT

HERE LIES

A young rookie and a wizened veteran are injecting new life into mountaineering in India with their record­breaking ascents >Pages 12­13

MANTO A hundred years after he was born, there is little evidence that Saadat Hasan Manto, one of 20th century’s great short­story writers, once lived and worked in Mumbai >Pages 10­11 IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

THE DEATH & RETURN OF ROSHIK BABU

The online reaction that followed the arrest of a professor indicates that the age­old culture of Bengali satire is alive >Page 18

THE GOOD LIFE

N. RAJADHYAKSHA

OUR DAILY BREAD

SHOBA NARAYAN

SAMAR HALARNKAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

SOCIAL CONVENTION SUMMER’S MANY SAN FRANCISCO, DISTINCT FLAVOURS ’TIS HARD TO LEAVE OVER RIGID RULES

A

few years ago, I attended a fascinating lecture by game theorist Avinash Dixit. He showed the audience two videos as part of his presentation on how societies coordinate activities. The first video was of a busy traffic intersection in St Petersburg, Russia. People drove at high speeds in the belief that everybody would be paying attention to the traffic lights, but every now and then they were blindsided by a truant driver who jumped the signal. There were car crashes galore on that busy traffic intersection in St Petersburg. >Page 4

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irius, twice as big as our sun and the brightest star in the night sky, is on the move. Ancient Greeks viewed this Dog Star with trepidation, believing it to be responsible for the “dog days of summer” that will grip much of India in the coming months.

Dazed dung beetles lie still on the parched earth, wishing for trickles of rain. Stunned dragonflies ride the humid air, their transparent wings unmoving as they coast on waves of heat. Spider webs sag... >Page 4

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o you really have boar?” The young man ran his hand through his rough, blond hair and hesitated at my question.

“Well, unfortunately, not today,” he said from behind a table laden with untidily strewn packets of various kinds of meat. It was a glorious Berkeley spring day, 16 degrees Celsius, bright and sunny at 7pm. The young farmer, clad in a plaid shirt, saw my eyes fall again to the board, where in chalk he had clearly scribbled that he was selling grass-fed pork, beef and boar. >Page 9

PHOTO ESSAY

BIRDMEN OF KAZAKHSTAN

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | SOUTHERN SPICE, TAJ COROMANDEL, CHENNAI

W

hen was the last time you found dessert to be the spiciest part of dinner?

You may find that to be true at Taj Coromandel’s newly renovated south Indian cuisine restaurant Southern Spice if the finale of your meal is their pepper and cardamom ice cream.

After a 11-month hibernation for a menu and décor overhaul, Southern Spice reopened in March, minus the fortune-telling parrot and live classical performances.

The spotlight has moved from unnecessary kitsch to the food.

My guess is that the focus now is on guests’ speedy acknowledgement of first-rate, freshly ground pepper, cardamom and fennel in dishes that from start to finish strum a comfortable buzz in your gut.

The Southern Spice restaurant actively transfers your wallet’s weight to your waist through expensive, home-style, banana-leaf fare that, as with all things in this part of the country, comes with a dash of Kollywood—Tamil Nadu’s film industry.

The good stuff Stardust rolls in through the Kair Katti Yerachi Kola Urundai—fried minced lamb dumplings infused with cashew and spices captained by fennel, precariously held together with a twist of banana fibre—at `650 for six small balls. Southern Spice chefs got this recipe rooted in Thanjavur—a heritage hot spot 325km south of Chennai—from cooks at the home of the late Sivaji Ganesan, Tamil cinema’s stalwart actor.

The dumplings brought

out the once-in-a-bluemoon non-vegetarian in me and I tried one crumbly, buttery piece to find that the lentils and spices outdid the meaty taste.

The newly expanded seafood menu has Mangalore, Malabar, Tamil and Andhra specialities ranging from `800-2,500 a dish. Here, the restaurant’s stance of not serving seafood if there’s no fresh catch of the day from their supplier has to be lauded.

The Asparagus Paruppu Usili (asparagus and steamed lentils with Madras chillies, a Western twist to the original avatar with usually green beans as the vegetable component) beckoned but I opted for the light vegetarian meal at `1,500. It got me four vegetarian curries with servings of idiyappam (mops of thin, steamed rice noodles or string hoppers), appams (hoppers or crisp, bowl-shaped crêpes with a thick centre), sannas (idli-like steamed rice cakes that I was trying for the first time) and the must-have coolant Thayir Saadam (curd rice) for half the rate the individual orders would have cost.

The dessert with unusual ingredients, including broken wheat in another ice-cream variant, was obviously exuberant enough to grab the top slot in the review.

The not­so­good Although the service was impeccable and the food good for the most part, I wouldn’t order the Vazhapoo Aamavadai (crisp galettes of banana blossom and lentils) again. I’ve eaten better ones at home and at low-budget

Chennai restaurants, without the oily aftertaste I felt in Southern Spice’s version.

Also, vegetarians could do with a few more choices on the menu. And tilting towards the unreasonable, I really wish the chatty waiters had

refilled my tiny chutney bowls as I lapped up the contents.

Talk plastic A dinner for two with drinks could effortlessly touch the `8,000 mark. The unusual, dedicated rasam menu has

vegetarian and unusually, non-vegetarian options, for `300-350. Vegetarian starters and curries are within `500, while meat options range from `650-2,500. Desserts, for the quality dished out, are truly a steal at `400. Lunch

thalis cost `1,500-2,200.

Southern Spice, Taj Coromandel, Nungambakkam, Chennai. For reservations, call 66002827.

Anupama Chandrasekaran

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

Why we prefer social convention to rigid rules

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WEN­YAN KING/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

few years ago, I attended a fascinating lecture by game theorist Avinash Dixit. He showed the audience two videos as part of his presentation on how societies coordinate activities. The first video was of a busy traffic

intersection in St Petersburg, Russia.

People drove at high speeds in the belief that everybody would be paying attention to the traffic lights, but every now and then they were blindsided by a truant driver who jumped the signal. There were car crashes galore on that busy traffic intersection in St Petersburg.

The second video captured traffic movement at a similar intersection in an unnamed Indian city, but one that had no traffic lights. Every driver was cautious. The vehicles moved slowly but there were no accidents. Dixit used these two videos to explain to us the difference between “law without order” and “order without law”.

I am often reminded of these videos when I am trapped in the manic evening rush in Mumbai. Drivers cut lanes, jump signals, park at will and bully pedestrians. The disregard for traffic rules helps nobody, as cars crawl amid the bedlam. Everybody would be better off following traffic rules, but few actually bother doing so.

Some would argue that such behaviour is a natural response to overcrowding. But then look at how people behave in the packed trains that snake through the metropolis. There are few formal rules laid down by the authorities. The sheer number of people crammed into a single compartment is an invitation to violence. Yet, a host of informal rules ensure that people get off the train before new passengers enter.

There are also rules about how to sit, where to keep a bag and how to make way for others. The brave hearts standing at the door often lend a helping hand to desperate commuters trying to jump in even as the train picks up speed.

Are Indians more comfortable making their own rules rather than following

those laid down by governments? And what does this mean for the social choices we make as a country?

Game theorists describe social life as a series of coordination games, which chart out what strategies people use in situations where some agreement is needed. One of the most common illustrations of such games is the one in which two drivers coming in opposite directions have to decide which side of the road they should drive. An agreement between them will lead to a more efficient outcome compared to a situation where both insist on driving on the same side of the road.

A more insightful coordination game is adapted from a parable found in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher. It involves two men who are out to hunt down a stag.

They need to work together to snare the beast; they will fail to catch the stag if either person abandons his mate in the forest to chase a rabbit for its meat. It makes far more sense for the two hunters to collaborate, but each is tempted to defect.

The fact that societies exist means that cooperation does emerge in some form or the other. The various coordination problems that we call social life are solved by three main forces—behavioural patterns that are hardwired into our brains through the process of evolution, by formal rules imposed by governments under the threat of retaliation and by social conventions that evolve from repeated interactions between human beings.

The radically different behavioural patterns on the road and in the trains suggests that Indians are perhaps more comfortable with social conventions

Order in numbers: Crowded trains can be chaotic, yet organized in an informal way. than formal rules as a means for coordinating social interaction. The problem is that many of our social conventions have emerged from the feudal past and are designed to create trust between smaller groups such as castes rather than crafting a wider arc of social cooperation that involves other people in all social groups.

The extended political debate between the modernists and traditionalists in Indian politics had its roots in this problem. I am reminded here of something I read in a Marathi novel based on the life of D.K. Karve, the pioneering campaigner for women’s education in the early 20th century. A social reformer asks a political radical: “How can we stand together to fight the British when we are unable to sit together for a meal?”

The rhetorical question has relevance in a different context today, to explain why we are like that only. Many social conventions in India have emerged out of a heterogeneous society of caste, regional and linguistic differences. We often have a better record of coordination within our specific social group than with people outside its pale.

One possible result of this is that we find it hard to agree on the provision of basic public goods that will benefit every member of society, instead preferring subsidies to our particular group. Is this preference at the root of our inability as a nation to build roads or provide clean water or maintain public hygiene or build primary schools?

I must admit here that this is only a tentative hypothesis. But some economists have shown in their research that stratified societies find it more difficult to agree on broad social needs.

For example, economists Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir and William Easterly showed in 1997 that US cities with higher ethnic fragmentation were less likely to provide common services such as education, roads, sewers, libraries and trash pickup compared to more homogeneous cities, after controlling for socio-economic and demographic parameters. However, economists Abhijit Banerjee and Rohini Somanathan, in 2006, argued in their research on the provision of public goods in India, “Measures of social heterogeneity that have been emphasized in the recent empirical literature on public goods are relevant but not

overwhelming in their importance.”

The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us.

None of this means that things cannot change, as we can see in so many other countries in Asia that have climbed the ladder of prosperity. But weak political leadership, a soft state and opposition to reform of traditional social arrangements are serious obstacles in this necessary transition. Till then, we will continue to be the stag hunters who run off in search of a rabbit.

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive editor, Mint, and will write a fortnightly column.

Write to Niranjan at impartialspectator@livemint.com

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The many distinct flavours of summer

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irius, twice as big as our sun and the brightest star in the night sky, is on the move. Ancient Greeks viewed this Dog Star with trepidation, believing it to be responsible for the “dog days of summer” that will grip much of India in the

coming months. Dazed dung beetles lie still on the parched earth, wishing for trickles of rain. Stunned dragonflies ride the humid air, their transparent wings unmoving as they coast on waves of heat.

Spider webs sag under wilting shrubs.

Rain trees fold their leaves hopefully in the evenings, unsuccessfully heralding rain. Bees hover over hives, flapping their wings meticulously to keep the hive at its preset temperature.

These hot languorous days are perfect for vegetarians—it is too hot to cook.

Summer is for delicious musk-melon juice stirred with three ice cubes—no more, no less—and a pinch of cayenne pepper if you have it—to bring out the sugars. It is for chilled chocolate shakes with a pinch of salt—as demonstrated in an episode in the television series Modern Family. Contrasting flavours accentuate the main ingredient. Stick a

slit green chilli into your sugar-cane juice. Put a spoonful of jaggery in your spicy Mysore rasam, as some cooks do.

Sweet strawberries, as Richard Gere told Julia Roberts in the movie Pretty Woman, bring out the flavour in the champagne.

Champagne mimosas are a great drink for summer. They go with salads. My favourite recipe includes lettuce, feta cheese, freshly ground pepper, sliced tomatoes, watermelon, roasted walnuts and a few sprigs of mint. Another great one is cubed watermelon, freshly ground pepper with a mint and feta garnish.

Summer is for chilled beer or wine with some extra-creamy blue cheese: My brother has a stock of Castello Danablu extra-creamy Bleu cheese in his fridge, which I raid periodically. Summer, in the end, is about fresh fruits and vegetables.

It is the time when farmers, especially those that farm out of passion rather

than for a living, make a lot of friends.

The father of a friend in Delhi decided to become a gentleman farmer after retirement. He is oversubscribed, with too many customers even before his first harvest. When his son—my friend—called to ask his dad for some farm-fresh organic vegetables, the father replied: “I have restaurateurs waiting in line outside the farm. Call me when summer ends. I’ll give you some leeks.”

But who wants leeks when you can have tomatoes—especially vine-ripened cherry tomatoes, if possible? My neighbour, Jo, brought me a whole bowl full of cherry tomatoes recently. They are the stuff of memory—the best tomatoes I have ever eaten. For one they are tiny, beautifully round, each still attached to the stalk, which is key for retaining flavour.

Bite into a cherry tomato and the juice spurts into your mouth. The skin is not tender like the usual tomatoes we buy.

Cherry tomatoes have the taut skin of youth. Slit the skin and there is little pulp but oodles of juice. It is what Ferran Adria attempted at his restaurant, El Bulli, when he fashioned olives through a process called spherification—containing liquids in their own skin.

Here is the second thing I found out when I ate those sublime cherry tomatoes: The taste isn’t intense.

Coolers: Home­made drinks are the best.

It is like grand cru wines, first flush teas, 87% dark chocolate, or Japanese cuisine: The flavour is subtle and well-rounded, with no one taste to overwhelm the taste buds. You could call them flat, especially in relation to assertive foods like Bleu cheese or coffee. Vine-ripened tomatoes, haricot verts, or even peas have that subtlety. They aren’t particularly tart; or sweet; or whatever it is you associate with a certain vegetable.

Tomatoes were fruits, till a US court established them as vegetables in 1893.

They are, along with cape gooseberries, capsicum, potato and eggplant, or

brinjal, members of the Solanaceae or nightshade family. The name of the family comes from the Latin Solanum, “the nightshade plant”. Alternatively, the name has been suggested to originate from the Latin root solari, or “to soothe”, but the amount of alkaloids elevates their toxicity from mildly irritating to—as in the case of Atropa belladonna—fatal.

Tomatoes originated in South America and are now the base of that most ubiquitous of dishes: pizza.

But tomatoes in all these forms taste nothing like the real thing. To eat a real tomato, you have to hand-pluck it from a farm where the sun has ripened it into this creature that is flat yet bursting with juice. Or have a kindly neighbour with a farmer-mother. Thank you, Jo. Shoba Narayan ate the best strawberries of her life at the East Hampton Farmers’ Market in New York 10 years ago. She still remembers the car she was driving and the clothes she was wearing at that moment. A strawberry, much like a tomato, can create a memory. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

Parenting

LOUNGE EXCERPT | DAD’S THE WORD: THE PERILS AND PLEASURES OF FATHERHOOD

And a father is born A

s part of her English composition exercise, Oishi is required to write stories. Each assignment specifies—in the tradition of the best of genre fiction—whether she should write a ‘funny’ or ‘scary’ or ‘adventure’ story.

Oishi largely enjoys this bit of homework, but—in the tradition of all those who are forced to write rather than those who write because they believe they can’t but write—she hopes that writing will bring her plaudits.

For the most part, she also—and this is in the tradition of most writers, especially those with day jobs (including Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens, Anton Chekhov and Franz Kafka)—writes rather slowly.

So on a Saturday morning, Oishi was laboring over a scary story. Or, there she was at any rate, more wandering around the room than sitting at her desk, looking out of the window with fierce concentration, with a story that was meant to be scary barely begun.

(Imagine how intimidating this can be: Dad’s the Word—The Perils You are condemned to write a story of a And Pleasures of Fatherhood: certain kind. It had better be scary.)

Westland, “Why are you taking so long?”

196 pages, `2,256.

Chandrani asked her, predictable and

Soumya Bhattach­ arya’s book is not a how­to guide on being the perfect parent

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familiar overtones of sinister inquiry in his voice.

“I’m thinking,” Oishi replied. “Sometimes, writing can be hard.” Recognizing in this the ring of absolute truth (sometimes? Oh, it’s hell most of the time), I leapt to Oishi’s defence.

“Look, it’s a story. Vikram Seth would take a day for a couple of sentences.”

“She doesn’t have all day. And she’s not writing what Vikram Seth would,” my wife said, predictable and familiar overtones of scornful disgust in her voice. “I’d like to see the story in half an hour,” she said, and, with an ungentle elbow, made sure that I left the room.

The story did get done in half an hour. (Which might—or might not—go to show that a writer with a day job—or one without one—needn’t always write as slowly as he does.) And it turned out quite well, I thought. It had a well-paced plot: dramatic beginning, meeting with ghost, fright, and adequately feel-good ending when the ghost turns out to be not as malevolent as initially imagined.

But—in the tradition of much fiction—it had its flaws. The inverted vowels in a particular word; a misplaced apostrophe; and, in presumably the hurry to finish in half an hour, a rudimentary error or two.

I was tempted to give it the praise it deserved. Yet, I wanted, too, to point out the mistakes. If I did, the praise would be forgotten, I knew; I would be seen to be a quibbler.

But it isn’t merely quibbling. It’s a wish, I think, to pre-empt dispraise from others; an attempt to protect her from someone else saying something cruel or rude.

John Updike puts the paternal anxiety, this combination of protectiveness and possessiveness, very well in his almost-forgotten classic, Of the Farm: “Nothing is more surprising in children than the way…they give us the courage we need to defend them.”

Soumya Bhattacharya is the editor of Hindustan Times, Mumbai.

Fixed frame: Should creative writing be a time­bound exercise?

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LISTEN TO THE

LOUNGE PODCAST

The original Indian DJ, Nikhil Chinapa chats with us about the rise of electronica in India, as British DJ Fatboy Slim plays at Gurgaon and Bangalore this weekend.

www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

Style

LOUNGE

IN THE CLOSET | PERNIA QURESHI

Vintage verve This stylist and designer prefers timelessness and minimalism in her wardrobe

B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

···························· ut darling I haven’t a thing to wear tonight!” reads stylist and designer Pernia Qureshi’s almost-amonth-old fashion website home page, and she doesn’t deny saying that every now and then. That’s in spite of a wall-towall, floor-to-ceiling walk-in closet at her home in Defence Colony, New Delhi. “It’s just a girl thing,” says Qureshi, laughing, while admitting that her “simple” husband has given up reacting to that remark.

Qureshi first made news when she styled for the movie Aisha, and mirrored the growing global design sensibility of the Indian woman. Last month, to bring haute couture within the reach of anyone and everyone, she launched her online boutique, Pernia’s Pop-Up Shop (perniaspopupshop.com).

As much as you do go giddy looking at all the clothes, shoes and bags, there is a certain precision and pattern to Qureshi’s closet. Clearly a classic dresser, she has her whites, blacks, navys and nudes all in place and in abundance. Her online boutique reflects the same ethic—a neatly put together website with a clear focus on the product and an order in categorization by designer, price, as classics or new pieces.

“I am an online shopper and I realized there was such a lack of a well-curated online fashion store, especially showing Indian designers,” says Qureshi. “If I buy from Net-a-porter.com, it’s because I trust their choice. They give you the best of the season, all in one place. It saves you the trouble of

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going through collections of different designers.”

Asymmetrical kurtas and anarkalis by Anamika Khanna, classic silhouettes by Atsu Sekhose, chic kaftans by Ayesha Khurram, polka-dot saris by Masaba—six months in the making, Qureshi’s collection for her website is reflective of her own sense of fashion. A peek into her wardrobe reaffirms this.

After a styling internship at Elle magazine in New York, stints with French designer Catherine Malandrino as an assistant stylist and as a stylist with Harper’s Bazaar India, Qureshi returned to Delhi in 2008 to practise what she had learnt. She attributes her love and sense of fashion to her mother. “She’s the most stylish woman I know,” says Qureshi.

She spoke to Lounge about her passion for fashion and dressing for the summer. Edited excerpts: Your wardrobe is a mix of

WATCHMAN

SIDIN VADUKUT

THE FUTURE BECKONS

F

or all the variety in the international watch business—from Patek Philippe to Bell & Ross and all the class and chicanery in between—the chief executives of many of these companies tend to say the exact same things in most media interviews. In fact, I have learnt, over the last few years, to ignore almost everything most watch CEOs say for the first 15-30 minutes of an interview. But get past that—past the PR messaging and marketing commitments— and sometimes, you get a glimmer of what they really think about the business, markets and customers.

Sometimes. And even then, not days later, a PR operative will email to say that everything said outside the “message” was off the record. Pity.

One of the questions the industry always seems to shrug off uncomfortably is, “How will you make your products relevant to young people today?” We are not referring to the rich

hedge-fund managers, bankers or Instagram proprietors. Those 20and 30-somethings spend, and spend big.

We are talking about teenagers, young adults and college students, many of whom are merely years away from making their first serious, considered watch-buying decision. If they decide to buy at all. This is a generation that is increasingly learning to manage most of its information, communication and even computing needs with one mobile device: a phone, or perhaps a tablet. Or a Galaxy Note.

The wristwatch is exactly the kind of wasteful, single-purpose device that modern technology and innovation is making obsolete. Sure, many watch marketers will tell you how the watch still sells because men think it is jewellery. “It is the ONLY element of

PHOTOGRAPHS

classics, some statement pieces, brands and flea-market finds.

Where do you shop?

I shop from anywhere and everywhere. I don’t discriminate. It’s not about brands and labels, it’s about clothes. Through school, I used to shop at Sarojini Nagar and Janpath. In New York, I love the vintage stores. I travel a lot so I shop a lot, everything from GAP to couture. When in India, I buy from Indian designers. It only makes sense.

jewellery and accessory that men have!” they tell you fervently.

This has a kernel of truth in it, but what if the next generation of potential customers doesn’t want jewellery? What if their idea of conspicuous consumption is not what they own—watches, cars, clothes—but what they do—travel, eat, cook, read, develop? There are tremendous avenues for luxury in the latter.

Which is why I have always been fascinated by how the big-name brands continue to treat new technology with disdain. The farthest some of them will go is to make entry-level quartz models to capture new customers. But others detest even this. How then, I wonder, will they convince a new customer in 2015 or 2020—someone who finds his phone obsolete

Who are your favourite Indian designers?

A designer who never fails me is Anamika Khanna. Also, I love Atsu and Savio Jon. A designer who is really riding high right now is Anand Kabra. I had no green in my closet, but now I do. After looking at Kabra’s Spring/Summer collection, I wanted to buy all of it. He’s really good with prints, his cuts are unique, and he’s good with mixing Indian with contemporary.

If you had to choose between a classic and something really edgy, which would you pick?

Honestly, I’ll go for a classic. If you buy something edgy, you can only wear it once. But something classic is everlasting. You can change the look a bit, put a jacket over it, maybe a chunky necklace over it, and it looks different every time. My yellow skirt that I picked up at a vintage store in New

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PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Sneak peak: (clockwise from top) A vintage clutch by Judith Leiber; a bag by Loro Piana; sandals by Manolo Blahnik; a bustier by Atsu; a necklace by Chanel; and Pernia Qureshi in an Anand Kabra dress.

York—I’ve matched it with so many things, and every time it becomes a new outfit. Classics allow a lot more versatility.

As a stylist and designer, do you feel you have to carry a cultivated look all the time?

Not at all. Neat and presentable is a given, after that everything depends on my mood. I go with anything from jeans and tees to a well-tailored Pakistani salwarkameez. I don’t even use make-up on a daily basis. Especially for women and girls who work and have a family, it’s impractical to be dolled up all the time.

Dual purpose: The Pebble smart watch piggybacks on your iPhone or Android phone and channels information to your watch screen. in six months—to cough up $10,000 for a watch that uses technology which is 200 years old? For a function the cheapest mobile phone will do with infinitely greater accuracy?

At this year’s BaselWorld fair in March, I was thoroughly impressed with some of the work that Seiko and Citizen are doing. Seiko’s new GPS solar technology has all the potential to become an industry standard,

especially with the inevitable improvements over the next few years. Citizen’s Eco-Drive is, for me, a hallmark of applied science. Both innovations—automatic time-setting based on location and hassle-free power—are useful and somewhat geeky. These are good, honest innovations.

But I have been truly blown away by the work being done by a company called Pebble Technology. Pebble recently put up one of its projects on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com. Its idea is to create a smart watch, complete

You don’t wear too much jewellery or accessories.

I like buying jewellery but I hardly wear it. You’ll never catch me wearing too much of it, maybe on rare occasions like my wedding. I like wearing one thing at a time—a cocktail ring or a statement neck piece. I don’t want the jewellery to wear me, which happens too often to women in Delhi.

Christian Louboutin is a favourite?

I love high heels, and Louboutin makes them the most comfortable and has the most variety, from basics to really cool, unique designs. He came to India and charmed everyone here. I did go through a sparkly phase, so I bought a lot of golden, silver and Swarovski-studded heels.

Give us a look for this summer.

Summer should be about easy dressing. A white salwar-kameez is the way for this summer.

Whether you do an elaborate anarkali or some straight cuts, it looks pristine and beautiful. Even for the website, we bought some white pieces from Varun Bahl. I’m especially enamoured by Pakistani salwar-kameez this season.

They are airy, comfortable, yet have a beautiful structure. They make you look slim and tall. I love the kaftans and kurtas by Ayesha Khurram. She’s done contemporary pieces; one even has a Marilyn Monroe print on it.

The how-to section on your website is a great idea.

I am a stylist first, I wanted to incorporate my skill in this website, and also make it interactive and fun. The point of the how-to section was to give people an inside look into the fashion world. I’ll do styling tips, how to take the day look to evening, put together things, drape a sari. I’m open to requests.

with a processor, vibration motor, accelerometer, waterproofing, Bluetooth, smartphone integration and a screen made with the e-paper technology that powers e-book readers.

The Pebble, as the watch is called, basically piggybacks on your iPhone or Android phone and channels a bucketload of information to your watch screen. This includes caller alerts, email, GPS information and even Internet alerts. In time, the company says, it will also have an app marketplace exclusively for software meant for use on the Pebble.

This has been tried before, mostly poorly. But Pebble’s demo video is astonishing, and I have great hopes for the device that will be priced at around $120 (around `6,200). The founders were hoping to raise $100,000 online. So far they have netted pledges for more than $8 million.

They expect to ship out watches starting September.

If the Pebble works, I sincerely hope it motivates some of the more traditional watch brands to embrace new technology and, therefore, potential customers with less fear and derision.

Write to Sidin at watchman@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

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Play

LOUNGE REVIEW | HTC ONE X

Is this the One? The company’s Android refresh is being led by a stylish and substantial phone B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· aiwanese handset maker HTC has launched two new handsets, the One X and One V in India in April. The One series is HTC’s attempt to provide buyers with a simplified line-up of handsets after a bad run in 2011.

The HTC One X is supposed to compete with the iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and at `37,899, the One X is priced competitively.

T

The phone is a premium device, the first quad-core phone in India, with one of the best cameras and displays around.

Running HTC Sense 4 on top of Android 4.0, the software interface is the most user-friendly Android experience, and the One X also has a polycarbonate unibody design—the entire phone is made of an ultralight, high-strength plastic which looks extremely stylish and cheerful.

The phone does not support miscroSD cards and has 32 GB

storage. This is supplemented by 25 GB of free cloud storage on Dropbox. The Dropbox app can be accessed from any computer or mobile device, and photos can be set to uploaded automatically.

Any documents of media items that you don’t need to have at hand can also be offloaded to the cloud, with the added benefit that you can put files and media on your phone from your computer without ever having to connect the two with a cable.

The HTC One X is thin, at just 8.9mm, and the white polycarbonate shell has gentle curves that make it easy to hold, despite a huge 4.7-inch display. The front of the phone is all screen, coated in scratch-proof Gorilla Glass, and the polycarbonate is white all through, so scratches at the back aren’t visible. The camera is centred in the upper half of the back,

HTC One X: This is possibly the best Android phone now available. in a slightly projected cone, and serves as the only piece of colour.

The 4.7-inch display uses a Super LCD2 panel, and runs at 720p. It has a pixel density of 316ppi, almost the same as the iPhone 4S, and reading and browsing are really helped by this. The contrast and colour range on the phone is excellent,

which makes watching movies and playing games a pleasurable experience.

The 8 MP camera can be switched on in 0.7 seconds and takes only 0.2 seconds between shots. The camera stands out from the body, and while that looks great, it does make the lens more open to scratches.

The phone is powered by an Nvidia quad core 1.5 GHz CPU, and it’s fast for most uses. With a few games, the phone had issues such as not registering touches and slowdowns. This is an acknowledged software issue that is affecting some users—the company has recently issued an update to fix the battery and performance concerns affecting some handsets.

Our battery experience was good—going a day and a half between charges—but others didn’t fare well, and a quick Web search confirmed that for some users at least, the battery was discharging in just 6-8 hours.

The HTC One X is available at retail outlets and HTC also has a range of accessories available, such as a camera stand, battery-charger packs and Beats audio headphones.

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www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

NIGEL PORTWOOD

On selling a word The youngest CEO in publishing is getting the 426­year­old Oxford University Press to embrace the digital age

worthy not only because the 45-year-old is running a 426-year-old organization but because of the way he has chosen to run it, embracing the digital age and trying to “outrun change”.

Marrying “old school” practices with contemporary publishing technology is how he’s chosen to run this leg of the race. OUP already has several successful digital products such as Oxford Reference Online, Oxford Dictionaries Online and Oxford Scholarship Online. “It’s true that our brand name is a throwback to when people wrote in Latin and didn’t have electric light.

But as a publisher today, I know we cannot be successful without going digital,” says Portwood.

With an engineering degree from Cambridge, UK, and an MBA from Insead, France, Portwood started his career in 1990 with a brief stint as a strategic management consultant. So how did a business management graduate with an engineering background end up in publishing?

“Even as a strategy consultant, my clients were in media and publishing and I found that tremendously challenging,” says Portwood. “Publishing is a big business and has to be run as a big business, but it’s got a creative spark that makes all the difference between success and failure. It’s about placing risky bets all over the place.”

For Portwood, making the shift from the corporate environs of Manhattan to the Oxford campus—where the offices of the OUP are across the road from that of the vice-chancellor—with his wife and three children, wasn’t particularly challenging. “My day-to-day job remains the same: making broad-range decisions and directing where we’re headed as a company,” he says. “It’s not an enormous industry, so you tend to work with some of the same people.”

The educational arena has been Portwood’s strength through his career. At Pearson, he helped reshape its portfolio by investing in the educational and publishing areas. He also oversaw the group’s education publishing portfolio in Europe, Middle East and Africa from 1999-2003.

While heading a publishing house that once had the sole rights to publish the Bible brings with it the benefit of thoroughbred ancestry, it also means that one has to work within certain boundaries.

One of Portwood’s recent

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

··························· hat’s unique about India is that when you’re driving around, you’re more likely to see hoardings selling coaching classes and new colleges than toothpaste or biscuits,” says Nigel Portwood, global CEO of Oxford University Press (OUP). This observation serves him well as he draws up strategies for the brand’s development in India.

In New Delhi in March to attend events to commemorate 100 years of OUP in India, Portwood was filing away his insights as they came. With a turnover close to `300 crore and approximately 400 titles published in India every year, the country is the fifth largest market for OUP, which functions as a department of the University of Oxford in the UK. It is the world’s largest university press, publishing more than 4,500 new books a year, with a presence in more than 50 countries. The publishing house operates in both print and digital formats in a wide range of fields, including scholarly books, journals, educational titles, Englishlanguage teaching resources, and reference works.

“Add all the other university presses together and we’re still bigger,” says Portwood, who confesses that he’s more than glad to have this legacy served to him on a platter.

Portwood joined the company in 2009 after 14 years with the publishing conglomerate Pearson, where he held various positions.

Most recently, he was executive president for global operations for The Penguin Group, owned by Pearson, in New York.

When Portwood took the reins of OUP, he became the youngest CEO of a major publishing house. This is note-

W

IN PARENTHESIS The third edition of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary‘ (‘OED’) is 12 years into its 30­year working frame, with a team of 70 lexicographers at work on it. “This is an ambitious edition,” says Portwood.

“Neologisms from every English­speaking country are under consideration to be included.”

With the first edition out in 1857, the ‘OED’ is the world’s most comprehensive single­language print dictionary, according to the Guinness World Records. The third edition, expected in 2030, is likely to be well above 600,000 words.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Modern missionary: Portwood says the OUP’s publishing decisions are guided by the university’s mission—‘to promote excellence’.

challenges was getting cleared a digital English-language teaching course which uses Disney characters: Mickey Mouse guiding toddlers through the Queen’s English.

It was finally approved.

From the 17th century, the university has followed a system to oversee the press: A group of academics appointed by the vice-chancellor, known as the “delegates of the press”, meet every two weeks during term-time to review publishing proposals and discuss other press business.

“Every book is vetted by each of these scholars. They vouch that the press is putting in sufficient effort; that the author or editor has responded to any peer criticism or reviews. They basically ask if the book is worthy of OUP and this ensures that all of our processes leading up to that meeting are rigorous,” says Portwood.

From growing at twice the global rate of 8-9% in India before his arrival, Portwood’s strategies have changed those figures to thrice the global rate. More Indian academics are being published by OUP for global markets. “We’re in the process of including 140 new monographs by Indian academics on our online database for access by libraries and academic institutions worldwide,” says Portwood.

It is the pace of the publishing industry that keeps him engaged. “Everything is changing so quickly now. In my first 15 years in this business, nobody spoke about publishing’s backstage. It was something that someone you didn’t know did to get you a book on your bookshelf. Now, with the Kindle, iPad, etc., the future of publishing is public discourse.”

Portwood has a particular interest in new trends in publishing and what they mean for growing markets such as India and China. When he took over OUP at the wane of the global recession, a change in strategy was called for.

“I felt OUP had under-invested in growth. We were afraid to try new things, particularly internationally. We could surely afford more ambition,” says Portwood.

Plunging head first into digitization was the first of it. “Despite our ‘academic’ image, we were actually one of the first publishing houses to adapt to changing technology and go online,” says Portwood.

While OUP already offers interactive digital materials for teachers and students, around 140 digitized academic titles especially geared to India are forthcoming on the Oxford Scholarship Online website, along with important reference works like The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India on the product called The Digital Reference Shelf.

Portwood says he was brought up believing that the Oxford English Dictionary was akin to a Bible. “Always at arm’s length,” he says. He also compulsively collected OUP’s classics’ titles.

Now, the fanboy in him is spoilt for choice.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

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Eat/Drink

LOUNGE OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

‘San Francisco, ’tis hard to leave’ SAMAR HALARNKAR

right encompassing the wide spread of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Plucking lemons from the tree in our backyard and squeezing the juice on everything from couscous to bork.

“San Francisco,” as Rudyard Kipling noted, “has only one drawback—’tis hard to leave.”

How about bork, a pig whose father was a boar? New discoveries occupy our columnist’s last days in Berkeley

D

o you really have boar?”

The young man ran his hand through his rough, blond hair and hesitated at my question.

“Well, unfortunately, not today,” he said from behind a table laden with untidily strewn packets of various kinds of meat. It was a glorious Berkeley spring day, 16 degrees Celsius, bright and sunny at 7pm.

The young farmer, clad in a plaid shirt, saw my eyes fall again to the board, where in chalk he had clearly scribbled that he was selling grass-fed pork, beef and boar.

“Oh well, thanks anyway,” I said and started to move on, when the farmer plunged his hand into the heap of meat packets and said, “But I do have this.”

“Pork?” I asked, disinterested because, really, how much difference could I, brought up on the snuffling black pigs of southern India, tell between farm-raised pork and their unfortunate cousins bred in industrial farms?

“No sir, the dad was a boar, only the mama was a pig.”

Now, I was interested. I often ate boar growing up in the Deccan, and I remember it as a meat that required a lot of cooking, but once spiced and cooked, it carved out an indelible space in my memories.

So here in Berkeley, at the weekly Farmers’ Market, created by blocking off one end of the main street near our home, I mulled my novel purchase. It was expensive, about 400g for

$28 (around `1,460). For that money I could have bought four-five times the quantity of salmon caught somewhere in the wild Atlantic, the best beef or lamb on offer.

It was worth it, I reckoned.

After all, we are down to our last 15 days in Berkeley. Where in India would I be able to buy what I have now termed “bork”, half boar, half pig?

As I ponder our five months in organic-obsessed Berkeley, I treasure the fresh, unusual food—well, unusual to us—we have cooked.

Bork is only the latest. I have eaten mahi-mahi (a fish with firm, white flakes), Ossobuco (veal shank with a juicy marrow bone in the middle—in Italian, literally “bone with a hole”), fresh salad with edible flowers. I could go on. I will especially miss scrunching on the salad with my noisy, wide-eyed two-year-old pointing to the flowers and reciting “ello”, “porpol”. That’s yellow, purple to you folks without kids.

The week before the bork episode, at the end of my late-morning run down the quiet streets draped in the wildflower blooms of spring, I found myself at the local hub for fresh produce, Monterey Market (a confession: My runs always seem to end at the market, after which I find myself walking home with random purchases, from The New York Times to pizza to fish).

We like the crowded marketplace because it is quite unlike the giant, aircraft-

Baked mackerel Serves 3 A word in advance: The mackerel (bangda) available in India is a miniature version of the one I baked in Berkeley.

However, the recipe holds. Vary spice amounts accordingly. My advice is to substitute with surmai (kingfish), as under:

Fishy business: Bake the mackerel with a little sesame oil, chilli powder, garlic and lemon juice. hanger-sized grocery stores so beloved of the US. From elephant garlic (each clove, or piece, is twice, maybe three, times the size of an entire desi garlic pod) to bottles of freshly squeezed blood-red orange juice to varieties of fresh-baked bread, the market is our local wonderland.

Outside the Monterey Market is a line of little shops, again uncharacteristic of modern USA. There’s the quiet, old man who runs the tobacco-and-newspaper store.

There’s the neighbourhood pizza shop, turning out the best, simple thin-crust pizzas (with sausage or spinach as the chief toppings) we have ever tasted. There’s the butcher,

Green bowled

with the shelf of spices from across the world. And there’s the fishmonger, selling fresh fish from local bays and the Pacific Ocean.

I finally listened to the wife, who was trying to persuade me to buy from the fishmonger instead of supermarket cold-storages. But, you know, after spending a lifetime washing dirty fish in India, it was just a relief to open the pre-cut, pre-washed fish packet and bung it in. Now, as our stay wound down, I thought it was time to visit the fishmonger. I was glad I did.

I bought two arm-sized Atlantic mackerel, one a 2-pounder (just under 1kg), the other a 3-pounder, after getting

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Some pretty pieces to serve your fruits and salads in B Y K OMAL S HARMA p apartment9: Bone china bowl, at N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi; and Mereweather Road, Colaba, Mumbai, `1,800.

komal.sharma@livemint.com

························

q Fabindia: Natural wood bowl, at N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi; Jeroo Building, Colaba, Mumbai; 152, Commercial Street, Bangalore; and 11A, Allenby Road, Kolkata, `1,190.

p Fabindia: Ceramic bowl, at N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi; Jeroo Building, Colaba, Mumbai; 152, Commercial Street, Ban­ galore; and 11A, Allenby Road, Kolkata, `1,990.

q Address Home: Golden bowl, at N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi, `5,900.

p HomeStop: Deep dish, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Inorbit mall, Malad, Mumbai; and Raheja Point, Ashok Nagar, Bangalore, `899.

the head lopped off in deference to my brother-in-law, who will eat fish but cannot suffer two dead eyes staring at him over lunch.

At any rate, you can read what I did with the mackerel.

So we prepare to move on from Berkeley and wind our way back to Bangalore. We will miss our life here. The great food. The shady country lane and bridge over the local stream that take us to the neighbourhood kiddie park.

Stopping frequently to pluck “dandandans”, as my daughter calls dandelions, blowing them and giggling as the seeds float away on little parachutes. The walk to office through the Berkeley Hills, the views to my

Ingredients 1kg surmai, lop off head, gut and clean 3-4 tsp chilli powder 1-2 tsp garlic paste Juice of 1 lemon or 2 limes 1 sprig of rosemary Salt to taste Method Rub the chilli powder, lemon juice, salt and garlic into the fish. Stuff the rosemary sprig into the belly. Pour a little sesame oil over the fish, wrap in foil and bake in a preheated oven at 275 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes.

Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times. He is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley.

Write to him at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | AYESHA JALAL Across time: (from far left) Film­maker Ardeshir Irani’s former film studio; the decades­old Sarvi restaurant at Nagpada; Rafique Baghdadi pauses outside the Imperial theatre on Lamington Road on his walk through Saadat Hasan Manto’s neighbourhood; and (right) Manto.

THE WITNESS The historian on her forthcoming book about Manto, her great­uncle B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

······································· yesha Jalal, Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University, US, is one of the world’s foremost historians on modern South Asia. Having written books on subjects ranging from jihad in the region to the history of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, her next project is more personal: It is a history of Partition connected to the life and work of Saadat Hasan Manto, who happened to be Jalal’s great-uncle. On a visit to India earlier this year, she spoke to Lounge about The Pity of Partition: Manto as Witness to History, to be published early in 2013 by Princeton University Press, and in India by HarperCollins India. Edited excerpts:

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PHOTOGRAPHS

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GOPAL MS/MINT

CENTENARY

HERE LIES MANTO

Saadat Hasan Manto is more popular than ever before, but there is little evidence in Mumbai today that one of 20th century’s great short­story writers once lived and worked here

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· t 44, Clare Road in Byculla, Mumbai, the building which housed the former Adelphi Hotel now stands in the midst of the Ismailia Co-Operative Housing Society. The residents, suspicious of journalists entering the premises, want to know why the building is important.

“We are looking for the place where the writer (Saadat Hasan) Manto lived when he worked in Bombay,” explains veteran film critic and historian Rafique Baghdadi. “It’s his barsi this May—a hundred years since he was born.

We are interested in the places where he lived, and which he wrote about.”

“Manto who?” asks a resident.

Baghdadi and his walkers are turned away.

On a sweltering morning in April, Baghdadi is at the end of a walk through south Mumbai’s Grant Road, Nagpada and Byculla neighbourhoods, in search of the Urdu writer Manto, perhaps even more famous for having left Mumbai than having lived there.

Manto had spent 12 years here, writing movies like Chal Chal Re Naujawan and Eight Days, among others, for Bombay Talkies and Filmistan. His short stories and sketches, which rarely linger on the specifics of their location, are nonetheless full of the atmosphere of the spaces he inhabited.

There is Kennedy Bridge, which once overlooked the sparkling

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windows of courtesans’ quarters, and at one end of which Manto’s employer, the film-maker Ardeshir Irani, had a film studio bordering the railway tracks; Arab Gali, off Grant Road (now Maulana Shaukat Ali Road), where Manto once rented a room; the venerable Sarvi restaurant at Nagpada junction, from where a Manto character orders kebabs in one of his stories.

Everywhere in this district there is evidence of a glittering multicultural world, full of Parsi, Muslim, Christian and Jewish landmarks, the now-darkened offices of old-time film producers, and a handful of the grand movie theatres of the Times Square of the East—the Alfred, the Imperial, the Super, the Novelty.

“He didn’t describe the areas he was writing about much,” says Baghdadi. But these were the streets which Manto missed bitterly in the last years of his life, troubled by poverty, alcoholism and legal persecution, eking out a living in Lahore by writing some of his finest work—which ranged from short stories about Partition to scintillating sketches of his former colleagues in Bombay cinema—and some of his most forgettable. “I am a walking, talking Bombay,” he wrote in one of these pieces. “I loved that city then and I love it today.”

Of the movies he wrote in his time in Mumbai, a handful retain their place in public memory, with Mirza Ghalib, written in 1948 but filmed after he had left for Pakistan, perhaps the most

famous. It would have pleased him, had he lived long enough, to learn that Clare Road’s official name is now Mirza Ghalib Marg.

The enigma Going in search of Manto has always yielded mixed results, not only for Byculla’s flâneurs, but also for scholars, translators and readers. “He was an enigma in his lifetime,” begins Jagdish Chander Wadhawan’s 1989 biography, Manto Naama, “and is still an enigma...years after his death.”

The English translation of Manto Naama, by Jai Ratan, came out in 1998, in a somewhat different literary climate. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s anthology of Indian writing post-1947, Mirrorwork, had been published a year earlier. Controversially, Rushdie and West had chosen to include only one work of fiction in translation. This was Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, the fable-like story of the inhabitants of a mental asylum facing an “exchange” across borders during Partition. On the 50th anniversary of India and Pakistan’s independence—the 50th anniversary of Partition—Manto, whom Wadhawan describes as a writer for whom “few persons had praise...during his lifetime,” came to enjoy a posthumous wave of near-universal admiration.

It was a moment of bizarre poetic justice for the man—he died in 1955—who composed his own epitaph in the words: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto.

With him lie buried all the arts

and mysteries of short-story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who of the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he.”

Those familiar with the Manto classics—Toba Tek Singh, as well as landmark stories like Kali Shalwar, Khol Do, Bu and Thanda Gosht—may find it difficult to see a writer whose work is paid such close attention as an enigma. The tone of his epitaph is instantly recognizable, since it shares the style of his rattlingly concise short stories: tongue-in-cheek, morbid, full of suppressed and fierce emotion.

A hundred years after Manto’s birth on 11 May 1912 in Samrala, Punjab, he is read by more people than ever before, and acknowledged as one of the most powerful voices of his time. “At his best,” as Lahore-based literary critic Bilal Tanweer says, “he is as good as anyone in the world.”

But for all that subcontinental readers and writers inevitably run across Manto, often early in their reading life, “no one cared about Manto until the late 1990s,” says Urdu scholar and translator Muhammad Umar Memon. “It was only after the 50th anniversary that he began to acquire his reputation as a writer of Partition and his work taken up as a document of Partition. This has done him a disservice: a fiction writer is not a documentarian.”

Evidence shows that his contemporaries certainly cared about him, but not to his benefit. He wrote, among other things, about murderers, prostitutes and rioters,

a parade of venal men and women in the habit of survival.

Their ordinariness has the power to make readers flinch even across the decades. During his lifetime, he was called to the stand as a defendant in no less than six obscenity cases, asked to explain why he was writing “filth” (in one judge’s words) like Kali Shalwar or Dhuan, short stories hauled up for their approach to sexuality and prostitution.

As damaging as Manto’s cast of incidental criminals would be to his career when he was alive, they have been enormously influential to those subcontinental writers who took his writing to heart. Via email, Rushdie says: “What attracted me to Manto was his approach to low-life subjects.

I’ve always been interested in writers who investigate the underbelly of society, and I like it that Manto is neither sentimental nor hard-boiled, using, instead, a form of ironic dispassion that paradoxically becomes very moving.”

“I liked the simple clarity of the story’s ruling metaphor of insane people caught up in a larger insanity,” he says of Toba Tek Singh, whose inclusion in Mirrorwork has arguably contributed to its reputation as Manto’s masterpiece. “And I liked even more Manto’s elliptical treatment of that metaphor (he’s far too subtle to “unpack” it and thus make it obvious and pedestrian). I liked the repeated

nonsense phrase, “Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain,” and the way it seems to teeter on the edge of meaning, paralleling the larger absurd universe in which the characters are trapped, which also almost, but never quite, makes sense. And I liked the unresolved tragedy of the ending.”

Author Keki Daruwalla once suggested that Manto’s insularity, his disinterest in the world outside India at a time when so much was going on in the world—the Spanish civil war, the rise of Fascism and Nazism—can make him, in some respects, an oblivious writer. We might equally say that Toba Tek Singh, even if its author did not intend it so, reflects not just the plight of India and Pakistan, but the whole world, in a century when the promises of nationalism systematically failed, and war went from being a battle between armed forces, to a constant crisis in which no one suffered more than civilians.

In search of Manto Reputations change through time. In his centenary year, we are no closer to a consensus about Manto’s work, and his influence on our literary life, than his contemporaries ever were. With much of his best work in translation, his literary career may seem like an open book, especially in India, where translations from other lan-

guages are only slowly gaining a popular readership in English, and Manto’s work is more readily available than most.

But any vast and inconsistent body of work elicits arguments and polarizing opinions, and Manto’s readers today continue to argue over his work and its meanings. “His Partition stories are the most fashionable but in some ways they’re the most banal, constantly studied for some sort of historic symmetry between India and Pakistan,” says Aatish Taseer, who translated 10 stories for his 2008 collection, Manto: Selected Stories. “I was tired of the existing translations, with their convent-school English and their stiffness. Manto is anything but stiff.”

Manto remains persona non grata to the political establishment in the subcontinent: Perhaps this explains why subcontinental cities are more likely to have a Mirza Ghalib Marg than a Saadat Hasan Manto Road.

“We shall be celebrating Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth centenary in May 2012,” wrote Ajmal Kamal in Pakistan’s The Express Tribune this February. “By ‘we’, I mean his readers for whom Manto has been one great and rare source of insight about ourselves as a people. For the official ‘nation’…he has always been the enfant terrible, the rather recent efforts to somehow co-opt him for the official world view notwithstanding.”

In search of Manto in Byculla, Baghdadi points out that the

neighbourhood in which he once lived has changed little.

The marble plaques in Christ Church, across the road from Manto’s old house on Clare Road, recall the histories of members of its congregation who lived here over a century ago. Scratch the Urdu and Marathi flyers from the walls of the municipal garden, and the Star of David underneath, confirming its identity as an old Jewish cemetery, is intact. Any evidence of the writer of Mirza Ghalib and Mozail, Thanda Gosht and Letters to Uncle Sam having once lived here, though,

must now be imagined.

“Take him away, Lord, for he runs away from fragrance and chases after filth,” Manto wrote about himself in his cheeky, devastating supplication to God, Manto’s Prayer. “He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you.”

Deep within Christ Church across the road, a Robert Southey verse honouring the dead offers a quiet rejoinder. “Fame’s loudest trump on the ear of time/leaves but a dying echo: They alone/are held in ever-lasting memory/ whose deeds partake of heaven.”

What was the origin of this book?

When I was invited to give the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton (University, in 2011), somebody said “Why don’t you do a microhistory?” The microhistory that came to mind was Manto’s, because I’d been in the process of organizing and locating some of his papers. I thought I could connect his life and his work—the micro—to the macro event of Partition.

How do you approach Manto as a reader?

I must first of all say that he’s known as a fiction writer, but for me he is a terrific writer of memoir. He has written many essays that are crucial in the writing of Muslim and Pakistani history. His short stories are clearly very important, and I enjoy them. He writes concisely; he’s gripping. I’ve been reading them or hearing of them since I was a child.

And then, he is my grand-uncle. He was dead by the time I was born, but I grew up in a household calling him Manto abbajaan.

So he was present in his absence.

He had a lot of influence on me and why I turned to studying history. I was curious to know what he wrote was more than fiction; (it) was fact. I turned to history for that.

What did you find?

It was corroborated to the extent that I accept that Manto was better. He captured that violence better than any historian could. We are constrained by our methodologies, in our need to be able to produce the sources. In many ways Manto was a great historical writer but, of course, he didn’t have to suffer the constraining aspects of history.

He was something of a polarizing figure in his lifetime.

He was that. But the beauty of Manto was—he said, you know, I don’t write filth.

I don’t write obscenity. I only write what is there in your society. So why are you so ashamed? Clearly he made people uncomfortable; the sort of people who didn’t blink an eyelid going to a prostitute, but would be infuriated if any mention was made of the prostitute as a human being.

But, you know, we keep harping on how Manto was polarizing; I must also say he has a lot of admiration across the subcontinent and I think that is very unifying as well.

Was there an emotional tension in writing about someone to whom you are related?

All I’ll say is that I would not have written this book as my first book. But there comes a time to do it, and I always knew I would do it.

HINDUSTAN

EXTRACT

A SPIRIT LIKE LIQUOR A section of Manto’s short story ‘Siraj’, translated by Matt Reeck

D

hundhu was outside the Iranian restaurant across from the small park near the Nagpada Police Station, and he was leaning against the electricity pole that he manned from sunset until four in the morning.

I don’t know his real name but everyone called him Dhundhu, which was fitting because his job was to find girls that satisfied his customers’ varied tastes. He had been a pimp for about ten years and in that time he had pimped thousands of girls of every religion, race, and temperament.

Since the beginning, he had been working from the same pole outside the Iranian restaurant across from the small park. It had become his symbol, so much so that the two were inseparable in my mind. Whenever I went by the pole and saw the white chuna lime and red kattha betel stains where people had wiped their fingers, I mistook it for Dhundhu chewing throat lozenges and betel paan.

Dhundhu was tall. The pole was too, and a mess of wires coiled at its top. One wire

extended far across to another pole, where it merged with the entanglement of wires there.

Another wire looped across to a building, and yet another went to a store. It seemed that this pole commanded a large area, and that its influence radiated out through other poles to encompass the entire city.

The Telephone Department had installed a box on the pole so that from time to time they could check to see if the wires were working. I often thought that Dhundhu was also a type of box, one there next to the pole to collect information about men’s sexual desires. He knew all the rich men, both those in the surrounding neighborhoods and in the far-flung ones, men who from time to time (or always) wanted to have sex, either to check if their plumbing still worked or to relieve stress.

He also knew all the girls in the trade. He knew everything about their bodies, as well as their temperaments—he knew very well which one was right for which customer at which time. There was only one, Siraj, whom he

Beneath the bridge: Some parts of Manto’s Mumbai, like this church near Kennedy Bridge, are unchanged.

couldn’t figure out.

Dhundhu had said to me many times, “The bitch’s crazy. Manto Sahib, I don’t understand her. She’s very moody. Sometimes she’s all fire, and sometimes she’s like ice. She cracks up laughing, and then suddenly she starts crying.

The bitch can’t get along with anyone. She fights with every trick. I’ve told her many times, ‘Look, straighten up, or go back to wherever you came from. Your clothes are rags. You have hardly any money for food. You know, fighting and cheating’s not the way to get ahead.’ But she’s a real pill. She doesn’t listen to anyone.”

I had seen Siraj once or twice. She was really skinny but beautiful, and her prominent eyes overshadowed her oval face’s every other feature. When I saw her for the first time on Clare Road, I was puzzled. I wanted to tell her eyes, “Excuse me, please move aside a little so I can see Siraj.” Needless to say, it didn’t happen.

She was small, and her body was like a carafe and her spirit was like liquor so strong that someone had added water, although this

adulteration strangely didn’t make the liquid any less intoxicating but merely more abundant. Her body radiated allure.

Seeing her, I could guess she was upset. Her matted hair, sharp nose, clenched lips, and fingernails—which looked like the pointy tips of cartographers’ pencils—advertised her irritable disposition. She seemed upset at Dhundhu, at the pole, at the customers he brought to her, but also at her big eyes and at her thin, long fingers, perhaps because she wanted to use them like cartographers employ their pencils to make something fine and yet she couldn’t accomplish this. But this is the impression of a short-story writer who in describing a tiny facial mole can make it seem as large as the sang-e-aswad in Mecca.

Matt Reeck is a writer and translator based in New York. This excerpt is from “Bombay Stories”, his manuscript of translations of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories related to the city of Mumbai.

On history: Ayesha Jalal.

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Q&A | AYESHA JALAL Across time: (from far left) Film­maker Ardeshir Irani’s former film studio; the decades­old Sarvi restaurant at Nagpada; Rafique Baghdadi pauses outside the Imperial theatre on Lamington Road on his walk through Saadat Hasan Manto’s neighbourhood; and (right) Manto.

THE WITNESS The historian on her forthcoming book about Manto, her great­uncle B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

······································· yesha Jalal, Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University, US, is one of the world’s foremost historians on modern South Asia. Having written books on subjects ranging from jihad in the region to the history of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, her next project is more personal: It is a history of Partition connected to the life and work of Saadat Hasan Manto, who happened to be Jalal’s great-uncle. On a visit to India earlier this year, she spoke to Lounge about The Pity of Partition: Manto as Witness to History, to be published early in 2013 by Princeton University Press, and in India by HarperCollins India. Edited excerpts:

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CENTENARY

HERE LIES MANTO

Saadat Hasan Manto is more popular than ever before, but there is little evidence in Mumbai today that one of 20th century’s great short­story writers once lived and worked here

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· t 44, Clare Road in Byculla, Mumbai, the building which housed the former Adelphi Hotel now stands in the midst of the Ismailia Co-Operative Housing Society. The residents, suspicious of journalists entering the premises, want to know why the building is important.

“We are looking for the place where the writer (Saadat Hasan) Manto lived when he worked in Bombay,” explains veteran film critic and historian Rafique Baghdadi. “It’s his barsi this May—a hundred years since he was born.

We are interested in the places where he lived, and which he wrote about.”

“Manto who?” asks a resident.

Baghdadi and his walkers are turned away.

On a sweltering morning in April, Baghdadi is at the end of a walk through south Mumbai’s Grant Road, Nagpada and Byculla neighbourhoods, in search of the Urdu writer Manto, perhaps even more famous for having left Mumbai than having lived there.

Manto had spent 12 years here, writing movies like Chal Chal Re Naujawan and Eight Days, among others, for Bombay Talkies and Filmistan. His short stories and sketches, which rarely linger on the specifics of their location, are nonetheless full of the atmosphere of the spaces he inhabited.

There is Kennedy Bridge, which once overlooked the sparkling

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windows of courtesans’ quarters, and at one end of which Manto’s employer, the film-maker Ardeshir Irani, had a film studio bordering the railway tracks; Arab Gali, off Grant Road (now Maulana Shaukat Ali Road), where Manto once rented a room; the venerable Sarvi restaurant at Nagpada junction, from where a Manto character orders kebabs in one of his stories.

Everywhere in this district there is evidence of a glittering multicultural world, full of Parsi, Muslim, Christian and Jewish landmarks, the now-darkened offices of old-time film producers, and a handful of the grand movie theatres of the Times Square of the East—the Alfred, the Imperial, the Super, the Novelty.

“He didn’t describe the areas he was writing about much,” says Baghdadi. But these were the streets which Manto missed bitterly in the last years of his life, troubled by poverty, alcoholism and legal persecution, eking out a living in Lahore by writing some of his finest work—which ranged from short stories about Partition to scintillating sketches of his former colleagues in Bombay cinema—and some of his most forgettable. “I am a walking, talking Bombay,” he wrote in one of these pieces. “I loved that city then and I love it today.”

Of the movies he wrote in his time in Mumbai, a handful retain their place in public memory, with Mirza Ghalib, written in 1948 but filmed after he had left for Pakistan, perhaps the most

famous. It would have pleased him, had he lived long enough, to learn that Clare Road’s official name is now Mirza Ghalib Marg.

The enigma Going in search of Manto has always yielded mixed results, not only for Byculla’s flâneurs, but also for scholars, translators and readers. “He was an enigma in his lifetime,” begins Jagdish Chander Wadhawan’s 1989 biography, Manto Naama, “and is still an enigma...years after his death.”

The English translation of Manto Naama, by Jai Ratan, came out in 1998, in a somewhat different literary climate. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s anthology of Indian writing post-1947, Mirrorwork, had been published a year earlier. Controversially, Rushdie and West had chosen to include only one work of fiction in translation. This was Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, the fable-like story of the inhabitants of a mental asylum facing an “exchange” across borders during Partition. On the 50th anniversary of India and Pakistan’s independence—the 50th anniversary of Partition—Manto, whom Wadhawan describes as a writer for whom “few persons had praise...during his lifetime,” came to enjoy a posthumous wave of near-universal admiration.

It was a moment of bizarre poetic justice for the man—he died in 1955—who composed his own epitaph in the words: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto.

With him lie buried all the arts

and mysteries of short-story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who of the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he.”

Those familiar with the Manto classics—Toba Tek Singh, as well as landmark stories like Kali Shalwar, Khol Do, Bu and Thanda Gosht—may find it difficult to see a writer whose work is paid such close attention as an enigma. The tone of his epitaph is instantly recognizable, since it shares the style of his rattlingly concise short stories: tongue-in-cheek, morbid, full of suppressed and fierce emotion.

A hundred years after Manto’s birth on 11 May 1912 in Samrala, Punjab, he is read by more people than ever before, and acknowledged as one of the most powerful voices of his time. “At his best,” as Lahore-based literary critic Bilal Tanweer says, “he is as good as anyone in the world.”

But for all that subcontinental readers and writers inevitably run across Manto, often early in their reading life, “no one cared about Manto until the late 1990s,” says Urdu scholar and translator Muhammad Umar Memon. “It was only after the 50th anniversary that he began to acquire his reputation as a writer of Partition and his work taken up as a document of Partition. This has done him a disservice: a fiction writer is not a documentarian.”

Evidence shows that his contemporaries certainly cared about him, but not to his benefit. He wrote, among other things, about murderers, prostitutes and rioters,

a parade of venal men and women in the habit of survival.

Their ordinariness has the power to make readers flinch even across the decades. During his lifetime, he was called to the stand as a defendant in no less than six obscenity cases, asked to explain why he was writing “filth” (in one judge’s words) like Kali Shalwar or Dhuan, short stories hauled up for their approach to sexuality and prostitution.

As damaging as Manto’s cast of incidental criminals would be to his career when he was alive, they have been enormously influential to those subcontinental writers who took his writing to heart. Via email, Rushdie says: “What attracted me to Manto was his approach to low-life subjects.

I’ve always been interested in writers who investigate the underbelly of society, and I like it that Manto is neither sentimental nor hard-boiled, using, instead, a form of ironic dispassion that paradoxically becomes very moving.”

“I liked the simple clarity of the story’s ruling metaphor of insane people caught up in a larger insanity,” he says of Toba Tek Singh, whose inclusion in Mirrorwork has arguably contributed to its reputation as Manto’s masterpiece. “And I liked even more Manto’s elliptical treatment of that metaphor (he’s far too subtle to “unpack” it and thus make it obvious and pedestrian). I liked the repeated

nonsense phrase, “Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain,” and the way it seems to teeter on the edge of meaning, paralleling the larger absurd universe in which the characters are trapped, which also almost, but never quite, makes sense. And I liked the unresolved tragedy of the ending.”

Author Keki Daruwalla once suggested that Manto’s insularity, his disinterest in the world outside India at a time when so much was going on in the world—the Spanish civil war, the rise of Fascism and Nazism—can make him, in some respects, an oblivious writer. We might equally say that Toba Tek Singh, even if its author did not intend it so, reflects not just the plight of India and Pakistan, but the whole world, in a century when the promises of nationalism systematically failed, and war went from being a battle between armed forces, to a constant crisis in which no one suffered more than civilians.

In search of Manto Reputations change through time. In his centenary year, we are no closer to a consensus about Manto’s work, and his influence on our literary life, than his contemporaries ever were. With much of his best work in translation, his literary career may seem like an open book, especially in India, where translations from other lan-

guages are only slowly gaining a popular readership in English, and Manto’s work is more readily available than most.

But any vast and inconsistent body of work elicits arguments and polarizing opinions, and Manto’s readers today continue to argue over his work and its meanings. “His Partition stories are the most fashionable but in some ways they’re the most banal, constantly studied for some sort of historic symmetry between India and Pakistan,” says Aatish Taseer, who translated 10 stories for his 2008 collection, Manto: Selected Stories. “I was tired of the existing translations, with their convent-school English and their stiffness. Manto is anything but stiff.”

Manto remains persona non grata to the political establishment in the subcontinent: Perhaps this explains why subcontinental cities are more likely to have a Mirza Ghalib Marg than a Saadat Hasan Manto Road.

“We shall be celebrating Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth centenary in May 2012,” wrote Ajmal Kamal in Pakistan’s The Express Tribune this February. “By ‘we’, I mean his readers for whom Manto has been one great and rare source of insight about ourselves as a people. For the official ‘nation’…he has always been the enfant terrible, the rather recent efforts to somehow co-opt him for the official world view notwithstanding.”

In search of Manto in Byculla, Baghdadi points out that the

neighbourhood in which he once lived has changed little.

The marble plaques in Christ Church, across the road from Manto’s old house on Clare Road, recall the histories of members of its congregation who lived here over a century ago. Scratch the Urdu and Marathi flyers from the walls of the municipal garden, and the Star of David underneath, confirming its identity as an old Jewish cemetery, is intact. Any evidence of the writer of Mirza Ghalib and Mozail, Thanda Gosht and Letters to Uncle Sam having once lived here, though,

must now be imagined.

“Take him away, Lord, for he runs away from fragrance and chases after filth,” Manto wrote about himself in his cheeky, devastating supplication to God, Manto’s Prayer. “He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you.”

Deep within Christ Church across the road, a Robert Southey verse honouring the dead offers a quiet rejoinder. “Fame’s loudest trump on the ear of time/leaves but a dying echo: They alone/are held in ever-lasting memory/ whose deeds partake of heaven.”

What was the origin of this book?

When I was invited to give the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton (University, in 2011), somebody said “Why don’t you do a microhistory?” The microhistory that came to mind was Manto’s, because I’d been in the process of organizing and locating some of his papers. I thought I could connect his life and his work—the micro—to the macro event of Partition.

How do you approach Manto as a reader?

I must first of all say that he’s known as a fiction writer, but for me he is a terrific writer of memoir. He has written many essays that are crucial in the writing of Muslim and Pakistani history. His short stories are clearly very important, and I enjoy them. He writes concisely; he’s gripping. I’ve been reading them or hearing of them since I was a child.

And then, he is my grand-uncle. He was dead by the time I was born, but I grew up in a household calling him Manto abbajaan.

So he was present in his absence.

He had a lot of influence on me and why I turned to studying history. I was curious to know what he wrote was more than fiction; (it) was fact. I turned to history for that.

What did you find?

It was corroborated to the extent that I accept that Manto was better. He captured that violence better than any historian could. We are constrained by our methodologies, in our need to be able to produce the sources. In many ways Manto was a great historical writer but, of course, he didn’t have to suffer the constraining aspects of history.

He was something of a polarizing figure in his lifetime.

He was that. But the beauty of Manto was—he said, you know, I don’t write filth.

I don’t write obscenity. I only write what is there in your society. So why are you so ashamed? Clearly he made people uncomfortable; the sort of people who didn’t blink an eyelid going to a prostitute, but would be infuriated if any mention was made of the prostitute as a human being.

But, you know, we keep harping on how Manto was polarizing; I must also say he has a lot of admiration across the subcontinent and I think that is very unifying as well.

Was there an emotional tension in writing about someone to whom you are related?

All I’ll say is that I would not have written this book as my first book. But there comes a time to do it, and I always knew I would do it.

HINDUSTAN

EXTRACT

A SPIRIT LIKE LIQUOR A section of Manto’s short story ‘Siraj’, translated by Matt Reeck

D

hundhu was outside the Iranian restaurant across from the small park near the Nagpada Police Station, and he was leaning against the electricity pole that he manned from sunset until four in the morning.

I don’t know his real name but everyone called him Dhundhu, which was fitting because his job was to find girls that satisfied his customers’ varied tastes. He had been a pimp for about ten years and in that time he had pimped thousands of girls of every religion, race, and temperament.

Since the beginning, he had been working from the same pole outside the Iranian restaurant across from the small park. It had become his symbol, so much so that the two were inseparable in my mind. Whenever I went by the pole and saw the white chuna lime and red kattha betel stains where people had wiped their fingers, I mistook it for Dhundhu chewing throat lozenges and betel paan.

Dhundhu was tall. The pole was too, and a mess of wires coiled at its top. One wire

extended far across to another pole, where it merged with the entanglement of wires there.

Another wire looped across to a building, and yet another went to a store. It seemed that this pole commanded a large area, and that its influence radiated out through other poles to encompass the entire city.

The Telephone Department had installed a box on the pole so that from time to time they could check to see if the wires were working. I often thought that Dhundhu was also a type of box, one there next to the pole to collect information about men’s sexual desires. He knew all the rich men, both those in the surrounding neighborhoods and in the far-flung ones, men who from time to time (or always) wanted to have sex, either to check if their plumbing still worked or to relieve stress.

He also knew all the girls in the trade. He knew everything about their bodies, as well as their temperaments—he knew very well which one was right for which customer at which time. There was only one, Siraj, whom he

Beneath the bridge: Some parts of Manto’s Mumbai, like this church near Kennedy Bridge, are unchanged.

couldn’t figure out.

Dhundhu had said to me many times, “The bitch’s crazy. Manto Sahib, I don’t understand her. She’s very moody. Sometimes she’s all fire, and sometimes she’s like ice. She cracks up laughing, and then suddenly she starts crying.

The bitch can’t get along with anyone. She fights with every trick. I’ve told her many times, ‘Look, straighten up, or go back to wherever you came from. Your clothes are rags. You have hardly any money for food. You know, fighting and cheating’s not the way to get ahead.’ But she’s a real pill. She doesn’t listen to anyone.”

I had seen Siraj once or twice. She was really skinny but beautiful, and her prominent eyes overshadowed her oval face’s every other feature. When I saw her for the first time on Clare Road, I was puzzled. I wanted to tell her eyes, “Excuse me, please move aside a little so I can see Siraj.” Needless to say, it didn’t happen.

She was small, and her body was like a carafe and her spirit was like liquor so strong that someone had added water, although this

adulteration strangely didn’t make the liquid any less intoxicating but merely more abundant. Her body radiated allure.

Seeing her, I could guess she was upset. Her matted hair, sharp nose, clenched lips, and fingernails—which looked like the pointy tips of cartographers’ pencils—advertised her irritable disposition. She seemed upset at Dhundhu, at the pole, at the customers he brought to her, but also at her big eyes and at her thin, long fingers, perhaps because she wanted to use them like cartographers employ their pencils to make something fine and yet she couldn’t accomplish this. But this is the impression of a short-story writer who in describing a tiny facial mole can make it seem as large as the sang-e-aswad in Mecca.

Matt Reeck is a writer and translator based in New York. This excerpt is from “Bombay Stories”, his manuscript of translations of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories related to the city of Mumbai.

On history: Ayesha Jalal.

TIMES

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

Adventure

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MOUNTAINEERING

Vertical limit A young rookie and a wizened veteran are injecting new life into mountain­climbing in India with their record­breaking ascents

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BY RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

····································· rjun Vajpai was in the “death zone”.

It’s here, in the wastelands of rock and ice above 8,000m in the world’s highest mountains, that the human body stops adapting to the extremely low levels of atmospheric pressure and available oxygen, and begins, quickly and inevitably, the process of dying.

Vajpai was a little over 500m from the summit of Lhotse, at 8,516m the world’s fourth highest mountain, dragging himself up a vertical gully. With each step, he kicked the tip of his crampons (metal claws attached to boots) into the ice, and with increasing fatigue, drove his ice axe into the snow. His heels hung in thin air, his body weight entirely on his toes and his ice axe. Below him stretched a horrific 2km drop— “You don’t want to look,” Vajpai says. “I looked down once, and went no, no, no, no.” So Vajpai looked up, like he had done every day for more than a month now—up at the windswept, desolate summit, sucked on his oxygen tube, and climbed on.

After three-and-a-half hours, he was standing on the summit of Lhotse, the youngest climber ever to do so. It was 20 May 2011. From the top, a mesmeric view: some of the world’s highest peaks, all framed under an improbably blue sky, in a 360-degree sweep (there are only 14 peaks in the world, including Lhotse, that rise above 8,000m).

“There was Makalu behind me, Manaslu further behind,” Vajpai says.

“Everest on one side and Cho Oyu on the other, K2 up ahead…and that’s when it occurred to me—I have to climb them all!”

Vajpai is 18, with a mop of tousled hair, an easy smile and the hint of a swagger. In 2010, he became the youngest Indian to summit Everest which, at 8,848m, is the world’s highest mountain.

In 2011, just four months after summiting Lhotse, he climbed Manaslu, 8,156m, becoming the youngest person in the world to climb three peaks over 8,000m. Vajpai is moving mountains to become the first Indian to climb all 14 “8,000ers”, as they are popularly known.

Only 27 climbers have done it. As you read this article, Vajpai is attempting something only a handful of climbers have ever tried: climbing two 8,000ers, Cho Oyu (8,188m) and Shishapangma (8,027m) in Tibet, back to back.

Beyond the gloss of Vajpai’s remarkable personal achievements, there is the

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The ascent: (clockwise from above) The Garhwal Himala­ yas; climber Arjun Vajpai; and Vajpai unfurls the Indian flag atop Lhotse.

hope of a deeper impact—of bringing mountaineering into the mainstream in India, something that generations of gifted climbers before him have failed to do. Companies want to sponsor his climbs, he is becoming a regular speaker at business and media conclaves, and his climbs are being widely covered by newspapers and television channels.

Today, the general public can name five Indian mountaineers with as much ease as it can name five modern poets.

Tenzing Norgay, who first summited Everest along with Edmund Hillary in 1953, remains the most famous “Indian” mountaineer even though he was actually born and raised in Nepal before settling in India. As the precocious and glamorous young face of Indian climbing, Vajpai could change this.

Where are the climbers?

Despite India being home to hundreds of Himalayan peaks, no Indian features on any list of great climbing feats. Mountaineering in India remains a fledgling affair, marked by the lack of pioneering ascents, and the pervasive belief that Indians are just not cut out for such a high-risk endeavour. But guts and grit are not in short supply here.

Take Basanta Singha Roy, 50, for example. Lean, intense and sporting a carefully groomed salt-and-pepper beard, the climber from West Bengal has been tackling some of the toughest technical climbs in India for over two decades. Roy, who works for Punjab National Bank, his climbing partner Debasish Biswas, 41, who works for the income-tax department, and sherpas Pasang Phutar and Pemba Chuti form the most formidable climbing team in India right now. Though they have climbed two 8,000ers, Everest in 2010 and Kanchenjunga (8,586m) in 2011, their most significant achievement to date has been the successful ascent of Thalay Sagar, a 6,904m peak near Gangotri in Uttarakhand.

“I had been eyeing Thalay Sagar since 1999,” Roy says. “That year we were climbing Bhrigupanth, which is right next to Thalay, when we saw a Russian team on a vertical bivouac (a makeshift sleeping/resting arrangement on a rock face) high up the mountain. I looked up at them and thought, ‘We Indians can’t do this, this is not for us.’”

But the thought rankled. It was exactly what Roy was used to hearing from both climbers and non-climbers in India. In 2005, he found the courage to climb Thalay while negotiating a deadly 200ft-

long ice wall prone to avalanches, on his way to becoming the first Indian civilian climber to summit Shivling (6,543m).

From the top of the mountain, Thalay looked enticingly close. “Can we do that?” Roy asked Pasang. “Yes,” he replied. “People thought I was too ambitious,” Roy says. “They would say, ‘Of course, they will go to Thalay, but let’s see how many of them come back.’”

Thalay Sagar, which rises like an icy, jagged knife near Gaumukh, was first climbed as late as 1979 by an American team. Since then, the peak has continued to be a proving ground for elite climbers, and till 2007, had seen 75 foreign expeditions, only 15 of which were successful. No Indian team had attempted the mountain before Roy’s 2008 expedition. Outside the Mountaineers’ Association of Krishnanagar (MAK), the club that backs Roy’s climbs, the successful summiting didn’t create any ripples. “It’s partly our own fault,” Roy says. “We are incapable of promoting ourselves properly.

If a foreign expedition climbs Thalay, there will be a flood of articles, books and documentaries.”

Right now, Roy, who has spent his single annual holiday on climbing expeditions every year since 1990, is attempting Annapurna I, 8,091m, in Nepal, with his team. If they are successful, they will be the first civilian expedition from India to climb the mountain that has the highest fatality rates among all the 8,000ers.

The army’s playground In 2002, Chhering Norbu Bodh, 42, a subedar major in the Indian Army, became the first Indian to summit Annapurna I. In 2003, he was the first Indian to climb Lhotse. He followed this in 2009 by summiting Dhaulagiri (8,167m), his sixth 8,000er. He had earlier climbed Everest, Kanchenjunga and Cho Oyu. “When I first saw the list of people who have climbed 8,000ers, and there were no Indians in it, I was disheartened,” Vajpai says. “Later, I found out that someone called Bodh has done six of them, and I said, ‘Who’s this man?’”

Bodh is an instructor at the army’s High Altitude Warfare School in Srinagar.

When he was conscripted in 1988, he had no idea that he would spend more time with crampons and ice axes than with guns and combat boots. He comes from a village called Chobran, with a population of around 30 (and not a single phone), high in the mountainous Spiti region in Himachal Pradesh and—like many local people living in India’s mountains—he is a natural on the slopes.

Like Vajpai, Bodh too wants to be the first Indian to summit all the 8,000ers.

“I can’t decide when I’ll go on my next climb, because that’s up to the army,” Bodh says. “But I want to finish at least one more peak before I retire next year.”

The Armed Forces are intimately linked with the story of Indian mountaineering. Ever since they made the first successful Indian ascent of Everest in 1965,

the Armed Forces have launched at least two major expeditions a year.

They don’t lack funding for their expeditions, which often involve a large number of climbers. The Annapurna expedition, where Bodh and three others of his party reached the top, had 65 members, plus sherpas—12,000kg of supplies were used during the climb. In comparison, Vajpai and Roy both climb with small teams of four-five members.

The army’s climbing ethos, though, is far removed from the free-spirited adventure mountaineering is supposed to be.

“We do it as part of our duty,” says retired Colonel H.S. Chauhan, a veteran of multiple army climbing expeditions, and now the president of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF). “You are called to volunteer for the climb, and you respond because it’s part of your job.” This approach to mountaineering is best exemplified by the story of the late Colonel Auteur Singh Cheema, who in 1965 became the first summiteer of the army’s Everest expedition. Cheema was not a mountaineer before he climbed Everest, nor did he continue climbing after it.

It’s no surprise then, that despite his feats, Bodh remains unknown.

Summits and headlines This is where Vajpai scores over most mountaineers in India. He has the perfect public relations machinery behind him—his parents.

As a 16-year-old in 2010, when Vajpai first came up with the plan for climbing Everest, he needed `22 lakh for the expedition.

Despite knocking on many doors—relatives, corporate houses, the sports ministry—no help was forthcoming. Vajpai’s family finally used their own savings to fund his climb and turned their attention to creating a media buzz around him. “At first, no one was interested,” says Priya Vajpai, Arjun’s mother. “All the reporters said, ‘Let him summit first, and then we’ll cover him.’”

After his successful attempt, the media swamped the Vajpai family. Priya Vajpai used this experience as a stepping stone, made an exhaustive list of contacts of reporters, and for Vajpai’s subsequent climbs, she began sending out press

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releases, photographs and climbing information to everyone on the list.

Priya Vajpai’s zeal, though, is tempered by a fear she keeps quietly hidden from journalists. “Before Everest, since there is no climbing history in our family, we really had no idea about the dangers of mountaineering,” she says.

“Then we realized that when he is climbing, if he takes one wrong step, it could be the end of his life.”

Vajpai’s leap into serious mountaineering happened quite suddenly. He enjoyed trekking as a teenager, and decided to try out the basic training course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in Uttarkashi.

He did well, and that spurred him to do the advanced course. Again, he was one of the best in his class. That’s when the idea of Everest struck him. Summiting the world’s highest peak to kick-start a career in mountaineering may surprise nonclimbers, but it was an astute move.

Till the 1970s, Everest was the forte of elite mountaineers. Now it’s a “tourist” peak—and adventure companies take hundreds of people, both climbers and non-climbers, up on guided expeditions to the summit. Such is the traffic on Everest that on one single day in May 2010, a record 169 people summited the mountain. Compare that to the total of 302 people who summited K2 (at 8,611m, the world’s second highest mountain) from 1954 till 2010. Yet, summiting Everest immediately brings you to public attention and for Vajpai, it opened the door for sponsorships. All his subsequent climbs were funded by business houses like Essar Group, Aditya Birla Group, and his alma mater, Ryan International School.

How climbing lost its way There was a brief period in the 1950s when there was a zest and zeal in Indian climbing that is only now beginning to seep back in. Gurdial Singh, 88, was part of that beginning. He led India’s first mountaineering expedition—summiting Trisul (7,120m), a peak at the edge of the Nanda Devi National Park, in 1951.

Age seems to have had little effect on his sharpness—he holds himself ramrod straight, recites the heights of mountains and their first-ascent dates with ease. He speaks in a clipped, stentorian growl and blames “overprotective Indian parents” for the lack of ambitious climbs by Indians.

“I was introduced to the mountains when I joined Doon School (staff) in 1945,” says Singh, who now lives in Nagpur, Maharashtra. “There were three teachers in the school, John Martyn, Jack Gibson and R.L. Holdsworth, who were Alpinists. Every chance they got, they would take students out for a climb or a trek to nearby mountains.” Holdsworth was already a pioneering mountaineer, having climbed Kamet (7,756m) in Uttarakhand in 1931 with the legendary British climbers and explorers Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton—at that time the highest peak ever summited. In close contact with the Alpinist-masters trio, Singh was sold on the mountains.

By 1946, Nandu Jayal, a student, also hooked on the mountains through the Alpine masters and Singh, had become an integral part of the “Doon School climbing team”, along with a young sherpa who was quickly making his reputation as a wizard on the mountains—Tenzing Norgay. Till the early 1950s, Singh and Jayal were obsessively heading up peaks in Garhwal, making heroic first Indian ascents of various peaks, including Kamet in 1955.

“But the real impetus came when Tenzing climbed Everest in 1953,” Singh says. “It is hard for me to describe just how visceral the impact of that climb was.” Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister, ordered that a climbing institute be set up, and by the next year, the

Himalayan Institute of Mountaineering was up and running in Darjeeling with Jayal as principal, and Norgay as chief instructor. In 1958, at the age of 32, Jayal died of altitude sickness at 6,340m while climbing Cho Oyu, on the first Indian expedition to an 8,000er.

Cho Oyu was summited, however, and the attention naturally turned to Everest.

In 1960, the first Indian Everest expedit i o n w a s b eaten back by awful weather, and the pattern was repeated in 1962. Three years later, in 1965, Captain Mohan Singh Kohli, who was part of both the earlier expeditions to Everest, led India’s first successful summit of the world’s tallest peak.

It was the beginning of the end.

“We used to climb for the fun of it,” 81-year-old Kohli says, “but Everest became a matter of national pride.”

Harish Kapadia, 66, India’s most celebrated explorer and mountaineer, and an avid chronicler of mountaineering in the country, says this nationalistic attitude meant that climbing quickly became an institutionalized pursuit, monopolized by the Armed Forces. “The spirit of Gurdial Singh—just four or five friends going out looking for adventure—that did not go forward,” Kapadia says.

What’s stopping us?

Mountaineering in India faces a wide range of impediments. The biggest one, according to Sir Chris Bonington, a British climber and one of the world’s most eminent mountaineers, is the way climbing is regulated in the country. To attempt a peak in India, you require permits from the IMF. If the peak you want to climb falls within the “inner line”, or the border areas, then the permit application has to go through a long-drawn bureaucratic process involving the IMF, the Armed Forces, the home and defence ministries, and the state government under which the peak falls. Since most of the Himalayan range is in the border areas, this puts hundreds of mountains mostly off-limits to civilian climbers.

“I’ve always been able to climb the mountain I’ve wanted in India, but often with a lot of hassles,” says Bonington, 77, who has made numerous first ascents in India. “Climbing is an individualistic thing, it comes from the heart, it involves people who enjoy taking risks and love stretching the limits.

Regulatory bodies tend not to like any of that. In the Alpine countries, there is no regulation whatsoever.”

Throughout the 1990s, Bonington and Kapadia explored unknown and uncharted valleys and peaks in the Indian Himalayas. They did it all without GPS systems or satellite phones, which government regulations ban you from carrying into the Indian mountains. “These are ridiculous and outdated rules,” Kapadia says. “If you have an accident or an emergency in the mountains, there is no way to ask for help. You can’t get proper maps of the mountain areas because they too are restricted by the government, which makes no sense. Who will go and climb without maps and a sat-phone? It’s almost suicidal!”

“That’s why foreign climbers also don’t want to climb in India,” Chauhan says.

“But the IMF has been trying to convince the government to change these policies.”

The next peak Can the precocious and record-chasing climbs of Vajpai and the hard-edged, boundary-defying ascents of Roy inject new life into mountaineering in India?

Can Bodh shake off obscurity and become the first Indian to summit all the 8,000ers?

COURTESY BASANTA SINGHA ROY

High times: Basanta Singha Roy (left) and Debasish Biswas on the summit of Kanchenjunga.

Pioneers: (below) Captain Mohan Singh Kohli on top of Everest in 1965; and members of the failed 1962 Indian Everest expedition.

“The base is already there,” Kohli says. “There are thousands of men and women in India who are climbers, much more than we’ve ever had. Vajpai is bringing climbing to the public eye, Roy is a fearless climber who is already moulding the next generation. So, like cricket, I feel a critical point will be reached, and out of that, strong climbers will inevitably come out.”

Roy believes it is crucial that good Indian mountaineers shift their focus from commonly climbed peaks and routes to “virgin” peaks. “There is a lot of love for the mountains—for example,

West Bengal has over a hundred mountaineering clubs, but there is no real drive to climb challenging peaks,” Roy says.

“After my Thalay expedition, at least three-four teams have tried it. Why didn’t anyone do it before?”

Despite his disappointment, the fact that Thalay and Shivling have been attempted by civilians after Roy’s success points to the fact that he is breaking down barriers for climbers in India.

For Vajpai too, the next logical step is to target unexplored peaks. “In a couple of years, once I have enough experience, I’ve got to go to the virgin mountains,” he says. “There are more than 400 such peaks in India. If you have to be a climber in its absolute sense, then you have to open new routes.”

In many ways, he is already leading the way.

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SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

Books

LOUNGE MINT

Scared spaces: Rajendra Prasad Ghat in Varanasi.

INDIA: A SACRED GEOGRAPHY | DIANA L ECK

The holy land

A scholar’s lucid mapping of Hindu India’s religious places is an instant classic

India—A Sacred Geography: Harmony Books, 559 pages, $27 (around `1,400).

B Y R ACHEL D WYER ···························· inston Churchill claimed that “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.” While the second part of his statement has been proved wrong, it is unlikely he had any idea quite what the first part meant. While India is indeed a geographical term, it has a dual geography, a physical one, but also a sacred geography which dates back millennia.

It is surprising we have had to wait so long for a volume to examine this fascinating spiritual geography. The concept of the sacredness of the land of India is one which makes many people uncomfortable, in part due to its politicization as Bharat Mata or “akhand Bharat”, that is, an undivided India which includes Pakistan and Bangladesh. There has also been unresolved political conflict over sacred sites; from Ayodhya, where a mosque is said to have been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, to the Ram Setu, a rock formation to some and the bridge built to rescue Sita from Lanka, to others.

India’s sacredness is sometimes regarded as being a way of labelling the country as backward

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for those who believe, as Max Weber says, that the modern world is disenchanted. But this everyday sacredness for millions of Indians is more interesting as a way of querying the whole idea of modernity itself.

Diana L. Eck, a distinguished scholar whose book, Banaras: City of Light, is rightly regarded as a classic, is an ideal guide. Wearing her immense learning lightly, she leads us gently but firmly through the contested nature of India’s sacredness. She focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on Hindu texts, taking the reader around the whole country, though rarely stepping beyond its 1947 borders. After the introduction and “What is India?” sections, themselves comprising a hundred pages, the book is organized around an overview of Hindu cosmography, the sacred rivers, then the landscapes of five major deities, Shiva, Shakti, Vishnu, Krishna and Ram. Eck

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travels from place to place, pausing to tell us stories before moving smoothly on to the next.

In Hinduism, the boundaries between humans, gods and animals are porous. Vishnu’s 10 incarnations include animals (kurma or tortoise, matsya or fish), half-animals (Narasimha or the Man-Lion) and humans (Krishna, Ram). Yet Hinduism does not stop with the animate, as gods are also manifest as shalagrams (stone symbols of Vishnu) and other svayambhu (spontaneously occurring) forms. These include signs of Shiva as lingas, notably the 12 jyotirlingas (lingas of light) as well as murtis (statues) and swarupas (true forms) or in mountains, rivers and forests.

Heaven and Earth are not clearly divided, for the borders between the world of the gods and the human world are thin in places. These include tirthas (fords, crossing places) and inaccessible places in the world, such

as the mountains, the Himalaya or Devalaya, where gods dwell.

Places loved by the gods and where they have been manifest have further sacred associations, while the seven places where the goddess’ body fell on earth are the Shaktipithas.

The sacred locations are linked by stories of pilgrimage routes, from chardham yatras (pilgrimage to the four main holy places), which map the sacred space of India, to digvijayas (conquests of the regions), famously in canto IV of Kalidasa’s beautifully evocative Raghuvamsa, where Raghu goes to set victory pillars in the mouth of the Ganga, before travelling to subdue the regions.

These circuits of movement carry implications not so much for the nation-state of India, as for understanding ways of thinking about networks of interrelatedness on spatial and spiritual levels. They also ask us to reconsider the ecological implications,

FIRST WORDS: I BEGAN THINKING ABOUT THIS BOOK IN THE CITY OF BANARAS ON THE RIVER GANGA IN NORTH INDIA MORE THAN 25 YEARS AGO.

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R. SUKUMAR

DRAWN FROM LIFE t was the sale that made me do it, and boy, am I glad.

Last weekend, ComiXology had a half-price sale on Top Shelf Productions comics and I used the opportunity to buy, among other books, Alex Robinson’s early 2000s graphic novel Box Office Poison, and then, I actually read it (all 608 pages of it).

Box Office Poison is what is called a slice-of-life comic. The genre is especially popular among some alternative publishers such as Drawn and Quarterly and Top Shelf itself, although Top Shelf does have a varied portfolio, including the latest works of the legendary

Alan Moore. Set in Brooklyn, Box Office Poison tells the story of an aspiring writer, Sherman, who is now a salesman in a book store; his manic girlfriend Dorothy, a magazine writer; his flatmates, history professor Stephen and his girlfriend, cartoonist Jane; his friend, aspiring comic book artist Ed; and veteran comic book artist Mr Flavor, who lives in near-penury while a character he created makes hundreds of millions of dollars for the publisher.

Like most slice-of-life comics, Box Office Poison is about ordinary people who, like other ordinary people, obsess about life and food and

Rachel Dwyer is professor of Indian cultures and cinema at SOAS, University of London. Her next project is on the Indian elephant.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Slice of life: Robinson fleshes out his major and minor players.

CULT FICTION

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from exploitation to pollution, of these sacred places: Ram Teri Ganga Maili.

As the book is already such a rich spread it may be greedy to ask for more, but although it has black and white photographs, the author probably has amassed a considerable collection of her own, and a link to a Flickr site would be welcome. I missed a discussion of my guilty pleasures, namely mythological films, which are often modern-day mahatmyas (works of praise), and the T-series pilgrimage films which allow one to follow arduous journeys in the comfort of one’s own home while joining in the singalong bhajans.

While it could not be comprehensive, some of my favourite places are omitted, probably because the book is already lengthy and they are marginal or recent—indeed, some of them are 20th century. These include the Shirdi Sai Baba temple, a syncretic centre whose links to the film industry are demonstrated by the helicopter link to Mumbai which allows film reels to be brought for speedy blessings, and the nearby Shani temple in Shinganapur, the town with no locks and no doors, visited by businessmen who want to avert Shani’s malign influence.

Gujarat’s extraordinary mountain shrines of Palitana/Shatrunjaya are not mentioned (although Girnar is), nor is Gujarat’s Bahuchara Mata temple in Mehsana, a centre for hijras (eunuchs), or its Jalaram Bapa shrine in Virpur. Eck rightly points out that new sacred geographies are evolving overseas, as Hindu temples are being built, though she does not discuss the Akshardhams that the Swaminarayan sect is putting up in India, following those built earlier in Africa, Europe and the US, as they establish themselves as the dominant overseas Hindus.

This book is a genuine classic; a summation of a scholarly life, where an academic engagement with religion and research meets pleasure in travelling in India. Elegantly and lucidly written, India: A Sacred Geography is accessible to all readers, from researchers to students to pilgrims. I devoured all 500 pages in one sitting, and am inspired to visit and revisit these sacred places. Chalo Man Ganga Jamuna Tir.

love and sex and relationships and a better future. Given its cast of characters, it is also about writing and comics, and, lest I forget, the business of book stores.

The best slice-of-life comics are those that have interesting characters, and Robinson fleshes

out his major and minor players—and there are many of these, from the archetypical cranky landlady to the unusual lesbian sister—as well as you can expect in a 608-page book.

Everyone in the book is in transition. Sherman is looking for his first big break in writing

(he doesn’t get it); Ed is looking for an entry into the comics business (he eventually makes it, but in an entirely unexpected way); Jane is looking for a publisher for her comic-biographies (she finds one); and Mr Flavor is looking for justice.

Robinson tells their stories honestly and with a light touch.

Dozens of subplots emerge, diverge, and then converge again, amplifying the feeling of incestuousness that pervades the book; everyone knows everyone in some way. All the while, the story moves inexorably forward (even tangled tales need a denouement). Robinson’s illustrations are almost cartoonish, but he has a way with words—especially dialogues—and there’s that thing he does to show continuing conversations or a crowd scene that I haven’t seen anyone else do as well.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

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TURING’S CATHEDRAL | GEORGE DYSON

QUICK LIT | SANJAY SIPAHIMALANI

Machine men

Mother dearest WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

A history of the digital computer that reads like a superhero ensemble comic

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· eorge Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral doesn’t really focus all that much on Alan Turing, the British mathematician whose theoretical work forms the foundation of modern computer science. The book speaks as much—if not more—about John von Neumann, Julian Bigelow and other equally important mathematicians and engineers. It’s possible that Turing has now achieved such iconic status among lay readers that his name in a title can drive book sales.

So what is this book about, if not Turing? It’s not a textbook or beginner’s guide; and Dyson is not a trained historian, so it is not a serious professional history. Dyson spent his childhood at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, US, among the scientists he writes about, but was too young to understand what they were doing—so this is not quite a memoir either.

The analogy that works best, then, is that Turing’s Cathedral is a superhero ensemble comic in disguise, the non-fiction version of X-Men. The team wouldn’t exist without the philosophical backing of Turing, its Professor X—but like any good action movie, the focus is more on the team’s more active and flamboyant Wolverine: von Neumann, and his supporting team members.

Just as in a superhero comic, lots of time is given to origin stories. We learn about the childhoods of von Neumann and his family, his wife Klári, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, and a host of others. But while the book is full of

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Kyung­sook Shin’s wildly popular Korean novel is treacly

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biography and other interesting diversions, it remains primarily about the quest of Neumann’s team to create their equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone as Dyson sees it. For him, the digital computer is fascinating not merely for what it accomplishes, but far more for what it is: the first machine that has ever erased the distinction between data and instructions.

Turing had proposed such a machine as a theoretical construct in 1935, in a paper that answered mathematician David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem—is it possible for a machine to decide whether a mathematical statement is provable or not? Turing’s paper established that it wasn’t.

Today, young students learning to code in C take it for granted that the memory their programs request can be assigned or unassigned at will, and that subsequently this memory could be used to store either the program itself or the data it requires. But the realizations that a number could be translated to an instruction to a machine to do something, and that these numbers could be stored in the same place as the numbers they would then act upon, were revolutionary conceptual leaps.

Turing had erased the difference between subject, object and verb; between karta, karman and kriya.

Someone still needed to bring the Platonic ideal of the universal Turing machine on to our plane of existence, and Turing’s Cathedral describes this process in detail.

The mechanism that would allow a number to act as either data or

Team digital: (above, left) A statue of British mathematician Alan Turing; and John von Neumann.

Turing’s Cathedral—The Ori­ gins of the Digital Universe: Allen Lane, 432 pages, £25 (around `2,125). instruction is known to us as RAM, or Random Access Memory.

Thanks to the discovery of solid state electronics—that is, usable semiconductors—RAM is now cheap and ubiquitous. But semiconducting electronics were invented after the computer was: von Neumann’s team had to create RAM from scratch, with the unreliable materials they had at hand—glass valves and mercury-filled tubes.

For von Neumann, the digital computer project was a means to an end: He needed a digital computer so that he could design atomic bombs to prevent a recurrence of the horrors that had exiled him from his native Hungary and killed his family. The digital computer is a remarkable example of

good coming out of evil, coming out of good. Its progenitor was the bombe built by Turing to crack the German navy’s Enigma encryption system; its prototypes were used to develop hydrogen bombs, and along the way it came to be used for other things too—weather forecasting to begin with, and now for everything from processing images of cats, to developing new drugs through virtual hit and trial.

Dyson strays from the computer’s early history in a few chapters that act as end notes. In these, he examines the steps computers have taken towards artificial intelligence (or, as Turing called it to emphasize his belief that it wasn’t artificial, machine intelligence).

Google’s search algorithm, of first generating all possible answers, and then deciding which ones fit the question, is already close to how human minds work. Dyson suggests, perhaps mischievously, that computers or digital life have already gained overlordship over us, and we just haven’t noticed.

For a book that is so close to a superhero movie, that’s a good twist to include.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Science framed like a superhero comic

n Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin and Ek Din Achanak—the first and last films of his so-called Absence Trilogy—the disappearance of a member of the family is a plot device used to examine the responses of those left behind. The same stratagem is to be found in Kyung-sook Shin’s novel, Please Look After Mother, the recent winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize and a best-seller in her native South Korea. There’s a marked difference in tone and aim, however, between those films and this book.

Please Look The person who goes missing is After Mother: Park So-nyo, the 69-year-old wife and Phoenix/ mother of five grown-up children.

Hachette India, She’s parted from her husband at a 261 pages, `399.

Seoul subway station on the way from their village to the city where the children have settled. The reactions and memories of the rest are brought to us in chapters that shift between the points of view of some of the others in the family. There’s one of the daughters, a peripatetic writer; the eldest son, his mother’s favourite; the wayward father; and finally, the missing person herself. So-nyo’s absence, then, is a frame within which is revealed a portrait of her role in keeping the family together.

From the start, what’s emphasized is the mother’s utter selflessness and hard work when it comes to caring for others.

She doesn’t let her various ailments—including a stroke and breast cancer—come in the way of doing whatever it takes: “She would grind red peppers in the mortar to make kimchi, sift through beanstalks to find beans and shuck them, make red-pepper paste, salt cabbage for winter kimchi, or dry fermented soybean cakes.” That’s just for starters. She also cultivates vegetables, scrimps and saves on expenses, breeds silkworms and brews malt.

The food and customs of rural Korea are vividly brought to life, pointing to what’s between the lines, an elegy for earlier ways of living now lost (like the mother herself) because of increasing urbanization. In this parable of change, for example, people prefer to holiday abroad during the full moon harvest festival instead of staying home to perform rites for their ancestors. This is also the link between some of Shin’s characters and those in the short stories of Yiyun Li, relics in a fast-changing China.

What mars the novel is the tone of extreme sanctimoniousness when it comes to So-nyo. The attitude towards her is nothing if not reverential; at one point late in the book, there’s even a comparison with Michelangelo’s Pietà. In all this overstated pathos, the mother is shown to have few needs or desires of her own apart from the upkeep of her family—and the members of an orphanage, to boot.

In Sen’s films, the reactions of the families to the absence of one of their own are designed to uncover middle-class hypocrisy and insecurity. In Shin’s Please Look After Mother, the mother’s absence turns out to be a way of valorizing her motherhood above all else. Mum isn’t the word. Treacle is.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BETWEEN CLAY AND DUST | MUSHARRAF ALI FAROOQI

Private histories The chronicle of a changing world through the story of a wrestler and a courtesan

Between Clay And Dust: Aleph Book Company, 216 pages, `450.

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

···························· usharraf Ali Farooqi dedicates his new novel to Afzal Ahmed Syed, the Urdu poet who writes, in The Secret History of a Republic (not incidentally in Farooqi’s own translation), “Brought under the hammer/the Republic was declared destitute and ill-starred/Except for wellcared-for hunting fields/and/loveplay couches of kept women/which attracted the highest bids.”

Much of the action of Between Clay And Dust alternates between sporting arenas and women’s rooms, in spaces which we tend to think of as repositories of our memories, rather than our histories. Perhaps this accounts for the power of this small, spare book, a novel which fulfils the most novelistic of purposes—to refract history through the prism of memory, and to tell us its secrets and doubts.

Between Clay And Dust opens in an unnamed city, in the austere confines of an akhara. The ageing pehelwan, Ustad Ramzi, worries about how to preserve the glorious ascetic tradition of wrestling in which generations of his family and disciples have been brought up. His life of rigid principle has left him ill-prepared for change

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outside the akhara, and the ways in which that change intrudes into his own world, through his young, impetuous brother and heir Tamami. We guess that this story is set some time after Partition, but not exactly when, or on which side of the India-Pakistan border. Yet, beyond the atmosphere Farooqi creates for his story, this becomes immaterial to our reading. Ustad Ramzi’s dilemma, the struggle of the very disciplined in an undisciplined world, is timeless.

The ustad has one escape from worldly turmoil, the music of the courtesan Gohar Jan, who is also an artiste from a fading world. The mansions of the tawaifs (courtesans) are closing fast as the story opens, prey to new construction and new morality. Gohar Jan, a graceful, remote woman, has dedicated her life to her music. But while Ustad Ramzi’s art is founded on ideas of social and moral purity, hers lies outside the boundaries of propriety altogether. So Gohar Jan, perhaps circumstantially, becomes a foil to Ustad Ramzi; as a woman and something of a pragmatist, she sees, forgives and accepts changes that he cannot. As her street grows dark and silent, and her own disciples leave her halls, it occurs to her “that among the many men who frequented her kotha, Ustad Ramzi was the only one for whom she remained only a voice. It was strange that at the end of her career he was the only person with whom she shared her deep rela-

tionship with her art.”

They must both come to a reckoning in the end, and Farooqi traces the unravelling of their world with near-uncanny attentiveness. Gone is the air of suppressed hilarity that pervaded his last novel, 2008’s The Story of a Widow. But the careful tread of that story through the inner lives of its characters is echoed here too. Farooqi’s narrative voice is cool and hypnotic, almost impassive in its patience.

The Story of a Widow had admirers comparing him both to Jane Austen and Vikram Seth. But while his talent for social observation—the basis for that praise—remains as keen as ever in this book, Farooqi does something far too original here to make those comparisons useful.

His Gohar Jan remains, at the end of the story, something of an unknown quantity, in spite of the time we have spent with her. That may seem befitting of such a pri-

vate character, and we are not left dissatisfied. But Farooqi’s true victory in this book is Ustad Ramzi, a patriarch who evokes both our sympathy and our discomfort. His sins may seem smaller than those of a society rushing headlong into the future, but Farooqi’s writing is too wise and too elegant to make this a romance instead of a tragedy. As in Syed’s poem, we are left with the notion that every history is underwritten by the minute, private failures of human beings.

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Cheap, yet lovely

Other Indian films at Cannes 2012 u Gangs of Wasseypur Anurag Kashyap’s biggest film yet will be screened as part of Directors’ Fortnight, a non­competitive category.

The coal mafia provides the background for this film, which boasts of acting talents such as Manoj Bajpai, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tigmanshu Dhulia. Its 320­minute run­time, a narrative spanning three generations and 60 years, and a 150­odd strong cast suggest epic proportions.

Director Ashim Ahluwalia’s ‘stylistically pop’ film about B­grade cinema will compete at Cannes later this month

u Peddlers Vasan Bala’s directorial debut will be featuring at the oldest parallel competitive section at Cannes Critics’ Week—a category that has discovered such cinematic giants as Ken Loach, Bernardo Bertolucci and Arnaud Desplechin in the past.

‘Peddlers’ stars Gulshan Devaiah and Kriti Malhotra, both relatively new to Bollywood. Two love stories run parallel to each other in this film, where a man living a lie, an aimless drifter, and a lady on a mission run into each other. Bala, who has worked as an assistant director for Kashyap in the past, will also be in the running for the Caméra d’Or, awarded to first­time directors.

B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· shim Ahluwalia’s films tiptoe on a tightrope between documentary and fiction. John & Jane (2005), his award-winning debut film, was a documentary that “aspired to look like a dystopian sci-fi film”. A scathing comment on the outsourcing industry, it made Phaidon Press declare him one of the “10 best emerging film directors working today” in 2010.

Miss Lovely, his latest, has been selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard category at the 65th Cannes International Film Festival 2012 (16-27 May).

Introduced in 1978, the category recognizes “original and different” work, awarding a Prix Un Certain Regard of €30,000 (around `20.7 lakh) for the film adjudged the best in this lot. The film marks Ahluwalia’s feature film debut and is the story of two brothers, Sonu and Vicky Duggal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Anil George), who eke out a living by making low-budget, sex-horror films.

Ahluwalia spoke about the making of Miss Lovely, shooting in “Bombay” and the road to Cannes. Edited excerpts:

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Tell us about ‘Miss Lovely’.

The film is set between 1986 and 1992—at the end of our socialist period. It’s a film about change, about transitioning out of one era and into something new. In film terms, it’s about the end of celluloid and the beginning of digital. John & Jane aspired to look like a dystopian sci-fi film while remaining a documentary.

Miss Lovely tries to look like a documentary, while being fiction.

It’s stylistically pop.

Where was the film shot? Did you have to employ ingenious

methods to shoot peacefully?

I shot it over 44 days in 2010. I’m still finishing it as we speak!

The whole film is shot in Bombay—and I specifically say Bombay and not Mumbai, because that city in the 1980s had a different feel. I had to recreate cabaret halls, discotheques and apartments from that period, which was hard because nothing of that exists. It had to feel like the city I remember from my childhood.

We were the first film to ever be allowed to shoot in the West End Hotel, which is one of the most amazing locations in this city. They’ve said “no” to everybody from Chetan Anand to Nargis in the past, so that was a pretty big feat. We also shot in places like the Liberty preview cinema and the Kit Kat bar across from Metro (cinema), because that still had a little bit of the atmosphere of old Bombay.

Have you drawn upon or been influenced by Shohei Imamura’s ‘The Pornographers’?

If there is one cinematic influence that changed my life, it would have to be Japanese cinema. I love Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Nagisa Oshima and directors like that who worked, at least initially, on the cusp of

Amber and sleaze: (above) A still from the film; and Ahluwalia is fascinated by the way sex­horror films were made in the 1980s.

art cinema and popular culture.

I love The Pornographers but was probably more influenced

by Imamura films like Vengeance Is Mine or Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth. I’ve always found great Japanese films to have something very Indian about them—the relationship of the individual to family and society, codes of honour, the way women are represented, even the melodrama.

Did you have any trouble convincing your cast of actors to appear in the film?

There were no preconceptions. I just told them that I’m making something crazy, it’s not Bollywood or a multiplex film. I think somewhere they trusted me. It was Nawaz’s first lead role—he

The Tiger comes to play Girish Karnad’s ‘The Dreams of Tipu Sultan’ returns to the stage after eight years B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· e was a local man and he was the only one who actually, really, fought the British. If he was not Muslim, he would have been treated better than Shivaji,” says Bangalore-based actor and playwright Girish Karnad, explaining why he picked Tipu Sultan when the BBC commissioned him to write a play for the 50th anniversary of

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India’s independence in 1997.

He wrote The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, about the life of a warrior and a visionary—also known as the Tiger of Mysore—and his dreams, originally for radio. It was adapted by Arundhati Raja in 2004 for the Deccan Herald Theatre Festival.

“Tipu Sultan is misunderstood and that can be credited to the British, who painted him as a villain,” says Karnad.

Making a comeback after eight years, the play opened in Jagriti theatre last night in a new avatar, with a new cast. It depicts Tipu Sultan, the man, the statesman, the husband, the father and the son who dreamed of ousting the British from the country 150 years before it actually happened.

While most of India knows the stories of Tipu Sultan, his battles and his tragic death—thanks to the popular television serial on his life in the 1990s—this play addresses lesser-known aspects of his life. For instance, he spent most of his life on horseback and often returned to camp to jot down his dreams. “There were 30-odd notes on his dreams that he recorded by writing and I picked a few to create a representation of what he was like,” says Karnad, indicating that the title plays on the word “dreams”. “There is what he dreamt of and then the dreams he actually woke up to. I was fascinated by them all. They speak of a man who is mystical and mysterious,” says Karnad, adding that he’s based the play

had been doing lots of strong character roles but nobody wanted to give him a break.

Niharika Singh had done some Bollywood films with Himesh Reshammiya that hadn’t released. Both were fed up with the industry at that point and then along comes this strange little film...

Did you have a particular cinematographic palette in mind?

I had a specific sense of overall design. I wanted it to look like something between a B. Subhash-Mithun Chakraborty film and a Japanese new wave film from the 1960s. I did not want it to look “realistic” and yet I didn’t want it to have this (Quentin) Tarantino retro-cool thing going on. The one person I know who

understood what the hell I was saying was K.U. Mohanan, the film’s director of photography, who is a good friend. We worked on John & Jane together, so he knew what he was getting into.

But at one point when he was lighting something with garish Ramsay Brothers-style gels, he turned to me and said, “This film isn’t going to ruin my career, is it?” That was a laugh.

How did you fund this film?

Did you have to cast your net really wide?

Initially, I tried to get finance in India. We approached everyone, Balaji, UTV, etc., but they said it was not for them. Luckily, John & Jane had worked well internationally. It was the first Indian film distributed by HBO Films in the US. That kind of traction helped get finance from various co-producers in Germany, Japan, etc., and once that money was in, it was easier to raise the rest in India. It took almost three years.

Tell us a bit about the Cannes selection.

Cannes knew about John & Jane because it had been at the Berlin

film festival and Toronto. They have a pulse on what’s going on in cinema internationally and had wanted to see a rough cut of Miss Lovely as I was making it. I don’t think the rest of the world has as much faith in Indian cinema as we do, so they liked that we were doing something experimental and invited us.

‘Miss Lovely’ is concerned with the horror-sleaze films of the 1980s. What intrigues and repulses you about them?

The films themselves are pretty terrible, but the way they were made fascinates me. I spent a lot of time hanging out with the cast and crew of these films. These renegade film-makers produced films out of nothing. Here was genuinely independent filmmaking, misfits working on the margins with pathetically low budgets, making cinema with their own sweat, blood and tears.

What after Cannes? Are you looking at an India release?

Do you foresee trouble with the censors?

Of course, an India release would be the ultimate achievement but Indian distributors are safe and star-driven. The censors are probably also not going to be kind to this film. But things may suddenly change. One must have faith, so I hope for the best.

ROY SINAI

Regal: Abhijeet Shetty (left) as Tipu Sultan. on the biographies and literature available on Tipu Sultan.

In its new version, the play has a completely different cast, and the set has been adapted for the Jagriti theatre stage by

Raja, who founded Jagriti theatre and runs it. While Abhijeet Shetty plays Tipu Sultan, Jagdish Raja and Vivek Madan play historian Mir Hussain Ali Khan Kirmani and Arthur Wellesley, a colonel in the British army, respectively. “A new cast changes the tone of the play in many ways, but I have not consciously tried to make it different from what it was in 2004,” says Raja. She considered adding a video component but decided against it because the play is historical and called for a simplistic presentation.

The play opens in the year 1803, four years after Tipu Sultan was killed on the battlefield, at the point when Colonel Colin Mackenzie visits the house of Kirmani, who has been appointed an historian by the English. The story is narrated through Kirmani, who was in the service of Sultan, and holds him in high regard. The play

weaves through battle scenes, stories of Tipu Sultan’s personal life and, most importantly, the dreams he maintained a record of and kept concealed even from his closest associates.

An integral part of the play is the background score that was created by Sankarshan Kini and Rahul Bharadwaj for the first version of the play. They have kept the music as is. “We spent a lot of time then on what kind of music we should use and what instrument was used then,” says Raja.

“Once I have written a play, I hand it over completely to the director. I was happy with how it turned out previously,” says Karnad, who is yet to see the new adaptation.

The Dreams of Tipu Sultan is on till 20 May at Jagriti theatre, Bangalore. Tickets, `300, are available on www.bookmyshow.com or at the venue.

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DESIGN

MUSIC MATTERS

East by East­West Sotheby’s ‘Inspired

By India’ exhibition showcases a global design sensibility that honours Indian craftsmanship

B Y R AJNI G EORGE rajni.g@livemint.com

···························· ritish designer Alice Cicolini was looking up at the ceiling of Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, England, one day when she realized how similar it was to that of a palace she had seen in Agra. Next week, Cicolini will display jewellery inspired by the Silk Route in a fitting tribute to inherited traditions. Her work will be part of Inspired By India (8-15 May), an exhibition in London that will be hosted by auction house Sotheby’s.

Moving between an old haveli in Jaipur, where she works with Kamal Meenakar—one of India’s 15 master enamellers—and the hushed luxury outlets of Matches, London, Cicolini epitomizes the craftsman’s accretive impulse to borrow as she travels.

She is one of a growing tribe of artisan artists who comfortably borrow from everywhere and find acclaim and profit in work created out of their time in India—whether or not it is their country of origin. “These nationalized boundaries are not as hermetically sealed as museology would have you believe,” says the designer, who also curates exhibitions. “There is a shared global design language.”

Artists, like gypsies, have historically appropriated as they move: Inspired By India exemplifies the magpie eye of today’s global designer. Featuring contemporary design from, or evoked by, India, the show’s 11 participants will include established work such as the elegant khadi tones of US design house Dosa and the sumptuous fabrics of Kolkata’s Sabyasachi Mukherjee, as well as promising new designs like the Mughalinspired thrones of Delhibased Gunjan Gupta, jeweltoned stacking vessels of German-born Pia Wüstenberg and striking tables of Dutch-born Els Woldhek, who combines desi basket-weaving and European thatching.

“I have mixed designers

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based in India with others who are t r u l y ‘inspired’,” s a y s t h e show’s curator Janice Blackburn, who took designers like B a r b e r Osgerby (who designed the Olympic Torch) to Sotheby’s while they were still young talents. “I do it in a way that doesn’t look ethnically Indian; it’s global.” A visitor to India for over 25 years, she believes Indian design needs to help preserve local craft through international collaborations. “Sabyasachi, for example, embraces craftspeople with an unapologetic Indianness—unlike some Indian designers, who are a little bit of Versace,” she explains. “The designers I have selected use the best of fine, original design without compromising the rich tradition of India’s hand-making processes.”

“I regret being unable to take larger, heavier work like that of metal worker Vikram Goyal and sculptures by Anand Sarabhai made from abandoned inner rubber tubes,” says Blackburn, who was unable to get sponsors to cover transportation costs.

Indian design is the current focus of many art institutions.

Coming two months after the inaugural India Design Forum in New Delhi in March, Inspired By India precedes India Design Now, a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which is currently being scheduled and will feature only Indian designers.

The total revenue from Indian art sales at Sotheby’s in London and New York for 2011 was $2.6 million (around `13.9 crore) and $6.3 million, respectively.

“Between 2000 and 2010, the total auction market for Indian art shot up from around $5 million to an estimated $85 million,” says a spokesperson for the auc-

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

THE BIG DIVIDE

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ollywood watchers are all abuzz about the healthy box-office business generated by Paan Singh Tomar, Kahaani and now, Vicky Donor. It is that time of the year for such pronouncements as “content is king”, “plot is everything” and “the screenplay is the real hero of the movie”.

But there is another truth to contend with: The determinedly escapist Housefull 2 crossed the `100 crore mark, according to trade reports and a press release issued by the movie’s triumphant producer, Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment.

India is a land of great divides—rural and urban, Us and

Them, English and Indian language. Perhaps there is room for another division: the Housefull residents and the Paan Singh Tomar rebels.

The true-blue movie-goer will tell you that the real distinction is between good and bad cinema, but the spectrum of quality is so wide in India that perhaps the difference is actually between the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet, the fact is that the idea of the multiplex is finally being put to good use by so-called small movies. It’s easier to notch up respectable figures over several weeks at a 280-seater in a multiplex than it is at an 800-seater cinema hall.

SHUBHA MUDGAL

UNITED WE SING

I

Mix ’n match: Alice Cicolini’s Silk Route Shinkara Pendant; and (below) Pia Wüstenberg’s stacking vessels.

tioneer. “Buying and selling activity from India as well has doubled across all Sotheby’s selling categories.”

At the Inspired By India sale, buyers in London will pay anywhere from £130 (around `11,000) for 3-inch-high red porcelain works by potter Rahul Kumar to £10,000 for one of Sabyasachi’s legendary wedding saris. Cicolini’s work begins at £675 and Pia Wüstenberg’s recycled paper furniture and stacking vessels begin at £640.

“Western collectors have been actively seeking out contemporary Indian art operating in the same art world as Western work for a while,” says art historian Laura Williams, whose gallery, Art 18/21, in Norwich, England, sells work from—and to—both England and India, the latter through a partnership with the Indian Contemporary Art Gallery, Jaipur. She disagrees with the positive consensus, saying, “Since the overinflated prices of four-five years ago, the contemporary Indian art market has suffered considerably.”

As Ishaqzaade writer and director Habib Faisal has reiterated, popular taste is cyclical. The foreign, represented

by New York City (or Toronto masquerading as NYC), London and parts of Switzerland, was all the rage some years ago, but viewers seem to have by and large become indifferent to tourism department videos.

Unless, of course, the journey is integrated into the story, as Zoya Akhtar successfully did with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

Moreover, foreign destinations are not as inaccessible as they were in the 1990s. Indians who benefit the most from globalization and changes in the Indian economy seem to be spotted far more in Phuket than in Patna, but it is nice to be reminded every now and then that Bharat still exists—and has preserved its quirks and linguistic peculiarities. The newfound—and possibly fleeting

However, she adds, while the general feeling from the India Art Fair 2012 is that the domestic market is reluctant to collect non-South Asian art, her gallery has found collectors receptive to these artists.

Will both non-Indian art and Indian art’s modern aesthetic soon be embraced on a levelplaying field at home?

“India still has some way to go with design, it needs to find its own voice,” says Blackburn, who appreciates Gupta’s work, which marries Indian heritage with something modern, for this reason. “A lot of Indian clients would rather go to Milan—they don’t encourage Indian designers enough.”

Ultimately, there is a fear that craft-related traditions will fade out, just as there is a fear that “modern Indian” as a design aesthetic may not take off at home. Meenakar’s ancestors walked from Jaipur to Persia and returned to create traditional meenakari work, unique in how it is engraved on gold, Cicolini explains. “But with each generation, some of the skill degrades,” she says. Rural youngsters are unlikely to dedicate themselves to a proper apprenticeship which can take 15 years, let alone harken to its origins in a museum they would not feel permitted to visit.

But Meenakar’s Jaipuri palette has broadened to include the shade of lighter, more Western pink, which marks the new pieces created with Cicolini—perhaps it is in this unlikely partner that he has found his successor.

For while we may or may not get the Koh-i-Noor back, our new gems belong to the world.

f the advice meted out to contestants of Indian talent shows and reality shows were to be believed, a performance is effective only when the singer can shake a leg, dress like an overloaded Christmas tree bearing every trinket in the vicinity, and also jiggle, wiggle, shake, thrust, pout and moue like actors in Bollywood movies. The truth, fortunately, is far removed from this formula, and each singer must find his or her own mannerisms and performance styles, in addition to being convinced about the music they present. At times, it is this ring of conviction that communicates more effectively than anything else, touching and moving the hearts of listeners inexplicably, and consecrating a relatively simple song with the power to heal, inspire and lead. I heard one such performance on 25 April at the Sheth Mangaldas Town Hall in Ahmedabad.

The concluding item at an event to mark the 40th anniversary of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, or Sewa (the trade union organization for self-employed women workers started in 1972 by Ela Bhatt), was an adaptation of We Shall Overcome, sung by approximately 100 members of the Sewa union, who had gathered from different parts of the country, as well as from Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

At some point, we have all sung and heard the song. There was a time when no community-singing training programme SAMIR PATHAK

Soul sisters: Members of Sewa Nepal at the celebration in April. was complete without Hum Honge Kaamyaab, the Hindi translation of the original protest song. Doordarshan would regularly broadcast remarkably lacklustre renderings of the song by choral groups consisting of singers with deadpan expressions dressed neatly in coordinated saris and kurtas. I have judged innumerable group-singing contests in schools where one group after the other would arrange itself neatly on stage and rock back and forth on their heels while rendering the song listlessly.

There came a point when I had to stop myself from wincing noticeably when yet another group shuffled on to sing the same song. Yet, the other evening, the song came alive in a manner worthy of its history.

Arranged in an informal, crowded semicircle on the stage at the town hall, the Sewa singers, dressed in traditional attire from the regions they represented, sent the idea of colour coordination and neat rows flying out of the auditorium. They just gathered together in solidarity, cheered on at regular intervals by roars of “Hum sab ek hain” or “We are one” as they arranged themselves on stage. Then, starting with one end of the semicircle, each group sang the historic song in the language or dialect of their region. From Gujarati to Pashto to other languages, the song continued till each of the groups had sung. At times, the singing was tuneful and in unison, at other times it was raucous and even out of tune. But what remained constant was the resolve, and the unfailing conviction of being able to overcome exploitation, neglect, indifference and discrimination.

That fire, energy and charge is often missing in more sophisticated presentations by trained musicians, robbing the music of its ability to inspire and speak to listeners. One can only marvel at the power of music as invested in this song, so inextricably linked with the civil rights movement in the US. Journeying across continents and over time, it retains its anthem-like structure and is used time and again in protests across the world.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

New landscape: Arjun Kapoor (left) in Ishaqzaade, set in a small town.

—interest seems to be in those parts of the country that are removed from big-city living patterns—the criminal underbelly, the mall-free and fashion-blind urban neighbourhoods, the small-town feudal set-ups, the rolling fields of rural India. In recent months, we have been to small-town

Uttar Pradesh (Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster), the Chambal valley (Paan Singh Tomar), working-class Kolkata (Kahaani) and the insides of a fertility clinic in middle-class Delhi (Vicky Donor). Faisal’s Ishaqzaade (releasing on 11 May) and Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai (8 June) will once again pull us

away from the metropolis and in the direction of the mofussil.

Even big-budget Bollywood has been trying to slum it out: Agneepath moved between the coastal port Mandwa and a designer chawl in Mumbai.

Enter Housefull 2. It has been shot in foreign locations and on sets in Mumbai. However, its characters remain typically Indian—the types who lapse into Marathi exclamations or Sindhi bad words in sticky situations.

With its SMS-joke level of humour and roster of A- and B-list stars, Housefull 2 provides another kind of reality check. We love to venture out into the real world once in a while, but we will always be found at the gates of la-la land.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

The death and return of Roshik Babu PHOTOGRAPHS

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

The online reaction that followed the arrest of a professor indicates that the age­old culture of Bengali satire is alive

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n 14 April, the day after Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra was arrested in Kolkata for circulating a cartoon on the Internet allegedly satirizing West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Chandi Lahiri, one of the city’s foremost cartoonists, released a book he has edited on the long tradition of wit and satire in Bengali life.

The book came at a time when debate was rife on the legality of state-sponsored curbs on expression, on whether the reach of social media should be curtailed, on the line that demarcates artistic expression from the derogatory, and on the declining levels of tolerance and acceptance in political society.

There was no missing the irony. Through essays and illustrations, Bangalir Rangabyanga Charcha celebrates a community’s right to raise a laugh at the expense of itself and others. It is a custom in the printed form from the late 19th century when Gaganendranath Tagore, nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, cast a mocking eye at India’s British rulers, subservient sections of the Bengali community and the debauched lifestyle of the Britishpatronized babu.

Despite this tradition, Prof.

Mahapatra was first beaten up, allegedly by activists of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), and later arrested for distributing the cartoon—a recreation of a sequence from Satyajit Ray’s film Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress).

While the cartoon—not a product of skilful line drawing or original wit—possibly deserved nothing more than a chuckle, the turn of events raised an outcry.

As news of the professor’s arrest spread, cartoons began a dissenting online march and irreverence and humour became a serious daytime affair. On the social networking website Facebook, cartoons showed up like the rebellious torches glowing within the dark forest in the other Ray fantasy classic, Hirok Rajar Deshe, a film that introduces a George Orwell-like situation of dystopia blended with rich satirical humour.

Directed at the present political dispensation of West Bengal, the cartoons, including the offending one, came to be tagged as “crimetoon”, “thoughtcrime”, “Mamatatoon” and “ToonMool”. It was almost like a call to arms and a trigger to keep cartooning. After all, “Big Sister is watching you”, warned a hand-written illustrated poster at Jadavpur University a few days later (Banerjee is often referred to as Didi, or elder sister).

One of the cartoons that transited through Facebook was of four TMC pall-bearers carrying the body of Roshik Babu (“Mr Humour”; roshik, in Bengali, is someone who is

witty and humorous) to the Nimtala crematorium.

“Any act of repression of the arts and the democratic right of expression will eventually generate a reprisal and the outpouring of cartoons is indicative of that,” says illustrator Sarbajit Sen. “Over the years, cartooning has been marginalized in the mainstream media in Kolkata. Much of what we see is lampooning, a lesser art compared to cartooning. This resurgence, unless it gets a sustainable platform, will only be temporary.”

Lahiri, as a cartoonist who joined the Hindusthan Standard newspaper in 1961, followed by a long stint with Anandabazar Patrika in Kolkata, saw it coming.

In his newly released book, he imagines the future of cartooning to be in the free space of the Internet and social networking sites. “Most contemporary political leaders don’t like to be caricatured and newspapers too have compulsions,” reasons the man who, along with the Kerala-born cartoonist Kutty and Kolkata-based cartoonist Kafi Khan (also known as Piciel), provided the early morning capsule of humour and incisive socio-political observation through work in newspapers like Anandabazar Patrika, Amrita Bazar Patrika and Jugantar.

At 82, Lahiri has not let age, an ailing daughter and an absent left hand (he lost it in an accident when young) rust his wit. Sitting

cross-legged on a narrow bed in his north Kolkata home, Lahiri seems to embody the endangered spirit of pure, rational jollity.

“West Bengal’s former chief minister, Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, encouraged cartoons even when he was the object of caricature. He collected a few I made on him,” says Lahiri, reflecting on the political broad-mindedness of an earlier era. “But Jyoti Basu as chief minister of Bengal didn’t enjoy comic representations. His government revoked my press pass to Writers’ Building (the state’s administrative headquarters) saying I really didn’t need to be there.”

Banerjee too, he says smiling, is wearing blinkers.

In earlier years, caricaturing and lampooning of public figures and social codes existed in the singing and storytelling traditions. In the city’s Kalighat Pat paintings and Battala literature, even the coarse and the vulgar were employed as satirical tools.

Cartoons in their modern form came with the British.

In 1872, when Colonel Percy Wyndham started The Indian Charivari from Kolkata, the comic magazine inspired by the London Punch, the inaugural issue stated: “…no literary vehicle exists by which the faults and follies of our public-men may be satirically exposed, and our own various

grievances humorously ventilated.” The magazine, while inspiring similar publications, including the popular Bengali magazine Basantak, nevertheless maintained utmost secrecy about its operations. It refused to identify contributors and even wilfully misinformed the public, according to Devasis Chattopadhyay in The Statesman in 1992.

Partha Mitter, emeritus professor (art history) at the University of Sussex, UK, contends in his piece Cartoons of the Raj that the most effective cartoons in the early 20th century emerged from Bengal and were a “savage and yet playful game of self-mockery”—the piece was published in 1997 in History Today, a magazine that has been published from London since 1951. In an article published in the Anandabazar Patrika in October 1993, author and editor Gour Kishore Ghosh rued the gradual demise of the once-flourishing Bengali sense of humour in literature, cinema and the arts. “Our ministers and political leaders, through their work and action, are making us laugh so much that writers no longer feel confident to pen humour,” he reasoned.

At Jadavpur University, the epicentre of the current controversy, cartooning is back in serious academic focus. Abhijit Gupta, associate professor of English, wants to revive the

optional subject, literature and censorship, in which he earlier taught students about the Danish cartoon controversy—the publication of 12 cartoons caricaturing Prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper between 2005-06 that led to violent protests by Muslims around the world. Now, Gupta—admittedly proud after his students participated in a spontaneous protest rally against the arrest of Prof. Mahapatra—wants to talk about Banerjee.

“Cartooning has found a fresh lease of life in social media, and it is easier to draw a cartoon with the software tools available. The skill or expertise of earlier cartoonists is no longer needed,” he says. “But this controversy and the overreaction frankly puzzles me. In the West, cartooning is much more accepted and no distinction is made on whether they are hand-drawn or morphed.”

In an open letter by author Ruchir Joshi to Banerjee, which appeared in The Telegraph, the writer drew an effective sketch of the cultures of tolerance in Kolkata and London, a city that the Bengal chief minister wants the former to transform to. “...let me tell you how the last four British prime ministers have been portrayed in cartoons in London newspapers: John Major, always wearing his underpants outside his trousers; Tony Blair, as a one-eyed monster, sometimes as a one-eyed poodle

Cartoon row: (clockwise from top) Protest posters; a rally organized by students at Jadavpur University; illustrator Chandi Lahiri; and professor Ambikesh Mahapatra (left). trotting after George W. Bush; Gordon Brown, as a square, financial thug and bouncer; David Cameron, repeatedly, as an empty, blown-up condom,” Joshi wrote. “No one has ever sued about these portrayals, no one is beaten up, no one is arrested, no one even lodges a written protest.” In a city where Rabindrasangeet (Tagore songs) is played at important street intersections, and where the chief minister is often found uttering the poet’s lines, cartoonist Lahiri’s book lends yet another element of absurdity to the current situation.

In a chapter titled “Lampooning”, Lahiri writes about a comical representation of Rabindranath Tagore. On a visit to China, the poet was offered the delicacy of fried cockroaches by his hosts. While his companion hesitatingly gulped down a couple, only to throw up, Tagore remained the gracious guest, unperturbed. Later, in their room, Tagore started combing his flowing white beard.

And out came the two fried cockroaches which the poet had hidden there.

Write to lounge@livemint.com