Lounge for 06 Aug 2011

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

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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 32

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE NEW OLD DELHI As New Delhi turns 100, Shahjahan’s Walled City is also embracing change. We visited a joint family and its neighbourhood to feel the new pulse >Pages 10­12

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH ACUMEN FUND’S JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ >Page 8

SMARTPHONE THINKING ON A DESKTOP

OS X Lion is a wily beast, but it recognizes that things have been wrong for too long with desktops >Page 7

‘JUST A WAY TO SHUT UP SOCIETY’ As experts debate their ‘marriage’, two women get protection from a Gurgaon court against prejudices and death threats >Page 9

MODERNITY AND MEGA CITIES

Architect Rahul Mehrotra on his new book, how ‘impatient capital’ shapes a city’s skyline, and the relevance of Gandhian ideas of space >Page 16

An old­style house at Chitli Qabar Chowk in Old Delhi.

LUXURY CULT

REPLY TO ALL

RADHA CHADHA

MCQUEEN’S ART OF CONTRASTS

I

am not the only lady gaga over McQueen—there are thousands of people in the queue, waiting an average of 2 hours to enter the spectacular retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which is in its last week at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York. Its 4 May opening pulled a crowd of 5,100, the highest first-day traffic the Met has had since the Vincent van Gogh show in 2005. Nearly half a million visitors have already seen... >Page 4

AAKAR PATEL

WE OWE THE ‘PAV BHAJI’ TO AMERICA

S

nack food represents a higher form of civilization. We can trace the ascent of man through his diet, from gulped mouthfuls to nibbled morsels. The peasant eats three meals, and often only two, lunch and an early supper. His day is structured around these sittings, and for him eating is purely for nourishment. Evidence of this is before me every day. My lunch is always thick bajra roti, one lightly cooked green, thin chhaas and a paste of garlic and red chillies. The food of my fathers. It is the trader who has introduced... >Page 5

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WHY YOU WILL LEARN ON THE JOB

W

hat do you know, they say to you.

Wait till the pain starts. Wait till the baby wakes up, starts toddling, demands an iPad. Wait till the brat starts school, the angel turns 12. Wait till they fall in love…and then you’ll know. I don’t know what the grand truths are. I do know that everyday life with children needs to be constructed every day.

Bruises kissed, roads crossed, stories narrated, albums uploaded, excuses made and work done.

So how does one do it all? >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

FASTING, FEASTING

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

LOUNGE REVIEW | BRU EXOTICA

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

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PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

THE NUN FROM NEWCASTLE ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

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 ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

I

t was one of those rare New India tales that made you feel warm and fuzzy.

“Mother Teresa of Sumanahalli”, a sparkly moped-driving nun from Newcastle who had worked with leprosy patients for the past 29 years in Bangalore, was suddenly notified that her visa had expired and she would have to leave the country in a week. Sister Jean (born Jacqueline) McEwan’s story presumably reached the Union home minister, perusing the newspapers as he sipped his estate branded robusta.

So as McEwan, 63, sat on the steps of the house she had lived in for the past three decades, her bags loaded in the airport pickup, her farewells said, forcing herself like any good Christian to block out the feeling of devastation and focus on the fact that she would be reunited with her sisters in England, the phone rang informing her that P. Chidambaram had extended her visa.

Now she’s everyone’s hero. Mine too. I’m addicted to stories of little women who quietly go about making big changes.

When I call her, the mini celebrity answers the phone guardedly. “Earlier, when I saw an unknown number I would think, advertisers. Now when I see an unknown number I pray, let it be advertisers,” laughs the HERO WORSHIP nun whose conversation is peppered equally with British phrases like “out in the sticks” and Kannada descriptors such as galata (disturbance).

McEwan came to Bangalore in the days when Kamaraj Road was a river of flame trees and no autorickshaw driver would agree to take her home to the Banaswadi boondocks. Now she’s on the city’s buzzing outskirts, after a flyover, left from two petrol pumps, just in the lane with a “very large construction” and a demolished public toilet “but you can still see the tiling”, camped in the same blue house with the dark blue trimming. The TVS moped she’s been riding since 2000 is parked in the compound. It’s her fourth vehicle if you count the 50cc bicycle that didn’t need a licence.

These days though she takes the moped out only on short rides because, as she says, she’s too old to be knocked over by a bigger vehicle (she’s had five accidents so far). “If there’s a hole in the road too, I’ll get off and push it,” she says.

I ask if she feels safe. After all, Austra-

The good stuff The instant coffee drinker in India has more to choose from. The freeze-drying technology makes for impressive-looking granules that are more pleasing to the eye than the lowly powder variants. The click-lock jars the Exotica range comes in keeps the coffee fresh.

The not­so­good

At home: Jacqueline McEwan changed her name to Jean after she came to Bangalore. lian Graham Staines too worked with leprosy patients for over 30 years in Orissa before he and his two sons, Philip and Timothy, were burned alive by Hindu fanatics in 1999 as they slept in their station wagon. “Personally, I’ve never had a problem, but you’re always aware it’s there,” she says referring to the tension from some quarters. “If something happens to a Christian missionary, it’s a tiny little article hidden in the inside pages,” she says. In January this year, the Supreme Court upheld the high court’s decision to dismiss the death penalty for Staines murder accused Dara Singh.

The trained nurse encounters only the stray aggressive comment also because she usually travels with the Sumanahalli Society ambulance to dispense medicines and dress leprosy wounds from three community halls in Bangalore.

When she got the visa notice, the organization was in a panic because McEwan’s the one who remembers not just the names but also the medical histories (for example, which patients suffer from diabetes and hypertension) of all the people she’s ever treated.

For most of us, leprosy is a disease of the past, alive only at the occasional traffic light, but McEwan believes that if India doesn’t work hard to eradicate it, in 15 years the country could “have a shock”.

Officially India says it has eliminated leprosy, but new cases continue to be detected every year.

McEwan’s an expert on all the “work” that her patients do at traffic lights. She knows which abscess-ridden beggars work where, at what times and on which days in Bangalore. “Begging is hard work. They have to stand at the traffic light in the hot sun, go back in and out as the light changes, walk kilometres on their ulcers,” she says, adding that nowadays, most of her patients want to educate their children and ensure they have a better life.

McEwan could spend days dipping into her sackful of sad India stories (gangs, alcoholism, destitution, drugs), and some happy ones (an enduring Hindu-Muslim friendship). Over the years, her midwifery training has come handy too, when she was called upon to deliver two babies. Working with leprosy patients has taught her the importance of feeling pain. Clearly, the nun from Newcastle is more invested in India than most of us.

I ask if news of this latest episode had reached her family back home and she laughs: “Well it was in the BBC, Telegraph and Guardian so they’re probably looking at it and saying ‘Can that be our Jackie?’”

The three varieties are differently priced. Bru Exotica Brazil, `180 (50g) and `360 (100g); Colombia, `300 (50g) and `590 (100g); Kilimanjaro, `275 (50g) and `540 (100g).

This is expensive, considering fresh-ground Brazilian and Colombian coffee in India would cost `1,500-2,000 per kg.

The reviewer, Keshav Dev, is the proprietor, Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea, New Delhi. Disclosure: Devan’s will be retailing fresh-ground Brazilian and Colombian coffee from next month.

As told to Anindita Ghose.

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: JAVEED SHAH/MINT

A crowd­sourced project collects South Asian slang and the histories associated with it parts of the subcontinent.

“We see the site having one foot in the past—how sad would it be if a kid born today never knows what dark room (the children’s game) or Gold Spot (the cold drink) is?” says Vikram Bhaskaran, one of five friends who initiated the project. “And one foot in the present; when a new word is invented we want it to quickly find its home on Samosapedia.”

For many people the Samosapedia entries—written and edited by contributors based on personal vocabularies and crowd-sourcing via Facebook and Twitter—are indeed awash in nostalgia. Entries like “elocution” (noun, “some poor kid typically mugs a poem/chapter from a Gora author they have no connection with…”) or Godrej (noun, “steel cupboard…”) will spark off memories in middle-class homes, regardless of their native language.

Many others come from well within the Indian part of Indian English. If you want to know why your friends in Bangalore use “sakkath” as an intensifier, or when it is appropriate to say “ainvayi” in Delhi, Samosapedia offers a ready reckoner. Unlike many popular desi culture communities on the Internet, the majority of its input is from

Talk plastic

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

‘Desi’ dictionary allet,” reads one entry on Samosapedia (Samosapedia.com). “Adjective. When you pay someone a small fee to park your car, and later, bring it back to you, usually at five-star hotels. Sometimes incorrectly pronounced, ‘vallay’.”

Between Aai ga and Zindabad lies the demotic of a subcontinent—and the most serious effort to chronicle it on the Internet, Samosapedia. Well, “serious” is one word for it. Samosapedia, which went live just over a month ago, is in the process of compiling something like a desi Urban Dictionary, a “definitive guide to South Asian lingo”.

The results will make you laugh.

“Headbath. Verb. The daily act of washing your hair.” “Traditional with Modern Outlook. Phrase. She speaks the vernacular, toasts the coconut before putting it in the keerai koottu…but in the privacy of youthful company she knocks back Old Monk Rum and Thums Up.” Projects like these can be irritatingly patronizing about desi English usage. But Samosapedia is not just about smiling at our Hobson-Jobson vocabulary. It is also about building a tongue-in-cheek but comprehensive resource of a dialect that connects many English speakers across the urban and rural

If you’re a coffee connoisseur who’s accustomed to fresh-brewed coffee, a French press or an espresso maker, this instant range is no match. The flavours are flat and the coffee (especially the Colombian variety) has neither a “kick”, nor staying power.

Coffee loses part of its flavour with every process, from roasting to grinding to brewing. The process of producing instant coffee granules involves another interim stage, so hence it can rarely match up to freshly brewed coffee.

Note: I used 2 tsp of coffee for a mug of hot water while the jar recommends one.

Write to me at lounge@livemint.com

LOUNGE LOVES | SAMOSAPEDIA.COM

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ith Bru Exotica, Hindustan Unilever Ltd enters the premium coffee segment in India. They have on offer a set of three international blends: Brazil, Colombia and Kilimanjaro, which are being marketed for their “rich flavour and lingering aroma for the discerning palette (sic) of coffee connoisseurs.”

They promise different pleasures of the cup. Bru Exotica Brazil is the one with the richest taste; the exquisite and gourmet Bru Exotica Colombia, grown under the shade of banana and rubber trees, is supposed to have a rich aroma, while the Bru Exotic Kilimanjaro is designated as fruity.

Web view: Currently the site contributions are largely about south India. source-land, but it contains some diaspora talk too (if you want to know who a “Hinjew” is, look it up).

When Bhaskaran and partner-incrime Arun Ranganathan first hashed out the idea of a dictionary of desiisms, “we first called it Wonly.in, for ‘wonly in India’, or even ‘we are like this only’,” Bhaskaran says. But they wanted the site to be inclusive of shared colloquialism from all over the subcontinent, so they went with the slightly absurd and always intriguing “samosa” as a starting point instead.

“What could be more iconic to desis than the samosa, which exists in some form or the other just about everywhere you’d think of as having a South Asian influence, whether it’s in a Burmese soup or called the ‘sambusa’ in Kenya and Ethiopia?”

Bhaskaran says. “It’s pretty ubiquitous, from Chennai to Karachi.” Not to forget, he says, the word “Samos-

apedia” makes everyone laugh.

Currently, site contributors seem to be tipping the Samosapedia balance somewhat in favour of the south Indian end of things, but with more contributors from other parts of the region, there should soon be equivalents to “Macha” (noun, lit. brother-in-law but also close friend) and “da” (“…these days used for females as well”) up on the dictionary. The site’s founders say they are hoping for future contributors to come with the same appreciation for humour and personal touches on which the site has been built so far.

“Leave your chappals, suit-boot and seriousness at the door,” Bhaskaran advises. But if you want an orthodox reference guide, kindly avoid (verb. “Have some sweet, beti.” “No thanks aunty, I’ll avoid”).

Supriya Nair

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT

Alexander McQueen and the art of contrasts

I

RIEGER BERTRAND/AFP

am not the only lady gaga over McQueen—there

are thousands of people in the queue, waiting an average of 2 hours to enter the spectacular retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which is in its last week at The Metropolitan Museum of

Art (Met) in New York. Its 4 May opening pulled a crowd of 5,100, the highest first-day traffic the Met has had since the Vincent van Gogh show in 2005. Nearly half a million visitors have already seen the exhibition, a tribute to the genius designer who tragically ended his life last year, at the age of 41. Viewing time has been extended to accommodate more pilgrims to this unlikely mecca of fashion—the show opens at 8.30am for members (an hour before the rest of the museum) and the Met’s holiday on Mondays has been suspended for McQueen.

Inside, the crowd moves in orderly lines, but it is packed three deep—it is like trying to view the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, you never quite make it up close, but it is still worth it.

In fact, it is breathtaking. Quite literally so, as you suck in your breath and gasp as you are subjected to a series of delight-shocks, and just when you think there can’t be anything to top the exhibit in front of you, you gasp again. At the end of the show, emotionally wrung out like a piece of laundry, I pause to think—what is it about McQueen’s work that generates such an emotional wow? I have admired clothes of exquisite beauty from many designers, but what is that extra magic potion that McQueen pours into his creations?

You realize pretty quickly that these aren’t just pretty frocks, they are exceptional pieces of art, and McQueen isn’t just a fashion designer but an artist of phenomenal talent. His chosen canvas happens to be the female form, his medium fabric, leather, metal, wood, indeed found objects as diverse and curious as clam

shells, impala horns and human hair.

What do you call a dress of ostrich feathers and glass medical slides, all dyed red to cue blood? Mixed-media artwork? (VOSS, 2001.) What do you call a coiled corset (think elongated African spiral necklaces) constructed of aluminium? Sculpture? (The Overlook, 1999-2000.) What do you call a short film showing a woman morphing into a sea creature? Video art? (Plato’s Atlantis, 2010.) What do you call a mirrored glass box with a plump naked woman reclining on a sofa, surrounded by thousands of moths that fly out as the glass walls crash down? Installation art? (VOSS, 2001.) What do you call a hologram of Kate Moss twirling ghost-like in a wispy flowing dress? Digital art?

(Widows of Culloden, 2008-09.)

His fashion shows too weren’t the usual strut down the catwalk, they were stunning pieces of performance art. Who can forget the mesmerizing power of two robots (very Star Wars attack mode) spraying fresh paint on the model’s pristine white muslin dress, and as she goes round and round, you see a yellow and black pattern of sublime beauty created in front of your eyes (No. 13, 1999.)

And like all McQueen works, there are multiple layers of meaning here—machine vs man, aggression vs surrender, calculated design vs random improvisation—prodding you to think deeper. The point is McQueen may have operated within the confines of the fashion world, but the Met retrospective—which showcases 100 of his finest works, starting from his college graduating collection Jack the Ripper right up to the posthumously finished Angels

and Demons—convinces me that in time he will not just be compared with contemporary designers such as John Galliano and Marc Jacobs, but also contemporary artists of significant stature such as Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.

Like all great art, McQueen’s work is not just visually arresting, but also provocative food for thought.

His collections had a serious conceptual spine, and he often went out on a limb to make a political comment. For example, Highland Rape, as also Widows of Culloden, is a comment on Scotland’s violent history at the hands of the British—and the collection of brutally slashed dresses generated ample controversy. In VOSS, the naked woman on the sofa, obviously overweight, was a way of thumbing his nose at fashion’s insistence on super-skinny models. In the same show, he fitted double amputee Aimee Mullins— the paralympic champion who walked the ramp for him—with beautiful carved wooden prosthetic legs, again shaking up the very notion of beauty and the fashion world’s politics of exclusion. The wooden legs, incidentally, were called in for shoots by many magazine editors, who thought they were boots!

But ultimately, I think it is the “tension of opposites” that makes McQueen’s work spellbinding. He has a knack for juxtaposing two contradictory forces—romance and brutality, nature and

Genius: (above) A McQueen creation displayed at the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue, New York; and an exhibit at the Met show. technology, sexuality and elegance, medievalism and modernity, primitive and futuristic, pristine and ragged, death and life—and making them tango together with crackling tension. For example, he brings nature and technology together in his last collection Plato’s Atlantis, which is based on the notion that as ice caps melt and sea levels rise, the human species will adapt and evolve into sea creatures—a reverse take on Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

The clothes that follow are utterly riveting—hi-tech engineered prints that suggest snakes, spreading out like symmetrical Rorschach images, cut into futuristic clothes that exaggerate the hips.

Lady Gaga wore the

Jellyfish outfit from this collection, as also the amazing Armadillo shoes, for her Bad Romance video—in fact, she launched the video at the end of his fashion show, triggering such a stampede that the show’s live-stream website crashed.

McQueen knew how to translate his extravagant ideas from the ramp to wearable clothes in the store.

When he died, I went and paid my own homage by buying a dress from his last collection. I am no slim model, but the dress fits like a glove, as if it was made for me. And that was part of his genius—he understood a woman’s body and how to make her feel beautiful.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury.

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

BLOOMBERG

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

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panakopita? Kaltsounia?

Hortopita? Cretan “Samosa”?

What’s in a name? This week’s unexpected culinary controversy started when we were staying with our Greek friends in Corfu last week. One day for lunch our friends’ daughter, Annie, made a wonderful dish—spinach, mizithra (a ricotta-like cheese) and dill wrapped in layers of fine phyllo pastry—which we devoured on their wisteria-shaded terrace while watching boats bobbing in the bay down below and gazing out to Albania beyond.

“Cretan Pies,” Annie called them.

Back in Delhi, I decided to try and recreate a bit of Greek island magic. I found spinach, dill (sowa in Hindi) and phyllo at INA Market and even rustled up some homemade ricotta. The pies turned out so well—the only thing lacking was the sound of cicadas—I decided to share the recipe here.

Confusion started to set in when I decided to cross-reference on the Internet and discovered that Cretan Pies, or “Skaltsounia”, sometimes known as “Kaltsounia”, are usually sweet cheese pies served with honey. I quickly called my best friend Jane

back in Corfu for clarification but her on-the-ground investigation, while leading to much animated Greek debate, only muddied the waters further. Some thought Annie’s pies were technically “Hortopita” (greens pie), others said “Spanakopita” (spinach pie), but no one was willing to stake a culinary reputation on either.

Later, however, when Mint photographer Pradeep came to take the pictures, he needed a name for the captions. I confessed I wasn’t exactly sure what to call them. He studied the pies long and hard, then took a bite. “How about ‘Cretan Samosa’?” he suggested brightly. “They’re the same shape.”

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what they’re called. To me, they will always be quite simply the delicious pies made for a memorable family lunch by my best friend’s daughter. But I’m sure no one will object if we call them “Cretan Samosa”.

Cretan Samosa Makes about 10-12 pies Ingredients Phyllo pastry, available in delicatessens and with grocers selling imported goods, about four sheets

1 large bunch of spinach, thoroughly washed, stalks removed and roughly chopped 100g soft ricotta-like cheese (shop-bought or see below for a ridiculously easy way to make it at home) A handful of fresh dill leaves (sowa), chopped. Mint can also be used Zest of one small lemon A handful of breadcrumbs 1 egg, lightly beaten Olive oil Grated nutmeg, salt and pepper Method First make the cheese. Bring 1 litre of milk to the boil, then switch off the heat. Stir in a teaspoon of salt and a few tablespoons of yogurt and stir until the milk splits into curds and whey (as if making paneer).

Strain the curds into a muslin bag and hang it over a bowl to drain off the whey (keep it for bread-making though). Don’t press the curds as you would for paneer, you need this cheese to be very soft. The cheese is ready after about an hour or so and can then be used in any recipe calling for ricotta or the Greek equivalent, mizithra.

Put the spinach in a large pan with a lid and cook until the leaves are all completely wilted.

Press out as much liquid as possible and chop finely.

In a bowl, mix together the spinach, cheese, egg, dill, lemon zest, breadcrumbs and seasoning.

Taste the mixture and adjust until the balance of flavours is to your liking—I like it quite salty and

cheesy (Annie puts Parmesan in too, though this is not traditional) and with a definite taste of dill.

Unwrap the pastry but keep it covered with a clean tea towel as the fine sheets dry out and crack very quickly.

Cut each sheet into three strips lengthways. Brush each strip with a little olive oil— important for keeping the pies crisp. Put a teaspoonful of filling on the bottom left corner of one of the strips. Take the bottom right corner and fold it over the filling to make a triangle shape, sealing the edges to stop the filling escaping. Now continue to fold the pie in triangles all the way to the top of the pastry strip.

When you’ve used up all the filling, you can either shallow-fry the pies in a little sunflower oil or bake in the oven for about 15 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius.

After baking or frying, let the pies cool down a little.

Incidentally, the Greeks believe the flavours of their food are much better lukewarm or at room temperature—something we have difficulty with in Britain, where there is an obsession with everything being piping hot.

Serve with wedges of lemon and a glass of wine—instant Mediterranean sunshine.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at http://eatanddust.wordpress.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

Mediterranean bite: The spinach­ and cheese­filled phyllo pastry.

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

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

What Mumbaikars owe to the American Civil War: ‘pav bhaji’ ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

S

BALA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

nack food represents a higher form of civilization. We can trace the ascent of man through his diet, from gulped mouthfuls to nibbled morsels. The peasant eats three meals, and often only two, lunch and an early supper. His

day is structured around these sittings, and for him eating is purely for nourishment. Evidence of this is before me every day. My lunch is always thick bajra roti, one lightly cooked green, thin chhaas and a paste of garlic and red chillies. The food of my fathers.

It is the trader who has introduced snack food to our culture, bringing variety and art. He’s been able to do this because he has something the peasant does not and that is surplus money and, more important, surplus time. The trader’s workday shows that man needn’t be a creature merely of toil. He celebrates this independence with snack food, an indulgence. There are other benefits to not staying in the field the entire day. Surat’s textile merchants have coined a word, baporiyu, for afternoon sex.

Snack food in India is the product of its urban centres. The first community to settle in Bombay’s Fort area, in the 1660s, was the traders of Surat. Now Gujarat has been an urban state for centuries. While Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras were settled by the British, Ahmedabad and Surat existed as urban centres before the British arrived in 1608, their ship docking on the Tapi’s right bank near my house. When the Tapi silted over later in the 1600s, Surti traders were cajoled to move to Bombay. They brought with them their afternoon food—khandvi, dhokla, patra—and their breakfast snacks, fafda, thepla and khamni.

This, of course, isn’t street food. That would have to wait for a couple of centuries. Street food is very recent in Indian cities and its origins can be dated to around 1840. This is when a group of Gujaratis began trading in the area now known as Dalal Street, starting Asia’s first stock exchange a few years later.

They traded mainly in cotton, and many made fortunes in the period 1861-65 when global supply of the stuff was affected by the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln’s navy blockaded New Orleans and the Mississippi and Manchester’s looms came to a halt, sending cotton prices shooting. The Gujarati merchant is one of the world’s finest managers of uncertainty and he made a lot of money. These early globalizers worked, as today’s call centre workers, late into the night when rates were wired in and orders wired out at American and European times. By then everyone would be quite famished and the wives would be asleep at home.

This demand for regular food at an

unusual time created a unique supply.

The traders were served by street stalls that invented a late-night special: pav bhaji. This is mashed vegetables (all the leftovers) cooked in a tomato gravy and served with buttered loaves. The loaf came from the Portuguese Jesuits, who settled in Bandra around the mid-1500s.

It has been neatly absorbed into Indian fast food, soaking up the oil and gravies that Indians love.

As the city flourished, the street food became more sophisticated. Today, at Opera House and Zaveri Bazaar, regularly bombed because they are Gujarati neighbourhoods, the diamond trader has packets of buttered corn costing `70 and served from roadside stalls. But one thing did not change, at least in south Bombay. The variety expanded, and pani puri makers came from the north, and “tiffin” came from the south, but the food remained vegetarian. The reason for this is that the trading castes in India are quite fanatic about staying away from meat. Gujaratis love south Indian food, because the sambar is familiar through the link with dal, and tiffin is vegetarian. This doesn’t mean that all south Indian food is vegetarian. In fact most of it, in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, isn’t because the peasantry eats meat. The popularity of tiffin in south Bombay produced the sweet sambar that is unfamiliar in the south, but now loved by the rest of India.

And so, while the story of Bombay’s food is interesting, it is also limited.

This is the reason Indian street food isn’t popular outside of India. It cannot be easily produced abroad, because it doesn’t use the most commonly found ingredient of street food: meat. Those who wanted cheap non-vegetarian fare would have to wait for a few more decades, till Bombay began receiving a community of non-Gujarati Zoroastrians.

One of Bombay’s most recognizable places is the Irani café. These are run by Persians who have come relatively recently to Bombay, from the turn of the 19th century, the period the French call fin de siecle. They are called Iranis, while the older lot, who came in the centuries after the conquest of Persia in 644 under Caliph Umar, are called Parsis and they speak Gujarati. Both share the Zoroastrian faith.

A century ago, Iranis could come to Bombay and get very good corner places, facing two streets, cheap. In these they would set up their cafés

Mumbai classic: (above) The sweetness of bhelpuri points to its Gujarati roots; and a vada pav stall patronized by the Shive Sena. selling bun-maska, keema with peas, omelettes and pastries. These places had names that revealed their Persian origin: Khorshed, Kayani, Bastani and such.

The corner places were cheap because Gujarati merchants would not buy commercial property that was sinh-mukhi (lion-faced, wider at the front than the rear). They preferred gau-mukhi (cow-faced with an opening narrower than its rear). But all corner properties are necessarily sinh-mukhi and so Bombay has a lot of these excellent cafés. Many have shut down and all will be gone in a decade. Iranis brought food that was new to India.

South Bombay’s Britannia restaurant is the only place we can eat berry pulao, made with a sour little fruit that is apparently still imported from Persia.

Most Indian snack food is vegetarian

because our merchant castes are almost without exception Hindu. The exception is Gujarat, and Surat has always had excellent non-vegetarian street food in the Bohra neighbourhood called Jhampa bajaar (Zampa bazaar in English). Here you can eat organs deep-fried and served with delicate sauces on small sheermal bread. The Hindu equivalent of the area is called, unpretentiously, Khau Galli. This is shortened from the word khaudra, which means greedy. Uniquely among Gujarat’s cities, Surat has non-vegetarian street food. Surat’s OBC communities such as Khatris and Ghanchis, both meat-eating, are economically empowered and because of that it has excellent and diverse street food.

Oppressively vegetarian Ahmedabad has the dullest restaurant experience of any

city in India because the Baniya and Jain is intolerant in this sense.

The last wave of innovation in Bombay’s street food happened in the early 1970s. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s great idea was to encourage Marathi boys to set up stalls selling vada pav, the deep-fried potato ball stuffed in a loaf lined with dhaniya chatni, garlic chatni powder and a fried green chilli. TV chef Anthony Bourdain took one bite of vada pav and judged it the best Indian food he had ever eaten. Hundreds of little illegal vada pav stalls dot Bombay and employ thousands. Neighbourhood Shiv Sena offices would normally open around these stalls, spreading a political movement through food.

I am quite certain Bourdain hadn’t been taken to eat pani puri. It is the most complex street food in the world. A planet of crust, core and liquid. A globule with two fillings—mashed potato and boiled chana (or moong)—and two sauces, sweet and sour. Boondi is often added. At the mention of pani puri Calcutta’s phuchka and Allahabad’s golgappa also raise their hand. However, these are neo-urban cultures and neither is mercantile. We can safely dismiss either of them as being the origin of pani puri. My guess is pani puri and bhel, given their sweet ingredients and their texture, are Gujarati and probably invented in Bombay in the early 1900s.

Today’s Mumbaikars do not have as rigid a diet as their parents did, and the nature of the city’s street food is changing. One aspect of it is the spread of fast food chains. They have risen as the Iranis and the tiffin cafés have shut down for lack of demand, lack of profit, and lack of ability to scale up. There are few chains that serve Indian snack food, because it is not easy to quickly assemble, and most of it cannot survive refrigeration.

There is one advantage our street food has which hasn’t eroded over time.

It is cheap. Bombay’s street food has fed generations of migrants who arrived with big dreams but shallow pockets, and it will continue to be around as long as that does not change.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

L6

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011

Parenting

LOUNGE

GUIDES

Hidden city A book on Delhi, as experienced by its animal and bird visitors, is the latest in a clutch of children’s books set in urban India

Snapshots: (clockwise from above) An illustration from Toto and the Leopard in The Adven­ tures of Toto the Auto: Book 2; a double­spread from 366 Words in Kolkata; and an illustration from Tales of Historic Delhi.

B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· mid the publicity blaze of new novels by star authors such as Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga, the quiet launch of a new book on Delhi went unnoticed. Written and illustrated by Premola Ghose, Tales of Historic Delhi is that rare children’s book that focuses on a city. It has been published by Amber Books in association with Young Zubaan.

“Besides textbooks, there have been almost no books in India that help children understand their cities,” says Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, a publishing consultant and critic who has been working on children’s and young adult literature since the 1990s. “It’s only in the past few years that such books are being produced and a market for them is being created.”

In recent years, illustrated children’s books from publishing houses such as Puffin, Katha and Tulika, focusing on Indian mythological stories, have been selling well. There have also been books on cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore—indicative of an emerging trend of cityspecific books for children. In further indication of how the market for young readers is growing, Bahrisons Booksellers in Delhi’s upscale Khan Market is opening a floor dedicated entirely to children’s books later this month.

A

Tales of Historic Delhi:

By Premola Ghose, Amber Books and Young Zubaan, 64 pages, `225.

Ghose’s stories engage the young reader in a tone descriptive of the city’s flavours, but not condescending or preachy, and come complete with paintings of colourful bazaars, kings, animals and tombs. “I wrote the way I always write, irrespective of whether the book is being targeted towards children or adults,” says Ghose, who works as head of programmes at the India International Centre, New Delhi. Her slim volume showcases Delhi as experienced by animals and birds, visiting the city from the forests of Ranthambore in Rajasthan. “Last year I’d made drawings on this theme for an

exhibition. Later, I made up the stories around these images. I concentrated on what a tiger, a rabbit, a butterfly would think and say while loafing in Delhi.”

A few years ago, author Kim Narisetti wrote two Delhi-centric books. Published by Random House India, Urban Crayon Delhi (`199) was more like a family travel guide. It pulled in both children and parents to explain what they could gain from visiting a particular site or monument. I Saw Delhi, a drawing and sketch book, presented a few nuggets on monuments such as Humayun’s Tomb or India Gate, and showed how to draw each in three simple steps. “In a city like Delhi one should not study its history via a book, but experience the vibrancy on a daily basis through going out and about,” said Narisetti in an email exchange. “But as a writer, I

think children love reading about the gardens, monuments and museums. It really is fascinating how they were built and why.”

In September 2008, the Indian subsidiary of Scholastic, the group that first published the Harry Potter novels, published a children’s book on Mumbai. Vivek Tandon’s A Blind Man’s Map of Mumbai is a thrilling adventure. Three major characters, including a schoolboy, grapple with a mystery involving such diverse people as an MLA and an astrologer. The novel has no illustrations and despite being a work of fiction, it gives a sense of the mad energy that makes up Mumbai. “For children to understand our cities better and in a fun way, we need more books like Tandon’s novel,” says Anushka Ravishankar, a children’s writer and the publishing director at Scholastic. “Besides being enter-

taining, it conveyed Mumbai’s character by making the city’s geographical and cultural specifics integral to the story.”

The characters in these stories are not always humans and animals. The hero could even be…well, an autorickshaw! That’s what Toto is: a Mumbai-based autorickshaw. Published by Mumbai-based FunOKPlease, Toto’s adventures, targeted at children aged 3-6, are growing in popularity. Having made its debut in January, Toto became a beloved hero by rescuing schoolchildren from one of those ghastly Mumbai floods.

The second adventure, Toto and the Leopard (`80), was set in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivali, Mumbai. “I want to give children a flavour of our cities,” says Ruta Vyas, the author.

The same company has also

published Deepti Belliappa Ganapathy’s 366 Words in Bengaluru (`125). In 40 pages, the colourful book gives children a sense of the city—and they also end up learning new words. Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi are also covered in the 366 Words... series.

There is no success formula for children’s writing, though, and there’s no guarantee that a book on, say, Chennai, will find buyers beyond that city. Ravishankar admits that Tandon’s book did better in Mumbai than in other cities. “It’s impossible to guess what children would like to read because each child is different,” she says. “Children are as different from each other as adults are, and we’d never presume to know what all adults like.”

But children in Delhi at least seem to be taking to Ghose’s guide on the Capital. Last month more than 25 copies of her book were sold within a week at Jor Bagh’s The Book Shop. “The book is well illustrated and mostly it is the parents who are buying it for their kids,” says K.D. Singh, the store owner. Narisetti’s Urban Crayon also did extremely well in this bookshop.

“It was distributed to us by Prakash Books and we sold all the 30 copies. Unfortunately the publishers didn’t come out with a second print,” says Singh.

Meanwhile, Toto is coming to Delhi this month. His next adventure, Manku’s Escape, will start at India Gate.

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

LEARNING ON THE JOB

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hat do you know, they say to you.

Wait till the pain starts. Wait till the baby wakes up, starts toddling, demands an iPad. Wait till the brat starts school, the angel turns 12. Wait till they fall in love…and then you’ll know.

I don’t know what the grand truths are. I do know that everyday life with children needs to be constructed every day. Bruises kissed, roads crossed, stories narrated, albums uploaded, excuses made and work done. So how does one do it all?

I won’t lie. I was clueless.

When we first brought baby home, our house of cards collapsed quite swiftly. Nothing I had ever done before had prepared me for this. Or had it?

I looked back at my years as a media-wallah. I had spent a decade lugging lights, tripod and

video camera, making pictures for news television. I had dust on my shoes, a passport out of pages and an eye for composition. I knew how to circumvent barricades to be on the front line.

And now I was home with baby. A glossy baby book for reference. Hmm, think of them as video camera and manual, I said to myself. It gave me confidence. Till the camera began to bawl.

Eventually I discovered that almost everything I know about being a mum, I had practised in the years that I had been a video journalist.

Make a checklist. I know lists are for amateurs. The first step is to admit that you are an amateur. In the first year of my career, my mantra had been white balance-focus-aperturecompose-roll camera. Cut. My

new chant: Feed-burp-rockcheck diaper-clean-repeat. Build a team. Feed your team well for best results.

Everyone loves cameras. And babies in other people’s laps.

Airline staff pays extra attention.

Army men smile. You can ask for the seat of your choice.

Confront customs, visa, immigration, security and other bullies by planting the camera on their desk first. When the baby makes eye contact, something changes. In the confusion, you might be able to get away with what you want.

Having a friend for a partner makes all the difference.

Someone who will shield the lens from the glare of the setting sun. Hold the baby and clean her behind the ears. Replenish you with a drink after the shot.

After the feed, I mean.

In my glorious years, I’ve driven off twice forgetting the camera behind. Once in Yangon, once in Delhi. Don’t panic, soon enough we reversed and picked it up from exactly where I’d left it.

One camera lost consciousness on me, in London. One fell from the tripod in Pokhara, Nepal.

Mom mantra: Small is beautiful.

What do you think I did? In fuzzy slow motion, I picked up the baby, returned to my resort room and hung myself by the 5m XLR cable. Went shopping the next day.

From cameras to children. In the last six years, twice or thrice

I have forgotten to appear at Sahar’s school bus stop to receive her. Ok, thrice. Naseem fell once from my arms.

Sometimes Aliza’s batteries run out. We make mistakes, we mend our ways.

You work with two cameras.

Wow, you are so awesome.

Three cameras are a bit much. So are three children.

You will be mocked. Everyone will ask you why. Don’t bother with an answer, no one really wants to know.

When you have stuck around long enough, you either evolve into a higher form of being or become a crabby bore. Some of us switch from one to the other between dawn and dusk.

Parenting isn’t a limelight kind of role. Neither was camerawork. You are supposed to do it quietly in the background and not hanker for credit. Yet both of them taught me to see the light. Think on my feet. Do jugaad, be creative, stay in control.

Charge baby’s batteries in time, talk to her lovingly.

Recharge your own batteries.

Differences. Well, cameras never cry. They stay in one

place when you ask them to.

Alas, they get obsolete. As with all love stories, the memories acquire a warm glow.

On a good day at work, someone would ask, “What’s a little girl like you doing among men like us?”

Among other things, I was learning how to have fun while doing dirty jobs for the rest of my life. I was learning to see beauty, beauty in the small moments.

So you tell me. Tell yourself.

What is it that you do best?

Actor, actuary, teacher, editor, doctor, dodger, whatever.

Identify your expertise.

Transfer your lessons. Be a boss.

Watch baby sleep and take a picture. Put up your feet and absorb the peace.

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

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

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011

L7

Play

LOUNGE REVIEW

OS X Lion: Apple’s latest OS is a mix of mobile and desktop features.

Smartphone thinking on a desktop OS X Lion is a wily beast, but it recog­ nizes that things have been wrong for too long with desktops

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· n all likelihood, the mobile phone in your pocket is the best computer you’ve ever owned or used. Any half-decent smartphone from any half-decent brand is going to offer you a computing experience that is superior to a desktop computer’s in many, many ways.

But to appreciate this you must think back to the first time you ever used a desktop computer. Perhaps you were a child and you used a primitive machine at a parent’s workplace.

Or you went to a pioneering school that invested, with much fanfare, in a “Computer Lab”.

The details of that first encounter are irrelevant. But in all likelihood it was one of wonderment. You can draw pictures? Holding down “Shift” makes the letters come in capi-

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tals? THERE ARE GAMES??!!

Since those days of wonderment, the computer has evolved tremendously. And yet it has also simultaneously and defiantly refused to change.

Computers have become more versatile. They have better processors, smarter software and sturdier hardware. Yet little has changed in the way we interact with our desktop computers.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are typing a document on a computer and now wish to refer to a Web page you have open in your browser. You wish to copy some text from that Web page and paste it in your document.

First you must switch from your word processing application to your browser. If your browser is not open, you need to summon the app. At worst this could mean minimizing your word processor window, opening a file system manager, navigating to your applications folder, locating the browser application file and then double-clicking to launch it. After this you must type in your website address, wait for the page to load, search for the text you seek and then copy. After this you navigate back to your word processor screen, place the cursor where you want and paste the text.

The astonishing thing is that in the last two decades of computing, this basic process has not changed substantially for the average user.

This explains why most publicuse computers are such a mess.

Check any machine at a shabby airport Internet café or hotel lobby.

Usually the desktops are littered with documents, many of them personal ones like resumes or letter drafts. Orphan browser windows with emails, tickets, schedules and maps are the digital equivalents of empty crushed beer cans and greasy burger wrappers.

Now compare this with the mobile phone in your pocket. Your device can browse, play music, edit documents, take photographs and even edit them.

You achieve all this without once wading through file structures or folders. Good apps need a setting or two. Great apps need none.

Switching between apps usually takes no more than a fraction of a second. Apps start instantly. And disappear instantly as well.

So then five years after the launch of the iPhone and a clutch of other excellent smartphones, why do our desktop computers still suck so much?

OS X Lion, the latest iteration of Apple’s desktop operating system, is perhaps the first indication of a great rethink that could change all that.

Lion has been reviewed extensively by a plethora of technology writers. So we will not delve into any of those hundreds of tweaks, tricks and optimizations that Apple has built into Lion.

Instead, let us briefly reflect on a handful of additions to Lion that offer a glimpse into the future of a more meaningful desktop computing environment. One prominent reviewer has said that Lion could keep developers engaged for the better part of the next decade as they figure out ways and means of really leveraging the software. This is because Lion is not just an upgrade on old software, but also a somewhat ambitious first attempt at bringing to desktops some of the simplicity and efficiency of the mobile environment.

First of all, Launchpad.

Launchpad recreates on the desktop the same app launching system as on most smartphones. A gesture on the Trackpad summons screen upon screen of icons. From here you can launch, delete, rearrange and group icons. Some of the icons even have informative badges—emails unread, time remaining for task completion, and so on.

Then there are a set of features that enable full-screen apps, app switching and desktop management. The philosophy here seems to be directly inspired from the mobile phone: People want to multitask but not like they used to.

Rather than have multiple windows open on the same screen, perhaps they prefer to switch from window to window more seamlessly and effortlessly. Like they do on phones. This, combined with

an improved desktop management system, makes Lion a joy to multitask meaningfully.

Lion also handles apps and files more sensibly. Quit, say, a word processing app at any time. Even in the middle of a half-written article. The app quietly disappears without any niggling questions about saving. The next time you restart, the app carries on from exactly where you left off.

This is how, you can’t help think, things should have been always.

When the iPad was first launched in 2010, many people dismissed it as an oversized iPod Touch. This was not a serious computing device, they said, this was a ridiculously large MP3 player.

Since then these pundits have been proven wrong by buyers. The iPad has become a device of transformational significance for industries such as media, news and entertainment. It appears that users’ computational needs are determined by more than just the sheer hardware horsepower of devices. It is also determined by

how easy these devices are to use, how amenable these devices are for developers and how versatile they are for various kinds of users.

OS X Lion is not the desktop computer’s iPad moment. Enjoying Lion’s potential to any significant degree may be beyond most novice users and anyone averse to experimentation. One of the most popular settings on Lion, going by Internet posts, seems to be the one that turns off the new inverse scrolling setting (Apple says this setting, which is standard on all touch devices, is more natural).

But Lion does point to a future where your computer will begin to behave more and more like your phone or your tablet. No doubt experts will denounce future versions of OS X or Microsoft Windows as having dumbed down your computer. “This just turns your computer,” they will say, “into an oversized tablet with a keyboard and a mouse.”

Who is to say this is a bad thing?

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L8

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ

Cheerleader who invests in people The founder and CEO of Acumen Fund wants to bridge the gap between rich and poor B Y S ONYA D UTTA C HOUDHARY ···························· mpressing a roomful of financiers with a fund size of $50 million (around `221 crore) is not easy. But Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, does exactly that.

Dressed in a flowing bluegreen chiffon kurta, which complements her blue-grey eyes, and leggings, this 50-year-old graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business tells stories about capital saving the world.

We are in the banquet room on the 29th floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange, as Novogratz talks with Akhil Gupta, senior managing director and chairman of Blackstone India. Blackstone Worldwide may have assets of $19 billion but it is Novogratz and her Acumen Fund that has captured everybody’s attention.

Started in 2001 with seed capital from the Rockefeller Foundation, Acumen uses capital to fund efficient businesses that “serve the poor”. Having so far invested $50 million in 50 different companies in East Africa, India and Pakistan, Acumen funded-companies include one that makes solar lights (Delite, India), anti-malarial bed nets (A to Z, Tanzania) and clean toilets (Ecotact, Kenya).

As a globetrotting CEO, Novogratz is a spectacularly effective ambassador for the Acumen brand. Whether it’s making her way through the tribal Chitral district of Pakistan, or talking strategy at Acumen’s Bandra office in Mumbai with investors such as G.V. Prasad, CEO and vice-chairman of Dr Reddy’s, or Rohini Nilekani, chairperson and founder of Arghyam. Novogratz is equally enthusiastic, a “cheerleader”, as she puts it, for the fund.

“I think of myself as someone who invests in people,” she says, when I meet her a day later. We are sitting in the coffee shop of Mumbai’s suburban Grand Hyatt hotel. Novogratz opts for watermelon juice and I choose my standard fix, a cappuccino.

She is dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, accessorized with a beautiful silver necklace bought in Mumbai, wooden bangles from Ghana and a colourful Nigerian cummerbund.

The cumulative effect is both chic and charming, and certainly an evolution from Novogratz’s earlier days where she describes herself as a

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“perfect librarian of sorts, with wire-rimmed glasses, pressed linen suit and swept-up hair”.

We are sitting at a round table.

There’s a paperback on it, with a young Tanzanian girl staring quizzically into the camera. This is The Blue Sweater—Bridging the gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, Novogratz’s best-selling autobiography, published in 2009. It tells many incredible stories—beginning with young Novogratz giving up a job with Chase Manhattan Bank and then with the World Bank to develop her own brand of social change.

Of the difficulties of doing business in Africa and the many challenges Novogratz, then 25, had to face. These include incredibly bizarre ones—like threats of voodoo, poisoning and even an attempted seduction by a powerful African woman Novogratz refers to as “Aisha”.

Novogratz talks about her life today—travelling 70% of the year to Acumen offices around the world, to investors and to investee companies, constantly networking in her effort to “tell stories, to influence policy, to see capital invested in ways that can really change the world”.

“A rich life is one where you are stretching yourself to work on the world’s toughest problems and focusing on others,” she says. Working on such a diverse set of problems is certainly something this CEO should know about, having spent the last 25 years doing everything from setting up a microfinance institution, Duterimbere, in Rwanda to funding healthcare, alternative energy and agricultural projects in East Africa, India and Pakistan. Little wonder that there are such a high degree of encomiums to her credit, ranging from being named among “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy, a

news magazine published by The Washington Post Co., in 2009 to one of the “25 Smartest People of the Decade” by The Daily Beast, a news reporting and opinion website which merged in 2010 with Newsweek.

So does Novogratz do the usual banker/venture capitalist lifestyle things? Does she, for instance, travel business class? If you take donor money, you need to think about accountability, explains Novogratz. “So Acumen has a policy of paying for only economy-class travel, but I do use miles to upgrade myself to business class. I am not an ideologue.” But what one spends one’s money on is a different conversation, a distraction

from a systemic conversation of what it takes to make a change, concludes Novogratz, perhaps a trifle irritatedly.

Three years ago, she married Chris Anderson, a media millionaire who made his money by creating and then selling a publishing business, and now runs the non-profit organization TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences that focus on the power of ideas. “There’s an extraordinary sense of mutual respect; we both feel we want to change the world,” she says. The

couple is based in New York.

Novogratz’s eyes light up as she describes the days in Manhattan. “I live downtown in the village. I have six brothers, their spouses, and 15 nephews and nieces, all within walking distance.” Also within walking distance is the Acumen office. On a regular New York day, Novogratz, an early riser, goes running in her Saucony shoes down the river, before she goes to work. At work, besides meetings with Acumen investor partners and board members, there are team meetings, discussions on “values, actions and insights.

I also look at the team meeting notes from India, Kenya, Ghana, etc., to see what the ‘aha’ moments were and if there were any insights from these,” says Novogratz, who likes to focus her time on looking at the team goals for the year, on knowing the entrepreneurs and companies in which Acumen invests.

“We used to always speak in numbers, but now the goal has shifted from being, (for example), a $250 million-fund and what have you, to changing the way we solve the problems of poverty,” says Novogratz, who would like to demonstrate to the world that patient capital can be deployed for good causes in an economically viable way, and through building partnerships with entrepreneurs, with established industry and ultimately with the government. “The solutions to the world’s problems have to come in through these partnerships,” Novogratz declares.

By now it’s 11.30am, and time to pack up; in a few hours, Novogratz has a flight to Bhubaneswar in Orissa, where she will speak to villagers about the quality of their drinking water.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Milestones: The Foreign Policy magazine named Novogratz among the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’.

IN PARENTHESIS If she wasn’t doing what she currently does, Jacqueline Novogratz says she would have liked to be a war correspondent.

“Writing is how I process reality,” says the CEO whose insomnia drives her to spend the nights typing away on her Apple Mac. “I wake up, I think about the day and then I think, well, maybe if I write about the day, it’ll make me fall asleep.” Novogratz is also on Facebook and Twitter, with more than 300,000 followers, perceiving both as the “most extraordinary social media tools this world has ever seen”.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011

L9

Life Wire

LOUNGE LOVE ON THE LAM

‘Just a way to shut up society’ As experts debate their ‘marriage’, two women get protection from a Gurgaon court against prejudices and death threats

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

···························· hen Savita “married” her childhood friend Veena Dhama, it was simply a matter of choosing life over death. She did not know that in the process she would become one half of India’s first officially recognized lesbian couple, as the media hailed them, after a Gurgaon court ordered the Haryana police to ensure their security in the face of death threats from Savita’s relatives.

In its order on 25 July, the court of the additional sessions judge stated that Veena and Savita had filed an affidavit that they were married, but did not comment on the validity of the marriage.

Five days later, on a muggy Saturday morning, the women, who had been in hiding, turned up at the court to claim protection.

Dressed in a light blue salwar suit with the dupatta draped demurely over her head, 25-year-old Savita could have been any newly-wed young woman—the parting in her hair was marked with dark sindoor, a mangalsutra hung around her neck and on her arms were the trademark red bangles. But the stiffness of her shoulders and her tightly pressed lips, as she stared straight ahead, ignoring the assembled media, underscored the fact that she was aware of her

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unique status. Veena, her thick hair cropped short, was dressed in a man’s full-sleeve shirt and dark brown trousers. A couple of Veena’s male relatives formed a protective ring around them.

As they waited to appear before the judge, Savita blushed when asked if she’d like to change anything about her spouse: “No, nothing.” As the response was met with sceptically raised eyebrows by the 20-odd listeners—relatives, lawyers and journalists—crowded around her, she added: “Not any more. I’ve changed whatever I had to.” As Veena glared a warning against spilling secrets, she giggled that she had made Veena give up gutka. “I told her I wouldn’t live with her if she chewed gutka. She listened to me.

We’re friends. We’ve been friends always. I’m alive today because of Veena,” she said.

The final-year BA student of Chaudhary Charan Singh College in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, insists there’s nothing more to the relationship. They have no sexual relation, claims Veena. But according to their petition, filed in the court of the additional sessions judge, the friends, who had been in hiding since mid-June, “married” before a notary public on 22 July.

“It’s just a way to shut up society.

Marriage is a powerful word, a convenient word. We are friends and we want to spend our lives with each other,” adds Veena, the quieter of the two.

To them it had seemed like the most natural choice. Growing up together in Khekada village in Baghpat, the women have been friends for as long as they can remember. “Our families were very close. We practically grew up in each other’s homes. We were playmates and grew up to be our closest confidantes,” says Savita.

The families drifted apart somewhat after the Dhamas sold their land in Khekada last year and moved to Doghat, about 2 hours away, but the girls’ friendship con-

tinued unhindered. When Savita took up a job as a teacher in a private nursery school, it was Veena, a school dropout, who ferried her to and from the school on her Bajaj Pulsar motorcycle.

When Savita was married to a UP police constable in December, it was Veena who visited her. And it was Veena who discovered that Savita was being treated brutally by her in-laws and was contemplating suicide. She informed Savita’s family, and despite their initial objections, convinced them to intervene. Savita denies that her relationship with Veena affected her marriage. “We did not have any ‘relationship’. I was happy and excited when my marriage was planned. Veena too was happy for me. Every girl dreams of marrying, so did I,” she says.

The dream soured when her husband, mother-in-law and sister-in-law started abusing her. “He was a policeman, and he knew I would not dare to go to the police against him,” she adds. However, with Veena’s support she complained to the local panchayat, which dissolved the marriage in May. Savita returned with Veena to her parents.

Within a month, matters worsened. Savita’s maternal uncle tried to get her married again, alleges Veena. Savita swore she would kill herself if forced. Veena stepped in to save her once more and proposed she move in with her at her family home. “Her family was trying to get her married again and she was threatening to commit suicide. She had tried that once before. I was afraid she would succeed the next time,” says Veena.

For 22-year-old Veena, the youngest of six siblings, who has always been treated as a son by her parents and has shouldered the family’s responsibilities since the death of her elder brother more than three years ago, convincing her parents wasn’t difficult. “They had no objection to our staying together. But Savita’s fam-

ily was livid. Especially her uncle.

They swore to kill us. Her uncle even turned up with a few goons.

We decided to run away and get married,” Veena says.

The couple hid at the home of Veena’s cousin Jaiveer Singh, near Manesar, Haryana, and moved the Gurgaon court seeking protection. Singh says he had no objection to the women staying with his family: “We’ve known Savita since childhood. And if two friends wish to stay together, what’s the harm in that?”

The court granted them secu-

rity citing a March 2010 order of the Punjab and Haryana high court “to ensure help and assistance to runaway couples”. The couple’s counsel, Durgesh Boken, says that contrary to reports, the court has not married them. “The court has not remarked on their status—whether married or live-in partners. It has simply called them a runaway couple, and a couple could simply mean two people,” explains senior counsel T.K. Bhatnagar, who was also consulted by the women.

Even as some reports in the PHOTOGRAPHS

It’s official: Savita (standing) and Veena; and (below) a photo of their ‘marriage’ filed with their petition.

BY

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

media hailed the order and went to town saying the court had married them, the gay community remains sceptical. LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights activists and legal experts too say the court order cannot be read as legalizing same-sex unions. “There’s a difference between decriminalizing and legalizing. The Delhi high court verdict of July 2009 read down Section 377, which criminalized same-sex relationships. As far as LGBT rights go, that was the big step forward.

My understanding of the Gurgaon court order is that it has merely accorded protection to two women who claim their lives are under threat. As individuals they are already guaranteed such protection by the Constitution,” says advocate Gopal Shankaranarayan, who is not connected with the case. He adds that the women only cited marriage as the reason they were being threatened, but did not move the court to validate their marriage. The court too left the question open.

At the court, as they waited for the police to complete the paperwork and deploy a bodyguard, Savita and Veena appeared to be settled in their new life. They say they now discuss future plans.

For the moment, they will be at a Gurgaon police safehouse. “They will be there till 16 August, the date of the next hearing,” their counsel said.

The couple wants to return to Doghat soon—Veena needs to be at the family’s farm and Savita wants to complete her BA before she begins looking for a job in the government.

And waiting back home are “their children”—Veena’s brother’s four children, whose mother abandoned them when their father died. The youngest, three-year-old Vansh, can’t wait to meet Veena, whom she calls “papa”.

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NEIGHBOURHOODS

The new Old Delhi

As New Delhi turns 100, Shahjahan’s Walled City is also embracing change.

We visited a joint family and its neighbourhood to feel the new pulse

B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· n a house on Pahari Rajaan hill, stairs lead to a courtyard. Here a new flight of stairs passes a kitchen and leads to another courtyard. More stairs, another room, stairs—and then you reach the roof and get a view of Purani Dilli or Old Delhi.

These low hills and flatlands are carpeted with rooftops. Your view is framed by the domes of the Jama Masjid, the ramparts of Red Fort, and the high-rises of

I

Connaught Place.

The Walled City that Shahjahan built in the 17th century has undergone many transformations. And this labyrinthine house and its occupants reflect the changes.

The seven-room mansion is at Chitli Qabar Chowk, Old Delhi’s only traffic intersection with four streets. Dating back to the latter half of the 19th century, it is home to a family of 11. The Jhinjhanvis, originally from western Uttar Pradesh, settled in the area in the 1950s. Muneer-

ul-Hassan, 51, and Naseer-ulHassan, 47, are brothers. Their wives are daily readers of the Quran, and Delhi Times, a supplement of The Times of India.

One of the five sons in the family works in a medical transcription firm in Noida. The family’s printing and binding factory shut down in 2009 but there’s enough money to have meat at every meal, they say. The house has an Internet connection and everyone is on Facebook.

Yumna, one of the two daughters, is a student of political science

(honours) at Maitreyi College in Delhi University’s south campus.

She says she is the only Muslim girl from Old Delhi in her class.

“After she completed her 12th standard exams, my daughter started receiving marriage proposals,” says Naseer, whose visiting card describes him as an “Ex-Stephanian” (a 1986 alumnus, he was admitted to St Stephen’s College through the sports quota). “I said ‘no way, not even if the offer comes from the Prime Minister’s family. First comes the career’.”

Yumna stepped out of Old Delhi alone for the first time in 2010. “Once I joined the college, I got my freedom and also my first cellphone.” The 19-year-old hangs out in the cafés and malls of south Delhi. “I no longer want to be in Purani Dilli,” she says.

“I’ll prefer to live in Malviya Nagar or Saket, where I can dress up in anything I like.”

After Yumna started wearing jeans to college, some boys in Turkman Gate nicknamed her “Jeans ki pant”. “I ignore them,” she says.

The Metro, which reached Old Delhi in 2005, has made its contribution to women’s liberation. One resident says she has often sighted jeans-clad girls pulling off their burqas at Chawri Bazar station as they walk down the escalators.

The house’s courtyard—sehen in Urdu—has a balustrade overlooking Chitli Qabar Chowk, named after the grave of a saint of whom not much is known.

Huge electric cables hang across the streets like art installations.

A dahi-vada vendor is stationed at the centre. The alleys are lined with pavement traders.

Pointing to a man pulling a loaded trolley, Naseer says, “Old Delhi has been taken over by labourers from Bihar.”

The migrants began arriving in the 1980s and took up jobs in households and in small karkhanas—or factories—of handicrafts, printing, bookbinding and masonry. “Instead of focusing on their businesses, the owners, all Old Delhi gentry, wasted their time in sleeping, gossiping and eating,” says Naseer, who has rented out the premises of his closed factory to Bihari labourers. “The migrants worked hard. Now,

they are our owners and we are their servants.”

There are signs of change everywhere. Facing Red Fort, Meena Bazaar specializes in scooter parts, water pumps and machine tools. Biharis run most of the shops here. The bazaar’s street food vendors too are from Bihar. “Biharis work on low wages,” says Haji Mian Faiyaz Uddin, the owner of Haji Hotel, Matia Mahal. His staff is made up of Bihari migrants. “First, they worked in the eateries owned by Old Delhi people, learned how to make nihari, kebab, haleem and biryani; then they started their own stalls. Once they established themselves, they called relatives and friends from their villages.

Educated Biharis also followed.

Most reporters on our local Urdu dailies are from Bihar,” says Faiyaz Uddin.

The migrants have made the place a little cosmopolitan. The Excelsior Cinema in Hauz Quazi screens Bhojpuri films. The Rooh Afza sellers at Turkman Gate sit alongside the vendors of sattu ka ghol, the traditional drink of Bihar.

The new arrivals are settling in an overpopulated area. Shahjahanabad was built over 569 hectares to house 60,000 people.

According to the 2001 census, its population is 235,160. There are no empty spaces save a few gardens, and these are taken over by the homeless. For morning walks, Old Delhi residents cross the Walled City’s limits to Shantivan, the memorial of India’s first prime minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru. There are no playgrounds, so Naseer’s two younger boys, Kabeer and Nameer, play cricket in the house’s second-floor courtyard.

Occasionally a stray ball

Changing times: (clockwise from above) Sisters­in­law Sabiha (left) and Shaheena scanning a newspaper in their living room; Yumna, Naseer’s daughter; Chitli Qabar Chowk as seen from the Jhinjhanvi house terrace; and Shaheer, Muneer’s son. splashes into the yogurt of the dahi-vada vendor below.

Decorated with sadabahar flowers and money-plant vines, the courtyard has other purposes too. “In winters, we enjoy the sun here,” says Shaheena, Muneer’s wife. Since the kitchen is small, the courtyard is used for peeling vegetables and making chutneys. In a neighbourhood without open spaces, these private courtyards are precious.

And they are disappearing.

Over 30 years, many Old Delhi residents have sold ancestral homes to builders and moved to localities such as Okhla, Preet Vihar and Jafrabad. The aesthetics of traditional architecture have given way to the needs of commerce, and a courtyard is a costly indulgence. The Walled City has been reduced to multistoreyed apartments; the sun and air barely reach the congested streets.

To see this degradation, take the short walk from Naseer’s home to the tomb of Razia Sultan, India’s first woman ruler, in Bulbuli Khana. The two stone mounds are hemmed in, surrounded by the walls of shabbylooking buildings. According to a 2004 paper by A.K. Jain, then a commissioner with the Delhi Development Authority, Old Delhi has more than 400 historical monuments, sites and buildings. “Most havelis that I chroniTURN TO PAGE L12®

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

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NEIGHBOURHOODS

The new Old Delhi

As New Delhi turns 100, Shahjahan’s Walled City is also embracing change.

We visited a joint family and its neighbourhood to feel the new pulse

B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· n a house on Pahari Rajaan hill, stairs lead to a courtyard. Here a new flight of stairs passes a kitchen and leads to another courtyard. More stairs, another room, stairs—and then you reach the roof and get a view of Purani Dilli or Old Delhi.

These low hills and flatlands are carpeted with rooftops. Your view is framed by the domes of the Jama Masjid, the ramparts of Red Fort, and the high-rises of

I

Connaught Place.

The Walled City that Shahjahan built in the 17th century has undergone many transformations. And this labyrinthine house and its occupants reflect the changes.

The seven-room mansion is at Chitli Qabar Chowk, Old Delhi’s only traffic intersection with four streets. Dating back to the latter half of the 19th century, it is home to a family of 11. The Jhinjhanvis, originally from western Uttar Pradesh, settled in the area in the 1950s. Muneer-

ul-Hassan, 51, and Naseer-ulHassan, 47, are brothers. Their wives are daily readers of the Quran, and Delhi Times, a supplement of The Times of India.

One of the five sons in the family works in a medical transcription firm in Noida. The family’s printing and binding factory shut down in 2009 but there’s enough money to have meat at every meal, they say. The house has an Internet connection and everyone is on Facebook.

Yumna, one of the two daughters, is a student of political science

(honours) at Maitreyi College in Delhi University’s south campus.

She says she is the only Muslim girl from Old Delhi in her class.

“After she completed her 12th standard exams, my daughter started receiving marriage proposals,” says Naseer, whose visiting card describes him as an “Ex-Stephanian” (a 1986 alumnus, he was admitted to St Stephen’s College through the sports quota). “I said ‘no way, not even if the offer comes from the Prime Minister’s family. First comes the career’.”

Yumna stepped out of Old Delhi alone for the first time in 2010. “Once I joined the college, I got my freedom and also my first cellphone.” The 19-year-old hangs out in the cafés and malls of south Delhi. “I no longer want to be in Purani Dilli,” she says.

“I’ll prefer to live in Malviya Nagar or Saket, where I can dress up in anything I like.”

After Yumna started wearing jeans to college, some boys in Turkman Gate nicknamed her “Jeans ki pant”. “I ignore them,” she says.

The Metro, which reached Old Delhi in 2005, has made its contribution to women’s liberation. One resident says she has often sighted jeans-clad girls pulling off their burqas at Chawri Bazar station as they walk down the escalators.

The house’s courtyard—sehen in Urdu—has a balustrade overlooking Chitli Qabar Chowk, named after the grave of a saint of whom not much is known.

Huge electric cables hang across the streets like art installations.

A dahi-vada vendor is stationed at the centre. The alleys are lined with pavement traders.

Pointing to a man pulling a loaded trolley, Naseer says, “Old Delhi has been taken over by labourers from Bihar.”

The migrants began arriving in the 1980s and took up jobs in households and in small karkhanas—or factories—of handicrafts, printing, bookbinding and masonry. “Instead of focusing on their businesses, the owners, all Old Delhi gentry, wasted their time in sleeping, gossiping and eating,” says Naseer, who has rented out the premises of his closed factory to Bihari labourers. “The migrants worked hard. Now,

they are our owners and we are their servants.”

There are signs of change everywhere. Facing Red Fort, Meena Bazaar specializes in scooter parts, water pumps and machine tools. Biharis run most of the shops here. The bazaar’s street food vendors too are from Bihar. “Biharis work on low wages,” says Haji Mian Faiyaz Uddin, the owner of Haji Hotel, Matia Mahal. His staff is made up of Bihari migrants. “First, they worked in the eateries owned by Old Delhi people, learned how to make nihari, kebab, haleem and biryani; then they started their own stalls. Once they established themselves, they called relatives and friends from their villages.

Educated Biharis also followed.

Most reporters on our local Urdu dailies are from Bihar,” says Faiyaz Uddin.

The migrants have made the place a little cosmopolitan. The Excelsior Cinema in Hauz Quazi screens Bhojpuri films. The Rooh Afza sellers at Turkman Gate sit alongside the vendors of sattu ka ghol, the traditional drink of Bihar.

The new arrivals are settling in an overpopulated area. Shahjahanabad was built over 569 hectares to house 60,000 people.

According to the 2001 census, its population is 235,160. There are no empty spaces save a few gardens, and these are taken over by the homeless. For morning walks, Old Delhi residents cross the Walled City’s limits to Shantivan, the memorial of India’s first prime minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru. There are no playgrounds, so Naseer’s two younger boys, Kabeer and Nameer, play cricket in the house’s second-floor courtyard.

Occasionally a stray ball

Changing times: (clockwise from above) Sisters­in­law Sabiha (left) and Shaheena scanning a newspaper in their living room; Yumna, Naseer’s daughter; Chitli Qabar Chowk as seen from the Jhinjhanvi house terrace; and Shaheer, Muneer’s son. splashes into the yogurt of the dahi-vada vendor below.

Decorated with sadabahar flowers and money-plant vines, the courtyard has other purposes too. “In winters, we enjoy the sun here,” says Shaheena, Muneer’s wife. Since the kitchen is small, the courtyard is used for peeling vegetables and making chutneys. In a neighbourhood without open spaces, these private courtyards are precious.

And they are disappearing.

Over 30 years, many Old Delhi residents have sold ancestral homes to builders and moved to localities such as Okhla, Preet Vihar and Jafrabad. The aesthetics of traditional architecture have given way to the needs of commerce, and a courtyard is a costly indulgence. The Walled City has been reduced to multistoreyed apartments; the sun and air barely reach the congested streets.

To see this degradation, take the short walk from Naseer’s home to the tomb of Razia Sultan, India’s first woman ruler, in Bulbuli Khana. The two stone mounds are hemmed in, surrounded by the walls of shabbylooking buildings. According to a 2004 paper by A.K. Jain, then a commissioner with the Delhi Development Authority, Old Delhi has more than 400 historical monuments, sites and buildings. “Most havelis that I chroniTURN TO PAGE L12®

L12 COVER

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

L11 ® FROM PAGE L10

cled in my book have been destroyed, altered, modified or mutilated,” says Pavan Varma, the author of Mansions at Dusk: The Havelis of Old Delhi, which was first published in 1991.

A century ago, the modestsized havelis were confined to a single floor. Each courtyard had flowerbeds and a well. Houses had two sections: the mardana for men, and zenana for women. The kitchen was in the mardana section and the lady of the house would interact with the khansama (cook) through her maid. Today, families crowd into tiny apartments, and privacy is one of the first victims of economic survival.

Meals at the Jhinjhanvi household are prepared by Shaheena and her sister-in-law Sabiha. Both women experiment with different cuisines; it is not unusual for the family to break the Ramzan fast with homemade pasta. After explaining the difference between pulao and biryani, Sabiha says, “We read the Quran in our spare time but we also like reading Delhi Times to catch up with film

gossip.” Both women scan the paper to find out which showroom in which market is giving hefty discounts. As they prepare dinner, Muneer says, “We don’t know how long our unity will last but my and my brother’s families dine daily on the same dastarkhan (the food spread).”

Old Delhi owes its bustling nightlife, in part, to a shortage of space. Large families live in oneroom homes. Everyone cannot fit on the floor at one time, so members sleep in shifts. Waiting for their turn, people keep the streets crowded until 2am.

Close to the Jhinjhanvi house, Haveli Azam Khan was once the residence of a Mughal-era general. It has 10 rooms, each of which is occupied by a different family. Measuring 13 sq. ft, one room is home to 11—mother, father, three sons, three daughters and three grandchildren. There is a goat, a parrot, a refrigerator, a washing machine and a kerosene stove. The air is musty and walls damp. Outside, in the courtyard, an old woman, stark naked, takes a bucket bath.

In the Jhinjhanvi household,

fish are enjoying the illusion of being in the sea. “That’s flowerhorn, and that’s upside down catfish,” says Shaheer, Muneer’s 24-year-old son. Working as a medical transcriptor with a firm in Noida, Shaheer bought the aquarium from Matia Mahal bazaar. An aspiring model, he returns from the office at 6 in the evening and heads straight to the gym for an hour. He is dating a Hindu girl he met on the social networking website Orkut. “There’s nothing to do in Old Delhi except eat and sleep,” he says. “If you want to make something of your life, you have to leave this place.” Earning a monthly salary of `12,000, Shaheer wants to double the figure within a year. “My next stop is the IT sector.”

More and more parents in the Walled City are now forcing their children, both boys and girls, to give time to their studies. “After the economic reforms, employment is not limited to difficultto-get government jobs,” says Naseer. “Now, most of us understand that decent schooling can land our children jobs in private companies.”

We are family: (clockwise from above) Sabiha praying while her husband Naseer reads the newspaper; women preparing the dough for rotis in the courtyard; and the family having a meal together.

Immediately below the Jhinjhanvi house is Chitli Qabar Bazaar, displaying the contrasts of the changing neighbourhood.

Burqa-clad women walk past men wearing T-shirts sporting slogans such as, “I’m still a virgin, please give me a chance”. Chicken-flavoured Maggi noodle packets are sold alongside chicken stalls, where a customer chooses a live bird that is killed on the spot. Half-naked beggars follow foreign tourists.

In his white salwar-kurta, Naseer is heading to his sister’s home in Kucha Challan. Having undergone kidney transplant surgery, he says: “I don’t like hanging outside long. I have to protect myself from infections.” The street is lined on both sides with open drains. Flies are buzzing; swarms flying between the roadside muck

and meat at a butcher’s stall. During the British era, bullock carts fitted with water sprinklers washed the streets twice a day.

The accepted wisdom is that the cream of Old Delhi society chose to flee to Pakistan after it was created in 1947. But there is at least one living exception. At 102, Mian Naseem Changhezi, a friend of Naseer’s father, spends most of the day with his 2,000 books at his haveli on Pahari Imli hill. His elegance is the work of generations. His conversational Urdu is as pure as that of any 19th century Old Delhi poet. His pronunciation is perfect. His manner is gentle. His voice is never loud.

His beard is snow-white. The architecture of his house is close to that of an original haveli. There is a raised courtyard, leading to an arched veranda that opens

into a room, with small storerooms on both sides.

“I did not go to Pakistan,” says Changhezi—one of his two sons is settled in that country. The other lives with him. “Does Dariya-e-Jamuna flow in Karachi? Does Lahore have a Jama Masjid built

by Shahjahan? How could I ever leave my Purani Dilli?”

However, the grandchildren of his late friend are itching to leave the area. Every morning Naseer’s daughter Yumna puts on a top and jeans, covers herself in a stole and boards a rickshaw for Turkman Gate. Her father says: “Those girls who are confined within the walls of their homes lose their personality. To succeed in life, a woman has to walk like a man.”

On bus No. 729, as it leaves the Walled City, Yumna removes her stole and enters the other world.

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Books

LOUNGE THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE | ANITA DESAI

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

Past continuous

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

I

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

A filigreed and nuanced work in which characters move in limbos of their own making

The Artist of Disappearance: Random House India, 156 pages, `350.

B Y S ANJAY S IPAHIMALANI ···························· he ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past. That was the intriguing epigraph to Anita Desai’s last novel, The Zigzag Way, and it’s a dictum many of her characters would subscribe to. The ones in her latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, are no exception. This comprises a series of three novellas featuring people who find themselves cut off from the mainstream of everyday life, brooding over former actions and inactions.

With characteristic delicacy and the incremental accumulation of small effects, Desai takes us into their hearts and minds.

To begin with, there’s the reserved bureaucrat of The Museum of Final Journeys who, when posted in a remote, tedious outpost at the start of his career, chances upon a series of rooms in a mansion resembling a ramshackle version of Kolkata’s Mullick Palace. Here, he marvels at artefact after artefact sent from overseas, an experience that haunts him even many years later.

In Translator Translated, an introverted college professor with a knowledge and love of Oriya proficiently translates a volume of a favourite author’s short stories, only to confuse notions of creator and translator when it comes to the same author’s new novel (language and its context: It’s a theme reminiscent of the author’s earlier In Custody). Finally, in the title story, a reclusive young man lives in the burnt shell of his family

T

Crumbling: Desai’s characters’ half­lives play out in dusty mansions. mansion near Mussoorie, finding solace in nature, only to have his idyll interrupted by strangers from the city.

These are stories of lives half-lived, of the disappointment of destinations and of the ever-receding possibility of transformation. The causes, more often than not, turn out to be remote parental figures matched by a native irresolution bordering on timidity.

Looking back on the years gone by, the bureaucrat realizes that “while others dreamt dreams and lived lives of imagination and adventure, my role was only to take care of the mess left by them”. And the translator could be speaking for all of the others as she muses while taking a bus journey: “We are all in this together, this world of loss and defeat. All of us, every one of us,

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

NEWLY ENGROSSING Fiction ahoy In the last few weeks, unusually, I have come across new fiction that has kept me engrossed—and not in a superficial manner either. Some of it is by established writers, and some by little-known ones.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, for instance, is a major African-British novelist, shortlisted for the Booker and Commonwealth Prizes. His latest novel, The Last Gift, is about 63-year-old Abbas, who had met Maryam outside a Boots in Exeter when he was a (migrant) sailor, and married her decades ago. With their children having grown up and moved away, Maryam and Abbas lead the kind of suburban life that most ageing couples do. But when Abbas suffers an unexpected

L13

collapse, his illness not only forces his two children to return home (with shreds of their various lives), but also makes Abbas and Maryam confront the secrets and silences of their pasts.

As the blurb puts it, Gurnah’s novel is a sensitive “meditation on family, self and culture, and the meaning of home”.

There are also two excellent collections of fiction by two other major writers, Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai. But of these two I will speak at greater length in a later column.

Of writers I had not read before, I greatly enjoyed Dilip Simeon’s Revolution Highway.

Sometimes a bit verbose but never without humour or perception, this is a first novel by a writer and scholar who is already established in other

had had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond, but all of us…have had that window close and remain closed”.

There are no finessed, artificial climaxes to these narratives; rather, Desai’s technique is to place her characters in situations that take them out of their workaday milieu and then follow them and their actions with her pen, in a manner of speaking. The simplicity with which the tales unfold belies the artisanship that has gone into their crafting.

The interweaving of the present and the past apart, there are other exercises in craft, such as the shifts between first and third person as well as between past and present tense in Translator Translated (here, and elsewhere, Desai also gives rein to the

genres. It engages with the lure of, and disappointments with, far-Left ideologies, mostly referred to as “Naxalism” in India, for a class of young and educated middle-class men and women in the 1960s.

Naxalism remains one of the taboo areas of Indian English fiction. Very little of any significance has been written about it. Simeon’s novel is interesting in that

understated humour that is her other trademark. Of the atmosphere at a publishing conference, for example, she writes: “Terms proliferate that indicate the large number of academics in the audience: Subaltern. Discourse. Reify. Validate…Wasn’t ‘subaltern’ a military term?”)

However, the title story, the one that’s the most fleshed out, suffers on account of being curiously bifurcated by the amount of time Desai spends on the activities of the intruders who encroach upon the central character’s Eden. The actions of this three-member film crew from Delhi who travel to Mussoorie in order to shoot a documentary on environmental degradation draw attention away from the titular character’s predicament and weaken the spine of the story—even though it is because of this disturbance that he discovers a new, albeit more private way in which to express his inventive urges.

The Artist of Disappearance doesn’t exactly extend or deepen Desai’s concerns as a writer: The India she writes about, for example, is the same India she’s always written about. Yet, it is a filigreed and nuanced work, once again demonstrating her moving powers of description, of both inner and outer states. The past may be a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, but in Desai’s hands, it’s capable of many domestic disturbances.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Stories in search of lost time

context, though it too restricts itself largely to the middle-class canvas: “Naxalism” had a major rural and lower-class source too, or it would not have survived (in whatever contorted forms it has assumed) the fall from vogue and intellectual grace of far-Left ideologies after the 1970s. Having said so, I also need to add that the novel covers a large area with

Present times: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel investigates family silences.

’m still undecided.

Last year, I wrote about the experience of reading comics on the iPad (very nice) and the app ComiXology. Since then, I am happy to report, I have bought a few dozen (maybe more, but why talk numbers) comics from the store. Over this period, the ComiXology store has grown to include around 45 publishers of comics, including all the big known ones and several of the lesser-known ones. It still doesn’t include publishers focused on graphic novels, such as Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics, but it has most of the rest.

Depending on what you buy, the cost could vary from $0.99, or around `44 (for comics on sale), to $1.99 (stand-alone single-issue comics) to $4.99 or $5.99 (trade paperbacks and graphic novels).

ComiXology is moving to a same-day-as-print release for some comics at least, although this isn’t happening as fast as I would have liked it to. When this becomes more the norm than the exception—I think it is just a matter of time and should definitely happen within a year—there will be another strong reason to buy comics on the iPad. Right now, though, there are several other very good reasons. The first is availability. Again, there is room to improve, but ComiXology definitely has more comics on sale than most comic book stores even in the US, which means it has far far more than any book store selling comics in India. It’s also a convenient way to pick issues you have missed.

The second is resolution. Like I mentioned in the first piece I wrote about comics on the iPad (http://www.livemint.com/ batmancomics.htm), there’s something to be said for the reproduction of colours and images on the screen. It is also possible to expand individual panels.

So, why am I still hesitant to make a complete shift to digital comics?

After all, I no longer buy Net gain? The ComiXology app. books in physical form.

Unlike collectors who prefer single issues, I buy trade paperbacks (collecting several comics) and commemorative volumes (called Absolute editions by one comic book publisher), so I am not sure the small fortune I have spent on comics over the years has appreciated.

While trade paperbacks are a lot more substantial than individual editions, and are also usually printed on better paper, they have practically no resale value.

Thinking about this behaviour has made me realize that I do exactly the same thing when it comes to music.

I do buy a lot of digital music, but I still remain a CD man.

Now, CDs are the trade paperbacks of the music world, just like vinyls are the single issues; and they too have no collector or resale value.

I’d like to put this down to the generation I belong to, one that was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and started working around the time India opened up its economy in the early 1990s. It’s a generation that is comfortable with technology but isn’t immersed in it like the ones that followed.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

intelligence, humour, perception and, what has become even rarer these days, a memory.

I wish I could get all my colleagues in Western academia who talk of globalization as if it was something invented by Rupert Murdoch to read those segments of Simeon’s novel that illustrate how certain ideas, techniques and hopes travelled like wildfire across nations in the radical 1960s. If Revolution Highway sometimes falters as a novel, it nevertheless maintains a roaring pace as a book of ideas and necessary recollection.

A writer I had never read before is Anirban Bose. Though credited with a “best-seller” (that never came my way), Bose’s new collection of stories, Mice in Men, which I am reading right now, heralds a promising new voice. Precise, sculpted, narrated with the right tone for the right topic, not suffering from the wordiness of much of Indian English fiction, these are stories that manage to make fiction comment on reality and

reality comment on fiction. An excellent collection of stories, and an author to watch.

In memoriam Writer, journalist and editor, Sunil K. Poolani died at the early age of 41. Sunil had a varied career path in journalism, having functioned as senior editor with the Express group, The Sunday Observer, The Free Press Journal and Blitz. He was a regular contributor to many mainstream publications. Seven years ago, Sunil founded the fiction imprint, Frog Books, as a platform for the writing talent he saw around him. It was later incorporated under Leadstart Publishing, where he functioned as editorial head, fiction. A well-known reviewer and editor, Sunil also compiled the significant journal, Urban Voice. He will be missed.

Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of The Thing about Thugs.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

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Travel

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

FRANK KOVALCHEK/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

ANDREAS PRAEFCKE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

dogs or hamburgers.

But roots run deep in Texas, and the State Fair hasn’t forgotten its past in agriculture and cattle.

Somewhere deep within us there’s supposed to be a pastoral farmer lurking. But since most of us are about as capable of farming as milking a bull, there are delightfully informative displays of farm livestock, milking shows, tractor fixing and other such activities for all ages and knowledge levels (that is, designed for ignorant city folk such as yours truly). And paying tribute to the oxen of today, there is this enormous auto show featuring everything from cars to pick-up trucks that could probably lift the Titanic.

Yet there are times when we don’t want to be lost in the chaos of mega fairs. Contrary to all expectations, Texas also surprises me with delightful small fairs and festivals (albeit the “biggest” small fairs in the country), celebrating local flair, flavours and culture. In these fairs, the atmosphere may be a little more rustic, and we make fools of ourselves throwing surprisingly heavy horseshoes or sportingly wagering pennies on racing armadillos (which by the way, are not reptiles, but ant-eating mammals).

The little town of New Braunfels is a blink-and-you-miss-it stop between San Antonio and Austin.

But it suddenly explodes into activity for 10 days in November, when Wurstfest comes to life. New Braunfels was founded in the mid-1800s when several German colonies were established across Texas. Wurstfest celebrates those ancient German roots in true American style by consuming vast

TEXAS

A slice of Americana Country fairs are where the south­ west comes to shake a leg and fry up just about any­ thing. It’s America served ‘Texas­size’

B Y S UNIL L AXMAN ···························· here was a time when America’s south-west was a sprawling, harsh, unforgiving land where sombre, sombrero-wearing, gun-slinging rancheros and crusty cattlemen struggled to survive. Somehow, the towns there grew, families developed roots, and suddenly there were a large number of people who realized that the entertainment provided by church fairs alone wouldn’t cut it. They needed a place where the entire county could gather, compare each other’s livestock, shake a leg at a dance, and deep-fry some animals in batter, or some sugar in dough, or both. And perhaps it was thus that the great fairs and festivals of the south-west came into being.

County, town and state fairs and festivals are a still-enduring slice of Americana, particularly in that enormous stretch of country between the coasts dubbed “middle America”. Since (at least for Texans) it doesn’t get more heartland than Texas, some of the very biggest fairs it’s home to. After a stiflingly hot Texas summer where outdoor entertainment is hard, and most of us swing between yet another Michael Bay movie or another very late evening barbecue (with Bay winning narrowly because of cinema air conditioning), it is almost with eager anticipation that we await September, when fair and festival season begins.

It isn’t for nothing that “big” is synonymous with Texas. This is a larger-than-life place where even food comes in medium, large, extra large and “Texas-size”.

Unsurprisingly, county and state fairs stick to the state’s motto of

T

“bigger and better”. And the biggest daddy of them all is in the fair city of Dallas, where the 50ft cowboy mascot, Big Tex, waves in the wind, welcoming visitors to the annual State Fair of Texas. A century ago, Dallas was a forgotten stop during cattle drives on the way to neighbouring Fort Worth. But in true Texas tradition, the Dallas-based forefathers of this fair had dreams as big as this state itself, and started organizing a great fair in the middle of almost nowhere.

Today, come September, Fair Park in burgeoning downtown Dallas becomes the location for the biggest state fair in the country. It is a fair on steroids, giving “supersize” a new definition. The massive Ferris wheel is over 200ft tall, and claims to be the biggest in the world. As it rotates slowly and reaches the sky, we struggle to keep our eyes open, holding back extreme nausea. At the top, the free-flowing aerial view of Dallas is spectacular.

But beneath all the entertainment, this fair is all about the food.

This may be an era of yoga, Acai berry health drinks and spinach snacks, but “healthy” is a foreign word in the State Fair dictionary.

All pretensions of healthy living are thrown out of the window as the State Fair confidently declares itself to be the fried-food capital of Texas, aka the world. This fair is conceived on the very simple concept that frying improves the taste of everything. Walking around, you can find fried ice cream, fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fried banana splits, fried Fritos pies and yes, fried beer. If there exists something that can give you an instant coronary heart attack, it probably has been fried

and served at the fair.

A lifetime of fairly Spartan eating with the occasional indulgence failed miserably to prepare me for this dazzling palette of the fattest and sweetest foods the south and south-west can conjure. While I’m distracted by fried Snickers bars, my more discerning friends walk past, ignore silly diversions and experiment with, say, Cajun-style food, alligator steaks or skewers.

And for sheer masochistic voyeurism, we gawkers all head towards the mandatory eating contests to observe food gladiators consume unimaginable quantities of corny

TRIP PLANNER/TEXAS

Apply for a US visa at www.vfs-usa.co.in. Most fairs run from late summer through fall. Check their websites (State Fair 2011, www.bigtex.com; Texas Renaissance Festival, www.texrenfest.com; and Wurstfest, www.wurstfest.com) for the exact dates.

If you’re already in the US, Dallas and Houston’s secondary airports are served by the low-cost carrier Southwest Airline. If you’re flying in from overseas, your best options are Dallas Fort Worth airport and the George Bush airport in Houston, which serve as major hubs. Current airfare to Houston is: Emirates Lufthansa (Star Alliance) Air France/KLM (SkyTeam) American Airlines/British Airways/Kingfisher (oneworld)

Delhi R57,060 R69,200 R64,780 R93,560

Mumbai R56,200 R69,400 R55,620 --

Bangalore R65,720 R72,900 -R67,980

The fair south: (left) The skyway at the State Fair of Texas; and fire and belly dancers at the Texas Renaissance Festival. quantities of quintessentially German junk food; wurst, sauerkraut and beer.

Inexplicably, this place has become an annual destination for my office. Here, the outfits are from an imaginary Bavaria, there’s plenty of faux German music, and there’s sausage on tacos and sauerkraut on pizza, giving it that Texan twist. Incredibly, all of these get better as the evening wears on and the kegs go empty. In inimitable Texan style, Wurstfest also presents “the world’s largest” beer bottle collection, supposedly containing over 17,000 empty bottles of beer. Even in our smaller fairs we find the “biggest” something. You certainly don’t mess with Texas.

There is something about these fairs and festivals that awakens some distant childhood memories. As a child, one of my favourite weekend activities was to go to the children’s area in Cubbon Park in Bangalore to ride the merry-go-round or giant (Ferris) wheel, trot on a somewhat puny pony and enjoy spicy roast corn cobs and cotton candy. In Texas, we’re spoilt for choice, with everything from the mega state fair to smaller town festivals with their own unique histories, and twists on fried food. For this year’s postsummer entertainment, perhaps I’ll prove to be a prophet when I head out to observe jesters, jugglers and jousts at the Texas Renaissance Festival, where a fantasy medieval European town (the largest in the world?) springs to life. There’s way more to fairs here than plain vanilla Ferris wheels and cotton candy, though there’s still some of that as well. Only, here the cotton candy will be the biggest in the world.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Rates may change.

Stay

US

Skip chain hotels and head to one of the “ranches” outside San Antonio or Austin which have charming, comfortable accommodation and Texas-style food.

Search online for ranch stays in whichever town you're headed to.

Prices and types of stays vary a lot.

Texas

Dallas

TEXAS San Antonio

Austin

Eat

Houston G ulf of Mexi co

Fairs are all about food, and you’ll have your choice of fair pickings. Beyond fairs, look for “Texas”-style barbecues and smokehouses specializing in brisket or pork chops. “Tex-Mex” is the hybrid Texas-style Mexican cuisine, and all cities have multiple dining options for both Tex-Mex and authentic Mexican food.

Once you’re in Texas, drive. Car rentals are easy while public transport (within and between cities) is generally poor.

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Fairs are a paradise for children.

There’s tonnes of sweet/fried food, and child­friendly entertainment.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Most fairs have rest areas, refreshment and medical facilities and are wheelchair­accessible.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Texas may sound conservative, but there isn’t visible discrimination and all major cities have LGBT populations.

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LOST WORLDS

Rocky mountain high A Victorian woman travelled through Colorado in the 1870s, producing an American classic

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

···························· ictorian womanhood sometimes gets a rap in the press as a condition of intense stodginess, rigid piety and terminal repression. Many of the British women writers and thinkers we read from the period give this assumption the lie. Then there is Isabella Bird, who somehow manages to combine both a personal radicalism and the worst stereotypes of her society in her writing.

Isabella Lucy Bird was a 19th century British explorer—and what an explorer. Women like her had grown used to global travel through the latter half of the 19th century, accompanying friends and family around the world on their colonial exploits, trade missions or simply on pleasure trips.

Bird, unlike many of her compatriots, travelled alone, and to get away from the demands of domestic life. She had been a physically fragile child, and we may guess at the effect that prolonged convalescences may have had on her desire to travel. Flouting convention and improvising with courage and skill to travel freely in places and times

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Isabella Bird’s Footnote on Travel Dress “For the benefit of other lady travelers, I wish to explain that my ‘Hawaiian riding dress’ is the ‘American Lady’s Mountain Dress,’ a half-fitting jacket, a skirt reaching to the ankles, and full Turkish trousers gathered into frills falling over the boots,—a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough traveling, as in the Alps or any other part of the world.”

Isabella Bird meets Deer Valley Justice A man accidentally shoves another in a saloon, or says a rough word at meals, and the challenge, “first finger on the trigger,” warrants either in shooting the other at any subsequent time without the formality of a duel. Nearly all the shooting affrays arise from the most trivial causes in saloons and bar-rooms. The deeper quarrels, arising from jealousy or revenge, are few, and are usually about some woman not worth fighting for. At Alma and Fairplay vigilance committees have been lately formed, and when men act outrageously and make themselves generally obnoxious they receive a letter with a drawing of a tree, a man hanging from it, and a coffin below, on which is written “Forewarned.”

Isabella Bird commutes in Colorado Early the next morning I left in a buggy drawn by light broncos and driven by a profoundly melancholy young man. He had never been to the canyon; there was no road. We met nobody, saw nothing except antelope in the distance, and he became more melancholy and lost his way,

when single women found it hard going, she became a famous exception. From her first trip in America in 1856, she went on to visit the Outer Hebrides in the UK, Australia, Japan, China, Persia, Morocco—and a good part of the rest of the world.

Her best-known book, published in 1879, was another American odyssey: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Reading it today conjures up images of inner North America that are now entrenched in cultural memory, but which must have been fresh and—given their unusual source—especially piquant at the time.

Bird has a terrific eye for description. Her America, a place of vast, humbling landscapes, deep colours and an environment that can make a human traveller feel like an intruder, is one that any explorer would have been proud to write about.

She also has a hilarious inability to tolerate most other human beings. As she travels through Colorado, we meet a large cast of characters who continually disappoint her. In Cheyenne she complains about the foul-mouthed men stumbling out of bars,

driving hither and thither for about twenty miles till we came upon an old trail which eventually brought us to a fertile “bottom,” where hay and barley were being harvested, and five or six frame houses looked cheerful. I had been recommended to two of these, which professed to take in strangers, but one was full of reapers, and in the other a child was dead. So I took the buggy on, glad to leave the glaring, prosaic

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains:

By Isabella Bird, 1879, available to read on Google Books and Project Gutenberg. answering only to the rough justice of the mob lynching; in Greeley, you can practically hear her suppress a sigh at the zealous temperance colony of “total abstainers, all holding advanced political opinions”.

She’s never shy of expressing insulting personal opinions, presumably because she never thought her subjects were likely to

Wanderer: A portrait of Isabella Bird, a 19th century British explorer. read her (“She looks like one of the English poor women of our childhood—lean, clean, toothless, and speaks, like some of them, in a piping, discontented voice, which seems to convey a personal reproach”). Her racism almost mitigates the work of other Orientalists discussed in this column (“They are perfect savages,” she writes of a Native American party,

settlement behind. There was a most curious loneliness about the journey up to that time.

Isabella Bird is from Venus, Men are from Mars Vainly I pointed out to him that we were going north-east when we should have gone south-west, and that we were ascending instead of descending. “Oh, it’s all right, and we shall

“without any aptitude for even aboriginal civilization, and are altogether the most degraded of the ill-fated tribes which are dying out before the white races”).

Her portrait of the Rockies may enlighten us on many things that a male, explorer might have written of; but the portrait it affords us of her, and how people related to her, is utterly unique.

soon come to water,” he always replied. For two hours we ascended slowly through a thicket of aspen, the cold continually intensifying; but the trail, which had been growing fainter, died out, and an opening showed the top of Storm Peak not far off and not much above us, though it is 11,000 feet high. I could not help laughing. He had deliberately turned his back on Estes Park.

He then confessed that he was lost, and that he could not find the way back. His wife sat down on the ground and cried bitterly. We ate some dry bread, and then I said I had had much experience in traveling, and would take the control of the party, which was agreed to, and we began the long descent.

Isabella Bird meets a Romantic Hero “Jim” was a shocking figure; he had on an old pair of high boots, with a baggy pair of old trousers made of deer hide, held on by an old scarf tucked into them; a leather shirt, with three or four ragged unbuttoned waistcoats over it; an old smashed wideawake, from under which his tawny, neglected ringlets hung; and with his one eye, his one long spur, his knife in his belt, his revolver in his waistcoat pocket, his saddle covered with an old beaver skin, from which the paws hung down; his camping blankets behind him, his rifle laid across the saddle in front of him, and his axe, canteen, and other gear hanging to the horn, he was as awful-looking a ruffian as one could see. By way of contrast he rode a small Arab mare, of exquisite beauty, skittish, high spirited, gentle, but altogether too light for him, and he fretted her incessantly to make her display herself.

DORI/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Sketches: (above) A drawing of one of Bird’s stopovers in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains; Mountains; and impressions of the Rocky Mountains.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011

Culture

LOUNGE

Q&A | RAHUL MEHROTRA

Modernity and mega cities The architect on his new book, how ‘impatient capital’ shapes a city’s skyline, and the rel­ evance of Gandhian ideas of space

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

PICTOR

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

·························· rchitect Rahul Mehrotra, a professor and chair of the department of urban design and planning at Harvard University, has been a key figure in envisioning the recycling of urban land in Mumbai, where his practice, RMA Architects, is based. His new book, Architecture in India 1990-2010, is a comprehensive history of Indian architecture after the 1990s. How did the glamour and displacement resulting from globalization affect the skylines of Indian cities?

How did the socio-political environment of post-independence India influence architecture before the 1990s? What’s the future after skyscrapers and their glass facades— “projected to make India appear efficient and competent”—have become de rigueur? Mehrotra spoke to Lounge about the tension between development and architectural aesthetic in modern India, and the future of his city, Mumbai. Edited excerpts from the interview:

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Books have been written on specific trends of architecture and specific works of architects.

What prompted you to write an history and overview?

In my understanding almost all the material on Indian architecture since independence has somewhat focused on our modernist tradition—this has been a limited lens. I was interested in making sense of all we see around us as well as looking at the last two decades and the period in which India’s economic policies were liberalized to embrace a global economy—these new flows of capital, ideas and images and their impact on the Indian built landscape is what motivated me to do the book. But above all, this book is for the new generation of Indian architects and is intended as an instrument for them to make sense of the pluralistic built environment in the Indian context.

You have said that architecture in today’s Indian cities is a result of “impatient capital”.

Can you explain?

When the only motive of capital is profit—it tends to be impatient—in other words then “time is money”. And the architecture that results from this is necessarily something that has to be made quickly so the time for it to be put in the service of profit-making is maximized. This naturally leads to particular kinds of buildings in materials that can be assembled rapidly. That is why curtain glazing, or metal cladding, steel frames, etc., are employed more frequently as these are

prefabricated dry modes of construction and less labour intensive and more predictable.

On the other hand, concrete, brick, custom-made doors and windows, etc., need more time to be put into operation.

Many Indian cities, especially a city like Mumbai, are imploding because of migration and lack of space. The only movement as far as construction is concerned will have to be vertical. How is it going to restrict architects?

There is no reason for this to happen. The sensible thing to do would be to open up more serviced land (with infrastructure) for the city’s growth. The idea of New Bombay in the 1970s was exactly a response to this scarcity of land and the diversification of the geography of the city. The myopia of our politicians subverted the idea and instead they resorted to the tactics of implosion—I use the word tactics because it was, I believe, a conscious decision to create scarcity and the implosion that you refer to. Controlling supply is what has made them all rich! So in short this scarcity you refer to is man-made and not in the city’s long-term interest.

You see four distinct trends in Indian architecture—global practice, regional manifestation, alternative practice and counter-modernism. Isn’t what you describe as global practice going to dominate our cities? What is required to achieve a balance?

It depends on what cities you are referring to. If it’s the mega cities where the impatience of capital manifests itself in extremes, the answer is yes. I think we should look to the hundreds of other cities that are emerging in India—where diverse conditions will create varied types of architecture and will necessitate professionals to engage with the practice of architecture in different ways. The four trends (I prefer to

call them models of practice) are only emblematic of this variety—they represent different ways and processes of making and naturally what results from these different approaches is different kinds of architecture that represents the multiple aspirations that are expressed—this is crucial for a functioning democracy!

Manifestations of economic development like skyscrapers are inevitable. Do you agree development is ultimately tragic as, say, Marshall Berman described Robert Moses’ New York, and the “expressway world”.

This is what one view of modernity makes us believe.

What’s fascinating in the world today is that alter or multiple modernities have come to flourish—these have different ways of expressing themselves. I think to understand the world around us we need to recognize and accept the aesthetics of Western modernity as being very particular. The multiple modernities that are emerging in the world today will find different forms of expression. The attempt in the book is to understand these varied aesthetics and way of constructing the built environment that we occupy.

You write that religious festivals, and not architecture, are the visual “spectacles” of modern India. Do you think that is bizarre?

No. I think it’s wonderful, sustainable and deeply profound!

Temporality and its role in the form of our cities have been underestimated and most thinking about cities pays attention only to what I call the static city. There is a life world that occupies that static city that is kinetic in nature—the temporal landscape is a manifestation of that energy and dimension. I think the spectacles of the city

Postcards: (clockwise from top, right) Mehrotra; and the works featured in his book—the Castro Café at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; Shaam­e­Sarhad Village Resort, Gujarat; and a collage at Sarabhai House, Ahmedabad.

being temporal in nature also save us from creating expensive and brittle form to codify the memory of the city—which is extremely unsustainable.

Is Gandhi’s minimalism, what you describe in architecture as “the austere and the elegant together attempting to evoke the spiritual”, seen as viable or fashionable in the world today?

I think this minimalism that I refer to cannot be achieved if the architect is conscious about this as an aesthetic decision. Today architects resort to this as a style and it’s hollow and very expensive. Gandhi’s aesthetic grew from the lack of self-consciousness about the aesthetic from the rigours of engagement and practise of the principles and values that governed his lifestyle. Similarly the Shakers in the US also achieved a very particular aesthetic not from addressing design but letting it grow out of principles of existence they believed in. And so if profit, economic growth, etc., are the only index and values in our lives then I am afraid we will be destined to live our lives in the architecture of impatient capital.

How did you develop your interest in urban planning?

Did you gravitate to a certain philosophy?

I grew up in Bombay and then Mumbai! I developed an interest

in architecture as my parents moved homes frequently, and moving into a new space and organizing it was very exciting. I looked forward to the moves and did not treat them as disruptive, rather (as) opportunities to reimagine the occupation of space. Of course I was not so conscious about this as I was growing up but in retrospect am sure this had a great influence in deciding my vocation. On the advice of a number of friends I went to see the School of Architecture at Ahmedabad (Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, or Cept). Loved it, did the entrance exam—got in. This has been an absolutely fundamental experience in the way I think about architecture and cities today. Cept was perhaps one of the first private institutions of architecture in India and B.V. Doshi’s presence at the institution and his global network exposed us to multiple ways of imagining architecture.

Being situated in Ahmedabad, with a rich landscape of traditional architecture as well the presence of Corbusier, Kahn and the Indian modernists, we went through our education seeing the simultaneous validity of different paradigms of architectural conception. I believe the critical contribution of

Cept was that it made the pedagogical agenda an intellectual project. It did not limit itself in its curriculum to skills only—but focused on educating architects to think through encouraging research and multiple modes of engagement with the profession!

You have written a number of books on Mumbai. What is the city’s future?

Grim! In Mumbai today planning is systematically “posterior”—as a recuperative and securing action.

In this post-planning condition, economics and profits are the central players. They have clearly replaced traditional ideological, social, environmental, historical and aesthetic elements as the main driving forces behind the creation and expansion of cities.

In this condition then, citizens have to confront urgent questions of instability, indecision, changeability and survival, while established social and urban fabrics are continuously being deconstructed and reorganized at an alarming rate. To reverse this would take the combined effort of citizens and professionals to squarely challenge the present governance regime—in cities like Mumbai perhaps we have no choice but to shift instantly to the mayoral system where an elected official is accountable to the citizens.

Mega cities can be governed successfully only with this model of direct accountability.

Architecture in India 1990-2010, Pictor Publishing, 311 pages, `2,700.

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ART

The Husain postscript COURTESY YODA PRESS

A new anthology of essays on MF Husain takes the discourse back from controversy to canvas

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

···························· Google search for “M.F. Husain” yields the usual clichés: He was the “Picasso of India”, he was controversial, and the “most famous” and “most celebrated” Indian artist of our times.

The spotlight moved from Husain’s art a couple of decades ago. We discussed, instead, his flamboyance (a `7.6 crore Bugatti Veyron), his various muses, the vandalization of his works by Hindutva groups, his frustrations in exile, and most recently, his death at the age of 95.

Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, a scholarly anthology of essays published in India

by Yoda Press, is a pioneering effort to take the discourse back to the artist’s works. Each of the 13 essays in the book makes an interdisciplinary engagement with the artist’s oeuvre. It looks through political and sociological lenses to establish how Husain’s life and work are intimately entangled with the legacy of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-

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ethnic nation. The book also has 67 plates of artworks, including reproductions of the artist’s own iconic works as well as works by other artists. It opens with a curious composite photograph by artist Vivan Sundaram, titled Barefoot with Husain, which splices together 16 images of people with bare feet and those of Husain’s, in a show of solidarity for the f a m o u s l y unshod artist.

Edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, a professor of history at Duke University, US, the book has contributions by artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians, critics, sociologists and scholars of postcolonial literature and religion.

In the opening essay, art critic Geeta Kapur traces the arc of Husain’s prolific career. She discusses his early significant works from the 1950s and 1960s, which reveal the “originary drama of a people becoming a nation”. Kapur calls Man (1950) the first sample of Husain’s virtuosity. It depicts a hulking dark figure poised between two disparate worlds—a possible depiction of the just-preceded Partition. She also dwells on the dark spots of his career, such as his defence of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency.

David Gilmartin and Barbara Metcalf, both American academics with an interest in the Islamic history of South Asia, explore Husain’s Nehruvian notions of

Bridging the arts Bollywood kitsch meets the arts in Khalid Mohamed’s debut play B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· verything about it is filmi: the evolution of Mumbai’s seamy red-light district across half a century is spanned by A.R. Rahman’s flute leitmotif, Himesh Reshammiya’s mujra composition, a video backdrop of artist Chintan Upadhyay and Akbar Padamsee’s art on a spartan stage. Add to this James Ferreira’s costumes, puffs of smoke, choreography that weaves in jazz with classical Indian and even into the gestures of spoken acts, and Nida Fazli’s Urdu poetry, a contrast to prosaic Hinglish dialogue.

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And yet, in an unlikely coming together of a life-long aesthetic, it harmonizes into a spectacle that is probably one of the most honest efforts in recent times for the stage. Perhaps because Khalid Mohamed is untutored in the restrictions of theatre, Kennedy Bridge, produced by Ashvin Gidwani for stage, breaks free of them.

Autobiographical, as all his previous works have been, it is the story of an eight-year-old boy, Jahaan, in a park who strikes a bond with a mujrevaali, Shehezaada, who is broken by her attempts to escape the realities of prostitution her own mothercum-matron, Allahrakhi, inflicts upon her. As he grows up, Jahaan is deeply affected when she falls in love and marries, not realizing his growing love for her, leaving him with a sense of abandonment and a life-long inability to commit. The story follows their lives for half a century, when they

Flashback: (above) Last Supper in Red, M.F. Husain, acrylic on canvas, 1991; and Barefoot with Husain, Vivan Sundaram, 2009.

secular nationalism. They elaborate upon the influence of Indian artistic traditions in shaping Husain’s art, ranging from classical Gupta sculpture and Basohli paintings to folk art.

Ramaswamy’s own essay in the book, Mapping India after Husain, provides an in-depth analysis of one of Husain’s most controversial paintings, a 2005 untitled painting of a woman assuming the cartographic shape of India, which was later referred to as Bharat Maa (Mother India).

Ramaswamy draws historical parallels with similar images appearing in Indian popular culture, including a 1947 chromolithograph by P.S. Ramachandra Rao from Chennai, which showed a goddess-like figure clad in a sari printed with the Indian flag. She also digs out a 1909 precedent from an expatriate revolutionary Tamil newspaper called Intiya, which was edited by the

meet again, through dramatic stagings of the kotha, the jazz clubs of the swinging 1960s, and the dance bars of the 1990s. It uses filmi dance numbers of various genres to punctuate the movement and video films shot

by Bollywood director of photography Sanjay Gupta to bypass periods in time.

“I do not know how to write stories that are not true for me, and yet, having said it is autobiographical, there is a way in which a story must be told—I have added the dramatic element,” says Mohamed, admitting he turned to theatre when a film he had scripted (Rutuba) didn’t work out. He then spent two years discovering it is much tougher to write for the stage than for film. His eyes become moist as he watches his own life retold in a room replete with late buddy M.F. Husain’s unseen works, Upadhyay’s paintings, his own paintings, sky-high piles of jazz and Hindi film CDs, the room strewn with books of all genres—the aesthetic of the play seems inevitable. “In film, there are assistants and editors and

nationalist poet-journalist Subramania Bharati, almost a century before Husain’s painting. In this, Mother India holds four infants in her arms, two of whom are suckling at her exposed breasts, while the whole ensemble occupies a roughly delineated map of (British) India. A century has transpired between Intiya’s literalist picturing of Bharat Maa and Husain’s Modernist effort. And in that, Ramaswamy observes, the capacity of a Muslim man not just to draw images of Mother India, but to show her unclothed body, has been enormously circumscribed because of the events leading up to Partition, the avowed secularist and nationalist credentials of the artist notwithstanding.

The essays in Barefoot Across the Nation were commissioned—and an international edition published by Routledge earlier in 2011—while Husain was still alive. But it is even more relevant now, not as a last word, but as a preface to a new brand of engagement with Husain’s art.

Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, Yoda Press, `1,950.

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

THE STORY OF A SONG

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am not sure if “all-time favourite” would be an appropriate term to describe those pieces of recorded music that journey with you for decades through the labyrinthine twists and turns of your life. But for lack of a better term, I would put it to use to introduce a track, Akeli Dar Laage, that has been a most wonderful and comforting companion to me for several years—and in diverse situations. This is a Dadra in Raga Pahadi sung by senior Patiala gharana vocalist Jagdish Prasad. Sung in his effortless style, it belies years of rigorous training and riyaaz which, when blended with brilliance and virtuosity, produce a master musician.

The 10.28-minute-long track starts, as is usual, with a few seconds of the tanpura, then the gentle strumming of a swarmandal or zither leads to a prefatory alaap which succeeds in sweeping you right into the piece, waiting for more. One must keep in mind that all this happens in a mere 40 seconds. But the singer’s voice, sure as it traverses the opening phrases of the melody, locks the listener’s attention into place immediately. It isn’t a particularly sweet voice. On the contrary, it has a tart and spicy edge. But the sheer tunefulness, and the easy, almost nonchalant intimacy with the idiom make it a masterpiece.

The singing has an expressive quality, and moves from alaap to lyrics, which say “Shaam bhayi Ghanshyaam na aaye, akeli dar laage....” (My Lord hasn’t arrived, and I’m afraid of being alone). Improvising on the words dar laage in a myriad ways, the singer works like a jeweller, embellishing, gilding, working now with filigree patterns, and sometimes leaving a phrase starkly unornamented.

Then it is time to move on to each of the two antaras in the composition, which construct a narrative of love and longing on a rainy evening (barkha ki saanjh), with the skies streaked in different hues of pink as the sun sets (aakaash gulabi), a balmy breeze (narm hawaa). This is nothing out of the ordinary in terms of imagery, but Jagdish Prasadji’s singing and the inimitable tabla accompaniment of the legendary Nizamuddin Khan Sahab transform the piece into a classic. Though the influence of his guru Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahab is amply evident in Prasadji’s singing, there is no trace of the imitative quality that followers of a distinctive style often fall prey to.

For years, this has been the track that I have played when I want to hear a voice that sings with effortless mastery. It has also sung to me on many a long drive from one city to the other. It also happens to be one of the last pieces of music that my mother heard as she lay battling lung cancer at the very end of her life.

As soon as she heard the first minute or so of the track, she looked up from her hospital bed and asked “Jagdish Prasad?”

Soul music: In a few hours, she was gone.

Pandit Jagdish In July, Prasadji died in Prasad with his Kolkata, where he had lived swarmandal. for many years. But for his admirers he leaves behind his voice and his music, immortalized in recordings like Akeli Dar Laage.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters @livemint.com

COURTESY ITC SANGEET RESEARCH ACADEMY

entirely responsible for it,” says Mohamed.

Upadhyay, who makes his theatre debut with the play, has spent more than a year researching areas such as Kennedy Bridge, poring over the script, lyrics and discussing the sets with the director. “I’m used to involving many people in my creativity, so I enjoyed the process; art only improves with others’ perspectives. Khalid wanted the sets to be invisible, so we used very few props. This crossing of genres was Khalid’s nod to Bollywood in a way,” says Upadhyay.

The play has a built-in structured complexity: It Lifelike: A still from Kennedy Bridge. addresses issues of transgenders, the mujrevaalis’ producers, so the execution is not place in a changing society, the about one person. For instance, ironic role of men in the microin Mammo, there was dialogue cosmic women-centric world of with Shyam Benegal that shaped the kotha, Mohamed’s longstandthe film. In theatre, the writer-di- ing portrayal of Muslim women rector owns the story and is as protagonists, even the evolu-

tion of music through the decades against this backdrop. On their own, each strand of the weave—art, music and theatre—are metaphoric expressions of the story itself.

Traditionalists will slam it for bringing Bollywood to stage (and how); but in the Indian context of theatre that veers more towards pretensions of colonialism, it works. Though in places the dialogue can be simplistic, naked, devoid of artifice or construct, it never aims to be more than what it is—an honest, if public, soul searching that uses the language of everyday thought. And that makes for a connect.

“I have sat with the high rollers, the superstars and their super insecurities, Shehezaada’s story always lingering in the back of my mind... In the end, I am an average journalist,” Jahaan says in a monologue, “one who visualized every comma. I must tell my story if only to exorcize it.”

Kennedy Bridge will open at the Tata Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, from 14 August.

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LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

BANGALORE BHATH | PAVITRA JAYARAMAN

We have no branches

Green signal: (above) Workers chop a tree on Sankey Road; and activists protest Bangalore’s vanishing green cover.

Residents ask if widening city roads by cutting trees is the only solution to decon­ gesting Bangalore

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rom around midnight on 30 June, into the early hours of 1 July, 15 residents-turned-activists watched as Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) workers ran electric saws through trees flanking Sankey tank in Bangalore’s Malleswaram. The group, subdued by the heavy police presence, could only offer some verbal protest.

The residents and activists regrouped in the afternoon.

Twelve protesters who lay on the ground near the trees, trying to stop the BBMP team, were detained. They were released later in the evening; felling was stopped after a court stay order.

By then, the BBMP team had felled 17 of the 19 trees it had planned to bring down. In all, 70 trees are earmarked for felling on this stretch.

Meenakshi Bharath, a resident of Malleswaram, was forced to watch helplessly in the early hours of 1 July. “They had announced the auction (the wood is sold immediately to timber merchants) would take place on 1 July and instead stole in at that strange hour. There were only 15 of us and around 150 of them, including police,” she says.

The fight for the canopy along Sankey tank, called Sankey Road, began in May last year when residents first heard about the corporation’s plan to widen 220 roads across the city. Each road that lost its canopy caused some outrage in a city that once took pride in its extensive green

cover, but this time the protest grabbed headlines.

The 17 trees felled were fruit-bearing ones, including four jamun and two jackfruit trees; they were auctioned for `3 lakh.

Jahnavi Pai, ecologist at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (Atree), who has been mapping trees in Malleswaram, found that many residents remember the trees along the tank as children, half a century ago. “More importantly, trees like the two species of Ficus, jamun and tamarind support a lot of biodiversity like fruit- and insect-eating birds,” says Pai, adding that the trees form a connect for many residents.

Bharath and five others filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Karnataka high court on 1 July, questioning the plan to cut around 19 trees along Sankey Tank. For many, it’s not about one road, but the entire city.

Some believe countries across the world made the mistake of thinking road widening would solve traffic problems. It didn’t.

Bangalore, they say, should learn from these mistakes.

One big-ticket early protest was in 1998 when a portion of the city’s landmark lung space, Cubbon Park, was denotified for commercial use. “There were protests every day for more than a month and signed petitions by thousands of people,” says Leo

Saldanha, coordinator of the Environment Support Group which led the Save Cubbon Park Campaign. The park was saved, and since then the city has seen several attempts to save its green cover. “It is an effort to reclaim public space, that which rightfully belongs to citizens,” says Saldanha.

Ashish Verma, associate faculty at the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation, and Urban Planning (Cistup) and assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), says that while the city needs an immediate solution to congestion, road widening is merely a “supply side measure” which may allow

for better flow of traffic for a year or two at most. “The roads will fill up and we will be back to square one,” he says.

What then is the solution?

Verma, like many others, believes the answer lies in public transport. “If a road transports 17,000 people in private vehicles per hour per kilometre, the same road space can transport 40,000 people if they travelled by bus, and 70,000 by train,” he says.

Bangalore does have a Metro rail route in the making, and it’s hoped that this will help take cars off roads and make further road widening unnecessary. But the first phase of the project has missed three deadlines so far.

Verma believes the solution lies with the government, given that Bangalore is a young city where buying more cars per household is aspirational. “The benefit of taking a private vehicle is higher in convenience; if the cost of this convenience is increased by slapping taxes and at the same time public transport is made more accessible and easy, people will automatically switch,” he says.

Elected by the BBMP, the deputy mayor of the city, S. Harish, does not wholly agree: “All this looks good theoretically, but we have tried it all. We reached out to many companies and have organized ‘Bus Day’ every day to encourage young people to use buses and advertised heavily to encourage car pooling. I don’t see any change.” Bangalore, he adds, has more than four million private vehicles, and 10,000-15,000 new vehicles are being registered every month. “It is a big city that needs wide roads. Let us plant new trees so future generations can benefit just like we have from our ancestors,” Harish argues.

An urban issues researcher and faculty member at the

PHOTOGRAPHS

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S RADHAKRISHNA/KARNATAKA PHOTO NEWS

Indian Institute of Human Settlements, H.S. Sudhira, and 70 other academicians submitted a public statement to the BBMP soon after the Malleswaram protest. He says: “I found in my study, done between 2000 and 2006, that Bangalore has grown by 20 sq. km in built-up area, which means that around 30 sq. km of green cover and open space has been lost.” He adds that though it is scientifically too short a time to ascribe any side effect to the loss of green cover, worldwide it has led to increased temperatures, pollution and associated diseases such as lung ailments. “The trends are definitely strong enough to point us towards stopping the chopping,” he says.

It’s not just residents of Bangalore who are suffering.

M.B. Krishna, an ornithologist, describes a Bangalore where more than a quarter of the city was green, and which had ample space for birds. “In fact, there was a survey in the 1990s, done

by Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), of around 600 sq. km, including Bangalore city, that showed the area consisted of 5% wetland and 15% wooded land. This 20% combined housed 66% of the bird life in the area,” says Krishna. He recalls a time when the administration too was responsive. “When I was 16, there was a plan to introduce boating in the Lalbagh lake. I wrote a letter to the chief minister (R. Gundu Rao) that many birds would be affected if the project were to take off. A few days later, I received a letter from the CM’s office saying my grievance had been sent to the director of horticulture, who met me, consulted with experts, and the whole idea was cancelled,” says Krishna.

It’s very different now. “That there’s need for a large-scale public protest reflects the decadence of the government.

Residents have to come on the streets to be heard, and that is sad,” he says. pavitra.j@livemint.com