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Saturday, October 8, 2011
Vol. 5 No. 41
LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE
WT FL OLBRBF YI I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOGL EI TE KC HANC EMI L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT YPEL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YT UMHARAP Y AARP Y AAR, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP ANYL OVEYOUHAME S HARAS C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HMET OUC HMEP RANABME E T SP M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT OS PE AKON2 GI S S UEI FNE E DE DAF T E RME E T I NGP M WT FL OLBRBF Y I I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOGL EI TE KC HANC EMI L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT Y P EL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YT UMHARAP Y AARP Y AAR, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP ANYL OVEYOUHAME S HARAS C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HMET OUC HMEP RANABME E T SP M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT OS PE AKON2 GI S S UE , I FNE E DE DAF T E RME E T I NGP M Just how many languages coexist WT FL OLBRBF YI I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOG L EI T E KC H ANC EM I L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT YPEL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E A S EBE L O HERO T I I DONis ’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI in India? AT new survey BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL Ythrowing T UMHARAP Y AA RP Y AA R, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON up some startling MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z figures >Page 9L F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E R MRE AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP A NYL OV EYOUIndia HAME S HAR A S C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME Urban aS new Plus: I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HME T OUC H MEP RANABhas ME E T P M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D sound. emoticons and C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT O S PE AKAcronyms, ON2 GI S S UE I FNE E DE DA F T E RME E T I NGP M WT FL OLBRBF Y I I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOG L EI Twords E KC HAN C EMreplaced I L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT Y P EL OL cuss have words. : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI does it say about modern BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YWhat T UMHA RAP Y A A RP Y A AR, HAM ARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E N DZ AR RIHO T AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z living ?OO >Pages 1011 F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP ANYL OVEYOUHAME S HARAS C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HMET OUC HMEP RANABME E T SP M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT OS PE AKON2 GI S S UE , I FNE E DE DAF T E RME E T I NGP M WT FL OLBRBF YI I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOGL EI TE KC HANC EMI L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT YPEL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YT UMHARAP Y AARP Y AAR, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP ANYL OVEYOUHAME S HARAS C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HMET OUC HMEP RANABME E T SP M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT OS PE AKON2 GI S S UEI FNE E DE DAF T E RME E T I NGP M WT FL OLBRBF Y I I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOGL EI TE KC HANC EMI L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT Y P EL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YT UMHARAP Y AARP Y AAR, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT C RE DI TC RUNC HRDXS E XT I NGS UBP RI MEDOUBL EDHAMAALAL WA Y SK ABHIK ABHIME REBROT HE RKI DUL HARL OVEAAJK ALS ORRYBHAI BADMAS HC OMP ANYL OVEYOUHAME S HARAS C AL SDKBOS EMYNAME I SS HE E L AS HE E L AK I J AWANI Z ARAZ ARAT OUC HMET OUC HMEP RANABME E T SP M, S A Y SP CI SAV AL UE D C OL L E AUGEI S I C HI E FME E T SHE ADI NUSPRANABT OS PE AKON2 GI S S UE , I FNE E DE DAF T E RME E T I NGP M WT FL OLBRBF YI I L VUCU: ): (RUT HR?CY AF OGOOGL EI TE KC HANC EMI L E GA?S HE ’ SS OAUNT YT YPEL OL : )BE C HARI Y ABI T C HI ’ ML I K ES OAMAZ E DC ANYOUPL E AS EBE L OT HEROT I I DON’ TWANTANYS A T I S AVI T RI BRBMYF UNDAI NL I F EMYF AT HE RI SE NGI NE E RONL YT UMHARAP Y AARP Y AAR, HAMARAP Y ARS E XT E NS I ON MATL EY AARY EDI LMAANGEMOREHARE KF RI E NDZ AROORIHOT AHAIMDY I NG2T AL KT OK2UPL Z F ORGI VME E EHAP P YB’ DA Y2UHOPEV’ L LMANAGEL ONGT E RMRE L AT I ON2 GAT HE RC ARBONF OOT P RI NT
BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH SONY MUSIC INDIA’S SHRIDHAR SUBRAMANIAM >Page 7
RECLAIMING THE LAMBRETTA
Decaying models can fetch `75,000, yet the iconic Lambretta is embroiled in a legal battle >Page 6
MIND YOUR
LANGUAGE THE GOOD LIFE
DETOURS
SHOBA NARAYAN
STALL ORDER
SALIL TRIPATHI
NANDINI RAMNATH
THE NOBLE ART OF IN LIVERPOOL, GOT TELLING WHITE LIES A TICKET TO RIDE
THE RUN ON REMAKES
T
I
he words came out so fast and for the silliest of reasons. Last week, my Japanese neighbour, Mayumi, shared her fresh home-made tofu with me. A few hours later, I ran into her in the garden downstairs. “How do you like the tofu?” she asked with a hopeful beam. “Oh, it’s wonderful. So soft and fresh,” I replied. I hadn’t tasted the stuff. Have you ever uttered a white lie? Before you say “No”, let me remind you of the time your friend sang off-key during a party or puja. >Page 4
I
n his poem Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote that sexual liberation (the word he actually used is less appropriate for a family newspaper on a weekend) began in 1963; after the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. Until then, there was “bargaining, a wrangle for the ring… a shame that started at sixteen and spread to everything”. If 1963 was a seminal year, then the clubs and taverns of Liverpool were the hot spots where it all began; clubs with names like the Casbah and the... >Page 13
f admirers of Tamil superstar Suriya file a public interest litigation against the recent Hindi remakes of his hit films Singam (as Singham) and Kaakha..Kaakha (as Force), we won’t be surprised. In fact, I wouldn’t mind signing up as a witness and sharing my anguish at the pedestrian Hindi versions. Neither of them captures the spirit of the original movies, but the fact that they have worked with audiences and some critics indicates that the remake idea wasn’t a bad one in the first place. >Page 17
THEIR OTHER FACE
Karachibased Arif Mahmood and Tapu Javeri photograph dual portraits of wellknown Pakistanis >Page 16
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
Mumbai’s salt pans, ignored and largely unused, are a perpetual battleground between nature and humanity. Who should win? >Page 18
DON’T MISS
in today’s edition of
PHOTO ESSAY
GRIT AND GREASE
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LOUNGE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.
LOUNGE REVIEW | PVR DIRECTOR’S CUT
FIRST CUT
PRIYA RAMANI
LOUNGE EDITOR
PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS
SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA
THE CRAP ON INDIAN TELEVISION PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP
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
A
new movie-watching concept called Director’s Cut by PVR Cinemas takes premium viewing a notch higher. Ajay Bijli, chairman and managing director, PVR Cinemas, calls it “a full-length experience”. The `20 crore project in New Delhi’s Ambience Mall has four 3D-compliant auditoriums with seating varying from 25 to 108.
The good
©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved
D
ear Bigg Boss, In recent years, Indian television has seen a lot of crap—in fact, call it a coincidence but the stuff that outrages me the most (aside from the news channels) has invariably aired on Colors, the same general entertainment channel that you hang out at. So what if there’s a new “education” theme on top-rated show Balika Vadhu these days? I’ve always believed that the vile serial about a child bride (incidentally, my mother is still addicted to it and I blame you for that) should never have been conceptualized let alone aired on national television. Until a year ago, I routinely forced myself to keep tabs on all these shows that depicted violence against women and female infanticide in the name of education and reality. Then I OPEN LETTER decided to ban Colors from my television viewing. Why support a channel that doesn’t support women, I reasoned. It wasn’t a complete ban. Once a year, I decided, I would succumb to your baritone instructing housemates to make chicken sounds all night and engage in other asinine activities. Once a year I would ignore the husband when he asked me: “How can you watch this show?” I’m a Bigg Boss addict and not ashamed about it. I feel like a New India sociologist, and not a bored voyeur when I watch 14 housemates trapped in your candy-coloured house for three months. They always make it to the news. Last year, within the first four episodes of your show, the Shiv Sena protested, a real-life thief made a dramatic exit, three people
In the house: Nihita Biswas, wife of infamous criminal Charles Sobhraj, is a contestant. sobbed on camera and we sniffed a romance. The Bigg Boss Season 4 cloud would have had the following tags: abused women, MMS scandal, cricketer squeezes, lawbreakers. So what happened this year? Why no above-average biceps in Season 5? No lawbreakers? There’s only one wife of a criminal. And one lover of the ex-husband of last year’s winner. Are we going to have to spend the entire season waiting to see if the Creep, the only male on this year’s show, is going to get lucky with one of the 12 silly female housemates/the transsexual? If I have to complete this season, Bigg Boss, you need to promise me two things. First, you will confiscate all the Creep’s diaphanous, sleeveless nighties and ensure we don’t have to see him bend so his posterior fills the camera. Also, ensure we don’t see his thighs please—I draw the line at this appalling skin show. Second, ensure that there is no further talk of bowel movements. I don’t want to know if a housemate can’t take a crap. Or what trauma that lack of crap is causing her. Sneak in some dates and a bowl of spinach if you must. Suggest a non-invasive fix-it such as an abdominal massage (don’t air the massage). But no crap confessions please. As I said before, we’ve already seen a lot of crap on Indian television. You can write to me at lounge@livemint.com
LOUNGE LOVES | FN SOUZA PORTRAITS
All the grey tones Ida Kar cap tured many shades of the iconic artist
W
Cinema eclipsed
hat is there not to love about the wild Expressionist of Indian modern art? Francis Newton Souza: suspended student of Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Art, founder of the Progressive Artists’ Group, the man responsible for the discovery of M.F. Husain. He was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition internationally. In 1949, he left for London. It was there, in poet Victor Mus- Deep focus: Kar shot Souza in his studio. grave’s bohemian outfit, Gallery One, that Souza had his first Kar at the National Portrait solo in 1956 and met the Armenian Gallery in London, Grosvenor photographer Ida Kar (1908-1974), Vadehra gallery, London, has who was married to Musgrave. brought Kar’s portraits of Kar was known for her defining Souza to India. The seven picportraits of artists and writers— tures have never been pubblack and white images that cap- lished or shown before. tured their spirit. Her photoThe photographs, all shot at the graphs included those of the artist’s studio between 1957 and French architect Le Corbusier 1961, document a crucial phase in and the co-founder of Cubism, the artistic careers of both Kar and Georges Braque. Souza. They capture Souza in a To coincide with a major ret- manner reflective of what we rospective of photographs by know of him—proud, unapolo-
getic, dandy—against the backdrop of his cluttered studio. The photographs themselves are of great quality, eschewing stark contrast for finely nuanced grey tones. Souza was obsessed with self-portraits. In his own depictions, he highlighted what he considered to be his physical failings: scars from his near-fatal childhood encounter with pox. In his sketches, he always had an exaggerated nose. Souza, the man and his art, covers vast landscapes. His canvases swing between the extremes of his strong Catholic upbringing and his later obsessions with graphic sex and nudity. He was a man of countless different shades—Kar manages to reproduce many. In his manifesto for the Progressive Artists’ Group, Souza had said, “Our art has evolved over the years of its own volition; out of our own balls and brains.” Surely, you’d want to see the face of the man who said that. Ida Kar’s portraits of F.N. Souza will be on view at the British Council, New Delhi, till 15 October; Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts till 18 October; and Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, till 28 October. Anindita Ghose
Unlike PVR’s Gold Class—or similar premium experiences offered by other multiplex chains—where one auditorium has plush seats and seat service, the Director’s Cut is designed entirely as a luxury experience. All four auditoriums come with fully reclining seats and an airline-style remote to call a waiter. You can choose your drinks, main courses and desserts from an in-theatre menu. A bar, lounge and fine-dining restaurant greet you at the entrance; as does a store with quirky film memorabilia and DVDs for sale. But more than its luxury trappings, the most interesting feature is the Director’s Rare programme which will screen independent films you’d be hard-pressed to find on the big screen: documentaries such as Catfish (2010) on social networking and Restrepo (2010)—the riveting film shot by photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed recently in Libya.
The notsogood Its namesake implies a director’s personal vision for his movie, untampered by market forces or the censor board.
Luxury flight: The auditoriums simulate airline businessclass service. But be forewarned of the project’s title: It does not mean that you’re seeing a director’s cut of a film. In fact, the title is rife with irony. Imagine watching Restrepo, shot in the deadliest valleys of Afghanistan, with a couple deliberating on pizza toppings beside you. Bijli, who is aware of this concern, assured me beforehand that the staff was being trained for discreet service. They’re equipped with backlit tablets with a browse-through menu to minimize interaction with movie watchers. But despite the very courteous bearings of the staff, I did not discern this training. And in a city like Delhi, where people have a larger than life sense of entitlement, we fear that those paying `1,050 for a ticket will think it is okay to holler at waiters just when you’re looking at Scarlett Johansson doing that thing with her lips. What we’re saying is, this is a great outing for a first date or a birthday, but not for watching that Terrence Mal-
ick film you’ve been waiting to see all year.
Talk plastic Introductory prices for tickets are `1,050 (weekends) and `850 (weekdays). These are likely to double. The food and wine buffets are priced at around `1,000 each per head. The in-theatre food, which is strictly average, is overpriced. My rucola and truffle pizza, a lemon ice tea (I ordered an iced green tea) and a rich chocolate pastry were billed at `911, including service charge and taxes. It is the memorabilia store that is the real steal, with bags and wallets for `699 and a fair range of DVDs priced under `300. PVR Director’s Cut is at Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. There are plans to expand to Mumbai and Bangalore after testing the market in Delhi. For details, visit www.pvrdirectorscut.com Anindita Ghose
ON THE COVER: IMAGING: MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT
g ii n g , g i v i n g Th e
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE
The noble, useful art of telling white lies
T
PHOTOGRAPHS
he words came out so fast and for the
BY
THINKSTOCK
silliest of reasons. Last week, my Japanese neighbour, Mayumi, shared her fresh home-made tofu with me. A few hours later, I ran into her in the garden downstairs. “How
do you like the tofu?” she asked with a hopeful beam. “Oh, it’s wonderful. So soft and fresh,” I replied. I hadn’t tasted the stuff. Have you ever uttered a white lie? Before you say “No”, let me remind you of the time your friend sang off-key during a party or puja. As a host, what did you do after she finished the song? You clapped and told her that it was lovely, right? What about the time when your colleague (whom you like and respect in general) asked you if you had read his policy paper—the one you thought was drivel? What did you say? With my untasted tofu, I fell victim to a concept that economists call framing. I blame it on the question really. Had Mayumi asked, “Did you taste the tofu?”, it would have been very easy for me to say I hadn’t. But when she asked if I liked the tofu, and that too with such a hopeful smile on her pretty face, it seemed cruel to say “No”. Far easier to please her by saying that the stuff she had prepared for me was ripe and tasty. With a simple white lie, I was making her happy. As behavioural economist Dan Ariely notes in his lectures and writings, the human urge to cheat and lie goes against the desire to feel good when you look in the mirror. Yet, humans lie and cheat. The way we do this—something that studies corroborate—is by doing a little cheating some of the time, so that we get the benefits of cheating without feeling bad about ourselves. The same rule applies to white lies. We say them, not because we are compulsive, pathological liars but because they are quick and easy. A friend of mine decided to do
something about this. Sriram took out a stickK.com contract where he committed to pay 17 cents (around `8) each time he uttered a white lie. StickK.com is a website that attempts to help people accomplish their goals—exercising four days a week, giving up sweets. You pay a penalty each time you fall off the proverbial treadmill. I read about stickK in a book called Nudge, but found it too cumbersome to use. So I decided to just pay attention to the white lies I was saying. It wasn’t often, after all. Or so I thought. The next morning, I lied—to my child, no less. My daughter came into my bed late at night, whimpering about bad dreams. Our bed is too small and I didn’t sleep at all. When we woke up, she asked (again with that hopeful face that was going to be my nemesis) if I had slept well. What did I do? I didn’t explain that I had slept fitfully because she had pulled every inch of the blanket over herself. I didn’t tell her that she kept kicking me. I merely lied. “Did you sleep well, Ma?” “Like a baby, darling. I loved having you back in our bed,” I replied with a genuine Duchenne smile that involves both the zygomatic major muscle and the rise of the orbicularis oculi. Authentic smile; fake words. Authentic sentiment but not the truth. Is truth overrated? Later, I asked Sriram—the founder of the white-lie experiment—what he would have done in my situation. He laughed and said that he would have changed the topic. Perhaps I could have said the truth, said Sriram—that I hadn’t slept all night, but I still loved having
Truth be told: (above) Friendships would be tough to sustain if the occasional white lie was completely ruled out; for instance, honesty over a gift of tofu could cause friends to part ways. her in my bed. Such nuanced explanations don’t work well with children, not at 7 in the morning. They want a Yes or No answer. That’s my excuse, anyway. A few days later, I lied again, to another friend, who had dropped in at home to pick up something. It was prearranged. I had forgotten. My friend sent me a message: “Where are you?” I am on my way, I SMSed back. It was technically true. I was on my way home, in an hour, after finishing my pedicure. My friend picked up the package and left. Actually, that was a white lie. I wasn’t at a pedicure. I was having a massage but I didn’t want you readers to think I was a dilettante. You see, this is why we lie: to make ourselves seem
better than we are. White lies, in such situations, are at least easier to understand. Unlike my tofu incident, where the lie didn’t gain me anything, lying to my friend had to do with self-esteem. I wanted to seem like an organized person who didn’t forget appointments. The Chinese call this mianzi, or saving face. White lies serve a noble purpose in society. They lubricate social interactions and make life bearable. What if the colleague you are attracted to doesn’t like you? When you ask her out to lunch, do you think she is going to say: “Sorry, but I can’t stand you so I’d rather not have lunch with you. Not now. Not ever.” She’s going to make up a reason: say
that she has other commitments and is “otherwise engaged”. You know she is lying but your foolish ego will thank her for it anyway. I can’t say that I have stopped uttering white lies. I can say that I have become more conscious of them. When there is no obvious benefit, I am able to catch myself and do the hardest thing of all in that particular situation: Tell the truth. So the next time you ask me how the tofu was, I’ll say: “It was tasteless. I only eat it for the good flavonoids and antioxidants.” Unless you are Japanese and enjoy subtle cuisine, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Shoba Narayan enjoyed writing this column. And that, dear reader, is not a white lie. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan
THINKSTOCK
LEARNING CURVE
GOURI DANGE
GROWING UP IN BODY AND SELF My eight-year-old son has a habit of cracking joints, especially of fingers. He does it constantly. We have tried to break this habit, but in vain. While he understands that it is not good, he involuntarily starts doing it, especially when playing or watching TV, among other things. He is otherwise a confident and well-behaved boy, doing well in school and at play. Many parents get extremely hassled with this habit. One, because there is a feeling that it is harmful and can in later life lead to arthritis, and two, because it is simply an annoying thing to watch and listen to all day long! Knuckle cracking, making odd sounds from the throat, licking lips all the time, nail-biting, and other such behaviour in children, is the source of much friction in the house. Some of these lead to pretty serious self-inflicted bodily harm, especially nail-biting. Cracking knuckles is not harmful as such, so you don’t have to worry on that score. Understandably, however, it annoys you and you want it to stop. Most such habits are actually signs of mild to severe nervous disorders. Unfortunately, the more you nag
about them, the worse they get. The good thing is that most children outgrow them—either the fascination with the click sounds diminishes, or whatever is prompting the nervous habit gets resolved. Children’s preoccupation with their own bodies takes different forms right from infancy—thumb-sucking, playing with private parts, curling one’s own hair around the finger (to the point of forming tight knots and tangles), chewing on a collar or hanky, knuckle-cracking, blinking a lot, to name just a few. Several adults too exhibit this kind of behaviour, but it is not a given that children doing it will carry on doing it in their adult lives. So do see it as a passing preoccupation, to some extent. Even if the origins of such a habit are in some kind of nervous disorder, it could be part and parcel of generally edgy moods and preoccupations in your son, unless you know that there is some particular tension in his life, like a particular subject in school, or an interpersonal issue, etc. If there isn’t anything specific, I suggest you just let it pass. Explaining the ill-effects of such a habit, and then constantly trying to get him to stop it, is
exhausting for everyone. Perhaps it is best to stop commenting on and correcting your son; advise other elders around to do that too. Try this for a month, and see what happens. Many parents resort to imitating the child, to show him how bad something that he does looks and to embarrass him into stopping. I would urge you not to do this with your son. My daughter is 12 and I have noticed that she gets extremely self-conscious when any of her uncles (my husband’s brothers and cousins) visit. Sometimes she is almost flirtatious. While some of the men maintain their distance, others don’t quite know how to react as she sits close to them, wants to be spoken to all the time, and is cold and aloof with their wives. It’s all awkward for me. I also fear that someone may take advantage of her. I have refrained from saying anything to her except calling her away, giving her some task, among other things, when I feel she is behaving too inappropriately. These days she also chooses to wear figure-hugging T-shirts, particularly when men visit. She is very normal and nice with male cousins of her age
Body basics: Becoming selfconscious is part of growing up. and a little older; it is with the uncles that she behaves this way. That your 12-year-old is acutely self-conscious is part of the growing pains we have all experienced. Along with being awkward, there are the insistent and confusing hormonal changes that dictate this kind of social behaviour, which comes across to others as strange, and from what you describe, embarrassing. She is becoming aware of herself as feminine, entering
womanhood, and feels attracted to the opposite sex, particularly in the form of “safe” father figures like uncles. It seems she wants to be noticed by them and acknowledged as a young woman, not a little girl—she seems hungry for this kind of attention. It seems important to her to impress them in some way. She is too young to do it subtly, hence the rather blatant and clumsy physical behaviour. Perhaps this is the time for you, and particularly her
father, to acknowledge her emerging femininity, in verbal and non-verbal ways. This is not the time for her dad to be aloof or disapproving, however much her current behaviour puts you off. Do have a chat with her father about this, if he is willing to listen without expressing disgust or being extremely uncomfortable with the subject (which unfortunately many fathers tend to be in such situations). You are right in gently pulling her away from such situations by giving her some tasks, etc.—however, it is important that you speak to her about it quite directly. She may bristle and argue and call you mean and other such names. Perhaps it is a good idea to have another woman with you during this conversation—someone she likes and respects, either one of your friends or an aunt. You would have to go into important territory in this conversation, including talking about your fear of someone misreading her and taking advantage in some form. You would need to tell her that part of becoming a young woman is to sit at an appropriate distance from people, and not stick to them like children do. Totally avoid using judgemental words like “cheap”, “shocking” and “silly”. Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting. Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com
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Spotlight
LOUNGE EXCERPT
The employment exchange PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT
Exclusive extracts from Rohini Nilekani’s ‘Uncommon Ground’, in which Sunil Mittal and Aruna Roy debate job creation in India
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Uncommon Ground— Dialogues Between Busi ness and Social Leaders: Penguin/Viking, 251 pages,`499.
ndia’s demographic trajectory is such that, for the next twenty years, about 1 million people will enter the workforce every month. Will there be a sufficient number of jobs for them all? And will these jobs fulfil the aspirations of youth everywhere? What kind of livelihoods do the majority of people want for themselves? These are vexed questions that the government and society must deal with sooner rather than later. There is a flurry of activity by way of policies and programmes, to try and cash in on the demographic dividend that India is experiencing because of its vast young population. It is a window of opportunity that begins to close around 2025, when India’s population will start to age dramatically. That gives us merely fifteen years to get things right and to universalize education, employability and gainful employment under decent conditions. Historians lament the fact that independent India’s new leaders did not prioritize universal elementary education. ... I am going to start with you, Arunaji. You quit the bureaucracy in 1975 and went to work with craftspeople in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Looking back on your journey, why do you think it became so critical for the state to enable the right to work, to guarantee the right to work? Well, actually, since you mention Tilonia, I’ll go back to what the nine years there—I stayed up to 1983—taught me. It was a very Gandhian period because, in a sense, I listened to and learnt from rural people as to what they really wanted. The notion that a middle-class person has of rural employment is crafts,
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but it barely touches the ground reality. The main occupation of rural people is either agriculture or employment as physical labour—either in government works or elsewhere. So the main issue for employment of rural people, therefore, is not handicrafts—it is daily-wage work. They go and stand at haats from where they are hired by private companies or private people. Or they engage in migration and move elsewhere for work. Or they go and offer their services to bigger farmers. Or they go and work with government programmes. The main thing for them is employment with a skill they already possess, which is working with tools like the ghainti, the phawra, with the various implements of mud work, of plastering, of building. These are their skills, so one has to build from there. And they want employment. And they have always wanted to live with dignity. This is a myth that we always have, of people not wanting to work. India’s poor work very hard, because if they don’t, there will be no food at the end of the day. Much more than any of us, they have had to work. So when I went to the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, which is a non-party political organization—we are not members of any political party but we think we have to make democracy work better—employment was a major issue. It was the people’s demand and therefore we wanted to fashion it in such a way that there was an act, a legislation and a commitment of the state to look after its people. So that’s how the NREGA was actually conceived of and born much later. But the Maharashtra government had had a Maharashtra Rural Employment Guarantee Act for twenty-odd years and that was, in fact, the basis on which the NREGA was conceived. Sunil let me come to you. Yes, we have employment guarantee and it’s a process—it’s going to evolve. But in the meanwhile— you know the statistics better than me—we have about 400 million people in the labour force. Fifty per cent of them are entrepreneurs, perhaps not out of choice. We have 92 per cent of the workforce in the unorganized sector. Sixty per cent of them have no skills that would fit into, say, a European guild. How do you see the transition happening from unorganized to organized (labour)? From the kind of wage labour that she is talking about to more dignified livelihoods? We need to go back again to the history of how our labour has been organized over the last fiftyodd years. The fact is that we went for state planning where the premise was that the state would be the provider of jobs; and we ourselves put out plans on the model of the Gosplans of the state planning commission of the Soviet Union, where five-year plans would lead to the economic build-up of the nation. The fact is it was a big failure. All of us know that that didn’t work very well, even though there is a big role that the state has to play, which it can’t abdicate in favour of either non-profit organizations or corporate bodies. And I believe that each one of us has a role to play in contributing to that particular objective of providing sure, good dignified jobs to everyone. Now let me come to the area where we normally operate, which is more organized. I think that is an area where people are
ARIJIT SEN/HINDUSTAN TIMES
Labour crisis: (from above) Sunil Mittal says we need to go back to the history of how our labour was organized to address problems of skilled labour and livelihood; Aruna Roy; and Mittal.
getting secure jobs, dignified jobs; careers are growing at a rapid pace and they are getting globalized. But this is not enough. It’s a very small portion of our overall workforce. In fact only a fraction of India’s labour force is employed by the organized industry. Equally we are finding that as we grow our businesses, we don’t have enough people joining the labour force. Today I am not in real estate but we have three or four buildings coming up. Every building is significantly behind schedule and the reason for this is not enough skilled manpower to build those buildings. I can’t imagine how the large builders would be managing their affairs today. It was just mentioned that there are people who are daily wage employees, who look for jobs on a daily basis, which is entirely true. I mean I grew up in Ludhiana, in a city where in the morning there used to be the labour market where thousands of people just used to wait—you know, wait for a contractor to come and pick up five or ten people. It used to be a sad sight. They were all waiting for somebody to pick them up for that one day. That state has disappeared— thankfully! You don’t see those labour markets because there is a massive shortage of labour. And that is (because) of our economic development. Are they skilled? The answer is no. They are not skilled for the job that is required today. So I would say the biggest job for the nation today is skill building.
There are jobs. People want jobs. Employers want people. There is a mismatch. Do you want to respond? Actually none of us is wrong, but none of us is entirely right. So the issue really is that out of the 92 per cent of our workforce that is unorganized today, only a small fraction can really be absorbed in the skilled sector by industry. A very small proportion can go into the private sector. There is no argument with upgrading skills. Of course it is vitally important and the younger generation that is coming up now—it’s going to schools, it’s going to colleges, and finding itself unemployed—definitely wants a skill upgradation. But, I would like to ask of you, since you are next to me today: What is the commitment of the private sector to really giving, imparting skill learning—not with the idea of immediate absorption into your own industry but of creating a larger skilled group in the country?... ... Sunil, why is it that when corporate India goes into the rural hinterland there is so much unease. Why do people feel so threatened? That’s one thing. So what is the partnership model where the last person that she’s talking about feels that there is a stake for me here and my future can be built on this? That’s a good point. What can you do? What can you do as a business? Inherently there is suspicion about industry’s moves in the rural area. And that is deeply
embedded in our psyche for a long time and for right reasons. Because rural India has been exploited by people for a long period of time. And the resultant share of what they gained was very small. So when an industry moves into the rural areas, when you are trying to acquire land for industry, there is a hue and cry. The motive behind what industry does is always suspected. We were trying to acquire land for India’s first football academy. Bharti Foundation (feels) we must have an Indian team in the World Cup in 2018. We work with AIFF—the All India Football Federation. To get that land we had so much resistance. What we are doing—there is a philanthropic project to build a world-class academy there. But you have to work with them. You have to tell them what you are doing. Sit down with them. At one stage my people said let’s go to another state. There are many people who are inviting us. I said no, let’s stay there and address their issues. They wanted guaranteed employment in the academy; they wanted participation in the academy; they wanted to be part of the decision-making process. I said who are we doing this for—it’s for them—let’s do it. Sunil Mittal is founder, chairman and group CEO, Bharti Enterprises, that owns Airtel, India’s largest mobile service provider. Aruna Roy is a social activist and Magsaysay Award winner. She is a member of the National Advisory Council set up by the UPA government. Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from Uncommon Ground: Dialogues Between Business and Social Leaders. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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Old faithful: Siddharth Naidu with his 1970 Lambretta in Bangalore; and (below) the iconic Italian scooter brand later became fully Indian owned.
Motolife Italia. Motolife has also come under pressure from Lambretta Consortium, which says that Motolife scooters, being of sub-par quality, represent a breach of their sub-licence contract. Motolife is now mounting a legal challenge, but if the Indian government loses the trademark, their argument will be irrelevant. Thus, they too are appealing to SIL to defend the trademark, and to license it directly to them, says Nicola Gurrado, the lawyer for Motolife. Gurrado says he made his case to SIL’s Kumar at the company’s Lucknow headquarters last year, but was frustrated by the slow pace of talks.
Muddle in the marketplace
SCOOTERS
Reclaiming the Lambretta EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS/GETTY IMAGES
Decaying models can fetch `75,000, yet the cult brand remains stuck in a legal tangle
facing an uphill legal battle to retain ownership of the Lambretta brand, the result of a lackadaisical defence of the trademark at home and abroad. Complicating matters is the fact that SIL was declared a sick company in 2009, and the government has announced plans to divest its 95.38% stake in it.
End game for SIL
B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com
···························· ike many teenagers, when it was time for Siddharth Naidu to graduate from a bicycle to a scooter, he was concerned with how cool he would look. He was therefore disappointed when his parents, apprehensive about the speed of the popular Japanese bikes, gave him a hand-me-down Indianmade Lambretta, which was slower, but steadier. He eventually moved on to a Japanese rocket bike, but in adulthood, Naidu, a founder of the Bangalore Classic Scooter Club, found himself yearning for “a slice of the past”. In 2008, Naidu bought a 1970 Italian Lambretta, Li 150, which was assembled in India, for `8,000 and put in another `25,000 to restore it to mint condition. His wife later gifted him a Vijai Super Mark II, made by Lambretta in 1985, by which time the iconic Italian scooter brand was fully Indian-owned. “We all remember our dads riding them and we all learnt to ride on them,” Naidu, 33, says of the Lambrettas—and Vijais, as the locally sold ones were called. Their stability, durable frames and long bodies, which could accommodate three riders, made them popular in India. Today, the Lambretta is riding a wave of nostalgia, with even decaying models fetching up to `75,000. It has, in fact, captured the imagination of scooter enthusiasts worldwide, with vintage “Lambys” fetching top dollar among collectors. However, Scooters India Ltd (SIL), the government enterprise that bought Lambretta in 1972 from its Italian founders, is not in a position to capitalize on this nostalgia. It is
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The saga of the Lambretta trademark is a tangled web. In 2006, the UK company Fine White Line Ltd entered into a licensing agreement with SIL that allowed it to sub-licence the brand for use on clothing, vehicles and other paraphernalia bearing the Lambretta logo. Not long after, another company, the Netherlands-based Lambretta SRL, as it is now called, began what some view as a hostile takeover of it by registering new Lambretta trademarks in numerous countries, on the grounds that SIL, which stopped producing scooters in 1997, had lost ownership of the trademark due to non-use (the owner of a trademark must produce products bearing its name, or risk losing it to a usurper). Fine White Line shareholders then formed another company, Lambretta Licensing Ltd (LLL), and entered into a licensing agreement with Lambretta SRL (the two companies now release statements under the name Lambretta Consortium, a nonlegally binding alliance of companies with shared business interests). Both agreements are valid, LLL executives say, only the one with SIL is no longer of any commercial use. Harry Willits, a spokesman at LLL, says the Indian government’s dominion over the Lambretta trademark is all but lost. “We’re pretty much in the end game now,” says Willits, also the in-house lawyer for LLL. “Meanwhile, (we’ve) paid £750,000 (around `5.7 crore) in defence of SIL’s trademark. SIL, as a sick company, has done absolutely not a jot to support (us) in their effort. All that time Lambretta SRL has been gaining more and more ground in the legal battle because of a long period of nonuse (by SIL), who I’m assuming has no capacity, no money and no interest in a brand that is clearly valuable.”
SIL chairman, chief executive officer and managing director Ajai Kumar says SIL still owns the Lambretta trademark in India and abroad, and maintains that it is defending it—and has been doing so. He says that though SIL does not manufacture Lambretta scooters any more, it does make replacement parts bearing the brand’s name. He acknowledges a dispute with LLL, which, he says, owes royalties, but adds that they are in “dialogue” with the company and the issue will soon be “resolved”. Steven Wilch, the managing director of LLL, says the company stopped paying royalties last year because it was spending so much money defending SIL’s trademark. “We call SIL once a week and we get zero response. One meeting would resolve all of this,” he says. Lambretta SRL declined to comment, but a company official noted, by SMS, that most of SIL’s scooters bore the Vijai, not Lambretta, name. According to the Indian office of the Registrar of Trademarks, SIL is still the owner of the Lambretta trademark, but records show that this has been contested by the parent company of Lambretta SRL. “If a company is not spending any money to police the trademark, and other companies pick it up, your case will be weakened,” says Shamnad Basheer, a professor of intellectual property law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata. “The onus is on the owner of the trademark to protect it, because if other companies use the trademark, it will lose its distinctiveness and its value.” Intellectual property courts look on non-defence of trademarks unfavourably, he says. Furthermore, standard “quality control” clauses, which stipulate that the owner will police the trademark, were left out of the agreement with Fine White Line, which will weaken SIL’s legal standing, says Basheer, who has reviewed a copy
of the contract available on Lambretta Consortium’s website. “With the clause, the onus is on the challenger to prove the trademark wasn’t used properly. Without it, the tables are turned,” says Basheer, who calls the clause’s omission “a very serious mistake” on the part of SIL. G.S. Davar, SIL’s long-time legal adviser, declined to comment.
Meanwhile, LLL is anticipating Lambretta SRL’s unchallenged ownership of the brand. “Because of the ongoing legal battles and because of the uncertainty, it became difficult for us to license out the Lambretta name. Our business became unviable,” says Willits. “We’ll end up licensing from Lambretta SRL.” Another layer in the Lambretta onion is the fact that Fine White Line granted sub-licences to two companies to produce Lambretta New garb: scooters in Europe and Asia. A variant of Already they are on sale in Europe the Lambretta. under the banner of Lambretta
COURTESY MOTOLIFE ITALIA
The story of Lambretta has always been complicated, says Paul Moylan, 47, who is a member of the committee that runs the 4,000-member Lambretta Club of Great Britain, which he says is the largest of its kind. Lambretta was founded in Italy by Ferdinando Innocenti in 1922 and sold at various times under licence in Europe and South America before the company was sold to the Indian government 50 years later, says Moylan, who owns two Indian-made Lambrettas and two Italian-made ones. Moylan says India didn’t export Lambrettas to the UK until 1978, a year before they became popular again after being featured in Quadrophenia, a 1979 film credited for the revival of Mods, the socalled “modern” youths in 1960s England who were characterized by sharp suits, countercultural music and, of course, scooters. Moylan got his first Lambretta a year after the film’s release. Moylan says the nearly 50,000 Lambretta enthusiasts in the UK know there is a tussle over the trademark, but would only be interested in new bikes and parts that were up to snuff. “The new Lambretta is a poor copy of the iconic Lambretta,” he says, so there is no interest among purists. (The new scooter has been reviewed positively by non-purists.) As for the spare parts made by SIL, “they are hit and miss and I know that dealers in the UK can wait months and months for orders to be shipped,” he says. Complicating matters is the fact that SIL is now on the block. Minister for heavy industries and public enterprises Praful Patel said in September that the government would go ahead with the planned divestment of the company, which still makes a line of three-wheelers (though of the 77,252 three-wheelers produced in India in August, only 1,400 were made by SIL, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers). Analysts say that despite the fact that the two- and threewheeler market is growing at a robust clip, SIL will be a tough sell. “They don’t have any two-wheeler products at all. They have no products in development and no product development capability. There’s no value in buying the company,” says V.G, Ramakrishnan, a senior director with the consultancy Frost & Sullivan. “Probably Lambretta has an element of value in European markets and that might make it valuable to some buyers, but I don’t see too many companies lining up to show interest. It’s a difficult organization with no element of talent pool to defend the assets of the company.” Regardless of how things work out for SIL, Willets says the consortium “very much” plans to produce Lambretta scooters again, but must first settle the lawsuits and end the confusion over who actually owns the name. “The idea is to clean up the market first,” he says.
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Business Lounge
LOUNGE SHRIDHAR SUBRAMANIAM
The counterculture perk The president of Sony Music India talks rock while taking Bollywood music global B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com
···························· bunch of audio engineers fiddle with complicated machines on the left while a group of musicians informally gather on stage to perform. Cigarette smoke rises from another corner, covering in its wake a not-sosubtle sign that discourages smoking in the hall. On the right, a small bar lists the prices of a range of beverages. Thick wires run across the room near the entrance, taped to the floor, ensuring that those who do not tread carefully are likely to make a flying entrance. K.C. Loy and his band of boys sing Aai No. 1 in Marathi followed by Hariyali Chhayi Hai in Hindi. Young boys walk in and out with great urgency, most of them with long hair or Bandra-style haircuts, in dark T-shirts, keds and torn jeans. This is the setting for Live from the Console, Sony Music’s monthly attempt to revive indie music, at Mehboob Studios in Bandra, Mumbai. I am 30 minutes late but Shridhar Subramaniam, president, Sony India and Middle East, of Sony Music, is more than an hour late. We decide to blame, rightly, the Bandra fair which has started that day and clogged all the roads leading into the suburb. Two glasses of beer arrive, in plastic glasses, as is the norm at rock concerts, before we find a quiet room away from intense musicians. Subramaniam is slim, wearing a dark shirt, Ray-Ban spectacles, and bursting with energy. The
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47-year-old can barely hide an innate restlessness and passion for music, which is now also his profession. “I am not the content, happy kind of guy,” he says. “I am a committed, start-up kind of guy. I don’t like to worry about a rocket’s trajectory; I say let’s just get it off the ground first.” His instincts for start-ups show in his career choices—he joined Titan and Sony Music India when they started. But for a restless person, he has ironically stayed with just two companies. He joined Titan in 1988, when they came into the market with Timex watches and later the Fastrack series, and has been with Sony Music since its inception in India in 1996. “Headhunters call me and say, will you ever leave? But it goes back to values—Titan established character and values and now it’s my turn to instil that in Sony.” This is again a contradiction to the rebellious streak that Subramaniam says he had growing up in Mumbai, with a love for rock music and reading. His father Shiv, a self-made man who was in the Indian Revenue Service, with Nehruvian ideals of nation building, was not always in favour of his son’s musical inclinations. “We have gone through the stages of teenage angst when he would lock up my records,” remembers Subramaniam, of days when he would trade in records, lounge with friends older than him, have the “Pink Floyd experience” and head to Eros Cinema for a 10am show of Woodstock. Most friends were in bands, he says—his big-
IN PARENTHESIS Shridhar Subramaniam remembers going for the music release of actor Suriya Sivakumar’s 50th (Tamil) film ‘7 Aum Arivu’. “It happens in a stadium where 30,000 people show up, wait for 3 hours in hot sun behind barricades. It’s live on TV with massive ratings,” he says. Some weeks ago, he was at another music release in Madurai where 200,000 people showed up as part of a political rally. “In the final climactic moment, a cow and calf were rolled out on stage, surrounded by people in these big badges. Some guy’s name is announced, the crowd erupts in ecstasy that (actor) Vijay has given this family a lifetime of livelihood. That’s a music launch.”
gest regret was not having learnt an instrument. “You know how it is, if I was interested in Carnatic music, things would have been different. It tends to happen in families of second-third generation with their sense of value systems being challenged.” In certain respects, he followed the conventional academic path. A degree from Mumbai’s Sydenham College of Commerce was followed by an MBA at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, US. College meant blowing up a semester chasing the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan—“for me, being in the US was about music,” he says. Subramaniam’s decision to return to India in 1988 had something to do with his innate Indianness, because the practice in those days was to follow up graduate school with a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley, as his brother Sundar did. Subramaniam took one look at Mumbai and decided it could not be his life. His father was posted in Kolkata, but that did not work either. Someone suggested Bangalore, with its green boulevards and lovely weather, and Subramaniam headed south, to Titan’s offices. “Even when I came back and started working, I had not grown up in the truest sense, in the sense of having a purpose,” he says. That changed when he met Xerxes Desai, Titan’s former managing director and vice-chairman. “He is my mentor, the teacher I never had. He threw me into the deep end having absolute confidence and faith and let me swim with it,” Subramaniam says. This included launching Titan in Europe, getting into the luxury business with its jewellery division Tanishq and doing all the “swish, French stuff” for three years from 1994. His hardest decision was to tell Desai about his decision to quit when the opportunity to join Sony came in 1996. He got a few words of advice: Be careful about making your passion your profession. At some point you will lose one. If his first job interview at Sony in their US office was slightly surreal—on the 32nd floor, with a sushi restaurant around, and Billy Joel lurking somewhere—the second, with the Asian head, was weirder. “In a girlie bar in Bangkok, in Thailand. Here I am, in front of a pole, and you are talking to me about what you want to do in India?” he says, laughing. This was a time when the likes of Alisha Chinai and Baba Sehgal were rocking newly instituted countdowns on fresh television channels in India, like MTV. It was also a time when audio companies were not run professionally and several labels were vying for a slice of the growing market. Over time, not only did that brand of Indian rock-pop-hip hop merge into film music, but many of the labels disappeared too. “Between Bollywood
and pop, the former was more remunerative. It just sucked up all the talent, from music, advertising. At a $2 billion (around `9,600 crore) business, you can buy all the talent,” says Subramaniam. “People falsely accuse the music industry for this singularity of what music is put on now,” he continues. “It’s not the music companies, it’s the media: Their fixation with all things Bollywood is incredible and depressing.” But there is hope, because the “beauty about music”—and Subramaniam uses the word beauty often—that drove him and continues to drive generations “is the counterculture rebellious component attached to it. Cinema is not a counterculture business. Music is. I like something my parents don’t. It’s a separating line, it’s a divider,” he says. The counterculture lives in pockets, one of these being Sony’s newly started Live from the Console, where the company invites and pays musicians to play one Saturday a month. Set in Mehboob Studios, with 200-300 people attending after buying inexpensive tickets, the event gives Subramaniam another reason to feel proud and happy. “Why I enjoy Sony is because the music business allows you to do these super-cool things.” The other more serious business is Sony/ ATV Music Publishing Llc, a music publishing firm formed by Sony Music Global and the family trust of the late singer Michael Jackson. This has formed a strategic joint venture with Sony Music Entertainment India Pvt. Ltd, marking its India entry. Through this joint venture, announced 19 September, Sony Music Entertainment will represent Sony/ATV’s 750,000-plus global music assets in India and Sony/ATV will represent Sony Music’s musical works internationally. The joint venture company will ensure timely monitoring, tracking, collection and payment for the use of music they own and manage. With a 16-18% market share of a $200 million industry in India, Subramaniam is looking for the “magic sweet spot”, which is 25%. That’s the reason why the company is stepping into regional zones—it entered Tamil Nadu three years ago and will soon be in Punjab. He still wants to take Bollywood music global, a journey that started with the company’s first Indian product, A.R. Rahman’s Maa Tujhe Salaam. “For every hit, we have had misses, an equal number of wrong calls. The humbling component, it comes in the hit rate,” says Subramaniam.
Rock star: Subramaniam listens to music for about 4 hours every day on his Spotify device, a music streaming service.
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Red eye This year’s Emmys were dominated by scarlet and burgundy. We tell you how to paint the town with dresses in the ‘it’ colour of the moment B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com
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THE RIGHT HUES L’Oréal makeup artiste Ojas Rajani’s tips on what to wear with a red dress u For work Red is a bold colour for work, so keep it simple with a minimal soft mouth. But play up the eyes with mascara and maybe a touch of kohl smudged under the eyes.
Notte by Marchesa: Rosetteembellished organza dress, at Netaporter.com, approx. `62,600.
u For play With a casual look, keep your makeup understated. Use cheek and lip stains, and maybe add a bit of mascara.
Zara: Strapless lace dress, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; and DLF Promenade mall, Saket, New Delhi, `2,690.
u For the evening Use loads of mascara and an earthy, sexy lip colour. Remember to stay away from gloss and wear your hair up. Most importantly, don’t match your lipstick to your dress. Leave that to the accessories.
Star by Julien Macdonald: Embellished and draped jersey dress, at Deben hams, Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, `5,990.
Viseshika Sharma
Mango: Structured dress with faux leather waist tie, at Mango stores countrywide, `3,550.
Resplendent: (left) Nina Dobrev of The Vam pire Diaries in Donna Karan, on the red carpet at this year’s Emmy Awards; and Kate Winslet in Elie Saab, accepting the Emmy for her performance in Mildred Pierce.
Diane von Furstenberg: Stretch poplin dress with draped details, at Netaporter.com, approx. `31,750.
Promod: Cowlneck jersey dress, at Promod stores countrywide, `2,450.
Rohit Gandhi + Rahul Khanna: Fringed silk crepe dress, at The Collective stores in Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; UB City, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and at standalone stores in New Delhi, `29,500.
Michael Kors: Leather trimmed boucléwool dress, at Netaporter.com, approx. `1.02 lakh.
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011
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LOUNGE MAPPING INDIA
WE THE
Just how many languages coexist in India? A new survey is throwing up some startling figures
SPEAKERS PHOTOGRAPHS
B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com
···························· owards the end of her life, Boa Sr spoke to the sparrows gathered around her hut in the Andaman Islands. For the last of the speakers of Bo, a Greater Andamanese language believed to be 65,000 years old, it was a way to keep in touch with a tongue no one understood any more. When Boa Sr died on 26 January last year, her language, with its unbroken history dating back to one of the oldest human cultures on the planet, came to an abrupt end. If it wasn’t for London-based Anvita Abbi, a linguist from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who spent almost five years with Boa Sr, the Bo language would have died unnoticed and unrecorded. The Unesco-endangered languages list says 198 languages in India are threatened with extinction, more than anywhere else in the world. But just how many languages are spoken in India, and which are they? Despite being one of the richest multilingual countries in the world, India has no accurate record of the diversity of its living languages. An ambitious new project, the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), is set to answer this fundamental question that defines ethnic and cultural identity. Led by Ganesh Devy, a 61-year-old linguist and the 2011 Unesco Linguapax laureate, an army of over 2,000 volunteers comprising academics, farmers, authors, schoolteachers, linguists, publishers, polyglots, nomads, translators and activists, is mapping the linguistic contours of India. “We are aiming at a clear snapshot of languages in contemporary India,” Devy says. The first report from the survey, which covers Jharkhand, will be published in November. The survey results for Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh will be released at the 2012 World Languages Meet in Ahmedabad in January, where representatives of 1,000 languages from around the world will be present. Each language mentioned in the reports will be backed by a brief history of the language, the basic structure of its grammar, a lexicon with common terms and samples of stories, songs and poetry in that language. By 2015, the entire project is slated for completion, and Devy, the founder of Bhasha Trust, a Vadodara-based organization that works for the welfare of tribal people, expects to print 21 volumes in English and nine Indian languages. The PLSI data will also be made available in 122 different Indian languages on the Web. The last time a linguistic survey of India was completed and published was in 1923, under Sir George Abraham Grierson, an Irish linguist who was also the Opium Agent of Bihar, entrusted with the purchase of poppy for
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the East India Company. Grierson’s survey identified 179 languages, but this number suffers from a few glaring flaws, not the least of which is the use of untrained field workers. Grierson neglected a large part of southern India after the nizam of Hyderabad refused his team entry into the province. He also kept nomadic tribes outside the purview of his survey. The PLSI’s projections of India’s linguistic diversity are not just light years away from Grierson’s results, they are also radical. It expects to find close to 900 distinct languages in the country. Compare that with the 2001 census, which lists 122 languages, of which 22 are part of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, ensuring that these get government funding, and fall within the educational ambit. “We don’t have proper language policies in India because we don’t really know or understand our linguistic diversity,” says Pramod Pandey, a professor at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an author. “When the language of a community is recognized, the chances are high that it will lead to both cultural and social progress, because the two go handin-hand.” The PLSI, which is currently in action in 15 states, promises to have deep ramifications. Not only will it be an invaluable tool for academics and a powerful weapon for social and cultural progress for neglected communities, it will also nip at the colonial definitions of ethnicity that still exist in India. Linguists and policymakers around the world recognize the need to impart primary education in a child’s mother tongue, after years of research established a strong correlation between improved cognitive abilities in children when the medium of instruction in primary school and the language spoken at home were the same. The Indian Constitution recognizes the right to primary education in the mother tongue, though it has never been implemented. “If you don’t teach a child in the language that he or she uses at home, then what you impose on the child is called ‘aphasia’—the cutting of the child’s tongue,” says Devy. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, former director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore, who is also working on the PLSI, says basic education in the mother tongue builds bridges between the official state languages and native languages, which in turn reduces gaps in governance, education, and communication, and ensures that a
BY
VIJAY SONEJI/MINT
tures of their own. “We are also documenting these code languages,” says Devy. “The Kanjars of Rajasthan speak a language called Bhantu, but when they are in trouble, and they think people around them understand Bhantu, they switch to a code called Narsi-Farsi.”
A linguistic citizenship
cts to e p x e y ve ct The sur to 900 distin . se try find clo s in the coun e e languag e that with th s Compar sus, which list n 2001 ce languages 122
language and its culture do not die out. According to K.K. Chakravarty, chancellor, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi, introducing primary education in the mother tongue and generating education kits in these languages will not be a difficult endeavour, and will not need massive funding. “But for any of these things to happen, you need to know what languages are spoken in the country, and that’s where the PLSI comes in,” says Chakravarty.
The silent voices For the last nine months, 49-year-old Damodar Jain, a lecturer at the National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research in Bhopal, has been travelling the length and breadth of Madhya Pradesh, contacting teachers, authors, tribal welfare workers and traditional storytellers, dispensing survey material for the PLSI and collecting data on languages spoken in the state. “When we started work, we knew about five major languages in the state, like Malwi, Bagheli and Bundelkhandi,” Jain says, “but as we went deeper and deeper in our survey, we were amazed at the number of languages we found. It was an incredible thrill, the kind I would imagine explorers used to feel
Speak out: (top) Ganesh Devy, the founder of the Bhasha Trust; and tribal children in Tejgadh, Gujarat, study their language. when they discovered new lands, and all this in our own backyard!” Jain claims they have gathered enough material to prove the existence of 21 separate languages in the state, and are trying to establish the status of four-five more tongues. “There is little or no documentation, and certainly no primers on the multiple tribal languages in the state,” he says. “We will be the first to study these languages.” Chakravarty says it’s difficult to put an estimate on the number of undocumented languages in the country, but believes the PLSI will catalogue nearly 200 languages which have “not been described outside the immediate locality of
the people who speak it, and all these languages are probably facing extinction”. “Nomadic tribes like the Madaris, Chharas and Garudis, who are spread out between Gujarat, MP and Rajasthan, the Kaikadis who roam between Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, the Nats in Bengal and Orissa—their languages are not described, even their basic grammar is not documented,” Devy says. These communities, which were branded “criminal tribes” from 1871 till 1952, and have been subjected to discrimination for thousands of years, also developed code languages, which have evolved into complex struc-
Part of the reason for the massive disparity between the number of languages projected by the PLSI and Grierson’s survey and the Indian census list is the debate over dialect and language. “We still suffer from a colonial hangover when it comes to dialects,” Devy says. “The concept of dialects originated in British sociolinguistic practices to politically dominate people.” Grierson’s survey, for example, lists Punjabi, Konkani and Maithili as dialects of Hindi. All three are recognized now as major languages. PLSI considers a tongue as a language when 70% of its basic vocabulary, which consists of words used to describe space (length, breadth, distance, etc.) and time (minutes, hours, days, etc.), kinship terms, terms for colours, flora and fauna, basic verbs, geographical and anatomical terms, are original. Through this, deliberate misconceptions, like people in Himachal Pradesh speak a language called “Pahari”, are being overturned. “Pahari is a link language used for administrative purposes in the state,” says Pattanayak. “There are actually 28 languages in Himachal Pradesh, and Pahari is a mixture of these.” “In India, 4% of people speak 96% of languages, and 96% of people speak 4% of languages—basically the Scheduled ones,” says Chakravarty. “We understand that the government can’t have a Schedule of 600 languages, and that having a lingua franca like Hindi or English is important for the country, but that doesn’t mean we destroy the diversity of cultures and languages. Multilingualism in India is the norm, and many languages can co-exist.” Unlike the census, the PLSI does not have the means or the scope to count the number of people who speak a certain language, but it does aim to throw light on how various speechcommunities in India perceive themselves and are perceived by others. “If you look at the Oriya language, people from northern, southern, western and eastern Orissa all differ and argue about the language,” says Pattanayak. “We are studying the relationships between these varieties, and how they interact.” Devy proposes a dramatic conclusion to his enormous project. “In 2016, I would like to visit Ajmer and go to the tower where Sir Thomas Roe was given the licence to do commerce in India in 1616,” he says, “and present the 21 volumes of the PLSI there as a return compliment.”
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SOCIETY
T e n s i o nma t l ey a a r
MIND YOUR
LANGUAGE Urban India has a new sound. Acronyms, emoticons and cuss words have replaced words. What does this transformation in spoken and written language say about modern living?
Myf u n d a i nl i f e
B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com
···························· ews flash on a website: 2G:BJP demands probe against PM, PC. The meaning of the cuss word Chutium Sulphate, explained in an online dictionary: “Complete moron, as in, That chutium sulphate can’t drive two feet without blowing his horn.” Slutwalk’s Indianised avatar: “Slutwalk athhart Besharmi Morcha.” The synopsis of the forthcoming film Ra.One on its official website: “A father trying hard to ‘fit-in’ in his son’s badass world. A son…trying hard to ‘dude-up’ his dad from ‘aiiiyyyo’ to ‘YO!’. And a mother lost in translation between her husband’s ‘ingeva’ and her son’s ‘Inn’it!” This is the 21st century sound of urban India. In a republic of 122 languages with more than 10,000 speakers (2001 census), we have entered into a new kind of multilingual anarchy, where a colondash-bracket on the keypad has become shorthand for a smile. Our conversational language has disintegrated into a mess of jargon, idiom, acronyms, abbreviations, cuss words and
N
symbols. When a college girl in Delhi mocks her classmate, saying her “chamki (shining) shoes are so aunty-type”, or an executive in Mumbai tells his colleague that “Your PowerPoint was just jhakaas (superb)”, or a teenager in Chandigarh sings “Zara zara(little little) touch me, touch me”, little do they realize that what they are saying comes from a cocktail of new influences. The language that we use in our daily lives is an amalgamation of every aspect of modern living. Deep historical and cultural transformations have reshaped the landscape in which it is evolving—from politicians trying to control the language that must be spoken to intellectuals attempting to adjudicate the style; teachers explaining how literature must be understood; book publishers deciding what works with the masses; writers exploring new idioms; radio jockeys magnifying the reach of local slang; and words being shaped for technology. All these forces are merging with us. We are shaping the language, the language is shaping us. Some celebrate the transformation; others see a crisis. “Language mirrors society and so there is correct language in so far as there is correct society :),” says US-based Vikram Bhaskaran, who last year cofounded Samosapedia, an online guide to South Asian lingo. In an email chat, he wrote: “At Samosapedia, we celebrate language and all its modifications and imperfections. The multifarious and the nefarious all have a home here.” Samosapedia invites readers to sign up as volunteers by exhorting: “Join us, yaar! Create
J u s t g o o g l ei t
an account, share your words, and maaja maadi! Or else, just linger around, checkout the Daily Chutney and yenjoy!” Purists might flinch. “Language is the storehouse of memory,” says Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, who heads Lalit Kala Akademi, a premier art institution in Delhi. “The linguistic mix-up that is happening today is stripping our language of its past. It is reducing us to an eternal present, which is Now, as if nothing happened or was thought before.” So is language in decline? “Earlier, people were fluent in at least two languages. Today, they can’t speak one full line even in Punjabi,” says Swati Pal, associate professor of the English department in Delhi’s Janki Devi Memorial College. “The SMS lingo has invaded the way we think. The exam sheets are littered with ‘u’ instead of ‘you’.” One of Maheshwar’s students, Isha Gupta, says: “Our language is as casual as our attitude. Nobody dresses formally in colleges; it’s shorts, sandals and T-shirts. Similarly, there’s nothing official about how we speak and write. It’s our zamana (age).” “The social changes reflect in our everyday language,” says Aligarh-based Urdu poet Akhlaq Mohammad Khan Shahryar, the lyricist for Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan, who received the Jnanpith Award in September. “Inhibitions are disappearing. There is more tolerance for ishq (love affairs). The word ‘sexy’ has become a popular adjective.” Jaskaran, a class XI student in a south Delhi school who didn’t want his full name used, says, “If my mother has made a good meal, and I compliment her saying, ‘Mummy, rajma-chawal is sexy’, it’s not thought rude.” Within his circle, Jaskaran is known for peppering every sentence with cuss words. “Everyone says ‘chootiya’ all the time,” he says. “When the first of the recent quake tremors hit Delhi a few weeks ago, Jaskaran’s classmate, a girl, SMSed him, saying, “Bhais ki aankh!” This slur is like a nursery rhyme compared with the chartbuster song Bhaag DK Bose from Aamir Khan’s Delhi Belly. The chorus keeps repeating DK Bose until the reverse pattern loops into the Hindi slang meaning “of the vagina”. Although earlier generations may have punctuated their speech with swear words, it’s only recently that they have begun encroaching on to popular culture through cinema, music and what we read at our breakfast table. Journalist Indrajit Hazra’s columns in Hindustan Times (Mint is published by HT Media Ltd, which also publishes Hindustan Times) are fre-
quently filled with cuss words such as “KLPD”. “Swear words are like beggars on the street, part and parcel of our lives,” says Hazra. “They are as much of our vocabulary as exclamations like ‘Oof!’ and ‘Hey Ram!’ and verbal ropes like ‘Um’ and ‘You know’. To deny their existence, whether in the garb of propriety or in the form of disapproving shock tactics, is being illogically righteous, both aesthetically and politically. Life, especially public life, is too fucking serious to be left to being talked about through only proper vocabulary.” “‘Sexy’ and ‘fuck’ are used so indiscriminately that today they are almost non-sexual words,” says Nikhil Yadav, an English professor at Delhi’s Sri Venkateswara College. “Does this mean we are having more sex? I guess so. Are we loosening up in language? Definitely not. There’s no wonderful ‘chutnification’ happening here.” The term chutnification, implying a certain alteration that produces a taste of truth, was coined by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, a novel littered with Hindustani swear words. The only memorable chutnification of urban India’s language took place decades ago. The pioneers were two authors who would perhaps not like to be compared with each other: Shobhaa De and Arundhati Roy. As founder-editor of the Stardust film magazine in 1971, De would add common Hindi words to her popular English gossip column Neeta’s Natter. “I enjoyed the liberties we took with language,” she said in an email interview. “When we coined names like Garam Dharam (to describe hotblooded actor Dharmendra), they became the rage. At the time, we were mocked but it was a zippy, irreverent, wicked masala column that spawned countless clones.” In 1989, Arundhati Roy wrote the screenplay of the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which won the National Award in the category “Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution”. The most important character in the low-budget production was English as it was spoken in Delhi University in the 1970s. In the film, a flirty college student tells her professor: “Hai sir, I’m so confused, pata nahi kuch samajh me nahi aa raha what to do.” Years later, Roy wrote an introduction to the script, saying, “It was an enterprise that deliberately and almost by definition excluded most people
I ’ ml i k e s oa ma z e d
and most of the ‘market’.” Today that jumble of English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi leads the market. Ask author Anuja Chauhan, whose last novel, Battle for Bittora, was described by reviewer Ira Pande as legitimizing “a new vocabulary emerging from the violent collision between Bharat and India that has all the promise of a new lingua franca”. Is it an enriching fusion or a hodgepodge? “The content of what you say is more important than the language you say it in,” says Chauhan. “You could say something very crass or violent or rabble-rousing in perfect Hindi/ Urdu like the lunatic fringe in many political parties. And you could say something very pure and reverential in tootaa-phoota (broken) Hinglish.” There is increasing irreverence for the correctness of a language. “Grammar is for gram-
marians,” says De. “Language rules are there to be broken at will. I’m all for throwing antiquated usage out of the window and speagging, wridding, thingging like this only!” The “only” has uneasy vibrations for many. “I detest words and phrases like ‘we do this only’ or ‘anyways’ or ‘I am having a very nice dress’, even if it’s in a direct quote,” says Sanchita Guha, the copy-desk head of Marie Claire, a women’s magazine with target readership in the age band of early 20s to late 30s. “When a young woman is quoted in an article, the way she speaks adds a lot of energy to the piece. While I keep the writing as chatty as possible, it cannot slide into ‘Inglish’ (Indian English). Being chatty does not mean sacrificing style and elegance of language.” “The idea of correct English is changing,” says Neelini Sarkar, editor at HarperCollins India, who edited Chauhan’s novel. “It’s now acceptable for a character in a novel to say, ‘I’m from Delhi only’. The market is interested in such writing. Readers want a book with a good story, low price and something that’s a light read. Earlier, Indian novelists wrote to prove that they are Indians and yet could write a book in good English. Today, the language of urban India is becoming less self-conscious.” Are we marching onward to a new grammar-less utopia? In the popular Dil Se column in HT City, a supplement of Hin-
Ha r e kf r i e n d z a r o o r i h o t ah a i !
Md y i n g2 t a l k2u
dustan Times, college students write love messages in which each sentence is an artwork of various languages woven into a mesh of film titles, SMS terms, acronyms, keyboard symbols and Internet slang. One such message should be a compulsory read for linguist professors: “Kavita, Hope jaan u had taken decision? And jaan take risk but be carefull u dont get caught. Jaan i need exact date if not time when u will come to me. Jaan never take tension of mine m fine, u take care of urself. love you hamesha chuhiya pagal idiot. i need u hugg n kiss. come sweethrt. Rajesh” What does such eloquence say about us? “It shows a complete lack of imagination. We are at a stage where we are trying to find new identities for ourselves but clearly we can’t find it in one language,” says Rupleena Bose, a college lecturer at Delhi University who is working on an
independent documentary called English-India, which aims to explore the sounds of urban India. “Today everyone is in a hurry, so every word has to be connected to productivity. There is a substitute for every emotional expression of silence; smiley, hugs, brb... ” Mobile-phone texting and Internet chatting is changing the way we think and visualize our language. Thanks to this parallel mode of communication, we are writing and reading more than we did in the past, but our ability to express feelings has been reduced to jargon and abbreviations. The information and technology overload has greatly affected the ability to concentrate; it is harder to pick up the finer nuances of a language by listening to others speak. “The notion that we can do with fewer words is making us a little less human,” says poet Vajpeyi. “This is intellectual lethargy. Language is becoming a fast food because we are forgetting how to cook.” Some could be enjoying this food. “SMSes and emails have given us abbreviations and everything sounds like a railway PNR number or the initials of a hit Hindi movie,” says Chauhan. “One new phrase I love is the ‘main’. ‘We will have other items also, par biryani main hoga.’ Or, ‘Ram Teri Ganga Maili’ mein, waterfall shot was the main. But I’m not an unabashed fan of the khichdi language.” “As we sit in our offices eating lunch al desko, indulging in a bit of Social ‘Not’working—tweets, likes and wall writing—it is easy to see that the English language has changed,” says Steven Baker, who works with the British Council in India as a language trainer and has appeared in Bollywood films. “In this 24x7 culture, we should not waste time blamestorming these changes, but accept that language growth is a constant and complex evolutionary project. When sociologists look back at some of this new vocabulary that has entered into daily use like carbon footprint, credit crunch, staycation, and subprime, it will provide a snapshot of our times.” That language could also be beautiful—and not merely a tool to communicate—is becoming an idea for Luddites. In the past, a painter might have depicted our speech as a meadow of trees, streams, waterfalls and rainbow. Today, it would most likely be a highrise with glass cabins. “Language is becoming consumerist, to be used more as a module for specific career choices than a web of words and expressions,” says Prof. Yadav. “It’s this premium on a fixed, limited kind of communication skill that is the danger. Students are dropping out of accredited courses to
take calls in funny accents.” Many young Indians effortlessly switch between two or three languages, or combine the vocabulary of both in the same sentence. In India’s linguistic history this has been a tradition and continues today—“a phenomenon reflected in Bollywood releases like Double Dhamaal, Always Kabhi Kabhi and Mere Brother Ki Dulhan,” says Baker. “Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas is an epic in Awadhi, a Hindi dialect, but it has more than a thousand words in Arabic and Persian,” says Vajpeyi. The irony is that today people are unable to speak even one language really fluently. And English has been raised to an elevated position at the cost of other vernacular languages. “This is not a bad thing,” says Aatish Taseer, an English novelist who speaks Urdu in a perfect Old Delhi accent and is taking Sanskrit classes. “The Indian linguistic scene has for 20 centuries been composed of many languages. The idea of a hyper-glossia, or a high language, has existed from the advent of Sanskrit. That place was filled by Persian, and is now occupied by English. What is different is what Sheldon Pollock describes as English’s ‘scorched earth’ relationship with the languages operating below it. Many people have ended up bezubaan today, that is without a language they can read easily in, one to whose music they are sensitive. An entire generation of Hindi/ Urdu readers, my grandparents’ generation, produced children who could no longer read or even speak those languages.” WTF, or shall we say, Bhais ki aankh!
I d o n ’ twa n t a n ys a t i s a v i t r i Y e hd i l ma a n g e mo r e
S h e ’ ss o a u n t y t y p e
c a r b o n f o o t p r i n t
T u mh a r ap y a a r p y a a r , h a ma r a p y a a r s e x
IMAGING
BY
JAYACHANDRAN/MINT
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SOCIETY
T e n s i o nma t l ey a a r
MIND YOUR
LANGUAGE Urban India has a new sound. Acronyms, emoticons and cuss words have replaced words. What does this transformation in spoken and written language say about modern living?
Myf u n d a i nl i f e
B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com
···························· ews flash on a website: 2G:BJP demands probe against PM, PC. The meaning of the cuss word Chutium Sulphate, explained in an online dictionary: “Complete moron, as in, That chutium sulphate can’t drive two feet without blowing his horn.” Slutwalk’s Indianised avatar: “Slutwalk athhart Besharmi Morcha.” The synopsis of the forthcoming film Ra.One on its official website: “A father trying hard to ‘fit-in’ in his son’s badass world. A son…trying hard to ‘dude-up’ his dad from ‘aiiiyyyo’ to ‘YO!’. And a mother lost in translation between her husband’s ‘ingeva’ and her son’s ‘Inn’it!” This is the 21st century sound of urban India. In a republic of 122 languages with more than 10,000 speakers (2001 census), we have entered into a new kind of multilingual anarchy, where a colondash-bracket on the keypad has become shorthand for a smile. Our conversational language has disintegrated into a mess of jargon, idiom, acronyms, abbreviations, cuss words and
N
symbols. When a college girl in Delhi mocks her classmate, saying her “chamki (shining) shoes are so aunty-type”, or an executive in Mumbai tells his colleague that “Your PowerPoint was just jhakaas (superb)”, or a teenager in Chandigarh sings “Zara zara(little little) touch me, touch me”, little do they realize that what they are saying comes from a cocktail of new influences. The language that we use in our daily lives is an amalgamation of every aspect of modern living. Deep historical and cultural transformations have reshaped the landscape in which it is evolving—from politicians trying to control the language that must be spoken to intellectuals attempting to adjudicate the style; teachers explaining how literature must be understood; book publishers deciding what works with the masses; writers exploring new idioms; radio jockeys magnifying the reach of local slang; and words being shaped for technology. All these forces are merging with us. We are shaping the language, the language is shaping us. Some celebrate the transformation; others see a crisis. “Language mirrors society and so there is correct language in so far as there is correct society :),” says US-based Vikram Bhaskaran, who last year cofounded Samosapedia, an online guide to South Asian lingo. In an email chat, he wrote: “At Samosapedia, we celebrate language and all its modifications and imperfections. The multifarious and the nefarious all have a home here.” Samosapedia invites readers to sign up as volunteers by exhorting: “Join us, yaar! Create
J u s t g o o g l ei t
an account, share your words, and maaja maadi! Or else, just linger around, checkout the Daily Chutney and yenjoy!” Purists might flinch. “Language is the storehouse of memory,” says Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, who heads Lalit Kala Akademi, a premier art institution in Delhi. “The linguistic mix-up that is happening today is stripping our language of its past. It is reducing us to an eternal present, which is Now, as if nothing happened or was thought before.” So is language in decline? “Earlier, people were fluent in at least two languages. Today, they can’t speak one full line even in Punjabi,” says Swati Pal, associate professor of the English department in Delhi’s Janki Devi Memorial College. “The SMS lingo has invaded the way we think. The exam sheets are littered with ‘u’ instead of ‘you’.” One of Maheshwar’s students, Isha Gupta, says: “Our language is as casual as our attitude. Nobody dresses formally in colleges; it’s shorts, sandals and T-shirts. Similarly, there’s nothing official about how we speak and write. It’s our zamana (age).” “The social changes reflect in our everyday language,” says Aligarh-based Urdu poet Akhlaq Mohammad Khan Shahryar, the lyricist for Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan, who received the Jnanpith Award in September. “Inhibitions are disappearing. There is more tolerance for ishq (love affairs). The word ‘sexy’ has become a popular adjective.” Jaskaran, a class XI student in a south Delhi school who didn’t want his full name used, says, “If my mother has made a good meal, and I compliment her saying, ‘Mummy, rajma-chawal is sexy’, it’s not thought rude.” Within his circle, Jaskaran is known for peppering every sentence with cuss words. “Everyone says ‘chootiya’ all the time,” he says. “When the first of the recent quake tremors hit Delhi a few weeks ago, Jaskaran’s classmate, a girl, SMSed him, saying, “Bhais ki aankh!” This slur is like a nursery rhyme compared with the chartbuster song Bhaag DK Bose from Aamir Khan’s Delhi Belly. The chorus keeps repeating DK Bose until the reverse pattern loops into the Hindi slang meaning “of the vagina”. Although earlier generations may have punctuated their speech with swear words, it’s only recently that they have begun encroaching on to popular culture through cinema, music and what we read at our breakfast table. Journalist Indrajit Hazra’s columns in Hindustan Times (Mint is published by HT Media Ltd, which also publishes Hindustan Times) are fre-
quently filled with cuss words such as “KLPD”. “Swear words are like beggars on the street, part and parcel of our lives,” says Hazra. “They are as much of our vocabulary as exclamations like ‘Oof!’ and ‘Hey Ram!’ and verbal ropes like ‘Um’ and ‘You know’. To deny their existence, whether in the garb of propriety or in the form of disapproving shock tactics, is being illogically righteous, both aesthetically and politically. Life, especially public life, is too fucking serious to be left to being talked about through only proper vocabulary.” “‘Sexy’ and ‘fuck’ are used so indiscriminately that today they are almost non-sexual words,” says Nikhil Yadav, an English professor at Delhi’s Sri Venkateswara College. “Does this mean we are having more sex? I guess so. Are we loosening up in language? Definitely not. There’s no wonderful ‘chutnification’ happening here.” The term chutnification, implying a certain alteration that produces a taste of truth, was coined by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, a novel littered with Hindustani swear words. The only memorable chutnification of urban India’s language took place decades ago. The pioneers were two authors who would perhaps not like to be compared with each other: Shobhaa De and Arundhati Roy. As founder-editor of the Stardust film magazine in 1971, De would add common Hindi words to her popular English gossip column Neeta’s Natter. “I enjoyed the liberties we took with language,” she said in an email interview. “When we coined names like Garam Dharam (to describe hotblooded actor Dharmendra), they became the rage. At the time, we were mocked but it was a zippy, irreverent, wicked masala column that spawned countless clones.” In 1989, Arundhati Roy wrote the screenplay of the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which won the National Award in the category “Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution”. The most important character in the low-budget production was English as it was spoken in Delhi University in the 1970s. In the film, a flirty college student tells her professor: “Hai sir, I’m so confused, pata nahi kuch samajh me nahi aa raha what to do.” Years later, Roy wrote an introduction to the script, saying, “It was an enterprise that deliberately and almost by definition excluded most people
I ’ ml i k e s oa ma z e d
and most of the ‘market’.” Today that jumble of English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi leads the market. Ask author Anuja Chauhan, whose last novel, Battle for Bittora, was described by reviewer Ira Pande as legitimizing “a new vocabulary emerging from the violent collision between Bharat and India that has all the promise of a new lingua franca”. Is it an enriching fusion or a hodgepodge? “The content of what you say is more important than the language you say it in,” says Chauhan. “You could say something very crass or violent or rabble-rousing in perfect Hindi/ Urdu like the lunatic fringe in many political parties. And you could say something very pure and reverential in tootaa-phoota (broken) Hinglish.” There is increasing irreverence for the correctness of a language. “Grammar is for gram-
marians,” says De. “Language rules are there to be broken at will. I’m all for throwing antiquated usage out of the window and speagging, wridding, thingging like this only!” The “only” has uneasy vibrations for many. “I detest words and phrases like ‘we do this only’ or ‘anyways’ or ‘I am having a very nice dress’, even if it’s in a direct quote,” says Sanchita Guha, the copy-desk head of Marie Claire, a women’s magazine with target readership in the age band of early 20s to late 30s. “When a young woman is quoted in an article, the way she speaks adds a lot of energy to the piece. While I keep the writing as chatty as possible, it cannot slide into ‘Inglish’ (Indian English). Being chatty does not mean sacrificing style and elegance of language.” “The idea of correct English is changing,” says Neelini Sarkar, editor at HarperCollins India, who edited Chauhan’s novel. “It’s now acceptable for a character in a novel to say, ‘I’m from Delhi only’. The market is interested in such writing. Readers want a book with a good story, low price and something that’s a light read. Earlier, Indian novelists wrote to prove that they are Indians and yet could write a book in good English. Today, the language of urban India is becoming less self-conscious.” Are we marching onward to a new grammar-less utopia? In the popular Dil Se column in HT City, a supplement of Hin-
Ha r e kf r i e n d z a r o o r i h o t ah a i !
Md y i n g2 t a l k2u
dustan Times, college students write love messages in which each sentence is an artwork of various languages woven into a mesh of film titles, SMS terms, acronyms, keyboard symbols and Internet slang. One such message should be a compulsory read for linguist professors: “Kavita, Hope jaan u had taken decision? And jaan take risk but be carefull u dont get caught. Jaan i need exact date if not time when u will come to me. Jaan never take tension of mine m fine, u take care of urself. love you hamesha chuhiya pagal idiot. i need u hugg n kiss. come sweethrt. Rajesh” What does such eloquence say about us? “It shows a complete lack of imagination. We are at a stage where we are trying to find new identities for ourselves but clearly we can’t find it in one language,” says Rupleena Bose, a college lecturer at Delhi University who is working on an
independent documentary called English-India, which aims to explore the sounds of urban India. “Today everyone is in a hurry, so every word has to be connected to productivity. There is a substitute for every emotional expression of silence; smiley, hugs, brb... ” Mobile-phone texting and Internet chatting is changing the way we think and visualize our language. Thanks to this parallel mode of communication, we are writing and reading more than we did in the past, but our ability to express feelings has been reduced to jargon and abbreviations. The information and technology overload has greatly affected the ability to concentrate; it is harder to pick up the finer nuances of a language by listening to others speak. “The notion that we can do with fewer words is making us a little less human,” says poet Vajpeyi. “This is intellectual lethargy. Language is becoming a fast food because we are forgetting how to cook.” Some could be enjoying this food. “SMSes and emails have given us abbreviations and everything sounds like a railway PNR number or the initials of a hit Hindi movie,” says Chauhan. “One new phrase I love is the ‘main’. ‘We will have other items also, par biryani main hoga.’ Or, ‘Ram Teri Ganga Maili’ mein, waterfall shot was the main. But I’m not an unabashed fan of the khichdi language.” “As we sit in our offices eating lunch al desko, indulging in a bit of Social ‘Not’working—tweets, likes and wall writing—it is easy to see that the English language has changed,” says Steven Baker, who works with the British Council in India as a language trainer and has appeared in Bollywood films. “In this 24x7 culture, we should not waste time blamestorming these changes, but accept that language growth is a constant and complex evolutionary project. When sociologists look back at some of this new vocabulary that has entered into daily use like carbon footprint, credit crunch, staycation, and subprime, it will provide a snapshot of our times.” That language could also be beautiful—and not merely a tool to communicate—is becoming an idea for Luddites. In the past, a painter might have depicted our speech as a meadow of trees, streams, waterfalls and rainbow. Today, it would most likely be a highrise with glass cabins. “Language is becoming consumerist, to be used more as a module for specific career choices than a web of words and expressions,” says Prof. Yadav. “It’s this premium on a fixed, limited kind of communication skill that is the danger. Students are dropping out of accredited courses to
take calls in funny accents.” Many young Indians effortlessly switch between two or three languages, or combine the vocabulary of both in the same sentence. In India’s linguistic history this has been a tradition and continues today—“a phenomenon reflected in Bollywood releases like Double Dhamaal, Always Kabhi Kabhi and Mere Brother Ki Dulhan,” says Baker. “Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas is an epic in Awadhi, a Hindi dialect, but it has more than a thousand words in Arabic and Persian,” says Vajpeyi. The irony is that today people are unable to speak even one language really fluently. And English has been raised to an elevated position at the cost of other vernacular languages. “This is not a bad thing,” says Aatish Taseer, an English novelist who speaks Urdu in a perfect Old Delhi accent and is taking Sanskrit classes. “The Indian linguistic scene has for 20 centuries been composed of many languages. The idea of a hyper-glossia, or a high language, has existed from the advent of Sanskrit. That place was filled by Persian, and is now occupied by English. What is different is what Sheldon Pollock describes as English’s ‘scorched earth’ relationship with the languages operating below it. Many people have ended up bezubaan today, that is without a language they can read easily in, one to whose music they are sensitive. An entire generation of Hindi/ Urdu readers, my grandparents’ generation, produced children who could no longer read or even speak those languages.” WTF, or shall we say, Bhais ki aankh!
I d o n ’ twa n t a n ys a t i s a v i t r i Y e hd i l ma a n g e mo r e
S h e ’ ss o a u n t y t y p e
c a r b o n f o o t p r i n t
T u mh a r ap y a a r p y a a r , h a ma r a p y a a r s e x
IMAGING
BY
JAYACHANDRAN/MINT
L12
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011
Travel
LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS
ST LUCIA
BY
KATHERINE ATKINSON
Birth of a notion THINKSTOCK
Between influences of French and English colonizers lies an island that once inspired poet Derek Walcott
B Y K ATHERINE A TKINSON ···························· here is a tropical storm warning in effect for St Lucia, an announcement which dampens my plans for a “lime” with friends at the weekly Friday night street party in Gros Islet, a cornucopia of food, people and music. The change in plans, however, gives me a chance to brush up on my St Lucia trivia. St Lucia is one of the Caribbean’s Windward Islands. Its historical moniker was “Helen of the West”, because the island, populated primarily by people of African origin, changed hands between the British and French empires 14 times, gaining a unique cultural stamp in the process. Its contemporary fame is attributed to a stunning defiance of statistical probability: The island has produced two Nobel laureates—Derek Walcott for literature, and the late Sir Arthur Lewis for economics. There is also the “pre-packaged” side of St Lucia, of Sandals and similar resorts with their bubblegum colour palettes and promises of instant romance. There is the Rodney Bay Marina of travel brochures with its mega-yachts and the glow of the entertainment district across the bay. Somewhere in between is the truth. When the weekend passes without incident, St Lucia reveals her true allure in the crisp, poststorm light. Except for an initial squall and some isolated downpours, it wasn’t much of a storm, but St Lucians are understandably cautious. Last year, Hurricane Tomas bore down on an unprepared island, and the country still bears the marks of its wrath. The drive from the airport along the east coast and across the Barre de L’Isle mountains to the island’s capital on the west coast is long and winding, but perhaps the one that best tells the
T
Of shore and shoal: The Castries harbour; (top, left) the mountains of Soufriere in the north; and the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
story of Tomas. It starts with the dry grasslands of Vieux Fort and the drama of the Atlantic Coast, and slowly ascends through a series of mountain ranges. It seems as though a giant straddled the island and clawed at the landscape. The island’s rainforest has done its best to reclaim the scars of exposed red clay, but there are places on the drive that reveal that St Lucia is still a developing nation—the gouged-out bits of road demarcated by rickety wooden barriers and promises of work in progress that have either stalled or never began. Castries, the capital city, is hot, congested and a little down in the mouth, but still charming. In the Central Market, vendors chatter in Kweyol, a French patois. St Lucia is officially English-speaking, but the island’s mixed heritage finds expression in the cadence of Kweyol. In the market, I find some late-season mangoes, and sample a bit of bake (fried bread) and saltfish, the breakfast favourite of locals. The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is a sanctuary in the heart of the city, bordered by the Derek Walcott Square which is dominated by giant Samaan trees. Locally, the tree is referred to as ma’sav, a Kweyol expression meaning “I don’t know”. Reportedly, when a travel writer asked a passer-by about the name, he replied simply that he didn’t know. His response stuck. The cathedral showcases the murals of artist Sir Dunstan St Omer, which depict a black Madonna, Joseph, and Christ, an assertion of Caribbean Christian identity which was revolutionary for its time. The murals go largely unremarked now and there are elderly women tending the altar with flowers and replacing the devotion candles. It is they who direct me to the French colonial architecture which survived the devastating Castries fire in 1948. On the outskirts of the city, I find the energetic and whimsical-looking—but highly practical—architecture that characterized French colonies: gingerbread fretwork, louvre windows and doors. It takes a little imagination to reconstruct the impact of rows upon rows of such houses. For a day of rumination after the bustle of Castries, I visit Pigeon Island, now joined to the mainland by a causeway, and
TRIP PLANNER/ST LUCIA
The trouble with paradise is that it’s difficult to get in: You can get a visa to St Lucia quite easily, but all flights to the island depart from countries which need visitor or transit visas—the UK, US or Canada. The least onerous visa process is Canada’s: Apply through VFS (www.vfs-canada.co.in). Visitor visas are processed within a week, and often faster. For the St Lucia visa, send scanned copies of your passport and the completed application form available at http://is.gd/TPObBd to immigration@rslpf.com. An approval letter will be sent back. Carry a printout, present it at immigration when you arrive, and pay a $50 (around R2,400) visa fee. To get to St Lucia, fly to Toronto, and catch an Air Canada flight to Hewanorra International Airport at approx. R48,000 per adult ticket. Prices from Indian metros to Toronto are:
KLM/AirFrance (SkyTeam) Austrian (Star Alliance) Emirates Jet Airways
Delhi R54,730 R54,840 R60,830 R60,020 (direct)
Rodney Bay
Bangalore R65,050 -
Fares may change.
Stay
Caribbean Sea
ST LUCIA
Mumbai R54,740 R54,580 R22,300 -
North Atlantic Ocean
Hewanorra International Airport
CANADA Toronto
Do
Eat
Rodney Bay: On a budget? Coco Palm (www.coco-resorts.com/) puts you at the heart of the action with rooms from $125 plus taxes a night. To splurge, try The Landings Resort (http://landings. rockresorts.com/), with one-bedroom villas starting at $289 plus taxes for the off season. Soufriere: To splurge, there is Ladera Resort (http://www.ladera.com/) at $400 plus taxes a night (off season) or Jade Mountain (www.jademountain.com/), starting at $950 plus taxes per night. Or try the self-contained cottages of Stonefield Estate Villa Resort (www.stonefieldvillas.com/), starting at $340 plus taxes or Crystals (www. stluciacrystals. com/), starting at $250 plus taxes a night. All boast of truly spectacular Piton views.
Go to one of the Friday street parties at the villages of Gros Islet, Anse la Raye or Dennery, fishing villages which pull out all the stops for street food and an air of gaiety. For quick eats: Rodney Bay Marina has several cafés and restaurants. For something special, try The Edge Restaurant or Big Chef Steak House. Visit the rainforest on one of the many hikes organized by the ministry of forestry. Take a gondola ride or go zip-lining in the rainforest canopy. The diving is spectacular, with wreck and shore dives and some fascinating wall dives. GRAPHIC
once the stronghold of English admiral George Rodney. Now a national park, the promontory houses some fascinating ruins. The hike to the armoury and fortress is a little daunting, but worth it. The vista there is of Rodney Bay, an expansive crescent stretch that is home to several beaches, a stretch of restaurants, the Gros Islet fishing village and the mouth of the Rodney Bay Marina (Rod-
BY
AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT
ney, it seems, left an indelible mark on the island). Jambe de Bois is a restaurant on the water’s edge, named after the pirate who is reported to have once stored his booty there. It is as rustic as a beachfront restaurant might be expected to be, but with a good menu, fresh local juices such as lime and golden apple (not actually an apple at all, but another fruit, astringent and
refreshing). Its deck is a good place to pass a lazy afternoon writing postcards. I save my excursion to Soufriere for last. There is a marked difference in pace after the touristy north, and the commercial bustle of Castries. Pastoral scenes evoke clichéd tableaux—bare-backed farmers wielding cutlasses, and fields upon fields of bananas with coconut vendors along the road. I sample some of the refreshing nectar and try a cassava bread delicacy, one of the few enduring legacies of the island’s original inhabitants. The Pitons appear sudden and majestic after more than an hour of wending over hill and dale. The peaks are thought to be the plugs of a now-eroded volcano; and the odorous and fascinating Sulphur Springs are what keep the pressure from mounting to eruption. The mud silt in the run-off from the springs claims healing properties, and so, in spite of the heat from overhead and underground, I shimmy tentatively into the hot baths and liberally apply the mud to my skin. Louis XVI once created a restorative spa for convalescing troops here, according to Joan Devaux, owner of the Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens and Baths. When I rinse the mud from my skin I notice an immediate improvement in complexion. After a plate of local fare from one of the many cafeteria-type
restaurants in town, I head to Malgretoute, a beach that has for a sentry Petit Piton, and idle deliciously, snorkelling and sunning, until the light begins to wane. I scramble to head up to Ladera Resort for a sundowner. The resort sits along the ridge between the Pitons and affords the view which inspired the poet laureate Walcott. I sink into my chair, sip my cocktail and sigh contentedly. St Lucia is brochure-worthy and so much more! Write to lounge@livemint.com
CHILDFRIENDLY RATING
The beaches satisfy most family trippers. They have scuba tours, underwater rides for children as young as 3, gondola rides and ziplining. SENIORFRIENDLY RATING
There isn’t a tradition of recognizing seniors with discounts or special excursions. Sidewalks are rare and wheelchairaccess almost nonexistent. LGBTFRIENDLY RATING
Homosexuality is illegal, even if the law isn’t enforced. There is, however, a general culture of intolerance.
TRAVEL L13
LOUNGE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
DETOURS
SALIL TRIPATHI
Got a ticket to ride JAMES SIMPSON/BWP MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES
Forty years after the Beatles split, Liverpool still remains a city that lives off their memories
I
n his poem Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote that sexual liberation (the word he actually used is less appropriate for a family newspaper on a weekend) began in 1963; after the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. Until then, there was “bargaining, a wrangle for the ring… a shame that started at sixteen and spread to everything”. If 1963 was a seminal year, then the clubs and taverns of Liverpool were the hot spots where it all began; clubs with names like the Casbah and the Cavern, where four young men in mop-tops, with their guitars and clean looks, started singing, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and nothing was the same, ever, again. Now those clubs are long gone, embedded in people’s memories, and resurrected in clean, kitschy surroundings in a museum, without the messiness, the smells, or the smoke that wafted through the air, giving the city a new beat, a new meaning. If all of that was too late for Larkin, it was too early for my father, who studied in Liverpool but left the city in 1960 after graduating with a management degree, returning to India. Over the years, he has often complained about Liverpool’s cold weather, praised the polite
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES
but aloof people of England, and grumbled quietly about how hard it was for him to get vegetarian food in those days, and how he had to make do with tomato soup and rice pilaf, day after day. He is a fan of K.L. Saigal and Rabindrasangeet, and I often wondered what he’d have made of the Beatles. I needn’t have worried, for many years later, when I was a teenager and played songs like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and Yellow Submarine on my tape recorder, he’d smile, his feet tapping gently. Maybe there were places that he remembered he didn’t tell me about; he remembered them all his life, though some had changed, some forever not for the better, some had gone, and some remained. My father was right about Liverpool’s weather. Liverpool was cold, all right. As my son and I walked along the windswept promenade by the Mersey, the wind howled, forcing us to wrap ourselves, even though it was late summer. From the pod of the giant Ferris wheel, the city offered a clean look, the imposing cathedral towering over the buildings surrounding it. If Manchester made its fortune in cotton mills, a significant part of Liverpool’s prosperity owed its roots to the slave trade. Liverpool
Rewind: (clockwise from left) The Cavern Club, where the Beatles originally performed; the statue of Eleanor Rigby; and the Beatles performing in Liverpool in 1962.
The museums make good use of the Beatles’ songs, and you can’t help humming tunes you grew up to knows that past, and has a sober museum which tells the story of the slave trade with a matter-of-fact intensity, digging deep into the past and taking us to West African homes, and bringing us to the present, reminding us of the inequities we continue to live with. Seagulls flew over us, chattering noisily, as if challenging the avuncular liver birds sitting on top of the Royal Liver Buildings. They flew past those static statues, mocking the liver birds who stayed firm, perpetuating the myth that the female looks out for sailors returning home, while the male keeps his eye out for taverns and pubs that might still be open. The Beatles split 40 years ago,
but the city tries to squeeze every penny it can out of their lives. The city’s airport is named after John Lennon. There is a Beatles Museum on the waterfront, a much-hyped Beatles 3D tour, and several companies take you in taxis and buses on trips to sites made famous by the Beatles’ songs. The museums make good use of the Beatles’ songs, and you can’t help humming the tunes you think you grew up to, for the Beatles have the amazing ability of making you feel young no matter what your age, and making you feel you were there when it happened, even if you may have heard them the first time years after they stopped being a group. In Woolton at St Peter’s
Parish, you can find the gravestone marking the passing of a 44-year-old Eleanor Rigby. On Stanley Street, there is a statue of a woman sitting on a bench. She is called Eleanor Rigby and it is dedicated to all the lonely people. There are signs pointing towards the Cavern Club, although the original club where the Beatles performed closed down in the 1970s, and a new club, using some of the old bricks and materials, opened a decade later. There is the Strawberry Field, near Beaconsfield Road and Menlove Avenue, with a replica of the original wrought iron gates. Fans have stolen the street sign for Penny Lane so often that the city decided to paint the
street’s name on the wall, rather than keep on replacing them, only to have them stolen again. We go to the waterfront one last time. Seagulls soar in the sky of this free city, where the ships now open doors to children, where warehouses have become museums, and cabs promise a magical mystery tour. Then, you picture yourself in a boat on that river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Or, beneath the blue suburban skies, you can look for the barber with photographs of all the heads he has known, the banker who never wears a mac in pouring rain, the fireman with the portrait of a queen, and a pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray. You may not find them on the streets, but they stay with you, they are part of your Liverpool. Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours
FOOT NOTES | AADISHT KHANNA
Literary spot Do spare a stop for Dublin’s literary landmarks, and the protective spaces for the notsowild
H
istorical tourism often feels like a parade of forts and battle sites. A traveller who’s looking for areas of historical interest that are less martial can often be disappointed. Pacifists needn’t despair: There are cities that emphasize their literary heritage over their military history. Proud of having been home to Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and, of course, James Joyce, who set Ulysses in its streets, Dublin has lots of options for literary tourists. You can go on the Ulysses tour,
in which you follow in the footsteps of protagonist Leopold Bloom. Bloomsday (16 June, the date on which the events of Ulysses take place) sees Joyce fans recreate this route, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it on other days. Ireland takes its food and drink seriously, and if you walk the route yourself, you’ll find enough pubs along the way to offer solid or liquid refreshment. Readers who couldn’t quite get through Ulysses have other options. Trinity College, alma mater to Wilde and Jonathan AIDAN CRAWLEY/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
By the letter: Dublin offers literaturethemed tours to suit every taste.
Swift, is open to the public, and its Old Library displays one of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures, The Book of Kells. Handwritten by sixth-century Irish monks in spectacular “insular majuscule” calligraphy, The Book of Kells is a compilation of the four gospels. Dublin’s Writers Museum, across the river from Trinity College, has exhibits which are merely 200 years old and worth a couple of hours. Along with a huge collection of first editions, it houses such oddities as Samuel Beckett’s telephone and Mary Lavins’ teddy bear. Yeats’ letter to Frank O’ Connor, and a (signed) letter from George Bernard Shaw in which he refuses to provide an autograph to a fan, are also on display. Although it’s possible to do this all by yourself, there are other guides, both human and technological, that simplify things for you. If you’ve got a posh phone, download the Dublin Literary Walking Tour (works offline too) iPhone app from Gpsmycity.com, or the GPS City Guide app for the Android or iPhone. Should you prefer a human guide, enrol for the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl (email info@dublinpubcrawl.com). Highly popular, the pub crawl has experienced guides taking you along literary hot spots and providing anecdotes about Irish literature and nationalism. Awarded the City of Literature honour by Unesco last year, Dublin makes sure its visitors know why it was well deserved.
Me and my donkey
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ildlife reserves that host big game—tigers, elephants, rhinos, or cheetahs—draw the most attention from tourists. Bird sanctuaries such as Bharatpur in Rajasthan or Vedanthangal in Tamil Nadu come slightly lower in the pecking order. But across the world, there are small sanctuaries that provide a home to animals not glamorous enough to get their own shows on Discovery Channel, and they do an important job protecting endangered or abused animals. They rely on visitors to help them survive, so feel free to drop in. Lounge takes a look at some of the oddest sanctuaries. u Home for Helpless Donkeys, Leh (Donkeysanctuary.in) Donkeys are used as pack animals in Ladakh, but many old donkeys which aren’t capable of working any longer are abandoned on the streets, to face the dangers of traffic and stray dogs. Moved by their plight, Joanne Lefson and Stany Wangchuk started the Home for Helpless Donkeys in Leh. A 10-minute walk from Leh’s main market, the donkey sanctuary welcomes visitors and encourages them to bring carrots for the residents. u Screech Owl Sanctuary, Cornwall (www. screechowlsanctuary.co.uk) It’s surprising to think of owls as a threatened species, but as forest cover shrinks, owls face
Têteàtête: An orangutan with its baby in Kalimantan. the same troubles as mammalian predators: fewer habitat areas, and less to prey on. The expansion of power transmission lines and mobile networks also means that owls get injured more often. The privately operated Screech Owl Sanctuary in the UK started in 1990 in the founders’ home to take care of Cornwall’s injured owls. Since then, it has expanded to a dedicated preserve, with an owl hospital and conservation programmes for more than 20 owl species from all over the world. u Orangutan orphanage, Kalimantan (www.orangutan.org) With palm oil plantations swallowing up Malaysian and
Indonesian rainforests, the orangutan’s habitat is under severe threat. As rainforests get logged, orangutans living there are frequently killed or injured, leaving behind orphans. To take care of baby orangutans, and help them adapt to living in the wild without a mother to guide them, the Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) started an orphanage in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Here, young orangutans learn to climb trees, forage for food and build nests. The orphanage is a quarantine area, and not open to the public, but the OFI does organize orangutan eco-tours elsewhere in Borneo. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011
Books
LOUNGE
ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS | HANAN ALSHAYKH
The nights of old The world of the medieval Arabic tales comes alive in a dazzling new translation
One Thousand and One Nights: Bloomsbury, 288 pages, `699.
BY S U P R I Y A N A I R supriya.n@livemint.com
···························· o we need another English retelling of Alf Layla Wa Layla? Is there another corpus of stories which has been mauled so often by such a variety of people hoping to impose their agenda on it? Orientalists want to showcase the strange, if attractive, lusts of foreigners. Bowdlerisers want to shield innocent eyes from said lusts. Salvagers want to rescue a tradition under threat from narrow-minded religionists. Feminists regularly want to privilege the framing story of the courageous queen telling stories to stay alive, over the stories themselves. And so on. It’s enough to make a dervish dizzy. Why can’t we Anglophones go away and apply our good intentions to someone else’s literature for a while? But in spite of our sins, let’s tarry a while to absorb the triumph of this newest adaptation, Hanan al-Shaykh’s “reimagining” of some of the stories of One Thousand and One Nights. Al-Shaykh, a Lebanese novelist and memoirist, joined forces with the theatre director Tim Supple (whom Indian audiences may remember for his multilingual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this country some years ago) to adapt some of the stories of the Nights to stage. The show, a six-hour long, sixteen-act play, opened in Europe late in August. The book, a stand-alone text separate from al-Shaykh and Tim Supple’s stage adaptation of the Nights, is a brainy, discomfiting transcreation of 19 stories from the Arabic One Thousand and One Nights. Unlike many literary retellings, it does not focus on the frame story of Shahrazad and Shahrayar, but uses it to set the stage for the other stories. The bizarre cruelty and sexual jealousy of Shahrayar is met with the calm reason of Shahrazad, the vizier’s daughter, who
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staves off her death by spinning the king a story every night. But instead of circling back to their marriage bed after each tale, alShaykh sets us off on a journey through a nested narrative in which each story contains a character who tells a story, in which a character tells another story, and so on. Al-Shaykh explores Shahrazad’s tales themselves for what they say about relationships between men and women. There is no fairy-tale reclamation of the texts from their horrors. Marriages are abusive, romances unequal, and race, as well as religion, are cruel faultlines. Many women, and some men, find themselves at the receiving end of the worst of human nature. Yet, al-Shaykh retains their magic too, allowing the tales to exist in an alternate universe where peacock-men turn jealous sisters into dog-women, jinns struggle to escape from bottles, and repentant murderers scoop out their own eyes. She writes them in a polished, playful style, lingering over the flavours and colours of the world in which they are set. But the stories also race along, briskly told, their structure rigorously controlled. As they unfold within each other, we are drawn into their hypnotic rhythm of births, deaths, love affairs and marriages. The Shahrazad story has generally been seen as a triumph of humanity because it shows us how a victim, by speaking (a sort of) truth to power, becomes powerful herself. But the women in these stories aren’t all princesses spinning tales: They are magicians, weavers, healers, entrepreneurs and fighters too. Al-Shaykh leaves out the bestknown stories from Nights—Sinbad makes one brief appearance—but she chooses many familiar stories and characters. Shahrazad starts with Abdullah the fisherman and his jinn, through to the plight of the Chi-
PAKISTAN: A PERSONAL HISTORY | IMRAN KHAN
The rake recants Imran Khan disavows his ‘life of fun’ in an acutely political memoir B Y S OUTIK B ISWAS ···························· ill the real Imran Khan please stand up? In his new book, the charismatic Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician exudes a puritanical rectitude, far removed from the public image as a dashing sportsman and a ladies’ man, at ease at home and the world. Studying at Oxford in the swinging 1970s, he writes, he had a “huge culture shock”. He is appalled by Monty Python movies because they lampoon religion. “Our role models were Mick Jagger and David Bowie,” he writes, “while our intellectual thinking was defined by the then popular Marxist rejection of religion”. The only hint of some good times in this moral wasteland arrives in a belated realization of the “feeling of emptiness I experienced in transitory relationships (which) far outweighed the moments of pleasure”, and of
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Pakistan—A Personal History: Bantam Press, 390 pages,`599.
how he had “mistaken pleasure for happiness”. Khan makes it sound like a hormone-fuelled hell of a life. Or was it? “People said that having satiated myself with the life of fun,” he writes, “I had now turned religious.” He disagrees. With an odd certitude that marks most of the book, he writes that “people never have enough of a fun life, they just get more and more debauched in search of pleasure”. Much of the memoirs will come as a disappointment for his cricket fans and those looking for prurient goss i p . R a t h e r , K h a n For faith: appears to be seeking redemption for his youthful excesses: He portrays himself as a rare, clean leader in the bog of Pakistan’s politics. He does this through a familiar retelling of Pakistan’s troubled history and how he navigates it in his life as a star cricketer, successful social worker and struggling politician. Khan comes across as a doughty fighter, an exceptional
Spinning a web: AlShaykh evokes the flavours of a fabled world in her polished, playful folk tales. nese princess Budur, ropes in Haroun al-Rashid as a storyteller as well as a main character along the way, and gives us my favourite, Zumurrud, the chatty slave girl who makes bewitching art, enriches her sweet but unworldly husband, fights off covetous villains, and ends up as a great and just cross-dressing king. Talk about a role model. Al-Shaykh’s characters tell us, like the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter, that the stories we consign to children are equally capable of teaching adults more about themselves and their world. Her evocation of the cultural contexts of these stories also attempt to reach out to an adult sense of wonder.
There are a few obvious ways in which you might react to encountering the following sentence in a book. “The lady stopped at a fruit seller’s stall and chose Damascus quinces, Persian pomegranates, apples from Jabal Lubnan, tamr-henna from Egypt, figs from Baalbek, grapes from Hebron, oranges from Jaffa, and she placed everything in the porter’s basket.” You might shut it, put off by this wilfully fantastic “Arab world” which informs everything from political harangues on the coming global caliphate to Mills & Boon romances about the caramel-skinned secret babies of desert princes these days.
Or, as in al-Shaykh’s book, you can just marvel. It is a sentence that The Porter’s Tale’s early listeners, whether they sat in a busy street in cosmopolitan Baghdad or around a remote campfire in a village, might have heard with a sudden sense of how much there was to discover in the world. It is not necessarily a fantasy in which we are invited to participate: As with one of Zumurrud’s fabulous carpets, we might simply revel in the fact of its existence. IN SIX WORDS From Abdullah to Zumurrud, spellbinding storytelling
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embraced similar values for the better part of his life, and many people who donated handsomely to his admirable causes also came from it. But his heart is in the right place. Khan identifies Pakistan’s myriad failings—feudalism, dynastic and venal politics and neglect of ethnic groups. He appears to favour a “good” Islamic state, wedded to welfare, democracy and meritocracy. He talks about discovering his faith after a posh childhood and sparkling youth when, in the words of a writer, he gave cricket in the subcontinent “real sex appeal”. For inspiration, Khan denies his past for a political future. he turns to a prescient retired civil servantleader, a motivated social worker turned-guide and the stirring and a born-again Muslim. He also p o e t r y a n d p h i l o s o p h y o f comes across as a confused man. Muhammad Iqbal. But Khan does not offer a The upper-class, private school and Oxford-educated cricket deeper understanding of Pakisicon-turned-god-fearing conser- tan’s structural problems. He vative politician’s tiresome rants writes that a “small minority of against Western values, clothes, hard-core militants” do not pormusic, elitism and materialism tend a takeover of the state by relis o u n d d i s i n g e n u o u s . K h a n gious fundamentalists. That the b e l o n g e d t o a c l a s s w h i c h country’s Sufi influences will tri-
umph over the militant ideologies. That Pakistan needs to work—and not fight—with its tribes to isolate militants. That it needs to remain neutral in the “insane” war on terror and disengage from it. All this is well meaning but embarrassingly simplistic. Did aid-dependent and geographically cursed Pakistan have the choice of remaining neutral? Khan is at his eloquent best when he is writing about his personal struggles. But as the book nears its end, it begins reading more like a manifesto of his political ambitions. His party Tehreeke-Insaf (Movement for Justice) has been in the opposition for 15 years and hasn’t made much of an impression. With Pakistan struggling and President Asif Ali Zardari’s feckless government in tatters, Khan believes his time has finally arrived. Citing two opinion polls conducted by US and UK pollsters, he writes that his party is the only one which can drag Pakistan out of its funk. For a West-baiting politician, this is curious evidence to present his case. Soutik Biswas is India editor, BBC News Online. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011
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Culture
LOUNGE ESSAY
That passed the time AFP
On the 30th anni versary of Louis Malle’s film ‘My Dinner with Andre’, the philosophical questions it raises remain relevant
B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· n 8 October 1981, it was morning in the US—Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the hostages were back from Iran, and the “malaise” that Jimmy Carter had said had affected the nation was being forgotten—and a film with two people talking over dinner made its way to the cinema halls. Louis Malle had directed the film, and it was called My Dinner with Andre. Like High Noon (1952), the old Gary Cooper classic, here was a film that operated in real time: It was a simple, direct film, about a conversation between men who had not met each other for some time, and it began with their arrival in the restaurant, and ended with their departure. Over the course of that meal, they not only ate fine food; their conversation covered an astonishing span, with profound thoughts expressed effortlessly as though they were from a well-planned script, and inverted the meaning of that Brechtian dictum—eating comes first, morality later. Here, morality came first, eating was incidental. Last Sunday, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the two friends whose conversation the film celebrates, spoke about the film, its deeper resonance, and their work in the past 30 years, including several projects done together. These projects include the workshop production of Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), now also a film, and Master Builder, based on an Ibsen play. Together, the three form a formidable, Proustian trilogy of our time. And it is an erudite film—the conversation includes informed references to the English novelist Jane Austen, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the American writer of the “beat generation”, Jack Kerouac, the surrealist Andre Breton, the French pilot and writer Antoine de SaintExupery, the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber, and the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, among others. When you put together a list as eclectic as that, you might think that this is the beginning of a good Woody Allen joke: After all, think of that wonderful scene in Annie Hall (1977), when Allen, as Alvy Singer, is stuck behind a pompous academic in a queue to buy tickets to a film, where the man pontificates about how the media critic Marshall McLuhan would have interpreted something. Allen, as Singer, ridicules him, at which the man bristles, and informs Singer that he teaches a course at Columbia University about TV, media, and culture, so he knows what he is talking about. At which point, an
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It began as an experiment, with Gregory and Shawn talking to each other over extended periods older man interrupts the conversation, saying: “I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work…. How do you teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” He is Marshall McLuhan. If only the real world were like that, Singer says. Shawn has acted in a few of Allen’s films—Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), Melinda and Melinda (2004). And while My Dinner with Andre is set in the Allen habitat, it is not satire. It distils the angst of the human condition, a topic of perpetual fascination for Allen, once you penetrate through the layers of humour. Indeed, My Dinner with Andre depicts the Ivy League-educated New Yorker-reading Upper East Side (or make it Upper West Side) bhadralok of Manhattan, whose world view gets formed by the op-ed pages of New York Times (some of them even write those pieces) and who eagerly await the next issue of The New York Review of Books. Describing that class, though not intentionally, early in the film, Shawn says: “When I was 10 years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat. Riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I’m 36, and all I think about is money.” The film began as an experiment, with Gregory and Shawn talking to each other over extended periods, and Shawn recording the conversation and creating a script out of it—not by adding new material, but by edit-
Proustian: (clockwise from top) A still from My Dinner with Andre; the film’s set ting is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s world; and Wallace Shawn, one of the two pro tagonists of the film.
ing it skilfully. Shawn is a playwright and actor; Gregory is a writer, director and actor. At their conversation in London last week, Gregory related how eager Louis Malle was to make the film. He was tearful when he called them, saying he really wanted to direct the film, and if they didn’t want him to direct, he wanted to produce it. In the end, they made a gem, and like Samuel Beckett’s absurd play, Waiting for Godot (first staged in 1953), it reveals how much you can do with two men on a stage, no props, and little else (Godot has two other characters playing minor roles; Andre, too, does, with even less significant roles). The central premise of their conversation is simple: What is the meaning of life? They don’t go about deciphering it and exploring it with that aim, nor do
they intend to reach a conclusion by the end of the dinner. In fact, neither knows what they will talk about when they meet. We aren’t even sure how close they are as friends. They have not met each other in some time, and Shawn knows that Gregory has an annoying habit of disappearing from New York for extended periods, doing unusual things. What those things are, he doesn’t know, until they meet at this restaurant. Shawn is more down-to-earth, aware of his immediate surroundings and his worldly obligations; Gregory gets inspired by a whim and takes off, abandoning his family in New York, returning months later as if nothing has changed. Shawn is wary about meeting Gregory, and begins by asking questions, aware that it would relax them
both. Gregory takes off, his conversation meanders from what he did when he disappeared, and tells fascinating stories about being with Grotowski in a forest, going off to the Sahara, meeting a Japanese monk, and carrying on as if the quest of self-discovery, which many Americans underwent in the 1960s, hasn’t ended. Shawn, on the other hand, has stayed in New York, tried making a living, and realizes what it means to live up to one’s expected obligations and responsibilities. Neither is judgemental about the other; Gregory wants to experience the heightened sense of awareness life offers; Shawn doesn’t necessarily want to explore the parts of the unconscious best left undisturbed. Shawn understands what’s functional, Gregory explores the spiritual. Gregory fears apocalyptic visions, and sees deeper meaning—even messages—in what Shawn sees as mere coincidences. But towards the end of the conversation, Gregory reminds Shawn of the virtues of being sceptical of science and modernity, and Shawn acknowledges the mystical world that
Gregory has experienced, and you realize how his world view has altered, even if slightly. Gregory said something striking towards the middle of their conversation in London: He referred to a young man who was inconsolable after he had broken off with his boyfriend. With the wisdom of age, Gregory told him—you are going to hate me for saying this, but it gets better. And 10 years later, anything that’s tragic seems funny. The first part of what he said made sense—time heals wounds. But the second part—that anything, however tragic, seems funny a decade later—seemed odd—they were speaking within weeks of the 10th anniversary of 11 September. The US wasn’t ready for Bill Maher’s humour then, it isn’t ready for any attempt to mock anything about 9/11 now either. You can mock the idea of freedom fries—but what else? So it was a provocative thought: Is every tragedy funny a decade later? Is there a statute of limitations to pain and tears? Does it make a difference if one is personal, the other political? That weekend was an unusual one for me: It was the fifth anniversary of a personal bereavement, and it was the weekend my younger son went to university. The first parting was final; the second parting painful, but temporary. My son will be back in a weekend with his laundry. The immediacy of a child’s growing up and departing for college seems more overwhelming; the finality of a more permanent grief is of a different scale. Where Gregory wants to lead us is to possess equanimity and grace that allows us to laugh like the Buddha because, in the end, life is absurd. Vladimir: That passed the time. Estragon: It would have passed in any case. Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly. (Waiting for Godot) Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com
L16 CULTURE
LOUNGE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
Dou Rukh: Markings Publishers, 86 pages, Pakistani rupees (PKR) 1,200 (around `680). Available at Libertybooks.com from 10 October.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Their other face
Karachibased Arif Mahmood and Tapu Javeri photograph dual portraits of wellknown Pakistanis ARIF MAHMOOD/MARKINGS PUBLISHERS
ARIF MAHMOOD/MARKINGS PUBLISHERS
B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com
···························· o photograph the much-photographed, says Tapu Javeri, the portrait photographer must wait patiently to glimpse what lies beneath the “stage” face of the celebrity. To Arif Mahmood, the photographer’s brief must be to remember that, celebrity or no, the lens’ subject is always more important than the photographer himself or herself. The photographs in their new book of portraits reflect and comment on their individual approaches to the art by contrasting their distinct viewpoints on a single subject. Dou Rukh (Two Faces), released last week in Pakistan by Karachi’s Markings Publishers, is a book that has its origins in a photo exhibition. Mahmood and Javeri—also natives of Karachi—put together 15x4 in their home city in 2007. The exhibition featured 15 people, each photographed once by Mahmood, Javeri and fellow photographers Amean Jan and Izdear Setna. Javeri and Mahmood then decided to spin the idea into their own book. They had photographed most of the people in Dou Rukh several times before, but all of them were reshot in 2011, to keep the project as current as possible. The 17 people featured in the book are well-known Pakistanis; from designer Rizwan Beyg to artist Durriya Kazi, singer-actor Ali Zafar to humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi. Mahmood’s intimate, lingering portraits of them run through the book’s first half, seeming to capture them deep in thought, or in a moment that takes them out of themselves. The qawwals Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad are caught mid-performance, dominating the space around them, in a sharp black and white photograph. By contrast, in Javeri’s photograph, Ayaz and Muhammad feature in a blur of lights and almost indistinct colour, their faces half-glimpsed in a shot that tries to express the momentum of their performance, and perhaps the abandon of the qawwali itself. Javeri’s portraits, which run through the second half of the book, find the same people in Mahmood’s shots much more aware of their context and the gaze of the camera. Comedian Durdana Butt is seen laughing, and model Ayaan pouts at the camera in a selfconsciously glamorous shot. Zafar, whom Mahmood captures in an unguarded moment during a concert, laughing at someone outside the frame, frowns from the stage, a brooding pop idol wreathed in smoke,
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TAPU JAVERI/MARKINGS PUBLISHERS
TAPU JAVERI/MARKINGS PUBLISHERS
Mirror, mirror: (clockwise from top, left) Arif Mahmood and his horizontal cover for Dou Rukh, featuring cabaret dancer Marzi; Tapu Javeri and his vertical cover shot with Marzi; television host Mathira, cap tured by Mahmood and Javeri; and qawwals Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad during a performance, captured by Javeri and Mahmood.
in Javeri’s shot. Javeri thinks Mahmood is “a Romantic; his photographs have a painterly quality”, while Mahmood finds Javeri’s oeuvre a mixture of the candid and experimental. They were both photographers and photo editors at Pakistan’s film/lifestyle
magazine Xtra in Karachi in the 1990s, a quarterly project that they both describe as “cutting-edge”; each issue had two covers, one by each of them. In the quick but heavily premeditated gaze of Page 3 glamour shots, the image appears void of reflection. “There are
two kinds of portraits, one that is artificial and staged, another that is informal. Fashion and glamour portraits, like the Page 3, ones are usually changed on photoshop and completely artificial,” Javeri says. “For us, it’s always about elevating the image,” Mah-
mood adds. Portrait photography like that of Dou Rukh functions as a doppelganger of sorts to the quick fixes of celebrity culture. It tries to bridge the distance between posed and natural displays, looking for a character, rather than a
moment. The portraits in Dou Rukh showcase Mahmood and Javeri’s markedly different approaches to portraiture. Both separately and together, they also create a quiet, beautiful mental composite character for each of their subjects.
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STALL ORDER
ART
NANDINI RAMNATH
Fingerprinting the artist
Sudhir Patward han’s new show aims to bring the neglected art of drawing to the fore
B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com
···························· cribbles, drawings, sketches, charcoal marks are strewn on the floors of The Guild art gallery in Mumbai’s Colaba area, as though dots waiting to be connected by curator-artist Sudhir Patwardhan. Drawings, snapshots of art, Patwardhan agrees, are often quick, one-sitting projects, but as the bare bones of an artwork, they are the fingerprint of an artist—telling more about his style than any painting or sculpture. “Drawings are deceptive in their spontaneity,” says Patwardhan, who has curated The Art of Drawing, the show now previewing at The Guild. Vilas Shinde, for instance, comes back to a one-sitting drawing after a month or a year. Gieve Patel draws a few lines, and returns to them repeatedly to compose a sketch that is a dialectic between spontaneity and rationality. Krishen Khanna’s drawings are studies in evolution. Each is a unique expression of the artist. And yet, drawings exist in the notional space of the temporary. “It’s not just restricted to artists. Great film-makers used to do drawings, theatre people, even older architects used to do a lot of freehand drawing. You lose something
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when you lose the art of drawing; of course, you gain something else,” says Patwardhan. Drawings today are often seen as “on-the-way” to a painting, but not quite there yet. A painter and draftsman himself, Patwardhan is purposefully oldschool about drawing at a time when it is losing its point. While drawing was once the grammar of art—much like reciting your multiplication tables every morning at school—and remains a discipline drilled in by art schools everywhere, Patwardhan says its role as the preparatory practice of painting, sculpture and other art forms is decreasing, with students choosing to evolve out of it. He explains: “One hears a lot of artists, especially young artists, say that nowadays one doesn’t draw as much as one used to. Students don’t see what could be the use of this activity—go out to the railway stations, bus stations, doing 100 sketches a day. Fewer and fewer preparatory drawings are available. This is for various reasons: Newer mediums are coming up; one depends on photographs, rather than drawings, to base one’s painting on; one is not moving towards painting—but towards newer media—and, therefore, drawing in itself has become a little less prominent.” The Art of Drawing (Reshavishkar in Marathi) was conceived therefore to showcase drawing for students of art in Pune. The first part was shown from 17 September-1 October at the Maharashtra Cultural Centre, Pune. The second showing will be in November in Pune. The current exhibit of 10 artists at The Guild is a preview capsule of the show. “My only aim is to reach out to students who would not ever have access to such works,” Patwardhan
says. The exhibit spans the variety of ways in which drawing is still used by senior as well as junior artists today, covering the generational age of artists as well as the variety of work—artists working in pencil, pen, brush and wash. “Contentwise, some are political, personal, observational, introverted. I have tried to indicate the mini-genres within drawing.” The drawings are as varied as the artists. There are independent drawings—as in the case of the youngest artist in the group, Parag Tandel, or Patel’s sketches; unrelated to his painting practice. Khanna’s drawings are precursors to his painting practice. K.G. Subrahmanyam’s brush drawings are also related to his practice, “not in the sense that he makes this sketch and then makes a painting out of it, but that this is a riyaaz of doing trees, figures, animals in a certain way. It is what he has continuously done, which is what leads to, and what translates into, his paintings,” Patwardhan says. In a world where art is increasingly investment, the interest in drawing separates the men from the boys. Ergo, to love a Khanna painting, you simply must be interested in the sketches that were its genesis. “These pages from Krishen Khanna’s sketchbook; he didn’t do these for an exhibition in a gallery. He did these for himself. But they are very important for critics and students of art and for anyone who wants to understand a Krishen Khanna painting.” But that is a concept of art still not quite developed among buyers. There is a tendency to look at it as less important, just as there is hesitation to buy prints. There is, understandably then, less demand for a sketch, Patwardhan
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Sketch man: Sudhir Pat wardhan with his series of drawings made from photographs at The Guild art gallery in Mumbai. points out (the sketches on show range in price from `25,000 to a few lakhs, depending on the seniority of the artist, size/complexity of the work, etc.). Each artist uses drawings in his own way. Patwardhan himself devotes half his time to painting and half to drawing. “Drawing remains very important to me in both ways—as an independent activity and as a preparatory activity for my paintings.” For Patwardhan, it is a discipline that connects him to the critical evaluation of technology in art. “I’ve always been interested in how photography has invaded art—a lot of artists, including myself, depend on photographic images.” The series of Patwardhan’s drawings currently on show are drawn from photographs; a shift from drawing directly from nature. “When I am taking the photograph, I am not looking at it as a photographer, I am looking at it as a draftsman. So I seek something that appeals to me in drawing.” Just as drawings for Patwardhan are connectors in a technologically evolving space, he explains, they map other things for other artists: “Drawings open a window into an artist’s mind apart from painting, or sculpture, or any other medium, in a manner that is distinctive.” The preview of The Art of Drawing is on till 15 October at The Guild, 02/32, Kamal Mansion, Second floor, Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba, Mumbai. For details, call 022-22880116/0195.
PREVIEW | MUMBAI FILM FESTIVAL
Cineaste October The year’s selection is filled with popu lar draws such as ‘The Ides of March’ and ‘Moneyball’ B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com
···························· hey once grabbed Jafar Panahi in between his incarcerations long enough to judge the fest, but this year, Essential Killing and Le Depart film-maker and Roman Polanski camper Jerzy Skolimowski is as exciting as the Mumbai Academy of Motion Image’s (Mami’s) Mumbai International Film Festival (Miff) gets, jury-wise. “Oh, and there’s Sarika, instead of Suhasini,” Mami president Shyam Benegal says. Also on the jury are Bond man
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Roger Spottiswoode, The Yellow Sea’s Na Hong Jin and Hugh Hudson (whose claim to fame is Chariots of Fire). With the festival beginning 13 October, do watch out for greats like Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Danish film-maker of Melancholia, Lars Von Trier. Of course, you may get pushed around at a screening of a popular film like George Clooney’s The Ides of March, because the organizers aren’t exactly working on better crowd control this year. “A festival is meant to be crowded,” Benegal says, insisting that is the way it is around the world. The veteran film-maker says, “This year, Miff has the best-ever line-up since its inception. Our tie-ups with the Cannes film festival allow us to screen selections from Critics’ Week.” The fest opens with Brad Pitt-starrer Moneyball and closes with the Morgan Freeman-starrer Dolphin Tale.
National Award-winning films will also be specially screened. The sections in competition—Harmony Celebrate Age, Dimensions Mumbai and International Competition for first-time film-makers—will vie for a share of the total prize money of $200,000 (around `96 lakh). Benegal says: “A film-maker invests himself in his first film emotionally and financially. Your later films allow you a progressive dispassion. But your first is always an indicator of who you are as a film-maker.” An Indo-German scriptwriting workshop will be held from 11-13 October, and the Mumbai Film Mart will be held at the Raheja Classique Club from 15-17 October. Benegal says tributes will be paid to Mani Kaul, Shammi Kapoor and M.F. Husain. As for Gulzar receiving the lifetime achievement award: “It’s about high time, isn’t it? We are correcting our neglect of him.” The 13th Mumbai Film Festival will take place from 13-20 October at Cinemax theatres in Andheri and Sion.
HIGHLIGHTS u MF Husain’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’: This film won the Golden Bear in 1967. u Mani Kaul’s ‘Duvidha’: This National Awardwinning 1973 film is based on a tale by 2011 Nobel prize nominee Vijaydan Detha. u Shaji Karun’s ‘Piravi’: This is a Camera d’Or and National Awardwinning film. u Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’: This Cannes Grand Prix cowinner is Turkey’s Oscar entry. u Wim Wenders’ ‘Pina’: The 3D film captures the late choreogra pher Pina Bausch’s works. u Bennett Miller’s ‘Moneyball’: This Brad Pittstarrer has so far premiered only at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. u George Clooney’s ‘The Ides of March’: The dirty politics of an American presidential campaign. u Lars von Trier’s ‘Melancholia’: This Kirsten Dunststarrer grap ples with the apocalypse.
f admirers of Tamil superstar Suriya file a public interest litigation against the recent Hindi remakes of his hit films Singam (as Singham) and Kaakha..Kaakha (as Force), we won’t be surprised. In fact, I wouldn’t mind signing up as a witness and sharing my anguish at the pedestrian Hindi versions. Neither of them captures the spirit of the original movies, but the fact that they have worked with audiences and some critics indicate that the remake idea wasn’t a bad one in the first place. Why risk inventing something new when somebody else has already taken the trouble to do so—and succeeded? The latest fad in Bollywood is the “official remake”, which means that instead of stealing plots and characters from other movies, producers are actually paying a fee to the original creators. Nagesh Kukunoor’s Mod, which releases on 14 October, is an acknowledged remake of the Taiwanese movie Keeping Watch. A positive way of looking at this development is that film-makers have become more conscientious and professional and are finally giving credit where it’s due. The uncharitable view is that producers are paying up because they don’t want to be caught out. They don’t like being told by critics and bloggers that their movies are either partly or wholly lifted from some place else. The fact that Hollywood studios such as Fox Star and Warner Bros are attempting to make inroads into Bollywood by producing Hindi films is another deterrent. Many of the films copied by Hindi directors and writers tend to be from Hollywood, and all the studios need to do is reach into their back catalogues to trace the source. Also, Bollywood producers don’t like being slapped with legal notices. In 2007, Overbrook Entertainment, the producer of Hitch, sent a gentle reminder to the producers of David Dhawan’s Partner about the similarities between the Will Smith movie and the Salman Khan starrer. We never found out the result of that note—did the producers pay as they should have?—but Bollywood’s dream merchants have become a bit more open about where they’re catching their dreams from.
Second avatar: Ayesha Takia in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Mod. Just how much progress has been made in this regard can be judged from the fact that Tees Maar Khan’s source was acknowledged to be the Peter Sellers comedy After the Fox. Abbas Mustan’s upcoming Players is an official remake of The Italian Job (the 1969 original as well its 2003 Hollywood version). In the old days, the Burmawalla brothers would have simply plonked themselves in front of a video player and remade the Hollywood movie they liked the most. How times have changed. Hollywood could work out to be too expensive—and potentially alienating, as Dharma Productions realized with its remake of Stepmom. We Are Family (2010) didn’t connect with local audiences the way the original movie had—it didn’t help that the Hindi movie didn’t try too hard to localize the original story. A less risky option is to retool an older hit, like Don or Chupke Chupke. The more foolproof route is to look south rather than go West. Remakes of Tamil and Telugu hits are all the rage. It appears that Bollywood is so keen on reconnecting with small-town and rural audiences that feel removed from NRI-oriented films and Hindies that it’s looking at Hyderabad and Chennai for some answers. The kind of Tamil and Telugu movies being remade here are broad enough to adapt to new contexts. Bodyguard worked very well in Malayalam and did decent business in Tamil. Combined with the resurgence of love for Salman Khan, a favourable run in the Hindi belt seemed guaranteed. This means that we will have to suffer remakes of our favourite Tamil and Telugu films for some more time. We are doomed to grumble to fellow southies about how neither Ajay Devgn nor John Abraham is a patch on Suriya, or how Akshay Kumar will make a very bad Ravi Teja in Rowdy Rathore, an official remake of Teja’s Telugu superhit Vikramarkudu. The cheapest way to avoid paying up for remakes is to go down the “homage” route. If a hero or a villain strongly resembles a previously created iconic character, it’s not because somebody didn’t want to write out a cheque. It’s because the director or writer is paying tribute to the older film. So if Sanjay Dutt’s Kancha Cheena from the Agneepath remake strongly resembles Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, it’s not because the director, Karan Malhotra, has the blessings of Francis Ford Coppola. Cheena could well be a “tribute” to Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. You can whine, blog or send an anguished email to the Brando estate, but you can’t sue. Mod will release in theatres on 14 October. Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com
L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
MS GOPAL/MINT
MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | SUPRIYA NAIR
The salt of the earth Mumbai’s salt pans, ignored and largely unused, are a per petual battleground between nature and humanity. Who should win?
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ate last month, the state government of Maharashtra, led by chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, requested permission from the Centre to “unlock” an exceptional feature of Mumbai’s topography: its salt pans. In a conclave on urban poverty alleviation, Chavan said that space was essential to the city’s slum rehabilitation projects and requested the Central government, which has long owned the leases on many parts of this land, to allow it to be used for residential development. It was the latest in a long line of government announcements hopefully seeking to claim this land. For a city perpetually looking for space, the salt pans, like the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the mangrove swamps, are an aberration. Thanks to tourism and the attention of ecologists, we readily acknowledge the importance of the latter two. But there are probably more people in Mumbai today who know the rough location of the city’s nuclear facilities, than those of the salt pans. The phrase conjures up shining visions of the Rann of Kutch, glittering whitely under a desert sun. The very idea seems out of place on this small, rainy metropolitan island. And yet, commuters on the Harbour line between Mankhurd, the last station within the limits of the island, and Vashi in Navi Mumbai, see them as they rattle past every day. For much of the monsoon, they lie submerged under blackish-brown sludge, glutted by rain and the Thane creek. To reach them from Mankhurd, you can follow the railway tracks northwards, past slum settlements and complexes of new slum rehabilitation apartments, on to a mud track overgrown with tough coastal weeds, buzzing with dragonflies,
The pans: (clockwise from above) The detritus of migrant labour; Mankhurd’s salt pans; fishing baskets near the creek; and the postmon soon soil of the salt pans.
and possibly snakes. A kilometre or so past the Mankhurd railway station, the last shacks made from discarded political party banners and tarpaulin recede. Some way beyond that, even the puddles bisecting the path are free from human excreta, the universal sign of habitation along the city’s rail lines. The only smell on the humid October breeze is a light, almost grassy tang, different from the stinging brine of the open sea. We are in the island’s uttermost east, and experiencing something eerily unusual in Mumbai: an absence of other people. Only the Harbour line trains, running back and forth over our heads every 5 minutes, tell us that we are still in the city. The Mankhurd salt pans are among the few parts of the flats which are still operational. Overall, the city’s salt lands are spread over close to 3,000 acres, across the north-eastern coast of the island, and along the coastal mainland where much of Navi Mumbai and the far western suburbs have developed. Controlled by the Central government, leases for business
on many salt pans have lapsed and the pans fallen into disuse, which gives the state government grounds to request their release. For years, environmentalists have been protesting these periodic requests strongly. Debi Goenka, conservationist, explains how the salt flats are vital to Mumbai’s environmental health. “Mangroves have regenerated over many of these areas,” he explains. “The salt pans act as sponges during the rain. There must be builders licking their chops at the prospect, but the housing crisis is not going to be resolved by giving away the national park or mangrove lands or salt pans to developers.” Houses coming up in these low-lying areas would be exceptionally susceptible to floods, and would block the island’s natural drainage mechanisms irreparably. Reclaiming and developing these tracts of land would exacerbate soil erosion problems, as the practice essentially means denuding an existing land mass, like a hill, to graft it on to this unstable sea-land. “Because of climate change and the rise of the sea
level, to even think of reclamation in a city like Mumbai is a death wish,” Goenka says. The salt pans are currently governed by Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules, falling in a primary category, CRZ-1, between the high and low tide lines. CRZ-1 protects two further sub-categories: of ecologically sensitive land, as well as land with special features—and mangroves are a special feature. “The salt pans fall under both sub-categories,” Goenka points out. In 2005, PTI reported that the salt production from these areas was about 120,000 tonnes. But for all the uniqueness of a salt pan in the metropolitan region, the salt Mumbai actually uses does not come from within the island, but from larger flats and plants around the country. Goenka
speculates that the salt produced in these “small-time” operations is used in industrial facilities, rather than sold as a consumer good. So soon after the rains, the soil is a wet, loamy black, just beginning to dry out. On the borders of the salt plots, patches of fuzzy white begin to appear, baking slowly under the afternoon sun. There is a lone reed hut at one edge of the land, where the migrant labourers who work on this plot live. “Now we are just making the soil ready, repairing and building the furrows,” explains Dharma, who works on one stretch of these flats. “If you want to see the salt, come back in May—or a little before.” Dharma and 11 other workers have returned from their villages after the monsoon to work on this lonely edge of the coast.
They walk some distance to bring drinking water from a tanker every day. With fishing baskets made of reeds, a young man has caught small “English” fish—as he calls tilapia—and a large white crab. A red flag flutters at a curve ahead, over a tiny shrine to a goddess. Neither Dharma nor Manoj the fisherman have heard about the government’s plea to turn these pans over to the towers which curve along the borders of this land; nor will they hear about it for some time. A week ago, The Times of India reported that state officials discovered an old official communication from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government, stating her opposition to the use of salt pan land for development. The newspaper says that Chavan has “decided to withhold the demand for now”. A train rattles past. Behind us, a cluster of men come by to ask us our business. “Oh, Press,” says one of them when we explain. “We wondered. We’ve been following you all this while to make sure nothing happens to you.” supriya.n@livemint.com