Lounge for 09 july 2011

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

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Saturday, July 9, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 28

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

FLOATING WRECKS

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH MERCEDES­ BENZ’S PETER HONEGG >Page 8

Sachin Pawshe, 23, returned home safe two weeks ago. He is among numerous Indian sailors who’ve fallen prey to a vicious and violent cycle of piracy in the Indian Ocean.

The horror of his story and what it says about the shipping industry >Pages 9­11

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

The Trinity ring, a classic piece of jewellery pioneered by Cartier in 1924, has renewed appeal for young couples >Page 7

POCKET WORKSTATION

The BlackBerry PlayBook stays true to the first part of its name while paying lip service to the latter >Page 6

THE ARTIST AS IDEOLOGUE

A retrospective of artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya shows why his observations of human suffering echo today’s realities >Page 16

Pawshe calls himself the joker of the pack.

‘I had to keep laugh­ ing to keep everyone alive,’ he says.

REPLY TO ALL

PIECE OF CAKE

AAKAR PATEL

THE BUSINESS OF BEING A ‘JAWAN’

T

he slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, coined by Lal Bahadur Shastri, ennobles the role of warrior and peasant. In reality there is little respect for the profession of soldiery here. Any number of American politicians proudly announce their son’s enlistment as a private, the entry-level soldier. How many Indian leaders send their sons to become jawans? I can think of none. Foot-soldiery in India is for the poor. In Kipling’s Kim, the one sensual episode is the brief exchange between the Dogra jawan... >Page 4

MUSIC MATTERS

PAMELA TIMMS

A PROPER LOAF OF BREAD

T

his month sees the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Chorleywood baking process. I say celebrations, but you may well feel that commemorating the invention of pre-packaged, long-life, tasteless white sliced bread is not necessarily a reason to start popping champagne corks. Whatever your point of view, back in 1961 a revolution in bread making occurred and Britain led the way in replacing wholesome, nutritious, hand-baked bread with limp... >Page 5

SHUBHA MUDGAL

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE MUSICAL SHORTHAND

I

f music in India is abundantly diverse, so is the terminology associated with its many genres and styles. Film music too has its own set of unique terms, short codes, phrases often coined and used almost exclusively by sessions musicians, particularly those who were active in the pre-digital, pre-multi-track recording days. These sessions musicians have largely been an anonymous lot, with no one caring to acknowledge them on album covers.

Often, they may find due place... >Page 17

PHOTO ESSAY

BACK TO SCHOOL

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

TWO WOMEN, TWO WORKPLACES

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LIONEL BONAVENTURE/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 ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

D

irector Madhur Bhandarkar is upset that actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan became pregnant in the midst of shooting his dream project Heroine. Eight days into the shooting of the film and post a splashy launch at the Cannes film festival, Amitabh Bachchan announced on Twitter that his daughter-in-law was pregnant. Now everyone’s debating the usually super professional actor’s lack of professionalism.

I’m puzzled. For a while now, it’s been widely discussed that Aishwarya and her husband Abhishek have been trying to conceive. If we were aware of this, surely Bhandarkar, who has made multiple films on the “authentic” dirty secrets of the film/fashion fraternities and the society staples featured on Page 3, knew there was a big likelihood his lead actor would get pregnant this year?

At 37, a pregnancy comes DEBATE with its own set of risks Aishwarya Rai: Pregnant at Cannes. and, predictably, India’s most closely tracked—and highly the “women in the workplace” story superstitious—film family waited a that unfolded around the same time few months before they went public in another continent. (don’t you recall all those unverified Harrods employee Melanie Stark, stories of Aishwarya subjecting her- 24, resigned after she was sent home a self to elaborate religious rituals couple of times from one of Europe’s because her horoscope indicated she m o s t i c o n i c d e p a r t m e n t s t o r e s was manglik, an astrological position because she hadn’t complied with the in one’s chart that is believed to organization’s strict dress code. By all result in marital problems). reports, Stark was a hard-working The film industry needs to organize employee who had a good five-year itself so that producers have the clout work record except for one quirk: She to introduce no-pregnancy clauses in refused to wear make-up to work. their contracts. Either that or they If you’ve ever visited the stuffy should factor in potential feminine store, you know Harrods is Dos-andrisks the same way they handle a crisis Don’ts Central. Rules for customers caused when a lead actor suddenly are accessible on its website. Harrods goes to jail. doesn’t allow any person to enter the Personally, I was more intrigued by store dressed in high-cut, Bermuda

or beach shorts; swimwear; athletic singlets; cycling shorts; flip flops or thong sandals; with a bare midriff or bare feet; or wearing dirty or unkempt clothing.

The longer list of rules for employees has been widely debated in England after Stark’s story came out.

There are guidelines on everything from footwear (stilettos or kitten heels) to sideburns (not more than an inch wide). Cleavage must be avoided and antiperspirant is a must. While I believe the last should be a law in any workplace (the HR department should be in charge of enforcing it), Harrods clearly needs to re-evaluate its archaic staff dress code, especially for its female employees.

One of the few remaining joys of being a journalist in India is that nobody expects you to wear make-up and stilettos to work. My current editor who admits that he likes people who dress well is known more for his collection of Day-Glo Grateful Dead T-shirts than the variety of ties he wears to work.

Bottom line? As women take over the professional sphere, workplace issues specific to our gender are increasingly likely to pop up. Earlier this week, a CEO in New Zealand was sacked because he said in a television interview that women’s “monthly sick problems” made them less productive and hence they should be paid less. In the years ahead, companies and organizations will need to update their rulebooks and thought leadership if they have to handle and nurture their growing feminine forces.

FEDERER AND POETRY

Write to me at lounge@livemint.com

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: RITAM BANERJEE/MINT

Rohit Brijnath’s article on Roger Federer, “The perfect dancer rules, though momentarily”, 2 July, was poetic and makes a good read for anyone who loves sport. I’ve just made my debut in journalism and reading his piece was a learning experience. I look forward to reading more columns by him.

ABHISHEK

SPORT AND BEAUTY As a diehard fan of Roger Federer, I enjoyed reading Rohit Brijnath’s “The perfect dancer rules, though momentarily”, 2 July. It has restored hope in me. It doesn’t matter if he wins or loses; we are blessed every time he steps on the court.

ANDREW DYER

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX I cannot remember the last time I searched frantically for a newspaper. It happened this morning after I returned from football training. I was searching for a copy of ‘Mint’ because I had to read Rohit Brijnath’s “The perfect dancer rules, though momentarily”, 2 July, for a second time.

It was difficult to see Roger Federer lose, but it delights me to just see him nonetheless—in much the same way I tried to imprint in my memory every move of Zinedine Zidane towards the end of his career.

Brijnath’s piece also reminds me of my favourite poem—a strange choice—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’. I hope these lines from the poem define Federer’s final few years: For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

SIDDHANTA PINTO

EYE­OPENER I liked Sanjukta Sharma’s story, “The silent epidemic”, 2 July, on endometriosis. It was a real eye­opener. The article will give strength to many women who take extreme measures to counter the pain.

SALMA KHAN

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

The business of being a ‘jawan’

T

he slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, coined by Lal Bahadur Shastri, ennobles the role of warrior and peasant. In reality there is little respect for the profession of soldiery here. Any number of American politicians proudly

announce their son’s enlistment as a private, the entry-level soldier. How many Indian leaders send their sons to become jawans? I can think of none.

Foot-soldiery in India is for the poor.

In Kipling’s Kim, the one sensual episode is the brief exchange between the Dogra jawan and the Amritsari girl on the train. Kipling suggests she finds the jawan attractive for his status. The truth is that Indian society doesn’t see him that way. But no need for pity. The Indian jawan’s mercenary nature has sent him on adventures around the world. Let’s look at his story, for instruction as much as for entertainment.

In his great work Histories, written around 450 BC, Herodotus reported the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Accompanying the Parsi emperor Xerxes was a group of Indian mercenaries.

Herodotus writes that the Indian infantry wore not armour but cotton, and carried cane bows and cane arrows tipped with iron. Indian cavalry was similarly armed, on horseback or in “chariots drawn by horses or wild asses”. Most of the Persian army withdrew with Xerxes in 479 after smashing the Spartans at Thermopylae and flattening Athens. The Indian mercenaries were kept back to fight one final battle at Plataea alongside the elite Persian guard called Zhayedan, the Immortals. This shows us what the quality and reputation of the Indians was.

On 1 October 331 BC, the Parsis lost their empire to Alexander the Great at Gaugamela. Indian mercenaries “from both sides of the Indus” fought in the army of Darius, according to Alexander’s best historian. The Indians fought tactically with 15 elephants, and were

placed “in the centre with Darius’s personal guard” (Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander). Though their side lost, the Indians fought well, Arrian reports. They broke clean through the Macedonian lines and made their way to Alexander’s baggage train—to loot it.

Indians would have also fought the previous battle at Issus in November 333 BC, according to Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, but there wasn’t enough time to hire them before the battle. In his otherwise unreadable and prejudiced work, called The History of Alexander, Curtius Rufus says “the Indian fighters were so tall that the Macedonians’ heads only came up to their shoulders”. It is likely they were Jats from Punjab/Haryana. After Darius was assassinated by traitors, Alexander marched his armies into Punjab.

While Indians offered their mercenary services to foreigners, they also roamed India in bands and fought for whoever paid them. Before the battle against Porus in May 326 BC, Alexander massacred 7,000 Punjabi mercenaries.

The men had fought Alexander’s forces to a standstill in a skirmish at a town that had hired them. Arrian says they were then allowed to leave under a compromise. But Alexander worried they would be hired again, and broke his word, setting his soldiers upon them as the Indians left the town fortifications.

In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch writes: “Now the best fighters among the Indians were mercenaries, whose custom it was to travel from one city to another as they were needed: they defended their clients vigorously and caused Alexander heavy losses. So he concluded a truce

with them when they were in one city (near Rawalpindi), allowed them to leave, and then attacked them on the march and annihilated them.”

Tactically, I think Alexander was justified in killing them, but the Greek historians were uniformly horrified.

Diodorus Siculus described the action in his multi-volume work Bibliotheca Historica: “Not daunted at the greatness of their danger, the mercenaries joined ranks and, forming a full circle, placed their children and women in the centre so that they might effectively face those who were attacking from all directions.

Filled with desperate courage and fighting stoutly with native toughness and the experience of previous contests, they were opposed by Macedonians anxious not to show themselves inferior to barbarians in fighting ability, so that the battle was a scene of horror. They fought hand to hand, and as the contestants engaged each other every form of death and wounds was to be seen. The Macedonians thrust with their long spears through the light shields of the mercenaries and pressed the iron points on into their lungs, while they in turn flung their javelins into the close ranks of their enemies and could not miss the mark, so near was the target.”

Diodorus says that the Indian mercenaries’ women also took up arms and “fought beside their men, since the acuteness of the danger and the fierceness of the action forced them to be brave beyond their nature”.

Outnumbered, the Indians were annihilated.

Plutarch wrote: “This action remains a blot on his career as a soldier.” After fighting Porus, Alexander then turned back, sailing down the Indus to the Arabian Sea and then through Persia to Iraq where he died on 10 June 323 BC a month before he turned 33.

Pakistani writer Mustansar Husain Tarar thinks that Porus actually defeated Alexander at the battle of Hydaspes (Jhelum). He believes Greek historians later papered over this humiliation by saying Alexander turned back because

his army was disheartened (“sipah baddil ho gayi”). Alexander wouldn’t have retreated, Tarar argues, had the Indians not given the Macedonians a hiding.

Funnily, Tarar says Pakistan has raised a monument to Alexander the Great (“Sikandar-e-Azam”) on the banks of the Chenab because they mistakenly think he was a Muslim who defeated the Hindu Porus.

The Athenian historian Xenophon, himself also a mercenary, writes in his superb work Anabasis that the Persian civil war between Cyrus the younger and his brother Arsaces featured many mercenaries on both sides. This was during the battle of Cunaxa, fought on 3 September 401 BC. Xenophon, who himself fought on the losing side of Cyrus (who was killed), does not name their nationalities but we can be sure Indians dominated the list. The Indica of Megasthenes is the source of the famous line that “India never invaded another nation”. But Megasthenes adds that India’s mercenaries always responded to Persian summons to invasion. Turk, Afghan, Mughal, Maratha, Sikh, Frenchman, Persian, Dutchman, Portuguese, Briton. The Indian jawan fought for and against all of these as long as someone gave him salary and rations.

Army chief Gen. Vijay Kumar Singh is from the Rajput Regiment (war cry: “Bol Bajrang Bali ki jai!”), raised in 1778. The Punjab Regiment (“Boley so nihaal, Sat Sri Akal!”) was raised in 1761. The origins of the Madras Cavalry and the Madras Regiment (“Veer Madrassi adi kollu, adi kollu, adi kollu!”) go back to 1776, the year of American independence. The Maratha Light Infantry (“Bol Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki jai!”) was raised in 1768 and the Dogra Regiment (“Jawala Mata ki jai!”) in 1877. Manekshaw’s Gorkha Rifles (“Ayo Gorkhali!”) came in 1824 and the Jat Regiment (“Jat balwan, jai Bhagwan!”) has its origins in 1795.

The Sikh Regiment was raised in 1846 and the Kumaon Regiment’s (“Kalika Mata ki jai!”) battalions, raised in 1887, go back to 1813. The Marathis of Mahar Regiment (“Bol Hindustan ki jai!”)

defeated Bajirao II’s Maratha armies at Koregaon on 1 January 1818 and this has been our story all along.

If India was independent in 1947, whom did the jawans in these regiments fight and kill for almost 200 years? Other Indians.

Question: Why do only the untouchable Mahars have a patriotic war cry? Answer: Because the regiment was disbanded under the Martial Races theory and then reformed before independence under Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s influence. None of the other regiments had “India” in mind. Jawans fought and died abroad in the tens of thousands for their employer, first a British corporation and then the British parliament. In World War I 74,000, in World War II 87,000, thousands more in the Anglo-Afghan wars. There are Indian mercenaries buried in swathes of western and southern Europe and they spilt and drew blood in some of the most savage battles against the Nazis and the Fascists.

If the United Nations raised an army and paid in dollars, would Indian and Pakistani jawans line up to get in? I believe so. And they would get in too, because they are brave, disciplined and loyal fighters, particularly when led by quality officers of the sort the British empire produced.

And why not? Our elites flee India to work in the West the first chance they get. Why insist jawans are different from other Indians? We only express our patriotism at Wankhede, but they must do it at Kargil and at Siachen. We transfer all responsibility for patriotism to them through slogans, but that’s unfair.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

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

Arms and the men: Jawans take position at the battlefront.

GETTY IMAGES/AP THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

THERE IS NO SINGLE ‘BIRDS­AND­BEES’ TALK Our son is 11 and I am keen to have a frank chat with him on sex education. My queries are: 1) What is the right age to do this? 2) Is there a right way to do this—any book, etc.? 3) We got “educated” by default and this has worked fine for us—my parents never had any chat with me on this. Would having a formal chat increase curiosity unnecessarily, i.e., are we creating too much of a fuss about this? Is it better that he learns on his own? He already seems to know quite a lot. 4) How do we cover controversial subjects like gays, porn on the Net, etc.? 5) Instead of parents doing this

session, will children be more comfortable if it is done by an independent agency?

There are many different ages and stages at which you talk to your children about sex. There is no single “birds-and-bees talk” which one can have and “get it over with”. As you say, by this age children today already have some ideas on the subject.

However, those are often sketchy, out-and-out wrong, or surrounded by much speculation, giggling and a kind of lurid interest. What you can do at various stages of your child’s growing up is to provide age-appropriate information on sex—both the physical

Let’s talk about sex: While doing so, it’s important to be at ease with your child. aspects and the emotional ones. The parents’ role in this matter, most importantly, is to provide healthy, non-awkward information and debunk the wrong notions, guilt and the kind of “ikky fascination” children have with the subject.

I don’t believe that being educated by default is a good idea. Sure, some people grew up stumbling upon

information and dealing with their own sexual desires and encounters in whatever way they could. However, why avoid and side-step an issue and risk your child getting warped ideas and being drawn into experimentation, porn, etc., without having armed him in any way with any knowledge or emotional preparedness on the subject?

It’s important for a parent to be at ease with the subject, and also know how much he/she would like to discuss. There are many books in the market, especially if you want to show your child diagrams and functions of sexual and reproductory organs.

However, the emotional and social implications of sex and sexual behaviour must come from you. I suggest parents avoid bringing in religion, God, punishment, permission, and keep the conversation about sex as an extension of a respectful, joyous and loving relationship with a partner.

As for porn, it exists out there and what you can hope to do is

restrict access on the Internet.

Avoid labelling it too heavily as “evil” and “disgusting”. Perhaps you can, over time, stress that sex is a one-to-one interaction that can be healthy and fulfilling.

You could definitely ask your child’s school to introduce sex education at various levels. There are many excellent sex educators who could conduct sessions in schools. In such sessions, children are also encouraged to write anonymous questions, which are read out and adequately answered. Of course, this does not mean that parents should avoid talking about sex with their children. It just means that, in addition to parents, other responsible adults can provide information and help children deal with their emerging sexuality.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

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Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

A proper loaf of bread

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

What’s a hot, steamy monsoon kitchen good for?

Why, baking bread, of course

T

his month sees the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Chorleywood baking process. I say celebrations, but you may well feel that commemorating the invention of pre-packaged, long-life, tasteless white sliced bread is not necessarily a reason to start popping champagne corks.

Whatever your point of view, back in 1961 a revolution in bread making occurred and Britain led the way in replacing wholesome, nutritious, hand-baked bread with limp white sliced loaves tasting like cotton wool.

The Chorleywood baking process is named after the town in Hertfordshire where scientists at the British Baking Industries Research Association devised a means of turning cheap low-grade flour into mass-produced bread. The means, of course, were a highly mechanized mixing process and a cocktail of additives. Traditionally, a loaf of bread takes up to 20 minutes to knead—the Chorleywood chaps reduced this to 3 by radically speeding up the mixing process. Proper bread, though, needs proper flour and the inferior variety used in sliced white has to be enhanced with salt, sugar, fats, flour improvers, emulsifiers and enzymes.

In India, the Chorleywood process is

responsible for the ubiquitous Britannia loaf and a billion bread pakoras. In fact, it accounts for 80% of the bread produced in India and the UK. But if a mouthful of cotton wool “enhanced” with sugar, salt and chemicals isn’t to your taste, and you’re crying out for a pukka loaf, then you’re in tune with a new generation of food revivalists urging a return to real bread making.

As there are few artisan bread makers in India, making it at home is the only option. Turning out a loaf at home couldn’t be easier, especially at this monsoon time of year when kitchens are hot and humid—ideal conditions for encouraging yeast to work. This recipe, as well as being a great way of using the whey left over from paneer making, uses a method introduced to me by British baker extraordinaire, Dan Lepard. Incidentally, if you’re at all interested in starting to bake bread at home, Lepard’s book The Handmade Loaf is the only one you’ll ever need.

Follow him on Twitter too for daily dough-y wisdom.

You will need to buy some imported fast-action yeast but it’s well worth the investment. On the upside, there’s no need for expensive “Bread Flour”, the Bread basket: (clockwise from bottom, left) Add yeast, sugar and salt to the whey; add the flour slowly; knead immediately; usually, the dough takes 20 minutes of kneading; and (top) Whey Bread.

home-grown maida makes a loaf far, far superior to anything you could buy in a packet.

Lepard also introduced me to a new way of kneading: Instead of the traditional long knead and long rest, the kneading and resting is broken up into short bursts over a few hours.

Having tried both methods, I can confirm that Lepard’s produces a much better loaf. Try it—you’ll never look at Britannia again.

Whey Bread Makes 1 large loaf Ingredients 125ml cold cream (malai) 250ml whey 1K tsp salt 2 tsp sugar 1 sachet (7g) fast-action yeast 550g plain flour (maida) A few drops of sunflower oil Method Heat the whey until hand-hot (not

boiling), then pour into a large bowl with the malai.

Add the sugar, salt and yeast. Whisk gently to mix, then add the flour. With your hands mix quickly until you have a soft, ragged, slightly sticky mass—no need to knead at this point—then cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, smear a few drops of oil on a clean work surface. Tip the dough out and knead for 10 seconds. Put the dough back in a clean bowl and leave for 10 minutes. You will notice that the dough has already changed structure—the yeast has already started to work on the flour, making it springier and more elastic. Again, knead for 10 seconds and leave for 10 minutes. Give

the dough a final knead, it will now be quite soft and pillowy.

This time leave the dough, covered, to rise for 1 hour, until it has doubled in size.

Lightly oil the inside of a loaf tin. If you don’t have a loaf tin, you could make a free-form loaf on a baking tray.

Tip the bread dough on to the work surface and pat it into a shape that fits in the tin or an oval shape if you’re going free-form. Put the bread into the tin and leave to rise again for about 1 hour. Heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and bake the loaf for about 45 minutes. If you like a crustier loaf, take the bread out of the tin and bake for a further 5-10 minutes.

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

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to bake Whey Bread, visit www.livemint.com/bread.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Play

LOUNGE

GADGET REVIEW | BLACKBERRY PLAYBOOK

Pocket workstation B Y G OPAL S ATHE

The BlackBerry PlayBook stays true to the first part of its name while paying lip service to the latter

gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· fter the launch of the iPad, every big manufacturer has been trying to create a tablet computer.

The latest is the BlackBerry PlayBook from Research in Motion (RIM).

The adoption of the iPad by businesses globally, must have set alarm bells ringing in RIM, whose primary market still lies with enterprise users. The company faced a lot of pressure to create a viable iPad alternative—one that would be focused on business use as well as appeal to more general users.

The BlackBerry PlayBook largely delivers on both counts.

The device is portable, and an excellent tool for working with office documents. It also has a no-fuss HDMI connector for presentations, along with the best tablet browser yet.

On the other hand, the

A

PlayBook has very few apps at launch. It has on paper around 9,000 apps to draw on, after duplicates and e-books are removed from the count, but the best apps are already on the device. While the PlayBook comes with Facebook, YouTube and decent media apps along with excellent tools for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, it has no Skype, Kindle and official Twitter client. Neither did the iPad, of course, but when it launched, there was no competition. RIM says it is working on plugging these gaps.

The smaller size of the PlayBook is a selling point. Compared with the iPad 2, it’s almost half the size (see table for details) but is also surprisingly heavy for its size. A thick bezel around the screen sets it apart from other tablets.

BB PLAYBOOK vs APPLE iPAD 2 A head-to-head comparison of the stats that matter to you

The bezel is more than decorative. It’s one of the touches that the new QNX operating system (OS), which is making its debut along with the PlayBook, brings. Unlike the iPad or Android, there is no home screen button. Instead, the touch screen extends beyond the visible screen, and swipes that begin and end on the bezel are used for system commands—swipe down to call the home screen, up to close an app, or diagonally across to access notifications, for example.

It’s less complicated than it sounds, and QNX is a smooth and intuitive system, every bit as easy as iOS or Android, but very distinct from them.

The size also means you can slip it into your trouser pocket or a handbag quite easily. It also means that you can use your tablet to take pictures from the ser-

Let’s play: The PlayBook works well for office tasks, but is sorely lacking in apps at launch.

BlackBerry PlayBook Weight Size

Apple iPad

425g

613g

19.4 x 13 x 1cm

24.1 x 18.6 x 0.8cm

Battery

6K hours

9K hours

Camera

5 MP rear, 3 MP front

720p rear, VGA front

Apps

Approx 9,000

Approx 100,000

Cost

`28,000

viceable if not spectacular 5 MP camera on the back. This is in contrast to the iPod quality camera in the iPad 2.

The browser is stable, has tabbed browsing and supports Adobe Flash, so you can look at charts in Google Analytics or watch a streaming movie or play Farmville easily. The PlayBook has a serviceable, if not spectacular, apps for video, music and books, along with PlayBook-to-PlayBook video chat and an excellent document-editing suite, so you’ll never be stumped when faced with an Excel sheet.

Unfortunately, the App World is pretty empty at present. There is already a good collection of games available, but more are clearly needed.

While reliance on the Web is a good thing, many of these apps are why the iPad is such a compelling device, and unless RIM can incentivize development in a big way, it’ll always lag behind the iPad. There are around 9,000 actual apps available to BlackBerry users, once you take away the themes and the

`27,900 e-books. Compared with the 100,000 iPad apps on the App Store, this is nothing.

The other problem is that unless you’re a BlackBerry user, you don’t get your email and calendars delivered to the tablet. The PlayBook allows you to connect your BlackBerry using Bluetooth, to share its 3G connection, contacts, calendar and email, but there’s no other way to activate these things.

The Bluetooth-based BlackBerry Bridge bleeds the battery on the PlayBook, and at around 6 hours of use to a charge, it’s not exactly setting any records to begin with—and seems outright puny compared with the iPad, which can go nearly twice as long.

Starting at `28,000 for the 16 GB model, the PlayBook matches the iPad in price, and for people who already own a BlackBerry, it’s a great tablet.

For enterprise users, the added security of the BlackBerry Bridge and the built-in document-editing options that help you deal with everything related to MS Office are a great advantage. For those who want to use it more casually, the older but cheaper Galaxy Tab is a good option—it also comes in the convenient 7-inch size.

GAME REVIEW | DUKE NUKEM FOREVER

Too late to matter B Y G OPAL S ATHE

A high­profile release which looks and sounds outdated and has too many glitches

DIGITAL DOOM

gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· uke Nukem Forever (DNF), which just released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is the sequel to 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D. DNF has spent the last 14 years in development and with every delay, the problems just piled up. It shows in the final version.

In 1996 the foul-mouthed, misogynistic and immature Duke was a good mascot for video games. The game had over-the-top weaponry that lent as much of a voice to the game as Duke himself.

There was the shrink ray, which allowed you to squash enemies with a kick, or the freeze gun, with which you could shatter frozen

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enemies with a kick.

DNF tries to maintain that tone but it loses track of the fact that Duke Nukem 3D was also a polished shooter, and would be fun no matter what. DNF holds promise but never really shines, trying too hard to emulate the games that followed in Duke Nukem 3D’s footsteps.

The story is so mindless that it can be told in three sentences: You saved the world and have popstar girlfriends, but the aliens want revenge. They kidnap the girls and by the time you rescue them, they are dead, having given birth to alien babies. A roaring rampage of revenge follows, with monster trucks on the Hoover dam, and the game ends with Duke saying he will run for president of the US. Insert a dozen expletives and you’ve got the original script.

The game play shines in the run-

Other video games with high expectations and low returns

‘Duke Nukem Forever’ is the latest in a long line of delayed digital disasters, a trend that has dogged the video­game industry since the 1990s. Here are other games that have been lost in development:

Prince of Persia 3D The game transitioned the franchise

from 2D to 3D and from excellent to excruciating. A game that took 10 years to make nearly destroyed the series’ reputation overnight.

released, Romero has not worked on any big league project again.

‘Daikatana’ combined idiotic artificial intelligence and poor design.

Daikatana

Too Human

The oft­delayed ‘Daikatana’ was built on the name of its star designer John Romero. After it

‘Too Human’ took 10 years to make, and went in development through three consoles. The result was an

and-gun sequences, but there aren’t enough of those around.

Instead, you’re treated to a game that looks and sounds dated and has far too many glitches for such a high-profile release.

The checkpoint system for save games is simply thoughtless, and the regenerating health shabbily implemented. The game began at a time when health was measured, and death meant that the game ended. Halo changed that, and DNF tries to imitate it, but half-heartedly.

Instead of the large halls where you ran with a shotgun shooting Pig Cops in the face, you get scripted sequences, a la Call of Duty, so Duke looks like a poor imitation instead of standing proud as the real deal that started it all.

There are many scenes where you must shrink or drive, which would work a lot better if the controls made sense. Because of the

indifferent game that couldn’t live up to the reputation of its designer.

But unlike Romero, Denis Dyack still gets work.

Prey ‘Prey’ took a decade to make and went across multiple platforms as 3D Realms struggled to create something ahead of an ever­ accelerating curve. Here, unlike with

terrible controls, you die a lot, and the loading screen is also endless.

When Gearbox announced last year that they’re going to revive the franchise and actually release DNF, millions swooned in delight.

Today it’s clear that Gearbox decided to do what Duke’s original creators at 3D Realms wouldn’t. Finish the game and release it. For gamers, the name Duke itself is enough to make this a best-selling game, which might have been the company’s plan all along.

Duke Nukem Forever—for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, `2,299. www.livemint.com For a story on the evolution of the FPS genre of games, visit www.livemint.com/videogame.htm

Duke, they mostly got it right, but it was to be their last hurrah.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 Eight years in development and still not ready, this game will now release on the next generation of consoles, having started life on the last. That’s an ominous trend considering that every game in this list has a similar tale to tell.

Hail the king: Duke returns after 14 years.

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Style

LOUNGE q Anmol Jewellers: White gold ring with princess­cut diamonds, at Turner Road, Mumbai; and Gold Souk mall, Sushant Lok, Gurgaon, `99,000.

JEWELLERY

t Poonam Soni: Set of rhodium­plated yellow gold band with baguette­cut diamonds, and yellow gold band with princess­cut rubies, at Poonam Soni boutiques on Altamount Road and Linking Road, Mumbai, approx. `3 lakh.

p Forevermark: Encordia eternity ring in white gold with diamonds, at fine jewellers countrywide, `1.25 lakh.

t Gehna Jewellers: Baguette­ and brilliant­cut diamonds in white gold, at Turner Road, Mumbai, `1.6 lakh.

From here to eternity The Trinity ring, a classic piece of jewellery pioneered by Cartier in 1924, has renewed appeal for young couples

B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com

································· ven as ostentatious displays of wealth in the form of stones almost merit their own pin code these days, there has been a steady trickle of understated rings that buck the norm. The most popular of these is the eternity band—essentially a Western concept, meant for engagement rings and wedding bands.

“The eternity ring is a simple band set with a continuous row of diamonds.

The popularity of these rings has been steadily increasing over the years,” says Mumbai-based Binita Cooper, managing director of Forevermark India, the De Beers brand. Eternity rings are popular with young professional women looking to make their first affordable jewellery purchase.

Mumbai-based jeweller Poonam Soni says the design of a conventional eternity ring is such that there is no defined end. “It denotes never-ending love and an everlasting relationship,” says Soni.

Adds Ravi Soni, store manager, Gehna Jewellers, Mumbai: “We sell twice as many solitaire rings so they may never entirely be replaced as engagement rings, but eternity bands are certainly very popular. A lot of couples choose eternity rings to commemorate anniversaries. These rings are also popular choices for wedding bands as the concept of wedding rings has caught on with younger customers.”

Deepanjali Lahiri, a Mumbai-based human resources professional, sports a half eternity engagement ring, with three half rows of diamonds. “My fiancé knew solitaires weren’t really my thing but didn’t want to simplify things to the point of giving me a plain band. I loved this ring the moment I saw it,” she says. It’s fetched her a constant stream of compliments.

The image that springs to mind at the mention of an eternity ring is of the iconic Cartier Trinity ring. First

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designed by Louis Cartier in 1924, the rolling bands signified the bonds of love, loyalty and friendship between the designer and the poet Jean Cocteau.

The simplest version is the original—linked bands of yellow, white and rose gold—and the most expensive is the three-coloured gold rings encrusted with yellow, colourless and pink diamonds. Over the years, there have been more contemporary versions of the Trinity—the Trinity Sauvage features a panther-like pattern on the yellow gold band. The Trinity concept has also been carried over to rolling bangles and necklaces with tri-gold chains.

“Eternity bands have universal appeal and are a favourite with everyone, from the fabulously wealthy to the middle classes. They are greatly appreciated by people who have an eye for classic design,” says Koshy Cherian, area business manager for Tanishq, Mumbai. “People who look at eternity rings usually have a clear idea of what they want before they come in. I’d say 95% of people who come in know to ask for eternity rings by name, while the remaining 5% have seen it either in a magazine or on a friend,” he adds.

Delhi-based fashion designer Christine Aranha, who retails out of Aza and Ogaan in Mumbai and Delhi, likes the eternity band because it goes with everything. “It just never looks out of place and is the least controversial accessory. It’s also great for stacking with other rings for a more complex look,” she says.

Mass-market brands are a great resource for young women as they have more affordable ranges, according to salespersons and showroom managers. “Half eternity rings are a way to cut costs when you don’t want to compromise on the visual appeal of the eternity concept,” says Madhavi Sahu, a designer at Tanishq Design Studio, Bangalore.

Of course when price is no object, the sky is the limit. The Platinum Guild of India, the body responsible for promoting platinum in India, promotes the use of platinum in eternity rings as the most enduring expression of love because of its impenetrable quality. “Platinum is a popular metal to use these days because it doesn’t get damaged easily and introduces another dimension to the message of enduring love behind eternity rings,” says Poonam.

She adds that a lot of clients choose to go for an elaborate cocktail ring as an engagement ring and add an eternity ring as a wedding band. “It’s just the done thing now,” she says.

THE ABC OF AN ETERNITY RING The colours, setting and shapes that make this trendy classic what it is u An eternity ring is generally a band encrusted with diamonds u A half eternity ring is studded with precious stones across only one half of its length u Eternity bands now have innumerable variations in settings and colours due to the range of stones and metals used

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u Cartier’s Trinity ring is the definitive eternity ring. Cartier’s Moon and Platinum Trinity ring is a new take on the classic with bands of white gold, diamonds, platinum and black ceramic u Online diamond retailers such as Caratlane.com and Forzieri.com are good for innovative takes on the eternity ring.

t Platinum Guild: Textured platinum love bands, at fine jewellers countrywide, `30,000­60,000.

u Asmi: Eternal Bliss, diamonds set in 18­carat yellow gold, at Asmi counters countrywide, `24,000 onwards.

p Cartier: Tri­gold Trinity ring with white diamonds, at the Cartier boutique, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `13.5 lakh onwards.

t Caratlane.com: Diamonds and rubies channel set in 18­carat yellow gold, available online, approx. `17,000.

t Piaget: Limelight platinum wedding band, set with brilliant­cut diamonds, at the boutiques in DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and The Oberoi, Nariman Point, Mumbai, approx. `1.52 lakh.

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

PETER HONEGG

A German gypsy’s Indian challenge The MD and CEO of Mercedes­Benz India wants to make the brand young and hip

B Y S HALLY S ETH M OHILE shally.s@livemint.com

···························· eter Honegg doesn’t conform to the stereotypical image of a hard-nosed, no nonsense, supremely structured German businessman. The selfproclaimed “abnormal German” says he is truly a gypsy at heart. “I don’t make plans in personal life,” he says, chuckling.

We meet at the Mercedes-Benz Café that overlooks lush lawns at t h e h e a r t o f t h e company’s 100-acre facility in Chakan near Pune. The only embellishment in the theme-based, minimalist lounge is the three-pointed star present in various forms such as at the counter, on the central table and on the wall adjacent to the sofa.

After a few minutes’ wait, Honegg strolls in. He greets me in a thick German accent, with a warm handshake and we camp on the beige leather sofa. His crisp white shirt, red striped silk tie and black trousers complement his freewheeling, candid style of communication, often laced with humour that makes us both break into laughter several times. It’s not surprising when he says he has made lot of friends—both in and outside the company in all the countries he has worked in. And he has worked in a lot of countries.

My first experience with Honegg and his wisecracks was in Mumbai some months ago when Mercedes invited reporters for an evening function to welcome him to the country. “My speech will be like a miniskirt—long enough to cover the bare essentials and short enough to keep the interest sustained,” he said then, as the respectful silence gave way to roaring laughter.

Honegg, 56, who has been with the company for 36 years, took over the reins of Mercedes Benz India Pvt. Ltd as the managing director and chief executive in January. He has come with a specific mandate—to revitalize and project brand Mercedes, which has been losing ground to rival BMW, as a sporty young brand for the hip.

Honegg is the third-generation family employee at Daimler Benz—a 125-year-old firm—with both father and grandfather hav-

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ing served the company for 44 years each, respectively. His tryst with the “three-pointed star” was more by default and not by design, he says, as he runs his fingers through his bushy white Einstein moustache, reminiscent of an era gone by.

As a young man who wanted to be a bioscientist several years ago, Honegg was reluctant to take the scholarship he got from Mercedes to do a master’s in business economics. He wanted to opt for biology in Stuttgart, his hometown in Germany.

But that was not to be.

“My father said, you study business for three years and then go back to university. But I eventually got sucked in,” he says.

Honegg joined Mercedes in 1976 as a salesman and there was no looking back after he moved to the export department in 1982. He

says in jest that the lure of travelling across the globe drove him to the “family business”.

In the subsequent years, his job took him to several countries—from East Europe and Iran to North-East, South-East Asia and the Asia-Pacific, as he kept moving up the company ladder, straddling various roles within the firm.

In 1992, he was appointed regional director of MercedesBenz Iran, his first posting outside Europe. There was initial resistance from his wife Daniela, who was unsure how life would take shape away from the comfort of familiar surroundings. After a lot of persuasion and the promise of an opportunity to see a land they wouldn’t have otherwise, the Honeggs agreed to shift gears and move. Daniela loved the place so much that even before he had offi-

cially accepted the position, she got their two children enrolled into local schools. Thus began the Honegg family’s continuing Oriental sojourn.

Credited with turning around the Mercedes-Malaysia operations, playing a key role in expanding sales in the Asian region and making China the No. 1 market for the company in three years, Honegg is Mercedes’ Asia expert. Under his stewardship (2002-05), sales for the company in China catapulted to 150,000 units a year from 4,000-5,000. Malaysia started selling 5,000 cars a year, during his stint from 2006 to 2010, from virtually nothing.

Honegg is optimistic that India too will see similar growth trajectory, and emerge as one of the world’s largest markets for Daimler Benz in the near future. But he remains intrigued by the Indian market because, “it’s quite different from the breed I have known so far”.

“It’s important for me to know what the Indian customers want as I don’t think one size fits all.”

Daniela was not reluctant to move to India because a threeweek visit to the Kumbh Mela in 2001 had given her an instant liking for the “world’s spiritual epicentre”. So when the offer to head India came by, Honegg says, in the last quarter of 2010, she couldn’t have been happier. Several years of work in Asian countries—including Hong Kong, Singapore, and now India—have made the Honeggs, particularly son Mario, fond of Asian culture.

So deep is the influence on Mario that the 20-year-old chose a Malaysian university over an Australian one for his graduate studies

in economics. His elder sister Marienne, 24, completes her father’s dream by pursuing biology in Germany.

Honegg’s next project is to give the brand a sporty perception in India which he plans to leverage with the Formula One (F1) connection similar to the way the Mercedes brand has been built in other Asian markets. Mercedes is the only other luxury car-maker associated with F1—its team is McLaren-Mercedes—besides Ferrari. He has already launched various models which conform to the new perception like the Maybach 57S & 62, Mercedes-Benz G 55 AMG, Mercedes-Benz SL 350 and Mercedes-Benz GL-Class 500.

“Our customers here do not recognize it as a sporty brand.

Few know that besides Ferrari, we are the only company in F1,” says Honegg, who adds that India is known only for its three sports—cricket, cricket and cricket. He has already set his mind on selling F1 tickets through the company’s dealerships and catching consumer fancy as India gets ready to host the world’s most adrenaline thumping motorsport event for the first time in Delhi in October.

Come autumn, the wine aficionado also plans to brew his own wine. He wants to go plucking grapes from his friend’s vineyard near Pune. “I don’t like the wines available here. Some Indian wines give me a headache,” he complains, as he goes on to explain the intricacies of winemaking and invites me for a tasting session.

“You will be the guinea pig,” he remarks mischievously.

Honegg’s wide range of interests—from golfing, motorcycling to architecture, books, love for wine, watches and cooking propelled by his love for chicken tikka and dal from Sher-e-Punjab, Pune— and his ability to leap from one subject to the other with dexterity, makes 1 hour and 45 minutes whizz past.

“What more can I ask for, I get paid to talk,” he says, laughing.

As the “gypsy” leaves for his next pit stop—his office—he appears to be in no hurry, strolling through the sprawling premises, with a philosopherlike air, his tie fluttering in the cool breeze.

IN PARENTHESIS Peter Honegg loves children. When he was growing up in Germany, he spent 18 months working with differently abled children. In Germany, it’s compulsory for youth to either enrol in the army or in community services. Honegg chose the latter. He and his wife Daniela adopted three shelter homes in Malaysia. He now plans to play Santa Claus to children in the Mercedes­Benz International School in Pune during Christmas. An enthusiastic magician, Honegg hopes to intrigue these children with his tricks. He believes children are far more observant than adults and tricking them is not easy. How does he manage to do all this? Time management, helped by his collection of watches. Honegg has an assortment of more than 150 pocket and wristwatches, which include everything from a Rolex and a Muhle to a Corum.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

The default choice: Honegg is the third generation from his family to work at Daimler. His father and grandfather worked for Daimler for 44 years each.

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

L9

Cover

LOUNGE

AFP/HO/PIB

Blow the man down: An Indian naval rescue ship approaching the hijacked dhow MV Nafeya on 15 July 2009. The pirates abandoned it the following day.

B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···································· n the bridge, with a gun to your head, all men are equal, whether captain or sailor; you eat together, sleep together, think you are going to die together, and cry together.” Sachin Pawshe, 23, has been home just four days since his release after 10 months in captivity aboard the ill-fated MV Suez. Even his candy-pink ground-floor home in Katemanavli in Mumbai’s Kalyan East, where narrow streets crumble into wide open drains, offers him renewed breathing space. Floral ceramic tiles on the walls, plaster-of-Paris frosting on the ceiling, and the black-andgold trellis of the felt-upholstered sofa must seem disorienting to a man who, only a week ago, ate flour and never thought he’d see home again.

Flowers and plaques, felicitations from local political groups on Pawshe’s “safe return”, dot the showcase in a living room corner. His two siblings—a precocious 15-year-old brother and a mild-mannered 18-year-old sister—bound about with nervous energy. His widowed mother, Sunetra, lost the last local election she stood for as a Nagar Sevak five years ago, leaving Pawshe the only earning member of the family. Pawshe finished his class XII at the local Sai Vidyalaya, then completed a course in maritime studies and signed up with the Egypt-based Red Sea Navigation Company in 2008. Like all sea cadets, he dreamt of seeing the world. “Nobody in my family had ever left Mumbai. I wanted to be the first,” he says. He has not received his $500 salary (around `23,000) since May 2010, when he first boarded the MV Suez.

Not since the ships of the East India Company traversed the Spice Route with black gold in the 1690s has piracy been so violent and destructive a force on the high seas. The oldest existing merchant ship, Star of India, stands at the San Diego Maritime Museum, a reminder of this golden era of trade, and piracy. Today, there are rumblings of a seafarer strike across India, Bangladesh and Malaysia, of sailors refusing to travel the Gulf of Aden corridor; plans which Abdul Gani Serang, secretary of the National Union of Seafarers of India (NUSI), says are still “in the initial stages, and will be implemented only if required to wake up governments that refuse to act”.

Capt. Howard Snaith, marine director at shipping industry forum International Association of Independent Tanker Owners (Intertanko), points out that 40% of the world’s sea-borne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz into the Indian Ocean. As do $50 billion in imports and $60 billion in exports from Indian shores, according to Union shipping ministry estimates. Ron Widdows, chairman of the World Shipping

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PIRACY

FLOATING WRECKS Sachin Pawshe, 23, returned home safe two weeks ago. He is among numerous Indian sailors who’ve fallen prey to a vicious and violent cycle of piracy in the Indian Ocean. The horror of his story and what it says about the shipping industry

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HISTORY

Riders of the sea Somali pirates didn’t just pop out of an overactive imagination

MOHAMED DAHIR/AFP

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Council, puts piracy costs to the world shipping industry at $3.5-8 billion a year. The impact on trade is brutal. According to London’s International Maritime Bureau, since the start of 2011 alone, there have been 71 attacks resulting in 21 hijackings off the coast of Somalia, with more than 3,500 sailors being held hostage. With India being the largest supplier of seafarers in the world, more than 65% of those held captive at any point in time are Indian, according to Save Our Seafarers, an international coalition of major shipping companies against piracy.

Dipendra Singh Rathore, 22, studying to be a third mate at the Glasgow Institute of Maritime Studies, was aboard the MT Marida Marguerite when it was waylaid in May 2010 on its way to Antwerp. Rathore grew up in Chittorgarh and had always been fascinated by the sea. “I had never seen a ship in my life. I convinced my parents with great difficulty to let me go,” he says. “I was the youngest on that ship and at my age, physical pain is still bearable. But what actually got to me was watching or hearing people twice my age being tortured and beaten. I couldn’t help them. All I could do was pray. There came a time when I even stopped praying,” he says.

As such captive sailors disembark, smile for the cameras and disappear into their homes in the towns and villages, away from the euphoria surrounding their release, stories of abuse and torture, careers cut short, financial handicaps, physical and mental scars, and recurring nightmares remain untold. Some inevitably return to the only source of income they know, while others choose to go jobless, paralysed into inaction by the trauma. It is almost as though Amitav Ghosh wrote of men such as Pawshe in his Sea of Poppies: “How had it happened that while choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines… It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”

Pawshe boarded MV Suez at Tuticorin and sailed to Karachi on 24 July 2010, where the ship picked up its cargo of cement bags intended for Eritrea via the IRTC (Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor) through the Gulf of Aden. “It was a journey that should have taken just 10 days,” says Pawshe, who was on watch the night of 1 August 2010. “It was the seventh day of our transit; at 11pm, we saw the pirates approach in speedboats and circle the ship, like sharks. I actually recorded it on my mobile phone because it was the first time I was seeing pirates.” The pirates were reconnoitring to check if the MV Suez had firearms. At 7am, they attacked. “It was like a game that just took 5 minutes to play,” recollects Pawshe, who stood ready, manning his high-pressure water hose. “These drills are pointless—they tossed a ladder with a hook over the side of the ship, despite the razor wire, and began to climb as their accomplices sprayed the bridge (made of glass) with their AK-47s.” Pawshe hid behind the hatch, but within minutes the pirates had taken a man hostage and reached the bridge, threatening to kill him, forcing the Pakistani captain, Syed Wasi Hasan, to shut down the engines and summon the 22-member crew. Beaten, kicked and punched, the crew was forced to huddle in complete silence. By the time a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) helicopter responded to the distress signal an hour later, it was too late. The crew was forced to divert the ship to Danana, Somalia, from where it was periodically shifted to Garth, and docked at a distance from 10-15 other hijacked ships.

The sailors’ belongings were looted. Pawshe says: “On the first two days, we were given only packaged food to eat; biscuits, bread. We were hit if we tried to speak to each other. The captain and chief engineer were isolated. We were not allowed to even use the toilet.”

Since 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau, 62 sailors have died due to piracy: some from heart attacks during torture, some from injuries, some committing suicide.

On the MV Suez, some men broke down as bullets whizzed past. Frying pans were thrown at their heads. Their ankles and wrists were tied. When the pirates were satisfied the crew was submissive, they summoned the cook and a rudimentary supply of rice, flour, onions and potatoes was rationed out twice a day—at 11am and 6pm—while the crew worked its shifts with armed guards. “Till the stocks lasted, we got food. That was three months. But none of us thought we would be there for so long. We thought, maximum six months? But 10 months?” Pawshe’s voice trails off in anger as he adds, “At the end of one month, the captain told us the owner had said ‘kill the men and keep the ship, I don’t want either back’.”

Lounge was unable to get through to the Red Sea Navigation Company, Suez.

Ansar Burney, a Pakistani lawyer who works to free innocents incarcerated worldwide, explains on the phone from London how he travelled to Somalia, Yemen, Aden, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Dubai repeatedly after being contacted by the families of the Pakistani crew. When the Indians on board appealed to him, he couldn’t refuse. “I do not believe in boundaries or religion. There is only one religion—human dignity,” he says. Burney refused the pirates’ offer to release only the Pakistanis. He explains why: “If I had accepted, the four Pakistanis would have been released but the 18 remaining would have died.”

In the West, kidnap-and-ransom insurance is common, allowing companies to secure their employees’ lives more quickly. The profile of the shipping company can dictate how quickly you will be set free, but it can also determine the extent of torture. Sandeep Dangwal, 27, was hostage aboard the MT Marida Marguerite. Captive for eight months, until their release on 28 December, the 22-member crew of the Marguerite was subjected to physical abuse, by all accounts much worse than what the crew of the MV Suez underwent. Their owner, OMCI, a German company, was more likely to shell out the ransom money that saw negotiations begin at $25 million. Dangwal, speaking from his home in Dehradun, says: “The pirates asked us to run the ship for 30 days on three days’ worth of fuel. If the captain said he couldn’t, he was hit, strung by the legs and dunked repeatedly in the sea. A polythene bag was put on his face until he began to choke. We were stripped, our genitals tied with cables; the pirates would fire around us, tie us to air ducts where temperatures were upward of 40 degrees (Celsius).” Yet during their captivity, Dangwal says, officials sat with their families, conveyed crucial information, relayed salaries and negotiated patiently with the pirates.

On the MV Suez, the pirates began tapping the crew’s native governments through translators. In the meanwhile, fuel and food supplies dried up. “After six months, we lost all hope that we would live. We had heard ‘the money is being arranged’ so many times, it didn’t matter any more,” says Pawshe. Four translators came on board during that time, he says. “The first, Hasan, a well-dressed advocate from London, kept telling them ‘this company will not pay you. At best they have $1 million’, but they wouldn’t listen. They wanted $5 million. The second was the son of a Somalian minister. The pirates were scared of him; he got money out of the owner, but he kept it for himself. He also got money out of the pirates.”

Then the revolution in Egypt derailed talks.

Every time a deal died, the sailors were grouped by nationality and beaten. “They would pull out the Indians saying ‘your government doesn’t want you, is it?’ and they would start hitting us,” Pawshe recalls, bitterly.

It was November by the time the Indians persuaded the pirates to allow them to speak to their families and convince them to collect the ransom money.

N.K. Sharma, 39, a third engineer aboard the MV Suez, now home in Jammu, echoes Pawshe’s sense of abandonment. He says: “It was hell and more. Yet for those the owner let down, the governments stepped in. While the Pakistani captain had access to Burney,

TED RUFUS ROSS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ································· he pirates of Somalia are reviled by international security agencies, shipping companies and several national governments. These fierce gangs, estimated to comprise between 1,000 and 2,000 pirates in total, terrorize one of the arterial shipping routes in the world.

Despite their small numbers, limited firepower and—with some astonishing exceptions—primitive organization, these pirate gangs pose a serious threat to professional security organizations and national navies.

They are sometimes portrayed in the media as modern-day buccaneers. But while the opinion of modern Somali piracy is polarized, the history, origins and driving forces behind this phenomenon are less so.

What drove so many people in coastal Somalia to piracy? Today Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 2010, the country had an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of around $5.73 billion (around `26,000 crore), approximately equal to that of Goa. This translates to a per capita income of around $600. Somalia is often cited as the perfect example of a failed state: The country has not had anything remotely close to a national government since 1991, when it was plunged into a civil war along clan lines.

But things were not always so bleak.

When Somalia was granted independence in 1960, it embraced democracy enthusiastically. For almost a decade, seething clan and regional rivalries were held at bay by a sense of pan-Somalism.

But slowly democracy lost that initial head of steam and in 1969, socialist military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre came to power. Barre’s ideology of choice was a heavily Chinese-influenced “scientific socialism”.

Barre’s regime oversaw a period of intense nationalization, collective farming and forced suppression of ethnic and clan differences. Eventually the Somali government began accepting aid from foreign governments, including help to develop a floundering fisheries sector. In many ways the seeds of modern Somali piracy were sown in this period.

A December 1982 issue of the Marine Fisheries Review journal lists aid from Japan, Germany, Denmark, the UK and Sweden that was being used to build and renovate cold stores, fish markets, marine engines and other infrastructure. The report states that despite the modest beginning and low domestic demand—at the time Somalis overwhelmingly preferred

T

Ahmed Chinoy (citizen-police liaison chairman) and the governor of Sind with just one phone call, whenever the pirates asked us Indians to call home, we had nobody to talk to but our families.” Pawshe thought relief would never come. But finally it did. After Khalid (the third translator, a teenager) came and went, the fourth translator, Mohammed, a sales manager from Dubai, convinced the pirates to negotiate with the families. The five families of the Indian crew, except for Pawshe’s which did not have the resources, collected `3 lakh each, to be handed over via MP K.D. Singh. Singh was to be the Indian conduit to Burney, the liaison at the Pakistan end, who would make the transfer to the pirates.

“I will never forget 23 May 2011 in my life,” Pawshe says. “The money was to be handed over. The dates had been conveyed. Four times, Singh made excuses after reaching Dubai. When only the money for the six Indian crew members didn’t come, the pirates beat us brutally.” Burney realized what was happening, and paid for the Indian crew.

Burney says: “Ransom is illegal under international law. I could not pay the pirates directly. At best, we could put the money into accounts for the families and transfer to the shipping company as ‘humanitarian aid’. On the day of the transfer, the MP from India disappeared. When I informed the pirates, they called the Egyptian crew member and poured boiling hot oil on him as he screamed into the phone. I pleaded with them for three days time

and literally got on to the pavement—you know the state our nation is in now. In Pakistan, it is not easy to raise money for Indians.”

A spokesperson for Singh says: “We had attempted to raise money and had approached corporates but we could not even collect `1 crore, when the demand was much higher, so we gave up. As you know there is no official policy from the government on ransom so as an MP, there was little Mr Singh could do as an individual. We did collect money from sailors’ families for the Sailors’ Relief Fund, which is in an ICICI Bank account, KG Road branch. Mr Singh is not signatory to the account—only the sailors’ families are.”

The modus operandi pirates use while leaving a ship is as set as when they attack. The money is airdropped by a Dubai-based chartered plane. The engines are started 4 hours before the money arrives. The pirates bring counting machines and check it for fakes.

Then they leave. At the MV Suez, the $2.1 million was dropped on 14 June.

What was Pawshe’s first thought when the pirates left? “To return the ship to its owner,” he replies. “To a sailor, that is our duty. It ensures we get our salary.” Amazingly, the beleaguered crew, who by now had nothing—no clothes, no luggage, no food, no electronics, no fuel—simply got back to work. The crew contacted the owner repeatedly. Maritime protocol has it a warship must accompany a hijacked ship into safe waters. “The warship is coming. It’s behind you,” the owner

promised. A day passed. The crew sent a distress call and a Pakistani navy vessel responded, accompanying them to Karachi.

“Soon, the MV Suez began to fill with water and we didn’t have enough diesel to pump it out. The owner promised to send a tugboat.

When the captain realized it was not coming, he gave the order to abandon ship,” says Pawshe. Transferred to the Pakistani warship, the crew watched the MV Suez sink.

The room falls silent. The smell of hot chappatis fills the afternoon air. Sharma comes to mind. “I have not seen vegetables for 10 months,” he had said on the phone. “I think our owner wanted to kill us,” says Pawshe. “He did not want to pay our salary claims, settlements, and besides, he could collect insurance on the ship. And us.” It is a realization that has come to haunt him.

The saga does not end for Burney. Another set of families of crew held hostage for more than a year has contacted him via email. “I am a human rights activist. If you were a doctor and a man called you and said he was dying, what would you do?” he says.

Despite his own ordeal, Dangwal is all praise for the Indian Navy. “Why should the government negotiate with terrorists? It will simply set precedents. Blame Nato and the UN who don’t deem Somalia important as it has no oil. After all, the Indian Navy is the only navy in the world that has even arrested 120 pirates. It’s just that internationally, there is no maritime law to support their prosecution.” Governing

laws make provision for measures and drills that Dangwal calls “bull****”. “We can neither carry weapons, nor fight the pirates, nor kill them. If caught, they have to be released.

Why?” he asks.

Anil Devli, CEO of the Indian National Shipowners Association, says laws are changing and the anger against the government’s lack of action is unjustified. “The (Union) law ministry is in the process of drafting a new law to support the action taken by our navy,” he says. The Bill is scheduled to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament. The government is also considering a proposal to allow armed guards on board commercial ships. But as Devli says, “The onus on international action lies with the United Nations, which needs to empower navies currently patrolling these waters, to act.”

Sharma, a father of two, will not return to the sea. He calls his life back on shore a rebirth. “There should be some time limit.

When the government can see that everything that could be done has been done, owners are irresponsible, and crew member’s lives are on the line, it is important to step in,” he says. Pawshe, however, needs the money. He will sail again in two months, wiser, he believes. “I will go straight to the captain and tell him to shut all hatches, kill the electricity and gather every man to the engine room with walkie-talkies, where we can call for help sealed in. When they cannot find us, they cannot navigate the ship, and they will leave,” he says. For Rathore, the hardest lesson came after being released: that astounding sense of aloneness. He refused to quit the sea, much to his parents’ annoyance. With monetary assistance from Save Our Seafarers, he is completing his exams. “I am sorry for causing my father pain, but I can’t just quit the sea. One can’t just surrender to the terror of Somali pirates like most of our governments have. The sea to me is synonymous with freedom, and a bunch of maniacs can’t scare me.”

Return to safety: (clockwise from top, left) Indian Coast Guard’s chief of Western Command A.K. Mahajan inspecting 15 pirates aboard the Veera in November 1999; Sachin Pawshe (left) reunited with his family in Kalyan in June; Dipendra Rathore (right) and the crew of the Marida Marguerite celebrating their release in December; and the Star of India at the San Diego Maritime Museum.

meat to fish in their diet—the industry “has considerable potential, for Somali-claimed waters reportedly contain important stocks of sardines that are currently underutilized”.

But then just when the fishing industry was beginning to develop, the country was plunged into a civil war in 1991.

Barre’s government was overthrown and the country subsequently fragmented into several pieces. With no functioning government, navy or coast guard, the waters inside Somalia’s nautical boundaries were left open to exploitation.

According to experts, what followed was foreign players using Somali weakness to commit two enduring crimes: illegal fishing, and dumping of harmful toxic waste in the country’s waters. A January 2005 report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization put the number of unlicensed foreign vehicles fishing in Somali waters at 700.

In the space of just a few years,

under­equipped Somali fishermen,

who were making

around $15 million a year, saw their

catches being decimated

by European and

Asian trawlers stealing as much as $300 million worth of

tuna, shrimp and lobster each year

In the space of just a few years, underequipped Somali fishermen, who were making around $15 million a year, saw their catches being decimated by European and Asian trawlers stealing as much as $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp and lobster each year (estimates for the amount of stolen fish annually vary from $50 million to $300 million).

Then there is the poison in their waters. The sheer scale of illegal waste dumping in Somali waters only emerged after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when toxic barrels washed up on Somali shores. A Times of London report after the tsunami quotes Somali sources who said the chemicals

Setting sail: Somali pirates in Hobyo, north­ eastern Somalia. that washed ashore “included radioactive uranium, lead, cadmium, mercury and industrial, hospital, chemical and various other toxic wastes”.

Several companies, many European, were quick to spot an opportunity in the unguarded Somali waters. While disposing of toxic wastes in Europe can cost around $1,000 a tonne, illegally dumping it in Somalia costs merely $2.50-8 a tonne, according to a 2005 United Nations Environment Programme report.

There is a popular point of view that piracy began in Somali waters with locals trying to ward off illegal trawlers and dumping ships. When this failed, the Somalis began to demand some form of compensation to let these foreign intruders ply their trade in unprotected Somali waters.

Eventually this resistance, still seen by many Somalis as a patriotic struggle to protect their sovereign rights, transformed into today’s quasi-organized pirate enterprise. In April, intelligence consultancy Geopolicity released a report that estimates the size of the “piracy economy” at $5-9 billion. Which means that piracy easily doubles the size of Somalia’s economy. The report also said several pirates drew annual incomes of around $79,000 a year, 130 times the annual Somali’s per capita income.

The most startling indicator of how widespread piracy has become a part of coastal culture, society and economy is the pirate stock exchange in Haradheere, 400km from the capital Mogadishu. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the stock exchange allowed individuals to buy stakes in future hijack attempts in exchange for cash, equipment or even time.

The impact of all this is several bizarre pockets of prosperity on the Somali coast. Successful pirates live in large homes, drive big cars and feed thriving local economies. There is no doubt that most of them no longer fight for the sovereignty of Somali waters. But the scourge of Somali pirates is not something that popped out of an evil imagination. It is the outcome of a sad sequence of events, including a dictatorship, civil war, international apathy and planned assaults on Somali livelihood and environment.

And, once again, our only solution right now is to bomb it out of the water.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L10 COVER

COVER L11

LOUNGE

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM AFP

RITAM BANERJEE/MINT

HISTORY

Riders of the sea Somali pirates didn’t just pop out of an overactive imagination

MOHAMED DAHIR/AFP

® FROM PAGE L9

Council, puts piracy costs to the world shipping industry at $3.5-8 billion a year. The impact on trade is brutal. According to London’s International Maritime Bureau, since the start of 2011 alone, there have been 71 attacks resulting in 21 hijackings off the coast of Somalia, with more than 3,500 sailors being held hostage. With India being the largest supplier of seafarers in the world, more than 65% of those held captive at any point in time are Indian, according to Save Our Seafarers, an international coalition of major shipping companies against piracy.

Dipendra Singh Rathore, 22, studying to be a third mate at the Glasgow Institute of Maritime Studies, was aboard the MT Marida Marguerite when it was waylaid in May 2010 on its way to Antwerp. Rathore grew up in Chittorgarh and had always been fascinated by the sea. “I had never seen a ship in my life. I convinced my parents with great difficulty to let me go,” he says. “I was the youngest on that ship and at my age, physical pain is still bearable. But what actually got to me was watching or hearing people twice my age being tortured and beaten. I couldn’t help them. All I could do was pray. There came a time when I even stopped praying,” he says.

As such captive sailors disembark, smile for the cameras and disappear into their homes in the towns and villages, away from the euphoria surrounding their release, stories of abuse and torture, careers cut short, financial handicaps, physical and mental scars, and recurring nightmares remain untold. Some inevitably return to the only source of income they know, while others choose to go jobless, paralysed into inaction by the trauma. It is almost as though Amitav Ghosh wrote of men such as Pawshe in his Sea of Poppies: “How had it happened that while choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines… It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”

Pawshe boarded MV Suez at Tuticorin and sailed to Karachi on 24 July 2010, where the ship picked up its cargo of cement bags intended for Eritrea via the IRTC (Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor) through the Gulf of Aden. “It was a journey that should have taken just 10 days,” says Pawshe, who was on watch the night of 1 August 2010. “It was the seventh day of our transit; at 11pm, we saw the pirates approach in speedboats and circle the ship, like sharks. I actually recorded it on my mobile phone because it was the first time I was seeing pirates.” The pirates were reconnoitring to check if the MV Suez had firearms. At 7am, they attacked. “It was like a game that just took 5 minutes to play,” recollects Pawshe, who stood ready, manning his high-pressure water hose. “These drills are pointless—they tossed a ladder with a hook over the side of the ship, despite the razor wire, and began to climb as their accomplices sprayed the bridge (made of glass) with their AK-47s.” Pawshe hid behind the hatch, but within minutes the pirates had taken a man hostage and reached the bridge, threatening to kill him, forcing the Pakistani captain, Syed Wasi Hasan, to shut down the engines and summon the 22-member crew. Beaten, kicked and punched, the crew was forced to huddle in complete silence. By the time a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) helicopter responded to the distress signal an hour later, it was too late. The crew was forced to divert the ship to Danana, Somalia, from where it was periodically shifted to Garth, and docked at a distance from 10-15 other hijacked ships.

The sailors’ belongings were looted. Pawshe says: “On the first two days, we were given only packaged food to eat; biscuits, bread. We were hit if we tried to speak to each other. The captain and chief engineer were isolated. We were not allowed to even use the toilet.”

Since 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau, 62 sailors have died due to piracy: some from heart attacks during torture, some from injuries, some committing suicide.

On the MV Suez, some men broke down as bullets whizzed past. Frying pans were thrown at their heads. Their ankles and wrists were tied. When the pirates were satisfied the crew was submissive, they summoned the cook and a rudimentary supply of rice, flour, onions and potatoes was rationed out twice a day—at 11am and 6pm—while the crew worked its shifts with armed guards. “Till the stocks lasted, we got food. That was three months. But none of us thought we would be there for so long. We thought, maximum six months? But 10 months?” Pawshe’s voice trails off in anger as he adds, “At the end of one month, the captain told us the owner had said ‘kill the men and keep the ship, I don’t want either back’.”

Lounge was unable to get through to the Red Sea Navigation Company, Suez.

Ansar Burney, a Pakistani lawyer who works to free innocents incarcerated worldwide, explains on the phone from London how he travelled to Somalia, Yemen, Aden, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Dubai repeatedly after being contacted by the families of the Pakistani crew. When the Indians on board appealed to him, he couldn’t refuse. “I do not believe in boundaries or religion. There is only one religion—human dignity,” he says. Burney refused the pirates’ offer to release only the Pakistanis. He explains why: “If I had accepted, the four Pakistanis would have been released but the 18 remaining would have died.”

In the West, kidnap-and-ransom insurance is common, allowing companies to secure their employees’ lives more quickly. The profile of the shipping company can dictate how quickly you will be set free, but it can also determine the extent of torture. Sandeep Dangwal, 27, was hostage aboard the MT Marida Marguerite. Captive for eight months, until their release on 28 December, the 22-member crew of the Marguerite was subjected to physical abuse, by all accounts much worse than what the crew of the MV Suez underwent. Their owner, OMCI, a German company, was more likely to shell out the ransom money that saw negotiations begin at $25 million. Dangwal, speaking from his home in Dehradun, says: “The pirates asked us to run the ship for 30 days on three days’ worth of fuel. If the captain said he couldn’t, he was hit, strung by the legs and dunked repeatedly in the sea. A polythene bag was put on his face until he began to choke. We were stripped, our genitals tied with cables; the pirates would fire around us, tie us to air ducts where temperatures were upward of 40 degrees (Celsius).” Yet during their captivity, Dangwal says, officials sat with their families, conveyed crucial information, relayed salaries and negotiated patiently with the pirates.

On the MV Suez, the pirates began tapping the crew’s native governments through translators. In the meanwhile, fuel and food supplies dried up. “After six months, we lost all hope that we would live. We had heard ‘the money is being arranged’ so many times, it didn’t matter any more,” says Pawshe. Four translators came on board during that time, he says. “The first, Hasan, a well-dressed advocate from London, kept telling them ‘this company will not pay you. At best they have $1 million’, but they wouldn’t listen. They wanted $5 million. The second was the son of a Somalian minister. The pirates were scared of him; he got money out of the owner, but he kept it for himself. He also got money out of the pirates.”

Then the revolution in Egypt derailed talks.

Every time a deal died, the sailors were grouped by nationality and beaten. “They would pull out the Indians saying ‘your government doesn’t want you, is it?’ and they would start hitting us,” Pawshe recalls, bitterly.

It was November by the time the Indians persuaded the pirates to allow them to speak to their families and convince them to collect the ransom money.

N.K. Sharma, 39, a third engineer aboard the MV Suez, now home in Jammu, echoes Pawshe’s sense of abandonment. He says: “It was hell and more. Yet for those the owner let down, the governments stepped in. While the Pakistani captain had access to Burney,

TED RUFUS ROSS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ································· he pirates of Somalia are reviled by international security agencies, shipping companies and several national governments. These fierce gangs, estimated to comprise between 1,000 and 2,000 pirates in total, terrorize one of the arterial shipping routes in the world.

Despite their small numbers, limited firepower and—with some astonishing exceptions—primitive organization, these pirate gangs pose a serious threat to professional security organizations and national navies.

They are sometimes portrayed in the media as modern-day buccaneers. But while the opinion of modern Somali piracy is polarized, the history, origins and driving forces behind this phenomenon are less so.

What drove so many people in coastal Somalia to piracy? Today Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 2010, the country had an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of around $5.73 billion (around `26,000 crore), approximately equal to that of Goa. This translates to a per capita income of around $600. Somalia is often cited as the perfect example of a failed state: The country has not had anything remotely close to a national government since 1991, when it was plunged into a civil war along clan lines.

But things were not always so bleak.

When Somalia was granted independence in 1960, it embraced democracy enthusiastically. For almost a decade, seething clan and regional rivalries were held at bay by a sense of pan-Somalism.

But slowly democracy lost that initial head of steam and in 1969, socialist military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre came to power. Barre’s ideology of choice was a heavily Chinese-influenced “scientific socialism”.

Barre’s regime oversaw a period of intense nationalization, collective farming and forced suppression of ethnic and clan differences. Eventually the Somali government began accepting aid from foreign governments, including help to develop a floundering fisheries sector. In many ways the seeds of modern Somali piracy were sown in this period.

A December 1982 issue of the Marine Fisheries Review journal lists aid from Japan, Germany, Denmark, the UK and Sweden that was being used to build and renovate cold stores, fish markets, marine engines and other infrastructure. The report states that despite the modest beginning and low domestic demand—at the time Somalis overwhelmingly preferred

T

Ahmed Chinoy (citizen-police liaison chairman) and the governor of Sind with just one phone call, whenever the pirates asked us Indians to call home, we had nobody to talk to but our families.” Pawshe thought relief would never come. But finally it did. After Khalid (the third translator, a teenager) came and went, the fourth translator, Mohammed, a sales manager from Dubai, convinced the pirates to negotiate with the families. The five families of the Indian crew, except for Pawshe’s which did not have the resources, collected `3 lakh each, to be handed over via MP K.D. Singh. Singh was to be the Indian conduit to Burney, the liaison at the Pakistan end, who would make the transfer to the pirates.

“I will never forget 23 May 2011 in my life,” Pawshe says. “The money was to be handed over. The dates had been conveyed. Four times, Singh made excuses after reaching Dubai. When only the money for the six Indian crew members didn’t come, the pirates beat us brutally.” Burney realized what was happening, and paid for the Indian crew.

Burney says: “Ransom is illegal under international law. I could not pay the pirates directly. At best, we could put the money into accounts for the families and transfer to the shipping company as ‘humanitarian aid’. On the day of the transfer, the MP from India disappeared. When I informed the pirates, they called the Egyptian crew member and poured boiling hot oil on him as he screamed into the phone. I pleaded with them for three days time

and literally got on to the pavement—you know the state our nation is in now. In Pakistan, it is not easy to raise money for Indians.”

A spokesperson for Singh says: “We had attempted to raise money and had approached corporates but we could not even collect `1 crore, when the demand was much higher, so we gave up. As you know there is no official policy from the government on ransom so as an MP, there was little Mr Singh could do as an individual. We did collect money from sailors’ families for the Sailors’ Relief Fund, which is in an ICICI Bank account, KG Road branch. Mr Singh is not signatory to the account—only the sailors’ families are.”

The modus operandi pirates use while leaving a ship is as set as when they attack. The money is airdropped by a Dubai-based chartered plane. The engines are started 4 hours before the money arrives. The pirates bring counting machines and check it for fakes.

Then they leave. At the MV Suez, the $2.1 million was dropped on 14 June.

What was Pawshe’s first thought when the pirates left? “To return the ship to its owner,” he replies. “To a sailor, that is our duty. It ensures we get our salary.” Amazingly, the beleaguered crew, who by now had nothing—no clothes, no luggage, no food, no electronics, no fuel—simply got back to work. The crew contacted the owner repeatedly. Maritime protocol has it a warship must accompany a hijacked ship into safe waters. “The warship is coming. It’s behind you,” the owner

promised. A day passed. The crew sent a distress call and a Pakistani navy vessel responded, accompanying them to Karachi.

“Soon, the MV Suez began to fill with water and we didn’t have enough diesel to pump it out. The owner promised to send a tugboat.

When the captain realized it was not coming, he gave the order to abandon ship,” says Pawshe. Transferred to the Pakistani warship, the crew watched the MV Suez sink.

The room falls silent. The smell of hot chappatis fills the afternoon air. Sharma comes to mind. “I have not seen vegetables for 10 months,” he had said on the phone. “I think our owner wanted to kill us,” says Pawshe. “He did not want to pay our salary claims, settlements, and besides, he could collect insurance on the ship. And us.” It is a realization that has come to haunt him.

The saga does not end for Burney. Another set of families of crew held hostage for more than a year has contacted him via email. “I am a human rights activist. If you were a doctor and a man called you and said he was dying, what would you do?” he says.

Despite his own ordeal, Dangwal is all praise for the Indian Navy. “Why should the government negotiate with terrorists? It will simply set precedents. Blame Nato and the UN who don’t deem Somalia important as it has no oil. After all, the Indian Navy is the only navy in the world that has even arrested 120 pirates. It’s just that internationally, there is no maritime law to support their prosecution.” Governing

laws make provision for measures and drills that Dangwal calls “bull****”. “We can neither carry weapons, nor fight the pirates, nor kill them. If caught, they have to be released.

Why?” he asks.

Anil Devli, CEO of the Indian National Shipowners Association, says laws are changing and the anger against the government’s lack of action is unjustified. “The (Union) law ministry is in the process of drafting a new law to support the action taken by our navy,” he says. The Bill is scheduled to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament. The government is also considering a proposal to allow armed guards on board commercial ships. But as Devli says, “The onus on international action lies with the United Nations, which needs to empower navies currently patrolling these waters, to act.”

Sharma, a father of two, will not return to the sea. He calls his life back on shore a rebirth. “There should be some time limit.

When the government can see that everything that could be done has been done, owners are irresponsible, and crew member’s lives are on the line, it is important to step in,” he says. Pawshe, however, needs the money. He will sail again in two months, wiser, he believes. “I will go straight to the captain and tell him to shut all hatches, kill the electricity and gather every man to the engine room with walkie-talkies, where we can call for help sealed in. When they cannot find us, they cannot navigate the ship, and they will leave,” he says. For Rathore, the hardest lesson came after being released: that astounding sense of aloneness. He refused to quit the sea, much to his parents’ annoyance. With monetary assistance from Save Our Seafarers, he is completing his exams. “I am sorry for causing my father pain, but I can’t just quit the sea. One can’t just surrender to the terror of Somali pirates like most of our governments have. The sea to me is synonymous with freedom, and a bunch of maniacs can’t scare me.”

Return to safety: (clockwise from top, left) Indian Coast Guard’s chief of Western Command A.K. Mahajan inspecting 15 pirates aboard the Veera in November 1999; Sachin Pawshe (left) reunited with his family in Kalyan in June; Dipendra Rathore (right) and the crew of the Marida Marguerite celebrating their release in December; and the Star of India at the San Diego Maritime Museum.

meat to fish in their diet—the industry “has considerable potential, for Somali-claimed waters reportedly contain important stocks of sardines that are currently underutilized”.

But then just when the fishing industry was beginning to develop, the country was plunged into a civil war in 1991.

Barre’s government was overthrown and the country subsequently fragmented into several pieces. With no functioning government, navy or coast guard, the waters inside Somalia’s nautical boundaries were left open to exploitation.

According to experts, what followed was foreign players using Somali weakness to commit two enduring crimes: illegal fishing, and dumping of harmful toxic waste in the country’s waters. A January 2005 report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization put the number of unlicensed foreign vehicles fishing in Somali waters at 700.

In the space of just a few years,

under­equipped Somali fishermen,

who were making

around $15 million a year, saw their

catches being decimated

by European and

Asian trawlers stealing as much as $300 million worth of

tuna, shrimp and lobster each year

In the space of just a few years, underequipped Somali fishermen, who were making around $15 million a year, saw their catches being decimated by European and Asian trawlers stealing as much as $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp and lobster each year (estimates for the amount of stolen fish annually vary from $50 million to $300 million).

Then there is the poison in their waters. The sheer scale of illegal waste dumping in Somali waters only emerged after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when toxic barrels washed up on Somali shores. A Times of London report after the tsunami quotes Somali sources who said the chemicals

Setting sail: Somali pirates in Hobyo, north­ eastern Somalia. that washed ashore “included radioactive uranium, lead, cadmium, mercury and industrial, hospital, chemical and various other toxic wastes”.

Several companies, many European, were quick to spot an opportunity in the unguarded Somali waters. While disposing of toxic wastes in Europe can cost around $1,000 a tonne, illegally dumping it in Somalia costs merely $2.50-8 a tonne, according to a 2005 United Nations Environment Programme report.

There is a popular point of view that piracy began in Somali waters with locals trying to ward off illegal trawlers and dumping ships. When this failed, the Somalis began to demand some form of compensation to let these foreign intruders ply their trade in unprotected Somali waters.

Eventually this resistance, still seen by many Somalis as a patriotic struggle to protect their sovereign rights, transformed into today’s quasi-organized pirate enterprise. In April, intelligence consultancy Geopolicity released a report that estimates the size of the “piracy economy” at $5-9 billion. Which means that piracy easily doubles the size of Somalia’s economy. The report also said several pirates drew annual incomes of around $79,000 a year, 130 times the annual Somali’s per capita income.

The most startling indicator of how widespread piracy has become a part of coastal culture, society and economy is the pirate stock exchange in Haradheere, 400km from the capital Mogadishu. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the stock exchange allowed individuals to buy stakes in future hijack attempts in exchange for cash, equipment or even time.

The impact of all this is several bizarre pockets of prosperity on the Somali coast. Successful pirates live in large homes, drive big cars and feed thriving local economies. There is no doubt that most of them no longer fight for the sovereignty of Somali waters. But the scourge of Somali pirates is not something that popped out of an evil imagination. It is the outcome of a sad sequence of events, including a dictatorship, civil war, international apathy and planned assaults on Somali livelihood and environment.

And, once again, our only solution right now is to bomb it out of the water.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE PULKIT VASUDHA

ARIZONA

Thorny miles

You may seek the desert, but you’ll find six ecosystems and towering saguaros to define each

B Y P ULKIT V ASUDHA ···························· ruising on a dark, desert highway across the width of California, I entered the outskirts of Phoenix on a balmy summer night. Long before the city lights approached, the weak beams of my 1995 Nissan began picking out stupefied giants scattered across a bare Arizonian landscape.

As I pulled up outside my host’s, I saw, properly, for the first time, a saguaro (pronounced sawaa-ro)—the tallest cactus in the world. Towering over the red sandstone town home, this saguaro had just started sprouting arms. “It’s about 60 years old, still young in saguaro years,” said Karen Wonders, my friend and host for the night. “It’s only 17ft, no more than a dwarf!”

The saguaro, whose blossom Arizona has appointed as its state flower, is stamped vividly in our imaginations—less as a cactus, more as the subject for scenic sunsets.

The giant cacti live up to 150

C

ALEX DIOMIDOV/THINKSTOCK

years, growing as tall as 50ft, their arms shooting out when they turn 50. People like having saguaros in their front or back yards, and sometimes steal or kill for them.

Karen’s home is full of saguaros, the framed kind. “I left the thick ponderosa pines of Pennsylvania 18 years ago and fell in love with the barren beauty of the desert,” she said.

As we walked around her home looking at photos of many-armed massive cacti, Karen told me of Native American legends that have become mere memory in these uber urban times—of people lost in the back country, without food or water, who transform into saguaros and stand sentinel, warning people of the dangers of the desert.

She told me of other, more recent legends—less fantastical ones about Mexican drug lords who paid thousands of dollars to dig up and deliver house-high cacti to mansions across the border. It is illegal to harm a saguaro in Arizona, but the law has never deterred the mafia from indulging in a little cross-border trafficking, prickly as it may be.

I had come to Arizona in search of Spanish stucco homes, arid deserts and fiery fajitas, but the saguaros had me bewitched. I was so taken that Karen suggested a visit to the Saguaro National Park in Tucson, a 2-hour drive away.

I took the bait. To avoid the dehydrating heat of the desert sun, I took off at the crack of dawn. The early morning light thickened with saguaro silhouettes as I got closer to Tucson.

After an hour and a half on the road, a breakfast of burrito and horchata (an icy rice powder and milk drink), I made my way into the park. A $10 (around `450) vehicle entrance fee later, I was officially in prime saguaro terSurreal beauty: (from extreme left) The saguaro cactus; there are 24 other cacti varieties; a vineyard in Tucson; and a Convair 240 in the Arizona Boneyard.

PULKIT VASUDHA

PHILLIP CAPPER/FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/FLISSPHIL

TRIP PLANNER/ARIZONA

You will need a visa for the US. Apply for one through VFS (www.vfs-usa.co.in). There is a long wait for an appointment with the embassy or consulate, so apply well in advance.

There are direct flights to Tucson from most American cities. Phoenix, also in Arizona, is a major focus airport for low-cost carrier Southwest Airways, so you may find it cheaper to fly to Phoenix and drive from there. Current advance return fares to Tucson on full-service airlines are:

Delta (SkyTeam) Lufthansa/United Airlines (Star Alliance) American Airlines/Jet Airways (oneworld)

Delhi R85,690 R86,930

Mumbai R75,300 R79,400 -

Bangalore R95,230 -

Rates may change.

Stay

US To Los Angeles

ARIZONA Phoenix

Tucson

To New Mexico

Eat

Do

There are many reasonably priced, charming B&Bs in Tucson. Book at the hacienda-style Desert Trails B&B (a double-occupancy room from $105, or around R5,000, a night, www.deserttrails.com), or stay closer to the historic downtown at Adobe Rose Inn (a double-occupancy room from $90 a night, www.aroseinn.com).

Tucson has excellent Mexican food. Stop at any taqueria to get hearty burritos, enchiladas, quessadillas, and more. Don't forget to get a tall glass of horchata to beat the southern sun.

 Tucson is a bike-friendly city with plenty of bike paths.  After a day hiking amid cacti, head to the Aircraft Boneyard, which has more than 4,000 out-of-service aircraft ($7 for adults, $4 for children).  Visit the Old Tucson Studios, where Wild West movies have been shot since the 1930s ($16.95 for adults, $10.95 for children).  Get out of Tucson to visit stunning limestone formations at Kartchner Caverns ($22.95 for adults, $12.95 for children).

GRAPHIC BY AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

ritory, and fittingly, there was a conclave of saguaros, standing upright in their welcome, right outside the visitor centre.

I craned my neck to marvel at the sheer size of the cacti. Ignoring other morning hikers heading into the visitor centre, I got my binoculars out and began to scan the height of a giant saguaro. The tiny black spots, no larger than a beetle, turned out to be woodpeckers perched high, pecking out homes for themselves.

The Saguaro National Park covers an astounding 57,930 acres, and before you say “desert”, think again. The area has six diverse ecosystems teeming with life, ranging from desert scrubs to pine forests that are covered with snow in winter. And apart from saguaros, there are 24 other cacti varieties here, creating a desert so lush you’ll hesitate to call it one. In the lowlands, the only wildlife you’ll come across is squirrels, coyotes and skunks, but higher up in the pine forests, there are mountain lions and black bears.

The half-mile, self-guided trail at the park’s entrance gives hikers a taste of the wilderness ahead, with information boards and plenty of benches should one tire.

The trail runs close to a dry creek bed, where I spotted a shy coyote rubbing itself against the ribs of a dead saguaro.

There is a scenic 8-mile drive through the park with turnouts to stop and take in the breathtaking scenery. But to get up close and personal with the tallest cacti in the world, you have to abandon the luxuries of your car (difficult to do if the sun is rising high in the sky) and hike into the forest.

I got off the trail to explore some of the more interesting saguaro contortions. Sensitive as the saguaros are, the slightest winter frost can shrivel their growing arms and result in delightful sculptures. And this is why collectors cough up good moolah for strangely sculpted saguaros.

Karen had told me a story about saguaros taking sweet revenge. The hulky arms of the giant cacti have a penchant for falling on and killing poachers who try digging them up—a thorny and painful way to go.

Stepping around prickly pears, organ pipes and barrel cacti, I followed the trail deeper into the desert. For every saguaro I found, there was one taller, more spectacular in the distance. After an hour of hiking, I sat down at a picnic table to take in the surreal beauty surrounding me. The whiff of food made me some friends. The wrens living in a saguaro nearby were probably used to hungry hikers leaving them some titbits. Perhaps because they were Sonoran, they quite enjoyed my spicy poha. The Californian birds would have surely turned up their beaks.

Forest squawks and squeals broke the eerie silence of this desert. In this Arizonian Brobdingnag, I felt a strange serenity, as if the saguaros were watching my back.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Children will enjoy the exhibits at the national park, the zoo at the Arizona­ Sonora Desert Museum, and fake gun­ fights at the Old Tucson Studios.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

The self­guided trail at the national park is wheelchair­accessible, as are many destinations in the city. There are also discounts at many places.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Tucson is among the most liberal cities in southern US, and was the first big city in the US to offer LGBT protection by law.

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

Barcelona’s green fairy QUIM LLENAS/COVER/GETTY IMAGES

A quest to find Hemingway over conversation and drinks with friends across continents

B

y the time we reached the end of the street where we’d find the bar I had been looking for, we had walked through several back alleys behind the opera house.

Pakistani shopkeepers ran the shops and cafés alongside the alleys, and one of them curiously called itself a Tandoori House and served pizza.

After another left turn at the end of that alley, we came to the square that was barricaded because the ground was being surfaced, and as we had been warned, we saw several women—their tightest possible dresses tensely hugging their bodies—keen to attract the roving eyes of single men walking alongside us.

And I saw Bar Marsella. But it was closed.

I hadn’t come all the way to Barcelona to see this bar with its shutter down. To cheer my mood, my friend Melissa who had come with me looking for the bar, told me to stand in front of the shutter while she took a picture. As she asked me to smile, one of the charming ladies walking the streets said: “Mister, it opens at 10 o’clock.”

And then she winked. It felt like a Hemingway moment.

After a stop at a bar serving tapas and more wine, we decided to head back to Marsella, hoping to raise a glass of absinthe for Papa. Later, back home, I would write to Jack Turner, asking about the bar. He is writing a book on absinthe, and would reply: “The bar is a mandatory stop for all admirers of Hemingway, absinthe, and callow American English majors abroad, impressed by the relevant passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

The women outside had found companions and looked busy as they began disappearing into the blocks of flats near the bar. Marsella’s ceiling was imposing and

looked yellowed, like fading newsprint, as if no one had washed it in the nearly two centuries of the bar’s existence.

The light was yellow too, looking brighter because of the chandelier that reflected and magnified its reach. Its yellow glow, and the green tinge of absinthe, gave the bar a muted look, as though we had stepped into the Degas painting of an absinthe drinker. The mirrors were tall and faded, the woodwork looked solid and old. In its seedy, melancholy air, it looks like the kind of bar where Hemingway would have found home.

One table had three men, saying little to one another; another had two women, sitting close to each other. The bar had a large floor, but it didn’t seem it had ever been used for dance. This was where you went to sit, brood, and reflect on your loneliness. As the night lengthened, it became a bit more cheerful, as more people came to the café, and the bartender, who had looked morose, seemed to brighten a little.

I watched the waiter place the glass and a fork on my table. He put a sugar cube on the fork and gave me a bottle of sealed, chilled water, with a tiny hole in its cap, asking me to pour it over the cube until it dissolved.

The sweetened water would drop on the spirit below, releasing the powers of the green fairy.

Absinthe was banned for some time in the last century. Made from herbs such as anise and fennel and wormwood, absinthe supposedly had magical powers that played with your mind. The French symbolists—Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme certainly, but to some extent even Baudelaire— credited it

ERIC LITTON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Back­alley boost: (above) A night view of Barcelona’s Passeig de Gracia avenue in Eixample district; and a glass of absinthe. with spurring their creativity and grew to depend on it. In 1995 on a trip to the Mediterranean, I had discovered pastis, the “parental-guidance” equivalent of absinthe, and had often wondered what was so special about a drink that tasted like fennel juice.

Turner credits Hemingway for being “almost single-handedly responsible for the American myth of absinthe, namely its supposedly hallucinogenic properties. He was gifted in this respect: what he did for bulls in Pamplona, and daiquiris in Cuba, he did for absinthe in Barcelona. It helped enormously that absinthe was

FOOT NOTES | AADISHT KHANNA

S

ome museums are private collections built as a labour of love. Some are grand, like the Salar Jung museum in Hyderabad and the Sheesh Mahal in Patiala.

Sometimes a museum is set up in premises dreamt up by a reputed, overimaginative architect, such as New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, which Frank Lloyd Wright designed to be all curves, to the exasperation of its curators—there are no flat surfaces on which to hang paintings.

There’s one class of museum that is neither repurposed building nor original construction, for the simple reason that it’s not a building, but a ship. These are decommissioned ships through which people can wander, exploring the design, technology and history. Lounge rounds up some of the most famous ship museums in the world.

INS Kursura India’s fourth submarine, INS Kursura, was in service from

Clean, Well-Lighted Place who had no one to talk with and had attempted suicide a week earlier.

But I had no cause for despair. A little electronic device had connected me with the friends I’d have liked around our table, and, for a brief moment, created a conversation across continents that collapsed so many worlds into one, cheering me.

We left the clean and pleasant bar. It was well-lighted, even if unpolished. From the outside, I couldn’t be sure, but there were perhaps shadows of the leaves as well.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Sea beasts: (clockwise from left) The Cutty Sark is the world’s most famous clipper; inside India’s fourth submarine INS Kursura; and the INS Kursura.

History in a ship The best ship museums in the world and why you should visit them

underground, and so the real thing was no longer available.

And it didn’t hurt that the drink was so strong. It appealed to both the alcoholic and the sentimentalist in him.”

I sipped absinthe, and it began its work alongside the ambience of dishevelled desolation. It was more potent than pastis. I uploaded on my Facebook page the photograph Melissa had taken: of me and my glass. A friend in London, a novelist, commented immediately, asking me to have one for her, and then another. A concerned friend in Seattle chimed in, warning me of what it did to the French symbolists. Hemingway would have challenged the bar and outdrunk everyone—or, at least claimed to have done so in a finely crafted story, even if he might have sat there, lonely, like that old man in A

MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

1969-2001, and is now a museum ship at Visakhapatnam. The museum provides details of the submarine’s role in the 1971 war and its goodwill visits to other nations. (www.indiannavy.nic.in)

Cutty Sark The Cutty Sark is possibly the world’s most famous clipper. These small, light ships were the peak of sail ship technology before steamships took over, and were used to speed Chinese tea to Britain in the 19th century. Today, the Cutty Sark is under renovation in a Greenwich dry dock. It will open to the public again next spring. (www.cuttysark.org.uk)

USS Nautilus The USS Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine.

It was an astonishing technological leap when it was developed in the 1950s—a boat that could stay submerged for unprecedented lengths of time, stay invisible to radar, and travel under polar ice.

Anchored in the Thames river in Connecticut, it now serves as a museum of all submarine warfare and navigation. (www.ussnautilus.org)

MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT

Edwin Fox The Edwin Fox is the world’s only surviving convict ship. Built in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1853, it sailed to London and began service as a troop ship in the Crimean War. After the war, it was turned into a passenger ship—and then, in 1858, a convict ship, transporting criminals to western Australia. The Edwin Fox ended its maritime life transporting sheep in New Zealand. For more than a hundred years it suffered the indignity of being treated as shore-bound junk, and was only restored as a museum in 1999. (www.edwinfoxsociety.com) Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

CRIME FICTION

The (really) long goodbye THE YOUNG GUNS

He’s got a gun, a badge—and rheumatoid arthritis. The iconic detectives are fighting a new foe: old age

Several best­selling authors are anointing a new generation of sleuths, launching young adult series with teen crime­solvers.

Some writers may extend their adult series by passing the torch to their regular protagonists’ young relatives

TERRILL LEE LANKFORD

Mickey Bolitar Creator: Harlan Coben Age: 15 Profile: Mickey is the teenage nephew of the sports agent and amateur investigator who stars in Coben’s best­selling ‘Myron Bolitar’ series. Mickey, who had a cameo in Coben’s last adult novel, gets his own young adult series this September.

Tory Brennan Creator: Kathy Reichs Age: 14 Profile: Tory, a crime­solving budding scientist, is the teenage niece of Temperance Brennan, the forensic anthropologist and star of Reichs’ best­selling ‘Bones’ series. In ‘Seizure’, the second Tory book, out this October, Tory and her friends search for buried treasure.

TIM DUNCAN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

B Y A LEXANDRA A LTER ···························· hen he first appeared in a 1985 mystery novel

by J.A. Jance, detective J.P. Beaumont was a brash 42-year-old chasing a serial killer.

Twenty books later, the Seattle homicide investigator, now a cranky, weathered grandfather of two, is still hunting killers—but it’s getting tough.

Beaumont needs knee-replacement surgery and constantly takes Aleve to ease his aching joints. He struggles to descend a ladder after pulling evidence from a hedge. When he threatens to arrest a fleeing suspect, the criminal taunts him: “You and who else, old man?”

His partner chases the rogue on foot; Beaumont drives after them in his Mercedes.

“It’s hell getting old,” he complains in Betrayal of Trust, which came out on 5 July.

Jance says that if she’d known Beaumont would endure for 26 years, she wouldn’t have aged him so much through the series.

Now, with 5.5 million copies of her Beaumont books in print and legions of obsessed fans, she says, “It’s too hard to put all that toothpaste back into the tube.”

Beaumont is years past the standard retirement age for policemen, but he’s not the oldest fictional detective pounding the pavement. A handful of popular crime series feature protagonists who age in real time, and now, several decades on, the sleuths have matured well past their prime. Michael Connelly’s famous Los Angeles homicide detective Harry Bosch, who has starred in 16 novels over 19 years, will be 60 in the forthcoming fall novel The Drop (the title comes from an acronym for the Deferred Retirement Option Plan for policemen and firefighters).

Lawrence Block’s grizzled private investigator Matthew Scudder, an ex-policeman with alcohol issues, has been tangling with henchmen, murderers and thieves since the series debuted in 1976. “The poor devil is 72 now,” says Block, who is 73.

For crime writers who are committed both to realism and to their cash cow characters, keeping old detectives on the beat requires some plot gymnastics. Block set his recent bestselling Matthew Scudder book, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, in the 1980s to explore Scudder’s younger years. Some writers

W

Theodore Boone Creator: John Grisham Age: 13 Profile: A middle­school student and aspiring lawyer investigates his best friend April’s disappearance in the new novel ‘The Abduction’, the second in Grisham’s ‘Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer’ young adult series.

Ageing formula: Crime fiction writers Michael Connelly (top) and Ruth Rendell. have slowed down time, or arrested ageing all together.

Sue Grafton, author of the A Is for Alibi alphabet series, developed her own fictional time scheme so that her private investigator Kinsey Millhone ages roughly one year for every two and a half books. As a result, Kinsey, who was 32 when the series began in 1982, will be around 40 when it concludes. “You’re never going to have to watch Kinsey Millhone go through menopause,” says Grafton, 71, whose 22nd book, V is for Vengeance, comes out in November.

It’s easy to see why publishers and authors are reluctant to retire mystery icons. Crime fiction sales have skyrocketed in recent years, driven in large part by successful series. Mystery and detective fiction became the topselling genre in 2010, up from fifth place in 2009, according to Simba Information, which tracks the publishing industry. Recurring characters have built-in audiences and command reliable sales with each instalment, which in turn boosts sales of paperback books in the series.

Some writers say they now wish they could wind back the clock. British novelist Kate Atkinson wanted her sardonic private detective Jackson Brodie, originally 43 years old, to “experience time the way readers do”. In her 2011 book, Started Early, Took my Dog, the fourth in the series, Brodie squints and struggles to recognize people because his eyesight is diminished. At 50,

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

he’s come out of retirement because it made him feel “redundant to the world’s needs”; he’s now semi-retired.

“I wish I’d started him off younger,” Atkinson says. “I don’t want him to be an old man.”

The ageing of recurring characters has been an issue for crime writers for more than a century, tracing back to archetypal sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Holmes—who at one point died but was brought back to life by Arthur Conan Doyle when readers revolted—retired and devoted himself to bee-keeping. Christie was blunt about her character’s demise: In his final appearance,

I wish I’d started him (Jackson Brodie) off younger... I don’t want him to be an old man.

Kate Atkinson Novelist

in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, an old, wheelchair-bound Poirot—with arthritis and a bad moustache dye job—dies of an apparent heart attack.

Other icons from the Golden Age of detective fiction in the early decades of the 20th century remained eternally in middle age. Some timeless characters—including Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne—have outlasted their creators, enduring as “zombie franchises” after literary estates contract new writers to keep the series going.

Some writers worry over whether readers will stick with them through their characters’ golden years. Connelly says he’s wary of straining readers’ credulity as Harry Bosch continues to age. “Right now, the oldest homicide detective in the LAPD is 58,” he says. “Harry’s older than him.”

Connelly’s 2008 novel The Brass Verdict has a detailed description of the LAPD’s pension programme to explain why Bosch was still reporting for duty after 33 years on the job (his pension isn’t getting any bigger, but he’s a man on a mission).

To prolong the series, Connelly may make Bosch head of special investigations for the district

attorney’s office, or pass the torch to Bosch’s teenage daughter. “I’m trying to come up with some way of keeping him going,” he says.

Retirement has become a fraught issue for writers, publishers and fans of long-running detective series. Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin faced protest when he announced that his beloved Edinburgh inspector John Rebus would retire from the force in 2007. Rebus was around 40 when the 17-book series began in 1987. Rankin says he planned for Rebus to work until he was 65. “When a policeman told me that detectives retire at age 60, I was kind of horrified,” Rankin says. “I didn’t want him to retire. He definitely didn’t want to retire.”

In the 2007 book Exit Music, Rebus’ swansong, the detective gets winded by three flights of stairs. He refers to himself as “a dinosaur” and is taunted by an old criminal rival who teases him about his impending retirement: “You’re days from the scrapheap.”

Fans still clamoured for more.

Readers begged Rankin to slow the passage of time or stop Rebus from ageing. Politicians weighed in. Scottish parliament member Helen Eadie jokingly asked the justice minister to raise the retire-

ment age for policemen to 65 so Rebus could stay on the force.

Rebus hung up his badge in Exit Music, but Rankin says he’ll probably bring him back: “There’s a cold-case review unit that would be a shoo-in for Rebus.”

He wouldn’t be the first to pull his detective out of retirement.

British crime writer Ruth Rendell made headlines in the UK two years ago when the Telegraph reported that she was done with her popular character—the genteel, cerebral Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford—after 45 years and 22 books.

But this August, Wexford returns in The Vault. The retired inspector, now a doting grandfather, goes to plays and sits in his living room reading novels. He bumps into an officer he crossed paths with more than 30 years earlier. The younger officer, who has climbed the ranks from constable to superintendent, asks Wexford to consult on an investigation into an underground vault that holds four decomposed bodies (three of which were buried there in Rendell’s 1999 novel A Sight for Sore Eyes).

“I thought I should retire him but not leave him out of the series altogether,” says Rendell, 81. “He’s very aware that he’s no longer what he was.”

Wexford feels condescended to by the superintendent and hampered by his “consultant” status, which bars him from questioning witnesses on his own. “I wish I could go in and talk to them,” he complains to his wife. “Like one of those amateur detectives in fiction.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | SIDDHARTHA DEB

This side of paradise HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

The author of ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ on India’s Gilded Age, journalistic objectivity and the lawsuit his book is currently facing B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· he Shillong-bred, New York-based Siddhartha Deb is the writer of two acclaimed novels (The Point of Return and Surface). His first work of non-fiction, The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India, has been eagerly anticipated for some time now. The Beautiful and the Damned (also, tellingly, the title of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel) tells five extended stories of life in a country that is constructing a very different future from the one envisioned six, four, even two decades ago. It reflects deeply on the stories of subjects ranging from farmers in Andhra Pradesh to a Manipuri waitress working in Delhi.

The book’s first chapter, “The Great Gatsby,” an investigation of the life and enterprises of the businessman Arindam Chaudhuri, was excerpted in The Caravan magazine in February.

But the considerable attention it received included a reprisal from Chaudhuri himself: He brought charges on Deb, along with publishers Penguin India, The Caravan and Google India, of “grave harassment and injury”.

Deb spoke to Lounge about the book, journalism in India, and Chaudhuri’s stance.

Edited excerpts:

T

Your title is interesting. What connected the India we’re living in—which you’re writing about—with the ironies of Fitzgerald’s America?

I was quite caught up with the striking contrasts in contemporary India and the ways in which they reminded me of Fitzgerald’s Gilded Age. Of course, no age or nation is an exact copy of another, but the guiding metaphor gave me a starting point for my foray into contemporary India, including what some would describe as the incredible flamboyance and energy of its monied classes as well as the vast, shadowy and

deprived majority on the other side of the divide.

Was it easy to incubate long, reflective pieces of reportage in a time when everything in India seems to move so fast?

The reporting for this book began in earnest in the summer of 2007, although it was sparked off as a project by some of the pieces I did as early as 2004, which was when I suffered my initial shock at how much India had changed.

It was easy to see the ongoing change as a continuation of the same basic trends. The reflective passages came later, in the writing rather than in the reporting, and in part that was because I wanted to emphasize this book as something other than journalism.

I didn’t want the book to have the pretence of objectivity. I’ve always had problems with that presumption of objectivity in non-fiction, including in journalism. The facts can be accurately researched, and you can try to represent opposing points of view, but the writing itself is inevitably subjective, from the individual writer involved down to the language and media in which the writing appears. I tried to make that subjectivity quite transparent.

What are some of the things that surprised you as you wrote this book?

I was surprised by the fact that there was a greater plurality, a sense of the collective, among characters lower down the class ladder. They were less likely to see themselves as the centre of even their own universe. At the same time, I found that less privileged people were far more subject to contingencies; they couldn’t plan their future in the same way that the rich or the middle-class characters could.

Esther, the waitress in the final chapter who stands at the cusp of these two worlds, showed this most clearly, planning compulsively for the future and yet subject to contingency. What this meant for me as a writer

Shining: (clockwise from left) Siddhartha Deb; his book The Beautiful and the Damned; and spaces like the new Bangalore airport form the backdrop to Deb’s investigations.

was that the chapters for the underclass characters were, as a result, more driven by plot.

And what annoyed you?

I remember being struck by the arrogance and sense of jadedness some people gave off when I told them I was working on a non-fiction book on India.

But they were reacting, in part, to the notion that there were many books already on the subject. Quite a few more have been added to the list, obviously, and that will only continue. This is partly because of the importance of India as a consumer market, and in part because it’s a pretty interesting place in terms of characters and stories.

Are there “India books” you’ve enjoyed reading?

The India books I enjoy tend

therefore to be thoughtful explorations of the country, books that display an empathy for people rather than functioning as brand ambassadors for abstractions like the marketplace or capitalism.

The writers I’ve liked most on this count are Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra and Basharat Peer. I see myself as quite different politically and temperamentally from V.S. Naipaul, but I was certainly aware of his India books as I worked on The Beautiful and the Damned. The other books important to me include classics like (George) Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in

Paris and London as well as contemporary works like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.

You’ve recently been involved in a lawsuit, brought by the entrepreneur Arindam Chaudhuri, against his profile, excerpted from your book’s opening chapter. Could you comment on it?

The lawsuit claims that I, along with The Caravan, Penguin and Google India, am “acting on behest or in connivance of certain competitors who are jealous and envious of the success of the IIPM (Indian Institute of Planning and Management)”. I remain deeply interested in seeing how IIPM goes about proving that I was or am working for or am in connivance with its competitors.

I thought I was writing a nuanced exploration of certain social phenomena in today’s India, including wealth and celebrity. Mr Chaudhuri thinks otherwise and is well within his rights to do so. If he thought there were factual inaccuracies in the piece, he could have first

resorted to the simple, democratic instrument called a “letter to an editor”, an instrument that is used by countless other individuals and organizations. Instead, an injunction was issued from Silchar, where none of the parties involved have their primary business, and without prior notice to me or my publishers.

This has made it legally impossible to publish the chapter in India even though the chapter is available in every other edition around the world.

As for the Caravan article, which is an excerpt from the chapter, it is available within India on countless blogs and mirror sites that have nothing to do with me or The Caravan or my publishers. This seems to show that the purpose of the lawsuit wasn’t even to remove the piece from circulation, in which case its purpose remains mysterious, unless, of course, it is meant to intimidate.

Penguin and The Caravan are responding to the lawsuit in courts, and at this point we have no reason not to have faith in the Indian legal system as a whole.

The Beautiful and the Damned was published in the UK in June.

It will be published in India this August, without its chapter on Arindam Chaudhuri.

THE MEMORY OF LOVE | AMINATTA FORNA

Love is not enough The British writer’s novel, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, doesn’t bind up its threads memorably

B Y A DITI S AXTON ···························· ome pens are propelled by politics. They revel in it, punctuate their plot with it, and in doing so parenthesize and contain some of its perceived power.

Such politically charged novels can subtly guide a reader’s perception of public events till it coincides with the novel’s own projection. Consider Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, that passionate poem to Biafra.

Other writers find themselves fettered by the binds and bounds of identity, unable to unshackle their theme from themselves. Aminatta Forna’s lovely, languorous prose in The Memory of Love doesn’t have the kernel of agitprop necessary to write war. Yet she feels that write it she must. The comparison to Adichie may be insensitive—West African conflict is the milieu for both books and Forna was shortlisted for this year’s Orange prize, which Adichie won in 2007—but it is apt.

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Forna’s novel is set in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the recent past. The shores of the capital are awash with aid workers in the wake of a grisly 11-year civil war.

Among them is Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist of some repute who is seeking, as per usual, meaning in mid-life.

His skills are not in high demand with the average Sierra Leone patient who seeks, instead, fastaction medication. Kai Mansaray, a young general surgeon at the same hospital, is much busier than Adrian but manages to fit in a fragile friendship with the foreigner. The only other relief in the torpor of Adrian’s days is his weekly session with the retired professor, Elias Cole.

The Memory of Love is preoccupied with weighing the crimes of silence and complicity. Did Elias Cole betray his friend by holding his peace? Encompassing that question, did the developed world betray Sierra Leone by withholding its peacekeepers?

And shadowing that in the subtext, do the people of Sierra

Leone betray themselves by not talking through their trauma?

Despite judging each guilty in different degrees, the novel itself is strangely silent on the specifics of the conflict. It is as if the reader too is deemed culpable if unfamiliar with the particulars of the civil war.

Forna justifies her elision through the structure of her story.

By enveloping the war within three narrative arcs, she creates a funnelling spiral, which pulls most of the action to the end.

That the three storylines will intertwine can be gleaned from the first page. Adrian “is new here”, with a tenuous toehold in post-conflict territory. The elderly Elias is determinedly coughing and spluttering his way through a reworked personal pre-war history, to be punctiliously transcribed by Adrian in clinical notes. And Kai, who suffers unexplained nightmares and debilitating insomnia, is presumably still mired in combat.

Linking disparate stories for a delayed denouement is a format popular in film, but an almost 450-page novel cannot sustain that sort of suspense. The broad, lazy, beguiling narrative threads of the beginning tighten into a

The Memory of Love: Penguin/Bloomsbury, 464 pages, `399. gnarly, bathetic knot by the end.

The reason one rails against the lacunae in Forna’s plotting is that though the larger picture is incoherent, certain vignettes sparkle with pointillist detail.

Consider the complexity compressed in this interracial conversation: “(Adrian) laughs.

‘But you know what I mean.’

Kai does not know what he means. Still, he chooses not to say. This is the way Europeans talk, as though everybody shared their experiences.”

Or a counterpoint presented via Adrian: “And because he is trying not to show how discomfited he is by Kai’s lack of niceties and because the notion that a conversation is a continuous act is bred into his bones and silences like nudity should be covered up lest they offend.”

Though these instances are not contiguous in the novel, they have a deep and deliberate link.

The syntax of Kai’s construction reveals not only a relative cultural nonchalance to speech, but also the terse thought process of a busy man. The multiple clauses in Adrian’s thought indicate a predilection for layered language but also hint at the many justifications he must continually find for his own presence in this country. It is a sophisticated working by which the characters grow to be representative, yet stay true to themselves.

Forna is able to weave this little bit of magic through many of the personal, intimate moments of the book. Yet the promise of her writing is ultimately thwarted by the premise of her book.

If only all flawed novels were this rewarding to read.

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The artist as ideologue The artist’s oeuvre: (clockwise from left) Bhattacharya in a torn vest in 1943; a poster, At the Cost of Lives, by the artist; and a linocut on paper from the Ramayana series.

A retrospective of an artist whose observa­ tions of suffering echo today’s realities B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· rtist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-78), whose retrospective is opening today in Delhi, was most memorably the illustrator of the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which more than three million people died. But even if he had not wandered with his sketchbook in that starving countryside, occasionally on foot from one village to another, Bhattacharya’s collected drawings, prints and paintings would still be full of feeling.

Chitta, as his friends called him, was born in Naihati, West Bengal; his father, a government officer, was an amateur pianist, and his mother a poet. Having spent most of his productive years in Mumbai, his work is diverse and some of it is borne out of his political ideology.

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Part of the Communist Party of India (CPI) cadre, the self-taught artist created portraits of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, made propaganda posters celebrating the oppressed masses, caricatured politicians and colonizers, drew lovers and mothers, and depicted riverside and villages. He made the poster of Bimal Roy’s film Do Bigha Zameen and produced linocut prints of deprived childhoods. He experimented with puppetry and did calligraphy in Bengali. Bhattacharya’s work is displayed at the National Museum of Prague; he had many admirers in erstwhile Czechoslovakia, where his first major exhibition was held in 1956. He never went abroad, never married. He died of chronic bronchitis at age 63.

Besides his drawings, watercolour paintings and prints, the

exhibition at the Delhi Art Gallery includes Bhattacharya’s published writings, letters, posters, photographs and puppets. For the show, the gallery has published four lavishly produced books that are encyclopaedic in charting the artist’s life, work and thoughts. One is the facsimile edition of his book Hungry Bengal, all copies of which were seized and burnt by the British. A single copy survived in a bank vault in Kolkata.

By 1943, Bhattacharya had settled in Mumbai. The CPI sent him to Bengal’s Midnapore district to cover famine victims for People’s War, the party mouthpiece. Hungry Bengal is a selection of 22 sketches from the many that appeared in that weekly journal. These black and white images of Bengal’s living skeletons are stark, not voyeuristic.

Despite losing everything—their land, family, even clothes—the famished people retain a flicker of their humanness in Bhattacharya’s lines and strokes: a boy’s half-raised head, a woman’s bony hands hold-

ing a pitcher, a man looking away from the food offered to him.

Sadly, the originals of these images too were destroyed. The absence is compensated for by the inclusion of drawings that Bhattacharya made during a tour of the eastern districts of Bengal in 1944.

This set illuminates the experience that is still lived in our cities.

Bhattacharya’s propaganda posters for the Communists are a different story. They could be mimicked by today’s ideologues. At the Cost of Lives shows a dhoti-clad farmer pinned to the ground. A military base is built around his body. Fighter jets are parked on his bare back. A general is entering the fenced enclosure and is being saluted by a turbaned guard. Muscled but in bondage, the angry farmer is clenching his fists.

How would someone in, say, Singur, West Bengal, interpret it today? Would there be Nano cars parked on the farmer’s back and would the general being saluted be industrialist Ratan Tata? Or

OBITUARY | MANI KAUL

would it be bullock carts on Ratan Tata’s back, with new West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee as the general?

In Bhattacharya’s most impactful propaganda drawings, the oppressed is always a man with strong bare limbs, whose chains have just broken and who is about to annihilate oppressors the size of insects. Typical of the kitschy revolutionary art that came of age with the rise of the Soviet Union, such images lack the subtlety of Bhattacharya’s other works, but then propaganda is all about communicating one’s ideology in the simplest and most direct way.

By the late 1940s, disillusioned by the growing sectarianism in the CPI, Bhattacharya started withdrawing from politics. The violent images gave way to idyllic scenes of village women and folk dancing.

He painted birds, flowers and nudes. He made a series of linocuts, Angels without Fairy-Tales, on the lives of children as family earners. He drew cover illustrations for children’s stories with titles like The Kingdom of Rasogulla. He founded a puppet theatre and hosted plays for his area’s slum children in Mumbai. He wrote poems. He

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

···························· ani Kaul, who died on 6 July after a prolonged illness in New Delhi, returned to India after 12 years in 2007. He took over the running of Osianama, still an unrealized idea initiated by Neville Tuli’s Osian’s, for a film theatre and museum in Mumbai. What spurred him at this time was not so much the business at hand, but the challenge of testing his cinematic language—a formula-shattering way of using images and speech in a film’s narrative—for stories set in modern India.

For 12 years he had been teaching cinema at Harvard University in Boston, Duke University in North Carolina and Rigks Akademie, Amsterdam, as guest professor. The tag of an “out-

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sider”, which he acquired after his first film Uski Roti (1969), remained with him and strangely enough, seemed to egg him on even in his 60s. Uski Roti outraged critics and the film establishment, then heady with stardriven, Bachchnesque euphoria, as well as the parallel cinema movement of the era. Kaul didn’t quite fit in either school, like another of his contemporaries, Kumar Shahani. Their films tried to replicate the relationship between real time and space in movies, which meant setting natural rhythms of speaking and being, to background music.

Silences were mandatory in Kaul’s scenes.

They did not seek big audiences and even from a small audience, demanded involvement. Satyajit Ray, master of a lyrical and nuanced, but very for-

Chittaprosad: A Retrospective will be on at the Delhi Art Gallery, 11, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, from 11 July-20 August, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed). It will show at Kolkata’s Birla Academy of Art and Culture from 30 August-11 September. The works will be on sale, at prices ranging from `20,000-10 lakh.

ASHESH SHAH/MINT

The theorist film­maker A rare kind of pioneer—fearless and stub­ born about his language and art till the end

drew scenes from the Ramayan.

Living in a one-room apartment called Ruby Terrace in Andheri, Mumbai, Bhattacharya’s house had books, a dog and a cat.

Dressed in a vest and lungi, he would recite the poems of Stéphane Mallarme, Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke (in at least two photographs, he is seen in a torn vest). He cooked his own food; the stove and dinner plates were stacked under the bed, next to his paintings.

Bhattacharya never overcharged for his works. If a buyer gave him more than he thought right, he would return the money. Spending most of his earnings on books, he struggled constantly. In a letter to his mother in 1965, he wrote: “Only the other day, the dailies were writing volumes about my work after the exhibition in Kolkata. But nobody spends a pie to buy my work… I have been able to survive because a few foreigners have paid me for the pictures they bought. If I had to rely on the people of my own land, I would have died a ghost long ago.” Bhattacharya died in Kolkata where his sister took him after an extended illness.

mal aesthetic, severely criticized Uski Roti when it came out. Jokes about Kaul’s films, perceived as slow and impenetrable, exist even today among students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). He was from the first batch of FTII, schooled by the iconic Ritwik Ghatak.

I met Kaul, when he was in his mid-60s, in the monsoon of 2007. Burdened by some of his films, which I had watched while in college, I expected a grim, unresponsive man. Kaul was in a grey formal shirt tucked into a pair of dark trousers. He wore a pair of immaculately polished shoes. He was restless, energetic and very eloquent, and excited about making a film about, he said, “the irrational violence so common in India” which had engaged him since his return. “I have a selfish reason to be here.

It’s a great time to be in India.”

The passion to make movies was undiluted, and he appeared stubborn about his way of making them. Kaul believed film-

On the job: Mani Kaul in Mumbai in 2007, when he was with Osian’s. makers must have free reign and that his cinema had an audience in the new India.

He was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in 1942 into a family that had its roots in Kashmir. His uncle was an actor-director and Kaul joined FTII as an acting student, later switching to the direction course. In 1966, he came to Mumbai and made his first film three years later. Around that time, Kaul met actor Rajkumar, a relative. Not surprised at the reactions to his film, Rajkumar said to him: “Roti, aur woh bhi uski? Mere saath kaam karo, hum

halwa banayenge.”

After Uski Roti, Kaul made Ashad ka Ek Din (1971), Duvidha (1973), based on Vijaydan Detha’s short story which was remade by Amol Palekar as Paheli in 2005, Dhrupad (1982), on the musical form, Mati Manas (1984), a quasi-documentary on the development of pottery in the subcontinent, Siddheshwari (1989), based on the life of the eponymous thumri singer of Varanasi, and Idiot (1991), based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which was Shah Rukh Khan’s first major film role. His

last film, Naukar ki Kameez (1999), a surprisingly linear but beautiful film, alienated some of his loyalists.

Kaul’s death means we won’t see that film on “irrational violence”. The end of a pioneer’s life, especially in Indian cinema, where fierce, unapologetic experimentation and originality hardly blossom, is an immense loss.

Kaul’s sophistication of thought and engagement with society and politics, evident in all his films, made him an even rarer artiste.

The last film by Kaul I watched was at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2008—a documentary called Before my Eyes. Shot in 1998, at the height of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front’s (JKLF’s) resurgence and the peak of the secessionist movement in the Kashmir Valley, Kaul’s perspective in the film is that of a hot-air balloon soaring above the valley, unflinchingly documenting its people—two people sleeping in a hotel, seen through a window, a woman playing a cello—and its beauty under threat. Kaul said he had written a script for it, but decided to shoot without one. It is an eloquent and gritty film—a proof of his obsessive love for real time and space.

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POP CULTURE

Magic missionary

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Sleight of hand: Magician Gopinath Muthukad casting a spell; and (below) in a show.

Gopinath Muthukad on childhood, street magicians and being the second Indian to win the ‘Oscar’ of magic

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

···························· t’s 1969. A five-year-old boy rushes home, clutching a lemon and a powder sachet.

Unable to contain his anticipation, he bores a small hole in the lemon, pours the powder into it and sits back, waiting for what the snake charmer who sold him the powder promised would happen.

“Of course, the lemon didn’t walk,” Gopinath Muthukad, now 44, laughs. “I was disappointed.

But it was the day I decided to become a magician.”

Another lemon turned out to be a blessing in disguise for little Muthukad. He had been drawn to the snake charmer by his trick of making a lemon roll from one end of a table to another with a mere wave of his hand. Muthukad requested the charmer to teach him the trick, which he promptly agreed to do for `25. Muthukad learnt the trick, but had no money to pay the magician. The five-yearold stole the money from his father, who soon came to know of it. The necessary admonitions over, Kavananchery Nair decided to do something about his son’s love for magic.

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The second start Quite adept at stirring his son’s imagination with stories of legendary magicians from Kerala, Muthukad’s farmer father requested R.K. Malayath, a local magician, to teach his son the fundamentals of magic.

Muthukad performed for the first time with his teacher in a show that was anything but a success. Malayath led the spirited 10-year-old towards V.N. Nam-

boothiri, the legendary Kerala magician whom Muthukad calls the “master of all Kerala magicians at the time”. Namboothiri was considered an incomparable teacher because of his brilliance and mastery of a magic that shunned props and other extraneous embellishments such as elaborate robes.

During the six years he spent with Namboothiri, Muthukad imbibed the three fundamental facets of magic—the angle of visibility (the role of perspective in a magic performance), the power of suggestion (the style of presentation) and the art of misdirection.

“To these three things we magicians add our own ideas and imagination to create our unique form of magic,” he explains.

On 23 June, 37 years after he began, Muthukad became only the second Indian magician after P.C. Sorcar Jr. (1996) to win the Merlin award, bestowed on him by the International Magicians Society. Muthukad is now in the august company of illusionists such as David Copperfield, Penn and Teller and Siegfried and Roy. The son of illiterate farmers from Kavalamukkatta has come a long way.

Now here, now not But if his father had had his way, Muthukad would have been a lawyer. After his graduation, says Muthukad, “my father had me sent to Bangalore to study for a law degree. But I had my mind set on magic and I decided to discontinue after a year and returned

SEVEN AGES OF ROCK The opening riffs of ‘Seven Ages of Rock’, a seven­episode odyssey through the annals of rock beginning Sunday, reverberate with the wild, jarring guitar notes of singer­songwriter Jimi Hendrix, newly arrived in England from the US. Each episode explores the history of rock music as an almost indispensable organ of popular culture.

From the grease and grime of punk to the oneiric hallucinations of psychedelic rock, it’s all there, manifested in artistes

home.” His father’s doubts about the prospects of magic as a career made him oppose his son’s decision, but Muthukad remained firm. He soon began assembling his own troupe to travel across Kerala; a few setbacks and hiccups later, started building a reputation.

He has not forgotten the snake charmer, though. Muthukad takes pains to tell everyone that magic is an art that shares a deep connect with science; that it is all a blend of chemistry, physics, mathematics and psychology.

“All my art is a sleight of hand. It is all skill. I am just an actor,” he says. “It is the duty of the magician to entertain; not fool. We magicians are not into the business of selling superstitions.”

Beyond the stage Muthukad has injected this philosophy into the curriculum at his Magic Academy in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the first magic academy in Asia and the only one in the world to be affiliated to a university—Kerala University in this case. Started in 1996, the academy has five teacher-magicians teaching 20 students each year.

The academy also houses a Magic Academy Research Centre that researches and preserves ancient tricks such as the Great Indian Rope Trick, the Green Mango Magic, and Cups and Balls.

It also comes up with new tricks and designs for his magic shows.

Muthukad acknowledges the important role that technology and media can play in promoting magic. “Namboothiri passed away

as diverse as The Velvet Underground, Iron Maiden and Queen.

The series’ creators have been careful to recognize the shifting musical landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic, remaining mindful of the cultural exchanges and the resulting sounds. There is a generous supply of archival footage and interviews with artistes and music critics, offering the viewer perspectives from within and without.

Like all histories, this too has its share of casualties, and one can complain about a certain artiste being given more screen

in 1983. His magic was enough to fulfil the needs of his time,” says Muthukad. “But I can’t possibly attract audiences if I follow his austere form of magic.” He says the uniqueness of magic lies in its ability to embrace and employ different art forms within a single show, from dance to cinema. His admiration for Copperfield stems from this aspect of his magic shows, which Muthukad likens to cinema, and Copperfield’s body movements to poetry.

Muthukad does not shy away from acknowledging his debt to the unparalleled skill of street magicians. “I cannot imagine performing between three walls the magic that they are able to perform in daylight,” he says.

Muthukad is referring to the advantage he enjoys over street magicians, since he can determine the amount of light that falls on him during his performances, in addition to the obvious advantage of perspective.

In an attempt to support street magicians, his academy organized Mazma, a festival of street magicians in 2005, which culminated in an award of `25,000 for the best street magician.

More than just magic Muthukad’s endeavour to take magic to the people while addressing social ills and superstitions is best illustrated in this example.

Muthukad stands beside a statue of Gandhi and after having the chief guest inspect it for authenticity, declares the statue will walk towards the audience. Soon enough, the statue springs to life and begins addressing the people on issues ailing the country as it walks towards them.

Thirty-seven years of illusion, dangerous stunts, precise predictions and tiring schedules haven’t dimmed Muthukad’s enthusiasm.

Only the tools and scale of his ambition have changed. The lemon has ballooned into that celestial wanderer, the moon. “My greatest magic trick will be achieved when I make a full moon vanish, and it will happen soon,” he says. “Everyone, everywhere, would see it disappear.”

time than another, perhaps unjustifiably.

The series hits Indian screens almost four years after it debuted on British television. Yet it succeeds as a riveting chronicle of the growth of rock lexicon and the social forces that shaped it.

‘Seven Ages of Rock’ will air at 8pm every Sunday from 10 July on BBC Entertainment.

Anupam Kant Verma

THE MUSICAL SHORTHAND

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f music in India is abundantly diverse, so is the terminology associated with its many genres and styles. Film music too has its own set of unique terms, short codes, phrases often coined and used almost exclusively by sessions musicians, particularly those who were active in the pre-digital, pre-multi-track recording days. These sessions musicians have largely been an anonymous lot, with no one caring to acknowledge them on album covers. Often, they may find due place in the credit roll at the end of a film, but since that is usually the time when viewers are rushing out of theatres trying to beat exiting crowds to make a quick getaway, the names of the musicians seldom register clearly or only with diehard fans of music. But apart from their musicianship, sessions musicians are also repositories of little-known anecdotes, information, legends, myths, facts and inside stories about the music industry. For years, groups of musicians from different parts of the country congregated in the many studios in Mumbai to record the millions of songs that form a unique and integral part of Indian films. Large orchestras would record parts and interludes written for each song by the respective arrangers who worked with composers and music directors.

In a typical film song from the 1970s, there could be over a dozen rhythm players in the rhythm section of the orchestra. This could include half a dozen tabla players, several dholak players and percussionists. Unlike current times, a song would have to be recorded in a straight run-through, with no option for punching in a correction. If you made a mistake, you just had to start all over again. Many of the musicians were unable to notate the music they played and hence played from memory, or followed signals provided by colleagues or arrangers or composers to mark changes in rhythm patterns or breaks in the music. Still others developed simple methods of notation that could be hurriedly scribbled down, and at times they developed unique terms and codes too. It was a kind of short code language that the musicians understood and used deftly.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

Old codes: Singers Asha Bhonsle (centre) and Kishore Kumar (right) with a sessions musician.

For example, what would you do if you were asked to play a rhythm pattern called “78”? You or I could just sit there looking completely befuddled, but a sessions musician would know instantly that he had to play a specific rhythm pattern that became exceedingly popular in 1978! And if 78 isn’t funny enough, how about making sense of “gumboot”! Yes, that’s right. Rhythm players use the term to indicate the specific sound produced on the dholak. At times, names of composers and music directors form the basis for new coinage. For example, a rhythm pattern used typically by Rajesh Roshan would be notated as RR. Just say RR and the entire rhythm section will start playing the same groove. Say BL and the rhythm they will play is one popularized by Bappi Lahiri. And if you think you are ready now to decode these terms, how about figuring out what “sargam theka” could mean?

Sargam or solmization is the system of singing a swara with an associated syllable, for example, sa, re, ga, ma. So would the rhythm section be playing solfège in the sargam theka? No, they simply play the rhythm pattern that became popular in the 1979 Rishi Kapoor starrer Sargam. Remember the popular “dafli waale dafli bajaa…” track from the film? It is the groove from that track that has been immortalized as “sargam theka”, says Pratap Rath, experienced and popular percussionist from the Mumbai film industry, who patiently explained these terms to me, and to whom I am deeply grateful. He also mentioned the sheng-dana thekaa but to figure that one out, you will need to join a recording session and recite with the rhythm section detos ka malaa sheng-dana sheng-dana.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Pain killers: Heavy metal pioneers Judas Priest.

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PRADIP KRISHEN

DELHI’ DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

The city’s wild side Verdant city: (from above) The Ridge Road, with Rashtrapati Bhawan in the distance; Mangar Bani valley; and Shalimar Bagh.

In the rains, Delhi’s forest cover is a rich green. We revisited Mangar Bani, home of a local mystic, and other hidden spots of wilderness

SOLVEIG MARINA BANG

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ecretive and silent.

Intertwined trees, twisted trunks, thorny twigs, rocky slopes, and clumps of grass. The nearest McDonald’s is 2 miles away. We are on Delhi’s Central Ridge, a forest in the Capital’s heart abutting Sardar Patel Road in Chanakyapuri.

For a city on the edge of a desert, Delhi is remarkable for the number and diversity of its trees. This dry, dusty metropolis is home to 252 species (New York has 130). We could just as well be in a rainforest. The 2009 Forest Survey of India records Delhi’s forest area at 85 sq. km, which is 5.73% of the city. In the period between 2005 and 2009, the cover grew by 16 sq. km.

Delhi’s pockets of wilderness are rarely frequented. The popular Lodhi Garden and Nehru Park are wooded but the grass is trimmed, the hedges pruned. The natural wilderness that once existed is now hidden, built upon or degraded. Connaught Place was a forest of babool trees before the British destroyed it to make a commercial district. Over the years, especially after independence, many parts of the Aravalli hills, which end in isolated hills and rocky slopes in the Capital, have been flattened to make way for neighbourhoods and bazaars.

The Ridge, the hilly spur of the Aravallis that survives in four distinct patches in and around the Capital, is Delhi’s lungs. It starts at Wazirabad, north Delhi, passes through Delhi University, and goes to Paharganj, where it

was levelled and built over. The central portion, made into a reserved forest in 1914, extends from Sadar Bazaar to Dhaula Kuan. Some bits have since been nibbled away by petrol pumps.

The Ridge then surfaces in areas such as Jawaharlal Nehru University in the south, before culminating in the Tughlakabad stretch that includes the Asola Bhatti wildlife sanctuary. Mangar Bani falls in the last part.

Not far from the Chattarpur farmhouses in south Delhi, it is a spectacular sight. It is a 100-hectare jungle, consisting of dhau, a tree with small leaves and silvery trunk. A species that’s adapted to rocky land, there are great jungles of dhau in Ranthambore and in Bundelkhand, but here it is close to the limits of a metropolis, with the skyscrapers of Gurgaon threatening an

invasion from the west.

Early morning is the best time to visit Mangar Bani. The forest is sacred, the trees are worshipped and there are two temples. The valley has a village of Gujjar herdsmen who believe in a mystic called Gudariyadas Baba. The forest has survived because of the faith of villagers.

They believe that cutting a tree—even a branch—would invite Baba’s wrath. On Sundays, village children share stories of the invisible Baba under a banyan tree.

After the rains, tiny red velvet mites appear, their almost-luminous bodies in stark contrast to the greens around them. A monitor lizard, more than a metre long, ambles into the undergrowth. Above, a sunbird flits in the low branches. Underfoot, a centipede plays dead.

Walking in the valley reveals the fragile beauty of our fast-receding green cover. Pradip Krishen, an encyclopaedia on Delhi’s forests and author of Trees of Delhi, says, “Mangar Bani is like a little museum of what the rocky past of the Ridge must have looked like before being swallowed by Delhi.”

In summer, dhau sprouts new leaves. By the time the monsoon arrives, the area is one of the most beautiful sights in Delhi.

“Standing on a cliff with the valley below you, it’s like looking at a giant cloud of green,” says Krishen. The new leaves of dhau have long silvery hair on their tips. When you look at trees from the distance, you see little silver points of light.

Another beautiful and strange forest, close to Mangar Bani, is in a former stone quarry on the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, about a half-hour drive from Lodhi Garden in central Delhi. On a recent weekend morning, Krishen led a group of seven people there.

The quarry used to be excavated for Badarpur sand and Delhi quartzite, among the most commonly used construction materials. The mining in this area began in 1992 and, following a Supreme Court order, ended a decade later.

The group walked down a slope on which trucks once carried stones from the mine.

The ground was red with Badarpur sand. The sides of the slope were made of the same sand; their depressions and fissures indicating that the surface was being eroded by water. The extraordinariness lay in that this sandy and rocky landscape was the site of a special ecosystem. The slender leafless stems of tamarix, a tree rare in Delhi, were just beginning to bloom with little pink flowers.

The blue flowers of shankhpushpi were growing not an inch above the ground. The soil here is porous and does not retain water, so only a narrow band of plants survives. Siras, ullu and sheesham were the other trees.

While cicadas sounded in the undergrowth, the group clambered down to an area of flat, parched ground. At one corner of it stood a dhatura plant with a solitary white flower. A little further, on a slope, was a

sand cave that housed a small community of Rhesus macaques, along with a few birds and insects. There were also signs of porcupine and palm civet. The cave’s packed sand could easily disintegrate and wash away in heavy rain, destroying the microhabitat it nurtures.

To the north, at the other end of the city, lies Shalimar Bagh.

Nestled between shopping malls, banquet halls, bungalows and apartments are the 100-acre remains of a network of Mughal-era orchards and gardens. Shahjahan gave this land to his subjects on the understanding that their rent would be waived if they grew trees. In the 1857 uprising, the Indian sepoys fired at the British soldiers on the Ridge from behind these trees. After the British took over the city, they cut down most of these woods.

Today the area is owned by the Delhi Development Authority.

Entering the Shalimar Bagh garden, also known as District Park, Sheesh Mahal Park, etc., gives an idea of what it must have been like when the grove stretched all the way to Subzi Mandi in Azadpur. Fruits that have gone out of fashion can still be found here: badhal, kamrakh, shehtoot, karaunda, amda and amla. Some trees are unwieldy; their limbs leaning close to one another, their branches embracing. The walkways are like ribbons choked with moss and grass. Bird sounds drown out every other noise. A few white cows complete this pastoral scene. You begin to wonder if Shahjahan’s greatest contribution to Delhi was its Walled City or this orchard.

The Walled City was, of course, built on the Delhi Ridge. The Jama Masjid, for instance, is on a hill. Much of Old Delhi has its neighbourhoods named after hills.

As Delhi has grown, it has lost vast folds of the Ridge. What is left is the semi-wilderness of trees such as dhak, khai, phulai, kareel and—most sadly—vilayati keekar, a thorny foreign import planted by the British that has singled-handedly wiped out many other tree species from the Ridge. Yet there are patches of serene, untamed surroundings. One such haven is in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, within earshot of Nelson Mandela Marg. There’s a stream, indigenous bushes, and native trees. Close your ears, and Delhi disappears. mayank.s@livemint.com